by Jamie Mason
A sharp bark wrenched him from his trance and sent barbs of fear pricking into his armpits and groin. Mrs. Truesdell’s dog barked a second volley, and Jason flinched again, even though it was only an announcing call at the arrival of a car, not the excited yip of discovery. Another longish blob of a sedan, this one marked by its government-issue blandness, pulled up to the curb behind the patrol car.
Jason evaluated his opponent as the man introduced himself to the members of the Dearborn’s crew still sulking in their work truck, glad-handing in a politician’s ploy to set them at ease. This was the man to beat. This was the guy who had to believe him or, better yet, give him no consideration at all. Jason was not adept at fielding adversaries, but he was a crackerjack wallflower. Fear made a grim brute of the troll stalking across the front yard, but reality presented a short, trim fellow in a crisp golf shirt and khaki slacks. He extended a hand to Jason, complemented by a perfectly tempered smile to go with it: professional, comforting, not inappropriately friendly given the circumstances. It was the smile of a man with the casual clarity of being right in his purpose, right in his conscience, and right in his “authority.” Jason’s spine sagged into the space generally reserved for his stomach. The battle felt lost before it had begun.
“Mr. Getty, I’m Tim Bayard.” Detective Bayard’s hand was warm and dry, and Jason did his best to calculate the correct number of pumps required to convey his innocent-bystander status. The detective somehow fashioned a neutral pleasantry from the worst thing that Jason could currently imagine: “Some day you’re having, huh?”
“I’ll say.” Jason’s mouth twitched into an admirable best shot at an agreeable smile.
“Well, why don’t you show me around and we’ll figure out where to go from there.”
• • •
“So, what do you know about the previous occupants?” Bayard asked.
“Nothing. I bought the place from a Realtor. She said it had been empty for a little while,” said Jason.
“Did they leave anything behind? Boxes, papers, anything?” Back in the kitchen, Detective Bayard sipped from a glass of ice water as Jason shook his head. The detective’s eyes roamed his notes, but Jason suspected that it was only for show, a sort of dimming and raising of the lights before the curtain call. Bayard drew a deep, preparatory breath. “Okay. Well. I’m going to call in a team to retrieve the remains. That’s the first thing. We need to know who got themselves buried out here.” Bayard drank again, but Jason took it as only pacing the pounce. “Mr. Getty, I’d like to get your permission to search the house.”
“There’s nothing here.” It had zipped out too quickly and more than a bit flat, and Jason had to replay it in his head to assess the damage.
“You’re likely right. And I am sorry for the intrusion. We’ll be as quick as we can.”
“I mean . . . it’s just . . . It’s my house now. And my things.”
“If you’d feel better about it, I can get a warrant, and, of course, you may certainly involve an attorney at any time.”
It was the oldest tableau in police drama. The inevitable question. That it had been made innocent by legal necessity did nothing for the one on the receiving end. All protestations of protocol aside, if an attorney was called for, the unspoken-by-law implication was What do you have to hide?
Jason stalled. “The people before me really didn’t leave anything. Just dust.”
Bayard shrugged. “All the same, I can’t say I’ve checked it out if I haven’t checked it out. You know, attics, crawl spaces, loose floorboards. I’m sorry for the intrusion, but there is every good chance we’re dealing with a homicide. It may very well have happened in this house.” Bayard continued with an I-feel-your-pain smile that was really just tightly pressed lips stretched back into his cheeks. “Bad luck you ended up sitting on a crime scene. We really do appreciate your cooperation.”
Cooperation was actually the last thing on Jason Getty’s mind. The months of distance from the October night that he’d sweated and ached through didn’t exist anymore. He was back in his living room, betrayed, a fool. Very only, indeed. Hollowed out, trembling with rage and humiliation at a torrent of threats and gibes. The taunts rang in his ears, his chest and back throbbed where the heel of a strong hand had slammed him into the doorframe, the aftershock ricocheting through his ribs. There was a blank, red space in his memory and then a sound like a bell wrapped in felt, dully clanking. There were grunts of exertion and a groan of pain cut short. Cracking plastic and cracking—
“Mr. Getty?”
