40

After three days in the hospital, Susan was more than ready to go home. While the tornado was roaring into Hampstead, an ambulance was screaming to the emergency room. The twister touched down in two places, uprooted trees, flattened houses, twisted cars, and downed power lines. Eight people injured, two seriously, fortunately no deaths. While George and Parkhurst dealt with the aftermath, she languished in a hospital bed.

Dr. Sheffield snapped on latex gloves and eased the bandages from the wound on her left hip. “Looking good,” he said.

“Easy for you to say.” Lying on her right side, she craned her neck to see what damage Ida’s bullet had done.

“No signs of infection.” Doctor Sheffield prodded and squeezed and tapped. “You’re fortunate the bullet missed the femur.”

She gritted her teeth as pain zinged through her entire left side. He dropped bloody bandages in the hazardous material receptacle, applied clean gauze, and taped it securely. She felt better having the wound covered up.

“Another day and you should be able to go home.

Susan looked up at him. “I need to leave now.”

“Another day,” he repeated. “To make sure you don’t do any more damage to that leg. That you stay off of it and keep it dry.”

Susan opened her mouth to protest, then said, “How’s Cary Black?”

“Feeling miserable, but coming along.”

“I need to question her.”

Head lowered, he peered at her, then gave a short nod. “Okay. You can have a few minutes.” He paused to make sure she understood. “If she gets agitated, you’ll have to stop.”

He got busy scribbling orders on the chart. “You lost a lot of blood. We need to keep an eye on you.”

“I need to get back to work.”

He said no, she said yes, they argued. Finally, despite her weakened condition, she managed to convince him to discharge her. Flush with success, she rolled out of bed and nearly screamed at the pain. She picked up the phone, got an outside line, and asked Hazel to send her Parkhurst. A nurse brought her a set of scrubs and a pair of crutches. By the time she got the scrubs on, Parkhurst was striding in with a bouquet the size of Montana.

“What were you thinking?” He banged the vase down on the bedside table.

“That it was time to get out of here.”

“You need rest.” He crossed his arms.

“There’s no rest in hospitals. They’re loud. Someone is always drawing blood. They send in the kitchen help for the practice.” With a great deal of awkwardness that necessitated much muttered cursing, Susan managed to get herself and the crutches to the elevator. Parkhurst thrust the flowers at a nurse, told her to keep them, and followed Susan.

In the second-floor room, Cary lay motionless, eyes closed, bruises vivid purple against her pallor. A nurse adjusted the clear plastic tubing sending oxygen to her nose and hung a new bag of fluid on the IV stand. She patted Cary’s hand, gave Susan a cautionary look, and left.

“Cary Black? I’m Susan Wren, police chief. This is Lieutenant Parkhurst.”

Cary looked so battered and frail, Susan wondered what a defense attorney could do with any statement she might give. Susan hobbled to the chair balanced on her good leg, propped the crutches against the wall, and dropped to the seat. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

“What questions?”

Susan knew Osey had Mirandized her, but she did it again, then said, “Do you understand?”

Cary pushed herself higher in the bed. “Am I being arrested?”

“We’re just asking questions.” Parkhurst stood inside the doorway.

“Was it Kelby in the silo?”

“It appears so.” Susan rubbed the top of her good leg in a failed attempt to ease the pain in the injured one.

“What happened?”

“We’re working on that. How well did you know Kelby Oliver?”

“I didn’t know her. I never even met her.”

“You were pretending to be her. Living in her house. Using her ID, her money.”

Cary scrunched in on herself. “Was she murdered?”

“We don’t know that yet.” Susan wondered where the woman’s husband was. He came to see her when she was first brought in, but the visit seemed to cause so much stress the doctor wrote orders he shouldn’t be allowed back. Nobody’d seen him since. He checked out of the motel he’d been staying in, and so far they’d been unable to locate him. Had he gone home?

“Where is Joe Farmer?” Cary had the taut, skin-too-tight look of someone who’d recently lost weight.

“He’s been arrested.” Right now, he was in a cell talking to his dead daughter, crying and carrying on, apologizing all over the place because he’d let her down, was unable to save her from the sicko who hurt her. Susan didn’t know what would happen with him. Padded cell, most likely. He’d obviously slipped off into the ether somewhere.

“He came to the house. He had a gun and…” Cary related what had happened, but it was apparent there were gaps in the memory, or she deliberately left a lot out.

“Why does seeing your husband upset you?”

A small sound, like a resigned breath. “If he knew where I was, he’d kill me.”

“Your husband.” Susan loaded the two words with sarcasm, but years of being a cop made her aware of the dynamics in a “battered wife, abusive husband” situation. They needed to double their efforts to find him.

“How did she—Kelby—die?”

An attempt to sound innocent by showing she didn’t know the manner of death? “Grain pressed against her chest so she couldn’t take a breath. She suffocated.”

“Am I a suspect?”

“Not at this time.” This was a lie. Cary Black was their best suspect.

“Maybe…” Cary paused, like she had to search around in her head for the words. “Maybe Joe Farmer pushed her in there. And when he saw me maybe he thought she got out somehow.”

Was that possible, Susan wondered. “How did you know it was safe to use Kelby Oliver’s name?”

“I don’t think I want to answer any more questions,” Cary said. “I’m very tired. Please leave.”

Susan looked at Parkhurst, he raised an eyebrow.

Out in the hallway, he said, “You didn’t arrest her.”

“We don’t have enough evidence.”

He started counting off on his fingers. She was living in the dead woman’s house, using her name, using her money, using her ID, writing checks on her account. How could she expect to get away with that unless she knew Kelby Oliver was dead? And she knew the woman was dead because she killed her.

Susan nodded at all that. “Let’s talk with the DA, see what he thinks.”

“Right. Let’s get out of here.”

“There’s something I have to do first. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

She took the elevator up a floor and went to a room at the end of the corridor. Jen lay on the white sheets unmoving, looking small and blank. Somebody, probably her mother, had pinned a pink bow in her hair. She would hate it. All the fire and spirit and wide-eyed eagerness, all the special qualities that made Jen such a neat individual were gone. All that was left was the hiss and thunk of the respirator keeping air in her lungs.

Susan picked up her hand, surprised at the warmth. Somehow she’d expected it to be icy cold, but it was warm and pink, and completely flaccid. She curled Jen’s fingers around her own, held them a moment, then put Jen’s hand back on the bed. From the box on the bedside table, Susan tore out a tissue, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose. She met Parkhurst and hobbled out to the Bronco. At home, she hobbled inside.

“Yank the phones,” he said. “Take your drugs and crawl in bed. I’ll come back later with soup.”

“A cane would be more useful.” She swallowed the magic pain pills and went to bed, drifted in and out, dreamed about corpses on the autopsy table. Sometimes her own face looked up at her, sometimes Jen, sometimes a stranger, sometimes the badly decomposed woman from the silo. What had happened to her?

Yellow, a voice explained. The voice was familiar. Whose was it? She slept fitfully, dreamed, heard the voice again. Ah, she thought, that’s it, that’s—

Pounding at the door shattered the dream. She woke.