Shots in the Dark

by Allyson K. Abbott

Mal didn’t hesitate. He came around to the side of the chair, slid one arm around my back, the other beneath my legs, and hoisted me out of the chair, cradling me against his chest. I wrapped an arm around his neck to steady myself and felt the heat of his body from beneath his coat radiating through mine. It made me see soothing waves of warm reds and sunny yellow. At the base of the stairs, Isabel locked the wheelchair, and Mal set me back down. I looked at him just before he let go of me, and our eyes locked for a few seconds. A tiny buzzing sensation zipped down my back, and I wasn’t sure what had triggered it. The sight of him? His smell? Or the emotions I was feeling? I blushed beneath the intensity of his gaze and made myself look at Isabel.

  “This chair is great for tonight,” I said, “but I’m going to need my crutches later.”

  “Oh, right.” She turned and headed back into the house.

  Mal released the locks on the chair and wheeled me toward his car. Then we did as Isabel had instructed, a practice run for getting into and out of the chair. By the time I was settled in the front seat, Isabel had come out with the crutches. Mal opened the back door of the car and set the crutches on the floor. Then he went around to the trunk to load up the wheelchair.

  “I’ll get the wig, chair, and coat back to you as soon as I can,” I told Isabel.

  “No rush. And good luck.”

  “Thanks again.” I shut the door and waited for Mal to get in on the driver’s side.

  As we pulled away, I looked back to wave at Isabel. She waved back and gave me a smile, but not before I saw the look of worry on her face.

  Chapter 20

  Mal headed for the impound lot, once again keeping a wary eye on the rearview mirror to look for any tails. There weren’t any that he could see, and when we were about five minutes away, I called Duncan to let him know. He was waiting for us when we arrived. Mal parked in the street, and Duncan hurried over to Mal’s window.

  “I’ve been scoping the place out for anyone who might be watching,” Duncan said. “I haven’t seen anything.” He shifted his gaze to me. “Wow. Isabel’s talent is truly remarkable,” he said, looking awestruck. “Is that really you, Mack?”

  “It is,” I said.

  “Amazing.” He took a few more seconds to appreciate my transformation before getting down to business. “There are video cameras in the lot, but I’ve been given permission to view Gary’s car with someone I’ve listed as a potential witness. The cameras will show us entering the impound lot, but the car itself is not in view of the cameras. I gave them a phony name, so you shouldn’t have anything to worry about, and when we’re done, I’ll tell them you said the car wasn’t the right one.”

  Mal and I proceeded to get out of the car, using the wheelchair the way Isabel had instructed. As soon as I was settled in the chair, with the blanket tucked in around my legs, Mal wheeled me toward the lot’s gate. Duncan punched in a numeric code on the lock mechanism, and with each beep, I saw a fleeting number appear before my eyes.

  “Four, two, five, eight, six,” I said, and Duncan turned to stare at me. “Those are the numbers I saw when I heard you push the buttons,” I explained.

  As the gate slid open, Duncan shook his head and said, “If the bar and this crime-solving stuff don’t work out, you might have a career as a criminal, breaking and entering.”

  I tried to wiggle my eyebrows, but the makeup I had glued to my face made it difficult. Mal pushed me through the gate, and we followed Duncan across the lot and around the corner of a building to an older model Ford sedan.

  “Sit for a moment and look at the outside of the car,” Duncan said. “Let me know if anything strikes you.”

  I nodded and told Mal, “Wheel me around it slowly.”

  Mal did so, and I looked closely at the car’s exterior, lowering the filters I typically had in place to shut out all my synesthetic reactions. I caught a faint whiff of gasoline, which made me hear the sound of rustling leaves, and the dark blue color of the car made me feel a dampness along my arms and hands. On the driver’s side of the car, I saw that the window had a dark, thick stain on it, and I caught a whiff of blood, which made me grimace. As we continued around the car, I picked up on two other smells I recognized: rust and salt. Gary’s car was at least fifteen years old, and it had body rot in a number of places where the salted winter roads had eroded away the exterior finish. But neither of these smells told me anything useful.

