Cameras clicked from the watching crowd, the archaeologists’ lunch being the most exciting thing to happen all morning. Except for the arrival and departure of the Coburgs, Mark told Hilary. “And Vasarian on his leash,” added Jenny.
“I don’t suppose they skulked around acting guilty?” asked Hilary.
“Hell, no,” Mark replied. “Travis broke down the edge of the trench, Kenneth told Jenny how to excavate, and Dolores reminded us a hundred times or so that Victoria Square has to get started and that this is her property and we’d better not slow things down any further.”
“As though you buried the body on purpose.”
“Right,” said Jenny. “Good biscuits. Thank you.”
The sky was streaked with blue, gray, and white clouds, looking like one of Olivia’s watercolor landscapes. A fitful breeze gasped through the limbs of the trees. The tossing leaves were so dusty, they made Hilary think of August instead of April. “Happy April Fool’s”, she said.
“I’ve had quite enough jokes played on me already,” Mark told her.
By the time Hilary finished her sketch, the afternoon had darkened, the clouds stuffing the sky with deep blue-gray billows, and the breeze was a cold, steady wind. Mark and Jenny enlisted the aid of the police officers to dig a drainage ditch. Hilary put the drawing board in the kitchen, petted Graymalkin, and watered the ivy on the old icebox which was now blocking the door into the rest of the house.
She sped away from Osborne through the prematurely dark evening to the bright and mundane precincts of a supermarket, shopped, and raced the rain back home. To the thunk of raindrops against the windows, she dumped the groceries on the kitchen counter and hurried upstairs.
She was going to attempt curried chicken and rice tonight—eventually, she told herself, she had to figure out how to cook. Cooking couldn’t be as confusing as sex. Again, Jenny had declined to join them—three’s a crowd, after all, and Jenny might be feeling particularly awkward now that Mark and Hilary had more or less gotten together.
Blushing furiously, Hilary turned on the lights in her bedroom and bathroom and showered. Maybe tonight or tomorrow night they could try again. This time when she touched herself she sensed a reminiscent tingle, and her breath caught in a moan of delight that sounded ludicrous out of context.
She remembered the romantic fancies she’d had as a young girl, and shook her head over the years she’d spent when she was sure no one would ever want her. What she had never imagined was that when she did fall in love, it would be against an international backdrop of murder and mayhem.
Hilary got dressed to the insistent screech of a burglar alarm, coming from two blocks over, she estimated. Many times her neighborhood in Indianapolis had been awakened by alarms set off by passing trucks or squirrels on the roof. Just as she decided she ought to call the police herself, the wail stopped. Good. Someone else had taken care of it, whether it had sounded by accident or purposeful incursion.
Through the rush of the rain, she heard a noise downstairs. Mark? No, he’d come in calling her name. Oh, for heaven’s sakes, Minnie Mouse was probably nibbling at her groceries! Hilary rushed into the kitchen. The boxes and bags lay just as she’d left them. The cookies reposed in their tin. Not one rodent whisker did she see.
Two strong arms grabbed her from behind. Every nerve ending in her body shorted out. Her breath escaped in a choked squeak and she couldn’t force another one into her lungs. Hands groped across her breasts. Her legs wouldn’t support her weight; she fell back against her assailant, pushing them both into the darkened living room.
A labored breath in her ear became words. “Come on, baby. Come on, baby.” The hands groped further down her body. Something cold and metallic pressed into the small of her back—no, not a gun. Both her attacker’s hands were accounted for. She tried to scream, tried to move, but her body was no longer hers to control, just a lump of meat….
Her mind spasmed into incandescent rage. She remembered a plush toy pressing against her face and light burning her eyes. “No!” she screamed. “I’m not your baby!” She planted her feet and pushed, and she and her attacker tumbled onto the couch. His grasp loosened. She flung herself forward. Even as the huge hands seized her again, she found her knitting needles.
