Whatever Remains (3 page)

             
She was twenty-eight now, but still leggy, still crowned with a waterfall of dark coffee hair, pale face still delicate and refined. Her lips were pressed in a tight, white line, and her head was bowed, free hand between Alicia Latham’s shoulder blades in a touch meant to be soothing. She glanced up at the sound of his approach, mouth forming an O of surprise, eyes wide and bright and tear-filled. Shock crashed through her – he could see it – before she smoothed her expression and her gaze went skidding away from his, out toward the arena and the place where Harding and Trey crouched. Her profile was something from a painting; the deep, rattled breath she took sent a half-dozen memories cartwheeling through his head.

             
“Alicia,” Jade said, gently, “the detectives are here.”

             
While the woman disengaged her wet face from the front of Jade’s sweater, Ben took note of the other two. One he didn’t recognize; McMahon, he supposed. But the other was Jeremy Carver. Tall, ballet thin, dark-headed and pretty enough to be almost feminine, Jade’s gay best friend was the closest thing she had to a brother; Clara thought of him as an uncle. He had his hands in the pockets of his high-necked jacket, face too pale, gaze somehow able to do disapproving as it fell over him and moved away. The other guy – Jade’s date – looked like he either had, or was about to puke.

             
Standard reactions all around; no alarms went off in his head.

             
“Mrs. Latham,” Ben said.

             
She was mopping at her face with a sleeve and cut a glance up at him from under gummy lashes. She had blunt, unremarkable features going soft with age and hair an unnatural shade of red-brown. Trauma did ugly things to women’s faces, and hers was wrecked: lined, puckered, sagging and bloated from crying.

             
“Mrs. Latham,” he said again.

             
Her eyes pinged in crazy leaps over his face, her mouth opened, and for a moment, Ben thought she meant to respond. But she dissolved into tears again, a desperate sound catching in her throat.

             
“Detective,” Jade said, her voice tight, “can’t this wait?”

             
Over the top of Alicia Latham’s head, her expression was all too familiar, loaded with revulsion. Ben twitched a non-smile. “I’m afraid not; it has to be tonight.”

             
Jade kicked her chin up and wound a protective arm around the weeping woman’s shoulders. “We’re going up to the house while your people…” Her eyes went to the arena and the picture-snapping techs. “You can come up and talk to us there.”

“Nothing of interest,” the lead CSI, a guy with a generic name Ben could never remember – James, John, Jason, something – said as they passed one another in the arena. He was in department coveralls, paper mask dangling around his neck, in the process of snapping on a fresh pair of latex gloves. “This is obviously just the dump site, not the primary scene. We’re collecting trace, but this isn’t exactly the environment for prints.”

              “Do what you can,” Ben said and moved past him where Harding was still crouched beside the body. Trey had the back of one hand pressed to his mouth, not looking much better than Jade’s date had.

             
“Your partner,” Harding said as Ben’s shadow fell across him, “doesn’t have the strongest stomach.” Not an insult, just an observation. “Watch my light.” Ben stepped out of it. “I guess you want caught up?”

             
“Please.”

             
“Heidi Latham, age eleven,” Harding began, shining his flashlight beam on the vic’s face.

             
She was a tiny thing. She lay on her back, arms flung to the sides, legs together and curled, hair fanning, dark and curly, around her head, looking black against the sand. If he squinted, it might have looked like she was in some dance pose, coiled and ready to leap back into the next movement. But he wasn’t squinting, and the blue flush under her white skin, the slits of her half-open eyes, the utter stillness of her, was obvious in the way of all victims. He’d talked to witnesses who’d mistaken bodies as only sleeping, but Ben didn’t see how that was possible. Death wasn’t peaceful; it was wretched, and shocking, and too bold to mistake for anything else.

             
Heidi Latham was no exception; the portrait of her against the sand was all the more hideous because she looked like she could have fit in the palm of his hand. Small for her age, she looked too thin: knobs of elbows and knees showing through her clothes, concave dip of her stomach, prominent ridges of her collar bones at the neck of her t-shirt. Her features were still round with childhood, but more delicate than her mother’s. No makeup. Natural eyebrows. Her t-shirt was navy and silk-screened with cartoon flowers; it and her jeans and dirty white sneakers seemed like typical rowdy kid gear, and none of it looked disturbed.

