Lesser Crimes Page 8

  Their mother would arrive in the late afternoon, drink wine coolers and smoke in the kitchen. A lot of mothers did that in Hawkshaw. Lee would never stay for dinner; she would know that Mrs. Wheeler was tired and there wasn't enough food for everyone, not all the time. People would be sensitive to each other's situation, then they'd be insensitive. It was an eternal back and forth, as if almost everyone in that town belonged to an extended but highly dysfunctional family.

  Maddy had married Ross Olson, after all, and he would sometimes speak to Lee when his wife wasn't around. "It was rough on her because she wanted me to buy the house in Greensboro. And with Billy this sick, she couldn't work anymore and help out. But the upside was that we were able to save money by being here instead of paying rental. It's cheaper in Hawkshaw than over there for everything."

  From the time she was eleven, whenever Lee had visited Billy, Ross had always been there. He had been like everyone's older brother, a calming influence in a place that could be volatile. Ross always seemed to understand all sides of an argument. He was the peace broker, a young man who would probably succeed in life through quiet determination.

  Nowadays, he was employed as a parts analyst for a truck company, going from work straight to courses at night college. One day, he would have his own transport business.

  "We'll buy our house soon," he assured Lee. "And Billy ..."

  He let the end of the phrase drift. Billy won't last long.

  Billy was in a bad way. It was as if the air hurt him, even as he gulped it. He could hardly walk from the bedroom to the living room, where he would stay most of the day. Lee had only managed to move him outside a few times, during sunny days, but everything had bothered him: the birds, the light, even the wind moving through the trees.

  Nature wasn't necessarily a solace for someone that sick.

  "Have a look," she told Maddy.

  Maddy opened her eyes, blinked several times and leaned forward to peer at herself. "Can I have a bit more glitter on the eyes? It's New Year's Eve."

  There was already more eyeshadow than Lee thought possible, but she applied the glitter. When Maddy was satisfied, Lee stuck the long, pointy end of a comb through her brown hair and teased it.

  "Why do you like flat hair, Lynn?" Maddy asked, taking a gingerly sip of her soda through a straw so as not to spoil her lips.

  Lee shrugged, thinking of how James liked to run his fingers through her hair. It made her lips curve with amusement to imagine him trying to do that to Maddy, especially after the thick cloud of product that she wanted sprayed around her head.

  "Why, thanks, Lynn," Maddy finally said. "I look pretty good, don’t I?"

  "You look amazing," Ross said from the door.

  Maddy screamed, clutching her chest. "Ross, don't give us a fright like that. How long you been there?"

  "You almost ready?"

  "Have to put on my clothes, if you haven’t noticed."

  "Why do you have to leave so early?" Lee asked.

  "I said there will be people on the road." Maddy bustled out of the bathroom and toward her room. "Don't my husband look handsome, Lee?"

  The suit Ross was wearing wasn't expensive — not like the suits Lee had seen since leaving Hawkshaw, which cost thousands of dollars, but whose cut was perfection; suits like James’, when he cared to wear them. Yet, Ross' suit wasn't cheap. It might have cost a few hundred dollars, and Maddy's small diamond earrings a few hundred more. Ross was coming up in the world, little by little, as Maddy had always hoped.

  But he wasn't a handsome man with his pitted skin, fuzzy blond hair and burly build that would, one day, turn to hopeless fat.

  "You don't have to answer that, Lee," he said, letting out a guffaw.

  “You do look handsome, silly,” Lee said as she walked to the living room. She sat next to Billy on the sofa.

  "What's going on, then?" Even the short question left him out of breath.

  "They're almost ready to go."

  "Oh."

  Lee caressed his cheek and left her hand in his hair. He looked exhausted, and Maddy had already warned Lee that he hadn't stayed awake for midnight on New Years’ in a long, long time. However, sleep was kind to him. It was the only thing that took his pain away.

  "How do I look, Billy?"

  Maddy walked in on precarious heels and twirled for her brother to admire her dress.

