Chasing The Dead (An Alex Stone Thriller) (22 page)

Alex wanted to tell her to use the five thousand bucks sitting buried in her stack of mail but was afraid Bethany would throw her out for pushing too hard and for snooping. She’d have to make that call to Child Protective Services after all, opting for sympathy for the time being.

“That’s a shitty crack in the system to fall through.”

“Tell me about it. But you didn’t come here to listen to my troubles. I guess you want to talk about Joanie.”

“If you don’t mind.”

Bethany cocked her head to one side. “Quit pretending that I’ve got a choice. Let’s go back outside. I need a cigarette.”

They sat in the folding chairs. Bethany lit up, exhaling a long plume of smoke.

“See there? I don’t smoke in the trailer because I know that’s bad for Charlotte.”

“Good for you. When did you find out about Joanie?”

“Friday afternoon, just after I got to work. The supervisor called me in to her office. There was a detective waiting for me and he told what happened and asked me to go to the morgue to identify Joanie’s body.”

“That must have been quite a shock,” Alex said.

“Not so much. With her, it was always a matter of when, not if, she’d end up like that. I told her so till I was blue in the face, but she wouldn’t listen. She’d get that drug addict’s dreamy look and say someday she was gonna find a guy who’d take her away from all that, and I’d ask her how that was gonna happen when all the guys she met just wanted her to suck their dicks, swallow, and get the hell out of their cars.”

“Sounds like you two argued a lot.”

“Pretty much all we did. I shoulda thrown her out twenty different times, but she was my sister and no matter what she did, I couldn’t turn my back on her. ”

“Must have been hard on Charlotte.”

Bethany nodded and took a drag on her cigarette. “Hard on all of us.”

Whatever grief Bethany felt was too tied up in anger and resignation to find its way to the surface, but Alex could see hints of it in her unsteady hands and glistening eyes.

“How did Joanie end up on the street?”

“You want the whole father-raped-her-strung-out-junkie sob story or you want me to just cut to the chase and tell you that selling her pussy and trading blow jobs for crystal was the only thing she was ever halfway good at?”

“I get the picture. Did she ever try rehab?”

Bethany laughed. “Shit! Whenever it was too cold to be outside and she was too mad at me to come home.”

“How’d she pay for that?”

“Medicaid, except for when she did a stint at Fresh Start, that fancy place up north of the airport.”

Alex was familiar with it. Fresh Start was the closest thing to the Betty Ford Clinic in the Kansas City area, drawing an affluent clientele from around the region. Medicaid patients didn’t fit their preferred patient profile.

“How’d she pay for a place like that?”

Bethany took another drag on her cigarette, lifting her chin and blowing out the smoke. “I wouldn’t know.”

Alex didn’t believe her, not the way Bethany looked away and her voice took on a phony nonchalance. Rather than press the point, Alex filed it under leads to follow up on, knowing she could subpoena Fresh Start for the information.”

“When was the last time you talked to her before she died?”

“The day she was killed. She called me all excited that she had some big date that night.”

“Did she say with who?”

“No, and I didn’t ask. I figured it was more of her bullshit.”

“If she did have a date with someone special and she wanted to get all dressed up, would she come here to shower and change?”

“I don’t know where else she’d go.”

“Did the detective tell you that Joanie wasn’t wearing anything when her body was found?” Bethany nodded. “Do you have any idea what she might have worn if she was going out for a special evening?”

“Only thing she had was a satiny black dress she said always showed off her tits and ass real nice.”

“Do you know if that’s what she was wearing that night?”

“Must have been because when I came home from the morgue, I gathered all her things and took them to Goodwill and I didn’t see that dress.”

Rossi’s investigative report didn’t mention finding the dress or any other clothing belonging to Joanie.

“Did the detective ask you about what Joanie might have been wearing?”

“No. Only thing he asked me was if it was Joanie lying in the morgue. When I told him it was her, he said not to worry ’cause they got the guy that did it.”

Bethany took a final pull on her cigarette, the smoke curling around her until a wisp of air coming through the trees blew it away. She turned in her chair, facing Alex, her brow furrowed.

