Edge of Midnight (32 page)

Susan opened her mouth to protest, then said, “How's Cary Black?”

“Feeling miserable, but coming along.”

“I need to question her.”

Head lowered, he peered at her, then gave a short nod. “Okay. You can have a few minutes.” He paused to make sure she understood. “If she gets agitated, you'll have to stop.”

He got busy scribbling orders on the chart. “You lost a lot of blood. We need to keep an eye on you.”

“I need to get back to work.”

He said no, she said yes, they argued. Finally, despite her weakened condition, she managed to convince him to discharge her. Flush with success, she rolled out of bed and nearly screamed at the pain. She picked up the phone, got an outside line, and asked Hazel to send her Parkhurst. A nurse brought her a set of scrubs and a pair of crutches. By the time she got the scrubs on, Parkhurst was striding in with a bouquet the size of Montana.

“What were you thinking?”
He banged the vase down on the bedside table.

“That it was time to get out of here.”

“You need rest.” He crossed his arms.

“There's no rest in hospitals. They're loud. Someone is always drawing blood. They send in the kitchen help for the practice.” With a great deal of awkwardness that necessitated much muttered cursing, Susan managed to get herself and the crutches to the elevator. Parkhurst thrust the flowers at a nurse, told her to keep them, and followed Susan.

In the second-floor room, Cary lay motionless, eyes closed, bruises vivid purple against her pallor. A nurse adjusted the clear plastic tubing sending oxygen to her nose and hung a new bag of fluid on the IV stand. She patted Cary's hand, gave Susan a cautionary look, and left.

“Cary Black? I'm Susan Wren, police chief. This is Lieutenant Parkhurst.”

Cary looked so battered and frail, Susan wondered what a defense attorney could do with any statement she might give. Susan hobbled to the chair balanced on her good leg, propped the crutches against the wall, and dropped to the seat. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

“What questions?”

Susan knew Osey had Mirandized her, but she did it again, then said, “Do you understand?”

Cary pushed herself higher in the bed. “Am I being arrested?”

“We're just asking questions.” Parkhurst stood inside the doorway.

“Was it Kelby in the silo?”

“It appears so.” Susan rubbed the top of her good leg in a failed attempt to ease the pain in the injured one.

“What happened?”

“We're working on that. How well did you know Kelby Oliver?”

“I didn't know her. I never even met her.”

“You were pretending to be her. Living in her house. Using her ID, her money.”

Cary scrunched in on herself. “Was she murdered?”

“We don't know that yet.” Susan wondered where the woman's husband was. He came to see her when she was first brought in, but the visit seemed to cause so much stress the doctor wrote orders he shouldn't be allowed back. Nobody'd seen him since. He checked out of the motel he'd been staying in, and so far they'd been unable to locate him. Had he gone home?

“Where is Joe Farmer?” Cary had the taut, skin-too-tight look of someone who'd recently lost weight.

“He's been arrested.” Right now, he was in a cell talking to his dead daughter, crying and carrying on, apologizing all over the place because he'd let her down, was unable to save her from the sicko who hurt her. Susan didn't know what would happen with him. Padded cell, most likely. He'd obviously slipped off into the ether somewhere.

“He came to the house. He had a gun and…” Cary related what had happened, but it was apparent there were gaps in the memory, or she deliberately left a lot out.

“Why does seeing your husband upset you?”

A small sound, like a resigned breath. “If he knew where I was, he'd kill me.”

“Your husband.” Susan loaded the two words with sarcasm, but years of being a cop made her aware of the dynamics in a “battered wife, abusive husband” situation. They needed to double their efforts to find him.

“How did she—Kelby—die?”

An attempt to sound innocent by showing she didn't know the manner of death? “Grain pressed against her chest so she couldn't take a breath. She suffocated.”

“Am I a suspect?”

“Not at this time.” This was a lie. Cary Black was their best suspect.

“Maybe…” Cary paused, like she had to search around in her head for the words. “Maybe Joe Farmer pushed her in there. And when he saw me maybe he thought she got out somehow.”

