Healing Sands

by Nancy Rue

  “What are you saying? They think he killed this person?”

  “I don’t know, but they’re scaring me, taking him off like that. I just don’t want bad press for him—I mean, there’s no way he was involved in this.”

  “Look,” I said, “if you talk to the reporter, tell him only what you know—don’t embellish. And say just what you told me, that Dr. Crisp couldn’t—”

  “Okay, yeah. Good.”

  He seemed so shaken, I wasn’t sure he could even do that much. We were both basket cases.

  “Listen, thanks,” he said and started to move away.

  “Wait,” I said. “Mr.—”

  “Neering. Kyle Neering.”

  “Can I take your picture—as a concerned friend? It could help.” He shook his head. “I’d rather not do that. I’ll just go talk to the reporter.”

  “Well . . . please, if there’s anything I can do for Dr. Crisp—help with bail—anything, please call me.”

  “I will.”

  “My name’s Ryan Coe. He has my number.”

  Neering came back and squeezed my hand with his damp one. “I’ll tell Sully,” he said. “That’ll mean a lot to him.”

  I watched him go, my camera still motionless around my neck. All the pictures were in my head—the interview room at the police station—metal tables, fluorescent lights, Detective Baranovic slapping the table. I didn’t know how much anything I said or did could mean to Sullivan Crisp right now.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  When Detective Baranovic offered a cup of coffee in the interview room, Sully thought of Tess, telling him he didn’t know how to drink the stuff. That seemed like a long time ago now. He’d just lived another lifetime in this place.

  When he’d arrived, they’d taken his fingerprints—elimination prints, they told him, since he did touch the doorframe and the doors themselves, and they wanted to be able to eliminate his when they took prints from the murder weapon. If they found it. Sully still didn’t even know what the murder weapon was.

  Another detective had asked for his cell phone, which he promised to return before Sully left the building. At this rate, Sully wasn’t sure that was ever going to happen. It was eleven o’clock, and his numbness had given way to sickening horror. He wanted to get away and sort this out. Talk to Porphyria. Tess. Anybody but these people who had asked him the same set of questions no less than three times.

  Detective Baranovic sat across from him now and pushed a cup of water toward him.

  “I’m sorry for all this,” he said. “I know you’ve had a rough evening.”

  “You could say that.”

  “I just want to go over a few more things with you, and then we’ll see that you get home.”

  Sully just nodded. He was finding it harder to be congenial. He hadn’t smiled for hours.

  The detective turned the tape recorder on again. “Mr.—I’m sorry. I understand it’s Dr. Crisp. Why did you go to Belinda Cox’s residence tonight?”

  “I knew her from years ago. I had some unfinished business with her that I wanted to clear up.”

  “And what would that be?”

  Sully bristled. “It was personal.”

  “Okay. And who knew you were going there?”

  “One of my associates, Kyle Neering. And my mentor—who is back in Nashville—we talked on the phone earlier. And a friend of mine.”

  “And that would be?”

  “A friend.” Sully suddenly felt stubborn. Why did he have to bring Tess into this?

  “Does this friend have a name?”

  No, idiot. She goes by number. Sully smeared his hand over his mouth and hoped he wiped off any of the surliness that might have seeped out of his thoughts.

  “Tess Lightfoot,” he said.

  Baranovic’s brows lifted. Of course he would know her. Sully wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. Holy crow—why should it be either one?

  “How can we get in touch with Mr. Neering?”

  “You can’t,” Sully said. “He went out of town—Little Rock. He left earlier tonight.”

  “No cell phone?”

  “The number’s in my cell phone—which you still have.”

  Baranovic nodded and pulled it out of his pocket. “If you’ll bring it up for me, I’ll write that down and you can be on your way.”

  Sully flipped open the phone and read off Kyle’s number. Why did he feel like he was betraying Kyle somehow? Why did he feel any of the things that were tying his stomach into knots?

  “I’ll have an officer take you back to your car,” Baranovic said.

  “I’ll call a cab,” Sully said.

  And the sooner the better.

  Sleep was out of the question. I sent Frances a couple of shots of the outside of the crime scene. With that done, I wrapped up in Jake’s Chicago Bears blanket and spent the night in the chair by the kiva, moving in images from Jake to Alex to Sullivan Crisp and back again until the sun crept in among rare early-morning clouds. There were a few in my head, too, but I was clear enough on two things I had to do.

  At seven I was in Frances’s office. Fifteen minutes later I came out with a new lawyer. We were set up for a meeting at four, at the jail so Jake could be there. I was already liking this William Yarborough—and he had to be better than the pointless Uriel Cohen.

  My morning assignment wasn’t until nine, which gave me time to get to J.P.’s to do the second thing before Alex left for school.

  J.P. lived not far from Dan in a double-wide no one would have dared call anything but a bona fide house. It was neatly fenced, and the yard was alive with pots of fiery chrysanthemums and a pair of young cottonwoods.

  J.P. and Poco and the three boys were all outside, backpacks stacked like carry-on luggage for boarding. Alex spotted me and ran to the car, and then stopped as if he were having second thoughts about giving me a hug. I grabbed him anyway and held on until I could get control of threatening tears.

