Hush (26 page)

He had two bar stools, fake black leather with arms, and he sank into one now like it was a Barcalounger. Flipping open the file, he had to blink several times because Coby Re ndell‘s face seemed to be superimposed on everything he was looking at. Recognizing his own idiocy, he allowed himself a few moments to review the evening they‘d spent together and then, with a smile on his lips, he dragged his attention to the file‘s contents.

Twenty minutes later he felt that awareness that always grabbed him like a cold hand on the back of the neck.

Among the pages was a small, typewritten observation at the bottom of a page that listed the condition of the body.

Stubs of hair at victim’s crown. Section missing.

He heard his own voice: ―You looked in the envelope?‖

And Coby: ―It was a lock of blond hair. Blondish, I guess, with some light brown in it.‖

He stared unseeingly across the bar and into his own kitchen.

The question was: when had that lock of Lucas‘s hair been taken? Postmortem? Or had

someone snipped it off as a souvenir?

Rituals. Rites. I will see all the bitches soon, those that remain.

Once upon a time they were the royalty of the school.

I’m always with them, though they don’t know it. Annette would have betrayed me, and
when the opportunity arose, I had to kill her. Her gurgling death was necessary.

I always do what is necessary.

I saved Lucas from a life not worth living. He was staring at the sky, broken. His beauty
fading. If he had lived, he would have not been the same. I turned him over and pressed his face into
the cold salt water.

And I took care of that other bitch, that outsider, with her big lips and thrusting thighs who
dared to poach from me, taking what wasn’t hers. I found the means to crush her throat.

But when I see the realm from Rutherford High, I will decide who dies first.

Coby, I whisper to myself. Soon. . . .

The memorial service for Annette took place on Wednesday on a dry, windswept November afternoon with leaves being whirled around in small eddies in the parking lot and mud puddles slowly drying in the respite of two full days without rain.

Coby held the collar of her coat close as she skirted the remaining puddles and headed to the door of Cramer House, a hall in Northwest Portland that had once been an Elks Lodge but had been taken over, renovated, and was now an event destination. She‘d worn a black skirt, a pale blue sweater, and a black raincoat that hid everything and offered another layer of warmth.

Jean-Claude, Suzette, Juliet and Nicholette, and Nicholette‘s daughter, Paige, were standing just inside the double doors, greeting people as they entered an anteroom that led into a larger room with a stage on one end. Dave was a few steps farther inside, and after murmuring condolences to the Deneuves, Coby slipped into her dad‘s arms as he gave her a heartfelt hug.

Yvette and Benedict were nowhere to be seen.

Faith appeared a few moments later and also hugged their father, then Coby and Faith found a couple of chairs toward the rear of the room where they had a bit of privacy.

―Do you know I had to talk Mom out of coming,‖ Faith said.

Coby shook her head in disbelief. ―She didn‘t like Annette. At all.‖

―What the hell is going on with them?‖ Faith muttered, glancing back to Dave.

―I‘m pretty sure I don‘t want to know,‖ Coby murmured.

McKenna and Big Bob Forrester came in together and squeezed in a few rows ahead of Faith and Coby, McKenna giving Coby a quick smile of acknowledgment. And behind them, something of a surprise: Donald Greer with Wynona. Wynona wore a long brown wool coat, her face as cold and rigid as a gravestone. If she saw Coby she gave no sign of it.

Annette‘s voice suddenly clamored inside Coby‘s head as if she were speaking to her again:
Wynona made two suicide attempts, one with pills, one by slitting her wrists. Neither effective. I
don’t want to sound like a complete bitch, but they were cries for help, not a serious attempt to kill
herself, and she got a lot of attention. Then she decided to dedicate her life to social work, helping
others, but she’s not very good at it.

―What‘s the matter with you?‖ Faith whispered to Coby.

―Nothing.‖

Just before the Deneuves took their seats Yvette blew in, Benedict in tow. Yvette wore a black turtleneck, black jeans, and black boots; Benedict was in a navy sports jacket over blue jeans.

