Fear the Darkness: A Thriller Page 7

  After firing up the first pot of coffee, I grabbed my cell phone off the kitchen counter, and the Pug and I sat together on the back porch watching the sun come up and listening to the coyotes’ high-pitched keening in the arroyos behind our property. Two cups later Carlo followed suit. Like any normal teenager, Gemma-Kate slept in. That allowed Carlo and me to have privately a little of the postmortem that only mates can have, a conversation that feels like lazy lobs on a tennis court where no one needs to score points.

  “I called the vet,” I told Carlo.

  “So early?”

  “They say they’re twenty-four hours, so I took them at their word. They told me he’s stable.” I petted the female a bit. “She misses him. I’ve come to like these guys.”

  “I like them, too.” Carlo gestured at the invoice on the table between us. “At these rates it’s a good thing.”

  “You told them his name is Al?”

  “The girl asked, and I was too embarrassed to say we hadn’t named him. While you were in having the other guy treated, the girl asked the female’s name.”

  “I can’t stand the suspense,” I said.

  Carlo glanced away with a smile as if he was half embarrassed and half kind of proud of himself. “Peggy.”

  “Peg the Pug. Al and Peg.”

  “Well, it’s not like they’re going to file for Social Security someday. We can always change them. Are you going to call Jacquie Neilsen?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she’s crazy.”

  “She’s not crazy, she’s in pain.”

  “There you go doing that priest-and-the-stray-pup thing.”

  He made a whining sound.

  “Okay, okay, you know I can’t stand it when you whimper. I’ll call her, I just want to do a little homework before I go over there.”

  A little while later Gemma-Kate shuffled out in her drawstring pajama bottoms and T-shirt and asked about breakfast.

  “What, no crepes?” I asked. If not an apology, seemed like there would be at least that for letting the Pug eat a toad on her watch. Now she just rooted around in the pantry for cereal without speaking, looking more guarded, as if she feared blame would descend without warning.

  Thirteen

  The Neilsen homework consisted of calling Dr. George Manriquez, a lovely individual first and medical examiner second, who treated the dead as if they were his patients. He told me once that they, or more precisely their flesh, spoke to him more intimately than any of us, the living, are capable of. We were kind of close because we both came from Florida. Florida is a different kind of place.

  The eye bank was there removing some corneas for reuse, and it took a while for George to return my call, but when he did he was as helpful as ever. We exchanged a few pleasantries, whether I was okay after a particularly heinous crisis six months before, and what was going on with Laura Coleman. I told him she was staying with her brother in the North Carolina mountains, healing psychologically and physically after working that case with me. She kept in e-mail contact, so I knew she didn’t hold me responsible even if that was how I held myself. I asked if he had seen Max Coyote lately, whether he was suffering any residual effects. I didn’t ask whether Max had ever submitted that DNA swab he got from me, and Manriquez didn’t say. Then I got to the point.

  “I’m doing a little work on the death of a fourteen-year-old named Joseph Neilsen, drowning,” I said. I filled him in on a few more of the details to bring him up to speed. “What have you got?”

  Computers have made things a lot easier. He didn’t have to get up to go to a file cabinet.

  “Not much here,” he said after a few minutes. “I got a death certificate.”

  “You sign off?”

  “No, it was done before the body arrived at the morgue. Dr. Lari Paunchese.”

  “Know him?”

  “No, but it doesn’t take an ME or a coroner to sign off.”

  “I know, just curious.”

  “I confirmed cause and manner.”

  “Death investigator?”

  “Sam Humphries. I know him a little. He was green at the time.”

  “It was only six months ago. He’s still green. Why so little information? Didn’t you do an autopsy?”

  “Not complete. Note here that the father asked me not to do it, would have been too disturbing for the mother, so I did mostly external. But I took some fluid from his lungs to confirm cause of death.”

  “No bruising, he didn’t hit his head on the diving board or something?”

  “Mild abrasion on his right zygomatic—”

  “English, please.”

  “Cheekbone. Nothing that would have indicated a blow to the head hard enough to knock him out. I checked that.”

  “No evidence of autoeroticism?”

  “No, why?”

  “Rumor going around.”

  “Nothing but the water in his lungs perimortem confirming drowning.”

  “What’s the blood work show?”

  “No tox report here. Could have one, just not posted yet. That’s not unusual. They’re really backed up, and nobody was pushing.”

  “You okay that nobody was pushing?”

  “You know how it is, Brigid, I’m not the detective, and I’m not Quincy. I call the COD, deliver my report, and advise the investigators whether to pursue the case from there. I know what you’re thinking, we should rule it undetermined until all other manners of death have been ruled out. And I think the investigator—I think it was his first case, so he was really thorough, he did a good job. But you have a drowning death in a swimming pool and the chances of it being anything other than an accident are one in three thousand unless you find concrete on the feet. Maybe he took some drugs, but doesn’t matter, this has accidental drowning written all over it.”

  What can I say, I’m a sucker for parents who have lost their children. At least I had something to take to Joseph’s mother, to reassure her that a person I trusted had made a good call. After asking George to check on that tox report, I called Jacquie.