Was that possible, Susan wondered. “How did you know it was safe to use Kelby Oliver's name?”

“I don't think I want to answer any more questions,” Cary said. “I'm very tired. Please leave.”

Susan looked at Parkhurst, he raised an eyebrow.

Out in the hallway, he said, “You didn't arrest her.”

“We don't have enough evidence.”

He started counting off on his fingers. She was living in the dead woman's house, using her name, using her money, using her ID, writing checks on her account. How could she expect to get away with that unless she knew Kelby Oliver was dead? And she knew the woman was dead because she killed her.

Susan nodded at all that. “Let's talk with the DA, see what he thinks.”

“Right. Let's get out of here.”

“There's something I have to do first. I'll meet you in the lobby.”

She took the elevator up a floor and went to a room at the end of the corridor. Jen lay on the white sheets unmoving, looking small and blank. Somebody, probably her mother, had pinned a pink bow in her hair. She would hate it. All the fire and spirit and wide-eyed eagerness, all the special qualities that made Jen such a neat individual were gone. All that was left was the hiss and thunk of the respirator keeping air in her lungs.

Susan picked up her hand, surprised at the warmth. Somehow she'd expected it to be icy cold, but it was warm and pink, and completely flaccid. She curled Jen's fingers around her own, held them a moment, then put Jen's hand back on the bed. From the box on the bedside table, Susan tore out a tissue, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose. She met Parkhurst and hobbled out to the Bronco. At home, she hobbled inside.

“Yank the phones,” he said. “Take your drugs and crawl in bed. I'll come back later with soup.”

“A cane would be more useful.” She swallowed the magic pain pills and went to bed, drifted in and out, dreamed about corpses on the autopsy table. Sometimes her own face looked up at her, sometimes Jen, sometimes a stranger, sometimes the badly decomposed woman from the silo. What had happened to her?

Yellow
, a voice explained. The voice was familiar. Whose was it? She slept fitfully, dreamed, heard the voice again. Ah, she thought, that's it, that's—

Pounding at the door shattered the dream. She woke.

 

41

Susan propped the crutches under her arms, swung into the living room, and answered the door. Parkhurst came in with a container of minestrone soup. He poured out a cup. She sipped and swallowed, took more pills, drank a few gallons of water, went to bed, and dropped off the edge of the world. Hours later she opened her eyes, groggy from drugs and too much sleep.

Sunlight bashing through the open curtains made her squint. The clock said twelve. Not dark. Had to be noon. She inched herself from the bed and stood to see if she could manage that Herculean feat without falling down. Yes.

She pulled in an invigorating breath that was going to allow her to leap tall buildings and stop locomotives. The leaping and stopping idea lasted until she took a step and pain buzzed through her leg. Okay, tall buildings were out. However, she was alive, she was awake, and life was good. That lasted until she remembered she couldn't take a shower. Okay, she was alive and awake and life had a few drawbacks.

She brushed her teeth, washed her face and slathered soap and water around, trying not to get bandages wet. By the time she was dressed and slipping on shoes, Parkhurst was at the door.

“There's no reason you can't stay home today,” he said.

“No reason I can't go to work.”

“Right.” He opened the passenger door, then went around and slid in under the wheel. “What's a little gunshot?”

*   *   *

Hazel looked up when she came in. “You sure you should be here?”

“Yes.” Susan hobbled toward her office. As soon as she got settled behind her desk, Parkhurst came in with two mugs of coffee and handed her one. He planted his rear in the visitor's chair and slid down so he could rest his mug on his chest.

“Anything more from Joe Farmer?” she asked.

Parkhurst took a cautious sip of hot liquid. “He's still claiming he shot Kelby Oliver in that field. I questioned him again. Osey had a go at him. Farmer's slipped over the edge and there's no hauling him back. He admits to all kinds of things. The problem is about half of what he says is completely wacko. He talks a lot to his dead daughter, and she tells him things like ‘Kelby should know what it was like. If she did, she would vote for the death penalty.' Times are mixed up in his head. He apologizes to the daughter for not torturing Kelby. She was getting away so he had to shoot her.”

