by Sam Reaves
Abby put the car in gear and wheeled around to head back into town. “OK, you’re safe now. Listen, did the guy hurt you? Did he, I mean, should we talk to the police? Did he assault you?”
“No, no, no, no, no. Oh, God, no. He was just trying to kiss me and stuff. But I’m OK. I’m OK.”
She didn’t sound convinced. Abby said, “You’re going to have to give me directions to your house.”
“I’m not going home. I can’t go home. I told my mama I was staying at Leticia’s. Can you take me there?”
“Um, sure. Why wasn’t Leticia with you?”
“She didn’t want to go. I got mad at her, and I went by myself. But she was right. Oh, God, I’m so stupid.”
Abby drove in silence for a while. “Natalia, instead of beating yourself up about it, get mad at the guy. When they don’t take no for an answer, that’s their problem, not yours.”
The girl sniffed a couple of times. “I was stupid to go with this girl. I don’t even really know her.”
“They were drinking Everclear? So, not exactly a wine-and-cheese kind of event.”
“I know, right? I mean, what a bunch of lowlifes. Oh, my God.”
She laughed then, and the tension in Abby’s stomach began to ease. In a few minutes they had rolled back into Lewisburg and Natalia was directing her to the trailer park. “Leticia’s gonna be so pissed. Her mom’s gonna be pissed. And then she’ll tell my mom and I’ll be in soooo much trouble.”
Underneath the makeup and the nail polish and the tight jeans this was still a little girl, Abby thought. Biology and culture conspired to make girls irresistible to men before they had sense enough to evaluate risk, and trusting men to restrain themselves was always a bad bet. Suddenly Abby was immensely weary. “Here we go,” she said, turning in through the gate of the trailer park. Natalia was on her phone, talking softly to Leticia in Spanish.
“Abby, thank you so much. I’m so sorry to do this to you.”
Abby pulled up at Leticia’s trailer and put the car in park. “Please, don’t worry about it. Just be careful next time. Call me, OK?”
“OK.” Natalia was tearing up again, sniffing, and suddenly she reached for Abby and nearly gave her a neck sprain with a vigorous hug. “Thank you. You’re so awesome.” She got out of the car and ran up the steps, where Leticia, softly lit from inside, was holding the door open for her. Natalia waved once and disappeared inside.
Abby sat with the car idling for a moment, depressed by the prospects for a girl like Natalia, all her support kicked away at a crucial time. She sighed and put the car in gear. She backed out onto the street and headed for home.
She turned onto the road that led to the exit, her lights sweeping over a row of trailers. She was focused on the road but her eye was drawn by movement near the edge of the illuminated arc, and suddenly she leapt with fright because there, ducking back behind a porch but not quite fast enough, unmistakable with his dark feral look, the hair and moustache and intense eyes beneath black brows, was the man she had last seen smiling at her in the light from Rex Lyman’s pyre.
“I’m positive,” said Abby. “I have no doubt whatsoever. I felt that certainty that was missing when I looked at the pictures of Gómez. It was the same guy.” She was shivering in the cool predawn air coming in through the car window. Behind the steering wheel, Ruffner looked as if he would rather be in bed, which was where he had been when a call from the station had roused him. Abby had raced there through deserted streets and told her story to a desk sergeant, who had showed what Abby considered to be a stubborn lack of urgency before calling Ruffner.
“All right,” Ruffner said softly, looking out across the park to where flashlights probed the dark near an idling patrol car. Only a few isolated lights burned behind windows in the trailers. “Looks like we missed him. He was probably long gone before we got here. Either that, or he’s inside one of these trailers. I guess we’ll have to canvass in the morning. I’m going to take you back to the station and get your statement. Anything else you can think of as far as a description would be helpful.”
Abby tensed, arms crossed, trying to quell the shivering. “I didn’t get a really long look at him. Just, like I said on the phone, the same cargo shorts, same shoes, like Chuck Taylors, and a shirt this time. A dark T-shirt. Hair, moustache, face, the same. Absolutely the same guy.”
