by Gregory Ashe
Shaw nodded.
“He said Philip sent him,” Marjorie said, opening one hand in a what-can-you-do gesture. “That’s what I meant when I said Philip is a step ahead of you. I thought it was strange, the whole thing, but honestly, I was just so relieved it was over.”
“What are you saying, Marjorie?”
“Jadon, that young man. He took the Caddy.”
Chapter 25
SHAW STARED at Marjorie Parrish in shock, trying to absorb the last thing she had told him. Below them, on the bluff, blackbirds rose and settled like smoke. Upriver, another low toot came from a riverboat. And off in the other direction, a car buzzed along the highway.
“I really should get back to work,” Marjorie said, glancing over her shoulder. She blushed; the empty restaurant gave away her lie. But Shaw couldn’t bring himself to protest, and North had slumped back into his seat, those ice-rim eyes hooded with thought. Marjorie seemed to sense her chance, and she loaded the plates back onto her cart and trundled into the darkness beyond the French windows.
“Jadon took the car?” Shaw said.
“What the fuck was he doing?” North said.
Digging a pencil out of one pocket, Shaw unfolded a paper napkin across the table and began to sketch. North glanced at him, and then his eyes cut toward the bluff, where blackbirds smoked again from one tree to another. The sound of the river seemed louder now; on Shaw’s next breath, he tasted the odor of wet, dead leaves mixed with the dark clay along the bank, all of it perfumed by Irish Spring and leather.
“Talk to me,” Shaw said; he was trying to draw a blackbird, only the beak was too long, and he thought it looked more like a grackle.
“I’m thinking.”
“I need a distraction. Talk to me.”
A growl built in North’s throat.
“North.”
“What the fuck are you doodling anyway?”
“A bird.”
“It doesn’t look like a bird. It looks like a penguin wearing a safety cone.”
“A penguin is a type of bird.”
“You’re not drawing a fucking penguin. I said that because it’s not supposed to be a penguin.”
“Why did Jadon come up here?”
“That’s obvious,” North said. “Even if it makes no sense.”
“To get the car.”
North turned his attention back to the river. After a moment, he said, “It doesn’t make sense from the beginning. Thomas Parrish was dirty; that’s obvious. He’s got more money than any honest cop, and he was buddies with Waggener and Taylor, which is about as bad as it gets. He’s under investigation, along with Taylor and Waggener. He’s stressed; he’s losing his shit, actually. And then, of all the fucked up ideas, he decides to kill a bunch of gay boys.” North drew a hand over his eyes. “Maybe he’s doing it to get IA off his back, but in what universe does that make sense?”
“String theory says—”
“Don’t fucking string theory me. I’m the one that took physics. You took a fucking Issues of Science class and wrote eight papers on masturbation.”
“I didn’t write eight papers on masturbation. One of them was about the emotional release of pornography.”
“Yeah, well, I walked in on your first-hand research,” North mimed jerking off, “and was fucking traumatized for the rest of junior year.”
Shaw fought a grin. He’d abandoned the blackbird-grackle-penguin and was now looking at North, glancing down only occasionally, letting the dark side of his brain take over. “You did a lot of first-hand research yourself that semester, I remember. That was when you got really shy all of a sudden and stopped banging every Chouteau boy who looked at you twice, and—” Shaw’s pencil skipped over a rough spot on the table. “Oh my God. You stopped sleeping with all those Chouteau boys because we were living together.”
“Ok, Shaw. Cool it on the ego.”
“Were you embarrassed about having me see the conga line of boys you screwed?”
“Can we talk about this case, please?”
“Was it because none of them was as cute as me?”
“None of them talked as much, that’s for fucking sure. Listen, this thing with Parrish, it doesn’t make sense. If he wanted—”
“Was it because you were afraid I’d be jealous?”
North spoke through gritted teeth. “If he wanted a distraction, why not pin the drugs and money on another cop? Why not try to clear himself that way? Fuck, why not turn over Waggener and Taylor and save his own ass?”
