Close to the Bone (16 page)

‘Theresa!’ Don cried. The ferret snuffled.

She stopped moving.

‘James,’ she rasped. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Finding justice,’ he said.

EIGHTEEN

S
he couldn’t see him, could only feel the muscles in his chest and legs as he crushed her against himself, and her gaze instead fixed on Don. Nearly close enough to touch, and yet on the other side of an unbridgeable gap formed by the knife at her throat. She could see the struggle in his face – afraid to move yet terrified not to. She had never seen him show fear before – death-defying situations rarely arose in the forensics lab – and it paralysed her.

The knife stayed at her throat, but James moved his other hand long enough to pull something that clanked from one of his pockets and toss it at Don.

Then he grasped the wrist of Theresa’s knife hand hard enough to numb it and, before she could figure out what he was doing, pulled the knife out of it. She barely had time to draw a deep breath before the blade returned to her throat. She pulled at that forearm with both of her hands, the attempt as useless as every other one of her actions to date.

‘Put your hands out.’ It sounded more like a growl than actual speech.

No one moved.

‘You, Theresa. Put your hands out straight.’

It took a moment, but she made herself let go of the arm that held a knife to her skin. Slowly, trying to avoid any rebound motion. It stayed in the same place, not breaking the surface but resting on it, tense enough to make swallowing feel foolish.

She stretched out her arms.

‘Put them on her.’

‘No,’ Don said. It seemed to be a gut reaction. ‘Let her go. I’ll do whatever you want but—’

‘Put them on!’

‘What do you want? Just let her go. I—’

The blade shifted slightly. ‘Put them on or I’ll cut her open right here and now!’

She watched Don swallow, considering his options and failing to find an acceptable one. Even in her abject terror, her heart melted a little to see his distress. He may not
love
her, but he surely loved her.

He opened the metal circles, not the bare-bones cop variety but with, incongruously, hot pink padding along the edges. He locked one around her left wrist, then did the same with her right. And even though she didn’t argue, knew this had to happen, she couldn’t help but feel a little shock of something like betrayal when the second one clinked into place. They weren’t even particularly loose.

She lowered her hands, refusing to embarrass herself any further by tugging at James’ arm. ‘All right,’ Don said. ‘Now what? What do you want? Why did you kill—?’

The chest plastered to Theresa’s back expanded and contracted, its voice rumbling in her ear. ‘I want my wife’s ring back.’

Don blinked.

Theresa felt herself do the same.

‘What?’

‘What?’

‘Someone at the ME’s stole Diana’s sapphire ring. The cops thought it was me, that it made the case airtight. But I didn’t steal it, and I didn’t kill her. She was alive when I left that house and she still had that ring on her finger. Someone else did both those things.
You
—’ clearly he meant Don – ‘were at the office when her body came in. Suddenly at the autopsy, there’s no ring. Explain that.’

‘But you pawned—’ Theresa began.

‘I pawned a ring, yes. But it wasn’t
that
ring.’

They were silent for a moment. Then Theresa said, ‘James, you need to start from the beginning. Let’s sit down, and you can tell us what happened.’

The blade tightened across her larynx. ‘Oh, I’ll explain. Then we’ll see what your baby boy here says.’

He freed one hand only to plunge it into her hair, pulling it hard enough to make some of the stars return.

‘Don’t!’ Don shouted again.

‘Shut up.’ James moved backward, stepping between the sofa and overturned coffee table, up to the end of the sofa. Then he moved his grip downward, dragging her hair by default, until she took an uncomfortable seat on the sofa cushions, with him standing behind its arm. The blade stayed at her throat, and with a small movement he could thrust it downward and into her chest if he wanted. If her theory about a cut on his right hand had been correct, then obviously the wound didn’t bother him much.

‘You, lover-boy – sit there. Now.’

Don did as told, thrusting himself into the armchair, mashing the cute matching throw pillows his ex-girlfriend had picked out.

James’ voice emanated from above her, his grip on her hair not lessening in the slightest.

