“Carol—”
“No.” She breathed hard and angry. “Look, why would he do to other people what someone did to his family? Why would he do that?”
“He wasn’t selling?”
“Hell, no, and anyone who says he was has got an axe getting grinded.”
“But what about—”
“Look, missy, ever’body has demons. Maybe Doc’s were bad enough that he’d do it to himself but he never hurt nobody else. Ever. But what the hell do I know? I’m just a fat old nurse who needs a job because her husband has a bad back and never made enough cotton farming to sock anything away. Don’t ask me about this anymore.”
Carol was gone, in a blast of sudden silence. Then the electronic beep of Jace’s cell phone losing the signal.
CHAPTER 27
That evening, just before work, Jace stood at her window. The sky darkened as dusk fell over Zachary City and it matched Jace’s state of mind. She’d been wrong about Mercer and had misread Inmate Bobby and was in a dark mood. She shook her head at the metaphor. She’d always thought the weather was too cheap and easy a metaphor for life but sometimes it simply couldn’t be avoided.
There wouldn’t be a winter storm, though the weathermen were calling for it. There would be cold that got into bones and cracks and crevices, but there wouldn’t be any rain or snow, nor any blasting winds that left ice in her blood. Tonight there would be only dark skies.
Beneath the clouds were the downtown skyscrapers that tried to puncture them. Those spires were three or four miles distant, deep in the city’s heart, but were visible from nearly everywhere, as was so much in the almost mind-numbingly flat west-Texas desert. Twelve miles from here there was a four-corners stop; eastward would take a traveler to Tarzan and Lenorah, while west led to Andrews. But if a traveler stood at that four corners, where the black ribbon of state routes 349 and 176 collided, and stared south, those downtown buildings would be perfectly visible.
There was a hamlet a little north of that crossroads, too small to even be considered a village, called Patricia. It had three or four old buildings whose best days were a century gone and a few nearby dirt farms. It also had a garage that did very little business in cars but a thriving run in machine soda. Visible from nearly a mile down the road outside of town was a Coca-Cola machine with bright-red, electric skin. That machine did business by the truckload when drivers stopped and jammed in a handful of quarters.
That road was the way to Lubbock, and it was the road Mama and Jace traveled every time they made the trip. And every time, without fail, Mama stopped and bought a single sweaty can of Coke to split with her daughter. Nowadays, the machine was half-liter bottles but regardless, there had been something about the ritual of coin-coin-can that always left Jace with a radiant warmth. Since Mama’s death, Jace had stopped frequently, even making the drive with no reason other than the machine. She’d realized only a couple of years ago that, with Mama gone, the sodas not only didn’t conjure up any particularly strong memories, they barely scratched the surface of nostalgic. Standing there, dust in throat, soda in hand, Jace had realized with a startling bitterness that it was just a soda machine in the middle of the desert.
“Babygirl,” Preacher called through her closed door. When she opened it, the old man stood there with a sloppy grin on his dark face, his pipe emitting its usual spicy, orange odor. Without waiting for an invite, he entered, set his briefcase on her coffee table, and tapped a withered finger against it. “Ain’t understanding that boy’s homework.”
“I wasn’t much of a student, but let’s take a look.”
Robison’s death had broken something in Preacher’s heart and head. He believed, with an eagerness and sincerity that sometimes scared Jace, that Robison would be back someday, and when the boy came back, he would need to finish school. To that end, Preacher tried to keep up with what his head told him was Robison’s homework. In reality, it was a sheaf of pages marked with Preacher’s own chicken-scratch handwriting and kept in his briefcase. But it made the old man feel better and connected to his dead son, and who did it hurt?
Preacher snorted. “Ain’t much of a student . . . tha’s just a lie.”
When they sat, Preacher handed a few sheets of paper to Jace. She stared at the incomprehensible writing and furrowed her brow, as though deep in thought. During her academy training, they’d had a few courses on mental illness. So many of the country’s jails were short-term housing for the mentally ill, her instructors told her, that she had to have at least a general understanding of mental illness. “You will see it,” a particular instructor had told her. “You will see it and it will scare you and you won’t have any idea what to do. It will embarrass you and frighten you and eventually anger you.”
