Borrowed Time

by Tracy Clark

  I tumbled out of bed. The line went dead. I checked caller ID, but the number he’d called from was scrambled; the ID simply read, UNKNOWN. He was obviously no longer using Bucky’s loaner phone. I raced around my room, grabbing up clothes, shoes. My bedroom door slowly opened, Barb peeking her head in, wild red hair mashed from the pillow, green eyes rimmed with red from too much travel, too little sleep.

  “What’s going on? Who died?”

  I blinked, for a second confused. “I don’t know. No one, I hope.” I studied her while I shoved my feet into running shoes. This was the second time in a week I’d woken to a disturbing call from Jung. It was getting old. I squinted at Barb. She looked not herself. “You okay?”

  She eased in fully dressed, wearing worn jeans and a faded Pope Francis T-shirt, her athletic frame masked by both. She yawned. “I’m still on Tanzanian time. Up when everyone else is asleep, asleep when everyone’s awake. I was in the kitchen making a sandwich when the phone rang. Nothing good happens this early. What’s up, besides the two of us?”

  I didn’t bother with shoelaces. They were still tied from the night before, so I jammed my feet in. “That was my client. He’s done something stupid. He says he didn’t, but I know he has. I’m headed out.” I scanned the room, looking for my bag.

  “Anything dangerous?”

  “Only to my overall health and well-being, I think.” I found the bag, headed for the door.

  Barb smiled. “Mind if I tag along?”

  I stopped, faced her, saying nothing. I was at that place again where I had to choose whether to involve family with the job. Mrs. Vincent had chided me for pushing my friends away, but I had a legitimate reason for doing it. I didn’t work in a bank or in a grocery store. I chased criminals for a living, and sometimes they took offense and chased me back. What kind of person would rope a nun into something like that? Even a nun, born and bred on the gritty South Side of Chicago, one raised in a family of battling Irish, one who could likely whip my ass.

  “I’ll keep you company,” Barb said. “Watch you do what you do.”

  She met my look straight on, unflinching. Barb was always unflinching. I could tell there was something on her mind, though. I’d known her more than half my life—Whip too—and they knew me right back. We were the same in many ways, which is what made it so weird that we’d each gone in such drastically different directions. I became a cop; Barb married God; Whip, until he got pinched and incarcerated, boosted cars for a living. I worried that Whip would revert to his old ways. He said he never would, but the streets, the lure of an easy score, had a strong pull.

  Barb gave me half a smile, her green eyes keen. “I saw the letters.”

  I bristled. The letters from my prodigal father were where I’d left them, unopened on the table in the entryway. The stack by now had to be at least a dozen high. “Is that what’s on your mind?”

  She shook her head. “Just an observation. You’re not even a little curious?”

  I swept past her, my mind on the marina. “If you’re coming, come on. You can stay in the car.”

  I grabbed my keys and checked my bag for aspirin, finding a small bottle tucked in the inside pocket. I had a feeling I was going to need it. Four AM, I thought as Barb and I stepped out into the street. My neighbors were sound asleep in their beds; Jung was somewhere doing Lord knows what; Barb had something she needed to talk about. In my opinion, talking was overrated. People talked too much. Handle your business, keep it to yourself, and keep it moving. Those were words to live by.

  Chapter 21

  I saw the blue police lights from Lake Shore Drive and pulled into the marina lot, parking far away from the hub of activity. Barb glowered. “If you’d parked any farther away, I’d have to take a bus to see anything remotely interesting.”

  “That’s what I was aiming for.”

  The talk we were supposed to have on the ride over never happened. She talked about Africa and the kids she missed, her family, her mother, what was new with me—small talk. I didn’t press it. You had to give Barb room. When she was ready, whatever it was she needed to talk about, she would. I turned to her. “Please stay in the car.” She frowned, nodded. Not good enough. “I need verbal confirmation. Actual words, so I know you heard me.”

  Barb folded her arms over her chest. “I see Mrs. Vincent’s talk is going to take some time sinking in.”

  I squinted at her, my voice low. “I knew that smelled like an ambush. You were in on that?”

