Blinded (33 page)

The rules of nitroglycerin are simple. If one tiny tab under your tongue doesn’t make your chest pain go away in a few minutes, you throw another little white pebble into your mouth. The instructions don’t tell you to pray, but if you’re still caressing that minuscule brown bottle after those first few minutes of center-of-your-world, center-of-your-chest agony, then it’s likely you’ve already made contact with whatever version of God that you consider might be the most influential.

I was sitting, leaning up against Holly’s garage, when I popped the second nitro. As a general rule, standing and nitroglycerin go together about like beer and chocolate. Not too well. That’s why I was sitting.

I started thinking about Simon. That freaked me out.

As a way of distracting myself while I waited for the second nitro to kick in and the pain under my ribs to ease, I refocused on Holly’s house. Artie was at the kitchen sink. I didn’t take him for a roll-up-his-sleeves, get-his-hands-dirty kind of guy.

But no Holly. Still no Holly.

My head was pounding. After the flush and the disorientation, the next side effect of nitro is the headache. An ice-cream brain freeze and a big bass drum. It’s that kind of thing, and it comes on instantly.

Artie walked away from the window. One of Holly’s sisters took his place at the sink.

Holly?

I phoned Carmen.

“Any sign of her yet?”

“Sam, where the hell are you?”

“Behind the house.”

“You don’t sound too good.”

“A little indigestion.”

“How can you have indigestion? You haven’t eaten anything.”

“It was probably that energy bar thing you gave me. My body’s not accustomed to healthy crap like that. Any sign of Holly?”

I heard a car door open, then slam shut. I turned my head and spied the Cherokee, but I could only see the front end from where I was sitting.

“No,” she said. “Nobody’s gone in or out of that house.” Her tone announced that she was pissed off.

I could hear her walking. First the sounds came through the earpiece of the phone, then gradually I could hear her footfalls through my other ear, the one that was uncovered. The steps grew louder, more determined. Finally, Carmen emerged above me. God, she was tall.

“I’m calling an ambulance,” she said.

“No, no. It’s getting better. I swear. The nitro’s working. It is.”

Was it? I couldn’t tell. The pain wasn’t gone. But I could almost breathe without gasping. That had to be a good sign.

I didn’t want to get into another ambulance. Not on Thanksgiving. Not in South Bend.

She squatted beside me, adopting a posture that I knew I couldn’t have managed after a year of dieting and daily yoga sessions.

She touched my face. “You’re clammy.”

“No, I’m Sammy.”

She slapped me. A true little love pat.

“If you die out here after you talk me out of calling an ambulance, I swear I’ll come to your funeral and piss on your grave.”

“I’d love to see the surveillance tape on that.”

She slapped me again.

The pain was easing. It was. The knife was out from below my ribs.

“I’m good,” I said. “Just a little angina. Doc said I might have some angina every once in a while. That’s what the nitro’s for.” The doc hadn’t said that, but it sounded like something a doc might say.

She stared at me as though she didn’t believe a word out of my mouth.

“I have a feeling Holly’s not alone,” I said.

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m serious. I think he might be in there. Sterling.”

“Why?” Her solitary word was a simple question, but given its inflection, it was also a statement. The statement was
“Don’t be an asshole. Not with me.”

Not now.

I explained about watching the kitchen window and about my phone call to the house.

“Okay, how would he have gotten in?” she asked. Her inflection? I recognized it. It was the one I used to employ with Simon when he was younger and he blamed mishaps around the house on his imaginary friend, Tank.

“Maybe he went in when everybody arrived, you know? He snuck in the back door when the family was at the front. Isn’t that possible?”

“Anything’s possible.”

Carmen was staring at me, not at the house. She thought my sneaking-in-the-back-door scenario was about as likely as Gibbs going to Wal-Mart to buy her winter wardrobe.

“Or Holly might have let him in,” I added.

“What?” she said. The tenor had changed. It was more like: Now you’re saying something interesting. Tell me.

“She likes danger-risk might be a better word. We know that, right? Sexually speaking, Holly Malone likes risk. That was the whole thing with Sterling in the first place.”

Carmen nodded. She completed my thought as though we’d been partnering for years, not hours. “And doing it with an accused murderer while her family is gathering for Thanksgiving…”

I visualized Artie’s disapproving eyes. “Yeah, that sounds risky enough. That would qualify.”

