Out of Nowhere, page 29
Elle remembered Compton mentioning “discrepancies” that she wanted to check with Calder and her. Did they relate to Frank Whitley’s murder? She thought it probable.
“Mom had done exactly what I’d told her. She got over there soon after the deputies had taken me away. Frank was distraught. She made out to comfort and reassure him. He never felt a thing. It was supposed to be an imitation of the staged suicide at the fair. But,” she sighed, “all that questioning about the crime scene was making her edgy. That’s when she began suggesting that maybe we should call it quits.”
“Who shot up the safe house?”
“Well, duh, Elle. Mom!” She kicked Elle’s inoperative phone aside and sat down on the sofa. “See, after we moved down here from Iowa… Do you know about that?”
Elle shook her head.
“Well, it’s a long story. I won’t bore you. But we came down here for the purpose of killing Calder Hudson.”
Elle swallowed with difficulty. “Why?”
“He ruined our lives.”
“How so?”
Elle didn’t mind if it was a long, boring story told by a deranged individual. She had to give them—Calder—time to find her. She’d texted him only that she was going to see Dawn. He would have assumed that she meant at the hospital. She glanced at the clock on the dusty mantel. Three minutes till five o’clock. When she failed to arrive at the house in time to—
“So I put him out of his misery.”
The jarring statement pulled Elle from her thoughts. “I’m sorry? What?”
“Daddy. After he got the boot from Maxwell, he couldn’t find another job, especially not after the accident, which fucked up his back something awful. He could barely walk, much less work.
“Our car had been repossessed, which is why he was riding that damn motorcycle. Medical bills piled up. We had to sell the house and move into this crappy apartment. All because Mr. Calder Hudson had gotten Daddy fired. He’s to thank for him getting hooked on the meds, too.”
Elle remembered that one of the men in the photograph had died of an overdose. “Opioids?”
“Yes. Daddy was pitiful. Pathetic. One day he told me he would be better off dead.” She shrugged. “I agreed.”
“You put him out of his misery.”
“Eventually he probably would have offed himself, accidentally or on purpose.” She leaned forward and reached for the TV remote. “Show time.”
Elle looked at the clock. One minute till five. Soon, soon. They may all already be there. They would be calling Glenda to ask where they were, what the holdup was. But not even Glenda knew that she hadn’t stayed at the hospital.
She hadn’t told her because she hadn’t wanted an argument against this visit with Dawn. With misplaced compassion, she’d felt she owed it to the younger woman for leaving her at the safe house.
She’d planned to make it a brief courtesy call, then return to the hospital before anyone realized she’d come here. Then she would have called Glenda to come pick her up and begged forgiveness after the fact.
“I feel like I should be popping popcorn.” Dawn grabbed a throw pillow and hugged it to her chest.
As Dawn had said, Calder was smart. He would figure it out. Compton and Perkins would have people—
“You look sort of washed out,” Dawn remarked.
Elle looked toward the television. Shauna was opening the interview with her falsely warm greeting. Elle did look washed out. She said, “We were under fluorescent lighting.”
“Hmm.”
“Dawn, what about the death threat?”
She giggled. “Oh that. I planned that soon after the shooting. I was certain no one would ever suspect me, but just in case, Mom and I worked out the wording of a threat on my life—being sure to mention that kid’s tattoo—which would have eliminated any suspicion that I was the culprit.
“Mom got this simpleton who walks the neighborhood looking for her lost cat—who’s said to have been dead for ten years at least—to buy her a burner phone that she could use to call me, leave a message, then ditch the phone. We rehearsed it a lot. As you heard, she got real good at disguising her voice.
“When blondie there”—she nodded toward the TV—“broadcast our names, I thought it would be a good time to pull out the death threat. It would practically force the police to round us up, which would give me access to him.”
“Calder?”
“You, too. See, by then, I’d already decided that the two of you together might not be the safest thing for me, and that I… well, you know.” She ran her index finger across her throat, then returned her attention to the television.
Elle’s hands were beginning to tingle with the lack of blood circulation, and her mind was reeling. But, to buy time, she must keep Dawn engaged.
“So, your mother shot up the safe house?”
She continued to watch the TV. “Uh-huh. She had a busy day and night and was really cranky when I arrived at the hospital here in Dallas.”
Elle mused out loud, “You weren’t calling Frank from the safe house. You were calling your mother, giving her directions there. Information on the layout.” Then, “Dawn, how did she know she wouldn’t hit you in the barrage?”
