by Merit Clark
“Stay with me, Corie, it’s Jack. You’re going to be okay.” He freed her hands and legs, then took off his coat and covered her with it. It was so cold and she’d lost so much blood. Was still bleeding. Her pulse was so weak he was afraid he was imagining it. He talked to her the whole time, told her she was going to be okay, told her she was beautiful, told her not to go away.
Where the hell was Jessie? Evan wouldn’t kill his own mother, would he? Except there was no telling what Evan would do.
Two bodies on Jack’s watch. So far. Not counting Monique. Or, God forbid, Aranda, or the others they hadn’t figured out yet. Not counting Corie. And they never would count Corie, not if Jack had anything to say about it. He shouldn’t have baited Evan; he should have kept his cool and done his job.
Jack reached for the radio again. “I need that goddamned ambulance yesterday.” He made no effort to disguise the desperation in his voice.
“Two minutes out,” came the response.
“Make it one.”
Did he hear sirens in the distance? Pink foam edged her mouth. What did that mean? Jack should know. He kept talking to her, a stream of soothing nonsense, saying the things he’d recently begun to hope he’d have the chance to say. You’re beautiful. I love you. Please don’t leave me.
Jesus. She was down here in the dark and the filth, all alone, scared, and in pain. What kind of evil bastard could dump her like this and leave her to die?
“I’m here, Corie. You’re going to be all right.” With an agonizing sense of futility he tucked the coat tighter around her, touched her face, her hair, held her hand. What had Evan done to her?
Definitely sirens. And they were getting louder.
Jack turned his flashlight into the dark void around them, its arcing beam no match for the fetid darkness, its weak light soaking into the dirt floor like Corie’s blood. It was so dim he wasn’t sure at first what he was seeing.
“Christ.”
Another body, or rather a skeleton, half buried in the dirt at the far end of the crawl space. Number three.
Car doors slammed. Voices. The reassuring chatter of police radios.
“Under here!” Jack yelled. Forms appeared in the opening. Uniformed officers, paramedics. Flashlight beams raked his face.
“You need to get a homicide team out here.” Jack stopped as the paramedics loaded Corie on a stretcher and gave instructions to an officer. “Secure the entire property. There’s a body under there. Looks old. Skeleton.”
Chapter 68
A male doctor called for a medication, machine alarms sounded, a female doctor said, “She’s crashing, get the paddles.”
They had asked Jack for Corie’s name and used it as if she could hear them.
The male doctor injected something into an IV they’d hastily put in her arm in the ambulance. Epi, Jack thought he heard them say. He tried to remember his rudimentary first aid training and gave up. It was bad. That was all he needed to know. All that was relevant.
“Get another IV,” someone said. “Tube her.”
They’d brought her to Denver Health, a Level One Trauma Center, only a few minutes from Jessie’s house. Usually. Precious minutes ticked away on the icy drive, and now Jack watched the doctors’ frantic work from a narrow spot he’d found against the wall in between an unused IV stand and an ominous-looking piece of equipment with lots of dials on a cart. He’d flatly refused to leave and, since he was a cop, they let him stay, although they’d threatened him with forcible removal if he got in their way.
He could barely see Corie in the bed surrounded by doctors, nurses, and equipment. The female doctor injected something else into Corie’s IV. Used gauze and bandages accumulated quickly in bloody heaps on the linoleum floor. He heard them say “clear” like in the movies and saw Corie’s slight body jump from the charge.
“Three sixty,” the woman said, a note of desperation in her voice.
“Charging. Clear.”
“You’re all right. Please be all right. You have to be all right. Please be all right.” Jack’s mouth moved and he whispered the words over and over, his own kind of prayer.
“Again,” the woman called.
“Clear.”
On the bed, Corie’s body jumped.
“Got a rhythm,” the male doctor said, wrapping his stethoscope back around his neck. “Notify the OR. Let’s move.” They started rolling the bed from the room.