“How long since you’ve seen her?”

“Ten, twelve minutes.”

We were both staring at the house. My eyes were plastered on the window wells that led to the basement. That’s where I figured they’d be, Holly and Sterling. In some room down there. For some reason I decided that it was the laundry room. An image of Holly propped up on the dryer began to develop in my consciousness until I shooed it away like some aggravating insect.

But like a yellowjacket in late summer, it came right back.

I was ready to move, to go inside the house, but I wanted Carmen to arrive at the same conclusion herself. While I waited for her to come around, I hit a speed-dial number on my phone. Lucy. “Hey, Luce. I just have a second. The feds ever find Brian Miles?… No?… Thanks… Yeah, fine. Seriously. I’ll call you in a bit.” I hung up. “Miles is still missing.”

Carmen nodded as though she expected the news. “You think they’re together? Sterling and Miles?”

“Can’t rule it out.”

She said, “What about the car? Maybe they’re doing it in the car. Have you checked the garage?” She nodded at the wall I was leaning against.

I felt stupid. I was so focused on the basement that I hadn’t even considered the detached garage. And no, I hadn’t checked the garage. I shook my head in response to Carmen’s question, suddenly not wanting to risk having my voice carry through the bricks.

“Shall we?” she whispered.

I stood. My balance problems were gone. My headache wasn’t.

Carmen hopped the three-foot fence as though it were the height of a curb. I stepped over using a more conventional scissors maneuver. Carmen’s revolver was in her hand when she got to the side door of the garage. I pulled my gun, too.

I don’t like my handgun. Some cops do. Some don’t. I’ve never felt right with the damn thing in my hand. I’m a pretty good shot; that’s not it. It’s something more intrinsic that I’ve never understood. I’m more comfortable with a rifle or a shotgun pressed against my shoulder.

Carmen, on the other hand, held her Smith amp; Wesson with the comfort of a good cook holding her favorite knife over an onion. No ambivalence there at all.

Holly’s vehicle was a late-nineties GM sedan. Through the hazy glass pane in the side door, I couldn’t have identified whether it was a Pontiac or a Chevy or an Olds if my life depended on it. I could tell that it didn’t seem to be moving-moving, as in rocking side to side.

Carmen turned the doorknob and entered the narrow garage in a single fluid motion that reminded me of a ballroom dance move. I was right behind her. Despite my adrenaline surge, I was thinking that I wouldn’t want to be screwing in that car and have us burst into the garage with our guns drawn.

It could change a person’s view of sex forever.

We covered the perimeter of the little rectangular space and the interior of the car in seconds and came to the same conclusion at the exact same time: The garage wasn’t Holly’s love nest.

“Okay,” Carmen said. “I’m convinced. Let’s go ruin a lot of people’s Thanksgiving supper.”

As an actress Adrienne was a little over the top. I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“Thanks for coming in to see me on Thanksgiving,” she began. “I know it’s a terrible inconvenience. The reason I needed to see you is that… I did something last week that… well… I can’t get off my mind.”

“I assumed it was important for you to have come all the way in from Denver.” I realized my role in this drama was going to be entirely ad-libbed. And with Adrienne as the person responsible for hitting the ball over the net for me to return, I knew I was going to need to stay on my toes.

“I’m having trouble living with it, with what I did. And I don’t know exactly what I should do next.”

“Yes?”

If Jim Zebid was sitting outside listening, he was-thus far-hearing a pretty convincing presentation. If he was somehow watching, however, he wouldn’t believe a word of it. When she wasn’t choking down some laughter, Adrienne was leaning over, talking into the couch pillow like Maxwell Smart with his shoe phone.

“I was doing a vasectomy on Tuesday in my Cherry Creek office-I do a thousand of them, they’re no big deal. First a little poke, a little cut, snip-snip, burn-burn-”

Burn-burn?

“-stitch-stitch.”

“Stitch-stitch” I understood just fine. I was still stuck on “burn-burn.”

“Burn-burn?” I asked. I shouldn’t have asked-it wasn’t germane to the trap I was setting-but I really wanted to know.

“Cautery,” she explained with a frown.

