All That Remains ks-3

by Patricia Cornwell

  "Yes?"

  "A 1990 Mark Seven. Registered to a Barry Aranoff, thirty-eight-year-old white male from Roanoke. Works for a medical supply company, a salesman. On the road a lot."

  "Then you talked to him," I said.

  "Talked to his wife. He's out of town and has been for the past two weeks."

  "Where was he supposed to have been when I saw the car in Williamsburg?"

  "His wife said she wasn't sure of his schedule. Seems he sometimes hits a different city every day, buzzes all over the place, including out of state. His territory goes as far north as Boston. As best she could remember, around the time you're talking about, he was in Tidewater, then was flying out of Newport Mews, heading to Massachusetts."

  I fell silent, and Marino interpreted this as embarrassment, which it wasn't. I was thinking.

  "Hey, what you done was good detective work. Nothing wrong with writing down a plate number and checking it out. Should make you happy you wasn't being followed by some spook."

  I did not respond.

  He added, "Only thing you missed was the color. You said the Lincoln was dark gray. Aranoff's ride is brown."

  Later that night lightning flashed high over thrashing trees as a storm worthy of summer unloaded its violent arsenal. I sat up in bed, browsing through several journals as I waited for Captain Montana's telephone line to clear.

  Either his phone was out of order or someone had been on it for the past two hours. After he and Marino had left, I had recalled a detail from one of the photographs that reminded me of what Anna had said to me last. Inside Jill's apartment, on the carpet beside a La-Z-Boy chair in the living room, was a stack of legal briefs, several out-of-town newspapers, and a copy of the New York Times Magazine. I have never bothered with crossword puzzles. God knows I have too many other things to figure out. But I knew the Times crossword puzzle was as popular as manufacturer's coupons.

  Reaching for the phone, I tried Montana's home number again. This time I was rewarded.

  "Have you ever considered getting Call Waiting?" I asked good-naturedly.

  "I've considered getting my teenage daughter her own switchboard," he said.

  "I've got a question."

  "Ask away."

  "When you went through Jill's and Elizabeth's apartments, I'm assuming you went through their mail."

  "Yes, ma'am. Checked out their mail for quite a while, seeing what all came in, seeing who wrote them letters, went through their charge card bills, that sort of thing."

  "What can you tell me about Jill's subscriptions to newspapers that were delivered by mail?"

  He paused.

  It occurred to me. "I'm sorry. Their cases would be in your office.…"

  "No, ma'am. I came straight home, have 'em right here. I was just trying to think, it's been a long day. Can you hold on?"

  I heard pages turning.

  "Well, there were a couple of bills, junk mail. But no newspapers."

  Surprised, I explained Jill had several out-of-town newspapers in her apartment. "She had to have gotten them from somewhere."

  "Maybe vending machines," he offered. "Lots of them around the college. That would be my guess."

  The Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, maybe, I thought. But not the Sunday New York Times. Most likely that had come from a drugstore or a newsstand where Jill and Elizabeth may routinely have stopped when they went out for breakfast on Sunday mornings. I thanked him and hung up.

  Switching off the lamp, I got in bed, listening as rain drummed the roof in a relentless rhythm. I pulled the covers more tightly around me. Thoughts and images drifted, and I envisioned Deborah Harvey's red purse, damp and covered with dirt. Vander, in the fingerprints lab, had finished examining it and I had looked over the report the other day.

  "What are you going to do?" Rose was asking me.

  Oddly, the purse was in a plastic tray on Rose's desk. "You can't send it back to her family like that."

  "Of course not."

  "Maybe we could just take out the charge cards and things, wash them off and send those?"

  Rose's face twisted in anger. She shoved the tray across her desk and screamed, "Get it out of here! I can't stand it!"

  Suddenly I was in my kitchen. Through the window I saw Mark drive up, only the car was unfamiliar, but I recognized it somehow. Rummaging in my pocketbook for a brush, I frantically fixed my hair. I started to run to the bathroom to brush my teeth, but there wasn't time. The doorbell rang, just once.

