snakebyte: book 5.0 in the Byte Series (The _byte series) Page 7

I winked at Sam as he turned to look at me. “Your girlfriend does excellent work.”

  “Chicky Babe,” he replied in acknowledgement.

  I wonder where else Ronald Latham had visited with his evil raven. The show ended without excitement.

  I called and had another team standing by outside to pick up Blanchard and his guest. The guest turned out to be a known criminal and someone recently released from jail for smuggling. Whether he was involved in the raven murders or just plain unlucky, I didn’t know. But his friend was in breach of parole by associating with someone recently charged with a drugs offense and Blanchard breached his bail conditions in a similar manner.

  It wasn’t their night. First, subjected to an average show in a clapped out theater and now, a free ride back to jail.

  We waited until the place cleared then made our way backstage to talk to Ronald Latham.

  Sandra called me to let me know the police had no leads and no suspects for the Greensboro murder. It appeared to be an opportunistic crime. The officer leading the case passed a comment that it could well have been someone traveling through the area.

  I wondered at that moment why he thought that and if he’d followed that thought anywhere. Might be worth a con-versation later.

  I knocked on a door that bore a handwritten sticker announcing Mr. Ronald Latham’s dressing room. The scrawl was almost childlike. An uneasy feeling built in my stomach. The thought of being up close and personal with the raven didn’t thrill me. I was less fazed by the parrot; from his cage I figured he couldn’t do much harm.

  The door opened.

  “Ronald Latham?” I asked, showing him my badge.

  “Yeah,” he drawled with a lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

  Charming.

  “We would like to have a word with you about the raven.”

  Without waiting for an invitation, I stepped inside. The lady with a feather in her hat was flopped on a sorry looking chaise longue. From a far corner on a poop covered perch Jack squawked, “FBI.”

  The woman threw him something that he caught and ate.

  Latham was behind us. “Come on in, why don’t ya.”

  I turned and smiled. “Why thank you for the hospitality. I am SSA Conway.” I set about introducing the men. “SSA Henderson, SSA Davenport, and SSA Jackson.”

  “What is that supposed to mean – super special agent?” he sneered.

  “That’s right,” I said quietly. We have super powers, yes we do. We can detect bullshit at about five miles, and we’re charming as hell.

  I looked around the pokey room hoping to see something in plain sight that would tell us we were on the right track with Ronald Latham. Nothing jumped out at me. The parrot shifted from foot to foot on the perch of the rusty cage. Up close, it looked kind of rag-tag and moth eaten. Old and sad. My attention moved to the woman.

  “Could I have your name ma’am?” I addressed the horror slurping a beer on the chaise longue. What a gal. The deep lines on her face spoke of more than one beer a night. Her voluptuous body cascaded over the edge of the seat.

  “Desiree Juliette.”

  And it suited her. She looked like something from the trailer park in My Name is Earl. Frightening.

  “Your occupation Ms. Juliette?”

  “I’m between places of work.” She lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of stinking smoke in my direction.

  “Your last place of employment?”

  “Candy’s beauty salon in South Carolina.”

  “And you are here because?”

  “Helping out my little brother, he’s fallen on hard times.”

  “Ronald Latham is your brother?”

  She nodded. Smoke billowed from her nose. It certainly looked like her brother had fallen on hard times.

  “Do you do that a lot? Help your brother I mean?”

  “When I can.”

  “You like traveling?”

  She shrugged, her shoulders wobbled. “Lap of luxury this gig,” she commented with a sneer and waved her cigarette toward the ceiling. “Playing nothing but high class establishments.”

  “Current address?”

  “We’re staying with friends.”

  “Do they have an address?”

  “I don’t know what it is, it’s somewhere by the zoo.”

  “Been there long?”

  This was going quite well. She was quite chatty in a snarly, gravel-voiced old smoker way.

  “Two weeks give or take. We’re moving on soon.” She wagged a nicotine stained finger in Ronald’s direction. “Ronald gets restless.”

