If Looks Could Kill (25 page)

"Then what the hell are you talking about?"

Slowly she straightened and faced Mac, the vivid images and almost-forgotten instincts fading just enough to let her through. "It didn't occur to me to mention
Family Business.
It isn't due to come out until November."

That brought him right to attention. "What?"

She made a vague motion, suddenly too spent to offer more. "It's still in the editing process in New York. I mean, how could anybody copy it if it isn't even out yet?"

Mac looked toward the front of the station, to where the coroner's car had just pulled up alongside the latest Cootermobile. "They could if they'd seen it in New York."

Chris's reaction was immediate. "No."

When he turned back to her, his expression was implacable as Judgment. "We're going to need to go over that list of people," he said. "Especially the ones you work with who might know about the book. We're going to have to check them."

"It's not them," she insisted desperately, terrified for them, for herself. "It can't be."

"And everybody here," he mused, almost to himself, "who could have access to your house."

When Chris followed his gaze this time, she saw Weird Allen standing right at the front of the crowd, his usually blank features avid.

He's been following me, she almost said. Even opened her mouth to do it. The words died stillborn. Suddenly Chris wasn't sure that that shadow under the tree in Mary Willoughby's yard had really been there after all.

She looked hard at him shouldering his way clear of the rest of the crowd, hands in work pants' pockets, his shirt just a little grimy, his hair just a little greasy, close-set eyes the color of old urine. A vague sense of vulgarity followed him like a distasteful smell.

Chris wanted it to be him. She wanted to be able to give the phantom a name. A recognizable form that could be supervised and cautioned and, if necessary, threatened. She couldn't quite do it, and the world shifted just a little more.

"Chief?"

They both turned to greet Tom as he walked over, stripping off gloves and wiping the sheen of perspiration from his upper lip with his forearm. "We rolled him a little. Easy answer. Small-caliber gunshot wound to the chest. Two of them. He looked pissed."

"How long?"

Tom shrugged, his posture still betraying the effort of facing that room. "Can't say right now. It's been cool, so longer. When did you let him out of jail?"

"Five days ago."

Tom nodded. "I'd guess he had another day after that. I'll bet nobody's seen him for a while."

Mac took a look at the assembled Cooters. "Looks like I get to take a trip down the yellow brick road."

"Ding dong. You want me for anything else?"

That brought his attention right back. "Yeah, will you take Chris home for me?"

Tom's answering grin was at once sympathetic and faintly superior, the kind those in the loop gave to greenhorns. "Reality a lot smellier than fiction, Chris?"

Chris launched herself away from the wall and hoped her wobbly legs would carry the day. "I'm not sure anymore, Tom," was all she said.

She liked Tom a whole lot. Except now. Maybe she could see her way to decorating the seat of his new Cadillac for that one.

"Think Sue'd mind having her at your house?" Mac asked.

Chris brought her head up. "Think Chris might have an opinion about it?"

She almost got a grudging grin out of him. "Just until I check out your house."

"I can check my house out myself. Thanks, Mac, but I hate having someone holding my hand when I barf."

Tom nodded commiseration. "And Sue is the champion hand-holder."

"Humor me, then," Mac suggested in a voice that implied it wasn't a suggestion at all. "Just until I get some calls made... and talk to a few people. I'll meet you at the Clarksons' as soon as I'm finished here."

It took every ounce of willpower in her, but she straightened to her full height, which put her just a few inches shy of Mac's. Wiping her hands on her pants, Chris drew the shakiest breath she'd ever managed and faced him down. "No."

The good chief of police had a look on his face that betrayed the fact that very few people had ever gotten away with saying that word to him in his professional capacity. "I guess I didn't make myself clear. Your friend has hit town. That means that you're in some danger yourself."

"You made yourself perfectly clear," Chris obliged, her tones just as steely. "And although I disagree with you, I appreciate the concern. But I'm either going to my house, or I'm staying right here."

"Here?" This time he sounded as if she were insinuating herself into a locker room of unclad athletes.

Chris glared at him. "My books," she reminded him. "My killer. I might be able to help."

"In the condition you're in?"

That damn near cleared Chris's head completely. "In the
what
I'm in?"

"I'm sure I have better things to do," Tom demurred. "I'll be at home if he manages to change your mind, Chris."

"He won't."

"He will," Mac echoed decisively.

"Have I thrown up?" she demanded, not even noticing Tom's sad headshaking as he walked to his car. She directed her attention instead to where JayCee was rather spectacularly decorating the parking lot with the blue plate special of the day. "Have I contaminated the scene?"

"That's not the point."

She didn't know what else to do. What else to say. So Chris told him the truth. "It's my fault, Mac. At least let me do something to make up for it."

Chris could see her words' impact on him. Saw the instinctive denial, the classic soothing responses take shape. He never got a chance to make use of them. They'd run out of time with their crime scene.

"Chief MacNamara?"

Mac hesitated, obviously taken aback by Chris's words, frustrated at the intrusion. Chris thought it couldn't have been better timed. She didn't want commiseration or consideration. She wanted expiation, and she knew the only way to do it.

Finally Mac spun on his heel. "Yes, sir."

Sam Milligan followed much the same procedure Tom had as he approached. A neat, gray-haired businessman with well-connected poker-playing pals, Sam had been coroner long enough to know where most of the bodies, both corporal and figurative, were buried. "Body's goin' over to Puckett General. Tom'll do the autopsy tonight. I'd say that unless that boy in there shot himself twice in the chest, threw away the gun, and then dragged himself in there to die, we have a homicide on our hands. You got any problem with that'"

"Other than wishing he'd done it in Iron County? No."

