Shattered Shell

by Brendan DuBois

  "Sounds like it," I said, enjoying a sip of the tea. "And then you came home."

  He nodded. "Right. Saved most of my money and invested some and bought this house and another one in Salisbury that I rent out, and I do all right." He held the cup in both of his large hands. "Not like some of the guys I was with, they whored and drank all of their paychecks. I was raised right, and so here I am, homeowner and landlord."

  "Tenant problems?"

  "Hah," he said, slurping loudly. "I tell ‘em they have one shot with me, and that's it, out they go. Word gets around. I don't have many problems."

  "How is Kara Miles as a tenant?"

  "Just fine, just fine," he said, moving the cup down to his large lap. "Never any problems, rent on time, always something nice to say to me whenever I saw her."

  I picked up one of the butter cookies and decided my cholesterol level could take a hit this morning. "Many visitors?"

  He cocked his head. "You said you're a friend of hers, right?"

  "That's right," I said, munching on the cookie. "And I'm also friends with Diane Woods."

  A quick nod. "Just checking. It's none of my business who Kara is and what kind of friends she brings in. She and her lady friend are damn nice people."

  "Other friends you can remember? Other people who come by for a visit who might not have been so nice?"

  "Nope, not really," he said. "Her parents might have been by once or twice, and her brother, but that's about it."

  "They from around here?"

  "Her parents live in town. I don't know about her brother."

  "And nothing's been out of the ordinary the past few weeks?"

  "Like what?"

  I finished off the last Pepperidge Farm product. "Like phone calls where the other party hangs up. Attempted break-ins. Odd guys, hanging around. Kara saying her mail is missing, or someone's been bugging her at work."

  He seemed to think for a moment, staring at the far wall, and slurped again at his cup of tea. "Nope, nothing. Nothing at all."

  "All right, then. What happened last week?"

  He nodded, gave me an exaggerated wink. "My, you're a slick one. You start way back there and work your way up and get your questions answered, nice and smooth, and then you go right to the core. Not bad."

  "I was once trained well. Were you here that night?"

  He looked down. "You know, I wish I had been more awake. I could have felt something was wrong, something wasn't right, and I might have stopped it."

  "Were you sleeping?"

  "Oh, I was in bed and I had dozed off, watching my TV in there. Then I had woken up and heard some sounds, and I was in that half-awake state, you know, when you're not sure what you're listening to? And then the voices got loud and there was some, well," and I think he blushed, "the sound of the bed, you know how it is... "

  I gave him a smile. "Something you've probably heard before, right?"

  He nodded a bit too eagerly, like he was pleased to be talking to another man of the world or something. "That's right," he said. “I mean, Kara's a healthy young woman, there's nothing wrong with what goes on up there.... "

  "I see," I said, suddenly curious about something. I made a motion of rubbing my fingers together. "Mind if I take a moment to wash my hands? Those cookies tasted great but my fingers got sticky all of a sudden."

  "Sure," he said, gesturing over to one side of the house. "Go over to the kitchen, take a right, and it's the door on the left, right by my bedroom."

  "Thanks." I got up and went through the kitchen. It was neat and orderly and quite smalL The hallway was narrow and the door to the bathroom was on the left, as promised, and I went in and turned on the spigots and then went back out into the hallway and ducked into the bedroom. I had a minute, maybe more, and I half-remembered the old exercises I had to do when I had joined up with the DoD, when you had ten seconds to stare at a photograph and ten minutes to tell an examiner what you saw.

  Right now I saw a bedroom with a large single bed. Magazlnes on the floor, bookshelf on one side, windows that overlooked the yard. Near as I could figure it, this room was right below Kara's bedroom. There was a bureau near the foot of the bed, with a small TV on top. The bureau was filled with knickknacks and coins. I looked up at the ceiling. It was white plaster, cracked in some places. A faint black smudge about the size of my hand was near the center of the ceiling. Two doors that looked like closets. A chair near a nightstand, with a large mirror. I went over to the chair. Two shiny spots in the center of the chair, where the red fabric in the seat had been worn away.

  Then, like a little click inside my head. Time was up.

  I went back to the bathroom and splashed water on my hands, and then, as an afterthought, I sprinkled a few drops on my pants leg. I wiped my hands down with a towel and walked quickly back

  out to the living room, where Jason nodded as I came in and said, "Ready to hear the rest of the story?"

  I settled back down in the couch, hoping he couldn't tell that my heart was thumping along with the exciting, scary feeling of almost getting caught. I picked up my cup and took another sip of the tea.

  "Sure," I said. "What happened after you heard the sounds in the bedroom?"

  Another gaze back in the cup, like he was looking for tea leaves to tell his fortune. "Like I said, I heard sounds from upstairs. And then I woke up a bit more, startled I guess, 'cause something didn't sound right. There was sobbing."

  He looked at me, his expression bleak. "Sobbing. And then it stopped. And then I heard the footsteps on the stairs coming down, and the laughter and voices."

  "Then what?"

