Not bad, Deputy. I’d missed my own pun.
Back in my office, Ramsey collected his jacket, slipped an envelope from one pocket and handed it to me.
“One’s a bit outdated, the other was taken a few months before Cora ‘ran off.’ ” Hooking air quotes around the final two words. “But I think I got the views you wanted—one from the side, one from the front. Mama and Daddy didn’t offer a wide range of choices.”
“Then these will have to do.”
“I’m going to make some inquiries, see what I can dig up regarding the nanny job.”
“Did you ask the Teagues?”
“John felt revealing the name of Cora’s employer would be a breach of confidentiality.”
“That’s bizarre.”
“It is indeed.”
When Ramsey had gone, I checked the contents of the envelope. Two color prints.
I slid the photos onto my blotter and arranged them side by side. One showed a girl of twelve or thirteen with pale skin, freckles, and long blond braids. John Teague stood behind her, hand on one of her shoulders. A second man stood facing her, thumb on her forehead. He was wearing red robes and a miter—the ceremonial garb and headgear of a Catholic bishop. “Confirmation. March 19, 2006” was handwritten on back.
The other picture had been taken outside. A young woman was seated at a picnic table, arms crossed, huge green eyes grimly fixed on the lens. Her hair was drawn tightly back from her face. Long wavy strands flowed forward over her shoulders, sparking in the sun like liquid gold.
Like the filaments I’d swabbed from the concrete?
I sat staring at the time-gap versions of Cora Teague, doubts winging in my head like startled moths. Was she dead? Would I reveal her in 3-D death mask form? Would the cast even work?
The landline shrilled into my thoughts.
“I’m in autopsy room one.” Larabee sounded nuclear-level amped. “Get down here. Fast.”
Larabee was on the far side of a gurney, studying a corpse still packaged in its going-for-a-ride bag. The zipper was closed, but the contouring of the lumps told me the occupant was a good-size adult.
The man on my side of the gurney had his back to me. The silhouette looked familiar—tall, with shoulders too narrow for the waist and bum. Yet it was wrong, somehow.
As I paused, palm still pressed to the door, the man turned. And confirmed what I’d hoped had been a case of mistaken identity.
Eyeing me coolly was Erskine “Skinny” Slidell, CMPD homicide squad. And a magnum-force legend in his own narrow mind.
Slidell graced me with a nod.
“Detective.” Discreetly assessing what was off about Slidell’s appearance.
His face was clammy and gray. Autopsies did that to him. Otherwise, he looked better than I’d seen him in years. Perhaps ever. I guessed he’d lost fifteen to twenty pounds. He was rocking a suede jacket, shirt with no tie, and khakis combo, and his hair was buzz-cut, Bruce Willis style.
“Come here.” Larabee gestured me to him with an agitated curling of gloved fingers.
“Doc, this don’t—”
“Bear with me, Detective.” Larabee was clearly not up for attitude from Slidell.
As I rounded the gurney, Larabee picked up a clipboard holding an intake file.
“Sixty-one-year-old white female. Height: seventy-one and a half inches. Weight: one hundred and eighty-two pounds. Spotted by a neighbor at eight-oh-seven this morning wedged under a dock in the lower pond at the RibbonWalk Nature Preserve.”
“Where’s that?” Charlotte is lousy with parks. I hadn’t heard of this one.
“Derita neighborhood, off Nevin Road. It’s got a couple of ponds, a wetland bog, trails.”
Across the gurney, Slidell cleared his throat. Loudly.
Larabee ignored the not so subtle prod. “The victim lived a few blocks away. According to the neighbor”—checking one of the sheets clipped to his board—“Franco Saltieri, she liked to walk there.”
“Any history of depression?”
Larabee shrugged. Who knows?
Realizing the significance of Slidell’s presence. “You’re thinking murder?”
“Unless Granny opted for a midnight dip.”
Larabee did not acknowledge Skinny’s attempt at humor. “There’s an awful lot of facial trauma.”
