Close to the Bone (18 page)

‘They’re looking for Justin Warner.’

‘Yeah. That’s why I can’t go to my apartment or use my car.’

‘Why did you hang around in the deskmen’s office for so long? The blood had mostly dried when I passed you coming in.’

‘Figured out it was me on the gurney, huh? Would have scared the shit out of you if I suddenly sat up!’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it would have. But why were you still there?’

‘It took him a while to die. Like an hour, it seemed. The clock in that office ticks loud enough to hear when it’s quiet, did you know that? Every time I thought he was dead he’d make another sound or seem like he was breathing.’ James’ voice trembled, and he suddenly seemed quite a bit less than cold blooded. ‘I didn’t know what to do. Whether I should call a doctor, or just hold my hand over his nose. If he lived, he would have been able to say I did it. But with him dead everyone would figure I did it anyway – or Justin did. Maybe I could disappear … Then I’d think, no way. Then I’d hope he’d wake up so he could tell me the truth. I’d tell him that I’d call an ambulance for him if he’d tell me the truth. But he didn’t wake up, didn’t die, and the clock kept ticking. So finally I took a shower and changed clothes and was just going to leave when I heard you unlock the back door.’

She fought to remove that image from her mind and hastily moved on. ‘So Dr Reese—’

‘Pretended he barely remembered Diana and didn’t remember her autopsy. He certainly didn’t remember her jewelry. He got all puffed up, that way he did. Like he couldn’t believe I had the nerve to speak to him.’

‘He was probably scared.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ James said simply. ‘I’m sure he was that.’

‘Maybe he really didn’t remember. And maybe he didn’t take Diana’s ring. Now, you think the guilty party is still out there – so you do realize that that means you’ve killed three innocent men?’

She spoke as gently as she could, but made her words clear. If she could make James face the extent of what he’d done, perhaps he would let himself feel enough remorse to give up—

‘That’s not on me.’ He fairly hissed the words, his body a coiled force on the other side of the front seat. ‘That’s on them. I asked simple questions. All they had to do was answer them.’

‘They
did
answer them. You just didn’t like the answers.’

‘No. All I wanted to know was if they took Diana’s ring. Yes or no. Instead they gave me all sorts of crap, pretending they didn’t remember, asking who I was, how did I know about that – just kept
asking
questions. Not answering them.’

Theresa tried to rub one hand across her face, but the cuffs stopped her again. The car wavered on the road. ‘And you’ll probably kill me, once you get the file.’

‘I don’t care about the file,’ James said. ‘That’s just an excuse for you and me to spend some quality time together.’

Her stomach, which had been flopping around in her torso for the past forty-five minutes, plunged to her knees. ‘What?’

‘You heard me.’ He leaned forward slightly, his voice an ominous rumble in her ear. ‘Now I get to ask
you
some questions. And I had better like your answers.’

She stammered, and hated herself for it. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You and Diana were close. All that girl talk.’

She wanted to say that they weren’t
that
close, and that men often assumed that women shared many more details than they actually did. But that would feel disloyal, distancing herself from her friend just to save her own skin, so she nodded.

‘So I need you to tell me who it was.’

‘Who—?’

‘Got her pregnant.’

TWENTY-ONE

T
hey stood at a small bluff overlooking the coastline, about eighteen miles east of downtown near the mouth of the Chagrin River. A lifelong west-sider, Theresa had never been there before. The sun began to fill the sky with a dull rosy glow far to her right, and the waves crashed with angry force into the large rocks below. A seagull landed on the edge not far from her and watched carefully to see if she might be willing to share some food. The breeze off the lake stayed robust enough to make her shiver as it cut through Don’s old T-shirt. But the momentary discomfort seemed well worth it in order to breathe fresh air. And to get out of that damn car.

‘This is where I proposed to her.’

Beside her, knife ever at the ready, James gazed out over the water. ‘I packed a picnic lunch with two real glass flutes and a bottle of champagne. She worked at a bank then, doing secretarial work in the Loan Department – boss was a real bitch – and they were closed Mondays. So she had the day off. We sat right here.’

