Whatever Remains (23 page)

             
Ben shot him a skeptical look and he made a face.

             
“Not like that. Can you stop being a homophobe for half a second?”

             
A lingering mellowness was all that made him comply. His relationship with Jade was forever peaks and valleys, but Ben had never felt compelled to treat her friend in any particular way. They didn’t get along: end of story. With a sigh, he followed Jeremy down to the master suite, pausing at the door, half-expecting – in an automatic prejudice that almost made him smile – some sort of shrine to male underwear models pasted to the walls. But it was just a bedroom, a modern, tasteful one at that, like the rest of the house, and he could imagine Jade’s scolding if she’d heard his thoughts. “What?” he asked with a sigh.

             
Jeremy went to his closet and parted his hanging clothes. Behind them, gleaming faintly in the lamplight, was a shiny black Browning gun safe. He spun the dial and it came unlatched. Ben went to his side unasked, to have a look, and whistled to himself. Long guns – a .30-06, a twelve-gauge shotgun, a twenty-gauge, and a handsome Winchester 30-30 – were racked up beneath a shelf of boxed ammo. The .38 had obviously come from a handgun collection that sported a .45, 9mm, .357, and a .22. From the top shelf, Jeremy took down a key, then pushed aside more clothes, revealed a door set in the paneling of his closet, slid the key into an almost-hidden keyhole, and unlocked a padded vault that contained…             

             
“You have an
elephant gun
?” Ben asked, not believing it. “Why…
why
?”

             
Jeremy’s smile was more sad than smug. “My dad’s a real man’s man. Great white hunter. He started taking me hunting before I was old enough to even carry the guns, let alone shoot them. He took me on safari when I was twelve. You can imagine what a shock it was for him to learn I didn’t like girls.”

             
Ben lifted his brows, silently asking the obvious.

             
“Oh, he got over it,” Jeremy said. “We get along great. We still go hunting. Target shooting.” He breathed a laugh. “He’s always awkwardly trying to set me up on blind dates. He was one of the ones who urged me to go to Florida,” he said, becoming serious, turning a meaningful look to Ben. “He thought I should leave Jade to fend for herself, but I couldn’t do that.”

             
Ben folded his arms and propped a shoulder against the closet door. “What do you want me to say? I’m a jerk; you’re a stand-up guy? Is that it?”

             
Jeremy’s smile was humorless. “Why is everything definite with you?”

             
“I dunno. Why do you have to ask me stupid questions?”

             
“You,” Jeremy went on, “look at it only one way. You think Jade tried to get pregnant; when you realized that wasn’t true, you couldn’t step back and apologize and get your shit straight about it. You kept treating her like shit. You decided you guys couldn’t work, and you’ve tried as hard as you could to make sure you don’t.”

             
“I – ”

             
“Let me finish. You think – thought – Jade was a shallow kid with stars in her eyes. You know that’s not true now, but you won’t let yourself think different. Jade’s young and dumb. But you can’t even begin to figure her out. I’m gay, but you’re standing here wondering why I don’t have a closet full of drag getups instead of guns.”

             
Ben ground his teeth and said nothing.

             
“The only cliché in your life, Ben, is you. You’re an asshole cop, right down to the shoes and cheap shirts. When the rest of us don’t file away somewhere in your mental Rolodex, you lose it. I don’t dislike you because I’m Jade’s bitchy friend. I dislike you because you’re too stupid to understand that you’re throwing away what’s left of your life because you’re afraid you might have been wrong all this time about your girls. And when you’re eighty, and Jade’s married and it’s too late, you’ll wish things were different. I just can’t forgive that kind of idiocy,” he said with a stuffy little sniff, and leaned in to lock his elephant gun away again. The safe shut with a solid thud and a click of the pins sliding in place. The clothes rattled back into place on their hangers, shirtsleeves swinging. “Now.” Jeremy pulled the closet doors shut, shooing Ben out of the way. “I’m going back to bed.”

             
“What about your dog, shithead?” Ben asked.

             
“I’m waiting for my dog to come back in and then I’m going to bed.”

             
Ben was at the door when Jeremy called him back; he paused in the threshold, half-turning to look over his shoulder. “She called you,” Jeremy said in a grave voice. “I was three hundred feet up the drive and I’ve got an
elephant gun
.” His brows twitched. “But she called
you
. Figure it out already.”

             
Ben refused to consider anything he’d been told all the way up the stairs. He wasn’t a dumb kid who needed educating by…a dumb kid, essentially, because Jeremy was eighteen years younger than him and that equaled “kid.” His ups and downs with Jade had always been inevitable: they were too different, in age and manners and life expectations. He told himself this firmly, at the top of the stairs, and shook off the stirrings of what might have been guilt Jeremy had tried to foster. But when he slipped into Jade’s dark room and climbed back into bed beside her, she rolled toward him, mostly asleep, and propped her head against his shoulder. Her hand found its way over his slow-thumping heart and her leg slid between his. Then the guilt was crushing. In the morning, in the daylight, logic would take control again; but now, he curled an arm around her back and held her to him. And wondered why he kept sabotaging himself.

Dawn was pink and new through the gaps in the blinds when he woke again. He’d become so used to the bleary-eyed, slap-the-alarm routine of his monotonous life that it took him a moment to realize that he’d awakened on his own, and that he was, somehow, restored. Just a few hours with Jade curled up beside him had done wonders, and he wasn’t naïve enough to think that a coincidence.

              He rolled his head on the pillow and saw her at the closet, sliding her arms into a thin sweater. She was in thick socks and black cotton underwear and worked the look like she was at a photo shoot. Ben lay still and enjoyed the view; she stepped into skinny jeans, zipped them, and glanced up, gaze bumping into his.

