by Lissa Pelzer
He was already inside and pulling out of the lot when it dawned on him that he’d intended to dump the Camaro. But looking at it now, with its expensive, glittery paintwork picking up starlight, it seemed best just to leave it there. He’d wiped the prints off. Let the cops wonder. And the roads were dead. No one had seen anything. He was safe.
He rolled off down a county road, passing dark, single story houses in packs of twos and threes and was just starting to get the feeling that he’d get home without seeing a single soul, when he heard the sirens. He looked up into his rear-view mirror and scanned the black horizon, but there was nothing there. Then it hit him, literally.
The cop car plowed into his passenger side door, lifting the truck right off its wheels and throwing Chad into the roof lining. He wrapped his arms around his head as his driver’s side door hit the road surface and he stayed like that as the windscreen warped and balled up. The siren gave a final, desperate death wail and Chad thought, there goes my alibi.
When the truck stopped swaying, Chad placed his hands on the rocky shards on the floor and got up. He stood up through the passenger side window and saw the cop car pressed into his passenger side wheel. The red and blue lights were still flashing across the trees making them look like they were moving, coming towards him.
‘You stupid son of a bitch!’ the cop shouted out of the darkness. And then he was there, reaching across and grabbing Chad by the shirt. ‘Didn’t you see my lights?’
‘I didn’t see nothing!’
‘Are you high?’
‘No! No!’
The cop let go, turned away and went back to inspect his own damage.
Chad turned in place too. This was not good.
‘I’m sorry.’ he tried, but the cop was already back at his patrol car.
The hood was crushed up like a shark nose and the cop lowered himself down to get a better look. The movement was difficult for him. Either his belt or his waist was getting in the way. But he got out his flashlight and started running it along the edge, muttering to himself in the process. Then suddenly he jerked himself up.
‘Oh. Jesus Christ,’ he said, and there was genuine fear in his voice.
The cop was on the other side of the car now and down again and talking fast. Not to Chad, but into his radio.
Chad pulled himself out of the window. The truck rocked as he swung his legs out and over the roof. He came around the passenger side of the patrol car and there on the ground was a bundle of rags with a pair of feet sticking out the end. There was a head as well, but it didn’t look like it was in the right place.
‘Oh shit!’ He backed away.
Before tonight, he’d never seen a dead body in his whole life. Now, in the space of an hour, he’d seen two. His hands began to shake and then the rest of him joined in.
Now, the cop was down on the ground with the corpse. He’d pulled some of the blankets away and twisted his head like he was looking up its nose one minute, down its pants the next. Chad hung there like a scarecrow waiting for the wind.
‘She’s not breathing,’ the cop said.
‘She?’ He came a step closer. ‘Fuck.’
The blanket she was wrapped in was like the one he had in the back, her hair was black and not just from the blood and it clicked all at once. Chrissie or whatever the hell her name was hadn’t got another ride. She must have been in the back again.
‘Is she dead?’ he asked.
The cop didn’t answer him. ‘Did you see her in the road? Where the hell did she come from?’
Chad blew the air out of his cheeks. No way was he going to say she’d been in the back of his truck, not after what she’d done.
‘Did you hit her?’ the cop snarled.
‘What makes you think I hit her? She’s next to your vehicle. I’m all the way over there. How the hell is it that I hit her?’
The cop got up. He gave Chad a look like he was going to come over and punch him in the face, but he didn’t. He swung his stretched shirted torso around the back of his patrol car and got in.
‘Hey!’ Chad felt for his phone and pulled it out. He pressed the camera button maybe half a dozen times as the cop reversed back six feet and swung the nose behind Chad’s tipped-over truck.
Then the cop got out and Chad rushed him, swearing and pointing and saying things to a cop that you shouldn’t, but there were more lights now and his eyes followed the cops to the ambulance pulling up.
Chad rushed to the driver’s side door. ‘I didn’t hit her!’ he yelled at the paramedic getting out.
