A Twist of the Knife

by Becky Masterman

  So I left as she told me to do, got in the car, and drove blindly north, overwhelmed with Mom-guilt, hating myself for being such an insensitive idiot, because with everything that had gone on I was all out of whatever she needed from me.

  I drove for two hours and found myself nearing Vero Beach. I remembered that time I’d visited Shayna Murry. As long as I was doing some damage, I thought I’d see her again, describe the execution, and watch her face to see what it would tell me. This was something I was good at.

  When I called Cracker’s Café and asked if she’d seen the news lately, Sam said he didn’t know, she still hadn’t come to work.

  “Since when?” I asked.

  “Since before the execution, I guess,” he said. “I don’t know, I lose track.”

  What was she feeling about Creighton’s execution, I wondered. Was she relieved now that the long journey had reached what she thought was its destination? If so, I would give her a little something to worry about. I would tell her Laura Coleman wasn’t stopping her investigation.

  Just like last time, I knocked at her front door, and there was no answer.

  The door was unlocked just like last time.

  I pushed open the door, only this time, instead of finding Shayna working with her blowtorch, oblivious to the rest of the world, I found myself pushing against a stench that pushed back at me.

  Shayna.

  I turned my face from the interior of the studio and took a deeper breath of the fresher air outside. Then I covered my nose and mouth with both hands and ran in. I thought briefly that I should have had a gun in hand, but then I would have to give up one of my hands to hold it. Besides that, no real need to worry about some bad guy being in there. He wouldn’t be able to stand it any better than I could.

  Several steps into the place I tripped over something in my path and fell to my hands and knees, sucking in much more air than I wanted. I went back outside for another breath, then returned, this time noticing that a piece of art, the huge metal medallion that I had seen on the wall the first time I was there, was on the floor.

  I had some fleeting notion of the rest of the room I ran through, dim because of the boarded-up windows, the makeshift gallery with I-don’t-know-whats spread about, works in progress, works mounted on the walls, more rusty metal, some cypress knees. I can’t tell, though, if what I’m remembering was from that day or from the previous visit I’d made to the place.

  No one was there, but I saw a dried brown palm frond pushed across the entrance to a hallway, and I followed that trail. Each breath through my mouth was as small as I could make it because I could even feel the odor in my mouth.

  There were more rooms at the back. Living quarters. Nothing in the tiny corridor of a kitchen, but I knew she was somewhere. I had to breathe again but again tried to keep it to a minimum. As I ran down a short hallway, the smell grew to a truckload of ground round left out long after its use-or-freeze-by date.

  I found what I was looking for in the bedroom. The door was partially closed, and I kicked it open with my foot. Then I saw what I took to be Shayna Murry, long gone. She was crumpled against the wall under where the window was boarded up like in the front. I say “took to be” because she was no longer easily recognizable as the woman I had met.

  * * *

  When Delgado got out of his car I said, “She’s been dead for some time, so if I was you I’d call the ME and both go in once at the same time. The room where I found her had a window unit, but it was off, so the whole place is hot. I’m sorry I must have corrupted the scene some.”

  Delgado stopped to call the ME and then told me to wait where I was and started into the house.

  “She’s in the bedroom down the hall,” I called after him.

  He was able to tolerate it a little better than I could, was in there for several minutes. But he still reeled down the front steps when he returned.

  I said, “I think it’s homicide.”

  “The ME will take a closer look. I didn’t see any gunshot or stab wounds.”

  “There was that metal sculpture on the floor, and the palm frond across the hallway. Looked like a struggle,” I said.

  “Did you see the glass?” Delgado asked.

  “No, I missed that. Shattered?”

  “A plastic glass on its side next to the body. Like she dropped it.”

  “You thinking heart attack?” I asked. Coming this soon after Creighton’s execution, I wondered.

