Vanished in the Night (14 page)

“May I say again that you are one sick puppy?” Veronica shook her head.

“I wear it with pride. Oh, and about your police officer squaring off with your father? I think that’s totally sweet. He was protecting you.” Tina walked away, her purple Crocs squeaking with every step.

“I don’t need protecting.” She’d been taking care of herself for years. She didn’t need anyone else to do it.

Tina paused in front of the curtain she was about to slip through. The usual smart-ass snap to her eyes
wasn’t there. “Everybody needs protecting sometimes, Veronica. Even you.” Then she slid through the curtain to check on the guy who had apparently attempted to edge his own foot off while working in his yard. The curtain popped open and Tina peeked out. “By the way, did I tell you that I figured out why that asphyxiation patient looked so familiar?”

Veronica shook her head.

“It was Susan Tennant.”

The name sounded familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it. “And I should know her why?”

“You remember, she’s the nurse who started that program for at-risk teenagers. The one down in Oak Park?”

That did sound familiar.

“We heard her speak once, at the Radisson. It was part of a continuing-ed thing,” Tina prompted her.

Ding ding ding. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.
Veronica did remember now.

But seriously? Susan Tennant and autoerotic asphyxiation? “She’s the one who looked like it was, you know, a kinky consensual thing?”

“Yep.” Tina nodded, her eyes big. “I swear, I thought she was practically a nun. You never can tell with people, can you?”

“You sure can’t.” Veronica walked away as the emergency room doors slid open and Matt Cassel came in
pulling a stretcher right toward Tina. Even from the nurses’ station, Veronica could see the nails sticking straight up out of the guy’s chest.

Tina’s eyes shone. There were all kinds of sweet in the world.

Lyle watched the rebroadcast of Max’s sister’s press conference. Would this story never die?

He could see why the police wanted her in front of the cameras. She was pretty in an approachable way. She looked good on camera, sympathetic.

Too bad she wasn’t obese, with a wart on her nose. The story might have disappeared by now. Eclipsed, ironically, by Susan Tennant’s murder. That was assuming the police didn’t figure out that they were connected. But maybe they weren’t. Maybe it was one big crazy coincidence.

Lyle poured himself a drink. It was going to be okay. The phone rang and he snatched it up before it woke his wife, who had already gone to bed. “Hello.”

“My price just went up,” the man on the other end said.

Wow. Matt wasn’t sure how much more he could take. The cute little nurse in St. E’s emergency room
was Max Shelden’s sister? What was the universe trying to do to him?

More than one shrink had told him that he couldn’t run from his past, that it would catch up with him eventually. He’d thought they meant metaphorically. But first Susan Tennant, and now Max Shelden’s sister?

He’d had nightmares last night. Dreams that he’d been the one who had tied up Susan Tennant and watched her choke on her own vomit. He had been able to smell her fear, feel the texture of the ropes he’d used to bind her. It
was
just a dream, right?

Had Tennant been able to smell the fear of the boys she’d tormented? Or had it never touched her? He’d never know now. He hoped the memories of it followed her straight to hell.

But now Max’s sister was in front of his face. What did that mean? Maybe he didn’t have to do anything about Veronica. Maybe the universe would take care of that, too.

After her shift was over, Veronica wanted nothing more than to go back to her condo, crawl into bed, and stay there until her next shift started. There’d been too much emotional turmoil lately.

But today was unlikely to be drama free. She had
to check on her dad. Maybe he’d have been drunk enough that he wouldn’t really remember what happened last night. He rarely blacked out enough to have no memory, but the details were often hazy, so she could spin them into a gentler reality.

It wasn’t lying. Not really. It was more of a creative reimagining of her life. She preferred it in soft focus. She wasn’t doing it for him, after all. She was doing it for herself.

The only reason she didn’t cut him out of her life completely was that she couldn’t bear to be the kind of daughter who wasn’t there for her parent.

She got behind the wheel of her car and checked her watch. Dad would be up. She dialed his number on her cell, but after five rings it went to voice mail.

She hung up without leaving a message. So much for getting away with a quick phone call.

