Lucky Day (4 page)

With about a week to go before the election, the race was a statistical dead heat. Incumbents of the sheriff’s office traditionally did not campaign, which was good for G. William—he’d added even more weight to his bulk. His color was sallow, except for strained blooms of red on his cheeks and his usual florid nose. He wheezed when he stood, when he sat, when he walked more than thirty feet at a stretch. If the people of the Nod and the surrounding county hadn’t already lost faith in him, they would have if he’d had to attend campaign events. Just the sight of him would have dropped his chances at reelection straight into the toilet.

The final indignity (well, he reasoned, the penultimate indignity) came exactly one week before the race, when Tommy Shanahan called to give him a heads-up that the morning paper would carry its editorial endorsement. G. William didn’t bother to ask for whom. He’d been expecting this, and thanked Tommy—with genuine gratitude—for the warning.

“At least Weathers isn’t riding you anymore,” Tommy said weakly.

In the pages of the paper, sure. But that blog was still out there, and even though he knew he shouldn’t, G. William checked in regularly.

Failure…!

Blight on the Sheriff’s Office…!

Untenable…!

Violation of the public trust…!

He read the case files over and over, to the point that he could recite them from memory. They were the only proof he had that his memory was even functioning these days—he’d worn mismatched socks, the wrong tie with his uniform, a pajama top under his shirt. His brain fired at random, it seemed, to the point that he made sure to come to work long before the morning commuters took to the streets and long after the evening drivers were off the roads.

He didn’t trust himself behind the wheel. His mind drifted. Yet he couldn’t stop himself from coming into the office each day, huddling at his desk behind a closed door, looking for something—anything—that could lead to a break in either case.

Some days, he believed they were connected. They
had
to be! Two young, pretty blond girls get killed in a town with a murder rate of zilch? Within two weeks? You’d have to be a blithering idiot not to see the connection!

And yet…other days, he shied away from this theory, all too aware of the fate that befell cops who tried to fit facts to theory, not the other way around. Other than location and general appearance, there was nothing to tie the cases—or, indeed, the girls—to each other. Blond? Yep, sure. So what? Lots of blonds in the world. Pretty? Damn straight. But in different ways. Calling Samantha Reed pretty was just being honest. Cute girl. Calling Cara Swinton pretty was probably a crime of understatement. She wasn’t model quality, as she seemed to think she was, but she wasn’t deluded, either. She was damn close. Different girls, different kinds of girls.

Who wanted them dead?

And why?

With six days to go before the election, G. William wore one black shoe and one brown shoe to the office. And that turned out to be the break he’d been waiting for.

“Gettin’ your clothes mixed up, Sheriff?” the receptionist asked as he walked into the building. He paused, aware of the hush that fell over the office as she asked it. Loralynn Sweeney was somewhere north of seventy, long overdue for retirement, but G. William had too much heart to let the old bird go. The silence that greeted this latest in Loralynn’s line of off-the-cuff bombs told G. William what he’d already suspected—the office had been aware of his erratic behavior (both sartorial and not) over the past few weeks, and they’d instituted an informal code of silence. Now Loralynn had broken that code, and everyone—from the deputy frozen at the fax machine to the new guy halfway through a doughnut—was wondering what the reaction would be.

Something in his head shook loose.

“What did you say?” he asked.

The sense of
Don’t say anything!
from everyone else in the room was almost palpable, but Loralynn was impervious. “I said, you gettin’ your clothes mixed up these days, Sheriff? You got two different shoes on.”

He looked down. Sure enough.

“Couple days ago, you had on different color socks. And before that, you—”

“I get it. Thanks.”

He hustled to his office as rapidly as his bulk would permit.

Gettin’ your clothes mixed up?

Door closed, he lunged for the Samantha Reed file. It was right on top of the desk, as always.

Gettin’ your clothes mixed up?

Talk to your medical examiner about how difficult it apparently is to give the next of kin the right damn clothes!

Henry Reed. Right? Right?

