JD was angry. ‘Barb said they never came to visit you.’
She flinched and pulled her hand away. ‘That’s true. That’s one of the many reasons I no longer visit them.’ She hiked the duffle bag onto her shoulder and headed for the door. ‘Time’s passing, Detective. If we’re going to Anderson Ferry, let’s go.’
He needed a moment to calm his voice. He’d made her painful memory worse without meaning to. ‘Lucy. I didn’t expect you’d tell me what happened. Thank you.’
She shrugged. ‘You were going to hear most of the story from Sonny Westcott sooner or later. I just wanted to give you my side first.’
‘Wait a minute.’ He gently grabbed her arm to stop her when she opened the door to leave. ‘I’m going to meet Sonny Westcott?’
‘I imagine so. You do plan to visit the Anderson Ferry sheriff’s office, don’t you?’
‘Sonny Westcott works for the sheriff’s office?’ he asked, surprised.
‘Sonny
is
the sheriff.’ She tugged free, leaving him open-mouthed. ‘Let’s go.’
Tuesday, May 4, 12.25 P.M.
Breathing hard, he stepped back from Ryan Agar who now sat slumped in the wheelchair, passed out cold. Getting him from the car to the chair had been a pain.
Guy weighs a freaking ton
. He needed to rest before pushing Ryan up the ramp and onto the
Satisfaction
.
Pulling his cell from his pocket, he checked the tracking website and frowned. Lucy was on the move again. She’d left her apartment and was headed east, back to Anderson Ferry – which troubled him. She could mess everything up. He needed to know what she was doing.
Ryan would have to be stored for a little while. Now that he was in the chair, it would be easy to dump him down the stairs into the hold. He’d leave him trussed up like a Christmas turkey and when Ryan woke up, he’d have time to stew a bit. Apparently the police hadn’t told him specifically what had been done to his mother.
No matter. He’d find out for himself soon enough.
Chapter Seventeen
Tuesday, May 4, 12.30 P.M.
J
D was relieved to find the highway in the direction of Anderson Ferry to be fairly empty, allowing him to catch up to Stevie and Berman who were miles ahead of them.
It was a fine day for a drive. The sun was shining, the sky a cloudless blue. But the mood in JD’s car was dark and tense. Lucy sat in the passenger seat, her duffle at her feet. She stared out the window, having said nothing since leaving her apartment.
He’d been on the phone with Sloane and Kaminski, the detectives who’d picked up the Jane Doe case. The pair had searched for leads as to where Jane Doe had been before her throat was slit. So far they had nothing. They were waiting on Latent to run her prints, hoping she’d be in the system.
He’d then checked in with Tory Reading, the cop staked out in front of the Peabody Hotel. So far Ryan Agar had not emerged. He’d not called for room service nor to the morgue to arrange to ID his mother. JD thought the man might run. Agar was definitely terrified and had every right to be. He’d asked Reading to make sure Agar was still in his room, because if this field trip to Anderson Ferry was a bust, Janet’s son was their only link to real answers.
Thirty hours after finding Russ Bennett’s body, they had six victims and so far nothing more than connections and a lot of unanswered questions. And Lucy Trask, who for some reason was the center of it all. Something had happened in her town.
‘Lucy, I need to—’ His question was cut off by his cell phone. ‘Fitzpatrick.’
‘It’s Debbie.’ Hyatt’s clerk. ‘I have those LUDs you’ve been waiting for.’
‘Russ Bennett’s?’
‘Home and cell. They came last night, but they were sent to the fax in Narcotics. Somebody had your old fax number in their file. What do you want done with these?’
JD glanced at the clock. Even if everything went well it would be hours before they returned to the city. ‘Can you email them to Mazzetti and me? She has her laptop.’
‘Yeah. It’ll take a little while to scan them,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you when it’s sent.’
‘Thanks,’ he said and started to hang up.
‘I’m not finished yet,’ Debbie said. ‘You asked for a trace on the number that called the victim’s son last night. It came from a pay phone.’ She gave him the address and JD frowned.
‘That’s just a mile from the dumpster where Jane Doe was found. Can you send a request to Latent to take prints from that phone?’
‘Will do. I’ll call you when those LUDs are on their way.’
‘Thanks.’ He hung up and glanced at Lucy who was checking her messages. ‘Any news?’