Shaw shrugged and rotated the napkin, the pencil flying now. A door. Then a car. Then a door again. Then the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Then a door again. Then another Leaning Tower of Pisa. Then another door. He tried a car again, and then an icicle went through his gut and he flipped the napkin over and started drawing teeth.
“Marjorie’s theory about the gay son,” North said, “about Parrish displacing that anger onto random gay boys, that’s bullshit too. One minute she’s telling us Parrish couldn’t be behind any of this stuff, and she wants to point the finger at Waggener and Taylor. Then the next minute she’s got a whole Freudian explanation for why her husband was out butchering queer kids. That’s bullshit. That’s all bullshit.”
Teeth, Shaw thought, another of those icicles working inside him. He tried different angles. The way teeth looked with the lips pulled back. The way teeth looked from below, staring up at someone’s mouth. From above, staring down. With a tongue sticking out. With a cigarette. With a gold crown.
“I understand,” North said. “She might not want to admit to herself that she lived with a killer. I really do. But she’s twisted herself into knots, and the result is that she gave us a whole lot of internal bullshit that might be hiding important facts.”
“The car,” Shaw said.
“The fucking car. He takes the Caddy out a lot. And it’s nights that gay kids get slaughtered. That feels pretty fucking open and shut to me. We’ve even got the car on camera, right? I mean, that’s it, right? Shaw, for fuck’s sake, will you quit drawing blowjobs and listen to me?”
“Blowjobs?”
“This.” North’s finger stabbed at a drawing. “And this. And this. I know I blew your mind last night, baby, but you’ve got to focus.”
“No, those are teeth. Like, you know, when you tried to give Nick Navarra your first blowjob ever and you basically chewed him to a pulp.”
“And what’s this going between the teeth?”
“That’s a—”
“That’s a dick.”
“I know it might look that way. You’ve gotten fixated because of that experience with Nick. But that’s a cigarette.”
“Shaw.”
“Uh huh?”
“Baby.”
Shaw drew his lip between his teeth and erased part of the mouth he’d been working on. “Yeah?”
“Bring up Nick Navarra one more time, and you’re going to have the worst fucking dry spell of your life. Understand me?”
“You’ve gotten better, North. Honest to God. I barely felt it when you bit me last night. I didn’t even need a band-aid; it stopped bleeding all on its own.”
“Oh, baby. Fine. All right. Get ready for the fucking Sahara.”
Shaw had to keep his face down to hide his smile.
“If you’re finished drawing blowjobs—”
“They aren’t blowjobs.”
“—maybe we can try to figure out the car.”
“Oh, yeah. It’s around here somewhere.”
“No. Jadon took it, remember?”
“Yeah, but he just moved it. He hid it somewhere close.” Shaw tore off a piece of the napkin, where he had drawn the car, and passed it to North. “I figured that out a few minutes ago.”
The silence that followed made the back of Shaw’s neck prickle.
“You figured that out a few minutes ago?”
“Yeah, that part was easy.”
“Do you want to explain that?”
“What? Oh. You haven’t—sure, yeah. I’ll explain. Jadon didn’t leave his car here.”
“And?”
“And that means the Caddy is somewhere close by. He drove it away, hid it, and walked back for his own car. Trust me: Ricky would have told me all about it if Jadon had come back with a different car.”
North was making a noise in his throat that kind of reminded Shaw of someone being strangled. It went on so long that Shaw finally looked up.
“Your face is a little red. Do you want to sit inside?”
“Were you going to tell me you figured that out?” North said. “Or was I supposed to read your mind?”
“I wanted to talk about blowjobs first.”
“I knew it!” North said, stabbing viciously at the napkin. “I fucking knew it.”
“And teeth. North, the Slasher had a gold crown. I know. I was up close with him, and I saw it. You know who doesn’t have a gold crown?”