She sighed and started the engine. She’d just check on him. She could be in and out in ten minutes. He could make his own breakfast and take out his own trash for once.

She clicked on the news as she drove, but it was too depressing. Suicide bombs. Floods. Oil spills. She started scanning through the music stations, but nothing caught her interest. Not the song she didn’t recognize, the song she’d heard too many times before, or the creepy old man trying to tell her that he
was her friend in the diamond business. She snapped the radio off and rode in silence, brooding.

She wished her father would tell her whatever he knew about Max’s death and get it over with. All the comments about her not knowing what she was getting into made her suspect that he knew precisely what type of hornet’s nest Max’s bones had stirred up.

It could take weeks to piece together the dribs and drabs he was giving her. By then, the police would have lost interest. She was surprised they’d been willing to do as much as they had up to now. There was no public hue and cry over twenty-year-old bones; why would there be? Why should they care anyway?

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Zach McKnight seemed to care. He should have been scrambling away from this case as fast as those powerful-looking thighs of his could take him.

And why was she even noticing his thighs? She had sworn off cops, kind eyes or not.

When she parked in front of her father’s house no lights were on. It was a good thing she’d come by. If he didn’t get up now, he was going to be late for work. Jobs were harder and harder to come by for anyone, and even more so for alcoholic wrench jockeys in their fifties. He needed to hold on to this job for as long as he could, because Veronica was damned
if she was going to support him or make another loan to him from her savings.

Loan, her ass. She’d known when she’d written him that last check that she’d never see that money again.

She looked at the house with its sagging front porch and peeling paint. Someday, all this would be hers. The porch steps creaked under her feet. She’d never felt more like a princess. Not.

She knocked. “Dad? It’s me, Ronnie.”

No answer. Maybe he was in the shower. Or maybe he was still out cold. She knocked again. Still nothing. She fished her key out of her purse and let herself in, tucking the key back into her purse as she walked through the door.

She nearly slipped in the puddle of blood on the floor. It took her a second to register why she’d lost her balance, and another second to register the sight of her father lying in the pool of blood.

Her throat clogged up as if a scream had gotten stuck just above her larynx, but it never made it out. Carefully, ever so carefully, she touched two fingers to his carotid artery to check his pulse. Nothing.

She’d known there wouldn’t be. Heads weren’t supposed to be bent at that awkward angle. Faces weren’t supposed to be that color of gray. Eyes weren’t supposed to stare with glassy fixation at puddles of blood.

There was a protocol to these things, and Veronica
knew exactly what to do. She’d checked for a pulse. Now she called 911. She gave the address. She said her father had fallen. She did not scream. She did not become hysterical. She did not move the body.

The body. Not her father. The body. She said it out loud. Her father was gone. He’d been gone for at least a few hours. She knew that. The words felt strange on her lips. In fact, her whole face felt strange. Numb.

It was stuffy in the house and it smelled terrible. She knew that smell. She should have recognized it the second she’d opened the door. It smelled like vomit and blood and feces. It smelled like recent death. It was the smell she fought in the emergency room. It was the smell she’d fought in her mother’s hospital room. She was too late to fight it here. This battle had been lost long before her feet had hit the first creaky step outside.

She squatted down on her heels. “Oh, Daddy,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I’m so very sorry.”

Zach’s cell phone had rung less than an hour before he was due to be at the station. Veronica Osborne’s father was dead. Dispatch thought he’d want to know.

Half an hour later he pulled up in front of George Osborne’s house, chewing the Clif Bar he’d grabbed out of his pantry before rushing to his car. There were already
two black-and-whites, one unmarked car, an ambulance, and a fire truck at the scene. People were crawling all over hell and creation, but no one was moving fast. No one bothered to rush when the subject was already dead.

Zach sighed and got out of his car, making sure his badge was clipped to his belt and visible. One of the uniformed officers held the crime-scene tape up for him to duck under. There were no news crews on the street yet, but they’d be here eventually. He was glad the uniforms had secured the scene in advance.

“Who’s inside?” he asked the uniform.

