by Linda Ladd
“Hi, Ben. I’m doing fine. Thanks for asking,” Claire said in return, which seemed to put him into a quick, relieved relaxation mode around the office’s most disconcerting amnesiac detective.
Claire moved on quickly. “So, Ben, I understand that you took the call when Ms. Long went missing.”
“Yes, ma’am. I immediately drove to this location, checked the doors and windows, found the front door key where it was hidden under that flowerpot over there, and then took a quick look around inside. Nothing appeared unusual, nothing out of place that I could tell, and no sign of foul play.”
“Your report indicated that her office called and reported that she wasn’t answering her phone and hadn’t checked in at work. The sheriff put out a BOLO on her, but didn’t get any credible responses. Is that correct?”
“Yes, ma’am, exactly.”
Bud said, “Who was the last person to see her?”
“My understanding is that she last saw her real estate partner the afternoon she disappeared. The partner told me that Miriam Long was getting ready to go abroad for several weeks, so she didn’t miss her for quite some time.”
“So you’ve interviewed the partner?” Claire asked.
“Yeah. Name’s Kay Kramer. Her statement says this behavior is not like Miriam Long at all. That she always calls in, but she was excited about going to Italy so Kay thought she forgot. Kramer didn’t think anything was wrong until Long’s husband called and said he couldn’t get in touch with her.”
“We’ll go downtown and reinterview Kay Kramer. The description you have on the BOLO is a pretty close match to our homicide victim. We need fingerprint analysis to ID the body before we go see Ms. Kramer.”
“Yeah, I heard the perp did a real job on her face.”
Claire nodded, remembering and wishing she didn’t. She couldn’t recall much, true, but that poor woman’s face was forever imprinted on her mind.
“We need to gather some items inside the house for fingerprinting and DNA analysis.”
“Okay. I didn’t touch anything when I went inside. Just the front doorknob and a couple of closet doors. The place is small.”
They snapped on white latex gloves and stretched paper footies over their shoes while Welch opened the screen and unlocked the front door. He stood back and remained on the porch while they proceeded into the house. Inside, it was very cool, frigid even. Felt nice after standing outside in the morning’s sweltering heat. She was finding that Lake of the Ozarks did not have the temperate climate of southern California. But more important, Miriam had left her air conditioner on full blast. Nobody would do that right before a transcontinental flight and lengthy holiday. No way did this look like a house that a professional woman would leave behind when going away.
The living room was decorated professionally, very neat and orderly, but in a homey, comfortable way. The color scheme was muted blues and beiges and dark browns. The accent color of burnt orange made its appearance in the sofa pillows and a large picture depicting a pitcher full of sunflowers and daisies that hung over the mantel on a dated redbrick fireplace with black soot marks on the bricks.
There were enough masculine touches to indicate a man lived there, too, meaning the worn brown leather recliner and locked mahogany gun case on the wall against the kitchen. Claire walked over and inspected several long hunting rifles and the Remington shotgun that were displayed behind the glass panes. Miriam could be a gun enthusiast, of course. Lots of women were, including Claire, but somehow she doubted it. Obviously, they belonged to Miriam’s husband.
“Where is Long’s husband? Didn’t Welch say the partner said he couldn’t get in touch with his wife?”
Bud said, “I think he’s deployed in the Gulf.”
“Oh, God, I hope our victim isn’t this woman.”
“I think she is.” Bud was not optimistic. It was just too much of a coincidence. Chances were that the victim and missing person were indeed one and the same.
When they pushed through the swinging door that led to a separate kitchen, they found a Bose radio playing very softly on the kitchen counter. It was tuned to a country station. The kitchen was old, but looked recently updated with new stainless-steel appliances, a brown granite countertop, and white cabinets. There was a dark mahogany table built up taller than usual, with four high bar stools around it. The window over the sink was cracked about an inch to let in fresh air. This woman had been planning to come back before she left the country, no doubt about it.
“Oh, man, that’s ‘Kissed You Tonight’ by Gloriana. Have you seen their video, Claire? I’m telling you, man alive, that girl who sings with them is smokin’.”
