An Arm and a Leg

by Olive Balla

  “Blinquet’s calling the brother’s death accidental. He thinks the sister claims it was murder to make it look like she’s being targeted. Like she’s the victim of some nefarious plot. He’s clamped down on this like a crazed bulldog.”

  “If she did make all this up, wouldn’t it make more sense for her to get rid of the leg before setting the fire? And wouldn’t she leave the dead bird and chalk threat on the porch to back up that story? It’s a good thing the inquest verified her account of her brother’s shooting or someone would be charging her with that as well.”

  “Blinquet figures she forgot about the leg. And you know as well as I do, criminals often make stupid mistakes. Most of them are not real bright.”

  “Yeah, but she’s not stupid. And she’s no killer. She’s an intelligent, capable woman.”

  “Well, well, listen to you. Tell me before you break into poetry and I’ll dig out a tissue.”

  “I’m serious, Ted. Life has dealt Frankie O’Neil more than her share of body blows. She’s tough, I’ll give her that, but she’s also bull-headed. I think she’s in way over her head.”

  “You’ve fallen for her.” Ted chuckled. “You do know that Karla has run through all her single female friends trying to fix you up, right? And now here’s the take-em-or-leave-em bachelor Nick Rollins talking like a love-struck kid. And without Karla’s help? She’ll be ticked.”

  Nick’s face grew warm. He wished he could think of an appropriately acid comeback, but his mind teemed with images of Frankie smiling at him over her salad at Kate’s. Frankie with the miss-matched eyes and the deviated septum that made her little nose sit a bit crooked on her face.

  “Need I remind you,” Ted was saying, “that you’ve been wrong about women before?”

  “One woman. I was wrong about one woman.”

  “Yeah, and it nearly got you killed.”

  “Yeah, yeah, and if you hadn’t come along when you did, I’d have bled to death—as you seem to never tire of reminding me.”

  “And it left you with a permanent limp.”

  “Your concern for my welfare is duly noted. Listen, you told me I could stay at your place if I ever needed to. Does that invitation still stand?”

  “Sure, when are you coming?”

  “I won’t get to your place until later this afternoon,” Nick said. “I’m hoping the neighbor knows something.”

  “Let me know what you learn…the Captain’s pressing me for details.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Lisette will be thrilled to see you. You know you’re her favorite adult male in the world.”

  Nick chuckled. “That’s because I always bring her treats.”

  “No, that’s because you’re a terrific godfather. I’ll call Karla and let her know you’re finally taking us up on our invitation.”

  Nick hung up the phone and sat back. An old woman’s leg in Frankie’s freezer? What in God’s name was that about? Had he been so far off base about her? He’d brushed up against some pretty cold-hearted people, both as an MP in the military and as a county deputy. Some of them had been perfectly capable of smiling warmly into your face while wielding the knife to disembowel you. But Frankie O’Neil?

  Nick dialed another number into his phone and Deputy Pritney answered after a couple of rings.

  “Are you busy?” he said.

  “Not really. Served Tom Jasko his divorce papers this morning, so there’s nothing else pressing. What’s up?”

  “I need you to do some digging for me.”

  “Is this about that O’Neil thing?” Pritney said.

  “Yeah, it is. I need you to find out everything you can about the Cottonwood Hospital in Albuquerque.”

  “You want me to work on something outside our jurisdiction?”

  “I think it’s connected to our case.”

  “What kinds of things are you looking for?”

  “Backgrounds on all the administrators and staff. Anything you can learn about the operation.”

  “That’s going to take some time,” Pritney said. “I hope you’re not in a hurry.”

  “Actually, I am. I’d do it myself, but I’m going to look for Miss O’Neil.”

  “Why don’t you just call her?”

  “I’ve tried. She’s on the horn four, five times a day. Suddenly she stops calling and no one’s seen her for a while. Something’s up.”

  “It’s an APD issue now,” Pritney said. “Besides, she’s a suspect in an arson investigation.”

  “I never knew you to be so territorial.”

