Dark Fissures

by Coyle, Matt;

  “Okay.” I folded the printout and put it in the inside pocket of my leather jacket. “I’m going to need a copy of the police report, the autopsy, and a check for twenty-five hundred dollars to start. That’ll cover the first week. I’ll email you a contract to sign when I get home.”

  Brianne smiled for the first time since we met a half hour ago. Warm, just a hint of teeth, but her eyes seemed to brighten. In my line of work, I didn’t see too many smiles. And none that looked like that. I hadn’t quite earned the smile yet. The information she’d given me was just enough to question the finding of suicide in her husband’s death. The opportunity to possibly find more dirt on Police Chief Tony Moretti was a bonus. I needed any advantage I could get when that knock finally came to my door.

  Brianne slid the file folder across the table to me. I glanced inside and saw the police report and autopsy. Underneath them was a short list of handwritten names and phone numbers. Presumably, Jim’s friends. Brianne was smart and thorough. My kind of client. When I looked back up, she was already ripping a check from her checkbook. She handed it to me, and I stuffed it in my pocket without looking at it. I wanted to show her that trust went both ways.

  “One last thing.” I locked on her eyes.

  “Whatever you need.”

  “I have to talk to your son.”

  “Why?” Her eyes went wide, forcing up her eyebrows. “He’s been through enough. I don’t want him to have to relive finding his father.”

  “He may know something you don’t.”

  “That’s why I gave you a list of Jim’s friends.” Her face flushed and she reached across the table and opened the folder, rustled the papers until she came out with the list. “See?”

  “That’s very helpful, and I’ll talk to all of them.” I kept my voice psychiatrist cool. “But I need to talk to your son, as well.”

  “No.” She clasped her hands together and rubbed one thumb with the other. Over and over. “I can’t allow that.”

  “Brianne. Kim said you could trust me, right?” Just uttering Kim’s name put a hole in my gut and made me long for a beer, chased by a fifth of tequila. “And she told you I’d find the truth and do the right thing. I need to talk to your son to learn all the truth. I won’t ask him anything more than necessary.”

  “What’s necessary?” Thumb rubbing thumb, over and over.

  “I won’t know until I talk to him, but you have to trust me.” I understood Brianne wanting to protect her son. The image of his father hanging in the garage would be forever branded into his psyche. Brianne didn’t want me shining a spotlight on it. Fine. But years of dealing with duplicitous people made me wonder if the son might know something his mother wanted kept secret.

  Brianne looked at me without saying anything for what seemed like a minute. Her eyes still wide with fear, anxiety, or both. Finally, in a voice just above a whisper, “Okay.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I DID THE speed limit on the drive home. Fall had pulled the night down early and headlights stared unblinking at me in the rearview mirror, refusing to reveal the make or model of their car. They were all Crown Victoria police cruisers in my imagination. I didn’t know how much longer I could tempt fate. Or Chief Moretti. But without the money to lease real office space, a free table at Muldoon’s was the best I could do if I wanted to keep a La Jolla presence and have a chance to pay most of my bills.

  The twenty-five hundred from Brianne Colton would help. I’d be able to pay off a month’s mortgage and buy a six-pack of beer. Domestic. Brianne had bought me for a week. Finding the truth about her husband’s death would likely take longer than that. Probably not long enough to pull me back to even, but at least I had a place to start.

  Midnight greeted me at the front door when I got home. The breadwinner had just bought him a few more weeks to enjoy a spacious backyard. Things were looking up. Except for the fine I’d have to pay for the traffic ticket.

  I gave Midnight a treat and let him outside. His tail arced up like a scorpion about to strike as he trotted around the yard sniffing out the best spot to pee. Someday, I hoped to feel that kind of joy again.

  I went upstairs to a spare bedroom I’d converted into an office. The other spare remained empty, waiting for a reason to be filled up. I sat at my desk and typed in the personal information Brianne Colton had given me onto a standard contract and emailed it to her to sign and send back to me.

