Best Friends Forever (16 page)

used to swaddle himself, poking his head

and arms through one, wrapping another

around his crotch like a diaper. He’d rested

for a while, curled up in a drafty corner of

the shack, and then he’d started down the

road. He swished when he walked, and he

didn’t even want to think about how he

looked. There was nothing he could do

about it. That bitch Valerie Adler—he’d

remembered her name—had taken his

wal et and his phone.

There has to be something, he told

himself as he walked. A convenience store

or a gas station or something. He would

walk until he found it. He would go home,

get clothes, get warm, and then he’d find the

bitch and he’d fix her wagon.

He was so lost in thought that the van was

almost on top of him before he noticed, and

it was too late to jump into the ditch on the

side of the road, too late to hide himself.

The van slowed—Dan braced himself for

laughter, a hurled bottle, some kind of

joke—“Time to take out the trash!” is what

he personal y would have gone with—but

instead, he heard a woman’s voice cal ing

kindly through the grayish half-light.

“Dan Swansea? Is that you?”

Eyes dazzled by the headlights, he

squinted at the van, but couldn’t make the

face behind the wheel.

“Are you al right? What happened to your

clothes?”

“Long story,” he managed. The van’s door

slid open without anyone touching it. For a

minute, Dan thought about supernatural

phenomena, about psychic forces and

otherwordly visitors, about the Holy Ghost,

unseen but ever-present (his mother had

been big on that), before remembering that

al vans these days had remote controls.

“Come on in,” said the voice. “I’l take care

of you.”

No time to weigh his options. As he saw it,

his choices were getting into the van or

continuing to trudge through the frigid

darkness, naked except for his shoes, his

socks, and a pair of Hefty trash bags. Dan

Swansea limped across the road and

climbed inside.

SIXTEEN

The cal came in at just after six in the morning, less than three hours after Jordan Novick had final y managed to fal asleep. Except, he acknowledged, “fal asleep”

wasn’t exactly accurate. “Passed out” might have been a better description of what had occurred in the folding chair in his living room after a great quantity of beer, a tumbler ful of whiskey, and a fast, furtive episode of masturbation as The Nighty-Night Show played on the TV. He groped for the telephone. “Novick,” he grunted, noticing that his pager was spasming on the coffee table like a rodent having a seizure.

“Good morning, Chief,” said Paula the dispatcher. “We’ve got a situation in the Lakeview Country Club parking lot. Acknowledge?”

Jordan rubbed the bridge of his nose, then his stubbled cheek. “What kind of situation?”

“That’s the thing. We’re not exactly sure,”

said Paula. “I know you’re 10–10-A, but it’s a possible 10–80. Or maybe a 10–81 with a 211. Or it could be…”

“Hey. Hey, Paula.” An old line, but it was usual y enough to get her to stop with the numbers. Paula Albright, the Pleasant Ridge dispatcher, was a fifty-four-year-old retired school cafeteria worker who took her work very seriously and knew the codes for everything, including “lost bicycle.”

“Yes, sir?”

“How ’bout you just tel me what happened?”

“Sure, Chief. The club custodian found a man’s belt and some blood in the parking lot, but no victim yet.”

An actual mystery, Jordan thought, getting to his feet with the telephone pressed against his ear. That was unusual. Situations in Pleasant Ridge tended to fal into a few large and easily quantifiable categories. You had your accidental y tripped burglar alarms. Your lost dog, your cat up a tree. Your missing children, usual y teenagers who hadn’t bothered to tel Mom and Dad where they’d be, and neglected to keep their brand-new state-of-the-art cel phones charged. There was credit-card fraud and identity theft, car crashes and house fires and DUIs. There were, of course, husbands smacking

their

wives

around

and,

occasional y but not as infrequently as most people would think, wives hitting their husbands.

These

incidents

were

unpleasant, but at least they were a kind of expected, predictable unpleasantness, and there was a protocol, honed over time, for handling them. Jordan couldn’t remember anything in his ten years of service that had been along the lines of an actual mystery. He swal owed and coughed, grimacing at the sour taste in his mouth, and tucked the phone under his chin so he could zip his pants. “10–8, acknowledge,” he said to make Paula happy, and to cover the sound of the zipper. “On my way.”

