“I know what she means. So what happened then?”
Keaton clutched the arm of the couch. “That’s pretty much all I could get out of her. I told her I’d come and see her, I’d see that it was all right. That made her happy. She likes her sons to come running.”
The bitterness came and went quickly, but Sonora wondered if the role of big brother and elder son wore thin.
“I’ll go with you,” Sonora said.
He inclined his head toward the kitchen. “What about that?”
“We’ll have a technician look at it. See if we can pick something up.”
“Fingerprints?”
“Prints, saliva on the seal of the envelope, hair. Whatever.”
“That would be something,” he said woodenly.
It would also be unlikely, Sonora thought. This killer was too intelligent to lick the envelope.
The papers were calling Mark Daniels’s killer the Flashpoint killer, a term culled from a quote by an arson investigator who had been discussing the flash point of the fire. Around the department they were calling her Flash.
Sonora wondered if there would be more pictures. It could get a whole lot worse. She studied Keaton Daniels, wondering how he’d hold up.
He caught her eye, held her gaze. Something changed, and she realized she was breathing a little too hard. She felt high-strung, suddenly, and nervous.
“Did you change your locks?” she asked abruptly.
“Yeah.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“What?”
“I’m a cop, remember? I know when people lie to me.”
“Must be hell on your kids.”
“It is, and don’t change the subject. If your problem is the expense, I know somebody who will do a good job for a cut rate. Look, I’m not trying to be a pest about this. But this killer may have your house keys. She’s called you, sent you a picture, maybe even gone to see your mother. I’m worried about you.”
It was true, but she hadn’t meant it to sound so personal.
He moved away from her on the couch. Shrugged. “I had some idea that if she came here, I could take her on.”
“Pictures change your mind?”
He nodded.
“Good.” Sonora glanced back at the front door. Glass panels lined both sides, which meant locks would not keep the killer out. “You might want to think about an alarm system.”
“I’m subletting. I can’t do something like that without permission.”
Sonora leaned against the desk, faced him. “I’ve got something I want you to take a look at.” She dug into the briefcase, maroon vinyl, a gift of love from her children who had spent some time saving up for it. She took the sketch and set it on the couch beside Daniels, then stood in front of the desk.
The artist had worked with Ronnie Knapp for two solid hours, and Ronnie had been happy with the results. Sonora had made a point of asking him later, in private. People often said the sketch was good when the artist was in the room—afraid of hurting his feelings.
The woman in the profile was blond and unsmiling, though she did not look ethereal to Sonora. That kind of quality would be hard to catch.
Keaton Daniels frowned, but his eyes held the light of recognition.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Keep looking. She says she knows you, but you don’t know her.”
“She says?”
“She calls me too.”
He looked ill. Went back to the picture, chewed his lip. “I can’t be sure, but she’s familiar. Like I’ve seen her around, or something, but I can’t place her.”
“Anything comes to mind on it, let me know. Look, I need to make a call, can I use your phone?”
“Sure. One right there, and one in the kitchen.”
“Let me take care of things in the kitchen. You get ready, and we’ll go pay a call on your mom.”
“Do you think she’s in danger?”
“I wouldn’t think so, but I’d like to hear what she has to say.”
Sonora went into the kitchen, took the red cordless phone off the wall mount, looked at the picture of Mark Daniels while she dialed. Eversley’s words from the morning autopsy echoed in her ears.
Another Kodak moment.
17
Keaton Daniels’s mother lived in a convalescent home in Lawrenceburg, located between Cincinnati and Lexington on the Kentucky side. The “home” was several miles down a two-lane rural road. Sonora followed Keaton’s rental, a navy blue Chrysler LeBaron. He turned left into a dirt and gravel drive—more dirt than gravel—and stopped beside a wood-and-brick ranch house that had been built sometime in the sixties or seventies.
Keaton led Sonora to the side of the house and up three steps to a concrete patio. A rusty grill, red paint flaking off, sat next to a wet mop. The grill was full of water. Lumps of white, burned charcoal floated in soot-streaked sludge. Old lawn furniture, black wrought iron, floral-print vinyl, was stacked in the corner. The cushions were torn, the chairs missing legs.
