Читать книгу Detective Defender - Marilyn Pappano - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIt was a strange winter. The sky hung heavy and gray, the clouds so dense that the sun hadn’t managed to break through in days. Damp cold drifted through the French Quarter streets, spreading its chill with each bit of ground it covered. Martine Broussard had lived her entire life in southern Louisiana, and she couldn’t recall any winter that been so relentlessly bleak for so shamelessly long.
Tugging her jacket tighter, she regretted not taking a few moments to run up the stairs from her shop to get a heavier coat before striking out for the river, but Paulina had been so insistent on the phone. You have to come now. I really have to talk to you, Tine.
When a ghost from your past broke twenty-four years of silence with both fear and anger in her voice, what could you do besides go now?
No one sat on the benches in Jackson Square or lounged on the grass, a rare emptiness that was as strange as the chill. The walkways along the four sides saw a bit more traffic, but people seemed eager to go from one place to another. Like them, Martine didn’t linger but lengthened her stride instead. It was only a handful of blocks from her shop on Royal Street, and the walk to the river normally took ten minutes or so as she strolled and dawdled and exchanged hellos with fellow Quarter residents. This afternoon she cut the travel time in half, jogging across Decatur, crossing the trolley tracks, reaching the Moonwalk in record time. It was even colder here by the river, but that wasn’t what caused the prickling of her nerves.
It was the sudden absolute sense of...wrong. This weather was wrong. The phone call from Paulina was wrong. The panic in her voice was wrong. The queasiness in Martine’s gut was wrong. It was a normal Tuesday in a normal week in a normal January in a normal French Quarter, and the uneasiness, the nervousness, the weirdness, were all wrong.
But it wasn’t a normal day, a normal week, a normal month.
The broad path stretching in both directions atop the riverside levee was empty. There were trees, benches and trash cans, all shrouded in swirling fog, but not a sign of life in either direction. Martine reached inside her jacket, touched her fingers lightly to the charm that lay beneath her shirt, then gripped it as a figure materialized a dozen feet ahead of her. A gasp escaped her before she recognized Paulina, but even recognition didn’t slow the pounding of her heart.
“Never thought I could hide behind a little tree, did you?” her old friend commented. Though she still looked very much like the girl Martine had grown up with, she was significantly different, too. Teenage Paulina had always carried an extra ten pounds that gave a soft roundedness to her beauty; she’d rarely been without a smile; her blond hair had gleamed and her blue eyes had glistened with life, love, anticipation and promise.
This woman needed an extra ten pounds to fill out the hollows in her face. Her hair hung dull and limp, and her eyes were hollow, too. She wore black pants that bagged on her skinny frame, a dingy white shirt and a gray fleece jacket that helped her blend into the steely day.
She would have been voted “the girl most likely to...” if their generation had done such things. Most likely to sleep with the boys. To talk back to the teachers. To flirt with the handsome football coach. To get suspended for being a wild child and named homecoming queen in the same year. To go to college, to live life loud, to run wild and travel far, to have the perfect career, marry the perfect man, birth perfect children.
Like the day, the weather and everything else, that title would have turned out to be wrong.
Realizing she was still clenching her charm, Martine let it drop and slowly closed the distance between them. “It’s been a long time, Paulina.”
“Not long enough. I’d hoped I’d never see you again.”
Though the baldly spoken sentiment stung, Martine couldn’t take offense because subconsciously she’d reached the same conclusion long ago. For fifteen years they’d been best friends—the two of them plus Callie and Tallie, the Winchester twins, and Robin Railey—but one June night had ended that. Robin had refused anything to do with them starting the next day. The twins had moved their summer visit to relatives in England ahead by a month and left without a goodbye, and Paulina had escaped to college two months early. As far as she knew, none of them had ever returned home.
“Why don’t we get out of the cold? Get some coffee?” Martine gestured vaguely to her left, her wave taking in Jax Brewery and Café du Monde.
Paulina shook her head and went straight to the point. “Someone knows.”
Without thought, Martine reached for the charm again, caught herself and forced her hand away. A chill swept through her, unsettling and eerie and totally irrational. She knew that last part in her brain—had tried to convince her friends of it twenty-four years ago but never could. She gave herself a mental shake and Paulina a faint smile. “Knows what, Paulina? That five girls who’d had too much weed played some silly games in the woods one night?”
Paulina’s features looked as if they would crack if she tried to return the smile. They were masklike, the coloring off, the contours exaggerated, the eyes shallow and empty of any emotion that might come down on the lighter side. A not-real mask of how a real Paulina might look if she were scared to death.
