Lark (2 page)

He loved his daughter. At one time she had been the only firm personal relationship he had. If she were only ten again and they could canoe and walk in parks as they had done so often in the past … Lark hated nostalgia and shook his head to erase the images.

He left the pickup and glanced down the street past the rows of identical two-family homes toward the university campus three blocks away. Three blocks! As far as his daughter was concerned, it may as well be thirty miles. He strode toward the entrance to the second-floor apartment.

He wasn't surprised that the door bell for her apartment was immobile. It obviously hadn't worked in years. He opened a punctured screen door and tried the inner entrance. It swung back to his touch to reveal a steep stairwell leading up to a dark interior.

“Cathy! You there?”

His voice seemed to echo up an endless hall. He shook his head and trudged up the stairs. The door to the apartment was cracked and he pushed it open. A hallway entered directly into a living room that ran the length of the apartment. A sparse accumulation of cast-off furniture was spotted around the bare floor. Empty beer cans and piles of magazines were scattered indiscriminately around the room. A heaped ashtray squatted on the floor next to a worn leather easy chair.

Lark bent over and pinched some of the ash from the overflowing ashtray. He sniffed the mixture slowly and then brushed it off his hands.

“If you haven't already discovered it, it's pot.”

Lark whirled as his right hand automatically reached for his holster. His daughter stood in the bedroom doorway. She wore a man's shirt open one button too far that fell to midthigh. Her long blond hair was tousled and stringy. “You need to wash your hair.”

“Oh, Jesus! You haven't seen me in five months and your first sentence is an order. Damn!” She found an empty package of cigarettes, crumpled the paper, tossed it across the room, and continued searching. “And before you snap at me, you sniff my ashtray.”

“We don't bust people for smoking anymore.”

“I'm sure that's ruined your decade.” She found a partially filled package and lit a cigarette before plopping down on the couch.

“I didn't come here to fight with you, honey.”

“Why did you come?”

“Last week I stopped in to see Dean Branigan at the university. He tells me that they'll readmit you to the summer session on a conditional basis. If that goes well, you can matriculate in September.”

“I don't want to go back now or anytime soon.”

Lark brushed some remaining flecks of ash from his fingers. “I'm going to stop sending money. I'm in no mood to support your present habits.”

“I'll get a job.”

“Doing what?”

“They need night help at the Seven-Eleven on Grove Street.”

“That place has been held up three times in the past year.”

“Then you had better put a stakeout on it or whatever you call it.”

“I'm not in the street anymore,” Lark said.

Her eyes flickered and she became slightly less belligerent. “Oh. What are you doing?”

“I don't know yet. They'll tell me this afternoon.” He didn't want her pity. He had never indulged in it himself, and was damned if he would accept it from her. He paced the room and paused to look out the rear window down at a well-kept vegetable garden that took up nearly all of the rear yard. “I want you to go back to school, Cathy. It's important for you.”

“I'm not ready. I couldn't concentrate. During my last semester I'd read forty pages of an assignment, and an hour later I wouldn't have the slightest idea what I'd read.”

Lark turned, eager to grasp at a slim straw of hope. “Go back into it gradually. Take it easy this summer, do one, maybe two courses. Take French, you always loved French and it came easy for you; then maybe a music-appreciation course.”

“Clapping for credit? I'll think about it,” his daughter said.

A young man dressed only in Jockey undershorts appeared in the bedroom doorway and looked out at Lark in astonishment. “Holy shit!” he said before he disappeared back into the bedroom, slamming the door.

“Who the hell is that?” Lark asked.

“That's Craig.”

“Is he a student at the college?”

“He dropped out.”

“Does he work?”

“He's keeping a journal. He wants to be a poet.”

“A poet! Jesus H. Christ, a poet! I'm supporting him too. You know, I ought to shake this place down. I might just find enough goddamn grass to bust his ass with a possession-with-intent-to-sell.”