‘Okay, Buddy,’ came the reply, as he pushed Chad aside. ‘Make some space.’
Chad hovered, daring himself to look one minute, turning away the next. One of the paramedics was down on the ground with the girl, but he didn’t seem to be doing anything to her. But what would they do if she were already dead? Chad felt a panic coming over him. He backed away, but someone stopped him with a firm hand on his shoulder. It was another cop.
‘I didn’t hit her!’ Chad said again.
The cop had him by the arm now and was twisting him around. Chad felt the crush of a hand on his skull as the cop lowered him into the back seat. And the thought came to him, jammed him with its fingers like a drunk demanding attention, you haven’t killed anyone, but there are two dead bodies out here and you’re connected to both of them.
The patrol car door closed and Chad saw his breath misting up the window.
‘Hey! Hey! I need to talk to someone! I didn’t hit her!’ he shouted.
But no one could hear him.
Then there was a light from above as a helicopter came into land a hundred feet away. The paramedics had the stretcher out and the girl on it and they were scurrying along like kids who had stolen a crate of beer. And Chad leaned back in the seat. The girl was alive. They didn’t airlift dead bodies to hospital. She was alive. Surely, that was a good thing.
Davis
The sun was shining and making her squint. She lifted a hand to shield her eyes and carried on walking through the field of waist-high golden wheat. The farmstead was in front of her, a ramshackle collection of trailers and cabins surrounded by sunflowers and pampas grasses and she was amazed at how well she remembered it. She had known straight away that this was only a dream. She’d been slipping in and out for some time. They must have given her some seriously strong pain meds.
She breathed out heavily, touched the wheat and wondered if he would be here in her dream, Rane, the father of her two girls. It would be the Rane she had known before the other wives started showing up. He wouldn’t be the Rane who must exist somewhere now, the deluded old prophet, the fugitive who had escaped the police fifteen years ago. Not that one. It would be the lovely version of him, young, charismatic and energetic.
She saw his cabin beyond in the haze and willed herself over, flying like an angel, thinking even now, he would be impressed that she could fly and think that she was a sign from God. And suddenly she was at his door, pushing it open and there he was. His hair hung in dark red ringlets around his hard, sunburnt cheekbones. He was stripped to the waist as she had seen him many times when he’d been chopping wood or working in the fields and he was heaving over the table as if he were trying to lift it. She saw his muscled stomach and chest and the dew as it started to form in the hollow of his throat. Davis felt the pressure growing in her chest and moving downwards. She would position herself on the table and give him something to heave on. She could do that. She could do anything she liked. This was only a dream.
But as she moved forward, she noticed, somebody else was already there, a girl, her legs bent at her smooth white knees.
She didn’t know her. It must have been one of his later wives. Davis watched as her long blonde hair fell from the table, and her big blue eyes rolled back. Then she saw who it was. It was Carol Ann Baker and she was moving in rhythm with Rane’s heaving.
Davis grimaced. Even in her own dreams, she couldn’t control what happened.
&nb
sp; ‘What the hell are you doing here? This is my dream.’
‘I don’t want to be here,’ Carol Ann said. ‘I didn’t ask to be here. You could have just let me walk away like I asked... Why didn’t you let me walk away?’
Davis woke with a start. The cold sweat on her skin felt as pure as mineral water. For a moment, it was all still real and she wondered why she had never remembered before that Carol Ann had been one of Rane’s wives. But of course, she hadn’t. Carol Ann wasn’t even born back then. Carol Ann was an eighteen year old runaway with two murders to her name, and if Davis hadn’t have woken up after her gunshot surgery, it would have been three.
Davis wiped a hand down her face and caught a hold of the tubes resting against her nose. She pulled them away and over her head.
A man’s voice sounded outside the door, loud and aggressive, and she recognized it. When the door opened and Eddie Marquez came in like a man looking for a fight, she wasn’t surprised.
