The Coldest Fear

by Rick Reed

  “Jon, would you mind coming in here a minute?” Jack said from the doorway of the apartment.

  Jon looked up and a shadow crossed his features. Jack had seen this look on hundreds of witnesses and suspects. The “moment of truth” look. When they realize that you know.

  “Does he have to know?” Jon asked and nodded toward the chief of police.

  “It depends, Jon,” Jack answered truthfully.

  Samuels tied the dog’s leash to the railing and hugged her, commanding her to stay, and trudged down the porch. He entered the apartment and motioned for the two detectives to follow him into the bedroom. He opened the closet and Jack and Liddell saw a wide assortment of Victoria’s Secret–type bras, panties, and other lingerie on hangers. There were at least a hundred pieces in all, and on the floor of the closet was an assortment of high-heel shoes and sandals and boots.

  “I guess your Sergeant Walker thought all this was mine,” Samuels said. A sardonic grin played at the corners of his mouth. “Not really my style. Or my size.”

  Jack sat on the edge of the bed and said, “What are you not telling us, Jon?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The killer stayed in the shadows, leaning against one of the huge metal struts of the abandoned Ohio Street Rail Bridge, and looked down at least thirty feet into the water that flowed below him. He should have come here earlier, but even he had to work sometimes.

  The Ohio Street Bridge had been abandoned in the late seventies when the new Ohio Street was built less than a hundred yards from the old one. At one time there were two bridges, side by side, one for the trains and one for vehicular traffic, and both spanned the mouth of Pigeon Creek where it emptied into the Ohio River. The railway bridge had been upgraded and painted, but the traffic bridge had fallen into disrepair and was an eyesore in the area.

  Just downriver from that spot the Blue Star Casino, the floating riverboat, was anchored. Upriver was the abandoned SIGECO (Southern Indiana Gas & Electric Company) building, which had supplied electricity to the tri-state area before coal stopped being such a big part of the fuel source.

  He knew all of this because his grandparents had owned a houseboat that they kept tied up on the water not far from where he now stood. Everything was gone now. His grandparents died while he was still young, and although they had always been good to him, his memories of the houseboat were clearer than those of his grandparents. His life had started inside the cold concrete walls of a mental asylum. He had accepted the fact that he would never see his sister or mother again, and that he had killed his father. He had become The Cleaver.

  And now, because of Cordelia, he had found his mother. The woman who had abandoned him. He was grateful to her, because she had caused him to become the man he was today. But he hated her for leaving him with an abusive degenerate who was a father in name only. He had settled up with his old man years ago.

  Sometimes, in that dark period between sleep and dreams, reality and “what might be” clashed in his heart. There were nights when he would wake screaming, but there was no sound, and his heart would trip-hammer against his ribs. The medicine the doctors had given him only made it worse. They only numbed the outward expression of disgust and flight he so desperately sought in his dreams. If there was a God, then there was surely a Hell and he had spent most of his life there.

  He wished he could make everyone else see what he saw. Feel what he felt. But what he had learned from life is that people tend to ignore others, simply dismiss them, unless there is something life-changing, some catastrophic event, to stamp a memory onto their minds. The thought that people were more forgettable than events both amused and comforted him. Soon there would be another unforgettable event here. In fact, it would be front-page news.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “Look, Detective Murphy, I don’t want to say anything more,” Jonathan Samuels said. He sat on the edge of the couch, head propped between his hands.

  “Jon, I don’t want you to say anything bad about your friend. I just need to know the truth. That’s the best way to help her now. To find out who did this to her,” Jack said. Liddell had opted to wait outside with Chief Johnson. Jon was gradually opening up, but Jack knew the man was holding something back.

  Jon let out a deep sigh, and said, “Cordelia was a call girl.” He got up and paced around the room. “Those clothes you found in my room are hers. I hid them from your men because I didn’t want anyone to know. But that’s all there is. I don’t know any more.”

  “What about her appointment with Lenny Bange? Could Lenny know more than he is telling us?”

  Jon sat motionless. If he heard the question he wasn’t going to answer. Jack knew this was all he would get from him for now.

  “Okay. That’s something, I guess.” Jack stood and handed Jon a business card. “If you think of something else, please call me.” When Jon didn’t look up, Jack leaned over him and made eye contact. “No matter how trivial it might seem. Understand?”

  Jon gave a half smile. “You’re a good man, Detective Murphy.”

  “I don’t know about that, but if I promise you something you can count on it.”

  He left Jonathan Samuels in his living room. The dog barked at him as he walked to the stairway, and continued to do so as he made his way to the car where Liddell waited for him.

  Chief Johnson joined Jack and Liddell in the parking lot.

  “Give you anything new?” Liddell asked.

  Jack looked at the chief. He was uneasy talking about the case in front of the man. But he was the chief of police here and had a right to know what was going on.

  “The Victoria’s Secret stuff we found in Jon’s room belonged to Cordelia,” Jack said, and he noticed that Liddell was surprised but Chief Johnson didn’t react. He remembered what Jon had said about the chief ’s unwarranted attention to Cordelia. This little town is just full of secrets, Jack thought.