“Cautery,” I repeated. A rapid personal inventory didn’t reveal any pieces in that vicinity that I would be eager to have fried during the “burn-burn” segment of her operation.

Adrienne went on. “During the procedure I cut one of the guy’s nerves.”

“You cut a nerve?”

“By accident, just after the first little cut. One of my snips? My hand slipped a little.”

“Your hand slipped during a snip?”

“Are you just going to repeat everything I say? Is that all you’re planning to do? I say ‘my hand slipped,’ and you add a question mark? I could go talk into a tape recorder and just play it back and add my own question marks, save myself a lot of money.”

I glared at her. My nonverbal admonishment didn’t faze her, though; she was having a great time.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“He doesn’t know. I didn’t tell him. How the hell would he know? You think guys watch while I do vasectomies on them? There are some things a guy likes to see done to his genitals, but that isn’t one of them. You’re going to have to trust me on this.”

I almost said,
“You didn’t tell him?”
but thought that another repetition might be too much provocation for Adrienne to ignore. Instead, I said, “It was an important nerve?”

That question cracked her up. She took five seconds to compose herself before she was able to say “Down there? They’re all pretty important. That’s what I hear, anyway.”

It was my turn to swallow laughter.

“Is he going to be… impotent?”

“It’s possible.”

“Likely?”

“Maybe likely.” She rolled her eyes.

“Won’t he know you did it?”

“I’m sure he’ll suspect I had something to do with it. But it’ll be hard for him to prove. He’s had trouble raising the flag before. And he knew the risks going in.”

Raising the flag?

She ruffled a piece of paper. “You know what this is?”

I did, of course, but I said, “No.”

“His phone number. I know I should call him. That’s what I should do. That would be the right thing. To let him know what happened. But then the next thing I know I’ll be getting served some stack of incomprehensible papers by some damn bloodsucking lawyer who’ll make one little mistake seem like the assassination of King Ferdinand.”

That last line-the World War I allusion-was pure ad lib. It was definitely not in the script. Not even close. I was tempted to ask Adrienne to defend Francis Ferdinand’s posthumous promotion from archduke to king, but restraint was indicated and discretion ruled.

She leaned directly over the pillow and made a great show of ripping the paper into shreds.

“So you’ve decided not to call him?” I asked. That line was in the script.

“I’ve been staring at that number for two days. I have it memorized.” That’s when she recited the phone number in a lovely, melodic little singsong. She couldn’t have delivered the line any better if she’d rehearsed it for days.

I mimed some silent applause for her benefit.

A beeper chirped. It wasn’t mine, which was set to vibrate.

Adrienne responded to the interruption by diving at the little backpack/purse she carried and said, “Shit, that’s my pager. I have to go, sorry. You’ve been… I don’t know… ‘helpful’ isn’t exactly the right word, is it?”

I sat openmouthed.

She grabbed her things and skipped toward the door. The skipping part wasn’t in the script, either.

“Back or front?”

I was standing with Carmen beside the gate in the chain-link fence in Holly Malone’s backyard. Carmen had stopped my forward progress by placing her palm against my chest. To be more specific, her hand had come to rest on top of my left man-boob. A couple of inches below her hand my upper abdomen still ached from the angina or whatever it was. But the ache was dull, not sharp. I could live with it, I thought.

Figuratively, if not literally.

“The adults are all in the kitchen,” I said. “We should probably just knock on the back door. We’ll spook ’em a little bit, which is a good thing. And that way we don’t have to fight through the whole bushel of kids at the front of the house.” While I was speaking, I was also involuntarily sucking in my gut and tightening my chest muscles.

Carmen removed her hand from my chest. “You want the honors?”

“No, no. You go right ahead.”

She pulled back the screen door and knocked. Artie opened the door with a carving knife in his right hand and a stern expression plastered on his face, as though he suspected that he’d just discovered that one of his dressed-for-church kids had snuck outside for something sinister, like fun, and he was planning to Jack-the-Ripper the child into submission as a lesson for the surviving siblings.

Through the open door I spotted Holly’s two sisters lined up behind Artie. The other brother-in-law? Elsewhere.

Carmen said, “I’m Detective Reynoso. This is Detective Purdy. We’d like to speak with Holly Malone, please.”

