“Mr. Levine, my name is Debra Mansfield. I’m a State Patrol detective out of Omaha. I was wondering if we could arrange a time to meet.” Her voice was professional.
“What?”
“I assure you, it’s nothing to be concerned about. Is now a bad time?”
“To meet?”
“I’d like the opportunity to introduce myself properly.”
“Whatever you’re after, I’m not interested.”
“Perhaps I could offer you a ride to work? We could discuss my proposal on the way.”
“Listen—”
“I’m parked outside.”
“Now hold on. What time is it?”
“Just after eight forty-five.”
“Shit,” I said, and ended the call.
I got ready fast. Nine minutes, shower included; a new personal best. Stumbled out into an exceptionally bright morning. Even the snow was glaring at me.
I spotted her parked on the other side of the street. Next to a dented lamppost and behind the piece-of-shit pickup that had probably dented it.
A black sedan.
I watched it as I walked to my car. Noted the glossy black paint job and tinted windows and tried to picture Detective Debra Mansfield from Omaha staring back. The thing couldn’t have looked more out of place.
When I reached my Impala I heard from behind me the soft click of an expensive door. From across the roof I saw a suited woman clambering out, smile already in place like she’d started it early. She was short, with big shoulders and a little pig face framed by curly black hair. A pair of oversized sunglasses on an upturned nose.
Now Debra, I’m sure they’ll give you a copy of this tape, so let me add that I did feel a little mean for thinking this, but only a little. You’d caught me on a bad morning.
“Mr. Levine,” she called as she strode awkwardly across the snow-covered street. Her thick heels made deep imprints in the white, and I wondered how much shorter she’d be without them. I popped open my door.
“Don’t have the time,” I said.
“Running late?”
I grunted and climbed in. Slammed the door and turned the key. The car gave a shudder but refused to start. “Come on,” I muttered, holding the key down until I thought I might blow something.
There was a short rap on the passenger window and her face loomed large.
“Engine trouble?” she said loudly, crinkling her pig nose. “I can give you a ride to the station.”
I scowled at her. Squeezed the steering wheel. Finally let the key go.
“You giving me a ride home too?”
The woman smiled.
Chapter Twelve
The sedan was a palace. Leather seats, the heated kind. I stretched my legs as we pulled away and glided down the empty street.
After some time had passed I turned and stared at her. She gave me a side-glance but kept quiet.
“What did you say your name was?”
“Debra. Debra Mansfield.”
“And you’re a detective?”
“From Omaha, that’s right.”
“Long way for a conversation,” I said. “You could have just called.”
She turned onto the main street. The only other car in sight was an SUV, dirty red. It coughed and shook as it passed, and I watched mistrustful eyes track us from behind a grubby windshield. I was suddenly thankful for the tinted windows.
Mansfield said, “What I need to discuss, it’s better in person.”
I grunted and rubbed at my face. Despite the shower, my skin felt hot and grimy.
“How do I turn this off?” I asked.
“Turn what off?”
“This . . . seat.”
She pushed a rocker on the dash. Her finger was small and stumpy, her nail neatly cut. I opened the window and cold air washed over me.
“Better?”
“Much,” I said, my eyes closed.
For a few moments we were quiet, and I felt myself relax into it.
“How are you finding Cooper so far?” she asked.
I snorted.
“I just checked in this morning,” she said. “They had to move me to a different room when they realized it didn’t have any running water.”
“Sounds about right.”
I was starting to gather myself. The cold breeze was helping. I peered at Mansfield through a slitted eye. Ran my gaze over her expensive ride.
“You work Homicide up there in Omaha?”
She paused before she answered, rolling the car smoothly around a tight bend in the road, feeding the wheel from one hand to the other.
“Used to,” she said, and there was something about the way she said it.
“What case you working?” I asked. I was paying attention now. “What is it you’re so desperate to talk to me about?”
“Your partner.”
“Isaac?”
