Time of Death (8 page)

The place smelled as though it had been freshly vacated by a man with intestinal flu. Or maybe it smelled that way all the time. Wishing she’d walked down the hall after all, she filled the coffee carafe at the sink and made a quick exit.

With coffee brewing and her head rapidly clearing, she sat back down to converse with Merlin. They went back a long way, the two of them. She’d met him when she was in college, twenty years ago, although she’d never
met
him in person. He called her by her old college nickname, Keypunch Kid, which she’d earned by her proficiency and accuracy using a keypunch machine to punch programs and data into cards that were fed into the computer. Keypunch machines were anachronisms in the current technological climate. Merlin chatted with her, encouraged her, got her through rough times, and served as a sounding board for her ideas. A mentor who popped in and out of her life.

They’d started talking when online communication was the province of geeks, and moved forward as the technology did. Sometimes ahead of it. Currently they talked over secured VoIP, voice over Internet protocol. PJ had slyly suggested adding video, but Merlin predictably declined.

“So what’s new, dirty old man?” she said.

“I resent that. I bathe on a regular weekly basis. Besides, I asked you first.”

“You took advantage of me when I was groggy,” PJ said. There was one apple left on her desk, so she picked it up and started munching it.

“Not the first time, won’t be the last. I say again, what’s up?”

“A new case. You’ve probably read about it in the papers. Oh, I forgot, you don’t read newspapers.”

“I prefer more direct sources. Heh, heh.”

PJ pursed her lips. She’d wondered dozens of times before how Merlin picked up the threads of stories. She pictured him as a spider with the Internet as his web, information thrumming along the strands to the center, where he felt the sensations with his eight feet.

“Keypunch? You fall back asleep?”

“No, I was just imagining you as a spider.”

“You definitely need to get out more.”

“Hah! If only,” she said. “I seem to spend more time in the company of the dead than the living.”

“I told you Schultz wouldn’t make a good lover. But did you listen?”

PJ chuckled. “Stay out of my sex life.”

“Is there any to stay out of?”

Not much, lately.
“Changing the subject, have you heard of the body found on the riverfront?”

“The guy with no dick? I thought we were staying out of your sex life.”

“Merlin!”

“Yeah, I’ve heard about that murder,” Merlin said. “Are you sure you’re old enough to handle these sex cases? After all, there was the time when …”

“When I had to put back the beer I was trying to buy. That’s beyond lame.”

PJ knew there were legal issues with her discussing an open case in detail with a man she couldn’t identify. She might have passed Merlin on the street and not known it. But all that was beside the point. He was a sympathetic ear, and she trusted him. She poured out all the recent events.

When she finished, he was quiet for a time.

“June could have hired someone to go to Kansas City for her to establish an alibi. It would be tricky, but it could be done.”

PJ sighed. “I felt sorry for June at first. Now I don’t know what to make of her.”

“Psychos can be very charming when they want to. You should know that.”

Before she could respond, her office door burst open and Schultz strode in.

“Good, you’re awake. A bloody knife was found during the search of May Simmons’s home,” he said. “It’s got her husband Frank’s fingerprints on it and Arlan Merrett’s blood. We found the murder weapon.”

DEAR DIARY,

These are things that happened to me, cross my heart and hope to die.

The earliest memory I have of my sister is from a time when I’m two years old. She is considered responsible enough to baby-sit for me while our parents have a getaway. All I know is that they are leaving and that I’m going to be alone with my sister. I hear my momma say that big word a lot, “responsible.”

I’m terrified that I will die before they come back.

As soon as they drive away in the black car, she ties me in my booster seat. When I try to wiggle free, the rope or tape
—
I don’t know now
—
cuts into my arms, so I cry. I am sitting across from her at the table, big tears rolling down my cheeks and my throat hurting from crying. She’s eating something that I want, because I’m hungry, too. My parents are gone and I don’t think I will see them again, or get something to eat because my stomach hurts.

When she’s done eating, she leaves. Then I cry harder because I don’t want to be alone. She’s gone for a long time, a forever time.

