Damage (16 page)

Ray turned, hoping the other person hadn't overheard him, and found himself facing an elderly man in a white volunteer coat. His name tag stated simply "Harold, Volunteer." He was a grandfatherly, gentle looking old man. Ray couldn't help grinning at the sight of him.

"I was just admiring the painting," Ray said.

Harold beamed. "Old Bertie was a wonderful gal."

"Her daughter looks exactly like her," Ray said, turning back to the portrait.

"That she does," Harold said.

"It's a shame what happened this weekend," Ray said.

"Terrible," Harold said, shaking his head. "Oh, just terrible. Who could want to do such a thing to such nice young people?"

"You know them well?" Ray asked.

"Not the husband so much, but the daughter, yes," Harold explained. "Bertie and I used to work shifts together a couple afternoons a week. Corrie would often stop by to visit her mother. They were very close. That was before this new building went up, of course, back when the main entrance was over on the east side of campus. I was glad Bertie lasted long enough to meet her grandchildren. They were the light of her life at the end of it all."

"So she only died recently, then" Ray interjected. "Because the littlest one can't be more than two or three years old."

Harold nodded with his eyes closed. The reminiscing appeared to have made him emotional, though he did his best to maintain his composure.

"What about Mrs. Lowson's husband, Avery? Did he come around much?"

Harold cocked his head and pursed his lips disapprovingly. "My mother taught me to keep my mouth shut if I didn't have nothing nice to say. Let's just leave it at that."

"Fair enough," Ray said, smiling for what seemed the first time that day. "Say, you couldn't tell me what room they have her daughter in, could you?"

Harold's head shook again. "I'd like to help you, young man, I really would, but they have security watching her and the police said family only, not that there's much family left to visit. You aren't family, are you?"

"No," Ray admitted. He instinctively held out his hands, palms up, and looked down at the cuts on them. "I was one of the people who found her yesterday. And, well, I've just been curious how she's doing and thought... Don't worry about it."

Harold gently took one of Ray's wrists and gazed intently at the many little scratches. He shot Ray a glance and said "Come on."
 

A few minutes later, Ray was in the Green Elevator holding a small scrap of paper with the number 5203 written on it in Harold's shaky script. He stepped out onto the fifth floor and followed signs that led him around a glass-walled waiting room and to a nurse's station. Officer Jason Hussey of the Glen Meadows Police Department had his elbows resting on the high counter and his rear sticking out into the corridor as he tried to make conversation with a pretty, blond nurse filling out charts at the station. Hussey was the officer Ray usually spoke with each morning to get the Glen Meadows criminal activity report for the Citizen-Gazette. A tall, lean man in his mid-thirties, he also was a personal friend of Billy's. The two hunted deer together occasionally and honed their shooting skills at the local target range. He noticed Ray only when they were a few feet apart.

"Oh, hell," Hussey drawled. "They let damn anybody wander in through them doors, don't they?"

Ray leaned on the counter next to the policeman. The young nurse looked up at him distractedly and immediately went back to her chart.
 

"Chief Yeager still letting you pretend to be a cop?" Ray asked.

Hussey leaned over and tapped the desk to get the nurse's attention. "I can arrest this man if he starts causing any trouble. I could shoot him, too, but that'd cause me an awful lot of paperwork."

"Can't imagine what that's like," the nurse complained as she tried to concentrate on the charts in front of her.

Ray chose not to respond to Hussey. He didn't have the mental capacity at the moment to exchange good-natured verbal volleys. Instead, he asked how Correen Wallace was doing. The question caught the nurse's attention.

"Are you related to Mrs. Wallace?"

"Huh? No, I'm not a member of the family."

The nurse gave Ray a long, critical stare. "I know you," she said.

"Do you take the Citizen-Gazette?" Ray asked. "I write a column every Wednesday. My picture's always at the top of it."

"That's it," she said, then stared at him again. "Is there something you need here?"

"Relax. This is the white knight who rescued your patient," Hussey proudly said, landing his broad hand between Ray's shoulder blades with a wince-inducing smack.

