by Brant, Kylie
It had been the last day his granddaddy had forced him to spend in bible school.
“I’m sure you’ve saved many a soul with that Christian attitude of yours,” Dev said tightly. Because it seemed wiser, he began moving away. “Maybe if your tolerance was as well-developed as your self-righteousness, your wife wouldn’t have run off with the Schwan’s man a few years back.” A low blow, but Dev didn’t mind fighting dirty with bullies, especially so-called moral ones.
“You’ll be condemned to perdition, Devlin Stryker,” the man’s voice thundered behind him. “You’ll burn in hell for this godless activity you embrace.”
“See you there. In the meantime, you’re violatin’ a county ordinance by bein’ here at night. I’d advise you to leave before I tip off the sheriff.”
“We’ve got a couple prints that can’t be matched to any of the kids’ shoes. Here.” Powell tapped one picture from the array on the table in front of them. “And here.”
Ramsey narrowed her eyes as she studied the photos. Most of the kids had been wearing sneakers, which seemed to be part of the teen uniform these days. But Robbie Joe had had boots on that night. And from the look of these photos, someone else had, too.
She snatched up the magnifying glass a second before Matthews reached for it and took a closer look. Trampled was the best description of the area around the shore of the pond. Print over print. But with the magnification, she could see that the sneaker prints, and the boot print attributed to Robbie Joe, were on top of the faint boot marks that had been made sometime earlier.
“Still no way to know if those footprints were made by the perp,” Matthews pointed out, leaning uncomfortably close to peer over her shoulder. Ramsey shrugged him away.
“Look at the heel marks on that boot print going toward the pond and the matching one leading away. The first one’s deeper, isn’t it?” If the UNSUB was carrying something heavy, like a body, the print going toward the water should be deeper than the one leading away from it.
Powell held up a sheaf of papers. “The techs made measurements from the casts we took and determined that it is. Glenn’s right, there’s no way to be certain. But it’s sure possible they could belong to the perp.”
Matthews straightened. “So all we have to do is check the boots of everyone in a tri-county area or so and we’ll solve this thing.”
Ramsey ignored his barely checked sarcasm. This gave them something to hold in reserve, for when they did get a suspect. Something that could tie the guy to the crime or eliminate him as suspect. As such, it was valuable, even if it didn’t lead them to a specific individual right now.
“We should receive the LUDs for Frost’s cell phone by the end of the day.” Powell dropped the papers on the table and leaned both hands on it, looking from one of them to the other. “I’ll update Jeffries while I’m waitin’ for the phone records. I’ve already contacted the resort owner at Pine Lake. He affirms Quinn Sanders and Sarah Frost had reservations for the date in question. But someone needs to go down there and show him pictures of them and all the people they claim were with them. Get a positive ID, and then see if anyone there can alibi them for the time of death. Then we’ll need statements from everyone who was in the Sanders group that weekend.”
“I think Ramsey’d be best for—” Matthews started.
Powell interrupted him. “You’re goin’. Do you good to give the women in Buffalo Springs a rest for a few days.”
That surprised a half smile from Ramsey. She’d wondered just how much of Matthews’s pastime that Powell was aware of. Apparently little got by the man.
“I’d like to run down that substance in the victim’s stomach,” she said. “Talk to the people around here who are known to dabble with healing or holistic health. See if I can get an idea of what the plant is, who uses it, and for what purpose.”
Powell nodded. “I’d also like you to check in with that nail gal who gave you Frost’s name again. Find out if the victim mentioned someone botherin’ her. I have a meeting with Rollins this mornin’, then I’ll head back to Kordoba, too, and start talkin’ to customers who frequented the bar, ask them the same thing.” After a moment, he added, “How far have you gotten on the ViCAP printout?”
“Not far,” she said blandly. In fact she’d looked at the huge stack of responses and immediately determined to narrow the search. “I want to resend a more specific request focusing on multiple attackers, foreign substance ingested, and the method of killing the victim.”
He grunted. “That should keep you busy for a while. But in the meantime, start goin’ through the responses we do have.”
Ramsey caught Matthews’s grin from the corner of her eye. Clearly he was feeling better about his assignment. Probably looking forward to a new locale for picking up unattached women.
But Ramsey was content enough with the tasks she’d been given, with the exception of the bottomless pile of ViCAP responses. She’d had a feeling from the beginning about the unidentified substance found in Cassie Frost’s stomach.
Instinct told her if she found out what it was, it might just lead them to the killer.
After checking on Jonesy’s progress sorting out the fibers they’d collected from Frost’s apartment—and getting an unkind, growled response—Ramsey headed to her car. She figured she could put in a call to Tammy Wallace, the owner of the nail salon the victim had frequented, as she was driving into town.
The woman sounded harried when she answered. Ramsey had a moment to wonder just how busy a person could be who painted fingernails all day for a living before she began.
