Touch of Evil (7 page)

“If one door’s been left ajar, it’s sometimes sucked closed when a second exterior door is opened.” Justine took a step so she could make eye contact with Laney. “Deputy Savoy found that to be the case when he tried it at the residence. And you know what else he and the other deputy found there?”

Rather than answering, Laney looked down at her own knuckles, which had gone white where she gripped the table.

Justine flashed a mirthless smile. “No prints on the kitchen chair or on the back door. Excepting yours, that is.”

Laney glared up at her, her expression shimmering with emotion. “I’ve had enough of this suspicion, first from Deputy Savoy, and now you. You don’t think anyone smart enough to put three murders past your department is smart enough to wear a pair of gloves?”

“Well, there’s another triumph of community relations to mark down on the department scorecard,” Justine grumbled as she peered through the blinds. In the parking lot beyond her office, Ross Bollinger was opening the door of a bright red, classic sixties-model Mustang convertible for his cousin.

Seated behind her desk, her father gave a dry chuff of amusement and looked up from the file he’d been perusing. “I kind of miss rattling cages. You get anything out of the Girl Who Cried Hate Crime?”

Justine shot him a dark look. “Could you be any less politically correct?”

Her father grinned. “You don’t really want to go there, do you?”

Justine pinched the bridge of her nose.

“Your head hurting?” he asked, as if he weren’t a leading contributor to the cause.

“Yeah, it is.” She dropped into an empty chair and looked across her desk at him. She had to admit, the great Ed Truitt appeared a hell of a lot more at home than she ever had in Lou’s place.

Lou’s place, but not hers. Not yet, not ever, really. Not considering the way she’d claimed it.

Her father flipped shut the file, which exposed a stack of pink phone message slips and the row of yellow number two pencils she always kept there. The tips had all been snapped off, as they had on numerous occasions in the past weeks.

Yet another expression of admiration from one of the deputies working the bullpen just outside the office door she always left unlocked.

Her face heating, she itched to sharpen the damned things again, just to show she wasn’t going to be run off by petty bullshit.

Her father saw her looking, shook his head. “Forget that, Chili Pepper, and let’s get this show on the road. Can we take this file with us? There are a couple of things here I want to ask you about.”

Snatching up the messages, Justine riffled through them, finding the usual calls from the two main contenders trying to convince her that jail privatization was the way to go, along with another reminder from County Judge Ellis Major that she had better have that revised budget to him by Friday at the latest. If she gave in on the jail issue, she knew she could come up with the required cuts, but she remained determined to find some way that wouldn’t put a dozen of her people out of work. Especially after several employees had come to her on the eve of her election and given her so many good reasons to rethink her late husband’s plan.

But right now, budget shortfalls, pushy bidders, and the
county judge’s wrath would have to be bumped to the back burner. Behind three hanging deaths and her assault, though well ahead of broken pencils.

Shoving the messages into her pocket, she told her dad, “Sure thing. I’ll make copies of all three files, and we’ll go over them, see if there’s anything my guys and I missed. And don’t let me forget my notebooks.”

“So you’re still using my old system.” Her father sounded gratified.

“Always steal from the best,” she said. “You taught me that one, too.”

It took longer than she expected, tracking down the other files and wresting them from Savoy, who was racking up a lot of overtime this week, in spite of all her memos warning deputies about the budget. But finally she and her father were heading back to her place, discussing Noah’s recent fascination with digitally recording and collecting sound files. Though Justine had turned him on to the hobby, mostly in the hope of an eventual escape from his years-long fixation with crashing, clashing, and banging pots and pans, she felt the need to warn her father about her son’s new interest in sneaking about and capturing any unusual noises, including those that emanated from the human body.

Her father laughed at that, then changed the subject. “I like the way you stepped up back there, in your office.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The way you said we’d be looking for anything your men and
you
missed showed a willingness to take blame rather than trying to pin it on your men.”

“You grab a share of the credit, you shoulder a share of the grief.” As the still-green border of her pasture came into view, Justine threw the old man another bone. “Couple of good lawmen taught me that much.”

Behind the wheel, her father nodded. “Lou
was
a good sheriff. A decent man, too. I’ll admit that.”

