Noah dug his fingers into Izzy’s ribs and bared his teeth faux-menacingly.
“I killed me a man in Dodge fer lookin’ at me funny,” Izzy said in a Western drawl.
“Come on,” Noah said. “I’m serious.”
“I hardly think it’s fair,” Izzy said, “that you get so much of my biography spoon fed to you on a regular basis whilst maintaining your man of mystery schtick, good sir.”
“Schtick?”
“Schtick.”
Noah laughed quietly and raised his arms up to prop his hands behind his head on the damp pillow.
“All right, then,” he said. “What would you like to know?”
“I don’t know,” Izzy said. “Tell me something you don’t normally tell anyone.”
“I’m an open book.”
“Then make something up.”
“And honest to a fault, too.”
“You’re being evasive.”
“At least I look good doing it.”
Izzy sighed, then groaned, then sat up and tossed a soggy pillow directly at Noah’s face. Noah caught it, chuckled some more, and said, “Okay, okay. How’s this: when I was growing up in Stockdale, my best friend was a girl at my school named Amber Grant. She was the first person I came out to, and I was so scared of anyone else finding out she agreed to be my fake girlfriend for almost my whole freshman year in high school.”
“You had a high school beard?”
“I did. I felt just like Vincent Minelli.”
“That’s kind of amazing,” Izzy said. “And sweet as hell of her.”
“My old man thought I’d knock her up and we’d get married as soon as we turned eighteen. He was weirdly relieved when he found out.”
“I’d imagine so.”
Noah laughed to himself at the memory as Izzy stood, somewhat uncertainly, and struggled into a pair of pajama bottoms.
“I’m going to go put on some joe,” he said.
Noah snagged him by the elastic waist band and pulled him back down to the bed.
“Oh, no you don’t. You owe me some biography, handsome.”
“Like a steel trap.”
“That’s me.”
“Who is he?”
“An ex.”
Noah waited a moment, and when Izzy didn’t elaborate he said, “Fascinating story. How do you do it?”
Izzy rolled his eyes.
“Hector,” he said, “is bad news. Probably the only person I’ve ever known in my life where I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that he’s an unmitigated, to the core sociopath. I think he’s the scariest guy I ever met.”
“We’re talking about the lawyer here?”
“One and the same.”
“What—what did he do to you?”
“Nothing I can’t put behind me. He was a liar and a bastard to me. It’s what he did, what he does to others that scared me.”
“In his practice?”
Izzy nodded.
“Among other things,” he said.
“An ‘I was young’ kind of thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Guess I don’t have to worry about living up to that, then.”
“Guess you don’t,” Izzy said, and he left the room to make his coffee.
While Noah sat on the carpet to examine the record collection—offering the occasional comment when he could remember an artist or song from way back—Izzy perched in front of his desktop and browsed the vast web resources for the university downtown. At first he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for, so he more or less floated from page to page, department to department, scanning text and clicking links. He whizzed around the faculty pages for a bit, found himself perusing the campus Police Department from there, and eventually hit upon a link dump of counseling resources. In among the links he stopped scrolling at the Mental Health and Counseling Center’s suicide prevention program.
Much of what he found on that page concerned helping someone else with depression or suicidal ideation, but a couple of clicks away he found the address and phone number for the Center’s office on campus, plus a twenty-four hour crisis number for students only. Izzy went for his scratchpad on the living room coffee table, tattered as it was from all the scribbling and toting around. He copied down the information and noted the office would open tomorrow, Monday morning, at nine AM.
First he had his appointment with Forbes at the DPS lab. But then he was heading straight for the university. Izzy did not know if it started with the kids there or the ones on the fringes, in the squats, but he was certain between the lab results and the Mental Health center on campus, he’d find the link.
Noah said, “Jesus, my mother loved Kim Weston.” He was holding up a 45 and examining it like it was the Shroud of Turin.
Tapping the pad with his pen, Izzy said, “Tomorrow’s the day.”
“This might be the first time in recorded history anyone was excited about a Monday morning,” Noah said.
“I’m going to crack this open.”
“And then take whatever you find out to the police so they can handle it, yes?”
Izzy screwed his mouth up to the side.
“Any way it gets resolved,” he said.
Noah slid the 45 back into its place on the shelf and stood up from the floor.
“Izzy,” he said, “what if she really did do this to herself? What if it was just an OD, or if she intended to kill herself?”
Izzy said, “Then I’ll know.”
Thirty-Four
All the way down Airport to Guadalupe, Izzy yawned. He’d slept through the night with minimal interruption, but he wasn’t accustomed to nocturnal sleep. Worse still, he was going to have to be up most of the day and be back in the ER come eleven PM. The schedule shift alone was knocking him for a loop, and the exhaustion, he feared, would do him in. If he was yawning his head off now, he dreaded the wee hours of the night when he’d have already been up for most of a full day.
The four story monolith housing the Department of Public Safety’s crime lab came into view as Izzy drove parallel with Waller Creek, the sun hanging just behind the building and lending a beatific glow to an otherwise bleak feat of architecture. He noted Forbes’ car in the lot when he pulled in, and she climbed out when he parked beside her, paper cup in hand. She looked as meticulously put together as ever and regarded him impassively, walking up to join her. A mild scent wafted on the slight breeze past her shoulders and hair, sweet and warm.