“No! Leave me alone! You have no right!” Wrenching herself around, lunging toward her assailant instead of away from him, Hilary took him by surprise. She flung him against the couch and struck, again and again. All she could see was the flash of the needles, and a pair of eyes glinting, and a lumpish shape jerking beneath her.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, sugar, stop it, I didn’t mean nothing!” The man threw her away from him and ran toward the door.
The door opened. Mark’s sturdy body was a silhouette against the silvery rain, unconcernedly shaking itself. The shape slammed him against the door frame and disappeared into the rain. “What? Hilary!”
Hilary ran to him, still clasping the needles, her copy of Felicia’s sweater wadded in her hand. She was surprised she didn’t light up the entryway like a bolt of lightning. “He attacked me, Mark!”
Barely were the words out of her mouth before Mark, with a vicious oath, was out the door. She ran behind him. Cold rain poured over her. The grass slipped beneath her feet. Puddles splashed onto her ankles. A dim blotch retreated around the corner of the condo. Somewhere a dog started barking hysterically.
They turned the corner and stood, hesitating. Through the roar of the rain came the snick of wood. “Come on,” Mark said, and threw open the gate of the fenced backyard next door.
The man-shape was clambering over the far side of the fence. Mark and Hilary doubled back, colliding with each other, and raced around the building and through the hanging branches of a willow. Wet leaves slapped Hilary’s face, and she sputtered and blinked.
Faint beyond the sound of the rain came the sudden growl of an engine. Red tailights flared and retreated into the downpour. Mark and Hilary stood sodden on the sidewalk, gasping for air. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“My hero,” she said with a shaky laugh. Suddenly her knees gave way. Mark’s arm around her waist buoyed her back through her doorway.
“No,” he said. “You had him on the run before I ever got here.” For a long moment they stood tightly embraced, clothes squishing, dripping on the tile of the entryway. Outside the rain slackened. A breath of fresh, cold air blew in the open door. Hilary started to shiver. Odd, how the rain on her face tasted of salt. The knitting needles seemed embedded in her hands. “Who was it?” Mark asked. “Could you tell?”
The images coalesced in her mind, the voice, the metal against her back, the big hands. “Yeah,” she managed to say between her chattering teeth, “I know who it was. Travis Ward.”
“The hell it was.” Mark, his arm securely around Hilary’s shoulders, walked into the kitchen and dialed police headquarters.
Chapter Twenty-One
Hilary’s hand was small but strong, its delicacy intriguingly deceptive. Mark folded his fingers over hers and wedged their joined hands between his denim-clad thigh and her cotton skirt. The orange plastic chairs in which they sat were as uncomfortable as they were ugly, but no one expected the waiting room of a police station to look like the atrium of the Lloyd.
“You’re sure you’re all right?” he asked.
“You’ve asked me that twenty times since last night. I’m all right. Really.” Hilary had a way of dropping her eyes and looking up through her lashes; the effect was not shyness but reserved caution, less charm than a warning to back off.
She’d lain shivering in Mark’s arms for a long time after the police had come and gone, until at last her skin had warmed against his and she’d muttered, “I showed him, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did,” Mark had returned. “No one’s ever going to hurt you again, Hilary.”
She’d slept then, trustingly, in his arms. He’d lain awake for a long time, listening to the night noises of traffic and r
ain, watching her shadowed smile.
No one would ever hurt her again, not if he had anything to say in the matter. He shifted in the chair, every muscle in his body clenched; he wanted to hit and smash and hurt. But Travis Ward was in police custody, safe from Mark’s inchoate visions of revenge, but not, he devoutly hoped, from the slowly grinding gears of legal vengeance. He glanced at his watch. Eleven o’clock. Jenny was waiting for him to help lift the burned beam. “Hurry up, Zapata,” he said under his breath. “You called us.”
Across the room an elderly woman read a Dallas Morning News, the front page of which featured an article on the latest developments in the Osborne murder case. Hilary said, “The reporters were sure out there fast after you found the bones.”
“Most of the media keep a stringer here at police headquarters, or else listen in to the police radio.”
“The Coburgs were out there awfully fast, too.”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised if they also have a stringer. They seem to have a hook into everyone in town.”
