by Harvey, JM
Placing one foot in front of the other was an effort almost beyond him. He bounced off the hallway’s walls, back and forth, leaving a staccato pattern of blood on the plaster, only the tightness of the space keeping him from collapsing. He knew that he was dying, bleeding to death. He was surprised to find that he really didn’t care that much.
A voice from behind him stopped him before he reached the end of the hall.
“Who are you?” a woman demanded in an East Texas twang. “Where’s Lamar?”
Val turned toward the voice, moving with a bone-grinding slowness, shuffling his feet to keep his balance. With eyes that barely focused, he saw Abby Sutton standing in the kitchen entry, a bag of groceries on the counter beside her. He stopped, facing her, and almost fell. The hallway’s wall saved him again, bouncing him back upright. Blood pattered from his fingertips to the floor.
Val had spoken to Abby several times before, looking for information on her brothers’ whereabouts. The girl had been less than helpful. Her replies were more profanity than nouns, but Val had never suspected her of being complicit in their crimes, of helping them. But there she was one flight up from a torture chamber full of corpses.
Val raised his pistol, the gun wavering and weaving before his eyes. He aimed it at her chest.
“Police,” he said, the word thick on his tongue. “You’re under arrest.”
Abby wasn’t listening; she turned and grabbed a sawed-off twelve-gauge pump shotgun that had been lying on the kitchen counter. She had a knowing way with the gun. It came around swiftly, its black bore turning in his direction.
“Put the gun down!” he screamed, the words erupting from his throat with surprising ferocity, almost staggering him, but the shotgun kept moving. Val started to squeeze the trigger, but he couldn’t do it, his finger refused to budge. Too many women had already died here today. And he was just too damned tired to care whether he lived or not.
Abby fired from the hip. Flame blossomed and blazing heat slapped Val in the left cheek as three double-ought pellets ripped his face open to the bone. The wall behind him disintegrated in a blizzard of plaster and splintered wood. The shotgun’s pump action went ‘click-clack’ as Abby worked the slide, chambering a fresh round. Val watched as she flung the gun to her shoulder and aimed from ten feet away. She wouldn’t miss again. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to shoot. Death was looking him square in the face, an old friend come for him at last. It was almost a relief.
Val flinched as a second gunshot boomed, but the shotgun didn’t spit fire and lead in his face. Instead, Abby buckled at the waist, bending in the wrong direction like a marionette with broken strings. Her mouth blew open in a piercing scream and the shotgun went flying. It hit the floor a split second before Abby followed it down, landing face first on the kitchen’s yellow Linoleum.
Abby flopped around like a grounded fish, her hands clawing at her lower back, at a wound that was pulsing blood. She screamed and screamed again. Her chest heaved up off the floor, but her legs remained motionless, twisted at an acute angle to her torso. It took Val a confused moment to make the connection between the shot and Abby’s wound. Someone was behind her in the kitchen!
Val shoved himself off the wall, stepped clumsily over the wounded girl and went through the kitchen entry as fast as he could, almost falling atop her in his haste. His feet felt like they were mired in concrete, his ears were buzzing from the shotgun blast and his vision was watery. He had to lean against the cabinets or go down, offering a perfect target for whoever had shot Abby, but the room was empty. Dirty dishes filled the sink to overflowing, trash was mounded around an over-stuffed plastic garbage can and fast food wrapper and Budweiser bottles cluttered the kitchen table. The door to the back yard stood open, bright sunlight spilling through the gap.
Val crossed the room in as straight a line as he could manage and fell against the door jamb. He stared out into sunlight so dazzling that it made his brain recoil. He slitted his eyes against it, but saw nothing and no one - just a yard overgrown with Johnson grass. The gate to the alley hung open. Maybe the shooter had gone that way? Val stared at the gate for a long time, but he knew there was no way he could cross the yard and give chase. He could barely stand. He needed to get back to his car and call for backup. Tell them to be on the lookout for Abby’s shooter and to send an ambulance for the wounded girl.
