Sacrificial Ground

4

Karen Devereaux looked quite different when she reappeared a few minutes later. The soiled artist’s smock had been replaced by a long black skirt and dark red blouse. She had unpinned her hair, and it now hung loosely at her shoulders. She looked somewhat younger because of that, but the emotions Frank had seen rising into her face now seemed even more forcefully contained.

“I’m ready to go now,” she said, almost stiffly, and with an air of quiet command.

Frank stepped to the door immediately. “We’ll take my car,” he told her.

“Yes, all right,” Karen replied, “I’d really prefer not to drive right now.”

For a time, Frank kept quiet as he drove back toward the city. The wide, shaded lanes no longer seemed as imposing as they had earlier. It was as if something of their invulnerability had been taken from them. The armor of wealth had not been able to protect one of their youngest and most beautiful, and the failure reduced their grandeur, brought them down to human scale once again.

“It is beautiful out here,” he said quietly.

Karen said nothing.

“Never seems as hot as it is in the city.”

“We have our days,” Karen said crisply.

Sitting beside him, her large dark eyes fixed on the road ahead, she seemed extraordinarily composed, considering the news he’d just brought her. She kept her shoulders lifted slightly and her hands folded gracefully in her lap, and as he looked at her, Frank thought that perhaps in a continually shifting and uncertain world, she had learned that only her dignity could be kept in place, that it was the only thing in her life over which she truly had full and personal control.

“There’ll be questions, of course,” he said.

Karen continued to stare straight ahead. “Yes, I suppose so.”

“And it’s important to move quickly in something like this,” Frank added.

“Yes.”

“I’m sure you have a few questions, too,” Frank said, still hoping to draw her out, but without coming on too fast.

“You said you didn’t notice that she didn’t come home last night,” he said, finally.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Is that unusual?”

“That she didn’t come home, or that I didn’t notice it?” Karen asked.

“Both.”

“She had her own room,” Karen said stiffly.

“And her own life?”

“Yes, that too.”

“What did you know about it?”

“That she kept it to herself.”

“What about friends?”

“I don’t know if she had any.”

Frank looked at her doubtfully.

“I mean, if she had friends, I don’t know who they were,” Karen explained.

“Other kids, maybe. Didn’t anyone ever come by to see her?”

“Not that I know of,” Karen said. “I have a studio in the back of the house. I spend a lot of time there. People could come and go; I wouldn’t see them.” She shrugged. “But as far as I know, Angelica was very isolated.”

“It sounds like you are too,” Frank said, before he could stop himself.

Karen looked at him sharply. “Maybe I am. So what?”

“Look, I know how people can lose touch,” Frank said quickly. “In families, I mean. They can lose touch. My own daughter. It’s just that it was only the two of you in the house. That’s right, isn’t it? Only the two of you?”

“Yes.”

“So you had to have some contact,” Frank said. “No matter how little, there had to be some.”

Karen said nothing. She turned back toward the street and stared straight ahead.

“When a doorbell rings,” Frank went on, “someone has to answer it. Was there ever someone there who was looking for Angelica?”

“No,” Karen said crisply.

“Never?”

“Not when I was there, no,” Karen repeated firmly. “Maybe somewhere else, she had friends.”

“On the Southside?” Frank asked pointedly.

Karen did not reply.

“Do you know what Glenwood Avenue looks like?” Frank asked.

“Vaguely,” Karen said, almost in a whisper.

“Then you know it’s not exactly West Paces Ferry.”

“I’m aware of that, yes.”

“We don’t know exactly what happened to your sister,” Frank said, “but she ended up a long way from home.”

Karen said nothing. She kept her eyes on the road ahead.

As he glanced at her from time to time, Frank tried to come up with some idea of what she had felt for her sister. He’d had enough experience to know that it was hard to tell where love began or ended in a family. His own mother had appeared to love his father, and yet on one raw afternoon she had simply disappeared, left him with two boys on the brink of manhood and not so much as a note to tell them why.

