by Layton Green
He looked the detective over again, with new eyes, and then grunted. Before he could respond, Claire shuffled into view behind him, wearing lavender sweats and a Creekville Football hoodie. The cuffs were rolled so the sleeves would fit her.
Brett turned, laying his hands on her shoulders as she approached. “You don’t have to talk to him right now, baby. You have rights.”
She stepped away from him and hugged her arms across her chest. “You think I care about rights?” She started to break down but composed herself with a shudder. Come in, Joe. I’ll do everything I can to help.”
“I guess I’ll go to the store,” her boyfriend called out, as Preach stepped past him. “Unless you need me ?”
She waved him off.
“You still need almond milk?”
Her face twisted, furious at the innocent tone, the intrusion of daily routine on her grief. “Just go.”
Preach watched him walk toward a Mercedes S-Class and beep the lock. After Claire closed the front door, Preach asked, “What’s he do?” “He has an Internet marketing company. Vertical Integration or something.” A hiccup of a laugh slipped through the sadness. “To be honest, I don’t really know. Every time he tries to tell me, my eyes glaze over.”
“So he’s probably got a lot of money.”
She gave a sad smile and looked away. Preach heard the unspoken story, saw the quick clench of her jaw.
The interior was a modern open floor plan that comprised most of the first floor. Moving as if dazed, she led him to a sectional sofa across from a stacked stone fireplace. Preach shrugged out of his coat and sat a few feet away. Before he started the interview, he leaned in and took her hand. “I can only imagine how hard this is. If you need to stop, let me know.”
“I want to help.”
He gave a slow nod. “Okay.”
“Thank you for coming. I know it didn’t have to be you.”
“It kind of did. But you’re welcome.”
She gave a little shiver, still huddled within the protective embrace of her own arms. “What do you need?”
“I’ll need to see David’s room, but why don’t you take me through the day he disappeared?”
Her arms uncrossed and moved to her lap, her thumbs rubbing against each other as if she couldn’t sit still. “It was a day like any other. A school day. I made him eggs and toast and bacon . . . I still make him breakfast . . . and he left for school.”
“Is the old Wrangler outside his ?”
“It breaks down all the time, but he loves it.” Her face crumpled as she looked down. “Loved.”
“Who brought it back?”
Her eyes lifted. “Sorry?”
“I assumed . . . go ahead and finish, please.”
“After he left, I went to work, as I always do. I’ve been at the boutique for a few years now. I get home at five and make dinner. He got home from practice late, around six-thirty. He seemed a little preoccupied and wouldn’t talk about his day.”
“Was that strange ? Was he open with you?”
“He used to be, until he started high school. Except for my mom, we’re all the family each other has. My dad is dead, and David’s father’s parents are in a nursing home in Pennsylvania.”
“Have you contacted his father ?”
“Brett sent him a text this morning.”
Preach’s eyebrows lifted.
“We don’t talk,” she said.
“What about him and David?”
“Barely. I don’t really know anymore.”
She didn’t explain further, and Preach made a mental note. “Does he live close?”
“Richmond.”
The absence of emotion on her face, as if all feeling had long ago been stripped away, spoke louder than words.
“Do you think something happened at school ? Maybe at practice ?”
“I don’t know. He’d been acting weird all week.”
“In what way?”
“Just . . . preoccupied. But he was a teenager, you know? That’s more usual than not.”
“Was he a well-adjusted kid in general?”
“As well adjusted as a kid can be whose father abandoned him.”
She said it deadpan, with as little emotion as her earlier mention of her son’s father.
“No recent fights at school?” he asked.
Her hands moved to cup the back of her neck, gently massaging. “He was such a good boy, Joe. Never in trouble. Good grades. Lots of friends.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “He had his whole life ahead of him. He was so young. My baby . . .”
She began to cry, shielding her brow with her hand. When she didn’t stop, he reached for her hand and gently squeezed it. In return, she dug her nails into his palm with the strength of the bereaved.
