The Intersection of Purgatory and Paradise (13 page)

“No one’s supposed to discuss the case with me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I know you weren’t within a thousand miles of that boy when he died. Glenn, Harris, and Marshall are just being dicks because they’ve never tackled a case like this and they know you have.”

“Nothing quite like this. But yeah, they’re small-town officers.” That was the nicest thing he could say about them.

“They didn’t even want to hear about Caleb Owens,” she went on. “I can’t see how two young men the same age, exhibiting evidence of the same type of assault and being found dead within a few days of each other, can possibly be a coincidence.”

Doug swallowed hard. “The same type of assault?”

She shook her head miserably. “Owens’s assault wasn’t a factor in his death. He had a lot of scar tissue. A lot. But the forensic tech from the crime lab said it was fairly consistent with a normal violent rape, but it was from older injuries. Since he obviously killed himself, everyone’s focused on Jeff Lowe.”

“Just because they’re trying to find whoever killed Lowe doesn’t mean they’re not going to look for whoever attacked Owens. It’s a process.”

“It got ignored,” she whispered. “I’d never considered there was such a thing as a
normal
violent rape, but I think I’ve learned my lesson with this case.”

He squeezed her shoulder. “They’ll find out who did it, Brit. We’ll figure it out. And it’s my land; I can look for tire tracks myself.”

She sniffled and nodded. “I know. I ran out of things to clean at work, and I need to do something right now. I figured I’d offer to help you sort out the garage.”

Doug had spent the last two nights in the Super 8 just outside of town while the forensics team and a crime scene cleanup crew collected evidence and attacked the concrete floor with something toxic enough to kill any biohazards that might have survived the fire. He didn’t want to deal with the burned-out skeleton of his garage, much less the rubble and memories it contained. He wanted to go back to his hotel room and forget the world existed. “I don’t want to. I want to go climbing, but… all my equipment is gone. Maybe I’ll just go hiking.”

“The sooner you get it done, the sooner your insurance company will cut you a check so you can buy new climbing equipment.” She looped her arm through his and steered him toward his truck. “I’ve got a Costco-sized pack of garbage bags, a whole bucket of cleansers from work, and lots of rubber gloves. Go on, I’ll follow you in my car.”

“But I really don’t want to.”

The detention access door swung open with a clang. Elkin’s youngest deputy wandered out, looking exhausted and older than Doug remembered. He glanced at the two of them. “Hey. What’s up?” he asked, trying to smile.

Brittney gave him a look that was almost maternal. “Biohazard team is done with Doug’s garage. We’re going to start cleaning up the rest. Don’t suppose you want to volunteer to help?”

Jackson’s entire body sagged. “That’s going to be a lot of work.”

“Yeah,” Brittney said with an evil grin.

Jackson slapped his hands together, standing up a bit straighter. “Best to get it done, then. Are we heading out there now?”

D
URING
THE
first hour, Doug’s stomach felt like it was twisting itself in knots. No matter what Brittney said about the amazing job the biohazard team had done cleaning up the mess, he couldn’t stop glancing at the dark stains on the concrete. Even though it had been almost twenty years since he’d given up eating meat, the garage smelled so much like a barbecue, he nearly threw up.

Thanks entirely to Brittney and Jackson, the burned-out frame soon began to smell like some unidentifiable cleanser.

“You’re lucky he wasn’t killed here,” Brittney said, pulling off a pair of industrial blue rubber gloves. “They wouldn’t have been able to get the blood cleaned up so quickly if he had been.”

“You can tell he wasn’t killed here?” Jackson asked.

“Based on his last recorded weight, I figure he lost at least three liters of blood. There wasn’t that much on the ground, even accounting for the fire. The stains in the circle there are burned stuff they couldn’t get up as easily.”

Jackson, who was already so pale he looked sick, turned a bit yellow. “I don’t think I could do your job, Ms. McAllister, I really don’t.”

“Crime scene cleanup is worse. Normally, my job is interesting,” she insisted.

