Racing the Devil (28 page)

“I think we’ve found her. But we need you to come down and I.D. her for us.”

“Sure.” My brain still wasn’t functioning, but a vague uneasiness was seeping through the fog in my mind. “I can be there in an hour. Is that soon enough?”

His sigh was heavy. “Take your time, son. She ain’t going anywhere.”

“Aw, no. Don’t tell me, Frank.”

I could almost hear him nod. “She’s in the morgue.”

“
I
T AIN’T PRETTY.”
Frank stood beside the metal morgue table and unzipped the plastic body bag. “She’s been dead awhile.”

The smell knocked me back a step. In Nashville’s humid heat, a body could be skeletonized within a matter of weeks, but the woman on the slab was still recognizable. Barely. I covered my nose and mouth with my hand and prayed for olfactory fatigue.

“What’s awhile?”

“Probably since the night you picked her up. That’s when she apparently went missing.”

“Buried?” Burial would slow decomposition.

“He wrapped her in plastic first.” He gave a little bark of humorless laughter. “Garbage bags.”

Freudian, pragmatic, or a deliberate message?
This woman is garbage
.

What was left of her face and neck were dark red, indicating manual strangulation. A ring of livid, broken bruises marked the place where the ligature had been.

Something besides insects had been at her.

“It’s her,” I said. “Any idea who she was?”

“Hooker. Worked the Dickerson Pike area.”

My bowels clenched. Ninety percent or more of the hookers who work that area are HIV positive. “Any connection to Amy Hartwell?”

“Not that we could find.”

I tried to keep the fear from my voice, tried not to think of the pills, the pneumonia, the purple lesions that advertised the presence of Kaposi’s sarcoma. I tried not to think of AIDS.

I said, “There must be something.”

“We figure she was hired to set you up. Fingerprints, DNA. Then whoever hired her decided she was more of a liability than she was worth.”

“‘Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead.’”

“Exactly.”

I remembered the fresh bruises on her face. “She must have let him hit her.”

He zipped the bag. There was something sad about watching the opaque plastic close over her face. I thought of the note she’d left.
I’m sorry
. In spite of what she’d done to me, I felt a rush of sorrow for the person she might have been and for the pitiful, pathetic thing she had become.

“They didn’t use your gun on this one,” he said. “For whatever that’s worth.”

They
. I cleared my throat before I spoke, but my voice still sounded strained. “You don’t think I did it.”

He rolled the body back into the freezer. “If I thought you did, we wouldn’t be here. Anyway, a couple of hikers found the body out near the lake. Buried shallow, looked like something got at her, maybe dogs, maybe a coyote. That’s why they found her. Saw a foot sticking out of the ground.”

“Jesus.”

“She’s been dead about three weeks, give or take. Another hooker, works the same stretch of road, says she saw the victim get into a red Corvette at about seven-thirty the same night Amy was killed. We found gray fibers matching the ones on Amy Hart-well’s body. We figure those came from the carpet in the Corvette. No license number, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“Our witness was so hopped up on crack it was a wonder she remembered anything, let alone the license plate.”

“Does Avery have an alibi for that time frame?”

“Home in bed with his wife.”

Too bad. “She credible?”

“Credible enough, since there’s no evidence against him.”

“Heather’s friend. Where could I find her?”

“Try driving up and down Dickerson Pike until you spot a white woman with her hair a kind of purple red. Street name’s Shannon. This morning, she was wearing a leopard-print bustier and a black leather miniskirt. Black panties. Ask me how I know.”

I didn’t need to. Lot of these girls got a rush out of flashing their arresting officers.

“Mind if I go see if I can get anything else out of her?”

“Be my guest.”

I didn’t ask the other question I had, the one I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to. He answered it anyway.

“There’s something else you want to know,” he said.

“What’s that?”

He looked at the ceiling, at the shiny metal instruments, at the slanted metal tables with their faucets and gizmos. Anywhere but at me. “She tested positive.”

I’D USED A CONDOM
, I told myself. I couldn’t have been infected; I’d used a condom. But I’d performed cunnilingus on her, which was not without its risks.

If I’d known she was a whore . . .

But I hadn’t known. And what difference did it make? The risks were what they were. Only suddenly, the risk factor had multiplied.

Whoever she was, I should have been more careful.

The worst part was, it would be months before I knew. I’d have to be tested in three months, then again in three more. That was a heck of a long wait to know if you were dying.

My mouth filled with the metallic taste of genuine fear. Beatings by thugs, broken bones, a quick bullet—I’d never been too afraid of those. The quick rush of adrenaline when a gun was pointed at my head, that sudden awareness of mortality, that wasn’t fear. That was preparation. Even at Caleb Wilford’s hunting lodge, with my blood pooling beneath Frank’s hands, I’d felt more shocked than frightened. But the thought of the long slow death that was AIDS, the wasting, the cancers, the eventual dementia . . . I wondered how Jay lived with this crushing fear.

“You okay?” Frank pushed me down into a metal folding chair and handed me a cup of water.

“I’m okay.” I took a sip, noticed that my hand was trembling. Thought of Valerie. We’d used condoms. We hadn’t done anything that might put her at risk.

“You been thinking about what I said?” Frank asked. “About this being about you?”

“I’ve been thinking about it. But this pretty much proves Amy was the target.”

“How you figure that?”

“If all that mattered was framing me for murder—just any murder—they could have just planted all that evidence on Heather and left photos of
her
in my car.”

“Hope,” he said.

“What?”

“Her name was Hope. Heather was her street name.”

“Hope.” The irony of the name wasn’t lost on me. “They could have just framed me for her murder. Why kill
two
women, if all that mattered was I go to jail? And if they were going to kill both women anyway, why not just frame me for both?”