  “It makes me think we need to dig harder into Louise Brigham’s past. Maybe there’s something we didn’t find there,” Jack said.

  “You think she might have been a call girl, too?” Liddell asked.

  “So Cordelia’s death probably has nothing to do with her living here,” Chief Johnson said, a little too quickly for Jack’s taste. “I guess you boys have been barking up the wrong tree.”

  The chief hitched his gun belt up and made for Jon’s apartment. “I’ll tell the judge what you found,” he said over his shoulder, “but first I got some words with Mr. Jonathan Samuels.”

  “Did we say that her death had anything to do with living here?” Liddell asked.

  “Let me tell you what Jon told me about the chief,” Jack said, and from upstairs they could hear the booming voice of the chief yelling over the strained voice of the younger man.

  On the drive back to Evansville the two detectives drove in silence for a few miles before Liddell broke the silence, saying, “Chief Johnson didn’t seem surprised that Cordelia was in the flesh business.”

  “You noticed that, too, huh?” Jack had an unpleasant image come to mind of a red-faced, sweating Chief Johnson lying on top of the petite young woman, and he shuddered.

  “She worked a part-time job at the Dollar General in town,” Liddell said. “Think we should talk to them?”

  “The chief said she only worked there during the holiday seasons. And Samuels said she hadn’t worked there for months. I doubt it will be anything.”

  “I don’t think Louise Brigham was a hooker, Jack,” Liddell said.

  “Me either,” Jack admitted. “I think she was just what she appeared to be, a single mom trying to get by.” He was quiet, thinking, and then said, “I think Cordelia was the real target. Brigham was a cover-up.”

  “Yeah,” Liddell agreed. “Look at what the killer did to Cordelia. You don’t do that kind of violence unless you have a personal grudge. Cordelia was definitely a person of interest to the killer.”

  “Samuels knows more than he’s telling,” Jack a
dded. “He had time to hide things in the apartment before we came back with a search warrant.”

  “How much do you think the chief is involved?” Liddell asked.

  “The judge said the chief came here about ten years ago. Cordelia’s problems started way before that. Her mother left just after her birth and was never seen again. Her father was murdered by her brother when she was two years old. And according to Samuels and Lieutenant Johnson and others, she has never stopped looking for her mother and brother,” Jack said.

  “Which brings us back to her appointment with Lenny Bange,” Liddell added. “But what could Lenny do for her?”

  Neither man knew the answer to that question.

  “Well, at least we now know how she was going to be able to support herself,” Jack said. “That is something we need to know more about.” He looked out the window and saw golden cornfields glowing in the afternoon sun. “Needle in a haystack,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Shawneetown Police Lieutenant JJ Johnson put the binoculars on the seat beside him and started the engine of his police cruiser. He’d watched the Evansville police officers and Uncle Bob going in and out of Cordelia and Jon’s apartment. They had come away empty-handed.

  Then he watched Uncle Bob reading the riot act to Jon, and the whole time Jon just kept his eyes on the ground with his fists clenching and unclenching. JJ had hoped to see Jon haul off and pop Uncle Bob in the kisser, but he’d known Jon since grade school and there was no way he would do something like that.

  JJ then parked on a side lane and waited for everyone to leave. Uncle Bob and the Evansville guys left, but Samuels was still in his apartment. JJ hoped Jon would be pissed and take off just to get away, and he was right. A few minutes after Uncle Bob had driven by, he spotted Jon Samuels’s little purple Pontiac Vibe pull out onto the road that ran back into Old Shawneetown. The dog was riding shotgun with its head stuck as far out the window as possible.

  He didn’t know how long Jon would be gone, but he would have to make the best of it if he was going to get a chance to look around that apartment on his own.

  He parked in front and hurried up the stairs to Jon’s door. He’d been here many times as a friend and even if someone did see his car outside it wouldn’t mean anything. The key was under the mat like it always was and he used it to open the door, then put the key back.

  JJ stepped inside and shut the door behind him. He knew Cordelia’s bedroom was on the left and Jon’s on the right, but what he was looking for wouldn’t be in a bedroom. Cordelia was too smart for that. And she was too smart to tell Jon everything she was up to.

  Those Evansville detectives seemed pretty sharp, but then Jon knew a thing or two about searching, too. He knew because he was good at hiding things of his own, and had been doing so since he was a youngster. For example, there was an ounce of weed hidden in the police station that Uncle Bob had never found. JJ was careful to smoke it outside, and only then when he knew where his uncle was located, but the fact that his fat-ass uncle had never sniffed it out told JJ that he was a better cop than Bob would ever be. You gotta think like ’em to catch ’em, he always said. So now, if Cordelia had something important, where would she have hid it? he asked himself.

  He looked under the throw rug in the living room and found some old rolling papers. Pocketing these, he checked the bathroom. He reached his hand into the toilet trap, but there wasn’t anything hidden there. He looked inside the toilet tank and again nothing. He checked under the sink, shook out all the towels and washrags and even dumped the talcum powder. Nothing.

  He went back to the living room and was about to leave when he noticed it was awfully cold in the apartment. The air conditioner was on high and it was only seventy degrees outside.

