The Body Reader (16 page)

Jude spotted the server moving toward their booth. She gave her a small shake of the head, and the woman nodded and returned to the bar.

“Let’s play a game of pool before we leave,” Jude said, hoping to divert Uriah’s attention from another drink.

It worked. He pushed his glass away. “Five bucks says I win.”

While they played, as balls vanished from the table, the detectives quietly discussed the case in voices that wouldn’t be overheard, each presenting theories, none of those theories satisfying to either of them.

The game was pretty evenly matched.

“Eight in the side pocket,” Uriah finally said, pointing with his pool cue.

The black ball dropped. The white cue ball with blue chalk followed the green felt rail to the corner pocket—a scratch. Uriah paid up.

Fair was fair, but Jude would have preferred to win by sinking the eight ball. She tucked the bill away, slipped her stick back in the rack, and held out her hand for the car keys.

CHAPTER 33

H
is girl.

He wasn’t coming around as much. Sometimes she filled two full journals before he appeared with a grocery bag in his arms and new batteries for the lantern. The grocery bag contained boxes of cereal and boxed milk. PowerBars and granola bars. Along with that, he brought jugs of water that she’d learned to ration. One time she ran out and began to hallucinate from dehydration. That’s what he told her had caused it, anyway. And then she asked if he was some kind of doctor, and he slapped her.

She used the water to wash herself, but God, how she’d love to take a shower. Sometimes she fantasized about what she’d choose if she had the choice. Hamburger, fries, and a chocolate shake—or a shower. It would be tough.

Curled on her side on the mattress, her stomach a knot of pain, she fumbled for the lantern, for the switch, found it, turned it on.

He’d lost interest in her journals. He didn’t read them anymore, but she still wrote about him. Not with the infatuation of the past, but with fondness.

How long since he’d been to see her? Weeks? She was sure it had been weeks. She was down to a few granola bars and one gallon of water.

She’d been proud of her bravery, but now she was afraid. Not afraid of him, not afraid of what he might do to her. Her fear, her stupid and real fear, was that her captor, her lover, wouldn’t do
anything
to her. She was afraid that one day he’d simply decide to
never come back
.

CHAPTER 34

T
he headless body and hand did indeed belong to Lola Holt.

Two days after their trip up north, Jude and Uriah sat at a bistro table on the outdoor patio down the street from the police station, no other patrons nearby, a corner to themselves, the just-released autopsy report between them, sandwiches on plates, Uriah with a turkey, cheese, and fresh-baked bread concoction, Jude with an avocado-and-pesto sandwich, plus dessert.

“You should try my brownie.” She pointed. “It’s kind of amazing.”

He broke off a piece while she flipped through the report. DNA was a match, as they’d suspected.

“This is interesting.” She passed the lab report to him. He read it and looked up. “Chlorine.”

“Traces, not in her lungs but on her skin.”

So far they’d been unable to piece together much about the day Lola had been murdered. What they did know was that she’d gone back to school after the funeral, hung out with friends at a café, and hadn’t returned home.

“I’ll call the father and give him the news about the match,” Uriah said.

“A better idea would be to visit him in person.” Jude checked the clock on her phone. “He should be at work. I say we drop in and surprise him.”

“After last time? I don’t know.”

“I want to see how he reacts.”

They finished eating, both leaving a tip as they gathered their things and got to their feet.

Mr. Holt was a mortgage broker working in a downtown office located in the IDS Center on South Eighth Street not far from the police station. Jude parallel parked the unmarked car, and Uriah swiped the department credit card at the meter. Inside the IDS Center, they checked the directory and paused long enough to get a temporary photo pass that got them through security before taking the elevator to the twenty-third floor and Holt’s office.

“There are two detectives here to see you,” the woman working the reception desk said into the landline phone. The reply must have been favorable, because she hung up and led the partners down a carpeted hall.

At the sight of them, Holt’s face drained of color. He managed to tell them to take a seat as he dropped into a chair, the city skyline behind him.

“We have some news,” Jude said from the seat across from him.

“I’m not sure I’m ready.” He wiped a trembling hand across his forehead. On one arm was a gray sling. “Will this ever end? I want it to end.”

The words seemed to burst out of him, ripped from a place of numb despair that went along with events the mind wasn’t prepared to deal with.

What Jude didn’t say was that there would never be an end. Mr. Holt would never wake up one day and feel lucky or fortunate or blessed. His heart would never again swell with the simple excitement of a new morning, and beautiful sunsets would hurt because they were sunsets his daughter would never see.

