by Shane Lusher
I waved to Janine and went over to the metal detector, but she motioned for me to come over.
“Randy’s not in,” she said and held out her hand. “I can take those.” She was looking at me over her orange bifocals.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think I’m supposed to give them directly to him.”
She took off her glasses and studied me.
“How long do you think I have been here, Dana?”
I shrugged.
“I’ve been employed by this department through five sheriffs,” she said, and lowered her voice. “And I’ll still be here when Randy Dubois is long gone.”
I walked slowly over to the counter and handed her the file folders.
“Roe and Sweeney,” I said.
She looked at them and then placed the files in a drawer behind her desk. I turned to leave, but she called me back with a strange sound that was halfway between a click of her tongue and a whistle.
“Never heard anything like that before,” I said.
“Years of practice.” She held out a letter-sized envelope.
“What’s this?” I said as I took it out of her hand.
“You’ve been served. This your first subpoena?” she asked, looking at me skeptically. “That kind of surprises me,” she said. “Considering your record.”
She sniffed and looked up at me. “You know, you almost look like a cop,” she said. “Actually, if I didn’t know your story, I mean your whole story.” At this, she took a breath mint from the bowl on the counter and unwrapped it. “Then I would say you were a cop.” She placed the mint in her mouth and began chewing.
“Why do you say that?” I asked, leaning on the counter.
She thought about it, looking down at the screen and then back up again, cocking her head to one side. “You tell me.”
“Okay,” I said. No reason not to humor her. “Let's see. For one thing, I'm thirty-eight, and I don't have a belly.”
She laughed; a crisp, clean, pleasant sound. “Down here, that would just about amount to it,” she said. “You’re in shape. But that could just make you military. Not all cops are in shape.”
I looked up, through the glass into the back of the building, and then back down at her.
“No,” she said, and shook her head. “Anybody your age wouldn't be military. Everybody in the service who shows up around here is under twenty-five.”
“So what is it, then?” I asked.
“You're shifty,” she said.
I laughed. “I don't think I've ever actually heard anybody use that in conversation.”
She threw up her arms. “Come on,” she said. “You keep checking for a badge. Why do you do that?”
I wasn’t even aware of any such behavior, but I had time to kill, so what the hell. You have to stay on the good side of the woman who runs any office.
“Something you used to wear on your hip,” she said, pointing.
Self-consciously, I moved my left hand away from my belt.
“See?” she said.
I blinked, at a loss for a moment.
“Corporate ID,” I said finally. “You could either wear it on your belt or your shirt pocket. I hated that.”
She nodded. “But you’re still always looking for it,” she said. She chewed her mint thoughtfully. “When my father was in the nursing home, he didn’t know anybody. Didn’t know who I was, didn’t know where he was, didn’t even know his own name.
“But every day, he would get up, shower, shave, put on a suit, and walk down the hall to the activity room. Somebody would give him a stack of papers and a pen, and he would sit there, signing his name all day long. He did that every day, up until he died.”
And here I was, stuck out in the sticks, doing much the same thing. Even though I could have gotten by wearing cargo pants and a wife beater every single day of my life, I still got up, showered and shaved, and put on a suit.
“Jesus,” I said, my hand going automatically to my throat to adjust my tie. “Sorry. How long did he do that?”
“Five years,” she said. “That was the saddest part. I could deal with him not knowing me, but I think if he’d just been vegetative, you know, or catatonic, staring at the TV all day long, then it would have been easier to visit him.
“Think about it. You do a job forever, and then finally you retire. Then, when you should be enjoying life, and spending your final years with family and friends, you revert back. Back to the job—to the chain—that kept you away from your family, away from your friends. For your whole life.”
I looked at her for a moment, wondering how to respond.
“Stop checking for that ID card,” she said. Her voice was lower now, and raspy. “It’s not there anymore.”
That was some kind of a warning. Get out whole you’re still young. That had actually been my plan, only a few months before, when I left Chicago.
“Thanks,” I said. I turned to go.
“And don’t forget you’ve been served,” she said. She pointed at the envelope. “You have to be at the courthouse at nine tomorrow morning. It’s just a deposition, honey, no worries. They might even give you a visitor’s ID you can carry around on your belt.”
She was smiling as she went back to her computer screen.
“Okay,” I said. “Any pointers?”
Just then the telephone rang.
“Yeah,” she said as she put her hand on the phone. “Don’t make us look like a bunch of assholes.”
Nineteen
Kelly lived in Lake Windsor, a subdivision near the river on the north side of Pekin, in a tiny one-story ranch that was essentially a huge room, a bedroom and a bath.
Her daughter, Casey, who’d slept in the same bedroom with Kelly until she was eight years old or so, now had a basement room, which was a basement only in the sense that half of it was in the ground. The rest opened up onto the wooded slope that led down to the lake.
