Stalker (9780307823557) (7 page)

“But he said he didn’t know anything. He told me he was playing basketball and when he got home his mother told him about the murder.”

“That’s all he said?”

“That’s all, Mr. Maldonaldo. Honestly.”

“It takes too long to say ‘Mr. Maldonaldo.’ Call me ‘Lucas.’ ” He stretched in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, his elbows poking out like sharply bent chicken wings. “Now, you’ve learned lesson one, Jennifer. Get names, get addresses, get facts, and write them all down.”

“Everything? Even stuff that isn’t important?”

“How will you know what’s going to be important and what isn’t until all your facts are gathered?”

Jennifer shrugged.

“Keep a small notebook with you, something you can carry in your purse.”

“Okay.”

“A lot of what a private investigator does is nitty-gritty stuff, looking up information in county and city record departments, in credit unions, state offices, and so forth. Getting that information is the background to investigations. So … get that notebook.”

Jennifer nodded impatiently. “Aren’t we going to go out and talk to someone or do something?”

“Yes,” he said, “but slow down. First, I’ve got some information to share with you.” He picked up a small notebook covered in imitation black leather, flipped a few pages and studied it. “Elton Krambo was released from prison on parole two months ago. He regularly reports to his parole officer in San Antonio. As far as the officer is concerned, Elton’s come up clean.”

Jennifer sat upright. “But it isn’t far from San Antonio to Corpus Christi! He could have been here and his parole officer wouldn’t have known about it!”

“That’s right.”

“So why don’t you tell the police and have him arrested?”

“On what evidence?”

“On—well, he’s a rotten person, and—Damn! You make everything so hard!”

He slowly put the notebook back on the table. “You want to give up?”

“No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound off. I’m just impatient.”

“I know you’re impatient, and it’s the worst thing you could be. Impatient people miss important facts. Impatient people charge into a case without getting sufficient evidence. Sometimes impatient people get killed. Do you get my point?”

“I couldn’t miss it.”

Lucas picked up the notebook and again thumbed through the pages while Jennifer clenched her teeth and her hands and tried not to shout.

“As for Darryl. You told me he had come in from Arizona early Wednesday morning on a Trailways bus. Right?”

“That’s right.”

“There were no early Trailways buses from Arizona or any points west scheduled for Wednesday-morning arrival. Are you sure he didn’t say he’d arrived the night before?”

“I’m positive!” She stared at Lucas and added, “Darryl was lying, wasn’t he?”

“Please don’t tell me that now he ought to be arrested,” Lucas said. “Just think of this as one more item to be checked out.”

“But he lied.”

“Lots of people lie. There are pathological liars, and people who lie to be evil, and people who get involved in all sorts of small lies for no particular reason. Or maybe they’re scared, or trying to cover something not even related to the case. Or maybe they just find it hard to tell any story straight.”

“There you go again!” Jennifer leaned forward, gripping her knees. “We’re never going to get anything done if you keep giving me all these lectures!”

“We’ll get something done,” he said. “We’ll find out who murdered Bobbie’s mother, and we’ll do it the right way.”

“I—I don’t know what the right way is.”

“That’s what I’m trying to teach you. As it stands now, you’re a walking hazard—to me as well as to yourself. You’ve got your safety catch off and you’re about as safe to be around as a loaded gun.”

Jennifer sagged. “I’m sorry, Lucas.”

Lucas heaved himself to his feet. “Remember what I’ve been telling you. Let’s go.”

Jennifer stood. “Go where?”

“I’ve got permission to go inside the Trax house. We’re going to look—not touch, just look.”

“Okay!” Jennifer scooped up her books so quickly she dropped some of them and had to scramble to pick them up. “What are we going to look for?”

“We don’t know. One thing I’ve found, over and over, is that murderers are not as clever as they think they are. They’ll make a mistake. Maybe they’ll leave some clue.”

“I don’t understand. You mean like fingerprints?”

“It might be a fingerprint, or a strand of hair. It might be a blade of grass, or a bit of mud from his or her shoes.”

“Something that small? How will we know it if we see it?”

Lucas’s smile tipped one corner of his mouth. “This is what I’ve been trained to do. It’s why you came to me for help. Right?”

