Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest
13.
Grady Merritt had lied, but only a little.
The truth was, he’d already decided to go meet Whiteside without Leda, for all the reasons that Leda had stated and then some. Whiteside wasn’t a bad guy, but he’d talk to a fellow dude more openly and honestly than he’d talk to any given woman. He was only in his sixties, but he somehow seemed older than that—like he belonged back in the 1950s from whence he came.
Grady knew Leda would not take such exclusion lightly, but he figured she’d get over it quickly—especially if he got any useful information out of the older man. So rather than ask for permission, he’d decided to beg forgiveness.
And the next day, he took a long lunch break to go see the retired detective.
The drive north to Lake City didn’t take long when rush hour wasn’t in play, and soon he’d found his way to the tasteful split-level house on a hillside. He pulled up into the driveway next to a fence that had been dug beneath and reinforced so many times that it looked like a WWI trench.
As Grady was getting out of the car, the house’s front door opened to reveal a heavyset man in a Hawaiian shirt, with a wagging wiener dog tucked under his arm.
“Merritt!” he hollered. “Come on in, you ol’ son of a bitch—it’s good to see you!”
Grady pointed at the fence, with its strips of sheet metal, chicken wire, and sticks of rebar pounded around the edges. “One of the dogs is a digger?” he guessed.
“Two of them are, and goddamn them both.”
When Grady reached the small porch, they shook hands.
“This one’s smart enough to dig like a Virginia coal miner but too dumb to stay out of the road. Got a death wish, he does.”
“Well, he’s a cute little guy.”
“They’re all assholes, but they’re my assholes.”
An army of ankle-high canines spilled out of the house, swarmed Grady’s feet like furry piranhas, and followed both men back inside—where they thoroughly sniffed the newcomer, deemed him harmless, and immediately began fighting over whose belly he’d pet first.
Whiteside said, “Have a seat, man. Can I get you a drink? I mean a soda or something, since I know you’re still on duty.”
“I’m on my lunch break, but no, thanks. I can’t stay long—I just wanted to touch base.”
“About an old case, you said. The one with that kid, dead in the back seat of his own car, at the bottom of the reservoir.”
“Tod Sandoval. He wasn’t exactly a kid, but he was young. Barely thirty when it happened. I think there might be a connection between his case and another one I worked a year or two ago.”
“Some lead popped up, and now it’s got you looking even further back?”
“Something like that, combined with a real strong feeling,” Grady said, not clarifying that the feeling belonged to someone else. “I’ve read through the files but wondered if you might have any insight you feel like adding to the stack. Anything at all: any impressions you might’ve gotten that were too vague to write down, or connections that felt like connections but didn’t—I don’t know—connect.”
Whiteside nodded sagely. “That was a weird one, I tell you what. And God Almighty, the Sandoval widow.”
“His widow? I didn’t think he was married…”
“Maybe not. You got a word for a surviving girlfriend, because I don’t. I remember her clear as day: a flaky, feisty brunette who couldn’t keep her voice down and had real strong opinions about every goddamn thing, if you know what I mean.”
Grady badly wanted to laugh, agree, and high-five the man—but he tamped it down. “Oh, I’ve met her. She’s something else.”
“Something else—that’s putting it mildly. Whole lot of personality, that’s what my late wife would’ve said. Crazy as a soup sandwich, that’s how I’d put it. I know she’d just lost her husband, but—”
“Fiancé.”
“Whatever. It was tragic, that’s for sure, but woo boy howdy. That girl could raise hell and make it wish it’d never shown up.”
Grady grinned, despite the subject. “She’d lost someone she loved.”
“Just a kid, that one. Plenty of other fish in the sea, and all. She’d only been with the guy a couple of years. How well could she have even known him?”
That wasn’t a fight Grady was willing to pick, so he gently redirected. “Long enough to care that he was gone, but there’s nothing I can do about that—except find whoever killed him. I know the official word was that it must be a carjacking gone bad, however…”
“However”—Whiteside picked up the thread—“there were a dozen little things that didn’t fit the scenario. Why was the guy in the back of his car? What was with the woman they found downstream? At first, I thought there was no way the cases were connected. Grim coincidence, that’s all it was—finding two bodies in the water, a week apart, in different places. We’d found her car a couple of miles away; it looked like she’d had a minor wreck and got out to go look for help. Then ballistics came back, and I had to throw the coincidence out the window. Even if they didn’t know each other, even if they never met, alive or dead, the same gun definitely killed them both.”
“Yeah, I’m having that same problem,” Grady admitted.
The old detective sank deeper into his easy chair. A second and third dog leaped into his lap, joining the one he still held in the crook of his arm like a loaf of bread. “There was no evidence that the two ever so much as shared a bus. All I could figure is that the intended victim was one of them—and the other got caught up in the murder by accident.”
