The Angel of Death (17 page)

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Authors: Alane Ferguson

BOOK: The Angel of Death
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Gently, he asked, “Do you want to know about Amy?” Cameryn, still reeling inside, worked on hardening her inner shell. “Not particularly,” she said. “I don’t think I’m up for adding another woman to the equation when I haven’t figured out Hannah yet.”
“Understandable. Completely understandable.” He looked disappointed, but he smiled to cover it. “Let’s make a deal. How about if I be happy for you and Kyle, and you be happy for me and Amy?”
Cameryn forced an answering smile. “Sure. Absolutely. You know what they say—life goes on.”
“If it doesn’t, there’s definitely something wrong.” He laughed at this, but it sounded hollow. His face shifted again, and now he was earnest as he tried to explain, “Cammie, I need you to understand. Your life is just about to start and it’s going to move on without me. You’re a year from going out on your own and—I’m suddenly very much aware of that ticking clock.”
So am I!
she wanted to scream.
Hannah’s on her way and I’m facing this alone and now there’s no way to bring you in because now there’s another woman! You’ve done this thing and ruined the dream.
This was the proof she needed, to confirm that their lives had pulled apart, like a braid undone. Before, there had been no secrets, and now that was all there was between them. Separate lives, lived underground. Instead of saying any of this she stared blankly at him.
“You’ve changed,” he told her, perplexed. “I’m looking at you and I’m not seeing the same girl.”
Funny, that’s what Justin said when he showed me the carcass of a dog. And I’m
not
the same girl. I don’t want to be.
“I’m not sure what to say to that, Dad. Maybe I’m growing up.”
“Up is fine,” he said. Then, eyes pleading, his features turned soft. “Up is fine,” he said again. “Just not away.”
Who knows what’s coming?
she argued inside.
Who can tell?
Then, on the outside where everything counted, she answered, “Never away, Dad. I promise.”
Chapter Twelve
AS CAMERYN APPROACHED the Oakes home, she heard, rather than saw, the difference. It was the silence. Rudy, Mr. Oakes’s dog, had been given to a friend who lived across town, and now the backyard stood empty, with a single water dish turned on its side, giving the house an eerie feel. Trees shifted restlessly in a wind that flapped a remnant of yellow plastic tape caught on the chain-link fence, a scrap from the CRIME SCENE: DO NOT CROSS barrier.
The rest of the tape had been taken down, she knew, because the sheriff had released the crime scene the day before. “We’ve done everything that we know to do, and I still don’t understand what in the Sam Hill I’m dealing with,” Sheriff Jacobs had said. “Could be flipping aliens for all I know, and I’m not sure how to serve a warrant on green men in spaceships.” Cameryn’s father, handing her the balled-up yellow tape, had replied, “Something killed this man, John. And if there’s a something, I bet there’s a someone.”
Which was what had brought Cameryn back to the Oakes house. After a lot of thought last night, Patrick had called the sheriff with Kyle’s story, and Sheriff Jacobs, desperate due to the lack of clues, had decided to follow the lead. At best it was a tenuous link to a possible suspect. Following a paper-thin trail, Cameryn was here to see if that someone might be Dwayne Reynolds.
She heard a car door slam and turned to see Deputy Justin Crowley walking toward her. She hadn’t noticed his car parked across the street.
“It’s about time you got here,” was Justin’s greeting.
“Hello to you, too.”
“Sorry,” he said, unlocking the door. “I’m a little tense. It doesn’t help that I had to wait for you to get here to even put the key in. I’ve been sitting in my car for almost fifteen minutes!”
He pushed open the door and stepped inside, then waved her in. But he didn’t move back far enough, which meant Cameryn had to brush past him, grazing his body lightly as she entered the foyer. Justin’s hair had fallen into his blue-green eyes like a wedge. Impatiently, he raked it back.
“Something you should know about me, for future reference,” he said. “I hate to wait.”
“I will pledge my entire life around that
incredibly
important fact. If I ever make you wait again may I be put to death on the spot.”
