Ties That Bind (3 page)

From personal experience, Sam knew that Lydia Malone was not a mentally well person. What would happen to her now that her only son was dead? A disgraced death, no less.

Suicide. But something was off. Desperation, sadness, and despair always emanated from the body of a suicide. At least, that’s what Sam had sensed whenever she’d come upon a suicide scene. But in a murder victim, the emotion was anger, red hot and toxic. And Jeremiah Malone was an angry corpse. Angry and bitter.

Sam shivered, and D-Ray started as her elbow bumped into his arm. He turned to look at her, but she pretended not to notice. Lind Harris gave her a look of complete disgust, now that there was nothing that could be done.

She would deal with him later.

Sam zeroed in on the face of Lydia Malone. Could she be involved? Another pang shot through Sam, and she tried to steel herself to be the cold, hard detective she needed to be.

The third teenage death in as many months. All from strangulation or hanging. Sam’s eyes moved to the coiled blue silk tie, pushed aside as the paramedics first did CPR and then blessed the boy. Was it the cause of his death? That sure wouldn’t add up to suicide. Unlike the room of the first teenage girl, this one had tall ceilings and no evidence of a chair or … She scanned the rest of the room. A large, powerful computer sat in the corner, resting on a beautiful dark wood desk. A screensaver—surfers in a powerful ocean swell—was all she could see. No evidence of premeditated death or depression.

Something was terribly wrong in Kanesville. Three months. Three dead teenagers.

Sam looked up to see a somber, gray-haired, portly man headed in her direction. Something
was
terribly wrong, and based on the direction Police Chief Mike Roberson was headed, it was going to be her job to try to figure out what.

The EMTs finally succeeded in convincing Lydia Malone to leave the room, but her sobs were loud as they moved her away.

“Well, Montgomery, this one’s yours. It’s priority, obviously.” Roberson’s face was solemn and distraught, and he looked around the room at the bustling chaos as though trying to figure out how so many people got into one room. Slowly, the unnecessary medical personnel filtered out. A bald, portly man in a white polo shirt and black khaki pants put his arm around President Malone and talked quietly to him.

While Sam did not know the man, she recognized the look and feel of the situation. Even the stake president had a spiritual leader, and this man was probably his ward’s bishop; he probably sent his most difficult cases Malone’s way. And today he had to comfort the man he served under.

Malone would not leave as they bagged the body. He stood and watched, hand to his mouth, tears streaming from his eyes. The other man stood stoically by his side, arm curved awkwardly—protectively—around his shoulders. They didn’t speak as the crime scene techs finished scouring the body for clues, finding nothing out of place.

When they were done, Sam donned gloves, then stepped forward. She fought the urge to wince as she knelt down by the dead boy. She looked closely at the ligature marks, the chief standing right behind her, watching her every move.

“It’s time to let them work, Mark,” the stocky bishop said, and Malone seemed to fall into himself, no longer strong and powerful. He allowed himself to be led from the room, and Sam breathed a sigh of relief.

She continued examining the body, looking for any type of evidence, injuries, or foreign objects that would explain why the boy had died this way. There were marks on his throat, dark and vivid. Rigor had not set in yet, so he was still pliable but rapidly decomposing.

Sam picked up his left hand, examined it closely, and let it drop, moving to the right one. Neither showed signs of defensive marks, which didn’t mean much. No clues screamed at her demanding justice. It would be easy to write this off as suicide, even though her every instinct told her it was something else. She’d never had a homicide of her own before. A few suicides, some accidental deaths—and the homeless man who froze on a cold winter night. Her rookie status hit her like a punch in the gut.

The smell seemed overpowering now that the room had emptied. Bile, blood, body fluids, and fecal matter left a stain that would never come out.

She finished, stood up, and nodded to the CSI tech who came over to the body. Sam’s stomach roiled from the smell and the process, but she fought against showing any outer sign of turmoil. She had to be tough.

Sam and Chief Roberson watched solemnly as they encased the handsome young man in a black body bag. Jeremiah Malone took one of his last rides on a gurney, out of his childhood home and into the darkness of a morgue.

