Darker Than Any Shadow

by Tina Whittle

  “Did you notice anything weird about Rico?”

  He spat in the sink. “Weird?”

  “You know, homicidal weird, like a shank in his sock.”

  “Nothing like that. During his performance, however, he lost the rhythm twice. That’s very unusual for Rico, isn’t it?”

  “It is. He dropped lyrics too. Or mixed them up.” I hesitated to even say the next part aloud. “Was he ever lying?”

  Trey shook his head. “Not that I saw.”

  “I didn’t think so. But he sure as hell wasn’t telling me the whole truth, especially about Lex. That guy was destined to win the homicide lottery at some point in his life, and I can’t imagine Rico shedding one tear over it.”

  Trey’s eyes sharpened at this. “Are you saying he had motive?”

  “I’m saying he expressed a certain amount of anger toward Lex.”

  “Did you tell Detective Cummings about this?”

  “Yes.”

  Trey frowned.

  I sighed. “Okay no. And don’t you even think about blabbing it either. Underneath all the muscle and piercings, Rico is a marshmallow, and you know it.”

  Trey moved to the end of the bed. It was late, and he was tired, his concentration waning. But the question that came out of his mouth was crack-of-dawn direct. “Could he have killed Lex?”

  “Oh good grief, no!”

  “Not for any reason?”

  “If his life were in danger, sure. Or my life. Adam’s life. Maybe even your life. But not in cold blood.”

  “So he could kill.”

  “Trey! Why are we talking about this? Even if Rico were a homicidal maniac—which he’s not—he was right in front of us when the murder happened.”

  “You’re assuming the person who set the fire is the person who killed Lex.”

  “Of course they are! I can’t imagine some random firebug stumbling in and setting the place on fire despite a dead body on the floor.”

  “An unlikely scenario.”

  “Putting it mildly. So I’m his alibi, yours too for that matter, should it come down to it.”

  “And I’m yours. Except for the time I was in back. And for the time after the alarm when you went in the back. I can’t provide an alibi for you then.”

  And he wouldn’t, not even if they came for me with leg chains and a Taser. I licked the last of the ice cream off the spoon.

  “We were all out front when the sprinklers came on—you, me, Rico, Adam. Cricket, Jackson and Frankie.” And then I remembered. “Padre came late.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you say he lied about why he was late.”

  “Yes.”

  I tapped my spoon against the bowl. “You know he invited me over, right? Sunday morning? For a photo shoot with Rico?”

  “I heard. Do you think Rico will want to go?”

  “I don’t know. But I sure as hell do.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Nope, not really sure at all.”

  Trey didn’t comment. I started to leave my ice cream bowl on the nightstand, but then I remembered—Trey’s place, not mine. So I got out of bed and schlepped it to the kitchen, suppressing the grumble.

  This is how things work at Trey’s, I reminded myself. I had one drawer in the bathroom and two drawers in the bedroom and exactly thirty-six inches of closet space. Even my toothbrush had its own cup, black ceramic to match his. Anything I left lying around would be put away in whatever Trey deemed the proper place.

  When I got back, he was sitting up in bed, waiting for me. He looked as much a part of the room as any of the furniture, as dark and sleek as the leather chair, as refined as the four-hundred-thread-count ivory sheets. Most of the décor was featured in the two-year-old GQ magazine residing in his desk drawer. It had been his blueprint for putting his life back together after the accident—a necessary and certainly clever response to the identity crash that followed his cognitive rearrangement—but sometimes I found the whole thing…unsettling.

  And yet when I climbed into bed next to him, those sheets were undeniably luxurious against my skin. And Trey himself was undeniably real, not made up at all.

  I leaned against him, shoulder to shoulder. “So no obvious criminals lurking about tonight?”

  “No. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any, only that I didn’t see them.”

  “No knives?”

  “No.”

  “Guns?”

  “Not on the men. Women have an easier time carrying discreetly, of course.”

