BUT BEFORE JULIA could put her part of the plan into action, she had to deal with Mack Coates, with whom she hoped to fare better than she had with Hayes.
Her mission with Coates was simpler. Maybe she’d get information from him. Maybe not. But for sure, she’d issue a warning.
Finding him would be easy, although the timing was tricky. A quick scan of his file, whose thickness rivaled that of Ray’s, informed her that Mack’s two business interests, women and drugs, converged at the Mother Lode, a dingy strip club in an industrial area on the edge of town. Julia had her own share of clients who’d run afoul of the law there, although she sometimes wondered if the club’s reliable appearance in affidavits owed more to the fact that the cops preferred arresting people there over a less entertaining locale.
Her best chance at finding Mack there was late at night, when things would be in full swing. But even when Beverly was still babysitting on a regular basis, dropping Calvin off at nine at night would have raised her meticulously plucked and penciled eyebrows. Julia would have to slip in during the scant hour between leaving work and picking up Calvin at after-school care.
She crossed her fingers, hoping for a Friday evening after-work crowd, and headed for the Mother Lode.
The club owed its name and existence to Duck Creek’s silver mining history. It stayed true to its roots, resisting any urge to remake itself as a “gentleman’s club” even as Duck Creek papered over its gritty, blue-collar history in its headlong transition into a ski resort whose service industry jobs paid a fraction of the miners’ union wages. Most of the Mother Lode’s green paint had flaked off the cinder-block facade, and something was wrong with the neon in the two blinking babes in bikinis who bumped and ground against its sign. They buzzed and fizzed, their bright-red outlines intermittently going dark.
Julia wrenched her attention away from the sad sign and forced it to the task at hand, pushing through the door and into a world of eardrum-busting darkness. Sir Mix-A-Lot? Really?
A half-dozen men sat widely spaced along a bar, eyes trained on a small stage where a weak spotlight highlighted a woman shaking a butt that likely wouldn’t have occasioned a second glance from Mix-A-Lot. Then the woman grasped the pole and somehow flipped upside down and spun in an undulating maneuver that left Julia feeling both impressed and slightly seasick.
“Hey. No looking for free.”
Julia hadn’t noticed the woman behind the bar. Now she wondered how she’d missed her. Like the woman onstage, she wore a G-string so minuscule that Julia winced at the thought of all that waxing.
Julia shouted above the music. “I’m looking for Mack.”
The men at the bar glanced back toward her, ascertaining that she was dressed and that she wasn’t anyone’s wife, and ignored her. The dancer flubbed a move and tumbled to the stage.
The men guffawed. She scrambled to her feet, found her balance on her clear plastic platform heels, and shot Julia a look that sent Julia fumbling in her purse for a five-dollar bill.
She handed it to the bartender. “For her,” she nodded toward the stage.
The bartender took it and waited. Julia found another five, thought twice, and switched it out for a twenty. “And for you.”
The woman jutted her chin toward a room in the back. Julia thought again of the deserted playground. Of Calvin in the tub, twisting his face to mime Mack’s scarred lips. That was all it took.
She strode across the sticky floor and banged into the room. Mack sat at a metal desk, giving her a rare height advantage. Better yet, his chair was wheeled, which made it easy for her to slam it against the wall when she grabbed him by the collar.
Shock flashed across his features before they assumed their characteristic sneer. “You’re about to be very sorry,” he began, half rising from the chair.
Julia shoved him back down.
“Not half as sorry as you’ll be if you go near my child again.”
He gave her that grin, flicking his scar with his tongue. “He ran to me.”
Julia had always looked askance at so-called crimes of passion. Really, how hard could it be to drop the gun, loosen the fingers around the throat, lower the arm holding the knife?
Impossible, she now knew as she grasped the chair’s arms and smashed it again into the wall, harder this time.
“Knock that nasty shit off. Show me that tongue again and I’ll rip it from your throat.”
Where had that come from? Julia was one step away from the misdemeanor assault line, if she hadn’t already crossed it.
Phrases floated through her mind. Malicious intimidation. Harassment. Terroristic threats. Sanity belatedly reappeared.
Julia spun on her heel and got the hell out of the Mother Lode.
If Mack was her stalker, surely he’d strike again after her shenanigans at the Mother Lode.
She spent a restless weekend with an unnervingly silent phone in hand, clicking the app for her security cameras, which showed only a ragged-eared tomcat wisely backing off from a brief confrontation with a skunk.
Monday morning meant putting in motion her part of Marie’s plan. It involved a return trip to the medical examiner.
Maybe she was imagining things, but Pinkham had always seemed uneasy about the investigations into Duck Creek’s recent deaths.
Julia found Pinkham at her desk instead of wrist deep in a cadaver, which was where she’d rather be, she informed Julia.
