Body of Evidence

by Stella Cameron

  He nodded but looked blank.

  “It’s put all our schedules off,” Finn told him. Billy must have decided to keep Colin on as the night man in the evidence room despite his being past old enough to retire. Now it was time to lie. “Billy’s been helpin’ me take a closer look at what happened to my dad.”

  The smile dropped from Colin’s face. He sniffed and raised his chin. Finn saw his Adam’s apple jerk. “Best police officer this place ever saw or will see. Could have held his own in any department anywhere, too.”

  Finn agreed, but he had things to accomplish. “Thanks, Colin. I thought he was pretty special, too.”

  Colin glanced at Emma again. The man might be old, but he wasn’t senile. Finn prayed there wouldn’t be more questions about her. She should have remained in the truck, but he didn’t like her being alone—and she wasn’t keen on the idea, either.

  “What can I do for you?” Colin asked. “I just do the night work, so I’m not as familiar as the day shift, but I’m sure we can work out what you need.”

  “I’m looking for Dad’s uniform and the rest of his personal effects. Mom was too sick, and they didn’t get picked up.”

  “So you thought you’d get ’em now?” Colin looked at his watch. “And you’re the second one tonight. Askin’ for Tom’s stuff, that is. The other one called, though.”

  Finn realized he was digging his fingers into Emma’s arm and released her. “That’s strange,” he said. More than strange.

  “That’s what I think,” Colin said. “The other one was rude. Sure I didn’t know what I was talkin’ about, that sort of thing. Reckoned the stuff had to be there, I just hadn’t looked hard enough. I told him, there’s entries for Tom Duhon’s effects, but they must have been checked out, because they’re gone. There. Simple as that. And you know I’d help you if I could.”

  Finn kept a smile on his face. He felt as if he’d been punched in the gut. “Who was it who called?”

  “How should I know? He didn’t say. Wouldn’t say, more like it. I told him if there was anythin’ here, he wouldn’t get it without a court order, anyway. Only there’s nothin’.”

  Finn knew what he had to do next. “Thanks, Colin. Sorry to interrupt you.”

  “It’s nothin’. You sure someone else in the family didn’t take Tom’s things? That’s what usually happens in a case like that.” He rubbed his ample belly. “Awful sorry, boy. Never would have thought it of Tom, but you never know what’s happenin’ in another man’s head, do you?”

  Emma kept quiet until they’d driven away from the police station. She wasn’t sure what to say. Finn had behaved like a man possessed since he read the records she’d brought to him.

  “Before you ask,” Finn said, “we’re goin’ to Billy’s. It’s time he gave me some honest answers.”

  “He was tryin’ to protect you,” Emma said. “And the rest of your family.”

  Finn pounded the steering wheel. “I don’t need protectin’. What he should have done was dig deeper, not accept what it seemed he was seein’ and make up some lies.”

  There was nothing she could do or say to lessen his anguish. “Billy may be exactly what you need right now,” she told him. “Once he knows you’ve seen the truth, he’ll be straight with you.”

  Finn glanced at her. “Only because he doesn’t have a choice anymore. Will you be okay if I leave you in the truck this time, cher? I don’t want to deal with Billy askin’ questions about us yet.”

  Yet? He talked as if he thought a time would come when they would be open about their relationship. Emma looked at his profile. She had struggled with thinking she was no better than Orville, another unfaithful spouse, but what she felt for Finn wasn’t all about sex. That didn’t make her right, but it did mean she could be gentler with herself—or choose to be.

  “What are you thinkin’?” Finn said.

  “I agree I should stay in the truck,” she said, and turned her suddenly flushed face away.

  “Good. But that isn’t what I asked, is it?”

  She shook her head.

  “So let it out. Tell me.”

  “I’m a married woman,” she said. “I’ve made excuses for myself, made it all right that… I’ve told myself it’s all right. But am I any better than Orville?”

  Finn slammed on the brakes.

  Emma’s seat belt crushed her chest, and she cried out.

