by Jim O'Shea
“Do you believe everything people tell you? Maybe I should call Hunter?”
“You told me he said the last piece was key. There are still five or six missing.”
“True.”
“Didn’t he say he’d call you when he got back from Idaho?”
Libby nodded while rotating the puzzle piece between her thumb and index finger. A curved black line ran across its back.
Aisha got up and went to the front window. “I realize you had to tell Florich what was going on when you got the leave of absence,” she said, while peeking between the curtains, “but you don’t give a stalker your parents’ address.”
“I didn’t,” Libby said. “But I know he talked to my parents for a long time at my birthday party. I think he’s just a lonely man, Azzi.”
Aisha returned to the sofa, grabbed the tiny bottle of toenail polish, and began applying a coat to the last toe before stopping abruptly. “By the way,” she said, “Is it becoming a little more personal than professional for that detective friend of yours? He seems a little too much up in your business as far as I’m concerned.”
Or not far enough?
If given a choice, Libby would’ve met a man like Hunter at a different time in her life, and perhaps in a different place. But life was funny that way. He was in her life right here and right now, and she’d lost too many people close to her to not cling to the man—one who undoubtedly had serious reservations about her. When she looked up, Aisha was staring at her.
“You like him,” she said.
Libby’s instinct pushed her toward the safety of silence, but now was not the time to linger there. She needed to open up, if only a little. “He seems like a good man, Aisha. I think he wants to protect me.”
“I was pretty sure you had feelings for him before, but it was obvious when I saw how you stared at each other in the museum cafeteria.”
Libby looked away, as if admitting what she was truly feeling would make it all too real. The pretense of confusion felt much safer than honesty.
Aisha recapped the toenail polish. “If it’s none of my business, honey, just say so.”
She was considering making it Aisha’s business when a cloud passed under the sun and dimmed the light in the room. It felt like a sign. “Let’s get out of here.”
Without hesitating, Aisha tossed her belongings into her purse and carried her left shoe in her hand as she skipped out to Libby’s car.
Forty minutes later, day had surrendered to night and Libby’s mood had darkened along with the sky. A fresh layer of snow covered Stansberry Lane, smoothing out the landscape and removing all unnecessary detail.
Libby paused before pulling into her driveway. Officer Potts’ car had been removed, but tiny pieces of yellow plastic still clung to nearby trees and bushes. She inched past the charred oak tree from her dreams, but the only sign of ghosts were phantom footprints in the snow leading up the driveway from a second Tooele squad car. She stopped her car next to the house and cocked her head at the sight of Officer Kimberly Mard standing in the doorway with a cell phone to her ear.
Unlike Darby Potts, Kimberly Mard had a stocky build, no-nonsense personality, and a persistent frown across her face. The holster strap over her gun was noticeably unbuttoned as she approached along the sidewalk. “We’ve been looking for you,” Mard said.
“We?” Libby asked. “I told Detective Hunter I was at my parents’ house.”
Mard buttoned the strap over her revolver and her shoulders seemed to relax. “There’s been a break in the Ginger Killer case, Ms. Meeker,” she said. “Detective Hunter is in route and can update you when he arrives. I’ve been instructed to keep you safe until then.” She looked up when Aisha opened the passenger side door. “I assume you’re Ms. Barry?”
“Aisha,” Libby said, stepping aside. “This is Officer Mard of the Tooele Police Department. She’s been assigned to protect me.”
Aisha circled the car. “Nice to meet you,” she said as she shook Mard’s hand. “My condolences on Officer Potts.”
Mard turned toward the street where the attack had occurred and bowed her head while her lips moved silently. After a few moments, she stepped to the side and gestured toward the front door. “Please come inside, Ms. Meeker.”
When Aisha attempted to follow, Mard blocked the sidewalk. “I’m very sorry, Ms. Barry, but Ms. Meeker is under official police protection and I must ask you to leave.”
Aisha put up a mild protest before agreeing, and promised to call when she got home.