Dawn looked across at her and frowned, seemingly over Elle’s stupidity. “Practice. We brought all of Daddy’s guns with us when we moved down here. We’d go out in the country and practice. She and I both became very proficient.”
“Did Frank know what you intended?”
“God, no. Frank would never shoot anybody. He didn’t have the nerve. I only married him so Mom and I would have a scapegoat if we ever needed one. But he was a good husband. He liked taking care of me. A little too much sometimes. He hovered, you know?”
“How did you—”
“Shh. I want to hear this.” She focused on the TV, where Elle was talking about life after Charlie. “Just getting up in the morning was a challenge,” she was saying. “I didn’t want to face another day without him. I would think about all the days to come that I would have to face without him, and grief would paralyze me.”
Dawn looked across at her. “I didn’t mean to kill your little boy. I was going for Calder Hudson. I fired a nanosecond too late. He’d already moved past you. The bullet struck that old man next to you instead. I fired several more rounds—I lost count of how many—in Calder’s direction, but they were misses, too, because he had hit the deck.
“Of course, by now people realized there was a shooter among them. They were panicked, running crazy in every direction. I figured I’d blown it, missed my chance, so I ran, too. That’s when I banged right into your stupid stroller.
“But it actually turned out to be fortunate. Because when I glanced back to see if anybody was coming after me—no one was—there was Calder Hudson, hero, trying to catch the stroller before it went over. As he reached for it, I got off a lucky shot.
“Figuring he was dead, I thought, ‘Yea! You son of a bitch.’ But,” she sighed, “the shot wasn’t as lucky as I’d thought. He didn’t die. The damn bullet went straight through him. So he’s to blame for your kid dying, Elle, not me.” She turned her attention back to the TV.
Elle was thinking that by now they would all be looking for her, but how much time did she have? How much of the interview had Shauna edited out? How long would it run? Time enough for rescue to arrive? When the interview was over and Dawn was no longer distracted by it…
She had to keep her talking.
“How did you know that Calder would be at the fair that day?”
“We followed him. All the time. Well, whenever he was in Dallas. He went out of town a lot on his jobs to fire other people from theirs. Sometimes we’d have to wait months at a time for him to come back. But when he was in town, he kept a fairly routine schedule, and we kept track.”
“There must’ve been nights when Calder was out late. Didn’t Frank become suspicious of your… excursions?”
“I’d tell him that Mom was having one of her spells and that I had to stay with her.”
“What kind of spells did she suffer?”
“She didn’t really suffer spells, silly. I only told Frank that.”
“He believed you?”
“There was no reason for him not to.”
Elle knew she was dealing with someone who’d lost all touch with reality. To keep her talking, she would continue to feed her ego. “You must’ve been very clever stalkers for Calder not to catch on.”
“Oh, we were. Shauna never caught on, either. We knew where they lived, of course. High-and-mighty people like them never notice people like Mom and me.”
Her features tensed into a hateful expression that chilled Elle to the bone. To divert her from whatever thoughts had caused it, Elle said, “You were going to tell me about the day of the fair and how you knew he’d be there.”
“Oh, yes. Well, he’d been working in a downtown skyscraper for several months. Every weekday, we followed him out of the parking garage when he left. He was driving this mediocre car, pretending to be a nobody.
“But that day, he left the parking garage in his Jaguar. We followed. Which wasn’t easy, let me tell you. He drives like a bat out of hell. On that day, he was going even faster than usual. He drove and drove until we had about decided to turn around and wait for another time.
“Then, when we realized he was going to the fair, I knew it was the perfect place. Just dark enough. Tons of people. We could get lost in a stampeding, terrified crowd. I told Mom to get ready.”
“Ready?”
“With our disguises. We kept them in the trunk of her car at all times.”
“Your ball cap.”
“Um-hum. So at a glance I’d look like a boy.”
“But how did you know about Levi Jenkins? The tent he was in, all that?”
“We didn’t.” Again, she looked at Elle with impatience. “We’re not clairvoyant, you know.”
“It really was an ingenious plan,” Elle said, looking at her with feigned wonderment.
Dawn beamed. “Yes, I know.”
“I’m just trying to understand how you pulled it off.”
“Well, we knew that when I started shooting—”
“Where did you have the gun?”