             
“The uniforms directed me to trace amounts of vomit when I arrived,” Harding said, aiming the flashlight beam on her small, blue mouth. “There are traces. But they were wrong in supposing poison. I won’t know any of that until I get her on the table, but I can hypothesize that isn’t the cause of death. And then, there’s this.”

             
He took the back of her head in one gloved hand – her hair rustled against the latex and Trey made a sick sound – and pointed the light to her throat. There was no blood, not so much as a trace of it on her slim white neck or in her hair or on her clothes. But there was a neat little hole in the side of her throat.

             
Ben felt his brows go leaping up his forehead. “Stabbed?”

             
Harding nodded. “Right through the carotid. And there’s no blood, which confirms what Jason said. She would have bled profusely.”

             
“She wasn’t killed here,” Ben said. “And the killer cleaned her and redressed her.”

             
“That’s sick,” Trey said. His voice was shaky. “That is sick shit.”

             
“Obviously, I won’t know anything else until post,” Harding said.

             
“Obviously.”

             
Trey turned away, hand still pressed to his mouth.

             
“But this” - Harding tapped the wound with a latex-covered finger - “is the cause of death. I’d bank on it.”

             
Ben nodded. “Thanks, Doc.” He took one last look at Heidi – her small hands open, palms facing the night sky, nails short and chewed – then laid a hand on Trey’s shoulder and steered him away, back toward the arena gate.

             
“I’m sorry, man.” Trey swallowed what was either a cough or a gag. “I didn’t mean – ”

             
“It’s fine.” Trey had doggedly watched Dr. Harding fish out a three-hundred pound four-day-old corpse’s stomach contents without flinching; but the guy had a kid sister. Clearly, dead kids were going to be his hang-up. “But get your shit together before we get up to the house,” Ben said. “The second you let a victim’s family see that you’re rattled is the second they start thinking about suing the department if you don’t get a solve.”

Ben knocked twice on the back door, the one off the kitchen, on the patio ringed by tidy flower beds and one gnarled crabapple. The lights were blazing; he could see them filtering through t
he translucent drapes.

             
Carver answered the door, and his mouth curled in a show of dramatic disgust. The queen: there was a murder investigation underway and he still had time for grudges. Ben was half convinced the guy would squeal like a girl if he hit him, and wanted to do it just to see. But one of the two of them had to be professional.

             
To prove his point, he pulled his badge and flashed it at Jeremy’s face. “Can we come in?”

             
Brows slanted and nostrils flared to show how much he didn’t like the thought, Jeremy stepped back and left the door wide; he went to the table to take up sentry behind Jade’s chair, leaving them to close the door for themselves.

             
The moment the latch clicked into place, Ben was slammed with something very much like panic. The kitchen came rushing up to meet him – the dark stain of the cabinets, sleek white countertops, the heavy clean lines of the white table and its stainless chairs, the light on over the cooktop, the crayon art on the fridge, the row of neon-colored mugs hanging beside the sink, the faint smell of sawdust they’d tracked in on their boots – like the time he’d leaned head-first into an electric fence and done a nosedive in the grass. Everything blurred and tilted…and snapped back; he’d come into this place before as Ben, but tonight, he was Detective Haley, and the collision of his personal and professional lives had him reeling. He blinked, and the haze cleared and the kitchen, in all its familiar coziness, came back in to focus; only now, he felt like an outsider. The looks he was getting weren’t helping.

             
On the far side of the table, facing him, Jade sat beside her mother, Shannon, one a twenty-years-older mirror image of the other. Their heads came up in unison, blue eyes sweeping over him with expressionless scrutiny, before shifting to Trey. Alicia Latham was in front of them, shoulders hunched, sniffling, both fists clenched tight around a soggy tissue. A steaming mug of something sat in front of all three women. Holding up one side of the fridge, McMahon had some of his color back; there was something of a depressed bulldog about his face.

             
Ben cleared his throat and decided there was no sense in pleasantries. There was also no sense tipping his hand to his partner that he knew three of the room’s occupants more than he should have. “I’m Detective Haley and this is Detective Kaiden,” he said, and saw Jeremy roll his eyes. “We need to take statements from all of you, individually if there’s a place for it.” He thought of the den, its paneling and super-deep sofa and the lingering scent of spilled brandy.

             
“None of us have anything to hide,” Shannon said, sliding her arm through her daughter’s, the mother bear protecting her cub. “We can answer your questions all together.”