The nurse turned as an alarm bell somewhere nearby began to ding softly. She told Ray to wait with Hussey while she checked on her patients. Hussey leaned over, resting his head in his hands to watch her walk away.

"That is a thing of rarest beauty," he said dreamily.

"And you're a married man," Ray said, though he couldn't disagree with Hussey's assessment. When the shapely distraction was out of sight, Ray spotted room 5203 and asked if he could visit Correen Wallace.

"You boys really should come together," Hussey complained. "Chief'll give me hell if I keep letting people in and out all day."

"What are you talking about?"

"Billy," Hussey said. "He was here about an hour ago to see her. What the hell happened out there anyway? I never seen him more shook up. He stayed in there twenty minutes, or so, and If I didn't know any better I'd say he was praying."

"Praying?"

"That's what it sounded like to me," Hussey said. "Either that, or he was talking to himself, cause she's unconscious. If he was trying to talk to her, I guarantee it was a one-way conversation. All I heard clearly was him telling her he was sorry."

"He was acting funny at their house when we first found her," Ray said, thinking back to the day before, recalling how Billy stood gawking over her. "I can't remember him ever being affected like that by anything."

"It happens to all of us at some point. You feel like ain't nothing gonna surprise you no more, and then something just hits you hard in the chest." Hussey popped his fist against his sternum. The natural joviality of his face diminished. "With me, it's kids. First time I saw one I was still pretty new, working over near Charlotte. Pretty little black girl, all bruised up, clothes a mess, just staring up at the sky like she was daydreaming. I had all to do to keep from bawling like a newborn right there at the scene."

A brief silence passed between them. Ray had never seen a serious side to Hussey, and he wasn't sure he liked seeing it now. Life was easier to understand when simple people remained simple.

"Can I peak in from the hallway or something?" Ray asked. "I just feel like I need to see her. Make sure she's okay."

"That's about the same as what Billy said. You gonna start praying, too? Might as well turn the whole damn place into a church." Hussey sighed and gave Ray a dubious glare. "All right, take a minute, if you need to. I'll tell miss pretty britches I gave you permission if she squawks about it."

"What are you going to tell miss pretty britches?" the nurse asked. They hadn't heard her return to the station. Ray felt his face flush. Hussey just smiled and told Ray to go on.

The patient in the bed was almost unrecognizable as the spritely partygoer Ray had bantered happily with at the groundbreaking ceremony just two days earlier. With the blinds drawn to block the afternoon sun, the room was dark and quiet. No machines beeped, no little lights blinked. The only medical equipment he spotted was an intravenous drip leading to a port at her wrist. Swelling and dark purple bruising distorted the right side of her face. Her right arm was hidden under the blanket, but appeared to be in a cast. At the foot of the bed, her toes poked out into the open air from the end of a cast.

A rolling table next to the bed held two small floral arrangements and many get well cards. He read a few of the cards -- mostly simple notes from friends and acquaintances by the look of them. Nothing on the table came from her father. Avery Lowson was so concerned for his daughter he couldn't even be bothered to send her flowers or a five-dollar mylar balloon from the gift shop. He probably hadn't come to visit, either. The old man could barely walk the length of his living room without stopping several times to rest.

Standing at the foot of Correen's hospital bed marveling at the thought of that fragile woman being tough enough to survive her many injuries, Ray wondered how long she had waited in the bushes after falling from the window like a bird shot from the sky. Had she been conscious the entire time? Maybe she watched her husband's killer casually stroll away, assuming she was dead. The added security, lame as it might be at the moment, made perfect sense. Whoever did this to her might return to finish the job. Unless, of course, he had already committed suicide by suffocating himself in his own garage after sobering up enough to realize what he had done. If only she could open her eyes long enough to tell him what happened. Just a minute would be all he would need to confirm or deny his suspicions, but she didn't move. Ray tried to imagine Jake pulling out a gun and shooting Evan Wallace in the chest, then turning to chase Correen Wallace up the stairs. Yet again, he failed to convincingly cast Jake in the role of killer. His brain simply would not allow the images to form.

