| Writing Samples - Novels "Riverbend" Chapter Twenty Six: Everyone's a Suspect |
Chapter 26. Everyone’s a Suspect Les and Cindy stared down at Helen Miller’s body, half-submerged in black Everglades muck, the dark teal cocktail dress from the pale blue garment bag bunched up around her abdomen—matching clutch and shoes off to one side. The Diamonds in the Raw waitress’s throat had been slit from ear to ear; her eyes, tongue and female organs gouged with something jagged and mean. Her implants had been sliced out and tossed aside, metal bar still in the nipple of what was left of her deflated breast—for I.D., no doubt. She had been scalped. It was a savage sight, one clearly meant to send a message to someone. Someone got it loud and clear: “Goddammit!” Les shouted with surprising sharpness. Broward County sheriffs turned away. “I’m sorry, Les,” Cindy said quietly, knowing it wouldn’t help any; but she had to say something. It felt—being here, seeing this; seeing him see this—like gravity had suddenly tripled. Maybe it was the heat, or the humidity. Maybe she was coming down with something. Maybe it was all this goddam endless barbarity and suffering! At least there were no yellow ribbons. But there was the dress. “It was for me, wasn’t it?” Cindy said, looking down at the teal dress, blackened with crusted blood and chunky loam. “You went back and gave it to her after I was such a bitch.” Now, she knew. Les turned away. It didn’t matter anymore. A girl was dead; his informant, an innocent, a friend. He stared off, seemingly without emotion. Cindy knew better. “We’ll get him,” she said, trying to be positive in the mire of hate and homicide, lost dreams. She felt sorry for the girl; but almost sorrier for Les. You tried not to take each bit of human loss personally, out in the field, but it was hard; and on the rare occasion you had actually met a victim before his or her demise, well, it was virtually impossible. A sheriffs deputy came over with some paperwork. “Strip Killer, probably,” he said. “She worked at—“ “It wasn’t him,” Les said flatly. The deputy didn’t know Les well; he started quoting facts and figures and— “IT WASN’T HIM!” Les shouted so loudly that all work stopped. Every face turned. The deputy went cold. Les looked at him with lifeless eyes and said softly, “It couldn’t be.” And he walked away. Cindy felt the need to explain her partner; at least his thought process. At least try. “She wasn’t a stripper; she was a waitress.” The deputy weighed what she was saying. He was middle aged, no rookie; thick around the waist, but still fit. He knew what he’d seen and heard, what the stats were. He looked the decomposing body over, then Cindy, then posited that the Killer, “Could’ve made a mistake.” “These guys don’t make mistakes,” Cindy said, remembering Pittsburgh and how everyone thought the Slasher had made a mistake with the first doctor, thinking she was a nurse; Holy Dick throwing elbows this way and the other to be at the head of that line. The deputy’s eyes narrowed. He looked after Les, retreating to the newest loaner, a grey Galaxy. “He always like this?” “No.” “I guess you’re happy as a clam about that.” “Not really,” Cindy said to the hardened veteran. “At least he’s still got feelings.” Les had parked their Miami Bureau loaner on top of the dike with the rest of the county and press vehicles. The sky was mostly clear to the east, but out to the west, a storm was building, high and dark. The rain would be here soon; any minute if the nervous air was an indicator. Cindy got in the passenger side of the flat grey four-door, sat quietly a moment, then said, “Les—“ “You know why I listen to Sinatra?” he cut her off with. “The Francis thing?” Les hadn’t expected an answer, especially that one, and he realized, just then, that he had never thought about it before: both of them being Francises like they were. But that wasn’t it. “No,” he said, “because he’s perfect. It’s all wrapped up tight when he sings: the pain, the pleasure, the pointlessness; the joy, the...beauty, the tragedy; the getting out while you still can. All that Live Hard, Die Young stuff; the whole phony self-indulged Sixties Las Vegas Hollywood Rat Pack mythology. James Dean. “Only Frank didn’t go. He stayed past his welcome. Even when he couldn’t remember the words, up there looking like a fool; when he knew he was embarrassing himself and his audiences, sullying his good name, his legend, he wouldn’t get off the stage. His own family was telling him it was time to go, but he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. “He wasn’t done yet. “You’ve got to respect that in a man. The willingness to go on even when he knows there’s no point in it anymore; when he starts doing more harm than good, even to himself. You have to respect