Better Off Dead (34 page)

"Sit," he said.

I sat, hoping he would ask me to roll over
as my next trick.

"You see this?" he said, pointing to a
photograph encased in a plastic bag. One corner of the image was
stained with Luke's blood. It showed the department secretary
standing happily beside a Santa-capped David Brookhouse at some
long-gone Christmas party

"I see it," I admitted.

"Where did it come from?" he asked.

"Why does it matter?" I countered.

He tapped the eraser of a pencil on a figure
in the background. "It matters because that woman is now a dead
woman."

I had not noticed her the night I stole the
photograph. "Oh." I was stunned. She knew David Brookhouse. Or, at
least, had attended a party with him.

"Oh, indeed." Ferrar waited.

I examined the photo from across the table.
A group of two or three people were laughing and toasting behind
the couple in the foreground. An older woman with carefully styled
blond hair stood to the left of Brookhouse, talking to an unseen
person. She had money and good looks if this photo was telling the
truth. What she no longer had was a life.

"That's a coincidence," I said. "I had no
idea she was in the photo." I either had to lie or admit I had
broken into the department's offices. Naturally, I lied. "My
client, Helen Pugh, took this photo one Christmas at a department
party," I said. "I was using it when I went around and questioned
people about David Brookhouse. I showed it to the janitor the night
he got attacked."

Ferrar nodded. “Thank you. You can go
now."

"That's it?" I was confused.

"That's it," he said. "Except that I need
your client to come in and talk to me."

"Helen can't come in. She's not able. She's
not even able to leave her house."

"Then I need for her to agree to talk to
me," he said. "You do the convincing."

"I'll try."

“Tell the others to come back in."

He turned his back to me and started reading
a file. That stung. I was lower than scum in his book, not even
worthy of more than a moment of his attention.

The other detectives filed back in without
looking at me. I had a feeling I was going to have a hard time
getting any cooperation out of the Durham Police Department once
this case was done.

Marcus watched me as I slunk my way through
the department, anxious to reclaim my freedom. I did not dare give
him a signal, as my friendship with him was a carefully guarded
secret. The fact that Ferrar was letting me leave would have to be
evidence enough that I was still free to roam at will. As scary as
that seemed to more than a few people.

I arrived back at the hospital a few minutes
after Luke's parents arrived. They were huddled in his room with
Fanny, conferring in low whispers. Bobby D. and Burly were waiting
in the hallway. I had barely said hello before Luke's father joined
us.

"You must be the woman who saved Luke's
life."

I stared at the older version of Luke
standing in front of me. He was tanned and dressed in expensive
sports clothes, dripping a tasteful gold watch and subdued men's
jewelry. His voice was a carefully cultivated businessman's dream.
And he smelled like Fort Knox.

"I don't know if you could say I saved his
life," I said. And let's not go there, I silently prayed.

"The doctors say you carried him out of the
park. Yelled for help. They say it may have saved his life."

"The paramedics and a doctor walking past
saved his life," I told him. "I'm just a friend of your son's. I
only did what anyone else would have done."

He ignored my protests. "Thank you," he
said, taking my hands and squeezing them. "The doctors say he's
going to recover."

"They do?" I stared at Bobby D. and Burly
for confirmation. They both nodded, smiling.

I smiled back.

A thirty-something blond came out of Luke's
hospital room, adjusting the hem of her linen dress. I stared at
her. At first glance, she appeared young, blond, thin and bored
with all of her bucks. But her pinched face and narrowed eyes told
me all four attributes were a stretch. She had to work at being the
trophy wife. Hard.

"Who's this?" the woman demanded, looking me
over and pegging me in a millisecond. Her female radar was on
overdrive. She instantly calculated that I was bigger, bulkier and
much poorer than she was. But I was single. And that made me a
threat.

"This is Luke's friend," the father
explained. "The woman who saved him."

"Oh." She appeared unimpressed. "I thought
you'd be younger. His age." She turned her back on me. "I'm
starving, honey. What do you think they serve to eat in this
godforsaken place? Stewed possum?"

