Sacred: A Novel (15 page)

My first thought upon reading about her was,
Shit. Desiree.
But after checking into the section of Clearwater where the body was found and hearing the coded language used on last night’s six o’clock news, it became apparent that the victim had probably been a prostitute.

“Sure,” one of the Canadians said, “it’s like the Wild West down here. That is for sure.”

“You are right there, Bob,” his wife said and dipped her entire batter-fried grouper finger in a cup of tartar sauce.

It was a strange state, I’d been noticing, but in ways it was growing on me. Well, actually, the Crab Shack was growing on me. I liked Sandra and Rita and Gene and the two signs behind the bar that said, “If You Like the Way They Do Things in New York So Much, Take I-95 North,” and “When I Get Old I’m Going to Move to Canada and Drive Real Slow.”

I was wearing a tank top and shorts and my normally chalk-white skin had reached a happy shade of beige. Angie wore her black bikini top and a multicolored sarong and her dark hair was twisted and curled and the chestnut highlights were turning almost blond.

I’d enjoyed my time in the sun, but these past three days had been a godsend to her. When she forgot her frustration over the case, or once we’d reached the end of yet another fruitless day, she seemed to stretch and blossom and unwind into the heat, the mangroves, the deep blue sea and salty air. She stopped wearing shoes unless we were actively on the chase for Desiree or Jeff Price, drove to the beach at night to sit on the hood of the car and listen to the waves, even eschewed the bed in her suite at night for the white rope hammock on her balcony.

I met her eyes and she gave me a smile that was part sad knowledge and part intense curiosity.

We sat awhile like that, smiles fading, eyes locked, searching each other’s faces for answers to questions that had never been vocalized.

“It’s been Phil,” she said and reached across the table to take my hand. “It felt like sacrilege for us two to, you know…”

I nodded.

Her sandy foot curled up over mine. “I’m sorry if it’s been causing you pain.”

“Not pain,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow.

“Not real pain,” I said. “Aches. Here and there. I’ve been worried.”

She brought my hand to her cheek and closed her eyes.

“Thought you two were partners, not lovers,” a voice cried.

“That,” Angie said, eyes still closed, “would be Rita.”

And it was. Rita, in her ten-gallon hat, her fishnet stockings red today, bringing us our plates of crawfish and shrimp and Dungeness crab. Rita loved that we were detectives. Wanted to know how many shoot-outs we’d had, how many car chases we’d been on, how many bad guys we’d killed.

She placed our plates on the table and moved the pitcher of beer off the case file to put our plastic utensils somewhere, and the warm wind picked up the folder and the plastic sporks and tossed them to the deck.

“Oh, dear,” she said.

I got up to help her but she was quick. She scooped up the folder and closed it, caught the one stray photo between her thumb and index finger just as it had lifted off the deck and headed over the railing in a gust. She turned to us and smiled, her left leg still up in a half pirouette from when she’d lunged for the photo.

“You missed your calling,” Angie said. “Shortstop for the Yankees.”

“I had a Yankee,” she said, as she looked down at the photo she’d caught. “Wasn’t worth shit in the sack, always talking about—”

“Go on, Rita,” I said. “Don’t be shy.”

“Hey,” she said, her eyes fixed on the photo. “Hey,” she said again.

“What?”

She handed me the folder and the photo and dashed off the dock inside.

I looked at the photo she’d caught.

“What was that all about?” Angie said.

I handed the photo to her.

Rita came running back onto the dock and handed me a newspaper.

It was a copy of the
St. Petersburg Times,
today’s edition, and she’d folded it back to page 7.

“Look,” she said, breathless. She pointed to an article midway down the page.

The headline read:
MAN HELD IN BRADENTON SLAYING.

The man’s name was David Fischer and he was being held for questioning in the stabbing death of an unidentified man found in a motel room in Bradenton. Details in the article were sketchy, but that wasn’t the point. One look at a photo of David Fischer and I knew why Rita had handed it to me.

“Jesus,” Angie said, looking at the photo. “That’s Jay Becker.”

