Up in Smoke (25 page)

She sprawled across it and banged her head on the tile floor. A gray fog crowded her mind. He kicked her breast and stomach and throat. She gagged and knew she was going to be sick.

When she vomited, he yelled, “You're disgusting,” and rubbed her face in it. Grabbing the back of her neck, he squeezed it hard and smashed her face against the side of the tub. Whimpering, tears and snot mixing with the vomit, she begged him to stop. He tossed her in the tub and her head hit a faucet.

When she regained consciousness, he was gone. She could barely move, the pain was so bad. It was a long time before she managed to get to the phone and call help.

Alice Ann was hospitalized for several days. Em told her she had to have Kirby arrested and somewhere she had to find the courage to testify against him. If she didn't, he would kill her next time.

Maybe, Em thought, she shouldn't have done it, shouldn't have pushed Alice Ann so hard, shouldn't have insisted she have him arrested. Maybe if Em hadn't been so angry, so intent on revenge, if she had snatched up her daughter and run far away maybe Alice Ann would still be alive.

Alice Ann's husband got a lawyer and the lawyer got him off. The husband bought a gun and killed Alice Ann. The lawyer was Jackson Garrett.

With everything set, Em felt restless. Waiting was something she'd never done well. She felt nauseated all the time and food didn't taste good. It was almost like her system was getting ready for the end. Anticipation left her feeling giddy.

When you lose a child, some part of you dies. You can't explain it to anybody who hasn't been there. You never get over it. You wake up with it, you carry it with you all day wherever you go, you take it to your grave.

It's almost over. Her world was at the verge of ending as she put herself on the path toward the final confrontation.

She turned on the television, pulled off her shoes and lay back.

*   *   *

When Cass turned on her television set, she discovered she was all over the news. The shot of her leaving the faculty dining room with her head down was played over and over on every channel. Hadley Cane put her press secretary spin on it and explained that Ms. Storm had only recently joined the team and didn't realize that all walls had ears, even those of the ladies room.

Free advertising for Jack, the seed planted in the voters' minds that Halderbreck was stupid, and payback for Halderbreck's suggestion that Jack would be second on his ticket.

Democracy in action.

29

“If you'd stop yelling, maybe I could figure out what you're going on about.” Sean, with two large grocery bags, trotted up the steps, brushed past Susan in the doorway and plopped the bags on her kitchen table.

“Where the hell have you been?” She'd left messages all over the place and he hadn't called back.

“Jesus, you sound like my wife.”

“You didn't answer the question.” The media had been clamoring at her all day and she wasn't in the best of moods to begin with. Having to fight them everywhere she went didn't help any.

“Just like my wife.” He turned to face her, leaned back against a cabinet and crossed his arms.

“Are you trying to make me lose my temper?” It wouldn't take much.

“No, darlin', though 'tis a delightful sight altogether.” He started removing tomatoes, garlic, onions from a bag. “You want to tell me what you're going on about before I lose mine?”

“What are you doing?”

“I'm in the mood for a home-cooked meal, and since you can't cook, I'm the one who has to do it. Always been that way. You get into something and can't handle it. I have to step in.”

Susan put her hands on her hips. “You only step in when you have a guilty conscience. What have you done?”

Bell peppers, baby squash, salad greens. Her kitchen table was beginning to look like the produce department at Erle's Market.

“Is there a place called Weir, Kansas?” He squatted, rummaged in the cabinet and came up with a large pot.

“I doubt it. Why?”

“I think I was there.” With a woefully weary sigh, he crossed his eyes in a mad, blitzed-out-of-his mind dippy look. “I've been places today where no man has set foot since the beginning of the last century. They dig them out of the ice for the tourists.”

“All right,” she said. “You've charmed me out of being mad. Now—”

“No, really. That's where I was. Learned fascinating and highly suspect information from the natives.”

She eyed him suspiciously, wondering what the hell he was going on about. He smiled benignly. Alarms went off. “My father sent you, didn't he? He bribed you and sent you out here to get me fired. That way I'd have to come back home.”