Scared to death? Because of something they’d done when they were kids?
“They know what we did, Tine. I don’t know how—maybe they saw us, maybe Callie or Tallie or Robin told someone—but they know, and they’re...they’re...” Her gaze swept the area, her eyes wide. She hunched her shoulders and lowered her voice. “They’re coming after us.”
Martine shuddered, reminded of too many late girls’ nights watching horror movies on TV or wandering the entire town after everyone else was in bed, snitching tomatoes from Mrs. Bush’s plants, peaches from Mr. Everard’s trees, sharing plans and jokes and stories to scare the pants off each other. Paulina had always been best at those, holding a flashlight so her face was mostly shadows, creating voices for every character, including low, growly, vicious ones for the villains. She’d never failed to make Martine shriek with good-natured fear, followed by laughter.
But a look at Paulina showed the great release of laughter wasn’t on the agenda today.
Again, Martine gestured toward the more populated area a few dozen yards away. “Come with me, Paulina. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and some beignets. You always said they were God’s dessert, and they’re as good today as they were then.” She even took a few steps before realizing that Paulina hadn’t moved.
“Have you talked to Callie or Tallie or Robin?” the woman asked. “Heard anything about them from your family or on Facebook?”
Retracing her steps, Martine returned to her original spot. “No.” The end of their friendships had come too fast, had been too hard. She’d moped around alone and lonely after they’d abandoned her, until finally she fled, too, though not far: only the fifty miles to New Orleans. She’d put them out of her head and eventually out of her heart, and she’d made new friends and built a new life with no room for them. The day she’d realized she could think of them dispassionately—Oh, that blonde looks like Paulina or She reminds me of Robin with the way she walks—had been a very long time coming.
“Well, you can’t talk to Callie. She’s dead. They tried to kill Tallie, but she got away. No one knows where she is. I haven’t been able to find Robin, so I don’t know if she’s still alive. And that leaves you and me, Tine. Me, I don’t stay in one place very long. You, though...you’re living over there on Royal Street. Hell, you’re even listed in the phone book. You need to leave. Run. Find a dark little hole and pull it in on top of you, because they’re coming after us, and they’re not going to stop until we’re—we’re...”
She said the last word in one of those scary-story voices, little more than a whisper but still loud enough to echo inside Martine’s head: “Dead.”
A passing ship chose that moment to blast its horn, both muffled and amplified by the heavy air. Martine gazed at it a moment, headed downriver. Once it reached the Gulf of Mexico, its crew could go anyplace they wanted in the world. A tiny part of her wished herself on the deck, where soon the sun would shine and all of life’s possibilities would open up before her again.
But she couldn’t run away, wouldn’t, especially from a problem that wasn’t even really a problem. Those foolish kids from twenty-four years ago hadn’t done anything deserving of punishment. Besides, she had a business here, a home and the best friends a woman could be blessed with. Who gave up perfect to run from unfounded fears?
Apparently Paulina. When Martine turned away from the ship and back to her friend, Paulina was quickly disappearing into the mist ahead. “Paulina, wait!” Boots with three-inch heels weren’t made for running, especially when the ground was damp, but she got close enough to snag the trailing hood of Paulina’s jacket. “Paulina, please, let’s talk about this. I’ll get you a place to stay. You can get a good night’s rest, tonight I’ll cook your grandmother’s gumbo, and in the morning we’ll have beignets and coffee and straighten all this out.”
Paulina’s gaze took on a scornful cast as she spun around to face Martine. “You don’t believe me, do you? You, with all your voodoo and charms and black-magic curses—you think I’m crazy. I knew Tallie would doubt me. She and Callie never had half a brain between them. And Robin...she always thought I didn’t have half a brain, either. But you—you make your living off this stuff, you’re surrounded by it all the time, and you think I’m crazy.”
“I don’t, Paulina, I don’t think you’re crazy at all. I just want—I want to understand it. I want to know what’s happened. I want to wrap my head around it. We can do that together and maybe even find Robin. Just come back to the shop with me. Come on, we’ll talk it all out and—and find some way to make things right, okay? We always made things right, didn’t we?”
Stiffening, Paulina gave her a haughty stare. “You think I don’t remember your lying-your-ass-off voice? So innocent and sincere that every adult you used it on believed every word you said?”
