by Shane Lusher
“You don’t have a Keith Richards burger, do you?” I asked the waiter.
“No, we don’t serve beef that’s been aged that long,” he shot back. Kelly and I laughed, as did the waiter.
He had a tired look in his eyes, though, and I remembered I’d known somebody long ago who had a job on Times Square in New York, and had to wait tables wearing an astronaut’s suit.
The things people had to do for money.
The evening went smoothly. The girls had already done their research, and had the day planned out ahead of time. Kelly groaned a bit when they pulled out a sheet of paper they’d printed out from Google Maps detailing all of the stores and eating establishments they were planning on hitting.
I was impressed. I studied the map for a moment and then gave it back.
“You know, if you want to do all of that, it’s going to take you about eight hours.”
“Try twelve,” Kelly said. “You think you can get through five clothing stores, one pizza restaurant, a book store and Apple in eight hours? When was the last time you went shopping?”
I looked down at my borrowed T-shirt and cargo pants. “You’ve got a point.”
“Anyway,” she said. “How long do you think your thing will take tomorrow? Any chance we can run up to Evanston later in the afternoon?”
“What’s in Evanston?”
“This little boutique thing-y I heard about on Pinterest,” Kelly said.
“T-time is at nine,” I said. “How long can a golf game last? I should be back by three o’clock at the latest. If you want to go up earlier, I can just rent a car tomorrow.”
“No,” Kelly said. “The least I can do is let you borrow my car.”
“Well, you could take the red line up to Evanston and then hit the purple line,” I said.
“The what?” Kelly said. She licked the salt from her margarita glass and waved at the waiter. “No, I’ll just wait on you,” she said.
It was after ten-thirty by the time we got back, and I was all but dead to the world. The fatigue of the past few days, and the efforts of trying to sift through all of the information, not to mention being thrown off the case at the last minute, had made me more than ready to just fall into bed and forget about everything.
Before we left the restaurant, I’d handed over my credit card to Kelly and told her she could use up to five hundred dollars for whatever Erin decided to buy.
“Think that’ll be enough?” I asked.
“Plenty,” Kelly said as we left, the girls running out ahead of us to watch the lights and the people walking by. “I probably won’t spend that much on Casey, so don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried,” I said.
“I know,” Kelly said. “That’s a good thing to see.”
“Me not being worried about my almost-daughter’s spending?”
“No,” she said, slipping her hand into mine again. “You not being worried about something.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a new look for you, too,” I said.
“Hey, if you don’t like it I can always starting pecking at you for the two beers you drank,” she said.
“No,” I said. “Don’t do that.”
Now, in the hotel room, the only thing that was keeping me upright was the fact that I was about to spend the night in a room alone with Kelly for the very first time. Strange how certain drives kick in, even when you’re approaching forty. Maybe especially then. The old testosterone having one last stab at things.
I felt like I was seventeen again.
We put the girls to bed, which meant only that we’d banished them to their side of the adjoined space, told them there would be no television and that they were not, under any circumstances, to open the door to the hallway unless someone knocked, and only then if Kelly or I were doing the knocking.
Erin rolled her eyes. “We’re nine years old, Dana,” she said. “We’re not stupid.”
“They were up late last night,” Kelly said. “They’ll be out in five minutes.”
I listened to the girls talking to each other and bumping around next door for half a minute, then went over and sat in the chair next to the window.
Kelly had gone in to take a shower, and I took a Coke out of the mini bar and poured it into a glass.
I had a thought. I got up and listened at the bathroom door. The shower was still running.
I’d already looked for my telephone for a minute or so when I remembered I’d officially turned it off for the night and given it to Kelly for safekeeping.
Her purse was on the vanity opposite the bed. I went over to it and hesitated, looking at myself in the mirror. Was I the kind of person who went through a woman’s purse, especially when chances were high that I was about to sleep with her for the very first time?
I’d never done that with my ex-wife. I’d always considered two things in life to be sacred: purses and mail. You didn’t go through either one, unless you were told to do so. Otherwise, it was a serious break in trust.
I slipped my hand tentatively inside her bag and felt around, thinking that feeling was different from looking.
My phone was right there. I could just take it out and make the call, but I knew that it would take a minute just to power up, and if I was going to call Tuan I really needed enough time.
I’d figured Tuan, as reticent as he was, might know more about Jasper Stevens than anybody else. But just then the shower switched off, and I removed my hand. I would hit Tuan up tomorrow, on my way to Joliet.
Tonight I had other plans.
Thirty-Nine
I’d just sat back down at the table when Kelly stuck her head out the door of the bathroom. Her hair was wet, and I could see she was wearing one of the hotel’s white robes.
“You want to have some wine?” she asked.
I’d had the two pints of beer at the restaurant, and I thought that if I had any wine I would most likely just pass out—wine tended to have that effect on me—but I knew that there was no going back.
