J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

“Bea,” I say. “Calm down. There’s something you need to know.”

She starts to go. “I’ve heard enough from you-”

“Wait.” I take her by the arm. Her eyes flare with outrage, and for a moment I’m afraid she’ll lash out. “Wait, Bea. You need to hear this.”

She glances at the office workers, who start gathering their things and moving on. She looks at the sky, her whole body trembling with rage. Then she takes a deep breath and bores into me with her eyes. “What is it?”

“There were two men. They got the drop on me in Ford’s office. For some reason, they wanted the evidence-he’d covered a wall full of clippings related to Andrew Nesbitt’s death.” Her face is blank. No reaction to the name. “They took the computer hard drive, too. One of them, the man I killed, was tall and lean. He wore a gold ring shaped like a skull. The other one did all the talking. He had a faint Texas accent, stood about six feet and had a broad, muscular chest. They wore hoods so I couldn’t see their faces. When I shot him, the one with the skull ring had pulled his hood up. The other one got away in the car. He’d taken his mask off, so as he went by I got a good look at him.”

“And?”

I nod at the photo still clutched in her hand.

“What?” she says.

“That’s who I saw.” I point to Brandon Ford. “That face.”

“Then you saw a ghost.”

“We’ll see.” I take the photo back. “I want you to go somewhere with me, Bea. We’ll figure out which one of us is right.”

“Go with you? Where?”

“The morgue,” I say. “You’d know Ford’s body, wouldn’t you? I want to see if we can make a positive identification.”

Bridger waits outside, not looking too pleased by our sudden arrival. He senses something’s wrong between Bea and myself. I close the door gently, then walk to the cantilevered platform where the body waits, draped by a sheet.

“I don’t want to see this,” she says.

She stands a few feet back, her hands gripping the fabric front of her blazer, pulling it tight. The room is cold to begin with, but the open refrigerator forms a chilly draft. She’s breathing hard, loud enough that I can hear it. Her eyes stray to the depression in the sheet where a head should be.

“What other choice is there?”

“Are you sure about what you saw? Absolutely sure?”

“You’re not going to believe me if you don’t see for yourself.”

Maybe it’s cruel, what I’m putting her through. If I could be absolutely sure, then I would stop. But I only glimpsed the man with the shotgun, only got a snapshot impression of his features. This is the only way to be certain.

“I’ll start at the feet,” I say.

She extends one of her hands as if to stop me.

“You have to do this, Bea. You have to face up to it.”

She drops her hand.

I lift the sheet in stages, folding it back on itself, revealing the feet, the shins, the thighs, the genitalia. The mutilated hands appear, and there’s a catch in her breathing. I reveal the torso with its autopsy incisions. At the height of the clavicle, I rest the sheet and step back.

“Is this Brandon?” I ask.

Bea edges forward slowly. She takes her time with the body. When she’s finished, she straightens up. The expression on her face is unreadable.

“Bea?”

She doesn’t look at me. She turns for the exit, her heels clicking across the hard floor.

“It’s not him.”

She disappears behind the swishing door.

Bea is a quiet passenger, uninterested in anything I have to say. Legs crossed, arms folded, face turned toward the window so I can only see her expression in chance reflections. Blank. The muscles slack. Signifying nothing. The extent of her contribution is to point the way to Hilda Ford’s house at the opposite end of Westheimer from Brandon’s office. When we pull up in the driveway, she’s out the door before I can cut the engine, advancing up the driveway with her side arm drawn.

“Bea!”

She keeps advancing, halted only by the locked door. I coax her gun back into the holster and try to calm her down. But she already seems calm, preternaturally so. It’s hard to judge whether I’m getting through to her.

We circle the house, peering in through the windows. I half expect to find the place cleared out. But no, it’s fully furnished, even a little cluttered with knickknacks. Through the kitchen door I can see the white fridge covered in layers of children’s artwork and alphabet magnets. I try the handle, but it’s locked.

As I check the nearby windows, Bea rears back and kicks the kitchen door. She can’t put enough weight behind her foot to force the lock, but the wood gives a satisfying crack. She tries again before I can stop her.

“Have you ever heard of a warrantless entry?” I ask. “Anything we get will be unusable without probable cause.”

She glares at me. “We’re past warrants.”

“No, Bea, we’re not. I’m not. The people responsible for my partner’s death, I plan to put them away. And I can’t do that if you go nuclear on the scene.”

“March,” she says. “ March .” She clutches my arms in her hands, shaking me, looking up at me like she’s gone crazy. “Are you listening to yourself? Are you serious? Don’t you get it?”

I grab her wrists and pull her hands away. She tries to twist free, but I hold her.

“Get control of yourself,” I say.

“Let go.”

“Bea, I mean it.”

Her shoulders slump and the mask falls over her features again. “I’m fine. Let me go.”

I release her wrists.

“We’re going in there,” she says.

After a long, silent standoff, that’s what we do. There’s no way to stop her, and I need her cooperation. Without that, I don’t have a next step. If I go along with her this time, the forced entry will hopefully burn up some of her rage and I can reason with her before we move on. She gives the door a final kick while I look on.

We clear the house, which is unoccupied, then work our way back through the various rooms. While all the furniture, appliances, and clothing are still in place, there are no computers or phones. The garage is empty, too. Nothing I see suggests this is anything other than the home of a lone woman in her fifties with a fondness for her grandchildren. There are even toys strewn across the living room floor.

“Look at this,” Bea says, beckoning me over to an upright piano tucked against the wall. On top, a line of framed photographs, mostly of the two kids I recognize from the ex-wife’s apartment. There are two gaps in the row. Missing photos. “There used to be one of Brandon here. And there was one of him and Miranda with the children.”

She finds a pack of plastic bags in the kitchen and starts filling them with random small objects, anything that might yield fingerprints or trace evidence. Then she goes into the master bathroom in search of combs and brushes for stray hair.

“We’re going to find out if Hilda’s in the system,” she says. “Maybe we can get a real name on her.”

Given the fact that her supposed son was in the database, I seriously doubt that. But it’s worth a try. When she’s finished, we go out the way we came in, pulling the busted door shut. She stores her samples in the trunk of my car.

Back on the road, I ask if she wants to talk.

“What I want to do is find him,” she says.

We hit a series of locations, places she thinks he might be: a chain of bars and restaurants and cigar lounges along the Sam Houston Tollway, Hempstead, and Tidwell. She shows his picture around, but gets nothing. She has me drive slowly through the parking lot of several hotels along the Northwest Freeway without explaining why she’d expect to find him in these particular spots. None of this is likely to bring results, of course, but I’m humoring her in the hope that once she simmers down, she’ll be forthcoming with information.