There was no sign of that someone now, thank goodness, and just to make sure there were no critters lurking to surprise me, either, I clapped my hands and stomped
I’d remembered to bring a flashlight, and I dug it out of my purse and flicked it on, training its light on the crime scene photo I plucked out of the file.
I stood just inside the door where the photographer had been standing when he took the picture that showed the entire room, comparing the photo to the empty space in front of me. It would have been easier if the light was better.
The bathroom door was directly in front of me, and it was closed. If there was a window in there—and if it wasn’t boarded—I knew I could count on a little more light. As it turned out, there was a window that was maybe two feet square, high up on the wall. It was broken but not boarded up. Perfect, except that as soon as I pushed the door open, it swung shut again.
Frustrated, I went back out into the bedroom and looked for something I could use to prop the door. I grabbed one of the sticks from the almost-fire, wedged it between the door and the jamb and when the door stayed open, just like I wanted it to, I congratulated myself. “Good work, Pepper,” I murmured, and while I was in there, I looked around.
The bathroom was no more spectacular than the rest of the place. The toilet and sink were gone and the bathtub was filled with debris. The floor—or at least the parts of it that hadn’t been worn away by time—was black and white linoleum, the wallpaper was kitschy. It was dotted with pink flamingoes and green palm trees, and even though they were faded, they looked too playful and tropical to be part of the decay.
In spite of myself, I wondered what Vera had thought about those flamingoes.
And I shivered.
It was better to concentrate on the facts than it was to get mired in emotional details, and just so I wouldn’t forget it, I stepped back into the other room, all set to get to work.
I would have done, too—if I hadn’t heard someone walking right outside the door.
I hauled in a breath and stood rooted to the spot, watching as a shadow slipped under the door. I held my breath when the doorknob turned, and I thought about darting back into the bathroom and slamming the door, but one look over my shoulder at that window—and one thought about how small and how high up on the wall it was—made me change my mind. If I needed a quick exit, I wouldn’t find it in that direction.
The picture window was my best bet, and with that in mind, I grabbed another one of the sticks from the fire, darted over to stand behind the door, and held my ground.
“Pepper?” A voice from outside whispered my name, but this did not reassure me in the least. I reminded myself that the mugger who’d nearly sliced open my windpipe knew where I lived. It wasn’t much of a stretch to think he might also know my name.
I clutched the branch tighter.
“Pepper?” The voice called to me again, and a head and shoulders popped through the window. “Are you—”
I’d already shot forward, ready to administer a mighty blow, so it was a good thing I stopped myself just as I was about to bring the branch down on Absalom’s head.
“What you doing, woman?” He shot straight back, one hand clutched to his heart. “You nearly scared me to death!”
I leaned forward for a better look, just in case my
“Maybe we should ask you the same question.” Without further explanation, Absalom stepped over the windowsill into the room. Sammi was so short, it was clear she would do herself some serious damage if she attempted the move on her own, so Absalom lifted her up and hoisted her inside. The rest of my team followed.
Always the spokesman, Absalom shook his head. “Don’t seem like the kind of place a woman like you should be hanging out. What are you up to?”
It seemed only fair to counter with a question of my own. “How did you find me? And why would you follow me in the first place?”
Like he was amazed that I was being so dense, Absalom shook his head. “You been sneakin’ around for weeks, and we all had a talk about it.” Our fellow teammates acknowledged that he was right by nodding. “You’re going to get yourself in some trouble if you’re not careful. Can’t guarantee that voodoo doll I gave you is going to guard against every evil.” A shiver snaked across his massive shoulders. “Especially in a place like this.”
“Nothing here you should even care about.” This came from Reggie, who actually looked pretty much at home in the dilapidated mess.
“Unless you’re up to something . . .” Absalom dragged out the last word, giving me every opportunity to jump right in.
I might have been able to hold out when it came to Reggie. And I sure could have ignored Crazy Jake (who wasn’t paying all that much attention anyway, since he was kicking around the room and snapping pictures). I
But I couldn’t resist them all.
I gave in with as much good grace as I could muster. “I’m investigating a murder,” I said.
“Cool!” Sammi shot forward. “Somebody got murdered? Here?”
“Yeah, twenty-five years ago.”
“And you’re looking into it . . .” Absalom’s expression was as thoughtful as his voice. “Why?”
Honest to gosh, I thought about telling them the truth. For all I knew, my teammates just might believe me when I told them about the dead who visited and the cases I’d taken on their behalfs.
I decided to play my cards close to my chest.
“You’ve seen Jefferson Lamar’s grave,” I said.
Delmar stepped forward. “Where we found that coin.”
“That’s right. He’s the guy who was convicted of murdering Vera.”
“The girl who died in this room.”
Sammi had made the comment, and I nodded toward her. “Lamar’s wife doesn’t think he did it.”
“And you’re trying to prove it?” Absalom asked.
I pulled back my shoulders. “Believe it or not, I’ve done this sort of thing before. I mean, I’m not a professional or anything, but I’m pretty good at it.”
