You Can’t Stop Me (10 page)

And as the image on the monitor showed Carmen back in the mobile crime lab, where she was introducing the rest of the superstar criminalists, Harrow lowered his mic. The show’s sign-off would follow Carmen’s last mini-segment, and would be handled by Moreno, back in LA.

But Harrow’s on-air claim of Ferguson providing puzzle pieces hadn’t been TV hype.

In the Ferguson living room, the marshal—late in the interview—had frowned and said, “You know, Mr. Harrow, there
was
this one thing.”

“Yes, Mr. Ferguson?”

“While I had that first guy pulled over, another vehicle, a pickup truck, was coming from the direction of my house…and it slowed way down, and the guy gave me, you know, the old hairy eyeball as he went by.”

“You made eye contact?”

“Oh, yeah. Impossible not to. He knew he’d caught my attention.”

“Did you tell the detectives about the guy eyeballing you in the pick-up?”

“No, sir, I don’t believe so. I forgot all about it till just now.”

“Did you get a plate?”

“No, damn it. Couldn’t even tell you the state. Don’t even know for sure what the make was. But it was blue—light blue.”

“Sounds like you got a look at the driver.”

“Yeah, I saw him, all right. That SOB was trying to tell me something with his eyes. Like he was sending a goddamn message. Sorry. Didn’t mean to curse on TV.”

“That’s okay. Could you recognize him?”

“You bet your ass I could. Sorry.” The marshal sighed. “You know, in my day, I wrote more than my share of traffic tickets, ran down kids for doin’ the kinda shit kids do, even investigated a burglary or two.”

“Yes, sir?”

“But this is the first homicide I was ever involved with—my own wife and kids.”

“It might have been him, your eyeball pick-up truck?”

Ferguson nodded, his mouth and chin tight. “You know, I can’t explain why I forgot about that truck till now. God
damn
it!”

“We’ll get you with an artist,” Harrow said.

“Why did he
do
that, Mr. Harrow?”

“These killers all have their own tortured—”

“No, not that. Why did he have to mutilate her? Why cut off her damn…her
sweet
…finger?”

Harrow had no answer.

The interview had wrapped, and crew were tearing down as Harrow and Ferguson sat in the kitchen where Mrs. Ferguson had been killed. The two men had coffee in Styrofoam cups provided by a production assistant.

“Everybody knows your story, Mr. Harrow. While your family got shot, you were off savin’ the life of the President of the United States.”

“Don’t tell the Secret Service,” Harrow said, “but I’d trade him for them in a heartbeat.”

The marshal smiled at this bleak humor. “You’re better off than me, amigo. I was writin’ a goddamn traffic ticket, busting the ass of some salesman for goin’ forty-two in a thirty-mile zone.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And the goddamn murderer slowed down to watch me do it.”

Laurene Chase liked to sit in the back of the bus.

It tweaked her sense of irony, as a black lesbian who’d managed to survive and even thrive in Waco, Texas. Right now she had the aisle seat next to Carmen Garcia by the window, with Jenny Blake and Nancy Hughes across the way, as they headed for a town in North Dakota (
were
there towns in North Dakota?) called Rolla.

She held in her hands hard copy of material Jenny Blake had downloaded about the burg of fourteen hundred or so, which covered a scant mile and a quarter. Median income was just a shade over thirty thousand, meaning nearly twenty percent of the population lived below poverty level. One statistic stood out to Laurene: seven-tenths of 1 percent of the population was African-American.

Across the aisle Jenny was pounding at the laptop keyboard as if sending repeated SOS messages from a sinking ship. The petite blonde, hair pony-tailed back, wore jeans and a white T-shirt, the letters OMG printed on the front (the back, Laurene had previously noted, read: WTF).

Laurene asked, “How’s your math, Jen?”

Jenny reacted with her usual caught-in-the-head-lights freeze, fingers poised over the keyboard like gripping claws. “Okay.”

