If Looks Could Kill (24 page)

Standing there, a bright bird with sharp, snapping eyes and the gall of a con man, she told him. "I don't know."

He wasn't sure how long it was before the phone rang. Probably seconds. It seemed like a frustrating eternity. Inside that drab little kitchen, the silence throbbed. Mac sat perfectly still, the smoke tickling at his nostrils as it curled up from the ashtray. He could hear birds rustling out under the eaves. He could smell tobacco and the brisk tang of soap. He could almost see the shimmer of tension on Chris Jackson, as if she waged a silent battle within herself, let loose by incautious words.

He caught the whisper of indecision, that split-second breach in defenses that could presage confession or the explosion of violence. A catch in the wind, a hitch in sound that betrayed vulnerability, a window into revelation that was so tenuous that even reaching for it pushed it closed.

Mac had the sense that she was about to reach a decision, and it stroked his instincts and set them humming like the strings of a harp. Humming, warning, goading. There was something Chris needed to tell him. Some confession she wanted to make, and it balanced on that moment like a child at the edge of a high roof.

It was the shrill of the bell that shattered it.

Chris jerked to life by the alarm like a fireman caught napping, her eyes wide and wary, her posture promising flight. Mac managed to stay in place, his features passive, as if he hadn't just trespassed into an area to which she never would have knowingly allowed him admission. With deliberate movements he picked up his cigarette and stood for the phone, taking a long, cleansing drag to burn away the quick frustration.

Behind him, Chris turned back to the window.

"Chief? It's Marsha."

Mac reached around for the rest of his beer while he still had the chance. "What's up, Marsha?" He didn't suppose he could hope it was just the Reverend Sweetwater down there raising hell again.

"JayCee just called in. Looks like he's found himself a body. He wants you to come look."

Mac rubbed the warming can against his temple and bit back several oaths. "Where?"

"In the old Phillips station. JayCee tends to head off behind there to relieve himself. You know how small that boy's bladder is. Well, he says he smelled somethin' god-awful, and went sniffin' around. Sniffed as far as the door of the station and won't go any farther. He thinks it's Cooter Taylor."

"Cooter? Which one?"

There was a pause. "Well, he didn't say. Not that it makes much difference. They're all of a kind. Bound to end up rottin' someplace sooner or later, ya know?"

"Yeah, I know."

Mac sneaked another peek over to where Chris was sipping at her soda and trying to look as if she wasn't eavesdropping, and took a quick drag from his cigarette. "I'm on my way. Call Doc Clarkson, have him meet me over there, and Sam Milligan. He's the coroner, isn't he? And call JayCee back. Tell him not to touch a thing. Not anything. And to make sure he keeps everybody else out of there, too. You hear?" God, he was even beginning to talk like a small-town police chief.

"Sure thing. You want Heilerman's standin' by?"

"Might as well. It won't matter how slow they go this time."

He got a chuckle for that as the dispatcher hung up. Mac downed the rest of his beer in one gulp.

"I was joking," Chris protested.

He looked over to see that all pretense of disinterest had vanished. "About Cooter," she explained. "Which one died?"

Mac noticed that all defenses were securely back in place. She was once again sharp and certain, her expression avid.

Everybody lies, he thought, that old litany of homicide. Small lies, big lies, stupid lies. It was time for Mac to make a call and find out about Chris Jackson's.

"JayCee didn't take the time to find out."

"They all look pretty much alike anyway," Chris assured him. "Can I come?"

That brought Mac to a halt. "To a murder scene?"

Her grin was at once brash and coy. "Research. I don't get to attend crime scenes down here like the guys in the big cities do."

"Chris—"

"L. J. always let me tag along. I don't get in the way, and I have never once compromised a crime scene." She lifted her gaze to the heavens and recited, as if from the Good Book itself. "' The best place for your hands at a crime scene is in your pockets.'"

Damn it if Mac didn't want to grin at her. "You don't have any pockets."

"I keep mine behind my back. Like this." She showed him, looking for all the world like an English schoolgirl instead of an impending pain in the ass. "I am the consummate professional," she assured him with a glint that really did make him laugh.

"No wonder you piss Harlan off." He scowled and scooped up his cigarettes as he headed out the kitchen door. When Chris followed right along, he didn't say a word.

* * *

It was Cooter, all right. Senior rather than any of the juniors, who began to show up within moments of Mac's arrival, each and every one of them meaner, dirtier, and more stupid than the next. Their father lay sprawled in a prone position in the corner of the old Phillips bay, a grotesque, bloated black thing that had already been visited by vermin.

"JayCee," Mac snapped with his first eyeball check through the grimy window JayCee had uncovered beneath the boards. "Go in my trunk and pull out my black bag. Get out the Vicks VapoRub."

JayCee wasn't the only one to stare at him.

Mac backed up from the window with a sour smile. "He's gonna be a popper," he warned. "You're gonna want to shove something up your nose before you walk in there, and we don't have a stove we can burn coffee on."

JayCee didn't need any more encouragement than that. Within the space of two minutes, the beefy patrolman was back with the bag that held Mac's old homicide paraphernalia. Latex gloves, Vicks, rolling tape measure, extra Polaroid, yellow legal pads, tweezers, evidence bags.

"I bet you'd be great fun on a date," Chris quipped as she took a peek inside.

"This isn't my date gear," he retorted, the adrenaline of the job already shooting through him. "There aren't any handcuffs."

