Deviations (15 page)

“What’s the risk?” I said.

“I want to keep a lid on the patriot connection,”
the chief said. “I’ve made it a point not to release any information about the
1488 on Weston’s chest. When we get whoever did this, we’ll know it’s him
because he’ll be so proud of it we won’t be able to shut him up. Then we’ll have
him on federal charges and he’ll get the needle. We tell Christopher Barry, he
starts putting the word out, that could scare the murderer, make him go underground.
It’ll give him time to think about whether he wants to die for his crime—and he
might decide not to.”

“Okay,” I said. “What do you want us to do, then,
while we wait for you or Nick to get back to us?”

“Just hang tight,” the chief said.

“Hang tight?”

“That’s what I said. If you need something to do,
see if you can track down those operations mentioned in the emails. Read more
of Willson Fredericks’ articles, check out the patriot group propaganda if you
want. But don’t go to the university, don’t go to Lake Hollow.”

“All right, Chief,” I said. “Thanks.”

* * * *

“Look at me, Ryan.” I was
leaning back in my chair, fingers laced behind my head, feet up on my desk.
“Would you say I’m hanging tight?”

He smiled at me. “I don’t know, Karen. Looks more
like you’re hanging loose.”

“I think I’m just hanging around.”

“Are you making a comment about the chief’s telling
us to hang tight?”

“You think, maybe?”

“Listen, Karen, things have changed a little here
since the old chief left.”

“Yeah, I get that. The old chief, as long as I
didn’t make him stay after five or pull him off surveillance detail at the
tittie bars, he was good with whatever the hell I did. He thought I was a crazy
drunk; I thought he was a corrupt, lazy, incompetent son of a bitch. You know
what I’m saying?”

“You’re saying you understood each other?”

“Exactly. But I have no idea what’s going on here
now. Corelli’s the federal guy with all the experience and all the authority,
but when we go to him to get his permission to do something, he’s not around.
And he doesn’t pick up his damn phone. What the hell kind of FBI guy doesn’t
pick up his damn phone?”

“That kind, I guess,” Ryan said, smiling gently at
me. That’s one of the many good things about Ryan: because he has about thirty
or forty sisters, he’s had a lot of experience dealing with screwed-up women.

“Corelli’s off somewhere getting a mani-pedi, so
we ask the chief for authorization to, you know, solve this damn case, and he
tells us no, I don’t think that would be appropriate, no, we don’t want to move
too fast, no, we don’t want to hurt the professor’s feelings, no, the Nazis are
very sensitive people, too. The guy who smashed in Weston’s head and raped her,
I’m sure he was just having a stressful day and he didn’t really mean to do it.
For the love of Christ, am I the only man left on this damn police force? I
feel like going into his office and appraising him—”

“Apprising him.”

“I’m so sorry, miss, did I just use the wrong
fucking word?”

“Well, you did just now,” Ryan said, cheerfully.

“What the hell are we supposed to do?”

“I think we were told to find out if any bad
things happened to good people on the dates mentioned in the emails and read
some more of the professor’s articles. In general, hang tight.”

“You’re good drinking the Kool-Aid, aren’t you?”

“I like to stay hydrated. Besides, since my checks
are signed by the Rawlings Police Department, I think it’s smart to do what I’m
told—you know, all other things being equal.”

“You’re quite an ordinary young man, you know
that?”

“Sticks and stones, Karen.” He smiled his big
grin.

I didn’t realize how much I missed him when I was
gone. I think he gets me.

Chapter 14

“Anything new?” Ryan said.

“Give me one more second.” I was reading Weston’s
autopsy report. The ME wrote excellent reports, complete with a couple of
paragraphs in English at the top.

“Nope, it’s almost exactly what Harold told us
when we were downstairs with him. Blunt force trauma, massive intracranial bleeding
caused swelling that compressed the brain stem, shutting down all her systems.
Before she met the guy with the brick or the rock,” I said, “she was a very
healthy woman of fifty-nine. Her organs were clean, he writes. Would have lived
a good thirty more years, he says. And one more thing: from looking at the
skull fragments, he concluded that when the object hit her skull it was coming
in on a slight downward trajectory. More damage to the front side than the back
side, so he was right-handed.”

