Sucker Punch

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “But I’m not holding back anything that can help save me.”

  “How do you know?” Edward asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How do you know that we won’t find a clue in what you’re not telling us?”

  Bobby seemed to think that through as he sipped his soda.

  “We’re cops, Bobby,” Newman said. “It’s our job to make sense out of stuff like this. You never know what might help us to help you.”

  “You’ve never been a police officer, right?” I asked.

  “You mean me?” Bobby asked.

  “Everyone else in the room is a police officer, so yeah, you.”

  “Sorry, yes. It’s just you all asking questions from all over the room is sort of disorienting.”

  I filed that thought away for future interrogations and asked, “So you don’t know how to do our jobs, right?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then why don’t you stop deciding what will and won’t help us figure out whodunit, and just tell us everything you know so we can try to do the crime-busting part of our jobs?”

  “I thought crime busting was your jobs.” He smiled as he spoke as if I’d said something to amuse him.

  “Only part,” I said.

  “What’s the other part?”

  “Executing people,” I said.

  “Killing people,” Edward said.

  “Killing,” Olaf said.

  Bobby looked around the room at all of us one at a time. “You’re trying to scare me.”

  “If that will get you to talk, sure, but that last part wasn’t planned. It’s just the truth,” I said.

  Bobby turned back to Newman, who was the only one of us who hadn’t said that particular truth. “Don’t you want to scare me, too?”

  “No, I want to save your life and find out who killed Ray and framed you for it, because if they’ll do all that, then they are a danger to everyone else in our town.”

  “I don’t know who killed Uncle Ray. I just know I didn’t do it.”

  “Then tell us what you know, Bobby, please. Once you die for this crime, the investigation is over, and there will still be a double murderer free in our town to kill again.”

  “Double murderer? Only Uncle Ray died, right, no one else?” He was scared now, worried for other people.

  I’d have let him sweat and asked whom he was worried about, but Newman was lead marshal and he didn’t ask my opinion. “You’re the second murder victim, Bobby.”

  “But I’m alive, Win. I’m right here.”

  “Not for much longer, Bobby, not unless you help us.”

  Bobby’s emotions went across his face like clouds across a windy sky, too fast for me to catch them, but the shadows of them chased across his face as he fought through them all. Whatever he was hiding was important to him and came with an emotional price tag.

  “Troy is one of the biggest gossips in town. I couldn’t talk with him right there. I still don’t feel right about it. I gave my word.”

  “Bobby, it’s just us now, and I swear to you that anything you tell us won’t leave this room unless it directly relates to the murder,” Newman said.

  Bobby looked at him and then at all of us in turn. “Do you promise?”

  We all promised. He was so earnest, I half expected him to ask us to pinkie swear.

  “Jocelyn and I grew up together. Her mother married Uncle Ray when she was five and I was eight.”

  That didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything, but I was betting who the “she” might be.

  “She saw me in leopard form after the accident every month. I know you’ve seen the pictures of me with the family in both forms, Win. I’m not sure about the rest of you.”

  “I’ve seen them. That’s how I knew your leopard was the same size as a regular leopard,” I said.

  “Then you know that I’m in the pictures like the family dog. Joshie saw me in my animal form a lot, but she never saw me shift. I always did that in private, sort of like changing clothes. She wanted to see the change all the way through once.” He looked back at Olaf. “Like you said, I had the most control at the dark of the moon, so that’s when we planned it.”

  “Planned what?” I asked. If he said the murder, I was going to be both pissed and pleased: angry I’d almost gotten killed protecting a murderer and pleased we could solve the case.

  Bobby looked back at me. “Um . . . to have her see me change form.”

  Olaf came up beside Bobby’s chair and leaned over him as he said, “You’re lying.”

  Bobby glanced up at him and then away. “I’m not lying. It’s the truth.”

