Close to the Broken Hearted

by Michael Hiebert

  Chris had brought down a cocaine deal that went bad for the people involved, and he did it pretty near all by himself (although a lot of it happened by utter good fortune) and seized over one and a half million dollars’ worth of coke off the street, according to the values the feds in Mobile came back with.

  Stories of exactly what happened that night tended to vary. Some said the deal was in progress, some said Chris caught them by surprise as they were leaving their hotel room with the drugs to make the deal. Some said both they and Chris caught each other by surprise. There were stories involving civilian passersby getting involved and helping Chris take down the gang. Some reports said Chris was responsible for two of the men. Chris said that he nabbed all four men, and had planned his entire takedown well ahead of time. At any rate, four men did go into custody. Ethan was just happy Chris was still alive.

  What that amount of drugs had been doing passing through Alvin was anybody’s guess. Chris only got wind of it from a last-minute tip. Then he did a one-man stakeout, which Leah thought was incredibly irresponsible of him, not bringing her into the loop. He could’ve easily been killed. Drug dealers don’t carry around product worth millions of dollars without also carrying around weapons.

  But it all worked out in the end. Chris rounded up the two or four men (depending on who you listened to) and got the coke. He even made all the papers right across the state and, for five or six days, Alvin was actually put on the map, so to speak.

  Leah found it funny that she could solve crimes of girls going missing and turning up murdered and raped and that didn’t make nothing but the local news, but when cocaine was involved, everyone was suddenly interested.

  Anyway, the bust happened, oh, must be going on nine or ten months or so ago now, and Chris seemed to have been resting on his laurels ever since. It wasn’t that he didn’t do anything; it was just that his work lacked its usual dedication, commitment, and luster. If it stayed like this much longer, Leah was going to have to say something to Ethan about it. She hoped Chris would figure it out and work things through on his own, though. She hated going above people’s heads, or behind their backs, or around any other body part. It all just sounded so sneaky.

  Chris did know his stuff, and he was dead on with a bull’s-eye when Leah arrived at Sylvie’s. Miss Sylvie was truly messed up by what had happened to her cat. “Thank God you got here so fast,” she said, opening the door before Leah was even fully out of her car. “I didn’t know what to do. The cat—she’s . . .”

  Leah tried to calm her down. “It’s okay, honey. I’ll take care of it.” Sylvie let Leah into the house. She had the baby on her shoulder. The baby was awake but quiet. The moment Leah was inside with the door closed and locked behind her, Sylvie started pacing the floor, rubbing the baby’s back. Leah got the impression she’d been doing this ever since calling the station.

  “Where’s the cat?” Leah asked.

  “Right outside the back door.”

  Opening the door, Leah found the animal lying lifeless right on the back step. It looked as though it just fell over and died. Putting on blue latex gloves, she squatted down and, touching the body as little as possible, turned it different ways looking for any sort of mark that might indicate a cause of death. She expected to find some blood somewhere. Maybe the cat caught itself on some barbed wire or a piece of sharp metal. God knew there was enough garbage lying around this backyard for anything to kill itself on if it tried hard enough.

  But there was nothing. No puncture wounds. No blood. Not a mark on its body. Rigor mortis had begun setting in, so the body was stiff. Leah didn’t have the background needed to discern any time frame as to when death might have occurred.

  But the lack of obvious means of death niggled at the back of her mind. Something killed this cat. Normally, the first thing Leah would suspect would be a coyote. But if it had been a coyote, there’d be no body left here for Leah to be examining. Whatever it was that took this animal’s life did so without leaving a single mark. Not even a scar. And, like Sylvie told Chris on the phone, it wasn’t like Snowflake was old. She wasn’t even a year yet, by Leah’s calculations.

  Something wasn’t right. Leah could feel it. She hated that feeling, that gut feeling she got all the time when something “wasn’t right.” Her own daddy and Police Chief Montgomery always said it separated the good detectives from the bad ones. She hated it because it meant she had to follow it, even though, rationally, she knew it was crazy.