“Wrong place, wrong time?”
“A bad case of it, for sure.”
“But the question is… which one?”
Whiteside’s big round head bobbed up and down. The ambient light flashed off the top of his crown, which was quite bald and rather shiny. His remaining hair, still cropped close in traditional cop style, was mostly white with streaks of the same yellow as an old nicotine stain. “I went back and forth on that. Some days, I was sure it was the guy. Others, I was sure it was the girl.”
“Did anything leave you leaning one way or another?”
Thoughtfully, he said, “If you held a gun to my head and forced me to pick, I’d say that the girl was the original target. She was young and reasonably attractive, if you don’t mind them a little thick. She’d had trouble with a boyfriend, once upon a time, but he didn’t pan out.”
“Right, he was in Afghanistan, wasn’t he?”
“Uh-huh. His CO confirmed that he was deployed a few thousand miles away when she died, so we could safely cross his ass off the suspect list. But if she had a problem with one guy, she might’ve had a problem with another one, that’s my thinking. She might not have even known it, or known the full extent of it. Some of those creepers hide it real well, right up until they don’t—and things go south.”
“So all things being equal, you think it’s more likely that Amanda had somebody out to get her.”
“Neither victim had any known, current problem people in their lives. It was either someone with a very quiet grudge, or a totally random act of violence that caught up two strangers and a 2007 Toyota Corolla.”
“Anything ever turn up at work? For either one of them?”
“Nah. Sandoval was a bottom-rung Amazon employee, ticking boxes and pulling levers, and everyone seemed to like him. The worst thing a coworker had to say about him was that he was too earnest and too quick to take on extra tasks.”
“Made other employees at the same level look bad?”
“Not that bad. Nobody was on the verge of getting fired, and he wasn’t up for any promotions in competition with anyone else. I know, because I checked. And as for Crombie, she was fresh off her master’s degree in accounting. She’d only been working at her job for a few months, and everyone seemed to think she was great at it. Her boss said she was the best damn accountant he’d ever had.”
“Hmm,” said Grady. “Sometimes accountants find things they aren’t meant to, especially if they’re extra good at their jobs.”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t chase that angle too hard. The company folded, like I said. I talked to her old boss again after that, it was a guy… what was his name… Elliot something.”
It was Craig Elliot, but Grady didn’t want to contradict him while he was on a roll. “I’ll look him up when I get back to town.”
“Don’t bother. He was on a cruise ship in Alaska when it all went down. Left a few days before the murders happened and didn’t get back until after both bodies were found.”
“That’s awfully convenient.”
“I thought so, too—but the trip had been booked for months. If he orchestrated the killings, he must’ve cheaped out and hired some inexperienced nobody, because that was not a professional hit job. The girl was shot—what? Three or four times? Twice in the back, as she was presumably running away? And the guy, he just took the one bad hit, right in the gut. Bled out in the car, but it took some time.”
Grady leaned back in his own seat and exhaled heavily—which apparently sounded like an invitation to one of the remaining dogs. A small black-and-tan girl in a pink collar with a bow put her feet up on his shin and gave him the big-eyed dog stare of Please pick me up so I can sit on you.
He obliged, gently lifting her up to his lap.
“That’s Smidget,” Whiteside told him. “She’s a lover, but don’t pet her ass. She doesn’t like that, and she’ll nip your fingers.”
“Good to know,” Grady said, sticking to ear scratches until she turned three circles and settled down atop his knees.
“She’s a sweetheart, though.” When the dogs who occupied Whiteside’s own chair gave him concerned looks, he patted them all in turn. “They’re all sweethearts; that’s a fact. Daddy’s sweet little assholes.”
Grady murmured in polite agreement. Then he said, “Let me ask you something: What do you think happened? Nothing you can prove, nothing you even have any good evidence for… I’m asking for any hunch that you never did shake, or any theory that you wanted to stick to but you couldn’t nail down enough proof.”
Whiteside pondered this while he rubbed the head of the nearest pointy-nosed dog. “Well, first of all—I think it was definitely Crombie on the gas station surveillance video. The resolution was garbage, and the IT guys would never confirm it one way or another, but she fit the bill and her clothes matched up about right. I think she was hanging around, looking for help—and I think Sandoval tried to give it to her. She might’ve approached him as he was about to drive away, or even hitchhiked from the edge of the road as he was leaving. He left the pump alone, but his car went out of frame as soon as he’d moved away from the fill-up island.”
“But it was probably her.”
“I’d swear it on a Bible. She was running from somebody, and she saw this nice young man—clean-cut, friendly face, and prone to offering assistance, according to his parents. I think she was running, and whoever was chasing her figured he had to kill them both. Maybe Sandoval got a good look at him or tried to fight him off.”
