Pursuit (11 page)

“Do you mind, Willie, if Cher stays with you a bit longer?”

Wilhelmina had gotten used to Julie's nicknames for her. “Mind? Are you kidding? I wake up in the middle of the night having dreamt of cooking and cleaning up after darlin' Cher baby.” She waved her chubby fingers at Cheryl and then let out a huge laugh. “Really, all kidding aside, not a prob. Right, baby doll?”

Cheryl imitated an infant and waddled across the room toward Billie. “Cherwee wants her Aunt Billwee to make her fave-fave pasta with sausage for sup-sup.” She put her thumb in her mouth.

“Oh, now I know why she likes staying with you.” Julie smiled. “You fall for all that baby-talk crap. So, what's going on with your latest? What's his name again?”

“My latest? I haven't a clue as to what you are speaking of, madam.” Billie adapted a prim manner. “But it might be, of course, my Diet Constant. A lifestyle I've chosen to keep my figure within the boundaries of human decency.”

Cheryl quieted her giggles, hand over mouth.

“Why, just today a woman at the market asked if I
knew where the sugar-free colas were kept. I took that as a compliment. A number of people stood about, and she could have asked anyone, yet she approached me.” She fluttered her hand in front of her face as if she were having the vapors. “But if you're speaking of Jackass Johnnie, or Johnson, as he liked to be called, he beat it out of town after borrowing two hundred bucks from me.”

Julie breathed a heavy theatrical sigh. “Ah, piss, Willie, where do you get these dudes?”

“The internet.”

“You're joking.”

“Yeah, I am. I met Jackass Johnnie at a gym I was trying out. One of those free workout deals. He said he was a masseur—yeah, right. Anyhow, Cher and I will be great. Don't worry about a thing, rocket woman. You just get well.”

Julie marveled at her friend's humor. “If Cher misbehaves, call nine-one-one.”

“
Mom
.” Cheryl extended the last
m
to make the word last an eternity.

“What? I have to have your word that you'll behave. Word?”

“Yes. Word, Mom, word.”

“Love you, kiddo.”

The day had passed quickly, and Julie never missed feeling bliss when spending time with Cheryl. She loved her to distraction.

Twilight set in as she nestled into the chair by the window and gazed out at Downtown Saint Louis. She knew her pursuit of the truck driver would be consuming, and the cold cases would just have to wait. She smiled at the captain's admonishment of putting a chain on her.
Chain.
Why was that familiar? The chain was important
because—the chain from the ring that Beverly Preston had found, the one she saw in the woman's hand, where was it?

She didn't know. It could be important. But it was too late to call the State Patrol property room and her new best friend Madeline. She'd do it in the morning.

The next day, Julie felt ridiculous being carted out to the entrance curb in a wheelchair, but no sense fighting policy. It felt great to be out. Todd picked her up for the drive home.

“Before I forget it, Big Man, can you do me a favor?”

“Sure, what's up?”

“I keep going back to this cold case I've been on. Who or why would a ring be put on a chain? If it wasn't the victim's, did it belong to someone else? A keepsake? The ring got taken into evidence, but I don't know about the chain.”

“So what's your thinking about this, Sarge?”

“There might be some evidence there. The lab checked the ring and cleaned it but not the chain, at least as far as I know. Probably a long shot but worth checking.”

C
harles walked through
Legionnaire's Park. Bronze statues of fallen heroes flanked the wide concrete paths. He pushed his hands into his trouser pockets, trying to get over the stupidity of his unsuccessful recon at the hospital. But doing stupid things these days seemed to be his life's blood. He just needed to see her, to glance at his handiwork, the beautiful dark bruises around her green cop eyes.

He wanted her. The brief newspaper account of Sergeant Juliette Worth's auto accident made no mention of criminal intent. Her prognosis, according to the paper, seemed good and her release from the hospital imminent.

He tried to think positively about the events; he slotted his feelings with ease. Whether successful or not, he'd manage to find something of the truth in what he liked to refer to as “the periodic arrival of the circus.”

Rarely did the red-nosed buffoons appear; it was always men and women in their tights. The vision of the ringmaster thrilled him. The long-tailed jacket, flowing cape, often a white scarf draping his torso, and, of course,
the hat. His fingers touched the silk brim of the topper as he turned to introduce his acts.

The bareback riders. Demure women sitting with both legs on one side of the shiny beasts, their buttocks protruding delightfully as they crouched upon the undulating hind quarters of their half-ton chargers.

His ringmaster would introduce a woman—a Rosetta or a Maria Elena—who would wrap her arm around a thick lanyard and then flange her legs straight out horizontally as stagehands towed her forty feet into the air. One foot secured into the inner thigh of her opposite leg, the vulnerable Maria Elena would begin to twirl faster and faster.

