Cooler Than Blood

by Robert Lane

  “Four thousand one hundred twenty-nine.”

  “Right. You firm on that?” Still coming at me.

  “No doubt.”

  “You think she was there?” He seemed to sense his forward momentum and backed off.

  “We do.”

  “I’m sure”—he settled into the back of his chair—“that Detective McGlashan explained that Ms. Spencer has every right to slip out, but the circumstances do make her disappearance suspect.”

  “You think she slipped into a garage three hours away?”

  Rutledge let that cook for a few seconds, his fingers dancing on the table. “I’ll remind you that you’re here at our invitation. Don’t forget that. Scratch marks on a wall—you don’t build a case on that. We have no firm proof, just suspicion on yet another missing teen. If you find her—or them—call me. We won’t tolerate vigilante actions. I’m the lead, so call me first. Don’t let that slip your mind.”

  “Loud and clear, Detective,” I said in response to his rambling statement, although I was confused as to what I wasn’t supposed to let slip my mind—that he was the lead or that vigilantes weren’t allowed. It didn’t matter; I’d say anything to keep him on our side—and then do what I damn well pleased when the time came. He slid a minicassette tape across the table.

  I asked, “You don’t have digital?” The light flicked again.

  “We don’t even have light bulbs, Mr. Travis.”

  “Any leads on the car?”

  “Car?”

  “Billy Ray’s Honda.”

  “No.”

  I waited. The light flicked. The AC came on. I said, “You must have something.”

  “No.”

  I started to stay in that lane, but switched. “And the Colemans’ property in Ohio?”

  “Their car’s gone. We assume someone told them about the raid. I doubt they’ll return. Why they would break into their brother’s car, though—even if it was them—is anyone’s guess. You know the deal with funding for toxic cleanups, don’t you?”

  “It’s been cut.”

  “As in virtually eliminated. These brothers are medium producers with big-time ambitions. I doubt Ms. Spencer’s disappearance has anything to do with them, but it’s your time you’re burning. Meanwhile, we don’t have the dollars to track them. That’s why we’re helping you help us.”

  I couldn’t keep his signals straight. I let it go and returned to the subject of the car. “Any idea what was in the Honda that was more valuable than the Alpine GPS and speakers?”

  Rutledge gave that a second and shrugged. “Probably nothing. Likely just kids, and when they started to lift the system, they got spooked. We can hypothesize—”

  “Why tear apart the insides?”

  “What?”

  “The interior. Why trash it if the Alpine system is staring you in the face?”

  “Who the hell knows? We—”

  “Did the stereo system even look as if someone had gone after it?” I didn’t recall McGlashan saying the stereo system looked the least bit tampered with.

  He shifted his upper body over the table, his elbows on the armrest. “As I was saying before you interrupted me, we don’t have the resources to hypothesize all day as to what might have occurred. You aren’t here to question how we allocate our time. You want to see my calendar? I got a Viet vet at Kelly’s Green that bashes his wife every night and a hit-and-run that left a German tourist with only one leg. The Reichstag’s all over me on that one. I got a perennial drunk who claims he passed out, and when he woke up, his wife had crammed a cucumber up his ass. Claims she’d had it with thirty years of his whining that her vegetables tasted like shit. He wants to discreetly press—”

  “I realize—”

  “You don’t realize dick squat.” Rutledge planted his elbows on the table and interlocked his hands in front of him like a tent. “Here’s my real world, boys: I got a root canal at four today because Dr. Toothfuck did the wrong damn molar a month ago, and to top it off, I haven’t taken a dump in three days.” He pushed off the table and stood up. “We’re done here.”

  “No one touched the stereo,” Garrett said quietly. His arms were folded, and he hadn’t moved since we’d entered. “And you didn’t find any prints around the trunk.”

  Rutledge eyed him, hesitated a beat, and said, “You evidently didn’t catch the drift of my previous comment.” He walked out the door.

  Garrett said, “He’s lazy.”

