“Hello?”
David identified himself, saying he needed to ask Max Chisholm a few questions. He willed his voice to be calm, steady. Just routine.
“My nephew? He’s not here.”
“Can you tell me where I might find him?” The list of Chisholms filled a page of the address book, but with out-of-town addresses.
“No.” The man sounded weary. “He dropped off a casserole earlier, but now he’s probably at work.”
“I just went to Kopecki’s and he wasn’t there. He’s not at home, either.”
“Then I don’t know where he is,” the man said impatiently. “We’ve had a death in the family, in case you cops had forgotten.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. But if you want to clear Jimmy’s name, we need information and we need it quickly.” The only other local Chisholm was a Sarah in Lakewood.
The phone lines only amplified a derisive snort. “I may have been born at night, mister, but it wasn’t last night. You guys are making my nephew into another Son of Sam. I’m just trying to help my sister bury her son and there’s reporters on the lawn turning it into the movie of the week. Ain’t they violating my civil rights?”
David hadn’t thought of that. Jimmy’s relatives were in the middle of a three-ring circus. It sounded like there were lights and action and lots of people. It sounded like the last place in the world Max would go with someone he wanted to kill.
“You have a right to order them off your property, Mr. Chisholm. But about Max—are his parents there with you?”
After a wary pause, he spoke. “Max doesn’t have any parents, never really did. My mother had to raise him. What’s this sudden interest in Max, anyway?”
A faint tickle moved along the back of David’s neck, lighter than the touch of a butterfly’s wing. He had found something important. “Your mother, Sarah? Does she live on”—he checked the address book again—“Warren Road? In Lakewood?”
“Lived. She’s dead, too.”
David’s hope plunged to a forlorn death.
“She left the house to Max after twenty years of telling him he should have been drowned at birth. I keep telling him to sell it and oh by the way maybe split the money with me and Cindy since my mother left all her money to poor struggling Donna and never fixed the damn will after poor struggling Donna got herself blown to bits at Hanna’s Diner. Her finest performance, if you ask me.”
But David had hung up.
Chapter 35
IT NEVER OCCURRED TO Evelyn to wonder where she was. Frankly she didn’t care. She had been sitting there for at least forty-five minutes, but she had no idea how much time had passed while she had been out cold. Max had finished his snack and they remained undisturbed, but this did not seem to reassure him. He grew more agitated instead of less, and padded back and forth in stocking feet over the basement floor. The top of the bucket showed pockmarks from his firmness tests. Evelyn could hear no sounds from outside, and all she could smell was fear.
She cleared her throat. “What time is it?”
“Who cares?”
“I do.”
With a show of patience he looked at his watch. “Six-forty.”
She had left the ME’s office only two hours earlier. Even if Angel had gone home, she would not be particularly surprised by her mother’s failure to show. She had grown accustomed to Evelyn’s work ethic. Only the cat would miss her.
No one would be coming to her rescue. She could try to talk Max out of killing her, but that seemed unlikely. What about Lia and Destiny? Had they talked? Had they begged for their lives? Sobbed? Cajoled?
Whatever they had done, it hadn’t worked.
She had to keep him talking until the weather turned and the rivers froze solid. Then he could toss her onto the ice and if the fall didn’t kill her, the exposure would, but at least she would be able to breathe. “Who’s the woman in the picture?”
He glanced at the photo, picked it up. “My mother.”
“She was pretty.” Instinctively she used the past tense.
“She could have shown Narcissus a thing or two about self-esteem.” He set the picture down carefully, caressing the top of the frame as he did. “In other words, she was a self-loving bitch. But she taught me that you have to make your own dreams. The world won’t do shit for you.”
“I’m sure she loved you,” she said, not at all sure this was true.
“Yeah, good try, Evelyn. Get the monster crying in his beer over dear old mum.”
“Mothers always love their children,” she persisted. “It’s instinctive. Even when they don’t show it.” Even when they’re yelling at you to clean your room and do your homework. Even when they want to throttle you with their bare hands. Does Angel know that? Did I make it clear?
Max startled her by coming closer, planting his hands on her thighs, his face four inches away. Salmon-scented breath warmed her face. “Let me tell you about my mother. My mother was an actress. Never mind that she couldn’t act for shit and got what bit parts she did only after an enthusiastic turn with the casting agent. She told people she was an actress, so she was. See what I mean? You have to make your own dreams.”
Evelyn put Angel out of her mind and listened. She listened with every pore of her being. There had to be a key here somewhere.
“I was the product of one of those enthusiastic turns, but motherhood didn’t slow her down. She had Aunt Cindy and dear old Grandmama to do all the icky stuff like change diapers and see that I went to school. And so my life went. For fifteen years. One day she said, ‘Let’s go to the beach.’ It was early June and way too cold to swim, practically too cold to be outside without a coat. I didn’t care. My mother was actually going to spend an hour or two of her day with me. I couldn’t believe my luck.”
He straightened up, and Evelyn breathed out in a sigh. But he didn’t move away. He circled her, trailing one hand along her shoulders as he spoke.
