Fortunes of the Dead (33 page)

Janis smiles. The message had been left two hours ago. Maybe she'll get lucky, and Curly Girl will live long enough for a short conversation. Janis sheds the barn coat and one of the sweaters, then peels the ball cap off her head, shaking her hair out and pulling it into a low ponytail. She's hungry. She considers stopping at Waffle House on the way.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
FOUR

I have not been able to sleep since that afternoon in Mendez's office. I talked to Brady, typed up a summary of everything I'd done on the case, and spent another afternoon at the movies. The only source of information I had concerning developments in the case came from the newspapers, and there was nothing there. Edgers hadn't been arrested yet, and I wondered why.

My nightmares were back—deadly quiet now, full of silent open-mouthed screams and the vibration of running feet. People's lips moved but no words came out.

All my dreams involve strangers who need me to help them escape. We are behind enemy lines in a nameless war, and I have to get everyone on the train that will get us over the border to safety, whatever border that is. My charges come in twos and threes, bringing their children, their dogs, their grandmothers. Some of them are in wheelchairs, some are pregnant. The faces change; the only constant is they are all helpless; they use crutches, they can't hear, they are too afraid to move. They won't leave without the family cat or the rabbit they've raised since birth.

Roughly half of these dreams end badly and the bad ones tend to repeat. My psyche launches the sequence again and again until I know who waits outside the door. I know that one of the children will fall off the train if I don't get to the window now, and shut it tight. The body will still be there behind the couch, but if I am careful to get everyone through the room quickly, then the mother won't see and refuse to leave, and we can all get away this time, without being caught.

Mendez is deeply asleep beside me in our bed. He worked late tonight, stayed at the office through dinner, and avoided my eyes once home. We don't talk unless we have to. Twice I've come across him sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at nothing in particular. He eases away from me to his side of the bed even in sleep, and I curl away from him to mine.

I don't know what finally woke me the next morning, only that I sat up suddenly, wide awake. The house was quiet and I felt that disconnected confusion you get when you seriously oversleep. I usually wake when Joel gets up in the morning, and it was strange to be so suddenly alone, save Maynard, who was curled on my pillow over the top of my head.

The clothes Joel left draped over the footboard were gone. Even Joel finds it difficult to be neat without the majority of our furniture. The shirt and pants are missing, he has left the tie. I walked down to the kitchen. The coffeepot was clean and empty. There was no water in the sink. I padded back upstairs and looked into the bathtub drain. No dark curly black hairs. Joel had left in a hurry, no shower, no coffee, in the shirt and pants he wore the day before. Whatever it was that was critical enough to get him out of bed so quickly, he did not see fit to share with me.

Events were moving along all around me, and I was out of the loop.

I picked up the phone to call Miranda. I still had the key to Cheryl's apartment and I was ready to give it back and be done with it. I pulled on the shirt and jeans I wore yesterday and paused just long enough to brush my teeth and put on enough makeup to keep from scaring the unwary stranger. I would drop by Miranda's apartment, and if she wasn't there I would leave it in the mailbox or shove it under the door. Then I'd be done with the whole business, which sounded pretty good to me.

Miranda lived in the Lamplighter apartments on East Reynolds Road, right next to the Landsdowne post office. She rents what is called a garden apartment, which means basement in less friendly terms. The parking lot was small, there are only four buildings, and I didn't see Miranda's car. She was in the first building on the left, and I knocked on her door with little hope that it would be answered.

It wasn't.

The mailboxes were the locking kind, and there was no room under the door for a key. I have a girlfriend, Kay, who lived in one of these apartments after her first divorce. It was easy enough to get in. I shoved the front door hard with my right shoulder and the door swung through the frame. I had the grace to be slightly ashamed, but it didn't stop me from going inside.

