Triangulation, p.13
Triangulation, page 13
part #2 of Borealis Investigations Series
“And the money?” Shaw said.
“I don’t know. It’s not mine. They keep asking me why I had it, why I kept it hidden, on and on. I’ve never seen it. If I had that much cash, I would have paid off my Amex.”
“Who would want to set you up?”
“The murderer. I think it’s—”
“Hold on,” North said. “Walk us through yesterday after you left Iris.”
“My finger was bleeding. I needed stitches.” She held up her hand, displaying the bandage. “Pari drove me to the urgent care. We waited around an hour or so, they stitched me up, and we went back to Iris.”
“Did you drive to work that morning?” Shaw asked. “Did anything seem off about the car?”
“You mean, did I smell my dead boss rotting in the trunk? No. And trust me, I would have. I left Chinese food back there one night in June, and the whole car reeked of it by the morning.”
“What—” Shaw began.
Shaking her head, Chuck cut him off, “I can do you one better, though. I put some plastic plates and cups in the trunk and got them out again when I got to work. Trust me.” She barked a sharp laugh. “I would have noticed Shep. And I know the rest of what you’re going to ask me: I didn’t leave my purse at Iris, I didn’t forget my keys, I didn’t have a spare set.”
“Nobody had a copy?” North said. “You didn’t leave one with your mom or with Pari or somebody in case you lost your set?”
“No, nobody had a copy. But it can’t be that hard, right? I mean, people break into cars all the time. And if you get locked out, you just call somebody, and they’ll get you back in. I mean, anybody could have done it.”
North wanted to argue the point—it wasn’t quite that easy—but Shaw put a hand on North’s arm, and North shrugged. It might not have been a cakewalk like Chuck described, but she wasn’t wrong. It could be done.
“Who do you think did this?” Shaw asked.
“Donny.” She spoke without hesitation.
“Why?”
“Because of the fight, the one Beau told you about. Donny was in Iris. He basically said he was going to kill Shep. And now Shep’s dead.” A dry sob racked her. “It’s not hard to figure out, is it?”
“Why don’t you tell us about the fight?” Shaw said.
“And why you didn’t mention it to us.”
A blush came into her cheeks. “I mean, I didn’t hear exactly what he said. I just heard them shouting at each other. I was upstairs, working on accounts, and I had the door closed. By the time I realized they were angry shouts and not the kids getting excited while they were playing Wii, I went out to the stairs, but then I just heard the door slam and it was over.”
“And what did Shep say?”
Her blush grew hotter. “I didn’t even talk to him about it. I figured it wasn’t any of my business.”
“You’d heard two men in a shouting match, which ended with one of them slamming the door, and you didn’t want to know what had happened?” Jadon raised an eyebrow. “That’s a lot of self-control.”
“Cool it,” North whispered.
Jadon just raised his other eyebrow, his whole expression implying that North wasn’t acting like a professional. Jadon Reck, on the other hand, was being so fucking professional about the whole thing that North wanted to knock out his teeth and send them to him in a box.
“You can’t tell us anything else?” Shaw said. “You must have heard something over the next few days. Didn’t Shep talk about the fight at all? Did he seem scared?”
“No.” Another definitive answer. “He acted like nothing had happened. And he would, you know? That’s why I didn’t go investigate. There’s always stuff like that happening at Iris. Kids who are in the closet, or halfway out, or all the way out, even—they get their buttons pushed all day, and then they come to Iris and they blow up at Shep because it’s a safe space. Or parents come by. They think we’re queering their kids. They want to fight about it. They threaten us, tell us to stay away. That’s what I figured had happened, until Beau told me what he heard. And that’s why Shep would just shrug it off—just one more fight. He’d had plenty of them with Donny too.”
North didn’t like the answer, in part because it left open too many questions about what had happened that night between Shep and Donny and in part because it opened the range of suspects considerably. He hadn’t even considered the number of parents who might be happy to see Shep Collins dead and their child safe from his clutches.
