What is so important about the words drawn across her chest? This one really bothered Leah. She felt certain they were there for one reason and one reason only: to taunt the police. And that meant this was someone who should be on the radar. In a small town, you don’t run into people this devious very often. She should’ve known by now just from the phrase where it came from.
Why was there no sex involved? Why keep the woman alive if you aren’t having sex with her? What makes the killer decide it’s time to actually kill her?
She let her mind wander over the clues Madame Crystalle gave her as though they were a checklist, and came to one that hadn’t really been any help as of yet.
The number seventy-eight is important. . . .
That was a weird one. It seemed like such a random number. What could seventy-eight point to? It wasn’t a caliber size for a bullet; at least, nothing standard. It wasn’t even right to be something like a social security number or a bank account number—it was too short.
Could it be somebody’s age? Maybe a street address? In Alvin there were probably many seventy-eights on different streets. That certainly would narrow things down, but still leave a large handful of suspects.
It could be a speed measurement of a vehicle.
It could be someone’s age.
It was one thing: frustrating as all hell.
Leah continued wracking her brain. Like most of Madame Crystalle’s clues, out of context, this one was pretty much meaningless. There were just too many possibilities.
“You look a little lost in thought,” Uncle Henry said as Leah was pouring her coffee. His voice made her jump.
He laughed. “Sorry, wasn’t tryin’ to scare you.” He was carrying a big brown bag full of stuff he bought while in town.
“How has your day been?” Leah asked him.
“By the looks of things, better than yours,” he said. “What’s up?”
She poured Uncle Henry a coffee of his own and handed it to him before taking hers to the kitchen table and sitting down. “Oh, it’s this case, Hank. It seems like the whole thing is one step forward, two steps back. Every time I think I’m getting on top of it, things suddenly get slippery as a fish and I lose it again.”
“Keep asking questions,” he said.
“That’s all I have is questions.”
“That’s all you need. You’re a goddamn good detective. Asking questions is your job. The universe’s job is providing you with answers to them.”
Leah thought about this and took a deep, heavy breath that turned into a sigh. “You believe that?”
“I do.”
“Okay, thanks for the pep talk. Believe it or not, I think you gave me my second wind. I needed that.”
“Much obliged, my friend. Much obliged.”
CHAPTER 9
Lately, me and Dewey had discovered the world of Dungeons & Dragons, quite possibly the best invention known to man. It actually came out in 1977, but we only found out about it when the local comic shop started carrying it. Now they hold tournaments there and everything.
The game is different from a normal game in that there isn’t any board. You play the game in your head using your imagination. One person is designated as the dungeon master and he runs the game while the other players explore dungeons and fight monsters and collect treasure. I was always the dungeon master when we played. That meant I ran the game while Dewey played it.
The players take on different personas and have different strengths and weaknesses in different categories, like Strength, Wisdom, Dexterity, things like that. It’s not as complicated as it sounds. You keep track of everything on a Character Record Sheet. Dewey always played the same character: an elven fighter named Malchunar. I had no idea where the name came from.
“I reckon this would be a lot better if we had figurines,” Dewey said.
Some people play with small metallic figurines that you can paint. The comic shop also had painting contests. Some of their figurines were incredibly detailed with their painting.
“Dewey, I had to save up two months’ worth of my allowance to buy this set. Be happy with it. The next thing I’m gettin’ is the Dungeon Masters Guide and the Player’s Handbook.”
“What ’bout the Monster Manual.”
“Oh, I forgot ’bout that. I’ll need that, too.”
“This game’s gonna cost you a small fortune,” Dewey observed.
“This is why I think you should buy some of the stuff.”
“With what? I don’t even get an allowance. Besides, ain’t all those books for advanced D and D?”
“Yeah, but I reckon we’re ready to move up.”
“I further reckon this game would be tons more fun with more players. Even just one or two.”
“I agree. I wonder what Bo Burkett’s doin’?”
