Kay Scarpet - The Last Precinct Part 26

"I would a.s.sume so. He wasn't burned through his clothing," I reply. "It's very possible both victims lost control of their bladders due to fear, panic. You get scared badly enough, you wet your pants."

"Jesus," Mclntyre mutters again.

"And you see some a.s.shole s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g eyebolts in the ceiling and plugging in a heat gun, that's enough to scare the p.i.s.s right out of you," Marino abundantly ill.u.s.trates. "You know d.a.m.n well what's about to happen to you."

"Jesus!" Mclntyre blurts out. "What the f.u.c.k is this about?" Her eyes blaze.

Silence.

"Why the f.u.c.k would someone do something like that to Mitch? And it's not like he wasn't careful, not like he would just get in someone's car or even get close to some stranger trying to stop him on the road."

Stanfield says, "Makes me think of Vietnam, the way they did things to prisoners of war, tortured them to make them talk."

Making someone talk can certainly be one reason for torture, I respond to what Stanfield has just said. "But it's also a power rush. Some people are into torture because they get off on it."

"You think that's the case here?" Pruett says to me.

"I have no way of knowing." Then I ask Mclntyre, "I noticed a fishing pole when I was coming up the walk."

Her reaction is a flicker of confusion. Then she realizes what I am talking about. "Oh, right. Mitch likes to fish."

"Around here?"

"A creek over near College Landing Park."

I look at Marino. That particular creek is at the edge of the wooded camping area at The Fort James Motel.

"Mitch ever mention to you the motel over there by that creek?" Marino asks her.

"I just know he liked to fish over there."

"He know the lady who runs the joint? Bev Kiffin? And her husband? Maybe you both know him since he works for Overland?" Marino says to Mclntyre.

"Well, I do know that Mitch used to talk to her boys. She has two young boys and sometimes they'd be out there fishing when Mitch was. He said he felt for them because their dad was never around. But I don't know anybody named Kiffin at the trucking company, and I do their books."

"Can you check that out?" Jay says.

"Maybe his last name's different from hers."

"Yeah."

She nods.

"You remember the last time Mitch went fishing out there?" Marino asks her.

"Right before all the snow," she replies. "It was pretty nice weather up until then."

"I noticed some change, a couple beer bottles and some cigars on the landing," I say. "Right by the fishing pole."

"You sure he hasn't been fishing out there since it snowed?" Marino picks up my thought.

The expression in her eyes makes it evident that she isn't sure. I wonder just how much she really knows about her undercover boyfriend.

"Any illegal s.h.i.t going on at the motel that you and Mitch are aware of?" Marino asks her.

Mclntyre starts shaking her head. "He never mentioned anything about that. Nothing like that. His only connection to the place was fishing and being nice to the two boys, on occasion, if he saw them."

"Just if they happened up when he was fishing?" Marino keeps pushing. "Any reason to think Mitch might have ever wandered over to the house to say hi to them?"

She hesitates.

"Mitch a generous guy?"

"Oh yes," she says. "Very much so. He might have wandered over. I don't know. He really likes kids. Liked them." She tears up again and at the same time simmers.

"How did he identify himself to people around here? He say he was a truck driver? What did he say about you? You supposed to be a career woman? Now, you two weren't really boyfriend and girlfriend. That was just part of the front, right?" Marino is on to something. He is leaning forward, his arms braced on his knees, staring intensely at Jilison Mclntyre. When he gets like this, he fires questions so rapidly, people often don't have time to answer. Then they get confused and say something they regret. She does that this very moment.

"Hey, I'm not a f.u.c.king suspect," she snaps at him. "And our relationship, I don't know what you're getting at. It was professional. But you can't help being close to someone when you live in the same d.a.m.n townhouse and act like you're involved, make people think you are."

