It took a moment for the balance of his comment to sink in. When it finally did, I almost stuttered my next question. “Just a second ago you said you were keeping me as far from this as possible. Did I miss something here?”
“Missin’? No. Denyin’? Yeah, prob’ly. Gimme a break, I know how ya’ are.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You ain’t serious? I gotta spell it out for ya’?”
“Please.”
He huffed out a heavy sigh then launched into an explanation, “It means, number one, less than forty-eight hours ago ya’ just showed up at a crime scene right out of the blue, so somethin’ tells me ya’ just might do it again.” He paused as he hooked the van through a quick right turn and down the ramp onto the highway. “And number two, ya’ handed me a piece of paper with Debbie Schaeffer’s handwritin’ all over it that ya’ say ya’ wrote yourself. So, whether I like it or not, you’re already connected to all of this by some of that weird ass Twilight Zone shit.
“Believe me, this is a decision I did not wanna make,” he continued, “but the way I got it figured, I have two choices. Either I keep ya’ as isolated as possible and not even let ya’ know what’s goin’ on; or, I go ahead and bring ya’ in on it right from the git’go and try ta’ keep your involvement to a minimum.
“Considerin’ what you’ve already done and what I’ve seen ya’ do in the past, I doubt the first choice has any chance of workin’-period. That leaves me with nothin’ but option two. So I figure if I can exert some control over the contact you have with this case, then maybe ya’ won’t go off into la-la land on me.”
“That’s a pretty big maybe,” I told him. “I don’t exactly have control over it myself.”
“That’s why I want Felicity ta’ meet us,” he explained. “I want ‘er there with ya’ every goddamned second.”
“She might not have that much control over it either.” I shook my head at the comment. “Besides, you know she’s not going to be happy about this.”
“Whaddaya mean ‘not happy’?” he returned. “She’s gonna be freakin’ mad as hell. I just hope she leaves me some hair.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” I told him. “So what are you going to do? Sneak me in and out of my back door?”
“If I hafta.”
“You know, they’ll get to me eventually.”
“As long as that eventually is after it’s all over and they’ve got no reason to put the spotlight on ya’, then I’m okay with it, ‘cause ya’ won’t be interesting to ‘em anymore.”
“I don’t think we’ll be that lucky,” I sighed, “but I do appreciate the effort.”
“Not a prob, Kemosabe.”
Having dispensed with my confusion over the immediacy of the situation, I moved on to the next point that needed clarification for me. “So how did you make this connection to begin with?”
“Don’t you watch the news, Row? Old dude out pickin’ up aluminum cans stumbled across a body wrapped up in a plastic drop cloth this morning,” he explained. “What was left of a body anyway-she’d been there for a while. M.E. says a couple of months probably.
“She was stuffed back up in the brush on a kinda isolated section of Three Sixty-Seven on the way ta’ the Clark Bridge. Best guess is that’s why she didn’t get found until now.”
Disgusting visions of a corpse left unattended for the better part of two months flitted through my head. Having never witnessed such a thing before in real life, the mental picture was an imagining based on remembrances of Hollywood special effects. The image was more than enough to turn my stomach, and I was afraid that the real thing might be far worse than anything I could conjure in my head.
I blinked back the imagining and willed away the sudden churning in my gut. “If she’d been out there that long, how’d you identify her so quickly?”
“We had our suspicions based on size, clothing, all that,” he explained, “but positive ID came this afternoon from matching dental records. They were already on hand at the coroner’s office from a check on another Jane Doe, so there was no waitin’.”
“Okay, but all this still doesn’t answer my first question. How did you make the connection with the handwriting?”
“Once this case went from a missin’ person to a homicide and got turned over to the MCS, the investigation went in an entirely different direction.
“The real deal is that most of the time the victim knows the killer. It’s standard procedure to look for anything in the personal effects that could give us a handle on who might’ve done it. So we spent part of the afternoon back at her parents’ house goin’ over everything in ‘er bedroom. The minute I looked in ‘er notebooks and saw that curly-q thing on ‘er I’s, I knew. I had the graphologist in the crime lab verify it, but Jeezus, I friggin’ already knew.”
“Did you find anything else worthwhile?” I asked solemnly.
“Not really. We got a coupl’a leads ta’ run down, but I don’t think they’ll go anywhere.”
“So if you’re pulling me in on this, why are we going to your house instead of the morgue or a crime scene or something?”
“Because right now I just wanna keep ya’ out of the spotlight while I figure out what ta’ do,” Ben answered. “Not to mention gettin’ Firehair on board before I go any further with this.”
“Have you figured out how you’re going to do that yet?”
“I was thinkin’ I might start with beggin’ ‘er not ta’ kill me.”
“What happened to the promise you made me, then?” Felicity asked in a carefully measured cadence that audibly displayed the weakening foundation of her composure. Her outrage was more than palpable; it was literally filling the room with tension, and at the moment, she was ground zero to what I’m certain was soon to be a catastrophic explosion of anger.
The three of us were seated around a small dining table that occupied one wall of Ben’s kitchen at the rear of his house. Felicity was directly across from Ben, and I had taken up residence next to her.
My friend had at least been farsighted enough to send his wife and young son out to a local pizza parlor before my wife had arrived. He was expecting the worst, and it was looking very much like he was going to get it.
What had been a guarded smile on my wife’s lips when she first walked in had morphed instantaneously into a thin-lipped frown the moment Ben outlined the reason for her being here. That frown had grown thinner and more severe with every word that came out of his mouth. The current set of her jaw was visible evidence of her tightly clenched teeth.
“I’m sorry, Felicity.” He shook his head.
“You’re sorry?” she spat incredulously. “You’re sorry? Is that the best you can come up with?”
“Whaddaya want me ta’ say?” He held his hands out, palms upward as he shrugged surrender.
“Aye, for starters I want you to tell me this is all some sort of sick joke, then,” she hissed.
“I wish I could, but…” He allowed his voice to trail off without completing the sentence.
“Then why don’t you tell me you aren’t really dragging him into another murder investigation.”
“Me draggin’ ‘im in? I don’t suppose ya’ noticed that he’s not exactly kickin’ and screamin’ here.”
“Are you two going to spend the whole night talking about me like I’m not even sitting here?” I interjected with a perturbed edge to my voice.
“You stay out of this,” my wife commanded as she flashed an angry glance my way.
“Why would I stay out of it?” I shot back. “I’m the one who’s being talked about here.”
She ignored me and turned back to Ben. “You know how he is. But you’re still bringing him into this even after everything that’s happened.”
“Well, if ya want the truth, he pretty much brought ‘imself into it.”
“He’s right.” I nodded in agreement.
“And how would that be?”
“Well you were there when he handed me that writin’ sample,” he answered.
“So?” she shot back. “You didn’t have to take it.”