Hush My Mouth (14 page)

“I don’t know, but it’s not funny.” He snorted anyway. “They could’ve lost more than a video camera. Now, thanks to some wiseacre’s idea of a joke, we get to send a deputy out to retrieve their camera.”

“The crybaby bridge?” I said, shaking my head.

“They wanted ghosts.” The grin on his broad face showed how much he enjoyed the thought of the three ghosters trying to capture the illusive baby’s cry.

“You finished?” He stared at my empty bowl, perhaps feeling pity that it sat alone in front of me, no other crockery to keep it company. “They’ll be waiting for us at impound.”

As we walked to the register to pay, one of the three fishermen threw up a wave at Rudy. “Chief. How’s it going?”

Rudy stuck out his hand. “Cuke.” He shook hands with Cuke’s two buddies with that kind of smiling grapple that always looks like guys are testing whether one could take the other in a fight. I eased on through the tables to pay my check.

The impound lot turned out to be nothing more than a fenced-off portion to the side of a towing service and auto body shop. The gravel and dirt had been compacted and glued together with
crank case drippings for so many years, while so many greasestained hands had touched the doors and equipment that the whole place had a gray-black tone to it.

Four garage bays stood open with cars parked inside, hoods up or tires dangling from hydraulic lifts. The guys working inside, all with at least one greasy rag hanging out a back pocket, gave us only cursory glances. Just another DUI coming to get her car, for all they knew.

The fifth garage bay sat next to a pen encircled by a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with concertina wire. A battle-scarred, dingy white pit bull shot out of his tar-papered doghouse straight toward us, moving like a heat-seeking missile. He didn’t bark. He just danced along a well-worn track inside the fence and, head turning and bobbing, kept us in view with his one eye. The other eye had been stitched shut. I hated to think where he’d gotten the gouges and brown scars that patchworked his face. Was this the retirement home successful fight dogs long for?

Rudy rummaged around in his pants pocket. I realized the dog wasn’t on a chain. How did those who were allowed entrance get past him?

Rudy walked to the edge of the fence, made the same sappy “good boy” kissy sounds he gives Aunt Letha’s rottweiler, and poked something through the fence before he turned to unlock the garage bay.

Two large Milk-Bone treats. The dog dove for them, his eye fixed on me. He stood at attention, holding both treats in his mouth, until he saw me step toward the garage bay and away from his fence. Only then did he turn toward his house, with one final check over his shoulder to make sure I was behaving.

I studied Rudy’s broad back as he flicked on the garage lights and punched the button that sent the door rattling shut. Both the dog and I knew, it’s good to have friends.

“So this is separate from the body shop.” I’d wondered how they maintained chain of custody using storage on private property.

Rudy, standing at the passenger door, fixed me with that look that said something between
you’re so dumb
and
don’t bring your city smart-ass back here
.

“Safer here than parked in the patrol car garage. Some’a those numbnuts’d have the thing stripped and selling pieces on eBay.”

Rudy stepped to the back of the car and popped open the trunk. Inside, the lining was missing, leaving only gray rough-coat metal and glue spots holding stray bits of gray felt.

“Guess the lab took everything, huh?”

Rudy pulled the trunk lid down with two fingers, trying to avoid the sections with the heaviest dusting of fingerprint powder. “Reckon so.”

He unlatched the passenger door and swung it open. “You wanted to see.”

We stood beside the red car, dusty black with leftover powder. The metallic smell of dried blood hit me. I blinked. I can get myself ready for the sight, but the smells always take me by surprise.

“Well, Sherlock? Or is it Dr. Phil? Any insights?”

I didn’t take the bait. The driver’s side of the car, predictably, contained most of the aftermath. Bloodstains and stuff I didn’t want to think about had spattered as far as the left rear window. The darkest blood, though, had pooled on and beneath the driver’s seat.

