“Crap,” I whispered to Alex, “if that’s the MAHPS guy, he’s more than half an hour early.”
Theresa spotted us, and being her usual charming self, said, “Well, it’s about time. Where the hell is everyone?”
“Welcome to the Center,” I told the guy in the suit while I ignored Theresa. “I’m Daniel Weber. I’m sure Bridget and Luke are upstairs in the office.”
“Jose Trevino from the Mid-American Historical Preservation Society.” I’d always pictured guys named Jose as being fun guys. Mr. Trevino shattered that stereotype.
“No one’s answering the phone,” Theresa complained. “And what about Marvin? Don’t he start at seven? Where’s he at? And why don’t any of my keys ever work?”
The thought of grabbing her baseball cap and stuffing it in her mouth was tempting. I glanced over my shoulder at Alex. He met my eyes and the corner of his mouth twitched, and then I had to put all my energy into not bursting out laughing, not because anything was actually funny, but because it would be the worst possible time to crack up.
I’m not one of those people who believes everything happens for a reason. Maybe some people with brain tumors think that way; I suppose I can’t begrudge anyone their coping mechanism. But me? I think sometimes we’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time when the shit hits the fan—and it cheered me immensely to know it was someone else in the path of the shitstorm for a change. Luke, in this case. Because I knew how much he was counting on the grant.
I whipped out my keyring and sifted through in search of the front door key—one potato, two potato, three potato, four. It turned the lock easily. “Sorry for the inconvenience. I’ll walk you to the offices.” I might even set him up with a little something special from the water cooler, if he was nice.
I held open the front door and they all trooped in, Alex last. He half-mouthed, half-whispered, “Where do I go?”
The executive decision I made, even though I was a peon who was probably about to be downsized out of a job, was to put the guy who didn’t know what he was doing on the farthest floor from the entrance. I held up three fingers.
“Where the...heck is Marvin?” Theresa muttered, avoiding the F-bomb at the very last second. She stormed off toward the six-inch deep lead mine. Alex’s mouth twitched again.
I did my best to give Jose a good tour, though I didn’t really know what I was doing—there hadn’t been tour guides at the Center since I was a horny high school sophomore. “The Faris Natural Sciences Center was founded fifteen years ago.”
The elevator dinged open and Alex, the MAHPS guy and I got in.
“Faris received federal funds after an F-4 tornado destroyed half the town, and that money allowed construction on the Center to begin.”
It was a grand time, too—or so Aunt Noreen always told us. Tourism went up, and Faris became the natural sciences darling of the Midwest.
For a couple of years, anyway. Until buildings sprouted up in New Faris, and the freakish path of the F-4’s destruction became less apparent.
What could I say that wouldn’t make our situation sound as dire as it was? That the tourism drying up made the museum tank? That the nearby Chevy plant closing added a few more nails to the coffin? That Dubuque and Chicago had the natural sciences covered, and slapping up something in between the two where we didn’t have the population to support it had been a doomed idea from the get-go?
Instead, I said, “Our Rock River beaver is the largest on record in North America.”
The elevator opened, and I led Mr. Trevino toward the Admin offices, then stepped back out of his visual range, pointed toward the staircase, and mouthed, “Go,” to Alex.
He nodded and ran self-consciously toward the stairwell with one hand on my spare flashlight where it flapped against his thigh. The only thing that made him look even remotely like a security guard was his buzz cut.
I pulled out my keyring on its tether, then saw the Admin door was ajar. The building had obviously decided to demonstrate every single thing that wasn’t working properly during Trevino’s visit, like it wanted to get even with the handful of us trying to keep it afloat. Or maybe put us out of our misery.
When I opened the door all the way to let the guest of honor in, the smell of scorched microwave popcorn billowed out. Trevino squinted his already-narrow eyes as if it would help him navigate through the stink.
Jesus. Of all days to make popcorn—and burn it. I hoped it wasn’t the ancient box from the back of the cupboard. That stuff was so old it belonged with the People of the Plains.
“I’m sure Bridget or Luke...or someone...is here,” I said, louder than I normally talked, hoping that one of them would emerge from the offices and save me. Neither one did.
