Because their energetic fingerprints are different, she reminded herself.
The door to the deck opened, and Scott limped out. He toed down the hems of his sweat pants and drew his shirtsleeve over his bandaged forearm to ward off the chill. That afternoon, Scott’s mother had sped him to an emergency clinic after Scott and Janis explained how a dog had bitten him during their bike ride. “Now this town is crawling with stray attack dogs?” Mrs. Spruel had asked in exasperation.
“How’s it going?” Scott asked. Outdoor lights from the first floor shone from his glasses.
“Quarter to four and all’s well. You’re early.”
“Yeah, woke up a little bit ago and couldn’t fall back asleep.” He scratched the side of his mussed hair and took J.R. into his lap as he joined Janis on the porch swing. She spread the blanket so that it wrapped both his and her backs. She rested her head against his shoulder.
“We can’t spend the next two nights like this,” she said.
“Yeah, I’ve been thinking the same thing.”
“We need to talk to Detective Buckner.”
Scott winced. “Ooh…”
“If that was blood in those vats, the police need to know. There was more than a couple of dogs’ worth in there, too.”
“Fine, but there’s the little problem of how we came on that evidence. David was right. We trespassed, broke into their house…”
“An anonymous call, then?” She knew it was a reach, and for the reason Scott was about to explain.
“It would be the search warrant problem all over again. If the judge couldn’t find sufficient cause when David was wearing my dad’s shirt, he’s not going to sign off on anything based on an anonymous phone call.” He fell silent for a moment. “I’m starting to think that the only reason David hasn’t shown up tonight is because he knows there’s nothing we can do. Anyway, they’ve probably moved the vats by now. That evidence is long gone. History.”
“Not all of it,” Janis said.
Scott looked at her sidelong. “What did you do?”
“While we were listening for their motorcycles, I took a rag from Thistle’s bedding and dipped it in the vat. Then I wrapped that rag in another one and stuffed them in my pocket.”
Scott pressed his lips to her temple. “Have I told you how awesome you are?”
Despite that they were discussing blood and dog slayings, laughter bubbled from Janis’s chest. Ever since they were kids Scott’s enthusiasm had a way of infecting her.
“Evidence,” he whispered victoriously.
“Whoa, there, Inspector Gadget. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” She patted his thigh. “We still have to explain how we obtained it.”
“Oh. Right.”
An idea occurred to Janis. She sat up and snapped her fingers. “He invited us.”
“He did?”
“Well, he invited me, remember? To the amusement park. So we went to his house to take him up on the offer. We knocked, thought we heard someone say ‘come in,’ opened the door—it was unlocked—and searched the house. When we heard a sound coming from the garage—someone or something in distress, possibly—we can exaggerate that part a bit—we forced the door open and, lo and behold, look what we discovered, Detective.”
“Cue handing over blood sample,” Scott said. “You’re awesomer all the time.”
“But something’s still bothering me.”
“What?”
She drew her feet up onto the porch swing. “We never found a match for those energetic fingerprints.”
“I’ve been mulling that over, too,” Scott said. “Part of why I couldn’t sleep. Maybe it’s something David and the others do that cause those energetic disturbances. And maybe it’s not something they ever do at home because they don’t need to do it there.”
“Like turning to mist?” she said. “Sorry. I should have flashed my cheap shot warning.”
Scott rolled with it. “Well, mist or whatever they do to access houses without a trace.”
Janis brought a strand of hair around to her nose. “But that wouldn’t explain J.R.’s freak-out at the police station. David and the others were nearby, but why would they have been using their … powers?”
“Probably to terrorize J.R.” Scott patted the dog’s chest.
But his answer didn’t resonate with Janis’s intuition. “Was there anyone else out there that night?”
“At the police station? No one that I saw…” Scott’s final word trailed off. “Actually, there was someone, maybe a half block away. Hard to make out in the mist. But what’s the point of chasing shadows? We have blood evidence now. And I’m betting it’s going to match up to at least one of those dogs. Where else would they have gotten it? The blood bank?”
Janis nodded slowly. “You’re right. We’ll go to the police station first thing in the morning.”
Scott illuminated his watch. “Your shift’s up.” He kissed her temple again. “Go get some sleep.”
Janis unwrapped herself from the blanket, fixed it around Scott’s shoulders, and rose. For the first time, the rims of her eyes burned with fatigue. She tousled his hair. “Stay safe out here, sexy. Signal me if you need help.”
But she didn’t think he would need her help. David and the others had gone out earlier but were back home now and sound asleep. She shared that info with Scott. Neither did she think the blood in the rag would prove to belong to either of the murdered dogs.
But she kept that to herself.
Detective Buckner turned the bloody rag over in his gloved hands, vertical lines splitting his dark brows.
“And you say you found this in their garage?”
They nodded at the same time, Janis sensing that Scott was as reluctant as she was to say any more than they already had. During their telling of The Story, Detective Buckner had watched intently. Janis could almost hear his investigative mind at work. Parsing out relevant details, marking the illogical with a red pen (like why they would ever want to go to a closed amusement park with someone like David), underlining possible inconsistencies.
