Eyewitness (Thriller/Legal Thriller - #5 The Witness Series) (The Witness Series #5)

by Forster, Rebecca

  Satisfied, he got out of the car, paused to open the trunk and retrieve the bag inside, and then he opened the passenger door. He stepped back to let the uncle out of the car while his eyes darted to the small houses hugging the sides of the wet street. The old man rested his big hand atop the car and the young man realized how shameful it was that he had been proud of a piece of metal. The car was nothing in the grand scheme. The old man had opened his eyes to so many things. He touched his uncle and they walked to the house.

  The door was unlocked and a single light burned as they had expected. They went through the living room, and the kitchen, and to the place where the washer and dryer stood. The young man opened the lid of the washer, stripped, loaded his wet clothes inside, waited for the old man to do the same, and then he turned it on. The sound must have disturbed the young man’s wife because she appeared, dressed in her thin robe, arms crossed, looking worried. Her lips parted, but before she could speak she made the mistake of looking at the old man. He did not acknowledge her. She looked at her husband, and a shiver ran down her spine. She glanced at the washer, and then disappeared into the back of the house.

  She was just crawling into bed when she heard another cabinet in the washroom open and close, and she heard something fall. She hoped they weren’t making a mess she would have to clean up later. When her husband came into their bedroom and dressed again, she kept her eyes shut even though she wanted ask what he had been doing. When she heard voices, though, her curiosity got the best of her.

  Carefully, she got out of bed again. Hiding in her own house, she spied on her husband and the old man. They had dressed in fresh clothes and now her husband was welcoming other men into her home at an hour when no one should be awake. The last one to come in asked:

  “Well?”

  The old man shook his head and set his mouth. Some of the visitors shook their heads as they settled down to finish this night with coffee, talking quietly of places the young man’s wife had never seen, in a language she could not understand. Her mother had been right. It was never good to marry someone from another place. She checked on their son who slept like a baby even though he was a big boy of five. Then she went back to bed wishing her husband was with her and the old man was gone.

  ***

  “Jesus, Archer, what kind of mother is this woman? I could barely tolerate it when she left that kid out on the beach all night when the weather was good. Locking him out tonight was criminal. Billy could have died out there.”

  “Maybe that’s what he wanted.”

  Josie considered her lover, her friend, her honest man for a minute before turning her head, resting her elbow near the window, and covering her mouth with her cupped palm. If Archer was right and Billy wanted to kill himself, then everyone in Hermosa Beach who said they cared about that kid were liars including her. Josie dropped her hand and tried to remember the last conversation she’d had with the boy. Was it a day ago? A week? Longer? As if reading her mind, Archer reached out and squeezed the hand that rested in her lap. She squeezed back.

  “You should have to get a license to be a mother,” Josie muttered.

  Archer snorted. There was no arguing that. Both of them had run across a lot of women who never would have qualified. Linda Rayburn threw Hannah under the bus to save herself; she did it with style. Josie’s own mother had abandoned her without a word of explanation; she had done it with surgical precision. And there was Archer’s long dead wife and her son. Lexi had brutally betrayed every tenet of motherhood. But Billy’s mom was something else entirely. If Archer were a betting man, he would lay odds they were about to meet a woman who didn’t think about her son one way or the other.

  “There it is.” Josie sat up straighter. “One in from the corner.”

  Billy’s house wasn’t in the fanciest neighborhood in Hermosa Beach. It was sandwiched between an equally decrepit house on the right and one under construction on the left. The small patch of lawn in front of Billy’s house was dead and dry despite the deluge of the last eighteen hours. Paint peeled off the gutters and around the windows. There was a hole in the downspout by the front door and the rain had poured through it to create a huge puddle on the painted porch. A rusting bicycle shared the space with the skeleton of a dead bush in a broken pot. The upstairs windows were covered with tin foil, and the downstairs window with a flag.

