If Looks Could Kill (20 page)

Chris took a contemplative sip of coffee. "I'll have to ask Shelly to give me fair warning if Lawson gets her hands on an arrest warrant."

"You think she suspects you?"

"I think she's having too much fun suspecting everyone on the planet to single me out. She did really enjoy the fact that the post office box where my strange letters are coming from was in a name only I know."

That, more than anything, got a reaction out of her friend. Sue darned near slammed the beer bottle on the scarred pine table. "Which brings us, I hope, to the second reason for your visit."

"If you mean apologies," Chris retorted as easily as she could, "you're not getting any."

Sue shrugged. "I wasn't really expecting one. An explanation might help, though. I've been reading you since I got married. Imagine my surprise at finding out you've been hiding under the eaves almost all the while."

"It was the only way I could manage," Chris protested. "My books are so different—"

Sue gave a heartfelt nod. "If anybody but you had told me that C. J. Turner and Jacqueline Christ were the same person, I would have accused them of smoking the books instead of reading them. I mean, Jacqueline is so bright and reaffirming, so—"

"Optimistic?"

"Yes, damn it."She gave an emphatic nod. "Optimistic. I can't really say as much for C. J."

"C.J.'s reflecting on a completely different side of life."

Chris wasn't sure if it was her tone of voice, or maybe the fact that Sue had never understood quite all that Chris was protecting before. Whatever it was, with Chris's words, Sue came up short, her quick blue eyes just shy of amused.

"You really do think of them as separate persons, don't you?"

Chris took a second to study the chipped stoneware mug between her hands. Comfortable, warm, worn. "Different bits of the same person," she conceded. "I just like to keep them farther apart so that they can comment on each other sometimes."

"Don't you ever get lost in them?"

The truth? Chris didn't know. She knew where the parts of her had been born, knew how they'd been separated into their equals, knew how they had been set upon their various and disparate journeys. She knew, most days, how to keep them in recognizable order. But she didn't really know, after all, what happened when she dreamed. She had an imperfect memory that held secrets even she couldn't dig out.

So, in the end, she gave Sue what would make her comfortable, and saved the rest for Victor's keen night ears. "Only when I'm in the middle of a really good book."

* * *

She was walking back home when she heard them. Footsteps. Stealthy, slow, their faint scraping all but swallowed in the rustle of wind in the trees. Twice she turned around. Twice they vanished, chimeras of her imagination, whispers from her conscience.

She stopped beneath a street light by the Axminsters'. Listened. She heard the growl of traffic out on the highway, the discordant notes of a piano from the Miller house. She smelled the thick perfume of newly turned earth. Normal, quiet things. Pyrite sounds and smells.

It didn't ease the sudden staccato of her heart. Didn't quell the clammy frisson of dislocation.

Memory.

Something niggled at her. Something dark and slithery. Something dangerous.

Chris stood stock still for almost five minutes trying to wrench it free. Knowing already that it was futile. She walked on.

She thought the footsteps followed.

Once she even tried to double back, sure she could catch someone only a few feet back. Maybe Weird Allen, getting bold, or Bobby Lee, thinking to scare her for standing up for Shelly. Maybe anybody. Anything but specters loosed from a suddenly shaky subconscious. Chris hid alongside the Swinsons' latticed porch, peering through the faint milk of street lamps, discerning shapes from the shadows, inventing attention where there was none.

Nothing. Not even a breeze to ruffle through the trees.

Chris was stepping back out of hiding when the headlights swung toward her. A cruiser, heading toward her from the direction of Sue's house. Loping across the lawn, Chris flagged it down.

JayCee rolled down his window. "What are you doin' out this late?" There was a bag of pork rinds on the other seat.

Chris took a quick look over her shoulder. "JayCee, did you see anybody up the street there? Maybe on one of the lawns or something?"

JayCee actually turned around to look, his thick neck straining against the light blue shirt collar. "Nope. Nothin' out here but me and you."

Chris was sure that was what she wanted to hear. She thought. She nodded, wishing his answer made her feel better. "Nobody at all."

JayCee squinted at her, as if trying to decide if she were working on all cylinders. "What's the matter?"

Chris wished it could have been anybody but JayCee. "Oh, I thought I heard something. I guess I thought Weird Allen was following me home or something."

JayCee laughed. "Nah, old Weird Allen's at the church with his mama. Every Wednesday night, like clockwork. He's too busy havin' Harlan show him the road to heaven to be followin' you around."

Chris must have allowed an opinion to escape into her expression.

JayCee laughed again, waving off Chris's objection. "Ah, old Allen's harmless. He's just... weird. You want me to drive you on home?"

"No, thanks."

JayCee gave her one more wave before heading on down the street. Chris followed in the same direction, not feeling any better. After ten minutes of shivering in the dark, she finally had to admit that what she was hearing wasn't a pursuer following her; just the wind. It was the dark, just like always. For a minute there, though, walking faster and faster toward the bright lights inside her house, she imagined one of her own creations had come to haunt her.

Chapter 8

"Brentwood doesn't remember who rented the box?"