“Inside the pocket of the windbreaker. I shot through it. I dropped the cap on purpose.”
“Weren’t you afraid of leaving DNA on it?”
“No. Weren’t you listening? Compton said they couldn’t test any DNA on the cap until they had a suspect, and I certainly wasn’t one.”
She laughed. “See? Nobody would suspect a casualty.”
Chapter 40
Calder ended his call with Compton and Perkins, swerved out of his lane and onto the shoulder of the freeway, then brought his car to a shuddering stop. He called Glenda again.
She answered with “What’s going on?”
“The Smithson woman. What’s the address of the house you sold her?”
“Calder, where is Elle? She hasn’t called—”
“I know.”
“Why haven’t I heard from her? Tell me what’s happening.”
“Give me the fucking address!”
After a put-out sigh, Glenda rattled it off to him.
“Thanks.”
“Wait!”
But he didn’t. He hung up and repeated the address to his car’s navigation system. The map appeared on his touch screen. “Fuck fuck fuck!” He was traveling in the opposite direction, and the estimated time to get there from his current location was twenty-two minutes.
He whipped the Jag back onto the freeway. As he took the next exit so he could turn around, he called Compton. “I’ve got the address for Dawn’s mother.”
The traffic light at the bottom of the ramp turned red. He looked both ways, saw a narrow opening, then hooked a sharp left turn. On the other side of the underpass was another red light. There were cars in front of him waiting to turn left onto the access road.
“We already have her address,” Compton said. “We’re on our way, just leaving the hospital now.”
“Well, step on it. Have you sent a SWAT unit?”
“SWAT unit? Calder, we haven’t even questioned Dawn yet. We can’t send a—”
“Why the fucking hell not?” The traffic light turned green. He waited impatiently for the cars ahead of him to go. “Move already!” he shouted at them, and then to Compton, “This is the Fairground shooter, for chrissake.”
“We don’t know that. You don’t know that.”
“It feels right.” He reentered the freeway, dodged his way between several slow movers until he found a reasonably clear lane, and floor-boarded the accelerator.
Compton was saying, “We don’t have any evidence on which to base an arrest. We’ll talk to her, then—”
“Talk? What is the matter with you? You’re the one who advanced the idea that somebody had a vendetta against me. Now we have a likely somebody. Take her into custody first, then talk.”
“You saw the individual who tipped over the stroller. You identified him as male. It wasn’t Dawn.”
“It could have been. She’s tall. Easily attainable cap, remember? Never mind all that now. We’ll talk details later. Just—”
“Dawn was a victim. She dropped where she was shot, and the bullet removed from her leg was fired from the same gun that wounded and killed the others, including you.”
“Look, I don’t know how she did it. But I know that she was somehow involved. I feel it. And Elle’s with her. So send the fucking badasses to that house. Make fools of them, yourselves, make a fool of me. But if I’m right—”
“We can’t barge into someone’s house only because it feels right to you. We have civil rights laws in this country.”
“Yeah, while you’re clinging to that, I’ll violate more than the rights of anybody who harms Elle.”
“Calder, listen to me. You need to calm down. You’re overreacting.” After a beat, she added, “Remember what happened to Charlie Portman when you acted on impulse.”
As though he’d been slapped, Calder blinked to clear the red haze of fury from his vision. “Fuck you.”
Realizing Calder had hung up on her again, Compton cursed him. She looked over at Perkins. “You heard him. What do you think?”
He pondered it for all of one heartbeat. “Send in the badasses.”
Calder made the twenty-two-minute trip in twelve.
The street address was in a neighborhood barely hanging on to a middle-class designation. All the houses were constructed of brick, but their wood trims needed fresh paint, the shrubbery was scraggly, and the roofs sported curled shingles.
He located the house number, and the name printed on the dented metal mailbox at the curb confirmed that Marjorie Smithson lived there. A Ford compact was parked in the driveway.
He drove the length of the block and around the corner and parked in front of a run-down playground. He felt conspicuous as he alighted from his car, but the houses he walked past were shuttered. He got the impression that this was a neighborhood where minding one’s own business was probably the best policy.
He wasn’t as impulsive as Compton had accused him of being. He wasn’t going to “barge” in until he had some idea of what was going on inside the Smithson home. If anything.
Maybe this was a fool’s errand. He would prefer that it was. But his gut was telling him otherwise.
