Cringing, I pulled my feet under me, pushed myself up, and moved on, staying as close to the hedge as I could. Twin lightning bolts of pain shot from my lower back down my sciatic nerves to the backs of my knees, making me gasp. My bruised ribs punished me with every ragged breath. I would have been cursing, but that would have hurt too.
Another fifty yards and I would be at the shopping center.
I broke into a jog, fell back to a quick walk, and tried to will myself along. I was sweating like a horse, and I thought I smelled of garbage. I could hear a siren in the distance behind me. By the time the deputies arrived at Lorinda Carlton's/Van Zandt's town house and got the lowdown on the break-in, I would be safe. For the moment, anyway.
Of all the rotten luck. If I had left the house two minutes sooner… If I hadn't spent too much time looking at the horse tapes or marveling at Van Zandt's porn collection… If I hadn't stayed those extra few minutes and gone into the garage to dig through Van Zandt's garbage… I would never have found the shirt.
I had to call Landry.
I walked into the lights of Town Square. It was Saturday night. People were on the sidewalk in front of the Italian place, waiting for a table. I walked by, head down, trying to look casual, trying to regulate my breathing. Music spilled out the door of Cobblestones, the next restaurant on the row. I passed China-Tokyo, breathing in the deep-fried MSG, reminding me I hadn't eaten.
Normal human beings were having a lovely evening eating kung pao chicken and sushi. There probably wasn't a woman in the place who had ever broken into a house to search for evidence in a murder.
I've always been different.
I wanted to laugh and then cry at that thought.
In Eckerd's drugstore, I bought a bottle of water, a Power Bar, a cheap denim shirt, and a baseball cap, and got change for the pay phone. Outside, I tore the tags off the shirt and put it on over my sweat-soaked black T-shirt, broke in the bill of the ball cap and pulled it on.
I pulled a couple of scraps of paper out of my jeans pocket-one: the note from Van Zandt's garbage, the other: Landry's numbers. I rang Landry's pager, left the pay phone number, and hung up. While I waited, I tormented myself wondering how clearly the woman at Van Zandt's had seen me, wondered who she was, wondered if Z. had been with her.
I didn't think she'd gotten a very good look. She had told the dog to get "him." She'd seen the short hair and assumed, as most people would, that burglars are men. The cops would be looking for a man-if they looked at all. A simple B amp;E, nothing taken, no one hurt. I didn't think a lot of effort would go into it. I hoped to hell not.
Even if they bothered to dust the place for prints, mine weren't in any criminal database, and no other database was checked as a matter of routine. Because I had been in law enforcement, my prints were on file with Palm Beach County, but not with the prints of the common bad folk.
Still, I should have worn gloves. If nothing else, they would have been nice to have while I was digging through the trash.
I kept the wrapper around the Power Bar as I ate it.
They would have my jacket-or what was left of it when the dog finished with it-but nothing about the jacket connected it to me. It was a plain black windbreaker.
I tried to think if there had been anything in the pockets. A Tropicana lip sunblock, the end of a roll of Breathsavers, a cash receipt from the Shell station. Thank Christ I hadn't paid with a credit card. What else? When had I last worn that jacket? The morning I went to the emergency room.
The bottom dropped out of my stomach.
The prescription. The prescription for painkillers, which I'd had no intention of filling. I had stuffed it in my pocket.
Oh, shit.
Had I taken it out? Had I thrown it away and forgotten? I knew I hadn't.
I felt sick.
I leaned back against the wall and tried to remember to breathe, to think. My name was on the scrip-Elena Estes, not Elle Stevens. The name wouldn't mean anything to Van Zandt. Unless he had seen the photograph in Sidelines. The photograph with the caption that identified me riding at Sean's farm. And if that happened, how long before all the puzzle pieces fell into place?
Stupid, careless mistake.
If the deputies came knocking on my door, I would deny having been on Sag Harbor Court. I would say I'd lost that jacket at the show grounds. I wouldn't have a witness to corroborate the lie that would be my alibi, but why would I need an alibi, for heaven's sake? I would say with indignation. I was no criminal. I was a well-brought-up citizen with plenty of money. I wasn't some crack addict forced to steal to buy my next fix.
And they would show my photograph to Van Zandt and ask him if he recognized me, and I would be fucked.
Dammit, why wasn't Landry calling back? I called his pager again, left the pay phone number with 911 after it, hung up, and started to pace.
The worst of this mess wasn't going to be explaining my way out of charges. The worst of this was going to be if Van Zandt found that shirt before Landry could get there with a warrant.
Damn, damn, damn. I wanted to bang my head against the concrete wall.
I didn't dare go back to Van Zandt's. Even if I could have cleaned up and changed clothes, showed up as Z.'s abandoned dinner date in the hopes of finding him there, I couldn't risk that woman recognizing me-or Van Zandt himself identifying me as the person in his garage, if Van Zandt had been in that car too. At this point I didn't even dare go back to the complex to get my car.
What a fuckup. I'd had the best of intentions, but there was a real chance my actions were going to result in the loss of a potentially crucial piece of evidence, and a chance I'd blown my cover with Van Zandt-and thereby with all of Jade's crowd.
This was why I shouldn't have gotten involved in the first place, a nasty little voice inside told me. If a killer got away because of this, it was on my conscience. Another weight pressing down on me. And if Erin Seabright ended up dead as a result-
Why didn't Landry fucking call?
"Screw him," I muttered. I picked up the phone and called 911.
26
The phone on the other end of the line rang unanswered. Landry swore and hung up. He didn't recognize the number. The 911 on the end of it made him think it was Estes. Up to her pretty ass in God knew what. It was a sure bet she hadn't stayed home and gotten into the tub with a book.
She was something. Going off to dinner with a possible sex killer like it was no big deal. Landry supposed he had overreacted to the plan. She was a cop, after all-had been. And she was the last woman any man should have felt compelled to protect, but he had just the same. There was something about her lack of a sense of self-preservation that got to him, that made her seem, of all things, vulnerable. He kept thinking of her jumping on the running board of Billy Golam's truck, trying to wrench the wheel out of his hands… going under the goddam thing… being dragged down the pavement like a rag doll.
She didn't know enough-or care enough-to take care of herself. And it was a safe bet she didn't appreciate him doing the job for her. He could still see the look in her eyes when he'd called Weiss and told him to pick up Van Zandt. Anger, hurt, disappointment-all just beneath a scrim of tough indifference.
He stood in the hall outside an autopsy suite in the medical examiner's building. He had run straight from interviewing Van Zandt to catch the ME at the tail end of Jill Morone's slice-and-dice.
Van Zandt had provided nothing but frustration, mouthing off for fifteen minutes about the inferiority of the United States justice system, then exercising his right to an attorney. End of interview. They hadn't had anything solid to back up an arrest warrant. As had been pointed out to him recently, being an asshole was not against the law.