  Spinning the wheel, Finn steered onto the verge, spewing troughs of soft gravel. The vehicle stopped under the low branches of a stand of trees.

  “Finn!”

  She expected him to shout. Didn’t men always shout when they were angry? From the vibes she felt, Finn was real angry.

  He didn’t shout. In slow motion, he switched off the engine, crossed his forearms on the wheel and rested his face on top.

  Emma didn’t move, didn’t dare to.

  Branches scratched gently on the windows.

  She breathed with care, very shallow breaths. He had taken another blow to the treasured memory of his father. His personal sands were shifting beneath him.

  “Did you sleep with me to get back at your husband?” he said.

  Shocked, she stared at him.

  “Did you, Emma?”

  “No. I wanted you. I still want you. My marriage was over a long time ago, but I’m dealin’ with notions I believed in. I’d still believe it them—one man and one woman—if I hadn’t married the wrong man.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I get that. Did you do something to make your husband behave like a cock in a henhouse?”

  “No,” she said. “He didn’t want me. I don’t know if he ever did—not the way a man’s supposed to want a woman. He treated me like his special doll to be taken out and admired, but there wasn’t any… We weren’t passionate together, not really.”

  “Passion is different with different people.”

  “We were passionate, Finn. You and I. I know the difference now.”

  Faint light penetrated the trees, a pewter light. Morning on its way.

  “I want you now,” she said under her breath.

  Not enough under her breath. He jerked around in his seat. “And I want you. I can’t look at you without wantin’ you. I can’t sleep for wakin’ up and wantin’ to be inside of you. If that makes me a bad man, so be it. You’re special, too special for the life you’ve been livin’.”

  Emma had undone her seat belt and rubbed her chest absently. She looked at his face, and he was watching what she did. He took her hand away, unzipped her jacket and used both hands to pull the tank over her head.

  “I bruised you,” he said, touching red marks on her skin. “I’ve got a temper, Emma. I nearly killed Rusty Barnes when he came up behind me.”

  “So you’ve told me several times,” she said. “You’ve got some issues left over. You’ll deal with them.”

  Finn leaned slowly closer and touched his mouth to hers, nudged her lips apart, and she met his tongue. There was no hurry. They sat by a road just out of town, barely hidden by a few branches, and kissed. Emma undid the buttons on Finn’s shirt and pushed it from his shoulders. He took it all the way off.

  “I want to feel you against me,” she said, starting to unhook the front of her bra.

  He stopped her and did it himself, his eyes hot as he freed her breasts and bent to lick her skin with the tip of his tongue. Every languid move he made set Emma’s nipples tingling. She grew wet and contracted her muscles to hold in the sensations.

  “Wait!” Emma pushed him away, knelt on her seat and stripped.

  “Emma, Emma,” Finn whispered, following the dips and curves of her body with his hands—and his eyes. “Oh, God. I don’t want to take another risk. I need something.”

  “No, you don’t.” She didn’t stop tugging at his clothes until she’d freed him and sat in his lap, legs astride, taking him deep inside her. Any light went out except the lights behind her eyelids. He gripped her hips and moved her. Emma helped. She used her own
strong thighs to jounce on him.

  Finn arched his back, pressed her bouncing breasts to the hair on his chest, and she moaned through her teeth. Madness, the most desirable madness, had taken her. And it had snatched Finn, too.

  She felt him come in her, hot, wild, a flood of the man himself.

  “Emma,” he said again, and finally grew still.

  They huddled together, Emma naked, Finn all but naked, in the driver’s seat of his truck. The pewter light turned silver.

  “I didn’t plan that,” he said.

  “I know, but maybe I did. At least, it came real naturally and real fast when the opportunity presented itself. Thank you, Finn.”

  He laughed. “Thank you. We’re gettin’ real good at makin’ love.”

  “Real good,” she echoed.

  “If we don’t want some highway patrol car screechin’ off the road with its lights flashin’, we’d better do somethin’,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she sighed, and climbed off him.

