Angels Burning (22 page)

I'm not comfortable with being called a hero for a number of reasons but most notably because I didn't do anything remotely heroic. Zane Massey may die. Tug Truly is going to jail. Camio's killer is still out there. But I don't bring up any of this.

I smile, nod, greet the reporters I know by name, and field a few questions while Ben stands off to one side in a blue-striped purple polo and a military green Indiana Jones fedora. His hair started falling out a couple of years ago. He should just shave off what's left, but instead, he's taken to wearing a ridiculous array of hats. I can feel his eyes crawling all over me.

My ability to arouse passion in men who arouse nothing in me is the stuff of legends.

“I'm glad you're okay, Dove,” he says as he follows me inside the station house.

Phones are ringing. The seats in the waiting area are full. Even Everhart, our new daddy, is here, along with Dewey, Singer, and Blonski, who I look at pleadingly as Ben and I pass. He knows what that means.

“Chief,” he says, excusing himself from the woman he was assisting at one of the desks and rushing up to me. “We've got a situation you need to address. It's urgent.”

Ben looks eagerly back and forth between the two of us, not showing any signs of leaving.

“Might be a matter of life and death,” Blonski adds.

Amazingly, Ben takes the hint.

“Oh, then I should get out of your way.”

“Yes, that's probably a good idea. I'll be in touch later.”

“What a tool,” Blonski mutters under his breath.

“What's going on around here?” I ask him.

“People are freaking. None of this has anything to do with the Truly murder or the Massey shooting. They're just upset by what's going on and want us to hold their hands and tell them it's going to be okay.”

“Aw, that sounds right up your alley,” I tease. “I have three girls on their way here. Camio's best friends. I'll need the interview room. But I want to talk to Tug first.”

Everhart has wandered over. He gives me a cigar with a blue wrapper that reads:
IT'S A BOY!

“Thanks. You know you can have today off.”

He smiles a little guiltily.

“Nah. I got so many relatives at the hospital right now, I can't get anywhere near the Jakester.

“Tug's not here,” he tells me. “Dewey and I moved him to Broadview already.”

“Why?”

“Sandra Goldfarb,” Blonski says, squinting his eyes and puckering his lips like he's just taken a gulp of a skunked beer. “She came breezing in first thing this morning and announced she's his lawyer. I told her you wanted to talk to Tug before he was moved and get a statement and she looked at me that way she does. You know. Like you're a bug.”

“Or a mortgage payment,” Everhart adds.

“She said he's not giving a statement and wanted him moved to Broadview and arraigned this morning. That we should have moved him last night. That we were derelict in our duties.”

Singer joins us, wide-eyed and breathless.

“She didn't want you to talk to him, Chief, and get him to accept what he did,” he says in a whisper. “She's planning on some big trial where she's going to argue he was out of his mind when he did it.”

“Having a dissociative episode, probably,” Blonski provides knowingly, folding his arms across his chest.

“Dammit,” I say. “Well, she's going to have to let me talk to him, although now she's going to be in the room with us and not let him say much of anything.”

“But we do have some good news,” Singer says, practically bursting with excitement. “Corporal Greely sent us copies of the surveillance footage from the Dairy Queen. Lonnie Harris and Camio had an encounter.”

I follow the three of them and sit down at Singer's computer. He plays the footage for me.

The images were captured in the drive-through. Lonnie's in his pickup truck. The girl in the window is Camio in a red-and-yellow Dairy Queen cap with her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. The sensation of seeing her alive, smiling, talking, making change, handing over a bag of chili cheese dogs, fills me with an indescribable sadness. I'm the last person who held her in this world. She was dead already, but I
pulled her body close and helped bring her out of the anonymous grave her killer intended for her. I never met her when she was alive. I've only seen frozen moments of her existence, a candid on Zane's phone and her DMV and autopsy photos on Nolan's murder board. Here she is in front of me, vibrant and cheerful, putting in her hours at work, looking forward to seeing Zane later, looking forward to the rest of her life, but then her expression darkens. Lonnie has said something vile to her. She closes the window and turns away.