  He shook his head and wiped his sleeve against his forehead, sweatier than the day called for. “Hard to tell. Usually I’d do the initial death scene investigation, but for this I’m going to call in a team. They’ll want impressions of your shoes and prints to exclude you, so stick around, okay?”

  “I didn’t touch anything. Moved the bedroom door a few inches. Oh, I tripped on something that was on the floor.”

  I waited around for the ME to come and examine the scene and the body on-site. Dr. Oliver Brach and I recognized each other from when the bones of the Creighton children were found. He might have been curious about why I was at this scene, too, but his questions were only about my discovery of Shayna Murry. I knew enough about situations like this that, not being the investigator at the scene, not even in active law enforcement, I ghosted it. Just stayed unobtrusive, didn’t offer anything except to answer Brach’s questions.

  Brach and Delgado left me sitting in Delgado’s cruiser with the AC on, smeared a little Mentholatum under their noses, then went in the house together. I was impressed by how much longer they were able to spend inside the house than I did, but then this was their job, so they didn’t have much of a choice. By the time they emerged, both the meat wagon and a forensic van had arrived, the first to take the body away and the second to go over the scene. I gave them my prints and shoe impressions to exclude me as a suspect.

  I submitted to another round of questions, why I was there, what time I had arrived, did I know when anyone had last seen her alive, again did I touch anything, did I walk anywhere but in a straight line to the bedroom. I was so well-behaved they didn’t mind my asking some questions of my own.

  “Could you tell how she died? Strangulation? Blunt trauma? I couldn’t see any blood, not that I spent much time looking.”

  Brach shook his head. “I’ll know better when I have her on the table and cut away her clothing. There’s nothing apparent, but it’s often that way once decomposition sets in.”

  “Holy moly, it was bad in there. How long since death, do you figure?”

  “The more time elapses, the harder it is to say. Could be as little as forty-eight hours.”

  “With that much putrefaction?”

  “In that house, this time of year, you can go from dead to bones in two weeks.”

  During this conversation I had been standing there forcing air out my nose in hard little puffs to get rid of the smell of one hundred and twenty pounds of bad meat. It can get so bad the thought of putting your head under water and sucking it through your nose is actually appealing. Brach noticed and gave me some of his Mentholatum to smear on my upper lip, which helped a little.

  Delgado looked at Brach. “Natural? She’s in some kind of physical distress? That piece of art on the floor in the studio, could have been dropped. She tries to make it back to her room where her cell phone is to call nine-one-one. Goes off balance and pulls the palm frond onto the floor.” You could see on his face that this was playing out in his head, hopefully. I wondered if Delgado was still as much out of his league as he was with the Creighton case. Why did he hesitate to call it homicide?

  “I’d seen that sculpture before, hanging on the wall near her workbench. Now it’s on the floor across the room. It was a defensive maneuver.”

  Delgado gave in. He said to Brach, “We treat it as a homicide until you determine cause of death.”

  Brach nodded. “Can’t rule out sex crime. I’ll do a swab and see if there’s anything that hasn’t been contaminated.”

 
; Delgado nodded, too, which made me forget my intention to remain silent. “You know it’s not a sex crime,” I said to Delgado.

  Brach looked at me with an enhanced interest, while Delgado went poker-faced.

  I said, “Way too coincidental. This is connected.”

  I could tell Delgado knew what I was talking about, but Brach said, “Connected?”

  “To the Marcus Creighton case,” I said to him. “To the bodies of the children you saw. To the execution two days ago.”

  Then they both got cautious. I didn’t think I’d find out any more information until the crime scene techs got finished with the place and Brach did Murry’s autopsy. Delgado agreed to share information he got, and I agreed to let him know if I thought of anything. He seemed very amicable, maybe overly so.

  I could feel the smell of decomposition wafting off my clothes, so I rolled down all the windows of the car when I got in and cranked up the air-conditioning full blast. But before I could be on my way, the old Ford pickup I’d seen outside of Cracker’s Café pulled onto the grass not far from me.

