We showered one at a time, because we both knew damn well we’d end up back in bed if we didn’t. And when he borrowed my T-shirt and a pair of socks, I realized that I could get used to someone wearing my clothes, too.
I opened my front door, and Kathy’s and Alex’s voices drifted up the stairwell. “Should I be worried about the gay thing?” Jesse asked as we headed downstairs.
“No, they’re cool.” At least, they would’ve been, if Luke hadn’t gone and turned up dead.
I led the way into Alex’s apartment, calling out, “Alex? Kath? This is Jesse Ray Jones.”
We found Alex in the dining room. There were four places set at the table, and Alex was powering through oatmeal and reading the sports page from his usual seat. “You’d better eat something,” he said.
I took the almost-cold pile of toast from the center of the table and split it between Jesse and me, and loaded my three pieces up with grape jelly. “D’you say grace?” Jesse asked us. Alex actually looked up from the paper and raised his eyebrows at me.
“We’re lapsed Catholics,” I said. “Super lapsed.”
“Second generation,” Alex added through a mouthful of oatmeal.
“You?” I asked.
“Me and the old man? Snake handlers.”
Kathy came in with a skillet full of hot scrambled eggs and started spooning them onto Jesse’s plate. “Eat up. It’s harder to focus when you’re hungry.”
Did she really need to make it sound like we were taking our GREs or something? She gave me a mound of eggs, then disappeared into the kitchen.
“She’s nervous,” Alex whispered.
I said, “Duh,” under my breath.
“You took your pill?”
“Yes. I took my pill.”
“And you have your next dose on you?”
“The next one’s at midnight.”
“If they keep us there that long, I’m gonna—”
Kathy swept back in. “You’ve got nothing to worry about,” She told me. “You were here.” Then she said to Jesse, “You’re the one I’m worried about—the medical examiner says he died at approximately eight a.m.”
Jesse thought back. “I was here. I was online. I didn’t leave ’til maybe quarter after.”
“At which time you could’ve gone back to the museum.”
“But I didn’t. I headed home.”
“I’m going to tell you something,” Kathy said, “and you’d better listen. Do not answer any of Bobby’s questions without a lawyer.”
“But I didn’t do anythi—”
“He’s either got to charge you with something or let you go. And meanwhile, he’ll probably leave you sitting in a room for a few hours to make you nervous. Stay calm, don’t answer any of his questions, and keep asking for your lawyer.”
Jesse dug the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Do you know how much it’ll cost for my dad’s lawyer to drive out here from Ames?”
“Do you realize someone was murdered and only a few people had access to that building? You didn’t have keys, but if you showed up at the museum after hours and called Luke, he would have let you in.”
Jesse went very still.
Kathy said, “So you can guess what the last incoming call was on his cell phone, at ten to eight.”
Jesse sagged against the chair back and closed his eyes, as if the gravity of the situation had finally hit him. “I was gonna tell him to mail my paycheck. He didn’t answer.”
“And you didn’t leave a message.”
“No. I was....”
He was pissed off about that bison hide—and only three people knew about that: Jesse, me, and Luke. I guess that made two. Unless you counted the appraiser—but he had no way of knowing we knew, right? Cold toast churned in my stomach as I realized that because he’d never hurt a fly, Jesse would probably crack and spill it all. And then Bobby really would charge him with something, because if anyone had a good reason to kill Luke, it was Jesse, trying to protect his family’s livelihood.
Or me. Or Theresa. Or even ancient Marvin, for that matter. All three of us guards were potentially on the chopping block.
Who knew about what—other than Jesse and me? I couldn’t very well go around asking, especially considering how I came by the information by snooping through Luke’s computer. But if it came down to it, if they actually did arrest Jesse, I’d have to man up and say something.
We really needed to get our stories straight before Bobby “invited” us in for another round. I tugged on Jesse’s sleeve and said, “We’re going back upstairs for a minute.”
Kathy said, “Web? Sit.”
“Just a sec. I need to—”
“Sit.” There wasn’t any arguing with her when she sounded like that. I sat. She said, “The M.E. also told me Luke was covered with pepper spray.”
I was glad I was sitting. Otherwise, I probably would’ve keeled over. “My pepper spray,” I said.
“Oh God, that’s what I thought. What happened, exactly?”
“I don’t know. It’s missing.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Jesse said. “Just that it’s missing. What would be bad was if you still had it on you.”
“You’d better start keeping your logic to yourself.” Kathy started to pace. “It might make sense to you, but what you don’t get is that Bobby can’t screw this up—he’s got to treat everyone like they’re a killer.”
“No he—” Alex said, but Kathy turned to me and started talking over him. She said, “How did you lose something that was clipped to your belt? You weren’t...were you...?”
“Yeah. I was sleepwalking.”
“Shit.” She enunciated the “t” like a little stab.
“The time of death, is that for sure?” I asked her.
“It’s pretty accurate, within half an hour either way.”
I wondered if that would give me enough time to leave my place after Jesse did, sleepwalk to the museum, let myself in, mace Luke, beat his head in, hide his body and come back to bed as if nothing had happened. Kathy knew me so well I might as well have said it out loud. “The worst thing you do when you’re having one of those spells is to hide things from yourself. You must have put your pepper spray where someone else could get hold of it. That’s all.”
