Drawing Blood

by Deirdre Verne

  and the woods enveloped us as we strolled. It was surprisingly quiet and not unpleasant. We walked in silence until I could see the turnoff for Bob’s driveway.

  Frank reached for my hand and slowed to a stop. “Who would have thought the grounds of a recycling center could be so romantic?”

  I tensed up.

  “Is it me?” Frank asked. “Or the smell of garbage?”

  “You’re perfect, and you smell delicious,” I said. I gave Frank a perfunctory kiss. “I’m just a little spooked. We do agree that someone pushed Bob?”

  “I think that’s what happened on the catwalk.” Frank squeezed my hand and then released it. “We’re fine out here, but maybe it would be better for Barbara if we weren’t hanging all over each other.”

  We turned into Bob and Barbara’s driveway, a narrow dirt path lined with bursting lilacs. I wondered if the couple’s plantings had been designed to diffuse the odorous output of their closest neighbor.

  From about halfway up the drive, we had a clear shot of the hodgepodge home, which appeared permanently askew. One thing, however, stood out today: the metal front door was wide open.

  Frank shoved me to the side and mouthed stay here. He rose up on his toes and trod silently down the driveway toward the side of the house. A lump formed in my throat as I watched Frank feel around his back. I detested guns, but in this instance, it felt appropriate.

  I took one giant step sideways and plastered myself to a pine tree. With my nose against the bark, the sap stunk like overmedicated menthol. You can do this, I thought, breathing in and out of my mouth.

  A twig snapped behind me. Sounds of the forest, I screamed in my head. Like the cliché, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound?” Well, since I was there, I took my own word for it, because I’d heard it. I tried to find comfort in the fact that I hadn’t lost my hearing. Of course, if you happen to be in the middle of a murder investigation and you’re hiding behind a tree while your boyfriend has his gun drawn, random sounds in the woods will scare the pants off you. As I thought about my pants flying off, I sensed something brush across my leg. I lowered my eyes without moving my head. Not as easy as it sounds.

  Bob’s cat had wrapped itself around my leg.

  “Good kitty,” I croaked. I tried to blow slowly through pursed lips, like Katrina practicing her birthing exercises. I reached down for the cat, who curled into my arms.

  “You scared me,” I said, nuzzling the nape of his neck. The cat’s purring did miracles for my nerves. I peered around the tree and saw Frank waving to me that the coast was clear. I turned to put the cat down and stepped directly into the path of a woman.

  My vocal abilities, undiscovered until this moment, lit up the woods like a horror movie soundtrack, sending the cat into a full frenzy of icicle sharp claws. I spun around like a Zumba dancer on speed while the cat did laps up and down my body. In the split second it took to peel the cat off my chest, the woman disappeared.

  At a distance, all Frank could see was me as I grasped frantically at my chest. He charged toward me, his gun out.

  “Don’t shoot,” I screeched again. The poor cat scrambled back up my body like a scratch post.

  “A cat?” Frank’s face registered disbelief. “You’re screaming about a cat?”

  I sunk to the ground with the cat shivering in my arms. “No.” My chest heaved uncontrollably. I had to tell Katrina her controlled breathing birth method probably wouldn’t work. I looked up at Frank. “I saw someone.”

  Frank knelt on the pine-carpeted ground and placed his steady hands on my shoulders. “Take a deep breath.”

  Been there, I thought. I shook my head yes, but my mouth was closed. Maybe that had been my problem.

  “Try opening your mouth.”

  I stretched my jaw wide and let my lungs fill with air.

  “I’m fine,” I whispered faintly as I put the stunned cat down. He whipped his tail and scampered away. Get out while you can, I thought.

  “Who did you see?”

  I shook my head. “I have no idea.”

  “I realize that, but can you describe the person?”

  I looked up at the blue sky peeking through the bows of arching pine branches. A patch of cottony clouds drifted swiftly by, each one unique, but somehow indistinguishable.

