Bridge Water

Bridge Water

Allen Renfro

Copyright © 2013 by Allen Renfro

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

ARMSlength Publishing Ltd.

Cover Art: LLPix Photography

Editor: Beth Lynne, BZHercules.com

Bridge Water is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All Rights Reserved

www.allenrenfro.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

The neighbor's cat is a champion mouse killer. He has the blue ribbons to prove it. I see him every day. We exchange the daily pleasantries and go on about our business; well, the type of pleasantries every normal human and orange tabby exchange. But that morning, there was something weird about it, a feeling, something that I couldn't put my finger on. I was taking out the trash. He was sitting at the end of my driveway, his tail curled up around his legs, the very end of it moving up and down. He was giving me the strangest look. The look said to me, you're next.

Hey, Leo, I called out to him, not really feeling it with the throbbing hangover headache I was nursing. My tongue had on it a coat of what could be described as Leo fur. It was going to be a most unpleasant workday.

I know it pisses him off, calling him Leo. His name is Lion. That morning, he just stared at me with that look. It made me stop and stare back for a minute.

Something I can do for you this morning? I asked him.

He didn't respond with his aloof eye roll or his usual how dare you address me turn and stomp away. He just sat there, crouched. I finally looked over my shoulder at the garage door to see if someone was standing behind me.

Okay, I said. I gotta take my garbage around back. You're gonna have to move outta the way. I'm leaving for work.

He just stared.

What? I asked. My new hair cut? My sexy ass? What is it?

He sat still, just staring.

Diva, I mumbled to him and turned around the corner of my garage, leaving Leo and his dramatic pose.

I should have known Leo wasn't threatening to kill me. I should have known, that in his own way, he was trying to warn me. Today was not going to be the first day of the rest of my life. What he was telling me was I know something you don't know.

I don't have room for my trash bin in my garage, so mine is hidden under my deck around back. HOA rules. No trash bins on the street or in front of the dwelling. It's a dwelling, not a home.

I live in a two-story condo in Cedar Hills Condominiums. I'm pretty lucky. I have a small backyard and a row of trees between the yard and a steep embankment that slopes to the river; all the condos on this side of the complex do. There are no neighbors behind me, and that means no neighbors peering through their blinds and no neighbors watching me from their decks or patios, except the neighbors on either side of me. Not that my neighbors do that anyway. It's a very quiet and private complex. Everybody tends to mind their own business as far as I'm concerned. Of course, it doesn't hurt that I'm a cop, a detective to be exact.

My deck is really nice, open air, totally enclosed, no steps leading to the backyard. It's the perfect place to host company in the spring and summer. The adjoining condo is owned by Leo's, or should I say Lion's, human, Miss Alice Jergens. She's in her late 60s and claims to be an heiress to the Jergens lotion fortune. We all have our stories. And I'd be a liar if I said I didn't invest in and use a certain lotion throughout my pubescent years.

Each Cedar Hills Condo building houses two units and the buildings form a natural alley between them. I have the pleasure of walking between my condo and my other neighbor's place in the next building to get to my backyard. It's nothing more than grass and central air units buzzing, but it still has the feel of a big city alley. It's the suspicious in me, I guess, that certain feeling something bad is about to happen.

I could hear Miss Jergens' weary voice calling from her front door. Lion! Lion, your food's getting cold! Where are you, you sonuvabitch?

My cell phone ringing in my pocket cuts my laugh at the neighbor's expense short. I have a bad habit of reaching for my gun instead of the ringing cell phone in my pocket. It's no easier with one hand wrestling a full trash bag of empty beer bottles and Chinese takeout cartons. The Welcome to the Jungle ring tone identified the caller as my partner, Kyle.

Hey, I said as I wrestled with the trash bag and my tie, which kept moving around.

Hey, where the hell are you? His voice sounded electronic through the phone.

On my way in, I replied as I slipped in the wet grass.

