Something About Sophie (15 page)

“Ho.” Jesse stood taller. “They tried. But I told Fred Murphy I'd call his mother if he didn't put everything back the way they found it.” She huffed, hardly as daunting as she pretended to be, and settled in a wicker chair to wait out the search. Drew glanced down at his watch, debated in silence, and then mounted the steps to lean against a support pillar—to prop up his friend. “That was the only fuss I made, though. I figured I'd get more out of Fred with honey than my usual sweet self, so I cooperated as much as my temper would let me. I came out here when they found Mike's Swiss army knife—it was my father's.”

“They'll give it all back,” he said, sounding certain. “They think Cliff's throat was slashed at with a thin smooth-edged object, likely a scalpel or razor blade, less than two inches long. And if it was anyone's house but yours, I'd have to say it's better to take too much and return it later than not enough and miss something.”

Reluctantly the women agreed—or at least didn't argue. Instead, Sophie asked, “What else do you know?”

“All I got was a quick peek at the preliminary autopsy in the ER—nothing's for certain yet.” They stared at him, unaffected by his disclaimer. He heaved a sigh. “Because of the shape and location of the lacerations—and the pattern of the blood splatter—they think the killer was in the truck with him at the time of the attack, that the killer was right-handed, that he may have some knowledge of human anatomy, and was either a weak or an unpracticed killer due to the number and the various lengths and depths of the wounds.”

“Why right-handed?” Sophie asked.

“Because of the direction of the cuts and which side of the neck they were made on,” Jesse explained, clearly up to date on her episodes of
CSI
but shaken enough to look at Drew for confirmation.

“That's right. We know Cliff was in the truck when he died because that's where all the blood was. And if the splatter was on the left side of the truck, the cut had to be on the left side of his neck.”

Jesse stood and, without a word, took Sophie by the hand, turned her and placed her behind the steering wheel of an imaginary pickup truck. She pointed to the left side of Sophie's neck. “You're on the driver's side with the window down and the cuts are here. If someone came up behind you on your left and they were left-handed, the cuts would be on the right side of your neck. If they were right-handed it would be too awkward.” She tried a pretend incision from Sophie's larynx to her left ear and was startled to see it wasn't impossible. She looked to Drew.

“You can tell the direction of the cut because they're deeper where they start and end superficially.” Perhaps he was thinking this gruesome reenactment would supply more facts than their wild speculations.

“Yes, right. I knew that.” Jesse turned back to her victim. “So they can tell that the cuts were made from left to right, so anyone standing here, outside his window, couldn't have done it . . . with either hand.” She circled the invisible truck and came up on Sophie's right. “Obviously, I can't reach you from over here, so I have to get in.” She wiggled in close to the soon-to-be-deceased. “I could maybe stab the left side of your neck with my left hand if I had rubber joints, but not slice it. I'd have to use my right hand and reach across like this.” When she did, Sophie's hands automatically reached up and grabbed Jesse's arm to protect herself—and again, the older woman looked surprised and turned to Drew.

“That's a natural response,” he said with a shrug. “And it might explain the number and mix of lengths and depths of the wounds. They struggled.”

“Should we tell Fred?” Evidently Jesse was hoping that solving the crime would make it go away, flush it from her mind. Sophie wasn't so certain.

He grinned. “Couldn't hurt, but I'm guessing one of his other forensic specialists might have told him by now.”

She simpered at him and made a short production of walking away from the murder scene. Sophie remained, completely creeped out.

“What I can't figure out,” Drew went on, “is why he's still so fixated on Sophie? Do you know if he thinks everything is related? Cliff, Maury, the tires, Lonny?” He glanced at Sophie, aware of what she thought.

Keeping her eyes averted, she walked passed Jesse to take the other big white wicker chair. She felt drained, sat—then bounced to her feet just as Sheriff Murphy pushed through the screen door to join them on the porch.

“I do,” he said, looking around at each of them—one no longer than the other. “I do think they're related.”