  “It just seems like you talk about her a lot. Your mind’s not on your other work, that’s all.”

  “By the way, when were you going to tell me about the leg in her freezer?”

  Pritney paused a couple of beats. “I haven’t seen you long enough to give you an update for the past few days. But I was going to—”

  “What’s going on, Judy?”

  During the two or three years they’d worked together, Nick had never seen Pritney as keyed up as she’d been over the past few weeks. She’d developed a tightness around her eyes and mouth that gave her face a sharp, grim look. More than once, she’d quickly hung up her phone when he walked into the office and been evasive when he asked about the calls.

  Pritney breathed into the phone, the resulting plosive loud in his ear. “It’s just that I’ve been under a lot of pressure lately. My grandmother’s sick and I’m the only family she has left.”

  “Want to talk?”

  “Nothing you can do about my situation. But it seems to me that you’ve put more time into this O’Neil shooting than you should. Especially since there isn’t any new evidence to justify it.”

  “There are too many things happening to the sister. This whole thing smells. Are you going to help or not?”

  “I’ll do whatever I can. Where are you?”

  “I’m going to stay in Albuquerque for a while. I’m taking some personal days. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Pritney didn’t respond.

  Nick hung up and started his engine.

  ****

  The absence of odor meant Frankie’s cistern companion had died within the past twenty-four hours, give or take. And the cool, dry, ambient temperature in the belowground tank served as an additional bonus. At least she wouldn’t have to deal with the smell of rotting human flesh. It also meant the body had not decomposed to the point of being useless for her purpose.

  With her hands against the corpse’s torso, Frankie half pushed, half rolled the body over to the side of the cistern. Other than a bit of stiffness from remaining rigor, the body rolled easily. Gratitude, horror, and fear formed a slurry in her stomach. She swallowed hard.

  Squatting beside the corpse, she gripped its shoulders. After several minutes of struggling, she managed to prop the body into a sitting position against the cistern wall. She put one hand on each shoulder and pushed downward in an effort to wedge the body tightly into place.

  Long hair brushed Frankie’s hands and something hard and sharp scraped against her arm. Hoping for anything that might prove useful, she ran her fingers through the thick tresses. Her fingers sank into a concave area and shards of bone stabbed her fingertips. Hair wrapped like tentacles around her searching fingers. She swallowed the gorge that shot up into her throat.

  Bracing the head against the palm of one hand, she slowly ran her other hand around it until her fingers made contact with a metallic object. She pulled the thing free, and ran her fingers over its outline.

  Made of what felt like metal, rays radiated out of a solid center in a starburst pattern. An image flashed across her mind’s eye of Mina in Dr. Bellamy’s office self-consciously touching her heavy barrettes.

  Frankie slid the barrette into her pants pocket. She hugged Mina’s body, sobbed and rocked back and forth. “I’m so sorry,” she said over and over.

  Enough. It was Uncle Mike’s drill sergeant voice.

  “Don’t you understand? I’m the
reason she’s here. I’m the reason she’s dead.”

  You don’t know that. But you do owe it to her to get out of here and tell someone.

  “That’s easy for you to say.” Frankie gritted her teeth. “If you weren’t already dead, you’d know there’s no way out of here.”

  Then make a way. Use what’s at hand, like I taught you.

  For several minutes Frankie considered her uncle’s words. The only thing at hand was a corpse. Then, like light dawning in the East, she understood what he’d meant.

  Again, she propped Mina’s body up against the cistern wall. When satisfied with its position, she stood. “Help me do this.”

  But attempt after attempt to use the body for a ladder failed. When Frankie put one foot onto a shoulder, the weight of the head either pulled the body forward, or Frankie’s weight on the shoulder would make it angle downward toward the floor and pull the body over onto its side.

  For the next several minutes she mulled over possible solutions. Finally, she pulled Mina’s body away from the wall and turned it onto its stomach. Then she doubled the body so it rested on folded knees. In this position the nurse’s body would add perhaps sixteen to eighteen inches to her reach.

