The Trophy Exchange (A Lucinda Pierce Mystery)

by Fanning, Diane

  “Dr. Spencer, do you know of anyone who would want to hurt your wife?”

  He raised his head, looked in Lucinda’s eye then shifted his gaze back down.

  “Do you know anyone who was angry with her? Anyone she may have slighted or insulted?”

  Evan raised his head again; this time he maintained eye contact. “Lieutenant, when I tell you Kate is lovely, I mean it in every way. Sure, she is a beautiful woman to look at – but she’s more. She’s warm. She’s caring. She’s a wonderful mother and a supportive wife.

  “People think of a mathematician and they think cold and remote. Kate isn’t like that. She lights up any room she enters. She embraces the world. She is kind to everyone – even those who don’t deserve it.”

  Lucinda remained silent, her eye focused on his face. She hoped her quiet would compel him to continue. Instead, Evan averted his eyes. Was he avoiding the sight of her face? Or was he avoiding her?

  He pushed around the jewelry he’d dumped from the envelope. Then he picked up the watch and looked at the black smudge on its face. “A fingerprint?” he asked.

  “Your wife’s. I’m sorry. I should have cleaned that up for you.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t. I never will. It’s a unique piece of her,” he said and sighed. He fingered her gold wedding band and the small gold hoop earrings. Then he picked up the tarnished silver chain with a turquoise cross and dangled it in front of Lucinda. “This does not belong to Kate.”

  “Are you sure Dr. Spencer?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “She was wearing it when we arrived on the scene.”

  “It is not hers,” he said pushing his chair back from the table and rising to his feet. He shook the cross in Lucinda’s direction. “She would not wear this.”

  “I realize it’s not an expensive piece, sir. But she may have just taken a liking to it. It was a minor purchase and maybe she just never showed it to you.”

  “No!” he shouted. “She would not buy this. She would not wear this.” He clenched his teeth and nodded his head. “He put it there. He put it there to taunt her.” He dropped the chain as if it were molten metal. It clattered on to the table.

  “Who put it there?”

  “The bastard who murdered my wife. He must have known – he must have hated her to put that thing around her neck.”

  “I just don’t understand why you would jump to those conclusions, Dr. Spencer. Do you know who took her life? How can you be so sure your wife wouldn’t wear this necklace?”

  Spencer slammed his hands on to the table and leaned toward Lucinda. “Lieutenant. My wife. Is Jewish.”

  “Has her Judaism caused problems with other people? Did someone threaten her? Intimidate her?”

  “No. Nothing like that.”

  “No racial epithets?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Is there anyone in the neighborhood who would be bothered about a Jewish woman living there?”

  “I don’t think any of the neighbors knew. She didn’t practice her religion.”

  “Was it a problem in your marriage, Dr. Spencer?”

  “Of course not,” he snapped. Then he slumped back into the chair. “Sorry. Maybe it was a problem, in a way. I was raised a Methodist but I didn’t go to church any longer. I guess I really never had that solid core of faith. When we married, Kate said she didn’t either. But the last couple of years, she’s done some soul-searching and found that she did after all.

  “We talked about it a lot. I think Kate is like a lot of people. They leave home. They react against becoming anything like their parents. Then they get a little older. The children come and some – like Kate – find they’re ready to embrace the faith of their fathers once again.”

  “Did that bother you?”

  “No. It bothers Kate though. She worries that if she revitalizes her faith and introduces it to the girls, it might alienate them from me.”

  “Was that a concern for you?”

  “I didn’t see it that way and I told her so. She said she might go see a rabbi while I was in Afghanistan. I told her I thought that was a good idea.”

  “You didn’t worry about your daughters practicing Judaism?”

  “I was raised in a home where you went to church because of social expectations. Kate, on the other hand, was raised in a religiously observant household. That home environment molded her and played a major role in creating the woman I married. Kate is wonderful, warm – almost perfect. I couldn’t want anything less for my two little girls.” Evan’s head fell back into his hands. His shoulders shook but he made no sound.