“The DNA matched,” Uriah said quietly. “The body found in the woods two days ago was that of your daughter. I’m sorry.” He unzipped a leather case, pulled out a manila folder, and placed it on the desk. “Here’s the autopsy report.” Without removing his hand from the top of the folder, Uriah leaned forward. “It contains eight-by-ten color photos. If you’d like, we can hang on to the report and just pass along the crucial information. I can put the file away. Save it for you. If you decided to take it, my advice would be not to look at it—not now. Put it in a safe-deposit box or locked file. Seeing it will serve no purpose.”

“We especially don’t think it would serve any purpose for your wife to see this,” Jude said. From what she understood, the poor woman was back home, out on bail.

The man nodded and reached for the file, picked it up, but didn’t open it. Instead, he hugged it to his chest, his mouth trembling, eyes red rimmed and glistening. “Did it tell you anything?” he asked. “The report?”

“Mr. Holt, do you happen to know if Lola went swimming on the day she was murdered?” Jude asked. “Did she possibly have a swimming class in school?”

“Not this semester. What’s this about?”

“The autopsy report indicated that she had chlorine on her skin,” Jude explained. “Do you have any idea why that would be? A friend with a pool, perhaps? A place she might have gone swimming, if not at school?”

“I can’t think of anything. It’s possible she went somewhere I didn’t know about. She had a mind of her own and didn’t always tell us everything. She was a teenager, after all.”

They thanked him, gave him their sympathies, told him they’d be in touch, and left.

“Why did you tell him not to open the folder?” Jude asked as they headed for the elevators. “I’d planned to watch him as he looked at the photos.”

Uriah hit the “Down” button, then turned to face her. “I know you did.”

“So?”

“You remember what you told me your first day on the job? No? I do. You said kindness was maybe the most important trait a person can have.”

“But it doesn’t apply when dealing with a possible criminal. When dealing with someone who might be able to give us information. Parents are always number-one suspects.”

“He didn’t know anything. And sometimes you have to decide when to quit being a detective and just be a human.”

CHAPTER 35

A
s the Uber pulled away, Jude approached the door of her old home with two black trash bags of belongings, one in each hand. The backpack cutting into her shoulders was stuffed with a laptop, case files, and notebooks. She’d return to her apartment later to get her bike.

It was Wednesday, early evening, three days after meeting Eric for coffee in Uptown. Another beautiful example of Minnesota weather. The air was dry, the sky was clear, temperature about seventy-five. It was the kind of day that almost made up for winter.

Eric had offered to pick her up. Begged, actually, but she’d wanted to arrive by herself, on her own. And for some reason not fully understood, she hadn’t wanted him in her apartment. Not that she was embarrassed. She wasn’t ashamed of the place. It was more like she wanted to keep it separate from this house and the man inside. Maybe that should have been a warning.

He answered her knock with a smile, and she thought about how different it was from the last time she’d stood on the same porch. That moment was probably forever etched in her memory. His horror. The woman whose name she still didn’t know. That person had replaced Jude, and now Jude was replacing her.

“Come in!” Eric’s excitement made her uncomfortably aware of her lack of emotion. Should she be feeling the same thing? Should she be
happy
?

The duplex was a two-story cream stucco. Their space was on the left, with a kitchen, half bath, and living room down, bedroom and full bath up. From the bedroom window a person could see the dome of the Basilica of Saint Mary.

“I’ll take your things to our room.”

He relieved her of the garbage bags and headed for the stairs while she shrugged out of the backpack, dropping it on the couch.

Our room.

“I’m making us something to eat!” he shouted from the second floor while she wandered around, examining familiar and unfamiliar objects. The couch was the same, but a floral chair had been added to the mix. New television, new lamp. The built-in bookcase was still overflowing with books, mostly hers. She pulled out and replaced one after the other.

“I tried to put everything where it used to be,” he said once he was back downstairs. “Most of the stuff was in storage. I couldn’t bear to look at anything that belonged to you.”

She wondered what had happened to the scrapbook she’d put together on her mother.

“Say something,” he said. “What are you feeling?”

What
was
she feeling?

She eyed him with the kind of scrutiny she realized made people uncomfortable. He wasn’t handsome, but he was attractive, with an innocent naïveté that almost made
her
uncomfortable. And right now he was like a boisterous child, anxious and nervous and excited all at once. The emotions he exuded overwhelmed her.

