River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “You keep saying ‘the suspect.’ Is there a suspect?”

  He twitched a bushy eyebrow. “Nobody in particular yet. But when there is, he’ll be the suspect until he’s convicted.”

  “Cop talk.”

  “That’s right, ma’am.”

  Molly suddenly felt old, hearing this baby cop calling her “ma’am.” At thirty-three, she couldn’t have been that much older than him. He had to have graduated from high school, at least, and then the police academy or whatever they called cop school. She didn’t know if the term “police academy” was used outside of the comedy movies she had loved as a teen, but she figured if Frank was going to assign her to a lot of crime stories, she would have to learn.

  “Can you show me where it happened?” She wasn’t sure she really wanted to look. From his description, it sounded awful, and chances were it hadn’t been cleaned up yet. She didn’t think she could count on a neat chalk outline, like in the old movies. More likely, from the sound of things, a bloody gorefest, like in the new movies. And no doubt accompanied by smells that moviegoers never have to deal with.

  “I just need you to sign in,” he said. “Wait right here.”

  He went back to his patrol car and returned a moment later carrying a clipboard. Molly signed with trembling hands. She was surprised by how nervous she felt about this—nervous, yet at the same time, she couldn’t deny that a thrill of anticipation coursed through her. There might have been some twisted excitement about the fact that she had been less than a mile away, sometime around the hour of the murder. Wade, who hadn’t been to the mall in years, had parked on the wrong side. After dinner, she had helped Wade buy a few groceries at the upscale market attached to the restaurant. They had carried them to Molly’s car (really Byrd’s Nissan Xterra, which he hadn’t been able to bring himself to sell even though he couldn’t drive it), parked by the Macy’s that had been a J.C. Penney the last time Wade had been there, and she had driven Wade around the mall to his rental. He had parked at the northeast corner of the mall, the end closest to where Gretchen Fuchs had been murdered. For all they knew, the killer might have been stalking her while they chatted in the SUV.

  After she signed his list, Officer Kozlowski escorted her under the tape and up the driveway. A narrow gate opened into the backyard. He hung back a little and let her go in first.

  The backyard was even less impressive than the front. Yard work apparently wasn’t very high on Gretchen’s list of priorities. The back didn’t have grass she could kill, although she had been doing a pretty good job of destroying the row of saplings that partially blocked the view of an unpaved alleyway. Mostly, it was concrete, cracked and dry. Like the skin on my legs this morning, Molly thought, remembering how they had itched.

  She was stalling, inspecting the yard as if she were house-hunting instead of looking at the actual crime scene. She made herself face it. Four concrete steps led up to a solid back door. Blood coated the lower two steps, as thick as paint in places. More had spattered the upper steps and even the bottom half of the door. Embedded in the blood, in spots, were chunks of some thicker, meatier material. Molly’s stomach lurched when she realized they were probably bits of brain and bone.

  “That’s it?” she asked after regarding it for a minute or two. “Nothing inside?”

  “Like I said, there’s no evidence that the suspect ever went in. We believe he came and left through the alley.”

  “Do you mind if I look around some? My editor wants me to try to find out who Gretchen really was, and I can’t get much sense of her from out here.”

  “I’ll have to accompany you.”

  She had watched enough CSI on TV to know that she was ignoring all kinds of things the police had probably spent hours poring over. That didn’t matter; she wasn’t here to find a killer, but to know the victim. She had needed to see the actual murder scene, but more important was what she could find inside, where the dead woman had lived.

  They went around to the front of the house and he peeled back the tape covering the door, letting her in. She had never before, to her knowledge, walked into the home of a murder victim. She took a deep breath before the door closed—as if the air inside might be toxic in some way—and went to work trying to get a feeling for the life of the newly deceased Gretchen Fuchs.

  FOURTEEN

  Water.

  Not very helpful, Truly thought. He stood in the formal dining room of his father’s house in northern Michigan, looking out a massive picture window. Snow covered the property, right to the edge of Lake St. Clair (iced over at the shore, but still liquid farther out). The snow was essentially water, the ice was water, and the water…well, that was water, too.

  So for Robb Ivey, in mountainous Colorado, to say that he felt a sensation of water at Lawrence Ingersoll’s house was essentially saying nothing at all. Water was everywhere.

  Truly had flown from Colorado to Michigan because it was his mother’s birthday, and the fact that she had been dead for more than fifteen years didn’t stop his father from wanting his only son there to mark it with him. The house was a virtual shrine to Barbara Livingston, former Hollywood starlet and political wife. Truly thought his dad would have run for president, and might have won, if she hadn’t become ill—if not for himself, just so that the country could have his beloved wife as a First Lady.

  Turning away from the window, Truly came face-to-face with his mother, immortalized in oils at the height of both her career and her nearly legendary beauty. The painting was almost life-sized, surrounded by an ornate gold frame that added another six inches on every side. She wore a satiny blue dress with an off-center V-neck, trimmed with black velvet. Her honey blonde hair was freshly coiffed and curled, her blue eyes glittering, her lips bright red, her teeth white and straight. She was trim and lovely and she carried a hint of mystery, an almost Mona Lisa-like enigmatic quality to her smile and to the way her eyelids were partially lowered, her gaze drifting off to her right, as if something more interesting than the viewer lurked there.