  When he raised his head, his eyes were wet. “Lieutenant, I really want to get back to my girls. Do you need anything else?”

  “No, Dr. Spencer. That’s enough for now. Thank you so much for your time. I’m so sorry . . .”

  He waved her words of sympathy away and pushed on the table as he rose. He dropped his wife’s watch, wedding band and earrings in the pocket of his jacket. He pointed to the cross on the table. “That I don’t ever want to see again.”

  Lucinda nodded. Evan left the room and Lucinda stood in the doorway watching him walk down the hall with hunched shoulders and a rapid stride. The door to the next room opened and Ted stepped into the hall.

  “You saw it all?” Lucinda asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think?”

  “He seemed sincere – grief-stricken.”

  “He did. But he also seemed very angry.”

  “Hey, Lucinda, you would be angry, too, if your spouse had just been murdered and your three-year-old witnessed it all.”

  “Yes, you’re right. But still—”

  “He often referred to his wife in the present tense,” Ted said. “That usually indicates a lack of guilt.”

  “But did you notice he never asked who did it? Never asked if we had any leads?”

  “That was a little odd. Is that all that’s bothering you?”

  “Yes. No. Maybe. I just have the feeling he knows something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Who the killer is. Why she died. I don’t know. Something. He knows something he doesn’t want me to know.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yeah. But maybe he isn’t aware of what he knows. But there’s knowledge there, Ted. I can taste it. I can roll it around in my mouth. The flavor is familiar but I can’t identify it. And I won’t stop until I do.”

  Eight

  Lucinda sat in her cubicle reveling in the chaotic jumble of documents and files that covered the surface of her desk. She’d worked so hard to get this job and even harder to keep it. For weeks, while Internal Affairs investigated the shooting, her work area was neat, tidy, sterile.

  She’d scrounged for anything to fill the hours, any mundane task that could save her from herself. The coffee pot in the break room gleamed from her daily cleaning. No one had to engage in a desperate search for a clean cup. Each day, she gathered dirty mugs, pouring the leftover liquid down the drain and scrubbing out the dark rings that marked the inside like the high water mark after a flood.

  She offered to do paperwork for detectives throughout the building: Homicide, Robbery, the gang task force. It didn’t matter, she did it all. When, with manic speed, she’d depleted that workload, she plucked data entry work from the hands of the administrative staff – anything to keep introspection at bay. The clerks appreciated the extra time Lucinda’s efforts allowed them to devote to gossiping together: whispered rumors, tittered confidences, furtive suspicions.

  Lucinda knew she was one of the topics of their fevered exchanges. They wondered if she had a life outside of her devotion to the job. They suspected she did not. And they were right. She was a member of the living dead – walking, talking, breathing – not dead but not alive. Empty. Vacant. Like an old warehouse abandoned to the mercies of rats.

  Her work was her life and suddenly her life was nothing – nothing but a gray swirling mass o
f numbness. She’d shut everything and everyone out of her life long ago. She could not afford to feel her own pain. She had no confidantes, no love interest.

  She did once. It was glorious soaring high over the earth tethered with a wispy spider thread to the ground in the rapture of true love. The sexual release of their enthusiastic couplings liberated her from herself for hours at a time. More importantly, though, were other shared intimacies – the revelation of dark thoughts and quaking fears. The ability to verbalize them all eased her torment and released her from the gnarly grasp of the tenacious fingers of her past. Her work was what she did then, not who she was.

  She thought her life was perfect until two years into the marriage. What she thought was reality was no more than a fantasy. It crashed and shattered like a hollow shell kicked out of the nest by a neat but callous mother bird. He left her. He just left her. She came home one day, the center of her chest vibrating with the excitement of seeing him again and no one was at home.

  His closet was empty. Her toothbrush stood alone. Books tilted drunkenly on the shelves abandoned by those that had fled with her husband. No note. No explanation. Nothing of him remained as if he’d ceased to exist or never existed at all. A call to her mother-in-law provided no solace. Her questions about her husband’s whereabouts were answered curtly: “He’s left you. That’s all you need to know.”

