East of the Sun

by Trey R. Barker

  There’d been so much blood, and she’d been so far away, it would have been impossible for Jace to see a second set. “From what?”

  “Something sharper. Much more precise than a shank. Could be anything.”

  Jace thought. “So you’ve got a missing murder weapon?”

  Jakob nodded. “I prefer to think of it as unrecovered but basically you’re right. So what do we do about that?”

  “Lockdown.” Jace said it without hesitation but immediately saw the problem. “No. Lockdown announces to everyone something is going on. The murderer will assume it has to do with him. He’ll jettison that weapon and we’ll never find it.”

  A sturdy smile slipped over Jakob’s face and Jace found herself bathing in it. She liked this woman. Even with the vaguely condescending way the woman forced Jace to think situations through, Jace liked her. Jakob carried herself with absolute confidence and spoke the same way, but managed it without sounding arrogant. The strength in her jaw, a product of nothing more than genetics, seemed to advertise a self-assuredness that Jace had never felt in her entire life. This woman, Jace was sure, knew exactly where her path in life was and how to navigate it.

  She’s the antithesis of Mama.

  “Listen to me, Deputy Jace Salome. Only three people know about the murder weapon. Me, a lab rat, and you. No one else is going to know with the possible exception of Sheriff Bukowski, as much of a waste as that is.”

  Jace squirmed at the sentiment. “What about Von Holton?”

  When Jakob smiled, the warmth was gone, replaced by a predator’s leer. “When you talk with him tonight—”

  “I’m off tonight. And tomorrow.”

  “Well, then, next time you’re on. That bit of knowledge will keep. After all, I haven’t yet finished my report, have I?” She flashed her predator’s smile again and then it was gone. She stuck a stray bit of dark hair up under her knit cap. “So next time you talk to him, I want you to jam the murder weapon so far up his bazoo he tastes it.”

  “Uh . . . ‘bazoo,’ ma’am? I’m not familiar with that term.”

  “You oughta be, as much as he’s been putting it up yours.” The woman buzzed to be let inside the facility. “Oh, before I forget, this is for you.”

  She handed Jace the book. Techniques of Crime Scene Detection. “Barry Fisher wrote it. Good guy. Good book. Take your time with it. Get it back to me whenever.”

  “Wow. Uh . . . okay. Thank you, ma’am; I appreciate it.”

  “Well done, Deputy, well done.”

  When the door closed, Bibb’s voice slipped from the intercom speaker. “Making some friends, worm?”

  Jace laughed at the overhead speaker. “Damn it, Sarge, why are you still here?”

  “I could say overtime . . . but mostly it’s just to annoy you.”

  “Yeah . . . well . . . I guess your work here is done.”

  But as she drove home, the book between her legs, Jace smiled.

  CHAPTER 18

  That morning, Jace slept better than she’d thought she might.

  While she had gone through the ritual, it had lasted but a moment, just long enough for her to feel a sliver of victory before closing the door and locking the two deadbolts. She hadn’t gone into her second bedroom, painted with flyers, though she’d felt the pull in an almost primitive way. She’d resisted, had undressed and climbed into bed. She pretended she didn’t hear the flyers calling her with their schoolyard mockery. She pretended, too, that the dreams of the house on cinder blocks with broken walls and windows wouldn’t come for her.

  Those dreams, night after night, frequently made it difficult to sleep. But this morning, after her conversation with Major Jakob, she’d read a bit of the book, and then slept nearly five hours. When she woke, she lounged under the blanket for a bit, thinking she might get a few more minutes. Eventually, she realized that wakefulness was playing in her head like edgy free-form jazz. Finally it annoyed her out of bed and she filled the apartment with Frank Morgan’s sweet alto sax as she showered and dressed.

  Major Jakob wanted a suspect and Jace wanted to give her one, but she had no idea where to turn. With the other small investigations she’d done in the jail—thefts within a cell block, scammed phone cards, fights and rapes—there had always been something for her to follow. This time, everything had evaporated when Mercer had.

