If Looks Could Kill (16 page)

For a moment the two of them stood there in the dappled sunlight, the breeze picking at their hair, the Milton kids skipping across the small yard on their way home from school.

Finally Shelly dipped her head, hands in jacket pockets, hair swinging forward to mask the tears Chris knew were swelling in those woman-child eyes that were going to get her into such trouble some day.

"I'm flunking," she admitted, not looking up, her voice as tight as dried leather.

It was Chris's turn to shove her hands into pockets. She took a long, considering look at the solid, white, square expanse of her house that could hold such silence inside. She thought of the space that had been lost there this afternoon, of the clean, empty, solitary lines, her own gladioli bought to mask the stench of misery. She sighed.

Chris wasn't good at this. Another one of her secrets. She'd been trained to atone, not to care. No matter how much she wanted to, she wasn't familiar enough with getting close to people to ever be comfortable with it. She knew all the catchphrases and platitudes that were supposed to work in a situation like this, but she tended to trip over them like a blind man on barbed wire.

She wanted to help. She knew just what the judge was going to do when he found out about Shelly's grades. She also knew that Shelly was dead serious about her threat, and she couldn't say she blamed her. Chris knew just how Shelly felt. But she also knew just what she was asking for.

The chief and the detective were supposed to meet her back at the city hall at one. They were going to have to wait. Chris had other problems to sort out first, and they weren't going to be much easier.

Briefly closing her eyes, Chris did her best to complete her most important mental exercise. Slamming one door, opening another, keeping everything in its place.

Only suddenly there were a couple of doors that were getting difficult to close.

"Let's take a walk," she suggested, turning away from the house.

It took Shelly a moment to follow, but she did, the two of them looking uncannily alike, even though they bore no physical resemblance as they headed down the sidewalk toward city hall.

"I've got to get out of here," Shelly insisted, the hush of her voice betraying the real need no one would ever expect from her.

Chris automatically shook her head. "No," she said. "You don't. We'll figure something else out, if you want, but you're not leaving Pyrite."

"Why?" Shelly demanded. "So the judge can break my other arm?"

"Chris Jackson, have you found Jesus yet?"

Chris didn't even bother to look over. "It wasn't my day to watch him, Harlan."

That actually got a surprised giggle out of Shelly. "Chris, that's terrible."

Chris smiled smugly at the sound of sputtering protest from the pressboard-and-stained-plexiglass doorway of the Old Tyme Faith in Jesus Church. "Oh, what would Harlan have left to do if I actually joined the fold and became a good Christian?"

"How do you keep fighting him?"

"Easy," she admitted with that same sly smile. "Just say no."

They'd slowed, just shy of the closed Phillips 66 station. Weeds and trash littered the lot, and the boarded-up windows sported the latest in high school graffiti. Bold obscenities that had to be expressed in the anonymity of darkness.

Shelly examined her shoes as she walked, her voice suddenly smaller. "Maybe I could just stay with you for the rest of the year."

Chris didn't even have to think about that. "No, honey, you can't."

Shelly stopped again, the distress on her face like an open wound. She'd obviously been waiting for that option to be proposed all along.

Chris could have kicked herself. She'd seen this one coming a mile away. She'd half been planning for it, figuring that hers was the kind of refuge Shelly would take to. Two weeks ago she would have suggested it herself. Two weeks ago, the dreams hadn't returned.

There simply wasn't any way she could have a second person in her house all the time. The only way she prevented the nightmares was not to sleep at all, and she simply couldn't do that for an indefinite period of time, especially while she was fighting a shadow that committed murder. She couldn't stay up, and she couldn't expose her nightmares to anyone else. Especially Shelly.

"Don't you want me?" the girl asked.

Chris fought against a sigh of frustration. She didn't need to be backed into a corner from two separate directions at once.

"Well, afternoon, ladies," a new, booming voice interrupted. "How are you today?"

Both of them turned to greet Ray Sullins, the town mayor and real-estate maven. Fair, fat, and forty, he had the backbone of an oil slick and played smalltown politics like a first-chair violinist. Ray, word had it, was tickled to death the town might have a murder attached to it. Nothing sold like sensation.

"Hi there, Ray," Chris greeted him, her hand on Shelly's elbow as they deliberately kept walking by. Neither of them needed to get into a session with Ray.

"Mr. Mayor," Shelly echoed, that little grin flickering at the corners of her mouth again as she let Chris shepherd her past.

"Saw that little policewoman from up St. Louis way," Ray announced loudly enough that anybody in the laundromat across the street could have heard him. "Real dynamo, isn't she?"

Chris just nodded. "That's where we're headed now."

"Well, you need anything, you let me know. Can't have our very own author facing all this alone."

Chris almost laughed. If it were up to Ray, she'd be a mention in the town's yearly calendar under civic improvements. Her picture right there under the new drive-in window at the Pizza Hut. If Chris hadn't had so many friends in town who voted, he would have been on the phone to the
Enquirer
four days ago.

"You didn't answer me," Shelly insisted when they'd made it out of earshot.

"That's right," Chris countered, letting go of the girl now that they were in the clear. "I figured you didn't want your dad's poker partner to know."

"Well?"

She was doing her best not to be stopped by the other townspeople who nodded in passing. "It's not you, Shelly," she insisted. "Please believe me. It's me."

"Then what am I going to do? I'm not going back."

Chris pulled out a smile she hoped looked a lot heartier than she felt and turned Shelly back in the direction of city hall. "I have an appointment with the chief," she said. "I thought we'd talk to Sue while we're there."

