The Angel of Knowlton Park (38 page)

Finally, she perched opposite him on the arm of the sofa, a lighter in her hand, and focused on him. Her pupils were gigantic, her head rocking like a bobblehead doll. "So?"

"Friday night. The night he was killed. You were driving through the neighborhood and you stopped to talk to Timmy. Can you tell me about that?"

She tugged her top up and her shorts down, worked a finger into her ear and studied it carefully, and then looked back at him. "How do you know?"

"One of the neighbors saw you. Do you remember what time that was?"

She shook her head. "My watch broke. Coupla, two weeks ago."

"Do you remember seeing Timmy on Friday?"

"It was down near the park?"

"I wasn't there, Ms. Lowe," he said. "You were. You tell me."

"Down near the park. I was on my way out here. I saw Timmy, so I stopped to say hi. He was a cute little kid, wasn't he?"

"Do you remember what he was wearing?"

Her hands scrabbled across her chest like a pair of agitated spiders. "Shirt with these blue and red guys on it. Action guys. You know. Shorts. He had his backpack." She went to the cigarettes again. Shook one out. Raised the lighter. Lowered it again. Her nail polish was electric blue. "Mind if I put on some music?"

"It's your house," he said.

"Oh. Yeah. Right." She crossed to a stereo and pressed a button. The same song he'd heard from outside came on again. "I just love this song, don't you?" She began swaying.

"You remember anything about your conversation with Timmy?"

"Conversation?" She squinted up her eyes and peered at him. "Oh. You mean what did we talk about?" He nodded. "I asked where he was going, 'cuz of the backpack, you know. Like you said, making conversation. He said he was running away from home. So I asked him why, still just kidding like, because I didn't really think he was. I mean, you know. Kid that young, like where would he go, right?"

"What did he say?"

She held up a hand, signaling for him to wait. Crossed the room and pressed the button. The song began again. The room was dusty. A coffee table was littered with old pizza boxes and Oreo packets, beer bottles, soda bottles, and empty chip bags. A couple dusty terminals, monitors and printers were stacked in a corner. Instead of answering, she began to dance, swaying slowly to the music. Burgess realized that she must have been very pretty once and still thought she was. That her dance was a kind of seduction.

"What did Timmy say?" he repeated.

"Timmy?"

"When you talked with him on Friday. When he told you he was running away."

She looked toward the closed kitchen door. "Goddammit!" she said. "That bastard won't let me smoke in the house. How can I go outside when every goddamned mosquito in the state's waiting out there to suck my blood?"

Something was making his eyes sting, his throat hurt. Starting a dull ache in his head. He tried again. "Friday. When you met him. Did Timmy say where he was going?"

"Oh, yeah. Right," she said brightly, giving him a smile showing bad teeth and receding gums. "Timmy." Burgess watched her agitated fingers turning the lighter over and over. "He said Dwayne was going to kill him. That don't surprise me. Dwayne's a bastard at the best of times." She picked up the cigarettes again.

"You want to smoke," he said, "we could go sit in my car."

"You think I'm stupid?" she said. "I ain't getting in no cop car."

He didn't think she was stupid. He knew she was. "Timmy," he repeated. "He say where he was going?"

She half turned away, looking back over her shoulder, an incongruous sultry look on her ravaged face. "What'll you give me if I tell you?"

He shrugged, playing along. She was making him work damned hard for one sentence. Kyle was probably bled out by now, Perry and Bean mere desiccated husks. "What do you want?"

The blue-tipped fingers flew to her waist, working at the button on her shorts. "I could use a good fuck."

Some piece of work, wasn't she? He was feeling sicker by the minute, wondering why it didn't affect her. Maybe if you lived in a fetid, airless place long enough, you got used to it. A man's voice called through the door, "Valerie? You talking to someone?"

"Oh, yeah, honey," she said, dropping her hands. "Portland cop's here. Came to ask about Timmy."

"Well, give him what he wants and tell him to get the fuck out."

"Who's that?" Burgess asked.

She looked surprised. "Jason, of course." It seemed Jason Martin had inherited the family's social graces.

"Ricky's not here?"

She shook her head. "Ricky and me had sex a few times. Jason got mad about it and threw him out."

"When was that?"

She squinted in concentration. "Week ago, maybe? I forget."

"You know where he's living now?"

She giggled. "Some abandoned warehouse? Rooming house? But he's got plans. Gonna make some money and get a nice place. Maybe I'll move in with him."

"Val," the voice roared from the other room. "I told you to get rid of him."

Valerie Lowe did up the button with a sad look at Burgess's crotch. "Another time, I guess. You gotta go. What was it you wanted to know?"

"You were driving through the neighborhood," he said, forcing himself to speak slowly. "You saw Timmy coming down the street with a backpack. You stopped to talk with him and he said he was running away from home because he was afraid of Dwayne. Did he tell you where he was going?"

"Oh." Her face brightened. "Oh yeah. He told me where he was going."

"And where was that?"

She opened her mouth to answer. Got distracted by a stream of curses from the next room. "Ms. Lowe? Where was he going?"

She scratched her head and tipped it to one side, considering. "He said... he said... Jeez. I don't know what's wrong with my head today. I remembered it a minute ago." She fiddled with the lighter again. "Wait. I got it." A louder curse from the next room. "Yeah. He was going to go—"

The kitchen door burst open, a slightly smaller version of Dwayne Martin looming there. "Get the hell out," he yelled. "Get the hell out."

