Impulse (11 page)
Dexter pushed open the door to his apartment and switched on the light. He looked at the clock on the bedside table and shook his head. Seventeen hours without a drink. That is a modern era record, he thought. He stepped over clothes scattered on the floor and made his way to the corner that served as a kitchenette, a badly scratched Formica-topped counter with a double hot plate, a tiny sink, and a mini-refrigerator beneath. He kept a bottle of scotch under the sink and it sang a love song to him. He bent over and pulled at the cabinet door, then stopped and stepped back. From harm’s way, he thought. He sat heavily on the edge of his bed. It had taken him hours to navigate his way home and his feet burned from too much walking. He glared at the cabinet door, daring it to open.
“Tomorrow. I am going to uncork and finish you. Tomorrow will be a head buster, but not today. I am going to complete one sober day, if only to see if I can.”
He stood and retraced his steps to the door, kicked it shut, and contemplated the mess on the floor. Clothing, newspapers, and brown paper bags, the long thin kind designed to hold fifth and quart-sized bottles—the kind that come filled from liquor stores. A half dozen were strewn about the thin carpet like fallen leaves on an October lawn. One by one he picked up his clothes and stuffed them in a laundry bag. He collected papers, bags, and cartons and crammed them into a trash bag which he then deposited in the hallway outside his door. He found a rag, moistened it at the sink, averting his eyes from the cabinet door below, and wiped down counters, walls, window sills, and his cramped bathroom. He made up the bed with clean sheets. He kept at his house cleaning for hours, working furiously, straightening, scrubbing, and sorting. Finally his mania gave way to exhaustion and he collapsed on his bed. He fell asleep before he could turn off the light.
***
Barbara Thomas sat up and gathered the blankets around her. “He’s not back yet.” Her husband moaned and rolled over. “Bob,” she said, her volume increasing with each word, “Dad has not come in yet.”
“What time is it?” he mumbled and tried to make out the numbers on the alarm clock. Without his glasses the LED images blurred together.
“Two o’clock.” Her voiced was edged equally with anger and fear.
“He’s probably out with his old buddies, Barb—big reunion,
auld lang syne,
and all that. Go back to sleep.”
“I can’t go
back
to sleep. I never got to sleep in the first place. He’s not with buddies, Bob, he’s with that woman.”
“Okay, he’s with a woman. What’s the problem?”
“What’s the problem? Bob, what about my mother? He can’t just forget her. We don’t know what happened to her, and he could….What’s that woman want with him, anyway?”
“What any woman wants, I expect.”
“Men, it’s all you think about. Women aren’t like that. Dad might want to, you know…whatever. But she’s got something else on her mind, I’m telling you. Besides, they’re both pushing seventy.”
“It’s none of our business, Barb.”
“It is my business. He’s my father and he’s old and easily duped by any flashy woman with an eye to get his money or whatever she’s after.”
“Barb, be sensible. Your father is perfectly capable of taking care of himself. He’s not suffering from dementia and has never, in my experience, done anything rash or foolish, and I don’t think I’d describe Rosemary Mitchell as flashy.”
“It’s the boys’ money, Bob. That’s what she wants. They will need it for college when he dies. What if she gets her hooks into him? Women do that, you know.”
“Women? I thought it was only one woman. My guess is she probably has money of her own. I know George Mitchell’s accountant and I think he left her pretty well off. Go to sleep.”
“But—”
“Barb, listen to me. It’s not the boys’ money and it’s not your money. It’s his. He earned it over fifty long years. If he wants to squander it, that’s his privilege.”
She got out of bed and turned on him. “How can you say that? Do you think you will ever earn enough to take care of your family? No, you have to disappear every whipstitch to go to ‘work.’ Do you want them to go to public school? You think the state university system is going to get them to the top? Well, I won’t let that happen. You can roll over and watch your children’s future slip away, but not me.”
“I’m doing my best, Barbara, and I could use some help here, instead of this constant harping.”
“Your best isn’t enough, is it?”