“Thomas Parrish.”
“Or Marilynn Waggener or Philip Taylor. None of them. I’ve looked. They’re not our killer. Maybe they were helping. Maybe they orchestrated the whole thing. But they weren’t the one in the alley that night. And North?”
North glanced over.
Tapping one incisor, Shaw said, “The other thing about teeth, you know, is that there’s always room for improvement.”
He had to run to get inside the restaurant before North caught him.
Marjorie was making a lot of noise in the kitchen—water running, pots clattering, singing something from Gypsy—and Shaw figured she wasn’t going to come out again any time soon. Shaw led North outside, and then he pulled out his phone and displayed again the picture he had taken of the map tracking Jadon’s movements.
“See,” Shaw said, pointing to the collection of red pins that marked Jadon’s locations over the last two weeks. “There’s only one pin south of the city, and it’s here at the winery. So the car has to be close. So close, in fact, that the tracker app wouldn’t register it as a second location.”
“If you’re right,” North said. “He could have driven the car back into the city, stashed it somewhere, and then taken an uber back out here.”
“Nope,” Shaw tapped his screen again. “Look at the timestamps. He was only out here once, and only for a few hours.”
North tipped his head toward the road, and they walked down to the asphalt. For the moment, they were alone. Two deer poked their way out of the woods about a hundred yards north, their heads moving from side to side, their thin legs trembling with nerves. Then, with sudden energy, they sprang into a run, crossing the state highway in easy leaps and disappearing into the brush on the other side.
“If you were Taylor and Waggener,” North said, looking in the direction the deer had gone, “and you found out that Jadon had taken the car, would you worry?”
“Yes. The car’s important. Not only do we have it in the security footage, but we also have Marjorie’s story about the times her husband used the car and how those dates lined up with the Slasher’s killings.”
“Why did Jadon take it? Did he think he could get some sort of forensic evidence after all these years?”
Shaw shook his head, looping one arm through North’s and resting his head on North’s shoulder. “I don’t think so. Hey, do you think I could keep a deer as a pet?”
“Some people do. And I don’t think Jadon took the car because of forensics either.”
“Why do you think he took it?”
“Most importantly, to keep Marjorie or Taylor or Waggener from destroying it or hiding it. The fact that the car appears in the security footage is important; if the car’s missing, though, and Marjorie Parrish tells the police that it was stolen years ago and she never bothered to report it, then we lose an important link to the Slasher killings.”
Shaw nodded; he ran his hand up and down North’s arm, his nails sifting the blond hair. “And something else.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. But Thomas Parrish did something strange: he told his wife to keep the car. He could have told her to get rid of it. Even if he didn’t know it had been caught on tape, once the killings were done, he should have found a way to dispose of it. But he didn’t. He told her to keep it. Don’t sell it. Don’t get rid of it. That was his dying request. That’s really weird, and I think Jadon must have known how weird it was too.”
“You think there’s something in the car?”
Shaw shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”
“So where’d Jadon stash it?”
“Somewhere within walking distance.”
“North or south?”
“Or west.”
North shook his head. “Not from here; he’d have to go north or south first on the state highway and then turn off. And the river blocks everything east.”
“North is the city.”
“So that means he took it south; Taylor and Waggener don’t have the advantage of a tracking app, so their most likely guess is that he took the car back to the city, or that he hid it somewhere between here and there. But we know he didn’t; my guess is that he went south.”
“That’s a good guess.”
So they walked south, North in the lead and Shaw behind him as they trudged along the gravel shoulder. Queen Anne’s lace grew in clumps that came up to Shaw’s chest, and Shaw spotted tiny patches of violets and a lone sunflower that had grown so tall that it drooped now, its heavy head almost brushing the highway. When the air shifted, Shaw tasted motor oil and the dustiness of the gravel, and the sun played across his back like a warm hand. When North looked back with a half-smile, Shaw realized he was whistling.