  She cracked a Dr Pepper and drank half of it, the fizz stinging her throat and making her eyes water pleasantly.

  If there was no evidence, what else was there? As she drank, her gaze fell to a prescription for antibiotics she’d had after a prisoner bit her during a wrestling match, and something in her brain clicked.

  Dr. Vernezobre had been adamant about Mercer as unrepentant killer. He’d said Mercer threatened to kill Wrubel, and while that might have been true, it was equally true that Dr. Vernezobre, late of Cuba and giving medical care to the poor of Zachary County, had been incorrect to the point of lying. Big Carol hadn’t been asleep nor had Mercer escaped medical.

  “So why’d you work so hard to convince us otherwise?”

  A quick call and half hour later they were in Rory’s Monte Carlo.

  After passing the park where Zachary City asked residents to put their old Christmas trees and Christmas garbage, Rory said, “Christmas pretty much gets funky after it’s over, don’t it? All the crap, I mean. Decorations and trees and lights. See, before Christmas, everything’s nostalgia and what you remember as a kid and everything. After, it’s just garbage and lots of trees without needles and tons of wrapping paper. Like Times Square after New Year’s.”

  Jace laughed. “Have you ever seen Times Square after New Year’s?”

  “Well . . . yeah . . . on TV and stuff.”

  “What I remember of Christmas is Denny’s. The rule was that I could play with anything Santa left out and whatever was in my stocking. But I couldn’t unwrap anything until after breakfast. Everybody had to get up and get dressed and then we’d go eat at Denny’s. So Christmas to me is pretty much the smell of eggs, overcooked bacon, coffee and pancakes, and drunks left over from the night before.”

  Rory looked at her. “Wow, and you think I’m the cynic? So where we going?”

  “I want to know why Dr. Vernezobre lied to us.” Jace laid it out quick.

  “He’s a helluva guy, Jace, biggest heart I’ve ever seen.” Rory spoke in sorrowful tones.

  “Yeah, but—”

  Rory held up a hand. “Yeah, I think he lied to us.”

  They headed toward The Flat, on the opposite side of Highway 80, and a world away from Zach City’s Garden District. The Flat lay on the south side of the rail line that sliced Zachary City in half like a ragged scar, and it was home to most of Zach City’s blood clubs. That blood both rained and reigned was as inevitable as the summer dust storms and every night, on a dance floor or in a bathroom or in a parking lot, someone bled. Frequently, they died. This area of town was steeped in violence. Though there were good places and good people who lived down here, the seductive odor of violence held absolute dominion, covering even the stink of cattle and oil.

  Violence wasn’t The Flat’s only attraction. People came for booze brewed in bathtubs hidden in basements, for drugs grown in Mexico or Afghanistan or sometimes the rural parts of Zachary County. They came, too, for the sex. A five-spot or the cost of a single room could easily score the entire breadth of human depravity: young and old, fat and thin, fetishes running from bugs underfoot to diapers on hips. It was a seething mass of humanity that Jace knew far better than she wanted. It was, at once, both the pinnacle and pit of those who called Zachary City home.

  Dr. Jesus Vernezobre’s office lay in the middle of The Flat, as though it had been dropped from a plane that had gone badly off course and shoved its cargo out in a blind panic. It was a glass-front building and looked as though in a previous life it had been a laundromat. The windows were dirty, streaked with lines of dust and liquid long since dried to a crusty stain. The door was open,
propped with a rock that had a picture of Jesus painted on it, and plywood nailed over a small window where Jace presumed there had once been glass.

  “What?” Rory shut the car off.

  “Nothing. Just doesn’t seem like the man I met.”

  “Don’t judge the cover by the book.”

  “Book by cover.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever. I’m saying, shitty office or not, this is where Dr. Vernezobre gets his pass to Heaven.”

  Standing on the cracked sidewalk, Jace saw Vernezobre through the front window. At just after one in the afternoon, the doctor was bent over an elderly woman while three other patients waited in plastic folding chairs. “Not much of a castle for a man of Cuban royalty.”

