The Debt Collector (8 page)

Nina was in the lab spraying Krazy Glue into a fish tank. She did not look up. “What?”

Nina wore black cat glasses and her hair, dark and straight, was coming out of the absentminded ponytail.

“You know a guy named Jack Van Owen?”

“Nope.”

“Where's Mickey?”

“Men's room.”

“I'll check back.”

Sonora headed for her computer, entered Barty's name, tapped her fingers on the desk. Lanky's sister's address came up. Old Frankfort Pike.

“Hey, Sam?” she said, craning her neck. “You ever hear of a place in Kentucky called Versailles? Wasn't that where you and Louis the Thirteenth were born?”

Sam gave her a look, rubbed the back of his neck. “You're pronouncing it wrong. It's Ver-sayles, by local custom; anything else'll make you sound like a hick from out of town.”

“I am from out of town.”

“And no, you've got me placed at the wrong end of the state. This is down near Lexington. Remember, that Daniels guy you used to date lived there.”

Sonora frowned. “Of course I remember. About an hour from here, isn't it?”

“Maybe with you behind the wheel. Most people take an hour and a half.”

“How come they say Ver-sayles and not Ver-seye?”

“Sonora, when you go to Arby's do you order a chicken cordon
bleu
or a chicken cordon
blue?
”

“I order the chicken and bacon thing at Wendy's.”

“Then let me put it to you this way. People in Kentucky don't need some smart-ass from Ohio telling them how to say Versailles. Why are we on this subject, anyway?” He got up and looked over her shoulder. “Why are you typing Js?”

Sonora pointed to the computer screen. “Lanky Aruba has a sister who lives near Versailles.”

“Who in the hell is Lanky Aruba?”

“Known associate of Barty Kinkle.”

“That explains everything.”

“I just got off the phone with some old guy, retired cop named Jack Van Owen, and he—”

“
Jack Van Owen?
”

“That's what he said.”

“Guy that used to partner Sergeant Crick?”

“Yeah, that's what—”

“Hellfire, Sonora, that guy is a … he's a damn legend.”

“And me without my autograph book.” Sonora saw that Crick, on her left at the coffeepot, was looking their way.

He stopped his coffee cup in midair. “Somebody say Van Owen?”

“Yeah.” Sonora ripped the sheet of Js out of her typewriter and shoved it in her middle desk drawer. Easier said than done—the drawer was crammed tight and would not shut.

“
Jack
Van Owen?”

“What he said.” Sonora pushed harder, but the drawer was stuck.

Crick headed to her desk. “Let me talk to him.”

“He hung up already.” Sonora shoved harder, and the desk made a high-pitched squeak but came within an inch of shutting.

“Let me help you with that,” Sam said.

“
No
. Thank you.”

“See? Cranky for the last seven months.”

Crick left his coffee cup behind, signaling serious intent, and headed for her desk. “Let me talk to him.”

“I told you, sir, he hung up already.”

“When Jack Van Owen calls, you let me talk to him. What did he want?”

“He had information about some guy he arrested eighteen years ago, guy named Lanky Aruba, and another one named Barty Kinkle.”

“Kinkle.” Crick went back for the cup, swallowed coffee. Chewed it around in his mouth. “Don't remember Kinkle, but something about Aruba gives me that old bad feeling.”

“Van Owen knows both of them. Says this Aruba is not all there, but what is there is brutal, spits olive pits on his victims. I just don't see how Van Owen knew about the pits.”

“Probably called a buddy in CSU, but the guy is damn near psychic. Best cop I ever worked with.” He pointed his cup toward Sonora. “This guy tells you something, you better pay attention.” Crick took a gulp of coffee. Waiting.

Sonora picked up her notes. “Aruba is some kind of uncle or something to Barton Melville Kinkle, and Aruba's got a sister in Kentucky. That's where he'll be headed, is what Van Owen thinks. If this is our guy.”

“How many olive-pit killers you think there are in Cincinnati?” Sam asked.

Crick rubbed his chin. “So Jack thinks Aruba and Kinkle look good?”

“Yeah. And if it's them, Van Owen says they'll be headed for Kentucky. Course, if it's not, they're both probably home in bed.”