  “Then why did your pulse rate speed up? Your body is reacting like you are hiding something.” Olaf leaned closer, bowing his bigger body over the other man’s head so that Bobby reacted like the roof was getting lower.

  “It’s the truth,” Bobby said.

  “If it is the truth, it is not all of it,” Olaf said, his face nearly touching the other’s man’s cheek.

  “Win, tell him to back off.”

  “I’m not his boss,” Win said.

  Bobby’s eyes flashed up at Win, and he was afraid as he tried to sit up straighter with Olaf’s body almost touching him. For the first time since we had come into the little room, Bobby seemed to realize that he wasn’t safe, that maybe bad things could happen to him and Newman might not be able to help him. Good. Maybe he’d stop playing games and tell us the truth.

  Olaf asked the next question damn near curled around Bobby. “Why did your sister want to see you change form?”

  “She’s not my sister,” Bobby said, and he sat up so suddenly that if Olaf hadn’t moved back, Bobby’s head might have hit him in the face. Why had that question upset Bobby?

  “You were raised together,” I said.

  Bobby looked at me, and he was angry. “That doesn’t make us brother and sister. Uncle Ray never formally adopted Joshie, just me, so even legally, we’re not related.”

  “Everyone in town calls her Jocelyn Marchand,” Newman said.

  “We’re the Marchand family, and when Joshie and I were younger we didn’t even know that her last name wasn’t Marchand.”

  I had an idea. It was kind of twisted, but his anger and defensiveness were coming from somewhere. “When did you start having sex together?”

  Newman said, “Blake!” at the same time that Bobby said, “It wasn’t like that.”

  “So, you and Jocelyn didn’t have sex together?” I asked.

  This time Newman didn’t say anything. He was trying to do his best blank cop face, because his mind was having trouble with the detour.

  “We love each other,” Bobby said.

  “How long have you loved each other?” I asked.

  “I’ve had a crush on her since she was in her teens, but she still thought I was her brother, so I didn’t say anything. I figured I was just wrong. I mean, you’re right, we were raised together, but I didn’t feel like a brother. But if she felt like my sister, then I could live with it.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “She said she had feelings for me, and I finally told her how I felt.”

  “Then what happened?” I asked, because apparently this line of questioning was my lead, or Newman didn’t want to touch it.

  “We couldn’t date exactly, because people do think of us as siblings here. We were planning to tell Uncle Ray how we felt, and then we were going to move away to a big city where no one knew us. We weren’t doing anything wrong, but Jocelyn didn’t want to have to explain it to the people we’d grown up with. It bothered her more than it bothered me.”

  “Would you have just told everyone if she’d agreed?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I’m in love with her. I’ve been in love with her for yea
rs. I was engaged once, but I realized that Joshie had been my first love and still was, so it wasn’t fair to marry anyone else, not if I couldn’t really love them.”

  “Noble,” Olaf said. “Many men would have married and tried to forget what they could not have.”

  “It didn’t feel noble. I thought maybe if she found someone else and married, I’d finally be able to let it go, but she couldn’t find anyone either. We finally both realized that it was because we were meant for each other.”

  “But you weren’t able to tell anyone,” I said.

  Bobby shook his head. “She knew we weren’t really brother and sister, but to the rest of the town we were, and so she made me swear that I wouldn’t tell anyone that we were in love.”

  “Or that you were lovers,” I said.

  He nodded. “Or that.”

  I was beginning to see why Jocelyn might have been a little hysterical in the hospital. She’d been hiding the fact that she was having an affair with the man who was raised as her brother; it’s legal, but if she hadn’t felt conflicted about it, she wouldn’t have made Bobby swear not to tell anyone.

  “Why did she want to see the whole transformation from human to leopard?” I asked. Maybe if I concentrated on what we didn’t know, I wouldn’t get hung up on what we’d just learned. Was it incest if you weren’t blood relations? I mean, technically, legally no, but if you were raised together it just felt . . . wrong.