Meet me at the bridge, he said with excitement. We got a floater.

I squeezed the phone between my chin and shoulder as I tried to pull the large green trash bin from under my deck. The two black wheels of the bin did not roll. Strange. It was heavy. The wheels were sunk into the damp ground. I grunted with more effort as I worked the bin from under my deck, nearly dropping the phone from its uncomfortable position.

Are you rubbin' one out? Kyle laughed. What the hell you doin'?

Hold on a minute, I said as I placed the trash bag on the ground and opened the lid of my bin.

We go through much of our mundane routines without even thinking about it, like taking out the trash. Sometimes I wonder how much more we would learn if we paid attention to the details, if we came to a stop at caution lights instead of speeding through them. If we read the book instead of watching the movie, if I said hello to my neighbors more often, if I wasn't a cop. It was obviously a lesson I needed to learn. I learned it that morning when I opened the lid of my mundane routine and saw two bloody feet sticking up.

Derek? I could hear Kyle's distant voice coming through my cell. Yo, Derek! Hey!

Uh… I put the phone to my ear. How am I supposed to say it?

You better send a squad car over here.

Huh? he replied.

I got a body, I said, not believing I was saying it, in my trash bin.

Jesus, are you serious? Kyle asked.

Yeah. What else am I gonna say? I'll do the 9-1-1 thing too.

I'm on my way, Kyle said as he hung up.

At least it was a pretty, sunny, spring day, I thought as I backed my car out of the garage and came to a stop at the end of the driveway. I could already feel Miss Jergens' eyes staring a hole through me from behind her HOA-authorized screen door as I pulled the yellow, police do not cross tape from the trunk. Maybe it should be raining, I thought. More appropriate.

As a detective, it's all part of my training: focus on the case, don't think about the life discarded in a trash bin. Don't think about the mother or the father who wonders where their child is. Don't think about the husband or wife, son or daughter, sister or brother, girlfriend or boyfriend. Don't think about what the victim was doing to wind up dead, that is, until you had to think about what the victim was doing to wind up dead.

It's not the look of death that gets people. We all think it is, but it's more than that. It's the smell of death, the decay, the rot. It's the feel of death, the strange cold of the skin. It's these things that lead to the realization the person on the inside is not there anymore. The house is empty and they're not coming back.

* * *

Get it over with, was all I could think as I approached Miss Jergens' small front porch and wrapped the end of the yellow tape on the wood column. She held Leo in her arms as she stroked his fur nervously. His frozen eyes stared at me with I told you so written all over his face.

What's going on, Derek? She was scared. The way she stroked the fur over and over on Leo's back told me she was scared. Her dyed black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, revealing the silver roots. She wore an ugly oversized pink sweat suit. It was a typical day for her until I wrapped that yellow tape around the wood post that created one of two columns on her porch. Usually the sight of a policeman in uniform has a calming effect. This day, it wouldn't.

Just stay inside, Miss Jergens, I said, trying to be as reassuring as I could. I'll come talk to you in a little while. Don't be scared. More police cars will be coming.

Should I lock my doors?

No, I said. It'll be okay.

Probably the only thing I hated about our condos was that our front porches were too close to each other, only separated by waist-high shrubs.

She smiled at me. And I have Lion to protect me, don't I? she said as she lifted him up and nuzzled her nose against his nose, evoking a hiss and a scratch at her face. Leo didn't have much of a right cross. He never came close. At least I was more reassuring than the cat. Miss Jergens chose not to notice Leo's hostility. All she saw was a loving cat that took care of the mice. Did I ever see mice?

I pulled the tape across my small front yard to my typical gray sedan and around to the other side of my driveway around the cherry blossom tree that divided my side from the neighbor's side. The front area of the condo was secured and I took a deep breath. Thinking.

