The Library: Where Life Checks Out

by Carmen DeSousa

  Before driving to the station, Mark weaved his way up and down several side streets to see where the man’s friends had gone. Like most vagrants, they’d scurried away and hidden in the shadows, out of his sight.

  More than likely, the man didn’t know anything, but he was still trespassing, even if he had a key.

  Mark pulled into the station and led the man straight to an interview room without booking him. He’d hold the charge of trespassing as a wild card. Mark went for coffee while leaving Bill to wait. Not that he thought that would gain him an edge—obviously this wasn’t the homeless man’s first arrest—but because Mark needed coffee. He wished it wasn’t the crappy stuff he’d been drinking for the last few days; but caffeine was still caffeine, and he needed it. He really needed to start brewing his coffee at home, since he never seemed to have time to pick some up once he left his apartment.

  Mark made a quick stop at his office, hoping Townsend had arrived. The man was behind his desk all right, but his head was on the blotter. Drool had already caused a few marked entries on the pad to bleed across the paper. Mark shook his head. Yeah, he’d been sleeping here.

  “Tim,” Mark said at the same time he rapped on the older detective’s cubicle entrance.

  Townsend jumped in response. “What the—” He wiped his eyes, which were swollen and red.

  Sad. If he’d stop being such a horndog, maybe his wife would keep him. She’d sure taken him back enough times.

  Mark leaned against the cubicle wall, waiting as Tim got his bearings. “I need you to track down some of the homeless community today. Find out if anyone saw anything.”

  Tim wiped at his eyes some more as he stretched, but nodded. “Yup. Got anything I can start with?”

  “Mention a guy named Bill, tall gangly fella. I have him in custody for trespassing. Several of his friends saw me arrest him, so let them assume he’s talking.”

  “Got it.” Townsend blinked his eyes, as if he were trying to wake up, and then motioned his head to the Styrofoam cups Mark held. “You drinking both of those?”

  “One’s for Bill.”

  His partner grunted.

  When Mark returned to his detainee, he handed Bill the cup of coffee, read him his rights, offered if he wanted an attorney—which he declined—and then peppered him with the same questions.

  The only thing that changed from outside the library was that he got his full name William “Wild Bill” James.

  “So, Bill,” Mark smiled, attempting to get the man to let down his guard, “why d’your friends call you Wild Bill?”

  Bill shrugged and flashed a nicotine-stained grin. Surprisingly, his teeth weren’t rotting away as he’d seen with most of the homeless community. “No reason other than my name is Bill. Like the Old West, Wild Bill Hickok. Some folks say I look like him.”

  Mark tilted his head, taking in the long dark hair, which hung in greasy and stringy strands with a bit of a wave. Bill had thin brows above wide-set narrow eyes and a long thin nose. “Hmm…you kinda do.”

  “And the fact that I was a cop back in the day.”

  “Really? What day was that?” Mark asked.

  “Long before you, kid.” The man’s street lingo had almost completely disappeared.

  Mark dropped his head and stared at the man, realizing he’d seen him before. He wagged his finger as it occurred to him. “I saw you the other day. You were talking with Jay on the second floor of the library.”

  Bill shook his head. “Don’t know no Jay.”

  “Yeah, you do…I saw you. The young librarian,” Mark clarified. “The redhead.”

  The man nodded in acknowledgment, but then shook his head. “She may have been talking to me, but I wasn’t talking to her. I don’t talk to her.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Andrew Davis squinted against the first rays of sunlight, watching as his wife of almost twenty-five years tiptoed to their bedroom door.

  “Where ya going, Margaret?” Andrew asked. She’d been gone a lot lately, and it made him wonder what she’d been up to.

  They’d been happy for the most part. Their lives had just gravitated together after Jessica’s death, but he’d always tried to be a good husband. Margaret knew she wasn’t his first choice for a wife, but she also didn’t try to compete with a dead woman, the only woman he’d ever truly loved. They’d had their issues over the years, but had worked out most of them and had fallen into a comfortable pattern.

