by Liliana Hart
“Sure did. Like clockwork that boy was. And he wasn’t hard to look at either. If he hadn’t been seeing that nice antiques man, I would’ve made a play for him myself. Gay men make the best lovers, you know. They’re very in tune with the body.”
Jack nudged me under the table when I snickered.
“Did you see any cars go by that morning?” he asked.
“Oh, sure. Bucky Dew had the early shift at the gas station and he left a few minutes after five-thirty that morning. He lives in the yellow house on my left. There was an old hatchback that had broken down sometime the night before, and it was pulled off to the side of the road. Olive green and ugly as homemade sin. Someone stopped to get some things out of it before the tow truck came to cart it away.”
My eyebrows went up, and Jack sat forward. “Do you remember what the car looked like when it stopped next to the hatchback?”
“Sure, boy. I’m not senile. It was a white Cadillac. One man inside, but I didn’t know him. It just looked like they were transferring their belongings from one car to the other.”
“Was this around the same time Reverend Oglesby was making his run?”
“Now that you mention it,” she said, pursing her lips in thought. “Daniel jogged by and the white car left, and I stopped watching because I saw Joanie Neddler next door sneaking back home, wearing the same clothes she’d left in the night before. Mr. Neddler’s been away on business all week, so I knew she’d been up to no good. Also, her dress was on backwards, which is never a good sign.”
“What time did the tow truck come?” I asked.
“Let’s see,” she said, closing her eyes as she thought back. “I’d already watched The Price is Right. Idiots, all of them, that morning. And I’d finished the crossword puzzle in the paper. So I’d say around ten o’clock. Maybe ten-thirty.”
“Did you recognize the tow truck?”
“Oh, sure. It said Murphy’s Auto Shop right across the side. It’s where I take my truck to be serviced. The owner’s an asshole, but he’s a damned good mechanic.”
***
Thirty minutes later we were back on the road and headed home to Bloody Mary.
“You know,” I said. “I want to be just like Miss Pilcher when I grow up.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re already there, babe. I knew she reminded me of someone. Though I don’t know what your current movie viewing habits are.”
“My tastes don’t lean to Sunday morning orgies, if that’s what you’re wondering. And unfortunately, religious guilt stays with you no matter how far you stray from the church, so I can’t see it happening any time in our future either.”
“Damn,” Jack said. “I was hoping.”
“Where are we headed now?”
Jack turned off the Towne Square, and he made a slow pass-by of Murphy’s Auto Shop. The building was locked up tight, but that wasn’t saying much. Every business in Bloody Mary was locked up tight on Sunday.
“Something was going on there,” Jack said, idling in front of the shop. “Something that doesn’t have anything to do with what we originally thought was a hate crime. It’s a distraction, and it’s working. They’re trying to make me split my attention, when what I need to be doing is digging into that auto shop. We’ve got two cars abandoned by the side of the road, and George goes to collect both of them. The first time, there’s the white Cadillac that’s somehow connected. The second time, George ends up with a bullet in his brain. Add in the tattoo on George’s arm and Reverend Oglesby’s sexual orientation, and we have two crimes that are too coincidental to be anything other than connected. Let’s go pay another visit to Doc Randall.”
Jack had just put the car in gear when his phone rang. He put it in park again and answered, “Sheriff Lawson.”
I let Jack’s conversation drone on in the background. There was something important I was missing. Something that nudged the edges of my memory, but I couldn’t quite get a grasp on it. I looked at the auto shop again and tried to replay the scene from the time I’d arrived. I needed to look at the picture I’d found inside George. Maybe that would shake something loose.
“That was Agent Carver,” Jack said once he hung up. “He’s halfway here. I’m supposed to meet him in an hour and bring him up to speed. I’ll make sure to take him with me when I go pay a visit to the mayor. Maybe he won’t threaten to fire me in front of a fed.”
“It doesn’t bother you?” I asked. “Having to turn over everything to him?”
