Outside a car door slammed, followed by the scuff of footsteps.
She uncurled from the corner and threw herself at the door, barely aware of Rex barking and jumping about. Her hand grasped the bolt, but she stopped herself from slamming it back. She peered into the tiny circle of glass. Maury was coming up the walk, his face expanding as he got closer. He looked as she’d imagined, except for the determined look in his eyes and rictus of resolve in the muscles of his jaw.
She pushed the bolt back and yanked open the door. “Thank God,” she said in the instant before everything exploded. It happened so fast that, even later when she tried to place the events in the order in which they occurred, she couldn’t be certain what had happened first. Maury had started to come inside, and she’d stepped back, pulling the door with her. Yes, that was how it went. Except that Maury had burst inside, as if he’d been shot from a cannon. Or had that happened first and then—with the shock of it—the door slammed back? The man dressed in black blurred like a shadow flitting across her vision and threw himself against Maury. Maury toppled like an oak felled in a field. The sound of Rex barking came from far away, background noise as Maury rolled over, jumped to his feet, and swung a thick arm against the figure dancing about, a grotesque marionette, swinging and dodging Maury’s fists.
Then they were locked together, stumbling about the living room, breathing hard. The coffee table crashed onto its side, a chair toppled backward. She staggered toward them, looking for something to grab, some weapon. She spotted the lamp on the side table, but before she could reach it, they crashed into the table and the lamp fell, shattering into minuscule pieces of glass that spilled marbles across the tile. Rex was circling about, barking and yelping. Finally Maury wrenched himself out of the man’s grasp. He rocked backward before he threw a fist into the man’s chest.
Then the man rocked backward. Yes, that was how it happened. There had been a moment when she’d thought that it was over, that the intruder would collapse. He staggered about, throwing his head around, and that must have been what she was watching because she hadn’t seen him pull the gun out of the pocket of his bulky jacket. Yet he was pointing the black gun at Maury. Maury moved backward, both arms thrust out, as if he could have deflected the bullet that exploded in his chest. She blinked at the deadened report of the gunshot, when she had expected an explosion like an accumulation of all the noise in the world. Maury fell backward, head and shoulders hitting the floor in the doorway to the kitchen, blood blossoming across the front of his white tee shirt, running across the tile.
She pressed herself down behind the upturned table near the foot of the stairs and held her breath, terrified that the sound of her breathing would lead him to her. She could hear the small noise of Rex’s whimpers coming from the corner where they’d waited for Maury. Her eyes were glued to the man standing over Maury, head cocked to one side, the knitted cap pushed up into a peak. At first she thought he was looking for her, then she heard the sirens and realized that he was listening. He glanced around, and she moved back into the shadows along the wall, still holding her breath. She felt as if a stone were crushing her chest.
A door slammed somewhere, followed by a cacophony of voices, neighbors yelling across the yards: “What’s going on?” “You hear that?” And against the cacophony, the swelling noise of sirens.
The intruder swung about and ran through the front door.
She crawled around the table and across the cold tile to Maury. The black hole in his chest was like a crater sucking everything into it: tee shirt and blood and life, as if Maury himself would disappear into the crater. And yet it was his blood and life that were pouring out, turning the white tee shirt black.
She tried to find a pulse in his neck, her fingers as numb as dried twigs quivering against his warm skin. She was barely aware of Rex crouching next to her, or of the black boots and dark trousers of police officers moving toward them.
2
My name is Catherine McLeod.
I’m thirty-nine years old.
Divorced. Married six years, divorced ten months.
What do I do? I’ve been an investigative reporter for the Journal the last three years.
Maury Beekner is my friend. He came to help me. God, don’t let him die.
I don’t know the intruder.
I don’t know why he followed me. How would I know why he followed me?
I have no idea why anyone would want to kill me.
“Catherine? Are you okay?”
Catherine shifted her weight on the hard seat and looked across the metal table at the man with black hair cropped short over his ears, silver at the temples. “Detective Bustamante,” he’d said when he met her in the lobby at Denver Police Headquarters. “Nick Bustamante.” He had held out a large hand that could probably wrap around a basketball. “I’m handling the investigation into last night’s shooting.”
There was some comfort in that. She had felt the strength and determination in his grip.
“I’m okay,” she managed. They were in a cubicle not much larger than a closet with a one-way glass panel behind Bustamante and a door that led into the wide corridor they had traversed after they had stepped out of the elevator. Someone on the other side of the glass would videotape the interview, Bustamante had explained. She had a prickly sense of invisible eyes moving over her.
Bustamante opened a file folder and stared at a printed sheet. Filtering into the quiet were angry, insistent male voices moving along the corridor.
“I told the officers everything last night,” she said. Nick Bustamante was handsome in an unaware way. Dark eyes, the hint of a shadow along his jaw. “Can we finish up here? I have to check in at work and get back to the hospital.”
