Playing Dead

CHAPTER 26

I heard a commotion outside the door, but it seemed miles away from the fantasyland where I’d retreated with a giant and a dwarf.

Hudson snapped me right back.

He stood at the door to the interview room, radiating his own kind of nuclear energy, instantly raising my temperature ten degrees. The man kept showing up no matter what. Not letting go.

“What do you think you’re doing, Tommie?” Controlled rage. The tip-top of Hudson’s temper scale.

Sheriff Woolsey surprised me by rising with the quick grace of an old movie cowboy, his hand resting on the.45 in his holster. “Ma’am, do you want me to draw?” he asked politely.

“No. No! I know him. He’s a friend. It’s OK.” The sheriff didn’t move, his eyes traveling to the bulge at Hudson’s waist.

“We’re in a relationship,” Hudson said, tossing over his security firm’s card.

“Who says?” I spit at him, while inside I hoped that he meant it.

“Oh.” Sheriff Joe Bob relaxed, as if that explained everything, sitting back down and propping his boots up on the table. “Go right to it.”

“We’re leaving.” Hudson gestured for me to get up.

Uh, have you met me before?

“How did you find me?” I asked, not moving, trying to keep my voice level. Then, grudgingly, “I was planning to check in with you again shortly.”

“Well, let’s see,” he said. “You rented a car under your real name with your MasterCard. The car had a GPS device in the trunk. I have enough special abilities to charm minimum-wage rental car agents.” His voice grew more sarcastic, which I didn’t think was possible. “Oh, yeah, and Lyle called and told me where you were. My ten-year-old nephew could have found you, Tommie.”

Hudson was always good with reality checks. I’d been playing a dangerous game on this trip, fooling myself. Thinking I’d left my hunters behind.

Before I could respond, Sheriff Woolsey flipped his chair around and sat it down hard inches from me, probably one of his tried-and-true witness intimidation techniques. One move closer and I’d get poked by the toothpick getting a workout in his mouth. His breath smelled like Skoal and bitter coffee.

“She can’t leave yet. If I’m not mistaken, she recognized these boys.” He tapped the paper in front of me.

It wasn’t like I’d forgotten. Dear God.

“Do you know these men?”

With the sheet in my hand, I moved over to the light by the window, buying a little time for Hudson to calm down. In the old days, I timed him at sixteen minutes but this was a fairly egregious offense on my part. I examined the men in the picture closely, thrilled I’d found a connection but even more confused. How was Jennifer Coogan’s death tied to Jack Smith and Anthony Marchetti?

Less than twenty-four hours ago, Jack had rambled drunkenly to me about a seemingly mythical hobbit, a giant, and the lying ways of the Chicago mobster who just might be my father. Now here, in the murder file of Jennifer Coogan, in a small Oklahoma town, the Hobbit and the Giant had sprung to life.

The Hobbit stood about three feet tall. “Little person” would be the politically correct term. Because I’m rarely politically correct, he looked to me like a malevolent Sneezy, with a bulbous red nose and pockmarked cheeks. Genetics had not been kind. The Giant stood four feet taller and two feet wider, with tree trunks for arms and an enormous shaved vegetable of a head.

I imagined a gentle tap from him would send me into outer space. He wore size giant jeans that he must have special-ordered and a cutoff white Harley T-shirt that bared pumped-up arms. A cupid’s heart tattoo the size of a baseball curved around his left bicep. I couldn’t read the name that arced around the top of it.

“I don’t know these men,” I said firmly, now that I could catch my breath. That was true. “Who are they?”

“Strangers in town who got caught on a video exiting a local bar two nights before Jennifer’s body was found. Their looks made folks remember them. The bar owner had just put in a newfangled camera outside his dump to keep the drug pushers away. He watched every frame for the first month until he got bored of it. He brought this in right away.”

“Did the FBI know about these two? I didn’t read anything about these guys as suspects.”

“Nope. Don’t think so. Like I said, they treated us like a bunch of local yokels with our heads up our asses. So the sheriff kept a few clues to hisself.”

Great, I thought. Prove the FBI right by hiding information that could lead to solving Jennifer’s murder. It occurred to me that Sheriff Joe Bob knew this meager case file surprisingly well.

