The Lost Witness (24 page)

And then his eyes came to rest on the fireplace.

There was something wrong with it. Something odd about the way the firebox was cut into the wall. It almost looked as if the house had settled into the ground at an angle and thrown the level of
the room off.

Cava felt a tinge in that space between his shoulder blades. He found the switch on the wall below the mantel and pressed it, then looked down at the fake logs. When nothing happened, he hit the
switch a second time and watched the ignition spark. In spite of the season, in spite of the draft from the casement windows, Fontaine hadn’t bothered to turn the gas on.

Why? Particularly when it was so obvious that he spent a lot of time in the room.

He took a step back, eyeing the firebox and following the gas line into the floor. The level was definitely off, but he suddenly realized that it had nothing to do with the fireplace. Instead,
it was the small sheet of marble laid to the side of the hearth. The stone wasn’t seated into the floor properly.

He checked his watch again. It was only eight-thirty Less than an hour had passed and the Fates had left him alone.

Sinking his fingers into the seams, he pried the stone up and lifted it away. As he peered into the darkness, he felt that rush again. That anxious feeling in his chest. The gas pipes were here
and so was the shutoff valve. But nestled between the floor joists was Fontaine’s secret. Counted and wrapped in one-inch packets of hundred-dollar bills.

Cava dug the money out of the floor and counted it, wondering what the doctor had done to earn one point three million dollars in cash. He shook his head, staring at the pile. Knew it would go a
long way in Coronaville, and wished that he could see the doctor’s face when he realized that his stash was gone.

He took a deep breath and exhaled, the scent of all that money filling his lungs. Then he pinched himself hoping that he wouldn’t wake up in his car at the airport with an empty box of
Lucky Charms. When the cash was still there, when his world didn’t turn to shit, he felt his heart slow down. The muse dancing with his soul.

He still had a seat on the guilt train. All this money wouldn’t change that. But dealing with Jennifer McBride’s ghost would be easier now.

He spotted a gym bag slung over a chair and got to his feet. Ripping it open, he dumped Fontaine’s workout clothes on the couch and scooped up the money. Then he reset the piece of marble,
double-checked the floor, and hurried out.

He could smell the cash riding his wake. He could feel the dollar signs buzzing around his head even though he thought that he was immune. But as he reached the landing, he stopped. There was
something else in the air. Another fragrance just as fresh and strong.

Perfume . . .

Cava spun around. He could hear something.

Tightening his grip on his bounty, he eased down the hall to the next set of double doors. As his view cleared, he took a step back and realized why the alarm hadn’t been armed.

Fontaine’s girlfriend from the office was still in the house. She was standing before him in her underwear. A black bra and panties. The kind Cava liked to look at because he could see
through them. He heard the TV going in the room. Some guy from one of those early morning news shows was doing the weather and laughing like a fool at his own joke. She seemed to like it, though,
and kept turning back to watch as she made the bed.

But Cava kept his eyes on her body. It had been a long time since he’d been with a woman. Her breasts looked soft and round and jiggled every time she turned. Her hips were wide and curvy.
When she bent over to fluff the pillows, he felt his dick get hard and push against his pants. He had seen her before, but only from a distance. Only wearing a business suit or jacket to protect
her smooth tan skin from the cold. From what he could tell, she didn’t appear too thin. All things being equal, the blonde in the black underwear smoothing out the silk sheets was just about
perfect.

For some reason a memory from his youth surfaced. A good one.

Cava had grown up on the East Coast, just a few blocks from the prep school Holden Caulfield was rumored to have attended in one of his favorite books,
The Catcher in the Rye.
Beneath the
railroad bridge in the center of town, a barber kept his shop in a small space he rented over the movie theater. Cava could remember his mother dropping him off with his best friend every six weeks
or so. How the strange old man took two hours off in the middle of the day and laid on the floor to rest. How he showed everyone the weird box doctors had placed inside his chest to keep his heart
beating. How he liked to talk about women when no one’s parents were around.