  The air conditioner, he thought, and went to the a/c unit that was fitted into the wall under the living-room windows. He looked at the frame and saw that it wasn’t stuck down too tight. JJ pulled out a penknife and pried at one side of the frame until it popped off the wall.

  At first he didn’t see anything but the air conditioner unit and the metal housing that held it in place. He took a small powerful flashlight from his pocket and shone it around the edges of the unit. There was something underneath that looked like a piece of cloth.

  JJ used the penknife to snag the cloth and pull it free from the housing. The material was wrapped around something and when he pulled it free, a small paperback book fell to the floor. He picked it up and looked at it more closely and realized it wasn’t a novel. He opened it and looked at the first page of handwriting.

  “Hot damn!” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The clock on the wall over the detective sergeant’s desk said it was three-thirty in the afternoon. Only a few of the second-shift detectives were still in the office. Most had reported in at three and then got the hell out before Sergeant Mattingly could assign them more work. The ones that were left in the office had been conscripted into helping with the telephones and they were none too happy with Jack and Liddell.

  Not that they blamed Jack and Liddell for the onslaught of telephone calls since the news release of the murders, but they did think that Jack and Liddell should answer their own phones. Jack didn’t blame them. Answering calls from every crackpot in the city definitely sucked.

  Jack made it to the back of the room, where he expected to find a foot-tall stack of messages regarding the murders, but was surprised to find his desk had been cleaned off.

  “You’re stuff’s been taken by Homeland Security,” Sergeant Mattingly yelled at him from across the room. “Something about it being considered toxic waste and declared an issue of national security.”

  “Where am I supposed to work, Sarge?” Jack asked.

  “You have a new office in the basement, Jack. The old ‘training’ office,” Mattingly said, a grin plastered on his face.

  “Yeah, the toilet-training office!” one of the detectives said loudly, and everyone laughed.

  Jack knew where the old training office was located. He also knew it had been vacated by the training unit because it was considered a health hazard. The police department was housed in the Civic Center, on the same branch of the building as the sheriff ’s department. The police department had most of the first floor and basement, while the sheriff ’s department and jail were housed on the second and third floors.

  The inmates had figured this out and would routinely stuff clothing or sheets into their toilets to cause them to back up into the walls and plumbing chases. The waste would eventually find its way through the ceiling of the police department.

  “Better take a raincoat,” someone yelled at Jack as he left the office.

  JJ sat at the breakfast bar in Jon Samuels’s apartment. The little book he’d found hidden in the air-conditioning unit lay open on the cigarette-burned Formica countertop. There was no name or other identifying marks on the covers of the book, but he was pretty sure it had belonged to Cordelia. It was a combination diary, address book, and appointment book.

  He recognized several of the names listed in that little book, and they belonged to some pretty important people. He was pretty sure the other names were fat cats as well.

  So this was Cordelia’s client book, he thought. I never would’ve believed she was doing all these guys. The Cordelia who JJ remembered while growing up was very quiet and kept to herself. She was a looker for sure, but because he had grown up in the same house with her, he had never thought of her as a woman. But after reading some of the entries here he had a whole new view of who Cordelia had been.

  He had always wondered why she had taken the apartment with Jon, and way out in the cornfields away from everyone. But now it kind of made sense. She and Jon both had things about their lives they didn’t want to parade in front of the public. Everyone knew Jon was as gay as a Care Bear, but outside of the local names in this notebook, probably no one in Shawneetown had any idea that Cordelia was a hooker.

&n
bsp; Uncle Bob had taken a chunk out of his ass after those Evansville detectives complained about him talking to that reporter. But now JJ had something that would eliminate that from ever happening again. Uncle Bob and Cordelia! he mused. Who’da ever thunk it?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “Hey, Garcia?” Liddell said from his desk in their temporary office. There was room for exactly three desks in the cramped quarters that used to be the “training office” in the basement of the police station. It smelled of wet dog and more unpleasant things. The concrete walls were covered with cracked and peeling puke-green paint and stains.

  Garcia was removing laptops, extra monitors, and other electrical equipment from three banker’s boxes stacked on a large table that ran across the back of the room. “What is it, Cajun?” she replied. She didn’t bother to look up. She knew that Blanchard was up to some stupid joke. He probably has pencils sticking out of his nose or something, she thought, and then couldn’t help but smile at the thought. He’s just a big kid.

  Liddell’s mouth was full of the Styrofoam peanuts that some of Garcia’s equipment had been packed with, and he couldn’t call her name again, so he just grunted.

  Garcia sighed and looked up.

  Liddell began shooting the Styrofoam peanuts out of his mouth, just as Jack came into the office.

  “If we don’t look, will he quit?” she asked, and Jack shrugged.

  “Nah. He’s not out of peanuts,” Jack said. “Which desk is mine?”

  Garcia pointed to the remaining desks and said, “Take your pick. Your stuff is in the little storage room over there.” She hooked a thumb behind her at another door. The storage room was actually a tiny closet that held a stack of boxes.

  Liddell was now cleaning the top of his desk with Lysol and a rag.