Jennifer’s cheeks felt as though she’d been too long in the sun. “I keep saying all the wrong things. I’m sorry.”

“You’ll learn,” he said as he fished his car keys from his pocket. “Come on.”

As they parked in front of the small frame house, Jennifer shuddered. In her eagerness to actually do something, she hadn’t thought how hard it would be to walk into the room in which Bobbie’s mother had been murdered. The living room was a vivid poster in her mind: yellows and lime greens and faded browns and muddied blues, old and lumpy upholstery dotted with a hodgepodge of pillows, none of which matched each other or anything else. A monstrous mismatched armchair stood in the corner nearest the entry to the kitchen. Two limp potted plants rested on a blond oak coffee table that looked like a reject from a garage sale. A metal magazine rack stuffed with
People
and
US
and outdated copies of
TV Guide
was jammed against the wall. And a cluster of colored snapshots of Stella—a much younger Stella—framed in plastic, hung next to the light switch by the front door.

There was a special lock on the door, but Lucas had a key for it. He opened the door, stepped inside the room, and Jennifer followed him. She was trembling so hard she had to hold the doorframe to steady herself.

“Back door and front door across from each other,” Lucas said.

“It’s not a very big house,” Jennifer said. “There are two bedrooms off to the right, and the kitchen is to the left.”

Lucas slowly moved around the perimeter of the room, and Jennifer could see that a small, braided rug had been shoved aside to make way for the faint chalk marks that must have outlined Stella’s body as it lay on the dull wooden floor.

“Oh,” Jennifer said. “I think I’m going to—to—” She slid along the doorframe until she was sitting on the floor, watching the room twist and blur and pulse toward her.

“Go ahead and faint if you want to,” Lucas said. “You’ll come around soon enough.”

Jennifer took a sharp, angry breath and blinked as everything snapped back into focus. “You don’t even care? You’d just let me lie here?”

He turned to glance at her. “You don’t look faint to me,” he said. “I don’t think I have to worry about you. Why don’t you get up and see what you can do to help?”

Jennifer scrambled to her feet. She tried to think of something clever and cutting to say, but Lucas broke into her thoughts. “We need your memory now. Take a good, long look at everything in this room. From what you told
me, you’ve been here often enough to know if anything is out of place.”

“That end table,” Jennifer said. “It’s fallen over.” She automatically stepped toward it to straighten it, but Lucas’s voice was sharp.

“Don’t touch a thing! The table probably went over in the struggle.”

“Oh.” Jennifer gulped. She stared at the room as though she didn’t know where to start.

“When you came to see Bobbie, which door did you usually use?”

“The back door.”

“Then carefully walk to the back door—this way, around the edge of the room.” Lucas waited until she was standing at the closed door, then said, “All right. Turn around and look at the room again. See anything that doesn’t belong? Anything out of place? Take your time. People tend to remember only the most obvious details. I expect better from you.”

Jennifer took a long breath and began to study the room from left to right. Nothing different. Nothing. But something bothered her, and her glance swept back and up. “Some of the pictures are gone,” she said.

Edging the room again, she went to the wall by the front door. The framed snapshots were like a bunch of grapes with a few juicy ones plucked from the middle. “Yes,” she said. “There was a picture here, and here, and over here. See—where the wall is a lighter color.”

“Who was in the pictures?” Lucas was beside her.

Jennifer shrugged. “I have no idea. Mrs. Trax, of course, but I don’t know who else. I guess these must be a collection of snapshots of her with her friends. This looks like a picnic at the beach. And here’s one taken in a nightclub.” She poked at one of them in the top row.

“Husband? Boyfriends?”

“Maybe. I guess. Bobbie might know. I’ve never paid much attention to the pictures, because I didn’t know any of the people in them.”

Lucas was writing in his black-covered notebook. “Okay,” he said. “That was a good start. Anything else?”

She studied the room again, and this time she shook her head.

Lucas had opened a drawer of the table against the wall.

“I thought you said we couldn’t touch anything,” she told him; then she saw the pencil he had used to hook the plastic drawer pull. He didn’t answer. He used the end of the pencil to poke through some of the papers in the drawer.

