Before I Wake (22 page)

“You caught a few.”

“Not as many as I knew were out there working against me. Some were artists, labeling their products with initials and fancy names; others were clinical about it, their products merely hitting the streets with a number. One guy, I always knew his stuff was six-nine-something. After I caught him I realized sixty-nine was his street address.” Bruce winced at the memory. “That arrogance was more rare than common. Most just wanted to stay in the background and get rich. And most eventually ended up spending the money in ways that gave themselves away.”

Bruce shrugged. “I once had a kid boast how he had burned up a million dollars’ worth of cocaine swiped from his dealer brother as he figured out how to make cocaine-laced lollipops. That kind of cost structure—you will find financial backers for cooks occasionally, but it is rare. There is so much money to be made in known drug formulas that there is not much investment interest in creating more.”

Nathan listened and he realized it was the most he had gotten Bruce to say about his former job in all the years he had known him. Bruce had forgotten more about the subject of drugs and dealers than Nathan had personally ever known. If there was something here to see, Bruce would have already spotted it.

Nathan pushed his hands through his hair and had to laugh. “Up until a couple years ago my biggest headache around here was worrying about the kids who were splitting open fireworks to use the gunpowder to make their homemade rockets go higher. Please just give me back those days.”

“They’ll be back,” Bruce promised, amused. “If there really is a local connection to the Prescott kid’s death, it’s just a couple people, Nathan. Justice is too small a town to have its own population of drug dealers and players living here. They need big cities and plentiful customers nearby. Two or three guys who will eventually either get busted by you for a crime or who will move on, because everyone moves on in this mobile society, and they will become some other town’s problem.”

“You know how cynical that is, hoping that any bad guys that happen to be in the area just move away?”

Bruce shrugged. “You take whatever works. And if they are good enough to not get caught—let them move and become someone else’s problem.”

Bruce got up from his desk chair. “Population growth in Justice being what it is it’s major news having five more births in a year than deaths of elderly residents. Face it, Nathan, Justice is a small town that will always be a small town. That’s one of the reasons I moved here. It’s hard to have a long-term serious crime rate when criminals consider the town boring to live in.”

Nathan smiled as he got to his feet. “Before you cheer me up too much more, let’s go get that steak.”

Bruce grinned. “I did the math before I moved here, you know. A 2 percent criminal population—which you don’t have—gives you two hundred fifty people to worry about, and only one or two of those are capable of being trouble with a capital
T
. You’ve got twenty-some officers. You should be able to take them eventually.”

Nathan pushed his friend in the doorpost as he went by. “Eventually indeed. You really did the math?”

“Insulting, isn’t it?”

“I want a raise. I can count two hundred fifty troublemakers that show up at the city council meetings alone.”

22

By the time he was headed out to Nella’s, Nathan felt like he had relaxed for the first time in days. Bruce was the kind of guy that had that influence on him, and listening over dinner to Rae and Bruce talk about their former days together at the Chicago PD brought back good memories of his own first days as a beat cop.

Traffic was light, and the snow in the air was holding off to only an occasional skiff. Nathan glanced over at Rae. She sat beside him now, quietly looking through her notes for what she might want to ask Nella. He liked that quiet focus she brought to her work.

He’d suggested she ride with him rather than have her drive separately, figuring it was better to know what she was finding as she worked for Peggy’s parents than not. He skirted the line of having a civilian along for police business by accepting the technically true fact that Peggy’s case was no longer a police matter, for they still didn’t have enough to override the coroner’s ruling and formally reopen her death. Truth was, he didn’t want Rae to find out something sinister without a cop at her side.

Andy had suggested Peggy talk to Nella, and the reporter had been persistent enough on this story that she would have taken that suggestion and stopped by Nella’s on Saturday night after leaving Andy’s. Nella had probably told her an earful of news.

