Sketch Me If You Can (18 page)

“It’s like I told you before, I can’t always be focused on this place. And I don’t always have the energy to appear or to affect things. Hell, even at the best of times, I can’t actually touch anything or anyone here.” His voice, ebbing and flowing with his image, reminded Rory of her parents’ old vinyl records that skipped between the grooves, obliterating syllables and entire words. He was becoming harder to understand by the second.

“All right,” she said. “All right, I do remember you saying that.” She needed to calm down before her own emotions hijacked all rational thought. Maybe if she relaxed, Zeke would be able to relax as well and they could continue this conversation.

“Please, just tell me what happened,” she said evenly.

Zeke seemed to have been doing his own version of deep breathing, because when he replied, his image as well as his speech had stabilized.

“I wasn’t strong enough to just pop up in front of them and scare them away, so I used what energy I had to knock the alarm clock off the nightstand. It startled them all right, but then they figured one of them had stepped on the clock’s wire and tugged it off. They didn’t make a run for it till I managed to set off the security alarm.”

“Did you know who they were?”

Zeke shook his head. “I didn’t recognize them. Don’t think they’d ever been here before.”

“Was he . . . was Mac . . . already gone when you found him?” Rory found it difficult to say the words aloud, as if she’d just learned about his death all over again.

“I thought he was. But after they left, he came to and pulled himself up enough to grab the phone and hit a few numbers, but he never got a word out. They must’ve traced the call, or whatever it is they do, ’cause the law showed up maybe ten minutes later. One of those big ambulance rigs too.”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” As surprise mutated into anger, Rory struggled to keep her voice neutral, with only limited success.

Zeke was too beleaguered by his own misery to take notice. “I had my reasons,” he said. “Besides, I was afraid you’d get it into your fool head to hunt them down.”

“Then why tell me at all?”

“’Cause you’re after them now anyway, even if you don’t realize it yet.” Zeke sighed deeply. “I couldn’t save Mac, but maybe I can make it up to him by tryin’ to save you.”

Rory stood up, too agitated to sit still. “For the last time,” she said, her face flushing with emotion, “I do
not
need saving!”

She started pacing around the room. “Even if everything you said is true, I don’t know how you can be so sure that there’s a connection between Mac’s death and Gail’s. What if it was just a coincidence? There are coincidences in life, you know.” But even as the words left her mouth, she realized that she no longer believed them herself.

“There ain’t a soul alive who didn’t like your uncle Mac,” Zeke said. “You don’t have to have my instincts or experience to know for certain that he was killed because he was investigatin’ that woman’s death.”

Rory came to a stop in front of him. “Let’s say I agree with you. You can’t seriously expect me to stop the investigation, especially now that I could be after Mac’s killer too.”

“’Course not. Truth be told, I don’t think I’d respect you much if you did. I just want you to be more careful. You’re not just a peace officer here; you’re also likely to be the next victim.”

“You’ve made your point,” she said, heading toward the stairs, “and I will try to be as careful as possible. But for now, I could really . . . oh my God.” She stopped in her tracks. Why hadn’t she thought of it immediately?

“Wait, wait a second,” she called to Zeke as she raced up the stairs.

A moment later she came running down, holding a sketch pad and pencil. Zeke was still sitting in the chair, his forehead furrowed with curiosity. Rory turned on the lamp and perched on the edge of the couch, her pencil poised over a blank sheet of paper.

“What’s all this?” he asked. “You suddenly get the urge to draw a picture of me?”

“Describe them to me,” Rory said, ignoring the question. “Describe the men who killed Mac.”

“Oh, I get it,” he said. “This here’s what you do for the police. Trouble is, I don’t know how much I can tell you, bein’ it was night and all.”

“That’s okay, just do the best you can.”

“Well, one of the fellas was tall and thin, and the other one was shorter, stockier. I’d guess they were somewhere between thirty and forty.”

