Close to the Bone (24 page)

‘Who’s Casey Allman?’ Theresa asked.

‘The cousin who’s a cop,’ Shephard explained, rising as well.

‘Good. I’d really like to meet him.’ She scrambled after both of them.

‘You’re still bleeding!’ Neenah called, pointing to a scrape on her arm that would not stop oozing.

Theresa snatched a Kimwipe out of the dispenser box as she went out the door. They were designed to be used on a microscope lens, but worked on skin just as well.

Casey Allman looked like a cop. Tall and pale with short sandy hair, he exuded calm, authority, and many hours in the gym. His uniform fit with barely a wrinkle. He stood straight with only the slightest hunch to his shoulders to hint at some inner pain. He seemed neither cynical nor defensive, nor sad. Theresa let him and the cops into the tiny library. The conference room had been taken over by a grief counseling session ‘for staff members who would like to attend due to the office’s recent losses’.

Theresa shut the door behind them, neatly including herself in the meeting.

Yin noticed immediately. ‘You don’t have to stay for this, Theresa.’

‘Oh, I do. I was with your cousin when he died,’ she added to Casey, putting extra warmth into her voice. Perhaps he would believe she remained to support him instead of question him. Perhaps Yin would, too.

Shephard knew better, from the sharp look he gave her.

‘What happened?’ Casey Allman asked.

She let Yin summarize as she doodled with the handy pencils and supply of scrap paper kept in the library.

‘I’m sorry that happened to you,’ Casey told her when the detective had finished.

‘I’m not too much the worse for wear. You don’t have to apologize for your cousin’s actions.’

‘Why not? I’ve been doing it most of my life. James was pretty much trouble from the day he was born.’ Casey Allman crossed his arms and glanced out the window. ‘We grew up together, yes, but that bond has a shelf life. Truth is, I’m only here now because my mother would give me grief if I didn’t show up to, I don’t know, represent the family or something.’

‘Tell me about him,’ she said. The two cops just listened.

‘Let’s see – he stole my neighbor’s dog when we were ten. Of course, the thing ran home as soon as it could, and I had to talk him out of a repeat. He watched an old movie once and decided we should hop a boxcar and go to California. He had this thoroughly planned out, he said. Talked me into it. It turned out his careful planning meant he put a juice box and a package of gummy worms in his pocket, and we wound up in Pittsburgh. I mean, that stuff sounds cute now and we would laugh about it, but as the years passed he did stuff that wasn’t so cute any more. He sold pot at our junior high. He robbed a convenience store at gunpoint before he was old enough to drive – got away with it, but it still scared him bad enough that he stayed pretty cool for years after that. Then – well, I’m sure you’ve seen his record. He dragged half of my family members into every one of his dramas. I hate to say it, but the past ten years were just a little bit more peaceful with him in jail.’

Theresa nodded.

‘Did you know he was out?’ Yin asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Did you know he was working at the ME’s under an assumed name?’

‘What? No! He said he worked at a grocery store.’

Yin explained about the Justin Warner alias.

‘You mean he’d been
planning
this?’

‘Yes. That surprises you?’

‘James hasn’t planned a single thing since the gummy worms, so yes, that surprises me.’

‘Do you remember Diana?’ Theresa asked.

Casey Allman sat back in his chair, tightening his arms and looking at the slender window again as if checking his options for egress. ‘Diana. Di-ana.’

‘His wife—’

‘We all knew Diana, bel
ieve
me.’ He sighed, returned his gaze to Theresa. ‘Hot as … well, hot. Never understood what the hell she was doing with James, and it seemed clear, after the first couple of months, that neither could she. She was nice to James’ mother while she was alive, I’ll say that for Diana. The rest of us she tolerated. I don’t think we fit into the life to which she some day hoped to become accustomed.’

‘Why not?’ Theresa asked. Across from her, Shephard fidgeted with what was probably impatience. She ignored him.

Casey sighed again, but it seemed more dismissive than weary. ‘She complained that James had champagne tastes on a beer budget, and he did, but so did she. She bitched that he got a tattoo instead of getting the furnace fixed, but then she bought a purse instead of a new tire when his were bald. Diana planned to tour Italy – oh, and France – and spent a lot of time talking about the Grand Canal and the Palazzo Farnese and other places that I don’t think she was even pronouncing correctly.’

