Darker Than Any Shadow

by Tina Whittle

  I saw the open door to the gallery. She’d been unloading things from his van into the still-dark shop. And there was only one reason I could think of to hide a cargo hold full of merchandise.

  “It’s all stolen, isn’t it? Every single thing in there.”

  She got out her cell phone. “I’m calling the cops.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s going to get you in more trouble than me.”

  “You’re the one sneaking around on private property.”

  She stood there, finger on the send button. I held up my hands.

  “Fine. I’m going. But I want you to think about one thing, and think about it hard. Lex is dead, and whatever he was into, chances are good it got him killed. So yeah, you might actually want to call the cops. They might be your last best hope.”

  She glared at me and slammed the door to the gallery. Then I heard the deadbolt click into place.

  ***

  I sat in my car, staring at the phone. Oh boy, had I gotten myself into a mess. And damn skippy, I needed some help getting out of it. But how could I explain this to Trey, the original dyed-in-the-wool straight arrow? Every now and then, the curtain over the front window would part and Debbie would glare at me. She made no move to leave, however.

  Fifteen minutes into my surveillance, I saw a silver sedan pull up to the front door. A man in khakis and a golf shirt got out. He pushed his way into the gallery, and I slumped down in the seat as far as I could. Shit shit shit.

  I took a deep breath and punched in Trey’s number.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  I started explaining before he could even say hello.

  “It’s a long story, but it comes down to this—I found Lex’s missing SUV. It’s behind Frankie’s gallery. I’m watching the area right now from the front parking lot, but Debbie’s called the property manager on me—I think—so I’m about to be in big trouble—pretty sure—but if I leave, then Debbie can shimmy that vehicle god-knows-where, and then it’ll be my word against hers.”

  He digested the story much more quickly than I expected. “Are you sure it’s Lex’s?”

  “She admitted as much.”

  “Then you need to call the authorities.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I maybe got my fingerprints on the damn thing. Or hair. Or doughnut glaze thick with my saliva.”

  A long pause stretched into a taut silence. Trey could work a silence like no one I’d ever known. His silences had heft and edges.

  “Stay there. I’m on my way.”

  A tapping on the window startled me. It was Golf Shirt Guy, looking all aggrieved in a corporate way. Behind him, the curtain in the gallery window fluttered, and Debbie peered out.

  I lowered my window. “Yes?”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to leave, ma’am.”

  “But I’m just sitting here!”

  “At this point, you’re trespassing on private property.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t make me call the police, ma’am.”

  I cranked up the engine. “Fine.”

  I swore under my breath as I pulled out of my space. The air conditioner coughed out stale hot air as I called Trey back.

  “Change of plans,” I said. “I’m meeting you at the shopping center across the street. Just hurry, okay? And no lectures.”

  ***

  And that was how I ended up staking out an art gallery in a Ferrari with my pissed-off boyfriend giving me the cold shoulder.

  “Jeez, why did you agree to come if you’re going to be this way?”

  “Because you compromised a key piece of evidence in a murder investigation.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Immaterial.” He shook his head. “I can’t find a way to get around calling the authorities.”

  “Of course you can’t. Improvisation is not your strong suit.”

  He didn’t argue. Unfortunately, I had nothing to offer either.

  The lights in the gallery remained off, and the Suburban stayed hunkered behind the building—I could see it down the sliver of alley. I’d been concerned. There were about ten different ways in and out of that back lot, and we could only cover so many.

  Unfortunately, Trey wasn’t interested in covering anything. He sat there, seething, as I explained the sequence of events from Cricket showing up at the store to the property manager giving me the heave-ho.

  “I could wipe it down real quick?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  He sat there some more, one hand resting on the steering wheel. I could sense the gears in his brain meshing and turning, but finding no purchase. No protocol for when your idiot girlfriend maybe plasters her fingerprints all over key evidence in a murder investigation.

  “We have to call the authorities,” he said finally, not looking at me.

  I tipped my head back and stared at the roof of the car. “Fine.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I know.”

  “But I have to.”

  “I know.”

  He got out his phone as the curtain in the window fluttered, and the black cat careened into the front window display, upsetting a trio of vases. I watched it claw its way up the curtain, in full feline panic.

  Trey cocked his head. “Why would a cat do that?”

  “I have no clue.”

  “Neither do I. Wait here.”

  He got out of the car and headed for the front door. I ignored his command and followed, which didn’t seem to surprise him one bit. He didn’t spare a glance my way until we’d reached the entrance.

  Trey held up one finger. The thumping noise increased, culminating in a muffled whomp, layered with the hiss and mewl of the cat from the top of the curtain.

  Another crash. Trey pushed the door with one foot. Like a flash, the cat dropped to the carpet, shot between his feet, and bolted for the parking lot.

  “Is anyone in here?” he called.

  A dense silence smothered his words. No response.

  He pulled out his gun. “Call 911. Now.”

  This time I did as I was told. Trey moved one hand inside the door jamb, looking for the light switch. He found it, and the overheard lights flared and hummed as he made his way to the other side of the semi-dark room.

