Chapter Seventeen #3
“Twenty-eight,” Emmy said. “I put in a request for the autopsy report, but his record says he died of third-degree burns to the face, neck and hands.”
“Sounds like Prison Napalm.” Jude couldn’t suppress another shudder.
She’d seen the aftermath of an attack firsthand.
“Inmates cook it on hot plates in their cells. Heated sugar water. Sometimes they add oil. The sugar raises the boiling point, so the temperature can brush up against two hundred fifty degrees. The oil increases the viscosity. The sugar makes it sticky. When somebody throws it at your face, it sticks like glue. The weight makes the flesh peel from the bone. It gets into your nose and throat, burns through your windpipe. The burns on his hands were defensive. He was trying to wipe it off.”
“Jesus.”
“Prison is a tough place, but it can be torture for gay men.” Jude looked out the window. They were close to downtown. “Is it odd to you that a lot of the same names keep coming up?”
“North Falls has fewer than a thousand people. Half of them are named Clifton. The rest are Colemans, Garrisons, Wilders, Gilchrists—”
“I get it.” Jude had not missed the claustrophobia of small-town life, which could be wonderful if you were born into the right family and isolating if you were not. “Let’s spitball about the trial. Millie said the verdict was a foregone conclusion.”
“It’s Ruel I’m curious about. That’s odd—drowning in your waders.”
Jude had spent her childhood on the Flint. She knew how unpredictable the current could be. “When the Albany dam closes, the river reverses. The water can rise anywhere from two to three feet in a matter of seconds.”
“Yeah, I grew up here, too. They post the times for the closings. Ruel was a sportsman. He’d know when the river was going to reverse. The weird thing is, he was an angler, not a fly fisherman. I don’t know why he’d get in the water unless his boat got caught on something.”
“He was wearing waders while he fished from his boat?”
“It’s not smart, but it’s not unheard-of.
” Emmy took out her phone, her eyes darting between the screen and the road.
“I’ll get Cole to ask Verona PD if they still have a record of the death.
I remember Ruel drowned on their part of the river.
Dad went with old Chief Stevens to give Cynthia the death notification.
Taybee was still in college. Father Nate drove over to Athens to pick her up. ”
“I’m sure Taybee has copies of everything.”
“Probably in triplicate, but I don’t want her to know we’re looking into her father’s death unless I have to.
” Emmy finished typing and dropped the phone in her lap.
“Bill looks so good for the shooting. He was broke and desperate. The Rawleys were on his ass. Allison was divorcing him. Dad loved a money motive, but shooting a woman and her child to get five grand for a pawned camera isn’t much to hang a case on. ”
“If it’s not Bill, then who?”
“The same old same old. Reggie, the Rawleys, and I’ve still got this UnSub worrying the back of my mind. And on top of that, we’ve got the clues Allison left. God knows what that’s pointing to.”
“It could be five different things that are connected to Allison and Mandy but have nothing to do with the shooting.”
“We could churn butter with all these circles we keep going round.” Emmy turned onto Main Street.
“The crime scene was sloppy, amateurish. The killer couldn’t shoot straight.
We’re still missing a bullet and a casing, which means at least one of the gunshots is unaccounted for.
We’ve got three hundred grand that hasn’t been touched in twenty-four years.
None of the five suspects fits what we found inside Allison’s house.
If you wanna kill somebody, you go in and kill them. Tell me what I’m missing.”
“I have no idea,” Jude admitted.
Emmy tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. Jude recognized the expression on her face. She was working through a piece of information, trying to find the meaning. “What did Millie mean when she said you know who Ruel Clifton is?”
Jude held back a curse. Emmy really did remember every word anyone had ever uttered. “I slept with Ruel before he met Cynthia. She found out after they were engaged. Obviously, it didn’t stop them from getting married.”
Emmy said nothing.
“I told you that you wouldn’t have liked me back then.” Emmy tapped her fingers again. “Were you ever married?”
“Yes.” Jude felt cautious. She had seen Emmy take quick turns during an interrogation to throw off a suspect. “We lasted six years. He’s a good guy. Remarried, loves his wife. Loves his kids.”
“You didn’t want children?”
“Wasn’t in the cards.” Jude forced her eyes to stay on the road. “What happened between you and Dylan?”
