Her Last Scream (10 page)

“You missed the target entirely!” Harry roared as Rein stood from the floor, the firing range echoing with the sound of her rounds. It was the second of what Harry had turned into sixteen-hour workdays. “What kind of shooting was that?”

I shouldered off the wall and stepped in. “Uh, Harry …”

Rein held up her hand to cut me off. “It was lousy shooting, Carson. My fault. I’ll try again.”

Harry shook his head in disgust and reset the protective headset on his ears. “From the beginning!” he yelled, moving to the target-control button, zipping the outline of a human torso thirty yards down the range. “You’ve got a perp running at you and firing. You’re on the ground with no cover for miles, only one chance in the world, hit him while you’re rolling. Here he comes.”

Harry pressed the button, the target racing toward us.

“Go!”

Rein dove to the floor rolling and firing, an almost-impossible piece of marksmanship, trying to keep the target in her sights while tumbling across a dozen feet of floor.

The target zipped up. Harry rolled his eyes. “One hit,” he said. “You hit him in the love-handle, officer Early. He’s still shooting and you’re dead.” He turned to me, bellowed, “Carson!”

I rolled my eyes. “What now?”

“Can you show officer Early how it’s done?”

“I think it’s time we took a break and –”

“She needs to learn this.”

I took a deep breath. “Look straight up at the ceiling, Rein,” I said. “Point your weapon at that light up there. What I do is lock my shoulders, elbows and wrists into a solid unit and roll mainly with my hips and legs. The top of my body out to my weapon – the firing unit – is stable. Keep your head in the same position as you roll. Fire when you hit your belly, roll away.”

She aimed at the light, did as told. “Like this?”

I didn’t have time to answer, Harry sending the target down range.

“Here comes your killer,” he yelled. The target flew toward us at ten miles an hour. I hit the floor, my body a straight line to the gun sight, cranking off four shots during five rolls. The target zipped to a stop as I stood. One hit in the kill zone, one on the line, two close enough to have done damage in a real-life situation.

“Wow,” Rein said.

“OK, but not great,” Harry sniffed. “officer Early, your turn.”

Rein stepped into position as Harry reset the target, brought it racing to us at top speed.

“Go, dammit!”

Rein hit the ground rolling and firing. The target was within reach within five seconds, Harry leaning close. “Two hits outside the zone,” he snarled. “You’re dead again. Set up for another.”

“I have to reload,” Rein said. She walked to a nearby bench and opened a new box of bullets. I pulled my cap from my back pocket and snapped it on my head.

“Where you going?” Harry said.

“Out for something to eat. You guys coming?”

“You’re kidding, right? We’re gonna stay until she gets it right.”

I stared at him, shaking my head.

“What?” he said.

“Stop being an asshole,” I said, turning toward the door. “It doesn’t look good on you.”

Treeka lay on a single bed in the guest room of a woman named Marge, her first stop on the railroad. Marge had left for work, saying she was sorry she couldn’t stay with Treeka.

“I’m just happy there are people like you,” Treeka had said.

The night before last, Meelia, the black woman with the owl glasses, had driven Treeka west for an hour. She was funny, making Treeka laugh and mostly forget that Tommy would go crazy when he saw Treeka had run away. Meelia volunteered at the center to pay back for what everyone there did for her when her boyfriend would smoke crack and kick her around their apartment. She said the people at the center saved her life. Treeka heard the woman’s serious voice, the one that was glad to be alive and proud to be part of a system that saved others.

The scariest part came when Meelia pulled into a truck stop at one a.m., the air smelling of diesel fuel and fried food. Treeka was to walk from the car side of the rest stop across to the truck side and stand beside the phone booth, waiting for two rings on the phone, which meant
Get ready to move fast.

“Won’t it look weird,” Treeka asked, “me carrying a suitcase?”

“It’s a truck stop at one in the morning,” Meelia laughed. “Everything’s supposed to be weird.”

Treeka stood in the hard light beside the phone watching a tractor-trailer rig being fueled, a bearded, bear-sized driver beside the cab in stained overalls and shooting over-the-shoulder glances at Treeka. The driver wiped his windshield and disappeared into the huge black cab. Treeka jumped as the phone rang …

Once, twice.

She picked up the suitcase and held it tight with both hands. A rumbling diesel roar and the truck swept from the fueling bay to turn directly toward Treeka. It squealed to a stop at the curb, the passenger-side door swinging open.

“Climb up,” the driver said. “Quick.”

Her heart in her throat –
was this how it was supposed to work? –
Treeka pushed the suitcase up until the man pulled it inside the cab. Treeka followed, setting herself into the seat.