  I turned to Ronald.

  “Do you travel a lot?”

  “Nature of the job. I go where there’s chance of a booking.”

  “Where were you last?”

  “I can’t remember,” he said, lighting another cigarette. The room was already full of foul-smelling smoke. It was increasingly uncomfortable for me to be in the room. I gave up smoking a long time ago, and being stuck in an enclosed space with chain smokers was nasty.

  “Do you have set towns where you …work?” I struggled to find a verb that fitted what he did. “A circuit of sorts, like the standup comedy circuit?”

  “I know what a circuit is,” he snapped sending more smoke into the room, and then he shrugged. “We don’t, I go where I fancy.”

  “And where did you fancy being a month ago?”

  He shrugged again.

  Jack cawed.

  In a moment of weakness, possibly induced by the cigarette smoke and rising damp from the old building I turned to Jack.

  “Where were you, Jack?”

  “FBI!” He squawked.

  “Very good, Jack,” I said.

  It took a lot to remain calm and talk to the bird.

  “Greensboro,” he said bobbing his head up and down.

  “Thank you, Jack.”

  “FBI!” he squawked again.

  “Your bird thinks you were in Greensboro? Sound familiar?”

  “My bird answers to cues, he can’t think.”

  Whatever.

  “Greensboro, Mr. Latham, have you been there?”

  “Sure I’ve been there. Lots of times.” He stabbed his smoke out into an over full ashtray and pushed off from the wall. Lurching precariously across the room to join his sister. “What’s all this about anyway?”

  Took him a while to ask.

  “I’m interested in you and the raven, and where you’ve been lately.”

  “Why?”

  “I saw a raven at Rock Creek Park the other day, and wondered if it was Jack.”

  Color me curious.

  “Maybe, I let him fly when we’re not working. He always comes back.”

  “So you don’t go with him, take him out to parks, and let him stretch his wings? You’re not worried someone will take him?”

  “Sometimes I take him, depends.”

  I looked at Jack. He didn’t seem so menacing now.

  “Jack?”

  He titled his black head and looked at me.

  “Pretty hair,” Jack said.

  Ronald pulled himself to his feet and approached the bird. “Be quiet, Jack.”

  The dolls, the dummies, whatever they were that he used in his act. I hadn’t seen them.

  “Where are your dolls?”

  “In the suitcase. You’re going to need a warrant to get them,” Ronald said.

  Sadly, he was right. If they’d been sitting out in plain view, I wouldn’t. Smart bastard. I had horrible feeling the hair on the first doll we saw that night, was so wild, and different colors, because it was from different people.

  People.

  “Who makes the dolls?”

  “They were given to me, by our father.”

  Sam coughed then said, “Your father used to play the fairs I went to as a kid, yes?”

  “If you went to fairs in North Carolina, yeah, it would’ve been the old man.”

  I brought the dolls back into the equation. “Who rep
airs them, they must need maintenance over time?”

  “I do what I can myself, there’s not a lot of money in this business. Not enough to send them to one of those fancy doll doctors at any rate.”

  The sister spoke, “I make their clothes when they need new outfits.”

  “So between you the maintenance is taken care of, no need for doll doctoring, wig making etc?”

  The mention of wigs created an interesting and startling chain of events. Ronald and Desiree stared at each other with horrified expressions, and the raven went nuts, cawing, squawking, flapping its long wings. It attempted flight in the small room, crashing into a pile of old video tapes piled high on a bookcase. The parrot flapped in its cage, screeching loudly. The noise drove spikey shrieks through my eardrums.

  Ronald called to Jack but he didn’t respond. Instead he squawked, “Pretty hair.” And then dove at me.

  I jumped back, covering my head with my arms. Lee and Kurt stepped in front of me. Sam waved his arms trying to distract the bird, trapping me against the wall and out of the bird’s reach.