"But you weren't involved," Marino says. "Or at least he wasn't with you. You guys were doing a job, right? Meaning, if he wanted to pay attention to a lonely woman with two nice little boys, he could do that." Marino leans back in his chair. The room is so silent, it seems to hum. "Problem is, Mitch shouldn't have done that. Dangerous, f.u.c.king stupid in light of his situation. He one of those types who had a hard time keeping his pants on?"

She doesn't answer him. Tears jump out.

"You know what, folks?" Marino scans the room. "It just might be that Mitch got tangled up in something that doesn't have a d.a.m.n thing to do with your undercover operation here. Wrong place, wrong time. Caught something he sure as h.e.l.l wasn't fishing for."

"You got any idea where Mitch was at three o'clock Wednesday afternoon, when Matos checked into the motel and the fire started?" Stanfield is putting the pieces together. "Was he here or out somewhere?"

"No, he wasn't here," she barely says, wiping her eyes with a tissue. "Gone. I don't know where."

Marino blows out in disgust. He doesn't need to say it. Undercover partners are supposed to keep track of each other, and if Agent Mclntyre didn't always know where Special Agent Barbosa was, then he was up to something that maybe wasn't germane to their investigation.

"I know you don't even want to think it, Jilison," Marino goes on in a milder tone, "but Mitch was tortured and murdered, okay? I mean, the guy was f.u.c.king scared to death.

Literally. Whatever someone was doing to him, it was so awful, he had a f.u.c.king heart attack. He wet his f.u.c.king pants. He was taken somewhere and strung up, gagged and then has a weirdo key put in his pocket, planted, what for? Why? He into anything we ought to know about, Jilison? He fishing for more than ba.s.s out there in that creek by the campground?"

Tears are rolling down Mclntryre's face. She wipes them away roughly with the tissue and sniffles loudly. "He liked drinking and women," she barely says. "Okay?"

"He ever go out at night, barhopping and that sort of thing?" Pruett asks her.

She nods. "It was part of his cover. You saw ..." Her eyes jump to me. "You saw him. His dyed hair, the earring, all the rest. Mitch played the role of a sort of, well, wild party guy and he did like the women. He never pretended to be, uh, faithful to me, to his so-called girlfriend. It was part of his cover. But it was also him. Yeah. I worried about it, okay? But that was Mitch. He was a good agent. I don't think he did anything dishonest, if that's what you're asking. But he didn't tell me everything, either. If he got onto something going on at the campground, for example, he might have started poking around. He might have."

"Without letting you know," Marino confirms.

She nods again. "And I was out doing my thing, too. It's not like I was here every minute waiting for him. I was working in the office at Overland. Part-time, anyway. So we didn't always know what the other was up to every hour of every day."

"I'll tell you this much," Marino decides. "Mitch stumbled onto something. And I'm just wondering if he wasn't out at the motel around the time Matos showed up, and maybe whatever Matos was into, Mitch had the misfortune of being spotted in the area. Maybe it's just that simple. Somebody thinks he saw something, knew something, and next thing, he gets picked up and gets the treatment."

No one argues, Marino's theory, actually, is the only one so far that makes any sense.

"Which brings us back to what Matos was doing here to begin with," Pruett comments.

I look at Stanfield. He has wandered out of the conversation. His face is wan. He is a nervous wreck. His eyes drift to me and quickly move away. He wets his lips and coughs several times.

"Detective Stanfield," I feel compelled to say to him in front of everyone. "For G.o.d's sake, don't tell any of this to your brother-in-law." Anger sparks in his eyes. I have humiliated him and don't care. "Please," I add.

"You want to know the truth?" he angrily retorts. "I don't want nothing to do with any of this." He slowly draws himself to his feet and looks around the room, blinking, his eyes glazing over. "I don't know what this is all about, but I don't want no partI mean, no part of it. You feds are in it already, up to your eyeb.a.l.l.s, so you can just have it. I quit." He nods. "You heard me right, I quit."

