A Shattered Lens

by Layton Green

  21

  Preach lost Nate in the woods, and by the time the detective returned to the baseball field, there was no sign of any of the kids. Alana he could track down over the weekend, but he had the feeling Nate would go deeper underground than before.

  Could he have murdered David?

  It was possible, though Preach doubted it. What he did think was that Nate knew more than he was letting on.

  After returning to the car, he filled Ari in on what had happened, and they headed home. Preach was annoyed at himself for letting Nate get the best of him, but he forced himself to shake it off and enjoy the rest of the evening.

  In the morning, he planned to kick the investigation into high gear. Enlist some of the other officers to dig deeper into phone and email records, track down every lead, reinterview as many witnesses as possible.

  There was an invisible thread running through this town that connected to David’s murder; he could feel it.

  When they arrived at his house, Ari poured the bourbon while Preach made a fire on the screened porch.

  She curled into the hammock, and he slid in beside her, breathing in the familiar jasmine of her perfume. In this age of social media and information overload, things for which he had no intrinsic dislike but which in his opinion had far outstripped their purpose, he loved to lounge on the screen porch with Ari while the forest came alive around them, the pure deep black of the night sky replacing blue lights and tiny screens.

  “It was nice to see that part of you” she said, the hammock gently rocking as the bourbon warmed their bellies. “The high school.”

  “It’s a part better seen from afar,” he said. “After a few decades have passed.”

  “At least you had a childhood. I was all over the globe.”

  Ari’s parents, he knew, were teachers at international schools, and she had moved every two years her entire childhood. As she had once put it, her lifestyle was a “social death sentence for a kid.”

  He said, “I had cliques and keg parties; you had culture and travel.” “You had friends and dates; I dressed as a goth and had birthday parties with my parents. Who weren’t very fun and didn’t like my outfits.”

  “Maybe we should agree that we both survived our childhoods in one piece,” he said. “Despite the circumstances.”

  She released his hand and reached up to stroke his cheek, though her gaze was in another place, another time. She had once told him, after drinking too much wine, that her parents had never wanted to have a child. He didn’t know if there was any truth to that, but he knew she had begged them not to move schools, time and again, and they had always put their careers and travel lust first.

  The troubles of the past fell away as they had another drink and began to kiss. When he tried to remove her jacket, they almost fell out of the hammock, and she put a finger on his lips.

  “Not here,” she said. “It’s too cold.”

  He set his drink down and scooped her up. “That’s better,” she purred, as he carried her inside, locked the door behind them, and started toward the loft.

  “The couch,” she said, running her hands under his shirt and along the ridges in his stomach. “The bedroom’s too far.”

  Thrumming with desire and feeling closer to Ari than any woman he had ever known, he set her down on the sofa, and she slipped out of her jacket and sweater. He slid a hand behind her back to undo her bra. “Wait,” she whispered.

  “For what?”

  “Music” she said, with a giggle. “I can’t make love in silence. It makes me laugh.”

  “Makes you laugh?”

  “Have you ever listened to yourself in bed?”

  As he spluttered for a response, she grinned and slid off the couch, then padded to the iPhone dock in the kitchen. After a few moments passed and he didn’t hear any music, he glanced over and found her studying his phone.

  “Is the Internet down?” he asked. “I have a CD player.”

  No answer.

  “Ari?”

  Finally she looked up. “So did you swing by?”

  “Sorry?”

  She walked over to retrieve her shirt from the floor and slipped it back on. “When Claire texted that she needed you. Did you go?”

  He stilled. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Twelve texts in the last three days ?”

  “It’s my job, Ari. I’m working her case.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re working David’s case. You don’t even know that she’s innocent. All of which is beside the point. Did you go to her?”“I swung by her house to check on her, yes. That’s all. She’s emotionally . . .”

  “Vulnerable? I bet she is. God, there are so many things wrong with this I don’t know where to start. So I won’t even try. I’ll just finish it by leaving.” She threw her jacket on and grabbed her shoes by the front door.

  “There’s nothing to explain,” he said, though he winced at the halftruth. He decided, right then and there, not to be a fool and try to pretend nothing had happened. “She’s beautiful, I admit. I had a crush on her once. I still find her attractive, as I’m sure you find many young and handsome lawyers in the courtroom attractive.”

  “Don’t.”

  “But that’s it,” he said. “I don’t want Claire. I want you.”

  “The texts on your phone, hidden from your girlfriend, say otherwise.”

  “I wasn’t hiding them.”

  “You should have.”

  He sighed. “No, I shouldn’t have let it happen in the first place. It’s just that I’ve known her for years and her son was just murdered and

  I . . .”

  “Jesus, Joe, it’s not like I don’t understand that. I’m not the jealous type. A text or an email twice a year is one thing, especially with someone who could never be a threat, but I need you ? And then all those texts ? From someone who looks like her?”

  “Please don’t go,” he said softly, as she opened the door.

  “Do you want someone like her? Older, taller, tanner? You never got over her, did you?”