Jason sighed. “Sorry.” He swallowed the last of his vision: his knuckles sinking into a wet crimson breach under a tangle of dark hair. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s just a lot for a Sunday morning.”
“I know. And I am sorry.” Bayard stood and gathered his things. “I’m going to head out to the car and call in for the people I need. May I go ahead and get you to sign a consent form, or should I have them start the process for a search warrant?” It felt as if Bayard made sure to catch Jason’s eyes dead-on. “Really, it’s no problem, either way.”
Bayard would have his ramble through Jason’s house, and the twinkle in the detective’s damned eye was the period on that particular sentence. Pinned in the standoff, neutral and professional as it was, Jason’s heart squirmed hard under his breastbone, and the fleeting hope that he was dying of a heart attack elbowed around in the queue of pressing issues at hand. “No, that’s okay. You can come in and look around.”
Bayard smiled, but his eyes stayed strong on Jason’s. “Thanks. And the lawyer? I can give you time to look one up and get him over here.”
Jason wasn’t sure he could take this. He toyed with the image of falling to his knees, confessing all, and baptizing Bayard’s loafers in a flood of contrite tears. Except that would have been a lie and he wasn’t quite sure he’d be able to pull it off. He wasn’t one bit sorry that he’d killed that son of a bitch.
Mostly he avoided thinking about it—the actual killing and that the world was short one human being because of Jason Getty. The decision to hide the evidence on his property was an enormous regret, of course, especially now. But when the torture of the rest of the problem fell away, as it occasionally did, and the bottom line stared back at him, Jason tingled with triumph. There was horror and revulsion and a crippling fear of getting caught, but there was also satisfaction. He’d stopped it. He’d shut that vile mouth once and for all and wiped the smug smile off his lousy face. He’d seen that bastard’s blood on his own hands.
“Really, if you don’t have anyone in mind, or”—Bayard left a bit of important dead air on either side of a good-natured chuckle— “keep a legal eagle on retainer, the phone book’s got a whole page of good local lawyers with great reputations for making sure we dot all our i’s and everything.”
“I don’t see that I need a lawyer right now.”
Jason had said it without a quiver. He hadn’t blinked or swallowed hard. He hadn’t shifted his feet and certainly not his eyes from Bayard’s. He’d even managed a comfortable smile. He should have been proud of the performance. But something had changed. Maybe the ambient temperature in the space between the two men had dropped a degree or a cloud had passed over the sun. Something was definitely, minutely altered.
“If you’re going to have one, Mr. Getty, I’d say better sooner than later.”
In for a penny, in for a pound. “There’s no reason to, Detective Bayard. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
4
Detective Bayard pretended not to notice the inch-wide gap in the bedroom curtain that winked shut whenever he turned toward the house. But Tim Bayard noticed everything. It drove his seventeen-year-old daughter nuts. The twitching curtain and the unseen hand that worked it shouldn’t have bothered him really. Getty’s behavior wasn’t all that strange. Anyone with a skeleton in his mulch bed and a crime-scene unit crawling all over his side yard would be drawn, morbidly, to the view. That was probably al
l there was to it. Probably.
Bayard cornered the lead tech out of sight of the window and its restless draperies. “So, Lyle, what’ve you got?”
“What do you mean?” Carter County’s lead crime-scene investigator was a man of impossible-to-determine age in that his hair was salted to make the pepper incidental, but his face was as unlined as a college freshman’s. His sharply pressed collar gleamed against its color-coordinated sport coat, and it all looked much more suited to nightclub prowling than it did to crime-scene mucking. Bayard sometimes wondered what excuses played out to Lyle’s dry cleaner, foul as his laundry was likely to be.
“I mean, what do you know?” Bayard’s eyes tossed an arc of indication over his left shoulder toward the action in the flower bed. “What do you think?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Lyle scowled at his watch. “I’ve only been here, like, forty-four minutes.”
“Yeah, and you’ve spent forty-one of those minutes taking notes and three minutes scratching your arm.”