Detective Stanfield, to our amazement, collapses. He falls so hard the room shakes. I spring up. Thank G.o.d, he is breathing. His pulse is running wild, but he is not in the grips of a cardiac arrest or anything life-threatening. He simply has fainted. I check his head to make sure he hasn't injured himself. He is all right He comes to. Marino and I help him to his feet and get him on the couch. I make him lie down and prop several pillows under his neck. Most of all, he is embarra.s.sed, acutely so.

"Detective Stanfield, are you diabetic?" I ask. "Do you have a heart condition?"

"If you just got a c.o.ke or something, that would be good," he says, weakly.

I get up and head into the kitchen. "Let me see what I can do," I say as if I live here. Inside the refrigerator, I get out orange juice. I find peanut b.u.t.ter in a cabinet and scoop out a big spoonful. It is while I am looking for paper towels that I notice a prescription bottle by the toaster oven. Mitch Barbosa's name is on the label. He was taking the antidepressant Prozac. When I return to the living room, I say something about this to Mclntyre and she tells us that Barbosa went on Prozac several months ago because he was suffering from anxiety and depression, which he blamed on the undercover a.s.signment, on stress, she adds.

"That's interesting," is all Marino has to say about it.

"You said you're going back to the motel when you leave here?" Jay asks Marino.

"Yeah, Vander's going to see if we might have any luck with prints."

"Prints?" Stanfield murmurs from his sickbed.

"Jesus, Stanfield," Marino blurts out in exasperation. "They teach you anything in detective school? Or did you get sent ahead several grades because of your G.o.dd.a.m.n brother-in-law?"

"He is a G.o.dd.a.m.n brother-in-law, you want to know the truth." He says this so pitifully and with such candor that everybody laughs. Stanfield perks up a little bit. He sits higher against the pillows. "And you're right." He meets my eyes. "I shouldn't have told him one peep about this case. And 1 won't tell him nothing else, not a word, because it's all politicking to that one. It wasn't me who dragged in this whole Jamestown thing, just so you know."

Pruett frowns. "What Jamestown thing?"

"Oh, you know, the dig out there and the big celebration the state's planning. Well, thing is, if the truth be known, Dinwiddie got no more Indian blood in him than I do. All this horse c.r.a.p about him being a descendent of Chief Powhatan. Pshaw!" Stanfield's eyes dance with resentment that I doubt he rarely touches. He probably hates his brother-in-law.

"Mitch has Indian blood," Mclntyre says somberly. "He's half Native American."

"Well, for Christ's sake, let's hope the newspapers don't find that out," Marino mutters to Stanfield, not buying for one second that Stanfield is going to keep his mouth shut. "We got a gay guy and now an Indian. Oh boy, oh boy." Marino shakes his head. "We got to keep this out of politics, out of circulation and I mean it." He stares right at Stanfield, then at Jay. "Because guess what? We can't talk about what we think is really going on, now can we'? About the big undercover operation. About Mitch being undercover FBI. And that maybe in some fruitloop way, Chandonne is all wrapped around whatever the s.h.i.t's going on out here. So if people get all caught up in this hate crime s.h.i.t, how do we turn that around when we can't tell the truth?"

"I don't agree," Jay says to him. "I'm not ready to say what these murders are about. I'm not prepared to accept, for example, that Mates and now Barbosa aren't related to gun smuggling. I do think without a doubt their murders are connected."

No one disagrees. The modi operandi are too similar for the deaths not to be related, and in fact, committed by the same person or persons.

"I'm also not prepared to totally ignore the idea that they're hate crimes," Jay goes on. "A gay male. A Native American." He shrugs. "Torture's pretty d.a.m.n hateful. Any injuries to their genitalia?" He turns to me.

"No." I hold his gaze. It is odd to think we were intimate, to look at his full lips and graceful hands and to remember their touch. When we walked the streets of Paris, people turned to stare at him.

"Hmmm," he says. "I find that interesting and maybe important. I'm not a forensic psychiatrist, of course, but it does seem in hate crimes the perpetrators rarely injure the victims' genitals."

Marino gives him an incredible look, his mouth parting in blatant disdain.