  She stepped onto the nurse’s back and ran her hands up the corrugated metal wall, straining to reach as high as she could. But her fingers encountered only the uninterrupted near-flatness of the cistern’s dome.

  Since she had no clue as to the opening’s location, she had to move Mina’s body around the perimeter of the cistern several times. Each time, she dragged the corpse a few inches to her left, stood tiptoe on bent back, and felt for the cistern opening.

  With each re-location of the body, Frankie’s muscles objected more and more strenuously. She grew alarmed at how all the stooping, tugging, and pulling on the dead weight of Mina’s body was sapping her strength.

  Her throat constricted. She could die in this dark hole.

  “Stop it. You can do this…” Her voice had become an unrecognizable whine, but its echo somehow strengthened her, bolstered her determination. She began to sing the words of a childhood song, her voice growing in strength until she was virtually shouting the words, “The wheels on the bus go round and round, round and round…”

  Again she stepped onto Mina’s folded body. This time her outstretched fingers encountered the inside of the cistern’s opening sleeve. With a burst of renewed energy, she stood on her tiptoes and stretched. Her fingertips touched the lid, but just barely.

  After several jumps that ended in her sliding off Mina’s back and onto the floor, she managed to dislodge the cover from its sleeve. The metal set up a clanging reverberation as it bounced off the cistern’s rooftop and fell to the ground.

  Exhausted, Frankie crumpled to the cistern floor beside Mina’s body and looked up.

  The starlit evening sky told her she’d been in the cistern for at least four or five hours. So where was Baby Face? How long could it possibly take him to talk to Dr. Bellamy? Either something had happened to him, or he was making good on his promise to leave her in the cistern for a couple of days.

  Frankie rested, willing her body to relax, knowing her next move would require every ounce of strength she could muster. She removed her tennis shoes and thick cotton socks, replaced the shoes on her feet and slid the socks onto her hands like gloves.

  “Okay Mina. Let’s try again.”

  Again Frankie stepped onto the corpse. All too aware that she had only enough strength left for a couple of tries, she launched herself off the nurse’s back.

  This time she cleared the opening by just enough to hook her fingers over the rim. With the socks offering some protection for her fingers and the horizontally corrugated metal walls offering toeholds, she walked up the cistern walls. The muscles of her arms quivering from the strain, she finally managed to pull herself up and through the opening before collapsing onto the ground.

  Every breath a ragged gasp, her heart hammered so it seemed ready to jump through her ribcage. Instinct screamed for her to get going, to escape. But her tortured muscles twitched and jerked so violently, she couldn’t even stand.

  Finally, she managed to get to her feet and stumble toward her car on legs that felt like gummy worms that had been left in the sun in July. But she’d only taken a couple of steps when something hit the side of her head. Her knees gave way, and she sank to the ground.

  “Thanks for saving me the trouble of having to haul your skinny ass out of that cistern,” she heard Baby Face say as everything went dark.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  When Frankie regained consciousness she was lying on her back. The inside of her mouth tasted like she’d been chewing on a handful of copper pennies. Her throat was dry and her eyes felt too big for their sockets. A continuous buzz hummed in her ears, as if a phalanx of worker bees had moved in. Her head throbbed with each heartbeat.

  With what seemed like an inordinate amount of effort, she lifted her head. But waves of vertiginous nausea caused her to drop her head back down. Tears sprang to her eyes as an evident head wound made contact with sharp, curled edges of cracked naugahyde covering the old hospital gurney upon which she lay. Salty drops rolled down the sides of her face, stinging when they came into contact with the scrapes she’d sustained in her fight with Baby Face.

  Padded leather straps at Frankie’s wrists and ankles held her tight, seriously inhibiting blood flow. She commanded her fingers to move, but had no way of knowing whether or not they responded.

  She tried to call out, but only a muffled moan made its way through something covering the lower part of her face. Duct tape? Panic pushed bile into her throat. Unable to open her mouth, she could choke to death on her own vomit.