“I can't understand why you wouldn't,
aghra.
Have you looked around at where you are?”

“I have an officer who wants to throw your ass in jail. I'm having a little difficulty understanding why I don't just let him.”

“You'd just stand by and let me be arrested?”

She sighed and rubbed the tips of her fingers up and down her forehead. “I'd appreciate it if you'd stop behaving like a jerk and recall that someone hit a woman over the head and stuffed her into the trunk of her car to die. Someone also—maybe a different someone, but most likely that same someone—stuck a gun in the mouth of a paralyzed man and pulled the trigger.”

“Sorry, Susan. What am I about to be arrested for?”

“Your fingerprints were found in her house.”

“Yeah.”

She thought he sighed, but since he'd banged the pot in the sink and turned on the water, she couldn't be sure. “Sean—”

He transferred pot to stove and turned burner on beneath it. “That's what I came to see you about.”

“You were in Gayle's house.”

He slapped a package of pasta on the countertop, set a bottle of olive oil beside it, brought out a bottle of wine from the other bag and took glasses from the shelf. “Where do you keep your knives?”

“Why the hell didn't you tell me? Top drawer on your left.”

“I'm a reporter, Susan. I'm not in the habit of giving information to cops.” He uncorked the wine, poured two glasses and handed her one.

“You want to explain?” She took the glass, held it up to the light, and admired its ruby color. She sipped.

“Friday.” With the tip of a knife, he chopped onions with a precise rhythm. Chop chop chop. Shoved minced bits out of the way. Chop chop chop. “I ran into the hotel and Wakely, listing in his wheelchair, was waiting in the lobby. Half-looped, as usual, and mad as a viper. He kept saying, loudly, that he had to be somewhere and his keeper wasn't there.”

“Keeper?”

“Murray, the physical therapy guy, who takes care of him. Being the sort of crafty investigative reporter that I am, I thought, aha, a gift horse. Far from looking him in the mouth, I'll put him in my rental car, and extract hitherto unknown secrets about Jackson Garrett.” Sean put a dollop of oil in a skillet and turned the burner on under it.

“Where'd you take him?”

“I followed his directions. Turn here, turn there, that's the house, stop here. I got him inside, wheelchair and all. And that wasn't easy. For my troubles, I got nothing. He wouldn't even introduce me to the woman who opened the door.”

“You took Wakely Fromm to see Gayle Egelhoff.” It never hurt to state the obvious if you were arranging clarity in your mind.

“Yes.” He scraped onions and garlic in the skillet and stirred them around. The resulting aroma made her mouth water.

“Don't try to tell me you didn't find out her name.”

“When I got Wakely settled in the living room, I noticed a magazine on the coffee table just before I left. It was addressed to Vincent Egelhoff. I assumed she was Mrs. Egelhoff.”

“Why?” she said with exasperation. “Why did he go to see Gayle and why didn't you tell me?”

“He wouldn't tell me who he was going to see, he wouldn't tell me why.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “What did he say?”

Sean added chopped bell peppers to the sizzling onions. “He kept muttering to himself, ‘No point now. And better left alone.'”

“What did that mean?”

“I couldn't get anything more out of him.”

“Really?”

He held up a hand. “Honest to God's truth.”

“Sure,” she said flatly.

He dropped pasta into boiling water. “Wakely always talked about his good friend Jack. Best smoke jumper that ever was. Hero. Wouldn't be alive if Jack hadn't dragged him out of hell's fire. It was like a litany, repeating the same phrases over and over. That's all he ever said.”

“You think there's something fishy there.”

“It piqued my interest. Enough that I did a little research at the Hampstead paper on that twenty-year-old disaster.”

“And you found out—?”

“Jack Garrett was a hero and saved the life of Wakely Fromm.”

She took a sip of wine. “How was Fromm getting back to the hotel?”

“He said he'd call someone.”