“Brittney’s weird. She was the only cheerleader in our class in high school who thought dissecting a frog in biology was cool,” Doug chimed in.

She glared at him, then smirked at Jackson. “Doug was the only boy in that class who threw up when we dissected those frogs.”

Jackson grinned. “You did?”

“Cutting up anything except tofu creeps me out,” Doug admitted. “I grew up slaughtering cattle, pigs, deer, and elk. You name it. We even hunted bear once when my dad got one of the permits in the Fish and Game lottery. I was never comfortable with it from the start, but every year it got worse. By the time I got to high school biology, I was a wreck every time I thought about cutting up an animal. But it was the smell of the formaldehyde that made me sick.”

“Just keep telling yourself that, tough guy,” Brittney said, tossing an empty cleanser bottle into the pile waiting to go into garbage bags.

They shifted the burned-out boxes into the driveway and spent hours digging through each one, looking for any scrap of color. Everything burned beyond recognition went into a black trash bag and ended up in the back of Doug’s truck. When Doug’s truck was full, they began to load Jackson’s too.

He hoisted a bag into the truck bed he was pretty sure held the charred remains of his mother’s old cookbooks and cursed. “This is not how I envisioned getting around to cleaning out the garage.”

Brittney hoisted a smaller bag into the truck, jumping when something in it shattered. “It’s efficient, though.”

Doug followed her back to the pile and looked up sharply when he heard Jackson shout. “Photos! Oh my God, there’s a whole album in this one that’s barely been touched!”

The box he held up triumphantly even had a few patches of brown cardboard left on the outside.

“The box is soaked, but the pictures are all wrapped in those plastic sheets! Here”—he set it down in front of Doug—“see what you can save. Anything else I find, I’ll set aside.”

“Thank you,” he whispered, staring down at the waterlogged photo album that had caught Jackson’s attention. His mom had filled dozens of albums over the years. He recognized one she’d put together in the years before she died, getting prints made of old slides she’d had since she was a kid. Her childhood had been filled with exotic trips to Europe and Asia, and her parents had indulged her desire to document everything with a camera. When his mom eloped with his dad in college, their budget had forced them into smaller adventures. They’d explored the entire East Coast in his mom’s old Volkswagen before settling down and taking over the ranch.

He opened the dripping cover and stared at the pictures, each one showing his dad or parents in front of some historic building or monument. Sometimes they were captured in front of amazing vistas, sometimes in front of waterfalls. He turned page after page until he came across a photo he remembered seeing before.

When he was twelve years old, his mother had let him go through the old slides, and he’d been stunned when he came across one of three men surfing. He had thought the slide was in black and white, even though all the others had been in color, but then he realized there hadn’t been much color in the scene. It was a thin strip of beach with gray rocks and even grayer water. The white-capped waves were high enough to be dangerous, but the men riding them had been on stable long boards and were probably damn good surfers. They’d also been so dedicated they were in the freezing waters of Newport, Rhode Island, in February. They’d been covered head to toe in the type of heavy wet suits used for scuba diving, complete with full masks.

Since Doug’s childhood had included a television but not time to sit down and watch it, the slide was the first time he’d ever seen anyone surfing. But he also remembered the picture that had come after it in the carousel.

The wet plastic pages slapped against one another as he flipped through them, hoping to find it.

“Something important?” Brittney asked.

“Not really.” He turned back to the half-frozen surfers and showed her the picture. “My dad took this one. When him and my mom were on their honeymoon.”

“Wasn’t their anniversary on Valentine’s Day? Kind of cold to play at the beach.”

“Yeah. And it was really, really cold.” Then he found the picture he was looking for. His parents, both dressed in peacoats and scarves, huddled together against the New England chill. They were posing under a street sign. “One of the guys surfing took this.”

“Were they friends?”

“Nope, they were just there. It was the sign. My dad said he noticed the streets when he was looking at a map in their hotel room, and he had to see if they really intersected.”

Brittney squinted at the picture. “Purgatory?”