  He took me in his arms, whispering my name, like a small cry of pain. I wondered why he was here, why he was not in Denver.

  He kissed me as he pushed the door with his foot. It slammed shut with a tremendous bang.

  My eyelids flew open. Thunder cracked. Lightning lit up my bedroom again and then again as my heart pounded.

  The next morning I performed two autopsies, then went upstairs to see Neils Vander, section chief of the fingerprints examination lab. I found him inside the Automated Fingerprint Identification System computer room deep in thought in front of a monitor. In hand was my copy of the report detailing the examination of Deborah Harvey's purse, and I placed it on top of his keyboard.

  "I need to ask you something."

  I raised my voice over the computer's pervasive hum.

  He glanced down at the report with preoccupied eyes, unruly gray hair wisping over his ears.

  "How did you find anything after the purse had been in the woods so long? I'm amazed."

  He returned his gaze to the monitor. "The purse is nylon, waterproof, and the credit cards were protected inside plastic windows, which were inside a zipped-up `Compartment. When I put the cards in the superglue tank, a lot of smudges and partials popped up. I didn't even need the laser."

  "Pretty impressive."

  He smiled a little.

  "But nothing identifiable," I pointed out.

  "Sorry about that."

  "What interests me is the driver's license. Nothing popped up on it."

  "Not even a smudge," he said.

  "Clean?"

  "As a hound's tooth."

  "Thank you, Neils."

  He was off somewhere again, gone in his land of loops and whorls.

  I went back downstairs and looked up the number for the 7-Eleven Abby and I had visited last fall. I was told that Ellen Jordan, the clerk we had talked to, would not be in until nine P.M. I mowed through the rest of the day without stopping for lunch, unaware of the passing hours. I wasn't the slightest bit tired when I got home.

  I was loading the dishwasher when the doorbell rang at eight P.M. drying my hands on a towel, I walked anxiously to the front door.

  Abby Turnbull was standing on the porch, coat collar turned up around her ears, face wan, eyes miserable. A cold wind rocked dark trees in my yard and lifted strands of her hair.

  "You didn't answer my calls. I hope you won't refuse me entrance into your house," she said.

  "Of course not, Abby. Please."

  I opened the door wide and stepped back.

  She did not take off her coat until I invited her to do so, and when I offered to hang it up, she shook her head and draped it over the back of a chair, as if to reassure me that she did not intend to stay very long. She was dressed in faded denim jeans and a heavy-knit maroon sweater flecked with lint. Brushing past her to clear paperwork and newspapers off the kitchen table, I detected the stale odor of cigarette smoke and a pungent hint of sweat.

  "Something to drink?" I asked, and for some reason I could not feel angry with her.

  "Whatever you're having would be fine."

  She got out her cigarettes while I fixed both of us a drink.

  "It's hard to start," she said when I was seated. "The articles were unfair to you, to say the least. And I know what you must be thinking."

  "It's irrelevant what I'm thinking. I'd rather hear what's on your mind."

  "I told you I've made mistakes."

  Her voice trembled slightly. "Cliff Ri
ng was one of them."

  I sat quietly.

  "He's an investigative reporter, one of the first people I got to know after moving to Washington. Very successful, exciting. Bright and sure of himself. I was vulnerable, having just moved to a new city, having been through… well, what happened to Henna."

  She glanced away from me.

  "We started out as friends, then everything went too fast. I didn't see what he was like because I didn't want to see it."

  Her voice caught and I waited in silence while she steadied herself.

  "I trusted him with my life, Kay."

  "From which I am to conclude that the details in his story came from you," I said.

  "No. They came from my reporting."

  "What does that mean?"

  "I don't talk to anybody about what I'm writing," Abby said. "Cliff was aware of my involvement in these cases, but I never went into detail about them. He never seemed all that interested."

  She was beginning to sound angry. "But he was, more than a little. That's the way he operates."