  I eased inside, phone to my ear. The room was deserted, and except for the cat damage to the display, exactly as it had been the day before. I heard the operator pick up on the other end of the line. “911, what is your emergency?”

  “Don’t know yet. Hang on a sec.”

  Without warning, Trey wheeled on me, his gun pointed at my feet.

  I threw my hands in the air. “What the hell—”

  And then I felt it, like someone laying a bag of cornmeal on my foot. I looked down, the operator’s voice yammering indistinctly, and caught my breath.

  Of course. I’d known it would show up eventually.

  An enormous snake as thick as my bicep looped around my ankle in a ripple of muscle and scaly tapestry. Like a richly patterned log come to life, it uncoiled from around one leg of the display table, its triangular head oozing forward along my instep.

  I heard the click of Trey’s gun as he engaged the squeeze cock, and looked up to see that he had both me and the snake locked in the crosshairs.

  “Trey! Stop pointing that thing at me!”

  He didn’t drop his aim, didn’t say a word. But I saw the tiniest tremor in his hand. Adrenalin. Not good.

  I tried to sound calm. “Put the gun away, Trey.”

  He didn’t reply. The snake wound around my leg, its body seeking purchase, its tongue flickering in and out, hypnotic and rhythmical.

  “It’s a python,” I explained. “My ex-boyfriend used to have one. It’s not going to hurt me.”

  Trey didn’t drop his weapon, which unnerved me more than the snake. Snakes I understood, even big ass constrictors. Trey, however, was a wild card. I’d never seen him panicked
before, but this was coming close.

  “Trey Seaver, unless you wanna be my ex-boyfriend, you put that gun away right now!”

  At that moment, a police car pulled up into the parking lot, no lights, no sirens. Two officers I didn’t know got out of the cruiser and stormed the front door, guns drawn. I put the phone to my ear.

  “Did you send a unit?”

  “I need an address, ma’am, I can’t dispatch without one.”

  “So it wasn’t you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Trey didn’t reply or break eye contact with the snake. He didn’t drop his weapon either. The cops saw him and reacted accordingly, both weapons now covering Trey.

  “Sir, drop your weapon and put your hands up. You too, ma’am.”

  “It’s a cell phone,” I said, holding it higher.

  They didn’t care. Trey pointed his gun at the floor and held his left hand up, palm forward, but he didn’t drop anything. “I’m not aiming at her,” he said, and gestured with his chin. The officers followed his eyes and then whipped their guns in my direction too.

  “Jesus Christ!” one said.

  “Python,” I corrected.

  They didn’t get the joke. One of them snatched out his radio and started barking out a request for back-up. The other held the snake at gunpoint and started firing orders at me. “Step away from the snake, ma’am!”

  I was getting tired of this command. “Only if you people put your damn guns away. This animal is not dangerous. See?”

  I slipped off my sandal and ran my foot along the snake’s back. It was a gamble. Pythons could be kinda jumpy, more so than the average snake, especially when people were leaping around in testosterone-fueled panic. But this one was a pussycat.

  “It’s somebody’s pet,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because pythons aren’t native to Atlanta. And this one wasn’t wild caught. See how calm it is?”

  Nobody moved. The three men stared at me, Trey with his head cocked, the cops with increasing puzzlement.

  I was getting annoyed. “I swear, if any of you harm this snake, I will have PETA on you so fast—”

  “We won’t shoot the snake. Just step away, ma’am. And sir, you need to drop your weapon now.”

  Trey looked at the snake, then at me.

  I met his eyes. “Trust me on this one.”

  He considered. Then he laid his gun on the floor and stepped away from it, the second cop scooping it up fast. Both officers lowered their weapons as well.

  I exhaled, hard and sudden, hands still up. And then I knelt, the better to pull my ankle free without disturbing the big reptile. A disturbed python was a dangerous python, and for a snake as big as a tree branch, they were fast. And they did bite.

  But this one remained gentle, even as I dumped it off my foot. It wasn’t huge, not by python standards, but it wasn’t a dwarf variety either. I peered under the display table to take its measure.

  And then I froze. And then suddenly I wasn’t okay.

  I stood abruptly, shaking now. “Oh shit.”

  The cop moved closer. And then he saw too. “We’ve got a body under there,” he said to his partner.

  It was Debbie. And she was dead, very dead, that was easy to see, even if most of her body was obscured by the snake’s coils, loops and loops of reticulated muscle, lying like ropes on top of her.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Cummings sat down. He read the case notes, without speaking. I sat, also without speaking. He pushed the folder away and ran both hands over his face.

  I was betting it was an interesting incident report. Especially since there probably wasn’t an APD protocol for a scene with two suspected burglars, one of them wearing Armani and wielding a nine-millimeter, the other with a python wrapped around her calf like a leg warmer.

  Cummings shook his head. “I don’t even know where to start. Twenty-two years on the force, and I think I’ve seen it all, and then…” He waved a hand at the folder. “I get this.”

  “Believe me, this is not what I saw coming this afternoon either.”

  “And what was that? That you were going to break into a closed place of business to accost an employee as to why she had a dead man’s car in her alley—”

  “I can explain—”

  “A car containing stolen property—”

  “I didn’t know that part!”