“You’re going to the southeast corner of the parking lot, by the Dumpster.”

“Got it,” he said, and grabbed for his keys.

By the time he arrived at the country club, al three of the town’s uniformed patrolmen (one of them was Hol y Muñoz, so he supposed it was actual y three patrolpeople) were waiting.

An investigator from the county district attorney’s office with rubber gloves on her hands and a high-tech digital camera and an old-school Polaroid looped around her neck met him at his car.

“What have we got?” Jordan asked the investigator, a young woman named Meghan, who wore her hair in a high ponytail and had a tiny silver stud glittering in one nostril.

“Come take a look,” she said. Jordan forced himself to breathe steadily through his nose, in case during the twenty minutes it had taken him to get there, they’d discovered a body. He kept his eyes between Meghan’s shoulder blades until she stopped and pointed down.

“Weird, right?”

Jordan aimed his flashlight at the ground. There was something wet and rusty-red that had trickled into the gravel and splashed on the corner of the Dumpster. There was a man’s black leather belt with a silver buckle coiled neatly a few feet south of the blood. That was al .

“The club custodian, George Monroe, found this stuff when he took out the trash this morning,” said the tech. She pointed to a skinny guy in khaki pants sitting on the steps outside of the country club’s kitchen. When the man saw Jordan looking, he raised one hand and waved.

“No body?” asked Jordan.

Meghan shook her head. “We looked: the road, the parking lot, the golf course, the ditches along the road, a mile in each direction, and we went through the Dumpster. If there is a body, it’s been moved, but I gotta say, there’s not a ton of blood here, so I’m not necessarily thinking corpse.”

“Did the custodian see anything else?”

Jordan asked without much hope. Meghan shook her head again and fingered her cameras. “We’re almost done here,” she said. “Then it’s al yours.”

“You’re not staying?”

She gave him a sunny grin. “If it’s a homicide, we’l be back. Obvs. But until you’re sure it’s not some drunk dude who fel down…” She drifted back to her car.

“Holiday weekend, you know?”

“Got it.” Jordan spoke briefly to his patrolmen, reviewing the procedure for securing a crime scene. Then he headed over to the custodian.

“Morning,” he said, extending his hand.

“Jordan Novick. Pleasant Ridge chief of police. You found the, uh…” Effects? he wondered. “Effects” didn’t sound quite right.

“The belt,” the other man said. He was in his late twenties, with brown hair and pale eyes.

He had a high, rough voice, an Adam’s apple that bobbed and jerked when he swal owed, old acne scars pitting his cheeks, and a fresh zit blooming on his chin. “I got here at five a.m. First tee time’s at six, so I come at five. I was carrying the trash to the Dumpster when I kicked something. I thought it was a bottle or something, but then I looked down and saw the belt and the blood, and I thought, okay, this isn’t right. I went back inside and cal ed 911. Didn’t touch anything. Didn’t want to contaminate the crime scene.” He nodded at Jordan, one professional to another. “I watch CSI. ”

“Excel ent,” said Jordan.

“So what are you guys gonna do now?”

asked the custodian, scratching at his chin.

“DNA testing on the blood? You got that luminol?”

“I thought,” said Jordan, “that we’d start by seeing if anyone who was here last night is missing a belt.” The kid’s zit had started to bleed. He pressed one khaki sleeve against it as he thought this over and final y grunted his approval. “Any trouble here lately?”

Jordan asked. “Any ideas about what might have happened?”

The other man lowered his eyebrows and ground his teeth. “Vegans,” he final y pronounced.

For a moment Jordan thought that he’d heard him wrong, or that the man was speaking something other than English.

“Vegans?”

“Because of the leather,” the man said.

“The belt’s leather. You notice that?” He shook his head. “Vegans are fucked up. I saw some of them on the news trying to liberate the bees. I mean, vegetarians are one thing. No meat, okay, animals got feelings. I get that. But no honey?” He cleared his throat and spat onto the gravel.

“Have you had trouble with vegans here before?” I’m stil asleep, Jordan thought. I’m asleep and this is a dream. The custodian shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “But I watch out for them.” He tapped the side of his eye with one finger, then went back to working the pimple.