  “I can’t see her,” I said slowly. I looked hopelessly at Frank. “I’m drawing a blank.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I am.”

  “You just said ‘her.’ You saw a woman.”

  True. It was a woman, but as I explained to Frank again, I couldn’t visualize her face.

  “Was her face obscured?”

  “No”

  “Were you focused on something else?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe the cat?”

  “Come on, Ce. This doesn’t make sense,” Frank countered. “This is what you do. You memorize people’s faces. If you weren’t looking at her face, what were you looking at?”

  I put my hands on my knees and bent over. My stomach rolled, and I thought I might throw up. My rock, my stability, my core—the root of my person was dependent on my ability to truly see faces. I had always had the ability to capture the exact expression that made an individual’s face their own. Yet suddenly, I felt blinded. Just at the moment the woman’s face formed in my mind, it dissolved like an overexposed photograph.

  “I can’t see her,” I repeated.

  “Why? Did she scare you? Threaten you?”

  The one thing I could see was Frank’s face. His brow crumpled and his bottom lip jutted forward. He had lost patience. Sometimes I forgot that solving crimes wasn’t a sideline for him. It was his bread and butter, and now I was just another slow-witted eyewitness.

  I didn’t want to disappoint Frank, but my mind was vacant, and I couldn’t even fake a description.

  I blinked hard like an old-fashioned slide carousel moving my memory backward with each click of my lids. The cat had been at my feet. I had picked her up, and then I saw Frank signaling me. I remembered a feeling of relief when Frank gave me the thumbs-up. I had taken a step away from the tree and turned toward the road. The woman had been standing about twenty feet away from me, but there was something wrong about the encounter. “Think,” I said as I squeezed my eyes shut. I remembered the cat’s claws digging into me. I must have clutched the cat too hard. But why? I opened my eyes.

  The woman had leaned toward me, and as she tilted her head the bright sun over her shoulder filled my visual frame.

  Frank shook my shoulders. “Why can’t you see her?”

  As my body jerked under Frank’s grasp, I replayed the woman taking a step in my direction, her neck stretched forward, my eyes squinting toward the sky.

  “CeCe,” Frank implored. “Why can’t you see her?’

  “The sun,” I said. “It was in my eyes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I wasn’t sure, but I nodded anyway. There was something about the way the woman had tilted her head, as if she wanted to ask me a question, that struck me.

  “I don’t know,” I said as I shook my head. “I’m so used to looking at people, and it seemed as if she was looking at me. It was,” I confessed, “confusing.”

  Frank loosened his grip on my shoulders. “Listen carefully before you answer. Did you look away because of the sun or was it something about her face?”

  I searched for an answer.

  Frank scratched his noontime beard. “You need a break, CeCe.”

  “No, I don’t.” I raised my voice with each syllable.

  “Look, you’re not a trained officer. I think I’m pushing you too hard.” Frank stood up and began a useless pace around the woods, as if the woman would suddenly materialize from behind a tree with all the information we needed to solve the crime. “It’s
a shock, and it’s not uncommon when a witness experiences fear.” Frank sighed. “Did you get a chance to see her pants?”

  At first I thought Frank was joking, and then a vision popped into my head. “Actually”—I grimaced—“I think she was wearing skinny jeans.”

  “Let’s leave it at that,” Frank said. “I want you to step back from the case for a few days, maybe a week.”

  “A week?” I moaned.

  He rubbed my head as if I had a boo-boo. “Take a break, relax, and give your memory a chance to surface.”

  “What am I going to do for a whole week?”

  Frank laughed. He knew I didn’t do a whole lot of anything. “You can help Katrina get ready for the baby.”

  sixteen

  thursday, april 24

  My week of forced furlough so far included two tasks: I watched Katrina not give birth and I assisted her in the kitchen. In her last few weeks of freedom, Katrina had decided to cook, freeze, and can anything within arm’s reach, and I had become her gofer. My KP duties, although mind-numbing, freed me at the same time. With every jar I boiled and bowl I washed, I sensed a breakthrough building until it fizzled like soap down the drain. I genuinely could not conjure up a single detail related to the mystery woman’s face, despite the fact that I’d had a full-on, unobstructed view of the stranger. In one particularly low moment, I tried to tempt Frank with a few poorly executed sketches of the unidentified woman, but he immediately saw through my ruse.

