Fortunes of the Dead

by Lynn Hightower

  I went into the kitchen and took a bottle of the Dasani Joel had stashed in the fridge. There were no glasses, so I unscrewed the cap and took her the bottle.

  “Water?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

  “I don’t like coffee. This is fine, really, I’m okay.”

  “Why don’t we call it quits for today, and I’ll give your father a call tonight.”

  Miranda covered her eyes with her hands. “Don’t do that to me, don’t call my dad. This is as important to me as it is to him, sometimes I think more important. I’m the one who’s here, you know? He’s up in Pittsburgh, working and getting fitted for a tux.”

  “All right, then. I won’t shut you out. I expect you to tell me if it gets to be too much.”

  “Is there any way I can take a look at the car? I want to know what the police see when they look at it. I want to know what it is that makes you so sure Cheryl’s dead. I need to know, one way or the other.”

  I considered. It was pretty far on the rogue side, but I knew how being shut out feels. Sometimes you can’t believe things until you can see them, or touch them, to make them real. And the car was the last point of contact, the place where Cheryl Dunkirk died. I could take Miranda right now, if I wanted to. And if she was sure she wanted to go.

  She said yes, of course. That’s what sisters do.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Miranda was childishly pleased with my beat-up Miata, though she said that, like Cheryl, she was a Mustang girl herself. She didn’t think twice when I suggested we ride together, and there was no reason to point out that after seeing her sister’s car, she might be in no shape to drive herself home. Miranda didn’t even ask where the car was. She had yet to grow out of the childish expectation that she would be taken care of by the grownups in charge.

  I had to think about where I was going, the twists and turns of the neighborhood were new, but once I was on Tates Creek Pike, I was back in familiar territory. I headed east toward downtown and that magical place where the road changed its name to Euclid. Lexington, like many cities, often succumbs to the schizophrenic habit of changing street names from one side of an intersection to another.

  Miranda peeled the cuticles on the fingers of her left hand and stared quietly out the window. Having her in the car felt like taking a nervous dog for a drive.

  I’d left Paul Brady’s check covering a twenty-five hundred dollar retainer by the kitchen sink. Real money strikes a note of reverence when you see as little of it as I do. Clients like Paul Brady don’t come along often enough. I wondered if I would have agreed to take Miranda to see her sister’s car without that check. I decided I would have no matter what. I also decided Joel would be furious if he knew. I’d have to make sure he never did. The thought gave me a pang, as if I had put some distance between us.

  The rain started up again, and I veered around deep puddles, cursing the SUVs that sprayed mud on my windshield. I muttered quietly so Miranda wouldn’t hear. Joel says I am an aggressive driver, but I think he’s just not used to the passenger’s seat.

  Traffic moved like slow agony on Main Street. The stoplights were flashing yellow. In a perfect world this would mean that each intersection would be treated as a four-way stop, but actually meant every man for himself. A drop of water splashed Miranda’s left shoulder, and I noticed that the duct tape I had used to repair the tear in the roof was sagging with condensation.

  I reached around the back of my seat for the semiclean navy blue towel I had stashed, and passed it to Miranda. I pointed to the roof and the drips. She shrugged and wadded the towel in a ball, holding it like a pressure bandage against her stomach. She’d run out of conversation.

  The corner of Broadway had turned into a lake, and water fanned both sides of the Miata, coating the plastic slit that serves as the back window with mud. Traffic was thinning, and the stoplights ahead were functional as downtown Lexington petered out into storage units, discount gas stations, strip malls, and vacant buildings. Traffic picked up again once we headed east on Leestown Road. We were almost there.

  Miranda’s sister Cheryl drove a vintage ’64 Mustang, navy blue with rust spots. It was out of sight and out of reach behind a chain-link fence topped with three separate strands of barbed wire. I pulled the Miata across a gravel drive, getting as far to the right as possible.

  “Is it too muddy over there for you to get out, Miranda? I can pull up some more if you want.”

  “This is fine,” she said, without looking.

  I let it go. She had boots, and the mud was near impossible to miss. “Stay put for a minute.”

