by David Horne
He had no idea how long he was lying on the floor. The searing pain at the back of his skull made him press a hand to his neck. It felt wet. Struggling to get to his feet again, using the wall as a guide, he made his way out the back of the house. He shouldered against the plywood and fell across the threshold.
It took minutes to stagger along the yards to reach the back porch again.
“Trevor,” he rasped. It was hard to stand, harder to see straight. Now with the light on, he saw the crimson in his hand. It was a lot of blood.
The room tilted as Trevor came into view, running toward Joshua as he lost consciousness.
***
He had the sickening sense of déjà vu when he woke in the ER. The murmuring sounds of the hospital around him, the familiar and gentle touch of Trevor’s hand holding his hand. The scorn and hurtful look on Nora’s face when Joshua opened his eyes and squinted at her.
“Do you believe me now?” he whispered. He closed his eyes again to keep the room from spinning away.
It was as if the air left the space, Trevor folded over Joshua, wrapping his arms around his chest. Joshua tried to move, to embrace the man, but it was too much to stir.
“So, here we are again, Dad.” It wasn’t that Nora was upset. She didn’t have that edge to her voice. She looked concerned. Joshua felt the dampness on Trevor’s face from the tears. Nora reached out, took Joshua’s hand and held it. “How’s your head?”
“Well, if there wasn’t something wrong with it before,” Joshua joked. He looked at Trevor. “How long was I out?”
“A while.” He sniffled and pressed the palm of his hands to his eyes. “I was scared. It was a lot of blood.”
Joshua waved it off. “Head injury. Always a lot of blood.”
“You can’t be glib about this.” Nora folded her arms over her chest. “Did you get a look at the assailant?”
“No, not really,” he said. “I think it was a man. I can’t be sure.”
“Well, I’m here to declare the property is off-limits officially. We’ve got police watching the house now. So you’re to stay off the property, or they have my permission to arrest you for trespassing.”
“Are you going to look into Stuart’s death now?”
Nora reached up and squeezed the bridge of her nose. “Look, Dad, you’re not being charged because it wouldn’t look good for a former police officer to be charged with burglary. You shouldn’t have been in that house. Again! Now you’re injured. You could’ve been killed. And you’re not worried about that? You’re following something that has no bearing on what happened to you.”
“There was someone in that house. They were after something.” He couldn’t articulate it any clearer for Nora or Trevor, both standing mute witness to his plight. “I’m not insane. I know Stuart was murdered. Someone is looking for something in his house, and you’re not going to do anything about it.”
“You know there is nothing legally we can do about it. If I applied for a search warrant based on you being ambushed, the DA would argue you walked in on a homeless person, someone looting the place. You got nothing.”
“What about the cigars?” Trevor added, thinking it was Joshua’s white rabbit and he was the hat.
“What cigars?”
“Well, um.” He was an educated and intelligent man. If it had to do with art or art history, he’d speak volumes about the potential. But crimes and the law, he learned secondhand from either Joshua or television. And neither source was forthcoming on the details.
“I went to a convenience store in Warrenton.” Joshua knew it was time to come clean. He’d been working to gather evidence. Nothing outside the scope of understanding the law, but could do as an ordinary civilian. “The clerk found a package of cigars for me. I was looking for a particular brand. It’s relevant because it happens to be the same brand of cigars from a prior case I had years ago.”
“Okay.” Nora nodded. “So you think there’s a connection between the two cases based on the brand of cigars.”
“In the case, Larry and I worked, the victim had this cheap cigar. We had the fire marshal run tests on the cigar and how it burned.”
“When you say ‘we’ you mean ‘you,’ right?” Nora was a cop through and through. “I know the case, Dad. I’ve slowly combed through a lot of cold cases at the PD. But your case, you didn’t sign off on it, Larry thought it was an accident. The ME thought it was an accident. You’re the only one who didn’t want to let it go.”
“We talked to the victim’s wife. She was suspicious.”
“You got as far as an estranged and bitter wife who’d washed her hands of an abusive husband and had representation.”
“He wasn’t abusive.” Joshua frowned. He didn’t recall seeing anything about the victim’s treatment toward his wife. It felt like a slap in the face because it might have been on the reports and he completely forgot it. Losing memory was scary because it meant he had to rely on others, to tell the truth. Now it felt as if he was the only one telling the truth and everyone else didn’t care.
“For your sake, and mine, and Trevor’s,” Nora started and sighed. She didn’t want to get angry with her father. He was injured. He saw the sadness in her eyes. She held back. “Please, let it go. If something is going on, we’ll take care of it.”
“You’re not going to pursue something that doesn’t present as a crime. You said it yourself. You have no evidence.”
“And you thought you’d go next door, again, to see if you could conveniently find that evidence. What were you looking for?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the cigars,” he mumbled. “I don’t know. All I know is what my head is telling me. Stuart was murdered, and you’re not going to do anything about it.” No one spoke for a while. Around them, on the other side of the drawn curtains, the emergency room buzzed with activity. A child cried nearby. He knew when he mentioned his thought process; they were uncomfortable with his brain. The looks between the people who loved him made Joshua feel as if his mind was betraying him.