“I sure don’t recall Cassie mentionin’ anyone who was botherin’ her,” Tammy said in response to Ramsey’s first question. “I think I told you she didn’t offer much personal information. I didn’t even know exactly where she lived.”
“So she never mentioned her ex-fiancé, either?”
There was a pause. “Is that what it was?” There was a measure of sympathy in her voice. “I got the feeling someone had hurt her badly. That she was sort of usin’ some time to recover, you know? But she never seemed scared or anythin’. Just sort of . . . sad, I guess.”
Ramsey paused her vehicle at the end of the drive, waited for a total of four cars to go by on the blacktop before pulling onto it. That constituted Buffalo Springs’s morning traffic jam. “Did she ever talk about her sister?”
Again there was a short silence. She knew she’d taken the woman by surprise. “No-o.” The word was drawn out. “If I’d had to guess, I’d have figured she didn’t have one. Come to think of it, I think she might’ve told me she didn’t have any family. That’s odd, isn’t it?”
Not really, Ramsey could have told her. God knew she didn’t spend time talking about her own. Cassie had probably been doing her best to forget she had a sister. She’d been betrayed in the most intimate way possible by the two people she’d probably trusted most in the world.
Life, she reflected, could be a real bitch.
“Any of the other gals in your salon ever talk to her? Do her nails maybe?”
“Oh, no.” It was clear from Tammy’s voice that she’d ventured into a forbidden area. “She was my client, and no one else would have worked on her nails. But she got her hair cut here once. If you give me a few minutes, I can check on who cut it, if you’d like to talk to her.”
Ramsey agreed to hold as she drove slowly into Buffalo Springs. It was, if one liked small towns, a sort of quaint place. The streets were wide and lined with storefronts, many of them still filled. Some had modern facades, but others, like the museum, had been restored to the original front, dating, she supposed, back well over a century.
Flags lined the streets, left over from Flag Day, and barrels of flowers dotted the curb and spilled bouquets of color in front of shop doors. And everywhere she looked, it seemed, there were small clusters of people passing the time of day.
Three older men sat on a bench in front of a barbershop that still had an old-fashioned str
iped pole. Kids rode bikes down the street with little heed for the intermittent oncoming traffic. A small group of people were gathered outside the car repair station; another set were talking on the steps of the post office. Most raised a hand in a friendly wave as she drove by, in the manner of people in a small town. Either they recognized you, figured they knew you, or soon would. Most would find the scene charming. Friendly.
Of course, most hadn’t lived in a place similar enough for comparison. Most hadn’t experienced walking by similar bunches of people. Hearing their conversations stop, only to start again a few moments later.
Most, she thought grimly, didn’t realize the weight of the stigma that came from being born poor white trash in just this sort of town. How desperate the need to escape could be.
How that desperation could fuel decisions that were regretted for years afterward.
Tammy came back on the line then and introduced the hairdresser who had trimmed Cassie Frost’s hair two months ago. Ramsey asked her much the same questions she’d asked Tammy, with the same lack of results. She disconnected the call just as she spotted a parking spot close to her destination.
Minutes later, she was pushing open the door to the Buffalo Springs Family Health Clinic to find herself in a surprisingly modern lobby area. She walked up to the front desk where a woman in her late fifties was multitasking by talking on the phone while typing at the computer. Her dark hair was liberally threaded with gray and worn in two soft wings on either side of her face. Her nameplate read Jenny Callison.
The woman smiled at Ramsey and lifted a finger long enough from the keyboard to indicate for her to wait a minute.
Ramsey used the interim to gaze around at the other occupants of the waiting area. There was a couple who were easily in their nineties, a bearded man holding a blood-soaked bandage to his hand, and a younger woman with a boy who looked as though his biggest health problem was boredom. He kicked at the legs of his seat with increasing volume as he stared in disgust at the ceiling while his mother flipped through a magazine.
When the receptionist disconnected the phone, she looked up at Ramsey with a warm smile. “Thanks for waitin’. How can I help you?”
“I’d like to see Doc . . . Doctor Theisen, if I could.”
“And your name?”
“Ramsey Clark.” When the woman immediately turned to the schedule on her computer screen, she hastily added, “I don’t have an appointment.”
Her smile decidedly cooler, the receptionist turned back to her. “Are you a pharmaceutical salesperson? Because the doctors here don’t . . .”
“No, nothing like that.” Ramsey dug in her pocket for a card and handed it to the woman. “I have a few questions about a case I’m working on that I thought he could help with. Maybe he could call me. My number is on the card.”
Jenny craned her head to send a practiced eye around the waiting room. “If you don’t mind waitin’, he can probably work you in. Dr. Matlock is here today, too, so it shouldn’t be too long.”
