But mostly I felt relieved, because it was impossible for me to think that Jesse had done it, so I’d been selling myself the idea that it was me. And as much as prison would mean free health care and all the cornholing I could handle, it still struck me as an even lamer career path than security guard. Color me brain-damaged, but I liked sleeping in on Saturdays and ordering out from Sky High Pie.
Kathy circled the desk, found a dusty power strip, and flicked it on. Two of the huge monitors crackled and hummed to life. One did not. Security station. Probably.
“C’mere, Web. Don’t touch anything—just tell me what I’m seeing. Where’s that spot we found Luke’s body?”
I squeezed into the narrow slot with her between the hulking monitors and the wall and tried to orient myself to a view of the building I’d been circling through for the last year and a half, but in black and white, from a vantage point up by the ceiling. Each functional monitor was divided into quadrants, and the views in those quadrants changed every few seconds, so that whoever was looking could monitor a few dozen cameras at once, twelve shots at a time—if all three monitors were functioning. We were stuck with eight, and since we were the only people in the building, there was a lot of nothing going on. Kind of like watching a golf match, with picture-in-picture. “The trashed monitor must’ve hooked up to the first floor,” I told her. “We don’t have shots of any of the exterior doors here.” Movement caught my eye. I saw a shot of the backs of our heads, and my own finger pointing. “There we go. Say cheese.”
The shot changed to Bridget’s office. Empty. Then it went black.
The closer I looked at the shots, the more I realized that some of the quadrants went black for a minute before they cycled to something else, and some of them showed stellar views of tops of doorframes, or ceilings.
I don’t know why I was surprised. Everything else in the center was on its last legs. Why not the cameras?
Kathy tapped something into the keyboard and the shots started cycling quickly on the second-floor monitor. “Whoa,” I said, “shouldn’t you wait for Bobby?”
“This is almost exactly like the system at the bank—maybe a few years older—and I know that one like the back of my hand. Everything’s still recording, I’m just taking a look at what happened yesterday.”
I felt a lurch of disorientation when people appeared in the frames, all moving backward. Cops and technicians reverse-swarmed the break room, and Kathy slowed the tape. “Which rooms are we missing, here? I don’t see that weird hidey-hole Martin made.”
“Nope. He must have covered up the camera. And I think Luke’s office is the shot of that acoustic drop-ceiling.”
“Shit.”
I told myself it was made no sense for me to feel relieved. But I did.
“I can’t tell where that cave diorama is,” Kathy said.
I watched the images cycle. There was a shot of the prairie dog display, the stairs, the Denizens of the Sky. And another shot that looked like a bunch of nothing, with a single plastic leaf showing right at the edge of the frame. “There. It’s all messed up, but I think I recognize the plant.”
We went out to the petroglyph alcove and ducked under the security tape Kathy had stretched across the entryway the day before to see if we could locate the camera.
The lens, and the area all around it, were covered in about a year’s worth of spitballs. Kathy muttered something under her breath. I thought I heard “tubes tied,” but I couldn’t say for sure. “Okay,” she said. “The surveillance footage is useless. I’ll call Bobby about the golf club.”
I eased away from Kathy, pulled up the last incoming call on my cell, and hit “talk.” I expected Jesse. What I got was five rings, and “This is Jesse Ray Jones of Jones and Son Taxidermy. Leave a message.”
I almost hung up, but then I remembered how Jesse’d hung up on his last call to Luke, how it made him seem suspicious, and thought better of doing it myself. “Hey.” Just thinking of you—smiling to myself every time I think of you in my T-shirt, and practically crawling out of my skin wondering when I’m going to get to be with you again. “Uh, nothing, never mind. I’ll talk to you later.”
While I had my phone out, I figured I might as well check with Alex, and not just because he was probably with Jesse. He was the first one in my contacts because his name began with A and I’d never keyed in his last name. “Hey,” he said.
“Hey. What’s up?”
