Chapter Twenty

Sam Chase wasn’t asleep when Nick’s call came. She had been sitting up in bed with three weeks’ worth of coupons, cut up, sorted on her lap by product. She’d been clipping coupons since the boys had come to live with her, and every few weeks she clipped another batch and added them to a large accordion file. When the phone rang, she had just been filing a Brawny coupon under “P” for paper towels.

She’d been thinking nonstop about what Nick had told her—evidence that she was involved with Sandi Walters’ murder. “Evidence.” The word rang in her mind as clear and sharp as “guilty.” What could they possibly have? She’d been home that night. She’d been alone for most of it. She knew the questions they would ask. Had she seen anyone? Talked to anyone?

But she hadn’t. She’d heard Derek come in at curfew and that was it. The phone rarely rang for her. Sam stared at the walls of the barrier she’d built around herself, contemplating the irony of it. The same walls she’d thought would protect her left her open to their accusations. She had no alibi.

Tonight she’d been anticipating a personal call from Nick, but not this. Nick’s voice was cold and tired as he gave her directions to an apartment in Antioch. She remembered the neighborhood. It was not a place she could forget. She didn’t blame Nick for his tone. She’d been the one to tell him that she would handle this alone. How could she not? How could she justify taking him down with her? It wasn’t smart for either of them. But now, without his smile to look forward to, she felt very alone.

Dressed warmly, she used her roof light and sirens to move through the sparse traffic quickly. That was how she wanted this to be—quick.

Nick hadn’t given her any details on the phone—no victim’s name or M.O. His voice rang with the same tired frustration she felt about this case. She wanted to go back to Yoshi’s, to dance in his apartment. Suddenly she wanted anything but to do the job she was supposed to do. When had it all built up? And worse, why was it crashing down so quickly?

It felt like everything had been stirred up. Sorting it out didn’t even seem possible, or perhaps just not realistic. And Nick deserved more. She wanted to give him more, but how could she possibly explain what she was feeling if she didn’t know? Maybe it would be better to just forget the whole thing.

She parked in front of the address Nick had given her over the phone.

The shanty-like structure could hardly be called an apartment complex. It was a cement U-shaped building, covered with spray paintings of curses and gang markings in all colors. A few of the tags she recognized from her days in homicide. She didn’t miss them.

This wasn’t the first time she had been here. The memory of a little girl surfaced in her mind, and of the thin, almost decayed crack mother whom the judge had refused to see as a long-term danger to her child.

The stench rose fast against the thick, hot air of summer and the hard cement surfaces. Even the rain couldn’t wash these smells away. Fire seemed the only true purifier. The corridors were quiet, people locked away behind doors. No one would have seen anything. There were no eyes in these walls. People turned their heads and expected others to do the same.

Yellow crime-scene tape marked the latest battleground, and Sam shoved her hands in her pockets and walked straight for it. A police officer stood at the door.

“Sam Chase,” she said, showing her badge. “Department of Justice.” She watched his face, waiting for his expression to judge her guilt.

Instead, he nodded her through without so much as a sideways glance. She should have felt better, but the not-knowing was making her crazy.

She shoved her personal problems aside and surveyed the surroundings. The inside of the apartment made the corridor look pristine. Sam had seen humans live in utterly foul conditions, but this was worse than she’d ever seen before, worse than the last time she’d visited this same apartment.

Lying in the center of the stained carpet was the woman Sam remembered. Painfully thin and jaundiced, her remains were crumpled on the floor like a soiled rag. Like Sandi Walters, she had two eucalyptus branches tucked behind her ears. The tree had begun to take on the symbol of death.

Nick knelt on a tarp laid beside the body, speaking with the medical examiner. He looked up and gave her a nod. His brown eyes looked duller today, and she wondered if the death wasn’t getting to all of them.

Sam walked immediately to the woman’s feet and, not daring to kneel for fear of tainting the scene, crouched over to stare at the arches of her feet. Nothing stood out to her. Frowning, she circled the body, looking for something different about this one—some tag, like the gum wrapper on Sandi Walters. The wrapper had been obvious, and she suspected it had been a mistake. Even if she hadn’t seen it at the time, it would have been quickly caught by the M.E. She scanned the room for something flashy and elegant that would stand out from the rubbish. She found nothing.

This dead woman, Eva Larson, like Sandi Walters, had been accused of abusing her daughter. Passed down from the attorney general’s office after relatives in Utah complained of the girl’s situation, the case had been delegated to Sam at D.O.J. The judge had sentenced Eva to eight weeks of rehab, during which time the girl stayed in foster care.

