by Neliza Drew
“Is Eric Wright still there?”
She sighed into the phone before taking it away from her face. “Hon, this is for you. You think I’m your receptionist? You ain’t commissioner no more, you know.” Seconds went by and her voice softened, in tone and volume. “I do appreciate you givin’ my nephew a job, though.”
Eric’s voice replaced hers. “Hello?”
“What the hell, Eric?”
“Davis?” He whispered my name. “How did you find me here?”
“I called you back. Seriously, what the hell? There’s a dead girl in your email and it doesn’t look like you’ve been home in days.” My anger did a fine job of masking my fear as usual, but I also knew eventually that’d run out.
“Sh… Wait. You’re at my house?”
I waited.
“You can’t be there. It’s not safe. Look, I have to go.”
“Eric, no, what the hell is going on?”
“Get out of there. Please.” He hung up without further explanation. If I remembered right, the Captain’s Table was a dive in Morehead, which, if I were a crow, wasn’t too many miles away yet still far enough he’d be gone by the time I got there.
I stared at the screen again. The open email was nearly a week old. Another email with the MISTAKE subject line had appeared, and been left unopened, a day ago. When I clicked it, a naked blonde appeared. She squinted in what looked like a boat compartment. The flash, too bright against her milky skin, barely illuminated the cubbyholes. I saw no evidence of drugs, but she’d been handcuffed to a rail attached to the paneling. A note came with the photo this time: Your choice.
The rest of his email folder was related to Wright’s, his last campaign, or the sort of spammy ads that filled my inbox. Nothing had been opened since the first photo, which had arrived the day before Billy Guthrie died.
I called Tom back. “What’s your hacker’s email address? The one he uses for stuff he doesn’t want getting back to you?”
“Why?”
When I didn’t answer, he rattled off a random series of letters and numbers as I typed them in to forward the two photos.
“You gonna answer me?”
I hung up and turned to the desk and started with the bottom drawer, where I found a lockbox with a cheap lock. I popped it and found myself staring at a stack of deeds and titles. I picked up a Post-it and scribbled down the names and addresses. From what I could gather, Eric somehow had the deeds or titles for twelve houses, his seafood company, a menhaden fish factory, and twenty-one boats. Most of the boats and properties had been acquired in the past two years. The seafood company he’d owned for almost six. Where the money had come from wasn’t explained.
I turned around to the fax machine on the credenza behind me and made copies.
While they were scanning, I checked out the other two desk drawers.
One was a junk drawer of sorts: a couple of jewel cases for rap artists, a half-used roll of shipping tape, a semi-melted roll of duct tape, some more cheap pens, a swatch of bubble wrap, push pins, a computer mouse without the scroll wheel, some batteries and more paperclips.
In the other, I found six spindles of blank DVDs and a bunch of stray paperclips. I pulled out the top three discs from the closest spindle, flipped them over and held them at an angle to see if there was a change in the silver rings. The discs underneath were either blank or full, but the top one only had about three gigs on it. It just wasn’t labeled.
I stuck the disc in the drive and waited for it to load some software and play.
Homemade porn. Low-quality homemade porn.
I started to turn it off before I realized I recognized the actress. Then I stared, dumbfounded.
Jackie. Little church girl Jackie, who’d been dead for years.
Jackie. His password.
I looked at the surroundings in the video. The walls were an older brick, with sheets hung up over the loft windows, and cheap futons. Eric’s old Wilmington apartment.
And then I noticed something else. Jackie wasn’t acting. She seemed completely unaware of the camera, but she didn’t look happy either.
The guy stayed back to the camera, hair and face in shadow, but as he finished, the lamplight caught a tattoo of a tiger on his shoulder.
I searched my brain until I found the image I needed: Eric pulling his shirt over his head after baseball practice one day, turning to pick up another shirt off the bench so that his whole, ink-free back was visible.
