Bobby stood and reached out his hand. “Hi, Clare. I’m glad you could come.” He made it sound like she had a choice. “This is my fiancée , Caroline.”
Caroline popped up from the couch and came over to give Clare a big hug. “So nice to meet you! I was thrilled when Bobby told me another woman would be here. What can I get you to drink?”
“Is coffee possible?”
“No coffee, I’m afraid,” Henry said. “Beer, wine, anything you can think of.”
“Anything non-alcoholic?”
He grimaced. “Except that.”
She’d resolved to not drink at the party. She didn’t want to blindly agree to anything they might propose.
“I’ll take the beer.”
“I’ll get it!” Caroline said. She turned toward the kitchen and hurried away. Clare could see the tattoo on her lower back that said “Bobby.” She hoped they had a long marriage in front of them. She sat on a dining room chair across from the couch, where Henry and Ray occupied chairs on either side of it.
She took the beer from Caroline and looked from one man to the other.” “Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t understand why I’m here.”
Bobby looked insulted. “Isn’t hanging with us reason enough?”
“Frankly, no. I didn’t know I was meant to become buddies with you all.”
Henry looked uncomfortable, as if a date were making a scene. “In our business, everything is about relationships.” He made it sound like they ran a client-based service business, which she supposed they did. “You’re a person we definitely want a relationship with.”
“But why?” She took a long drink of beer and thought about whiskey.
“I’m your client, right?” Ray said. “That’s one aspect of our relationship. But we want more. We want to rely on you for legal advice and we want you to convey information to us, like you did yesterday to Henry.”
She sat still, though the meth made her want to bounce her leg. “And if I refuse?”
“Same rules as before. You’ll lose your drug supply and Henry will tell his mother you’re an addict.”
“That will expose him to Elizabeth, as well. And I’m not an addict.”
“That doesn’t worry me,” Henry said. “I wish you’d relax, Clare. Let’s just hang out and get to know each other.”
“What about the speed that’s supposed to come in?” she said. “One thing you can do for me is get that shipment.”
Ray shrugged. “We can’t control everything. There’s a crackdown on Adderall and it’s gotten hard to come by. Be patient. That shouldn’t be hard if you’re not an addict.” His expression was just shy of a smirk.
Clare ignored the remark. “Do you think it’s a matter of days, weeks?”
“Why so nervous about it?” Bobby asked. “It seems the meth has gone over well with you.”
“That’s not something I mean to repeat.” She hoped that was true.
With the help of some more beers and shots of tequila, Clare made it through a couple hours of conversation about topics she couldn’t care less about. Caroline pulled a chair next to her and tried for some girl talk, but she didn’t want to talk about boyfriends. What she really wanted was to talk to a friend about Freya, but Caroline didn’t qualify. And there was the question of letting these people know she was a…what? A lesbian? This was downstate Illinois, where each small town had eight churches and the vote was reliably Republican.
Henry stood and put his phone in his back pocket.
“I’ll say good-bye, then. I have to get going.” He turned to Ray. “Remember I told you I had that thing I have to be at?”
Ray nodded and Henry reached for his coat.
“I’ll go with you,” Clare said, rising quickly from her chair.
“No, you’ll stay,” Ray said, looking up at her with penetrating eyes. “We’re just getting started here.”
“Please, I want to go home.”
Henry shifted his eyes from Clare to Ray and back again. “Not now, Clare. Just relax and enjoy yourself.” He left the room quickly and she heard the front door close behind him. Clare sat down again.
Furious, she got up to excuse herself to the bathroom. Even a short break from these awful people was welcome. Freya was coming by her house at nine. She had to get home by then. She stared in the bathroom mirror a full minute, trying to figure out how she’d gotten into so much trouble. She wanted a simple life, and now it was anything but. Suddenly, an explosion of gunfire erupted and she threw herself to the floor, biting her tongue to keep from screaming. The shooting continued for what seemed an eternity but was probably less than ten seconds. When it stopped she could hear her heart beat, pulsating in her ears. There wasn’t a sound from the other side of the door. She was nearly catatonic, terrified the gunman would search the house and kill her, too. There was more gunfire and footsteps pounding through the house. Then she heard the backdoor slam. She got up and peeked out the bathroom window and saw a man walking along the side of the house carrying a pistol in his hand. He wore a vigilante mask on his face, an open camouflage jacket, and a green Guns N’ Roses concert T-shirt. He was tall and lanky.