“How old were you when this happened?” I asked.

“Sixteen goin’ on thirty. Scared the pee out of all of us. Shut down our Saturday night make-out and beer parties for a month or so.” For a second, I felt the panic of trying to get the beer and cigarette smell out of Sadie’s favorite jeans before Granny got hold of them for Monday’s wash. I was familiar with the thrill of illicit parties that spilled into hay fields from the backs of pickup trucks, the cheap beer, the amateur groping.

“Her younger sister was a wild thing when she was growing up.” The sheriff paused. “Not pretty like Jenny, but she put out. I hear she’s finally settling down. Some psychologist fellow in Broken Bow.” My hope for Amanda took a hit. “Y’all want to see where they pulled Jennifer out of the water?”

Now he sounded like a forty-year-old going on sixteen.

There seemed to be no reason, other than morbid fascination, to say yes. Hudson gave a mute nod. His face was unreadable.

Minutes later, the three of us sat in intimate discomfort bumping along in the front cab of the sheriff’s fully loaded shiny black Eddie Bauer Ford truck, the portable flashing red cherry on the roof giving us the eighty-mile-an-hour right-of-way down the highway. I was squashed in the middle and none of us smelled very good.

The speedometer tipped up toward ninety.

“All the sudden, I’m guessin’ you’re not a reporter,” the sheriff said.

“No.” The right tires caught the rough, unpaved berm and he swung the wheel back, but his focus stayed on me, the speedometer holding steady. “But I do have a legitimate reason for being here.”

“That’s what they all say. You leaving town soon?”

“Yes. Soon. Very, very soon.”

“Then I reckon I don’t need to know about your legitimate reasons.” He gunned the motor.

This seemed to be the general approach to law enforcement in Idabel. Machismo and benign neglect.

Minutes later, the sheriff brought the pickup to a halt on the side of the road right before an old bridge that hovered over a slow-drifting, rusty river. We sidestepped broken beer bottles as we worked our way down a marshy path of trampled grass toward the water. I remembered that two boys out fishing had discovered Jennifer’s corpse.

“Can’t keep the kids out, unless I physically post somebody here. Her ghost brings ’em. Freshman football initiations, séances, first-time lovers, double-dares-you name it.”

Surely, I thought, swatting at mosquitoes, anyone idiotic enough to lose their virginity at a murder site must wind up with some pretty big hang-ups.

It took about five minutes to walk the path, five minutes for my anxiety to start thrumming again. My white T-shirt, soaked with sweat, clung to my breasts. The mud-caked leopard-print cork wedge sandals on my feet appeared to be yet another piece of my new Nordstrom wardrobe headed for a hotel trashcan. Thorns found their way up the hem of my jeans and bit my ankles.

I stepped into the clearing with a sense of dread and involuntarily grabbed Hudson’s hand. To my surprise, he didn’t pull away.

Someone had stuck a small white cross in the ground near the water’s edge. A used, cream-colored candle lay toppled on its side, wet with river muck and dripping with hard tears of wax. Candy wrappers, diet drink cans, and a couple of broken tequila bottles littered the area. I saw three used condoms and a pair of muddy purple thong panties.

Almost as soon as we got there, I asked to leave.

Hudson and I silently shared wrinkled hot dogs and soggy crinkle fries in a green plastic booth at Burger Barn, a small converted dry-cleaner shop smack in the middle of the Idabel loop. We probably should have been dissuaded by the fact that the word “Burger” on the sign had been changed to “Booger” by some spray-paint-happy teenagers. At least we were smart enough to pass on the special of the day, jalapeño tater tots.

I did venture a hesitant question.

“Did you… see Jack?”

“The Jeep was gone by the time my friend got there.” He said it curtly.

That’s all he was giving me. He knew a lot more, I was sure. He was Hudson, the legend.

In as few words as possible, we determined that the most sensible thing was to spend the night at my motel before heading home. We stopped at Walmart on the way back so I could buy a pair of pajamas. The choices in my size were covered with ducks, cupcakes, or Britney Spears’s face. I picked cupcakes.