“Why?” Jace had said. “No reason to get mad at someone who’s sick.”
“When the shit’s hitting the fan, it won’t be someone who’s sick, Salome, it’ll be someone—in crisis—who’s not listening to your orders. It’ll be someone who is, at best, ignoring you and, at worst, threatening you.”
Preacher had never threatened her but she knew his was different. Preacher’s illness was soft and sad but at the jail it would be violent and scary. Yet Jace always felt a bit of guilt with Preacher. Not only was she doing nothing to help his illness, she was actually hurting him by playing in his melancholic world. She knew that only reinforced his sickness but she also understood it made both him and her feel better to believe in a world where the dead might come back and repair life’s broken glass.
“I don’t know, Preacher, this looks pretty tough to me. Can I think about it a while?”
“Ain’t nothing but a thang.” He stuffed the papers back into the briefcase. “Got a few days yet before I have to turn it in.” He would forget about it before the day was through. “So, how’s jailing?”
Jace grinned. “Helping with a case.” The grin dissolved into a frown. “Thought I had it solved yesterday. Turns out I had the wrong guy.”
“So that how that work?”
“What do you mean?”
“You remember that carnival St. Anne Catholic used to put on? Had the rides and hot dogs and dart throws?” He chuckled. “I ’member the first time I let Robison go by himself. He met some girl there, Elicia something. Boy had it bad for her; tightening his pants he had it so bad. Well, they met and ate some food and went on some spinny ride and after they done? Robison threw right up. She runned away so fast I felt for that poor boy.” Preacher winked. “It’ll be a’right, though. When he get back, she’ll still be waiting on him. She had it hard for him, too.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah, young’uns and they hormones. Anyway, what I was saying was is it like them dart games? Where you just keep throwing and throwing and eventually you hit the right balloon? Your cases like that?”
The analogy didn’t please Jace at all. It made her efforts seem nothing more than a poker game or a spin on the roulette wheel. “Well, that’s not really how I see it, Preacher. I look at the evidence and follow it. Sometimes I don’t have all the evidence at the beginning. Then when I get more evidence, things sometimes change.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Preacher nodded. “I getcha, little girl. Like knowing half the Bible, maybe you understand this verse or that chapter, but when you add it to some other book, you understand it better.”
Jace nodded. “Yeah, Preacher, maybe kind of like that.”
“So now you got all the verses now? Gotcha all the chapters you need?”
Maybe, Jace thought. This time, she was certain it was the right person, as much as she didn’t want it to be. Inmate Bobby was the only person with access, or so Jace told Major Jakob late this afternoon when she called the woman after talking with Carol. It had been a tense phone call and after Jace gave her Inmate Bobby’s name, there was a long pause. Jakob asked if Jace was certain, and then asked her reasons for believing so. Jace went through the entire thing twice. Once for herself and once for Major Jakob.
After a pause, the major had said, “Well done, Salome, very well done.”
Jace had pocketed her cell phone gently, both angry at Inmate Bobby and disconcerted by the glow she felt at Jakob’s approval. When Jace had started the job, she’d thought she might be good at it, but she didn’t delve too deeply into any motivation beyond that. Yet now, with a few months behind her, with a few small cases and one huge case tucked safely in her experience, she found herself with an appetite she hadn’t expected.
“Ain’t cain’t be nobody else, then gotta be him,” Preacher said as he hugged her lightly. “Done good, babygirl. But you ain’t looking so happy.”
“What? No, I’m fine. It’s just . . . I’m surprised at who the bad guy is.”
“He playing a good guy?”
Jace thought about that. He hadn’t ever said he was a good guy—he owned the crimes that landed him in jail—but this did seem a step up for him. “I didn’t think so, Preacher, but I don’t know now.”
“What flavor bad is he now?”
“Murder.”
