The Occupied Page 20

  “Funny. I had been thinking the same thing.”

  “Don’t get any ideas, okay? But I’ve got a spare bedroom in my apartment. Maybe you’d be better off there. At least for tonight.”

  Everything in my physical and psychological being was telling me to run with this. No need to catalog all the reasons. “You know, Ashley, I’m glad you’re here. I was hoping we could see each other again.”

  “You mean so I could rescue you from another beat-down?” We both laughed.

  “No,” I said, “because I wanted to see you.”

  “Okay, okay. We can talk it over at my place over a glass of wine.”

  She turned toward her car. But I didn’t move. “You coming? Or not?”

  “Not,” I said.

  She threw me a look. One part hurt, perhaps. And maybe two parts confusion.

  I tried to clear it up. “You know, when I was a trial lawyer, I learned something about putting in a case. When things are going your way, don’t overreach. Don’t take a lily and then try to gild it with gold plating. The lily is perfect just as it is.”

  She went snake-eyed. “You must be talking Portuguese, because I don’t speak the language. What are you saying?”

  “Let me translate. We’ve got a chance to start off on the right foot, and I don’t want to spoil it by making wrong choices. You deserve better. Your reputation. Who you are. And how I am now, compared to who I used to be.” Then I asked, “But can I see you tomorrow?”

  She snorted out a laugh. “Trevor, you’re an interesting case. Such a major mess of a man. Maybe a good mess. But still a mess. Okay, let’s team up tomorrow. But I’ll call you. Don’t call me.”

  42

  Ashley didn’t call me, but she did text. I saw it when I woke the next morning after getting a relatively good sleep—meaning no nightmare visitors entering my room to attack me in the dead of night.

  Her text had two parts. The first part raised some serious questions in my mind. Come right down to the sheriff’s office this morning. Sheriff Jardinsky needs to talk with you.

  Then the next part: And after that, come over to the Sunrise Cafe and meet me for breakfast. It’s my day off.

  The sheriff was waiting for me in his office when I arrived. No handshake, but a quick hello and then asking me to take a seat as he strolled over to the door and closed it before sitting down behind his desk. He opened up the button on one of the two chest pockets of his tan sheriff’s uniform and plucked out a stubby little yellow pencil. It looked like he had cut it in half so it could fit into his shirt pocket. There was a pad of paper on the desk in front of him, and he laid the pencil on the pad. Then he started to talk.

  He asked me if I was part of the defense team for Donny Ray Borzsted, and I quickly and accurately denied it.

  “But you met with Donny Ray in jail?” he asked.

  “Certainly,” I said, “as an independent investigator.”

  “There is no such thing. You’re either with the defense or with the prosecution.”

  I didn’t want to argue the finer points of the law with him, but in fact there is a third alternative, one that values truth over victory in court. I told him I fit nicely into that third option.

  “Okay, then are you working as an assistant to Detective Ashley Linderman?”

  “Not really.”

  “But you’ve been spending time with her.”

  “True. Because I want to find the killer of my friend.”

  “We already have the man who killed your friend. You spoke to him in jail, remember?”

  “You’ve got the wrong man.”

  “Our DA doesn’t think so.”

  Given my prior life as a criminal defense attorney, I had heard that kind of retort before. I told him, “I will be glad to instruct your district attorney on the fact that the eyewitness who supposedly saw Donny Ray by Pebble Creek that night with Bobby, when she’s cross-examined, will fold up like a bad poker hand. And the forensic evidence that you possess does nothing to connect Donny Ray to the scene of the crime.”

  Jardinsky stroked his hand over his graying flattop, then reached for his pencil, picked it up, but laid it back down. Then he leaned back in his chair. “I trust our DA. He’s a good prosecutor.”

  “I’m sure he is. But occasionally a good prosecutor is stuck with a really bad case. Like this one.”

