Sacrificial Ground fc-1

by Thomas H. Cook

“Must have been about four.”

  “Was it still dark?”

  “Just turning light.”

  “Odd time for a stroll, Davon,” Caleb said.

  Davon glared at him. “Ain’t no law against it.”

  Caleb waved the can in front of him. “Well, we got something else.”

  Davon looked at him sourly. “Lucky punch,” he said knowingly. “You didn’t get a clean bust. You just bumped into it.”

  “That don’t matter to the judge,” Caleb reminded him.

  Davon smiled contemptuously. “Bust me fine, I do the time.”

  “A poet,” Caleb said with a grin.

  “Do me bad, I make you sad.”

  Suddenly a streak of anger flashed over Caleb’s face. He grabbed Little by the shirt and wrenched him forward. “Listen to me, you little shit, you’re a thief and a pimp, and in your whole goddamn life you haven’t done one good thing.” His voice hardened and grew cold. “You fuck with me, and I’ll go through you like a spear.” He let him go, and Little stumbled backward slightly.

  Frank stepped over to him. “You’d better come squeaky clean on this one,” he said. “The girl in that picture was the owner of that BMW, and somebody killed her.”

  Little’s eyes shot away from Frank. “I ain’t got nothing to say.”

  “You figured it out, didn’t you?” Caleb said. “You knew that car was about as hot as a car could get, and so you dumped it on a cutter.”

  Little said nothing.

  “Didn’t you?” Caleb asked loudly.

  Little nodded slowly. “But I didn’t kill no girl. I didn’t even see no girl. I just seen that car, all shiny and red, with the windows open and the keys right in it.” He shook his head. “It was like ready to be grabbed. I mean it was sitting there just for the taking.” His eyes lifted slowly toward Frank. “So I took it,” he said. “But I never seen no girl.”

  “Was anything in the car when you stole it?” Frank asked.

  “No. It was clean. Looked like it had been done over real good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Cleaned up real nice.”

  “Did you see anyone around it?”

  Little shook his head. “You think I’d took it if I’d seen somebody ’round it?”

  “Where did you take it?”

  “I rode around a little,” Little said. “It’s something, a flashy car. I knowed it was dumb not to just let it go to a fence. Car like that, it’s easy to spot. But I just couldn’t do it for a while. I liked riding in it too much.” He shrugged. “So, I took the chance.” He smiled. “Don’t take a chance, you got nothing in your pants.”

  “So you rode around awhile?” Frank said.

  “That’s right,” Little said. “I even thought of just heading off up North or something.” He looked at Caleb. “I’m righteous ’bout that woman. She ain’t nothing to do with me. She a friend’s whore.”

  “When did you decide to drop it?” Frank asked.

  Little turned back toward him. “When I seen that girl’s picture in the paper. It said she was from that school, what you call it?”

  “Northfield Academy.”

  “That’s right,” Little said. “And in the glove compartment, well, they was this piece of paper that had the name of the school on it, and her name too.”

  “The play program,” Frank said.

  “Is that what it was?” Little asked. “I don’t know. I just left it in the glove compartment.” He turned to Caleb. “I knew the car was burning when I seen that paper.”

  “So you took it to the cutters?” Caleb asked.

  “Fast as I could drive, that’s for sure,” Little said. “I didn’t want to hang around nothing that girl had. She too hot.” He looked back at Frank. “And that’s the righteous truth.” He shook his head. “I ain’t never seen that girl.”

  “You still living on Simpson Street, Davon?” Caleb asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t pull any deals in that house, you understand? You got little kids living there.”

  Davon peered toward the soda can. “What you going to do ’bout that?”

  Caleb lifted it toward him. “I’m going to toss it into the garbage, Davon, and let the narcs clean up their own house. But if I ever hear of a deal going down around those kids, I’ll come get you myself.”

  Davon nodded vigorously. “Yeah, all right, man.”

  Caleb shoved the can in his jacket pocket. “Don’t fuck with me, Davon.”

  Frank took out one of his cards. “Call me if you hear anything about this girl,” he said.

  Little took the card and gave it a peremptory glance. “Yeah, right, okay.” He shifted nervously on his feet. “So that’s it, then, right?”

  “Just don’t leave the city without telling me,” Frank warned.

  “Nah, I won’t go nowhere,” Davon assured him.

  “And stay out of the zoo,” Caleb added. “Do your business in a parking lot somewhere.”

  “I don’t like the zoo, noways,” Little said. “All them animals, it stinks like shit ’round here.” He walked a few feet away, then glanced back tentatively, as if half-expecting to be shot down where he stood.

  For a few minutes, Frank and Caleb stood together outside the reptile house. The heat seemed to swirl around them, despite the motionless air.

  “What do you think?” Caleb asked.

  “I think we got the straight story,” Frank told him.

  “Me too. He ain’t got the guts to kill a girl like Angelica.”

  Frank drew out her picture and looked at it.

  Caleb watched him closely for a moment. “You think about her a lot, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes,” Frank said. He put the picture back in his jacket and glanced around the park. “Sometimes I get tired of talking to people like Little.”

