Blood Memory

by Margaret Coel

  “Which brings us to your ex-husband. Lawrence Stern, part of the prominent Stern family, correct?”

  She studied the metal table: the file folder and the printed map with the thick, red lines, the stream of light reflected from the fluorescent fixture overhead. Detective Bustamante had done his homework. “There would be no reason for Lawrence to want me killed, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  “I’m not implying anything,” Bustamante said. “I want to nail the guy that followed you home last night and shot Maury Beekner. I don’t want him out walking the streets, so why don’t you just tell me about your relationship with Lawrence Stern.”

  “There is no relationship.” This was complicated, she was thinking. She hurried on: “We parted on friendly terms, irreconcilable differences, or some such. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  Bustamante’s eyebrows arched. “Six years? No big deal?”

  “We wanted different things, different lives.” She paused for a moment, trying to gather her thoughts into a logical sequence that would make sense to this stranger probing into her life. “We came from different backgrounds,” she said. “I grew up on the northwest side, not quite the right side, an adopted girl with no background, and Lawrence—well, he came from a pioneer Colorado family, the Denver Country Club and all that. He was Harvard; I was Metro State. He was WASP in capital letters, a real blueblood, a Denver aristocrat.” She paused. “And I don’t really know who I am.”

  That had stopped him, she thought. She tried for a smile to let him know that it was all right. It was just the way things were. When he didn’t say anything, she said, “You might say that my genealogy is mixed. I’m part Indian, Arapaho, maybe, but it wasn’t something that was ever discussed. It was a miracle Lawrence and I ever met.”

  Bustamante had an annoying way of remaining absolutely quiet.

  She went on: “I was a general assignment reporter at the Journal, occasionally covering social news. You know, who attended which fund-raising event and donated the most money, who wore tailored tuxedos and designer gowns and had the biggest hair, the best face-lifts, and the whitest smiles. Supposedly it was a temporary assignment until a position as investigative reporter opened up. It lasted three years. I didn’t mind it all that much. I got to see another world, and I met interesting people.”

  “You met Lawrence?”

  Catherine nodded. “I did a story on his engagement party. We ran photos of several guests and a photo of Lawrence holding his fiancée’s hand. Very blond, very beautiful, and appropriate for him. He should have married her, but I remember that when the photographer snapped the picture, Lawrence was looking at me. He called the next day and invited me to lunch. I thought he was going to give me a scoop about the upcoming wedding. Instead, he told me they had agreed to call it off.”

  “How did it end, your marriage to Lawrence Stern? Large alimony he might want to stop paying?”

  “You’re out of line.” She was beginning to feel an intense dislike for the man across from her.

  He didn’t blink or move. “I’m conducting an investigation. Most crimes are solved in the inner circle—family, friends.”

  She took a moment before she said, “I’ll answer the question because you’ll just keep asking until I do. Lawrence and I parted on good terms. There’s no alimony. He gave me a town house, a car, and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. We go to lunch occasionally. We’re friends.” We sleep together once in a while, she was thinking, but that wasn’t any of Detective Bustamante’s business.

  “Two hundred and fifty thou from the Stern family?” Bustamante shook his head. “Didn’t I just read your ex-husband built the hundred-million-dollar office and residential complex near Colorado Boulevard? Six years of marriage, seems like you could have gotten more.”

  “You sound like my divorce lawyer.”

  “Maury Beekner,” he said. She imagined a hive of assistants bent over computers somewhere in the windowless cellars of the Denver Police Headquarters, accessing her life.

  She said, “I’m going to tell you what I told Maury. I didn’t marry Lawrence for his money, and I didn’t divorce him for his money. Is that understood?”

  “Let’s discuss your current position at the Journal,” he said without missing a beat. “You’ve been there now for three years. You must have taken some time off.”

  She shrugged. “I stopped working for a while when I was married. Lawrence didn’t really approve, and . . .” She tried to blink back the memories looming in front of her. “. . . there were so many obligations.”