“Don’t be afraid, miss,” the driver said as he turned back to the steering wheel, his voice soft and tender, like talking to a lost child. “Sit back and relax and in a couple hours my wife, name’s Marge, will fill you with sausage and eggs and tuck you into bed. We’ve got a nice place for you.”

And away they had run.

I ate supper at a po’ boy joint, buying an extra shrimp-stuffed model and a six-pack. Harry called two hours later, wanting to meet on the Causeway, a slender strip of dirt and concrete binding Mobile to the eastern shore of Mobile Bay.

He arrived after fifteen minutes. I was leaning against my truck and watching the jewel-like running lights of small craft as they crossed the dark water. Low waves pressed into the shoreline reeds and, though many months had passed since the disaster, I could smell oil, but a lot of times I knew it was in my head.

Harry walked over and leaned beside me, taking his turn studying the boats.

“You eat anything?” I asked.

“My stomach’s been knotted last couple days.”

I reached in the window for the spare po’ boy, handed it to him alongside a can of beer.

“You think I’m being too tough on Rein, right?” he said.

“You’re trying to squeeze a quarter-century of experience into a few days’ training. How much time did you spend teaching her to shoot while rolling?”

“I keep seeing her outside without cover, the perp running at her shooting as he –”

“How much?”

“Counting the hour after you left, maybe three. We quit when she got dizzy and puked. Thing is, I close my eyes see every psycho we ever faced, Carson. I want Rein ready to stop them all.”

“We’ve got two days till Boulder. It won’t happen.”

“I can try,” he said.

I watched the dark shape of a freighter slip from the river into the bay, preparing to cross the vast waters. I turned to Harry. “Would you act like this if the person going into the system wasn’t your niece?”

“I’m tired of all this talking,” he said, turning to watch the ship.

Our training days passed in what felt like minutes, Harry trying to jam experiences and responses and procedures into Rein’s head, me trying to add insight into the psychology of misogynist killers. There was a fair body of literature on these sad boyos, not exactly a rare species.

Tom Mason called Harry, Sal and me into his office the final morning. “The Chief and I talked to the Colorado State Police …” He riffled a sheaf of reports. “It’s a joint operation and we’re good to go.”

“How’s Amica Cruz fit in?” I asked.

“Detective Cruz is your primary contact. She said she was ‘down with the situation’.” Tom puzzled a moment and looked at Harry. “That’s a good thing, right, being
down
with something?”

Tom was old school, amazed the word “text” had turned into a verb and “killer apps” were desired features on cell phones. Harry was only five years younger than Tom, but had become the Lieutenant’s contemporary linguistics advisor because, being black, Harry was supposed to know hip things.

Harry nodded. “Down is currently up, Tom.”

Sal said, “How do I fit into this?”

“I want you digging into the cases from every angle. Putting officer Early into the system is a crapshoot, and if it doesn’t pan out we’ll have to crack this nut from the outside.”

Sal nodded, miffed at being replaced as the undercover operative, but knowing it was the right play. “I’m gonna ride Krebbs. Check out every piece of his alibi.”

“Do it carefully. I don’t need Nate Bromley howling at me for harassment. Where’s our undercover girl?”

“With Doc Kavanaugh,” I said. “Getting some last-minute grounding in anti-fem types.”

“Best get officer Early back here,” Tom said, looking at his watch. “You’re leaving in two hours.”

From an approaching jet, Denver airport looks like Salvador Dalí’s idea of a circus tent. I suppose the white multi-pronged pinnacles were symbolic of snowy mountaintops, but all I saw was a weird tent. Then we were down and watching bags ride the carousel. Amica Cruz had wondered about holding a sign, but I’d told her to look for a big square black guy bookended by a lovely light-complected black woman and a six-foot, dark-haired Caucasian guy with a limp.

We were grabbing the final bag when intersected by a petite Latina with shoulder-length auburn hair and brown eyes the size of saucers. She wore a white blouse over khaki pants and looked as fit as a gymnast.

She said, “I take it you’re the –”

“The Early Show,” I affirmed. “One star, two supporting players.”

We did formal introductions. Cruz looked at me and nodded toward the door. “I’m parked right outside, you won’t have to walk very far.”

“I’m good,” I said, slinging my bag over my shoulder as we started for the door. Cruz frowned at my suddenly normal stride.

“You’re not …”

“It was possible for another trio to look like us,” I said, “but I figured the odds of one of them limping were astronomical.”

