Turn Me Loose (Paradise, Idaho)

by Rosalind James

  “If that was supposed to be a subtle opening,” Rochelle said, “it isn’t working.”

  “You think I’m a nosy old woman.”

  “I don’t think. I’m sure.”

  Dell chuckled her low ho-ho-ho. “Now, what’s got you all grumpy? Just because you came home hot and tired, and he didn’t kiss you good-bye as good as you hoped? What was that peck on the cheek all about?”

  “Do you see everything? What do you do, sit over there with a telescope?”

  Dell just smiled and lifted her glass. “Honey, my entertainment sources are limited, and people are a whole lot more interesting than soap operas. You’re not as good as you could be, though, I’ve got to say. Now, when the Kavanaughs were living next door? He’d go to work, and, oh, my.” She shook her head. “Well, let’s just say that I never saw one woman get so much cable TV service in my life, if you get my drift. They’ve each got their own place now. And today? I saw Stacy come hightailing on home and leaving again, after she started out on that bike ride with you. Was leaving the two of you alone your idea, or hers?”

  Rochelle had been smiling, but now, she sobered. “Hers. She’s been moody, upset about her boyfriend. And about school, I finally realized today. But Travis was being so sweet to her, took us both to lunch and was helping her with a math problem, and then . . . the boyfriend thing, and she left. Didn’t leave me a note, either. Did that Shane come pick her up, by any chance?”

  “Nope. She walked. Dressed to kill, too. Skirt up to her hoo-ha. You ever look in her underwear drawer?”

  Rochelle blinked. “What?”

  “Girls always think they’re being so sneaky. And nine times out of ten, it’s in their underwear drawer, whatever it is. Or under the mattress. Like nobody in the world ever thought of that hiding place.”

  Rochelle remembered packing up Stacy’s apartment. About how her sister had emptied her sock and underwear drawers, and then had sat on the bed. Until she’d packed up her bedding.

  “What do you . . .” She swallowed. “What do you think it is?”

  Dell put her head on one side. “Vodka, maybe. That’s usually it, because you won’t smell it on ’em, and it’s cheap.”

  “No,” Rochelle said. “She’s not drunk. Not when she’s home, and not even when she comes home. At least, not bad.”

  The blue eyes in their web of wrinkles were sharp. “You know drunk?”

  “Oh, yeah. I know drunk real well.”

  Dell waited, but Rochelle didn’t go on. Seems to me like that bitter’s trying to drown out all your sweetness. Her marriage was over and gone. Time to put the past behind her.

  “Well, check that underwear drawer,” Dell said at last.

  “I will.”

  “And ask yourself why.”

  “Why what?”

  “What’s a pretty young girl like that so scared of? What’s she got to hide away from with . . . whatever it is? With booze, or drugs, or bad boys? She’s going to college, got a good family. If she’s looking to drown herself in something else—why?”

  “Why does anybody do anything?” Rochelle said with a sigh.

  “Oh, honey,” Dell said reproachfully, “you know better than that. There’s always a reason. Why are you holding off that prime piece of beef like he was hamburger? Got to be a reason for that, too.”

  “I knew you’d get around to him.”

  “Well, somebody’s got to. You going to be good with that, when he gives up on you and finds a woman who wants him?”

  “He said—” The cold fingers were inching down Rochelle’s spine. “That he was good with going slow.”

  “Uh-huh. For how long? Because, sweet thing . . .” Dell sighed. “There’s plenty of somebodies going to be ready and willing. A fine-looking man like that? One who’ll look at you the way he does, like he’s got a special treat just for you, and he can’t wait to give it to you? One who’ll take your sister for a bike ride, and be sweet to her, too? Man who can kiss like that? Give me a time machine, and I’ll take him myself.”

  “Well,” Rochelle said, giving it her best shot, “if somebody does take him, there’s only so long it would be for, no matter what. He’s here teaching for one semester, and that’s all. Then he’s going home to San Francisco. Back to being a hotshot computer millionaire.”

  “I can sure see why you don’t want him. Sounds like a real loser. What in the wide world are you waiting for?”

