Consider the Crows Page 8

  Conflicts battled in his mind. Self-preservation told him to move on; get out of town, cowboy, this place isn’t big enough for both of us. Against that tugged desire. And deep down was another emotion, some mixture of pride and disgust at giving up without a shot. He drove by open fields. An old maroon Volvo came toward him heading for town and he glanced in the rearview mirror when it passed.

  Egersund. That lady was guilty as hell, but he didn’t know of what. Homicide? Why would a math professor off a typist in the English department? He needed to find out what Osey’d dug up on her.

  He pulled into the gravel drive, cut the motor, got out of the Bronco and leaned against the fender to stare at the house. What had he missed? He rolled his shoulders in irritation, mind probably split a seam and started leaking sawdust, result of losing control and allowing headroom to adolescent yearnings.

  Gawking at the outside of the house sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him anything. He scuffed at sparse gravel, then started for the rear door.

  A kid in jeans and blue down jacket wheeled a bicycle across the open field and came toward the house. Parkhurst raised an eyebrow. Math teacher meets kid in the woods?

  The kid spotted Parkhurst. His face, which had been dreamy and relaxed, went tight. Parkhurst could feel waves of hostility rolling toward him.

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Nick.”

  “Salvatierra?”

  “So what?” He stood with one hand on the crossbar of the bicycle.

  “So I’ve been wanting to talk with you.” With a loose, easy stride, Parkhurst ambled to the oak tree with the rope swing, folded his arms and leaned against the trunk. He knew this kid, not as an individual but as a type. He knew that look of bored insolence, the curl of adolescent underlip young males in their vulnerability take on to hide their fear of exposure, the don’t-fuck-with-me stance. He might have been looking at himself twenty years ago. Nick faced him like a badass tough Hispanic street kid tempered by fighting his way through life. Parkhurst could see the cannon fire behind Nick’s eyes and hear the distant rumble of the kid’s own monumental war with the world.

  “What are you doing here, Nick?”

  “Communing with nature.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Yeah, by myself. That a crime?”

  “Depends on what you’ve done.”

  “Nothing.” Nick studied him with bored, suspicious eyes.

  “That right, Nick? Lynnelle Hames. You knew her, Nick?”

  He shrugged. “So what if I did?”

  “So I want you to tell me about her, Nick.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “Come on, Nick, you can do better than that. Did you like her? Think she was pretty? Take her out? Take her to bed?”

  “I don’t have to talk to you.”

  “Wrong, tiger.”

  “Yeah? What can you do, cop? Bust me?”

  Parkhurst grinned. “Beat the shit out of you.”

  Nick’s knuckles tightened on the crossbar, his nostrils flared and his breath came hard.

  “Don’t try it, kid,” Parkhurst said in a voice like silk. “I’m twenty pounds heavier and twenty times as mean.”

  “Yeah?” With casual deliberation, Nick lowered the bike, stepped back to face Parkhurst, flexed his hands.

  Parkhurst shook his head wearily. “You’re not very smart, are you, Nick?”

  For a moment, Nick looked startled as though firm ground had given way to swamp, then he stuck out his jaw and clenched his fists. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Wrong again, kid. I know everything about you. You came here all gung ho about education. Make something of yourself. Going to be great, right? Only it didn’t work that way. You got here and it was a foreign country with a foreign language. The kids are different. They make you feel like a freak, look at you like something in a zoo. Makes you mad, doesn’t it, Nick? You only feel like a man when you’re playing basketball. Or is it football?”

  “Football,” Nick retorted, then glared, angry he’d given away even that much.

  “These other kids may have it easier, some of them, but I’ll tell you something, Nick. They’re all just as scared, just as worried, and fighting just as hard to win their own game.” If the kid would ever smile, he’d be movie-star handsome, but the sullen stare made him look like a killer.

