We let her sit and stew in the interrogation room. Catherine and I watched her from behind the glass. She sat with her ankles hooked together, her back ramrod straight, a severe looking black purse that looked like something my grandmother used to carry, the kind with a snap closure, clutched in her lap. A thin sheen of sweat shined off her forehead and she patted herself dry with a dingy handkerchief she'd pulled out from her purse. Squaring her shoulders, she settled back into the chair, her face set with an anger that grew by the second. She stared at the door; as if she was willing it to open, mentally challenging anyone who may be on the other side to walk through it, face her wrath.
She looked quite a lot like her son. Or rather, he looked like her I suppose; they shared the same roundness of features. She didn't breathe through her mouth in sloppy gulps like her son does; she held her mouth in a tight orange-red lipsticked thin line. A cluster of tiny black moles dotted the crater of her left cheek, and just above them, the yellowish green of a fading bruise.
She ran her tongue over her teeth, and cleared her throat, fidgeting a little. "That's my cue." Catherine almost whispered as she turned toward the door. I moved to follow her out, and she stopped in her tracks, and held out a hand, as if she was going to push me backwards. Her eyes searched mine, and I don't know what she was looking for, or if she found it, but after a moment she seemed to give in to her inner debate, and shrugged outwardly, moving her hand away and continuing though the door.
A uniformed officer stood outside the interrogation room door, and pushed it open for Catherine. "Mrs. Webber." Catherine said in her pleasant voice and moved the corners of her mouth a little into something that almost resembled a smile.
The round woman would have none of it, and launched into a tirade before I had the door shut behind me. "What is this? You call me in the middle of my shows, tell me there's something wrong with my sons release paperwork, I shlep down here, and you keep me waiting for an hour? What the hell is going on?" If she hadn't opened her mouth so wide, neither Catherine nor I would have been able to see the gap of black in her upper tooth line, just below the vanishing bruise. But because she was such a boisterous woman, one who used her whole mouth to speak, there it was, plain as day. DNA was enough, but there was something satisfying about seeing the
hole of a missing tooth in that large hole of a mouth.
Catherine pulled out the chair opposite Mrs. Webber and slid herself in to it. She watched me as I circled around behind the woman and leaned up against the wall. Moving her eyes back to the suspect we both knew was a murderer, Catherine used her not so pleasant voice.
"Must have been quite a shiner, how'd you get it?"
The woman was taken aback; she hadn't expected any questions about herself. "Wha…? My son. My son hit me when I brought him home the other night. You people worked him into a frenzy, and I'm…I'm gonna sue."
Catherine's smile was genuine this time. She was amused by the explanation. The grin dropped from her lips and she shook her head slowly. "I don't think so."
"No. No, that's exactly what happened…"
"First place, you've got your son so pussy whipped there's no way he'd ever raise a hand to his Mommy. And secondly…" Catherine saw me move, and she stopped speaking while I leaned in to whisper in Mrs. Webbers ear.
"Secondly, you're son is so screwed up that if he ever did find the balls and hit you, he wouldn't stop at just once." She froze when she felt me so close to her, her knuckles whitened in her death grip on her purse. She had the cobwebby sent of an old woman, but she couldn't have been much over sixty. She opened her mouth, as if she was going to say something, but must have thought better of it, as she snapped it closed.
"Is that when you lost your tooth?" Catherine asked. "When you were punched, by…whoever?"
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Catherine almost laughed out loud, and put her fingertips to her forehead for a moment. "You're missing tooth. Well. Not so missing…" she paused dramatically. "We found it for you."
"This was knocked out years ago."
"That can't be true." I leaned in again, breathing in the haunted house stench of her. "See, gums turn grey after a few months" I was making it up, and hoping she knew nothing about dentistry. "This" I tapped my finger on her cheek, it felt spongy "is pretty fresh, still pink." I was so close to her, I heard her swallow.
"My son did it. When he hit me. I just didn't want you to arrest him again."
"You really need to make up your mind Mrs. Webber. Either you're going to press charges and sue the department for getting him riled, or you're going to cover his ass. But we both know you're not going to do that because he didn't hit you." I pulled out the chair next to her and sat down, still leaning in toward her, letting my face be as menacing as it wanted to be.
"You didn't ask where we found your tooth. Aren't you curious?" Catherine slid the plastic evidence bag across the table. The older woman shook her head. "We found it at a crime scene." The round woman's eyes grew round themselves as she started at the enamel rectangle incased in the bag.
"We found it in the bedroom of a woman who your son had a crush on. An innocent woman who is now dead." I breathed the words hard at her. She tried to get up from her chair; I put a hand on her arm, tethering her down.
"Innocent? HA. That tramp…" my fingers tightened on her arm for just a second before I forced them to loosen enough to where I could move my hand away. Four cherry bands blazed across her skin where my fingers had been. She stopped talking long enough to look at her arm, then to glare at me for a moment. I met her gaze with a stare of my own. She backed down quickly, moving her eyes to Catherine. "She wasn't innocent. Enticing my Harry, trying to get him away from me…"
"He's over thirty years old, don't you think it's about time he got away from you?" Catherine asked, good mother to awful mother.
She shook her head emphatically. "No. I'm…sick. I need Harry with me."
"So you go over to Ms. Knights house…" Catherine began the story.
"Just to talk to her. She was ruining my sons life, got him fired from his job; had a restraining order against him."
"You got him fired. The TRO was because HE was harassing HER." I bit my words off.