It was quite a concession coming from the father who had once called her late husband “that sorry-ass old lecher” and boycotted their wedding. Probably because she’d seen Lou in secret for four months before she’d blurted the news that they were getting married.

Though Lou was gone now, Justine soaked up the belated acceptance like a parched flower. Mostly because she needed to believe in her own choices—and needed confirmation of Lou’s basic decency, in spite of the lapses she’d discovered. Lapses she knew her father would never understand.

Scanning the empty pasture, her dad added, “So what happened to Lou’s horses? This morning I went out to feed the animals, and all I found was that one whiskery old mare.”

At twenty-one years old, Moonshadow would never find a good home. And because the pregnant mare had always been patient and trustworthy with her son, Justine couldn’t bear the thought that the graying Morgan would end up processed to feed the big cats at the Dallas zoo.

“Hell, Justine, even the dogs are gone,” her father said. “What’s going on around here?”

Justine grimaced, not wanting to spoil the moment with her answer. But her father was no idiot. No matter what story she fed him, he’d soon notice more than missing livestock.

“I had to sell them, Dad,” she said. “Horses, even the miniatures, need a lot of time and care. And one of the buyers fell in love with Clyde and Oscar. She begged me to let them go, too.”

A pair of Great Pyrenees trained as herd guardians, the huge white dogs needed to work. It would have been unfair, and outrageously expensive, to simply keep the two as pets. Besides that, every time she looked at them, she saw Lou’s ghost walking with them in the pasture, bending to scratch their ears, or whistling them over for a romp.

“So what did Noah think about that?”

“Those dogs belonged heart and soul to Lou,” Justine said. “Maybe if they’d been brought up from puppies around Noah, they all would have bonded.”

“Then maybe he should have a pup of his own. Maybe his ol’ grandpa should see to it.” Her father turned onto the long gravel drive that approached the white, wood-frame twostory, with its big, welcoming front porch and long decades of history.

Like both her son and the animals, the old house needed attention. More attention than Justine could possibly supply.

“No puppy, Dad,” she pleaded. “I don’t have the time…or the money, either.” Her father, of all people, should remember what had happened the last time she’d allowed a dog to get inside her heart.

There. She’d said it. She’d finally broached the subject. Her heart bumped, and she prayed he’d let it drop.

Her father, sharp as ever, stopped the truck short. “Out with it, Justine. All of it.”

She snapped the thick rubber band she’d used to bind the files. “Dad, I’m really tired. My head’s hurting, and I—”

“Stay right there and tell me. You’re having money troubles?”

Almost imperceptibly, she nodded. Like a child admitting she’d blown her allowance on something trivial. “I’m sure Lou never meant for this to happen. I’m positive he thought he could fix things before…”

“Fix what? Don’t make me drag it out of you, girl.”

Justine sucked in a deep breath. “His life insurance, Dad. Lou borrowed against it.”

Her father’s face went scarlet. “Are you telling me that stupid son of a bitch left you with no insurance?”

She looked away, thinking of the money that should have secured Noah’s future. Money Lou had promised would keep Justine and her son in the house. “In a nutshell, yes. He’d emptied out his retirement fund, too.”

“The damned fool.” Her father shook his head, but couldn’t shake off the disgust in his expression. “Do you know what happened? Where’d the money go?”

“Lou…Lou bet on a lot more than weekly poker.”

“So it was gambling trouble?” her father asked.

“Not the kind you’re thinking. He bet his money on highrisk speculation. And horse breeding wasn’t the only investment he lost big on.” She didn’t go into specifics, how he’d backed several harebrained local ventures, more than a few of them from major campaign contributors.

Which was why she’d been so confused by the direct deposits to their joint account months after Lou had died, transfers from some offshore entity by the improbable name of Sunrise Happy Doodle International, located in the British Virgin Islands. But by that time, Justine had been seriously behind on bills and too desperate to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Her father parked alongside the house.

“The choices make the man,” he said bitterly, referring to Lou’s errors.

But Justine had no problem decoding the subtext, the unspoken message that
her
bad choices were the trouble, dating back to that worst of all decisions…

The one that had cost the family her older brother’s life.

