by David Archer
He gave me a lopsided grin. “And I just heard you say you were no good with money.”
My next appointment showed up about then, so I took her back to my office. This was a more serious case than Beverly’s, because this woman was often covered in bruises. Her makeup that day was so thick that it looked like she put it on with a spatula.
“Regina,” I said as we got into my office, “Bob’s been hitting you again. What happened this time?”
She let out a sigh, then reached up to adjust her sunglasses. “Kenny, my oldest boy? He came home Saturday from hanging out with his friends, and Bob spotted a pack of cigarettes in his back pocket. He went ballistic, of course, and so did I, but Kenny kept insisting they weren’t his. He said they belonged to another boy, and that he was just holding them for him, but Bob didn’t believe it. He yelled at Kenny to tell him the truth and Kenny argued, so Bob slapped and knocked him down. I got in the middle of it, trying to get Bob to chill out, but it just made him even angrier.”
I looked at her. “Did you call the police?”
She hesitated for a second, then shook her head. “Cassie, I’m afraid to. He gets so damned angry, and I just can’t afford to move away. If I tried to break it off with him now, I’m literally afraid of what he might do.”
I leaned forward. “I know,” I said. “I remember what that feels like. I hardly even admitted to myself at the time that I wanted out, I kept telling myself that I loved Mike and that everything was going to be perfect once we were married, but I was already wearing as much makeup as you and keeping long sleeves on even in the summer. I thought about leaving a few times, but it scared me so badly that I convinced myself I was just imagining that there was a problem.”
“Oh, I know there’s a problem,” she said. “I don’t lie to myself about it, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just know that Bob can be—he can get a lot worse than this. This is nothing, compared to some things I’ve been through. If I try to leave, I’m not just afraid of what he’ll do to me, but what he might do to the boys. All three of them hate him, and I’m pretty sure he knows it. He just wants the whole world to believe that he’s got the perfect little family, and I don’t want to think about what would happen if he had to face the truth.”
“Regina, we can go to the courts and get an order of protection. The court would tell him to stay away from you, and if he violates that order…”
“What good is it going to do me for him to go to jail if I’m dead, or one of the boys is in the hospital? Cassie, I know you mean well, but there have been three stories in the news in the last six months about women being killed by their ex-husbands in spite of restraining orders.”
“Then let me put you in a shelter,” I said. “There’s a family shelter in Sand Springs where they help you get back on your feet. They’ll help you find a job, help you move into a new place of your own, get the kids in school, everything.”
“And what happens when Bob finds us? And he would find us, too many people know us around here. It probably wouldn’t take him a week, and then he’d be in a real rage. What happens then?”
“What happens then is the shelter security will have him arrested. He’d go to jail, and you’ll get your chance to testify about the abuse you’ve been suffering. The courts are getting very serious about domestic abuse nowadays, so he wouldn’t get just a little slap on the wrist. He’d be looking at doing some time.”
Regina smiled sadly. “Bob is a hunter,” she said. “I don’t know how many of his buddies have told me how he can drop a deer from five hundred yards away. He wouldn’t even have to come near the shelter, all he’d have to do is wait until I stepped outside, or one of the boys.”
I sighed. “Then we can move you away from here,” I said. “There’s a process that lets you change your names, get new Social Security numbers, everything. You and the boys would go to a shelter in another city, at first, and then that one will help you start over.”
“I can’t do that. For one thing, I can’t take the boys away from their grandparents, on both sides. Bob’s parents love those kids, but they’re just as afraid of Bob as I am.” She put a hand over her eyes. “I don’t know what to do, Cassie. I’m afraid to stay, but I’m even more afraid to leave.” She sat there and cried softly.
“I want to help you, Regina,” I said. “But I can’t, if you’re not willing to involve the police. You have enough bruises on you right now to get him arrested, and an order issued. You could go to the shelter while he’s waiting to go to trial, but the DA is pretty good about pushing a plea-bargain on these guys. Bob would do pretty well to get away with less than eight years. I’m certain he would do at least five years, and you could be well established by the time he got out.”
The quiet crying continued for a couple of minutes, and then she opened her eyes and looked at me again. “If I did this,” she asked, “how soon would he be arrested?”
“I can call Alicia Perkins right now,” I said. “She’s the detective with the Tulsa PD who handles domestic abuse cases. One look at you and she’d go right out to pick him up. The DA would file charges, but they’ve gotten good about holding them in jail for several days. It would be a week or more before he had a chance at a bail hearing, and the DA would do everything possible to make the bail so high he couldn’t afford it. You could be in the shelter by tonight.”
She licked her lips and thought about it for a moment, but then she shook her head. “I can’t do it just yet,” he said. “He’s been kind of calm the last couple days, so I need to just—I need to just take some time and think. Maybe this is the best thing to do, but I need to be sure before I stick my neck and my kids’ necks out there, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said with a sigh. “Just do me a favor, and call me if things get bad. You got my cell number, so you can call me anytime. If it gets bad, I want to know it. Okay?”