She flounced out the door. He heard the guest room door slam shut. Any hope he had of a decent night’s sleep was caught up in the silence that followed.
***
Brad Stark had had a bad day and when it didn’t look like it could get any worse, Felix Darnell had called him in. Judith had kept him jumping around like a puppet on a string most of the day, alternately teasing and excoriating him. She would coo and purr like a Persian cat and just when he thought their relationship had returned to some resemblance of normalcy, she unsheathed her claws and left him hurt and bleeding. As if that weren’t enough, that night he had to hop from one reunion class party to another. He missed most of the people he wanted to speak to, and the ones he did manage to buttonhole put him off with vague smiles and “Send me something in writing, Brad.”
He turned and studied his wife. She’d insisted they make love when they got home, although what transpired seemed more contest than connubial. Now, she lay on the bed, sprawled across its width like a child, face as innocent as a baby. But twenty minutes ago that same face had been contorted with excitement. She loomed over him, teeth bared, hair damp and flying wildly, as she shook her head back and forth and spat out commands like a mad drill sergeant.
That had been the characteristic that attracted him to her when they first met. Her willingness to take risks and the ferocity of her love making intoxicated him. He felt they lived on the sexual edge. But now, settled in a community like Scott, where everyone’s life was an open book, the very thing that once possessed him like a narcotic, now frightened him. The thrill had been numbed with the passage of time. He wondered if she didn’t need some sort of psychological help. The sheets had fallen off the bed. He pulled them up and covered her. She hadn’t bothered to put her night gown back on. He stepped out onto his mini-porch and dug out his last cigarette. What to do?
Darnell had thrown Meredith Smith up at him—that and Brad’s poor performance on that project to date. He had not closed the deal. He had not even put the deal on the table. In fact, he’d missed Smith completely. And Smith planned to leave for Arizona the next day. What was Brad going to do about that, Darnell wanted to know.
He told Darnell he managed to persuade Smith to stay over a few days. He said he’d personally convinced him to study the mystery of the missing boys and perhaps write another book with that as its theme. Naturally he, Brad, would be with him and there would be time to work on the gift. Smith, he’d declared, would not commit to a donation as big as the one they were after unless he had time to think. But, by demonstrating the school’s support for his work, etc. etc….Of course, Brad made most of it up, but Darnell couldn’t know about that.
“Are you sure it’s wise to pursue the missing boys mystery, Stark?” Darnell had sounded worried. “That tragic chapter is closed. Do we really want to open it up again? It would mean the press, all those reporters, TV. It can’t do us any good. Think of the families of those poor boys.”
“Well, Dr. Darnell, you’re quite right, as usual.” Brad began to backpedal, “I’ll just make it my business to see that he doesn’t succeed. In the end, there will be no story. The past is the past.” Yes, indeed. The last thing Brad needed was for that business to come back and haunt him—haunt them all. Now there would be no resolution. Not now, not ever.
And, if it turned out Smith did, in fact, leave for Arizona on Sunday, well, he couldn’t be held responsible for that. These old guys were not exactly the most reliable people, after all. But to be on the safe side, he’d have to get hold of Smith first thing in the morning and convince him to make good on his promise to look into the disappearance. At least long enough for him to make a pitch.
Judith rolled over, spilling the sheets back on the floor. He thought he saw her eyelids flicker. He decided to sleep in the guest room.
***
Rosemary stopped talking when she realized Frank’s breathing had become much too regular. She placed the paper in her hand on the coffee table and turned to him. His head had slumped forward. Eyes closed, he dozed peacefully at the end of the couch.
Poor baby. He’s had a big day.
“What do I do now?”
Put him to bed?
“Hush.”
She yawned, stretched, and considered her options. Should she wake him? And if so, should she do it now or later? And if later, how much later? She decided to let him doze for a while. She stood, adjusted a pillow so that he could lean back.
“Frank?” she said softly and shook his shoulder. “Frank.” Louder. His eyes snapped open.
