Claudia will not be consoled, and no amount of comfort from her father, whom she loves more than anything, will stop her tears. I wish I could tell her, “Don’t cry for me. I’m not worth it. If you only knew how worthless I really am, none of this would even matter to you.”
I know I’m guilty. I only hope poor Claudia won’t pay the price for my sins.
WEDNESDAY
Victor
Pride puffed Vic’s chest as he waited at the gate for his mother to buzz him into the retirement community he had finally been able to afford to help her get into. She stood at the door of her two-bedroom duplex as he pulled the Camry into the parking place in front of the garage she had no need of, since she’d never had the money to buy a car. He’d have been pleased to get her one, but by the time he could have, she wasn’t interested. “Start driving at my age? I’d be a danger to society.”
Vic waved at her through the windshield as he slid the gearshift into Park and cut the engine. Though her face lit at the sight of him, her years of hard living had taken their toll. She was no older than Claudia’s mother, and yet in appearance, she could have been fifteen years Mrs. King’s senior.
What she lacked in social grace and breeding, she made up for in wisdom and unconditional love, like any good mother who only wanted better for her child than she had herself.
Vic had grown up in south Dallas in a dingy apartment crawling with roaches, and his mother, Darla, worked two jobs to support him after his dad had gone to prison. Mama insisted Dad was set up, that he hadn’t murdered the owner of the liquor store. Dad had gone in for a bottle of wine for them to celebrate their anniversary. When he arrived at the corner store, he hadn’t noticed a robbery was in place. Foolishly, he had run as soon as the gunshot rang through the neighborhood. He was seen by several witnesses on the street. They didn’t know what had happened, and the real robbers, a pair of brothers well known for dealing drugs and petty crimes, had stuck together and made a deal with the DA. Dad had died in a prison brawl when Vic was twenty-one.
Shaking off the ghosts of his past, Vic locked the car door as he walked toward his mother. She enfolded him with the sort of embrace only a mother’s arms could deliver. Warm and soft, scented with cinnamon and spicy beans and rice and corn bread. The embrace felt like coming home. Especially nice since his actual homecoming last night had been tense and silent. Claudia had apologized, her face pale and her eyes watery. Then she had left him to fend for himself for dinner. Emmy had eaten peanut butter. Why was he being punished when he was the one having to clean up her mess?
His mother patted his back and pulled back, holding him at arm’s length. Studying his face, she frowned. “You’re not sleeping. What’s wrong? Are you working too hard, or do you have other troubles?”
Releasing a heavy breath, he nodded toward the front door. “Let’s go inside so we can visit for a while.”
“I cooked for you, so you’re going to stay and have lunch.”
He chuckled. “Yes, Ma, I’m staying for lunch.”
Inside, she took him straight to her kitchen and sat him down at the table. The duplex was warm. “Why don’t you have the air cranked? It’s hot in here.”
She waved aside his complaint. “Waste electricity when I got a nice cross breeze?”
A nice cross breeze? More like a hot one, but he simply shrugged out of his sport coat, rolled up his sleeves and unbuttoned his top button at his throat.
There was no arguing with a woman who had scrimped and saved her entire life to make ends meet. His mother pinched every penny and clipped every coupon. Too bad Claudia grew up as an entitled rich girl. As soon as he had the thought, he wished he could take it back.
Darla set a plate of chicken and dumplings in front of him. “No one makes chicken and dumplings the way you do.” She went back to the kitchen counter and returned with a plate of fried okra.
“Don’t try to flatter me.” She slapped him lightly on the shoulder. “I’m going to pour you a glass of lemonade and then I expect you to tell me what is wrong with you.”
Digging into the plate in front of him, Vic let a sense of peace comfort him. The sort of peace that came only from a mother’s table.
She poured a glass of lemonade for each of them and sat catty-corner from him. “Now tell me why you’re fretting.”
“I’m not exactly fretting.” He savored a bite of dumplings, sipping his lemonade to wash down the thick, cooked dough.
“Don’t tell me that, son. I saw it on your face the minute you drove up. Now, you tell me what’s wrong. Is it a case? Or Claudia.”
Something in his face must have given it away, because she gave a knowing nod.
“What is wrong between the two of you?” She peered closely, frowning.
Setting his fork back on his plate, Vic released a breath and met his mother’s compassionate gaze.
“Tell me.” It was the same soothing voice that had calmed him after the bullies teased him for having a murderer for a dad. The same voice that told him he had a whole life to prove them wrong. The voice that told him better to be beaten by the gangs than stoop to their level and join them.
“Ma …” He told her about Claudia’s coolness toward him, her panic attacks, and the latest—overspending and not paying the bills. Anger began to build as he told her about dipping into the vacation fund they had been saving for so long. “Just like that, two-thirds of it’s gone. And the worst of it is that she lied to me. I had no idea until my clerk brought me the checks that had bounced.”
“So you were embarrassed?” She gave him what he thought of as her Maya Angelou stare, the one that peered into his soul to get to the truth.
“Well, yeah. But it’s more than that. I don’t know how much more I can take.”