“Something to check,” Sam said.

Sonora felt a tap on her elbow. It was Sanders, thirty pounds heavier than a year ago when she'd given up at long last on a toxic romance, but still wearing the soft straight sandy pageboy, the Peter Pan collars, and pleated skirts. The extra weight made her look older.

Her look was apologetic. “I've got an address for you, Sonora. Carl Stinnet's next of kin.”

14

It was a life of late-night work, Sonora thought. A cone of light, cast by a lamp against the press of shadow and dark, illuminated the papers on her desk. She put the typed two-page description of Joy Stinnet's last words in a file, inhaled the smell of fatigue and concentration, a human alone, at work, lonely. Strange for a Tuesday, giving her an out-of-sync feeling. The world was out at Applebee's and neighborhood bars, tucked up with Jay Leno and their significant others, and she was here, alone with the guys on the last shift, sweating beneath the halogen light, working on things to make the heart cringe.

She left the coffee cup half full on her desk and headed home.

It was long, the drive out to Blue Ash. Somehow, the death of the family Stinnet had infected her, settled into her mind like silt in the bottom of a dirty brown river. She could not stop things. She only saw the aftermath, in the hushed, shocky quiet after the noise and the shouting, the blood and the tears.

She would die, too, one day. Step off that ledge. Sonora tried to shake the thought. Couldn't. The recognition of mortality was as familiar to her as desire.

She was way too tired, way too down. Police work was dangerous that way.

Clampett was glad to see her.

It dawned on Sonora, as she passed the kitchen table, that she had not looked into the fruit basket for a while. It was always her intention to keep it full of crisp apples, firm kiwis, and whatever else was in season. But it was not the kind of thing you could leave on its own for weeks at a time.

She passed it by with a twinge of guilt, carrying her plate of pork roast and rice, hot from the microwave, a thick white napkin not quite protecting her fingers from the heat. She sat down, Clampett at her side, looked at the newspaper, took a sip of ice water, ate one bite of pork roast.

Her appetite deserted her with a suddenness that made her spit the bite she was eating into a napkin. She put her fork down and set the plate on the floor for Clampett, who did not need the snack but was ever so grateful.

She took her gun out of her purse, made sure the safety was on. Headed down the hallway toward her bedroom, turning off lights as she went. She had touched the dark things before, walked through the wreckage, shoes sticky from those rivers of blood.

Speaking of which. Blood traces on her new Reeboks. Elf Reeboks, Tim called them, because her feet were small.

Sonora washed her face and brushed her teeth and put on a big white Oxford shirt that almost reached her knees. Her favorite shirt to sleep in. She deserved it tonight.

She thought she might be pathetic, having a favorite shirt to sleep in. There had to be more to life than that. Like maybe a favorite person to sleep with.

She opened the window, and Clampett came in and rested his wet black nose on the sill. He would not want to share the bed if the window was open. She could have it all to herself.

She curled up on her right side, lights off, one leg under the covers, one leg out. The room was growing chill and damp, dark and mysterious with the wind.

And on the night air came the resonant saxophone howl of a train, horn blowing, and the background presence of the engine and those massive boxcars, streaking down the rusting iron tracks.

The noise took her back, back to a night like this one, with the smell of rain in the air, a paddock full of horses, the bay of a bloodhound on the scent, and the hunt for a missing child.

She pushed the memory away. The horn wailed again. Train music—it always made her want something, she just did not know what.

Sonora closed her eyes, willing sleep. Instead, she heard whispers. The voice of Joy Stinnet.
Hail Mary, full of grace
.

Some noise, like a window opening, startled her out of a doze. Sonora shoved the covers back, jumped out of bed, headed down the hallway, snatching her loaded Beretta off the lingerie dresser as she went.

That Clampett stayed relaxed in front of the window should have tipped her off. She checked every door, every window.

Stood outside the children's rooms in the middle of the hallway, knees like jelly. She did not venture into the bedrooms, did not breach the closed doors. Instead, she stood with her back to the wall, thinking what a wonderful thing it was that the children were alive, asleep, unaware.

Her legs, suddenly, did not hold her. She slid down the wall and landed on her knees, slowly, softly, like a woman unwinding.