“How long was she in the water?”
“Saltieri says he saw her around seven Saturday morning. She must have died sometime after that.”
Given the cool weather and the short period of submergence, the body would have undergone little postmortem change. I wondered why I’d been summoned. Was about to ask when Larabee flipped back to the cover page and read off a name.
“Hazel Lee Cunningham Strike.”
The room receded around me.
“Isn’t Hazel Strike the woman who came here to see you?” I sensed Larabee’s eyes on my face, narrow and watchful. “The websleuth?”
I could only nod.
“That’s what I thought.”
I heard a clipboard clatter against stainless steel. The buzzy rip of a zipper. The whistle of air in Slidell’s nose.
“Is this Strike?”
I took a second to clear my head. Deep breath. Then I looked down.
The garish hair lay wet against the right side of Hazel Strike’s face. The skin was morgue white, shadowed where the underlying bone had caved in—the cheek, the upper rim of the orbit. The lips hung slack, revealing bruising and broken teeth.
“What’s he mean, she came to see you?” Slidell demanded from the far side of the gurney.
“He means she came to see me,” I said, not looking up.
At that moment Hawkins pushed through the door. Larabee gestured him in, then refocused on Slidell and me. “How about you two take this elsewhere so we can get on with the autopsy?”
I cast one last glance at Hazel Strike’s face. Recalled the messages on my phone. Urgent. Pleading that I call.
Mind already packing for a guilt trip, I brushed past Slidell and headed out into the corridor. Skinny hesitated a beat, then followed.
In my office, I took up position behind my desk. Slidell sat facing me, shoulders and jaw tight, already in confrontational mode.
“When’d she come here?”
“A week ago.”
“Why?”
Words and images were spinning wheelies in my mind. I tried to force them into alignment. To arrange them into some sort of meaningful pattern. Slidell granted me at least thirty seconds of patience.
“We gonna do this today, Doc?”
“Fine.”
I relayed what I hoped was an accurate chronology. Strike’s hobby as a websleuth and her visit to the MCME. Cora Teague. My trips to Burke County, the Lost Cove Cliffs, and Wiseman’s View, the three overlooks for Brown Mountain. The printless fingertips, the fragmented skeletal remains, the Devil’s Tail trail concrete with its contents now hardening in autopsy room four. Deputy Zeb Ramsey. John and Fatima Teague and the Church of Jesus Lord Holiness. The suspicious death of their youngest, Eli, at age twelve. The insistent calls from Hazel Strike the previous Saturday.
Slidell listened, taking not one single note. When I’d finished he looked at me as though I’d said Elvis was tone-deaf.
A comment was coming at me when Slidell’s mobile buzzed at his belt. Without excusing himself, he got up and strode from the office. For the next ten minutes I could hear the cadence of his voice through the door. A pause. Then a new conversation. Perhaps act two of the previous one.
I’d moved on to paperwork when he finally returned.
“So the old lady called you.”
“Hazel Strike was sixty-one.”
Slidell gave a derisive twitch of his chin.
“She phoned several times,” I said. “Left messages requesting that I call her back.”
“When was this?”
“Last Saturday.”
“Times?”
“One was early morning. One was afternoon, the
other I’m not sure.”
“Did you call her back?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I was busy.” Again a pang of guilt. What had Strike wanted? Had she been afraid for her life? Whom else might she have contacted for help?
“You’ve not seen her since this little skip through the woods?”
“No.”
Slidell began ticking points off on his fingers. To my surprise the nails were, if not manicured, uncharacteristically clean and trimmed.
“Here’s how I see it. One, Cora Teague is a big girl and free to diddle whoever she wants. Two, no one’s filed an MP—”
“She was reported missing.”
“That’s not what you said.”
“Her disappearance was entered on a websleuthing site called CLUES.net.”
“Online.” Voice triple-coated with disdain.
“Yes.”
“By who?”
“Someone posting as OMG.” Though tempted, I didn’t correct his grammar.