  “I proposed, and she said she couldn’t decide if she didn’t see me change. She was comfortable with me being a wereanimal as her brother, but not sure about as a husband.”

  “What happened that night, Bobby?” I asked.

  He told the story pretty much as he’d told Newman from the beginning up to a point. They’d sat down to dinner with Uncle Ray at seven o’clock like normal, but then all the hired help had left, even Carmichael, who lived on-site in a small house on the grounds.

  “Except for Carmichael leaving, it was a normal Friday night up to that point. Uncle Ray went to his study to look over the stocks and write in his journal like he did almost every night. We had some television shows that we watched together, and sometimes we’d watch a movie as a family, but other than that, he went to his study and left Jocelyn and me to entertain ourselves. That’s how he always said it: ‘You kids go entertain yourselves. I’m going to do boring old-man stuff.’”

  Bobby’s eyes got shiny at that point. He raised his hands as if he’d rub the tears away, or pretend he had something in his eye, but the shackles brought him up short, and he couldn’t complete the gesture. “I can’t believe he’s never going to hug me and say that ever again. I didn’t see his body, so I don’t believe he’s dead. Does that make sense?” He looked at me.

  “Yeah, makes perfect sense,” I said.

  He nodded, and the tears started down his face.

  “Go on, Bobby,” Newman said. “What happened after Ray went to his study?”

  “We went up to my room and made love. She let me hold her for a while, and then she asked to see me change.” The tears were drying on his face by the time he’d finished the sentence.

  He hesitated so long that I was debating on asking a question while he struggled to find the words, but Edward beat me to it. “You said she let you hold her afterward. Was that unusual?”

  Bobby nodded. “She joked that I was the girl, because I liked to hold her after sex and she just liked to clean up and be done like a boy.” He smiled as he spoke, his face going gentle at the memory.

  In my head I thought two things. One, if she could get up every time that fast, then she wasn’t having that good a time. Two, if she didn’t want to be held after sex, she had serious issues about the whole thing, or she was using him for sex or in general.

  “How did she react to seeing you change shape?” Olaf asked from the corner to which he’d retreated.

  Bobby glanced back at him, and there was an uneasy look on his face, but I think that had more to do with Olaf intimidating him earlier than anything else. “She didn’t scream or run away. She looked happy, smelled pleased. I rubbed up against her legs. She petted me like she always does in leopard form, and then I went out the open window and down the tree outside my window like I always do.”

  “The same tree that you put your deer in?” I asked.

  He frowned and nodded. “Unless one of the other animals in the area moved the deer, it should have been there.”

  “Rico looked in the tree. He didn’t search the woods for it,” Newman said.

  Bobby smiled and then looked utterly serious. He glanced at me and then at Newman. “Does she really think I killed him?”

  “I’m sorry, Bobby, but yeah, she does.”

  “Win, I did not do this. Maybe the deer fell out of the tree. Have Rico look on the ground around it. If the deer is there, then that’s all I killed.” He sounded so certain.

  “I’ll have Rico check again,” Newman said.

  “Thank you, Win.” Bobby looked up at me. “Thank you, too, Anita, for believing in me when I didn’t believe in myself. Thank you, too, Marshal Forrester and Marshal Jeffries.” He started to lift his hands as if he’d offer to shake, but the shackles stopped him.

  “Don’t thank us yet, pardner,” Edward said, pushing away from the corner and smiling his Ted smile at Bobby.

  We shuffled him back to his cell and then Newman’s phone rang. It was Dr. Jameson at the hospital. Jocelyn was awake and alert enough to talk to us.

  “We’ll be there in just a few minutes, Doctor. Thanks for the call.” Newman hung up.

  “Perfect timing,” Edward said.

  “What’s perfect timing?” Sheriff Leduc asked as we moved through the office area on our way to the cars.

  “We’re off to chase clues,” I said.

  “Chase clues? Who are you, Nancy Drew?”

