Don't Be Afraid (5 page)

“When was that? Recently? What about?”

“I take it the police are interested in talking to Mr. Sylvester?”

“Absolutely.”

“Horrible. It’s a terrible thing for a man to beat his wife. But to kill the mother of his children—may God have mercy on his soul.”

Amy nodded, urging him mentally to get to the point, feeling a sick eagerness to hear something that would bring Trevor Sylvester to justice.

“He wanted the boys to spend Christmas with him and she wasn’t sure. They wanted to go, I gather, but she didn’t want them around his drinking and she didn’t want to be around him and I gather that was the time of year when he made his pleas that she come back.”

“So what happened? Did she let them go?”

He crossed his arms over his chest to pin his vestments down and thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think she did. I’m not entirely sure, but I do know that I counseled her not to give in to him. That it was a risk to the boys and to herself and she shouldn’t allow herself to be persuaded by the sentiments of the holiday.”

And Sheila would have listened to this, Amy thought. She wouldn’t have been swayed by Trevor’s sweet talk and pleas. She was tough, she was strong. But she hadn’t been strong enough.

“Well, I’d better get back to work, Father. I just wanted you to know that the police will probably be contacting you. They asked me for a list of everybody that Sheila knew and I had to give them the names from our group.”

“I’d have done the same,” he said, as reassuring as ever. Then he did something uncharacteristic and reached forward, capturing her in a brief hug. “Take care of yourself, my dear, and Emma.”

She was startled for a second and then returned it, clasping him briefly before both of them withdrew. He was quite red in the face and she wondered how often he had any physical contact with anyone whatsoever.

“Is there still a meeting tomorrow?” she asked, moving them back to comfortable ground.

“Yes, yes, I thought everyone needed to meet. I saw no reason to cancel.”

She said her goodbye and walked back to her car. Halfway there, it occurred to her to ask whether Sheila had ever mentioned anybody else bothering her, and she retraced her steps to the side of the church but stopped short when she saw that Father Michael was in conversation with someone else. The man was wearing a dark blue windbreaker, though it didn’t look as if it was protecting him from the cold. His shoulders were hunched and he didn’t appear to be listening to whatever Father Michael was telling him. Then the priest put a hand on his arm and Amy was startled by the other man’s sudden move to knock it off. He said something, scowling as he looked the priest in the face before turning abruptly and stalking off.

Father Michael looked after him and then turned and walked rapidly back toward the rectory. The moment to catch his attention was gone and Amy walked back to her car, wondering what that had been about. The other man had seemed genuinely angry about something and it was hard to imagine benign Father Michael inspiring that sort of emotion in anyone.

She returned to Braxton Realty to find the office in an uproar. Apparently she’d missed the police visit and the two less-than-polite uniform cops who’d insisted on accessing Sheila’s computer files.

“I tried several times, very patiently, to explain to these—these lug heads that I couldn’t just unplug the central computer and give it to them, that disconnecting it meant shutting down the entire system, but they were too stupid to understand.” Alison Paddington, the IT manager, ran one hand repeatedly through her short red hair as she explained to Amy what had happened.

“We were down for over two hours and we’re still off-line. I don’t know how those idiots managed to screw up our Internet connectivity, but they managed it.”

“Did they take anything else?”

Alison raised her eyebrows in a look clearly meant to imply that what else could possibly be worse than the computer system crashing, but she managed to summon a reply. “All Sheila’s files. All the office files on her clients. They went through everybody’s files, for that matter, and then they insisted on personally interviewing everybody here. Do you know that they actually expected Bev to phone all the agents who weren’t here and bring them in to be interviewed?”

“What were they asking?”

“How well did we know Sheila? Did we know who might have wanted to hurt her, did we have an office photographer, etc. . .”

“Did they single out anybody?” She tried to sound casual, but it hadn’t occurred to her that it might have been someone other than Trevor. She thought of smarmy Douglas, trying to picture him being angered enough by Sheila’s behavior toward him to kill her.

“Actually, they were asking a lot of questions about you.” Alison looked faintly apologetic. “I told them you often took photos of the houses.”

“That’s what they were interested in?” Anxiety uncurled in her like a small, new leaf. “They can’t possibly think that I took those photos.”

“What photos?”