She heard an engine start and the sound of gravel crunching under tires. She started shaking, making it hard to open the door. The bathroom was at the end of a hallway lined with three small bedrooms. She crept toward the living room and smelled cordite. She peeked into the room. Bobby was pressed against the back of the couch, the front of his shirt bloody. Caroline was draped over the end of the couch, still alive. By the time Clare had turned around to call an ambulance, she was dead. There was no mistaking the fixed stare from her blue eyes.
Bobby had fallen forward on the coffee table, his arm across her phone. Ray had fallen out of his chair, a bullet hole in his forehead and many more in his body.
The smell of fresh blood made her gag. She looked at the bodies with glazed eyes, seeing but not seeing the surreal sight in front of her. Then she took a breath and reached for Bobby’s arm to move it off her phone, but realized she should put her gloves on. They were thick and wooly and made her hands clumsy, but it was better than leaving anything identifiable behind. Her self-preservation instinct had kicked in. She went to the closet to retrieve her things and put her coat and gloves on, then carefully lifted Bobby’s arm and slipped her phone out from under it. She went into the bathroom to rub everything down that she’d touched.
Back in the living room she looked out the window to see if anyone was in front of the house, but all was empty and silent. She opened the door with her gloved hand and slid outside. No one should be able to detect she’d been there. She pointed her car down the drive and tried to slow her racing mind. What should she do? It was bad enough she was fleeing the scene of a crime, but could she leave the murders unreported? It could be months before anyone found the bodies, if at all. She found another Valium and swallowed it, trying to counter the meth, but doubting there was enough Valium in the world to make her unsee what she just saw. As she drove to Money Creek, she kept a look out for a public phone booth, praying they hadn’t all been eliminated as they had in the city. There was one outside a Texaco gas station about halfway to Money Creek. She called 911 and when the dispatcher picked up she spoke with an unnaturally low voice.
“There’s been a multiple murder at 15264 Lamont in Timson County.”
“What is your name, ma’am?”
She hung up and drove quickly away from the station, hoping no one noticed her or her car, and pulled up to her house at eight thirty. Freya would arrive in thirty minutes. That was undoable—she’d have to cancel. She sent a text and said she’d become ill, which was certainly true. Freya would be upset, but no one was more upset at the moment than she was. She poured a healthy amount of bourbon in a glass and sought refuge on her couch, where she looked about her with unseeing eyes, thinking about something that was unimaginable.
Chapter Twenty-one
Ben looked at the scene in front of
him. “Jesus Christ.”
Three bodies were sprawled around the small living room, blood everywhere. The air was sticky with it. Freya picked up a shell casing from the floor with her gloved hands. “Nine-millimeter. I would have though an AK-47 from the looks of things.” She looked from one body to the next. She’d never seen a triple homicide and tried to keep a professional face on, though the bloodshed was horrifying. “De we have their phones?”
Sheriff Phillips walked into the living room from the rear of the house. “You two got here quick.”
“What do you think, Sheriff?” Ben said. Freya picked up a phone from the coffee table with her gloved hands. It had a pink cover so it had to be the woman’s. She patted down the pants pockets of the two men and pulled out a phone from one of them.
The sheriff looked at the scene with his hands on his hips. “I think we have a fucking mess, is what.” He turned to Freya. “I informed you of this as a courtesy, but you know this is our jurisdiction.”
“You can understand our interest,” Freya said. “Seems logical to me this is some kind of drug hit.”
“And I’m not going to shut you out, but I am going to run the show. Agreed?”