             
She twitched an uncertain smile; mornings after were usually strange. “I didn’t think you’d sleep this late.”

             
He’d been thinking the same about her. “Aren’t you supposed to be horseback sniper-fodder by now?”

             
Her smile thinned. “I rode last night instead.” So she’d at least taken what he’d said into consideration. Jade was brave, but she wasn’t stupid; she knew the difference between courage and lunacy.

             
He sat up and scrubbed his hands through his hair. He had a thousand things to do – the case was slipping through his fingers; Trey was up to speed on everything and Ben felt like he was fumbling – but the thought of the precinct left him nauseas.

             
Jade seemed to read his mind. “Jeremy’s feeding this morning – he’s got a lesson trailering in – so I’m making breakfast. Do you have time to stick around and eat?”

             
He should have said no, but nodded instead. Before she left the room, Jade walked over and dropped a kiss on his forehead. It almost felt normal.

16

             
T
hey had scrambled eggs, wheat toast, and some kind of fancy leftover fruit salad with white wine and mint in it. Clara came bounding down at ten till seven, in flouncy white nightgown, hair a disordered curtain of curls. She was delighted to see him and insisted on sitting beside him while they ate. Ben kissed Clara and gave Jade an awkward squeeze on the shoulder before he left. As his hand withdrew, she reached up and grazed her fingers with his; the look she slanted over her shoulder was heavy with meaning:
come back if you need to
. He was determined not to make that mistake again.

             
There was a truck and trailer rig down at the barn, the same one from a few days before; Jeremy was coaching the same muscularly challenged woman down in the arena. Mist banked in thick drifts over the landscape, giving the farm a disconcerting, dreamlike feel that left Ben uneasy. He cast one last look across the property before he climbed in his car – searching for whatever ghost had rattled Jade the night before – but the fog played tricks with his eyes.

             
He called Trey on the drive, listening over the ceaseless prattle of his broken radio.

             
“Hey,” his partner answered on the first ring, sounding three cups of coffee into his day. “So the CSI team went through the house yesterday afternoon.”

             
“Yeah.”

             
“The wife and the other two sons are in Florida visiting the grandparents, apparently. They’re on the way back home and lemme tell ya, the wife is losing her freaking mind over this. She’s gonna be fun.”

             
“I bet.”

             
“But, back to the house.” He was talking in a fast, irregular jumble. The coffee had been sugared, apparently. Probably more caramel Starbucks crap. “Our guy Jason found what he thinks is the murder weapon.”

It was a slot head screwdriver, the head wiped clean, the black and yellow handle smudged with forgotten blood. Under the fluorescent lamp over the lab table, the tool was transformed to a wicked length of steel, dark and deadly. In his mind, Ben watched the head punch through Heidi Latham’s fragile white skin, severing her carotid, blood spraying in a sick wet arc.

              “Where’d you find it?”

             
“In the back of one of the metal cabinets in the basement. It was shoved back behind a tackle box. We pulled blood off the cabinet wall too – transfer – and off the handle. We’re running them against Heidi’s DNA now, but there were no prints: too smudged for discernible patterns.”

             
“And you’re sure it’s the murder weapon?”

             
“That’s my guess, yeah.” Jason pushed his glasses up on his forehead and made a face. “But Doc Harding won’t say ‘yes’ for sure. It’s his ‘opinion that the screwdriver is most likely the murder weapon – it’s consistent – but barring DNA evidence, nothing can be certain.’”

             
“Ugh,” Trey said.

             
“No,” Ben said. “He has to say that. We start throwing around the word ‘definite’ and the defense will have a field day at trial.” He nodded to Jason. “Thanks.” And turned for the door, gesturing for Trey to follow.

             
Riley and Woods were waiting for them in the conference room. Riley was blowing steam off her coffee, leaned back against the table, studying the white board. Woods was picking something off the front of his too-tight shirt and breathing through his mouth. Both looked up when they entered.

             
“How nice of you to show up,” Woods said with an ugly scowl. “You made an arrest and you couldn’t even bother to tell us?”

             
Ben didn’t have the energy to piss on fences with the asshole. Good night’s sleep or not, he was running on a years-long deficit and preoccupied by,
“I was frightened, and I wanted to hear your voice.”
Jade might as well have been standing beside him, holding his hand for how successful he’d been at leaving her behind that morning.

             
Riley gave him an up-down exam and frowned. “You look like hell.”

             
He’d showered, and borrowed a toothbrush, but his jacket smelled like wet dog for some reason. “Yeah.” He joined her at the table, folding his arms and throwing his gaze in the general direction of the board. He needed a minute to line up the cards in his head, lock the case down solid.

             
Behind him, Woods leaned across the table. “Don’t ya think you jumped the gun with the Reddings?”

             
The majority of murder cases in Cobb County were straightforward. They didn’t see Zodiac Killers or Ted Bundys. If there was such a thing as a “normal” homicide, the county had seen all types: arguments taken a dark turn, strung-out junkies with nervous trigger fingers, cheating spouses, bullies, even a few gang-related killings. For the most part, even on high profile cases like this one, the whiteboard was a second grader’s connect-the-dots of simple, logical clues that led to the most obvious answer. No one would ever want to make a cop movie out of his life: not enough crazed zig-zags on the board or overly dramatic epiphanies reached at the height of genius level monologues. Heidi’s board looked like all the others: crime scene shot of Heidi, bloodless and tiny; mug shots of Asher McMahon, Scott and Jared Redding; snapshots of the trail behind the Latham house, the blood on the leaf, the bloody clothes, the Redding sink; a hurried, jotted list of Alicia’s grievances against the Reddings in, appropriately, red marker. The Reddings had means, opportunity, and their own twisted motive that didn’t have to make sense to the rest of them.