A Welcome Grave (9 page)

He got to his feet and unlocked the door, held it open for me. I was halfway through it when he reached out and took me by the arm. It was a slow motion, almost gentle, but his grip was like a pair of forceps. His slender fingers closed around my elbow, his thumb finding a pressure point there and grinding against it. He held me like that and leaned his face sideways, looking up at mine.

“Last night you suggested I check the dead man’s thumbs for hammer impressions.”

“Did you?”

“Uh-huh. And they were there. I found that out, and I thought, shoot, that is one smart guy we’ve got sitting in the jail. Started to feel bad, you know? Then I began to wonder if it wasn’t
too
smart. Hammer impressions on the thumb. Hell of a thing to think of in the first hour after witnessing a traumatic event like that.”

“I’m a detective, Brewer. It’s kind of ingrained in me by now.”

“Coroner tells me that the hammer impressions could have been left by someone placing the gun in the victim’s hand and using his thumb to pull the hammer back. Said it would have had to be done very fast, immediately after the shot was fired, but that it might be possible to leave those impressions and then freeze them when circulation stopped.”

I reached down and wrapped my fingers around his wrist, pulled his hand from my elbow, and then used my forearm against his chest to push him back. I moved just as he had—aggressive disguised as slow and gentle. He kept his
eyes on me and didn’t attempt to resist. I turned away from him and walked through the little hallway to the next locked door. Then I looked back at him expectantly. After a moment’s pause, he walked down and unlocked this door, too.

“It’s been a blast, Brewer. Damn shame we’re never going to see each other again.”

“Oh, we most certainly will. I intend to be present at your murder trial.”

He had those eyes that never told whether he was kidding or serious.

T
he sun was a smashed ball of red in my rearview mirror when I reached Cleveland. I made one stop for lunch, as I’d missed out on a tasty jail breakfast, but otherwise stayed on the road and kept the speed up, not really caring if I got pulled over. When you’re a suspected murderer, tickets don’t mean a damn thing. Lincoln Perry, highway rebel. I needed to get a tommy gun, be ready to go down in a hail of gunfire if it came to that.

I came up I-71 into the city, heading for the west side, and home. When I got to Brookpark, though, I pulled off onto I-480 and started east. I was wearing the same clothes I’d had on the day before, unshaven and tired and stiff, but I wasn’t ready to go home just yet. After seeing a guy blow his brains into a pond and spending a night in jail, waiting for some cop to lock his fingers into my arm and call me a murderer, I had a few questions of my own. A detour to Pepper Pike seemed very much to be the order of the evening.

The house and all its windows were gleaming in the sunlight when I pulled into the drive, the glass reflecting a crimson glow back into my eyes. I got out of the truck and laid my hand against the hood, feeling the searing heat of an engine that had been driven long and hard. The longer you spend around a machine, the more human it begins to seem. Like that old Steve McQueen movie where he’s the engineer on the navy ship.
Sand Pebbles
, was it? Good movie. He loved that damn ship engine. McQueen dies at the end, though.
Trying to save a woman, if I recall correctly. Probably should have stuck to the engine room.

I walked up the path to the house and onto the porch with my head down, thoughts of McQueen and engines running through my head, and when I reached the door I saw it was already open, Karen looking at me with red-rimmed eyes.

“I heard you drive in.”

“Yeah?” I went in without waiting for an invitation, walked past her, and into the living room. I dropped down into the same couch I’d taken on my last visit and waited for her to join me.

She came in a minute later, after shutting the front door and fastening all the locks. I heard her do it—the snap of the dead bolt, the rattle of the security chain. I listened to that and thought about the way she’d rushed to the door at the sound of my truck and how she’d spilled the wine during my last visit when the phone rang. Pretty damn jumpy.

“They told me what happened,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, but they were the sort of jeans and sweatshirt that you pay three hundred bucks for in a store where all of the employees have their nails done weekly and none of them has ever purchased a rock album.

“Who did?”

“The police in Indiana. They called me last night.”

