by Shane Lusher
“Nothing,” she said.
We crossed Route 9 and headed off toward Broadway and the gentle decline of the otherwise flat fields down into the dip that had been formed by two centuries of crossroads.
“Actually,” I said. “She mentioned that the only thing I have to worry about is you.”
I saw Rassi wince out of the corner of my eye. He shook his head.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I get an A-, but you have an A+, owing to the fact that you’re a woman,” I said.
“Well, they’re right about that.”
“About you being a woman, or about you getting an A+?” I asked
“Both,” she said. I realized then that her voice was lacking its usual bitter tone.
“How are the girls?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said. “Television, iPad. I keep trying to get them to go swimming, but they say it’s too hot. Isn’t that the whole point of swimming?”
We pulled a right onto Broadway and went up the rise toward I-155.
“What’s this?” Rassi said next to me. An old pick-up and an SUV were parked on the right side of the road. In the ditch next to it, a man in his fifties and a woman my age were involved in what looked like an escalating discussion, gesturing wildly at each other. As we came up, the man had just taken a step closer to her and, seeing our approach, took a few steps back.
Rassi pulled over behind the two cars and got out.
“Yeah,” I said to Kelly. “That is the point. Hey, Kelly?”
“Yes?” she said.
“I have to go,” I said. “I’m with Dave Rassi, and we’re going to look at something right now.”
“Look at what?” she asked.
“Tell you later,” I said.
After I hung up, I realized I hadn’t said goodbye. As I got out of the car, I wondered if that would count against me in the Kelly department.
“Can you believe that?” the woman asked Rassi as I walked up to them.
She was brunette and wore her hair long, dressed in a yellow T-shirt and a denim skirt. Judging by the condition of her mascara, it appeared that she had been crying.
The man, in jeans and a work shirt with a hat bearing the logo of a seed company, stood a distance away, looking at the ground. He was shaking his head.
“What’s up?” I asked as I came up.
Rassi looked at me. “This is Hannah Trueblood,” he said. He lowered his voice, though she was close enough to hear. “Colby Trueblood’s mother.”
She looked away for a moment and when she turned back I held out my hand.
“Dana Hartman,” I said. She shook my hand and then crossed her arms over her chest. I saw that her lower lip was trembling.
She turned to the man. “What, it’s not enough what we give you at Christmas?” she said and then turned away from us again.
Rassi went over to the man. “You really going to do this, Ray?”
The man cleared his throat.
“This is just a misunderstanding,” he said. He still hadn’t looked up. “That’s not what I said.”
Hannah Trueblood whirled around.
“So you didn’t just tell me that if I didn’t pay you for those, you were going to send them off to the Observer?”
It was then that I noticed Ray was holding a digital camera in his hand.
“How much did he ask for?” Rassi asked Hannah.
She snorted. “Does it make a difference?” she asked. “We hadn’t gotten that far in our negotiation.” This last part she bit off, and if she had been a different kind of woman she might have spit on the ground. “It’s extortion,” she said.
“Actually, in Illinois it’s called intimidation,” Rassi said. He turned to the man. “Ray, you’re looking at 2 to 10 years.”
“Jesus, Dave, it’s really not what it looks like,” he said.
“What’s it look like, Ray?” he said quietly. “Stay here.” He gave me a look. “Watch him,” he said.
I stood next to Ray as Rassi went over to talk to Hannah. Ray wasn’t looking at me, which was fine. I was looking at him, though. I was wondering whether he was apt to run away, and I looked at the stomach protruding from beneath his work shirt as I calculated whether or not I would be able to catch him.
I figured I could take him, too. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Rassi came back over. Hannah Trueblood was getting into her SUV. We watched her pull a U-Turn and head back toward Springfield Road. Rassi waved as she went by, but she was looking straight ahead, wiping at her eyes.
When she left, Rassi turned to Ray.
“What the hell were you thinking?” he asked.
The man didn’t answer.
“You got copies?” Rassi asked.
Ray shook his head and then looked up across the road. “No. I don’t.”
“Give me the camera,” he said.
“Dave-“
“Give me the damn camera,” Rassi said.
The man gave it to him grudgingly. Rassi popped up the display and held it so that neither one of us could see.
“Christ,” he said and took out the memory card. He handed the camera back to Ray.
“Hey,” Ray said. “I got pictures of my grandkids on there.”
Rassi stepped closer to Ray, towering above him. “You want her to press charges on this? She’s not going to, if you play along. You’re on thin ice as it is,” he said. “You’re goddamn lucky we don’t make you a murder suspect. “
Ray took a step back. “I got an alibi.”
“Which could’ve been faked,” Rassi said. “Go. Now.”
We watched him get into his truck and drive off, in the opposite direction from Trueblood.
“That was the guy who found Colby Trueblood’s body,” he said after Ray had left. “That’s the reason I brought you out here. Bastard was trying to sell pictures of her corpse. Can you believe that?”
I didn’t say anything as we got back into Rassi’s car and drove another quarter of a mile, where he turned right onto a short lane and parked. In front of us was a ridge lined with trees, and behind it, I knew, an old Boy Scout camp.