“I want to look around upstairs,” she said.

He started to follow.

“By myself.”

He stopped, and she could see she’d hurt his feelings.

“I just need to be alone for a few minutes,” she explained with a softened voice.

He nodded, seeming to understand. “I’ll be in the kitchen. Come down when you’re ready, and we can eat. I'm making your favorite: chicken fajitas and guacamole.”

Upstairs on the double bed covered with a pink-and-green quilt, she dropped her backpack beside the garbage bags. The quilt was new. The curtains—frothy, feminine things—were new too, most likely added by the woman with no name. Shopped for and picked out and hung in much the same way Jude had shopped for linens when she and Eric moved in together.

The house had been built in the twenties, and much of the original detail was still there. The wooden floors, the crown molding, painted white, contrasting with the pale-blue walls. The walls used to be a soft beige. She liked the blue. It was peaceful.

The closet still had the vintage glass knob. She opened the door to see her clothes on one side, Eric’s on the other. The dark suits she’d worn to work were there, along with boots and shoes and a red wool coat she’d gotten from a thrift shop. Vintage dresses that she recalled wearing. How could clothing feel so personal, yet so foreign?

She shut the closet and turned back to stare at the bed. From downstairs came domestic kitchen sounds, and she smelled chicken cooking.

How many times had they made love in this room, this bed? Hundreds?

She imagined how it would be tonight. The two of them, together.

It was odd, because one of the things that had kept her going during her years of captivity were the memories of them right here. His gentle ways, his teasing, the softness of the mornings together. Those were the things she’d clung to, the things that had reminded her that she was human and that two people could have something between them that wasn’t painful.

But right now she felt pain.

On the bedside table was a framed picture staged at just the right angle. An image of a happy couple. The girl was on the guy’s back, her head tilted to the sky, her mouth open wide in laughter.

She remembered that day . . . The photo had been taken at Lake Harriet. They’d gone canoeing, and later they’d had a picnic near the rose garden. A perfect day . . .

Her phone buzzed.

She pulled it from the small pocket of her backpack. A text from Uriah:
How’s it going?

She stared at the message. Had he known how hard this would be? She entered a reply:
A little weird.

It was a lie. She should have said,
A lot weird.

Uriah:
I’ll bet. Let me know if you need anything.

Jude:
Thanks.

His texts made her feel better.

Downstairs, the table had been set with lime-colored dishes that were new to Jude. Every detail in the house was either a reminder of the life they’d once shared or a reminder of the years that had passed.

“I thought maybe we could walk around Lake Harriet later,” Eric said. “Then go to Sebastian Joe’s for ice cream. They still have your favorite, raspberry chocolate.”

Why, he was
wooing
her. The kind of wooing where the day was a setup for the night. She needed to ease back in gradually, not just take up where they’d left off, pretending the past three years had never happened.

This was a mistake. A horrible mistake.

She supposed she had him to thank for her rapid realization. If he’d approached with caution, if he hadn’t pushed so hard, so fast, she might not have known for weeks. If he hadn’t put her things in their old room, if he hadn’t prepared food she used to like, if every single thing he’d mentioned hadn’t been referencing the old Jude . . . If the day hadn’t been all about the coming night . . .

He had no idea how much she’d changed. He had no idea she would never be the person he used to know. When should she tell him this was a bad idea? Now, before they ate? Or after?

“This isn’t going to work,” she said, deciding to jump in without hesitation. It was a relief to acknowledge how wrong it was. Being here was like seeing herself in someone else’s photo.

He stopped halfway between the sink and the table, two glasses of water in his hands. “The food? I can make something different.”

“Not the food. This. You and me.”

He was understandably stunned. She felt bad about that.

He placed the glasses on the table. Not just anywhere, but to the right of the plates, as if expecting the evening to continue. “I changed my life for you,” he said. “I broke up with Justine. I redid the house. I got all of your old clothes out of storage. I made your favorite food.”

She thought about her belongings in the bedroom, already imagining carrying them back into her apartment.

“I should have known when you didn’t want help moving. I should have known when you just brought two garbage bags of belongings.” Then his tactic changed. “Don’t go,” he begged. “Give it twenty-four hours. A couple of days. You just got here. Of course things will seem strange.”

“It’s wrong. Time isn’t going to change that. I’m sorry, Eric. I shouldn’t have called you.” She turned to go upstairs.

