Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) (9 page)

Joining Tom, Fagan studied the space. “The plastic she was wrapped in was clean?”

“Spotless,” Tom said.

Fagan looked upward again. “If the body was rolled or dragged—”

“The plastic would have been dirty, probably torn too.”

Fagan was silent a moment, frowning. “If she was wrapped in a blanket, a sheet, something that protected the plastic—”

“It would have snagged in a dozen different places.” Tom waved a hand at the wild rhododendrons and other stunted shrubs that clung to the slope like barnacles on a ship’s hull. “There would have been plenty of fibers left behind, especially if a blanket was used.”

“And the crime scene tech didn’t find any fibers?”

“He picked up a few, but they probably came off the kids’ clothes yesterday.” Tom paused, then added, “You couldn’t roll a body straight down, with all the vegetation in the way. Dragging it, yeah, that’s possible—if the body was wrapped twice, then dragged carefully, weaving around a lot to stay clear of the brush, then the outer wrapping was removed and carried away.”

Fagan stuck his right hand in his pant pocket and jingled his keys. “Lot of trouble to go to, out in the open where you don’t know when somebody might drive by.”

Tom hoped that thing with the keys didn’t turn out to be a constant habit. He could get tired of it fast.

“How’d somebody get a mattress down here?” Fagan asked.

“Two guys standing at the top could throw a mattress, and it could make it all the way to the bottom before it hit. Two guys with enough muscle. The body wasn’t tossed, though. It was carried.” Tom cleared his throat and asked Fagan, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Fagan’s eyebrows went up. “And what are you thinking, Captain?”

“That one person might have managed it with a lot of time and effort. But it makes more sense to think two people carried Shelley Beecher’s body down here.”

***

Michelle sat on the edge of the bed, a hand pressed to her forehead. Frank, sitting up on the bed and tensed to bolt, watched her with wide eyes. When Rachel walked in, the cat leapt off the bed and trotted out.

Dropping her hand, Michelle watched Frank retreat. Emotion brought some of the color back to her cheeks, and tears rose to her eyes. “Even the cat doesn’t want to be around me.” She followed the words with a choked laugh.

Rachel sat next to her sister. “Kevin said you got a call that upset you.”

“He didn’t believe me.” Michelle plucked a tissue from the box on the bedside table and dabbed her eyes with it. “He doesn’t believe any of it.”

“He knows you got a call,” Rachel pointed out. “He was right here with you.”

“No, he was in the bathroom, with the water running. And my phone log says the caller’s number is blocked. I told him the caller spoke and used my name, but still—” Michelle blotted her eyes again with angry jabs. “I’m getting tired of my own husband looking at me like I’ve lost my mind.”

“Mish—” Rachel searched for the right words. She didn’t think Michelle would invent such things, but she hoped her sister wasn’t in real danger. The harassment could be a prank, a nasty one that had gone on too long and had to be stopped. “Maybe Kevin just doesn’t know how to handle it.”

“Well, neither do I. Who is this person? Why is he doing this to me?”

“Are you positive it’s a man?”

Michelle nodded. “When I first started getting calls, I couldn’t tell. For a while he didn’t say anything, he just…
breathed
, then hung up. When he started speaking, I knew it was a man. He whispers, a soft, creepy whisper, but I’m sure it’s a man.”

“What did he say on the phone just now?”

“He said,
Are you enjoying your little vacation, Michelle?
He knows where I am.” A tremor ran through Michelle’s body.

“That’s what he wants you to believe. Maybe he’s just angry that you’re not at home and he can’t find you.” But what if he guessed where Michelle had gone and came after her? To reassure herself as much as Michelle, Rachel placed an arm around her sister’s shoulders, the way she had so many times when they were girls, and automatically spoke the old, familiar words of comfort. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re safe now.”

Michelle jerked away from her and jumped up, an angry flush coloring her face. “Don’t treat me like a child! You’re just
indulging
me. I thought you’d understand after what you went through with Perry Nelson.”