Cruz shot a look at my companions. Rein giggled, Harry sighed.

“Maybe you’ll get used to it, Detective Cruz,” he said. “I haven’t.”

Boulder was a half-hour’s drive, crossing brown and rolling desert, the magnificent Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in the distance. A wide-eyed Rein pointed at a skeletal orb of brush rolling across the highway.

“Is that a real tumbleweed?”

“Welcome to the Wild West, officer Early,” Cruz said into the rear-view mirror. “Of course, some days it’s wilder than others.”

Cruz pulled into Boulder, crossing Pearl Street, a draw for tourists and townies alike. “Anyone hungry?” she asked.

We headed to one of Cruz’s favorite lunch joints, happy to move cramped legs. Boulderites spent a lot of time outdoors, every third vehicle boating a rack: bike, kayak, ski or multi-tasking. Bicyclists were everywhere, from students on Wal-Mart cheapies to full-spandex Lance Armstrong wannabees on featherweight road machines. I watched someone’s great-grandfather blow past on a recumbent bike, grinning like a madman as wind parted his white beard.

“Everyone looks like they just stepped out of a vitamin catalog,” Rein noted with a smile of approval.

Cruz said, “Boulder’s the fittest town in the country as determined by weight, hours of exercise a week, time spent outdoors and so forth.”

“You look like you spend a goodly amount of time exercising, Detective Cruz,” I said. “Part of the culture?”

A rueful smile. “I grew up in Denver, where my aunt owns a popular taquería. Thanks to her cooking I used to weigh twenty pounds more. When I got assigned to the Boulder post I wanted to break all my mirrors. Then I bought a bike. I’m baselining at two hundred miles a week.”

“Two hundred lovely miles,” I amended.

Harry shot me a look. “This is all real nice, but how ’bout we grab some chow and get working. I want to go over everything with Rein one more time.”

“Huh-uh,” Cruz said. “You had your turn, now it’s mine. I need to fill everyone in on what we know, and where we’re going with this thing.”

After we’d eaten, Cruz drove us to our lodging. We’d hoped to stay near the Boulder women’s center, and Cruz had reserved a cabin in Chautauqua Park, a community of cabins on a hill angling up to the Flatiron Mountains, which resembled the back of a gigantic stegosaurus pushing up through the earth.

“Can we take a peek at the women’s center?” Rein asked. “It’s close, isn’t it?”

We passed the center on our way to the cabin, a nondescript house in a business-residential zoning, a bar across the way, a shoe store down the street. The University of Colorado was centered a few blocks distant and students wandered the street, some looking hip, some looking studious, others looking lost.

“There it is,” Cruz said to Rein. “Your door to the unknown.”

“There’s still time to change your mind, girl,” Harry said quietly. “Say the word.”

Rein either didn’t hear Harry or pretended not to, watching the small brown house as if dissecting its secret intentions, turning her head to study it even as the house fell away into the distance.

“What do you think, Rein?” Harry prodded, an under-tone in his voice saying,
You can still bag the assignment.

Rein said, “This is all so cool.”

Liza Krupnik entered the scarlet-carpeted, high-ceilinged room at seven-fifteen p.m. The bar had opened at six-thirty, perhaps a hundred people in attendance, more entering every minute. It was one of several such gatherings during the year, an opportunity for the social sciences departments to display collegial conviviality and monetary benefactors to be fêted. “The contributors need to feel a connection to the U,” someone had once explained to Liza. “They like to be recognized and patted on the head. It helps loosen their wallets and pay our salaries.”

“Salaries?” Liza said.

Liza smoothed down her black dress and ambled to the bar table, grabbing a glass of wine, something better than the usual U-whine, as she and Robert termed the boxed swill normally set beside the platters of cheese, crudités, chips and salsa. She bantered with colleagues for several minutes, keeping an eye on the door for her colleague.

Or Sinclair.

She looked up to see Robert crossing the floor, one side of his shirt tucked, the other fluffing halfway out. He finger-pushed his glasses up the bridge of his long nose and his eyes found Liza, mouth arching into a smile. He pointed to the bar, meaning he was going to pick up a drink.
You?
he mouthed, and Liza lifted her full glass to indicate she was fine. He nodded and angled toward the bar.

Robert had been gone for a few days, something he did every couple of months, heading to Montana to care for family. Liza had missed her colleague during his absence. Robert Trotman had become her only confidant in the department, perhaps owing to the proximity of their cubbyholes, or maybe being in disparate sociological fields. Academia offered far fewer jobs than there were applicants, turning teaching assistants into fierce competitors.