Fear is a noose that binds until it strangles.

—Jean Toomer

Anyone with balls enough to take a man’s life, to slip the noose around some poor bastard’s neck and give him that last push, ought to have brains enough to get the terminology straight.

You’re meant to say you hanged the fellow, or that he was hanged, for that’s the proper term to use when speaking of a killing.

As to whether he was hung or not, you’re going to have to consult the dead man’s girlfriend, or maybe the folks over at the Peaceful Slumber Funeral Home.

Because—and I’ll swear this on a stack of Bibles—I am not the kind to look.

Unless it comes to the execution of a woman, because
that,
my friends, is a far more intriguing proposition. So interesting that if my hand is ever forced, I’ll be sure to talk the lady in question into wearing a sweet, short skirt or that little black dress she’s got (so much like yours, with those golden sandals you loved to death) tucked way back in her closet.

Saving it for a special occasion, no doubt. And what could be more special than her last occasion, one final chance for a man to stare up at her in awe?

With no sleep and little prospect of catching any in the next few hours, Ross grabbed a can of Coke from his aunt’s refrigerator and sat at the table to call Kenneth Fleming at the hospital. When he reached the ER doctor, Ross asked, “Is
there any way you can finish out my shift? If you can’t, I’ll get hold of Tremont and see if he can cover.”

Since tomorrow was Ross’s scheduled day off, that would give him a little breathing space, at least.

“You all right?” Kenneth sounded more concerned than tired, though he’d spent the night on duty. “You need to come in and let me check you over?”

“It’s nothing like that,” Ross said quickly, though exhaustion was turning his limbs leaden. “It’s just…I’ve got a family issue. I need to be with Laney right now.”

“Sure, Ross. Family comes first,” said the man who had let down his own regularly enough to lose them. “I’ll be glad to cover for you. Least I can do after dragging in so late last night.”

Ross thanked Kenneth before ending the call. Hearing a sharply drawn breath to his left, he spotted Laney through the open kitchen doorway. Wrapped in a thick white robe with her hair damp from her shower, she stood frozen in the living room, her gaze fixed on the spot where the noose had been left hanging.

Though the deputies had taken it for evidence, Ross imagined he saw it there, suspended, a teardrop-shaped loop of malice, or its ghostly afterimage.

“I didn’t do it.” Laney’s voice was soft and rich, as melodious as her saddest ballads. “I could never have touched a thing like that, and I would
never
hurt myself. I want you to know that. So if something happens to me—”

“Don’t talk like that,” Ross said. “Nothing’s going to happen, not with the family looking out for you. I spoke to Trudy and Dara, and they’re coming over as soon as they can to—”

“Oh, no.” Tears gleaming in her eyes, Laney stalked into the kitchen. “God, Ross. Why did you have to go and do that?”

“They’re your sisters. Of course they have to know. They
want
to know so they can help you.”

“They want to know so they can rag on me about how they always knew something like this would happen if I hung around in bars and shacked up with some musician.” She pulled open the refrigerator and began scanning the contents. “I swear, the two of them are worse old ladies than Mama and Aunt Helene.”

“Well, it’s too late now. They already know, and they’re coordinating. Trudy’s going to call my sisters, too, set up a schedule for who comes when.”

Laney let the refrigerator door drift closed and looked at him, her face a study in despair. “God help me, then. Jake and the guys dead, and now I’ll have our whole clan showering me with suggestions that I get a nice, safe nursing degree…or maybe my teaching certificate. Or if I’m too dumb for college, I can maybe wait tables over at Hammett’s or ring up nose spray, cards, and condoms at the drugstore. Anything but wasting ‘the best years of my life’ on some stupid little dream.”

Ross walked up behind her and laid his hand on her shoulder. “Go sit down. I’ll make us breakfast.” He glanced at the old rooster clock that hung above the back door. “Or lunch, I guess. I can’t believe it’s almost noon already.”

Laney sank down into a chair beside the table, where she pushed her head into her hands.

Ross pulled out leftovers from two nights before, green peppers stuffed with rice and lean ground turkey rather than the usual sausage. “For your poor heart,” Aunt Ava had soberly pronounced, as if he were recovering from the same clogged arteries that had killed Ross’s father rather than a viral illness. After spooning one into a bowl, along with a generous topping of tomato sauce, he popped it inside the microwave to heat.

