The Intersection of Purgatory and Paradise (12 page)

“That’s kind of harsh, isn’t it?”

“Police work is a harsh job. It’s not like we’re waiting tables.” Christopher took a deep breath, trying to quell the anger that still simmered every time he thought about his partner’s secrets and lies. “Plus, I don’t screw around with people I work with. He started screwing Elliot when they were working together on your sister’s case, and look how that turned out.”

Christopher realized his mistake a moment too late. He felt the cold bite of a knife against his windpipe and the warmth of Alejandro’s fingers closing around his neck. Alejandro had moved around the patio chair in a flash, leaning over Christopher’s shoulder while his knife dug into his neck not quite deep enough to cut him.

“There was no other way Sophie’s mess could have ended,” Alejandro hissed. “No good way, at least. Should I have let Garcia’s men rape and torture her before she died? Should I have tried to preserve my alliances by letting him order me to do it? I think he’d have enjoyed that. Or maybe I should have let Ray and Mr. FBI take her to prison, where Garcia would have had to pay off the guards to deal with her? Compared to what they’d have done to her, a quick and clean death was a kindness.”

Christopher forced himself not to lean away from Alejandro’s breath on his ear. Flinching toward the knife was definitely not a good idea. “If I thought you actually wanted to kill her, I wouldn’t be here right now.” Alejandro shifted behind him, but the knife and the choking fingers remained. “I sure as hell wouldn’t be sitting here asking you for help. You think about loyalty the way Ray thinks about duty—it’s the one thing you’ll never compromise on.” The pressure of the knife against his skin relaxed a bit. “Otherwise, you’d have stopped protecting Ray years ago.”

Alejandro released his neck and withdrew the knife completely. “You think the fact that we’ve had some fun together means I owe you that same loyalty?”

“No,” Christopher said, rubbing his neck to check for blood and tender spots. “I don’t expect anything from you. But I couldn’t think of anyone else who could help.”

“This guy means that much to you?” Alejandro asked.

Christopher stood up, careful not to move too quickly. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

Alejandro circled him, moving more like some kind of predatory cat than a human being. He stopped in front of Christopher and pouted dramatically. “Fine. I’ll do it without you coming back. But you’ll owe me.”

Christopher shrugged. No matter how much he loved Doug, it wasn’t enough to make feeling hated and alone worthwhile. “I’m coming back,” he promised.

D
OUG
STARED
at the burnt frame of his garage, wondering if there was any wood left beneath the cracked lines of soot and charcoal to be repaired. Beyond the burned two-by-fours that marked where the walls had been, there was a mass of waterlogged black. He hadn’t kept much of his stuff in the garage. Just his weight bench, climbing gear, and the four surfboards he’d brought back from Florida in the back of his truck. He knew he would probably never use them again, but he hadn’t been able to leave them behind. Now that they were melted in a congealed fiberglass puddle in the far corner, he would have to part with them after all. The climbing gear had been hung on a pegboard on the far wall. Since there was no sign of the wall, he assumed it was gone too.

Charred cardboard boxes, drenched from the fire department’s efforts to put out the blaze, were piled in heaps where the other walls of the garage had once been. In most of the boxes were things his parents, and possibly his grandparents, had accumulated over their lifetimes. Before his mother died, she’d spent a week each spring sorting through the boxes but inevitably found she couldn’t part with the things she discovered, and so she repacked them yet again.

Figuring out if there was anything left to salvage in the treasures she couldn’t throw away would have to wait.

A tangle of yellow police tape had been wrapped around the frame of the entire garage, with several strips of tape crossed over the doorframe.

Sheriff Daniels stood beside him. “I know it looks bad,” he said, “but the only bit of the house that was touched was the adjacent wall there.”

Doug gestured to the remains of the garage and tried to think of something to say. He had no idea how much of his family’s history lay smoldering before him, and the only things that had really been
his
were gone. Knowing that the only wall of the house to sustain damage was a primary support wall that also anchored the stairs didn’t make him feel better. “Daniels, I…. Just tell me what you need from me, okay?”

“I need you to come in and give a full statement. I need a timeline of your whereabouts from Friday morning until you arrived here, with any receipts or collaborating evidence you can provide. It’s nothing personal, you understand, and I’m not saying I think you had anything to do with this. I need to make sure every base is covered.”

“I know,” Doug managed. He had credit card receipts from when he and Christopher had stopped for gas, and more than fifty people had seen him at Ray and Elliot’s wedding. “Right now?”

“If you could, yes. And Hayes, too. Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“He’s not coming back,” Doug said. “You have his phone number, but that’s the best I could do.”

“What? Not at all?”

Doug glanced up at Daniels, then turned back to the carnage of his garage. “He’s staying in San Diego. He hasn’t had any luck finding work up here.”

“And when folks look at him, they only see that brother of his,” Daniels added. “He’d have more luck finding work someplace else.”

Doug didn’t say anything. He’d known there were a few people in Elkin who didn’t like Christopher, but they’d never liked him either. He had always thought the good people outnumbered the assholes, but Christopher seemed to see it differently. Doug had spent his whole life telling himself there was no point in hating people because they hated him, and he’d gotten more used to it than he wanted to admit.

But he chalked a lot of it up to their different perspectives, too.

Aside from the everyday experience of being openly gay in law enforcement, Christopher had probably never had to deal with the kind of discrimination small towns were capable of dishing out. Being gay hadn’t been that bad for him. He’d gone to work with a team of detectives who treated one another like family, with a devious and malicious partner who made life hell for anyone who said something disrespectful to him. And he’d lived in San Diego, where there seemed to be as many gay couples walking down the street as straight ones.

“Are you going to be all right?” Daniels asked, nudging Doug with his elbow.