Chapter Fifteen
Trevor lay on the sofa for the rest of the night after they returned from the hospital. He wanted Joshua comfortable in bed. After a head injury, as the doctor mentioned, they wanted to monitor him overnight. Trevor knew Joshua had no tolerance for staying in the hospital or listening to the doctor.
Once home, Trevor checked on Joshua every fifteen minutes while the man lay sleeping fitfully in the large bed.
“You look like you needed this,” Joshua said, pressing a coffee mug under Trevor’s nose. He’d dozed off and somehow daylight happened, Joshua was dressed, and he had a thin blanket draped over him.
Trevor took the mug after he twisted and sat up on the couch. “Thank you. How do you feel?”
“I have a headache.”
“You have ten stitches in the back of your skull. I’d expect a headache.”
“I see you cleaned up the blood in the kitchen. I’m sorry I bled on the floor.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
He looked from Trevor to the living room window. Out front of the neighbor’s house was a Fredericksburg police cruiser. Inside was a young man looking at the face of his smartphone. It was a lousy gig; he was getting paid to babysit a house. “I’m glad they have someone watching the house now.” Joshua sipped at his coffee. “Maybe it will keep out whoever jumped me.”
“You know the reason they put a cop out there is because of you, don’t you?”
“I was trying not to think of it like that.” He sat in the armchair and looked at Trevor. “I feel like I’m missing something. I feel like I’m the only one who can see it, but I’m still missing something.”
Trevor presented a thin smile. “It is good to hear you talk to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“This thing, this business, not the stuff next door, you’re opening up to me. You haven’t really talked to me like this in a long time.”
“What do you mean?” Joshua fr
owned. “We talk all the time.”
“We talk politics, weather, bullshit,” Trevor pointed out. “You haven’t opened up to me and I like seeing this side of you.”
“I see things differently than you do.” Joshua put the mug down on the coffee table and said, “You know how you can look at a painting. Something from a hundred years ago, and you see things I’d never see. You know all about the paint, the texture. You know why the artist painted it in that way, why the light is the way it is. You know the painter; you can give lectures on the painter.” He took a moment, collecting himself. He wasn’t going to cry in front of Trevor. “I felt like that once when I was a cop. When I worked a case, I was that good. I knew all that. I could tell you all about the victim, about how the suspect did things, why he did those things.” Then he shook his head with the sinuses opening and Joshua felt the sting of tears. “I need to feel something that makes sense to me.”
Trevor was wise enough to not turn the statement around. He knew Joshua wasn’t questioning their closeness. They had a relationship that was stronger than any misinterpretation of words based on how he felt. Trevor put aside his feelings and tried to see through Joshua’s eyes.
“Take me through it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Help me see it the way you’re seeing it. You tried it before. Now I want you to show it to me the way it makes sense to you. Maybe if I see it through your eyes it will make as much sense to me.”
“I think Stuart was murdered by his ex-wife. I think she made it look like an accident. Just like Lydia Green did with her husband, Gordon.”
“You found the cigars at Gordon’s house?”
Joshua nodded. “I wanted to question her about it. I talked to a couple of Gordon’s neighbors. He didn’t smoke cigars. He smoked cigarettes. Larry argued it was semantics.”
“I agree.”
“I think Lydia Green used the cigars to hide Gordon’s death. She killed him for the insurance money.”
“You think Stuart’s ex-wife is still beneficiary to an insurance policy? Do you even know if he had an insurance policy? I mean, we lived next door to him all those years and we really never got to know him.” Trevor thumbed toward the front of the house. “I feel like I know Jim across the street better because he gets into our business.”
“I think Jim’s secretly gay and he’s jealous of our relationship.” It came out of Joshua like a vision.
“I think Jim’s jealous of our relationship because he doesn’t have one of his own. I don’t know if that makes him gay.”
“True.”
“You’re off-topic.”
“So, Lydia got away with murder. I think Jane did the same thing to Stuart.”
“You have to establish motive, right?” Trevor asked.
Joshua nodded.
“You think she left him and after all that time decided to come back, kill him, only to benefit from the insurance policy.”
“Maybe that’s what she’s looking for in the house. Maybe she’s looking for the original policy.”
“Why not take it the night she murdered Stuart? Why not call the insurance company to get copies of the policy?” Trevor wanted to make sure he followed along, but he felt like the Devil’s advocate when he turned the evidence around on Joshua.
“If I was her, I wouldn’t call the insurance company. Especially after leaving Stuart, that’s suspicious. Call to find out if she’s still on the policy and then Stuart ends up dead. We wouldn’t have to do anything; the insurance investigators would look into it for us.”
“You mean, the cops.” That time the redirect was intentional. He needed to keep Joshua grounded. He wasn’t a cop anymore. He might need reminding.
“Yes, sorry.” He looked hurt for thinking otherwise.
“So, what can you do? You make it sound like people are motivated by money.
“It’s always about the money, Trevor. It happens all the time. Money is usually the mitigating factor in most homicides.