  He nodded toward the pocketbook I kept my .38 revolver in. It was a stylish cognac-colored leather number designed for concealed carry—roomy as a saddlebag, lockable, with a no-snag harness that wouldn’t trip a hammer accidentally.

  “All I saw tonight were teeny-tiny Barbie doll purses like the one I had. Unlikely to conceal a firearm.”

  I put my head on his shoulder, and he leaned his head against mine. I was always stunned at the tenderness underneath the angles and planes, the curious yielding softness scaffolded by so many rules and addendums to rules. It had been the most surprising thing about our first time together—after my abrupt U-turn, after that nail-bitingly slow elevator ride to his door—to find such intensity tempered with such gentleness, so inextricable, in one man.

  I whispered against his neck. “Trey?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is all very hard to keep straight.”

  “I understand.”

  I looked up at him. “Help me make a flow chart?”

  “Now?”

  I nodded. He blinked once, then twice. Then he rolled over and got a yellow pad and a pen from his bedside table.

  Chapter Nine

  “Okay, so here’s Lex in the center.” I wrote his name and drew a big circle around it. “And we’ll put Rico here.” I drew a satellite circle and connected then with a line.

  “This isn’t a flow chart. It’s a bubble map.”

  “Whatever. What do I do next?”

  “Next you illustrate the other connections.” Trey wrote his name down, circled it, then drew a line from himself to Rico, and two lines from himself to Lex.

  “But you didn’t know Lex.”

  “I spoke with him in the parking lot, so that’s one connection. Plus I secured the scene after you told me he was dead.” He tapped the paper. “That’s two.”

  “But he was dead! That’s not a connection.”

  “Of course it is. And if I’d had motive to kill him, that connection would become significant because it would have allowed me to alter the scene.”

  “But you didn’t alter the scene!”

  “That doesn’t matter. I was there. It’s a connection.”

  I knew he was right. Means, motive, and opportunity—the unholy trinity of murder.

  “So I have to track not only the how and the why, but the when and where as well? For everybody who had a connection, even myself?”

  “Yes, but you’ll need more than a bubble map.”

  He got out of bed and went to his desk in the living room. When he returned, he had several sheets of graph paper. He climbed back into bed, and I watched him sketch out a rectangle divided into squares and other rectangles.

  “This is the main seating area,” he said. He counted squares and then drew in another rectangle. “And this is the podium with the mike stand and the speakers. The equipment was behind here.”

  He sketched in the DJ station. I pointed. “And here’s the door to the back.”

  “No, it’s here.” He darkened a stripe. “Twenty feet from the wall.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I paced it off when we first arrived. In case of an emergency.”

  “So you really were expecting trouble?”

  “No. I always do this in a new environment.”

  I watched him finish shading in the diagram, remembering each area as it formed on the paper. I could see the space now in my mind’s eye, and the people i
nhabiting it. I could hear the laughter, the din of people talking too loudly, the clink of glasses and ice. I could smell the mingled perfumes and fried shrimp and floor wax.

  And I remembered the bathroom. So I went back to the yellow pad and wrote “secured crime scene” across the second bubble, then drew in a third bubble and a fourth, one with my name and one with Jackson’s.

  “We both found the body. Either of us had the opportunity to alter the scene. Not that I did, mind you…well, except for dragging Lex into the hall. So those connections go down too, right?”

  Trey nodded, satisfied, but his focus was weakening. I could see it in his eyes, which dulled to a gunmetal blue when he was tired. They were past that stage, as gray and flat as an overcast sky.

  I rubbed his shoulder. “You need to sleep.”

  “Not yet. You need to draw another map with Rico in the center.”

  “But he’s not the victim.”

  “He’s the hub of your personal involvement, not Lex. See?”

  Trey flipped to a clean sheet and drew lines from all of the other characters to a central bubble for Rico. A new pattern emerged. Suddenly all the people I’d only been looking at as potential murderers sorted themselves into new contexts.

  “So Rico’s the key?”

