The Woman (15 page)

I love you,

Mother Cynthia.

* * *

The light from the morning sun, not yet cresting the mountains to the east, crept through the trees when Nora Jean Larick left Linda Darby’s condo, locked the door, picked up her travel case and started walking toward storage garage seventeen.

Chapter 23

“Chief, we’ve got a dead body in the surf, down near Cypress Rock.”

“Where?” Chief McIlhenny said into his phone.

“You know, the big rocky area where the homeless hang out, just north of town. You know.”

“Who is it?”

“No clue,” said Clyde Martinez, Chief Ben McIlhenny’s newest deputy. “I’ve never seen this guy around town.”

McIlhenny had found his new deputy’s name an odd ethnic blend. Then he learned Clyde was half Hispanic on his father’s side, with his given name coming from his mother’s grandfather who raised her. “The guy’s been shot,” Clyde stated, as if the cause of death were an afterthought.

“What is this, a frigging epidemic?” blurted Chief McIlhenny. “Are you sure?”

“No doubt, Chief. Old Dickie, you know him, the unofficial head of the Sea Crest homeless group, called it in. The guy’s got a cell. Can you imagine? I never heard tell of a homeless guy with a cell phone. Dickie tells me it’s some new federal program that provides the poor with free, limited use cell phones. Can you believe it? What is this country coming to?”

“Clyde, did you call me to discuss homeless people, cell phones, government policy or the dead guy? So far you’ve told me more about all that than about the corpse.”

“Not much to tell, Chief. The guy’s dead. He’s carrying no ID. Not real bloated so my guess is he hasn’t been in the surf long. The crabs and birds haven’t chewed him much, but then, hey, what do I know. You coming down, Chief?”

“Quick as I can. Keep people away. Make sure the morning tide doesn’t pull him out to sea. Now that he’s come visiting, let’s do what we can to make him feel welcome.”

“That’s sick, Chief.”

“I’m on my way.”

* * *

On the highway above Cypress Rock, Nora Jean Larick drove by in the car Cynthia had left in rental garage seventeen on her way to the county road which eventually became a state highway. The state highway would connect up to I-5, north to Portland, Oregon, where she hoped to learn more about the insanity that had taken over her life.

* * *

Six minutes later, Chief Ben McIlhenny pulled his car off Ocean Street onto the sand and gravel road that angled out onto the beach a few miles north of Cypress Rock.

An hour later, the chief drove back up that makeshift road without having learned much beyond what Deputy Clyde had told him on the phone. The man was fit, about six-foot, around one-hundred-seventy-five pounds, a wild guess said he had been in the water less than a day. As Clyde had said, the man had no ID. Even the labels had been cut out of his clothing. McIlhenny had noted one more thing. The man had been shot two times. One in the head and one in the heart, just like Cynthia Leclair.

Besides the police and the medical examiner, only the shooter and Linda Darby knew that Cynthia Leclair had been shot once each in the head and the heart. What troubled McIlhenny most was his involvement. Had his installation of surveillance equipment inside SMITH & CO. also led to the murder of this man? He wanted to think no, but he feared yes.

He pulled to the side of the road and picked up the empty, disgustingly brown foam cup that had for too long been substituting for the broken plastic screw cup to his thermos. If he wanted coffee now, and he did, he would have to use that cup. He poured from his thermos until the coffee covered the old stains. After promising himself he would get a new thermos or at least a new white foam cup, he took a sip and licked his lips. The hot coffee would sterilize the gunk. At least he hoped that was the way this kind of thing worked. But, bottom line, the taste was right and that’s all that mattered right now.