“I don’t doubt that for one minute.” Absalom said this in a way that made me think I’d jumped the gun when it came to getting all defensive. “But why here?”
“I’ve got the original police file from the murder,” I explained, “and the crime scene photos. I thought if I came here and looked around—”
“You’d get a sense of the place, and of everything that
I shrugged. It wasn’t exactly an answer, but then, I wasn’t exactly sure what to say. “I didn’t want to take away your free time. I didn’t want to involve you in something you might think is stupid. I didn’t want you to think I was some sort of nut job, going around trying to prove something when the police weren’t even able to prove it back when it happened. I didn’t want—”
“Us to be in any danger?” A comment that insightful coming from Sammi was the verbal equivalent of her walking into work wearing a plaid jumper and loafers. Just like an outfit like that would have done, it got my attention.
“You have better things to do than hang around with me when we’re not working,” I said, “looking for clues to a murder that happened so long ago, none of us even remember it.”
Absalom pursed his lips. “Think so?” He glanced at his fellow teammates. “Maybe we’ve let our team captain have her way long enough. Maybe it’s time our team became a democracy. What do you say? Let’s take a vote. All those in favor of letting Pepper investigate on her own in places like this, which don’t look too savory to me, raise your hand.”
Not a single hand went up.
“And all those in favor of helping her out?”
Every hand shot up, even Jake’s.
I am not by nature an emotional person, but my eyes misted and my throat closed over a lump.
“Don’t sweat it, Pepper.” Sammi slapped me on the back. “You don’t have to thank us. This is our way of thanking you.” I knew when she realized she’d said more than she meant because her cheeks got dus
ky. Her voice
I laughed, because it wasn’t funny, but it was a way to make Sammi feel less embarrassed. “What? And miss all the other fights?”
Absalom was a man of business. He knew a girly bonding moment when he saw one, and he wasn’t about to let it get out of control. If it did, he knew Sammi and I would be sitting down, having a heart-to-heart, and comparing fashion pointers and love lives before another five minutes were up.
“Good, then that’s settled.” He grinned. “We got us a murder to solve. Let’s get started.”
“Jake, you’re the dresser. You stand over there.” I J pointed, and since Jake was crazy but not uncooperative, he moved to stand in the spot where the crime scene photos showed the dresser. “Delmar, you’re the mirror. The dresser looks like it was bumped away from its usual place, probably while Vera was trying to defend herself. So you want to stand a couple feet away from Jake. Reggie . . .” I consulted the photo again, “you’re over there, you’re the bed.”
Reggie grinned.
I rolled my eyes.
“Sammi, you can either be the smashed lamp or—”
“Oh, come on. Let me be the murdered chick. Please!” Sammi scampered over to where I was standing and stood on her tiptoes so she could see over my shoulder and look at the photograph. There’s no way on earth I would have asked her—or anybody else—to make full-body contact with the floor, but hey, Sammi was nothing
“You want me to be the murderer?” Absalom asked.
“I dunno.” I looked at it all and at the way my teammates looked to me for answers—except for Sammi, who was staring up at the ceiling just the way Vera was in the photo—and my shoulders slumped. “I’m not sure this is getting us anywhere.”
“Sure it is. It must be.” Absalom stripped the photo out of my hands. “It gives us a better idea of where things were, how the room was set up.”
“But not who killed Vera.” I shook my head in an effort to clear it. It didn’t work. I was still as baffled as ever. “She was here to meet somebody,” I told them all because, of course, they didn’t know that I had figured out this part of the story. “She arrived wearing her office clothes, but she brought a trampy sort of outfit with her, and—”
“Oh, was it really cool?” Sammi shot up. “Are there pictures? I’ll make a copy of it. Then we can come back and I can dress just like her, and—”
“It’s not going to make a difference what you wear,” I pointed out. “These pictures don’t really matter. None of them. All that matters is what happened before the pictures were taken. And we can’t know that.”
“Hey, maybe we need to get a psychic in here.” The idea came from Reggie, who was pretty proud of himself for thinking of it. “You know, like those ones on TV. We could communicate with the dead girl. She’d tell us what happened.”
I was in no mood to point out that I’d already tried this. And that it hadn’t worked.
Frustrated by the whole experience and wondering
It meant I was standing right in front of the window when the first shots were fired.
17
Remember what I said about the disgusting floor? Right about then, I didn’t care.
I hit the cement face-first, and though I screamed to my teammates to do the same, I really didn’t have to. When I got up the nerve to lift my head just long enough to glance around, I saw that they were all on the floor, too.
We stayed that way for I don’t know how long, waiting for another volley of shots that didn’t come. The only sound in the room was our rough breathing. That, and the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears.
I swallowed hard. “Everybody OK?”
Fortunately, everybody was.
Still on his stomach, Absalom shimmied over. “You never said nothin’ about people tryin’ to kill you.”
“Like I knew somebody was going to start taking pot-shots at me?” I half-crawled, half-rolled in the other direction, and when I was out of range of the window, I sat
“Not lookin’ for a freakin’ apology.” Absalom sat up, too. “Lookin’ to know what you got yourself into.”
