“Miss Salome, please believe me when I tell you it tears my heart desperately that I do not know.” He touched a black and white picture of a doctor and nurse standing in front of a severe-looking government building. “My father was a doctor and my mother, a nurse. In Cuba. They were good people and I fear I have dishonored them with my lies.”
“No, Doctor, you just made a—”
“Miss Salome, there is one other thing I can tell you, though I have no idea if it has any bearing.” His eyes, so strong and brown that morning at Alley B’s, were now weak and tired. “Dr. Cruz told me, a few days before Francis’s death, that a scalpel was missing from medical.”
Rory’s eyes bulged. “What? I hadn’t heard that.”
Jace swallowed. An inmate walking around with a scalpel?
“Francis said nothing. It was found within a few hours. He believed it never left medical.”
Rory, frowning, said, “Doesn’t matter what he believed, it matters that—”
“Where’d he find it?”
“He didn’t; Dr. Cruz did. He told me that he and Francis had a terrible argument over it. Dr. Cruz believed Francis lost the instrument.”
“You don’t believe he did?”
Vernezobre took a deep breath. “I believe that whoever killed my friend took the scalpel.”
“But you said it had been found? So it was accounted for when Wrubel died?”
“Perhaps, but that is not to say the missing scalpel wasn’t supposed to be the weapon. Apparently, Dr. Cruz found it before it could kill Francis. The killer simply found something else.”
Two sets of stab wounds, Deputy. One from the shank, one from something else . . . something sharper . . . more precise.
And that second weapon, the sharper, more precise one, was still missing.
Unless it had been used and put back into the medical inventory.
Could Major Jakob check the scalpels for blood? Could she check for Doc Wrubel’s blood and DNA?
In the silence, the trio heard a baby crying from the cramped lobby. When Jace looked, she was surprised to see the place had filled for the afternoon with patients.
“Ladies, I have made your job more difficult and I will atone for that in any way possible. But can it not wait until my office has closed?”
“Uh . . . yeah . . . no problem,” Jace said.
Digging a twenty from her wallet, Rory set it on the desk. “Thank you, Dr. Vernezobre.”
“Bless you, Miss Bogan. By the by, American Buffalo is opening at the Zach City Theatre in two weeks. Perhaps you will accompany me? It concerns a robbery.”
Rory laughed. “Everyday stuff for me. Call me when they do a love story.”
“You are ever the romantic. I will surely call you.”
CHAPTER 19
“Theater?” Jace asked when they were gliding along in Rory’s Monte Carlo.
Rory shrugged. “We go sometimes. Symphony, too.”
“Right . . . music with rules.”
“As opposed to your music . . . where they play whatever they want.”
“They don’t, but that doesn’t mean you’re not a philistine.”
“Philistine? I’m a Texan.”
“Again, the razor sharp wit.”
But both women smiled as Rory navigated the streets of Zachary City. She drove confidently. The Monte Carlo’s motor thrummed, steady and certain.
“So who did it, then?”
“Beats the hell outta me.” Rory changed lanes seemingly without regard to those behind her. Her speed continually crept up over the limit and at least once, as she passed a Zach City officer, she held up her wallet badge, flipped open so the badge was visible.
“You always keep that ready to flash?”
Rory giggled. “Just since I started working in Rooster. The older guys there do it all the time. Seems like a decent perk.”
“Yeah, hey, why not? Now I’m the law so these pesky laws don’t really apply.” Jace huffed.
“Now you’re getting it.” She glanced in the rearview mirror. “I’ll make a road deputy outta you yet.”
“No, thanks. I’m perfectly comfortable in the jail.”
Rory grinned. “Sister, you’re uncomfortable all the time and everywhere, but I get what you’re saying. Listen, come with me tomorrow tonight. It’ll be fun. You’ll love it.”
“Thanks, but I just don’t think I’m interested. It just . . . I don’t know . . . just doesn’t seem like something I want to do.”
Rory gunned the car into the right lane. “Yeah? Then why are you putting so much effort into Wrubel’s killer?”
Jace’s hesitation was uncomfortable. “Well . . . because it was an assigned case, I guess.”
