South Of Hell lk-9

by P J Parrish

  He watched the Gremlin leave, climbed back into his wagon, and made the quarter-mile drive to the farm. Brandt had left the gate ajar, and Shockey drove around back to park, remembering that Kincaid had told him the only way into the house was through the cellar doors.

  In less than a minute, he was in the kitchen.

  Something bad happened here…

  That’s what the girl had said. And Shockey was sure he knew what it was. If Jean had been killed in this house, it was here in this god-awful kitchen.

  But where to start?

  He stood in the center of the kitchen and took a long look around. No appliances, scuffed blue linoleum, dark scarred wood paneling halfway up the walls, then faded yellow paper spotted with black mold. One wall of built-in cupboards in the same dark wood, the doors flung open to empty shelves.

  The cupboard.

  Kincaid had said the girl had been hiding in there when he found her. Maybe that’s where she had been that night, too. Shockey knelt by the cupboard and opened it wider. He grabbed his flashlight from his rear pocket and shined it over the inside.

  Nothing but cobwebs and scratches. Maybe made by the sliding of pots and pans or maybe by the kid. No blood he could see, but then again, if the door had been closed during the murder, there would be no blood inside.

  He had seen plenty of domestic homicides, and it was his experience that when the abuser was someone like Brandt, the scene was almost always bloody and violent, the result of a beating or a stabbing. It would not have been what the cops called a clean murder, a smothering or a strangling done quietly in a bedroom.

  Shockey closed the door and carefully examined the outside. When he could see nothing, he drew his pocketknife from his pants and opened it. Slowly, he scraped at the stains and grime stuck in the grooves of the old wood cupboard.

  Small dark bits fell to the linoleum. He wet his finger and pressed it to a flake, bringing it to his nose. It had no odor. But he pulled a small envelope from his shirt and put some of the scrapings inside. He labeled it cupboard door and sealed it.

  Still on his knees, he crawled across the blue linoleum. There were many holes and tears, and he shined his flashlight at each one, hoping to see something that resembled blood, but all he saw was black grime. He scraped some up, filling three more envelopes.

  It occurred to him that he no longer had access to a lab or the authority to request an analysis of anything. But hell, if he had to, he’d find an independent lab and pay for it himself. Or get the peeper’s girlfriend to do it for him.

  He sat back on his heels and looked around.

  This place was so filthy that any of the stains and dirt could contain blood and he’d never see it. He should have pilfered some Luminol and a lamp from station supply. But using Luminol to bring out bloodstains required total darkness, and there was probably no way he could get in here at night. It looked as if Brandt had set up permanent housekeeping.

  Shockey eyed the blue linoleum.

  There were enough gaps and holes in it that if Jean had bled much at all, there was a good chance some of it had soaked into the floorboards below.

  He shut his eyes for a moment. It was a horrible image and he wondered how he could even conjure it up to sit in his head beside his memories of her face.

  That lovely, innocent face that never asked him any questions and never demanded anything from him. Never made him feel like the heel he was for leaving her in that shitty motel on Washtenaw and going home to the three-bedroom ranch in time to kiss his wife good night.

  Stop it, you asshole. Stop it. This is how you fix it. This is what you do now.

  He wiped the blade of the pocketknife on his pants and started digging at one of the small holes. He worked the linoleum up until there was enough to grab. Then he started ripping it away from planks below.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Shockey looked up. Owen Brandt stood in the kitchen doorway. Black T-shirt, dirty jeans, three days’ growth of whiskers. He held a large knife in his hand.

  Shockey reached for his gun and leveled it as he rose to his feet. “Put the knife down, Brandt.”

  “It’s just a kitchen knife. It’s legal for me to have a fucking kitchen knife.”

  “I said put it down.”

  Brandt reluctantly dropped it to the floor. He even did Shockey the favor of kicking it away before Shockey told him to.

  “You got a warrant to be doing that?” Brandt asked, tipping his head toward the torn linoleum.

  “You worried?”

  Brandt smiled. “Not one damn bit. But I still know you need a damn warrant to be tearing up my kitchen.”

