Bad Girl and Loverboy

by Michele Jaffe

  “Can I say good-bye to Daddy?”

  “I think you’ve hurt him enough already, don’t you?”

  She had started screaming then, tried to attack her mother, and the police were called. They came and asked her father what was wrong and he couldn’t say anything, just shook his head from side to side. She wanted to go to him so badly, apologize, say anything that would make it okay. But her mother wouldn’t let her.

  On the bus ride to Los Angeles all she could think about was how happy her mother must be to have her father all to herself now. She tried phoning a few times but her mother always answered, so she hung up.

  In the end, the police never even pressed charges, and she had no record. But they had ruined her life. And branded her with those words, “home wrecker.” When her father was killed by a heart attack a few months later, she knew what it meant. It meant he died of a broken heart. The heart she’d broken.

  She never got to say good-bye.

  Sitting in Harry’s kitchen now, she saw the sweep of his headlights coming up the driveway, and ran to the door to meet him. It was late, after eleven, and she had been worried that he wasn’t coming back, but was determined not to show it. When he came in, he smelled like bubble gum, like he had been with someone else. She smiled at him brightly.

  “Harry. How was your day?”

  He kissed the top of her head, familiar, sweet, and said, “Long. I had hoped to be home hours ago. How was yours?”

  “I talked to Nadene and found out when she was coming back, but other than that, uneventful.”

  “You look great wearing my shirt.” He looked at her more closely. “What did you do to your wrist? And why are your hands so dirty?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “Eve.”

  “I—It’s a paper cut. I went out for a sketch pad and I’ve just been doing some drawings.”

  “You left the house?”

  She shrugged. “I was bored and I wanted to draw. I borrowed your other car to do some errands. You don’t mind, do you? I got it washed as a thank-you.”

  “I think we need to talk.” He took her hand and led her to the table, turning on the television on the counter. “You should not have gone out,” he told her as he flipped channels.

  “What are you talking about? Why did you put the TV on?”

  “Because I wanted to show you this.”

  He had turned it to the news. On the screen a blond woman ducked under some crime scene tape and ran up the stairs of the Sun-Crest apartments. Across the bottom of the picture it said CHICAGO THOMAS, METRO CRIMINALISTICS. As Eve watched she realized that this was the woman she had seen coming out of the Johnson house, the one she had followed home. And now she was at the Waterses’. As though the woman were following her. She looked up at Harry, uncomprehending.

  “You are in serious trouble, Eve.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He pointed at the screen. “All those people are looking for you.”

  “For me? Why?”

  “They think you had something to do with the Home Wrecker case. Those murders. The ones in the houses you used to live in.”

  “How do you know that? That I used to live there.”

  “You drove me by them, remember?”

  She didn’t, but it was possible.

  “I’m afraid that’s not all,” Harry said. “I used your gate opener to go to your house today, like you asked me to? There were police all over it. I couldn’t go in.”

  “Police? At my house?” All of a sudden she couldn’t think straight. The police, looking at her things. The police calling her the Home Wrecker. “Harry, you can’t let them get me.” She had to make sure she could count on Harry. She could not get caught by the police, not now. She had to make him want to help her.

  She grabbed his hand. “Harry, I need you.”

  “Calm down.”

  “No, you don’t understand. You can’t trust them.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “No. They don’t care about the truth, they just care about their own cases. I hate them.”

  He brought her hand to his lips. “Okay, we won’t go to the cops. But can you think of anyone who could be behind this? Anyone who would want to frame you for murder?”

  “No.” She started to tremble, her mind shouting Home Wrecker Home Wrecker. “I can’t believe this is happening to me. I can’t believe it.”

  “Shhh,” he said, wrapping his arms around her. “I have an idea. You’re a mess. Why don’t I run a bath for you? A long bath. It will calm you down.”

  “I don’t want to be alone. If I’m alone I might hurt myself.”

  “I’ll be right here. I’ll even wash under your nails and your hair for you.”

