River of Glass Page 11

  I shook my head to clear it. This wasn’t about Caitlin. It was about Bridget. I said into the phone, “I’m waiting for a locksmith, but I’ll run by after he’s done. I’ll call you when I know something.”

  Khanh said, “Trouble?”

  I filled her in, and she lowered her eyes and said, “This bad, yes?”

  “Maybe. Maybe she fell asleep watching a movie. Maybe she was bumping bellies with a new boyfriend and lost track of time.”

  “You think?”

  “No. But I’d like to.”

  IT WAS twenty more minutes before the locksmith arrived. By that time, I’d had enough of Ray Salazar, and it was a relief when he closed and locked the door behind us. The locksmith was a wiry guy about five feet tall, with stringy brown hair and eyes the color of mud. The name tag on his chest said Waylon, and he thrummed with nervous energy. He moved lightly on the balls of his feet, his footsteps quiet on the broken asphalt. He looked us over as he climbed out of his van. Lifted an eyebrow but didn’t ask why we looked like we’d been spat out of a meat grinder.

  “This the truck?” He gestured toward the Silverado. Prison tats covered his forearms and the backs of his hands.

  A real trust builder.

  I showed him the lock, and he shook his head and said, “You’re gonna need new locks. Take a few minutes.”

  He quoted me a price that wasn’t quite highway robbery and set to work. His hands were deft, and I figured he’d done his time for burglary. It did my heart good to see him pursuing an honest profession.

  I would have smiled at the thought, if it weren’t for Bridget. Instead, I looked over his shoulder until he turned and squinted back at me with a raised eyebrow. “You get much closer, you’re gonna have to buy me dinner.”

  I held up an apologetic hand and stepped away, pacing the blacktop until he straightened up and pressed a fist to the small of his back.

  He handed me my shiny new key. “Better ’n new.”

  I paid him, and he climbed back into his truck, whistling. When he’d gone, I looked at Khanh. “Let’s go find Bridget.”

  18

  The house Bridget shared with her grandmother was on the outskirts of Antioch, a small clapboard farmhouse with peeling paint and a sagging wire fence. A pale light streamed from the lace curtains in the windows. The air smelled of rain and marigolds. Someone had planted a double row around the mailbox and along the length of the gravel driveway.

  A dog on a chain gave a series of half-hearted barks, then whined and settled onto his stomach with his muzzle between his paws. Khanh hung back as I walked over and stroked his head. He thumped his tail on the ground and pawed at the empty bowl in front of him. Not far away was another bowl, a few nuggets of kibble scattered in the dust around it.

  I took a bottle of water from the cache behind my front seat and poured it into his water bowl with my good hand, keeping my left pressed against my stomach to stabilize it. While he lapped eagerly, I scratched his head again and looked at the windows. No movement from inside.

  Khanh followed me to the front door, and when no one answered my knock, trailed behind me to the back, where the air took on the musty smell of chickens. A sagging coop lolled behind the house, where a few bedraggled hens scrabbled in the dirt. They scattered, clucking protests, as we rounded the corner.

  No answer at the back door either. I wrapped my good hand in my shirttail and jiggled the doorknob. Locked. No scrapes or chipping paint around the lock, no broken glass or forced entry.

  I wiped dust from the rear window with the sleeve of my shirt. It was dim inside, but a thin light streamed from the front room into a tiny kitchen. On the floor lay a white-haired woman in a pink housedress and a single pink slipper. The other slipper lay a few inches from her bare foot. A small pool of blood had collected beneath her head.

  “Shit,” I said. “Wait here.”

  I fetched a pair of rubber gloves out from the truck, used my teeth to tug the right one on, then took out a credit card and went back around to the rear of the house. The card slipped easily between the latch and the doorframe. The door creaked open a few inches, and I nudged it the rest of the way. Smelled a musty odor, the scent of early decomp. A pair of dirty plates sat on the counter, piled with chicken bones and a few sad sprigs of rotting broccoli.