             
Ben matched the stare she pinned on him. “Sorry, ma’am, but it doesn’t work that way.”

             
“Can’t you see how upset –  ” Jade began, but Alicia Latham cut her off.

             
“It’s okay, honey,” she said, voice a clogged whisper. Over her shoulder, Ben saw her reach a hand across the table to Jade. Jade’s eyes went to the fistful of damp tissues before she patted the woman on the back of the wrist. “They’re just doing their job,” Alicia said. “And I need them to find whoever did this to my Heidi.”

             
Jade nodded and Alicia turned in her chair, her face swollen and wet and blotchy, but brave, in a way. She sniffed hard. “I-I’m ready.”

             
Ben looked to Jeremy, who frowned. “Dining room,” he offered, and pointed over his shoulder.

             
As discussed, Trey stepped up; his gentle bedside manner would be the better approach for a grief-stricken mother. “Mrs. Latham,” he said in a voice Ben couldn’t even hope to fake, “why don’t you go ahead and get settled and I’ll be in in just a sec.”

             
Shaking, she got to her feet, crammed her tissues in the pockets of her denim jacket, and shuffled toward the dining room like a drunk woman, all eyes following her progress. She was in sweatpants, Ben noted, that were tight in a bad way, and a man’s t-shirt under the faded denim jacket. She’d been at home, relaxing; she hadn’t expected this. Her hair looked damp, the fake red color brighter where it had air dried.

             
A sound caught his attention – a light brush of movement – and he glanced toward McMahon and the fridge, toward the back hall.
Shit
, he thought, the same moment relief flooded him. He hadn’t thought seeing Heidi Latham’s body had bothered him, but seeing Clara’s tousled little dark head peeping around the corner knocked the wind out of him. She was in a white nightgown that skimmed the floor, lace-edged and loose over her tiny bare toes. She was a miniature of Jade, soft and small and cherubic; four and already looking like her mama. But the eyes, the color of melted chocolate, those were her father’s. Those were his.

             
She clutched her stuffed rabbit tight under one arm and rubbed at her eyes; she’d been asleep. Her grandmother had probably been called to watch her. She glanced around the room at all the somber faces, and then she found his. In front of Trey, and Jade’s date, and the victim’s mother, she said, “Daddy,” and rushed him.

3

C
lara Lee Haley: she smelled like baby shampoo and her hair was soft as silk; she felt breakable as a baby bird in his arms, her cheek warm and smooth against his.

He was an awkward dad; a bad dad, if he was honest. Clara had always been some fairytale creature to him; he’d never known how to hold her or talk to her, or how to love her in a way that counted. When she was older, she’d realize that, but for now, she was awake and frightened and she wanted her daddy; and Ben didn’t have it in him tonight to keep her at arm’s length.

He cradled the back of her head in his palm and asked, “What are you doing up?” right in her ear, feeling acutely the stab of watching eyes.

Clara was innocent of the room’s mood. “Everybody’s talking.”

“We woke you up? I’m sorry.”

Jade was on her feet. “Clara, baby.” She walked around the table toward them. “Come on. Daddy can’t visit with you right now.” The look she hurled at him made it clear she didn’t
want
him to visit with their daughter.

Clara made a sound,
a fast, breathy almost-squeal.
“You don’t spend enough time with her,”
Jade had told him, only a month before.
“She’s getting older, Ben, and she’s going to think you don’t care about her. Maybe you don’t. I dunno. But if you do, you have to show it.”
The look on Jade’s face, the wounded disappointment, had been cutting.

“Come on
, love.” He leaned down till Clara’s nightgown brushed the floor, but she refused to let go. “I have to work right now, but I’ll come see you in a bit, okay?”

He felt her heartbeat against his shoulder, through his jacket, light as raindrops. “Clara – ”

She turned loose of him like he’d burned her, whirling away with a swing of white gown and flashing dark hair, back the way she’d come. Ben sighed as he straightened; she would hold it against him this time, and he couldn’t blame her.

Across the kitchen, Trey was staring at him goggle-eyed. “
Daddy
?” he asked. “Are you…” His gaze bounced around the room, going to Jade and then returning. “Dude!”

“How…how…is she your?...and that means Donovan is…”

              “First rate interrogation skills you’ve got,” Ben said, turning away from his stammering partner. They were on the patio again, moths swirling over their heads to get to the light above the door.

