by Lisa Black
‘Stop telling me what I already know. Are you alone there?’
Just the barest of hesitations. ‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t tell the cops about me?’
‘No.’
‘You can’t lie worth shit, bro,’ James said with a humorless laugh. ‘That’s all right. I knew you’d go running to them the minute my feet hit the pavement.’
Theresa heard a wind-like noise as if Don had breathed out in relief, and then the DNA analyst, cleverly, tried to distract. ‘Stone acted as diener.’
‘The ME?’
‘Yes. And Causer was there too.’
‘Mitchell Causer?’
‘Yes.’
Painting a target on their backs, but Shephard would have them surrounded by cops. James would never get close to them. He had to know that. And yet, his reasoning process had some holes.
‘And me,’ Don added. ‘You know that I did the fingernail scrapings. Julie Barnes worked Property then, she logged in the personal effects the following day, Tuesday. She listed a wedding band, watch and earrings.’
James said, ‘So Darryl either stole it, or it was already gone.’
‘You’re right. Either way it never got to Property.’ No harm in casting aspersions on to Darryl – he could no longer be hurt.
Theresa asked if he had the toxicology report. She had only just glanced at it before.
‘Yeah, it’s here. Clean. No surprise there. Only drugs found in the house were vitamin B, vitamin C, and a prescription metformin. No alcohol.’
‘Diana didn’t drink,’ James pointed out.
They heard the rustling again. Shephard, no doubt getting restless. Theresa wouldn’t have been surprised if half the command staff of the police department, the medical examiner and two or three pathologists were currently crammed into the records vault, hovering over Don’s cellphone.
‘Okay, that’s the file, James. I did what you asked. Let Theresa go.’
‘Here?’ James peered through the dirty windshield at the empty park. ‘I think she’d be safer with me. Lot more than ghosts to fear in this neighborhood.’
‘Uh – someplace else, then. Just let her go,’ Don said, in what sounded very close to anguish. Theresa’s heart did that tiny fluttering again, as if she had a defect in all four chambers at once.
‘I got a better idea. I was trying to eliminate suspects one by one—’
Literally, Theresa nearly snorted.
‘—so let’s just cut to the chase.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I want you to exhume my wife’s body.’
TWENTY-FOUR
In the background, she heard Shephard forget himself and exclaim, ‘What?’
‘She had a baby inside her,’ James said simply. ‘I want to know whose it is. Because that will be the guy who killed her.’
‘But she wasn’t pregnant,’ Don said.
‘James, that’s not going to work,’ Theresa said.
‘She was,’ he insisted, both to the phone and to Theresa. ‘If she said she was, she was. How close was your doctor looking, anyway? She had been strangled, not – nothing to do with her inner parts. He would want to get it done and over, someone he knew like that.’
‘Not Reese,’ Theresa said. The man had invented the word meticulous. ‘And besides, James, there’s nothing that can be done now.’
‘Yes there is. You can still get DNA from a fetus. I know you can. I had a cell mate for a while, that’s how he wound up in the can.’
‘But—’ Don said.
Theresa said, ‘The fetus isn’t there. The – look, you know what happens at an autopsy, right?’
‘Yeesss … ah. I never actually watched one. Not the whole thing.’
She turned toward him and spoke quickly but carefully, aware of the audience on the other end of the cell tower link. ‘The chest cavity is opened and the organs are removed. The doctor examines each organ, sections them – that means he slices them open – and cuts off tiny bits of the tissue if he wants to take a closer look.’
‘I know that.’
‘Those bits go into a quart of formalin, and histological samples will be made later if the doctor thinks he needs a closer look. But the organs go into the red biohazard bag.’
‘And that goes back in the body,’ James said.
‘Yes, it does. This large garba— biohazard bag, full of the organs, heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, etcetera, is placed in the now-empty chest cavity, which is sewn back up. Then the body goes to the funeral home.’
‘Yeah. Anderson-Day, that’s where Diana went.’
‘At the funeral home they need to embalm the body, drain whatever blood is left and send embalming fluid through the veins and arteries.’ The interior of the car had grown airless again; she rolled the window the rest of the way down and unlatched her safety belt. Her bottom had gotten tired of the driver’s seat, and her legs were quivering in miniature spasms. ‘James, they take that biohazard bag out. There is no way to embalm each individual organ for placement back inside the chest cavity, and of course if they just put the whole bag back as it is, those organs will rot, and of course they can’t have that because the whole purpose of embalming is to prepare the body to be viewed by loved ones.’
His eyes narrowed to slits. ‘So what happens to them?’
She forced herself to speak. ‘The funeral homes have incinerators for small amounts like that.’
‘They burned her?’
‘Just the—’
He seemed to swell right in front of her, sucking in air until his shoulders blocked out the passenger side window. ‘Insides? They burned up her insides?’
‘James, there’s nothing else they can do. There’s no way to preserve—’
‘So you’re telling me that my Diana in the ground, there’s nothing inside her? She’s just an empty shell?’
He won’t kill me, she told herself. He’s been angry all day, this is just one more thing and it isn’t my fault— ‘Yes. I’m sorry, James. I’m trying to explain that exhuming her body won’t do you any good.’