Heat flushed Martine’s face. She hadn’t realized when she slipped into the voice, but she’d recognized it by the end of her little speech. Her best friend Evie called it her dealing-with-psychos voice. A popular French Quarter psychic, Evie had her own version, the tourists-wanting-their-money’s-worth voice.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—” A screech rushed up from the fog that hid their feet, making them both jump. An instant later, an angry little dove flew up into view, hovered for a moment to chitter at them—they must have interrupted his dining on whatever scraps he’d found below—then darted off.
At the same moment, Paulina darted off, too. She moved fast and silent, either sure of her footing or not caring if she took a wrong step. Martine watched her go, tugged her coat even tighter and headed back to the shop.
* * *
Jimmy DiBiase didn’t have the typical wanderlust. He had no desire to travel to every state in the union. He didn’t like flying enough to want to spend hours in the air to tour Britain, France, Italy or Greece. He didn’t care about China or India or Vietnam or any of hundreds of foreign places he’d never been. He’d been born and raised within spitting distance of the Mississippi River, and he was happy to stay within that same narrow range.
But he did like moving.
When he woke up, he knew automatically that it was Wednesday, and without looking at a clock, he knew it was too early for him to be awake, for which he could thank the person calling his cell. He knew it looked like another grim, dreary day, and he needed to take a leak, but he didn’t know where the bathroom was because, not for the first time in his life—or even this year—he didn’t know where he was.
First things first. He picked up the cell, setting it on the table next to the mattress. The mattress and the box spring were the only other furniture in the room, and the tile seemed to radiate out from them in dark shiny waves. Shoving his hair from his face, he answered the call as he sank back under the covers. “What time is it?”
“Five fifteen.” The voice belonged to Jack Murphy, the homicide detective he worked with most often, and he sounded as unready to roll out of bed as Jimmy. Understandable when he had a beautiful wife curled up next to him. “Spare me the complaints, James. We got a case.”
“How’d we get a case when our shift doesn’t start for nearly two hours?” Jimmy sat up and swung his feet to the floor, then saw the wall of windows on the other side of the room. This was his new apartment. He’d seen it only once before and never in the dark, but there was no mistaking all that glass eight stories above the ground.
“Personal connection,” Murphy said. “I’ll pick you up in five.”
“I’m at the new place.”
“I’ll be out front.”
The call ended, and Jimmy thought for about ten seconds about stretching out again, but there was nothing in the world he loved as much as his job—not even sleep when his head was thick and his ass was dragging. Add in Murphy’s personal connection to a homicide case, and he moved fast enough that he was standing on the sidewalk when Murphy pulled to the curb.
Jimmy slid into the passenger seat, angling the computer away to give himself some space. He fastened his seat belt and reached for the travel mug of steaming coffee in the holder nearest his seat. A carefully wrapped muffin sat on top of the cup—carrot and walnut, by the smell of it. Evie Murphy was a princess among wives. Murphy was damned lucky to have her.
Jimmy’s behavior in his one and only marriage had proved he didn’t deserve any kind of wife. The way he’d treated Alia must have seriously pissed off the gods; judging by the sorry state of his relationships since then, it seemed they were done with him.
With his dark hair standing on end and his tie looped around his neck instead of tied, Murphy was stoic and silent, not yet awake. He drove through the freaky, patchy fog, following empty streets past houses where outdoor lights cast dim halos. It wasn’t raining, but everything was wet, and the dampness helped the cold penetrate deeper into a person’s bones. Jimmy hadn’t even begun to warm up until his muffin was gone, he’d downed half his coffee, and a swirl of ghostly blue and red emergency lights ahead announced their destination.
“A cemetery?” He glanced at Murphy. “You volunteered me for a case in the middle of the night at a cemetery that looks like a set for Halloween 47: Everyone Dies?” Then he realized he hadn’t shown the courtesy of asking about the connection. “Do you know the victim? Does Evie?”
“No.”
“Favor to family?”
“No.”
“A former employee? A neighbor? Parents of one of your kids’ friends?”
Murphy parked near the other vehicles and shut off the engine. He pulled on gloves before picking up his own coffee. “The only thing the victim had on her was a prepaid cell phone that had made only one call—to Charms, Notions and Potions.”
Jimmy blinked. He was familiar with the business name. He’d worked half his life in the French Quarter and spent the other half partying, celebrating, crashing or living there. The cutesy name belonged to a shop owned by Martine Broussard, Evie’s best friend, where up front she sold tourist stuff: good luck charms, candles, voodoo ritual kits, how-to books and worry dolls, along with the usual New Orleans T-shirts, coffee mugs and mass-produced voodoo dolls. In the back room she offered the serious practitioner stuff. Her market for that was mostly local. Tourists rarely ventured through the door separating the two rooms.