  "If you didn't go into detail with him," I said, "then how did he get the information from you?"

  "I used to give him keys to my building, my apartment, when I'd go out of town so he could water my plants, bring the mail in. He could have had copies made."

  Our conversation at the Mayflower came back to me.

  When Abby had talked about someone breaking into her computer and had gone on to accuse the FBI or CIA, I had been skeptical. Would an experienced agent open a word processing file and not realize that the time and date might be changed? Not likely.

  "Cliff Ring went into your computer?"

  "I can't prove it, but I know he did," Abby said. "I can't prove he's been going through my mail, but I know he has. It's no big deal to steam open a letter, reseal it, and then place it back in the box. Not if you've made a copy of the mailbox key."

  "Were you aware he was writing the story?"

  "Of course not. I didn't know a damn thing about it until I opened the Sunday paper! He'd let himself into my apartment when he knew I wouldn't be there. He was going through my computer, anything he could find. Then he followed up by calling people, getting quotes and information, which was pretty easy, since he knew exactly where to look and what he was looking for."

  "Easy because you had been relieved of your police beat. When you thought the Post had backed off from the story, what your editors had really backed away from was you."

  Abby nodded angrily. "The story was passed into what they viewed as more reliable hands. Clifford Ring's hands," she said.

  I realized why Clifford Ring had made no effort to contact me. He would know that Abby and I were friends. Had he asked me for details about the cases, I might have said something to Abby, and he had wanted to keep Abby in the dark about what he was doing for as long as possible. So Ring had avoided me, gone around me.

  "I'm sure he…" Abby cleared her throat and reached for her drink. Her hand shook. "He can be very convincing. He'll probably win a prize. For the series."

  "I'm sorry, Abby."

  "It's nobody's fault but my own. I was stupid."

  "We take risks when we allow ourselves to love - "

  "I'll never take a risk like that again," she cut me off. "It was always a problem with him, one problem after another. I was always the one making concessions, giving him a second chance, then a third and a fourth."

  "Did the people you work with know about you and Cliff?

  "We were careful." She got evasive.

  "Why?"

  "The newsroom is a very incestuous, gossipy place."

  "Certainly your colleagues must have seen the two of you together."

  "We were very careful," she repeated.

  "People must have sensed something between you. Tension, if nothing else."

  "Competition. Guarding my turf. That's what he would say if asked."

  And jealousy, I thought. Abby never had been good at hiding her emotions. I could imagine her jealous rages. I could imagine those observing her in the newsroom misconstruing, assuming she was ambitious and jealous of Clifford Ring, when that was not the case. She was jealous of his other commitments.

  "He's married, isn't he, Abby?"

  She could not stop the tears this time.

  I got up to refresh our drinks. She would tell me he was unhappy with his wife, contemplating divorce, and Abby had believed he would leave it all for her. The story was as threadbare and predictable as something in Ann Landers. I had heard it a hundred times before. Abby had been used.

  I set her drink on the table and gently squeezed her shoulder before I moved back to my chair.

  She told me what I expected to hear, and I just looked at her sadly.

  "I don't deserve your sympathy," she cried.

  "You've been hurt much more than I have."

  "Everybody has been hurt. You. Pat Harvey. The parents, friends of these kids. If the cases hadn't happened, I'd still be working cops. At least I'd be all right professionally. No one person should have the power to cause such destruction."

  I realized she was no longer thinking about Clifford Ring. She was thinking of the killer.

  "You're right. No one should have the power. And no one will if we don't allow it."

  "Deborah and Fred didn't allow it. Jill, Elizabeth, Jimmy, Bonnie. All of them."

  She looked defeated. "They didn't want to be murdered."

  "What will Cliff do next?"

  I asked.

  "Whatever it is, it won't involve me. I've changed all my locks."

  "And your fears that your phones are bugged, that you're being followed?"

  "Cliff's not the only one who wants to know what I'm doing. I can't trust anyone anymore!"