  “There’s a time to fight, Nick, and there’s a time to use your head.” Parkhurst felt like he was quoting the Bible, or maybe it was Pete Seeger. Yeah, listen to me, kid. I’ve got all the answers. “When you figure out which is appropriate for a given situation, you might have a chance. Now we’re going to start over and I’m going to ask you some questions and you try not to be a bigger asshole than you are. What do you know about Lynnelle Hames?” To a kid like this, Parkhurst was the enemy. He wouldn’t want to open his mouth even if he knew anything.

  Nick stared at him. “Knew who she was.”

  Parkhurst waited.

  “She was a friend of somebody I know.”

  “Julie Kalazar?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You come out here a lot?”

  Nick shrugged.

  “How often?”

  “Once or twice.”

  Parkhurst would bet on that being a little short of true. “Anybody else ever out here when you were here?”

  “Yeah. Julie.”

  “Did Lynnelle ever seem afraid?”

  “She liked this dump. It doesn’t even have any furniture.”

  “When was the last time you were here?”

  Nick took a moment before answering. “I don’t remember.”

  Now here we have a lie, Parkhurst thought. Why lie about that? “You don’t seem to care about Lynnelle very much. Why’d you come?”

  “Julie liked her.”

  “What do you know about Lynnelle’s death?”

  Nick’s expression went just short of a sneer. “Didn’t I already answer that? Nothing.”

  “What about Julie? She know anything?”

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  Parkhurst wondered if Julie’s mother knew about this friendship. From what he knew of Dr. Kalazar, he’d say the lady was a wee bit prejudiced. Could be why Julie was uptight, and had nothing to do with the murder. “You ever see Lynnelle with anybody?”

  “I never saw her at all, except here and then she was with Julie.”

  “She ever mention any trouble with anybody?”

  “We never talked.”

  “Anybody ever hanging around out here?”

  Something shifted in Nick’s bored eyes and for a second Parkhurst thought he might get an answer, then he could see Nick decide to keep dumb.

  “Where’s Lynnelle’s family live?”

  “Hey, man, I told you, we never talked.” Nick scuffed at the mud with the toe of his Nike. “Take it or leave it. I can’t tell you anything about her.”

  Parkhurst raised a skeptical eyebrow, waited a beat, then backtracked. “What were you doing here?”

  Nick’s sullen expression didn’t change, but Parkhurst, veteran cop, sensed the flicker of apprehension and it made his antenna go up. “Who did you meet?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Dr. Egersund?”

  Nick snapped his fingers. “Oh yeah, I forgot. I came to get a math assignment.”

  “Were you born an asshole, or do you have to work at it? Dr. Egersund was here, you were here. I want to know what you talked about.”

  “She didn’t even see me.”

  “Nick,” Parkhurst said wearily, “I stomp freshman football players and rip them apart a little piece at a time. It makes me feel good the whole rest of the day. Why’d you come?”

  Nick shrugged. “I like it out here. It’s quiet. No trees where I come from.”

  Yeah. That got under Parkhurst’s skin a little. It was the only thing the kid said that rang true. “What about Dr. Egersund? You see her?”

  After some in
ner struggle, Nick said, “Saw her pick up something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” Nick muttered. “Small. Picked it up and put it in her pocket.” He lifted his chin defensively.

  For the first time Parkhurst felt a touch of liking for the kid. Nick seemed to have some respect for this math teacher and regretted ratting to the enemy. Maybe there was hope for a hardass with respect for a teacher. Maybe said something for the teacher too.

  He told Nick he could go, and watched with itchy dissatisfaction as Nick righted the bicycle and wheeled it around the house toward the driveway. I hope you didn’t kill that girl, kid. I hope you make it. I hope you win your fight. He fished the key from his pocket and unlocked the back door.

  As soon as he stepped inside, he had the feeling somebody had been here. Nick? Egersund? He sniffed and smelled nothing but mildew and dry rot. He went from room to room. Nearly as he could recall, nothing had been added or subtracted.

  One nebulous quest at a time, he told himself, and starting in the kitchen he searched the place again. No notebook. And nothing set off light bulbs either, to spotlight the grain of sand.

