Resurrection Blues

by James, Harper

  He didn’t have to wait long to find out who.

  Chapter 41

  THERE WAS NO POINT spending any more time with Ivanovsky. He’d confirmed what had been obvious, that Lauren’s death was faked. And he’d explained how it had been done. But not why, and that was far more important.

  Evan left him in the middle of calling for an emergency glazing service and went to sit in his car. He got out his phone and checked the missed call. His heart sank as he saw the name. Arturo Rivera. The nagging twinge of anxiety he’d felt in Ivanovsky’s house came back with a vengeance. There was nothing nagging about it this time. It was screaming at him.

  He called Arturo back. It went to voicemail, as he knew it would. Should he call the police?

  No need.

  They were ringing him now. At least Guillory was. Ten minutes earlier, before the brick had interrupted his tête-à-tête with Ivanovsky so rudely, he’d have said she was calling him back with more information about either Kristina Kincade’s death or Valentine Waits. Not now. Now he had a very bad feeling indeed.

  ‘You okay?’ she said, a hint of concern in her voice.

  It wasn’t the sort of emotion he was used to hearing from her. Then he realized he hadn’t said anything when he answered the call, just waited for whatever bad news it was to be delivered down the line.

  ‘Yeah. I’m good. I hope you’re not going to change that.’

  A strangled laugh echoed strangely in his ear.

  ‘What? By cancelling Baltimore, you mean?’

  The attempt at humor spoke volumes. Something bad was on its way.

  ‘That would be bad enough, Kate, but I get the feeling it’s something even worse.’

  ‘Arturo Rivera. That was the guy with you in Bar Coyote the other night wasn’t it?’

  Evan’s breath caught in his throat, his chest tight. He pushed open the door with his foot and got out of the car. Glancing back up at Ivanovsky’s house, he saw him staring at him through the open space where his window should have been. He turned his back and walked around the car, leaned against it with his back to Ivanovsky.

  ‘Yep.’

  Keep it short and sweet. Seemed she felt the same. Verbose had no place here.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  Well, maybe not so sweet.

  His premonition had come true. From the moment the brick came sailing through the window, he’d known something like this was on its way. He hadn’t expected it to be so fast, that’s all. He also knew where the conversation was going. He knew how he’d be feeling by the end of it too.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Somebody beat him to death with a baseball bat. Dumped him in an alley.’

  ‘You calling me because I was the last one to see him alive.’

  He imagined her standing with her eyes shut for some reason, head down, trying to make it all go away. Maybe because he felt like doing it himself. He tried it. It didn’t make it all go away, of course, it made it worse. Images of Arturo Rivera immediately flooded his mind. Arturo sitting at the table in Bar Coyote, a small smile on his lips as he watched the macho stand-off between Evan and Guillory’s friend, Just-so. The look of horror on Arturo’s face as he awoke to find his estranged wife standing over him before she hauled him outside for the warning he should have heeded. He opened his eyes again quickly.

  ‘That’s one reason. I recognized him from the bar.’

  ‘I’m not a suspect, am I?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You sure? Your friend Just-so, the prosecutor, was looking at me as if he’d like to see me in a professional capacity.’

  ‘I thought we’d dealt with that.’

  In the background he heard the sound of a police radio and beyond that, traffic sounds, an angry horn blaring. Then a sound he recognized only too well. A man’s voice.

  Jesus, Kate, you’re not talking to the asshole already.

  Ryder.

  ‘You’re still at the scene? With Donut?’

  ‘Uh-huh. You always seem to forget he’s my partner.’

  Ryder had a point. First time ever. That didn’t make it any less valid. What was she doing talking to him already? It must have only just have happened. He felt the first tug of what would grow into a red tide of guilt pluck at him.

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘Last hour or so.’

  ‘That’s very definite.’

  ‘Apart from the fact that he’s still warm and only just stopped twitching, we can pin it down by a couple calls he made on his cellphone. He only made two calls today.’

