Jeff Abbott - A Kiss Gone Bad

Whit pulled up a chair next to the bed.

‘Well. Hello. It’s been a long while. I know you and I weren’t close, but I also don’t know… what you can hear, what you can understand. I’m gonna assume it’s more than we think.’ He touched the bone-thin arm under the sheet, remembering the smiling boy holding a proud string of redfish aloft. ‘The fishing’s been good this year, Corey, although I sure haven’t had time to go. We don’t have a prayer in football season this year. The coach doesn’t know his butt from a hole in the ground, so we’re all resigned to losing. We ought to do better in basketball next spring, one of the Lindstrom boys is six-seven. And would you believe I’m a judge? I know: a Mosley acting all respectable. But it may only be for a little while now.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I went to go see Marian Duchamp. She cares about you, you know, even if things weren’t exactly running smooth between you…’

The talk went on for another hour before Corey dozed into sleep. Whit stayed by his bed, watching the ghost breathe.

The one true suicide note composed that October in Encina County read as follows: I deeply regret the things I have done and left undone. I murmured that at church each Sunday for the past sixteen years and each time it felt like a bee’s sting near my heart and God knew I was a rotten liar. If I make it to heaven I’ll know He’s forgiven me. I take full responsibility for what happened to Corey Hubble and in turn what happened to Pete Hubble. I heard as a boy that love made you do great things, but I never figured good love would make you do evil. I write this not as explanation but as apology, and because regretfully Lucinda will not tell one moment’s truth. Lucinda and I became lovers before her husband died. His death from cancer was long and drawn-out, and the love between them faded long before he got sick. We were very careful and discreet, but Corey found out about us after Lucinda’s election to the state senate. I don’t know how, maybe he started following his mother and spotted us at one of the motels we used. He delivered flowers for spending money, so perhaps he saw us where we shouldn’t be. While we were staying at a friend’s house in Houston, Corey surprised us. He burst into the upstairs bedroom with a shotgun and we fought. I got the shotgun away from him, but then he grabbed for my service revolver and I grabbed it back and it fired twice, once hitting him in the head. He was hurt, but he didn’t die. Lucinda’s an RN. She stabilized him but refused to take him to a doctor because she was worried about the scandal. I began to cease to love her then. What kind of woman does that? A kiss can fool you. But I went along with her idea, scared shitless of losing my career, and we drove the boy to Texarkana, where she knew of a nursing home where she could cut a deal. She’d been doing legislation on nursing home reform, so she knew which homes were crooked and might cut her a deal and would benefit most from her protection. Lucinda greased some palms and he got care at the home. We thought he would quietly die but he didn’t. We returned to Port Leo late that Saturday, me driving Corey’s car, Lucinda driving mine. I took command of the investigation into Corey’s disappearance, and I stamped out any evidence that could point to him having fallen victim to violence. I am sorry to the people of Port Leo for betraying their trust, but I was young and foolish and scared. I have read a lot on head and brain injuries, and they are confounding, unpredictable things. Corey hovered over our lives, not alive and not dead. He haunts me even now. The administrator at the home (Phil Farr) was a goddamned crook, and he’d done Medicare fraud before, creating clients that never existed. After we took Corey there Lucinda protected this home against agency investigations. Farr and this clerk made Corey into John Taylor. This clerk was a creepy little bastard who was suspected at one point of smothering a lady patient at the home, but nothing came of that. Now we know that clerk became Buddy Beere and followed Lucinda eventually to Port Leo, and now he has killed some poor young women. I take blame for that as well. I thought Lucinda had killed Pete, or perhaps his ex-wife Faith. I did not want a murder investigation centering on the Hubbles. I behaved badly. I am sorry to the people I have hurt. I am not sorry to Lucinda Hubble, and the people of the Coastal Bend should not suffer her one moment longer. I apologize to the people who have suffered so because of my mistakes, including Claudia Salazar, who I wrongfully terminated and should have her job back. Claudia, don’t hate me. I always loved you more than a little. God forgive me my wrongs. – Delford Morton Spires

He hanged himself with a stout length of rope. His service revolver lay on the floor below his feet, polished and oiled, next to his gleaming badge and his carefully folded uniform.

Claudia and Whit stood on the slope of land leading away from Buddy Beere’s cabin, watching the work crew spear the ground with their shovels. The men dug slowly, carefully, methodically unearthing the land around Buddy’s house, looking for the mortal remains of Marcy Ballew and the women from Brownsville and Laredo. Claudia stood on crutches, her leg heavily bandaged, her hair pulled up from her eyes. Whit leaned against an old laurel oak. He held blank autopsy orders, ready to fill out in case the searchers found human remains.

Whit watched her. Her face was emotionless. ‘You sure you want to be here?’

‘It’s okay. You got to look the beast in the eye, Whit.’

‘You gonna bring David here when’s he released?’ Whit asked. David was recuperating at a Corpus Christi hospital, having suffered severe bone and nerve damage in his back and chest from the shotgun blast. He was out of immediate danger, but the road to rehabilitation looked to be long and winding.

‘If he wants to come,’ she said, not looking at him.

‘You haven’t talked about David much.’

‘David… needs me right now. Badly.’

Claudia said nothing for a long while, watching the dirt slowly pile.

A pair of FBI agents came out of the cabin, notepads open, arguing. Buddy’s belongings had been boxed and catalogued and no doubt would be sent to Quantico for the criminal psychologists to purr over. All the evidence they would need to scribe their papers on Buddy Beere, add him to the literature of the compulsive killer. Patsy Duchamp, given a meaty story, had delineated most of the facts in the paper, and Whit had read the account with a greasy kink in his stomach: Buddy was born Darren Burdell in Milwaukee, with a hophead mother who disciplined her tot with blades and lit cigarettes. Little Darren killed his mother at age thirteen when she tried to castrate him. He decapitated her an hour after her death, which gave the social workers pause. He spent time at a juvenile home and mental ward, seemed to improve, worked odd jobs. Fell out of sight and headed south, apparently killing the occasional prostitute or runaway. One pundit quoted on television opined that Buddy preferred work at nursing homes since he would get to see people expire on a fairly regular basis. This might also explain his desire to be a rural JP. Serving as coroner, inspecting dead bodies, would have been delightfully stimulating for him. Credit-card receipts showed he had visited Deshay at least twice a year – perhaps treating Corey as a trophy, an example of his cleverness, paralleling the serial-killer fixation on visiting hidden remains of victims. A check of the human resources files at Placid Harbor showed that Buddy, armed with a master password, had altered the personnel records three times to indicate he was present at the nursing home when he was not. The dates were the dates when Marcy Ballew, Angela Norris, and Laura Palinski all vanished.