  She didn’t answer or look my way, and I gave her a second look, wondering if this was such a good idea.

  But we were parked, and I could see the uniform out of the corner of my eye, and I was going to have to get out and talk to him no matter what. The rain fell steadily, and I grabbed a ball cap from behind my seat, and left Miranda alone in the car. I’m not sure she noticed me leave.

  “Hey, Chris McFee, how you been?” I was in luck. I knew this guy.

  McFee wore a plastic cover over his hat, and a poncho over his uniform. He stood in front of the chain-link gate, oblivious to the rain. This meant I had to be oblivious, too, since Chris had left the dry comfort of his little wood hut to see to my business.

  “Hell, Lena. I didn’t recognize you with your hair stuffed up in that hat. You a Steelers fan now?”

  “This?” I flicked a finger at the bill of my cap. “Got it from a grateful client.”

  “Spoils of war?”

  “Don’t knock it. I got a jersey, a jacket, and season tickets that brought me a nice sum on eBay.”

  “No shit?” McFee rocked back on his heels. His hair was normally sandy and light, but today it was dark with rain. Chris had a build like a bulldog and a face that looked like it had been hit with a shovel; this exterior covered a tender heart.

  I was counting on it.

  “Mendez send you out here?”

  “Mr. By-the-Book? I think not.”

  McFee gave me a look that could only be described as wary. “So what brings you out here, Lena, on such a nice afternoon?”

  “Chris, you see that girl over there in the car?” Rain dripped off my ball cap. My jacket was already soaked, and the thighs of my jeans were wet.

  “What about her?”

  “Her name is Miranda. She’s Cheryl Dunkirk’s little sister.”

  “Man. Jeez.” McFee caught Miranda’s eye and gave her a sympathetic but masculine nod that managed to somehow be courtly. McFee had presence.

  Miranda raised a hand. At least she was responding.

  “She wants to see the car, Chris.”

  “Oh, hey now, Lena, come on.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s a lot to ask. I’ll take no for an answer and no hard feelings. But if you’ll do it, I promise we’ll follow you at a distance, we’ll stand where you tell us, and we won’t touch a thing. We’ll keep our hands in our pockets the whole time.”

  “What’s the point, Lena? Seeing the car isn’t going to change anything.”

  “Sure it will. It’ll change Miranda. Right now she’s just trying to deal with it, you know?”

  Chris did know. He’d lost a boyhood friend to a mugger when he was a seventeen-year-old living in Chicago.

  “You really think it’s going to help?”

  “Does anything help, Chris?”

  “I have to believe it does.”

  I liked this guy more every time I saw him.

  “Hands in pockets, Lena. Okay?”

  “At all times. We won’t jam you up, Chris.”

  “Listen, Lena, be straight with me. Does Mendez even know you’re out here?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Did she hire you? Are you working this now, too?”

  “The daddy hired me. I signed on this afternoon.”

  “Does Mendez know?”

  “I didn’t ask permiss
ion, if that’s what you mean.”

  McFee gave me his penetrating look. “Aren’t the two of you engaged or something?”

  “We just bought a house.”

  “One step at a time, eh? Congratulations. Invite me over for the housewarming, okay?”

  “Will do.” I hadn’t thought of a housewarming, but now that Chris brought it up, I liked the idea. Joel would have to cook.

  McFee led the way in a golf cart. Rain funneled off the canvas roof and brown water splashed up from the gravel road. If he hadn’t already been drenched, he was now. Miranda and I followed in the Miata.

  “This is where the police store their evidence. Cheryl’s car will be in one of these warehouses.” I glanced sideways at Miranda and wondered if she even heard me. She sat forward, seat belt stretched, clutching the navy blue towel. I had no doubt that Miranda was sure that seeing Cheryl’s car would give her some kind of insight—maybe even a gut feeling on whether or not her sister was alive.

  The golf cart veered left, and stopped beside one of three corrugated metal Quonset-style warehouses. I stopped the Miata behind the cart. McFee raised a hand and headed toward the inset door, fumbling with a fistful of keys. The rain came down harder, pattering the roof of my car.

