Her Last Scream (21 page)

The medical wagon was backing to the victims when Teemont stepped over, studied the bodies, shaking his head. “One body’s slim, the other’s hefty. You can tell that even through … everything else. I think it’s Katka Kassolian – the slim one – and her partner, whatever, Delma Thorne. They’ve lived out here for years, decades. It’s a damn shame.”

“Partner? Were they gay?”

“You saw one, you saw the other. I patrol this road a lot. On hot days they’d wave me over and give me a glass of ice tea or lemonade, tell me how much they appreciated us, the force. I had no problems with them two ladies at all.”

“They were the sole occupants?”

“Now and then you’d see another woman on the porch or sitting out back. It’s sometimes a safe house for women here.”

Cruz and I turned to him like synchronized robots. “You
know
that?” I asked.

Teemont leaned against his cruiser and tipped back his hat. “Y’know how some people ain’t got enough to do in their lives they gotta sneak around and look at ever’one else’s?”

“Too much,” I said.

“There used to be this busybody ol’ hen down the road, called once to say Miz Katka and Thorne was holding some young girl here, like running a white-slave thing. I came out and Miz Katka introduced me to the woman … not a girl, a lady in her middle twenties who was gettin’ away from a guy who used her like a punching bag. I guess the ladies did that sort of thing now and again, and I say good for them.” Teemont shot another look at the bodies, forlorn shapes against the dry grass. “You people say you’re working on something along them lines?”

“I’d appreciate it if you could look long and hard for that license plate,” I said.

“You got it, buddy,” Teemont said.

“I’m moving toward Dodge City. Everything’s cool.”

Tommy Flood left his message in the voicemail box, flicked his cell phone shut, and set it atop the dashboard beside the packs of cigarettes and lighters and fast-food wrappers. He cranked the Dwight Yoakum CD up, hard bass and twanging guitar again filling his cab and pouring out the open windows as he shot an eye at the speedometer, careful to keep the rig below the limit and safe from the prowling eyes of the occasional cop. It was ten p.m., the sky like a black blanket pulled flat over everything for a hundred miles. Only occasional flashes of heat lightning shivered under the far edges of the blanket to display scrubby plants of brown and gray.

Tommy was two-thirds of the way through Kansas, more than halfway home, the threads of lightning edging the sky like God telling him he was on the side of the righteous. He’d gotten justice, right? Got back what had been stolen from him?

Tommy lit another cigarette, smiling at his fortune. Hell, he hadn’t even known Treeka’d been snatched away by a system of dykes. He’d been looking for her all over the county when the phone call had come in.

“
Brother Flood?
”

“
Who’s this?
”

“
Your wife betrayed you, didn’t she? Ran off.
”

“
Who the fuck is this?
”

“
A friend, Brother Flood. One of many who understand you. We’re a band of brothers, Tommy, helping one another. Let me show how we can help you … what’s the thing you want most in the world right now?
”

“
My goddamn prop’ty back.
”

“
It’s not that hard, Tommy. She’s just settled into a house in south Missouri. Would you like the address?
”

“
You damn bet I do.
”

“
It’s yours in return for a few small favors, payback to your brothers …
”

Everything since had been too good to be true, and he’d figured there’d have to be some kind of fly in the ointment, somebody asking him for money to give up the place the bitch was hiding.

But everything happened as promised: Treeka was his rightful property and he could do with her as he pleased. All Tommy had to do was burn down the house when he left, and bring a second slut back to Colorado. He was allowed to discipline the whore if she acted poorly – and discipline her hard – but was not allowed to kill her. Someone else, it seems, had that right.

Tommy Flood looked at the clock again. Eight hours and he’d be back on the ranch. There were things that needed doing to keep Treeka in line, plus he was going to pass the other whore to his benefactor.

A busy day coming up, good business all around. Tommy Flood checked his speedometer again and began singing along with Dwight Yoakum, his voice booming out the window and into the desert sky.

Can a man get any happier than this?
he wondered.

I called Harry, then Cruz and I returned to the motel. We had no idea which way Rein had gone, everything depending on a license tag attached to an unknown vehicle. Teemont had expanded the APB to surrounding states.

I was pacing the balcony, wanting to jump in the van and join the search. But at this hour it was just headlights in the black. Plus there were four directions I could take, three of them wrong, so I paced and wrung my hands and tried to think of things I had missed.

Meanwhile, Cruz sat on the bed checking every note generated while following Rein, every detail from Boulder to Branson. She’d been working for an hour when I heard a door opening.

“Carson!”

I spun to see Cruz waving me back to the room, her laptop in one arm. “What?” I said, pushing into the cool of the air conditioning, the scent of the fast shower she’d taken.

“I was checking into Victoria Miles, the transport and safe house before Rick, thinking about her story about her sister. We hadn’t really read it, just scanned the headlines for verification, right?”