“How’s he know the Truebloods?” I asked as we got out of the car.
“Works some ground for them,” Rassi said. “They’re pretty generous with him. Wife left him ten years ago, moved to Arizona. No idea why he would pull a stunt like that.”
“I guess you never really know anybody,” I said. I nodded up toward the stand of trees. “That where they found the body?”
Rassi motioned for me to follow. “Yeah,” he said.
We followed a trail overgrown with multiflora rose, picking our way carefully.
We hit the top of the ridge, passed by the empty fire rings from the camp, and descended. When we’d reached the dry creek bottom, Rassi stopped. Down here the undergrowth had been flattened, and dried tire marks led from where we were standing down the creek bed toward Springfield Road.
“Not a mile from her house,” Rassi said, and when I looked at him he explained, “The Truebloods live in that house at the corner of Broadway and Springfield. The one with all the pin oaks and the white columns in front.”
I nodded. I’d passed that house a few hundred times in my lifetime, and never wondered who lived there.
“That guy, Ray,” Rassi said, crouching down to run a finger along the crusted edge of a tire track. “Ray Coulter. He found her the day after she was dumped.”
“Where was the body?” I asked, scanning over the ground.
“In her car,” Rassi said and stood up. “Right here.” He pointed to where the wheel ruts stopped. “Somebody drove in here, left the vehicle, and went off on foot toward 155.” He jerked his head in the opposite direction.
“They found her in the back, tied up. Beaten to death,” he continued. “Ray Coulter lives over in Allentown. He was hunting mushrooms that Sunday afternoon when he found her.”
“She was killed when?”
“Kelly do the autopsy?” I asked.
Rassi nodded.
“So, this guy, Ray,” I said. “Did somebody clear him?”
“Of course somebody cleared him,” he said.
“You said Dubois gets a little rammy,” I shrugged. “He failed to clear Maclaren.”
“Yeah, but he doesn’t ignore the obvious,” Rassi said.
“Money motive, obviously willing to break the law-”
“Ray Coulter was gambling on the riverboat in East Peoria all night,” he said. “We have the surveillance video. It’s covered.”
“Okay,” I said.
Rassi was silent for a while, and when I didn’t ask any further questions, he handed me a snapshot.
She was naked, lying on her side in the open back of an SUV, brunette, her hair long. Like her mother. Her arms were bound with duct tape at the wrists in front of her, her legs at the ankles and at the thighs.
There were bruises and cuts all over her entire body. The killer had paid special attention to the buttocks, the breasts, and the pelvic area. The one eye that was open was glassy, the other had swollen shut. Her mouth was open, revealing a set of broken upper incisors.
“Jesus Christ,” I said as I handed the photo back to Rassi. I couldn’t look him in the eyes.
“Are you in?” Rassi asked.
I rested my gaze on the trail of tire tracks, imagining coming across that scene on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
“Did he tie her up before or after he beat her?” I asked.
“What difference does it make?” Rassi asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. I looked up at him.
“Before,” he said.
I nodded. Tied up, and then beaten. No chance to defend herself, no chance to run, certainly no chance to raise her arms and ward off the blows falling around her body and into her face. I sighed.
“Are you in?” he asked again.
I wanted a cigarette.
“Yeah,” I said.
Six
Tuan was sitting at the diner out by the Scotty Mart fighting off the munchies with a sixteen hundred calorie concoction of bacon, fried dough and processed corn syrup when his cell phone rang.
He looked at the caller. Jasper. Again. Looking to hook up. Again. Tuan let it go to voice mail. He put the phone down, thought about turning it off, and then put it back in his jeans pocket.
Something was going to have to be done about Jasper, and it needed to be done soon. Jasper was a tweaker like Sweeney. He had all of the trappings, including the bad teeth, and if he didn’t keep getting it he would get squirrelly and talk.
Jasper was calling because he’d already smoked the meth Tuan had given him.
The day before, Tuan had driven by Sweeney’s house and seen, as he’d already suspected, that the police were still there. He went on to the truck stop out on Route 9 near 155 to meet up with Jasper. He came bearing gifts, which was the only thing Jasper really wanted from him.
Jasper had been his usual self: convivial, stupid, and jonesing.
“I always told Sweeney he had to be careful with that shit,” Jasper said as he drank a glass of ice water. His hands were shaking.
“The situation with Sweeney was good for you, though,” Tuan said. For once, he didn’t have an appetite. “Were you guys close?”
Jasper shrugged. “We hung out in high school,” he said. “I was over there a couple of times.”
Tuan nodded. “But you told the cops about him,” he said, watching as Jasper picked up Tuan’s glass of water without asking.
“Shit, man,” Jasper said. “They locked me up. I was there for twelve hours. You know how it is.”
Tuan did, and he didn’t. Meth made you do a lot, especially when you couldn’t get any, which was why he never touched the stuff, or any other kind of drug, for that matter.
Yet he understood hunger, and what it would make you do.
“So, what’s our deal now?” Jasper asked. He’d put down the glass and was scratching at his arms.
Tuan looked at the blackened stump of Jasper’s left canine and said, “There is no deal. What kind of a deal are you talking about?”