When she comes back, she has a pretzel for me. I love pretzels. I like to bite them because my mouth hurts sometimes. Momma says I am a big girl, getting new teeth. I want the pretzel. She puts it on the table but doesn’t untie my hands. I try to reach it with my mouth, I reach far and then stretch some more. My tongue touches the pretzel. That’s when something bad happens. The chair with my booster seat on it falls over, and me with it. Suddenly I am sideways on the floor, still tied in the seat and screaming. Screaming.

Everything moves very fast when she pulls the chair up hard, and that scares me some more. But now she seems sorry. She cuts whatever is holding my hands and gives me the pretzel. I don’t remember what happens next.

Later I am crying for Momma and my sister puts something in my mouth to make me stop. It smells bad and I choke on it. She puts me on the bed and pulls my clothes off. I stay there looking up at her as she moves around the room. I remember she’s humming.

The next thing I remember is that I’m in the water in our pool. I’m holding on to a tube around my stomach that’s holding me up. I’m inside it, like I’m the hole of a doughnut. If I let go, I will slip down into the water and never come up. I can’t think of anything but holding onto that tube. I hate the water.

My sister is close by, moving through the water, forward and backward in the pool. I can’t figure out how she does it. It looks like she’s pulling herself through the water. I don’t know how to do that. If I let go of the tube, I will go down under the water. She stops by me and presses my nose and gives me a big smile. I smile back because I think she’s going to take me out, so I won’t lose the tube.

She puts her hands on the tube and I’m very happy. Then she pushes down. The tube goes under the water. I’m holding on and I go down, too. I scream and water pours into my mouth. My eyes are open and I see her legs under the water. She’s right there. I reach for her and the tube slips away from me. There is nothing holding me up and water is in my mouth and nose. I scream, but I only get more water in my mouth.

I feel her hands grab me. She pulls me up and puts me in the tube. I am spitting water out of my mouth and I can’t get any air. I’m so sick and scared. She starts to go forward and backward in the pool again. I know that soon she will stop by me and push my tube down. I can’t do anything. I can’t get away. I’m sick and scared.

That’s the first memory I have of my sister.

P
J HADN’T SEEN HER
son since early in the morning, and that was only a quick glance into his room, where he was sprawled across his bed. As usual, Megabite had claimed his pillow, causing Thomas’s upper body to hang off the bed to avoid disturbing the cat. That was the image of him she’d retained all day.

She pulled her faded blue VW Rabbit convertible into the driveway of her home. It was a story-and-a-half on Magnolia Avenue, one of the smaller homes in the Shaw neighborhood. That made it affordable for a newly-divorced professional woman. PJ had started out renting the place, but fell in love with it and bought it when the owner decided to sell. It had wood floors, stained glass windows, a fireplace, and two bedrooms upstairs. The private yard had an intimate feel and beautiful perennial plantings that PJ had maintained. She could walk to Tower Grove Park, and often did when the pond lilies were in bloom.

And there was that driveway, allowing her off-street parking.

The house was dark, but a porch light had been left on for her around back. She touched the pane of glass in the back door out of habit, the pane shattered by a bullet that saved her from a psychopathic killer. Some people would have moved to get away from the reminder of an event like that, but in PJ’s case, it strengthened her.

Track lights in the kitchen bathed the space in light. The smells of pizza and popcorn greeted her nose, and she smiled.
The smells of normality.

Megabite appeared from nowhere and rubbed against her leg, meowing and showing off her honey-gold eyes. Obediently, PJ bent down to pet her. The cat rose on tiptoe and arched her back under PJ’s hand. The young cat looked like different cats depending on the angle of viewing. Seen from the top, she was gray tiger-striped. From the underneath, she was pure white. Seen from the side, there was a horizontal band of orange fur on all four legs that neatly divided gray and white. The white tip of her tail was very expressive, and at the moment, it was expressing Food.

