An Intimate Murder (The Catherine O'Brien Series) (22 page)

He shook his head and let out a breathy, “haw.”

“Like he even fucking knows anything about me.”

“We visited your aunt and uncle yesterday,” Louise said. “Your uncle looked like he might have something to hide. Do you know what that could be?”

“Hell, I don’t know. He could be a drug king pin for all I know. Dealing cocaine to all his label-wearing, money-whoring buddies.”

“We also met with your aunt, Katie,” Louise said.

“Jesus, you’ve found all the loons nesting around my family tree.”

“Did she threaten your Mother?” Louise asked.

He pressed his lips flat and then sighed through his nose. “Yeah, she’s threatened just about everyone, I think. She’s completely crazy and not just in my opinion.”

“I spoke to the Sheriff in McCann County yesterday,” I said. “About your Grandmother’s murder.”

He sat up so straight I thought he might lunge at me. “Why did you call him?”

“I wanted to see if the murder could be connected. Sheriff Rose said that they thought a family member committed the murder. Do you think what he said could be true?”

Chad’s eyes went glossy and fixed on the floor again. This time his stare wasn’t one of nervousness but one of someone remembering. From the contorted expression on his face, the memory was exceptionally painful.

“How could it be true if they never arrested anyone for the murders?”

“Chad, do you know who killed your Grandmother?”

He didn’t look up, but tears covered his eyes. He shook his head.

“Were you at your Grandmother’s house the day she was murdered?”

His eyes closed and tears rolled down his cheek. Chad’s head drooped to his chest.

“Yes. I found her.”

Jane Katts went for her notebook. Chad Luther had, in his nineteen short years, lost three loved-ones to a violent death, and had the unfortunate luck to be the one to find all three. A corral of psychiatrists would pay real money to follow Chad around for the next thirty years or so, to find out how he might cope (or fail to cope) with the trauma of this situation.

“I am so sorry, Chad.” I put my hand on his shoulder.

His body shuddered with sobs beneath my hand. My gaze went immediately to Louise. I am not good at handling emotional situations, especially when I’ve hurt someone. In my years on the force, I had never inflicted the pain I had put Chad Luther through, not even with a gun.

Louise leaned forward and touched Chad’s hand. Tears dripped over her knuckles and between the spaces of her fingers.

“Chad, I’d like to put you in touch with a Doctor to talk about what has happened. You can’t keep this bottled inside.”

From behind me, I heard the scritch, scritch of Jane’s pen on her notepad. I turned and slapped my hand on the page.

“Please,” I whispered and then gave her a fierce warning glance.

“Why is this happening?” Chad raised his head. “It’s like there’s a fucking curse following me and no matter what I do, I can’t get away. I just want out of this, out of my life.”

I escorted Jane out of the audiovisual room to allow Louise time to get Chad calmed and put him in touch with Doctor Xavier. After examining the aunt and Chad, plus the family history of both sides of Chad’s family, Xavier would have a lifetime worth of research papers.

“You can’t sensor this, Catherine.”

“Call me Detective O’Brien. Especially if you feel that allowing you to use my first name means we’re friends.”

A harsh shush came from one of the student librarians. I fanned my hand in her direction.

“Chad Luther discovers both his Grandmother and his parent’s bodies,” Jane said in a harsh whisper. “This is too good to be true. I could win the Minnesota Journalism Award for breaking this story. It could make my career.”

Jane rambled on about how great her bosses, and peers would think she was when this came out. Anger flared through me and my cheeks flushed with heat. I wanted to reach out and strangle her.

“This is exactly the behavior I was talking about when I called you guys vultures yesterday.”

She stopped chattering.

“What?”

“What?” I mimicked the stupid expression on her face. “Are you serious? Can you not hear what you’re saying?”

“I know what I’m saying. Why are you getting so pissed off all of a sudden?”

The librarian interceded before I could answer. “Ladies, please. You will have to leave if you can’t keep your voices down.”

I was ready to bark and snap and there was no way I was going to wait until we were outside. I swiveled my head from side to side until I saw an empty A.V. room. I gripped Jane by the arm, dragged her along with me, and closed the door.

“What is wrong with you?” Jane said and pushed my hand away.

“Your ignorance. Didn’t you hear yourself talk? The only person you were talking about was you.”

I pointed to the door.

“What about him? What about Chad Luther? I, I, I, I – that’s all you can say. Me, me, me – only your stories don’t just affect you. Your stories are not about you at all, they’re about other people. Real people.”

Jane Katts reached into her purse and took out her tape recorder, and shoved it into my face. The little, red recording eye blinked at me. With each pulse of the red light, my blood pressure inched up.

Finally, I wrenched the tape recorder out of her hand and threw it to the ground.

“Jesus Christ, Catherine. What the fuck do you think you’re doing? That tape recorder cost a lot of money.”

She knelt and scooped the pieces of plastic into her hands.

“You saw Susan Luther lying on that autopsy table yesterday, but you didn’t see her, did you? You just saw a body, not a person. And you don’t see her son now.”

Jane stared up at me with a blank, confused, expression.

“Maybe I wasn’t right about you being a vulture, but you’re certainly not a human being.”

I stormed out of the A.V. room, out of the Library and onto the campus grounds. A walk would cool me down and the frigid air chapping against my cheeks and forehead was exactly what I needed. I half walked, half ran, until my heart thudded against my ribs. A mild euphoria washed over me and I felt dizzy from the blood pumping to my head.