Daniels knocked at a screen door that opened into a dark cluttered kitchen.
“They expecting us?” Sonora asked.
“I like to drop in unexpectedly.”
Sonora glanced over her shoulder. The house was surrounded by tobacco fields, stubbled with the withered brown stalks of stripped burley. The lawn was patchy and full of clover.
“Well, Keaton, oh, my word.” The voice was loud and hard edged, and a woman opened the screen door in obvious invitation. “Keaton, honey, I’d thought you’d come sooner. Come in, come in, bring your little girl in.”
Keaton stepped up into the kitchen and was gathered into an awkward hug that neither he nor the woman seemed to find palatable.
“This is Police Specialist Blair,” Keaton said.
“Police?”
“She’s a homicide detective, Kaylene. About Mark.”
The woman’s mouth opened wide, exposing stubbles of yellowed teeth, one going black, several missing. She was a hefty woman, solidly built, and encased in a loose tentlike print dress, gaping armholes exposing a grimy beige slip. The woman was bra-less, and her breasts sagged onto the expansive soft belly. Her hair was gray, sparse, pinned into a bun. Her eyes were pale blue, the whites yellowed, like wax buildup on a kitchen floor. She had a faint but noticeable mustache on her upper lip.
Sonora wondered if Keaton Daniels hated his mother.
“Honey, this whole thing is jest awful, jest awful.” She led them through the dark kitchen to a dining room and den that had obviously been added on. The family pictures on the walls perpetuated every nasty rural stereotype Sonora had ever heard.
“All my people were upset about your brother, Keaton. We’re all family here. And honey, your mama. Your mama like to die. I wished you could of come up just that night.”
Keaton looked stricken.
“I’m afraid Mr. Daniels was with the police all night,” Sonora said.
Kaylene opened her mouth, then closed it. “Oh, well. Well then.”
The den wasn’t dirty exactly. In fact, Sonora decided, it was clean. But the furniture was old, the flowered orange-and-yellow couch worn through on the armrests. An avocado green easy chair with a footstool had newspapers in the seat and a soiled lace doily on the headrest. A space heater glowed orange in the corner of the room. The fireplace was boarded up, and a black wood-burning stove sat in front of the hearth. There were baby pictures of toothless infants with unusually large heads, and a bronze pair of baby shoes sat atop a stack of Reader’s Digests on the mantle.
Keaton glanced around the room and over his shoulder. “Is my mother in her room, Kaylene?”
“That’s where she is, hon. You go on, go on, I know she’s wanting to see you.”
Keaton looked uncertainly at Sonora.
“Take a few minutes alone,” she said.
He nodded and moved down a corridor to the left. Sonora wondered if that was where Kaylene’s “people” were. If so, they w
ere a quiet bunch.
“Come on and sit down, honey. I guess I should say Detective.” Kaylene settled onto the green easy chair and patted the footstool in front.
Sonora wondered if she was expected to sit at the woman’s knees. She settled on the edge of the couch and hoped Keaton would get a move on. She’d felt safer working undercover narcotics.
Sonora put a tape in the recorder. “How long have you run this home, Mrs.—”
“Oh, you can call me Kaylene. But if you need it for your records, my married name is Barton, and my maiden name is Wheatly.”
“Kaylene Wheatly Barton.”
The woman gave her a royal nod. “Honey, you want some ice tea, or a pop?”
“No thanks.”
Kaylene picked up a Popsicle-stick fan that had a romantic picture of Jesus on the front—brown curly hair, soulful eyes, white skin. Angelic sheep and storybook children clustered around his knees.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m burning up. I got to keep it warm for my people, because they get cold. Blood thins, I guess, when you get old. Mr. Barton says the blood will thin.”
Sonora began to feel fascinated by this woman with bad teeth who called her husband Mister Barton.
“How long has Keaton’s mother been here?”
“’Long about four years.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I guess, you know, it’s her laigs.”
