A Welcome Grave

12

I found the photograph in the morning. It was a simple print on low-quality paper, slipped into the back pocket of my jeans. I hadn’t noticed it the previous night, but I’d been damn groggy then. Besides, the picture didn’t have much weight to it. Not until you looked at it.

Alex Jefferson’s head and upper torso filled the frame. His shirt was off, and there were two diagonal slashes across his chest, intersecting at the bottom of the picture in a way that made me think it was the top half of an X. The blood appeared more black than red in the photograph, and the wound had to be fresh, because the blood was just beginning to spill and coat his skin and the wiry gray hairs that covered his chest.

There was duct tape over his mouth, covering the lower half of his face, and above it his eyes bulged with pain and horror. His gray hair hung disheveled over his forehead, a sheen of sweat on his skin. Temperatures had taken a drop the week Jefferson died, cold nights and cool mornings, like the one when Targent and Daly showed up at my gym. I remembered that, and then I thought about the sort of pain that could make your body break out into a full sweat on a cold night.

For a long time I looked at his eyes. I’d swung on them that night in the country club parking lot. Connected with his nose, maybe, but when I felt my fist shatter bone and saw Jefferson’s legs crumple soft beneath him, it was his eyes I wanted to change. The smugness, the arrogance, that sense he had that the world was in his palm, everything perfectly in control. I wanted to remove it, and I failed. The splash of blood on the pavement didn’t disrupt his life anywhere near as much as mine. The next time I saw him, the world was still his, and his eyes showed it.

Not anymore. I looked at the photograph, and I saw that all the things I’d loathed were gone from his face. The world had risen up out of his palm, risen harsh and angry and violent, leaving a powerful man utterly powerless in the end. The world has that tendency.

Several minutes passed while I stood alone in the bedroom with the photograph in my hand. The police should have it—evidence, directly connected to the crime scene.

Evidence. The word had been running through my brain for all of my professional life. It was the focus of my work, what I pursued, what I needed. And now, what I feared. Any other day, with a photograph of a murder scene in my hand, I’d be reaching for the telephone to call the police. Today, I hesitated. Evidence.

I saw Targent leaning into the cab of my truck again, his face reflecting the dashboard lights, explaining the options he and Brewer had discussed. They were options that would send me to jail. Ludicrous options, sure. But now I held a photograph of a murdered man in my hand. It would be evidence, yes, but evidence against whom? I already knew that there would be no fingerprints on it, that the paper would be a generic brand sold across the country, that the image itself would offer nothing to point back to the killer’s identity. All that would have been cleared long before it was carefully folded and placed in my pocket. Jefferson’s killer was a pro.

There was my face, the bruises and damage left by my attacker. Would that be proof enough, though? Would Targent and Brewer, pinning me between two investigations hundreds of miles apart, believe my story?

I wasn’t going to give them the photograph. Even while I realized this, I marveled at it, the audacity and stupidity of such a decision. It was ridiculous. A crime, suppression of evidence. I chastised myself when I held the flame of a cigarette lighter to the photograph’s edge, continued even while I sprayed water at the charred remains to drive them down the sink drain in a swirling smear of wet ash, kept the lecture up until I was in my truck and headed for Karen’s. I expected the berating would scare me eventually, convince me I had made a mistake. Instead, what let the fear loose was the unshakable sense that I had not.

______

“Lincoln—your face!”

It wasn’t the nicest greeting I’d ever heard, but I suppose it had to be expected. I tried to smile at Karen as she stood there in the doorway, but didn’t put too much into it. Wouldn’t want that split lip to open up again and start dripping blood all over her furniture.

“Morning,” I said. “You mind if I come in?”

She stepped away from the door, her expression still horrified, and let me inside. This time, she didn’t take me into the living room but just stood in the entryway.

“What happened?”

There was a mirror just over her shoulder, a huge thing with a polished brass frame that probably weighed about eighty pounds. I caught a glimpse of myself in it, and it took effort not to grimace.

“One of your husband’s old friends decided to look me up,” I said. “He wished to talk. The talk, I was told, was the alternative to killing me.”

