by M. P. Cooley
“So the only thing that slowed the killer down was a broken ax?” I asked. I angled around to see the face, which was difficult between the blood, the cuts, the ax blade, and Annie’s rule that we not mess up her crime scene.
Off in the corner, a piece of wood was emerging from the melting snow. I pointed it out. Annie retraced her steps, stopping two and a half feet short of where an ax handle stuck out of the snow.
“Get out.” She pointed toward the door. “I’m not done here. While I appreciate the fact that you need a place to have a tea party, you need to leave.”
“C’mon, Annie, we can work together,” Dave said.
“Out.”
“Fine, fine,” I said, pulling an evidence bag out of my pocket. “Give us the ax handle and we’ll leave.”
Annie folded her arms in front of her chest. “No way. The reason there’s only me in here is yes, they wanted the best, but also it’s such a small space, we didn’t want to miss any trace evidence. Post one of the chuckleheads outside the door of the tent. I’ll send it over when I’m done.”
“We’d like it now,” I said.
“Mmm, good for you. And if this were going to hold you up by twenty-four hours or even two hours, I’d hand it over right now. But it’s going to take twenty minutes. I’ll send it over after I photograph and bag it and you can have all the alone time you want. I’ll even send candles.”
We couldn’t argue with that logic. The second I stepped outside I was hit with a shower of sleet; I pulled up my hood. The sleet, while more miserable than the snow, was a good sign in that it meant the storm was on its way out. By the time I got home, things would have calmed down enough that Lucy would be ready to turn all this snow into a snowman, or better yet, a snow fort. Just the thought of her made my step quicken. I kept my head low and followed Dave’s feet.
With a last push from the wind, we stepped into the relative heat of the barn. Pete waved us down. “Jerry told me to send the two of you into the command center’s command center.”
“Huh?” Dave said.
“Yeah, Jerry’s in with the tools.” He waved his hand to a door on the far side of the barn. State troopers sat on one side of it, forced to dart in and out of stalls left over from the property’s days as a working farm. On the other side of the door sat Hale and the FBI agents. Hale looked worn out, or rather, his hair did. He had worn a fur-lined hat—with earflaps, no less—and his hair hadn’t taken kindly to being in something so unfashionable and was now sticking out in pique. He was briefing four local agents, gesturing at a computer that was propped on a saw bench. I didn’t know them, having gone out of my way over the last few years to not meet people from the Albany field office.
“Her? Really?” one of them said as I passed. They all stared, and for the first time in my life I rushed to see Jerry. We found him perched on a chair he had grabbed from the tool bench, a map of the area pinned up behind him, notebooks and pens on a barrel to his left.
“I reviewed the interview with the congresswoman and her husband,” Jerry said, waving at a closed pad, “and I think it’s pretty clear the husband did it.”
“Phillip Brouillette?” I said, surprised.
Jerry rolled his eyes. “No. Marty Jelickson.”
“Good thinking, Jerry.” Dave said. “But we can’t prove that he did it, can’t even prove he had an opportunity to do it.”
I heard a knock on the door, and Hale walked in, snapping open a folding chair in front of him like a lion tamer.
“Y’all mind if I join you?” he asked, straddling the chair backward.
Jerry shifted back and forth in his seat, back straight, trying to appear taller. “Actually, we’re—”
“Or my liaison, Officer Lyons, could brief me right now.”
Jerry pursed his mouth so tightly that I could see the outline of his teeth, which made me like Hale a little. What was the old saying: the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I did appreciate that when Jerry spoke, his mouth barely opened. “You can both stay and brief me. Why don’t you go first?”
“That’s very generous of you,” Hale said, all politeness. “The first bit of news I have is on the phone.”
“It’s working?” Dave asked.
“Not yet. But we subpoenaed his cell phone records—”
“Already?” I asked. Most of the judges we worked with were fast asleep, and the ones who were awake would want the petition for discovery presented in person for something that could be such a violation of privacy.
“Federal judge.”