“Good, ’cause mine sucks. What’s seven-tenths of a percent of fourteen-hundred-seventeen?”

“About ten.”

Jenny had given up three whole words in the exchange. What did that make, in the three days they’d spent together on the bus, twenty-six words out of the cute little nerd?

Laurene settled back in the bus seat. So they were headed for a town with ten black people. Two-thirds of the populace was white, with nearly 30 percent Native American. Totals for Asians and Latinos were higher than blacks, with those listing their race as “other” outnumbering African-Americans three times over.

Suddenly, Waco seemed pretty damned progressive.

Sure as hell wouldn’t be a police force in Rolla, which meant they’d be dealing with the Rolette County sheriff, a thought that in itself made Laurene uneasy. She kept thumbing through the information, and when she read about the last sheriff being removed from office for gross misconduct, she immediately pictured a big old redneck John Madden-looking motherhumper, sweat stains in the pits of his dirt-brown uniform shirt, nose a mass of red veins below mirrored sunglasses and a campaign hat.

Then she laughed to herself, thinking,
That’s me, just another progressive from Waco.

Laurene remembered what her mother had once said to her:
God made us each in His own image, darling child. That’s why we are all completely different.
Still wasn’t sure she understood that, but it often floated through her mind.

“Something funny?” Jenny asked, with just a little attitude.

Laurene, who’d been laughing to herself, held up a hand, like one of Rolla’s Indians saying,
How
.

“Not laughing at you, Jen,” Laurene said. “Just amused by my own dumb ass.”

From her window seat, where she’d been half-napping, Carmen Garcia looked over and asked, “Did I miss something, girls?”

Jenny, naturally, said nothing.

Next to her, the ponytail blonde, Nancy Hughes—who’d also been napping—came slowly awake and stretched.

“So,” Carmen said, looking over at Laurene, “spill it. What’s so funny?”

Shaking her head, Laurene said, “I was wondering how the folks in Rolla, North Dakota, are gonna react to me and Jenny here—the world’s most beautiful black Amazon, and a nearly mute blond girl wearing a T-shirt sayin’
Oh My God, What The Eff?
”

Jenny looked injured, and Carmen frowned. Nancy wasn’t awake enough yet to have an opinion.

Laurene made a dismissive wave. “Jen…guys…I’m not making fun of anybody.”

Carmen said, “Kinda sounds like you are.”

“Well, maybe myself a little. The locals see
my
fine gay black ass, they are going to shit gold bricks, and start the gold rush all over again.”

That made Carmen laugh, Nancy too, and even Jenny managed a tiny smile.

“Hey,” Laurene said, “we’re all freaks to somebody.”

“You can’t just be figuring that out,” Nancy said.

But the other two had given all their attention over to Laurene, who not only was Harrow’s right hand, but the oldest and maybe wisest of them.

“I always lived my life the way I wanted,” she said, no laughter now. “Nobody could make me believe I was wrong—even when I was.”

That drew wry smiles out of Carmen and Nancy, though Jenny remained poker-faced.

“I really thought I was in charge of myself, if not my destiny—I mean, no cop thinks the world is anything but a random damn mine field. But I was in a relationship that was working, and I really thought I was the captain of that frickin’ ship too. Me and Patty. That was her name.”

Now it was Carmen and Nancy whose expressions had gone blank with the fear of getting too much information, while Jenny had tight eyes and a cocked head, like a dog just figuring out what those words its master had been blurting were all about.

“Since Patty died, though, I realize I wasn’t the one with the hand on the rudder. She’d been runnin’ things, all along. Made me think I was in charge. Out front, leading the way.” Laurene chuckled again, but this time there was no humor in it. “Leading the way? Hell, I
lost
my way.”

“We all do, time to time,” Nancy said, and Carmen nodded.

But Jenny said, bluntly, “I don’t.”

All eyes went to the petite computer guru.

“Never
had
a way,” she said with a shrug.