He wore a red tie and yanked at his collar with two fingers, looking about as uncomfortable as any eleven-year-old could.

Surreptitiously, Coby glanced around for Danner. She‘d seen Jarrod and Genevieve arrive, but if Danner was on the premises, he was keeping a low profile. Settling in, she drew a breath and waited for the service to begin.

Danner drove with controlled urgency toward Cramer House, aware that he would likely miss the opening remarks and/or prayer. He‘d planned on calling Coby and seeing if she needed a ride, but things had started running at work almost from the moment Danner, and then Lieutenant Drano, had okayed Celek to move to burglary and leave Danner on the Lloyd home invasion/homicide case on his own. Things were coming together fast now, a snowball rolling down a hill with increasing speed. He was counting the hours until Elaine Metzger returned, but in the meantime those hours were flying by, leaving him no time for the Deneuve homicide or much of anything else.

He‘d had to put off seeing Coby and he had yet to tell her about the swatch of hair that seemed like it might be Lucas Moore‘s. He‘d called Clausen with the information and he‘d said simply, ―Huh,‖ and that pretty much was how Danner felt, too.

Huh.

Meanwhile, inconsistencies in the Lloyd case had started coming together and the picture that was developing wasn‘t pretty. Mrs. Lloyd had been shot in the back of the head in her bedroom, unresisting, while downstairs, shortly thereafter, Mr. Jarvis Lloyd was shot in the arm and smacked hard against the head with what appeared to be the missing 9mm. The daughter, appearing apparently unexpectedly, had taken two bullets as she turned and tried to run out the front door from which she‘d arrived. She‘d died on the entry floor.

Jarvis Lloyd‘s version was that he‘d been unconscious at the time of his daughter‘s killing and only came to when the house was full of police. When he was told what happened, he broke down and tried to prevent the EMTs from taking his daughter‘s body from the house. He‘d never been able to do more than weep every time Danner, or Celek, or the officers who ‘d first arrived at the scene spoke to him.

Police had canvassed the area, asking if anyone heard or saw anything that might give them a clue to the perpetrators. The Lloyd house was on a quiet tree-lined street on Portland‘s east side, a neighborhood that was currently going through a gentrification with Victorian and Craftsman style homes being beautifully restored. Most of the residents were young urban professionals and weren‘t home at three o‘clock in the afternoon. Lloyd was there to take his wife to the doctor for ongoing treatments for breast cancer.

Lloyd said two Hispanic men burst through the door, shouting in Spanish, that one shot at him straight on and the other must have attacked him and knocked him out. He didn‘t remember anything past the sound of the shot and burst of pain in his arm. He didn‘t know they‘d killed his wife, or his daughter, until he was told at the hospital by the police.

Danner had first interviewed the man at the hospital after he‘d had surgery on his arm. Jarvis wept and wiped his eyes and said next to nothing, and when Danner remarked, ―Your wife must have heard the shot, but she just stayed in the bedroom and let the killer shoot her in the back of the head.‖

―She was in her bedroom, getting ready,‖ Jarvis said. ―That‘s where she was.‖

―But she didn‘t run. She didn‘t try to come to your aid. It looks like she was seated at her makeup desk and let the killer walk in, get behind her, and shoot her. Looks like she just toppled off the chair.‖

―She was getting ready,‖ he said again, starting to blubber.

Danner didn‘t press the issue at that time. Maybe Mrs. Lloyd had just froze at the sound of the shot. Maybe.

Lloyd couldn‘t talk about his daughter at all. His lower jaw trembled and his eyes were wild and he cried silently or made hiccupping noises. His grief was real.

Danner had tried to talk through his thoughts with Joshua Celek, but Celek didn‘t quite get the process, so he gave up. He‘d taken the trip last weekend with Faith to kind of step away from the investigation for a few hours, clear his head, and look how that had turned out.

