Close to the Bone (23 page)

So she spared a moment to express her regret to James for the way things had turned out.

Then she looked through his pockets for his cellphone.

TWENTY-SIX

‘Y
ou’re
where
?’ Shephard asked.

‘At a place called Brynwood Manufacturing, off Woodland and East 79th. The guy here says we’re right by the tracks.’ She sat on an old steel desk talking on a phone so dilapidated that she didn’t want to put it to her face and so instead held it a quarter of an inch from her skin. She was surrounded by at least five men, who eyed her as if she were a hamburger accidentally dropped into the lion cage. That she had shown up in, essentially, pajamas as well as handcuffed with a pair of hot-pink bracelets had no doubt prompted all sorts of theories as to her history, each one more salacious than the last. Yes, they were having a mental ball filling in the gaps.

The interior of the factory, by contrast, had been painted a brilliant white, and there were at least one or two windows, forming an odd backdrop for the workers in stained, rumpled clothing. ‘Get here.
Quickly
. James’ body is sitting out there by itself. Whoever killed him also took his cellphone, so I had to walk until I found an open door.’

‘Units are on their way, and I’m getting in my car now.’

‘Bring Don.’

‘Of course,’ he said, without inflection. ‘What do they manufacture?’

‘Toys, believe it or not. Tricycles, and something that looks like a Big Wheel.’

Two of the men had already lost interest and wandered out for a smoke, since no work seemed likely to occur in the next half hour or so, or maybe for the rest of the day. The other three stood and listened to her every word, including the foreman who had directed her to the phone after she’d shown up at the door with feet hurting and eyes still blinking at the overcast but bright sky.

‘We call it a Big Spinner,’ one of the guys told her, his focus on her chest. Which wasn’t even particularly big, and what, had these guys been in isolation for the past ten years, chained to their work station attaching plastic pedals to large plastic wheels?

‘Why “believe it or not”?’ Shephard asked.

Because, she thought, you would not look at these men and think that they and innocent children could possibly exist in the same world. But she didn’t say so. They were her rescuers of a sort, and she would appreciate them accordingly. ‘Just get here. I’ll be with the body.’

She hung up.

‘We might be able to find you a pair of shoes,’ the foreman said.

‘Thanks – I appreciate it, but my feet are pretty tough.’

‘Want some more water?’

‘No, I’m good.’

‘Do you want us to do something about those cuffs?’

She looked at them as if she’d forgotten their presence, because she very nearly had. They restricted her movement and therefore made her less able to fend off any unwanted advances. On the other hand, waiting for these gentlemen to rustle up a bolt cutter meant she would have to remain in their custody for the duration. ‘No, thanks. The cops will be here any minute, and they’ll have a key. I need to get back to the body.’

‘You might as well wait in here.’ The third guy had eyes like a rodent, round and dark. ‘We sometimes have a pretty good time.’

‘Sure,’ said another, his gaze roaming over her in frenetic cycles, as if he couldn’t take it in quickly enough. ‘We don’t often get visitors.’

She wanted to ask if they had been bussed in from the local penal colony, but they might answer in the affirmative. Instead she fixed the Big Spinner spokesman with a look that summed up how she felt, and spoke slowly and clearly. ‘I have had a
really
bad day.’

The rodent-like eyes stopped roaming, and the other guy straightened up.

‘
Really
bad.’

It took only another minute or two for the gallery to break rank and wander away, and she hopped off the desk and pushed past them to the door. The foreman insisted on coming with her; if there had been a murder on his boss’ property he needed to stay abreast of the developments. Happily for her he wasn’t chatty; other than sneaking glances at her bottom, he kept all thoughts to himself.

The large building had, at least, a small sidewalk in front of it, so that she hit gravel for only two sides of the horseshoe shape she had to make to get back to where James’ body lay next to the car. No one else appeared in the long, wide alley behind the plant.

‘Any cameras back here?’ she asked the foreman.

‘Used to be. They broke.’

‘Great.’

‘We don’t have much of a problem with crime,’ he added as a defense, and she supposed that would be true; Big Spinners most likely did not form a major segment of the black market.