As the food spun on the carousel, he told his cousin, “You’re wrong about the family. Everyone’s proud of your talent. ”

“You are, maybe. You’re the only one who’s ever—”

“We’re
all
proud,” Ross insisted. “It’s just…we worry, that’s all. We see musicians around here working in rough places, with a lot of shady people. You have to admit, the Tin Roof’s not exactly the kind of—”

“The Tin Roof won’t be forever,” she snapped, but her bravado quickly faltered, and she looked down at the plastic place mats. “Or at least, it wouldn’t have been, if Jake and the guys were still…”

Ross’s stomach growled at the pepper-and-tomato aroma filling the kitchen. He pulled the bowl out of the microwave and tested the inner temperature. “Damn it,” he muttered, shaking his burned finger.

Laney’s expression darkened so that she didn’t seem to see him set the food before her, along with a napkin, knife and fork, and, as his meal heated, a glass of iced tea with a wedge of lemon.

“Those demo tracks we did…” she said, “they could have gotten us out, Ross. Simon told me they’re the real deal.”

The band’s booking agent, Simon Cordero out of Austin, supposedly had all sorts of entertainment industry connections. Which had always begged the question, at least in Ross’s mind, of what the guy was doing in a backwater spot like Hammett’s on the Lake trolling for talent. Laney had explained it as an “act of fate” that Cordero and his wife, both avid fishermen, had docked their fancy bass boat and gone inside to grab a burger last June, just as Laney launched what she laughingly called her most “vampalicious crowdpleaser,” a song called “Cat-eyed Callie.” According to Laney, who never tired of telling the story, Cordero’s food went stone-cold (much to his wife’s irritation) as he’d watched, mesmerized. Before the evening was over, he’d offered to represent the band.

When Ross had asked a few questions about the arrangement, Laney had flown off the handle, assuring him they
were beyond lucky to hook up with a “star maker.” Since it wasn’t his area of expertise, Ross had quickly backed off, relieved and happy when Cordero began booking the band in venues throughout Texas and Louisiana.

“I’m sure those tracks were good.
Are
good, I mean.” Ross groped uselessly for some prescription, some treatment plan he could write to mend a broken dream.

“I burned a CD for you,” Laney said. “I want you to have it.”

“Thanks,” he told her, but as much as he loved the band’s music, he couldn’t imagine enjoying the recordings. Couldn’t stomach the thought of listening to his cousin’s voice backed up by three hanged men.

But she pressed the issue, her eyes heartbroken as she added, “When you hear the music, you’ll see how close we came.”

“I keep coming back to this one. Defensive wounds?” Justine’s father asked her, pointing out some bruising on the underside of the late Jake Willets’s forearms.

Feeling refreshed and clearer-headed after lunch, a shower, and a long nap, Justine slid into the seat beside him at her kitchen table and peered down at the photo through a magnifying glass.

“Just a shadow,” she wondered aloud, “or postmortem lividity?”

She dug the ME’s report out of the folder and skimmed down until she found what she was looking for. “Yep. Here it is. Blood settling, that’s all. No signs of trauma on his body. Other than the neck, that is.”

Her own words—
signs of trauma
—had her reaching for the LeJeune file, but the crime-scene photos, taken only yesterday, had not yet been printed and inserted. She’d left a note to Roger to attach and e-mail the digital files to her but hadn’t gotten around to checking her computer. Partly because
she didn’t look forward to calling Savoy to remind him, which she’d bet the farm she’d have to do.

“Where’s the tox-screen report?” her father asked. “I didn’t see one in Hart Tyson’s file, either. Reports ought to be kept in one spot. Hallmark of poor discipline, having information scattered hell to breakfast.”

Justine bristled at the criticism. “It’s only been a month since the first body was discovered. Since there weren’t any outward signs of foul play, I didn’t have the ammunition to put a rush on the report. It could be two months before toxicology gets to it. Unless you have some special kind of magic you want to share with me.”

“No magic, just relationships, Chili Pepper. You build relationships with your medical examiners, you can lean on them for special favors.”