After that, Eva had received some job counseling and short-term childcare assistance. A service worker was supposed to check on them every few months, but it was always the same excuses: the system was overwhelmed with need, and they lacked funding and manpower to take on the massive problems. This one, another one, had simply fallen through the cracks.

“You know her?”

Sam focused on Nick, now standing beside her.

Shivering, she crossed her arms. “I knew them both.” She was the only link between the cases. Sloan, Walters, now Larson.

He moved closer, so he was almost touching her, and she felt the warmth between them, thankful for the gesture.

Nick sighed. “I figured.”

She was grateful he didn’t say what they were both thinking, that this didn’t make things look any better for her. Her alibi tonight was only slightly stronger than the last time. Derek and Rob had been in and out and had seen her. But two orphaned nephews would surely lie to protect their guardian. Any jury knew that. Sam looked around. “You find the daughter?”

Nick met her gaze with dulled eyes. “In the other room.”

“How is she?” From his expression, she should have known not to ask.

Nick ran a hand across his face. “Not good.” He put his hand on the small of her back and guided her toward the other room.

Sam stepped forward. The smells of urine and mold were overpowered by a stronger, more potent odor coming from the back room. She recognized it instantly and it caused a thick, syrupy rise in her gut. Halting in the doorway, Sam didn’t need to go farther. She could see the blue paleness in the girl’s hands and arms. Her body was way too thin and her face was sunken from neglect.

“She’s been dead three, maybe four days.” Nick’s tone was flat.

Sam forced herself into the room. “And the mother?”

“Only a few hours.”

“You think the mom killed her?”

Nick squinted in the direction of the far room. “I think she let her die. Can’t tell if it was violence or just neglect. Coroner will tell us more.”

Sam nodded. Had the killer been distracted from leaving his clue by the presence of the dead girl? She studied Becky’s face, her closed lids. “I’d check for prints on the eyelids. Someone’s closed them, and I’d bet it wasn’t the mom.”

Nick motioned to an officer, who wrote her suggestion down.

Sam leaned over the girl, examining her expression. Besides her closed eyes, it didn’t look like she’d been disturbed in death. Her mouth was partially open, her purple-tinted lips showing the signs of old bruises. She glanced at Nick, watching the muscles in his jaw tighten in concentration. “Any leads?”

He shook his head. “None.”

“Lugino?” she asked.

“He’s in jail. Has been since we picked him up.”

“Damn,” she said.

“And to add to the mess, Charlie Sloan’s family is suing for wrongful death.” Defeat resounded in his voice.

It didn’t surprise her. “Charlie was guilty,” she reminded him.

“He never confessed.”

“We had half a dozen people I.D. him with four of the six victims. He was guilty, and he was working alone. The D.A.’s office will handle the petition. We’ve got some time.”

“It’s not time I’m worried about—it’s answers.”

Sam looked around. “This feels different.” She thought about the method of Sandi Walters’ death. “Lugino confessed to having sex with Walters postmortem, right?”

Nick nodded. “He didn’t know she was postmortem—or so he said.”

“So the signatures are identical.” If they had found the presence of semen at Sandi Walters’ crime scene and not at the others, it would have been easy to prove that the signature of the killer, what he did to get off on the kill, was different. If the signature was different, they had a strong case that it was a different killer. But if the semen had come from Luginoafter the fact , the signatures were identical. It gave Sloan’s family a good shot. Who the hell else could have known about the eucalyptus?Who else ? That was the question she didn’t want to ask.

“The signatures are identical—M.O.’s too,” Nick commented. “We found a flashlight by the body. Maybe we’ll get lucky with that.”

Sam nodded. “Check the batteries. They always forget about wiping those off.”

“Good thinking.”

Someone from the medical examiner’s office called his name.

He waved, then looked at her again. “Will you take a look around, tell me what else you see?”

“Of course.”

He leaned in and lowered his voice. “We’ll talk more about the other stuff. Don’t worry, okay?”

She gave him a stiff smile. “Thanks, Nick.”

He started to walk away.

“Sloan never used drugs with them,” Sam called out to him.

“No, he strangled them,” Nick agreed, motioning to the other room. “Which is what this one looks like. The transition to use of a drug could be a sign of a maturing M.O.—or someone experimenting with a new method, not necessarily a different killer.”

“You have someone checking into the source of the heroin?”

He nodded.

“I’ve got a list of people who knew about the eucalyptus in the last case,” Sam said. “It’s a short list, but I’ll dig deeper tomorrow.” Then, scanning the apartment, she added, “I’ll add what I can.” The prospect of spending any more time in this depressing place made her back ache. She forced away the pity and pushed herself out of the room where a tiny girl would never have a chance for a happy ending.