Dewey laughed.
“What?”
“Bo Burkett?”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Bo Burkett couldn’t find no cheese in the middle of a dairy farm. He’d never understand this game.”
“The game isn’t that hard.”
“Would be for Bo Burkett.”
“I don’t think Bo Burkett is dumb. His marks seem okay in school. He’s in some of my classes,” I said.
“Maybe you couldn’t find no cheese in the middle of a dairy farm neither, then.”
“Where did you get that expression? I’m not even a hundred percent sure they’d have cheese at a dairy farm.”
“Well, you and Bo Burkett should play together, then. I’ll play somethin’ else.”
“You’re weird. Anyway, where were we? I think next time we play I’m going to have some NPCs go out with you.” An NPC is a nonplaying character controlled by the dungeon master.
Carry walked into the room. “What are you two turds doin’ now?” She picked up one of the dragon dice off the table. It was the ten-sided one. “Hey, what’s this? It looks kinda neat.” D&D comes with a bunch of different dice, all strange and exciting. There’s a four-sided (which looks like a pyramid), a six-sided (which was a normal die), an eight-sided, a ten-sided, and a twenty-sided.
We were currently in the middle of a game. Dewey was in the dark recesses of a dungeon where torches lined the walls, stuck in a very short and narrow passage. He had just come up to a door on the western side of the hallway. The torches threw weird shadows in their flickering light.
“Hmm,” he said. “I’m betting the door’s a trap.”
I asked Carry for the ten-sided die she’d grabbed. “Can you please just let us play?” I begged.
“What? I finally show an interest in somethin’ you’re doin’ and you want me to just leave you alone?”
“You’d never understand this game,” Dewey said.
“Like, whatever,” Carry said back. “If y’all can play, I am sure a cat could play it.” She gave me back the die and continued on into the living room and turned on the television.
I rolled the ten-sided die.
“Why’d you just roll that die?” Dewey asked.
“It’s a secret.” I actually rolled it to see if any wandering monsters would be coming down the hallway toward him if he didn’t open the damn door. Wandering monsters are monsters that aren’t already set in the game. They just appear at random, by specific dice rolls.
“Hmm,” he said again. “I still can’t decide on this door. The last time I opened a door and you rolled a die right before, there were four basilisks behind it waiting to eat me. This time my strength is ’bout half as much as it was then. Four basilisks would kill me.”
I rolled an eight-sided die. Bingo.
“Quit rollin’ that damn die!” Dewey snapped.
“You hear a rumble from down the hall.”
“Which way?”
“You can’t tell yet. Too many echoes off the stone walls and floor.”
Dewey sighed. “Okay, I open the damn door.”
“Just as you do, a gelatinous cube comes into view. It’s coming down
the hallway from the direction you was headed.”
“Okay, I get into the room and close the door.” Gelatinous cubes are like the garbage collectors of dungeons. They are like Jell-O and they take up the entire hall as they squish their way through caverns, picking up whatever they can. They aren’t very pleasant.
“All right, you successfully outwitted the cube, which since they have no brains isn’t such a feat. You are in a very old bedroom. There is dust covering everything and it smells very old. The room is about twelve feet across and maybe ten deep. It is dark because the only light is through some slits in the ceiling letting the sun leak down inside. There is a bed, a chest of drawers, and a very old and ornate chest at the end of the bed. The chest has a padlock on it as big as your fist.”
“Oooh,” Dewey said. “We like chests. I strike it with my sword.”
I rolled a ten-sided die. “The padlock doesn’t open, but you make a tremendous clang.”
Dewey looked at me. “How sturdy is that door coming into this room? Is it locked?”
“You left it unlocked,” I said, and rolled an eight-sided die.
CHAPTER 10
The forensics reports from Mobile and the ballistics report from Satsuma came into the Alvin Police Station at near on exactly the same time. Leah sat at her desk and decided to pull the information from Mobile out first. It was in a large manila envelope and contained only a thin, two-page document that she laid in front of her on the table.