‘I’ll make this quick. I went to my home. Diana and me, we – we had a fight, okay. I went and got my shoes from the bedroom and figured, sure, if she wants to be like that … so I took a look in her jewelry box, helped myself to a ring. Which
I
bought her, got it? I left. Later, the nosy neighbor came over, found my Di—’

A pause. She heard a breath shudder through his body, felt his hand tremble; then he went on. But she could see only Don; he didn’t appear to be breathing, sitting with each hand on a knee and a look of both paralysed fear and complete confusion. Even the ferret stayed quiet.

‘Found my Di dead. She called the cops. The cops get there. Diana has two rings on, her wedding band and this silver thing with blue and white stones that she’d been wearing lately, said she bought it at Tower City, just a cheap thing. It didn’t look cheap, though. The body goes to the ME’s. A deskman – I think it was Darryl Johnson, but I can’t tell because the copy my attorney showed me had been cut off at the bottom – fills out the clothing list but under jewelry just writes “earrings, watch, ring”. Or maybe he writes “rings”. I thought it was Darryl’s handwriting, so I asked him, showed him the copy my lawyer gave me.
He
said he can’t tell if he even wrote it, much less what it says. Like I was gonna believe that.’

‘You killed him,’ Theresa said.

A pause. It seemed that his grasp on her hair lessened just a millimeter – or perhaps the muscles were simply getting tired.

‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said.

NINETEEN

‘Y
ou beat him to death,’ Don said. ‘You flooded the deskmen’s office with his blood.’

The grip tightened again. ‘He wouldn’t tell me the truth! He kept saying he didn’t remember, but I know he was lying. He had that sly way of looking at you, like he was laughing at you, taking you for a fool the whole time he’d be pretending to like you—’

‘He looked at everyone that way,’ Theresa said. They needed to calm him. They needed to soothe him. Nothing else would get them out of this. ‘He wasn’t very nice.’

‘Kept saying he didn’t remember anything about that day. Said he didn’t even remember Diana. You ever
met
a man who didn’t remember Diana? He hit on her every day she worked there. She told me.’

‘She told me, too,’ Theresa said.

Behind her, James drew a ragged breath. ‘Anyway, even when he was dying, he wouldn’t tell me anything about the ring.’

‘So he was probably telling the truth,’ Don extrapolated.

Another sigh. ‘Maybe.’

‘And George Bain?’

James jumped back into his narrative. ‘He had the whole trip to the office, just him and Diana in that ambulance. He could have made a pit stop to take a closer look at her.’

‘George didn’t work alone,’ Don pointed out. ‘The bodysnatchers work in pairs.’

But James had done his homework and would not be distracted. ‘That Cindy woman moved away. And she was a minister – ministers don’t steal, at least not most of them. But Bain didn’t strike me as any sort of upstanding character, so I went an’ asked him about it.’

‘You started with him,’ Theresa supplied.

‘He wasn’t working there any more. He didn’t know who I was, didn’t know that a Justin Warner now worked at the ME’s. But I barely started asking him—’

‘Aggressively?’ Theresa asked, as gently as she could.

‘He tried to throw me out! All I did was ask about what happened that day, and he got all offended and tried to kick me out. I said that wasn’t going to fly, and then he gets so uptight he has a heart attack and dies, right there in front of me. So I look through his papers – why do old dudes always have so much paper? – and his jewelry box, but he didn’t have any women’s jewelry. And if he sold it, there’s no sign of it.’

A short silence ensued, but Theresa kept to the plan of letting him talk it out. ‘So you went on to Dr Reese.’

‘’Cause then I started thinking about the bags, right?’ She felt his leg on the edge of the sofa behind her, as if he had hitched one hip on to it. He must have gotten even less sleep than she had, and this time his grip really did loosen, not enough to free her but enough that her scalp kept aching. The blade stopped pressing into her skin but remained resting against it, so she did not move. ‘The cops at the scene bagged the hands. Ring was there. We – deskmen – aren’t allowed to take those things off. Only you guys, you trace evidence guys. So Darryl and the other deskmen and George Bain, they were the wrong guys … maybe … because that ring would have been inside the bag where they couldn’t get to it. But you were. The autopsy report said you removed the bags.’

Don said, ‘I did, but – I didn’t take Diana’s ring. I don’t steal from our co— our victims. I certainly wouldn’t have stolen from
Diana
.’

Theresa flashed back to another memory, this one unbidden and unwanted of Don when he first began work at the ME’s. He’d been desperately broke, with crushing student loans and his first apartment to pay for. His mother had recently died, far too young. He’d been counting every penny and particularly upset that the county never provided for overtime in any way, shape or form.

