by Sandra Brown
But he’d heeded the call. When he arrived, he’d been met by the chief ME, who’d looked frazzled and near exhaustion himself. His staff was overwhelmed by the number of bodies still being brought in, some in pieces, making identification a challenge that strained the objectivity of even the most hardened pros.
Leaving Dale even more puzzled as to why the doc had called for a detective to drop what he was doing and rush right over.
“We’re both busy, Detective, so I’ll make this quick. We’ve got a girl here, in her teens, whose body was recovered from the state park.”
“She was at the Lyston Electronics party?”
“She was a Lyston. Their daughter Susan.”
“Jesus.”
“I’m told her body was discovered under the branches of an uprooted tree. But the thing is, the reason I called for a detective, that’s not what killed her. The injuries she sustained during the tornado were postmortem.”
“Come again?”
“Cause of death was asphyxiation. She was strangled.”
“Are you sure?”
He’d shown Dale the cadaver. “The bruising here on her neck indicates strangulation. Where she was scraped and cut by the falling tree, she didn’t bleed. She sustained blunt trauma to several organs, which could have been fatal, but she was already dead.”
It had fallen to Dale to impart that news to her parents, who were already reeling from shock and grief over what they believed was a storm-related death. He’d watched Howard and Olivia Lyston shatter. Learning that their daughter had been murdered compounded their heartache a thousandfold.
Their tragedy had landed Dale Moody a murder case.
Combing the crime scene for evidence had been an exercise in futility, a joke. The tornado had ravaged the entire area. Trees that weren’t completely uprooted had been stripped bare of leaves, their naked branches ripped off and tossed to the ground like toothpicks. Investigators had to hack through the natural debris just to get to the scene of the crime. The area had also been trampled by first responders and panicked survivors searching for missing loved ones.
If the perp had planned it, he couldn’t have done better than to have an F-5 tornado sweep through the place where he’d killed Susan Lyston.
Dale and other detectives had tried to question everyone who’d attended the barbecue and had been in the vicinity at the time of the slaying. They’d interviewed as many as they could locate. But both the pavilion and the boathouse had been flattened. The gravel lot where over two hundred vehicles were parked had been turned into an apocalyptic landscape of twisted steel and shattered glass.
Consequently, dozens who’d narrowly escaped death had sustained serious injuries. Many were hospitalized with internal injuries, head trauma, compound fractures, cuts and contusions, and shock. It had taken weeks to track down and question everyone.
But in the meantime, Dale had grilled Denton Carter.
As the boyfriend with whom Susan had quarreled that morning, his name had gone to the top of the list of possible suspects. Right off, Dale and his team of detectives thought they had their man. The eighteen-year-old was a surly wiseass who had issues with authority. Dale heard that from faculty members of the high school from which Dent had graduated only the week before.
“He’s an intelligent kid,” a school counselor had told Dale. “He finished with a three-point-two GPA and probably could have done better if he’d wanted to. But that was the problem. He didn’t want to. Terrible attitude. The boy carries a big chip on his shoulder.”
Dale had discovered that for himself the first time he hauled Dent Carter in for questioning. After the vulgar language, Dale had put him in jail, thinking that a night in lockup might improve his manners. But the following day he had smirked at Dale and shot him the finger when he was released.
Dale had hated watching him saunter out, but he didn’t have any evidence with which to hold him. Not then, and not days later, after conducting a thorough investigation and repeated interrogations. The boy’s story never deviated from what he had initially told Dale. No one could testify to seeing him at the barbecue, and the old man from the airfield provided him with an alibi. Dale had had no choice but to let him go.
His interest had shifted to Allen Strickland.
Now, Dale hefted his pistol in his palm while mentally enumerating all the facts that had pointed to Strickland’s guilt. There had been enough to charge him. But there wasn’t a single, solid piece of hard evidence to prove that he’d killed that girl.
The ADA assigned to prosecute the case, Rupert Collier, an eager bloodsucker if ever there was one, had built a case out of circumstantial evidence. His summation had been delivered with the fervor of a tent revival evangelist. As though fearing hell for themselves if they didn’t convict, the jury had brought in a guilty verdict in under two hours.
Allen Strickland had gone to prison.
Dale Moody had turned to drink.
Eighteen years later, Bellamy Lyston Price had written a book that underscored every doubt Dale had ever entertained about what had happened in the woods that day just before the historic tornado.
And what made him mad as hell was that that damn book might conjure up doubt in the minds of others as well. The ending left a lot open to speculation. Readers might start wondering if maybe the criminal investigation had been sloppy, if maybe the ambition of the ADA had outdazzled that of the accused’s court-appointed defender, if maybe Allen Strickland hadn’t been the last person to see Susan Lyston alive after all.
It was one thing for Dale to rethink the Susan Lyston case all day, every day. But he didn’t want anyone else to.
It had made him feel only marginally better to learn that Bellamy Price’s book had made Rupe nervous, too. Rupe Collier was a bigshot in Austin these days. He couldn’t be happy over having himself portrayed in the book as a ruthless young prosecutor who would go to any lengths to get his belt notched with a felony conviction, although that was exactly what he’d been and precisely what he’d done.