  “You ready?” I asked.

  Miranda nodded. She did not seem able to talk.

  “Okay, then. Ground rules. Once you get in there, the only thing you’re going to care about is Cheryl’s car. You’re going to want me and Chris to go away and let you sit in the front seat and think a little, and be private. I wish I could arrange it that way. The car is evidence, and if your sister was murdered—and you know that’s what I think—the physical evidence in the car is what’s going to nail her killer. We can’t compromise that.”

  Miranda made no sign that she was taking anything in. She was leaning so far forward in her seat she could stick out her tongue and lick the windshield.

  But I did take everything in, and I was thinking I made the decision to drive out here a little too fast. I was thinking I might be in over my head. It was too easy for me to identify with Miranda; but she was young, and I didn’t know her all that well. And what might have been right for me in this situation was not necessarily right for her. If Joel ever found out I brought her out here, I was toast.

  I took the ball cap off and brushed hair out of my face. “Okay, Miranda, here are the rules. You can’t touch the car. You can’t even—stand close to the car—keep back at least six feet. Keep your hands jammed down in your pockets. I’ll be doing the same.

  “Understand, Chris is sticking his neck out letting us in here. When he looks at us I want him to feel comfortable. I want him to see two women well away from the car, and with their hands in their pockets. Just so you know, Chris could lose his job for doing this.”

  “Then why is he doing it?”

  Her voice was faint, but at least she was listening.

  “Think of Chris as another one of your peers. You can’t tell anybody you were here or let on to the police that you’ve seen Cheryl’s car. Just remember you’re among friends. Agreed?”

  Miranda turned so she could meet my eyes. “I won’t tell a soul.”

  The Mustang sat on the concrete floor like a showroom exhibit, the rusty blue metal cold but clean. Joel continually referred to the car as a “nice ride,” and most of the guys, even Joel, spoke wistfully about the ’64 “Stang.” And always with an annoying reverence in their tone.

  Miranda halted midstride when she saw the Mustang, and she stood rigidly, like a woman in a trance. After a moment of watching her, I had to look away.

  The one person I hadn’t worried about in my long lecture to Miranda and my plea to Chris was me. I wondered how Joel stood this sort of thing, day in and day out. I realized how happy I’d been the last few months, how light. I didn’t want to watch Miranda Brady storing up memories of her big sister’s death car. People say it’s time to get out of the business when things stop affecting you, when you no longer care; but to my mind that’s leaving it too long. Maybe I didn’t want to know every bad thing that happened in the world.

  The warehouse was noisy with the echoes of rain clattering on the tin roof. It was crowded inside, but organized, like the attic of a pack-rat control freak. Miranda turned and looked at me, ready to hear what she did not want to hear.

  “The police think Cheryl’s killer disposed of her body, and then drove her car back and left it in the apartment parking lot.” I started to point, then remembered that I had to keep my hands in my pockets. My jeans were heavy with rainwater and felt tight and miserable on my legs. I thought of the upstairs bathroom in my new little cottage, of the claw-foot bathtub that I had been fantasizing about since Joel and I made our offer on the house. I imagined a tub of bubbles and scented oil, the water hot enough to steam up the mirror, a stack of thick white towels.

  “Do you think you could explain the evidence to me, like you said?”

  Miranda was leaning toward the car, a speculative glitter in her eyes. I thought through what I needed to say, trying to remember how Joel and I worked out the whole scenario. I considered how best to word things.

  “If you look hard, you can see fresh scratches in the paint on the passenger’s door.” I walked to the side of the car, watching Miranda out of the corner of my eye, making sure she kept her distance, making sure her hands stayed in her pockets. “It’s a crisscross of tiny scars, like you’d get if you drove your car into the brush.