“Not really,” he said. “Ben’s a good guy. He’ll let me take the lead on Oglesby and George, but I know he’s about to have a mess on his hands and a shitload of paperwork. And it’s going to be a nightmare trying to make charges stick. He’ll shut them down for a little while, but they’ll resurface again.”
“The law sucks.”
“Yeah, sometimes it does. But we’ll keep plugging away at it, and maybe someday it’ll make a difference.”
That was one of the things I loved most about Jack. Deep down he believed in right and wrong, and that good would always triumph over evil. He’d been in the trenches, first in the military and then during his time on the SWAT team, and nothing he’d seen or experienced had clouded his views. Maybe that’s why I’d had such a hard time believing he could really love me. I’d always lived by shades of grey. And maybe I thought he’d eventually get tired of trying to make me the good guy.
Jack drove through a Burger King and ordered us a couple of burgers and something to drink other than coffee. I was feeling a little twitchy, and I realized I’d been living on caffeine since coming back to Bloody Mary. I was feeling full and ready for a nap by the time we parked in front of Doc Randall’s house.
I noticed his lawn was looking a little scruffy and most of the plants in his flowerbeds had long since died. A black Volvo sat in the driveway, and I heard the TV blaring from the front porch.
“Doc Randall,” Jack called out as he banged on the door, pitching his voice louder to compete with the television. “It’s Sheriff Lawson and Doctor Graves.”
We stood there for a few minutes and waited, but no one came to the door.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” I said, stepping into the flowerbed so I could look through a window. I peeked into the kitchen and saw an uneaten bowl of soggy cereal and a newspaper on the kitchen table. A half pot of coffee was on the kitchen counter, but there was no sign of Doc Randall.
I described the scene to Jack and we walked back to his cruiser to grab some gloves. Jack looked up as a car passed by, and he waved to Leroy Gherkin. Church had let out, and in a few minutes the street would be busy with traffic as people made their way home to Sunday pot roast. I tossed my coat in the backseat because the temperature was warming up, and also because if we stumbled across a crime scene I wouldn’t have to worry about dragging the coat through blood. I stuck my Beretta in my pants at the small of my back.
“Let’s do this quick,” Jack said as we both put on gloves. “We’ll check it out from the back door.”
Jack’s hand was on his weapon as we made our way behind the house. The backyard wasn’t in any better shape than the front, and it was soggy from the rain.
“Ah, hell,” Jack said. “The grass is tamped down back here. Got a few partial footprints. No blood that I can see though.”
We stepped wide around them, and Jack boosted me up and onto the cement stoop before he jumped across. The storm door was cracked and Jack grabbed the handle to open it wider. When he brought his hand away to knock, I noticed the small smear of blood.
“Jack,” I said, catching his arm. He opened the palm of his hand and there it was—a brownish-red stain against the blue of his glove.
“Shit,” he said, pulling his weapon from the holster. “Stay back.”
“Like hell,” I said, my little Beretta already in my hand. “I’m with you.”
Jack glared at me so the molten chocolate of his eyes darkened to black, and his mouth pinched in a straight line.
I could tell he was fighting for control of his temper, and I could tell he was going through the entire argument we’d have in his head before he ever spoke a word. Jack was good about thinking first before he ever opened his mouth. I still needed work in that area.
He must have come to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to budge because he said, “Fine. But stay behind me, and for God’s sake don’t shoot me.”
I listened to him mumble something under his breath about unreasonable women, but I blanked it out as his hand turned the doorknob and it opened easily. He pushed it open and we didn’t have to go very far to see we were too late. Death had happened here, and with it came a smell that couldn’t be attributed to anything else.
We stepped carefully around small dots of blood and into a living room crowded with comfortable furniture worn with age. It had the look of a house that had gone too long without a woman’s touch. A thin layer of dust coated dozens of picture frames and knickknacks, and old newspapers cluttered the coffee table. The house was cut up into several rooms, so it was impossible to stand in one place and see anywhere else.