And he was looking for Dale.
Donald Haymaker, a buddy from Dale’s days on the force who still had ties to the Austin PD and was one of the few people among his acquaintances who knew how to reach him, had called him a few weeks ago, days after T. J. David’s true identity became known.
After they’d swapped trite pleasantries, he’d said, “Uh, Dale, have you heard about this book?”
He didn’t need to specify which book. Dale told him he’d read Bellamy Price’s Low Pressure.
“Me, too,” Haymaker admitted with noticeable awkwardness. “I think everybody in the country has. Rupe Collier included. He, uh, he called me, Dale. He hem-hawed for ten minutes or so, then casually—way too casually—asked me if I knew where you were and how to get in touch.”
“You didn’t give him my number, did you?”
“Hell no! But what do you think that slippery sumbitch wants with you after all these years? It’s gotta have something to do with that book, don’t you think?”
That was precisely what Dale thought. The book would have caused Rupe’s sphincter to pucker. He would be hating it and the hype surrounding it even more than Dale did, and Dale hated it like hell.
Bellamy Lyston Price, that homely, gawky titmouse of a girl, had stirred up a damn fucking mess. It had all the potential of becoming the crowning touch to Dale Moody’s miserable life.
He finished his whiskey in one slug, dropped his cigarette butt on the porch, balanced the pistol in his hand, and wished with every decaying fiber of his being that, just once before he died, he could enjoy a moment when he would know with one hundred percent certainty that he had helped convict the right man.
Chapter 7
I was the first,” Dent said, repeating it with emphasis.
He held Bellamy’s stare for several moments, then, muttering an expletive, got up and moved restlessly around the kitchen. He bumped his fist against the crate of small appliances she hadn’t yet unpack
ed and eventually went to stand at the sink. He slid his hands, palms out, into the seat pockets of his jeans and stared through the window into her backyard.
“There’s a broken flowerpot on the steps,” he said. “I found it last night.”
“That must’ve been awful for you.”
“Naw, it was just a flowerpot. I got over it.”
“I was talking about being considered a suspect.”
He turned his head and spoke to her from over his shoulder. “I got over it.”
“Did you?”
Hearing the doubt behind the question, he turned back to the window, pulled his hands from his pockets, and placed them on the edge of the sink, leaning into it. “Have you ever been questioned by the police?”
“Other than being stopped for speeding, no.”
“It makes you feel guilty, even though you’re not. It’s the loneliest, most isolating feeling in the world.”
“Your father—”
“Couldn’t be bothered to go with me to the police station.”
“You had Gall Hathaway in your corner.”
“The police questioned us separately. He wasn’t in on those initial interrogations.”
“If I recall correctly, he retained a lawyer for you.”
“Not right away. We didn’t think a lawyer would be necessary. During those first couple of shakedowns I was all alone.”
“They came down hard on you.”
“You could say, yeah. He thought for sure I’d killed your sister.”
“The detective, you mean?”
“Moody. You called him Monroe in your book, but his name was Dale Moody. Soon as he got my name from your folks—who also thought I was the culprit—he came to my house, woke up me and my old man, asked if he could talk to me about Susan. But he didn’t exactly put it in the form of a polite request. Till then I didn’t even know that she’d been murdered. I learned that from him when he started trying to strong-arm a confession out of me.”
“What was that like, being pressured to make a confession?”
He left the window and went to the fridge, took out the pitcher of tea and brought it back to the table. She shook her head no when he held the pitcher above her glass, so he poured himself a refill, then resumed his seat across from her. However, instead of taking a drink, he placed the fingers of both hands against the glass and rubbed them up and down.
“Dent?”
“What?”
“I asked you a question.”
“I heard you.”
“Well, how did you feel?”
“How do you think? I felt like shit. Enough said.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m inviting you to vent your anger, and I think you want to.”
“After all this time? It’s a little late.”
“Yesterday you said it hadn’t been long enough.”
He removed his hands from around the glass and rubbed his wet fingertips on the legs of his jeans. He frowned irritably at Bellamy, but she kept her expression calm and inquisitive.
He mouthed another curse, then said, “The girl I’d been making out with two days earlier was on a slab in the county morgue. Something like that sorta messes with your mind, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, I would.”
“I was trying to wrap my brain around Susan being killed by the tornado, when this Law & Order wannabe shows up and starts asking me what we’d argued about, when I’d last seen her, where was I when she was being choked to death.” Noticing Bellamy’s grimace, he pointed at her face. “Yeah. Like that. That’s how I felt.”
“I tried to capture those conflicting emotions in my book.”
“You described the scene real well, even down to leaving my old man out of it.”
“I omitted him because I didn’t have a sense of him.”
Dent barked a laugh. “Join the club. I lived with him, and I didn’t have a sense of him, either. For all practical purposes, the man was a fucking ghost.”