  He knew then why she was calling him. He wanted to crawl away somewhere like a sick dog gone under a porch to die.

  ‘First call he made was at’—there was a pause as she consulted her notebook, the sound of pages flicked with a finger—‘seven forty-seven.’

  His gut twisted a little tighter, a physical pain gnawing at his stomach. In his mind it was seven forty-seven again. He felt the soft breeze blowing across his face, the support of the car seat comfortable under him as he chose to sit in his car after leaving Tom Jacobson instead of going up to his office. He silently mouthed the words she gave voice to.

  ‘That call was to your office number.’

  He remembered telling Arturo to keep the business card in case he needed it. Seemed like he’d needed it in a big way, so he’d called Evan for help. And Evan had been sitting comfortably in his car downstairs, enjoying the warmth of the sun through the windshield.

  ‘Then there’s a gap of just over an hour before he made his next call. No idea what he was doing for that hour.’

  Being hunted down, what do you think?

  He wanted to scream it down the phone at her. Better still, put Donut on the line.

  ‘Then, at eight fifty-four, he called—’

  This time he didn’t bother mouthing the words, just came right out and said them.

  ‘My cellphone.’

  ‘Correct.’

  Evan pushed his butt off the Corvette’s fender and walked slowly down the street, his eyes on his feet the whole time. The silence coming down the line invited him to explain, to justify himself.

  ‘I was on my way to talk to Ivanovsky. Seeing as it’s such a beautiful day’—he stopped and stared up at the clear blue sky—‘or it was until this happened, I had the roof down. I didn’t hear it.’

  He stopped short of explaining how he was driving the car hard at the time on account of her teasing remarks. No need to drag anyone else into his guilt trip. He spun around on his heel and re-traced his footsteps back towards his car. He kicked angrily at a small rock, sent it flying into the middle of the road. The tire of a passing car caught it, fired it out sideways like a bullet. There was a sound like somebody beating on a cast-iron skillet with a hammer as the rock pinged into the Corvette’s gleaming paintwork. He barely noticed.

  ‘Don’t give yourself a hard time, Evan. His phone was found on the ground next to him. It looks as if he was hit for the first time as he finished the call. He dropped the phone, didn’t have time to put it away. Even if you’d picked up, you’d never have got back in time. All that would’ve happened is you’d have had to listen to the sound of an old man’s head getting caved in with a baseball bat.’

  If her words were meant to comfort him, then the Captain needed to send her on a refresher course of some kind. Deep down though, he knew there wasn’t a training program yet invented to deal with a man on a mission to blame himself.

  ‘You might want to check your voicemail. He might have left you a message.’

  ‘It’s a bit late now.’

  She was very patient, didn’t snap at him.

  ‘I meant in case he said who was after him.’

  ‘Right.’

  There was a lot of information in that word. It said he didn’t need Arturo Rivera to tell him who was after him, he already knew. It also said he was keeping that information to himself for the time being. He had a lot of self-recrimination to get through before he
felt like saying anything productive.

  ‘If I’d been in my office that would have given me an hour to get to him.’

  Guillory was up to the challenge. She’d seen him at his lowest, giving himself a hard time over Sarah’s disappearance after too many beers. She knew he was a past master at not listening to anything he didn’t want to hear.

  ‘Then maybe there’d be two of you dead in this filthy alley instead of one. Then I’d have to deal with Ryder grinning all over his fat face while he prodded your dead body with his shoe. I know that’s my destiny, my role in life, to find you face down in the dirt one day because you’re so damn stupid and pig-headed. I’m just glad it wasn’t today.’

  He felt a hot pricking at the back of his eyes, ignored it. He wouldn’t be put off that easily. He was the Angel of Death and if he stood on the grass, it would wither and die.

  ‘I was downstairs, sitting in my car in the parking lot, Kate. Because I needed some fresh air, for Christ’s sake.’