I didn’t have the answer, but as it turns out, it didn’t matter. Another round of gunfire erupted, and before I had a chance to dial 911, I fell flat again. My phone slipped out of my hand and skittered across the floor.
A bullet slammed into the cement not ten inches from it, and a spray of tiny cement pieces spewed into the air. Another bullet whizzed past my ear. I knew it wouldn’t do any good, but hey, self-preservation instincts aren’t always logical; I rolled into a ball and covered my head.
And that’s how we all waited. One minute. Two. Three. With each second that passed, I was convinced the shooter was going to spring through the window and finish us off. When nobody did, I took the chance of unfurling and taking a careful look around. “Maybe he’s gone,” I whispered.
“Maybe.” Absalom rocked to his knees and crawled to the window. He was a big target and he knew it, so he stayed close to the floor and peeked around the side of all that was left of the board that used to cover the opening. “I don’t see anybody.”
“Me, either.” Reggie crawled up beside him. He had one of the sticks from the fire, and he tossed it out the window. It clattered to the ground.
There was no response, no gunfire. In fact, it was dead quiet for another whole minute. Then we heard a car door slam.
“Son of a—” It was gloomier than when I arrived at
“It’s just a shirt, Sammi. Chill.” Delmar made sure he kept his distance when he delivered his advice. “Better your shirt gets wasted than Pepper.”
Sammi being Sammi . . . . well, she was well beyond being soothed. I’d like to think it was me being the shooter’s intended target that sent her over the edge, but it just as easily could have been the damage to her shirt. Before any of us could even think to stop her, she raced to the window, hopped over the sill, and barreled into the parking lot, swearing a blue streak at the top of her lungs.
“No!” I scrambled to my feet just as the car outside revved its engine and squealed its tires. Absalom and I made it to the window at the same time, and it might have been a toss-up as to who was going to push who out of the way and get outside first.
Except that the next sound we heard froze us both in our tracks.
The crack of a single gunshot.
By the time we jockeyed for position to get out of the window and raced to Sammi’s side, she was already dead.
“You look like you could use a cup of coffee.”
As if by magic, right after I heard these words, a disposable cup appeared under my nose. The coffee in it was hot and steamy, and it smelled like heaven.
Just thinking about drinking it made me feel like I was going to throw up.
I looked up from the coffee cup, and maybe I should
I’d like to say I sniffed, but the noise I made was way less polite than that. I swigged, and when he handed me a handkerchief, I grabbed it gratefully and wiped my nose and eyes.
“We were just doing research,” I said, telling Quinn the same story I’d told the patrol cops when they arrived in answer to my frenzied 911 call. It was, after all, technically the truth. “We were looking over the scene and talking about the crime, and—” I hiccupped. “That’s when the shooting started.”
“And this Sammi Santiago . . .” He consulted a small, leather-bound notebook. “She ran out of the room?”
“You know Sammi!” I felt I could get away with this explanation because Quinn was a Cemetery Survivor fan, and as every fan knew, Sammi has—er, had—a temper. He’d seen her in action. “She was so mad about the shooting and about her shirt getting dirty . . .” I remembered how back in the room, she thought her T-shirt was ruined, and how out in the parking lot when I finally dropped to my knees at her side, I saw that St. James’s face was obliterated by the dark red blood that oozed from the wound in Sammi’s chest. When I tried to draw in a breath to steady myself, it wobbled on the sob stuck in m
y throat. “Sammi just took off. And that’s when . . .” I swallowed hard. It hurt. “That’s when we heard the shot.”
“And the car?”
I thought back to the moment I hopped out the window. “I only saw it from the back. It wasn’t new. I could tell that. It was gray. Or maybe white. It was getting dark, and it was hard to tell.”
“Did anybody think to get the license plate number?”
I shrugged. After the first detective on the scene interviewed me, a nice uniformed officer sat me down in the patrol car, got a blanket out of the trunk, and draped it over my shoulders. The blanket sagged. Quinn didn’t adjust it. “I didn’t see much,” I told him. “I was looking at Sammi, and it all happened so fast.” I wasn’t sure if I was talking about the way the shooter escaped or the way a person can be living one second and gone the next. Since my eyes filled with tears and my nose clogged, I don’t think I was talking about the shooter.
“It’s OK,” Quinn said. “It’s over now. You’re safe.”
I was, and it didn’t make me feel one bit better. When he made a move to get out of the car, I plucked at his sleeve. “How did you know I was here?”
“I heard the call on the radio. The dispatcher mentioned the Lake View.” His expression was dead serious. “I remembered that file you asked for, so I figured you were here. They said there was a victim, a woman. I thought—” He didn’t finish the sentence, just slid out of the car.
Before he could walk away, I leaned over to see him better. “Did you call Virgil?”
“I’ll leave that up to the patrol guys,” he said. He stooped down to look me in the eye. “We’re done talking to you for now, though somebody will probably be by tomorrow to interview you again. You want me to follow you home?”
Dead Man Talking Page 20