The name was a misnomer. There was no actual Lake Windsor. Lake Windsor was the subdivision. It sat on Pekin Lake, which was in and of itself not really a lake but a side arm of the Illinois River, although it really had no discernible current.
Like the river itself, however, it was dark and murky, filled with the same rich black runoff that annually carted off millions of cubic inches of prime topsoil. Occasional eddying swirls cut the surface of the lake. Fishermen told their children these were caused by catfish, most likely, though some said that sturgeon were coming back for the first time in two hundred years.
The old timers who knew said it was just Asian carp.
Lake Windsor had only one road, Lake Windsor Road (the real estate developers who’d built it in the eighties hadn’t exactly been interested in originality), which managed to swirl and curve around three-quarters of the lake through courts and backwaters and main thoroughfares set up like boulevards, with oak trees lining the middle. The trees would one day be majestic; currently, at only twenty-five years, they looked like baby maples.
Kelly’s house was on a cul-de-sac halfway around the lake, but the name of the road it stood on was still Lake Windsor Road.
I walked up the driveway and opened the front door. I knew better than to knock.
“Anybody home?” I called out.
“Out back!” came Kelly’s voice from the patio.
Rather than take off my shoes, I took the long way around through the yard, past the massive lilac bushes Kelly had planted to wrap around the front of the house.
I sank into a soft spot near a gutter on my way. I tried to remember when it had rained the last time, but I knew that the lushness of Kelly’s yard didn’t rely on natural irrigation alone.
Pots of Bougainvillea lined the patio. Come fall, she would have to move those inside. Next to the patio table, in lieu of an umbrella, stood the largest banana tree I’d ever seen outside of Florida.
She referred to it, specifically to its pitcher-like blossom, as her “penis tree,” but only when the kids weren’t around.
“Erin!” I called. She turned and a stream of water caught her on the cheek.
“Dana!” she squealed and ran up the slope to envelop me in a wet bear hug. “I missed you.”
She squinted up at me, the sun in her face.
“I missed you, too,” I said.
“Shooting match?” she said, hoisting the toy gun in my direction.
“Not right now,” I said.
“Come on,” she said, hopping up and down.
“Sorry, babe, next time,” I said. I pointed at my suit and spread my hands, palms out.
“Fine,” she pouted and ran back down to the dock.
Kelly was sitting at the patio table, one leg crossed over her knee. The leg bounced as she paged through a magazine.
“Hi,” I said.
She looked up, shielding her eyes from the sunlight with her hand. “Did you happen to bring Java’s?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Was I supposed to?”
She looked down at her magazine and then set it down on the table before looking up again.
“Did you talk to Dubois?”
“No,” I said. “I got subpoenaed, though.”
“I did, too,” she frowned. “I’m being sued for suppressing evidence,” she said. “I’m so going to nail his ass to the wall.”
“Who?” I asked. “Dubois? Dubois claims it was Tad’s fault.”
“How could it be Tad’s fault?” she asked. She put on her sunglasses and looked off toward the lake. “I guess that makes me an accomplice.” She snorted. “Back when I did Roe’s autopsy, we didn’t even know what we were looking at. Just a V-shaped incision on the back of the neck. All of that was in the report. And Sweeney I just did on Tuesday.”
“Well, then I don’t see how you have anything to worry about,” I said.
I took in the lake and the girls. Casey hit Erin with a long swathe of water and she screamed and jumped into the lake.
Kelly looked over at me. “You want a beer?” she asked. She’d removed her sunglasses, her eyes searching.
“Kelly,” I said.
“Yes?” The girls were getting out canoes, and when Kelly stood up to get a better look, I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed before what she was wearing: a bikini top with an orange sarong tied around her waist. I remembered that she’d always been a runner in high school. Judging by her figure, she still did that.
I really needed to pay more attention to things.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Don’t what?” she asked. She rested her hand on her hip and smiled coyly as she looked down at me.
“Don’t test me,” I said. “We’re too old for that. I’m not going to drink a beer at eleven o’clock in the morning.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Anyway, how’s the Colby Trueblood investigation going?”
“I haven’t done anything with that yet,” I said. “I’m more worried about what Dave Rassi told me last night.”
I looked at her stomach, and then back up at her face.
“He says Dubois switched the gun in Tad’s case.”
“He what?”
I filled her in on everything Rassi had told me, finishing up with my concern about the fingerprints. When I was done I looked at Kelly, finding my eyes drifting down to her bikini top.
“Sounds made up to me,” she said. She shook her head.
“You think? Dave seemed pretty convinced.”
“Well, then, he’s pretty convinced that the story he made up could work,” she said. She sat back down.
“You think Dave made it up?”
“Which is more likely?” she asked. “Dubois is a bungling idiot, sure, but he’s not somebody capable of orchestrating a full-on conspiracy.”
“So what, you think Dave has something to cover up?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “No. I just don’t believe him, that’s all. It sounds to me like he’s trying to complicate things.”