“A scuffle would make sense. He was shot at close range, maybe even point-blank. He’d been in the water too long to find any gunpowder residue, but the coroner said the gun hadn’t been more than a couple of feet away when it went off.”
“See, there you go. Knight in shining armor gets murdered for his efforts. Tale as old as time.”
“It works, but there are still a lot of holes to plug.”
“Yeah, and that’s the problem, ain’t it? If I could’ve plugged those holes, the case would be shut by now. The only other thing I can think of…” Whiteside said slowly, chewing on the words, considering every one. “Her purse turned up almost a month later. A couple of kids found it tangled up in some plastic roadwork netting and fished it out of the water.”
“Her purse? I don’t remember seeing anything about that.”
“Like I said, it turned up well after the fact, and there was nothing in it that pointed to anything. We sent a couple of beat cops down to dredge the area, and all they ever found was an empty glasses case. Her vision was bad, and she usually wore contacts, but I guess she carried a pair for backup.”
“I don’t remember seeing anything about contacts in the coroner’s report, but I might’ve just missed it.” Grady added the last bit to himself.
“Well, I don’t remember anymore. But even if the doc didn’t find any, they might’ve washed out of her eyes or something. She was lying downstream from the pond, in the water runoff trench—and she’d been there almost a week. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
“Again, you have a point. Still, good to know. Was there anything else in the purse?”
Whiteside shrugged. “Tampons and breath mints, stuff like that. She had a little key chain Mace thing, too. Pink, so you know it’s for girls.” He laughed to himself. “I don’t remember what all else; I just remember that none of it was helpful. See if you can’t get into the evidence locker and get a gander at it, though. It might tell you something it doesn’t tell me.”
On that note, Grady carefully put Smidget back down on the floor and offered his thanks, then said he’d take his leave.
Whiteside stayed put but shook his hand heartily, and cautiously—so as not to disturb the dog that was now snoring across his thighs. “You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t see you out. Good luck to you, though. I hate leaving a case open like that. If you can zip it up, more power to you.”
“Thanks again, Jim. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
Back at the precinct, Grady went to his desk and pushed a small stack of paperwork aside, then removed a couple of new folders that had been left in his seat and sat down. There was always something, wasn’t there? He was falling behind, but he was used to that. Before she’d retired, the previous police captain had told him that coming to peace with playing catch-up was one of the most important skills a career detective could learn.
“Every day,” she’d told him, “you have to decide how to fail, and make the best of it.” At the time, he’d found it cynical. Now he honestly found it helpful—if for no other reason than he knew it was normal and he knew he wasn’t alone.
Every day, something was going to fall through the cracks, run late, or be wrong. If he paid enough attention, he could come back and deal with most of it later. Collect the crumbs. Run a little faster. Correct the inaccuracies. Bat cleanup.
But some days, he only had the bandwidth to do so much and try so hard.
Grady looked up at the desk that faced his own. His partner, Sam Wilco, had been out for the last couple of days with the flu.
“When Sam gets back…” he said under his breath, “I’ll have some help again.”
“Getting a little snowed under?” asked Lieutenant Le from the next desk over.
“Par for the course, right?”
“Always.” Her phone rang, and she took the call before her vibrating cell could shuffle off and fall on the floor.
Grady glanced at his phone and saw a message from Molly. She was grabbing pizza with a friend after school, then heading to a short shift at Starbucks. Someone had called in, and she wanted the hours.
“Will wonders never cease?” he mumbled. If nothing else, it meant he didn’t need to make dinner that night. He could grab a sandwich on the way home.
For a guy who worked in a large building surrounded by people, Grady Merritt felt weirdly alone. His partner was out of the office, his daughter wouldn’t be back home until bedtime, and his conversation with Jim Whiteside had left him feeling oddly unsettled. It had unnerved him, seeing what living alone could do to a man. He could wind up in a split level, surrounded by tiny, yippy dogs who were constantly trying to tunnel out to freedom like fuzzy little prisoners of war. If it’d happened to Jim after his wife had died, it could happen to anybody.
Even Grady. Maybe even inevitably Grady, when Molly moved out.
Grady sighed down at his desk. He wouldn’t let it come to that. No yippy dogs, just Cairo—who yipped once in a while but mostly just barked at delivery people and cried for treats. That wasn’t as sad as an army of dachshunds, was it?
He popped his laptop open.
It took him a couple of minutes, but he finally found an address for Abbot Keyes, the low-level consultant Beckmeyer mentioned who’d worked for Christopher Gilman. Technically, the case was still open. Technically, he was doing his job.
“Everybody knows ‘technically’ is the best kind of correct.”