  "Then the door slammed, and a car from the side parking lot started up," he said. "Sounded like one of those muscle cars the young guys like to drive, the rough-sounding ones that sound like they have a bad muffler. Then a while later, I don't know how long, I guess I heard her take a shower. Then the door up at Kara's place opened up and she ran downstairs and, well, that's when I guess she went to the hospital."

  "The car that you ---" and then I stopped, the teacup halfway up to my mouth. "Hold on. You said voices on the stairs. What did you mean by that?"

  "What?"

  "What kind of voices were on the stairs?"

  "Just like I told the cops," Jason said, and what he said next damn near made me drop my teacup.

  "There were two men coming out of her place."

  Back at home I had a fire going and I just stared at the flames and tried to bounce around what I had learned. It was a little past three o'clock in the afternoon and already the shadows were lengthening through the windows of my home. It was days like this when I wished winter was only a month long.

  Years ago I had done well in my own little world in the Marginal Issues section of the Department of Defense, but in many ways it was like any other workplace. You had your routine, your boring meetings, and your own set of code words. A "fire drill" was when we were busy responding to a threat that never materialized. A “rocket report" was a document that we prepared that was sent right to the top, either with the SecDef or to the White House. And being "knee-deep in rodents" was our own fond expression, a way of saying we were being overwhelmed with squirrels --- meaning a case that was too squirrelly for its own good.

  With what I was now doing, the damn furry creatures were up to my waist.

  First there was the discrepancy between what Kara had told the police and what she had told me about the rapist being clean-shaven. Then there was her apartment --- signs of a struggle in the bedroom, but no sign of a break-in. No broken lock, no splintered doorjamb. And then there was the little tactical nuke that Jason Henry had tossed my way. Voices. More than one man was in the apartment that night, maybe helping or looking, but definitely there. That was something that even Inspector Dunbar had failed to mention in his preliminary report.

  I tossed another chunk of wood onto the fire. What had happened to Kara that night, and what was happening with her now?

  Then ther
e's the landlord. Something about him didn't seem right, not right at all, and I thought about that as I picked up the phone and dialed Felix's number.

  He was home, which was a surprise, and I got to the point.

  “Want to get together tomorrow, get a sense of where we're going with things?"

  "Sure," he said. "How about breakfast at the Ashburn House?"

  I said that sounded fine and hung up, then stared again at the flames, watching their little dance as the shadows grew longer in my house.

  Chapter Eleven

  When the breakfast dishes had been cleared away and we were left with our second cups of coffee, Felix looked at me and said, "So where do we stand?"

  "Right now, it feels like we're standing on quicksand," I said. "Nothing is making sense, and nothing is fitting together."

  The Ashburn House on this Sunday was doing reasonably well, and the post church crowd had arrived, men and women and kids dressed in their goin'-to-meetin' clothes. Felix and I were sitting against a table at the south wall, the windows freshly washed, the beach a fresh white, and the ocean bright blue.

  "Knew the minute we saw the bedroom was lit up like noon that things weren't right," Felix said. "And let's face it. We both looked at the door. Either she knew her attacker and let him in or the son of a bitch had a key to the place."

  I nodded. "Yeah, I knew that, too. Just didn't want to admit it. Plus, I went to see the landlord yesterday, and he told me what he heard the night of the rape."

  "Which was what?"

  "Which was two guys, coming down the stairs, laughing and talking. Then they get into a car parked behind the house and drive away. You think a random rapist is going to park in a small lot like that, where he sticks out like a bass drum in a bathtub?"

  Felix folded his hands before him. "What the hell are we involved with?"

  "I don't rightly know," I said.

  His voice was flat. "You think she faked the whole thing?"

  A memory, of a broken shell, and then of a bruised face and shaking body in a hospital examining room. "No, not at all," I said. "I saw her that night, and she was hurt bad. Somebody --- whether one guy or two or even six --- hurt her that night."

  Our waiter dropped off the bill and Felix opened up his wallet. "Maybe our Kara has a secret life, something she doesn't want our police detective to find out."

  "Maybe so," I said.

  "So what do you intend to do about it?"

  "I'm going to see Diane today, tell her what we've learned, and then go on from there."

  Felix smiled, shaking his head. "You make it sound like you're getting your teeth cleaned. Listen, my friend, you're about to tell a woman that someone dear to her may be lying about a rape or something equally awful. If you think she's going to shake your hand and say thanks for passing that along, then you've gone into orbit."

  "I know."

  "From what I know of the lovely Detective Woods, she is going to explode, and it's not going to be nice."

  I gathered up my coat. "I also know that, and I don't need you to remind me. Diane and I will be just fine. We've known each other for years."

  Felix still looked bemused. "You want to get together again later this week, see what we do next?"

  "Sure, but are you going to be around this afternoon?"

  "Yeah, I will. Why? You want to talk again later?"

  I got up and put on my coat. "No," I said, trying to put some humor into my voice. "If Diane gets really mad, she might put me in a cell this afternoon, and I might need to be bailed out. Can you do it?"

  “Absolutely," Felix said, and there was no smile when he said it.

  So much for humor.

  I had called Diane earlier and we were to meet in the police station parking lot in about a half-hour, since she was going to drop off some paperwork she had been doing at home. Instead of driving home and then turning around and driving right back, I stayed at the beach and walked to the Tyler Point Market, where I bought a bouquet of flowers.