“Maybe that’s why the police missed the body in the garage in 1975—the Coburgs made a big donation to some police benevolent fund and had the bulldozers standing by. After all, no one was reported missing.”
“We found the space heater next to the door,” Mark replied. “The body’s in the back, hidden behind some workbenches—which, ironically, protected it from the collapse of the ceiling. The Coburgs didn’t bribe their way out of Felicia’s murder—Arthur did stand trial. That was the main event, after all, not the fire.”
Hilary crossed her legs and knotted her nylon-clad ankles beneath her chair. “And now? I know someone listening in the house overheard us talking about the artifacts, but we also told Yeager and Zapata….” She stopped, glancing toward a door marked “Homicide”.
Mark knew paranoia, chapter and verse. “I wondered about them, too. But the Coburgs would’ve had to get Yeager and Zapata onto the take pretty fast—I can’t see them keeping all the homicide detectives on their payroll, just in case. And I can’t see a couple of detectives condoning murder, Nathan’s or ours. Of course, I do have to wonder just what they were talking about at Ida’s restaurant the other night.”
“I bet,” said Hilary, “he wants a relationship, but she’s afraid a relationship will hurt her career.”
“What were you doing, reading lips?”
“No, just body language. And Zapata’s hair was loose, down her back….” She laughed. “Guess I’m making a deductive leap, like Nathan used to do.”
The door opened. Frank Yeager beckoned. Mark and Hilary followed him down a hallway and into a small windowless room furnished with a coffee-stained table and several more plastic chairs. The fluorescent light flickered faintly and emitted a whine almost too high to hear. Despite a chill draft from a ceiling vent, the air stank of stale cigarette smoke and fast food. No wonder Zapata was usually in such a foul mood, Mark thought.
The woman herself wheeled a television set and VCR into the room. “You’re in luck. You don’t have to identify Ward. He confessed.”
“To the murder?” Hilary asked, her eyes huge.
Zapata chunked the plug into the wall as though whacking Travis with a nightstick. “No, more’s the pity. To assaulting you last night. We’re also going to charge him with trying to asphyxiate you both: we found a little carved Dia de los Muertos bone in his car. Must’ve stuck to his shoe after he tripped over the cat and knocked the sculpture off the mantel. Unfortunately we can’t charge him with simply planning to assault Jenny.”
Mark held a chair for Hilary. She sat down without looking around, her attention fixed on Zapata.
“A neighbor of the Hernandezes,” the detective went on, “saw a maroon BMW taking off in a hurry late Thursday night.”
“We got a search warrant for the Wards’ house,” Yeager said. “Lots of guns and knives, but not the murder weapon.”
Mark sat down beside Hilary. Zapata inserted a tape into the VCR and sat at the head of the table. She shot Mark and Hilary a look like polished jet. “We’re checking Ward’s alibi again. We are working on this case.”
“I realize what pressure you’ve been under,” Mark said politely.
Zapata jabbed at the VCR remote control. The screen lit with static, which resolved itself into a picture. Mark expected to see the cutting horse contest, the clumsy Travis transformed into a centaur. What he saw was a washed-out video of Travis at this very table, his face puffy, his unshaven jaw set in Neanderthal stubbornness. His fingers were spread on the tabletop in a gesture of appeal at odds with his pugnacious expression. Beside him, almost out of the frame, was a suit-jacketed arm, shirt cuff gleaming. “One of the Coburgs’ pet lawyers showed up,” Zapata explained, “before Travis had so much as given us his name.”
Yeager’s voice came from the speaker. “Where did you get those scratches on your face?”
“My wife. Bitch came at me with those damn fingernails of hers.”
“Why?”
“I told her what I thought of her morals.”
This from a man, Mark thought, who frequented topless bars and manhandled women in their own living rooms.
Zapata’s voice asked, “And those bruises on your arms and chest?”
“Horse bucked me off. Got all stove up.”
“How about the splinters in your hands?”
Travis’s hands contracted to fists. “Fence rail.”
“I’ll spare you the picking and grinning. Here.” Zapata wielded the remote wand. The picture skewed. Travis looked up and down again jerkily, gesturing like a marionette.