She would have rolled her eyes but didn’t want to risk rekindling her headache. “You ever try leaning on the Dallas ME’s office? We’re not talking one of your Podunk goodol’-boy pals who can swing it on his lunch break as a special favor to you.”

Grinning, her dad pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “You’re contracting out of Dallas? Well, hell, Justine, why didn’t you say so?”

While her father made the call to a former fishing buddy, Justine went into the laundry room and dumped out the bag with her clothing from the emergency room to see if there was anything she could salvage. After looking at the blood-stained shreds, she sighed…and tried not to think about Ross Bollinger cutting the clothes from her unconscious body with a pair of scissors.

“You’ve got it wrong,” she heard her father saying on the phone. “You pronounce it
WOFF-erd,
but she’s my daughter, all right. Nope, that apple didn’t fall too far from the tree.”

Smiling to hear pride in his voice, though she suspected it
was put on, Justine plucked out her shoes and was just about to toss the ruined suit when she thought to check the jacket’s pockets.

No keys or wallet, since her father had collected both last night, and she couldn’t find the small notepad she used to jot down various observations and reminders to herself throughout the day. But she did pull out a folded strip of thick ivory paper.

Opening it, she frowned at the machine-printed words: KEEP YOUR WORD OR STEP ASIDE. NOW.

Great, she thought. Another happy constituent. From irate e-mails to phone messages to letters to the editor of the local paper, she’d heard from plenty since the allegations had gone public.

Though this particular example was milder than many, the part about keeping her word confused her. What word did the note refer to? And where had this piece of paper come from? She couldn’t recall ever seeing it before. Was it just one more thing she’d forgotten, as she’d forgotten so many things from the hours surrounding her assault? Or was it…

Maybe the message had not been sent to her by mail or left at the front desk at the office. Maybe whoever had whacked her on the head had slipped it inside her pocket.

Jolted by the thought, she nearly called for her dad to bring a plastic sandwich bag so she could preserve the note for evidence. Before the idea could translate into speech, however, she remembered going to her vehicle in the office lot before the hanging and finding the unsigned note tucked beneath her windshield wiper. Preoccupied with other concerns, she’d shoved it absently inside a pocket.

At the sound of tires on the gravel driveway, Justine looked up.

“Noah?” asked her father from the kitchen.

“Still a little early, but…” Justine glanced outside. “Oh, no. Of all the damned things.”

Her outburst came in response to the silver Cadillac rolling up the driveway.

Edging away from the window, Justine wondered if it was too late or if the visitor had seen her already.

“Who’s that?” Her father came into the laundry room and walked up to the window.

“Erik Whatley,” Justine said with a curl of her lip. “Schmoozer-in-chief for Southern Humane Detention, Inc.”

“One of your husband’s rent-a-jailer outfits?” There was no mistaking her father’s disdain for the private detention companies, which he’d so often called “a bunch of corner-cutting scammers.” He’d thought Lou was crazy to ask for bids in the weeks preceding his death.

But then, Lou had believed her father, who had retired from office more than fifteen years earlier, was a dinosaur with no concept of modern economics.

“Thought you told ’em both to take a hike,” her father added.

“I did,” Justine said, “but this guy’s probably heard I have my ass in a sling over the budget right now. Which gives him one last shot at boring me into a coma about how much money his outfit can save the county and how he’ll run a good, clean operation, unlike a
certain competitor
he’ll decline to name.”

Where Whatley came, his competitor Hal Smithfield usually followed, so Justine figured she had a visit from the attorney representing CorrecTex to look forward to. And if Whatley always left her feeling slimed with his unctuousness, Smithfield left her feeling bulldozed.

Sighing, she watched Whatley exit his sedan. Strikingly handsome, he wore an expensive charcoal suit and a two-hundred-dollar haircut that made his prematurely silver hair look like a fashion statement. After glancing toward the house, he went around to the passenger door and removed a huge basket of white flowers.

Justine cut a look her father’s way. “Looks all ready for a funeral. Damn golf club must’ve whacked me harder than I thought.”

Her father grabbed his hat from the table. “Hard enough that we can spare you all this nonsense.”