Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (29 page)

Rachel stiffened and drew away from her sister. When Michelle reached for her hand, Rachel snatched it away. “
You
were happy. You were the one she loved. You looked like the daughter she’d lost, she gave you her name, she made you her replacement. She doted on you. Of course you were happy.”

Michelle pressed her hands to her chest as if trying to stanch bleeding from a wound. “She cared about you too. I know she did.”

“I was nothing but collateral damage. I just happened to be on the playground with you, so she had to take me too. You were her dead husband’s child, after the car crash you were all that was left of him. But I was a different man’s daughter, and I didn’t fit into her fantasy. The very sight of me must have reminded her every single day that her husband had betrayed her and you weren’t hers either. A child knows when she isn’t loved, Mish.”

Tears flowed freely down Michelle’s face now, but she cried silently, her body rigid. When she spoke, her voice had a bitter edge, a hardness Rachel had never heard before. “Were you any happier when you uncovered the truth? Was it worth it, what you put us all through? Was it worth Mother’s life?”

The question, the accusation in it, cut like a knife to the heart. Rachel had heard it before from her sister, but not for a long time, and she hadn’t expected to ever hear it again. “She killed herself. I didn’t kill her.”

“She killed herself because you made life unbearable for her, you dug it all up and threw it in her face.”

Rachel sat still for a moment, then she rose, fighting to stay calm. “If you still feel that way, if you’re always going to feel that way, I don’t see how we can go on. I don’t see how we can ever trust each other.”

Panic bloomed in Michelle’s upturned face. She grabbed Rachel’s hand and squeezed it tightly. “No, don’t say that, please, Rachel. I’m sorry. I do trust you, you’re the only person I trust, and I love you so much. Please don’t shut me out of your life.”

Rachel didn’t try to stop her own tears. “I love you too,” she said. “You’re my sister, and I’ll always love you.”

“Tell me how you did it,” Michelle begged. “You put your life back together and went on. Tell me how you got that door closed again.”

“I didn’t,” Rachel said. “Once it’s open, you’ll never be able to shut it again.”

Chapter Thirty

The locksmith shop, a two-story, flat-topped box of a building covered with brown siding and sitting alone by the road, appeared deserted when Tom and Brandon walked in. A voice said from somewhere behind the counter, “With you in a sec.”

Tom peered over the counter and found Jordan Gale crouched next to a steel cabinet, rummaging on a lower shelf.

Jordan raised his head, seemed momentarily startled when he saw who had come in, then smiled and said, “Hey, guys. Be right with you.” He plucked something off the shelf and stood. “Here’s what I need. Okay, sorry, what can I do for you?”

“We need to ask you about the night Brian Hadley died,” Tom said.

Jordan’s mouth fell open. Then he laughed. “Whoa. Where’d that come from?”

“You know Shelley Beecher was looking into the case? Trying to get Vance Lankford out of prison?”

“Yeah, sure, everybody knows about that.” His expression sobering, Jordan set a small box on the counter and wrote
Atkins
on it with a felt-tip pen. “What’s it got to do with me?”

“For some reason I thought you weren’t living here at the time,” Tom said.

“I wasn’t. I was living in Manassas.”

“But you were at the concert that night.”

Jordan frowned and shook his head. “No, I wasn’t. Where’d you get that idea?”

“Did my dad ever talk to you about what happened that night?”

“No. Why would he? Like I said, I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even in Mason County.”

“You sure you weren’t here visiting your parents?”

Jordan leaned on the counter with both hands and shook his head. “Yeah, I’m sure. Why are you asking about it?”

Tom pulled a photocopy of the newspaper picture from his jacket’s inside pocket and spread it on the counter. He’d used correction fluid to cover the name Shelley had written on it. He pointed. “Is that you?”

Bending close to the paper, Jordan squinted and studied the photo. After a moment he shook his head. “Naw, that’s not me.”

“Have you ever seen this picture before?”