  “Rich people don’t need his medicine.” Rory shrugged. “ ’S what he tells me, anyway.”

  Inside, they waited until he was finished with the woman. She nodded while he spoke rapid-fire Spanish and then handed her a sandwich bag of pastel-green pills. Nervously, she glanced at Jace and Rory but Vernezobre calmed her with a few whispered words. The woman shoved the pills in her purse and hobbled out. The other visitors never stood to take their turn with the doctor. Instead, they kept their eyes on the portable TV or in one of the gossip magazines strewn about the place like dead party favors.

  “Ladies.” Vernezobre bowed. “Good afternoon. I am honored to see you. How can I be of service?”

  “We need to talk, sir,” Jace said.

  The doctor’s smile faltered but he immediately ushered them into the office.

  Rory swallowed. “Dr. Vernezobre, you know how much I respect you and your work.”

  “I do, and I thank you for all the help you’ve been. But, Miss Bogan, are friends to stand on ceremony? How can it be that, given the ground we’ve traversed together, you hesitate to ask something of me?”

  “Yes, sir. Well . . . uh—”

  “You lied to us.” Jace held his gaze.

  For a long moment, Vernezobre said nothing. His gaze hardened and moved between the two women. His jaw tightened and the muscles across the back of his shoulders tensed.

  “Doctor?”

  Then it was gone. Like the air from a tire, he deflated and sat heavily on his exam table. “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Rolling his shoulders, he spread his hands. “Who knows why I do anything, Miss Salome. I am an old man who’s spent his life helping those who couldn’t help themselves and—”

  “Doctor, please; I don’t need the pity party, just the truth.”

  “Jace, dial it down.”

  “Do not scold, Miss Bogan. In trying to help Francis, I have probably impeded your investigation. I was going to say that I’ve spent my life helping those who couldn’t help themselves and in Dr. Francis Wrubel, I have—had—a dear friend who could not help himself. In telling you what Dr. Cruz told me, I was attempting to ensure someone paid for Dr. Wrubel’s death.”

  “Even if it was the wrong man?” Rory asked.

  “I did not know it was the wrong man. When I spoke to you, I believed, as fervently as my dear mother believed that salvation lay through the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, that Mercer had killed my friend.”

  They were interrupted by a frail woman. Her face was as white as wedding lace though her hair was steel gray. She was in obvious distress and to her, Jace and Rory did not exist. She has too many other things to care about, Jace realized. When she came in, Rory and Jace were immediately forgotten to Dr. Vernezobre. He and the woman hovered together near the corner of the office and then the doctor went into a tall file cabinet near the window. He pulled out a sandwich bag similar to the one Jace had seen earlier except these pills were tiny and white and there were few of them. He handed the bag to the woman by wrapping her tiny hand in his giant ones. He then kissed the top of her head and she left. The entire transaction took less than thirty seconds and everything they needed to say had been said silently.

  The doctor watched her leave, then nodded to the other waiting patients. “Her daughter is a lovely woman. I did not expect her to survive so long.”

  “What’s she have?” Rory asked.

  “Heart disease. Quite advanced for someone so young. Three heart attacks so far, each worse than the previous. She will not survive a fourth.” His face was filled with some measure of hurt for his patients but also with a self-knowledge that there was nothing else he would do with his life.

  “What are the meds?” Jace asked.

  “Nitroglycerine. It will not help.”

  Jace frowned. “Then why?”

  “Because this is what I do, Miss Salome. Because I am a doctor and I tend to the sick. And because—for her daughter, those pills are the last thing she has. She believes they will save her and if that is what she needs for comfort at the end of her life, then that is what I will do.”

  “Will they save her?”

  He shook his head. “Her heart is too damaged. When the next comes, it will most likely kill her.”

  “False comfort?” Jace asked.