“So,” Ryan said, “the guy was right-handed, taller
than she was?”

“I guess, or maybe he had punched her in the face,
and she was doubled over when he hit her.”

“Basically, then,” Ryan said, “Harold’s report
doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.”

“Not one damn thing.” I dropped the report onto my
desk. “Shit.”

“Hey, Karen, we felt the same way when we started
out on the Hagerty case, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember,” I said. “But at least that one
we had some biologicals under Hagerty’s fingernails.” I picked up my phone and
punched in Robin’s number, then hit Speaker. “Hey, Robin, this is Karen. You
got some great news for me on Dolores Weston?”

“I was just writing this up for you. I don’t have
shit on Weston.”

“You finished typing the DNA on the semen?”

“Yeah, just finished it. It’s not in any database—not
Montana, not federal. Checked NDIS and CODIS. The guy’s got no record of
violent crime.”

“No defensive wounds?”

“Nope.”

“Fibers, blood, anything?”

“When I said ‘I don’t have shit on Weston,’ I
meant that to include DNA, fibers, blood, and anything.”

“You call yourself an evidence tech?”

“I try not to, actually. Spooks the guys. Really,
Karen, I’ve got nothing. No tire tracks, no footprints, no fibers, no
biologicals. All I’ve got is those four buttons from her blouse. A partial
print of Weston’s on one of the buttons, but nobody else’s prints since our nobody
else just ripped open her blouse without touching the buttons.”

“You can’t get anything off the blouse where the
guy ripped it?”

“Yes, Karen, I thought you’d enjoy it if I delayed
telling you until the end of our chat. We got his prints off the silk blouse,
ran him through the computer this morning, he works down at Nazis“R”Us, we arrested
him a few minutes ago. He’s in lockup. He confessed; he’s scheduled for
execution after lunch.”

“Thanks, Robin. Always a pleasure.”

“Later, Karen.”

I hung up the phone. “Where you headed?” I said.
Ryan was getting up from his desk.

“I’ve got a presentation out at Bishop Halloran.”

“Career Day?”

“Meth and huffing.”

“Have a great old time. See you later.”

“You bet.”

I’d headed up enough investigations to know that
Ryan was right saying it was too early to get bummed out. After the initial
buzz of starting a murder investigation—doing the canvass, the autopsy, the
forensics, drawing up a preliminary list of suspects, devising a strategy, figuring
out the resources you’ll need, making the personnel assignments—you often hit a
wall. Or a better word would be you run into some bog. You get stuck in some
wet, oozy stuff, and your wheels just sink in. No matter how hard you hit the
accelerator, the damn car won’t budge. In fact, the harder you hit it, the
deeper you sink in. We were sinking into the bog.

The slime had made it up to the wheel wells. Day
after the murder, the department had put out a call on TV and radio for
information about any suspicious activities near the industrial park where
Weston’s body was recovered. Even though the state had offered ten thousand
bucks for information leading to an arrest, we hadn’t gotten anything useful.
Unless you consider it useful to know that seventy-three people thought it
worth a shot to finger their husbands/boyfriends/fathers/sons, and, in one
case, their mom, on the chance that they’d be arrested for killing Weston. It
was all bullshit, of course, but what are you going to do? Ten thousand is a
lot of cash. The good news, I guess, is that only fourteen of the callers were
certain that their people had killed Weston. The rest were just calling out of,
you know, civic duty.

So the canvass got us nothing, which made sense
since there weren’t any houses within a couple hundred yards of where the body
was recovered. Add the nothing we had from Weston’s house and we officially had
nothing. Nothing from the autopsy, and nothing from forensics. The only
remaining tests were the tox screens, which would take another couple of days.
But we weren’t expecting anything from the blood.