  I opened the manila folder to read the police report. On top of the report were three “crime scene” photographs. Although the death was later ruled a suicide, crime scene investigators are almost always called when a body is discovered. The photos were three different angles of Jim Colton’s body hanging by a rope a foot off the ground. I’d seen death many times before. Back on my cop beat in Santa Barbara’s barrio, here in San Diego in my civilian life. And in the morgue staring at my wife’s lifeless body. Colton looked peaceful in comparison to most deaths I’d seen, but that wouldn’t have mattered to his son. I knew the pain Cash Colton must have felt when he found his father. He’d take that image to his own grave.

  The photos would seem to fit the conclusion of death by suspension hanging and a probable suicide. A knocked-over kitchen chair lay on the garage floor to the right of Colton’s dangling legs.

  The only thing that possibly seemed out of place was the rope tied to the ceiling beams and around Colton’s throat. It was a nylon climbing rope. Actually a piece cut from one. Most climbing ropes are at least 150 feet long. I’d used them when I’d gone rock climbing with Turk Muldoon in college. The rope in the photos was at most a quarter of that. Colton must have cut it from a rope he used when he went climbing. Brianne had said she’d never seen the rope before. Odd if her husband was a rock climber. I made a mental note to ask her if Colton ever went climbing.

  Climbing ropes have a lot of spring in them so they can take the weight of a climber falling fifty to a hundred feet. Good choice for a hanging in that it could take the drop without fear of breaking. Bad choice in that the rope might stretch from the weight and put your feet back on the ground, at least for a second. Colton had apparently estimated it perfectly.

  Unlucky him.

  The first thing in the report made me shudder almost as much as the death photos. The reporting detective was Hailey Denton. We had a history and, as with everyone I’d come in contact with at LJPD, it wasn’t a good one. For the second time that day, I cursed the fact that Jim Colton had lived in La Jolla and, by his hand or someone else’s, had died there.

  The report echoed what Brianne told me earlier. Jim Colton’s body was discovered hanging from a beam in the garage by his son, Cash, at 12:15 a.m. on August 29. Cash had just returned home from a party at the beach. The fact that Colton had been hanging high enough to have his feet off the ground ruled out accidental death by autoerotic asphyxiation. Maybe a little solace to Brianne and her son.

  The coroner determined the method of death to be strangulation by hanging. She’d listed the time of death to be between 9:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m.

  I pulled Jim Colton’s last phone bill from the folder. He made three calls on his cell phone the day he died. The first call was placed at 12:31 p.m., the second at 7:17 p.m., and the last at 8:43 p.m. The first call lasted three minutes and the last two a minute each according to Colton’s phone bill. If you took the coroner’s earliest possible time of death, Jim Colton made a short call to someone roughly twenty minutes before he died.

  A call to say good-bye or for a last hope to be talked out of killing himself ? Or neither?

  I pulled the list of Jim’s friends and their phone numbers that Brianne had given me from my jacket pocket. The calls Colton made the day he died matched phone numbers on his friends’ list. The first to Kyle Bates and the last two to Odell Rollins. The man Brianne called “Oak” who she said was Jim’s best friend. If you were contemplating suicide and looking for a good-bye or a way out, you’d call your best friend if your wife wasn’t that person anymore.
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  Suicide remained the leading contender. That still left the call to the man named Kyle Bates. I went back to the police report to see if there was mention of the phone calls or the missing cell phone. Nothing.

  So, if the police were right and Jim Colton committed suicide, he made a call to his best friend, disposed of his cell phone somewhere where no one could find it in the next twenty minutes to two hours, and then killed himself.

  Why?

  A question I’d ask Odell “Oak” Rollins, but not over the phone. I wanted to do a face-to-face for that. I’ve found it’s easier to lie on the phone and harder to detect. First I had to find out where Rollins lived. I couldn’t afford the subscription to the data-mining website that we used at the agency where I used to work and certainly couldn’t call in any favors over there. Hard to believe, but I didn’t have any connections at LJPD or even the San Diego Police Department.