“Little Hillary,” the man said, dropping the tape behind Zach.

Little Hillary was a coroner’s investigator named Nancy Martinez, who had earned her nickname from the black pantsuits she habitually wore. She definitely was not little, though. The “slimming” black didn’t hide the width of her behind. She was good at her job, smart, efficient, and hard to rattle. Maybe that was why they called her Hillary, and it didn’t have anything to do with the pantsuits.

Zach stopped at the doorway to put on booties over his shoes and stepped into the house. Little Hillary was crouched over the body of George Osborne where it lay at the bottom of his staircase in a puddle of blood, urine, vomit, and excrement. Zach took a second to let himself adjust to the smell.

“Let me guess,” he said when he finally trusted himself to speak without gagging. “A drunk fell down the stairs.”

Little Hillary looked up at him. “Good guess.”

Zach gave a little bow, feeling as if he’d gone to the head of the class. “Thank you so much.”

“It is, however, completely wrong.” She stood up and walked over to Zach, by the door.

“Really?” There was a drunk lying on the floor at the base of a staircase. Being wrong was pretty surprising.

Before Hillary could explain any further, Frank arrived. He stepped into the house with exaggerated care and then sighed. “They got this many people out here for a drunk who fell down the stairs?”

“Apparently that’s a bad guess,” Zach informed him. “Or maybe it was a good guess that just happens to be wrong.”

“Really?” Frank looked downright surprised. “Do tell.”

“Do you two want to know what happened here or not?” Little Hillary asked. While she was known for her professionalism, she was not known for her sense of humor. Or her patience.

For Zach, the black humor was a coping mechanism. It was for most cops. And firefighters. And a lot of health care professionals. When you dealt every day
with the tragedy and the detritus of the way human beings deal with each other, sometimes you had to choose between laughing and crying. Sometimes drinking was thrown into the mix. Drugs weren’t unheard of, either, especially prescription pills. Anger-management issues were definitely a possibility. Zach generally chose to laugh. Or at least to crack bad jokes and hope that someone else would laugh at them.

“We are all ears,” Frank assured Little Hillary.

“Your drunk didn’t fall down those stairs on his own. He had some help.” She gestured for them to follow her over to the body, then pointed up the stairs. “The trajectory is all wrong. If he had fallen on his own, he would have landed closer to the bottom of the stairs. To land where he did, he would have needed a push.”

The stench worsened with every step they took toward the body. “You’re sure he was drunk, though.” How many hours would it have taken George Osborne to sober up from last night? Zach wasn’t sure. “How long has he been here?”

Little Hillary gave him a long, measured look. “Perhaps you might want to wait until I tell you what I know, and then ask questions. It might save all of us quite a bit of time.”

She sounded like an impatient elementary school teacher. “No problem.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and waited.

“So not only did your guy get a push down the stairs, somebody had a moment or two with him beforehand.” Little Hillary crouched down and lifted Osborne’s shirt. “See this bruising? That’s a boot mark. Or maybe a dress shoe. We’ll be able to get you a shoe size.”

“Somebody kicked the crap out of him and then threw him down the stairs?” Frank crouched next to her and glanced up the staircase.

“I’m pretty sure they knocked him unconscious, then dragged him up the stairs and threw him down. Look at his shoes. The backs of the heels are all scuffed up. Someone staged this. They wanted us to come in here, smell the booze on this guy, shake our heads, and walk away.” Little Hillary stood up and looked over at Zach. “Now do you want to ask your questions?”

A voice behind him said, “So my father was murdered?”

So much for asking who found the body. Apparently the answer was standing in the doorway to the kitchen wearing the scrubs she’d worn to work the night before.

His heart sank. This was a lot of loss for one small woman in a short period of time. How much could those narrow shoulders carry?

She walked into the room and turned to Hillary. “You’re saying my father was murdered.”

“I’m afraid so. I’m so sorry.” Little Hillary looked sincerely regretful. She probably was. Overhearing
the cops and the coroner’s investigator talking at the crime scene was not the approved way of informing a family member that someone had met with foul play.