“Paperwork,” she said, glaring at her computer screen before swiveling to face Julia. “It’s the bane of my existence. You understand I deal in science, right? Facts. And yet the minute I finish a report, you guys—not one of you a scientist—start trying to pick it apart.”
“With precious little success,” Julia reminded her. “Which is why I’m here today.”
Thus mollified, Pinkham relaxed, her inky brows unknotting, lips curving into a slight, sanguine smile. “And why is that? Coffee? I just made fresh.”
“Sure.”
Pinkham poured from a coffeemaker within easy reach and handed the mug to Julia. If it’s breathing, we’re leaving, it read.
Julia took a careful sip, half expecting the tang of blood. Pinkham liked her coffee strong. She took a bigger sip.
“I’m just checking on the most recent death. Craig Thompson.”
Pinkham quirked an eyebrow.
“Thought you were off the case.”
Julia choked on her coffee. “News travels fast,” she said when she’d recovered.
“So …”
“Call me curious.”
“Right.” Having established her skepticism, Pinkham delivered the basics. “Head injury, but that’s not what killed him.”
Julia sat up. Finally, something different.
“Are you going to tell me?”
“Given the alcohol in his system, it’s possible he’d have died of exposure before he recovered consciousness from the blow to his head. But there was water in his lungs. He was alive when he fell into the creek. Or when someone put him in it.”
Julia very much hoped Craig Thompson had stayed unconscious, that his last few moments hadn’t involved an awareness of a battle he couldn’t win. She turned to rote questions to steady herself.
“Any drugs in his system?”
“The usual suspects. Weed, meth.”
She thought yet again of the bruise on Ray’s arm.
“Nothing IV?” she persisted. “Can you inject meth?”
“You can. But somebody who does that is usually pretty far gone. Craig Thompson may have used once in a while, but I doubt he was a hard-core addict to anything beyond his alcoholism. Despite what the billboards tell you”—their state’s anti-meth campaign featured a series of billboards, each more lurid than the last—“it’s possible to use without become immediately addicted. Assuming there’s an arrest, it’ll come up at trial, or at the sentencing hearing—that is, if the charges aren’t dismissed. Just like in the case involving Mary Brannigan.”
Julia nearly choked again. It would have been unprofessional for Pinkham to come right out and say she had doubts about Ray’s guilt. But the fact that the medical examiner was entertaining her questions at all told her what she needed to know.
She finished her coffee, slid the mug back across the desk, and rose.
They smiled bleak understanding at one another. Julia left without saying good-bye.
She’d left it up to Marie to find a case she could take to the press.
She figured it would take a few days, given that most of her cases were of the low-level variety, discouraging in their banality.
But Marie waved a file as soon as she walked in the door.
“Walker Bennett,” she announced.
Julia shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“There’s no reason it would. He was Dave Pearson’s case.” She named a public defender who’d recently found a job in private practice. He’d had to move two states away, but the raise involved would allow him to buy his first home at the age of forty, he’d told his colleagues with the stunned look of one who’d just won the lottery.
“Bennett’s got a hearing in a couple of weeks for nonpayment of fines. Listen to this. Dude’s got nothing but municipal citations for things like loitering, along with a couple of drunk and disorderlies, the usual. But he’s homeless, sort of—I think he’s couch surfed all over town—and doesn’t have an address and can’t afford a phone. He uses the public computers at the libraries, but still, he misses the notices for his court appearances, and every time he doesn’t show up, his fines double. He does odd jobs for under-the-table cash, but he’s on the hook for a couple grand by now, and facing a jail sentence because of it, which means he won’t be able to work to get the money to pay off the fines, let alone eat or save up on a deposit for a place to live—you get the picture.”
Julia got it. She could have papered her office walls with similar pictures.
She held out her hand for the file and let out a sigh of relief when she saw Bennett’s mug. He was youngish, early thirties, past the age when people tended to refer to men as thugs but not so old that he’d started losing teeth, accumulating scars, or acquiring the cauliflower ears and veined noses of drunken brawlers, the occupational hazards that signaled life on the margins.
He didn’t sport the facial and neck tattoos that people found so off-putting, and he didn’t have any violent crimes in his file. Best of all, he didn’t have any DUIs. While their state had what in Julia’s mind was a ridiculous tolerance for drinking and driving, people frowned on repeat offenders.
“Where is he now?”
“Where do you think? In jail, awaiting his hearing.”
Julia clicked on her phone’s calendar and started to log in a date to interview. She stopped and looked at Marie.
“Tell you what. Why don’t you talk with him? Make sure he’s the guy we want for this.”
Spring was finally making itself felt in Duck Creek, the creek rising higher every day, trees budding, the sun intermittently shoving its way through the lingering dark clouds, and the temperature creeping upward to almost warm.
But Julia could have sworn that it took a ten-degree jump due solely to the wattage of Marie’s smile.