Mourning Gloria (21 page)

Was she crying for her family? Was she mourning the girl? Was she mourning herself, still alive, still breathing, but maybe not for long? Was she mourning all of them, all the sad, forgotten dead? She didn’t know. All she knew was that it was the first time she had cried since she’d made herself stop crying all those years before.

But she couldn’t make herself stop now, so she cried until the pain in her head became so brutal that she couldn’t cry any longer, and she fell into an exhausted sleep that was lit by the fires of nightmare.

Until a few years ago, the Adams County Sheriff’s Department was housed in a nineteenth-century building on one corner of the courthouse square. The old place had its problems, to be sure: small rooms, gloomy halls, antique restrooms, limited parking, even bats in the belfry—Mexican free-tailed bats whose guano created a terrific stink that made the tourists complain. But it also boasted beautifully polished wooden floors, dark oak woodwork, and tall windows with stained glass panels at the top and a view of the courthouse kittycornered across the street. It was a genteel place, built in a time when life was lived at a mannerly pace. When you came into the office, it was like stepping back into the old, slow days. People smiled at you. They knew your name and they said hello. They were friendly.

There’s nothing friendly about the new building on the outskirts of town. It’s a two-story gray concrete bunker with few exterior windows, built to withstand almost any imaginable twenty-first-century assault—a terrorist’s car bomb rammed through the front door, maybe, or a Stinger missile attack by unfriendly agents from a neighboring county. You have to show your driver’s license to the grim-faced guard at the door, and once he’s let you inside, you might wish he’d told you to go away. It’s not a comfortable place. The hallways and rooms all have the same gray-white walls, gray tile floors, gray steel desks, gray filing cabinets, everything washed in the chilly, featureless glare of fluorescent lighting.

I flashed my driver’s license at the guard and waited while he noted my name and TDL number in his big black book and gave me a Visitors badge, so I wouldn’t be shot on sight. Classified and properly tagged, I made my way to Blackie’s office at the far end of the corridor, passing staff offices as I went. All the people I saw were wearing dour expressions and several of them had their heads together, whispering. I guessed that they had heard the shocking news. Sheriff Blackwell was hanging up his star. It was the end of three generations of Blackwell law enforcement in Adams County, the end of an era. It was also the beginning of a political storm, and they didn’t like the idea one bit.

The sheriff’s door was open and I rapped with my knuckles on the jamb. He looked up from a pile of papers, a Coke can at his elbow. There was no computer on his desk. Blackie uses one when he has to, but he says he doesn’t want to be chained to it.

“Mornin’, China,” he drawled, and leaned back in his chair. “Sheila get you fixed up last night?”

“No, but she straightened me out,” I said. Before he could speak, I added, “Sheila told me, Blackie. About your quitting.” I raised both eyebrows. “Imagine my surprise.”

“I’ll bet,” he said dryly. “You’re not the only one who’s surprised.”

“I’m sure. Anyway, I passed the word along to McQuaid on the phone last night. He’ll be back today. He said he wanted to talk to you, when you have some time.”

“Yeah, sure.” He ran a hand through his buzz cut, looking rueful. “I told the folks here this morning. Hard to do. Really hard.”

“I’ll bet,” I said sympathetically. Blackie has always been completely dedicated to his job and to his staff, and the people he works with know it. Leaving must feel like he’s letting them down—and letting them in for months of the crazy political chaos that can happen only in Texas, with candidates tossing their Stetsons into the ring and dancing their two-party fandangos. It won’t be a pretty sight.

He threw his pencil down on the desk. “The thing is, Sheila and I know we’d never make it work if both of us stayed in this business. So . . .” He lifted his shoulders and let them fall.

“So you had to make a choice. Either you quit, or she quits.”

“Yeah. That was pretty much it.”

I grinned. “I ain’t never gonna tell how you two decided which was which, Blackie. But personally, I think flipping a coin is pretty cool. Fair, too.”

“Only rational way to do it,” he said, answering my grin. “So what can I do for you this morning, China?”

“You can let me see the crime scene photos that you showed to the intern from the newspaper on Monday. And tell me about your interview with her.”

He tilted his head, his eyes curious. “Oh, yeah? Why?”

“Because nobody knows where she is. I wondered if there was something in those photos or the interview that might have . . .” I shrugged, not wanting to finish the sentence. “I guess maybe I’m clutching at straws. Did Sheila tell you why I called you last night?”

“Yeah. There was a phone call on your answering machine. Got you worried. The girl still hasn’t turned up?”

“No. Her roommate’s out of town. Hark went by her house and it was locked up tight. I phoned there again this morning and got no answer—no answer on her cell, either.”

“And you think this has something to do with this arson-homicide?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. All I know is that nobody’s heard from her. Okay if I see the photos?”

He gave me a dubious squint. “You sure you want to?”

“No. But I figure if anybody has the right to see them, I do. I was the one who made the 9-1-1 call. I have the scorched eyebrows to prove it.”

“Yeah. But these photos are . . .” He broke off and pushed his chair back. “Well, come on, then. Down the hall.”

The computer was on a table in a small library. He pulled out a chair for me, booted the machine, and brought up a photo of the victim in gruesome color. “I told you so,” he said softly, and stepped back.