When we stepped through our motel room doorway, I announced I was taking a shower. Anything to avoid him.

Every molecule in the room was charged with the potent combination of anger, cheap pine-scented air freshener, and sexual tension. Hudson ignored me. He flipped on the TV, trying to find something other than gray fuzz. While I dug through my backpack for clean underwear, he adjusted the aluminum foil on the rabbit ears for a recognizable image of Diane Sawyer. Or maybe it was Brian Williams.

I yanked out a T-shirt. That’s when my gun hit the floor.

But he didn’t seem perturbed at all. He picked it up off the floor and handed it back to me, butt first.

“I used to love watching you shoot Miller Lite cans off the fence at twenty-five yards,” he said.

“Thirty-five yards,” I corrected. “And I can do it on a horse at full trot.”

“I don’t think I can do this again, Tommie.” His voice was tired, not angry. He sat on the edge of the bed, eyes wet. “I thought we could make it work this time, but I was wrong. As soon as we get back, I’m assigning a friend of mine to see you through this. He owes me a favor. And he’s almost as good as I am.”

I stood there, stunned, feeling an awful weight in my stomach, not at all sure I believed him.

“What do you mean, ‘again’? I asked. “You said you couldn’t do this again.”

“This push-pull thing. I think I’ve made my intentions pretty damn clear all along but you still go your own way at the end of the day. This time, you might get yourself killed. Go on, take your shower.” He lay back, faceup on the bedspread, eyes closed.

“I want to know why you think we broke up.”

He opened his eyes and regarded me thoughtfully. “Partly because you were too young. Partly because I’m an ass. But mostly because I was never going to live up to your Daddy.”

I looked around for something to throw at him but the choices were limited. The pillows weren’t hard enough and the bedside lamps were screwed to the tables. I stalked off and slammed the bathroom door.

I waited to cry until I stripped and leaned into the tepid stream of water, so Hudson couldn’t hear. I didn’t indulge myself for long.

The shower was the size of a coffin standing on end. It took all my concentration to wash myself while dodging alien life-forms that grew in black patches on the walls. The mildewed shower curtain brushed up against my skin like a dog’s cold wet nose. With evil timing, the shower spurted boiling hot water down my spine, followed shortly by an icy blast. I let out a tiny shriek. At least it sounded tiny to me.

Not three seconds later, a shadowy figure hovered outside the curtain. I screamed.

The bathroom erupted in a stream of angry words. Hudson, busting in on me again. Thankfully, the scummy plastic shower curtain obscured his view. Until he slung it open.

I scrambled to cover myself with the Sunset’s rag of a washcloth and pointed wordlessly to the showerhead. He couldn’t help himself. He laughed, a sound I loved.

He whipped the curtain back across and I heard him mutter either, “Oklahoma’s version of Psycho,” or “Omigod, she’s a psycho,” before making his exit. I figured on the latter.

The shower had settled on a temperature right below freezing, and I reached for a towel. The air-conditioning draft from the gap left by the open door woke up every goose bump on my body. I shivered into the pajamas and then took a good half-hour to blow out my hair into the long, soft mane that Hudson used to bury his face in.

Push. Pull.

I stared at my face in the milky mirror. A small, good nose, defined cheekbones, pearl-white poreless skin that needed the regular attention of a self-tanner, green eyes, arched eyebrows. And fear. I saw fear.

By the time I exited the bathroom, it was after nine. All the lights were out, except for a small lamp shedding a half-moon glow on my side of the bed. I say my side because Hudson’s long lean form took over the other side. No chivalrous pallet on the floor for him, I guess. He lay under the tiny pinecone forest, his back to me speaking volumes.

The door chain was in place and a brittle-looking unfinished pine chair, the only one in the room, was jammed under the doorknob. The setup didn’t give me confidence that it would hold a determined person from getting in, but maybe just long enough for us to draw or hit the floor. I slipped the gun out of my backpack and placed it as quietly as possible near the lamp, although I imagined the evil outside transforming into wisps of smoke and snaking under the crack of the door. In that scenario, a bullet would not help.