  A small reedy voice answered, “Tim?” I could tell it was Jacquie. Apparently she either didn’t have caller ID or didn’t look at the number.

  “Mrs. Neilsen, we met briefly last night. I’m Brigid Quinn.”

  “Yes. Oh. Yes.”

  “I’m calling to let you know I just talked to the ME. The medical examiner.”

  “You talked to a medical examiner?”

  “He’s kind of a friend.”

  “Oh! Can you come over right now?”

  Fourteen

  On the way over to the Neilsens’ I checked in with Mallory via cell to tell her what I’d found out from George Manriquez and thank her for the lovely evening. She laughed at me. “Did I tell you I got the call about the Nobel Peace Prize? I’m still licking my wounds. Speaking of licking, what’s up with your dog?”

  “Vet said he ate a toad.”

  Immediately veering from quip to sympathy, she gasped. “Oh, that’s ghastly. I’ve heard of animals … how did he get it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Didn’t Gemma-Kate see him dig it up? They hibernate that way. Or did it jump over your fence and the dog got there before she could stop him? She must be totally heartsick, with her being responsible. Poor child.”

  I thought of Gemma-Kate that morning, how she looked.

  Was there a pause in the conversation just then, another question that came and went without being asked? Or am I misremembering the details again? Did I mention to Mallory that Gemma-Kate did not appear heartsick, or even offer an apology? Or did I just think it?

  If there was a pause, I know Mallory heard it. I know we were both thinking the same thing, but she picked up the thread of the conversation again with her usual aplomb, saying all the right things about how it couldn’t be helped but that she was sure the Pug would pull through.

  “What about Jacquie?” Mallory asked.

/>   “I’m going over there now.”

  “You realize when I encouraged you last night I was being ironic.”

  “I got that. But when I talked with the medical examiner there were a few irregularities I’d like to check on. These things happen with equivocal death. Guy pushes his wife down the stairs, kid road-trips her dad who’s got dementia and says he must have wandered away…”

  “Equivocal death. Sounds like Brigid Code for murder. Chilling. I’m chilled.”

  I laughed. “I’ll call you after I talk to her.”

  I looked at my watch and figured I could delay getting to the Neilsens’ long enough to stop by the pet hospital.

  The night before I’d been distracted. On arrival today, I noticed the lobby was clean and spare, with those exposed pipes near the ceiling that you find in modern architecture, and current copies of Your Cat magazine instead of the usual old issues of People.

  I had to wait until the receptionist took care of a woman who had come to collect her dog’s ashes. The woman reached for the box and held it against her tattered T-shirt formally like a relic in a procession while she walked out, a little dazed.

  “May I help you?” the receptionist said with more sympathy than I’d encountered in some intensive care units. She had a long ponytail pulled back severely off her face, like mine, only not white. It was likely she was different from the one the night before. I couldn’t remember.

  “I’m Brigid DiForenza. I’m here about … Al,” I said.

  Apparently they didn’t have a lot of animals staying overnight, because she knew I was talking about the Pug. She called an assistant who took me back to a spacious, well-lit room where my Pug slept. There were other cages, but they were all empty. It didn’t appear he minded either being alone or in a cage.

  “Do you want me to get him out?” the assistant said, while everything about her body and voice urged me to say no.

  “No,” I said, “he looks too contented. How is he doing?”

  She checked a chart she had brought with her. “He hasn’t thrown up since he arrived, and we’re continuing to monitor him and keep him hydrated. I would think another twenty-four hours and he should be ready to come home. You just should keep an eye on him in the future. Sometimes they become toad junkies.” She pointed to a chair. “Stay as long as you like.”

  She closed the door behind her. I pulled the plastic chair next to the cage and sat with my Pug a few minutes, reaching my fingers through the mesh of the cage, stroking an unresponsive ear as soft and thick as a wilted rose petal. The pink tip of his tongue stuck out between his black lips.

  After trying a faint “Hello, Al,” I went quiet. I wasn’t used to talking to animals much, so I didn’t say anything. When I stood up to leave, the Pug still didn’t react. I slipped out of the room, closing the door softly behind me as if that would make a difference, feeling a little dazed, like the woman who left with her pet’s ashes.

  Over the last couple of years I’d been connecting to the world more than I did when I was with the Bureau, but sometimes I think connecting to the world isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

  I headed on to the Neilsens’, stopping at a drive-through Starbucks on the way.

  Fifteen

  Tucson is like a stream that runs next to the Catalina Mountains to the north of the city, longer than it is wide. People choose their friends partly based on what part of town they live in. It can take more than an hour to drive from one side of the city to the other. You might see a glimmer of interest in a first conversation sputter out when one person says “east” and the other says “northwest.” You’re both thinking that driving home after dinner just isn’t worth it.

  Most of the city flows through the low-lying area, but some of the houses along the stream slosh up onto the sides of the mountains, and this part of town is called the Foothills. It’s where the money is.

  In my AARP-issue white Toyota Camry, dusty to fit in with the others, designed to make me disappear into the crowd, I wound around a steeply circuitous road that turned out to actually be the Neilsens’ driveway.