Laurene laughed. “That’s a good one, kid,” she said. “First joke I ever heard you crack.”

Jenny said, “Joke?”

Then the other three howled and, truth be told, Jenny was smiling herself, just a little.

They all rocked forward a little as the bus stopped. Looking past Carmen out the tinted window, Laurene made out a low, long building with a sign proclaiming they were parked by the Rolette County Sheriff’s Office.

In the aisle, Laurene Chase smoothed her blouse and pants with only moderate success, after ten hours on the bus, but for a couple of pee breaks. She slipped into a black
Crime Seen!
silk jacket, retrieved her carry-on-type bag from its perch, and headed for the front of the bus, Carmen and Nancy behind her, Jenny staying on the bus, still glued to her laptop.

They walked down the few stairs and outside into bright sunshine and a cold north wind. Behind their bus was the semi that was home to the lab and the mini production studio.

“Damn,” Laurene said, zipping up the jacket at the chill. “Wasn’t it just summer?”

“Not convinced it’s
ever
summer up here,” Carmen said, shivering as she stepped down, a hand trying vainly to keep her hair intact.

Blond Nancy, still wearing only a T-shirt and jeans and seemingly impervious to the windy North Dakota welcome, walked off toward the semi to collect her gear.

“Tough kid,” Laurene said, nodding toward the sound woman.

“Crew,” Carmen said with a shrug. “Different breed.”

The street was two-lane with curb parking, the buildings mostly one-story, a gas station across and down the only real sign of life, as cars pulled in and out. A parking lot to the right of the sheriff’s office revealed two cruisers and a four by four bearing the department logo.

From the semi, bulky Maury Hathaway emerged, lugging his camera, Nancy Hughes and Billy Choi tagging after. Hathaway, like Nancy, wore only a T-shirt, this one with a Phish logo, and jeans—in his fifties, he remained a teenager. Choi, his hair “Werewolves of London” perfect despite the wind, wore a black leather jacket over a black tee and black slacks.

Laurene gathered the camera crew plus Carmen and Choi trailing behind them, and left them grouped on the sidewalk like a parade that got sidetracked as she went in through the double glass doors. The meeting had been set up by Harrow via phone—all Laurene knew was the sheriff’s name, Jason Fox.

A tall, broad-shouldered Native American in uniform with sheriff’s badge loomed over a long counter. His hard brown eyes under a helmet of raven-black hair looked past Laurene at the group gathered beyond the glass doors.

So much for the redneck musclehead she’d pictured. Maybe the sheriff who got thrown out of office had looked like that.

“Sheriff Fox? Laurene Chase with
Crime Seen!
”

“Been expecting you.” His eyes went past her again. “Didn’t expect that kind of entourage, though.”

“Not really an entourage, Sheriff—that’s actually a very pared-down TV crew, plus a forensics expert working with us. I’m a crime scene analyst myself—on leave from the Waco P.D.”

He clearly liked the sound of that, his thin mouth even turning up at the corners enough to qualify as a smile. “Okay. You can let ’em in.”

She did, and soon they’d all shaken hands and made introductions, after which Sheriff Fox said, “Shall we move into my office? It’ll be snug, but you should all make it.”

The pebble-glass door had to be left open so that Hathaway could shoot from there. Otherwise the modest office accommodated them, but just—nothing fancy, a metal desk, computer desk next to it, file cabinet in a corner. Walls were spotted with diplomas, commendations, and some colorful outdoor pictures of sheriff and deputies in wooded areas.

The sheriff sat himself behind his desk, signaling for Laurene and Carmen to take the two seats across. Choi leaned against the file cabinet while Nancy ran the boom from the close-quarters sidelines. A file folder sat before the sheriff on the neat desk like a meal he was contemplating.

Laurene asked the sheriff for permission to start rolling and got it.

She asked, “Sheriff Fox, what can you tell us?”

Fox flipped open the file folder. “Burl Hanson was county comptroller.”

Not law enforcement,
she thought,
but another public servant….