The old man’s grin slipped away. He sucked long and hard on his pipe and a spike of orange filled the apartment. “Yeah? Another inmate get himself killed?”
“The assistant doctor. Guy named Wrubel. Worked nights in the medical pod. An inmate stabbed him a few nights ago.”
Preacher frowned. “You didn’t say nothing.”
“No.” Maybe she hadn’t wanted to worry Preacher or Gramma. Maybe she had been all too aware of what Gramma’s response would be and she’d wanted to avoid it. She shrugged. “Lots of things go on in that jail I don’t mention. It’s nothing, Preach, just the job.”
“Uh-huh. So death ain’t no big deal.”
Jace cleared her throat. “Anyway, we thought it was one inmate because he’d had an argument with the doctor. He wanted some drugs or something—”
“Drugs?”
“Well . . . asthma medicine.”
“High-dollar narcotics.”
Jace felt herself color and tried to bite back her defensiveness. “Preacher, you can’t just have anything you want; it’s jail.”
“Ain’t doubting that, little girl. Just don’t seem like no big deal to me . . . a little inhale make a man feel better.” He took a deep drag on his pipe, held the smoke deep in his lungs, then blew it out over Jace’s head.
“Well, regardless, it turns out it wasn’t that guy. I was asked to do some legwork on the suspect and I managed to discover—” She was unable to stop the swell in her chest. “. . . that he couldn’t have done it.”
“That’s my babydoll. Damn straight if you didn’t save a man’s life keeping that murder noose from around his neck.”
“Yeah, Preacher, I guess I did. Now I’ve got a major who likes me, I think. She’s fourth or fifth from the top in the command staff. Big cheese.”
“And she’s got her eye on Jace Salome. World winking at you right now, ain’t it?”
“Maybe . . . for now.”
“But you wearing your missing-Mama face.”
Jace shook her head as though she could empty it. “I always miss her, but that’s not . . . I don’t know. I’m sad at who killed Dr. Wrubel. I thought he was a decent guy. A criminal, yeah, but a decent guy generally. I read him completely wrong.”
Inmate Bobby had actually been a help since she’d started the job. He and she had connected during her first night on duty and they’d had an easygoing relationship since. Yes, he’d been convicted. Yes, he’d been sentenced to eleven months in county. But he was unfailingly polite and had even guided her a few times to this or that location. And he’d been in jail so many times for minor things, what Rory called misdemeanoring, that he knew the jail better than Jace did and helped her with the little things that fell through the cracks in her training. So the image of him stabbing a man repeatedly was a cognitive disconnect for her. It simply didn’t reflect who she thought she knew. Yet she also understood that she didn’t really know the prisoners—or a prisoner’s psychology—well enough to be able to wear their skin.
“What’sa matter?”
“I look good and he goes to prison for murder. Doesn’t seem like the scale is balanced on that one, does it?”
“Well, decent ol’ boy or not . . . do the murder, do the time.”
“Yeah.”
“How that sleeping coming?”
“PTSD takes a little time.”
“You be aw-right.” He snorted. “Back in the day, didn’t call it no PTSD. It was just fucked-up. Got counseled with a bottle of Thunderbird . . . Cuervo on a good day.”
“How’d that work out?”
He smacked his lips. “Well . . . mighty tasty either way.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes, Jace’s eyes on the book Jakob gave her, then on Preacher. He’d said everybody changes everybody. She wasn’t sure she’d believed it, but it came up in Jakob’s book, too.
Every contact leaves a trace.
Locard’s Principle . . . that every perpetrator left something of himself at a crime scene and took something from that crime scene with him.
For Jakob, it was about hairs and fibers, DNA and fingerprints, but maybe Preacher was right and it was that way with life. Maybe every contact Jace had, with criminal or cop, changed her in some slight, nearly undetectable, way.
How long before I don’t recognize myself anymore?
She nodded thoughtfully. “Preacher?”
“Yeah?”
“I have to go to work, but do you think maybe we could go look for Robison, maybe when I get off.”