  “Because I want serious,” Rochelle tried to explain. “I want a future. I want the real thing. I want—all right. I want a family. And if I’m spending time with Travis, I’m ruling out finding that guy. The right guy.”

  “Huh.” Dell sat quietly for a minute, sipped her iced tea, and stared out over her curved patch of grass, neat pea-gravel path, and the flowering plants bordering it. All the way to the weeping birch and crab apple trees at the edge of the property, and beyond, to something Rochelle couldn’t see. “Well, see, I’d have said that if he wasn’t the real thing, I couldn’t imagine what real would look like. How do you know he’s not it?”

  “I told you. He’s leaving.”

  “Did he say he wouldn’t ever come back?”

  Rochelle moved her legs restlessly under the table. “But—”

  Dell wasn’t done, though. “Planes only fly one way, then?” she asked. “Or did you make some promise to your dying grandpa saying you’d never go anywhere but here?”

  “This is—this is where I live,” Rochelle said. “Anyway, he never said anything like that.”

  “Uh-huh. See how impressed I am?” Dell said. “You saving it up until somebody catches sight of you and tells you right then and there that he wants to marry you so you can be his and only his, forever and ever? Because, honey, that might be how it happens in some book from the drugstore, but out in the real world, that isn’t true love, it’s somebody who’s going to be looking in your kitchen windows and scaring the bejeezus out of you when you finally wise up and break it off. Normally, you find a good man, put him through his paces, see if he’s willing to, oh, say, take you on a bike ride, plant your flowers, be nice to your sister, meet your folks. And then you see what happens. Might work, and it might not. If you don’t give it a try, you’ll never know.”

  “I’ve given it too many tries already,” Rochelle said. “That’s my problem.”

  “Your parts don’t come marked off for only so many users,” Dell said, and Rochelle about spit out her iced tea. “You got some number of men in your head you can’t go above? Forget the number. Who do you imagine knows it besides you? Long as you’ve got your heart and your eyes open, whose business is it?”

  “You’re saying that?”

  “I’m watching for entertainment. It’s not my life. It’s yours. You going to let a bunch of old biddies like me tell you how to live it?”

  “All right, then,” Rochelle said. “The truth? I don’t want to get hurt again. I want to be sure. I want forever.”

  “There’s only one sure way to not get hurt,” Dell said. “That’s never to love anybody at all. Course, that hurts, too. And, honey, you can be as sure as the day, you can be right as rain, and you can do every single thing in the world exactly perfect. And you still won’t necessarily get forever. Only wrong thing Randy ever did was die on me. But the son of a bitch sure did that.”

  JUST A GIRL

  The girl answered Jim’s knock pretty quickly. But then, calling out, “Sheriff’s department. Open up!” usually worked.

  She was young, blonde from a bottle, and wearing too much makeup. She wasn’t from around here, but Jim already knew that. Because it was the second time he’d been in her apartment.

  The girl’s eyes darted between Jim, in his gray deputy’s uniform, and Tony DeMarco, dark and sharp in detective’s plain clothes that might have worked fine in Chicago but made him stick out like a sore thumb in Paradise.

  “Cheryl Hendricks?” DeMarco asked.

  “Yes?”

  “May we come in?”


  She hesitated a moment, then she glanced down the hall, and Jim knew why. She didn’t want to be seen talking to the cops in the hallway of her apartment building. Either to protect her reputation from her neighbors, or . . . to protect it the other way. Because her neighbors weren’t the kind of people who’d take kindly to a resident talking to the cops. It was that kind of building.

  Just as Jim had expected, she held the door a fraction wider and said, “OK. But I already told him everything I know.” She jerked her head at Jim.

  DeMarco moved past her and led the way into a small living room that looked out onto an alley, then asked, “May we sit down?”

  “Uh . . . sure.”

  DeMarco sat on one end of the old flowered couch and Jim took the other, removing a small notebook and pencil from his pocket and preparing to take notes.

  “Thanks for contacting us,” DeMarco began. “I’m very sorry to tell you, but you were right. Your roommate Heather Jones has been positively identified as the murder victim.”

