Time of Death (35 page)

I could almost feel sorry for her. She’s just reaping what she sowed thirty years ago.

Jasmine pulled a tissue from a box on her desk, dabbed at her eyes, and pursued the drops on her cheeks. When she spoke, her voice was almost back to normal.

“I worried that someday this might happen,” Jasmine said. “It was the price I paid for preserving the family name. It was my burden, and after me, it would be May’s. Although I had thought that April would have an unfortunate drug overdose before May had to take up the mantle.”

“So May knows nothing about this?”

“No, other than what she heard and experienced as a child, before April’s ‘riding accident.’ May definitely believes her older sister is dead.”

PJ had heard enough. Jasmine was self-centered enough to believe that
she
was the one who’d paid a price.
What about April, who should have gone on trial for the first murder she committed, of the man who raped her? What about all the people April had killed since that time? She would never have served a day in prison after her first murder. A high-powered attorney would have gotten her time in a treatment facility, which she surely needed. Excellent treatment might have alleviated April’s rage and lessened the effect of her schizophrenia. Or not. At least she would never have had the chance to kill again, and again.

“I think we need to get going,” PJ said. “There’s a lot to do, based on what you told us. I would suggest hiring a lot of extra security, Jasmine, and notifying the police here.”

I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long.

“I have a couple of questions before we go,” Schultz said. “What connection would April have to the murders of Loretta Blanchette, Bernard Dewey, and the Royalviews?”

Jasmine considered. “Blanchette was a teacher April had at summer camp. I remember the name because my sister got an unflattering report about April’s performance at the camp. The rest, I don’t know.”

“Why are you telling us all this if your motivation for years has been to protect your family’s secrets?” Schultz said. “With a pedophile and a serial killer as ornaments on the family tree, I doubt that you’re going to be in demand for teas, golf dates, and charity events. May and June are going to experience the fallout, too.”

Jasmine fastened her eyes on her desktop and didn’t speak for a long time, long enough for Schultz to start fidgeting in his chair.

“I would like to say that I’m unburdening my soul in the face of death, Detective. But it’s nothing so lofty,” Jasmine said. “The fact is that our roles are reversed now, April and I. She’s free and I’m trapped in this facility. I don’t dare leave. She’s probably out there now, waiting for her chance and gloating. And that pisses me off; after all I did for her.”

FROM MY VANTAGE POINT
twenty feet above ground in a majestic old oak, its arms spread wide to embrace me and my purpose, I see Dr. Gray and Detective Schultz leave. Snow falls gently on their bare heads, in Schultz’s case, literally bare, and gives them crowns of six-sided stars. Snow dusts their shoulders as they walk to Dr. Gray’s new car. Even the obscene redness of the car is muted by the floating snow, as though Mother Nature is embarrassed by the Freudian display. You’d think a psychologist would pick up on that, but it must be true that the plumber’s faucets always leak.

They take the time to brush the snow off the car, passing the scraper from one to the other, in a long reach across the windshield that reminds me of Michelangelo’s painting on the roof of the Sistine Chapel, the one where God reaches out his hand to Adam. Since Adam is naked and equipped, he would have to be Schultz. That leaves Dr. Gray as God. As I watch, they shift into being those characters and back again.

They drive away, the car’s exhaust making a thin stream of exhaust fumes, doing its part to hasten climate change.

The snow is beginning to cover me, too. By nightfall I will be nothing more than a bump on the oak’s branch, which I suppose is better than being a pimple on the ass of the world. Having been one, I will be able to make a down-to-earth comparison.

I begin to see the individual snowflakes dancing in the wind, putting on a performance for me, and growing larger, too. As big as the oak’s silent leaves, soon as big as toasters. That’s when they talk to me. Falling things talk to me. Leaves, rain, waterfalls with their drops as big as my head, and snow. They all have different voices, but they all say the same thing to me:
You deserve better. You deserve to be a Rich Bitch who can do anything you want, go anywhere you want.

And so I will. The God of Successful Parties can be wooed and won over.