I knew I should wait for backup, but I didn't. I walked back to the crime scene that just happened to be in the shadow of my deck. Careful not to disturb the ground, I stood a few steps back and looked toward the bin. She was folded in two at the waist, her bare feet and top of her head sticking up just above the lip of the bin. I could see her open eyes staring at her ankles through strands of blond hair. Her face appeared to be streaked with blood. I could not see her arms, but knew they were at her sides, pressed down into the bin.

I walked back to my tiny front yard. I sat down on the little concrete square that was my front porch in between the two wood posts that held up the roof, my knees all the way up into my chest, arms folded across them.

My street, Devon Way, was a dead end street, the only one in the entire complex of straight lines and two ways. An added bonus was that the condos across the street faced the other way, so there were rarely the obligatory five-minute conversations with neighbors who happened to be in their yard or pulling out of the driveway.

Most of my neighbors would have already left for work or school. Devon Way at 9:06 a.m. was a paved street lined with cherry blossom trees, perfectly trimmed shrubs, green grass, for sale signs and two grandmas walking their Chihuahuas, staring at the yellow police tape around their neighbor's dwelling.

Interesting, the effect of yellow tape; those on the outside always wanting in, those on the inside only wanting out. Part of being human, my mother would say southern tradition, camouflaging nosiness with concern. But finding dead bodies in trash bins doesn't usually happen at places like 112 Devon Way, Cedar Hills Condominiums.

* * *

I could hear the rev of the engine before I saw the vehicle. The dirty black pickup truck appeared at the end of the street, the screeching tires, turning nearly sideways, running over speed bump after speed bump with thumps and clanks, barely missing the shrubs that lined Miss Jergens' driveway. Thankfully, he didn't have a siren or flashing blue lights.

Kyle leaped from the truck overly excited, leaving the door wide open. I was afraid he was going to draw his gun and shoot the bad guys that weren't there. I stood up from my comfortable perch and greeted him as he came up to me breathlessly, his slight belly, muscular arms bulging in the short-sleeved shirt with the poorly tied tie, military crew cut, the firm jaw, the good ole country boy style. Kyle and I looked a lot alike, except I was younger, thinner, a little bit taller, my hair was thicker and more brown than black.

You okay, man?

Yeah, I said.

Chief said we're supposed to wait on him to get here, Kyle said as his breathing started to calm.

Chief? I repeated, a bit surprised.

Yeah, he replied. Something about you not being able to investigate a crime you might be involved in.

What?

My what was obviously filled with anger as Kyle immediately stepped back with his hands up in an effort to calm me. Easy, Cowboy, I'm just telling you what he said.

What about Sergeant Tucker?

Chief wants to handle this one himself.

Then I thought about it. First priority would be to rule me out as a suspect. Didn't matter if I was a cop; cops do bad things all the time. And the chief would want the public to know he was personally handling the situation when one of his own could be involved. My fingers pinched the bridge of my nose in frustration. Yeah, that makes sense.

I'm not sure where he's at, Kyle said, turning around to look down the street. He was right behind me.

Yeah, what could've happened? I asked sarcastically. "You were only driving the speed of bat outta hell."

Two bodies, dude, he said with too much excitement. On the same day! When's the last time that happened?

Bodies? Miss Jergens was still standing just inside the screen door. Oh my God! Around back?

She suddenly disappeared from the door.

Miss Jergens! No! I shouted, knowing what she was going to do. I ran inside the house with Kyle right on my tail. I realized suddenly how rarely I used my front door. I almost always come in through the garage. I ran through the living room, past the stairs, and into the dining room. The double French doors in the dining room opened to my deck. I nearly knocked over a chair as we bolted outside, my forehead colliding with a pointy edge of the large umbrella that shaded my table.

Dammit! I screeched with my hand on my forehead. Am I bleeding?

After a quick examination, Kyle shook his head. No, just a red mark, not even a scratch.

Shit, that hurt!

Kyle looked around at my table, four chairs, potted plants in every corner. Hey, this ain't bad! I think this is the first time I've been on your deck.