“You think maybe she really did have a date that night and was wearing that dress when she was killed?”

“Maybe.”

“That fella they arrested, what’d he do with the dress?”

“I don’t think he did anything with it. He was living in a tent down in Liberty Park. That’s where they had sex, but he says he didn’t rape her. She told him that she had to go home to get cleaned up for some big date. That was the last time he saw her.”

Bethany gave her a long look. “So you really think he’s not the one who killed her?”

“I haven’t seen all the evidence the police have against him, but at least that part of his story matches up to what Joanie told you.”

Bethany dropped the cigarette on the ground and clasped her hands in her lap.

“Joanie always did look good in that dress.”

She lowered her chin, quiet at first. Her chest began to swell, her shoulders heaving. She snaked her arms around her middle, trying to hold back her grief, then giving in and sobbing.

“I shoulda been there. I shoulda been there.”

Alex put her hand on Bethany’s shoulder. “Been where?”

Bethany lifted her head, tears streaming down her face. “In the garage the first time our daddy raped her. On the street the first time she traded her pussy for dope. I shoulda been there, but I wasn’t. She was my baby sister and I shoulda been there. I shoulda saved her.”

She began to cough, a convulsive smoker’s hacking that forced her to stop crying. When the cough subsided, she stood, red-eyed and out of breath, ashamed that she’d broken down in front of Alex. She lit another cigarette, putting her armor back on.

“You can go. We’re done here.”

“Almost. Who stays with Charlotte when you’re at work?”

Bethany folded her arms against her breasts. “That child is ten years old. She don’t need nobody to stay with her.”

“Of course not.”

Alex walked away, stopping and turning around when she reached the end of the concrete slab. Bethany was standing at the trailer door, one foot on the step, watching her.

“You’ve got five thousand dollars sitting on your kitchen counter. That would buy a lot of therapy for Charlotte.”

Bethany glared at her, drawing deeply on her cigarette and exhaling the smoke through her nose.

“You come snooping around here again, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

“Is that money yours or Joanie’s?”

Bethany flicked the butt on the ground and opened the door to the trailer.

“Doesn’t matter anymore, now, does it?”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

PIECES WERE LINING UP, even if they weren’t quite falling into place for Alex as she drove away. Joanie Sutherland had a benefactor concerned enough about her to pay for a rehab stint at an exclusive treatment center. She was excited enough about meeting someone special the night she was killed to put on her one good dress. And Bethany had five thousand dollars in crisp hundreds sitting on her kitchen counter. Chances were those dots connected in a straight line to Joanie’s killer.

Her benefactor may have started out smitten, pretending he was Richard Gere in
Pretty Woman
or, if he was old and proper enough, Rex Harrison in
My Fair Lady
. Joanie latched onto him, street-smart enough to know a good thing when she saw one, leveraging sex for rehab, then tacking on a premium to keep their relationship a secret, adding blackmail to prostitution. Her benefactor ran a cost-benefit analysis and decided he could no longer afford her. End of a sad but familiar story. The good news was that, if Alex was right, Jared Bell was innocent.

Had Rossi not made up his mind that Jared was the killer, he might have actually done an investigation that would have painted the same picture. But he didn’t, which brought Alex back to the night in Judge West’s barn when he told her that Jared was her new client. She suspected then that the judge was fronting for someone who wanted this case closed in a hurry, and now she wondered whether Rossi’s decision not to look past Jared for a suspect was part of that effort. She couldn’t picture Rossi conniving with the judge, but a year ago she would have said the same thing about herself.

Proving all of that wouldn’t be easy. Judge West wasn’t going to find religion and confess his sins, and he wasn’t going to give up whomever he was protecting. The same was true for Rossi if his hands were dirty. Bethany knew more than she was willing to say, maybe even knowing who killed her sister. But five thousand dollars was a lot of money, and if there was more where that came from, it might be enough to soothe her grief and guilt over her sister’s death.

Alex called Grace Canfield, leaving a message with a to-do list when Grace didn’t pick up. Subpoena Joanie’s records from Fresh Start and find out who paid for her treatment. Check Joanie’s rap sheet to find out who posted her bail. Track down her street sisters and ask them if they knew Joanie’s sugar daddy’s name.