  “Harry, you do love me, don’t you?”

  “I do.” He smiled at her so nicely. Sincerely. Like he meant it.

  She knew it was a lie but she held onto it anyway. What was a few more hours? Maybe even one more night? She could give him one more night.

  “Okay.”

  She heard him chuckle over her head. “Those are great sketches. How did you come up with the faces? I especially like the twin girls.”

  “They’re just people I’ve seen on the street. People who interested me. Drawing helps me get my mind off—other things.”

  “Do they have names?”

  She pointed to each as she said the names. “Claudia, Minette, Martine, Carol, Ellie, Norman, and Doug Junior.”

  “What about this one? It only has half a face.”

  “That’s Kelly. I’m not quite done with her yet.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Windy got a ride from one of the officers stationed at Eve’s back to criminalistics. After four tries she finally entered the pass code for the evidence room correctly and put the rings in one of the beige lockers with orange keys that looked like they should be in a train station, except you didn’t have to pay a quarter. She recorded them on the Evidence Status Board and scanned the rest of the items listed there, then went to flip through the Major Incident log book, a weak attempt, she knew, to stay on top of the cases the rest of her staff was working. In her office she made a few notes for the report she’d write the next day, ignored the tall stack of messages and mail that had come in, tossed the “engagement ring” made out of a paper clip and a Good ’n’ Plenty that someone had left on her desk with the note “Love Ernie” into the trash, and headed for the parking lot.

  There were a lot of people around for the late hour, Windy thought as she dug around her purse, looking for her car keys. She could feel the round keychain of her office keys, but not the unicorn keychain Cate had chosen that she kept her car and house keys on. Walking to the car, she went over all the places she could have left them that day, thinking it might be easier just to call a cab and give up, when she spotted them. They were in the door on the driver’s side, where she must have left them that morning when she locked it, even more distracted than she’d thought. Some detective—can’t even keep track of her car keys, she told herself.

  Telling herself that no, she was not going to fingerprint them. There was no reason to get paranoid. She had just left her keys there. Or dropped them.

  Everything at home would be fine.

  The traffic on the road at one in the morning was minimal and she floored it. When she pulled into the driveway, the house was completely dark. Her hands were shaking so much that she had trouble with the locks. The front door was double-locked and the alarm set exactly the way she’d instructed Brandon to do it. She ran upstairs, her heart pounding. Both Brandon and Cate were sleeping peacefully. See, she told herself, everything was fine. She needed to stop overreacting like that. It wasn’t responsible. It wasn’t stable. She was not falling apart.

  She checked to make sure all the doors and windows were locked, read the message Brandon had left saying her mother called again wanting to talk about where they would have dinner after her wedding, res
et the alarm, stripped off her work clothes, put on her Supergirl pajamas, checked the doors and windows again, and finally, finally tiptoed down the hall to kiss Cate good night.

  It is not only the things we are afraid of that we circle around, leave for last, she thought. Sometimes it is those we most look forward to and hold most dear.

  When she woke up the next morning, she was curled around Cate, hugging her tight.

  CHAPTER 31

  “We’ve got a four-twenty in the desert,” Ned told the group sitting around the fake wood table in the briefing room. “Not another Home Wrecker, this one is just your standard issue Jane Doe dead body. Corner of Rainbow and Warm Springs.”

  Windy was only supposed to be sitting in on his briefing of the A-Team but she raised her hand and said, “I’ll take it.” When everyone looked at her, she started making excuses. “I haven’t had a crime scene in the desert yet. I can use the practice.”

  “Really?” Ned asked.

  Really. Not admitting that she would jump at any excuse not to attend the Waters memorial service. Death she could handle but grief still knocked the wind out of her.

  Driving there, Windy felt like she was playing hooky, doing something really illicit. She was being bad, irresponsible in numerous ways. Bill would kill her if he knew she was working a crime scene, much less that she’d volunteered for it. And skipping the Waters memorial service was wrong. She turned up the radio and sang along.

