New Blood

by Shane Lusher

  He leaned back again. “I was the one who found out about Maclaren,” he said in a low voice. “Not his being a suspect, but his being a non-issue.”

  “I thought his lawyer did,” I said.

  He smiled. “See, that’s what they want you to think,” he said. “I didn’t run it as a favor to them.”

  “Wait. You found out about it?” I asked. “How?”

  Nguyen laced his hands over his vast stomach and leaned back even farther in his chair. “Same way you find out about everything,” he said, pointing to his monitor. “Doesn’t take a genius.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t believe they didn’t check that earlier,” I said.

  “I can,” he said. “If you’d been around Dubois long enough, you’d understand.”

  “Tell me about him,” I said. “I already know you ran the story that got him out of office.”

  Nguyen snorted. “That was only the half of it,” he said. “And it was six years ago.”

  “Who’s your source in the sheriff’s department?” I asked.

  He folded his arms behind his head, sticking out his chest. “We don’t reveal our sources.”

  “Is it Rassi?” I asked. “Dave Rassi?”

  There was a flicker across Nguyen’s face, but it was gone almost as fast as it was there.

  “Why do you ask?” He grinned. He’d found something in his teeth again, and took it out, looked at it, and wiped it on his pants. “Did Rassi tell you to come talk to me?”

  I shook my head.

  He seemed to be pulling away from the conversation. His eyes had glazed over, and he was gazing out the window into the front office, thinking about deadlines and the evening edition, no doubt. Or weighing his options.

  “If you know something, Tuan, it doesn’t have to be on the record. Just tell me.”

  Tuan laughed. “‘Just tell me.’ You walk in here, asking questions, and after two minutes I’m supposed to tell you my life’s story? I’m under no obligation to you, and I am not under arrest, so anything I tell you would be construed in court as hearsay and tossed out.

  “I could tell you that I killed Colby Trueblood myself, and it wouldn’t even be admissible.”

  The conversation had taken an antagonistic twist I hadn’t been prepared for. I’d spoken to Nguyen a few times, and each time he’d struck me as a gregarious personality, open and without much complexity. It took me a moment to change gears.

  “Did you?” I asked. “Kill Colby Trueblood?” I put on a smile I hoped would be disarming.

  Tuan just looked at me.

  “So why be so reticent?”

  “Look, Dana,” Tuan said.

  I leaned forward.

  “Look,” he said again. “Forgive me if I don’t exactly trust the police, but around here—around anywhere—you figure out who calls the shots, and I didn’t get to my position by spouting off everything I know to anyone who walks in that front door. And certainly not to people I don’t really know.”

  “So, these are buttons that you don’t want to have pushed?” I said, realizing the conversation was going nowhere. I nodded and leaned back. I decided to change direction. “You stopped with the youth group? Why?”

  “I stopped with the youth group because after a while, I didn’t see the point,” Tuan said. “Kids get adopted, sometimes they go into foster care, and sometimes those places they go are good. Sometimes they’re bad. I didn’t feel like I was making any headway.”

  He shrugged. “Besides. I’m forty-two years old. What do I have in common with some thirteen-year-old kid who just wants a mom and a dad?”

  There was a break in his facade, in the regime he’d put up, for a brief moment. It was a sadness that spoke of nostalgia and lost time, but also something else.

  I couldn’t be sure what that was.

  “Why so bitter, Tuan?” I asked.

  The crack in his mask was gone.

  “I should ask you that,” he said. He stared at me. I didn’t even bother asking him what he knew about me. I stood up, ready to go, and Nguyen stood up as well, but I couldn’t leave just yet.

  “So, we’re both two old, bitter bastards,” I said. “But don’t you care that Colby Trueblood was killed?”

  He thought about that for a moment. “In my business?” he said. “You don’t get ahead running a newspaper, even a dying one, by caring too much.”

  He looked out the window at the two students, watched as the man stood up and poured himself a cup of coffee. He gave Nguyen a thumbs-up before returning to his desk.

  “But yeah, I suppose I still do.” He was distracted by something, thinking, as if he were weighing as to whether he should tell me something. “Roe, and then Colby, and then Sweeney,” he said.

  I must have looked surprised, because Tuan said, “Who do you think put that idea in Rassi’s head? You think he came up with that all by himself?”

  I remembered Rassi saying something along the lines of ‘why in the hell would we talk to that guy?’ just that morning. So he had lied to me about that. I wondered what else he’d lied to me about.

  “Dave’s a good guy,” I said.

  “Yup,” Tuan said, though his face said otherwise. I let that one go.

  “So, if you’re the idea guy, why don’t you give me some? If you do care, after all?”

  “Let’s just say I think you’re on the right track,” Tuan said, and then sat down. He picked up his mobile. “It was just a matter of time, considering everybody was adopted. Though I would’ve thought somebody else would have come knocking other than a computer librarian.”

  He began typing on his telephone. “Did you know you can order pizza by e-mail now?” he asked, concentrating on his screen.

  “Wait,” I said. “Roe and Sweeney were adopted. And Trueblood owns the adoption agency, so there’s Colby-”

  Tuan hit send on his phone and tossed it on the table.