  “Ari—”

  “I saw the way you looked at her at the funeral. I tried to tell myself I was overreacting, but it was the opposite. Is that why we went to the game tonight? In case she showed up?”

  He shook his head. “Of course not. I’m sorry about the text.”

  I m sorry too.

  He started toward her, but she walked out and slammed the door behind her.

  22

  Trust, Preach knew, is gained over time and lost in an instant.

  And it can take years to claw back.

  The content of his text exchanges with Claire was harmless. Yet sometimes it wasn’t just the content that mattered.

  The conversations had happened, he hadn’t told Ari, and he knew he had hurt her. He felt as low as a slug crawling through the garden mud.

  Too depressed to sleep and not feeling enlightened enough to read, he found himself flipping through TV stations in his loft, then watching a string of movie trailers, dozens of them, snippets of random adrenaline that unfocused his mind. Eventually he put on ESPN so he could lay on his back and stare at the ceiling and listen to mindless voices until he drifted off, jittery at the thought that he might have jeopardized his relationship.

  Hoping for the peace of oblivion, he instead dreamed of an alternate reality where he had moved back to Creekville and started dating Claire instead of Ari. Everything felt so right, so natural. As the dream turned sexual, he woke with a start, the sheets damp with sweat as the memory of Claire’s lean body coursed through him, convinced for a moment it was real.

  With a snarl, he threw off the bedsheets and stomped to the bathroom, splashing cold water on his face until his desire faded. He checked the clock—5:30 a.m.

  Unable to finish sleeping, he made a pot of coffee and sat with his laptop at the kitchen table. He ran through a batch of personal emails he hadn’t checked in a week. In addition to an overdue electric bill, he found a no
tice that he had missed another porch drop for the homeless and would no longer be allowed to participate in the program. Every other Friday, he was supposed to leave canned goods on his front porch for delivery to local families in need.

  Who gets kicked out of a charity program? He couldn’t even get that right.

  Browsing the daily news depressed him even further. Another school shooting. Another few kids found chained in the basement of some psychopathic family member. Another famous sexual predator, another genocide, another group of desperate immigrants dying on a raft while trying to flee their war-torn country.

  As a detective, Preach spent his days wallowing in the muck of humanity. He struggled with how to balance the pain in the world versus his need to come home to a cold beer and unwind, to restore his mental equilibrium.

  What kind of life was spent bobbing in the dark waters of Aleppo or Sandy Hook, or a neglected toddler who had frozen to death on the front porch while his parents mainlined heroin?

  He knew from experience one had to come up for air. Yet what kind of life was spent warm and dry onshore ?

  He scanned the weekly departmental statistics. Another spike in the crime rate, with an abnormal amount of activity reported in and around the Carroll Street Homes trailer park. Was Nate’s gang responsible, he wondered? Los Viburos? Both?

  Were they competing for territory, or had one subsumed the other? If so, he doubted Nate had the upper hand. Had Cobra gone to the football game to check on him? Perhaps send a message ?

  If so, did it have anything to do with David’s death?

  Preach didn’t see the angle. But it was worth investigating, starting with a long talk with Alana Silver.

  After a breakfast of cheese grits and bacon, as well as another pot of coffee, a text came in from Lela Jimenez, the forensic investigator.

 

  Preach poured his coffee into a Durham Bulls travel mug.

  When he arrived at the station, Lela met him inside and followed him to his cubicle. In her typical businesslike manner, she didn’t mince words, extracting two photos from a manila folder and setting them on his desk. Each photo depicted a crusty yellow shoe print with parts of the tread missing. Sulfur casts made by forensics.

  “Where’d they come from?” he asked.

  “We found the first one in the woods, in the mud beneath the leaf pile.”

  He sucked in a breath and made a mental note to find out how deep the path led. Before he could ask another question, she continued, “Good news first?”

  “Sure.”

  She pointed at the photo on the right. “That one matches the shoes found with David’s body. It was found on the trail behind Claire’s house.”

  “Which makes sense, if he was killed there and bagged.”

  “The bad news is that nothing is certain. The opinion on pattern evidence has eroded in recent years, ever since DNA became king.”

  Pattern evidence, Preach knew, referred to evidence identified by a repetition of common designs or markings, such as tire tracks, shoe prints, and fingerprints.

  “Pattern evidence,” she continued, “is difficult to cast perfectly, hard to interpret, and even harder to match to a particular individual. A solid fingerprint is one thing, because they’re individual, but for a shoe print or a tire track to hold up in court, there has to be more than the identification of a particular tread. Do you know how many size ten Nikes there are in the world? We need a nail in the tire pattern, or wear and tear in a particular manner on the heel of a shoe. Even then, it’s a subjective standard that has fallen out of favor in court.”

  Though talented, Lela sometimes got pedantic. He knew all of this already. “Speaking of tire tracks, have you found any?”

  “Negative. No skid marks on the road, too much traffic for a latent print, and there are no impressions in the yard or near the woods.”