  “Only to find said owner murdered and apparently, just for kicks, a big damn snake wrapped around her!”

  “No. I didn’t see any of that coming, the snake especially.” I leaned forward. “Why was there a snake?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.” He leaned forward too. “But let’s stop playing Wild Kingdom for a second and talk about the rest of the stuff in that Suburban. Like two video game consoles, three DVD players, a box of iPods, and more jewelry than you could shake a stick at.”

  I drummed my fingers on the table. “Sounds like a stash.”

  “Indubitably.”

  “Have you found out how he was fencing that stuff? Because I’m guessing Debbie was up to her eyeballs in that end of it. She had this online shop that would have been perfect for—”

  “We know, and it was. We know something else too. Debbie knew who killed Lex.”

  He paused to let that sink in. And sink it did.

  “She’s the one who called the cops?”

  “Absolutely. She was ready to turn state’s evidence. She wanted a guarantee she’d ride on the stolen merchandise and the murder itself.”

  “Wait, Debbie was worried she’d be charged with the homicide?”

  “Apparently. We told her we’d be right out. She said to hurry. She said she was afraid. And then we get there…” He spread his hands. “And there you are, and Seaver, and a big damn snake just to throw a wrench into the whole thing. Hawkins will never be the same. Pathological about snakes apparently.”

  I remembered the look in Trey’s eyes, the tamped down panic, the shaky gun. “Yeah, snakes can bring out stuff you didn’t know you had.”

  Cummings flipped a page. “It gets better. This body is the second body that’s showed up in your vicinity in less than a week. Most people never stumble across a body their whole lives, but you? You get two in one week. Hell, factor in that mess back in the spring—”

  Here we go, I thought.

  “—you’ve seen more action than some guys on the force.” He narrowed his eyes. “In addition to murder, my officers tell me you admitted that vehicle of stolen merchandise has your fingerprints all over it.”

  “It maybe has some, true, but—”

  “As does the inside of the gallery. As does the damn snake probably.” Cummings closed the folder. “Which has me wondering, what other fascinating information about you is going to surface when the ME is done with the body?”

  And that was the shift. I recognized it, easily. My interview was now an interrogation, and I knew what my next response had to be—don’t say anything until you get a lawyer, and keep repeating that over and over until said lawyer walks in the door.

  But that wasn’t what came out of my mouth.

  “It’s not what it looks like.”

  “You say that a lot.”

  I sat back in the chair. “I haven’t heard any Miranda warnings. I’m assuming that means I’m not being arrested?”

  “No, ma’am, you’re not being arrested. You’re here because two people are dead, and those two dead people have one thing in common—you.”

  “They have a lot of other people in common too.”

  “Yes, they do, including our mutual acquaintance Trey Seaver. Who is also not being arrested. Yet.”

  I suppressed a surge of guilt. Trey. He was probably getting his own grill job. Probably in a nicer interrogation room, however, one with squishy sofas and hot tea. The ex-cop unit.

  “Talk to the shopping center manager, Detective. He’ll verify I drove out of his parking lot while Debbie was still breathing
.”

  “The manager left when you did. All he can verify is that several tenants were complaining about you and Debbie having a loud fight in the back lot, which is why he showed up.”

  “But—”

  “And there are a lot of ways back in, Ms. Randolph. Back ways, side ways.”

  “I was across the street in the other shopping center! Ask around. I’m sure somebody saw me sitting there, saw Trey pick me up.” I tapped the police report. “Your officers will find lots of other fingerprints in the galley. So stop looking at me like I’m means, motive, and opportunity all rolled into one. I had no reason to kill Debbie.”

  “Unless you killed Lex and she’d decided to turn you in.”

  “If that were the case, do you think I would have called you before I even got there and said, oh by the way, I think I know where his missing van might be? Get real. If I’d killed Lex, I’d be hunkered down, counting the days until the next sensational Atlanta homicide sends Lex’s file to the cold cases.”

  Cummings ignored my little speech. “I don’t think you killed Lex. Or Debbie. And believe me, that’s the only reason you’re not being charged.” He leaned even closer. “But you know something, I know you do. And I want to know what it is.”

  “Here’s what I know.” I ticked off on my fingers. “Somebody killed Lex, somebody killed Debbie, and the main thing they have in common is a bunch of stolen property. Whoever killed Lex took his phone and—”

  I froze. Cummings narrowed his eyes. “What?”

  “And his necklace.”

  “His what?”

  “His big damn necklace.” I smacked the table. “That’s what was missing. I kept telling you the night he was killed that something was missing, remember? But I was so in shock at seeing what was there—this big bloody stain—that I completely blocked what should have been there.”

  “What kind of necklace?”

  “Gothic-looking, with roses and skulls and an ankh.” I remembered Cricket’s explanation. “I’ve heard it’s sacred in certain circles.”

  He didn’t ask how I knew that, which was a relief. But he did write down everything I said, taking every word as seriously as gospel.

  I sat back in my chair. “He stole something he shouldn’t have, didn’t he? That necklace maybe? And whatever it was, somebody wanted it back bad enough to kill him.”