Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3) (14 page)

“You’re not going to believe me if you don’t see for yourself.”

Maybe it’s cruel, what I’m putting her through. If I could be absolutely sure, then I would stop. But I only glimpsed the man with the shotgun, only got a snapshot impression of his features. This is the only way to be certain.

“I’ll start at the feet,” I say.

She extends one of her hands as if to stop me.

“You have to do this, Bea. You have to face up to it.”

She drops her hand.

I lift the sheet in stages, folding it back on itself, revealing the feet, the shins, the thighs, the genitalia. The mutilated hands appear, and there’s a catch in her breathing. I reveal the torso with its autopsy incisions. At the height of the clavicle, I rest the sheet and step back.

“Is this Brandon?” I ask.

Bea edges forward slowly. She takes her time with the body. When she’s finished, she straightens up. The expression on her face is unreadable.

“Bea?”

She doesn’t look at me. She turns for the exit, her heels clicking across the hard floor.

“It’s not him.”

She disappears behind the swishing door.

Bea is a quiet passenger
, uninterested in anything I have to say. Legs crossed, arms folded, face turned toward the window so I can only see her expression in chance reflections. Blank. The muscles slack. Signifying nothing. The extent of her contribution is to point the way to Hilda Ford’s house at the opposite end of Westheimer from Brandon’s office. When we pull up in the driveway, she’s out the door before I can cut the engine, advancing up the driveway with her side arm drawn.

“Bea!”

She keeps advancing, halted only by the locked door. I coax her gun back into the holster and try to calm her down. But she already seems calm, preternaturally so. It’s hard to judge whether I’m getting through to her.

We circle the house, peering in through the windows. I half expect to find the place cleared out. But no, it’s fully furnished, even a little cluttered with knickknacks. Through the kitchen door I can see the white fridge covered in layers of children’s artwork and alphabet magnets. I try the handle, but it’s locked.

As I check the nearby windows, Bea rears back and kicks the kitchen door. She can’t put enough weight behind her foot to force the lock, but the wood gives a satisfying crack. She tries again before I can stop her.

“Have you ever heard of a warrantless entry?” I ask. “Anything we get will be unusable without probable cause.”

She glares at me. “We’re past warrants.”

“No, Bea, we’re not. I’m not. The people responsible for my partner’s death, I plan to put them away. And I can’t do that if you go nuclear on the scene.”

“March,” she says. “
March
.” She clutches my arms in her hands, shaking me, looking up at me like she’s gone crazy. “Are you listening to yourself? Are you serious? Don’t you get it?”

I grab her wrists and pull her hands away. She tries to twist free, but I hold her.

“Get control of yourself,” I say.

“Let go.”

“Bea, I mean it.”

Her shoulders slump and the mask falls over her features again. “I’m fine. Let me go.”

I release her wrists.

“We’re going in there,” she says.

After a long, silent standoff, that’s what we do. There’s no way to stop her, and I need her cooperation. Without that, I don’t have a next step. If I go along with her this time, the forced entry will hopefully burn up some of her rage and I can reason with her before we move on. She gives the door a final kick while I look on.

We clear the house, which is unoccupied, then work our way back through the various rooms. While all the furniture, appliances, and clothing are still in place, there are no computers or phones. The garage is empty, too. Nothing I see suggests this is anything other than the home of a lone woman in her fifties with a fondness for her grandchildren. There are even toys strewn across the living room floor.

“Look at this,” Bea says, beckoning me over to an upright piano tucked against the wall. On top, a line of framed photographs, mostly of the two kids I recognize from the ex-wife’s apartment. There are two gaps in the row. Missing photos. “There used to be one of Brandon here. And there was one of him and Miranda with the children.”

She finds a pack of plastic bags in the kitchen and starts filling them with random small objects, anything that might yield fingerprints or trace evidence. Then she goes into the master bathroom in search of combs and brushes for stray hair.

“We’re going to find out if Hilda’s in the system,” she says. “Maybe we can get a real name on her.”

Given the fact that her supposed son was in the database, I seriously doubt that. But it’s worth a try. When she’s finished, we go out the way we came in, pulling the busted door shut. She stores her samples in the trunk of my car.

Back on the road, I ask if she wants to talk.

“What I want to do is find him,” she says.