To get to Bradenton, we drove 275 south through St. Petersburg and then rode up onto a monstrous bridge called the Sunshine Skyway, which stretched over the Gulf of Mexico and connected the Tampa/St. Petersburg area with the Sarasota/Bradenton landmass.

The bridge had two spans, which seemed to be modeled after dorsal fins. From a distance, as the sun dipped toward the sea and the sky turned purple, the dorsal fins appeared to have been painted a smoky gold, but as we rode over the bridge itself, we saw that the fins were made up of several yellow beams that converged in ever-smaller triangles. At the base of the beams were lights that when turned on and combined with the setting sun, gave the fins a golden hue.

Christ, they loved their colors down in these parts.

“‘…the unidentified man,’” Angie read from the paper, “‘believed to be in his early thirties, was found facedown on the floor of his room at the Isle of Palms Motel with a fatal knife wound to his abdomen. The suspect, David Fischer, forty-one, was arrested in his room which adjoined the victim’s. Police refused to speculate on motive or comment on what led them to arrest Mr. Fischer.’”

Jay was being held in the Bradenton County Jail, according to the paper, pending a bond hearing, which would have been held sometime today.

“What the hell is going on?” Angie said as we drove off the bridge and the purple in the sky deepened.

“Let’s ask Jay,” I said.

He looked awful.

His dark brown hair was flecked with gray that had never been there before and the bags under his eyes were so puffy I’d have doubted anyone who told me he’d slept this week.

“Well, is that Patrick Kenzie sitting before me or is that Jimmy Buffett?” He gave me a weak smile as he came through the doorway into the visitation area and picked up the phone on the other side of the Plexiglas.

“Barely recognize me, eh.”

“You almost look tan. I didn’t know such a thing was possible for you pasty Celtic folk.”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s makeup.”

“Cash bail is a hundred grand,” he said and sat down in his cubicle across from mine, cradled the phone between chin and shoulder long enough to light a cigarette. “In lieu of a million-dollar bond. My bail bondsman’s a guy name of Sidney Merriam.”

“When’d you start smoking?”

“Recently.”

“Most people are quitting at your age, not starting.”

He winked. “I’m no slave to fashion.”

“A hundred grand,” I said.

He nodded and yawned. “Five-fifteen-seven.”

“What?” I said.

“Locker twelve.”

“Where?” I said.

“Bob Dylan in St. Pete,” he said.

“What?”

“Run the clue down, Patrick. You’ll find it.”

“Bob Dylan in St. Pete,” I said.

He looked over his shoulder at a slim, muscular guard with a diamondback’s eyes.

“Songs,” he said. “Not albums.”

“Got it,” I said, though I didn’t yet. But I trusted him.

“So they sent you,” he said with a rueful smile.

“Who else?” I said.

“Yeah. Makes sense.” He leaned back in his chair and the harsh fluorescents overhead only accentuated how much weight he’d lost since I’d last seen him two months ago. His face looked like a skull.

He leaned forward. “Get me out of here, buddy.”

“I will.”

“Tonight. Tomorrow, we’ll go to the dog races.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I got fifty bucks on a gorgeous greyhound. You know?”

I’m sure I looked confused again, but I said, “Sure.”

He smiled, his lips cracked by the sun. “I’m counting on it. Those nice Matisse prints we saw in Washington that time? They’re not going to last forever.”

It took me thirty seconds of looking into his face before I understood.

“See you soon,” I said.

“Tonight, Patrick.”

Angie drove back over the bridge as I looked through a street map of St. Petersburg we’d bought at a gas station.

“So he doesn’t think his prints will hold up?” Angie said.

“No. He told me once that when he was with the FBI, he made himself up a false identity. I guess it was this David Fischer guy. He has a friend in Latent Prints at Quantico, so his fingerprints are actually on file twice.”

“Twice?”

“Yeah. It’s not a solution, it’s a Band-Aid. The local police send his prints to Quantico, this friend of his has the computer programmed to spit out the Fischer identity. But only for a couple of days. Then the friend, to save his job, will have to call back and say, ‘The computer’s coming up with something odd. These prints also match a Jay Becker, who used to work for us.’ See, Jay always knew if he got in some sort of jam, his only hope was to make bail and skip.”