The Spanish web, a marvel of grace and sex. His hero would doff his hat and encourage the throng to applaud what he had wrought. Often in his daytime dreams, the women would follow his master of ceremony into a wooded glen, his cloak a blanket to perform upon. The white scarf for later, when dreams succumbed to reality.

He stopped in front of a seven-foot bronze soldier, hand in hand with a small boy.
How cheap.

His rendition of the law enforcement pit maneuver had gone well, until the arrival of the first lookie-loos, and then the ambulance. He parked fifty yards down the road and then jogged back, hoping to finish the job. She saw him, but all cockeyed and jumbled through a maze of splintered glass and sharp-cornered metal. The wheels of her vehicle reached skyward, turning gently.

Not able to complete his task, he drifted back up the culvert and meandered through the growing crowd to the stolen truck, as wide-eyed late arrivals hurried to the overturned police car.

He recalled driving past the spectacle, seeing a tall,
sandy-haired young man in a dark sport coat bullying his way through the crowd. He looked like the one from the parking lot with the cell phone outside the police station. Were they lovers? He hoped so.

Then the deliberate drive back to town, to shed the illegally acquired truck. It disappointed him that his mission remained unfulfilled both on that day and the hour previous, which he'd spent wandering through the scrubbed halls of St. Mary's Hospital.

He sat under a flowering dogwood just off a well-used nature path.

Over the years, hikers expanded the winding trail that stretched for several miles across a vast wooded area, eventually leading to a rapidly flowing creek. In the distance, a small rundown community, unchanged over the years. A church steeple appeared slightly tilted, a general store and school long since abandoned by their people.

To the east, another group of houses, the road connecting the two settlements making a large semicircle around the dense woods.

He stopped along this road a blue moon ago to let the Nomad cool off.

While his overheated car sat ticking in its cooling process, the woods beckoned. He walked to a patch of berries alongside the road extending into a pine-covered wood. He thought back about the dense growth of underbrush and timberland, his several-day-long surveillance under this same dogwood.

Animated with constant chatter, their friendly arguing interrupted by genuine excitement at the discovery of an odd-shaped stone, peculiar-looking stick, or flower they
couldn't identify. They seemed in no hurry to get home from school, and one of them always appeared too proud, a criticism ready to roll from her tongue. Sisters, undoubtedly. Similar but different. He tried to sort out how many years it had been—perhaps seventeen. The seasons melded into one enormous tangle.

He recalled having come back after the—what should he call it?—“occasion.” But that word seemed too casual. He liked “happening.” It felt celebratory, as if it had reason to exist. His mind wandered back to the search of the grounds for his keepsake, much of it having been trampled by the authorities. He blamed himself, not for the way it was lost but for his hubris—the sheer overbearing need to advertise his accomplishments by wearing something around his neck that should have been left in his nostalgic treasure trove along with the rest.

Rising now from his mossy seat, he searched once again—more out of curiosity than hope—the brush-covered area just off the hiking path. Wondering if the slight slope in the ground would, with the yearly rainfall, carry something as heavy as his prize farther toward the creek bed, he moved downhill.

The sound, when it came, startled him. A squeaky voice, an off-key song coming from the direction of the path. The key high and tremulous, full of wispy accusation.

The words seemed cobbled together. Something about a blue-eyed girl with a wandering heart.

Come back, come back, ohh sweet little one,
your kin doth miss you so.

Oh run, please run. Blue Mountain girl,
run home this bright clear morn.

He dropped down behind a thorny bush, the spiked branches tearing at his sleeves and forearms. A woman off the path with a stick made large circles around the area he had been searching. She scratched the earth and hummed, raising her head as if sensing the air.

Run, oh Betty Blue, please run lest
you be late for school.

J
ulie had been
home for three restless days. Her limp was only a bit more pronounced, and with her shoulder strapped and supported under a generous blouse and a cut above her ear covered by her hair, one might not have known she had survived a serious accident. They would have to overlook the discoloration between her eyes, however.

If anyone asked, she would blame it on her ex-husband. “He's six foot four, can't fight for beans, but he managed to clock me in the face. I got him good, though. A size-eight hard-toed oxford right in the man handle. Blah-blah-blah.”

She called Todd. “What's doing, partner?”

“Funny you called. I was just waiting for an email from the lab before talking to you. I spoke to them this morning. Listen to this. After our talk in the hospital about ex-cons looking for tit for tat, I rechecked the debris from the stolen truck for evidence and ran a Kleenex tucked into the driver-side door pocket—mucus and a dot of blood on it. Guess what?”

“I don't know, but I'm sure you're going to tell me.”

“None of the yahoos we've managed to blood-type
over the last—how long we been partnering? Seven years, something like that?”

“Yeah, so?”

“No match. The suspect has a rare AB negative blood type. One in one seventy.”