Thicker Than Blood (15 page)

Rachel launched into her story about an absentminded father who had left a black Cadillac DeVille for repairs, but couldn’t remember which body shop.

“Naw.” The man shook his head.

“You sure? I think it almost has to be here. I’ve checked just about every other shop in this area.” She moved toward a grey door that obviously led into the business end of the shop. “Mind if I take a look?”

The man moved out from behind the counter. “Yeah, I do mind.” For a big man, he was fast on his feet. He put a shoulder against the door, blocking her way.

“I just thought I might recognize the car.”

“Look, I got cops up my ass for a couple hours, I got two guys off sick, and the one left, I gotta give him directions even on how to pick his nose. The day’s half over and we ain’t got any work done. I ain’t about to let you monkey around in there askin’ questions and screwing up the other half.” His small eyes had turned mean and pig-like.

Rachel dropped her hand from the door’s steel handle and shrugged. “Mind if I come back tomorrow?”

“Matter of fact, I do. I don’t let customers back there. Ever. ’Count of the insurance. You know what liability insurance costs? And you ain’t even a customer.”

“But I think my father left a car here. A black—”

He cut her off. “Don’t bother comin’ back till you know for damn certain sure.” He heaved himself back into his chair behind the counter.

Rachel was careful to close the door behind her, hoping this episode wasn’t a harbinger of how the rest of her day would go. Her mind wandered back to Hank, wondering if last night was bogus or maybe—just maybe—the real thing,

Halfway up the block, a slender man who reminded her of Lonnie looked up from a clipboard of papers and asked, “Andy’s Bodyworks down this way?”

Rachel nodded. “Be careful, though. He’s in a seriously foul mood.”

The man gave a dry laugh. “Figures. After a robbery, they’re either whiney or macho.”

“Robbery?”

“Guess somebody broke in last night. Don’t know what they took, but they cut all the wires on his burglar alarm. He’s not going to be happy when I tell him it’ll be a couple days before we can get the alarm fixed.”

333

Peter’s round face furrowed with concentration as he slipped the Visa credit card between Rachel’s apartment door and the molding and carefully drew it down toward the lock.

Goldie snorted. “If that don’t beat all. I am standing here watching a child show you how to crack a lock.”

“Ssh,” Rachel hissed. “Let him concentrate.”

The lock gave a muffled click. Peter’s eyes danced. “See? Easy.” He opened the door. “Good?” He handed the plastic card to Rachel. “You do.”

“Ever hear of contributing to the delinquency of a minor?” Goldie clucked.

“I’m not teaching him, he’s teaching me.” Rachel slipped the card into the slot and slid it down the side of the door, but when it reached the tongue of the lock, it would go no farther. She tried twice more without success. “Damn.”

Peter took the card from her and opened the lock on the first try.

Goldie grunted, “I am not going to feel safe in my bed ever again. Where’d you learn that, boy?”

“Danny,” Peter said.

Goldie looked at the ceiling and muttered something under her breath.

Rachel made another try with the card and failed again. “Who’s Danny?”

“His brother. Now I know why he did time in Chino.”

Peter beamed. “Danny does it real good. He say it’s a gift of the touch.”

“Well, I sure don’t have the gift.” Rachel looked at Peter. “When do you get off work?”

He shrugged and looked at Goldie, who said, “When we finish and not until.” Peter scampered back down the garage ramp.

Goldie swung back to Rachel. “You cannot be thinking of making a criminal of that child.”

“I have to get into that body shop. If the car is there, it won’t be there long. You were the one saying I shouldn’t let someone get away with murder.”

“I didn’t say you should do it yourself.”

“I need some solid evidence. Not just a tie tack I can’t even prove was Jason’s.”

Goldie pursed her lips, stared at some spot in space, then held out her hand. “Give me the card.” When Rachel did, Goldie fed the gold plastic into the slot between the jamb and the door, drew it down, and the lock clicked open.

333

Arriving at Benchmark Analytic, Rachel was so nervous she knocked against the door jamb, ripped her jeans and gouged her knee on a small, barely protruding nail. She looked over her shoulder almost expecting to find a cop behind her.

The chubby, bald man behind the counter, oblivious to her less than graceful entrance, was studying a piece of paper, the tip of his tongue protruding between his lips.

