Body Parts (Rye & Claire 1) (13 page)

Rye took a center seat on the sofa directly in front of a munchies-laden coffee table and a widescreen TV.

“Perfect timing, Rye,” Bobby
Panther said, as he stood in front of the TV, wearing a wide,
mischievous grin. “The entertainment is about to start.”

Bobby was Phil’s younger
brother by two years. He taught math and coached wrestling at Southern
Oregon University, and was the mastermind of the party. As he started
the video tape and stepped away from the TV, a groan went up from the
room even though every eye was glued to the scene unfolding on the
screen.

A voluptuous blonde wiggled
out of her clothes and climbed into a waiting tub of bubbles. She slid
under the white foam, closed her eyes and moved her hand beneath the
water. As she moaned and sighed, the water lapped over the edge of the
tub onto the floor. The camera followed the water onto the bathroom
floor where the scene segued to the water in a swimming pool and the
sound of another female moaning.

“Hey my pool didn’t come with a sound track,” someone in the back of the room hollered.

The camera panned to a
knothole in a wooden fence; an eye peering through it. The scene changed
to reveal what the peering eye was seeing—two nude bodies on a
manicured lawn by the pool. The camera zooms in to a tight shot of the
couple’s union, then pans up to the woman’s face…

Rye suddenly leaned over the
edge of the sofa, forgetting about the Doritos chip he was raising to
his mouth. “Stop the tape!” he yelled.

“C’mon, Rye, don’t be a prude,” Bobby said.

“No, really, stop the tape. I know that woman.”

“We’re glad for you, buddy. You can take the tape home if you’d like. That is, if Claire doesn’t mind.”

The room erupted in laughter.

Nobody tried to stop him as
Rye stepped around the coffee table and walked up to the TV. “Someone
show me how to pop the tape out.”

“Shit, OK, but sit down. I’ll do it.”

“No kidding,” Rye said. “That
woman came up to me at the scene of an accident yesterday and asked for
help. I just want to see where it was made, that’s all.” Bobby handed
him the tape.

“Hey man, you could have at
least waited until the end,” Bobby said. “But since you didn’t, you have
to promise to stick around and watch the other one.”

“Sorry,” he said, heading back to his place on the couch, tape in hand.

Phil came over and sat next to Rye who was trying to read the tiny print on the tape’s label.

“You’re really serious about
this aren’t you?” he said, taking the tape from Rye. “Looks like the
name of the company is Lewd and Lascivious.”

“It was the pleading look in
her eye, there was nothing wrong with her, I mean she wasn’t injured.
Her husband or whomever the guy was she was with, was the first on the
scene of an accident and had set out flares. I got the impression that
she didn’t want to go with him. I just don’t know, and now here she is
in a porn flick. Maybe this guy is forcing her to perform. I feel like I
should do something.”

Phil put a hand on his
friend’s shoulder. “Bounce this off Claire, see what she has to say. Oh,
and don’t worry about the guys. I heard a rumor little brother is
bringing in a lap dancer.” Turning to get up, Phil looked at Rye and
said, “I don’t mind you taking the tape, just get it back to Foxy Lady
Video by noon tomorrow.”

Claire was reclining on the
couch reading when Rye walked in. She spotted the tape in his hand.
“What, you won the booby prize?” she said.

“Very funny. I’ve got something for you to look at.”

Rye walked across the room to
the VCR where he inserted the tape. “Remember my mentioning that woman
who asked for help at the I-5 accident? Well, take a look at this,” Rye
said, facing Claire, totally unaware that his tape had been playing.

The TV screen was filled with a woman’s head bobbing up and down. “Oh shit, sorry.”

He bent down and pressed
rewind, which made her head bob even faster, only backwards. Rye stopped
it at a scene where the couple on screen were all over each other. He
let the tape run until it came to the close up of the woman’s face.
Pressing still, the tape paused.

“There,” he said. That’s her, the woman from the accident. She said her name was Crystal.”

When he turned to Claire her
expression was etched in stone. “You forgot something when you did
maintenance yesterday,” she said.

