“Most of the time. Not tonight. Thank God he’s gone. It’shard enough looking at sex pics, but to do it with your boss in and out constantly?” JoJo said. “Your boss who is drop-dead gorgeous. And who has the best poker face on the planet. I can’t read him at all. Gives me the creeps.” She swiveled and stared me down in my seat in the corner. “You okay?”
I scowled at her. “Put all the sex pics back up on the big screens. And the photos of the dead bodies in Stella’s basement. I gotta get used to looking at that stuff.”
Without turning, JoJo tapped a single key and a dozen of the pics appeared overhead. Seven naked people. On a big mattress with lots of pillows, scrunched-up covers, and body parts. Doing things. Partially out of focus but not out of focus enough to hide all that. I closed my eyes.
“Don’t worry,” Jo said. “Occam doesn’t want that. Well, he might think about wanting it, but he doesn’t really.” I stilled and she added, “He’s a guy. People think things all the time. That doesn’t mean they go through with them. That’s why we police people for what they’ve done, and not for what they might do. Well, usually.” She smiled slightly.
“Are you sure?” I asked, meaning the part about Occam, which she seemed to know.
“That man loves you more than anyone I’ve ever seen love anyone on the face of the earth.” She waved a hand. “You know what I mean.”
I did. Sorta. I stared at the screens, looking back and forth between sex photos and dead body photos. “Why’s it harder to look at sex than to look at the dead bodies?”
“Our culture says death and violence are okay but sex isn’t. And your church culture says it’s worse than anything.”
“Everyone on the unit knows that? About my culture? About the church?”
“Honey,” she said, sounding a little sad, but not pitying, which was good because I’d get real mad at any kind of pity. “Everyone on the unit knows. Everyone wants to protect you and help you through your constraints so you can be the best special agent that ever lived.”
“Oh,” I said. I looked at the photos again. There were six pictures on the biggest screen, bodies everywhere doing everything. “FireWind says I’ll never get used to it.”
“No. You will never get used to it. But you will learn to hideyour reactions and to study the photos for information. For instance, look at every photo. In every one of them, one person is right beside, or under, or over, Stella. Always close. Always right there.”
“Ohhh,” I said. “The missing woman? Racine Alcock?”
“Yeah. Hanging on to Stella like a lifeline.
“And then there’s this.” She put up a photo of seven people, all the men in tuxedoes, all the women in long gowns. Longwhitegowns, some off the shoulder, some lacy. The women carried flowers. Two of them wore veils over their faces. They all stood together in a semicircle. A man wearing a dark robe, like some preachers wore, stood in the center of them. It looked like a wedding with seven participants. Stella Mae had gotten... poly-married? I wasn’t sure of the term. Or if there was one.
“It wasn’t a legal marriage,” JoJo said. “It isn’t registered anywhere. But they had a ceremony. And they recorded it for posterity.”
I went back through all the photos. In every one, Alcock’s face was veiled or blurred or partially hidden. In every one, Cale Nowell was looking at Stella with desperate need. I checked my lists. I had done a prelim interview on Cale at the farm on Friday, but he hadn’t been seen since.
***
“Cale Nowell went to prison for vehicular manslaughter four years ago,” I said, as I dumped a French fry into a pile of mustard. “He’s out on good behavior. His parole officer, A. K. Montgomery, says Cale got special permission to travel across state lines with the band, with Stella Mae swearing in court during his parole hearing that there would be no alcohol and no drugs on any of the tour buses. Cale missed his parole meeting last week, but he called, talked to Montgomery on the phone, and said he would be back for a long break and would be in to see the parole officer. He’d been a model parolee so the officer let him go this once.”
JoJo and I were in the conference room eating. The big boss was in back, on the phone. The sex pics were off the main screen, thank goodness.
I punched a key and put up crime scene photos taken by Occam from the farm. Cale Nowell had taken shelter in the tents andhad then spent time in the portable null room. I had talked to him through the layers of sky blue P3E unis and never seen his face so I didn’t recognize him from the sex photos. He had tattoos on every visible part of his body, from knuckles to face. There were tattooed swirls over his left eye and into his carefully sculpted hairline. He was tall, buff, with chiseled musculature and beautiful bone structure. His jaw was sharp, his chin hard, his green eyes soft. His driver’s license listed him as Black and Other, which meant that he was probably mixed race. In one single photo from Stella’s farm, snapped by a deputy early on, his eyes were red from weeping, his expression shocked and full of horror.
I studied the photos, and then pulled up Nowell’s original arrest report. At the scene of an accident that had killed a seventy-year-old woman, Cale had been arrested, pled guilty to a reduced charge, and served three years. He had been driving Stella’s car and Stella had been injured. I opened the crime scene photos from the car accident. It had been awful, Stella’s car half on top of the other car. There was no way that the driver in the other car had survived.
I focused on the images of the car Cale had been driving, paging through. The driver’s seat was far forward. That could have happened from the impact. But there was makeup smeared on the driver’s-side airbag. None on the passenger-side airbag.
In the arrest photos, Cale’s face showed no traces of makeup.
I could find no mention or photos of Stella Mae, except that she had been taken to the hospital by ambulance.
I had a bad feeling that Cale, one of Stella’s husbands, had taken the hit for Stella, or the arresting officer had arrested the only black man at the scene. It was unlikely to affect this case, but I ran a quick search for the family and heirs of the woman who had died in the accident, just in case vengeance was a motive. I found nothing that led me to believe there was any family revenge involved. The accident didn’t look as if it pertained to this case.
Summarizing my conclusions, I sent all the information to the current case files. Almost immediately my cell rang and Occam’s name appeared on the screen. A warm, slightly electric heat flashed through me. “Special Agent Ingram,” I said, letting him know that I was in the presence of other unit members.
“Nell, sugar, this is good stuff. Prison record. Disappeared from the crime scene. Hasn’t been seen since. I’ll be contacting Cale Nowell. We finally got us a person of interest.”
“I’m glad I could help.”
“I miss you, sugar.”