‘Good God! What the hell happened?’ he rattled off like a machine gun. ‘I’ve got the local boys out here wanting to interview you. I told them you were one of mine. I told them, I get to speak to my detectives first!’
Davis squinted at the old-school cop she’d known so well. He’d been her shift sergeant before being moved horizontally as the department had called it, into officer liaisons, or as everyone else called it, a desk job in preparation for retirement.
‘They called down to ask if you were up here connected to the Bobby Alvin case. Thank God you had your badge on you.’
Straight to the point, she croaked out a question. ‘What time is it?’
He looked at his watch. ‘Eleven, why?’
‘You got here quick.’
‘Davis...’ His thick eyebrows came together for a moment. ‘It’s Thursday the 24th. I flew up here three days ago when we got the call. You’ve been in an out since the surgery...’
‘I’ve got to get up!’ She craned forward and felt the rigidity in her belly, as if a length of wood had been inserted in her abdomen.
‘Stay put, lady.’
Marquez laid his hand on her and Davis fell back towards the pillow and let out a big breath.
‘Did you call my girls?’
‘They’re fine.’
‘What about Alice?’ She could picture the older one, Jade who was studying in Washington State taking the news with a roll of her eyes, but Alice back in Homestead was probably worried sick. She’d told her to behave for a weekend and that she’d be back Monday at the latest. ‘I need to call Alice.’
‘It’s all good. Jade’s gone home to her.’
‘You sure?’
‘Positive.’
‘Okay – okay.’
She looked around the room now and saw the flowers in the corner, one of those big baskets full of showy heads and lilies, the kind public relations would send to families they wanted to acknowledge, and she groaned.
Marquez rubbed his hands together like he wanted to crack his knuckles.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’d like to give you the time you need to pull yourself together, but the local boys are snapping at my heels. I need to know, what the hell happened?’
She cringed and screwed up her face.
‘You got shot by one of Bobby Alvin’s little whores. You remember that much, right?’
Davis pressed her lips together tightly.
‘I’ve heard the fundamentals from these guys. You had some clarity going into surgery. You managed to give them Baker’s name, at least.’
Davis remembered that much. She might have told them to look out for her using the name Lilly Lessard too, but couldn’t say for sure.
‘You pick her up already?’
‘Nope, and I’m not going to. This isn’t our case, Davis. This belongs to Montgomery County.’
Davis craned her neck up. ‘How can this not be our case? We’ve been on Bobby Alvin for ten years.’
‘Right, but the Judge Ramsey murder up in Georgia isn’t our case either, remember?’
Davis sucked in some air that seemed to have escaped her chest without permission and let her head flop back down onto the pillow.
‘Which would beg the question, as to why you were up here chasing it.’
‘I wasn’t chasing it. I just…’
He probably knew where she was going, that Alvin was wanted for sending young girls out to the hotel rooms of wealthy men, Judge Ramsey included, that he had powerful friends, especially in Georgia, the kind of people who blocked permission and funding when leads were identified. The Ramsey family, in particular, would rather no one learned of their late uncle’s predilection for young girls and large sex toys.
‘I know why you were up here.’
‘You do?’
‘It was that pre-paid credit card, the one used up at the Sea Island resort that we couldn’t identify, the one in the name of Lilly Lessard. I’m guessing you’ve been hounding Visa, saw a new purchase made up here in Ohio and followed through.’
He was close. Not bad for a blind guess.
‘Standard detective work.’ She tried a smile, but Marquez held up a hand.
‘No jokes. Let’s do this the right way. Let’s bring Montgomery County in and do a full info transfer. It’s the only way we’re going to get her.’
Davis leaned away. He couldn’t even hear himself. Let’s get her. Because that was what this was all about. The apprehension and conviction of Carol Ann Baker and another lucky escape for Bobby Alvin, with no mention of why she was in a room with Judge Ramsey, or why she was in the back of a car with Gary Madison, when the two men were killed on two separate occasions. But now was not the time to talk about ingrained departmental biases.