The apartment had the aura of a fake smile plastered over a less than friendly face. The carpet was tan and new and the walls were cream-colored and relatively unsmudged. Miranda had hung a depressing array of posters—recent movies, most of them bad, and a few obscure heavy metal bands with softly pornographic names. The place was clean enough, which surprised me, though I'm not sure why. The faint but unmistakable aroma of McDonald's scented the air.

“Hello?”

No one answered, but the phone rang. In three rings the machine picked up, parroted Miranda's canned message, and I heard Miranda's father on the line.

I picked up the extension on the wall in Miranda's tiny kitchen.

“Paul? This is Lena Padget.”

A pause. “I guess you and Miranda are wrapping up the details. Can I speak to her, or would you ask her to call me in the next hour or two?”

“She's not here.”

“What's going on? Is something wrong?”

“No, I just came by to drop off the key to Cheryl's apartment. The door was unlocked, so I thought I'd just leave it on the kitchen counter.”

“I wanted to talk to you anyway. Do you know what the details are on Edgers's plea bargain? How easy is he getting off?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ah. I'm sorry. I've been indiscreet. Miranda told me you asked her to keep things quiet until everything settled out.”

“Keep what things quiet?”

Brady was silent for a long moment, and when he spoke his voice had a flattened quality. “Miranda called me yesterday and told me not to come down this weekend. She said that Edgers had confessed to killing Cheryl, and made a deal with the police, and that it was all over. I take it that's not the case.”

“Paul, excuse the question, but I don't think Miranda was telling you the truth.”

“No, she was, I just got off the phone with Captain Mendez. But he wouldn't give me any details, just confirmed that there had been a deal, and that Edgers would be giving himself up in forty-eight hours. Lena? Are you there?”

“I'm here. Who told Miranda about the plea bargain?”

“She said you did.”

I thought about that. None of the thoughts were useful. “Let me get back to you on this, okay, Paul?”

“Catch me on my cell phone, will you? I'm on the way out. Do you have a pen?”

I looked around the kitchen cabinets. No pen, but a notepad. I ripped the first sheet off, then gave it a second look.

Miranda had written down explicit directions to Kate Edgers's house on the mountain.

I let Brady give me his cell number but I did not bother to find a pen and write it down. Why would Joel tell Miranda and not me? And why would Miranda tell her father that
I
gave her the news? Maybe she'd gotten her information from someone other than Joel.

But it wasn't a good thing, Miranda on her way to see Edgers's wife. I had Kate's number in my case notebook, but she didn't answer.

And then, my feeble brain, long clouded by sympathy and concern for the family of victims of violence, particularly the sisters in the family, at last put the pieces together. Miranda, always jealous of Cheryl, would be instantly drawn by any man in Cheryl's life—particularly a man Cheryl looked up to, and admired, and maybe even had a crush on. It made sense now that Miranda had lied, and defended Cory Edgers, and misled me from beginning to end. Miranda was in love with him—so much so, that she had stood by and almost let him get away with killing her sister.

Past time for me to get some distance from my clients. There are no good guys, there are no bad guys, there are only guys.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
FIVE

The little trailer was dim inside, even with both lamps on, and Wilson opened the crimson curtains over both windows to let in the blaze of sunlight. The temperature had risen to fifty-two degrees, which seemed to thrill the locals. Wilson was cold.

Rodeo had left bits and pieces of furniture and kitchen utensils, a few dishes, and a dead fig tree, but the clothes—everything else—all were gone. She went by the name of Janis Winters, but no such woman existed in the Social Security registers, no such woman had a birth record, or paid taxes, possessed a passport, or had any credit card or bank accounts. She did own a truck, which was sitting beside the trailer, hopefully containing enough forensic traces to identify this woman who had not officially existed before she vanished.

Why now?
Wilson wondered. It can't be a coincidence that Rodeo disappears within twenty-four hours of Cory Edgers handing her over. He had called Mendez in Lexington, and told him to pick Edgers up instead of letting him surrender in the presence of his attorney and in the eye of the news media tomorrow at noon.