  With nowhere to go, Jack screeched and dove toward the woman on the chaise lounge. I peeked out between Kurt and Lee in time to see Ronald throw a blanket over the crazed bird. It had a beak full of hair. Blood ran down the woman’s face.

  The display didn’t bode well for either Ronald Latham or the bird. I saw a feather fall to the floor. Carefully I slipped away from Lee and snatched it up while everyone focused on the bird. I pushed into my jacket pocket and stealthily stepped back to resume my position.

  Sam helped Ronald wrap the bird firmly in the blanket. “Got a box?” he asked holding the now still blanketed bird in his arms.

  Ronald nodded. From under a pile of clothing in the corner of the room, he dragged a large cardboard box, tossing the contents on the floor as he did. Sam plonked the wrapped bird in it and closed the top.

  Kurt took a bunch of tissues and held them on the woman’s head. She hadn’t said a word. Shock? By the amount of blood that ran down her face and the generous coating her clothing received, she needed stitches. Scalped by a bird.

  Kurt called for paramedics while I called for transport for Ronald Latham, Kurt and Sam back to the office. My next call was to animal control, I asked someone to come and pick up the raven. It was the weirdest evidence I’d ever dealt with. Then it was a call to the Crime Scene Unit. On a whim, I scrolled through my phone directory, found the number to Jennifer Blanchard’s cell phone, and called it. From somewhere near the large woman a cell phone chirped then rang.

  What a coincidence.

  Lee looked at me questioningly. I shrugged in reply and concealed my phone in my hand.

  “Ms. Juliette I think your phone is ringing, shall I answer it?”

  The woman squeaked out a few words that barely made sense. Lee interpreted for me. “She said yes.”

  Her arms flailed in protest. A quick search revealed the ringing phone in her handbag on the floor. I extracted it with two fingers, holding it so as not to destroy too much fingerprint evidence.

  “Yours?” I asked and dangled it in front of the woman.

  “Never seen it before,” she croaked.

  “How’d it get in your bag then?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “I’ll drop by the hospital later. Maybe the ambulance trip will jog your memory.”

  The paramedics arrived and removed Ms. Juliette. I arranged for a police guard at the hospital. She wasn’t off the hook by any means. I suspected she knew more about the situation and I wanted to discuss it with her in depth in the morning. After all, the woman had a dead person’s cell phone in her possession.

  Animal control came in with a steel cage. They transferred the bird and blanket to the roomier cage. I added a note to the cage. It read, ‘evidence in a murder enquiry. Do not talk to this bird!’

  The officers looked at me as if I was nuts, so I walked them out. With Jack locked safely in the back of the animal control truck, I explained.

  “The bird may be involved in several murders. He’s very clever, and very good at talking. I don’t want him picking up anything before we get a chance to have an animal trainer look at him.”

  “Okay,” they both said.

  The first officer suggested they put the bird in solitary and I agreed it would be best for now. Putting a bird in solitary sounded bizarrely funny. I knew I needed to stop thinking about it, but it was too late, and I already had visions of Jack the raven in little striped pajamas with crow’s feet instead of arrows on them. There he was in his pajamas, running a metal cup along the bars and screeching about the injustice of it all. I watched my internal screen for a few seconds longer, allowing Jack to squawk about hard labor, and then switched it off.

  I let the animal control officers know that we’d check on Jack in the morning and arrange for a trainer to see him as quickly as we could.

  When the last lot of people arrived, a small sigh of relief escaped. I looked at Sam, Kurt, and Lee.

  “Which one of you wants to continue the interview with Ronald Latham?”

  There was a quick game of rock, paper, scissors; Sam lost.

  “Me,” Sam said with a grin. I wondered if he lost on purpose. Sandra was still at work and I imagined she was quite a draw card when it came to getting Sam back to the office.

  “I’ll go with him,” Kurt said. “See you back there.”

  Sam and Kurt took Latham away while Lee and I showed the Crime scene investigators through the building and left them to their evidence gathering in the dressing room, they also took charge of the found cell phone.