  Windy knew criminalists who avoided looking at family photos at their crime scenes, saying that it interfered with their ability to be scientific and objective. For her, after years of seeing death daily, the opposite was true: looking at the photos helped her do a better job by reminding her that the victims were individuals with lives, not just case numbers.

  And yet, getting out of the car with only the desert and the crime scene and an unknown dead woman in front of her, she could appreciate the other opinion. When you didn’t know anything about the victim you could get lost in the crime scene in a way that was almost meditative. Most people would say she was demented and they would be right. She suspected that Ash would understand.

  The victim, female between thirty-two and thirty-eight, Caucasian, cropped brown hair, had been hit with a heavy object on the head from behind but there was no puddle of blood, so the dump site was not the site of the murder. This was a secondary crime scene. Someone had transported her here, dragging her body from a car parked on the shoulder of the road, leaving three partial tire track impressions but no footprints.

  She had been there for half an hour when a shadow fell across the ground in front of her. Looking up, she saw a Nevada Highway Patrol officer, hands on his hips, sun glinting off his aviator glasses, the toe of one of his shiny black boots grazing one of her tire marks.

  “Anything for us?” He shifted his weight dangerously.

  Windy squinted at the man. “Not yet. But you might get some people talking to mechanics, asking for the names of customers with Camaro IROC Z’s in a light color, white or with white accents. My guess would be a 1985 in yellow beige, but it could be anything from ’85 to ’89.”

  “Right.” The officer laughed, like he was getting into the spirit of her joke. She could practically see him thinking that next she’d be telling him what he ate for breakfast. “T-top or just regular two-door model?”

  “They did not make a T-top. And there will be an air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. One of those little trees? Yellow. Sorry I can’t be more specific.”

  The officer started to laugh again, then seemed to realize she wasn’t kidding. “You’re serious. Aren’t you?”

  “Of course. This is a crime scene.”

  “You can tell all that? About the car and the air freshener? You know all that from two tire treads?”

  “Three,” Windy said. “These are special tires. Original Goodyear Eagle VR50 Gatorbacks. The same treads as they put on Corvettes, but the axle length has IROC written all over it. These tires are beauties. Someone has been storing them or collecting them.”

  “And the air freshener? Where do you see that?”

  “I smelled it, on the woman’s clothes. Fresh Lemon Burst is the flavor. The color of the car I got from paint scratches on the victim’s metal watch band. It must have scraped the side of the car when she was dragged out. Many people like to match their air fresheners to their cars, so the yellow could be a hint. I’d say the car is clean too.”

  “Yeah, of course,” the officer said soberly. “I bet you find cleaning fluid, soap bubbles and stuff in the tire treads. And those yellow air fresheners, you buy those at the car wash. That makes sense.”

  Windy gave him a smile, A for effort. “Soap would be gone in about ten seconds on the street. It’s designed to wash away. I was actually thinking that the woman must have bled from this head wound all over the car and whoever did this would have wanted to get it cleaned off.”

  “Oh.”

  Clearly disappointed, the officer started to head to his car to and call the ID in, but stopped when she said, “Beef jerky.”

  He turned slowly and looked at her.

  “You had Beef jerky for breakfast. Teriyaki flavor.” She let him walk away, fast, his expression almost scared now, not mentioning to him the wrapper was sticking out of his back pocket. It was a cheap trick but he had stepped on her crime scene.

  Windy could tell them a lot about the car that had left the body there, but not much about the body itself, especially about the cause of death. The injury to the head was a bleeder, but it did not look fatal. Broken capillaries in the eyes could mean asphyxiation, but there were no ligature marks, no bruising to the neck to suggest strangling. What were present were insects, more than Windy would have expected for a body that had only been dead a few hours and lying outside even fewer.

