Angels Burning (15 page)

A brief spark of defiance runs through Eddie. He clamps his hands on the armrests and rises up in his chair but quickly changes his mind and crumples back against the cracked faux leather upholstery.

“I didn't have nothing to do with her dying,” he says quietly. “She was a sweet girl.”

His word choice is interesting: not
I didn't kill her
, or
I didn't have anything to do with her “murder”
; he said he didn't have anything to do with her “dying.” With these words, all the violence, shock, and outrage had been removed. Her death was no longer an act of aggression but something visited upon her; not something someone did to her but something that happened to her. Something expected. Maybe even something inevitable.

“Why did she come to see you?” Nolan persists.

“Hell,” he says, shifting uncomfortably in his chair.

He gets to his feet and starts rubbing his hand over his mouth and chin while his eyes dart around the room searching for the bottle of booze he would have run for in the past.

“She liked to talk to me. Wanted to know about some stuff in my past.”

“What kind of stuff?”

He shoves his hands into the pockets of his jeans and shakes his head.

“You know.”

“Know what?” Nolan prods him.

“Know all about me. I'm sure you've checked me out. You know my criminal record and my service record.”

I came here fully expecting to dislike this man because he mistreated an animal and because he's a Truly, but I'm beginning to wonder if the first could have been a regrettable mistake he made in his past like many others and the second might be a reason to feel sympathy for him instead of contempt.

He's the oldest of Miranda's children. What was that like? He survived a war only to return and watch two younger brothers cut down in their prime by their own recklessness mere miles from their home. What did that do to his head? His own little patch of the American dream turned out to be more dangerous than the killing fields of Vietnam.

“I'm sure Corporal Greely knows everything about you from your favorite song down to the last time you had a prescription filled,” I say to him.

Both men turn and look at me like they're surprised I have a voice.

“All I know is your niece used to walk all the way over here from her house in order to talk to you. That's a couple of miles isn't it? And sometimes when she left she was very upset, even crying.”

“What?” Eddie says, concerned.

“Corporal Greely, being male and being highly suspicious, jumps to the obvious conclusion that you must've hurt her in some way,” I go on. “But as a female who wants to think the best of everyone, I'm wondering if she was upset
for
you and not
by
you. I think she cared about you very much.”

He walks back to his chair and falls into it like he's just arrived home after a hundred-mile march.

“I spent some time in and out of VA hospitals. If you asked anyone in my family, they'd tell you I had ongoing complications from a couple of bullets I took in 'Nam. But that would be a lie. They were through and throughs. Healed just fine. I was in the psych ward.”

He pulls up his shirt and shows us his scars, two tiny, pink, puckered mouths on his lower left side.

Nolan was shot in the line of duty twelve years ago. It happened right after I'd started looking for the church windows stolen from Campbell's Run. I think this is one of the reasons I threw myself into that case. It provided a distraction, first from wondering if Nolan was going to die, then from wondering if he was going to walk again, and then from wondering if he was going to be able to be a cop again. To this day every time I see a stained glass window, a spasm of fear clutches at my heart.

Nolan came here wanting to dislike Eddie Truly as much as I did and wondering if he might be our killer; now he has to give him begrudging respect and accept that on one level, he has more in common with this man than he does with anyone else he knows.

“It started out with her wanting to talk to me about Vietnam. She was always trying to find out what makes people tick. She wanted to be a psychologist when she grew up. She didn't know I'd been in a loony bin when we started talking, but eventually I told her and that's what we ended up talking about most of the time.”

We all fall silent.

“So there's your big mystery solved. She felt sorry for me, I guess. There was a time in my life where that would've offended the hell out of me and I would've kicked her out the first time I got an inkling of it, but now”—he pauses, leans forward in his chair with his forearms on his knees, and stares hard at the floor—“I gotta tell you it felt good to have someone finally care. I talked her ear off. Told her things I've never told anyone, and while I was doing it I realized no one ever asked. Not a single goddamned person my entire life. No one wanted to know about 'Nam, and no one sure as hell wanted to know about the hospital.”

“Can you think of anyone who would want to harm her? Anyone she had a problem with?”

“Like I said, she was a sweet girl,” Eddie replies. “Far as I know, everyone loved her.”

“What about the boyfriend?”

“I know the family's all up in arms saying he did it. There's no way. Cami was crazy about him and vice versa. She was so excited over that sparkly anklet thing he gave her.”

My thoughts jump to the piece of jewelry and how alive those legs looked attached to a body that had been grilled like a piece of meat. I feel like I might be sick.

“Your mother said she heard them have a heated argument about breaking up,” I provide as a distraction, even though it's Nolan's claim.

Eddie gives me the same look he gave me earlier when he mentioned Miranda, a strange mix of something playful and defeated.

“Then it must be so,” he says, rising to his feet. “Now if you don't mind, I got somewhere I need to be.”

Nolan and I stand up, too, both of us knowing this isn't true. There's no place Eddie Truly needs to be. This fact could be considered liberating, but I think it's become his private prison.

I suddenly understand what he's waiting for. He's been doing it since he stepped off that army plane into the sweltering heat of a jungle that must have hit him like an oven door thrown open in his face. He's waiting to die.

From where I'm positioned, I can see through a doorway into his kitchen and through a window into his backyard, where there's an empty kennel.

“Do you have a dog?” I ask him.

He follows my gaze.

“I did. Afraid I didn't treat him too well.”

“What happened to him?”

“Don't know. He might've been able to slip off his collar, but I don't see how he cut through the lock on his kennel door.”

He looks me square in the face and I know the question he's asking me. He must know who Tug started working for after his dog went missing.