“Why do we have to keep guessing,” Jesse asked. “Isn’t this all on tape?”
“What do you mean?” Kathy snapped.
“The video cameras—all over the museum.”
“Were you going to mention this at any point?” she asked me.
“I guess...I just thought....” I shrugged. “I don’t even know where the monitors are. There was a head of security who handled it, years back when they used to get foot traffic, but not since I worked there. I figured Luke or Bridget dealt with that.”
Kathy pulled out her cell phone while Alex mouthed, “Holy shit!” to me.
“Bobby? Listen, there’s video surveillance. Yeah. I’ll ask.” She put her hand over the phone and said to me, “Do you have the key?”
“I don’t even know which room the surveillance is in...but if anyone’s got a key, it must be me.”
Kathy hung up her phone. “You,” she said to Jesse, “stay here. Alex, you stay with him. Web and I are going to the Center.”
14
IT WOULDN’T BE THE first time I was driven to the Center in a police cruiser; Kathy hated it when I walked to work in horizontal freezing rain. There were signs on every door across the front of the building, four regular entrances, the revolving door, and the handicap door, all of them printed on copy paper, too small to read from the street. Closed pending police investigation.
Faris was a small town. No doubt no one would even need to be able to read the signs from street-distance. Not by the end of the day, once the rumor-mill had done its work.
We put plastic covers on our shoes and latex gloves on our hands, and I led Kathy around to the side entrance. She said, “Do not touch anything unless I say you can. Go
t it?”
“Got it.”
“If you can remember anything, any detail, no matter how small....”
“I would tell you,” I said. “Don’t you think I would tell you?”
The inside of the Center was cool and dim with the overhead lights off, and the slight attic-smell seemed more pronounced than it had right after Jesse had finished his cleaning. The building felt foreign, as if I hadn’t walked it hundreds of times before, and the weak light shining down through the atrium made me want to head over to Pat’s Diner for some eggs. “Look,” I said. “I don’t even know where the cameras all lead.”
“How many places can they be? It’s fine, Web, we’re not on a timetable. And it’ll give us a chance to....”
“To what?” To get our stories straight? Damn it.
“To make sure you don’t say something that you don’t really mean.”
We bounced our flashlights in tandem through the shadows at Isaac Faris looking for silver and finding lead. And the donkey that had once been alive. My beam dropped to the floor, and Kathleen’s traveled to Old Faris, New Faris. A series of framed news clippings—not actual newspapers, because they would have been brittle and yellow with age from the acids in the newsprint, but careful reproductions on archival stock—five articles in all that bridged old Isaac Faris with the freakishly divided town that bore his name.
Kathy’s beam lingered on the reproduction in the center, probably because a big, melodramatic photo of a 10-year-old version of her husband was on the cover, holding an 8-year-old version of me against his chest. Both of us had our faces scrunched into wails, with tears coursing down our cheeks. Brutal Tornado Leaves Ten Dead, One Orphaned. That was the headline. I couldn’t see the story from where I was standing, but I knew how it started off. Young Daniel Weber, playing with his cousin in a two-flat south of Main Street, is lucky to be alive.
Right. I was the Goddamn poster child for luck. I looked hard at a hairline crack on the opposite wall and said, “Security’s either somewhere in the basement offices where no one’s worked for years, or it’s in one of the empty offices in the Admin section on the second floor.”
“What’s your best guess?”
Anywhere but where we currently were. The stairs seemed closest. “Let’s try the second floor.”
Kathy grabbed me by the arm. “No, we’ll start in the basement.”
“Why’d you ask if you weren’t gonna—?”
“Because maybe my biggest arrest was the shoplifter with three thousand dollars’ worth of disposable diapers in her garage, or the guy who keeps stealing the big “E” from the Great Shakes sign, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a gut feeling about this.”
I presumed I didn’t want to know what her gut was telling her, but I didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to guess. “I’m being straight with you. I had a blackout that night, but Jesse kept an eye on me and got me home safe. I’m not trying to make this harder for you.”
Except that I was. By not telling them about all the dirt I’d found in Luke’s office, I totally was.
But who else was there to blame? I couldn’t exactly frame the Kickapoo Nation by saying they were up in arms about their diorama, or whatever it was that letter from MAHPS was about.
Seriously, though. Maybe I could mention Luke’s plans for outsourcing the guards without divulging that I knew he was planning to eat Jesse alive over that Bison skin. Saying something about the security company would at least divert the attention to...who? Big-assed Theresa? Marvin the great-grandfather?
Or me. After all, I was one of the guards, too. And technically I could have sleepwalked over and nailed Luke, then come back home and crawled into bed like nothing had happened. I only lived a few blocks away. And I like to think I’m a pretty efficient guy when I set my mind to something.
Kathy chafed her bare forearms and said, “It’s creepy down here.” Daylight slanted down the penny-throwing grate and threw a pattern of lozenges on the wall. The places where the sycamore roots caused the cement floor to shift looked starker and more neglected by the filtered daylight than it did under the bug-yellow after hours lighting.