After letting her hand slide away, she blew her nose and composed herself.
“I can come back later,” he said.
“No. We do this now.”
His eyes flicked to the fireplace, taking in the photos strung along the mantle. David throwing a football, David at the prom with a tall blond girl, David and Claire posing on a mountaintop, David in the back of a boat with some friends. He was a strikingly handsome kid, with a fine-boned face and large expressive eyes. Gentler, more refined than Preach at that age. There was also a depth in David’s eyes, a brooding self-awareness that Preach knew had never been present in his own. At least not until his senior year when he had watched his cousin Ricky suffer a horrible death, and Preach’s self-awareness had come swooping in like a vicious homing pigeon.
But enough of all that. “So he came home, was acting a little off, and you sat down to dinner ?”
“Fried chicken and waffles with chocolate sauce.” She flashed a wan smile. “His favorite.”
“Homework after dinner?”
“We didn’t finish until eight or so. He disappeared to his room for a while, maybe for homework, probably for Snapchat, and by the time I washed up and saw him again it was after nine. We—” She paused and looked out the window to her left, at the pine cone-strewn yard behind the house that sloped down to a tract of woods. “We had an argument.”
“About school?”
“About Brett.”
She stood and walked to a cabinet in the kitchen. After sloshing Jack Daniels into a rocks glass, she took a long drink, her face wrinkling in displeasure. “I assume you don’t want one ?”
“No.”
She returned to the sofa and stared into the glass. As the silence lengthened, despite the professional nature of his visit and the terrible circumstances behind it, he caught himself looking at the curve of her neck, and a jolt of attraction coursed through him. As beautiful as Claire still was, it was not so much a physical longing for the grieving, disheveled woman on the sofa, but rather a ghost of unrequited lust rattling its chains, the return of a supernatural force that had once consumed him.
He forced the intrusion away, thinking of Ari, berating himself for the weak moment.
“David didn’t approve of Brett,” she said finally. “He didn’t think he was good for me.”
He left the unspoken question hanging in the air. “How bad was their relationship ?”
“It wasn’t physical, if that’s what you mean. I doubt Brett could have laid a hand on David even if he’d wanted to. David was a strong kid.”
Preach wasn’t so sure about that. David may have been an athlete in the prime of his life, but he was still a kid. Adults had a different kind of strength, and a different outlook on violence. Grown men fought for keeps.
But he could talk about that with Brett.
“Let’s keep going. You argued. What happened next?”
She resumed staring into the glass, her head sinking lower, as if she hadn’t the strength to hold it up. “He ran out of the house and got in his Jeep. I heard him leave, and then—” she sobbed once, “that was the last time I saw my son alive.”
After giving her another moment, he said, “How did the Jeep ge
t back here ?” When she looked at him in confusion, he continued, “Did you find it somewhere ? Or did someone report it ?”
“Oh. No. It was here when I woke up the next morning.”
“You didn’t hear him come in the night before ?”
“I was really upset about the argument. I . . . took some pills.” “What kind?”
She waved a hand. “Just something to help me sleep. Does it matter?”
“It might,” he said, then caught himself when she flinched. He wondered if he was overcompensating for his earlier moment of weakness. “If you were too far gone to hear a struggle.”
“You mean you think someone might have come to the house ?”
“I don’t know what I think.”
Her face fell. “It was just an Ambien. God, Joe, if I missed something that night—”
“Don’t think like that. You didn’t know.” She put her head in her hands and began to softly weep again. He yearned to leave this woman to her grief, but there was one more question he had to ask. He knew how the question would affect her, and it seemed as if he had to rip it out of his own gut. This wasn’t a hardened criminal in Atlanta or Charlotte, this was Claire Lourdis, grieving mother, lifelong citizen of Creekville, and denizen of his own past.
“Claire, do you own a gun?”
