Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 4-6: Blood Brother, In the Blood, Little Girls Lost. J. Kerley A.
tugged at the lapels of his orange jacket. “It’s interesting. I grew just big enough to fill my clothes.”
“And right colorful ones they are, Detective. Gimme a moment and we’ll talk about Jim Day.”
Reamy set aside the beekeeper’s hood and hive-smoker he’d been carrying, resembling a coffeepot drizzling smoke from its spout. He yanked off gloves and jammed them in his back pocket. Pulled off a sweatshirt. He wore a starched white shirt and red suspenders braced his khaki pants. Nautilus looked into the side yard and saw the hives, a dozen white boxes, the surrounding air alive with black dots. He hoped the dots would return to the task of making honey. Reamy nodded to a pair of wicker chairs in the corner.
“Drag them chairs into the shade while I fetch something cool to drink.”
Reamy disappeared inside the home, a beige modular with green shutters on several acres in the heart of farmland. The acreage was studded with water oaks, pecans and towering longleaf pines, cones the size of shoes at their bases. Reamy was back a minute later with two glasses of sweet tea.
“Some folks like Red Diamond tea,” Reamy said. “But I prefer Luzianne. I sweeten it with two parts white sugar, one part turbinado sugar, one part honey. I balance it off with a little mint and lemon.”
Nautilus took a sip and pronounced it delicious. Reamy nodded appreciation and sat his chair in reverse, arms crossed over the backrest.
“So the gist is you’re trying to find Jim Day’s personal take on the killing of Earl Ridgecliff all them years back?”
“My partner thinks it might be important.”
“And he’s way up in New York?”
“Yes.”
Reamy sighed and stood. “Let’s take a drive, Detective.”
They drove out the main highway, turned on to a tight road bordered by piney woods. Reamy swerved from the road and drove through three hundred feet of woods, branches squealing against his pickup. He stopped in a quarter-acre clearing surrounded by arrow-straight pines. The two men exited, walking a carpet of pine needles.
“This is where it happened?” Nautilus said.
“I remember it clear as yesterday. A guy out hunting squirrels found the body, what there was of it. Hadn’t been dead more’n three hours, what the coroner figured.” Reamy raised an eyebrow. “The guy that found the body? He never went hunting again, said it got ruint for him.”
Reamy’s boots crunched over a deadfall. He paused and surveyed the scene. “Day was closest and got here first. Probably here ten minutes ’fore I arrived. We both parked on the road, afraid of messing up potential evidence, tire tracks, whatnot. I came down a deer trail yonder.”
He nodded to a dirt path tracing through underbrush.
“The path’s soft with needles and Day didn’t hear me coming. He was standing in the middle of all that human wreckage, not moving, like he was hypnotized. When he heard me, he snapped out of it and waved. It was a strange moment, but Jim Day was strange. Then the rest of the crew showed up, the Staties, the Medical Examiner and so forth.”
“Day wrote the official report, not you.”
“Because he had an eye for detail and a dictionary vocabulary. He took the photos that day, went through twenty packs of film. Shot every bit of meat, every organ, every possible angle. He climbed that tree over there to get pictures from above. Couldn’t get enough pictures.”
“How much involvement did your department have with the case?”
“Interviewing the locals, mainly. The State Police and ABI did the heavy lifting. But Day always kept them bloody pictures up on his desk like the case was his alone. Kept the full stack of reports, too. All the updates. One day, about a year after the killing, he put them away like the case had been magically solved, though that was still eight years away.”
“You never had an inkling who did it?”
“The Ridgecliff kid was never a suspect. A skinny, smart-brained and good-looking young fella who never spoke much. When the truth came out you could have dropped me with a feather.”
“When we spoke yesterday, you gave the impression of not caring much for Day.”
Reamy looked down, kicked a pine cone. “Seemed like a super choice when he got hired, the best scores ever seen from a recruit. But he never quite fit in, a loner when it came down to things, I guess.”
“I know a lot of guys who go their own way. Good cops.”
Reamy followed the cone a few feet, punted it into the trees. “Once I asked him to clean the gear in the ordnance cabinet. I was working third shift, about three a.m., and come in from a patrol. Day was cleaning the pieces when I passed by, didn’t know anyone was there. He had maybe twenty weapons disassembled, rifles, handguns, shotguns, specialty weapons, all laying on newspaper on the floor around him …” Reamy pulled off his cap, scratched his forehead.
“And?” Nautilus prompted.
“I’m pretty sure he had an erection.”
“What’d you do?”
“I never asked him to clean the ordnance again. But like I said, he did what he was asked and got it done. No one disliked him, no one liked him. He was here three years and when he left, the whole place seemed happier somehow.”
They climbed back in the car. “Could you drive by the house where the Ridgecliffs lived?” Nautilus asked. “If it’s not out of the way.”
“Ain’t far. I got nothing else to do but play with my bees.”
They drove three miles down the road, the air rippling with heat as though the land were a thin crust atop a raging furnace. Reamy turned a corner, pointed.
“That’s the one. Looks pretty much the same, abandoned out here all by itself.”
They drove by the white two-story farmhouse, windows boarded over, one side of the porch swing still dangling on its chain. Nautilus’s head replayed stories of occurrences within the house and he held his breath as they went by, like a kid passing a graveyard and afraid of inhaling ghosts.
“You were right,” Waltz said. He’d called and we’d met in a subway station near the precinct house. A train swept to the platform, wheels squealing.
“About what?” I yelled.
Waltz waited until the train pulled away. “Ridgecliff. The uproar at the Portuguese Embassy was threatening to ramp into a major brouhaha, so the NYPD put out the word that we were looking for a Portuguese businessman, but no relationship to the Embassy. All a mistake.”
“I saw the clarification.”
“Anyway, a rental agent, Jessica Stambliss, was visiting family upstate, When she heard, she ran to her nearest precinct, all whipped up. Turns out she had leased a place to a Mr Caldiera, a Portuguese businessman.”
A train swept to the opposite side of the station. “What happened?”
“We got to the leased condo, a sublet. Empty. It’s staked out now, but he’s gone.”
Relief washed over my body.
Waltz said, “There was fresh food in the fridge, take-out entrées from a four-star restaurant. A chocolate cake, too. Covered with cherries and nuts, like a sundae. There was torn duct tape beside a bed. And an empty roll. How’s he moving her?”
I’d given it a lot of thought. He was using his special ability.
“All he needs is a schizophrenic driver, Shelly. He can convince the guy of anything. Maybe he enlisted a psychotic