Pennies glinted along the cracks in the floor.
“What on earth...?”
“For luck. Kids throw ’em down the grate.”
Kathy looked up at the ceiling. I got a shiver of déjà vu, hopefully not because my body had done something down there while my brain wasn’t along for the ride, but because she was in the exact same spot doing the exact same thing that Jesse Ray had been when I’d explained the pennies to him. Kathy broke the pattern by shining her flashlight up toward the ceiling, onto a thing hanging from the grate.
I didn’t know what to make of it at first—that long, narrow whatever-it-was dangling there. Icicle? Stalactite? I shone my beam at it alongside Kathy’s.
“Golf club,” she said, and a wave of dread washed over me, because I hadn’t known at first sight where the club had come from, but I could sure as hell figure it out easily enough. We were looking at the putter that had killed Luke Presioso.
“That’s from Luke’s office.” My voice sounded incredibly calm, given that I was totally freaking out inside.
Kathy sighed, long and loud. “Okay. I’ll call Bobby and have it collected.”
“I could have touched it. I mean, I don’t remember touching it, but I could have.”
“But he was your boss—you went in his office all the time. Nothing weird about that—right?”
Was there? “I mean, I think I was sleepwalking in there.” I woke up in his computer chair, for Chrissakes. “So, I could’ve touched...things.”
“Damn it.”
And then there was the issue of me rifling through his garbage. I bet the paperwork was still in there—no cleaning crew. Paperwork full of my greedy, greasy fingerprints. “A lot of things.”
“Web? Look at me.” I did—but why was it so difficult? Something about her tone of voice. “You weren’t fraternizing with him, were you?”
Fraternizing? What the heck was— “My God, I can’t believe you’d even say that!” I was so pissed off I was pacing around her, waving my arms like I was nuts. “I’m gay, he has a tan, so we must be fucking! Right?”
Kathy grabbed me by the shirt and pulled me toward her so she could whisper at me in a way I couldn’t possibly miss. “We’re family. I’m on your side. Would you stop seeing homophobia where it doesn’t even exist? It’s not unheard of for someone to fall into a relationship with his boss. Now calm the hell down and tell me—as your cousin, not as a police officer—if you were sleeping with him or not.”
“No,” I said. It sounded like a wail.
She let go of my shirt and the tension drained from her shoulders. “Thank God.”
Fraternizing. What a stupid word.
“Listen, before I call that thing in,” Kathy nodded toward the dangling golf club with her chin, “Let’s go look at those tapes. That way we’ll know. When it’s just you and me, we’ll know.”
She turned and punched the elevator button. I asked, “What is it you think we’re going to find?”
“I don’t know. I just need to see.”
“Because you think I did it?”
The doors slid open behind her as she turned and cupped my chin in her hand. “No. Never. You don’t have that kind of violence in you, sweetie. Not you, and not Alex. The only way you’d lift a finger to anyone would be to defend yourself, or defend your family.”
Did keeping Luke from destroying the life of the guy I really, really dug count as defending my family? Maybe so.
My hands were surprisingly steady as I unlocked the Admin area, but that was probably the Neurontin.
Of the five offices off the break room, one belonged to Bridget and another to Luke, and a third was a graveyard for all the really, really old computer equipment that no one had the initiative to take to the recycling place across town—easier for the Center to let it all pile up than to pony up the dispo
sal fee. I’d never gone into the other two offices. Never had a reason.
We approached the first unused office and I sifted through my keys. The third key I tried unlocked the door. My first thought was that someone had ransacked the place. The room was a mess of institutional furniture, garbage and old magazines. But once I put together the cleared-off bench, the empty pop cans and the titty-mag spread open on the floor, I decided it looked more like a space that had been squatted in, rather than robbed.
Kathy crouched to look at the magazine cover without disturbing it. “Two months old. This is fairly recent.”
“Marvin.” He was the only person in the world I knew who drank cream soda. “He must come up here early in the morning and sack out until Bridget comes in.”
“Maybe someone found out about him ditching work in here. Maybe Luke came in early....”
“Come on. No one’s gonna kill Luke for finding out he’s been slacking off. Not when he could just retire.”
Kathy stared down at a mound of crushed soda cans. “How much time did he have here to himself every morning? Not more than a couple of hours.”
“Looks like he’s been making the best of it.”
Kathy gave the room a final scowl, then ushered me out the door. One office left. I fit a key I’d never used before—not that I knew of, at any rate—into the lock. The doorknob was stiff, but I murmured, “Open, Sesame,” under my breath, and it gave.
Three gigantic tube-monitors dominated the desk. They were a dozen years old if they were a day, and if they’d been on, they would have been able to heat half the building. But they were dark.
“Jesus,” Kathy said. “This looks like something out of Flash Gordon.”
The equipment was about as effective as a movie prop, too. Heck, for all I knew, we were in a backup computer graveyard and not a security station. I should have been disappointed, because the quicker we figured out what had happened to Luke, the more likely it was that Jesse and I could recover from the wrench in the works and have half a chance at actually getting to know each other.
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