“And that Sophie's involved?” Jesse jumped on him. “Because of those stupid pictures? Or because of the bloody knife you found in her room? No? No knife? Maybe you found Maury's truck up there—or the black clothes and ski mask Lonny reported. No? So, where's your evidence, Fred? And let's not forget she has an alibi for nearly every second she's been in town. Truly, I don't understand why you're wasting all this time on Sophie when it's so obvious it isn't her. You should be looking somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

“Well, how the hell should I know? You're the cop.”

His moan was long suffering. “I swear to God, Jesse, you are chewing on my last nerve.”

“Then talk to us,” Drew said. “Help us understand where you're coming from. If you think Sophie has something to do with this, explain why and maybe she, or we, can elaborate or explain it for you.”

The sheriff debated so long, Sophie was sure he was going to step off the porch and leave them to their guessing—or worse, leave her panicking that her most terrible imaginings were true.

Finally, he took up the pillar opposite Drew's, in front of Jesse, and began to count out the steps he'd taken to his deductions. “First, and most obvious, is the location of Palmeroy's murder and Sophie's pictures in his truck—both of which I could have taken as circumstantial until Carla, his wife,” he clarified for Sophie, “told me that their camera hadn't worked in years; that he hadn't let her get a new one; that she'd wanted to take pictures of the boys . . . and so on. The next day she tells me the only thing missing from the truck, that she could tell, was a hotshot that Cliff kept in the bed of his truck.” He put up a hand. “And don't ask me why he needed a cattle prod for the half dozen head he keeps out there when a cattle cane would work just as well, because I don't want to think about it.” His jaw tightened with disgust, and it was plain the sheriff didn't approve of or like the victim, either—not that that let Sophie off the hook.

“So I have pictures of you on a camera that's not his, in the truck with his dead body, and a missing hotshot.” He gazed at each face. “It didn't make any sense to me, either. Then your tires are slashed and we all sort of agree that it's vandals. New bright red car in town. They might even have known whose it was because of all the hoopla with Arthur Cubeck's will. I get it dusted for fingerprints for two reasons—to see if it's one of my habitual delinquents—case solved. And because it sets off an alarm in my head that it's the second time in two days that you've been involved in a crime.” Again he held up a hand to stall Jesse. “One way or another. Next, when I was ready to call whoever was next on our towing list, you requested that it be taken to Lonny's. Fine, no problem. But now I have you in a suspicious connection to Lonny.”

“Why suspicious?” Drew asked before Sophie could.

“You know Lonny. You know his place. Why would anyone—especially a stranger—request
him
to tow her car?”

“Because she'd met him that morning getting gas and she liked him?”

“How would I know that?”

“Okay. Go on.”

Sophie glanced at Drew. She was scared—not so much of being found guilty of something she didn't do because, well, because she didn't do anything. But even the sheriff believed she was connected somehow to the evil occurring in his town. And that connection scared her. A lot. How many more people would it lash out at, and why? And how long before that evil came after her?

“Maury goes missing. I don't respond as aggressively as I should have because it hasn't been twenty-four or twelve or even eight hours yet, and I'm busy with the homicide. By noon, Leigh was beside herself and I begin to take notice. I didn't begin to make the connection until I went over to the house to interview her—and this is
after
I find out Frank Lanyard thinks someone might be trying to kill him, too—and she tells me Maury had been acting strangely all day Friday, even before they heard about Cliff Palmeroy.”

“I wondered about that,” Sophie said, and when the sheriff turned his curious scowl on her, she added, “I heard from . . . through the grapevine that Mrs. Weims thought he was acting peculiar after he heard about the murder of his friend.” Both men slid their gaze in Jesse's direction—identifying the grapevine—and back again. “I wondered what he was doing that would stand out as odd behavior after the death of a friend, but if it was all day Friday as well . . .” She paused. “Well, I'm still curious. More, since I saw him earlier that day, before I saw Mr. Palmeroy watching me across from the hospital.”