Libby grabbed the gift bag from the back seat, which still contained the puzzle piece and tickets, and followed Mard toward the house.
Once inside, the Tooele officer turned the dead bolt and pulled the curtain over the front window. “I hope you don’t mind, Ms. Meeker, but I brought some strong coffee and started a pot. I’m pulling a double because we are so short-staffed.”
“Of course not,” Libby said.
“It should be ready in a minute or two, so please help yourself.” Mard pulled her gun from its holster, placed it on the coffee table next to a large, open book, and leaned back in the sofa. Instead of picking up the book, she selected one of Libby’s magazines from the end table and laid it in her lap. “Pretend I’m not here.”
Libby set her purse on the kitchen table and poured a cup of Mard’s coffee. It was as advertised, so she dumped a third of it into the sink and topped off the rest with milk before gazing out the window at a black and gray sky. The first star meant a free wish, which she needed right now, but thick cloud cover wasn’t letting that happen.
She was reaching inside her purse when a familiar scent tickled her nose. What did Dr. Lambert call it? She pulled out her phone and was in the process of internet searching ‘benign olfactory hallucinations’ when it buzzed with an incoming call. ‘BFF’ showed up on the screen’s caller ID. “Hey,” Libby said. “Miss me already?” She pulled the new puzzle piece from her purse while holding the phone up to her ear with her shoulder.
“You good?” Aisha asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine. My own personal armed officer is no more than thirty feet away.”
“Did I hear my name?” Officer Mard entered the kitchen with her gaze trained on the back door, but when she glanced down at the object in Libby’s hand her face hardened. “Is that what I think it is?” When Libby hesitated, Mard’s eyes narrowed to beads.
“It turned up earlier today, Officer,” she said, her words tumbling out in a rush. “I intended to show it to Detective Hunter when he arrived.”
Mard frowned as she picked up the piece with a paper napkin. “Please don’t handle evidence with your bare hands, Ms. Meeker.” She wrapped the new puzzle piece in the napkin, placed it on top of the refrigerator, and turned on the outside light. After staring out the back window for almost a full minute, Mard slid past the table without saying another word.
Libby grabbed the puzzle piece off the top of the refrigerator, shoved it in her pocket, and brought the phone back up to her ear. “You still there?”
“Yeah,” Aisha said. “She’s pretty intense.”
“Stay on the phone with me. I’m going upstairs to see if this new piece fits.”
The large book was still propped open on the coffee table as Libby strolled past the living room making idle chit-chat with Aisha, but the veteran Tooele police officer was already re-engaged with an article in an architecture magazine. When she arrived at the spare bedroom, Libby pulled the chain on the gooseneck lamp. The puzzle hadn’t changed, and that alone helped her breathe easier. “You still there?” When she didn’t get a response, Libby looked down at the phone’s screen and saw the call had dropped.
She set the phone on the nightstand, pulled out the new piece from her pocket, and positioned it on the puzzle. Perfect fit—forming the bottom half of Melissa’s face and leaving only the open space for the eyes. She grabbed the only remaining loose piece and stared at the two green eyes for a few seconds before placing it over the
open spot. The eyes piece would complete baby Melissa’s face, but there was one problem. It didn’t fit. Libby spun the piece around several times, but it was clear the second set of eyes was not designed to fit in the open slot on Melissa’s face. Libby slumped onto one of the twin beds with the piece still between her fingers.
Officer Mard came into full view, standing just inside the door. “Just checking on you.”
Libby closed her hand around the piece and offered up a sheepish grin. “How psycho is this Ginger Killer?”
“In my opinion, about as much as they get.” When her right hand settled on top of an empty holster, her lips thinned into blue lines. “I’ll be downstairs.”
Libby waited until she heard Mard downstairs before calling Aisha back. She told her what had transpired.
“That was close,” Aisha said. “I think tampering with evidence is a big deal.”
“She’s not very observant for a police officer.” Libby reassured Aisha she’d keep her posted and after terminating the call, suddenly felt more alone in the house than ever before.