He grunted. “Who says they haven’t? Just because I don’t think you killed her doesn’t mean nobody else will.”

“They didn’t use my gun on Hope, and they hid her body. Somehow it was important for Amy to be the one I was supposed to have killed, and somehow it was important for you to think I’d taken those pictures of Katrina.”

“Just think about it, okay?” He jangled the keys in his pocket. “Somebody about your height and build. Who knew you’d be a sucker for a lady with a hard-luck story. Who knew Maria called you ‘Cowboy.’ Someone who knew the combination to your glove compartment, and that you’d have your piece in there.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I think you know.”

“No.”

“He knows the combination to the lock.”

“Hell, everybody in the family knows. Ashleigh announced it over Sunday dinner, thought it was a big joke. ‘He knows his horse’s
birthday
. It’s the combination to his glove box.’ ”

“But Randall knows the exact date.”

“It wouldn’t be that hard to find. Besides, if Randall hated me that much, he’d just shoot me and be done with it.”

“All I’m saying is, somebody knows an awful lot about you. How sure are you that Randall wasn’t banging Amy Hartwell?”

I thought of Wendy’s tear-streaked face.
Ask him where he goes when I wake up at night and he’s not there
.

“I’d bet my life on it,” I said.

“Good.” His voice was somber. “Because that’s exactly what you’re doing.”

HE WAS WRONG
about Randall. My brother might have reason to resent me, but he would never kill a woman or take pornographic pictures of a child.

I drove up and down Dickerson Pike for an hour and a half, looking for Heather’s—Hope’s—friend, seething at Frank’s suspicions and reminding myself that he had my best interests at heart.

Then I saw her, a tall girl with purple-red hair, maybe five-nine without the three-inch spike heels she was wearing. She had on black fishnet hose under her miniskirt, and nothing under the bustier, which had been laced so that a three-inch gap showed most of her cleavage and a glimpse of aureole.

I pulled over, reached across the seat, and shoved open the passenger side door. “You Shannon?” I asked.

She stared at me, chomping on a wad of gum the size of an apricot. “Who wants to know?”

I grinned and arched my eyebrows. “I have a hundred bucks says, what do you care?”

“Show.”

I slipped a hundred out of my wallet. On a normal case, this would be considered an expense, and the client would reimburse me for it. This time, I was the client, so once it left my pocket, it would stay gone.

I waggled the bill at her.

“You a cop?”

“Nope.”

She got in.

“Okay.” She slammed the door, hard. “For a hundred bucks, what the hell?”

I shook my head and pulled away from the curb. They’d go anywhere, these girls. With her friend newly dead, it still hadn’t occurred to Shannon that she might be in danger. Or maybe it had, and she just didn’t care. “Buckle up,” I said.

She gave me a funny look, but pulled the seat belt across her lap. “What gives?”

“You were friends with a girl named Hope? Called herself Heather?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I thought you said you weren’t a cop.” “I’m not.”

“What you want to know about Hope for?”

There were track marks on the inside of her arms, but she seemed to have come down from the high she’d been on when Frank questioned her.

I glanced at her from the corner of my eye. “ ‘Cause I’m the guy she helped set up for murder.”

She shrank back against the door. “Oh, my God.”

“She tell you about that, did she?”

“She called me from the dressing room when the john was buying her new clothes. Said he gave her five hundred bucks to let him beat her up, and she’d get five hundred more if she could get you into bed and bring him something with your fingerprints, a couple of strands of hair and the used rubber.”

“And it never occurred to her to wonder why?”

She popped her gum and shrugged. “Hey, man, a thousand bucks. Nobody gonna turn that down.”

“Some people would.”

She shrugged again. “Girl’s gotta live.”

A flush of anger started at the top of my head and washed downward. “You gonna live, Shannon? You got the virus? Gonna pass it to some poor schmoe who never did you any harm?”

“Hey, man.” It was her turn to redden. “You pays your money and you takes your chances. Anyway, some pig wants to pay me so’s he can rut around like some kind of animal, what do you expect? Guy’s an exploiter. He deserves what he gets.”

“For buying what you’re selling?”

“For being a pig.”

It hadn’t been like that. Had it? I’ll admit that Heather—Hope—had meant next to nothing to me. A night of pleasant company, an enjoyable diversion from the thought of Maria with D.W. But the desire had been mutual—or so I’d thought. If anyone had been exploited, it had been me.

“So.” I decided not to argue the point. “Who’s the guy who hired her?”

She snorted derisively. “You think he gave her his name?”

“Could be.”

“Well, he didn’t.”

“He have a face?”

“I expect he did.”

I gave her a look of annoyance, held up the hundred between two fingers. “Did you see it?”

“Naah. Never met him. It was s’posed to be some big secret, never tell a soul, yadda, yadda, yadda.”

“But she called you from the dressing room.”

“A thousand bucks. She got to tell somebody. Besides, I’m her best friend.” She rolled down the window and tossed the plug of chewing gum at a pedestrian. “Shit,” she said. “Missed.”

“She tell you what he looked like?”

“Don’t remember.”

“Hundred bucks,” I reminded her.

“Ain’t worth squat if you ain’t alive to spend it.”

“He know about you?”

“How should I know? I don’t know what she might of told the guy before she died.”

“You figure the guy who hired her is the one that killed her?” “Sure.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Had to keep her quiet, didn’t he?”

“Then, if she’d told him about you, I reckon you’d be dead by now.” I gave her a minute to think about it. When fear flickered across her face, I said, “You see him when he picked her up?”

Her eyes were wide. “Uh-uh.”

“She tell you what he looked like?”

She leaned her head back and squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t know.” A tear trickled from the corner of her eye and down into her ear.

“You do know.”

“Blond,” she said. I could be called blond, but there was no reason for me to try to frame myself.