Grand Avenue (40 page)

“Tracey?” Vicki asked, not really sure what she was asking.

Tracey lifted her head from Susan’s shoulder, dropped it back without acknowledging Vicki’s presence.

“Is she all right?” Vicki asked Susan.

Susan shook her head. “She’s in shock.” The look on Susan’s face said they all were.

“Was she able to tell the police what happened?”

“Just bits and pieces.” Susan directed Tracey to the old green sofa and sank down beside her, as Vicki grabbed a nearby chair and pulled it closer.

A policeman approached. He was tall and broad, with a football player’s thick neck and biceps that cramped his light gray sports jacket. He was forty, maybe forty-five, with thinning blond hair and heavy lidded blue eyes. Vicki thought he looked vaguely familiar, but then all police officers looked vaguely
familiar to her these days. “Mrs. Latimer,” he said, as if he knew her.

“Officer …”

“Lieutenant Jacobek,” he said. “I testified at the Keevil trial last year.”

Vicki quickly recalled every word of the policeman’s testimony. He’d been very good on the stand, she remembered. So good he’d almost sunk her case.

“I understand you’re acquainted with the victim.”

The word
victim
brought Vicki squarely back to the here and now. She swallowed hard to keep the bile from rising in her throat. “She was one of my closest friends.” Vicki gasped at her easy use of the past tense. She noted a single tear running the length of Susan’s face. “What exactly happened here?”

“We’re hoping you might be able to get the girl to tell us,” Lieutenant Jacobek stated, as several policemen raced past the living room and up the stairs.

Forensic officers, Vicki decided, leaving her chair to kneel in front of Tracey. Vicki could hear her husband talking to Owen. “Did you see her?” Jeremy was asking.

“Tracey, sweetheart,” Vicki began, about to take Tracey’s hands in her own when the blood on Tracey’s fingers caused her to shrink back, leave her hands at her sides. “Tracey, can you hear me?”

Tracey nodded, although her eyes remained blank, unfocused.

“Tracey, can you tell us what happened, sweetheart?”

Tracey’s body began rocking back and forth, a series of low moans escaping her throat. The moans filled the
room, climbed the walls, dropped from the ceiling like rain.

“She’s been like this since we got here,” Susan said.

“She phoned you?” Vicki tried not to sound surprised that Tracey had called Susan and not herself.

“She was incoherent. We couldn’t make out what happened. Owen called the police, and we rushed right over. The front door was wide open.”

Vicki noticed at least one police officer taking notes. “And then what?”

“We rushed upstairs, found Barbara.” It was the first time anyone had actually spoken her name, and the weight of it lingered in the air. Susan gestured helplessly toward the stairs. “Oh, God, it was so awful. She was lying on the floor beside her bed, covered with blood. At first I didn’t even recognize her. Her face was all bashed in. Oh, God, after all that surgery …”

“Where was Tracey?” Vicki stared at Tracey, but Tracey was looking through her as if she weren’t there.

“She was sitting on the floor beside her mother. Holding her hand. There was so much blood. We tried to get her to talk, but …”

“Tracey, talk to me,” Vicki commanded now. Tracey looked away. Vicki’s hand brought the young girl’s chin around. “Tracey, you have to tell us what happened. Do you hear me? You have to help your mother.”

“My mother …”

“She needs your help, Tracey. She needs you to tell us who hurt her.”

“She’s dead,” Tracey said.

“Yes,” Vicki agreed, although the word sounded
strange, as if it were coming from someone else’s mouth.

“He did it.”

“Who?”

“Tony.”

“He must have thought Chris was here,” Susan said, as if trying to explain. “The police are out looking for him now.”

“Chris didn’t sleep over,” Tracey said, as everyone in the room leaned closer. “My mother wanted her to, but she said she was okay, that she’d be all right on her own.”

“Where is Chris now?” Vicki asked.

Fresh tears fell across Susan’s cheeks. “We don’t know. She wasn’t in her apartment.”

Vicki didn’t say what everyone was probably thinking—that Tony had Chris, that it was only a matter of time before yet another horrifying phone call. “Okay, Tracey,” Vicki said again. “It’s really important that you tell us exactly what happened here tonight.”

