A Younger Woman Read online

  It was amazing what your mind could create with a little prompting. Each night Ry entered the Toucan he had imagined that Margo had invited him and that the songs she chose to sing were sung solely to him. Later, when he returned home, he furthered his fantasy by reliving the intimacy they had shared in that short month before his job had destroyed their happiness. In truth, his new life had been far better therapy than any damn pills, more soothing and satisfying than alcohol or warm milk. And it had been something perfectly safe as long as he stuck to the one rule he’d designed to keep him grounded. That rule had been distance—he would have absolutely no physical or verbal contact with Margo.

  The shrink had called it insane; Ry had called it staying alive. Only now he knew that alive and living were two entirely different things. For two years he’d just been existing—last night was the first time he’d really lived since he’d walked out of Margo’s life. Last night had made him realize something else, too—Margo had been just existing, too.

  To say he wanted Margo back in his life was an understatement. He wanted to wake up next to her every morning. He wanted to kiss her anytime he felt like it. He wanted to take her to dinner and to the grocery store. He wanted to shop for vegetables with her and he wanted the choose wine together, toilet paper and toothpaste. He didn’t care what, as long as they did it together. And he wanted to juggle every day for the rest of his life around seeing her and loving her.

  Ry blinked out of his musing. He was standing in the file room at the stationhouse, his hand poised, ready to resurrect an old ghost. He pulled open the file and searched for the name that would forever be emblazoned in his mind.

  “Banker’s hours?”

  Ry turned to see Clide saunter in just as he curled his fingers around Koch Menaro’s file. “Hey, how’s it going, Chief?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know. You haven’t been to the lab yet this morning. What gives, Ry? You’re usually so damn anxious to move forward on a case that you’re standing on Archie’s heels gnawing on his collarbone.”

  “I take it Archie’s run the blood samples.”

  “He found three separate blood types. What do you make of that?”

  Ry nodded. “I figured.”

  “You knew there was someone other than Mickey on the pier that night?”

  “I knew.”

  “Why do I get the feeling you know more than you’re saying, Ry? What gives?”

  “You know me, Clide, I don’t like to point a finger until I’m 99 percent sure.”

  “There’s been plenty of times when all we had to go on was your reliable hunch. I’ve never complained.”

  That was true enough, but not this time, Ry wanted to say. There was no way he would tie Margo and Blu to the blood samples without solid proof, and maybe not even then. He let his hand drop as soon as he realized Clide was stretching his neck to read the name on the file. But he wasn’t quick enough.

  “What the hell are you doing with that?” Clide’s brows lifted halfway up his forehead. “I thought we agreed—”

  “You agreed we would forget about him. I didn’t. How could I?”

  “Koch is in hell, Ry. In a roundabout way, that is—in hell hanging around, is how I like to think of him. A smear here and a smudge over there.”

  “Not funny, Clide.”

  “When a body goes poof it takes on a new shape. But dead is dead, and Koch has been dead for two long years.”

  “You decided he was dead, I didn’t.” The bitterness in Ry’s voice told the story—he was still too damn sensitive about the subject to be objective. But then what did Clide expect? It was Ry, along with three others who had made the ultimate sacrifice. Actually it was the other cops who had suffered the most. Ry had decided to cut his losses quickly instead of gambling with his loved one’s life. And it had paid off—Koch Menaro had never known Margo ever existed. That’s why she was still alive today.

  “Dammit, Ry, I don’t need you going wacko on me in the middle of this case. Why the hell are you going over this now? I thought you had settled things. You’re off the booze and pills. You’re sleeping, right?”

  “I’m sleeping.”

  Clide sighed in relief.

  “There’s a big difference between living and existing, Clide.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I want my old life back.”

  Ry knew that Clide understood what he was saying. His boss and Goddard Reese were the only two men who knew why he’d given up Margo and how low he’d sunk afterward. Only a select few at the precinct, on a need-to-know basis, had ever been informed about Koch Menaro and his vendetta against the Eighth District, and with good reason. News of Koch could have started an all-out panic at the precinct. As it was the department hadn’t taken Koch seriously until he’d killed a police officer’s wife on her way home from the grocery store, another officer’s twin brother and the teenage daughter of a thirty-five-year veteran ready for retirement.