“Bullcrap. Could’a dumped the whole heaping pile on Von Holton and been done with it. Hey, I’m all for showing Von Holton up; that’s an admirable goal. But I’ve seen your face. When you thought it was over you were disappointed. When it didn’t go down, your face lit up like a crack whore when poppa comes calling.”
The silence grew this time, even more uncomfortable.
“A crack whore? Thanks.”
“Look, babe, all I’m saying is that you like the investigation and the hunt. You hate most of what we do but you love that part.”
“I don’t hate most of what we do. I hate the physical violence.” She turned sideways in the seat to face Rory. “And I tell you this: I really hate the emotional and spiritual violence that people like Laimo dish out to people.”
“Laimo? What’s the she-beast got to do with any of this?”
“I don’t like how she treats people.”
“Bah. Don’t worry about her. She’s weak and scared and so she covers it by getting over on weak and scared people. Someday someone’s going to come along and put her in her place.”
“Getting over on people who are weaker by nothing more than circumstance.”
“She didn’t rot far from the tree, you know.”
“What? Her mother is not that kind of a person.”
“No, Major Jakob is tough and strong and amazing.” Rory shook her head. “Major Jakob’s ex-husband . . . Laimo’s daddy? Not so much.”
Jace couldn’t have been more surprised if Rory had told her every rainbow came from Laimo’s heart rather than a pot of gold or the refraction of sunlight through water.
“From Major Jakob’s first marriage.” With a shrug, Rory grinned. “What’s more . . . you know him. And he ain’t one of your favorite people, either. At least not right now.”
Rory’s eyes held tight to Jace’s and eventually, with Rory smirking, Jace’s jaw dropped.
“Gonna catch flies in there.”
“Von Holton?”
“Married thirty years ago for about thirty-seven seconds. Neither of them has ever forgiven the other.” Rory laughed. “Or maybe themselves. Hell, I’ve had bad boyfriends I haven’t forgiven myself for.”
That little nugget of info certainly explained the animosity between them when Jace was in the Pulpit and why Jakob was so insistent about Jace working in Von Holton’s face.
“She’s using me to make him look bad.”
Rory inclined her head. “Ahhh . . . probably not. She hates him, no doubt, but she’s about solving cases and empowering women.”
“A three-fer, then. Empower me, solve the case, and make him look bad.”
“Hah! Maybe.” Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, then back to the road, which she sliced and carved with ease. “Has to be an inmate.”
“Why?” Jace asked.
“Because of the shank.”
“Unless someone was using the shank as a cover.”
“Huh?”
Jace told her what Jakob had said. Rory frowned when Jace mentioned a weapon sharper and more exacting than a jailyard shank. “That was what killed Dr. Wrubel, not the shank.”
“And she doesn’t know what it was?”
“Said she didn’t but who knows.”
“And Dr. Verne
zobre said there was a scalpel missing.”
“Which he said they found.”
Rory nodded. “Yeah, but still.”
Jace yanked her phone out and called Jakob. “Major? Deputy Salome. I have a question. Do you have the capability of checking all the scalpels in medical for traces of blood?” She paused. “So you could tell if it was Wrubel’s blood or DNA?” Another pause. “Well, I was just thinking that maybe whoever killed him, if they did it with one of those scalpels, maybe they got it back to medical before anyone realized what was going on.”
Jace pulled the phone from her ear so Rory could hear the long pause. “Well done, Deputy. We’ve already done that. There are ten scalpels in stock. Seven of them were still in factory-sealed packaging. Two were clean with no trace evidence. One had a bit of blood. Not enough to type the DNA but enough to say it wasn’t Dr. Wrubel’s blood type.”
“Oh. Well, it was just a thought.”
“You and Rory make a good team,” Jakob said. “Keep going. Find me a suspect.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
When Jace hung up, she glanced at Rory. Rory’s smile took up the largest part of her face. One hand was banging the steering wheel in a rhythm only she could hear. “That’s a good day, Jace. Jakob noticing us? That’s a damned good day.”