Burgess grabbed the door handle and jerked it open, letting a rush of fresh air into the room.

"Stay with Iris," Valerie Lowe said, obliviously. "I asked him how he was going to get there. Did he need a ride? He said no, he'd get there the same way he did last time." She smiled at Jason Martin and flicked the lighter. Burgess threw himself through the door as the air around her erupted in a ball of flame.

Chapter 29

Even with his eyes shut, he could see the vivid red of the flames against the total black of the night. And no one can shut his ears. Valerie Lowe's screams would be seared in his brain forever. He'd used the last of his strength keeping Kyle from rushing in to save her. Only seconds after he'd dragged Kyle to the edge of the clearing and slammed him to the ground, the trailer exploded. Jason Martin hadn't stopped for her, either; he'd only saved himself. Maybe not even that. He was in intensive care.

A bad night all around. Everyone was scratched and bruised. Bean, the Westbrook cop, was nearly scalped by a piece of flying metal. They'd kept Burgess in the hospital overnight, giving him oxygen, because of his exposure to toxic chemicals. A typical, sleepless hospital night. Whenever he'd drifted off, they'd woken him to do something officiously medical. So he was alive, but he was beat, his head was pounding, and everything hurt. Waiting for the docs to say he could leave, impatience made him surly and explosive.

The papers had had a field day with the missing amphetamine followed by the clandestine lab explosion. The Maine DEA agent sitting by his bed wasn't helping. "It was too fuckin' stupid for words, Detective," had been his first sentence. The ones following no more complimentary. "Going out there, risking four lives, without a shred of protective gear or clothing. Don't you know anything about meth labs?"

"Maybe you guys been doing training courses I just happened to miss?" he countered. "I do now. Know plenty." His throat had been scoured with sandpaper. "Next time I go into a house smells like cat piss, I'll back right out and call you, even if the owner's a geriatric with a dozen cats. Same goes for kerosene, gasoline, any other sene or lene. Hell, you're so smart, maybe I'll let you do all my jobs. You've got a real way with people."

"You shoulda called me this time."

"How? Using my psychic friend?" He looked for water. No pitcher. No glass. No nothing. He pushed the call button. "You're so smart, how come you didn't find it?"

"We were closing in. We woulda got 'em, if you hadn't blown things sky high."

"I didn't blow it. She did. Martin told her not to smoke, and she deliberately flicked her Bic. She knew what she was doing. She used to cook the stuff. Or she was so wired she didn't give a damn."

He wanted Chris, his own private-duty nurse. But judging from the phone call in which he'd dutifully reported his latest physical fiasco, Chris was as pissed at him as Agent Hamlin. He based this on her sigh, her silence, and the cryptic comment, "I don't know how much more of this I can take. If I wanted a nurse-patient relationship, I could date a geriatric." She wasn't likely to show up to dispense kindness and mercy.

He supposed, were their positions reversed, he'd feel the same way. No one takes well to a series of phone calls reporting physical and psychic damage to a loved one. He'd probably be worse. After a lifetime trying to serve and protect, he'd want to lock her up in Rapunzel's tower. All she wanted was for him to stay in one piece.

"Valerie Lowe was a tweaker and a moron," Hamlin said.

"You think I didn't know that?" Burgess felt so sick he could barely lift his head. He closed his eyes, wishing the asshole would leave. There was stuff to be done. He had no energy to waste on a pissing contest about something that was over and done. Even if it was hot news. Even if a woman was dead and it was Maine's first lab explosion. MDEA, in the person of one Jesse Hamlin, might be steamed and posturing, but none of that helped his case. He'd sat in Hamlin's chair, done undercover, knew what the man was about. He wasn't so sure Hamlin understood him. Burgess's business was with whoever killed Timmy Watts. "You here because you want something or just to see if you can make a bad day worse?"

Hamlin, in his miserable, pissy way, was enjoying himself. "You've got an attitude problem, you know that?"

Fuck his attitude. His throat felt like he'd swallowed a red-hot poker and it had gotten stuck. He was ready to kill for a glass of water, and his head was about to explode. He wanted to carry it to the sink and stick it under a tap with ice cold water. He rang for a third time, ready to request euthanasia. "So I've got an attitude problem. That and a couple bucks'll get you a Starbucks coffee."

"I can come back when you're feeling better."

"You come back here, you won't find me. I've got a killer to catch."

Hamlin shook his head. "That's not happening."

"You think I won't find him?" Burgess pushed himself up, glaring at the agent.

"I don't think they'll let you. If they let you work at all, you'll be counting paper clips or sharpening the Chief's pencils. Something nice and safe you can't screw up."

"What're you talking about? I'm the primary on a homicide."

"Were
the primary.
Were."
Hamlin sounded as though Burgess's downfall gave him great pleasure. "By now, you'll have been taken off the case."

Hamlin must be jerking his chain. If it were true, Melia would have told him. He valued their relationship too much to let Burgess learn it from someone else. But Cote believed in power and control. Cote might use that power to decide that the potential taint of the missing drugs, plus the taint of an excessive force complaint, combined with his disabled condition, made him unfit to handle the case. A cop was never innocent until proven guilty but guilty until proven innocent. That's why they needed unions.

He needed to call Melia and find out what the story was. And couldn't—no, wouldn't—do it while this smug prick was sitting here yammering at him.

Hamlin talked on, nipping and snapping like a small mean dog. Burgess ignored him. When the nurse finally arrived, he opened his eyes and smiled. "Be an angel, would you, and get me some water and something for this headache?"