“Oh, Meg, I’m sure you’ve been fed a dozen times today,” PJ said. Thomas loved the cat as much as she did. Being a teenager, he assumed that the cat needed to eat every hour, like he did. PJ put down a bowl of remnants of a roast beef sandwich. Megabite purred her approval and went to work.

PJ walked further into the house, looking for Thomas. The study door was closed, but there was a line of light underneath the door. She knocked and opened it, to find Thomas bent over the desk, working on the homework that was due the next day. Obviously he’d played around all day and left his schoolwork for the last minute. Typical, but she wished he’d get the important things done first.

Not that I did any better at his age. Then along came the to-do lists that run my life.

Feeling old and stodgy, she went over to him and tousled his straight black hair.

“Hey, you’re messing up my look,” he said.

“No, I’m creating a new look. You can be the first one in school to have it.”

“Yeah, right. We’re out of soda and frozen pizzas, and there’s only one bag of microwave popcorn left.”

PJ sighed. Sometimes her relationship with her son boiled down to a grocery list.

“I’ll be back when I smell better,” PJ said. “We can talk about the school week coming up.”

Thomas grunted, but at least it was a social grunt.

The hot bath was wonderful, but PJ didn’t linger. She tossed on a clean sweater and jeans over fresh underwear. She made a phone call and then went back downstairs with her hair dripping from a thorough scrubbing. Thomas joined her at the kitchen table. He was eating a granola bar.

“I’m going to be really busy the next couple of days. I just called Mick’s mom,” PJ said. “She said you could spend tonight and Monday night at her house and she’d take you to school with Mick. Megabite’s going, too.”

PJ found that having Thomas attend Jamison Academy had a side benefit. There was an active and supportive group of parents who looked out for each other’s kids, called simply Parents Care. She’d thrown herself into it, because she liked the way others were concerned not only about academic success but the whole well-being of their kids. Mick was in some of Thomas’s classes, and his mother Lilly Kane was a divorcée like PJ. The two women had gravitated together. The boys often spent the night at each other’s houses, and usually Winston made it a trio. It was like having a co-mom, a tremendous relief for PJ, who had once had to ask her boss to recommend a babysitter.

“Okay by me,” Thomas said, around bites of granola bar. “She makes eggs and bacon for breakfast.”

“Do you make all of your decisions based in what kind of food is available?”

“Pretty much, yeah, unless there’s girls involved. Mom, when are you and Schultz going to get married?”

So much for discussing the school week.

Schultz wanted to get married, and she wasn’t ready for it. He’d surprised her with a ring, and when she didn’t immediately say yes, Schultz assumed that she thought he wasn’t good enough for her. As he put it, “Good enough to fuck, but not good enough to commit to.” They’d talked it over, but she couldn’t get him to see her reasoning.

She still hadn’t left behind the pain of her divorce. It didn’t help that her ex-husband Steven married a woman two decades younger than PJ before the ink was dry on the divorce decree. A few months later, Steven and Carla had a baby. PJ had wanted another baby, but Steven kept putting her off. Apparently, Carla was more suitable to carry the offspring of his loins.

That hurt.

Schultz had gone through major changes, too. His separation after thirty years of marriage had come as a shock to him, and was followed by divorce and his wife’s remarriage within a couple of months—nowhere near Steven’s record, but still a blow. And then the biggest blow of all, the murder of his only son.

PJ felt they needed time to work through those life-altering things on their own. From years of experience as a psychologist, she knew that decisions made right now might be rebound ones, to be regretted later. Schultz didn’t worry about that. He just wanted to move on to happier times together.

She loved him. She loved his dedication, his caring for the victims and their families, his search for justice, his desire for her. Schultz had a hot core, even if the surface was chilly at times. He was a great father to Thomas, and that meant a lot to her. She wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. Just not yet.

If they got married, she couldn’t be his boss. That meant either he left CHIP or she did. It was wrong already, just having the relationship that they did. She was probably breaking regulations every time they made love.

“It’s complicated,” she ventured, her eyes not meeting her son’s.

“C’mon, Mom, that’s bull. Do you love him or not?”