She sat in front of me, her regard curious as she picked up the phone. I did the same and, wanting a clean, unobstructed read off her, said one word only.
“Miranda.”
Outwardly, she blinked and waited for me to get to my point. Inwardly, her defenses rose. Her pulse quickened. Her muscles tensed.
“Did you kill her?” I continued.
She pressed her lips together so hard, they turned white. When she finally spoke, it was with a vehemence I hadn’t expected. “I did not kill Miranda.”
I forced myself to be still as a wave of shock rushed through me. She wasn’t lying. Not completely. But I knew from Miranda’s crossing she had been horribly and unforgivingly abused by this woman. I went over the case file in my mind. They’d found Miranda’s body in the Sandia Mountains, almost directly under the path of the tram. She was too decomposed when they found her to determine an exact cause of death, but the evidence pointed most strongly to blunt force trauma to the head. She had two cracks in her skull. Either could have caused a subdural hematoma. Either could have caused her death. She also had ligature marks on her ankles and wrists and multiple discolorations along her skin suggesting massive amounts of bruising.
That certainly wasn’t enough to convict Mrs. Nelms. In fact, it would almost point to the opposite. Anyone could have taken Miranda. Anyone could have tied her up and killed her. But the prosecution had proved that Mrs. Nelms lied about how long Miranda had been missing. She’d reported her daughter missing two weeks before they found her body, but forensics showed she’d been in the wilderness at least a month. The fact that the timelines didn’t match up combined with other circumstantial evidence, like the multiple fractures and repeated visits to the emergency room over Miranda’s short life, was enough for a jury to find her guilty of a lesser charge of gross child endangerment resulting in death. The prosecution, knowing they probably couldn’t get much more, settled for that.
“I had nothing to do with her death,” she added. Though there was a boatload of resentment, there wasn’t the slightest spark of guilt in her eyes. How was that possible? I’d felt it from Miranda. Sensed it when she crossed. This woman had caused her death. She had to have.
I leaned forward, more determined than ever to get to the bottom of Miranda’s passing. “Then who did?”
“Is this why you came here? To question me on my case? The guards said it was for another case. I just figured it was about my son.”
“Marcus? Is he in trouble?”
She glared at me, making it very clear she had nothing else to say.
Perhaps she was a sociopath, and the reason I felt no guilt off her was because she simply felt none. But she’d reacted when I mentioned Marcus’s name. She’d flinched, the movement quick, almost invisible. And a wave of emotion sprang out of her. It wasn’t what I’d expected. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was fear. The kind of fear that materialized when one had done something bad and didn’t want anyone else to find out about it. Not that I had any experience in that area.
I suddenly had someplace else to be.
“Fine,” I said, placing my elbows on the desk in front of me, “you may or may not have been directly responsible for Miranda’s death, but you damn sure contributed. She’s in a better place, a place where monsters like you can never harm her again.”
Mrs. Nelms schooled her expression, refusing to say more. It didn’t matter. I had what I’d come for. What I needed to see. She had zero remorse for what she’d done. Whether she killed her daughter or not, she was a monster, and I intended to make sure she burned in hell for what she’d done.
Just in case someone in the future dropped the ball and she got sent in the wrong direction after she died, I put my hand on the glass, relaxed my muscles, cleared my mind, and stepped back onto another plane. I’d been here before. I’d seen Reyes’s eternal fire from this plane. I’d seen the flames that licked across his skin, that caressed every inch of him. And from this plane, I could see the true nature of the woman sitting before me. I could see her soul, cold and dark and empty like a giant chasm.
I swept my hand between us, brushing my fingertips along the glass partition, sweeping my essence across to her, and marked her soul. As I sat there, an energy took shape in the blackness within her. I had seen it before on Reyes. Not on his soul, but imprinted on his skin. It was part of the map to hell, a part of his tattoos, and I knew I’d sent Mrs. Nelms’s soul to the right place.
I grinned and spoke into the receiver, my tone matter-of-fact, and somehow she knew I was telling the truth. I could feel her acceptance of each word that left my mouth as I said them. “You will suffer in hell for a very, very long time.”