  “I was always more of a Hardy Boys fan myself,” I said.

  “Me, too,” Edward said.

  “I had a crush on Nancy when I was a kid,” Newman said.

  “I do not know who this Nancy Drew is or the Hardy men,” Olaf said.

  “I knew you missed Sherlock Holmes, but didn’t you ever read any kind of mystery as a kid?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, and that one word put a stop to the conversation.

  We got our jackets and headed to the hospital. As I settled into the passenger seat of Edward’s rental, I could have sworn I could feel Olaf’s gaze on the back of my head. Maybe if Olaf and I had that coffee date, I could ask him what he liked to read. Yeah, that sounded swell.

  I turned in my seat and managed a smile. “If you move over and sit behind Edward, I’ll be able to look at you while we talk on the drive.”

  “Would looking at me please you?”

  “Yes,” I said, smiling even more brightly.

  So long as he didn’t ask why it would please me to look at him, we were good. He could think it was so I could admire his scary good looks, and I could feel safer, not having him pressed at my back in the car. He didn’t question why I wanted him to move over. He just did it. Perfect.

  44

  SOMEONE HAD PROPPED Jocelyn’s pillows up behind her, so she was sitting up this time. Her reddish brown curls were still almost eerily perfect, as if someone had done her hair before we got here. Maybe the back of her head was all mushed the way that my curls were when I lay down, but the front was bouncy and framed her face perfectly. If we hadn’t been there for a murder investigation, I might have asked what hair-care products she used for such manageable curls. Her large brown eyes still bothered me, like I was still waiting for her mother’s green eyes to appear in her face. Her wide, curved mouth was shiny and had a tinge of color like she’d used lip gloss. The color was wet and even and stayed put as she sipped diet soda through a straw, so it was high-end lip gloss.

  Jocelyn sti
rred her fork through the tray of hospital food in front of her, but it didn’t look like she’d eaten any of it. I wasn’t sure if it was grief or a critique of the food. She stared at the food instead of at any of us. It reminded me of Bobby avoiding our eyes earlier. Maybe it was a family trait? I wondered if her mother or Ray Marchand had done it and Jocelyn and Bobby had both learned it as children. Since both parents were dead now, I guessed I’d never know.

  Olaf stayed by the door this time so he wouldn’t “tower” over the patient. Edward stayed a little back from the bed, too. Newman and I stood directly beside the bed. We’d all discussed our strategy on the drive over. We didn’t want to give Jocelyn any extra reason to get spooked before we’d asked our questions. Newman and I were the least physically intimidating, and he was lead marshal, so we got to take lead on the interrogation.

  Dr. Jameson stood across the bed from us with the tall nurse who had gone to fetch him on our first visit. He’d introduced her as Nurse Trish, as if her first name were her last. Nurse Trish was over a head taller than the doctor, which meant either she was even taller than I’d first thought, or the doctor was shorter than he’d seemed. I had a moment of wanting to see her stand next to Olaf so I could get a firm height on her. Her pale brown hair was styled more today so that the tips of the short haircut framed her face on purpose in delicate pixielike points that seemed more club kid than RN. Her smock was pink again, but instead of kittens it was covered in unicorns. No, really, unicorns.

  “In the interest of potentially saving lives, I will allow you to question my patient, but I warn you to tread carefully, or I will have security escort you off the property.”

  Dr. Jameson seemed serious. I almost wanted to see what would happen if hospital security tried to kick us out. On second thought, I didn’t. We were here as U.S. Marshals. We’d have to behave ourselves, and that wouldn’t be any fun at all.

  “Thank you, Dr. Jameson, Nurse Trish. We really appreciate you understanding how important this is,” Newman said.

  I realized that he had his own version of Ted’s “Aw, shucks ma’am/sir,” except this was genuinely a part of Newman and not an act to manipulate people. Newman was as nice as he seemed, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing in this job, but one problem at a time.