09 Dead Man Running, page 18
“Yes, you did,” I spat.
“I didn’t marry a cop, Torie. I wouldn’t have married a cop.”
“But, Rudy, I help people. I don’t see how you think I can just sit back and not help Colin, when sometimes I’m the only one who sees the things I see.”
“Like right now with the mayor,” he said. “You just had to get your nose in there.”
“Rudy, I can solve this. I can do it. I mean, I don’t know if I can find out where Bill is, but I can sure as hell find out what this is all about, and then that could help Colin,” I said.
“You don’t do this for other people. You do this because you can’t stand not to be in the middle of things,” he said.
“That was uncalled for,” I said, holding back tears. “Right now I’ve got some stupid Mafia guy breathing down my neck. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks. I’m trying to keep my stepfather from making a terrible mistake by endorsing Lou Counts, and I’m trying to keep Sam Hill from committing career suicide. On top of that I’m trying to figure out where the mayor’s gone, what he’s hiding, and why dead bodies keep turning up in our town. You think that’s all for me? You think I do all of that for me, Rudy? I don’t even like the mayor!”
Rudy hung his head then.
“Dammit, Rudy. At least I do something.” Tears were rolling down my face now. I swiped at them angrily and hoped that the kids were far enough away not to notice.
Rudy sighed and looked around the field, then kicked the pile of horse manure in front of him. “Which horses did you pick out?” he asked.
I pointed to Cutter. “That one,” I said. “And that yellow one over there.”
“Pretty,” he said.
“Sweet-natured, too,” I said.
We walked over to the kids. Rachel had found a brush on the fence and had taken it down and was brushing one of the horses. She glanced up at us, a twinkle in her eye that I hadn’t seen since the parade. She was vibrant and glowing, her cheeks flushed with exactly what should be on the face of a youth. Life and happiness. Matthew was squatted beneath one of the horses, stepping whenever ever the horse did. He’d get a real rude awakening if the horse decided to take a whiz. Mary held her hand out and she had three horses following her all the way through the field. Wherever she went they followed.
I hadn’t seen either one of the girls so calm and … normal in weeks. The horses were a good idea.
“So, we’re horse owners,” Rudy said.
“Looks like it,” I said. “Unless, of course, you really don’t want to do this.”
He glanced at the kids. “Are you kidding? Look at them.”
“I know,” I said.
“But I want three. That way one of the adults can ride with the two older kids.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. “I’ll tell Hank when he comes out.”
Rudy stopped suddenly. “Wait, did you say something about a Mafia guy?”
“No,” I said. “That part was an exaggeration. The rest was all true.”
“Oh, whew,” he said.
We picked out a third horse and drove home. Rudy and I had spoken no apologies and made no obvious gestures of forgiveness to each other, but we didn’t need to. It was out in the open, and we both knew it was over. By the time we got home, the kids were so excited that Rachel and Mary raced each other to the phone to see who could call her friends first and tell them about the horses. Mary beat Rachel to the phone, so Rachel went out the back door to go and tell Riley in person.
I sat down on the couch, and Matthew climbed up on my lap with his coloring book and crayons. I sat there half watching the television and half thinking about the new house and the horses and how I was actually getting excited about this move. Yes, the view of Old Man River would be gone, but I’d replace it with a view of hawks swooping in the pasture and the horses in the field. Besides, I was in New Kassel every day for work. I could see the river then. The river had been there long before me, before people, and it’d probably be there long after our reign on earth.
The police and CSU were finally gone from Bill’s house. The tape was still up, though. Like that would stop anybody who really wanted to get into his house. I thought about the papers hidden in the fake bottom of the utility cabinet in his garage. I should tell Colin about it. I knew I should. To not tell him was keeping evidence from him. If I told him, though, chances were I’d never get to see what it was. Besides, even though I know that anger isn’t a good enough reason to obstruct justice, I didn’t want to tell him about the papers because of what had happened earlier today. Let him find the stupid things on his own.
The phone rang, and Rudy answered it. He brought the phone to me and headed for the kitchen. “Hello?” I said.
“It’s Colin.”
I hung up.
The phone rang instantly, and I knew it was him. I picked up the receiver. “I’m not talking to you,” I said.
“Torie, I can explain,” he said.
“You mean there’s a justifiable, believable reason why you’re a completely insensitive cad?”
“Torie, look,” he said.
“Not interested in what you have to say, Colin. Not at all.”
“I’ve got bad news,” he said.
“What?” Instantly my scalp prickled.
“Fisherman found a piece of luggage with Bill’s name on it,” he said. “Washed up on the shores of the river. Found some shoes, too.”
“Oh, God, no,” I said. The hair stood up on my arms.
“I’m going to drag the river,” he said.
“You can’t drag the Mississippi!” I exclaimed. “The Mississippi is undraggable.”
“I’m going to send down divers,” he said, “and I’ve alerted the counties to the south in case somebody … washes up down there.”
“Did you call Karri?”
“Yes.”
I was speechless.
“Torie, is there anything I should know? Is there something you’re not telling me that could help me here, with Bill?”