Family friendship aside, Jimmy wasn’t sure he would have dragged himself out before dawn to Halloween 47 just because the murder victim had called Martine’s voodoo shop. Maybe she’d wanted directions. Maybe she’d been looking for a love potion or an Obatala candle for self-purification, or maybe she’d wanted to know if the bar across the street whose name she couldn’t remember was open yet.
Not that it mattered. Murphy had wanted the case, and they had it. Now it was time to get out of the car, wander into the cemetery and start working it.
The cars belonging to the officers assigned the initial call and those of the crime scene technicians were parked along the street. Bright lights had been set up some fifty yards away among the graves, and a canopy had been erected to protect the body from the elements. As Jimmy buttoned his overcoat, he noticed it was starting to rain, just small half-hearted drops, as if the fog had worn itself out and was liquefying in the sky.
He’d spent a lot of time in cemeteries—investigated a few murders that took place there, attended plenty of victims’ funerals to see who else showed up and even gone to a few funerals for friends or distant relatives. Cemeteries didn’t normally creep him out, but there was something about this scene...the weird weather, the unusual hush of the voices, the edginess that kept everyone focused on their duties. He wasn’t the only one who’d rather be home in bed.
Yellow-and-black crime scene tape draped limply from crypt to crypt, cordoning off the area where the body lay. Uniformed cops stood outside the perimeter, detectives and crime scene investigators inside. Between them, he caught a glimpse of legs, ankles showing between sodden pants hiked to the calves and canvas sneakers, the skin unusually colorless under the bright lights.
“Detectives.” A grim-faced patrolman lifted the tape so they could duck under, keeping his back to the scene. He looked so young that this was likely his first body, and he was doing his best to avoid it.
It was far from Jimmy’s first, and probably just as far from his last.
“What do we know?” he asked, shoving his hands into his coat pockets.
It was a uniform who answered. “Neighbor out with his dog saw suspicious activity by the angel.” He gestured behind him with one hand. “Myself and my partner didn’t see anything from the street, but when we walked over here, we found...” He gave the body a quick nod that prevented any details from registering.
Everyone under the canopy mimicked his look at the victim, then turned to the angel. It adorned a spire atop the crypt twenty feet away, its gray marble turned dingy by time and weather. Her face was tilted to the sky, her wings stretched out. In prayer? Pleading? The promise of protection?
Had the victim seen the angel? Had she had a chance to pray? Or had she already been dead when she was brought here?
“She has no ID,” Leland, the senior of the crime scene guys, said. He and Jimmy had started with the department at the same time, Jimmy an ambitious patrol officer, looking for arrests, wanting to make a meteoric rise through the ranks, and Leland a lab rat, perfectly content with handling corpses. The dead were so much less annoying than the living, he’d insisted. He’d risen through the ranks, too, to the point that he often had to deal with the living, as well. “No driver’s license, no credit card, no jewelry, nothing. Just two hundred bucks cash in her jacket pocket and the cell phone with its one call.”
“So it wasn’t a robbery.”
Jimmy didn’t notice who’d stated the obvious—not him, not Murphy. He studied the woman instead: wet hair of dirty blond or light brown. Thin face, sunken cheeks, deep shadows under her eyes. Lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes, signs of worry or general unhappiness. Her T-shirt clung to her in wet folds, once white but now a vague shade of gray. She’d lost weight recently, judging from the long loop of drawstring that held her pants around her skinny hips and from the way her skin sat uncomfortably on her frame. Her clothes were cheap, maybe secondhand, but something about her didn’t strike him as a secondhand-clothes person. There was a line on her left index finger where she’d long worn a ring, not a tan but a bit of shiny skin where the ring had rubbed back and forth, and all ten of her nails were bitten to the quick.
What there wasn’t was an obvious cause of death. She didn’t look like she was just sleeping, though Jimmy had seen his share of dead people who did. No, it was apparent with the quickest of glances that this woman was dead. The lights were out; the soul wasn’t home.
Which meant the cause was on her back side. “Can you roll her over?” he asked, and the crime scene guys moved to comply. Something dark stained the back of her head. Blood, possibly from a blunt object, possibly the entry wound of a small-caliber bullet.
“There’s something under her shirt,” Leland said, and they returned her to her original position. He pulled up her T-shirt to reveal a large bandage, sticky clear film protecting some type of dressing. It was centered over her chest, crossing her breasts, extending above and below several inches.
