Purple Knot

by Raquel Byrnes

  “Keep the laptop on the map, it’ll update automatically as soon as Shane pulls out of the parking space. You don’t have to stay close because you’re tracking him via GPS. Use the laptop’s car adapter so you don’t run out of battery life. Other than that…just keep out of sight. If he meets with Parker or goes somewhere interesting write it down, but don’t tail him like in the movies. You don’t need to. That is what the GPS tracker is for.”

  “What about pictures?”

  “If you see him meet with Parker don’t bother to take any. If Shane meets with anyone else, use the telephoto lens. Take pictures of the person, their car if you see it, and the place they meet. Other than that, don’t risk your safety. Don’t get out of the car. You’re following him to photograph him, nothing else.” I stopped talking and watched Salem’s face.

  A sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead and nose. It was sixty degrees outside. He looked like he was going to vomit, but took the keys. When he looked at me he seemed moved. “You really trust me with this?”

  “You can do this, Salem. It’s a piece of cake.” I smiled and mussed up his hair.

  Purple Knot

  32

  Maurice lived on a small cul-de-sac in a housing development that had been old in the eighties. His house was salmon colored with paned windows, and fake shutters. It was a beautiful sight. I hadn’t been on his porch since I’d left Seattle four years ago. His wife, Sarah, had filled a wicker picnic basket full of baked treats for me to take to my new life in California. She said that cinnamon made any place smell like home.

  I barely had time to pay the cab fare and unhinge the latch on the chain link gate before Sarah opened the front door and smiled. Maurice walked up behind her, his rotund figure a silhouette in the warm glow coming from the doorway.

  “Hey there, Old Girl.”

  “Hey there, Spring Chicken!” I walked up and hugged them both in turn, handed Sarah the flowers I brought, and felt the time fall away. Nothing had changed, and that felt good. I chatted with Maurice in the kitchen while Sarah bustled back and forth between the stove and the fridge.

  She asked me to chop veggies for the salad and refreshed my cream soda every time I drank more than an inch’s worth. We moved into the dining room and ate and laughed and reminisced, but the ghost of my last days here hung over the three of us. They’d helped me when I was at my most vulnerable. I could never thank them properly, not really.

  Sarah left us sitting while she went to get dessert ready. Maurice pushed his plate away and leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “Spill it, girlie,” he said unceremoniously. “What’re you into exactly?”

  “I just want to read the murder book, Maurice.” I pushed my plate away, too, and leaned in over my arms.

  “You just curious, or is there something more?”

  “Will it make a difference whether you show me the book or not?” I shrugged and tried to keep from showing my apprehension.

  He regarded me for a few seconds, and then hefted himself from the table and motioned for me to follow. He called into the kitchen as we passed it.

  “We’re gonna have pie in the shed, Sarah.”

  “Okey-dokey.”

  The shed was actually the garage that Maurice had converted to a work room when he’d left the police force. The remnants of his failed attempt at retirement still littered the far workbench. Fly fishing lures, perched half-finished on their stands, gathered wispy webs alongside unpainted civil war miniatures, and other discarded hobby shrapnel.

  The main work area, a double-sized mahogany desk butted up against the pegboard wall, stood piled with files and surveillance equipment catalogues. Maurice didn’t do process serving anymore, but he’d never given up on the life of an investigator. He still consulted for law firms on occasion.

  I walked over to the desk, and he motioned for me to sit in his chair. He leaned against the side of the desk, fingers in his front jeans pockets, thumbs through the belt loops, and nodded at the binder.

  “It’s all there,” he said quietly. “I got Phil to photocopy the whole thing.”

  “Thanks, Maurice.” I looked the black three-ring binder, the kind I’d used in college for classes, and felt my heart rate kick up a few notches. I wasn’t sure what I’d see, or how I’d handle it. I swallowed against the painful squeezing in my throat and forced a smile.

  “Take your time,” he said and looked at me with his shrewd brown eyes. Then he left.