Did I mention that my oak is close to the building? The hardest part was getting here, climbing up the side of the tree away from the surveillance cameras. Once up high, I might as well be invisible. Nobody looks up, including cameras. Maybe I am invisible.

This is the way it will happen. Time will do its skating-by thing again, and then I’ll shake off the snow and move. After tying my rope to this heavy branch I’m on, I’ll toss the other end over to the building. It has a grappling hook. The hook catches, I take up the slack in the rope. I’ve done this tree-to-tree in the woods, but tree-to-building is different enough that my body will be buzzing with adrenaline. Next I’ll lower myself onto the rope like a sloth hanging underneath it, and work my way over to the building. My arms and legs are up to it, but what if I’m unlucky? What if the God of Successful Parties chooses that moment to sneer at me, and I tumble to the ground? I’ll be on camera at the very least, caught and handcuffed at the very most. If that happens, if I get the handcuffs, I’ll freak out. Handcuffs bring it all back.

No falling.

I’ve studied the architectural drawings so much they must be tattooed on my retinas. There’s a vent shaft topped by one of those huge twirling metal caps, like a dome on a Russian church. Unscrew it, drop a rope, shimmy in. The shaft goes horizontal and I can crawl in it, just barely. Good thing I didn’t eat today. Count the passageways, third left then fifth right, ends in an air return in her office. Kind of tricky here. The air return grid is a tight fit. If I drop it, maybe handcuffs.

No dropping.

Jasmine has no cameras in her office, I suppose because some of her business dealings aren’t squeaky-clean. Or she doesn’t like Candid Camera keeping track of how many times she uses her private bathroom.

It’s the best of circumstances. Jasmine has her arms folded on the table, and her head resting on them. She’s taking a quick nap. Poor dear, I guess she hasn’t been sleeping well lately.

I put the tip of a knife to her throat, make a small cut. A few red drops well up, and she startles awake. There’s not much light in the office, she can’t see me clearly, but she knows it’s me. I pull the knife across her throat. Her scream turns into a gurgle.

As she dies, I make a few quick doodles with the knife, and then I’m out. Traversing the rope, I play back my triumph as the snow whispers in my ears.

S
CHULTZ WISHED HE WAS
driving. It was hard enough for him to relax as a passenger, but when it was snowing, relaxing was out of the question.

“I can drive if you’re tired,” Schultz said.

“I’m fine,” PJ said. “That’s the third time you suggested that. If you have something to say about my driving, just come out with it.”

“I get nervous when other people are driving in bad weather. I trust my reflexes.”

“And not mine, I guess. I grew up in a small town in Iowa. I’ve slipped around on more snowy streets and little country roads than you can imagine.”

“Don’t take your eyes off the highway when you talk to me,” Schultz said. “Why do you keep bringing that up, anyway? Your idyllic early life in Iowa?”

“Do I?”

“Oh, it comes up every now and then. You’re not the only country mouse, you know. I grew up on a farm in Missouri.”

She looked over at him, eliciting an annoyed gesture to keep her eyes on the road. “I never knew that about you. I thought you were a city boy.”

“Well, I exaggerated a little. I only lived on the farm until I was nine. Then I moved in with my aunt in St. Louis.”

“Your parents kicked you out at age nine? You must have been some little devil.”

“My parents and my two sisters died in the fire that burned down the farmhouse. My little brother and I survived because he’d pestered me into going out looking for frogs.”

“I’m so sorry, Shultz. I didn’t know about that.”

A cellphone rang. Both of them reached for their phones, but it was Schultz’s that was trilling in his pocket.

“You can’t answer your phone anyway,” he said as he flipped the phone open. “You’re driving.”

She rolled her eyes, but at least she was facing forward at the time.

Schultz listened, then mouthed to PJ that it was Dave on the other end.

“Good news,” Dave said, “times two. Searching the cab records for pickups at Laclede’s Landing paid off. We got three between ten-fifteen and eleven o’clock that Saturday night. Two destinations were hotels. The third was a house in South St. Louis. The driver remembers it because it was a nice fare, but in the opposite direction of where he was hoping to end up, which was to the airport.”

“You show him the photo?” The picture of the two sisters on the beach, the one PJ had received in the mail, had been passed around.