“The two situations aren’t exactly the same,” Rachel said, “but believe me, I do know how scared you must be.” Nelson had been a charming, blandly handsome young client who brought his dog to Rachel for treatment and grabbed an opportunity to steal her prescription pad. When a pharmacist alerted her that Nelson had presented orders for narcotics in amounts not normally prescribed for dogs, Rachel had pressed charges against him. Nelson retaliated with a campaign of harassment and, ultimately, by shooting her. “I still dream about it sometimes. So please don’t think I don’t understand.”

Michelle wrapped her arms around her waist and stood rigid as a statue. Her face displayed every emotion she was sorting through, as if searching for one that suited her. Stubborn anger gave way to grudging acceptance of Rachel’s apology, only to be displaced by a fresh wave of anxiety. “I knew it was bad for you, but I had to experience it myself to really understand.”

“I was lucky in a way,” Rachel said, “because I knew Perry Nelson, I understood why he wanted to hurt me.”

“The police knew who he was too, and they knew what he was doing, but they didn’t do anything to keep him from hurting you,” Michelle said, her voice rising. “He almost killed you, while the police stood by and let it happen. I can’t even identify the person who’s harassing me, so what hope do I have of getting any protection?”

Oh, god, Rachel thought, weary with tension. She felt helpless. Was there any right way to deal with this? Rubbing the knotted muscles at the back of her neck, she said, “Maybe Tom can help somehow. I promise he’ll take you seriously. Come sit down, please. If you need to talk, I’m here to listen.”

Michelle returned to sit on the bed beside Rachel, but kept her arms clamped around her waist. She rocked slightly, back and forth.

Everything in Rachel urged her to embrace Michelle, beg her to stop torturing herself, but she stayed silent while her sister groped for words.

When Michelle spoke again, her voice came out a whisper. “I’ve been thinking about Mother a lot since all this started. I still miss her so much.”

Rachel’s desire to comfort her sister vanished. “Well, I’m sure she’d be a big help if she were here. Maybe she could hypnotize you and make it all go away.”

Rachel instantly regretted the words. She had to look away from Michelle’s wounded expression.

“How could you say something so cruel to me?” Michelle’s voice quavered. “So much for sisterly understanding.”

“I’m sorry.” This time Rachel meant it. She was fumbling for something more to say when footsteps sounded on the stairs. Michelle yanked a handful of tissues from the box on the bedside table and dabbed and wiped her face. Seconds later Kevin appeared in the doorway.

Chapter Nine

Detective Fagan frowned as Tom pulled onto the shoulder of the road in front of the Lankford house. “Are we going to have a pack of pit bulls jumping us when we get out of the car?”

Two PRIVATE PROPERTY—NO TRESPASSING signs hung on the five-foot high chain link fence and a third on the gate. A padlock secured the gate on the inside.

“You wouldn’t put out the welcome mat either,” Tom said, “if you’d been through what these people have. It’s incredible, the crap they get thrown at them. Literally, sometimes.” He plucked his cell phone from his shirt pocket. “Having a convicted murderer in the family doesn’t make life easy.”

Tom punched in the couple’s home phone number and drummed his fingers on the armrest while he waited for an answer. Vance Lankford’s parents lived in a residential area on the outskirts of Mountainview, where the lots were smaller and the houses closer together than anywhere else in the mostly rural county. Tom could remember when robust azaleas had lined the front of the white siding-covered house and the flower beds had overflowed with spring bulbs and colorful summer annuals. Now the azaleas looked sickly, with sparse foliage and only a few pink flowers dotting the branches. Several clumps of gold and white daffodils bloomed beside the front steps—you couldn’t kill a daffodil if you beat it with a shovel, Tom’s mother used to say—but the tulip leaves struggling up through the weedy beds looked like weak afterthoughts of bulbs long since spent.

Although the Lankfords’ cars both sat in the driveway, the curtains on all the windows remained tightly drawn in midday. After the phone rang for the sixth time, Tom tapped his horn. One downstairs curtain flicked back a couple of inches, then fell closed again. A moment later, Jesse Lankford answered the phone inside the house. “What is it? What do you want?”

“I just came by to see if everything’s okay here. Can I come in? I won’t bother you for long.”