  Although he’d never love her as much as Jessica, he did love and care for her. He’d also learned to read her well in the last two and a half decades, and it was clear; his wife was keeping something from him.

  She jumped at the sound of his voice, obviously surprised that he was up so early, but then again, so was she—again.

  “Oh!” she gasped. “You startled me.”

  Davis wiggled his eyebrows at her, wondering if she’d be up for a quickie. “Save the librarian charm for the groupies. I know you’re a tiger.”

  She smiled, a hint of pink highlighting her pale cheeks, but she didn’t make her way back to the bed, so she really was in a hurry to get somewhere. “I want to get to the library early in case there was another break-in.”

  He shook his head. “I told you yesterday, the library is now a crime scene. When the scene was outside, I gave in. You opened when I said you shouldn’t and look what happened. What if the intruder had still been there when you arrived?”

  “But,” she huffed, planting her hands on her hips, “we need to open. We have enough issues. We don’t need citizens complaining to the city council.”

  “At five a.m.?” He scooted up in the bed and propped his chin on his fist, narrowing his eyes. “By the way, why did I have to find out for myself that Wade was hanging out at the library, Margaret?” he asked her point-blank, wondering what she knew about his showing up after twenty-eight years.

  It made no sense that she wouldn’t confide in her police-captain husband that a man wanted for two murders was stalking the library. At minimum, unless she had a good reason for keeping quiet, she would have told Wade to leave the premises.

  She released a deep breath and leaned against the doorframe. Still in the room, but as far from him as she could get. “You know I hated Wade Buchanan, but I never believed he murdered his wife and daughter.”

  “I know you never liked him. He was hell-bent on bulldozing the library. But how can you be so sure he didn’t kill them?”

  She shrugged. “I just know.”

  “Were you worried I’d turn him in or try to hurt him if I discovered he was hanging around the library?”

  His wife licked her lips before answering, which meant she was either dehydrated from sleep or preparing to lie. “Both,” she croaked out.

  Hmm, he mused silently. Her one-word answer didn’t sound like a lie. Unless she was holding something back. Whether people realized it or not, their bodies gave away an omission of the truth just as much as if they’d actually lied.

  He didn’t want to badger his wife, but he did want to know how much she knew about the Buchanan murders. It’d been a long twenty-eight years since Buck had disappeared. Of course, no one in the police department had been looking closely for him.

  After Wilson Waters died, most of his investigations got swept to the side. It was amazing, though, that Wade had managed to hide in this small town for so long. Someone had to have helped him.

  Why would Margaret have wanted to keep a possible murderer out of jail? Unless she had proof that he was innocent.

  His wife knew one truth; he hated Wade Buchanan too, and he always would. Jessica would still be alive if she’d stayed with him.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After interviewing Wild Bill for three hours, Mark finally let him go with a stiff warning not to return to the library after hours and to stay in town in the event he had further questions.

  Not that Mark thought Bill had the means of skipping town quickly, but even a slow pace could have him in the nex
t county before nightfall. Or hitchhiking—the preferred method among most vagrants—would have him in another state in a few hours.

  Fortunately, even without family, the homeless community still fell into comfortable patterns and preferred not to relocate. They knew where to find food, shelter, and which areas to avoid. A new city meant more work just to be safe. Wild Bill didn’t look as though he’d been on the streets long, though, so more than likely, he’d stick around.

  The library was still closed, per Captain Davis’ orders, so Mark headed back there, hoping to do some investigating on his own. Roland and Anna had finished their search yesterday evening and hadn’t found anything interesting.

  Plenty of scribbled notes in margins and sticky notes pasted to pages, but nothing that screamed ‘secret information’, Roland had told him over the phone when they left at nine p.m. Regardless, they’d bagged everything they found for Mark to sift through when he was ready.