Once the body was removed, the crime scene techs returned and began casing the grid, looking for evidence. One was a petite girl with a bright smile and an encyclopedia of crime facts in her brain. Cori was her name, Sam thought. She wasn’t smiling today.

The other tech was a tall, awkward brown-haired man named Austin, who was rumored to have Asperger’s, so poor were his social skills. Both techs wore gloves, and Cori picked up the tie, transferring it carefully to a sealed plastic bag.

Chief Roberson said, “About done here,” and motioned Sam to follow him.

In the corridor of the beautiful Malone home, he told her what he expected of her.

“Solve this case, Montgomery, and solve it fast. If this boy committed suicide, you better come to that conclusion in one hell of a hurry. If you suspect it’s something else, I don’t want to hear a peep about it without facts. Either way, this one goes away quick. President Malone’s an important man in this town.”

“Are you trying to say the other two weren’t important?” Sam shot back, immediately regretting her words.

“Do you really want to go there?”

“No, sir. I apologize.”

The fact that the boy’s death mattered so much more than the two teenage girls’ rankled—though she realized it wasn’t about Jeremiah, quarterback of the football team. This was about his father and what he represented.

“Watch your mouth, Montgomery, and get the job done.”

Roberson turned and walked away, and Sam sighed as she headed for the EMTs who were tending to Lydia Malone.

Questioning an already unbalanced woman—whose son had just died a violent, premature death—would make this a very long, unpleasant Saturday.

FOUR

Modern drugs combined with religion were a godsend to many. To police officers, they were often a deterrent.

Sam was unable to interview either Lydia Malone—who was now off in la-la land thanks to a sedative—or Mark Malone, who was in “seclusion.” She walked slowly through the house looking for anything out of the ordinary. And making sure that the techs employed by Smithland County didn’t miss something she might need.

There was a picture of Joseph Smith in the main entryway, a picture of Jesus in the Mormon sitting room, and a copy of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” along the main hallway, next to pictures of Jeremiah in various stages of youth. The “proclamation” was the same one hanging on the wall in Sam’s childhood home and nearly every other Mormon home throughout the United States. It was the Church’s credo about what made up a family: a man, a woman, and children. There were no two moms or two dads for Mormons. Rules were rules, and black and white was black and white.

Sam wandered farther down the hallway and found Jeremiah’s room, taking a quick look around. A jumbled mess of dirty clothes, CD cases, and empty pop cans were scattered through the room. The walls were decorated with skating posters, along with banners for the Utah Jazz and San Diego Chargers. “Go hard or go home,” was written on a poster of an NFL athlete. A normal, messy, stinky, teenage-boy room; nothing jumped out. Without the family’s permission, she couldn’t conduct a complete search of his bedroom, and since the family was unavailable to her, she had no choice but to leave it alone for now.

She entered the den one last time, grimacing as the awful smell wafted up to her, then exited through the front door. The first thing she saw was Lind Harris. She took off after him almost before she’d realized what she was doing.

“You moved that tie. You took it off his neck,” Sam spit out, not trying to hold back, hoping all the derision and disgust she felt for Lind Harris was apparent to him and anyone else within earshot. She was inches away from his face, having caught up with him just as he got into his police-issue Durango, complete with the Smithland County sheriff’s insignia on the side.

“Get out of my face, Montgomery,” Harris snarled back, his lip pulled up on one side. His face was ravaged with the marks of teenage acne, lips thin, chin almost nonexistent. He had a frosting of light blond hair that seemed to recede farther every time Sam saw him. She also saw, as she always did, that wild look of fear in his eyes. Like he had to carry a gun, just to be safe: one never knew when life would jump out and get you. Sam understood this feeling, but it did not bond her in the least to Lind Harris. “Having a little raging PMS today, huh? A little out of sorts?”

“Back off, Harris,” D-Ray warned from behind her.

“Back off? Who is in whose face here, D-Ray, or did you miss that? She wants to act like a bitch, she better expect to get treated like one.”

Sam shook off the hand she felt on her shoulder, never breaking contact with Lind Harris’s weasel eyes. Finally, he looked away, shrugging and pulling his door in just a bit farther, trying to urge her to leave. She wasn’t budging.