“Yeah, it is.” Jace grinned at her friend’s delight. “She told me this morning we were a good team.”
“Yeah? Very cool.”
After a moment of silence, Rory frowned and said, “So someone was pretending to be an inmate. Using the shank, I mean.”
“Who better to look guilty than four hundred guilty people?” Jace chewed it over. “You’re saying a cop.”
“Civilian staffer? Lotta those in the jail.”
“A medical staffer could get a scalpel but Jakob said none of them was the murder weapon. But a staffer would end the question of how an inmate got out of the pod, wouldn’t it?” Jace took a deep breath. “There weren’t any staffers around, at least not that I remember.”
With a sidelong glance, Rory said, “Hell, you don’t remember anything . . . you were too freaked out.” Again, her eyes drifted to the mirror. “Got something else might freak you out.”
As she looked behind them, the spit in Jace’s throat dried. There were four or five cars and some trucks, but to her they all looked like regular morning traffic. “Which one?”
“The beat-to-crap pickup. White and rusty.” Rory pushed the speed a bit and moved over a lane.
“The one right behind us? Too obvious. Plus, why’s he following us?”
Months earlier, she’d been followed and run off the road, and remembering that nightmare put a cold ball deep in her gut. But, as scared as she’d been, she’d learned something that time. So instead of panicking, which is what her gut wanted to do, she started looking for the license plate. “Maybe he’s following us because we are two extremely lovely women and he hasn’t had a date in . . . like . . . years.”
Rory sighed. “Great, another creep. You’d think simple percentages would give me a winner some time.”
In spite of their attempts at humor, fear bubbled deep in Jace’s soul. She breathed deeply, trying to keep adrenaline at bay. From experience, she knew it would narrow her vision and speed her breathing. It would steal her fine motor coordination and leave her with only the most basic of skills. But mostly, it would make her paranoid.
Calm down. It’s not happening again. This isn’t a thug Badgett sent. His thugs are gone. He’s gone.
Except her sleeplessness and tangled dreams demonstrated that the fear was not gone completely, not in her head and heart. Not being able to simply enter her apartment, snapping at Gramma and Preacher when they invited her to play dominoes, told her the experience still had its thorns deep in her soul.
“Hang on.” Rory eased their speed, yanked the wheel hard left, and got them into a turn lane at the last minute. A car somewhere in their wake honked, but the pickup behind them managed to make the turn, too.
“Shit.” Jace grabbed her phone and tried to see the plate.
“Don’t call. Not yet.”
“You have to stop, Rory.”
“And do what? No, let’s see how this plays a little first.”
“No, you have to stop.”
“Ain’t stopping just yet.”
Rory hit another turn, this time to the right and pushed the car harder. Her Monte Carlo rocketed west along Front Street. The abandoned two-room train station slipped past in a gray blur. Every pothole was as large as a crater. The car bounced and howled its protest.
“He’s still coming. Rory, please. Just stop.”
Rory came off the gas, went on the brake, then on the gas again. The car lurched, dodged, and fishtailed around another corner. The pickup truck followed, though now the driver looked apprehensive.
“Who the hell is it?”
“No idea. Some punk kid, probably.”
“Go to Industrial Loop.”
Rory nodded. “Good. Lotta warehouses and alleys.”
Thirty seconds later, Jace pointed down an alley. “There. Maybe he’ll miss it.”
But he didn’t. Raggedly, his truck came around the corner and bounced over some trash cans.
Rory tossed a hard glance at her friend and rounded another corner. “Man, what is it with you and car chases? My insurance rates are gonna go up . . . seriously.”
“Rory, I can’t see the plate.”
“What?”
“No front plate.”
“Doesn’t mean anything. All kinds of cars ain’t got no front plate.”
“Stop.”
“Jace, I’m not stopping to call anybody or—”
“Just stop. Right now. In that lot. I’m done.” Anger spiked her throat and her volume filled the Monte Carlo.
“Jace—”
“Stop.”
Rory blasted into a dirt parking lot and slammed the car into a power slide. It came to rest in a shower of gravel and dust and then swam in the cloud. Jace yanked Rory’s shirt up and jerked her Glock from her waistband. Rory looked stunned while Jace jumped from the car and strode through the dust.
