Safe Keeping

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  “Sorry to trouble you, but we’ve come for Tucker’s car,” Garza said. “We have a warrant to take the vehicle and another allowing us to search the premises.” She held up a fistful of folded documents, meaning for Lissa to take them.

  She didn’t. She asked if it was necessary, as if she had a choice. She thought of shutting the door.

  Garza introduced her to the man in uniform, explaining he was there to take the vehicle. “We’ve got a tow truck standing by in the alley.”

  Lissa stood motionless, but when Garza moved as if she meant to step over the threshold, Lissa blocked her. “I’d like to look at the warrants, please.”

  Garza handed them over, and Lissa unfolded them, amazed at her nerve. Phrases written in legalese swam at her: Affiant came before me this day... Whereas I have made inquiry... But her anxiety was so strong she couldn’t make much sense of the words. She did note the warrants were signed by a judge and stamped with an official-looking Lincoln County seal.

  “Look, Mrs. DiCapua, I know this is difficult, but the quicker we get started, the quicker we can be out of your way.”

  “Lissa? What’s going on?”

  “It’s the police, Momma. They’re taking Tucker’s car and searching the house.” Lissa backed out of the doorway; she found her mother’s hand.

  “I need one of you to open the garage,” Garza said.

  Lissa wondered how they knew Tucker’s SUV was in there.

  “I’ll do it,” her mother said.

  An image of the rust-colored stain on the floor of the cargo hold flooded Lissa’s mind. “Is it really necessary to take the Tahoe?”

  Her mother said, “You won’t find anything,” as if she knew.

  “Blood.” Lissa said it before she could stop herself, as if she had to.

  Her mother stared at her. Garza and her cohorts were riveted, waiting for Lissa to explain.

  She darted a glance toward her father’s office. Even though the door was closed, he must hear them. Why wasn’t he out here, taking control? It was what he was best at. Suppose he’d had a heart attack? “There’s blood in back,” she said, “on the carpet. It’s from a dog.” Lissa spoke over her panic and dismay. She argued with herself that it could work in Tucker’s favor, that she had volunteered the information. She said to herself that it would show Garza they weren’t attempting to hide anything, and if they weren’t, then neither was Tucker.

  “Tucker rescued a dog a few weeks back. Someone hit him and left him in the street,” said Emily.

  Lissa was relieved that her mother knew.

  “My son is kind like that,” she continued.

  Lissa exchanged a look with Garza. Told you. The words hung in the air, palpable for all that they were unspoken.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Garza was noncommittal. “We still have to impound the vehicle.”

  Her mother nodded and retraced her steps to the kitchen with the deputy trailing in her wake. Lissa was amazed at her mother’s composure. She seemed like the eye of the storm, and somehow it settled Lissa, quieted the hammering of her pulse. “Where do you want to start?” she asked Garza, and when the detective answered that they would like to begin with her brother’s bedroom, Lissa led the officers up the stairway, conscious of the sound of their tread on the steps, the ribbons of dust swirling in the muted light, the booming tick of the grandfather clock on the landing.

  “This is it.” Lissa paused in the hallway outside Tucker’s bedroom, hesitating, unwilling to move aside, to open his private space to police scrutiny.

  “We can take it from here,” Garza said.

  Lissa stepped back then, letting the detective and her partner cross the threshold. While he went immediately to Tucker’s closet, Garza stood just inside the doorway, running only her glance around the room, as if she were studying it, absorbing the atmosphere. Something in her posture, the intentness of her gaze, caused a frisson of unease to loosen along Lissa’s spine. After a moment, Garza crossed to the bed and bent to retrieve a stack of magazines from the floor, riffling through them. Lissa saw that issues of Playboy were among the collection.

  So what? she thought. “All guys read Playboy,” she said, and she regretted that she’d spoken, that she sounded so defensive.

  Garza set the magazines on the nighttable. “Maybe you should go downstairs and check on your mother, Mrs. DiCapua.”