She shook her head, physically, which only reminded her of the knife at her throat. Ridiculous. Don would never have done such a thing no matter how young or desperate he might have been. And he certainly wouldn’t have done it in a case he knew would be so thoroughly scrutinized.

‘So what happened to it?’ James demanded.

She watched Don’s face contort and crumble into a frantic fear. ‘I don’t remember.’

James’ voice rose. ‘You don’t remember what you did with it?’

‘I didn’t take it – I just can’t remember anything about her hands or what rings were on them—’

‘This lady’s blood is going to be soaking your couch in another second if you don’t—’

‘I didn’t take it!’

The knife pricked her skin again.

Theresa spoke, straining for her firmest, most first-grade-teacher-like voice. ‘Start from the beginning.’

‘What?’ Don asked.

‘Go back to that day,’ she said, enunciating each word. ‘Leo told you to take care of the trace evidence duties – the fingernail scrapings, the clothing – so I wouldn’t have to come in. Right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Careful. Don’t lead the witness,’ James warned her, sounding almost amused. He let go of her hair, finally, but moved that hand to her shoulder where he gripped it hard enough to interrupt the carotid where it emerged from behind the collarbone. The knife did not move.

But Theresa persisted. ‘Where was she?’

‘In the amphitheater.’

‘And were the hands bagged?’

‘Yes. I mean – I don’t remember, but they must have been because it’s in the report.’

‘Okay.’ Theresa sucked in a careful breath. ‘So you cut the bags off.’

‘I must have.’

‘And what condition were her hands in?’

He gave her that desperate look again, as if trying to convince her instead of James Allman. ‘I don’t remember. I’m sure I did it, I collected the fingernail scrapings, but I don’t actually remember doing it. I know I can’t tell you what kind of jewelry she had on.’

‘How could you not—’ James began, angrily.

Theresa said, ‘Because we look at one or two sets of hands a day, every day, all week long, and have done for the past ten years.’ She remembered some details from cases that old – the color of someone’s shirt, a pair of shoes, a tattoo – but there were umpteen million other details which she would never recall.

‘But this was
Diana
,’ James pointed out, reasonably.

‘All I remember is her—’

What? Theresa wondered. Boobs?

‘Face,’ Don finished, his gaze slumping to the floor. ‘Her face looked so – awful.’

The hand on her shoulder tightened. She’d pass out from lack of blood to the brain at this rate.

‘And how upset Theresa would be,’ Don added, looking at her again. ‘I knew you two were pretty close. Leo insisted on calling you with the news, and I knew he’d do a crappy job of it.’

‘He did,’ Theresa admitted. ‘Human compassion never having been his strong suit.’

James stayed on point. ‘So you got no idea whether this ring with blue stones was still on Diana’s hand?’

Don shook his head. ‘None.’

Theresa cleared her throat. ‘So you collected the fingernail scrapings. What did you do then?’

‘I wheeled her into the hallway, outside the autopsy room.’

‘And then?’

He gave a small shrug. ‘Then I went back into the amphitheater and taped her clothing. I stored the clothing in the trap room and took the samples up to the lab—’

‘But
Diana
,’ James interrupted. ‘What happened to Diana?’

‘I – I didn’t have anything else to do on – with – her after that.’

‘So you just
left
her there? In the
hallway
?’

Don visibly struggled to find a comforting phrase. ‘That’s how we always do it. The building had been emptied, anyway … and when I left the amphitheater with the samples, they had started doing the autopsy.’

‘Who was in the autopsy suite?’ Theresa asked.

‘Two, three guys – I don’t know. I didn’t look, I just went past … I didn’t want to see her like that.’

That must have seemed appropriately sad to James because she felt a deep breath ease out of him. But in the next moment he said, ‘That is not very helpful. Not at all.’

‘There’s nothing else I can tell you!’ Don said, a catch in his voice. ‘Just let Theresa leave. I’ll stay here with you. Just let her go.’

‘Wrong plan.’ James stood and pulled Theresa to her feet as well, plucking her upward like a child and keeping her body wedged between his chest and the knife. ‘I got a better idea. You stay here, and she comes with me.’