Until now, the dead woman had been only a compelling voice, an awful idea. But the photograph gave her an inescapable reality, although the body was so grotesquely burned that I couldn’t have told that it was a woman. The charred corpse lay on a charred sofa in the rubble of a charred room, hands and feet bound, writhing in the throes of an awful death. I looked, looked away, and looked back, forcing myself to confront the almost incomprehensible fact of her pain.

“There’s more,” Blackie said. “Click on the arrow at the bottom.”

I clicked through a series of two dozen photographs of the victim and more of the blistered area around the trailer, most of the photos taken at the eastern end and around back, where the accelerant had apparently been applied. By the time I’d looked at all of them, I was feeling sick.

“Ugly,” Blackie said flatly. “That was the reporter’s word for it. Ugly.”

“Yes,” I said. I’d seen dead bodies before and I had been there when this happened. I had been at least halfway prepared for the awfulness, but still it was hard. It must have been harder still for Jessica, whose sister and parents had died by fire.

I navigated back to the photo of the area where the accelerant had been applied and studied it for a minute. “What did the arsonist use?”

“Coleman camp stove fuel, we think. We found three empty gallon cans not far from the trailer.” He clicked the mouse a couple of times and an image of three cans came up on the screen.

“Camp stove fuel,” I exclaimed. “That’s what I thought I smelled, Blackie, the night of the fire! I think I told the dispatcher. You can probably hear that on the 9-1-1 tape.” I frowned. “Three cans? That would be an unusual purchase, wouldn’t it? I mean, three gallons would keep a Boy Scout camp in business all year. Somebody might remember selling that much.”

“Yeah, but the brand is commonly available. Walmart, Academy, sporting goods stores. Probably not all bought at the same place or the same time, either. A gallon here, a gallon there. We’re checking, but I’m not betting on turning up a lead.”

“Fingerprints on the cans?”

“Several, smudged, nothing usable.” He pointed to a burned patch of ground in the photo. “The arsonist piled up some trash and branches next to the trailer skirting, right here. Then doused the whole place with it and hauled ass. Must’ve finished up just before you got there. Took a risk of being seen. The place isn’t that far off the road.”

“But there’s not that much traffic out that way,” I said. “And the fire could’ve smoldered for a while, until it got going good.” I clicked forward a couple of photos to a print of a shoe, fairly sharp. “Where’d this come from?”

“The area where the accelerant was applied. Looks like the arsonist spilled some, softening the ground, then stepped in it. Lucky for us. Unlucky, though, because while this square-and-diamond pattern is unique to the brand—Converse—the brand is ubiquitous. The shoes have been sold for decades, every shoe with the same pattern. This one looks like a size ten.”

“A man,” I said thoughtfully. “Or a woman with big feet.” I leaned forward, studying the photo. “Did you see this?” I pointed to a barely visible scar that slashed diagonally across the four bars in the heel pattern.

“Yeah. Here’s another view.” He clicked again, and the scar was magnified several times. “The slash is about an eighth of an inch deep. Looks like the wearer stepped on a blade of some sort.” He clicked again, to a higher magnification. “It happened a while ago, too. The edges are worn. See here?” He took a pencil out of his pocket and pointed. “And here.”

“I see.” I looked up at him. “What kinds of questions did Jessica ask you?”

“The standard stuff. Identification of the victim, leads we’re following, that kind of thing. I gave her what we’d already released, more or less, and a couple of quotes. She made some notes and asked to take a photo of me for her story, to which I said no. She said Hark would probably run her article with the photos she’d taken at the scene. And that was that.”

I hadn’t expected much, so I wasn’t disappointed. “Anything new on the victim’s identification?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. Did Donna Fletcher tell you that she brought in her sister’s hairbrush for a possible match?” When I nodded, he said, “The DNA will take a while, and the dental’s lost somewhere in the prison system. I didn’t mention that to the reporter. So keep it close, please.”

“How about the gun?” At his inquiring look, I added, “I heard about that from Donna, too. Small-caliber handgun, she said.”

He nodded. “There’s nothing new on the gun, but the coroner recovered the bullet from the victim’s body.”

“Donna also said she was shown a bracelet with initials on it. G.G.?”

“Right.” He clicked to another enlargement, the engraved letters faintly visible through a sooty black film. “Of course, there’s no way of knowing whether the initials are the victim’s. Here’s the bracelet. Those initials mean anything to you?”

“No, sorry,” I said regretfully.

“Well, then, that’s the lot. That’s all we’ve got.” He bent over and logged out.

“Thanks.” I got up from the chair. “Oh, there is something,” I said. “I stopped at the trailer earlier this morning to have a look around. While I was there, somebody else stopped. A neighbor, Becky Sanders. She mentioned that she noticed a red Mustang convertible—new—parked at one end of the trailer sometime recently, behind the trees.”

“Oh, yeah?” Blackie frowned. “Sanders? I sent a deputy out there to canvass the neighborhood, but I didn’t see that name in his report.”

“She lives about a mile up the road. Sanders’ Animal Services. It might be worthwhile sending somebody back out there to talk to her. Turns out that she was keeping an eye on the trailer because she was thinking her sister might want to rent it. She said she even talked to Scott Sheridan about its availability. Anyway, she noticed the Mustang because it looked out of place. She might come up with a few more details when she’s had some time to think about it.”