To her surprise he turned and opened his door, phone still in hand, and stepped out.
Good. Let him walk off a little nervous energy and they—
To her great surprise he reached in, grabbed her by the shirt front and dragged her across the passenger side and out of the car. Too shocked to scream, she bumped one knee on the gear shift and sank to the other one before she could get her legs underneath her. The asphalt felt cool and gritty under her bare feet.
He shook her with one hand, hard enough to make her head snap. ‘How could you do that? She was your friend!’
‘Stop it! James, stop it. That’s how all autopsies are done. There’s no way to preserve everything. There’s nothing I or anyone else could have done about it. Besides, she wasn’t pregnant!’ she added, her hands futilely trying to pull his from her shirt, straining against both the cuffs and his wrist.
This did nothing to calm him. ‘Stop saying that! You’re just trying to help your office cover it up! I thought you were on my side. I thought you were on Diana’s side.’
‘I am! But I can’t change reality.’
A voice squawked from somewhere; James still clutched the phone in his free hand, and she could hear Don’s frantic tones calling her name. James looked at it. Then he looked at her. A crow shouted from the top of a maple. Otherwise, they were alone in the world. No mourners came to visit, and the lone maintenance worker was off somewhere with his rake.
James stopped shaking her, but didn’t let go of the shirt.
He brought the phone to his cheek. ‘Change of plans. Forget the exhumation. I just want to know two things: who stole my wife’s ring, and who she had been cheating with. That’s not too much to ask, since they’re probably the same person.’
On the other end Don said something, but James cut him off. His gaze never wavered from hers.
‘I’ve got this woman here, and I’m stashing her
until you answer those two questions. And the first time you tell me you can’t, I pull her back out and slice her throat open. No second chances. Then you can burn her organs too and bury the empty shell. Got that?’
A flurry of words she couldn’t make out.
‘I said, do you got that?’
But he didn’t pay much attention to whatever it was Don said, because he moved her around to the back of the car, set the phone on the trunk, unlocked the trunk, then replaced the keys in his pocket and picked up the phone.
‘James,’ she said, ‘no.’
‘You’ve told me everything you know, you say. So we don’t need to converse no more.’
‘No!’ She did what she should have done in the first place – screamed, kicked at his balls with bare feet, clawed at his arms and face. But he held her far enough away to protect his eyes and shifted his massive thighs to shield his privates. Her voice echoed off the roof of the tunnel, and yet another approaching train threatened to drown it out entirely. She had no more effect on James than a small child, and as if she were one he picked her up and tossed her in the trunk hard enough to knock the breath out of her body. She raised her arms as she sucked in air, but he slammed the lid before she could mount any real defense – not that would have done any good against his weight and force. As the lid clicked shut she heard Don’s panicked voice over the cellphone in James’ hand. She couldn’t make out words, only her name as he shouted it over and over.
She did all the useless things people do in movies. She pounded on the inside of the lid with her cuffed hands and screamed until she got dizzy. She kicked at the corners where the taillights should be, which only hurt her feet. Of course, none of that helped.
Nor did it have any effect on James. When she finally paused in her shrieking she heard the door open, feeling the vibration of the movement more than the actual sound, and then the vehicle rocked. The door shut. An instant later, he started the engine.
This was not going to be fun.
TWENTY-FIVE
James pulled out from under the tunnel and drove smoothly away through the rolling hills. Smoothly in that he didn’t peel out, and he then turned the corner on to what must be the outside street in a reasonable manner. But she definitely felt the uneven curb, and the road needed to be paved after one too many freeze-and-thaw Cleveland winters … One of the disadvantages to being kidnapped and locked in a trunk in the less ritzy area of town.
She made herself stop screaming – with an effort – and tried to think. First, assess your surroundings. At least the trunk was not full of old gym clothes and cockroaches – she didn’t think so, anyway. It smelled of grease, and the carpet felt less than clean, and the bolt that held down the spare tire had stabbed her in the back upon her entrance, nearly missing her spine, but at least no insect life presented itself. The weatherproofing around the seal had held up over the years, for not the slightest crack of light appeared between the frame and the lid. She lay in utter darkness.
She felt around, sliding slightly as James took another corner. For a stolen car it had a very clean trunk, and she wondered if he had stolen it from a used-car lot. Larger ones had so many vehicles that staff couldn’t always keep track and had a bad habit of leaving the keys in them. Unless they had a solid fence and good lighting, a car might not be missed until a salesman went looking for it. And this trunk held nothing but the spare tire on its bolt and a whiff of Febreeze New Car Scent. No car care kit or emergency flasher or, what would have been really handy for both extricating herself from the trunk and beaning James once she did, a tire iron.
She wriggled around until her back lay against the outer wall, and she kicked at the seat back with both feet. Heavy boots would have made this much more effective. Stilettos would have made it more effective. As it was, the impact jarred her frame and made both feet scream in protest, while having no effect at all on the seat.
James shouted something, but whether he might be speaking into the phone or shouting at her to stop it, she couldn’t guess.