Cathy, her face sharp in anger, catapulted to her feet. “You do that, Daddy! Bust his ass real good. That's how you get your kicks, isn't it?”

Lark took an angry step toward his daughter and stopped stock-still as he fought for control. “You know me better than that,” he said in a husky voice.

“Do I? Do I know you as well as Mama? Is that why she did it?”

Lark turned away from her and walked to the door. “You had better take that job at the Seven-Eleven.” He took the steps two at a time and walked out into a bright sunlight that made him blink. He slammed into the pickup and screeched from the parking place. He gasped in a near groan as the truck reached the corner. He loved her and yet it always went so badly these days. And then, as he knew they would, the pictures returned: Cathy taking her first step, Cathy at a dance recital in her first long dress, and Cathy nearly nude with a young man living with her …

For the second time that day Lark confronted Frank Pemperton. During a time that now seemed a thousand years ago, he had played football with Frank at Middleburg High. Then, Pemperton had been a lightning end with a miraculous ability to pluck impossible throws from the air. He was now the aging athlete, his jowls were pronounced, and his belly protruded over his belt. His eyes were heavy as he shuffled through the personnel folder while occasionally glancing at Lark.

“I had thought about putting you in charge of the high-school drug-orientation program, but I reconsidered because of your language.”

“If you try to put me in the records room, I'm going to shove that folder down your throat.”

“You'll go where I send you or get out!”

“How about school-crossing guards? That would get me out of the way.”

“You'd have everyone on stakeout for child molesters. I want you off the street, Lark. That's what I've been trying to tell you. We created you, and now we've got a responsibility to see that you don't hurt anyone.”

“Jesus, where did the newfound ethics come from?”

“Some of us grew, Tommy.”

“And some of us are pompous asses.”

“You know, buddy, I can have you up on charges for a remark like that.”

“That would solve our little problem, wouldn't it?”

Pemperton's voice softened and his hands slid forward on the desk almost as if he were reaching for Lark. “I know it's been tough. But we're trying to help. We all know what you've been through since Margaret died and with what's happened with the girl—”

Lark sprang from the chair in a swift movement, rushed to the side of the desk, and grasped Frank's neck with his right hand. “Don't ever say that again! Don't even think that!”

With both feet braced against the desk, Frank Pemperton pushed his swivel chair backward and forced Lark to relinquish his grip. “You crazy son of a bitch! You want assault charges? Is that what you're after? You bastard. You've gone over the hill!”

Lark's fists clenched and unclenched as he turned away. “Okay, so I overreacted.”

“That's one hell of an understatement.” The phone rang and Frank snatched it from its cradle. “Yeah … I don't want to be … When?… Who's on it?… What's the first report?… Tell the crazy bastards not to touch a thing until a senior officer gets down there.” He slammed down the phone.

“What's that?”

“A body has been found down on Mark Street. Young, girl, probably a street OD.”

“Who took the call?”

“Car thirty-two, Najankian's driving.”

“Horse Najankian? He'll muck up the scene in ten minutes.”

“The watch commander will put a senior man down there in minutes.”

“Give it to me, Frank.” Lark's voice had sunk to a deep register and he realized with impatience that he almost sounded imploring. “What the hell. You don't have anything else on tap for me right now.”

Pemperton looked dubious. “I want you off the street, Lark.”

“A kid DOA isn't really the street.”

“I don't know what in the hell you think it is.”

“I need a transition case, something to work off the pressure.”

“No roughing witnesses.”

“You know me better.”

“That's what I'm afraid of.”

“Come on, Frank. I'm asking you.”

Their eyes met until Pemperton looked away and picked up the phone. “What the hell. All right. Take it, and I'll notify the watch commander.”

Lark drank a can of beer as he drove to Mark Street. The case would be routine—most were—but it would allow him to take time to decide on a future course of events. As much as he hated to do it, he would have to come up with a workable plan for his future and get Frank Pemperton to go along.

