Her Last Scream (5 page)

Another entity entered the chat room, RAISEHELL.

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The member named MAVERICK entered the conversation. Like HPDRIFTER, MAVERICK was a regular.

I entered the Homicide department at eight a.m., a convenience-store cup of coffee in one hand and a half-eaten apple in the other. My hand had first reached for a glazed pastry the size of a catcher’s mitt, but I’d reluctantly snagged the fruit. Across the wide room I saw Harry and Sal in our cubicle. They looked excited.

“You’ve got something,” I said, walking up.

“The Colorado cops ID’d their Jane Doe,” Sal said. “Name’s Lainie Devon Krebbs. They found out early this morning, got the ID from an arrest seven years back – the lady was caught trying to sneak a few joints into a Jimmy Buffet concert.”

“Any ties to the Mobile area?”

Sal flicked the page with a scarlet fingernail. “She lived her whole life here.”

If the kick I’d gotten from the discovery of a body paralleling our crime was a three on a scale of one to ten, the identification rang up a six.

I said, “Was she –”

“Married?” Sal answered, always a step ahead. “Why yes, Carson. Her hubby is one Lawrence Krebbs of west Mobile. And before you ask, the missus filed charges against the mister. One count of abuse filed eight months back, later dropped. Three police calls to the residence, domestic beefs, the lady throwing things, the neighbors calling the cops at two a.m. when they saw Mrs Krebbs run out of the house, get tackled and pulled back into the house by her hair. Krebbs went to jail for assault, made bail in an hour, beat the charge on condition of anger-management classes.”

“Probably promised to go and sin no more,” Harry snorted. “The abuse continued, of course.”

“Three months back the lady got a restraining order on Krebbs, saying he was threatening her life. Krebbs violated by banging on the door at midnight, screaming. The wife said he had a knife, but it was never located.”

“He go to jail?”

“He got a warning. The jail was probably full that night. It happened again and he did a week in the slammer. Took mandated anger-control classes. You can read between the lines as well as me, Carson: he abuses her, she leaves, finds she can’t make it on her own, comes back when he promises to be a good boy …”

“And it all starts anew. Anything else?”

“Yeah, a few similar charges, but spread out over years. Filed by Mrs Krebbses, but all with different first names.”

“A serial matrimonialist,” Harry snorted. “They always love the ladies, don’t they?”

“Sometimes to death,” Sal added.

Lawrence Krebbs lived in a small house, the lawn so manicured it looked like baize on a billiard table. The hedges were geometric forms, not a sprig out of place. The crepe myrtles were tamed to resemble outsize bonsai. I rang the doorbell, two muted bell-sounds from within.

A curtain shifted in the window to my right, the fabric diaphanous enough to display a prominent forehead. The face disappeared.

“Someone’s home,” I said.

Harry knocked again, harder. Thirty seconds passed and the door opened to reveal a powerful-looking man in his mid forties dressed in a red tee and multi-pocketed hiker shorts. He was slender at the waist, big in the shoulders, bespectacled, the former expanse of pink head flesh now hidden under brown. The guy had needed to slap on a hairpiece to answer the door, which said something about his ego. The toupee was decent. There are no good ones.

Harry held up the badge. “You’re Lawrence Krebbs?”

The gray eyes studied us. “That’s the name.” He made no effort to open the door further.

“It’s hot out here, Mr Krebbs,” Harry said. “How about we come inside so we don’t let all your fine air conditioning out into the street?”

The man looked at our feet. “Take off your shoes. I don’t want shit tracked on my floor.”

“You’re wearing shoes,” I noted.

“They don’t have shit on them.”

I slipped off my suede desert boots, Harry toed off his burgundy loafers, and we stepped on to a white carpet. The interior showed all the personality of a clam, jammed with furniture sold as “American Tradition” or “The Heritage Collection”, copywriter’s gloss for style-deficient crap with fake carving and dark stain masking the green grain of poplar. The AC was bottomed out and the place reeked of pine air freshener, like Krebbs was trying to simulate a vacation on Hudson’s Bay.

“So what can I do for you?” Krebbs asked, closing the door.