  “Get up against the counter,” Shockey said.

  Brandt turned slowly and put his hands on the counter. Shockey patted him down. The fact that Brandt had walked in with a knife meant he might have another weapon, and Shockey was praying to find one on him. For a second, he even thought of planting one, but he knew he’d never get away with it, and he did not want this bastard suing the city and getting any money. Another idea crossed his mind, too. Plant drugs or a weapon in the Gremlin, and then make an anonymous phone call. But that idea was interrupted by Margi’s nasal voice.

  “What’s going on?” she asked.

  Shockey looked up, keeping one hand on the back of Brandt’s neck. Margi was backlit by the open door, but he could still see the splash of bruises on her thin face. A cut over her left eyebrow was so swollen it left her eye shut.

  Shockey banged Brandt’s head against the wall. “You do that?”

  Brandt twisted to look at Margi. She quickly faded into the shadows. Shockey slammed Brandt’s head a second time against the wall, then jerked him back by his T-shirt.

  “Answer me. You do that?”

  “What are you going to do about it?” Brandt asked.

  Shockey spun Brandt around and slugged him. Brandt’s body smashed into the wall behind him. He never got his hands up before Shockey hit him again.

  “Did you do that?” Shockey yelled.

  “Why do you care?” Brandt said, wiping his lip. “You wanna fuck her, too? You like my leftovers, cop? Then take her, take her like you did Jean.”

  Brandt’s ugly face blurred in a flash of white rage. Shockey started swinging. His fist busted into Brandt’s jaw, nose, eye — anywhere he could hit him.

  “She wasn’t nobody’s leftovers!” Shockey shouted. “You hear me, you stupid sonofabitch? You hear me?”

  Brandt crawled along the counter, ducking the blows. “Stop it!” Brandt yelled. “I can’t hit you back. You’re a fucking cop. Leave me alone!”

  Shockey grabbed Brandt’s T-shirt and flung him to the floor. He kicked him in the gut before he could get up. Brandt groaned and tried to slither away, but there was nowhere for him to go. “She wasn’t nobody’s leftovers!” Shockey said. “She was a good woman, and you killed her!”

  “She was a fucking whore!” Brandt shouted.

  Shockey kicked him again. Brandt threw out his hand, trying to protect himself, but Shockey smashed his knuckles with the toe of his shoe.

  “Shut up!”

  “She was a fucking whore when I married her,” Brandt said, crouched now against the cupboard. “Seventeen years old and already fucking pregnant with some other bastard’s kid. You didn’t have nothing special with her nobody else didn’t have.”

  Shockey stared at him. “What did you say?”

  “What?”

  “What did you say about her being pregnant?”

  “I said she was already a whore when I married her. Her father paid me to marry her.”

  “So that kid isn’t yours?” Shockey asked.

  Brandt looked up slowly, hand at his mouth. Blood dripped from his nose. His eyes were swimming with a different kind of fear, something more powerful than the fear of getting kicked again.

  Shockey dropped to one knee and put his gun to Brandt’s temple. “Is Amy your kid or not?” Shockey demanded. “Answer me!”
>
  “Please, mister, please don’t kill him.”

  Shockey looked to the kitchen door. Margi was watching them, one hand on the wall, the other at her mouth. Black mascara tears cut through the bruises on her face.

  “Please don’t kill him,” she said again. “Cops can’t just shoot people, can they?”

  Shockey drew away from Brandt and rose to his feet. He knew he could have done it. And a second ago, it might have been worth it. But not now.

  “You wanna press charges for what he did to you, lady?”

  Margi shook her head, her nervous gaze going to Brandt, then coming slowly back to Shockey. She was the most pitiful thing he’d ever seen. And he had a horrible feeling about leaving her with this monster.

  He reached into his pocket for one of his Ann Arbor PD business cards, then realized he didn’t have any. He had a pen, though, and he scribbled his home phone on the moldy yellow wall.

  He looked at Margi. “When you get tired of being a punching bag, you call me,” he said, pointing to the wall.