Fear spiked within her. She sat stunned a moment, then slammed down the receiver and stood to leave. I offered her a quick wink, then did the same. I had places to be and people to see.
The moment I got back into Misery, I called Cookie. “I need an address,” I said when she answered. “Marcus Nelms. I need to know where he is right now.”
* * *
I exited off I-40 at Moriarty, a small town about thirty minutes east of Albuquerque, and headed straight down Central. Marcus Nelms would be in his very early twenties. Cookie said he’d been in and out of jail since he was twelve for various offenses, but mainly possession of a controlled substance. After a few twists and turns that led me to a small mobile home park, I pulled to a stop in front of one just as my phone alerted me to a text. Cookie sent me Marcus’s latest mug shot. He was a nice-looking kid who’d already led a hard life.
I stepped out and walked through milk- and ragweed until I got to a wobbly set of stairs and, after taking my life into my own hands, the front door. With no vehicle out front and no lights on inside, no one appeared to be home, but I knocked anyway. After my third and most aggressive try, I felt annoyance through the paper-thin walls of the mobile a few seconds before the door inched open.
A set of dark eyes peered through the slit. It belonged to one Mr. Marcus Nelms. I showed him my PI license to make myself seem more official, then asked, “Mr. Nelms, can I talk to you about a case I’m working on?”
“I’m busy,” he said, his voice deep and groggy. I’d clearly woken him.
“Marcus,” I said, trying to connect, “my name is Charley Davidson. I’m a PI. You’re not in any trouble at all. I just need to ask you a couple of quick questions, then I’ll leave. Can I come in?”
He hesitated, then released a loud sigh and opened the door. He stood shirtless, his jeans fitting low on his hips, revealing the fact that he’d decided to go commando underneath them. He was too thin, his unhealthy skin revealing long-term drug use, and his hair hadn’t been washed in at least a week, though he didn’t smell bad. I stepped inside the dark living room as he turned on a single lamp. It illuminated the place just enough for me to make my way to a rickety recliner.
I took a moment to absorb what I could, to get a better understanding of him. The frigidity I’d felt with his mother wasn’t there. He wasn’t all warm and fuzzy inside, but he wasn’t cold. Calculating. He was … vulnerable.
“What’s this about?” he asked as he cracked open an energy drink and took a large gulp. His Adam’s apple rose and fell, his lack of fat tissue making it easily visible. He dropped onto the only other chair in the room, another rickety recliner, only with a little more stuffing than mine. After crossing his bare feet on the milk crate he was using as a coffee table, he gave me his full attention.
“Do you have roommates?” I asked, looking behind me, not wanting to be caught off guard.
“Not at the moment. My girlfriend left me a couple weeks ago.” He peered into the top of the can. “Said I had commitment issues. Johnny send you?”
He took another long swig, so I figured I’d get right to the point. “I don’t know who Johnny is, but I wanted to ask you about your mother.”
He stopped drinking, coughed lightly, then said, “Bitch ain’t my mother. You come to the wrong place if you think I’m going to answer anything about her. Ain’t seen her in years, anyway.”
I did feel hatred radiating out of him, but also something else. Pain. A thick, caustic pain that seared the back of my throat when I breathed in. Either that or he had a meth lab in the back and I was breathing in the toxic fumes. That would suck.
He looked out the dirty front window, rubbing his bottom lip with his thumb.
I waited a heartbeat, gave his emotions time to level out, then went for the jugular. “She says she didn’t kill Miranda.”
What hit me next felt like a fist in my gut, but he hadn’t moved. I fought the urge to double over, his pain was so powerful, so suffocating. Yet he hadn’t moved. His expression hadn’t changed.
“She’s a liar” was all he said.
“I believe you. I was just wondering if you could tell me what you remember about the time Miranda disappeared. It would really help my case.”
“And what case would that be?” he asked. He turned a heated scowl on me. “She’s in prison. What else is there?”
“There’s justice for Miranda,” I said, but it did no good. He was already deflecting, looking me up and down like I was his next meal, even though I felt very little interest emanating out of him. It was a ploy to change the subject. To put me on guard.