The truck stopped at the lot entrance. The engine rattled and the windshield was cracked, a long spider’s leg reaching across corner to corner. It was a work truck, with a faded logo of an animal on the side. The driver, a white male who ran maybe mid-thirties, made no move to get out.
“Here I am,” Jace shouted and raised the pistol. “Whatever you think you want . . . here I am.”
Behind the wheel, she saw the man’s eyes widen and his lips flap. Jace moved fast and the guy froze. When she was nearly at the truck, he gunned it, spun it, and shot down the street, trails of black rubber behind him like adrenalized fear.
“Jace.” Rory dashed from the car and clapped her hard on the back. “Holy crap. Did you see that? Holy crap. You scared the shit outta me. And him. Holy jeepers. What were you thinking?”
“Huh?” Her hands shook and she could feel her heart slowing. Her breath was hot and fast in her throat. Her vision had shrunk to just the truck but now was opening up. She had peripheral vision again. She looked at Rory. “Holy jeepers? What kind’a jeepers are those . . . specifically?”
She handed the gun back to Rory and walked unsteadily back to Rory’s car, where she leaned on the hood, fear and violence sloshing through her like bad booze. It was all going to come up; the doubt, months of anger, years of uncertainty, of being alone. It would come out here and now, on a cracked parking lot shot through with weeds and broken bottles and lost pennies. Here where so few footsteps left an impression, with a closed-down Redi-Mix concrete plant hovering over them, with a barely open auto-body shop and the stink of oil and cow shit heavy in the air, she would be sick and leave everything that had poisoned her since Mama left on the gray asphalt.
Will that let me sleep at night?
“Damn, girl, you okay?”
Jace hadn’t been thinking at all. The world,
and the man chasing her, had been screaming at her, red-faced and fists swinging. Red anger, maybe, or black or maybe even sickly yellow. Mindless fury had been her response.
“Man, that was outta sight.” Rory danced a little jig. “That got me all juiced up and ready to rock and roll.” She frowned as she repacked her gun in her waistband and drew her shirt down over it. “How’d you know I was carrying?”
“You should wear looser clothes.”
“Well, whatever. That was great.”
“No, it was stupid.” Jace took a deep breath and her head began to slow down.
If the driver had been armed, he could have killed her. Or he could have run her down. A million possible scenarios and all of them ended with her dead in the dirt. Her breath caught in her lungs and came out in hitches, percussive like a hard bop jazz drummer from the Fifties . . . strung out and pounding his kit until it bled music. The bitter taste of burned adrenaline sat on the back of her tongue and made her gag. And she couldn’t quit blinking.
She’d been thinking nothing and that bothered her.
In her short time at the jail, she’d seen too much of that, from both inmates and cops. Those were boots she didn’t want to wear. If she needed anger or violence she wanted to choose it. She wanted a conscious choice rather than being led.
So now the girl wants you to use violence. You waved a gun, Jace. What if he’d gotten out of the car? Shoot him? Violence doesn’t fix anything.
Gramma’s sentiments. Not her words but what she believed to the core of her soul and what she’d tried to teach Jace in the years since Mama was killed.
Jace swallowed. Maybe Gramma was right.
“Hey, you okay? You’re kind’a pale. Don’t pass out on me, okay? Come on, let’s hit the road.”
Jace stared at the empty lot. “No back plate.”
“What?”
“No front plate . . . no back plate.”
Rory frowned. “Son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER 20
That night, she fell asleep in her second bedroom. Curled on the floor, fetus-like, staring at the walls towering above her. At first she wallowed in the violence of the flyers, fantasized about hitting back at those who left them, thought about flattening their car tires and putting sugar in their gas tanks; her brain filled with an entire universe of juvenilia to hurt them. Eventually, she closed her eyes but that only seemed to magnify the flyers’ power. Perhaps it was the power of what was in shadow and hidden. It was waiting for her, regardless of whether she looked at it directly or tried to hide herself.
East of the Sun Page 13