  He looked at the two shoe prints again. “These are different sizes.” “David was a size twelve. A large foot. The other one is two sizes smaller but still male.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s wider than a woman’s shoe, and it matches a generic men’s work boot from Walmart. Unfortunately, there were no other distinguishing marks.”

  “Not much help,” he said, trying to remember what kind of footwear Cobra and Nate had worn. He thought he recalled a pair of brown hiking boots on Cobra, and scuffed tennis shoes on the kid.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  She reached into the folder and set down three more photos. Each showcased another plaster cast, and they all looked similar: partial casts of a pieced-together rectangle with rounded edges. A few inches below each rectangle lay a circular impression less than a millimeter wide. “This is a tough one,” she said. “They all came from the same shoe, we’re pretty sure.”

  “A high heel of some sort?”

  She nodded. “Good. Yes. An ankle boot, to be exact.”

  “Where’d you find these ?”

  “Under the leaf pile. In the mud next to the male prints.”

  He felt a little unsteady. “Can you tell the size ?”

  “It’s hard to be certain, but my analysis is a female ankle boot, size six to eight, made at the same time as the print under the leaf pile.”

  “A woman,” he said, almost in a daze. “A woman was there too.” “Claire wears a size seven,” she said. “I checked when I was there. But half the women in Creekville, myself included, probably wear size six to eight.”

  “Any chance you could go through her shoes, or someone else’s, and match the shoe with the print?”

  “Almost nil. The print is a partial, and the impressions were shallow. That rounded point in the heel is as common as shoelaces.Every woman I know has a pair of ankle boots with that general shape.” Preach knew she was right, but that was okay. There were other ways to catch a murderer. The fact that had rocked him was that two people had been in the woods with David that night.

  And one of them was a woman.

  Lela set another photo down. Though less defined, it looked similar to the tread on the work boot. “Final one. This has the same pattern as the size ten male boot. Is it the exact same one ? Impossible to tell.” “Where’d this come from?”

  “Sharon Tisdale’s lawn.”

  “On the night of the murder ?”

  She blinked. “You don’t know about last night?”

  He stared at her. “Last night ?”

  “Someone tripped the alarm at her house around 4 a.m.”

  “What? Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me ? Who was on call?” “Bill Wright. He thought it was a neighborhood kid, but he called me just in case. I didn’t find anything except the print.”

  Preach couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Was the print fresh?” “Very. I found it in a wet patch outside the sliding glass doors in the back garden.”

  Sliding glass doors. The same place Sharon had a view of Claire’s study.

  After thanking Lela for coming to him, he marched over to Bill’s cubicle, didn’t find him, and called him on his home phone.

  Officer Wright sounded sleepy when he answered. “Yeah?”

  “Bill, if you ever talk to a witness on your own during my murder investigation, you tell me immediately.”

  “I didn’t—it was a false alarm. We didn’t find anything.”

  “Except a print that matched another print found under the leaf pile with David’s blood all over it.”

  There was silence on the phone. “Do we know whose it is?”

  “Male, size ten, common work boot. Check the files and keep an eye out. What did Sharon say?”

  “Someone pried the doors open and the alarm went off, but she never saw anyone. It’s not all that unusual in that neighborhood. Bastard kids trying for an easy score.”

  Preach made a fist at his side. “Someone went there to send a message.”

  “But no one outside the office knows about Sharon’s testimon
y,” the older officer said, perplexed.

  As far as Preach knew, that was true, though there was one person who might have put two and two together from watching the investigation.

  Claire.

  That, or the murderer had noticed a light on in Sharon’s house that night.

  “Next time,” Preach said, “if you have something that involves an active homicide investigation—I don’t care how peripheral you think it is—you let me know right away.”

  “I didn’t have a chance to write it up,” he muttered. “I was going to after lunch.”

  “Right away, Bill.”

  After hanging up with Bill and shaking his head at the lack of immediacy—major crimes just weren’t in the man’s skill set—Preach decided to drive to Sharon Tisdale’s house.

  Ignoring the magnetic pull of Claire’s front door, trying not to think about the disastrous night with Ari, he greeted Sharon and had a conversation about the break-in. He learned nothing of import, though he could tell the retired professor was shaken.

  “Will he come back?” she asked.

  “I hope not,” he said. “Keep your alarm on, even during the day. I’ll make sure a patrol car swings by a few times each night.”

  “Thank you,” she said, then plucked at the collar of her pink bathrobe. “Why do you . . . what do you think it was about?”

  He decided to tell her the truth, even though it might upset her. “It’s possible it was just a burglar, looking for an easy grab. An alarm system scares off most thieves. But given the similarity of the prints . . . I think someone wants you to forget about what you saw the night of David’s murder.”

  She put a hand to her mouth. “You mean . . . am I in danger?”

  “I don’t think so. Not yet. But if we make an arrest . . . I’ll keep you posted, okay? And please let us know if you notice anything strange.” “Should I leave town?”

  “That’s your decision, I’m afraid. If you have someone to stay with . . . maybe it’s not a bad idea, for now. Just let me know what you decide.” She swallowed. “Okay.”