“I think you should call the sheriff’s department.”
“And tell them what?”
“That a man has been murdered.”
“Murdered! Here?”
Clarisse turned back to look at Barbara. “Go do it now,” she said in a strained voice.
Barbara turned and clattered back down the stairs. She could hear the older woman bouncing off the walls in her haste.
She bent down and scrutinized the dead man’s face and then recoiled in horror.
No way. It cannot be. Please.
She stepped back and glanced at the man’s arm. She edged the sleeve up to the elbow and then slowly turned the arm toward her so she could see the inside of the forearm.
She saw what she needed to see and pulled the sleeve down and put the arm back.
It was a tat of Superman’s insignia.
Shit.
Unfortunately for Clarisse, she had chosen burgundy gloves to wear today. And thus she didn’t notice the small bit of congealed blood that had leached onto one of her fingertips.
Clarisse stepped away and looked at the shelves lining one wall. They were filled with comic books. She rushed over and then stopped and stared at the one on top of a large pile. It was, she knew, a copy of a special edition Superman comic. But was it that one? She opened the cover and looked on the first page.
The initials BD and RE housed inside a drawn-in heart.
She thrust the comic back, her panic rising. Now she had something else to look for, and she needed to do it quickly.
She rushed across to the opposite room she had noticed when they had reached the second floor. Clarisse pushed the door open using her gloved hand. It was a small room that was obviously used for storage. Boxes and old bed frames and the clutter and castoffs of seemingly several lifetimes were piled in here.
Her sweeping gaze stopped at the far wall. And there it was. She lifted her iPad and took a picture of what was written on the wall in black Magic Marker.
She didn’t want this found. She pulled a pen out of her bag and had started to mark through the words when she heard Barbara on the stairs. She quickly put her pen away as Barbara appeared in the doorway.
“They’re on their way.” She looked at the message on the wall. “Oh my God, what does that mean?”
“I don’t know. The police will have to figure it out. And I have to be going.”
“What! Aren’t you going to wait for the cops?”
“Look, I came out here because it was part of my job. I don’t know anyone here. I certainly didn’t know Daryl Oxblood. You’ll be able to tell the police a lot more than I ever could. And while I don’t want to sound heartless, I have twenty more people to survey before the day is out, and they live all over.”
Barbara glanced at the message and shrugged. “Well, all right, I guess. But I’m not staying in the house alone.”
“You can wait for them outside.”
They walked down the steps and out into the yard.
“Oh, what’s your name, in case the police ask?” said Barbara.
“Julia Frazier. Good luck. And I’m very sorry about what happened to your friend.”
“Well, we were more neighbors than friends. His mother was my friend, though. I bet it’s drugs. That opioid stuff. Maybe he owed money or something and they came and did that to him when he couldn’t pay. Bastards.”
“You’re probably right.”
Barbara went back over to her house while Clarisse hustled to her car. She reached the main road and turned left. A few seconds later she saw two sheriff’s cruisers in her rearview mirror. Sirens blaring and lights swirling, they turned down the road where there was a dead man waiting and disappeared from sight.
A few moments later, so did Clarisse.
Chapter 36
Clarisse sat in the airline’s first-class lounge at Dulles. She had had a return ticket to her previous location but had opted to take a flight to New York instead. She had changed her appearance in the bathroom stall. Clarisse was a redhead now and her clothes were far more businesslike. Her delicately applied makeup had softened her previous harder edges. The lipstick was muted, the eyeliner the same. She could be going to close a big deal or coming back from doing so. And in a way she was.
Do as I say, not as I do. She had seen that phrase twice now. They had anticipated her drilling down to the theft of Daryl Oxblood’s identity to rent the car and get the credit card. But the truth was they did not have to kill him. They didn’t have to do anything to him. The fact that they had brutally murdered a man for no reason at all had changed the equation of all of this for her.
But there was a reason. I know who Daryl Oxblood was. And they know who Oxblood was. He was the BD in the heart drawn in the Superman comic book, a comic book that he had proudly shown me over twenty years ago.
They had found him, used his identity to rent the car, and killed him in the process, apparently just for the hell of it.
She sat back in her comfortable chair, not feeling comfortable at all. She sipped on flavored seltzer water and munched on a sesame seed cracker topped with Gruyère cheese.
She gazed around the room where well-to-do people lounged while waiting for their flights.
So many marks, so little time.
But that would have to wait. And truth be known, her heart was no longer in it. At least not right now.
They had killed before, she knew that: Daniel Pottinger aka Harry Langhorne. They had used a nasty poison and watched him croak. But there had been a good reason for killing him, at least to her mind. But Daryl Oxblood, not so much.
Which means things have changed and so have they.
She boarded the flight to New York and an hour later looked down upon the delicate spires of the city right before they landed at LaGuardia. She deplaned and took a cab to her hotel. She had made her reservation online from the airline lounge at Dulles. During the drive she scoured her phone for news of the very recent murder in rural Virginia, but found nothing yet. It might take a while out there, she assumed.
She got to her hotel, a chic boutique in SoHo that charged more than it should, but she liked it because no one looked you in the eye, except for the front desk people and they only did so once. It was an organization that understood privacy and boundaries, and right now she was feeling exposed and thus welcomed both.
She took a hot shower, then lay wrapped in a luxurious towel on her immensely comfortable four-poster bed staring at the ceiling, which was done in a quiet gray silk damask. In the very center was a three-bulbed chandelier that looked so modern that it, counterintuitively, seemed rooted in a distant past.
Three bulbs, three players in this little drama, if I don’t count Mickey Gibson, but I probably should. She’s more than a pawn. She’s at a rook or knight level now, and maturing fast. Hopefully. Because when I beat her I want to beat her at the woman’s absolute best.
She dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, ordered room service, and sat down to eat thirty minutes later. She had indulged with some steak and potatoes and a glass of cabernet, when she usually didn’t eat meat or many carbs and she kept her alcoholic intake to a minimum, mostly because of the example of Mommy. And she had never put a cigarette in her mouth or voluntarily done drugs for the very same reason. Mommy was a poster child for the consequences of shitty life choices.
After her meal was done she slid out her computer, set her notebook next to that, pulled out her burner phone, and placed it on the other side of the computer. Then Clarisse drew a long breath while complicated thoughts flooded her mind.