At the sight of his flared nostrils, Forbes said, “Sandalwood. Got it at Banana Republic, thanks for noticing. Here’s your ABG, by the way.”
She withdrew a twice-folded report, three pages deep and stapled, from her coat pocket and passed it to Izzy.
“Same as Ramos. Elevated helium in the artery. This guy used before, had the scars on his feet and legs to prove it. But your acumen paid off. Come on, she’ll meet us inside.”
Forbes started walking and Izzy struggled to keep up and look at the report at the same time.
“And she’d be?”
“Janet Stokes. Known her for years, we’ve worked on a few of the same cases, trials, what have you. What did you do to your foot?”
“Twisted my ankle chasing a girl.”
“Something wrong with flowers and candy?” Forbes said, opening the door for him. In the shade from the morning sun the air was uncommonly cool. Inside, it was downright cold. “Maybe I’m just old fashioned. Look, there she is.”
Across the frigid lobby an Amazonian woman strode up in a gray, knee-length skirt, matching gray blouse, and white lab coat. She wore her chestnut-brown hair up and had enormous gray eyes that looked perpetually surprised. They met in the middle, where Izzy realized she dwarfed him by a good five inches. Forbes brought the woman into a hug that lasted most of a minute. Izzy stared.
“Alana, you look terrific,” the woman said.
“Janet, this is Izzy Bishop, my precocious protégé,” Forbes said, sidestepping the compliment. “He just might be a
n FN or an FNDI one of these days.”
Janet extended a long-fingered hand and delivered a strong handshake to go with it. She smiled, showing enormous, bright white teeth.
Izzy said, “Pleased to meet you.”
“I’m off,” Forbes said. “Work to do. Play nice, children.”
Janet giggled at Forbes’ cool brevity and said, “This way, Izzy.”
She led the way to a bank of elevators, and he followed her inside when a car dinged and slid open. To his surprise, she pressed the button for the basement floor.
“Why is it everything we do is always subterranean?” he said as the elevator doors slid shut.
“You and I both deal with violence and death,” Janet said. “Nasty business. Most people would rather keep it all underground where they can’t see it and don’t have to think about it. Even hospital and law enforcement people.”
Izzy said, “Wusses.”
She giggled some more, her laugh and voice far higher in pitch than he would ever have guessed for a woman so big.
The light for ‘B’ came on and the elevator dinged again. Janet stepped out, her flats slapping the cold, white tiles of a well-lit hallway with office doors on either side. She turned to the left. Izzy followed.
At the end of the hall, past the Quality Assurance office and what looked like several storage rooms, Janet swiped her ID card across a reader and opened a door marked crime laboratory, austin dps. Inside was a large room that reminded Izzy of college chemistry labs, replete with high desk stations and clean white counter spaces where various pieces of unfathomable equipment from computers to high tech microscopes to an old-fashioned DNA marker profiling system were set-up. There were filing cabinets and fuming chambers and a massive white evidence drying cabinet. Glass-encased workstations, hooded workstations, and a large boxy piece of equipment that looked to Izzy like a stove all caught his eye. Through open doors to connecting rooms or through small windows, he observed different colored lights—blue, green, black. On one workstation a balding man with huge goggles and a thin red beard examined a collection of carefully separated seed pods. Izzy gawped at it all.
“It’s not quite like on TV,” Janet said, “but still pretty cool.”
“I like the lab coats,” he said. “Très chic.”
“Come on in here,” she said, pushing a door open behind the seed man. “I’ll go over what I found for you and Alana.”
In the side room Janet moved around a table in the middle, on top of which rested some of the items Izzy recovered from the scene. The cigarette butts were neatly arranged on one side, the bottles on the other. Between them she had some print-outs and a tablet. She tapped the tablet’s screen and it came aglow. Izzy lingered in the doorway, waiting for her.
“I’ll start with the cig—come in, I won’t bite.” Izzy advanced the table, reddening. “I’ll start with the cigarettes, because they didn’t yield anything useful. If you look at the ends, they weren’t smoked down to the filter, but rather the filters were ripped off. So there’s no saliva or anything usable in that regard, and the best I could get fuming them for prints was a partial, the very edge of a thumb, that I couldn’t get a match for.”
“So far, so bad,” Izzy said.
“That’s not necessarily all bad news,” Janet said. “That’s a pretty unusual habit. The brand isn’t too common, and generally smokers don’t rip off a filter. They either smoke them that way or buy them filterless. I can’t tell you what it means, but it’s worth noting.”
Izzy stiffened. He regretted not having brought the cigarette ends he’d collected at the squat house, but thinking back he was certain they were cleanly broken off, as well. Unusual habit, unusual brand. Almost definitely the same smoker.
Not bad news at all.
Janet gave a toothy grin and swiped the screen to a new page.
“Now that swab we got from Alana turned out to be a small piece of skin,” she said. “It looked to me like it originated from somebody’s lip, like when you that little loose bit right in the middle. Chromosomally male, no database hits. Where’d it come from?”