  “Your Jane Doe was dead approximately twelve hours when she was found out there,” Dr. Bob, the medical examiner, told Windy at eleven that same morning in the autopsy room. Dr. Bob tucked a stray red hair behind her ear as she hunched over the dead woman’s face, using a light and a magnifier. “And I think I’ve just figured out where all your insects came from. I can’t be positive until I cut her open, but I’m 90 percent convinced this woman died from eating dirt.”

  “Dirt?”

  “Fertilizer, to be more exact. A rich blend, probably for flowers, with a fair bit of organic material in it. That’s what brought out the bugs.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”

  “Me either. Reminds me of being on the school yard, ‘Eat dirt or die’. Only this woman didn’t have a choice.”

  “How do you get someone to eat enough dirt to kill them?”

  Dr. Bob slipped off her mask and shrugged. “It wouldn’t take much. The stuff isn’t that easy to swallow. But from the bruising on the inside cheek, it looks to me like there was something stuck in the mouth. Maybe a funnel? Like stuffing a foie gras duck. I’ll know more when I get a closer look. I’ll do a dental impression too so we can send it out, maybe get an ID, and notify her emergency contact. Although I’d say for her the emergency—hey, are you all right?”

  Windy was pulling off her latex gloves and moving toward the door, fast. “Yes, I’m fine. I just thought of something I’ve got to do.” She said, “Send me the results as soon as you have them thanks bye,” over her shoulder and disappeared.

  “—the emergency is over,” the medical examiner finished her joke, thinking that she’d have to work on the punch line a little more if it was going to send people running out the door.

  CHAPTER 32

  “Am I interrupting your breakfast?” Windy asked.

  Ash looked up from the package of Lifesavers he was crunching his way through to see her standing in the doorway of his office, her hair half out of its ponytail, two dirt spots on her knees, and realized he’d been waiting all day for this.

  “Lunch. Care to join me? I have a fresh pack of Big Red.”

 
“I wouldn’t want to deplete your stores. Sorry I missed the memorial service. How was it? Do you think you got anything?”

  “Not much. Dr. Waters standing there in a brand new suit, and the pair of Nikes he’d been wearing the day he found his family dead. Not crying, not moving, nothing. Had to have been over a thousand people there.” Ash shook his head. “And then, just as it ends, my phone rang with an SOS from the mayor’s office about a friend of his who needs help.”

  Windy leaned against the doorjamb. “Is that the vehicular manslaughter I saw listed in the log book?”

  “Exactly. At least it’s a change from senseless serial murder. Wife runs over her husband in her Mercedes three times, leaves the car parked on his body, gets caught a mile from the scene of the crime ordering a hamburger. What do you think she says?”

  “Can I get that to go?”

  “Good one. No, she says, yes she ran over her husband and left her car there, that it was a lapse of judgment.”

  “Lapse of judgment. That’s one way to put it. Homicide is another.”

  “Oh, she’s not talking about running over her husband. She’s talking about leaving the car. She says, ‘I should have driven away. I would have been done with my burger by the time you got here.’ ”

  “Crazy.”

  “Or pretending. I can’t believe I had to miss my flight to L.A. for that. Apparently she’s a heavy contributor to Gerald’s campaign. Which ought to help her insanity plea, if she chooses to make one.” Shaking his head again. “Okay, your turn. I hear the highway patrol is thinking of making you an honorary member.”

  Windy rolled her eyes. “It was kind of exciting, really. My first ever case of suffocation-by-fertilizer.”

  “You got Dr. Bob for the autopsy, right? Did she make any jokes? Something like that ought to have been perfect for her. She’s just doing pathology to pay the bills—her real dream is to do stand-up somewhere on the Strip.”

  “How would you advertise that, the laughing pathologist? I think she might have tried, but she accidentally gave me an idea. That’s why I came down here. She started talking about checking the dental records to get an ID and it made me think, what about checking Eve’s medical or dental insurance to see if she had an emergency contact number? Maybe it can give us a starting point.”