Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (33 page)

“Believe what you want to. But she didn’t want to talk about it until she could prove it.”

“And you didn’t give her any ideas about who else could have killed Brian? How did you persuade her to get involved in the first place?”

Vance folded his arms tightly over his waist and raised his chin. “All I know is that I didn’t kill him. And after Shelley heard me out, she believed me. She thought I was telling the truth, and she was willing to look into it.”

“The people at the innocence project don’t have any of the information she collected. It all disappeared when Shelley did. They don’t have anything to start over with.”

“I know that,” Vance mumbled. For a second his mask slipped and Tom glimpsed the despair behind it.

Tom had heard protestations of innocence from a lot of guilty people, many so earnest that they might have been persuasive if hard evidence against them hadn’t existed. Some seemed to have convinced themselves that they’d done nothing wrong, and Tom was beginning to wonder if Vance was one of those. But he wasn’t here to debate Vance’s guilt or innocence. “There’s something else I wanted to ask you about.”

Vance regarded him with suspicion. “What?”

Tom reached into his uniform jacket to pull the photocopied newspaper picture from an inner pocket. He spread it open on the table. “Did Shelley ever show you this?”

Vance shot a cursory glance at the photo. “Yeah, a couple of times. What about it?”

“Why did she show it to you? What did she want to know about it?”

“She wanted me to identify some of the people. I don’t recognize most of them. The light’s bad, the picture’s not all that clear, and some of them were probably from outside the county anyway. But that’s Jordy Gale.” Vance shifted in his seat and tapped the picture.

“So Jordy was there that night?” If Vance had seen him, so had a lot of other people, Tom thought. “You told Shelley that?”

“Sure I did.”

“He claims he wasn’t at the concert,” Tom said. “Why would he lie about it?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe he just didn’t want to get dragged into a police investigation.”

“Rita says he wasn’t there.”

Vance laughed and shook his head. “She knows he was there. I saw her talking to him.”

“Why would she lie about something like that?”

“Don’t ask me to explain Rita. I’d have to be a psychiatrist to even try. But I’ve been over every second of that night a million times in my head. I can tell you what happened minute by minute. I saw Jordy before the concert, I talked to him, I told him to get the hell out of my face. And I think he was gone by the time we wound it up. I didn’t see him afterward, anyway. But why does this matter to—”

“Are you saying you had an argument with Jordy that night too?” Tom broke in. “Was that before or after your fight with Brian?”

“I wasn’t
fighting
with either one of them. An argument’s not a—Aw, hell, I don’t have to put up with this crap.” Vance pushed himself to his feet.

Tom rose too. “Sit down, Vance. We’re not finished.”

“Oh, yeah, we are. Just leave me alone and let me serve out my time in peace. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Me stuck in here for the rest of my life. You sure as hell don’t want anybody proving your daddy got the wrong man.” He turned away.

“I said
sit down
.”

The door swung open and the balding guard appeared. “What’s going on in here? Didn’t I tell you to stay put, Lankford? Do I have to cuff you to the table?”

“Take me back to my cell.”

The guard looked past Vance to Tom. “Deputy? You done with him?”

Before Tom could answer, Vance said, “Yeah, he’s done with me, whether he thinks so or not.”

Tom sighed and waved a hand. “All right. Take him.”

On his way out, Vance paused at the door and looked back at Tom. “I’ll tell you what I told Shelley. If you really care about finding the truth, go ask Rita your questions. Keep after her, break her down. I think she knows stuff about that night that she’s never told anybody.”

***

Tom followed another correctional officer, retracing his steps through the prison to the outside. Ninety minutes to get here, ninety minutes to get back home. What a goddamn waste of time. He’d confirmed that Jordy Gale was on the scene the night Brian was murdered, but so what? Maybe Vance was right and Jordy had lied for the simple and obvious reason that he didn’t want to get caught up in a police investigation. Maybe Rita had backed him up out of friendship. It could meant nothing.

In his cruiser in the parking lot, Tom grabbed his cell phone from the glove compartment and held it out the window to see if he could get a signal. Might as well check in and find out whether he’d missed anything important while he was on his wild goose chase.

He picked up a weak signal and found a couple of voice mail messages waiting. One was from Rachel, who sounded like she was clinging to self-control by her fingernails. What the hell? A rattlesnake at the animal hospital? Michelle in the ER?

Tom yanked on his seat belt, swung it around his body and fastened it with a click. He revved the engine, but before he shifted into drive he clicked on the other voice mail message. He had to play it twice before he was sure he’d heard right.

Dennis Murray wanted him to know right away about the crime lab report on the blood that was thrown onto Tom and Rachel’s porch. “It’s deer blood,” Dennis said. His voice faded in a burst of static, and when it became audible again it sounded faint and distant. “…heard Blake and Skeet Hadley shot a buck last weekend…out of season, so they’re not going to admit it…stalker probably didn’t do it…I’m betting on Skeet…boy’s out of control.”

Chapter Thirty-five

Rachel found Michelle, propped up and looking groggy, near the end of the row of beds in the emergency room. The only other patients were a teenage boy with a broken leg and worried parents, and an infant who screamed in his frazzled mother’s arms while a doctor struggled to examine his throat. Curtains drawn on both sides of Michelle’s bed gave her privacy.

“Hey,” Rachel said, laying a palm against her sister’s ashen cheek. Michelle’s skin felt cool to the touch even though it was moist with perspiration. An IV dripped fluid into her, delivering the antivenom to a vein on the back of her left hand as rapidly as possible. Not much more left in the bag. “How are you feeling?”

“Kind of loopy from the pain meds. I can’t stay awake.” Michelle sighed and her head lolled to the right. She wore a light green hospital gown, and a sheet covered her to the waist.

“Are you in much pain?”