“I also hate sarcasm.”
“Can’t help you there.”
Justin helped Cameryn out of her coat, hanging it on a metal hook near the door. She felt cold, and blew on her fingers to warm them.
“Before we go any further I want you to know I think this Dwayne-Brad connection is completely bogus,” Justin claimed. “Rumor is not the way we’re going to solve this thing. Do you have any news from the forensic front?”
“The lab work hasn’t been completed yet, but nothing’s changed since we were there with Dr. Moore,” she told him. “Brad Oakes fried in his own bed. Manner of death—unknown. So far, no one has a clue, so we’re pretty much grasping at straws.”
“The difference is, these straws can destroy innocent people.” A beat later, he added, “I talked to Dwayne today. ”
“And?”
“And . . . he said he knew Brad fairly well, but he had the key to the house just in case he needed to get Scouting equipment at the last minute. He also said they didn’t socialize much beyond Boy Scouts. For what it’s worth, I believe him.”
“We’ll have to see. And by the way,” Cameryn mentioned, pulling a pair of latex gloves from her bag, “you could have started without me.”
“No, I couldn’t. The law, remember?”
She wiggled her fingers into the end of the gloves. “Ah, yes, I remember. Colorado State Statute 30-10-606. Having a coroner present allows you to recheck a formerly released scene without going through the hassle of securing a new search warrant. As long as I’m here you can step oh-so-neatly around the law. Am I right?” She watched Justin’s face as it registered surprise, his dark brows arcing into his hairline.
There was another pause. “How old are you again?”
“Seventeen. Eighteen in January.”
He blew out a breath, like steam escaping from a kettle. “Hard to believe,” he said. “You are the oldest kid I’ve ever met.”
Justin’s badge was actually pinned on his shirt this time, but his jeans looked as though he’d been riding a motorcycle. There were grass smudges, dirt. The hem of his pants was encrusted with mud. Cameryn, at least, was clean. She had on jeans, faded but just washed, and her favorite sweater. The sleeves were too long, which meant she was forever pushing them up to free her hands, but the fabric made it worth the hassle. Chenille yarn, soft as velvet, in a Dublin-green color made her think of moss on stone.
“How’d you get so dirty?” she asked him.
“I went looking for the dog carcass I dumped down the mountain.”
This surprised her. “Really? I wanted to look, too. I know the sheriff says there’s no connection, but I thought it should be checked. Did you find it?”
“Nope. Body’s already scavenged and gone. Not a trace left, at least that I could see. But at this point I want to follow every thread I can because nothing about this case makes sense. So far we’ve got a dead man and zero evidence.” He held up his hand, ticking off his fingers one by one. “We got no motive. We got no weapon. Brad had no enemies and there’s no money trail. We got blown-out eyeballs and cooked flesh and a crime scene that’s completely clean. I don’t know what happened in this house. We may be looking at the perfect crime.”
The thought chilled her enough that she didn’t speak. In that slice of silence she could hear the wind outside howl mournfully, the harbinger of a coming storm. This was the time of year when Silverton itself became frozen in a layer of snow. The townspeople still existed, of course, but they were like fish in a winter pond, alive beneath the glassy ice but living in an ever-shrinking sphere. If there was evidence outside, it was about to get buried until spring. But forensics looked
inside
, into the very corpuscles themselves, if necessary, to let a body tell its own story.
To be here, she’d had to miss another shift at the
Grand, which worried her a little. If she missed too many shifts she might lose that job. It didn’t pay a lot but it was steady, or at least it had been until she became so involved in what she was doing as assistant to the coroner. She was thinking about this when Justin said, “Sheriff Jacobs is up in Ouray, filing for a search warrant to let us get the phone records legally. Your presence here is just to jump-start the process until we get the right papers.”
“I know. My dad’s with him.”
Justin cocked his head. “Why’d Pat go?”