“Your new partner.”
“Joe?”
“Now, it’s all rather delicate,” she started, and at once it became clear.
“Oh hell, stop the car,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re IA.”
“Well, no. State Patrol Internal Affairs only investigates State Patrol officers. That’s the ‘internal’ part.” She chuckled to herself. “I’m looking into this matter on behalf of the state AG’s office. They have jurisdiction over—”
“You serious? You go after cops, you might as well be IA. Jesus, I can’t believe I let you give me a ride.”
“Levine—”
“You know, I always wondered what kind of asshole drove a car with tinted windows.”
“It’s a company car.”
“I know it’s a company car,” I snapped. “Pull over.”
She brought the car to a halt by the side of the road. I was already out of my seatbelt and opening the door.
“It’s another mile to the station,” she said.
“I’ll manage.”
“Thomas, please, I just want to talk.”
“Well I don’t. Now get lost back to Omaha.”
“I understand—”
Her words were lost to the slamming of the car door. My tinted reflection glared back and I had to fight the urge to pound my fists on the glass. I turned and walked away, plunging my hands deep into my pockets.
Behind me, tires crunched on fresh snow and then faded into nothing, and I was left with only my anger for company.
As traveling companions went, anger wasn’t bad. When it burned, it was all-consuming. Hot and bright, like a firecracker in my chest. Sometimes it felt like it had always been there. A parasite buried deep in the hollows of my bones, and that was fine with me.
As I walked, it ebbed slowly. Seeped out through my pores and sank into the ground beneath my feet. I passed a bearded man in rags, hunched in a doorway, his glazed eyes sliding over me. A block later a dog, thin and wary, chained to a rusted metal fence outside a boarded-up shop. A car with its windshield shattered. I walked on, and with each step my anger drained away, and the town leeched off it and ate hungrily, and it dispersed into the slabs of concrete and then into the soil and then down farther, where it coalesced and flowed like a river. A deluge of filth running just beneath the surface. A sewer system of hate.
By the time I arrived at the station the anger was gone. Instead I was filled with a nervous energy, like my heart was beating off-time. My hands shook. I eased them open in front of me as I stood on the steps outside. They were red and sore and I could feel the blood pounding. Pins and needles danced on my fingertips.
I’d felt it before. Sixteen years old and fooling around with Lisa Simone in the cramped back seat of her dad’s extended-cab pickup truck. That rush of adrenaline, so strong it made me shiver. Pills, liquor, sex; I guess I’ve been chasing that fix my entire life. Kicking down front doors and breaking noses does it too.
I paused at the top of the station steps and stared through the murky window. I’d been in Cooper six days now. Six days
of stumbling, of trying to find my feet. I took a breath, pushed inside, and began running through everything in my head.
Kevin Foster. Alcoholic cancer patient, convicted triple murderer, and all-round American schlump. You believe Joe? This guy strangled three women. In the dirt and the cold and the early hours. Strangled them and scooped out their eyes with a spoon. Served his time like a champ and when they finally set him free on appeal he went right back out and strangled a fourth. I guess some guys just don’t know when to quit.
If you believe Joe.
You ask me—and I’m going to assume you are, otherwise what’s the point in any of this—that whole thing stank. It stank then and after all I’ve been through since, it stinks twice as bad now. You want to know who killed Kelly Scott? Well, it wasn’t Foster, that’s for damn sure. The guy just about pissed his pants at the sight of us. Poor bastard was struggling just to survive.
So I finally decided to wise up and play it smart. The killer hadn’t left anything on the body because he knew what he was doing. Which meant he’d done it before, which meant he’d do it again. I needed to reconstruct the scene. Follow the evidence and see where it led. Might be it’d take me somewhere interesting.
So, like I said earlier, my mom gave birth to me in a prison hospital. We’re skipping ahead a little here—nine months later, hardened inmate, blah blah blah. The only thing to really note at this point is how much of a bitch her own mom was to her. I guess being given the option to either support her sexually assaulted daughter or chastise her for shooting the guy was too much to handle. She chose door number three: skip town and leave a tearful note to your landlord about the rent.