  I stared at the binder for a few seconds and ran my hand along the smooth vinyl cover. I blew a shaky breath out of my mouth and opened it.

  Murder books were the paper trail of a murder investigation. They had everything from transcripts of investigator’s notes to witness interviews, autopsy reports, forensic reports, even crime scene photographs. I flipped to the back of the binder and found the manila envelope that contained the photographs of the crime scene—Summer’s home.

  My hands shook, and I had trouble opening the little brass prongs that held the flap down. The white edges of the printed photographs peeked up from the envelope. I hesitated, then pulled the stack out and forced myself to look at the first one. I wasn’t prepared.

  The photographs captured, in garish light, the aftermath of a violent struggle. Summer was attacked in her living room. The broken lamps, upturned furniture, and shattered mirror all screamed of a desperate and terrible moment in my best friend’s life. The photographs, taken after the paramedics had left with Summer, showed the bloody gauze and plastic caps of syringes that littered the moss green carpet.

  I dropped the photographs on the desk and leaned back in the chair gasping for breath. Bile churned in my stomach. She’d fought for her life in the room where she’d had her baby shower. I sat in that broken chair and had coffee with her.

  I couldn’t stop the tears from burning down my face. I shot out of the chair and paced the garage crying silently. I didn’t know what I expected to accomplish by looking at all of this. It was like she’d been attacked twice, once here, and once at the hospital when her heart stopped and the doctors jumped on her and pushed on her chest, then dragged her to the operating room, and hurt her some more. I couldn’t stop shaking.

  My phone rang, startling me. It was Salem.

  “Hey, Reyna I followed Shane to his apartment. Then to the bar, you know, ‘The Border’. You were right, he met Parker there.”

  “That’s great, Salem. Are you still at the bar?” I cleared my throat and wiped my face.

  I could hear him hit the blinker, and I knew he was on the road.

  “No, they didn’t go inside. Parker and Shane met out in the parking lot, and it looked like they were fighting. Parker grabbed Shane by the shirt at one point and threw him against the car!” Salem sounded like he was on speed. The adrenaline was getting to him.

  “Promise me you stayed in the SUV.”

  “I did, I did. I did take some pictures, though. I know you said they wouldn’t help, but I figured I better practice.”

  “OK, that’s good. Where are you going now?”

  Salem said something, but it was muffled. I couldn’t make it out. Then his voice was very clear, almost like he was in the room with me.

  “Sorry about that, I put my blue-tooth earpiece on. It’s hard to drive and look at the laptop, and hold my cell phone all at once.”

  “Salem, you need to slow down. You’re OK, right?”

  “Yeah, uh…Shane is heading north. Any idea where he’s going?”

  I wracked my brain trying to remember where the bar was in relation to the freeway. “Maybe…Rainier beach? There’s a lot of things out that way.”

  “OK, well I’ll just stay with him. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Salem, don’t follow too close, OK? Don’t follow him if he goes down a back road or something, he’ll notice you following. Rely on the GPS and forget taking pictures if you think it’s too dangerous.”

  “Yeah, OK. I’ll keep you posted.” Salem’s vo
ice was exhilarated, on edge.

  “Salem…” I began, but he had hung up. I stared at my phone and wondered if I should call him back.

  “You yell for me?” Maurice poked his head in the door and lifted his eyebrows.

  “No, I got a call from my intern.”

  Maurice’s eyes shifted to the pictures splayed on his desk, looked like he was about to say something, but nodded instead and closed the door.

  I gritted my teeth and sat back down. I could do this. Flipping past the initial crime scene, I found that the crime scene tech had photographed the lock on her back door. It had scratches on the finish and it appeared that someone had broken in. There was a close up photograph of some debris under a chair, parts of a broken chair leg or something like that.

  In the bedroom, the dressers and nightstands were ransacked; Summer’s jewelry case was on the bedspread, its contents missing. There were pictures of wires snaking across her desk that no longer held her pink laptop. It looked like a robbery gone wrong. It looked like a random, senseless, crime.