G. William flipped through his notes. Yes. Yes, there it was, just as he remembered it. During G. William’s abortive attempt to interrogate the grieving father of Dead Girl Two, Henry had shouted that. G. William had thought little of it at the time. Mistakes happened in police work. The morgue had mixed up a possessions bag and handed off the wrong clothing to the Reeds, that’s all. Since Henry mentioned it and was so het up about it, G. William had assumed he’d already reamed out the morgue folks and gotten the proper clothes.

Assuming. Dumbass thing to do. Never assume. Never.

He picked up the phone and dialed the morgue. The morgue was actually part of the sheriff’s department, down in a basement room that also connected to the mortuary next door. But G. William wanted answers now, and he didn’t want to waste time making his slow way downstairs.

“Morgue!” vibrated through the phone.

Renny Cartwright was way too cheerful for someone who worked in a morgue, but he was also good at his job, so G. William couldn’t find it in his heart to chastise him for sounding like a carnival barker.

“Renny, you know the Reed case? I’m wonderin’ if there was a complaint from—”

“Jesus H.!” Even exasperated, Renny managed to sound like he was having a good time. “They still on about that? I apologized up and down, G. William. Even though it weren’t my damn fault at all. They lookin’ to sue? Over a goddamn pair of
underwear
?”

G. William’s breath caught. “Maybe you better start at the beginning, Renny.”

So Renny spilled the story, in the upbeat, enthusiastic tones of a pep squad. After processing Dead Girl Two, he’d released the body to the funeral home, a procedure no more complicated than knocking on the connecting door and letting the folks at the Giancci Funeral Home come on in to wheel her through. Also per standard procedure, he’d packed up the victim’s clothes and other personal belongings into what was called a “possessions bag.” It was actually a box in this case, but tradition dictated it be called a bag. Since there had been no trace evidence of any kind found on the clothing or other items, they would be returned to the family.

“And that’s when all hell broke loose,” Renny went on. “Next thing I know, the dad’s on the horn, screamin’ at me about how I messed up, I’m incompetent, I’m a jerk, he’ll get me fired. All because he says I sent them back the wrong britches.”

“Her underwear.”

“What I said.”

G. William closed his eyes and cursed his memory. He could see the wink of Dead Girl Two’s panties under her hiked skirt the day they’d found her body. Could remember his thought—later proven wrong—that she hadn’t been raped.

“Go on.”

“So anyway, he’s tellin’ me as how his daughter never wore no underwear like these and I mixed it up and what
else
have I maybe mixed up and how’re we ever gonna catch the prick done this crime if the cops can’t even keep a pair of underwear straight?”

“And?”

“I swear to God and all holy, G. William—those panties are the ones Reed was wearing. I took them off her myself when she was on the slab. We have crime-scene photos of her wearing them. But there was just no talking to him, not the way he was. So I apologized and told him we’d look for his daughter’s underwear. He came in a couple, three days later, practically threw ’em in my face. I told him I didn’t have anything for him, and he just stomped out.”

G. William leaned back in his chair. “You still have ’em?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, seriously—they belong to the Reed girl. I left ’em in the evidence locker. Someday, he’s gonna come apologizing to me and I’ll be the bigger man and let him have ’em.”

“Bring them to me,” G. William said. “Now.”

There was nothing special about the underwear.

They were somewhere between lime and Kelly green, with modest-sized white polka dots both front and back. No telling stains or markings. At the sides, they were remarkably narrow, and G. William imagined that, to those who cared about such things, they would look fetching, cut high over a teenage thigh. It had been a long time since G. William had witnessed a teenage thigh, and he had no particular interest in thinking about them, but this was work.

He’d called the Reeds, thankfully getting the missus and not the mister. Deanna Reed had always been a dull, gray woman, and her daughter’s death had only deepened the shades of gray. Talking to her on the phone was like negotiating with a bucket of dishwater, but he eventually prized out of her the answers he needed: The underwear did not belong to Samantha. Not her brand, for one thing. Not her style at all, for another. G. William had no children, but he was positive that kids of a certain age would do things like buy underwear—especially slightly sexy underwear—without informing their parents.