  Lissa didn’t move. “Did Tucker bring you the receipts? If not, they’re in the glove box of his car. They’ll prove he wasn’t here.”

  Garza didn’t answer.

  “Have you checked out the security footage at the club where he was in Austin? Talked to the members of the band he was with? What about the club owner? Tucker knows him.”

  The pity on Garza’s face when she looked at Lissa infuriated her. “What about Darren Coe? Have you heard of him? Did you know he assaulted Miranda and threatened to kill her the month before she died? There’s a report in Houston. Could you at least look into it?”

  “I think I found something.” Garza’s partner was far enough inside Tucker’s closet that Lissa couldn’t tell what he was holding. Clothing, maybe—a shirt or a jacket. “What is it?” She started across the room.

  Garza held up her hand. “We need you to go downstairs now, Mrs. DiCapua. We’ll let you know when we’ve finished.”

  Lissa kept the detective’s gaze long enough to know she would gain nothing by arguing. On her way to the kitchen, she tapped on her father’s office door.

  “Daddy?”

  No answer.

  “Please say something, will you? Just let me know you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine.” The syllables were clipped, dark.

  “The police are here. They have a warrant to search the house.”

  No response.

  “Daddy? You’re going to have to let them in.” Lissa balanced her fingertips on the doorknob, thinking of turning it, but she knew it was locked. “Be that way,” she said under her breath.

  Her mother was sitting at the kitchen table and Lissa joined her. Neither of them spoke. The drag of the officers’ footsteps overhead was loud and jarring. It was as if the house had been overrun by aliens or thieves, and they could do nothing about them.

  “They took the Tahoe?” Lissa finally asked.

  Her mother said they had. She said, “There was a lot of blood in the hatch.”

  “I know,” Lissa said. She didn’t say how badly the sight of it had frightened her. She would come undone if she started talking about her fear, and that would undo her mom.

  “The deputy said they would run DNA on it.” Her mother looked down the disordered front of her sweater, unbuttoned and rebuttoned it. “He told me he couldn’t just take our word for it, that it was from a dog.”

  “I don’t know why the police are even looking at that blood. Jessica and Miranda were strangled.” Lissa thought a moment. “I bet it’s a scare tactic. They do that, you know. They’re like Daddy. They think it’ll make you talk.”

  She heard the detectives descending the stairs, and she went into the hall, heading toward the living room, her mother following close behind.

  “What’s in those bags, do you suppose?” Her mother had stopped to look at the two brown sacks with tops neatly folded over, standing by the front door, and Lissa thought of the discovery Garza’s partner had made upstairs, that whatever it had been, it was inside one of the sacks now.

  She went into the living room, her mother at her heels. “Sergeant?”

  Garza turned from the piano, holding the photo of Tucker and Lissa in their childhood Easter finery. It looked obscene in her hands. Lissa wanted to order her to put it down.

  “You aren’t taking those, are you?” Her mother’s voice was thin with dismay.

  “No.” Garza set the photo back o
n the piano.

  Lissa looked through the arched doorway into the dining room where the other detective was hunting through the drawers in the sideboard, riffling the stacks of linen, turning over pieces of the family’s sterling silver.

  Her mother said, “If you could tell me what you’re looking for...”

  Neither of the police officers answered.

  Lissa said, “I imagine that would defeat the purpose, Momma. Wouldn’t it, Detective Sergeant?”

  “What’s that door go to?” Garza indicated the office on the other side of the hallway. “We’ll need to get a look around in there. The kitchen and laundry room, too, then we’ll get out of your hair.”

  “My husband’s in there. He isn’t well. I don’t want to disturb him.”

  Lissa said, “We don’t have a choice, Momma,” and crossing the hall, she knocked on the door. “Daddy? You need to let the police in, okay?”

  He pulled open the door so abruptly, Lissa was almost unbalanced, and brushing by her, steps dragging, uneven, heartbreaking, he demanded Garza show him the warrant.

