Old school bones, p.8
Old School Bones, page 8
All he’s left with is the message:
“Where the hell are you, Rambo? I got some news on your Red Bull. You want to meet me about four-thirty to talk about this? We’re not dealing with roofies here. But you sure as hell hit pay dirt.”
Votolatto’s message says the lab rats found of GHB. Gamma hydroxy butyrate. Another date rape drug. Called liquid-X and scoop on the street. The Red Bull had something like ten times the normal dose or GHB to knock out somebody. Enough to put a person into a coma—or stop a heart if she had finished the whole can.
He feels the blood draining from his eyes. Drops the phone away from his ear, Lou Votolatto’s message still playing. A scratchy voice, saying something about meeting for chowder at a bar in Woods Hole, then fading to nothing. He hears only the whir of the nor’west wind topside, the groan of the Rosa Lee tugging at her lines, the squeal of the steel hull against the heavy rubber fenders of the fish boat rafted inboard. Waves slapping the boat windward.
His back sags against the metal wall, knees buckling as he slides slowly down the bulkhead. He is sitting on the diamondplate catwalk around the engine, staring blankly at the knees of his jeans. Already the sharp scent of salt, gin, a whole lot of limes, rising in his mind.
On the beach in the dark. The sky raining stars. They sit facing each other in their bathing suits on the sand, warm surf swirling in tiny waves around them. His bare legs, bare feet, stretching out before him, pressing the soles of her feet.
They both lean back, braced by their arms. Cassie wants to try this odd form of intimacy she read about in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, Cat’s Cradle. Boko-maru.
“Close your eyes,” she says. “When two people are like this, you know, sole-to-sole, they cannot lie.”
He feels a little surge of pressure, the tips of her toes rolling gently against his. Knows he may soon admit to things that he never talks about with anyone.
“So where did you get your dark blood?”
The question is a wasp in his head. His mind filling with pictures of the long-dead woman he called Vóvó Chocolate.
“It came from an island a long way from here. But maybe not so different.”
“In Africa?”
“Near. São Vicente. The Cape Verdes.”
“The green capes.” Her voice is lazy from an afternoon of gin and tonics.
“My mother’s mother. She died when I was little. Spoke the old language.”
“You mean she sang her words Bahamian style, mon?”
“Only in Crioulo.”
“African.”
He says Criuolo is a blend of African languages and Portuguese. “A callaloo stew, we call that. Kind of like you … and me.”
“Oh …”
“Except you got more from your father, the European side, right? I got most of the African.”
He opens his eyes. Looks at her, lids still closed, the face of the moon’s daughter tilting toward Venus. Her body a mermaid’s at rest. Cristo.
“And you don’t pay no never-mind, to your African blood.”
“Until I come to a place like this …” The words gush out.
His heart quivers.
“Is that a confession?”
The surf thunders offshore on a reef. He says nothing. Just wonders who this new self is. This Crioulo.
“So maybe we could be long lost cousins.” She reaches out for his hand. “Kissing cousins.”
“What are you going to do now, Rambo?”
He eyes the detective over his nearly-empty mug of draft. Watches from his barstool as the fire in the wood stove at the center of the room sputters and flares. Outside the bay windows of this Woods Hole pub called Captain Kidd’s, Eel Pond is a wind-whipped snowfield dotted with a few lobster boats and a small sloop frozen at their moorings.
“That’s why I’m here, Lou. I need some serious advice.”
“You are totally fucked when it comes to the chain of evidence.”
“What about prints?”
“A lot of people have touched that can of Red Bull, including you and me. Didn’t you say you found it like two weeks after that poor girl’s death?”
“It was in her dorm counselor’s apartment, by the stereo in the living room.”
“Which is not where she died.”
“Not even close.”
“And no one saw your dead girl with the Red Bull?”
He says no. If you believe her friends, she was addicted to the stuff. Usually kept a stash of it. But the night before she died, one of Liberty’s pals drank the last one.
“What you’re saying is the very existence of this can is a mystery. That the house counselor doesn’t drink the stuff. Never saw our can before the morning you found it.”
“She found it.”
“How do you know she didn’t plant this thing?”
“Why?”
“As a distraction? As manufactured evidence to make it look like there’s been a crime here? As bait to keep you around? Maybe she wants your bod. I don’t know. I can think of a million reasons.”
“She’s not like that. Her mother used to be my landlady. A total sweetheart.”
The detective shakes his head. Disbelief. “So that excuses everything.”
He says she seemed totally surprised to see that can. It was not in some obvious place. Next to a stereo on a shelf. Nobody would have been looking in that corner of the room if he hadn’t gotten interested in her album collection. She didn’t even want him or the girls in her apartment.
“So maybe she does have something to hide.”
“We all have our secrets. But I don’t—”
“Someone died, pal. We’re talking about more than Miss Lonelyheart’s private collection of peekaboo undies here.”
“Hey. Come on, Lou. That’s not fair to—”
“You want another beer?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Look, my young fisher friend, you got a serious problem. You just found a smoking gun and somebody nearby turned up dead.”
“You think I should tell the local officers? The M.E. and the state CPAC guys in Middlesex county?”