  “We know this: no prints. Someone wiped the trunk area clean. Ripped the seats but left the stereo.”

  “They know something went down on that car, but it’s not a crime scene. They’ve folded and moved on. But kids don’t randomly trash a used car or take a crowbar to the trunk—”

  “Then slow down and wipe the scene clean.”

  I pocketed the tape and Rutledge’s business card; my card was still in the middle of the table. Garrett and I left the room. I didn’t see Rutledge in either direction in the hall. We strolled out the front door, and the heat walloped me like a heavyweight fighter who’d been waiting for the perfect opening. The predawn hours had held hope of finding Jenny, but the day had sputtered and left me with nothing more than I’d had the previous night. Perhaps less. Hope and hard wishes have a way of becoming real, even tangible, if we don’t treat them as the frivolous imposters they are. But I did have one thing.

  Jenny’s voice was in my pocket.

  CHAPTER 21

  Garrett leaned against the aqua-colored cinder block wall in Susan’s office. Susan, in beige shorts and a silk gold T-shirt, sat in a black swivel chair. It had a pad on it so she would be higher. A four-by-six picture of Jenny was on a shelf to her left. The background was a hill cloaked in Midwest summer green. Jenny’s home? Susan had told me she had visited there last summer, and I wondered whether that was when she’d taken the picture. I sat in the folding chair by her desk and momentarily thought it was going to collapse from my weight. A window air conditioner quietly hummed over Garrett’s right shoulder.

  A pink minicassette player was on her desk. We had found it at an electronics store on US 41, the Tamiami Trail. Not the nostalgic section of the road that evokes images of paradise past captured on fold-down postcards, but the congested traffic-light-regulated strip of runway-wide concrete that makes you want to leave Florida in hopes of finding Florida.

  I hit the “play” button. Rutledge identified himself, as well as Jenny, the time, and place. As I heard his voice, I thought of his dull eyes and dancing hands. I like incongruity; it sparks my senses.

  He asked her a series of questions about the casual run-in Jenny and Susan had with Billy Ray earlier that day on the beach. He had her recite in chronological order her actions after Susan had departed for work and her subsequent encounter with Billy Ray. Jenny never raised her voice. She never broke.

  “What did he say just prior to when he attacked you?” Rutledge asked her.

  Jenny said, “Just some small talk, like, you know, ‘Remember me?’ I said, ‘Yeah, from this afternoon.’ Then he said something about Sherman.”

  “Sherman?”

  “I asked him if it was warm like this up in Georgia—he told us earlier in the day he was from there—and he said, ‘Sherman. That’s his name.’ Or maybe something like, ‘Yeah, baby, that’s his name.’ He seemed pretty excited about it.”

  “About what?”

  “Sherman.”

  “I don’t follow,” Rutledge said. “Who’s Sherman?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he ever mention a Sherman again?”

  “No. Didn’t he burn Atlanta?”

  “Who?”

  “Sherman.”

  “Oh, him. Did he really burn it, or is that just legend?”

  “Pretty sure he torched it.”

  “Why would he talk about Sherman?”

  “You’re kidding, right? Why would he try to rape me?”

  “All right. Let’s move on. What else?”<
br />
  “I told him that I was looking for turtles and that my aunt said they come to that area. He said she was hot too.”

  “Hot?”

  “Like, you know, attractive. Then he hit his head.”

  “How?”

  “How what?”

  “How did he strike himself?”

  “Slapped himself hard, like this.” I heard a dull thud.

  “Okay. Then what?”

  “I told him my aunt was behind me. I was scared. He wasn’t right. But I said it wrong. It came out weak…uncertain.”

  There was a pause, and then Rutledge said, “What happened next, Ms. Spencer?”

  “He said, ‘No, she ain’t, magazine girl. I saw her drive away earlier.’”

  “Magazine girl?”

