Angel of Death Read online

  “Exactly when did I become your page?” she asked tartly.

  “I think this comes under the Justin-could-use-the-help heading.”

  “I’m assistant to the coroner, not a detective.”

  “Pretend the house is a body and you’ll do fine.”

  It felt wrong, searching through Brad Oakes’s things. Although Statute 30-10-606 was on the books, it was supposed to be invoked only when a coroner wanted to try and match a murder object to a wound. Justin, though, was skating through the legal loophole, which meant if this search ever went to court they were on very thin ice. Her eyes skimmed only the surfaces while Justin pulled out drawers and carefully rifled through the contents.

  The house was bare, spartan, its major decoration being several bookshelves that stretched the length of the entire living-room wall. She walked past them slowly, her gloved fingertips stroking the spines, each one by a famous author and all hardbound. Dostoyevsky, Fitzgerald, René Descartes, C. S. Lewis—she felt she did not belong here, prying through her teacher’s mind. She’d already been through his body, and that should have been enough.

  “We’re not going to find anything, you know,” Justin called out. He opened the bottom cabinet of a china hutch and pulled out a large amber bottle, round at the bottom with a golden foil lid. “Oakes had good taste in booze. This is Chivas Regal, sixty bucks a bottle. And it’s unopened. Did I tell you I think Kyle O’Neil’s sent us on a fishing expedition?”

  “Why would he do that?” Cameryn picked up an Indian pot that was encircled at the base in a brick-red pattern. She looked inside. It was empty.

  “I don’t know. It’s a vibe of his. I think he gets off on power.”

  She was about to set down the pot, but her hand stopped midair. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean one accusation from Kyle and everyone has to start jumping through hoops. Search warrants. Interviews. I get the feeling he’s sitting back, enjoying this.”

  “He was trying to help,” Cameryn said, bristling. “I was the one he talked to. Kyle wasn’t even sure we should say anything! You’re not being fair. You don’t even know him.”

  “Hey, pull in the claws. You’re right, I don’t know the guy, just the type.” He shifted his gaze around the room. “I’m not finding anything. How about you?”

  She started to shake her head, but then she did see something, although it had nothing to do with Dwayne. On a shelf was a plain picture frame, and the face inside it was a woman’s. The features were soft, but her smile was anything but. It lit the face from within, crinkling the skin beneath her eyes and dimpling her cheeks. Her hair was warm brown.

  “Did Mr. Oakes have any next of kin?” Cameryn asked.

  “One sister in Florida is all we could discover, and she apparently died about two months ago. Car crash.”

  Sister. It must have been the woman in the picture. Cameryn could see the resemblance now, the shadow of her teacher in the smiling face. “So who inherits if there’s no relative?”

  “Oakes just changed his will. It all goes to the Boy Scouts of America. But before you go thinking of a motive, Brad Oakes’s net worth is less than twenty thousand dollars, and that’s including the fair market value of this house minus the mortgage still due, if and when the house sells. Hardly enough to kill for.”

  “People have murdered for less.”

  “Not if they have to pay a realtor. Try hitting the bedroom to see what, if anything, turns up. I’ll go through the kitchen.”

  She made her way to the bedroom, moving carefully, trying to disturb things as little as possible. The bed was stripped and empty, sadly impersonal. Everything had already been taken from it, leaving no evidence, so she went to the dresser instead.

  On its top she saw a stack of photos of Brad rappelling down a mountain—whoever had snapped the pictures wasn’t in any of them. There was another book of poetry, this one by Keats. Feeling like a voyeur, she pulled open drawers, flipped through magazines, took out his empty shoes. Nothing that she could see suggested anything more than a man who loved literature and the outdoors. She turned to leave, giving the room one last glance.

  It was the flowers, the ones on the nightstand, that caught her eye. When she’d been there the first time they’d been dry, like moth’s wings, but now they had undergone another metamorphosis. Cameryn walked to the flowers and stared, because they weren’t flowers anymore. Only the withered stalks remained, curving in a glass. The petals themselves had crumbled to dust. Yellow, lavender, and blue powdered the top of the nightstand, mingling in a sorbet of color. There was no scent. Puzzled, she’d just put her finger into the residue when she heard Justin cry out, “Oh, man! Cammie, you got to get in here. Hurry—I’m in his office.”

  Wiping her fingertip on her jeans, she raced to the office. When she rounded the corner, she saw Justin sitting in the rolling chair behind the desk. In his hand was a thick document, stapled at the top. He didn’t look up.

  “What is it?” Cameryn asked.

  Justin pointed to the papers, smoothing them until they lay flat. “This is Brad Oakes’s cell-phone bill from last month. Take a look.”