‘Did she or James mention being pregnant?’

His eyes bulged momentarily. ‘No! Was she? No one ever told us that.’

‘Truthfully, we’re not sure at this time.’

‘Shit.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘
Shit
.’

‘She didn’t say anything about it? No hints, or indications? What about your wife or the other women in the family? Might she have confided in one of them?’

‘Not a chance. Diana wasn’t a coffee klatch kind of girl, said all the chatting about babies and playdates and soccer practice bored her silly. As I said, she had a much different lifestyle in mind. The last time I saw her she talked about skiing – s
kiing
. I mean, seriously?’

‘A lot of people ski,’ Theresa pointed out. Especially in Cleveland.

‘The most physically intensive activity Diana participated in was filing her nails,’ Casey snapped. ‘She batted her eyes at everything that walked by with a d— anything male, especially if it came with a paycheck. But if James so much as talked to another girl, then he was taking her for granted.’

‘So you weren’t a big fan of Diana’s?’

‘No.’ He looked away again, down, fiddled with the ancient metal fittings around the table leg. ‘Not at all.’

Except, perhaps, in the way one shouldn’t feel about their cousin’s wife.

‘So it didn’t surprise you when he killed her?’ Theresa asked.

‘No – honestly, it didn’t.’ He fell silent.

‘I understand you were the first responder.’

‘Yeah. I heard the address over the radio when I was only two streets away, so I took it. I was a FTO then—’ Theresa knew this meant Field Training Officer – ‘and I had a rookie with me. Dispatch had just said dead, they didn’t say who, so my first thought was that James had overdosed.’ He sighed, and this time he did seem sad, rubbing his face with a calloused hand. His nails had been bitten to the quick, black ink marked up the inside of his middle finger, and the springy hairs from some kind of pet fur cropped up here and there along one sleeve. He didn’t relish, understandably, going over the murder again. Theresa’s attention never wavered from his face, trying to crawl back through time and see everything through his eyes.

‘And that was late afternoon?’ Odd, for her to be questioning someone, but Yin and Shephard let her go. As long as the witness is talking, don’t mess with the process.

‘Yeah. It was a nice day, clear. We rolled up. The back door was open, and we made entry … found her on the floor. Cleared the house, called it in.’

‘What was she wearing?’

‘Wearing? Um – a blue shirt, those
Viva Las Vegas
white hot pants. No shoes. Strangled with the jump rope. I didn’t know it was the jump rope then, I didn’t look at it that closely.’

‘Do you remember her jewelry?’

His eyebrows went up a notch. ‘He told you about the ring, huh?’

‘Yep.’

‘I should never have told him that. He’s obsessed with that damn ring.’

‘What did you see, at the scene?’

He shot her the tiniest lift of his lips, as if appreciating the nicely non-leading question. ‘She had on a gold band and a silver sapphire and diamond ring. Earrings. I couldn’t really see if there might have been a necklace in that mess. I didn’t want to get that close, and I did
not
move the body. You can ask the rookie, he’s still with the department.’

‘Okay,’ Theresa smiled. ‘What did the sapphire ring look like?’

He described stones and clusters until she held up her doodle. ‘Did it look like this?’

‘Yeah. That’s it.’

‘Okay. So you bagged the hands.’

Yin finally began to fidget as well, but Shephard seemed to have resigned himself. She figured that
he
figured that Theresa had spent a morning listening to James’ self-justifications of the crime, so she had a list of statements to confirm.

‘Yep. Paper bags, evidence tape. By the manual.’

‘And EMS responded out?’

‘They came and pronounced. Didn’t move her or anything.’

‘Detectives came out.’

‘And the lieutenant. But I stayed until they loaded her up.’

‘And that was George Bain – the body-snatcher that day?’

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know his name. I’d seen him before, and afterwards, but—’

‘And you were in and out of the house, probably?’

‘No, I stayed with her body from the time I got there until the bodysnatchers left. Figured it was the least I could do, for James.’

‘Not for Diana?’ she couldn’t resist asking.