  The painting was mounted over a white marble fireplace. On the mantel (to the painting’s right, not blocking an inch of it) was her Emmy Award for a TV movie she had appeared in. Her last role, as it turned out. She had been in her early forties by then, too old for the ingénue roles that had made her famous, but in the drama Across Town, she had played against type, as a shrewish (but ultimately redeemed) Southern wife and mother, and she had been rewarded with the statuette.

  To the left of the painting, as if to balance out the mantel, two silver candlesticks held tall white candles that were never lit.

  Framed stills from her movies and TV appearances were scattered around the walls. A glass-fronted cabinet contained other souvenirs of her Hollywood career. Signed scripts, props (a brush and mirror from Across Town on the top shelf, a gold cigarette lighter from her first feature, Island Girl, even the cowboy hat she had worn on an episode of The Big Valley), a warm, flirtatious note from John Huston, and more. The household staff kept the glass case and the big window equally spotless. Truly didn’t think his father hosted a lot of dinner parties anymore, but this room was always ready for one.

  Tonight it would be just the two of them, Senator Willard Carsten Truly and James Livingston Truly, dining in awkward solitude, served by white-coated African American waiters, occasionally lifting a glass toward the portrait above the fireplace. The younger Truly returned to the window and gazed out at the dock jutting into the lake. For just a second, he remembered long summer twilights when his mother would stand out there, her fingertips touching the pilings, or sit on the dock’s end, smoking cigarettes and watching the sun’s last rays captured and fragmented by the water. She had seemed impossibly glamorous, as if the sun hoped to bask in her glory and not the other way around. When she came inside for the evening, the sun, its dreams dashed, hid its disappointment behind the horizon.

  “Dinner won’t be for hours yet.”

  Truly hadn’t even heard his fath
er come in, but there he was, standing just inside the double doors. He had a mane the MGM lion would envy, pure white now but impressive just the same. He still commanded the attention of any room he was in. His shoulders were stooped these days, his back hunched a little, and his face sagged at the jowls, the flesh spotted and tinged with red from a network of capillaries just beneath the skin.

  When he looked at his father’s face, Truly felt sure he was looking into his own future. He’d never have that hair or the regal bearing, and he wouldn’t wear, as his father did now, a blue pinstriped dress shirt with white collar and French cuffs, suspenders, navy blue dress pants and an Italian silk tie, in his own house in the middle of the day. But his face owed much more to his father than to his mother—the same roundness, the same big blue eyes and soft lips, lacking only some indefinable quality that in the older man suggested strength. Truly would be baby-faced until he was in his sixties or seventies, he guessed, and then, overnight, he would look like his father did now.

  “I know,” he said, aware that his father still waited for an answer. “I was just admiring the view.”

  “It never stops being impressive, does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Your mother loved it.”

  Truly had known that was coming. The old man brought up Truly’s mother frequently, especially when they were together for her birthday commemoration. Usually on occasions like this when there wasn’t much of a response possible.

  “I wish your lady friend had been able to join you, James.”

  “So do I.” He had expected Bethany to come along, and when Truly showed up alone, he pressed for an explanation. Truly hadn’t wanted to tell him that he was seeing a married woman, not because he was necessarily ashamed or embarrassed, but because until falling in love with Barbara Livingston, this had been his father’s habit, too. Admitting that he was fooling around with a married woman was like saying he was more like his father than he felt comfortable with.

  “You could have shown better judgment, James. You’re lucky it hasn’t become public knowledge.”

  “Who would care? I’m not really in the public eye.”

  “Your father is. You could be. And with you in the CIA, you could be compromised. Of course, I suppose someone would have to care about your branch to go to the effort.”

  “That’s true.” Truly’s father spared no opportunity to take potshots at his son’s agency posting. He had made his reputation as a hardheaded realist, and if the press got wind that his son, as he put it, “chased ghosts” for the agency, he feared they would somehow use that knowledge to attack him, never mind that he’d been out of the Senate for years.

  “Then be more careful. If you should take my advice and run for office some day, you won’t want something like this in your closet. These days the press will use any kind of dirt they can dig up.”

  “Not like in your day, right?”

  “They were a bit more circumspect then. Imagine what today’s press corps would do to Jack Kennedy if he tried to run today.”

  “A frightening thought.” Truly had no intention of running for office, ever. His father had idolized Kennedy, and remained convinced that an unholy collaboration of CIA agents, mobsters, and anti-Castro activists had assassinated him, which gave him one more reason to despise his son’s job.

  “It really wouldn’t be a bad idea to try something else.” This was a familiar refrain around the Truly house. “I know we could turn something up with a phone call or two.”