After he got back to his office and finished the paperwork on the crime scene, he’d go see Linda Darby. She jogged mornings, but was usually back by noon. He figured she must be good at day trading as it appeared her only means of support. Then again, she could have had an inheritance or perhaps a divorce settlement, maybe both. Police work was habitually nosey in that it led to analyzing everyone, breaking them down as to resources and peculiarities, even sexual proclivities. It was that last one, when it came to Linda that he couldn’t quite figure. She had a fabulous body. All the men in town knew that, not that she showed it. Fact was she dressed a bit dowdy. No cleavage, yet there was no doubt she had an ample supply. She just didn’t share it. She never wore short skirts or even cheeky shorts during the summer. Still, she had this unmistakable air about the way she looked and walked.

The chief would tell Linda about the Fed Ex packages SMITH & CO. mailed having been sent to a Mr. John B. Smith at a residential address in Baltimore. The occupant of the house, a retired elderly man, confirmed that Mr. Smith rented an upstairs room. He explained that Smith was a traveling salesman who only came to Baltimore a couple of times a month and hated hotels. The owner knew about the packages, being retired he was home and had signed for and taken in all of the packages. He estimated the number to be a couple dozen at least over the last two years or so. He simply held the packages until Smith’s next arrival. The home had burned to the ground the day Linda had found Cynthia Leclair’s body. The Fed Ex driver never again saw Mr. Smith.

Chief McIlhenny planned to get a bit more direct with Linda. He had always sensed she was holding something back, and with this latest body the time had come to pressure her to come clean.

* * *

Clark sat having coffee on his back patio before leaving for his lunch shift at O’Malley’s. He had not slept well. He was worried about Linda Darby. The woman’s blood had saved his life. She had given it to help a complete stranger, a man she knew only as a motorcycle rider who worked for the marijuana growers. Now she was in trouble. She didn’t say so. She didn’t have to. He knew. He had seen enough violence to know the red blotch on the front of Linda’s jersey the night she came to his door had been blood. After his lunch shift, during the break before the dinner crowd, he would take another run at getting her to talk. While he had been a biker and before that in the Navy Seals, he had seen or been involved in a lot of mayhem, Linda Darby was involved in something for which she was ill prepared. Some of his past activities gave him pride. Others did not. But he had learned things. He could help Linda, if she would ask before it was too late.

* * *

Around two in the afternoon, Chief McIlhenny got out to Linda’s place. She didn’t answer her front door. He followed the wooden walkway that wrapped from her front porch around to her rear patio. She wasn’t on the deck, but the screen door was, bent. He had once walked through his own when he thought it had been pulled back. He smiled at the thought she had likely done the same thing. He looked over the rail down to the beach but he couldn’t see her running or walking in the surf. He went back and looked more closely at the back slider. A carefully cut wooden dowel lay in the trough inside the rear sliding glass door to prevent it from being opened from the outside. On his way back to the front of the house he stopped where the side walkway bumped out to provide space for her barbeque. His peek through the glass insert of the locked kitchen door told him nothing. He would come back later.

* * *

Interstate five stretched like a steel-gray ribbon winding through the easy hills of central Oregon. Linda had never particularly thought it before when driving the nation’s roadways, but each car traveling with her or passing from the opposite direction carried people with their own distinct lives, their own troubles and joys. She hoped none of them were traveling, as was she, in a desperate attempt to escape an invisible threat. At least she had no family to also be trapped into her terror. Not even an extended family. She had chosen to live in seclusion, to not let others into her life. And now, with Cynthia’s death, her wish had become completely true. She was truly alone except for a cell-phone in the bottom of her purse, an umbilical cord linking her to a violent stranger. She lowered her window and took out the cell phone. Looked at it in her hand, turned it over and considered tossing it into the brush bordering the interstate. Then she stuffed it back into her purse.

A few hours later, the southern outskirts of Salem, Oregon, came into view. She would be in Portland in less than three more hours. There she would rent a room and get something to eat. Then she planned to sleep, something she hadn’t done at all last night after her exhausting encounter on the beach. In the morning she would need to make herself look like Nora Jean Larick before visiting Key Bank where, hopefully, she would find more answers, maybe even a way out of this consuming nightmare.