Half an hour and dozens of questions to help jog his memory later, Rory put down the pencil. She had the basic outlines of their faces but little else in the way of distinguishing characteristics. Zeke had described the taller one as bald with sharp features that reminded him of his old pal, Jake. Rory pointed out that since she’d never met Jake, it wasn’t really helpful to know that, after which Zeke kept his answers short and to the point. All he could tell her about the shorter man was that he had an accent of some kind.

“I’m real sorry.” He shook his head. “But like I said, it was dark.”

“It’s not your fault.” Rory sighed. For a short while there she’d envisioned having pictures of the two men that she could check against the data bank at work. “I guess I was hoping that ghosts could see better in the dark.”

“I think that’s vampires,” he said with a tentative smile.

The remark was so out of keeping with the seriousness of the moment that Rory couldn’t help but laugh. She put the pad down on the glass table and stood up.

“Thanks for trying. And now I really am going to sleep.” She started toward the stairs again, but halfway there, she turned back to him.

“Zeke, I want you to know that I believe you, that I believe you would have helped Mac if you could have. You don’t owe it to him or to me to stick around and try to keep me safe.”

He didn’t reply, but when she reached the steps, Zeke was already there blocking her way. “I’m not stayin’ around just to do penance on your behalf or Mac’s,” he said, the laughter gone from his eyes. “There’s more to it than that. A heap more. But it doesn’t concern you, Aurora, and that’s all you need to know about it for now.” He vanished while his last word still hung in the air.

Rory continued on up to her bedroom, glad to finally be left alone with her roiling thoughts. Or what passed for alone in this house. As she undressed and pulled on a nightgown, she wondered what other penance he was doing. Despite his protestations, she couldn’t shake the feeling that it would eventually impact her life too.

T
he white clapboard church sat on a low rise just beyond the busy streets of Tucson. Within its simple walls families and friends had gathered for decades to attend Sunday services, celebrate weddings and baptisms, and mourn the passing of loved ones.

That morning in June, so many horses and wagons filled the churchyard that latecomers were obliged to leave their rigs on the other side of the hard-packed road that led from the town to the church and beyond. The horses huddled together beneath the few mesquite and palo verde trees, even though they provided little shade with their narrow, feathery leaves.

The morning sun burned through the hard blue sky with a heat so scorching that it seemed to warp the air itself. Marshal Zeke Drummond road his horse around the church building to the side that had not yet been claimed by the sun, his saddlebags full to bulging for the miles that lay ahead. There were no trees around which to tether the horse, so he looped the reins around the saddle horn to prevent them from tripping him. He knew that the chestnut wouldn’t wander far. In any case, he was only going to be a few minutes.

As he made his way through the brooding heat to the burying ground, he felt as if he were walking across the threshold of Hell itself and straight into perdition. He hadn’t wanted to be there. He’d even convinced himself that it would serve no purpose for him to go. Yet there he was, hair washed and slicked back, dressed in the best of his hard-worn clothing.

He stopped when he reached the back corner of the building and removed his hat. There was no need to go farther. From where he stood he could see the mourners gathered around the small pine coffin that rested near the lip of the freshly dug grave. Their heads were bent in prayer as Reverend Hopkins read from the Book of Psalms. His words drifted slowly to the marshal in the windless air.

Drummond wasn’t a churchgoing man, and he found the cemetery with its wooden markers particularly unnerving. Like a miniature rendering of Tucson and its structures, the city of the dead seemed to be waiting for the souls who were taking temporary refuge in the city of the living.

Since the service was taking place in a back corner of the cemetery, no one took note of the marshal’s arrival, which was fine with him. Emotions were too raw, and although he had no problem facing accusations or shouldering blame when it was his due, little Betsy deserved to be laid to her rest peacefully.

After the last “amen” had been murmured, Frank Jensen, his wife, Katherine, and their two remaining children, Aaron, fourteen, and Noah, ten, each placed a small bouquet of yellow trumpet flowers on top of the casket. It was Betsy’s favorite flower.