Outside, an Eastern meadowlark flew by just as a few drops of rain began hitting the street.
The first thing Leah read about was the nail shavings. No blood was found beneath them, and there was no external DNA. Mercy Jo Carpenter gave every indication that she went willingly or was highly inebriated. Leah guessed it was the second. Of course, there was always the possibility that this was done by someone Mercy Jo knew.
What was found under the nails was a high concentration of cedar shavings and some small particles of dirt and soil. Going by the nutrient and contaminated content, composition, trace elements, and acidity of the soil, it matched the same sort of soil you’d find in the northern parts of Alvin. It definitely didn’t come from Willet Lake.
With a heavy sigh, Leah turned to the next page of the document.
The shoe casts she had made came back with three different types of running shoes and one type of loafer. She hadn’t bothered to send the cast she made of Luanne Cooper’s shoe prints.
The sneakers were a man’s size-eight Reeboks, a woman’s size-seven Nikes, a man’s size-seven Nikes, and the loafers a man’s size-ten Hush Puppies. Leah gave another big sigh. These weren’t going to be much use in catching the killer. That pretty much covered everyone in Alvin, and there was nothing stopping a killer from wearing a shoe too big for him.
The last thing she looked at was the information garnered from the casts made by the tire tracks they found in the mud up by the side of the road. They were almost all from trucks. Chevys and Fords mainly. Anywhere from a 1981 to a 1986. There was one set that could be from a Toyota, but the lab was unsure because they were an off-brand that would fit any vehicle.
Near on everyone in Alvin drove trucks. These could belong to anyone. Nothing in this report was really going to help narrow things down to find the killer.
Leah ground her teeth. It was a habit she had and something she did when she was frustrated. Setting the information from Mobile aside, she opened up the ballistics report from Satsuma.
The slug was a .22 short caliber, and ballistics’ best guess was that it was shot from a rather ancient handgun. One of the original Beretta Model 950 Jetfires, a model that has been manufactured by the gun company since the early 1950s.
The report explained that the Beretta Jetfire is a simple blowback pistol with a single-action trigger mechanism and tip-up barrel. The frame is made out of aluminum alloy; the slide and barrel are carbon steel. Early models did not have a safety lever, employing a half-cock notch on the hammer instead.
The .22 caliber magazine has an eight-round capacity; nine if the first round is chambered. Because the pistol lacks a shell extractor, it relies instead on blowback pressure to clear shell casings. Misfires are easily removed manually by tipping up the barrel and prying them out.
The weapon was intended to be simple and reliable and fit in a pocket. It’s a semiautomatic pistol, building on a long line of small compact pistols manufactured by Beretta for self-defense.
“Not for shooting directly into the temple of women bound up with their eyes stitched up,” Leah mused aloud.
The report went on to say that the .22 short calibers it takes are not very powerful, but when well-placed can be lethal. The accuracy of the pistol is adequate enough, but only for short ranges.
Leah couldn’t figure out why the killer would use such a gun when there were so many other more obvious choices around. Did he have sentimental ties to it? Had he used it before? Was this not his first murder?
If this wasn’t his first murder, she might be able to track down others. But not using the same MO. At least not in Alvin. She’d remember another victim with those eyes. As it was, she’d be finding herself remembering these ones for the rest of her life.
“Judging from the slug we found in the victim’s skull, our shooter is using original bullets, or at least very old ones. I’d date the one I found back to the early fifties, possibly as late as the midsixties,” Norman, the medical examiner, said to Leah.
Leah couldn’t help her mind from going back to what the psychic said.
A maniac tailor . . . Someone dangerous . . . Welcome to Gray . . . something. Again, it certainly wasn’t Welcome to Alvin.
Like everything else, forensics was unable to detect any latent fingerprints on the slug or anywhere on the body. The crime lab in Mobile came up with the same big ball of nothing. This killer was pretty organized. So organized, it was starting to piss Leah off.
