Last Call (8 page)

Frank tips her chair again, pleased as a kid with a new toy. A good profiler needs to be flexible. Frank learned that during her sabbatical at Quantico. Getting fixed on a single track usually derails a profiling effort. Rigidity makes it impossible to tweak and rearrange data. Frank’s been profiling a single perp. Now she has to switch tracks and look for a couple. She drums the chair’s arm with the pencil.

“No problema,”
she tells the ceiling. The case is six years old and Frank has nothing but time. Amused at her folly, she smiles. Of course there is no one to see it.

Gail has to run downtown and she calls Frank to meet her for lunch.

Frank lies, “I’m kind of tied up, but thanks for asking.”

“Okay. I’ll see you tonight then. Want me to get dinner?”

“Actually, I’m going to have dinner with Trace and the kids.”

“Oh.”

Gail’s disappointment is obvious in that one, small word. For the merest second, Frank feels like a real shit. Then she feels nothing.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you when you get here.”

“Yeah. Don’t wait up. I’ll slip in next to you.”

Frank is glad to hang up. Gail’s voice used to be enough to soothe the cold, dark places inside of Frank, but lately not even Gail’s touch can penetrate those lonely hollows. She saw a stone quarry once, in upstate New York. It was winter. She was on a school field trip. The quarry was fenced off and abandoned. Steep, gray pits had been left to fill with snow. Dark pines brooded above the holes. The bloodless sky matched the cold rock. Her classmates went quiet, hushed by the stillness of wind on stone. Frank wonders if a surgeon were to cut her open, would he find just rock and snow?

Irritated, Frank shakes away the image. She has things to do before dinner. When she arrives at Noah’s, Tracey is overjoyed.

Frank says, “You’ve lost weight, mama.”

“Yeah. One of the advantages of grief,” Tracey replies, not without rancor. Frank plays Munch’s Oddysee with the younger kids while Tracey puts dinner out. When she goes upstairs to get Leslie, she returns without her.

“Not eating?” Frank asks. Tracey shakes her head with a helplessness that breaks Frank’s heart. She wrestles with her cowardice before asking, “Can I go talk to her?”

“What are you gonna say?”

Markie sits at the table playing with army men and Jamie meticulously lays out napkins.

“That I know how it feels.”

Memory surfaces in Tracey’s eyes. She nods and Frank slips up the stairs.

“Yeah?” Leslie says to the knock on her door.

“Hey. Not hungry?”

Leslie wags her head and Frank balances next to her on the edge of the bed. Noah’s oldest daughter is all giraffe legs and stick arms, skinny like her dad. She’ll bust hearts someday and Frank hates that Noah won’t be there to fret over her first date or give his daughter away when she marries. She hates this whole fucked-up situation and cuts straight to the point.

“You miss your dad pretty bad?” Leslie shrugs. She doesn’t look up from the book in her lap, so Frank admits, “I do. He was my best friend.”

The admission gets her nowhere. But for Noah’s sake Frank tries another tack. She pulls in a deep, silent breath, sounding before she dives into the benthic mess of emotion.

“I know how you feel, Les. When I was about your age, maybe a little younger, more like Jamie’s age, my dad died, too. It was real quick. One minute he was there and the next he was gone. I felt like the whole world had ended. I thought I was gonna die too. I wanted to.”

Leslie’s hair hangs over her face. Frank tucks a curtain of it behind a rather large ear. Les is a beauty but she got her daddy’s ears. This vestige of Noah is sharp and wickedly painful, but Frank pushes through her discomfort. She will see this through, for Leslie and for Noah.

“You ever feel like that?”

The head bobs.

“Yeah. You will for a while. It feels bad for a long time. But then one day, and you don’t know which day it’ll be, you’ll wake up and you’ll forget to feel bad. You’ll remember later in the day, and you’ll feel bad, but then it’ll go away again. The hurt gets softer and softer.”

Leslie offers no indication she’s heard.

Frank asks, “Remember when you broke your ankle, how bad it hurt?”

“Yeah.”

“Does it hurt today?”

“No.”

“But it hurt for a while after you broke it, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what this is like. I know it sucks big-time, but I promise it’ll get better someday.”

A droplet falls onto the open book and Leslie whispers, “I want someday to be today.”