“I’m okay. What were you saying?”
“You were asleep.”
“No, just drifted off there for a second.”
“You were dead to the world, my friend. Now you have two choices: Since I don’t like to drive late at night, you can take my car and go back to your daughter’s, or you can spend the night here. Either way, I’m beat and going to bed.”
What are you up to, Lady? This will be three nights in a row for the two of you here in the house.
“I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said, sleepily, confused.
“Actually, I wasn’t talking to you,” she said.
He sat up and looked around. “There’s someone else here?”
“In a way. I’ll tell you about it some other day. Your decision.” She dropped the car keys on the table. Frank yawned and his eyelids crashed again. She found an afghan, put his feet up on the couch, and covered him. She watched him for another minute and then, certain he would not awaken, at least not soon, she put out the lights, and disappeared into the shadows at the foot of the stairs.
“Ledezma?”
“Yeah, who’s this?” he rasped. The clock read six
A.M.
“It’s Barnett. You know, I work the eleven to seven shift at the Medical Examiner’s office.”
“Right, okay. Sorry, Barnett, it’s Sunday and I’m not quite awake yet. What’s up?”
“You still working the Smith case, the one where the old lady—”
“Yeah, for now, anyway. That could change in a week though.”
“No kidding? I guess the brass wants to put the old files on ice, right?”
“Something like that. So what’ve you got?”
“Maybe nothing, maybe you caught a break. You said I should call if anything turned up, you know. So when I get the paper work, I’m thinking of you right away.”
“Right, thanks. What paper work?”
“What we have here is a body. Well, not a body, a skeleton mostly, but it’s a woman, for sure, and the doc says fifty to seventy years old and in the desert at least three years. Could be your dame.”
Ledezma slipped out of bed and started dressing. This could be it, he thought. Finally, a break. “How’d she die?”
“Somebody put a bullet right through the old brain box.”
“Bingo. Don’t do a thing until I get there.”
“No problem, Sergeant. You don’t, by any chance, have a copy of her dental records, do you? The doc says we’re stuck until Monday because the dentist’s office is closed and we don’t have a warrant anyway.”
“I’ve got them. By the way, where did they find her?”
“Out with the saguaros and the snakes.”
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
***
Ledezma did not like the morgue. The place gave him the creeps. It smelled of chemicals and other things he didn’t want to identify. He recognized formaldehyde from his days in biology lab, and the clove oil. When things got really ripe, they’d use clove oil to cover the scent. He tried not to think about the sweet rotting odor that served as a kind of olfactory pedal point to the rest. He considered himself a pretty tough guy. He’d seen his share of gore and body parts in various stages of decay in his time, but the morgue always threw him. Somehow, to collect all that human garbage in one place seemed obscene.
He looked around the room. McMicken used a morgue set up in an old building next to the county medical examiner. The town struggled to keep up with the explosive growth and coincident increase in the homicide rate, so they expanded as best they could. There wasn’t much to see. The room had the predictable white tiles on the walls and tiers of refrigerated drawers to hold the bodies, each with its identifying card slot. He’d pulled one of those drawers once and vowed he’d never do it again. He had just joined the force then. His squad sent him to the morgue to identify a body. What he didn’t know was one of the officers had been put in the drawer and covered with a sheet. When he opened the drawer, the cop sat up and moaned. He cleared the morgue and the building in something like four seconds flat.
Bones were laid out on a stainless steel table. A steel bucket was positioned on the floor at one end. Someone, the medical examiner probably, had begun to arrange them in order. He would count them first to make sure they were all there. Then he would try to retrieve some DNA to confirm the ID. He’d arrange the bones this way and that to make up a story about how the person had died. Ledezma shivered, not just from the chill air—they kept the temperature down, like working in a refrigerator—but because he secretly feared the place.
