by Shane Lusher
“You stay away from Tasha Roe,” he said.
“What-”
“She called,” he said. “She wanted to know why members of the sheriff’s department were harassing her.”
“I only-”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you were doing,” he said, looking at me. “You stay the hell away from her. I don’t know what kind of bullshit Dave has cooked up with you, but the only thing you will do is look at Colby Trueblood’s file.”
“Look, Sheriff,” I said. “I can’t just plug all of this into a computer and have it spit out somebody’s name. I have to get out there and knock on doors.
“You do know that, right?” I asked, unsure what Dubois was thinking.
“Shit,” he said, though his tone said that maybe that was what he had been hoping for. “The only thing I know is that this is the biggest cluster fuck I’ve ever come into contact with. You keep your head down, and you don’t mess anything up. You understand?”
I looked at him.
“And one thing you are not going to do,” he said. “You are not going to get access to your brother’s case.”
“We’ll see what Glenn Holzel has to say about that,” I said.
“Are you stupid?” Dubois said, coming down off the windowsill. He pointed at me.
“You think things like that happen? Holzel’s not going to give you anything. He’s going to tell you what I’m going to tell you right now: Alisha Stamm killed your brother. You go snooping around, and you’re going to risk a mistrial. You want your brother’s killer to get off?”
I stood up. “No,” I said. “I don’t want that.”
Dubois nodded. “Good,” he said. “And hey. Your brother and I may not have always seen eye to eye on everything that went down around here, but any time anybody gets killed in the line of duty, I take it seriously.”
“Are we done?” I asked.
“We are,” Dubois said. He came around the desk and opened the door. “You can get a copy of Colby’s file from Dave. He knows that’s all you’re going to get. Wayne Trueblood can say what he wants, but I am still the acting sheriff of Tazewell County.”
He held out his hand, and I hesitated before taking it.
Dubois was shaking his head. “The things I’ve done for that man over the years.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Wayne Trueblood.”
Eight
The door breezed shut behind me on its springs, and I found myself staring at a painting on the beige sheetrock wall of the corridor.
My phone rang, and I looked at the caller ID. Kelly.
“Shit,” I said as I picked up the phone. “Hi, Kelly,” I answered.
“Dana,” she said.
“What’s up?”
“Erin wants to talk to you.”
There were fumbling noises at the other end, and while I waited, I looked at the painting. It was Midwestern noir, if that was what you called it. A frame print depicting a prairie landscape, deer and coyotes, and somehow, cornfields and a Native American dream catcher.
“Dana?”
“Hey, stinky, what’s up?”
“Nothing,” she said. “We’re going to the movies tonight. And Kelly’s going to take us to Doc’s.”
“Nice,” I said. “Fish and chips?”
“Yes,” she said.
There was silence at the other end. One thing I’d learned about talking to children on the telephone is that they lose the thread of conversation rather quickly.
“Erin?” I asked.
“Dana?”
It was Kelly.
“I guess that’s all she wanted to say,” I said.
Rassi walked over just then, and I held up an index finger.
“Yeah,” she said. “Hey, listen, Dana. I got tomorrow night off. Why don’t we go out to dinner?”
This was a new development.
“Okay,” I said.
I pointed to the print on the wall, and gave Rassi a thumbs up.
“I haven’t been out of the house with another adult since G.W. was president,” Kelly said. “I got a babysitter. Pick me up at 6:30?”
“Sounds fine to me,” I said. “See you then.”
I shook my head when I hung up the phone.
“What?” Dave said.
“I got a date with Kelly,” I said.
“I thought she couldn’t stand you,” he said.
“That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “Hey.” I pointed to the picture again. “You guys get this at Scotty Mart?”
“Shh,” Rassi said. “Dubois' daughter did that. She teaches at Vermilion.”
“I’m serious,” I said as we walked out into the room with the cubicles. “But wait, there’s more: old gravel roads, barns. Indian woman, braids. Nice.”
“What’s gotten you all giddy?” Rassi said as he sat down behind the desk and laced his hands behind his head. “You get the job?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess. And I’m not giddy. I think that was the first conversation I’ve had with Kelly where she didn’t accuse me of being a deadbeat.”
“Women,” Rassi said. “Can’t live with ‘em. Anyway, what did you think of him?”
“Who? Trueblood?”
“Yeah.”
“Seems like a nice enough guy,” I shrugged. “He also seems to have a lot of control over what decisions get made here.”
“You could say that,” Rassi said. “It’s the same everywhere. When you have money, you have benefits.”
“Like suppressing evidence?”
Rassi leaned forward and lowered his voice. “They told you?”
I nodded. “I can’t figure out why. I’m a complete stranger.”
“It’s because they want you to solve the case, that’s why,” Rassi said. “Maybe they figured you’d find out sooner or later.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Or maybe they figured nobody would believe me if I told.”
I’ve learned throughout life that there are gray areas everywhere, and whether or not the public knew that Colby had been coked up the night she was beaten to death probably didn’t matter in the long run.
