Sorrow's Crown (12 page)

"Well, if that's all they did . . . for you that's not too bad, actually."

"I think I have to agree."

I checked the refrigeration unit to my left and saw through the glass doors that most of her stock had been emptied in the past couple of days. Except for the irises. "How've things been here?"

"About what you'd expect with a funeral that size. And hey, did Anubis eat my spider plant?"

"Only a little bit."

Lots of people walked by the shop. A few hovered in front by the door talking excitedly, either because of all the media coverage in town lately or because the purple stuff had escaped
Pembleton's
and was currently rampaging down Main Street.

"I had a raid on white roses and lilies," Katie said. "They didn't even want wreathes. Folks trying to outdo each other with larger and more elaborate arrangements, hoping to impress Theodore
Harnes
."

"Or just each other."

"Strange what people take pride in."

"City image, maybe," I said, thinking about the neighbors I knew at the funeral, without understanding why they were there. "Nobody wants the reporters to think we don't throw nice funerals for all the murdered kids who get their faces sliced off."

I shouldn't have said it, and especially not with such an offhand tone. Katie paled, her jade eyes appearing even more intense and luminescent as she lost her color.

"I'm sorry, it was wrong of me to joke that way."

"No, it's not that, Jonathan, I'm only sorry you were the one who had to find him."

"Me too."

She looked at me for a minute as if she didn't want to tell me something. I waited. I wouldn't push it. She grew more rigid on my lap. "He didn't order anything, you know.
Harnes
. All those flowers at the funeral and that wealthy man didn't have anything to do with it. I thought it was odd, but maybe not. Since Carl screwed up my orders so badly this week I called around to most of the other shops in the county, working out exchanges.
Harnes
didn't order anything from them, either." She tried to give me the grin again but couldn't quite pull it off. "Is that a clue? Did I just give you a clue?"

It made sense if Teddy wasn't really dead. Why would
Harnes
waste his efforts on whoever had taken Teddy's place? But that would mean he and his son were in it together, spoiling my idea that maybe Teddy had planned his own death to escape his father.
Harnes
had the news teams there; he'd opened the ceremony up to a public that knew nothing about him. He'd gone through all the appropriate motions, even if he found himself incapable of properly playing the bereaved father. Or was it possible that
Harnes
so loved his son that his grief had fashioned him into the colorless man I'd met?

Katie stared at me, and I saw the fear nudging everything else aside. "Let Lowell and the department handle it. As much as you dislike
Broghin
, he is the sheriff, and I can't believe he'd ever allow
Crummler
to come to any harm if
Crummler
is innocent."

"And if he's not?"

"If he's not then it isn't your fault." She kissed me lightly; it was the kind of peck you give a crying kid when you want him to shut up and go watch cartoons. "If you keep getting yourself involved where you shouldn't be it's going to cost you a lot one of these days."

A veiled threat of an ultimatum might be lurking in that statement, but I chose to let it pass. I looked over at the other room, thinking of workmen putting in bookcases, a neon sign in the window, and wire spin racks that squeaked and never rotated correctly. I could just see the Leones serving
pasta
faglioli
to anyone who came in.

"Listen, Katie, I ..."

"I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about you. You're going to get hurt, and I don't ever want to see that again." She'd actually stitched me up only a few days after we'd first met, using her background as a med student one last time before she'd fully left it behind to take over the shop. "Sometimes you just need to let it go."

"
Crummler
needs all the help he can get right now.”

“And have you found anything to help him?"

"No," I admitted. "Not yet."

"So what happens next?"

"I didn't listen to him when I should have. Now I'm going to try to make him tell me whatever it was he needed to say.”

“You're going to visit him in the hospital?"

"Yes."

"What if he says that he murdered Teddy?"

"Then I want to know why."

She traced the lines of my face for a while, and I did the same to her, stroking her hair. So many huge decisions loomed nearby, and it seemed like I was the only one who felt any pressure from them, a coward at heart. I let my fingers continue to glide across her throat in the playful way we sometimes did when not thinking of so much that might come between us. I ran my palm lightly over her belly and could almost sense our child growing there, heading toward the world.

"He came back in," she said.

"Who?"

“That football player who still hates you,
Arnie
."

"
Devington
," I said. "He came here again?"

"Yeah."

I thought of him unchanging through the years, emotionally and mentally stagnant while his body grew to fat, balding prematurely, his knees probably not in the best of shape, so that they sounded full of sand when he got up in the morning. Perfecting his pettiness. "What did he say?"

"Nothing. He just watched me."

"Watched you?"

"Stared a little while he wandered around the store. Don't get upset. It was nothing, really. I sort of feel a little sorry for him. He seems like he's trying to find something he already knows is gone, but can't help checking for it anyway."

"Okay," I said.

Watched her
.

~ * ~

I spent a half hour downtown shopping until I found what I needed, then called Lowell.

"What's that noise?" he asked.

"A Suburban with a bad transmission in the left lane."

"So you finally bought a cell phone. Keep a set of fresh batteries on you. I've got a feeling you're going to be on that thing a lot."

"It's a rechargeable."

"You buy two. Keep one always charged so when the other starts going you just switch them."

"Oh."

"Give me the number."

I gave it to him. I also gave him the doubts that had been stacking up like firewood in my mind. "Listen, this might sound stupid—"

"Hell, when you admit it yourself, I know it's going to be bad."

"—but are you sure it was Teddy?"