  “I see. I’ve read some of your articles. I pulled a number of them this morning. You dig beneath the PR releases. Maybe you’ve stepped on somebody’s toes.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Got somebody mad enough to send a killer after you?”

  “I’m a reporter,” she said. “I’m paid to do the research, gather the facts, and write the stories. I don’t make up the stories.”

  Bustamante folded his elbows on the table and leaned toward her. “I want you to think very carefully. Anybody called or e-mailed you, taken issue with what you’ve written?”

  “Every day,” she said. “It’s part of the business. If I make a mistake, I retract it in the next issue.”

  “Threatened you?”

  “You mean, called me too dumb to be a reporter, too biased toward the right or the left, too stubborn and pigheaded to see the truth?” Catherine shook her head. This wasn’t the early decades of the last century when irate readers broke into the offices of the Denver newspapers and shot at the editors, wounding some of them. “It’s part of the business. I report the facts as I find them.”

  “State treasurer charged with embezzlement. You came down pretty hard on that story. Went into his background, wrote about how he’d been fired from a job twenty years ago after accounting irregularities were discovered. And what about the Civic Center architectural plans? How many stories did you write on how the design had nothing to do with Denver’s history and how it would destroy Civic Center? Seems to me your stories influenced the city council’s vote. The architects folded their tent and went back to Boston or New York or wherever they came from.”

  “Boston,” she said. “They have commissions around the world. The Civic Center makeover was a minor job. I hardly think they would send someone to shoot me.”

  “The point is, Catherine,” he said, “you’ve taken on tough issues involving important people. Last couple of weeks you’ve written about how the Arapahos and Cheyennes have filed claims on twenty-seven million acres of Colorado.”

  “It’s a developing story. The government has already settled the land claims. The tribes were paid $15 million in 1965. They’re hoping Congress will reopen the agreement.” She shrugged. “Look, the Mirror has been covering the same story. Nothing I’ve written would make someone want to kill me.” Catherine started to lift herself to her feet. “Are we done here?”

  Bustamante stood up, reached inside his sport coat, and pulled out a business card. He leaned over the table, scratched a number on the back side of the card, and handed it to her. “You can reach me on my cell at any time.” Then he closed the file folder over the thin stack of papers and picked it up. “You should stay somewhere else for a while,” he said.

  “Somewhere else?” The town house was home. There wasn’t anywhere else. She didn’t want to camp out in some motel that allowed dogs. “Check your unsolved rape cases,” she said.

  “Whoever the guy is, he knows where you live.” Bustamante kept his expression the same. He gripped the folder in one hand and opened the door with the other.

  Catherine stood rooted to the floor. She felt as if he’d slapped her in the face with a wet towel. He knows where you live. She had been pushing the truth from her mind. She had to hold on to the edge of the table a moment before she trusted herself to cross the room and walk into the corridor. She had no idea where she and Rex could go.

&nbs
p; 3

  Erik Bolton surveyed the array of guns and ammunition on the bedspread. The motel room smelled of cigarette smoke and stale food. Daylight filtered past the dingy curtains. He’d had to switch on the lamp by the bed to appreciate the subtle differences in his collection. He didn’t need to carry the assortment with him—any one of them could handle the job, but he liked having them. The way they looked nestled in purple velvet inside the walnut case he’d had constructed. Businessmen carried laptops and files. He carried guns.

  The Beretta, Model 21A. The little .22, excellent for close range, easily concealed. The semiautomatic Beretta, 92FS—a sentimental favorite. It was accurate. He could always count on it. He liked the Sig Sauer P220, which he considered the most accurate .45 out of the box. Decocking lever, automatic firing pin safety block that meant the pistol was always ready. A sentimental favorite; he’d been armed with one in the Army. Accurate, but loud. And it wasn’t fitted for a silencer. He’d needed a silencer last night. He’d carried the Sig 226 Tactical, easy to control and threaded for a recoil reducer that screwed on the same as a silencer.