The film jumps to three days later. Lonnie's back. Camio obviously remembers him. Her sunny smile doesn't surface. Her mouth is set in a stern line. She reaches to take his money, and he grabs her by her wrist. All of us watching the film flinch. She twists her arm and is able to wrench it free. Lonnie grins.

The footage is time-stamped three weeks ago.

“This is huge,” I say.

“Chief,” Dewey calls me. “There's some teenagers outside say they're supposed to talk to you but they won't come inside.”

“Girls?”

“And boys.”

Nolan must be doing backflips over this new information, I think to myself as I walk outside, although the acrobatics will occur only inside his head. I've never seen him outwardly express enthusiasm or happiness, but I like to think there's a mini Nolan inside him who jumps up and down like a cricket and shouts tiny, tinny “yippees” whenever something goes right.

He's probably at Lonnie Harris's home right now with a team of troopers tearing the place apart.

I recognize Camio's three best friends—Katy, Mindy Dawn, and Madison—from social media photos and the ones I looked up in their yearbook. All three of them are in cutoffs and skimpy tops with tiger-claw rips across the front. Their faces look the same to me: vague, almost drunken expressions on soft features that have gone straight from baby fat to couch-potato chubbiness. Footwear, hair color, and body shape are the only ways to tell them apart. Katy is busty and margarine-haired in clunky cork-heeled platform sandals. Mindy Dawn
is a tall, lanky brunette with hoops in her upper lip, wearing scuffed white cowboy boots with fringe and silver beads. Madison is a heavy girl with crow black tresses streaked in electric blue in a pair of gladiator sandals that crisscross up her calves.

The two boys with them are interchangeable redneck spawn: jeans, black tanks, shit-kicker boots, empty wallets on chains, faded snuff can rings on their back pockets, camo ball caps. Their arms and shoulders are inked in bullets, bloody knives, and leering skulls, and their faces are carefully arranged in the sullen smirks of those who are proud of not trying. I know the armor well.

One of them stands possessively close to a Kawasaki motorcycle, the consolation prize for those who can't afford a Harley. It's in excellent condition, though. This boy cherishes his bike. The other leans against a black Ford Silverado that's seen better days. They both have chews in.

I was around the same age as these kids when my mother was murdered. For that reason and a few others, this time in my life has remained very clear and vivid to me. I remember exactly what it felt like to be them. Same town. Same school. Even though I had recently become the stepdaughter of one of the wealthiest men in town and now lived in a big house and wore much nicer clothes, I also knew what it was like to be poor, to be neglected, to have wants and desires that constantly went unmet.

I might not have been friends with this particular five standing in front of me, but I would've tried my best to be friendly with them. No matter how badly I was treated by others, I always tried to take the high road. I was a collector of people. I had friends from every clique: potheads, eggheads, meatheads, rednecks, no-neck jocks.

I was a caretaker, negotiator, organizer, and motivator long before I'd use these same qualities in my future profession, and I took my status seriously at the time. I even gave up my earlier sluttiness because I realized, as a popular kid and a leader, I had to set an example and be a role model no different than if I'd been a professional athlete or a congresswoman. I had a lot of boyfriends and went through them quickly but always one at a time, the same way I ate potato chips.

I'm going to give these kids the benefit of the doubt. The girls were
friends of Camio's, and from what I know of her, I like her, therefore, I should like them.

“Hello, ladies,” I say, smiling, as I approach them. “Thank you for coming in.”

“We're not going to talk to you,” Katy says.

“Why not?”

“We just don't want to. You can't make us, right?”

“By not wanting to talk to the police you make yourselves look suspicious,” I explain, glancing quickly at all of them, trying to sort out the hierarchy and their relationship to the boys.

Mindy Dawn sidles up next to the boy with the bike. He flops an arm possessively around her shoulders. Madison glares at me, my shoes, the parking lot blacktop, the sky, Katy, her own fingernails; I notice they're elaborately, professionally polished in black and gold animal-print patterns.

