The Dead Past (17 page)

She smiled. "Believe it or not, chemically it actually does help one get to sleep."

"I've already had my fill."

"As you wish."

I did not like the heavy politeness that had fallen between us, but couldn't think of a way to get past it. Maybe the morning would clear both our sensibilities.

She drank her milk. I started to ask about her day when she frowned at the same moment that Anubis cocked his head. "Did you hear something?" she asked.

"No."

"I could have sworn I heard a car door—"

She wheeled herself to the window and murmured my name.

Anubis barked twice.

"Oh, shit," I said.

Anna looked back at me. Her right hand clawed the neck of her cardigan, face draining of blood until it was the color of her hair. Anubis barked twice more, sounding incredibly lethal. Anna's mouth thinned as if she champed at a bit, trying hard to swallow. She closed her eyes and kept them shut as she reached to pet Anubis, and he ducked his head beneath her hand and she opened her eyes and gazed steadily at me. "It seems we have quite a growing collection," she said. Her voice dropped like a boulder. Furrowed tracks ran across her forehead. She stroked the dog more firmly between the ears, and he began to whimper, then whine loudly, and I moved forward. "I think it's fair to say that we most certainly do have a case, Jonathan." She smiled faintly. "There's another body in the snow. A woman, I think."

Broghin
and Lowell and the other cops ranged across the front yard as the snow spun madly. Red and blue lights flashed, and the wig-wag high beams threw hellish shadows against the brush. Neighbors came onto the sidewalks from both ends of the block, and the deputies asked questions and looked for a murder weapon all along the street. I sat at the top of the ramp watching the scene and feeling disconnected from it. I had a sour stomach. The headache was much worse. I bent and took a handful of snow and rubbed it into my face until I came a little of the way back.

The corpse was still there. They had set up a kind of lean-to over it to keep the snow off. They were taking photographs of it and every so often a powerful flash exploded and illuminated most of the yard. Jim
Witherton's
car went by slowly and Lowell stepped into the street and directed him to stop. They spoke for a couple of minutes and then shook hands and Lowell waved him on. Jim must've just gotten back from his night security shift at
Syntech
. He'd missed the action this time; he hadn't found our body tonight. I had.

I'd grabbed a flashlight and gone outside, and even before I saw her face I knew who it was. She was on her belly, one arm twisted around as if she was reading a good book on a beach and reaching to scratch her back. Her hand hung in the air, fingers splayed. Steam rose around her head. The light reflected off the thick lacquer of her turquoise nails: I hoped Mary Jean Resnick didn't spread the rumor that Anubis had partially eaten Karen Bolan, too.

Sheriff
Broghin
stepped beside me without a word. He stared long and hard and I stared back. He started to say something and then stopped, started, and stopped again. His enormous gut hung out from beneath his jacket and over his belt like the blob trying to get at Steve McQueen. It was very close to the side of my head. He didn't cock his thumb and point his index finger. I rested my elbows on my knees and my chin on my fists. He said, "You. . ." and then cleared his throat and went into the house to talk with Anna.

Lowell tracked across the lawn, flipping a small notebook shut. "You're going to freeze out here not moving around," he said. "Let's go inside."

"I prefer to stay here."

"I don't. I've been going from a pizza oven to a refrigerator all day long and I can feel a goddamn head cold coming on."

"Too bad."

He breathed deeply and shook his head and put his notebook in his coat pocket. "You want to freeze your ass off, that's your business. Mine is to settle this."

"Hell of a job you've done so far," I said.

I wanted to snipe at somebody and now I'd done it to my friend, and it sure as hell didn't make me feel any better, especially when you considered the fact that he might break my arms now. The calm I'd seen drop over him at the
Bubrick
house in the afternoon descended once more like an avalanche. It was a bad thing to snipe at somebody who could look down death and not flinch, and I promised myself to remember it. I suddenly felt like I was standing on an ice floe shattering beneath me, and a careless step in any direction would dump me in the bottomless ocean. He stood rigid as a statue of a Roman war god. An enraged bull wouldn't move him, or a tractor trailer or an air strike. Nothing except for one more wrong word from me, and then I'd need serious attention from the EMS.

"All right," I told him. "I'm sorry."

"Pull it together, Johnny," he said. "I don't need you in pieces. I'm not even sure I need you at all. You look like shit and you've been falling apart this whole time around, and now you're really starting to get on my nerves."

"Okay, okay, I already said I was sorry. What happened to her?"

He took off his hat and slapped it against his thigh, wiped sweat and snow off his forehead and put his hat on again. "Small caliber, maybe a twenty-two. In the ear."

"Christ."

"She was murdered someplace else and dumped here."

"It's becoming a regular habit for somebody."

He turned and looked at the other deputies checking the sewer drains and under nearby bushes. "She couldn't have been dead for more than a half hour. The bullet took out part of her head, but there's no sign of skull fragments or brain tissue in the vicinity. She might've even been shot right in the car and then thrown out. Blood was still running; it pooled beneath the body."