  “High society’s not much better, I bet,” Caleb said with a short laugh.

  “I wasn’t really thinking of that.”

  “Oh yeah,” Caleb said. “What were you thinking about?”

  Frank shrugged wearily. “Nothing really,” he said, and realized that it was a lie. He had, in fact, been thinking about someone, and not for the first time. As if carried on a current, her image came unbidden, dark hair, dark eyes, with a curled rose still resting in her open hand.

  14

  There was a black Mercedes parked in the driveway of Karen Devereaux’s house when Frank arrived, and he found its presence there disquieting. It was too elegant, and its elegance was something against which he felt utterly powerless. He could not help but compare it to the battered, dusty frame of his old Chevrolet, the unwashed windows and plain blackwall tires. Parked beside it, the Mercedes shimmered brilliantly in the cascading sunlight. It was beautifully polished, and Frank immediately imagined its owner as equally sleek and stylish, a man in a black tuxedo and red cummerbund who knew one wine from another and smoked expensive European cigarettes.

  Once at the door of the house, Frank hesitated. He did not want to intrude upon her, but he also felt himself powerfully drawn back to her. It was as if the line connecting them, the one he’d felt the night before, was sturdier than he had imagined, and that it was forever being tugged gently and insistently in some effort to bring him back.

  The man who opened the door was exactly what Frank had expected. He was tall, blonde, and very handsome. He wore dark gray pants and a black velvet jacket, and looked to be in his middle thirties. He seemed at home in his surroundings, utterly natural in clothes that would have looked like a costume on almost anyone else. As Frank faced him silently, he felt his own disarray, the frazzled suit and rumpled hat, but he realized that he did not in the least feel shamed by them, and for an instant he felt a sudden, exhilarating pride in what he wore.

  He pulled his badge from his coat and watched as the gold shield glinted in the light.

  “I’m here to see Karen Devereaux,” he said.

  “She’s upstairs,” the man answered q
uietly.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is James Theodore. I’m Karen’s partner.”

  “Partner?” Frank asked, as if he suspected that this was the sort of word that could easily mean something a great deal more.

  “Yes, in the Nouveau Gallery,” Theodore explained. “It’s an art gallery downtown.” He stepped out of the door. “Please, come in.”

  “I told Miss Devereaux that I would be back some time today,” Frank said as he walked into the house. He was annoyed with himself: How had he missed finding out about the art gallery? He took off his hat and twirled it in his fingers. “She should be expecting me.”

  “I’m sure she is,” Theodore said. He closed the door and pressed his back up against it. He looked as if he were guarding a bank vault. “She mentioned you to me,” he said.

  “Mentioned?”

  “That you’d be coming by today,” Theodore added quickly. “I’m sure she’ll be right down.”

  “Did you know Angelica very well?” Frank asked.

  “Slightly.”

  Frank pulled out his notebook. He could sense that Theodore was not just some upper-class playboy. He had an air of quiet authority, as if he knew he would be the same person even if the Mercedes suddenly evaporated, along with the velvet coat.

  “So you’re sort of a friend of the family?” Frank asked tentatively.

  “Well, there isn’t much of a family,” Theodore said mournfully. “I suppose you know what happened to Karen’s parents?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it was only the two of them,” Theodore added, “just Karen and Angelica.” He drew in a deep breath. “Now there’s just Karen.” He smiled sadly. “But that really doesn’t answer your last question, does it?”

  “No.”

  “Sorry.”

  “How well did you know the family?”

  “Not at all, as a family,” Theodore said. “And as for Angelica, not at all, really. My only relationship is with Karen.” He shrugged. “And to be entirely candid, I’m not really sure that I know her very well, either.”

  “That sounds more like her sister,” Frank said.

  “What does?”

  “That no one seems to have known her very well.”

  “Is that what you’re discovering?”

  “Yes.”

  Theodore looked at Frank curiously. “So you have to live their lives a bit, is that it? The lives of the victims, I mean?”

  “In a way,” Frank said.

  “Fascinating.”

  “Not really,” Frank said. “It’s just that most people know the people who kill them. So, you have to find out about the people they knew.”

  “Do you think Angelica was murdered?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And that she knew her murderer?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “You know,” Theodore said, “I sometimes think that there is such a thing as a family that simply carries its doom around with it. Like a virus, you might say. It’s as if they’ve been infected, and there’s nothing that can be done to them.”

  Frank nodded.

  “The Devereaux family strikes me as very much like that,” Theodore went on. “It just doesn’t seem possible that mere accident could have generated so much tragedy. It’s more like a plague, don’t you think?”

  “When was the last time you saw Angelica?”

  Theodore thought about it for a moment. “That would have been last Friday.”

  “Two days before she died,” Frank said. He pulled out his notebook. “Did she seem different in any way?”

  “No, not then.”

  The “not then” struck Frank as unusual. “But there were other times when she did seem different?”

  “Oh, no, not really,” Theodore answered quickly. “It’s just that I saw so little of her. I hardly knew her.”

  “Did she seem happy that last Friday?”

  “I suppose,” Theodore said. “I really saw her for just a few seconds. She sort of passed me in the foyer here. She seemed very busy, but that was nothing odd for Angelica.”