“I know how it is sometimes,” Frank said tentatively. “Sometimes, people just don’t get along. Blood’s not everything. I know that, believe me. But you did live in the same house as your sister.”

She turned toward him. Her eyes widened somewhat, as if she were seeing him for the first time.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

For an instant he thought she meant his life, what had happened to his life, but then he realized that she was asking about his face, the scars and bruises. He touched his left eye and winced slightly.

“I had some trouble,” he said.

“In the line of duty?”

“No.”

She turned away from him very quickly, almost fearfully, as if she’d found something terribly disturbing in his answer.

They reached the morgue a few minutes later. It was very clean. The tile floors shone brightly and the walls were sleek and white. There was no clutter, no mess, much less any signs of blood or tissue. It was as if the staff was determined to stand up against the terrible disorder which swept up and down its corridors, in and out of its dissecting rooms; murdered wives and husbands, children suffocated in their tiny closets. The broken bodies were little more than the physical remains of something already broken long before, and which the gleaming hallways could not hide.

“How you doing, Frank?” Jesse said as he moved down the long corridor to where Frank and Karen stood beside a small wooden desk.

“Hello, Jesse.”

Jesse sauntered up to the desk and took a seat. “Got a problem?”

“We’re here to see Angelica Devereaux,” Frank told him.

“Got a number?”

“Not yet. The lab work wasn’t in when I left headquarters.”

“How about a description?”

“Young.”

Jesse looked at Frank questioningly.

“Pretty,” Frank added.

“Oh, yeah,” Jesse said. “She’s just come down to us.” He looked at a large open accountant’s book. “Laura Angelica Devereaux,” he repeated, “Number Fifteen.” He looked quickly toward Karen. “You with him?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” Jesse said softly and with a hint of surprise.

“Miss Devereaux’s sister,” Frank explained.

Jesse smiled quietly. “Sorry, ma’am. She looked like a nice young girl.”

Angelica was the sort who didn’t fit the morgue’s usual cast of characters, and Frank could see Jesse’s curiosity as clearly as if questions were written on his forehead. How had she been caught up in the general web? How did her body end up drenched in a light which usually swept down upon the poor, the deranged, the ones for whom the last wound was very much like the first?

Jesse shifted slightly in his chair. “Anyway, she’s in Number Fifteen. I guess you’ll be going with her, Frank?”

“Yes.”

“Fine, then,” Jesse said quietly. “You know where it is. Last door on your right.”

“Thanks, Jesse,” Frank said. He stepped around the desk and glanced back toward Karen. “This way.”

She followed him immediately, keeping to his pace.

Frank opened the door and walked to the wall of refrigerated units which stood at the rear of the room. They were made of stainless steel, and he could see Karen’s face reflected in the door of Number Fifteen as he placed his hand on the latch.

“Sometimes, they look a little different,” he warned.

“Open it,” Karen said.

The latch clicked sharply as Frank drew open the door, and he noticed that Karen’s body stiffened at the sound, then held that stiffness as he pulled out the long, metal carriage which held Angelica’s body.

“I am sorry,” Frank whispered as he drew down the zipper and exposed Angelica’s upturned face. It was bloodlessly white, except for the purplish lips.

Karen drew her eyes slowly down to her sister’s face. She held them there for a long time, as if trying to explain some facet of it, the long, graceful arch of her eyebrows, the smooth line of her nose, the large, slightly oval eyes.

“She was so beautiful,” Karen said softly. She continued to gaze at Angelica’s face. “So beautiful.”

“Yes.”

“At every moment beautiful. A beautiful baby. A beautiful child.”

Frank nodded.

“A beautiful woman,” Karen said. She looked at Frank. “There’s nothing more powerful than that.”

Frank closed the black plastic bag over Angelica’s face. “I have to ask you. It’s a technical thing. Is this your sister?”