  Between kisses, they dressed quietly.

  “Can you stand it if I still go to Billy’s?” Finn said.

  She could stand anything that would help him. “Of course.” What she feared was that talking to Billy would take away Finn’s last hopes of proving that his father was the man he’d believed him to be.

  “Emma?” Finn said, covering one of her hands. “You said I didn’t need to do anything before we made love. Are you doin’ somethin’?”

  What he was asking, Emma thought, was whether she used birth control with Orville. She didn’t tell him she and Orville and sex were over too long ago for that.

  “I was pregnant once,” she said. “I lost the child. There was never another sign of a baby. I was told they didn’t think there ever would be.”

  31

  Billy opened the front door of the Meches’ picture-perfect little white house wearing a plaid broadcloth bathrobe. Barefooted, his hair looking the way it always looked, like a gray bristle brush with red roots, he didn’t appear nearly as surprised as Finn thought he should.

  “I hope I didn’t wake Blanche,” Finn said.

  “You woke me, didn’t you?” Billy said. “You think she’s deaf? Don’t worry, Blanche knows when to stay out of the way.”

  “May I come in?”

  “Sure.” Billy turned away and left Finn to pull open the screen and go into the house. He closed out the cool air from the night and followed Billy into the kitchen.

  “Coffee?” Billy said, pulling forward the coffeemaker.

  “I just want to talk,” Finn told him. “I went to the station. Did you call Colin earlier tonight and pretend to be someone else?”

  Billy stared at him. “Why would I do that?”

  “You told me Dad’s stuff must be in evidence. Someone called to check up on it. I thought it might have been you.”

  “No, but I’d like to know who did.”

  “So would I, but it didn’t do them any good, did it? Any more than it did me any good to ask to see it.”

  “You did that?” He put a filter in the pot and scooped in coffee.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because there’s nothing to be gained. You’re just torturin’ yourself.”

  “You think it didn’t torture my mother to be told her husband killed himself? She was only weeks from passing away herself. Didn’t she deserve the truth?”

  Billy flipped the switch on the pot. “Her husband was dead. What did you want me to tell her?”

  “I already told you. The truth, if you knew it. Only you didn’t.”

  Slowly, Billy set down the mugs he’d taken from a cupboard. “What does that mean?”

  Finn had carried in the envelope of forms. He took the papers out and tossed them on the table, on top of a snowy cloth printed with cherries and leaves. The paperwork lay there for a long time before Billy approached and looked down at it.

  “You couldn’t quite bring yourself to lie on record,” Finn said. “Only you got it wrong anyway. When did guesswork take the place of good police work?”

  “You’ve said enough.” Billy picked up the sheaf of papers and started reading. “I’ve forgotten more about police work than most people will ever learn. Where did you get these?”

  Finn shook his head slowly. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Yes, you can. It’s easy. Just answer the question.”

  “No. And given what it could do to you, you won’t push.”

  Billy breathed heavily through his nose.

  “He didn’t shoot himself,” Finn said.

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s something, anyway—comin’ from you,” Finn said. “You wrote there was a struggle.”

  “There was.”

  “But you thought he was with a woman.”

  “He’d had a woman in the car.”

  “And she overcame him, got his gun and shot him.”

  Billy glanced toward the rest of the house, and Finn saw him listening for Blanche. There was no movement. “Let it go,” Billy said. “This is a cold case now.”

  “Not for me. A year is nothin’. Was the woman still there when you arrived?”

  Billy snorted. “What d’you think? Of course she wasn’t.”

  “But you knew a woman had been there.”

  Billy threw the papers down again and hooked a thumb toward the back door. “Come see my garden.”

  Walking between rows of potato mounds, greens past their prime and unlikely sunflowers that could only be Blanche’s idea, Finn listened while Billy gave him the “facts” in a monotone.

  “Tom’s clothes were in disarray. His pants were round his ankles. There was lipstick on his face and various other parts.”

