What the Dead Know

by Laura Lippman

  She heard her father’s echo. All these years later, he was in her head, his pronouncements as definitive as ever. Don’t be the first to purchase any kind of technology. Keep your knives sharp. Eat tomatoes only when they’re in season. Be kind to your sister. One day your mother and I will be gone, and you’ll be all that each other has.

  The young patrol officer regarded her gravely, the kind of awed inspection that good children reserve for those who have misbehaved. It was ludicrous that he could be so skeptical of her. In this light, in these clothes, the rain flattening her short, spiky curls, she probably looked younger than she was. People were always placing her at a full decade below her real age, even on those rare occasions when she dressed up. Cutting her long hair last year had only made her look younger still. It was funny about her hair, how stubbornly blond it remained at an age when most women needed chemicals to achieve this light, variable hue. It was as if her hair resented its years of forced imprisonment under those home applications of Nice’n Easy Sassy Chestnut. Her hair could hold a grudge as well as she could.

  “Bethany,” she said. “I’m one of the Bethany girls.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t know?” she asked him. “You don’t remember? But then I guess you’re all of, what—twenty-four? Twenty-five?”

  “I’ll be twenty-six next week,” he said.

  She tried not to smile, but he was so much like a toddler claiming two and a half instead of two. At what age do we stop wishing to be older than we are, stop nudging the number up? Around thirty for most, she assumed, although it had happened to her far earlier. By eighteen she would have done anything to renounce adulthood and be given another chance at childhood.

  “So you weren’t even born when—And you’re probably not from here either, so no, the name wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

  “Registration in the car says it belongs to Penelope Jackson, from Asheville, North Carolina. That you? Car didn’t come up stolen when I called the tag in.”

  She shook her head. Her story would be wasted on him. She’d wait for someone who could appreciate it, who would understand the full import of what she was trying to tell him. Already she was making the calculations that had long been second nature. Who was on her side, who would take care of her? Who was against her, who would betray her?

  At St. Agnes Hospital, she continued to be selectively mum, answering only direct questions about what hurt where. Her injuries were relatively minor—a gash to the forehead that required four tiny stitches, which she was assured would leave no visible scar, something torn and broken in her left forearm. The arm could be stabilized and bandaged for now but would require surgery eventually, she was told. The young patrolman must have passed along the Bethany name, for the billing person pressed her on it, but she refused to speak of it again no matter how they poked and prodded. Under ordinary circumstances she would have been treated and released. But this was far from ordinary. The police put a uniformed patrolman outside her door and told her that she was not free to leave even if the hospital determined it was appropriate. “The law is very clear on this. You must tell us who you are,” another cop told her, an older one, from traffic investigation. “If it weren’t for your injuries, you’d be in jail tonight.” Still she said nothing, although the thought of jail terrified her. To not be free to come and go as she liked, to be held anywhere—no, never again. The doctor entered the name “Jane Doe” on her chart, adding “Bethany?” in parentheses. Her fourth name, by her count, but maybe it was her fifth. It was easy to lose track.

  She knew St. Agnes. Or, more correctly, had known it once. So many accidents, so many trips. A calf sliced open when a jar of fireflies was dropped, the shards ricocheting up from the sidewalk and nicking the roundest part. A flyswatter applied to an infected smallpox vaccination with nothing but good intentions. A knee opening like a flower after a fall in the underbrush, revealing the terrifying interior of bone and blood. A shin scraped on the rusty valve of an old tire, a huge inner tube from some tractor or truck, their father’s makeshift version of a bouncy castle, obtained and erected in deference to their mother’s Anglophilia. The trips to the emergency room had been family affairs, more father-enforced togetherness—terrifying for the injured party, tedious for those who had to tag along, but everyone got Mr. G’s soft ice cream afterward, so it was worth it in the end.

  This is not the homecoming I imagined, she thought, lying in the dark, allowing self-pity, her old friend, to come for her, envelop her.

  And she had imagined returning, she realized now, although not today. Sometime, eventually, but on her own terms, not because of someone else’s agenda. Three days ago the hard-won order of her life had jumped the track without warning, as out of her control as that pea-green Valiant. That car—it was as if there were a ghost in the machine all along, nudging her north, past the old landmarks, toward a moment not of her choosing. At the I-70 exit, when it would have been so easy to go west, toward her original destination, and possibly escape detection, the car had turned to the right and stopped on its own. Prince Valiant had brought her most of the way home, trying to trick her into doing what was right. That’s why the name had popped out. That, or the head injury, or the events of the past three days, or her anxiety about the little girl in the SUV.

  Floating on painkillers, she fantasized about the morning, what it would be like to say her name, her true name, for the first time in years. To answer a question that few people had to think about twice: Who are you?

  Then she realized what the second question would be.

  PART I WEDNESDAY

  CHAPTER 2

  “That your phone?”

  The sleep-creased woman staring at Kevin Infante was angry about something, not exactly a first for him. He also wasn’t sure of her name, although he was reasonably sure it would come to him in a second or two. Again, not a first.