“He came home from work and found something terrible.”

Two years before

Nola Hanson was a typical mother, convinced her daughter Katie was no typical child. And she had typically big dreams for her daughter Katie—Dr. Hanson, Katherine Hanson (Attorney at Law), Governor Hanson, Senator Hanson, even
President
Hanson. Ever since Hillary, all the doors were open now, weren’t they?

On the other hand,
Doctor
Hanson did have a real ring to it….

As for eight-year-old Katie, her biggest ambition was doing well at tomorrow night’s softball game.

“You’re
sure
he’ll be there?” the child asked for the fifth or sixth time.

The girl’s mother was at the stove, stirring chicken noodle soup. Patient with her blond, pigtailed interrogator, Nola said, “Your father’s working late today, so he can be sure not to miss an inning of the game tomorrow.”

Tall for her age, and slender, Katie slipped onto a diner-type stool opposite her mother at the kitchen island, and displayed a big grin made memorable by a missing front tooth, the new one about a quarter of the way in. Mother and daughter shared hair color and the same lively blue eyes. Nola, in her mid-thirties, had kept on a few pounds after giving birth to Katie, but Burl, her husband, not only never complained, he seemed fully in favor of the additional curves.

“I like my women with some meat on the bone,” he’d kidded her.

“Women?” she’d kidded back, one eyebrow arching.

“
Woman
,” he corrected.

“No problem. I like my
men
big and stupid.”

This little exchange had become a running joke with them, and seen endless repetition and variation over the years.

Burl was comptroller for Rolette County, having worked his way up from the entry-level accounting position he’d landed out of college. Nola and Burl were alumni of North Dakota State, Bisons through and through—Burl even insisted on owning a green car (the school’s colors were green and gold).

Some good-natured guff had come Nola’s way from her sorority sisters when she’d started dating the accounting major, but when she retorted, “CPAs do it with a long pencil,” the carping had turned to laughter, and maybe envy.

The couple married just after graduation. Burl took the job out here, one interstate exit past the middle of nowhere, and Nola signed on at the Rolla Public Library. At first, their lives were about as boring as Nola’s sorority sisters predicted. Slowly, however, things changed—they both earned promotions, Nola first, rising to head librarian with a speed that dismayed some of her co-workers.

And though she wasn’t exactly overseeing the Library of Congress, the Rolla branch brought its own challenges, and she took pride in having the best public collections of both fiction and non-fiction (for a town Rolla’s size) in the state.

Burl’s rise had been slower, his path blocked by more than a couple geriatric librarians. Still, his progress had been steady, and they always considered themselves both happy and blessed—at least until Katie came along and showed them what happiness was really about. The gifted little girl became the center of their universe, and her accomplishments in school gave Nola and Burl more pride than anything in their respective careers.

Everything was working out even better than Nola could ever have hoped. Both she and Burl came from broken families, and making their house a home was a shared goal. When her female friends would whine over petty arguments with their husbands, Nola (to her slight embarrassment and major pleasure) couldn’t report a single spat. She and Burl were simply on the same page, and Katie had only made life better. Nola made no apologies for her good luck.

Ladling soup into a bowl, Nola asked, “Washed your hands?”

Her daughter leaned toward the waiting bowl on the counter and said, “Smells
good
….”

“Don’t change the subject. Straight to the bathroom and wash them.”

Defeated, Katie climbed down and trotted off toward the first-floor bathroom.

“Soap too!” Nola called.

If getting Katie to wash up was the biggest dilemma of the day, Nola knew she didn’t have anything to complain about.

A potentially touchy subject had come up earlier—what Katie wanted for her birthday. The girl said she’d settle for nothing less than a little brother or a puppy. Katie didn’t really seem to care which, though Burl would probably be happy to hear that Katie, given a choice, was leaning toward the canine option….

Smiling to herself, setting the bowl of soup on the counter where Katie would sit, Nola was surprised to see the doorknob turning across the kitchen, on the door off the garage.