Parkhurst lifted the coffee mug. “From what I can gather, the dead daughter is irritated about it. He says killing Arlette Coleridge was an accident. Claims he didn't mean to, didn't want to. She wouldn't give him Oliver's address and so he hit her. Apologizes all over the place for slapping a woman, says he's never done that before.”

“How did he know Arlette had that information?”

“He'd been stalking Kelby Oliver for months, following her around, calling, threatening. He saw them together numerous times.”

“Slapped her,” Susan said. “The woman was beaten so severely she died.”

Parkhurst nodded. “I've hammered at Farmer, and each time he comes back with a different story. Sometimes he just slapped her, sometimes he hit her over and over until she talked, sometimes he shot her.”

“Shot her.” Susan's head was starting to ache. “Autopsy show any bullet wounds?”

“No.”

She massaged her temples. “Is it possible he didn't kill Arlette?”

“He's so out of it anything's possible. Innately he feels you don't hit a woman, so he's changed beating her severely to a slap. Or maybe he did just slap her and then someone else came along and beat her to death.”

“Anything point to that?”

“Nothing to say either way, according to Sergeant Manfred in Berkeley. She was a defense attorney. Could be somebody wasn't happy with his defense.”

“And came along just after Farmer left?”

“Possible. Not likely.” Parkhurst sipped at coffee. “He admits to killing Kelby Oliver, but thinks he shot her, and denies shoving her in the silo.”

“If he didn't kill her, who did?”

“We have a dandy suspect lying in a hospital bed.”

Susan massaged her temples. “Cary Black exercised her right to keep her mouth shut.”

“Sounds like guilt to me,” Parkhurst said.

“Yes,” Susan said, drawing out the word. “Cop's wife. She knows a thing or two about how the system works.”

“She moved in, took over Kelby's name, her house, her money.”

“True.” Susan hoped the caffeine would get rid of her headache. “I got the impression Mitchell Black slaps her around.”

“Sweet fellow.”

Something flickered way down in the murky bottom of Susan's mind. She couldn't get it to float up where she could grab it. “Where is he? Why can't we find him?”

“He moves around. By the time we find the motel room he rented, he's checked out.”

“Why?”

Parkhurst shrugged. “Something to hide.”

“What?”

“When we find him, we'll ask.”

Her dream from last night swam around and floated slowly up. The voice in her dream was Jen's, telling her about a yellow shirt. “Find something of an evidentiary nature and we'll arrest somebody.”

Parkhurst stood up. “Do my best.” He gave her a sharp look. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I'm fine.” She buzzed Hazel and asked her to have Osey come in, then she took a folder from the teetering pile, moved it to the center of the desk, and opened it. As she read about the devastation caused by the tornado, she tried to tease loose the rest of the dream. Just as she grabbed it by the tail, Osey came in and it slithered away.

“You wanted to see me?”

She nodded. “Have a seat.”

In his loose-jointed, ambling way, he folded himself into the chair Parkhurst had vacated.

“How's it going with Ida?”

Osey grinned. “She's a mite subdued.”

“What about Kelby Oliver's sister? She tell you anything that might help us?”

“That woman sure does talk, that I can give you. Enough to cause a headache. She was in Berkeley trying to find her sister. Talking to police and people who knew her. At her job, and like that. There's some gaps in her story. I've been checking airlines.”

Susan rubbed her right leg, because rubbing the left made pain shoot everywhere. “Was there any friction between Kelby and her sister?”

“I don't know about that, but I did learn that Kelby Oliver was a rich lady by most standards. Seems she owned a house in Berkeley that she sold for over two million, and she had money on top of that. Who pays two million for a house?”

“Someone who wants to live in Berkeley.”

“Faye, the sister, inherits everything, and she can use it. She's married to a man who can't keep a job. When he gets one, it isn't right, or the boss is stupid and he says so to the boss's face and gets fired. Never finds anything he likes, or a place where he's appreciated. Faye's been supporting the family working at the phone company. I can see him drooling over the fact he'll be able to get his hands on Kelby's money.”