“I believe you. And it was this trailer here where you saw him?” He pointed.
“Between that one and the next one. Right by the porch steps.”
“Did you get the impression he had just come out of the trailer?”
Abby thought. “No, the impression I got was that he was sneaking around. He didn’t want to be seen. He jumped back when my lights hit him. I don’t think he had come down those steps. But I could be wrong.”
“Was he carrying anything?”
“I think, yeah, he had like a plastic bag. Like a shopping bag. With . . . I don’t know. There was something in it.”
“Was he near a vehicle? Did he look like he was heading toward a car maybe?”
“Not that I saw. I got the impression he was walking toward those trees there but turned around when my lights hit him.”
Ruffner nodded. “So he was heading toward the creek?”
Abby just blinked at him. “That’s the creek?”
“That’s South Branch, that runs into Shawnee Creek.”
“I see.” Abby shivered again. “The one that runs behind my house.”
Ruffner thought for a second. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
Abby pulled herself together. “I’m sorry. I tried to make it clear when I looked at the pictures that I wasn’t sure. Now I’m sure. I don’t know how I can prove it, but I’m sure. This was the guy I saw, not Gómez.”
“You don’t need to convince me.” He put the car in gear and pulled slowly onto the main street of the park. “To be frank, I thought our case against Gómez was weak. And his lawyer pulled an alibi out of a hat a couple of days ago, which last I heard the state police hadn’t been able to crack. What I need from you right now, though, is enough certainty in this identification to take to the prosecutor this morning and convince him we’ve got the wrong guy locked up. Can you give me that certainty?”
Abby closed her eyes briefly, seeing the man again, ducking away from her headlights, moving just as he had moved when he stepped away from the burning car. She opened her eyes. “Yes. I’m certain.”
“Where does that stream go?” Abby sat on the edge of an armchair in Ned’s living room. Ned stood by the fireplace with his hands on his hips, frowning.
“Well, as I recall, it runs all the way across the southern part of Lewisburg and empties into Shawnee Creek west of town. It runs behind the frat houses a few hundred yards west of here and then through the railroad arch and on for another mile or so till it hits the creek.”
“Through the railroad arch.”
“Yeah.”
They stared at each other for a moment. Abby said, “I’ve been standing out there in plain sight, looking for deer, talking on the phone, daydreaming, advertising where I live.”
“I don’t know how likely it is he’d have seen you, even if he’s been wandering around down there.”
“I don’t either, but I’m starting to feel really fucking exposed. Excuse my language. Am I panicking? Am I paranoid?”
Ned stood looking down at her, pensive. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’d be scared, too.”
“So what do I do?”
He wandered toward the window, crossed his arms, stood looking out. “Go somewhere else for a while. Find a place to lay low until they get this guy. I’m not going to let a lease stand in the way of your being safe.”
Abby vented an exasperated breath. “Terrific. Maybe I can go back to the Tarkington. I could probably get my old room back.” She stood up. “I have work to do. I can’t think about this right now.” She was light-headed and queasy.
“Go work. I’ll make some phon
e calls, find you a place to stay.”
Abby was looking out the window into the trees. “Right now I’m too freaked out to walk down those steps and show myself back there, even in broad daylight.”
“OK, let’s do this. You can come and go through the house, by these stairs here. That would be less exposed. I’ll give you a key to my door.”
“Thanks. That would help. But that door’s bolted on the other side.”
“OK, I’ll go down and unbolt it. You want to give me your key?”
“Sit still. Jerry will do the dishes.” Lisa Beth put out a hand to halt Abby, who had started to rise.
“I’m happy to help,” said Abby. “I feel like I should pull my weight if I’m going to stay here.”