"Dirt," I told her. "Jethro will be out at
any moment with a heaping big bowl for you."

"What?" She stared at me, her lower lip
protruding in what I suspected was a much-used pout.

"Down here, we sit around and share buckets
of dirt when we're not inside banging our brothers," I
explained.

"Why don't we go inside and see how Luke is
doing?" Burly suggested. He gripped my elbow and dragged me away
from Luke's stepmother, running over my foot in the process.

"That was not going to help things," Burly
told me.

"She doesn't give a shit," I said angrily,
shaking off his touch and stepping up to Luke's bedside. The nurse
made no comment. She probably agreed with me. Nothing worse than a
trophy wife who thinks she's slumming it. It would have been my
pleasure to put her fancy ass in a hospital bed down the hall from
Luke's. The first thing of hers I'd bust would be that lower
lip.

I watched Luke breathe for a few moments,
then held his hand and wondered how the doctors had figured out he
would recover. The boxes and monitors seemed as mysterious as ever,
yet clearly one of them had spit out happy news.

What would he be like when he came back from
wherever he had been? And would he remember me? "Where are you, my
friend?" I asked him out loud.

Luke squeezed my hand.

"He squeezed my hand!" I yelled. The nurse
put down her book and stood.

"He squeezed my hand," I insisted. "He did."
I leaned over him. "Luke, can you hear me. It's Casey. I'm right
here. Squeeze my hand if you can hear me."

I felt it: his fingers tightened around
mine.

"He squeezed my hand again." I bounced on my
toes in excitement.

"Please clear the room," the nurse asked
crisply. She pushed the call button. "Wait outside."

The small group was still assembled in the
hallway, debating where to go eat. Fanny was reciting a litany of
fine restaurants in Durham, North Carolina—none of which served
dirt.

"He's coming out of it," I told them.

Luke's father turned to me and I saw a
hundred years drop from his worry-lined face. He smiled. I smiled
back. His smile looked just like Luke's.

"Are we going to go eat or not?" the
stepmother demanded. "I'm hungry."

Even Bobby D. turned away in disgust.

Helen was as relieved as the rest of us to
learn that Luke was going to be okay. I think she saw everything
that had happened as connected to her, maybe even caused by her.
She'd had enough of the unhappiness and she wanted it to end.

We celebrated Luke's good fortune and
Fanny's return from the hospital with an early dinner of fried
chicken, creamed corn and okra. We let Fanny cook, naturally. She
made homemade biscuits that melted on your tongue. Even Miranda
stumbled down from her upstairs lair to partake, her bruises
layered so thickly with pancake makeup that it looked as if her
face was melting.

The guys on the front porch refused to come
inside, but they sure as hell accepted plates heaped high with
food. I must admit that they looked a lot less mean when they
smiled.

As we ate, Helen and I discussed what she
had found in the boxes she and Burly had searched. It wasn't much
help.

"I think I was working on a grant proposal
the day I was attacked," she said. "I can't really remember much,
but that was one of my jobs. I was supposed to be an expert in
writing grant proposals."

"Do you remember which proposal you were
working on?"

She shook her head. "I know there was some
pressure at that time for Carroll and Brookhouse to pool their
ideas into one study since they overlapped. I could make some calls
and find out. But, obviously, the idea was never followed up on, or
we would know about it."

"Did you find any papers about that
particular grant in your storage boxes?" I asked.

She shook her head.

"Someone took them," I decided. "It all
comes back to that department. I know it does."

No one at the table argued with me on that
one.

I spent the weekend before Thanksgiving
calling the hospital to check on Luke's progress. Now that he was
out of his coma, his nonfamily visitor list had been cut to zero.
His father never left his side, according to the private nurse. The
stepmother was not to be found, the nurse added—and she sounded
relieved. The nurse also promised to ask the doctor when it was
okay for Luke to have other visitors, but she thought it would be
at least a few more days.