“So she has surgery, someone kills her and dumps her in the cemetery?” It was the same voice that had stated the obvious earlier. This time Jimmy looked and identified its owner as one of the crime scene guys who’d so far managed to stay on the perimeter, not doing much of anything. Maybe one of their lab rats who’d thought working out in the field would be fun, or maybe a new guy who was destined to get on Jimmy’s last nerve pretty quickly.
Ignoring his coworker, Leland began peeling back the edge of the dressing. He worked it loose carefully, teasing the adhesive from the skin, as gentle as if his patient were alive and watching, then abruptly he stopped. He looked a moment, then folded back the flap of bandage as his distraught gaze met Jimmy’s. “I think we’ve found the cause of death.”
Jimmy and Murphy both leaned forward, concentrating on the small area of chest that had been revealed—not pale smooth skin but a wickedly ugly wound and, inside, emptiness. Not real emptiness, of course, but the essence of something missing. Something important.
“Damn.” Jimmy breathed the word the same time Murphy did, then looked to Leland for confirmation. Leland nodded.
“The killer removed her heart.”
* * *
After a restless night, Martine gave up any hope for peaceful sleep, pulled her robe on and shuffled to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. She’d had dreams all night—ugly, unsettling ones involving deep shadows, woods, birds screeching that had raised the hairs on her arms. If she were fanciful, she’d say the fog was keeping the happy dreams at bay. It didn’t want her nights to be any more cheerful than her days had become since it moved in.
“It’s just fog,” she groused, pouring cream and sugar into her coffee. “A cloud of tiny water droplets hovering above the earth. It doesn’t think or care or even know you exist, Tine.”
The old, almost forgotten nickname made her pause before taking the first sip of coffee. Where was Paulina this morning? Had she checked into a motel or crawled into a hole and pulled it in after her? Had she stayed safe last night? Had she gotten anything hot to eat?
Was she crazy?
Martine had tried to put all the memories behind her when she got back to the shop yesterday, a task made easier by an influx of tourists. They’d worn a variety of N’Awlins T-shirts, a few had sported Mardi Gras beads or feather boas around their necks, and they’d done their best to project the carefree, good-time-in-the-Big-Easy air that most tourists came by naturally, but it had been a struggle for this group. Even inside the brightly lit shop, they’d huddled together in small numbers, their voices muted, lamenting the lack of sunshine and the mild weather they’d expected. They’d been worried without knowing why, and they had cleaned the shelves of every single good luck charm and candle in sight before leaving the way they’d come.
After the shop was closed, after Martine had finished off a po’boy from down the street and locked herself inside her cozy apartment, the memories had come knocking again. A search of the internet had proved true one of Paulina’s claims: Callie Winchester had died three months ago in Seattle. The details reported by the news outlets were scarce, but the obituary confirmed it was their Callie. Her parents, who’d once lived two blocks from Martine’s family, were now in Florida, and her twin, Tallie, made her home in London.
Callie...dead. Though Martine hadn’t seen her in twenty-four years, though she hadn’t thought about her much in twenty of those years, it hurt her heart to know she was dead. Callie had always been so vibrant, full of humor and wild ideas that usually ended in trouble for all of them. She’d been beautiful, with sleek black hair that reached down her back, olive skin and gray eyes, and she’d done a perfect imitation of her posh mother’s British accent, but there had been nothing refined or elegant about her huge booming laugh. Tallie, identical in every way except the laugh, had compared it to a braying jackass, which merely made Callie laugh even harder.
And now she was gone. Someone had stolen her very life and discarded her for someone else to deal with, as if she were no more important than an empty burger wrapper.
That thought raised goose bumps on Martine’s arms and stirred an ache in her gut. She was browsing through the pantry, looking for something to settle it, when the doorbell rang, echoing through the floorboards.
The clock on the microwave showed the time was 7:23. No one came to visit her before nine, and rarely without a phone call to alert her. Maybe it was just some punk, walking along the sidewalk and pressing doorbells. But no sooner had that thought cleared her brain, the bell rang again, seeming more impatient. Her nerves tightened, and apprehension throbbed behind her eyes. Whoever was downstairs on this ugly dreary morning after her ugly restless night couldn’t possibly be good news for her.
Unless it was Paulina, come to take her up on her offer of coffee and beignets.
Hope rising over the dread, Martine hurried down the stairs as the bell rang a third time. Reaching the bottom, she jerked the security chain loose, undid the dead bolt lock and yanked the door open, prepared to meet her friend with a smile and a comforting hug—
But it wasn’t Paulina. Jack Murphy stood on the stoop, dressed in the white shirt and dark suit that were his usual work clothes. He looked as if he’d slept in them, hadn’t had time to shave and had forgotten to comb his hair, and his eyes were dark and somber with shadows.