He turned and began the trek back across the kitchen, dripping a sticky trail of blood across the warped linoleum. He had to stop for a moment and lean on the kitchen table when the world suddenly reversed its spin. That’s when he saw a photo clipped to a DPD booking sheet lying among the castoff food wrappers and beer bottles. It was your standard mug shot and incident report. Val recognized the man in the photo; he had seen him just a few hours before, lying face-up, his torso ground to taco meat by a dozen or more jacketed rounds. He was one of the Ukrainians. Val picked up the sheet to find another booking sheet beneath it and two more under that. He recognized them as three more members of the now deceased Ukrainian crew. That wasn’t the end of it. Four more pages lay underneath the booking sheets, all neatly typed DPD surveillance logs. A list of names, times and dates. Two weeks’ worth of comings and goings at the Ukrainian’s bungalow in Pleasant grove. There was only one way that Lamar and Lemuel could have gotten these sheets: someone inside DPD had given them to them. A dirty cop. He dropped the paperwork and turned away. Someone else could handle that problem. He had done his job, had found the Suttons and killed them. He left the pages where they were, a decision he would regret for the next four years. By the time the crime scene team had reached the house an hour later, those pages had been gone.
Val released his grip on the table and headed for the door. He stepped carefully over Abby. She was still facedown and moaning, a lake of blood spreading out from her hips.
“Ambulance,” Valentine said to her, that one word all he could manage. “Ambulance,” he said again. He stumbled down the hallway, reeled across the living room, taking twenty wavering steps to cover twelve feet, and staggered out onto the porch. That was as far as he made it. He dropped to a seat on the edge of the porch, head hanging. Dimly, he was aware of a dark SUV parked across the street, but he couldn’t make his eyes stay on it; they kept drifting skyward. Val guessed, much later, that the SUV was where the guy who had taped Val kicking in the Suttons’ door with a smart phone had been located.
The last frames of the phone’s video showed Val falling face forward into the tall grass, his fingers still wrapped around the butt of the cocked 9mm.
46
Victoria had been to Herby Lubbock’s home twice before. Herby threw the biggest, swankiest lawyers-only Christmas bash in the city, but those two visits had been more than enough for her. Attorneys were the most blandly pretentious people on the face of the earth.
Jesus, she hated lawyers.
There was something Freudian there, but she didn’t stop to consider it as she parked in Herby’s driveway, under the portico of his brick and stone home. A home that was just a few rooms short of being a mansion. It fit right in with the other huge houses that lined Swiss Avenue, their front lawns large enough to hold a trio of suburban tract homes. This neighborhood was where the old money lived, the inheritors and the successors. Herby was neither; he was the snake in the garden.
Victoria stepped down from the Jeep and climbed the steps of a deep porch lined with wicker furniture that was covered in a thick layer of dust. The lead panes of the windows flanking the front door were dirty as well, and a collection of yellowing newspapers covered the doormat. Herby needed a new housekeeper. She hesitated in front of the door. What could she hope to get from Herby? Would he even talk to her? Probably not. And if he did, would he say anything that would prove that Valentine was not a murderer? What if he did just the opposite? What if he implicated Val even further? Her mind leapfrogged over those two questions, fearful of what the prosecutor in her would conclude, but she couldn’t turn around and go home. S
he’d face whatever lay behind the door and deal with it. There was no other option.
She pressed the doorbell but nothing happened. She cocked her ear and pressed the buzzer again but heard nothing. The doorbell obviously wasn’t working. Victoria raised her fist and knocked loud and long. A minute passed. She knocked again, using the side of her hand, pounding the door like she was driving nails. Still nothing. She did it again for twice as long, until her hand began to ache. More nothing. Herby wasn’t home. Or he was home and didn’t want to see her.
Victoria retraced her steps to the driveway, but instead of returning to the Jeep, she turned in the opposite direction, following the concrete drive as it paralleled the house, heading for the back yard. As she went, she chinned herself up at every window and peered inside. She saw nothing but dusty rooms, some empty and unused, some cluttered with antique furniture filmed with dust.
