Racing the Devil (4 page)

Here, hold this
. She’d gotten my prints on both glasses.

Semen, hair, and fingerprints. While there were plenty of people who could have gotten prints and hair samples, she was the only one who’d had access to semen in quite a while.

But why?

How long had she been planning this perfect little murder?

I think a murder would be interesting
.

Had she chosen me to be her fall guy because I was convenient? Was I just the one she happened to pick up?

But if that was the case, how had she gotten my voice on the victim’s voice mail?

And who was the man with the beard? The elusive, abusive Ronnie? Had there ever even been a Ronnie?

I thought about the note she’d left.
I’m sorry
.

Sorry for what, I had wondered.

Now I knew.

I
WIPED A LINE
of perspiration from my forehead and left the motel on foot. My shirt was plastered to my back before I even made it out of the parking lot.

I made my next call from the diner across the street and ordered a pot of coffee to occupy me until my ride arrived. His name was Billy, like about a million other good ol’ boys from the South. I have personally known three Billy Rays, a Billy Don, a Billy Jack, a Billy Bob, two Billy Joes, and even, once, a Billy Bill. William Bill Burleson. It said so on his birth certificate.

My buddy’s name was William Mean, which had, in his army days, been shortened to the more descriptive (and more accurate) Billy Mean. In military fashion, he’d found himself called “Mean, William,” which eventually became Mean Billy, or sometimes even Mean Billy Mean.

Back then, he was shaped like a sparkplug, all bone and gristle under muscles packed hard as a buffalo’s. Now that bone and muscle was blanketed under fifty pounds of fat. But Billy was no prey animal. He’d been in Special Forces, and he still moved that way, dangerous beneath the flab, like a caged tiger.

He was three years younger than my father would have been, and back in the late sixties, had served two tours in Vietnam. Dad was Air Force and Billy was Army, but I wondered sometimes if their paths had ever crossed. There was no reason why they would have, but I wondered just the same.

Billy swears, and I believe him, that he hardly felt afraid at all in ‘Nam. Fear was such a constant presence that he hardly even noticed it. But when he got back home, all that fear crashed down on him like fifty tons of bricks.

He had night terrors. He was petrified of thunder. One afternoon, a woman spat at him as he was buying groceries. Another called him a rapist and a monster and a baby killer. Before long, he could hardly leave his own house.

There was no money. His wife moved out and took their two-year-old daughter with her, and while Billy said he couldn’t blame her, it only made the black depression worse.

One day, a buddy from his old platoon called up and said he had a plan to make them rich. It involved guns and a liquor store.

It was desperate and stupid, and Mean Billy knew it. But he was desperate himself. And besides, it served the commie-hippie-liberal assholes he’d gone to war for right.

The best thing to be said was that nobody died.

After six hard years at DeBerry Correctional Facility in Nashville, he got out with a Bachelor’s in Social Science, a handful of grant applications, and a
vision
. Within the year, he’d wrangled a warehouse down on Seventh Avenue and turned it into a shelter for homeless men, mostly ex-vets and ex-cons. He arranged jobs for them and provided transportation in a faded Chevy van on which one of his clients had painted a not-too-shabby replica of Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
. He called it the Dream-mobile.

His clients called it the Mean Machine.

Twenty minutes after I called him, he pulled up in it and honked the horn.

I paid my tab and went outside to catch my ride.

“Think you might announce us to the whole damn neighborhood?” I brushed a petrified French fry off the passenger seat and slid inside. After a few fruitless tugs at the seat belt, I gave up and consoled myself with the hope that he’d drive less like a bottle rocket than usual.

“Aw. Nobody’s watchin’.” He peeled out of the parking lot, dispelling my misguided optimism. “Now, tell me what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

“I wish I knew. Frank says they’ve got a boatload of evidence against me in this killing they had out at the Cedar Valley Motel night before last.” I told him about the hair, the prints, the tape, and the semen.

“Jesus, buddy. That’s almost enough to make me think you did it.”

“Don’t even joke around about that.” My tone was sharper than I’d intended.

“Well, who have you been giving semen samples to?” He tugged at his grizzled beard and laughed at his own joke, his ruddy face reddening to the shade of a country ham.

I shot him an annoyed look. “I know who planted the semen. I don’t know how they got the tape. I never met this woman, and I sure as hell never threatened to kill her.”

“Which, if you was gonna do, you wouldn’t have announced on tape.”

“Exactly.”

“Nashville’s full of actors, buddy. Maybe they just found someone who sounds like you.”

“Maybe.” It seemed unlikely, but if there was some other explanation, I had no idea what it might be.

We drove to Billy’s place and I followed him up a narrow stairwell to the efficiency apartment he’d built above the shelter. He jiggled the key in the lock until it caught, then kicked the door open and made a sweeping gesture toward the living room—sagging brown leather couch, frayed tartan La-Z-boy, scuffed coffee table, and a twenty-nine inch TV way too heavy on the green. His battered maple desk was jammed into one corner, piled high with bulging manila folders. The room smelled stale, like sour socks beneath a veneer of Pine-Sol.

“Welcome aboard, good buddy.
Mi casa es su casa
.”

“Gracias,”
I said, which was about the extent of my Spanish.

“I’ve got a couple of appointments downstairs. Grab yourself a beer and make yourself at home. Stay as long as you need to.”

He picked through the precariously balanced folders, eased out two fat files, and nudged the stacks back into place.

“It won’t be long,” I said. “Don’t want them looking at you as an accessory after the fact.”