The detective leans back on his bar stool, locks his hands behind his head and stares at the ceiling. “Why the hell did I ever get mixed up in this?”
“I don’t know. Because you’re a good guy? Because you don’t go for people killing the children of the world?”
“Naw. That’s you, Rambo … I just fucking felt sorry for you. Now, Christ, I could be up to my ears in another one of your vigilante justice schemes.”
“What?”
“If you tell the cops about the Red Bull now, they’ll be all over you, your buddy the Indian chick, and those high school girls. There are laws, you know, against withholding or tampering with evidence.”
“But isn’t that what you are telling me to do?”
“Whoa, pal. Hold on here. I, Lou Votolatto, am not telling you to do anything. I’m just saying the system will make a lot of people’s lives miserable if you hand over that Red Bull now.”
“So now what?”
The detective signals the bartender. Suddenly he wants two shots of rye with his bowl of chowder. “This is your gig, buddy boy.”
He sighs, squeezes his eyes shut. Thinks. “I’ve got to ask you again. You think you could get the can dusted for prints? Maybe we will find something interesting. Maybe we can at least learn if Liberty Baker ever held this can. And maybe there’s some DNA.”
“Do you know how many laws you are asking me to break?”
19
NOON. Bright and sunny. The dry snow sugaring out of the oaks and maples. Tiny diamonds. She waits in her Saab at the far corner of the freshly plowed parking lot of the public boathouse on Jamaica Pond.
Surely no one will see her here. See them together.
When his jeep rolls up, she feels the bridge of her nose flush. Knows that she is happier to see him than she will tell him. This is the way she used to feel every time she saw her brother Ronnie.
Before his war. Before he came back from Iraq with his hideous confession. Land of Allah. Land of a thousand and one Arabian nights. Land of flaring skies, weeping oil, and sin so dark it should never be named.
I have to tell you something, Awasha. I HAVE to tell you, but you have to promise not to tell another living soul. Promise. By the Great Spirit, the Medicine Circle, Maushop, and …”
“Hey!” He’s knocking on the passenger-side window. Smiling. “Want to walk around the pond?”
She is out of the car, taking both his gloved hands in her deerskin mittens.
He’s an old friend, now, right? Sort of. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
“Cristo. You look amazing.”
Her coat is knee length, pale white deer hides stitched together, the fur visible at the seams, at the hem, inside the collar. Her boots, reaching above the calves, the same material. Her hat a beaver crown. Long black hair in braids tailing over her shoulders. Lips deep red.
“My mother made these clothes for me. They are stitched like the traditional winter wear for our people, but the style is all her own.”
“Your mother had an eye for it. Beauty. I think she would be embarrassed for me to come to meet her daughter looking so shabby.”
She looks at him. Slightly-too-large black hooded sweatshirt, jeans, black clamming boots. Beneath the hood, his cheeks dark with the shadow of a beard coming.
“A swarthy stranger in our midst!”
“Is that good?”
“I don’t know yet. Are you still my ally?”
She gives him the slightest wink and wiggle. A devilish smile.
He wonders for a moment if Lou Votolatto could be right. That she’s possibly playing him. Maybe so. But well, screw it, he is already breaking the law. A girl’s dead. Others may follow. Unless he hangs with this lady … who sure as hell does not look lonely or desperate today! A lady who could have every man she wants.
She takes his arm. Leads him along a path through the fresh, eighteen-inch snowfall cut by nordic skiers and dog walkers. Into the woods.
“My friend is checking out the can again. For fingerprints, and other stuff.”
“I could be in a whole lot of trouble if someone finds out about what’s in that can and where we found it, couldn’t I?”
“We both could.”
“What about the girls? Do they know about the GHB?”
“I haven’t told them. Should I? Maybe they have a right to know.”
“Why put them outside the law, too?”
The trail through the snowy woods narrows. Now she takes the lead.
“You mean we are actually … already … technically … a conspiracy?!”
“Sweet, huh?”
“We could go to jail?”
“Oh yeah.”
“And somebody might actually try to pin a murder on me.” She sighs. Resignation.
“Unless we find some prints on that can other than yours and mine and Lou’s.”
“So what do we do?”
“You said the girls told you Kevin Singleton supplied them with drugs.”
“Pot and ecstasy. He sold them some.”
“And we know from Gracie that he and Liberty were having some kind of spat.”
“Right.”
“Did he have access to chemistry equipment at the school? I mean could he have cooked up that batch of X for the girls?”
“His father is the chair of the science division, one of the faculty old-guard. He has keys to the labs, chemicals.”
“You know anything about GHB?”
She says just what she has learned in drug seminars. It’s a lot stronger than other popular date-rape drugs. Pretty easy to make if you know a little chemistry.
“Some addicts like to use it to add zip to their crystal meth and heroin. You can take it with booze too.”
Her stomach feels on fire. She stops so fast to ride out the pain that he crashes into her from behind. Grabs her in a bear hug to keep from falling.
“Hey!”
With his arms around her, the burning beneath the waistband of her wool skirt begins to melt away.