Her head slowly rose, and he winced at both the accusation and the suffering in her eyes. “I have a Ruger. It has a pink handle.”
“It’s called a grip,” he said, with a faint smile. “What’s the caliber?” “I have no idea.”
He could tell by the curtness of her answers what she thought of his line of questioning. He didn’t want to upset her by pressing further, and it would be easy for forensics to verify the type of gun that was used.
“Joe” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t waste your time.”
“It’s a standard question. I’m sorry I had to ask. Do you have David’s phone?”
“No. It wasn’t . . .” She couldn’t finish.
“We didn’t find it either. Can you give me his number? I’ll request the phone records.”
After she wrote the number down, he pushed to his feet. “Could I see his room, please?”
She pointed. “Up the stairs and to the left. I can’t . . . I’ll just stay here.”
“Of course.”
As he made his way upstairs, he noticed expensive furniture and elegant touches throughout, signs of careful selection at high-end department stores. Shiny pottery displayed on a mantle, a trio of diamond-shaped mirrors in the hallway. There was also a series of framed watercolors, impressionistic stick figures dancing in the moonlight that Preach suspected might be Claire’s. In high school she had been very artsy, a talented painter and singer as well as an aspiring actress. Her taste for clothes and jewelry was always impeccable, though she never had any money. Like most everyone else in the Creekville public school system, Claire’s family had gotten by just fine, but they were solidly middle class. Her mother had worked as a bank teller, and he couldn’t recall what her father had done. But Claire had never needed money to stand out. A born fashionista, she had bargain hunted and shopped at thrift stores and, if he remembered correctly from their few conversations, designed some of her own clothes.
In David’s room, a queen bed faced a television mounted on the wall. There was a set of dumbbells and dirty football pads in the corner, and a desk scattered with schoolbooks, notepads, pens, a photo of Claire, and one of David with his father. Stacked on the desk chair were a few college information packets: Davidson, Emory, Furman, and NYU. Atop a nightstand, he saw a leather cross necklace, three books, a football-shaped alarm clock, a recent copy of Men’s Health, and an iPhone stand with speakers.
Preach read the book titles. A Tale of Two Cities he guessed was a school read. The other two were American Gods by Neil Gaiman and a nonfiction book titled Why Does the World Exist?
When he returned to the living room, he asked, “David didn’t have a laptop ?”
“We shared one, but he rarely used it. Kids are always on their phones these days.”
“Was he religious?”
“You saw the necklace ?”
“And the books.”
“He picked the necklace up on a spring break trip to Charleston. He didn’t go to church or anything, though since he was young”—she gave a smile so wistful Preach felt a lurch in his stomach—”he always wanted to know where we came from and what happened after death. And now . . .”
As her eyes teared up again, he gave her his card. He had intruded enough for the day. “If you think of anything else,” he said quietly, “anything at all, let me know. The smallest detail might matter.”
She stood to see him out. When they reached the door, she teetered on her feet, as if she had lost her balance. He put a hand on her shoulder to steady her, and she gripped it. “It doesn’t feel real, Joe,” she whispered. “I don’t know what I could have done—”
“Claire!” he said sharply. “You can’t let yourself go there.”
“Go where? Where is there left to go?” She snarled and stepped closer. “Somebody murdered my baby boy. Shot him and left him lying in the bottom of a goddamned swamp.” She jabbed him hard in the chest. “You find out who did this, you understand? Find him and hide him somewhere, then take me to him. I’ll do the rest of your job for you.”
As he backed through the door, the intensity of her stare burned into him as if cauterizing a wound. “I’ll do everything I can,” he said. “You have my word.”
“You find him” she said, right before he turned and walked away. “You find him.”
On his way out, Preach searched David’s Jeep and found nothing of interest. A few smelly clothes on the back seat, empty Gatorade bottles, candy wrappers, a pair of movie ticket stubs, and an iPhone charger. He called a tow to impound the vehicle so forensics could search for hair and other fibers.