Next she moved closer to the seat back and ran her hands over it, paying special attention to the upper corners. Shouldn’t there be a release in case the owner wanted to lay the seat down in order to fit something extra-large into the trunk?
Apparently, that had not been an option in this model. She didn’t even know what kind of car she was in – there had been a Chevy emblem on the steering wheel, but beyond that … Being dragged from Don’s apartment in the middle of the night and focusing on James and his tendency to murder had left her little time to be her usual observant self.
There should be a trunk-release cable with a little plastic handle somewhere around there. She felt around, covering every inch of the area with her hands. When did they start requiring those in vehicles – 2002? Could this car be that old, or had James clipped the thing off before going to Don’s? Had he thought that far ahead?
James went over a slight bump, and the movement knocked her head against the trunk lid. On top of that, several exposed bolts protruded from the lid – trunks were not meant to be passenger areas – and one cut into her scalp. She had also begun to sweat; a cool spring day didn’t feel so cool inside an enclosed metal space, and she would have given anything for just one breath of fresh air. The walls around her seemed to be getting closer with every rotation of the wheels, cinching inward until—
‘James!’ she shouted. ‘What are you doing? How do you think this is going to help?’
He said something back. She couldn’t make out the words, but from the cadence she would guess he had said, ‘I can’t hear you.’ And probably meant that literally.
Her fury at herself edged out her fury at him. How could she have been so stupid? How many tales of abduction, murder and other woes had she heard in the line of her work? She should never have gotten into the car with him. How many times had she promised herself, and told Rachael the same thing: in the case of an attempted abduction, don’t go! If he says he’ll shoot you, tell him to go ahead. Better it be in a parking lot where help might pass by before you bleed out than lost on an isolated country road. If he says he won’t hurt you, don’t believe him. And if he says he’ll hurt you if you don’t, he had planned to anyway. Once you get in the car the needle on your life expectancy meter falls from debatable to less than slim.
But this was different! she could say if she wanted to defend her own actions. James wasn’t a rapist or a serial killer in the usual sense. Harming her had never been his goal. She had cooperated because, first, it got him away from Don, who seemed a more likely victim, and second, because she thought her friendship with Diana might put her in a position to bring the situation to a close without further bloodshed. She had thought she could handle it. She had thought she could handle him.
That had been her most foolish mistake.
Okay. Stop with the recriminations and think. How does one get out of a car trunk?
She had read once that an intrepid Girl Scout had pulled out the taillight and then stuck her arm through the hole and waved until someone noticed and reported the vehicle to the police. She wriggled carefully and ran her hands over the outer corners, though she knew what she would find from her first pass. The frame covered the taillight area completely. They were not accessible from inside the trunk. She pulled back the molded upholstery just to make sure, but the metal felt smooth and unbroken. The taillight wouldn’t help. Maybe if she had the actual Girl Scout.
She heard a tinkling sound and stopped moving to listen. The car slowed – perhaps for a light, because she could hear other vehicles around them – and then James’ muffled tones penetrated the seat back. Someone must have called him, meaning he must have hung up at some point. It was probably Don calling back to keep him talking, communicating and, she hoped, negotiating.
The car curved to the side and sped up. They were getting on the freeway, most likely I-77. He was driving much faster than he would dare on city streets.
There were so many things t
hat could happen next, all of them bad.
Upset, manic, distracted, James could get into a car accident, in which a large truck or even a tractor-trailer plowed into the back of him, and Theresa would have to be scraped up in small pieces for the funeral. Rachael would—
Don’t think about Rachael.
James could be planning to drive out to hilly Geauga County and dump the car in a copse of trees. Theresa would not be found until she had long since died of dehydration, her body crawling with maggots and lying in its own—
Best not think about that, either.
He might, for whatever reason, think that the vehicle would best be hidden in the lake and drive it off the end of a pier, escaping through the window she’d opened while the trunk filled up with water with nowhere for her to go.
Or James could get an answer he didn’t like – a nearly inevitable outcome, since how could Don and Shephard and Stone and the rest of the group at the ME’s possibly figure out who might have been Diana’s lover/killer this many years later? The guilty man certainly wouldn’t be willing to admit it, and, if James had been right about the pregnancy, they had incinerated the only evidence. Unless the histological samples held a surprise …
He seemed to be shouting into the phone now, though she still couldn’t make out any words. Definitely an answer he didn’t like.
Probably, the best scenario would be if James bailed out and left her parked in a populated lot, where a hapless shopper might hear her pounding before she collapsed from a lack of water and oxygen.
Maybe the car’s owner had reported it stolen, and the cops were looking for it – either because it was a stolen car or because Shephard had put the two things together and suspected it to be James’ current mode of conveyance. In which case the cops on the street would be keeping an eye out for a multiple murderer, not a car thief. That changed things. Cops would be extra determined not to let him get away. They might not know she was in the car – perhaps a dispatch cut out before they got that info, or they wouldn’t see her inside the car and would think he had let her out somewhere else. James could lift the knife and, seeing a flash of metal, they think it’s a gun. Or maybe they set up a roadblock and he tries to ram the officers and their vehicles. There were so many scenarios that could end in a compacted crush or a hail of bullets, cutting through the relatively thin metal compartment where she lay—