  Lissa’s breath faltered at the sight of him. He looked awful, raw-eyed, as if he’d been crying. Was that possible? Like her mother, he was dressed in the same clothes he’d had on yesterday. He hadn’t shaved, and the short gray bristle of his beard faded into the gray bristle of his buzz-cut hair, catching the light, seeming to wrap his head in a silvery caul. Lissa exchanged a worried glance with her mother.

  Lissa said she had the warrant, and she went to the kitchen to retrieve it. When she returned, the detectives were already inside her father’s office, with the gun cabinet open. They were questioning him about permits and whether any of the guns had been fired recently. Lissa handed him the warrant, and he took it, without looking at it. Looking instead at Garza, asking the same question Lissa had. “Why do you care about the guns? The Sweet girl was strangled, wasn’t she? The same as Miranda.”

  Garza didn’t answer him. She left the room without the guns. Her father sat behind his desk, but Lissa and her mother followed the detectives into the kitchen.

  “When will you return our things?” Lissa’s mother asked them.

  “Once the investigation is over,” Garza said.

  But Lissa wondered who would care what became of the sacks and their contents after this was over—especially if Tucker went to prison?

  Garza spoke to her mother. “If you could direct us to the laundry room—”

  Lissa pointed it out, and when Garza came from there with the basket of unwashed laundry, when she dumped it into the sack her partner held open, Lissa was in disbelief. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Those are my husband’s clothes.” Her mother was nearly shouting.

  Garza said she was sorry; she mentioned the warrant again, that it stipulated they could take anything and everything that might be useful as evidence.

  “My husband’s clothes don’t qualify.”

  Lissa slipped her arm around her mother’s waist.

  “Roy’s favorite flannel shirt is in there. At least let me have—” She broke off, taking in a sudden breath, shifting her gaze.

  Lissa tightened her grasp. “Momma?”

  “Tucker did some wash—”

  “When?” Garza asked.

  “Monday. He started a load. I finished it for him.” She faltered over the words, as if she were examining the memory in her mind. When Garza’s brows rose, she said, “There was nothing on his clothes, Sergeant. I would have noticed. I can testify to that. I can put it in writing, or whatever you people—”

  “Shut up, Emily.”

  Everyone, including Lissa, turned toward the sound of her father’s voice.

  He came into the kitchen, pausing at the foot of the table, holding on to the back of a chair as if he needed it for support.

  Lissa’s mother stepped out from her embrace. “I’m just explaining—”

  “I’ll handle this.”

  Garza set down the laundry basket. “Let’s stay calm here, okay, Mr. Lebay. You give us another minute or two, we’ll be on our way.”

  “I’m not giving you a goddamn thing. I want you out of my house.”

  “I understand—” Garza began reasonably.

  But she didn’t understand, Lissa thought.

  “Now!” her father shouted, stepping toward Garza.

  “Stay there, Mr. Lebay.” The detective raised her palm to the level of his face, widening her stance, and putting her free hand on her hip, she flipped back the front edge of her suit jacket far enough that Lissa saw the butt of her holstered weapon. Her partner adopted the same square-shouldered stance as Sergeant Garza. Their moves were sharply defined and well-executed, like dance steps.

  Like taking the safety off a gun.

  “C’mon now,” Garza said. “Let’s not make this any more difficult than it has to be.”

  “Lady, you haven’t seen difficult.” He took another step, and it was meant to be menacing, but the posturing was empty, almost foolish, and it hurt Lissa to see him. He was so disheveled, dilapidated really, weighed down. The whole structure of his face seemed to have loosened overnight into folds that sagged toward his neck.

  Seconds passed, and Garza evidently came to the same conclusion, that his threats, like his appearance, lacked substance. She retrieved the laundry basket, returning it to the laundry room. She smiled at Lissa and her mother and said she was sorry. “Truly,” she added.

  She seemed genuine, but it could just as well have been an act. She said they would see themselves out, and Lissa waited with her parents in the kitchen, listening to the scuff of their footsteps fade down the long front hall. The click of the front door was soft. Lissa looked at her mother. She was looking at Lissa’s dad.