Panic clutched Martine’s chest, cutting off her breath. “Oh, God, please tell me nothing’s happened to Evie or the kids.”
His eyes widened, an instant of alarm followed by sudden regret. “No. No, God, no, they’re fine.”
Her knees going weak, she sagged against the doorjamb, one hand pressed to her chest. “Aw, jeez, you about gave me a heart attack! Don’t do that again!” For emphasis, she poked him with one finger. “Not ever!”
“Is she always this ditzy?” a voice drawled from the curb, and Martine realized Jack wasn’t alone. He’d brought along her least favorite police officer in the world—her least favorite person. It was too damn early in the morning—too damn early in the year—to face Jimmy DiBiase.
Especially when she was wearing what passed for pajamas and a robe: tank top, shorts, an old boyfriend’s flannel shirt. She was exposed from the top of her thighs to her bare toes, to a letch like DiBiase with a freakishly cold fog silently creeping everywhere. No wonder her skin was crawling.
She was torn between slamming the door and fleeing upstairs to wrap up in her favorite quilt and inviting Jack inside while pointedly leaving DiBiase in the cold. Neither action would surprise Jack; he knew DiBiase was an acquired taste for most women besides strippers, hookers and cop groupies.
Then the realization clicked in her brain: Evie and the kids were okay, but Jack was still here, still in work mode. That meant someone else... “Who is it? Anna Maria? Reece? Jones? Alia? Landry?” Her brain was spewing forth names faster than her mouth could get them out.
Paulina’s voice sounded faintly through the mist, sending a bone-deep shiver through Martine: They’re coming after us, and they’re not going to stop until we’re dead.
Dear God, could it be her?
“I’m sorry, Martine,” Jack said. “I’m handling this badly. We’ve got a...victim.” The grimness returned to his expression. “No ID, nothing but a call to your shop yesterday afternoon.”
Martine thought longingly of the quilt, and of the coffee she’d left on the kitchen counter. She needed warmth. She needed a lot of it to melt the ice that suddenly coated everything inside her, slowing her heartbeat, making it difficult to breathe. Paulina had warned her, had told her they were in danger, and Martine had done nothing. Had let her walk away. Had let her die.
Because she knew in her heart Paulina was gone.
“Oh, God.” She swayed forward, and a hand caught her arm, holding her steady. It was a big hand, strong, the skin olive-hued, the fingers bare, and the overcoat sleeve above it was gray. Jack’s overcoat was black. She knew, because she’d helped Evie shop for it. Which meant this coat belonged to DiBiase.
The hand holding her up was DiBiase’s hand. For one brief moment, she let herself accept the warmth and comfort and strength that seeped from him, just one moment when she was too weak to do otherwise. Then, with the stubbornness she’d been legendary for back home, she tugged free, folded her arms over her chest and hid her fisted hands against the soft flannel.
“I guess you should come in.” Her voice was flat and numb, a pretty good match for the dismay and sorrow building inside her. She’d been a fool for letting Paulina walk away. Paulina had obviously not been herself; she’d needed taking care of. Needed someone to pretend to believe her, to take her home and help her until she was better able to help herself.
Twenty-four years ago, Martine had been the person Paulina turned to first, before anyone else. Oh, Tine, he broke up with me for good. Tine, I’m failing algebra, and my dad will take my car away for sure. Tine, my mom and dad are fighting again. Tine, I think I’m pregnant, but I’m too young to have a baby!
They had been best friends—had had a bond that should have been unbreakable. But now, after all those years, when Paulina came to her again, Martine had let her down. She hadn’t even tried. She’d just wanted to get out of the cold and go back to her shop and take care of business. She’d wanted to stuff the past back into its cramped little corner of her brain and never take it out again.
At the top of the stairs, she turned left into the kitchen. “I’ll make coffee,” she suggested with the same numbness.
“We’ll do it.” Jack touched her arm. “Go get some clothes on.”
She glanced down. Her legs and feet were an unflattering shade of blue, thanks to the cold, and goose bumps covered every bit of skin. When she lifted her gaze again, it automatically went to DiBiase, who was also just lifting his gaze. Jerk. Self-centered, unfaithful, two-timing, arrogant—
Giving him a look of loathing, she went down the hall to her room, where she dressed in comfort clothes: fleece pants, a long-sleeved shirt, thick wool socks and cozy slippers. By the time she returned to the kitchen, the two men had their coffee, and Jack had reheated hers in the microwave until it steamed.