She agreed, and then she left. I went back out front to sit down with Dex, and saw him watching her as she walked away past the window.
“She looks pretty shook up,” he said.
Ethically, I’m not allowed to tell anyone what my clients and I talked about, and Dex knows that. He didn’t expect a response, he was just letting me know that even he could see there was a problem.
My phone rang and I answered it quickly.
“Cassie McGraw,” I said.
“Cassie, it’s David. It turns out that the broker handling that listing is a close friend of the owner of the property, so I was able to get him to take an offer over the phone. The seller says he’ll agree to one oh five, but he wants an answer right away.”
I smiled at Dex and gave him a thumbs up. “Buy it,” I said. “Do I need to do anything?”
“It’s a real estate deal, so you’ll have to come in and sign the paperwork. I’ll have everything ready within an hour, can you come by this afternoon?”
“Yeah, but it’ll probably be closer to two hours. Is that okay?”
“That’ll be fine. I’ll see you then.”
I turned to Dex. “You have a gas station. Well, an old gas station.” I told him about the deal David had made, and he shook his head in amazement.
My last appointment was set for three, but she called at five minutes till to cancel. She had been on the way to the office when her husband called, throwing a fit because she had left the house without telling him. Apparently he had gotten off work early, and she was rushing home to try to defuse the situation.
That sort of thing happened periodically, and it was always frustrating. Legally, I can’t do much of anything without the client’s authorization, and this was a case where I couldn’t absolutely say that I thought she was in danger. Her husband had gotten physical with her a few times, but it had never been worse than a few bruises. Unfortunately, the courts don’t consider that to be serious danger, so unless she ended up in the hospital, there wasn’t much I could do.
Since I was free for the rest of the day, I took Dex and headed on ov
er to David’s office. I introduced the two of them and signed all the paperwork, and then David faxed it to the broker. Fifteen minutes later, we got back a signed acceptance and the real work of transferring the property over to me began.
“Listen, I got the feeling you were in kind of a rush,” David said. “I snuck a clause into the contract that said you would get immediate possession. The broker has the keys, and you can go pick them up right now, if you want to.”
Dex broke into a big grin, and we headed across town to Oklahoma Real Property Associates, Inc. The broker, whose name was Malachi, completely ignored me and handed the keys to Dex.
For once, I didn’t mind a bit.
TWELVE
We went down and took a look at the inside of the building, and Dex was suddenly kicking himself. We found evidence that the roof was leaking in a couple of spots, and the pictures on the website that showed the interior of the building had obviously been taken sometime before the present. There were a couple of broken windows, and a great deal of graffiti on the inside walls.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You were going to want to set it up your own way, anyhow. As far as the roof goes, we can get a contractor down here to look at it tomorrow. It may not be as bad as it looks.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he grumbled. “I can fix the roof, I just should have known that we needed to look at it before you bought it.”
“Relax, it’ll be fine. We’ll replace the windows with those new unbreakable ones, especially if you’re going to have your tools in here. The walls just need some paint, so that’s no big deal. I think this is going to be great, myself.”
It worked. Once I got him thinking about how to set it up this way, he was in a much better mood. We walked around inside the place for half an hour, making notes about repairs and design ideas, and then we went outside.
The lot was huge, and completely paved. The chain-link fence that surrounded it was twelve feet high and in very good condition, with barbed wire angled out over the top to keep anyone from climbing inside.
I pointed to the back of the building, which sat near the front of the property. There were two large dog houses sitting there. “Looks like you need some watchdogs,” I said. “We can put in a security system, too, with video cameras and everything.”
He was standing in the middle of the lot, just looking around and thinking about what he could accomplish there. I was just standing beside him, letting him establish the dream in his mind, when he suddenly spun around and grabbed me.
“I love you,” he said. “Just deal with it.” He crushed me against him and pushed his lips onto mine, and I didn’t even get upset about what he’d said. That was a kiss, let me tell you. That was definitely a kiss!
Since the building wasn’t quite secure yet, we decided to go ahead and take all his tools to my garage. We had ridden together in my car, so I drove him to a local equipment rental place to get a truck, then followed him back to the Ford dealership. I wasn’t much help as he was loading up his tools, but a couple of the other guys who work there were happy to lend a hand.
Good thing they did. He had four extremely large toolboxes on wheels, and several smaller ones. I remember him telling me once that he had almost eighty thousand dollars’ worth of tools, and that he was going to be paying for them for a few more years yet. Then I recalled him telling me that it would take a hundred thousand or so to set up the shop, and found myself wondering what else he could possibly need.
I asked, and he started laughing. He pointed at different machines there in the shop and told me he’d be needing one of each. I didn’t have any idea what some of them were, but they certainly didn’t look like they were going to be cheap.
Oh well. At least I’d be able to call him for help if I needed him, without getting him fired or in trouble.
We took the truck to the house, and found Jimmy and Nicole waiting when we got there. She had just been released from the hospital a couple of hours earlier, after they were confident that the concussion wasn’t as serious as they first believed.