 

Sam tucked deeper into the warm flannel sheets and pulled the denim comforter up under her arms. Propping her notebook on her lap, she tilted the light. It was almost two in the morning and yet she couldn’t imagine sleeping, didn’t feel the slightest fatigue. Instead, each time her eyes closed, she pictured the skeletal form of Eva Larson and the discarded body of her young daughter. The image was followed by one of herself before a jury. The judge was her father. “I warned you,” he was saying, over and over.

A part of her longed to go pull the thick diary of her cases off the living room bookshelf. But if she did that, she knew she would never sleep. She closed her eyes and processed the scene of Eva Larson’s death in her head. As she went, she opened her eyes to make notes—the location of the body, the appearance of the apartment. She drew a crude sketch of Larson’s resting pose, the right hand clenched as though she’d been gripping something. A weapon maybe. But where was it? Or perhaps it was something her killer had taken from her. She couldn’t imagine Eva Larson had anything worth killing for. She made a question mark on the page beside her notes and set the notebook down. She’d have to wait for the results from the sheriff’s crime scene.

Tonight she had promised herself she would finish chapter six of the book she was reading,The Teenage Jungle: A Parent’s Guide to Survival .

The peppy little pictures of parent/child relations had irritated Sam to the point that she covered them as she read. The first sentence of the chapter was “Where do feelings come from?” She made a gagging sound and forced herself to read on. There had been a quiz at the end of the last chapter. Scoring you as a parent. She’d gotten a fifty-two, the low end of the “non-nurturer.” The paragraph that followed began, “There is nothing wrong with being a non-nurturer. A lot of you men out there are probably just that. And you have some real advantages over the natural nurturer.” Bah. Why didn’t they just come out and say, “Not fit to parent.”

Sam refocused on what she was reading. The chapter was on listening to what your teenager was telling you. “Listening is different from hearing. We hear the cars on the street, but we’re not listening for one with a diesel engine or squeaky brakes. This is how we have to listen to our kids. It’s the best way to understand your child. Like a car, people (and especially teenagers) give all sorts of warning signals in what they do and say. This chapter is going to teachyou how to translate this secret language.”

The author’s cheerful prose describing the difficulties of rebellious teenagers scraped Sam’s mind like sandpaper. Older than his twin by two minutes, Rob had always been bigger and stronger, louder and more outgoing, and eminently more difficult for Sam to understand.

Sam turned the page and started the next paragraph, then heard a knock on the door. Slipping the book under the covers, she snatched a magazine off the bedside table and flipped it open. “Come in,” she called.

Derek stuck his head in the door. “How come you’re up?”

She shrugged and laid the magazine across her lap. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither.” He crossed the room slowly, his left leg stiff and awkward beneath him. Despite his frequent visits to a physical therapist over the past eight years, Sam didn’t notice much change in Derek’s limp. She never suggested that he stop going, and neither did he. If after all these years Derek retained the faith that he would learn to run, then she admired him for it. Hope would carry him further than any doctor. The mind was a powerful instrument, and his faith was something she refused to allow anyone to take away.

Derek sat on the edge of the bed and looked, without comment, down at the magazine Sam had been flipping through.

Sam watched him. “You want some tea?”

He shook his head.

“Warm milk?”

“Gross, Aunt Sam.” He scrunched his nose and shook his head again. There was a sad look in his eyes, under it just the slightest edge of anxiety or even fear.

“Something happen?” she asked, following the advice of the book hidden under her covers to make herself available if he wanted to talk to her.

“Just stupid kid stuff.” He sounded like an adult as he spoke, rubbing his hand over his bad hip and staring down at it.

“People say stupid stuff all the time,” she said, guessing someone had commented on his limp. She thought of her own experience at work the day before. “They feel threatened and call people names because they’re different, and they don’t bother to try to understand that different doesn’t mean bad.”

Derek frowned and then smiled softly. “They do, don’t they?”

She nodded. It was the first time either of the boys had spoken to her without being spoken to first in at least three days. She wanted to reach out and hug Derek, but she didn’t dare. Instead, she put her hand on his and squeezed.

“They’re such morons.”

She laughed. “Mostly.”

Derek stood and made his way to the door, his limp less noticeable. “Good night.”

When the door closed, Sam pulled the book out and found her lost page. The book warned not to try to compare her own childhood emotions to what her child was feeling. At leastthat wasn’t a problem. Nothing in her childhood was worth repeating. The doctor talked about ways to avoid pushing your own past on your child, avoiding the cyclical pattern of parent/child relations. Sinking deeper against the thick pillows and flannel sheets, Sam concentrated on every word. Maybe there was something to be said for the doctor’s suggestions after all.