  “Isn’t that the baker from the gourmet shop where you get the day-old bread?”

  Boy, he had some memory. It wasn’t easy dating a detective.

  My plan B involved using Cheski’s stomach and Katrina’s pre-natal cooking frenzy to win back my spot on the team.

  “Homemade pie,” I yelled upstairs where Frank, Cheski, Lamendola, and Charlie had been holed up for the last two hours. “Katrina and I are setting the table on the front porch.” And then I added, “Fresh whipped cream.”

  “Only two days past the expiration date,” Katrina added with a laugh.

  As I expected, the steaming pie lured the group to the front porch of Harbor House.

  “Nothing wrong with a break,” I said as I passed out plates of peach pie. Cheski was in heaven and close to a food coma. Frank took a few polite bites, careful to never fill up on anything we offered lest its origin come into question.

  I didn’t have much of an appetite, as Bob’s death had begun to weigh on me. Frank’s connection to Bob was through me, and that one phone conversation seemed to have triggered the events that led to Bob’s murder. I wanted nothing more than to undo the events of the past week. Worse, my visual block had rendered my talents useless, which made me as purposeful as a computer stripped by scavengers.

  We had learned one thing since the sighting of the unidentified woman at Bob’s house: Barbara had left Cold Spring Harbor. Frank found a note tacked to a box of dry cat food on the porch. Please feed cat. Be back in a few months.

  “Do we even know she wrote it?” I asked as I plopped an extra spoonful of cream on my pie.

  “It seems to check out,” Frank offered, although I sensed he wasn’t sold. “The refrigerator had been emptied, and her bedroom drawers appeared half full. I also checked with the utility companies, and she paid a handful of bills forward the day after Bob died. Her actions seem consistent with the note.”

  “What about the front door?” I asked. Barbara and Bob might have been a bit bohemian, but their lifestyle didn’t justify leaving a door wide open. “If you’re not planning on locking your front door, why leave the cat food on the porch?”

  “I think we have to assume that the door was closed, and your unidentified woman had been in the house as we approached. It’s possible she heard us coming.”

  As I hoped, my simple observation about the cat food started the ball rolling, and I used the opening to insert myself back into the investigation. Charlie, it turned out, had been busy cataloging the remaining equipment in the warehouse as well as going through the containers of e-waste at the recycling center. Despite the fact that

  I was under thirty years old, my technical literacy skills were a bit underdeveloped. While my peers had been riding the Internet boom,

  I had been renovating a 150-year-old house and nurturing a self-sustaining farm. My goal had been to plug into life by unplugging. As a result, I had no idea what Charlie had been looking for in a pile of used computers, but if a lead or a connection existed, Charlie was Frank’s man.

  “I need two more days with the equipment,” Charlie said, and Frank nodded.

  “Whatever you can give would be great.”

  Cheski and Lamendola had been tasked with dissecting HG Space Savers’s business. This included analyzing the accounts in the hopes a renter’s name would provide an elusive clue. They were also in the process of interviewing the day trippers on the outside chance a renter had seen something. Cheski and Lamendola were also eager to uncover the bad blood between Harry Goldberg and his cousin David. Were the Goldberg cousins involved in a green-washing scam gone bad, or was it simple family rivalry, as Harry Goldberg had suggested? Moreover, was there any evidence, no matter how thin, that either Goldberg cousin knew Bob? It seemed a bit of a stretch since the Goldbergs made money storing junk, and the recycling center made money getting rid of junk. In my opinion, the purpose of these two organizations were diametrically opposed, thus reducing the chance for an overlap. I reminded everyone of their divergent goals.