Barnett, the ghoul who helped the ME, stood a few paces away, waiting. He was a messy man wearing a stained tan lab coat over an equally stained tee shirt. He had hair that had started out as a widow’s peak but male pattern baldness sent his forehead up and back. Only the peak remained, a thin greasy brown smear of hair clinging to his forehead like a drowning rat. Ledezma contemplated with distaste Barnett’s large, pitted nose, his slouching stance and wary, sly expression. He felt about him in the same way as he felt about the room; he didn’t like either of them for the same reasons. But Barnett served a purpose. Ledezma peeled a twenty off his roll and put it in Barnett’s palm. He got a yellow crooked-toothed grin by way of thanks. Ledezma turned back to the body, or what was left of it.
Bits of fabric and metal had been stuffed into plastic bags. Ledezma picked one up and peered through the plastic, a buckle of some sort, too small to be from a belt. He didn’t recognize much else, khaki that might have come from a pair of shorts or slacks, some denim and coins. He sifted through the pile looking for personal belongings. Nothing. Curious.
“What’s this?” he said pointing to a pile of bleached canvas on the next table.
“That’s what covered her, probably why they never spotted her on the flyovers. It was the same color as the ground, see?”
He flipped a corner of the material, noted the bit of white trim on one edge, and then turned his attention back to the bones. Forensics he left to others, but he knew a bullet hole when he saw one. He moved to the head and inspected the skull. He took a new pencil from his pocket and inserted it in the eye socket, then rolled the skull on its side. He peered at the shattered bone at the back, then at the larger hole in the front. If he remembered right, the entry wound indicated she took the shot in the back of the head, like an execution, almost. He frowned. That didn’t fit, but he’d wait for the ME to fill him in.
“Where’s her wedding band?” he asked.
Barnett shrugged. “None came in so I guess the crime scene guys who picked up the body didn’t find one, or they decided that since she was dead she didn’t need it anymore.”
“No ring, no jewelry at all?”
“Nada.”
He rolled the skull back in place. The ME did not like people tinkering with his work-ups. Ledezma scanned the rest of the skeleton looking for breaks, anything out of the ordinary.
“Healthy sixty, plus-minus, female,” the ME boomed from the door. “Don’t touch.”
The medical examiner was a big man. He stood something over six seven, probably went three hundred and fifty pounds and had one of those voices you expect to hear on an opera stage. He didn’t talk, he projected. Ledezma jerked his hand away from the skeleton like a kid caught with his hand in a cookie jar.
“Are you Ledezma?” the ME intoned, a little
recitative
before the big aria.
“Yeah, Sergeant Ledezma.”
“Your case, isn’t it?”
Ledezma resisted the impulse to sing. “Yes, it is.”
“You have the dental records?”
“I do.” He handed the papers to the ME, who looked at them briefly, then, Hamlet-like, picked up the skull and stared at its teeth.
“Need dental forensics in here for the official determination, but I’d say this is your woman. The amalgam filling is the clue, see….” He pointed to a molar. “Hardly anybody does amalgams unless they don’t show or their dental plan is a bad one. It’s an old one and in the right place. And there is a gold crown in the back. Yep, this is your woman.”
Ledezma nodded his head. Now it begins.
“How’d she die?” he asked. He knew, but he wanted the ME to have the privilege of telling him. The ME snapped on a pair of latex gloves.
“Big bullet in the base of the skull just above the occipital foramen, see?” He held the skull so that Ledezma could look at the hole again. “Then it comes out here in the frontal bone right where it joins with the parietals.”
“That means she got popped in the back of the head,” Barnett volunteered. The ME shot him a withering look and Barnett shrunk an inch or two and skulked away.
“Shot in the back of the head, as our Deaner says, in the nape of the neck, bullet comes out through her forehead. Poses an interesting problem. I wish I’d been there at the scene.”
“What kind of problem?” Ledezma did not want a problem. He wanted a nice clean homicide. Shoot and drop.
“Well. It means that to figure out the who, see, I need to know the how. Your suspect—the husband—describe him. He’s not a dwarf, is he, or a jockey, a short guy?”