  I kept my mouth shut. One of the first things senior homicide detectives delight in telling rookies is that all odor is particulate, which meant we were breathing in bits of decomposing broccoli, along with bits of decomposing woman. Something it was better not to think about.

  “Stay here,” I said again, and stepped inside, hands in my pockets, keeping to the edges of the walls. Like the rest of us, criminals take the most direct path to where they want to go. If the killer had left evidence, the edges of the room were the least likely places to find it.

  Khanh slipped her hand into her pants pocket and edged in behind me.

  I blew out a sigh. “Fine. Just don’t touch anything.”

  I had to step over the dead woman’s lower legs to get into the living room. Behind me, Khanh moaned softly, then sucked in a sharp breath and stepped across.

  The living room was cramped, with mud-brown furniture and Elvis collectible plates on the walls. In the center of the room, Bridget slumped in a wooden chair, bound to it by her wrists and ankles, held upright by the rope that clamped her naked torso to the chair back.

  She’d been there awhile.

  Her face, upper body, and the tops of her arms and thighs were white. Her lower legs and the parts of her thighs and buttocks that weren’t touching the chair were a livid purple where the blood had settled. Her lower abdomen was tinged with green. Small circular burns pocked her breasts and inner thighs, and just below her collarbone was a burn in the shape of a double helix. Bruises and thin cuts marred the rest of her torso.

  Her hands looked malformed, and it took me a moment to realize why. The crocheted rug beneath the chair was soaked with blood, and some of it had pooled around what looked at first like Beanie Weenies. Then my mind registered the chipped purple polish and the occasional flash of bone. In the center of one bloody fingernail, a bit of rhinestone glittered.

  Khanh clapped her hand over her mouth and stumbled backward, over the older woman’s body and out the door. A moment later, I heard her retching.

  I turned back to the body. Careful not to step in the blood, I pressed a finger to the side of Bridget’s calf. Living skin would blanch, leaving a pale, fleeting impression of my fingertip as the pressure displaced the blood beneath. The skin on Bridget’s calf remained a deep purple. Dead at least eight to twelve hours, enough time for the lividity to fix.

  Her wrist was cold and stiff, but her head lolled forward and her facial features were beginning to relax. Somewhere between twenty-four and thirty-four hours, then. Much more, and the smell of decay would be stronger. Much less, and she’d still be in rigor.

  My mouth tasted sour. While I’d been showing his picture around, he’d been here, torturing the girl. Wanting answers. Tying up loose ends.

  This kind of torture, either he enjoyed it, or he wanted something from her. Maybe both. I stepped away, breathing fast and shallow, and tried to put it together.

  Why Bridget? The news reports had said she’d found the body in midafternoon, which meant he should have no reason to think she could ID him. But if he’d seen Lupita, he might have reasoned that a young woman coming to the office at that hour almost certainly worked for Strip-o-Grams. After that, how hard would it be to stake out the place and, when the girl he’d seen didn’t show, snatch Bridget? Either he’d decided that Bridget knew more than she was telling, or he thought she could lead him to Lupita.

  My temples began to throb. If I hadn’t spread his picture around, Bridget might still be alive.

  I retraced my steps out to the back porch, where Khanh sat with her head between her knees, breath coming in ragged bursts.

  “You okay?” I said.

  Without liftin
g her head, she said, “We do this?”

  “We didn’t do this.” It didn’t sound convincing, so I said it again. “We didn’t do this.”

  “Tuyet—” Her voice broke.

  I sat down on the steps beside her. Laid my good hand between her shoulder blades. “She’s going to be okay. We’re going to bring her home.”

  It wasn’t Malone’s jurisdiction, but I called her anyway, then dialed Frank’s number. Patrice answered, her voice thick with sleep.

  “Is it an emergency?” she asked, voice low.

  “It’s nothing the night crew can’t handle, but they may call him in anyway. I’ve got a homicide here, and it’s related to a case he’s working.”

  “If you don’t need him right away, I think I’ll let him sleep until they do.”

  All the years I’d worked with Frank, she’d never let him sleep through a call about a case. “What’s going on, Patrice?”