All we had was the emails from the professor, who
probably was getting his pebbles off by pretending to be Nazi-compatible. Then
there were my two wet, oozy bosses. Agent Nick Corelli was working real hard on
the case right here in Rawlings—except, of course, that we didn’t know where he
was or what he was doing or how to get in touch with him or maybe I was trying
to get off the booze too quick and I was just hallucinating that there was a
Nick Corelli. And the chief, who trusted me and appreciated my work and thought
I’d have a terrific future serving the citizens of Rawlings—no, wait a second, now
I’m definitely hallucinating.

I’m just supposed to hang tight. Right around now,
I’d rather just
be
tight.

But something would break. If I could stay
patient, something would turn up, something would happen. We’d get a court
order to force Willson Fredericks to talk. The prosecutor would put his stones
in a vise, make like he was going to tighten it, and we’d have BC’s name,
address, and Social Security in ten seconds. We’d pick him up, and he’d start
confessing, right in the back seat of a big Ford, about how he was proud of
what he did, he’d do it all over again, he’s the only real American, Heil
Hitler, game over. Or we’d get a call from some woman whose shitty husband or
boyfriend is a disappointment not just because he drinks, whores around, and
beats her up occasionally but due to that weird, boozy story he told her about
bashing this senator’s skull in and carving 1488 on her fucking chest, which
she certainly deserved. He wouldn’t tell her about the rape, of course, because
women always get hung up on details, missing the big picture, which is that
he’s a real hero.

Yes, something would break. Unless it didn’t. Nine
times out of ten we hand the murderer over to the prosecutor, but what if
Dolores Weston’s case is that one time out of ten? What if we do everything
right—I stay sober, Ryan stays Ryan, we figure out a way to work with Corelli
and the chief—and we still don’t find him? Well, what if? It could happen. It
would be real bad, but it could happen.

* * * *

“Jorge, Karen Seagate.” I
was phoning our IT guy.

“Hey, mi hermana. Welcome back.”

“Thanks, Jorge. You got a second?”

“For you, of course.”

“When you went out to the university with Nick
Corelli the other day—you know, to grab the professor’s email?—did you get a
chance to check the routing information on those emails from the guy named BC?
You know what I’m talking about?”

“I know what routing information is, but I didn’t
go out to the university the other day. And this guy Corelli, never heard of
him.”

“I’m sorry, Jorge, I thought he mentioned you two
went out to the university. Could there be anyone else in the Department might’ve
gone out there with him? You got anyone else in IT since I been gone?”

“It’s just me, Karen.”

“Okay, Jorge, sorry to bother you.”

I wrote out a note for Ryan, telling him I’m sick
and headed home. Which was largely true.

* * * *

Dear
Mamma-

Let
me start by apologizing for not staying in touch better. I should have called
you more. I could say I’ve been busy, but that’s not really true. I’ve been
busy the last few days, but not at all before that. The department has a new chief
and he re-hired me. Not exactly sure why. But I’m on a case now. I’m back with
that Mormon kid, Ryan, who I think I mentioned, so not everything is new.

You’re reading this
because I’m working on a case that looks like it might get kind of complicated.
I might not get a chance to call for a while.

I want to say some
things that I haven’t been able to say to you on the phone. Sometimes you sound
a little blurry and tired when we do talk. I know I feel that a lot, too. So
I’m going to try to say them here now.

I do love you. I know
I don’t say that. I have many memories of having told you other things, things
that were very hurtful. I hope you can understand that was about me, not about
you. Are you able to understand that? I hope you are.

When your problems
began, I wasn’t in a good enough place to see what was happening to you. I just
wasn’t together enough to think about you as a person going through that shit,
with what happened to Kathy, then Dad leaving. I like to tell myself it was
that I was just a screwed up teenager—you know, insecure about what I looked
like, what with the no boobs and all. I know that a lot of the girls my age
were into themselves, too. I like to think it was a phase I was going through,
that I’m a little less about myself now. But someone looking at how I’ve
treated you since I left for college, that person would think the way I treated
you was because that was the person I was. The person I was then, and still the
same person now. If I’m being honest, that’s what I’d have to say.

