Act of Betrayal (3 page)

“Shit,” he shouted. He shoved her aside roughly, and she banged her shoulder into the wall. “Get out of my fucking way!”

He barreled up the stairs and disappeared into the hallway. PJ turned and went after him, her heart leaping out to him in his pain. She wished she hadn’t been the one to give him the news.

Schultz had taken a lightning bolt through the heart. Looking at PJ, hearing her words, he was transfixed. Then everything seemed to come loose inside him, whirling out as though chunks of his body were flying away into space. His knees gave way, and he sagged against the wall. He couldn’t seem to find the center of himself, and his vision faded around the edges.

The victim is Rick.

He pushed PJ aside angrily. Why would she try to keep him from his son? He had to see his boy, no matter what. At the top of the steps, he saw an officer in the hallway. She put her arms out toward him, then backed off as he showed no sign of stopping. Toward the end of the hall he was met by the unmistakable smell of death, ripened by heat.

Christ, that stink has nothing to do with Rick. Nothing.

He blundered into someone at the doorway, and pulled together enough focus in his eyes and mind to recognize Dave.

“Tell me what happened,” Schultz said hoarsely. It seemed as though he hadn’t used his voice in a long time. “It’s not Rick, is it?”

Schultz held Dave’s gaze and saw his own agony reflected there.

“Boss, you should wait downstairs. You don’t want to remember Rick like this.”

Schultz lowered his head and lunged forward. Catching Dave off guard, he rammed his junior detective in the center of the chest, sending him staggering backward. Dave was a big bear of a man, tall and broad, but Schultz had desperation on his side.

There was a photographer in the room snapping away, and the Assistant ME was off to one side. They looked over in surprise at the commotion at the door and assessed the situation rapidly. Deciding they were suddenly needed out in the hall, the two nearly tripped over themselves, and then over the recovering Dave, trying to get out in a hurry.

Schultz took a few steps toward the center of the room. There was a chair, an old wooden one that had been painted green at one time.

A man’s body was fastened in a sitting position in the chair with leather straps at the wrists, ankles, and around the chest. He was naked. Someone had draped an opaque piece of plastic sheet across his groin as a modesty cloth. Not approved investigative practice, but they had probably guessed Schultz was on his way. It was a small kindness, and he was grateful for it.

The tissues of the man’s body were swollen, and the bands of leather dug in so tightly they were practically buried. His mouth was taped, and there was crusty dried blood on his chin that had dribbled out from underneath the tape. His eyes were open, and there were so many broken blood vessels in them that the whites looked red. Patches of skin had begun to slide off, as the skin of a ripe tomato can be neatly removed after immersing it in hot water.

Schultz noted objectively that there were no maggots, and that meant the place had been tightly closed off indeed.

Rick Schultz had been slowly suffocated from the inside, his flesh and heart and brain starving, as hemoglobin carried the cyanide through his blood vessels in place of oxygen.

In a gas chamber, it could take ten minutes to squeeze the life from a convict. In the uncontrolled amateur horror show in apartment 3F, there was no telling how long it had taken for his son to die.

After the initial viewing, Schultz’s eyes could only take in a little at a time. His gaze rested on a foot, then flitted to the window, then to a shoulder, then to the peeling paint on the leg of the chair. Schultz wondered if it was lead paint.

Hazardous. Have to warn somebody about that.

He couldn’t draw breath, and his heart felt as though it had split apart in his chest. His roving eyes landed on the right hand. There was a silver ring deeply embedded in the flesh—a ring that Schultz recognized. It had been given to Rick by his mother. There were initials RWS on the face of the ring, and on the inner band, Schultz knew, was the inscription
Love from Mom and Dad.

Schultz was struck down by the sight of the ring, like a giant redwood felled by a saw. He dropped to his knees, covered his face with his hands, and sobbed.

P
J CAME UP BEHIND
Schultz, placed her hands on his shoulders as he knelt, and let her tears flow hotly down her cheeks. After sharing Mike Wolf’s grief for his wife just hours earlier, she didn’t think she had any tears left, but she proved herself wrong.