“We’re here about your wife, Mr Krebbs,” Harry said as I gave an eyeshot to Krebbs’s physique: shoulder-heavy with thick biceps and triceps. But his legs were soft and the tightly belted shorts showed a couple inches of love-handle slopping over the gunnels, a guy who built the showpiece muscles, slacked on ones he could cover with clothing.

“Which wife?” Krebbs said, inching toward us, his toes edging our comfort zone, broad arms crossed to further fatten the guns, showing us it was his home and he was Alpha Dog.

“Lainie D. Krebbs,” Harry said quietly, sliding his six-four, two-thirty body two inches closer to Krebbs’s chest. Krebbs stepped back a foot, like needing room to think. “That bitch ran off two months back. Nine weeks to be exact. And two days.”

“By bitch, I take it you mean your wife?”

“If you take wife to mean a person who cooks decent meals and keeps a house clean, I’ve never been married.”

“Let’s use a legal definition, then,” Harry said. “You were married to the former Lainie Place for three years.”

“I guess. It felt a lot longer.”

“You seem fuzzy on wives, sir,” I asked. “I take it you were married before?”

“I’ve been married four times. And don’t give me that look. I’m either a sucker or an optimist. I probably should have my head examined.”

I left that one alone, said, “You didn’t report Mrs Krebbs as missing?”

“You’re not hearing me, officer. She wasn’t missing, she ran off. The woman broke her vows.”

“You weren’t interested in Lainie coming back?” I asked.

“You can tell her or her shyster lawyer that she signed a pre-nup. She’s not eligible for a red nickel.”

I looked into his eyes. “We don’t serve documents for lawyers, Mr Krebbs. We’re here to tell you Lainie was found in Denver yesterday. Dead. She’d had her eyes cut out, her breasts wounded, and her body dumped into a tank of sewage at the water-treatment plant.”

I’d hit him with a bat, expecting shock. Instead, Krebbs put his hands in his pockets and jingled his change, wandering to the front window. “Shouldn’t you be looking for her pimp?” he asked after a few seconds of reflection.

“You think Lainie turned to prostitution?” I said.

Krebbs sighed. “A woman like that runs off, a failure with no brains and no education, how else is she going to live? She’s got one natural talent … Not that she was any good at that, either.”

Somehow I managed to keep from ripping the man’s pathetic hairpiece from his head and shooting it. “You don’t seem sad, Mr Krebbs,” I said instead, “at the death of someone you lived with and, presumably, loved.”

Krebbs turned away, like figuring out how he was supposed to look. His face came back about the same. “I’m sorry it all happened. But she never learned respect, never figured it out.”

“There was one thing Lainie could figure out, Mr Krebbs,” I said. “How to call the police when you were beating her. And file restraining orders, which you twice violated. That was just the last Mrs Krebbs. Seems you have a record of this kind of action with the Krebbs wife corps.”

The eyes flashed. “I fall for these, these ridiculous
sensitive
women. Once they settle into the cushy life, they turn on me.”

“Seems Lainie was the one who filed the order, not you.”

Krebbs’s face reddened with anger. “I never
touched
the bitch. I’d yell at her – hell yes, she pissed me off – and she’d gimme this big shit-eating grin and smack her face against the fridge or the microwave, call the cops. You people would show up, see a tiny little scrape on her face, and fucking pull me out of my own home.”

Harry held up his notes. “So all these charges should have been filed against your appliances?”

Krebbs spun to my partner, fists balled, the anger-control classes a waste of time. Or maybe they weren’t. Krebbs closed his eyes and took a deep breath. I watched his shoulders relax and the hands loosen.

“You think I did it, right?” he said.

“Everyone’s a suspect,” Harry said. “Until they’re not.”

Krebbs stared at the floor. “Boy, that slut really got me good.”

“Got you how, Mr Krebbs?” I asked.

“When she was alive she gave me a police record. Then she dies and makes me a suspect.” He jammed his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “I sure can pick ’em, can’t I?”