The driveway took a ninety-degree right turn behind the house, ending at a three-bay garage that was fronted by oversized French doors whose windows were hazy with grime. She peered through a dirty pane, cupping her hands to the glass. Herby had two identical Cadillac convertibles. Both were in the garage. She continued along the back of the house, climbing the steps of a brick terrace that bordered a pool filled with scummy-green water. Dead leaves floated on the surface and mosquitoes hovered in clouds above it. Beyond the pool, the back lawn was long and scraggly. Cicadas made their high-pitch chirring from shrubs and ornamental trees gone wild. Herby needed a new gardener as well.
Victoria walked the length of the terrace, doing more window snooping. Kitchen: dirty and empty. Library: ditto. Guest bedroom empty of furniture, dust-bunnies clustered in all four corners. She was finally rewarded when she pulled herself up to look through the fourth window in the row, into Herby’s office.
The window’s heavy brocade curtains were half closed and the overhead lights were off, but she could still see Herby seated in the darkness behind his oversized desk, facing away from her. Victoria considered pounding on the glass but that was just too undignified. She had to have the upper hand with Herby if she expected to get anything out of him. Instead, she dropped back to the terrace and retraced her steps to the front porch. This time she pounded on the door, hammering away until her fist went numb, but Herby never appeared. Victoria tried the doorknob. It turned. She didn’t hesitate; she stepped into the musty gloom of the front hall.
The air inside the house was still and hot, maybe ten degrees cooler than the outside temperature of one-hundred-and-two. The hallway leading back was dim. She flipped the light switch by the door but nothing happened. That’s when the silence struck her - there was no whir of ceiling fans or whine of refrigerator motors and air conditioners - all the normal noises that filled a house with an omnipresent background drone. The power had been turned off.
For the first time Victoria wondered if the unkempt home, pool, and lawn were more than just an expression of Herby’s slovenliness? No one in their right mind would live without power in Dallas in August. Was Herby broke? Was desperation for money what had driven him to set up Rankin for murder and herself for a criminal conspiracy charge? There was only one way to find out.
“Herby!” Victoria called out as she moved slowly down the hallway, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom. Everywhere she looked she saw dust and decay. Plaster was peeling and the wood floors were battered and scuffed. Cobwebs hung in the corners of the ceiling. It was like something out of a gothic novel: the crumbling mansion of a deranged aristocrat.
“Herby!” She heard nothing in reply but her own voice echoing down the corridor.
She followed the hall to the kitchen door. The smell of rotten meat came from an overflowing galvanized garbage can. She crossed the kitchen and entered a narrower corridor that paralleled the back of the house. Herby’s office was the fourth door on the left. It was only half-closed; she pushed through the door, already cursing.
“Damn it, Herby—” she began but the words got log-jammed in her throat as her eyes fell on what was left of Herby Lubbock’s face.
Herby was facing her, his head thrown back against the chair’s headrest. His left shoulder, the desktop and the carpet were clotted with blood - blood that still gleamed wetly in the light filtering through the dirty window behind him. His forehead had been cratered by a single gunshot wound that was ringed by a blue-black powder burn. On the desk, beside his out-flung hand, was a snub-nosed revolver.
Her stomach convulsed and her eyes veered away, falling to the floor on the right side of Herby’s desk. A pair of feet dressed in sober black shoes peeked out beyond the edge of the oversized desk, the toes pointed at the ceiling. A few inches of blue pants legs with a gold stripe were visible above the shoes, the rest of the body was hidden by the desk.
Victoria stared, her mouth dry, her stomach twisting, her pulse a deafening roar in her head. Hesitantly, she took a step to the right and looked around the corner of the desk. The pants legs ended in a blue County Deputy uniform blouse that was dark with blood. She took another step and found herself looking down on the slack features of Deputy Debbie Foster.
Foster’s eyes were open, her blonde hair hanging across her face, tendrils of it drooping down into the darkness of her open mouth. She had been shot in the chest at least three times at very close range.