“How did the killer get in?” Jennifer asked.

“There was no sign of forced entry,” he said. “Both doors were locked.”

“What about the window with the broken lock?”

Lucas stood and looked at her sharply. “What window?”

Jennifer pointed to the window behind the sofa, the window opening to the backyard. “The window doesn’t lock. The catch has always been broken. Bobbie sometimes used to slide it up and climb through when she forgot her key.”

“Did anyone besides Bobbie know about the broken catch?”

“I guess. Her brothers must have known.”

He was already at the window, bending, stooping, staring.

“Are you looking for fingerprints?”

“The window hasn’t been dusted for prints,” he said. “I’ll get someone to do that.”

“Will they let you know what they find?”

“We’re not playing a game,” he said. “We’re not seeing who are the winners or the losers. We’re all working for one thing—to gather as many facts as we can to help solve this case.”

“Well, in detective shows on TV—”

“Forget what you’ve seen on television. It has nothing to do with life.”

“Could we turn on a light?” Jennifer asked. “It’s getting dim in here.”

“We’re almost through.” He was bent nearly double, one hand pressing against the small of his back, as he studied the upholstery directly under the window.

Jennifer glanced down at the open drawer of the desk, at the jumble of letters and papers it contained. There were grocery receipts, old shopping lists, one of Bobbie’s report cards, but a paper sticking out of the pile near the front of the drawer drew her attention. The scrawly handwriting looked vaguely familiar. It wasn’t Bobbie’s or Stella’s. Why did she feel as though she ought to be able to identify it? The few words she could read made no sense. They came at the end of what seemed to be a short mailer about a sale at Dillard’s Department Store. It wasn’t signed. She picked up the paper and folded it in half, shoving it in the back hip pocket of her jeans. She wasn’t supposed to touch anything, but there was something about this paper she had to remember. She’d bring it back later, and in the meantime it couldn’t be important to anyone.

Jennifer jumped guiltily as Lucas suddenly appeared beside her, his mouth close to her ear. “Keep looking in the drawer,” he said.

“What—?”

“Don’t look up. Look—in—the—drawer. We’ve got a visitor outside. Someone’s watching us from the yard beyond the back window.”

There is no way the girl can connect us. I’m careful. Very careful. I know how to protect myself. And I know what to do with people who become dangerous to me.

Careful, careful, little girl.

I’m keeping track of you.

Lucas stood slowly, cautiously, wincing a little. Jennifer could see that although he seemed to be interested in what she was doing, he was gazing through the corners of his eyes at the window and whatever was beyond it. She wondered how he could be so calm. She wanted to panic and scream and run from the house, but fear shuddered through her body and she couldn’t move.

“Jennifer, suppose you see what you can find in the kitchen.” Lucas spoke in a normal tone.

“The k-kitchen?”

The firmness in his voice was a support that stiffened her back and propelled her legs into the cramped little kitchen. She didn’t turn on the light. There was enough light coming into the room from the living room. She wanted to do as Lucas had told her, but instead she collapsed into the nearest chair, clinging to its wooden rungs as though in some way they could protect her. Jennifer tucked her feet up as a large cockroach scuttled across the floor and under the refrigerator. She glanced across
the room to the telephone that balanced on top of the counter, as though it could automatically summon help. Maybe she’d have to call for help!

Lucas was a blur streaking across the room. The back door slammed, and someone screeched. Jennifer couldn’t stand the suspense. She ran to the door, opened it, and peered into the darkness.

Limping toward her, into the patch of yellow light that patterned the grass, came Lucas. He was gripping the arm of a woman whose face was screwed into puckers of fear, propelling her against her will into the rectangle of light. Jennifer recognized her. She was one of Bobbie’s neighbors, the one who had been interviewed on television.

“She lives next door,” Jennifer said. “It’s Mrs. Aciddo.”

“I—I saw the light on,” Mrs. Aciddo said. Lucas had let go of her arm, and she rubbed it, staring at him. The corners of her mouth turned down even more deeply. “You had no call to grab me. I got rights. Who are you? You’re not even a policeman, huh?”