Two doors down from the Smithson residence was a house with a for-rent sign in the yard. It looked like it had been there for some time. Banking on the house being vacant, he waded through the weeds in the front yard and down the side of the house to the backyard. A dog from somewhere in the vicinity began to bark, but he ignored it as he walked across the next backyard. It was separated from Marjorie Smithson’s by a chain-link fence. Calder climbed over it.
There, he stopped, waiting for a challenge, listening for any indication from inside the squat, square house that he’d been seen or heard. When nothing happened, he moved to one of two narrow, vertical windows on the back of the house, cupped his hands around his eyes, and peered through the pane.
The woman looking directly back at him through the window glass was only a yard away from him. But her open eyes were unseeing. The sight was so unexpected, so grotesque, he reflexively stumbled backward, huffing breaths through his mouth.
Collecting himself quickly, he took his phone from his pocket and sent Compton a text. Woman, guessing Marj, fatal GSWH. Bedroom, NE rear corner of house. I’m going in.
He made certain that his phone was silenced, then cautiously approached the block of crumbling concrete that served as a back stoop. The outer door was screened. He held his breath as he tried it. It was unlocked, but the hinges squeaked when he opened it. He waited. So far, so good. He wedged himself between the screened door and the solid one and tested the knob. It turned. Heart thudding, he pushed the door open.
He was surprised to hear a familiar voice: Shauna’s.
He listened for several seconds and, when he heard Elle’s mellow voice, he realized he was hearing the broadcast of their interview.
He stepped into an untidy kitchen. The television would help cover any noise he made, but he wished he had on shoes other than his boots. His footsteps—
Dawn’s voice froze him.
“Weren’t you listening? Compton said they couldn’t test any DNA on the cap until they had a suspect, and I certainly wasn’t one. See? Nobody would suspect a casualty.”
The TV sound track continued but became like white noise to him. He crept forward across the kitchen and passed through a doorway into a small dining room. On the opposite side from the kitchen was a wide opening into the living area.
A framed mirror hung on the wall to his left. In it, he could see Elle reflected, seated in a chair. He experienced a momentary surge of relief to find her still alive, but upon further inspection, he saw that her arms were taped to the chair.
She hadn’t noticed him. He mentally tried to telegraph her of his presence. At the same time, he didn’t want her to react in a way that would alert Dawn.
“Mom had done exactly what I’d told her. She got over there soon after the deputies had taken me away. Frank was distraught. She made out to comfort and reassure him. He never felt a thing. It was supposed to be an imitation of the staged suicide at the fair. But,” she sighed, “all that questioning about the crime scene was making her edgy. That’s when she began suggesting that maybe we should call it quits.”
“Who shot up the safe house?”
“Well, duh, Elle. Mom!” She kicked Elle’s inoperative phone aside and sat down on the sofa. “See, after we moved down here from Iowa… Do you know about that?”
Elle shook her head.
“Well, it’s a long story. I won’t bore you. But we came down here for the purpose of killing Calder Hudson.”
Elle swallowed with difficulty. “Why?”
“He ruined our lives.”
“How so?”
Elle didn’t mind if it was a long, boring story told by a deranged individual. She had to give them—Calder—time to find her. She’d texted him only that she was going to see Dawn. He would have assumed that she meant at the hospital. She glanced at the clock on the dusty mantel. Three minutes till five o’clock. When she failed to arrive at the house in time to—
“So I put him out of his misery.”
The jarring statement pulled Elle from her thoughts. “I’m sorry? What?”
“Daddy. After he got the boot from Maxwell, he couldn’t find another job, especially not after the accident, which fucked up his back something awful. He could barely walk, much less work.
“Our car had been repossessed, which is why he was riding that damn motorcycle. Medical bills piled up. We had to sell the house and move into this crappy apartment. All because Mr. Calder Hudson had gotten Daddy fired. He’s to thank for him getting hooked on the meds, too.”
Elle remembered that one of the men in the photograph had died of an overdose. “Opioids?”
“Yes. Daddy was pitiful. Pathetic. One day he told me he would be better off dead.” She shrugged. “I agreed.”
“You put him out of his misery.”
“Eventually he probably would have offed himself, accidentally or on purpose.” She leaned forward and reached for the TV remote. “Show time.”
Elle looked at the clock. One minute till five. Soon, soon. They may all already be there. They would be calling Glenda to ask where they were, what the holdup was. But not even Glenda knew that she hadn’t stayed at the hospital.