Rudy rummaged in the pocket of his khaki pants and pulled out a flashlight. He flicked the beam around the car’s interior roof, along the frame of the driver’s door window where bits of glass glistened, and settled the light on the driver’s floorboard.

“They vacuumed most of the glass,” he said.

“Somebody going to glue it together?” That was mostly a joke.

He shook his head. “For somebody smart, you sure must watch a lot of TV.”

I didn’t bother telling him I didn’t own a television set. My niece Emma and I used to watch
America’s Most Wanted
together at her house until her mom decided that wasn’t acceptable fare for a seven-year-old.

“Can I get in?”

Rudy frowned as though I’d suggested something unseemly.

“Here.” I pointed at the passenger seat. “I won’t mess anything up.”

Still frowning, he stepped back so I could slide in.

Someone with long legs had been sitting here. Skipper was tall. Had he been the last person in this seat?

I looked out the front window at the smudged gray cement block wall. What had Neanna seen? Had she sat at the overlook as the sun set over the valley? Could she see the trees, with the leaves now hard-green for summer? Could she see all the shades of green, or had it been too dark?

“When did she die? What time of day?”

“Best guess is sometime after midnight, roughly six hours before she was found. Food in her stomach, but no one to say when she last ate, so internal body temp is our best guess.”

“So it was dark.” I looked over at the Honda coupe’s dashboard. I’d never driven one of these—or even ridden in one.

“Were her headlights on?”

“Don’t know. Can check the report.”

I shook my head. “Just curious.”

I quit trying to imagine what she’d seen, what had been in her head. I studied the inside of the car. The dashboard, steering
wheel, doors, all the hard surfaces were dusted gray with powder. Even though the car was older and smaller than Fran’s sedan, with fewer gizmos, the fingerprint powder was the only dirt in the car.

“Can you show me exactly where she would’ve—held the gun?”

Rudy raised his right arm, using his finger to point behind his ear but not quite as low as his earlobe.

“Like this?” I tried to mimic him. He bent over and pushed my right elbow back, directing my finger at a sharper angle behind my ear.

“Of course, to hold the gun, her hand would’ve been about here, not with her finger jammed against her head.” He pulled my arm back a few inches. A sharp muscle spasm made my arm jerk out of his grasp.

“Where would her head have been?”

“On her shoulders?”

“Smarty. Was it on the headrest? Was she leaning forward? Was her arm resting here?” I patted the headrest of the passenger seat.

“Don’t know for certain.” He stooped over, his hands on his knees, and studied the seat. “From the looks of things, I’d say she was leaning back on the headrest.”

“Do you have your gun? Could we try it? Is it about the same size?”

He looked dubious.

“Just unload it. It’ll help to think it all through. Was she about my size?” The image of her small, pale hand in the crime scene photo flashed to mind.

“About. She might have weighed less.”

Never crossed Rudy’s mind that was something no female, however clinical, wanted to hear.

He unholstered his pistol, popped out the clip, and pulled back the slide to make sure no round had been chambered. He left it open. “Keep your finger off the trigger.”

Surrounded by the smell of stale blood, I was glad he was maniacally safety conscious.

I hooked my index finger into the trigger guard and tucked it safely behind the trigger, then hefted the pistol. Even without the clip full of bullets, it was an unwieldy weight.

“No, farther back.” Rudy pushed my elbow and tried to guide the muzzle to the sweet spot behind my ear.

“Oww!” My arm jerked forward in a self-protective reflex. “I don’t bend that way.”

Rudy studied me, then wrapped his hand around both the pistol and my hand. “Try this.”

He slid my thumb into the trigger guard, twisting and pulling just short of dislocating my shoulder. I could feel that the muzzle still wasn’t quite in the spot he’d pointed to earlier.

“Could you pull the trigger like that?” He let go of the gun. I tried squeezing the back of the trigger guard, but I couldn’t hold the heavy weapon. It slipped from my grasp. Rudy stood close enough to grab it before it slid out the open door onto the concrete floor.