  When I held him in front of me at arm’s length, he grinned, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

  “Did you come to get me out of school for the day?” he said.

  “In your dreams. But I did come to talk to you.”

  “Aw, man.”

  I waved to Poco and J.P., who were sipping at their mugs and visibly dying to know what was going on.

  “How much longer till they have to leave?” I said across the yard.

  “Until Victoria gets here to pick them up,” J.P. said with a grunt. “Which could be anywhere from two minutes to half an hour.”

  I turned to Alex. “Let’s hang out by the fence for a minute.” I leaned. He swung his foot along the line of rocks that bordered J.P.’s flower bed and pretended he wasn’t watching my every nuance.

  “I’m not sure what anybody has told you about Jake,” I said. “But I promised you that I would tell you if he had to go to jail.” “I know. He’s in juvie.”

  “No, he’s in real jail.”

  “How come?”

  “Because Miguel died, Alex. That means the police think Jake killed him.”

  He did what I hoped he would do, what I’d wrestled with half the night because I had to make him do it. His face drained of color, except for two red panic spots on his cheekbones. The foot stopped swinging, and his eyes were now two stormy pools of fear. He was clearly beyond just being sorry for Jake.

  A horn blew and jerked us from the stare we were locked into. Alex turned away from me, but I caught his sleeve.

  “Is there something you need to tell me, son?” I said.

  “I gotta go.”

  “I will take you out of school if you want to talk about something.”

  “I got a test,” he said and bolted for his backpack.

  I waited until he was on his way in Victoria’s van before I joined J.P. and Poco on the porch. Poco gave me a cup of coffee. J.P. gave me the old disapproving stare.

  “What?” I said.

  “I don’t know what you just dumped on your kid,�
�� J.P. said. “But he hasn’t looked like that the whole time I’ve had him. I’ve been making sure he doesn’t watch the news or anything that would freak him out.”

  “I appreciate that,” I said. “And if he’s too much for you when he comes home, let me know.”

  “For Pete’s sake, what did you say to him?”

  My hackles were too tired to stand up, even under the what-kind-of-mother-are-you voice I’d thought J.P. had stopped using with me. So I told them.

  J.P. looked at me, to use another of my mother’s similes, like an old mule staring at a new fence. “I just don’t think I would have done that to the kid right before he left to go to school.”

  “I need for him to tell me what he knows—not just for Jake’s sake, but for his. He doesn’t need to be burdened with the kind of information I think he has, and that’s the only way I know to get it out of him.”

  J.P. swatted back her straying hair. “I still don’t think I’d handle it that way.”

  “J.P. Leave it.”

  Our heads turned to Poco in unison, like prairie dogs attending to an unfamiliar sound.

  “You don’t know how you’d handle a thing like this,” she said. “I sure don’t.”

  J.P.’s pause told me she was as taken aback as I was.

  “This could be the only way for Ryan to handle it,” Poco said. “So just leave her alone.”

  I prayed she was right. Because if this wasn’t what God was telling me last night, then I really didn’t know what else to do.

  “I don’t know anything about kitchens,” Sully said.

  “No kidding?” Tess wrinkled her nose at the bottle of A-1 sauce he was about to pour on a pair of raw rib eyes. “That goes on after they’re cooked, Crisp. Go sit down and have a Frappuccino.”

  Sully grinned for the first time in almost twenty-four hours. “You have a Frappuccino in this house?”

  She opened the refrigerator and produced one. “It gave me great pain to buy it, but I thought you’d need comfort food.”

  Sully took it gratefully and leaned on the wood counter across from her. She chopped tomatoes with the same grace with which she cruised across a room or told him he had the taste of a ten-year-old boy.

  “What were you going to say about kitchens?” she said.

  “I was going to say this one is . . . it’s you.”

  “Yeah, it is.” She kept chopping, keeping up a rhythm that soothed him. “I had the cabinets made from old New Mexican furniture I collected. And I love having the pots all hanging out in the open like that.” She pointed the knife above her head without looking up. “I like to see everything at once so I know what I have.”

  Sully took a long draw from the bottle. When he set it down, she was watching him.

  “What?” he said.

  “You don’t want to talk about my kitchen.”

  “I don’t?”

  “You want to talk about what happened last night. That’s why I asked you over for lunch.”

  Sully set the bottle aside and felt his grin fade. “Did the police question you?”

  “Baranovic did.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to get you involved.”

  “If you hadn’t told them the truth, they would have found out, and it would look bad for you.”

  Sully felt the pang he’d been fighting off ever since he left the police station the night before. No one had accused him of anything. The detective had been more than cordial. But he couldn’t stave off the uneasy feeling that an invisible finger was pointing at him.

  Tess scooped up the pile of diced tomatoes and slid them onto the salad. “I’m going to ask you a question, and if you don’t want to answer it, just tell me to back off.”

  Sully nodded.

  She reached for an avocado. “How do you feel, now that the woman responsible for your wife’s death is dead?”

  “Funny you should ask.”

  “Is it?”

  “I’ve been trying to sort that out. Part of me is shocked, of course, that anybody would do something like that—no matter how miserable she made them.”