"The chief." Shelly immediately sighed with all the melodrama of a teenage girl. "Maybe he'd like to have me over."

* * *

Lately, his dreams had begun to seem more real than his life. Vivid dreams, the colors supersaturated so that the sky looked like old stained glass and the grass shuddering tides of peridots. Hot, horrific dreams starring his wife and her lover, clenched together in that winking, gleaming grass.

In his dreams, he crept up through the blades of grass to see the heave of their bodies, to smell the chlorine-sharp stench of sex.

He grew in his dreams, Alice in his wonderland. The genie let loose from the bottle. The terrible swift sword of retribution....

"Quite a book, isn't it?"

Mac looked up from his copy of
Too Late the Hero
to find Luella Simpson poised in front of him, weight on one hip, order pad in one hand, coffee pot in the other. The skinny waitress with dyed black hair and denim and spandex wardrobe used the pot to point at the book in his hands.

"Not really lunchtime reading, ya ask me," she continued with a grimace that threatened to crack the top two layers of makeup on her face. "Too... oogie."

Mac set the book down on the chipped Formica table at his booth. Before him lay the remains of the blue plate special, a fan of catfish bones and a little pool of catsup still holding onto a lone french fry. Luella was busy topping off the cooling coffee in his mug.

"You didn't like it?" he asked, still trying to decide exactly how he felt about C. J. Turner's work.

Luella brightened immediately. "Oh, sure. Missed my bowling league night and two dates to finish it. Same as the others. Makes you wonder, though, how a girl who grew up in a convent school could come up with some of that stuff."

"Convent school?" Mac closed the book over a marker, his attention completely on the black-haired waitress. "I thought she was raised in foster homes."

"She was. Orphaned at four, from what she said. When she was livin' in Los Angeles, though, the family who had her had some money, sent her to one of these live-in places."

"California? I thought she was raised in the Midwest."

This time he got a shake of the head. "Nah. She moved here for college, what she said. Doesn't have a lot of nice things to say for the coast."

Mac wasn't sure why Luella's story niggled at him. Not because he thought he knew so much about Chris Jackson. All he knew so far was that she wrote books that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck, lived in a place that looked like a garage sale for eccentrics, and slept even less than he did. And that her psychic professor saw things in her dreams that kept her awake, too.

Mac believed in intuition. He had it. He'd earned it, soaking up thousands of miles of street time, watching even more people: smart people, dumb people, guilty and innocent people, on the run or standing at a quivering stop at the edge of a police .38. Mac knew people, and he just didn't know how to read Chris Jackson.

She was a woman of contrasts. Intensely private, but with a finger in every pie in town. Able to alienate the local fundamentalists enough that their pastor had vowed holy vengeance more than once about some slight or another, but still able to convince them to join the town in keeping her secret. Sharp as a narc on undercover, and as fey as a creature from the old Irish tales his mother had fed him with his bedtime snacks.

"Thought that lady detective was here already," Luella said, picking up Mac's empty plate.

Mac checked his watch. He'd seen Chris whip around the corner on that outlandish vintage Triumph of hers about five minutes ago, so they should be about ready to dive back into those files. He found himself looking forward to it more than anything since he'd come to in the Neurosurgical ICU at Michael Reese.

"She's getting a room over at Harmonia Switzer's," he said.

The perfectly painted black arc of one of Luella's eyebrows raised several notches. "Instead of the Sleep Well?"

"She didn't want to stay over by the highway. Hates the noise."

"Wait'll she gets a load of Harmonia's organ music."

Mac fought a grin. "No, I think it's gonna be the monkey that'll drive her out."

Luella laughed out loud as she sashayed back to the counter, and Mac was left to get his things together. He couldn't believe it. He was conspiring just like the rest of the town, punishing the person who didn't belong. And another cop, at that. He should know better. It didn't make him like Elise Lawson any more.

If it were up to him, he'd grab all the records she'd brought and send her off on a wild goose chase while he worked the case himself. He could smell something really bizarre in this one. Something hot, like the time he'd managed to nail down a murder-one rap on a guy who'd killed three separate women to make it look like a serial killer had chopped up his wife. There were layers to this, currents that he hadn't even tested yet.

He wanted to get Chris Jackson back on those pictures, wanted to spend more time on those notes she'd gotten, and dig into the reasons she wrote her books. He had his own theories after reading the first three, but he wanted to hear it from her. Somehow that figured into why three people had been killed in her name. He wanted to sit down and do a real interrogation of Chris Jackson and find out just how much of the truth she'd told him.

The first thing you learned in the real world was that everybody lies. Big lies, little lies, evasions of the truth, half-truths. When you're questioning five people about a murder, every one of them will lie about something. It's just a matter of finding out what they're lying about, and who's telling the smallest lies.

Everybody lies. Mac wanted to know what Chris Jackson's lies were.

He wanted answers. Suspects. A case.

He wanted to belong again.

God, he missed Chicago. Getting to his feet, he pulled out his pack of cigarettes and lit one up as he left. He knew his hands were shaking again, but it didn't matter.

* * *

"Just how long have you had a motorcycle?"

Chris reached the doorway into Mac's office and turned to walk the other way. "Since I was about eighteen." She flashed Mac an irreverent grin where he sat tilted back in his chair. "I don't like seatbelts."

She wondered why they couldn't do this out by the courthouse under the trees. Maybe along the Watson trail up in the mountains. The rooms in the city hall were just too close, especially the small corner reserved for the police. Since the dispatcher was over at the sheriffs office, the only space they needed was for a common room with all the latest in official bulletins, county and city ordinances, and lascivious calendars, and the chief's little office.