“So we’re aiding and abetting bail-jumping.”

“Not so as they can prove it in court,” I said.

“Is he worth it?”

I looked at her. “Yeah.”

We crossed into St. Petersburg and I said, “Name some Dylan songs.”

She glanced at the map on my lap. “‘Highway Sixty One Revisited.’”

“Nope.”

“‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.’”

I grimaced at her.

“What?” She scowled. “Okay.
Positively Fourth Street.
”

I looked down at the map. “You’re a wonder,” I said.

She held up an imaginary tape recorder. “Could you say that into the mike, please?”

Fourth Street in St. Petersburg ran from one end of the city to the other. At least twenty miles. With a lot of lockers in between.

But only one Greyhound station.

We pulled in the parking lot and Angie sat in the car while I went inside, found locker twelve, and dialed the combination on the lock. It popped open on the first try and I pulled out a leather gym bag. I hefted it, but it wasn’t terribly heavy. It could have been filled with clothes for all I knew, and I decided to wait until I was back in the car before I checked. I closed the locker and walked back out of the terminal, got in the car.

Angie pulled onto Fourth Street and we drove through what appeared to be a slum, lots of people lounging on the porches in the heat, waving at flies, kids huddled in groups along the corners, half the streetlights knocked out.

I placed the bag on my lap and unzipped it. I stared inside for a full minute.

“Drive a little faster,” I said to Angie.

“Why?”

I showed her the contents of the bag. “Because there’s at least two hundred thousand dollars in here.”

She stepped on the gas.

“Jesus, Angie,” Jay said, “last time I saw you, you looked like Chrissie Hynde taking fashion tips from Morticia Addams, and now you look like an island girl.”

The jail clerk slid a form over the counter to Jay.

Angie said, “You always knew how to smooth-talk a girl.”

Jay signed the form and handed it back. “No shit, though? I didn’t know a white woman’s skin could get that dark.”

The clerk said, “Your personal effects,” and emptied a manila envelope onto the counter.

“Careful,” Jay said as his watch bounced on the counter. “That’s a Piaget.”

The clerk snorted. “One watch.
Pi-a-jay.
One money clip, gold. Six hundred seventy-five dollars cash. One key chain. Thirty-eight cents in coins…”

As the clerk checked off each of the remaining items and slid them across to Jay, Jay leaned against the wall and yawned. His eyes skipped from Angie’s face to her legs, rose back up over her cutoff jeans and ripped sweatshirt with the sleeves shorn off at the elbows.

She said, “Would you like me to pivot so you could ogle the back?”

He shrugged. “Been in prison, ma’am, you’ll have to excuse me.”

She shook her head and looked at the floor, hid her smile in the hair that fell around her face.

It was odd to watch them occupy similar space, knowing what I did now about their past together. Jay always wore a certain wolfish look around beautiful women, but rather than take offense, most women found it innocuous and a bit charming if only because Jay was so blatant and boyish about it. But there was more to the look tonight. Jay’s face held a melancholia I’d never seen before, an aura of bone-deep fatigue and resignation as he glanced at my partner.

She seemed to notice it, too, and a curious curl formed in her lips.

“You okay?” she said.

Jay pushed himself off the wall. “Me? Fine.”

“Mr. Merriam,” the clerk said to Jay’s bail bondsman, “you’ll have to cosign here and here.”

Mr. Merriam was a middle-aged man in an off-white three-piece suit who tried to give off the air of the genteel southern gentleman, even though I picked up traces of New Jersey in his accent.

“Be mah pleasure,” he said, and Jay rolled his eyes. They signed the papers and Jay scooped up the last of his rings and his wrinkled silk tie, placed the rings in his pocket and the tie loosely under the collar of his white shirt.

We walked out of the station and stood in the parking lot to wait for a cop to bring Jay’s car around front.

“They let you drive here?” Angie said.

Jay sucked the wet night air into his nostrils. “They’re very courteous down these parts. After they questioned me at the motel, this old cop with a real polite way about him asked me if I’d mind following him down to the station for a few questions. He even said, ‘If ya’ll got the time, we sure would ’preciate it, yes sir,’ but he wasn’t really asking if you know what I mean.”