  “She always seemed busy?”

  “Bustling, rushing about, that sort of thing,” Theodore explained. “There were times when I suspected that she might be quite a creative person.”

  “Why?”

  “Her energy,” Theodore said. “That’s the one thing I’ve noticed about creative people. They may not be brighter than others, and they certainly have no better morals or any more ordered personal lives than the rest of us. But they do have this energy. It’s like—forgive the standard image—it’s like they’re on fire.”

  Frank wrote it down. “Did Angelica seem that way?”

  “Sometimes,” Theodore said. He thought a moment, as if trying to recapture some part of her in his mind. “But, at the end of all that energy, there was nothing. I mean, she never really did anything.”

  “She was eighteen,” Frank reminded him.

  “Of course, you’re right,” Theodore said. “What can you expect from a young girl?” He walked a few paces away, then turned back toward Frank. His face was very grave, as if some disturbing thought had occurred to him. His lips parted slightly, as if he were about to speak, then closed suddenly, sealing off the words.

  “Hello, Mr. Clemons.”

  Frank glanced toward the stairs that swept down to the foyer and saw Karen as she slowly made her way down them. She was dressed in a long, lavender skirt and white blouse, and as he looked at her, Frank could feel something go soft and pliant within him.

  “I told you that I’d be coming by today,” he said.

  “Yes, I know,” Karen said. “James was just leaving.”

  She stopped on the last step, lingering there, as if to hold herself back from something. Then she moved forward quickly and touched Frank’s hand. “I’m glad you came,” she said. “The funeral is tomorrow, and I wanted to get as many things done as possible before then. Things having to do with the investigation, I mean.”

  “Yes,” Frank said. His hand tingled where she had touched it.

  “I’d better be on my way, Karen,” Theodore said quickly. “Nice to have met you, Mr. Clemons.”

  “Thank you,” Frank said. “And if you think of anything that might …”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll let you know,” Theodore said as he walked briskly out of the house.

  Frank looked at Karen. “Your partner?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “In a gallery?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I didn’t know you owned a gallery.”

  “Of course you didn’t,” Karen said crisply. “How could you?”

  And yet it seemed to Frank that he already knew a lot about her. He had seen her in the garden, with that rose. He glanced down at his notebook, and the facts gathered there suddenly struck him as the least real things in life, little more than an inventory of its debris.

  Karen stepped away from him. “Do you want to see Angelica’s room now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Follow me,” Karen said.

  Frank walked directly behind her as she made her way slowly up the stairs. There was an odd weariness in her movement, it seemed to him, a reluctance which all but stopped her at each step.

  Angelica’s room was at the far end of a long, wide corridor, and when Frank walked into it, he was amazed at what he saw. It looked like the room of a little girl, rather than a young adult’s. Frilly curtains hung from the two large windows. The walls were papered with designs that looked as if they’d come from Fantasia. There was an enormous canopy bed, all white and lavender, and at the opposite end of the room, a large cabinet filled with exotic dolls. A white wicker vanity sat near the adjoining bath, but it looked as if it had never been used. The tall mirror was polished to a bright sheen, and the ornate embroidered stool showed no signs of wear.

  “I came into this room for the first time only a few hours ago,” Karen said. “For the firs
t time in many years. I was very surprised by the way it looked. Nothing had changed in all that time. It looked as it had when Angelica was eleven.”

  “You haven’t been in this room since then?” Frank asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Karen assured him. “It became a real issue for Angelica when she was around eleven. Privacy became an obsession with her. She refused to let anyone in.”

  “Even you?”

  “I think, especially me.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought it was just something she was going through,” Karen said, “some sort of prepuberty thing. So I went along with her. But it never changed. Time went by. I didn’t make an issue of it.”

  “But why especially you?”

  “Big sister, I suppose.”

  Frank walked slowly to the center of the room. He remembered the look of Sarah’s room, cluttered, strewn with books and records, perpetually disordered. It was as if she had despised the order Angelica had worked so hard to maintain.

  “It sure doesn’t look like a teenager’s room, does it?” Karen asked.

  “Not like my daughter’s,” Frank said, before he could stop himself.

  “Oh, you have a daughter?” Karen asked.

  Frank turned away slightly. “She died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Frank glanced at the bed. “Did Angelica ever have people up here?”

  “Not that I know of,” Karen said. She stepped over to the vanity and opened the top drawer. “I found this,” she said, as she handed it to Frank. “It’s a diary.”

  Frank took it from her and opened it. “Where did you find it?”

  “It was on her bed,” Karen said. “And it was open.”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything in it?”

  “Odd things,” Karen said. “But only odd because they’re so normal.”

  Frank began to flip through the pages. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, from the diary, you’d get the impression that Angelica was a very average sort of teenager. She writes about going to parties and sleep-overs. She writes about being the treasurer of the senior class. She writes about being on the prom committee, that sort of thing.” She shook her head. “But she never did any of those things. It was all a lie.” She glanced at the diary. “That’s what I mean about it being odd. It’s about a normal life that never existed.”