A glance up at the clock said it was only 6:45, and she didn’t expect Burl for another hour, at least. Which was why she was serving Katie her dinner now.

Pleased to have Burl home, she half turned to the door and said, “
You’re
early! How was your—”

She stopped mid-sentence, frozen at the sight of a strange man at the threshold of her kitchen. Middle-aged, a little chunky. Tennis shoes, blue jeans, and a blue jacket. Blue baseball cap pulled low almost over his eyes.

Pistol in his right hand.

Though physically petrified, Nola was mentally racing, thoughts streaking through her mind:

Katie was still in the bathroom, good.

Nearest knife in the block on the counter behind her.

Soup hot enough to throw at this intruder and burn him?

What then, the knife?

No getting to the phone for 911, too far away.

Duck behind the counter of the island, but what then? Fight or flight?

The presence of Katie in the house made the decision easy.

Nola shouted, “
Katie—run!
”

Then, snarling, she grabbed the pan of soup—maybe it wasn’t hot enough but it was metal and she could swing at him—and moved toward the intruder and the pistol barked.

Like a hard punch, it knocked Nola back, and she felt her balance slipping. The counter’s edge was right there, but when she reached for it, it seemed to move away and she found herself on the floor, tile cool against her flesh.

To her surprise, there was no pain. She knew she had been shot, from the noise echoing in the airy kitchen to the spreading warmth in her chest, but she couldn’t get over the lack of pain. Everything just felt numb. Something smelled bitter—cordite. Burl was a hunter.

She tried to yell again, for Katie to run, but nothing came. She coughed and realized she was spitting up blood. The man stood over her now, his eyes on her but unconcerned, as if he were looking at spilled milk and not a dying woman.

Nola tried to recognize him, couldn’t, then tried to understand why this stranger had just walked into her house and shot her.

Should have locked the door
, a voice in her head said.

Too late now, wasn’t it?

Spilled milk.

Sending thoughts to Katie to run, to hide, to get out of the house, was all she could manage for her daughter—a sad desperate attempt at telepathy. She tried to talk, to ask this man why he had done this thing, but her efforts were only rewarded with more coughing.

She struggled to focus on his face again, but her vision blurred.

Was she about to die? Was
Katie
about to die? Was the price of her happy life these terrible last agonized moments?

He raised the pistol again, and the last thing she saw was the flash.

Katie’s hands were under the warm water when she heard her mother yell for her to run, but that made no sense—her mommy
never
wanted her to run in the house….

A moment later, she heard what sounded like one of the M-80s the bigger kids had been shooting off last summer, on the Fourth of July, when both her parents warned her about the dangers of firecrackers. They’d finally relented and let her hold a sparkler that her dad lit.

But this bang had been so loud, she jumped, water from the sink spraying the front of her when she pulled her hands back, making a mess Mommy wouldn’t like.

Katie was scared now. Something was going on in the kitchen, something not normal, something wrong, but she had no idea what. She crept closer to the open door.

A second M-80 exploded in the kitchen, and Katie jumped again, her hand stifling a scream. She tiptoed into the hallway, and looked out to the kitchen, where her mother’s feet were sticking out, on the floor! Rest of her hidden by the kitchen’s large island.

Standing over Mommy was a tall man who seemed to be pointing down, maybe with his hand, maybe with something
in
his hand; but from here, the man’s body blocked the object and Katie couldn’t see.

But she did see a stranger, and she of course understood that a stranger meant danger, and she grasped now that Mommy yelling for her to run was because
this
stranger meant danger….

As the man turned slowly in her direction, Katie turned and sprinted down the hall to her bedroom and ducked inside, closing the door as quietly as she could.

Had he seen her?

She looked for a place to hide—there were really only two choices: the closet and under her bed. When they played hide and seek, her mommy always looked in the closet first. Under the bed was her best choice. More than once, Mommy had failed to find her there.