  Chapter Eight

  Taking it Back.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said to Lee. He nodded.

  It was a welcome relief to be out in fresh air. We walked slowly back to work; the only reason we were going there at all was to pick up Lee’s car.

  “You think it’s him?” I asked Lee.

  “I’m not sure. That bird sure has something to do with it. You said a while ago that there could be two people involved. Could be that woman is the killer, and Ronald the accomplice.”

  “Could be,” I said. We waited on a corner for the cross lights, despite the absence of traffic. “What are we waiting for?”

  “Habit,” Lee replied. “You in a hurry?”

  “Nope.”

  The city was mostly in deserted darkness, although restaurants and some cafés were still open. The light jovial atmosphere of the early evening was long gone, replaced by Washington DC at night. Not the most comfortable feeling, at all: more vigilance was required while negotiating the city after dark. An element of nastiness came with the night. I looked over the road at the building in darkness. Deep doorways hid secrets.

  Secrets.

  It’s a city built on secrets.

  As the lights changed and we crossed the road, I wondered about vampires, werewolves, and zombies. The city took on a horror movie feel after dark. Old buildings looming over the streets, deep alleyways, intersected by sidewalks. No one would even see someone standing against a wall in one of the alleyways, not until it was too late. I stopped myself, aware that my line of thought was serving no purpose but to cause internal panic. We weren’t that far from the office, it was somewhere ahead of us, straight down the road.

  The lights changed.

  My cell rang. I pulled it from my pocket. We kept walking. A picture with a name in the middle of it filled my screen. I couldn’t make it out, it was blurred, or my eyes were blurred. I swiped my finger across the screen and answered it blind.

  “Conway.”

  Rowan’s voice greeted me. “Can we talk?”

  I stifled a sigh. “No, we have nothing to talk about.”

  “You home?”

  “No.”

  “Call me when you are.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “You know I …”

  I cut him off. “Yeah, I know. We’re done.”

  My fi
nger swiped the screen ending the call. I shoved the phone back in my pocket. I could see the lines around Lee’s eyes crinkle and his mouth turn up slightly from the side.

  “You’re what?” he asked.

  “Done.” I swallowed.

  “What happened?”

  “Lots of things.”

  “He was going to ask you to marry him … I thought you guys would make it.”

  No, he was going to ask me the night Carla overdosed then went it all went pear-shaped.

  “Things change.”

  “But …”

  “Let’s not. It’s done.”

  There it was the truth. What was really behind me pushing him away? Was it because he reminded me too much of life with Carla or was it because there was an engagement ring in his pocket that night or because my gut said there was something going with him and there was?

  “Wanna grab a coffee? I think the Hard Rock Café should still be open,” Lee said.

  “You wanna pay those prices?” I asked, looking down the street. Didn’t seem to be any sign of life outside the Hard Rock Café, I could see the flags on the side of the building but no one was on the street.

  “We need coffee, we deserve coffee,” Lee replied. “We’re working, it’s an expense.”

  “I like the way you think but the café is right across the road from work, we could just get coffee there.”

  “It’s late, there won’t be any coffee there, and if there is it’ll be burnt.”

  He had a point.

  “Okay, Hard Rock then. I want a tequila shot with my coffee.”

  “You haven’t had enough tequila?” Lee asked, bumping my arm with his.

  “There’s such a thing?”

  I wasn’t sure what it was that made me look over at Lee, a sudden blast of awareness or a ghostly presence. I spun on my heels and grabbed his shirt as he swayed all the while conscious that I needed to stop his fall.

  Across the street, Chad faded into a shadow. Gone, before I could call out.

  I positioned myself so Lee slid down me and didn’t fall straight to the ground. We were right by the light-controlled cross walk. A garbage bin provided a modicum of cover from the street. It took a few seconds for me to realize I’d heard two sounds in close succession. My mind said they were gunshots. Lee was leaning on me bleeding.