Darla’s head tipped to the side, her face resting on two fingers. “Son, you know the Lord won’t give you more than you can bear. So you’ll take as much as comes. You’ve made it through before.”
Vic scowled. “I guess so.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes. Darla’s eyes were closed, and Vic knew she was communing with God. And he knew better than to interrupt. When she opened her eyes, she reached across the table and took his hand in her wrinkled, worn hands. “Poor Claudia. You must be worried sick about her.”
“I guess I am.”
“Of course. That’s why you’re so angry. It’s not about the money. You have plenty of money squirreled away here and there to pull from if you had to.”
“You’re excusing her behavior?”
Darla shook her head. “No. But something is eating at her soul, baby. Why else would her personality change so drastically? You used to brag about how good she was at budgeting and stretching those pennies to make your home look elegant and beautiful like her mother’s.”
“She started changing after the miscarriage.” The memories flooded over him. Claudia, four months pregnant, calling him home from work, panicking by the amount of blood flowing from her body. By the time the ambulance arrived, she had fainted.
And he brought her home two days later, her womb empty, her heart broken, and panic beginning to show in her eyes as they sat at the tracks waiting for the train to pass.
“You have to be patient. Go home to your wife, love her, be kind to her, and pay the bills yourself until she’s whole again.”
She made it seem so simple.
As though hearing his thoughts, Darla smiled. “It’s as simple as that. A woman is healed with kindness and forgiveness from the man she loves. Have you ever read Hosea?”
“Yes, Mama.”
She frowned at his tone, and Vic’s face warmed as shame flooded over him. “I’m sorry, Mama. I don’t mean to be disrespectful.”
“You be loving to your wife and let God love her through you. She’ll heal eventually, and one day this test will become a testimony God can use to help someone else.” She stood. “Now, I’m going to wrap up the rest of that food, and you take dinner home to Claudia and my lit
tle Emily.”
Thirty minutes later, Vic pulled out of the drive, the smell of chicken and dumplings and coffeecake filling the inside of his car. His mother’s words were a challenge. He would love Claudia. He would be kind and understanding and take the checkbook and credit cards until she could be trusted again. But in the meantime, there was something else he had to do. He had to find the man who had murdered BJ Remington.
His thoughts drifted to Casio Hightower. The last thing he wanted to do was let that man into his life, even in a small capacity. But if Casio truly had information that had been overlooked in the original investigation, maybe he should give it a look.
He supposed he could bully the file from him. But Casio might just do something stupid like burn the file, and it would be his word against the officer’s that it even existed.
THURSDAY
Casio
Casio gulped his coffee, cleared his throat, and tried not to look squeamish in front of Vic, who held the autopsy report he’d retrieved from storage. It revealed that BJ Remington had died from blood loss even before the train had passed and the paramedics could cross the tracks.
“Why didn’t the paramedics go around and cross the tracks at St. Louis Street?” Vic asked.
Casio looked up. “At the time, there was no St. Louis Street. The tracks only opened at that one spot.” He shrugged. “Ten years ago, Conch Springs was even smaller than it is now. The new zoning and your father-in-law going on TV has increased the population from the thirty-five thousand residents we had then to the fifty thousand we currently have. After the murder, the town rallied and demanded another place to cross the tracks. Now there are several places, but back then, it was just the one crossing.” He glanced back down at the photographs. “There was even talk of building a second hospital on the side of the tracks without one, just in case something like that ever happened again, but it was shot down in committee.”
“The town isn’t big enough to support two hospitals, I’m sure.” Vic said.
Casio tried not to recall Miss Remington lying on the floor of the bus or see the dark, nearly black blood pooling from her body.
“Claudia wouldn’t leave her.” He stared as the pictures from the investigation took him back ten years. “Just about everyone else hightailed it off the bus, but she just laid there rubbing Miss Remington’s hair. Crying. I thought she’d really lost it.”
“Weren’t the two of you dating during that time?”
Casio’s gaze lifted, defenses rising. “What’s your point?”
“You were her boyfriend and she stayed with Miss Remington instead of coming to your side after you were shot?” Vic’s eyes held no mockery, so Casio took the comment for what it was: a simple observation.
Casio remembered waiting for Claudia to come to the hospital to see him, but she hadn’t. He had lain there, like a chump, assuming that as soon as she left Miss Remington, she’d come to his side. Finally, he’d given up. When he called her house later that night, her mother said she had given Claudia a sleeping pill and put her to bed. “What can I say? We were kids.” Although they probably wouldn’t have broken up so soon if that night hadn’t happened to them. Claudia never did come back to him after the shootings. She never called him and didn’t take his calls. Finally he moved on to the next girl and got on with his life.
Vic nodded. “She must have been really close to Miss Remington.” He sounded like a guy trying hard to keep his distance from something that clearly hit close to home. Close enough that he was willing to turn back the clock and work to bring his wife closure.
Casio shrugged and cleared his throat. “Yeah, well. It was a pretty close call for all of us.”
“Do you mind if I take a look?” Vic reached for the pages Casio had found.
Casio turned the folder around, pointing to the part his dad had hidden for ten years. “Here it is,” he said. “Approximately ten weeks pregnant.”