“The doctor says the reason I was unconscious so long was because of shock,” Nicole told me. “I didn’t really suffer any serious injuries, but I’m sore as hell, I can tell you that. They think it was just shock from the blast wave of the explosion that kept me out of it so long.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” I said. “Did you happen to see Marsha? I was supposed to go back and see her today, but I didn’t get the chance.”
“Yes, I went down and visited with her this morning. That poor thing, she can’t even talk, and I can’t imagine what she must’ve gone through. One of the nurses told me that she had lost almost enough blood to be beyond saving by the time they got her in the ER.”
“Yeah, she was a mess. She was so badly beaten and bloody that I didn’t even recognize her at first.”
Nicole pointed at Dex and Jimmy, who were manhandling those big toolboxes out of the truck and into my garage. “Dex says he’s opening a shop to build hot rods?”
“Yep,” I said. “It’s what he’s always wanted to do, I guess, and that means he’ll be able to take time off whenever he needs to. According to him, that means he’ll be available to play bodyguard for me now and then, and I’ll confess that I kinda like the idea.” I grinned at her.
She gave me a knowing look, with a bit of a smirk in it. “Yeah, I kinda figured you were bankrolling this thing. Did you know he was going to offer Jimmy a job?”
I chuckled. “Let’s just say I’m not surprised,” I said. I had figured he was going to need helpers, and Jimmy Hanks was not only his best friend, but one of the few mechanics Dex respected. I made a mental note to find an accountant to help with handling payroll and such, and that made me think of my own new office. I turned to Nicole.
“Hey, what are you going to do now, with St. Mary’s gone?”
“Well, I’ve still got my own practice,” she said. “What about you?”
“I’m opening my own office, too. I’m still going to work for free, but I just can’t run out on the clients.”
Her eyes went wide and she smiled at me. “Really? That’s awesome. Got any room for a child psychologist to drop by now and then?”
“The place I got has a big conference room,” I said, “but we could easily turn it into an office and a break room. It’s got a little kitchen area in it, but it wouldn’t be hard to put up a wall and a door, to give you a nice sized office.”
She stuck out her hand. “Put me down for Wednesdays and Fridays,” she said. “But let’s start it next week, okay? I need a few days to get past the stiffness and soreness.”
“You got yourself a deal,” I said. I was about to say something else, but my phone rang. I pulled it out to see who was calling, and it was Pennington.
“Cassie McGraw,” I said.
“I figured I’d better call you right now,” he said, “before you hear it on the news.”
My guts twisted up in a knot again. “Oh, God,” I said. “Angie?”
“Yes,” he said. “We found her. A motorist called 911 twenty minutes ago and said he saw somebody get thrown out of a car, and found a young woman who looked like she’d been beaten to death. Officers responded immediately with paramedics, and they took one look at her and figured it was too late. One of the paramedics checked for a pulse anyway, and found a faint one so they went into action. She’s at the hospital, but nobody is saying whether they think she might make it.”
“I’m on the way,” I said. “Are you at the hospital?”
“I’ll be there in about two minutes,” Pennington said. “I’ll see you there.”
I ended the call and screamed for Dex, and he came running quickly. I told him, Nicole, and Jimmy what Pennington had said, and that I needed to get to the hospital.
“Jimmy, can you finish up for me?” Dex asked.
“Go,” Jimmy said. “I got this.”
Nicole gave me a hug and then Dex grabbed my hand and took me to m
y car. He shoved me into the passenger seat and ran around to get behind the wheel, hit the starter button and slammed it into gear. We left rubber as we pulled away from the house.
We got to the hospital and hurried into the emergency room entrance. I flashed my ID and badge at the front desk and asked where Angie Milligan was. The woman looked at me blankly for a second, so I told her bluntly that Detective Pennington had called and told me to get down there.
“Just one moment,” she said. I started to say something but Dex put a hand on my shoulder.
“She’s just doing her job,” he said.
She spoke quietly into a phone for a moment, then hung it up and looked up at me. “Go through the double doors, then to the fourth room on the right. The detective is waiting for you there.”
I barely even heard the last part. I hurried through the doors with Dex right beside me and saw Pennington standing outside the door of the fourth examination room.
“How is she?” I asked.
“Determined to live,” he said. “The doctor stuck his head out a minute ago and said she’s stabilizing. They’ve got her heart rate closer to normal and her blood pressure is up where it should be. Apparently the biggest worry is whether she’s getting enough air. They said her diaphragm is ruptured and some of her abdominal organs are getting into the chest cavity, so her lungs can’t expand properly. They got her on oxygen, now, but she’ll be going into surgery shortly.”
“That settles it, then,” I said. “There is no doubt the body you found is not the killer, not if he’s done this.”
“We actually got an ID back on the body,” Pennington said. “Guy’s name was Richard Long, a local punk who’s been in and out of trouble for the last few years. I don’t know if he was actually involved in this or not, but we did find gunshot residue on his hand. He could be the one who took the bomb in and killed and kidnapped your friends, but I still have my doubts. I think he was a patsy, and just a ploy to throw us off.”