I glanced at Hudson’s still form on the bed. I knew he was awake, the jerk. I slipped in beside him, a foot of sexual tension between us. I turned over and faced the wall, making out the face of a monster in the knotty pine. Maybe he was asleep. Oh, God, was that a brown recluse crawling on the back of my neck? I thought I’d seen a carcass in the bathroom. I slapped at it, the worst thing to do with a legendary poisonous spider that eats a hole in your skin.

“Hmm, I guess that’s not one of your top ten erogenous zones,” Hudson said. “I was misinformed in eighth grade by my sister’s Cosmo.” His finger continued to trail up my neck, disturbing every nerve ending in my body.

“Turn around,” he urged, pulling me over. “Let’s not go to sleep angry.”

The window air conditioner was rattling like a truck. My body, still cool, melted against his warm one. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and my hands moved on his back, feeling the hard curve of muscle. I couldn’t tell what, if anything, he was wearing below the waist.

This simple hug in Idabel’s Bargain Bed with scratchy 100-thread-count sheets was the safest place I’d been in days. Maybe years.

When he finally bent to kiss me, I lost track of everything. It was like falling into an endless stream. We came up for air and he tipped my chin and planted a light kiss on my forehead.

“Good night,” he said gently, and turned over, his back now a wall, leaving me wide awake, body pulsing, thinking I was screwing this up again.

Push. Pull.

I woke to my cell phone vibrating like a giant cockroach on the bedside table.

It was Lyle, and “unhappy” didn’t begin to describe him. I had broken my promise to call.

“Hold on,” I whispered, pressing my finger over the tiny speaker, trying not to disturb Hudson, still rolled over, sleeping like a tank. I wrapped the top sheet around me and sat with my knees up in the corner of the room. A real spider made its move down the wall inches from me. At the moment, it seemed less scary than Lyle.

As soon he stopped berating me, I apologized, rattling on about Hudson’s arrival, the gloomy decorating habits of Jennifer Coogan’s parents, Amanda’s conviction that Jennifer’s boyfriend had been murdered by the same killer, the makeshift memorial site where Jennifer washed ashore, the Hobbit and the Giant as possible suspects, the surreal connection to Jack, his drunk presence at my house. It all seemed ludicrous in the pale light of dawn, now trying to get in through the dirty picture window that looked out on the parking lot.

“I need to tell you something about Jack Smith,” Lyle said when I finished. “My friend at Texas Monthly’s back. He’d never heard of a Jack Smith, so he checked it out. An IT intern was bribed to set up a voicemail and email for Smith. A kid from Princeton. You think he’d know better.” Princeton. Jack’s supposed alma mater.

“Tommie, you need to stay away from that guy. Seriously think about taking Sadie and Maddie and going somewhere. The next step needs to involve the police.”

“I’ll talk to Hudson about it,” I said noncommittally.

“Good. One more thing. Did you happen to read about Barbara Monroe?”

It took a sleepy second to jog my memory. Barbara Monroe, previously known as Barbara Thurman, star reporter. It seemed like years since I’d talked to her about Adriana’s kidnapping.

“Someone broke into her house. The Chicago Tribune ran the story this morning.”

“What happened?”

“They are using it as the centerpiece on the Tribune home page. It would have been a Metro brief but a rescue dog bit a chunk out of the intruder and saved the day. Readers love that kind of thing.” This last part came out a little annoyed.

“Let me call you back, Lyle. No, really, I promise.” I clicked off before he could start up with the yelling again.

My laptop was still in my backpack. I pulled it out, flipped it open, and sat cross-legged on the bed while the living, breathing lump beside me didn’t budge. The wireless internet connection worked right away, a freak gift courtesy of the Charles Wesley Motor Lodge across the road, which boasted such amenities.

RESCUE DOG RESCUES RIGHT BACK, the headline read, over a picture of a familiar grinning black dog with a white megaphone cuff around his neck and a new patch taped over one eye. The story, posted two hours and twenty-three minutes ago, had 400,342 hits.

The Tribune photographer made the heroic effort to take Cricket’s best side, without any scabs showing. The night before last, a man in a navy ski mask entered the Monroe house, apparently expecting it to be empty. But one of Barbara’s daughters was home alone, heard a noise, and wandered out of her bedroom, where she had been studying. The intruder grabbed her and Cricket went wild, banging against his crate door in the kitchen until it fell off the hinges. Cricket bit a chunk out of the guy, which was being tested for DNA.