“You want to go into the living room?”
Martine paused, then shook her head. “In here.”
* * *
Jimmy was the last to walk through the doorway she’d indicated. She went first, turning on lights, opening curtains, and Murphy followed. Jimmy stood at the threshold, taking in everything before invading it.
He would admit, he didn’t know Martine well. That time he’d tried to get her to go home from Murphy’s party with him had been only their second meeting, and since then she’d looked at him like he was some kind of bottom-feeder. He did know that he wished things had happened differently back then, that she and Evie Murphy were like sisters, that his ex-wife, Alia, had been welcomed into their group last year and that Martine ran the voodoo shop below: part good fun, part legitimate business. He knew she was serious and mysterious and superstitious and sometimes wild and worrisome.
This room didn’t seem to go with any of that.
It had once been a dining room, he suspected, from the general size and shape, the proximity to the kitchen and the arched doorway into the living room. Now it looked like it belonged in a suburban house, reigned over by a crafter who indulged creativity in the lulls between being World’s Best Soccer Mom and World’s Best Cheer Mom. The woman belonging to this room drove an SUV, had a closet filled with conservative trendy clothes, was organized enough to keep complex schedules for four kids in her head, never missed a PTA meeting and terrorized any mother who did.
It looked nothing like the Martine he’d offended a few years ago.
It held a large rectangular table, the top etched with a one-inch grid, and four perfectly matched chairs. Every available inch of wall space was covered with white bookcases, and the shelves were filled with books, craft supplies, an array of tools, fabric and a lot of things he didn’t recognize, all of it in color-coordinated hampers or boxes. The lamps in the room gave off bright white light; for the first time in a week or more, he could see clearly again. The fog had lifted, at least inside this small space.
Martine settled on one side of the table. Jimmy sat on the opposite side next to Murphy. She opened a white bin, neatly labeled with the years, and pulled out a photograph, laying it on the table in front of him and Murphy.
Jimmy leaned forward to study the shot of the smiling blonde in an off-the-shoulder gown. Gaudy decorations behind her suggested a high school prom, an innocent time. It was funny the things twenty-plus years could change and the things they couldn’t. This pretty, smiling, well-nourished, blue-eyed blonde shouldn’t have a thing in common with the underweight, hard-worn, weary woman they’d seen in the cemetery this morning, but he had no doubt they were one and the same.
Murphy knew, too, but he still offered his cell phone to Martine. She glanced at the picture—quickly the first time, as if afraid there might be damage she didn’t want to have in her mind, then for a still quiet moment. Shivering, she held her hands to her coffee mug before lifting it for a drink.
“Her name is Paulina Adams. We grew up together in Marquitta. She called yesterday afternoon and asked to meet me by the river.” Her voice sounded hollow and distant, making its way through a thick haze of shock and emotion and guilt and sorrow. Jimmy had heard that voice a hundred times from a hundred different people, when he broke the news that someone they loved had died. God, he hated that part of the job. Today, because it was Martine, he hated it even more.
“Did you meet her?” Murphy asked. Of course she did. Jimmy wouldn’t even have asked.
“She, um...she looked like she’d been having a tough time. She was frightened. She said...” Her breath sounded loud in the room. “She thought someone was trying to kill her. I thought she was being paranoid. But I guess it’s not paranoia if someone really is out to get you, right?” Her smile was faint and sickly and slid away faster than it had formed.
With prompting from Murphy—a lot of it; the hesitations and pauses started long and got longer—she related the conversation with Paulina. Paulie, she’d called her, and in return Paulina had called her Tine. After a time, she fell silent, locking gazes with Murphy. “How did she die?”
Death notifications were Jimmy’s least favorite part of the job, and definitely the least favorite part of that job was answering questions like that. No one wanted to hear that their sixteen-year-old daughter was raped before she was murdered, or that their elderly father had been beaten with a baseball bat by the thugs who broke into his house. Certainly Martine did not want to know that her friend’s heart had been cut from her chest.
“We’re waiting for the autopsy report,” Murphy said gently. All cops, no matter how tough or gruff or abrupt, had a gentle side—even Jimmy himself. Granted, the only people who ever saw his were the victims and the officers he worked with. Martine couldn’t see anything when she pretty much pretended he didn’t exist.
“Why would someone want to kill Paulina?” he asked, part curiosity, part to remind her that he did exist.