To be honest, I don’t know if she was ever aware I existed. I’m sure the state tried to contact her. There’s a part of me that hopes they reached her, you know? That they got her on the phone and said, Congratulations, you’re a grandma! Made her tell them she didn’t want to look after me. Made her say the actual words out loud.
’Cause if it hadn’t been for her? If she hadn’t run off when it all got too much? I might have ended up with a more normal life. Might not have been bundled up and sent to live with Nancy and Eddie.
They were Robert’s parents. Catholics, after a fashion. Maybe they thought taking me in was the Lord’s work. Apparently they’d asked for me, wrote a letter to social services and everything. I saw a copy of it years later. Important to show that miracles can be born in even the most awful of places. You believe that crap? I think they got it from a Hallmark card.
Nancy and Eddie. They lived in a little hick Kansas town called Eudora. Stupid name for a town if you ask me. The sort of place the word dustbowl was invented for. Warm and sticky, crops and cattle. Old cars with battered suspensions, and Saturday night dances at the juke house before church the next morning.
Growing up in Eudora, it wasn’t exciting. Wasn’t fun, wasn’t enjoyable—wasn’t unpleasant either, don’t get me wrong. It just . . . was. You ever watch those crappy made-for-TV movies they used to show on CBS or whatever back in the day? They always sounded so grand. The ABC Movie of the Week! They were awful, but Nancy used to devour those things. You know, the ones about the smart kid trying to make it to Harvard, only her parents are broke and alcoholic. Or the couple with the strained marriage who move next door to an eighteen-year-old seductress. Or the woman who falls in love with the Benedictine monk. They’re all the same, they’re all shit, and they’re all set in Eudora.
My memories of that place aren’t great. No flashbacks of warm summer days, of a swing set in the backyard, of fields and streams and climbing trees. All of it filmed on Super 8 with the saturation cranked too high. Maybe it’s just me, but the visual stuff never bothered to stick around too long.
It’s the sensations I remember. The feeling of the air in the evening on my bare arms, the sound of the wind as it rolled through the corn, the smell of the earth after a thunderstorm.
Nancy was old, I remember that. She was probably only in her fifties, but to me back then she might as well have been a hundred. Kids don’t have a good grasp of that sort of thing. Aging is something for the old.
But it wasn’t just how she looked. It was like she’d given up on being young, like she’d spotted death coming for her a little ways down the road and just thought, Screw it. You could see it in the way she walked, in the way she dressed, in the way she talked. Like she’d lived a full life already.
Her hands were near crippled with arthritis, and she’d rub this stinking paste on them every night. God knows what it did, or where she got it from. I’d imagine her fingers curling inward, day by day, until all she had was a pair of fists. I’d imagine her trying to put on that goddamn paste then, and laugh. Or doing up buttons, or tying her shoelaces. Anything that required fine motor skills and unclenched hands set me off.
Looking back, it was probably a relief thing. Maybe I thought she wouldn’t be able to slap me with crushed hands. She was a slapper, Nancy. If she’d been a puncher, I’d have been worried. It would have been like a boxer walking around with his goddamn gloves on all the time. But that wasn’t Nancy’s style, and as time went on she slowly lost her power, retreating more and more into her chair by the television, illuminated by shifting light, watching the doorway with eyes that gleamed.
Chapter Thirteen
Kelly Scott hadn’t kept a diary, she’d tweeted instead. Privacy, it seemed, was somewhat outdated.
A Facebook password and an inbox filled with discounted Viagra; she might have been dead but her life lived on. Stored on servers and downloaded onto USB sticks. A person’s legacy in my pocket.