He sighed heavily and there was a long pause that kept lengthening until I thought he might have gotten into his car and was about to drive up behind me. "You're dogging my steps, Jonny Kendrick."

I couldn't argue, and waited until he decided whether he'd threaten me, give me a lecture, or let it roll. We'd played it every way in the past. The cell phone had clear sound, and I could hear his slow, regular breathing while he ran it through his mind and wondered if I'd trip him up on this. He'd stand for a lot, but never that.

I thought I might have stepped over the line this time, as the silence thickened, but eventually Lowell said, "Cause of death, about what you'd expect. Multiple blunt trauma to the head. We matched fingerprints from the victim to Teddy's passport."

"Dental records?"

"No dental records on Theodore
Harnes
, Jr. that we could find. They spent most of their time in Asia, Africa, South America, and the Netherlands. The kid didn't put in a single grade in our school system.
Harnes
had private tutors, he's a certified tutor himself, and taught Teddy at home when they were in the country, which wasn't often over the past twenty years. Teddy was born in
Roggeveldberge
, Cape Province, South Africa. He'd never been in jail or the service, never been printed outside of his passport."

"You matched him to latent prints found in the house? In Teddy's room?"

"Hey, 'latent prints,' you been reading Ed
McBain
novels again, Jonny? You even know what 'latent' means? The mansion has six maids from Burma who can't speak English and have nothing to do all morning and night except cook, scrub, dust, vacuum, and do little things like pluck hairs out of brushes. Entire place gleamed like a sheet of ice, and smelled of four daily coats of furniture polish. They're teenage girls, and not one of them can so much as raise her chin high enough to look a person in the eye. More than likely, they're also
Harnes
' personal harem and he uses them to keep business associates happy."

"Jesus."

"
Harnes
probably bought them from their starving families for twenty bucks total. The man makes his fortune off slave labor." Lowell's tone didn't waver. "Not everybody is lucky enough to grow up in Felicity Grove."

It sounded like sarcasm, but he meant it sincerely.

"Okay," I said.

"Teddy wasn't murdered in his bedroom, there was no legal impetus to perform a full forensic investigation there once we established his identity. Sheriff
Broghin
was satisfied with the passport match. Why wouldn't he be?"

"And you?" I asked.

"I got
Harnes
' permission to inspect Teddy's room, but there were no grounds to bring in the lab boys and start dusting and pulling hair samples. I searched around, but didn't find much. Kid lived like monk in a cloister. Just a few books and some clothes. No posters, videos, or CDs. No love letters from Alice Conway, none of the usual stuff you'd expect from your average twenty-year-old."

''Art supplies?"

"No, though Alice and
Harnes
both mentioned that Teddy enjoyed painting. He didn't have any brushes or easels in his room or anywhere else I looked in the house."

"What about his driver's license?"

"Didn't have one."

"A kid rich enough to own a fleet of Lamborghinis, and he couldn't even drive? So Alice Conway wasn't exaggerating about him being a recluse."

"He sure didn't go to any father-son picnics."

I knew my time was running out; I could tell I'd just about reached my limit with Lowell, and was surprised he'd allowed me as much leeway as he had. He would be about this close to hanging up on me, anyway, so I went for broke. "Teddy could have faked his passport if he needed to get away from his father badly enough."

Lowell had considered it, of course, and any other angle I could possibly come up with. "Badly enough to kill somebody and cut the guy's face off? No, it doesn't play out. Not like he just found a hitchhiker and laid him to waste. He would've needed the accomplice in order to use his prints on the passport."

"But—"

"Like most people, you think it's easy to get a solid print. You have no idea how easily they smudge and smear, and how difficult they are to get off an unwilling party, or a corpse. Like some talcum powder and scotch tape are all you need." A passing eighteen-wheeler drowned him out for a couple of seconds. ". . . assume he did want to get out from under the old man. If even half the rumors about
Harnes
are true, you know you're dealing with someone capable of cracking your head open or poisoning you in your sleep. He's not on any corporate boards, he runs his shop the old-fashioned way. Alone, and in complete control. If I had a millionaire father like that, a man who makes most of his money from slave labor around the world, and my father was pissed at me about something, I'd probably run—"

"No, you wouldn't, but Teddy might."

"—but nobody would do it by leaving a faceless corpse in the cemetery. If he had the money and resources to fake a passport, he's got the brains to go for the long haul. A fire, a car explosion, a rock-slide, those are more effective ways to erase yourself, if you wanted to play dead. Why leave room for questions and doubt afterwards? No, it doesn't play out. Teddy
Harnes
is dead."

How did any of it fall back to
Crummler
? What had he seen the night before the murder that brought him miles out of town in the middle of a freeze searching for me? What had scared him that much?

"Can you get me in to see
Crummler
?"

He thought about that for a while too, turning it over. He was right, I should've bought an extra battery. "Beats the hell out of me. I'm not sure I can. Why?"

"I don't know. But if I'd talked to him before I'd started pounding him, maybe we'd have some answers and understand what happened."

"Understanding isn't a word I'd associate with
Crummler
. Talking, either, really. Prattling is more like it. He babbled and jabbered gibberish non-stop before we transferred him. Gave the guy in the cell next to him the crawling
heebie
jeebies
, this drunk British silverware rep from
Briscane
County we nabbed on the turnpike doing triple digits. You should have heard
Crummler
carrying on about ten thousand leagues of evil swamps in dark orders of ocher nights, fighting the dwindling obsidian empires. Dragons and knights kissing and fighting."