The morning sun didn't reach the rear of our condos, so the shadows were long and the air was cooler. We beat Miss Jergens outside and were waiting on her when she emerged through her French doors to her deck. She had followed my lead and decorated her deck nearly identically to mine. The one area we were allowed individuality and she copied me. Some people are followers, not leaders.

She couldn't see the trash bin from where she stood.

I don't see anything, she said as she looked around us and my umbrella, shading her eyes even though she stood in the shadow of our condos and the umbrella over her table.

Where's your glasses? I said to her.

Her hands on the wood rail of the deck, she leaned side to side trying to see around us. It's over there, isn't it?

Yes, she is, I replied back.

She?

I nodded.

Miss Jergens shook her head sadly, her hands to her lips. Poor girl. I'll put on some clam chowder.

Thank you! I called out as she disappeared back into her dwelling; not home, dwelling.

What'd she say? Clam chowder? For us? Kyle asked, looking at me funny.

I shrugged. It's good.

Kyle turned around and looked over the railing. I walked over beside him, leaning against the wood rail. The trash bin was just below us and we could see the girl's body, stuffed into the container, naked. We still couldn't see her face clearly.

Weird, he said.

I looked at him.

You're like what, the sixth or seventh condo down the street and they pick your trash bin? he said.

My trash bin is the only one outside, I said, annoyed.

Hey, man, I'm just thinking out loud, he replied defensively. He walked to the side of the deck that overlooked my small backyard. He stared long and hard at the row of trees that stood between my yard and the drop off to the river. The spring leaves were sparkling with drops of dew clinging to the edges.

Don't see no drag marks. No blood trail. Kyle murmured loud enough so I could hear. She was carried?

I leaned against the railing, folding my arms, and crossing one ankle over the other. I know it's weird. I didn't hear a damn thing last night.

But it's kinda hard to tell too, Kyle said as he studied the scene. Grass is pretty thick and it's wet so it might not show anything.

The sound of a car pulling up out front told me that the chief had arrived. Kyle and I stepped outside just as the chief was lifting up the yellow tape and stooping under it. Chief Wilson was a gray-haired lifer on the police force. His stern face and well-earned wrinkles belied the teddy bear that was underneath. Teddy bear was the way he acted and the way he looked. A good cop and a good man, I liked him from day one.

Two squad cars pulled in behind the chief's car.

Edgeworth! the chief barked in his long, slow southern drawl, looking at Kyle. Do you always drive that fast?

Sorry, sir, he mumbled, pissed off at the public scolding in front of other cops.

Cooper, he said to me with a bit more kindness, how you doin', son? What's goin' on?

Two policemen stooped under the yellow tape and stood just behind the chief. I didn't know them.

I pointed with my thumb. Girl stuffed in my trash bin. Around back.

I could hear Miss Jergens' voice, talking on the phone, loudly. She paced back and forth in her living room, not realizing her main door was still open. Yes! In the backyard! No! I can't see anything! Yes! Cops everywhere! Clam chowder!

I think it's a southern thing. Whenever there's a tragedy, cook food and take it to the dead person's family's home. The family has already got its hands full; the last thing they need to worry about is food, my mom would say. But we take it a step further and cook food even though we don't even know who the family is. At least that's the way Miss Jergens looked at the situation.

All right, the chief said as he motioned the two officers to go to the crime scene. I'm gonna put Jones and Burroughs on it. They should be here in a bit with the medical examiner.

I looked at the two robust young cops as they walked through the condo alley to the crime scene. They both nodded at me as they passed by and I nodded back. We're all part of the brotherhood.

Edgeworth, the chief said to Kyle. You need to get your ass down to the bridge to work the floater. Cooper, go inside and wait for me.

I'm workin' the suicide case solo? Kyle asked with excitement.

Of course not, the chief barked at him. "I'll