We hit a series of locations, places she thinks he might be: a chain of bars and restaurants and cigar lounges along the Sam Houston Tollway, Hempstead, and Tidwell. She shows his picture around, but gets nothing. She has me drive slowly through the parking lot of several hotels along the Northwest Freeway without explaining why she’d expect to find him in these particular spots. None of this is likely to bring results, of course, but I’m humoring her in the hope that once she simmers down, she’ll be forthcoming with information.

“He’s going to be anywhere associated with his old life,” I finally tell her.

“You think I don’t realize that?”

“What next, then?”

She thinks it over. “We should have a talk with Miranda.”

“And tell her what? Her husband’s not dead? I think she’s the last person who’s gonna have a line on his whereabouts.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “He loved those kids.”

She turns her face back to the window, elbow on the sill, her balled fist pressed against her lips. Then it all catches up to her and she doubles over. She doesn’t cry, doesn’t sob out loud. She just tenses up like a woman in labor, only instead of giving birth, she’s trying to hold something inside. The gravity of the betrayal, the weight of her own misjudgment—whatever it is, she’s overcome. I put a hand on her back.

“I want to help you fix this,”
I say, “but I need you to work with me.”

She sits up, burying her face in her hands. “I can’t do this. Take me back.”

“Bea, I need you.”

“Just drive me back. I can’t think. I can’t even breathe.”

I point the car in the direction of the Water Wall, trying to argue her out of it the whole way. She’s determined, though. Whatever force was driving her to the brink, overcoming all her instincts toward secrecy and self-preservation, now it’s gone. Perhaps she’s even a little scared of herself, afraid of the consequences of what she’s learned and what she’s done.

Just when I think I’ve lost her, pulling up to the curb behind her car, she turns in her seat and touches my arm.

“If I find anything, I will let you know,” she says. “You have to promise me to do the same. And remember: you’ll wreck us both if you’re not careful who you talk to.”

“What’s my next step?” I ask.

But she doesn’t know. “If you could figure out who that John Doe really is, it might help. Or get an
ID
on the guy you killed.”

“They won’t let me near the case. Is there anything you’re not telling me? Anything that could help?”

“I’ve told you everything I know.”

“What about Nesbitt? What’s his connection?”

“I don’t know who that is.”

Near as I can guess, she seems to be telling the truth. I fill her in on the shooting death of the self-proclaimed
CIA
agent and the fact that John Doe’s finger was found pointing toward the scene of his death.

“I don’t have a clue,” she says.

“Well, see what you can find out.”

She agrees. And she takes the bagged samples out of the trunk, too, suggesting she hasn’t abandoned the effort altogether. She just needs time, I tell myself. Once she’s had a chance to process everything I told her and figure out a way to collaborate without jeopardizing herself, she’ll come around.

———

My first partner, Stephen Wilcox, ended the relationship by leaving Homicide for Internal Affairs. We’d been through a lot by then. He had accompanied me on my early successes and then, following a personal tragedy of mine, watched my gradual decline. As my work became sloppy, he covered for me, but when he discovered my extracurricular vigilantism—nothing illegal, though I was pursuing some private vendettas at the expense of my casework—he decided he’d finally had enough. While he never came out and accused me of misconduct, he was pretty free with the accusations in private, especially among his new colleagues in
IAD
.

Over the years, as I’ve regained my balance, I have also made efforts to reconcile with Wilcox. The problem is, no matter how friendly and forgiving he seems, the old frustration is always bubbling under the surface. He can’t let go of it. As a result, I try to give him as much space as I can.

As he pulls into his driveway and sees me parked along the curb, the brakes on his Land Rover light up. He gets out, leaving the motor running and door open, bounding toward me with tight-lipped determination. I buzz my window down.

“What do you want?” he asks.

“Can we talk?”

He glances up and down the street, like he’s afraid the neighbors will notice. “You really think that’s a good idea? There’s an ongoing investigation into your shooting.”

“You’re not on that.”

“No,” he admits, “but I still think it’s a bad idea. If it’s professional, I can’t help you. And if it’s personal . . .”

“Hey, Stephen,” I say, “last time we met, you were all worked up about the Fauk case. You ever hear how
that
turned out?”

He sighs. “Yes, I did.”

When we were partners a decade ago, we made headlines by putting Donald Fauk away for murdering his wife. Last December, it looked like that conviction was going to unravel, and instead of backing me up, Wilcox was only too happy to throw me under the bus. In the end, I not only kept Fauk behind bars, but I managed to hand the Harris County Sheriff’s Department the name of a serial killer who’d been flying under the radar. The detective who broke that case, Roger Lauterbach, went on record giving me the credit. And I’ve never heard a squeak of apology out of Wilcox in all this time.