“Something wrong with it?”

“It happened as Miss Miles said: the wife’s suicide, the court proceedings, the acquittal, the shooting by the sister. Without the details from Victoria Miles, you get the impression the wife was a psycho sex weirdo who made hubby’s life a living hell.”

“That was Miles’s contention: The lawyer was shameless but talented, turned facts on their heads.”

Cruz tapped keys on her laptop and pulled a newspaper headline to the screen:
Dr Conette Acquitted of all Charges.
The subtitle was
Lawyer Paints Wife as
“
Sad, Sick Woman
”
.

“Read this and see if anything jumps out at you.” Cruz passed me the laptop and I started reading. Three paragraphs were all it took.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

It was almost ten thirty p.m. Mountain Time and Liza was dozing on the floor of her office for the second time in a week. Dr Bramwell was on sabbatical, Robert in and out, Deanna Werly, another TA, was ill with strep throat. Liza had been attending classes during the day, teaching Sinclair’s freshman-level courses at night. She planned to rise at four and grade quizzes before Sinclair arrived with his demands.

A sound intruded on her dreams and Liza found herself staring at the leg of her desk. The door of the elevator closed and she figured its opening had roused her. She opened her door a sliver and saw Dr Sinclair walk past. She started to speak, but was on the floor with her hair flat on one side, a drool-wet sleeve, and a sweater as a pillow.

Plus Sinclair was moving like a man on a mission, on
full-mull
as Robert called it, deep in thought. Disturb him at your peril.

Liza wiggled forward until peeking into his office. Sinclair was standing with a sheaf of papers in his hand. He set them on his desk, seemed to have second thoughts. He turned a full circle with the papers, as if unsure where to file them, then jammed the pages into a thick textbook on his shelves. He laughed darkly, then sat at his desk with his back to Liza. He tapped at the keyboard for two minutes, shoulders rocking with the motion.

He froze, then leaned toward the screen, as if not believing what he saw.

He whispered, “They’re my words.”

Liza watched Sinclair jump from the chair, still fixated on the screen.

“You stole my words! YOU SON OF A
BITCH!
”

Liza couldn’t tell if Sinclair’s voice held anger, confusion, or triumph. Suddenly fearful – though not sure why – Liza slipped her door shut. A minute later she heard Sinclair’s steps fade down the hall and disappear into the elevator.

One final
Son of a bitch
and he was gone.

Liza stood shakily, as if Sinclair’s voice still roiled the air.
What the freakin’ hell was that all about?
There was a cup of cold coffee on her desk and she drank it, part thirst, part to wake her dream-drowsed head. Dr Sinclair had either been too angry – or too jubilant – to remember to pull his door tight; half the time Liza or Trotman had to lock it at night anyway, Sinclair too lofty for such duties.

Liza crept toward the office, eyes on the textbook with Sinclair’s sheaf of papers jutting from the book pages. She felt gravity pulling her into his office, across the carpet. The pages seemed to tremble toward her shaking fingers.

Pick me up, Liza
, they begged.
Read me
.

“Say again,” Harry said, the sleep dissolving from his voice. I’d called his home at six a.m. to share the latest twist in this bizarre whirlwind of a case.

“You heard me, brother. The scumbucket attorney in the Macon case was none other than Nathaniel Bromley.” I looked across the room, saw Cruz rolled in a sheet, stripped to her skivvies and starting to stir.

“C’fee,” Cruz mumbled.

“What the hell does it mean?” Harry asked.

“Maybe nothing. Maybe Bromley fell into the case by accident, a friend of the dentist passing along the name of a high-level bottom-crawler. As a member of Blackwell, Carrington & Bromley, he would have been law-licensed in Georgia. They have clients in Atlanta.”

“The dentist, Krebbs …”

“You thought Bromley and Krebbs were an odd pair of golfing buddies. Maybe what’s bonding them isn’t smacking a little ball but a hatred of women. You said it yourself, brother: what if there’s an anti-system system?”

“That golfing stuff never felt right,” Harry said. “If Bromley wanted a golf buddy he could probably rent Tiger Woods.”

I hung up. Given what Harry’d said about Bromley’s comments to Sal and his BFF chuckling with Krebbs, women weren’t high on Bromley’s list. That alone meant nothing – I knew folks with similar issues, and it made them insecure, but not malevolent – still, it was a connection.

Cruz had slung a robe around her and was assembling a cup of coffee. My phone rang. “Chief Teemont,” my caller said, the chief of the county mounties. “We found the license tag from Mr Redfeather’s vehicle in the ashes of the burned home. The killer obviously grabbed another. There’s nothing to look for.”

I cursed beneath my breath as Teemont continued. “Doc Winegartner, the coroner? He reports that both women were lacking eyes, and from what he could tell, their breasts had been slashed. What the hell kind of maniac is out there?”