There was a muffled noise of him mashing the phone against his chest rather than hitting the mute button, which he never remembered to do. “I gotta take this quick.” Another few seconds of movement, and then he was back, whispering. “Don’t freak out, but Bobby brought us in for more questioning.”
I glanced over to where Kathy was angled away from me behind a prairie dog hill. “Great. So where’s Jesse? How come you could answer your phone and he couldn’t? Is he getting questioned right now?”
“Uh, yeah.” Alex was nose-breathing, loud. Not good. “Actually, he’s waiting for his lawyer.”
15
“YOU KNEW,” I SNAPPED at...fuck, I was so pissed I couldn’t think of my cousin’s wife’s name. “You knew Bobby was angling for Jesse all this time.”
Her hand hovered over the dashboard as she considered hauling us back to the station with her lights flashing, but she decided against it and punched the cruiser into drive. “For your information, I just found out about the twenty-five thousand dollar artifact. One of you could have mentioned it, you know. Didn’t you think we’d check out all of Luke’s recent phone calls? Smooth move. Now you both look like you’re covering something up. On top of that, one of Jesse’s tools was found right underneath the Cave Art sign.”
I couldn’t think of a decent comeback. I was too busy trying to remember her name. While she laid on the horn and charged through a red light, I snuck my notebook out of my pocket and took a peek.
Taxidermy Guy Here
Kissed Jesse
Put Out Uniform
9:30—all over soon
Luke is a rat bastard
Great. Fucking great. That didn’t look suspicious at all. I considered chewing up that page and swallowing it before it could incriminate me—or us, I supposed, since my cousin’s wife would’ve gotten a nice show of Jesse and me sucking face in the conservation lab if she’d backed up those surveillance tapes far enough. Wouldn’t you know, the only floor where all the cameras were functioning was the basement. I needed to ditch that note, but tearing a page out of a book is one of those things other people tend to notice—unless you’ve got a good reason to do it.
I flipped back to Pick up Kathy’s dry cleaning—Kathy, right—and said, “Hey, Kath. Got any gum?”
She dug a pack out of her pocket and handed it to me. “I’m sorry, sweetie, but you’re making me crazy. How can I help you if you won’t let me?”
I unwrapped a piece and chewed for all I was worth. “Seems to me that the best way to help us is to figure out who really killed Luke.”
Kathy pulled into her parking spot by the station, put the cruiser in park, and gave a heavy sigh. “Theresa had a record for shoplifting. Did you know that?”
“No.” It didn’t surprise me, either. Maybe she’d heard about Luke scoping out cheaper guards. She knew a lot of people in Faris, so why not someone at the security outfit? So she did have a motive—health insurance—not only for herself, but for her whole family. Seeing as how it was the same motive I had, I didn’t think it would be too smart to bring it up. Besides, she didn’t seem nearly industrious enough to have arranged for none of her keys to work so she could come in months later, douse Luke with my pepper spray and brain him with his own golf club, then sneak back out and act like she couldn’t open the door.
“Maybe once we recover the footage from the first floor,” Kathy said, “we’ll find a shot of someone dropping that club down the grate.”
If it was just the monitor that was on the fritz, and not the whole damn computer. “Ma
ybe.” And hopefully that someone wouldn’t turn out to be me. As we headed for the station, I spat the gum into the world’s most incriminating page of notes, wadded it up, and slam-dunked it into the garbage beside the front door.
THE NEW FARIS P.D. is only about two thousand square feet, plus a basement—but even though it’s relatively small, I didn’t spot Jesse anywhere. Even the holding cells that were normally full of drunk and disorderly U of I students were empty. I hoped they hadn’t trussed him up and stuck him in the basement next to the parade float.
Alex stood up from the narrow corridor of chairs where I’d been waiting to be fingerprinted the night before and came toward us. His stubble was nearly as long as the hair on his head, and his old hockey jersey had a mustard stain on it. “Um...so...did you find anything?” He looked like he was trying to figure out if he was expected to hug either of us, or if it was just too awkward. I took a step back to spare him the dilemma.
