Angels Burning (25 page)

I've seen even fewer photos of my mother alone. For all her vanity, Mom didn't like to have her picture taken. Neely and I used to theorize while playing in the attic of our little crooked house amid the spider skeletons why this was true. Neely thought she was a wanted woman, on the lam from the police. I thought it was because she believed, like some tribes of Native Americans and Australian aborigines, that the camera had magical powers over her inner essence and she was protecting herself; it would've been a crime for a girl that pretty to have her soul stolen by Kodak.

These photos make me want to laugh out loud remembering the good times we had but also make me want to cringe.

“We're funny and sad at the same time,” Neely once said to me while riding our bikes home from Laurel Dam, “like a turtle on its back.”

I suddenly realize why the only picture Shawna Truly displayed in her house was her wedding photo to Clark. I thought it was a stroking of her ego recalling how pretty she once was, but it was self-flagellation, a constant reminder of the mistake she made that sealed her fate and made her what she'd become.

Nolan doesn't knock. If I were a man, he would knock. Even if he didn't respect me or like me or suspected me of murder, he would knock.

I'm mad at him. Not because he didn't knock but because he didn't take advantage of my vulnerability last night and have sex with me at a time when I clearly wasn't thinking straight but when I desperately wanted to be manhandled into a state of mind-numbing distraction.

He stops in front of our murder board. It's only the second one I've put together during my tenure as chief. The other two homicides that occurred during my career happened when I was a trooper and when I was an officer here.

“I always thought the purpose of a murder board was to be able to share information with your squad,” he says.

“It has wheels. I move it back and forth. I like to look at it when I'm in my office.”

He glances behind and sees there's a chalkboard on the other side.

“We borrowed it from the elementary school,” I explain. “We don't have a lot of murders here.”

He gives me a patronizing shake of his head.

“Did you borrow the markers, too? I like how every suspect gets his own color. Why does Eddie Truly get green?”

“Ex-military.”

“The Massey kid, blue?”

“He's a boy.”

“Lonnie Harris, brown?”

“Shithead.”

“Shawna Truly, purple?”

“Royalty. The Queen of Crud.”

“Miranda Truly, red?”

“Satan.”

He shakes his head again.

“Did you find anything at the Harris place?” I ask him.

“A lot of porn. A loaded handgun in an unlocked closet, and he and his wife have three little kids running around.”

“Lovely.”

“But nothing that ties him to the Truly murder.”

I take a pack of markers out of my top desk drawer and join him at the board.

Under Shawna's picture I write in purple:
Camio wasn't her child. Real parents were cousins. Could this be motive?

Nolan studies it for a moment. He still has his sunglasses on. I can't tell what he's thinking.

I take out the black marker and in the center of the board I write:
Could this be THE motive?
I add arrows pointing from the question to each of the Trulys.

He doesn't comment.

He takes the green marker and writes under Eddie:
No alibi.

Then he trades the green marker for my black one and writes on my timeline of Camio's missing hours:
TOD 7:30 p.m.

“You have the definite time of death and didn't tell me? And it's over an hour before Zane received those texts?”

I was ready to tell him everything I learned about Miranda Truly this morning from my grandmother's friends and also that Eddie tried to kill his aunt Addy with an ax once, but if he doesn't feel the need to share, neither do I. I'm glad I didn't get around to writing any of it on my board.

He hands me the marker and takes a seat in the chair on the other side of my desk. I go sit behind it.

“You were worried what happened at the Massey house was going to cause you to lose your job,” he begins the lecture I knew I was going to receive from him.

He jerks a thumb in the direction of the parking lot.

“That's going to cause you to lose your job.”

“I appreciate your concern.”

“I'm not concerned. I don't care one way or another what happens to you. You can keep on being police chief of Bumblefuck, USA, or you can retire and take your pension and open a little pink doodad shop and get a bunch of cats.”

Nolan doesn't swear, so his description of Buchanan is out of character and means he's more upset than he's letting on.

“A doodad shop?” I wonder.

“You're a better cop than that,” he goes on. “What you did. That was beneath you. You know better.”

“If the next thing out of your mouth is I trained you better,” I interrupt him, “I'm going to . . .”

He leans forward in his chair. “What? Shoot me?”

I lean across my desk.

“How many years ago was that?” I reply, trying not to shout. “I'm sorry I didn't follow in your footsteps and become some hotshot state CID detective. I'm sorry me and my ovaries let you down.”

“You know your ovaries had nothing to do with it.”

We're at a standoff. He sits back in his chair first. I take that as a sign of victory. I know he's taking it as a sign that he's more mature, more responsible, a better leader, a better cop.

“Did you surrender your weapon?” he asks.

I give him a quick salute. “Yes, sir.”

“What'd this kid do to you?”

“He got to me. That's what he did.”

“Is something going on with you lately I don't know about?”

I shift in my chair. I don't want to talk to him about my personal life. I certainly don't want to admit I'm letting anything in it affect my work. I'm definitely not going to tell him Lucky is running around threatening my sister and me and planning to sue us in civil court for lying in criminal court. But I have to tell him about Champ because I need his help. He is, after all, the Inevitable.

“There is something,” I begin.

He stares at me until I think the hidden intensity of those masked eyes are going to make my head explode.

“My younger brother, Champ, who I haven't seen in twenty-five years showed up yesterday with a nine-year-old son I didn't know he had and left him with me.”

He remains silent. He's not going to make this easy.

“I have very good reason to think he doesn't mean to come back or at least not come back for a long time. I also have reason to think he might have some alcohol dependency problems. Maybe chemical, as well. I'd like to find him. My nephew seems to be a very nice little boy, but I'm not mother material.”

