Before I Wake (27 page)

“I don’t mind.”

She brooded over her empty mug. She did. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to hate the fact I told you.”

“You’re already regretting it. But that’s why I’ve got such notoriously forgetful hearing. We can wait to talk about this again for six months if you want.” Bruce got to his feet and took the mug from her hand. “Hot chocolate or hot cider?”

“Cider this time.”

He ruffled her hair. “Welcome to the land of recovering cops.”

She smiled but still caught his hand for one last serious question. “Tell me it gets better,” she whispered.

His hand tightened on hers. “It gets better.”

“How?”

He thought for a moment, then ran his knuckles along her jaw. “Hang out with Nathan some more, and remember what 99 percent of cop work really is about. You loved this job, Rae. You still can. There’s just a couple nasty detours that have to be sorted out and left behind first. Don’t throw out the first love just because life kicked you in the gut.”

“Easier said than done.”

“So hang out with me too; I’m reforming slowly.”

She smiled back. “Got to love a man that went from a cubbyhole of an apartment to a private hotel of a house.”

Amusement lit his eyes. “Oh, that’s good. I’m going to have to remember the private hotel answer. Maybe add a couple signs to the front yard. Folks in the neighborhood would get a kick out of that.”

“What did you say when people asked why you wanted this big old place for yourself?”

“I mentioned I had a lot of ghosts coming with me.”

She blinked. “Oh, that’s good too.”

He smiled. “I thought so. Find us a movie; I want to listen to you snore before I send you home.”

“I’m not falling asleep watching a movie on you, Bruce.”

“Yes you will. Find something John Wayneish. Or
Midway
. I always like watching
Midway
.”

“We’re going to town early tomorrow to pick up my car.”

“I remember. We’re still going. Just after you watch a movie with me. You can’t break a Friday night tradition the first Friday night you happen to come over.”

“True.” Who was she kidding, she wanted to stay. “Where do you keep the movies?”

Bruce gestured with the mug. “Third shelf of the cabinet.”

“You’re getting something more on the line of
March of the Penguins.
”

He laughed. “All those animals; you never change. Hot cider coming up. If you’re good, I’ll find the popcorn too.”

26

Nathan leaned against the window in his office Saturday morning and watched the snow fall outside. It was finally coming down at a rate that would please the kids and make this day an adventure for drivers. He hoped it eased off soon. As stretched as this town budget was for finances, snow removal was always hoped to be an overfunded line item in the budget come April.He sighed and turned back to his desk. While he scanned papers, he picked up the phone and called his deputy chief to confirm the most pressing item of the morning was handled. “Will, are you sure the negotiating teams are tucked away in a private enough place?”

The strikebreakers may have been able to leave the plant without incident on Friday, but if they appeared again on Monday Nathan didn’t expect that quiet to be repeated. He needed the strike to be history this weekend.

“Your dad and I got them out of their homes while it was still dark and snuck them out to the lake pavilion,” Will confirmed. “No one knows they’ve assembled. They’re using Ford’s lakefront home as the meeting site. It was as far as I could get them out of town while leaving them in the city limits.”

“We need a deal today.”

“Both Adam and Zachary are more serious than I’ve ever seen them. They know what Monday is going to bring if they don’t get a deal done this weekend. I promised we would bring them out dinner around five unless they call us earlier. They’ll decide over dinner if it makes sense to do another round through the night or break for the day. Your dad is staying out there to facilitate anything the group needs.”

“Have Dad call me if there’s any word from Adam and Zachary on progress. I’ll plan to go out to meet them when they are ready to break for the night.”

“Will do, Boss.”

Nathan hung up the phone. Losing the tile plant would kill this town. They had to get a deal this weekend. And there wasn’t much he could do to help make that happen. It was awful sitting on the sidelines waiting for news.

“You okay, Boss?”