  Her eyes pleaded with him to leave.

  Brandt was pulling himself to his feet. “Get out of my house, cop,” Brandt said. “’Cause you’re finished. I’ll make sure of that.”

  Shockey gathered up his small evidence envelopes and pushed out the back door. The gate was ajar when he reached it with his wagon, and he drove right through it, busting it from the post.

  He was a mile down the road before he finally slowed to a safe speed and took a breath.

  Seventeen years old and already fucking pregnant with some other bastard’s kid.

  Louis opened the door of the hotel room. He was expecting the pizza delivery man, but it was Shockey.

  “Look, Jake-”

  “I’m sober,” Shockey said. “Let me in. We have to talk.”

  Louis glanced behind him at Joe and Amy. They were at the coffee table, playing a game of Yahtzee.

  “You want to go downstairs?” Louis asked.

  Shockey was looking at something over Louis’s shoulder and Louis turned again to see what was so interesting. Shockey seemed to be staring at Amy.

  “Jake?”

  “I need to talk to both you and Joe,” he said. “It’s about the custody hearing. Can we send the kid — Amy — to the bedroom for a minute?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Louis said. “Joe?”

  Joe rose and took Amy to the bedroom. Louis heard her turn on the television. Joe returned a few minutes later and closed the door behind her.

  Shockey dropped into a chair. “I went out to the farm today,” he said.

  “Are you kidding me?” Louis asked.

  “Just listen,” Shockey said. “I gathered up these scrapings from the kitchen.”

  He laid the envelopes on the coffee table. “I’ll pay to find out if there’s any blood in them,” he said. “I knew when I did it I couldn’t bring it into court, but I had to know, Kincaid. I just had to know.”

  Louis shook his head. “You’re crazy.”

  “But that isn’t all,” Shockey said. “Brandt came back while I was there. I knocked him around when he started running at the mouth about Jean.”

  “Aw, man, Jake,” Louis said. “You’re lucky he didn’t kill you.”

  “Nah, he didn’t even fight back,” Shockey said. “He’s scared of going back to jail. And that woman, that Margi woman, she was all beat up.”

  “And she didn’t want to press charges, right?” Joe asked.

  “Right,” Shockey said. “I have a bad feeling about her being out there all alone with him.”

  “And you think telling a judge that you were out there doing an illegal search and you saw a beat-up woman will help keep Amy away from Brandt, right?” Joe said.

  “No,” Shockey said. “But I think telling a judge she isn’t Brandt’s kid might.”

  Louis leaned forward. “What do you mean, not his kid? How do you know that?”

  “He told me himself when I was using him for a punching bag,” Shockey said. “He said Jean was already pregnant when he married her.”

  Joe started to the box in the corner where they kept their files and notes on the case.

  “If you’re going looking for the date Owen and Jean got married, don’t bother,” Shockey said. “I already know it. It was November 1972.”

  For a long moment, the room was quiet. Joe came back to the sofa and sat down next to Louis. Louis was looking at the closed bedroom door. He broke the silence.

  “That makes Amy sixteen, not thirteen.”

  “Louis, do you really think someone that young could just lose three years of her life?” Joe asked. “Surely someone was able to keep better track than that.”

  “Maybe she was so underdeveloped the schools kept putting her back,” he said. “Maybe Geneva just lied to her. I don’t know.”

  Louis looked back at Shockey. “But how do we even begin to find Amy’s real father?” he asked. “Do we even know where Jean grew up?”

  “She grew up in Unadilla,” Shockey said. “It’s a little town near Hell.”

  “I didn’t see that in the report,” Louis said. “Did she tell you that?”

  “No,” Shockey said. He drew a deep breath. “I lied to you both. I knew Jean before she started showing up at the farmer’s market in 1980. I knew her when she was seventeen.”

  The second silence was longer than the first. This time Shockey broke it.

  “I think I’m Amy’s father,” he said.

  Louis closed the bedroom door and went to the kitchenette. He got a beer, his first in five days, and dropped down onto the sofa.