Though the soft-spoken Trotman wasn’t much of a conversationalist, he was a good listener, interested in Liza’s latest musical purchases and her volunteer efforts, and a more-than-willing helper when Liza’s unruly civic-volunteer schedule conflicted with academic duties. Recently receiving an award for her work at a local agency, Liza had tried unsuccessfully to get Robert to hang the plaque in his office, since she felt it equally his. Trotman’s help even went so far as keeping a copy of her calendar in his office, prepared to step in should a conflict arise, usually in the guise of Professor Sinclair.

“
Roberto? Uh, his nibs just said he needs a hundred handouts copied by …
”

“
You’ve got a staff meeting in an hour, Lize. I see it on the calendar. Go to your meeting, girl. I’ll put everything together for His Highness.
”

“
You’re a lifesaver, Roberto. It’s a training meeting and I have to –
”

“
You can tell me everything in wondrous detail tomorrow. Go!
”

There was another aspect to their relationship: Despite the time the pair spent together, Robert Trotman had never hit on Liza. At first she’d thought him gay, then decided he wasn’t, then decided she didn’t give a shit either way: he was her friend … disheveled, prone to poutery, a bit paranoiac about perceived slights – usually from Sinclair – but bright as a whip, interested in her life, and always ready to step in and lend a hand.

Liza had tried to encourage her anxiety-prone amigo to ask Sinclair for a regular schedule so he could actually plan ahead, but Robert had gone white at the prospect of confronting the Famous Sociologist. Liza felt irritation at Trotman’s lack of backbone, and then realized she hadn’t set a regular vacation schedule either; both slaves to the professor.

Robert appeared a minute later, a can of beer in hand. With his beardless complexion and languid eyes, he looked almost feminine, and closer to a sophomore than a grad student.

“How was your vacation?” Liza asked.

Trotman pushed a comma of black hair from his forehead. “I only had nightmares of Professor Sinclair twice in four nights. So pretty good. How was your volunteers’ meeting? Monday, right? Did the committee change anything?”

“Nope. As figured. The training sessions are still once a month, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Carol’s still in charge, but she’s been training Charlotte to run things.”

“Training the trainers,” Trotman nodded absent-mindedly, his eyes searching the room. “Is the king here, Lize?”

Liza shook her head. “His Majesty always arrives late and leaves early. He’s not social. He’s only here because someone has to represent the department with Dr Bramwell gone.”

“When’s Bramwell back from her sabbatical?” Trotman asked, his tone hopeful.

Liza chuckled. “Would you stop asking me that! Dr Bramwell’s been gone less than –”

“Think we could write and beg her to come home and save us?”

“Where would we send the letter? She’s in constant motion.”

“Hiding from Sinclair,” Trotman said. “A happy woman.”

Liza pointed across the room. “There’s his nibs coming in the door.”

“He looks angry,” Trotman said. “Let’s move across the room.”

“We have to greet him, Robert. You know the protocol.”

Sinclair was talking to Robert Morgenthall, the head of the Psychology department, and Liza inched to Sinclair’s side as Morgenthall nodded and turned away. “Fuck behaviorism,” Sinclair said instead of goodbye, Morgenthall waving farewell over his shoulder.

“Hello, Doctor,” Liza said, stepping in front of the Great Sociologist and fighting her feeling that she needed to bow.

“Liza Krupnik,” Sinclair said, as if reading a name from a Rolodex. “Tell me, Miss Krupnik, do you feel the desperation?”

“Pardon me, sir?”

Sinclair waved his hand, meaning the crowd, everyone in the room and maybe beyond. “Desperate souls jockeying for position near someone noteworthy, the frozen smiles of false bonhomie, the sharpening of knives awaiting unsuspecting backs?”

“I guess I’m too busy enjoying the free food, sir,” Liza offered.

“Good evening, Dr Sinclair,” Trotman said from the side. Sinclair turned as if expecting something interesting, face falling at finding the jittering Trotman.

“Oh, Robert, you’re here.”

“Y-yes sir. I got back from Montana just a couple days—”

Sinclair turned to the sound of his name trilled across the room. Liza looked over her shoulder to see Dorothy Balfours, a slender and stately woman she and Trotman had named the Dowager Fundraiser. In her early sixties, Balfours was the widow of the infamous “Timber” Bert Ellison, a man who’d made his money in logging businesses from the sixties into the eighties. She’d spent her early life accompanying her husband from logging camp to logging camp, a quiet woman who walked her husband’s footsteps like a shadow.