She dropped to her knees, breath coming in ragged gasps now, tears running down her cheeks, though she was barely aware of that; then she shimmied under the bed, and tried not to move.

Quiet as a mouse,
that was something her grandma would say.
Quiet as a mouse.

She knew of better hiding places in the house, but that would mean trying to get past the stranger, and she knew if he saw her, she was in trouble.

Under the bed would have to do.

The springs her roof now, Katie prayed to God that the man wouldn’t find her, and that her daddy would come home. She hoped her mommy was all right. Mommy was on the floor and maybe the man had hit her. But Mommy would be all right. She had to be! Katie would be all right too, if she just stayed quiet as a mouse. This was as far as her mind could take her.

Daddy,
she thought.
Please come home…please….

When she heard the bedroom door open, she again clamped a hand over her mouth to keep the fright in. Fear gripped her now; she was shaking, nearly uncontrollably. The door was behind her, to her left. She could hear the man coming in—he was not rushing. It was the same way Daddy checked on her when he thought she was asleep, but wasn’t.

Only this wasn’t Daddy.

The closet was to her right and soon she could see the man’s black shoes under the edge of where the bedspread hung down.

He opened the louvered doors one at a time, and poked around in there, among her toys on the floor and the neat hanging clothes. When he shut the closet up, her breath caught in her throat and maybe, maybe, a tiny sound came out.

She was sure he would look under the bed next, that his stranger’s face would be inches from hers; but he didn’t. Instead, he walked around the bed, circling behind her and crossing the room to her desk and the small table where she kept her snow globe collection.

When he stopped before the table, his feet still in view under the bedspread hem, she felt something that wasn’t fear—something that, had she been older, might have been described as a sense of violation.

Her snow globe collection was her most cherished possession, and the stranger was looking at them, maybe even handling them. She felt her face redden but made herself stay silent, knowing that his finding her, and touching her, could be far worse than him touching her toys.

Please, Daddy, please come home,
she prayed.

Then the stranger’s feet turned again—was he walking out of the room? Without finding her? A hopeful wave washed over her, but still she stayed quiet as a mouse. Then couldn’t see his feet, couldn’t hear him, didn’t know
where
he was….

Cold dry hands grabbed her ankles, and yanked.

The scream, the pure animal cry that escaped from her, seemed to echo off the walls, and engulf her whole world. She grabbed at the carpeting, but the nap gave her nothing to hold onto and anyway he was too strong, dragging her.

“
Mommy!
”

Once he had her out, he took her by the arm and brought her to a standing position, but the sudden force caused her to stumble and fall. He bent down close, his face a blank mask, his eyes staring right through her.

As he pulled her to her feet again, not roughly, not gently, Katie wondered if it was possible that this man wasn’t a human at all. Adults didn’t look at kids the same way they did other adults, but they did have life in their eyes, and this stranger did not.

As he swept her to her feet, Katie thrashed and kicked, but the stranger was too strong.

“
Mommy! Mommy!
”

Her throat burned, the tears streaming now, her breath uneven as she tried to fight and scream at the same time, the shrill sound of her cries hurting her own ears.

Then the stranger dragged her into the kitchen and set her on the floor, almost gingerly, next to her mother.

Katie saw two little holes in her mother’s chest, Mommy, with blood on her mouth, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, her eyes without life, like the stranger’s.

“
Mommy!
” Katie shrieked one last time, and she tried to shake her mother back to life, to no avail.

Katie looked up at the stranger, who was pointing something at her now—a gun. The ones her daddy had were bigger, but this was like the ones on TV. It looked like a big black squirt gun.

Beyond the gun, the man’s face remained blank as he aimed.

Katie’s eyes widened and her tears stopped and even her fear fled. Then she said something. She didn’t know why she said it, but she said it: “Now I lay me down to sleep….”

A flash filled her vision, and she fell backward into darkness. Her last thought—would Mommy be waiting for her, in Heaven?—ended when her head touched the floor.