  Shaking, Finn said, “I didn’t see anything about lipstick in the autopsy report.”

  “I cleaned it off. I cleaned semen off the car seats, too.”

  Finn covered his ears.

  “You asked,” Billy said. “I put your father’s clothes back on—wrestled them on. That’s when I figured a zombie would notice what was in his pants and on his pants. So I got the clothes off again. That’s how they thought he was found in the first place. They thought—after I suggested it—that he took his uniform off before shooting himself. To keep the blood off. People do strange things before they kill themselves.”

  “You…” Tom Duhon was a good man who loved his wife and children, he wasn’t a bad cop who picked up women in his patrol car. “There had to be blood on the uniform anyway.”

  “His mind was unbalanced,” Billy said, like a recording. “Blood went everywhere, but he wasn’t thinkin’ about that when he took his clothes off.”

  Finn bowed his head. He dropped to sit on his heels. “I think you did what you thought was right for your friend. But I also think you got it wrong.”

  Billy put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m fine with you thinkin’ that, Finn. I don’t know why what happened, happened, but the man who died that night was the best. So he was human, too, and stress got to him. Hell, I don’t know what he was thinkin’, but I didn’t want your mother to die thinkin’ about him with another woman and wonderin’ if it was because she’d been so sick. Better the other than that. I’m beggin’, Finn, leave it now. You pushed, and I told you. I never wanted to.”

  Finn thought over what he knew. “Location?” he said. “Where did you find him? It says an unimproved lot. Where? What does that mean?”

  “You don’t miss a thing,” Billy said. He watched pigeons land on his fence. “Does it matter where it was?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “I liked you better when you were a kid,” Billy said. “Okay. North about thirty-five miles, in the middle of nowhere. He’d driven way off the road.”

  “Thirty-five miles? It was real late, wasn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh. He must have tried to put distance between himself and Pointe Judah. Nearest town is Wells. Couldn’t find anyone who saw him there.”

  “
He probably didn’t get that far,” Finn said. “Did you burn his clothes? Everything? Did you even take off his wedding ring?”

  “The coroner does that. It was given to your mother. This isn’t goin’ to make anythin’ easier, but it’s what you want.” He took a key from the pocket of his bathrobe and went to a shed behind a trellis heavy with roses. “In here,” he told Finn.

  “No,” Finn said, suddenly sickened. “I believe you. Let it go.”

  Billy unlocked the door and stepped inside. Shelves lined each wall, and each shelf held a row of tidy boxes. Billy took a ladder and climbed to pull a box from the top shelf, a box smaller than the others. And returned to the ground.

  “The last uniform Tom wore,” Billy said.

  “You couldn’t bring yourself to get rid of it,” Finn said. “You’re a good cop.”

  “I wish I had. That was my first instinct.” He pushed the box into Finn’s hands. “Take my advice. You burn it. Do it for your father.”

  32

  Patrick Damalis’s restaurant and club resembled a Tudor house. The story went that Patrick had attended Oxford in England and fallen in love with the architecture there. Emma found the stone around large windows and the archway over outsized front doors elegant but misplaced, and Patrick had become carried away with topiary in front of the building.

  She had driven by a few times but usually avoided the street altogether. A call from Carl Viator had brought her here today, when she would have preferred to remain curled up in her bed, thinking about Finn and trying not to wonder what his silence had meant when she mentioned her infertility. He had said he was sorry she lost her baby, but nothing more.

  After the visit to Billy’s, Finn had withdrawn completely, given her distant smiles—his eyes worried—but he’d taken her straight to her folks’ house and made sure she was safely inside before leaving for his own place.

  A smaller door cut through one of two large ones stood open. Emma thought it almost ridiculously reminiscent of something out of a gothic movie. The great doors were fortresslike, painted black, with iron studs.

  Through that door came Carl, walking toward the Lexus with a disconcertingly grim expression on his usually pleasant face. As always, he was impeccably dressed, in a white suit today, and walked with the confidence of a man very sure of his place in the world and pleased with his fate.