“I thought you’d step up,” Jasper said. “You know.”
“I don’t know, Jasper,” Tuan said. He sighed. “Why don’t you tell me?”
Jasper sighed and looked around at the two or three truckers sitting at the bar. The man who used to run the place had gone up for cocaine trafficking a few years back, and since then the clientele had changed. Or rather, it was the same clientele. They just couldn’t buy cocaine here any longer.
“You know,” Jasper said. “You hook me up, we’re cool with each other.”
Tuan leaned in and said with a low voice, “Jasper. I’m not a dealer. I’m just a newspaper guy.”
Jasper finished the second glass of water and licked his lips.
“Now that’s where you and I both know different,” he said and smiled. It was not a sight that encouraged appetite, and Tuan was glad he hadn’t ordered any food.
He leaned back. “What else do you know?”
“What do you mean?” Jasper asked.
“About Sweeney,” Tuan shrugged. “About his past.”
For a brief moment, the dimmer switch in Jasper’s eyes got a bit brighter. “Well, you know he got arrested a few years back for possession?”
“That was pot,” Tuan said.
“Yeah,” Jasper nodded, fiddling with his hands. He raised a thumb to his ravaged mouth and bit off a piece of skin. “But he got community service for that.”
Tuan watched him chew and then swallow. “Anything else?” he asked.
Jasper looked confused. “What?”
“His past,” Tuan said.
Jasper’s brow furrowed, and his head gave a little jerk. “Um. He grew up in Pekin. His parents are assholes who wear suits to work.”
“You sure you don’t know anything else?”
Jasper pushed a lock of hair out of his eyes. “What are you talking about, man? Are you going to hook me up, or not?”
Tuan pulled out a few bills and laid them down on the table top. He gestured for Jasper to follow him outside.
“What?” Jasper said when they hit the parking lot. He took out a cigarette and lit it. He didn’t offer one to Tuan, which was fine, because Tuan didn’t smoke, but things like that registered with Tuan.
Junkies were rats who wore shoes. Some of the time. And they’d jump ship at the first sign of high water.
Tuan slipped a plastic bag into the pocket of Jasper’s shorts. “Just this once,” he said.
“Thanks, man,” Jasper said. Tuan watched him shuffle over to his car. He’d barely gotten the door shut and he already had the pipe out.
Tuan shrugged at the memory. Jasper was a liability. It would not be easy to keep him cowed, either, because Tuan knew there was never a “just this once” with people like Jasper. They kept coming back until you did something about it. Tuan just wasn’t sure yet what that something was going to be.
Besides, he had bigger things on his plate right now.
He spooned another mass of carbohydrates and lard into his mouth, the juice dripping down his chin. He caught at it with a tongue to put Gene Simmons to shame and shoveled another mouthful in.
The sugar still got him. He didn't have any conscious memories of Vietnam, but he did remember being hungry. Later on, in America, he was hungry just that one time, when people, not circumstances, had done it to him.
That one time he’d been forced to go hungry had left an imprint on his psyche, and he’d girded himself with food ever since. Food was his only real vice. He was a glutton, and he reveled in it. There was comfort and familiarity in food. It was where he hid when the shit hit the fan.
Because the memory of the hunger never went away.
He looked at his watch. Rassi and Hartman had to be go
ne by now. He had no idea why they’d come back, and why Dana Hartman would be there, but Tuan didn’t really care.
After he’d eaten he drove out of Pekin and past Sweeney's house, and when he saw that no one was there, he turned around and pulled into the driveway. He cut the engine and got out of the car, looking up and down the highway to see if anyone had seen him.
He was careful to stay on the concrete, convinced that if he stepped off into the lawn he would leave footprints and thus make himself suspect in some way. He walked up onto the porch and then looked down through the hole at the empty space that should have been carpeting, and underlayment, and then plain wood.
As he was getting ready to climb down, his phone chirped. So Hot For Her, by the Stones.
She hated that ringtone.
“Kara,” Tuan said as he walked around the edge of the hole, trying to find a way down. “You’re still on my shit list.”
Kara Hall was his assistant editor, which meant that she did half the editing and most of the reporting, including the crime sheet. She was also the only other full-time employee of the Pekin Observer.
“Oh my God, Tuan,” she said. “It’s not on the crime sheet? It’s fire?”
His rap. “We talked about this, Kara,” he said. “Anyway, I’m at Sweeney’s house right now.”
No reason not to lend this little visit a vestige of legitimacy.
“Really?” she asked. “I was, like, just there.”
“So, it’s crime now,” Tuan said, ignoring her.
“It wasn’t two nights ago,” she said. “Anyway, how is it a crime? He blew himself up. The police seem to be treating it as a pretty open-and-shut case, as far as I can tell.”
“It’s half-and-half,” Tuan said. “Don’t argue with me, Kara.”
“Do you know something I don’t know?” she asked.
“I only know what Rassi told me,” Tuan said.
He’d already circled the entire house and came back around to stand at the back of his car, watching the traffic run by on Route 9.
“Uh. Yeah?” Kara said, drawing out her ‘yeah’ into two syllables. “You coming by tonight?”