“You’re doing great, Corie,” the female doctor said, walking next to the bed with her hand on the rail.
Jack followed. “Where are you taking her?”
“To surgery.” The male doctor called more orders.
Jack tried to get on the elevator with them but they wouldn’t allow it.
“You’re almost there, Corie, you’re doing great,” he heard the female doctor say before the elevator door closed. “Hang in there. Stay with us.”
Yes. Stay with us. Please, please stay with us. Jack’s vision blurred as he stood there staring at the closed elevator door until it opened again and different doctors poured out. They stepped around him with some irritation. Eventually, Jack moved and found a seat along one wall. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, face in his hands. How could he have been so stupid?
Chapter 69
“What are you going to do?” Jessie asked from the passenger seat. She’d finally stopped fighting and sat quietly, meek and confused. “Where are we going?”
Evan laughed shortly. “You tell me. This was all your idea.”
In truth, there was nowhere to go. After his initial panic driving away from Jessie’s he’d headed aimlessly south, sticking to side streets and picking his way carefully on the snow. He couldn’t go home and look for the computer because the police would be watching the house. Hopefully the laptop was ruined after being outdoors, but Evan knew the police lab technicians might be able to salvage some of the information on it.
“I’m sorry.” Jessie spoke in a little girl voice.
Evan glanced at her to see if she was going to try something, but she was slumped in the seat with her hands in her lap.
“Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone?” Evan didn’t ask ‘how could you kill a man?’ He knew exactly how she could do that.
“Brice was onto you. What was I supposed to do? Stand by helplessly while some stranger destroyed my family?”
“Corie wasn’t a stranger.”
“I can’t go to jail, Evan. Maybe you should kill me too.”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“I thought I was helping you.” Still in the small voice.
“By killing Corie?”
“That was . . . unfortunate. I thought you would know what to do about Corie. That’s why I called you, that’s why I waited for you and insisted you come over. Everything was perfect. Even the snow. The snow would slow everyone down.”
“Thought it all through, did you?”
Malice crept into her voice. “I can’t believe you’re going to lose your wife to a cop.”
Not to Jessie’s bullets. No. He was going to lose his wife to Jack. If only Corie were alive to be lost to anyone. But Evan didn’t argue the point.
Jessie’s voice grew soft and dreamy. “I love it when it snows, when it’s biting and harsh outside and warm and safe inside. I wasn’t sure at first that I was going to do it. I decided to see her, to see how I felt. To see how she still felt about me.”
“Corie loves you. She never stopped. She loved visiting you—most of the time she had to convince me. She loved your cooking, your clothes, she admired everything about you—God knows why. She would have done anything for you.”
“You didn’t see her face when she walked in. And her hair. That’s when I knew: she’d left us.”
“She left me.”
Evan reached Washington Park. Front-end loaders were working to clear the northwest parking lot. He parked at the far end where they’d already finished.
“The roads aren’t that bad,” Jessie
said. “You can keep driving.”
“And go where?” Evan stared at the lake in the middle of the park. Not all that long ago the police had pulled a body out. A man down on his luck and friendless, the newspapers said. An apparent suicide. Evan compulsively checked his rearview mirror for police cars. He almost hoped for them. “I’m open to ideas. You’re such an expert, after all.”
“You’ll figure it out. You always know how to handle these things.”
Evan laughed again bitterly. These things? As if they were discussing paying a bill or hiring a gardener. “The police will have the cabin staked out, if we could even get there with all of the snow. Shaun usually plows the road but he’s a bit indisposed at the moment.”
“I hate it there anyway.”
Evan wondered if Jack drove by the park, if he would spot Evan’s car. But Jack was at the hospital with Corie. She wouldn’t be alone as long as she was alive. If she was alive.
“I can’t go to jail,” Jessie said again. “I’m old. I wouldn’t survive it.”
How odd to hear his mother describe herself as old. She must be desperate.
“I’m not prepared for these kinds of things. I didn’t mean what I said earlier, darling. I was upset. You’re stronger than I am. I’ve always admired you and the way you can prevail over anything.”