Lyle gaped at Bayard. “What is wrong with you? You don’t have anything better to do than to stand around staring at me? I’ve got a bug bite. It itches. Get a hobby, Tim.”
“I just want to know what your first impressions are. What’s in your notes?” Bayard craned his neck to peer at what Lyle had been writing.
Lyle slapped his clipboard to safety against his chest. “It’s a letter to my girlfriend.”
“I’m gonna tell your wife.”
Lyle chuckled. “I know we don’t get bodies very often, but try not to drool. It’s disturbing.” Detective Bayard wasn’t going away. “Tim, I don’t know anything about him yet.” He turned back to the site.
“But you do know it’s a him.”
“Yeah, I think so. He’s got a very manly brow.”
“ ‘Manly brow’?” Bayard scratched the back of his head and grinned. “You sounded just a little turned on right then, sport. You know that, right?”
Lyle tucked his tongue into his cheek and nodded in mild agreement. “You caught me. It was a letter to my boyfriend. Can I get back to work now?”
Bayard snagged Lyle’s sleeve before he could drift back into the sight line of the window. The idea of Getty peering out from the shadowed bedroom, watching them and straining to lip-read, tickled unpleasantly at the suspicious part of Tim’s imagination. “How long has the body been there?”
“Good God!” said Lyle. “I don’t know! We haven’t even taken the bones out yet.”
“Less than two years?”
Lyle’s mouth turned down in academic certainty. “Nah, no way.”
“Are you sure?”
“No. How can I be sure of anything anytime soon when I’m talking to you instead of doing what I’m supposed to be doing?”
Bayard scanned the taped-off plot. “I’m just thinking out loud here, Lyle.”
“Hope that’s working out for you. For me? Not so much.” Lyle’s gaze, however, followed the cop’s, and both men’s moment of silence whirred with purpose.
Lyle roused first from his musing. “But assuming he went in whole, that skeleton’s too clean. I mean, we’ve got tons of work to do—you know how long these things take. The tests and all that will be out for weeks—but I’m thinking at least three or four years.”
Math and the consequences of speculation clicked away in air between them. “Do not write that down anywhere,” Lyle added.
Bayard pressed his lips together and drifted into a contemplative headspace. “Hmmm.”
Lyle watched him slip into distraction, entertained. He leaned in to stage-whisper, “Do you really get paid for that?”
“Huh?”
“All these years, do they really fork out cash for you to look serious and make thinking noises?”
“You know, I’m gonna make sure I’m on your next review panel,” Bayard said.
Lyle snorted and turned back to his work.
Bayard called after him, “Hey! Let me know as soon as you find anything.”
“As opposed to what? I don’t start my reports, ‘Dear Diary, I discovered the most interesting thing today . . . ’ Gimme a break, Bayard.”
• • •
The curb was quickly stacking up with an official-looking traffic jam. Bayard trotted over to a monstrous pickup squeezing into the last space that could still loosely be considered “in front” of Jason’s house. “You’re quick!” Bayard called.
The man behind the wheel filled up the cab a time and a half the allotted driver’s space. A sleek-faced dog in the passenger seat flicked attention to every landmark as fast as its head could swivel. But the dog drew even more notice than it normally would because of the pointy, foil party hat on its head. It sent starbursts zinging off through the windshield with every movement.
“What the hell?” Tim cocked his thumb at the dog, wagging its greeting to him. “What did she do to deserve that?”
“What? It’s her birthday.” The two men watched the dog, which was not minding at all that the sparkling dunce cap had slipped down over one ear. “You caught me just on the way out for party supplies. This better be good.”
Such a scene has an excitement that only cops can appreciate; the secret ingredient that separates those who like to watch cop shows from those who want to live them. It comes with a tight smile and a complementary tightening in the gut. “It’s good,” Tim confirmed. “Body in the mulch bed.”
“You peg him for it?” The big man ticked a discreet nod to the front door of the house where Jason stood shuffling, hands squirming deep in his pockets. His brow mimicked his lips in a parallel set of worried crinkles that left him looking lost somewhere between a pout and a dire need for a toilet.
Bayard’s flickered glance was equally camouflaged. “Nah. Not unless Lyle is way off.”
