Whatever Remains (13 page)

             
She attempted a lame smile that sent deep grooves skating along the sides of her mouth. “I have all this energy…” She shrugged.

             
“Mrs. Latham…” Trey started, “Alicia, we have some things we’d like to go over with you, if you have the time.”

             
Her brows slid up into her hair. “Have you found anything out?”

             
“Let’s sit down somewhere,” Ben said, evasive on purpose. Trey struck him as the type who would make assurances just so a victim’s family could sleep easier. If Ben was going to lie, it was going to be to wring more information from someone, not to pretend that the case was moving in a certain direction.

             
She led them into the kitchen; it was a round Formica table, white laminate counters, brown linoleum, clean pine cabinets and a yellow check curtain over the sink window. It was a small, depressing thing compared to the kitchen at Canterbury – more like his own kitchen at home – but it was clean, like the rest of the house, and smelled vaguely of lasagna. “Something to drink?” she asked. “I can put coffee on.”

             
“No, no, we’re fine,” Ben said, but she went to the pantry for a can of Folgers grounds anyway, and wasted a good five minutes of their lives scooping them into a filter and switching on the machine. As it started to brew she came and pulled out the chair closest to him, fixing him with a pleading look.

             
“What’d you find out so far? Anything?”

             
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” Ben said, and watched her brows pucker together like she might become emotional. “We need to ask you about some of your neighbors.”

             
Fear streaked through her; Ben could see it flash in her eyes, tighten her lips, freeze her hands on the tabletop. “My neighbors?”

             
“We have a list,” Trey said, and pulled it from inside his jacket, unfolded it and put it on the table in front of her. They’d agreed, in the car, not to lead her, but, rather, to let her read through the names and pick out the ones who struck her as possibilities. “We have reason to think that Heidi may have been in a nearby residence shortly before she was found.”

             
Alicia studied the list, bewildered. “There’s dozens of houses down here – on the road that back up to us. And there’s woods and pasture and…” She shook her head. “How could you know? Will you search every house?”

             
“Look at the names, please,” Ben instructed, “and tell us if anything jumps out at you.”

             
She did; as the coffee bubbled down into the pot with a homey sound, she traced a finger down the double column of addresses, murmuring the names to herself.

             
“Have you had any disagreements with anyone?” Trey prodded. “Anyone who Heidi spends any time with?”

             
“Heidi has friends at school. She doesn’t visit down the street except for at Jade and Jeremy’s and with Tina Davis, but…” She sucked in a breath. “Redding. The Reddings: Scott and Lydia and their boys.” Her eyes lifted, a little wild.

             
“They said you’d called the police to their house,” Ben said. “Is that true?”

             
She nodded. “Those people are
awful.
Just ‘cause they have Land Rovers and Mercedes and fancy clothes and that big house – they think they can do whatever they want.” She scowled. “Their oldest, Jared, he hosted a party over the summer while his parents were gone and it was
crazy
. There were teenagers everywhere and they rolled my house; three of them went down the street and tried to break into Jade’s barn so they could ride her horses.” Ben made a mental note to confirm the story with Jade. “And someone had a gun; they were firing shots off into the air. The music was so loud it was making
my floors
shake.” Her lips were pressed in a tight, angry line. “If it hadn’ta been me, someone else woulda called the cops that night. It was one of those parties you hear about on the news: the ones where kids overdose and drown in the pool.”

             
“What’d the officers do who responded?”

             
“Scott and Lydia had to pay a fine out the ass. Jared got sent off to some retreat for spoiled kids with drug habits.” She scowled down at her hands. “Scott went nuts. He came over here one night while we were eating dinner – right after the party. He beat on my door so hard I was afraid to open it, but I did, and he
screamed
at me.” Her eyes widened as she remembered. “He said, ‘I’m gonna beat your ass if you ever even
look
at us again, you bitch.’ He said that,” she exclaimed, “where my girls could hear!”

             
Ben jotted fast, shorthand notes on his pad, adrenaline circling in his veins as he imagined the scene: Scott Redding crouching under the back window, hissing, luring Heidi out into the night, clapping a hand over her mouth so she couldn’t scream, her biting him and tearing loose long enough to scream anyway…

             
“What happened after that?” Trey asked.

             
“I locked all my doors and got the baseball bat outta the front closet. I slept with the thing that night, right by my hand if I heard so much as a sound.”

             
“He didn’t come back, though?”

             
“Not then, no. About a month later, I called the fire department on him. He and his boys dumped gas all over their pampas grass and lit it up. You’re supposed to trim those back, you know, but they burned them. And not even at the right time of year; I think they did it just for fun. Just to watch it burn.” She traced one thumb over the other and a shudder went through her. “Some of the leaves and dead grass caught fire, too, and there was so much smoke. The wind was blowing toward my house and I was afraid the fire would spread some more. So I called the fire department.”

             
“Did he retaliate?” Ben asked. “Yell again?”

             
“No.” She shot a look up through a fallen lock of hair that was almost guilty. “But he gave me this look, when I was taking the trash out. I was up by the mailbox with the big rolling can and he just stared at me. At first, I was just glad that’s all he did – that he didn’t bite my head off again – but the next morning…”

             
Ben could hear his pulse in his ears. Maybe it was sick, but there was something thrilling about catching a thread like this and unraveling it, learning there was a fox among the hens and loading up his shotgun. “What?”

