Carlene Thompson

by Black for Remembrance (epub)

  The dog remained at rigid attention, the growl deepening until it seemed to shake the ground. If it were the guard, Caroline reasoned, he would certainly have shown himself by now. The dog tensed. "George, please," Caroline wailed with an abrupt, blinding fear.

  Suddenly he jerked away from her and ran up the hill. She could barely see his shape pausing by the tree. Then he sat down, threw back his head, and howled. It was a chillingly mournful sound that cut the night like a death cry.

  "My God, George," Caroline gasped. "George, come! Come right this instant!" The dog bayed on, ignoring her. Caroline was beginning to feel as if she couldn't get her breath. "George, I'm leaving." She backed away. "I'm going now. Go home. I'm going home."

  George knew the word home. He stopped in mid-howl, hesitated, then bounded down the hill and jumped up, planting his big paws on her shoulders. "Good boy!"

  She grasped his leash and slipped the loop around her wrist, determined not to let him get away again. "C'mon. We've got to get back to the…"

  As the dog dropped down, Caroline looked with horror at the smears on her pale jacket. In the moonlight they looked inky, but she knew they were blood.

  She went limp with shock, and George took advantage of her momentary weakness to drag her up the hill. Her wrist was trapped by the leash and she couldn't get free. She stumbled once on the damp grass and heard herself sob as she clambered back to her feet, but George was eighty pounds of relentless will and muscle. He didn't stop until he had deposited her at the base of the tree.

  So it was the cemetery guard after all, she thought distantly. He lay across the gnarled roots, the front of his uniform shirt soaked with blood.

  Chapter 8

  LATER CAROLINE WAS amazed at how calmly she knelt and took the man's wrist, feeling the fault pulse. By now George was quiet, and she left him, alert and protective, while she ran down the hill to the car and drove to the guard booth.

  Lights blazed inside. A small color television blared and she turned it off, reaching for the black phone on the long, cluttered metal table. As soon as Tom said hello, she realized she should have called 911 instead. But calling Tom had been instinctive.

  "Tom, it's Caroline." Her voice was friendly and controlled. "I'm sorry to wake you and Lucy."

  "Lucy's at her mother's. What's wrong?"

  "I'm at Rosemont Cemetery, and I found the guard up on the hill where Pamela Burke was buried. He's either been shot or stabbed in the chest, I can't tell which."

  After a beat of silence, Tom asked, "Is he dead?"

  "No, but he's unconscious, and there's a lot of blood."

  "You're in the guardhouse?" Caroline nodded. "Are you in the guardhouse?"

  "Oh, yes."

  "Don't go back to him. Stay where you are. I'll be right there."

  Caroline suddenly felt her knees weakening. She sat down on the padded metal chair, absently noting the pornographic magazine spread on the table, the half-empty bag of Oreo cookies, the drip coffee maker with murky, strong-smelling dregs sizzling in the pot. She turned it off and closed the magazine, then wondered if she should have touched anything. But the guard hadn't been injured in here, and it was unlikely the attacker had come by to leave fingerprints on the magazine before leaving.

  She glanced at the black wall clock. 1:22. Had she left home nearly an hour ago? What if David had awakened to find her missing?

  Guiltily she reached for the phone again. After three rings, David answered groggily. "Caroline? Is that you?"

  "David, I'm sorry. I only expected to be gone a few minutes, but I'll be longer."

  "Why? Do you know what time it is? Where are you?"

  "I'll have to tell you later." She heard a siren in the distance. "Bye."

  He was still sputtering on the other end when she hung up, but she couldn't worry about explaining herself to him now. Already the EMS ambulance was pulling up. She ducked out of the guard booth and headed for her car, calling, "Follow me."

  The driver had shut off the siren, but the red light still twirled in the darkness, throwing lurid color over the tombstones. The excitement had set off George again, and when they arrived at the hill, he was howling like the Hound of the Baskervilles. The paramedics glanced at him warily. "It's my Labrador," Caroline said. "He won't hurt you."

  One young man looked skeptical. "Would you mind getting him under control, lady, so we can work?"