  When we were done circling the car, I told Duncan what I’d noted. “I don’t think any of it is particularly helpful, though,” I said when I was done.

  Duncan nodded slowly. “Let’s move on to the inside of the car, then,” he said. “The evidence indicates that the shooter was in the passenger seat, so we’ll approach it from that side. I have to warn you, the front of the car has a fair amount of dried blood in it, and while the interior has been thoroughly processed, there’s a lingering odor. . . .” He didn’t describe the smell; he didn’t have to. “The techs also vacuumed the passenger seat and floor and dusted the interior for prints, so there will be some powder in there.”

  I nodded. Thanks to the investigations into my father’s and Ginny’s deaths, I knew what sort of reaction I’d get from the fingerprint powder. Hopefully, I’d be able to single it out from any other reactions I had. “Did the techs find anything useful?” I asked.

  Duncan cocked his head to one side. “I’ll answer that once we’re done. I don’t want to sway your reactions any.”

  I saw the wisdom of this and nodded again.

  “I’m going to open the passenger-side door, and you can wheel up beside it and look in.”

  “Okay, but if there are any lingering smells other than what you mentioned, the longer the door is open, the greater the chance is that those smells will escape or diminish.”

  “I realize that, but the techs had the doors open for a long time when they were processing the car, so I think that ship has sailed.”

  “Too bad,” I said.

  Duncan opened the passenger-side door and, with some help from Mal, I wheeled myself up as close to it as I could get without touching anything.

  The smell Duncan had referred to earlier was the proverbial elephant in the room. It was a rank, rotten odor that made me stifle a gag. The smell of blood typically generated a metallic sound, like two metal bars clanking together. This old, fetid blood smell caused a metallic sound, too, but it was duller, heavier, more of a crunching metal noise. I’d had similar experiences when I smelled meat that had gone bad, and once as a child, when I and a couple of other kids came across a raccoon carcass at the back of the school yard one day.

  I catalogued my reaction to the rotten smell in my head and then parsed it, trying to determine if I was having any other smell reactions that didn’t fit with it. There were faint remnants of the gasoline, salt, and rust smells, and there was another smell, which I recognized as a polish used to refurbish dashboards. My father had used the stuff both on his car and on mine, and I recalled the smooth, oily sensation on my fingers that the smell of it always triggered.

  As I sorted through these reactions, I became aware of another smell, a very faint one that manifested as a musical sound, like a note being played on a saxophone. It was vaguely familiar—I knew I’d encountered it before—but I couldn’t place it.

  “There are a couple of other smells in here apart from the expected ones, like the gas, rust, salt, and . . . decay smell. One is from some polish used on the dashboard. But the other one I can’t place. It’s faint, but I’m certain I’ve encountered it before. It must be one of those things that I’ve always suppressed or ignored.”

  “Is there any one area it seems to emanate from?” Duncan asked.

  I leaned deeper into the car, but that made the smell and the sax music dissipate slightly. When I straightened back up, both of them grew a smidgen stronger. I leaned to my right, and they grew stronger still. Finally, I stuck my nose down by the armrest of the car door, and the musical sound crescendoed. “It’s
here,” I said, pointing to the front of the armrest. “It’s a faint odor. Something . . . spicy maybe? But I think it’s also floral.”

  “Like an aftershave, perhaps?” Duncan suggested.

  “Maybe. Like I said, I’m pretty sure I’ve smelled it before, but I can’t place it.”

  “We can have Cora search her database later,” Duncan said.

  Cora, in conjunction with her other duties, had started a database of my synesthetic reactions, a virtual catalog of experiences, which she could search if I couldn’t recall what triggered a particular reaction.

  “It’s worth a try,” I said, staring at the armrest. I got a strong dirt taste in my mouth and recognized it. “Your tech people dusted this armrest for prints, but I don’t detect any voids in the powder, so I’m guessing they didn’t find anything.”