“I don’t see any badges.” For a moment I thought Artie might be a lawyer but quickly decided that he had merely watched a lot of TV. I was having more than a little trouble getting past the dancing-teapots apron he was wearing and the fact that he had his hands on his hips in some semblance of indignation. With the knife at the ready, he looked a lot like an angry, aging transvestite on a day that he forgot to put on his wig.

Carmen and I both flashed our badge wallets for Artie’s benefit. All we offered was a bored, quick little flip/close. Nobody ever reads the damn things. I had forgotten mine one day in Boulder and just flipped open my regular wallet instead at someone’s house. It turned out that my driver’s license and a school picture of Simon worked just fine to get me in that door.

“Holly Malone, please.” Carmen’s voice was suddenly clipped into a no-bullshit tone that caused Artie to take a step back from her. “It’s important. We spoke with her earlier; we know she’s home.”

The older of the two sisters appeared appropriately sobered by our presence at the door. She said, “A few minutes ago she went to take a quick bath and get dressed. I’ll go find her.”

With a what-did-she-do-now tone the younger sister, Artie’s wife, asked, “Is she in trouble?”

Poor thing, she was actually asking Artie.

Before he could make a total fool of himself by pretending he knew how to answer her question, I intervened. “For something she did? No, ma’am. We just want to ask her a few questions.”

Carmen leaned back toward me and whispered, “She’s taking a bath, Sammy. I’m feeling kind of stupid.”

“Yeah, well,” I said.

I’d noticed that she’d called me Sammy.

But I wasn’t feeling stupid. Not yet. There would be plenty of time for that later. The bath? What was I thinking about that? I was thinking,
What else was Holly going to tell her sisters? To please excuse her so that she could go down to the basement for a quick poke with a stranger who’s probably a serial killer?
Tugging along immediately behind the locomotive of that thought came the unedited laundry room image of Holly on the dryer, followed by a cabooselike graphic still of what happened up in the organ loft after Holly and then Sterling climbed the stairs from the Chapel of the Reliquaries in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

Fortunately, all it took to make the prurient images vanish again was a quick glance at Artie in the dancing-teapots apron.

“Sir?” I said to him. “Feel free to go finish carving your turkey. This shouldn’t take long, shouldn’t interfere with your meal.” I smiled. “We came to the back door so we wouldn’t alarm the children.”

My suggestion about returning his attention to the turkey served as a reminder to Artie that he was holding a long thin knife in a provocative manner while speaking with a pair of police officers. He glanced at the blade, then at us. His face at that moment was priceless-he was the guy going through security at the airport who’d just remembered he’d forgotten to take his Mac-10 out of his carry-on.

Oops.

Artie slowly moved the knife behind his back, as though Carmen and I wouldn’t notice he was still holding the thing.

Good move, Artie.

Sometimes I really love my job. Put them under enough stress, and most people are endlessly entertaining.

Big sister returned ten seconds later, breathless. For the first few moments after she reentered the kitchen, she couldn’t make her mouth work. I had already started looking around for the basement stairs when she finally cried out, “I couldn’t find her. And the bathtub was dry.”

Carmen was halfway through the door. She demanded, “The basement stairs? Where are they?”

My cell phone rang. I should’ve been following after Carmen and grabbing my handgun in order to mount a search-and-rescue mission to the basement, but I grabbed the phone instead.

The caller ID? I held it at full arm’s length from my aging eyes. What did it read?

To Carmen, I said, “It’s Gibbs.”

Carmen instantly recognized the possible implications. She stopped in her tracks and stared at me. Her big gun dropped from the ready position until it was pointing vaguely at my feet.

Artie’s wife asked, “Who is Gibbs?”

“Yeah,” I said into the phone.

“He’s here, Sam! Sterling is here. Oh my God. Oh my God. Help me!” Gibbs was frantic.

I pulled the phone away from my ear, covered the microphone, and said to Carmen. “Sterling’s in Vail.”

Artie’s wife asked, “Who is Sterling?”

Carmen said, “So where’s Holly?”

The big sister said, “She didn’t take a bath. The tub’s dry.”

I lifted the phone back beside my ear just in time to hear Gibbs’s frenetic whisper, “Help me!”