The peaks of the Rocky Mountains rising around her, Treeka snapped one side of Tommy’s blue bikini briefs to the clothes rope, grabbed a pin, fixed the other side tight, making a line of blue flags waving in the breeze. Tommy wore briefs because boxers were for fags and niggers. The rest of the line was denim cowboy-style work shirts and skin-tight jeans. Tommy liked his clothes spread wide so sun and breeze could make them smell fresh. Treeka’s clothes were bunched at the end of the line, her yellow shopping dress as bright as neon.

Treeka grabbed another pair of damp briefs from the basket and shot a glance toward the doublewide modular at her back. Sided with wood slats to resemble a mountain cabin, it was a pair of trailers in disguise. Tommy had inherited the house from his daddy, a diabetic who ignored medical advice by drinking hard and eating wrong, even as the doctors amputated pieces until he was little more than a torso with an angry head.

Tommy’s mother had run off when he was twelve. There one day, gone the next, leaving only a note saying
I cant take it no more.
Both of Tommy’s parents disappeared on him, Treeka thought, the old man just took more time to do it.

Though it was a workday, Tommy was inside sleeping. Yesterday had been payday and Tommy never came home before ten p.m., heading straight from cashing his check to his favorite saloon. He’d gotten up and felt like shit and called in sick at the awning factory.

Tommy boasted to strangers that he was a cattle rancher, but of the dozen cattle he’d bought with Treeka’s Toyota money – his starter herd, he’d called it – four died of the bloat, three wandered off through the fence he could never keep patched, one died of infection when Tommy thought he could do better than a veterinarian at fixing a cut, and one tumbled into the abandoned mine at the back end of the property. The other four he sold at a loss, since they looked so sickly. For the last year he’d worked at a place that made canvas awnings for mobile homes, named assistant foreman when the company’s absentee owner discovered Tommy’s ability to browbeat extra work from the mostly undocumented Hispanic labor.

Treeka was holding the briefs tight against the line, clothespins in hand, when her head snapped back so hard she screamed. Tommy had her pulled tight to him by her hair. His other hand grabbed her neck beneath her chin.

“Where have you been?” he hissed into her ear. She smelled whiskey on his breath. He’d already started drinking.

“W-what are you talking about, b-baby?” Treeka said through clenched teeth. “I been r-right here doin’ the clothes.”

“Other days. You been sneaking out.” Tommy’s voice was fire against her ear.

“I d-don’t know what you’re sayin’, baby. How could I get anywhere if I d-don’t have a car?”

“You got some guy picks you up,” he slurred. “Or one a your lesbians.”

“I don’t know any lesbians. An’ there ain’t no one picks me up. You’re my man, Tommy. It’s just us. You and me, forever. Come on, baby, let go my neck. It’s hard to breathe.”

His hand fell from her throat as he spun her to him, slapping her face with a gunshot sound. She let herself fall to the dirt, hoping for safety on the ground.

“I work my ass off for you and you’re fucking around on me,” he hissed. “This is the thanks I get.”

“Your imagination is running away on you again, baby,” Treeka gasped, trying to catch her breath. “I ain’t been anywhere but here all day ever’ day.”

Tommy reached into his shirt pocket, made a flicking motion. A flash of color appeared in the air and a tiny bird fluttered to the ground in front of Treeka. The blue paper bird the lady at the woman center gave Treeka when they were done talking, setting it in Treeka’s palm and gently closing her fingers around it like the bird was alive.

“I found it in your special drawer,” Tommy said. “In back, hiding.”

Treeka felt sick. As soon as she’d returned from the trip to Boulder she’d put the paper bird in her cosmetic drawer until she could find a better hiding place. Tommy had probably gone through her face creams for something he could grease up and whack off with.

“The bird was up b-by the highway, baby,” Treeka stammered. “It must have got blown out of someone’s car. It was pretty so I kept it, Tommy. That’s all. It was a pretty little bird.”

“I TOL’ YOU NEVER TO GO TO THE HIGHWAY!”

“I was just looking, Tommy. I’m sorry, I won’t do it again, baby, I promise I –”

Tommy’s boot came down and stomped the blue bird flat. He pulled a pair of his jeans from the line and flung them around Treeka, her head caught in the crotch. He spun them tight and dragged her by the neck into the house.