His hand lashed out, fingers wrapping around her arm. She could feel the pressure of his fingertips as he held on, as he tried to keep her from leaving.

Any doubt she might have felt was erased by the aggressiveness of his touch. It wasn’t rough, it wasn’t brutal, but it was a man trying to restrain a woman, to physically restrain her, to make her stay against her will.

Sweat on his face, breathing rapid, his mouth open. He smelled like dish soap and deodorant and the onions he’d chopped for their meal together. His skin had a layer of freckles below the surface. She’d forgotten about that. You couldn’t see them unless you got really close.

Without breaking eye contact, she said, “Let go of me.”

It might have been the lack of emotion in her voice that made him recoil and drop his hand. Or maybe it was the fact that he was finally really seeing her, the new her. Not the young woman in the photo upstairs. Not the young woman who’d worn those clothes and danced with him right where they now stood. That woman was dead.

The surprise in his face changed as a new plan of action hit his brain. He charged to the hall closet and pulled out cardboard boxes. Like a child having a tantrum, he attacked the shelves, sweeping handfuls of books to the floor, most landing in the box at his feet while she stood and watched.

His face red, he sprinted upstairs, then returned, his arms overflowing with her clothes from the closet. He strode to the front door, opened it, and tossed everything into the yard. While he continued to purge her belongings from the house, Jude pulled out her phone and called Uriah. When he answered, she said, “I’d like to take you up on that offer to help me move.”

“I thought you already moved.”

“I’m moving back.”

“Oh.” Silence. She gave him the address even though she knew he’d been there at least once to interview Eric. Then, “Be there in fifteen minutes.”

He made it in ten.

Out of the car, hands on hips, Uriah perused the litter of clothing in the front yard. “Wow.”

On the porch, Jude hitched her backpack over her shoulders and strode toward his car, garbage bags in hand, all the while aware of faces in windows across the street. “Yeah,” she said as she passed Uriah. “Things didn’t work out.”

“I see that.”

Once everything from the yard was loaded in the car, they circled the vehicle. Jude was opening the door when Eric came running down the sidewalk. Judging by his expression, he was still wound tight. And God no, he was crying.

“You broke my heart twice!” he shouted. “Twice!”

Jude slammed her door and stared through the windshield while Uriah pulled away from the curb. “Self-involved little asswipe, isn’t he?” he asked.

“I don’t remember him that way.” She couldn’t keep the puzzlement from her voice. Who was that guy? How had she ever been involved with him? “And yet I have the feeling he hasn’t changed. I’m the one who’s changed.” Interesting, to think that the thing that had crippled her and broken her and turned her hair white was the very thing that had given her a fresh and true awareness of the world around her. It didn’t seem right that her new eyes had come from such a dark place.

“I clung to this for so long,” she said. “It kept me from going insane when I was in that cell, but this world isn’t me. Not anymore. And now I wonder if it was ever me. Even when I was living it.”

“It got you through it—remembering your life here. That’s something. That’s a lot.”

“Yeah, but it makes me sad to realize it no longer holds the same importance. In my memories, he was different. We were different. I don’t know what happened. How it changed.”

“It’s kind of unnerving to think about how we’re shaped by the darkness in our lives,” he said in an echo of her own thoughts.

“That’s true. I used to laugh at
South Park
and
The Simpsons
,” she admitted. “The person sitting here would not laugh at
The Simpsons
.”

He turned right on Lyndale. “We’ll have to work on that.”

Inside Jude’s apartment, boxes deposited on the floor, Uriah lifted the framed photo of her riding on Eric’s back. “I can’t get used to seeing you with dark hair.”

“Or seeing me happy?”

“I wasn’t going to mention that, but yeah. When was this taken?”

She dropped a bundle of clothes on the couch and looked up. “Four years ago, maybe.”

He put the photo on the coffee table and looked around. “Got anything to drink?”

“No.”

“I’ll run to the bar down the block.”

He returned so quickly that she’d hardly gotten a chance to put anything away. “Opener?” he asked as he pulled a six-pack of brown bottles from a paper bag.

She rummaged through kitchen drawers, then handed him a metal opener with a handle shaped like Minnesota. “It came with the apartment.”

He uncapped two beers and passed one to Jude. She took a swallow, then set the bottle aside to open a cupboard and pull out a can of cat food.

He glanced around, looking for signs of a pet. “You have a cat?”