T. Parker - Summer Of Fear

"Do you have anything to drink?" I asked.

"Gin."

"Light, ice."

"Make mine a little more substantial," said Chester.

We wandered the house. The carpet near the entrance was spotless, as it was inside the sliding screen door on which the mesh had been cut open as a nod to the Midnight Eye. We studied the stereo setup, in which Parish-after piecing together phrases from the tapes left at the Fernandez and Ellison homes-had left his dub. He would certainly have left no prints to go along with it. I saw an image of him, grim with purpose using some rinky-dink boom box in his office before the murder recording bits of monologue from tapes he had surely copied days ago, before they were booked into evidence. Amber delivered the drink to me with a guarded stare.

In the study, I noted the lamp and magazines I'd knock over. In the kitchen, we prowled around under the sink, in the broom closet, the trash compactor, the cabinets.

I began to feel tricked, anticipated, suckered. Marty had already done all this, I thought-cleaned up evidence of his and replaced it with evidence of Grace. Probably ran the fucking vacuum cleaner, I thought, and it actually sounded like something that anally retentive Martin would do.

"Where's your vacuum?"

"Corner of the den. Behind the room divider."

Chester smiled mildly. "Sometimes the obvious is best."

He pulled it out from beside an ironing board, popped off the back panel, and felt the bag.

"Empty," he said.

"Then he didn't use it," said Amber.

"Please get me some clean paper towels."

Chet worked off the roller and flicked the brush over a clean chain of towels. I used my pen to fan the bristles. What speckled down onto the white paper looked an awful lot like dried blood.

"Is that what I think it is?" Amber asked.

"Yes," said Chester. "The bag is empty because he used the machine, then put in a new bag. We are closer."

"And took the old bag with him?"

"Probably. It would depend on how calm he was able remain, on whether the bag might mean an extra trip back into the house for him. Show me where your trash cans are."

Of course I had already been through the trash, in search of a painter's mess. But this time through, we removed each item individually, bringing to our labor an attention that an onlooker would have found comical. The task was made more difficult by the fact that most of Amber Mae's trash had been run through the compactor. Not only that, but the garbage was over a week old because Amber had failed, with her disappearance, to have it taken out to curbside. The smell was not good.

The bag was, of course, nowhere to be found.

"Well," said Chester. "Another roadblock."

We all looked at one another rather gloomily.

"It wouldn't hurt to check the filter," Chet said finally.

We used a clean white towel that Chester carried, neatly folded, in his case. We spread it in the middle of the living room floor. Chet unscrewed the vacuum cleaner's lid and worked out the filter, which is engineered to keep large debris from the motor compartment. He cradled out the screen and laid it down on the towel carefully, as if it were an infant. What we had before us was a dusty mulch that covered almost a square foot of terry cotton, a bounty of dirt, dust, hair, fiber, more dust, a broken rubber band, a paper clip, a penny, more dust, a length of string, a wad of green dental floss that had somehow missed the brush, a warped postage stamp, and a great deal more dust.

"What a job," Amber noted.

Chester removed a bundle of evidence bags from his case and we began. "Ms. Wilson, we could use two standard tablespoons, rinsed and wiped."

First, we separated and bagged anything that might be useful. Several hairs could have been Martin's. Nothing else seemed indicative, even suggestive. The idea crossed my mind that I was a fool. We bagged the broken rubber band, which seemed to confirm this. Amber sighed. Using a spoon, I made little S patterns through the silt, disgusted.

"One of the hairs may help," I said, fully aware that you can't establish 100 percent identification of a human being with hair samples-not in court, anyway.

"What's that?" asked Amber.

"I said, one-"

"No. What's that?"

Amber's hand hovered over the towel, forefinger extended. I followed the aim of that finger, thinking-yes, even at this hour, even after this day, even after everything my dear Isabella had suffered at least in part for me-that if the entire promise of the female form could be contained in one finger here it was, a perfect digit, graceful, firm, strong, lovely in composition and utility, the skin slightly tanned, the flesh full with its slender contours, the nail bold and bright and domed imperiously, red as blood, pointing now at something in the dust.

"There," she said.

"I can't see it from here."

"Then give me the spoon, Russ."

She reached with it and dipped the outer lip as if for soup. She jiggled the utensil, worked it down through the gray matte She lifted it, tilting off a wad of nonspecific material that floated slowly back down to the towel. She presented the spoon to me handle first. I took it and spilled the contents onto a clean paper tissue.

What I saw at first, I still couldn't identify-it was a U shaped concave shell the size, roughly, of a fingernail. One end was jagged and looked as if it had been torn away from something else. The other end was smoothly rounded. It was covered with dust, but under the dust I could see pink.

"Turn it over, Russell," said Chet.

I flipped it with my pen. It was a fingernail-pink, tapered chipped noticeably at the round end. I looked at Amber, who looked back at me.

She shook her head. "Not one of my colors."

"Alice's?"

"How would I know? I don't suppose when you-"

"No."

Chester keyed in on this truncated exchange, his patient eyes searching first my face, then Amber's.

I returned his stare with what innocence I could fake, while trying in my mind to recreate that night, and I could see Alice's rigid outstretched arms inviting me into the freezer, could feel her icy-slick weight on my back as I bore her up the mountain, but I could not for my life see her fingernails.

I touched it with my pen. "Fake?"

"Yes," said Amber "It was torn off. Maybe in a struggle. There's probably some real nail on it. Does that help?"

"Definitely. Get Alice's makeup stuff and bring it in here."

Amber returned a moment later with her sister's overnight case. She dug through and found two bottles of nail polish in a shiny black plastic kit. One was red, the other an opalescent white.

"Amber, what does this suggest… in the cosmetic scheme of things?"

"Proves it's not her nail."

"Absolutely not?"

"Russ, nails aren't absolute. But you don't do them pink, then leave town for two weeks with red and white."

"Oh my, I can almost hear this in court," noted Chet.

"She might have forgotten it," I said.

"Might have."

"Or carried the pink in a handier place, like her purse."

"I already looked," said Amber. "She didn't."

Naturally, I had thought about another possibility. Amber looked at me, her eyes steady but rife with the same dire inklings that must have been visible in my own.

"Grace's color?"

"Women don't have just one color, Russ. Remember our bathroom?"

I did, a veritable makeup department, an entire warehouse of paints and polishes, shadows and liners in every hue and shade; solvents, removers, applicators, brushes, tissue: swabs, lighted mirrors, hand-held mirrors, magnifying mirror: wall mirrors. (It was our favorite place in the world to make standing, carnal, untender, image-drunk love.)

I said that I had not forgotten our bathroom.

"Well," she said, "then you know."