  “Tomorrow,” Roland had grudgingly told him during their phone call, “I’ll scan the microfilm per your request. Thanks for that, Waters. I owe you one,” he’d complained.

  “Anytime, man,” Mark had responded. “Think of it this way, maybe you’ll solve a twenty-eight-year-old murder and a current murder case simultaneously, earning you the coveted position of city employee of the month. I think you even get a fifty-dollar gift card to a steakhouse with your plaque.”

  “Hah! I’ll leave the solving murders to you guys; I just provide the information. All I see in my near future is a cold beer and a night spent laughing at the wannabe cops on TV, and in the not-so-distant future, retirement.”

  Roland had hung up after that with the assurance that he’d be veggin’ on the sofa for the rest of the evening. The older gentleman was the type of man you couldn’t help but like. He looked nothing like a scientist. He was tall and burly; a man you’d expect was a lumberjack at one time in his life, not a forensic scientist.

  Now that the sun was long up, and he doubted anyone would be desperate enough to break in during the day, Mark parked near the main gate in front of the library.

  The woman held his gaze from the moment he shifted the vehicle into park until he stood in front of her.

  “You ready to talk, Jay…” He let her first name fade off his tongue, again hoping she’d fill in the blank.

  She didn’t. Instead, she stood up and walked around the bench, making her way toward the front door. “You have a key, I hope.”

  Mark nodded. “I do. Are you ready to talk to me?”

  “Let’s go inside.”

  For whatever reason, Mark felt uncomfortable, as if this twenty-something, barely a hundred-ten-pound girl could be a threat. But, he had a Glock strapped to his side, and he doubted she had a thigh holster stuffed with a 9mm beneath the skirt she wore.

  With hesitation, he followed her as she walked toward the stairs, but stopped at the landing. He’d been a cop long enough that he didn’t trust anyone involved with a murder case, beautiful or not.

  “Where’re you going?” he asked as she sashayed up the stairs, passing a rectangular table next to the reference room, which still had Roland’s yellow tape pasted across the doorway. The table would have served perfectly as an interview station. Long enough that she would be out of his reach, which would enable her to let down her guard.

  She glanced over her shoulder but continued ascending the steps. “Upstairs. I told you I work in fiction.”

  Mark crossed his arms over his chest, refusing to follow. This was too similar to his dream for comfort. “I’d rather we talk right here,” he called, watching as she glided onto the second-floor landing with the gracefulness of a ballerina.

  She leaned over the railing and grinned. “Are you afraid the ghost might get you?”

  He frowned. One, he wasn’t afraid of anything, least of all a ghost, well, maybe slightly. Ghostly beings—whatever they were—had been known to entice people to do stupid things. And two, if someone else had known about a presence in the library, why wouldn’t he have heard rumors about it all the years he’d been coming here?

  He’d insinuated to Ashlyn that he hadn’t heard details about the ghost that haunted The Depot. When, in fact, he’d heard of disturbances for years from the police officers who’d had to go to calls at three a.m. Townsend was the worst; he hardly even wanted to eat lunch there anymore.

  “What ghost?” he ventured, taking one tentative step at a time toward the young woman.

  “I saw your expression the other day. Something happened, didn’t it?”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” he grumbled, still slogging up the stairs like a child heading toward a punishment.

  Jay giggled. “Just because you don’t believe doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

  Mark stepped off the last step onto the smooth wood floors and leaned against the banister. “First question, Jay. Why are you here?”

  “I volunteer here, remember?” She turned and strolled toward the rows of books, trailing her hand along the spines. She flitted from one shelf to the next as if she were admiring each individual book. As tiny as she was, he couldn’t imagine that even with the ladders she could reach the books on the top shelves. Each shelf touched the twelve-foot high ceiling.

  No wonder they needed someone to work in the different sections. He couldn’t imagine that they allowed patrons to climb the ladders to reach books on the top shelves. If a person fell from that distance, it was doubtful they’d walk away uninjured. More than likely, they’d die of head trauma.