And outside, the rain continued to fall.
CHAPTER 11
Leah decided to check the one place she figured she might find people who knew Mercy Jo: the Six-Gun Saloon on the western outskirts of Alvin. It was just over the city limits and sort of corralled the city’s slum area, with Oakdale Road taking up the other side on an angle.
The rain had picked up as Leah walked into the establishment that, as the name gave away, was a country bar. At least that was the idea. The floor was covered in peanuts and peanut shells. The bar was circular and in the center of the room. A dance floor wrapped around one side with booths along the edge of the place. Tables filled the other side. By the looks of things, the bar did a pretty good business. Chairs at the bar itself were mostly filled with women, most alone, some with guys who looked like they were on the prowl.
Leah pushed her way through to the barmaid, who wore a tag that said MARGARET. “Hi, Margaret,” Leah said, raising her voice above “Crazy” by Patsy Cline. “My name is Leah Teal. I’m the police detective here in Alvin.”
Margaret stopped wiping a glass and gave Leah the once-over. Margaret was a large black woman who wore a dress that had the look of her being poured into a glass and she’d forgotten to say when. She had very large breasts, black hair to her shoulders, and enough makeup for three people. Her fingernails were very long and very pink. So were her lips. Pink, that is. Not so much long.
“What can you possibly want with me?” she asked.
“Found a body washed up on Willett Lake. Have a hunch she might have been a regular here. Wonderin’ if you could tell me anythin’ ’bout her.”
“And what makes you think she’d be a regular here?”
Some guy down the bar was getting restless to buy his new “girlfriend” a drink and started whistling for Margaret’s attention. Margaret turned, and said, “If I was you, I would make that my last whistle or the next time you do it, you’ll be doin’ it outta your ass.”
The guy quit whistling.
Margaret set down the glass she’d wiped clean, picked
up another, and began wiping some more.
“Well,” Leah said, “from what we can tell, she was a loner and a heavy drinker, and there aren’t too many places in Alvin that—”
“You’re sayin’ she was probably a prostitute and not too many places in Alvin cater to hookers. That’s okay, Miss Leah, just lay out your cards. We’re all grown-ups here.”
“Detective Teal, if you don’t mind. And I wasn’t meanin’ no disrespect, Margaret.”
“I know you wasn’t. I’m just a busy lady without time to dick around and make things all clean and sterile. Who we talkin’ ’bout?”
“Mercy Jo Carpenter.”
Margaret stopped wiping the glass and thought this over. “Mercy Jo,” she said to herself a few times. “Sounds vaguely familiar. If she was a workin’ girl or a stripper, she probably went by a stage name. You don’t happen to have that, do you? Or a photo?”
Leah sighed. She had a photo, but it was four years old. Other than that, she had a newer one, but it wasn’t one she wanted to show unless she had to. “Can you ask anyone else if they might know of her?”
“Only other person other than me that’s in here nearly every moment we’re open is Gus Coleman, old man behind me.”
Leah looked. The man must’ve been eighty. He wore a fedora on his head and a cardigan sweater. “Oh, Gus,” Margaret called out without turning.
“Yes, my love?” he called back.
“Remember anybody comin’ in or workin’ here goin’ by the name of Mercy Jo . . . what was her name, hon?”
“Carpenter,” Leah said.
“Carpenter?” she called out more loudly to Gus.
“Sort of rings a bell, but I can’t really place it. Why? Who’s askin’?”
“I’m friggin’ askin’. Go back to your beer.”
After a long pause, Leah decided to go with the newer picture. It was so much different from the older one. “I do have a photograph, but I have to warn you, it could be a mite shocking to you. Remember, we found her dead.”
“I’ve seen dead bodies, love. When you live a life like me, you’ve pretty much seen it all. Don’t worry, I’m a big girl.”
A Thorn Among the Lilies Page 6