  No, it was the combination—a strange woman and a baleful glare—that made this morning unique in what his sergeant liked to call the annals of Infante, which the boss invariably pronounced with a long a sound. If Infante didn’t know a woman well enough to remember her name, what could he possibly have done to earn this martyred glare? He usually needed three or four months to inspire this kind of rage in a woman.

  “That your phone?” the woman repeated, her voice as tight and dangerous as her expression.

  “Yeah,” he said, relieved to be starting with an easy question. “Absolutely.”

  It occurred to him that he should try to find the phone, perhaps even answer it, but the ringing had stopped. He waited for the landline to kick in behind the cell, then remembered he was not in his own bedroom. He fished around on the floor with his left arm, his right one still pinned beneath the woman, and found his trousers on the floor, the phone clipped to the belt. Even as he grabbed it, the phone vibrated in his hand and emitted a shrill chirp, another disgruntled scold.

  “Just the office,” he said, glancing at the number.

  “An emergency?” the woman asked, and if he had been more on his game, he would have lied and said yes, absolutely, that’s what it was, then gotten into his clothes and escaped.

  Still sleep-fogged, he said, “There are no emergencies in my department.”

  “I thought you were a cop.” He could hear the anger curdling at the edges of her words, the pent-up resentment.

  “Detective.”

  “Same thing, right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “So don’t cops have emergencies?”

  “All the time.” And this would count as one. “But in my line of work—” He stopped short of identifying himself as a murder police, fearful that she would find it too interesting and want to see him again, cultivate a relationship. There were a lot of cop groupies out there, a fact for which he was normally thankful. “The type of people I work with—they’re very patient.”

  “You got, like, a desk job?”

  “You could say that.” He had a
desk. He had a job. Sometimes he did his job at his desk. “Debbie.” He tried not to sound too proud of himself for pulling the name up. “You could say that, Debbie.”

  His eyes flicked around the room, searching for a clock but also taking in his surroundings. A bedroom, of course, and a reasonably nice one, with arty posters of flowers and what his ex-wife, the more recent one, always called a color scheme, which was supposed to be a good thing, but it never sounded right to Infante. A scheme was a plot, a plan to get away with something. But then a color scheme was part of a trap, too, if you thought about it, the one that began with a too-expensive ring, revolving credit at Shofer’s, and a mortgage payment, then ended—twice in his experience so far—in a Baltimore County courtroom, with the woman taking all the stuff and leaving all the debt. The scheme here was pale yellow and green, not in the least objectionable, but it made him feel vaguely nauseous. As he sorted his clothes from hers, he began noticing other odd details about the room, things that didn’t quite track. The built-in desk beneath the casement window, the boxy minifridge draped with a cloth, a small microwave on top of that, the pennant above the desk, extolling the Towson Wildcats…Fuck me, he thought. Fuck me.

  “So,” he said. “What’s your major?”

  The girl—a real girl, a true girl, a probably-under-twenty-one girl, not that anything over sixteen was off the legal menu, but Infante had some standards—gave him an icy look and crawled over him, wrapping the yellow-and-green top sheet around her. With much conspicuous effort, she pulled a fluffy robe from a hook and arrayed it over herself, allowing the sheet to fall only after belting the robe. Still, he got a quick look and remembered what had brought him there. Lord knows it wasn’t the face, although that had probably been more appealing when it wasn’t puckered up this way. In the morning light, she was too all-over pale, this Debbie, one of those egg-faced blondes whose eyes disappeared without makeup. She grabbed a bucket from the floor of the closet, prompting a split second of panicky speculation. Was she going to hit him with it? Pour something on his head? But Debbie just huffed out of the room, on her way to the showers. Presumably to wash away any trace of her evening with Kevin Infante. How bad could it have been? He decided not to wait around and find out.

  It was still early by college standards, and he was almost out of the dorm before he crossed another student’s path, a plump, big-eyed girl who seemed unnerved by such an alien presence. Not just male but suited, older, so obviously not a student or even a teacher.

  “Police,” he said. “Baltimore County.”

  She didn’t seem to find much comfort in this. “Has something happened?”

  “No, just making a routine public-safety check. Don’t forget, lock your doors and avoid unlighted areas in parking lots.”

  “Yes, Officer,” she said solemnly.

  The March morning was cold, the campus desolate. He found his car in an illegal spot not far from the dorm. He had thought it was an apartment house when he tried to drop her off last night. The evening was coming back to him. He had gone to Souris’s, in need of a change from the usual place, Wagner’s, where his coworkers went. There had been a gaggle of girls at the end of the bar, and although he’d told himself that he was just coming in for a quick drink, he soon felt compelled to cull one from the herd. He hadn’t gotten the best one, but the one he had gotten had been pretty good. Eager to please, at any rate, blowing him in his car on Allegheny Avenue. He drove her back to this dowdy-looking midrise, quiet and hushed at 2:00 A.M. It had been his intention to watch her turn her key in the lock and then beat out a quick good-bye beep on the horn, but she had clearly expected more, so he’d followed her to her room and anted up. He was pretty sure he had made a good show of it before falling asleep. So what was up with the sour puss this morning?