  So, I used free websites whenever possible or paid for each search individually. I hid the cost in other expenses on clients’ expense reports because I didn’t want them to know how threadbare my “agency” really was. Luckily, there was a free and easier way.

  I called Brianne.

  “I’ve got a gig tonight and I’m running out the door.” Brianne rushed her words after I’d told her what I needed. “Can this wait until tomorrow? Or you could come by Chapin’s tonight, and I’ll give you the addresses between sets. Everything’s on my phone.”

  “What time?”

  “We start at eight and our first break is at eight forty-five. I’ll reserve a table for you near the stage. Tell the bouncer your name when you get there, and he’ll take care of you. Gotta run.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPIN’S IS A bar/restaurant located in the Gaslamp Quarter in downtown San Diego. Named after the gas lamps that once lined its streets, the area is a mix of historic Victorian buildings nestled among modern high-rises. Old and new, the DNA of San Diego. Constantly reinventing itself while holding onto its historic roots. The eighth-largest city in the country that still thinks it’s a small town.

  The Gaslamp Quarter had a sordid past, from saloons and bordellos in the late eighteen hundreds to adult movie theaters and “massage” parlors in the middle of the last century. Now a trendy, Millennial hang with diverse live music and great restaurants. Part of the gentrification finalized when the former owner of the Padres upped the team’s payroll enough to climb into the World Series in the late ’90s and then conned the city into bankrolling a new ballpark only to gut the team after its completion. Another chapter in San Diego’s shady dealings that tourists and most locals never see amid the blinding 365-days-a-year sunlight. Nice ballpark, though.

  Chapin’s long, skinny rectangular bar took up half of a Victorian structure opposite its twin restaurant. I told the bald, Sub-Zerosized bouncer collecting covers and checking IDs that Brianne had a table for me. He nodded me into the bar. I scanned the crowd looking for Kim Parker and was both disappointed and relieved that she wasn’t there.

  A small raised stage sat up against an original red brick wall at the far end. Brianne stood on the stage with her back to the cramped crowd sitting at tiny bar tables. She wore the same blue jeans she had on earlier and they still looked good. A buckskin jacket over a turquoise blouse gave off just the right country vibe. It wasn’t quite eight and she and the band looked to be talking over the last few details before they began playing. Even though she was the only woman onstage, I would have recognized her from behind. I reminded myself she was my client and sat up front, just to the left of the stage, at an empty table with a reserved sign on it.

  Brianne turned around and greeted the crowd to jarring applause. She had a following and they cheered her in the intimate room. She saw me and winked, then turned her attention back to her fans.

  “Ya’ll ready to have a good time?” Brianne’s voice filled out the hint of a southern accent I’d heard earlier at Muldoon’s. The crowd answered in full throat on cue.

  The band kicked off, guitar, bass, banjo, and drums, and Brianne broke into the Patty Loveless classic “That Kind Of Girl” and I instantly understood her fans’ reaction. Big full voice, but sultry in between. The band was good and could keep up, but Brianne was clearly the draw and on a different level. She commanded the stage without effort, like the sun commands the day. She didn’t so much sing the songs as live them. You believed every word. I could hear her life’s pain in Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus Take The Wheel.”

  I got lost in her performance.

  The band took a break after forty-five minutes. Brianne stepped off the stage toward me, and her male bandmates slipped into the crowd. I got up and pulled out a barstool from the high-topped table. “A gentleman,” Brianne said as she sat on the stool I’d proffered.

  “I can fake it.” I sat back down opposite her and caught her eyes flickering in the candlelight. “Get you something to drink?”

  “No thanks. I don’t like to drink while I’m performing, but I can get you another beer on the house.” She pointed to the empty beer bottle on the table. The second one I’d consumed during her performance.

  I’d gotten so lost in the music and Brianne’s talent that I’d forgotten why I was there. I’d forgotten about everything. Police Chief Moretti, the bank trying to foreclose on me, Jim Colton hanging from a beam in his garage. Maybe this was how normal people felt when they went out for a night on the town.