“Because my dad’s hoping to obtain a search warrant issued through Judge Amy Green. He’s got a . . . connection . . . with her. He thinks she’ll write it if he’s the one doing the asking.” Cameryn felt a pang when she said this, but Justin didn’t seem to notice. He was already on his knees, intent on a stack of DVDs.
“Wow,” Justin said. He held up several jewel-boxed DVDs toward the light, squinting at the titles. “Here’s some disturbing news. Looks like our Mr. Oakes was a wild one.”
“Is that porn?”
“
National Geographic
special on the life of Tolkien,
The Lord of the Rings
complete DVD set, and
Shakespeare in Love
. Here’s another one that’s pretty extreme—
Emma
. Wasn’t that a chick flick? Hmmmm, maybe Kyle’s on to something after all.”
“Not funny.” Cameryn drummed her fingers on the desktop. “While you’re investigating his movie selection, what exactly am I supposed to be doing?”
“Try to find any evidence of a too-close relationship with Dwayne. We weren’t looking for that before. Cards, pictures, phone records—if you see anything, just bring it to me.”
“Exactly when did I become your page?” she asked tartly.
“I think this comes under the Justin-could-use-the-help heading.”
“I’m assistant to the coroner, not a detective.”
“Pretend the house is a body and you’ll do fine.”
It felt wrong, searching through Brad Oakes’s things. Although Statute 30-10-606 was on the books, it was supposed to be invoked only when a coroner wanted to try and match a murder object to a wound. Justin, though, was skating through the legal loophole, which meant if this search ever went to court they were on very thin ice. Her eyes skimmed only the surfaces while Justin pulled out drawers and carefully rifled through the contents.
The house was bare, spartan, its major decoration being several bookshelves that stretched the length of the entire living-room wall. She walked past them slowly, her gloved fingertips stroking the spines, each one by a famous author and all hardbound. Dostoyevsky, Fitzgerald, René Descartes, C. S. Lewis—she felt she did not belong here, prying through her teacher’s mind. She’d already been through his body, and that should have been enough.
“We’re not going to find anything, you know,” Justin called out. He opened the bottom cabinet of a china hutch and pulled out a large amber bottle, round at the bottom with a golden foil lid. “Oakes had good taste in booze. This is Chivas Regal, sixty bucks a bottle. And it’s unopened. Did I tell you I think Kyle O’Neil’s sent us on a fishing expedition?”
“Why would he do that?” Cameryn picked up an Indian pot that was encircled at the base in a brick-red pattern. She looked inside. It was empty.
“I don’t know. It’s a vibe of his. I think he gets off on power.”
She was about to set down the pot, but her hand stopped midair. “What do you mean?”
“I mean one accusation from Kyle and everyone has to start jumping through hoops. Search warrants. Interviews. I get the feeling he’s sitting back, enjoying this.”
“He was
trying
to help,” Cameryn said, bristling. “I was the one he talked to. Kyle wasn’t even sure we should say anything! You’re not being fair. You don’t even know him.”
“Hey, pull in the claws. You’re right, I don’t know the guy, just the type.” He shifted his gaze around the room. “I’m not finding anything. How about you?”
She started to shake her head, but then she did see something, although it had nothing to do with Dwayne. On a shelf was a plain picture frame, and the face inside it was a woman’s. The features were soft, but her smile was anything but. It lit the face from within, crinkling the skin beneath her eyes and dimpling her cheeks. Her hair was warm brown.
“Did Mr. Oakes have any next of kin?” Cameryn asked.
“One sister in Florida is all we could discover, and she apparently died about two months ago. Car crash.”
Sister. It must have been the woman in the picture. Cameryn could see the resemblance now, the shadow of her teacher in the smiling face. “So who inherits if there’s no relative?”
“Oakes just changed his will. It all goes to the Boy Scouts of America. But before you go thinking of a motive, Brad Oakes’s net worth is less than twenty thousand dollars, and that’s including the fair market value of this house minus the mortgage still due, if and when the house sells. Hardly enough to kill for.”

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