After all this time. After all she had seen and done. All the times she had touched those stiff, lifeless wrists, walked through blood and broken glass, tearstains and spent cartridges. Was she losing her way? Why now?

Clampett padded out into the hallway and settled beside her with a groan, panting lightly, the tip of his tongue pink and wet. Kind brown eyes. The world was a weird place. On the one hand, dogs. On the other, the death of everyday America in the blood-soaked home of Carl and Joy Stinnet.

15

Sonora woke thinking of the old man, Franklin Ward. She was curled tightly in the fetal position, the room like ice beneath that open window. What, she wondered, stretching, was the attraction of the fetal position?

She looked at the bedside clock. Five forty-seven. The alarm hadn't even gone off. She was supposed to meet Sam back at the Stinnets' house at eight. She could take a quick shower, and she'd still have time, if she drank her coffee on the way, to talk to Ward again before she went back to the home of Joy and Carl Stinnet.

In the light of day, the place was easy to find. It had a sort of homey charm, and Sonora felt guilty for being the bearer of bad news to a house built in the 1940s and painted buttercup yellow.

The night before, when Sam and Sonora had broken their terrible news, Mrs. Cavanaugh had been nothing more than a phone number on the wall. This morning she greeted Sonora at Franklin Ward's front door and invited her into a living room that smelled of coffee and bacon.

Mrs. Cavanaugh—“call me Bonnie,” she had insisted—announced that she had hot biscuits on the stove with the air of one whose biscuits were never refused. Sonora felt vaguely comforted by this evidence that there were still people in the world who baked before breakfast. She had the feeling that she had stepped into another realm.

She followed Bonnie Cavanaugh past the couch, glancing at the picture Ward had shown her before she left the night before, a shapshot, faded and creased and framed in tarnished silver, of Ward and his brother in uniform before they had gone off to fight in World War II.

To fight in that war he would have to be … but there Sonora's education or her early attention to it failed her. She did not remember the precise years of World War II. At a guess, she'd say 1942 or 1943.

And even she, with her scant memory of history, had a sense of what a terrible thing that war had been. She paused in front of the picture, resisting the urge to pick up the frame. They were beautiful creatures from the past, Franklin Ward and his little brother, Emerson, tall and young in brand-new uniforms, immortalized by the local paper, teenage boys off to war. They had been no more than two years older than her own son was now.

It was only when you had children that you realized wars were fought by babies.

Bonnie Cavanaugh looked at Sonora over her shoulder, waiting politely. Her appearance did not add up to the sum of the whole. Taken in segments, she was almost comically unattractive. Crooked front tooth that protruded over her lower lip. Long, basset-hound face, sagging under years of excess poundage. Weird hair. Brown and frizzy, worn too long, pulled severely back from a face that had never been pretty.

But there was something about her, a peaceful charm, that gave her a comforting glow. No doubt she had worries. The lines over the brows were too deeply etched to be merely age and sunshine, and the dual effects of stress and gravity had worn creases at either side of her mouth.

But there was something about her. Perhaps it was nothing more than the woman's quiet assurance, her air of life experience that had not marred the impressions of a basic goodness.

Sonora had met people, men and women, who made the hair stand up on the back of her neck, men and women she would tear to pieces if they came to her front door and tried to cross the threshold into the air space of her children.

Certainly this woman led an ordinary life. But to Sonora, she seemed extraordinary. She wanted to pull up a chair at that kitchen table and tell Bonnie Cavanaugh her troubles, tell her the dream about her brother and the whispers she had heard in her sleep, Joy's voice saying her catechism.

She had not planned to talk to the woman and she did not want a biscuit. But that was before she met Mrs. Cavanaugh, that was before she realized that this was the kind of woman you talked to.

Bonnie Cavanaugh led Sonora into the kitchen and motioned her to a chair. Sonora settled in front of a worn maple corner cabinet that displayed the multicolored pastels of Fiestaware, originals, with chips and cracks and faded colors. Mrs. Cavanaugh put a pastel blue plate and a plaid cloth napkin in front of Sonora, served her two biscuits, and poured her a cup of coffee in a bone china cup that was white with deep rose flowers, a glued and glazed crack in the saucer beneath.