‘A bit. Craig just finished Jane Doe’s exam and checked the lab results on the samples we submitted yesterday. Both Janet Gordon and Russ Bennett’s urine tox screens came back positive for pentobarbital and chlorohydrate.’
‘Old-fashioned Mickey Finn,’ JD said. ‘They would have been highly suggestible, but for a little while able to walk on their own.’
‘Stagger, anyway. Eventually it would have knocked them out. No news on Jane Doe’s prints, but she’d had intercourse with two different men the night she died.’
‘A prostitute?’
‘Maybe, except most higher-class prostitutes that I see use condoms.’
That was true. ‘How do you know she was higher class?’
‘Her blouse was designer, probably ran her at least one-fifty. Her hair was well tended in a salon and her perfume was expensive, too.’
‘Her body was behind a dumpster. How could you smell her perfume?’
‘You learn to discern the smells you need to pay attention to,’ she said and he decided to leave it at that. ‘Few street hookers are going to be able to afford niceties like that. She also had no visible evidence of drug use, no track marks. We’ll need her tox report to confirm or deny.’
‘Anything else in the messages?’
‘The heart is the same blood type as Janet Gordon, just as we expected. That’s it.’
He said nothing for a minute, wondering how to phrase the rest of his questions, none of which she was likely to appreciate. She huffed an irritated sigh at his silence.
‘You want to ask me more questions. Go ahead. Get it over with.’
‘Okay. How long have you been partners with Thorne and Gwyn in the club?’
‘Four and a half years. The club’s been open a little more than three years. The first year and a half was planning and raising money.’
‘How long have you known Gwyn?’
Her glance was sharp. ‘She has nothing to do with this.’
‘I’m pretty sure I believe that, too. So how long?’
‘I told you yesterday, we knew each other as kids, before Buck died. We met again when I broke Russ Bennett’s nose.’
A detail fell into place. ‘You said you and Gwyn had become separated by life. That’s when you were sent to St Anne’s.’
‘Give the man a Kewpie doll,’ she said sarcastically.
He let her sarcasm roll off his back. ‘So she introduced you to Thorne.’
‘Yes, because I needed an attorney when Russ brought charges against me.’
‘And the three of you hit it off.’
‘What are you getting at?’ she snapped.
‘Nothing yet,’ he said, frustrated. ‘You won’t tell me enough to get
at
anything. I’m not the enemy, Lucy. My questions might just save your life or the lives of your friends. It’s too late for Kevin.’ She flinched, but he didn’t back off. ‘Somebody knew enough about you to know you’d be at the club last night. Somebody with a key to Gwyn’s place – who thought you’d be there – left you a heart. How did they get a key?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, frustrated also. ‘Gwyn insists that the only person who had an extra key was her neighbor. Gwyn couldn’t get into her place this morning because she’d given her own to me last night.’
‘She has a boyfriend. Does he have a key?’
‘No, they’re still in the sleepover phase. She doesn’t usually hold onto them long enough to get to the key-exchange phase.’
‘Tell me about him anyway.’
‘Royce is in Sales. Office printers, I think. I only know him from the club. We never spend much time together on the outside.’
‘Why?’
She shrugged. ‘I didn’t want him to know I was an ME, plus . . .’ She hesitated. ‘Gwyn’s last boyfriend tried to pick me up behind her back. She knew I had nothing to do with it, but it still hurt her. She’s kind of kept Royce at a distance until recently.’
‘What does Thorne do at the club?’
‘For a while he did the books and paid the bills. Now Gwyn does all that, along with keeping his schedule at the law office. We hired Mowry to be the club’s manager when the job got too big. He orders the booze and pretzels, takes care of the day to day stuff. Now Thorne scouts new talent and plays a mean bass.’
‘Thorne told me that the two of you shared a common past.’
She frowned. ‘Oh. Our trials. I suppose you want to know about that, too.’
‘I do.’
‘Then answer me something,’ she said, her jaw cocked belligerently.
‘If I can.’
‘Why did you come to the autopsy of a little girl you didn’t know and weren’t responsible for? And don’t say because you found her. She was the only autopsy you ever came to witness. I checked the sign-in records last night, after you dropped me off at the morgue. Before you followed me. I’d like to know. Please.’