Must mean legs, Sonora decided. She heard the deep male mumble of Keaton Daniels’s voice.
“I understand she had a visitor.”
“You must mean that little girl come by yesterday.”
“What was her name again?”
“Well, Lordy, Detective, you know she never did say. Just told me she was a friend come to call. Mr. Barton told me this morning I ought not to have let her in, but I didn’t know. She didn’t hurt nobody. But, oh, Miz Daniels, she was awful upset after. Awful.”
“What did she say when she came to the door?”
“She come to the front door. Most of my people’s family come to the side door there by the kitchen, we hardly use the front. And she says she’s here to see Miz Daniels. Well, she’s a pretty little thing. Tiny, you know, and that blond blond hair, not quite down to her shoulders, and wavy like. Brown eyes, and pale skin, but her cheeks was bright red. Scarlet, like she’d got a fever. I thought she might be sick even, and she seemed kind of shy. So I let her in, and took her to see Miz Daniels. I was expecting to see family and such, with Mark kilt like that.”
Sonora nodded.
“She’s in there, and I was in the kitchen, making up some corn pudding for supper. My people love that corn pudding. It’s sweet and they like that. I got the recipe from my cousin. She wrote a cookbook once, self-publish by my brother-in-law.”
Sonora nodded again. Patient, always.
“And then I hear crying. I might not have heard much in the kitchen, but I was going through the den to check on Mr. Remus, ’cause he needed his Haley’s flavored M-O. My people have schedules, you know, and they don’t want to miss. It upsets them.”
Sonora was unclear on exactly what was scheduled, and had no intention of asking.
“So I pass by Miz Daniels’s room on the way to give the Haley’s flavored M-O to Mr. Remus, and I see her door’s closed. Now that’s odd, I’m thinking, because I like my people to keep the doors open, so I can just check on them and such. But it’s closed, and I think I hear something, kind of a bird noise almost, then voices. So I go on and get Mr. Remus his Haley’s, and I’m there awhile, ’cause he don’t like that mint flavor, he likes the regular, and he can’t make up his mind to take it. So finally, finally, I just say, well, now, Mr. Remus, I’ll just leave it here while you make up your own mind.”
Something about the way she said “make up your own mind” made Sonora think of Sam, and she smiled, and Kaylene smiled back and kept on talking, and everything felt friendly in the room.
“So I just leave the little plastic cup on the dresser. I put it in little plastic cups just like they do at the hospital, because I don’t cut corners, you know, like they do at some places. I do things right, though what they charge for them little cups is just nasty.” She nodded her head and blinked.
“Everything’s gone up.” Sonora leaned back on the couch and uncurled her fist. Patience. Patience.
“Now when I go on out of Mr. Remus’s room, I see Miz Daniels’s door is open, and Miz Daniels is up on her walker, though you can see her laigs is bad and hurting her something nasty. And that little girl is leaving, but they don’t hug or nothing. Now you would think, if she was a niece or something, she might give Miz Daniels a hug, and might check with me to see if Miz Daniels needed anything. But I tell you I saw right off something funny was up. Because Miz Daniels looks mad as can be, and her eyes are red, like, and the tears is just a-running down her cheeks.” Kaylene pressed her fingertips to her own cheeks, then cocked her head to one side and frowned.
Sonora waited expectantly.
“Sorry, I just thought I heard one of my people.”
“Was the girl upset?”
“No, she seemed kind of excited, like. Really, she seemed sort of like my dog when he’s got that cat down the road in a corner.”
“Smiling?”
“No, don’t think so, but smug, that’s what I’d call it. That shyness was kind of gone, and she seemed pretty pleased. And I didn’t get a nice feeling, looking at this girl. The feeling I got was nasty.”
Sonora made notes. She dug in the vinyl case and took out the sketch of Mark Daniels’s killer. “Is this anything like her?”
Kaylene took the picture with eager hands.
“Well, I just don’t know, it could be. My reading glasses are in the kitchen. Let me get those, so to get a better look.”
