Perfect Trust: A Rowan Gant Investigation (13 page)

* * * * *

My keyed up friend was already navigating his
van out of the subdivision before I could get fully into my
seatbelt. The sun had fallen past the horizon almost an hour
before, and the light of the waxing crescent moon was diffused into
a weak halo by thin, wispy clouds that fell across it like a shroud
of frost.

For some unknown reason, Ben cranked the van
into a quick right turn onto the side street that was positioned
diagonally across from our driveway. Considering where we were
headed, I thought it odd since it wasn’t exactly the shortest route
to the highway. Out beyond the windshield, darkness overwhelmed a
no-man’s land of unlit asphalt that stretched at regular intervals
between the streetlamps. I caught only a brief glimpse of motion as
a vehicle came barreling toward us from one of the puddles of
blackness.

The van lurched left then almost instantly to
the right, narrowly missing a parked Thunderbird and tossing me
against my door just as I was about to snap the buckle of the
shoulder harness into place. Judging from the blotches of primer
decorating the otherwise darkly hued T-Bird, if we’d made contact
we wouldn’t have been its first scrape by far.

I hadn’t remembered noticing the vehicle in
our subdivision before, but there was something terribly familiar
about it, although I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what. Still,
it was the kind of aggravating feeling that makes a person say to
oneself, “Whoa, déjà vu.” The thought went as quickly as it came,
however, since any further concentration on the subject was
unceremoniously truncated by the sound of my friend’s voice.

“Asshole!” Ben exclaimed the epithet as we
narrowly avoided slamming into the oncoming news van. “Learn ta’
fuckin’ drive!”

I straightened in my seat and returned to the
task at hand, quickly coupling the safety belt before my friend’s
infamous driving could send me tumbling again.

“So have you calmed down a bit?” I asked.

“Whaddaya mean?”

“I mean have you calmed down yet?” I
repeated. “You just came through my front door like a runaway
train, and so far you’ve been a little short on explanations.”

“I told ya’,” he offered. “That handwriting
sample matched up ta’ Debbie Schaeffer.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I started, “but if
I’m understanding this turn of events correctly, Debbie Schaeffer
has been murdered, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Which by definition would make her dead
already, right?”

“Oh, yeah, she’s definitely dead. No two ways
about that.”

“Okay, then. So, I hate to sound cold,” I
said as a preface to my question, “but what’s the rush?”

“Simple,” Ben returned. “Because of a
chucklehead with a big mouth, there’s about ta’ be a goddamned
media circus bustin’ out all over this thing.”

“That’s to be expected,” I shrugged, not
seeing the correlation. “It was news then, it’ll be news now.”

“Yeah, well did ya’ happen ta’ notice
the logo on the side of the van that just tried to kill us?
Whichever asshole leaked the info also knew about the handwriting
sample and decided ta’ toss your name inta’ the mix. The circus is
headin’ for
your
friggin’
front yard, Kemosabe. Shit, it looks like I just barely managed to
beat ‘em there.”

“So that’s why you didn’t want Felicity to go
by the house.”

“Exactly. I just hope she gets the message
and doesn’t blow it off.” He let out a heavy sigh before
continuing. “Look, it’s bad enough that you’re gettin’ dragged
inta’ somethin’ like this again, ‘specially now. I just wanna at
least make sure ya’ don’t get caught up in the hype this time.”

“I don’t see how you are going to keep that
from happening, Ben.”

“By doin’ exactly what I’m doin’. Gettin’ ya’
the hell outta there.”

“Maybe that will work tonight, but what about
tomorrow? And the next day? And the next?” I asked.

“There might not be a tomorrow, or a next day
for ‘em. My plan is ta’ keep ya’ as far away from this as
possible,” he told me.

“They’ll just camp outside my door.”

“Already on it. The coppers in Briarwood know
what’s up and they’re gonna take care of it.”

“They can’t restrict the freedom of the
press, Ben.”

“No, but they can protect the rights of a
private citizen.”

“Okay, so then why didn’t they just take care
of it now instead of this whole clandestine escape crap?”

“They are. We just gotta give ‘em some time
to do it.”