  "Certainly." Caroline climbed the hill with them and, not looking at the blood-drenched guard, took hold of George's leash. He went back down the hill easily.

  Two uniformed policemen had arrived by then. One was taking her name and address when Tom pulled up. He jumped out of the car, his hair awry above a faded red Ohio State sweatshirt and jeans. "Caroline, are you all right?"

  "Yes, but I'm awfully glad to see you!" By now nervous reaction was setting in full-force. Her voice trembled and Tom took her arm, leading her to her car. When he opened the door, George jumped in and Caroline sat sideways on the front seat, looking out at Tom and the officers.

  "Are you going to faint?" one of them asked.

  Caroline smiled. "Sometimes I shake, but I never faint. I'm okay."

  "Can you tell us what you were doing out here, ma'am?" the other one asked, poised to write in a black notebook.

  "I know what she's doing here," Tom said quickly. "Caroline, just tell us about finding the guard."

  "I was at Pamela's grave, searching through the flowers." She saw a look pass between the two officers. "Then George started growling. He ran up to the tree and howled, time after time. I called for him to come. When he did, he jumped up on me and left blood on my jacket. I had my hand tangled in his leash, and when he ran back up the second time, he dragged me along."

  "The guard was unconscious then?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you see or hear anything?"

  "Nothing, Tom. But when I was in the guardhouse, I could tell that the coffee had been on the burner a long time. The pot was just about dry, as if most of the coffee had evaporated."

  "So you think this could have happened quite a while ago."

  "Well, certainly not within the last half hour. When I got here there was no sign of him in the guard house, and I never saw his car while I was driving around looking for Pamela's grave. He must have one, though. He couldn't patrol this whole place on foot."

  Tom turned to one of the officers. "Would you go up and find out what they know about his condition? And see if you can find his car." Then he looked back at Caroline. "What time did you get here?"

  "I'd say about twenty till one."

  "And you drove all around the cemetery looking for the grave?"

  "Only around the new section. I didn't think the Burkes or Fitzgeralds would have plots in the old section. That's taken up with families who have lived in town since before World War II."

  Tom grinned. "You know, with you and Lucy around I feel like turning in my badge. You've made some very good deductions, especially considering the circumstances."

  "I don't feel very smart. I feel like a fool, out here rambling around with a possible killer loose."

  "You shouldn't have been out here. I told you I'd look for the bouquet."

  "I didn't want to wait. You know the day after I found the bouquet on Hayley's grave it vanished." She paused. "And if the second black bouquet is on Pamela's grave, I couldn't find it."

  "That's too bad."

  Caroline looked at him sharply. "I know what you're thinking: there was no bouquet to begin with."

  "I didn't say that."

  "You didn't have to. But Tom, you can't deny one thing: that guard was shot near Pamela's grave. Maybe the person who sent the black bouquet came back to get it."

  "And was discovered by the guard."

  "Yes."

  Caroline couldn't read Tom's expression before he looked at the officer coming back down the hill. "The guard's car's on the next street over," he told Tom.

  "I didn't make it that far back," Caroli
ne said. "That's why I didn't see it."

  Tom nodded. "And the guard?"

  "They got the bleeding stopped and started an IV, but the guy's still unconscious."

  "What happened to him?"

  "Shot in the chest. And it looks like by his own gun. It's missing."

  Three days later Tom Jerome was convinced of one thing: the Hayley Corday case had suffered from some pretty sloppy police work. In spite of Millicent Longworth's abysmal lie detector test results, there was no concrete follow-up. In addition, little or no investigation had been done on the backgrounds of anyone who came in contact with the child, and glaring leads had been dropped for no good reason. For instance, a week after Hayley's disappearance a woman named Margaret Evans had seen a child fitting Hayley's description lying in the back of a Cadillac parked at a roadside rest outside of Chillicothe. The woman claimed she pecked on the Cadillac's window, but the child did not stir, leading Mrs. Evans to believe the little girl was drugged. Harry Vinton, the detective from juvenile in charge of the investigation, had dismissed the woman as a nut, claiming she was always reporting that she had seen missing children. However, Tom's research revealed no similar calls by Mrs. Evans. On impulse, he called the number listed for the woman, certain that in twenty years she would have moved. His heart leaped when a young woman answered, saying her mother was indeed Mrs. Margaret Evans, and although she was out of town now, she would probably be returning by Friday. After hanging up, Tom decided to do a little digging on Harry Vinton.