There was plenty that I wasn’t telling him, but I didn’t think any of it could help poor Bill. Anyway, that wasn’t why I wasn’t saying anything. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to answer him. It was more that I couldn’t answer him. On the TV a news bulletin was running across the screen. Body washes up in Ste. Genevieve.
“Oh, my God, Colin. They found him.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“They found a body in Ste. Gen,” I said. “I gotta go.”
“Do not go down there!” he said, but I hung up on him. I took Matthew off my lap and set him on the couch. I handed the phone to Rudy, who was just now coming back from the kitchen.
“What? You look … worried,” he said.
“Rudy, do you want me to tell you when I’m about to go off half-cocked and do something stupid, or do you want me to just leave you in the dark like I’ve done in the past?” I asked.
He straightened his spine and looked me in the eyes. “I want you to tell me,” he said bravely.
“Okay, look, I think they just found Bill’s body down in Ste. Genevieve,” I said. “I’m going down there now.”
“What? Oh, no. That’s terrible,” he said, and sat down. “What can you do?”
“Identify the body, so Karri doesn’t have to,” I said.
“Wait, Torie!”
“You said you wanted to know these things, so there. Would you rather I told you that I was going to the grocery store or something?”
He shook his head, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “Be careful.”
Twenty
The drive to Ste. Genevieve took me about forty minutes. I’d taken old 61-67 instead of Highway 55, mostly because I didn’t want to have to mess with getting off the highway and driving through town when I got there. This way, I’d be almost at the river when I entered town. Of course, I had no idea where the body had washed ashore, so I spent at least ten minutes driving along the river until I saw all of the squad cars. They had the area roped off, and people had begun to gather along the zigzagged edge of the tape. News crews were parked haphazardly along the side of the road, and their camera lights punctuated the dark night with a halogen glare.
I pulled up, got out of the car, and ran up to the edge of the crime-scene tape. “Excuse me!” I called out. I waved my arms back and forth, but nobody paid much attention to me. Finally I just yelled as loudly as I could. “Hey!”
A young officer walked my way with that swagger that only comes with the cockiness of being an untried rookie. He had a white-blond crew cut and large blue eyes. His nameplate read KEN CALLYOT.“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“I think I know who that is,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“The body, I think I know who it is.”
He raised the tape and motioned for me to follow him over to someone I assumed was his boss. The officer in charge was about sixty. Retirement age. His face showed the weariness that came from having had to clean up messes like this his entire adult life. His plate read T. C. ROUSSEAU.
“This woman thinks she might be able to identify the body,” Calyott declared.
“Why?” Rousseau asked.
“I’m from New Kassel,” I said. The man stiffened. Colin had called the surrounding counties to alert them to the possibility that there might be a body washing up on the shore. “Our mayor has been missing, and recently …”
Officer Rousseau held up a hand and said, “I know,” he said. “We got the call. Are you the next of kin?”
“No,” I said. “Next-door neighbor.”
He exchanged a glance with Officer Callyot.
“Sir,” I said, “I know his daughter really well. I just thought maybe I could do this for her, so that when she does view the body, it’ll be at the funeral.”
“Fine,” he said and waved me over to the body lying on the ground, covered with a white sheet. “You said his daughter?”
“Yes,” I said. “Why?”
“Because unless your mayor had a sex change operation, this ain’t him,” he said, and pulled back the sheet.
I gasped as I looked down into the lifeless blue face of Bill’s wife. Mrs. Castlereagh. “Oh, no,” I said and covered my mouth with my hand.
“You know her?” Rousseau asked.
“It’s the mayor’s wife,” I said. “Mrs. Castlereagh.” Her hair was plastered against her cheeks, and river foliage was stuck to her skin. Her clothes were torn and tattered. One arm was completely missing, and the lack of blood made me grotesquely aware that she had been dead when it had been severed. I took a step back and a deep breath and fought the bile that rose in my throat. “Oh, this is terrible.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” he said and pulled the sheet all the way back. Her feet were encased in cement blocks.
I fought back tears I looked to Officer Rousseau, searching his eyes for answers, but I could read nothing there except sadness. “I don’t understand,” I said. They covered Mrs. Castlereagh back up with the sheet, and I didn’t care how much Colin yelled at me, I was glad I had done this so that Karri would not have to remember this her whole life. “If she … The cement. How did she wash ashore?”
“We’re thinking her arm snagged on a tugboat or something. I think it might have dragged her a ways, until it reached shallow enough water that she couldn’t sink again,” he said. “I’m going to need to speak to your sheriff.”
Just as I nodded my head, I heard Colin behind me. “I’m Sheriff Brooke from Granite County,” he said.
“It’s not Bill,” I said to him, staring at the body. “It’s his wife.”
“Oh, no,” he said.
I turned to leave, and Colin called out, “Stay put. I want to talk to you when I’m finished.”
“Fine.”
I went back to my car and sat there stunned, watching the newsman reporting on the death of a woman I had known almost my whole life. I don’t think I could have left the crime scene if I’d wanted to. I couldn’t seem to figure out where the ignition was in my car. Or the seat belt. I had no choice but to wait for Colin. The Castlereaghs had lived next door to me for thirteen years. I shook my head, wondering why it couldn’t have been Bill instead. I suppose that wasn’t very nice of me, but as far as I could tell, his wife was an innocent in all of this. This whole charade had been Bill’s doing, whatever it was, and she was the one who ended up dead. With cement shoes.
