Upside Down wm-2 Page 10

  The envelope containing the negatives and photocopies was dry, but the tape was unprotected in the pack. She wanted to listen to the tape to make sure everything was there but knew she couldn't open the thick plastic packaging that the new Walkman was sealed up in without scissors or at least a knife. She didn't have scissors or a knife. She might need a knife in case…

  She had to protect the tape. She opened the chips and ate them slowly, savoring the familiar, dry taste. After emptying the baggie, she dropped in the cassette tape and sealed it. Then, unable to resist her pleading stomach, she opened the other baggie and ate the sandwich.

  Light washed over her. Startled, she looked up: someone had switched on the lights in the house next door. A man in his underwear sat down on a couch in his den, turned on his big television set, and started flipping through the channels. He hesitated on the news, and Faith Ann glimpsed a picture on the screen of her mother's building. Police cars were parked outside it. Then a man talked into a microphone and a picture of her mother came on the screen. Faith Ann had to put her hand up to her mouth to keep from crying out. Lastly, the television showed one of her own school pictures. That one stayed on for a long time, and she thought there was a phone number under it. When the story changed, Faith Ann sat back down and had to wipe the tears from her eyes so she could see.

  Sitting in the bushes, she thought about what to do. She wondered if the police were gone from her home yet. She needed to get some dry clothes, rest some, if she could, and figure out what she was going to do next.

  She had to find someone she could trust who would also know how to take the tape and the picture copies to the right person and free Horace Pond, and it had to be somebody the Spanish cop wouldn't just kill. She was sure that after she did that, God would make everything work out somehow. She looked at her watch. Twenty-four hours, she thought. I have to save Horace Pond. Help me, Mama.

  Faith Ann got back on her bike.

  24

  It was nearly noon when Manseur parked and went into the Park View Guest House. The clerk was reading a novel, which he set aside when the detective approached.

  “You have a Henry Trammel registered?” Manseur flashed his badge and let the young man read it. He showed the clerk a room key.

  “Sure. The Trammels are staying there.”

  “There was an accident. I'd like to have a look at their room.”

  “I don't know… You have a warrant or something?”

  “I'm just looking for next-of-kin information. I can have a warrant here in an hour.”

  “I don't know… I should call my boss…”

  The call took only a few seconds. The clerk came around the desk and accompanied Manseur to the room. Manseur gave the key to the clerk, who opened the door. “He said I should watch you,” the young man said. “To list anything you take away.”

  “Watch and list away,” Manseur said.

  Manseur looked around the room. The room was tidy, the suitcases beside the bed. The bathroom had used towels hanging on the shower bar, male and female toilet articles on the counter. There were some prescription bottles, an open dop kit, some makeup, a hairbrush, razor and lather, two damp toothbrushes bristles up.

  He looked at the clothes hanging in the closet, then set the suitcases on the bed and opened them. The only thing he found of interest was a leather holster for a Colt and a partially full box of. 45 +P ammunition in Hank's suitcase. There was an address book and a cell phone in Millie Trammel's suitcase along with eight hundred dollars' worth of American Express traveler's checks.

  “I want you to leave things as they are for a day or two in case I need to come back.”

  “This room is booked through Tuesday. I don't guess there's a problem there. We're like half full.”

  Manseur handed the clerk his card. “If anybody comes looking for them, or calls to speak to them, you'll call me?”

  “Sure. There was a little girl here earlier.”

  “What little girl?”

  The clerk shrugged. “She asked after the Trammels.”

  “She give her name?”

  “No, I don't think she did. She was only here for a minute. Just after they left.”

  “Describe her.”

  “Tall, skinny kid. She was soaked. I told her they had gone out to eat. She ran out of here.”

  “Was she wearing a yellow poncho?”

  “Yeah. You already know about her?”

  “If she comes back, you call me,” Manseur said, but he didn't think she would.

  25

  Concord, North Carolina

  The Masseys' home was a California Mission Revival, a yellow brick house with a red barrel-tile roof and arches defining the covered front porch. It sat in a line of other homes all built when F.D.R. was president. For the past hour, Winter Massey had sat out on the porch swing alone, looking out through the arch, but Sean, who had been taking periodic peeks out the window at him, knew he wasn't looking at anything that anyone else could see.

  She had never seen her husband grieve, but she knew him well enough to know that he didn't require her company, hadn't invited it. Knowing that she was helpless to comfort him was painful to her. She had been fond of both Hank and Millie, but she had been closer to Hank because he had taken a bullet in his and Winter's effort to save her life.

  Not being a relative made getting any information on Hank's condition impossible. Sean called a lawyer she had been using in New Orleans. She told him to tell the chief administrator at Charity Hospital that the Trammels had no relatives, just close friends named Massey, and that for certain considerations she was prepared to make a six-figure donation in the Trammels' name to the ICU. Twenty minutes after hanging up, a Dr. Russell, the chief of medicine, called her back. He told Winter that Hank Trammel had only a slight chance of living through the night. The physician said that if he made it through the first twenty-four hours, Hank's chances would greatly improve, although he would probably never be the same. Winter told Dr. Russell that he would be at the hospital in the morning.