“That’s fine,” Ben said. “What else can you tell us?”
“We received an anonymous call at 2013 hours and the first responders got here about 2045. Deputies have secured the scene but left everything untouched. They’ve started a canvas of properties in the area, but as you can guess, they’re far away from here and it’s unlikely anyone heard anything.”
“Someone may have seen a car on the road or going up the drive,” Ben said. “Will you let us know what they find?”
The sheriff nodded. Freya stepped over to the adjacent dining room and fished through the jackets on the table. She found a third phone. All three had security locks on them.
“Do we have an ID on these guys?”
“Ray Barnes, Bobby Hughes, and Caroline Sommers.”
She touched the numbers on one of the phones that corresponded to the word RAYB and the screen lit up. Not very sophisticated for a drug dealer. She couldn’t get the other two open. As the sheriff and Ben began to go over the scene, Freya scrolled down the contacts list in Ray’s phone. She got to the Ls and her heart nearly skipped a beat when she saw Clare’s name. What the hell? If these were the area’s main drug traffickers, as she suspected they were, why did one of them have Clare’s number? She looked at Ben and the sheriff to make sure they were occupied, then deleted it from the phone before she could think better of it. Her instinct was to protect Clare, but at what cost? Tampering with evidence could end her career. She’d stop by Clare’s later to find out what she could. Stingy’s name appeared on the list as she scrolled farther down.
“Ben?” She found him in the kitchen where he was looking in drawers. “Ray Barnes has Stingy’s name and number in his phone. That makes me pretty sure these were the guys he worked for.”
“No doubt. I’m surprised there’s a number there for Stingy.”
Freya called the number and an automated voice directed it to voice mail. She hung up, wanting to see how long it would take for him to return a call from Ray’s phone.
“If Stingy’s our man for this, what was his motive?” Ben said. “Do you think he was trying to take over the business?”
“Possibly. Or he was worried they’d eliminate him after his DUI arrest. He had good reason to think so after what happened to Morgan. They wouldn’t want anyone under pressure from the police to turn against them and testify.”
“That seems brutal,” Ben said.
She shrugged. “These aren’t nice people.”
They looked closely at the bodies. Rigor mortis had not set in and the blood looked fresh. There wasn’t more to see. When they stepped outside they found the sheriff talking to a deputy. Freya zipped up her down jacket and took her latex gloves off in favor of her leather ones. Her breath was visible in the cold air.
“Did you find anything else?” Freya asked him.
“No. There’s nothing in the house that indicates who owns it. No papers, no photographs. It’s somebody’s party house.”
“Let us run the property title down for you,” Ben said.
“Fine. We’ll take all the bottles and glasses in and run the DNA against the database. I’ve already run the names of the victims and no one has a previous record except for the woman, who was arrested for possession of meth. It was a low quantity—she didn’t serve any time.”
“There was a small amount of meth in her bag, so she hasn’t quit the stuff,” Ben said.
“Sheriff, I’d like to keep hold of Ray Barnes’s phone. I think Stingy might call him back. If he doesn’t it’s likely because he knows Ray’s dead and the police have got his phone.”
“I’d rather you hand it over,” he said.
She gave it to him. “Let me know, will you? And I’d like to see the other phones when you break into them. There may be more interesting names there.” God forbid Clare’s was one of them.
“I’ll put a couple deputies on calling all the names in their phones and let you know what we find. Do you think these are the traffickers you were looking for?”
Freya stamped her feet. Why were they talking outdoors? “Stingy’s name is in Barnes’s phone, so I’d say yes. We need to find where they lived. There may be computer files or notebooks in their homes that provide evidence. If Stingy doesn’t return the call from Barnes’s phone, he becomes more of a suspect. I think he’d get right back to his boss if he thought he was alive.”
“I agree. Let’s head back to the office and we can start sorting this out,” Ben said.