Amy caught herself. “Did they want anything else?”

The other woman shook her head. “I think they were just trying to find out as much about Sheila as they could. I heard she was stabbed multiple times. Is that true?”

“No.”

Alison waited for her to say more, an expectant look on her face that sickened Amy. Was this what it was like to be the friend of someone who’d been murdered? Had she been this insensitive at one time? Only she couldn’t think of a single time before now when she’d even been an acquaintance of someone who’d been murdered.

She was spared from saying more by Beverly, the middle-aged receptionist waving frantically. “Your school’s nurse just called. Emma’s having an asthma attack!”

The Steerforth coroner’s office looked from the outside like a fairly nice hotel. The flowerbeds flanking the concrete walkway were overflowing with mums in autumnal colors. Probably the only living thing in the place, Juarez thought as he followed Black in through the front doors.

There all resemblance to a hotel abruptly faded as one’s nostrils were assaulted by the smell of cleaning fluids and formaldehyde.

“He’s waiting for you downstairs, boys.” The paunchy security guard sitting at the front desk barely glanced up from his
People
magazine. He took another bite of an enormous meatball hoagie, apparently impervious to the odors that made Juarez’s appetite curl up and die.

They took the elevator down to the basement and came out into a dimly lit hallway slightly warmer than a freezer. Wallace Crane poked his head out of an open doorway and beckoned to them.

“Like we haven’t been here enough times to figure out which room he’s in,” Black muttered. “Pompous jackass.”

What was left of Sheila Sylvester was lying on a stainless-steel examining table illuminated by powerfully bright dangling lights. The coroner was wearing a lab coat, which was immaculately white except for a small constellation of rust-colored spots just above the waist. Juarez, who was used to seeing victims of gunshot wounds and visiting crime scenes splattered with blood, nonetheless felt squeamish and looked instead at Crane’s face.

There were two bright spots of pink on the coroner’s pale cheeks and a small smile played on his thin lips. “I’ve got something very interesting—very interesting indeed—to show you, gentlemen,” he said with the air of a magician about to perform a spectacular trick. Juarez half expected him to rub his hands together with glee, and perhaps he would if it weren’t for the gloves encasing them.

“What?” Black’s bluntness was deliberate, but Crane seemed to take no notice.

“I told you that the murder weapon was a high-speed, rapid-fire nail gun—have you found it yet?”

“Yeah, it was delivered this morning with a big bow on top and a note from the murderer thanking you for figuring it out.”

Crane narrowed his eyes at the older detective for a long moment as if he were a specimen he longed to be able to cut open on one of his tables. Then he gave a dry laugh. “Crudely amusing, detective. No doubt you missed your true calling on the comedy circuit.”

“You found something else?” Juarez asked, stepping casually in front of Black to prevent a possible lunge at the coroner.

“Yes, and I thought it best that you see it for yourselves.” He stepped closer to the examination table and removed a metal basin from one of the equipment tables nearby.

“While examining the deceased’s internal organs I found this.” He reached into the basin and held up a tiny brown figurine.

“What the hell is that?” Black said, but he, like Juarez, was already reaching for gloves from the box on a counter. They took turns examining it. It was a crudely formed plastic statue.

“It’s St. Joseph,” Juarez said, noticing the faint hammer and carpenter’s square the robed and bearded figure was holding in his folded arms.

“I believe realtors use these as some sort of good-luck totem to help them sell homes,” Crane said.

“Where was it?” Juarez asked.

“In the vaginal cavity very close to her uterus.”

“He’d shoved it in her twat?” Black said, oblivious to Crane’s wince. “That is one angry son-of-a-bitch. Before or after?”

“Excuse me?” Crane looked puzzled.

“Before or after he killed her?”

“I can’t be entirely sure, but I believe it was placed there postmortem.”

Juarez felt his body prickling with the tension that always seemed to precede major cases. “Was there anything else?”

“No more statues, if that’s what you mean.” Crane chuckled at his own humor.

“I mean anything else out of the ordinary.”

“No, not especially. She didn’t appear to fight whoever attacked her. There’s no skin under the nails and all the nails are intact. Minimal bruising, mainly of her wrists. I think he surprised her and it was done very rapidly.”

“What about the missing ring finger?”