 

Thick smoke billowed through an open window at the far side of the room. It floated down the long length and circled the bed like a ghost. She drew up the covers and tucked herself further in, but she couldn’t escape the low sound of his voice. It haunted her, stirring fears buried beneath years.

“Samantha Jean, where are you?” he called, his voice a record that played on her insecurities and mocked her successes, the Southern drawl nauseating.

She sat upright and sprang out of bed, hearing histhump, thumpon the stairs. She looked around the dark basement, realizing for the first time why she slept down there when everyone else was upstairs. Her mama put her there so her daddy could come get her.

“Sammy Jean,” he called again, his voice closer, his words drawn out.

Sammy froze in her tracks.

She heard him laugh, but it was a short, tired laugh. He didn’t like the game. “It’s not hide-and-seek, Sammy Jean. It’s a different game. All the kids play games at home, Sammy. This is ours.”

The sound of her father’s voice sent fear skittering up her spine. It wasn’t the same as with other kids. She knew it wasn’t the same.

She scanned the room for a new place to hide, but she had used them all. She sprinted to the crawl space and sank her toes in the cold dirt, pushing her way to the back. Flat against the cement wall of the house, she could hear the wheezing of her own breath. Tightening her jaw, she held herself quiet and still.

Her knees pulled up to her chin, she squeezed her eyes closed and willed her father away. She blinked hard. No matter what, she wouldn’t cry. Last time she went crying, her mama had said, “Worse thing you can do is cry. If you just keep your mouth shut, it’ll be over in no time.”

She didn’t want to do it again. Why did she have to do it? The other kids in school didn’t. Tammy Sue thought she was crazy when she asked. Nobody else had to touch it, to kiss it, to let them put it there. . . . It had hurt so much. Her lips began to quiver and she held them tight between her teeth. Don’t cry, stupid.

“Sammy Jean?”

She leapt at the sound of his voice. He was practically next to her. He wasn’t usually so quiet when he was drunk. Usually she could hear him coming a mile away.

“Sammy Jean, are you hiding from me?” he growled, and she could tell he was getting angry.

She willed herself not to cry. Please don’t cry. Please.

Suddenly his shape filled the entrance to the crawl space and his big, hairy hand reached for her.

She screamed and kicked at him to get away.

He howled and she scrambled to the furthest corner, but it wasn’t deep enough to get away. He caught her leg and pulled.

“You’re hurting me!”

“You don’t come here, I’ll hurt you more.” He yanked hard until he got her under one arm and dragged her out. Her nightie flew up and her pink panties showed. She tried to cover herself, but he pushed her hand away.

The smell of his breath reminded her of the first time he had come into her room, late at night. He always had the same smell when he came for her.

Her daddy pulled her panties aside and touched her.

Her eyes squeezed closed, she fought not to cry, not to fight.

“How do you like that?” he asked, blowing his breath in her face.

Ignore him. She had to ignore him. She lifted herchin. At least he didn’t go to Polly. She needed to keep him away from Polly. Polly was only seven. Sammy was nine. She could take care of herself.

“I said, do you like it?” He jabbed deeper.

Wincing in pain, she lashed out, throwing her hand at his face. Her palm made a loud smack as it struck his skin. She kicked hard and hit him in the chin.

He let go and she twisted fast and got up. Running for the stairs, she didn’t look back.

She reached the top and pulled open the door. The smells of the kitchen hit her as she gasped for breath. She took a step onto the yellow linoleum floor, but a giant hand yanked her back. She started to scream, but he hit her hard in the eye. She blinked hard to focus, feeling her left eye begin to swell.

“You want to fight?” he said, shaking her, her feet barely touching the floor.

She tried to pull away.

“I’ll show you what men do with women who taunt and then don’t put out. You can learn this lesson nice and early.” He smacked her hard in the mouth and then picked her up and turned back toward the basement. She searched for a way out, but he was too big. She could already barely see out of her left eye and she knew she shouldn’t fight anymore. She’d have enough explaining to do as it was.

He tossed her on the bed and tears closed her throat. She felt the hair on the back of his hand hit her belly. Sammy shut her eyes and clenched her teeth, trying not to make a sound. She could block it out. Block it out. She felt the pressure of his weight on her first, his round, hard belly pressing against her chest.

She shook her head and held back her tears. Dream about something else. Dream.

Sam shot up in bed, the dark sheets stained with tears and sweat, the flannel clutched in her hands. Her eyes scanned the room, her pulse like a drill in her ears. It was a dream. It was only a bad dream.