I scrolled down more, skimming quickly. One of Cricket’s eyes was damaged. He might lose some sight. The police believed it to be a random break-in.

The story finished with Cricket’s sad history of disease and abuse at the hands of a previous owner, his rescue by the SPCA, and the numbers and addresses of three of Chicago’s primary animal shelters.

Good for Cricket. Hundreds of people would scurry to the shelters this weekend to save lives on doggy death row. Unfortunately, a third of them would return the dogs two weeks later after deciding that their cute fuzzy faces weren’t worth all the poop and pee, that actual work was involved to love something that was damaged.

I punched my cell phone.

“Lyle?”

“I was sleeping.”

“I told you I was calling back.”

He grunted sarcastically.

“Do you think I’m the reason Barbara’s house got hit? That they’re looking for something?”

“Maybe. I went over those Bennett crime scene pictures again. We’ve still been unable to trace the sender. Can you call up the slide show wherever the hell you are?”

I clicked on the icon reluctantly. I didn’t really want to ever see these bloody images again.

“You got it up, Tommie? Are you there?”

“Yes. To both.”

“A source of mine faxed the crime scene and coroner reports on all six of the victims. Here’s something surprising: The FBI woman and Fred Bennett weren’t shot. The woman was hit in the head and strangled. The father was beaten with, and I quote, ‘a narrow lead object, probably a pipe.’ ”

“Why wasn’t this reported?”

“According to my friend, cause of death was inked out in the reports handed out to the press. He had to really dig for the original reports.”

“Who is your friend?”

Lyle acted as if he hadn’t heard me. “This couldn’t have been a one-man job. Really look at the pictures. Fred Bennett didn’t go down easily or quietly. The wife, the kids, would have jumped out a window while that was going down. There were at least two attackers. I think one man took out the FBI agent in the laundry room while she was pulling out a load of clothes. Then he moved on to the father, in the kitchen. The rest of the family was attacked simultaneously at the back of the house by someone else.”

“The kids and the mother were killed by a Sig semi-automatic.” It was a detail I remembered from one of the Chicago Tribune clips. “It was left at the scene.”

“As far as I can tell, that’s true,” Lyle said. “But there were three different methods of killing. There’s a psychotic quality to this. Like a Coen Brothers movie. A thrill kill.”

I wasn’t even really sure why any of this mattered. So what if Anthony Marchetti had an accomplice?

“This wasn’t Marchetti’s style,” Lyle insisted, determined to make his point. “There’s nothing in his history about killing women and kids. This job was inefficient. Messy. Beneath him.”

“Damning with faint praise,” I said softly. “But thanks.” I understood now. Lyle believed that Anthony Marchetti was my father. He was trying to make it as OK as it could be.

After we hung up, I stared at the photograph of the blood-spattered kitchen. Fred Bennett had been preparing a bedtime snack for his kids. An attempt to make their uprooted lives in a safe house feel a little normal? Did he pretend that they were on a big adventure? Or did he tell them the truth?

Plastic bowls with cartoon figures were lined up on the kitchen counter. Three glasses stood untouched, in a neat row, poured to the brim with juice. The popcorn, though, was everywhere. On the floor, on the counters, some of it dyed red like for a Christmas tree chain. The white cabinets slashed with blood.

A Jackson Pollock canvas.

A Coen Brothers movie.

I said their names softly.

Alyssa. Robert. Joe.

My breath grew more shallow, a rope of dread spinning tight around my chest.

Focus. Don’t give in.

I drew my knees up, settling my eyes on one of the printed cupcakes running down my pajama legs.

Pink frosting, lots of sprinkles.

Imagine something happy.

The taste of tart strawberry icing, a table piled with presents, a balloon floating away.

Suffocating to death on this hard, filthy floor.

All the oxygen in the room was suddenly gone, as if someone had shut off a valve.

And then, nothing.

Twenty minutes later, I found myself shivering on the bathroom floor.