When she went back down the stairs, Mard now had the open book in her lap, her gun was back in its holster, and her feet were propped on top of the magazine. She didn’t realize Libby stood next to her until she tapped her on the shoulder.
“Oh…sorry. Hope you don’t mind.” Mard carefully placed the open book back on the coffee table and took a sip of coffee. “Interesting passage, though.”
“What passage?”
“The highlighted one.” Mard ran her finger slowly down from the page’s header, which read King James in a large font, to several lines of text highlighted with a yellow marker about a third down the page. “And that will by no means clear the guilty,” Mard recited, “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.” She looked up and added, “Exodus, chapter thirty-four, verse seven.”
Despite her own misgivings about her father’s sacred Scripture, Libby was still a pastor’s daughter and the connection came as fast as her brain’s synapses could fire. The black scrawls on the back of the puzzle were an uppercase E and lowercase x, followed by a dash, the number thirty-four, a second dash and empty spaces where pieces to the puzzle were still missing.
Ex-34-
Like Hunter and Aisha, Libby had assumed the six missing pieces were meaningless, but that no longer seemed the case. Although the missing pieces’ fronts might form nothing but an empty bassinet on the front of the puzzle, she was sure there would be a number on their backs. The number seven.
Ex-34-7
The Book of Exodus. Chapter 34. Verse 7.
Libby approached Officer Mard with her knees quivering.
The veteran police officer had gotten up from the sofa and was now peering out from between the curtains at a white service van, similar to the one she’d seen at her parents’ house. It was parked in front of the Brown house three houses down, but otherwise the street was empty. She debated sharing her discovery with Mard, but decided to wait until Hunter arrived. “My father was a preacher,” Libby said.
“I know,” Mard said, without taking her gaze off the street. “My parents attend The Crossing. They said your father was a good man.”
“Did you?”
“Not much of a church person.”
“Me, either.” Libby glanced back at the open book on the coffee table. “Then why bring a Bible here?”
Mard turned toward Libby with a look of confusion on her face. “It was open on your coffee table when I got here. I assumed it was yours.”
Libby felt her hands clench into fists, and shot another glance at the Bible before turning back to Mard. “I don’t own one.”
33
Hunter went straight from the Tarman basement to the Idaho State Police crime scene van. The search on the Automated Fingerprint Identification System had turned up zero hits on the fingerprint found on the china coffee cup, which is what he’d expected. The Source AFIS software only compared prints against those in a database of previous offenders and, if he was right, the Ginger Killer had no priors.
He ran to his car, removed a paper bag from the trunk, and returned to the van. The officer who had performed the initial analysis hesitated at first, but when Hunter pressured him, he agreed to compare the print on the Tarman coffee cup with the fingerprint Libby had left on the mug from the museum. The process would take up to thirty minutes, so Hunter gave the young man his phone number and rushed back to his car.
He didn’t get cell service until he reached the interstate this time, and Hunter kicked himself for not getting the officer’s number when there was no message yet from him on his voicemail. He debated calling Brasier, but decided against it. Instead, he texted Officer Mard and asked her to take a close-up photo of Libby’s fine china, a coffee cup to be exact, and send it to him without her knowing. Surprisingly, she didn’t question the odd request and offered to forward any identifying information she could find on the cup, while cautioning him that it might take a while since Libby was currently in the kitchen eating dinner.
After thanking Mard, he provided his captain a brief update on the events at the Tarman home, minus his suspicions surrounding the cup—at least for now. Captain Leon Fitter insisted on updates every thirty minutes, until Hunter apprised him on the reality of cell coverage in rural Idaho.
He received an update from the surveillance team watching Libby, and checked his voice messages once again. Libby had been observed leaving her parents’ home on foot without Aisha Barry and entering The Crossing, so they relocated the van across the street from the church.
Only three of the remaining voicemails were important. The first was from the Bureau of Forensic Services’ central lab in Salt Lake City telling him the DNA results would be available by the end of the day.