  Leaning over his shoulder, Cameryn tried to make sense of the figures. Almost instantly her eyes registered the fact that one phone number, almost exclusively, filled the blue and white lines. Day after day, night after night, it repeated itself again and again, like a phone book with only one listing. 555-3813; 555-3813; 555-3813. It marched down the page, connecting two people, a link of indisputable evidence.

  “I’m assuming this number belongs to Dwayne Reynolds,” she said.

  “Bingo.”

  A sinking feeling spread through her gut, because even though it had been Kyle who suggested the possibility, she hadn’t wanted to believe it.

  “He told me they didn’t talk much,” Justin said. “He told me it was just about Scouting. Who talks about merit badges at three in the morning?”

  “There might be a reason.”

  “If there was a reason, Dwayne wouldn’t have lied to me. I’m looking at proof, black and white, that he’s hiding something. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

  “What about his wife? She must have known something about these calls.”

  “They’ve been separated since June. Dwayne’s alone.”

  “Oh.”

  A low tide bogged her down as she saw the evidence pointing to a secret life. This wasn’t about a lifestyle—it was about lying and deceit and other people who got hurt when they stood in the way. Dwayne’s wife, his child— they might be the victims who’d been caught in a vortex of a double life. Or maybe they’d stumbled upon a truth and Dwayne couldn’t find the way out.

  “You’re shaking, Cammie,” Justin told her.

  Cameryn commanded herself to stop, and she did. Justin rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s not a smoking gun, but get a load of the weird times. Two thirty-seven A.M. Four oh-five A.M. Here’s one, right on the stroke of midnight. These go on right up until Brad died. Why would he make phone calls in the middle of the night?”

  “Could it have anything to do with drugs? Buying, selling, that kind of thing?” Even when Cameryn asked it, she knew it couldn’t be true. Her teacher had always told the class that they should alter their minds with ideas, nothing else. “Staying sober is the way to keep your mind clear and ready to think,” he’d said, more than once. “Never numb yourself to life.”

  “It’s possible,” Justin said, “that they were into some sort of scheme, but I doubt it. We didn’t find any kind of drugs on our first search. Not so much as a marijuana leaf. And you’d think Oakes’sd have more money in his account if he were doing that kind of stuff.”

  Nodding, Cameryn added, “There’s another thing that doesn’t make sense. Supposing Dwayne did it. Just for the sake of argument. We still don’t have any idea of how.”

  “There’s a lot of chemicals used in photography, and he’s a photographer.”

  “No chemicals that
will burn a person from the inside out.”

  “You got anything better?”

  “At this point, no,” she admitted.

  “So we’re back to the possibility of a secret relationship. If Oakes was having some sort of a meltdown, if Dwayne was scared the secret was about to get out, well, that could supply a motive to ’off’ Oakes.”

  Cameryn didn’t answer this. Instead, she remembered seeing Dwayne in his floppy hat, teaching his son to fly-fish in the Animas River. She asked, “What happens now?”

  “We found one set of prints in the bedroom that we couldn’t identify. It didn’t match anything in the database and it wasn’t Kyle’s. Now we’ve got enough to get a ten-print card off of Dwayne and check his prints against what we found on the nightstand and headboard. If it’s a match . . .” He didn’t finish, and Cameryn didn’t make him.

  Straightening, she looked at her watch. “The funeral’s in forty minutes and I need to go. I don’t want to be late. Besides, you got what you came for.”

  “It’s a start. We’ll have a much more intensive search when the court order shows up.”

  She signed the supplemental indicia evidence form, noting the date and time she’d arrived, then picked up the phone records.

  “I’ll get you a copy of these tomorrow,” she told him. “I can’t do it now because of the funeral.”

  “This whole thing with you being assistant to the coroner is still mind-bending, Cammie. I mean, you, not me, get to take this evidence with you. In effect, I’m answering to you. Weird.”

  “I’ve been deputized, Deputy. I’ll try not to abuse my power. And I’ve got to get out of here or my mammaw will have a hissy fit. I’m driving her to the funeral.”

  Before she could go, she felt Justin’s hand envelop hers. It was warm, and there were calluses on his palm. His skin was dry and rough. He kept his hand over hers, and that fact alone made her breath catch in her throat.

  “Cammie,” he said. His look was intense enough that she could feel the atmosphere vibrate like hummingbird wings. “Cammie,” he said her name again, and this time his voice dropped low. “I know this isn’t the right time, but it seems there really never is a right time, you know? I need to talk to you.”

  “What are you doing, Justin?”

  “Don’t look so panicked—I just want to talk. Words, that’s all.”

  Her heart beat harder, and even though she willed it, she couldn’t quiet its sound. She stared into Justin’s blue-green eyes and saw more than she’d seen there before. A new emotion moved like a current underwater.