He supposed she was entitled to some quid pro quo so he sucked it up and made himself tell it. ‘My mother was . . . is a drunk. Not bad enough so that I got taken away, but bad enough that my childhood sucked. I was lucky enough to have an aunt take me in and give me some consistency in high school. I graduated, but not by much. I ended up going in the army.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Killed a lot of people,’ he said evenly. ‘Which messes you up. I was a loner before the army, but when I came home I was more so. Alone even in a crowd. I didn’t dislike people, I just didn’t know how to connect. And then I met Paul Mazzetti, Stevie’s husband. He was the first friend I ever had.’
‘But he died,’ she said softly and he nodded.
‘And so did Paulie, their son. I loved that boy, and when he was killed . . .’
‘It’s okay,’ she murmured, placing her hand over his. ‘You don’t have to say any more. I get it now.’
He turned his hand so that their fingers laced. ‘No, I don’t think you do. My wife died a few years later and I went a little crazy, took some risks I shouldn’t have. Then one day I came upon that little girl. She was dead when I got to her. Something happened as I stood there looking at her lying there dead in the grass. Something happened to me when I stood over her autopsy. I realized I was pissing my life away on grief and selfishness. I knew I needed help, so I joined Stevie’s group.’
‘She set you straight,’ Lucy said, using the same words he’d used the day before.
‘Yes. I can’t tell you why I was there that day, Lucy. I just knew I needed to be.’
She was quiet for a moment. ‘What happened to your mother?’
‘She’s still around. I would have thought she’d have drunk herself to death by this point, but she keeps on tickin’. She must have a liver of iron.’
‘Only the good die young,’ she murmured.
‘Well, I’ve met my share of bad that’ve died young too,’ he said pragmatically. ‘It’s just a lot less fair when it’s the good ones.’
‘But life is not fair,’ she said.
‘No, it often is not. Then other times, you win.’ Hesitantly he lifted their hands and pressed a kiss to her wrist. She didn’t pull away and he was encouraged. And then he noticed her bracelet, dangling from her wrist. ‘Lucy. This charm is a heart.’
‘That it is,’ she said, her voice strained. ‘I’d say it’s a coincidence, but . . .’
‘But it seemed awfully important to Sonny Westcott all those years ago,’ JD said. ‘Did you say Russ Bennett was with him the day he stole it from your house?’
‘Yes,’ she said, very softly. ‘Oh God, JD. Russ asked me about this bracelet, when I was seeing him. He was in my apartment and saw that picture of me and Mr Pugh.’
‘You’re wearing it in the picture,’ he said, suddenly remembering the detail. ‘What did Bennett ask you?’
‘He asked me about the violin, and did I still play.’
‘Did you tell him about the club?’
‘No. I told him that I sometimes still played for my old teacher and that I gave lessons at my old high school.’
His brows went up. ‘St Anne’s?’
‘Yes, on Wednesdays during my lunch hour. The girls need role models.’
His respect for her soared higher. ‘That they do. So what did Bennett say then?’
‘He pointed to my bracelet in the picture and said it was pretty. I got irritated and told him that his friend stole it from me when I was fifteen years old. He said he didn’t know that Sonny had really done that, that had he known, he would have made him give it back that day.’
‘Did you believe him?’
‘I didn’t
not
believe him. But then he asked where it was and I told him I’d lost it.’
‘So you lied to him.’
‘Yes,’ she said, troubled. ‘I felt bad about it at the time, but I didn’t want him to know I still had it.’
Which was telling
, JD thought. ‘I thought you said Westcott broke it that day.’
‘He did. I also said I hid it. The priest gave me a prayer book when Buck died. I hid the bracelet in it.’
‘How?’
‘I watched a lot of TV then and saw someone carve a hole in a book and hide something in there. I did the same thing. When I got to St Anne’s I thought they’d let me keep the prayer book, but they found the bracelet. I had to earn it back, just like all my other privileges. I did and one of the teachers helped me fix it. After that I wore it all the time. That’s why Mr Pugh likes me to wear it when I play for him now.’
‘What about when you went home, that one summer?’
‘I hid it again,’ she said in an odd voice. ‘I don’t know why.’
‘You trusted your instincts. What do your instincts tell you now?’
‘That this bracelet is somehow very important. What do yours tell you?’
His jaw flexed as he considered. ‘Depends. Did your brother give you gifts often?’
She sucked in her cheeks, annoyed, and he knew she understood the question behind his question. ‘No. This was the first.’