             
“Uh…sorry. I didn’t think I’d be coming to question my partner’s
wife
!”

             
“She’s not my wife,” Ben said, with such force that Trey took a step back.

             
“Oh, yeah, like that makes a difference. You have a kid with her? You know her? You know all of them!” His voice was getting too loud. “And you just walked in there and were gonna question them? Dude –  ”

             
“Stop saying ‘dude.’ We don’t live in California and you aren’t a surfer.”

             
“This is unethical!”

             
Of course it was, but Ben wasn’t about to agree with him. He’d known coming here would be a problem; now that he was here – that he’d felt Clara’s little shape tucked in his arm and smelled the gourmet coffee brewing in that kitchen – he couldn’t step neatly aside and request that another pair of detectives be assigned the case. Most of his colleagues had no idea that he had a daughter, or an ex-whatever-she-was, and none of them knew where they lived; but it was his duty to report his conflict of interest to his captain.

             
He wasn’t going to do that, though. This murder wasn’t like any of the others he’d worked; this time, it had been Jade’s pretty blue eyes landing on the body for the first time, her breathless, frightened voice on the line with the 9-1-1 dispatcher. Rational thought had abandoned him; he knew he had to work this case, and beyond that, God knew which direction his thoughts were spinning.

             
“How?” he asked, pinning Trey with a stare that left him shrinking backward. In the puddle of light outside the kitchen, the guy looked even younger than he was, his forehead slick with stress sweat. For a moment, Ben felt the tiniest prickling of guilt – if this blew up in his face, the kid might well go down with him – but it didn’t linger. “I don’t know the victim; I don’t know the victim’s family. Heidi Latham was found here, but her murder has shit-all to do with Jade or Clara. So explain to me how investigating that girl’s death is unethical.”

             
Trey wiped both hands down his cheeks. “It – it just is. If the captain knew – ”

             
“Yeah, that’s a rep you wanna have on the unit: the guy who goes squealing to the captain every time he gets scared.” Ben watched the hurt flash in his eyes and pressed on anyway; Trey had to learn how things worked. He wasn’t in the Boy Scouts anymore. “If you’re that big a pussy, you should have stayed in uniform writing traffic tickets.”

             
He made a childish, sulky face. “That’s not fair.”

             
“Our murder vic turns up in my ex’s yard.
That’s
not fair.” It was even less fair that his judgment was clouded by that fact. “Now, are you gonna do your job? Or do I need to call in for a new partner on this one?” He hoped Trey didn’t call his bluff; no other detective on the unit would sit by and let him investigate his own family.

             
Trey chewed it over a moment, pulling his lower lip between his teeth and cursing down at the toes of his sneakers. Finally, he heaved a great, dramatic sigh and lifted eyes that were, surprisingly, hard. “I’ll question your ex and her friends,” he said, and his voice didn’t even quaver. “You can talk to the mother.”

             
“Trey.” Ben almost wanted to smile. “Do you actually have some balls?”

             
He kicked his chin up. “Maybe.”

             
“Good. But backtalk me again, and you’ll be waiting for them to come back down for a week.”

“I’m so sorry about all this,” Jade said over the rim of her coffee mug. The warmth and the sweetness were helping soothe her rattled, icy insides.

              Standing with his arms braced over the counter, as far from her as he could get without leaving, Asher was still three shades away from his natural color. His shirt collar had somehow become rumpled and he reached to fiddle with it now. “Well…” That was all he’d said in response to any of her apologies. He licked his lips. “Maybe I should just…go ahead and clear out.”

             
She was disappointed, but appropriately so. What were the odds he would have stuck around for her when she had a kid and a farm and trust issues? If anything, it was better she see how easily freaked he was now. “Actually,” she said, and his eyes came to her, too-wide and startled. “The detectives will want to speak to you anyway, so you might as well get it done now instead of waiting. Get it over with.”

             
“And this one,” Jeremy said at her right elbow, his voice flat with distaste. “Would chase you down just for the fun of it. He’s got a sadistic streak.”

             
Asher visibly gulped.

             
“No, he doesn’t,” Jade said with a sigh. “He’s just a good cop.”

             
“Good?” her mother asked. “The only thing he’s ‘good’ at is getting pretty girls pregnant. The asshole.”

             
“Your mother,” Jeremy said, “is a brilliant woman. I’ve always thought so.”

