The Body Reader (26 page)

CHAPTER 61

I
’m telling you, this’ll work,” Uriah said.

Jude shot him a skeptical look. “I don’t think so.”

“Have some faith.”

They were on the roof of her apartment building, eyes on the cat watching them from the nearby tree. Jude sat with her back against the air-conditioning unit while Uriah lay on his stomach, holding one end of a long string. The other end was attached to a stick propping up a laundry basket. Under the laundry basket was an open can of cat food.

Will Sebastian was no longer the building manager. He’d admitted to entering Jude’s apartment while she slept. The new manager was unassuming and hopefully harmless. Grant Vang confessed to covering up the trail to Jude’s abduction, along with orchestrating that abduction and planting false evidence so investigators would conclude that her kidnapping was obsession driven and close the case. Vang’s motive? Money, and possibly hope of a promotion to chief of police one day. But Jude suspected he’d also never forgiven her for rejecting his more serious advances. She even wondered if he’d chosen Salazar for his reputation of extreme cruelty. She hoped not.

“You saw this in a cartoon, right?” Jude asked.

“And I’ve done it. You have no idea how many cats I’ve caught this way.”

“I still think the Havahart trap is the way to go. I can borrow one from the Humane Society.”

“And miss out on all this fun?”

“It’s hot up here. The tar paper is gummy.”

“This is an adventure.”

“When that falls on him,
if
it falls on him, he’s going to freak out, push the laundry basket off, and run. And I’ll never see him again.”

“He won’t push it off, because you’ll jump on top of it and hold it down. It’s all in being prepared. Being hypervigilant.”

“If we do catch him, I’m going to feel bad.”

“You said you feel bad because he’s getting skinny.”

“That too.”

“We’re doing the right thing. He’s not old. He’s probably got a bad tooth or maybe an abscess from a street fight. We’ll get him checked out.”

“And then?”

“The apartment building allows cats, right?”

“I’m not ready for anything like that.”

Propped up on his elbows, wrist bent as he kept the line slack, Uriah looked over at her. “It’ll be good for you.”

A week had passed since they’d rescued Octavia Germaine. The young woman had given a statement from her hospital bed, revealing that she’d attended parties at the governor’s mansion with other underage girls, the drug-laden events likely serving as a way of vetting potential victims for Phillip Schilling.

At the parties, attendees were coerced into signing official-looking confidentiality statements promising to never disclose what happened in the mansion. Most had felt honored to be a part of it. A secret club. It was so exciting and adult. But once the Schillings were exposed, girls came forward and the mystery of Delilah Masters was solved. On the night of her death, Delilah had panicked. Naked and screaming, she’d tried to run from the mansion. Adam Schilling had caught her and dragged her into the pool, holding her underwater, forever silencing her. Poor Lola Holt had been one of the witnesses. And Adam must have figured that because rocks in the pockets had worked once with Katherine Nelson, it would work again.

During a sweep of the governor’s cabin property, the four bodies from the Polaroids were discovered, all in shallow graves, one of the girls the daughter of a member of Ava’s missing children’s group, another the body of thirteen-year-old Hope DeMars, who’d gone missing shortly before Natalie Schilling’s death. Two of the bodies were still Jane Does. Not far from the root cellar, a human fetus had been unearthed. What horrors poor Octavia had endured.

Along with the search of the cabin and surrounding land, an investigation of the governor’s office had been launched. Unfortunately, since Jude’s father and brother were dead, she’d never know exactly what happened the day her mother died. How the necklace got inside the book was anybody’s guess, but it seemed likely Natalie Schilling hid it there, maybe fearing for her own life after discovering Phillip Schilling’s aberrant behavior. The theory was that he killed Jude’s mother and convinced the underage Adam to confess to what they reported as an accident. Maybe Adam had even believed her death hadn’t been intentional, at least at first. Whatever the story, the son had been killing for his father and covering up his deviant obsessions ever since. That day in the woods when he took the blame for his mother’s death had set his dark life in motion.

“I’ve been contacted by someone in Hollywood,” Jude told Uriah. “They want to make a movie about me.”

“You gonna do it?”

Keeping her eyes trained on the cat, she shook her head slightly. “No. I don’t want to relive it for the screenplay and relive it when the movie comes out.”

“If you’d agreed, who would have played you?”

She laughed softly. “No idea.”

“More importantly, who would have played me? It’d have to be somebody pretty damn good looking.”

They did this now. Joked around. Her sense of humor seemed to be returning, nursed, maybe, by Uriah.

“I don’t get why the governor didn’t just kill Octavia in the cell. If he’d killed her and taken the last journal, we would have always thought it was Adam.”

“I think he cared about her more than the other girls,” Jude said. “Look how long he kept her.” Octavia had done the best thing possible by making him the hero of her own story. He read the journals, and he fell in love with her in return. And now the poor girl missed him. Jude had seen it in her eyes.