They got into Freya’s car and headed into town. She dropped Ben at the office and told him she had to run home first. She drove toward Clare’s house, a knot in her stomach at the thought she was somehow involved. It was true she didn’t know her well, but could she be that far off base? Getting ridiculously drunk one night was one thing. Associating with drug dealers was quite another.
The house was dark. Freya phoned her from the driveway, but there was no reply. She went to the front door and rang the bell, which seemed unusually loud, like a dinner gong. After a minute or so, Clare opened the door and stared at her, obviously sleep stunned. She didn’t seem to recognize her.
“Sorry to disturb you, Clare. Can I come in?” Freya took hold of the doorknob before Clare responded. She stirred and her eyes came into focus.
“Why are you here? It’s the middle of the night.” She stepped aside to let her in.
“Actually, it’s ten thirty.”
She followed Clare into the kitchen where they sat at the table. Freya was alarmed when she took a close look at her. Her pupils were dilated—she looked high. She remembered the relationship she’d had with an alcoholic—the lies, the distance, the scenes. She wouldn’t go through that again. How could she be falling in love with the type of person she loathed?
“What’s up? There has to be something big for you to come by like this,” Clare said.
Freya leaned forward across the table. “Do you know a man named Ray Barnes?”
Clare’s eyes closed for a tick longer than a blink. “Why do you ask?”
“Answer the question.”
Clare sat back in her chair. “I don’t understand.”
“There’s been a multiple murder. One of the victims was a man named Ray Barnes. He’s been identified as a drug trafficker in the area. Your name was in his phone.”
Clare waved a hand in front of her. “That I can explain. I met Ray Barnes recently and he retained me to represent him in some commercial transactions. I didn’t know he was a drug dealer.” She said it without emphasis, as if admitting she didn’t know he was an insurance salesman.
“That’s good,” Freya said, only partially relieved. She noticed Clare hadn’t asked anything about the murders. “Where did you meet him?”
She looked embarrassed. “Abe’s. It seems I’ll meet everyone in th
is town if I go to Abe’s often enough.”
“Have you started working on one of these commercial transactions?”
“No, we haven’t got past an initial meeting in my office. I know very little about him.”
“Except that now he’s dead.”
Clare shifted. She was wearing a T-shirt and gym shorts, her hair piled on top of her head. Much of it had broken loose from its fastener and fallen across her face. Freya thought she looked adorable. “Yes. That’s pretty shocking. Can you tell me what happened?”
“Only that Barnes and two others were murdered in a house out in the country.”
Freya tried to catch Clare’s eyes, which flitted around the room and refused to settle.
“I hope I cleared that up for you,” she said.
“Sure. It’s a small town. Why not have you as his lawyer?”
“Exactly.” Clare nodded. “And I’m sorry I had to cancel last evening. But I guess you would have been called into work anyway.” They both stood and Freya walked around the table to stand in front of her. She raised a tentative hand to Clare’s face and touched her cheek with her palm. Her doubts about her seemed to do nothing to lessen her attraction.
“I’ve missed you,” Freya said. “There doesn’t seem to be time to spend together.”
Clare drew Freya toward her and kissed her gently. “Do you have to leave?”
“I need to get back to work.”
“Right away? Can’t you stay for half an hour?” She smiled.
“I thought you weren’t feeling well,” Freya said.
“Oh, I’m much better now. I needed to lie down for a bit.” She took Freya by the hand and walked toward the staircase.
She knew she had to get back to work, but what was half an hour? Her thinking compartmentalized and now it was in the quadrant that found Clare irresistible. As soon as they were in her bedroom, Clare pulled Freya down on top of her. The half hour turned into an hour before Freya peeled herself away.
“When will I see you again?” Clare said, a hand clasped on Freya’s arm.
“I’m going to be pretty busy with this investigation.” She saw the frown on Clare’s face. “But as soon as we both have a minute. We’ll find a way.” She kissed her good-bye and hurried to her car. Ben was going to give her hell for being away so long. Clare seemed too present, too skilled, to be high on anything. Maybe they were solid as a couple. She was shaken by how much she wanted that.
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