An empty park bench nestled between two gigantic maple trees appeared on my left and I collapsed on the thick wood slats. I gulped in panting breaths. The crimson leaves drifting down from the fall branches of the maples onto my lap, looked like embers floating through the air.

After about ten minutes or so, I could no longer feel my nose or my toes. A few minutes more, despite the fact that my hands were jammed as far down in my jean pockets as they could get, I could no longer feel my fingertips. I stamped my feet on the ground in a pointless attempt to drive blood into my toes.

“Maybe you should get in the car where it’s warm.”

I looked over my shoulder. Louise stood behind me with more than a little concern on her face. She had parked her car on the far side of the parkway.

Jane Katts sat in the back seat still fumbling with her tape recorder.

“I’m not ready yet. I might say something really stupid and I’d like to keep my job.”

Louise stepped around the maple on my right and sat next to me. She handed me her winter gloves.

“Thank you.”

We sat in quiet, except for the rustling of leaves, for a few minutes. An orange leaf skipped and skidded down the street in front of us. Louise and I watched it like two old people in front of the general store watching cars go by.

“Talk to me, Catherine. What’s going on? I know this is more than a general dislike of the press like the rest of the department has.”

Part of me had wanted to tell Louise for years, and on a couple occasions, I’d actually tried to tell her. Somehow the words wouldn’t come.

“I won’t push you if you’re not ready, Catherine.”

“No,” I said. “You have a right to know. Since you’ve put up with me all these years.”

I couldn’t make eye contact with her. Instead I folded my hands together and lowered my head like I were about to pray instead of confess.

“When I first started in homicide, I was assigned to a case where a woman was found shot to death in her bubble bath.”

Louise nodded but didn’t interrupt.

“Someone came in and blew her brains out with a handgun. The press went wild. Reporters were crawling all over themselves to get a quote, or some tidbit of information on the case.

My partner at the time was Spencer Trent.”

She nodded again. Louise had known I partnered with Spence, before she transferred to Saint Paul P.D., so this news was no great surprise.

“He and I did what you and I do. We speculated on who we thought killed the victim. Her husband’s alibi was airtight. We discovered that she’d had an affair. Her sixteen-year-old son had found out about it, so naturally we speculated that he could have killed his mother in a fit of rage.”

I filled my lungs with cold air and let it out slowly.

“Somehow this theory got out. We never did learn how the press got wind of the idea, but they ran it as a front-page headline.

We found the boy hanging, in nothing but his underwear, from the banister in the family’s entryway. They had one of those high cathedral numbers.”

Nothing could clear the image from my head. I closed my eyes and I was there again, standing in the entryway, with a hard rock in my stomach.

“He was holding a copy of the newspaper that proclaimed him a murder when he jumped over.”

“How do you know?” Louise asked.

“We found the paper on the entry floor and news print on his fingers.”

“Catherine, I am so sorry.” Louise put her hand on my back – a comforting gesture that didn’t comfort me at all.

“We found out later that the father’s alibi was fake. He had murdered his wife.”

I jerked my thumb toward the Chariot of Death parked against the curb. “He confessed to killing the mother. It was people like Jane Katts who killed the kid.”

Louise let silence pass between us for a few minutes. Anything she could have said to me in that space would have been lost in my anger.

“Jane wasn’t the reporter who wrote that story,” Louise said. “She’s too young. She was probably in college when that story ran, and we have her on a short leash.”

“I guess. But, you should have seen the glee in her face when she heard that Chad had found his grandmother’s body. It was like she’d gotten the pony she’d always wanted for Christmas.”

“Jane can be as excited as she wants to be. She’s not allowed to print any of it.”

I turned toward her. “What do we really have to prevent the paper from printing the story? Their word? Based on a promised exclusive interview? When they get wind of a juicy bit of fodder, our deal with them would be broken faster than a teenage pop star’s vow of chastity.”

Louise considered what I’d said for less than a second.

“My friend at the mayor’s office owes me. BIG.” A smirk that I couldn’t quite read crossed her face. “He’ll keep his word. He has no choice.”

I considered pressing her for more information, but the numbness in my toes had progressed to pain. If I didn’t get out of the cold soon I’d be dealing with an achy pain in my feet for days – a problem I’d had since I was a kid and had actually frozen my feet, because I didn’t want to stop playing long enough to go inside and warm up.

I stood.

“Okay, I think I can contain my temper. Let’s get back to our impartial observer.”

Jane was still fiddling with her tape player. I slid into the passenger seat, reached over flicked the heat to high, and then adjusted all the dash vents so they pointed toward me. I pushed my feet as high up as I could under the dash where heat poured over my feet. I cupped my hands over the vent near the window, like a camper huddled around a fire.

Louise got in and turned the fan down a couple notches.

“You’re buying me a new tape recorder.” Jane shook the plastic pieces in the air between the front seats. “This one is broke all to hell.”

I transferred the pieces of plastic from her hand to mine.

“Let me see what I can do,” I said. “I have a knack for fixing mechanical things.”

Louise pulled away from the curb and we were on our way. At this point, I didn’t care where we were going.

I twisted, shoved, and pressed the pieces of the tape recorder together, mashed them until finally, success. There was a loud click of the major two pieces. After that, the smaller pieces of the recorder puzzle snapped into place with ease.

“Viola!” I pronounced the word like my Grandmother always did, vi-ola. I held up the reassembled recorder so Jane could see it. “All better.”

“Great. Give it to me, please,” Jane said.

“Just a second.” I pulled it back before she could take it from me. “Let’s make sure it’s functioning. If not, then we can stop at Target and get you a new one.”

I pressed the rewind button. After a few seconds, I clicked stop.