“There’s something else we need to ask you about,” North said. “What happened between you and Shep on Wednesday?”
“Ah, Jesus,” Chuck said, her blush darkening.
“You know it looks bad, you not telling us, right?”
“I know. Come on, of course I know. But at the time, I mean, I was the one coming to you. I didn’t do anything to him. I wanted you to find him.”
Or, North thought, you wanted everyone to think you wanted to find him, which is a good way to throw off suspicion.
Chuck was still speaking: “I knew that argument didn’t matter, so I left it out. That’s not a capital crime, all right?”
“No,” North said. “But murder is.”
Chuck turned her head and began to cry.
Shaw elbowed North. Not discreetly.
“Ok,” Chuck said thickly. “Here it is. Money’s been disappearing. I suspected it for months. I finally managed to figure it out. It was going to bankrupt us if it kept going. I tried to tell Shep that he couldn’t use Iris as his personal piggy bank. I could see the withdrawals he was making. At first, he had explanations. He’d show up with receipts. Or he’d tell me about the expense and explain that he lost the receipt. I wanted to believe him. I tried to explain that we were going to lose Iris if we didn’t hire an accountant, a really good one, to figure out what was going on. And he wouldn’t listen to me at work. Well, he pretended to listen, and then he’d make up something he had to take care of right away, and he’d go do it. So Wednesday, after work, I went to his house to talk about it. It got heated. He thought I was accusing him of taking the money.” She was still crying, and she wiped her cheeks now. “I kind of was, I guess. It was just so weird. I couldn’t figure out why he wouldn’t look into it.” She snuffled into her arm and shook her head. “That was it, though.”
“Mike Llagas says you were taking the money. He says he was worried much earlier about Shep’s disappearance, and he thinks you blew him off because you didn’t want anyone to notice Shep was missing.”
“I hired you,” Chuck shouted. “And then, what? I put him in my own car?”
“No shouting,” the correctional officer said, hammering on the door with his baton.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Chuck said. “And you know it.”
“Is there anything else you noticed lately? Something with Beau? Or something between Shep and Mike? Do you know about Shep’s wife?”
“I know who she is. Because of Shep’s kids, you see. And no. I mean, Beau practically worships the ground Shep walks on. Mike is prissy and needy, but he was falling apart when things started to go bad between him and Shep. Neither of them would have ever hurt him.”
“Anything else you want to tell them?” Jadon said in that cool, dry voice. “Anything else you might have forgotten? Anything about, oh, say, why you’re dancing fast so you don’t have to talk about that night Donny and Shep got in a fight?”
Chuck blushed a dark scarlet and shook her head. “But I did think of something while I was sitting here. There’s nothing else to do but think. Donny did this. I know he did this. And he’s going to be hard to find because I heard Shep and Beau talking about him one day. It was after the fight, but they didn’t talk about the fight, and I didn’t really put things together until I was here with nothing else to do. I guess Donny owns a camper and he drives back and forth between here and Arkansas, staying at state parks and campgrounds. And I remember Beau saying something about visiting him, to make sure he was ok, and Shep saying something like, ‘I like camping, but that’s basically the suburbs. He might as well get an apartment.’ Something like that. So he’s close, ok? And they were thinking about visiting him. What if Shep went out there, just to check on him? That’s the kind of thing he did for Donny. He was always taking care of him.”
“We’ll look into it,” Shaw said. “And we’re going to find a way to get you out of here, Chuck. We’ll make sure you post bail as soon as it’s set, ok? And then we’ll figure out who did this.”
North fought the urge to elbow him again. Hard.
They left Chuck still quietly weeping behind the plexiglass, and when they got out onto the street, Jadon swept a hand through the stiff peaks of his hair and kissed Shaw on the cheek. He said, “Babe, you shouldn’t promise her things like that. Especially when she might be the one who did it.”