it. You can’t not. Such self-destruction on a grand scale. “The grandest,” Les chuckled, more to himself. “You spend your whole life building it up; then tear it down right in front of everyone. Jesus.” He shook his head with admiration and lament. “But it’s because he knew something they didn’t: After you’re gone, the soured memories will fade, and there will remain your best work. That’s what they’ll carry with them and talk about.” He looked out at the massive thunderheads, white and defiant. “They’ll even forgive you embarrassing yourself and them because goddammit you took it right to the limit, right to the bitter fucking end. They had to drag you away kicking and screaming. “And they’ll remember that.” Les nodded then shook his head. “Not the rest of it. The rest of it won’t matter anymore. And the truth is: It never did. All that mattered was that you cared and didn’t give up.” One very large raindrop smacked the windshield; heavy, humid gusts laying down the sawgrass. “That’s all he’s saying: It doesn’t matter, none of it; so don’t let them kick you off that stage a second before you’re ready to go. That’s all he’s saying, because that’s what he believed, no matter what words he used. That’s what matters. “The rest of it is shit.” Then Les went quiet, staring off at nothing, the way he did; but he had made peace with something inside himself, just then, seeing it through Frank’s eyes, his words, his way; sharing feelings only men can know—and only men who have known great victories and defeats, but most of all who have survived despite the odds against it. Men who weren’t done yet. At least it felt that way in a grey Galaxy under a rising storm. Cindy sat quietly digesting everything Les had said, watching the sky and thinking, Fine, she could accept that, all of it—even as a twisted metaphor for whatever it was Les thought he was doing. Even if he was wrong. Even if it was a lie. But it wasn’t what she was going to say, before. “Les, about this—“ “I don’t want to talk about it.” Cindy could accept that, too. Besides, “I wasn’t going to talk about her.” Only Les Moore could have looked over at her with such a symbiotic mix of acute curiosity and total disinterest. “Maybe this isn’t the right time, but...” “Hasn’t stopped you before,” he said. Cindy looked to see if he was being a jerk. He didn’t appear to be, so she went on: “You know why I didn’t say anything about the dress? When I found it in your closet.” Les looked out across the endless flat swamp, storm clouds roiling up, black now, closing in. “You think I’m the other SKK,” he said with less bother than he’d give a drycleaner for missing a spot on the elbow of an old jacket. “H...how’d you know?” Cindy forgot about the weather, the body, the condition of the body. The situation. “Wasn’t that hard to figure,” Les said with equal slack as two smallish women dressed in white labcoats started wheeling the bodybagged waitress toward their van, up on the dike, trying, with some difficulty, to stick to dry ground wherever they could find it. Les watched, hollow, as they made it to the levee and started up, struggling under the weight. One of them griped, “How come nobody ever dies on flat ground?” to which the other said, “It’s Florida, you’d think,” and the other agreed and they both pushed harder on the uneven slope and the gurney almost tipped over, them with it. Then, they made it to the top. “Imagine the poor schlump’s gotta tell her parents she was whacked,” Les said. “They’re gonna ask who did it. Cop’s gonna have to say he doesn’t know. ‘Might be the Strip Killer.’ They don’t even know she worked in a strip joint, you know. It’s gonna destroy them. Then, they’re gonna have to ID the body. In that condition.” He shook his head. The two morgue women, who, it was now obvious, were slight as well as short, wrestled the gurney into their van while a large well-muscled man, presumably their supervisor, watched passively, then got in to drive. One of the women flipped him off behind his back and they followed him in for the ride back. “Too hard on everyone,” Les sighed with finality as the van took away his dead informant, what was left of her. “It was more than the dress, you know,” Cindy said. “The...shaving. Your legs. And...” She nodded higher. Les stared at her longer and with more intensity than she would have liked—though less than she expected— then looked away. Cindy tried, “I know you’re a swimmer, but—“ “I’m a suspect, too.” “Les,” Cindy said reproachfully, “you’re not a suspect.” “Everyone’s a suspect, Baker. Even you.” Cindy choked slightly on some spittle. “Me? Why me?” This getting blindsided all the time was getting old. Les said, “You had access to the files. You’re smart. You know guns better than any three male agents I every met. You