Liberty or Death (47 page)

She shut the door quickly on the emptiness and hurried downstairs to silence the microwave. She measured out a cup of sugar. Went to dump it into the bowl. Couldn't find the bowl. But she must have gotten out a bowl. Maybe she was losing her mind. Better her mind than her child. She couldn't bear that. Not again. Then she remembered. She'd left the bowl out in the yard. As she rushed to the door, something rustled by her ear, something in her hair. She snatched at it, dashed it to the floor, hoping it wasn't a bug. A leaf. She put a cautious hand up to her head, felt the leaves and sticks, and looked in the mirror.

She looked like a lunatic. Her face and shirt were streaked with mud and stained green from rushing through the bushes, from crawling around the culvert. Looking down, she saw that her shoes were green and muddy. Stephen would be upset, she thought, and then, who the hell cares. She opened the door and would have raced down the driveway to the mailbox, but there was a big man standing there, a cold-faced, red-haired stranger, holding her missing bowl.

"Lost something?" he asked.

Numbly, she took the bowl and tucked it under her arm. "Yes. My child. I've lost my child." It hurt to say the words.

"Detective Gallagher. May I come in?" His voice was gravelly and cautious. She knew instantly that there would be no comfort coming from this man. Over his shoulder she watched the Lexus coming up the drive, watched Stephen get out, his face set and terrible. She knew he was holding back the same fears she was feeling, holding them back and determined to master them. Stephen had little patience with weakness, with fear. Except when it was David's. There, through some resource that Rachel had never understood, he always found the patience and gentleness he needed.

She ran toward him, her arms out, seeking some reassurance that things would be all right. He stopped and stared at her. "Rachel, for heaven's sake, have you looked in a mirror? Have you seen yourself?" He sidestepped and headed toward Gallagher and the house.

"I wasn't thinking about me. I was thinking about him," she said, but Stephen wasn't listening. He'd shaken Gallagher's hand and was leading him inside. Rachel turned to follow and ran into an impenetrable truth, standing like a barrier between herself and the door. This was really happening. This wasn't her vivid imagination or an excess of worry. Not a dream or an irrational fear. While she was at the store buying sugar and peanut butter and listening to an old lady's complaints, someone had come along and snatched her child. Taken her son. Her David.

She collapsed on the step like a puppet whose strings are cut, arms folded tightly around her body to keep the pain from blowing her apart. Tears poured down her face, but she couldn't cry out or even sob. The horror of it stunned her into silence. She could only crouch there like some helpless animal while the realization pierced her like a thousand swords. This was really happening. David was gone.

"Rachel. Hurry up! We're waiting," Stephen called.

Heavily, gravid with grief, with fear, with the burden of a thousand maternal imaginings filling her mind, she pushed herself up and headed not inside, but down the driveway, down the road toward David's bike, toward her last tangible link to her son. She approached it carefully, as though an inanimate conglomeration of metal parts could be sensitive, and stood staring, her hand outstretched, reaching to touch it, to put her hand where David's had so recently been. It shimmered before her blurry eyes, proud and red.

"Don't touch that, please, ma'am." Gallagher stepped between her and the bike so abruptly she stumbled backward. She hadn't heard them coming.

Stephen caught her arm roughly and set her on her feet. "What do you think you're doing, Rachel? Come inside. The detective needs to talk to both of us," he said.

Rachel looked up into his tight, fierce face. "He must be so scared," she said.

Stephen's face softened and she saw the fear that matched her own. He put a supporting arm around her. "He must be. But don't worry, Rachel. We'll find him. We've got to find him." Together they went inside to talk to Gallagher.

 

 

Page forward for an excerpt from
Playing God
by Kate Flora

 

 

 

 

 

Excerpt from

 

Playing God

 

by

 

Kate Flora

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1

 

The small black dog skittered into the street, shining eyes registering canine astonishment that a vehicle dared to be out at this hour. Burgess stomped on the brakes, the Explorer responding with orgasmic ABS shudders, stopping just short of the beast. Four-wheel drive beating out four-foot traction. With a look Burgess decided to take as gratitude, the dog turned and trotted away. A good result. The cops waiting with the body wouldn't have taken kindly to freezing their nuts off while their detective worked a dead dog scene.

Dog was right. Three a.m. on this icy bitch of a February night, even a murderer should have known enough to stay home. February in Portland, Maine, wasn't a benign month. Tonight, with the temp at minus ten, a roaring wind and black ice under foot, it was winter at its worst. But that was the cop's life. Get a call there's a dead body in a car on a lousy night, you don't roll over and go back to sleep, planning on working it in the morning. You get up and go.