  “It’s a fair point,” Cheski said. “We got a keeper and a tosser. I can’t think of any reason for Bob to connect with the Goldbergs.”

  “I had a storage unit once,” Lamendola said thoughtfully as he scraped his plate. “After the police academy, I was living in a huge house in Queens with two other guys. When I got my own place, a 400-square-foot studio, I stored my stuff.”

  “I guess that’s the routine,” I said.

  “Not exactly,” Lamendola corrected. “I stopped paying rent after about a year. I couldn’t even remember what I had in the unit. The storage place hit my credit card with a removal penalty. I have no idea what happened to my stuff after that.”

  Frank’s ears perked up. “You’re right. The Goldbergs must get stuck with defaulted units all the time,” he said, and then asked, “Don’t these storage places auction off the contents?”

  “That sounds familiar,” Cheski said. “Maybe there’s a link there. I’ll go back to Harry and ask him about default procedures.”

  “No,” Frank said. “Find another storage facility and figure out the industry standard on defaulted units first. I don’t trust Harry. If units are auctioned, find a local auctioneer and see if he’s done business with the Goldbergs. If Harry is lying, we shouldn’t use him as our go-to source on all things storage related.”

  Cheski and Lamendola agreed.

  I was encouraged by this revelation, but the pile of unanswered questions grew faster than the answered. Frank had secured an account list from the largest manufacturer of laminated badges. He was in the process of visiting the local companies with badges under the pretense that there had been some break-ins in the area. There was also Bob’s receipt book, which included at least twenty pages of recent tech drop-offs by local residents. The team planned on reviewing all the names in Bob’s pad and cross-checking them with the renters at HG storage. Then there was the issue of Barbara. Frank had planned to contact her friends and family in hopes Barbara had sought refuge with someone close to her.

  The painfully obvious hole in the investigation remained my visual recall. If I could get a sketch on paper, we’d have a tangible piece of evidence. As it stood, we had a jumble of loosely connected threads.

  The one thing we agreed upon was that Bob had most likely been pushed to his death. Although there was no eyewitness to his fall, he had been observed in a heated conversation with a man at the r
ecycling center after the center had closed. A few days before Bob’s death, he had had a benign conversation with the police about e-waste. At that point, Frank and Bob had never met and only spoken over the phone. At the time, Bob’s knowledge of e-waste appeared unrelated to the two storage warehouses packed with toxic waste. Bob’s death, so soon after the conversation with Frank, now appeared to be connected. The fact that Bob and Barbara’s house had been broken into fed the theory that Bob knew something about the warehouses.

  The marks on Bob’s arm were harder to understand as were the now-emptied warehouses. Possibly, the marks had nothing to do with his death. Possibly, the warehouse e-waste was simply en route to a legal recycling buyer. And, although three women had been spotted either right before or after Bob’s death—one at the recycling center, one at the storage unit office, and one at Bob’s house—there was no evidence they were the same person or that they were involved in Bob’s murder.

  The last tidbit, the unidentified women, bothered me to no end. My sketching talents had failed both me and Bob. I let a triangle of gooey peach rest on my tongue until the fruit’s acidity overpowered the sugar. I swallowed the pie and laid my fork to rest.

  “I need to unclog my head,” I announced.

  Charlie raised an eyebrow seductively, and I swatted his arm.

  “Bowling works for me,” Cheski said. “And Frank likes to pace.”

  “And grind his teeth,” I added.

  Frank’s jaw dropped. Did he think we hadn’t noticed the tread marks he had left in the floorboards and the gnawing sounds emanating from his mouth?

  “Sorry,” I said, “but you pace and grind. I have something else in mind to clear my head.” In fact, I had started to think that my brain bank had been overloaded with images of children. The children’s faces that filled my sketchbook. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds. To make room for the unidentified woman, I’d have to clean house. There was another woman I needed to see who I thought could help.

  My mother.