Celebrity in Death (In Death #34)(76)

“It’s a long way from Iowa.”

“Lord, yes.” A smile ghosted around his mouth, then vanished. “I know you’re the one who’s been looking after her.”

Eve felt the phrase keenly. “That’s right.”

“I wanted to thank you for that. Katie, she was a hard woman, but she was my sister. You know, it’s been more than five years before today since I laid eyes on her. I can’t do anything about that. Can’t do anything to change being mad at her all this time, having all the bad feelings I had for her. But she didn’t deserve to die like that. Do you know who killed her?”

“We’re actively investigating …” He looked so sad, she thought, so big and out of place. So lost. “I think I do, but I can’t prove it yet. I’m working on it. We’ll do everything we can to identify her killer, to get justice for your sister.”

“Can’t do more than that. Even after all Katie did, my ma’s kept up with what she’s doing. All the Hollywood shows and that—Ma watches. She told me Katie was working on a movie about you.”

The old-fashioned word suited him, Eve thought. “Not about me. About a case I worked.”

“They said how you were there when she died.”

“I was, yes.”

He nodded, looked off. “Ma wants to bury her back home. Katie hated everything about home, but Ma wants it, so … did you know her?”

“No, not really.”

“I guess we didn’t either—now, I mean. We only knew her before.” He took a drink, set the tube aside again. “My father was a hard man. He lived hard, died hard. Katie loved him. Or I don’t know if love’s what it was. She was like him, and I guess that’s why she was the way she was.”

Eve said nothing. If he needed to talk it out, she might learn something.

“He used to hurt my ma, used to hit her. He was big, like me. Like I am now, I mean. She’s not. She used to tell me to look after Katie, because Katie was younger. When he came home drunk and mean, she’d tell me to take Katie off, keep her away. I was just a kid. I couldn’t do anything to help my mother, not then. And Katie? She didn’t want to be away from him.”

He pressed his lips together, shook his head. “Nothing he did was wrong in Katie’s eyes, even when our ma was bleeding, she didn’t see he did wrong. When she got a little older, she’d tell him things—like if Ma talked to one of her friends too long or didn’t get some chore done. Sometimes she’d just make it up, make up something to get him going on Ma, especially if Ma said no to her about something, or wouldn’t let her have what she wanted.”

Learned early, Eve thought. Go with the power/take the power.

“He called Katie his princess, told her how she was better than anybody, how she had to go out and get whatever she wanted, take it if need be. She took that to heart. She was only a child, so maybe it wasn’t all her fault. And he’d buy her things, like a reward when she told him something about Ma. It got so Ma would give Katie most everything she wanted. You can’t blame her. But it was always more, and never enough.”

“It was hard on you,” Eve observed, “caught in the middle, without the power to stop it.”

“One day I thought I was big enough to stop him. I wasn’t, and he beat me so bad I pissed blood for—I beg your pardon.”

Eve only shook her head. “Is that when your mother left him?”

“I guess you know some about it. It seemed she’d take him beating on her, but when he did it to me, she wouldn’t take that. She waited till he passed out drunk, then she took me to the hospital, and she called the law. And there’s Katie screaming how she’s a liar, and her daddy never touched me. People around there knew my father well enough, and his hands were raw from beating on me. Then she—” He paused, took a careful drink. “Then she said how he’d been protecting her because I’d tried to get at her. That way.”

He lowered his head, shook it. “My own sister. They didn’t believe her, and she kept changing the story. But they had to ask questions, do tests and that. Anyway, at the end of it they locked him up.”

“And your mother took you to Iowa.”

“Yeah, packed up and left. This woman talked to my ma, about things she could do, and gave her the name of a place we could go, live awhile till we got settled in. I had to stay in the hospital near a week, but when I could travel, we left. Katie hated her for that, hated the both of us, I guess, as she surely made our lives a misery whenever she could. But she had to stay, go to school and counseling because the judge said so. Besides, the old man, he didn’t want anything to do with us, Katie either, when he got out of jail. She blamed Ma for that, too.”

He looked up again. “I’ll tell you something, ma’am, when we got out, it’s the first time I could ever remember my ma going a full week without being hit. How can you blame somebody for wanting to go a week without being hit?”

“I don’t know. I think for some, violence becomes a way of life. It becomes the normal.”

“I guess that’s true. Anyway, he got in more trouble when he got out, and I guess he took on somebody meaner than he was, and that was the end of it. Katie blamed us both—blame, I guess that was her normal, too. She got into trouble at school, stole things, got drunk whenever she could, started smoking zoner, and whatever else she could get. And when she could, she lit out for California. Ma had changed our names legal, but Katie took his back. That shows you something.