  “I wanted to tell you—” He shook his head. “No, I had this all worked out, but now I can’t remember how to say it.”

  And then Cameryn thought, Don’t do this, Justin. If you wanted to start something you should have done it before Kyle, but not now, because this is how the lies begin and I can’t go there. She knew the way that tiny seeds of deception planted into souls could sprout, intertwining one to another, and she was with Kyle now. She had no business letting Justin Crowley hold on to her hand, no business talking with him like this. Or liking it.

  “I’ve got a funeral to go to.” Gently, she pulled her hand free.

  He stared at her, perplexed. “I didn’t say what I wanted to say.”

  For a moment she didn’t speak. As she stood next to a dead man’s desk, she didn’t feel time moving. Everything within her was as frozen as without.

  “I’ve got a funeral to go to,” she said again. “Justin, I need to leave. Do you understand?”

  Outside, the winds kicked up harder, shaking the branches across the windowpanes, rattling them. She reached the door to the office but stopped when she heard his words behind her, soft and sad.

  “You’ve changed,” he said. “I told you that before, but I didn’t realize how much you have. You’re different. ”

  Cameryn was almost out the door when she turned to him. Wrapped in the protective folds of her moss-green sweater, she said, “I am. And I’ll never be the same again.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  PEALS FROM THE organ poured out of the back of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in a melodious waterfall, greeting the mourners with an ancient, medieval sound Cameryn had known since childhood. As she made her way down the aisle, she had to admit she was surprised to see so many people crammed into the pews. Townsfolk sat shoulder to shoulder, their coats beading water from the melted snow, their hair dotted with snowflakes that had transformed into crystal droplets. If Mr. Oakes could see them from heaven, Cameryn thought, he would be happy with the turnout.

  “Over there,” her mammaw said, pointing to a space in the back corner, directly beneath the stained-glass window depicting Jesus cradling a lamb. The lights on the inside, though, made the picture almost impossible to see. If she hadn’t known what it looked like in the daylight, it would have been difficult to tell.

  “Grab it before someone else sits down. Another minute and the church will be standing room only.”

  They settled into the wooden pew, and Cameryn studied the program printed with a picture of a lily on the front. Beneath it, in fluid script, were the words: In Loving Memory. After she’d read the name beneath, her eyes drifted to the front of the church, and she received a shock. In front of the altar stood a small table, draped in a lacy cloth. On either side of the table were dozens of flower arrangements in every color and shape imaginable. But on the table, and in the midst of the forest of blooms, sat a plain marble urn the color of teakwood. A picture of Mr. Oakes, smiling, was off to one side.

  “Brad Oakes was cremated?” she whispered. “I thought the Church didn’t allow that.”

  “Shush,” her mammaw said. “That was changed in the late nineties. The Vatican doesn’t like it, but it’s permitted under special circumstances.”

  Cameryn tried not to think of her teacher’s body, flayed open on the autopsy table, revealing the gray-red color of his flesh. That was one of the hardest parts of the job she did, she decided. It was knowing what really went on in the business of death. Death wasn’t like sleep. It was a bloody mess.

  “Oh, I hope Father John’s prepared a good eulogy,”

  Mammaw murmured as she unwound a scarf from her head. “He’s got a full house.”

  “The whole town’s here,” Cameryn agreed. “I’ve never seen so many flowers.”

  “It’s not a wonder. Brad Oakes was a great man, and his friendships ran deep. My friend Marion—you know her, she works in the rectory—told me Dwayne Reynolds put this whole funeral together—the program, the cremation, everything—and he’s not even Catholic.” She made the usual tsking sound between her teeth. “And it’s a pity your father couldn’t get back in time, but the snow’s making it awfully slow between Ouray and here. Is that Lyric in the back there?”

  At the sound of the name, Cameryn felt her scalp jump. Craning her neck, she saw Lyric standing by the door, her blue hair flecked with snow. It was the first time Cameryn had seen Lyric not wearing a bright color. A black coat hung loose to the floor, and beneath it she wore what Cameryn guessed was one of her mother’s dresses, a shapeless dark sack that reached to the tops of her Mayura biker boots. For an instant it was like seeing someone, for the first time, in a black-and-white photo—it altered Lyric somehow. Cameryn watched her brush the snow off her coat and eye the crowd. When she saw Cameryn, she looked away.

  “I’m sorry, Mammaw,” Cameryn said, “but I’ve got to go talk to her. Save my seat.”

  “Don’t be too long, girl! It’s about to start!”

  Just as they thought, St. Patrick’s had filled up. Now people were standing in the foyer, two deep, and tiny puddles were forming beneath their shoes. Lyric might have moved away from Cameryn under normal circumstances, but now she had no way to get past the sea of people pressing to come in.