To say he was skeptical was putting it mildly.
Detective Buckner fished an evidence bag from a desk drawer, dropped the stained rag inside, and sealed it.
“I’ll have our lab check it out,” he said, peeling off his gloves. “But there’s something you should know.”
Beside her, Scott swallowed. “What’s that?”
Detective Buckner dropped the gloves into a trash bin. “David reported a break-in at his residence yesterday.”
“He did?” Janis asked.
She tried to affect the shock of the wrongfully accused, but what was shocking was the fact that David had actually reported them. It seemed so risky as to defy reason. Scott was apparently thinking the same thing.
“David also said someone destroyed his garage door to get out.”
“Well, that’s just ridiculous,” Scott replied.
“Is it? In the midst of these dog slayings, we’ve gotten reports of people prowling in places they shouldn’t. They work in a team of two, apparently.” Detective Buckner’s gaze flicked between them.
Janis put on her confused face.
The detective sighed. He was tiring of the ruse. “Now, although David reported the break-in, he asked us not to investigate. He didn’t seem to think the perpetrators would be coming back.”
Well that’s a relief, Janis thought.
“But he did bag the garage door handles, just in case. Thinks there might be some fingerprints on them.”
Janis’s heart began whumping again. What was David up to?
“What all of this amounts to,” Detective Buckner said, “is that if he can prove you obtained this—whatever it turns out to be—in the course of a crime, it would become inadmissible in court. If it turned out to be the blood of either dog, we couldn’t use it to prosecute them.”
Janis shook her head. Somehow David had managed to reverse their check against him and his friends a
nd turn it into a checkmate against her and Scott.
“All right, look,” Detective Buckner said. “I think I know what’s going on here.”
Scott raised his head.
“You’re still stewing over the break-in at your house, about having your things stolen. You think it was David and his friends, and now you’re determined to see them prosecuted.”
Janis nodded to herself. She had been trying to tell Scott the same thing for the last two days.
Detective Buckner leaned forward onto his elbows. “But listen to me, and listen good. What you’re doing is called vigilante justice. And that kind of justice is a very slippery slope. There’s less a chance of you solving a crime and far more of one that you’ll end up a criminal yourself.”
Scott dipped his chin, chastised. “Yes, sir.”
“Now, why don’t you two head on home. Leave the police work to the police.”
Janis and Scott were almost to the front door when Chief McDermott burst into the station. He was wheezing for air, a high color spotting his cheeks. Janis and Scott stepped to one side as he hurried past.
“We’ve got a call,” he shouted into the detective’s office. “A DB on Chapman Drive. Looks like a one eighty-seven.”
Detective Buckner and Chief McDermott left the station through a back door. Seconds later, a police siren whined to life.
“DB? One eighty-seven?” Janis asked. “What are those?”
Despite that the sun was out when they stepped from the police station onto the sidewalk, Scott’s pupils were huge. “A DB is a dead body,” he said. “A one eighty-seven is a homicide.”
13
By noon a steady train of regional news crews had begun arriving in town, parking their vans along both sides of Center Street and setting up cameras in front of the police station and on the lawn of city hall.
To Scott’s knowledge, Murder Creek had never received this degree of attention. He supposed the town’s name was part of the hook. He and Janis moved among the herds of locals who watched from a cautious distance. They paused to listen to a halogen-bathed reporter rehearse her lead-in: “Murder Creek’s first murder in almost thirty years, the gruesome details coming up.”
No one could say yet whether the murder had in fact been “gruesome.” The investigators hadn’t released that information. With Chief McDermott and Mayor Walpole scheduled to hold a two p.m. press conference, Scott figured they would learn the facts then.
The only certainty was the victim’s name: Dr. Harold Fields, a semi-retired pediatrician and life-long resident of Murder Creek.
Scott’s mother had actually taken Scott to him once when Scott had a case of strep throat. Dr. Fields had been white-haired and age-freckled and spoke in a calming voice. His examining room smelled of Band-Aids. Scott could recall the soft pads of the man’s fingers palpating the nodes of his throat.
“Why him?” Scott asked in anger for the fourth or fifth time that morning. “He was so harmless.”
They had left the town center behind minutes before and were heading toward Goof’s Bar-and-Grill for lunch, more to pass the time than anything. Neither of them were particularly hungry.
“It was personal,” Janis said.
Scott stopped and met her dark gaze. Tension stretched the skin around her eyes. To that point, she had surmised that it was a botched robbery or ritualistic act of violence, with Scott pointing the finger at David.
“I … I received that impression just now,” Janis explained. “Whoever murdered the doctor had some kind of personal vendetta against him.”
“What, like someone upset that their kid was prescribed the wrong cough syrup?”
“No, it goes a lot deeper than that.”
“Deeper, how?”
Her eyes slitted in concentration and she shook her head. “I’m not sure.”
At Goof’s, Scott held the door open for Janis and followed her inside. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he made out a tide of locals crowding the bar. Leathery necks craned toward the lone television, where WBJD out of Ocala was providing continuous coverage of the murder.