What happened to you
scared me. You weren’t good at hiding how it hurt you. I know you wanted to,
but I could see that the only way to keep it from hurting was to not feel
anything. I understand now how that works. It scared me so bad, how you could
get so hurt by those things coming at you. So I did what a selfish person does.
I pushed you away. You couldn’t help me anymore, so it was the only way to keep
it from hurting me too.

It didn’t work, at
least the part about keeping it from hurting me. I thought about you all the
time. Does the fact that it hurt me say something good about me? I was cruel to
you and said things to you that make me cry even today when I think of them. I
tried to forget about you, but I never did.

I know you did the
best you could. The things that knocked you down, I couldn’t have handled them.
The things that have happened to me weren’t as bad. Kathy disappearing like
that—I think I would have died. I know I would have wanted to.

What I’ve done—the
things I do even now—I don’t take care of myself. I’ve picked up some very bad
habits. And that’s what I want to say in this letter. You have to know that
about the way I’ve treated you. It was about me, not about you. I love you,
Momma. I always loved you.

But I am ashamed of
myself. I couldn’t let you get any closer to me, let you see what I have
become, what I am. I let you down, and I didn’t want you to be hurt one more
time. I couldn’t take the chance that you would blame yourself.

You need to know that
I love you. As weak and busted up as I am, I love you. And if you are able to
pray, I ask you to pray for your little girl, who still needs you and always
will.

Karen

I folded the letter and placed it in an envelope. I
wrote Eleanor Hamilton on the envelope and slipped it between the salt and
pepper shakers.

* * * *

The city spent two-hundred-and-forty
thousand to build MacIntosh Skate Park about five years ago. The thinking was
to give the sidewalk surfers a place to hang out, out of sight and, if
possible, out of mind. That, plus a skater got paralyzed when a car hit him on
a street. The whole park is less than a half-acre, tucked into some useless
land off Thirteenth Street, right under the on-ramp to US 53. We have a uni stop
by at least once a day, at different times, to keep the wool-hat crowd from
relaxing. There’s just a few rules: keep the garbage under control, no tagging
the on-ramp or the nearby industrial buildings, and no dealing or using.

We don’t work real hard at winning any hearts and
minds. Some of the guys from the Salvation Army and the youth groups try to
reach out and help the more forlorn kids, but the official police attitude is
we’ll leave you alone if you don’t use the place for anything illegal. When it
opened, we explained to the kids that a bunch of solid citizens on the City
Council worried it would be a magnet for the local losers, and if they saw it
turning into Needle Park they’d yank out the ramp, the bowl, the tube, and the
vortex. One old fart said he’d personally pay for a bulldozer to strip off the
Gunite and level the dirt mounds. Amazing how some people would rather see the
situation go sideways than be proven wrong.
Once
or twice a year we break up a buy at MacIntosh, but all in all it was a good
investment of a quarter mill.

I was there in my own car. I got out and scanned
the place. There were about a dozen kids wearing their nonconformist’s uniform:
from the Vans to the low-riders, dark tees, and hoodies. Two guys came down
from opposite sides of the bowl, cracked heads when they collided, got up
laughing and rubbing their skulls, and gave each other a fist bump. One of
them, the smaller guy, looked a little shook up and was walking funny, but he
was working real hard not to show it.

Tommy was there. He was easy to spot, with all the
clothes black except for the red shoes. I watched him for a few minutes. He
wasn’t real good, so he stayed on the wimpier ramps. I flinched when I saw him
wobble, arms windmilling, then fall. He landed on an elbow, but he got up and
rubbed it and grabbed for his board. He wasn’t wearing his elbow pads, of
course. I remember him unwrapping them at Christmas, looking at the package
like it was a gravy boat.