“Nope. This amnesia thing crimps my video watching of late. But I did remember Picasso the other day.” Bud didn’t reply, too busy singing along and thinking about the man alive, smokin’ hot singer, no doubt. Even after this short time, she’d figured out that Bud Davis liked women big-time and they more than liked him back. He had the charm and looks, to be sure. He’d told her they hadn’t been an item, and she believed him. Office romances were never a good idea, especially in police departments.
After they finished a tandem and thorough search of the living room and kitchen, they moved down a short hallway to an open bedroom door. Inside, things were fairly messy, more so than anywhere else in Miriam Long’s house. It was painted a colonial blue, and Miriam Long had a white bedspread on a mahogany sleigh bed with lots of matching white pillows. The one centered in the middle had a large blue “L” on it. There was a matching dresser with little drawers under the mirror.
A blue-and-white porcelain lamp sat on one side, switched off. A large crystal frame sat on the other side, and the photograph inside depicted a nice-looking man standing in front of a couple of palm trees and a large white outdoor fountain. He was tall and tough looking and wearing desert camouflage fatigues.
“She’s married to military, all right, Bud. Take a look at this picture. My bet is Iraq.”
Bud walked over and took it out of her hands. “Poor guy. My gut tells me that he is now a widower and doesn’t even know it.”
Claire put the frame back where she’d found it and focused her attention on a complete set of matching white leather luggage spread out over the bed, all open and unzipped and half packed.
“It’s pretty obvious she wasn’t ready to leave yet.”
Bud glanced at the bed, too. “Well, she went somewhere. I don’t see a purse. A woman doesn’t leave the house without their purse, do they?”
“I don’t know, Bud. I doubt it.” Claire frowned. “I didn’t see one at my house. In fact, I better check and see if I’ve got a driver’s license somewhere. I hadn’t even thought about my having a purse.”
“Sorry, I keep forgetting. It’s probably on the bottom of the Finley River. Don’t worry ’bout the license. I won’t arrest you.” He grinned.
“Thanks a lot. But about that purse, most women I know carry them. I did, too,” she said, after thinking for a moment. “A big brown leather one.” Right now her memories weren’t flashing like film clips; they were more like ingrained thoughts she just dug up from deep inside her brain’s gray matter.
Bud said, “Yet her car’s sitting outside under the carport. She didn’t drive herself away from here.”
“Could be somebody picked her up. Took her someplace for a last-minute bon voyage lunch, something like that.”
“Maybe. Ben Welch canvassed the houses around here on the day she was reported missing. Nobody remembered seeing her that day, but the next-door neighbor said she had a motorboat that’s gone now.”
Claire pulled back the sheer white curtains covering the bedroom window. A little dock lay at the bottom of the flat backyard, one that looked a lot like Claire’s. No boat. “Nothing’s turned up. But I bet she took it out on the lake for some reason.”
Bud stared at her, palms planted on his hips. He’d already taken off his suit coat because of the heat outside and rolled the creased s
leeves of his dress shirt up to his elbows. He still looked nice and unwrinkled and unsweaty. Unlike her. How the hell did he do that? Everybody had to perspire sometimes, didn’t they? He said, “If I was off to Italy, you can bet I wouldn’t be out sightseeing on Lake of the Ozarks before I finished packing my bags.”
“Me, either. Maybe she had a good reason to go off with somebody.”
Inside the missing woman’s daffodil-yellow-and-white-tiled bathroom, Claire found an empty yellow-and-navy plaid cosmetics bag with an “M” and “L” embroidered on the front. All the contents were already emptied onto the white marble double sink. Brushes, mascara, lipstick, Roc night cream, Clinique overnight eye repair, and a small bottle of perfume, Obsession. She could smell the fragrance lingering faintly in the room and somehow remembered it from somewhere, but couldn’t place where. Miriam Long’s toothbrush was still sticking out of a hammered nickel holder. With gloved hands, Claire carefully picked up the toothbrush between thumb and forefinger and slipped it into a plastic evidence bag. She did the same thing with the hairbrush and lipstick. All three should have Miriam’s fingerprints and her DNA on them. She gathered up the evidence and carried the bags out of the bathroom.