I nodded.
“Check on the girls, too, would you?” she asked. She pulled her head back inside and shut the bathroom door.
Opening the cabinet to the mini bar, I found two tiny bottles of Cabernet—not my favorite, but it would do in a pinch—and two small wine glasses and set them down on the table. I opened up the bottles to let them breathe and then went over to the door adjoining the two rooms.
After listening for a minute, and hearing nothing on the other side, I opened our door and realized that there were two. Of course there were two—one for us and one for them. I was frazzled. Figuring it would be locked, I tried their door anyway and it opened.
I was surprised to find the room bathed entirely in darkness.
I listened, heard someone snoring, and made out two forms huddled together in one of the beds. Tiptoeing past them, I checked to make sure the door to the hallway was locked, set the deadbolt, and then came back.
I closed both adjoining doors and then turned the lock on our side.
When I returned there was the sound of a hair dryer coming out of the bathroom. I filled two glasses with wine, nearly emptying both bottles, and then, with nothing else to do, I went over to the bathroom door and knocked. The hair dryer switched off and Kelly’s head appeared.
“Almost done,” she said. “You check on the girls?”
“Checked,” I said. “Both of them are unconscious.”
“Because they’re asleep or because you hit them over the head?” she grinned. “I’ll be right out. Oh. Can you turn off the air conditioning? It’s freezing out there. Open a window.”
I wanted to tell her that the Chicago heat would broil us in our room sooner than she thought—thousands of acres of concrete would do that for you—but I knew when to do what I was told.
I’d just settled back into my chair and finished off the rest of the Coke, already hot and approaching sweaty in my T-shirt and my shorts, when she appeared.
Her hair, freed of the even
ing’s entrapments, hung down past and over the tops of her shoulders. She’d not put on any make-up. My eyes met hers, and I saw, perhaps for the first time, the woman she’d become in the twenty years since I last remembered her. Her face was dead serious as she looked at me, as if considering something.
She didn’t lose much time on what that consideration might have been. When she stepped out of the bathroom, she was naked, and I felt the kind of arousal you only get when you’re a teenager, the kind of hunger that made you just want to eat another person alive.
She cocked a grin. “You’d better lose those.” She jerked her chin toward my still-clothed body.
Afterwards, after we’d explored as much of each other’s bodies as we could on the first go around, we lay there in the hot Chicago night and sipped our wine, me leaning up against a pillow on the headboard, she with her head on my shoulder.
I stroked her arm absently with my free hand, and she took it and placed it on her breast.
“That was good,” I said. I was full of warmth, and satisfaction, and then my mind kicked in, wanting to know what it all meant.
“You don’t think I’m a slut?” she asked.
I took a hefty drink of the wine and told my mind to shut up.
“Why would I think that?” I asked.
“Good,” she said. “Because you suck at reading signals.”
The wine finished--Kelly had shaken her head when I asked her if I should ring down to the kitchen to have more sent up--we slid down into the bed.
“You want to talk about the case?” she asked. “We haven’t really had time to, yet.”
I watched her tuck a lock of hair behind her ear.
“There are a few questions I have,” I admitted.
“Shoot,” she said.
“But it can wait until tomorrow.”
“Shoot,” she said again. She wiggled her rear end against my naked body and I could feel the arousal start up again.
That had rarely happened in twenty years, either.
“I, uh-”
“Get it over with, Hartman,” Kelly sighed.
I kissed her ear and said, “Colby Trueblood’s time of death. How accurate is that?”
She stifled a yawn. “As accurate as it can be.”
“Which is?”
“It was hot. She was in a sealed car. By the time I got to her, rigor mortis was fully developed. Livor mortis, too. The blood pooling from the livor indicated that she’d been in that car for the better part of twelve hours, but mainly I used body temperature.” She shrugged. “It’s not a guess, but it’s not as accurate as you would think. You also have to take into account corroborated witness statements and the time her telephone was smashed.”
“How did you find that out?” I asked. “I thought once the smart phones were killed, they were killed.”
She turned around and pulled me toward her.
“You’re the IT guy,” she said. “You should know that. State Forensics hooked it up to their gadgets and came up with a time. I’d already put at somewhere between twelve and two A.M. that morning, which was a pretty big reach.”
“So, it could have been later?”
She nodded. “Or earlier. But not by much. We had the entomology people have a look at the bugs she had on her, but she was in a clean, sealed car, not in the middle of the woods.”
“What did they say?”
“They said she’d been dead a maximum of fourteen hours, according to insect activity in the body, which wasn’t much.”
“Okay,” I said.
“It’s science, but it’s not as good as television makes it out to be.” She wiggled again. I didn’t really want to continue with this. Her breath was hot on my neck. “The most important thing,” she said. “Shit.”
“What?”
She laughed. “Nothing. I just don’t want to ruin the mood.”