Slidell’s brows rose ever so slightly.
“You know. Oh my God.”
Not a flicker of understanding.
“I assume OMG is cyberjargon. Like LOL. Laughing out loud. Or G2G. Got to go.”
Slidell took a deep, long-suffering breath. “So you’ve no clue who this nutbucket is.”
“No.”
Slidell’s knowledge of the Internet is limited to running data such as prints, weapons, or vehicle registrations, tasks he usually shunts off to subordinates. He doesn’t own a computer. Fully aware of the folly, I surged on.
“I tried Twitter, found no user with a handle containing just the letters OMG. That’s as far as I got before I had to move on.”
“And you’ve no clue who this Hazel Strike is. Was.”
A mental image popped. Strike sitting in the chair now occupied by Slidell, elbows on her knees, face vibrant with compassion for the forgotten dead.
“Lucky,” I said.
“What?”
“She went by Lucky. You know. Like the cigarette—”
“Yeah, yeah. Poetic.”
“Strike was investigating Cora Teague. She even spoke to the family. It can’t be coincidence. There has to be a connection between Strike’s murder—”
“Maybe murder.”
“—and Teague’s disappearance,” I continued.
“Maybe disappearance.”
“Deputy Ramsey is not too busy to exert some effort.” Glacial. Read: not too pigheaded.
“This ain’t Avery County. Here’s how it’s gonna play out here in the big city. Doc Larabee says someone offed Strike, the bastard’s going down.”
“What can I do?”
“Stay out of my hair.”
I let a few moments pass to indicate how distasteful I found his attitude. Then, “I am not an amateur.”
“You’re a squint.” TV cop lingo. Classic Slidell.
“I have been helpful in the past.”
“We’re not talking bones here. Nothing personal, but if this drops to me, I prefer to work it without interference.”
Interference? I wanted to smack his surprisingly clean-shaven face.
The landline rang, saving me from the impulse. It was Larabee.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“As I suspected.” I heard water pounding a sink in the background, a male voice I assumed to be Hawkins. Larabee said something to him I didn’t catch. “I found significant cranial, facial, and thoracic trauma, the result of at least seventeen blows with a blunt object.”
“That suggests a whole lot of rage.”
“It does.”
“Cause of death?”
“Massive intracranial bleeding.”
“Any defense wounds?”
“None.”
Slidell’s eyes were riveted on me.
“Water in the lungs?”
“No. She was dead before she went into the pond. Is Slidell still there?”
“He’s here.”
“Tell him I’m signing Strike out as a homicide.”
“I’ll send him back to see you.”
“And it’s not even my birthday.”
“Your reward for a job well done.”
I hung up and relayed what Larabee had said.
As Slidell was pushing to his feet, a synapse fired in my brain.
“I did some Internet research,” I said. “There’s a side to websleuthing I found disturbing.”
“People playing Whac-A-Mole with virtual mallets?”
The comment was inane, so I ignored it.
“For some, not all, the pursuit is ego-driven and intensely competitive.”
“Whac-A-Sleuth?”
“Are you interested in this?”
Slidell sighed and chest-crossed his arms.
“Hazel Strike engaged in a lengthy and bitter dispute with a websleuth calling himself WendellC.”
“What’s that short for?”
“The man’s name is Wendell Clyde.” I described Clyde’s role in identifying Quilt Girl. His resulting stardom. “Strike accused WendellC of taking credit for discoveries they’d made together.”
“So?”
“The exchange was beyond nasty. Much of the language was truly vicious.”
Slidell blinked, then opened his lips to blow me off.
“News reports said Clyde was living in Huntersville.”
Slidell’s belt vibrated again. This time he ignored the call.
“So you’re saying there was bad blood between Strike and Clyde?”
“The two hated each other.”
“And the guy’s living right up the road.”
“He was in 2007. That’s when the articles ran.”
“You’re suggesting Clyde whacked Strike?”