  Duncan said nothing, but I saw him give Mal a look. I scanned the other interior surfaces and experienced the same dirt taste, until I looked at the steering wheel and the gearshift lever. Here there were voids. I could tell because the dirt taste dissipated when I looked at certain spots.

  “They found and lifted prints on the steering wheel and the gearshift lever. Gary’s, I assume. But I don’t think they found any fingerprints on the passenger side of the car at all.”

  “You are correct,” Duncan said with a smile.

  “That suggests your shooter was wearing gloves, which is not surprising given the time of year.”

  Mal, who was standing behind my chair, watching it all, said, “You’re amazing.”

  I smiled but said nothing. What I was doing didn’t feel amazing. It was just me. But I liked the praise, nonetheless. I went back to puzzling over that smell. I stared at the armrest, scouring it with my eyes, inch by inch. At one point the dirt taste intensified significantly, up near the front of the armrest, where the smell was the strongest.

  “The spot where the smell seems to come from has a thicker layer of fingerprint dust than the rest of the armrest,” I said. I closed my eyes then and imagined someone sitting in the passenger seat, their arm on the armrest.

  I opened my eyes and looked over at Duncan. “I’d assume, given the time of year and the weather, that whoever was sitting here was wearing a coat, meaning the bulk of their arm was covered. If that smell was from the material in the coat, I would expect it to be along the entire armrest, but there’s just this one spot along the front edge of the armrest.” I pointed to the area. “It continues down the side of it a bit . . . here.” I traced the area with my finger, getting close to it but not touching it.

  Then I sat back in the wheelchair and reached down with my right hand into the pocket of the coat I was wearing. As I did so, the edge of my coat sleeve caught on the armrest of the chair and was dragged up. The sleeve of the sweater I had on beneath my coat moved along with it, and my skin came in contact with the armrest of the wheelchair.

  “Though we can’t be sure, odds are the shooter was right handed, correct?” I said.

  “Correct,” Duncan agreed.

  “If they had something in their right pocket, like a gun, and they reached in there for it, their bare skin might have come in contact with the armrest in the car, the way my arm did here on the wheelchair just now. That may be how the residue of whatever it is I smell here was left behind. So maybe it’s a lotion or a soap or a bath oil of some sort.”

  Duncan arched his brows and gave me a look of admiration. “Makes sense,” he said. He leaned over the door and stared down at the armrest. “I suppose I could swab it and have the tech guys run it through the analyzer to see if they can find anything they can identify.”

  “You can try,” I said, “but there’s fingerprint powder mixed in with it. Won’t that skew the results?”

  “I think they can isolate the powder,” Duncan said. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small cardboard tube. From it he withdrew a cotton-tipped swab. “Show me the spot,” he said, and when I pointed to the area, he swiped it and then placed the swab back in the tube. “Nice work, Mack,” he said. “Anything else?”

  I gave it another minute and shook my head. “I’ve had lots of reactions, but I don’t think any of them are relevant or helpful.”

  “Okay,” Duncan said. “Then let’s call it a night.”

  Mal wheeled me back away from the car, and Duncan closed the door. I stared at the car, realizing it had been Gary’s tomb in a way, and a shudder ran through me.

  “Are you cold?” Duncan asked.

  “A little,” I admitted. “More upset than cold, though. This damned letter writer is getting to me.”

  Duncan gave my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “We got a break a little while ago on one of the cases I’m working, and I think I can sneak away later tonight. How about I take you over to my place and fix you dinner? You’ve fed me often enough. I think it’s my turn. And if you’re up for it, you can stay the night.”

  “That would be nice,” I said. “But I don’t feel comfortable leaving the bar for the entire night. As it is, I have my staff and Cora handling things, and I have a brand-new employee I hired last night. I need to go back.”

  Duncan scowled.

  “Besides,” I added, “how would I get back to the bar? You can’t take me, because you might be seen.”