  Barb grinned. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  I climbed out of the car, holding the driver’s door open. “We sure will, along with the other thing we were supposed to talk about on the ride over, but didn’t.”

  I pushed the door closed without further comment and headed toward the slips, scanning faces, looking for ones I knew. I didn’t see the ME’s van parked anywhere, which was a good sign. That meant nobody was dead. There was also no ambulance, no red crime-scene tape, just a few squad cars and two unmarked vehicles. I spotted Detective Marta Pena in the middle of a small huddle, which didn’t compute. She was a violent-crime detective. Dead bodies were her specialty. Cap was also there and the nosy Eldon Reese, his complaint book gripped tightly in his pale, hateful little hands. The two stood and talked, their heads together. What was that all about? I wondered. Cap said he didn’t talk to any of the marina residents, couldn’t stand them, in fact, but he and Reese looked downright chummy.

  Tim’s boat, the Safe Passage, looked fine from the outside, but there were uniformed cops trampling all over it. Marta spotted me on the edge of the crowd, grimaced, and charged my way. I waited for her, my hands buried deep in the pockets of my jeans. I had a client up to something and a jet-lagged nun with a secret sitting in my car. An angry Marta gave me the trifecta.

  At five six, two hundred–plus pounds, Marta Pena was a force to be reckoned with under normal circumstances. At a hectic crime scene, she was hell on wheels. We’d worked together on the job. I knew her family, her kids. But from the look on her face, I could tell our conversation wasn’t going to be convivial. She reached me, pulled her notebook from her pocket, and slid a pen out from between the pages. Her radio crackled, codes being called in between all the static. All business.

  “Raines.”

  That was her greeting, delivered gruff. I’d kind of expected more, given the rudeness of the hour.

  “Pena.”

  “Where were you a couple hours ago?”

  I looked out over the lake, which was little more than a large pool of undulating ink in the predawn darkness. The sun wouldn’t be up for another hour or so. “What happened over there?”

  Marta’s dark, almond-shaped eyes went flat, her thin lips pursed. “Answer the question, please.”

  “Until about twenty minutes ago, I was in bed. Why?”

  “Alone?” she pressed.

  Our eyes held until I got tired of holding it and let her have it. “Yep. Had I known I’d need an alibi, I’d have cruised by the bars and picked up a fella.”

  “Cut the crap, Cass. This is official business.”

  “That I’m getting from the mad cop face. Who died?”

  “You’re saying you don’t know?”

  “Marta, I was fast asleep in my own bed, alone, in answer to your earlier question, less than a half hour ago. Now I’m here, fast awake, waiting for you to tell me what the hell happened. If you really can’t take my word for it, I have a houseguest sleeping in my spare room who’s honest as the day is long, though she’s acting a little wiggy at the moment. She can vouch for me. She’s right over there in the car.”

  She glanced toward the lot, then let it go. “So you just happened to catch wind of this and headed right down here?”

  “Catch wind of what?”

  She shook her head. “Me first.”

  “Okay, I got a call.”

  “From?”

  Now it was my turn to shake my head. “Not till I know what we’re talking about.”
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  She slammed her notebook closed, stowed the pen away. “Someone reported a male trespasser on Ayers’s boat. Normally, this wouldn’t be any of my business, seeing as there’s no body, but the second I heard it was Ayers’s boat, I headed over here. The boat has been tossed. On the uniforms’ canvass, they found a witness who reported seeing a guy hanging around, watching the place. He also says he found a lone woman cop, fitting your description, hanging around a couple of days ago, asking questions. Mary Meachum.” Marta smirked and shook her head. “Who will you be next, Lois Lane? Not surprisingly, my witness thinks the two sightings might be related.”

  I eyed the dock, spying Reese in the center of the action like a little magpie flitting from ear to ear. I looked around for Cap, but he’d gone. “Eldon Reese?”

  “Well, that confirms it.”

  “I took a quick look around, but left everything as I found it. And I never said I was a cop, he just assumed. I can pull out cop face, too, you know.”