  I recognized Shayna Murry’s brother even without the truck. He left his door open. Shock competing with his forward motion, he stumbled with the gait of a drunk man trying to run. He fell to his knees once on the way to the gurney, pushed up with his hands, and kept on. None of that palpable aggression I’d felt in the restaurant, but a little boy scrambling to his sister before they could put her into the ambulance.

  I turned off the air-conditioning so I could hear better. I also scrunched down in the seat a bit, thinking that if he saw me it could cause trouble, that he might somehow blame me after our meeting in the café, if he remembered it.

  He cried, “Stop!” and everyone did. He swiveled his head around, trying to fix on the best person to tell him that wasn’t his sister. “You didn’t tell me.” He said it as if they had made a mistake in protocol and therefore his sister could be alive.

  “It’s not the kind of information we give over the phone,” Delgado said. “I’m sorry, Erroll.”

  Erroll was shrieking now, raising his fist as if he would pound on the body bag, and then realizing that’s just not what you do. Instead he scrabbled at the zipper before anyone could stop him, and he actually got it halfway down.

  Relief washed through his face and voice when he saw what was once her face. “It’s not her,” he said. “It’s not her.”

  “Aw, Erroll, I’m sorry. It’s her.”

  “She has bags on her hands. Why does she have bags on her hands?” He shrieked the words as if the plastic bags they used to preserve any evidence under her nails was worse than anything. Delgado grabbed him by his wrists and turned the man to himself so Erroll wouldn’t be able to see any more.

  “When was the last time you saw her, Erroll?” asked Delgado, his voice all sympathy and probably sincere. Surely he couldn’t be digging for anything. This was Shayna’s brother.

  “A few days ago, where she works,” he said, turning back and wiping away from the black bag some saliva that had trickled down from his mouth. “What happened to her?”

  Brach stayed suitably quiet and let Delgado answer.

  “We’re not sure,” he said. “Let us take her in and let Dr. Brach here see what’s what, give us a report. I’ll tell you everything we find out. In the meantime, you stay away from the house, okay?”

  Erroll looked closer at the house now, where the techs were following Delgado’s instruction. “You’re putting tape up. It says crime scene on it.”

  Delgado glanced in my direction inadvertently. I decided it was time to go.

  Thirty-three

  I pulled away from the area, parked a ways off, and just sat there, temporarily too stunned to consider my next move. Family was forgotten as Shayna Murry’s corpse set off alarm bells that hadn’t rung since Laura Coleman had been abducted the year before. No one believed me then, and I wondered if this time they would.

  Because it had not ended with Creighton’s execution. Someone was out there, and thirty years of finely tuned intuition told me they weren’t finished.

  The afternoon rain hit. No place does rain like Florida. Even with the windshield wipers going full tilt you couldn’t see out, but contrary to what others might do, that got me moving again. Like I’ve said, every Floridian knew either the downpour would let up by itself in ten minutes, or it wouldn’t be raining at all a block away. Whatever the case, you didn’t just wait. Only tourists waited like depressed ducks.

  I even called Laura while I was driving, having to speak loudly and get her to do the same over the hail-like pounding of the drops on the roof of the car.

  “Shayna Murry’s dead,” I shouted.

  “What?”

  “Shayna Murry’s dead.”

  “I heard you. How did you find out?”

  “I found her dead in her bedroom.” I described the condition of her body. “It’s a homicide.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But I know.”

  I explained how the ME couldn’t see any wounds but it looked like there was a struggle, like she ran into the bedroom to escape and then realized she couldn’t get out that way.

  “What about Delgado?” she asked. “Was that creep at the scene?”

  “Aw, don’t be so judgmental. I called him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “At first he was going along with a sex crime scenario, but I stopped him. You and I know this isn’t random.”

  Rather than respond to that as I expected, cursing Delgado or saying Damn straight it’s not random, she paused, as if she was weighing what to say next. Then she finally asked, “How long was she dead?”

