Best Friends Forever Read online

  “Long story,” he managed. The van’s door slid open without anyone touching it. For a minute, Dan thought about supernatural phenomena, about psychic forces and otherwordly visitors, about the Holy Ghost, unseen but ever-present (his mother had been big on that), before remembering that all vans these days had remote controls.

  “Come on in,” said the voice. “I’ll take care of you.”

  No time to weigh his options. As he saw it, his choices were getting into the van or continuing to trudge through the frigid darkness, naked except for his shoes, his socks, and a pair of Hefty trash bags. Dan Swansea limped across the road and climbed inside.

  SIXTEEN

  The call came in at just after six in the morning, less than three hours after Jordan Novick had finally managed to fall asleep. Except, he acknowledged, “fall asleep” wasn’t exactly accurate. “Passed out” might have been a better description of what had occurred in the folding chair in his living room after a great quantity of beer, a tumbler full of whiskey, and a fast, furtive episode of masturbation as The Nighty-Night Show played on the TV.

  He groped for the telephone. “Novick,” he grunted, noticing that his pager was spasming on the coffee table like a rodent having a seizure.

  “Good morning, Chief,” said Paula the dispatcher. “We’ve got a situation in the Lakeview Country Club parking lot. Acknowledge?”

  Jordan rubbed the bridge of his nose, then his stubbled cheek. “What kind of situation?”

  “That’s the thing. We’re not exactly sure,” said Paula. “I know you’re 10-10-A, but it’s a possible 10-80. Or maybe a 10-81 with a 211. Or it could be…”

  “Hey. Hey, Paula.” An old line, but it was usually enough to get her to stop with the numbers. Paula Albright, the Pleasant Ridge dispatcher, was a fifty-four-year-old retired school cafeteria worker who took her work very seriously and knew the codes for everything, including “lost bicycle.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “How ’bout you just tell me what happened?”

  “Sure, Chief. The club custodian found a man’s belt and some blood in the parking lot, but no victim yet.”

  An actual mystery, Jordan thought, getting to his feet with the telephone pressed against his ear. That was unusual. Situations in Pleasant Ridge tended to fall into a few large and easily quantifiable categories. You had your accidentally tripped burglar alarms. Your lost dog, your cat up a tree. Your missing children, usually teenagers who hadn’t bothered to tell Mom and Dad where they’d be, and neglected to keep their brand-new state-of-the-art cell phones charged. There was credit-card fraud and identity theft, car crashes and house fires and DUIs. There were, of course, husbands smacking their wives around and, occasionally but not as infrequently as most people would think, wives hitting their husbands. These incidents were unpleasant, but at least they were a kind of expected, predictable unpleasantness, and there was a protocol, honed over time, for handling them. Jordan couldn’t remember anything in his ten years of service that had been along the lines of an actual mystery.

  He swallowed and coughed, grimacing at the sour taste in his mouth, and tucked the phone under his chin so he could zip his pants. “10-8, acknowledge,” he said to make Paula happy, and to cover the sound of the zipper. “On my way.”

  “You’re going to the southeast corner of the parking lot, by the Dumpster.”

  “Got it,” he said, and grabbed for his keys.

  • • •

  By the time he arrived at the country club, all three of the town’s uniformed patrolmen (one of them was Holly Muñoz, so he supposed it was actually three patrol-people) were waiting. An investigator from the county district attorney’s office with rubber gloves on her hands and a high-tech digital camera and an old-school Polaroid looped around her neck met him at his car. “What have we got?” Jordan asked the investigator, a young woman named Meghan, who wore her hair in a high ponytail and had a tiny silver stud glittering in one nostril.

  “Come take a look,” she said. Jordan forced himself to breathe steadily through his nose, in case during the twenty minutes it had taken him to get there, they’d discovered a body. He kept his eyes between Meghan’s shoulder blades until she stopped and pointed down. “Weird, right?”

  Jordan aimed his flashlight at the ground. There was something wet and rusty-red that had trickled into the gravel and splashed on the corner of the Dumpster. There was a man’s black leather belt with a silver buckle coiled neatly a few feet south of the blood. That was all.