“Izzat you, Web?” Marvin came out of the bathroom with a wad of bloody toilet paper pressed to the corner of his mouth. He looked like he’d aged another ten years and just gotten over a bout of double pneumonia. “Glad you’re here. I gotta go. Broke my partial on that fucking popcorn and now I got a wire stuck in my gums.”
I flinched as the F-bomb Theresa had avoided earlier finally detonated. “Shouldn’t you be telling Bridget or Luke?”
“Can’t find either one of ’em. Look, it’s an emergency.”
“Okay, yeah, sorry to hear about your...uh...why’d you make that popcorn, anyway?”
Marvin shrugged into his jacket. “I didn’t make it. It was there when I got here.”
I looked at the scorched bag in the center of the table. Okay. Maybe the real question was, what on earth had prompted him to try and eat it?
Marvin left with his bloody wad of TP while I took the tape off the water cooler spigot as casually as I could. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? Water?”
“Thank you, Mr.—Weber, is it? But no. I think I can show myself around.” Mr. Trevino turned toward the doorway that Marvin had just exited, and nearly ran smack into Bridget.
“Oh! You must be Mr. Trevino. Welcome to Faris Natural Sciences Center. Can I get you some coffee—?”
“I’ll need to evaluate the displays. Is there a map?”
Oh God. That awful, out-of-date map. I started to say, “I can show Mr. Trevino—”
“Yes, of course,” Bridget said, and then she turned to me. “Mr. Weber, thank you for showing Mr. Trevino in. I can take it from here.”
I waited for both of them to leave, then flipped open my notepad. It said:
Taxidermy Guy Here
Kissed Jesse
Put Out Uniform
9:30—all over soon
I added Luke is a rat bastard, then stared at the kissing part, as if that would take me back to the moment in the conservation lab when things seemed a lot more straightforward than they did now, when my job and Jesse’s livelihood weren’t threatened by that total prick, but just seeing the words wasn’t enough. I closed my eyes and imagined Jesse, his hair spread across my pillows, his mouth on mine—and it helped, a little.
The door to the Admin offices rattled open and my cousin ducked into the kitchen. “I know, I’m supposed to be up on the third floor, but I gotta take a leak. Man, it stinks to high heaven in here.”
“Five-year-old popcorn—my people call it ‘maize.’”
Alex pulled open the bathroom door. “Whoa, who died in the can?”
When I went to show him where we kept the air freshener, I saw that he wasn’t talking about the lingering aftermath of a BM; the entire sink was spattered with blood.
“Oh my God. What if Trevino had come in here?” I grabbed a handful of paper towels from the dispenser and started smearing the blood around the sink while Alex stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me, flipped up the toilet seat, and peed without even bothering to close the door.
“You should probably be using rubber gloves or something,” he said. “You could get hepatitis.”
“Do you mind?”
“What? I told you, I had to go.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like we’re at home.” I s
tuffed the bloody wad into the garbage can, and was suddenly convinced that I was now crawling with hepatitis.
Alex zipped up. I was scrubbing down my hands when I heard the scream.
Alex burst out of the Admin doors and past the prairie dogs with me hot on his heels. My wet hand kept grasping at my pepper spray holster as if groping for it could make it magically appear.
Jose Trevino stepped out of the petroglyph alcove, shouting, “Security! Security!”
Sonofabitch. That was me...and I’d never had to do anything more than lock and unlock doors. Behind Trevino, Bridget yelled, “Somebody call an ambulance.”
I don’t think a twelve-foot alcove had ever been so many things to a person before that very moment. Once upon a time, it was a tedious stop on a Boy Scouts field trip. Later, a source of irritation with its constantly reappearing letter F. Yesterday, it had been the magical place where I held Jesse up against me, tasted his mouth, and felt the heat of his body—and got caught.
Now it became the spot I saw Luke Presioso with his head bashed in.
11
ALEX WAS TALKING SERIOUS and low to the cop in the suit—his softball buddy, Bobby. Faris only had two police departments, so of course the one handling the murder was the one where we knew everyone. Very awkward. “But Web was with me,” Alex was saying.