Victoria had seen dozens of dead bodies on the job, many in far worse condition than Herby and Debbie Foster, and she had always managed to maintain a certain detachment, but she had known Herby and Foster. That made this far worse than an anonymous homicide scene. Far more real. Her brain locked up tight, the gears gnashing and knotting, all rational thought banished by the animal core of her brain. Only tactile impressions remained: the heat of the room, the metallic smell of spilled blood mingling with the garbage-bin odor drifting down from the filthy kitchen. Her stomach rolled again, Hector’s cheese enchiladas pushing up into her throat. She turned abruptly, her hand flying to her mouth, and ran out of the room, down the hallway, to the kitchen. She reached the sink just as her lunch reemerged. She heaved and heaved again, emptying her stomach into the deep porcelain basin, and then continued to dry heave for another two minutes until her stomach muscles were aching and her head was spinning.
Several minutes went by before the nausea and shaking finally passed. She turned on the sink’s cold-water tap and was rewarded with a blast of lukewarm water. She washed the mess down the drain then splashed her face repeatedly. It took her several more minutes of deep breathing to gather herself together as she stood over the sink, her head hanging, damp hair sticking to her sweat-wet skin.
What was Foster doing with Herby? That was an easy one; the deputy had come to the man who’d bribed her. Had she come here to confront Herby? To accuse him? To relieve her own guilt over Sandy’s death? Murder-suicide would certainly explain the scene back in the office. Still, Victoria didn’t buy it. Herby wouldn’t have put a gun to his head. He was a lawyer after all, and a damn good one, he would have counted on his ability to bluff a judge and a jury. Arrogance was not only his strong suit, it was his defining characteristic.
Victoria shook herself. What was she doing? Why was she just standing here playing a mental game of Nancy Drew? She was an officer of the court; she had a duty to call this in, to get the cops on the scene. She dug her phone out to call 9-1-1, but stopped short. She, Jack Birch, and Valentine were all under suspicion of murder thanks to the perjured testimony of Herby Lubbock, and here she was with Herby’s corpse. It didn’t take a large leap in logic to realize that if she called the cops she’d be leaving Herby’s in handcuffs.
She called Jack instead. He answered on the second ring.
“Herby’s dead,” she said without preamble. “Shot in the head in his office at home. Debbie Foster, the Sheriff’s deputy who was in the hallway when Rankin was killed, is in there with him. Multiple gunshots to the chest. Looks like Herby killed her then shot himself.”
Jack was silent for a moment then calmly aske
d, “Have you touched anything?”
Victoria looked at the sink then thought of all the window ledges she’d chinned herself up on. The front doorknob. The doorbell. The French doors to the garage. Jesus! She had touched everything!
Her hesitation was enough to answer Jack’s question.
“Have you touched anything around the body?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But I touched a lot of other stuff. Windows and doors.”
“Well, then, you are in a pickle,” Jack said without inflection. He could be so maddeningly blasé!
“I can’t call 9-1-1,” Victoria said. “With all that’s going on I’d probably be arrested.”
“And you can’t go around clearing away fingerprints, either,” Jack warned her. “That’d just make you look guiltier.”
“Damn it, Jack,” Victoria exploded. Jack was pointing out the obvious while she was standing in a creepy old house with a pair of corpses three doors down. She dropped her voice. “I need solutions, not observations.”
Jack went silent again. “I’d say you should just back up out of there,” he finally said. “I know it cuts across the grain, but that’s what you got to do. We’ll deal with it later.”
Jack was right, but she wasn’t going to do that. She had come here for evidence of a crime and she had found it. She wasn’t leaving. Jack read her silence perfectly. He wasn’t the city’s best detective for nothing.
“Now, don’t you go getting foolish ideas,” he said, his bland tone shifting to concern. “Listen to me, now, Victoria. For all you know someone could have set that scene up. Wouldn’t be the first time, that’s for sure. The killer could still be in the house.”