As Preach was pulling away from Claire’s house, he saw Brett’s black Mercedes with custom rims turn onto her street. Preach reversed, lowered the window, and pulled alongside the sedan. “Can I talk to you at home later ?”
Brett frowned. “I guess. Why?”
“Just a chat.”
“About what?”
Preach didn’t bother with a reply. “What’s your address?”
He hesitated. “212 Baddington Street. Chapel Hill.”
“Six o’clock sound okay?”
“If we need to talk,” Brett said, “why don’t we do it here ? I’m free for a few minutes.”
“I think Claire could use a break.”
“We can go in the garage, light a stogie—”
“Brett.” Preach stared at him until the other man glanced away. When Brett turned back, his eyes were more wary. “Sure. I get it. I eat early, so maybe we could push—”
“I’ll see you at six.”
5
Ever since the night in the woods, Blue had known someone would come.
The reality was even worse than she had imagined. The gangbanger going door to door in the trailer park was a certified killer, a twentysomething Latino who everyone called Cobra. His quick knife strikes had earned him the nickname, along with the hooded black jacket he favored. Blue had never crossed paths with him, but she knew him on sight. His gang, Los Viburos, controlled the drugs that ran like diarrhea through the trailer park, and Cobra was their top enforcer. Whenever he rumbled in on his Honda CBR Interceptor, kicking up clouds of dust, the busy trailer park suddenly resembled a desert in the heat of the afternoon.
She peered through the plastic blinds in her bedroom. Sunlight glinted off the discarded toys and bicycles in the weed-filled yard of the trailer across the gravel drive. To her left, three doors down, Cobra was holding something in his open palm and asking questions about it. No doubt about it: the murderer who had chased her through the woods had found the items from the bag she had dropped. Maybe Cobra himself had been in the woods, maybe not. Didn’t matter. He was here now,
and he was looking for the owner.
Looking for her.
When she had watched the film footage she had shot a few nights ago, all she had seen was the flash of a gunshot and then a swish of brown, which she assumed was a burlap sack used to drag the body away. She hadn’t seen the murderer or the victim, though whoever had committed the crime didn’t know that and would never believe her.
Over the last few days, she had run through the missing contents of her bag a million times in her head. Food stamps. Lipstick she never used. A stolen cigarette lighter. Her father’s Ghostbusters keychain. A flyer for the end-of-semester variety show at the high school.
No doubt the food stamps, recovered so close to the trailer park, had led Cobra here. The fancy silver cigarette lighter might have thrown him off for a day or two, or maybe he had assumed it was stolen. She didn’t know why he had waited so long to come.
The crazy part was the victim.
David Stratton, the Morning Star, shot dead in the swamp behind Barker’s Mill.
No way there were two murders in Creekville that close in time. David was the victim, and someone had dumped his body in the swamp.
And she had heard the whole thing.
It didn’t seem real. Popular kids didn’t get killed in the woods, and contract killers didn’t hunt down witnesses in Creekville. Had David been mixed up in the drug scene ? It seemed to be the only explanation. She had heard nothing like that at school, though she was hardly part of his circle. Still, gossip from the popular kids usually trickled down. She knew Elliot Jacobson and Fisher Star, two of his closest friends, used pot and coke and pharmies.
Or maybe David was a dealer. Maybe that was how his mom afforded that house between boyfriends. Maybe the Morning Star had slung some rock on the side and skimmed off the top, and Javier Ramirez, the head of Los Viburos, had signed his death warrant.
She watched Cobra finish another home visit and walk through the yard to the house next door to Blue’s, his boots squashing the tiny pyramids the fire ants made in the dirt.
As she let the shutters close, her hands trembled like an alcoholic’s. If she didn’t calm down, Cobra would know she was hiding something. For once, she wished her mother was at home and didn’t work two jobs and sleep at her boyfriend’s house most nights.