She hadn’t told her because she hadn’t wanted an argument against this visit with Dawn. With misplaced compassion, she’d felt she owed it to the younger woman for leaving her at the safe house.
She’d planned to make it a brief courtesy call, then return to the hospital before anyone realized she’d come here. Then she would have called Glenda to come pick her up and begged forgiveness after the fact.
“I feel like I should be popping popcorn.” Dawn grabbed a throw pillow and hugged it to her chest.
As Dawn had said, Calder was smart. He would figure it out. Compton and Perkins would have people—
“You look sort of washed out,” Dawn remarked.
Elle looked toward the television. Shauna was opening the interview with her falsely warm greeting. Elle did look washed out. She said, “We were under fluorescent lighting.”
“Hmm.”
“Dawn, what about the death threat?”
She giggled. “Oh that. I planned that soon after the shooting. I was certain no one would ever suspect me, but just in case, Mom and I worked out the wording of a threat on my life—being sure to mention that kid’s tattoo—which would have eliminated any suspicion that I was the culprit.
“Mom got this simpleton who walks the neighborhood looking for her lost cat—who’s said to have been dead for ten years at least—to buy her a burner phone that she could use to call me, leave a message, then ditch the phone. We rehearsed it a lot. As you heard, she got real good at disguising her voice.
“When blondie there”—she nodded toward the TV—“broadcast our names, I thought it would be a good time to pull out the death threat. It would practically force the police to round us up, which would give me access to him.”
“Calder?”
“You, too. See, by then, I’d already decided that the two of you together might not be the safest thing for me, and that I… well, you know.” She ran her index finger across her throat, then returned her attention to the television.
Elle’s hands were beginning to tingle with the lack of blood circulation, and her mind was reeling. But, to buy time, she must keep Dawn engaged.
“So, your mother shot up the safe house?”
She continued to watch the TV. “Uh-huh. She had a busy day and night and was really cranky when I arrived at the hospital here in Dallas.”
Elle mused out loud, “You weren’t calling Frank from the safe house. You were calling your mother, giving her directions there. Information on the layout.” Then, “Dawn, how did she know she wouldn’t hit you in the barrage?”
Dawn looked across at her and frowned, seemingly over Elle’s stupidity. “Practice. We brought all of Daddy’s guns with us when we moved down here. We’d go out in the country and practice. She and I both became very proficient.”
“Did Frank know what you intended?”
“God, no. Frank would never shoot anybody. He didn’t have the nerve. I only married him so Mom and I would have a scapegoat if we ever needed one. But he was a good husband. He liked taking care of me. A little too much sometimes. He hovered, you know?”
“How did you—”
“Shh. I want to hear this.” She focused on the TV, where Elle was talking about life after Charlie. “Just getting up in the morning was a challenge,” she was saying. “I didn’t want to face another day without him. I would think about all the days to come that I would have to face without him, and grief would paralyze me.”
Dawn looked across at her. “I didn’t mean to kill your little boy. I was going for Calder Hudson. I fired a nanosecond too late. He’d already moved past you. The bullet struck that old man next to you instead. I fired several more rounds—I lost count of how many—in Calder’s direction, but they were misses, too, because he had hit the deck.
“Of course, by now people realized there was a shooter among them. They were panicked, running crazy in every direction. I figured I’d blown it, missed my chance, so I ran, too. That’s when I banged right into your stupid stroller.
“But it actually turned out to be fortunate. Because when I glanced back to see if anybody was coming after me—no one was—there was Calder Hudson, hero, trying to catch the stroller before it went over. As he reached for it, I got off a lucky shot.
“Figuring he was dead, I thought, ‘Yea! You son of a bitch.’ But,” she sighed, “the shot wasn’t as lucky as I’d thought. He didn’t die. The damn bullet went straight through him. So he’s to blame for your kid dying, Elle, not me.” She turned her attention back to the TV.
Elle was thinking that by now they would all be looking for her, but how much time did she have? How much of the interview had Shauna edited out? How long would it run? Time enough for rescue to arrive? When the interview was over and Dawn was no longer distracted by it…
She had to keep her talking.
“How did you know that Calder would be at the fair that day?”
“We followed him. All the time. Well, whenever he was in Dallas. He went out of town a lot on his jobs to fire other people from theirs. Sometimes we’d have to wait months at a time for him to come back. But when he was in town, he kept a fairly routine schedule, and we kept track.”