  He slid along the edge of the bed, lifting each of the guns in turn, savoring the weight and the smooth feel of the metal. Power. Now this was power. He had on a white tee shirt and shorts, and the cheap, rough fabric of the red and black striped bedspread nipped at the back of his thighs. He had made an unfortunate move last night, but one unfortunate move wasn’t the game. It was only the opening gambit. The job paid $50,000, which he made sure was deposited in his account in the Cayman Islands before he’d started the surveillance.

  Enough money to stay in a fine hotel in downtown Denver. He had walked through the lobbies and listened with a distinct pleasure to the clack of his own boots on the marble floors glistening under the chandeliers. He’d wandered about, had a drink in the bars. The Ship Tavern at the Brown Palace, now that was a nice bar, wood paneling and Oriental carpets and all of it drenched in history. He could stay anywhere, pull out his wallet and slap the cash on the registration counter, but that wasn’t his way. Stay anonymous, that was best. A seedy motel on Santa Fe Drive where the hungover clerk with a three-day-old stubble was used to taking cash, hadn’t bothered to look at him, and would never pick him out of a police album filled with the faces of losers.

  Erik Bolton was not a loser. He was a winner with, admittedly, a minor setback in the first move of the game. He picked up the Sig 226 Tactical and ran his index finger over the stainless steel frame and the soft rubber grip. He screwed on the silencer and lifted the gun, feeling again the familiar heft of it. He had chosen the correct weapon. No one would have recognized the gunshot for what it was, even if they had heard a noise. He could have shot her and been out of the town house in minutes.

  The plan had been foolproof. He’d been watching Catherine McLeod for ten days. He had even managed to slip the wallet out of her purse in the coffee shop, copy down the credit card numbers. He’d handed the purse to the kid at the counter, said he’d found it on the floor. All before she had realized her purse was gone. He had called his contact at the credit card company, an old friend he’d worked with on two or three other assignments. The minute Catherine used her card, the friend would let him know.

  How smoothly everything would work. He had even managed to steal a BlackBerry the day before, just lifted it out of the purse of a very stupid girl in line at another coffee shop. The cell phones that he kept on hand were another story. Cheap phones, purchased. The use-once-throw-away type. He smiled at the thought. Everything was in perfect order.

  After the first few days, he’d known everything he needed to know about Catherine McLeod. Simple life, pared down to basics. She left her town house every morning at seven thirty, got into her silver Chrysler convertible, drove downtown with the top up, and parked in the lot next to the Journal. She walked inside a few minutes before eight. He had parked the brown sedan he’d rented a half block away and waited near the entrance, dressed in a suit, inconspicuous, a businessman checking his wristwatch. Sometimes he had parked in the lot across the street, waited for her to come out, and followed her.

  She had come through the door a couple of times each day, gotten into the convertible, and driven off. He had stayed two or three cars behind, a safe distance. Once she’d driven to a two-story Victorian house on the northwest side of town, and he had waited a discreet distance down the street. Interviewing someone for a story, he’d thought at first, but later, when he’d checked on the occupant, he had found that her mother lived in the house. Her adoptive mother. Name: Marie Lansing McLeod. He had added those pieces of information to everything else he had learned.

  A couple of afternoons Catherine had emerged from the building and walked down the street. He’d followed her, staying a safe distance behind. She had gotten on the Sixteenth Street shuttle, and he had managed to jump on before it had pulled away. She had ridden to the end of the line at Civic Center, then walked to the Denver Public Library where, he’d discovered, she had spent several hours working in the Western History Department.

  He had followed her to restaurants where she had met Maury Beekner, who looked like a gorilla, thick black hair, black hair spilling out of the V of his polo shirts. Another man had joined them—Philip Case, Maury’s lover, he discovered. And that had been easy. He had followed one of Beekner’s secretaries to a bar, bought her a drink, and got her chatting. He’d learned how much Maury Beekner cared about his clients, made friends with them, got involved in ways that, well, in her opinion—but no one ever asked her opinion—weren’t smart.

