16

Wednesday, July 13

Peter arrived with dinner balanced on top of a four-inch binder stuffed with papers. Lia took Viola’s leash and held the door for him.

“Who rang the bell? Viola?”

“I used my elbow.”

“Good thinking.” She leaned over and sniffed the bags. The dogs sat and whined. “You’ve all had your dinner—Chinese?”

“I figure you’ve got to be craving pasta after all these weeks without it. The chow fun is made with rice noodles, no wheat. We also have teriyaki beef, and shrimp with broccoli. All diet approved. I already ate your fortune cookie so you wouldn’t be tempted. It said you’re going to spend a romantic evening with a tall, dark, incredibly handsome man tonight.”

“Yum. Food sounds good, too. What’s the binder? Homework?”

“It’s Sarah’s murder book.”

“All that?”

“And a bag of chips. I need to spend some time with it this evening.”

“I can’t believe one murder generates that much paper.”

“I wish this one didn’t.”

Peter set his load down on the kitchen counter and unpacked the bags while Lia took dishes out of the cabinet. “This case is so crazy, it’s hard to see what’s really going on.” He took a plate, using two forks to load it with the skinny noodles on one half, then spooned beef and shrimp on the other side and handed it to Lia. He filled a second plate for himself and took a seat at the table.

The dogs sat, eyes glued to this entire process.

“What has you hung up?” Lia asked, ignoring them. Viola curled under Peter’s chair with her head on her paws and sighed. Honey padded away, grumbling. Chewy waited, ever hopeful for a dropped morsel.

Peter made a face, then speared a shrimp.

“That bad?”

“Where do I start?” Peter ticked off points on his fingers. “Since Sarah didn’t die during the attack, we can’t pinpoint when it happened. Our window of opportunity is more than 10 hours. That makes it hard to rule anyone out.

“The people with the most motive would be Leroy and his cabal of knitting librarians, but unless RV lady is a scam, Leroy is accounted for and none of those women are strong enough to get Sarah inside the float. Not unless they all ganged up on her, and I can’t see that. Even if I could, their time frames don’t align. And if it was a conspiracy, one of them would have cracked by now.

“We can’t identify the murder weapon. We thought it was some kind of horse halter, but we can’t match it with anything.

“If Sarah was drugged, we’ll never know because the most likely drugs had time to metabolize before we were able to get a blood sample.

“The ladies agreed to open their books for us, but there’s nothing there. Monthly payments to a variety of charities, expenses, and modest profits split among the partners.”

“What about the charities?” Lia asked, relenting and scratching Chewy’s head.

“All legit. A number of local rescue charities, all in existence for years, the ASPCA, the Humane Society …. The Doris Day Animal Foundation gets the biggest chunk.”

“Those are the folks who are upgrading the park.”

“Que Sera, Sera.”

“I wish I could help,” Lia said.

Peter gave her a stern look. “I’ll be much saner if you don’t.”

“I don’t go looking for trouble.”

“You don’t have to, Babe. Trouble scrawled your number on the bathroom wall. It and all its mullet-headed cousins come looking for you with drool soaking into their boots.”

“Not fair, Kentucky Boy. Nobody has tried to kill me lately.” Lia’s tone was determinedly light.

“No, they’ve just put you in line to be charged for obstruction of justice and accessory to a crime. And these are your friends. I just want you safe.”

Lia set down her chopsticks. “I won’t be tucked away in a closet, just to make life easier for you. Life isn’t about being safe. Life is about dealing with what’s in front of you. You and Asia keep telling me this. Do you expect me to turn my back on the people I love?”

“I’d like you to turn your back on this and put it behind you. Get back to your painting. Make another one of those garden things with Bailey. Crochet ear warmers. Anything so I don’t have to chase down another freak in the woods before he has a chance to rape you. Please?”

“How am I supposed to put it behind me if it’s all around me? If you bring it with you?” Lia flipped the cover of the murder book for emphasis. “You want us to live together. How does that work? Am I just supposed to put my brain on ‘Bimbo’ when you walk in the door? Are you going to turn the job off when you leave the station? I don’t think so.”

“God, Lia, I don’t want a fight.”

“Good. I don’t either. But think about what you’re asking, and consider how you would feel if I told you all my problems, then expected you to butt out.”

“These aren’t my problems, they’re my job and you aren’t a cop. And if you learned how to say ‘no’ to your friends, you’d get in a lot less trouble.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, if you could say no to people, you might feel comfortable enough with our relationship to stop pushing me away. You just want your little hole where you don’t have to deal with anyone, including me. I’m tired of it.”

“Wait a minute, Dourson, you just took a left turn here.”

“You want to make everyone happy, and you never stop to think about whether people have a right to ask you to put yourself in the situations you’ve been in.”

“Peter, my income comes from doing everything I can to make my clients happy. I like making people happy, and I’m good at it. I like making you happy, too. I see no problem with having my own place so I can have some balance.”