“I really don’t think this is going to work,
Ben.”

“Well, we’re gonna
make
it work,” he shot back.

“Think about it, Ben,” I appealed. “You just
said yourself that I’m being dragged into this. The damage has
already been done. I think at this point it’s out of your
control.”

“Not entirely.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier if I just made a
statement to the press telling them I’m not involved in this
investigation?” I offered.

“No reason for them to believe ya’,” he
answered. “Especially once they find out you’re lyin’.”

It took a moment for the balance of his
comment to sink in. When it finally did, I almost stuttered my next
question. “Just a second ago you said you were keeping me as far
from this as possible. Did I miss something here?”

“Missin’? No. Denyin’? Yeah, prob’ly. Gimme a
break, I know how ya’ are.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You ain’t serious? I gotta spell it out for
ya’?”

“Please.”

He huffed out a heavy sigh then
launched into an explanation, “It means, number one, less than
forty-eight hours ago ya’ just showed up at a crime scene right out
of the blue, so somethin’ tells me ya’ just might do it again.” He
paused as he hooked the van through a quick right turn and down the
ramp onto the highway. “And number two, ya’ handed me a piece of
paper with Debbie Schaeffer’s handwritin’ all over it that ya’ say
ya’ wrote yourself. So, whether I like it or not, you’re already
connected to all of this by some of that weird ass
Twilight Zone
shit.

“Believe me, this is a decision I
did
not
wanna make,” he
continued, “but the way I got it figured, I have two choices.
Either I keep ya’ as isolated as possible and not even let ya’ know
what’s goin’ on; or, I go ahead and bring ya’ in on it right from
the git’go and try ta’ keep your involvement to a
minimum.

“Considerin’ what you’ve already done and
what I’ve seen ya’ do in the past, I doubt the first choice has any
chance of workin’—period. That leaves me with nothin’ but option
two. So I figure if I can exert some control over the contact you
have with this case, then maybe ya’ won’t go off into la-la land on
me.”

“That’s a pretty big maybe,” I told him. “I
don’t exactly have control over it myself.”

“That’s why I want Felicity ta’ meet us,” he
explained. “I want ‘er there with ya’ every goddamned second.”

“She might not have that much control over it
either.” I shook my head at the comment. “Besides, you know she’s
not going to be happy about this.”

“Whaddaya mean ‘not happy’?” he returned.
“She’s gonna be freakin’ mad as hell. I just hope she leaves me
some hair.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” I told him. “So
what are you going to do? Sneak me in and out of my back door?”

“If I hafta.”

“You know, they’ll get to me eventually.”

“As long as that eventually is after it’s all
over and they’ve got no reason to put the spotlight on ya’, then
I’m okay with it, ‘cause ya’ won’t be interesting to ‘em
anymore.”

“I don’t think we’ll be that lucky,” I
sighed, “but I do appreciate the effort.”

“Not a prob, Kemosabe.”

Having dispensed with my confusion over the
immediacy of the situation, I moved on to the next point that
needed clarification for me. “So how did you make this connection
to begin with?”

“Don’t you watch the news, Row? Old dude out
pickin’ up aluminum cans stumbled across a body wrapped up in a
plastic drop cloth this morning,” he explained. “What was left of a
body anyway—she’d been there for a while. M.E. says a couple of
months probably.

“She was stuffed back up in the brush on a
kinda isolated section of Three Sixty-Seven on the way ta’ the
Clark Bridge. Best guess is that’s why she didn’t get found until
now.”

Disgusting visions of a corpse left
unattended for the better part of two months flitted through my
head. Having never witnessed such a thing before in real life, the
mental picture was an imagining based on remembrances of Hollywood
special effects. The image was more than enough to turn my stomach,
and I was afraid that the real thing might be far worse than
anything I could conjure in my head.

I blinked back the imagining and willed away
the sudden churning in my gut. “If she’d been out there that long,
how’d you identify her so quickly?”

“We had our suspicions based on size,
clothing, all that,” he explained, “but positive ID came this
afternoon from matching dental records. They were already on hand
at the coroner’s office from a check on another Jane Doe, so there
was no waitin’.”