That struck her as odd phraseology. “Explain what you mean by that.”
“Why? Are you plotting another book?”
She slapped the tabletop as she came quickly to her feet. “Okay, don’t explain it. You’re the one who proposed we take this trudge down memory lane, not me. You can see yourself out.”
As she went past him, his arm shot out and encircled her waist, bringing her up short and close to him.
The contact startled her, making her breath catch. They held that pose for several moments, neither of them moving, then he relaxed his arm, dragging it away from her slowly, trailing his fingers over her rib cage. Softly he said, “Sit down.”
She swallowed and resumed breathing. “Are you going to act like a jerk?”
“Probably. But you wanted to hear this.” He nodded her toward the chair.
She returned to it, placed her hands primly in her lap, and looked at him expectantly. But after several seconds, he shrugged. “Well? Ask away.”
“I have to pull it out of you? You’re not going to volunteer anything?”
“What do you want to know?”
“What happened to your mother?”
The question caught him off guard, and she was glad it was he who seemed unbalanced for a moment. He looked away, shifted his position in the chair, rolled his shoulders in a defensive gesture. “I was told she died when I was a baby.”
She continued watching him, dozens of follow-up questions implied.
Finally, he said, “I never saw a death certificate. My old man never took me to visit a grave. We never commemorated her birthday or the day she died. There were no maternal grandparents. None of that. I don’t even know what she looked like because I was never shown a picture of her. It was like she’d never existed. So what I figure, she left me with him. Split. Vamoosed. He just didn’t have the guts to tell me.”
“Maybe he never came to terms with it himself.”
“I don’t know. It’s an unsolved mystery. Anytime I bugged him for information about her, he would say, ‘She died.’ End of discussion.”
“So it was just the two of you?”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t call it cozy.”
“You speak of him in the past tense. He’s no longer living?”
“No.” Then, bitterly, “Not that you could call what he did ‘living.’”
“He was a ghost,” she said, using the word he’d used earlier to describe the man.
“You know, on second thought, that’s not an apt description. Because he did take up space. He wasn’t invisible. He just wasn’t there. He provided for me. Roof over my head, food on the table, clothes on my back. He saw that I got to school every day.”
His moss-colored eyes turned hard. “But he never attended a single school event. He never met a friend. Never watched me play a sport, and I played them all. I signed my own report cards. He functioned. That’s all. He wasn’t into sports, women, religion, gardening, stamp collecting, basket weaving. Nothing. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke.
“His conversations consisted of maybe three sentences, including the ones he had with me. He went to work every day, came home, served our supper, turned on the TV for a couple of hours, then went to his bedroom and shut the door. We never took a vacation. Never went anywhere. Not to the movies, ball games, pool halls, the city dump.” He stopped himself and took a deep breath. “We did nothing together.
“I’d misbehave, do something really bad, just to see if I could get a rise out of him or, at the very least, cause a change in his facial expression. My bad behavior didn’t faze him. But nothing good I did fazed him, either. He didn’t care one way or the other.
“He was a consistent SoB, I’ll say that for him. He died a puzzle I never solved and had lost interest in a long time before. All I know about him is that whatever it was that shut him down permanently shut out the rest of the world.”
“Including you.”
He raised a shoulde
r. “No matter.”
Bellamy didn’t believe he was as indifferent to the parental neglect as he pretended, but, for the time being, she let it go. “When did you first meet Mr. Hathaway?”
“He would hate you calling him that.”
“All right, when did you first meet Gall?”
“I was twelve, thirteen. Thereabout. One day after school I didn’t want to go home, so I struck off on my bike. No destination. Just wanting to put miles between me and my house. When I got pretty far out, I spotted this small airplane swooping down and disappearing for a few seconds, then soaring up over the horizon again. I rode toward it and wound up out at Gall’s airfield, where he was instructing a student. They were doing touch-and-goes. Man, I envied them. I wanted to be in that airplane so bad.”
“Love at first sight?”
He fired a finger pistol at her. “Right on target, A.k.a. You’re a writer, after all.”
“You fell in love with flying that day.”
“Head over freakin’ heels. I stayed there watching until they landed. The guy taking the lesson left. Gall had noticed me lurking, waved me into the hangar. I figured he was going to tell me that I was trespassing and to get lost.
“Instead, he offered me a Dr Pepper. He asked if I liked airplanes, and I told him yes—although until that afternoon, I didn’t know it. He motioned me out to the airplane they’d been flying and asked if I’d ever been up in a single-engine. I hadn’t been up in anything, but I lied and told him I had.
“He pointed out all the parts and told me what they were called. He let me sit in the pilot’s seat, and gave me a rundown on what all the gauges were for. I asked if it was hard to fly one. He looked at me and laughed. ‘If it was hard, could I do it?’
“Then he asked if I wanted to go up. I nearly wet myself. He asked if my folks would care, and I told him no. Which was the truth. So we switched seats, and he took off, flying directly into the sunset. We made a wide sweep and were back on the ground in under five minutes, but it was the best time of my life up to then.”