Don't Know Jack (8 page)

“I didn’t hear anything about it,” Roscoe said. “I don’t know.”

The Blazer’s tires bounced from one hole to the next. Dead skunk perfume came in through the air vents. Kim held her breath. Then she saw a good-sized dirt lot and a pea-gravel driveway full of two GHP cruisers, two marked Margrave squad cars, an unmarked sedan with a portable bubble light on the dash, and a county ambulance. A coat of red dust already covered them all.

Kim asked, “Anything special you want us to do?”

Roscoe paused a moment and said, “Do whatever you think you should, I guess. I’ll catch up with you inside. Check in before you leave and we’ll see where we are.”

Then she said, “We’ll talk more about Reacher later. After I get this situation sorted out. OK?”

#

Kim watched as Roscoe followed a line of cracked sandstone slate pavers by taking a little hop from one to the next and over the dirt between them, like she was crossing stones in a running stream. Withered plants filled cracked red-dirt beds along each side of the pavers. Uncut yard weeds thrived, impersonating a lawn. Thirty feet ahead a frame shotgun style house rested on a cement block foundation. Its metal roof reflected the glare of the sun. Between the roof and the foundation were four windows cut into the walls, all grimy. A porch ran the twenty-foot width of the house. On one end, a gray weathered bench swing hung crooked on a rusty chain, and on the other end sat two white plastic dollar-store rockers with an overflowing ash tray between them.

Roscoe stepped over the last weed gap, up the single plank step to the porch, and entered the house through the open front door.

Kim stayed where she was.

Gaspar, too, seemed momentarily transfixed.

“What a hole,” he said. “My wife would never have moved out here in a million years. What kind of woman lives like this?”

“The killing kind, apparently,” Kim said. She reached into her bag and found her camera. Then she opened her door and stepped onto the hard red ground.

The first thing she noticed was the quiet noonday, bizarrely still. She was a city girl. Noise was normal; quiet was not.

Out in the woods, no one can hear you scream.

“Did you know?” she asked.

“Know what?” Gaspar said.

“Why he gave us the eleven-thirty deadline. Why he put us in that room at that time.”

“You don’t trust me, do you?”

“He wanted us to be there when the call came in. He wanted us out here at the crime scene. That how you read it?”

“Yes,” Gaspar said.

“What about Reacher?”

“Reacher’s irrelevant.”

“To what?  This homicide?  Or is the whole assignment bogus?”

He shrugged. “You’re number one. You figure it out.”

She could feel sweat above her lip. She couldn’t figure it out. She hated that. She said, “Take pictures, OK?  And don’t be obvious about it.”

If Gaspar resented her orders, he didn’t show it. He just turned back to the Blazer and got his own camera. She watched him from behind her sunglasses.

Was he limping?
  FBI field agents didn’t limp. Physical fitness was one of the basic requirements of the job. Definitely no limping allowed. She reached up and dabbed the sweat from her lip, and then she headed for the house, matching Gaspar’s longer stride step for step. As they walked his limp became less pronounced. Maybe it was just a cramp.

Maybe she could rely on him.

Only one choice.

CHAPTER TEN

Inside the house the tiny hallway was full of people and full of familiar muted crime scene sounds. Then one guy moved right and another moved left and Kim got a clear line of sight into a messy bedroom. Time stood still, like a single freeze frame in a video.

Harry Black’s body was face down on bloody sheets, right where his faithful bride had shot him seven times less than two hours ago.

Not a chance.

Complete bullshit.

Kim smelled him even over the skunk perfume. She saw the rigor and the lividity from all the way across the room. Every professional in the house had to know Harry Black had been dead a lot longer than two hours. The GHP trooper must have known when he called in the homicide.

People shifted again, blocking her view. The freeze frame ended. The video moved on. Gaspar looked at her and nodded. He had seen it too. The interior of the building matched its exterior for bleakness. There were four rooms. A total of maybe 800 square feet. Lots of pine, lots of gaps and warps. The living room had two worn recliners and a 60-inch flat screen TV. There were fashion magazines on a folding table. The windows were opaque with dirt.

Gaspar had moved farther into the house, observing everything, just as she was. He was taking pictures from time to time.

Of what?

Am I missing something?

Kim recalled Gaspar’s question. What kind of woman had chosen to live in this place?  She glanced toward the kitchen and saw the answer right there.

Mrs. Sylvia Black sat on one of the two kitchen chairs, head down. Cuffed hands hung between her knees. She held her palms together, rhythmically opening and closing each set of matched fingers, one set at a time, like a metronome, counting.

Counting what?   