Bobby said, “And what, he sleeps in the same bed with you and Kathy?”
“Don’t be a—”
“I’m just saying that he could have come and gone a dozen times while the two of you were asleep, isn’t that so? Listen, this is the first murder since the lead rush days. If we fuck it up, we look like a bunch of backward hicks. Don’t worry. I won’t mess with your brother.”
“Cousin.”
“You know what I mean.”
Kathy glanced over from where she was marking off the petroglyph alcove with black and yellow crime scene tape. We lived in the same house, so obviously I was used to seeing her in uniform—Alex called her the Tidy Bowl Man, or Tidy for short—but I’d never seen her doing anything more official than handing out a traffic citation. I couldn’t decide whether I should be worried that she wouldn’t be allowed to question me, or relieved.
“You know how sound carries in our house,” Alex said. “When he goes up and down the stairs, we hear it. Besides, you’ve known him since he was a kid. Take it easy, would you?”
“Questioning him will only take a minute. I swear—on my mother’s grave.”
My eye twitched. His mother was alive. Jag.
“C’mon, Web,” he said to me, cutting Alex off with a “stop” hand gesture. “The less we roam around here contaminating the area, the better. Let’s go sit down in the cruiser. I’ll take your statement.”
I wondered if I should lawyer up—but I wasn’t stupid. There was no way in hell I could do it without looking incredibly guilty. No one knew I was missing three hours but Jesse and Alex, and neither of them would rat me out. Right?
We got in the cruiser. Bobby stared through the windshield at the side of the Center while I watched him through my hair, doing my best to look like I wasn’t looking at him. He was blond, really blond, to the point where even his eyelashes were pale. Stocky, too—not much of a neck. “That’s something,” he said, “ain’t it, seeing your boss covered in blood, stuffed in a fake cave.”
“Are you going for a Law and Order delivery, or what? Last time I checked we were in New Faris, not New York.”
“Tell me you were nowhere near this place when Presioso got his head beat in and give me a real good reason why your shirt’s covered in blood, and we got no problem with each other.”
“This is Marvin’s blood—he bled all over the bathroom sink and left it for me to clean up. I don’t know when Luke was killed, so I have no idea if I’ve got an alibi or not. I was here for my last shift until seven, then I went home and slept until nine, grabbed Alex and came back.”
That seemed pretty cut and dried to me, but apparently Bobby thought that no detail was too small to omit and asked a dozen more questions about my shift. Since the last three hours were missing, I substituted a narrative from one of hundreds of typical shifts. I talked, and he wrote, and I told him about my rounds, my return, the front door that wouldn’t open, the world’s oldest popcorn, and Marvin’s dental emergency.
“Should be easy enough to check out. So, one more thing. When you walked home at seven, you stopped at Pat’s Diner?”
Shit. I was that predictable? “No, I got a ride from the taxidermist.”
“So someone did see you. That’s good.” He glanced through his notes. “Jesse Ray Jones. Where’s he at? We’ll need to talk to him.”
“He’s in Iowa.”
“Iowa’s a big state.”
I knew damn well where Jesse was—on Route 30, halfway between Faris and a rural stretch of townships outside Ames where the only other gay guy was known as Larry the Fairy. But I just played dumb, and hoped to hell my eye didn’t twitch.
Kathy strode up to the cruiser and rapped on Bobby’s window. He rolled it down. She said, “Are you done yet?”
Bobby might have wanted to bait her, to draw out his answer for Big Bad Cop Guy effect, but she looked like she was brewing up a big one and just waiting for someone to get in her way, so he said, “Sure, we’re done.”
She looked at me, and when she spoke, her tone switched from whoop-ass to motherly concern. “I’ll drive you home, Web.”
Bobby sat perfectly still as I got out of the car, as if he thought he was camouflaged by the seat, and if he sat still enough, he’d avoid her wrath. In his position, I would have done the same.
I got in Kathy’s cruiser, and said, “I’m fine.”
“Web.” She clamped her hand over mine where it rested on my knee. “I’m so sorry you had to see that. Are you okay, really?”