Katy's in charge. She continues to be the group's spokesperson. I notice her nails are painted a rainbow tie-dye. Mindy Dawn's appear to be plain red.

“We already talked to that big dumb trooper,” Katy says. “He knows we got alibis.”

I secretly smile to myself wondering if the big dumb trooper is Nolan; he's been called much worse.

He told me they do have strong alibis and none of them have a motive, but they're teenage girls and I know everything that happens to a teenage girl can in some way be construed by her as something worthy of killing for or over.

“Don't you care about Camio?” I ask them. “About finding her killer?”

The boy with his arm around Mindy Dawn drawls, “You know who her killer is. Tug took care of him for you. For all of us.”

All three girls look noticeably upset upon hearing his proclamation. There's no reason to think they didn't like Zane. He was a nice, good-looking kid and Camio's boyfriend.

“Zane didn't kill Camio,” I correct him.

“Yeah, he did.”

“And you know this how?”

He shifts his arm from Mindy Dawn's shoulders and wraps it around her neck in a chokehold. She leans back into him obediently. He's not going to answer me.

“Can you tell me this much?” I say, returning to the girls. “Did Camio ever talk to you about a customer at Dairy Queen who was giving her trouble? A scary-looking guy who harassed her in the drive-through?”

They all consider the question, look at each other to confirm, and shake their heads.

“Come on,” Kawasaki says. “Let's get out of here.”

“Just a minute, girls. If you weren't planning to talk to me, then why did you come down here? Why didn't you call and say you changed your minds?”

Before any of the girls have a chance to reply, the boy tongues his wad of tobacco from one side of his lower lip to the other and says, “We thought it would be fun to come over and tell you in person just to piss you off.”

His excessive, unwarranted dislike of me seems familiar, but the déjà vu moment passes. I can't remember when and where I felt this way before.

“I didn't catch your name,” I say to him.

“I didn't give it to you.”

His silent friend snorts a laugh from his post near the truck.

The girls shift around uncomfortably. Any bravado they arrived with has abandoned them. They look at their hero with awe and a little disgust. I'm sure he doesn't see the disgust.

I do the worst thing possible I can do to a kid like this. I ignore him.

“I really like your nails,” I say to Madison. “Yours, too,” I add, turning to Katy. “Did you get them done around here?”

I walk toward them and they reflexively hold out their hands and spread their fingers.

They tell me the name of the place. I know where it is.

“They did a great job,” I say admiringly.

Not one to go unnoticed, Mindy Dawn untangles herself from Kawasaki's
arms and comes over to our female powwow with her hands extended like a sleepwalker.

Her nails are a solid fire-engine red but with a tiny crystal glued in the middle of each tip.

“Those are so pretty,” I say, taking her hands in mine.

“Camio had hers done like me,” Mindy Dawn provides. “She loved anything sparkly.”

“Only hers were pink to match her toenails,” Madison pipes up, “and the crystals were heart-shaped to match the anklet Zane got her.”

She barely gets out the last few words before she chokes up entirely.

A girl Madison's age with weight issues usually either succumbs to the abuse she receives from others and becomes timid and deferential or fights back by hating everyone before they can hate her. I had put her in the second category, but tears start streaming from her eyes and it's obvious she loved her friend Camio.

Mindy Dawn and Katy get misty-eyed as well.

I'm one step away from convincing them to come inside the station with me and plying them with free cans of pop and little bags of vending machine Cheetos when Kawasaki commands, roughly, “Stop talking to her. Don't you see what she's doing? She's trying to make you think she likes you so you'll talk to her. She doesn't give a fuck about your fucking nails.”

“Why don't you stay out of this, Mouth?” I snap back at him.

“What'd you call me?”

“Mouth. Since you won't tell me your name I have no choice but to identify you by your most outstanding quality, and so far that appears to be your big mouth.”

I watch rage cloud his face and fear replace the grief in the girls' eyes.