The sun was rising when she had left Denver Health. Layers of golds, tangerines, and magentas filled the eastern sky and cast a bloodred hue over the skyscrapers in the distance. She had hurried across the parking lot to her silver convertible and, somehow, had found her way through the empty streets back to her town house, but she couldn’t have retraced the route she’d taken. She remembered gripping the steering wheel, barely aware of the parking lots, gas stations, and stores, and finally the residential neighborhoods that blurred past.
She’d had to duck under the yellow police tape to get into the town house, ignoring the words Do Not Cross. She had forced herself to look away from the dark brown smears on the tile as she’d walked through the kitchen and out the back door to check on Rex in the dog run. Refilling the water dish, shaking dried food out of the bag into his pan, patting his head, going through the morning routine on automatic, as if everything were normal.
Back inside, she had climbed the stairs and fallen into an exhausted and jerky half sleep for about an hour, she guessed, although time had stood still since Maury was shot, as if everything had coalesced into that moment. She had felt groggy and half-sick as she’d dragged herself to her feet, showered, pulled on a sleeveless dress and sandals, and tried to do something with her makeup so that the woman staring back in the bathroom mirror didn’t resemble a drawn, blanched character in a horror movie. She had run her fingers through her black, shoulder-length hair and pushed back the shorter pieces that fell about her face, then made her way down the stairs—don’t look, don’t look. Then she had driven downtown to police headquarters, still on automatic, following the instructions of the police officer last night, as if she no longer had any control over her own life.
“I’m sorry to put you through it again,” Bustamante said, his attention still on the sheet of paper. He wore a white shirt, opened at the neck, and a summer-weight, tweedy brown jacket that, she guessed, he’d pulled on for the interview, judging by the uneasy way it rode across his broad shoulders. He would never be mistaken for a banker, she thought.
He looked up at her. “I need your statement today as well. You would be surprised how many details victims recall after the shock begins to wear off.” A flickering of sympathetic light in his dark
eyes. “You must still be in shock after seeing your friend shot.”
“I don’t know if he’s going to make it,” Catherine said, and with that, the hard knots of anxiety and fear she’d been struggling to swallow back began pouring out. The interview room and the man on the other side of the metal table were a watery blur. She ran her palm across her cheeks in a not very successful attempt to wipe away the warm tears that kept coming, barely aware of the white square that Nick Bustamante held out to her. She took the handkerchief, mopped at the moisture, and blew her nose.
“Philip and I were at the hospital the rest of the night,” she said, closing her fist around the damp handkerchief. She felt as if she were still in the ICU waiting room, she and Philip sitting side by side, two plastic statues molded to the plastic chairs, and all the time she had felt the resentment and anger blowing off Philip like smoke. Every time the metal door had swung open and a green-clad doctor walked through, they had jumped up and asked about Maury. The answer was always the same—no change—and always delivered in a flat, neutral tone. As if it weren’t Maury they were talking about—big, smiling, bearlike Maury— but some anonymous gunshot victim brought in from the street.
She went on: “They refused to let me see him. Family only, they said, which is crazy because he doesn’t have any family. We’re his family.”
“I see,” Bustamante said, as if he’d just framed a picture in his mind. He leaned back against his chair. “Is that why you called Maury after you spotted the man following you last night?”
“No, you don’t see. We’re not in a relationship, if that’s what you’re thinking. Maury and I are good friends, that’s all.” She could see by the way his features rearranged themselves around some new idea that it was exactly what he had been thinking. “It’s not sexual. Maury’s gay.” God, what did this have to do with anything? Silence filtered between them a moment. “They should have let us see him. What if he should die? He will have died alone, and we . . .” The tears started again. She rolled up the moist handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes.
“Philip would be . . .” Bustamante clasped his hands on the table.
“Philip Case,” she said. “They even refused to let him see Maury at first. He’d had to go home and get Maury’s power of attorney and all the other legal papers.”
“So Philip Case and Maury are . . .” He let the rest of it drift.
“Married,” she said, “even if the law doesn’t say so. Maury is my good friend. We’re very close.”
“I know somebody in hospital administration,” Bustamante said. “I’ll call her. Perhaps she can arrange to relax the rules in this case, if Philip agrees. No promises.”
“Thank you.”
He went back to the file folder, thumbed through the thin stack of papers, and pushed one toward her. It was a map of her neighborhood, enlarged from a map of Denver. A thick red line had been drawn around the town house development. “Show me where you first spotted the attacker,” he said.
Catherine pulled the map closer and set her index finger on the spot a block and a half from her townhome. “Here,” she said. “He may have started following me earlier.” Then she told him how she thought she’d heard footsteps behind her, but when she had turned around, no one was there. It struck her now that the man hadn’t wanted her to see him at that point, yet a few yards later, he had been confident enough not to care. The idea sent a chill through her. At that moment, he had been confident there was nothing she could do.
She hunched forward, clasped her arms against the chill, and told him the rest of it. How she had kept walking at the same steady pace, how she had waited until she was out of sight around the corner before she broke into a run and got inside her townhome. She had called Maury before she’d called the police.
She felt the pressure of the tears forming again. She pressed the handkerchief against her eyes. “The bastard crashed through the door with Maury and shot him,” she said. “I never should have called him. This wouldn’t have happened.” Her mouth felt dry, bitter tasting. She wished she had a drink—bourbon or a glass of wine.