             
“And you, too, for noticing, Remy,” Shannon said. They made similar noises of self-satisfaction.

             
“Guys.” Jade felt her face getting hot. “This is not the time to rag on Ben.”

             
Asher was staring at her, making the most solid eye contact of the night. “This detective.” Something about his gaze seemed accusing. “He’s…” He shook his head. “Clara’s father?”

             
“Most babies
do
have fathers,” Jeremy said.

             
Shannon said, “And my poor grandbaby’s happens to be the devil himself.”

             
Jade’s cheeks burned. “Yes,” she told Asher, “he’s her father. And no,” she nudged her mom, “he
isn’t
the devil. You can’t say that sort of thing. Whatever we think about him, we can’t taint him in Clara’s eyes.”

             
Asher, who’d been so boyish and sweet and happy-faced only hours before, looked like a stranger. And he looked like he had no idea what to make of her. Ben tended to have a dramatic effect on people, and Asher was no exception; Ben was the kind of man other men wanted to fight, or run from. He was friendless and graceless and cold.

             
And once upon a time, she’d been so in love with him it had hurt. She felt, as Asher watched her, that he knew that; it felt like he knew Clara hadn’t been the repercussion of some fast, dirty night in a club. Like he knew they’d made her in this house, on the soft leather of the sofa in the den.

             
The patio door opened and all of them jumped; it was that kind of night. Ben came in first – tall and big-shouldered and sinister in dark casual jacket and jeans, his deep brown hair windblown along the crown and his lean cheeks dusted with stubble. His eyes – Clara’s eyes; they stared back at her every night when she tucked her baby to bed – raked over them, but he swept from the room wordlessly, going to find Alicia.

             
His partner, the young, nervous guy, closed the door behind him and cleared his throat. “Folks, I just have a few questions, if you don’t mind, while my partner talks to Mrs. Latham.”

             
“Oh, honey,” Shannon said, “aren’t you cute.”

             
Jeremy snorted.

             
Jade pushed her chair back. “Start with them,” she said, motioning toward Asher and Jeremy. “I need to go check on Clara.”

             
The house was a four bedroom, three of which were upstairs, situated around two guest bathrooms. The master was on the main floor, and Jade had let Jeremy have it; she and Clara could each have a bathroom and be beside one another upstairs, giving Jeremy some much-deserved privacy for putting up with the two of them. He’d told her, more than once, that he was never going anywhere.
“You two are my family,”
he’d said against the top of her head. He’d grinned.
“And just think, where else would you get a prettier man of the house?”
There were benefits – so many grown up benefits – attached to drawing chalk pictures on sidewalks with her mother’s best friend’s son as a little girl.

             
Upstairs, in the bedroom that overlooked the front garden, Clara was awake in bed, sitting back against her headboard, Oatmeal in a chokehold, flipping through a picture book in the lamplight and swiping at her eyes. She was trying to be brave, and defiant, but the tears were there on her little round cheeks, and they broke Jade’s heart.

             
“Hey, you.” She eased the door shut so they didn’t wake Alicia’s other daughter – Heidi’s little sister Grace who Jade had tucked away for Shannon to watch while the night’s horror was sorted. “Whatcha reading?”

             
They’d been working on reading – the slow, stumbling pronunciations that were becoming easier and easier – but this particular book was loved for the illustrations: storybook forest creatures.

             
Clara glanced up, eyes red, lips trembling. “You wouldn’t let me see Daddy,” she accused. She wasn’t a child who said “no,” or “hate,” or “get out,” but she was deeply wounded.

             
“Oh, baby.” Jade crossed to the bed and sank down on the edge; felt Clara’s little feet against her thigh under the covers. “I wasn’t trying to keep you away from him. But he’s working, and he has to do his job right now. He’ll see you later.”

             
“But he works
all the time
,” she said, mouth working into a pout.

             
He did work a lot, but he did a lot of ignoring them, too. “He’s busy,” she told Clara. “But he sees you when he can.”

             
“Why can’t he see me
now
?”

             
Jade bit her lip. Explaining Ben’s line of work to a four-year-old wasn’t an enviable task. “You know how Daddy’s a policeman, right?”

             
“A detective.”

             
“Right. A detective.”

             
“Like Sherlock Holmes.”

             
Ben wished. “Exactly. Just like Sherlock Holmes. Well, baby, when bad people do bad things, it’s his job to find out why and how. Right?”