Playing Dead (33 page)

Richard Coogan contemplated me as if I were another giant disappointment in a life crammed with them. “Nothing could make it worse. Our lives have been over for years.”

I’m not sure anybody but me noticed the slight twitch of Amanda’s lips when he said that.

Richard spit out the saga of Jennifer’s murder like a well-rehearsed speech, mostly things that matched my internet research. But I didn’t interrupt. I needed to feel his pain for myself, a part of my process. Sadie had warned me for years that it was dangerous for me to carry around so many people’s hurt.

“Jen always closed up alone every third Saturday night,” Mrs. Coogan told me. “I told Richard he should go up and check on her when she wasn’t home by midnight. But Richard said nothing bad ever happens in Idabel. And we went to sleep.” Tears welled in her eyes.

“Tell me about her boyfriend at OU. The one who disappeared. Did you meet him?”

Mrs. Coogan pulled a tissue out of her sweater pocket and dabbed her eyes.

“No, but she really liked him. They talked on the phone a lot. His name was Barry. They’d been dating for about five months. Jennifer said he didn’t like his picture taken so we never knew what he looked like. The police found that real suspicious.”

“What about the letter?” Amanda prodded her, in a barely audible voice.

“Oh, yes.” Mrs. Coogan got up and opened a drawer in an end table stuffed with letters and cards. “He did write her letters over the summer. I couldn’t find them anywhere when the police asked for them, not in her room or her car, but this one arrived a few days after she died. The police fingerprinted it but couldn’t find anything. Maybe he used gloves. Here it is.”

I tried not to appear too eager as she handed over a small white envelope with Jennifer’s name and address in clean, bold printing. Not cramped and distressed, like a maniacal killer of young women. No return address.

I scanned the one-page letter written on a spare sheet of notebook paper. It was a short, funny note about his landlady’s obsession with her poodle, Queen Anne Boleyn. He liked his new bartending job. He missed Jennifer.

No misspellings or grammatical errors. Based on this single piece of evidence, I liked Barry.

I handed the letter back and Mrs. Coogan placed it carefully in the drawer.

“He signed it with six X’s and ten O’s,” she said.

I stood up. “Thank you so much for your time. I’ll let you know right away if I find anything that sheds light on your daughter’s case.”

“That’s it?” Red splotches spread like a weather map over her face. “You’ve got nothing for us?”

Amanda was up in a flash, moving toward the door, pulling me with her.

I hesitated as we reached the door and decided it was worth the risk.

“Just one thing. Do any of you know an Ingrid McCloud? Or did Jennifer?”

All three of them stared at me blankly.

“An Ingrid Mitchell? A Genoveve Roth?”

They shook their heads.

“Um, well, thank you, anyway, for your time.”

“Don’t mention it,” Mrs. Coogan said sarcastically. “Really, don’t.”

Amanda pulled me with her onto the stoop, and the door shut a little harder than it needed to behind us. I wondered briefly whether her parents were getting out a gun or a bottle of vodka to put themselves out of their misery. The statistics on couples staying together after the loss of a child were staggeringly depressing.

“I call it the House of Pain.” Amanda slid on a pair of cheap drugstore sunglasses as we walked down the concrete walk. I noticed she stepped carefully over each crack.

“I got that line from my high school trigonometry teacher. He used to greet us at the classroom door with ‘Welcome to the House of Pain.’ Only it was funny when he said it. My therapist thinks it’s kind of funny when I say it. At least, he thinks it’s a positive sign.”

I wondered about the credentials of a therapist who set up shop in Idabel, but, then again, it looked like there was plenty of ripe material here.

We had parked back-to-back on the street in front of the house. A pink rabbit’s foot dangled from the rearview mirror of Amanda’s canary-yellow beater Toyota. I wanted to tell Amanda that I’d lost a brother, but I didn’t. I didn’t know which was worse:
for her to live in that horrid museum to Jennifer or for me to exist in a home wiped clean of any sign that Tuck ever existed.

Amanda opened the Toyota’s door and tossed in her purse. All fingers present and accounted for. Amanda was about the right age to fit Adriana Marchetti’s profile if she’d lived. This new habit of counting strange women’s fingers had obsessed me for an hour in the Chicago airport. That placed me on the scale of crazy an inch or so below Rosalina.

“I’ll tell you what I told the cops,” she said. “They didn’t listen because I was just a kid. Jennifer loved that guy Barry. I always thought that whoever killed Jennifer killed him, too. They just did a better job of making sure he wasn’t found.”

I waited forty minutes in the “interview” room of the McCurtain County Sheriff’s Office, a small, stuffy space crammed with an old school lunchroom table, a microwave that predated my birth, a coffeepot, and a humming refrigerator with a sign that read, “To Prevent BIOHAZARD, All Leftover Sack Lunches and TUPPERWARE Will Be DUMPED Daily at 5 p.m. ON THE DOT. NO EXCEPTIONS.” I decided the author uppercased the appropriate words.

Aging posters, the only attempt to spruce up blinding white walls, warned against the perils of alcohol, pot, and getting in cars with strangers. Too late for me.

When Sheriff Joe Bob Woolsey entered, he radiated nuclear Oklahoma heat. His body raised the room’s temperature five degrees.

“Sorry I’m runnin’ behind.” He sounded slightly out of breath. “I been out workin’ cattle on my ranch. This sheriff deal don’t pay enough for me to give up my day job.”

This is something I love about native southerners—a hello includes more personal information than a Yankee would parse out in an hour. Actually, the hello often doesn’t include the word
hello
.