Federal judges were even slower to issue phone record subpoenas than local ones were, unless it was part of an ongoing investigation. Jerry had other concerns.
“I could have arranged for the subpoena,” he said. “This is still our investigation.”
“But one less hassle is a good thing,” Dave said. “What was in them?”
“We can’t get the substance of the messages, not yet,” Hale said. “We got a list of who received them, however. It looks like there were a bunch to Danielle, a couple to his folks, and in the few hours before his death, several to an untraceable phone.”
“What do you mean it’s untraceable?” Jerry asked. “With a little effort, all phones are traceable these days.”
“The phone was purchased at a beverage center in Albany. You use up the minutes and throw it away.” Jerry looked skeptical, but Hale continued: “We’ll check with the owner tomorrow for credit card receipts and videos—you know the drill. Ray’s phone was registered in Marty’s name, although the bills were still going to an address in California.”
“His parents?” Dave asked.
“Very likely. And speaking of the vic’s parents, we’ll be seeing the whole clan tomorrow.”
I had a terrible thought. “Did anyone notify Marty?”
“Patrol car sent,” Dave said. “So the Brouillettes . . .” Dave ran his finger down the page, his eyes following his hand. I half expected him to tip over and fall asleep on the floor, and I was ready to curl up next to him. I used one of my old listening tricks, where I focused my eyes on different objects to concentrate on the words. A scythe hung on the wall. Geez, was I seeing things? Who the hell has a scythe?
Dave recited the details of the interview: Phil was distraught, but Amanda Brouillette remained calm.
“The lady doesn’t flinch at a thing,” Hale said.
“Well, she kind of can’t, right?” I said. “Her line of work, she probably can never show emotion or she gets hit for being ‘hormonal.’ When every day is a big swinging-dick contest.” Jerry looked shocked at my statement, Dave smiled, but surprisingly, Hale frowned, his head tilted in concern. He knew I was speaking from experience, and he pitied me. It pissed me off. “Although I would argue that having emotions makes you human, not female.”
A soft rap sounded at the door. We sat staring at it until Jerry yelled, “Come!” Pete ducked his head in.
“The FBI pulled the prints off the ax handle. Thought you might want to know.”
“Who came up?” Dave asked.
“Who turned it over to the FBI?” Jerry said. He started toward the door, stopping short and turning on Hale. “Was this your move?”
“I’m sure they were just—” began Dave.
“Yes,” Hale said. “We have better labs. Even our mobile labs. Plus, ya’ll are overloaded.”
“Decided that, did you?” Jerry marched out into the main room.
“Give me the ax,” he said.
“Will you excuse me?” Hale didn’t wait for our response. I peeked around the corner, pulling back quickly. Hale was going to face down both Jerry and Annie, who had got wind of the fact that evidence was going to be removed from her oversight.
“God, that’s going to be a bloodbath,” Dave said, the flannel lining of his pants sending up a cloud of dust as he patted them.
“I don’t know who to root for,” I said. “Maybe Annie.”
“Th
e prints,” Pete said, only continuing when I nodded. “The prints that came off the ax were Phillip Brouillette, Ray Jelickson—”
“Great. Maybe he committed suicide,” Dave said.
“—someone named Craig Madigan, and one unidentified.”
“Craig Madigan? Really? He’s on our list. Tomorrow, right?” Dave asked. “What was he doing with the ax?”
Voices rose from the other room.
“Shouldn’t you be out there throwing your weight around?” I asked Dave.
“Eh. Jerry’s so much better at throwing my weight around; I’ll let him do it.”
Jerry yelled, “Support capacity only.” I couldn’t quite make out Hale’s response, pitched low and deadly. I edged toward the door so I could hear better.
“—and if you think for one moment, sir,” Hale said, “that we are going to jeopardize this investigation so that you can play tin-pot dictator, you are very much mistaken.”
Dave stifled a laugh from behind me. I pressed close to the shelves lining the wall, feeling them crease my arms. I pulled away and brushed off the shoulder of my sweater. The wool was covered in red powder from one of the one hundred or so flares lined up on the shelf.