  “So, no relief?”

  “Not that I want to admit to.”

  “Isn’t that just human, though? I mean, now you don’t have to make sure she isn’t going to hurt anyone else.”

  “I didn’t want her dead!”

  “But now that she is . . .” Tess paused, knife still at the skin of the avocado. “I’m sorry. I’m putting words in your mouth.”

  “Words I probably ought to own up to. But you know, I think I’m more angry than I am relieved. I wanted to have my say. It’s like I’m still as frustrated as I was before.”

  She put down the knife and leaned on the heels of her hands. “I’m going to ask you another question, and you really, really don’t have to answer this one.”

  Sully smiled at her. She hadn’t asked him anything yet that he didn’t want to pour out an answer to, right into her magic eyes.

  “I know you’ll never stop loving Lynn. She’ll always be part of you. But do you think you’ll ever really get over what happened to her?”

  She went back to the avocado. Sully watched her cut it cleanly down to the pit and pull the halves apart like obedient twins.

  “This was all about letting Lynn go,” he said. “Maybe now I can.”

  Tess smiled and let the skin fall from the avocado. Sully hoped the easing he saw in her face was a sign that he’d said exactly what she wanted to hear.

  “Are you going to broil those or what?” she said, nodding at the steaks.

  Sully moved to her side of the counter and leaned over them. “You sure you want me to do it?”

  She looked at the meat and then at Sully and smiled.

  “I like mine well done,” she said.

  “Seriously?” Sully frowned toward the broiler. “That could take awhile.”

  “I know, Crisp.” Tess put her hand on his arm. “If you’re not going to do this, I am.”

  She came up on her toes and brought her lips close to him—and his dang cell rang.

  “Hold that thought,” Sully said. He was still grinning when he opened the phone. “Sullivan Crisp.”

  “This is Detective Levi Baranovic, Dr. Crisp. I have a few more questions for you. Would you be willing to come in for another interview?”

  “When?” Sully said.

  “Right now would be good.”

  Baranovic’s tone left no room for negotiation. The pang Sully had been avoiding went through his soul.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Although the gray floor and the metal table were just as they’d been the night before, Sully knew the space had changed from interview room to interrogation room. Baranovic dropped a file folder onto the table between them and sat with the finality of someone who wasn’t getting up until he got what he wanted.

  Sully drew in a long breath. The guy was going to get the truth, because that was all Sullivan Crisp had to give.

  Without the offer of coffee or water or apology, Baranovic bored into him. “Dr. Crisp, I need to advise you of your rights.”

  Sully stared at him. “My rights? Am I being charged with something?”

  “No. It’s just a formality at this point.”

  At this point? Was it going to be for real at some other point?

  The detective was already reading from a card in his hand. Sully barely heard the familiar words he could have recited from late-night reruns of Law & Order, hardly saw himself signing the paper that was pushed toward him.

  Baranovic slid it into the file and folded his hands on the tabletop. “Dr. Crisp, you told us you did not arrive at Belinda Cox’s residence until 7 p.m. Do you want to reconsider that?”

  “No,” Sully said. “That’s when I got there.”

  “That’s interesting, because a neighbor said it was six, which, according to the medical examiner, is much closer to the time of Ms. Cox’s murder.”

  “I don’t even know any of her neighbors,”
Sully said. “So I don’t see how—”

  “You don’t know Angelina DeCristo?”

  Even as Sully shaped the words on his lips, he remembered. “She could be the woman I met the day before in a café. I don’t know her.”

  “She apparently knows you. She says she saw you get out of your car and go into the entrance to Ms. Cox’s property. At 6 p.m.”

  Sully could only shake his head. “I was still at my office then.” “Anybody see you there?”

  “No.”

  “That’s your story and you’re sticking to it.”

  “It’s the truth,” Sully said.

  “There may be room for error there, but how are we going to get around the fact that your fingerprints are on the knife used to slit Belinda Cox’s throat?”

  Sully felt like his own had been cut. “I don’t understand.”

  “We found it in the trash can at the back of her property, with blood still on the blade.” His eyes narrowed at Sully, as if he were contemptuous of the sloppiness of the cover-up. “Your prints were on the handle. Can you explain that?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve never eaten in her home?”

  “I’d never been there before last night.”

  “Where are the clothes you wore last night?”

  Sully licked his lips, which had turned to sandpaper. It was time to get this under control. “They’re probably on my bathroom floor where I left them. Look, I don’t even own a knife.”

  “You don’t have a set of steak knives? Everybody has steak—”

  “No!”

  Baranovic put up his hand and lowered his voice. “Forget the murder weapon. Let’s talk about your motive. You’ve been stalking Belinda Cox.”

  “Stalking her?”

  “Didn’t you look her up in Oklahoma City?”

  “Yes—”

  “Little Rock? Amarillo? You’ve left quite the trail, Dr. Crisp.”

  Sully ground his teeth. If the guy used his name one more time, he was going to—to what? There was no getting control over this. He was racing in front of a runaway train and losing ground.

  “Why?” Baranovic said. “Why did you spend . . .” He flipped the folder open again. “A year looking for this woman?”