And knowing Nella, she would likely have more questions for them now about Peggy’s death than they had for her about Peggy’s visit. Nella was the kind of lady whose life revolved around what she heard as news and what she could pass on as news. Nathan liked Nella well enough, for she meant no harm in the gossip. Single and without family in the area, being a part of the town grapevine helped give her purpose in life.

Nathan turned into Nella’s long driveway, slowing to avoid the depressions and sinkholes taking over the crushed rock. The hardware-store owner might know someone willing to dump a load of rock for Nella free of charge. It wasn’t something she would think about dealing with until it tore up her car’s undercarriage, and she was perennially short of funds for things like home repairs.

Nathan parked near the front of her house rather than pull around to the detached garage. The trees in front of the house cast shadows that just brushed the front porch. Enough snow had melted through the day that he could see patches of grass peeking through.

Nathan picked up his notebook. “Rae, you’ll want to let me do the introductions and handle the conversation for the first bit, or you will have Nella asking enough questions to get your entire life history before she answers a single one of our questions about Peggy. She will want to end up with the scoop on the new town resident or she’ll feel shortchanged in this exchange.”

Rae smiled as she pushed open her door. “Got it.”

Nathan could hear dogs barking inside as he walked up the steps to the porch. Nella had a couple mixed-breed dogs, leaning toward the aggressive breeds. He opened the screen door and knocked on the door.

Newspapers were by the door, buried behind the planter box she still had set out, and a dozen letters were in the mailbox. The newspapers looked soggy.

Not hearing Nella coming, he pushed the doorbell and heard chimes echo inside. The dogs intensified their barking. She was normally home of an evening and quick to come to the door when she heard a car arrive.

She hadn’t been at the diner eating dinner in town, and her car hadn’t been parked on one of the streets downtown; he would have remembered that red station wagon she drove. He rang the doorbell again.

He walked down the porch and glanced through the window but could see only the living room, glasses on the kitchen counter, and more mail on the counter. They’d made a wasted trip; he should have called first. “I’m sorry, Rae. She’s not home.”

“Want me to leave her a note?”

“Leave her your hotel number. Knowing Nella, she’ll call you as soon as she gets home.”

While Rae dug out paper and a pen to write the note, Nathan walked back to the driveway. It really did need a load of rock to smooth it out. He estimated the width and walked toward the garage to check the length and estimate the volume she’d need. As he rounded the back corner of the house he smelled it. Garbage going bad, but worse.

“Rae.”

She came around the house.

She stopped when she got a first whiff of the odor. He could see it in her face, as her expression went still, that she recognized it too. “What kind of car does she drive?”

“A station wagon.”

Rae walked to the garage and found a window. “Her car is here.”

Nathan went to get his flashlight.

He walked the house circumference, opening the backyard gate and checking windows and doors as he went. Nothing obvious looked out of place, but the smell grew stronger.

He shone his light on the window at the east end of the house. The window screen had flies congregating on it and even a line of ants around the sill. He leaned against the house and shone his light inside, but the curtains were heavy and he could see nothing inside. The smell made his eyes water.

“We need in the house, without the dogs attacking us.”

Rae looked around. “We can force the back door and let them into the fenced backyard. If you pull over the picnic table and stand on it there should be decent protection from them going at you.”

“Which just leaves me stuck on the picnic table watching them go for my toes. I don’t want to have to shoot the dogs.”

“We can’t exactly wait around until animal control gets out here. Assuming they can find the place.”

“The roads have street signs even out this far, Rae. It’s not Siberia. What did you have left from dinner in your carryout bag? Food will distract them while I get inside.”

“A couple dinner rolls and some of the chicken. You’ll get maybe ten seconds while they wolf them down.”

“It will be enough.”

She went to get the carryout bag. He pulled the picnic table over near the door to provide him a perch of last resort. The dogs were not in a good mood, and breaking in would just intensify the sense of threat they already felt.