  But she wouldn’t be a good detective if she didn’t. So, turning around, she started back for her car.

  “What’re you doin’?” Sylvie asked, a slight panic in her voice. Leah suspected she thought Leah might just be leaving her alone again to have to deal with the dead cat by herself.

  “I left my radio in the car. I’m going to call Chris. I want him to come out here, too.”

  “So you suspect somethin’s up?”

  Leah looked into Sylvie’s eyes, searching them for any emotion. It was uncanny how much she could feel that five-year-old girl staring back at her. “I don’t know what I suspect, Sylvie. I just don’t want to leave any stone unturned is all.”

  Leah got into her car and radioed Chris back at the station, telling him to come by Sylvie’s and bring the cruiser with the CSI kit in the trunk. Even though she could tell he was trying to contain it, Chris couldn’t help cracking up. “Backup?” he asked, his laughter breaking up a bit over the radio. “For a dead cat?”

  She steeled her voice and said loudly, “Chris. Get your ass over here, now.”

  That got rid of his giggles but fast. “I’m comin’,” was his only reply.

  When Leah returned to the backyard, Sylvie was standing in the frame of the back door, purposely looking anywhere but down where the cat was lying basically at her feet. She still held the baby in her arms, but Leah was quite sure the baby had fallen asleep.

  “You think same as I do, don’t ya?” Sylvie said, whispering now, so as not to wake her daughter. “That someone killed Snowflake? That someone came into my yard and killed my poor kitty?” The poor girl was on the brink of breaking down. Leah didn’t need that right now.

  “I don’t reckon I know what I think right now, Sylvie. I just reckon we gotta check this out as thoroughly as possible. Now I promised you I’d take your calls seriously, so I’m takin’ this one as seriously as I can. That’s why I called for Chris, understand? That’s the only reason. Don’t go readin’ anythin’ into this that ain’t there.”

  “You talk to Preacher Eli yet?”

  That was a question Leah had hoped Sylvie wouldn’t ask. “Not yet.”

  “How come? You promised me that you would do that, too. He’s been back in town over a week now, and here my cat winds up dead on my back porch. I’d say that’s a mite coincidental, wouldn’t you?”

  “Now, Sylvie, I don’t think Eli killed your cat.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because what would his motive be?”

  “Just that he likes killin’ things smaller than him. He killed my baby brother.”

  Leah rubbed her eyes in exhaustion. She hoped Chris wasn’t taking his time getting here. The last thing she wanted was to keep up this line of conversation with Sylvie any longer than she had to. “I will go talk to Eli Brown tomorrow. Hell, I’ll go do it today if we get done here in time. You have my word.”

  “I’ve had your word before. It’s suddenly not meanin’ so much no more.”

  Wow. The girl knew how to make things sting, that was for certain. But guilt trips were something Leah was used to. She had two kids at home and one was a fifteen-year-old daughter who made Sylvie look like a rank amateur when it came to laying on the guilt.

  “My word is my word, Sylvie. You take it any way you like. Folks around town know what it’s worth. Main thing is that I know what it’s worth.”

  Fifteen minutes later Chris showed up, but the time seemed to go by so slowly that it could’ve been hours. He took one look at
Snowflake on the porch out back and said, “Hmm. Dead cat. Yep. Dead.” Then he saw the look in Leah’s eyes and his demeanor instantly changed. For the rest of the time he spent there, he was very professional and polite to Miss Sylvie, which made Leah quite happy. If he hadn’t gotten rid of the attitude, she was ready to tear a side off him something fierce when they got back to the station. Leah could shout louder than Chris could. Besides, she had seniority. And her pa and Ethan Montgomery went way back. When it came right down to it, it was exactly like they said: Blood was thicker than water. And Ethan and her pa had been close enough to consider each other blood. You didn’t turn your back on blood.