“You think you can waltz in here . . .” Jerry was building up a good head of steam.
The red powder on my sleeve . . . I racked my memory . . . there was something. . . . Scythe. Okay, decorative. Glass containers under the bench. Red flares. And was that ammonia?
I grabbed Dave’s arm. “Jesus Christ. We’re standing in the middle of a meth lab.”
CHAPTER 10
I STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of the barn, wrestling with the toggles on my parka. The toggles were winning.
“Going home to rest on your laurels?” Hale asked.
“Uh, yes?”
The last of my brain cells had shut down fifteen minutes before. The previous six hours had consisted of asking Hale and Jerry to come look at some evidence; shouting for Hale and Jerry to shut the fuck up and look at the bubbling 22s, flares, and ammonia; convincing Jerry the barn was a meth lab; implementing hazmat protocols—which consisted of trekking to the garage to wait for the all clear from Albany’s heavy rescue squad and watching the paramedics listen to Jerry’s lungs and assure him that no, the ammonia crystals in the barrel he had propped his pens on weren’t going to damage his lungs; searching the barn for remains of the drug operation; and finally, watching while Hale and Jerry, with Dave’s careful mediation, negotiated jurisdictions. Neither Dave nor I faulted Jerry for collaborating: A single murder was taxing our personnel to the limit. Two murders and a meth lab were going to do us all in.
We reluctantly agreed that Hale could ride along with us, and Hale reluctantly agreed to give the ax handle and phone to Annie for processing. Dave would coordinate the rest of the Ray scene, Hale and I would finish interviews, and the FBI would conduct a second search at the Jelicksons’. Jerry was all for me doing the interviews, which was surprising. I assumed his exhaustion impaired his spite. When I left, Annie was giving Ray’s phone a stern talking-to, and it seemed to be responding, the screen light coming on before dying again.
Hale snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Want me to carry you into town?”
I squinted at him sideways, partly from the snow glare and partly because I wondered why he thought we were now friends. I picked up my stuff and made my way down the narrow path. “You need a ride because you crashed your car, don’t you?”
“It was a controlled crash—”
“Says someone who has no understanding of black ice.”
“Who’s a touch more awake than you are, Officer Lyons. If you insist, you can drive, and I’ll be there to push the car out of the ditch once you fall asleep behind the wheel.” He grinned and held out his hand. “Throw me the keys.”
“So they can get lost in a snowdrift? No thanks.” I walked over and placed the keys in his hand, folding his fingers around them.
At the car, I pushed the Cheerios littering the seat next to Lucy’s booster onto the floor. Hale turned on the engine and grabbed the snow brush.
“You sit tight,” he said, popping out of the car.
I climbed in and shut the door. A blast of warm air hit me square in the face. I tried flicking the passenger-side vents but remembered they wouldn’t move. At the end of her dad’s illness, Lucy had decided he needed some company on his almost daily trips to and from the hospital. She’d shoved one of her Fisher-Price people between the slots—the girl with the yellow ponytail—and no one was able to dislodge it. One day last summer, furious in the humidity and with my inability to do anything about my crap car with the crap air-conditioning, I wrenched the vent closed. I succeeded only in breaking off the tab that shuttered it.
I closed my eyes in order to keep from drying out my eyeballs and drifted in the heat. Maybe I should move back to L.A. with Lucy? My time in Cali, at least before Kevin got sick, had been happy; surprising, considering that I spent my days collecting data on gang killings or doing drug buys in the Palm Desert. I would visit San Francisco once a month or so, and Kevin would come down to L.A., crashing on my couch over the weekend. We e-mailed constantly, and he sent me pictures of bikers he took on his travels around the country, with captions like “The Pagan’s (sic) need to bone up on the possessive form.” Our weekends consisted of hanging out, surfing (and failing disastrously), and biking.