  Archer pulled the Hummer into the driveway and stopped behind an old Toyota. The front end listed to the left where it was missing a wheel. No one had bothered to block the back wheels because the driveway was broken into shards by the roots of a ficus tree. The car wouldn’t be rolling anywhere without divine intervention. Archer set the parking brake and cut the lights.

  “You can wait here if you want.” Josie reached for the door handle.

  “I’ll go with.” Archer reached for his. “You might need a witness.”

  They opened their respective doors. It was two in the morning. The storm, furious though it had been, was passing on. They walked through a light drizzle that would be gone by ten, and reached the front door at the same time. Since Archer was closer, he rang the bell. One light was on upstairs; downstairs was dark. Josie reached over Archer and rang the bell again.

  Silence.

  She moved him out of the way and laid on it as if she could push it through the stucco. Still no one came. She tried the knob. Locked tight. Josie fell back, looked up, and checked out the permanent security bars on the windows. Billy’s mom wouldn’t get past them sneaking out a window and if ripping them off was the only way to get in, Josie might do it.

  “Hey! Open up!” Josie shouted but nothing happened. She called again. “Open up, Goddammit!”

  “Good one, Jo. Swearing will get her attention.”

  Josie shot Archer a withering look.

  “I’m going around back. Someone’s up, and I’m not leaving until I talk to whoever it is. Then I’m going to call the cops and have that woman arrested for neglect. Child endangerment. Attempted murder. If Billy had drowned. . .”

  Josie’s litany feathered out to nothingness as she strode toward the back of the house. Whatever was going to happen, Archer would hear about it soon enough. She wasn’t gone two minutes when he heard someone moving inside the house. Before Archer could call her back, the door opened.

  “Come on in,” Josie said.

  “Don’t you think we should wait to be invited?”

  “Believe me, nobody is going to be upset.”

  Josie pushed the door open wider. It didn’t escape Archer’s notice that she used her elbow to do so. She flipped on the light the same way. It was an awkward but understandable gesture considering what he was looking at as soon as the room was illuminated.

  “Guess we know why she didn’t answer,” he said.

  “Think Billy saw her do this?” Josie asked.

  “That would explain him freaking out,” Archer muttered. “He may be luckier to be alive than we know.”

  They stood side by side, surveying the scene, each lost in thought as the seconds ticked by. Finally, Archer glanced at Josie.

  “You okay, babe?”

  She nodded. It was the guy on the couch, the one with a bullet through his skull, who didn’t look so good.

  CHAPTER 3

  1985

  The legislature was divided. Half of them argued for the status quo: isolationism, socialism, one party – no, one man – rule. The problem was, there was not a man with an iron hand to govern. Enver Hoxha, supreme leader for half a century, was dead. This definitively proved that he, the supreme leader, had been, after all, nothing more than any other man. The other half of the lawmakers found their voices and spoke what people had been afraid to say for decades: under Hoxha’s rule the country had suffered.

  Traditions had been destroyed-

  National personality had been obliterated-

  People feared one another-

  The Cult of the Ugly had ruled –

  Calls for freedom were rampant
in the halls of government and drowned out those who did not want change. The echo was heard in the capitol and filtered to the towns and then to the villages. The people rose up. Once again they embraced their ancient culture with pride and looked to the future with hope.

  People wept and danced with happiness - all except Yilli. Yilli, the good boy, the goat herder, spoke with his wife, told her what he had done, closed his doors and shuttered his house for good.

  2013

  The couch was pushed against the wall in the corner of the living room. To one side was a crate with a lamp on it. In front of the couch was a low coffee table that was nicked and scratched, its finish long since dulled. The dead man’s legs were sprawled in front of him: left on the floor, right on top of the table. There was an armchair covered in floral fabric close to the table on one side and a lawn chair on the other.

