First Lady (35 page)

Except for the crack-up that sent me to the mountains, I'd always been able to sober myself quickly if I had to. I was sober as I passed Cuddy's cruiser on the bypass just before the turnoff to downtown and I'm sure he recognized my Jaguar as I flew around him. The thudding in my heart came more from dread than shame: they'd found another woman's body. Whose? If it had been the first lady's, if it had been Lee's, wouldn't Cuddy have told me so?

While driving, I tried to use my cell phone, usually in the well, realized it was missing, and remembered that Bubba had it. I'd disconnected the phone at Nachtmusik. Maybe Cuddy had called there, maybe he had gone by my house on Tuscadora before coming out to the lake house where he'd guessed I would be. Maybe even guessed with whom I'd be.

From blocks away I could see the brick checkerboard cupolas of the huge Victorian train station that was now boutiques and markets and known as Southern Depot Mall. Its parking lot was cordoned off by yellow plastic tape reading “HILLSTON POLICE DEPARTMENT. DO NOT CROSS.” Four HPD patrol cars, their blue barlights whirring, nosed to the edge of the pedestrian walk, while white spinning lights atop a waiting ambulance gave the scene an eerie silent film look.

Nancy Caleb-White stood on the hood of her cruiser, looking I think for me, because as soon as she saw me, she began wildly gesturing for me to hurry. The equipment on her uniform belt flew about as she led me in a sprint to the side of the building. There a rear passageway was sign-posted “LOADING UNLOADING ONLY.”

“Jesus, where you been?” She yelled over her shoulder. “The chief went ballistic when he couldn't find you!” Jerking her head around in a double take, she noticed that I had on trousers with suspenders, a sleeveless undershirt and loafers without socks. I didn't answer. We skidded around a corner into a small group of curious late-nighters, held back by the tape from the loading ramp of the International Fish Market. High intensity portable standing lights shone down on a hill of gleaming black garbage bags and on the opened pneumatic jaws of a city garbage truck. Looking into its cavity was a cluster of HPD officers—among them Augie Summers from forensics and the crime scene photographer Chuck Grant.

Suddenly Shelly Bloom shoved her way between two patrolmen. “Justin, hi! So what's going on?”

Nancy and I quickly slipped under the tape where she couldn't follow and made our way over to where Dick Cohen, his pants on over his pajamas, leaned beside his assistant medical examiner, looking at a body that hung in the truck opening, half out of a black plastic garbage bag.

I recognized the thick short arm, the raven black hair. Pushing forward, I leaned in next to Dick.

“About time,” he said grumpily.

“What happened?”

Nancy squeezed in beside me and Chuck, who was taking photos as fast as he could. She said, “The garbage guys started at midnight loading all the stuff piled up from the strike. So this guy here—” She pointed over at a stocky African-American in his forties, wearing a Hillston Sanitation uniform, who sat anxiously on the edge of the ramp, waiting. “—Name's Walter Webb. Walter here is tossing bags in the rear. The bottom on one of the bags rips and half of her falls out.”

“Rats,” mumbled the medical examiner. “Rats chewed holes in the bag trying to get at her.”

“What time?” I asked Nancy. “When Webb found her?” She said the sanitation worker had called 911 at 1:05 A.M. It was now 2:28.

Dick gently turned the battered face toward me. “This the woman that handed Cuddy the fish in the newspaper, right?”

I said, “No, it's not. That was Lupe Guevarra. This woman is her sister Maria. Lupe was upset, remember, because she couldn't find her.”

“So here's why,” Dick grumbled.

I told Nancy to drive over to Trinity Church as fast as possible and see if she could find Lupe Guevarra. She was supposed to be staying in the homeless shelter there. Twenty seconds later, I heard Nancy's siren shriek as she peeled out of the parking lot.

Dick estimated that the Garifuna woman had been dead as long as seventy-two hours. Someone had savagely crushed in her skull with a blunt force instrument. He showed me the multiple fractures, any one of which could have killed her. I asked him, “Gun butt, car jack, crowbar?”

He scratched at his narrow face. “Nah. Smoother. Round. Like a pipe. They're saying she picked up some work cleaning fish at the market here. Cuddy hauled the owner in—why should he sleep when I can't?—so you want to talk to the guy?” He jabbed a long hairy thumb at the back of the building. Then he motioned for the ambulance attendants. “Okay, Justin, we're going to lift her out now, head back with her. You agree with Cuddy? You think this is Guess Who–related or what?”