A squad car, its dome lights flashing, was parked across the entrance to Mark Street. A uniformed cop leaned against the hood and made gestures to detour traffic. Lark gave the patrolman a curt wave and angled the pickup between the squad car and the sidewalk. Mark Street was a short thoroughfare that ran a parallel course to the Interstate and was separated from the nonaccess highway by a thin strip of woods along the right-of-way. The houses were of twenties vintage and once were husky workingmen's homes filled with the tantalizing smell of fresh-baked bread. They were now the final refuge of disparate members of society's permanent underclass.

Number Twenty-one was midway down the street, with two squad cars, parked nose to nose, in front of the slanting front porch. A rusted car and a peeling van were jammed into a narrow driveway by the side of the house.

Lark left his pickup parked in front of the drive. He saw a small group of men and women in the rear yard and two more uniformed cops. He strode toward them while simultaneously clipping his open badge case to the front of his jacket. People parted before him. “Get on the radio and call for at least four more men,” he snapped at a bewildered Horse Najankian. “Move it!”

“Yes, sir.” Najankian bolted for his squad car.

“Get these people back,” Lark barked at another cop. “Where is it?”

“All the way to the back, right at the edge of the woods,” the second patrolman said as he began to move people away from the rear yard.

Lark stepped over two tires and moved cautiously around a rusting engine block and through ankle-high grass at the rear of the property. He saw the huddled form ten yards to his front, but purposely kept his eyes averted from the corpse. Once he became engrossed in an examination of the body, his attention to any other surrounding details would be lost. He moved slowly through the littered rear yard.

He heard the distant rumble of eighteen-wheelers on the Interstate, which he knew was only fifty yards away, but he could not see the highway due to the intervening dense second-growth timber and underbrush. Lark stepped into a small clearing and stopped.

The body lay curled on its side with one hand outstretched toward a three-foot-high column upon which was affixed a Christian cross in an upside-down position.

“Christ,” Lark said aloud. “This I don't need.”

He walked slowly around the cross and column. It was his initial guess that the column was formally the base of a birdbath or similar lawn ornament. The cross was a cheap affair that could be purchased at any religious-goods store. He turned his attention down to the body.

Her denim-clad legs were clasped together and drawn up toward her chest. While one hand reached toward the cross, the other was pinned under her body. She lay on her side, as if she had crawled here to nap. She wore a light cotton blouse unbuttoned to the waist, and it was obvious from the protruding right breast that she did not wear a bra. She wore a pair of L.L. Bean's Gumshoes, and as he circled her body slowly, he saw a mass of dried blood at the rear of the head.

It was not a drug OD.

After he completed the circle, he looked for the first time into her face. She was young, he would judge somewhere between seventeen and twenty-two. Her features were grotesquely frozen in a grimace of anger and hate.

He had seen that same scowl earlier in the day. It was the expression he had last seen on his daughter.

2

Two more police cars arrived at the small house on Mark Street with dome lights flashing and sirens blaring. It was going to be a goddamn circus, Lark thought. Horse Najankian lumbered back toward the murder scene and Lark raised his fist in the air and gave a pump signal for him to hurry.

“Get back on the radio and call … Wait, you had better write this down.”

“Yes, sir.” Najankian searched through his uniform pockets until he found a small pad and a stub of a pencil. He looked at Lark expectantly. “Shoot, Lieutenant.”

“I need the assistant medical examiner here as quickly as possible, an ambulance, and Sergeant Ralston with his camera. Am I going too fast?”

“I got it,” Horse said as he scribbled frantically.

“Have the watch commander call the chief medical examiner in Farmington and tell her that we need a fast autopsy on this one, and tell her that I'll be up there tomorrow to sit in. We'll need lights at the scene in case we work through dusk, so get the fire department to send a portable generator and lights. I want this whole area cordoned off into ten-meter search grids.” Lark pointed to two other patrolmen working their way across the littered rear yard. “Tell those two guys to start interviewing everyone in each house on the street except this one.” He pointed to the house directly in front of them. “I'll take this one myself. Who called it in?”