  "Pretty."

  "Now you behave." Maddy took his face between her hands. "Happy new year, sweetheart."

  "Happy new year, Maddy."

  A sharp, short rap startled everyone for a second. The front door was pushed open by Caleb. He was dressed in a suit as well, except that his was definitely cheap. He whistled over Maddy, kissing her, shook Ross' hand and touched Billy's hair softly.

  "How you doing, Billy? Ready for lift-off?"

  Billy managed half a smile as Caleb perched on the arm of a chair without looking at Lee.

  "I was going to help Lee take Billy to his room," Ross said.

  "I'll do that, don't worry."

  "Where you going tonight, Caleb?"

  "Some live music over at the lake."

  "That's where Masha wants to go, huh? ’Cause you don't like that place."

  Caleb scratched his head at the mention of his girlfriend. "A bunch of people going there. Could be good, ain’t no telling.”

  "Well, have fun," Maddy said, hugging him. "And happy new."

  "Happy new."

  The couple left, letting the screen swing back into place, and Caleb got up to close the door. "It's chilly for Billy. Hey, that rhymed — eh, Billy?"

  "Can you take me to the room now?" Billy asked.

  "Already, man? You'll leave Lynn all alone here for the new year?"

  "I'll be in the room with him," Lee said. "We'll watch TV."

  They managed to get Billy to his feet. Despite being so thin and frail, he was heavy, but Caleb was strong and so was Lee. They put the sick man in the hospital bed she had bought with James’ money.

  Once Billy was settled, he fought to regain his breath and asked with effort, "Is anyone going to the Hoffmans'?"

  Caleb's eyes flew to the photograph of Scott Hoffman, which Billy had by his bedside. It had shocked Lee to know that Scott, Caleb’s best friend, was dead. Better-off than other kids because his father had a bricklaying business, Scott had been kind to Billy, bringing him DVDs and comics. The two of them had often sat discussing the merits of some superhero over another.

  Scott had been found at his house with a needle in his arm, having shot a deadly overdose of methamphetamine through his vein. The school athlete who hadn't had it nearly as bad as everyone else had succumbed to a drug most people in Hawkshaw couldn't afford, at least not for long. Caleb had already been a cop, claiming to have known nothing of his best friend's addiction.

  "I'll go see them tomorrow. It's a thing," Caleb explained to Lee. "We try to go by on difficult days, you know. Holidays."

  Billy closed his eyes, struggling for breath until Lee put an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. They watched him for a moment as his chest wheezed painfully, until a tear escaped the corner of one of his eyes and his face relaxed.

  Lee motioned for Caleb to follow her. In the kitchen, she took the chicken out of the oven, and Caleb's eyes rested on her as if she were the meal. She didn't want to see that look from him, so she turned her back and began mashing the potatoes and carrots together, adding tiny pieces of chicken breast to the mixture.

  "It will be a kindness, you know, when he …" Caleb started.

  "Don't say that," Lee snapped.

  "He can’t go on like this. And you can't go on like this either, Lynn."

  "I've been here less than three weeks, Caleb. I can go on a lot longer."

  "But you gotta get out of this house sometime. Just for a bit. Have a drink, listen to some music. I've talked to Maddy, she isn't nearly as angry as she was at you before. She'd be fine staying with Billy one night."

  "I don't want
to go out."

  "Well, my sisters plan to ask you."

  She turned sharply. "Did you put them up to it?"

  "I did not — they want to see you. And you know those girls, they don't like to be snubbed."

  Who in the world, except someone as clueless as Caleb, would think that meeting his sisters would be fun? They were like the love children of Godzilla and King Kong. Yet that was small town life: others decided what was good for you. You didn't turn down any invitations, you didn't snub anyone, and you didn’t retreat into yourself, unless you could show the certificate to some incurable disease.

  "I know it's not really the case, Lynn, but happy new year," Caleb added. "I guess I gotta get going."

