Rowan Gant - Perfect Trust Part 9

"You know your little foray into the world of sick poetry?"

"What about it?"

"Well the handwriting might not have belonged to Paige Lawson, but it sure as s.h.i.+t belonged to Debbie Schaeffer."

"Debbie Schaeffer? Why does that name sound so familiar?"

"Because she was all over the news. She's the college cheerleader that went missing about two months ago."

D-E-A-D-I-A-M!.

D-E-A-D-I-A-M!.

What's that spell?

Dead I am!

Louder!

Dead I am!

One more time!

DEAD I AM!.

The words rang inside my skull with painful clarity, and the exuberance of the morbid cheer now sharply obvious. Ben didn't need to say anything more for me to know that Debbie Schaeffer was no longer a missing persons case. Her legacy now belonged to homicide, and the Greater St. Louis Major Case Squad."Where should I tell her to meet us?" I asked quietly as I turned toward the phone.

It was going to be a very long night, in more ways than one.

CHAPTER 6.

My wife's cell phone was either off or out of range, and based on the way her schedule often runs, I wasn't exactly certain when she would be home. Ben seemed almost in a panic, edged with a sense of urgency that he'd thus far left a mystery. He made it clear that he wasn't at all interested in waiting for her to call back and he insisted upon us leaving immediately. Knowing him like I did, I elected not to press for any further explanation until his adrenalin level started to drop off. As much as I hated to, I had done the only thing I could and left a quick message on Felicity's voice mail telling her to meet us at his house.

My keyed up friend was already navigating his van out of the subdivision before I could get fully into my seatbelt. The sun had fallen past the horizon almost an hour before, and the light of the waxing crescent moon was diffused into a weak halo by thin, wispy clouds that fell across it like a shroud of frost.

For some unknown reason, Ben cranked the van into a quick right turn onto a side street that was positioned diagonally across from our driveway. Considering where we were headed I thought it odd since it wasn't exactly the shortest route to the highway. Out beyond the winds.h.i.+eld, darkness overwhelmed a no-man's land of unlit asphalt that stretched at regular intervals between the streetlamps. I caught only a brief glimpse of motion as a vehicle came barreling toward us from one of the puddles of blackness.

The van lurched left, then almost instantly to the right, narrowly missing a parked Thunderbird, and tossing me against my door just as I was about to snap the buckle of the shoulder harness into place. Judging from the blotches of primer decorating the otherwise darkly hued T-Bird we wouldn't have been its first sc.r.a.pe by far.

I hadn't remembered noticing the vehicle in our subdivision before, but there was something terribly familiar about it, although I couldn't put my finger on exactly what. Still, it was the kind of aggravating feeling that makes one say, 'Whoa, deja vu.'

The thought went as quickly as it came, however, since any further concentration on the subject was unceremoniously truncated by the sound of my friend's voice.

"a.s.shole!" Ben exclaimed the epithet as we narrowly avoided slamming into the oncoming news van. "Learn to f.u.c.king drive!"I straightened in my seat and returned to the task at hand, quickly coupling the safety belt before my friend's legendary driving could send me tumbling again.

"So have you calmed down a bit?" I asked.

"Whaddaya mean?"

"I mean have you calmed down yet?" I repeated. "You just came through my front door like a runaway train and so far you've been a little short on explanations."

"I told you," he offered. "That handwriting sample matched up to Debbie Schaeffer."

"Correct me if I'm wrong," I started, "but if I'm understanding this turn of events correctly, Debbie Schaeffer has been murdered, right?"

"Yeah."

"Which by definition would make her dead already, right?"

"Oh, yeah, she's definitely dead. No two ways about that."

"Okay, then. So, I hate to sound cold," I remarked, "but what's the rush?"

"Simple," Ben returned. "Because of a chucklehead with a big mouth there's about to be a G.o.dd.a.m.ned media circus bustin' out all over this thing."

"That's to be expected," I shrugged, not seeing the correlation. "It was news then, it'll be news now."

"Yeah, well did ya' happen to notice the logo on the side of the van that just tried to kill us? Whichever a.s.shole leaked it also knew about the handwriting sample and decided to toss your name into the mix. The circus is headin' for YOUR friggin'

front yard. s.h.i.+t, I just barely managed to beat 'em there."

"So that's why you didn't want Felicity to go by the house."

"Exactly. I just hope she gets the message and doesn't blow it off." He let out a heavy sigh before continuing. "Look, it's bad enough that you're gettin' dragged into something like this again, especially now. I just want to at least make sure you don't get caught up in the hype this time."

"I don't see how you are going to keep that from happening, Ben."

"By doin' exactly what I'm doin'. Getting' you the h.e.l.l outta there."

"Maybe that will work tonight, but what about tomorrow? And the next day? And the next?" I asked.

"There might not be a tomorrow, or a next day. My plan is to keep you as far away from this as possible," he told me.

"They'll just camp outside my door."

"Already on it. The coppers in Briarwood know what's up and they're gonna take care of it."

"Then why didn't they just take care of it now?""They are. We just gotta give 'em some time to do it."

"I don't think this is going to work, Ben."

"Well, we're gonna MAKE it work," he shot back.

"Think about it, Ben," I appealed. "You just said yourself that I'm being dragged into this. The damage has already been done. I think at this point it's out of your control."

"Not entirely."

"Wouldn't it be easier if I just made a statement to the press telling them I'm not involved in this investigation?" I offered.

"No reason for them to believe you," he answered. "Especially once they find out you're lyin'."

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?"

"I know how you are."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means, number one, less than forty-eight hours ago you just showed up at a crime scene right out of the blue, so something tells me you 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, you handed me a piece of paper with Debbie Schaeffer's handwriting on it that you say you wrote yourself. So, whether I like it or not, you're already connected to this through some of that weird a.s.s Twilight Zone s.h.i.+t.

"Believe me, this is a decision that I did NOT want to make," he continued, "but the way I got it figured, I have two choices. Either I keep you as isolated as possible and not even let you know what is going on; or, I go ahead and bring you in on it right from the git'go and try to keep your involvement to a minimum.

"Considerin' what you've already done, and what I've seen you do in the past, I doubt the first choice has any chance of working, period. That leaves me with nothin' but option number two. So, I figure if I can exert some control over the contact you have with this case, then maybe you 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 to meet us," he explained. "I want her there with you every G.o.dd.a.m.ned second."

"She might not have that much control over it either." I shook my head at the comment. "You know, she's not going to be happy about this."

"Whaddaya mean 'not happy'?" he returned. "She's gonna be freakin' mad as h.e.l.l.

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 have to."

"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 you, then I'm okay with it."

"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, white man? 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. Kinda isolated section out off of Three Sixty-Seven on the way to 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 waiting."

"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 missing 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 going over everything in her bedroom. The minute I looked in her notebooks and saw that curly-q thing on her I's, I knew. I had the graphologist in the crime lab verify it, but I knew."

"Did you find anything else worthwhile?" I asked solemnly."Not really. We got a couple of leads to 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 want to keep you out of the spotlight while I figure out what to do," Ben answered. "Not to mention getting Felicity on board before I go any further with this."

"Have you figured out how you're going to do that yet?"

"I thought I might start with begging her not to 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, 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 Felicity had arrived. He had expected 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 to 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."

"You might have noticed that he's not exactly kicking and screaming 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.

"Aye, you stay out of this," my wife commanded as she flashed an angry glance my way.