Victor shook his head. “I can’t believe this was lost this whole time, and your dad didn’t follow up trying to find the baby’s father.”
A shrug lifted Casio’s shoulders. “We can get a DNA match. I assume they took tissue samples of the baby.”
“They would’ve thought of that the first time around. The report definitely shows that they took DNA samples of the baby.” He skimmed over the newly found pages and sighed. “We’ll have to interview the original forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy to find out why he left out information about the pregnancy and baby. When we find the killer, he’s going to be charged with more than just the murder of Miss Remington. He’ll have to pay for murdering her baby also.”
“Like you said before, my dad was lead investigator and never mentioned anything about Miss Remington being pregnant. I never even overheard him talking to anyone else about it. That file was probably misplaced while dad was still investigating. As far as I’m concerned, that’s our first good reason for even looking at this case again. I just want to find the guy that shot me and killed Miss Remington.”
Vic’s hands moved apart. “All right, then. Who was she seeing? We need to find the guy and question him.”
“How would I know that?”
“You saw her every day. Went to her class, right? Saw her on the field with the cheerleaders. It’s a small school in a small town. Surely you saw her with someone other than students.”
“She wasn’t my type. I didn’t exactly pay that much attention.”
He sounded like a jerk, he knew. But he was just sick of the images replaying in his head like a freaky movie he couldn’t shut off. Like in a scary B movie where you switch off the set and it comes back on by itself, so you unplug it and it still comes back on, scene after scene.
First the lights flashing, then the train whizzing by. A bunch of teenagers goofing off, pumped about the game they’d just won, and then a guy with a gun storms the bus, shoots the assistant coach who’s driving the bus, and turns toward the shocked-still students who barely have time to hit the deck.
He drew a shuddering breath and closed his eyes. “I don’t have a clue who she was dating. For all I know it could have been a student. Lots of guys thought she was hot. She wasn’t all that much older than us.”
Something like a revelation crossed Vic’s face. “I wonder if anyone ever questioned the students about their private relationships with her.”
“Seriously?” Casio laughed. “Man, listen, I was kidding. I said the guys thought she was hot. No way she would have slept with a student. She was like Mother Teresa. Just ask Claudia. She went to church all the time where Claudia’s dad preaches. Not like how some people go to church but don’t mean it. We’re talking the real deal with this girl. Woman, I mean.”
“According to the autopsy report,” Vic said, “BJ Remington was shot four times. Once in the chest. Once in the left thigh, once in the stomach, and one that grazed her neck but did no damage. Half inch down and it would have hit her jugular and she would have bled out in seconds.”
Casio’s hands shook as he reached for the report Vic held out to him. He paused a moment, then read aloud, “Number one bullet grazed victim’s neck, exited with only minor damage, bullet was not recovered. Second bullet entered chest wall, penetrated fifth rib, collapsing left lung and causing internal bleeding. Third bullet entered lower right torso, penetrating liver. Fourth bullet entered left thigh, shattered femur, but did not damage artery. Cause of death: combination of gunshot wounds two and three.”
“The autopsy report sent to the medical examiner confirms his findings about the cause of death,” Casio said. “The only difference is in the extra pages I found. ‘Victim was approximately ten weeks pregnant. Fetus expired with victim. Fetal tissue sample extracted from uterus for DNA testing.’ ”
Victor stared at him hard. “Those pages weren’t lost. They were hidden. Where did you say you found them?”
“In the evidence room. I was cleaning—have to do something to occupy my time.”
“B
ut where, specifically?”
It was time to manufacture a better lie. “Between two of the metal shelves. They sit back to back and boxes are loaded in on either side.”
“And you just happened to find a file folder with missing pages from the autopsy report slid between two of them? That had to be intentional. I mean, come on. Don’t you find all of this a little coincidental?”
“Are you calling me a liar, Campbell?” Casio knew how to look innocent even when guilty. He wouldn’t give his dad up. And he sure wasn’t going to admit to his own duplicity in the matter.
“It’s our job to find out if someone deliberately hid evidence of a pregnancy.” The ADA’s eyebrows rose. “Don’t you think?”
Casio shrugged. “I’m not convinced those pages were deliberately lost, but I’m willing to look into it.”
“Well, for now, let’s concentrate on what we have in front of us.” He studied Casio’s face for a few seconds. “Have you seen any of the photos from the autopsy? It’s pretty graphic. You think you want in on this investigation, but it might be more than you can stomach.”
“I can handle it.”
“Okay. Here you go.” The ADA shoved a stack of photographs that had come in the file with the autopsy report.
Casio’s limbs weakened as he stared at the photographs. Time fell away and suddenly he was back in the bus, seeing Claudia on her side next to Miss Remington while Georgie Newman did CPR. He sat on the floor, shocked as the blood spread across his football jersey. And then those eyes bored into him. “You okay, kid?” the killer asked. Casio had never told anyone about the encounter. He didn’t know why. Maybe if he had, the man wouldn’t haunt his sleep every night.
“Hightower!”
Casio jumped as Vic knocked hard on the table to get his attention. “What?”
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Are you sure? Because you spaced out. You weren’t even there, man.”
“I’m here. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”
The Crossing Page 7