The 5th Horseman

Chapter 108

CLAIRE AND I WERE at Susie’s at dinner hour, the smell of barbecued pork and fried plantains making my mouth water and my stomach grumble. As we waited for the others, Claire was telling me about a recent case that had torn her up. She’d been working on it since the small, dark hours of the morning.

“A nineteen-year-old girl, apparent suicide, was hung by an extension cord wrapped around the bathroom door—”

“Wrapped around the door?”

“Yeah. One end was tied to the knob, then the cord was slid under the door, up over the top, then knotted around her neck.”

“Jeez. She really did that?”

“It’s really a puzzle,” Claire said, pouring us each a glass of beer from the frosted pitcher. “Her twenty-eight-year-old dirtbag boyfriend with a history of domestic violence was the only witness, of course.

“He called it into nine-one-one as a suicide after a dispute they had. Said he cut her down, gave her CPR. Oh, and that she’s pregnant.”

“Aw, no.”

“Yeah. So the fire department responds first, and now it’s about keeping her body alive to save the baby. So they try to resuscitate her.

“Then the EMTs take over, and they try to resuscitate her. And then the ER folks at the hospital pound away at her and do a stat C-section.

“So by the time she comes to me, she’s been through the mill four times, cut up, bruised everywhere, back and neck injuries, and I don’t know what the hell happened to the poor girl.

“So I’m asking myself, did the boyfriend tune her up, kill her, and then hang her to cover up the homicide? Or was it a suicide, and the trauma is all from the attempts at resuscitation?”

“What about the baby?”

“The fetus, yeah. He was too little, only twenty-six weeks old. Lived for a couple of minutes at the hospital.”

Loretta dropped off the menus and the chips. She told Claire she looked fabulous in royal blue and that I looked as though I needed a vacation.

I thanked her kindly, told her we were going to wait for Cindy and Yuki before ordering, and asked her to bring some bread. Then I turned back to Claire.

Claire sighed, saying, “Double homicide or suicide? It’s too soon to tell. I’ve gotta backtrack, interview all the first responders, ask what they actually saw—”

Claire stopped, and I turned to see Cindy come through the front door.

Her kitten-gray sweater set off her pink cheeks and her tousled blond hair. But I could read the worry lines in her forehead.

She was wondering if she and I were okay, or if we had a fight to settle.

I got up and walked toward her, gave her a big fat hug.

“I’m sorry, Cindy,” I said. “You were right to do that story on Garza. You were doing your job, and I was off the wall.”