Sonora followed Keaton Daniels down the thinly carpeted corridor to an add-on that had obviously been built to accommodate Kaylene’s “people.” The ceiling was low, and Keaton dwarfed the hallway. His footsteps were quiet, the whole house was oddly hushed, and Sonora realized that Daniels had different tennis shoes on—Nikes this time.
Kaylene Wheatly Barton had not been sure that the woman in the sketch was the same girl who had visited, but her description-tiny, shy, unsmiling—dovetailed with the impression Sonora had from the bar owner of Cujo’s. Sonora did not like the feeling she got from this killer, as if Mark Daniels’s death was just the starting point for what she had in mind.
Keaton stopped suddenly, and Sonora bumped into him.
“Sorry.” He put a hand on her arm, and Sonora was aware of the weight of it. He leaned down and spoke softly. “She’s being difficult. I told her she has to talk to you, but I don’t know.” He scratched the back of his head. “She used to be very normal, your all-American mom.”
Sonora touched his shoulder. “It’ll be all right.” She moved around him and went into the tiny cubicle. “Mrs. Daniels?”
Aretha Daniels was on the tall side and had likely been slender most of her life. Her waistline had thickened, and her shoulders slumped forward, back rising in a hump that meant advanced osteoporosis. Her hair was dyed jet black, and she wore black-rimmed cat glasses with an old-lady chain.
She sat on the edge of a single bed that was made up with a worn green bedspread of cheap ridged cotton. There was a chair near the bed, plastic with a walnut veneer, harvest yellow padding, a waiting-room kind of chair. The walls were paneled with fake walnut, there was no window. A small table sat beside the bed, the surface overwhelmed by a stack of magazines—Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, Mature Health. A box of Puffs blue tissues was half full, and a glass of water with lipstick stains on the rim sat on top of a magazine that featured the fresh, intelligent features of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Three gray cartridges had been tucked into the tissue box for safekeeping. Gameboy cartridges. A book of crossword puzzles lay open on the bed, a dull-pointed pencil wedged in the gutter between the pages. Sono
ra smelled perfume—White Shoulders—and mentholyptus.
Aretha Daniels was hunched over a Gameboy, feet propped on the bottom rail of the bed. She sucked enthusiastically on a cough drop; Sonora saw it glisten on the edge of her tongue. Aretha Daniels’s thumbs moved quickly.
“Fireball,” she muttered, her face mirroring the dull intensity that Sonora thought of as the video-game look.
Sonora recognized the recurrent bar of music that rolled forth from the handheld console. Super Mario.
“Mrs. Daniels, I’m Police Specialist Sonora Blair. I work homicide for the Cincinnati Police Department. I’m handling Mark’s case.”
The woman glanced up. “Sonora? That’s unusual.” She went back to the game.
Keaton sat on the bed beside his mother. Tension was apparent in the controlled way he put an arm around her shoulders. Very close to ignition, Sonora thought.
“Mother. Put the game on pause and talk to Detective Blair.”
Sonora winked at him, turned the chair backward, and straddled it, resting her chin on top. Aretha Daniels watched her out of the corner of one eye, and Sonora got the feeling she was annoyed by imagined disrespect. Good.
“Keaton tells me you’re a schoolteacher.”
The woman rose slightly on the edge of the bed. “I was a schoolteacher. I haven’t taught since my husband’s death. My legs gave out on me.” She patted her knees and winced.
“Are you in pain? Should I ask Kaylene to get you something?”
“Young lady, I am in pain every minute of my life. I wish there was something you could get me.”
Keaton Daniels winced, but Sonora ignored him. As did his mother, who put the Gameboy down on the bed and gave Sonora a sideways suspicious look.
“All right, young lady, you want to discuss Mark. Very well. When are you going to catch his killer?”
“If I don’t track her down this week, then we’re talking months, years, or never.”
Mrs. Daniels’s hand hovered over the Gameboy. She pulled it away and pursed her lips. “Never is not acceptable.”
“I don’t like it either, so help me out. Because I think you talked to your son’s murderer yesterday, and I want to know everything she said.”
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