  “Could be as little as forty-eight hours.”

  “That much decomposition?”

  “ME said yeah, this part of the world, this time of year, no AC, you go from dead to bones in two weeks.”

  Just as I knew they would, the clouds started to break and the rain slowed. “Hold on a sec,” I said. Then a minute later, “Gimme a foot-long Veggie Delite,” I said.

  “What?” Laura asked.

  “I’m in a Subway. I have to have something to get the smell out of my nose. Whole wheat, please. No, no cheese. No animal products.” I lowered my voice and turned from the counter. “Hold on a sec, I don’t want to talk any more in here. Extra jalapeños. No guacamole.” I couldn’t take guacamole just now.

  I paid for the sandwich and a bottle of water, tucked them into my tote bag, and walked back out to the car, picking up where we left off. Predictably, the rain had stopped.

  Laura’s voice said, “What were you doing at Shayna Murry’s house?”

  “Long story. But the main reason I’m calling is to tell you this obviously isn’t just a cold case anymore. And I don’t think Shayna Murry is the end of it. You’re going to be needed.”

  I unwrapped the sandwich and bit into it, glad for the cleansing feel and the lack of any meat smell. Veggie Delites had saved my sanity on more than one occasion.

  I swallowed, and suggested to Laura that she do whatever it took to get official again, and expect a call from either Gabriel Delgado or my brother, more likely the former. Laura sounded good with that, and I thought this would get her off the Creighton loop while doing something of benefit to protect live people.

  Then I called Todd.

  “Quinn,” he answered.

  I told him what had happened, filling in anything he might have forgotten re Shayna Murry as witness for the prosecution and how many people might know we’d caught her in a lie. I repeated what I’d said to Delgado and Laura, putting it out there to get everyone thinking. “Delgado seemed resistant, but what do you think of the idea that this isn’t over?”

  Silence for a beat, while both of us counted up the other possible Shayna Murrys, then, “That’s a leap, Brigid.”

  “What can I say, I’m worried. I don’t think it’s isolated. How many people you got down there in your jurisdiction? Tracy Mack? Manny
Gutierrez? The state’s attorney, whatever his name is? What about people who weighed in after the fact? Alison Samuels from the Haven, she went on national television and practically said she wanted Creighton dead. What you gonna do, wait and see?”

  “I can’t just call Delgado out of the blue.”

  “You should at least talk. Find out who’s living where. Your—what about Madeline Stanley. Old friends, right? She can put the bug in his ear that he might even be in danger because he was the detective in the Creighton case. Have her reach out to him.”

  He snarfed. “When did you start saying ‘reach out’?”

  “And I know I’m thinking on my feet, but not bad to have a little FBI backup when you want it, someone who knows everything about the case.”

  “Who, you?”

  “I’m retired. Laura Coleman.”

  “Couldn’t hurt. Have some FBI resources without officially calling them in and letting them run the show. Would you talk to her?”

  “I already did. She’s ready.”

  * * *

  Back at my hotel, having bundled the clothes I had been wearing into a plastic bag and stuffed them into the small trash basket by the desk, I sat in the tub, soaking the remaining odor of the scene out of my skin. Bad as it was, finding Murry, after the shock wore off I started replaying in my head what had happened with my mother that morning. I needed to go back there, to either the hospital or her apartment. I needed to figure out what to say that would return us to usual. So far I couldn’t come up with anything, and that tightened the little knot in my gut.

  Strung out after the day with that combination of physical exhaustion and the mental condition of a just-plucked violin string, with an extra little vibrato running through me I realized I hadn’t called Carlo. I confess, the last thing I wanted to do was talk to another person, even him. That made me feel like a heel. One of the things I discovered in my late-life marriage is that, while the lover is always there, our feelings about them can change from one moment to the next. With more of a sense of duty than love, I threw on fresh jeans and a blouse and FaceTimed him.