Correen took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. Ray watched her face closely and was relieved when it became clear she wasn't waking up. He gently pulled down the blanket to cover her exposed toes.

Shuffling footsteps in the hallway startled him. He turned to see Officer Hussey standing in the doorway. "Time to go," Hussey said in a quietly respectful tone.

Shafts of light snuck through cracks between the vertical blinds and were inching across the room toward the patient. Ray motioned to Hussey to wait and went over to the window to straighten the blinds. He could see the entire visitor parking lot through the tinted window. Parked not far from a dormant crepe myrtle was Ray's beige compact car. It was easy to spot, even easier now because a black Camry had pulled up behind it and a man was standing next to it peering in the driver side window. Ray hastily motioned to Hussey to join him at the window.

"That's my car," Ray whispered.

Hussey squinted, but didn't seem to spot anything troublesome.

"That one there," Ray said. "Fifth back from the end. The Tercel. Somebody's checking out my car."

"That's definitely somebody," Hussey whispered in agreement. "It ain't a crime to admire another man's chariot. Mind you, that ain't much of a thing to admire."

"Can you see who it is?"

"From up here?" Hussey made a half-hearted attempt. "Looks like a man wearing a hat. Is that one of them Humphrey Bogart hats?"

"You mean a fedora?"

"I don't know what you call 'em, but it's definitely the kind they wear in old black and white movies," Hussey said. "Uh oh. I guess you got nothing worth stealing. He's heading back to his car."

"I saw that car parked down the street from where I live," Ray said. "It was there around lunch time."

"You think somebody's following you?"

Ray thought about it. Maybe it wasn't the same car he saw parked on his block. Maybe the guy in the fedora was just some random person doing some random thing that involved snooping around his car. Maybe the guy had been parked there earlier in the day and lost his phone, or his wallet, and was back looking for it.

"Maybe I'm just being paranoid," Ray whispered as he watched the black car pull away and leave the parking lot.

The pretty nurse cleared her throat. They turned to see her standing in the doorway with a perturbed expression on her face. She gestured vigorously for them to leave the room. Ray caught a last glimpse of Correen Wallace unconscious in her bed before exiting. He left Hussey to contend with miss pretty britches while he retreated to the elevator. The lobby was empty. Harold had gone home for the evening and a tent card propped atop the welcome desk announced the station would be staffed again at seven in the morning. The few clouds in the sky were painted magnificent shades of red and purple by the sun that shone up at them from low over the horizon. As he lost himself in the colors, he thought about Jake and Correen Wallace. He couldn't conceive of two less likely people to have crossed paths. The idea seemed ludicrous to anyone of a reasonable mind, but Ray had to keep reminding himself Jake might not have been of reasonable mind when the crime was committed.

Many questions buzzed in his head. He wanted to question Billy more about the details of Sunday afternoon. What had Jake told him about the job interview with Evan Wallace? Had Jake made any specific threats that correlated to the ways in which the Wallaces were attacked? And why had Billy shown up at Marco's to bring Jake home when Amy said he was supposed to be pulling the first half of a double shift down near Oxton almost twenty miles away? The last time Ray knew the two of them to have been in close proximity of each other, Billy was trying to express his feelings toward Jake with a Louisville slugger. Why the sudden interest in Jake's welfare?

Wednesday, Part I

Paranoid or not, when Ray left the hospital he inventoried the interior of his car to make certain nothing was missing. He drove directly home from the hospital and tried to watch television, but found it impossible to concentrate. Each time he allowed his thoughts to wander he ended up with images of the dead or dying people he had met in the past few days. Sometimes, he would envision Jake's grotesquely bloated face, some times Evan Wallace's mannequin-like body, and other times Correen Wallace lying in the bushes with her leg against the foundation of the house at a nauseating angle. Turning off the TV didn't help, and he didn't feel like listening to music, so he left messages for Becky and Emily on their voicemails and busied himself tidying the small apartment until two in the morning. He carried his laptop with him from room to room to check the weather and keep up with news from around the world. Apparently, it was a slow night everywhere. He peeked out the window several times to see if he could spot the black Camry.