He tried to think of the old man’s name, but couldn’t place it. Still, he remembered the day that he and his best friend were alone in the shop. The day the barber had told them that
the art of a great fuck was a matter of physics. And the whole thing came down to how much meat a woman had on her bones. He liked full-bodied women, he said. The more full-bodied, the better
because there was nothing good about a woman’s hip bones. And he liked doing it on the floor. He called it the secret to his success. The key to making it all work. Losing the soft mattress
and doing it with a full-bodied woman on the floor.

Cava remembered giggling. That feeling of racy uncertainty because he and his friend were still too young to really know what the word
fuck
meant. From the electricity in the air, the
dreamy smile on the old man’s face, it seemed more than likely that anything to do with getting laid was a good thing. All the same, it was a new world still lingering on the horizon. Still
too far off to touch. It would take a few years before Cava understood that the old man had been a wise man and everything he taught them that day was true.

The thought vanished. Chased away by a sudden rush of panic.

The blonde was staring at him. Frozen in her tracks and standing on the other side of the bed. Fixated on him with her mouth open and her blue eyes as wide as blue eyes go. Cava had seen it
before. That look that she could tell the future. That things were about to get dramatic.

Even worse, his meds had kicked in just as his luck ran out. He could feel his chemistry coming to a boil. An overwhelming bout of foreign body sensations mixed with a heavy case of those
intense urges he had read about in the car—sexual urges coupled with
other
urges. If he went by the book it was time to call his healthcare professional immediately.

She took a step toward the bedside table. But instead of reaching for the phone, her hand dipped down to the drawer. Cava lunged across the bed, spotting the gun as the drawer slid open.
Wrapping his arms around her chest, he yanked her away from the weapon and they tumbled onto the floor. She yelped and started punching him as he rolled on top of her. Soft glancing blows weakened
by fear and trembling. He could smell her skin. Her soft beautiful skin. And as he tried to quiet her legs and figure out what the hell to do, he thought about the hour he had spent searching the
house while she was getting ready for work. He wished that he hadn’t seen her. Wished that he hadn’t caught the scent of her perfume from the top of the stairs. Wished that he
didn’t have to do what he knew he had to do.

She would be a casualty of war, he decided, a domino in the middle of the pack that had no more meaning or relevance other than its position and timing. Its need to fall. There would be more
guilt to deal with. More medication and more sleepless nights. Another ghost on another chaise longue on that beach in Coronaville.

He looked down at her face, everything in slow motion now. She had ripped open his shoulder bag and was tossing the money all over the room. She was saying something to him. Something he
couldn’t quite hear with so much going on. Curiously, the scissor kicks had stopped and she had wrapped her thighs around his buttocks. As he tried to concentrate, tried to lock in on the Zen
moment, he became aware of his erection again. It was still there. Still hard as a rock. And when he gazed into her wild eyes, he caught the fire in them and knew that she could feel his dick,
too.

She grit her teeth. Ran her fingers down his arm and dug her nails in. Took a swing at him.

All of a sudden life was complicated again. A hodgepodge of mixed signals that he didn’t have time to figure out. The Fates had arrived and he needed to make his move. He needed to end
this. If the guilt got too crazy, he could always spend the night counting hundred-dollar bills . . .

L
ena had been late for her meeting
with Art Madina. Fifteen minutes late. Not from the drive downtown, but from an
unexpectedly long sleep. A big dreamless sleep so heavy and so blank that she had no idea how she finally broke back to the surface and opened her eyes.

She had gone to bed before the power was restored and fallen asleep before she could reset the time on her clock radio and switch on the alarm.

And it had been late. Long after Bobby Rathbone had given her the bad news and gone home. Long after two glasses of wine and another half a cigarette helped her think it all through.

She had come to a decision last night to leave the bugs in place. Her house would remain hot-wired except for the low-tech bug in the handset.
The feel-good
bug that she was meant to
find. After ripping it out of the phone, she killed it with a hammer on the kitchen floor. And when the electric company got around to turning the juice back on, Klinger and his sidekick would no
longer be burdened with loud music. By all appearances, everything would be back to normal, and the dynamic duo could listen in and think that they were outsmarting her.