Jack locked the back door behind us, and I followed behind him as we made a quick circuit of the first floor and then took the stairs to look in the three bedrooms on the second floor. There was no sign of Doc Randall.
Jack holstered his weapon, and I put the safety back on and stuck it back in my pants. We’d seen all we needed to see in the tiny office off the main living room.
“It’s like they lined him up for a firing squad,” I said, looking at the white wall smeared with blood. “At least two of the bullets exited the body and are embedded in the wall. There’ll be flesh embedded with it. Of course, it’s going to be hard to match it with anything considering we don’t have a body.”
Doc Randall’s office was Spartan. A wooden desk was shoved against the wall, but there wasn’t a computer or any papers on the surface. There was a lone bookshelf filled with worn paperbacks and a metal file cabinet.
Doc Randall had been shot standing against the wall. At least I assumed it was Doc Randall. It was easy to see from the blood pattern how the body would have staggered back as the bullets tore through flesh. I could see it clearly in my mind. A frail man slammed back by the shock of the metal ripping into his chest, and then sliding down to the floor in a heap, leaving a smear of blood behind that looked like one of those modern paintings people paid too much money for.
“They hit something vital,” I said, taking a swab of the blood and sealing it in a bag. “There’s too much blood, and you can see the arterial spray there against the adjacent wall and on the carpet.”
“You think he’s dead?”
“If he didn’t have immediate medical attention, then yeah. Even if he’d had immediate attention, his chances wouldn’t have been good.”
“What do you want to bet the murder weapon was a .22? Vaughn had two guns in that safe.”
I sighed. “No bet. I don’t like the game they’re playing.”
“There wasn’t any sign of breaking and entering at the front door or the back,” Jack said.
“He let them in,” I said, nodding.
“Fuck,” he said. “They’re cleaning up the loose ends. And if they’re using Vaughn’s weapons then he’s just another tool to them.”
He pulled out his phone, and I knew without asking he was calling Vaughn. Jack swore again when it went to voicemail, and he left Vaughn a message that was short and to the point about his safety.
“They cornered him in here,” I said. “There were at least a couple of people waiting at the back of the house if the footprints are anything to go by, so they had him trapped inside.”
Jack closed his eyes and I knew he was doing what he was best at—seeing the scene as it had been—trying to dig his way inside the killer’s mind.
“We’ll see if anyone heard the shots when we do a door to door, but the timing of this is perfect. Hardly anyone in this neighborhood is home on a Sunday morning.”
I followed Jack back to the front of the house and into the kitchen, and faced the evidence of Doc Randall’s last morning alive.
“Yeah, that makes more sense,” Jack said, taking in the half-eaten cereal and newspaper.
“You want to fill me in?” I asked as he continued to carry on a conversation with himself. “I can’t read your mind as well as you read mind.”
“That’s always good to know. They sent one person to do the job. Could be the same person who did George, but it could’ve just as easily have been someone different. Different styles will throw us off even further, right? This guy shot an old man three times point blank in the chest. He was grandstanding, maybe toying with the Doc a little. No head shot since there’s no brain matter anywhere, but it was still overkill. Whoever they sent was still someone expendable just in case he was seen. It’s dicey putting three bullet holes into someone during daylight hours in a residential neighborhood, but they knew the area. They knew everyone would be at church. He wouldn’t have parked in the driveway, but it would’ve been somewhere close by.”
Jack looked out the front window to take in the view. “The bank parking lot would be the closest, and there’s that area in back that’s hidden by the dumpster. It’s what? A five-minute walk?”
“If that,” I said.
“So he knocks on the door, interrupting Doc Randall at his breakfast, but he’s welcomed inside. The killer has orders to get the job done quickly. He’s on a deadline. But what does he do after he kills Doc Randall? That’s what bothers me.”
“What do you mean?”
“He doesn’t leave the body and walk away. He calls for help and they take the body with them. Why?”