The picture steadied. Zapata’s voice said, with more than a little relish, “Those bruises were made by knitting needles. The splinters match the wood in the fence next door to Miss Chase’s condo. She recognized your voice. And she felt this.” Yeager’s hand held up a plastic bag that contained a belt with a huge sculpted buckle. Mark didn’t have to see it clearly to recognize it. “You attacked her,” Zapata persisted. “Why?”
“You don’t have to answer that,” said the lawyer’s voice.
But Travis had already deflated. “I didn’t attack her. I just wanted to cuddle her a little bit. No harm in that. A man who doesn’t get any loving at home has to go somewheres else, doesn’t he? And Hilary was giving me the eye—those little egghead gals really go for us outdoor types.”
“You meant to rape her?” Yeager demanded.
Mark felt Hilary flinch. He darted the real-time Yeager’s unconcerned profile a resentful glare and took Hilary’s hand beneath the table.
Travis offered Yeager a tentative just-between-us-guys grin. “You know what they say about rape—if it’s inevitable, just lie back and enjoy it.”
Zapata lunged into the video image, leaning into Travis’s face. Her voice was low and harsh. “And I suppose if you were being castrated you’d lie back and enjoy it?”
Travis stared slack-jawed at her. The lawyer leaned over and whispered something into his ear. Travis wilted even farther, his features melting like warm paraffin. “No, I was just going to scare her, so she’d leave town.”
Zapata’s image retreated from the picture, guided by Yeager’s restraining hand. The real-time Zapata sat stiffly at the head of the table. “I’m not so sure that wasn’t entrapment, Frank. But we got it by the lawyer.”
Hilary’s hand was cold in Mark’s. “I wasn’t leading him on.”
“Of course you weren’t,” Zapata assured her. “Travis was trying to hide his real reason for attacking you behind what he thought was a passable excuse. Of course, he might actually believe some of the Tarzan crap—it’s genetic….” Her voice trailed away as both Yeager and Mark glanced indignantly at her.
“How,” asked Yeager’s recorded voice, “did you get into the condo?”
“Ward and Meyer own the condo management company,” Travis replied. “I got a passkey from the secretary, told her the owners wanted me to check the place while they were gone. Then all
I had to do was set off an alarm two blocks over to distract the cop. Pretty smooth, huh?”
No one applauded. “Why did you want to scare Hilary away?” Zapata’s voice asked.
“Sharon was scared to death of her. Kept saying that if only Hilary would go away, everything would be all right. I thought if I could get Hilary out of the picture, then I could get Sharon away, too, away from that mother and that brother of hers, and that foreigner—Jeez, he really riles me, always looking at you as if he could see holes in your underwear.”
Travis had that much right, Mark thought.
Zapata’s recorded voice asked, “No one told you to scare Hilary away?”
“Huh?” Travis returned.
Yeager leaned across the table into the picture, holding a plastic bag containing the tiny white sculpted bone. “You may have got the scratches on your face from your wife, or you may have got them from a cat. Where were you last Thursday night?”
“Huh?” Travis’s face creased either with bewilderment or an excellent facsimile of it. “Thursday? I was home with Sharon. What’s that?”
“Your car was seen on Moss Street just about the time someone tried to asphyxiate Hilary and Mark Owen. The bone is from the kitchen at Osborne, where someone presumably was going to attack Jenny Galliard.”
“Jenny? So the old man had some English cookie on the side. What does that have to do with the price of chicken feed….” Travis’s eyes crossed as the significance of the detectives’ questions finally percolated through his brain. “Hey, okay, so I tried to scare Hilary. But I sure as hell didn’t try to kill her and Mark! And I didn’t lay a finger on Sikora!”
The lawyer said, “Mr. Ward, Mrs. Coburg doesn’t want you to say anything that could be misconstrued.”
Travis slammed his fists onto the table and stated, very plainly and very carefully, just what the lawyer could do to Mrs. Coburg. “I didn’t kill Sikora,” he went on. “Neither did Sharon.”
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