He kept tellin’ people he was an actor. Said he knew a lot of people at the movie studio. Talked a lot about movies he’d been in, but they was all older stuff. He never seemed to be workin’ these days.” She leaned forward and her voice dropped to a confidential whisper. “Dealin’ drugs, is what I think.”
Keller thought for a moment. He knew a couple of people working at the Screen Gems lot outside of town. Maybe they had a listing of people who had worked there. It would be a long list; the studio was the biggest production facility on the East Coast. This was assuming the boyfriend wasn’t just a poser. Still, the boyfriend was all the lead he had right now. “This guy named Roy by any chance?”
“Yeah,” Alicia said. “Roy Randle. Sounded fake to me.”
“Probably,” Keller said. “But I’ll check it out. Thanks.” He slid out of the booth and stood up.
The flirtatious grin was back. “So when you gonna show me them handcuffs?” She darted a glance at the kitchen, where Bart was haranguing the other waitress about something. She lowered her voice. “I get off in an hour.”
“Sorry,” Keller said. “My workday’s just starting.”
“Well,” she said, disappointment obvious in her face, “I work every weekday ‘til three. Stop by, when you have some time.”
“I could be an axe murderer for all you know,” Keller said.
She smiled at him. “You don’t look crazy,” she said.
Shows how much you know, Keller thought. He left a twenty on the table for the coffee and the information and walked out.
Out in the car, he flipped open the file and looked again at the picture of Laurel Marks. He was beginning to get a sense of her, beginning to fill in the spaces behind what he could see in the photo. Now he felt the anger in the set of the jaw, the fury behind the eyes. He looked back at the restaurant. Alicia was looking out the window at him. When she saw him look up, she waved, then went back to work.
Keller shook his head. Not so long ago, he would have played the game, done the dance of invitation and withdrawal, until the final act, bodies locked together in a momentary coupling in a rumpled bed somewhere. And after that…nothing. For the long dead years since the desert, nothing had meant anything to him.
Now, everything had changed. Keller slid the cell phone into the slot of his hands-free system and hit a number on the speed dialer. There was the soft chirring of the ringer on the other end, then a gravelly male voice answered. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Jones,” Keller said. “It’s Jack Keller.”
“Keller,” Marie’s father growled, “how many times have I gotta tell you to call me Frank?”
“Sorry, Frank,” Keller said. “Marie’s working, I guess.”
“Yeah,” he said, “You wanna leave a message?” A loud metallic banging rose in the background, filling the car. “BEN!” Frank Jones shouted. “Cut it OUT! I’m on the PHONE!” The banging stopped.
“Sounds like you’re pretty busy,” Keller said. “Thirty years I was a cop,” Frank said. “I handled drunks, dopeheads, thieves, about a thousand varieties of asshole…and the person that’s made me craziest is a freakin’ five-year-old.”
“You can’t shoot him,” Keller said. “That’s what’s making you nuts.”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “That’s gotta be it. Anyway…”
“Just tell her I called. About this weekend.”
“Okay,” Frank said. “You comin’ up?”
“I don’t know yet,” Keller said.
Frank’s voice turned cooler. “Okay,” he said. “Whatever.”
Keller was about to say something, but the banging started up again. “BEN!” Frank hollered before coming back on the line. “Gotta go,” he said in a harried voice.
“Thanks, Frank,” Keller said, but the line was dead.
Shelby was standing over a plump woman in a shapeless flowered dress, on her knees in the parking lot. She had her hands over her face. As Shelby tried to put his hand on her shoulder, she dropped her hands, threw back her head, and screamed again. It was a wordless soul-tearing howl of anguish and despair and it made the hair on the back of Marie’s neck go up. Shelby yanked his hand back as if the woman had burned him.
Marie holstered the gun and walked over. The woman’s screams had subsided to great convulsive sobs and she had covered her face with her hands again. Marie looked at Shelby.
“Station owner’s wife,” he said.
“Jesus Christ,” Marie said. “She scared the shit out of me.”
A strange pained look flickered across Shelby’s face for a moment, then was gone. Marie hesitated for a moment, puzzled by the sudden tension between them. She broke it by asking, “The lady make an ID yet?” He gestured at her. “Looks like she’s doin’ one right now, doncha think?”
She grimaced. “Yeah, but we’ve got to…ah, shit.” Marie knelt beside the woman and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “Ma’am?” she said softly. “Ma’am, please, I need to ask you something.”
The woman suddenly turned to Marie and grabbed her shoulders like a drowning person blindly pulling her rescuer under with her. Her pale face was wet with tears and her eyes red and swollen.
“My boy,” she croaked. “Oh, God, oh, Jesus, did they kill my boy, too?” Her eyes unfocused and another wail seemed to be building deep inside her. Marie grabbed the woman’s shoulders in her own grip. A passerby might have thought they were wrestling. Marie shook the woman slightly. “Ma’am!” she barked. The woman came back briefly. “What boy, ma’am? Was your son here?”
The woman nodded vigorously. “How old, ma’am?”
Marie persisted. “How old is your son?”
“Suhh…suh…sixteen,” the woman blubbered. Her eyes went away again. She buried her face back in her hands and began sobbing.
Marie got up and looked at Shelby. “I haven’t found another body,” she said. “But there’s some drops of blood in the restroom. And some paper towels in the trash with blood on them. Like someone was trying to clean up.”
Shelby gestured toward where the body lay. “No one tried to clean up in there. So maybe the victim got a few licks in on the guy that kilt him.”
“Or,” Marie said, “maybe the kid’s…” She looked at the woman on the ground. “I’ll look around.” Shelby nodded. He bent down to the woman on the ground and began trying to raise her to her feet.
Marie checked the back of the station. There was a narrow passageway between the back of the building and a tangle of kudzu vines that had overtaken and strangled a thicket of pine trees behind the station. The narrow path was littered with twelve-ounce plastic soda bottles and discarded food wrappers. Marie slowly made her way down the narrow passage. It was barely wide enough for her to get through. There was no sign of anything or anyone having gone into the woods. She came around the other side of the station where a Dumpster sat, its green paint flaked off to expose the metal beneath, showing cancerous patches of rust. She took a deep breath and held it before looking in. Nothing. She walked back around to the front. Shelby had gotten the woman into the backseat of his car and was crouched down on the pavement next to the car door, nodding at something she was saying. Marie walked into the repair bay.
The lights were off and there were no cars in the bay for repairs. There was a door at the far end on which the word PARTS had been written with a marker on the bare wood. She opened the door and looked inside. She saw handmade wooden shelves filled with haphazardly stacked boxes of hoses, gaskets, fuses, and the like, but no body.
She