  Last Saturday morning he had followed Catherine McLeod to Confluence Park on the western edge of downtown. Maury and Philip were waiting on bikes, balanced on the seats, tipping water into their mouths out of plastic bottles. They looked ridiculous—tight, shiny bike shorts and shiny white shirts and sweat bands around their heads. There was a bike for Catherine waiting on the kick stand, and the three of them had started off. He decided against renting a bike and following. Let her enjoy her last Saturday, he’d thought.

  Last week he had followed her to a café on Larimer Street where she had met a man with black hair and big shoulders, an Indian. They’d taken a table on the sidewalk and lingered over sandwiches and coffee, and all the time she had scribbled in a little notepad next to her plate. In a way, it was a shame. All that effort for a story she would never live to write.

  He had stayed with her when she went to the supermarket and the liquor store, where she had emerged with a brown bag cradled against her. So she liked to drink, and that was also good information. A drink or two when she got home at night. She would be less alert, a little cloudy.

  Once, she had gone into a hair salon. He’d strolled across the street, keeping an eye on her through the plate glass window. Seated in a swivel chair wrapped in a white gown with a skinny, dark-haired man ruffling and blow-drying her black hair. He had followed her home each day, and he wasn’t sure when he’d begun to—what was it?—connect with her. Whether it was the black hair flying about her head, so wild and free, or the quiet in her neighborhood. Most of the neighbors didn’t even come home until late at night. And she walked the dog every night, no matter how late she got home. That was a bonus.

  It had come over him gradually, the desire to have a little fun, walk behind her at night, scare her, then enjoy himself in the town house for a half hour or so, before he shot her. All the pieces of the plan fell together so neatly that he knew it was the way it should be. The other victims—they had been men. He had never killed a woman before, and that was what had tripped him up, he realized now, led to the unfortunate move. He’d never had the urge to do any of the other victims. But he had made a mistake. He should have expected her to call Maury Beekner. As it turned out, though, the gorilla had been an easy way into the town house. And what did he matter? Collateral damage.

  The client had called his cell before six this morning. He had struggled upward out of a black well, sweeping his hand across
the night table, knocking the cheap clock onto the floor. Working into his consciousness was the thought that it was Deborah, that something had happened, an accident, one of the kids in the emergency room. But it hadn’t been Deborah’s voice shouting in his ear. He had forced himself to the side of the bed, feet planted on the rough carpet, and explained. Everything was under control, he would take care of it. There wouldn’t be any more glitches—he had refrained from calling what had happened last night a mistake.

  He raised the Sig 226 and pointed it toward the door. He could blow out the lock. It would be easy. He was an expert, well-trained and experienced. He set the gun in its compartment in the case. After last night he had revised his plans. He knew Catherine McLeod. She would continue to go to the office for a day or two in an attempt to live her life as usual. He could crouch behind the half wall at the edge of the parking lot across the street, sight her in as she walked from the parking lot to the front door. He could take her out easily, but it would be risky. Other employees coming in and out, traffic lumbering past, which would make it difficult to drive away without some fool making him in the brown Ford that he had rented.

  He could follow the original plan and kill her at home, but that was also risky now. The police would block off the house for a few days and step up patrol of the neighborhood. Nosy neighbors would start looking for any vehicle they hadn’t noticed before.

  In any case, as soon as she suspected that he was not a random intruder in the night, she would go into hiding. Stop going to work, stop living at home. He would have to finish the assignment before that happened, which gave him two days at the most, he figured. He knew her.

  There was one place she was sure to go. Unless her gorilla friend died from the bullet he’d put in him, Catherine McLeod would go to Denver Health. He had checked on the parking lot this morning, the number of exits, the quickest way onto Speer Boulevard. He’d seen her come through the wide glass doors at the entrance, follow the sidewalk that bordered the lot, and walk between the parked cars to the convertible. She looked terrible: hair uncombed and matted, face pinched, shoulders hunched. He could have killed her then, but he hadn’t yet mapped out the best escape route. People were coming out of the building and walking across the lot. There would always be people about, but he’d decided that the little groups hurrying to and from the hospital, consumed with their own worries, would work to his advantage. They wouldn’t notice him. They wouldn’t remember.