Then he left, and North thought again about shipping Jadon Reck his own teeth in a box—this time, for dropping a bomb and leaving North to deal with the fallout. North opened his mouth to say something; red slashed the sharp symmetry of Shaw’s face, and he was obviously upset. But before North could get a word out, Shaw caught his eyes and then glanced across the street.
North adjusted his pose casually, pretending to point out something to Shaw, turning so that he could rake his gaze along the line of cars parked opposite the city jail. Sunlight hammered down, turning the windshields white, but North could pick out a familiar shape. And then another, smaller glint of light on glass—binoculars, maybe? North recognized the unmarked car from the night at Iris; it belonged to Taylor and Waggener. North guessed the bigger man, the one who might be holding binoculars, was Taylor. But he was pretty sure the other one wasn’t Waggener. The other one was too big. The other one, North thought, was Barr.
And then, with a sick rush, North thought something else. Something that didn’t make any sense, something that seemed impossible in the intensity of the July sun on a city street. He thought, just a wild, crazy thought, that maybe it wasn’t binoculars. Maybe it was a scope, like Taylor and Barr were lining up a shot. He tried to shake it off, and he turned back to Shaw and ushered him down the street. But something crawled between his shoulder blades, and after they’d gone ten yards, with North’s hand clutching Shaw’s shoulder, Shaw whispered, “I know. I feel it too.”
Chapter 15
SHAW COULDN’T GET COMFORTABLE in the Beamer as they drove back to the office. North handled the car like a pro—the way he handled everything—and they glided through traffic. On the industrial sprawl of St. Louis’s south side, the sun turned metal roofing, glass, and acres of parking lots into mirrors. The whole world looked like it was burning; when Shaw squeezed his eyes shut, the afterimages bobbed in the darkness like witch lights. He kneaded the upholstery and thought about Jadon bending down to kiss his cheek.
“If you’re going to rip out all the stitches in the upholstery, could you do it in your own car? I’m probably going to have to give this back in the divorce, and I don’t want Tuck bitching about how I ruined his seats.”
Shaw’s eyes snapped open. He dragged his hand back into his lap. The afterimages hovered over North’s face, distorting it, and Shaw tried to focus on the man behind the bleached spots. Shaw wasn’t the only one going through a rough patch.
“Do you want to talk about it?” North said.
“No.” Then, as the brewery came into view, “Yes.”
North laughed quietly and squeezed Shaw’s shoulder. “Ok.”
“He didn’t have to be such an asshole about it.”
North nodded.
“I mean, we could have talked about it in private. Hell, we could have talked about it, wherever, whenever, instead of him just delivering it like the last word and then walking away.”
Signaling, the click-click filling the car, North guided them toward the next exit. He nodded again.
“He didn’t even ask what I was trying to do. He just assumed he knew more about it than I did. And he acted like I was being irrational.”
North nodded. Something flicked across his face, something he quickly locked down.
“Go ahead and say it,” Shaw said. “You hate Jadon, you think he’s an asshole, you basically told me I shouldn’t date him from the beginning.”
“I never said you shouldn’t date him. I never said I hated him.”
“Come on.”
“To be fair, I thought you were just seeing him to get information. I didn’t think—”
“What?”
North shrugged. “I thought maybe you’d need some time after Matty. That’s all.”
Shaw dropped back in his seat; the sunfire running across square miles of industrial zoning only seemed brighter now. He felt like he was on the edge of that flare going up again, and the darkness drifting in after it.
“He’s nice,” Shaw said. “To me, I mean. And he’s patient.”
“When he’s not being an asshole.”
Shaw pulled his hair out of the bun, shook his head, and finger combed the long locks. He sighed.
“Do you like him?” North said.
“What? Of course I like him.”
“And you know he’s right.”
“About what?”
“About Chuck being slippery about the fight between Donny and Shep. She knows something and she’s not saying it, which is fuck-all help when we’re trying to save her ass.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“And about the other part. He was right: you shouldn’t promise to get her out of there, not when it looks very possible that she had something to do with Shep’s death.”