  “All right. Here’s the situation,” the sheriff said, suddenly scooting forward with his forearms on top of the desk. “Number one, you are not to leave this jurisdiction for the time being. You are officially a person of interest in the murder of Bobby Budleigh.”

  I recognized the lingo. Keeping my discomfort hidden, I quickly asked why.

  “Because we know that you were here, at least very shortly after Mr. Budleigh’s death. Who knows, maybe you were even in Manitou when it happened.”

  “I can prove I wasn’t.”

  The sheriff rolled on. “Well, also you knew him—the victim. And your first name was written on his body. And also you’re out doing your own shadow investigation, and that bothers me. And then there’s the fact that a man who drove a car registered to Augie Bedders, and who had Bedders’s wallet and ID in the car, ended up being incinerated at the Manitou landfill, and you were a friend of Augie Bedders, which puts you only one degree of separation from the victim in the incinerator. Plus there’s the fact that frankly, Mr. Black, you have a very strange background in New York. And I find you to be a very strange man.”

  I saw no basis for the sheriff’s holding me in Manitou, but no matter, I wasn’t going anywhere for the time being. I changed gears. “I’m guessing that you have located Augie Bedders by now?”

  Jardinsky didn’t bite on that.

  I said, “You’ve given me the order about staying in Manitou, but was there something else?”

  “Yes, there is. You are to keep your distance from Detective Ashley Linderman’s official investigation.”

  I speculated that Sheriff Jardinsky’s last directive was the real reason he had brought me in. But as I walked out of his office, I concluded there was a bright side. Nothing I had said had caused him to pick up his little yellow pencil to jot any notes down.

  With the help of my GPS, I found the Sunrise Café. It was a green one-story restaurant with a rising sun painted over the front door and was attached to a greenhouse operation. Most important, it was twenty miles out of town on Highway 18, nestled between farmers’ fields and down the road from an agricultural co-op, which placed it just outside of the county jurisdiction and therefore outside the official reach of Sheriff Jardinsky. Ashley was in a booth next to the window with a view of the highway, and she had already ordered coffee for both of us. When the server swooped over to us, we said that we were fine with coffee for the time being.

  As I recounted my conversation with the sheriff, Ashley didn’t look surprised. Then I pieced it all together: Ashley must have known all along that it was coming, hence her “day off” and her choice of a restaurant in the next county.

  I said, “A day off? You really mean that you were suspended, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “Good deduction on your part. Only one day. Without pay.”

  “Because of me?”

  “No,” she said. “Because of me. I knew the risks of working so closely with you. I knew Butch would look for any reason to come down on me. That’s life.”

  “So, why meet with me now?”

  “Butch said no ‘official’ relationship with you.”

  I explained how Butch Jardinsky had told me the same thing.

  “Seeing as I am suspended today,” she said, “that would make this an unofficial meeting, wouldn’t it?”

  I couldn’t argue with that, and didn’t want to anyway. It was good to see her. She asked me for more details about my attack in the parking lot the night before, and I went over it again. But this time I felt the urge, at some point in the rendezvous, to share something else about the incident.

  But tha
t would have to wait. I knew, in light of Jardinsky’s edict, it might be my last official sit-down with Ashley, and I needed as much information as she felt comfortable sharing.

  I asked her about the identity of the corpse at the incinerator, and what she knew about Augie Bedders’s whereabouts, and why the dead man at the landfill had Augie’s car and driver’s license.

  She explained that the dead man was determined from dental records to be Wendell Quarlet, aged thirty-two, with a drug conviction on his record. He had worked with Augie at a local Manitou shop called Exotica.

  “Was the shop a front for drugs?”

  “Probably,” she said.

  “What about Augie?” I asked.

  I wondered if my old friend had wandered back into drugs after the car-crash death of his high school sweetheart and wife, Susan. From what Ashley explained to me, the timing sounded like it. She told me that Augie had two drug-related misdemeanors on his record, had no visible means of employment for long periods. Then, surprisingly, he started running Exotica a few months prior to Bobby’s murder. But after Bobby’s death, Augie disappeared and had become persona absentia.