I said, “I think it's Guess Who–related.”

Dick looked at me with an odd sort of awkwardness. “I feel bad I missed that stuff on G.I. Jane, you know? I mean this psycho had practically sawed her head off, but Chang caught the asphyxiation—guy's amazing.”

“Don't worry about it, Dick. We all missed things. Well, if it hadn't been for the rats, by now this bag would be compacted under tons of garbage in the town landfill. We'd have never found her.”

“Isn't that a problem? Doesn't Guess Who want you to find things?”

I said, “He's not proud of this one. He's just tidying up.”

The medical examiner shrugged. “He's got a real hard-on about us, doesn't he? I mean HPD. What'd we do to him?” He yawned. “So why don't you people ever find bodies at three in the afternoon? See you later.”

“You doing the autopsy tonight?”

“Why not? I'm up.”

“I'll drop in. Thanks.” I was watching Cuddy duck under the yellow tape. John Emory ran over to him with a computer printout.

I called to Augie Summers. Guess Who would want to discard the murder weapon as quickly as possible. He wouldn't want blood on his clothes or in his car. If he'd killed her here, he had most likely left both her body and the weapon for the garbage men to pick up. Augie and the two uniformed officers with him weren't happy when I told them that if they weren't able to find anything that resembled a blunt force weapon in the bag containing the body, they'd have to check all the garbage bags already loaded from this area into the truck or still piled in the passageway. I told them to look for something resembling a length of round metal pipe.

A light chilly drizzle had started to fall. As I walked over to Cuddy I pulled on the jacket I'd tossed in the Jaguar. Without looking at each other, we talked efficiently and impersonally about the victim's identity, the murder weapon, the likelihood that Guess Who had killed Maria Guevarra because she could identify him. The question was, could her sister Lupe identify the killer? And, if so, was there much chance that she was still alive? We did not talk about where and how he'd found me.

John Emory had just handed Cuddy a list of all Ford Explorers registered in the county that were blue, gray, or black, 1994–1999 models (the models that would match the gray fibers we'd collected as trace evidence on Kristin Stiller and Lucy Griggs). As soon as we'd learned the make of the vehicle, we'd started checking DMV records. There'd been 893 SUVs of that description on the original list. John had narrowed it down to 264. Back at the task force room, Rhonda was checking for any owners with criminal records. I called her, told her also to check whether any of the owners lived near or worked at Southern Depot. In the morning, HPD detectives would start interviewing the staff of all the stores in Southern Depot Mall to see if anyone had noticed a Ford Explorer in the area three days ago, if anyone had noticed a man talking to Maria Guevarra, or if anyone had noticed Maria Guevarra at all.

John Emory's cell phone rang. It was Nancy. She asked Roid to put me on. She was with Father Paul Madison in the parish hall of Trinity Church. Lupe Guevarra wasn't at the shelter and hadn't been there last night either. Two days ago, Paul had found her a Spanish-speaking lawyer to help her with her papers, she'd never shown up at the lawyer's office. Nancy was going to question other residents at the shelter. She'd get back to us. I asked Roid to call Detective Eddie Vega to see if the migrant woman had told him anything that might help. But my fear was that Lupe Guevarra was as dead as her sister, and for the same reason.

Then Roid handed me a folded manila envelope. “I meant to get this to you earlier, Justin, and I tried calling you, but it was weird. Bubba Percy answered your phone.”

“Yeah, sorry, he ran off with my cellular. What's this?”

“Haver transcript. Lucy Griggs. They finally pulled a hard copy out of her department.” He started to say something else about it, but just then a brown van with yellow stars on the doors and red lights on the roof pulled into the passageway, forcing us to jump out of its way. Sheriff Homer Louge hauled himself out of the van and pulled on his brown Stetson.

“Hey, Mangum, looks like you need some help,” he called to Cuddy.

We waited as the sheriff loped toward us. “Having trouble sleeping, Homer?” Cuddy smiled. “Must be that investigation the county commissioners are putting you through. Least you can take it easy now. What'd they call it—leave of absence? I heard about that.”