  "Sure, I remember him," Al McRoberts, once on Juvenile and now on Homicide, told him. "Damn good cop until the drinking got to him. He retired, oh, let's see, seventeen-eighteen years ago, long before you came."

  "A good cop, you say."

  "Yeah." Al frowned. "Good because he was smart and he'd bleed to show it. I mean, I know you can't get personally involved with cases or you'd lose your mind, but every one of them rolled right off Harry's back. No personal reaction whatsoever. Each case was like a puzzle to him, and he wanted to prove he could solve the puzzle. Aside from that, it meant nothing to him." He smiled crookedly. "How's that for a little dime-store analysis?"

  "Interesting. Do you remember the Hayley Corday case?"

  Al stared off, his prematurely aged face pale in the harsh morning sun. "Daughter of the artist, right? Killer cut off the head and burned the body?" Tom nodded. "I wasn't working on that one, but it does seem to me I thought Vinton wasn't showing his usual bull-doggedness about the whole thing."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Just that as I recall, he let that one go pretty quick after the kid's body was found."

  "It was a Homicide matter then."

  "I know, but that never stopped Harry before. Like I said, he loved attention. A prima donna. Normally he would have stayed with it, even on his own time, just to show he could solve the murder when no one else could."

  "Didn't anyone think that was strange?"

  Al rubbed his hand across his chin in thought. "Yeah, but we attributed it to him being all torn up over his wife at the time." Tom raised an eyebrow. "Oh, hell, what was her name? Something made up. She acted in a lot of local plays and seemed to think she was headed for stardom."

  "I assume she didn't make it."

  Al laughed. "Never stood a chance as far as I was concerned. I'm no judge of acting, but if the things my wife dragged me to see with her in them were any indication…well, anyway, she was young and sexy, a good twenty years younger than Harry, and she led him a merry life for a while. He left his first wife for her, spent what little savings he had, and then she dumped him and went to California. He started drinking bad. Then she got killed. Harry quit the force a couple of months later."

  "To do what?"

  "He played around at being a PI for a while, but he gave that up years ago."

  "So what's he live on?"

  "Search me. Maybe he had a windfall."

  "Maybe," Tom said thoughtfully.

  Harry Vinton rolled out of bed and looked at the clock. 11:30. Well, at least he was awake before noon for the first time this week. Hell, for the first time this month. What was the cause for all this get-up-and-go? Must be something exciting in the air, he thought, something he couldn't quite figure out until he had his morning coffee.

  Groaning, he hauled his two hundred and fifty pounds out of the bed, wincing as sunlight cut through the open Venetian blinds and right into his eyes. God, when was he going to remember to close those damn things before he turned in? Probably the first night he went to bed sober, which hadn't happened for a long time and wasn't likely to happen in this lifetime.

  He plugged in the Mr. Coffee and listened to it hiss into action while he leaned over the kitchen sink, peering out at the young woman next door. She was loading suitcases into her car, her long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her skirt tight over rounded hips. He'd never seen her up close, but he guessed her to be around twenty-five, and from this distance she reminded him of Teresa, his second wife. They had the same cocky walk that said they knew they were sexy, the same way of flipping their hair around for attention. But in spite of her voluptuous body and self-awareness, the girl next door somehow seemed innocent. Teresa had been anything but innocent.