“Okay, but all this still doesn’t answer my
first question. How did you make the connection with the
handwriting?”

“Once this case went from a missin’ person to
a homicide and got turned over to the MCS, the investigation went
in an entirely different direction.

“The real deal is that most of the time the
victim knows the killer. It’s standard procedure to look for
anything in the personal effects that could give us a handle on who
might’ve done it. So we spent part of the afternoon back at her
parents’ house goin’ over everything in ‘er bedroom. The minute I
looked in ‘er notebooks and saw that curly-q thing on ‘er I’s, I
knew. I had the graphologist in the crime lab verify it, but
Jeezus, I friggin’ already knew.”

“Did you find anything else worthwhile?” I
asked solemnly.

“Not really. We got a coupl’a leads ta’ run
down, but I don’t think they’ll go anywhere.”

“So if you’re pulling me in on this, why are
we going to your house instead of the morgue or a crime scene or
something?”

“Because right now I just wanna keep ya’ out
of the spotlight while I figure out what ta’ do,” Ben answered.
“Not to mention gettin’ Firehair on board before I go any further
with this.”

“Have you figured out how you’re going to do
that yet?”

“I was thinkin’ I might start with beggin’
‘er not ta’ kill me.”

* * * * *

“What happened to the promise you made me,
then?” Felicity asked in a carefully measured cadence that audibly
displayed the weakening foundation of her composure. Her outrage
was more than palpable; it was literally filling the room with
tension, and at the moment, she was ground zero to what I’m certain
was soon to be a catastrophic explosion of anger.

The three of us were seated around a small
dining table that occupied one wall of Ben’s kitchen at the rear of
his house. Felicity was directly across from Ben, and I had taken
up residence next to her.

My friend had at least been farsighted enough
to send his wife and young son out to a local pizza parlor before
my wife had arrived. He was expecting the worst, and it was looking
very much like he was going to get it.

What had been a guarded smile on my wife’s
lips when she first walked in had morphed instantaneously into a
thin-lipped frown the moment Ben outlined the reason for her being
here. That frown had grown thinner and more severe with every word
that came out of his mouth. The current set of her jaw was visible
evidence of her tightly clenched teeth.

“I’m sorry, Felicity.” He shook his head.

“You’re sorry?” she spat incredulously.
“You’re
sorry
? Is that the
best you can come up with?”

“Whaddaya want me ta’ say?” He held his hands
out, palms upward as he shrugged surrender.

“Aye, for starters I want you to tell me this
is all some sort of sick joke, then,” she hissed.

“I wish I could, but…” He allowed his voice
to trail off without completing the sentence.

“Then why don’t you tell me you aren’t really
dragging him into another murder investigation.”

“Me draggin’ ‘im in? I don’t suppose ya’
noticed that he’s not exactly kickin’ and screamin’ here.”

“Are you two going to spend the whole night
talking about me like I’m not even sitting here?” I interjected
with a perturbed edge to my voice.

“You stay out of this,” my wife commanded as
she flashed an angry glance my way.

“Why would I stay out of it?” I shot back.
“I’m the one who’s being talked about here.”

She ignored me and turned back to Ben. “You
know how he is. But you’re still bringing him into this even after
everything that’s happened.”

“Well, if ya want the truth, he pretty much
brought ‘imself into it.”

“He’s right.” I nodded in agreement.

“And how would that be?”

“Well you were there when he handed me that
writin’ sample,” he answered.

“So?” she shot back. “You didn’t have to take
it.”

“I didn’t see
you
do anything ta’ discourage it,” he returned.
“So you’re just as much at fault as me.”

“Go n-ithe an cat thú is go
n-ithe an diabhal an cat!”
Felicity
snarled.

“Excuse me?” Ben’s face was washed over with
abject confusion as he cast his questioning glance from me to my
wife and then back again. “What the hell was that?”

“It’s Gaelic,” I told him, having heard the
Celtic epithet from her before. “She just said something on the
order of ‘May the cat eat you, and may the cat be eaten by the
devil.’”