  “Koch is dead,” Clide said again.

  Ry wanted to believe that, but, without any solid proof, he’d been left to wonder if the nightmare was really over. Closure was all he’d ever wanted, closure and the certainty that Margo would live to a ripe old age.

  “Ry, you’re making me nervous.”

  “I’m all right,” he insisted. “The truth is…” Ry stopped himself. Just how much should he tell his boss?

  “The truth is what?” Clide’s eyebrows were climbing again.

  “I’ve been in contact with Margo.”

  Clide swore. “I thought you said you weren’t ready to do that. I thought you said if we didn’t come up with a body, then—”

  “I know what I said,” Ry interrupted. “I still feel the same way, or at least I thought I did until a few days ago.”

  “I still can’t give you a body! Either you’re going to have to be able to live with that and face Margo with the truth, or live with things the way they are.”

  “Was I wrong to want a damn body, Clide? Was I wrong to want Koch on a slab, reconstructed with a little glue so I could see that bastard’s face and know it was over?”

  “A body would have been nice, and you’re not the only one who wanted satisfaction. But the others accepted what they couldn’t change and got on with their lives.” Clide put his hand on Ry’s shoulder. “Koch is dead. I don’t know how many times I can say it to make you believe what I know in my heart to be true. If it wasn’t true, Koch would be out there laughing at us and terrorizing the hell out of the people we love.”

  Ry jammed the folder back into the file drawer and slammed it shut. “I want back what he took from me, Clide. That’s all.”

  “Okay.” Clide raised his hands in understanding. “But can’t this wait until after you’ve brought in Mickey’s killer? This is a high-profile case, Ry. The news media is just waiting for us to screw something up so they can feed our fried butts to those insensitive jackasses upstairs. We can’t afford to make a mistake right now. I need your full attention on this. I need you clear-headed and thinking straight. You’ve already kept Margo at arm’s length for two years, what can another few weeks matter? A month? Two at the most?”

  Ry turned to face Clide once more. “That would be the logical move, but I think I’ve got an eyewitness in the Burelly case.”

  “You do? Why the hell didn’t you say…” Clide swore. “Wait a minute. You said you’ve seen Margo. Does that mean… Is she… Oh, hell. Don’t tell me your eyewitness is Margo duFray.”

  “Okay, I won’t tell you it’s Margo.”

  Clide’s face drained of color. “I’m going to have to pull you off the case, Ry. You know that.”

  “This is my case, dammit!” Ry was instantly furious. “Mine, Clide. If you turn it over to someone else it’ll set you back days, weeks. Worse, what I’ve got so far will disappear.”

  “Blackmail! You think you can blackmail this department. Me!”

  Ry pulled his badge from his p
ocket. “You want this?”

  Clide swore. “See, already you’re acting like a fool. What the hell am I supposed to do? You’re my best detective when you’re thinking straight, but we both know you have a hard time doing that when that little lady fits herself in the middle of your business.”

  “That’s not fair, Clide.”

  “Life’s not fair, son.”

  “You owe me, Clide. I didn’t have to tell you that Margo could be my eyewitness. I didn’t have to tell you a damn thing.”

  “No, you didn’t.” Clide sighed. “Okay, this is how we’re going to handle this. You pick up that lab report from Archie and meet me in my office. We’ll go over everything you’ve got so far, then, depending on your answers to my questions, I’ll make my decision. I’ll expect you in front of my desk in fifteen minutes.”

  It was closer to an hour before Ry opened the door to his boss’s office and found Clide on the phone.

  “Another body!” Clide reached for his antacid as Ry seated himself in front of his desk. “Holy hell. Where? I’ll send my man down there pronto.”

  When Clide hung up, he popped the cap on his antacid bottle and tilted his head back. Ry lost count of the number of tablets that tumbled forward. “Another body?” he asked.

  “Somebody came across a floater. Some fisherman in Algiers called it in. The victim’s male, found him halfway between River Bay and DuBay Pier. You think he’s got something to do with your case?”