Rye was taken aback, here he was confronted by a mystery and Claire didn’t seem to care.

Standing she lifted out the jump kit from behind the couch and placed it on the coffee table between them. “Open it.”

“But the tape and the woman,” Rye said.

“Relax, open it.”

Coming around and dropping
into a squat in front of the coffee table Rye lifted the twin latches
that held the lid shut, pulled it back and found himself staring at a
video tape. “What the hell is this?” Rye said.

“I don’t know how it got into
your jump kit but it’s got your tape beat hands down, it also has your
girlfriend on it,” she said.

Rye traded tapes and pressed start then walked around the coffee table and sat beside Claire.

It was immediately apparent
by the overhead angle and the fish eye lens that this was a surveillance
tape. It was looking down on three different sets; it took in
everything from people standing off the set to the far side of the scene
and the backdrop. In the first set, on the far left of the screen, a
naked woman was talking with a man holding a clipboard—he seemed to be
giving her directions. The middle set was more bed than floor, but was
empty. The far right of the screen, the third set, was alive with
action. The distortion of the camera lens made it impossible to discern
what was happening, but after several minutes, three men stepped away
and the woman’s face was center screen for about thirty seconds.

“That’s her, isn’t it? Where
was your jump kit yesterday that she had the chance to put a tape in it
without you knowing?” Claire said. She got up, walked around the coffee
table and popped the tape out. “More important, why did she slip you
that tape? What did she want you to see?”

She tossed the video on the coffee table as she came around to sit next to Rye.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

Rye was staring at the tape
from the jump kit. “I don’t know, but this woman came to me for help. I
feel like I have to do something.”

“Why don’t you talk to Paul Casey, as a PI he’s probably seen a lot of this kind of thing.”

“Good idea. Paul must deal with this stuff all the time. Did you watch the whole tape?”

“No. It started grossing me out. Women aren’t into watching like men are,” Claire said.

* * *

“Casey investigations, Paul Casey speaking.”

“Paul, it’s Rye. How you doing?

“Fair to middlin’. What can I do for you good buddy?”

“I’ve got a need for your expertise.”

At the mention of business,
Paul changed gears. “Tell you what, I never do business over the phone,
just bad policy. But I do have a long lunch, day after tomorrow. Let’s
meet then.”

“Great, Paul. Spencer’s OK?”

“Yeah, fine. You buying? Say, I won’t be facing an attorney will I?”

“No it’s nothing like that. So, twelve o’clock? And yeah, I’m buying.”

“Twelve, and if I’m a couple minutes late just cool your heels. See you then, bye,” Paul said.

“Bye, Paul.”

Chapter Twenty Two

Raven reservoir sits nestled
in the Cascade Mountain range. From the town of Medford, Oregon, you
can take Reader Road, the more meandering route, or Hillsboro Drive,
about five miles shorter at a distance of seventeen miles. Either will
take you through beautiful forested mountains to the man-made lake. Some
days they drove Rye’s ‘71 VW bus carrying the kayaks, and spent the day
paddling around the lake. But no stop today, so they decided to take
Claire’s 1963 Austin-Healey convertible.

She tapped the brakes then
downshifted as the Healey headed into a curve. “So you have a noon
appointment with Paul? What did he say, will he take on the case and
find the girl?”

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t talk business over the phone. Said policy didn’t allow.”

Rye pitched a little to the
right as they entered the next curve. He liked Claire’s driving, she was
aggressive and self-assured, plus she had the reflexes of a cat.
Generally, when they went anywhere together Claire drove, but Rye
usually drove the ambulance.

“Hey you see that?” Rye said.

“What?”

“That blue spot on the embankment. Pull up at the next turnout.”

They’d driven Hillsboro Drive
hundreds of times in the years they’d been together. She knew every
turnout by heart and they’d stopped at all of them at one time or
another. The road cut into a mountainside so there was mountain on one
side and a deep ravine that turned into a canyon on the other.

“It’ll be just a bit to the next one,” she said.

Rye had unbuckled his
seatbelt and was bending in half, rummaging around under his seat for
the binoculars. By the time Claire turned out and stopped, Rye had
located the blue dot again and identified it as a car.