  Which is part of what attracted you to her, Harry thought. His first wife had been loyal, kind, and dull as dishwater. The only time her plain little face showed any animation was when she was planning a garage sale, and she bore his once-a-week lovemaking with the abstracted air of a woman making grocery lists in her head. Then had come Teresa, a cocktail waitress who hung on his every word when he stopped by the bar after work and one night in the OK Motel and acted thrilled when he told her he was going to divorce his wife and marry her. But domestic life wasn't for her. She craved attention, and although he'd done everything he could to hold her, she headed for Hollywood, certain there was a place for her on the silver screen. Harry laughed aloud at the memory, but there was no humor in the sound. He'd loved her, God only knew why. Poor Teresa. Teresa Torrance, that's what she'd called herself. But a year later, when she was stabbed to death by a mugger, the minuscule newspaper account had given her real name: Tessie Kuhn.

  Almost nineteen years. Hard to believe she'd been gone for so long. If she hadn't been murdered, she would have come back. Harry knew that. She would have come back when she realized Hollywood didn't want her and he did. And he had money by then. Just eight months after she left, Hayley Corday had been kidnapped. That's when he'd seen his chance, his only chance, to ever have enough money to lure Teresa home. He had talked to her three weeks before her death, telling her he'd "come into money." She didn't believe him at first, especially when she asked him to send her some of his new-found wealth and he refused. Supporting her stupid Hollywood dreams wasn't the way to bring her back. But months in Los Angeles had weakened her confidence. No one was interested in putting her in a movie, a TV show, a commercial, or anything else, and she was back to waitressing again, this time in a cheap diner. Harry figured that if she'd lived six more months, she would have come home. But she didn't live.

  He poured a cup of coffee, watching the blonde drive off. She sure traveled a lot, he thought without interest. The Corday kid would have been about the same age. She'd been a blonde too. Funny how he thought about her at the most unexpected times. No, funny how he thought about her all the time.

  Well, hell, what else is there to think about? he mused, slogging back to the living room in his shorts and snapping on the television. For nineteen years he'd officially been a private investigator, but he'd given up the pretense long ago. After all, he didn't need the money. Well, for a long time he hadn't needed the money. But now his source was drying up, and pretty soon there wouldn't be anything left, thanks to bad investments. He could coast along for a couple more years. And then what?

  The doorbell rang and he nearly jumped out of his chair. He never had company. Maybe it was a salesman. He peeked through the drapes to see a tall, slender man whose e
yes immediately spotted the movement. Harry darted back, but the bell rang again. Why doesn't the bastard just go away? Harry fumed. He wasn't about to buy anything. But when the bell rang for the third time, he gave up. Still clad only in ancient, baggy shorts, he opened the door a crack.

  "Harry Vinton?"

  Harry looked into a pair of piercing gray eyes. "Who wants to know?"

  "My name is Tom Jerome. I'd like to talk to you about the Hayley Corday case."

  Two hours later Harry slammed down the phone for the fourth time. Not home. Or not answering. Must know it was him. No, that was impossible. He was just shaken.

  He popped the top on a new beer and wondered what had happened. A confession? Because nothing could make Harry believe Jerome's story about the Corday kid's mother being harassed by someone claiming to be Hayley. Hell, no, that was a ruse. And a pretty poor one. He'd have expected better from the detective he'd heard so much about. Hot shit. That's what Jerome was supposed to be. Hot shit from Chicago. Hell, in his prime Harry could have run circles around him. The guy was an idiot.

  Except he wasn't. Harry knew that. The man was downright scary with those eyes as cold and hard as granite. And he was onto something.

  In spite of the fat that usually kept him too warm, Harry shivered. Then he dialed again. This time there was an answer.

  "This is Vinton. I'm coming over there tonight to talk to you." He gulped beer while someone spoke. "I'm not coming about money. I'm coming about your big mouth."

  He slammed down the phone. No one was a match for Harry Vinton, he thought, his big hand clenching into a fist. Not even Jerome. No sir. He was going to get to the bottom of this. And then he was going to fix it.

  Chris Corday ordered another Scotch and water and glanced down the bar. She was toying with a damp napkin under her drink, keeping her eyes downcast as if she was completely unaware of him. He smiled to himself. Why did they always act like they didn't see you? Like they didn't know you existed? When all the time they were tensed, waiting for you to make the first overt move. Well, okay. He knew how to play the game.