“We went to Edgewater Beach. I stood at the water. It was cold enough to numb my feet, but my mother had taken me swimming, and I was by golly going to swim. I turned around to show her, but she was busy chatting up one of those beefy types she went for. Her skin looked all crinkled up with goose pimples, but she never stopped smiling. And I saw.”
“Saw what?” Evelyn breathed.
“That I was still too damn naïve to make it in show business.” His fingers draped the curve of her neck, loosely, as he stood behind her. “She took me there to provide an innocent reason to take her clothes off in front of this guy. It had never been about me, not for a nanosecond. It was about her.” He leaned down toward her ear. “I was just a prop.”
“What happened?”
“I went there to swim. So I swam. After a while the cold doesn’t hurt so much.”
Evelyn shuddered.
“A really dedicated lifeguard came in and got me. I woke up as he was doing CPR, which was neither necessary nor expertly done. He cracked a rib, but hey, at least he tried.”
“What did your mother do?”
He laughed. “What do you think? Grabbed the opportunity. Just like when I saw you at Kopecki’s—see what I mean about learning from her? She grabbed the opportunity. It was one of her better performances, almost on a par with the aluminum siding commercial.” The hand on her neck trembled against her skin, energized by the memory. “The next week the Hanna blew up and my mother finally achieved immortality.”
“I was there.”
“There?” He came around to look at her face. “You mean, like you worked there? With the coroner’s office?”
She nodded, unsure how he’d take that news.
“Did you see my mother?”
“I—I’m sure I did.”
He smiled gently. “Wasn’t she beautiful?”
Evelyn didn’t dare to breathe, didn’t even blink, froze more still than cement.
“You’re beautiful, too, you know.” He traced one cheek with his finger.
She tried not to pull away.<
br />
But he noticed. He straightened up. “I’d love to sit around and tell you all about myself, but I’m afraid it’s time to go.”
She swallowed a rising tide of bile and spoke out: “I’m curious to see how you do this. Between this bucket and my body, I must weigh, what, two hundred pounds?”
“Depends,” he joked as he opened a small storage closet. “Have you been dieting?”
“How are you going to do it without Jimmy to help you?”
That arrested his motion. “Jimmy?”
“Your partner?” she reminded him.
“You still think Jimmy had anything to do with this?”
Shit. Poor Jimmy Neal. “You mean he didn’t?”
“Of course not. That’s absurd. Jimmy wouldn’t . . . Jimmy could never—”
“Kill innocent people?”
If he felt remorse, he did a masterful job of hiding it. “Nobody’s innocent, Evelyn. Someone in your line of work ought to know that.” He pulled a two-wheeled dolly out of the closet and shut the door. It was a battered piece of equipment, red paint nearly worn off, an innocuous thing that could be found in any household. To Evelyn it might as well have been an iron maiden.
“Then why did you kill him?”
At last Max seemed genuinely regretful over someone’s death. “He screwed up. He had ordered the chloroform for me. I told him I used it to kill rats—a stupid explanation, but Jimmy wasn’t a real deep thinker. He didn’t have a dream, a focus. He thought his nickname should be Slick, working at that hospital, everybody’s buddy, always with a story to tell, but he was pretty simple, really. When you guys started questioning him, he finally figured out it had to be me.”
“And he confronted you?” she asked, incredulous.
“Why would Jimmy be afraid of me? We grew up together. If it wasn’t for Aunt Cindy, I would probably have starved to death before my mother or grandmother noticed. Jimmy and I were like brothers.”
“And you killed him.”
“He panicked. He wanted me to confess.” He snorted, as if he couldn’t help but laugh at such a foolish thing. “Like I would do that.”
“But no cement bucket for him,” Evelyn said as he positioned the dolly next to her chair.
“I was in a hurry.”
David careened onto Warren Road in a cloud of rubber smoke. Two patrol cars followed, with lights but no sirens. Next to him, Riley cursed and clutched his lit cigarette as if it were a talisman that could ward off a fatal, body-wrecking car crash. It snapped in two, but at least snatching the lit end from between his thighs took his mind off the very real possibility of arriving at the ME’s office as an MVA—motor vehicle accident.
“Take it easy, will you?” he protested halfheartedly.
“She’s probably already dead.” David tried to ease the pain in his heart by facing the worst scenario. It didn’t help.
“No, she’s not,” Riley said, as if he knew it wouldn’t do them any good to despair, while secretly agreeing. Last-minute saves came only on TV. In real life, people died. Evelyn was most likely dead, and neither of them could stand the thought. David’s mind kept bouncing off the image as if it were coated with Teflon.
“She wouldn’t ruin my record like that,” Riley went on, as if barely listening to himself, resorting to cop humor to keep them going. “How is this case going to look? We scare an innocent kid straight into the arms of the real murderer, and then we lose one of the county’s most valuable employees. They’ll be doing an autopsy on us. We’ll be writing parking tickets at the stadium for the rest of our lives, if we’re lucky.”
“Like I give a shit,” David snarled.
“Oh? Suddenly Mr. Ambition doesn’t give a shit?”
He got no answer and apparently didn’t expect one. He talked only to direct their attention to something, anything, other than the picture of Evelyn laid out on one of her own autopsy tables.