  “Magazine girl…whatever.” She sounded ticked, and I knew why. She had picked up on the gist of the comment that had apparently eluded Rutledge. Jenny explained to Rutledge, “He said he saw her drive away. Get it? It meant he was watching. He was stalking me. I knew I was in trouble.”

  “Okay,” Rutledge said in a conciliatory tone. “Then what?”

  “He ripped off my shirt. My cheer shirt. I don’t know how he did it that fast. Just yanked it over my head. Then he hit me. Hit me hard. I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to hang on.”

  “Hang on?”

  “You know, stay conscious. I started to drift, but he…he bit my breast, and I think that brought me back. I reached out, and a stick was there. I shoved it at him. Then I saw…and then…”

  “Saw what?”

  “Oh…nothing. I just lost track of where we were.”

  “Okay, then what?”

  I wondered what Jenny had seen. She didn’t come across as a girl who lost track of anything.

  There was a pause, as if Rutledge was waiting for Jenny to continue. During the time of the actual interview, it was now approximately a half hour prior to sunrise, and I heard birds in the background. It reminded me of my trip to the Ohio woods. I don’t know much about birds other than rote regurgitation. Morgan can identify nearly every species by sound. I know them by sight and the basics. They fly. The ones in my ‘hood eat fish. One particular osprey exists just to crap on my boat and screeches all day and half the night. And around a half hour before sunrise, they all let loose, no matter where they are.

  Rutledge coughed loudly. Birds chirped.

  “I was on top of him before I knew it,” Jenny said.

  “How did you accomplish that?”

  “I don’t know how,” she said with a tinge of irritability. “I was just there. I found a stick. Listen, I didn’t think of killing him—it’s not like that; I just didn’t want her to go down. I pumped that stick like she was going to sink, and I wasn’t going to let that happen.”

  I glanced over at Susan to seek confirmation regarding Jenny’s confusing reply. She shot me a quick glance, and I knew why. I recalled her telling me of Jenny’s duty to pump the boat out and her feeling of failure—and of her desire to please her father in her dreams. I also remembered Susan’s supplication to me. “What do you do with that?” she’d demanded.

  “I’m not following,” Rutledge said. “Who is ‘her?’”

  “My father’s boat.”

  “A boat?”

  “What about it?”

  “Your father’s boat was going to sink?”

  “No, sir. Not on my watch.”

  I wondered if Jenny had put her dream to rest on the beach that night.

  Rutledge tossed her a litany of questions about her actions immediately after she’d realized Billy Ray was dead. Jenny took them in the same matter-of-fact voice in which she’d addressed all his previous questions. If there was any guilt in her action, or remorse in her decisions, it was buried too deeply to detect. She explained how she had stumbled upon a towel she had spotted earlier and wrapped it around her before she returned to Susan’s.

  He inquired why she had waited so long to notify the police.

  “We were talking,” Jenny told him.

  “Will you identify who you were talking with, please?”

  “My aunt, Susan Blake.”

  “About what?”

  “Life. Lots of things. But not about what had just happened.”

  “You got attacked on the beach, turned on your assailant, killed him, wrapped yourself in a beach towel, strolled back here, and then took the next few hours to repose and discuss life?”

  “Washed myself off first.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Before I wrapped myself in the beach towel, I washed off in the Gulf. I had…stuff on me. The water was warm, not much cooler than blood. Did you know that?”

  Rutledge cleared his throat. “Would you like something to drink, Ms. Spencer?”

  “No. I’m fine. Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Know that the Gulf of Mexico, at least at this time of the year, isn’t much cooler than blood?

  “Um…no, I missed that.”

  “Not by much, but I was relieved to cool down at least a little. I read somewhere that the salinity of the Gulf is approximate to the salinity of blood. Temperature, blood, and salt. Never expected to find that out for myself.”

  “Okay. Let’s back up just a second. You returned here and talked for hours with your aunt about events unrelated to your traumatic experience. Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “I had more important things to discuss.”

  “Than an attempted rape and murder?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “With all due respect, Ms. Spencer, you’re challenging my imagination.”