“Snipped off, not cut. It’s a clean cut, not jagged. Probably pruning shears.” He bagged the small statue and handed it over to them. “Oh, and there’s one more thing, gentlemen. There were traces of dirt on the statue.”

“Anything unusual?”

Crane shook his head. “Trace amounts of fertilizer, but it looks like what the average homeowner would use on their lawn.”

Juarez took large gulps of fresh air when they exited the building a few minutes later. “I don’t think it’s Trevor.”

“Because of the statue? I think that fits him to a T.”

Black pulled out a cigarette and put it in his mouth, taking imaginary puffs. His own personal nicorette system to force himself to quit.

“The nail gun, the finger, the statue—this has the earmarks of a skillful killer,” Juarez said.

“Maybe. Or maybe it’s just a pissed-off, drunken ex.”

“What about the statue? What message is he sending with that?”

“That he’s angry and he wants to hurt her.”

“Then why do it postmortem—”

“Crane wasn’t sure about that—”

“—and why kill her with a nail gun? She was killed pretty quickly, Crane said. That doesn’t sound like an angry ex to me.”

“Which is why he used the statue. He wanted to kill her fast and he needed the satisfaction of hurting her.” Black sounded pleased with his theory. He eyed his partner knowingly. “Missing the excitement of the big city? Looking for some big-time killer? You hoping to find out that she was some mafia bigwig’s mistress?”

“I think we need to keep an open mind and consider the possibility of other suspects.”

“What we need,” Black said grinding the unlit cigarette out under his foot, “is to find our boy Trevor.”

 

 

As soon as Amy pushed through the doors into the school, she saw the school secretary waiting for her.

“She’s in the nurse’s office, Mrs. Moran,” the older woman said, hustling her down the hall to another door.

Emma was lying on a leather chaise with an oxygen mask being held to her face by a uniformed paramedic. Another paramedic was kneeling next to an equipment case. Emma’s eyes were huge, her face pale, and she looked very, very small.

“Mommy’s here,” Amy said, pushing through the small crowd of adults clustered around the couch and dropping to her knees so she was eye level with her daughter. She took one of Emma’s tiny hands and pressed kisses on it. “How are you doing, sweetie?”

“ ’Kay, Mommy.” The sound was muffled but clear.

“She’s stabilized,” the paramedic sitting next to her said. “It was fairly mild. Levels at eighty percent but she’s had oxygen for ten minutes and I think the levels will rise even further.”

“Thank you,” Amy said, never taking her eyes off Emma.

“I don’t know what happened, Mrs. Moran.” The kindergarten teacher sounded flustered. “She was fine at lunch, maybe a little wheezy, but nothing out of the ordinary. During quiet time it just suddenly got a lot worse and she couldn’t seem to get anything from the inhaler—”

“Mrs. Strohmeyer got Emma straight to Nurse Hannigan who immediately called the office and we called 911,” the principal’s gravelly voice interrupted. “Thanks to their quick action, help got here right away.”

Clear in her tone was that the school had done nothing but help Emma and they weren’t responsible for her state.

“Thank you,” Amy said, turning to acknowledge all of the women, “but why wasn’t my cell phone called? You have that number in the file, right?”

“I did call that number,” the secretary said, “but it put me through to your voice mail. I left a message there, too.”

Amy suddenly remembered that she’d switched it off instead of turning it to vibrate when she stopped off at St. Andrew’s. Stupid, she thought, mentally berating that thoughtless action. She was usually so careful with her cell phone—she had to be. Sheila’s death had thrown her off balance. What if she hadn’t been at the realty office when the school called? The thought made her stomach lurch.

“This was a pretty severe attack,” the paramedic handling the equipment said. “But Ryan’s great with kids.”

“Thank you,” Amy said, lifting her head to look at both paramedics. The sandy-haired woman loading the equipment acknowledged her with a smile and after a moment so did the dark-haired man named Ryan. He smiled at her, and a small scar above one of his eyebrows quirked along with his mouth.

“Let’s see how you’re doing now, cutie,” he said to Emma, gently pulling the mask off her face. He gave her the peak flow test again and carefully watched the dial, calling the numbers out to his partner.

“That’s well within the normal range,” he said to Amy, “but I’d monitor her for the rest of the day and have her take it easy.” He ruffled Emma’s hair. “No trapeze practice today, okay?”

