R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning (5 page)

Counterfeiters rarely fire back.

Embezzlers cry when arrested at their office.

I knew it ate away at her inside and it did terrify me that it was not an issue put to bed comfortably but rather like a toddler: tossing, turning, fighting it every step of the way. And I was afraid the toddler would wake up in the middle of some night down the road, howling my name and pointing an accusatory finger.

I’d live with it. Selfish, yes, and maybe I would approach her first and retire early. I’d been researching a few options. Personal security seemed the best option but Denver was no Los Angeles or New York. The number of rich folk who paid well for a good security chief and entourage were markedly fewer there in our low-traffic  Rocky Mountain paradise than some other bigger metropolises.

Life was a series of trades. The sooner a person learned that, the easier they navigated the future.

“You still looking for warm destinations,” Manny Rodriguez said from the facing desk.

“Yeah. Amanda still wants to try to head somewhere. Until this morning I wasn’t onboard.”

“But now?”

“Now I walk from my car to the office and my ass still feels frozen to my pants.”

“Amen, brother.”

“I am becoming a complete pussy. Check that, my brother Jax—”

I stopped. Shit.
My dead brother Jax
, the heartless me whispered inside my head and my heart suddenly weighed as much as a steel ball of similar size.

“Sorry, man,” my younger partner said uncomfortably.

“No, not your fault. What I was going to say is that bastard was always busting my balls about something. He claimed I was going soft in more ways than just hating the cold. He lived in north Idaho—”

“I know, Mac.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Nothing in from the M.E. yet,” Manny said, wisely changing the subject.

“You know how backed up they are. We’ll be lucky to get anything until Monday.”

“Seems stupid,” he said. “Us sitting on our butts, them backed up like my uncle who eats too much cheese.”

“Shit I should go down and print her myself.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Manny said, smiling.

I picked up the phone and called Delta Swift. Delta and I did the academy together and she was now a Sheriff stationed at the County Building. The morgue was at County.

“Deputy Swift.”

“Delta, baby.”

“Bobby Mac, you exquisite piece of beau-flesh.”

“Now, Delta. You know I got remarried, right?”

“Marital status has never been a big concern of mine, you know that.”

“You still tight with the doc over there? Hollis, is it?”

“Doc Hollis has been known to butter my muffin from time to time.”

“I need a solid,” I told her.

“One good scratch begets another, Detective.”

“I’ll owe you one.”

“Depends on what you’re asking. Might be more than one.”

“I need a set of prints run on a victim that just showed up. I know they’re behind. I need to find out who this poor girl is. I swear, I’ll even bring a print pad and paper myself.”

“No one has reported her missing?”

“Not here. The national database is down.”

“I’ll talk to him. Don’t worry, he’ll do it.”

“Thanks, Delta.”

My desk phone rang about two hours after speaking with Delta at the M.E.’s office.

“Detective Macaulay.”

“Detective, this is Ben Hollis.”

“Doc, what can I do for you, sir?”

“I was wondering if you could come over to my office?”

I thought about his “office”. The cooler gave me the willies, but I needed this guy’s help and if it meant sucking it up and hanging around a bunch of purple stiffs, I could take one for the team. “Name the time.”

“Can you be here in an hour?”

“I can.”

“See you then,” he said, and disconnected.

I told Manny it didn’t sound like Doc Hollis was intimating that I should bring company so I drove to the morgue alone. As I approached the copper-colored brick building my stomach started its I-hate-hospitals-and-places-where-naked-dead-bodies-live routine of twisting into a fist and then screaming to my lower colon to go into overdrive.

I signed in and walked across the freshly polished tile floor to the bank of elevators and waited for one going down. The morgue wasn’t actually in the basement but on a level called the mezzanine. My catholic upbringing always made me think of Purgatory when I pushed the button for a floor between floors.

“Detective,” Hollis said. “I appreciate you taking the time from your day.”

“As long as this is about the Dahlia murder, this
is
part of my day, Doc.”

“Delt—uh, Deputy Swift came by earlier and wondered if I might run your victim’s prints sooner rather than later. She does make a convincing argument but the truth is I had just run them and was planning on calling you over about another matter in the first place.”

Hollis seemed nervous and was sweating profusely. Unusual, as the room was about thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.

“No problem,” I said. “Talk to me.”

“Shall we sit over in my office?”

“You read my mind, Doc.”

When we were in the office he motioned to a chair for me, removed a handkerchief, and wiped the water from his brow. “I am not usually this disconcerted about a body,” he said. “B-but this particular victim—the surgical incisions, the smiling mouth perpetrated by the massive cuts to the cheek area—I don’t know; I haven’t been sleeping well since she was brought in.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Our jobs aren’t always easy to bring home with us.”

“No,” he said. “But I called you here because of what I found.”

I stayed silent, giving him the floor.

“Frozen in the back of the victim’s throat, well behind the larynx, was a stack of thirty dimes.”

“Thirty
dimes
you said?”

“Yes.”

“Go on,” I said.

“I am a coin collector,” he said to no surprise of mine. “The coins are in excellent condition and each predated the year nineteen sixty-five by at least a decade. W-worthless from a collector’s point of view you understand.”

“I’m not following you here, Doc. You have knowledge about the coins, I take it? Usually I just tell folks to spit it out. Uh, just say whatever they need to.”

“Until the Coinage Act of nineteen sixty-five, dimes were composed of ninety percent silver. In fact, that’s why they’re so thin—so that the intrinsic value of the silver not exceed the ten cent coin itself. Since sixty-five, they, like most coins, are made mostly of copper, with nickel providing the coloring.”

“Interesting stuff, Doc, but as good a detective as I am, you’ve stumped me.”

“Most texts agree that Judas Iscariot accepted thirty pieces of silver to betray Jesus to the priests in the Garden of Gethsemane.”

“Are you a religious man, Doctor Hollis?”

“Ben, please Detective. Not particularly. But there is enough evidence in the books of history to suggest that a man named Jesus was nailed to a cross and left there to die a most excruciating death and, in the least, he was the kindest, gentlest man to ever walk the earth and at the most, as some believe, the son of God. Either way, I find the facts in
this
case disturbing.”

“Facts, as in plural?”

“Thirty pieces of silver and the hanging of the victim.”

“Judas hanged himself after having remorse for what he’d done,” I said.

“After returning the silver pieces to the high priests.”

The prints had a match in the system. A suspected runaway from Toledo: Deena Ballou. I reached out to the parents—the mother, Reba Carrigan, still lived in Toledo but the father had split to somewhere in the Midwest. He’d been out of Deena’s life for a while. Unfortunately not an uncommon story.

Reba took the news harder than I thought. Ballou had been missing for over three years and showed signs of drug abuse that went back even further. I mistakenly assumed the mother was already prepared for such a call.

She wasn’t.

She cried and told me she’d never given up the hope that Deena would find God or Jesus or whatever higher power always cured people on television and in the movies.

Such turpitude comes from the early days
, I thought at the time.
Parents instill such potential long before they think the child will need it
.

And it wasn’t a cruel accusation. Young kids were so perfect. I mean sure, they had their moments. Many of them. But they were so innocent and they
idolized
you. That idolization was as strong as any drug I’d tried or heard of. Intoxicating. And a parent
had
to keep things in check. Teach them right from wrong at a core level. That wasn’t going to guarantee ANYTHING in the years between fifteen and twenty-five or so. That was the scary part. But if you gave them a good core, they stood a chance. That was the best a parent could do, I had long since realized.