“So there’s no military school?”
“There’s no military school.”
Matthew cracked a smile. “Are you crying, Mom?”
“Maybe a little.”
“I think I’m going to, too. But I’m happy.”
“Look, just give me a hug, and then get the hell out of here, okay?”
The boy and his mother threw their arms around one another again. Then he grabbed his coat and disappeared out the back door of the house, hopped the fence, and was gone.
A knock at the door again.
“I thought you’d left, Detective,” Keisha said. She noticed the unmarked car had moved ahead far enough to allow Kirk to leave in his truck. But the bag of pizza trash was still sitting on the driveway.
They’ll figure out what pizza place it’s all from. They’ll go there, search the Dumpster.
“I’d like to speak with your son,” Wedmore said.
“Matthew’s not here.”
Wedmore looked surprised. “I didn’t see him come out of the house.”
“He went out the back. He’s gone to see a friend.”
“Which friend?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
“One of the friends he had over for his pizza party?”
Keisha nodded. “Possibly.”
“When was this party?” the detective asked.
“Just in the last few days. Yesterday? No, the day before I think it was. Did Kirk take off?”
“He did. Said he still had some errands to run, other than going to the dump. He must be quite the neat freak, wanting to make a trip to the dump to drop off a single bag of trash from a pizza party.”
Keisha said nothing while the detective studied her. Wedmore was thinking something, Keisha could tell. Plotting her next move.
Finally the detective said, “You have a nice day, Ms. Ceylon.” She let herself out, grabbed the bag of trash as she passed it, dropped it into the trunk of her unmarked car, and drove off.
Keisha closed the door and half stumbled back into her house. She went down the hall, into her son’s room, and collapsed on his bed. She pulled his pillow into her face and rolled her body into a ball, comforting herself with the scent of him.
Kirk, that son of a bitch, she thought. Telling her son she was going to send him away. She could only begin to imagine the thoughts that must have been going through Matthew’s head. What kind of man would put that fear into a child?
Of all the things he’d done, this was the worst.
She couldn’t allow the anger she felt for this man to overtake her. She needed to keep a clear head, to figure out what Wedmore might do next and what, if anything, she could do to protect herself.
Was it possible Rona Wedmore was going to return with a search warrant? Maybe bring along a team of CSI — type people, except they wouldn’t have fabulous hair and be dressed in the coolest clothes. They’d be in white suits that made them look like spacemen, and they’d very likely have some hi-tech gadget that would reveal blood that was invisible to the naked eye.
Keisha hoped she and Kirk had done a thorough enough job cleaning the house. If they’d got rid of all the blood, she should be in the clear on that No, there were other things to get rid of.
The money. She’d kept the cash Garfield had given her. Tucked it behind the toilet paper under the bathroom sink. Was there any blood on it? Wasn’t that something she’d meant to check later? Before Gail showed up, and she was dragged back into that house of horrors?
She swung her legs off the bed, started off in the direction of the bathroom.
The phone rang.
Keisha wanted to ignore it, but thought it might be Matthew. She ran for her bedroom and picked up the extension on an old phone that did not have call display.
“Hello?”
“Keisha, it’s Gail.”
“Oh. Yes, Gail?”
“That lady detective? She got me all confused.”
Keisha closed her eyes tiredly. “Yeah. About my card.”
“That’s right!”
“She was here a few minutes ago.”
“I told her you’d given me one of your cards, and that somewhere along the line I must have passed it on to Wendell, but then she started asking me when this all came up, and I told her you mentioned it to me this morning, and-”
“I know, I know.”
“And the other thing I called about,” Gail said hesitantly, “was if, since you got back home, was, you know, if…”
“If something comes to me,” Keisha said, “I’ll call you immediately.”
“Okay, that’s fine. Listen, I have to go. There’s family to call, I’m going to have to get in touch with the funeral home and-”
“Gail, I have to go.”
Keisha replaced the receiver in its cradle and was about to turn away when the phone rang again, so quickly it made her jump.
She snatched up the receiver before the first ring had finished and said, “Gail, please, I can’t talk-”
“Hey,” Kirk said. “It’s me.”
You told my son I was going to get rid of him.
They were the first words that came into her head, but what she said aloud was, “What?”
“I got good news.”
She found that hard to believe, but summoned the energy to ask what it was just the same.
“I went back.”
“Back where?”
“I got the bag. The right bag. I parked next door again, snuck over, opened the bin when there was no one around, and got it. I peeked inside, saw the clothes, made sure, right? I figured, that bitch cop, when she saw the pizza, she might start sniffing around at pizza places all over, you know, and-”
“Tell me you’re not bringing it home.”
“Jeez, Keesh, I’m not an idiot. I already got rid of it. In a Dumpster out back of a different plaza blocks away. And no one saw me this time. That’s good, right?”
“Yeah,” she said weakly, afraid to feel encouraged. “That’s good.”
It was, she conceded to herself, welcome news. If the police didn’t find the clothes, and if they didn’t turn up any blood in the house or the car, she might-just might-get through this.
So long as they didn’t show up at the door in the next five seconds to search the house.
“So, whaddya say now about a little celebration tonight? You me and the li’l fucker?”
The brief sense of relief she’d felt was displaced by hatred and contempt.
“We’ll see,” she said.
“Be home in a bit.” He ended the call.
“Finally,” she said, and strode out of her bedroom. She was swinging open the door of the cabinet below the bathroom sink when she was interrupted again.
This time, a knock at the door.
“No,” she said. “Please no.”
It seemed too soon for Wedmore to have returned with a warrant and a forensics team, but Keisha imagined the police could move quickly when they wanted to.
She swung open the door, expecting the worst.
And in a way, that was what she got. But it was not Rona Wedmore standing there on the front step, grinning at her.
It was Justin.
Parked at the curb was his stepfather’s Range Rover, but there was so sign of Dwayne Taggart.
“Hey,” Justin said. “I figured out another way to make a little more money, and I wanted to tell you about it.”
Thirty-one
“Not a good time, Justin,” Keisha said, blocking the door. The kid had always given her the creeps, but there was something about the grin on his face now that was particularly unsettling.
“Oh, I really think you’re going to want to hear this,” he said, his hands shoved into the front pockets of his jeans, his shoulders hunched, trying to fight off the cold in nothing more than a light sports jacket and sneakers. “Let me come in and I’ll tell you about it.”
“No,” she said, barring the door.
“Seriously? You don’t even know what I’ve got to say.”
“Justin, go away.”
“You look really stressed out, Keisha. Everything okay?” There was nothing in his expression that suggested empathy. He looked-was this possible? — mischievous.
“I haven’t had a very good day,” she said.