Bud was standing at the kitchen counter, bagging a laptop computer in a large brown paper evidence bag. “This has gotta have her fingerprints on it. Maybe even the murderer’s, if she is our victim. And God, I hope she’s not.”
“It’s also got her e-mails, I bet. That might give us a clue as to who wanted her dead. Maybe she had a boyfriend, too. A jealous one.”
They poked around some more. In the bedside table, Claire found a whole pack of photos lying loose in the drawer. Most all of them portrayed the same man that was in the large crystal frame, but this time he always had his arms around a woman who she assumed was their missing person. Miriam Long had long dark red hair, just like the woman at the duck blind. Claire bagged all of them. What a shame. Miriam looked to be around twenty-six or twenty-seven, a really pretty girl. Apparently doing fairly well in real estate, considering the new model black Cadillac out in the driveway. She was hugging an older woman in one of the photos. Who? Her mother, probably. Or her sister?
Claire stood there, staring at the picture and wondering a moment about her own mother, her father, her life, if she’d ever remember her family. She did remember those foster parents that she’d mentioned to Black, but not her real parents. Why would that happen? Maybe she didn’t have any kin. None of them had come to see her when she was in the coma, or if they had, nobody had thought to mention it. Then she shut down those maudlin thoughts. Black said she would remember things the way she was supposed to, and if she didn’t, he’d tell her about the blanks in her childhood and adolescence. She could wait it out. Meanwhile, she’d just do her job as well as she could and try not to think about her past. Let go of the stress of wracking her overwrought brain night and day. Relax. Get mellow. Yeah, sure. She didn’t think so.
Thirty minutes later, they locked up the house and took the items they’d collected down to the criminalists at the Medical Examiner’s office. Inside that cool and silent building, Claire’s old/new friends, Nancy and Buck, were working on the victim’s body, wearing full protective gear and breathing masks. Bud and Claire donned theirs at once. Buck had removed and bagged the woman’s torn and bloody clothing, swept her body for evidence, and then washed her flesh clean. Claire wasn’t hoping for much trace evidence left on the abused corpse. This woman had been in the summer sun for days and was in full decomposition. She just hoped to God they could match the prints and get a positive ID so next of kin could be notified. Claire’s gut already told her, though, that the body in front of them indeed belonged to Miriam Long.
“You got that missing woman’s prints for me?” Shaggy Becker asked them, rushing in through the swinging door that led out to the hallway. “I already got a scan of the deceased’s prints. Hey, you ’member me, yet, Claire?”
“Yes, about the prints. No, about you. But that’s okay, I like you already, anyway. I don’t need to remember anything else.”
“Cool. You always said I was awesome. Which is true. I’m all fun and games. You used to like comin’ over and watchin’ Bruce Willis flicks with me. Wanna do that sometime?”
“Sure. I remember liking him, too. Die Hard, right?”
“Well, you still got the important things goin’ on up there.” He tapped his forefinger to the fuzzy dreadlocks at his temple. Claire handed over the evidence bags, and he took off with them toward his own lab next door. Apparently, he did everything at a run. “Be back in a sec,” he yelled over his shoulder.
Through a glass wall separating the cold autopsy room from his lab, Claire watched him sit down in front of a laptop, with all sorts of computer equipment, complicated-looking instruments,TV screens, and lots of other criminalist goodies lining the counters and walls. He had to be good, with all that apparatus.
Looking back down at the victim, she wondered how anyone could hack, or pummel another human being in the face like that. The victim must have been terrified when she realized what was about to happen, if she’d been conscious and aware. Buckeye could tell them how she died soon enough.
Buckeye was staring at the picture of Miriam Long that they’d brought in. “She was a pretty lady. Hope this isn’t her. Too bad, this poor girl had to die at the hands of some deranged murderer. And that’s what he has to be.”