  Sean went back to Rush's bedroom, opened the door, and saw that the boy was sound asleep. Her stepson had been every bit as upset as his father and was also upset by the fact that Faith Ann Porter's mother had been murdered and Faith Ann was missing. It appeared that Faith Ann may have been there when it happened.

  Neither Winter nor Sean could imagine why Faith Ann hadn't gone to the police or remained on the scene after Hank and Millie were hit. They agreed that Faith Ann was probably in danger, that the odds against the two deadly incidents being unrelated were astronomical. Winter reasoned that whoever murdered Kimberly Porter must have run down the Trammels and was probably still after Kimberly's daughter.

  Sean was in their bedroom when she heard the front door close, followed by Winter's slow footsteps coming down the hallway.

  Winter entered the room, sat on the bed, put his arm around Sean, and pulled her close.

  “You know, I'm really happy about the baby. I haven't seen Rush so excited in a very long time.”

  “I know,” she said, hugging him. From the highest high to the lowest low in a matter of seconds. “Hank will be all right.”

  “And so will Faith Ann,” Winter said.

  “I want to go with you,” she said, knowing exactly what his response would be.

  “It isn't a good idea,” he said. “Nicky is going to stay close to watch over Hank and be there in case Faith Ann shows up. I'm going to be busy from the second I hit the ground. I don't want to have to worry about you.”

  “I can take care of myself, Massey. Or have you forgotten?”

  “I know that. But Faith Ann may call here. If she calls Rush you need to tell her to call me at the Pontchartrain Hotel. Or better yet, tell her to sit tight and you call me on my cell and Nicky Green or I will go to her.”

  “I just wish I could do more.”

  As he rubbed her shoulder gently, Sean looked over at Winter's packed duffel parked on the floor beside the
dresser. Winter's cordovan shoulder rig-the straps spooled around the holster containing his SIG Sauer 220-resting on top of the bag reminded her of a sleeping serpent.

  “You need to get some sleep,” she said.

  Winter stood, and Sean watched as her husband undressed. She pulled the covers back and he climbed into bed beside her, and without saying anything they held each other until sleep took her.

  When Sean awoke before dawn, Winter was gone. She thought about how adept he was at moving around without making noise. She lay there thinking about him and his mission. She knew that he wouldn't have left her a note.

  There was nothing he could say to her that she didn't already know.

  26

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  At daybreak, Detective Michael Manseur returned to the scene of the vehicular homicide and got out to walk it to look for things he might have missed. Only after the physical evidence had been gathered, photographs made, measurements collected, and witness statements taken had the street been reopened. Manseur wanted to take one more look in the light to make sure he had everything that was there to get.

  On his scene schematic, Manseur had marked the point of impact to where the Trammels landed and the relative distances where incident-related objects had been found. Hank Trammel's Seiko, one of his boots, a twisted umbrella, a cell phone, a purse.

  The broken turn-signal lens and paint chips were from a 2001 deep blue Range Rover, which had been traveling at approximately fifty miles per hour at impact. A matching Rover had been reported missing from long-term parking an hour before the hit-and-run. Its owner was a respected sixty-two-year-old heart surgeon with Oschner Clinic. Were it not for the Porter connection, Manseur would have figured it was most likely some joyriders, or a drunk had hit them and kept going to avoid the unpleasantness associated with bouncing people off the grille after having had a “couple of drinks.”

  A physician who had been in the restaurant described a child in a yellow poncho who had witnessed the accident, and the restaurant hostess said a child of the same description had asked for the Trammels seconds before they were run over. Manseur was certain the child was Faith Ann Porter, but he didn't make a note of that in his book, deciding to keep her listed as: kid in yellow slicker-witness?

  The presence of the murdered lawyer's daughter on the scene, and the fact that the Trammels were relatives of hers, made this anything but a coincidental event. While he hadn't informed Captain Suggs of the connection, he would have to do that very soon or risk serious consequences for violating protocols. Under normal circumstances, since there was such an obvious probability of a connection, Manseur would have been involved in both cases. But there was something very abnormal about the Porter/Lee case, and if told the connection Suggs would probably hand this one over to Tinnerino and Doyle. Manseur suspected that Jerry Bennett's connection to the crime might explain the abnormalities.

  Manseur read over his casebook to see if he had missed anything. He stopped at notes he'd made while interviewing a girl from the bar across the street who said she remembered the man because “that white cowboy hat and his mustache made him look like Wyatt Earp.” Manseur looked at the list of found objects again. There was no cowboy hat.

  While there were no cars driving by, the detective hurried out into the intersection, knelt, and scanned under the cars parked on the street. He spotted the hat under a Nissan truck and rushed over to it. Reaching under the vehicle, he captured the pale beaver-skin hat by its brim and pulled it out. Other than being soiled from its journey down the street and smeared with grease along the crown, it was a cleaning and a steam-blocking away from looking new.

  The decorative band was a simple gray cloth ribbon. As he inspected it, Manseur noticed the slightest bulge in the seam. He peeled back the band and removed a plastic disk that looked like the head of a thumbtack with a loop of fine wire sticking out from it.