“I do the laundry,” Deanna said. “I’ve always done the laundry. Samantha didn’t even know how. I realized I’d have to teach her before she went off to…college.”

G. William murmured comforting platitudes over the phone line, easing her through a series of choking sobs, then thanked her for her help and hung up.

This was a lead. A clue. His first.

It was his gut telling him so, again. Nothing that would stand up in court, of course. The panties could easily have been bought by Samantha on the sly or given to her by a friend. And maybe Deanna didn’t pay that much attention when doing the laundry. Or maybe her daughter had housekeeping skills that Deanna was unaware of. It was entirely possible that the underwear belonged to Dead Girl Two.

Except G. William’s gut knew that wasn’t true. It was too odd a detail. It was just too damned
weird
.

The killer had put them on her.

He had taken off whatever underwear she’d been wearing that day (if any…kids these days) and had raped her to his satisfaction, and then—for some reason—he’d slid these up her legs and snugged them at her hips, as if dressing a child.

G. William stared at the panties for what felt like hours, until he began to feel like a pervert. He’d heard that in Japan, there were vending machines where businessmen bought girls’ used panties. But then again, Japan was one of those places onto which people seemed to project their own peculiarities, so he didn’t know if it was true or just something people said.

In any event, he was certain there were no such vending machines anywhere near the Nod. So where had these panties come from? They didn’t look new—the elastic at the waist was stretched a bit, just slightly worn. Not brand-new. The killer hadn’t bought them expressly to put on Dead Girl Two. He’d acquired them some other way.

Stolen from someone? Rifling through someone else’s underwear drawer?

Made the most sense.

His wife’s? Sister’s?

No. Daughter. He has a daughter her age and he wants to, but he can’t, so he transfers the underwear, transferring the need and the sin? Can’t do the things he wants to do to his own kid, so he turns Dead Girl Two into a version of her.

That tracked.

So did something else. Something he avoided thinking. It flapped at him like a bat blinded by the light, panicking and screeching, and he swatted it away, but it kept coming back. Finally, it sank its teeth into him, and he stood from his desk and marched into the outer office.

“Going home to change those shoes?” Loralynn asked.

“Sure,” G. William said, and didn’t look back.

The Swinton house was preternaturally clean. Damned eerie, it was. As G. William spoke, Geraldine Swinton darted from surface to surface with a duster, whisking away microscopic motes with a ferocity that suggested a level of personal offense.

He thought of the mornings he’d woken up on the floor, in the bathtub, and he didn’t judge.

Everyone grieved in different ways, he supposed.

“I’m truly sorry for having to intrude on y’all,” G. William said, then paused. Geraldine’s incessant motion was making him ill. “Gerry,” he said quietly. He’d known her nigh on twenty years. “Gerry, won’t you please sit down, sweetheart?”

Geraldine Swinton batted at a speck of dust only she could see and stared down at the polished surface of the end table that obsessed her so. “I’m sorry. It’s just…the house is so
filthy
. Do you understand? It’s just absolutely wretched, and that’s not acceptable, you know?”

He thought of his pristine bed, undented by his bulk, the pillows fluffed to perfection weeks ago and then untouched.

“I know,” he told her.

He’d come here under the pretense of “just checking in.” A civil servant, looking after the needs of one of his constituents. He had a true reason, though, for the visit to Dead Girl One’s home, and he was avoiding it. The reason was on the smartphone tucked into his left hip pocket.

After some chitchat and after realizing that his heart couldn’t tolerate the ineffable, chaotic, yet pristine sadness of the Swinton house, G. William finally did what he’d come to do, what he absolutely did not want to do. Because once he asked the question, he’d have the answer, and the answer scared the bejesus out of him.

“Gerry, I need you to look at something for me.”

“Will this help?”

“Might could.”

She nodded and alighted on the sofa next to him. G. William hauled out his phone and showed her the photo he’d taken of the mystery underwear.

“Gerry, do you recog—”

“Those are Cara’s,” she whispered. “How did you find them?”