“I don’t think so. I mean, it’s just a picture of a crowd. I don’t think I’d remember it anyway. What’s this about?”

Ignoring the question, Tom asked another of his own. “When you came home to visit your folks, while you were living in Manassas, did you ever see Rita, or Brian, or Vance?”

Jordan’s large, sincere eyes held Tom’s gaze as he answered. “Yeah, I always got together with Rita, even if it was just to say hello. But Brian and the rest of them, that wasn’t my crowd. I didn’t know any of them real well.”

The guy appeared and sounded as guileless as a puppy, but Tom could swear Jordan was holding back something. He couldn’t guess what. He doubted that pressing him about the newspaper photo would be useful. The picture was so grainy that Tom couldn’t claim with any certainty that it showed Jordan at the concert. Shelley’s question mark indicated she’d had her doubts too. When Tom had called the editor to ask for the original so he could have it enhanced, he’d learned that all the photos were taken by a stringer who had long since moved out of the area.

He changed direction. “So you and Rita stayed friendly after you broke up? Even after you moved to Northern Virginia? That’s kind of unusual for couples that have been married.”

“Yeah, Rita and me, we’ve always been good friends. We never should’ve tried to take it any further than that. We didn’t have any business getting married right out of high school. Big mistake, but it wasn’t any reason for us to stop being friends.”

“She must have talked to you about what was going on with Brian and Vance.”

“Uh…” Jordan seemed suddenly uneasy, his gaze jumping around, avoiding Tom’s eyes. “What do you mean exactly?”

“Did she talk about their disagreements? Their rivalry over her?”

Jordan considered the question for a moment, then cleared his throat. “You know, there’s one thing I never told anybody about. It didn’t happen the night Brian died, so I never thought the cops would be interested. I mean, they had plenty of evidence against Vance as it was, so…” His voice trailed off.

“What is it?” Tom asked.

“Well…” Jordan picked up the box on the counter, seemed to be reading the label absentmindedly, set it down again. “There was this time a few months before Brian—uh, before he died, the band played in Manassas at some kind of fundraising thing. Up where I was living with my sister, you know? Rita told me to come on over when they were rehearsing, and we could hang out. So I went, and when I got there everybody was standing around listening to Brian and Vance yelling at each other. Rita told me Brian just had his first meeting with somebody from a record company about making an album, and Vance went apeshit about not being included.”

“He thought he ought to have some say in it?”

“Well, yeah. You see, Brian and Vance started the band together, they were supposed to be partners, now here Brian was acting like he made all the decisions, and Vance thought he was getting screwed out of his share,. Brian said him and Rita singing together, that was what brought in the audience, that was what the record company was interested in. Who played backup didn’t matter much.”

“And Vance didn’t like hearing that,” Tom said.

“Oh, no, not one bit. I heard him say…” Jordan paused. “Hell, none of this matters now. I don’t know what the point is, repeating it.”

“Tell me,” Tom said. “Let me decide whether it matters.”

Still looking doubtful, Jordan scraped a hand over his chin and frowned, thinking, before he went on. “I heard Vance say Brian was lucky that he—Vance, I mean—didn’t have a gun on him, ’cause if he did Brian would be a dead man.”

“Was that the only time you ever heard Vance threaten Brian?”

“Yeah. I mean, like I said, I wasn’t around them much. Rita told me it didn’t mean anything, Vance was just blowing off steam. But…”

Tom waited, and when Jordan didn’t go on, he said, “But what? What were you about to say?”

“Well, it seemed to me like Brian was bound and determined to show Vance who was boss, who was the big man, you know? Rita told me that was when Brian started coming on to her, and they had a triangle kind of thing going right up to the day Brian died. To tell you the truth, I’m kinda surprised it took Vance so long to kill him.” Jordan shrugged. “And that’s all I can tell you about those two.”

“All right.” Tom folded the photocopied picture and tucked it back into his inner pocket. “Let me know if you think of anything else.”