“If I believe him, it means Dubois had something to do with Tad’s murder,” I said. “It means that maybe he set the whole thing up. If I don’t believe him, then it means that Rassi had something to do with it.
“Either way, it’s a lead worth looking into, don’t you think?”
“How, Dana?” she asked. She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. “You said yourself there’s no evidence.”
“Maybe I can uncover something in Dubois' past,” I said.
“And what good would that do?” She shook her head. After a moment, she got up from the table and went inside. When she returned a minute later, she had two bottles of water. She set one down in front of me.
“Girls!” she called out. “Casey! Erin! Lunch is in five minutes!”
She sat down and looked at me. “I think you need to be more worried about why Dave is feeding you this story.”
“That just doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“I think he’s capable of it,” she said. “He can be pretty manipulative. I know that he leaks information to the papers.”
That caught me up for a moment. Leaked information had been a thorn in Tad’s side the entire five years he’d been Sheriff. “You think Rassi would do that to Tad? Dubois I could understand, but Tad?”
She opened her bottle of water and took a drink. “I think Dave needs to feel that he’s in the limelight,” she said. “I don’t think he’d see something like that as betrayal.”
“Okay, but this is a big thing, Kelly. This isn’t talking to the papers. This is my brother’s murder.”
She looked me in the eyes. “Dana,” she said. “I don’t need to think about that. I knew Tad. Dave Rassi fit together well with him.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
“How well did you know your brother, Dana? Now that he’s gone, can we be honest about him?”
“Where is this coming from?” I asked her. “You were his girlfriend, his partner-”
“I was not,” she began loudly and then, looking at the girls floating by in their canoes, she lowered her voice. “We were friends,” she said. “That was it.”
“I thought-” I began.
“I know,” she said. “But we were just friends. Strictly platonic.”
“He used to sleep over here all the time,” I protested.
“On the couch. He had to stay here, because of Erin.”
“She didn’t want to stay here alone?”
“He didn’t want to be without her,” she said. She stopped when the girls walked up from the lake. “Go in and change into dry clothes,” she said to both of them.
“But mom, we’re just going to go back in after lunch,” Casey said.
“I don’t care,” she said. “It’s not healthy to sit around in wet clothes.”
The girls argued, but they went inside all the same.
“Dana,” Kelly said. “Tad was a good man, but he wanted to be the only man.”
I looked away from her.
“Hey,” she said, waiting until I met her gaze. “I’m not talking about me here, okay? I’m talking about the sheriff’s department. You think he made Rassi his right-hand man because of Dave’s integrity?”
“I don’t want to listen to this,” I said.
“Hold on,” Kelly said. “I told you he was a good man. He was also a man who liked doing things on his own, and he didn’t like it if too many people got in his way. That’s why he never promoted Percy Trueblood, who’s always been a much better cop than Rassi ever will be.”
“That guy?” I asked. “He got his job because of who his father is.”
“Is that what Dave told you, too?” she asked. She was biting at her thumb.
I sat back down and sighed. “What do you have against Rassi? That he talks to the press?”
She looked back into the open door to the bottom floor. “I don’t like that he’s feeding you a bu
nch of bullshit,” she said before looking back at me.
“How can you be sure that what he’s telling me is bullshit?” I asked. “So what, he’s just jerking my chain for no reason?”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “You can’t tell me you believe it. I can see in the way you’re looking at me that you don’t believe it. It’s just ridiculous.”
She crossed her arms.
“So, you don’t believe him at all?”
Kelly rolled her eyes. “I really don’t know what to believe, okay?” she said, her voice softening. “Something weird is going on, though.”
“You mean other than three murders?”
She massaged the top of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. Then she got up, and I followed her upstairs into the kitchen.
“I’m telling you, Dana, this whole thing is really creepy,” she said.
“What thing?”
She made a vague gesture with her hands. ”All I did was fail to include the fact that Roe was killed — possibly, hypothetically, killed — with an arrowhead, which nobody had even thought about until Sweeney came up with an actual full wound in the back of his head two days ago.
“And now I’m being sued,” she said. She grimaced as she took a sip of her water. “I’ve never been sued before. I have a lawyer, of course, and pay enough in insurance, but I always figured if it ever happened to me, then it would come from a patient. Not from this stupid coroner job.”
She opened the refrigerator, got out an onion and a ceramic knife from a drawer, and began hacking away.
“Dubois asked me what I thought of you,” she said, changing the subject. “He seems to value my opinion.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“Or maybe he’s just good at charming women.”
“Really?”
She shuddered. “Cancel, cancel.”
“So what did you tell him?”
“About you?”
“Yes.”
“I told him what you’d expect me to,” she said. “That you did really well in Chicago, as far as I know, considering I didn’t really know you anymore then, but that I thought if he was going to bring in somebody else it would have been best to find someone from the state police, or maybe the feds.”