"Because you get some redneck h.o.m.ophobic sort, and the last thing he's going to go near is the guy's genitals," Jay adds.

"Well, if you really want to go around this mulberry bush," Marino acidly says to him, "then let's just connect it to Chandonne. He never went near his victims' genitals either. s.h.i.t, he didn't even take their f.u.c.king pants off, just beat and bit the s.h.i.t out of their faces and b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Only lower body thing he did at all was to take off their shoes and socks and bite their feet. And why? The guy's afraid of female genitalia because his own's as deformed as the rest of him." Marino surveys the faces around him. "One good thing about the b.a.s.t.a.r.d being locked up is we got to find out what the rest of him looks like. Right? And guess what? He ain't got a d.i.c.k. Or let's just say that what he's got I wouldn't call a d.i.c.k."

Stanfield is sitting straight up on the couch now, his eyes wide in amazement.

"I'll go with you to the motel," Jay says to Marino.

Marino gets up and looks out the window. "Wonder where the h.e.l.l Vander is," he says.

He gets Vander on the cell phone and we head out minutes later to meet in the parking lot. Jay walks with me. I feel the energy of his desire to talk to me, to somehow come to a consensus. In this way, he is like the stereotype of a woman. He wants to talk, to settle matters, to have closure or to rekindle our connection so he can then play hard to get again. I, on the other hand, want none of it.

"Kay, can I have a minute?" he says in the parking lot.

I stop and look at him as I b.u.t.ton my coat. I notice Marino glancing our way as he gets the trash bags and baby carriage out of the back of his truck and loads them into Vander's car.

"I know this is awkward, but is there some way we can make it easier? For one thing, we have to work together," Jay says.

"Maybe you should have thought about that before you told Jaime Berger every detail, Jay," I reply.

"That wasn't against you." His eyes are intense.

"Right."

"She asked me questions, understandably. She's just doing her job."

I don't believe him. That is my fundamental problem with Jay Talley. I don't trust him and wish I never had. "Well, that's curious," I comment. "Because it appears people started asking questions about me before Diane Bray was even murdered. Right about the time I was with you in France inquiries began, as a matter of fact."

His expression darkens. Anger peers out before he can hide it. "You're paranoid, Kay," he says.

"You're right," I reply. "You're absolutely right, Jay."["_Toc37098927"]

CHAPTER 25.

I HAVE NEVER DRIVEN MARINO'S DODGE RAM QUAD Cab pickup truck, and were circ.u.mstances not so strained I would probably find the scenario comical. I am not a big person, barely five foot five, slender, and there is nothing funky or extreme about me. I do wear jeans, but not today. I suppose I dress like a proper chief or lawyer, usually in a tailored skirt suit or flannel trousers and a blazer, unless I am working a crime scene. I wear my blond hair short and neatly styled, am light on makeup and, other than my signet ring and watch, jewelry is an afterthought. I don't have a single tattoo. I don't look like the sort who would be roaring along in a monster macho truck that is dark blue with pinstriping, chrome, mud flaps, scanner and big, swooping antennas that go with the CB and two-way radios.

I take 64 West back to Richmond because it is quicker, and I pay close attention to my driving because it is a lot to handle a vehicle this size with only one arm. I have never spent a Christmas Eve like this and I am increasingly depressed over the notion. Usually, by now I have stocked the refrigerator and freezer, and have cooked sauces and soups and decorated the house. I feel utterly homeless and alien as I drive Marino's truck along the interstate, and it occurs to me that I don't know where I will sleep tonight. I guess at Anna's, but I dread the necessary chill between us. I didn't even see her this morning, and a helpless feeling of loneliness settles over me and seems to push me down in my seat. I page Lucy. "I've got to move back into my house tomorrow," I tell her on the phone.

"Maybe you should stay in the hotel with Teun and me," she suggests.

"How about you and Teun stay with me?" It is so hard for me to express a need, and I need them. I do. For a lot of reasons.

"When do you want us there?"

"We'll have Christmas together in the morning."