She crouched next to the body. From that angle she could see the faint indentations where the other vehicle had stopped. James had stood in the middle, meeting him halfway. He’d brought only a knife to a gun fight, yes, but still it seemed to her that the shooter had been someone James trusted … or at the very least, not someone he expected to shoot him on sight. Though she had been occupied with the jack at the time, she recalled little, if any, conversation. The killer had driven up, gotten out, shot James, and left.

If he had known Theresa was in the trunk he didn’t care – neither about her safety after a round went through it, nor about leaving an eyewitness, since obviously she couldn’t see him. But if it had been him – or her – who called James just before they stopped, then how could they be sure that James hadn’t told Theresa who he planned to meet? James might have told the guy that he had put her in the trunk. Still, unless the shooter had a lot of experience riding around in trunks, he couldn’t be sure she hadn’t overheard the conversation.

Unless James never mentioned a name because he didn’t know who he’d spoken to, only that the person claimed to have information about his wife.

Unless he had been killed over some other element of his past, and the shooter – and the murder – had nothing to do with the ME’s office.

She checked his pockets again, in case she had missed anything, but James had traveled light – no surprise; he had had to cut out of the ME’s office in a hurry, and he probably knew better than to go back to his apartment. The knife had been tucked into a back pocket, ready if he needed it, but never ready enough for a bullet.

She gazed at him for a moment, with no sound around her except the slight crunch of the gravel as the foreman shifted his weight behind her, and tried to observe: did she notice anything she hadn’t while spending the previous seven hours with him?

Well, no. The same close-cropped hair, slim nose, a large mole on his neck. The same T-shirt under the navy hoodie, both dirty and bearing a few stains that were most likely three different types – hers, Reese’s, and his own. The bullet had not exited, she guessed from the lack of any blood flowing out from beneath the body. A large scrape along one temple – probably from Darryl, she couldn’t picture Dr Reese putting up much of a fight. And a gold band on the fourth finger of his left hand.

‘Did you know him?’ the foreman asked.

She thought. ‘I’m not really sure.’

Theresa stood up and made a gentle path toward the car, studying the area for a casing. They were notoriously hard to find, though gravel should be better than grass, but she did not see it – them, there should be two. The killer had either picked them up, or used a revolver. Finally, she gave up and went to the car.

The keys were still in the ignition, and the window she had lowered was still down. She opened the door and studied the interior, now without the twin distractions of driving and being threatened with a knife.

The door pocket held a map of Greater Cleveland, a small bottle of Bath and Body Works Japanese Cherry Blossom hand lotion – she helped herself to a dollop since she seriously needed to smell better than she currently did – and several loose CDs labeled with a girlish hand. The small armrest console had a few quarters and pennies and a cigarette lighter. The glove box let her know that the vehicle belonged to a Laurel Hightower of Garfield Heights and was overdue for its E-check. The owner had had a tire repaired at Conrad’s and bought something, identified by a gaggle of letters, at PetSmart. The passenger door pocket—

The foreman’s face appeared in the window. ‘You really did a number on that trunk.’

He had just done a number on her heart, but she didn’t say so. ‘Yep.’

‘I think the cops are here. Siren’s coming.’

The passenger door pocket carried a dead cockroach and the stubby end of a different kind of roach – naughty, Laurel – and a screwdriver. That might have been handy if she’d wanted to counter James’ knife, but of course she’d have had to get to it first.

A police siren that became more ear-splitting the closer it came announced that the cavalry had arrived. They burst around the side of the building, gravel flying, and the noise became truly uncomfortable. She waited, trying to cross her arms, but the cuffs made that impossible. No reason to be peeved at them, of course, but at the moment she felt peeved at the entire world.

Don flew out of the unmarked car as soon as it stopped rolling, shouted her name once and embraced her in an awkward – given the cuffs – hug; under usual circumstances this would have thrilled her, but right now she was too well aware of her unwashed, uncombed, bruised, barely and badly clothed body that had nothing save a dab of Japanese Cherry going for it.