  “The club custodian, George Monroe, found this stuff when he took out the trash this morning,” said the tech. She pointed to a skinny guy in khaki pants sitting on the steps outside of the country club’s kitchen. When the man saw Jordan looking, he raised one hand and waved.

  “No body?” asked Jordan.

  Meghan shook her head. “We looked: the road, the parking lot, the golf course, the ditches along the road, a mile in each direction, and we went through the Dumpster. If there is a body, it’s been moved, but I gotta say, there’s not a ton of blood here, so I’m not necessarily thinking corpse.”

  “Did the custodian see anything else?” Jordan asked without much hope. Meghan shook her head again and fingered her cameras. “We’re almost done here,” she said. “Then it’s all yours.”

  “You’re not staying?”

  She gave him a sunny grin. “If it’s a homicide, we’ll be back. Obvs. But until you’re sure it’s not some drunk dude who fell down…” She drifted back to her car. “Holiday weekend, you know?”

  “Got it.” Jordan spoke briefly to his patrolmen, reviewing the procedure for securing a crime scene. Then he headed over to the custodian.

  “Morning,” he said, extending his hand. “Jordan Novick. Pleasant Ridge chief of police. You found the, uh…” Effects? he wondered. “Effects” didn’t sound quite right.

  “The belt,” the other man said. He was in his late twenties, with brown hair and pale eyes. He had a high, rough voice, an Adam’s apple that bobbed and jerked when he swallowed, old acne scars pitting his cheeks, and a fresh zit blooming on his chin. “I got here at five a.m. First tee time’s at six, so I come at five. I was carrying the trash to the Dumpster when I kicked something. I thought it was a bottle or something, but then I looked down and saw the belt and the blood, and I thought, okay, this isn’t right. I went back inside and called 911. Didn’t touch anything. Didn’t want to contaminate the crime scene.” He nodded at Jordan, one professional to another. “I watch CSI.”

  “Excellent,” said Jordan.

  “So what are you guys gonna do now?” asked the custodian, scratching at his chin. “DNA testing on the blood? You got that luminol?”

  “I thought,” said Jordan, “that we’d start by seeing if anyone who was here last night is missing a belt.” The kid’s zit had started to bleed. He pressed one khaki sleeve against it as he thought this over and finally grunted his approval. “Any trouble here lately?” Jordan asked. “Any ideas about what might have happened?”

  The other man lowered his eyebrows and ground his teeth. “Vegans,” he finally pronounced.

  For a moment Jordan thought that he’d heard him wrong, or that the man was speaking something other than English. “Vegans?”

  “Because of the leather,” the man said. “The belt’s leather. You notice that?” He shook his head. “Vegans are fucked up. I saw some of them on the news trying to liberate the bees. I mean, vegetarians are one thing. No meat, okay, animals got feelings. I get that. But no honey?” He cleared his throat and spat onto the gravel.

  “Have you had trouble with vegans here before?” I’m still asleep, Jordan thought. I’m asleep and this is a dream.

  The custodian shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “But I watch out for them.” He tapped the side of his eye with one finger, then went back to working the pimple.

  Jordan wrote the word “vegans,” which made as much sense as anything else. Then he took down the custodian’s contact inform
ation, his name and address, his cell phone and social security numbers, thanked him for his help, and walked over to his patrol-people. One of them, Devin Freedman, was finishing up his law degree at Loyola. The lady patrol-person, Holly, had studied sociology and trained for Olympic-distance triathlons in her spare time. The third, Gary Ryderdahl, a Pleasant Ridge native like Jordan, had worked for the department for three years and had just moved out of his parents’ house and into his first apartment (Jordan had spent a Saturday helping him load, then unload, a U-Haul). None of them was older than thirty, and the three of them, plus Jordan, were all that stood between Pleasant Ridge and le déluge. “Gentlemen,” said Jordan. “Lady. What’ve we got?”

  Gary Ryderdahl glanced at his colleagues, pulled a notebook out of his back pocket, and stepped forward, squaring his shoulders like a batter approaching the plate. Ryderdahl had a round pink face and an unruly ruffled crest of white-blond hair that made him look like Snoopy’s tweety-bird friend, Woodstock. “It’s a Kenneth Cole belt. They sell them lots of places. Department stores, and, uh…” He took a quick glance at his notebook. “Freestanding boutiques nationwide.”