Sheriff Joe Bob, who had run unopposed for twelve years running, was a large red-faced man on his way to a coronary. Tributaries of burst blood vessels on his cheeks and nose were a better advertisement for not drinking than his own posters.

He stood well over six feet and was dressed in jeans, a pair of scuffed brown Justin boots, a sweaty blue plaid work shirt, and a crooked badge that I suspected he’d stuck on in his pickup on the way over. The holster and gun that rested comfortably around his hips like a second skin—those he probably wore to bed.

Big, calloused hands that reminded me of my father held a thin file, which he slid across the table to me before he took a swig of some black, oily-looking coffee. He slurped from the Styrofoam cup like a needy alcoholic.

“I’d offer ya some, but it might kill ya,” he said, grinning. “That there is the case file for Jennifer Coogan. Biggest thing that ever happened here, but you wouldn’t know it by lookin’ at that. I got bigger files on the town drunks. The way I hear it, the FBI guys took it over almost from the git-go, pissin’ everybody off.”

“Is the sheriff who worked the case still alive?” I asked.

“Nope. Died a few years back. Most everybody who had an inside track to that case is in the ground. We live hard and die young ’round here. If cancer don’t git you, your wife’s naggin’ will.” He winked as if I’d never heard that one before. “Nope, pretty much what you got is those few pieces of paper.”

He wiped his forehead with a dirty handkerchief. “It’s hotter than my Meemaw’s griddle out there.”

I flipped over the ten or so single pages of the file, thinking that I’d driven a lot of miles for a few folksy metaphors. The meager
police report didn’t even mention the cans of hominy and nacho cheese sauce. Jack said they’d been strapped to her body to weigh her down in the river. The coroner’s report was incomplete. Interviews were sketchy. Useless.

I reluctantly turned over the second to last page, feeling a lousy dead end.

A blurry, mimeographed picture stared up at me. I had to look twice, then one more time to be sure. I glanced up at the sheriff, wondering if this was a joke and he was in on it, but common sense said that was impossible.

It seemed more logical that Idabel, Oklahoma, was just a shortcut to Oz.

I blinked, and the men were still there on the page, unaware they’d been caught by the camera.

A hobbit and a giant.

A giant with a big heart tattoo.

I
heard a commotion outside the door, but it seemed miles away from the fantasyland where I’d retreated with a giant and a dwarf.

Hudson snapped me right back.

He stood at the door to the interview room, radiating his own kind of nuclear energy, instantly raising
my
temperature ten degrees. The man kept showing up no matter what. Not letting go.

“What do you think you’re doing, Tommie?” Controlled rage. The tip-top of Hudson’s temper scale.

Sheriff Woolsey surprised me by rising with the quick grace of an old movie cowboy, his hand resting on the .45 in his holster. “Ma’am, do you want me to draw?” he asked politely.

“No. No! I know him. He’s a friend. It’s OK.” The sheriff didn’t move, his eyes traveling to the bulge at Hudson’s waist.

“We’re in a relationship,” Hudson said, tossing over his security firm’s card.

“Who says?” I spit at him, while inside I hoped that he meant it.

“Oh.” Sheriff Joe Bob relaxed, as if that explained everything, sitting back down and propping his boots up on the table. “Go right to it.”

“We’re leaving.” Hudson gestured for me to get up.

Uh, have you met me before?

“How did you find me?” I asked, not moving, trying to keep my voice level. Then, grudgingly, “I was planning to check in with you again shortly.”

“Well, let’s see,” he said. “You rented a car under your real name with your MasterCard. The car had a GPS device in the trunk. I have enough special abilities to charm minimum-wage rental car agents.” His voice grew more sarcastic, which I didn’t think was possible. “Oh, yeah, and Lyle called and told me where you were. My ten-year-old nephew could have found you, Tommie.”

Hudson was always good with reality checks. I’d been playing a dangerous game on this trip, fooling myself. Thinking I’d left my hunters behind.

Before I could respond, Sheriff Woolsey flipped his chair around and sat it down hard inches from me, probably one of his tried-and-true witness intimidation techniques. One move closer and I’d get poked by the toothpick getting a workout in his mouth. His breath smelled like Skoal and bitter coffee.

“She can’t leave yet. If I’m not mistaken, she recognized these boys.” He tapped the paper in front of me.

It wasn’t like I’d forgotten. Dear God.

“Do you know these men?”

With the sheet in my hand, I moved over to the light by the window, buying a little time for Hudson to calm down. In the old days, I timed him at sixteen minutes but this was a fairly egregious offense on my part. I examined the men in the picture closely, thrilled I’d found a connection but even more confused. How was Jennifer Coogan’s death tied to Jack Smith and Anthony Marchetti?

Less than twenty-four hours ago, Jack had rambled drunkenly
to me about a seemingly mythical hobbit, a giant, and the lying ways of the Chicago mobster who just might be my father. Now here, in the murder file of Jennifer Coogan, in a small Oklahoma town, the Hobbit and the Giant had sprung to life.

The Hobbit stood about three feet tall. “Little person” would be the politically correct term. Because I’m rarely politically correct, he looked to me like a malevolent Sneezy, with a bulbous red nose and pockmarked cheeks. Genetics had not been kind. The Giant stood four feet taller and two feet wider, with tree trunks for arms and an enormous shaved vegetable of a head.

I imagined a gentle tap from him would send me into outer space. He wore size giant jeans that he must have special-ordered and a cutoff white Harley T-shirt that bared pumped-up arms. A cupid’s heart tattoo the size of a baseball curved around his left bicep. I couldn’t read the name that arced around the top of it.