“Ah, don’t worry,” said Jerry, gathering plates. “You’ll get your chance. For tonight you’re a guest.” He smiled, plump and benign in an apron that had MY KITCHEN MY RULES written on it in large red letters. The fringe of gray hair around his shiny bald dome was tousled and he was slightly flushed, whether with the effort of producing the meal or with excitement, Abby was not sure.
“Well, thank you. That was really delicious.”
“I don’t get a chance to make sole meunière very much because Lisa Beth doesn’t like it. But she lets me make it when we have company.”
“Not a fish fan,” said Lisa Beth. She drained her wineglass. “Would you like some dessert? There may be some ice cream in the freezer if you’re interested. We generally skip dessert. Our deal is that Jerry gets to nag me about my drinking if I can nag him about his weight.”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Well, let’s repair to the library, shall we? Tradition calls for brandy and cigars, but I’ve given up smoking. Brandy I can do.”
The library was a high-ceilinged room with floor-to-ceiling shelves jammed with books, deep armchairs, and a fireplace under a broad mantel. Through a tall window Abby could see a quiet tree-lined street, four blocks from the college. Lisa Beth strode straight to a sideboard with an array of bottles on it and uncorked one with dark amber contents. “Don’t mind if I do,” she said. “What can I offer you?”
Abby had brought her glass of water from the table. “I think I’m going to stick with this. What a lovely room.”
“It is, isn’t it? Most of the books are Jerry’s, but it’s become more or less my domain. He’s got his office upstairs where he works, and I’ve set up my little nerve center here.” She pointed with her chin at a desk in a corner near the fireplace where an open laptop sat in a welter of papers, folders, periodicals and books. “There are at least three unfinished books on that computer. Maybe four. Blistering exposés, every one. Reputation makers. Someday I hope to finish at least one of them. Sit, please. Take a load off. They released this Gómez today, did you hear?”
“I knew they were going to.”
“They cut him loose after lunch. Apparently there was a long and contentious meeting in the prosecutor’s office this morning. They cited an alibi, which has apparently stood up to investigation, and an unnamed witness who claimed to have seen the suspect at large. There wasn’t much in the way of an official statement. This is major egg on the face for the prosecutor’s office, of course. They weren’t very forthcoming, and they sure as hell weren’t happy about it. And you are the unnamed witness who upset the apple cart, aren’t you?”
“I’m afraid so. Unnamed but possibly known to the killer.”
“I don’t know how you’re holding up under the strain. You amaze me.”
“I guess I just don’t have any choice. Actually, I’m OK, except in the dark. I’ve gone back to being afraid of the dark, like a little kid. And the sound of sirens sets off a panic attack now, like it never did. You hear sirens all the time in Manhattan, you get used to them. Now, they terrify me.”
“My God, you’ve probably got post-traumatic stress syndrome. You should talk to Jerry about it.”
“I don’t know about that. Lots of people have gone through worse.”
Quietly, Lisa Beth said, “Honey, I can’t believe what you’ve had to put up with. But we’ll take care of you.”
Suddenly, catastrophically, Abby was on the verge of tears. She scowled out the window into the dusk, breathing deeply. “Thank you,” she managed to say finally. She raised her glass but it was empty. To cover her distress she stood and made for the sideboard. “Maybe I will have a small drink.”
“Help yourself, please.” Lisa Beth’s old jocular tone was back. “So. Now that they’ve given up on this Gómez, maybe they’ll blunder onto the real story.”
Abby opened the cognac, poured half an inch into her glass, and went back to her chair. The cognac was as strong as Abby had expected and she coughed a little. “So what’s the real story?”
Lisa Beth’s eyes narrowed, looking out the window. “I don’t know that I’m prepared to say, not yet. But I’ve been having all kinds of fun digging around in Mr. Lyman and Mr. Frederick’s dirt.” She smiled, not pleasantly. “I’ve got a nice little file on them on my computer. It’s not the kind of dirt you’d find in a place like Chicago, for example, because we’re not Chicago. They were small-timers, and this is the kind of small-time dirt, petty corruption and monkeyshines that you get in a small-time place like Lewisburg. I don’t know that anybody would be prepared to kill over it. But then somebody thought those two were important enough to kill.”