“It gets old after a while,” I say. “Me offering a hand of friendship, you spitting on it. We’re on the same side, whether you realize that or not. It would be nice if you’d at least hear me out before pitching a fit.”

“Fine,” he says. “Let me get my keys.”

Instead of inviting me inside, where I might be seen by his wife and kids, Wilcox has me drive in circles around the neighborhood while we talk. I ask him what he knows about Andrew Nesbitt’s shooting, and even though he didn’t conduct the investigation himself, he seems very well-informed. I imagine that one received plenty of airtime around the
IAD
water cooler. And since it’s old news and I haven’t been forthcoming about the nature of my interest, he can’t see the harm in humoring me by answering a few questions.

“That one’s gonna go down in the records as one of the strangest incidents in
HPD
history. You would not believe how many people behind the scenes are divided over it. This Nesbitt guy wasn’t some random crank. He was well known by people in law enforcement. He was on the payroll of a couple of the big energy companies, where he did some very hush-hush consulting. As far as anybody in this town was concerned, before the night of the shooting he was exactly what he said he was: a retired
CIA
officer. In fact, a pretty senior one.”

“But they denied that after he was dead?”

“Exactly.”

“Which doesn’t mean anything, right? They always deny it.”

He shakes his head. “It’s not like when a spy is caught in enemy territory. There are plenty of retired intelligence people around, and the government doesn’t deny
their
existence. I mean, if they did, it would be pretty hard for these people to cash in. And believe me, they do. All those contacts built up over the years really pay dividends when you go into the private sector.”

“You sound bitter.”

He laughs. “In this case, though, the government went out of its way to disavow the man. It wasn’t just a question of saying ‘We can neither confirm nor deny.’ They had people on the ground. There was a liaison to the investigation. All these retired intel folks who’d been telling us before that Nesbitt was a pillar of the community started coming forward to recant. They’d all been duped, they said. Even the ones who’re on record saying they’d served with him in the past. The end result was, pretty much everybody in Internal Affairs is convinced the dude
was
a spook.”

“And what about the uniforms who shot him? The video was released, and there are people on the Internet who think it was a hit.”

“Yeah,” he says. “People are crazy.”

“There’s nothing to it?”

“What do you think?” He laughs again. “Sure, a couple of
HPD
patrolmen are hiring themselves out as underworld hit men.”

“There’s such a thing as a corrupt cop,” I say. “I don’t have to tell you that.”

“Seriously, this was a righteous shooting. Nesbitt drew and fired. Case closed.”

We round the block, turning back onto his street. “I wish it was always that easy.”

“You mean your own shooting?” He adjusts his seat belt so he can face me. “I was sorry to hear about what happened to Lorenz. I didn’t know him that well, but he was a good man. I know that can’t have been easy for you.”

“Thanks,” I say, really meaning it. “They’re coming down on me pretty hard.”

“We really shouldn’t talk about that.”

“What was I supposed to do—let him put one in Jerry’s head?”

“It’s the automatic weapon,” he says. “They found something like sixteen entry wounds.”

“Sixteen?” It’s the first time I’ve heard the exact number. “It was over in a heartbeat. I didn’t even know the gun was full-auto. I just grabbed what was near to hand.”

I pull up in the driveway behind the Land Rover. He reaches for the door handle, but doesn’t pull it.

“Listen, Roland. I shouldn’t even be saying that. There’s a lot of pressure on our people. We’re not stupid. You shot a cop-killer in the middle of the act. Nobody wants to come down on you for that. A lot of us think you deserve a medal. But like I said, there’s a lot of pressure from up top. They want every aspect of this thing scrutinized.”

“It’s like a traffic stop,” I say. “They’ve got me on one thing and they’re trying to turn it into something bigger.”

“Pretty much. So keep your head down.”

He opens the door and starts to exit.

“One last thing. You heard about Hedges, I assume? Now Wanda Mosser’s in charge. I’m not sure why, but she seems to be gunning for me, too. I don’t suppose you have any insight into the back-room deals?”

“All I know is this: Hedges made a big play during the runoffs, thinking he had a shot at the chief’s office. I assume some promises were made, but I can’t say. In the process, he put a target on his back. Meanwhile, Wanda has a lot of friends in the new mayor’s office. Homicide was her reward for backing the mayor’s choice for chief. I think you’re wrong about her gunning for you.”