She stared at me out of the corner of her eye and lifted her chin before she went on. "Wasn't my fault he lost his job."
"Wasn't the victims vault." Catherine said as she leaned in to the table. Kelly I started to correct her, but swallowed the name before it could leave my mouth. It stuck in my throat like…like a frog. I thought about the ceramic frog sitting on my bedside table, a wave of guilt washed over me, I sat back in the chair heavily.
"She tried to help your son." Catherine paused, measuring her words. "And you killed her."
Kelly's killer mopped her brow with her antiquated handkerchief. She shook her head slowly. "It was self defense… She hit me."
"She hit you while you were strangling her. SHE was trying to defend herself."
"You can't prove that." Her voice was somehow meek and forceful at the same time.
"Yes. Actually, we can." Catherine flipped open a manila folder and flipped it around. The top page was the same body outline that she'd presented with me the day before. If not Kelly's name printed at the top, I wouldn't have been able to tell if it was Kristi's file or Kelly's. "We pulled skin samples off of the victims neck." Catherine slid her gaze over to me, I hadn't done that, and she admonished me with her eyes. "I also scrapped under her finger nails." She said it more to me than to the suspect. Catherine flipped the page in the folder revealing the lab results on the next page. The word MATCH dominated the paper.
Mrs. Webber leaned in, as if being closer to the page would make what was undoubtedly mumbo-jumbo to her clear. After a moment she looked up to Catherine. "What does this mean?"
"It means…" I stood up and nodded to the officer standing in the corner "that you're under arrest."
Catherine dropped me of at home a few hours later. She hadn't mentioned my mistakes, and I was grateful. I chalked up my errors as lack of sleep and assured myself it wasn't going to happen again. We'd watched the woman who murdered Kelly shuffle down the hall, screaming obscenities and thrashing enough that it took two cops to steady her. She'd brought Harry to the station with her, and he stood now seeing his mother in handcuffs for killing the woman he cared about. There was an odd blend of horror and relief on his face. And something else; I couldn't just quite put my finger on.
I unlocked my door, noticing that Catherine had already pulled the truck out of my driveway and was halfway down the block before I'd made it to my front door. There was still some daylight left, and she was off to spend time with Lindsay. Dragging myself inside, I tossed my jacket on to the couch and stripped of my shirt heading to the bedroom, wanting only sleep, regardless of the remaining daylight. I needed to feel nothing for a while.
I let my shirt drop out of my hand at the threshold, and crawled into bed. My head swam with images I didn't want. Recollections of Kristi at that boutique, outside the casino, in my arms; the pictures from Kelly bookshelves intermingled, and they all became a swirling kaleidoscope; two beautiful brunette girls, both now dead. The dead body outline sheets of paper, wounds of ink doting the paper doll like images floated though my mind, intruding on the smiling women. Kristi in her coffin, Kelly on Robbins table. Enough I sat up in bed and dug the heels of my hands in to my eyes, erasing the images. With a deep sigh, I gave up on the idea of sleeping for a while. When I opened my eyes, they landed on the frog sitting there on my nightstand. I picked him up, cradling him in my hands, and suddenly I knew what Harry had been feeling at the station, the elusive something in his face that I couldn't put my finger on. Crushed.
Prelude
The waitress slid the check down on the table between Grissom and me. I picked it up and quickly glanced down at it. "I got this, it's the kind of money I'm pulling down now." Sliding out of the booth, I left Warrick and Grissom behind me.
An old man was already at the register, arguing with the cashier about the price of coffee, and the amount of his senior citizens discount. I pulled a toothpick out of the dispenser and stuck it in between my teeth, chewing on it as I chewed on the day's events. I was suddenly working for Catherine; Grissom broke the news to Warrick and I, and then invited us to breakfast.
The cashier looked past the argumentative old man at me, and shrugged in apology. I gave her half a smile of understanding before I closed my eyes and forced myself to relax. Two deep breaths later, I felt someone's eyes on me. I turned back toward the table; Warrick and Grissom were deep in conversation. Glancing around me, I tried to find the source of the feeling. Besides an old woman who was probably the wife of the complainer in front of me, there were only two other women in the place, one, who's back to me, was on her cell phone, talking animatedly, probably to her boyfriend I guessed. The other woman who sat across from her companion, she was the one looking at me. She was trying to hide behind her coffee cup, but it didn't hide much. Alarms starting going off in my head like a World War II submarine: Pretty girl, straight ahead. Just before she shyly averted her gaze, I locked eyes with her for a millisecond, something about her felt familiar, like she looked like someone I'd known before. With her eyes off me, and staring at the tabletop, I was able to give her a better glance over than I would have dared if she'd been still staring at me. A thick lock of hair had fallen in to her half closed eyes, and I had an incredible urge to brush it away from her face. It was the oddest feeling, being so fascinated by a single lock of hair. I laughed at myself, looking toward the floor, and debated going over there when the cashier got my attention. "Sir?" I turned at her voice; the old man was toddling out the door. I pulled out my wallet to pay the bill.
A/N: Thanks to everyone for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.
Many, many, many Thanks to Kristen999 for all your help and inspiring ideas.
Lifeguard and Victoria87: Very sweet of you to keep coming back. I hope the ending didn't disappoint.
Krysalys73: I didn't forget the trace on her neck or the nail scrapings, but Nick did. Thanks for your comments, all were appreciated.
Sunset