Taking a second to blow her nose, Lawson once again shook her head. "It's one of the personnel training centers. I doubt they'd notice Madonna walking in to rent a box, unless she lived in the neighborhood. "

Mac doodled on his scratch pad, wishing he could turn on his tape player. It helped him think. Put things into perspective. The night before instead of adding to the recycling problem, he'd made a list of people and places to check. He was going over them now with the good detective.

"There's some kind of control on the box, though?" he asked, rubbing at his lip as he thought. "If Chris writes that reply today, we want to see who picks it up."

"We?" Lawson echoed.

Mac looked up to find a certain amount of outrage in her mud-brown eyes. Fence pissing, he decided. The fine art of protecting turf. "Nobody in St. Louis believes you about the murders, do they?"

That damn near brought her to her feet. She was parked on the other side of the table, her notes spread out amid folders of pictures and interview records and call sheets, her arms folded around them as if cushioning them from his interloping eyes.

"They're more interested in clearing cases than solving them," she intoned self-righteously.

No huge revelation there. It was the way Homicide worked the world over. The way crime stats worked. The headaches were big enough without looking for trouble. If you could clear off five or even ten open cases with one confession, you considered yourself a happy man and a step closer, with the help of God and whatever steam you had in the current administration, to promotion.

Mac reigned in his temper. God preserve him from people trying to prove themselves.

"What I'm saying, Lawson," he tried again, "is that crime isn't quite so rampant down this way. I have some extra time to help out if you want."

"Chief?"

Mac left his consideration of the Sergeant and turned to where John McIvey was leaning in his door. Short, skinny, and black as mahogany, John had announced himself as the token on the force, a local kid who'd scored honors on field and in class, and then after service and college, returned home. John was a good enough cop that nobody gave him trouble about his color more than once. One of Mac's first official functions had been elevating him to sergeant.

"Yeah, John."

The officer only afforded Lawson a fleeting glimpse before getting down to business. "You might let the sheriff know when he sits down with the highway patrol to map out their marijuana searches. There might just be a new patch of it in the works back behind Oz up County Road Y. Word is there's gonna be a good acre of it."

Mac nodded and made notes on his duty pad. One of the first revelations about working in rural Missouri, was that it was to marijuana what the mountains of Colombia were to coffee. The climate, not to mention the thick underbrush that prevented easy access by inconvenient law enforcement officials, was quite conducive to its clandestine cultivation. A quarter-acre of marijuana, growing to some twelve feet in height in this neck of the woods and so thick you couldn't hack through it without help, could net a street haul of damn near four million dollars.

Wouldn't hurt to spread the good will among all the forces in the area.

"I'll let 'em know, John. Thanks. How'd the range go today?"

That brought the young man up with a grudging grin. "Curtis did fine, JayCee failed again, and Buster wants another chance when the weather's better."

Mac all but sighed. Typical of small-town budgets and traditions, the police were handed a gun upon completion of a quick course in safety, and then never expected to practice with it again. Most of them couldn't hit anything unless it was big, brown, and had antlers, and then it was a toss-up. Another one of the changes the town wasn't so sure about. Mac was. He had the steel plate to show for what happened to a cop caught napping. He didn't need dead officers, too.

"No reprieve, John. Tell Buster when he can guarantee the bad guys won't go out in the rain, I won't make him go out either."

John chuckled. "One more thing. Allen brought in another application. He even bought his own handcuffs this time."

Mac groaned. Of all the problems he'd inherited from L. J. Watson, Allen Robertson was going to be the most problematic. Just how many ways was he supposed to tell the wannabe that the last thing in the world Mac needed right now was to give someone with the nickname of Weird Allen a license to peek in other people's windows?

"Lose it for a couple of days," Mac suggested. "And keep an eye on those handcuffs."

John chuckled all the way back out the front door.

"You really think you can help me?" Lawson demanded. "You have your hands full here with Barney Fife and company."

Which was why he so enjoyed working with Lawson.

"I'm getting pretty damn tired of this shit," he snapped. "You may have the murders going on up there, but I have the intended victim right here. Now, unless you figure out how to play nice, you're gonna be up to your asshole in excuses and short one murderer. I can protect Chris. I'm not so sure I give a rat's fuck I want to keep you from the wolves. Got it?"

Lawson's eyebrows elevated. "Chris?" she demanded. "Oh, really. Is that how it's going to be?"

That brought Mac right to his feet. "Call me next time you're in town, Lawson. Or when that oleander poisoning case shows up, because it will. You know it and I know it. And you're not going to have a single, sorry son of a bitch to help you with it."

Lawson came right up with him, her defiance dissolving. "I'm sorry," she said, suddenly repentant. "Really. It's just that this all means so much to me."

Mac wasn't ready to give ground. "To me, too. I'm not wild about bad guys doin' a number on one of my townspeople."

She nodded, hand out, suddenly smaller, uncertain. "I know. I mean it. I'm really sorry." She offered a smile then, a beseeching look that offset some of her plainness. "The only way I get an inch up there is to march right up assholes with cleats on."

It took Mac a few minutes, but he reclaimed his patience and turned back to the files. "Have you checked your known crazies up there?"

She nodded. "The ones I've been able to get to have alibis."

"Did you see any of the scenes in person?"