Somewhere in the bowels of the lab, someone turned on a faucet.

“Excuse me,” she said.

“Eh?” He blinked as though he had just emerged from a cave into bright sun.

“I left some stuff here a couple weeks ago. To be analyzed.” Her mind blanked when she tried to remember the phony name she had given. Fumbling among the contents of her handbag, she found the receipt and held it out. “Is the report ready?”

The bald man took the receipt, studied it, then disappeared, leaving Rachel to shift her weight nervously from one foot to the other. Minute after minute passed with no further sound save the running water. Something in the air hinted of damp metal.

Had they been instructed to call the police when she returned? Was the delay a ruse to keep her there till they arrived?

The walls of the lab reception area were a bright lime green. Who on earth chooses such colors, she wondered, pacing skittishly between the counter and the exit. Her knee hurt. She bent to pull up her pants leg. A trickle of blood was running down her shin.

“Gracious.” The man was peering over the counter.

Rachel pulled her pants leg down.

“You’d best put some ice on that.” He set a tray on the counter and disappeared again.

In the tray was the plastic packet, the brown envelope, and a piece of paper. She was craning her neck to read the paper when he returned with a plastic bag of ice cubes.

“To stop the bleeding,” he said, unperturbed, as though people bled there daily.

A trickle of blood found its way to the floor. “Sorry about the carpet.”

“Peroxide,” he said. “Blood comes right out.”

“I didn’t know that.” She took the ice from him and applied it to her knee. “Thanks.”

“Everything is chemistry. Everything. Just chemistry.”

“Did you find out what they are?” she asked, hopping on one foot to point at the tray.

“Of course, yes. That’s what we do.” He began reading the paper, glanced at her, then went back to reading. Was there a suspicious look in his eye?

He tipped his head back and peered at her through his bifocals. The fluorescent light overhead made his chin look pale purple. He nodded. “Sodium selenate.”

Rachel gaped at him. “What is that?”

He seemed to be trying to decide how much she knew about chemistry. “Selenium salt. A form of selenium.”

Why would Lonnie have a batch of selenium lying about in his kitchen? Why would he have swallowed enough to kill him?

“What does it taste like?”

He looked at her as if she had asked him to take his pants off. “This is a laboratory, not a kitchen.”

“What about the envelope? What was in that?”

“The two are, I believe, quite the same.”

Rachel forgot about her knee. Jason stashed selenium in his john? “But they can’t be.”

He glanced at the paper again. “I assure you, they are.”

“Selenium isn’t a drug, is it? I mean, I heard it was a sort of vitamin…?”

He shrugged. “People will call anything a health food. It is an element, of course, just a trace element, quite common.”

“But how would it get— Where does it come from?”

He lowered his chin and looked over his small round glasses the way her third grade teacher used to look at her when she had asked something silly. “From the earth, of course. It’s not a gas, is it?”

She ignored his look. “Is it poisonous?”

“Most of its compounds are highly toxic. Pure selenium, in small amounts, no. Large amounts, yes.”

“How large an amount?”

He scratched his left ear. “Of pure selenium? I wouldn’t recommend ingesting more than a few hundred micrograms. Your samples aren’t pure, of course.” He looked down at her knee. “I’m afraid you are bleeding again.”

Chapter Twenty-six

Rachel swallowed the last of her tea, banged the cup into the saucer, and said to Goldie, “It just isn’t logical.”

Goldie was staring at the ceiling of Rachel’s apartment. “Nope, honey. It don’t make a lot of sense to me, either.”

“Why would Jason put an ounce or two of an ordinary trace element in an envelope and put the envelope behind his toilet tank?”

“There’s nothing illegal about it?”

“At Walgreen’s it’s sitting right there on the shelf with the vitamins and minerals. That’s pills, of course, not powder.”

“That stuff of Jason’s was the same as your friend was keeping in an old teapot in his kitchen? And they didn’t know each other?”

“Lonnie and Jason didn’t live on the same planet. They had zero in common.”

“How do you know?”

Rachel stared at her a moment. “I guess I don’t know for certain.”

Goldie got to her feet. “It’s dark. You ready to go? I got to be back by midnight.”

Pain twinged in her knee when Rachel stood. “It’s nothing,” she said to Goldie’s look. “I walked into a door.”