  “She had another of her asthma attacks and couldn’t breathe,” Louis said.

  Joe started to get up, but Louis waved her back into her chair. “She’s okay now. She’s resting. We can talk now.”

  Shockey set down his coffee cup and looked at Louis and Joe. Louis had seen many men on the edge, criminals, cops, and sometimes just ordinary men with not so ordinary secrets. Shockey seemed to hold something of all three.

  “I met Jean when I was in high school,” he said. “Her family was real strict, and she didn’t get to go out much. But she made it to a church party one night, and I found her just sitting in the corner.”

  “When was this?” Joe asked.

  “My senior year,” Shockey said. “It was right after the last football game of the year. Anyway, I liked her right off. I mean, I didn’t have much, with my dad being on disability and all, but she had less.”

  “Was she a farm girl?” Louis asked.

  “Yeah,” Shockey said. “Her mother was this holy roller who put the fear of God in her about boys and sex and all that shit. I think her father might have beat her. She never said for sure, but Jean was always talking about wanting to get away from them.”

  Shockey drew a slow breath.

  “We started seeing each other, meeting secretly when she could get out of the house. I couldn’t help it, I loved her, and I wanted her so bad. We started…” His voice trailed off as he closed his eyes. “At the end of summer, I had to leave to go to football camp. We had plans. I mean, I wanted to come back and marry her, get us both somewhere better. But when I busted up my knee, I couldn’t face anyone, and, well, I finally stopped writing to her.”

  Shockey shook his head. “When I finally worked up the guts to go to her place, her mother told me Jean had moved away. Wouldn’t tell me where. Just slammed the door in my face.”

  “Jean never told you she was pregnant?” Joe asked.

  Shockey shook his head. “She wouldn’t have,” he said. “We talked a lot about not being the kind of people our parents were, always having to scrape for every dollar. We talked a lot about me needing to make something of myself before we could get married. I was supposed to go to college. That’s what Jean wanted for me — for us. That was our ticket out.”

  Louis was quiet, some of this sounding too familiar.

  “Nine years,” Shockey whispered. “I should have…”
His voice trailed off as he rose and went to the window.

  Louis watched Shockey’s broad back, hoping the man wasn’t going to break down right here. Not with Amy in the next room.

  “So now what?” Joe asked.

  Shockey turned to look at her.

  “Are you thinking of trying to prove this to a judge and taking custody of Amy?”

  Shockey ran a hand over his eyes. “Why not?”

  “It’s going to be hard to prove, Jake,” Louis said. “You know a blood test can’t prove you’re her father. It can only prove you’re not. And besides, you’d need Jean’s blood type-”

  “I have it,” Shockey said. “We got blood tests to get married. And I have a few pictures, and maybe I can find someone who remembers we were together back then.”

  Joe suddenly stood up and walked a small circle around the living room. “Jake, listen,” she said. “I appreciate your good intentions here, but I don’t think a judge is going to find you much more fit than Owen Brandt.”

  “If Amy is mine, she belongs with me,” Shockey said.

  “It doesn’t work like that, Jake,” Louis said.

  “But what are our options?” Shockey asked. “Some foster home?”

  “Do you hear yourself?” Joe asked. “My God, up until today, you still called her ‘the girl.’ You haven’t established any kind of bond with her. And she doesn’t feel anything special toward you.”

  “That will come,” Shockey said. “It’s a natural thing, and it’ll come. She’s Jean’s daughter. She’s my daughter. I can do this. I know I can.”

  “Sorry, Jake, I can’t let you do it,” Joe said.

  “You can’t stop me,” he said.

  “As her temporary guardian, I can,” Joe said. “Unless you can prove you’re her father, no judge is ever going to let you have her. And I won’t just sit back and let you disrupt her life all over again. At least, not yet. Not until you clean up your act and find a decent place to live and get a new job.”

  Shockey rose slowly to his feet. “She’s my daughter,” he said. “You have no right to keep her from me.”

  “Don’t try to fight me on this, Jake. You won’t win.”