Before I could eject the DVD, another video started. This time it was Eric, not Jackie. He smiled at the tiger tattooed man, who leaned down and kissed him.
Chapter twenty-nine
I passed an abandoned amusement park and pulled off at the first gas station. The place stunk of spilled fuel. They had a sign that claimed clean restrooms but it was the pay phone between them that caught my eye.
The only security camera I saw was pointed at the cashier. I pulled my hat low on my head and ducked out into the chilly wind. The weather gave me a good reason to be wearing gloves, and the sun gave me a reason to be wearing the massive shades I usually wore around South Florida.
I dialed 911 and waited for a dispatcher, then told her I thought I’d heard screams and gave her Eric’s addresses. When she asked for a name, I gave her Sandra Lewis and hung up.
The address Lane had for Amber turned out to be a trailer park next to an old campground. There were no adult-sized tricycles or golf carts in front of Retreat signs. No palms or citrus trees and no shuffleboard tournament signs. Instead, it was the sort of dilapidated, rusty place that epitomized rural white poverty, and except for the massive Confederate flag in the window, it could have been half a dozen of Charley’s nicer homes.
• • • • •
I parked behind a dinged pickup truck that might have been older than its driver. I felt terribly overdressed next to the patch of dead lawn festooned with beer cans. The porch didn’t look like it really wanted to support me, but it did, and once near the door the smell of marijuana leaked out of a nearby window.
I knocked hard, rattling the bent screen, and waited.
Amber answered in an oversize tee shirt, holding a large pink plastic cup, a mostly-spent cigarette between her fingers. “What the fuck do you want?” Her brown hair hung to her shoulders, mussed and full of split ends. She looked older than her years, maybe even older than mine.
“We need to talk about Lane.”
“I don’t got shit to say to you.” She tried to slam the door, but I stuck my boot in the way.
“Why would Lane want to kill Billy Guthrie? Your Billy.”
“Fuck you, bitch.” She stomped my foot, but she was wearing flip-flops.
I pushed against the door. “Look, you were dating Billy, right? So, I’d guess you’re angry at Lane.”
“You don’t know shit.” She gave up on the door and stumbled into her living room, spilling what looked like Kool-Aid and smelled like Boone’s Farm on the linoleum.
I followed.
“Lane’s had no family around for as long as I’ve known her. Go back to whatever hole you crawled out of.” Amber flopped on a seventies-era orange flowered couch and got out another cigarette. She had the shaky look of someone on the edge and her face wore a kind of pain I recognized in my nervous system. I was torn between the urge to punch her and hug her.
I tried again. “I’m Davis. I’m not dead. You were friends with Lane.”
She glared, her fingers twitchy as she took a drag. “And now I ain’t. What’s it to you?”
“I want to know what happened.”
“Lane is a bitch. A nosy-ass bitch. And you are a dead woman.”
“How was Lane nosy?”
“Just like you. All up in someone else’s business.”
“Can I be frank?”
“You can be Fred for all I give a fuck.” She ground the butt out on her flip-flop. “Fuck Billy. Fuck Lane, too.”
I gestured at the light-brown bruise poking out of her te
e shirt collar. “Billy ever hurt you?”
“Fuck you and fuck Lane. Ain’t none of your business. Ain’t none of her business. Billy loved me. Billy cared about me. And that bitch killed him.” She gulped the rest of her drink.
“Why?”
She looked annoyed in that way that only teenagers, who think they’re worldly because they do things no adult in her right mind would do, can actually pull off. I knew it well. “Look, Billy was a do-gooder. Couldn’t keep his mouth shut. I ain’t that dumb.”
“Doing the right thing is dumb?”
“Please. Like you ever did what you shoulda.” She sat up. “Look, you gotta go. You ain’t worth me risking what I got going on.”
I stood my ground. “What you have here is a shithole. I grew up in dumps like this. If you’re lucky, you’re going to turn into Charley.”