  “Don’t be stupid,” he said. He scowled and threw his face to the side again, at an angle, looking at me.

  “I don’t really think this is very productive-”

  “No shit. Not if you haven’t found out yet that Colby Trueblood was adopted, too.”

  Twenty-Three

  Her legs were numb from squatting down.

  She stood up in the corn, the filthy smell all around her, and stretched. The air here was stifling, the grainy dust of the pollen working into her pores, the back of her throat, every crevasse and fold of her skin.

  A car went by on the street, in the space between the two houses she could see from her vantage point between the rows, and she hunkered down again.

  The old man came around the back. His face was illuminated in the halogen light above the backyard. His dog, a Doberman pinscher, began barking again, jumping and straining on his chain, and the man stooped to scratch it behind the ears and unhook its collar.

  She hadn’t counted on the dog. The dog was a problem.

  The old man limped, and he was out of breath. He paused and clutched at his chest and then sat down on the stoop for a moment and coughed.

  She knew he was dying. Way past his prime and lung-sick, barely able to walk up the two steps to unlock the back door.

  He hacked and spit into the dirt and then went into the house with the dog and disappeared momentarily from view. From this distance, she couldn’t tell if he locked the door, but so few people did in Tremont, a town largely untouched by any kind of crime except for driving under the influence, that she was nearly sure it would be unlocked. She would check it when he went to bed. But that wasn’t a problem. She could pick a lock, if she had to.

  The light in the kitchen switched on, and he appeared in the bay window. He set his briefcase down on the counter and pulled a bottle of liquor from its shelf. Then he got a tumbler from a cabinet over the sink and poured a healthy glass, his hands trembling as he raised it to his lips and drank.

  After a moment, he set the glass down and disappeared from view.

  He was g
one for quite some time, and had he not left his drink on the table, full like that, she might have given up watching him. But she knew drinkers. Nobody who drank out of a full glass would leave it sitting around. There were things people didn’t forget about.

  He reappeared finally, carrying a bag on a shoulder strap. Out of the bag came a tube that wound around to the back of his head, where it forked and followed over his ears to his nose.

  Oxygen. She smiled. She knew how the old man was going to die.

  She’d been seventeen when she killed her mother.

  Twelve years old to fourteen, and her mother drunk in front of the TV every single time, never saying a word, her daughter in the bedroom, his hands pressed down into the back of her head so that she could barely breathe, let alone scream.

  It had taken her two more years, after her father had gone. She’d had to figure out a few things.

  For example. How much when wet. How much when you were a woman, five foot five, a hundred and forty pounds, with a constant blood alcohol content of two-point-oh to three. How to make sure that there was only one entrance and one exit wound.

  She knew that if she didn’t do it right she’d have to take her mother out and bury her. If there were too many marks on the body, it wouldn’t look like an accident.

  She could have done that, she was throwing the shot put by then, all muscle and breasts, and she was strong enough to carry a hundred-and-forty-pound adult woman.

  But she’d settled on pain, and something, finally, that wasn’t the woman’s way, and so she came home one weekend after the last track meet of her junior year in high school, locked the door, drawn the shades, and turned up the music.

  Her mother was already dead in the water. That was how she looked after she’d dragged her from her moldy sofa into the bathtub. She’d seemed to know what was coming, and at first, she’d gone gently into that good night.

  Friday night had been for the sponge. You hooked that up to a wire that was attached to a dimmer switch and plugged it into the wall socket. Then you wet the sponge and applied it to the body, and that took her through to Saturday morning, washing her mother slowly, almost lovingly, with electricity.

  Kept feeding her alcohol. Vodka, the cheap kind her mother bought that somebody probably distilled in a plastic tub in a basement somewhere in Nevada. Down the throat and in the water, and she lie there like a slug, mewling like a kitten begging for milk.

  On Saturday afternoon she replaced the sponge with a broom handle wrapped in a towel.

  She’d had to wear rubber gloves for that one, watching as her mother writhed and yelled and passed out again and again. Too weak from the alcohol and the sleeping pills to even fight back, to try to get up, her fingernails scratching at the broom, at the porcelain, at her daughter’s hands as she moved it in and out, one hand on the broom, one hand on her mother’s throat.

  She’d not been too weak to feel pain. Two years was a lot of time, and she’d gotten the dosage just right.

  By Saturday evening, her mother was sober, shaking from the absence of the alcohol in her body, and she’d dissolved a few sleeping pills in the bottle of Vodka and forced it down her throat. Her mother hadn’t fought that; alcohol was the life force, and she drank greedily like a baby from the teat.

  She’d left her there overnight, wet in the tub with just an inch or two in the bottom. Couldn’t have her drowning in her sleep, not when the grand finale was still to come.

  But she needed to have time to get rid of the sponge and the broom, and that had taken her a few hours, the evidence thrown on a random garbage-burn she’d seen when she’d gone to a track meet in Chillicothe, just up the river from Peoria. Then she’d slept, and when she awakened after eight hours, she went back into the bathroom to finish.