“Right.”

Rachel locked the apartment. “It isn’t far. We should walk.”

“With you on that leg? Why?”

“Because if the alarm goes off and the police come, we’re better off on foot.” Rachel’s voice was high and sharp with nerves.

“I thought the burglar alarm wasn’t working.”

“It isn’t.”

A soft, high-pitched sound came from the bottom of the stair well near the side exit from the garage. Rachel jerked around. “What was that?”

“I don’t think anything else goes meow but a cat.” Goldie scratched her nose. “I can’t believe you talked me into this. I am just gonna walk down the street and commit a felony.”

Rachel opened the door and they stepped out onto the sidewalk. “Had to be you or Peter.” She checked her watch. It was straight up eleven o’clock. Across the street, the Merry Maids van sat in front of the water agency headquarters.

The whitewashed cement-block building that was Andy’s Bodyworks glowed pale purple in the huge light that shone down on it.

Goldie stopped on the sidewalk, gaping at the front door. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. If we’re going to break into that place, we might as well hire a marching band.”

“Maybe there’s a back door.”

A passing car made the storefront even brighter.

“Maybe we don’t really need to get in there,” Goldie muttered.

But Rachel was already rounding the corner of the building toward the back. She was studying the door’s lock when Goldie reached her. “Give me the credit card.”

Goldie, eyes so big they seemed to take up half her face, nodded. Darting glances over each shoulder, she brought the card from a pocket.

Eyeing Goldie, Rachel said, “You look guilty as hell.”

“I am guilty as hell.”

“We’re not going to steal anything,” Rachel hissed.

“Try explaining that if the burglar alarm got fixed.”

“The guy said it would be a couple days.”

Goldie slipped the card between the door and the jamb. “Don’t watch me, watch the street.”

A glowing curtain of light suddenly swept over them; they both gasped and froze.

Rachel’s heart pounded so loud in her ears it was a few seconds before she heard the throb in the air above them and looked up. A helicopter was moving slowly toward Chinatown, sweeping a path beneath it with a huge cone of light.

Goldie’s eyes filled with fright.

“Give me the card and go on back,” Rachel said in a hoarse whisper. “I can’t ask you to do this.”

The black woman stared after the helicopter. “I’m no quitter.” Her trembling fingers were clumsy, but on the fourth try, the card nudged the door free.

Rachel breathed her relief. “No alarm.”

Goldie was less sanguine. “Don’t just stand there with your feet all over the floor, get inside.”

Patches of light from various windows mottled the linoleum. “What if the burglar alarm is a silent one that just dials the cops?” Rachel whispered.

Goldie hissed in the dark: “Now you think of that?”

They moved through the front office to the shop, where the ghostly glow from a skylight gave the row of cars a crouching, sinister look. Rachel pulled a mini Maglite from her pocket, but in her rush stumbled over something. The resulting loud clank spooked both of them again.

Regaining her balance, she moved on down the line of dented fenders, bumpers, hoods. Next to the last on the left was a dark Cadillac. “Yes!” she whispered loudly, motioning to Goldie.

The Caddy’s back bumper was crowding the wall, making it impossible to see the license plate, but the right front fender was missing. The Maglite’s narrow beam halted on the rearview mirror. The misspelled message was there: Objects In Mirror Are Close Than They Appear.

“This is it.” The passenger door creaked as she opened it. The overhead light flashed on.

“What do you think you’re going to find?” Goldie was at her elbow.

“Don’t know.” Rachel ran her hand over the dash. The glove compartment was locked. “Shit.”

“Since you already made me an accomplice, you might as well let me take a look.”

Rachel stood aside while Goldie reached under the seat for the lever, slid the seat back and ran her hands along the floor. “It’s a filthy mess under here,” she said, bringing out, one at a time, a crushed tissue box, a comb, three quarters, and a small slip of paper.

“What’s that?”

“Says Texaco on it. Looks like one of them receipts you get when you pay for your gas in person with a credit card.” Goldie handed it to Rachel.

“I thought all gas stations were set up so you pay at the pump.”

“I guess some aren’t,” Goldie said.

“Then it’ll have a date and a name.” Rachel shone the light on it. “Damn. The part with the name is torn off and the signature looks like it was written by a baboon.”