The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,42
Lucy wondered why, since the woman was so very obviously dead.
Lucy stood in the entrance to the living room. She had seen dead bodies when she was a cops reporter, but those had been covered with sheets. The most she had seen was the top of a head or the bottom of a foot. It was nothing like this. Lucy moved forward a few steps, involuntarily craning her neck to get a better look.
The woman’s body was discolored, with the blood pooling in weird places because of how she had fallen over the chair. There was no dignity in this kind of death. No peace. One minute you’re alive, and the next, strangers are in your home, staring at your varicose veins and stretch marks.
Gerald kneeled next to the body, peering at some long bruises on the woman’s neck.
“Come take a look at this,” he said to Lucy. Just then, a police scanner on an end table went off.
Acold wind hit Gil when he stepped out of his car downtown near City Hall. He had called Judy Maes to say that he was stopping by her office.
He found her standing over some blueprints. Her black suit didn’t have a crease in it. He had been surprised to reach her at work the day after her best friend had been found dead. As he got closer, he noticed how tired she looked. She wore lipstick but most of her eye makeup had been wiped off, giving her dark circles. She took him to a break room near her office and closed the door.
“When was the last time you talked to Melissa?” Gil asked after he offered his condolences.
“The day before she died. We talked about stupid stuff—my car problems. My Jeep is always in the garage. My lack of a boyfriend. I don’t think we even talked about her at all. God, doesn’t that seem selfish of me?” Judy Maes put her hand up to her face and rubbed her eyes before she went on. “We talked for only a minute or two.”
“How did she seem?”
“Normal.”
“Had anything out of the ordinary happened in the last few weeks? Anything that seemed a little odd that Melissa told you about?”
“Nothing. She seemed fine. But it was always hard to figure out Melissa. She could have been completely freaked out and never shown it.”
“What do you mean? What was Melissa like?” Gil asked.
“Studious. Nice. Dependable,” she said. “The guys always loved her because she was such a mystery. They thought no girl that beautiful could be so straitlaced. They wanted to find her bad-girl side.”
“What kind of people did she hang around?”
“That’s the mystery thing—she seemed drawn to wild people but she was never wild herself. Like a moth to a flame. There wasn’t a single weekend in college that I wasn’t drunk, and Melissa was right there with me, but never had anything to drink herself. She would just be with us. Just kinda watching. And when we went home, she’d be the designated driver. She was always the one holding my hair back as I threw up in the toilet. Always taking care of us.”
“Why do you think she never joined in?” he asked.
“We talked about that once. Melissa wasn’t a stupid girl. She knew she was uptight. She said she thought maybe it was because of her brother, the one who died. She felt she was the replacement child—the one who wouldn’t screw up. The one who did everything right.”
The one who shouldn’t die young, Gil thought. “And did she do everything right?”
“Too much so, sometimes. She once saw some friends cheating on a test and turned them all in. And these people were pretty good friends of hers. She was weird that way—she watched us drink ourselves stupid every night and said nothing about it, but as soon as someone did something she considered morally wrong, she would have no mercy.”
“So she had no problems at all? Gambling? Debts?”
“Melissa? Never in a million.” Judy shook her head. “I heard the newspaper did some story about her doing drugs. But no way. Her only real problem was dating guys who were jerks. She’s dated some real losers. It was the same kinda thing—she would never be a bad girl herself but dated bad guys.”
“Was anybody ever violent?”
“This one guy, she only dated him for a week or so a couple of years ago, but I can’t remember his name. God, what was that asshole’s name? Anyway, he slapped her for some