  “You was adopted,” her mother told her as she brought in the drop cord she’d run from the socket behind the stove. That was 220 volts, not 110, and she wanted it to be over quickly, to look like it was supposed to.

  “He couldn’t help himself,” her mother had said, struggling to sit up, but slipping drunkenly back down into the tub, her legs a white, marbled mass of cellulite and varicose veins. “He was trying to help you become a woman.”

  She had nothing to say to her mother. She plugged the drop cord into the hair dryer and tossed the hair dryer into the tub.

  There was a pop as the power went out, or maybe the pop came from the two toenails that shot off the end of one of her mother’s feet, before the lights flickered off.

  Either way, she was dead.

  She stood up again, in the darkness, and rubbed at the raw spots the corn plants had left on her skin.

  She looked into the empty kitchen of the old man’s house, the light gone out, the glass of liquor taken back into the recesses of the dwelling.

  She would have to figure out a way to get rid of the dog.

  Twenty-Four

  With the next day’s edition sealed up and sent off electronically to the printer, Tuan was finishing up the project he’d begun just before Hartman had walked in.

  The laptop was in its bag on the floor. He hadn’t had time to get to his safe deposit box, so the scanned material, annotated in a document Tuan had taken from memory, was in his safe, and would remain there until the bank opened the next day.

  Now he was shredding the remnants of the hard copies. Later on, when he and Kara were finished with the evening’s festivities, he would burn them and then soak the ashes in bleach before tossing them into the river.

  Outside in the office, Kara was cleaning up. She did this every night, even though it wasn’t necessary. They had cleaning people who came every morning at six, long before anyone else would dream of gracing the front doors of the Pekin Observer.

  Tuan watched her buttocks moving beneath her black skirt, the muscles above her Achilles tendons working. Those calves would soon be zipped beneath a screen of leather, and he would be begging her to show them.

  He thought about what would happen if the police burst in with a search warrant. Most likely they would request that the safe be opened, and he would open it, and they would find the stick and the shredded photographs.

  And then he would go up for child pornography, because what else would they think if they found him in possession of hundreds of photos of pre-teens engaged in sexual intercourse with adults?

  But assuming he lived long enough in the Tazewell County Jail on that charge, he would soon be out on bail. And then he would take the rest of them down with him.

  He really didn’t want anything more out of life, he realized as he looked out to watch Kara bend down under the desk to retrieve the wastepaper basket.

  Except for this one thing that kept him going. Kara was the best at it, the best he’d had in a long time, at any rate, and he was ready for her.

  He knocked on the window and she turned around.

  “Stop doing that,” he said loudly. “We have people for that.”

  “I know,” she smiled. “I just like to leave it clean.”

  Tuan shook his head.

  “Why don’t you come back here?” he smiled.

  “Well,” she said. “In that case. Do you want me to go get the stuff out of my car?”

  There was only one kind of thing that could get him aroused sexually, and Kara was the only woman he’d ever met who seemed to understand that.

  She did more than understand it.

  He nodded. “Please.”

  He watched her walk away from him and out into the front room and out the door and leaned back, stroking his stomach in anticipation of what was to come. Kara showed no sign of growing tired of playing together, and that made him happy, happier than eating.

  He was smiling to himself, his eyes half-closed, when his phone rang.

  It was Rassi, drunk, calling from somewhere in Peoria.

  Tuan listened to what he had to say, and then hung up the phone without saying goodbye.

  When Kara returned with her gym bag full of toys,
Tuan had already locked the door to his office, his bag full of shredded documents in his hand, the memory stick in his pocket.

  “Got to take a rain check, babe,” Tuan said and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Work calls.”

  She opened her mouth, staring at him, most likely wondering what she was doing with a fat bastard such as himself.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She nodded and put the bag down on the table. “You coming back?” she asked. “Can I go with you?”

  “Not this time,” he said. “I’ll fill you in on it later.”

  He left her standing there, thinking that he had only a limited number of occasions he’d get to see that black skirt come off, but some things, unfortunately, were more important than sex.

  Just before he closed the door, he took a good long look at her ass.

  Twenty-Five

  The motion sensor light on the porch came on as I pulled into the driveway of Tad’s nineteen-forties bungalow on Royal Avenue, just behind the park overlooking the Lagoon. The other houses on the street were all darkened. I still couldn’t get used to the fact that people out here, away from the city, actually went to bed at a decent hour. It didn’t feel natural, and it always gave me the feeling the populace was hiding somewhere, waiting to jump out at me as soon as the Wicked Witch of the East got crushed by a flying house.

  I pulled out my phone and swiped it open and got Rassi’s number up on the screen.

  It rang three or four times, and when voice mail picked up I rang off and dialed again. When the message box clicked on a second time, I hung up again and texted him.

  Call me. Now. Dana.

  As I was putting the key into the lock in the front door, I thought I smelled cigarette smoke, though when I looked around, I couldn’t see anyone. I didn’t really know the neighbors. One was an accountant for Caterpillar, and the other one I thought might be a hotel manager. I couldn’t recall seeing either one of them smoking.