Tears flowed down my face. I sobbed into my hands as I thought about the horror that had been her last minutes. Had she been alive when they threw her into the river? Or had they killed her first and then tossed her in, just to dispose of the body? A knock on the door made me jump nearly out of my skin. It was Colin, standing there with his hands on his hips. I wanted to hit him. I’m not saying that the impulse was logical, but I still wanted to hit him. I got out and wiped my tears on my sleeves. Crossing my arms, I leveled my gaze at him and dared him with a look to say one mean thing to me.
“Why’d you come down here? Because I told you not to?” he asked.
“I came so Karri wouldn’t have to see that,” I said. “No child should have to see her mother like that.”
“I could have identified the body. I know what the mayor and his wife look like,” he said.
“Well, I wasn’t sure if you were coming down or not,” I said. “You said you were going to drag the river. How was I supposed to know what you were doing?”
“All right, all right,” he said, and held his hands up in front of him. He made a motion as if he were going to hug me. I glared at him. After the things I had overheard him saying about me, how dare he try to comfort me? “You know, Bill is most likely at the bottom of the river, too,” he said.
“I hope,” I said.
“What?”
“If he escaped this”—I gestured to where Mrs. Castlereagh lay—”and she didn’t …”
“I think this was over a gambling debt. I found a recent deposit of a lot of money in his account. It’s a known fact that the Baietto and de Rosa families own casinos. With their presence in the town … I think it’s a pretty logical conclusion.”
“If he just made a large deposit, then why didn’t he pay off his debt?” I asked.
“I think he was going to,” he said, “but I guess whoever he owed the money to got tired of waiting. The deposit was in cash. A hundred thousand dollars.”
“Where do you think he would get that kind of money?” I asked.
“Well, if he was gambling in dollar amounts that big, I’d say Bill had connections we know nothing about.”
“You have proof he ever gambled? Or went to a casino? Do his kids say he ever went to a casino?”
“No, but it’ll come. You remember how he was pushing the riverboat gambling in town a while back,” he said, as if that explained everything.
“Whatever,” I said and looked off into the distance. He was wrong, and I knew it. That money could have been for anything. For all we knew, Bill could have made yearly deposits of that size. Maybe it was a stipend from his mother. We knew nothing about her, other than she’d been arrested for murder and released. Who knew what happened to her after that? She could have become wealthy. Maybe the money was from somebody in his wife’s family. Maybe they were having financial problems and borrowed money from a friend. To say automatically that it was a gambling windfall, when there was no evidence he’d even set foot in a casino, was ridiculous.
I wouldn’t say any of that to Colin. I’d find out what this was all about on my own. Then I’d think about letting him in on it.
“What, you disagree?” he asked.
I stared into his eyes long and hard. He flinched at the intensity in my gaze. “What do you care what I think? You’ve got Lou Counts now to confer with. You two are doing a bang-up job on this case without me.”
“You forget, I can haul you in and make you tell me what you know,” he said.
“Then I guess you’ll have to do that, won’t you?”
“Torie, you’re being silly,” he said. “Not to mention hard-headed. You’re interfering in an investigation.”
“I’m going home now. Oh, by the way, who was the man at the Corner Bar that you were gossiping about me with?”
“Torie …”
“Just answer the question.”
He said nothing.
“Fine, I can find out on my own,” I said and opened the car door.
“Mort Joachim,” he said.
“That’s real nice, Colin. He doesn’t even have the chance to form his own opinion of me. You have to give him one. What’s the matter? Afraid he’ll actually like me?” I said.
He hung his head, which was what he should have done.
“Oh, I will give you one tidbit of information,” I said. “I think the cement used to anchor Mrs. Castlereagh was stolen off of my construction site. So if you haven’t already been out there making casts of shoes and tires, you might want to.”
“Torie,” he said, “you can’t be mad at me forever.”
“Yes, I can,” I said and got into my car.
“I’m married to your mother,” he said.
“That’s her problem.”
Twenty-one
I cried all the way home. Just when I thought I was fine, I’d think about that poor woman, sitting at the bottom of the dark, cold river … then getting caught on something. And the tears would start all over again.
When I got home, Rachel was waiting up for me in the living room. Well, I’m not entirely sure she was waiting up for me specifically, but she was up watching television all the same. “Hey, kiddo,” I said as I came through the door.
“Hi, Mom,” she said.
“What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she said. She shrugged her shoulders. “You think I can go out and visit the horses before we actually get them?” she asked.
“I don’t see why not,” I said.
“Can Riley take me?” she asked.
I balked. Riley had just gotten his license. Rachel, of course, did not have a license or a car. I was prepared for her to grow up and go to college and have a boyfriend. I was prepared for her to date. Just as long as she didn’t have to get in a car to do it. Trusting my daughter in the car with a kid who’d only had his license for a few months and had uncontrollable hormones, as all teenagers do, was more than I was ready for. A car. Rachel in a car with a teenager driving.
