Jeff Abbott - A Kiss Gone Bad

‘Just because you’re an idiot,’ she said sweetly, ‘doesn’t mean you should get all the bad ones.’

Eddie Gardner leaned toward her and growled, ‘I bet you scratch when you fuck.’

She stood. ‘Get away from me, and don’t you ever talk to me like that again.’

He stepped back, a wounded look on his face. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Detective Salazar.’ He opened the door and left.

She sat, bile polluting the back of her throat, wondering why autocracy and viciousness had suddenly fouled this perfectly nice police department. Delford had turned tyrannical; Gardner, who she always suspected was a pig, had gone from mildly amusing to no-tolerance disgusting.

She went down to the kitchen to get a glass of ice water. She found Patrolman Fox snacking on a Butter-finger bar. Chocolate gummed the corners of his mouth.

‘What’s up, Bill?’ she asked, and he swallowed his candy.

‘Working hard for Eddie. I wore my fingers to the bone phoning on the Hubble case.’

‘What’s going on with that?’ She dumped ice into a glass and filled it from the faucet.

Fox shrugged. ‘I called all the numbers on Pete Hubble’s phone records. He knew some strange people, let me tell you. Most of them seemed to be people that he knew through his, um, film work.’ The milk-breathed Baptist boy could hardly say the word pornography. ‘I made notes. I haven’t typed them up yet.’

Claudia picked up his scrawled pieces of paper. In the last days of his life Pete had called a couple of porn directors and a screenwriter in legit film. He’d called his mother, several times, his ex-wife three times. There were a couple of calls to the Placid Harbor Nursing Home – the home David’s grandfather lived at, down by Little Mischief Beach, and that reminded her that she wanted to have another talk with Heather Farrell. She wondered who Pete knew there. And still the number in far East Texas, in the little hamlet of Missatuck, the one she’d tried the morning after Pete’s death, and Fox had similarly gotten no answer. The phone company said that the number belonged to one Kathy Breaux. Pete had called her four times in the three days before his death.

Claudia went back to her office and picked up the phone. She dialed the Missatuck number. It was now disconnected, and no new number listed.

The afternoon light slanted through the tilted blinds. Bars of light and dark lay against Whit’s desk – for once, cleared of the usual fan of papers and the half-full coffee cup. Whit sat across from Claudia, still in his judge’s robe, an askew collar of yellow tropical-print shirt peeking out from the sober black. He had finished with traffic court by two, and she’d given him a quick synopsis of the developments with Jabez Jones.

‘I don’t care much about that suicide note,’ Claudia said. ‘But there’s no way I believe Pete put Rachel into Jabez’s camp as a spy, then decided to kill himself.’

Whit loosened a stray thread from the throat of his robe. ‘Did Rachel say she’d told Pete about the drugs she’d seen?’

‘Actually, no, she hadn’t talked to him since she arrived at the camp. It was too risky, they thought. So let’s say Pete found out another way Jabez was dealing.’

‘Dealing?’ Whit said.

‘He clearly had more than he could personally use. Gives Jabez a motive.’

‘I suppose.’ Whit shrugged.

Claudia cocked her head. ‘You sound like you’ve graduated from the Delford Spires School of Low-Key Investigation.’

‘So Delford’s finally made it to your hallowed shit list?’

‘I’ve made room for him. Gardner’s king.’ She told him about her confrontation with Eddie Gardner.

‘Be careful of him. Very careful,’ Whit said.

‘He’s a mouth. I can handle him.’

‘Seriously, Claudia,’ Whit said, and she saw he was dead serious. The sharp-eyed glare on his face was the one he usually reserved for magistrating repeat offenders and irksome litigants. His mouth twitched slightly. ‘He’s trouble.’

‘Why’s he on your shit list, Honorable?’

‘Just don’t cross him, okay? Trust me.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Nothing. Tired. Inquest is tomorrow at one. I decided to call a full one in the courtroom instead of just issuing a ruling of death.’

She supposed the political capital of a high-profile death was too good for him to waste right before an election. ‘Sure, fine. I’ve got my notes ready to testify.’

He dug into his desk drawer and handed her a phone number. ‘This is a number Pete used in California with an answering service. It might be interesting to see who in Port Leo, or in Texas, called him,’

‘Haven’t you been the busy bee?’ Claudia said. ‘Thanks, I’ll have Fox check this.’

‘I’ve got to go. Promise me you’ll be careful.’

‘About what?’

‘Just be careful, all right?’

‘Sure.’ She walked back across the street to the police station, wondering who had wedged the coal lump in Whit’s ass.

Whit watched Claudia cross the street, a sudden whip of wind from the bay mussing her dark hair. She tucked the errant strands behind her ear and darted inside the police station.

He let the blinds fall. That morning he had called each of his five brothers. He heard updates on teething nieces and upcoming software releases and the casual cruelties of writer critique groups. But nothing of bullets, of shady characters lurking in darkened driveways, ready to make innocents pay for Whit being the wrong judge in the wrong place at the wrong time. He ended each conversation with a story about random violence he claimed to have seen on TV and begged them all to be extra careful.

He had trudged through the day’s duties of signing warrants, a brief truancy court, and a long and maddening traffic court session. Tomorrow was the inquest; he didn’t have much time. He picked up the phone.

‘Velvet? It’s Whit Mosley. I need a favor from you. Do you still have a key to Real Shame?’

‘I do.’ She sounded lazy, sleepy, as though just awakening for the day. If she was, he wondered what she’d been up to all night.

‘I’d like to stop by and borrow it, if I may.’

‘The cops have a key.’

‘I’d like to borrow yours.’

She was silent for a moment. ‘Well, yeah, that’s okay.’

‘I’ve got an errand to run first, but I’ll be over in an hour or so.’

‘I’ll see you then, Judgie.’

He hung up, doffed the robe, and in his beachwear shirt and khaki shorts and sandals headed over to the trashy west end of Port Leo.

The Blade watched the little waves surge up Little Mischief Beach, the sand flat, wet, and clean. The damp, fine air – the ocean exhaling – smelled of salt and freshness. No sign on the beach Heather Farrell had ever been there, no blood on the sands, not a gap-toed footprint to mark her passage.

He turned away from the water and the little voice, tinged with his mother, that whispered and berated in the curvy hollow of his ear roared: Do you think she only had the clothes on her worthless back?

He stopped. He turned toward the beach. Past the gentle crescent of sand, into the parkland, was a motte of live oaks, ringed with high grass. Hadn’t he watched her there once, stretching against the Tower-of-Pisa bent-trees, scratching her foot?

She had to have camped nearby.

He bolted along the stretch of sand, up through the bluestems and the grasses, panic drumming its rat-a-tat in his chest. Mama’s voice laughing at him, hiding in the wind.

He searched for a half hour among the askew oaks and the tall grasses. He found only a narrow rectangle of crushed bluestems, where a woman’s sleeping bag might have lain recently. A discarded peanut butter crackers wrapper fluttered, caught in the tall grass.