She had to look away. Beyond the glass, a camera was videotaping everything; officers were watching and listening. There was no hiding from the truth: she had sacrificed Maury for her own safety. The realization made her feel sick to her stomach. What had she been thinking? That Maury could protect her from a man with a gun? And yet, she hadn’t known the man had a gun. She hadn’t wanted to be alone, that was all, and she knew Maury would have stayed until the police found the man or morning arrived, whichever came first, and she could forget the whole nightmare of it—the hunter coming down the moonlit sidewalk, stalking her.
“You said he’s your friend. Wouldn’t he have wanted you to call him?” Bustamante set his elbows on the table and regarded her over clasped hands. Something new had come into his eyes, as if he had been observing her under a microscope and found something unexpectedly interesting. “If the attacker was lurking outside when Maury Beekner arrived . . .”
“What do you mean, if?” Catherine stared at him. “Obviously he was waiting outside.” She’d covered enough criminal cases for the Journal to know how investigations went: Everything was on the table. No account of what had occurred was ever taken at face value. Stories were always layered, like plaster on a wall. Peel back the top coat and you got a different design, a whole different wall.
“What about the gunshot?” Bustamante’s voice sliced into her thoughts. “What did it sound like?”
“A dull thud,” she said. She could see the black tube attached to the gun. “He used a silencer.”
“You know guns?”
“My dad used to take me target shooting when I was growing up. He taught me a little about guns.”
“That would explain why the neighbors heard the commotion, but nobody recognized the gunshot,” Bustamante said. His voice was neutral. “Describe him for me. Anything familiar about him?” A distant look came into his eyes. He was still peeling back the layers, and she had the sickening sense that he expected to find something else.
“You think I’ve made this up?” she said. “You think I called Maury and shot him when he arrived?”
The detective didn’t say anything.
“My God!” Catherine started to get to her feet, then sat down hard. She could feel the flush of anger in her face. “The man who shot Maury was six feet tall.” She kept her voice steady and certain. “He had on a bulky jacket that made him seem bigger than he might have been. He seemed slim, wiry, with a big jacket on. He was dressed all in black—black pants, black jacket, black knit hat. He wore black gloves.” She didn’t know why she remembered the gloves, except that, closing her eyes, trying to remember every detail, she could see the image of him lasered on the back of her eyelids. “He looked like a monster.”
Bustamante took a moment, as if he were starting to believe her. “Not anyone you think you might know?” he said.
She opened her eyes. “He’s a rapist. He was trolling for a woman out alone. He happened in my neighborhood and zeroed in on me, that’s all. It could have been any woman.”
“It’s possible . . .” he began.
“Now what are you saying?” Catherine had the sense that he was probing yet another layer that she hadn’t realized existed. “That I was his target? He was after me? That’s ridiculous. I told you, I don’t know why anyone would want to harm me. There’s a rapist in the Washington Park area, right? He hasn’t been arrested yet.”
“Washington Park’s three miles away. No reports of intruders in your neighborhood. Last year there was a domestic disturbance call, and a couple of months ago, one of the neighbors backed out of his driveway and scraped the side of the car parked across the street. You live in a safe neighborhood.” Bustamante spread his large hands. Wisps of black hair curled over the edge of his jacket sleeves. “He used a gun with a silencer, he wore gloves. Isn’t it possible he was a man with a specific mission and he came prepared?”
“To kill me?”
He gave her a long, searching look. “Tell me about yourself,” he said. “Problems with any neighbors?”
Catherine shook her head, and he went on. “Any repairmen in your townhome lately?”
“No.”
“Altercations with other drivers?”
“No,” she said again.
“Anything out of the ordinary at all? Angry encounters with anyone in a store or restaurant?”
Catherine was quiet a moment. “Not exactly,” she said.
“Tell me.”
“About ten days ago, I was having coffee at a shop around the corner from the Journal. I realized I didn’t have my purse. I went back to the counter and the clerk gave it to me. Said someone had just turned it in. I must have set it down while I was ordering. Nothing was missing. It didn’t look as if anything inside had been disturbed.”
Bustamante took a moment before he said, “Family problems?”
“Oh, God.” She looked away. Where was this going? All this probing, and what good would it do? Her mouth had gone dry. She needed something to drink. “I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that’s all.”
He didn’t say anything, and Catherine understood he was waiting for her to go on. “I don’t have much of a family,” she said. “I was adopted when I was five years old. Now it’s just my mother, Marie, and me. I’ve always called her Marie.” Why was she going on like this? What did this matter? “My father died when I was a teenager. No brothers or sisters. Maury’s like a brother.”
“Ex-boyfriends?”
“Who want to kill me?” She forced a little laugh that sounded like the rasp of a death cough. “None who might care that much,” she said, folding her hands in her lap, avoiding his eyes. She felt like a schoolgirl called into the principal’s office for breaking some rule she didn’t know existed. “I haven’t been in a serious relationship”—she shrugged— “since my divorce.”
Blood Memory Page 2