Merriam stuck a card in Jay’s hand. “Sir, if you ever require mah services again, why it would—”

“Sure.” Jay snapped the card from his hand and looked off at the soft blue circles that pulsed around the yellow streetlights fringing the parking lot.

Merriam shook my hand, then Angie’s, then walked with the stilted steps of the constipated or the practicing drunk to his Karmann Ghia convertible with the dented passenger door. The car stalled once on its way out of the parking lot, and Mr. Merriam kept his head down as if mortified before he got it going again and pulled out onto the main road.

Jay said, “If you guys hadn’t shown up, I would have had to send
that
guy to the Greyhound station. You believe it?”

“If you jump bail,” Angie said, “won’t that poor guy get ruined financially?”

He lit a cigarette, looked down at her. “Don’t worry, Ange, I got everything figured out.”

“That’s why we’re bailing you out of jail, Jay.”

He looked at her, then at me, and laughed. It was a short, hard sound, more bark than anything. “Jesus, Patrick, she give you this much shit on a regular basis?”

“You’re looking rough, Jay. Bad as I’ve ever seen you.”

He stretched his arms out, cracked the muscles between his shoulder blades. “Yeah, well, I get me a shower and a good night’s sleep, I’ll be good as new.”

“We have to go somewhere and talk first,” I said.

He nodded. “You didn’t come fourteen hundred miles just to work on your tans, marvelous as they are. And they are marvelous.” He turned and looked at Angie’s body openly, his eyebrows raised. “I mean, my God, Ange, I gotta tell you again, your skin, I mean, it’s the color of a coffee-regular at Dunkin’ Donuts for Chris-sakes. Makes me want to—”

“Jay,” she said, “will you just quit it? Give it a fucking rest, for crying out loud.”

He blinked and leaned back on his heels. “Okay,” he said with a sudden coldness. “No, when you’re right, you’re right. And you’re right, Angela. You are right.”

She looked at me and I shrugged.

“Right is right,” he said. “Right is definitely right.”

A black Mitsubishi 3000 GT pulled up with two young cops in it. They were laughing as they approached, and the tires smelled like they’d just had some rubber burned off.

“Nice car,” the driver said as he got out by Jay.

“You like it?” Jay said. “It handle well?”

The cop giggled as he looked at his partner. “Handled just fine, buddy.”

“Good. Steering wasn’t too tight when you were doing your doughnuts?”

“Come on,” Angie said to Jay, “get in the car.”

“Steering was just fine,” the cop said.

His partner stood by me at the open passenger door. “Axles felt a little wobbly, though, Bo.”

“That’s true,” Bo said, still blocking Jay from entering the car. “I’d get a mechanic take a look at your U-joints.”

“Sound advice,” Jay said.

The cop smiled and stepped out of Jay’s way. “You drive her careful, Mr. Fischer.”

“Remember,” his partner said, “a car is not a toy.”

They both laughed at that one and walked up the steps into the station.

I didn’t like the look in Jay’s eyes, or his whole demeanor since he’d been released. He seemed paradoxically lost and determined, adrift and focused, but it was an angry, spiteful focus.

I hopped in the passenger seat. “I’ll ride with you.”

He leaned in. “I’d really prefer if you didn’t.”

“Why?” I said. “We’re going to the same place. Right, Jay? To talk?”

He pursed his lips and exhaled loudly through his nostrils, looked at me with a burned-out gaze. “Yeah,” he said eventually. “Sure. Why not?”

He got in and started the car as Angie walked over to the Celica.

“Buckle up,” he said.

I did, and he slammed the gearshift into first and nailed the gas, dropping into second a split second later with his wrist flexed for another quick push into third. We cleared the small ramp leading out of the parking lot, and Jay shifted into fourth while the wheels were still in the air.

He took us to an all-night diner in downtown Bradenton. The streets around it were deserted, devoid of even the memory of human life, it seemed, as if a neutron bomb had hit an hour before we arrived. Blank, dark window squares in the few skyscrapers and squat municipal buildings around the diner stared down at us.