  I shoved the pictures back in the envelope and moved on to the transcripts of the detective’s notes. Ronald Warpol, the detective running point on the case, made extensive notes as he walked through the scene. He noted which lights were on and which ones weren’t. That Summer had made a pot of decaf coffee, but hadn’t had any. Warpol was meticulous, if not compulsive about his notes. Halfway through the transcript, Warpol mentioned a medication tablet found near the gauze, and trash left by the paramedics. That hit a wrong note with me.

  Summer hadn’t so much as taken an aspirin since her pregnancy was confirmed. She’d been adamant about it. Even when she was sick with the flu during her first trimester she’d fought the doctor when he told her to take a fever reducer. Jimmy said she cranked up the air conditioner instead and nearly froze him to death during his visit with her.

  The paramedics wouldn’t have given her a pill, she was unconscious. I went back over the photos. There weren’t any close up stills of a pill in the pile of pictures. Puzzled, I went to the door and called for Maurice.

  “Whatcha got?” He handed me a plate with pumpkin pie as he walked in.

  “The detective, this Warpol guy, he’s pretty meticulous, right?”

  “Yeah, he’s the son of one of my old partners. Mel says his son is a note taker; real detailed.” Maurice nodded.

  I pointed to the line in Warpol’s notes about a pill, and then handed him the photograph.

  “Warpol says a pill was discovered near where Summer was found, but I don’t see one in the picture.”

  Maurice squinted at the photograph, harrumphed, and opened a drawer in the desk. He grabbed a magnifying glass and scanned the scene again, with his nose practically touching the photograph.

  “There’s no pill in the picture, is there?”

  “Doesn’t appear to be,” he said evenly. “You think it’s something?”

  “Summer didn’t take medication. She didn’t take anything out of fear for the baby. This Warpol mentions a medication pill, but I don’t see one in the photograph. I doubt the paramedics would give a pill to her in that condition.”

  “Did you go through the whole transcript?” Maurice rubbed his chin. It was his thinking fidget.

  “No, not yet.”

  Maurice edged me out of the way and sat down in his desk chair. He licked the pad of his thumb and leafed through the transcript pages. The last page was a sketch of the pill with Warpol’s signature. It was done in pen, but Warpol had used a marker to draw a symbol on the pill. He’d done quite a good job, even making the ends of the rope look frayed. The sketch was of a white tablet stamped with a picture of a purple knot.

  I stared at it for a few seconds not understanding.

  “This white tablet isn’t medication, Reyna.” Maurice blew a breath out in a whistle.

  “I don’t…how do you mean?”

  “I saw these while I was on the force. It’s a homemade pill, the kind stamped out by hand, by dealers.”

  “Is it meth?” I looked at Maurice, dread pooling my chest. Parker, the lab tech, pseudo-ephedrine; they all made sense.

  Maurice rubbed his chin. “Could be, yeah. You see the symbol, the purple knot? It’s like a brand. Back when I was in narcotics, we had some pills coming out of Oregon, PCP mixed with some downers, the druggies called it China Red. The pills had a little red star stamped right in the center, like this one.”

  “Why would you brand the drugs? I mean, wouldn’t that make it easier to catch you?”

  “Nah, the chemist, the guy who cooks the drugs up, brands them and they give them to their dealers, who use the brand as a selling point. China Red, for instance, was supposed to be a faster high with a slower crash.”

  I looked at the photograph and remembered Parker’s stay in rehab. Had I been wrong about the gambling? I was getting a very bad feeling about what Parker was up to at work. I realized Maurice had said something. “Huh?”

  “I said, the only people who are brazen enough to stamp their products are large organizations; gangs and cartels importing product from overseas or down south.”

  “Why would this pill not be in the photograph?”

  “I heard a rumor from Phil, my guy in the department who copied the murder book for me, about Summer. At the time I dismissed it, but now…” Maurice rubbed his eyes with both hands and sighed.

  “What, Maurice?”