  He nodded grudgingly. “Well, then, I guess I’ll have to sneak into the bar again, assuming I’m welcome.”

  “Of course you are.”

  Duncan looked past me to Mal. “Would you mind taking her back?”

  “Happy to.”

  Duncan glanced at his watch. “I need to get this swab to the lab and finish off some paperwork on that case I mentioned. How about if I meet you at the back alley door at, say, eleven? That gives you a couple of hours to make sure everything is okay with the bar.”

  “You’ll wear a disguise?”

  “Of course,” he said a bit impatiently. His scowl deepened, and he looked at Mal again. “Would you mind waiting in the car? I want to talk with Mack alone for a few minutes.”

  “No problem,” Mal said.

  “Just push the green button on the panel by the gate, and it will open for you,” Duncan said, and with that Mal headed back the way we’d come.

  I looked at Duncan expectantly, waiting to hear what he had to say.

  He watched Mal walk off, and once he was out of earshot, he looked back at me. “Mack, are we okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly.

  “Would you rather I didn’t come by tonight?”

  “That depends. Will you be there with me once you get there, or will your head be somewhere else all night?”

  He arched a brow at me. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it? I offered to spend the entire evening with you away from all our other distractions, but you can’t tear yourself from the bar long enough to do that.”

  I sighed. “I think the timing is off. All this sneaking around we’re doing, and the demands we both have on us with our jobs . . . they make it impossible to carry on any sort of normal relationship.”

  “I never promised you normal,” he said with half a grin. He looked away for a few seconds, back toward the gate. “Is it Mal? Is that the problem? Are you looking to dump me so you can hook up with him?”

  I shook my head. “Mal is a great guy, and I admit, I’ve grown quite fond of him. But the feelings I have for him are different from the feelings I have for you. I just don’t know if the feelings I have for you are enough with all this other stuff that’s going on.”

  “Are they enough for you to hang in there until we can get to the bottom of this case? I know it’s not easy, but I really care for you, Mack, and I want to see where we can go with this.” He waved a finger back and forth between me and him. “With us.”

  “I can hang in for a while longer,” I said with a smile.

  “I promise you it will get better,” he assured me. “I think our schedules will always be something of an obstacle, but once we catch this
damned letter writer and we can stop all the sneaking around, I think it will make things a lot easier.”

  “Assuming we do catch whoever’s behind it.”

  “We will. Have faith.”

  Have faith. There were those words again. Maybe it was a sign . . . the world or God or something telling me to be patient and trust that things would eventually work out.

  “Okay. I’ll try to be patient,” I said with a pout. “See you later?”

  “With bells on.” His eyes lit up for a second, and he added, “You know, I could literally wear bells, or at least carry one.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I think I have the perfect disguise. In fact, it’s so good, you won’t have to sneak me in the back door. But I might need a little help from Mal.”

  He had me puzzled but intrigued as he stepped around behind my wheelchair and started pushing me toward the gate. “What do you have in mind?”

  And then he told me.

  When we got back to the car, he wheeled me up to the door and held the chair as I climbed inside. Then he and Mal went around to the back of the car to load up the wheelchair. I heard the trunk slam closed and expected Mal to get in on the driver’s side, but he didn’t. Curious, I craned my head around to look out the back window. Duncan had hauled Mal some distance back from the car, and the two of them were huddled together in the cold night air, conversing. I rolled my window down, hoping to eavesdrop, but their voices were low and I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  After a few minutes, Mal finally returned to the car and got in behind the wheel. “Ready to spread a little holiday cheer?” he said as he started the engine.

  Though it seemed disrespectful, considering what we had just done, I was. After all, trying to find justice for the dead didn’t mean the living couldn’t be happy and celebrate once in a while.

  Chapter 21

  Just to be safe, Mal once again took a circuitous route back to the bar and looked for a tail. If there was one, he couldn’t see it. As I went about removing the wig and makeup Isabel had applied, Mal and I discussed our trip to Forest Home Cemetery the next day.