“If you were a detective, how would you approach it?”
Chapter Sixteen
A few days later, reclining in the lawn chair, taking in the mild breeze and the sun overhead, the purr of lawn mowers throughout the retirement community covered the sound of someone approaching him. When the light stopped shining on his face, Joshua opened his eyes, looking up through the sunglasses.
“How are you feeling?” Nora sat down in the available chair beside her father.
“I’m doing okay. I’m staying off the neighbor’s property.”
“I know.”
He watched Nora’s profile for a while. She looked to the garden at the end of the back yard where Trevor was kneeling in the lawn picking at weeds that threatened to strangle his flowers.
“What can I do for you?” he asked gently. “You look a little lost.”
“I’m just worried about you. I might not be around all the time, but I do worry about you.”
“I know.”
“Are you still hung up on your neighbor’s death?”
“Of course I am,” he snapped. Then he sighed and shook his head. “I’m upset, yes. I don’t know if he has any next of kin.”
“I checked. His ex-wife isn’t claiming the body.”
“So Stuart’s languishing in the morgue?”
“For now,” Nora said. “After ninety days, they’ll cremate him.”
Joshua nodded. “I’ll let Trevor know. He might want to organize a memorial for Stuart with some of the neighbors.”
“Your neighbors didn’t really know the guy.”
“Stuart was a private person.”
“Your neighbor across the street didn’t even know he was married.”
“I forgot about Stuart’s wife too. Shows you how close we were to him.” He waited a minute, regarding Nora’s mood. “Can I show you something?”
***
They were in the garage. Unlike most of their neighbors, Trevor and Joshua used their garage for its intended purpose to park the vehicles inside. They didn’t use it for extra storage. Trevor’s Mercedes was always in the garage. Joshua usually parked in the parking lot, so there was always extra space.
“What are you doing?”
“I set up this experiment with the cigars.” It was a cot with blankets, pillow, and a half-burned cigar.“ Turns out it’s not so easy to burn up in bed. I guess they make these sheets flame retardant.” Nora looked at scorched edges where the cigar had smoldered. There was a fire extinguisher ready to the side in case the experiment went out of control.
“Does Trevor know about this?”
“It was his idea.”
“So now you’ve got him playing forensics on this stuff. You know what happens when you start looking for something that isn’t there, right Dad?”
“I know. Eventually you’ll find it.”
“You get how that looks, right?”
“I do. But I saw that fire, Nora. Stuart’s upper body was covered in flames. He hadn’t struggled, he was still lying in bed. If the cigar was used as an ignition,” he said and sprayed something across the blanket and cot. He lit the cigar with a match, placed it against the fabric. While he waited, Nora watched him retrieve the fire extinguisher.
It took very little time for the source of the spray to ignite and start to burn once the end of the cigar burned down to it.
“What did you use as an accelerant?” She waited to ask until after Joshua put out the fire.
“It’s just rubbing alcohol. Enough of this stuff and the vapors will ignite.” He looked at the scorch marks. There was the acrid scent of burnt fabric. It dissipated quickly with the garage door open.
“Okay, I’ll give it to you. I saw the photographs. It was localized. Stuart had soot in his nostrils and throat. The airway was burned, according to the ME.”
“He was alive but drugged. The house was closed off. The bedroom door was closed. He asphyxiated. But I think he had help staying unconscious.”
Nora regarded the project. There wasn’t a lot she had to say about it. When she turned around and walked from the garage, Joshua followed her. “I’m not going to investigate this, you know that, right?”
“What if you got me access to the files? Maybe I could take a look.”
“You have no official capacity anymore. You can’t just make up rules because you don’t like the ones you have to follow. You’re asking me to change the game. You’ve got nothing.”
“I’ve got stitches in the back of my head, Nora. That’s something.”
“You scared off some looters. You think this is something that it’s not. You’re fixated on this and your myopic view is going to get you in a lot of trouble or worse. You know as a detective, you have to follow the evidence.” She pointed to the garage. “That’s just obsessive. I’m disappointed in you and Trevor for enabling you. Let it go. I’m sorry you’re friend’s dead. I know you’re hung up on an old case that’s similar to this one and it’s like it happened yesterday. I have unsolved cases too. But I’m not going to fabricate evidence just to prove my point.”
“I’m not fabricating evidence.”
“What the hell is that?” She moved away from him. Joshua saw Jim staring through the bay window of his house, watching Joshua’s exchange with his daughter. She rounded the front of the car and opened the driver’s side door. “Take a vacation. Take Trevor on vacation. Have Trevor take you on vacation. But get this out of your head.” She slammed the door. The car revved to life and Nora had a heavy foot on the accelerator when she left.
Chapter Seventeen
Trevor couldn’t shake the sense of guilt and giddiness when he finished dressing. He had a nice collection of suits, blazers, slacks, and expensive ties. After he chose what he thought was appropriate, Joshua immediately had him change the tie and jacket.
“Think modest budget, nothing too flashy.”
Once Joshua was satisfied with what Trevor replaced the first outfit with, they got into his car and drove I-95 north to Manassas.
