Gravewriter (12 page)

“Why did he come here?”

She spread her hands. “He told me he came to see family,” she said. “Goddamn—are we out of licorice?”

“Sadly so.”

“You ate the last two pieces?”

“You told me to,” Billy said. “J.R. said he was here for family?”

“That might have been bullshit, but maybe not,” she said. “If he had come to start over and suddenly showed up with a suitcase on some second cousin's doorstep, it's easy to see how he could end up on the street. The week he got killed, he was in a good mood. First time I'd ever heard him talkative. He said he had come into good fortune
and we might not be seeing him anymore—but that when the case of champagne arrived, we'd know it was from him.”

“And then you found him here?”

“Upstairs,” she said. “This place is one of my regular stops. There are about twenty places we know our clients regularly hang out. I try to persuade the reasonable ones they'd be better off in a bed. I'll tell the delusional ones anything they want to hear—'If radio waves are scrambling your brain, we got a shelter with a lead-coated roof.' ”

“And that works?”

“Just listening to them usually works,” she said. “I wouldn't normally have gone all the way into the attic, except that the trapdoor was open and the folding ladder had been pulled down. J.R. was up there.” She bit her bottom lip.

“Are you sure it was murder?”

She looked away and lifted her eyebrows. “There aren't many accidental beheadings.”

An intense sadness pinched Billy's windpipe. He swallowed hard. “I'm sorry,” he managed to say.

“I had to recognize him from his clothes and the shape of him. He had a black thumbnail—that was what clinched the identification. There was so much blood. I called an ambulance from my cell phone, and that saved the life of the other dude—the one in the basement?”

“What other guy? You mean Peter Shadd?”

She nodded. “I searched the rest of the building while I was waiting for the ambulance and found that skinny guy in the basement—the room that leads out to the water—facedown at the bottom of the stairs. It looked like an overdose. His lips were blue. His nervous system was shutting down. The EMTs couldn't do anything for J.R., but they probably saved Peter Shadd.”

Billy looked out the window. “Now twelve of his peers have to vote on whether he was worth saving,” he said. “You're probably more qualified to sit on this jury than any of us would be.”

“None of you is his peer,” she said. “And neither am I. We could find a jury of his peers under an overpass I visited earlier tonight.”

“At least those folks are smart enough to avoid jury duty,” he said.

He still couldn't understand why Peter hadn't been charged with killing J.R.—unless there was no physical evidence. “You said there was a lot of blood upstairs. How much?”

“Do you want to see?”

The attic felt ten degrees warmer than the rest of the house.

The stain on the plywood floor looked like somebody had spread a quart of dark paint with a mop.

Billy had seen blood and bodies before as a journalist. But those bodies had been fresh, and the evidence of those crimes quickly swabbed away. This bloodstain was more than a year old. But then, in a decaying boathouse nobody seemed to care about, who would have cleaned it?

Billy borrowed Mia's flashlight and panned it around. The stain was roughly oval, about nine feet by fourteen. It went almost wall to wall across the width of the partially finished attic. The walls, formed by the pitched roof, angled up and met at the peak. Billy had to duck to walk around the splotch. The walls were unfinished and not insulated. Thousands of bent, rusted nails poked through the planks in straight rows, pounded there by roofers who had installed the tar paper and shingles.

Somebody long ago had begun converting the attic into usable space. The eaves had been blocked off with short vertical walls, maybe three feet high, which created crawl spaces that ran the length of the room. Billy pointed the light down a hole into one of the crawl spaces. A mound of soup cans, soiled clothes, newspapers, and other trash had been piled up in the gap.

Billy raised an eyebrow to Mia.

“Yeah,” she confirmed, “people live in there.”

She pointed to one end of the dark oval. “He was lying there. Faceup … well, I mean, he was on his back—put it that way.” She rolled her eyes at her own slip of the tongue. “The blood was still wet when I found him, and it stank, a heavy metallic smell.” Her nose wrinkled at the recollection. “There were a few footprints leading away… here.” She pointed again. Billy aimed the light. The footprints were faded and nearly gone. “I guess they've been trampled and worn off. They were barefoot prints. Just the front of the foot, like somebody had walked away on his tiptoes.”