* * *

Clark had never been invited to Linda’s home, but he had followed her home once. It was not exactly gentlemanly of him, but it was one more piece of knowing her. Today, he planned to press her into telling him what the hell was going on. She had not fooled him when she came to his home last night. She had not fallen while jogging and been covered by a wave. Her mind had been fried. Her hands were covered with small scratches. The scratches were not from a log. His guess being she had climbed the lava rock which had eons ago reached the cool hands of the Pacific Ocean. This lava flow appeared in only a few spots along the Sea Crest beach. There had been green stains from sea grass on her knees and red blood-like splotches on her front. From his deck, he had watched her, through his binoculars, cautiously walk up the beach stairs, then after moving to a side window he saw her hide a gun under the top step. While she had been in the shower, he had replaced the gun with a new one, untraceable. When she left his place he waited a few minutes then followed her home, at a safe distance. After everything had looked okay at her place he went home, disassembled the gun she had left under the stairs and scatter tossed the pieces into the surf. That is, he did except for the barrel. Tomorrow morning he was going out as a crewman on a friend’s early half-day fishing charter. He would drop the barrel necessary for ballistics tests into the deepwater coastal channel.

Clark got no answer when he knocked on Linda’s front door. He walked back to his hog, then just as he freed the kickstand from the soft gravel in front of Linda’s condo, Chief McIlhenny pulled his police car up behind him.

Clark reset his kickstand and walked back. “Hey, Chief, what’s doing?”

McIlhenny got out of his car and leaned his arms across the top of the still open door. “Hello, Clark. You come by to see Linda?”

“Yeah. Social call. She isn’t home. Can you tell me why you stopped by?”

“Can’t see that I should. Police business.”

“Fair enough. Some of my lunch customers in O’Malley’s were talking about a dead body. Made it sound like a new one, not the two found in the alley. They characterized it as another murder. That true, Chief?”

“It’ll be on the news in an hour, so it’s no national secret. A guy washed up on the beach a mile or so from your place.”

“That must’ve been down by the big lava rock.”

“Yep.”

“Drowning?” Clark asked.

“Murder. Two shots.”

“Head and heart like Cynthia Leclair?”

“Now how would you know that?” the chief asked.

“People talk without much noticing a waiter, your dispatcher and deputy for example.”

“You’re a pretty observant guy, Clark. I’ve noticed the way you watch things, people. Even in O’Malley’s. Why haven’t you ever applied to be a deputy?”

“Thought about it once, really did. Don’t know if I could handle being on the side of the law.”

“You don’t fool me with that tough, ex-biker business. I checked you out, back when you decided to stay in town. You had a solid military career in the Navy Seals, and that’s not so easy to come by. You had no trouble with the military police or with the civilian cops. There’s a big hole for the years after the military, up until you roosted in our town. That your time with the biker gang?” Clark nodded. “I watched you calm a near fight inside the bistro. Millie told me about you handling an out-of-control drunk down the street in her place. Settled it right down, she said, and Millie has endured more than her share of drunken scenes. You got yourself a knack for handling difficult situations. The city provides great benefits. You likely don’t get any at O’Malley’s. Pay’s likely better as well. You’d need to shorten your hair.”

“I already did that for O’Malley.”

“More for me.”

“I’m flattered Chief. I’ll think on it. Better than that, would you let me know next time you have an opening?”

“Be glad to. In the meantime, if you hear anything or have any thoughts about this craziness that has infected our town, my door is open. And, yes, I came by to see Linda about the killing on the beach. She sits on her deck a lot, thought she might have seen something. Routine stop, I’m paying a visit to all the beach houses.”

“Thanks, Chief.”

“See ya, Clark.” Chief McIlhenny got back inside his car. As he pulled around Clark’s motorcycle, he lowered his passenger side window. “If you hear from Linda, let’s all sit down and powwow. Okay?”