“Yes.”

“We can go now,” Frank said. He pushed the carriage back into the wall and closed the door.

Karen did not move. She continued to look at the closed door, as if studying her own marred reflection.

“Miss Devereaux,” Frank repeated. “We can go now.”

She shook her head. “Not yet,” she whispered. Her eyes remained on the stainless steel door, but it was as if they were passing through it, were still in the dark cold vault gazing at Angelica’s face. “Sparks flew from her,” she said. “My father used to pick her up in his arms and laugh. ‘Sparks fly from you,’ he’d say.” Her eyes remained on the closed door, but Frank could tell that her mind was somewhere else, and that everything in her life was passing through the dark funnel of this moment. Her body grew even more rigid, and slowly her hand lifted toward the latch.

Frank took it quickly. “No,” he said, then released it. It fell limply to her side.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because it won’t help anything.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been here before.”

“All right,” Karen said. She turned slowly and walked straight down the corridor.

“Just go on out to the car,” Frank told her, once they were back at the entrance. “I want to talk to Jesse for a minute.”

She was standing beside the car smoking a cigarette when he joined her a few minutes later.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” he told her.

“What did you talk to him about?” she asked.

“A few things. Technical.”

“What? I want to know, exactly.”

Frank took out his notebook and flipped to his last entries. “Well, the body came down about a half-hour ago. The lab report should be on my desk by now.” He turned the page. “No outside inquiries about her.”

“Do you keep everything in that book?” Karen asked.

“It helps my memory,” Frank said. He closed the book. “You took it well, Miss Devereaux.”

A slender black eyebrow crawled upward. “Did I?”

“Better than most.”

“With less feeling, you mean?”

“With less show of feeling.”

“Is there a difference?”

“I think so,” Frank said. He opened the car door. “Come, I’ll take you home.”

It was late afternoon, and the traffic had begun to build steadily toward its rush-hour snarl. Frank knew that it would be a long tangled line from downtown to West Paces Ferry, and given what Karen had just been through, it seemed unnecessarily brutal to add at least an hour of stop-and-go traffic to the day’s ordeal.

“We could stop somewhere if you like,” he said.

She looked at him curiously. “Stop somewhere?”

“And let the traffic die down a little,” Frank explained.

“All right.”

A few minutes later, Frank pulled into a small tavern on Peachtree Street. He felt the need for a drink, but he felt even more that he needed a dark, quiet room, a place away from the heat and traffic.

“We can talk about anything you want,” he said, after they’d ordered their drinks. “I mean, you don’t have to …”

“Was she murdered?” Karen asked immediately.

“Probably. We don’t know.”

“But wouldn’t it be easy to tell?”

“If she were shot or strangled, yes, it would be easier to tell. As it is, any number of things could have happened to her—some sort of accident maybe, hell, even a heart attack, I don’t know. If someone was with her at the time, and that someone panicked, didn’t know what to do, finally just brought her to that lot and left her there—well, it wouldn’t be murder. It’s not likely, but it’s possible.”

“Her body then, it wasn’t …?”

“There were no signs of a struggle,” Frank said, putting it as mildly as he knew how. “And she was fully clothed when we found her.” He shrugged. “Except for a shoe.”

“A shoe?”

“We found it a few feet away,” Frank said.

The drinks came and Frank looked at his, but did not taste it. “Look,” he said, “we don’t know exactly how Angelica died. We only know that certain common things didn’t happen to her.”

Karen watched him from over the rim of her glass. “Common things?”

“For me, common.”

The waitress bounced over and took the orders of two men in business suits who sat at a table a few feet away. Frank’s eyes involuntarily followed her. She was young, and she had a light, exuberant step, the sort he noticed in people who still thought their luck might change.

Karen glanced around the room. “I’ve never been here,” she said.

“Neither have I.”

“You just picked it at random?”