What she had always done was use him. He never had either her respect or her admiration. Let alone love. As long as he was useful she indulged him, but that was it. That had been Hennessy’s undoing, refusing to be what Jessie wanted her to be. Refusing even to pretend. Hennessy had turned on herself and he’d turned on—no. It was too much of a cliché: I did it because of my unhappy childhood. He wouldn’t reduce his life to psychobabble. Evan wasn’t much but he wouldn’t be a cliché.
“You have friends,” Jessie said.
“I don’t have friends,” Evan said.
Jessie’s voice was sweet. “You know people. That’s even better. You get things done. I’ve always wanted to go to Mexico. I love the art, the ocean, the intrigue. I know. I’d like to go see the Mayan ruins.”
Evan looked at his mother expecting the usual Jessie mask of delight and charmingly wicked humor. But her eyes didn’t sparkle and she didn’t press her hands together like a child in her usual manner.
Jessie’s eyes were dull and opaque and she did look old. “There are ancient mysteries there in Mexico,” she said. “Maybe I’ll finally find some answers.”
And he would sacrifice himself for her, as he always had.
Chapter 70
Someone sat down in the chair next to Jack and put a hand on his arm. Serena. He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there, and when he lifted his head to look at her he realized his eyes were moist. He didn’t care.
“She’s going to be all right,” Serena said.
“It’s my fault. I baited Evan. I shouldn’t have said the things I did.”
“You were doing your job.”
“No.” What Jack said to Evan at the wine tasting went way beyond the job. It was stupid, impulsive, egotistical. And possibly fatal.
“Evan’s the bad guy here, Jack.” Serena watched him for a moment. “They wouldn’t operate unless there was hope.” And then she sat with him in silence, although she left her hand, warm and soothing, on his arm.
One by one Jack’s whole team showed up—Dani, Mike, Tiffany.
Mike asked questions; the women seemed to know better.
Jack looked at his old partner and tried to remember exactly what the doctor had told him. “Shot three times. Collapsed lung. Lot of internal damage. I don’t know.”
It had sounded brutal and hopeless. One bullet punctured her lung, nicked her spleen, and lacerated her liver. One shattered her ankle. The ankle would require reconstructive surgery later. For now they would only immobilize it, until she was out of danger. The ankle injury wasn’t life threatening; the others were.
“I’ve, uh, secured the scene. At Jessie’s.” Mike paused as if waiting for something from Jack. “Frank says it’ll take some time to remove the remains. They’re old, he thinks ten maybe twenty years. It’s gonna be almost like archaeology moving the bones. It was gonna take a while for them to get the right technicians out there with the snow and all, so I left Scalamandre in charge.”
Jack nodded. Ten or twenty years. Hennessy. But that didn’t make any sense.
Mike didn’t seem to know what to do. He paced and finally volunteered to go get coffee.
Serena looked at the lieutenant. “Markham called Jack and told him exactly where to find Corie. And she was shot like Brice, not cut up. I know I’m new to homicide but I think we’ve got two killers.”
“Evan could be playing you,” Dani said.
Serena shook her head. “Uh-uh. Doesn’t fit. Corie found Evan’s office and helped us figure out the tax records. In essence, she led us to Evan’s crimes. So why would he try to save her?”
“Changed his mind at the last minute?” Dani asked.
Serena arched an eyebrow. “A serial killer with a conscience?”
“You guys are overlooking the obvious.” Jack was interrupted by his cell phone. He glanced at the display, said “D’Ambrose,” and then answered in his customary way: “Fariel.”
Chapter 71
There’s a word for wounds that have been washed clean of blood, a scientific term, sterile, clinical, unforgiving. The word feels no emotion, has no awareness, and merely seeks to accurately describe a process. In forensic terms these wounds have undergone lysis. This is also the root of the word for the self-destruction a human body initiates on its own after death: autolysis. Our decay is coded in our DNA. Soft tissue is the first to go: skin, eyes, lymph, muscle. Our organs feast on themselves. Our bones become dust. Our disintegration is inevitable.