Tracey looked around the room, blank eyes suddenly snapping into focus, like a shutter on a camera lens. “I was sleeping,” she began, her voice surprisingly animated. “Suddenly there were these noises. At first I thought I was having a nightmare, but then I realized I was awake. I heard banging, footsteps, my mother screaming, more sounds …” Tracey lifted her hands into the air, dropped them again. “I was scared. I got out of bed. And then I saw him.”

“You saw Tony?”

“Yes.” Tracey looked from Vicki to Susan to
Lieutenant Jacobek, then back to Vicki. “I’m sure it was him,” she said, as if she weren’t sure at all.

“Did you see his face?” Lieutenant Jacobek asked.

Tracey shook her head. “He was wearing a ski mask.”

“A ski mask?” Vicki asked. In this heat? she could almost hear Barbara add.

“It was pulled down over his face. All you could see were his eyes.”

“So, it’s possible it wasn’t Tony?”

“Who else would it have been?” Tracey asked in response. “Howard?”

“Howard?” Lieutenant Jacobek repeated.

“Howard Kerble, her fiancé,” Owen offered.

“Impossible,” Vicki said. “Howard worshiped the ground she walked on.”

“Someone should call him,” Susan said.

“We’ll take care of that,” Lieutenant Jacobek told her, with a nod to his partner.

“Howard adored my mother,” Tracey interjected. “You should see the ring he bought her.”

“Was she wearing the ring last night?” Lieutenant Jacobek asked.

“She always wore it,” Tracey said.

“Ring’s missing,” a nearby policeman noted.

“Where were you when you first saw the man?” Lieutenant Jacobek asked Tracey.

“What?”

“Where were you?” Vicki repeated, wishing Lieutenant Jacobek would back off. If they weren’t careful, Tracey would retreat back into near-catatonia.

“I don’t know. In the hall, I guess.”

“Did he see you?”

Tracey nodded. “He looked right at me.”

“How tall was he?” Lieutenant Jacobek asked.

“I don’t know. It happened so fast. He was all crouched over, running.”

“He ran down the stairs?”

Tracey nodded vigorously.

“Was he carrying anything?”

“I don’t understand.”

“A baseball bat? A poker of some kind?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t know.” Tracey’s voice was rising steadily.

Vicki sought to calm her. “It’s okay, sweetheart. You’re doing great. Tell us what happened next.”

“I went into my mother’s bedroom.” Tracey’s voice returned to normal. She spoke slowly, deliberately, as if retracing her steps one by one. “At first I didn’t see her. I called out, but she didn’t answer me. And then I heard moaning, and I came around the side of the bed, and that’s when I saw her. She was lying on the floor. She was covered in blood. At first, I wasn’t even sure it was her. Her face …”

Vicki looked to the floor, swallowed repeatedly before looking back up. Tracey had used almost the exact same words Susan had earlier.

“I ran to the phone,” Tracey continued. “I called Susan.”

“What about your father?” Vicki asked.

“What about him? It wasn’t him.”

“No, of course not.”

“Just because they used to fight a lot doesn’t mean …”

“Of course not,” Vicki repeated, stealing a glance at Lieutenant Jacobek.

“Where can we contact your father, Tracey?” he asked.

“It wasn’t him,” Tracey insisted.

“Somebody has to tell him what happened here last night.”

Tracey reluctantly provided the officers with her father’s address. “My father’s a very busy man. He has two little kids and Pam is pregnant again. I don’t want to stay with them.”

“You won’t have to,” Vicki assured her.

“You’ll stay with us,” Susan said, looking to Lieutenant Jacobek for his consent.

“That’s fine. She can stay wherever she’s most comfortable.”

“I don’t want to stay at my father’s,” Tracey repeated. “The bed creaks, and the kids get up so early. I’ll never get any sleep.”

For an instant Tracey reminded Vicki of Susan’s sister, Diane. Vicki quickly pushed the ungenerous thought out of her head. We say all kinds of crazy things when we’re under extreme stress, she thought, rising unsteadily to her feet.

Tracey giggled. “Your knees cracked.”

There was a noise on the stairs and Vicki saw several uniformed policemen carrying a large green body bag toward the front door. “Oh, God,” she whispered, looking away, knowing the body of her friend was inside.

“She was so beautiful,” Tracey was saying to no one in particular. “She was a former Miss Cincinnati, you know.”

Vicki nodded her confirmation.