“I've been to some dark places in my mind,” he says, turning away from me and staring at the empty pen. “Sometimes you mistreat the thing you love best just 'cause it's there.

“Wherever he is now, I hope he's okay. His name's Hòa Bình.”

“Hoban?” I repeat uncertainly.

“Hòa Bình. It's Vietnamese.”

He leans down, tears off a corner of the empty pizza box, and writes it out for me.

“It means ‘peace.' ”

He hands me the scrap of cardboard. I take it from him and nod. Tears spring to his eyes. Loss and shame flicker there, then relief.

EVERHART'S WIFE
went into labor while Nolan and I were chatting with Eddie Truly. This is his first child, a boy already named Jacob, already nicknamed the Jakester, already photographed more inside his mother's uterus than I was ever photographed outside of Cissy's, and already the proud owner of an NFL regulation Steelers football helmet and a sandbox shaped like a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Gen 6 complete with real tires.

Dewey, my thirty-six-year-old senior officer, has four kids who have all been extensively documented at every stage of life and the proof printed out from digital photos and tacked onto our communal bulletin board. He's taken Everhart under his wing these past months, training him and filling his head with parental tales ranging from adorable to terrifying.

Singer and Blonski are too young and too single to have more than a polite passing interest in the procreating of their coworkers. I'm not sure Blonski has even noticed that among our schedules for DUI classes and flyers urging everyone to wear a bike helmet are endless candids of little Deweys blowing out birthday-cake candles and dressed up for Halloween.

I know Singer has noticed. For all his domestic qualities, raising children doesn't seem to be something he's eager to do. When he walks past the board, he eyes the photos the way a shellfish-allergy sufferer regards a plate of shrimp salad.

Welcoming a new life into the world has provided a temporary distraction from the thought of the life that has been taken too soon. My men may not officially be part of the active investigation surrounding Camio's death but a murder this brutal and inexplicable brings with it a host of other problems to small towns. Everyone is suddenly on edge, hearing suspicious noises in the night, glimpsing threatening strangers, noticing cars parked where they shouldn't be, and we have to check it out. People call and drop by with unsolicited insights into the victim and those who knew her, and we have to listen patiently to all of it in the slim hope that we might hear something useful.

People don't want to believe someone living in their town could kill a young girl and light her on fire. They want the perpetrator to be an outsider so they can continue to believe evil doesn't bloom in their own backyards. However, if they are forced to acknowledge that an unsavory element exists right under their noses, a family like the Trulys is an acceptable choice. Not only do they have a track record of less heinous but disreputable behavior, they also don't have any allies. The Trulys don't go out in the world and make friends. They bring carefully culled individuals into their tribe for reproductive purposes and create their own network of support and assistance. This works fine for them most of the time until they need something one of their own can't provide, like a communal benefit of the doubt.

As I explained to Nolan earlier, I don't think a family member did it. He's not completely convinced yet. He wasn't even won over by the reformed Uncle Eddie.

He asked and was granted permission to send a team to search Eddie's house and vehicle. I don't think he's going to find anything and that includes Camio's cell phone, which has taken on new importance since I discovered the discrepancy in her final texts to Zane.

Nolan agrees with me that those texts have provided two important probabilities about the killer. Whoever sent them might not be too familiar with smartphones, but this fact doesn't help much. Even my grandmother, who's in her nineties, has one. Her arthritic fingers make it difficult to use the keypad, so I got her a stylus that she's constantly
misplacing; when she does use it she taps with the capped end of a pen instead. She loves to send me messages that are made up entirely of emoticons. I've become an expert at deciphering them.

Birthday cake / microphone / sleepy face = We did karaoke for someone's birthday at the home today and now I'm tired.

Soup bowl / thumbs-up / revolver / angel = Thank God the soup's good today or I was going to have to shoot someone.

Face with eyes X-ed out / monkey with eyes covered = Someone died and I know nothing.

Face with eyes X-ed out / monkey with mouth covered = Someone died and I'm not saying anything.

A line of ten birds = Lots of birds outside my window today.

The English flag / bag of money / clock = Can't talk now;
Downton Abbey
's on.

More important, the other clue the texts provide is that the killer seemed to be trying to frame Zane. Why else pretend to be Camio and get him to meet her around the moment she was murdered? This all but rules out the psycho-stranger theory since the killer would have had to know about Camio's relationship with Zane even to the point of knowing where they liked to hang out. It doesn't completely rule out someone like Lonnie Harris, who, although not closely acquainted with Camio, could have stalked her.

But why frame Zane of all people? The ruse could be personally motivated: the killer hated Zane and wanted to get him in trouble. If this is the case, then every member of the Truly family is back at the top of the suspect list, since they all disliked the boy. Or it could be because he's an obvious choice. Boyfriends and husbands are always the first suspects in a female's murder. If this is the reason, our killer is not only vicious and resourceful but smart, too, an unfortunate combination for those of us trying to catch him. Or her.

There's a chance two people were involved. It would've been difficult for one person to move the body although not impossible, but Nolan and I both find it strange that parts of the comforter were burned and bits of the synthetic elements of the fabric were found melted onto
her skin. This almost certainly means someone covered her with the blanket again after the fire started. Could the killer have changed his mind and decided leaving her in a sinkhole out at the Run would be concealment enough, or begun to feel some sort of remorse and decided he should just let her be? Or was there a second person who never wanted Camio dead in the first place and couldn't stand to see this final atrocity visited upon her? We don't have anything to back up our hunch about an accomplice, but if he or she exists, he or she might have been the one who sent the texts to help cover up for the one who did the actual deed.

Chet Shank told me Lucky thinks I accused him of killing my mother to protect Gil. He couldn't be further from the truth.