  His father was certainly right. He remained connected to enough important people that he could unearth a job offer without breaking a sweat. The idea of it, though, made Truly’s heart race. He had to do something worthwhile on his own, had to climb out from under his father’s long shadow, or he would never feel like his own man. Breaking up with Bethany had already left an empty space in his life—a space he realized had only been partially filled by his affair with someone else’s wife. If he couldn’t make his own way in the world, what good was he?

  Suddenly the urgency of the Ingersoll situation weighed down on him. “Listen, Pop, speaking of phone calls, I need to make a few.”

  “You can use my study, James. And there’s a phone in your room, too.”

  “I have my cell, but thanks.”

  “Is that secure?”

  “Someone would have to care enough about me to listen in, right?”

  Willard Carsten Truly peered at him, as if trying to tell by sight if he was mocking his father.

  Which he was. He left the senator to wonder and went to his room to make the calls.

  * * *

  “Yes, Monsieur Truly, of course.” Bernard Frontenac’s French accent was so thick it was hard to understand him over the phone. His English was much better than Truly’s French, but that didn’t always help. “I know the night you speak of.”

  “The night Ingersoll died.”

  “Oui, of course. The night of the disturbance.”

  “Right. Did you notice anything unusual that night?”

  “It was terrible! All that day, I could accomplish nothing. Rien.” Frontenac was a world-class remote viewer whose file had chilled Truly’s blood. According to CIA records, he was able to see into places he had never been with remarkable accuracy.

  Truly looked around the room, which had been his room when he was a boy—his room here, since the family had always maintained residences in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles as well). It had remained mostly unchanged since then, and he hoped the Frenchman would explain himself. When Frontenac’s silence stretched on, he probed. “What do you mean, Bernard? What happened?”

  “It was…I do not have the words to explain. Everything I tried to do gave me a sense of impending disaster, some doom that could not be escaped.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I gave up and had a glass of good French wine. Then I had another, and then several more. By the next afternoon, when I felt well enough to continue, everything seemed to be back to normal.”

  “I see.” So he drank himself into oblivion. Not very helpful. “Well, thanks, Bernard. I’ll let you know if I learn anything more.”

  “Be well, my friend.”

  The line went dead. Truly pushed the end button. He had been sitting on his bed—the one he had slept on for years, although the mattress had been replaced—but now he got up and went to the desk, which sat in front of a window overlooking the front yard. More snow out there, flocking the trees and filling the spaces between them. Somewhere beyond his sight was a tall iron fence, but from here the view might have been of a park or a sparse forest.

  He hadn’t learned much from Frontenac, from Johnny Crow, a telekinetic in Las Vegas, or from Robb Ivey, that he hadn’t already known. Which wasn’t much to begin with. All he really had was the fact that something bad had happened, but he didn’t know what it was or if he could do anything about it. Or even if he should try. He needed better data if he was going to make a decision, much less convince Ron Loesser that it was the right decision.

  Time to try Millicent Wong again.

  He sat down at the desk chair and dialed, gazing out the window the whole time.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, he put the phone down and took a deep breath. She had agreed to meet him in Colorado, but the price would be high. Millicent’s passion was ballroom dancing. He’d had to agree to find someplace in Colorado where she could dance and to escort her there. His offer to hire a hall, a band, and willing partners was rebuffed; it had to be the real deal or she wasn’t interested.

  Truly was no dancer. The idea filled him with the same sort of indescribable dread Frontenac talked about having felt on the night of the disturbance.

  He would do what he had to, though. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

  FIFTEEN

  Pencil clutched, the old man’s hand flew so quickly, so surely across the paper that an observer would never have known he was blind. With a few sure stroke
s he finished the sketch; then he shoved the paper off the table and started a new one. The sheet fluttered to the uneven wooden floor, joining a dozen or so sketches that had already fallen there.

  Back from his brief Colorado junket, Captain Vance Brewer crossed the tiny room, moving quietly—out of habit; the artist wouldn’t have noticed if he stomped or danced around in tap shoes—and picked up the sketches. They were all of the same general subject: a woman dancing. Her skirt swirled around her, her arms variously raised over her head or bowing out away from her body or holding onto a partner who was never pictured.

  Brewer wished he could ask the old man what the pictures meant. Their subject matter was obvious, but there had to be something behind it, some meaning to the dancing woman. This meaning was locked in the old man’s head, and try as he might, Brewer would never persuade the man to reveal it.

  He looked over the man’s shoulder at the next work in progress. A woman—the same or another, he couldn’t tell—also dancing. The old man would keep drawing, sitting in that chair, and then at some point he would stop, and then he would start again. The room didn’t contain a bed or a toilet or much of anything else. He didn’t need those. He only needed the chair and the drawing board, an endless supply of paper and dozens of pencils.

  No reason to mess with a good thing.

  Brewer left the room, locking it from the outside with a case-hardened padlock. He had the only key, on a keychain with nine other keys, and he kept it in his right front pocket at all times. If anything ever happened to him, someone would have to break the door down to get to the old man.