‘I can’t believe you’re alive!’ was among the things he exclaimed.

‘There were moments I had my doubts,’ she said.

Shephard stood a few feet away, watching them with an unreadable expression on his face. ‘Want those off?’

She held out the cuffs. ‘No, I’d actually gotten rather attached to them. No pun intended.’

‘That was a pun?’ He used his key. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Let me get back to you on that.’

He ducked his head down as he unlocked the second cuff, taking a closer look at her face. But he didn’t ask again.

‘Geeze, Theresa, your hands,’ Don said. The wrists were chafed and reddened, a layer or two of skin scraped off here and there, but they weren’t bleeding. They would turn a few different colors in the coming week.

‘What can you tell me?’ Shephard asked.

‘He got a phone call. We stopped. He got out and someone shot him. And, almost, me.’ She pointed to the hole in the car fender. ‘I used the jack to get out. Expect a victim’s compensation claim from a Miss Laurel Hightower.’

He nodded, solemnly. ‘Where have you been all day?’

‘First he had me drive to the beach—’

‘The
beach
?’

‘All part of a stroll down memory lane. Look, I’m starving and thirsty and really need a bathroom. Can we do this somewhere else?’ Her voice wavered on the last few words, but she cut herself some slack. It really
had
been a bad day.

‘Absolutely. Yin and Yang and Don here can handle the crime scene. Doesn’t look like we’ll get much from it, anyway.’ Shephard put a hand on each of her shoulders and guided her toward his car as if she might collapse at any moment, and in truth that seemed more likely than it had four minutes before.

He shot a look at Don as they left, and it appeared, inexplicably, triumphant.

TWENTY-SEVEN

A
n hour later – after she had scrounged a few clean clothes from her pathologist friend Christina, and then used up every paper towel in the ladies’ room trying to take the wettest sponge bath possible using nothing but a small porcelain sink – she felt nearly human. Especially after two cups of coffee and a western omelet, which Shephard had procured from the medical school cafeteria next door and presented with such pride that she hadn’t had the heart to tell him she felt that green peppers and eggs were two foods which should never intersect. Now she sat in a task chair blowing on her third cup of coffee while Neenah applied first aid to her raw wrists and the other small lacerations she’d accumulated during the morning. She didn’t need to call anyone; no one had had the courage to inform either Rachael or her mother of her plight, so both had gone through the day blissfully unaware of Theresa’s brush with violence. And she had already decided that they would continue to do so, for the rest of their lives.

Shephard had asked her to go through the day’s events again as both he and Yin – Theresa had completely blanked out on his real name – of the detective team took notes. They had that edgy air of indecision that came after a case broke. Urgency had ended, the killer put down and the prior murders more or less confessed to. Theresa had been recovered unharmed – largely unharmed, though she knew she would have trouble drifting off to sleep in the coming months without seeing a shadow creeping into her room or dreaming of a bumpy ride in an enclosed space. All should be well, with only a mountain of paperwork to tackle before memories faded.

Except for the slight problem of the extra dead body. James had killed George, Darryl, and Dr Reese, no question. But who had shot James?

‘And who strangled Diana?’ Theresa asked aloud.

‘You honestly think he told you the truth?’ Shephard asked.

‘Do I think he’s capable of killing his wife in a hazy, drug-fueled rage and then convincing himself he didn’t? Yes, I do. But if that’s true, then who killed him?’

‘Allman had a criminal history even apart from the murder, and he spent a long time in jail,’ Yin pointed out. ‘He might have had a target on his back for completely separate reasons. He meets up with an old pal to borrow some money or a weapon, and the old pal grabs the opportunity to settle a score.’

‘If that’s so we might never catch up to them,’ Shephard said.

‘But we can’t assume the obvious answer is the right one. That may be the mistake we made with Diana,’ Theresa said, trying to sound firm while wincing as Neenah tied the gauze around her left wrist.

‘Charitable use of “we”,’ Shephard said, obviously trying not to bristle.

‘I thought so.’

Yin’s phone rang. He listened, snapped it shut and stood up. ‘Casey Allman is downstairs.’