             
Another shudder went through her, harder this time. Her voice shook. “There was a dead squirrel on my front porch the next morning. It-it had been cut open.” She drew a finger down between her breasts and across her stomach. “All its guts were pulled out on the concrete.” She made a choked sound. “It smelled awful.”

             
“And you think Redding did this?”

             
“He hunts,” she said. “He takes the boys out somewhere and they bring back deer and turkey and stuff. They have the heads mounted and eat the meat; there’s a workshop in his basement where they…cut open the bodies or whatever it is they do.”

             
Ben traded a look with Trey; the kid was having a hard time hiding his own fresh-lead excitement. “Mrs. Latham,” Ben said, careful to keep his voice neutral. “When was the last time you had any sort of disagreement with the Reddings?”

             
She thought for a moment, rubbing at a spot between her brows with her fingertips; the skin looked too loose and sagging. “Two weeks ago,” she said at last. “Our mail got mixed up and when I took it over, Jared answered the door. He said, ‘You probably stole it, bitch,’ and slammed the door in my face.”

             
Bitch
: if nothing else, the men of that family had complicated vocabularies.

             
Alicia gasped. “Do you think –  ”

             
“We don’t think anything yet,” Ben lied smoothly. “We’re just gathering information. We also need to ask you about your ex-husband.”

             
Her frown was automatic and disgusted.

             
“What can you tell us about him? His relationship with the girls?”

             
Her ex’s name was Gene, and he lived in Boston with his current girlfriend and however many kids he’d sired with her. In her words he was an aimless loser who never held down a job for more than a few weeks and whose greatest love in life was marijuana. He’d sent Heidi a birthday card, three years ago, when they were living in Tennessee, but that was the last they’d dealt with him. Ben made the appropriate notes, but it was looking like he wasn’t involved in the least with the murder. Alicia’s coffee finished brewing and Ben declined a second offer; instead, he led Trey out the back door and promised to pop back in before they left.

             
“Shit,” Trey said as soon as the back door was shut behind them. He sucked in a deep breath of evening air and shook his head. “You think Redding’s our guy?”

             
“I think.” Ben pulled his mini Maglite from his jacket pocket. “That we need to expand the search of the backyard. And not make super obvious facial expressions in front of the vic’s family.”

             
Trey ducked his head in embarrassed acknowledgement and reached for his own flashlight.

             
The yard itself was small: a patch of brown grass littered with pine cones and twigs. Alicia had been right about the wildness; at the property’s edge, a slow downward slope met a ravine before climbing back toward the row of homes that backed up to Iris Lane. The ground was covered by drifts of last year’s dead leaves, brown and crackly. And the trees were just thick enough to encourage the mind to play tricks: shifting shadows, things crunching in the leaves, snatches of light that could have been children or fairies or nothing at all. Two hundred yards to the right, Canterbury’s black board fence separated the woods from thick grass pasture. It was mind-bending to be so close to Jade and in this capacity; it made his palms itch. To the left, a narrow footpath through the leaves headed up the hill toward the Redding place. Darkness was approaching, and the shadows lay like stripes over the forest floor; the path looked snaky and dark and exactly the sort of thing kids would want to go sprinting down, off on some make believe adventure.

             
“This way,” Ben said, and started down it, Trey falling in step behind him.

             
“Okay, so, for sake of argument,” Ben said, half-turning to talk over his shoulder. “Let’s say Redding had had it up to his acorn-sized balls with Alicia being a busybody. So he decides to get a little revenge.”

             
“Dead squirrel leads to dead Heidi?” Trey asked.

             
“He’s no stranger to killing. And whoever got Heidi didn’t mess around; her killer knew exactly where to stab her: no hesitation, no slipping, no additional marks, save the bruising.” He stopped in the middle of the path and turned to his partner. “So he lures her out here, hides, and jumps her. Grabs her around the middle,” he hooked an arm through empty air, “and,” he stabbed at an imaginary neck with his fist.

             
Trey was scratching at his five o’ clock shadow, staring at the ground. “Then he takes her up to his basement where he dresses his deer and cleans her up.”

             
“Means, motive, and opportunity,” Ben said, and broke into a ground-eating walk up the hill.

             
Like the Lathams, the Reddings didn’t have much of a backyard; it was a patio, a narrow ring of planted flowers, and then wilderness. Ben skirted wide, not wanting to be seen from inside the house, staying in the shadows of the trees. The entrance to the basement was on ground level, beside the garage doors, and there was a window. Ben motioned for Trey to be quiet and slipped up against the stone face of the house; braced his palm on the window and put his face right to the glass. The lights were off, so he clicked on his Maglite and panned his beam through the window, squinting through the reflection. Something flared bright and silver: a sink. A huge stainless sink. And a countertop. And a gruesome wall of hanging implements.

             
Ben waved Trey up beside him and moved the beam across what he’d found; he heard Trey suck in a sharp breath.

             
They didn’t speak until they were back on the path, headed for Alicia’s house. “Okay, what are the odds that the neighbor
just happens
to have the perfect place to wash a body?” Trey asked.

             
“Slim,” Ben said. He clicked his light on again and swept it across the path and the leaves surrounding. “Look for something.”

             
Trey complied without asking.

             
Dry and black, three perfect drops, Ben found blood on a leaf half-fallen over the path. He snapped on a glove and picked it up by its stem between thumb and forefinger, passed it to Trey once he had his own glove on. Trey was breathing through his mouth, staring at the blood speckles like they could speak to him. “We gotta call the lab and get people down here.”