“So you think this guy I saw was a hired killer. I mean, isn’t it possible he’s just a psychopath or something?”
“That’s possible, certainly. That may be the way the police are going to lean now. These weren’t nice clean hits in the great mafia tradition. It seems to me there are several possibilities. The one the cops have been going on up till now is that they were exemplary executions, designed to scare people into toeing the line. That’s the way a really nasty criminal organization like the Mexican cartels operates. Now, if that’s not what happened, the second possibility would be that the guy is really, really pissed off. Some kind of personal vendetta. Like these incidents that supposedly motivated Gómez. But now that seems to have been a dead end. So that leaves, as you said, the possibility that he’s just really, really sick.”
“And you don’t buy that?”
“Well, he can hardly be normal. This business of making off with Jud Frederick’s head is not exactly standard operating procedure for junkie burglars, to begin with. Have you asked yourself why he did that, by the way?”
“Um, I haven’t given it a lot of thought, no.”
“Well, I have. I think there are two obvious cases. One, as per the Mexican scenario, it’s a warning. You dump it in front of somebody whose attention you want to get, someone you want to intimidate. Here’s your business partner’s head, now let’s have no more misbehavior. Two, it’s a trophy, or proof of fulfillment. You take it to prove to somebody that you’ve completed the job. Now, it hasn’t shown up on anybody’s front porch that I’m aware of. And if it was taken as a trophy, God knows where it wound up. But I can see a third way to use it, which would mean it might turn up yet.”
“Good God, use it for what?”
“You could use it to incriminate someone. If I wanted to pin a killing on someone else, arranging to have the victim’s head found, say, in his car trunk or in the freezer on his back porch would make for some awkward explanations.”
Abby frowned. “That seems a little far-fetched to me.”
“Perhaps. There’s always the possibility he’s just sick. But that brings me back to the point I was going to make. People who are really, really sick can be used. They can be employed by people who have more delicate sensibilities.”
Abby drank, grimaced and swallowed. “That’s horrible.”
“Yes.” Lisa Beth tossed off the last of her drink. “Much of life is. Did Jerry make up the bed in the den?”
“The alibi in Indianapolis turned out to be solid. The state police confirmed it. So we were looking at having to let Gómez go any
way. Your sighting was just confirmation.” Detective Ruffner’s voice was a shade above a growl.
Abby sat at her desk with her phone to her ear. “I’m sorry.”
“Please. We should be thanking you. It was a bad arrest, and I’m just glad it fell apart before it got to trial. The good news is, we think we might have a better lead.”
“Really.”
“We hope so. We put a couple of things together and a name popped up. We’re trying to track him down now. This is someone who got out of prison recently. He has local connections and some history with both Lyman and Frederick. His mother actually lives there, at the trailer park. She swears she hasn’t seen him since he got out of jail, but mothers lie a lot when cops come asking about their sons. We canvassed the trailer park and turned up nothing. Nobody else saw this guy. But he’s on our radar. We’re working on getting a current photo and when we do I’d like you to come take a look at it.”
“OK, just let me know.” Abby hesitated; the last thing a hardworking detective needed was advice from her, but then with a flutter of anger she thought that she did have a fairly high stake in this game. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“Do you have any ideas, any leads, I don’t know what to call them, about what’s behind all this? I mean, if these killings were to cover something up? Or . . . something, I don’t know.”
There was a brief silence and Abby fancied she could hear Ruffner rolling his eyes. “We’ve looked pretty extensively into the background, yes. For both victims. I’m not sure what you’re asking, specifically.”
“Well, for example, I’m wondering if you know that Jud Frederick’s girlfriend seems to have disappeared. I mean, that’s what I was told. And I was wondering if that might be significant.”
“You mean Ms. Atkins?”
“I don’t know her name. I’m told she was Everett Elford’s secretary.”