“Did you see, uh, the head?”

“No.”

“Someone stole his fucking head?”

She shrugged, saying, “Once you've committed murder, who cares about larceny?”

“And you said Peter was in the basement?”

“Facedown, in the dark, at the bottom of the stairs.”

“Was he bleeding?”

She looked away a moment in thought. “He was bruised, as if he had fallen and whacked his forehead, but not bleeding,” she said.

They started walking downstairs, with Billy holding the light. The stairs creaked like a rusty seesaw.

“Are you sure he wasn't bleeding? This must have happened fast for you.”

“I spent an intense few minutes with him,” Mia said. “I had to check if he needed CPR. I remember unbuttoning his orange jumpsuit and putting my ear to his chest. His heart was beating as fast as a hummingbird's. I would have noticed bleeding. There was no blood at all.”

They returned to the front room, where they had entered through the broken window. A dry, scratchy drowsiness filled Billy's eyes.

“I can see why Peter Shadd wasn't charged in connection to J.R.'s body,” Billy said. “No blood.”

“Right—he didn't have a drop of blood on him,” Mia said, her face brightening at the revelation. “So how could he have killed J.R., decapitated him, and chucked the head without staining his prison uniform?”

“Whoever did that thing upstairs had to have been drenched in blood,” Billy agreed. He slouched on the sofa, sighed, and rubbed his eyes. “The cops have tests to pick up the slightest trace of blood on a person. Peter must have been clean.” He shrugged. “I'm more confused that I was before.”

“How's that?” she asked, vaulting over the arm of the sofa and landing with a whump. “You figured out why Peter Shadd wasn't charged with killing J.R.—he's not connected to it.”

Billy had been a reporter too long to believe in coincidence. “If somebody finds you overdosing in the basement of a crack house, it's
possible
you might not be connected to a headless body upstairs,” he said with a bitter little laugh. “Unless you just escaped from prison, and your cell mate is found shot to death in the river about ten minutes from here.”

They sat in silence awhile. There seemed to be nothing more to say, either about J.R. or Peter Shadd's trial. Billy worried that Mia might leave. He studied her profile in the dim light from the street. Their conversation had been so intimate; he couldn't stand to let it end.

“Let's talk about something else,” he said.

They whispered through the night.

Over the next few hours, he told Mia about how his career had begun to unravel at the dog track, and how divorce had crushed whatever journalist had been left inside him.

“I did not accept that she no longer loved me,” he confessed.

“Who says you have to accept it?”

“She shacked up with another guy.”

“So maybe she loved him, too.”

“That, I
really
don't accept.”

“Just because she couldn't stand to be around you doesn't mean she should join a convent,” Mia argued. “Don't you think she could have loved more than one man?”

Billy said nothing.

“Tell me more,” she insisted.

He told her about Maddox, about the crash that had killed Angie. He did not tell Mia about his dreams. She was, after all, still a stranger, and a crack house was not a confessional. But mostly he did not tell her because he did not want to scare her away.

She told him about watching her father drift into paranoia and madness, of learning to love a stepfather, and about her job poking through basements for people dying of self-neglect. Billy wondered what part of her story she might have kept from him.

She stretched on the sofa, rested her head on his lap, and closed her eyes. He could smell her hair, like lavender. Billy took her hand and lightly rubbed it, until he could not stay awake any longer and fell into a contented sleep.

Billy woke alone on the sofa.

Dawn had broken. He rose stiffly and shuffled through trash to the window. A breeze off the bay ruffled the sugar maples along the sidewalk. Sunlight slanted through their leaves and tousled with the shadows on the street.

“Oh shit,” he muttered, checking his watch. If he didn't hurry, he'd be late for court.

Billy looked around for a note, a message—anything.