There was no screen door to contend with and the doorframe didn’t look like it had been updated since the house was built sixty or seventy years ago. It would pop with the right kind of impact.

Rae came back with the sack and he pointed. “Stand over there, where the dogs can see you as the door opens. Throw the food toward them as soon as they lock onto seeing you and then swing that gate closed to protect yourself. That should give me enough time to get inside the house and push this back door closed behind me.”

“Okay.”

“On three.”

She nodded.

He judged his footing. He started counting.

“One.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

He slammed his boot into the door just below the doorknob. The wood in the frame splintered back. The locks snapped free. The door crashed inward.

Snarling dogs came through so fast they were one moving body. He flattened against the house siding.

“Here, boys!”

The fence gate slammed closed. Nathan darted inside as the dogs attacked the food and shoved the back door closed behind him.

The linoleum in the utility room area bore the marks of dogs trying to dig their way outside. The smell overpowered now, of decay and of dog urine, the heat oppressive in the still air. Flies buzzed around him. Glad he was wearing boots, he walked through the quiet house. He didn’t bother to call Nella’s name.

He walked down the hall. He pushed open the door. She was still in bed. He forced himself to look, to see what could be seen from the doorway that might suggest cause of death, and then he backed away. The decay had already made her nearly unrecognizable.

Nothing appeared disturbed in the living room, the kitchen. He noted that orderliness as he moved through the rooms. He flipped the lock open on the front door and turned the knob.

Nathan stepped outside, waved off Rae, and moved several feet down the porch. He put his hand against the porch column and looked at the grass poking through the melting snow. He took half a dozen deep breaths and then shook his head. He looked up. Rae was watching him. “She’s dead.”

“I know.”

“It looks like she went to sleep and never woke up. Blankets are still over the body.” He shook his head again trying to dislodge that image of the blankets that had moved because of the crawling maggots on the body but it sat there in his mind like a picture he couldn’t look away from.

Her hand touched his left one. “Open your hand, let go.”

The keys he’d held in his hand as a possible defensive weapon against the dogs had left an impression in his palm. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“The newspapers here on her porch, the mail in the box—she never took Saturday’s mail inside. Time of death is Friday night, early Saturday morning?” Rae asked.

“I’m not an expert on scenes like this, but that fits with the body, I think.”

“This wasn’t a shooting, a knife attack? She lives out in the middle of nowhere.”

“No signs of blood on the walls, on the bed, no signs of struggle. The rooms don’t look disturbed and doors were locked.”

“If it’s another death in her sleep, that puts you at three since I arrived in town.”

“Not to mention a strike about to turn violent. What’s happening to my town, Rae? It used to be such a quiet place.” The town was coming apart around him and he couldn’t figure out how to stop it or even what to fight.

He felt sick, and he stopped looking for his phone to just take a few more breaths and shake it off some more. Some things a man needed to expect to see, and that scene was outside anything he had expected. He had known he would find a body but hadn’t prepared for the blankets moving.

“I saw my first body when I was seventeen, and cleaned up my first murder scene at twenty. The images don’t settle well.”

He thought her quiet words worth a halfhearted smile. “I’ve been walking into hard things since my first year on highway patrol, but the bugs—you never quite get used to the bugs that come with an undiscovered death.”

“It’s the dreams afterwards that I hate. They are always three-dimensional, and the dead people have a habit of getting up and walking around.”

He did smile at that comment. “Thanks a lot for that image; it rivals this one. I’m going to find excuses not to sleep tonight, I think.”

Rae let him have a few more moments with his own thoughts; then she nodded toward the house. “Peggy, Karen, Nella—even if it is not foul play with a person behind it, maybe there is a trigger. Something in the water, something they eat, something.”

Her eyes narrowed as she studied the front door. “As awful as this is, maybe this is a break in this mystery too. The calendar at least suggests it might be. Nella may have been the first death. Then Peggy, then Karen. Maybe the source of all the trouble originates right here.”