“Did they tell you they were keeping me in jail?”

Her eyes went wide. “No. What? No. They just said . . . the detective said that he needed to get your statement and needed me to verify that what you said was true.”

I grinned. “They took their time verifying it. Thoughtful enough to allow me a comfortable cot behind bars while they sorted it out, though.”

She tugged the sleeves of the fancy sweatshirt down past her wrists.

“Lincoln, I’m sorry. I didn’t know this would happen. You hadn’t even told me you were going to Indiana.”

“For the amount of money you were throwing around, I thought I should make the notification in person.”

“I understand. I just can’t believe what happened.” Her hands now out of sight, tucked into the sleeves, she folded her arms across her chest, hugged them under her breasts. Her eyes passed over me only in flitting glances before settling on some more reassuring, inanimate object in the room. The base of the floor lamp seemed to be her favorite.

“It was pretty surprising,” I agreed, watching her with a hard stare. “The
crazy bastard put the gun in his mouth and blew out a nice chunk of his skull. He was closer to me than you are now when he did it.”

Her eyes rose, surprised by my description. “How awful.”

“Hell of a strange thing,” I said, and realized I was echoing exactly what Brewer had said to me the previous night. I’d taken his role now. We’d see if I had any better luck at it.

Karen didn’t say anything, just sat there, eyes on the base of that floor lamp.

“Imagine,” I said, “killing yourself just before you inherited a few million. I mean, what the hell, you know? Talk about bad timing. The really crazy part, Karen? He knew his father was dead. Told me that as soon as I saw him, sitting there with a gun in his hand and a bottle of whiskey beside him.”

She pulled her head back, gave me the wide eyes. “
What?
”

“Didn’t know that?”

“No, of course not. How could he possibly have known?”

I looked at her for a long time. She held my eyes, but she wasn’t comfortable doing it.

“You must be pretty damn stupid,” I said, “to think I wouldn’t be able to tell when you’re lying to me, Karen. If there’s one thing I remember about you, it’s what you look like when you lie. That’s pretty well ingrained in my memory.”

She recoiled, pulling back into the couch and releasing her arms from that squeeze she was giving herself. “Excuse me?”

“Do not lie.” My voice was ice. “I watched someone die who could just as easily have shot me as himself, and maybe was thinking about doing just that. Then I spent a night in jail, and now some Indiana detective wants to throw my ass back in there for good. My temper, Karen, is going to be pretty damn easy to trip. So don’t you dare tell me another lie.”

She looked like she was about to cry. “Lincoln, I haven’t been—”

“You knew Alex and his son had been in contact. When I told you the man knew his father was dead, you pretended to be surprised. That was stupid. First of all, because I know when you’re lying, and, second, because the cop that called you would have told you already. He’s a good cop, and he would have been awfully curious about that detail. He would have asked you about it. Asked how the kid might have found out. So why are you lying about it now? Because you already knew they’d been in contact. Yet for some reason you sent me to look for the son, and I’m damn lucky I didn’t end up dead.”

By the end my voice was rising and she was crying. I sat where I was and let her cry. The hell with her. I could close my eyes and see that gazebo again, see the gun moving in the shadows and hear the sound of the hammer pulling back, and I could
feel
the bullet heading for me, just like I had in that half second before Matthew Jefferson dispatched himself to places unknown. She wanted to cry? Shit.

My chest was rising and falling, a hit of adrenaline working through me. I sat there, watched her cry, and took deep breaths. Eventually, I spoke.

“Tell me something that’s true, Karen.”

She wiped her eyes. “It was all true.”

“Bullshit.”

“It was true! They’d been estranged. For years. I had no idea where Matthew lived. None. I didn’t have a phone number for him, or an address.”

“You knew they’d been in contact recently. Why didn’t you just check the phone records?”

“All I knew at the time was that he had called Alex. Incoming calls don’t show up on our phone records, only what you pay for.”