“What’s your name again?”
I leaned forward as nonthreateningly as I could and spoke slowly, gauging his reaction to each word I spoke. “My name is Charley, and I would love for you to tell me what you remember about your sister.”
Sister. That’s when his grief, as hot and raw as if she’d died yesterday, hit me in the midsection again, and I suddenly understood why he did drugs. He was still hemorrhaging so much pain, so much guilt over his sister’s death, self-medication was the only way he could deal with it. But there were better ways. I made a solemn promise right then and there to make sure he found them.
“She was missing for a month before they found her body. Do you remember what happened before she disappeared?”
He took another drink and went back to staring out the window, his jaw working under the weight of his guilt.
“Did your mother hurt her?”
He scoffed aloud before scowling at me, his eyes shimmering, a telling wetness pooling in their depths. “What makes you think I’m going to tell you a fucking thing when I didn’t tell the cops shit?”
“I’m not the cops, and I’m in this for Miranda and Miranda only.”
“She’s dead. Ain’t a fucking thing you can do about that, yeah?”
His torment was hard to see past. My own eyes were watering, too, remembering the frightened little girl in the cable car, remembering her despair, her utter hopelessness. Her belief that she had no value whatsoever. “You were a couple of years older than she was,” I said. “Maybe you feel responsible somehow.”
A slow, calculating smile appeared. He leaned forward, closed the distance between us until his face was in my hair, his mouth at my ear, and said, “I’m glad she’s dead.” His breath hitched in his chest, and it took him a moment to say more. “I wish she’d never been born.”
As cruel and unusual as his words sounded, as vehemently said, they didn’t mean what he would have me believe. I felt absolutely no hatred coming from him. No malice or contempt. I felt only a deep reverence and a debilitating, cutting guilt. That seemed to be going around a lot lately.
He pushed me away from him and stalked down the hall. After giving him a moment to gather myself, I followed. I could feel grief pouring out of him, so without knocking, I opened the door to a tiny bathroom. He was in a state of agony as he splashed water on his face. On the sink next to him was a bottle of prescription pills. According to his file, he’d been suicidal for years, and my guess was that those pills were a very powerful pain reliever. It took something powerful to mask that much pain.
I stepped in as he toweled off his face. “Marcus,” I said as softly and as unthreateningly as I could manage, “you do realize you aren’t actually responsible for her death, right?”
He granted me a flirtatious wink. “Sure.”
He opened the bottle, dropped two large white painkillers into his palm, then popped them into his mouth. He swallowed, waited a moment, then sank to the floor as his guilt devoured him. It was why he’d turned to drugs in the first place. I suddenly understood all too well. He felt guilty for not helping his sister when he had the chance. He’d loved her. I could feel it course through him.
“Please tell me that bitch isn’t getting out of prison anytime soon,” he said.
I knelt beside him. Like his sister, he’d been taught from an early age that he had no value. No intrinsic worth.
My torso felt too tight as I inched toward him. “Can you tell me what happened, Marcus?”
“Why do you care what happened to her?” he asked. “Nobody cared. My mother only reported her missing because a neighbor started asking questions. She’d been gone more than two weeks.” He looked up at me. “Can you imagine that? Two fucking weeks before she even considered calling the cops.”
“Marcus,” I said, putting a palm softly on his knee.
He had the towel in both hands, wringing it until his knuckles turned white. Dredging up the memories was taking its toll on him. He took the bottle off the sink and tilted it at his mouth, swallowing at least one more before setting it aside and covering his eyes with one hand. “We’d been evicted and were living in my aunt’s house while she tried to sell it. She married some rich guy from California and said we could stay there until it sold.”
That explained why Miranda was in that part of the city. The property around where she’d been found was upscale, and Mrs. Nelms didn’t strike me as ever having money.
“Something wasn’t right,” he continued. His hand clenched around the towel. “She was acting different. She kept saying she wanted her sister’s house but couldn’t afford it—then this man in a business suit came over and I heard them talking. My mom was buying life insurance on us.” He lowered his hand to look at me.
The bathroom had more light, and I could finally make out the color of his eyes. They were hazel green.