I spent the morning at the station, hunched over my computer with a steady stream of shitty coffee and twenty-five grand in the lining of my coat to keep me going. You might not agree with my thinking here—might say carrying that much cash on my person was downright stupid—but frankly I didn’t trust Joe not to break into my apartment when I was out, to try to steal it back.
Now Kelly Scott was lying one floor down and everyone I’d spoken to said Kevin Foster did it. I decided I wanted to be sure and put in a request for Foster’s original case files to be dug out. Twenty years in a dusty basement; I hoped Cooper PD didn’t have damp.
I trawled through Kelly’s life while I waited, going backward from her date of death. She’d been planning on going to Austria in the summer with her older sister, a childhood fascination with The Sound of Music. She worked as a teller in a local bank. She was good at her job—recently promoted to supervisor. A weekend in Rapid City to celebrate. I skimmed through the photos, more out of ordinary curiosity than anything else. I doubted I was going to find an obvious stalker hanging around her all night.
Midway through the morning someone banged a metal tin against the side of my desk, making me jump. It was Lloyd, the greasy-faced robbery detective from Kelly Scott’s backyard. He cleared his throat noisily, rattled the tin at me.
“Collection,” he said.
“For what?”
“Drivers of the transport. Everyone’s putting in for a stripper down at the hospital.”
It was the first I’d thought of them since yesterday morning. Self-absorbed asshole, but I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. I reckon I could still remember the taste of the officer’s blood on my lips, hot and bitter, like burnt coffee. It’s not a flavor you forget.
I looked away.
“Don’t worry,” Lloyd said hastily. “It’ll be classy.”
“How are they?” I asked.
“They’re alright. Not as nice as the ones down in Scottsbluff, but you know. Clean.”
“I meant the drivers.”
“Oh. Well, they’re doing alright. Broken nose, fractured jaw. Concussion.”
Fractured jaw. That was mine.
“They talking?”
“Talking? They’re drinking. Mack is, anyway.”
“He the driver?”
“Nah, that’s Casey. Casey’s still out of it. But the doc says h
e’ll come around when he’s ready. I told him Casey’s never been ready for anything, so he should be prepared for a long wait.” Lloyd let out a watery laugh that quickly descended into a hacking cough. His face turned red with the effort.
I thought about Casey, about how hard I’d smacked him. Remembered Joe kicking him when he was down. I wondered if we maybe hadn’t done some permanent damage. What if he’d recognized my eyes through the mask?
Lloyd had finally managed to compose himself. “Anyway, I bet they can’t wait to get rid of them. Now, you putting in or not?”
I thought about tossing in one of the bundles of cash. As though that would somehow make it alright. Hell, I’d happily take a busted face for a couple of grand. I’d taken them for a lot less.
In the interest of maintaining a low profile, I fished in my pocket and deposited the best part of two dollars in change. Managed to add a couple more in bills. I wasn’t sure how my donation compared to the rest of the station’s, but Lloyd gave me a nod and ambled off, shaking the metal tin like a beggar on a busy street.
I watched him waddle away. Told myself that everything would turn out alright in the end. Told myself that neither of them could have seen anything.
Turning back to the computer, I focused on moving through Kelly Scott’s feeds, scanning for anything of interest. Cinema trips, broken heels, burnt dinners; snapshots of a life that had ended in the early hours of a cold morning in late November. She’d updated her status the day before her death. Four weeks until Christmas!! ☺
I clicked past her posts and into her list of friends. She’d been popular. Opening up another window, I began cross-referencing the people she’d had most contact with against Cooper PD’s database. School friends, college roommates, ex-boyfriends. One at a time I ran their names and peeked a little into their lives, too.
Which was how I stumbled upon her past relationship with Gary Hadley. A realtor with a predilection for big houses and beating on people with his bare fists. Prone to outbursts of jealous rage, spent a night here and there in the bullpen to cool off. Kelly had never pressed charges. I slowly went through his Facebook profile pictures, one by one. His grinning face filled my screen.
Welcome to Cooper Page 6