  For a while, she fielded frequent invitations for dinner, movies, romantic weekend getaways. She had no faith in her judgment in men and turned them all down with apologies that she was not ready yet. She embraced her work and gained tremendous satisfaction serving the public and making a difference. Her commitment to the police department was one she believed was a two-way street.

  She didn’t realize how much ego gratification she got from knowing men were interested in her until a shotgun blast blew all those invitations away. It was a garden variety domestic violence call. She responded to the scene after neighbors reported a woman’s screams. She stepped into the living room where a battered woman whimpered. “Is your husband still here, Mrs. Grant?”

  She nodded her head and her finger pointed to the hallway. Lucinda heard a barely human growl of rage and spun around. She saw the tip of a shotgun barrel aimed at Mrs. Grant’s chest. Lucinda lunged at the woman, pushing her out of the way. Lucinda was successful at sparing the woman from any harm but was not quick enough to get herself out of the line of fire.

  Shotgun pellets smashed into the side of her face. Before she hit the floor, a flood of blue uniforms poured through the door. They washed around the shooter and threw him to the ground, disarming and cuffing him in the process. Lucinda heard voices shouting, “Officer down. Officer down,” before she faded away.

  Lucinda sighed at the memory, pulled a compact out of her purse and looked in the mirror, turning her head so that only the untouched side appeared in view. From that angle, no one would know she was damaged goods. Unblemished, smooth skin. The tiny creases in the corner of the eye were noticed only by Lucinda; she thanked her mother for passing along that age-defying look. Another genetic present, the perfect eyebrow that rose in a natural arch over thick, long lashes that really didn’t need the mascara she applied every morning. Beneath the lashes, a forthright brown eye, the iris so dark it was hard to see where it ended and the pupil began. Unfortunately, she only had one of them now. And that one had lost its sparkle. The lively twinkle was muted – perhaps it would return in time; perhaps it was gone forever.

  Thank God, I don’t have to respond to domestic violence calls any longer, she thought as she ran her fingers over the black patch that covered one ruined eye socket. Friends had urged her to get a wardrobe of patches in colors and patterns to complement her outfits but that seemed like a sick acceptance of defeat. She picked black – it matched her mood. Her fingers slid off the patch and roamed over the waxy skin that rose and fell in ripples like a melted candle down to her jaw line. Nausea undulated like an eel through her gut forcing bile into her throat.

  No one wanted to date a woman with a face divided – one half looking as graceful as a creation of Botticelli, the other half looking as if it emerged like the embodiment of a nightmare from the clam shell of Venus’ birth. In response, she built her walls higher blocking out every living thing but Chester. Her cat was critical when she was slow to open a can of tuna but in all other ways, he accepted her without question, without cringing.

  They did have a few problems living together, though, right after the accident. As she’d entered her apartment after her hospitalization, grumbling at the indignity she suffered by her loss of independence – she had to be driven home by someone else – Chester, a lazy, large, neutered, gray tom, ignored her grousing and greeted her with apparent pleasure. He twined around her legs in both affection and as a plea for a bowl of his favorite tinned food. The cat twisted into Lucinda’s line of vision and then out again. In and out. In and out. Lucinda’s head swam. She pressed both hands to her temples. She heard the physical therapist at the hospital: “Turn your head. Turn your head.”

  Vertigo and disorientation rose up on a tide of swelling panic. She jerked her leg to the left and stepped down hard on Chester’s tail. He yowled as he darted from the kitchen and down the hall.

  “I’m sorry, Chester. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Sorry,” she wailed. “Come get some tuna. C’mon. Nummies, nummies!” She reached for the handle of the cabinet over and over before her hand finally landed on it and jerked it open. She kept her fingers on the door’s wooden surface and trailed them around to the corner, down the inside of the door, across the edge of the shelf and to the can of cat food. She expressed her exuberance at the successful maneuver with a long, contented sigh.