Martine breathed deeply, her fingers running along the edge of the storage bin in a slow back and forth pattern. Her nails were painted dark red, and heavy silver rings gave an elegant look to her hand. Those hands could perform magic. He’d felt it for himself that last night, when everything had been full of promise. He didn't know even now what he had expected at the time—a few hours, a few dates, maybe even something serious—but what he'd gotten was rejection and her never-ending scorn. Most of the time, he was okay with that. Most of the time, he provoked her just because he could. But sometimes he caught himself wondering what if...
Realizing he was watching her, she stopped the rubbing and clasped her hands. “I don’t know. Before yesterday, I hadn’t seen her in twenty-four years.”
“But you were best friends.”
“Were,” she repeated for emphasis. “In school.”
“What happened?”
Again she drew a deep breath. He wasn’t sure if it was meant to imply her annoyance at being questioned by him or if she was using the time to figure out the right answer. Right answers never needed figuring. The truth came easier to most people than evasions or lies.
“We were kids. We went to the same school, the same church, had the same interests. Then we graduated and...things changed. We changed. The ones who went to college went elsewhere. The ones who didn’t moved elsewhere, too. We wanted to see what the world had to offer, and we lost touch after a while.” A narrow line creased her forehead. “Are you still in touch with your best bud from high school?”
“I am. I introduced him to his wife. His kids call me Uncle Jimmy.”
The crease deepened into a scowl. “Of course they do.” Snideness sharpened her tone. “Most of us move on after high school. We all found new lives and new friends.”
“And yet when Paulina was having a tough time, when she thought someone was going to kill her, she came to you, someone she hadn’t seen in twenty-four years. Doesn’t that seem odd? That she wouldn’t go to one of those new friends you all replaced each other with?”
Martine’s face flushed, giving her the first real color he’d seen since she’d found them at her door. Anger? Embarrassment that she didn’t have an answer for a perfectly reasonable question? Guilt that if she wasn’t outright lying, she was at least not being entirely truthful?
He had to give her credit: she didn’t shove back from the table, pace around the room or throw him out of her house. He’d watched plenty of people do all three. He’d even been on the receiving end of a few punches in the process of being thrown out. No, Martine might have surpassed the limits of her tolerance for him, but she retained control.
“I don’t know where Pauline’s new life and new friends are,” she said, a clenched sound to her words. “I don’t know where she went after school, what she did, how she lived, whether she married or had children, if she kept in touch with her family or anyone else. No one could have been more surprised than I was when I heard her voice on the phone, or when I saw her, or when she ran off into the fog. We were friends a lifetime ago, but after twenty-four years, she’s as much a stranger to me as she is to you. I’d have better luck coming up with suspects who want you dead than Paulina.”
If the conversation hadn’t been so serious, he might have laughed at that. He’d been a cop for eighteen years. Everyone could come up with a list of people who wanted him dead.
She slid her chair back and stood, replaced the picture in the bin and closed the lid. “I have to get ready to open the shop, and I need time to...”
Jimmy silently completed the sentence for her: grieve over a stranger who’d once meant the world to her. He needed time to figure out whether he believed everything—or even anything—she’d told them. His first two questions for himself after an interview were Did she lie? and Why? He wasn’t looking forward to telling Murphy he believed his wife’s best friend had lied.
Murphy made the small talk to get them out the door—thanks, sorry, take care—then they took the stairs in silence. The street was just as empty of life as it had been when they came.
Murphy started the engine and turned the heat to high before thoughtfully tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. “Notice how she just happened to have that box on the table? The yearbooks were inside there, too. A lot of pictures, souvenirs, old cards. Seeing Paulina yesterday upset her more than she wanted to show.”
“Maybe she was wondering how Paulina went from that kid at the prom to that woman on your phone. Or maybe seeing her made her nostalgic for the good old days.”
Murphy snorted. “I know you didn’t miss the fact that she wasn’t telling us everything, so don’t make excuses. I love Martine, but I’m not here because she’s my kids’ godmother. My job is to find who killed Paulina and why.”
“But you can’t forget that she’s your kids’ godmother, can you, and that makes the job harder. Evie and the kids would never forgive you if you treated her like a suspect or an uncooperative witness.”
“Hey, I can be tough,” Murphy said in self-defense. “I once handcuffed Evie and took her to jail.”
“Yeah, and you’ll never do that again, will you?” That arrest had been the end of their relationship the first time around. Once Murphy realized he’d been duped, he’d had to solve a few murders, arrest a few corrupt feds and grovel like hell to get back into Evie’s life. In Jimmy’s opinion, that was a hell of a lot of work for one woman.
Which probably explained why he hadn’t stuck with just one woman in a long, long time.