“We can stop talking about it,” I said. I touched her under her chin and moved her head up toward mine and kissed her lightly on the lips.
“The trauma,” she said. “There was too much blunt force trauma for the killer to be someone she didn’t know.”
“How do you mean?” I asked, pulling back momentarily.
“I keep forgetting you’re not a cop,” she said.
“Why is that?”
“Because a detective would know that heavy blunt force trauma almost always means that the person who did the killing was someone very close to the victim.”
Her hand was on my back, moving down to my hip.
“Last thing,” she said as she pulled into me, her lips on my neck. “It was someone who wanted to punish her for something. Someone who wanted to punish her sexually.”
I wanted to ask her what she meant by that, but even I know when to shut up.
“Dana?” she said.
“Yes?” I murmured into her hair.
“Let’s take it slower this time.”
Saturday
Forty
She was back in the cornfield behind the old man’s house, the cemetery on the hill off to her left. In one gloved hand she held a cow’s liver.
The other hand held a can of strychnine. She’d found it in the garage, and she’d taken it.
She’d opened it and sniffed, and the fumes had made the muscles in her face contract, and when she looked in the mirror a few hours later she looked like a skeleton: her cheekbones and her brows sticking out, her chin reduced to a dimple.
She would put the liver on the ground, at the end of the dog’s chain. Then she would pour the poison on top of it, and the dog would come out to eat it.
It would finish, and then, slowly, the dog’s muscles would begin to twitch. The twitching would turn into convulsions, extending the limbs and curving the neck. The pupils would dilate and then, when every muscle in the dog’s body had contracted so that it looked like rigor mortis had already set in, the respiratory muscles would cease to function, and the dog would asphyxiate.
She’d watched, and she’d waited, and she’d pissed on the ground, and still the dog did not appear. The old man had been home when she’d arrived, and though she had already seen him get up once to fill his glass with alcohol, and once more on the telephone, he had not yet let the dog out into the yard.
The scent was in the air, always in the air, the sexual evidence of what the plants were doing. She picked up a handful of dirt and rubbed it into her face, inhaling the dry purity of it.
Tuan had told her about what he’d discovered about the sheriff, the one who was dead, and about the information he’d gotten. He’d already spoken to Him, the one who had started it all, to try to find out what the new sheriff was going to do about it, and whether or not anything would come of it, but Tuan was playing games with all of them, because all of them thought he was working with them, for them, and that Tuan was not a danger.
That was Tuan’s way, though. Tuan was an old man, collecting his memories, waiting for a day that would never come. Waiting to pounce, like a leprous cat poised over the corpse of a dead mouse. He’d spoken to her of Official Needs and The Way Things Work and she’d laughed in his face, gone out to the garage and found the strychnine.
Her way was better. It had been better when she’d gone to Dillon that day and he’d told her what he’d said to the dead sheriff and what the dead sheriff was going to do and she knew right then that they’d been betrayed.
Betrayed because The Way Things Work is that you build a case against them, and then you go to court and the lawyers argue, and then they deal, and those who get convicted don’t go to prison. They get probation like the man over in Armington with his granddaughter six years old and nothing happened to him except for having to register as a sex offender, and that girl would grow up with the memory of an old man’s finger stuck in her pussy and wonder why it was that the old man was still alive.
Her way was final. She’d tried to explain it that day, in Dillon, but he’d only told her that she was a product of what had happened to her
, that she needed help, and that if they went together with him then they would be able to get the help that she needed.
She didn’t need any help. She could do for herself. Just like she’d done for her mother and her father and for Roe, and now, for Sweeney and Stevens.
She’d seen the arrow in her hand, put there like a gift screaming up at her, and when he turned his back she’d taken it and stuck it in the back of his head. And he fell to the ground, and lie still, and she buried him out in back of his shed.
And that was her way.
Forty-One
I was awakened around three A.M. by a tapping. Kelly’s naked body was pressed into mine, and at first I thought the sound was coming from her, but then I realized it was at the door dividing the two rooms.
I got out of bed and slipped into my boxer shorts and opened the door.
Erin was standing there, her hair a bird’s nest of a shambles, haloed in the light from one of the bedside lamps in her room.
“Can I sleep with you?” she asked, her eyes barely open.
“Sure,” I said, hastily covering Kelly up with the sheet as I went over to the second bed in the room and pulled back the bedclothes.
Erin lie down in the bed and I got in beside her and covered the both of us up, even though it was warm enough in the room to sleep without blankets.
She snuggled up to me, and just before she fell asleep she murmured, “I miss my Daddy.”
She was already snoring. I sniffed the apple scent of her hair.
“I do, too, Erin,” I said. “I do, too.”
I awakened from a deep sleep at seven A.M. Erin was gone. I jumped awake and opened the door between the rooms to find her lying in bed with Casey, where I’d seen them the night before.