“Sure will.” As Tom and Brandon turned to go, Jordan added, “Oh, hey, how’re the new locks working out at Dr. Goddard’s place?”

“Fine. No problems. I think it’s secure now.”

“Glad to hear it.”

When they were back in the cruiser, Tom asked Brandon, “So? What do you think?”

“He’s lying about not being at the concert. And he’s lying about something else too, but I’m not real sure what.”

“Yeah, same here.” Tom had to smile at how much alike he and Brandon were in their assessments of people. He always liked to have Brandon along to reinforce or contradict his perceptions, but he seldom heard a contradictory opinion.

“You think he’s the one Shelley suspected?” Brandon asked. “Maybe she showed him that picture and spooked him?”

“Could be.” Tom started the engine and pulled onto the road. “The fact that he was there doesn’t mean he killed Brian, though. Did you notice he never answered my question about what Rita told him?”

“Yeah, I noticed. And that story he gave us about Brian and Vance arguing is old news. He was trying to distract us.”

“You know,” Tom said, “I think it’s time I went to the state pen to see Vance Lankford. I’ll drive over there in the morning.”

***

That night, Tom fell asleep quickly, and his rhythmic breathing made Rachel feel lonely as she lay beside him staring at the ceiling, replaying their argument in her head. They had fought about Michelle, speaking in whispers to prevent her from overhearing.

“It’s you I’m worried about,” Tom had said. “You were out there alone in the woods today, and some maniac with a shotgun was right there with you. Anything could have happened.”

“I realize that. But you said it wasn’t necessarily the stalker. It could just as easily have been somebody who wants to derail the Beecher investigation.”

“We don’t know anything for sure,” Tom said. “But we could eliminate one possibility if Michelle went home.”

“My sister needs help. I can’t ask her to go home and take her problems with her.”

Tom sighed. “We’ll tackle this tomorrow, okay? Right now, all of us need some rest.”

Sometime after two in the morning, Rachel finally drifted off, only to be awakened by the ringing telephone. The dispatcher was summoning Tom to an emergency at the home of Vance Lankford’s parents.

Chapter Thirty-one

Deputy Keith Blackwood stood at the open gate when Tom pulled up in front of the Lankford house.

He climbed out of his cruiser, Maglite in hand, and stared at the chaos laid out before him.

The moon and a dim porch light illuminated a scene that looked more like a landfill than a front yard. Tom switched on his flashlight and swept it over the mounds and layers of trash, picking out beer cans, banana skins, pizza boxes, used tea bags, and garbage he couldn’t identify. He caught the stench of rotting meat from somewhere in the mess. Styrofoam packing peanuts lifted a couple of inches on a breeze and blew across the front walk like scuttling white beetles.

On the porch Jesse and Sonya Lankford, both in robes and slippers, stood two feet apart. The front steps dripped a red liquid that immediately made Tom think of the blood thrown on the porch of his and Rachel’s house.

“Christ, what happened here?” Tom asked Keith Blackwood.

The deputy shrugged. “Nothing new, just worse than ever before. Whoever did this spent a lot of time getting their act together. Looks like they raided the county dump.”

Gritting his teeth against an explosion of fury, Tom strode up the walk, kicking aside the peanuts—god, whoever invented those damned things deserved a special place in hell. He leaned over the steps and sniffed at the red liquid. Paint, not blood.

“You don’t want to step in that while it’s wet,” Sonya said. “Go around to the back door if you want to come in.”

She met him at the back door and double-bolted it again once he was inside. Then, without warning, she burst into tears. “I can’t do this anymore,” she sobbed. “I’ve had enough. It’s just too much.”

Her husband entered the kitchen from the hallway. “We’re not giving in to them now. They’re not going to win. You shouldn’t have called the police.”

“I don’t care about winning!” she screamed. “I just want one day, one night, of peace and quiet. I can’t stand this anymore. We’re not safe in our own home.”