  “Is it still my case?” Ry asked.

  “Harvey was waiting in my office when I got back from talking to you in the file room. The boys upstairs want this case wrapped up. I can’t afford to reassign, not and keep the deadline they gave me.”

  “Which is?”

  “You got four days to turn something up.”

  “Okay. Did you get an approximate age on our floater? Is he black or white?”

  “White. No age.”

  Ry came to his feet, anxious to get down to the pier. At the door, his hand poised on the doorknob, he said, “Thanks, Clide. You won’t regret this.”

  “If I do, I’ll see you cleaning toilets at the morgue.”

  Ry had never been relieved before when he’d viewed a corpse. Today, however, seeing the floater and not being able to recognize him gave him cause to let out a deep sigh of relief.

  He dropped the covering back over the dead body and stood. Pulling a notepad out of his pocket, he strolled toward the fisherman who had found the victim. The local man, a recreational fisherman, couldn’t tell him much. He’d been heading out in his boat early and spotted the body floating facedown, halfway under the dock.

  A few questions later, and Ry took the man’s name, address and sent him on his way. Then he returned to the body. Kneeling, he examined the corpse. The man’s face was distorted and swollen, his body bloated, but not overly. He hadn’t been in the water all that long from the looks of him. Ry figured ten or twelve hours max. One shot had done the trick—a single, small-caliber entry wound just above his right eye. He was wearing a suit and tie, fairly new shoes, and a better-than-average watch on his wrist. He had bruised knuckles to go along with the bruises on his face, signs that he’d been engaged in a fight sometime before or during his death. He was a big man, well over six foot and muscular, not the kind of man who would go down easily.

  After Ry had inventoried the man’s appearance, he added a number of questions like he always did to the bottom of his note pad. Minutes later, he turned his attention on the crowd who had gathered. He scanned the faces, hoping he’d get lucky and Blu duFray would be among them. Not surprised when he wasn’t, Ry began to search for the big fellow, Brodie Hewitt. It suddenly dawned on him in the midst of his search that there was an unusual number of duFray Devils standing around.

  Ry checked his watch and found it well past eight. The fishing business started early; some boats were moving before sunrise. The duFray Devils—Blu’s crew—were the early-bird fleet, the first boats to slip away from the docks and head through the canal to the Gulf. But not today. Why?

  Ry headed toward the collected crowd. “Can anyone tell me where I might find Blu duFray or Brodie Hewitt this morning?”

  The crew side-glanced each other, shrugged their shoulders and shook their heads. Finally a thin man in his sixties—a man Ry thought he recognized—missing his front teeth, stepped forward.

  “Name’s Pike, Detective. We don’t know where Blu is, but Brodie’s been stayin’ on Blu’s cruiser for the past two days. It’s long past the hour we should be out on the water, but Brodie ain’t showed up.”

  The moment the man gave his name, Ry knew why he had recognized him. Pike duFray was Margo’s uncle. “Maybe he’s sleeping off a hangover somewhere,” Ry said, remembering Hewitt’s taste for liquor.

  “He ain’t sleeping late. Leastwise, not on the cruiser. I checked. For a minute, when they hauled that body out of the river I thought it was—”

  “Hewitt?” Ry arched a brow. “Would there be a reason why you’d think that?”

  Pike hesitated, then said, “That fellow was big. Big like Brodie. That and the late hour. We never leave port this late.”

  “Maybe Hewitt decided to take the day off,” Ry suggested.

  The older man shook his head. “Brodie’s no slouch. Not even when Blu’s away. We work same as any other day. Sometimes longer.”

  “And Blu’s away?”

  “He didn’t work yesterday.”

  “You know where I can find him?”

  Pike shrugged. “Can’t say.”

  “Can’t?”

  “Don’t know,” he amended.

  Ry scanned the faces of the seasoned crew. “Any of you know different? Got something to add?”

  Their answer was random head shaking with blank looks.

  Ry left the duFray Devils standing dockside and walked a few blocks to where the Nightwing rode the calm tide at River Bay. He was just about to board when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned to see Pike eyeing him.