  “Good work,” said Jordan, straight-faced. “What was going on here last night?”

  “There was a class reunion. Pleasant Ridge, class of 1992,” Holly Muñoz said. “D.A.’s office is taking the blood, and they’re gonna see if there’s any fingerprints we can use on the belt, but Meghan said probably not. I spoke to the banquet manager. There were two hundred people here last night—a hundred and eighty-seven who’d preregistered, and thirteen walk-ins.” She reached through her patrol car’s open window and came out with a Dunkin’ Donuts cup, which she extended to Jordan. “I got you a coffee. Light and sweet, right?”

  “Thanks.” Jordan looked around. Officer Freedman, the soon-to-be lawyer, was cordoning off the crime scene with yellow tape. He stuck the tape’s edge onto the Dumpster, unspooled it past the belt, and then stopped, looking around with the roll of tape in his hands, realizing there was no place else to stick it unless he walked another twenty yards to the nearest tree.

  Jordan made himself stop staring. “Guest list?”

  “The class secretary’s got it waiting for us,” said Holly. Devin Freedman, meanwhile, was carefully affixing the end of the piece of tape to the ground, using a rock he’d grabbed from somewhere to hold it down. Jordan closed his eyes.

  “We’ll want to talk to everyone who was here last night.” Holly nodded and nudged Gary, who nodded, too. “You two, go back to the station. Call all the hospitals, here and in Chicago. Ask if anyone’s shown up with injuries, missing a belt.” He paused, thinking. “Check out the custodian. George Monroe.” He read off George’s social security number and DOB. “Check with dispatch. See if any calls came in for missing persons.” He thought for a minute. “Then call the body shops.”

  “You think this was a car accident?” asked Holly.

  “Could be,” said Jordan. “Worth checking.”

  “I hit a deer once,” Gary Ryderdahl offered. “Bashed in the whole front of my car.”

  “Here?” asked Holly. “In Pleasant Ridge?”

  “No, Wisconsin. My grandma’s got a place in the Dells, and I…”

  “Time’s wasting,” Jordan said. “Hospitals. Body shops.” Gary marched off. Holly looked at Jordan.

  “Uh, chief?” When Jordan looked at her, she asked, “What is this, exactly? When I type up my report, what do I call it?”

  “For now, it’s a lost belt,” Jordan said. And it’s weird, he thought but did not say.

  SEVENTEEN

  Class secretary Christie Keogh, perky and bright-eyed and dressed in a tight tank top and fitted running pants, met Jordan at the front door of her McMansion, with a list in her hands and a frown on her pretty face. She spoke in a whisper, explaining that her husband and kids were still sleeping upstairs. “What’s this about?”

  “We found a man’s belt in the country club parking lot. There was also some evidence that a crime may have been committed. We need to make sure that all of your party guests are okay.”

  “Evidence?” Christie’s frown deepened, then vanished instantly, as if someone had snuck up behind her and hissed Wrinkles! in her ear. “What kind of evidence?”

  “Physical evidence,” said Jordan. “Blood.”

  Christie wrapped her arms around herself and led him inside, into her vast kitchen, all gleamy stainless steel and shiny black granite, immaculate as an operating theater. “Would you like some green tea?”

  “You guys vegans?” Jordan asked.

  She looked at him strangely. “We do eat meat, but only organic.” Christie took a seat on a rattan barstool and waited for Jordan to do the same.

  “Did you see anything unusual last night?” Jordan asked her. “Arguments? Fights?”

  “Unusual.” She cupped her elbows in her hands. “It was a high school reunion. There were a bunch of people who hadn’t seen each other in years, plus an open bar, so yeah, I’d say I saw some unusual stuff. Lots of it in the ladies’ room.”

  Jordan raised his eyebrows, waiting. Christie tightened her grip on her elbows. “I saw Larry Kelleher and Lynne Boudreaux, being intimate. And they’re married.” She leaned in close enough for Jordan to smell her toothpaste. “Not to each other. Oh, and Merry Armbruster was trying to convert people in the parking lot. She’s born again—she got saved the summer between junior and senior year—and I guess she wants everyone else to be.”