  And technically, Leah outclassed Chris, although it was only a formality. Ethan Montgomery had made her detective as a favor to her pa before he died, so that the station would be able to pay Leah more money in order to help raise her family. Then it became doubly important when she lost Billy.

  Leah was just happy none of this mattered, as Chris seemed to come around now that he had arrived on the scene.

  He searched the cat’s body more closely than Leah had by using the various tools in the CSI kit and eventually gave up establishing a cause of death. It definitely wasn’t anything external. It seemed like the cat had just simply dropped dead. “Maybe it had a heart attack?” he speculated.

  “The cat was barely a year old,” Leah said. “Seems a bit farfetched to me.”

  “Well, somethin’ might of scared it to death,” Chris said. “But then, it’s s’posed to have nine lives.” He smiled at Leah, who didn’t smile back. Chris’s smile disappeared immediately. “Sorry, that was just a little joke to lighten the mood.”

  “We can use a little less lightenin’, thanks,” Leah replied.

  Pulling the camera from the CSI kit, Chris took pictures of the body from all the different angles, exactly as he would a real human body at a real crime scene. Good, thought Leah. Now he at least looks like he’s taking this seriously.

  When he was finished taking pictures, he put the camera back in the case. “Well,” he asked, “what do you want me to do with the cat now? I’ve pretty much done all I can.”

  “Bag it, I guess,” Leah said. “Give it to Norm in the morning. He can probably tell us how it died and give us a rough time of death.”

  Chris looked up at her. “Seriously? You want me to get the coroner to give your dead cat an autopsy?”

  Leah came in close and lowered her voice so Sylvie wouldn’t hear. “I want to set this girl’s mind at ease, Chris, and if that takes pulling some strings and getting Norman Crabtree to take a few minutes out of his day to examine this here body? Then, yes. That’s exactly what I’m sayin’.”

  Chris just shook his head. “I think you’re almost as crazy as she is.”

  “Chris, what if someone did do somethin’ to this cat? I mean it didn’t die of old age. There’s no indication a coon or a coyote got it. Somethin’ killed it, and we can’t tell what after an hour of examinin’ it? And you don’t find that odd?”

  “I reckon you’ve been readin’ too many detective novels.”

  “I reckon you’ve been spendin’ too much time behind your desk doin’ too many crosswords.”

  With a huge sigh, Chris reached his gloved hand into the CSI kit and pulled out a bag big enough for the cat’s body to go into. “Bagging the cat,” he announced. “But I’m gonna have one problem.”

  “What’s that?” Leah asked.

  “I’m not really sure how I’m gonna attach the toe tag.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Most nights when Sylvie suffered “incidents” she had trouble sleeping.

  Tonight, she lay in bed with thoughts circling like a kaleidoscope inside her head. This happened often. Usually, it was always the same thoughts; she’d go through different parts of the past, trying to make sense of them. But making sense of some things was impossible. Sylvie knew that, but she couldn’t do anything to stop the endless spinning. Sleep would come eventually, but before it did, she would have to succumb to the pain of reliving the memories of her childhood.

  For a long while, she’d known she wasn’t completely normal. When she saw her baby brother murdered that day something broke inside of her. Sylvie remembered it all so clearly: like a photograph, only one that went forward and backward in time with different pictures developing on it.

  She’d known something inside her wasn’t right back then, but she managed to hide a lot of it. After the initial shock wore off, and everyone grieved for Caleb, her folks appeared to somehow move on with their lives. It seemed they thought Sylvie had, too. The first indication her pa got that something was truly wrong with his daughter didn’t actually happen until she was twelve. Until then, she’d done a good job of hiding her depression and her paranoia from the world. Sylvie would hear her folks refer to her as “a kid who likes to spend a lot of time in her room” and “someone who likes to go on long walks, alone.”

  That was back when she would still leave the house by herself. Now she couldn’t imagine going on even a short walk alone.

  But in her childhood, Sylvie helped around the house the way she was expected to, lending Mother a hand with cleaning, and making supper while her pa worked out on the farm.