  “No, he’s one part of the solution, not a solution by himself. But this maps your perspective. It’s your reason for looking, which alters how you see things. You have to be aware of that and be able to shift that information into a new matrix.”

  He tapped the other diagrams. Suddenly, his approach was making sense, in the same way that quantum physics made sense—only if I didn’t try to understand it rationally. I examined the various pieces of paper, trying to see the patterns, but it was too much information spread out in too many places.

  I laid the diagrams in a row. “So is there a way to combine these charts?”

  Trey didn’t reply. He was leaning back against the headboard, eyes closed. I lay a hand on his arm, and his eyes flew open.

  I pushed his shoulder. “Go to sleep. I mean it.”

  He rolled over without protest. In two minutes, his breathing deepened, and he was fast asleep. I tucked the notepads under my arm and slipped out of bed, catching a glimpse of his dark head against the ivory pillowcase. If I ever forgot how vulnerable he really was, if he seemed bulletproof and ten feet tall, all I had to do was watch him sleep, and I remembered.

  I turned off the light and shut the bedroom door behind me. The condo’s living room was never completely dark—the lights from Downtown and Midtown sparkled in the distance, somewhat dulled by the late summer haze, but bright enough to reflect a burnished glow through the picture window. I rummaged in my tote bag for my new computer, a flat tablet only slightly larger than a paperback novel, and settled in on the sofa.

  I pulled up Google and typed Lex Anderson in the search box. There were a zillion hits, most of them social networking sites—Twitter, MySpace, Facebook—but the first link was the goldmine. Lex Anderson’s very own website.

  One hour and a dozen websites later, I had before me one very shiny and totally superficial person. I had tons of info about the music he listened to, the designers he favored, and his appearance schedule. I had seven YouTube performances and a slew of colorful graphics and photos, every single one of them professional, polished, and totally connected to the stage. But not one of the hits was from his high school reunion, or his workplace, or casual shots on his friends’ pages.

  In short, there wasn’t a real thing about him. And yet he was real, flesh and blood and dead-on-the-floor real. I remembered speaking with him in the hallway—his attitude, his bravado, his presence. I surveyed the accumulated data, like myriad slivers of light in a prism.

  “Who were you, Lex Anderson?”

  No answer presented itself. So I gathered my materials and piled them into my tote bag, turning off the light behind me as I padded barefoot onto the terrace. The night held no sway over the heat, which still pressed the city under its weight like a leaden glove. Below me, hundreds of serpentine headlights drizzled down Peachtree. This I could see from thirty-five stories up, even if I couldn’t make out the individual faces of the people weaving their drunken way from bar to bar.

  First, second, and third degree connections. Rico connected to Lex, I connected to Lex (barely), Trey connected to Lex (even more barely). And the rest of them, how did they connect to Lex, and to each other? I knew some of the stories, but they were sketchy, and all the more tantalizing for their gossamer insubstantiality.

  I checked my watch and cursed quietly. Still nothing from Rico. He’d be paying for that come morning.

  I knew I needed to get to sleep. Unlike Trey, I didn’t have an appointment with the pavement, but I did have a client to meet at the gun shop. I tiptoed into the bedroom. Trey was in deep slumber, his breathing slow and steady. I envied him that, that he could chart things and then fall asleep instantly.

  When I crawled in beside him, he moved to accommodate me, not waking. He was warm, the sheets as soft as an old handkerchief. I stretched myself against him, my very own private mystery wrapped in an enigma and tied pretty with a riddle.

  My familiar stranger. My boyfriend.

  Interesting, he’d said. Yes, indeed.

  Chapter Ten

  The next morning, I arrived at the gun shop to discover Bobby McGraw from the 11th Regiment of the Georgia Volunteers reenactment group pacing on my sidewalk. He was at my car door before I could even get it open.

  “You’re late.”

  “Long night.”

  “I heard.” His eyes sparkled. “Saw your name on the news, said you were mixed up in some murder. That so?”

  I fetched my revolver from its carry case under the seat. “That is so.”