Shaw spun in the seat, the belt riding up his shoulder to his neck, and he fumbled it back into place. “That’s our job, North. We’re in this to discover the truth. And when we find the truth, they’ll have to let Chuck go.”
North didn’t say anything. The Beamer’s quiet thrum across asphalt was broken by a long blat behind them.
“You don’t think she did this.” Shaw said it as a statement. “You can’t.”
“I think we need to keep our eyes open, Shaw. Consider all the possibilities. It doesn’t look good for Chuck right now. Her alibi isn’t really worth anything, you know. The heat makes it impossible to tell precisely when Shep was killed; she could have stayed at Iris until 11, keyed in the code, and gone straight to kill Shep. Hell, she could have slipped out of Iris, killed him, and come back and keyed in the code before 11. We know they were fighting about money. She’s got drugs in her system, and I know she says she’s being framed but—come on. By a guy who lives in a camper? That makes no sense.”
“And she just happened to know where Shep was that night? She just luckily crossed his path?”
North shrugged. “Or they arranged a meeting. Maybe that’s why Shep never showed up to dinner.”
“But Beau—”
“Drop it with Beau already.”
“Why should I drop it?”
“Because you’ve got nothing.”
“He’s lying about something, North. He was ready to go with that story about Donny, and—”
“We talked about that. You don’t like him. Fine. I don’t really get it, but fine. But just because you don’t like him, that doesn’t make him a suspect. I’m not saying he’s innocent, but I’m saying you’ve got nothing. Chuck, on the other hand, has a hell of a lot stacked against her.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this.”
“I told you how I wanted to work this case: I’m going to pull apart alibis until I find who did this. And here’s the truth, Shaw: Chuck doesn’t have an alibi. Not one that’s worth anything, anyway. I’m not saying she did it, but I’m not ruling her out, not yet.”
Shaw bit his lip. Please, he thought. Please don’t say it.
“We closed our eyes with Matty,” North said, his voice neutral but very, very soft. “I’m not going to do that again.”
When they came to a stop at the next light, two boys had set up a Bluetooth speaker and were dancing to cumbia, making their way through the rows of cars, their sweaty, flushed faces fixed with grins as they collected loose change. Shaw rolled down his window and tossed a couple of bills into the boy’s hands, and the boy whooped and ran—barefoot, Shaw now saw—toward his friend.
“Those were twenties,” North said.
Shaw left the window down; the muggy heat lapped at his face, brought sweat to his temples and forehead. He stayed there, leaning out the window, the sun baking his head.
North’s hand settled on Shaw’s back. “I wasn’t saying that to be a jerk, ok? I just think we need to learn from that.”
“Ok.”
They drove the last few blocks, and the last thing Shaw saw before they turned was the cumbia boys running down the sidewalk. Maybe they were done dancing for the day.
Inside, they found Pari eating a buffet that could have served twenty: a spiral-sliced HoneyBaked ham, green beans, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, some sort of corn and pepper succotash, an apple pie, a cherry pie, what looked like a blueberry-lemon crumble, and a salad bowl full of croissants. Pari sat behind the desk, not touching the food, her art history textbook open on her lap. Tissues made a mountain on the floor next to her—although the trash can was within easy reach—and her hair was tucked up under a shower cap. When she saw them, she burst into fresh tears.
“You can—you can—” More wailing. “You can have some, Shaw.” By the end, she was crying so hard that she couldn’t finish the sentence.
On any other day, under any other circumstances, Shaw’s jaw probably would have hit the floor. And his brain registered that he was hungry. Really hungry. But he didn’t feel any desire to eat; he felt like his mouth was full of cold ashes, and he shook his head. He took a step toward Pari, but North grabbed his arm and steered him toward the office.
“I’ll take care of her.”
“But—”
“No, that’s the last fucking thing I need. I’ll check on you in a minute.”