She had a recent manicure. She had perfectly shaped nails, quite short, painted pastel pink. She had a large square onyx ring with a silver cable around it on her right index finger, and a smaller turquoise ring by the same designer on her right pinky. She was wearing the kind of black patent sandals that fashionable women covet, and she had a fresh pedicure. Her toenails were polished deep purple. Her yellow silk blouse had a pink and green designer’s monogram. Dark silk slacks tapered smartly down her calf, where an ankle bracelet sat near a yellow rose tattoo.

Then someone made a noise and Sylvia’s head snapped up, eyes darted wildly. Kim saw dark beauty, enhanced by skillful makeup. Sylvia’s eyes met Kim’s, and then she lowered her gaze to the floor and began her finger tapping again.

Kim reached into her pocket and pulled out her camera. She framed the shot and said, “Sylvia?”

The woman looked up and saw the camera. She squared her shoulders, raised her chin, and smiled, revealing bright white teeth offset by shimmering pink lip gloss.

She was posing.

Kim switched the camera to video mode and followed her gut.

“I love your shoes,” she said. “Jimmy Choos, right?  They look great on you.”

Girlfriends.

“Thank you,” Sylvia replied, holding her leg out in front, the better to display her stylish footwear. “These are my favorites.”  She looked up into Kim’s face again. “Want to try them?  Your foot’s really tiny, though.”

“I’d better not,” Kim said, as if the refusal cost her a lot. “They wouldn’t like it.”

They.

Us and them.

Girlfriends.

Sylvia pressed her lips into a firm line, nodded as if to say she understood, and lowered her head again.

Kim asked, “So what happened here?”

Sylvia looked up again. Unsmiling this time, but not distraught. Not like she’d just killed a man whose body still lay in her marriage bed. “I’m not supposed to talk about it. I shot him. I couldn’t take him any more. That’s all I’m allowed to say.”

“Who told you that?”

“I’m not allowed to say.”

“Well, aside from his horrible taste in interior design, what was wrong with him?”

Sylvia smiled. She didn’t seem to grasp her situation. Maybe there was something wrong with her. Mentally. “I’m not allowed to say,” she repeated, smiling sadly now, as if she had much more she wanted to say, if only she was allowed to, which she wasn’t.

“Did he hurt you?  Do something to you?”  Kim continued to record. Sylvia knew she was being filmed, but didn’t seem to mind. She didn’t ask for a lawyer or object to the questions. But she didn’t offer any information, either.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Was that a confession?  Remorse generally followed when wives killed their husbands, in Kim’s experience.

“About what?” Kim asked.

“That I’m not allowed to say anything.”

Kim heard another car outside. “When do you think you’ll be able to tell us what happened?”

Sylvia asked a question of her own. “What time is it?”

Kim looked at her watch. “It’s one o’clock, give or take.”

“Maybe later this afternoon,” Sylvia said.

“Why then?”  Kim saw Sergeant Brent and another Margrave cop come in.

“I’m just not allowed to say.”  Silvia returned her gaze to the floor, and began her finger tapping again. Kim filmed the ritual for a full minute, but Silvia didn’t look up again.

“I’ll catch up with you later,” Kim said.

No response.

#

Kim slipped into the bedroom for a closer look. The master suite contained two rooms. She checked them quickly before focusing on the body. Both were lined in rough pine planks like the rest of the house. There was a small bathroom on one side, and a small closet on the other. The closet was open. It held three empty wire hangers on the rod, and two men’s sneaker boxes on the shelf above, and dry cleaning bags and paper shoulder covers  on the floor.

The bathroom was barely large enough for a shower stall, a sink and a toilet. The shower curtain was moldy and stained by iron-rich water. The toilet was running, porcelain cracked. The bedroom itself had a fourteen-inch oval mirror hung too high for Sylvia Black. A ceiling fan hung in the middle of the room, not turning. One jalousie window with frosted panes provided weak natural light.

But the bed itself was the main attraction. It filled most of the room. It was just a queen mattress on a box spring. No headboard or footboard. There was about two feet of space all the way around the bed. There was a beige cotton blanket tangled up in sheets that might once have been white once. There were three pillows with cases in the same yellowed percale as the sheets. There was not as much blood as there might have been.

Kim noticed everything: the blood, the smell, Black’s pallor and the blue bruises unmistakably creeping up his sides from where he lay on his stomach, rigid with full rigor. She was certain he’d been dead more than ten hours. Probably closer to fifteen. But absolutely, positively, most definitely more than two.

She memorized his position. She’d need a recent photograph to know anything about his face. The bullets had gone right through. They were buried in the wall planks. Kim thought about the difficulty of removing them for evidence.

Black’s left arm was bent at the elbow, his hand resting near his face. A thin gold band encircled his ring finger. Not a symbol of love and fidelity in his case, clearly. His right arm was bent palm up. His legs were splayed.