  She didn’t know the relevance, how could she? He couldn’t get the phrase out of his damn mind. Twelve years old, sitting in the passenger seat of a 1973 two-tone red and white Ford F-150 pickup, his father driving, a cigarette between his fingers on the steering wheel. The cold air whistling through the half open window, sucking the smoke out of the cab. His father’s voice, thick with inhaled smoke.

  A bit of fresh air never killed anyone.

  It sure as hell didn’t do Arturo Rivera any good.

  There was an uncomfortable silence on the line. In the background behind her he heard Ryder’s fat voice again.

  Kate. Get off the phone with that asshole. You’re needed over here.

  Everything became muted on the other end of the line as a hand was placed over the microphone of her phone. Then a muffled shout, a stream of good-natured abuse.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said coming back on the line. She didn’t sound sorry at all. She sounded a lot better for it. He was tempted to ask her to put Ryder on the line so he could get some therapy too.

  ‘You better go.’

  How is it that you can hear more from what someone doesn’t say than from what they do? That’s what Evan wanted to know. He was back at his car by now. He glanced briefly at the ding in the door the rock had made, licked his finger and tried to wipe it away. He gave up and dropped into the driver’s seat. It didn’t feel comfortable at all now. What the hell happened to it in two hours? It felt lumpy, like some of the springs had given up the ghost. He waited for her to say what she’d saved until last.

  She cleared her throat.

  Uh-oh.

  ‘There is something else.’

  In his mind Evan heard a loud crash, saw a brick flying through a window, landing on the floor in an explosion of glittering glass.

  ‘The sick bastards—’

  He saw himself bending to pick it up, careful not to get glass splinters in his hand, turning it over to see what was taped to it.

  ‘who killed him—’

  He saw a curved surgical needle, a length of black thread hanging from it.

  ‘sewed his lips together.’

  He imagined big, ugly sutures, pulled tight. How many would you need to sew up an average-sized man’s mouth? Six? Eight? He pictured two men, each selecting a needle from the packet, divvying up the thread as they prepared for their allotted tasks. You got enough there? Here, take some more, just in case. Just in case Arturo Rivera’s mouth was bigger than they expected. Bigger physically, as well as figuratively.

  ‘Black thread?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘No.’

  At that moment he didn’t feel as if anything would ever matter again. Not for Arturo Rivera, that was for damn sure.

  ‘Post-mortem?’

  ‘Has to be. You couldn’t do that to somebody while they were still alive.’

  He thought back to the van that had high-tailed it down the street after the brick was thrown through Ivanovsky’s window. Was it the same one as before? Or had that one been used to pick up Arturo, his hands cuffed to the rail inside while they went to work?

  ‘Any evidence he’d been cuffed to something?’

  ‘Not immediately apparent, no. Why?’

  He shook his head even though she couldn’t see him.

  ‘Doesn’t matter if there isn’t any.’

  She didn’t ask him to explain. Still more silence came down the line. It wasn’t over yet.

  ‘What else Kate?’

  ‘Whoever did this found one of your business cards on him.’

  ‘I gave it to him in the bar. So now they’ll know who he was talking to. Great.’

  An added surge of guilt went through him as the words left his mouth, left him feeling sick with himself. Arturo was dead and he was worried they might catch up with him. Well, bring it on. The way he felt now, he’d welcome the chance to go up against the bastards who killed him.

  ‘That wasn’t what I was going to say.’

  He didn’t want to listen any more. It was too personal already. He wanted to put the car in gear, close his eyes and put his foot to the floor, see what happened.

  ‘They sewed your business card to his lips.’

  Chapter 42

  EVAN WAS SAVED FROM having to respond or think about Guillory’s words by a cry of anguish coming from behind him. It came from inside Ivanovsky’s house, loud enough to be heard through the broken window. His head snapped around. Ivanovsky was still standing at the window where Evan had last seen him. He held his phone in his hand, staring dumbly at it. Evan couldn’t see his expression from where he was. He didn’t need to. The horror flowed through the broken window like water from a burst pipe.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Guillory said. ‘Sounded like somebody nailed a cat’s tail to the floor.’