He handed the binoculars to
Claire. “Look there, just to the left of the group of pines, what do you
see?” She scanned the embankment until she found the trees then panned
to the left and down just a little.

“It’s a little sports car.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t look rusted or old does it?”

Claire brought the binoculars down so she could look without their aid then brought them back up to her eyes.

“I’m sure we would have
noticed that bright blue last week when we came this way,” she said
“This is as close as I can get, the next shoulder isn’t for about
another mile,”

“This’ll work,” Rye said,
hopping over the door rather than opening it. He walked to the edge of
the shoulder where the embankment started. By the time Claire reached
his side he was peering at the car through the binoculars again.

“You better have a look,” he said, handing them to her. “I think somebody’s still in it.”

“Oh shit, you’re right. And I don’t see any movement.”

They kept a jump kit, rope,
gloves and flares in the trunk. Rye looped one end of the rope around
the front bumper and threw the rest over the embankment. “Are you sure
you don’t want me to go?” Rye said.

“Not a chance. I’ll repel
down to that row of trees, and work my way over to the car. If I need
you to bring the jump kit, I’ll whistle. No whistle, no kit.”

Rye watched her progress then
used the binoculars when she disappeared behind the row of pines and
reappeared next to the car. Claire had barely looked in the window when
she started waving and shouting for Rye to come down. She didn’t
whistle.

The repel was easy and so was
moving along the line of trees, as long as he maintained a grip on
either a tree or its branches. When he reached the car, Rye was out of
breath.

One look and he knew why they
didn’t need the jump kit. Claire was braced against the angle of the
slope using just one hand on the car to keep from slipping.

The car didn’t look like it
had rolled. It was as though it had been driven to the spot next to the
pines and parked. “Watch your step, the rock is crumbly and I’m not sure
how stable the car is,” Claire said. She reached in the driver-side
window and pulled the body off the steering wheel by its shirt collar.
“Better take a look at this.”

Rye stepped and slid a few
inches, then stepped again until he was just behind Claire, looking over
her shoulder. The man behind the wheel looked like he’d just arrived:
no bugs and just a few flies.

“What is it?” Rye said, looking through the window.

“Brace me up so I can use both hands,” she said.

Rye slid his feet around,
clearing away the rocks in one spot until he stood on solid ground, then
grabbed onto one of Claire’s belt loops with one hand and put the other
against her lower back.

“Take a look.” Claire said,
reaching into the car with her newly freed hand and lifting up the
drivers’ shirtfront. “Far right side.”

After a moment of silence, she looked back at Rye. “Stomach not face,” she said.

“Oh yeah, shit, he’s been eviscerated. I’ve seen enough, let’s get back to the car and call the cops.”

* * *

Claire coiled up the rope and placed it back in the trunk while Rye called on his cell.

“Fifteen minutes,” Rye said, as he tossed the phone into the car.

The police arrived first,
with a fire engine close behind. They grilled Rye and Claire about how
they found the car—and the body. Any other time they would have stayed
in order to fill out a report, but it was their day off and both were
eager to get back home.

Claire left the winding turns
of Hillsboro Drive behind, accelerating onto I-5 for the six-mile
stretch that would take them to Medford, exit 29. They drove along in
silence, both caught in their own thoughts about the little blue sports
car and its driver.

Claire gave Rye a quick look as she sped up and changed into the fast lane.

“What’s up, and why were you looking at his face?”

Rye seemed pre-occupied. “I recognized him. He was on the other porn tape Phil showed after I took the first one.”

Claire turned her head just a
bit to make sure Rye could see the face she was making. “Is that all
guys do at bachelor parties, watch porn?”

Rye settled back into the
bucket seat, straightening his legs and folding his arms across his
chest. He sat up abruptly as they passed Exit 29. “You just passed our
exit!”

“The guy worked at Medford General,” Claire said. “His I.D. was on the passenger seat. Doctor Frank Mason.”

Claire pulled into general parking. “Where do you think we should start?”

Rye hopped over the door and stretched. “For all we know the guy has his own practice with hospital privileges.”