  Marta studied me closely. She was listening to what I was saying, but she was also listening to what I didn’t say. She was also analyzing my body language, looking for signs of evasion, untruthfulness, nerves—“Cop 101.” And she knew me. I could only imagine how much more heat she’d apply to the look if she was dealing with your ordinary off-the-street suspect.

  “But that was early Monday, not today,” I added. “And I haven’t been anywhere near here since the day before yesterday. Last night, I had beans and rice for dinner around seven-thirty, got schooled for being a shitty friend, then I went to bed. You have a description on the male trespasser?” I had a sinking feeling this was where Jung came into the picture. “Is anything missing?”

  Marta scowled. “Description matches Jung Byson, that weirdo you bugged me about.”

  “What reason would Jung have to toss his friend’s boat?”

  “I don’t know because I don’t know him, but Reese puts him here, ‘skulking around,’ as he put it. Now I need to know where to put hands on him.”

  “I don’t know where he is or how to contact him.”

  Marta’s eyes dove in again. She took a moment. “If this is you doing your ‘shadowy PI stuff,’ I swear . . .”

  Shadowy PI stuff? It was a dig, and from her defiant expression, it looked as though she’d meant it as such, but no good would come of getting heated over it. I needed to keep the lines of communication open and get Marta working with me, instead of against me.

  “I don’t know where he is. I did not trash that boat. I don’t think Jung did, either.”

  She tapped the notebook against her thigh. Nervous energy. “He called you. Told you to get down here, right? He’s up to his neck in this. You know how I know? Because suddenly he’s nowhere he’s supposed to be. I sent uniforms to his place. He’s not there. He works at a diner, but he isn’t there, either. And now, conveniently, you’re saying you have no idea where he could be.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.” I scanned the slips. “Did you call Tim’s family? Did they show up?” All I saw milling around were cops and a few stunned-looking people who appeared to have stumbled off their own boats to take a closer look at the ruckus. “Maybe his concerned brother would have reason to break in and take a look around.”

  Marta groaned. “You’re exasperating, you know that? Get off my crime scene.”

  “Your crime scene? It’s a B and E. Or have you branched out from homicide?”

  Marta looked like she hadn’t slept in days. The bags under her eyes were pronounced. It was the job, I knew. If you did it well, it left you very little in the tank. She heaved out an exhausted breath. “Second case you’ve horned in on, in as many months. What gives?”

  “I didn’t go looking for it, it came to me. But something smells fishy here, and I don’t mean that literally. Somebody was looking for something tonight. That doesn’t get you thinking?” I straightened some, bracing, realizing I was about to step out on ice as thin as fairy glass. “I think you closed too early, based on misinformation.”

  The cop face was back, and funny thing was, I couldn’t blame her. If someone had just questioned my handling of a case, second-guessed the way I’d played it, I’d have taken offense, too.

  “The Ayers family is used to getting things their way, so they applied pressure,” I said, treading lightly.

  “You’ve got it all figured out, that it?”

  “Not by half.”

  “The boat got broken into because this marina’s got piss-poor security my ten-year-old could get around in his sleep,” Marta said. “Your pal Byson, for whatever reason, took that as an open invitation to walk off with whatever he wanted when no one was looking. That’s what I’m going with.”

  “It wasn’t Jung . . . and what’s with the ‘when no one was looking’? Eldon Reese is always looking. The little pissant’s looking now. That’s his problem. That’s the whole marina’s problem. Everybody over there’s minding somebody else’s business.”

  Marta took a step forward, leaned in. “It’s Byson, or at least you think it might be. That’s why you’re standing here and blowing smoke up my ass until you have a chance to talk to him yourself. It’s what you do.”

  “What do you mean that’s what I do? Since when—”

  Marta threw her hands up. “It’s what you do. You’re like a one-woman stray-dog rescue society.”

  I stared at her, mystified, my temper flaring. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Marta sighed. She looked done-in, but after the last crack, I’d lost some of the sympathy I had for her. “Look,” she said, “this isn’t personal. I know you’re solid, a thorn in my side, but solid. Still, I’ve got a job to do and Byson’s on my radar.”