Bud said, “All we need is another psycho running around the lake killin’ people. When’s it gonna stop?”
Both men looked at her, then at each other, as if they’d let something awful slip and felt terrible about it. People seemed to be doing a lot of that lately. Claire said, “Well, don’t look at me. I didn’t do it. I was in a coma.”
Both men appeared startled, but then they laughed. The tension in the room went away, and she stared down at the beaten body lying on the table and shivered. The whole day seemed surreal verging on bizarre. The deep sleep of her coma was looking better all the time. Maybe Black was right. Maybe she’d come back to work too soon.
Nancy Gill hadn’t said much, but she put her hand on Claire’s arm. “You know what, Claire? You oughta come down to my neck of the woods when Buckeye does his stint down there. You could do the same exchange thing in the detective bureau. Sheriff Friedewald would be happy to get your services for a little while. Russ is great to work for. You’d like him.”
It was funny how the state of Louisiana, and New Orleans in particular, kept coming up. Maybe God was trying to tell her something. “Maybe. We’ll see. I lived down there for a while when I was a kid. Don’t remember a lot about it, though.”
“It’s an interesting place. You’d like it. You can live with me if you do come down. I have plenty of room at my house on the bayou.”
“You live on the bayou?”
“Yeah, in LaFourche Parish.”
“Got it,” Shaggy yelled, bursting through the doors again and heading quickly toward them. “Perfect match. Our victim is Miriam Long. One hundred percent. Without a doubt. You can notify next of kin.”
“We got the impression she’s got a husband overseas, but we don’t know how to contact him. Her partner ought to know. Bud, you ready to go pay a call on Kay Kramer?”
“Yeah, now we’re getting somewhere.”
Yes, they were, but not the place they really wanted to be. In that better world, Miriam Long would not be lying on that cold stainless-steel table beaten to a pulp. She would still have her pretty face intact and would now be in Italy, smiling at her handsome husband and holding his hand.
Jesse’s Girl
Twenty-four days after the accident
The next few weeks felt as if all Jesse’s dreams were coming true. He got to see his Annie nearly every day. She didn’t recognize him, of course; she didn’t recognize anybody. But it still broke his heart not to touch her and smell her and lick her soft skin and tell her how much he loved her. He thought it would be different for the
m, that she would remember him because they were soul mates and always had been. But she didn’t recognize Nicholas Black, either, and that was good. That made Jesse so very happy. She had amnesia, but Monica said it wouldn’t last forever, that it was temporary, and that she would soon come back to reality and recollect everybody and everything that had ever happened to her.
Jesse just hoped that her memory loss lasted long enough for him to put the rest of his plan in action. First and foremost, he had to get rid of Nicholas Black, but he felt anxious, because right now would be the best time to steal Annie away with him. He feared she might still be angry about what he’d done in the past, about crashing them into the river and injuring her, and all that sort of thing. But her anger wouldn’t last long, not really. She had told him before that she loved him. She did love him, and he loved her.
During the last few days, he’d convinced Monica to let him walk Annie’s little poodle. Monica said Annie adored the dog. Monica had been walking him on her breaks, but Jesse took over that job for her and let her sit longer over her lunch while he and Jules Verne, that was the dog’s name, got to know each other. He fed Jules bits of steak and bacon on the sly so the dog would love him. He’d take Jules, too, when he took Annie away. They’d all be happy together then, with Miss Rosie. Everything was working out beautifully, and Monica didn’t have a clue as to who Jesse really was.
One time, he had even passed Nicholas Black in the resort’s busy lobby and had quickly turned his face away for fear Black would recognize him, despite his changed looks. But the big man barely glanced at him. He looked extremely distracted and hurried. If Nicholas Black only knew Jesse was right there in the hotel and getting a paycheck, to boot. Nicholas Black was footing the bill for Jesse to steal Annie away from him. Jesse laughed inside. And now Monica had asked him to take Jules upstairs to Annie because she had to accompany Nicholas Black on his rounds. Oh, God, Annie was awake, and he was going to get to talk to her.