  There was something I had to ask. “Do you think the same person who killed Bobby was also after Augie? That something happened to him too?”

  “That was my first thought,” she said. “It seemed that Augie could have been in danger, considering that the corpse belonged to Wendell Quarlet and that they had worked together at Exotica. Especially because Wendell had Augie’s car and his wallet and driver’s license and a wad of money that could have been stolen from the Exotica shop.”

  “But why Wendell’s suicide?”

  “I wondered,” she said, “whether it was guilt over the theft and a possible killing of Augie, and maybe even the murder of Bobby Budleigh too. His Judas message left in his own blood at the incinerator might support that, the same conjecture we had when we thought the body was Bedders. And yet, why in the world would he have picked that way to go, jumping into an incinerator? It’s crazy.”

  I shared one theory. “Maybe he was on a drug trip.”

  She nodded. But there was a look in her eye that told me she still had things she had not shared with me. Not yet.

  So I asked, “What do you know about Augie?”

  “He’s not dead. He’s very much alive.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s returned to Manitou. He’s running the Exotica shop again.” Then Ashley shoved her coffee cup aside and asked, “Now, about that guy who assaulted you last night, I get the feeling there is more from you too.”

  It was time for me to get real with Ashley. “There is something I need to tell you.”

  “I’d love to hear it. Was your attacker Karlin Borzsted? Or even Augie Bedders?”

  She had no idea where I was about to go with this. “No, couldn’t have been. Let me explain. When we first met, you said that you didn’t want me to talk to you about certain things. About my special ability—the supernatural one, for detecting demons.”

  She sighed. “Fine. Hit me with your best shot.”

  “I can smell them, the demons. And I mean that literally.” I paused. Her eyes widened like she was in the path of an oncoming car. I continued. “Don’t ask me how or why. But I can.”

  Ashley took her time responding. “Okay, I guess I asked for that. Look, I live fully in this world, not the next. I put my trust into what I can see, touch, hear—”

  “And smell?” I added.

  She smirked. “I should know better than to banter with an ex–trial lawyer. But you get my point.”

  “Of course. The physical world. Sticking to the strictly empirical. Suspicious about the spiritual. I get you. I was there once too.”

  I could tell Ashley wasn’t satisfied with that. She said, “I’m going to ignore your don’t-ask-me-why part. So, I’m going to ask you the ‘why’ part: Why you? And why . . . whatever that ability is . . . Why that?”

  “On the first question, I don’t know. On the second, I have this idea: I know there’s a God in heaven, and he has given me this ability for a reason, even though it feels like more of a burden than a gift. But there it is. My attacker last night was one of them. A demon walking around inside someone it has occupied.”

  If faces were billboards, hers would have read, Dubious. She asked, “Uh, okay, so how did you get out of that attack?”

  “That’s what’s strange. In every other situation I’ve been rescued through a variety of . . . let’s call them interventions. But this time, no. I’m just not sure how I escaped.”

  Ashley couldn’t resist and shot back with a smirk, “Were you maybe wearing garlic around your neck?”

  I flashed a smile. But I thought to myself that there was no way for her to understand the real-life terror of those beings from the other side. So I unfortunately started letting the words come out of my mouth. “It’s hard to describe to anyone unless they have experienced real horror.” Then, just as quickly, I reversed myself as I looked into her slender, perfectly proportioned face, but the face that also bore that thin white scar across her cheek, inflicted by a real-life monster of a different kind.

  I quickly added, “But then, you’re different. You’re a surviving member of that club. You could even be president of it.”

  Her face softened. “Thanks,” she said in a voice that was matter-of-fact and quiet.

  But I knew what I had to do next, so I told her. “I think you should know that I’m going to stop by the Exotica shop and see my old friend Augie Bedders.”

  “And just so you know, I didn’t just hear that.” Ashley waved to the staff so she could pay for our two coffees and added, “I’ll find a way to be in touch with you.”