  Frankie jerked against her bindings. The buckles rattled, but they’d been pulled so tightly, her range of motion could probably be measured in millimeters.

  She took a slow, shuddering breath, and let it out through her nose. Once her gut calmed a bit, she moved her gaze around the small, unfamiliar room.

  Paint the color of dried green peas peeled and flaked off the walls. Something dark had been spattered on one and then halfheartedly wiped off. About halfway up the discolored wall sat an oblong window of frosted glass crisscrossed by a reinforcing wire grid. Iron bars outside the window cast vertical shadows on the floor as bright morning or afternoon sunlight fought its way through the glass and metal barrier.

  How long had she been unconscious? One day? Two?

  The room’s only door had been fitted with a small window. Made of clear, wire-reinforced glass, the window’s position offered those outside the room the ability to observe whatever went on inside.

  The ceiling was of a type often found in schools and hospitals. It consisted of acoustical, mineral fiber squares, each patterned with tiny round holes and suspended in a metal grid. Frankie remembered a kid in middle school throwing pencils straight up like spears and sticking them into the same kind of ceiling.

  A cabinet with a sink and faucet ran along one wall. A soap dispenser flanked the sink on one side, a roll of paper towels lay on the other. The smells of mildew and disinfectant hung heavy in the air.

  “Hello, Beauty.”

  Frankie spun her head toward the sound. Too fast. Flashes of light went off behind her eyes and bile shot up into her throat.

  “Whoa,” the voice said. “Best to stay still for a while. You’ll be okay in a bit. I brought you some water.”

  A young man’s familiar face swam into Frankie’s field of vision. She recoiled at the smell of the same cologne she’d smelled in her house.

  “You don’t need to be afraid of me.” The young man stroked her hair. “I’ll take the tape off, but you can’t make any noise or we’ll both be in trouble.”

  Frankie nodded in agreement, and the man tugged the tape from her mouth. Even though he obviously made an effort to be gentle, the tape took flesh with it and left her lips raw and hurting.

  The young man lifted Frankie
’s head slightly and held a plastic, sipper-lidded water bottle to her mouth. As he bent forward, the sleeve of his blue chambray shirt rode up and exposed a silky blue ribbon knotted around his wrist. “You got yourself a bad concussion,” he said. “I can’t let you have too much water or you’ll get sick. Kind of swish it around in your mouth and let it trickle down your throat like.”

  “I’ve seen you before.” Frankie’s voice sounded raspy, like she’d been smoking for the past fifty years or so. “What’s your name?”

  “Mister Larry H. Littlefield, at your service.” Larry stepped back a bit and performed an awkward Sir Walter Raleigh bow.

  “You were there when my house burned.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve seen me a lot more’n that. I been going everywhere you went. Filled my car with gas at the pump next to the one you used. Opened an account at your bank while you were talking to a teller. I even said good morning to you while you shopped for clothes a couple of days ago, but you never spoke to me.” The young man moved his face close to Frankie’s. “It kind of made my stomach feel funny, you know, kind of like you were ignoring me. But then, I figured you were just being your lady self. Ladies don’t talk to strangers.”

  “Where are we?” Frankie said.

  Larry moved his hand in an arc. “This here is what’s left of the old hospital. It’s supposed to be torn down sometime or other, but Bellamy still uses it some.”

  “Are you the one who warned me about the fire?”

  “I am the very one.” Larry smiled beatifically.

  “Did you start it?”

  “It wasn’t me, I’d never hurt you. That was Mel.”

  “Mel?”

  “I figure it was him brought you here. You’ve seen him before, too. He was right there watching your house burn.”

  “Baby Face?”

  “Yup.” Larry shook his head. “I’ll say this about Mel, if there’s one thing he’s good at, it’s sneaking. I always said he could sneak away before his own shadow knew he was gone. I saw him coming down off your roof. I saw the flames through your picture window.”

  “He was on my roof?” Frankie frowned. For some reason her brain seemed to be working in slow motion. All her precautions and her security—all for nothing.