He got a round of nervous chuckles from the assembled crew: JayCee, John, and the Heilerman team. Mac could see the neighbors starting to venture out from nearby houses, and one or two patrons of the TrainWreck were standing at the door. He wasn't going to have long before he had a three-ring circus on his hands.

"OK," he announced, dipping his fingers into the jar and dabbing a sizable dose beneath each nostril.

Anointing yourself with the holy oil of homicide, his old Irish sergeant had always said at the door of a crime scene before making a sign of the cross over his crew like the presiding bishop.

Of course, in Chicago, they'd also had the coffee, which filled an enclosed space with a sharp, pleasant smell that made you hungry. That wasn't going to happen here.

"JayCee, you keep every person who's about to show up out of here. John, come on in with me. And you," he said, almost accusingly to Chris, who had just taken her own helping, "stay out of the way."

She lifted her hands in protest. "I'm a mouse."

Mac shot her a scowl and slipped on his gloves. John followed suit, and they bent to the task of prying the door open.

The stench rolled out of the fetid, closed room like a livid green wall and sent everybody to gagging. Measuring his breaths carefully so that he got as little of the smell of rot as possible past the menthol, Mac stepped in, his eyes already tearing.

Motioning to the drag marks, the traces of old blood on the floor that didn't show up on Cooter's back, he began his notes. "Victim white male Caucasian, approximately sixty, two hundred pounds. Found in prone position, unbound... he was moved in here. Probably killed somewhere else. Whatever happened, it happened face-on."

John's voice was quiet, hushed, as if afraid to desecrate the dead somehow. "Probably a fight over the marijuana."

Mac briefly turned away from where he was cataloging position and decomposition. "Your information on that field?"

John nodded. "Word around here is that Cooter controlled most of it. Enterprising old son of a bitch for being such a waste of protoplasm. And he controlled with more than an iron hand. I have the feeling somebody finally objected."

"One of his kids, you think?"

John shrugged. "He had all of Oz pretty much under his thumb."

"Jesus... oh, Jesus."

Mac swung around at the intrusion. "Damn it, you said you could handle it."

Chris was standing in the doorway, white and shaking and wide-eyed. Mac had the feeling that given half a chance she'd toss her cookies right into ground zero.

She didn't move at his challenge. She just shook her head. "Jesus."

"Harlan's going to be happy you finally found him," Mac snapped. "Now, get the hell out of here."

She lifted her eyes to him, and what he saw sent sudden shivers down his back. "He was moved here, wasn't he?" she asked faintly. "Shot out in the marijuana field and dumped here for somebody else to find."

"Shot?" Mac echoed, stepping away from the body. "How do you know?"

She looked desolate. "Because that's the way I wrote it."

Chapter 10

Chris was going to be sick. She'd felt a sense of unreality with the pictures. A sickening outrage. This was different. This was live theater. Rancid, sweltering, even in the mild spring air, obscene in ways that she couldn't even name.

"What do you mean you wrote it?" Mac was demanding, his face too near, the walls too close, the scene unreal and disorienting.

Chris gulped, the tide of menthol in her nose not enough. "In a book," she said, trying her best to focus through sudden tears. "It's called
Family Business."

She couldn't take her eyes off Cooter, off the fingers with their dirty fingernails and crude blue crosses splayed out on the concrete, the greasy plaid shirt he'd been wearing when he'd walked out of jail. She couldn't swallow past the nausea that churned in her. She wasn't even standing close, only in the doorway, and yet it was overpowering, as if this closed off, shadowy, silent room had been waiting just for her. As if her punishments had come to grisly life.

I'm sorry, Mama. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Other scenes suddenly rode in on the miasma, superimposed themselves on the thick, oily light. Shadows and lines, half-formed memories she'd only seen in her nightmares. Sickening thuds, dizzying panic, hands everywhere. And, far off, a figure. A shadow, standing. Patient and inexorable as time, uncertain as memory. Always there, waiting. Familiar, like the shadow under the tree. Soothing, terrifying, faceless. Sucking the air out of her, the life out of her...

Mac closed a hand on her wrist and yanked her farther inside. Chris instinctively flinched away, so close to crying out that she shook with the effort of control.

"What are you talking about?" he asked, letting go.

She shuddered, arms wrapped tight around her waist to protect herself, to hold herself away and safe. Fighting to shake off terrors nobody else could see. With a bitten-off curse, Mac turned on John.

"Secure the scene and don't touch a damn thing. I'll be right back. And get somebody to find out if Lawson's still in town."

He was dragging her out the door when they ran into Tom Clarkson coming the other way.

"Whoa," Tom protested, wheeling back into the grim sunlight. "You want me to tell you he's dead? He's dead. Can I go home now?"

"Tell me how," Mac snapped and dragged Chris right on past, out to the side of the station away from the gathering crowd where broken bottles of Old Crow and Sweet Rosie O'Grady littered the cracked asphalt.

"I've read all your books," he said without preamble. "This wasn't one of them. And you said the one you're working on is going to be knives. Did you change your mind, or what?"

Chris bent over, hands on thighs, her back against the greasy, chipping wall, willing her stomach to stay settled, forcing the nightmare back into the darkness. There was an old condom at her feet, cigarette butts, a torn, stained section of poster from Harlan's latest revival. "No," she answered, closing her eyes. "Nothing's changed."