  Her breathing changed, and for a moment, I thought she’d tell me. Then she sighed and said, “He’s fine, Jared. But come by and see us soon. We miss you. He misses you.”

  WE WENT back to the Silverado to wait for the police. I wanted to pace, but if there were footprints, I didn’t want to obliterate them. Instead, Khanh sat in the passenger seat hugging her knees while I used my good hand to pull out my phone and punch in Ms. Ina’s number with my thumb. She answered on the second ring. Waiting for my call.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this,” I said.

  “Oh no.” Her voice was soft, sad. “Is she . . .?”

  “I’m afraid so. You need to call Lupita. Get her someplace safe. Anything Bridget knew, we have to assume he knows.”

  “She didn’t know much,” Ms. Ina said. “Not about Lupita. Lupita is a secretive girl. I doubt any of the others knew where she lived.”

  “Lived?”

  “She’s already gone. Back to Mexico, at least for the foreseeable future. Poor Bridget.” Her voice caught. “Did she . . . suffer?”

  My hesitation was answer enough.

  “Oh, no,” she said again. And then, “I hope you kill this bastard. I really do.”

  I closed my eyes and saw the playful smirk on Bridget’s face, the blonde ponytails swaying as she danced across Ms. Ina’s hardwood floor. Had she bargained for her life? Pleaded? Made up answers when she realized she didn’t have the information he wanted? Had he left her alone while he checked her story and come back to punish her when he realized she’d lied? My mind raced, imagining things I didn’t want to imagine.

  Khanh lifted her head, still pale. “Why he do this?”

  “He wanted information. She didn’t have any to give.”

  “She tell, he let her go?”

  “Probably not. But maybe he’d have killed her quicker.”

  I shifted in the seat, trying to ignore the throbbing in my arm. I pressed a finger to it, and a slice of pain shot through it, sharp enough to make my eyes water and my stomach churn. Maybe I wouldn’t try that again. I touched it again, more gently, with my palm. It was swollen, hot to the touch.

  Headlights swung into the driveway, and tires crunched gravel. The dog barked twice, and a few moments later, Malone pulled up beside me and got out of her car, looking like she’d swallowed a frog. “You have a knack for finding trouble. How’d you get in?”

  “Back door. I popped it when I saw the old woman’s body.”

  “Jesus Christ, McKean.”

  “There was a chance the girl might be alive.”

  She held up a hand—stop talking—and went around to the back. A few minutes later, she came out the front door and said, “Start from the beginning. How’d you come to be here, anyway?”

  “She didn’t show up for work.”

  “So the old lady called you.”

  “She couldn’t very well call you. What would she say?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She reached into her purse, pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “How about, the strongest connection we have to a witness in your murder case is missing?”

  “And you’d have said, she’s an adult, she’s a stripper, so what if she’s a few hours late for work.” She glared at me, and I said, “I’m not busting your chops, Malone. I know how it works.”

  She heaved a sigh. “I guess you tromped all over the crime scene too.”

  “I didn’t disturb anything.”

  “Didn’t check her pulse? Try CPR?”

  “It was pretty clear she was beyond CPR.”

  She looked at Khanh. “How about you? You touch anything?”

  Khanh shook her head.

  Malone tapped a cigarette out of the pack. “We’ll wait here for the local cops and CSI. Not in any hurry, are you?”

  “Truth to tell,” I said, “I’m about tapped out. Khanh too, I guess.”

  “You saw the DNA spiral on her collarbone?”

  “I saw it. You think Helix is the guy?”

  “I don’t know. It’s kind of heavy-handed, but we have to check it out.”

  While Malone puffed at the cigarette, I told her about the attack in Salazar’s parking lot. A little furrow appeared between her eyebrows. “I don’t like this,” she said. “You know what this was, right?”

  “I know what it was.”

  “An interrogation.” She ground the cigarette out on her heel, field-stripped it, and put it in the pocket of her slacks. “If he’d knocked you out with that pipe, there’d be two more chairs in there, and you and your shadow would be tied to them.”