“Far be it from me to interfere.” Childish, but Slidell sparked that in me.
“Snotty don’t suit you, Doc.”
“I’m suggesting Wendell Clyde is a good place to start.”
Before leaving the MCME, I checked the schedule at my gym. Perfect. An evening yoga session at six. Stretching and breathing to help counter the stress.
Who was I kidding? The class meant one more hour away from the square mile of paper covering my dining room table.
I got to the annex around seven-thirty, relatively relaxed. A state of mind that lasted maybe ten minutes.
The phone rang as Birdie and I were sharing a Fresh Market chicken pot pie. It was Zeb Ramsey. I clicked on.
“I put the drive time to use.” Ramsey was eating something—maybe French fries. I could hear chewing punctuated by rustling. “Called in some favors on Mason Gulley, the kid the parents thought Cora ran off with.”
I waited out some wet mastication.
“He wasn’t easy to track, but my ‘associates’ ”—I could hear quote marks around the word—“managed to kick a few things loose. Gulley was born in ’94, which makes him a year younger than Teague.”
We each took a bite of our respective foodstuff.
“Gulley’s father, Francis Gulley, left home after high school to become the next gospel wonder in Nashville. His mother, Eileen Wall, came from a speck-in-the-eye town way over on the Tennessee border. Eileen dropped out her junior year to hit the footlights on Broadway. When they met, she was bagging burgers at a Wendy’s in Asheville, and he was scrounging pickup gigs as a drummer. A year after they moved in together, little Mason came along.”
“Did they marry?”
“No. And neither was enamored with the concept of parenthood. They split for California, leaving the baby with Gulley’s mother, Martha Regan Gulley.”
“Why not Eileen’s parents?”
“The father was a boozer and the mother had MS.”
“Grim.”
“Grimmer. Both were killed in a head-on the day after Christmas, 2000.”
While listening, I watched Birdie tongue a gravy-free pea onto a small collection of peas and carrots on the floor. Co
uldn’t help but admire his skill at triage.
“So Mason was raised by Grandma and Grandpa Gulley. Mostly Grandma. Oscar Gulley died of congestive heart failure in 2004. He was eighty-one.”
“Is Martha still alive?”
“Grandma was more than a decade younger than her husband. Still lives in Avery County.” Ramsey paused, but I heard no paper or dental action. “She’s raising the second of Eileen’s children, a girl named Susan Grace.”
“Seriously?”
“In 1999, Eileen dropped Susan Grace off at age one month. Two overnights, then back to L.A. Within the year, Eileen had OD’d on heroin.”
“Was she still with Francis at the time of her death?”
“They’d split.”
“What happened to him?”
“By then he was calling himself Frank Danger. He got popped a couple times in L.A. Petty stuff. Loitering. Disorderly. Resisting. The last arrest was in ’06 for possession of marijuana. He was ordered to rehab and given probation. After that the trail goes cold.”
“Never became a rock star.”
“No.”
Was Mason Gulley’s paternity really relevant? His parents’ loser past?
“Cora Teague went to Avery County High,” I said. “Was Mason Gulley a student there?”
“No.”
“Where?”
“I’m on it.” A beat. Then, “Apparently very few people knew this kid. My associates got some odd comments from those who had come into contact with him. A checker at the Food Lion, a pharmacist, a—”
“What does that mean, odd?”
“Folks said he was strange.”
“Strange?”
“Weird.”
“Weird?”
“Just repeating what was reported to me.”
I thought about that while working on a hunk of chicken.
“Time to get back to sheriffing.” I heard movement, probably Ramsey swiveling to cradle the handset.
“Hang on.” I swallowed. “There’s more.”
The line went still.
“Hazel Strike was killed last night.”
“The websleuth who came with us to the overlook?” Shocked.
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
I told him about the autopsy. About the injuries that suggested Strike’s killer was driven by rage. About her feud with Wendell Clyde. About Slidell’s refusal to include me in the investigation.