Sacrificial Ground (22 page)

“I don't care what it looks like,” Karen said.

“There's nothing to see,” Frank said insistently. “We didn't even find footprints. The ground was too hard from the drought. A little brush was broken, where he dragged her. That's all.”

“I don't care,” Karen said. “I want to go there.”

“All right.”

“When can you take me?”

“We could go now, if you like,” Frank told her.

Karen nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I think I would.”

During the long ride downtown, Karen sat silently beside him. Her face, as he glanced at it from time to time, appeared almost blue in the light, and just beneath it, he could see the same features, muted and less radiant, but clearly visible nonetheless, which others had seen, and probably adored, in her younger sister. And yet, to Frank, Karen's beauty seemed deeper and more completed. There were faint creases about her eyes, and here and there in the deep black of her hair, he could see a strand or two of gray twining upward like a flower, which gave her a beauty that was beyond the scope of youth, larger, richer, more to be desired.

“I went out to the lot myself one night,” Frank said, as he turned the car onto Peachtree.

She looked at him. “Alone?”

“Yes.”

“To do what?”

“I don't know. To take it in, I guess.”

“Take it in?”

“To see if I could feel something.”

She turned back toward the street, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. “But you seem so meticulous. That little notebook. You're always writing in it.”

“Yes, I am.”

“So what did you expect to ‘feel'?” Karen asked.

“Her death. Maybe her life. Something.”

“And did you feel anything?”

“No.”

“Then I probably won't feel anything either,” Karen told him.

“No, with you it may be different,” Frank said. “You were her sister. In one way or another, you've always been together. Something might be jarred loose. I've seen it happen. People suddenly remember some little fact or incident they hadn't thought of before. It happens all the time.”

He turned off Peachtree and headed toward Glenwood. The glitter of the city fell behind them and the other world of squat brick buildings swept in around them like a wave.

“The day Angelica died,” Frank said after a moment, “did you notice any change in her?”

“No.”

“A sudden coldness or harshness, anything like that?”

“Nothing at all.”

Frank turned the car onto Glenwood and edged it over toward the vacant lot.

“There it is,” he said. He stopped the car at the edge of the field. The lot rested to the left, its shrubs and weeds utterly motionless in the summer air.

“Oh, God,” Karen whispered.

Frank pointed toward the middle of the field. “We found her over there. She was lying on her back.” He looked at Karen. “We have a witness who saw someone carry a large bundle to the same area. Right now, we think it was a carpet, and that Angelica's body was rolled up in it.”

Karen bowed her head slightly. “It's still so hard to believe.”

“Do you want to get out?”

“Yes.”

They got out of the car and walked to the edge of the field. The air was thick with the day's lingering heat, and in the streetlight, Frank could see a thin line of perspiration as it beaded on Karen's upper lip.

“Follow me,” he said. “I'll show you exactly where I found her.”

Together they waded slowly out through the thick brush. The surrounding streets were quiet, except for Glenwood, where the night traffic continued in a steady stream.

Finally, they reached the place where Angelica's body had been left.

“Here,” Frank said. “She was on her back. And her hair was spread out around her head. I believe her killer arranged it that way.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because if he'd just laid the body down, her hair would have been beneath her head,” Frank said. He stooped down to the ground and moved his hand in a circular motion. “Instead, it was all spread out around her.”

“What kind of night was it?” Karen asked.

“Like this one.”

“No wind?”

“No wind.”

“Then we can find out for sure.”

“How?”

“My hair is like Angelica's,” Karen said, “so all you have to do is lay me down and see how my hair falls.”

Frank walked over and very slowly lifted her into his arms. Then he bent forward and lowered her softly onto the ground. Her hair fell beneath her head and gathered there like a pillow.

“Like you thought,” Karen said.

Frank nodded. “Yes.” He could still feel the weight of her body in his arms, and for an instant he thought it came from his desire, but then, suddenly, it faded, and he could feel the moment of Angelica's death moving through him like a steady, electric charge. He stiffened.

“What's wrong?” Karen asked as she got to her feet.

“Nothing,” Frank said, “nothing at all. Let's go.”

18

“S
orry to hear about your father, Frank,” Caleb said as Frank returned to the office the next morning.

Frank nodded quickly and sat down at his desk. He could feel his energy building again, and he wanted to take it at its peak. “Fill me in on everything.”

“Well, the department didn't exactly let things go stale while you were gone.”

“I didn't expect them to.”

“And Gibbons, he was hot to trot the whole time. I figure that if you hadn't got back today, they'd of turned it all over to him.”

“What did they do?” Frank asked.

“Well, the first thing they wanted to do was arrest Stan,” Caleb said.

“Based on what?”

“They'd blood-typed the fetus Angelica was carrying,” Caleb said, “and it was the same as Stan's. Gibbons was hot to move on that.”

“What happened?”

“Brickman wouldn't buy it,” Caleb said. “Too circumstantial. Gibbons said they could use it to break a confession out of the kid. But Brickman said no.”

“Good for him.”

“Brickman thinks the daddy theory is all wrong,” Caleb said. “He thinks it's a drug thing. Maybe a burn that went real bad.”

“Any evidence of that come up?”

“No.”

“What about Davon Little?”

“Nothing to connect him but that car.”

“Anything in that?”

“Not a hair. Lab said they'd never seen a car that clean. Little did everything but vacuum the exhaust pipe. After the lab boys got back to me, I asked Little if he'd scrubbed the car. He said yes.”

“So there was nothing in it at all?” Frank asked unbelievingly.

“Frank, if all we had to go on was what we found in that car, we'd have to swear that nobody but Davon Little had ever been in it.”

“Anything else?”