The second was from an officer in the Tooele police force who managed to obtain two segments of security video from the Tooele National Bank. His message indicated that the clips were roughly thirty minutes apart and clearly showed the same woman coming and going, each time to access a safe deposit box. There was no available video from inside the vault.
The last was from the linguistics expert, Dr. Harry Blake. He confirmed the language on the small piece of fabric was indeed Choctaw and that he’d managed to translate it, but said the words lacked any great significance. He finished the recorded message by suggesting Hunter stop by nonetheless. Hunter left Blake a return voicemail saying he would.
By the time he returned to the crime scene, the coverings over the basement windows were gone, and the late-afternoon sun cast shadows across two shallow graves. The bodies of a man and a woman, tentatively identified as Bryan and Patrice Tarman, had been removed from their temporary resting places and now lay on twin gurneys on the east side of the basement.
It was Brasier’s crime scene, and since the Idaho State Police lieutenant was intent on preserving the integrity of the evidence, Hunter could only observe as the photographers captured everything in digital clarity and forensic personnel bagged and arranged personal effects next to the bodies.
He eventually located Officer Lawrence in an upstairs bedroom collecting evidence, and was disappointed to hear the AFIS laptop had crashed. Lawrence assured he’d have it back up and running soon and would perform Hunter’s fingerprint analysis first thing. Hunter began the trip back to Tooele after receiving assurance from Brasier that he’d have on-line access to the evidence file as soon as it was available. The journey would include a brief stop at Professor Blake’s along the way.
A text from Officer Mard arrived just as he arrived at Interstate 15 south, so he pulled onto the shoulder and brought it up on his phone. The message included a crystal-clear photo taken from Libby’s china cabinet, and he recognized the coffee cup immediately. He clicked his photos icon, located the one from the Schrupp murder and the one he had just taken at the Tarman murder scene. He flipped back and forth between the
three photos, shaking his head the entire time.
Identical.
A second text from Mard included an image of light gray lettering that appeared to be on the bottom of one of the cups.
He queried the words and found that not only was it one of the most well-liked brands of fine china in the U.S., but the specific pattern was also one of the company’s most popular. That would make the evidence circumstantial, and he wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved.
Hunter waited for a string of trucks to pass before pulling back on the highway, his mind a whirlwind of thoughts and emotion. He pulled his cell phone from his jacket and called Officer Mard. When she answered, her voice sounded muffled.
“Everything OK, Kimberly?”
“Yes,” Mard said through the staticky connection. “I’m trying to keep my voice down because Ms. Meeker is just up the stairs. Did you get the photos?”
“I did,” Hunter said. “Thanks. How is she?”
“She’s a little shook up, Detective, but I’m very glad you called.” Mard paused and lowered her voice further. “I was looking through a Bible I found on her coffee table, and she asked me why I brought one with me. When I told her I didn’t, her face turned white.”
In a single moment, Hunter’s jaw went from a steady grind to slack. He wanted to speak, but struggled to muster enough air to push words out.
“She said she didn’t own a Bible, Detective Hunter,” Mard said. “It sounded awfully fishy to me, so I thought you ought to know.”
“Kimberly.” Hunter gripped the steering wheel hard with one hand, while trying to keep the phone from shaking with his other. “Can you tell me which version that Bible is?”
“Just a sec.”
Hunter heard footsteps and then pages rustling. When Mard returned to the phone, she confirmed his fears.
“Stay by the phone,” Hunter said. “I’m calling you right back.”
Hunter pulled off the highway, threw open the car’s door and walked around to the passenger side. He hunched over, breathing heavily, and stayed that way until he his heart rate slowed down a bit. When he returned to the driver’s seat, he opened the Tarman photos on his phone. The bottom of the page in the photo was a little harder to read because of the light coffee smudges, but Hunter could make out the number 162 at the bottom. He hit redial on his phone, and began talking as soon as he heard Mard answer. “Kimberly, I need you to check something specific for me.”