He frowned. ‘I guess for her, too, yeah.’

‘James spent the morning telling me he didn’t kill Diana.’

‘Don’t they all?’ Casey said with a shrug. ‘Say that, I mean?’

‘Why did you say you should never have told James about the ring?’

He puffed out a disgusted sigh. ‘I would visit him in the can once in a while. Felt like I should, no one else would other than his mom before she died. Maybe a year or two after he’d gone in, he started asking for details of that day, everything I’d done, seen. Like you just did. Okay, fine. But then first he decides that he didn’t do it at all, and then after another year or so he decides that this ring could prove his innocence. I kept trying to tell him, even if Diana had a ring on that disappeared somewhere down the line, it doesn’t change the fact that you did pawn a ring you stole from her just before she got strangled on your kitchen floor. That ring is not a friggin’ Get Out of Jail Free card, no matter what happened to it.’

Theresa nodded.

He continued, his voice growing more strident. ‘But he insisted. And insisted. I think he spent every night
dreaming
of that stupid ring for the last half of his sentence. It became some magic talisman that would fix his life and make him king.’

‘Did you know what he planned to do once he got out?’

He straightened in alarm. ‘No! Of course not.’

‘I don’t mean about the murders. But did he have any plans for finding this ring?’

He appeared to think. ‘No … he didn’t say. The last year of his sentence, he dialed it down. Stopped mentioning the ring, stopped talking about the murder … I was only there a couple times so I didn’t think about it, figured it had run its course. Obsession is a way of life inside. It gives them something to think about, and when one is used up they go on to another. If I thought about it at all, that’s what I thought. James talked only about getting out, getting a job, getting his life in order, blah blah blah, the same well-meaning bullshit they practice for the parole board, and James had been practicing since he could speak … I mean, I see that
now
. I probably should have paid more attention.’

‘You can’t be responsible for your cousin’s—’

‘Exactly,’ he said, but without a convincing amount of confidence. ‘I’ve been dealing with his fallout since we were kids, but that’s over. He was family, yes, so I visited and hugged him when he got out and said supportive things, but as far as responsible – that ended the day he killed Diana.’

TWENTY-EIGHT

‘W
hat do you think?’ Shephard asked her after Yin had taken Casey Allman to identify his cousin’s body.

‘I think Cousin Casey the Cop liked Diana a lot more than he’s willing to acknowledge, and not in a brotherly way.’ They had remained in the library; it gave them a quiet place to talk, with wide and worn wooden chairs. Theresa pulled her knees to her chin, feeling as if she had completed a marathon – after the adrenalin from the continued stress of the morning finally ebbed away, it left a sort of deep chill in its wake.

‘Think he did it? The cousin?’

‘He could have. He admits he was in the area. Your shifts change at six, right? He could have killed Diana, gone on duty, and hung around the area waiting for the call to come in. He sends the rookie out to the car for some reason, takes the ring and bags the hands.’

‘Then why tell James about the ring at all?’

‘Maybe he was afraid James would eventually remember it, or eventually remember something that would implicate him. A distraction.’

‘Maybe James actually did kill his wife and wasn’t coherent enough to remember it.’

‘Then who killed
him
?’

‘Why steal this ring at all?’ he asked wearily.

‘Let’s assume for the moment that James didn’t kill her. The person who stole the ring might have done so entirely for profit. In that case they are almost certainly not the murderer, or they would have taken the ring
during
the murder. Or, the person stole the ring because he gave it to her and thought it could be traced back to him.’

‘In which case he still might not be the murderer. James could have done it, but lover arrives on the scene and doesn’t want his little secret getting out, either because of his wife or because he doesn’t want to be a suspect. But James still did it.’

‘Then why kill James? Ten years later, would a little affair still be worth killing a man in cold blood?’

‘You don’t know some wives.’

‘Okay, we’re going around in circles here.’

‘Been doing that for two days,’ he grumbled. ‘Why stop now?’

‘I think one thing we can be certain of is that whoever called James is the one who killed him. Can you get the phone records?’

‘It was a burner phone.’

‘Yeah, but we should have the number from the caller ID on Don’s phone.’