I’d seen Luke’s body, sure, once Alex and I barged into the petroglyph alcove to try and figure out what all the commotion was about. He’d been jammed into that cave and covered with plastic foliage—fairly clean plastic foliage at that, thanks to Jesse’s blow drier. The way the body looked flashed through my mind like the Rock River Delta slide show. A shoe, light gleaming off its freshly polished surface. The relative paleness of a calf between the top of the silky black dress sock and the hem of the trousers where they’d ridden up. The dark plum shirt with its darker plum spatters. The unfocused gaze, as if Luke had been doing an impression of Isaac Faris, looking for silver and finding lead.
“I’m fine.”
“Was Bobby being an asshole? Because he looked like he does when he’s being an asshole.”
“He was fine.”
“Okay.” She peeled out of the parking lot on two wheels, and even though her lights weren’t flashing, what little noontime traffic there was on Main Street pulled into the bike lanes to get out of her way. “It’s just that you’ve got to be careful. Your medication makes you drowsy, and you’ve been up for how many hours?”
“I’m fine. Don’t make a big deal out of it—not in front of Bobby.”
“You know I’d never tell anyone about the tumor. Don’t worry, no one knows. None of them even suspect. You think you’re the only one who ever dropped out of school and took the first shit-job they could find?”
I tried to bite back a laugh, but it slipped out anyway in the way laughter does when it’s completely inappropriate.
“Oh God,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“No, you’re right. It is a shit-job.”
She laid a strip of rubber from the street to the driveway as she pulled in, then slammed on the brakes before she made a casualty of the garage door. “So you were with that Jesse boy right up until he went back to Iowa, right?”
“What? Whose alibi are you trying to figure out, his or mine?”
“Neither.” She put the cruiser in park. “Both. I don’t think you’d do something like that in a million years, and Jesse? I don’t know him, but what reason could h
e possibly have?”
Time expanded, and not in a good way, as I realized that both Jesse and I had very, very good reasons to want Luke Presioso dead.
12
BACK WHEN KATHY GOT her shield, I was senior at Faris High, a National Honors Society student too young, and too geeky, to get in trouble. So, the New Faris Police Department had never intimidated me. When I was at U of I, the department was someplace I’d stop to see if she could slip me a twenty ’til my student loans kicked in.
Or, once I’d moved into the apartment upstairs, somewhere I’d go for the house keys if I’d left mine in the microwave or the toilet tank while I was sleepwalking.
The building looked colder to me now, vaguely intimidating, but my stomach seemed to think it was the same old place. It grumbled at me as if to suggest in no uncertain terms that it needed a donut. Most of the cops were female, or diabetic, or allergic to gluten, so the dozen donuts Faris Bakery and Café dropped off every other day usually went stale if I didn’t swing through the break room and grab a few.
I told my stomach to take a chill pill. Now that I was being fingerprinted, the New Faris P.D. seemed a heck of a lot less benign. Not that anyone was arresting me. The crime scene was covered in prints, and they had to determine which ones belonged to those of us who worked there.
Theresa had been the first to be inked up and the first to leave. She was so matter-of-fact about it that I can’t have been the only one to wonder if she’d ever been fingerprinted before, but I didn’t want to ask Marvin. His partial was out for repairs, and now that he was short two lower front teeth he looked at least a hundred and five—plus, he whistled and spit when he talked. Bridget sat reading a magazine like she was waiting for something as routine as an oil change. And Kathy seemed to have a lot of reports that needed carrying to and from her desk. I figured she was just making sure I wasn’t sprawled on the floor, kicking my feet and swallowing my own tongue.
It was near five when Jesse was escorted in by the desk clerk. He wore a backwards Hawkeye baseball cap in place of his black bandanna, his flannel shirt was a slightly different plaid, and he’d shaved recently—but other than that, he looked exactly the same as he had at my house, leaning over my bathroom sink, brushing his teeth with my toothpaste. “Mr. Marvin...Ms. Barker...Mr. Web.” He nodded to each of us as if he was greeting us after Sunday mass, then sat down in the vacant chair beside Bridget.
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