“I checked out the kid.”

“Clean?”

“As a whistle,” Caleb said. “Good grades, fair athlete, all-around nice boy.”

“So we're back at square one.”

“Not exactly,” Caleb said. “Because that kid did give us a little something to go on.”

“What?”

“The fact that Angelica seemed to know the Southside.”

“Yeah,” Frank said. “I talked to Karen about that.”

“Karen?”

“Karen Devereaux.”

“When did you talk to her?”

“Last night,” Frank said, as matter-of-factly as he could.

Caleb smiled slightly. “Oh.” He cleared his throat softly. “And what did … uh, Miss Devereaux have to say?”

“She had no idea that Angelica knew about any part of town other than around West Paces Ferry.”

“Which makes it not one bit less odd that she did, right, Frank?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would Angelica know her way around Grant Park?”

“Caleb, if we knew that, I think we'd know a lot more.”

“Me, too,” Caleb said. “And the only thing I can figure is maybe drugs.”

“And where would you go with that?”

“I already took it a little ways,” Caleb said. “While you were back home, I went over to Northfield and talked to a few of the kids around there. They were a little jumpy at first, but after a while they started talking. Pot came up, then other things, like cocaine.”

“What'd they say?”

“Well, practically everybody does a little pot,” Caleb said, “and a few do more than that.”

“And Angelica?”

“What I hear is that she was clean, at least at the time she died,” Caleb said. “That's the funny part.”

“What is?”

“Well, Angelica was like a lot of these kids at Northfield. She had the money and she had the cravings. Put those two together and it means she got the stuff.”

“Pot?”

“And coke, a little.”

Frank took out his notebook. “Go on.”

“Well, at first I figured I was close to something,” Caleb said. “I had it all mapped out. Angelica was a junkie, and that meant she had to have a connection. I mean, she wasn't muling it in with that BMW, you know?”

Frank nodded.

“So I figured her connection was in Grant Park, and that's why she knew the area.”

“Sounds good,” Frank said.

“To me, too,” Caleb said, “but as the talk kept going, things fell apart.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there's no doubt that Angelica had done a few drugs in her time,” Caleb told him. “About three months before she died, this one kid spots her at one of these fast-food drive-ins. He goes over to her, and smoke just about keels him over.”

“Three months ago?”

“That's right, and that's about the last time anybody saw Angelica with drugs.”

“She just stopped?”

“Dead in the road, Frank,” Caleb said. “Went totally off everything, as far as they know. Everybody agrees on that one.”

Frank wrote it down.

“And that's not all,” Caleb added. “She cleaned up her diet, too.” He pulled a chair over to Frank's desk and sat down.

“Diet?”

“Angelica was a junk-food freak, the kids say. Always with the Fat Freddies and potato chips.”

“She stopped that, too?”

“Dead in the water,” Caleb said.

“And at the same time?”

“On the button. And this was
before
she found out she was pregnant.”

Frank leaned forward slightly. “What was happening to her, Caleb?”

“She acts like somebody who all of a sudden got religion.”

“So what was it? A change of heart?”

Caleb looked at Frank doubtfully. “When have you ever seen a case of that?”

Frank smiled.

“No, you were right the first time,” Caleb said. “Something was happening to her.”

“Yeah.”

“It's the Grant Park stuff I can't figure,” Caleb said after a moment. “I mean, everything is backwards. She should have met Grant Park on the way down. But it's like she met it on the way up. You know what I mean, Frank? She met it when she was going off drugs, not when she was going on them.”

Frank shook his head wearily. “I have the strangest feeling about this one, Caleb.”

“That's because nothing fits.”

“Something goes very deep down in this one,” Frank said. “You can't follow blood. You can't follow money.” He shook his head despairingly. “So where do you go?” He flipped to the first page of his notebook. “Just back over everything, I guess.”

He began reading his notebook.

“You're a slow healer, Frank,” Caleb said after he'd watched him for a while.

Frank looked up. “What?”

“Your face,” Caleb explained. “It don't look much better than it did a few days ago. You're a slow healer.”

“Always have been,” Frank said indifferently, as he returned to the notebook.

It was more like a sketchbook than anything else, and as Frank began the tortuous task of deciphering the minute, broken scrawl of his handwriting, it seemed to him that his notes contained little more than the basic facts of the case as he had meticulously gathered them. Aside from these, there was only an assortment of random thoughts and asides, intimations about character, impressions concerning how a particular person looked or spoke or gestured. He had noted that Arthur Cummings “appeared confident in his wealth and his innocence,” and that Davon Little had talked in a loud voice, as if he knew that what he said was true.

“What are you looking for, Frank?” Caleb asked finally.

“I don't know,” Frank admitted, but he continued to flip the pages of his notebook. He had noted that Albert Morrison was “very controlled,” and that Jameson, the drama teacher, “had something sick in his eyes.”

He turned another page, then another, until he was at Karen's house again. He had written that James Theodore “wanted to say something,” and now those four words struck him as the only important ones he had come across so far.

He closed the notebook and looked up at Caleb. “Maybe we should turn up the burner a little,” he said.

“How do you want to do it?”

“You take the park,” Frank said.

“Anybody in particular?”

“Dealers, mostly,” Frank said. “It's still possible that Angelica had a connection around there. Maybe it's old, but it still might be worth something.”

“Okay.”

“And do me a favor,” Frank added. “Go light at first. Just show them the pictures of Angelica, and see if anybody's seen her in the area.”

“Good enough,” Caleb said. “See you this afternoon.”

When Caleb had left, Frank pulled the telephone book from his desk drawer and looked up the address of the Nouveau Gallery. It was located in one of the vast, sprawling malls on the city's North-side.