“I’m already an accessory.”

“They can’t prove you knew I was wanted when you picked me up. In a day or so, there won’t be any question.”

His big shoulders hunched. “We’ll cross that river when we come to it. I owe you, boy, and I always pay my debts.”

The debt he was referring to was one of my first cases: finding his daughter, Cambria, and arranging a reconciliation. The first part was a cakewalk; people who aren’t hiding from anything are easy to find. The reconciliation was tougher. Cam hadn’t seen her dad since she was two, and the chip on her shoulder was about the size of a redwood.

In the end, she agreed to meet her father, and after a cool year, things had finally begun to warm up between them.

“Hell, Billy, you already paid for that, remember? Two hundred dollars a day, plus expenses.”

“Naw, man. You gave me back my little girl. That’ll never be paid back.”

He said he’d be gone until about four-thirty, then took his massive self downstairs. When he was gone, I helped myself to two aspirins and a Dr. Pepper, plugged my phone in on Billy’s charger, left a brief message on Frank Campanella’s answering machine, and settled in to figure out my options.

I knew I’d have to turn myself in sooner or later, but first I wanted to find out more about the woman I was supposed to have killed. Amanda Jean Hartwell. Amy. If I knew who she was, maybe I could determine who might have wanted her dead.

And why her murder had been pinned on me.

I still didn’t know why I’d been chosen. Had I just been at the wrong place at the wrong time, or did someone hold a grudge against me? There were plenty of candidates: guys whose insurance scams were derailed when I snapped photos of them lifting weights and dancing with their girlfriends, parents who’d lost custody of their children when embarrassing photographs surfaced, husbands who’d been caught with their pants down and lost half their assets in messy divorces.

Not to mention all the scumbags I’d helped put away while I was still on the force.

I grabbed a piece of paper and started jotting down names of people who might hate me enough to do this and be smart enough to pull it off.

By the time Billy got back, I had covered most of the sheet. Some of the names weren’t really names at all, but descriptions. “Scraggly reddish brown hair, scar on left cheek, arrested for burglary.” “Big guy, lightning bolt tattoo, arrested on suspicion of rape.” Some were nicknames: Ice Pick, Hammerhead, Crossbones, Blade.

I didn’t think any of the names would lead anywhere, but it was a place to start.

Billy ordered us a sausage pizza with double cheese, which we washed down with a couple of Heinekens while we watched the evening news.

Sure enough, my name was on it.

My gut lurched when they showed the victim’s picture. Dropping my pizza back into the box, I leaned forward for a closer look.

In the photo, Amy Hartwell stood in front of a Tudor-style stone house, her arms clasped around two young girls. Katrina and Tara, said the anchorwoman, ages twelve and seven. Amy’s hair and Tara’s were the same soft shade of golden-brown, like buttered toast. Katrina’s was as smooth and pale as corn silk.

They were all smiling.

The camera segued to an interview with the cleaning woman who had discovered the body. She was a buxom redhead in her fifties with a round, freckled face. Her hands, in her lap, twisted a frayed Kleenex into a corkscrew, and her eyes were swollen, rimmed with red.

“It was early, you know, and she didn’t have . . . Ms. Hartwell didn’t have . . . the ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the doorknob. So I used my key and went in . . . And I went in, and it was . . .” She stifled a sob. “There was a naked woman on the bed. Her legs were spread, like . . . like he . . . somebody . . . wanted her to be found that way.” She held the tissue to her nose and honked into it as the camera cut away to the reporter.

This time, they didn’t say I was wanted for questioning.

This time, they said I was a suspect.

I leaned over and flipped the channel to the Nashville station, where local celebrity Ashleigh Arneau was delivering the same news in a breathy, husky voice that made murder seem like seduction. She batted her eyes at the audience, wide blue eyes she insisted on calling “wisteria.”

On the screen behind her was a photograph of me with my eyes bulging and my mouth twisted in what was almost certainly a curse. I looked like a man with murder on his mind. In truth, I’d just dropped a hammer on my thumb.

A real Kodak moment.

I could imagine how Ashleigh must have salivated when she realized she had photos of a bona fide fugitive in her own personal archives.

“Aw, shit,” Billy said. “Not that bitch.”

“I have an idea,” I said.

“A bad idea. I can tell. You don’t even have to tell me what it is.”

“She can help me.”

He snorted. “Yeah, when Hell freezes over. Didn’t she help you enough already?”

“Billy . . .” I sighed. He was right. It was stupid. Of all the people in the world I shouldn’t trust, Ashleigh was at the top of the list. But she was also one of the few people in a position to help me out of the mess Heather had gotten me into.

Besides . . .

I punched the
off
button on the remote and said, “She owes me one.”

A
SHLEIGH ARNEAU AND
I met in high school. She was Ashley Arnold then. Head cheerleader, vice president of the student body (“president of student body vices,” was the joke), drama queen, and star reporter for the
Golden Bear Claw
student newspaper. We didn’t date back then, although we did a few shows together. In
The Crucible
, she played Abigail to my John Proctor, which might have been an omen of things to come.

But she was seeing a guy from MTSU, and I was dating a cute little junior who played clarinet in the band. The junior, Belinda Honeyman, was playing Goody Proctor, so there was little opportunity for conquest, even if either of us had been so inclined. By the time I ran into Ashleigh again, she was working as a reporter for a local TV station. She’d nose around the precinct house looking for a story, and I would spout whatever we’d been told to tell the press—usually “no comment.”