“There must’ve been nights when Calder was out late. Didn’t Frank become suspicious of your… excursions?”
“I’d tell him that Mom was having one of her spells and that I had to stay with her.”
“What kind of spells did she suffer?”
“She didn’t really suffer spells, silly. I only told Frank that.”
“He believed you?”
“There was no reason for him not to.”
Elle knew she was dealing with someone who’d lost all touch with reality. To keep her talking, she would continue to feed her ego. “You must’ve been very clever stalkers for Calder not to catch on.”
“Oh, we were. Shauna never caught on, either. We knew where they lived, of course. High-and-mighty people like them never notice people like Mom and me.”
Her features tensed into a hateful expression that chilled Elle to the bone. To divert her from whatever thoughts had caused it, Elle said, “You were going to tell me about the day of the fair and how you knew he’d be there.”
“Oh, yes. Well, he’d been working in a downtown skyscraper for several months. Every weekday, we followed him out of the parking garage when he left. He was driving this mediocre car, pretending to be a nobody.
“But that day, he left the parking garage in his Jaguar. We followed. Which wasn’t easy, let me tell you. He drives like a bat out of hell. On that day, he was going even faster than usual. He drove and drove until we had about decided to turn around and wait for another time.
“Then, when we realized he was going to the fair, I knew it was the perfect place. Just dark enough. Tons of people. We could get lost in a stampeding, terrified crowd. I told Mom to get ready.”
“Ready?”
“With our disguises. We kept them in the trunk of her car at all times.”
“Your ball cap.”
“Um-hum. So at a glance I’d look like a boy.”
“But how did you know about Levi Jenkins? The tent he was in, all that?”
“We didn’t.” Again, she looked at Elle with impatience. “We’re not clairvoyant, you know.”
“It really was an ingenious plan,” Elle said, looking at her with feigned wonderment.
Dawn beamed. “Yes, I know.”
“I’m just trying to understand how you pulled it off.”
“Well, we knew that when I started shooting—”
“Where did you have the gun?”
“Inside the pocket of the windbreaker. I shot through it. I dropped the cap on purpose.”
“Weren’t you afraid of leaving DNA on it?”
“No. Weren’t you listening? Compton said they couldn’t test any DNA on the cap until they had a suspect, and I certainly wasn’t one.”
She laughed. “See? Nobody would suspect a casualty.”
Chapter 40
Calder ended his call with Compton and Perkins, swerved out of his lane and onto the shoulder of the freeway, then brought his car to a shuddering stop. He called Glenda again.
She answered with “What’s going on?”
“The Smithson woman. What’s the address of the house you sold her?”
“Calder, where is Elle? She hasn’t called—”
“I know.”
“Why haven’t I heard from her? Tell me what’s happening.”
“Give me the fucking address!”
After a put-out sigh, Glenda rattled it off to him.
“Thanks.”
“Wait!”
But he didn’t. He hung up and repeated the address to his car’s navigation system. The map appeared on his touch screen. “Fuck fuck fuck!” He was traveling in the opposite direction, and the estimated time to get there from his current location was twenty-two minutes.
He whipped the Jag back onto the freeway. As he took the next exit so he could turn around, he called Compton. “I’ve got the address for Dawn’s mother.”
The traffic light at the bottom of the ramp turned red. He looked both ways, saw a narrow opening, then hooked a sharp left turn. On the other side of the underpass was another red light. There were cars in front of him waiting to turn left onto the access road.
“We already have her address,” Compton said. “We’re on our way, just leaving the hospital now.”
“Well, step on it. Have you sent a SWAT unit?”
“SWAT unit? Calder, we haven’t even questioned Dawn yet. We can’t send a—”
“Why the fucking hell not?” The traffic light turned green. He waited impatiently for the cars ahead of him to go. “Move already!” he shouted at them, and then to Compton, “This is the Fairground shooter, for chrissake.”
“We don’t know that. You don’t know that.”
“It feels right.” He reentered the freeway, dodged his way between several slow movers until he found a reasonably clear lane, and floor-boarded the accelerator.
Compton was saying, “We don’t have any evidence on which to base an arrest. We’ll talk to her, then—”
“Talk? What is the matter with you? You’re the one who advanced the idea that somebody had a vendetta against me. Now we have a likely somebody. Take her into custody first, then talk.”