  She popped the top and, after fumbling with the knob on the drawer, reached inside for a spoon. She thought her hand headed straight for the right section. Instead, her fingers landed two dividers over and withdrew a fork. It’ll do, she told herself.

  She stooped down by Chester’s bowl and scooped out a forkful of tuna feast aiming for the bowl; she missed. It landed in a sodden lump on the floor three inches away from its target. Lucinda sighed with defeat. Chester dug in. He wasn’t a prissy cat – tuna was tuna no matter where he found it.

  Lucinda concentrated on removing the water pitcher from the refrigerator and a glass from the cabinet. It took far more time than she thought it should. By the time she’d mastered it, Chester stood beside her begging for more.

  “Just a minute, Chester,” she said before lifting the pitcher. She believed she had the glass and pitcher spout in perfect alignment but when she poured, the ice cold water landed on Chester’s head. He shrieked in displeasure and raced out of the kitchen again.

  “Damn it!” she said and slid in defeat to the floor. Her posterior landed right in the middle of the puddle formed during Chester’s soaking. “Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!” she cursed as she pounded her fists on her thighs until one of them missed and slammed into floor. She shrieked in frustration. “My butt’s wet. My hand hurts. My cat’s freaked. And I’m still thirsty.” She remembered her stubborn insistence to the hospital social worker that she didn’t need therapy, that she could manage adjustment on her own. “You are a stubborn fool, Lucinda Pierce.”

  She hopped to her feet and managed to grab the phone without too many false attempts but when she tried to punch in the number, it was an exercise in frustration. No matter how hard she focused, she could not get her finger to land on the right buttons. She banged the receiver on the counter out of anger and then the thought hit: If I were blind, I bet I could find my way around the key pad. She closed her eye. She ran her fingers across the surface memorizing the layout by touch, punched in the buttons and brought the receiver to her ear. It’s ringing. Please let it be the right number!

  “Rehabilitation Clinic. May I help you?”

  Hallelujah! “Yes, ma’am, I need to make an appointment for monocular occupational therapy.”

  After setting up an appointme
nt for two days’ time, Lucinda smiled at her accomplishment until her first attempt to place the receiver back in the cradle failed. Anger burned away every shred of triumph. She regretted her call for help and wished she’d never picked up the phone but the effort required to call back and cancel was more than she could handle.

  The uncomfortable dampness in the seat of her pants fed her ire. She pulled them off and let them drop to the kitchen floor. She stomped out of the kitchen but came to a jarring halt when her hip bone collided with the corner of the counter. Her anger went up yet another notch. She collapsed onto the sofa and pulled an afghan over her outstretched legs.

  Fury at her inability to perform the smallest task, rage at her injury and despair over her future stirred up a deep well of bitterness. Why am I being punished for doing the right thing? It’s not fair. Life’s not fair, Lucinda. Grow up.

  Her anger morphed into self-pity. She felt all alone, forsaken, worthless. Will I ever be able to work again? Drive again? Pour a damn glass of water again? A single tear welled up from her remaining eye. As it coursed across her skin down to her chin, she realized she would never again feel a tear on the other side of her face. She sobbed quietly until she drifted off to sleep.

  When she awoke, a feeling of weight and vibration on her chest was the first sensation to cross her conscious mind. The sound of Chester’s contented purring registered on her awareness next. She opened her eye and Chester placed a soft paw on her chin. “Good morning, Chester,” she said. He responded by pressing his forehead against her nose. She scratched behind his ears and smiled. I’ve kicked him, drenched him with water and scared him to death. And yet, here he is – glad to see me, missing eye, scarred face and all. His simple affirmation resurrected her determination.

  After her morning prep and a quick breakfast, she gritted her teeth and called for a taxi to take her to the shooting range. She wanted to gauge how much her skills had deteriorated. After firing twenty rounds, she gave up. One shot grazed the paper but the rest were far off the mark.