There were a few people in the diner, night owls by the look of them—a trio of truck drivers at the counter flirting with the waitress; a lone security guard with a patch for something called Palmetto Optics on his shoulder reading a newspaper with a pot of coffee for companionship; two nurses with wrinkled uniforms and low, tired voices two booths over from our own.

We ordered two coffees and Jay ordered a beer. For a minute we all studied our menus. When the waitress returned with our drinks, we each ordered a sandwich, though none of us sounded particularly enthusiastic about it.

Jay placed an unlit cigarette in his mouth and stared out the window as a clap of thunder ripped a hole in the sky and it began to rain. It wasn’t a light rain or one that grew heavy gradually. One moment the street was dry and pale orange under the streetlights, and the next, it disappeared behind a wall of water. Puddles formed in seconds and boiled on the sidewalk, and the raindrops hammered the tin roof of the diner so loudly it seemed the heavens had dumped several truckloads of dimes.

“Who’d Trevor send down here with you?” Jay said.

“Graham Clifton,” I said. “There’s another guy, too. Cushing.”

“They know about you coming to get me out of jail?”

I shook my head. “We’ve been shaking their tails since we arrived.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like them.”

He nodded. “The papers release the identity of the guy I supposedly killed?”

“Not that we know of.”

Angie leaned across the table and lit his cigarette. “Who was it?”

Jay puffed on the cigarette, but didn’t withdraw it from his mouth. “Jeff Price.” He glanced at his reflection in the window as the rain poured down the pane in rivulets and turned his features to rubber, melted his cheekbones.

“Jeff Price,” I said. “Former treatment supervisor for Grief Release. That Jeff Price?”

He took the cigarette from his mouth, tapped the ash into the black plastic ashtray. “You’ve done your homework, D’Artagnan.”

“Did you kill him?” Angie asked.

He sipped his beer and looked across the table at us, his head cocked to the right, his eyes swimming from side to side. He took another drag off his cigarette and his eyes left us and followed the smoke as it pirouetted from the ash and floated over Angie’s shoulder.

“Yeah, I killed him.”

“Why?” I said.

“He was a bad man,” he said. “A bad, bad man.”

“There are lots of bad men out there,” Angie said. “Bad women, too.”

“True,” he said. “Very true. Jeff Price, though? That fucker deserved a lot slower death than I gave him. I guarantee you that.” He took a good-sized slug from his beer. “He had to pay. Had to.”

“Pay for what?” Angie said.

He raised the beer bottle to his mouth, and his lips trembled around it. When he placed the bottle back on the table, his hand was as tremulous as his lips.

“Pay for what, Jay?” Angie repeated.

Jay gazed out the window again as the rain continued to clatter against the roof and boil and snap in the puddles. The dark hollows under his eyes reddened.

“Jeff Price killed Desiree Stone,” he said and a single tear fell from his eyelid and rolled down his cheek.

For a moment, I felt a deep ache bore through the center of my chest and leak into my stomach.

“When?” I said.

“Two days ago.” He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.

“Wait,” Angie said. “She was with Price all this time, and he just decided to kill her two days ago?”

He shook his head. “She wasn’t with Price the entire time. She ditched him three weeks ago. The last two weeks,” he said softly, “she was with me.”

“With you?”

Jay nodded and sucked at the air, blinked back the tears in his eyes.

The waitress brought our food but we barely looked at it.

“
With
you?” Angie said. “As in…?”

Jay gave her a bitter smile. “Yes.
With
me. As in, Desiree and I were falling in love, I guess.” He chuckled but it only half left his mouth; the other half seemed to strangle in the back of his throat. “Hilarious, ain’t it? I come down here hired to kill her and I end up falling for her.”

“Whoa,” I said. “‘Hired to kill her’?”

He nodded.

“By whom?”

He looked at me like I was retarded. “Who do you think?”

“I don’t know, Jay. That’s why I’m asking.”

“Who hired you?” he said.

“Trevor Stone.”

He looked at us until we got it.

“Jesus Christ,” Angie said and hit the table with her fist so loudly the three truck drivers turned in their seats to look at us.

“Glad I could bring you both up to speed,” Jay said.