“Maybe her arms were longer than mine.”

Rudy cradled the pistol in his hand, lost in thought.

“Maybe.” Rudy reached in his pocket for his gun clip, reloaded, and holstered his gun. The holster snap sounded loud in the quiet garage.

I leaned back against the headrest, studying the inside of the car. Except for the gore and its sick-sweet metallic odor, the car was immaculate. Worn, but free of clutter. Unlike mine, which still served as a second home as I shuttled between my parents’
house, my new apartment over the office, and the lake cabin. Would the cops have cleaned out any clutter, gum wrappers or old newspapers? Maybe.

Over the rearview mirror, the cloth lining on the roof was wrinkled. My gaze kept passing over it, noting it because it fell at a demarcation between where the fabric was blood-spattered and where it wasn’t.

I reached out to touch it, a reflex I have for straightening things. When I brushed the fabric with my fingertips, a four-inch section gaped open at the edge, quite the opposite from what I’d intended.

“Oops.” I started to tuck the fabric back under the plastic band around the windshield when I felt something underneath.

“Hey, be careful,” Rudy said. “Don’t mess that up.”

I ignored him, slid my index and middle finger into the opening, and pincerlike slid out a rectangle of stiff paper.

Until I saw it clearly in the light from the open door, I thought it was a torn piece of cardboard interliner.

Rudy leaned in the door. “What’s that?” He wasn’t going to mess up a case over a stupid chain of custody issue.

“The photograph.” I held it by the edges and turned it so Rudy could see.

“This has to be it,” I said. “The photo Neanna found stuck in her grandmother’s scrapbook.”

Rudy took it by the edges and stood, studying it.

“Who keeps a photo like this in the family photo album?” he said.

I now had a visual for the phrase “deathly pale.” Never again would I use that to describe something that gave a meek imitation of reality. Just as Fran had described her, Neanna’s aunt Wenda reclined across a stone bench, her feet on the ground. Twenty-three
years ago, the camera flash had reflected at just the proper angle, freezing her lifeless face in stark detail.

The only color on the photo came from tiny droplets of blood that had soaked through the headliner and left rusty dots on the paper.

Rudy said, “I’m more curious about where she got this than why she kept it.”

“Neanna’s grandmother had it.”

“So where did she get it?”

“Beats me.”

He stood outside the passenger door, his head bowed over the photo.

“I need to get Fran French to identify this. Can you get her into the office?”

“She’s back in Atlanta.”

He kept studying the photo. “Somehow this doesn’t look like a crime scene photo. Maybe I’m just used to looking at Lester Watts’s atrocities.”

“Maybe a news photographer snapped it.” I couldn’t imagine why, or why anyone would offer it to the victim’s mother. “Maybe that’s what they used to identify the body, so her grandmother didn’t have to endure viewing the body in person.”

“Maybe. We don’t let them keep the photos as souvenirs, though. Can we fax this to your client? Make sure this is Miss Lyles’s aunt?”

“Sure. Or we can scan and e-mail it.”

“Not on the equipment I have. You can do that?”

“Sure.” I swung my legs out the door and stood, careful not to touch anything. We were both smudged with graphite powder.

“Let’s go by your office and reproduce it,” Rudy said. “Then I’ll log this in with the file. Maybe give the guys who went over this car some lessons on where smart people hide things.”

“Dear Lord.” I remembered the photos he’d shown me at lunch. “Hiding things. Whoever tore up her trunk and her suitcase was looking for something.”

I looked at the photo Rudy held. “Looking for that.” My voice was almost a whisper.

“Probably so,” he said and reached down to lock the car door before he pushed it shut.

Wednesday

“It wasn’t exactly part of the scrapbook,” Fran said when I called after faxing the photo. “It was stuck in the front, just loose.”

“This was the only photo like this?”

“The only loose one. The newspaper articles were pasted in. Of course there were pictures in those, but no other loose photos.”