  The heavily mascaraed brown eyes blinked twice, and the girl picked up a cushion from beside her and hugged it without seeming to realize what she was doing. “Oh.”

  “And we’d like to ask you some questions about her,” DeMarco said.

  “I didn’t say you could talk to me anymore,” she said. “It was a tip. An anonymous tip, like on TV.” She looked accusingly at Jim. And since he was the good cop, he answered.

  “We appreciated your call,” he said. “Like I told you, that was the first step toward catching whoever did this to her.”

  And if you want your tips to stay anonymous, he didn’t say, move to the big city.

  DeMarco spoke up while the girl was off balance. “We just have a few more questions, Cheryl. How long ago did Heather move in with you?”

  “Uh . . .” She blinked some more. “Middle of June. Sometime. I can’t remember exactly when.”

  “And when was the last time you saw her?”

  “Uh . . . I can’t say exactly. Like I told him before.” She nodded at Jim.

  “Please think,” DeMarco said. “It’s important.”

  A pause while she bit her thin lips with their heavy coating of dark pink lipstick. “I remember when she was gone for a while,” she said slowly. “And I thought, damn it, she’s split on me. Because the September rent was due, and I was pissed.”

  “Around the first, then?” DeMarco asked. “Or the thirty-first?”

  “Yeah. Like I said.”

  “And how long would you say it took you to decide she’d . . . split?” DeMarco asked.

  She put her head on one side and bit her lips some more. “About a week. I had to put up a new sign for a roommate, and I remember thinking, if she hadn’t come back in a week, she wouldn’t be coming back.”

  Ah. Jim wrote down, 23rd? 24th? 25th? Closing in.

  “How did you arrive at that figure?” DeMarco asked.

  “Huh?” Cheryl blinked some more.

  “A week. What made that the . . . cutoff date?”

  “Oh. If you’re with a guy more than a week, it’ll be a while,” she said matter-of-factly. “Because he wants you to stay. Or he took you somewhere else. Which was fine. I was just pissed she didn’t tell me.”

  “Huh,” DeMarco said, and Jim thought for a second about that life, going from one guy to another. “Where had she come from?”

  “Seattle. Like I told him. Already,” she said with another jerk of her head at Jim. “That was where her mom was, anyway.”

  Her mom—and her mom’s loser boyfriend, who, by all accounts, was the reason Heather had been on her own since she’d been seventeen. Jim had seen her high school yearbook picture. Junior year. Her last year. Dark bangs brushing her eyes, long hair, hopeful smile. Jim hoped her mom was suffering over the choice that had led to her eighteen-year-old daughter lying dead in an Idaho ditch. Mothers who chose their men over their children . . . He knew what a mother was supposed to be, and it wasn’t that.

  “We know where she was from originally, yes,” DeMarco said. “But where did she come to you from?” When Cheryl still looked at him uncomprehendingly, he said, “Where was she living before?”

  Cheryl lifted her narrow shoulders. “With some guy, I guess. The guy she came to town with.”

  “Who was . . .” DeMarco said. “Who?”

  Another shrug. “Some guy who was going to North Dakota, I think. For the fracking.”

  “So she was . . . what? Hitchhiking?”

  “You know. Just . . . with him for a while. Then not. Because he left.”

  “Uh-huh,” DeMarco said as Jim made a note. Some chance of finding that guy. “And he didn’t come back for her, or contact her that you know of?”

  “Um . . . no. I mean, she never mentioned him. She would have said, because she’d have been surprised. It wasn’t, like, true love or anything. He was just a guy she was with for a while.”

  “Right,” DeMarco said. “How did you meet her?”

  “I had a sign in the Laundromat about the place. She came by. We weren’t BFFs or anything. She was just a roommate.” She crossed and recrossed her thin legs, shifting restlessly in her chair. “I don’t know anything. I told you everything I know. You guys didn’t park out front, did you?”

  DeMarco ignored that. “Just a few more questions, Cheryl. Where did she get the money to move in with you? I’m guessing there was some money up front, right? How much rent were you charging?”

  “Two hundred a month,” Cheryl said. “How do I know where she got it? She had a job.”