Emmy shrugged. “He said he couldn’t compete with solitude.”
That sounded familiar. “It’s not a bad idea for you to have time alone to work on yourself.”
She laughed. “The only time I’m ever alone is inside this car. I’ve got grown men acting like ducks nibbling me to death at work all day, my sister sleeping on my couch when I get home at night, and my son pretending like I didn’t tell him to move out six weeks ago.”
Jude tried to put them back on more solid ground. “It’s good that Cole found the camera. He’s been chomping at the bit for more assignments.”
“You are bizarrely obsessed with horse imagery.”
Jude sighed audibly as Emmy turned into the hardware store.
There were three other cars parked in the lot. Inside the building, the overhead lights flashed to warn customers that they were about to close.
“Cole texted back.” Emmy’s phone was out again as they walked toward the entrance. “Verona PD doesn’t have the case file on Ruel’s drowning. His death certificate lists it as accidental. All the guys who worked on the Verona force back then are either dead or warehoused in a Florida nursing home.”
“That leaves Taybee.”
“Louis might know the details. They don’t lose the older memories until later. Mom couldn’t tell me what she’d had for lunch, but then she’d yell at me for making an A-minus on a spelling quiz in fourth grade.”
The glibness in her voice didn’t match the troubled expression on her face. It was clear that no matter how much she worked to block it, Myrna was never far from Emmy’s mind.
Emmy jerked open the door. “Stop analyzing me.”
Jude followed her winding path through the store. Wooden bins. Hand-painted signs. It was exactly the same, down to the smell of sawdust and machine oil.
She told Emmy, “Nothing was open on Sundays when I grew up here. The whole town closed at two on Saturday afternoon and didn’t open back up until eight o’clock Monday morning.”
“What did you do for fun?”
“Pummeled each other with metal lawn darts and took turns screaming into a box fan.” Jude gestured toward the back. “Millie said that Louis is always in the office.”
“I need to find Sonny and make sure he’s okay with us talking to his dad. Wait here.”
Emmy stuck her hand in her pocket as she walked down the aisle. Jude watched her until she disappeared around the corner.
“Ma’am?”
Jude shouldn’t have been surprised to see the man from the library in a town with fewer people than her apartment block in San Francisco. His hair was neatly parted. The nametag on his blue vest read My name is Carl. I’m here to help!
His smile showed a missing tooth. “Hey, the lady from the library. Small world, huh?”
Jude caught the sour odor of stale cigarettes and fresh whiskey on his breath.
“Can I help you find anything? We’re closing in a few minutes, but don’t let me rush you.”
Jude was about to demur, but then she remembered what Emmy had said in the car about telling Cole to move out. That was at least one tangible thing Jude could help with. “Do you sell moving boxes?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He gestured up the aisle. “Right there on the end cap. Lemme walk you to ’em.”
“I can find them, thank you.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He started to leave, then seemed to change his mind. “Don’t mean to intrude, but I saw you with the sheriff. I heard about that poor lady and her daughter. I hope she catches the guy soon.”
“She will,” Jude said. “Only a matter of time.”
“Good deal.” He gave her a thumbs-up before shuffling off.
Jude could still smell the tobacco and whiskey as she walked up the aisle. The endcap was loaded with packing supplies. Cole’s room was a mess, but she could get him started. She wrapped her fingers around a roll of tape. Then logic struck her with a sudden paralysis.
What was she doing? Was she going to help Cole pack? Go apartment hunting? Pick out sheets and hang curtains? Would Jude move into his old bedroom and become Emmy’s roommate? Was she going to pretend for the rest of her life that she was his aunt, that Emmy was her sister?
After four decades of yearning to tell the truth, hours of therapy, countless sleepless nights and deep, dark periods of depression, was Jude really going to let herself embrace this lie?
She let go of the tape. She looked up at the ceiling to keep the tears in her eyes.
She had been thinking about this on the metal bench in front of the flower shop before Emmy had shown up, but now she let herself come into a complete understanding.
The path she was currently on suddenly felt very familiar.
Old habits rearing their ugly head. Denial seeping back in.
The trickery of negotiating with herself, pushing herself to believe that she could have a few moments, then a few more, without getting pulled down a path that could only lead to destruction.