  From the bedroom doorway, he eyed the paperback books lined up under the window. A book? Was that it? Wasted this much time, why not waste more. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he flipped through romances, science fiction, a few mysteries, a few fantasies of the sword-and-sorcerer kind.

  Yeah. Two were different. Momma, Where Are You—not a mystery as he’d thought, but a story about an adopted child—and Sins of the Fathers, written by Keith Kalazar. Parkhurst read the jacket cover and raised an eyebrow.

  Should have caught these two the first time. Would have, if his mind had been working right. He evened up the books against the wall, picked up the two that had caught his attention and left by the kitchen door.

  Thirty minutes later, he trailed into the chief’s office and dropped the books with a sharp smack on her desk.

  She looked up and wondered what he was so pissed about. “What’s this?”

  “Wild geese, maybe.” He tapped his knuckles against the desk. “I’ve just spent two hours at the Creighton place and that’s all I came up with.” He sat in the wooden armchair, slid down on his spine and placed his fingertips together.

  “No notebook,” she said. “Lynnelle kept it with her, wrote in it all the time. Innermost thoughts, presumably. It was important to her. What happened to it?”

  “She either gave up childish things or somebody destroyed it. Maybe some of those innermost thoughts pointed right to our killer.”

  “It doesn’t explain why we couldn’t find any bills or correspondence or checkbook. Unless the killer destroyed all that too. Doesn’t make sense. You think these books mean something?”

  “Maybe. Lynnelle wasn’t the serious, studious type. She read light fiction. Mystery, romance. Those two stuck out.”

  Susan picked up Sins of the Fathers, by Keith C. Kalazar, and read the blurb on the back cover. Sally’s new stepfather loved her very much. That’s what he told her when he did those things. Their love was special, a secret. She was never to tell anyone. “Incest?” Susan said to Parkhurst.

  He shrugged. “A lot of that going around lately.”

  Could that be what Lynnelle was running from? It might explain why there was nothing of her background in that grim house; she covered her tracks.

  “On the other hand,” Parkhurst said, “she might have it simply because she knew the author.”

  Susan opened the book cover. No inscription.

  Momma, Where Are You, was the story of an adopted child looking for her biological mother. Well now, was this the past Lynnelle came here looking for? “Biological mother,” she said aloud.

  “I did wonder if that might not be what we have in Dr. Egersund.”

  “That’s quite a jump.” Susan thought about it. “A child given up for adoption who returns years later.”

  “It happens.”

  “Yes, but does anybody care?”

  He gave her an enquiring look.

  “Care to the point of keeping it secret in a murder investigation. Or care to the point of killing.”

  “This is not San Francisco.”

  She was getting a little tired of hearing that.

  “This is a small town, conservative, most folks go to church on Sunday. Even now they don’t take lightly living together without benefit of matrimony. It’s gossiped about and snickered about, fingers pointed.”

  “Egersund is an educated woman. Intelligent, accomplished. Why would she get all exercised and threatened by something long in the past?”

  “She grew up here,” he said. “Understand the circumstances. Twenty-some years ago, the whole thing would have been all wrapped around with secrecy and shame. Father a minister. We’re talking serious, heavy-duty sin here.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Believe it. It’s true.”

  Susan lit a cigarette and eyed him through the smoke. “Are her parents still alive?”

  He nodded, got out his notebook and flipped pages. “Osey’s still digging. Parents reside in Kirkwood, Missouri. The lady graduated with honors from the University of Oklahoma. Married, one son. Taught at Boulder.”

  “Any murdered clerk-typists while she was there?”

  “No criminal record, very law-abiding citizen. Divorced. Started teaching at Emerson last fall.”

  Susan frowned, edged the books up evenly and shook her head dubiously. “That’s building an awful lot on one paperback book.”

  “Yeah.” He slid even lower and crossed his feet at the ankles. “Egersund is guilty of something. She was out at the Creighton place just before I got there. I saw her leaving and I even wondered for a minute or two if she’d been in the house. I also ran into Nick Salvatierra.” He related his conversation with the kid. “Now just what was Egersund doing there?”