“Maybe Doc Randall knew something. Maybe he was still alive enough to tell them something. But he was bleeding pretty badly, so he wouldn’t have lasted long. The blood trail leads all the way to the back door.”
“Or maybe the guy was sent to question Doc Randall first and things got out of hand. Maybe he called in the others because he didn’t know what else to do. Maybe it was his first kill and he panicked.”
We followed the blood trail down the hallway and back into the living room where we came in.
“The blood trail stops here,” Jack said. “They wrapped him up in something to get him out of the house. Probably trash bags from the kitchen. We’ll check the alley for tire treads and see if they match Oglesby’s crime scene.”
“There’s one problem with all that,” I said. “The killer would be covered in blood if he moved the body here before they wrapped it. There’d be no way around it. How’s he supposed to get back to his car? Surely someone passing by on the street would notice.”
“This whole thing stinks of an amateur. No planning involved on his part once he got here. He left a mess behind, and maybe he left some fingerprints as well. If it were me I’d hand the keys of my car over to someone else. I’d wrap myself in the same plastic they put the body in and catch a ride with whoever came to bail me out. Still, though, there’s going to be blood in that car.”
“The blood has clotted and started to separate,” I said, “So the crime scene is only a few hours old.”
“That would normally be helpful information. But we’re lacking a body.”
“It might be for the best,” I said. “I’m out of room in my freezer.”
Jack shook his head at me in disbelief, but I just shrugged. I spoke the truth, and finding Doc Randall’s body meant we’d have to figure out some other way to keep him on ice, and it wouldn’t be pleasant for anyone involved.
“I’ve got to call this in,” Jack said. “And then I have to go ask the mayor for his alibi. The fun never ends.”
“Since there’s no body, I’m guessing I’ll just be in the way here,” I said, unlocking the door and heading out into the fresh air. Jack followed behind me. “I’ll walk back to the funeral home. I’m supposed to meet Reverend Thomas and Mr. Oglesby about Daniel’s interment. Let me know if you need any
thing else from me.”
“Let me have a patrol car take you,” Jack said.
I peeled off my gloves and stuck them in my pocket. “It’s only a couple of blocks. I’ll be fine.”
“I’ll check in with you once I get a break.” He kissed me once, and I stood there a little dazed before I shook myself out of it and walked back around to the front of the house.
I waved to Colburn as he pulled in behind Jack’s cruiser, and thought about the best place to hide Doc Randall’s body. The river would be an obvious choice. But they’d wait until dark to dump him. So it was being held somewhere. Probably the same place they’d tortured Daniel Oglesby. Unfortunately, the choices were unlimited at this point.
Chapter Nineteen
“This is more difficult than I thought it would be,” Reverend Thomas said half an hour later.
David Oglesby—Daniel’s father—had given permission for the church to handle all the minutia of burying his son, since he could never be sure what his mind was going to be from one day to the next because of the Alzheimer’s. So Reverend Thomas and Lorna had come in directly after Sunday services to get things settled. I’d already told them I’d do the service at cost, and that seemed to be satisfactory to the Reverend, even though Lorna’s mouth pinched in a disapproving line at my apparent lack of charity.
“Daniel had become like a son to me,” the Reverend continued, his voice papery thin. “It’s a comfort to know he’s in a better place now, but that doesn’t make our earthly wants go away. It’s selfish to want him here when I know he’s in heaven.”
Lorna scowled, but she kept her mouth shut in respect of the Reverend. I wondered then if he knew Daniel Oglesby was gay.
Reverend Thomas cleared his throat and picked a piece of lint off his black trousers. “I think I might need a moment to myself. Lorna can make the final decisions on the casket and flowers. Thank you for taking care of this, J.J. I’ll see you tomorrow evening at the viewing.”
I watched with sympathy as Reverend Thomas hoisted his creaky bones out of the little chair in front of my desk. He shuffled out of my office, and I heard the front door of the funeral home click softly behind him.
