Page 38 of The Murder Inn

“No! No! I’m fine! I’m fine!”

I crawled back to get the gun. More shots from the truck. I gave up, scrambled back, tucked myself behind a tree, madesure Susan was doing the same across the tiny clearing where the men had walked us. From my vantage point, I could see into the suitcase the man had flipped open.

A gunshot slammed into the tree behind which I crouched. I hardly noticed. I was so focused on trying to make sense of the object curved into the shape of the bag’s interior. The naked body was in the fetal position, arms tucked into the space between the thighs and chest. There didn’t seem to be a head. There was fluid, reddish brown, sunken into the creases and crevices of the figure’s hips and shoulders, sucked into wrinkles in the surface of the vacuum-sealed bag that contained it. I’d seen plenty of bodies in my life. Never one housed so neatly in plastic, airless, white, unmoving, perfectly fitting into the bag as though it had been designed for her.

I put my head against the tree trunk and fought the urge to be sick. Susan ducked out from her hiding place, arrived beside me, eyes wild.

“No time,” she said.

“Do you see—”

“Yeah, I see it.” She glanced toward the body in the bag, grabbed my biceps. “We can talk about that later. Right now, we gotta run, Bill. We gotta run.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

SHERIFF CLAY SPEARS leaned back in the seat of his cruiser, put his big arm on the windowsill and scanned the park. On the play equipment in front of his vehicle, Joe was hanging upside down, his knees curled around the monkey bars, the cruiser’s second radio dangling from his fingertips a few feet off the ground. Clay watched the kid raise the radio to his mouth as a woman with a dog appeared on the little path that trailed into the woods.

The radio on Clay’s shoulder crackled to life.

“Big Bear, this is Detective Joe. I’m gonna make a, um… a possible crime report, over.”

“OK,” Clay said and smiled. Beside him, in the passenger seat, April chuckled. “Go ahead, Detective. What’s the scoop? Over.”

“I’m seeing a lady with a dog,” the kid said, his head turning as he followed the woman on the path past the play equipment.“She looks kind of suspicious. I think probably she stole that dog. Probably she has lots of stolen dogs at her house.”

Clay and April considered the report. Clay thought April’s eyes looked happy behind her brown-lensed sunglasses. It made his stomach flip to think about those eyes, what they might convey as they turned on him in the coming days. Weeks. Months. Would he be looking into those eyes in years to come? The dreams were easier to conjure now that there was someone filling the empty space of the woman in them. A person with a name and a voice.

“Sure are a lot of suspicious characters around today,” Clay mused over the radio to the boy. “Could be that a gang has moved into town, over.”

“A crime gang?”

“Yeah.”

“We better get more surveillance.” Joe’s tone was contemplative. “From all angles.”

The pair in the car watched as the boy clambered across the equipment and took the slide to the ground, setting up again on his belly near the logs lining the edge of the play area.

“Listen,” Clay said to April as they waited for more reports from the boy. “I’m really sorry about Vinny.”

“Don’t worry about it.” April laughed uneasily.

“He’s old-fashioned,” Clay sighed. “Bullheaded. I mean, I see what he’s getting at. Joe’s pretty. But all little kids are pretty. Vinny’s probably caught on to the idea that you’re not being wholly truthful about something, the way I did, and he figures you’re lying about Joe being a boy. But he’s not going to question you about it anymore. Nobody is. I’ll make sure of it.”

April nodded, staring at her hands in her lap.

“It’s…” She struggled, her lip trembling. “It’s embarrassing, all of this. I mean, who lets it get that bad? So bad that you have to run away like a goddamn fugitive? There are women’s shelters. There are… phone numbers you can call.” She shook her head. “It just came out of the blue, you know?”

Clay nodded.

“He only started hitting me six months ago or so,” April said. “And then, uh. Then he changed the numbers on the bank accounts. Locked up all the money. I couldn’t leave the house without him wanting to know where I was going. Then one night, he just snapped.”

Clay tried to quiet the anger but it rushed up inside him, fast and boiling.

“What’s this prick’s name?” Clay’s jaw had become so tight he had to talk through his teeth. He turned the computer screen mounted between them toward himself. “Last name Leeler, right?”

April slammed a hand on top of the screen. “Wait—what? What are you doing?”

“This is the MDT,” Clay said as he started tapping at buttons on the screen. “Mobile digital terminal. I can access criminal records for out-of-state suspects on here. I want to know if your husband has any outstanding warrants.”

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