Taking Leslie’s hand, Frank whispers back, “I know. But it can’t be. It’s impossible. Like having your ankle fixed right away. It took time. This will too. But it
will
get better. I promise.”

Frank wipes Leslie’s cheeks with her thumbs and Leslie blurts, “I want him back.”

“I know, Les. Me too. We all do. But we can’t have him back. Now it’s just you and Markie and Jamie and your mom. And you gotta love each other even more to fill that empty space your dad left.”

“Nothing can fill that.” She gulps.

Frank cradles the little chin between both her hands. She speaks the words without thinking them, and will wonder later where they came from. “Love will. You gotta trust me on this. I know it doesn’t seem like it right now, but if you love each other enough, that hole’s going to fill up someday. It may not fill completely up. No one can ever replace your dad, but I promise it won’t hurt quite this bad.” Looking into the pools of hurt that are Leslie’s young eyes, Frank knows she can’t stay much longer. “Do you trust me?”

Leslie nods.

“Okay. Come on downstairs. Your family misses you. Your mom needs her oldest girl and Markie and Jamie need their big sister.”

Leslie lets Frank lead her downstairs. While Tracey dishes spaghetti at the table Frank disappears into the kitchen. She opens another bottle of wine, chugging an entire glass before returning to the dining room. Tracey smiles her thanks as Frank realizes the only empty chair is Noah’s. She fills Tracey’s glass, then her own.

“Do you want me to sit there?”

Tracey waves her toward it. Mark and Leslie stare and Jamie says, “It’s okay.”

“Okay with you, Les?”

“No one else is there.” She pouts.

“Right,” Frank agrees.

The talk during dinner is quiet but easy. Frank marvels how Trace and the kids neither avoid Noah nor dwell on him. Later, Frank does the dishes while Tracey tucks the kids in bed. The two bottles of wine that Frank brought are empty. She opens a third soldier that Tracey produced, a cheap but serviceable Cab. Finished in the kitchen, she waits for Tracey at the table. She swirls the wine in her glass, watching it run down the sides. Frank is thinking this is more entertaining than a lava lamp when Tracey lays a hand on her shoulder and asks, “Where’s mine?”

Frank smiles and retrieves a glass, appreciating that Tracey can match her drink for drink. “Everyone settled in?”

Tracey nods. “What did you say to Les?”

“Not much. Just told her about my dad.”

“What happen—”

Frank raises a hand, warning, “Don’t even go there. I just told her it was going to be bad for a while, then it’ll get better.” Steering the conversation, Frank notes, “I was watching you at dinner. You’re great with the kids. You’re a great mom. Noah loved that about you.”

Tracey’s head falls, and her voice wobbles as she insists, “I don’t know how great I am. I feel like I use the kids to keep from thinking about him. But nighttime’s the worst. God! When dinner’s done, baths are done, they’re asleep. That’s the worst. When it’s just me. And when I wake up and I’ve forgotten, and then it all comes crashing back in, just the horrible, awful loneliness of it over and over again, brand new each time. That’s the worst and I wonder how I can possibly get out of bed. But then the kids wake up and they’re hungry, so I get up, and I get dressed and dress them, and we eat and get out the door and life goes on. One goddamn meal and one goddamn minute at a time.”

Tracey swipes her tears with her palm. She gets up and clatters around the kitchen for a few minutes. She returns with a bowl of cherries.

“Noah hated cherries,” she says with a pale grin.

“In a pie, he’d have said, and wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Tracey waves. “He was all talk.”

The joking disappears and Tracey leans closer to Frank.

“Wasn’t he? Did he ever cheat on me? I know cops can get laid like that—” She snaps her fingers. “Did he ever—”

“Absolutely not.” Frank is shaking her head. “He wouldn’t have. He
couldn’t
have, Trace. He loved you. Loved the kids too much. The guilt would’ve killed him.” Tracey sits back, and Frank throws in, “Besides. You were a good wife. He didn’t have any reason to go elsewhere.”

“I hope so. He was a good husband.”

They are quiet, fiddling with the cherries.

At length Tracey says, “Did I ever tell you I can tie a cherry stem with my tongue?”

“Couple times. I ever show you a lesbian with a hard-on?”

Tracey bulges her cheek out with her tongue and Frank grins.

“I was so jealous of you when we were first married. He had
such
a crush on you.”