“No, average build, for an old guy, five eleven—”
“See, there’s the problem.”
“I don’t see.”
“She took the bullet here,” he said, pointing to the back of his own head with his left forefinger, “and it came out here.” Right forefinger high on his forehead. “Now, she would stand five six or five seven, so if he shoots her he has to be kneeling on the ground or she has to be standing on a stepladder, you see?”
“No. Why on a stepladder?”
The ME picked up the skull again and, taking the pencil from Ledezma’s pocket, ran it through the two openings. He held the skull level and Ledezma saw the angle it made. The pencil pointed at the ceiling. A man Smith’s height would have shot level or down.
“He’s sitting on the ground.”
“Possible, but think about it. If you’re going to shoot someone, are you going to sit down and shoot her in the back of the head or are you going to stand and take careful aim?”
“Stand, I guess.” Ledezma’s heart sank. “Suicide?”
“No, rule that out. There’s no way someone can twist their arm around and shoot themselves in the back of the head like that. Why would they even try?”
“So Smith is out, too?”
“Oh no, it’s just the bullet holes present a problem. Problems are what we specialize in here, Sergeant. No, of course she wasn’t on a ladder. Silly idea. I just mention that to show the difficulty of shooting her standing up and getting this wound track.”
“Doc, I appreciate the lecture, but could we get to the punch line?”
“Patience, Ledezma, patience. See, if you really want to nail your man, you need to go through this with me. Otherwise some smart lawyer will shred you on the stand.”
“Sorry. So show me.”
“Right. We have two possibilities. First, the shooter has the gun in his hand and presses it flat against the back of her neck like this.” He made a pistol with his hand and pressed it against Ledezma’ neck. “Then, bang. But it’s not a natural way of holding a gun. Now if the victim was lying on the ground, then you could get this track. Say she’s lying on her stomach, face in the sand. He’s at her feet.” The ME took a position at the foot of the steel table, pointed at the skull with his forefinger, and cocked his thumb and fired. “Bang.”
“So you think that’s it?”
“It works, but I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” Ledezma shifted from foot to foot. His low tolerance for the morgue and its aroma began to creep up on him. In a minute or two, he’d have to leave. Leave or heave. He wanted the ME to stop showing off and get on with it.
“Well, let’s consider the normal reaction one has lying face down in the sand. Do you stick your nose in it or do you turn your head to one side or the other?”
“Turn my head.”
“Right again, so the track would be behind one ear and out through the temporal or opposite parietal. Not the case here.”
“Finish this for me, Doc, I’m fading fast here.”
“Okay. Here’s how it must have happened. She is kneeling. Look at these photographs.” He pulled a sheaf of pictures from an envelope. “This is how they found her. Her knees are together and turned a little to the left, legs angled out a little. See that? And her arms are under her, hands together.”
“Look, you’re the expert, but if she’s kneeling and he shoots her from behind, the bullet would go in high and come out low, the opposite of what we have here.”
“Very good. So what conclusion do you draw from that?”
“I don’t know. Just tell me.”
“Okay. She’s kneeling. Look at the picture. Hands together, no sign of them being tied, and—this is the good part—she has her head bowed. She’s praying. Bang, bullet in here, out there.”
“She’s praying?”
“That’s what it looks like. For mercy, for release, for her killer perhaps.”
Praying, for god’s sake—yes, for God’s sake, indeed. That ought to pop loose some resources. The scenario worked. It had to be. A poor woman kneeling and praying to her god and he blows her away, the son of a….“Get me the confirmation on the ID,” Ledezma snapped, “pronto. And give me your best guess on the caliber of the gun.”
Ledezma almost ran to the door, his cell phone out and to his ear.
“I need a team of divers,” he said. “Yes, today. Okay, tomorrow. And metal detectors, the kind that work under water.” The door’s glass rattled dangerously as it banged shut behind him.
“He didn’t ask me about the canvas,” the ME said. He frowned and moved the bones forming the left ring finger over to the right. “He should have asked me about the canvas.”