Marquez leaned over her. ‘Talk to me.’
‘She was going west.’ Davis knew she had to say a few words. ’Trying to get a pick up on the lane heading back out onto the highway.’
Marquez nodded. ‘You said that going into surgery.’
‘I did? What else?’
‘That she smelled of ammonia and violets. You might have been in a state of delirium when you spoke to them.’
‘Could be.’ She shifted in the bed glad that Marquez didn’t spend much time coloring his roots. Because an idea was already forming in her mind, that once again, if she wanted to get Bobby Alvin then maybe she needed to take the personal approach on Carol Ann Baker and bring her in herself.
‘What does Bobby Alvin say?’ she asked, changing the subject.
‘He’s backing up what you said, that Baker shot Madison, not him.’
‘Did I say that?’
‘The detective out there seems to think you did. Smart kid, Kriegbaum, he worked out too, that ammonia and violets meant she’d dyed her hair.’
‘Smart kid. But I don’t think I said she shot Gary Madison.’
‘What? So now you don’t think she did? You got your thumb on Alvin for that?’
Davis didn’t. She knew Carol Ann had shot Gary Madison. The girl had told her as much in the blink of a semi’s turn signal. She confessed to killing the Judge too. But throwing her stone in that pot wasn’t going to get Bobby Alvin convicted. She had to play the devil’s advocate.
‘The way I see it is like this. It could be that Bobby Alvin beat Judge Ramsey because he didn’t get his money… And shot Gary Madison for the same reason.’ Davis felt her blood pressure going up and she lay her head back and took a breath. She was getting riled up just as if Carol Ann really were innocent of killing anyone.
‘Why do we assume it was the girl with no violent past and not the man who once faced a murder one charge, who killed these two men?’
‘Well, for one reason, it looks like you and Madison might have been shot by bullets fired by the same gun.’
She had figured that was the case already, but wasn’t ready to concede. ‘Found the gun?’ she snapped back.
‘Until they do, just give Montgomery your full cooperation.’ He leaned over the lilies and picked a card
out of the basket.
‘Who are they from?’ Davis asked.
‘WKET. I guess they want an interview.’
‘I guess they don’t know I’m a cop.’
Marquez cleared his throat. ‘That’s something else I need to inform you of... The main reason I was dispatched up here, I came to implement the conditions of your administrative leave.’
Davis felt the smirk like a razor cut to her face. ‘You mean, my suspension?’
‘I know your intentions were right, but in this case, your methods were dead wrong. Davis, I’m sorry...’
‘It’s fine,’ she said, feeling the room growing darker. ‘Anyway, I need time to recover.’
‘That’s right. In the meantime, you’re the key witness in a cop shooting. And you know what they say in cases like this, personal interest cases, if you can’t be the best detective in the room be the best witness.’
And Marquez came over and reached for her hand and she let him take it.
‘Tell them everything and let them draw their own conclusions. The sooner you do, the sooner they’ll bring her in.’
Davis nodded, but Marquez still hovered over her.
‘So Carol Ann Baker is Lilly Lessard?’
‘She might have been,’ Davis said. ‘But I don’t think she is anymore.’
Chad
The detective pressed the button again.
‘This is Detective Jim Caffey, with me Detective Darren Tanner, interviewing Chad Purcell…’ And he reeled off the time, date, place and the absence of Chad’s appointed lawyer, who was just outside the door, who had argued that giving the detectives a free hand would show they were cooperating fully.
‘Now before the break, you were just about to tell us what you were doing driving along the North County Road 200 E at four thirty on a Monday morning.’
Chad picked at the rim of the table that divided them. ‘Yeah. I was hungry. I went out for a burger.’
The two detectives locked eyes. Caffey, who was rocking a Miami Vice look, pouted in disbelief at Tanner, who had more of a divorced, history teacher thing going on.