  “I’m good. Thanks.” I did want that beer, though. So I could continue my drift into normalness. But that was fantasyland. I didn’t belong in normal anymore. And getting lost was dangerous.

  Even off the stage on a break from performing, Brianne was different than when I’d met her earlier today. Like a light inside had been turned on and its glow haloed her whole being. She smiled. The beers, the smile, the glow, or all three sent a warm buzz along my spine. I needed to follow Brianne’s lead and not drink on the job.

  “Heck of a set.”

  “Thank you.” Brianne smiled again, all the way up to her eyes. A blue dazzle. I felt like an average Joe scoring points with the beauty in the bar way out of my league.

  Normal.

  “How come I don’t see you on the CMA Awards on TV?”

  “So, you’re a flatterer as well as a gentleman.”

  “No. Just a good judge of talent. I used to book the bands at Muldoon’s, so I know a little bit about music. You belong on the radio or on tour, not on a tiny stage in a bar in San Diego.”

  “I’ve already done the honky-tonks and bars in Nashville.” No more smile. No more dazzle. “I had my chance a long time ago. Country radio isn’t looking for a forty-year-old ingénue.”

  “When were you in Nashville?”

  “Before I met Jim. I moved there from Brooksville, Kentucky, when I was eighteen. I didn’t know how the world worked yet. Thought I’d get a record deal by the time I was twenty. Instead, I met Jim, got married, and had Cash and . . . no singing career.”

  I caught eyes watching me over Brianne’s shoulder. Jealous eyes. I scanned the crowd and saw most of the men in the room, single or not, giving me the same look. They all wished they were sitting in my seat. I wondered what Jim Colton thought about those looks. Before and after he and Brianne separated.

  “A lot of the guys in the room have been eyeballing us. How did Jim feel about all the attention?”

  “He never came to any of my shows.” Deadpan.

  “He didn’t approve?”

  Brianne leaned forward and propped her elbow on the table, rested her chin in her hand, and studied me. I couldn’t tell what she was looking for or what she saw. “Is this pertinent to the case, Rick?”

  “Right now, everything is.”

  The beginning of a case was like mining for gold. You scooped up everything you could find and dumped it into a sieve and shook it until the dirt and dust disappeared leaving only the gold. I liked Brianne Colton. More and more each minute. But the truth was my journey and I followed its
path.

  “Jim was old-fashioned. He grew up on a farm in a tiny town in Alabama.”

  “A woman’s place is in the home?”

  “Yes, but it’s not that simple.” Her eyes softened and she seemed to be looking back at an earlier time. “He was old-fashioned in a southern gentleman kind of way.” She shook her head and came back to the present. “Anyway, to answer your question, no, Jim didn’t approve.”

  “How long have you been performing with the band?”

  “A couple years, but I took some time off after Jim . . . after Jim died.” She leaned back on the barstool. “This is my first week back.”

  “Was your performing again the main reason for the separation?”

  “Really, Rick, I don’t see how this has any bearing on finding the truth about Jim’s death.” She leaned forward and whispered the last two words. She then pulled her cell phone out of her jeans pocket, tapped the screen a couple times, and pushed it across the table in front of me. “Here’s my address book with the addresses for Jim’s friends. Isn’t that why you came?”

  “Yes. Thanks.” I picked up the phone. “But you came looking for me, Brianne. I didn’t knock on your door begging for a job. You want me to find the truth about Jim’s death, you have to trust me. I’m not a psychiatrist trying to heal your pain. I’m here to find the truth. So please answer my questions and never lie to me. Okay?”

  She folded her arms across her chest and nodded her head. “Okay.”

  “So, why the split? The band?”

  “Yes.” She stared at my shoulder. “But we’d also drifted apart. Jim would be deployed for months and months overseas, come home for a few months, and then be gone again. We lived separate lives for most of our marriage, but we always meshed whenever he’d come back home. The last time he came home three years ago, it was different. He was distant. Morose. I thought things would get better when he quit the GRS and joined the La Jolla Police Department. But they never did.”