The body. Karen Bolan used to have a body, and now she simply was one—the body. No more ecstatic rubbing and hugging and overly loud and excited laughter; a lot of guys would miss out on her friendly flirting, her long legs drawing their attention. The widest
cheesey
smile was now gone forever, and I didn't have any idea why in the hell it had happened.

"Has anyone told Willie yet?" I asked.

"He's on a business trip in Houston, just flew down this afternoon, we checked first thing. Roy called there and got him out of bed and said the poor guy nearly fainted right on the phone. He's taking the first flight back, should be coming in at around eight this morning if the airport's not shut down by the blizzard. I'll meet him at the airport." Lowell clopped his boots against the porch stairs. "Goddamn awful way to find out. Now he'll feel wrong about it, guilty he wasn't here to watch over her."

"Hell, yes."

"Last night was the first time you've seen her in how long?"

"At least a year. Maybe longer. I think ... I think it was at the winter carnival last year."

"How well did you know her?"

"As well as you. Probably less since I moved. What kind of question is that? I'm not up on recent events in her life, if that's what you mean, but she seemed the same as usual. You know what she's like."

"Yeah. She there when you had the fight with the guy with the crew cut?"

I nodded. "Like I said, I talked to her and Willie and Lisa and Doug Hobbes. Then I went looking for Tons
Harraday
, got caught up with the crew cut, and while we beat the crap out of each other she was there watching."

"She give any sign she knew this guy?"

"No."

He rubbed his eyes, turning it over in his head. There was nothing else you could do, wrapping yourself up in the knots and still finding that none of it made sense.

"Those implications I told you about are becoming even more scattershot."

"You aren't kidding." I reviewed the questions—watching her there on the ground and waiting for her to move. "Where does Karen fit into all this? Does the guy with the crew cut tie her to this, and did he kill her, and Richie? Was the whole thing a set-up? Why?"

"I went to Jackals last night and asked around about the crew cut."

"
Raimi's
," I corrected. "And they sell Schlitz."

"It'll always be Jackals no matter how much money they sink into that hole. Only name for a bar that ever fit." He rested his massive hands on the porch railing, and I could hear his shoulders crack as he shifted his weight from foot to foot. Snow clung to the edges of his face so that he looked like a Yeti. "The team had some good times there, though."

Some bad times too, I thought, but for once kept my mouth shut.

"Nobody knew the guy," he said. "Bartenders had never seen him in there before. Except for the crew cut and the smashed beer mug, nobody could really remember anything about him. They had their eyes on you because of the blood."

"That's a nice thought." I couldn't recall much either beyond the calm, crazy look in his eyes and my own heady rage. It had happened so fast. "He was nondescript," I said. "No outstanding features. He looked tough and mean in that calm insane way, written into his face. Had a perpetual sneer. He punched me in the forehead before I had a chance to really size him up, and then I was seeing stars more than anything else."

"But you would've taken him if he hadn't run."

I shrugged. Lowell glanced at the kitchen window and watched
Broghin's
shadow walk past the stove. I told him about my visit to the back hills and talking with Tons and Deena and hunting around Richie's room.

"Yeah, I saw the rubbers, too," he said. "Kind of throws a new curve on it.”

“Tons swears his brother never did enough so he would actually need a partner.”

“I believe it. He was a real Momma's boy, Richie was, except he had no mother. Left him on a pretty short path.”

“Was Margaret's jewelry ever found?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "We gave them back to her niece."

Two neighborhood kids had gone around through the park and were having a snowball fight across the street. Cops shooed them off but they didn't go far and started pelting one another with snowballs again, laughing, loudly, the way Karen would have. She was starting to freeze.

The snow fell harder, blanketing the areas where the ice had melted this afternoon. It was like watching somebody doing a paint-by-numbers where every number was white, covering over the haphazard patches. The wind returned, gusting across the skeletal branches of the canopy trees. The kids squealed and finally the cops shouted down the block to the parents and an embarrassed man in a ripped overcoat came and took the children home.

"
Broghin's
still a part of this," I said.

"Let's not start again.”

“It's time to ask him some point-blank questions.”

“Shooting at grizzlies will get you nowhere."

I burst out laughing. It hurt like hell, as if I'd forgotten how—and the stitches pulled—but I couldn't help it. Lowell didn't join in. The other cops stared. "Cripes. And you make fun of my lines."

He sighed. "Okay, it sounds dumb. But analogies aside, it's the truth. You get into his face and he'll get into yours. You want that? Anna has a lot more on the ball than you, Johnny, most of the time, and knowing her she's talking to him as his friend. She's got a better chance to learn what's been on his mind than either you or me. And I still don't think in the end it'll matter much. You don't trust him but I do, and that's the way it's got to be at the bottom line." A cruiser slowly pulled out into the street and blue light covered Lowell's face. "Shit, at least I didn't say 'you can catch more flies with sugar than vinegar.'”