  “What job was that?”

  “Working at Macho Taco. You should ask them when she left. They’d have, like, records. She didn’t work every day, but they’d know better than me exactly which days.”

  “Don’t worry,” DeMarco said. “We’ll be talking to them. How long had she been working there?”

  “I don’t know. How should I know? Since she came, I guess. Why don’t you ask them?”

  “We will,” DeMarco promised again. “What about a boyfriend? Who was she seeing?”

  The heart of the matter. Because the DNA results had come back. Heather hadn’t been in the criminal justice system. But she’d sure enough been four weeks pregnant, and the father could sure enough be identified. If they could get a match.

  They’d keep the information to themselves for now. If the killer had known Heather was pregnant, and if he was the only one who’d known—that could be very useful indeed.

  Especially since “four weeks pregnant” meant that the father wasn’t the mysterious fracker. It was somebody Heather had known in Paradise. Who had just jumped up to prime-suspect level.

  “I don’t think she was seeing anybody in particular,” Cheryl said. Which meant that finding him wouldn’t be easy. But then, this one hadn’t looked easy from the start. “I mean, nobody special.”

  “Anybody ever come here?” DeMarco asked.

  “No. It was a rule. No guys here. Because it’s my place, and I don’t want some sketchy guy in here stealing my stuff.”

  “How about when you weren’t home?”

  “Then I wouldn’t know, would I?”

  “OK,” DeMarco said. They’d ask the neighbors, of course. But the neighbors here? They wouldn’t be talking. “Where did she hang out?”

  “I saw her sometimes at the Back Alley, maybe,” she said reluctantly. “Places like that.”

  “At bars,” DeMarco said.

  “Well, yeah. Where else? She wasn’t exactly the library type.”

  “Who with?”

  “I don’t know. Guys.”

  “Anonymous guys,” DeMarco said flatly. “Come on. Which guys?”

  “I don’t know, OK? No one guy. Just guys. Sometimes she came home, and sometimes she didn’t. You know.”

  “Cheryl,” Jim said. Time for Good Cop again. “One of them may have killed her. If you know, please tell us. Otherwise, you’re leaving a guy out there who’s willing to kill
a girl and dump her like trash. And she wasn’t trash.”

  He could see her swallow. “How do you know she wasn’t?”

  “Because nobody’s trash,” he said. “Nobody deserves that.”

  A moment, and then she answered. “Maybe . . . country guys, some of them.”

  “Anybody you know?” Jim said, since he was on a roll here. “Anybody you could describe? Please. Think back. It could be important.”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t notice. I’m not from here, and besides, I go for college guys. You know, ones who might actually get you somewhere. Anyway, she was pretty. You don’t hang around in bars with girls who are prettier than you.”

  “So if you didn’t notice,” Jim pressed, “how do you know they were country guys?”

  Her brow knitted, and DeMarco and Jim sat quiet as she thought. “Chew,” she finally said. “On the back pocket.” She sketched a circle in the air, and Jim made a note. The round tin of chewing tobacco, always carried in that same pocket until it left a white ring on the back of your jeans. Not necessarily country guys. Plenty of college kids chewed. But those college kids were more likely to have come off of farms.

  “How old were these guys?” Jim asked. “Older guys? Kids? What?”

  “Not older,” Cheryl said immediately. “And not kids. Twenties, thirties, maybe. Like that.”

  “So you did notice them,” DeMarco pounced.

  “No. Barely. Hardly at all.” She was getting agitated again. “I told you. I can’t help you. And you can’t come back here.”

  DeMarco ignored that, too. They’d be coming back here. Talking to her neighbors, too. “You called us, what, almost three weeks after she disappeared? A week after the body was found. Why did you wait to report her missing?”

  “Because I didn’t know she was missing. I mean, I knew she wasn’t here, but how was I supposed to know?” And I didn’t want to get involved, she didn’t have to say. “I thought she’d left with a guy. But then I thought . . .” Something flickered behind the brown eyes. “Maybe it was her. Because I heard, long brown hair and pink shirt. She liked pink. And she left her stuff.”