And although the whole thing rang of complicity, whoever had killed her still deserved to be sitting in a prison cell.
“It just strikes me as funny,” I said.
Rassi shrugged. “He gets things done around here. And he gives away a lot of his money. Other than the big house out on Broadway and a condo in Gulf Shores, he doesn’t seem to spend all that much.”
“Anyway,” he said. “I copied the murder book for you.” He handed me a file and stood up, looking around the room before he sat back down. “Here’s Roe and Sweeney.”
I looked at the two files in his hands. “Dubois said I wasn’t supposed to have those,” I said.
“Which is why you aren’t going to tell him about it,” Rassi smiled.
“Still,” I said.
“Still what?” Rassi asked. “What’s in it for you?”
“I didn’t say that,” I said. “I just get the impression I need to stay on his good side.”
“Dubois doesn’t have a good side,” Rassi said quietly. “And you’re right. You need to watch your back.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just watch it, okay?” he said. “Now, sorry to eat and run, but I got to go. You need anything else?”
“What about Kelly?” I asked.
“What about her?”
“How did Tad get her to keep quiet about the coke? She did the autopsy, right?”
Rassi nodded. “Toxicology came back from the State Forensics lab,” he said. “But yeah, she knew about it. All I can say is, it wasn’t me.”
“Wouldn’t all of that be on record, then? At State Forensics?”
He was standing, now, his eyes skating around the room, resting on the corner with Dubois' office door.
“You think the lab technicians follow up on what we do with the evidence?” he asked. “Anyway, you want to know
anything else, you’ll have to ask Kelly.”
“I’ll do that.”
I was halfway out the door and looking into the sun, which seemed to be glaring straight across the horizon, even though it was sitting at a thirty-degree angle, when my phone rang.
“Dana,” a man’s voice boomed out. He was in a car, the hissing noise of the wind behind him through the car windows.
“Who’s speaking?”
“Wayne. Wayne Trueblood. We just talked-”
“Sorry, Wayne, I didn’t recognize your voice.”
“Yeah. Well. My apologies for not asking before, but my wife and I are having a little get together tonight. Just a few friends, steak, and beer. We’d like you to come. Bring your swimsuit.”
I opened my mouth to respond, thinking I’d beg off, but he’d already hung up.
I put the files onto the passenger seat in the car, and drove out of Pekin toward the farm, thinking about Kelly.
We had a date. What had she said, she hadn’t been out with another adult in years?
The last memory I had of sitting alone with her in a car was from twenty years before. I’d come to pick her up on the way to a track meet, and she’d gotten into my car, smiling, her blue eyes like sparkling ice.
“Your car smells like guy,” she’d said. She’d been smiling.
I’d glanced around at the trash on the floor, empty fast food wrappers and plastic cups, the lawn mower on the back seat.
“You mean gasoline and sweat?” I’d asked.
“Just…guy,” she’d said.
She’d laughed when she said it, and punched me in the shoulder.
I hadn’t been able to read her back then, and I wasn’t able to do it now, either.
I thought again, not for the first time, what a dumb fuck I could be when it came to women.
Nine
At home I changed into a pair of khaki linen pants I found at the bottom of a drawer, and slipped into the one polo shirt I owned. According to the clock on the microwave in the kitchen, it was five o’clock.
It was then that I realized Trueblood hadn’t said when his party was supposed to start.
When did people who lived in the country have dinner?
I thought about calling him and then decided against it. Instead, I settled on 7 P.M., cracked a beer and went out to sit on the porch.
I took Colby Trueblood’s case file with me, leaving Roe and Sweeney on the coffee table. I wasn’t sure yet whether I wanted to be looking at them at all, and since I’d already been warned off the case, I figured the best thing to do would be to leave them lie. For now, at least.
I put the folder on the table on the porch and stared out into the overgrown creek bottom.
My grandfather had always called the creek a “ditch,” and from my vantage point on the veranda that’s all that it was. It ran through Tremont and out past the sewage treatment plant, where it picked up a lot more water before flowing another half mile through my property.
My property. I still wasn’t used to calling it that. My father had deeded it to Tad and me before he’d gotten sick, and not long after that, two years ago, we’d sold off most of the farmland. My portion of the proceeds from the sale had brought two hundred thousand dollars and enough to invest so that I could live fairly comfortably for a while, if not into retirement.
It was out here that I’d learned to fish, learned to hunt, learned to ride a bike.
It was also here, when I was six years old, that my mother first left us, ran off to California, and then returned two years later to drop off Tad, whom she’d claimed was my father’s son.
The fact that Tad had been born well over eleven months after she’d gone had been something none of us had ever talked about. My father had raised Tad as his own, though the last name on his birth certificate had remained my mother’s.
When I opened the Trueblood file, I was surprised to find photos of Colby as she had been, in life.
In the first photograph she was wearing her hair in a ponytail, which was hanging out of a Chicago Cubs cap. She was grinning at the camera, mouth wide. In her right hand she was holding a flute. Her back was straight, standing at attention. On the back of the photo someone had written the date: September 1, last year.