  He didn't have any idea what the gizmo was, but he took an evidence bag from his coat pocket and dropped the object in. One thing he did know was that it hadn't come with the hat from the Stetson Company, and the fine wire looked suspiciously like an antenna.

  Before he left the scene, Manseur put the Stetson in his car trunk and slipped the evidence bag into his inside jacket pocket.

  John Ramsey Miller

  Upside Down

  27

  Faith Ann locked her bike up in the tall bushes next to a tennis club two blocks away from her house and, careful to walk quietly, cut through the basketball court, stopping at the twelve-foot hurricane fence behind her house. She waited in the dark for fifteen minutes, listening intently for the sound of anybody who might be lurking in wait. After she was sure there was nobody in the rear, she slipped under the base, where there was enough play to allow her to bow out the mesh. Two doors down, her neighbor's dog started barking its fool head off.

  She crept to the house, slipped under it, and crawled to her bunker. Faith Ann took off her backpack and placed it against the wall. Taking the flashlight with her, she crawled out of the bunker and checked for cops in the front and side yards. Satisfied, she hurried back to the rear panel that swung out, climbed out from under the house, and went to the back door. She tried the knob and found that it was locked. Reaching into her shirt, she pulled out her neck chain, on which she wore her house key. Carefully she unlocked the deadbolt, eased the door open, slipped inside, and gently closed it.

  The familiar smell of the house soothed the sharp edges of her fear. She didn't dare turn on any lights, but she could see well enough to navigate because of a night-light in the hallway of the shotgun-style three-bedroom house.

  White-hot fear gripped her again, though, when she turned on the flashlight and looked into her room. It was in absolute shambles. Instead of a few clothes lying on the floor, which was often the case, all of the clothes she owned had been dumped from the drawers, themselves tossed around the room. Her mattress and box springs had been flipped off the frame, her clothes jerked from the closet, the plastic hangers still inside them. Glass from the broken mirror and from shattered picture frames glistened faintly from the layers of clothing. Oh, Mama, why would they make such a mess?

  She spotted a cassette under her chest of drawers, the boom box shattered as if someone had stomped it. There was no label on it, but she knew that it was a tape of poems that she had written and her mother had put to music. Kimberly had often played it to hear her reading her goofy poems in a serious voice with god-awful icky romantic music in the background. She slipped the treasured item into her pocket, fighting back tears.

  This chaos erased any notion she'd harbored that she could stay there. She scooped up another hooded Tulane sweatshirt and her pillow. She clicked off the flashlight.

  In the kitchen she felt her way along the counter and took the scissors from the knife block. Kimberly had bought them from an eager salesman who'd demonstrated them by cutting a copper penny around the edge until he had formed a makeshift corkscrew out of it. She slipped them into her back pocket.

  She went into the hall bathroom and closed the door. There was no window in there, so it was safe to turn on the light.

  They had messed up that room, too. The floor was littered with hair rollers, towels, washcloths, and brushes, and they had thrown things from the medicine cabinet and the closet into the tub, breaking some of the glass bottles. Suddenly sick to her stomach, Faith Ann dropped to her knees and vomited into the toilet bowl.

  Standing, she looked in the mirror and was startled by her own reflection. Her face was streaked with dirt, so she washed it. Her hair was a tangled mess. She looked down in the tub at the empty box that had contained the electric clippers that her mother had used to trim their poodle Luther's fur. Luther had wandered into the street and got himself killed weeks before they'd moved to New Orleans. Kimberly had kept the clippers promising they'd get another dog eventually. Faith Ann pulled off her sweatshirt, put a towel around her shoulders, and plugged the clippers into the
outlet.

  Taking a deep breath, she put the buzzing contraption under her hair at the base of her skull and slowly brought it straight up, stopping at the crown. Circling her head, Faith Ann repeated the upward strokes until only the hair on the top of her head was still long. Gathering the remaining hair together, and twisting it so she could hold it up, she was pleased that the plastic gap in the blades had left her hair a uniform one half of an inch on the sides and in the back. With only a vague idea of what a boy's haircut should look like, she set the clippers aside, got the pair of scissors from the dog-grooming box, and started cutting her way through the rope of red hair where it entered her fist.

  After a few minutes hard at work with the scissors, Faith Ann figured she'd best stop where she was. Carefully she gathered up all the long strands of hair she could find in the sink, left on the towel and from the floor, and put them in the toilet. It took two flushes to clear the bowl. Turning on the tap, she carefully washed the shorter bits of hair down the sink.

  As Faith Ann studied herself in the mirror, she fought back tears as she imagined how horrified her mother would be at the sight of her daughter looking like a baby chicken.

  28

  Marta and Arturo sat in her Lincoln Town Car, parked across the street from the Porter house. Marta was certain the Porter girl would return home, because she, like other normal children, lacked the skills to survive outside what was familiar to her. The kid had run straight to her comfort zone immediately after leaving her mother's office. Maybe she had seen the cops waiting here, but if she had, where would she have gone? Best the cops could discover, Faith Ann Porter didn't have any close friends.