  “Roy?”

  He walked to the back door as if he hadn’t heard, as if Lissa and her mother didn’t exist. His gait was awkward; he was very nearly staggering, and when he stooped to catch the place on his leg where the stump met his prosthesis, Lissa brought her hands to her mouth. The screen slammed behind him.

  “Roy?” Her mother followed him onto the porch, down the back steps.

  Lissa went to the screen, holding it open, looking after them, her father lurching across the yard, disappearing into his workshop, her mother faltering in his wake. Lissa watched until her mother, too, disappeared. She should go after her parents, but what could she do or say that would help them? Instead, she hunted through the keys that were hanging on the hook by the door until she found the set that went to her dad’s truck.

  Before she left, she wrote her parents a short note—Running an errand. I borrowed the truck. Hope it’s okay—and signed her name.

  Pulling out of the neighborhood, she headed for I-45. Sonny’s company was located on the other side, the west side, of the interstate. His email had specified he wouldn’t be available until after twelve, but she was lucky, spotting him almost immediately through a partially open door behind the reception desk when she walked into the security firm’s outer office. He was talking on the phone, head down, leafing through the loose pages inside a manila folder.

  “May I help you?” the receptionist asked. She was young, still in high school, Lissa guessed.

  She gave her name and explained she had an appointment, that she was early. “It’s urgent, though,” she added. “He knows that it is.”

  “Okay. Let me ask if he can see you now.” The girl smiled, and went to Sonny’s door. A conversation ensued that Lissa couldn’t hear, but when the girl came back, she smiled again, and said Sonny would be free in a few minutes.

  Lissa was looking at a row of photographs, black-and-white images of men dressed in army fatigues, carrying weapons and all manner of wartime gear, when Sonny said her name. “Lissa Lebay!”

  She wheel
ed. “It’s DiCapua now,” she said.

  “Oh, right. I heard you married that guy who worked for your dad.” He came toward her, swallowed her hand in his grip.

  “I didn’t think you’d remember me,” she said.

  “Prettiest girl in your class and totally out of my league.”

  Lissa liked his grin, the humor and warmth in his eyes. She didn’t remember that from high school. The other real change in him she could see, other than that he’d gained in height and breadth, was his hair. It was cut short now, a military bristle, like her dad’s.

  He ushered her into his office, directed her to a chair in front of his desk.

  Lissa seated herself, noticing an array of photos on the credenza. A girl in one of them resembled the young receptionist and when Lissa remarked on the likeness, Sonny said it was his daughter. “Pammy’s a sophomore this year at our old alma mater. Can you imagine? That high school was new when we started going there.”

  “It goes by fast, doesn’t it?” Lissa said, adding truthfully, “Your daughter’s lovely,” and she was grateful for this initial exchange of pleasantries. It mitigated the intensity of her anxiety and made Sonny seem regular. He was a dad, a family man, not the smart-mouthed kid she remembered with the swagger and the attitude.

  He smiled again. “Good thing she takes after her mother, huh? She’s a good kid. You have any?”

  Lissa shook her head. “I’m here to talk about Tucker. You know he was arrested for Jessica Sweet’s murder. It’s possible he’ll be charged with Miranda Quick’s murder, too.” Mickey had explained the additional charge could be forthcoming.

  Sonny sobered. “Yeah, I kind of figured that’s why you wanted to see me, but I’m not sure how I can be of help.”

  “Tucker said you work security at the club, plus you’re a police officer.”

  “Not anymore,” Sonny said. “I quit the force last year when the company started making money. I like being my own boss.”

  “Oh, well, sure. I know what you mean.” Lissa ran her fingertips around her ear and smiled briefly. She felt nervous. It wasn’t anything she could put her finger on; Sonny was outwardly friendly, but she sensed a reserve. “Tucker didn’t kill those women, Sonny. I know how that sounds, coming from his sister, but you know him. You know he couldn’t have—” She broke off, afraid of losing her composure, and she didn’t have time for that.