  “The last person who drove the car back was pretty tall. The seat position pegs the driver at a height range of five-ten to six-three. As you know, Cheryl was only five-six. There are smears of lipstick on the bucket seat, passenger’s side, along the edge and on the back cushion, leading to the conclusion that Cheryl was on her back, lying in the front seat, twisting her head from side to side. The lipstick matches exactly a tube of Berry Red MAC lipstick found on the bathroom countertop in your sister’s apartment. There were hair and scalp fragments on the door handle that match up with strands of hair taken out of Cheryl’s brush. There was enough scalp material and blood for a positive ID. It’s pretty clear that Cheryl’s attacker slammed her head into the car door at least once. The signs are she put up quite a fight. No trace of semen anywhere. That doesn’t rule out the possibility of the attack being sexual, but it’s not definitive that it was. We … the police, I mean, think she knew this man. From the way the physical evidence charts the struggle, the police think Cheryl let the man in the car willingly, and that she moved to the passenger’s seat, and he drove. That’s all speculation, frankly. Body fluids found on the seat cushions indicate the strong likelihood that your sister died in the car.”

  “Body fluids? Was there a lot of blood? Did he cut her up?”

  I scratched my cheek, wishing Miranda could figure some of this stuff out on her own. “The presence of feces and urine often occurs at the time of death, due to the total relaxation of the bladder and bowel muscles.”

  Miranda looked away.

  “There’s a well-defined heel print on the inside of the windshield. The location is consistent with the placement of a five-foot-six female on her back in the front seat, head toward the passenger’s door. The size of the print indicates a size eight shoe. A swatch of pearl white silk was found snagged on the seat-belt buckle, and fibers of pink cashmere were present on the upholstery of the front seat. The police have asked you already, haven’t they, if you can identify the clothing owned by your sister well enough to tell what’s missing from her things?”

  “They did,” Miranda said. “But I couldn’t figure it out. I don’t even know my own stuff that well.”

  I nodded. Too bad, but understandable. “A size eight shoe—a black, two-and-a-half-inch stiletto heel—was found in the trunk of the car. Just the one shoe, and—”

  “Which shoe was it? Right or left?” Miranda had inched closer and was staring down into the front seat of the car. Her hands were still stuffed in her pockets. />
  I took a quick look at Chris McFee, who was so still and quiet he seemed not to draw breath. Then he sighed and shifted his weight, hipbones cracking.

  “Right shoe,” I said, pointing. “The heel print on the windshield matches up. I don’t know if you can see it, but there’s a hairline crack in the glass that emanates from the shoe print. It looks like Cheryl kicked the windshield, hard, while she struggled with her attacker. The theory is that she was strangled, but that conclusion comes from a lack of other kinds of physical evidence, and it may well be wrong. Three hairs in the trunk of the car are a positive match to Cheryl.” I took a quick breath. “The police think that Cheryl was meeting a man. She was pretty dressed-up just for work, but not overly so, so that’s another thing that’s not definite. But the silk, the heels, the fresh lipstick … all indicate a lover.

  “Cheryl meets with the man, he’s someone she knows, and she lets him into the car. Short strands of dark hair were found on the floor mats up front, as well as the seat of the car, and the police think it’s likely they belong to Cheryl’s attacker. The gas tank was on empty, so unless the guy filled the gas tank after killing Cheryl, which is certainly possible, wherever they went was in a range, there and back, of roughly two hundred fifty miles. We do know that Cheryl filled the tank late that afternoon at five-forty-five at the Pilot station just before the I-75 interchange off Richmond Road. Again, nothing definitive, and there are too many variables, but the mileage is something to look at.

  “The police are holding to the theory that your sister met a lover, the man drove the two of them to an undisclosed location, and something went wrong between them. The man strangles Cheryl, puts her body in the trunk of the car, drives somewhere and disposes of her remains, then returns the car to the apartment parking lot.”

  “But why take the car back? Why not keep it?”

  “He doesn’t want to be found with the car. He doesn’t want to leave the car where he’s disposed of the body. A car is hard to hide and if he leaves it, then it’s a connection that leads right to Cheryl’s remains. Making a case is a whole lot easier with a … with the victim on hand. And there would be a wealth of forensic evidence from Cheryl herself.”