Steve Erickson - Arc d'X

“A couple years ago she inherited some money. One of those things that happens out of the blue, a dead relative she never knew existed.” Mallory checked the note pad again. “Madison Hemings. Anyway, that money’s gone now.”

“Where was Hurley the night before last?”

“Arboretum, he says.”

“Was anyone with Miss Hemings when she checked into the hotel?”

“The concierge didn’t see anybody. She was up there alone the whole time he knew of. She went out the day before yesterday and came back and told the concierge she’d be leaving. Yesterday he goes up to her room to see if she’s checking out and the door’s open. He takes one look inside and sees everything and calls us.”

“And he never saw anyone else coming or going?”

“He sleeps behind the front desk at night.”

When he’s not watching his felonious TV, Wade thought. “There’s still no ID on the body,” he said, opening the file again. “Did you dust?”

“Of course we dusted. She left prints on the door knob and the knife, about what you’d expect.”

“No prints from the dead man.”

“No.”

“And you checked out the premises entirely, the streets outside the hotel and in back.”

“Yeah,” Mallory said impatiently.

“That other door that was in the room, where’s that go outside?”

“We couldn’t find any other door outside.”

“Did you look—”

“We looked fucking everywhere. There was no damned door outside. That door’s been sealed up a long time, like the concierge said.”

“Miss Hemings said something—”

“Mrs. Hurley you mean,” Mallory said.

Wade licked his lips. “Mrs. Hurley said something when she woke. Did you catch it? It was only a word or two.”

Mallory looked at his note pad. “‘A miracle.’”

“‘A miracle’? Are you sure?”

“That’s what I’ve got down here. ‘A miracle.’”

Wade kept looking at the file. “And you found nothing—”

“Give me a hint, Wade. What is it we’re supposed to have found?”

“A murder weapon.”

“Excuse me, but there was a knife with blood all over it—”

“You read this file? Guy wasn’t stabbed.” For a while Wade and Mallory looked at each other. “Not a stab wound on his body. He died from a blow to the skull.”

“Bullshit.”

“Hard enough for his brains to run out his ears.”

“The handle of the knife,” Mallory suggested.

“The handle of the knife? The woman goes to kill this guy with a knife and beats him over the head with it?”

“You know,” Mallory leaned across Wade’s desk and into his face, “I get tired of you making me feel stupid. There’s nothing complicated about this. A woman’s in bed with a stiff and a knife has blood all over it.”

“I apologize, Mallory. It may not be complicated to you but I’m confused, because if the knife isn’t the murder weapon, then—”

“She got rid of the fucking weapon.”

“Let me make sure I’ve got your theory straight. She beats the man over the head. She leaves the hotel in the middle of the night with the murder weapon while the concierge sleeps behind the front desk. She must have gone some ways from the hotel to dispose of the weapon because you searched the hotel and you searched the area around the hotel and you didn’t find anything. She gets rid of the weapon and then returns to the hotel. She comes back through the hotel lobby past the front desk where the concierge is still sleeping and goes back up the stairs. She comes back into the room where she’s murdered a man and leaves the door open, the way the concierge found it, so that people can walk by and get a good look inside and see she’s murdered someone. Just to make sure somebody finds her there, she crawls into bed with a knife and goes to sleep next to the murdered man while he bleeds all over her.”

Mallory was still leaning over Wade’s desk. “I just knew you were going to find some way to get her off,” he said. “I could see it all over that big black face of yours yesterday, you licking your chops for some of that black—”

“You should be careful right now,” Wade said quietly.

“Yeah, well, we should all be careful, shouldn’t we?” Mallory answered. “Woman in bed with a dead body and you’re telling me she had nothing to do with it. Well, sure, it’s your call. We’ve all got our secrets and I guess this one’s yours. But, you know, somebody up there,” and he pointed over his shoulder in the direction of Church Central, “might wonder just who killed this guy if she didn’t.”

“It won’t be the first murder that’s gone unanswered in this city.”

“It’ll be the first one,” Mallory said, “where the killer was lying in bed next to the fucking body.”

In fact, it hadn’t been Wade’s intention at all to release Sally Hemings. The discussion with Mallory just sort of evolved that way. Whether Wade liked it or not, Mallory wasn’t half wrong: Sally was the only person at the scene of a crime that didn’t have any other suspects, except for perhaps the husband if by chance his alibi didn’t check out. The fact was that Sally acted like a woman who had killed a man. From the beginning Wade had assumed she did it, though he might have hoped she had an excellent reason; the fact that they hadn’t found a weapon only meant Mallory had been too busy working his TV scam with the concierge to do a proper search. Now his petty little political struggle with Mallory had put Wade in the position of having to let her go, at least for the time being. He walked to her cell, turning everything over in his mind.

He almost expected not to find her there. He almost expected to walk into the jail and find her cell empty, a lapse among the city’s incarcerated. He thought she might have just disappeared as peculiarly as she’d appeared, that he’d walk back to his desk and find her file vanished with no trace of her having existed for the twenty-four hours she’d existed. But inside her cell she sat on the small bench staring at her hands in her lap the same way she had in the hotel room the day before, appearing only somewhat less dazed at the end of the twenty-four hours than she was at the beginning. Wade watched her awhile before she looked up at him.

“You said something yesterday,” he finally spoke, “when you woke in the hotel. Do you remember?” He said, “Something about a miracle.” She licked her lips and seemed to think about it very hard, terrified that there might be still another thing she couldn’t account for. Wade signaled to the jailer at the end of the hall, who pulled the lever that opened Sally’s cell. Nothing was so sophisticated in this city, Wade thought, as the levers that opened and closed cells. “I’m going to take you home,” he said, and she looked at him with the hushed alarm of someone who might be expected to know where home was.

He tried to explain things to her on the way to Redemption. They took the same outer road bordering the city that he’d driven the previous night coming back from the Arboretum. “You’re not clear of this,” he said to her next to him in the front seat, “not by a long shot. You and your family are going to be watched. There’s only so much we have the authority to do in this particular zone, but keeping an eye on you is one of them and arresting you again is another, since the crime was committed in the city proper.” He paused. “I’m sticking my neck out for you.” It only really occurred to him as he said it. Maybe, he thought angrily, she didn’t give a flying fuck. “But my neck’s not that long,” he almost snarled, “not for you, not for anyone.” He still had trouble talking to her. It didn’t help that she said nothing in return. “You know,” he blurted, “if there’s anything you’d like to tell me, this would be a fine time to do it,” and he looked at her to see that he wasn’t talking to thin air.