Jesse sighed. “I’ll be out in a minute.” He hung up.

“He’s coming to unlock the gate,” Tom told Fagan. They both stepped out of the cruiser.

Slamming the passenger door, Fagan said over the car’s roof, “These people are teachers? They teach in a public school when they have to live this way? You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“I don’t know how they do it,” Tom said, rounding the front of the cruiser. He lowered his voice when he saw Jesse Lankford emerge from the house. “Considering the shitty way teenagers behave sometimes.”

Jesse, a tall, thin man whose stooped shoulders made him look shorter, hustled along the driveway with his head down as if he were running a gauntlet. Ten feet from the gate he glanced up and stopped in his tracks. His eyes, fixed on Fagan, widened behind his black-rimmed glasses. “Who are you?”

“This is Detective Fagan from the Fairfax County Police,” Tom said. “Detective, this is Jesse Lankford.”

Before Fagan could speak, Jesse demanded, “What do the Fairfax police want with us?”

Fagan stepped forward. “I’ve been investigating the Beecher girl’s disappearance, and I’m down here looking into her death.”

A blotchy flush traveled up Jesse’s neck to his pallid cheeks. “We don’t need to get dragged into that. It has nothing to do with us.”

“We just want to talk to you,” Tom said. “Can we come in for a minute?”

Jesse shot a look to his left. Tom followed his glance and saw the white-haired woman next door peering through a side window at them. Muttering something under his breath, Jesse yanked a key ring from his pants pocket and fumbled with the padlock inside the gate. He yanked it open, and without speaking again, wheeled around and hurried back up the driveway to the house.

Tom and Fagan made their way to the front door, sidestepping a mess of half-rotted fruits and vegetables strewn over the driveway, the front walk and the steps. Dents pockmarked the vinyl siding on the house, and the rocks responsible for the damage lay on the ground along the foundation. Sitting only thirty feet from the road and lacking a porch, the house made an inviting target. Even so, Tom figured you’d need a hell of a strong pitching arm to lob a heavy rock this distance.

A blood-colored stain and bits of red pulp splattered the glass in the storm door—an over-ripe tomato, probably thrown the night before, its acidic aroma still strong.

When they entered the living room, Jesse started to slide one of the three bolts into place on the door, then abruptly abandoned it. “Nobody’s going to bother us with a police car parked outside.”

Sonya Lankford stood by the fireplace, a big box of kitchen matches in one hand indicating they’d interrupted her as she was about to light the kindling and logs laid in the grate. With her free hand she tucked her shoulder-length gray hair behind her ears, tugged at the hem of her green cardigan sweater, smoothed the front of her brown skirt.

“Are you two all right?” Tom asked her. “Has anybody been bothering you?”

“What do you think?” Like her husband, Sonya wore glasses, and her thick lenses made her eyes look disproportionately small above her sharp cheekbones. “People were driving by half the night. Screaming and throwing things. Yelling that Shelley got what she deserved, and we’ll get the same if we keep trying to get Vance out of prison.”

“Why didn’t you report it?”

“What good would that do?” Jesse said. “Are you going to park a deputy in front of our house all night, every night?”

“If it’s necessary, yes.” A rash promise, Tom knew, one he could keep only in the unlikely event that deputies volunteered their time.

Jesse snorted, dismissing the idea. “We don’t know anything that’ll help you with your investigation. Don’t drag us into this. You’ll just make matters worse.”

“If you’ll talk to us for a few minutes, we won’t bother you again.”

Jesse and Sonya locked eyes for a long moment, and Tom had the impression the two were debating without speaking a word. Then Jesse motioned the policemen toward the two easy chairs facing the sofa.

Tom and Fagan took the chairs and Jesse dropped onto the sofa. Sonya crouched by the fireplace and struck a match. For a second the sharp odor of sulfur stung Tom’s nostrils. When she set the fatwood kindling ablaze, a strong but pleasant aroma of pine wafted through the room, carrying with it a jumble of half-formed memories and associations. Childhood. Holidays. Family. It was what Tom thought of as a happy smell, but he saw no happiness in the Lankford house.