  “Came to have a few more words with you, Detective.”

  “Forget something?” Ry asked.

  Pike shot his hands into the pockets of his baggy trousers, driving them further down his narrow hips. “I boarded her ’bout an hour ago. Thought Brodie was sick or somethin’. There’s no sign of him, but it looks like he had some uninvited company before mornin’. I found blood topside near the stern. Lots of it. Didn’t want to mention it in front of the boys. They’re worried enough about keepin’ their paychecks rollin’ regular. I don’t much care for you, and I’m sure you know why, so helpin’ you ain’t why I’m doin’ this. Brodie’s a friend of mine. Blu’s family. Margo’s the only niece I got.”

  Ry nodded. “I’ll need you to come downtown and make a statement. If this is the crime scene, I’m authorized to impound the boat.”

  “That won’t make Blu happy.” Pike shrugged. “But if it’ll turn up Brodie, I guess Blu would be willin’ to lend it to you for a day or two. Long as you treat her like she was your own.”

  Within the hour, Ry had ordered the Nightwing impounded, then asked Pike to take a ride downtown with him. At the precinct he recorded Pike’s answers to his pointed questions, most of them repeats from their conversation on the waterfront, and when they were finished, he handed the typed copy to Pike and had him read the statement. “If it’s what you said, sign it.”

  Margo’s uncle scanned the paper, then scratched his signature on it. He stood ready to leave. Ry said, “I appreciate you coming down, Pike.”

  “I didn’t do it for you. Still gnaws at my guts what you did to our little girl. Margo’s special. She deserved better than she got from you.”

  “I agree,” Ry admitted. “At the time that’s why I set her free.”

  Pike frowned at that, then started to leave. Turning back, he muttered, “Must have somethin’ to do with being Texan. Ain’t met one yet that made much sense.”

  By midday, Ry made a call to Jackson to update him o
n what he’d found in Algiers, and check on Margo. Jackson informed him that he’d heard about the floater at DuBay Pier, and so had Margo. He explained that he and Margo were eating lunch at the kitchen table, listening to the radio, when it came over the noon news. He also told Ry that since then she’d been a wreck. She’d also tried to escape twice.

  “Don’t let her out of your sight,” Ry insisted. “She’ll likely try and skip on you again. I can’t get back there for a few hours, so hang close to her. Don’t tell her I called, and don’t talk about the floater. Did she use the phone?”

  “Yeah, she called Hewitt a half dozen times, but he’s not picking up.”

  Ry hung up the phone and eased back in his chair. Normally he was a patient man when it came to dissecting his cases. He knew that time always had a way of adding insight, and that trying too hard sometimes worked against you. But today he wasn’t feeling at all patient with the situation. He wanted answers, and Margo might not know all of them, but he suspected she knew enough to turn the tide.

  Maybe after last night she would be willing to trust him. What was he saying? Did he think one night in his bed would erase the humiliation he’d caused her and she’d simply wipe the slate clean? No, he knew better than that. Still, if he could gain her trust—convince her she could depend on him like in the old days. And if he could find a way to tell her the truth about Koch without making things worse….

  Then, too, maybe a fairy would appear and kiss his butt.

  Chapter 8

  A man was dead and they’d found his body in the river near DuBay Pier. The first time Margo heard it she was sitting at the kitchen table with Jackson. He’d convinced her he could cook, and she’d let him fix her lunch. The next time she’d heard it she was pacing the floor in Ry’s bedroom chewing on her lower lip.

  The news report said the body had been spotted early morning, a white male in his twenties. Margo had tried to call Brodie with no luck, then she’d swallowed her pride and called the precinct and asked to speak to Detective Archard. When she couldn’t reach Ry, she’d started to cry. Minutes later she’d attempted a reckless escape that had proven to be futile—Jackson Ward was as shrewd as Ry, and he’d anticipated her plan, right down to which door she would use and which direction she’d head. She’d made a second attempt a few hours later, but as she’d slipped through the hole in the hedge she’d run straight into Jackson’s muscled chest.