“You saw the individual who tipped over the stroller. You identified him as male. It wasn’t Dawn.”
“It could have been. She’s tall. Easily attainable cap, remember? Never mind all that now. We’ll talk details later. Just—”
“Dawn was a victim. She dropped where she was shot, and the bullet removed from her leg was fired from the same gun that wounded and killed the others, including you.”
“Look, I don’t know how she did it. But I know that she was somehow involved. I feel it. And Elle’s with her. So send the fucking badasses to that house. Make fools of them, yourselves, make a fool of me. But if I’m right—”
“We can’t barge into someone’s house only because it feels right to you. We have civil rights laws in this country.”
“Yeah, while you’re clinging to that, I’ll violate more than the rights of anybody who harms Elle.”
“Calder, listen to me. You need to calm down. You’re overreacting.” After a beat, she added, “Remember what happened to Charlie Portman when you acted on impulse.”
As though he’d been slapped, Calder blinked to clear the red haze of fury from his vision. “Fuck you.”
Realizing Calder had hung up on her again, Compton cursed him. She looked over at Perkins. “You heard him. What do you think?”
He pondered it for all of one heartbeat. “Send in the badasses.”
Calder made the twenty-two-minute trip in twelve.
The street address was in a neighborhood barely hanging on to a middle-class designation. All the houses were constructed of brick, but their wood trims needed fresh paint, the shrubbery was scraggly, and the roofs sported curled shingles.
He located the house number, and the name printed on the dented metal mailbox at the curb confirmed that Marjorie Smithson lived there. A Ford compact was parked in the driveway.
He drove the length of the block and around the corner and parked in front of a run-down playground. He felt conspicuous as he alighted from his car, but the houses he walked past were shuttered. He got the impression that this was a neighborhood where minding one’s own business was probably the best policy.
He wasn’t as impulsive as Compton had accused him of being. He wasn’t going to “barge” in until he had some idea of what was going on inside the Smithson home. If anything.
Maybe this was a fool’s errand. He would prefer that it was. But his gut was telling him otherwise.
Two doors down from the Smithson residence was a house with a for-rent sign in the yard. It looked like it had been there for some time. Banking on the house being vacant, he waded through the weeds in the front yard and down the side of the house to the backyard. A dog from somewhere in the vicinity began to bark, but he ignored it as he walked across the next backyard. It was separated from Marjorie Smithson’s by a chain-link fence. Calder climbed over it.
There, he stopped, waiting for a challenge, listening for any indication from inside the squat, square house that he’d been seen or heard. When nothing happened, he moved to one of two narrow, vertical windows on the back of the house, cupped his hands around his eyes, and peered through the pane.
The woman looking directly back at him through the window glass was only a yard away from him. But her open eyes were unseeing. The sight was so unexpected, so grotesque, he reflexively stumbled backward, huffing breaths through his mouth.
Collecting himself quickly, he took his phone from his pocket and sent Compton a text. Woman, guessing Marj, fatal GSWH. Bedroom, NE rear corner of house. I’m going in.
He made certain that his phone was silenced, then cautiously approached the block of crumbling concrete that served as a back stoop. The outer door was screened. He held his breath as he tried it. It was unlocked, but the hinges squeaked when he opened it. He waited. So far, so good. He wedged himself between the screened door and the solid one and tested the knob. It turned. Heart thudding, he pushed the door open.
He was surprised to hear a familiar voice: Shauna’s.
He listened for several seconds and, when he heard Elle’s mellow voice, he realized he was hearing the broadcast of their interview.
He stepped into an untidy kitchen. The television would help cover any noise he made, but he wished he had on shoes other than his boots. His footsteps—
Dawn’s voice froze him.
“Weren’t you listening? Compton said they couldn’t test any DNA on the cap until they had a suspect, and I certainly wasn’t one. See? Nobody would suspect a casualty.”
The TV sound track continued but became like white noise to him. He crept forward across the kitchen and passed through a doorway into a small dining room. On the opposite side from the kitchen was a wide opening into the living area.
A framed mirror hung on the wall to his left. In it, he could see Elle reflected, seated in a chair. He experienced a momentary surge of relief to find her still alive, but upon further inspection, he saw that her arms were taped to the chair.
She hadn’t noticed him. He mentally tried to telegraph her of his presence. At the same time, he didn’t want her to react in a way that would alert Dawn.