The roads were fairly clear. Dinnertime and the crappy weather kept people indoors, but there were still plenty of cars for David to weave through. Large stone houses with neat faces lined the street.
“We never did determine,” David said, his voice eerily conversational, “if he raped them first.”
“Stop it,” Riley growled.
They were silent the rest of the way.
The late Mrs. Chisholm’s residence loomed behind its hedges, a brooding mountain of dark stone with a front porch wide enough for a picnic table and a detached garage in back. The light snowfall, which could not make up its mind whether to stay or melt, gave it a slightly unkempt look. There were no lights visible.
David pulled into the driveway, stopping so short that one of the patrol cars tapped his bumper. The headlights illuminated the snow in front of him and he could see them. Tire tracks. Fresh ones.
They were out of the car in an instant and approaching, taking care even in their haste not to step on the tire marks. David headed for the garage and Riley turned to the house.
David used the flashlight to glance into the garage with a strange feeling of déjà vu. But this one was not filled with junk; in fact, it held nothing at all. Darker streaks on the floor, however, could only have come from wet tires.
He had been there. And he had left.
“Damn!” David cried to himself.
“What the hell is this?” Riley muttered. David turned.
Between the house and the garage there were two sets of prints—one going, one coming—and two solid ruts. David bent closer. It seemed to be wheel tracks, but from what? A wheelchair?
“I’m going in,” he told Riley, who didn’t even mention a warrant as David kicked the door. Sturdier than Max’s, however, the door didn’t budge. In frustration Riley tried the knob, and it turned.
They spread through the rooms; Riley went upstairs, David went down, the uniforms stayed on the ground floor and took in the many framed photos of beautiful Donna Chisholm.
A light switch threw the basement into garish relief and David felt utter hopelessness invade his soul as he took in the view: Chains. Bags of cement. A chair with duct tape clinging to the seat. Evelyn had been prepared.
They were too late.
Riley pounded down the stairs to join him, and together they stared in mute horror.
“Where the hell is he?” David spoke as if anger could stem the futility. “Where the hell is he?”
“We’ll find them,” Riley said with an utter lack of conviction.
“There’s miles and miles of Metropark system,” David grated out. He wanted to move, run, throw himself at someone, yet he had no target, no direction, and his body flinched at the forced control. “He could be anywhere. We don’t even know which way he went.”
Riley’s jaw clenched. “You ain’t giving up, kid, and I know I ain’t. This is the bottom of the ninth, and the bases are loaded.”
“Meaning?”
“Think.”
David thought. “Where’s the nearest bridge?”
Chapter 36
AT LEAST SHE WASN’T in the trunk. Trussed with chains in the backseat, duct tape over her mouth, Evelyn tried to move the bucket on the floor and tip it to one side. She assumed he had put her there because the cement had not fully dried and would spill out if turned over, so she tried to do exactly that. At the same time, she rubbed the duct tape against a heavy chain that ran over her shoulder. He had securely belted her into the seat, hidden behind pull-down shades that attached to the windows with suction cups. She could see out through the pinholes, but people outside couldn’t see in—had there been any people around on a frigid weeknight.
“Sit still,” Max commanded as he drove.
“Go to hell,” she said, but it came out as “Mmm.” She got a corner of the duct tape off, pressed the free end against one of the chains, and peeled further. It didn’t feel good. I won’t need to wax my facial hairs this month, she thought, and giggled hysterically.
“What was that?” Max asked.
She rubbed the opposi
te cheek against a shoulder until the piece came off entirely. “Why did you do this to Lia?” she asked, happy to see him give a little jolt of shock at the sound of her voice. It covered the sound of the seat belt slipping out of its buckle.
In the rearview mirror his face held no sign of recognition. “Who?”
“Lia Ripetti.”
“Oh. Ophelia. The one who got food poisoning from our potato salad. That wasn’t my fault, by the way,” he added as he turned a corner, glancing in the mirror to make sure she got that part straight. “I did the lettuce salads that night.”
“How did you get into her apartment?”
“The way most people do. I knocked on the door.”
“And she let you in?”
“I told her I had a coupon from Kopecki’s.” He seemed proud of his subterfuge. “As a gesture of goodwill, so on and so forth. I figured she’d let me in. She was sweet, didn’t look right past me like most people do at dinners. She talked to me.” His expression dreamed of the past as if he saw a young woman with long dark hair instead of the wet city street.
“And then?”
His eyes snapped back to reality. “And then she walked away with that mobster she worked for. Sweet Ophelia. I just love that name, don’t you?”
“Is that why you killed her? Her name?” Evelyn asked. She had to bite her lip to keep from asking about Angel. If he met the girls through catering events and their connection to Jimmy Neal had been coincidence, then most likely he didn’t know Angel existed. She had no reason to bring her daughter to his attention, or he might get around to her after Evelyn was dead and gone and unable to protect her child.
He considered the name theory. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Maybe. It gave her a certain classy quality, you know? She had beautiful eyes. Like they had seen their share of tragedy, but could still appreciate a sunrise or a perfect rose.”
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