“Paradise Avenue and Purgatory Road. He wanted a picture of the signs, you know? But right across the street was this little stretch of beach. And when the entire world was hiding inside to escape from the weather, these three guys were out there surfing.”

“Surfing at the intersection of Purgatory and Paradise?”

“When I was twelve, I thought the surfers were the only interesting thing they took photos of when they were young. But my dad went on and on about this picture. Those three surfers were the only ones who volunteered to take a picture of my mom and dad together without giving them funny looks.”

“Funny looks?” Brittney asked.

“Being a mixed-race couple was weird back then. Plus, she was obviously upper class. So it’s the only picture they had from that trip of them both together. My dad said my mom told him, after she saw the way everyone treated him in Newport, their marriage was either going to be heaven or hell.”

“Which one was it?”

“I asked her that,” Doug said, grinning. “She said it turned out to be like everything else in life. Whether it’s good or bad depends on which way you want it to be. It was always a question of how much effort they decided to put into it.”

“Your mom was always a smart lady. Smarter than you,” Brittney muttered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Look at the life she had,” Brittney said, nodding at the photo album. “She was part of the 1 percent before they had a label on the news, Doug. She gave all that up and came out here without knowing a thing about the reservation, your people, or how to raise cattle, all to try and make her marriage as happy and peaceful as possible.”

“She liked it here,” Doug insisted.

“Yeah, but do you think she’d have picked up and left her home and family if she thought your dad could have been happy back east?”

“She loved him. She always loved him.”

Brittney patted him on the shoulder. “Exactly.”

“What?”

“She loved him. And anyone who ever saw your dad stop work and just stare at her knows he loved her. I’m sure she loved her folks and her home, too. But she loved him so much she walked away from all of that because she wanted him to be happy. Do you think she regretted it?”

“Of course she didn’t regret it. She loved it here.”

Brittney smiled sadly and shook her head. “She loved him. Everything else was a conscious decision. Do you think your dad could have made a living on the East Coast? Do you think they’d have been happy there?”

“That was different. My mom would never have asked him to stay in New England. Mixed-race couples are all over the place these days, but back then there was a lot of hostility everywhere. It would have been hard.”

“She knew she could fit in here, and she knew it would have been hard for him there….”

Doug saw the wicked gleam in Brittney’s eyes. “I told you I didn’t want to talk about it. I still don’t want to talk about it.” Of course, he’d done just that regardless.

Brittney smiled triumphantly and turned to get started on another box.

Jackson glanced between them and laughed nervously before setting another soaked but intact box down in front of him. “Are you two back together again?” he whispered. “Is that why Chris is gone? Did you get it out of your system?”

Doug bit back the snapped remark that almost came out automatically. He reminded himself that Jackson’s body language said he was trying to be friendly. “Jackson, if I was straight, Brittney and I would be together. But I’m not. If you think being gay is something I’m likely to get over, why don’t you try getting over being straight? See how that works out for you.”

“I don’t think….”

Doug rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know.”

Jackson’s eyes narrowed. “I was going to say I don’t think you’d be my type either way, thank you very much.”

After a long silence, Jackson’s grin became infectious. They both laughed nervously, glancing around to make sure Brittney hadn’t heard them.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Jackson said. “Hell, you’ve been happier this last year than you ever were before. Even Daniels says so. I just wanted you to know, if you need somebody to talk to, you’ve got options other than the Ice Queen over there.”

“Ice Queen?”

Jackson nodded, eyes wide. “She might act like a bitch to you, but at least she acknowledges your existence. Normally when I try talking to her, she looks at me like I’m some kind of little spider she wants to dissect.”

Doug laughed harder. “She looks at everybody like that. Don’t take it too personally.”

“Oh, I know. I don’t take much of anything personally. I was just wondering about you. You haven’t been down to the Hay Loft for a beer in forever, which I get. I do. But you stopped coming to all the department stuff, too. The Christmas party, the Spring Picnic…. We all figured you and Chris would have come to them, at least.”

“It’s not like he would have felt very welcome at any of them.”