If none of that panned out, there was still Charlotte. Like a lot of autistic kids, the girl was a wanderer. A couple of years before, Alex had defended a father who was charged with felony child endangerment for not preventing his autistic son from sneaking out of the house at night. The boy was found at the bottom of a neighbor’s swimming pool. The boy’s doctor testified that nearly half of parents with an autistic child aged four or older said their child had tried to leave a safe place at least once and one in four said their child had disappeared long enough to cause concern.

Bethany must have been searching for Charlotte the day Alex found her playing in Rock Creek. That she was playing in the exact spot where Joanie’s body had been found could have been a coincidence, but Alex didn’t have faith in random chance on that order of magnitude. Since Bethany left Charlotte alone when she went to work, Charlotte might have gone out the night Joanie was killed and might have been playing in Liberty Park, maybe even in the creek, when the killer dumped Joanie’s body. If so, Charlotte might be able to identify the killer, assuming Alex could get her to talk.

It was midafternoon and Alex was famished. She headed to Hamburger Mary’s near the southwest edge of the downtown. The chain was known for its gay founders, openness to diversity, and knockout burgers, though Alex favored the GLBT, which added guacamole to the traditional BLT in a tasty salute to her world.

Her cell phone rang as she pulled into the parking lot on Southwest Boulevard, but it wasn’t the phone resting in the cup holder next to the steering wheel. It was the burner phone she’d set in the console between the driver and passenger seats, the caller ID displaying
Unknown
instead of a name.

She picked up the phone, unable to tell whether her hand was shaking because the phone was vibrating or because her insides were quaking. Judge West and his wife, Millie, were the only people who had the number for the burner phone. Millie had no reason to call. When the judge called her from his office, the familiar phone number showed up on caller ID, and when he called her from his home, his name was displayed.

Either the caller had misdialed or someone else had her number, and she didn’t want to answer without knowing who that might be. She hadn’t set up voice messaging for the phone, and since the caller was unknown, the phone wouldn’t capture the caller’s number. She stared at the phone, transfixed, waiting for it to stop ringing. Most people’s phones had voice mail. If it was a wrong number and there wasn’t an option to leave a message, odds were the caller would realize her error and not try again. If it wasn’t a wrong number, the caller would keep trying.

The phone quieted. Alex silently counted to ten, easing the phone back onto the console like it was fragile, jolting so hard when it rang again that she banged her head against her seat’s headrest and dropped the phone on the floor of the car. Unlatching her seat belt, she leaned forward, groping with one hand around her feet, accidentally kicking the phone beneath the seat. Cursing, she opened the car door, slid onto the asphalt parking lot on her knees, and stuck her head inside the car, peering under the seat. She grabbed the phone and answered.

“Who is this?”

“Why is Rossi asking me about our relationship?” Judge West asked.

Alex began to shake, her voice uneven. “I have no idea.”

“Don’t forget that if I go down, you go down with me.”

Alex heard footsteps approaching from behind her. “Like that’s news. I gotta go. Someone’s coming.”

The footsteps stopped. She could feel someone standing over her.

“Are you praying, throwing up, or just hiding from me?” Bonnie asked.

Alex shoved the phone under the seat and grabbed the inside of the car door, pulling herself up, her gut in full-tilt trampoline mode, a hot flash racing through her.

“I dropped my phone.”

Bonnie pointed to the phone in the cup holder. “There’s your phone. Is that the best you can do?”

Alex’s face was so warm she thought her eyeballs would catch on fire.

“And yes,” Bonnie added. “You’re blushing like your mother just caught you playing with yourself.”

“I can explain.”

“Me first. Sit down. In the car, not on the pavement.”

Bonnie walked around to the passenger side and got in. Alex stared at her. She wasn’t wearing makeup. Her eyes were red and puffy. Her hair was pulled back, held in place by a black headband. She was wearing faded jeans and a heavily pilled crewneck sweater. The only other time Alex had seen her leave the house looking like that was when they had to evacuate in the middle of the night because of a gas leak.