  “Phil said that word around the station was that the Evans family had used its influence to try to hide Summer’s drug use from the investigation.”

  “What!” I yelled. “Summer didn’t use drugs.”

  “Look, all I know, is that Phil heard rumors about Parker’s family asking that her drug use be kept out of the investigation. They said she agreed to go in for help that weekend, in fact Parker was in Colorado making arrangements for her stay at a rehab clinic when she was killed.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. How could anyone believe that? Then again, after years of marriage to Parker, who actually knew her? She’d been isolated by Parker, systematically cut off from Jimmy and me and anyone else.

  “What is going on here, Maurice? Are they really investigating her murder as a robbery, or did they chalk it up to a drug deal gone bad, now?”

  “I’m not part of this, Reyna,” Maurice said softly. “I’m telling you what Phil said, that’s all.”

  I put my hands to my head as if I could hold my jumbled thoughts together. “Are they even looking at Parker for this?” I whispered.

  Maurice didn’t answer at first, but ever-so slightly, he shook his head. “No, Reyna,” he answered. “Word at the station is they don’t even consider him a person of interest, anymore.”

  “They think that Summer, a pregnant mother in a privileged neighborhood, got beaten by her drug dealer?”

  “Pregnant women sometimes do drugs, Reyna. We’ve got hundreds of kids in foster care because of that fact.”

  “Yeah, but this is Summer, Maurice,” I said, a little too loud. “Summer wouldn’t be doing drugs!”

  “The police have documentation of payment for a rehab clinic admission.”

  “But that’s for Parker!”

  “No, Phil said the hospital faxed over the admitting paperwork. The stay was for Summer.”

  I paced the floor and tried to wrap my mind around what I was hearing. How could anyone buy this story?

  Maurice gathered up the photographs and stuffed them in the envelope.

  “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, Old Girl.”

  I stopped pacing and leaned against the wall, deflated. “No, this was good for me to see, Maurice. The problem is that it’s all a work of fiction. Summer wasn’t caught up in anything bad, Parker was. I have proof.”

  “You have actual proof?” Maurice cocked his head to the side.

  “Not exactly, no.” My shoulders sagged. I had stolen documents, illegal keystroke logs, and a great theory about what was going on, but proof
? Far from it.

  Maurice nodded silently.

  “If the paperwork from the rehab clinic backs up what Parker is saying, then he was making arrangements for both an alibi and an explanation for how Summer died.”

  “You’re positive she wasn’t using?”

  I looked at Maurice and shrugged. “It’s a lie, Maurice. Parker’s lying.”

  “You’d have to prove she wasn’t doing drugs to nail Parker in this lie.”

  “I can’t do that. How would I do that?” I paced, choking back the pain in my throat. “I don’t have access to Summer, her home, or her medical records. Parker really covered his tracks on this one…he...”

  Tears burned my eyes and I blinked them back. I felt like I was fighting against a tidal wave with a spoon. I just couldn’t battle Parker’s lies and money and influence. I didn’t have the resources.

  “You remember the first case you worked on solo?” Maurice closed the murder book and handed it to me.

  I looked at him confused.

  “The Fuller case?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  Karen Fuller was a secretary in the law firm Maurice and I worked for. She had an ex-husband who refused to pay child support because he said he was disabled and couldn’t work. Karen worked three jobs to make ends meet for her three young boys while her ex-husband took his girlfriend to the Bahamas. She couldn’t prove where he was getting the money, but she believed he was doing body work on his buddies’ cars for cash. Problem was, his house had a six foot wood fence surrounding his back yard and garage. Whenever she came over, he answered the door with a cane. She was stuck, and her divorce arbitrator was going to submit a report siding with her husband. Karen came to Maurice in tears and asked for help.

  “You remember that we couldn’t get proof of what he was doing because he worked at night and his fence was too high for pictures?”

  “I…yeah,” I said finally. I knew where this was going.

  “You found the only building that had a line of sight into his yard. It was that condemned apartment across the street.”