“Yeah.”

Noah had always been respectful with his ardor and Frank had gracefully ignored it. His passion eventually died for lack of fuel and what took its place was their friendship. Sitting here next to his wife, it occurs to Frank that Noah
did
have an affair. With her. Not a conventional one, surely, but an affair that endured all these years nonetheless. Tracey is watching her, and Frank knows she’s seen the naked thought when she asks, “Is there something I should know about that?”

“No. Never anything like that. You know that.”

Frank envies Tracey and Leslie their tears. She feels them churning inside her and wants to blurt how much Noah loved her and how much she loved him. How she took for granted that he’d always be there. Always interfering, always telling Frank what to do. Saying what she couldn’t. And still can’t.

Frank clamps her teeth together, but a quaver still escapes when she reminds Tracey, “It’s late. We’ve gotta work tomorrow.” She drains her glass and stands.

Tracey stands with her, taking Frank into a hug. “You love him as much as I do.”

The tears make a final stand against their stony prison walls, but Frank is prepared, quelling the surge before it can rally. “Maybe.” She shrugs. “Different, but maybe.”

She kisses Tracey good-bye. It will be a long time before she comes back.

The dumpsite hasn’t changed. A useless, handwritten sign warns, NO GARBAGE. Crude paths transect the lot. Frank looks at a crime scene photo from the same angle it was taken. There’s no path in the picture.

Frank steps into the cored ruin, checking it against a couple of pictures. It’s gone now, but there was a mattress about ten feet from where the bodies were found. Frank thinks the perp dumped the kids on the ground, but that the woman took the time to arrange them properly. She’d have felt remorse, but he would have been trying to hustle her out. She wasn’t familiar enough with the site to have him at least put the kids on the mattress. A guy like that wouldn’t be secure enough to leave his wife alone for very long. They probably did everything together, so Frank assumes he’s equally unfamiliar with what’s behind the improvised walls. They probably know the dumpsite in passing but never stepped foot in it until they left the kids there. This reinforces Frank’s suspicion that her perps live in the neighborhood and lead relatively respectable lives. They aren’t junkies or loonies crawling around in abandoned buildings.

Frank wanders the lot in a grid. She picks her way around broken bottles and chunks of concrete. Dried weeds brush against her legs. Their seeds hitchhike on her socks and trousers. She wonders if there are ticks. Gail would know. She’d probably laugh at Frank’s squeamishness, and for an instant Frank regrets the distance she’s put between them.

Having walked the entire lot, she surveys it from different angles. The perp would have been vulnerable from the north where the lot faces the street, and from the house on the west overlooking the site. High fences on the east and south block the view. Frank knows that the house directly across the street was vacant when the Pryce kids were dumped. Not a bad gamble to dump two bodies here. Especially in a part of the city where no one minds anyone else’s business, and if they do, they don’t tell.

But why not farther away? Frank wonders. The perps were obviously mobile enough to get the kids here, so why not keep going and hide them really well? Organized offenders usually make some attempt to hide the bodies. The Pryce attempt was half-assed, leading again to the idea of two perps. Frank thinks the woman might have pleaded to leave the children close to home, in a place where they’d be found quickly. The thought of the children rotting and being eaten by animals might have been so disturbing that for once she argued with her man. He might have been distracted enough to cave. He would have been anxious to get rid of the bodies. If the abduction was as spontaneous as it seemed, he wouldn’t have planned out a disposal site. The lot probably put a comfortable enough distance from where they lived, or from wherever they abducted the kids, while concealing the bodies in the rubble bought them time to clean up.

She is mindful as she walks that one of Ladeenia’s shoes was found next to a sprung sofa. It appeared that the shoe had snagged off her foot in passing. Either the killer hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. Probably the latter as he was no doubt in a hurry and what evidence would there be in a shoe? But it tells Frank her perp is tall enough to carry Ladeenia so that her foot dangled at the height of the couch. It’s also in the back of her mind that Ladeenia’s panties were never found. Frank has thought about this.

Power-assertive rapists, as she has tentatively classified her perp, don’t usually take trophies, but it’s possible this is one of the ways her perp doesn’t completely fit the profile. Frank’s hope is that whoever killed Ladeenia kept her underwear. It’s a long shot, she knows, and she mumbles, “If wishes were horses …”