“You’re in a good mood.”
“The macaroni and cheese was amazing.”
North rolled his eyes and kept walking.
After another twenty yards of gravel crunching underfoot, Shaw said, “I feel good.”
North looked back with another smile.
“We’re making progress,” Shaw said. “Marjorie didn’t give us the final answer, but she’s the first real gain we’ve made in a long time.”
“And she gave you that cardigan.”
Shaw blushed and plucked at the pink wool. “Well, I probably should give it back.”
“Don’t,” North said, his eyes flashing like sunlight on snow. “You look good in it.”
Shaw was so busy thinking about how that sounded that his next step went wrong, and a chunk of asphalt slid underfoot. He stumbled, and only North’s arm around his waist kept him from falling. They stood like that, North holding Shaw with what looked like no effort at all, and Shaw’s heart suddenly cranking up, his mouth as dry as gravel.
“I have legs,” Shaw finally managed to say.
“I’ve seen them,” North said. His lips still had that faint hint of a smirk.
“I know how to walk.”
“I think I read about that somewhere. The New York Times did a piece on it, didn’t they?” North’s face was closer now. Shaw wasn’t quite so sure why he’d been so insistent about his legs before because now they seemed to have melted, and the only thing holding him up was North’s arm.
“I got a medal,” Shaw whispered, “in fourth grade for walking the most miles.”
North’s lips brushed Shaw’s, then they brushed his cheek, and then his jawline. And then, North pulled back, helping Shaw stand. Shaw still felt like his legs might puddle under him, but he also felt a faint note of disappointment. Then he saw the tightness in North’s jaw, the way North held his body at an angle, the way North’s eyes fixed on something deep among the trees.
“North? Did I do something wrong? Did I—”
“I like this,” North said. “I like working with you. I like the cases we take. I like when you gang up on me with old ladies to give me shit, even though I’ll never admit it if you ask me again. I love you. I love having you in
my life like this. And I love seeing you happy like this. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you really happy.”
His eyes hadn’t pulled away from whatever he had spotted in the trees. Shaw tried to follow his gaze. A rabbit, maybe? Or a wild blackberry bush? Or tire tracks from a borrowed Caddy? Something moved in the branches down the road, and a raven, heavy and ungainly, flapped up into the sky.
Shaw slipped his hand inside North’s. “I love you too.”
North’s fingers tightened until they hurt. “Shaw, what are you going to do?”
“I told you: I’m working on it, North. I’m going to get better. We’ll get to a place where I can be with you—”
“No. Fuck that. I don’t care about that. I’m talking about this case. Jadon and Taylor and Waggener and, well, all of it. When we find the Slasher, what are we going to do?”
Shaw let go of North’s hand. He pulled back. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t want you to get hurt again, Shaw. I can’t . . . I don’t know if I could handle that. Seeing you like this, happy, I don’t want to lose that.”
“You won’t.”
North shook his head once, savagely, and his eyes flitted back to Shaw.
“What do you think is going to happen?” Shaw asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. That’s why you asked me what I was going to do.”
“I said we. What are we going to do.”
“But first you said you.”
North blew out a breath, and his shoulders lowered and he turned fully toward Shaw, reaching down to take both of Shaw’s hands. “I can’t lose you. That’s all I mean. That’s all I’m saying, ok? I like seeing you like this, happy, and I’m afraid—”
“What? What are you afraid of?”
“I don’t know, baby. I’m just afraid.”
Shaw hesitated; part of him wanted to pull away again, and part of him knew that was childish. Instead, he leaned up and kissed North’s cheek, and neither of them said anything. It was the raven’s sharp cry that fractured the moment and sent them walking, still silent, down the gravel again.
“Look at this,” North said, his voice slightly rougher than normal as he bent to point at a bedraggled line of honeysuckle. With the toe of his Red Wing, he prodded a piece of gravel almost lost in the weeds. “This used to be a turnoff.”