  Mark glanced toward the stained-glass windows, confirming that the vines from the patio hadn’t worked their way through the cracks as they’d done in his dream. He let out a breath of relief when the window frames appeared solid.

  Jay finally stopped prancing around and sat in a chair at the end of the aisle, leaving him to stand. “This is my favorite place in the library.”

  Mark glanced around, noticing she was sandwiched between stacks of books, a wall behind her with no place to go, and that the only exit would be to come through him. He wouldn’t feel comfortable without a means of escape, but maybe she felt safe within her cocoon of books.

  “How did you know I’d be here?” he continued his questioning.

  She pulled her legs closer, as though attempting to hide them beneath the chair. “I didn’t, but I’d hoped.”

  “Mrs. Davis said she would call all the employees and instruct them not to come in.”

  “I’m not an employee; I’m a volunteer. And I don’t have a phone, remember?”

  He nodded. “Do you know William James, goes by Wild Bill?”

  “Not personally. He started hanging out with Buck a few months ago. They seemed to have gotten awfully friendly, though.”

  “I saw you speaking to Bill the other day. What did you discuss?”

  “I asked him if he knew who killed Buck.”

  Mark leaned against the shelves, hoping they were sturdy enough to hold his weight. “Did he?”

  “He wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “Why not? Didn’t he know you and Buck were friends?”

  Jay shrugged. “I think so, but some homeless people don’t like to talk.”

  Mark nodded. He did know that. But though Bill had fed him a ton of one-word answers, when they were just shooting the breeze, he’d actually opened up. Maybe he was just concerned that someone might get the wrong idea witnessing a homeless man chatting with a beautiful young college volunteer.

  Mark could understand that. Right now, he wasn’t too comfortable with the current situation. Jay could turn around and accuse him of any type of misconduct, and whom would people believe? The captain’s first question would be: why hadn’t he brought her down to the station, knowing that he couldn’t force anyone to go to the station or talk for that matter. If a witness was willing to talk, he listened, wherever it was.

  “You know…Buck didn’t murder his family,” Jay spouted off out of nowhere.

  Mark huffed
out a breath, not understanding why this young woman would have felt comfortable socializing with a man wanted for homicide. “And how exactly could you have been sure enough of that not to turn him in if you knew he was wanted for murder, Jay?”

  “He told me,” she answered simply.

  The innocence in her voice made him want to believe as well, but he was far too cynical to trust a wanted criminal’s pleas of innocence without proof. All criminals claimed they were innocent.

  He scratched the scruff on his face that was beginning to itch from not shaving. “Oh…well, that makes perfectly good sense then.”

  “If you’d heard him talk about his wife and daughter, you’d know he never could have hurt them.”

  Mark resisted rolling his eyes at her naïveté. Many people loved their family and still killed them. That’s why those types of murders were referred to as crimes of passion, but he didn’t bother stating the obvious. Instead, he asked, “Did he happen to mention who killed them, then?”

  “He said it was one of four people, but he was never sure. When he came home the night of their murder, someone knocked him out. When he woke up and found the bodies, he realized immediately that he’d be the prime suspect. So instead of running to the police, he grabbed his daughter’s key to the library, knowing he could hide within the walls until he figured out who did it—” She stopped abruptly, glancing around at her shelter of books, as if wondering if she’d said too much.

  “Did he tell you who the four people were?” Mark pressed.

  Jay glanced up at him, her honey-colored eyes seeming to shelter a secret she didn’t want to release. “You’ll never believe me if I tell you, Mark.”

  Mark tilted his head in confusion. The familiar way she referred to him was unnerving. And why wouldn’t he believe her? “Try me.”

  Jay ran her fingers over the spine of a book next to her, caressing it with a gentle touch, as if she could draw strength with just a stroke of her fingertips. “If I tell you, you have to promise that you’ll never mention my name.”

  “I’ll need you to testify if I make an arrest.”