  I volleyed back, “And just so you know, I will be looking forward to that very much. Hopefully very soon too. And I hope it’s not just about this case.”

  She gave me this look just then that was more than a smile, a look that I would want to remember for a long time.

  43

  Exotica was on the back side of a row of stores in the old section of downtown Manitou. It faced the Little Bear River but was several blocks away from the part of town where the riverfront had been renovated with artsy sculptures, and buildings had been refurbished into nice condos. In the Exotica neighborhood, by contrast, peeling paint and drab little stores were the standard, and the area included a pawnshop, a bail bondsman’s office, and a few vacant shops with For Rent signs in the windows.

  When I strolled into Exotica, I found it to be a combination retro head shop out of the Haight-Ashbury ’60s mixed with the musty ambience of an antique store. I was greeted with beads hanging everywhere, racks of tie-dyed shirts, a poster of Jimi Hendrix on the wall, and, naturally, the powerful scent of burning incense. There were boxes of old vinyl records for sale, a scattering of very dated furniture, and imported objects displayed everywhere with little price tags hanging on them by strings. The collection of carved and sculpted objects—mostly dragons, wizards, and a variety of mythic creatures—looked like they might have been imported from Africa, India, or the Middle East.

  I spotted a cluttered counter with a cash register but no one manning it. Then I heard some movement from the back room and rang the little copper bell on the counter.

  A bearded man stepped through the doorway in the wall. He was my age. Taller than me, with long, thinning hair in need of combing. A pale face that was gaunt, bearing the ravages, no doubt, of personal loss, addiction, and jail time. He was wearing an untucked construction-grade shirt with a circular logo on the pocket and ripped jeans.

  We looked at each other. I gave him a moment to put it all together as I stood there at the counter.

  Then I said, “Augie Bedders. Good grief. It has been a long time. Too long. How are you, friend? I’ve missed you. Been thinking about you.”

  A weary smile spread over his face. “Oh, man, Trevor. Geez. Been so long . . .”

  He reached over the counter awkw
ardly and took my right hand into his two hands and squeezed hard. “Wow, yeah, missing you too.”

  “Is this a good time?” I asked. “I can come back if not.”

  “No, this is perfect. Really. So, Trevor Black, here you are. In the flesh.”

  I nodded.

  “No, really,” he said again, “in the flesh and blood. Back here in Manitou. What’s going on, man?”

  “Well, I’d love to talk to you . . .”

  “Sure, fine. Right. No customers, as you can see.” Then he laughed hard, and I recognized that laugh. “So, shoot.”

  “Well, first, I’m sure you know about Bobby.”

  “Oh, man, so mind-blowing. Gone, man. Totally gone. What can you say? He was one of us, you know?”

  “I know. We were the band.”

  He lit up. “The Soul Assault. Those were the days.”

  I hadn’t heard the name of our band out loud in so long. It sounded like someone else’s life. Distant. Foreign.

  Augie asked, “So you’re here in our fair city about that? About Bobby?”

  “I am. Trying to figure things out. Why he was killed.”

  Augie was nodding athletically.

  I continued. “And something else. Maybe unrelated, I just don’t know. Are you okay talking about this?”

  “Sure, yeah. Go for it.”

  “I’m referring to Wendell Quarlet. The guy who worked here with you. At Exotica.”

  “Oh, that was really disturbing. Right. Worked here. Then took my stuff. A bunch of money from the register. My wallet. My car. Goes totally nuts and drives to that place . . .”

  “The city incinerator. At the landfill.”

  “Right,” Augie shot back. His eyes were wide, his mouth drawn back, tight. “Drove there and then lit himself on fire. Insane.”

  “What was going on with that guy? Do you know?”

  Augie leaned forward like he was going to say something, but stopped and looked around. Side to side. As if he wanted to make sure we were alone. But of course we were. Then he motioned for me to follow him through the doorway behind the counter and into the back room.