“What you got up there?” Sammy yells from the bottom of the pull-down plywood stairs. “Want me to come up?”
“No need and there’s no room,” Win says, looking down through the opening at the top of Sammy’s graying head. “Doesn’t look like anybody’s been staying here, working here. Or if they were, they moved out and cleaned up pretty well. For sure, someone or maybe more than one person has been walking around.”
Win pulls a pair of latex gloves out of a pocket, puts them on, starts opening drawers, all of them. He gets down on his hands and knees, looks under the dresser, looks under the bed, something telling him to look everywhere, not sure what for or why except that if someone has been in and out of the apartment, obviously since it was cleaned and vacuumed last, then why? And who pried open the locked door downstairs? Did someone come here after Lamont was almost murdered, and if so, what was the person looking for? He opens a closet, opens cabinets under the sinks in the kitchenette and the bathroom, stands in the middle of the living room, looks around some more, his attention wandering to the oven. He walks to it and opens the door.
On the bottom rack is a thick manila envelope with the handwritten address of the DA’s office and a Knoxville return address, lots of stamps pasted on crooked, hastily, more postage than needed.
“Jesus Christ,” he says.
The envelope has been slit open, and he looks at the letter opener on the desk, the one that reminds him of a dagger. He pulls out a thick case file bound with rubber bands.
“You’re shittin’ me!” he exclaims.
Sammy’s feet sound on the pull-down stairs.
“The case. She’s had it here all along.” Then he’s not so sure. “Or someone has.”
“Huh?” Sammy’s baffled face appears in the opening.
“The Finlay case file.”
Sammy holds on to a rope railing, doesn’t climb up any farther, says, “Huh?” again.
Win holds up the file, says, “She’s had it for three damn months. Since before I started the Academy, before she’d even told me I was going. Christ.”
“That doesn’t make sense. If Knoxville PD sent it to her, wouldn’t they have mentioned that when you started looking for it?”
“No name.” Win is reading the label again. “Just the address, which I don’t recognize. Postmark June tenth. Zip code’s 37921, the Western Avenue — Middlebrook Pike area. Hold on.”
He calls Sykes, gets his answer, goes calm the way he does when everything is unraveling. The return address is Jimmy Barber’s.
“Looks like his Roller Derby wife dug in the basement long before you did,” Win says to Sykes. “Sent the Finlay file up here where it’s been hiding in an oven.”
“A what? The bitch lied to me!”
“That depends. Did you ever tell her exactly what you were looking for?” Win asks.
Silence.
“Sykes? You there? Did you tell her?”
“Well, not exactly,” she says.
At half past two, he parks Nana’s old Buick behind her house, can see her wind chimes in daylight, their long, hollow tubes moving in the trees and from the eaves and not quite as magical as they are at night.
Another car is parked near the basketball hoop, almost in the bushes, an old red Miata. He needs a landline and right now his apartment seems like a bad idea. He has a feeling about it and has decided to heed it, wouldn’t be far-fetched to suppose cops or someone who pries open locks might be patrolling his neighborhood. He knocks, then walks in through the back door, into the kitchen, where Nana sits across from a distraught young woman who is cutting the deck of tarot cards into three stacks. Nana has made hot tea, a house specialty, with sticks of cinnamon and fresh slivers of lemon peel. He notices a jar of Tennessee honey on the counter, a spoon nearby.
“Guess what we tried, my darling,” Nana says to him, reaching for a card. “Your special honey made by joyful bees. This is Suzy. We’re taking care of that husband of hers who thinks he doesn’t have to abide by the restraining order.”
“He been arrested?” Win asks Suzy, in her twenties, delicate-looking, face puffy from crying.
“My boy’s a detective,” Nana proudly says, sipping her tea as nails click and Miss Dog wanders in.
Win sits on the floor, starts petting her, and she wants her tummy scratched, and Suzy is saying, “Twice. Don’t do any good. Matt just bails himself out, shows up like last night at my mama’s house, waiting behind the hedge, and gets in my face as I’m getting out of the car. He’ll kill me. I know it. People don’t understand.”
“We’ll see about that,” Nana warns.
Win asks her where her mama lives, notices Miss Dog is looking remarkably improved. Her sightless eyes seem full of light. She seems to be smiling.
“Just down the road,” Suzy tells him with a question in her voice. “You should know.” She looks at Miss Dog.
He gets it. Suzy’s mother is Miss Dog’s owner. That figures. “Miss Dog’s not going anywhere,” he says, and that’s that.
“I don’t care, won’t say a word. Mama’s awful to her. Matt’s worse. I’ve been telling her the same thing you have. She’s gonna get run over by a car.”
“Miss Dog’s doing just fine,” Nana says. “She slept in my bed last night with both the cats.”
“So Mama doesn’t protect you from Matt.” Win gets off the floor.
“Nothing she can do. He cruises past her house all he wants. Walks right in if he wants. She doesn’t do anything.”
Win heads into the living room to use the phone. He sits among his grandmother’s crystals and mystical clutter and asks to speak to Dr. Reid, a geneticist who works for the DNA lab in California that is analyzing the bloody clothing in the Finlay case. He’s told Dr. Reid is on a conference call, can get back with Win in half an hour, and he walks out of the house, starts walking toward Miss Dog’s house, her former house. He’s seen Matt before, pretty sure of it, small, fat, lots of tattoos, the type to be an abusive bully.
His cell phone rings. Sykes.
“Don’t bother me. I’m about to get into a fight,” he says.
“I’ll make this quick, then.”
“No sense of humor today?”
“Well, I didn’t want to tell you. But if you and me aren’t back in class by Monday, we’re getting kicked out of the Academy.”
It will disappoint her more than it will disappoint him. The Massachusetts State Police has its own crime scene investigators, doesn’t need Win out there gathering evidence himself, and he doesn’t give a damn about being director of the crime labs or anything else at the moment. It enters his mind that maybe he’s lost his enthusiasm because he suspects the only reason he was sent down South to school was to set him up to work the Finlay case, to position him for selfish, political, and, at this point, unknown purposes. And he’s no longer sure who is behind what.
“Win?” Sykes is asking.
The house is in sight, about a block up ahead on the left, a white Chevy truck in the drive.
“Don’t worry,” Win says. “I’ll take care of it.”
“You can’t take care of it! I’m going to be in so much trouble with the TBI, probably get fired. I wish you wouldn’t keep saying you’ll fix something you can’t, Win!”
“I told you I’m going to take care of it,” he says, walking faster as Matt emerges from the back of the house, heading to the pickup truck, that brazen, stupid loser.
“I should tell you the other thing,” Sykes says dejectedly. “I checked with Ms. Trailer-Park Barber. Soused again, by the way. And you were right.”