  19

  The local police arrived, followed a few minutes later by the forensic tech van. Khanh and I watched the flurry of activity from my truck. CSIs in disposable jumpsuits gathered evidence while a deputy with a buzz cut waved his arms and blustered into his phone. A young guy in uniform untied the dog and put it in the back of a patrol car with a reassuring pat.

  It was after two by the time we’d made our statements and been dismissed. Two more hours before the doctor at Summit Hospital’s ER rebandaged Khanh’s wounds, put six stitches in her forehead, and told me to wake her up every few hours and ask her some simple questions. Concussions could be tricky, he said. You’d think you felt fine and then, boom, you were dead. With that cheery pronouncement, he turned his attention to me.

  After a couple of X-rays of my forearm, he diagnosed a hairline fracture and applied a bright blue cast that started at my palm and went up to my elbow, leaving only my thumb and fingers free. He sent us home with two prescriptions for pain pills. I took a perverse pleasure in noting that mine were better than hers.

  She dozed against the passenger door on the way home, stirring only briefly when I went in to fill the prescriptions. Twice, my eyes snapped open as the tires of the Silverado juddered on the shoulder, and I gave a little prayer of thanks when we finally pulled into the driveway. I shook Khanh gently awake, ran through the checklist the doctor had given me to make sure her brain hadn’t ruptured, and steered her upstairs to the guest room. A sliver of light streamed from under Jay’s door. Burning the candle at both ends.

  I was supposed to wake Khanh up every two hours and run the checklist. I was supposed to take a pain pill for my throbbing arm. Instead, I lay down on top of the covers and let my eyes close. A stream of images passed in front of my eyes, things I should be doing, people I wanted to see, questions I wanted to ask.

  Then there was nothing until the buzzing of my cell phone woke me. Lying on my stomach, I reached to turn it off with my left hand and hissed in a breath as a knife of pain cut through my forearm. I rolled over and fumbled for it with my other hand. Flipped it open and mumbled, “Yeah?”

  Frank said, “You’re not going to like this.”

  Before I could form a coherent sentence, he gave me the punch line. “We picked up Helix for questioning early this morning.”

  “Is that the part I’m not going to like?”

  “No, that’s the good part. The bad part is, we can’t hold him.”

  “One of his ladies alibi him
?”

  He gave a humorless laugh. “How’d you guess? Not to mention, as his attorney kindly pointed out, there are plenty of people who know about that double helix symbol. Any one of them could have killed the girl and marked her with the spiral.”

  “He have any ideas who might have done a thing like that?”

  “Says there’s plenty of people want a shot at his action. But I was thinking, if he had a partner . . .”

  “Or partners. They might be shifting the blame to him. But why do that, knowing he might give them up?”

  “Maybe he can’t. It’s the Internet age. Maybe they do it all online.”

  “Or maybe one of the people I talked to this week decided he’d make a terrific red herring. I put his name out there.”

  “You didn’t have to do much to get it there. He didn’t exactly keep a low profile.”

  We spent a few minutes chatting about the case. Then, from the front of the house, Patrice called his name. “Gotta go,” he said, and after weighing the virtues of sleep versus breakfast, I slid out of bed and reached for a pair of jeans.

  “Thank God,” Jay said, when I finally stumbled downstairs. It was almost noon, but he stood at the stove, stirring a pot of steel-cut oats. The butter, brown sugar, and cream were already on the table, a bowl of sliced bananas on the side. Khanh sat at the table, looking bleary-eyed. A bruise darkened one cheek, and one eye was ringed with purple. More bruises pocked her arms. A gauze patch covered the scrape on her forearm. Presumably, there was another beneath the knee of her black pants.

  Jay ladled a scoop into a bowl and set it in front of Khanh, who gave it a dubious look. “Look like . . .” She cast about for an appropriate comparison, came up empty. “Nothing good.”

  I shook my head. “This from a woman who eats duck fetuses.”

  Jay ladled out another dollop of oats, looked back over his shoulder. “I’m not fixing duck fetuses.”

  “Too bad.” Khanh forced a smile. “You learn make very good food, come Vietnam.”