  He didn't move, but she did. At the door, he added, "I hope it does turn out happy. I hope you ain't condemned. I hope Billy—"

  "Caleb ..."

  "I hope whatever is good for Billy happens. I'm here if you need me. If you let me."

  Caleb still felt the blind stubbornness of possession. He thought it was love, the purest motivation in the world. People shoved their so-called love at you and dared you not to accept it. They shoved you too, with your face against a locker at school, or against a wall in a bedroom.

  He might have forgotten the couple of split lips he had given her, but she wouldn't forget. He might have forgotten the nick she had given him with a pair of nail scissors, but he'd better not forget. Caleb had only been violent to her twice, and it had been enough.

  No, there had been the third time, when she had married Billy.

  Now he probably wondered if she had killed a man, and she didn't mind him thinking it.

  Still, he was gone, and she took Billy's plate to the bedroom. He could only eat three forkfuls before he shook his head. Lee removed the plates and cleaned Billy's teeth. She brushed the hair away from his forehead and put on the TV.

  "What do you want to watch?" she asked.

  "I think someone should go to the Hoffmans," he whispered.

  "Billy, it's the third year. They'll be all right."

  "Scott was their only son."

  Lee lay on the bed next to his and took his hand as they watched TV for a while. The news showed the fireworks that had already happened in other places of the world. They had been beautiful in Hong Kong, Berlin, Madrid.

  They had been beautiful in London.

  Her phone was on silent mode, but it lit whenever she received a call or message. There was a tearful drunken call from her mother.

  "Why do I have to be alone? You couldn't even invite me over there?"

  "Billy's already asleep, Mama."

  "Really?” April sniffled. “Maybe it would be bad to drink a toast with Billy like that. You tell him I said happy new year. I hope it's goddamned happy, is all I can say. I'm so sick of everything!"

  She would call again, when she got drunker and the self-pity increased.

  Lee looked at the screen. She had already called Cora. Now she wanted the phone to ring, and she wanted it to be James.

  She only wanted to hear his voice, but he didn’t call.

  TWELVE

  James didn't call because he was on his way to Charlotte.

  Bliss was an empty plane, and that was where he had spent the passage into the new year — happy to miss it in the country he was leaving, and in the country where he was headed. He had spent it twice over the Atlantic instead.

  James thought of Lee as he ran in the woods outside his rented Greensboro house. A run was the thing to get his circulation going after the long plane ride, although his mind raced faster than his feet. He thought Caitlin was right: Lee had always felt that she didn’t matter, and that others should come before her. Wary as he was of textbook psychological explanations, he could see why she would create aliases — women like Vivien who didn’t look like her, didn’t have her history and could remain in control of situations by lying.

  The men she robbed would think they were telling her what to do, where to go, how to be, and all the time she would be doing what she had set out to do. And the money, as she had told him more than once, had been the primary goal. She had needed it for Cora, for Billy and for April.

  A loud rustle to his right made him stop in his tracks. An owl perching on the thick low branch of a tree stared at him with almost indignant eyes. It had a brown and white coat of feathers, a round head and a bright yellow beak. The woods were bare and beautiful, and he enjoyed these encounters with the local fauna, but he walked away softly so as not to frighten the bird.

  Back in the house he ate a quick breakfast and ran up to take a shower before Paxton, Ava and others arrived. By a quarter past nine, the polished table in the dining room was covered with papers and files. Paxton introduced Dr. Gavin Koestler, the neuropathologist he had hired to reexamine the evidence released to the defense, which included the crime weapon.

  A young assistant from the firm projected a slide onto the bare white wall. It showed the crime weapon, a fire poker, and Paxton pointed at it with a laser beam as he spoke.

  "From the blood on the prints, we know that April, Cora and Lee touched the poker at or after Joe's death, not before. We also know that there was an attempt to wipe April and Cora's prints, and only partials were recovered from the handle." The laser circled an ornate handle depicting fruit and leaves as Paxton continued, "These nooks and crannies are difficult to clean, so the poker — and this is the real issue here — was used, wiped clean, and only then were Lee's prints decisively added, as you can see if we show them to you with the layer of dust."