Nolan knows a little about my past. He was twenty years old, in college playing football, working on a criminal justice degree, and already planning to attend the state police academy when my mother was murdered. We met seven years later and he knew who I was. He remembered the crime, the victim's maiden name, and the names of her daughters. Even before he became a cop, Nolan followed accounts of all local crime like he already was a cop. He never asked me for any lurid
details or pried into how my siblings and I survived; I appreciated this. It was enough that he knew this terrible thing had happened to us.

He knows nothing about what Gil did to Champ. He does know Champ moved away and I rarely heard from him.

He reaches underneath his suit jacket and brings out a pad of paper and a pen.

“When did he leave?” he asks.

“Last night. Or it would have been this morning. He was staying at my house and I got home around two a.m. I don't remember when I fell asleep. He was gone when I woke up.”

“Why didn't you call when you discovered he was gone?”

“I don't know. I guess I was hoping he'd come back. He still might,” I add hopefully.

Nolan ignores me. He knows I wouldn't be talking to him if I thought my brother would return on his own.

“Vehicle?”

“Green Kia Soul. California plates. I didn't get the number,” I tell him before he can ask.

He frowns.

“Description.”

“Forty-four years old, five-eleven, thin, maybe one seventy. Dark hair and eyes.”

“Home address?”

“Don't know.”

“Job?”

“Unemployed.”

“Wife? Girlfriend?”

“None.”

“Son's mother?”

“Dead.”

He takes off his glasses and sighs.

“Do you know anything about him?”

“No,” I admit.

“Criminal record?”

“I don't know.”

He flips the notepad shut. “He's had a big head start. He's got to be well out of the state by now.”

I want to say thank you, but he's being too much of a jerk.

“I've got the Truly case and four other active homicides. What do you have on your plate?” he digs at me further.

I think about all his favorite home-cooked meals.

“Tonight?” I reply in a snippy tone. “Stuffed pork chops with mashed potatoes and gravy. And lemon meringue pie.”

He stands to go.

“Enjoy your pork chop,” he says.

“Enjoy eating cold SpaghettiOs out of a can over your kitchen sink.”

I know that even though he's ticked me off I'm going to feel bad for the rest of the day wondering if I hurt his feelings and if he really is going to eat cold canned pasta for dinner and it will be the last thing I think about tonight before I fall asleep. He'll forget I exist the moment he gets in his car and goes back to work.

A man can love a woman and still put himself first; a woman can put a man first she's convinced she doesn't love: this is why I never let myself get serious with Nolan.

He stops on his way out my door.

“Why's the victim's name written in orange?”

I look at Camio's eleventh-grade school photo tacked to the middle of the board. She's smiling sweetly but I know that proves nothing.

“The last picture taken of her when she was alive,” I say quietly. “She was eating an orange Popsicle.”

THE SHANK,
Shank, and Goldfarb law offices are only a couple of blocks from the police station. The first opportunity I get, I call to make sure Sandra is there and then I run over.

Most of the people we arrest and process here in town don't end up employing Sandra. They can't afford her or they don't require someone of her abilities. They do fine with Chet.

I've been grilled by her on the stand a few times. She's sharp, precise, knows every detail of the case she's trying, and doesn't believe in long-winded opening statements or summations, whether they be pedantic or folksy emotional salvos that are supposed to appeal to a jury's desire to see justice done or tug on their heartstrings. She's all about the facts and casting reasonable doubt on them.

When she first breezes into a courtroom in one of her impeccably tailored dark pantsuits, with her short, spiky reddish-brown hair and guileless face without a trace of makeup, there's a moment when everyone thinks she's an overeager teenage boy intern who's arrived to stack folders and fill water pitchers. Once her identity is established, this feeling is quickly followed by a small-town instinctive dislike and distrust of her confident urban energy and androgyny that we assume must mean she thinks she's smarter, hipper, and better than us. But after watching her at work, we then start to think of her as the class brainiac, the one we make fun of and would never invite to a party but whom we cozy up to whenever we need help with some impossible homework assignment. The only difference is when Sandra helps you out it's not because she's a geek who wants you to like her; it's because you have or have not committed a crime that intrigues her and you give her a lot of money.

“Chief Carnahan,” she says, looking up from her Mac for an instant. “I just got back from a hearing and my secretary told me gunshots were heard coming from the direction of the police station earlier.”

Her fingers tap over her keyboard. She keeps her nails short but they're always polished, today in a flat coppery shade. It reminds me that I want to check out the nail salon where Camio's friends go.

“That's sort of the reason I'm here,” I tell her. “I only need a moment of your time.”

She motions to the chair in front of her desk. It's caramel leather and probably costs as much as all the chairs and the rest of the office furniture at the station house.

I slip off my stained shoe and place it on her desk: my desk is metal, the color of a tarnished spoon; hers is some kind of honeyed exotic wood that would make the Lorax cry, polished until it glows.

“Nice shoes,” she says. “They look expensive.”

“They're not. Kohl's. With my thirty percent off coupon and Kohl's cash they were almost free. I bought three pairs that day.”

She picks it up and examines it with pursed lips.

“Sometimes they have good shoes. What happened to it?”

I give her an emotionless recap.

“During the course of the Camio Truly murder investigation, I was questioning a young man and his companions in the police parking lot when he spit chewing tobacco on my shoe in the hopes of provoking me into assaulting him. I responded by shooting out the tires of his motorcycle.”

“Instead of shooting him?”

“Yes.”

“I admire your restraint. Did you provoke him in any way?”

“No. He did it in order to show his friends that no matter what he did to me, I couldn't do anything to him because he's a minor.”

“A minor? How old?”

“At least sixteen. And he's a Truly.”