The marshal walked back to where his horse was drowsing in the shade and swung up into the saddle. He may not have been able to save Betsy, but he was going to make damned sure that justice was served.

R
ory turned onto Pheasant Lane at eleven forty-five, fifteen minutes before the open house was scheduled to start. Since she was last there, construction had been completed on the rest of the houses on the block, with the exception of one, where the driveway was still only a muddy set of tire tracks and a Dumpster waited at the curb.

She slowed to a crawl as she neared number 16. The “For Sale” sign once again listed the hours for the open house, but there were no cars in the driveway or nearby on the street. Rory drove by and parked farther down the block to wait.

It had been a little over a week since Zeke had suggested bringing her own crowd to the next open house. Her aunt Helene had been the first to spot the ad in the real estate section of the weekend newspaper. She’d immediately called Rory and then her sister and brother-in-law. From the moment she’d been asked to help in the investigation, Helene had been awaiting the opportunity with unbridled enthusiasm, watching every detective and CSI program on television in the interest of being more helpful to her niece.

The plan was simple. Her parents and Helene were to go in first, so that the agent would be busy showing them around when Rory entered, leaving her free to explore unattended. If other people showed up, so much the better. The only variable that worried Rory was the possibility that instead of a real estate agent, Vince might be showing the house again. She’d already told him that she couldn’t afford the property, and since she didn’t want to admit to moonlighting, she was pretty much out of acceptable reasons for being there again. Of course, Vince had run the last open house only because the agent was ill. That wasn’t likely to be the case again.

She turned off the engine and kept watch in the rearview mirror. At two minutes to twelve, an ice blue BMW turned onto the street, and Rory was relieved to see it swing into the driveway at number 16. A man of about forty, wearing chinos and a dress shirt, got out of the car and hurried up the walk. He paused for a minute at the front door, fumbling with a large key ring before letting himself into the house.

Moments later the McCain/Brody car arrived and parked at the curb. Rory had gone over the plan with her family a dozen times, until she was confident that they understood their roles. This was a one-shot deal.

Her troop of performers emerged from their car and started up the walk to the house, making a point of not looking in Rory’s direction. As they reached the front door, Rory’s father turned back and gave her a quick thumbs-up gesture. Her mother saw him do it and jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow. Rory took a deep breath; this was not beginning well.

After they’d been in the house for a few minutes, Rory circled the block and pulled up to the curb behind their car. She opened the glove compartment and withdrew her latest acquisition, a digital camera that fit in the palm of her hand. Since she wouldn’t have time to do a thorough-enough search, she planned to take pictures of every room and then study them more closely later. If anyone questioned what she was doing, she would say that she was taking the photos to e-mail to her husband who was away on a business trip. She tucked the camera into the side pocket of her capris.

When she entered the house, she could hear Helene chattering away in the vicinity of the kitchen; words like “granite” and “center island,” “sofits,” and “convection” floated down the hallway to her. Evidently Helene had also spent hours learning about houses and stockpiling questions to fire at the agent.

Without hesitating, Rory took the stairs up to the second floor. At best, she had only minutes to check out each room. She started with the room that Vince had called the guest room. Standing in the center of the floor, she turned in a slow circle. Zeke had told her to look for anything that struck her as odd or out of place, even if it didn’t seem at all relevant to the case. Rory withdrew the camera from her pocket and snapped photo after photo of the room. Once she returned home, she’d pop the chip into her computer and scan the rooms again at her leisure. She harbored no illusions about finding something that the forensic team had missed. And even if they had managed to overlook a clue, the cleaning service that kept the house immaculate would probably have dusted, vacuumed or washed it away by now.

Rory moved on to the little girl’s room, conducting her search in the same manner. Again she came up empty. Nothing seemed to fit Zeke’s criteria in this room either. Muted waves of conversation drifted up to her from the first floor. Her little team was doing a fine job after all.