  Archer picked his way around the furniture and put two fingers to the man’s neck. He shook his head even though neither of them needed confirmation that the guy was a goner. The gunshot had entered the left temple neatly and then blown blood and brains over the upholstery and wall when it exited. Josie maneuvered around the opposite end of the sofa, looked behind it, picked up the skirt and looked under it. She stood and slid her gaze over the floor. The gun wasn’t in the guy’s hand and it hadn’t been ejected.

  “No weapon. Not suicide.” Josie whispered, but she wasn’t telling Archer anything he didn’t know.

  If this were a suicide, the man would have stabilized himself with both heels on the coffee table or both feet on the ground. More than likely he would have put the gun in his mouth. The body was contorted in a way that indicated the victim had been reacting to something, and that something was probably a gun being pointed at him.

  “Fed Ex.” Josie noted the man’s uniform.

  “He was off the clock,” Archer added.

  The guy was holding a notebook, not an electronic tablet. There was no truck on the street and no evident delivery in the living room. The blood was too fresh for this to have happened during working hours. Archer looked at the notebook. There was a logo on the top, but he couldn’t make it out. There were names written in it, and some of them were starred. Archer looked up to see Josie heading for the stairs.

  “You wait for me, Jo,” Archer cautioned.

  Josie paused half way between the front door and the staircase. Before he could join her, something caught his attention and he veered off toward the kitchen.

  “Got another one.” Archer poked his head in for a better look at the woman spread-eagled face down on the linoleum.

  “Is it her?” Josie asked as she worked her way back toward him.

  “Nope. It’s a guy. Took one in the back. The shot blew his wig off,” Archer said as she joined him.

  This man was at least six-four, his feet were huge, and his hands were the size of baseball mitts. Josie couldn’t see his face, but she could see the tufts of black hair billowing around his back and shoulders in bizarre contrast to the orange and pink satin backless dress he wore. The skirt had bunched up around his ass. He was an old fashioned kind of guy, preferring a garter and stockings to panty hose. One of his pink pumps was still on, the other rested near the fridge. The kitchen was small, neat and clean. He had been making a dash for the back door, but he didn’t have a chance. Not in those heels.

  “Poor Billy. God only knows what went on in this place.” Josie leaned into Archer. “Let’s see if good old mom is still here.”

  “She’s not,” Archer said.

  He was about to lecture her on disturbing a crime scene, but Josie was already on her way upstairs. He caught up with her and took her arm. He almost lost her a few months ago; he wasn’t going to chance it again.

  “Me first.”

  “I thought you were sure she was gone.”

  “There’s sure and there’s positive,” he reminded her.

  Josie fell back to make room for him. The stairs creaked under his weight. Josie tried to avoid the weak spots, but her efforts were futile. A spindle was missing and the railing was cracked. The carpet was threadbare and torn. Above them was a landing packed tight with boxes. The poster that had launched Farrah Fawcett’s career hung on the wall above them. The blond bombshell smiled brilliantly, eagerly, innocently, as if she had no idea that the red maillot clinging to her small breast exposed her erect nipple. It was racy stuff for the time. Archer’s first thought was that the poster was a collector’s item. His second was that the poster was an antique. His third was that there was no room for anyone to hide on the landing, so he moved on, craning to see past the boxes. Josie stepped lightly and joined him.

  Alert to the slightest movement, listening for any sound no matter how small, they swept the upstairs. Flanking the narrow hall were two bedrooms: one was dark, and the other was lit. Billy’s mom had a thing for sixty-watt bulbs.

  Archer motioned toward the closest bedroom, and Josie nodded. He approached the dark room, reached through the door, and found a switch. The light popped on. When he motioned again, Josie followed Archer into a woman’s bedroom.

  Pink, plastic-coated free weights were in one corner along with an ab exerciser. Clothes were everywhere: on the floor, the bed, on the little wicker table, spilling out of the tiny closet. There was a table that served as a desk. It was piled with magazines: Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and one in a foreign language that Josie didn’t recognize. There was a flat screen television facing a waterbed. An unframed poster of a naked man and woman was thumbtacked into the wall like a headboard. The subjects were not professional models and the photo was grainy. The woman in the picture was very pretty and young; the man wasn’t that good looking. Josie turned in a tight circle and then nudged the closet door open with her toe. It was packed with cheap clothes and shoes.