Not that Burgess had been asleep when Remy Aucoin called it in. He'd been finishing the report on an unattended handgun death, detailing the reasons they'd concluded it was suicide. He preferred working nights. He liked his landscape gray and quiet, regarded the day's flurries of activity—all those sounds and smells and people—as intrusions into the peace that was possible at night. Some cops didn't like nights. They got used to it—when you were low man on the totem pole, you got stuck on late out—but always found it a little spooky. He'd seen it. Touch a guy on the arm in the afternoon and he'd act one way, touch him the same way at night and he'd wheel around, hand on his gun, a little wild around the eyes.

The brass preferred him working days. Their grudging compromise was some of each. So Burgess, already well into a double shift, had gotten the call. He'd put on his expedition-weight underwear, lined, waterproof boots, and a snowmobile suit. A hard-faced, middle-aged Michelin Man.

But not everyone would dress for the weather and they were going to suffer. Crime scenes didn't take less time because it was cold. Ninety above or ten below, the job required the same slow, meticulous work. You had to give the dead their due.

In fiction, crime scenes were the pristine springboards of the mystery. People didn't move bodies and carry away souvenirs, cops didn't stomp on footprints, track blood everywhere, litter the scene with their own hair and fibers. In real life, anything could happen. He'd been to scenes so compromised by cops that the perp couldn't have asked for better. Once he'd found two EMTs and a fireman handling the murder weapon. Another time a patrolman washed the glasses the victim and her killer had used "so her parents wouldn't know she'd been drinking." Hell of a piece of numbskull chivalry, with the girl already dead. He'd said that loud enough to make the papers. Gotten called on the carpet for making the department look bad. He didn't care. Truth was truth. At least the hour and the weather would keep spectators away.

He passed the neon lights of the hospital, moving fast as the slippery streets allowed. Saw the flashing light bar, only sign of life at this dismal hour. He stopped well short of the cruiser and the parked Mercedes. Stepping carefully in the existing tracks, he went to meet Remy Aucoin, the young patrol officer who'd found the body. Aucoin got out, head down and shoulders hunched defensively, like a kid expecting to be yelled at. Burgess wanted to slap a hand on his shoulder and tell him it was okay, but held back. He didn't know if it was okay, or if the kid had fucked up somehow. Looked like the kid thought he had. It usually wasn't the end of the world, but he'd never let on he thought that. He'd never have another crime scene go right if word got around he was getting soft.

The wind whistled up the hill and tore into them, rattling the ties on his hood and stinging his eyes. "What have we got?" he asked, raising his voice.

Aucoin was hanging on to his uniform cap, trying to keep it from blowing away. "Dead guy in the Mercedes. Looks like someone jammed a rod down his throat." There was a faint whiff of sickness on his breath.

An ugly corpse, maybe the kid's first, or the prospect of getting reamed by Portland's meanest cop? He'd find out soon enough. "Rod. That a euphemism or are we talking about a piece of metal?"

"Metal, sir."

"There's crime scene tape in a bag on the front seat. Mark it off and then I want you to be the recording officer. You got your notebook?" Aucoin nodded. Burgess raised his flashlight and examined the kid's face. His color was bad. Despite the sour breath, Burgess decided it wasn't distress, that would be green. This was the blue of hypothermia. Kid probably wasn't wearing thermals. Didn't want to look fat in his uniform. Young guys were like that, and this was Aucoin's first winter. He'd learn. "There's a watch cap, a heavy sweater and wind pants on the back seat. Put 'em on."

Aucoin hesitated, pride warring with common sense, then nodded. Burgess watched Aucoin grab the gear, then look around for a dressing room, like he wasn't standing in a snowy street. "Out here or in your car, I don't care, but hurry it up. Like to get things under control before I turn into a Popsicle."

While Aucoin opened his cruiser door and sat on the seat to pull on the pants. Burgess got the crime scene tape, a mallet and a handful of wooden stakes and dumped them in Aucoin's lap. "Ground's probably too hard for stakes. Trees. Poles. Use whatever you can," he said. "How'd you happen to find him?"

The young patrolman looked like he wanted to be anywhere else on earth. "I'd noticed the car earlier, sir. It had been there a while. I thought I'd better check."

"How much earlier?"

"Three hours, sir." The words came out a little bit strangled.