Nathan looked toward the doorway. Sillman looked like the week had worn on him as much as it had on his boss. “Pending bad news on the tile-plant front. Come on in, Gray.” Nathan started looking again for the file on the stolen handguns. He was personally going to go talk to the top candidates on his list for having done the robbery. Even if he couldn’t get the guns to mysteriously turn themselves back in, maybe he could put the fear of life and limb into people that the guns should never be allowed to reach the street and be sold.

“You want the interesting news of the day first?”

“Hit me with it; I’m as braced as I’ll ever be.”

“Nella shows no sign of dying by murder in the traditional way—no knife wounds, gunshots, broken neck. The coroner thinks she may have died of cancer.”

Nathan stopped his search. “You’re kidding me.”

“Franklin found bone cancer, pretty advanced. It was at a stage it would have begun spreading to her organs. Given the time lapse in finding the body, he may never be able to rule out other contributing factors to her death, but his opinion leans toward natural causes.”

“Nella had no idea she had cancer.”

“The aches and pains she complained about she probably wrote off to her age. She never got it checked out. If you’ve got to die of cancer, I guess not knowing you have it would be one of the better ways to go.”

“How sure is Franklin that this killed her?”

“The cancer is there, enough to kill her, but he said he’ll have to go by absence of other factors at the scene to rule on this one.”

“You’re right. This would constitute interesting news. You’ve got more?”

Sillman nodded. “The final toxicology reports are back on Karen Reese. They are clean. Franklin is ready to rule her case natural causes. Everything he has seen points to a heart attack. He was on the scene within an hour or two of her death and still nothing showed up in the toxicology. We’ll have the results of the last vending-machine-food tests today, but I doubt we find something. All the food tests so far are clean too.”

Nathan squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Close the door.”

Sillman moved aside the box fan and closed the door.

“What are the odds someone in the county’s own forensic lab is in on the designer-drug production, and these blood-test results are being intentionally messed up?”

His deputy chewed on the coffee stir stick he held and thought about it, then looked over at him. “You really want to go there, Boss?”

Nathan knew what he was suggesting and the fallout that would come if his suspicions got out. “Just ask a couple quiet questions, okay? See if the tests are being run by the same shift. Ask the coroner if it’s possible to use another lab to rerun the most critical of the test results. I’ll pick up the cost to get it done.”

“I’ll ask.”

“Anything on the fingerprints you found on the wineglasses at Nella’s place?”

“We’ve got unknown prints. DNA from the cigarettes may still give us something, but it will be a day or two more at the lab.”

“That fits our luck with this case.” Nathan shook his head. “Three dead by natural causes? I just don’t buy it, Gray.”

Sillman leaned back against the door. “Assume the reporter is murdered to stop her story investigation, assume Nella is murdered because she knows something; that still leaves Karen out there as a strange anomaly. There’s no way Karen could learn something dangerous about this community in the few hours she was passing through town. If you start saying this one is natural causes and this one isn’t, it needs something to hang its hat on. We just don’t have it, Nathan, that one tangible fact that says murder.”

“I know we don’t. Keep on the environmental samples. Let’s try and rule out anything at Nella’s being a toxin that Peggy picked up.” Nathan looked at his officer. “Nella dies of cancer, two young ladies die of natural causes in Justice hotels—what are we going to be saying when the fourth body shows up?”

“I hear you, Boss.”

* * *

Bruce eased his car into a void in the alley, creating a parking place for the Caprice between an overflowing Dumpster and a discarded mattress.

“This is where you think the handguns are at?” Rae questioned, looking around the area before she considered opening her door. She didn’t mind the extra stop in their morning to pursue a lead, but normally Bruce had better information to work from than this. They were far enough outside of Justice that the Dumpster had a county address on it for the responsible collection company.

“The kid did see one of the stolen guns; he remembered the last three digits of the serial number and they were right. But he was a nine year old going on thirty-nine. He negotiated forty bucks out of my pocket just for those numbers.”

“You should have negotiated for the name of the friend who showed him the gun.”

“He wanted an even hundred for that; I didn’t feel like being that generous given the phone call woke me up.”

Rae laughed as she pushed open her door. “You were better able to haggle in the past. So what are we looking for again?”