  “Any fights?”

  She thought. “I heard Glenn Farber talking with his wife about which one of them was supposed to pay the sitter, but that wasn’t a fight. Just kind of an intense conversation.”

  “If you had to guess…” He let his voice trail off. Christie looked at him, blinking expectantly, her eyes wide underneath the pale, unlined expanse of her forehead. Stupid, or Botox? Jordan wondered.

  “As far as I could tell, everything was fine.”

  “We’re going to go through the list and contact everyone. Make sure that nobody’s missing a belt.” Or bleeding to death, he thought.

  Christie chewed on her bottom lip. “My God. I just can’t believe it. It was a really great party.”

  He asked for the guest list, and she handed over five stapled sheets. “That’s everyone who RSPV’d ahead of time. We had thirteen walk-ins. Judy should have their names—that’s Judy Nadeau.” She pointed out Judy’s name and address on the sheet. “She lives about a mile away. Elm Lane, do you know where that is?”

  Jordan did. “Think she’s awake?” he asked.

  Christie wrinkled her nose. “She had a lot of Cuervo. I’d maybe call ahead.”

  “Will do. You around today?” Jordan asked.

  “I’ll be in and out, but I always have my cell phone with me. My trainer should be here any minute. We’re going joggling,” she said.

  Jordan figured he’d misheard her. “Jogging?”

  “Nope. Joggling. You run while you juggle these little bean bags. It’s an amazing upper-body workout. I’m signed up for a 10K next month.”

  “Amazing,” Jordan repeated. He instructed Christie to keep her cell phone on, in case he had follow-up questions, and folded the list into his pocket. She walked him to the entryway and stood in front of a gold-framed mirror, tugging at the hem of her top. “I just can’t believe this. I seriously cannot. I was driving home not six hours ago, thinking how well everything went.”

  He gave her his card. “We’ll be in touch. Try not to worry,” he said as she rubbed her upper arms, frowning. “This could be nothing.”

  Christie offered one final “I can’t believe it,” followed by a plaintive, murmured “There’s no way they’ll let me be in charge of the twentieth after this.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Jordan had figured that Judy Nadeau would be hungover. He hadn’t planned on her being actively inebriated. But when a tiny, bedraggled brunette with a crushed updo and a sheer black dress slipping off one shoulder answere
d the door and offered her hand through a cloud of high-proof fumes, it took him about ten seconds to realize that she was still smashed.

  “A private dick!” she slurred, batting her prickly lashes and stumbling backward, giggling, as he let go of her hand. She steadied herself on the wall, blinked, and led him through a kitchen just as big as Christie’s had been, but considerably less neat. “That is so noir!” Instead of granite countertops, Judy had gone for white marble and a backsplash of food-splattered tiles behind the sink. Lined up next to the jumbo food processor and an espresso machine that looked like a rocket’s insides was a collection of painted ceramic roosters. Jordan tapped one, making it wobble on its yellow metal legs.

  “Nice cock,” said Judy, then pressed one ringed hand against her lipsticked mouth and giggled. Oh boy, Jordan thought as Judy pulled a container of orange juice and a bottle of champagne from the refrigerator.

  “Hair of the dog,” she announced, dumping juice and booze into a coffee mug that read NUMBER ONE MOM. For the second time that morning, Jordan had to force himself not to stare.

  He sat down at the cluttered kitchen table, stacking newspapers and twisting the lid onto an open jar of baby food to clear some space. “Ms. Nadeau, I need you to fill in a few details about the reunion last night.”

  “Sure thing,” she said, and hiccuped, sliding into the seat across from him. She propped her chin in her hands and stared at him with disconcerting intensity. “Hey. You’re cute.”

  “Thank you. Now, about last night…”

  “My ex-husband was cute, too,” said Judy. “I don’t trust cute men. They’re all so entitled.”

  “Last night,” Jordan repeated.

  “What about it?” She frowned and patted at her hair. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Listen. Pete told me he was divorced.”

  “Ma’am, we found a belt in the parking lot.”

  “Almost divorced,” Judy Nadeau continued. “That’s what he said.” She took a swallow of her drink. “And we used a condom. Let the record reflect.”