She hadn’t known Rick personally, but she knew with utmost certainty that Schultz was facing what no parent should ever have to see.

His sobbing subsided as abruptly as it had begun, like a storm over the Sahara. She put an arm under his elbow as he clumsily got to his feet. His arthritic knees must have been screaming while he was kneeling, but sensory information connected with things other than what was in front of him just wasn’t being processed.

PJ found her voice. It came out strong and sure, and she was glad of that.

“Leo, come with me. Let the others work in here now. We’ll wait downstairs.”

She got him as far as the second floor, but he couldn’t seem to go any farther, as if he were tethered to his son’s body and the cord only allowed him to travel that far. Folding chairs materialized, brought by a considerate officer from outside the building. Schultz sat, his large hands on his thighs and his eyes focused on the stairs. She waited next to him, one of her hands resting on his, refusing to let her thoughts stray into the dangerous territory of imagining what she would do in his place, if Thomas had been the one in the chair.

The thing in the chair.

The Assistant ME, Dr. Georgia Morton, came down the stairs, and Schultz stood to meet her.

“Tattoo?” he said. He had no room for civility, for extra words.

“An apple with a worm, and the word ‘rotten,’ in blue letters, I think, on the left buttock,” she said. “It’s hard to tell the color.” Her voice was low and sympathetic, and didn’t carry beyond the three of them.

Some time later, the body was brought down on a gurney, impersonal in its zippered black bag.

Schultz sighed as the gurney was maneuvered down the stairs, past the two of them on the landing, and out the front door.

“We can go now,” he said.

Out on the sidewalk, PJ winced at the sun and heat. At ten in the morning on the third of August, the humid air sat on St. Louis like an unwelcome crowd of houseguests who refused to get off the couch and leave. Already the sidewalk felt warm under her soles, and the sunshine was an oppressive weight on her shoulders.

Schultz seemed oblivious to the heat. His eyes followed the van bearing his son’s body as it made its way down the street.

“Let’s go to Millie’s,” PJ said. “We can get some breakfast and figure out what to do next. We’ll both do better if we get a little distance.”

She knew neither of them would ever forget those images in the hot building, but she was offering comfort and companionship, holding them out like a menu, for him to pick and choose whatever would do him the most good.

His head turned toward her, and she saw something frightening in his eyes, something primitive that evoked rending and bloody revenge—justice of a wild and very personal kind. He blinked, and it was gone. “Okay,” he said. “You buy.”

T
HE EXPANSIVE WINDOWS OF
Millie’s Diner were fogged over. Millie hated the heat, and she must have had the air-conditioner dialed down to sixty-eight degrees. The hot air outside pressed against the window glass like a dog at a butcher shop. PJ could practically hear it panting to get in.

Inside, she let the cool air, the familiar sounds, and the forthright sanity of the diner envelop her. The aromas of coffee, bacon, and even greasy hamburgers were welcome, and pushed away the odors of ammonia and death that hung around her face, in her hair and clothing. Ignoring the half-dozen empty tables, PJ and Schultz seated themselves at their usual stools at the end of the counter, leaving one place between them. Millie didn’t mind them taking up three places, because the middle stool was the one that wobbled, and all the regulars avoided it anyway.

The utensils were cold to the touch, and the steam rising from other customers’ coffee cups actually looked appealing.

The news had preceded them, probably in the form of a phone call from Dave, because Millie didn’t approach right away for her usual banter. Schultz had been coming to Millie’s Diner for more years than either he or the proprietress cared to remember, and the two of them had an established routine of insults.

Millie eyed them from the safety of the kitchen, peering around the edge of the food pass-through, her halo of frizzy gray hair visible even though she thought she was hiding. When she couldn’t avoid it any longer, she brought out a cup of coffee for each of them.

“Nice blouse,” Millie said.

PJ mumbled her thanks.

“I’m real sorry about what happened,” Millie said, finally making eye contact with Schultz. “He was a real pain in the ass, but he was family.”