“Trapeze?!” Emma giggled. “I’m not in the circus.”

“You’re not? I thought you were a trapeze artist. I must have you confused with someone else. Are you the ring leader?”

“No!”

“Lion tamer?”

“I’m not in the circus!”

“Oooh. You’re not a clown, are you? Because you can’t do any clowning today either.”

Emma was convulsed by giggles and Amy tensed for a moment before realizing that Emma was breathing easily. She also realized that Ryan was watching her closely and that making her laugh hard had been his intention so he could see just where she was post-attack.

“You seem to know a lot about asthma,” she said while he was packing up. The nurse was busy recording the incident for her files, while the principal and her secretary had returned to their offices. Mrs. Strohmeyer had gone with Emma to fetch her backpack and coat so Amy could take her home.

“One of my cousins had asthma,” the paramedic said. “I learned a lot about it.”

“Well, thank you so much. I was terrified when I got the call.”

“She’s a strong little girl. She might grow out of it.”

“Do you really think so?” It was Amy’s secret desire, but one that she was afraid to give voice to with the doctors, terrified that they’d tell her that there wasn’t a chance.

“She might. It happens.”

Emma came back, hand tightly clutched in Mrs. Strohmeyer’s. Now that the danger had passed, Amy could appreciate just how flustered the unflappable teacher had been. Under other circumstances, Amy would have been more amused, but she did take a small amount of pleasure in having the upper hand for once. Until Mrs. Strohmeyer and the school nurse pulled her aside.

“Maybe Emma needs a little break from school,” the kindergarten teacher said, while the whey-faced Nurse Hannigan nodded enthusiastically.

“A break?” Amy looked from one woman to the other, not immediately understanding.

“Kindergarten is optional, you know. Emma might do better at home.”

Amy’s own chest tightened. “At home,” she repeated.

“Yes. That way she could have the one-on-one attention she needs.”

“I think Emma needs kindergarten and she definitely likes it.” Amy struggled to keep her voice level, but she could feel her face coloring with anger.

“There are other schools that might be better,” the nurse said.

“What other schools?” Amy snapped. “Schools for asthmatic children? I didn’t realize Steerforth had an Academy for Asthma Sufferers.”

“We’re only trying to help, Mrs. Moran,” Mrs. Strohmeyer said, in a voice at once placating and condescending.

“Emma is just fine and she’s staying right here,” Amy said. “She has a treatable medical condition and if she needs help, like today, I expect you to help her.”

She grabbed her daughter’s backpack and pulled Emma away from the glass unicorn on the nurse’s desk. The paramedics were loading equipment back into their van and Ryan paused as Amy walked stiffly to her own car and ushered Emma into her booster seat.

“Everything okay?”

No, she wanted to tell him. No, everything is most definitely not okay. My best friend’s just been murdered, my husband is soon to be my ex, I’m not sure I have enough money to pay my mortgage and my daughter has been in and out of the hospital since she was born. Everything is most definitely not okay.

Instead she said, “Just ignorance. Teachers who are afraid and don’t want to have to deal with an attack again. It happens.”

“That sucks. I’m sorry.”

She shrugged, trying to appear casual, but the day was getting to her and she could feel tears rising yet again.

“Some days you just wish you’d pulled the covers back up and waited for the next one,” he said with a sympathetic smile and she laughed, a little shakily.

Emma seemed her usual self on the ride home, chattering about what she’d done in school and what some stupid boy had said at recess. Amy half listened while she drove, checking her often in the rearview mirror. She struggled to put the teacher’s words out of her mind, but they’d nurtured the anxiety inside her and she could feel it blossoming.

They pulled into their driveway and Emma announced that she was going to play outside.

“No, Em, no playing outside this afternoon.”

“But I want to play on the swings!”

“You can play something quiet inside.”

“Outside!” She hopped out of the car and slammed the door to emphasize her displeasure.

“That’s enough, young lady. You have to take it easy today—that’s what the nice paramedic said. How about watching a movie?”

“
Little Mermaid
?”

Amy sighed. Her daughter was going through a Disney phase and there was nothing she could do to dissuade her. She’d watched
Little Mermaid
—the current favorite—more than fifty times and still wasn’t tired of it.