A thud sounded as the cat dropped from the tree to the roof. “Here he comes,” Jude whispered.

He was skinny, and one side of his face was swollen, his pale-yellow coat matted and dull. He slinked across the roof, belly low, stopped, froze; then, little by little, he moved again, inching closer to the trap. Hunger made wild animals bold.

This was not going to work.

This was not going to—

Uriah jerked the string, and the basket fell over the cat.

Arm immobilized by the sling, Jude bolted for the basket and placed her foot on the overturned plastic bottom, holding it firmly so the animal couldn’t escape.

Uriah produced a soft-sided pet carrier, borrowed from the elderly woman who’d moved in downstairs, and donned leather gloves. He gave Jude a nod, and she lifted the basket while he grabbed the cat by the back of the neck. Legs thrashed and twisted; fur flew; the cat yowled. Uriah shoved him into the container, and Jude zipped the door.

Straightening, Uriah tossed off the gloves like a hockey player ready to fight, and brushed cat hair from his T-shirt with the backs of his hands. “You might have your work cut out for you.”

“Maybe he’s been feral too long.”

Uriah eyed the carrier, which was rolling around on the roof. “It’ll take a while, but I think he’ll be okay.”

He was talking as if she planned to stick around.

Most of her self-doubt was gone, especially since discovering she’d been right about her father all along. From now on, instead of ignoring her gut, she’d listen to it. She wanted to write her gut an apology letter. She was a decent detective. She knew that now.

Uriah crossed the roof and lifted the carrier to peer inside. Without turning around, he asked her the big question. “What do you think? Are you coming back?”

He meant back to Homicide. Her old position was available, the firing and arrest of Grant Vang leaving a second opening. Ortega was conducting interviews, but it might take some time to get the new hires on board.

Deep down, Jude knew it would be best to pack up and move somewhere else, get a fresh start in a place where every street corner didn’t hold a dark memory. But she kept catching herself thinking about the future
here
. Yes, people stared at her and talked about her, but that wasn’t always a bad thing. It meant they knew her history. It meant she didn’t have to explain or hide. She’d had some bad times in Minneapolis.

Bad. That was putting it mildly. But Jude was beginning to feel like she’d made some trustworthy friends. Ava, Chief Ortega, Uriah. And Ava was hoping Jude would visit with Octavia a few times a month. They’d had similar experiences, and it would be good to share, if not stories of what had happened, time together. Just hang out.

Jude looked at Uriah. He was holding the carrier high by the handle, peering in, sweet-talking the cat, and the cat was responding. It meowed, and the meow had a lilt at the end.

Uriah looked ready to say something. Couldn’t decide if he should, finally put down the carrier. “You aren’t going to do anything bad, are you?”
Like hurt yourself? End your life?
He was so easy to read, and she suddenly understood his reason for wanting her to keep the cat.

She couldn’t answer his question. Now that it was over, now that Humphrey Salazar and her brother and father were dead, her mother’s murder solved, Octavia found, Jude’s distraction and drive for justice and truth were gone. What did she have to live for? What did she have to obliterate the horror of her own memories?

“There are three things I’ve seen once in my life,” Uriah said, squinting against the sunlight. “Thick fog that stopped at my knees and swirled in circles when I kicked it, a rainbow that ended in a street right in front of me, and a rabbit dance. You ever heard of a rabbit dance?”

“No.”

“It happens in the middle of the night. Hundreds of rabbits rendezvous in a clearing, and they kind of dance in the moonlight. I can’t describe it, but it’s bizarre in a good way. With all of those events, I didn’t realize I was seeing something amazing for the first and last time. And I’m saying that those things, those random, crazy surprises that have nothing to do with life decisions or your past or your future, might be worth sticking around for.”

Car doors slammed, and the voices of new residents carried from the street below. Jude had probably made a subconscious decision days ago. “I’m coming back to Homicide.” She would return, and instead of trying to ignore her body-reading skills, she’d work on enhancing them.

“And the cat?” Translation:
Do I need to worry about you?

“We’ll have to get litter and a litter box if he’s going to be living with me.”

Uriah smiled and picked a yellow hair off his tongue.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2012 Sharyn Morrow

Anne Frasier is a
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestselling author. Her award-winning books span the genres of suspense, mystery, thriller, romantic suspense, paranormal, and memoir. She won a RITA for romantic suspense and the Daphne du Maurier Award for paranormal romance. Her thrillers have hit the
USA Today
list and have been featured by Mystery Guild, Literary Guild, and Book of the Month Club. Her memoir,
The Orchard
, was an
O, The Oprah Magazine
Fall Pick; a One Book, One Community read; a recipient of a B+ review in
Entertainment Weekly
; and a Librarians’ Best Books of 2011 selection. She divides her time between the city of Saint Paul, Minnesota, and her writing studio in rural Wisconsin. Visit her website to sign up for book-release announcements at
www.annefrasier.com
.