Max Harper’s cell phone number was on the Greenlaws’ speed dial. She hit the single digit, listened to the ring, was coughing from sawdust when Max answered.
“Shoes,” she said, swallowing. “Are you looking for shoes, maybe evidence to the assaults?”
“Yes,” Max said. “What have you got?” He didn’t ask who this was. Those days were long past when anyone in the department, except Evijean, would be so gauche as to question one of their prime snitches.
“Shoes thrown away in a Dumpster,” Kit said.
“Recently?”
“Yes. While they were clearing this lot. Looks like they’re all done, like maybe they’re just ready to leave now, but I have the shoes.”
“Yes, we’d like a look,” Max said. “The Dumpster’s where? Can you identify the person who dropped them?”
“No. I saw only their backs for a minute.” She didn’t want to say when she learned the shoes were of value, or when she saw them dumped. “I hauled five shoes out, hid them under a porch across the street.” She gave him the address where the Dumpster stood. Then, shivering, she gave him the address where the shoes were hidden, the address of her own house.
“Under that front porch,” she said. “That tall house with the children’s tree house in the back.”
She felt sick, taking a more than foolish chance, leading him to a hiding place so close to the truth. But her own front porch was the only one near that had a hollow beneath it; all the others were just a couple of concrete steps, solid and impenetrable. And if she hid the shoes among scattered bushes, neighbors’ dogs might find and chew up the evidence.
No, her porch was the safest. No neighbors’ kids poked around there, and it had been a long time since any unruly dog, facing her own claws and teeth, had invaded her yard.
“I know the house,” Max said uneasily. “Why that house?”
“It’s the nearest one to the Dumpster that has a good place to hide them,” she said coolly. “And that house looks empty, not a soul around. I pass that place every day on my way to work. There’s no car in the drive and never a newspaper and the shades always the same, half drawn, like they’re on vacation.”
She hoped she sounded businesslike and detached when in fact she was shaking with guilt. “Will you send someone for them?” she said innocently.
“We will, pronto. And thanks for the help.”
Smiling, Kit hit the button that ended the call—and prayed that Lucinda and Pedric’s ID blocking was working. With a nationwide phone company, one never knew. She shivered at having put the snitch in her own neighborhood. I pass that place every day on my way to work. That did scare her, to draw Max’s attention there—but it made her laugh, too. A cat going to work every day?
And how could she implicate Lucinda and Pedric, when they were far away in Alaska?
Max Harper reached the attack scene as the caller hung up. He pulled to the curb in front of the western shop where the little alley ran back, flanking the bakery. The street was blocked by the medics’ van and two squad cars. Parking beside the white van, but before stepping out, he called Dallas, sent Dallas over to retrieve the snitch’s evidence.
“Shoes?” Dallas said. “Under the Greenlaws’ porch? How come, after all these weeks, the snitch just now finds discarded shoes in a Dumpster? And near the Greenlaws’?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I don’t think they’ve been working long up there, clearing out those dying pines. Just go get the shoes,” Max said. “And get shots of any footprints the snitch left,” though of course Dallas would.
He sat a minute in his truck watching the four medics crowded around Sam Bleak, a woman medic taking his blood pressure, Sam huddled in his wheelchair looking pale and frightened. Tekla stood beside him, her hand protectively on his shoulder. Her stance was stiff and military, her face filled with anger as she raged loudly at Officer Crowley. The six-foot-six officer looked silently down at her, no smile, no frown, his face as still as stone. Max stepped out of the truck, approached the medics and three officers. Watching Tekla scolding, he took a second look at her black jogging pants, at the smear of dirt on the cuff.
He moved closer. Was that not a smear, but a small tear? He thought about Ben’s photographs, the one that showed a tiny rip in the cuff of black jogging pants, pants with the same satin stripe as these. Stepping away, he dialed Dallas again. “You still there?”
“Just out the door.”
“Before you leave,” he said softly, “send Kathleen over here with the big camera for some detail shots.”
Hanging up, he headed across to sort out the Bleak couple, Tekla’s angry diatribe filling his ears like swarming bees. Trying to hold his temper, he didn’t see Joe Grey peering out from the truck bed, didn’t see Joe’s smile as the tomcat thought about the phone call from Kit, about Kit leading Max to what? New evidence? Or only more useless shoes?
When, in the truck, Max’s phone had buzzed and, answering, the chief had straightened up in the seat keenly alert to the caller, Joe had slid out from under the tarp and pressed against the back of the cab, listening.
Shoes? Joe had come sharply alert. From Max’s end of the conversation, from the fact that Max didn’t cross-examine the caller or ask his or her name—and from the way Kit had raced out of the conference room earlier, she had to be the snitch.
Having been gone so long from the village, having just gotten home and most of her thoughts on Misto, she hadn’t realized shoes might be important until this morning. In the conference room piled with shoes and photographs of shoes, listening to Max and the detectives, she’d raced off alone to fetch what she hoped would be evidence. She’d retrieved the shoes, she’d hidden them where they’d be safe, and then she’d called Max, and that made Joe smile. Kit, their scatterbrained Kit, was indeed growing up.
21
In the back of Max’s pickup, parked in the shadows of a cypress tree, Joe Grey reared up to peer over the side of the truck bed. He watched one of the four medics, a woman, tenderly clean up Sam Bleak’s forehead and his upper arm, cutting loose his torn shirt, wiping away blood from both injuries. Officer Crowley was present with two other uniforms, talking with the chief. Sam’s wheelchair lay fallen across a flower bed that edged a narrow brick walk. Sam sat on a carved wooden bench at the edge of the walk, which ran back between the buildings past the western shop, a boutique, a toy shop. A matching bench could be seen farther in between the windowed stores. Little lanes and half-hidden courtyards could be found all over the village, pleasing the locals and offering a longed-for charm to eager tourists. When Sam’s forehead and arm had been bandaged, a second medic, a slim young man, handed him a clipboard and pen.
“This is your release, Mr. Bleak, if you’re sure you don’t want to go to Emergency.”
Sam said he’d see his own doctor. Tekla leaned over, took the board from him, and began to read it out loud to him. As if he were too injured and unsteady—or too senile—to read the form himself.
When she had finished reciting the dull paragraphs, she handed it back for Sam to sign: a release of liability, to protect the medics and police. These days a human could hardly breathe without removing responsibility from everyone in sight. The day will come, Joe thought, when Clyde and Ryan have to sign a waiver so the garbageman can pick up our trash.
When the medics had finished with Sam and turned away, Joe dropped out of the truck into shadow and slipped beneath the shrubs at the curb. Hunkering there out of sight, he watched the three men and the woman gather their equipment back into the van, their blankets and oxygen tank and masks, their various black leather cases with the big syringes, packaged needles, and who knew what other kind of torture. As the van pulled away, Max began to question Sam, nodding to Officer Crowley to take notes.