  “Can you wipe the dishes, hon?” Mother asked one particular night when Sylvie had been brooding. She brooded a lot, although much of the time she had no idea what she brooded over.

  “Yes, Mother,” Sylvie said.

  With each wipe of a dish, she felt the thoughts of Caleb grow slightly more distant. Doing anything had a way of pushing the bad thoughts a little farther back.

  “Is there anything else for me to do?” Sylvie asked when she was finished, hoping the answer would be yes.

  “No, that’s fine. Thank you. You really are a good little girl,” Mother had said.

  But Sylvie’s motives weren’t as selfless as Mother believed. She would have done anything to take even a tiny bit of those bad feelings away.

  After the initial incident, it had taken Sylvie’s pa a lot longer than her ma to get over Caleb’s death. Sylvie would hear him crying some nights after everyone had gone to bed. She knew he was in his own bed being rocked gently by Mother, who was telling him that everything was going to be all right, and that Caleb was with the angels now.

  “God called him early,” she heard her tell him once. “He had plans for our little boy. We just don’t understand them.”

  Sylvie would never understand plans from God that involved a three-year-old being shot all over her kitchen during supper. Especially such a happy three-year-old like her baby brother.

  And that was how Sylvie remembered Caleb: happy. Maybe time had painted her memories, but Sylvie could not remember a time when little Caleb wasn’t the perfect little brother.

  Then Preacher Eli killed him.

  Time is peculiar. It does change things.

  Sylvie had come to understand this.

  But she had hated Preacher Eli since that day. That thing hadn’t changed. Time had left that one all alone.

  And Sylvie had never been happy since that day. That was another thing that hadn’t changed.

  Not even when the baby was born. She should’ve been happy. It was her baby. But, somehow, Preacher Eli stole that, too.

  Yet, before she was twelve, nobody really knew how much of a mess the inside of Sylvie Carson’s head truly was.

  Then came the day she saw her pa butcher the hog.

  It was just before Easter, and Sylvie was coming back from one of her walks. She’d been out through their fields, past the horses and cattle, and well into the woods, which were full of mostly oak and birch. She remembered it like it was yesterday, but then she remembered every day of any importance in her life like it happened yesterday. It was that damn time-traveling photograph capable of developing a picture of anything in her past. The pictures were almost always ones she didn’t want to see. But she couldn’t control them. They just popped into her mind.

  The
morning had been wet and the grass full of dew. She had left for her walk around ten o’clock, just as the sky was beginning to clear. As usual, she walked to get away from everything. Mainly the farmhouse. Because getting away from the farmhouse was like getting away from the source of all the badness. It was like walking away from the tangled mess of nerves that her mind had become.

  As she walked, she tried desperately to keep her thoughts clear—to just be in the moment with nature. She had found that was the key to feeling normal: to have no thoughts. Because without thoughts, you could have no feelings. Some days were less successful than others. Some days she got completely lost in her walks, and ended up deep in the forest when she realized the sun was falling and she’d better head for home.

  This particular day, her thoughts refused to stop circling like sharks around a rowboat and, after an hour or so of plodding through the wet spring woods, she decided to head back and see if Mother might have some work for her to do that might take her mind to other places. Lately, Sylvie had started to realize just how much Caleb’s death had and continued to affect her, and she was beginning to see how much different it made her from other kids.

  Sometimes the difference scared her. Sometimes it made her think thoughts that scared her even more. Thoughts of joining Caleb and his angels.

  Looking back now, she wondered how she ever managed to make it through all that time without something like that ever happening. Especially given the years she would soon face alone. With absolutely nobody.

  The sun was out when she made it clear of the tree line and she slipped through the fence into the cattle field. The day had grown warm, and the dew no longer clung to the grass. She climbed over the horse fences, giving Willow, her favorite of the six horses they kept, a quick pat down before continuing to the other side of the field to the barn where her pa was.