know how to use one. You’ve been trained to kill.” He sounded detached, even disinterested, but went on anyway: “All the SKK hits were accomplished by a single gunshot wound to the head. No ligature strangulations, no knives, no clubs, rocks, beatings. No asphyxiation. No drowning.” He meant: no muscle. It didn’t take great strength to pull a trigger. Seduce the SK into a lonely spot somewhere, an alley, a field, a car, and bang, one shot, you’re an SKK. “Now we know which ones were Riverbend’s,” Les was saying. “But the others could be anyone.” He shrugged with his eyes. “You were unaccounted for on most of those occasions, if you consider the exact time of death. You want them off the street as much as anyone. Maybe not as much as some of us who’ve been at it longer, but you’re getting the burn. You can’t avoid it.” And the bottom line: “The SKK could be a man posing as a woman, or could be a woman. Could be a cop. Could be you.” He paused to let it sink in. “Motive, opportunity, ability. You’re a suspect.” He said the words dispassionately then looked away. All in the line of duty. Cindy stared a moment—half dumfounded, half angry as hell—then gazed outside as a passing smatter of raindrops rolled across the car, her mind stalking answers as to why Les would ever think she could kill someone for any reason other than self-defense—even a serial killer. Finally, she chose to say: “I hope you’re just saying this allegorically, to put my...suspicions about you in perspective.” Les said, “Suspicions are just your investigative training working in harmonious conjunction with your intuitive impulses,” quoting his own manual, again. “We’re all suspects, Baker. The sooner you learn that, the sooner you solve the case.” “And the sooner life has no meaning, whatsoever,” Cindy countered. “Who said it had any to begin with?” Les said. “You’ve been doing this too long, Les,” Cindy said sourly. “You’re starting to believe your own bullshit.” Les shook his head. “I will have been doing it too long when the last SK’s been dead and in the ground 10 years and I’m still doing it. Until then...” “We’re all suspects.” Cindy said it, but she didn’t like it. After a few minutes, a female sheriffs deputy leaned into Les’s window. “We’re done here, Agent Moore. If you need anything, just call.” “Thank you, I will,” Les said. When she lingered, smiling over at Cindy, Les added, “I think we’ll just hang out a little longer. See if we can make sense of any of it.” “Good luck,” the tawny woman of thirty-two said with joking cynicism; then she headed off to make sure the rest of her team and the press got turned around okay, without rolling off or falling in. Cindy turned back, eyeballing the form-hugging brown department slacks which highlighted the woman’s workout-tight buns—then saw Les scoping out the same view in his sideview. “Was she hitting on you?” Cindy said, feeling a fever coming on, for sure—and the possible need to have a few words with this honey-streaked sheriffette. “I don’t think so,” Les said indifferently. “She had a ring.” Cindy hadn’t noticed. Now she looked back and saw the large stone glint in a passing slash of sunlight as the woman waved a News-Six van back toward the hardtop. How had Cindy missed that? Definitely a bug. They sat in silence for several minutes as the motorcade faded toward the highway and the city beyond. Larger drops were hitting the new Galaxy with solid thumps now, one at a time, each jagged splat the size of Cindy’s fist. Les broke the relative tranquility. “What if I was an SKK, Baker?” Broke it hard. Cindy’s brain locked up. Again! And she was getting damn tired of it. What should she say? What could she say? After a prolonged moment of doubt, she chose a simple but direct: “Are you?” “I asked first,” Les said. “I know you’ve thought about it.” Had she ever. “Well,” Cindy started off with a telling pause, “I wouldn’t like it. I don’t condone it. Don’t think I could ever do it myself. But if you were...” She chose her words with great care, just in case. “...I’d probably love you anyway. I just don’t think I’d want to know about it.” There, that wasn’t so hard. She had said it without emotion, clean and simple. But she was thinking: What the hell? Les allowed a pensive beat. Unrushed, he said, “What if you found out about it? Later, say?” “Are we leading up to a confession, here?” Cindy asked irritably. She didn’t need that shit; not now, not here. “No,” Les assured her. That helped. “Then I guess I’d have to keep it secret,” she said. “Might cost you your job,” Les pointed out. “If, say, Brinkman found out.” “Hell, if Brinkman found out, he’d probably recommend you for Deputy Assistant Director over himself!” “Nothing could ever make him that happy.” “He didn’t believe it anyway,” Cindy said, shrugging