  They had the kind of house where the drive curved under a porte cochere as big as a Holiday Inn, but the more telling thing was the saguaro cacti in the front yard. Saguaro cacti—that’s the kind with the arms—grow an inch a year. When you buy them grown, they cost a thousand dollars a foot. The Neilsens had five of them that were twenty feet tall. One of them, that hadn’t yet grown arms but jutted rigidly up to the sky, had two big boulders at the base. I wondered if Timothy was a little insecure.

  I had to wait a bit for someone to come to the door after I rang the bell that resounded as faintly as a rock dropped into a well. I didn’t mind waiting. You may have noticed that I haven’t been complaining about the heat. The high that spring day would be under eighty, with twenty percent humidity. Doesn’t get any better.

  Jacquie opened heavy double doors with low-relief calla lilies carved into them. She smelled like beer. I knew that smell from my own drinking days well enough to tell whether it was old from the night before or new from this morning. This was new beer.

  She stood aside to let me in the door and took me through the formal living room without stopping to watch whether I was impressed. After a walk, brief yet something that could definitely be called a walk, we ended up in one of those areas at one with the kitchen. The kind of space that used to be a family room but these days is an entertainment center. She folded into the corner of a couch with her legs tucked under her and gestured at the other end for me.

  Her makeup and hair were left over from the night before and hadn’t even been reheated. She still hadn’t brushed her teeth well. From the way her hair was mashed I could tell she slept on her left side. These are not heartless criticisms. It’s just that I’ve known so many parents who’ve lost their child, and I note the signs.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, the first words since she had opened the door. “I was thinking so hard … I should … have offered…”

  The pauses in her speech were prolonged in odd places. It was as if, halfway through a sentence, she wanted to talk about something else but lost the nerve.

  “Water?” I suggested. People always give each other water in the desert.

  “Or coffee?” she said.

  I thought of my Starbucks cooling in the car. “That would be even better, actually.”

  She got up and quickly fixed me one of those single-cup servings that come from a little individual coffee container. She didn’t ask if I wanted milk or sugar, but that was fine. In the quiet I detected somewhere the sound of running water, likely a CD with nature sounds, and it made me have to pee. I’m one of those women who has to go to the bathroom on the way to the bathroom. Not wanting to show my age, I did a few Kegels instead of asking for the powder room.

  She didn’t get anything for herself, which made sense. More beer would have looked bad, and caffeine would have spoiled the effect of the beer. She sat back down on the couch without speaking.

  “I’m here to listen,” I said. Most people talk. It is the rare person who offers to listen; usually you have to pay someone to do that. So I’ve found that line is often the best opener to a case.

  I was right this time. She was off like the Preakness. Jacquie Neilsen talked for twenty minutes, but she didn’t run straight. She had a brain like a rodent, running down one path and then being distracted by a nugget of information that she happened to spot, and running down that path, returning without warning to the topic she’d been on before. I asked questions to try to get her to focus so I could make sense out of what she was saying, but the main gist I could make out was that she loved her son very much and she really really didn’t want him to be dead.

  That and it had to be someone else’s fault besides Joey’s. Yes, as Lulu had explained, that was the crux of it. Jacquie would consider accidental homicide from horsing around with a friend who ran away when Joe was in trouble. She’d even take suicide brought about by bull
ying at school or his stepfather’s rejection of his sexual orientation. The only thing she couldn’t take was the thought of Joey’s senseless death due to drowning while he was masturbating off the side of the pool. Not her son. No, no, and no.

  The loops of her conversation got tighter and tighter until all she was left with was that no. Then she got up from the couch and went to a fireplace big enough to spit-roast an elk. A shrine had been set up on the mantel. All of the school photos of a fair-haired Joe, from sweetly smiling first grader through sullen eighth grader with a zit the size of a blueberry on his chin, were lined up. Surrounding them were his crafts: A fruit bowl made of glazed clay with all the little fruits painted to look realistic. A gecko-looking thing made out of seashells. A rock with a cartoon face painted on it. A framed watercolor of a house and a family of three. These things looked at odds with the tastefully understated decor of the rest of the house.

  Jacquie took a pirate-chest-looking sort of box from the mantel, brought it back to the couch, and opened it before me as if I would see jewels. “He had a happy childhood. See, look at all the cards he made for me,” she said. She pulled them out one at a time, a valentine decorated with tissue carnations, a watercolor of a prickly pear cactus with pink blossoms along the ridges. “Joey was always very creative,” she said.

  The memorabilia continued with handmade cards and little pieces of art and found objects all the way up to the time he died, continuing into the teenage years when you’d expect he would start to detach from Mom. “Do you have any practical effects?” I asked. “Wallet, photographs, calendar, cell phone?”

  She was about to answer. The house was so big you couldn’t hear the front door open, but we both heard purposeful steps on tile. Jacquie may have jumped a little when she heard it, as if we’d been caught by Dad doing something naughty. I thought of that woman in the shelter again. I made a mental note to watch Jacquie more carefully for other signs of fear. Whatever her feelings, I noticed the too-wide smile from the night before stretching her lips as Timothy strode into the room and offered his hand to me. He didn’t look at his wife to appreciate her smile.