I also spent the weekend listening to
endless discussions about the menu for Thanksgiving dinner. How
hard can that be? So long as there's gravy and mashed potatoes, who
gives a shit about the rest? I finally started leaving the room
every time the topic came up, particularly when the debate veered
to coconut custard vs. pecan pie. I mean, for godsakes, just serve
both. There is something unseemly with the world's preoccupation
with food. Or maybe I just found it inefficient. If your mouth is
going to be flapping about food, it ought to be because you're
shoveling something substantial into it.

No one seemed to know when my grandfather
would arrive and he wasn't answering his phone. If I knew him, he'd
show up just as the turkey was being carved. Then leave once his
plate was clean.

Marcus and his partner were being invited to
dinner, likewise a few trusted people who had helped us out with
prior cases. Weasel Walters, Burly's friend, would be there, along
with his latest girlfriend.

We weren't so different from the Pilgrims
and Indians, I decided. We were gathering together everyone we
could find on Thanksgiving Day and hoping to create a sense of
belonging in that coming together. But, like the original
celebrants, everyone had the same vague fear that it would never
work and the day would be a disaster.

Marcus did not call about the case. For four
long days, I sweated out whether he had brought my information to
Ferrar's attention. On Monday morning, I had an inkling that Marcus
had indeed presented our evidence to the detective: an insider's
newspaper column on college politics in the Triangle reported a
rumor that two unnamed Duke University professors had been
suspended over the weekend, albeit with pay, while the feds and
local police department investigated them for allegations of
malfeasance and misappropriation of funds.

Who else could it be but our friends
Brookhouse and Carroll?

Was Ferrar really looking into them—or was
this a pressure tactic, much like the lawsuit we planned to file, a
move made in the hopes that Brookhouse would be spooked into doing
something stupid so Ferrar could catch him at it?

Marcus finally contacted me late Monday
afternoon. Helen's new lawyer had just left her house with a
promise that he was filing and announcing the counter lawsuit
against Brookhouse in the morning. I called my apartment to
retrieve my phone messages and found terse instructions to phone
Marcus at once.

"Finally!" I complained when I got him on
the line.

"It's going down," he whispered. I could
hardly hear him, he was keeping his voice so low.

"I can't do this," I told him. "I've been
waiting to hear from you for four days and I can't sit on the end
of the line guessing what the hell you're talking about. Find a pay
phone and call me at Helen's."

He did just that. What he had to tell me
gave me the proof I needed to be absolutely certain that David
Brookhouse was guilty as shit—in Helen's rape, in the recent
murder, in the entire string of assaults. It didn't nail Lyman
Carroll's coffin down quite so thoroughly, but it did make me
believe he was helping Brookhouse. Why, I could not fathom.

What Marcus told me was this: he had taken
my information on Brookhouse and pretended to have uncovered it
himself through clever cyber-sleuthing. That was okay by me.
Anything to help Marcus out. Ferrar had not considered the prior
connection between Brookhouse and Carroll significant, nor had he
so much as twitched an eyebrow at our theory about the ties between
Carroll and the motorcycle gang. He probably thought we were making
up that whole part. But Ferrar had immediately escorted Marcus back
to his computer screen when told that Brookhouse had authored a
paper years ago on sexual predators and their techniques. Marcus
had obtained this study over the weekend, thanks to an alert
librarian at North Carolina Central University, who had unearthed a
paper copy filed away years ago. Marcus had checked the details in
this paper with the specifics from various crime scenes. Yes. All
the actual crimes committed in Durham against women—all the rapes
and assaults with baffling and varied M.O.'s—matched the incidents
described in Brookhouse's paper. The scary part was that he still
had plenty of crimes left to imitate. Even Ferrar had immediately
figured out that it could not possibly have been a coincidence,
even if it was not conclusive evidence for a court of law. Ferrar
had actually turned white when he realized the connection,
according to Marcus. Well, "even whiter" were his exact words.