  “Perhaps. But it helps the patient and, to be brutally honest, Miss Salome, no one else matters in that equation. She will die but perhaps I can ease that knowledge.” He eyed her. “It is, after all, what we do with those who are terminal.”

  Rory spoke quietly. “Jace’s grandfather died of cancer.”

  Jace bit down her anger. She wanted to know why Vernezobre had lied to her about Mercer; she didn’t want to go mucking about in her own past.

  “Indeed.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Certainly, but I’d ask you to look into your memory and compare that woman’s daughter with your grandfather. Was there some last thing that comforted him, as useless as it might have been?”

  The truth was that the entire thing was a blur to Jace. Grapa had been the strongest man she’d ever known and then, seemingly overnight, he was reduced to chairs with blankets over his legs and then beds and sunken cheeks and constant bouts of nausea. She remembered him putting his head in his hands and saying he was tired, before making a trip to the hospital. They could do nothing and so released him. He spent two more days at home before dying. Then it was Jace and Gramma and a sad memorial affair with a few friends.

  “Miss Salome, I am sorry about your grandfather, but you understand, better than most non-patients who come through my door, exactly why I do what I do.”

  “I don’t. I do not believe it’s better to lie to someone.”

  “Yeah, she does,” Rory said. “If she ain’t a cop? She’d be a social worker or maybe stealing meds off the back of a truck and handing them out to poor people who can’t afford to pay.”

  Jace blinked. “What?”

  Doctor Vernezobre shook his head. “Well, Miss Bogan, let me address your contention of medicines stolen from a truck. I do not know what you’re talking about. Secondly, my patients can afford to pay; they simply do it in unconventional ways. Just last week, a woman whose husband I treated cooked a delightful lunch for myself and the four patients who happened to be here at the time.”

  Rory grinned. “Uh . . . okay, you don’t know about stolen meds. That’s fine . . . whatever.”

  Jace pressed on. “I want to know about what you told us Dr. Wrubel said to you.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  As they spoke, a middle-aged man came to them. He looked at them but said nothing. Eventually, the doctor spoke to him, frowned, took a small bottle of pills from his desk, scrawled his name and the date across a blank label, and handed the bottle to the man. The man disappeared.

  The doctor sighed. “Sometimes, medicines that come from trucks that are not . . . how shall I say . . . noticed by the government, are not the best medicines.”

  “You mean less than full strength? Or maybe not exactly what you’re told they are?”

  Dr. Vernezobre shook his head. “They are always what I’m told they are. If not—” He snapped his fingers. “I do business elsewhere.”
r />   “So you do know about stolen meds.”

  “I do not know about stolen medicines. I have never, in my life, given a patient stolen medicine. I have always paid for the medicines I give my patients.” Color flooded into his face but he stood as tall as his impressive frame allowed. “However, rarely do I pay full price. But yes, to answer your question, sometimes the strength is that of an old, weak woman, rather than a robust young man.”

  Rory said, “So you said Mercer had threatened to kill Wrubel. Other than that night in medical, is that true?”

  “Were there other threats, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Francis told me of no specific threat from Mercer.” A pained expression crossed Vernezobre’s face. “Dr. Cruz told me of the incident.”

  That surprised Jace. “When?”

  “When he called me about Francis’s death. The morning I had the good fortune of making your acquaintance at Alley B’s. I believed that by saying Francis spoke to me directly, I could give you some urgency.”

  “Mercer didn’t do it.” Jace took a deep breath. “But we spent a day working on him. Dr. Vernezobre, that time should have been spent looking for the real killer.”

  The doctor lowered his head. “I understand completely, but I honestly believed him to be Francis’s murderer. Ladies, is there anything I can offer beyond an apology? I believed I was helping, though it seems I made the situation more difficult. I see, now, that I became one of those who you deal with daily; I become one of the liars, though my intentions were good.”

  Jace tried to soften her glare. The man hurt, it was obvious, and was trying to help a friend. He had not meant to slow them down and, for that, Jace couldn’t fault him. “So who did do it?”