  Her eyes filled with angry tears. "You were the last person I wanted to hurt, Kay."

  "Stop it, Abby. You can cry all year and it won't do me any good."

  "I'm sorry…"

  "No more apologies."

  I was very firm but gentle.

  She bit her bottom lip and stared at her drink.

  "Are you ready to help me now?"

  She looked up at me.

  "First, what color was the Lincoln we saw in Williamsburg last week?"

  "Dark gray, the interior leather dark, maybe black," she said, her eyes coming alive.

  "Thank you. That's what I thought."

  "What's going on?"

  "I'm not sure. But there's more."

  "More what?"

  "I've got an assignment for you," I said, smiling. "But first, when are you returning to D.C.? Tonight?"

  "I don't know, Kay."

  She stared off. "I can't be there now."

  Abby felt like a fugitive, and in a sense she was. Clifford Ring had run her out of Washington. It probably wasn't a bad idea for her to disappear for a while.

  She explained, "There's a bed and breakfast in the Northern Neck, and - "

  "And I have a guest room," I interrupted. "You can stay with me for a while."

  She looked uncertain, then confessed, "Kay, do you have any idea how that would look?"

  "Frankly, I don't care at the moment."

  "Why not?"

  She studied me closely.

  "Your paper has already fried me in deep fat. I'm going for broke. Things will either get worse or better, but they won't stay the same."

  "At least you haven't been fired."

  "Neither have you, Abby. You had an affair and acted inappropriately in front of your colleagues when you dumped coffee in your lover's lap."

  "He deserved it."

  "I'm quite sure he did. But I wouldn't advise your doing battle with the Post. Your book is your chance to redeem yourself."

  "What about you?"

  "My concern is these cases. You can help because you can do things I can't do."

  "Such as?"

  "I can't lie, hoodwink, finagle, cheat, badger, sneak, snipe, snoop, and pretend to be something or somebody
I'm not because I'm an officer of the Commonwealth. But you have great range of motion. You're a reporter."

  "Thanks a lot," she protested as she walked out of the kitchen. "I'll get my things from the car."

  It was not very often I had houseguests, and the bedroom downstairs was usually reserved for Lucy's visits. Covering the hardwood floor was an Iranian Dergezine rug with a brightly colored floral design that turned the entire room into a garden, in the midst of which my niece had been a rosebud or a stinkweed, depending on her behavior.

  "I guess you like flowers," Abby said absently, laying the suit bag on top of the bed.

  "The rug is a little overpowering in here," I apologized. "But when I saw it I had to buy it, and there was no place else to put it. Not to mention, it's virtually indestructible, and since this is where Lucy stays, that point is important. " "Or at least it used to be."

  Abby went to the closet and opened the door. "Lucy's not ten years old anymore."

  "There should be plenty of hangers in there."

  I moved closer to inspect. "If you need more…"

  "This is fine."

  "There are towels, toothpaste, soap in the bath."

  I started to show her.

  She had begun unpacking and wasn't paying any attention.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed.

  Abby carried suits and blouses into the closet. Coat hangers screeched along the metal bar. I watched her in silence, experiencing a prick of impatience.

  This went on for several minutes, drawers sliding, more coat hangers screeching, the medicine cabinet in the bathroom wheezing open and clicking shut. She pushed her suit bag inside the closet and glanced around, as if trying to figure out what to do next. Opening her briefcase, she pulled out a novel and a notebook, which she placed on the table by the bed. I watched uneasily as she then tucked a.38 and boxes of cartridges into the drawer.

  It was midnight when I finally went upstairs. Before settling into bed, I dialed the number for the 7-Eleven again.

  "Ellen Jordan?"

  "Yeah? That's me. Who's this?"

  I told her, explaining, "You mentioned to me last fall that when Fred Cheney and Deborah Harvey came in, Deborah tried to buy beer, and you carded her."

  "Yeah, that's right."

  "Can you tell me exactly what you did when you carded her?"