“The first one on the right,” Frank said. “It looked nice. Better than the traffic.” He looked at his watch. “Things’ll clear up in about an hour. We’ll leave then.”

Karen pulled a pack of cigarettes from her purse and offered one to Frank.

“No, thanks.”

Karen lit her own. “You look like a smoker.”

“I do? How do smokers look?”

“Like certain things don’t really matter to them.”

“Health, you mean?”

“Too long a life,” Karen said.

“Then give me one.”

Karen held the pack up to him. “Angelica and I didn’t get along very well,” she said.

“I gathered that,” Frank said. He lit the cigarette. “Of course, that’s nothing new.”

“But I have no idea what happened to her,” Karen said, “and if she was murdered, I don’t know who killed her.”

“It’s her life I’m looking for right now,” Frank said.

“Why?”

“So I can trace it.”

“To its end?”

“That’s the way it works when you do it by the book,” Frank told her. He took a sip of Scotch, and the warmth hit him suddenly like a sweet promise of relief. He realized he’d want another after this, and then another. He placed the glass firmly down on the table.

Karen looked at him oddly. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Frank said quickly. He leaned back in his seat, drawing himself away from the beckoning glass. “Did you really not know anything about how Angelica lived?” he asked.

“I tried to watch out for her. I was her sister, after all. But she resented the intrusion.”

“Well, the only things I know right now are that she was rich and beautiful.”

Karen leaned forward. “Does that make it more likely that she was murdered, money and beauty?”

“Less likely, I’d say,” Frank told her. He took a draw on the cigarette. “There’s a saying in a homicide investigation: Follow blood or money.”

“Which means?”

“Well, in most cases people kill each other over money or some family matter.”

Karen shook her head gently. “I didn’t kill my sister, Mr. Clemons.”

“I was thinking more of money,” Frank said. “Did Angelica have much of her own?”

“Yes. She had a trust fund.”

Frank took out his notebook. “She had access to it?”

“Not until recently,” Karen said. “Arthur Cummings administered it. He was my father’s lawyer. And he was, you might say, Angelica’s guardian. At least, he was the guardian of her money.”

“Did he keep tabs on her?”

“I don’t think so,” Karen said. “I don’t think she would have let anyone do that.”

Frank wrote Cummings’ name in his notebook. “Where can I find Arthur Cummings?”

“Cummings, Wainwright and Houstan,” Karen said. “Have you heard of it?”

“No. Should I have?”

“Well, not really. It’s a major law firm, that’s all.”

The sort of high-powered legal muscle that people in Karen’s circle knew about, Frank realized immediately, and people in his circle didn’t.

“I know mostly bailbondsmen and ambulance chasers,” he said.

“You think Cummings is any different?” Karen asked.

“Better suits,” Frank said. He allowed himself to smile with her for the first time. “With the guys I deal with, it’s mostly Mart.”

Karen snuffed out her cigarette, but said nothing.

“Was Cummings your guardian, too?” Frank asked.

“For a few years,” Karen said. “I was almost of age when my parents died. He was my guardian until then.”

“How well do you know him?”

“Not very well,” Karen said. “I recognize his signature. It was always on my checks.”

“And nothing else?”

“He was my father’s best friend. That’s all I know.”

“And as far as you know, Angelica was no closer to him than you?”

“As far as I know,” Karen said. She took a sip of wine. “Besides, if Angelica was murdered, it could have been anybody.”

“Why?”

“Because she was beautiful,” Karen said firmly, “and anyone could have desired her: Arthur, the taxi driver, the kid with the groceries, the stranger in an elevator.” She paused. “Even you, Mr. Clemons.” She picked up the now-empty glass of wine and twirled it in her hands. “Anyone could have desired her, and because of that, anyone could have killed her.” She placed the glass back down on the table and leaned slowly toward him. “Was my sister raped?”

“I don’t know,” Frank said.

For what seemed a very long time, she simply continued to look at him. Then, slowly, a line of moisture gathered in her eyes.