A wooden bench faced the water, and he sunk slowly on to it. He held the knife loosely in both hands as if it were a hat or his car keys. He stared at the waves, but she would bet he didn’t really see them. The seagull edged closer.

Now that she had better light and time she got a closer look at him. He appeared to be the same Justin Warner she’d said hello to for three months – high cheekbones, thick eyelashes, just enough acne scars remaining to keep him from prettiness. But now the eyes she had thought were curious and thoughtful seemed still, cold. Dead.

The clothes he’d changed into, clean Dickies work pants and a navy hoodie, carried only one visible spot of blood – on the thick burgundy T-shirt, hovering over the sixth and seventh rib.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ she asked. ‘I
did
stab you.’

He gave her a wry and not reassuring smile. ‘Pinpricks. My blood clots really fast, always has. You can’t hurt me.’ And indeed the stain seemed dry, though he couldn’t resist a quick rub with the appropriate hand, and a small wince.

No one’s indestructible, she thought, but didn’t argue. He had gone on, anyway.

‘I told her she’d make me the luckiest man who ever existed if she would be my wife. That part was true. Then I told her that I would be a millionaire before my thirtieth birthday – I forget why I thought that, I guess I had some plan to open a sporting goods store with a guy I met in juvie – and I’d make her life perfect. We’d have four kids and send them to private school. We’d go in on a boat with my cousin and sail up to the islands on the weekends. I’d give her everything she could ever want. That part wasn’t true,’ he said. ‘I guess.’

Guess not, Theresa thought.
Unless being strangled in her own kitchen had been on her bucket list.

Still, it had been a much more romantic and thoughtful proposal than she herself had gotten. At least James had been, at that moment, sincere. The question remained: had he been equally sincere when he decided that killing her would be preferable to losing her?

‘She started to cry when I showed her the ring. It wasn’t a diamond – I wanted to be different, of course – but a sapphire with two diamonds on either side. Her birthstone.’

Mine, too, Theresa thought.

‘It was stolen. A friend of mine liked to specialize in jewelry stores, and I told him to keep his eye out for something special. Gave it to me for ten percent. No one ever caught up to him, though.’

He looked up at her. ‘That’s the ring I was pawning when someone killed my Diana. A sapphire with diamonds. But she had stopped wearing it, left it on her dresser. The ring she had on her hand that day, that the neighbors saw, that my cousin saw, it was also a sapphire with diamonds. But not the same ring.’

Theresa opened her mouth to say something, couldn’t think of anything that would help, and shut it again. She tried to remember Diana’s hands, typing, gesturing, stirring her Diet Coke with a straw.

‘I know I screwed up. I wasn’t giving her the attention that she needed. I spent too much time with my buddies and my crack. But I loved her. I never stopped loving her.’ His eyes filled with water, and his voice trembled. It seemed impossible not to feel sorry for a man in such pain, though at the back of her mind Theresa wondered if love could ever overcome the handicap of beginning a marriage with a stolen ring. ‘You have to believe me.’

‘Okay.’ She didn’t know what else to say. Besides, believing that he loved her did not at all imply believing that he might be innocent of her murder.

‘I didn’t kill her. But I
got
her killed. I drove her away. I pushed her to another man. He knocked her up, then killed her to keep her from having his baby.’

‘That’s the part I’m not quite getting,’ Theresa admitted. ‘Diana was
pregnant
?’

‘That’s what we argued about. On account of it wasn’t mine, since we … Anyway, we argued.’

Another man’s baby. If anything would send a husband into a jealous rage, that would be it. How many women had died that way?

‘She said how I need to leave her life, me being a loser who would never make good … Maybe she was right about that … Point is, now you need to tell me who that man is.’

‘I don’t know.’

He gazed up at her from his seat on the bench, his pose deceptively casual. ‘That’s the wrong answer, Theresa.’

‘She didn’t tell me she was pregnant! She certainly didn’t tell me she was having an affair. I – thought it was you.’

Confusion made him pause. ‘Me?’