  “Be back,” Archer whispered.

  Josie stepped back, squishing a stuffed toy underfoot. Josie picked it up, thinking it was an odd thing for a grown woman to have. She started to pitch it toward the bed, but changed her mind. She didn’t want to disturb anything that might keep Billy’s mom from getting what she deserved.

  “There’s not much in Billy’s room,” Archer was back, keeping the conversation going as if he never left. “His backpack is in there. Some surfing posters. The bed is made. At least his room is nice.”

  “Too bad he didn’t get to use it much,” Josie noted.

  Archer shrugged as he took out his phone.

  “I’ll call it in.”

  Archer never dialed. Josie held up her hand and walked around the far side of the bed. He followed.

  “Crap,” she muttered.

  Archer couldn’t have said it better. Lying in an impressive pool of blood on the yellowed linoleum was a nearly naked woman. Long matted hair covered her face. One arm was thrown up and over her head as if she had been trying to crawl away, but the other was pulled behind her, the bone jutting through the skin where it had been broken. There was a wash of blood on the wall, rivulets of blood, pools of blood, streaks of blood. There was so much blood, so much violence, that Josie and Archer both reached the same conclusion at the same time.

  “This one was personal.” Josie turned away, touching Archer’s hand as she did so. “Make the call. I’ll go to the hospital to be with Billy. I want to know-”

  Before Josie finished her thought, before Archer could remind her they had come in the same car, the woman on the floor moved.

  CHAPTER 4

  1987

  Everyone danced at Teuta’s wedding except her parents. It was not unusual for Yilli and his wife not to be at the wedding of their daughter. Tradition had it that the bride’s family stayed home to weep for their lost daughter. They had followed tradition exactly. Yilli had even wrapped a bullet in a leaf, handing it to Teuta’s husband as he stole her away. It was a symbol of his power over her. The bullet meant that Teuta’s father had given her husband the right to kill her if she was not a dutiful wife. Of course, he wouldn’t do that. He was a
modern and handsome husband who delighted Teuta. The matchmaker had done an exceptional job. Now that there were elections and democracy, Teuta could only imagine what wonders the future held for them. Yet her father, Yilli, was distressed by the turn of fortune. He no longer seemed to care about anything: not his goats, not her mother, not their new world. Then again, he was old now and not much would change for those who lived so far from the towns and villages. Perhaps that was what ailed her father. She was married, and he was old. But Teuta did not think it was so simple.

  Just as she was thinking all these things, Teuta’s husband cried out with joy. She looked up to see him dancing: arms high in the air, feet moving, grinning as his friends clapped him on the back. He looked happy and when he caught her eye he looked happier still. Teuta left her chair and threw herself into the joyous crowd. Today, tonight, the next days, she would celebrate her marriage. Yilli could wait. They had all the time in the world.

  2013

  Archer raised the woman’s head and held a towel to her throat while Josie went for the phone. It took seconds to give her urgent information to the dispatcher who simultaneously notified the cops and the paramedics. Josie wanted only one thing – to keep this woman alive long enough to find out what happened in this house. Archer was careful to note everything he touched, especially how he handled the woman. He spoke words she might hear but probably couldn’t comprehend.

  Wait. Hold on. Breathe.

  He didn’t take his eyes off her when the sirens sounded in the distance.

  Here they come now. Here they are. Hold on. Hold on.

  That was the last thing Josie heard because she was taking the stairs two at a time before running outside to flag down the responders. The first to arrive were Hermosa PD black and whites, then came an ambulance, and finally a sheriff’s investigative unit. Josie advised them about the surviving victim and the dead men and then stood aside. Down the street she heard a door open. There was probably more than one person along the way who wakened to watch the police cars barrel by.