  “Damn, girl. Remind me not to invite you over. You’re like that old woman on TV, people always dropping dead around her.” He checked his watch. “No excuse for keeping your customers waiting, though.”

  “Sorry, Bobby. Traffic was bad.”

  Atlanta traffic was always bad, but people said this anyway. It was the traditional greeting.

  I unlocked the front door, then gave it a good shove to get it open. Bobby was a progressive reenactor, which meant that while he liked the best and most historically-accurate clothing and accessories he could afford, he occasionally broke character enough to swallow some Mylanta while still in dress grays. Nonetheless, his disdain for the not-so-well prepared was obvious.

  “Did I tell you we had two idiots wearing Nike sneakers out on the field last Sunday?”

  I made a disgusted noise. “Some people.”

  I switched the lights on, and Bobby followed me in. He was an accountant at a downtown law firm, with neat brown hair, a rounded physique, and hands like a geisha. Had he been in the actual war, he would have been the butter on some Yankee’s toast in about five minutes.

  He shook his head. “I know, right? If you’re gonna be out there, make an effort to look the part. Whoa, is that mine?”

  As I put my gun away, he spotted the wool cap on the counter, a Confederate kepi with silver infantry bugle insignia. I’d tried to talk him into a suede version, but he’d wanted what the original boys in gray had worn, so wool it was. I broke into prickly sweat thinking about it.

  “All yours, Bobby. Came in yesterday.”

  He popped it on his head. “I thought you said it wouldn’t get here in time.”

  “I bribed the supplier. For history’s sake.”

  He beamed at me from under the hat’s dove-colored bill. “Speaking of history,” he said, pulling out a transparent aqua flask.

  It was scroll glass, used during the Civil War for both medicine and liquor, and from the crescent-shaped pontil mark on the bottom, I knew it was the real thing. The fluted pint-size flask had two inches of clear liquid in the bottom. I took a sniff. Also the real thing.

  I shot him a warning look. “Bobby?”

  He grinned. “Shhh. A
uthentic stuff.”

  “It’ll give you lead poisoning.”

  “Not that authentic. Clean and pure.”

  “And illegal. You get stopped with that in your trunk, don’t call me.”

  Bobby grinned, too happy with his hat to argue. This was the biggest part of my business, tracking down late-1860s weapons and ammunition and clothing, both authentic and reproduction, and making it available to Kennesaw’s population of fervent reenactors. I kept the basics of pretend war-making in stock—black powder, shells, soft lead round balls—but the kind of stuff Bobby wanted often required a little detective work.

  He examined himself in the mirror while I filled in the invoice number on the ledger. As he preened, I reached under the counter and pulled out his new shotgun—a barely used Bernardelli Mississippi .58 reproduction with bayonet and scabbard.

  I handed it to him. “Here. Just in time for the big event.”

  Bobby almost hemorrhaged with glee. He immediately opened the stock and checked the particulars. “You sure you can shoot live ammo in this?”

  “Absolutely sure. I checked with the gunsmith.”

  Bobby grinned, and I got the warm sense of satisfaction that comes from making someone happy…and from knowing my bills would get paid that month.

  He pulled out his checkbook. “Boonsboro here I come!”

  Bobby’s big event was a big one indeed—the sesquicentennial of the Battle of Second Manasses, known to the North as the Second Battle of Bull Run. General Stonewall Jackson himself fought there, and he described the fighting as “fierce and sanguinary.” The skirmish ended in a Confederate victory, and it was happening once again in Boonsboro, Virginia, one hundred and fifty years after the fact. And every single one of its participants needed weapons and ammo and chronologically-appropriate uniforms.

  My phone rang before I could take Bobby’s check, however. It was Adam. I felt a sudden punch of foreboding as I shoved the paperwork across the counter.

  “Hang on a sec, Bobby, I gotta take this.”

  But Bobby had already popped his weapon on his shoulder, its sights set on an ancient invisible enemy. He barely noticed when I took the phone into the office and answered it.