‘Making her happy. Because she
did
seem more light-hearted that last month or two, more—’
Excited
, Theresa thought, but didn’t think it prudent to say. ‘But she never said anything to indicate a boyfriend. And she couldn’t have been pregnant.’

Though, in a way, it made sense. Pregnancy would explain the glowing skin, the saltines and folic acid on her kitchen counter; it would explain why Diana excused herself from lunch one day and came back from the ladies’ room pale and sweating. Not because she’d been angry, only nauseous.

And yet—

‘I read the autopsy report, James. There’s no mention of pregnancy.’

This didn’t seem to concern him much. ‘She couldn’t have been more than a month along.’

‘That wouldn’t matter. They – they dissect the uterus, James. The doctor would have seen it.’

His face clouded, either at the image of his wife being cut up like a high school biology project or at this blow to his theory of the murder. ‘But—’

‘No,’ she insisted, as gently as she could. ‘That’s not something Dr Reese – especially Dr Reese, he took great pride in dotting every I and crossing every T – would miss. Pathologists check every female for— There are obvious signs inside the uterus, no matter how early the pregnancy is. They couldn’t have made a mistake about that.’

His frown deepened as he listened to her. ‘But why would she lie to me about that? Especially when she knew how angry I’d get?’

How angry
did
you get? Theresa wondered. ‘Maybe she was mistaken. Maybe she
thought
she was pregnant. She might have simply missed a period and assumed the worst. She wouldn’t be the first woman in history who’d made that mistake.’

He appeared to give that careful thought – always a good thing, in her opinion. Anything that kept him from getting agitated bought her time and improved her chance of survival.

Finally, he shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t really change anything, whether she was or wasn’t. She
thought
she was, which means she had been getting it on with somebody and that somebody might not have wanted to be a daddy. You cold?’

‘What?’

‘You got goosebumps.’

I’m standing on the shore in nothing but a T-shirt. In April!
‘Um … a little.’

He smiled, but with a curve of the lips that did nothing to warm her. ‘Then let’s go.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘To the scene of the crime.’

TWENTY-TWO

T
he sun still hovered just above the horizon, and tall trees along the backs of the houses cast the neighborhood in to a deep gloom. The small ranch home at the end of the street seemed almost swallowed up by the darkness.

‘It’s empty,’ James said, in the seat beside her. They had parked in the driveway, most of the other houses blocked from sight by the ranch.

‘Since the murder?’ Theresa asked.

‘No, just since last month. Owners moved out, realtor can’t find a buyer yet. She has to disclose the history, I guess. Some people are superstitious. Stupid – Diana would never haunt that house, she loved it. But then maybe that makes her more likely to stick around, I don’t know.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Theresa didn’t know the rules for haunting. She did wonder what the rules were for driving around town while restrained and under duress. But every moment she spent with James kept her co-workers safe, and he did not seem eager to harm her – despite the fact that he clearly believed her insistence that she knew nothing about Diana’s affair was a lie. He had simply shelved the topic for now. Perhaps he thought Diana’s ghost would give Theresa permission to spill her secrets. ‘Do you have a key?’

He gave her a look designed to make her feel foolish for asking. ‘Of course not.’ Then he got out of the car, not caring that the slamming door reverberated through the quiet area, and waited for her to join him. He did not threaten or prod, and she did not plan to run, scream, or fight. No option would end in a good way, and besides, she had begun to feel curious about Diana’s last day on earth.

That soporific feeling evanesced when James broke out one of the glass panels in the back door with a brick from the flower bed. The broken pieces tinkled on to the linoleum inside, and again he didn’t seem concerned about the noise. Theresa supposed with several murders hanging over your head, a B&E charge wouldn’t give much pause.

He had the door open in no time. ‘Go in.’

She moved slowly over the threshold, walking into the pitch-dark interior of a home where this man had murdered the last woman with whom he had been there alone.

Or had he?

It seemed vaguely familiar, from the crime scene photos, though all the accouterments of a home were absent. No table or chairs, no canisters lining up on the counter.

No body on the floor.

He watched her, his very large, very dark shadow blocking the exit. She wondered if he were even breathing.