“Her face was completely smashed in.” Now that Tracey had been forced to talk, she was incapable of keeping quiet. “It was like she didn’t have a face at all.” She made a sound halfway between a laugh and a cry. “After everything she did to stay beautiful. Not to have a face.” Her voice stopped as abruptly as a windup toy that’s run out of steam.

Vicki closed her eyes, tried not to picture her friend lying across her bedroom floor, bludgeoned beyond all recognition.

“Can I take Tracey home now?” Susan asked, clearly exhausted by the events of the last week. First her mother’s death. Now her friend’s murder.

Lieutenant Jacobek nodded. “We’ll drop by later, if that’s okay.” He handed his card to Owen. “If you or Tracey should think of anything else in the meantime.…”

“We’ll let you know,” Owen said.

“I’ll go upstairs and pack some of your things,” Susan offered.

“No,” Tracey said. “I’ll go. You won’t know what I want.”

Vicki watched the young officer who’d screened them at the door accompany Tracey up the stairs.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” Susan cried. “I keep thinking this is just a bad dream, and that any minute I’m going to wake up.”

“You really think Tony is capable of this?” Vicki asked.

“I think Tony is capable of anything. Oh, God, poor Barbara.”

“That’s what doesn’t make any sense,” Vicki said. “Why Barbara?”

“What are you talking about?”

Vicki could sense Susan’s growing annoyance. “It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Nothing about Tony ever made sense,” Susan told her. “He’s a vile, brutal man. You heard him at my house today. He threatened to kill Chris.”

“Chris, yes. Not Barbara.”

“He threatened all of us.” Susan turned toward Lieutenant Jacobek, explained about the incident after her mother’s funeral. “He made his fingers into the shape of a gun. He pointed it at Chris. He said there were plenty of bullets for the rest of us.”

“I’ll have police posted outside your house until he’s apprehended,” Lieutenant Jacobek said as he finished jotting down this latest information.

I don’t think that will be necessary, Vicki thought, but didn’t say. Even if Tony was responsible for Barbara’s murder, she didn’t think he’d come after Susan. It was Chris he’d been terrorizing for years, Chris he wanted to destroy.

So why kill Barbara?

Had he broken into Barbara’s house on the assumption that Chris would be there? Had he been so enraged at not finding her, he’d struck out at Barbara instead? Had he killed her as a warning to Chris, as a sign of greater horror to come?

And then what?

Had he fled the scene covered in his victim’s blood, confident no one would see him? Had he returned calmly to his house, to his children, changed his
clothes, and destroyed the evidence, assumed he’d be neither suspected nor apprehended, despite the fact he’d left Tracey alive to identify him?

It didn’t make sense.

Of course it didn’t have to make sense, Vicki reminded herself. She’d tried enough criminal cases to know that murder seldom made sense, that people had their own elaborate systems of justification for everything they did, no matter how heinous. Nobody ever saw himself as the bad guy. There was always a reason, however convoluted, however insane. And murderers, like every other person who breaks the law, always assumed they were invulnerable. Despite all the clues they left behind, they never actually thought they’d be caught.

So it didn’t have to make sense that Tony had killed Barbara and not Chris. What mattered was that Tony had been in a murderous rage and that Barbara was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Except she was in her own home. In her own bed.

“There were no signs of a break-in,” Vicki said to Jeremy on the long drive home. She brought her hands to her eyes, shielded them from the rising sun. Streaks of pink clouds, like long shreds of cotton candy, wafted across a brilliant powder-blue sky.
Red sky at night
, Vicki said silently, recalling the phrase from her childhood, hearing her mother recite the words along with her,
Sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, Sailor take warning
. Barbara would have loved this sky, Vicki thought, refusing to give in to the threat of tears, as she watched her husband rub his tired eyes. “Were you crying?” Vicki asked, not bothering to hide her astonishment.

“Weren’t you?” he asked, equally astonished.

Vicki hadn’t cried in almost forty years, since the morning she’d realized her mother had left her and was never coming back. That day she’d shed enough tears to last a lifetime, and where had it gotten her? Precisely nowhere. Her tears had fallen on the proverbial deaf ears. Her mother certainly hadn’t noticed them. And had her heartfelt sobs made Vicki feel any better? No. If anything, they’d made her feel worse. Tears sapped your strength, blurred your vision, imprisoned you in a kind of free-falling grief, kept you from moving forward, from getting on with your life. There was no room in Vicki’s life for wallowing in the past, in what was over and done with and could not be changed, no room in her life for tears. Not anymore.