But then, an unexpected break in the case: the deaf woman who lived catty-corner from the Lloyds had seen someone on the street she didn‘t recognize near the time of the killings. She might be deaf, but she was one helluva nosy neighbor and she kept her binoculars up to her eyes at almost all hours, hiding within the third-story bedroom of her house, watching the world go by in a perfect audio void. Had it not been for Mrs. Berney, the killer would not have been seen.

But Mrs. Berney was new to the street. She‘d moved into her daughter and son-in-law‘s house the previous month and quickly made herself the neighborhood watchdog, albeit a silent one.

One of the street cops discovered her by accident when he was interviewing the son-in-law, who hadn‘t even bothered to mention that his mother-in-law lived to spy.

She told the officer she‘d seen the woman who flew out of the Lloyd house. Had described her black wool coat and boots and baseball cap. A strange choice for a woman who was dressed as nicely as this one, the baseball cap, Mrs. Berney said with a sniff, unless she had something to hide.

Mrs. Berney had noted the time and date and written it on the back of an envelope, just in case.

When Danner interviewed the older woman, her daughter took him aside and said that her mother was having mental issues and might be making the whole thing up. She was wont to write notes and squiggles and concoct elaborate plots.

But the crime scene techs had lifted a woman‘s boot print from outside the front door that hadn‘t matched any of the mother‘s or daughter‘s footwear, and Danner thought maybe Mrs.

Berney was sharper than people gave her credit for. Not that a good defense attorney couldn‘t use Mrs. Berney‘s suspect mental capacity against her in a court of law, but Danner didn‘t intend to go that direction.

He chose to keep interviewing Jarvis Lloyd, whose attitude went into a sharp decline when the police started looking through his personal records. How could they think he could be involved in the death of his beloved Angie? His only child? He loved her more than life itself. If he could, he would trade places with her.

Danner responded that he believed him. But he also felt Jarvis was a first-class bastard who had set up the murder of his wife and then run into problems when his partner in crime, the woman in the baseball hat, killed the wife but then took out the daughter, too, when Angie unexpectedly showed up at home and caught the female killer with her father. Angie turned to run but was shot twice, and then the killer simply stepped over her, walked out the front door, and left.

To be seen by Mrs. Berney.

Lloyd was beside himself. Sobbing and shuddering or silently staring with horror-stretched eyes, as if he had looked into the bowels of hell. Maybe he had. If he was as guilty as Danner believed, he‘d killed his wife and his beloved daughter.

Danner had put more pressure on the man this week. Subtly, at first, but closer and closer to the bone as they got nearer to Lloyd giving it all up. Jarvis had a lawyer who was scrambling to keep control, but the man was disintegrating. Sooner, hopefully, than later, he would give up the name of the killer and then the whole thing would be over.

The only progress he‘d made on Annette‘s murder was to phone Yvette and talk to her.

She‘d been hostile and unwilling, and pretty much told him to fuck off. She said she‘d spoken to Detective Clausen and that ‘s all she was going to do.

Now Danner wheeled into the lot, checked his watch, ground his teeth, and then hurried hatless through a faint rain to the front door. He let himself in and opened one side of a pair of double doors, then slipped inside the main room and found a place to stand in the back, behind the row of pews.

Pushing the Lloyd murder and Yvette‘s objurgation to a corner of his mind, he searched the room for a glimpse of Coby.

The crowd slowly quieted and someone coughed as Coby stared toward the front of the room, her mind full of uncomfortable memories of Annette‘s floating body. She wondered vaguely about the necklace, and the envelope with its lock of hair, and why Annette had mentioned Dana in a way that incensed Yvette.

Her attention sharpened as her father walked to the front of the room and up several steps to a raised dais.

―Thank you for coming,‖ he said. ―Annette would have appreciated it.‖ A long pause and then, sounding almost apologetic, he said, ―I did love her. It‘s no secret we had a pretty big age gap, but she was . . . a wonderful partner. I‘m going to miss her.‖ He paused a moment, collecting himself, then invited anyone else to come up and say a few words. Jean-Claude took him up on his word and shared stories from Annette‘s youth that were funny and touching, but once in front of the group he couldn‘t seem to let go of the spotlight.