It was odd to come face-to-face with the mundane details—that the Rodeo assassin was the same woman who seemed to survive on yogurt, bananas, and Spaghetti-Os. The walls were marked where pictures and newspaper articles had been hung, then ripped away. Wilson had gotten statements from two people who had heard talk about Janis Winters's obsession with Waco and David Koresh, and about a sister named Emma who had perished in the flames. Nashville was trying to match the sister with the list of Waco victims.

So far Wilson had gotten nowhere with the cowboy Janis had supposedly been intimate with. The kid had managed to both tick him off and stir his admiration by giving the simple statement that Janis was a sweetheart, and gentlemen did not talk about their women, then he'd completely shut down. Wilson had pushed further and elicited a phone call from an attorney paid for by the kid's father, who was evidently wealthy, sophisticated, and in a very bad mood. The “clowns” Janis had worked with swore up and down they barely knew her, but their eyes said
she's one of us, buddy, and you can go to hell
. Wilson had never known a serial killer to draw this much affection. It reinforced his faith in the stupidity of your average guy on the street. Every time Wilson closed his eyes he saw Alex Rugger's wife sitting in the back of that paramedic unit, shirt drying chocolate brown with blood.

He had called Sel twice last night, and she hadn't been home. She hadn't returned his calls, either. No doubt she was working long hours at the restaurant, or maybe the waves were good. He just wanted to hear her voice.

Sel was the breath of fresh air in his life, an unpredictable mix of innocence, wisdom, and practicality. He could never anticipate her viewpoint. Wilson had given her the surfboard that first time they met, along with a handy explanation calculated to generate her sympathy and overcome her reluctance to take a gift from a stranger. It was no problem getting her to meet him later at a small café in Marina Del Rey. He'd known she was from out of town the minute she'd agreed; a local girl would have been more cautious.

Marina Del Rey was home for Wilson. He'd grown up just down the road in Playa Del Rey, and misspent countless hours of his youth blading off Venice Beach—another activity relegated to his past. It was dark by the time Sel arrived, a half-hour late. The air had gone crisp, like fall in New England, and Wilson was sipping a beer, listening to the surf from Venice Beach, and calculating the odds of getting laid.

What he didn't factor in was the effect Sel would have on him. He'd fallen in love within ten minutes of sitting across from her at the small round table. Although she noticed the candles flickering in the center of the table, and the starched white linen tablecloth that snapped in the breeze swirling in off the beach, Wilson noticed nothing but Sel.

His one-night-stand plan had not accounted for the confidence he felt when she tilted her head while he talked, giving him all of her attention; the effect of the intelligence in her brown eyes; or the way she pushed the dark, shoulder length hair from her face. He was captivated by the way she talked about surfing. The way she let him know, with a simple squeeze of her hand, that she understood how it would feel to give it up.

Wilson stood at the edge of Janis Winters's little kitchenette and saw that one small picture of Koresh had escaped notice, and was hanging on the side of the refrigerator and out of view. Winters had drawn devil horns in over the top of the man's head. Hard for Wilson to imagine this streak of light mischief from the same woman who excelled at cold-blooded execution. As always, a killer's humanity jarred him. It was perfectly logical that a murderer shopped at Kroger's like everyone else, ate Twinkies and Whopper burgers, but the details always stuck in Wilson's mind.

Where is she?
Wilson wondered.
Who is she?

He'd put an APB out on a Dodge Dakota that had only just been reported stolen from a bar no more than a half mile down the road. One of the locals had gotten drunk at a sports bar called Boots, gone home with a girl he'd met shooting pool, and woke up the next morning with a hangover, and a new girlfriend to hide from his wife. The girl had driven him back to Boots, but the truck hadn't been in the lot. They'd spent the next twenty-four hours trying to remember where they might have parked it before they finally notified the police. The Dakota had been sighted once, in Louisiana, but the sighting was made by an off-duty cop on his way to the ER with his youngest son, who was bleeding profusely after catching a football with his nose. The pickup hadn't come up on the radar since.