“Nothing new,” Kathy said, which wasn’t true, since we’d found the golf club hanging through the gate. “Look, why don’t you go home?”
He caught my eye and jerked his chin toward the doors. “Okay, let’s go.”
“Not Web,” Kathy said softly.
When Alex gets mad, it’s like one of those cartoons where you see the red climbing up a character’s face as if they’re a human thermometer. In half a second, when he was somewhere around eighty degrees, Kathy added, “I’ll take care of him, hon. He knows the Science Center building better than anyone, and he might be able to help us with the surveillance footage. That’s all.” She leaned forward and her voice dropped to a whisper. “You know I wouldn’t let anything happen to him.”
Alex’s coloration backed down to approximately seventy. “It’s not you I’m worried about. Bobby—”
“We’ll talk about it later. Okay?”
Alex stole another look around. He seemed incapable of doing subtlety at all. He sighed. “Okay.”
Alex left, and I checked my watch. It was nearly two. My stomach did an acidic clench that I took for a hunger pang. “D’you think there are any good donuts left?” I asked Kathy.
“Go check. Get me one, too.”
The office was deserted. The other cops must have passed us on their way to the Center to collect the golf club and the surveillance servers. I opened the massive donut box and wolfed down the half-Bismarck that someone always left—I’ve never determined who—and tried to find a cream, not custard, with no powdered sugar, for Kathy.
The fax machine squalled while I was sinking my thumb into a stale wad of dough to see what kind of jelly was inside. Did people even fax things anymore? I would’ve thought email was a heck of a lot easier. A sheet finished printing out just as I swallowed the last of the donut, which wasn’t very good, but I’d get razzed about touching them all if I left behind any of the ones that had been obviously tampered with. The paper slipped over the basket that was supposed to catch it and fluttered to the floor. I wiped my hands on my jeans and picked it up—and I probably would have put it right into the basket if there hadn’t been a mug shot on it. The picture was dark and grainy, which made it all the more intriguing. A punk in a backwards baseball cap....
Jesse.
Shit. Crap. Shit. My fingerprints were all over the fax now, in traces of jelly. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I was wandering around inside the station alone, totally unsupervised, but there I was, stuck to my latest crush’s rap sheet. I told myself no one would dust the fax, that they only fingerprinted crime scenes, but I was so busy trying to figure out what he’d done to get himself arrested that I wasn’t thinking straight. Drag racing? Hunting without a license? Damn, he looked incredibly young in that picture—truancy? I wasn’t familiar with the form, and the image was so pixelated I could hardly read the type.
He didn’t even strike me as the type to have a record, what with the whole “best practices” and “let’s shake on it” deal. What I really wanted to do was fold up the printout and stick it in my pocket so I could tear it up and flush it down the toilet once I was done ogling it, but with my luck the sheriff over in Boone County would follow up with a phone call. I found an arrest date seven years prior, and a birthdate—he was six months younger than I was, so he’d been in high school at the time, probably a junior. Crazy—I’d been on the chess team, and he’d been in a jail cell. For what? I scanned back up to the top of the page, and then I found it, half-buried under an image of a paper clip that had some lazy clerk hadn’t bothered to remove before the copy was made. Loitering—and Lewd and Lascivious Conduct.
Oh, shit.
I heard footsteps in the hall, so I dropped the fax in the basket, ran over to the donuts, and stuck my finger in another donut.
“I hate it when you do that,” Kathy said. “Someone besides me is going to catch you someday.”
“They’re stale.”
“I know, but I’m starving. Here, give me one that won’t get powdered sugar all over my shirt.”
“Is Jesse here?”
Kathy sighed, and her donut sprayed granulated sugar and cinnamon, not quite as telling on sky blue with navy trim as powdered sugar would’ve been. “We’re still waiting for the lawyer. It’s Saturday, and we haven’t been able to get hold of him.”
“His dad’s lawyer? From Iowa?”
“He can’t practice in Illinois, so Jesse opted to go with the court-appointed attorney. Don’t worry, it’s Reggie Stillwell. He’s good.”