“The Dowager Fundraiser crooks her finger and he runs to her,” Trotman whispered as Sinclair turned and crossed the floor. “I’ll bet the Famous Sociologist hates being a woman’s wind-up toy.”

Liza watched Sinclair greet Balfours, barking out a greeting. The Dowager’s timber-baron husband had been cut down twenty-three years ago while poaching virgin timber from government land. He’d been standing atop a donkey engine and cursing his workers when a dragline snapped, a recoiling cable slicing Timber Bert in half as neatly as a buzz saw, one side falling east of the engine, the other dropping west. Sierra-Club types – and folks who’d had the misfortune to work for Ellison and get shorted on a paycheck – dubbed the incident “The Revenge of the Trees”.

Ellison died childless and intestate, the bulk of his money invested in strip joints and legal brothels in Nevada – the swaggering lumberman bragging that “pussy was where the money was”. To the surprise of everyone, and as if a yoke had been thrown off, the quiet wife somehow found her voice and – with the help of a feisty lawyer – blunted efforts to buy her off for pennies on the dollar, standing defiant until standing atop one-point-six million dollars.

As if in penance for her husband’s often-illegal denuding of forested mountainsides, Dorothy Balfours – reverting to her maiden name a month after her husband’s demise – began studying investments in the future, green technologies that were at the time barely pencilings on engineer’s desks.

Avoiding more fantastical concepts, Balfours invested in structural advances: improved home insulation, less toxic coolants, energy-efficient electrical motors. As the ideas and inventions of the non-glamorous companies in her portfolio quietly become mainstream technology, Balfours found her net worth increasing to what many whispered was a fortune surpassing forty million dollars.

Nonetheless, her mountainside home in northeast Boulder was modest by local-wealth standards, a half-hidden assemblage of local stone and glass and solar panels, nestling like a bashful gem in the magnificent setting of the Front Range.

“Oh God,” Trotman said, looking across the room, face drained of color and his voice weak as wet paper.

“What, Robert?”

“Sinclair yelled your name. He’s waving us over. What’ll we do?”

“We go as summoned, Roberto,” Liza said, taking her companion by the arm and pulling him toward their boss. “Whatever you do, don’t piss your pants.”

They darted around a tipsy, overdressed professor from the theater department who slit his wrists annually – very shallow cuts; the university kept it quiet and waited out the next yelp for attention – who made a flamboyant twirl as they passed, bumping Liza’s glass and sending wine splattering across her right breast. She dabbed frantically with Trotman’s proffered napkin before arriving in Sinclair and Balfours’s company.

Sinclair raised an eyebrow at Liza’s dampened breast. “Are you lactating, Liza? I didn’t even know you were pregnant.”

“No, I mean … uh, there was a bit of a spill and –”

Liza caught herself in mid-apology and looked at Sinclair. He was grinning. Was the Famous Sociologist joking with her?

Sinclair nodded toward Dorothy Balfours, dressed in a simple green sheath, natural gray hair piled atop her head like it had been the easiest way to deal with it.
The Dowager Fundraiser looks like a real person
, Liza thought, not like certain pampered-poodle benefactors who needed royalty-level pampering to keep the largesse flowing. Balfours seemed genuine, whatever that meant any more.

“Ms Balfours wanted to see where her money is going,” Sinclair said, “so I’m humoring her.” He nodded toward Liza. “This is one of my most promising apprentices, Liza with a Z. Please don’t ask her to sing.”

Liza extended her hand. “Liza Krupnik.”

Balfours’s handshake was dry and firm. “Pleased to meet you, Ms Krupnik. Anyone who works in the Sociology department has both my respect and condolences.”

Sinclair grinned past the barb and nodded to Trotman. “And here’s Robert, another toiler in the vineyards. He crunches numbers. Positively massacres them.”

Balfours leaned forward. “I’m sorry, what was your last name, Robert?”

“T-Trotman.”

“You’re a statistician, then?” the woman asked, her head canted as if actually interested. Trotman stared at the graceful woman like he didn’t understand the question. Liza bumped Trotman’s ribs with an elbow, restarting his brain.

“Y-yes, Statistics. Volumetrics involving consumer choices based on data derived from –”

Sinclair held up a hand. “Please, Robert. We have to stay awake until the soirée is over. Was that enough, Madame Balfours, or should I introduce you to the departmental dog?”

“Do you really have one?” Balfours asked, a wry smile on her face, as though long accustomed to Sinclair’s antics.

“Yes, and it’s probably the best TA I have.” Sinclair looked at the pair and nodded. “Thank you, kiddies. You may now return to anonymity.”