“Yeah. He thinks it was her, but that picture’s thirty years out of date. She still had red hair, though.”

“Shit, what a break.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw PJ turn to look at him. “Cut that out, you’re making me nervous.”

“What?” Dave said.

“Not talking to you. What else?”

“You’re gonna love this one. Couldn’t get any fingerprints or blood off the pickup truck, but we did get hairs that had gotten trapped well enough to outlast a dunking in the river. Some were caught in an exposed bolt head in the pickup bed, having been yanked roughly out. DNA says it’s Arlan’s. More hairs were caught in the driver’s sliding headrest support, tangled and pulled loose when the person turned his head. Or her head, in this case. There were only two hairs, but it was enough for mtDNA testing. Whoever was driving had the same mother as May and June.”

“Holy shit motherfucking Christ!”

“Yeah, no shit. It’s all coming together.”

“We’ll be there,” Schultz looked at his watch, “in forty-five minutes. I want to be there.”

Schultz folded his phone. “Put the pedal to the metal, woman, we got her!”

“What about all the careful driving business?”

“To hell with it. We have to be in South St. Louis in forty-five minutes.”

“Your wish is my command,” she said. She pressed on the gas pedal and sent the rear end fishtailing, then regained control, going at a higher speed.

“I told you I was good at this,” she said. “I’ll have us there on time, unless there’s an accident on the road between here and there that slows me down. Now explain what’s going on.”

Schultz went over everything Dave said. When he started on an explanation of mitochondrial DNA, she interrupted.

“I know all that. It’s DNA found outside the nucleus of the cell in the mitochondria, little energy factories. A mother’s egg has a bunch of them, sperm relatively few because they’re so tiny compared to the egg. So the embryo’s mitochondria come almost entirely from a single donor, the mother. The nuclei of the embryo’s cells have two donors.”

“I’m impressed,” Schultz said.

“I’m not. Biology 101.”

Damn, it took me a year to learn that.

It was nearly dark by the time they got to Morganford Road in South St. Louis. Snow was pelting the window with serious intent. Three inches had fallen in a short time, with no sign of letting up. Schultz had to call Dave back to get the address, something he’d neglected to ask about in the first call.

“We just passed Bevo Mill Restaurant,” Schultz said. “Only a few more blocks.”

PJ squinted out the window. It was hard to make out anything in the road, much less alongside it. “You mean that big thing over there that looks like it has arms?”

“It’s a windmill,” he said, “and a restaurant. It’s hard to see the street signs. There’s the cemetery. Turn left. Left!”

PJ turned, trusting that there was a street there. Almost immediately, she came to a roadblock and slid to a halt, the front bumper inches from a cruiser that had been parked on an angle, blocking the street.

Someone was tapping on her window. She fumbled for the button to lower it, not having had enough time in the Focus for her fingers to go there automatically. The glass slid down, and snow rushed in, speckling her face.

“We’re about two blocks away from the house,” Dave said. “Officer Daniels will park your car out of the way. C’mon out, we’ve been waiting.”

A preoccupied Schultz walked away with Dave, leaving her standing alone.
At least I can follow their footprints.

She gamely took off after them. The wind was bitterly cold and insistent, finding all the chinks in her coat’s armor. She wasn’t wearing a hat or scarf, so she pulled her neck and head down, turtle style. Hunched, eyes tracking footprints, puzzling over the fact that other footprints were starting to criss-cross the two sets she was following, she collided with someone.

It was her boss, Lieutenant Howard Wall.

“Howard,” she said. “I’m glad I ran into you. I seem to have gotten separated from Schultz and I don’t know where all the action is.”

“The action hasn’t started yet, and when it does, it will be the SWAT team going in. The subject’s taking a little break from murdering people, watching TV, probably having a beer.”

“So I do what?”

“Go in after the house is secure. Let the guys with the big guns handle knocking on the killer’s door, Doctor. You notice I’m not up there at the front of the line, either.”

I guess when it’s safe to go in with paper booties, they’ll call me.

PJ knew she was being illogical, but she resented not being there when April was captured. “So when does this knocking occur?”