She watched the sheriff review his mental time line before saying, “Leigh said he rushed into the house unexpectedly Friday morning, about eleven or eleven-thirty. He rummaged through their utility closet for their camera and ran out again. She called out the door, asking what he needed the camera for, and he said, ‘to take pictures.' He got back in the car and raced off.”

“Oh, no.” Jesse hid her face from the truth with her hands. “It's his camera in Cliff's truck.”

“With my pictures in it.”

The officer pressed his lips together in a tight line and nodded. “She called him later in the afternoon on his cell—he was short with her, said he couldn't talk and would call her back. But he didn't. He was late getting home from work, nothing too unusual, but she thought he was coming down with something because she'd fixed something he liked for dinner and he hardly touched it. She said that even once they'd settled in front of the TV, she could feel his tension. She wanted to ask if something had happened at work, but assumed he'd tell her when he was ready. My wife would have nagged the hell out of me,” he said as an aside, marveling at Leigh's self-control. He took a breath. “Apparently he liked to have time to ‘think out' whatever he was feeling before he told her about it. I guess if you've been married to a guy like that for that long, you figure out quick what works and what doesn't.”

“Fred.” Jesse's voice was gentle but disapproving. “He's changed a lot since the old days. Leigh wouldn't have taken him back if he hadn't.”

“Hmp. You can take the stripes off a zebra but that doesn't make it a horse.”

She looked away, disinclined to argue. Sophie's heart smiled. It was just like Jesse to possess the simple fact that some hearts have more pardoning power than others—and that it wasn't up to her to judge the sheriff if his heart wasn't quite as strong as her own. It was a virtue she'd always admired in her mother as well. Forgiveness. She used to say that as hard as it is to forgive someone, it took more energy to hate them—and the weight of hate on your soul was destructive.

“When did he find out about Cliff?” Drew asked.

“One of his kids came home from a sleepover at a friend's house Saturday morning, around ten o'clock. He told them. Leigh said Maury was as shocked as she was at first, but the more questions he asked about it, the more he seemed terrified, as opposed to horrified by it—fearful, not sorrowful. She called him on it; asked him why and what he knew about. He got angry, told her to shut up and to mind her own business. But she was worried; she said she kept at him until he raised his hand to strike her.” Both women sucked in air and held it. “But he knew better, she said. He knew she'd leave him forever if he hit her again, even after all these years, so he shoved her away and slammed out the back door instead.

“He was gone most of the day. Next thing she knew, he was tearing the garage apart. Throwing things around, ransacking through boxes. He was clearly looking for something, but she was still ticked off and didn't want to ask what it was. Eventually, she sent the kids off to bed, turned out all the lights in the house, and went to bed herself.”

“She went to sleep? After all that?” Jesse broke in.

Drew reached into his pocket for his cell phone, checked it and put it back as the sheriff said, “She didn't sleep. She said she stood in the bedroom window for over an hour watching his shadow moving around in the garage. When she saw the light go out, she jumped back in bed and pretended to be asleep. A few minutes later, he stood in the doorway of their bedroom—he wasn't fooled—he said he was sorry and that he was going over to Frank Lanyard's place first thing in the morning and went back downstairs. He was gone when she got up for church on Sunday.”

Sophie stared up at Sheriff Murphy not knowing what to think—which left plenty of room for thoughts and images to form on their own. The first to take shape clearly: The officer was in over his head; not inept, but untested and afraid of making a mistake, hyperaware of the consequences if he did. She could see the torment and fatigue in his eyes; the curve of his shoulders from the buckling burden of responsibility, and the nervous flicking of his right thumbnail against the side of his pointing finger. She felt for him, but was still more concerned for herself and the people she'd come to care about—like Lonny.

“And last night Lonny is attacked with a cattle prod,” she said. “Presumably the one that belonged to Cliff Palmeroy.”

“Presumably.”

“And that completes a weird sort of circle of evidence that centers on me.” They were all looking at her, agreeing, but unwilling to say it out loud. Even the sheriff held off. There had to be a way out of it. “I . . . Do you think there might be some reason their friendship caused them to be targeted? Maybe because they both knew something that someone else doesn't want anyone to know?”