  “Eric, right?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I believe you introduced yourself as Detective Eric Rutledge.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Tell me, Eric.” Her voice ran decades ahead of her years and had been gaining conviction throughout the interview. “What in your male past causes you to think that you can imagine what I’ve been through in my life and how I should react after someone attempted to rape me and I successfully defended myself?”

  Garrett let out a low whistle. I thought of the spiked water bottle and caught myself smiling.

  Rutledge’s voice came back in clipped military fashion. He gave the time—6:17 a.m.—and reiterated the participants’ names and the location. An osprey screeched. The tape went silent.

  I recalled my exchange with Officer Kevin Trimble. “Eric, right?” And I’d thought I was tough. I wanted to find this girl so she could teach me a few lessons.

  I looked over at Susan. Her jaw was tight. I’d been too absorbed in listening to give her much attention while the tape played. “The reference to her father’s boat,” I said. “Is that what you mentioned? Her dream?”

  Susan glanced up at me. “Even more. It was the last time in her life that things were right for her. She’s just trying to get it back. That’s all.”

  “I don’t understand how that—”

  “Jesus.” She spat it out and bolted out of her office. I glanced up at Garrett.

  “Move,” he said.

  I found her behind the bar, scrubbing glasses at a frantic pace. As if at that moment, as the earth spun, there was nothing more critical than the cleanliness of that stemware and the speed and proficiency with which that simple task could be accomplished. I leaned in across the bar and inquired whether there was anything on the tape that was counter to the brief version Jenny had given when Susan first had gotten home that evening. She assured me there wasn’t.

  “She told me what happened,” she said as she finally ceased her fitful motion and dropped her hands to her hips, “but not the details she gave Rutledge.”

  “You need to listen again, just to—”

  “Did you hear what she said?” I didn’t know which part of the conversation she was referring to. Then I realized it was a question that wasn’t meant to be answered by the person it was directed to, but by the one who’d ask
ed it.

  “No,” I said. “What did she say?”

  “Cooler than blood.” A shudder went through her shoulders. She glanced down, and I imagined her staring at a sticky, black, rubber mat under her feet. “I don’t know. Maybe she was in shock.” She came back up. “What do you think?”

  That question warranted a response. “I don’t think she was in shock. I’ve rarely heard someone so composed and in control of her facilities.” I wasn’t sure I believed that, but it was what I wanted Susan to hear. I told her I’d keep her in the loop. My phone rang on my way to collect Garrett.

  PC said, “The Hardy Boys are here.”

  “Look like the pictures I gave you?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Any sign of a girl?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Why ask a question if you don’t believe the answer? They’re cleaning up, but I don’t know how long they’ll stay, knowing someone—”

  “Stay with them. Don’t let them out of your sight.” I disconnected.

  I didn’t bother to inform Rutledge or McGlashan. Some things are best accomplished outside of the law.

  I retraced my path on I-75 north and tailgated every scumbag who got in my path. Jenny’s voice took residence in my head, and I wondered what, or who, she had seen on the beach that night. She had claimed to Rutledge that she was flustered and lost track of the conversation. But then she compared Billy Ray’s blood to the temperature of the Gulf of Mexico. My Polaroid picture of Jenny was going high-def.

  Flustered and lost track?

  No way.

  CHAPTER 22

  “Jake-o, man, care for a SweeTart?” Boyd asked without taking his eyes off his phone.

  Garrett and I found PC and Boyd close to where I’d instructed PC to set up his observation post. It was the same place Garrett and I had started in the predawn hours on what was quickly morphing into a marathon day. PC had a T-shirt on that said, “I Love Bacon.” He was a 140-pound jagged collection of bones, attitude, and enough energy to fire up a nuclear plant that supplied half of Manhattan. He wore a red sweatband that made his hair look like a mushroom cloud on the top of his head. Boyd had grown a beard since our last encounter and was halfway through a sleeve of multicolored SweeTarts.