it off, thinking she would finally shock Les some in return, get him back. Les said, “But he told you to keep an eye on me, nevertheless.” He didn’t sound surprised at all, or even bothered by her admission of suggesting him as their UNSUB to their superior! “Yeah,” Cindy said, disheartened. Les dropped the Nagasaki: “Then he told me to keep an eye on you.” Cindy’s jaw dropped. Literally. Here it was again: one goddamned annoying bombshell after another. “He... when!” “Right after you talked to him and raised your...concerns.” But...”Why!” Unashamedly flabbergasted. Les said, “I told him I knew you suspected me. He said everyone’s a suspect. I agreed. Could be a smokescreen, I said. You could be our SKK. Wanna make it look like me, to keep the heat off yourself. So you tell Brinkman. He says it’s bullshit, but go ahead, keep an eye on me.” Les paused. “Then he calls me.” “He called you,” Cindy said as if restating such a horror out loud in her own words might somehow make it untrue, or at least make it sound untrue. It didn’t. “This is unbelievable,” she muttered. Rain on the roof now sounded like Tito Puente come back from the dead—angry. “He’s known me longer,” Les shrugged. “Better,” Cindy bristled. “You’re really saying better.” “I wouldn’t say that, no,” Les said. “He thinks he does. But, no.” Cindy felt betrayed, stupid, green—and definitely ill. It had to be the flu. Maybe meningitis. “Okay, so what,” she said with some attitude, “we’re watching each other now?” Les chuckled, seeming to almost enjoy that they had arrived at this conjectural standoff. “Let’s not get paranoid about it,” he said; then, “I’m just doing my job here, Baker. Same as you. Don’t waste your time worrying about me.” Rain was beating the car senseless. Twenty minutes later, what was left of the fast-moving squall hung high over the swamp, trailing sunlight sinking shafts of silver grace into the wetlands somewhere far off. It had past; the storm was over. They were still here. Feeling better—maybe it wasn’t a bug after all—Cindy sat staring silently out the windshield at the slowly rolling cumuli while Les watched several small ibis and a Giant Grey heron picking over the death site for abandoned parasites. Maggots. One died and one dined. You can’t stop it if you want to, Les was thinking. The notion was as depressing as it was voraciously honest. Finally, Cindy said, as if intuiting what Les was thinking, “He won’t get me, Les.” Les didn’t look over. He hadn’t thought Riverbend would get Marjorie and Melissa-Ann. How could he have thought that? They were a Lead Special Investigator’s wife and nearly grown daughter. He had trained them almost as well as he’d been trained himself. Marjorie carried a gun, a Ruger of course; Melissa-Ann carried pepper spray, two cans. How could Riverbend take both of them out of a busy, lighted parking lot with no sign of a struggle, no one having noticed anything—no consequence for the abominable acts that followed. Cindy wasn’t immune. Six-foot-six guys going two-eighty ended up in shallow graves next to their raped and mutilated girlfriends. Les had seen it. In Indiana, a cop and his wife had been hacked up and burned in their car in the middle of a town square at midnight. Why? Just so Riverbend could prove he was capable of pulling it off. No one was out of his reach: not a young, strong cop; not his wife; not Marjorie; not Melissa-Ann. Not Cindy. Les clutched his TASK partner’s hand tightly, wishing such sweet moments might never end, but understanding they must. It felt like standing at the edge of the universe, hands extended Sisyphus-like, feet braced, back aching, pushing for all he was worth, knowing that, sooner or later, Time would simply roll over them, just as it did everyone else. For, Time was the only real enemy, and Time was on Riverbend’s side. All he had to do was wait and Les would come to him. He had to. Then Time would stop. Finally, Les turned to her. Cyndra Lynn Baker was smart and beautiful; she was a dedicated agent with a great sense of humor and perfect breasts. He had never stood a chance. He knew it the first moment he saw her on that slippery slope outside Seattle, first heard that mouth in gear in Riverbend, where this all started—and where it would probably all end, someday. “I swim,” was all he said. “I know,” she said. “Cuban okay?” “Cuban’s great.” She slid closer. Then he said, “I ever tell you the reason I eat all the time is I’m hypoglycemic?” “No, but I wondered,” she said. “I am, too.” Les nodded and, holding Cindy close, wheeled out onto Highway 27 as the last drops of afternoon purgation fell over the Glades; and he tried not to think of the dead waitress’s butchered body, left out there in Cindy’s peacock teal evening dress. But he could think of nothing else. |