Ramsey nodded and went to choose a chair. She didn’t much like doctor’s offices as a rule, but she was feeling more tolerant today, probably because she was here only on business. For something to do, she picked up a news magazine and started flipping through it, only to discover that it was six months out of date. Replacing it on the table, she settled in, ignoring the boy across the room when he stuck his tongue out at her.
A nurse in white slacks and a patterned smock came out to the room with a clipboard and called in a loud voice, “Esther Gentry.”
The older couple took several minutes to get up and totter in the nurse’s direction. After a few minutes, another similarly clad woman came out and called for the man with the injured hand.
Deciding that reading old news was preferable to watching the kid’s rather substantial repertoire of rude faces, Ramsey picked up the magazine again and tried to read. Her time would have been better spent, she reflected after fifteen minutes crawled by, going over ViCAP hits. But Powell didn’t want anything leaving the cabin serving as their office, so that hadn’t been a possibility.
A half hour later, Ramsey had had ample time to consider that doctor’s offices had a totally different concept of time than did laypeople. But she was surprised when the older couple shuffled out toward the front desk and Jenny looked up to smile in her direction. “Ramsey? Dr. Theisen will see you now.”
A nurse showed her back to a room at the corner of the structure that, thank God, held no patient tables. A desk was wedged into one corner, with two chairs set next to it. The rest of the space was filled with bookcases that overflowed with medical journals and physician magazines.
She walked to the wall filled with framed diplomas and studied them. Theisen was a bit older than she’d presumed at their first meeting, closer to eighty than seventy by her calculation. She wondered why the man chose to continue working when most a decade younger would have retired to a life of fishing and driving the wife crazy with his constant presence at home.
The door opened behind her, and she turned to see the man Stryker had introduced to her at the diner.
“Ramsey Clark.” There was real pleasure in his expression, in his voice, as he shut the door behind him and crossed to her, his hand outstretched. When she took it, he covered their hands with his free palm. “I knew you’d get tired of Devlin and turn to me. It was just a matter of time.”
“Doesn’t take that long to tire of Stryker,” she agreed. And attempted to shake the memory of that surprisingly bone-melting kiss they’d shared the last time she’d seen him. “But I’m actually here looking for help.”
He released her, gestured her to a chair. “Since you’re the picture of health, I’m guessin’ it’s not for yourself.”
She sat, waited for him to sink into the chair next to her. “It’s not, no. It’s regarding a case I’m working. I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to go into much detail . . .”
He waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about that. I have a bit of experience workin’ with the police. No reason you’d know this, but I used to be the county coroner years ago, before the state went to all ME positions.”
She looked at him, intrigued. “I didn’t realize that.”
“Served for nearly thirty years. I think they turned to MEs fifteen years ago.” His brow above the dark glasses wrinkled for a moment before he shook his head. “Doesn’t matter now. It was a good move. I learned a few things over the years, but I can’t compete with the knowledge medical examiners acquire in their accredited classes.”
“Nor did you want to,” Ramsey guessed shrewdly.
His smile had his hazel eyes crinkling. “You’re right. I served as a service to the community, but it certainly wasn’t a position I relished. It was a relief to go back to treatin’ patients full time and not get those phone calls in the middle of night. Tell you the truth, I don’t think I was ever cut out for it.”
A thought occurred. “You would have served as coroner when Sally Ann Porter’s body was found.”
A grimace flickered across his face. “I was, yes. Must have been . . . what? Twenty-eight, twenty-nine years ago. I recall it was the same year that Lucas . . .” He stopped, cut his eyes at her, and amended, “Twenty-nine years ago, it was.”
She was curiously touched that he’d stopped himself before saying something about Stryker’s father. The man was obviously well liked in town. And not just by women. “I just heard the story about her death and thought to ask. I was told the body was too decomposed to easily identify.”
He nodded, crossing one long leg over the other and adjusting the crease of his dress pants. “Don’t mind sayin’ it was ’bout the worst I’d seen. Not enough flesh remainin’ to determine any foul play. Certainly no broken bones indicatin’ such. As I recall, the body was finally identified usin’ dental records.”
Which matched, more or less, what Dev had told her. She was still interested in looking at the police report regarding the matter. But
she had to admit it was more for her own curiosity. It’d be a stretch to claim it related to the case that had brought her here.
“I heard that it was determined she’d probably fallen in and drowned.”
He sighed, as if the memory was a sad one. “That was the most likely explanation. It was a sorrowful time in these parts, I don’t mind tellin’ you. Her mama had passed the same year. Had folks talkin’, and that rarely serves a useful purpose.”
She heartily agreed. “What I really came to see you about was to learn what you know about local healers in the area. Those that might use herbs and roots and things for various ailments.” She caught him glancing at his watch, and she added, “But if you’re busy, I can come back. Or you can call me later. I know you still have patients to see.”