“You heard about it? You fixed it.” Louge actually spit on the asphalt.

Cuddy pointed at the spittle. “I'm going to let this go with a warning. But spitting in public's against the law in the city of Hillston.”

“You're not as smart as you think you are, Mangum.” The sheriff stepped right up to Cuddy, almost chest-butting him.

Cuddy nodded. “Probably true,” he said. Then he stepped back and walking around Louge made his way through reporters to the mall entrance.

I followed him. “I know I'm not supposed to mention Haver Forest, but I thought the deal was, the sheriff would stay out of this case completely.”

Cuddy pulled me aside, staring strangely at a thought he was having. “I want you to put somebody on Louge right now and keep them on him.”

“Tail Louge? Why?” I looked behind me. The sheriff leaned against the side of the patrol van, unwrapping a piece of gum, dropping the paper to the ground, watching the body loaded into the ambulance.

“What about him for Guess Who?” Cuddy looked at me for the first time.

“For Guess Who?” I was taken aback.

“Who knows more about us, who hates us more? Who's in and out of the Cadmean Building? Who was messing up the evidence at The Fifth Season as fast as he could? Who had two wives divorce him and a hushed up record of domestic violence?”

I looked around again as Louge walked over to where Augie Summers was dumping the contents of a trash bag onto a sheet of plastic. “Okay,” I said. I called over John Emory and told him to follow Sheriff Louge until further notice. Roid asked no questions.

Like the small pretty bird of prey she resembled, Shelly abruptly darted at us again. “Come on, guys, this is a homeless woman somebody found in a garbage bag.” She tugged at Cuddy. “What's the big deal, why're you here?”

Cuddy shook his head. “Dignity of human life, Shelly. Don't they teach civics anymore?”

He walked ahead, leaving me to handle the determined reporter. I asked her if she'd gone to press yet with the quote about breaking the Guess Who case that I'd given her earlier at Pine Hills Inn: how Guess Who had made such stupid mistakes that we were close to an arrest. If Bunty Crabtree was right, being called stupid would agitate this man so much that maybe he
would
make a mistake. Despite the truth of everything Cuddy had just said about Louge, he just didn't feel like the man Bunty had described. And I trusted her description. She might have the wrong facts, but she was going to have the right personality.

Shelly said she still had an hour to file. I told her I was about to remake her career by telling her, and only her, that Maria Guevarra was a Guess Who killing. She was already on the phone as she ran off through the rain.

• • •

International Fish Market, known as IFM, was a very upscale shop selling fresh seafood and exotic luxury items like Japanese sashimi, Russian caviar, and New Zealand clams. The owner was a Vietnamese man in his sixties named Harry Minh. He had nothing much to tell us about Maria Guevarra or her sister Lupe, who had worked for him briefly but whose names he had never known. After he'd caught them food-foraging in back of the store, he had hired both for a few days at the end of last week because he was shorthanded. One of his cleaners had cut his hand open with a gutting knife, and Mr. Minh had fired another one for poor work habits.

“Too sloppy, too slow, I tell him, ‘You history, you out of here.'”

I said, “So the Guevarra sisters were gutting fish for you?”

Yes, and they had apparently met Minh's high standards. “Work good, very fast.” He'd paid them a total of forty dollars (which averaged a bit more than a dollar an hour each) three days ago and had seen neither since. Had they left together? He thought so. Had they bought or had he given them a whole flounder before they left? The question puzzled him. No, but it was quite possible that they'd stolen any number of fish from IFM. His workers robbed him all the time. Could he check in his records to see if anyone had bought a flounder, specifically a flounder, the last afternoon the Guevarras had worked here? It would take too much of his time, Mr. Minh told us. Finally he agreed to go through his receipts in the morning.

“
C´am Ön anh
,” Cuddy told him in what I assumed was the Vietnamese he'd learned while over in that country in his teens.

“No problem,” Mr. Minh replied, then turned away, uninterested in a dialogue about the bad old days.

I was looking around the store at the beautiful counters of all the varieties of fish, arranged like artworks on the ice, each species labeled by an exquisite handwritten card on a pin. My eyes moved along the rows—yellowfin tuna, halibut, coho salmon, pompano…. And then suddenly I saw a card that stopped my breath.