We didn’t just talk shop, but he didn’t mind hearing about work when it did come up. Still, he could understand when I had to keep confidences. Of course, I hadn’t considered that I might have to keep my love life quiet. For the most part, dating was a nonissue, since I worked seventy hours a week. But when I mentioned over sushi that I’d gone out with a likable graphic designer I’d met in a bookstore, the conversation got strained. No angry words, but Kevin addressed his full attention to separating every piece of ginger on the plate before eating them one by one. I knew I’d made a misstep, but I didn’t know how. When we left, half the sushi was still on the plate.
The night was sultry, the day’s smog burned off in a startling red sunset, and even downtown we could smell the faintest hint of orange blossoms. Kevin marched silently toward the car, and I got mad: he was carrying the protective friend thing a bit far. This situation was nothing like the one with Hale. I was older, and the graphic designer was a nice guy.
“What’s your problem?” I demanded. Kevin was two steps ahead of me and walked faster, so I pushed harder. “Are you mad you haven’t vetted him?” He put more distance between us.
“It’s not like you’re any sort of relationship genius! Your last relationship was with that crazy girl from your hometown, who cheated on you with your second cousin! Who’s fifty-three!” I reached out and grabbed his arm.
And suddenly he was in motion, pulling me to him and kissing me. If I was honest with myself, the kiss wasn’t very romantic. In my surprise, all I could do was grab hold of his left biceps and try to keep upright. I shut my eyes. His lips were dry but still really soft, and edged with stubble. I opened my mouth and ran my tongue over his lower lip, and his tongue met mine, and . . .
He broke the kiss, holding me at arm’s length and panting. I reached out for him again, but before I could touch him he said, “Right. I’m going to the hotel now. Right now. It’s for the best,” and walked quickly down the street, breaking into a run after fifteen feet.
Was it for the best? I wondered as I sat on the couch in my apartment, looking at his bag, tucked neatly away in the corner of the living room. He didn’t take up much space in my life, physically. He did take up a huge amount of space in my mind and my heart: I texted him when I wanted to tell someone about the hummingbird that was skirting the apricot blossoms outside my bedroom window, or the terrible turkey sandwich I had at lunch, or when I didn’t feel at home in my own skin after a day when I was June Lyons, FBI agent, rather than June Lyons, person. Although I never consciously thought, I want Kevin, I now found my first thought was ex
actly that.
The front door buzzed. I leaped up to answer, banging my knee on the coffee table in my rush.
“Hi, it’s me,” Kevin said through the intercom, as if it could have been anyone else. I stood in the hallway, my foot holding the door. He stopped short when he got off the elevator, then marched forward, explaining before he even got to my door.
“Look, I promised myself I’d never force the issue, but I felt more . . . more strongly than I realized. And I can’t change it, can’t change the way I feel.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes as he talked, instead professing his feelings to each of my neighbor’s doors, the floral arrangement the building’s management put at the end of the hallway, and the lines on the carpet. He almost walked into me, which forced him to meet my eyes. “I understand and respect the fact that you don’t feel the same way. I may need to put a little distance between the two of us for a while, but I love you, June, I’ve loved you for a long time—”
And I kissed him. This time he was the one with his eyes open, but he was quicker on the uptake than I was and he kissed me back. It was good. As we pushed and pulled each other into the apartment, Kevin took his hand away from my hip and backhanded the door shut. We slowed each other down in our haste to get our clothes off, with both of our hands reaching to unbutton his shirt and unzip my skirt. I broke the kiss as we neared the bedroom.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Yes,” Kevin said, picking me up and carrying me the rest of the way to bed.
Later, we lay talking.
“I didn’t want you to know,” Kevin said. “I overstepped the bounds of friendship back there at the restaurant, and I figured you’d never want to see me again.”
“That’s quite the conversation we had.” I smiled at him. “Too bad it only happened in your thick head.”
“Yeah”—his breath warm on my shoulder as he laughed—“I was all ready to do the honorable thing and slink back to San Francisco. And have you mail me my socks.”
“Honorable? Slinking?”
“It made sense, in a sort of southern gentleman way.”