We sat and stared at one another. The room was growing dark, but the pale hardwood floors still glowed with a faint hint of red. A clock ticked on the wall, and a mild breeze scattered leaves out on the deck, but otherwise it was silent.

“You’re a very rich woman now that your husband and his only other heir are dead,” I said.

The fear and apprehension went out of her eyes, replaced by anger.

“What? Surely, Lincoln, you’re not trying to say—”

“I’m not. But some other people might try to say some things, Karen. The things that people say when a woman becomes rich amidst a pair of mysterious deaths. And if I believed those deaths were unconnected incidents, and unconnected incidents that you know absolutely nothing about, I’d tell you to ignore the talk and go on with your life.”

“But you don’t believe that,” she said slowly.

I shook my head. “I don’t believe it, because it’s not true.”

“I don’t know what’s true, either, Lincoln. I really don’t.”

“You know more than me.”

“And you want to hear it?”

“I’ve got cops trying to pin a murder charge on me, Karen. Yes, I damn well want to hear it.”

She stood up from the couch and walked into the kitchen. I stayed in my chair and watched while she took a bottle of wine from the rack on the counter. She lifted it free, hesitated, and put it back before crossing to the refrigerator and returning with a bottle of mineral water. I waited while she sipped it, her eyes on the floor.

“There’s something very wrong with this family,” she said.

I almost laughed. No shit, Karen? Something wrong with this family? Where in the last week of torture killings and bizarre suicides did you get that idea?

“I met Alex through work—”

“I know,” I interrupted, and I couldn’t keep the cutting quality out of my tone. I knew awfully well how she’d met Alex Jefferson, though, and I didn’t need to be told again. Karen had been working in records with the district attorney’s office when she’d made the switch to the private sector and taken a nice salary boost to work as a paralegal for Cleveland’s most prestigious business law firm. Yes, I remembered that well, indeed. I’d splurged on champagne the night she took the job, bought a bottle of Dom on a cop’s salary, and toasted to her future success with Alex Jefferson.

She looked at me with sad eyes. “If you want to hear what I can tell you, you’ll have to listen to me talk about Alex. I can’t sit here and give you facts, because I don’t know any. All I can tell you are the changes I saw in my husband.”

I didn’t realize I was grinding my teeth until I had to loosen them so I could speak.

“Tell me, then.”

She took another drink of the mineral water, then put the top back on the bottle and set it on the table beside her.

“I met Alex when I began working with his firm. He was kind, and he paid attention to me. He took me to lunch my first week with the company, and then that became a regular pattern. I remember thinking how busy he was and being surprised that he’d make time for me every week. He asked about you a lot, and at first I thought that was just his way of reassuring me that his interest wasn’t romantic. Then I began to get the idea that it was just the opposite, that he was feeling me out to see how serious we were.”

To see how serious we were. Apparently, the word “engaged” hadn’t meant a lot to Jefferson. Maybe in his world, though, an engagement—or even a marriage—was no indication of how serious a relationship was at all.

“I know you don’t want to hear this, and I’ll spare you the details. I still feel awful, Lincoln. You probably don’t believe that, and maybe you never will. But
the reason I’m telling you this is because I have to explain what I saw happen to my husband.”

I was leaning forward, elbows on my knees, eyes on the floor. I reached out and ran my hand through my hair as she spoke, squeezing it until the roots pulled hard at my scalp.

“You, and everyone who knew us, probably had a lot of theories as to what attracted me to Alex. I’m sure everyone talked about the money, though I’d hate to think they truly believed I was so shallow. I’ll tell you what the attraction really was, though—he
needed
me. He seemed desperate for me. He used to joke about how much he enjoyed my youth and innocence, but after a while I saw that they weren’t all jokes. That I represented something that he thought he needed very badly. He told me once that I healed him, and he said that seriously. As seriously as anything anyone had ever told me. And it was attractive. Compelling, somehow. Here was this man who seemed to have everything, and yet what he thought he needed was a twenty-five-year-old girl who worked in his office and had aspirations of law school.”