Michelle ran her tongue over dry lips and murmured her reply, so that Rachel had to lean within inches to catch her words over the racket the baby made. “…gave me Percocet. You could flatten me with a bus right now and I wouldn’t feel it.”

Rachel forced a smile and tried to answer, but a lump of guilt sat in her throat like something hard and sharp-edged that refused to go down. She brushed a strand of damp hair off Michelle’s cheek.
It should have been me
.
This was meant for me.

Whispery words drifted from Michelle’s mouth. “Doctor wants me to stay overnight…That necessary?”

“Yes, it is. You have to be watched for a while.” The baby’s cries ceased abruptly. In the startling silence, Rachel lowered her voice. “Do you mind if I look at your leg?”

Michelle gave a little gust of a laugh and waved a hand. “Oh, go ahead. Everybody else has. I drew a crowd when they brought me in. Doctors, nurses, residents…I was a teaching moment, I guess.”

Michelle must have had a heck of a dose of the painkiller if she could laugh about being displayed as a teaching aid for strangers.

Rachel pulled down the sheet. Several inches of skin around the two fang punctures were as tautly swollen and shiny as a red balloon. The antivenom would prevent further damage, but it couldn’t reverse the destruction of tissue that had already taken place. Necrosis would follow the inflammation, and Michelle would always have an ugly scar on her leg. Rachel drew the sheet up again, folding it at Michelle’s waist.

A dark-haired nurse dressed in blue scrubs bustled into the curtained-off space, asking, “How are we doing here?” She brushed past Rachel to reach the IV bag. Her boyish figure and ponytail made her look about twelve, but she was all business. In seconds, she assessed the level of fluid, checked Michelle’s pulse, stripped away the sheet to check the wound, yanked it back up. “We’ll be moving you to a room soon, Michelle. Let us know if you need anything in the meantime.” With a nod at Rachel, she marched out.

Rachel rearranged the sheet, making it as neat as it had been before the nurse breezed in.

“I hate it when they call me by my first name,” Michelle whispered. “There ought to be a rule against it.”

Ah, the real Michelle surfaces.
“Kevin will be here in a few hours. I called him before I came over here.”

“Oh, no.” Michelle pushed away from the slanted bed, tried to sit up straight. “Why did you—I don’t want—”

“Stay still, please, Mish.” Rachel caught her by the shoulders and used gentle force to press her back against the pillows. “He’s very worried about you. He’d never forgive me if I hadn’t called him, and there’s no way he’s going to stay in Bethesda while you’re in the hospital. He wants to be here with you.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

A piercing scream from the baby a few feet away cut through the quiet.

Michelle winced at the noise, then all her defenses crumbled, her face puckered, and she seemed to become a child too, alone and frightened.

But she wasn’t alone.
You have me. You’ll always have your sister.
Trying to ignore the screeching infant, Rachel took Michelle’s hand and said, “Just rest now. That’s all you need to do.”

Michelle seemed not to hear her. “Mother thought Kevin was all wrong for me. You knew that, didn’t you?”

Rachel winced. “You’re stressing yourself when you should be trying to relax.”

“She was right.” Michelle’s fingers tightened on Rachel’s hand. “But she was blaming him, when it was
me
. I’m the one who’s all wrong. I shouldn’t have married him. He deserves a real wife, not somebody like me. I’m broken, Rachel. She ruined me.”

Would the woman they’d called Mother never let go of them? Would she always be reaching out from the grave to twist their minds and make them doubt their own worth? “You’ve had a shock and you’ve got a narcotic in your system. This isn’t the time to try self-analysis. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

Michelle seemed trapped in memories and regret and wasn’t listening to Rachel. “If she hadn’t died, I never would have married him. I couldn’t bear disappointing her. I was the one who always pleased her. I was the little princess, prim and proper, and you were the tomboy getting dirty in the woods and coming home with leaves stuck to your clothes and your hair a mess. You never could please her, no matter how hard you tried. And I liked being her favorite. I’m so sorry, Rachel. I wasn’t a good sister.”

“None of it was your fault, or mine. When you’re stronger, we’ll talk it all out.” Rachel knew how it felt to be drowning in a flood of memory and regret and guilt, and she wanted desperately to save her sister from that ordeal, but the past couldn’t be held at bay forever. At last it was bleeding through into the present, and its stain would never be erased.

The buzz of her cell phone made her jump. By the time she’d pulled it from her shirt pocket the brisk young nurse had appeared, scowling. “Not in the hospital,” she snapped. “Take it outside.”

Rachel was about to silence the ringtone and let the call go to voice mail when she saw the caller ID display.
Private caller.
The name and number had been blocked. She didn’t have to wonder who it was. She knew.

“I’ll be right back,” she told Michelle.

She rushed for the door to the outside, hoping voice mail wouldn’t take the call before she could. Shoving open the glass door, she punched the button to answer just in time.

“Hello, Perry,” she said.

No response. Unable to stand still, Rachel paced back and forth outside the ER door. “Nothing to say? You seemed to have a lot to say to my sister. But it’s really me you’re after, isn’t it? When are you going to stop hiding like a coward and come out in the open?”

The sound from the other end began as a soft chuckle and built to a laugh, louder and louder until Rachel had to hold the phone away from her ear. Then the connection went dead.

***

Tom peeled strips of fingerprint tape off the basement window and the area around it and pressed each one onto a white card. Rachel stood watching with folded arms and a grim expression.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “This guy hasn’t left a fingerprint behind yet. Or a footprint or a hair or anything else that might identify him.”

“Oh, yes, he has,” Rachel said. “That rattlesnake told me exactly who he is.”

Tom frowned at her. “What do you mean? What does the snake tell you except that he’s not afraid to handle deadly reptiles?”