Sally Hargreaves sat at the desk in Harry Nautilus’s home reading archived articles on the trial in Macon. She wore one of his robes, a small pretty head poking from the top of a blue velvet tent. The walls were covered with posters of jazz greats: Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker. The house smelled of fresh-brewed coffee.

Nautilus leaned down. “Cruz dug this stuff up late last night. Guess this means I got to be nice to her.”

“Jesus, Harry, I hated Bromley before, now I gotta get a twin to handle the overflow. Where from here?”

“I asked Bromley why he didn’t do any work for his old firm. He got snippy and made a face like smelling dog plop on his shoes.”

“Who’s the head shyster at Blackwell, Carrington & Bromley?” Sal asked.

“Carrington, I think.”

“Lemme make a call. I’ll bet they get started early at BCB, more hours to bill.”

Hargreaves dialed the firm, asked three questions, rolled her eyes and hung up. “The receptionist over there sounds like she’s got a broomstick up her ass, probably part of the job description. We need an appointment to see ‘Mistah Carrington’; the earliest he’s taking audiences seems to be next week.”

“Schedules of the rich and famous.”

Hargreaves eyes twinkled. “But broom-butt lady revealed that Mr Carrington is heading to the federal courthouse, something to do with a motion.”

Thirty minutes later the pair made their way through the high-ceiling halls of the federal courthouse in Mobile, Nautilus wearing a powder-blue suit with a scarlet shirt, Hargreaves in a dark jacket-skirt ensemble over a maroon blouse. Her artsy lapel pin was a scalloped, silvery disk with six holes toward the outside centered by a smaller hole. It resembled an organic form until closer inspection revealed a cross-section of the cylinder of a revolver.

“It looks like a suit convention,” Hargreaves said. “Have you ever smelled so much musk?”

“Not since my springtime visit to the zoo.”

Hargreaves pointed to four men in earnest conversation in a corner. “Looky there … Arnold Carrington of Blackwell, Carrington & Bromley, Nate’s old firm. I got to say hi.”

Nautilus started to grab Hargreaves’s arm to discuss strategy, but decided to let Sally brace the lawyer on her own. He watched Hargreaves plant herself in front of Carrington like a hungry bulldog.

“Howdy, Mr Carrington. I’m Detective Sally Hargreaves of the MPD. I wanted to say I wish you’d kept Nathaniel Bromley in the firm. It just doesn’t seem right that Blackwell, Carrington & Bromley is lacking its Bromley.”

Nautilus thought Arnold Carrington looked like an actor who played aging lawyers on TV: a touch of belly roll over the belt, brown hair with gray wings, a blue pinstripe suit without a wrinkle, as if constantly pressed by some internal engine. He was tanned and his teeth were capped and Nautilus figured the man never passed a mirror without snapping it a wink.

Carrington stared at Hargreaves over tortoiseshell reading glasses. “You’re behind the curve, Detective. We’re now Blackwell, Carrington & Associates. Mr Bromley is history. May I ask why you’d wish him still within the firm?”

“You haven’t heard? Your old buddy is preparing to attack the women’s center of Mobile. I think the center does important work. Maybe if you’d kept the Natester on the payroll he’d leave women alone.”

Carrington shot a heartbeat-long glance at his companions. One of the lawyers studied Hargreaves, the other two looked away, as if wanting no part of the conversation.

Carrington’s response was measured and precise. “Whatever Nathaniel Bromley is doing these days, it in no way reflects the views of the firm. He has no part in the firm, none. Bottom line: Blackwell, Carrington & Associates has absolutely no ties to Nathaniel Bromley, business or philosophical. Are we clear there, Detective?”

“Do you know why the Natester might –”

But Carrington and his posse were moving toward the courtroom at escape velocity. Hargreaves returned to Nautilus.

“Jesus, Harry … In no way reflects our views, no part of our firm – I was half-expecting Carrington to go all Mafia: ‘Nathaniel Bromley is dead to us.’ What do you make of that weirdness?”

Nautilus watched the quartet pushing into the courtroom, Carrington shooting a backward glance, his face a mix of curious and troubled.

“Seems the parting wasn’t so amicable, Sal. I Wonder what Nate did to make his old buddies take his name off their expensive door?”

“Must have been pretty major. Where could we get the low-down on Bromley?”

Nautilus stared into the distance and grimaced.

“What’s the matter, Harry?” Hargreaves said. “You look like a skunk just squirted under your nose.”

“Worse. You ever head of D. Preston Walls?”

“That little law office by the bail bondsmen and pawnshops?”

Nautilus nodded. “You ever meet Walls, Sally?”

“Never had the pleasure. Why?”

“We’ll stop on the way and get some Lysol. You’ll want to spray yourself when you leave his office.”