“We definitely need to talk to Kevin Singleton, don’t we?” she says at last.
He releases her. “Sooner rather than later, Awasha.”
“This isn’t going to be easy.”
“Whatever it takes … at this point.”
She’s silent for a minute, just watches a pair of cardinals chasing each other among the branches overhead. Thinking. “You want to pretend you’re a cop, Michael?”
“Not really.”
“I thought you said you were taking me to see Liberty’s mother, Dr. P!”
Kevin Singleton stands just inside the threshold to a guest room in the Tolchester Arms, a boutique hotel serving the school’s alumni and guests from a little nob of a hill on the western edge of the T-C campus. He has an uneasy look on his face, the corners of his mouth turned down in a frown as he looks around for some sign of a black woman.
Awasha closes the door quietly behind her.
“Hi, Kevin. Have a seat.” Michael motions to one of the vacant chairs next to his at the little breakfast table by the plate glass window.
He is doing his best to look like one of the plain clothes detectives on TV. Black trench coat, his father’s gray gabardine blazer, white collar shirt open at the neck. Blue tie, tightly knotted but pulled down a few inches, manila file of papers in front of him. The wooden grip of his gas pellet pistol peeping out from under his left arm, held in place by a shoulder holster contrived from a bungee cord.
“Where’s Mrs. Baker?”
“She had another commitment.” Awasha nods toward Michael. “The special agent’s here from homicide.”
His chest nearly buckles from the boldness and inaccuracy of her bluff. Hopes this kid doesn’t know that neither the local nor state police have any officers called special agents working their murder detail.
The boy glares at him with the righteous indignation of someone who has fallen for a bait-and-switch scam.
Kevin is a tall kid. At least 6’2”. Unkempt curly brown hair. Brilliant blue eyes, very anglo facial features—the fine nose, thin lips, cleft chin. No facial hair at all. Clear skin. His style mostly preppie. Layers. An over-sized green zip-up fleece over a plaid flannel shirt, red waffle-weave undershirt, ski gloves. Jeans just a touch too baggy and low on the ass. Hiking boots.
“I don’t understand. What’s this about? You said Lib’s mom wanted to talk to me.”
“Please sit, Kevin. We really need your help.” Her voice sounds oddly deferential.
The boy doesn’t move. Seems to be considering his next move. “Did you say homicide? You think someone killed Lib?”
“We need to talk.” Michael holds the boy in his gaze, tries not to blink.
“What? You lure me to this room with some bogus story about how it would mean a lot to Lib’s mom just to talk for a while? And then you do this: a cop … No. Hell no, Dr. Patterson. You deceived me. I’m not going to talk to you or this man. But I am going to report you to the headmaster for harassment.”
“Kevin. Look, I’m sorry, but—”
“You can’t treat people like this. Jesus Christ, my friend just died!”
“Kevin—”
“No! Absolutely not! I’m out of here.”
The boy turns for the door, but Awasha stands in his way.
Michael feels the hair rising on the back of his neck, takes a deep breath, tries to assume the professional cool Lou Votolatto projects in an interview.
He clears his throat so that his voice will sound low, a confident whisper when he speaks.
Then he starts to lie. Hates it. But the words keep bubbling forth. Because a girl is gone in the prime of her life, because her friends feel sick and threatened. Because this kid’s arrogance is starting to piss him off.
“Go ahead, Kevin. Leave. But if you do, leave with the knowledge that you’ve blown your chance to be on the side of the good guys here.”
“What?”
“We’re pretty sure your girlfriend did not kill herself. And we think you know it too.”
“Wait, are you saying I—”
“I’m saying you can talk to Dr. Patterson and me, now, off the record … tell us what you know. Or some folks in blue will be back here tomorrow to haul you out of class in cuffs under suspicion of murder.”
“Are you threatening me? Screw you, mister. You have no reason to think I had anything to do with—”
“We have it on good authority that she had a fight with you the night before she died.”
“What?”
“We also know about the pot and ecstasy you’ve been selling. Have you been stealing your father’s keys to the chem cab and mixing up some recreational flavors to earn a little spending money?”
“No.”
“Then you better talk to us because you never know what will turn up if we get the narcotics boys to search your room. Your house.”
“They can’t do that.”
He can see that this kid is not going to fold unless he calls his bluff with a bluff of his own.
“They can and they will.” He pulls a phone from the pocket of his trench coat. “What is it Kevin? You want to talk, off the record? Or do I hit speed dial to send the narco squad over to 1122 Union Ave. right now? Which?”
The boy wrings the loose gloves in his hands. The Adam’s apple begins to pulse in his throat, his ears suddenly red.
“Can I think about this for a second?”
“Take all the time you need,” she says.
“Here.” Michael stands up, walks to the mini-bar in the room, fetches a bottle of Poland Springs, offers it to the boy. “Sit down. Have some water.”
20
HAPPY hour. They are sitting at the bar, drinking black coffee, in the Dolphin Restaurant on Main St. in Barnstable village, the Cape.
The detective, looking shaggy and rumpled this afternoon, eyes him between sips.
“Jesus H. Christ, you were impersonating a police officer? Are you crazy?”