  Evan was already out of the car, on his way to the front door. At the last minute he veered to the right, towards the window. Ivanovsky was rooted to the spot.

  ‘Evan!’

  He ignored her. She sounded as if somebody nailed her tail to the floor. He got to the window, thrust his arm through. Ivanovsky dropped his phone into Evan’s hand at the exact moment his legs gave way. Evan caught it as Ivanovsky’s limbs melted bonelessly into the floor, landing with a crash on top of the broken glass.

  Evan didn’t need to look at the phone to know what was on it. He looked anyway, saw a picture of Arturo Rivera’s face, his own business card front and center in a row of ragged sutures. A shiver of revulsion ripped through him, the back of his neck suddenly cold.

  ‘They sent Ivanovsky a picture of Arturo Rivera,’ he said into his own phone.

  There was a sharp hiss of breath from Guillory, an uncharacteristic reaction.

  ‘Be thankful you’re not looking at the real thing.’

  He kicked out the remaining shards of glass in the window frame, then climbed carefully through it.

  ‘This is bad enough, believe me.’

  She gave a short, sharp laugh.

  ‘Maybe now you understand what I was saying about it being lucky Rivera didn’t find you. These people are very literal in their thinking. Rivera talked, he gets his mouth sewn up. You stick your nose in where it’s not wanted . . .’

  She made a noise like a knife slicing through the air.

  ‘Okay, okay.’

  ‘I don’t even want to think about if you’d seen something you shouldn’t have.’

  Luckily for him, her impressive repertoire of graphic noises didn’t extend to the sound of an eye being poked out.

  He dropped Ivanovsky’s phone into his pocket and offered him his hand. Ivanovsky looked as if he’d aged ten years and it seemed his muscles had too. He tried to pull himself up with Evan’s help. He was too weak. Evan hooked his hand under his armpit, felt the warm dampness of his fear and hauled him to his feet. They did an ungainly shuffle through the broken glass to Ivanovsky’s chair.

  Evan closed the image on Ivanovsky’s phone and gave the phone
back to him, told him not to delete the image in case the police needed it.

  ‘Call your sister. Tell her not to open any messages. David Eckert too. And anybody else you can think of who’s hiding information from me, who might get the same message.’

  It was too late already. Whoever sent the messages would have fired them all off at once. There was a chance Eva and Eckert hadn’t opened them yet. He’d made the crack about anybody else hiding information from him as a dig at Ivanovsky and now felt bad about it. Look what happened to the one person who did open up to him.

  He heard a sharp whistle coming from his phone, realized he was still connected to Guillory.

  ‘Don’t forget to check your voicemail. And don’t delete any messages.’

  He’d almost forgotten. If he was going to have to listen to Arturo being chased by the men who caught and killed him, he might as well get it over with. He said goodbye to Ivanovsky and went outside to make the calls.

  He checked his cellphone voicemail first, his heart in his mouth as he waited to be connected. He prayed there wasn’t a message, didn’t want to think what it would be like to listen to Arturo’s voice seconds before he was attacked, panic and desperation in his voice after being pursued for an hour or more. Thankfully there wasn’t one, not from Arturo anyway.

  For a moment he thought he’d accidentally dialled Elwood Crow and the pet bird had answered the phone. Then he realized it was Charlotte. He held the phone at arm’s length as a torrent of indignation spewed out of the speaker, then cut the connection.

  Then he called his office number, waited for the voicemail greeting and entered his password. Sure enough, he had one new message. It had been received at seven forty-eight—a minute after the first call. Arturo’s voice was breathless, tinged with panic, noisy street sounds in the background. The jerky, erratic delivery of his words made Evan think of an out-of-shape man, the sort who spent too much time propping up a bar, running down the road.