There was no sign Mia had even been there. His gut tightened with disappointment.

Poking his head out the window, he could hear the morning commute in the distance. He climbed from the boathouse and pounded heavy-legged down the porch, heading toward his van.

A squadron of squawking geese soared overhead in a V formation. Billy shielded his eyes and watched them turn with military precision toward the bay.

He could find Mia at the shelter, he reminded himself. He knew where she worked. He could walk to her office from his in ten minutes. Of course, she could reach Billy at the obituary desk nearly any night of the week.

He climbed into the van, caught a glance of himself in the rearview mirror, and shrieked.

“What the fuck!”

He looked more closely and laughed out loud.

Across Billy's forehead was a telephone number, inked on his skin with a felt-tip pen.

How considerate of her,
Billy thought,
to write the number backward so that I can read it in the mirror.

M
artin handed Carol his leather oxfords, then padded in stocking feet across his office to his desk and collapsed in his chair. It had been another long day at trial. His arches ached. He rubbed them.

“Is it smart for me to hide your leather shoes at my house?” Carol teased. “Somebody could get the wrong idea.”

“You know how crazy my wife is about animal rights,” Martin replied. “I'd rather she think
wrongly
that I was putting my pecker in my assistant than think
rightly
that I was putting my feet inside a dead cow.” He gazed out the window, to the brick wall outside.

She snickered, then encouraged him: “You made the best of your opening statement the other day.”

Martin waved off the compliment. “So unprofessional, to attack the opposing lawyer,” he said. “Not something I could get away with again. Let's see the art while it's fresh. Please.”

Carol opened a folder of eight-by-ten sketches of the jurors and began taping them to the wall. She arranged them in two rows of seven, in the order the jurors sat in the courtroom. With just a few
strokes of charcoal and rough shading in colored pencil, the artist had accurately represented each juror, seven women and seven men.

“Frankie does good work,” Martin said, looking over the drawings. “When he draws me for the newspaper, he always shaves off twenty pounds.”

“Must save him a lot of ink.” She winked at Martin.

Ignoring the dig, Martin nodded to the drawings and asked, “After two innings, what's our score?”

“Twelve to two, against us.”

“Jesus!”

“With our rotten luck, we'll lose the two when they dismiss the alternates.”

“I need six open minds to plant reasonable doubt,” Martin said, scanning over the faces on the wall. “Gimme the bad news first.”

“Dillingham has connected with most of the jury,” Carol reported. “Take his opening statement, for example. I noted mimicry in the body language of several jurors—when Dillingham folded his hands or touched his chin, they did the same. It shows a subconscious connection.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning Dillingham found their wavelength, and they accepted what they heard from him.”

Consulting her notes, she pointed out pictures on the wall.

“Jurors one, four, six, and seven are especially affected by Dillingham,” she said. “I note open hands, and heads tilted to the side, indicating interest.” She sighed. “I'm afraid there has been very little negative body language toward Dillingham.”

Martin flipped both middle fingers at the drawings and growled, “Read
my
body language.”

“The jurors are, ah, less accepting of your case,” Carol said.

“Don't sugarcoat it,” he scolded. “If I gotta eat horse shit, let me
savor the flavor. Makes me work harder.” He fished his eyeglass case from his coat pocket, opened it, saw a spider inside, frowned, and closed the case.

“I'm noting a lot of fidgeting when you make your points—a sign of discomfort,” Carol said. “Two jurors crossed their arms as you spoke today; another crossed her legs. It's defensive posture, an indicator of closed-mindedness.”

“They don't like what they're hearing.”

“Jurors two, three, and ten kept their heads down during your questioning this afternoon, which suggests they had reached negative conclusions. Worst of all, juror thirteen looked away and rubbed the back of her neck, which tells me she had mentally checked out of the process.”

Martin looked at the sketch of juror thirteen, a heavyset fifty-year-old sales manager. “She's made up her mind to convict him already. Goddamn!” He sighed and wiped his hand over his face. “So who can I work with?”