“You took the necktie off. You destroyed evidence in a scene that could be a murder. You are one step away from being busted down to watching prisoners take a dump in the jail, you know—”

“Shut the fuck up!” Harris yelled at her, sudden and violent, his eyes an angry blur, darting from her to the men she knew stood behind her, watching the two of them with extreme interest.

Lind’s weak, almost-absent chin quivered as he fought for words to put Sam firmly in her place. At least the place where he thought she should be—not telling him how to do his job. But her anger threw him off. He didn’t seem to know what to say.

“What’s going on here?” came the voice of her chief, boisterous and loud, almost jovial—a deliberate attempt to break things up, and an unspoken message to take it private or shut it up. Closing ranks.

Sam turned and stomped away. Behind her she heard the door of Lind’s Durango slam and the engine start.

“What’s your problem with him, Sam?” D-Ray asked, following her to their department-issued vehicle. “You want all the cops in Smithland County to hate you? Or just the sheriff’s department?”

They got into their respective sides of the car—Sam driving, D-Ray in the passenger seat—and she stuck the key in the ignition, then turned to him before she started the car up. “Do you hate me?” she asked.

“Sometimes I don’t like you very much.”

“But do you hate me?”

“Of course not,” he said, his voice gentle and melodic. “But what’s your point?”

“You’re a good cop and a good man. I don’t want you to hate me. Him? He’s isn’t either one. I don’t give a damn what he thinks.”

Sam started up the car and left the Malone house—and chaotic scene—behind. They’d been there for more than three hours. CSI was still doing the last of the investigation and cleanup.

“Sam?” D-Ray said, his voice and tone a question. Fury still rocked through her veins, and she wished she could get out of this car right now and pound the pavement, running until her heart felt like it might burst and there was no room for any feeling except sheer exhaustion.

“He took the necktie off,” she said.

“He probably did.”

“So why am I only one who is pissed off about it?”

“He was doing CPR, Sam.”

“The kid was dead, D-Ray. He knew it; you know it; everybody knows it. There was no reason to take the necktie off.”

“He did it for the parents. Maybe to give them just a moment’s more hope.”

“Well, he just made our job hope
less
.”

“No, he didn’t. Maybe he messed it up a little, but he didn’t make it hopeless. If the tie was around the kid’s neck, it could have been one of three things: suicide, accident, or murder. Found by his side, the marks on his neck, it means one of three things. Can you tell me what they are?”

“Shut up, D-Ray.”

She’d been dealing with assholes like Lind Harris from the day she started police academy at Weber State University. In fact, she had dealt with that particular asshole—who could never handle that she shot better, ran faster, and thought quicker then he ever could or would—since high school. Her marks earned her a place on the SLCPD, while he ended up as a Smithland County sheriff’s deputy.

Then she came to Kanesville, an even more lowly rank. What the hell was she thinking?

She hated Lind Harris. She hated small-town cops. Too bad she was one now.

FIVE

It was 6:00 p.m. before they finally called it a day. Ravenously hungry, D-Ray talked Sam into stopping at the popular local café, Sill’s, for dinner.

“So, what the hell is your problem with Lind, anyway?” D-Ray asked, tapping his fork on the table, drumming out a rhythmic beat Sam felt like she should recognize but didn’t. They sat in a booth near the front, always ready to head out quickly if a call should come in. Bone-weary, Sam prayed for the radio and her phone to stay silent. She still needed to check on her parents, pretend to eat, pretend sleep wasn’t restless and sparse.

“
So?
” D-Ray said again, his tone emphasizing the question.

“Why do you care?”

“Why are you a bitch?”

“Grow up, D-Ray. Welcome to adulthood. I don’t have to answer to you, and when I’m being assertive it doesn’t mean I’m being a bitch. When you’re throwing your balls and your testosterone around, do I accuse you of being a jackass?”

“First of all, I do not throw my balls around. They are attached to my body, and I prefer them that way. Secondly, I’ve never thrown testosterone at anyone. And thirdly, of course you accuse me of being a jackass. On a regular basis.”