“His friend who was showing off the gun shares a bedroom at home, so anything he considered important he never takes home; he leaves it stashed in his secret place. My nine-year-old hustler says that secret place is somewhere in this alley. Precisely where, he doesn’t know.”

“You would have been better off spending the hundred so we could just go talk to the friend.”

“If I have to. The store was robbed by a guy in his late forties or fifties so we’re still a ways away from the final name we need to find. This gun may simply be a discard, and forty bucks is enough for that.”

Rae scanned the depth of the alley and the stacked trash. “At least I dressed appropriately for the occasion.”

“You look cute in overalls.”

“I look like the trash man that never visits here. I’ll take the right; you take the left?”

Bruce held out a pair of work gloves. “Find it, and I’ll give you the hundred.”

“For a hundred, I might even show some competitive spirit in this search.”

* * *

“This is promising,” Bruce said.

Rae set aside a rumpled army jacket to look over at Bruce. Twenty minutes of searching had left her with a profound appreciation for neat people who threw their trash away properly.

Bruce pried the lid off a steel drum and looked inside. He nodded. “One secret stash site, nicely protected against rain, wind, snow, and less-persistent searchers.” He glanced over at Rae and smiled. “The kid had a box of dog doo sitting on top of the barrel.”

“That would be a good deterrent.”

Bruce set aside the lid and began lifting out items, starting with a layer of folded clothes. “Baseball glove, autographed ball, jacket with stitched name—
Stephen
—schoolbooks, school ID, bus pass—the kid’s life is in here.”

Rae opened one of the schoolbooks. “Stephen Foster. It matches the school ID. Sophomore? Junior maybe? I don’t remember the course work well enough to tell. I’m guessing from this that his home is somewhere he stays as little as possible.”

“Sadly probably true. It’s odd that a nine-year-old kid would have such an older kid as a close friend.”

“I don’t know; street friends are a breed of their own,” Rae guessed.

“One box. Heavy.” Bruce lifted it out and passed it over.

Rae opened the top and found several layers of fabric. She unwrapped the first piece of cloth in the box. “Handgun.” She read off the serial number.

“That’s one of them,” Bruce agreed.

Rae checked the box. “Six handguns, safely stored away. Do you have a full list of the serial numbers?”

Bruce tugged it from his pocket and she started checking each gun against the list. “Anything else from the robbery in that barrel?”

Bruce continued searching. “Not that I can see.” He returned items to the barrel in the same order he’d removed them. “The guns got too hot to hold or sell, got discarded, and our Stephen was enterprising enough to find them?”

“It works for me. Leave the kid the hundred bucks,” Rae replied.

“What?”

“Leave him the hundred bucks, your card, and a note that says there’s another hundred if he tells us where he found the box.”

Bruce dug out his wallet. “You’re awful generous with the company’s money.”

“Nathan is going to be able to get prints off this box or the guns. But I want to gift wrap it for him with names and everything.”

“And everything is right. For this price, we’ll end up losing money on the case.”

“Think of it as charity for street kids.”

“I prefer the tax-deductible kind,” Bruce replied, amused, but he wrote the note.

27

Nathan could not remember the last time the M&T Diner was standing room only. Folks were spilling over to Sir Arthur’s for seating and carrying over lunch. He listened to the talk around him and tried to sort out those who were only gossiping from those who sounded overly stressed. The strike was hitting families hard. He could hear it in the voices around him.

“Is this chair for me?”

Nathan smiled at his mom as she squeezed into the nook. He pushed over the coffee he had ordered for her. “Mabel wants to know if you would like peach or apple pie,” he mentioned, guessing the question he’d just been asked in pantomime by the lady behind the counter.

“Peach.”

Nathan pointed to the left plate Mabel was holding up. “Ready for the council meeting?”

“Never, but that’s beside the point,” his mom replied, cheerful as always. “The agenda should have us talking until dinnertime just to get through the public inquiries. I did get you the extra cash you need to deal with the building’s furnace. The fire chief was feeling generous this morning and gifted you part of his capital funds.”