  A campus cop was getting ready to stroke his car, but Infante flashed his badge and the guy backed off, although he was clearly itching to argue. Probably the highlight of the poor mope’s day, fighting over a ticket. He checked his cell phone—Nancy Porter, his former partner, whispering urgently into the phone, “Where are you?” Shit, he had missed roll call again. If he wanted to get to work in a reasonably timely fashion, he’d have to choose between a shower and breakfast, a real one that would settle his stomach. He decided he could handle being queasy for a few hours better than he could tolerate his own stink, so he drove to his apartment over in Northwest Baltimore. He could always claim that he had been chasing a lead on the…McGowan case, that was it. The inspiration came to him in the shower, and he stayed there longer than he should have, letting the hot water beat down on him, the night’s odors rising up from his pores. He’d been looking for the girl’s ex-boyfriend, not the most recent one, or even the one before, but three boyfriends ago. Come to think of it, that wasn’t a bad idea. The girl’s death, an old-fashioned stab-and-dump in Gunpowder Falls State Park, had a brutality to it that strangers seldom mustered. It hadn’t been enough to cut her. The killer had also set her body alight, igniting a small brush fire that had brought fire trucks to the scene, when she otherwise might have languished undiscovered for days, weeks, months. Citizens were always surprised when cops couldn’t find a body, but for all the endless development in the Baltimore metro area, there were still acres and acres of raw land. Every now and then a hunter stumbled on a pile of bones and it would turn out to be a vic from five, even ten years ago.

  Early in his career, Infante had worked a case like that, one where murder was obvious but the body couldn’t be found. The family had been rich and connected, with enough resources to drive the department crazy. When told that the things they wanted—searches, long-shot lab work—would have taken much of the department’s budget for the year, they shrugged and said “So?” It was three years before the body showed up, not even ten yards off a state highway on the upper shore, discovered by a shy-bladder type who had walked into the weeds to take a piss. Blunt-force trauma, the medical examiner concluded, so it was a murder, all right. But there was nothing more to be gleaned from the body or the scene, and the husband, who had been the primary suspect since the start, was dead by then. The only lingering question in Infante’s mind was if the fatal blow had been an accident, another Saturday-night fight in a house that had seen no shortage of such battles, or if there had been more intent to it. He’d spent a lot of time with the husband before cancer of the esophagus got him. The husband even came to believe that Infante came around out of friendship or kindness. He put on a good show of grief over his missing wife, and Infante decided that the guy saw himself as the victim. In his mind all he’d done was give her a push, a shove, no harder than any of the other pushes and shoves he’d meted out over the years, only this time she didn’t get back up. So hubby picked her up, dumped her in the woods, and spent the rest of his days believing himself innocent. You’d think the wife’s family would have been content that he died, fast and ugly at that, but it wasn’t enough for them. For some people, it was never enough.

  Infante stepped out of the shower. Theoretically, he was only thirty minutes late. But he was almost sick from hunger; and drive-through didn’t do it for him. He went to the Bel-Loc Diner, where the waitresses fussed over him, made sure he got his steak-and-eggs exactly the way he liked them, the yolks just this side of runny. He pressed the tines of his fork into them, letting the juice flow over the steak, and wondered once again: What the fuck did I do to piss off Debbie?

  “WE GOT A babbling brook of a lunatic at St. Agnes Hospital, saying she knows about an old murder,” his sergeant, Lenhardt, said to him. “Go.”

  “I’m on the McGowan case. In fact, I had to catch someone this morning, before he left for work. That’s why I was late.”

  “I gotta send somebody to talk to her. Late boy is the lucky boy.”

  “I told you I was—”

  “Yeah. I know what you told me. Still no reason to miss roll call, asshole.”

  Lenhardt had partnered with Infante last year, when the department had b
een shorthanded, and he seemed to be more of a hard-ass since he returned to his sergeant’s duties full-time, as if Infante needed to be reminded who was in charge.

  “What’s the point? You said she’s mental.”

  “Mental or making shit up to deflect attention from the fact that she left the scene of a bad accident.”

  “Do we even know what case she’s promising to solve for us?”

  “She was muttering something about Bethany last night.”

  “Bethany Beach? It’s not even in the state, much less the county.”

  “The Bethany sisters, funny guy. An old missing-persons case.”

  “And you’re betting she’s a wack job.”

  “Yep.”

  “You’re making me waste half my day—St. Agnes is about as far from here as you can get and still be in Baltimore County—to go talk to her?”

  “Yep.”

  Infante turned to go, irritated and angry. Okay, he deserved to have his balls busted a little, but Lenhardt couldn’t know that for sure, so it was unjust.

  The sergeant called after him, “Hey, Kev?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know that old expression, egg on your face? I always thought of it as metaphorical, but you reminded me this morning that it can still be literal. You been out talking to people all morning, and no one mentioned that yellow smear on your face?”

  Infante’s hand flicked up, found the telltale bit of yolk at the corner of his mouth. “Breakfast meeting,” he said. “I was working an informant that might know something about McGowan.”

  “You lie like that automatically?” The sergeant’s voice was not unkind. “Or are you just trying to keep in practice until your next marriage?”