With a fork, Sean lifted a strand of pasta and tasted it for doneness. “I have no idea why Fromm went there. I took him because I wanted to pump him, get something the rest of the media didn't have.”

“Why?”

“By the time
NewsWorld
comes out, that's all old news.”

Susan picked up the bottle and topped off both their glasses.

“The whole situation with Garrett taking Fromm in, making himself responsible for the man, Fromm living with Garrett even after Garrett got married. It's just—” Sean shrugged. “The whole situation is unusual. I wanted to find out—” He broke off, thought a second, then added, “What I could find out, I guess. What does this say about Garrett? Would it continue forever? If Garrett were to be nominated, and an even bigger
if,
if he were to be elected, would Fromm go to the White House?”

Sean turned off the burner and dumped boiling water and pasta into a colander to drain. “Fromm and Garrett have known each other since—hell, I don't know, since they were born maybe. I'm interested in Garrett. Like I said. I'm a reporter.”

“Are you looking for scandal? Dirty little secrets hidden away in dark holes until they grow mold and smell like defeat, that can be brought out in the light and spread before a salivating public.”

“Good Lord, have you been reading Edgar Allan Poe?” He shook the colander and dumped the pasta on a platter, poured sauce over it and put the whole thing on the table.

“Dinner.” He held out a chair for her.

She decided maybe she was hungry after all. “This is really tangled, Sean. I can't just let you waltz in here and do what you want. You may think it's funny, but I am the law enforcement in this town. And, if you laugh, so help me God, I will bash you over the head with that wine bottle.”

He looked at her with horror. “And spill the merlot? I want you to know I paid—”

“Sean—”

“Sorry.” He twirled linguini around his fork. “When you get all official, I get nervous.”

“Any reason?”

“See?” Pasta securely wrapped around the fork, he took a mouthful, chewed and swallowed. “There you go again. What do you think I did? Killed the woman and poor old Wakely?”

She looked at him. “No.” But Parkhurst didn't feel that strongly. Cops were always suspicious of the individual who found a homicide victim.

“Then why all this third degree, this where were you when the dog barked in the night?”

Eyebrows raised, she held her look.

“Oh, right. Just doing your job.”

“So why were you at Gayle Egelhoff's house the night she was killed?”

More pasta twirling, more chewing, more swallowing. “To pump Wakely, like I said. No reason. Simple reporter's curiosity.”

“What time was that?”

He took a sip of wine. “Nine o'clock, maybe.”

“She died sometime between nine and two
A.M.
You and Wakely were the last people to see her alive.”

“Except for the killer.”

Susan ignored that. “Tell me about her.”

“I didn't have a chance to find out anything. Mid-forties. A little nervous. As I was pushing in the chair, she said to Fromm, ‘You have to tell the truth now.'”

“Go on.”

“Fromm said, ‘The truth is different for everybody.'”

“What did she say?”

“That was it.”

“What else did he say?”

“‘Vince didn't.'”

“Didn't what?”

“I don't know. Wakely remembered I was there and closed his mouth.”

“What else?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing else? They didn't say anything else to each other? To you?”

“Nothing. That was it. The whole entire stock of words that were said in my presence.”

“What about after you left and stood with your ear to the door?”

Sean drew himself up. “I'd never do such a thing. Besides, the door was solid wood.”

30

As soon as his shift ended, Demarco picked up his laptop, headed for the hospital and tracked down the doc at the nurses' station writing on a chart. “How's she doing?”

“She lost a lot of blood.” Dr. Sheffield, stocky, muscular, black curly hair, stood with his feet planted wide, arms crossed over his chest, like he was prepared to protect the castle from roving hordes.

“I need to question her.”

“No.” Sheffield went back to scribbling notes.

“I need to find out what happened.”

The doc shifted his stance, gave Demarco a hard stare. “It was very dicey there for a while. She's not out of the woods yet. You can't bother her.”

There were times when Demarco missed the Marine Corps. You didn't put up with shit like this. If you wanted something, you asked, and you got an answer.