“Wherever he is.”
Kathy threw half her uneaten donut in the trash can and brushed the sugar from her hands.
“So Jesse is here,” I said. “Where? Did that fuckhead Bobby lock him up? Because if he—”
“Would you keep your voice down?” she hissed. “He is in the meeting room. At the very worst, he’s bored ’cause the magazines in there are three months old. Now you need to calm down and trust us to do our jobs. Got it?”
“I want to talk to him.”
“Web....”
“He didn’t answer his phone. That means Bobby took away his phone, right?” I thought about what I’d just said. “And that means he’s under arrest.”
“Web, sweetie...you’re exhausted. Go home. Rest. Let me call Alex to come and get you.”
I shouldered past her. “I’ll walk. I need some air.”
It was a longish walk from the New Faris P.D. to our two-flat, forty five minutes or so. And I was about to make it even longer by looping around the station a couple of times to see what I could see of the meeting room. A scraggly ring of juniper surrounded the perimeter. The building was a bland, flat-roofed, utilitarian slab of architecture—and that was good. It meant that everything was on one floor.
I jogged past the lobby, the office, and the wing of the building where the holding cells were—those didn’t have windows—and then, finally, the room where the village board met faithfully each and every month to determine if anyone’s driveway violated an ordinance.
The sun was getting low and the lights were on inside, and there was Jesse, framed in the window. Several magazines were fanned around him on the tabletop, but he wasn’t reading, just staring off into space. I rapped on the window, and he jumped.
He rushed over and fiddled with the window. It opened, but only a few inches. He crouched so we could see eye to eye through the narrow gap. “I take it the surveillance tapes were a bust,” he said. “Otherwise they’d let me go.”
“They’re all fucked up. Like everything else in this town.”
“Hey.” Jesse put his hand through the small opening, and I took it. Squeezed his fingers. “I’m not worried. Whatever they find, it’s not gonna add up to me. It can’t.”
“But what if they try to force it ’cause they can’t figure out anyone else? You had as much a reason as anyone to want to shut him up, you had access to the building—what do you want to bet your prints are on my Pepper Shot?—and, uh...” I hadn’t meant to bring up the fax, but thanks to George, I said a l
ot of things I didn’t intend to say.
“And what?” Jesse gave my fingers a squeeze. “Dude, you’re turning red.”
How could I not? Okay, so maybe I didn’t think I’d been navigating virgin territory, what with the whole quarterback fling, but I’d never dreamt the quiet taxidermist from Iowa was getting his jollies at truck stops back when my idea of a hot date was a bag of Doritos, a few math nerds, some graph paper and a handful of twenty-sided dice. “You have a record.”
“A what? For what?”
“Public, uh...” what was the jargon? “Lewd something.”
“Aw, c’mon, I was only a kid—that thing was supposed to be sealed. Besides, that doesn’t prove anything, just that I got caught with my pants down at the Petro.”
I bit back a laugh, because it so wasn’t funny. “You got laid at a truck stop?”
“Shit, back then I spent so much time there, my old man thought I was looking to get my CDL. ’Til I got picked up by the Sheriff, anyway.” He eased up closer and rested his other elbow on the windowsill so his eyes were framed in the open window. The corners creased as he smiled. He was probably flashing dimples at me, but I couldn’t see, not through the small gap. “Truckers are more my thing than Larry the Fairy.” His eyes went serious. “Too bad they’re mostly married, living these double lives. I get to feeling sorry for ’em when I think about it too hard.”
Double lives. Acting like you’re normal when you’re not—not at all. I got a chill that was something like déjà vu, but was probably more of an epiphany.
He pressed his cheek against our twined fingers. “I don’t want to make another phone call like that to my old man, Web. He survived hearing that I dig guys—from the Sheriff. But I won’t tell him someone thinks I killed a man. I can’t do it. You’re smart, and you know that Science Center building like the back of your hand. You know the people in it. And if you figure out what happened, Kathy will listen. She’ll make Bobby listen, too.”
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