  “You think she went there to meet him?”

  “She didn’t strike me as dumb and there are dozens of better places that wouldn’t rouse suspicion. I’m inclined to believe him when he said he didn’t speak with her. I definitely believe he saw her pick something up.”

  “Something incriminating she went back to find?”

  “Well,” Parkhurst said. “She didn’t sprint right down here to show us what she found.”

  No, she didn’t do that. “What was Nick doing there?”

  “Yeah, Nick.” Parkhurst shook his head. “I don’t know about him, but I’ll find out. Streetwise. All his defenses went up when he saw me. Set bells clanging in my head. He had the hidden caution that means he’s not squeaky clean. And that one’s hungry. He wants.”

  “You saying he might be our killer? What’s the motive?”

  “I don’t know.” Parkhurst stood up, paced to the doorway and then turned. “One other thing.”

  “What?”

  “If that book means anything and the girl was an adopted child, there might be another important figure in all this. The kid probably had a father.”

  “Anyone in mind?”

  “No,” Parkhurst said. “Except David McKinnon was handy on the scene.”

  He was gone before she could respond. She frowned, picked up the books, glanced briefly at each one and then stuck them in her shoulder bag. Quite possibly, they had nothing to do with Lynnelle’s death, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask Egersund another question or two. It was almost seven. She’d left the little cat alone for a long time again and wondered what kind of havoc it was wreaking. Put up a little higher on her list, find Sophie and get that cat back.

  * * *

  Receiver at her ear, Carena listened to the phone ringing in Topeka. Come on, Caitlin, answer. Where are you? Why haven’t you called back? Carena twisted her fingers through the cord and stared unseeing at Alexa lying on the kitchen floor.

  She clattered down the receiver. Phil probably neglected to pass on my message. Gingerly she rubbed her forehead, ignoring the low-pitched whirr o
f alarm in her mind. Aspirin, more aspirin. Taking a bottle from the cabinet, she shook two tablets into her palm, ran water in a glass and swallowed them. Alexa anxiously watched all her movements.

  Right. Dinner. She hauled out a sack of kibble, dumped a goodly amount in a bowl, perked it up with some canned food and set it on the floor. Food, that’s what she needed too, it might help the headache. Opening the refrigerator door, she stood gazing in, something she used to yell at Michael for doing.

  Alexa finished off her meal, licked the bowl several times to make sure, then squeezed past chairs and stretched out under the table with a heavy sigh. Her eyes fixed on Carena with mute appeal. Carena’s mind flashed on Caitlin, huddled under her desk, staring out from behind the chair legs with the same sort of imploring look in her eyes.

  Carena had been seventeen, awakened in the middle of the night by singing coming from Caitlin’s room. Frightened, Carena listened to the thin, high cadence of her sister’s voice. She got up, tiptoed across the hall and knocked softly on Caitlin’s door. There was no answer. She opened the door and went in.

  A full moon shone through the window and spread a wide rectangle of eerie light on the floor. The bed was empty. Caitlin in her nightgown crouched in the kneehole of the desk, drawn in tight with her arms around bent legs.

  “I’m tired,” she said to something invisible across the room. “I want to go to bed.”

  She didn’t appear to see Carena, even when Carena pulled away the chair and squatted in front of her. Caitlin’s mouth was trembling and saliva dribbled down one corner.

  “I already sang ‘Abide with Me’ and ‘It Is Not Death to Die’ and ‘Just As I Am without One Plea.’”

  “Caitlin.” Carena took both her sister’s hands and shook them. “What’s the matter?”

  “They’re here again.”

  “Who?”

  “They’re singing and I have to sing with them.”

  “Who are they, Caitlin?”

  “The dark angels.”

  “Where? Where are they?”

  Caitlin pointed. “By the wall. Can’t you hear them?”

  “There’s nothing there. Just the bookcase. You’re having a dream.”

  Caitlin shook her head violently. “They want me to sing. I have to do what they want. If I don’t, the crows will get mad.”