Jordan wrote the word “vegans,” which made as much sense as anything else. Then he took down the custodian’s contact information, his name and address, his cel phone and social security numbers, thanked him for his help, and walked over to his patrol-people.

One

of

them,

Devin

Freedman, was finishing up his law degree at Loyola. The lady patrol-person, Hol y, had studied sociology and trained for Olympicdistance triathlons in her spare time. The third, Gary Ryderdahl, a Pleasant Ridge native like Jordan, had worked for the department for three years and had just moved out of his parents’ house and into his first apartment ( Jordan had spent a Saturday helping him load, then unload, a U-Haul). None of them was older than thirty, and the three of them, plus Jordan, were al that stood between Pleasant Ridge and le déluge. “Gentlemen,” said Jordan. “Lady. What’ve we got?”

Gary

Ryderdahl

glanced

at

his

col eagues, pul ed a notebook out of his back pocket, and stepped forward, squaring his shoulders like a batter approaching the his shoulders like a batter approaching the plate. Ryderdahl had a round pink face and an unruly ruffled crest of white-blond hair that made him look like Snoopy’s tweety-bird friend, Woodstock. “It’s a Kenneth Cole belt. They sel them lots of places. Department stores, and, uh…” He took a quick glance at his notebook.

“Freestanding boutiques nationwide.”

“Good work,” said Jordan, straight-faced.

“What was going on here last night?”

“There was a class reunion. Pleasant Ridge, class of 1992,” Hol y Muñoz said.

“D.A.’s office is taking the blood, and they’re gonna see if there’s any fingerprints we can use on the belt, but Meghan said probably not. I spoke to the banquet manager. There were two hundred people here last night—a hundred

and

eighty-seven

who’d

preregistered, and thirteen walk-ins.” She reached through her patrol car’s open window and came out with a Dunkin’ Donuts cup, which she extended to Jordan. “I got you a coffee.

Light and sweet, right?”

“Thanks.” Jordan looked around. Officer Freedman, the soon-to-be lawyer, was cordoning off the crime scene with yel ow tape. He stuck the tape’s edge onto the Dumpster, unspooled it past the belt, and then stopped, looking around with the rol of tape in his hands, realizing there was no place else to stick it unless he walked another twenty yards to the nearest tree.

Jordan made himself stop staring. “Guest list?”

“The class secretary’s got it waiting for us,” said Hol y. Devin Freedman, meanwhile, was careful y affixing the end of the piece of tape to the ground, using a rock he’d grabbed from somewhere to hold it down. Jordan closed his eyes.

“We’l want to talk to everyone who was here last night.” Hol y nodded and nudged Gary, who nodded, too. “You two, go back to the station. Cal al the hospitals, here and in Chicago.

Ask if anyone’s shown up with injuries, missing a belt.” He paused, thinking. “Check out the custodian. George Monroe.” He read off George’s social security number and DOB. “Check with dispatch. See if any cal s came in for missing persons.” He thought for a minute.

“Then cal the body shops.”

“You think this was a car accident?” asked Hol y.

“Could be,” said Jordan. “Worth checking.

”

“I hit a deer once,” Gary Ryderdahl offered. “Bashed in the whole front of my car.”

“Here?” asked Hol y. “In Pleasant Ridge?”

“No, Wisconsin. My grandma’s got a place in the Del s, and I…”

“Time’s wasting,” Jordan said. “Hospitals. Body shops.” Gary marched off. Hol y looked at Jordan.

“Uh, chief?” When Jordan looked at her, she asked, “What is this, exactly? When I type up my report, what do I cal it?”

“For now, it’s a lost belt,” Jordan said. And

it’s weird, he thought but did not say. SEVENTEEN

Class secretary Christie Keogh, perky and bright-eyed and dressed in a tight tank top and fit-ted running pants, met Jordan at the front door of her McMansion, with a list in her hands and a frown on her pretty face. She spoke in a whisper, explaining that her husband and kids were stil sleeping upstairs. “What’s this about?”

“We found a man’s belt in the country club parking lot. There was also some evidence that a crime may have been committed. We need to make sure that al of your party guests are okay.”

“Evidence?” Christie’s frown deepened, then vanished instantly, as if someone had snuck up behind her and hissed Wrinkles! in her ear. “What kind of evidence?”