Doug shrugged.

“Do you want me to call somebody to come out and stay with you?”

Even the guys he’d worked with on the Search and Rescue team had pulled away from him over the last year. They’d been willing to see past the color of his skin, but they weren’t sure how to deal with knowing he went home to a man at night. “There isn’t anybody.” Doug inclined his head toward the garage. “Can you tell me about the kid?” he asked, desperate for something to distract him.

“You know I can’t.”

“Is there anything I can do at work?” he asked, almost begging. “Anything?”

Daniels nodded slowly. “Statements first, and then I’ll find you something.”

D
OUG
SPENT
the rest of the day, and a full eight hours the next day, repeating the same statement until his head felt numb.

After he handed over the gas receipts he’d shoved in his wallet from the trip to San Diego, along with his debit card statement showing the hotel rooms he’d paid for along the way and his boarding pass from the trip home, they’d begrudgingly agreed to let him go home. He’d seen a still photo of himself in the San Diego International Airport in one of the files before they all but kicked him out.

Brittney was waiting for him in the parking lot Friday afternoon. She handed him a cup of coffee with a sympathetic smile. From the dark circles and red rims beneath her eyes, he guessed she’d been working nonstop on the autopsies and paperwork required for Jeff Lowe’s death and the suicide of Caleb Owens.

He was about to hand the coffee back and tell her she looked like she needed it more than he did when he spotted the half-dozen empty white coffee cups on the floor of her tiny Mazda.

“You okay?” he asked, glancing between her and the mess in her car.

“I’m busy,” she snapped. “I kind of like having a job where I can get my nails done without having to worry about destroying my manicure, but this week has shot that straight to hell. I can deal with busy, though. How are you holding up?”

“I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“Which part? The fire, the body, or the boyfriend?”

Doug glared at her, but she didn’t seem to notice. He was torn between telling her to leave and accepting the sympathy she was offering. He wasn’t sure how she’d found the strength to offer him anything beyond scorn, given how their disastrous relationship had finally ended, but he wasn’t eager to ruin it. Aside from Daniels, she seemed like the only person in town who accepted he had nothing to do with the dead teenager in his garage without him having to provide extensive alibis first. “None of it.”

“Well, tough. You agreed we could be friends, and friends force each other to talk when things falls apart.”

“No, they don’t,” Doug insisted. In his experience, at least, they never bothered. No one but Christopher ever had.

“I suppose you haven’t managed to talk to your insurance agent yet?”

Doug took a long sip of his coffee, trying not to wince at the chilled, bitter taste. She’d been waiting for him long enough for the coffee to get cold. “He called. So did the land developer, six times. If it weren’t for that boy’s body, I’d wonder if he set the fire just to get me to sell.”

Brittney pursed her lips for a moment. “It’s possible, you know. Did you tell the sheriff about him?”

“Yeah, not that I think he actually had anything to do with it. I was just complaining.”

“He….” Brittney shut her eyes and chewed on her lower lip. “Lowe didn’t die of smoke inhalation. He was dead before the fire ever started. He had to have been killed someplace else. He bled out, and there wasn’t enough blood on the scene to account for it. His hands and ankles were tied up. I got some samples from the tissue that didn’t burn, there was adhesive on his skin. Some kind of tape, I think. He was shot in the chest, and there was tissue damage but nothing lethal. There were contusions, skull fractures…. But he bled out from—”

“Nothing lethal? Was he shot with a BB gun?”

“Twelve-gauge bird shot.” She held up her thumb and forefinger close together. “Tiny little flecks of metal. At least, they were tiny by the time I extracted them.”

“What the hell?”

“Whoever shot him didn’t want to kill him. They shot him to cause him pain. He was tortured, Doug. Daniels asked me if he’d been raped….” Her breath caught in her throat. “The crime lab guys agree with my assessment of the weapon, at least. Straight-edged crowbar with the split claw on the end for pulling out nails. There were so many internal lacerations, so much damage. I found residue, rust and iron, inside his torso. The only puncture wounds were around his rectum and inside his colon.” The clinical edge that normally kept Brittney calm and collected through anything cracked. “He wasn’t just raped, he was torn apart.”

Doug’s stomach twisted and rumbled, churning the coffee he’d just sipped. “Brit, you shouldn’t….”

She shook her head, and he could see unshed tears shimmering in her eyes. “I know. I know I can’t talk about it. But I need to, and you’re the only person in the world I can talk about it with. Do you think my parents want to hear it? Oh, they think they do, but if I actually told them anything at all, they’d freak out.”

“I’m sorry, Brit. If you can do the autopsy, I should be able to at least listen to the details. I’m just a wimp.”

She smiled a little.

“And now I know why they took my dad’s old shotgun,” he said, chancing a smile. They’d taken every gun in his home, in fact. He’d been given a pile of receipts for his guns, ammunition, knives, and even a few charred lengths of climbing rope that had survived the fire. “My dad stopped buying bird shot for it when I was eight because by then he figured he could trust me not to try shooting real ammo through the walls.”

Doug didn’t want to jump to the same conclusions Brittney had. His stomach would rebel if he assumed the choice of tiny pellets had been meant to cause pain. He could very easily see someone reaching for a shotgun to defend themselves without thinking about what type of ammunition they’d used the last time they’d fired it. But if Lowe had been shot in self-defense, there was no reason to go beyond stopping him. Certainly no reason to tie him up and mutilate him with a crow bar.

“Don’t suppose you know if they found much for tire tracks on my land?”

“Do I look like I analyze tire tracks? Besides, wouldn’t the others tell you? I gave copies of my report to Harris, Glenn, and Marshall. I think they’re all working it together.”