Scott and Janis joined the mostly-standing crowd, which included the waitresses and barmaids. The television was showing still images of the late Dr. Fields—here smiling in a lab coat, there kneeling in a flower bed with a pair of clippers. An anchor voiced over details of the doctor’s life in the halting, disjointed manner of a breaking story.
The scene abruptly cut to a wide-eyed reporter with a huge helmet of blond hair.
“I’m standing in front of the home of Dr. Fields,” she said, “where the crime scene investigation is wrapping up, and they’re preparing to transport the body to the coroner’s office for an autopsy.”
Beyond her right shoulder, the camera framed the front of a house, a respectable Windsor with trim bushes framing a short set of front-porch steps. A man in a white jump suit backed through the open front door carrying one end of a gurney. The camera jerked from the reporter to capture the gurney’s cargo: a black-covered mound. A second man held the gurney’s other end. Together, they maneuvered it down the porch steps before extending a set of wheels from the gurney’s underside.
The camera followed them until the men and the late Dr. Fields disappeared into the back of a waiting ambulance. As the ambulance rolled off, the reporter took center stage again.
“What you have just seen is the body of Dr. Fields being removed from his home. He is now en route to the coroner’s office, where—
The anchor interrupted. “What’s that on the front door, Kathy?”
Kathy rotated her cumbersome hair helmet. “Investigators were photographing it earlier, Ed, but have yet to comment. It appears to be a giant X, either painted in dark red paint or, I shudder to think, in blood.”
Beside Scott, Janis inhaled sharply and seized his arm.
What’s up? he asked.
I caught a flash of that same X when we were driving into Murder Creek, Janis answered, at about the same time I received the premonition about bad things happening here.
Scott eyed the effacement.
When the coverage gave way to regular programming, the chattering in the bar-and-grill swelled. Aside from drawing attention to Murder Creek, the murder had also turned the reclusive townspeople into overnight socialites. One sonorous voice soon established itself above the others. The voice belonged to a short, sun-baked woman wearing a pair of shield sunglasses.
“I finally got through to Millie,” she was saying. “Millie is close with Barbara’s older sister, Elsie—you know, the one who eloped upstate during the Depression. Well, according to her, Barbara came downstairs this morning and found Harry in the study. He’d sometimes go down at night for a brandy when he couldn’t sleep. She didn’t hear him get up because they sleep in separate beds, you see? That’s also why she didn’t know he hadn’t come back.”
The woman paused to take a drag on her dwindling cigarette before stubbing it out in a tin ashtray. Now that she had demonstrated propriety over the latest rumor, she could afford to take her time.
Can I assume that Barbara is Dr. Fields’s wife, Scott asked.
Janis nodded.
“Anyway,” the speaker went on, “the brandy was in a little glass on his desk. But not a drop had been touched. Dr. Fields was in his chair, head bowed forward, robe knotted around his waist. Everything just as neat as could be. Barbara figured he’d either fallen asleep or his heart had given out. He had to have that pacemaker put in last summer, remember?”
The crowd murmured that they remembered.
“Barbara lifted his face to look into his eyes, and that’s when she saw what had happened.”
“What?” the crowd asked restlessly. “What happened?”
Even Scott felt an impulse to grab the woman by the front of her flowery sweater and shake the information from her. Instead, he had to watch her tap a fresh cigarette from her pack, make several attempts to light it with a Bic, and then take a long, luxurious dra
g. The woman grimaced as she blew off the smoke. She looked around before drawing a finger slowly across her neck.
“That’s what happened,” she said. “Ear to ear.”
That evening Janis and Scott were back in front of another television. It was an old black-and-white model that Scott’s father had carried in from the garage and set onto the drift-wood coffee table in the living room. The unit was cobwebby and aluminum foil clotted the ends of the broken antenna, but Scott managed to position what remained of the rabbit ears for decent reception.
“There they are!” he said.
From the sofa, Janis concentrated on the snowy picture. David and his three friends were being escorted from police cars, wrists cuffed behind them. Officers gripped the arms of their limp black dusters. The suspects’ heads were bowed, except for David’s. He carried himself as though he were the prison’s new warden. Janis could make out the sharp lines of a smile.
“Look at him,” Scott said, the satisfaction fading from his voice. “Thinks this is some kind of game.”
“We’ll see,” Janis said. “Hard to argue your way out of a murder one.”
The reporting was largely a rehash of what Chief McDermott had disclosed at the afternoon press conference. Dr. Fields had been murdered in his home sometime the night before, the cause of death blood loss due to a neck laceration. His department had not located the murder weapon, but they had four suspects—“the probable culprits,” he called them—in custody. Though asked, the chief did not want to reveal what evidence linked the suspects to the crime just yet.
To fill that informational gap, the reporter gave a run-down of the suspects’ criminal pasts.
Janis watched David, Paulo, Duane, and Markus disappear into the state prison building. She had a feeling it was going to take more than tricky legal maneuvers, or even transfiguring to mist, to escape the state’s vice. There were already whispers of the DA seeking the death penalty.
XGeneration (Book 5): Cry Little Sister Page 9