She lifted a hand to her mouth and then lowered it, slowly. “Who . . .”

“Didn’t give me a name, unfortunately.”

“Well, what did he say? What did he say about Alex?”

“That he killed him.”

Her head rocked back, and more of the rest of her went with it than should have, and then she blinked and steadied herself.

“You saw the person who killed him.”

I shook my head. “No. I saw the inside of the bag he tied over my head after he knocked me out and dragged me off into the woods to sit with a gun against the back of my head and answer questions.”

She seemed twenty years older than me, and I wasn’t feeling particularly young. Her face was pale, with dark circles under her eyes, and her expression was the weary look of someone who’s been lost for a very long time and has given up on ever making sense of the map.

“You didn’t see him.”

“No.”

“What did he sound like?” she said, and her voice had a hard edge.

The question surprised me, but I answered it without hesitation. “Like an evil son of a bitch, Karen.”

She didn’t say anything to that, just turned and wandered out into the living room as if I weren’t even in the house. After a pause, I followed her. She watched me as I sat down, but her eyes were unfocused, distant. They stayed that way while I told her the rest of it, providing as near to a word-for-word account as I could manage. I came pretty close, too. It hadn’t been the sort of incident that fades from memory overnight.

When I was finished, she was sitting quietly. She hadn’t interrupted once, hadn’t visibly reacted. This wasn’t the Karen I knew. She’d never been able to internalize her emotions well, and I remembered that while we were together I’d thought that quality would’ve made her a bad cop—unable to stay distanced and unable to bluff.

“Is there anyone who has been pressuring you for money? Any unsettled debts?”

She shook her head.

“No.” “No one’s made contact with you about the murder?”

“The only contact I’ve had came in the form of two police officers showing up at my door to tell me Alex was gone.”

“Your husband was looking into turning assets to cash just before he was killed. Looking to generate big money, and do it fast. Why?”

“The police told you that?”

“Not directly. But I think the money is important. Liquidating assets just before he was killed could suggest extortion.”

“I know. And some of it is missing.”

“What?”

“According to the police. I didn’t even know. But the police have looked, and they say there’s fifty thousand dollars missing.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all that they told me about.”

Fifty grand, gone. Jefferson trying to free up even more cash. A menacing presence back in his life, reminding him of old sins. Whatever Jefferson had done, it must have been serious. The fifty grand hadn’t made a dent in his debt, apparently. Neither had his life.

“We’ll start with a phone call,” I said.

“Who are you going to call?”

“Nobody. But this all began with a phone call, and we need to find out when it happened. You told me that the one night your husband talked to you about what was happening, he made a comment about getting a call at two in the morning.”

She nodded. “He said he knew it was either going to be a wrong number or it would change his life.”

“Right. And last night the bastard who attacked me made a similar comment. He said that Matt Jefferson called your husband for help and that he—the guy who attacked me—paid the price. He said he paid it for five years.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“I didn’t expect you would. But you should be able to get phone records. You’re the spouse, after all—I think they’ll have to honor that request. If we get those records, if we go back and find this phone call that came in the middle of the night five years ago and changed your husband’s life, we’ll have a starting point. A day on the calendar, if nothing else.”

“We won’t need to make a request.”

“No?”

“Alex almost never used the house phone, just his cell phone. He had some weird hangup with that.”

It was easier to trace and tap landline calls. To be concerned with something like that was the essence of the corrupt. I was interested but didn’t comment.

“We’ll still need the records, though.”

“The cell phones have detailed billing. He saved all the bills.”

“You can go back five years or more?”

“I’d be stunned if I can’t, but let me check.”

“Please do. It’s a place to start, and without the phone call, I don’t seem to have one.”

“Two days ago you didn’t want one,” she said. “Two days ago you wanted to get far, far away from it all.”

“Uh-huh. Then I changed my mind. Credit for that goes to the guy who killed your husband, though.”

She gazed at me through those flat eyes she’d seemingly developed overnight. “Well, I hope he gets all the credit that’s due to him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the goal.”