“A girl can dream.” She gave me a wry smile and lurched toward the avocado-colored fridge. “Lane says there’s no such thing as friends. Family either. You have what you take. You use who you can until they run out on you or die.”
“Interesting philosophy. I can’t say I’d have argued with you about that when I was your age.” I sensed more to the story.
“We were going to be happy. We were going to be a family.” She slammed the fridge and opened the cabinet. “Doesn’t matter.” She poured several blue pills from a bottle and downed them dry.
I watched her, but only saw Charley.
“Why’d you leave?”
I shook myself back. “Had to. I thought they’d be better off.”
“Lane says you were a pussy. Selfish.” She opened a drawer and crushed a couple of pills on the counter with a spoon.
“Maybe she’s right.”
She snorted the powder with a cut-off straw. “Vince says he killed you.”
“He tried.”
“He says he killed your friend.”
I nodded, held my anger and sadness under the shell. “Who’d Billy talk to that got him killed?”
She rubbed her belly like she was pregnant, but it was much too flat. “Lane.”
“You lost the baby?”
“It wasn’t the dope.” She shrugged. She was just like a dozen other young junkies I’d known. She wanted love. She found everything but.
I knew she’d never be clean. I could see her future mapped out in shades of Charley’s, in the faces of the strippers I’d worked with.
“It was supposed to be okay.” She scratched her arm until she drew blood, but didn’t seem to notice.
I walked over to her. “What’d you take just now?”
“Just a few bars.” She clawed harder. “I really wish I had some heroin. Opiates are the best. They just make you feel so warm and safe. Like you’re sleeping in clean laundry with a puppy.” She slid down the cabinet and sat on the floor. “You don’t have any, do you?”
I shook my head slowly. Watched her head loll and her eyes turn glassy.
I pulled her into a standing position. “With me. Now.”
“Why? I’m fine.”
She didn’t look fine. She looked like Charley right before she passed out and we had to decide between ambulances and pumping her full of uppers. “We’ll go get pancakes. Jell-O shots.”
She smiled and walked to the door with me, a sure sign she’d lost control of her own thoughts.
• • • • •
At the ER, I parked illegally and half filled out some admission forms before slipping out the way I’d come in. We’d dumped and run on Charley a couple of times. The scariest part was wondering if she’d be there when we came back.
I looked back at the brick building behind me. Somewhere in there, Charley was watching TV or sleeping.
My phone rang as I unlocked the car. Dick.
I picked up, hopeful.
“I made an appointment for you with a friend of mine for three. I don’t know why he’s practicing up in that Podunk state after paying good money to Miami, but if you’re late, don’t bother calling me.” He hung up before I could say anything.
Chapter thirty
Former Detective Lawrence Jacobs’s sister lived in a nice, quiet neighborhood in Morehead where kids could still play in their yard and dogs could still hang out near the street. Since it was Friday, I should have been cleaning up after my pre–lunchtime kickboxing class and getting ready to spend the afternoon making up excuses for Dick’s clients while he got a massage from his girlfriend. Instead, I was traipsing around town playing detective. Poorly.
Jacobs was a huge man with deep brown skin and short, salt and pepper hair, dressed in jeans and a black tee shirt. He offered me coffee and a seat on the sofa. Then he told me I looked like crap. Or maybe he said hell.
I touched my face self-consciously.
He grinned, his teeth proportioned to match the rest of him. “Don’t worry about it. You don’t look that bad for someone got the crap beat out of her.” Maybe it had been crap.
“I can take care of myself.” I smiled and tried to look like I believed my own press.
“Uh huh.”
“You know something about my sister’s arrest? Lane Groves.”
He scratched his chin. “Interesting names. Especially for such pretty little girls.”
He reminded me of Tom.
“Don’t suppose your mother would be the lady they hauled off to Carteret General on Wednesday?”
I gave him one of those damn-you-caught-me looks. “Charley named us after the members of the band she was in back when we lived in San Francisco. At least she had the sense not to name me Chuck.”