PJ held her breath. She wasn’t sure how Schultz would react to that description of his son, no matter how closely it sliced to the bone of truth. Rick had been serving time for selling marijuana to school kids, which was not exactly the occupation that a cop would choose for his only offspring. PJ knew that there had been arguments over behavior, money, getting a job, petty thievery, and minor vandalism. It was an escalating pattern. Rick had been sliding into career criminal status, and Schultz had been belatedly trying to apply the brakes and slow his descent—belatedly, because he hadn’t been much of a presence in his son’s life until his wife, Julia, abruptly washed her hands of him. Schultz’s tough stance and his refusal to get his son off easy on a drug peddling charge had led to a physical confrontation between father and son.

Nevertheless, he was Schultz’s son, and she knew that Schultz hadn’t given up on the young man. In fact, Schultz had been planning to work with Rick to turn the situation around after he’d served his time.

“You really know how to cheer a guy up, you old bat,” Schultz said. “You ought to work for a greeting card company.”

Millie started to get her hackles up. PJ could see her forcing herself to be nice.

“I’m not going to mess with that,” Millie said. “I figure we have a truce, at least for a while. It’s early for lunch. You still want your usual?”

“Hell, why not? My bowels can use a load of grease.”

She pinched her lips together, but kept her silence.

“I’ll have a biscuit to go with my coffee, please,” PJ said. “Or a roll. Whatever you have today.”

“Coming up,” Millie said. She headed for the kitchen. “Someone could learn a few things about being polite,” she said, just loud enough for the two of them to hear.

So much for the truce,
PJ thought.

PJ’s sweet roll, a huge creation that could have filled a generous soup bowl, arrived in just a couple of minutes. She held her hand over it for a moment, enjoying the warmth. It was freshly baked. She sliced it in half, unwrapped two foil-covered pats of butter, and started one pat melting on each half. Her dad used to enjoy a sweet roll that way nearly every morning, and her mom teased him about adding butter to an already fat-laden item. “Like sprinkling sugar on Frosted Flakes,” she’d complain. PJ tried to lose herself in the sensations, the routine motions, and the memory as a way of avoiding what came next.

She had no idea what to say to Schultz.

A man she cared deeply for, respected, and trusted was… what? Angry? Numb? Sad? There had been that terrifying glimpse of what was going on inside him that she had gotten on the street outside the apartment building, that moment when his eyes had shown her things she didn’t want to see.

She was a professional, a psychologist with years of clinical experience before she turned away from her practice and moved into the corporate world. There she had used her computer skills to develop virtual marketplaces, where buyers strolled aisles that existed only in a computer, buying this item, leaving that one on the shelf, every preference noted and analyzed. Then came the divorce, the move to St. Louis from Denver, and her work with the St. Louis Police Department. She had been Schultz’s boss for over a year, and in that time their relationship had gone from outright hostility to acceptance of the value of each other’s approach to the job.

And possibly to something more.

She put that last distracting thought away quickly. It wasn’t the time to examine her feelings for Schultz. She should be thinking only of how she could comfort him, help him to make some sense of his loss. As soon as the thought entered her mind, she knew that trying to make sense of things was the wrong approach. Even if she came to an objective understanding of why Schultz’s son died, she wouldn’t be able to make emotional sense of it. There was nothing to do but cling like a bubble on the surface of Schultz’s emotions.

It would have been nice if she could have plucked some magic product from those virtual grocery shelves in her former job and make everything all right for Schultz. In spite of her training in grief management, she wanted a quick fix for him.

PJ started on her roll, and let her thoughts slide into a black pit she’d been skirting.

What if it had been Thomas? How could I bear it?

Just the thought made her chest tighten and a spasm travel up her spine. “Fairies dancing on your back with cold feet,” her mom used to say.

Millie came out of the kitchen carrying a white china plate loaded down with a burger and fries. Stuck in the top of the bun was the diner’s trademark, a toothpick with a little American flag at the top. As Millie placed the plate in front of Schultz, PJ noticed that the flag had been moved down the toothpick.

It was flying at half-mast.

Schultz spotted the flag. He put his elbows on the counter and rested his head in his hands. “Christ,” he said. “Jesus fucking Christ.”