“A decedent’s mouth, stuck behind the upper incisors.”
“Well, then. Looks like you got a biter.”
Izzy grimaced.
“Okay,” he said. “How about the bottles?”
“Common brand, but here I’ve got prints and a considerable amount of saliva from both the mouths of the bottlenecks and the—well, backwash at the bottom.” She scrolled down on the tablet screen and simultaneously tossed the print outs to Izzy. “You can have those. Alana provided a sample and profile from Cynthia Ramos—your decedent, I presume?”
Izzy nodded.
“There was a match there on the biological material and some of the prints,” she continued. “Another donor got a cold hit in CODIS, and that’s an individual called Byron Lee Twillig.”
Izzy nodded and said, “That’s expected.”
“Mr. Twillig had a few felony drug convictions in Williamson County and a terroristic threatening charge way out in Brewster County, down on the border, that got dropped back in ‘99. But in the process we got his profile, and you got a match.”
“I knew both him and Ramos were there,” Izzy said, glancing at the paperwork. Most of it was only completed forms with the details filled out and boxes checked here and there but there was also a full report on Deacon included, replete with a grainy, black and white mugshot of him looking around fifteen years old, with a full head of hair and no nose ring.
“Ah,” Janet said, “but there’s yet a third donor to the mix.”
Izzy planted his hands on the table and leaned forward, trying to make out the charts on the tablet upside down, and failing spectacularly.
“No hit on the DNA, I’m afraid,” she went on. “Inconclusive results due to the small size of the available sample, and no hits in the index, though I can tell you it’s not a relative of either Ramos or Twillig. Very nice print on one of the bottles, though—a couple, in fact. Partial palm and a full index finger. I couldn’t testify to it in court, but it’s probably a pretty good bet it’s our mystery donor.”
“Tell me you got something on the print.”
“Yes,” she said with a triumphant grin, “thanks to the Kidsafe program.”
“It was a child?”
“No, but she was when her school had her printed in 2004. Got a nice picture printed out for you with the rest of the report—rosy-cheeked little thing back then. Twenty years old now.”
Quickly, he leafed through the pages until he found the printout from the Kidsafe database. Her eyes were dark and stoic, despite a forced smile. She wore a knit cap on her head, dark hair cascading down from underneath on either side of her round, pale face. Beneath the photograph was the child’s full set of prints; Izzy presumed they were taken at some school-wide initiative, an increasingly common event to help identify missing children. To the right of her photo were her basic stats, including the little girl’s name, Teresa Montgomery.
“It’s a controversial program,” Janet said, “but not without its useful applications. In this instance, not really what it’s designed for, but you got a match.”
“Couldn’t it just be the clerk who sold them the beer?” Izzy asked.
“Doubtful,” she said. “This person was holding the bottle in her hand, the way you do when you’re drinking from it. And the number suggests they came in either a cardboard six-pack or larger case, where the clerk wouldn’t have come into contact with the glass at all. Again, this isn’t something that would hold up in court, but if it helps you narrow down whatever you’re working on, I’d guess this individual was the third party at the scene.”
“Teresa Montgomery.”
“Know her?”
“No idea,” Izzy said studying the face and wondering what she looked like now. “But I think we’re about to become acquainted, one way or another.”
Thirty-Five
A campus police car pulled up on East 2
1st, right in front of the library, and Detective Sergeant Esperanza climbed out. He spoke to the officer behind the wheel for a moment, then slipped on his sunglasses and walked across the plaza where Izzy was waiting.
“I seriously don’t know why you don’t just become a cop,” he said.
“We help each other,” Izzy said. “Or something like that.”
“Something like that,” said Esperanza. “Which building?”
“Other end of campus, actually. I’ll fill you in while we walk.”
Together, they set out for Guadalupe and headed up to Dean Keeton, Izzy glancing at the posters he’d canvassed earlier in the week.
“A third individual was present at the house on Cesar Chavez,” Izzy said. “A young woman named Teresa Montgomery—DPS matched a print on some beer bottles from the crime scene.”
“You little bastard,” Esperanza said, stopping and putting his hands on his waist. “You did take evidence out of there.”
“Because at the time absolutely no one was listening to me about this. Even the ME was happy with another OD and walking away from it. You heard him.”
The sergeant shook his head, amazed and annoyed.
“Who the hell is Montgomery?”
Izzy resumed walking, and Esperanza caught up.
“I don’t know her or anything about her,” Izzy said, “but I was expecting a male, the other man Cynthia was seeing. One of the squatters told me she’d seen this guy a couple of times, drives a white Mustang with a Longhorns sticker in the window. And the tattoo parlor across the street from the squat did three identical tattoos a few months back…”
“…let me guess, sideways eights on the wrist?”
“Leminscates,” Izzy said. “Infinity symbols, just like Twillig, and another man I saw that rave spot before the weekend. The tattoo artist says they were all young women, sort of upscale and out of their element. One of them had a UT shirt on when they were there.”
“Students, then.”
“That’s my assumption. And maybe the man Cynthia was seeing, too.”
The Irish Goodbye (Izzy Bishop Book 1) Page 18