“That’ll be the day.”
“Right. Anyway, thanks for not making me wait around, Ford.”
Ford Watts climbed out of the truck that perpetuated the corny joke he’d floated for going on fifty years. He’d finagled his driver’s training at age fourteen and, ever since, would not be caught behind the wheel of anything other than a namesake vehicle. Not, at the very least, without substantial grousing. When the department had gone turncoat and switched to Chevy for a stint in the eighties, everyone from the receptionist to the chief had reaped an earful from Ford Watts. This year’s Ford was a deep-red, double-cab pickup.
And how he loved his cars, buffing and dabbing in devotion to the showroom glow, and always eyeing the sky for birds of ill intent. The truck bounced on its springs as he climbed out, and although the season had been wet and chilly, Ford was as rosy and shiny as the finish on the polished cab. He dwarfed his human company by about the same proportion that his truck made the other cars look like toys.
Bayard briefed him on the basics as they crossed to the house. Jason had slunk back inside at the slamming of the truck door, so they were alone on the stoop while Bayard sketched out the simple strategy. “So, I’m going to take Valerie from Lyle’s team with me and we’ll have a first look around, while you get the search consent forms signed. You know, ask him all the same stuff I did. Just keep him outta my hair for a little while.”
“You brought me out here on a Sunday to babysit?” Ford grumped from his full altitude, an impressive nine inches above Bayard’s head, without somehow achieving the intimidation he was trying for.
“I could’ve called someone else. I thought you’d be interested.”
“It’s Tessa’s birthday,” Ford said.
Bayard pulled an inspired face, all high eyebrows and pursed lips. “Oooo! Maybe you should go get her, trot her around a little.”
“I do need to get her out of the truck. She’ll get lonely. And she’ll likely need a wee if I’m gonna be a bit. But either way, uh-uh, Tessa’s not working on her birthday.”
“Ford, Tessa doesn’t know it’s her birthday. She’s a dog.”
“Yeah, well, Maggie surely knows, and she
’s none too happy with you. That’s where we were going. She was sending me out for candles for the cake when you called.”
“Oh, God, your wife has finally lost her mind. She baked the dog a birthday cake?”
“Well, meat loaf is a cake if you’re a dog. It’s Tessa’s favorite.”
Bayard shut his eyes and shook his head as they both chuckled, Ford trailing his laugh behind him as he hustled back to rescue Tessa.
Tim called after him, “And do you think she could lose the doggone hat? It might be nice if we looked just the least little bit legitimate here.”
Ford flashed him the middle finger from behind his back with such blinding speed, Bayard would have missed it if he’d been midblink. Ford snatched a quick look over his shoulder to see if he’d made his mark and then every which way to see if anyone else had seen him.
In fact, there was no real mystery in Ford Watts’s inability to terrify. It seemed that God had simply taken a coffee break once He’d chiseled out the six-foot-five-and-a-half, rawboned frame. And when it came time to breathe life into the giant, the Almighty had reached over one jar too far and added a pinch of eternally ten-year-old boy instead of the helping of tyrant that would have better suited. The damage was done. The resultant creature inspired love and loyalty across the board, from his mother all the way down to the muttly puppy that he and his childless wife had adopted four years earlier—Tessa the wonder dog.
Tessa had, at times, filled the K9 void in Mid-County Division. As a volunteer and occasional recruit, her worth had been proven more often by accident and by being in the right place at the right time than by anything else.
Carter County laid out a sprawling semirural splotch on the map, wedged in between two humming cosmopolitan grids. It was a turmoil sandwich: bustling at both ends with the spillover of drugs, thievery, and the inevitable violence created by too many people crammed into too stingy a square acreage. In between, it was mostly the car-boosting, brawling, mailbox-baseball prankster set. Mid-County boasted only three all-purpose detectives and no frills. But the legroom was more often appreciated than bemoaned, and the workload was just enough to keep everyone complaining more or less good-naturedly. And they had Tessa. Ford was helplessly in love with the animal and figured she was the smartest dog in all the state. As guileless as he was, Ford wasn’t often wrong.