To lyse is to produce disintegration of a compound, substance, or cell. In this case, the substance that had disintegrated was blood. As Aranda’s body lay on the cold, metal stairs, the running water from the hose did indeed cleanse. Her blood and bile mixed with the icy water and drained onto the ground below the stairs; rivulets of fluid snaked away from the trailer and, at the edges, froze into a biological slush.
Drained of blood she took on a grayish cast. A pale beauty melting into the sharp perforations of the stairs. Predators found her, hungry at the onset of winter, to them a piece of meat. Held in place by Evan’s handcuffs, the mountain lion tasted but couldn’t drag her away. Held tight and bathed in the icy water, she was preserved, forever asleep, food.
Roger thought of Aranda as a beloved daughter and doubled over in agony upon his discovery that frigid October afternoon. He was a man who demanded answers. The police took too long so Roger ignored Jack’s advice and went to the construction site alone. His borrowed Lincoln Navigator sat in the lot, an ominous sentinel. Something lay on the stairs, some kind of debris Roger thought, or maybe some hapless animal that had found its way there to die.
Roger started to shake. His brain made no sense of the running water, and when he stepped out of his car he slipped and almost fell, confused and frightened by the icy, slushy parking lot. His reluctant gaze traveled to the form on the stairs again and he forced himself to take a closer look. It was far more evil than a dead animal. Roger’s fingers, already numb from the cold, fumbled with the cell phone keypad.
To Roger, Jack’s first instruction was counterintuitive and offensive: Don’t touch anything, leave the water on.
“Aranda? When?” Serena hugged herself.
“Last time she was seen was late yesterday afternoon,” Jack said.
Dani took a few steps away and barked commands into her radio.
“Evan’s been busy,” Serena said.
And Jack had been slow. He’d been sick while Evan was several lethal steps ahead. He had to close the gap. He had to go to Aranda. But he couldn’t leave Corie.
Mike returned with a carrier full of coffee cups and took one look at their faces. “Is it Corie?”
“Aranda Sheffield,” Serena said. “Roger D’Ambrose found her body a few minutes ago.”
“Shit.” Mike set down the coffee. “What do you want me to do?”
Dani said, “Warren’s on his way there.”
Jack stood. “No.”
They all stared at him.
Dani recovered first. “Jack, we can handle this. You’re not my only homicide detective. I’ll get as many resources on this as I need to. You stay here.”
“No,” Jack repeated. “This is personal. I need to go up there. Corie’ll be in surgery for a while. Mike needs to process the scene at Jessie’s.” He didn’t tell the lieutenant how Aranda had tried to call him multiple times. Had Evan killed Aranda while Jack was at radiation or while he was a useless piece of shit on the couch?
“Jack.” Tiffany touched his arm and looked up at him with kind eyes. He’d almost forgotten she was there. “I’ll stay here. I’ll let you know the minute I hear anything about Corie.”
Tiffany’s kindness was almost Jack’s undoing. He managed to nod and not fall apart. Then he looked at Serena. “We’ll take my car. It’s good on the snow.”
Serena picked up two coffees and followed her partner out the door.
Chapter 72
It was fully dark by the time Jack and Serena reached the construction site. Law enforcement vehicles clogged the icy, snow-packed road leading to the parking lot. At least they’d done that right. They were treating the parking lot as part of the crime scene.
When Jack stepped out of the car, an icy blast reminded him he no longer had his coat. And why. He set his teeth and walked toward the trailer with Serena, picking their way carefully toward the eerie glow of klieg lights illuminating the tent over the stairs.
It was hard to tell what the pale object was until you were too close to defend against the revulsion. Poor Roger. To have known her and then to find this. Uniforms swarmed the scene, and at one point, Jack noticed one young officer subtly slip away and head for the trees.