“Does it ever occur to you, that if you learned to say ‘no,’ you wouldn’t feel compelled to protect yourself by living alone?”

“Where is this coming from?”

“You say you love me, but you don’t want us to live together because you don’t want to lose yourself. You can’t lose yourself if you don’t give it away.”

“Did your granny stitch that on a sampler, Dourson?” Lia picked up her plate and dumped her dinner in the trash. She set the plate in the sink with the rest of the day’s dishes, turning her back to give herself distance. She ran water in the sink, using the activity to settle herself. Deep breaths, Anderson.

“Stay or go, whatever you want. But I need time to myself and I’m going into the studio.” Lia turned off the tap, abandoning the dishes.

“You can’t keep running away, Lia.”

“I’m not running away. You just dumped a bunch of stuff all over me and now I need time to think. I’m saying ‘no’ to continuing this conversation before one of us says something we can’t take back.”

Lia took her jar of dirty brush water into the kitchen and dumped it in the sink, now clear of dishes. Peter sat at the table, leaning on his elbows with both hands buried in his hair as he examined several color printouts.

Lia walked behind him, laying a hand on his shoulder as she looked down to see what he was so engrossed in.

“Truce?” she asked.

“Is that what you want?” Peter asked without looking up.

“I want you, Peter. I also want to make sure we don’t hurt each other in the process of working things out. I’m doing the best I can, but I have to do it in my own way. Can we put this aside for a few days? I promise we’ll get back to it.”

“You sure?” Peter shoved his chair back.

“Yeah.” She brushed the hair off his forehead. “Will you show me what you’re looking at?”

Together, the photographs documented the series of bruises that ringed Sarah’s throat. The light was different, somehow, revealing distinct impressions of objects. A braided rope. Parts of a large ring. An odd oblong shape made of thin parallel lines.

“These were taken under ultra-violet light? And that’s the weapon? This rope?” Lia asked.

“Yeah. It’s braided instead of twisted, and it looks like it has a ring on the end. When we saw that, Brent and I figured we had a break. It’s not ordinary, and that could focus our investigation. But it’s so not ordinary, we don’t know what it is.”

“And that oblong, what do you think it is?”

“At first we thought it was a footprint, but it’s too wide.”

“Why would they bother with the rope if they were going to step on her neck? Wouldn’t that be enough?”

“You’d think so. No defensive wounds, so she was probably drugged and they had all the time in the world. Whoever did it is strong, because there were no marks on her body or clothing from being dragged. That’s a crying shame. If she’d been dragged, we would have some transfer to work with.”

“If he carried her, wouldn’t you have fiber from his clothes?”

“Crime scene found some blue and green fibers. The color is too bright and cheerful for most men’s clothing. Looks like it came from something kids would wear.”

“So you’re looking for a child who can bench press 200 pounds and likes to play with ponies.”

“That about sums it up.”

Lia woke in the middle of the night with Peter spooned behind her. She couldn’t get the photos of Sarah’s neck out of her head. Restless, she left the bed, careful not to disturb Peter. She pulled on a robe and went back into the living room, Honey padding silently after her. The murder book lay open on the coffee table. She paged back until she found the photographs.

She picked up a drawing pad and pencil and swiftly reproduced Sarah’s neck and the marks from the murder weapon. Then she stared at her drawing, imagining the form suggested by the marks, joining the curved parts into a D-ring just an inch off the front of Sarah’s throat—no, it curved too much to be a D-ring, it had to be round—circling round and round with her pencil to give it weight, defining the gap on one side of the ring that lacked the braid texture, shading the rope to make it appear round.

The gaps in the impression of the ring on Sarah’s skin, on one side it would be some smooth material—leather maybe, or plastic—where the rope attached, on the other side, the braid pattern continued inside the circle where the rope slid under the ring and came up through the center.

She imagined the hand pulling the rope through the ring and to the right. Someone would normally hold down the left side that was connected to the ring so they could pull it tighter, but the mark wasn’t a handprint.

Instead there were parallel lines. They started at the base of Sarah’s throat and leaned left, with the lines perpendicular to an axis about 40 degrees off vertical. The lines were too wide for a shoe, the proportions were wrong. Peter was right about that. Where she could see an edge, it was straight, not curved like a shoe print would be.

Peter said they removed blue and green fibers from the body. She grabbed a case of Prismacolor pencils and gave the rope a candy cane pattern. She chose a dark grey pencil and filled in the odd shape with the parallel lines.

Lia looked at the clock. 3:15 a.m. Drowsy now, she closed her eyes to slits and opened herself to suggestion. When it was 3:22 and no visions were visited upon her, she closed the pad and put it away. She and Honey returned to bed. Peter had rolled onto his other side. She curled up against his back and sent the image to the back of her mind. Something was niggling at her. Pursuing it would chase it away. She would let it simmer as long as it needed. When it boiled over, she would know.