John Hart - The King Of Lies

“I’m not unsympathetic, Work, but it doesn’t change anything. We haven’t even finished working the crime scene. I can’t discuss the case with a member of the defense bar. You know how bad that would look.”

“Come on, Douglas. This is my father, not some nameless drug dealer.” He was clearly unmoved. “For God’s sake, you’ve known me my whole life.”

It was true-he had known me since I was a kid-but if there was any cause for sentiment, it failed to reach the surface of his lightless eyes. I sat down and rubbed a palm across my face, smelling the jailhouse stink that lingered there and wondering if he smelled it, too.

“We can do the rounds,” I continued in a softer tone, “but you know that telling me is the right thing.”

“We’re calling it murder, Work, and it’s going to be the biggest story to hit this county in a decade. That puts me in a tough spot. It’ll be a media frenzy.”

“I need to know, Douglas. This has hit Jean the hardest. She’s not been the same since that night-you’ve seen it. If I’m going to tell her about our father’s death, I’ll need to give her some details; she’ll want them. Hell, she’ll need them. But most of all, I need to know how bad it is. I’ll need to prepare her. Like you said, she shouldn’t read it in the paper.” I paused, took in a breath, and focused. I needed to visit the crime scene, and for that I needed his agreement. “Jean needs to be handled just right.”

He steepled his fingers under his chin, as I’d seen him do a thousand times, but Jean was my trump, and he knew it. My sister had shared a special friendship with the DA’s daughter. They’d grown up together, best friends, and Jean was in the same car when a drunk driver crossed the center-line and hit them head-on. Jean suffered a mild concussion; his daughter was nearly decapitated. It was one of those things, they said, and it could just as easily have been the other way around. Jean sang at her funeral, and the sight of her could pull tears from Douglas’s eyes even now. She’d grown up under his roof and, apart from myself, I doubted that any one person felt her pain the way Douglas did.

The silence stretched out, and I knew that my arrow had slipped through this one small chink in his armor. I pressed on before he could think too much.

“It’s been a long time. Are you sure it’s him?”

“It’s Ezra. The coroner is on-scene now and he’ll make the official call, but I’ve spoken with Detective Mills and she assures me that it’s him.”

“I want to see where it happened.”

That stopped him, caught him with his mouth open. I watched as he closed it.

“Once the scene is cleared-”

“Now, Douglas. Please.”

Maybe it was something in my face, or maybe it was a lifetime of knowing me and ten years of liking me. Maybe it was Jean after all. Whatever the reason, I beat the odds.

“Five minutes,” he said. “And you don’t leave Detective Mills’s side.”

Mills met me in the parking lot of the abandoned mall where the body had been found, and she was not pleased. She radiated pissed-off from the bottom of her expensive shoes to the top of her mannish haircut. She had a pointed face, which emphasized her look of natural suspicion; because of this, it was impossible for anyone to find her beautiful, but she had a good figure. She was in her midthirties-about my age-yet lived alone and always had. Contrary to speculation around the lawyer’s lounge, she wasn’t gay. She just hated lawyers, which made her okay in my book.

“You must have kissed the DA’s ass to get this, Work. I can’t even believe I’ve agreed to it.” Mills stood only five five or so but seemed taller. What she lacked in physical strength, she made up for in smarts. I’d seen her shred more than one of my colleagues who had presumed to challenge her on cross.

“I told him I won’t leave your side, and I won’t. I just need to see. That’s all.”

She studied me in the gray afternoon light and her animosity seemed to drain away. The sight of a softening expression in a face rigorously trained against such things was vaguely repellant, yet I appreciated it nonetheless.

“Stay behind me and touch nothing. I mean it, Work. Not one damn thing.”

She began a purposeful stride across the cracked, weed-filled parking lot, and for a moment I was unable to follow. My eyes moved over the mall, the parking lot, and then found the creek. It was a dirty creek, choked with litter and red clay; it flowed into a concrete tunnel that ran underneath the parking lot. I could still remember the stink of it, the chemical reek of gasoline and mud. For an instant, I forgot why I’d come.

It could have happened yesterday, I thought.

I heard Mills call my name and I tore my eyes away from that dark place and the childhood it had come to represent. I was thirty-five now and here for a very different reason. I walked away from it, walked to Mills, and together we approached what had once been the Towne Mall. Even in its prime, it had been ugly, a prefab strip mall sandwiched between the interstate and a power-transfer station that chewed at the sky with towers and high-tension lines. Built in the late sixties, it had struggled for years with imminent closure. Only a third of the stores had had tenants as of a year ago, and the last one had fled with winter. Now the place crawled with bulldozers, wrecking balls, and itinerant workers, one of whom, according to Mills, had located the body in a storage closet at the back of one of the stores.

I wanted the details and she gave them to me in short, bitten sentences that the warm spring breeze could not soften.

“At first all he saw were ribs, and he thought they were dog bones.” She threw me a glance. “Not bones that a dog would eat, but a dog skeleton.”

I nodded foolishly, as if we weren’t talking about my father. To my right, a hydraulic jackhammer gnawed concrete. To my left, the land rose to the heart of downtown Salisbury; the buildings there seemed to gleam, as if made of gold, and in a sense they were. Salisbury was a rich town, with a lot of old money and a fair amount of new. But in places, the beauty was thin as paint and could barely hide the cracks; for there was poverty here, too, although many pretended there was not.

Mills lifted the yellow crime-scene tape and ushered me underneath. We entered the mall through what used to be a double door, now a ragged mouth with crushed cinder-block teeth. We moved past boarded-up storefronts to the last in the row. The door was open beneath a sign that read NATURE’S OWN: PETS AND EXOTICA. Nothing more exotic than rats had been behind those plywood sheets for years-rats and the decaying corpse of Ezra Pickens, my father.

The power was off, but the crime-scene unit had set up portable spotlights. I recognized the coroner, whose pinched face I would forever remember from the night my mother died. He refused to meet my eyes, which was unsurprising. There had been many difficult questions that night. From the rest, I got a few polite nods, but most of the cops, I could tell, weren’t happy to see me. Nevertheless, they moved aside as Mills guided me through the dusty store to the closet at the back. My gut told me that they moved out of respect for Mills and my father more than they did for any grief they might imagine me to feel.

And just like that, there he was, ribs gleaming palely through a long rip in a shirt that I had forgotten but now remembered quite well. He looked something like a broken crucifix, with one arm outflung and his legs folded together. Most of his face lay hidden beneath what looked to be a candy striper’s shirt still on its hanger, but I saw a porcelain stretch of jawbone and remembered whiskers there, pale and wet under a streetlamp on the last night I saw him alive.