  Most of the sidewalks weren't plowed --- with so few people living at the beach, what was the point? --- but traffic was so light that walking along the side of the road posed no problem. A few cars grumbled by, their sides whitened by the road salt that New Hampshire uses so lavishly on its winter roads, and seagulls flew overhead in the empty sky, no doubt wishing for the summer and the tons of food scraps to return. I walked past the empty and shuttered shops, yet there was some sign of life. On D Street, there were some yelps, and two children bundled in snow gear played among the snowbanks with a shovel and a broken chair. Their faces were alive with the reddish glow of those who are young and at play, and utterly innocent of where they are.

  There was an odd quality about the air and light as I went past the empty and closed stores. I felt like I was trespassing in an amusement park condemned and prepared for destruction. With the piles of snow and ice and the empty shops, it seemed hard to believe that anything or anybody would come back to this place. But it happened, every spring, like the return of the migratory birds --- these stores and hotels and shops would open up again, and the tourists would return. You could guarantee it.

  I stopped for a moment, catching my breath, looking over at the blackened hulk that used to be the Rocks Road Motel. But some businesses weren't coming back. I kept on walking, stopping only when I reached the crest of the Felch Memorial Bridge, which crosses over into Falconer, spanning the channel that connects Tyler Harbor with the ocean. I undid the plastic wrapping of the flowers and tossed them into the cold salt water. I didn't bother with a prayer. Those words would do nothing to bring them back or to punish the guilty. Instead I gave myself over to memories for a moment, recalling the members of my dead group back at the Pentagon, especially a very special woman with a bright smile, reddish hair, and a laughing look that seemed able to seize me for whatever ransom she desired.

  The wind picked up, scattering the flowers on the water. Old scars under my clothes began to ache, and I turned around and started walking back to Tyler Beach.

  We were parked between two pickup trucks, which were the unofficial off-duty vehicles of choice for most Tyler cops. There was a clear view across the unplowed lot to the chilly marshlands and the squat buildings of the Falconer nuclear power plant. Diane had a cup of coffee in her hands and said, "Heard on the news yesterday that the nuke has shut down for refueling. Going to be off-line for a couple of months."

  "Feel any safer?"

  She shook her head. "Not really. Every time they're down for refueling, that place brings in a couple of hundred contractors. That means two or three hundred lonely guys here in the middle of winter with paychecks in their pockets. Sometimes that means more work for me and the other cops, just when I need it easy."

  My coat felt tight around my chest. "Anything happen yet with those workers?"

  She looked right through me. "Stop dicking around, will you? What's going on?"

  Here we go. I took a deep breath. "Diane, things aren't making sense."

  "What do you mean?" Calm voice

  “I mean we’re finding discrepancies in what Kara has told me and the cops. And they’re not minor problems, not at all."

  She looked through the windshield. "What kind of problems?"

  I pressed on. "Kara said the man broke into her place that night. Diane, either the door was unlocked or she let him in or he had a key, for there was no sign of a break-in. Lock looked fine and the door hadn't been jimmied. She also said she couldn't get a good look at his face. You know that streetlight across the way lights up the entire bedroom and hallway. If someone had come into her room, she would have seen his face."

  Her gaze hadn't shifted. "What else?"

  "Other things that don't make sense. She's been with you for a while, and she must know how important evidence is --- yet she destroyed every piece of evidence she could before she went to the hospital. Her apartment has computer gear and jewelry and other stuff that's easy to pick up and fence, but nothing had been
touched. Nothing."

  A sip from her coffee cup. "You've been busy. Is that all?"

  This wasn't going where I expected. "Just one more piece, and it's the hardest one to figure. She said there was just one guy there that night. The landlord said he heard two guys come down the stairs. Not one. Two. And then they got in a car parked behind the house and drove away. That didn't make sense, either, that a rapist would park in such a small lot where he would stand out and be remembered."

  "Is that all?" she asked, voice still calm.

  "That's it for now."

  She turned to me and said, "No, that's going to be it. Period." Her chin scar was white and prominent, a blatant danger signal coming from Diane, but the calmness of her voice didn't match the whiteness of the old scar tissue.

  "Listen, will you?" she said, looking out at the quiet marsh. "Don't think that I'm finally going off the deep end, but I need to say this. Look, I grew up in Porter, all right? Oldest of three girls. Mom worked as a beautician and Dad was at the shipyard. He drank, which was no big deal, but he could be a mean drunk, especially when times were tough, when there were layoffs. So he'd drink and, like most cowards, he was afraid, and he took his fear out on Mom. You know, until I was in high school, I didn't realize normal families didn't have mothers who wore sunglasses in the kitchen in the middle of the day, or who wore long-sleeve shirts during the hottest days of the summer."

  A glance my way. "I'm sure that a psychologist or a psychiatrist would have a lot of fun with me, trying to determine why I love who I love is because of my father. Big deal. I just knew on day enough was enough, that no one would be around to protect my mom or my sisters, or even myself. The parish priest didn't care, our neighbors didn't care, and my guidance counselor didn't care."