Sam smiled, a friendly, unpretentious smile, and nodded to Chris. "Liked your last book. When's the next one comin' out?"

"Seems it already has," Mac said. He motioned toward the building. "Looks like we might have a copycat murder on-our hands."

Sam took a glance back over his shoulder to where the crowd was getting restless and JayCee was trying to reassert his authority after providing a moment of entertainment, and then looked back with a whistle. "Well, what do you know?"

* * *

She ended up staying. Through the measurements and the pictures, the struggle to get the body into the bag without exploding, and the interrogation of the other Cooters on the scene. She rode along when they all caravaned up the road to inform Cooter's wife and two daughters, one of whom was grossly pregnant at fifteen with, no doubt, another Cooter.

The trailer that had housed Cooter and the missus, the two girls, and two pasty, whey-faced toddlers, was rusted and bastardized bits and pieces of other trailers, of trucks and sheds added on for space, plastic over the windows, and every old appliance that had ever died littering the yard like ancient elephant bones.

Chris saw the impact of Cooter's death strike the women, not the way she'd imagined, with cries of freedom, but with sullen silences, as if this were just another misery to be balanced on top of all the other miseries in their lives.

You can't bring me anything new, Chris could almost hear his wife say, even though her eyes were still puffy and discolored from where Cooter had evidently made good his promise to beat her for calling the police the night of the fight. You can't hurt me anymore. The reason Chris had left social work was that she understood why freedom was just as terrifying as prison.

Chris told Mac where the murder site would be. John directed them from the information he'd received, back through the brambles and blackberry bushes and early poison ivy. They found the bloodstain there at the edge of the new marijuana patch. The faint traces of drag marks back to the dirt road, where Chris supposed the tire tracks had been erased by the rain. Mac and John conferred and measured and photographed, and Chris watched in silence.

And while she watched, something else managed to worm its way through the miasma of Cooter's murder. Something only Chris seemed to notice.

It wasn't the Cooters or the Cooters' women. It wasn't her book or the mystery murderer. It was Mac.

Mac, who had been completely at ease at a grisly murder scene, who had handled the various Cooters with tact and patience, who had delegated all the various tasks and quietly exerted his own authority when the sheriff had shown up to take his share of the action.

He'd been the first to step from his car when they'd reached the trailer. As Chris had climbed out, she'd seen him settle his navy blue cap on his head, wincing a little and giving a passing touch to the scar at his temple.

And then he'd waited.

Waited for the boys to untangle themselves from their vehicles and fight off the six or so mongrels that bounded forward at their approach. Waited, his hands with that funny tremor, even hooked to his belt, as the Cooters had stepped up the iron grate steps, pulled the door open, and bent a little to step inside.

And standing there, at the other side of the police cruiser, silent and watchful, Chris had seen his hand instinctively go for his gun when the door had opened. She'd seen him sweat.

All the time they searched for the weapon they knew they wouldn't find, while they measured distance and took photos and nudged the freshly turned earth for spent casings, Chris saw the police chief struggle to maintain his composure. She thought of that scar, of that tremor, of the short time he'd been in town, and she wondered.

* * *

They never did catch up to Lawson. By the time Mac finally dropped Chris off, they'd collected the autopsy results, a ,38-caliber bullet, evidence bags with clothing and nail scrapings and hair samples to be held for the lab in Cape Girardeau. They had no idea at all, though, who had managed to shoot Cooter Taylor point-blank in the chest and then drop him off at the edge of town without anyone noticing.

The sun had already set by the time Mac pulled the cruiser up in front of Chris's house. The streetlights were on, and down toward the high school, cars were wheeling in and out of Main Street in a never-ending round of cruising the drag. It was Saturday night, and the teens were enjoying age-old mating rituals. The only ritual Chris was enjoying was the anticipation of her high, white, empty walls. Like a cloister away from the real world.

Chris took a considering look at her rumpled, limp T-shirt with its gaudy stripes. Chris Jackson, cloistered nun. That'd be one for the books.

She saw the note when she stepped up to unlock the door. Taped with a Band-Aid, since Sue was probably out of tape, it read: "I hear you don't like my bathroom. I'm insulted. Stop by for lasagna." No signature necessary. It was classic Sue Clarkson, Empathy Through Pragmatism. It worked. For the first time all day, Chris felt better. Well, since she wasn't going to get over to the Clarksons' tonight, she knew Sue would be over in the morning. Chris would just make some coffee cake for them both.

Better than trying to sleep after the day she'd had.

"What's this?"

Mac had just stepped up beside her when he came to a shuddering halt like a bomb defuser with a trip wire in sight. His attention had been snagged by something on her step. Chris took her own look and smiled.

"It's sweet," she insisted, and bent to pick up the single pink sweetheart rose that lay across her doorstep. "It's from Victor."

"And Lester!" came a high, reedy voice in the night.

Chris fought a chuckle as she straightened, the rose in her hand. "Thank you, you two. It's beautiful!"

Again the voice through an open second-story window, this time deeper, more recognizable. "You're welcome, li'l darlin'."

Mac was not in the least amused. "Does he do this all the time?" he asked.

Chris ignored his scowl as she unlocked her front door. "What's the matter? Don't any of your friends leave you little presents?"

Instead of answering, he reached around for his gun. "Let me go in first."

Chris stopped dead in her tracks, her hand already on the doorknob. She hadn't really thought about it. Somebody invading her house. Threatening her. She turned to find that Mac was deadly serious, and pulled her hand back to wait.

Mac took her place. Reached out for the door, gun in hand, expression steely. Tensed, silent. Sweating. Hesitating, there on the threshold before pushing the door open onto the darkness.