He beamed. “You bet, babygirl. That a fine idea. He might be home when you get off, though.”
“He might be at that, Preacher.”
CHAPTER 28
That night, Sergeant Bibb buzzed her in. The intercom boomed with his voice. “See if you can foot chase your way over to a particular cell.”
“Foot chase?”
“I hear that’s what you’re good at.” His laugh was heavy even through the intercom. “Congrats, baby cop.”
“This the cell I think it is?”
“Yeah. Adam 1 and Lincoln 1 have been waiting. I think your fav dick is there, too.”
The door lock popped and she stepped into the jail. The deputy sitting on the sign-in desk grinned at her.
“What’s up?”
“Stock in Jace Salome, sounds like.” He pointed to the bandage on her ear. “Come back and tell it all.” He banged a fist against the desk. “Been here six years and never had a foot chase.”
Law enforcement was a small community and everyone knew everyone else’s business. It was, Jace thought, much like living at the Sea Spray, with the same support and jealousies and prying eyes and ears that heard everything but admitted to nothing.
“That wasn’t anything,” she tried to say. “It was just—” She stopped. It was a foot chase that ended in a two-shot gun fight and a mass of felony charges. There was no way to dress the night down.
“Salome.” Bibb’s voice was impatient. “The cell . . . now.”
The deputy behind the desk winked.
Most trusties were housed in administrative segregation because it was easier, with so many of the ad-seg inmates on 23/7 lockdown, to shuffle trusties in and out for their work assignments. Most trusty cells were left open 24/7 and trusties came and went, to a degree, when they needed. When she arrived, the entire pod was locked and a batch of people stood around the jailer’s desk. Sheriff Bukowski, Major Jakob, Detective Von Holton, with Sergeant Dillon between them, along with two B-shift jailers—Smit and one Jace didn’t know—and one of the lab techs Jace had seen working Wrubel’s body.
The sheriff passed her on his way out.
“You’re not staying?”
“Naw. Now that you’re stuck here, I can go smoke this.” He held a cigar between two fingers.
“Sir, if you light up, I’ll know it.”
He nodded, tired. “Yeah, you probably will. Good luck, D
eputy.”
“Thank you, sir.”
When she got to the desk, Jace rubbed her hands together, amazed again at how nerves and excitement could work on her at the same time.
Von Holton tapped his watch. “Can we finally get started now?”
She wanted to laugh at his transparent grin. Let him make himself look bad, Ezell had said. The man was supremely satisfied at how he’d played her. “Sure, now that I’m here.”
His grin faltered and Jace caught a twitch on Jakob’s mouth.
“Bobby’s cell, please,” Jakob said to the jailers. One of them touched the computer screen and a door on the bottom tier near the war doors clicked open.
Dillon keyed his radio. “Control, you got this recording?”
—10-4—
“For whatever we might find,” Dillon said to everyone. “Control, keep the subject wherever he is right now.”
—which is?—
Dillon thought for a second. “Give me a 21; let’s keep this off the air as much as we can.”
Half a second later, Dillon’s cell phone rang. “He’s probably still mopping. Hallways or the kitchen. He’s working on the sally-port thing, too. He’s been sleeping out there sometimes.” He sighed. “Guess we ought to end that, huh?”
Jakob nodded. “Probably.”
Dillon snapped his phone closed, and as the group moved toward Bobby’s cell, Von Holton smirked at Jace. “Good job on this thing. Took you too long, but at least you got there.”
Don’t rise to the bait, Jace thought. Just eat the anger and wield Jakob’s information as precisely as a surgeon’s scalpel. “Least I found what I was looking for. You crib up that murder weapon yet?”
“What?” His eyes narrowed. “That’s classified information.”
Inwardly, Jace grinned. How’s that feel . . . up your wazoo?
“Got a source in my lab, Deputy?” Jakob asked smoothly. “I can’t have information leaking out. When we are finished with this investigation, I expect a visit.”
Von Holton’s eyes darted to the major, then back to Jace, a glimmer of understanding sparking on his face.
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