He offered to refill my untouched coffee.
“You told Tom you knew something?”
“You realize this is way off the record. Based on a chat I had with Detective Huber over coffee down at the shop yesterday.”
I nodded.
“Detective Huber and I have known each other a while. Used to see each other at conferences, those little mandatory classes, up at the state lab. He heard I retired in the area, he gave me a call.”
“But you can tell me things he can’t. Things he thinks are hinky, but can’t divulge.”
He put a finger to his nose and leaned back in his recliner. “Neighbors heard a gunshot and called it in. Sheriff’s deputies pulled in first. First one, then the other. One neighbor thought she saw a couple leave in an old car wearing one of the Sheriff’s jackets. Later, she said it was dark and she didn’t see nothing but the lights flashing on a cruiser.”
“One of those deputies Murphy?”
He rolled his lips like a girl distributing lip gloss. “Doesn’t matter. Unverifiable. Besides, state lab will still confirm it was Lane’s gun that shot Guthrie.”
I noted the future tense. “Any idea how it got to the scene, the gun?”
He shifted and sipped. “She was unconscious when Huber arrived.”
“Like she passed out? Fainted?”
“Got herself knocked out from the looks of it. Knot on the back of her head, but she wouldn’t talk.”
“Did she fall? Was she on something?”
“Lotsa stuff’s possible, but the area was carpeted, swelling on upper back of her head… Nobody did a tox screen that I heard about. She did, however, land after the shooting. Found fluids under her.”
“If she and the victim were the only ones there, how’d she get knocked out?”
“Huber found a void pattern nearby.” He sipped, let that sink in.
“Someone standing? Or something disappeared?”
“If anyone else had been there, there should’ve been some footprints at least. She threw up all over the floor, and unless you’ve seen the back of someone’s head blown off, it’s hard to imagine the mess.” He looked over at me to see how I took that.
I held my mug and thought. I’d seen that before. So had Lane. I wasn’t sure if she remembered it. Probably better if she hadn’t. It had been well over ten years. “No other fingerprints, footprints?”
“Void on th
e floor seemed foot-shaped. On the wall?” He shrugged. “Huber played that angle close. My guess? Somebody was behind Guthrie, but the size of the void would point toward who.”
“How badly did they mess up the floor responding?”
“Huber didn’t see obvious footprints leading out if that’s what you’re asking. But remember, the deputies got there first. Supposedly secured the scene.”
I wondered how much that “supposedly” had to do with bickering departments and how much had to do with actually suspicious behavior. “Guthrie boy was stabbed from behind before he died. Shortly before, according to the coroner.”
“I thought he was shot.”
He nodded. “Stabbed. Then shot.”
“How’d Lane do that? And who left the voids?”
He spread his hands and I noticed how worn they looked.
“It’s possible the stabber moved before the gun went off. Did the body end up where the stabber would have been standing?”
He nodded. “Blood drops in the void look like they came from the stab wound.”
“What about the gun? I was told she had powder residue on her hands. It couldn’t have been much. Phil always kept those guns in pristine working order. It wasn’t like some Saturday night special.”
He eyed me. “It’s possible you read too much. ’Cause you’re not a cop.”
“I used to shoot competitively.”
“Huber said the powder was a little strange. Not much, you’re right. Traces of metal, same kind as the barrel. That much fits. But most of the powder was on her finger, like the rest of her hand was wrapped in something. Huber noticed because he to swab three times before he came up with anything.”
“So, what’s all that mean?”
“A gun grip doesn’t hold fingerprints very well but the metals do, including brass.”
Brass. The cartridges. “So, whose fingerprints were on those?”
“Guthrie’s.” He leaned back while I absorbed.
“Billy killed himself?”
He shook his head. “Huber thinks he tried to stop her. His hands had the same traces of metal and powder.”
“Why’d he load the gun?”