Nine months before she’d been murdered.
In the second picture, she was standing next to a pool, wearing a bikini. The photographer had been situated across from her, taking a wide shot of the girl and a large house beyond, a sprawling one-story ranch with white vinyl siding.
It struck me as odd that a photo her parents had given to the police would be in swimwear, half naked, but someone had circled a spot next to her hip, along the edge of the bikini, and attached a blown-up section to the picture, showing that the spot, which initially appeared to be a birthmark, was actually a tattoo.
The tattoo was an unrecognizable sign that looked like some kind of Celtic rune resembling the mathematic symbol for pi. I flipped over the photo, which bore another date: July of last year.
So Colby had gotten the tattoo sometime prior to her seventeenth birthday, on September 30. As far as I knew, that was illegal.
I flipped through the file until I came across Maclaren. From what I could glean from the case file, Maclaren had been picked up because he had been seen near her, at the high school on the night that she’d disappeared.
Rather, someone had thought they’d seen him hanging around her car. That information had gone in under an anonymous tip. The call had come in on Monday, which would have meant Maclaren would have been out of Peoria County’s lockup by then.
Otherwise, there was no physical evidence linking him to the murder. Anonymous witness, the phone call the only statement. Nobody picked out of a lineup, nobody to testify, just the name of a known vagrant.
Seemed rather flimsy to me.
I flipped back to the front, turned the pages with the photos, and read the case summary.
On the night in May when she was murdered, Colby Trueblood had driven her SUV to the high school, where she’d parked it and left for a graduation party in the company of another student, a boy named James “Jimmy” Remmert.
They’d arrived at the party around 9 P.M. Remmert had provided this information, and it had been collaborated by other witnesses.
Next to Remmert’s statement someone had penciled in, lightly, one word: ‘Gay?’ Below that, another entry: ‘Best friend’.
From nine to eleven fifteen, the two remained at the party, which was also attended by Trevor Jones, eighteen. Jones was listed as the “ex-fiancé.”
A broken engagement at seventeen?
Trevor had been there with another woman, Meredith Pinnel, a girl from Metamora, twenty years old, a big blonde with long, straight hair that hung way past her shoulders, a slight gap in the upper teeth of her smile that made her interesting.
Her photo appeared to be from a school play, Pinnel up on stage, smiling. She was singing.
But then this: ‘Waitress, studying to be a tattoo artist’.
Where did you study that?
I made another note in my spiral to check that out. I also wrote down the names, because I kept having to flip back and forth—Remmert, best friend; Jones, ex-fiance; Pinnel, ex’s girlfriend—and paged through to the back of the file, to the autopsy and toxicology reports.
Trueblood had died sometime between 12:00 and 2 A.M. the next day, and the only toxicology listed was alcohol, 0.08 BAC, nothing else. No ecstasy, marijuana, meth, whatever it was they were taking downstate nowadays. And certainly no cocaine.
I returned to the summary.
Colby had left with Remmert between eleven-thirty and eleven forty-five. In his statement he said that he’d just taken her back to get her SUV at the high school, and then returned shortly afterward, alone.
Everyone was consistent and relatively accurate in their statements of time—Remmert had been gone for no longer than fifteen minutes, not long enough to kill someone, drive three miles out of town
, dump the body, and drive back—unless, of course, he'd hidden her body somewhere and then taken it out to the creek bed at Broadway and Springfield Road later on.
They’d looked long and hard at Remmert, I could see that, but his parents had been awake when he’d come into the house, at 1 A.M.—sober, according to them—and the others at the party had it that he’d been there until around 12:45.
The obvious candidate, the ex-fiancé, Trevor Jones, had left the party early, in the company of Meredith Pinnel, and had been in Metamora when she was killed.
Wayne Trueblood and his wife had been in Chicago the entire weekend. They’d gotten the news on the drive back down to Pekin, after Ray Coulter had discovered the body.
I went back in to get another beer, got my cell phone and dialed Rassi.
He picked up after two rings. “Shoot,” he said.
“Okay. First thing,” I said. “The fiancé. What’s up with that?”
“Cleared him,” Rassi said. “Solid alibi.”
“How solid?”
“Enough to clear him,” Rassi said.
“Can you give me a bit more than that?”
“It’s in the file, but okay,” he sighed. “He left the party around 11:30 and they found him in Metamora with Pinnel at 12:15.”
“They?”
“The municipal police. They found them screwing in the park,” Rassi said. “Ticketed them for indecent exposure.”
“How good are you guys on time of death?” I asked.
“She’d been dead for about fourteen hours when Coulter found her, around three,” Rassi said. “There was body temperature, rigor mortis and livor mortis. And the bugs.”
“Bugs?”
“You’ve seen CSI, you know. You can determine time of death based on which bugs are eating the corpse when and where it has been stored,” Rassi said.
“Yeah, but can you get it down to a two hour accuracy?” I asked.
“Ask Kelly,” Rassi said. “But the main way we figured time of death was that her cell phone had stopped at 12:35. The screen had been crushed when she was killed.”