  Another slide appeared, and Paxton circled the prints that were meant to be Lee's, also showing which ones were Cora's and which were April's.

  "Crime scene, please."

  A third slide showed the L-shaped stairs from the front door, with Joe's body lying on the ground at the bottom, facing away from the camera and toward the kitchen.

  "The other visible elements in the scene are of course blood spatter, blood traces and footprints. And there, James, we got a bit flummoxed."

  It wasn't the first time that James looked at crime scene photos. He had been shown the images of his wife lying on a rock, her face and limbs smashed by a fall. He had had to identify her body as it lay, cold, blue and broken, on a slab. His hand was nevertheless steady as he held the cup of coffee to his lips after asking, "Why?"

  "Our expert here, I should say, is flummoxed,” Paxton explained. “It's another of those cluster thingies."

  "I can hear the word clusterfuck, Carter," Ava said without raising her head from her yellow notepad.

  "There's soap in this house, young lady." Paxton faced James and continued, "What do we know from the medical examiner’s report? That the actual cause of death for Joe Keane wasn't the blows, but a fall from just about the middle of the stairs, when he hit this bend and rolled on to the ground here, where he landed badly and broke his neck. However, a case will still be made by the prosecution that the fall was provoked by the blows to his head, even that he would have bled to death because of his wounds. The question is, where did these blows take place? Gavin, dear, d'you want to cover this?"

  Koestler was a tall man in his late fifties with a full mane of white hair. He stood and took the laser pointer Paxton offered him.

  "All right, so the prosecution supposed that Joe was on the stairs going down, and that he was hit from behind by someone on a higher step. If you look at where the blood is, then we would have to say it started about here, midway up or down. However, there are seven lacerations on his skull — which means the killer would have had to raise the poker to strike again and again."

  Forgetting the laser, Koestler motioned with a large hand toward the walls in the image. "Where is the cast-off pattern? It would have to be here. No one strikes someone else like this." He took the stick they were using as a stand-in for the poker and held it low, making repeated but short striking movements. "People strike like this." He raised the stick past his shoulder. "You can see how a poker with b
lood on it would create at least some blood pattern on the walls and ceiling and would also drip in a specific pattern on the carpet when the killer struck again."

  He asked the assistant for the next slides. "Except we just see dollops of blood on the carpet, which are consistent with profuse bleeding. And here we have smears on the wall and on the rail, which were made by the victim: these are Joe's fingers and palm, but his hand is not facing down, as if, after being hit, he was trying to hold on and not fall. The fingers and palm are facing up — as if he had turned to confront his assailant and was holding on to the rail and the wall to climb."

  The next slide showed the bottom of the wall, close to the steps. "And this low spray pattern here has been described by the prosecution as a cast-off pattern. But that pattern, in my opinion, was not caused by a blow when Joe had already fallen down, for example, but by coughing or spewing."

  A close-up of Joe Keane, lying on a metal gurney, followed. "You see, there is blood in his mouth. As he fell, he coughed or expelled his breath in a way that would cause this type of spray pattern."

  Paxton pushed printed photos across the table for James to look more closely.

  "If his assailant were a woman or a child," James asked, "and if the first blow or blows were not strong enough to kill him or render him unconscious — would he not naturally try to confront the killer and take the weapon from someone weaker than him? That would explain him turning around to climb."

  "That's where we have the next clusterfuck," Ava announced.

  Paxton threw her a look of gentle chagrin as Ava efficiently distributed several sets of photos of Joe Keane's skull, shaved by the pathologist, and the report, which included drawings of a man's head with marks that represented the lacerations.

  "You see, six of the seven lacerations follow a similar pattern. They are the result of blows delivered from above, over what you would know as the crown or top of the head," Paxton said. "The six long lacerations were allegedly made by the point that sticks out from the poker. There is only one short blow, which hit his posterior skull near the back of his neck.”