  “And I’m back to the lack of a dead body on that boat,” I said. “Where do you fit in all this? It’s a boat trespass, or did I miss a step?”

  Marta didn’t answer. She just stood there, fuming. And I got it. “Oh, wait. I get it now. It’s the Ayerses. That’s why you’re here. No one’s dead, but the boat’s got their name on it, so you’re hovering over this whole thing so nothing blows back their way, that it?”

  “I’m doing my job,” Marta growled.

  “I know,” I said. “And I, for one, appreciate it, but c’mon. Think about this. Things are not adding up—things that have nothing to do with Jung.”

  Marta stowed her notebook away and fastened her jacket, a signal she wanted to end our conversation. “They add up just fine from where I’m standing.”

  “Then you know Tim had an argument with a guy named Vince Darby a few days before Tim died, but when I asked Darby about that, he flatly denied it. Also, a witness to that argument says Darby boarded one of those boats over there, one with a blue canopy. If he’s living out here, and knew Tim, don’t you think he’s worth at least talking to?” I gestured toward the slips. Marta turned to look. “Being so close, he’d certainly have no problem getting around security cameras.”

  “And you’ve got evidence that puts him on the boat when Ayers fell off it?” she asked.

  I paused. She knew I didn’t. I knew I didn’t.

  “See? Evidence gets me an arrest. Evidence I can build a case on and hand off to the DA. Anything less isn’t good enough.”

  “You had no problem taking Stephen Ayers’s word as evidence. He bold-faced lied to your face. None of Tim’s meds were for depression, bipolar disorder, or anything like that. No one I’ve talked to puts him under a psychiatrist’s care.”

  “He took the meds from his own cabinet.”

  “The meds from his cabinet were in his system. You don’t know how they got there. What if Stephen made the whole crazy-brother thing up, knowing Cap would repeat it and that it’d stick? Hell, Cap’s probably sneaking around here somewhere right now, telling everybody again what a sick puppy Tim was.”

  “So I have somebody who told me one thing, you have someone else who tells you different. Again, where’s the proof? Because I have a dead guy and no witnes
ses.” She waited. “Go on. Show me and I’ll reopen this case so fast, it’ll make your head spin.” Marta held her hand out, wiggled her fingers. “Well?” She dropped her hand. “Didn’t think so. It’s done. Walk away now.”

  “It is not done. Did you know Tim offered a friend financing for a club, then didn’t come through? People have killed for less, and you and I both know it. Did you know Tim was cut off from his inheritance, by his brother? He had to sell his insurance policy in some weird arrangement just to get by. And where exactly was Stephen the night Tim died? What lie did he tell you? I’d gladly ask him, but he’s avoiding me like the plague, hiding behind his creepy lawyer.” I eyed the slips again, half expecting to see Felton crouching behind a bush.

  We were getting loud, and people were paying attention. I was not only walking on thin ice, I was ice-skating on it, backward and with flourish. The look on Marta’s face was enough to freeze a person’s intestines, but I had a job to do, too. Granted, it wasn’t one I initially wanted, but I had it now.

  “No witnesses, no prints, nothing on surveillance, and the victim is half in the bag,” she said, ticking off the points on her fingers. “Oh, yeah, and he was dying, which might just screw with your head a tiny little bit. The Ayers case is a slam dunk, and I want you out of my hair. I’ve got actual homicides stacked on my desk right now with actual killers attached to them. I don’t have to go around inventing murders.”

  I should have stopped, but couldn’t. “Nobody wipes their prints off their own stuff before they nose-dive into the lake, they just don’t.”

  Marta opened her mouth to speak. I raised my hand to stop her. “He was not OCD. I got that from someone who’d know. But for the sake of argument, let’s say he was. He could have obsessively wiped away his prints from the cabin, but he couldn’t have gotten up and over the side without leaving at least one smudge behind.”

  “It was a monsoon that night,” Marta said.

  “Not one smudge, Marta? That reeks, and you damn well know it.”