For Lena, this was the quickest way back to her case and what really mattered. And it was easy enough to avoid Klinger’s camera by using the shower upstairs in her old bathroom.

But none of that was really on her mind as she followed Art Madina inside the cooler and the door snapped shut behind them. None of what happened last night really mattered right now.

Madina switched on his flashlight, checking toe tags in the darkness and rolling gurneys out of the way as he searched through the crowd of dead bodies. The dank air was just above freezing, her
breath vaporizing before her eyes and thick as smoke. After ten long minutes, they found Jane Doe resting in the far corner beneath a thin sheet of translucent plastic.

Madina handed over the flashlight and pulled the plastic away. Time, even in a temperature-controlled setting, had a way of changing things. Although Lena’s first instinct was to turn
away, she held her ground and looked at the corpse.

“If something was missing, how much would it be?” Madina asked in a low voice.

“I don’t know.”

“What did he do with it?”

“We found a meat grinder in the garage.”

Madina turned and gave her a long look. “You’re not serious.”

“We can’t tell when it was last used,” she whispered.

Several moments passed. Then Madina took charge of the flashlight and panned the beam over the victim’s wounds.

“My problem with all this is that it’s such a neat job, Lena. So surgically precise. This guy went to med school.”

The door opened, the space flooding with light. Two men were peering into the cooler. When they spotted Lena standing beside the pathologist, the man in the lab coat stepped away and the second
man entered on his own. He was holding a manila envelope and seemed as uncomfortable by the setting as Lena was. She recognized him as Martin Orth from SID, but they had never been formally
introduced. Orth was a division supervisor and it appeared strange to see someone so high in the food chain off-site and making what looked like a delivery.

“Lena Gamble?” he asked.

All three shook hands and introduced themselves. Then Orth handed the envelope to Lena, straining to keep his eyes on her and away from the victim.

“You were right,” he said. “It’s her.”

A moment passed—SID’s confirmation giving the depravity new life and breadth.

“You’re absolutely sure,” she said.

Orth nodded. “We ran side-by-sides from the blood samples taken in the alley last week, the parking lot at the Cock-a-doodle-do on Saturday, and the garage on Barton Avenue. Everything
matches. It’s her. It’s Jane Doe. That’s where she was killed.”

His voice trailed off, his gaze finally moving to the victim. Lena could see the pain in his eyes as he measured the woman’s battered face and skimmed over her wounds. A certain amount of
determination lingered in his jawline as he turned back to her.

“We’re twenty-four-seven on this, Lena. Weekends and holidays. Forget about the backlog. Anything you want, you get until this guy’s in the ground.”

She wished the case was that simple. One man acting on his own.

“What about the meat grinder?” she said.

“We found trace amounts of muscle tissue, but we don’t think it’s human. There’s enough rust to indicate that it went through a dishwasher. We’re not really sure
what it is.”

Lena traded looks with Madina, then turned back to Orth.

“What about the rest of the garage?” she said.

“It’s gonna take a while,” Orth said. “Everything we pulled looks like it came from the victim, not the doer. Hair, fiber, fingerprints. But there’s still hope.
There’s still a long way to go.”

“What about the trash can by the workbench? He left behind a smock. Everything he wore Wednesday night.”

“We’re concentrating on the gloves for touch DNA. There’s a chance we might luck out and lift a print, but I wouldn’t count on it. They’re vinyl.”

Lena understood the odds, but remained upbeat. Nathan Good would have been wearing the gloves long enough to have left a fair amount of perspiration behind. Although touch DNA, or low copy DNA,
was still new, still not legislated in all fifty states, the science had evolved and could yield a positive result. But lifting a print from inside a vinyl glove would be more difficult. While it
had been done before, success depended on the conditions being just right. Still, they were inching closer. And when she caught the glint in Orth’s eye, she realized that there was more.