Triptych

by Karin Slaughter

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s her. All of those files, all of those stupid notebooks. Did you know she never went anywhere without one?” Joyce added wryly, “Of course you didn’t. She never took them inside when she visited you, but she worked on them, thought about them, the whole way down and the whole way back. Sometimes she’d call me in the middle of the night and ask me to look into some obscure law she found, something she thought might wrangle a new trial for you.” Joyce looked back at the filing cabinets, the notebooks. “It’s like they’re tiny little pieces of her heart, her soul, and if I throw them out now, then I’m throwing her out, too.”

  John smoothed his hand along the cover of the notebook. His mother had given her life to him, dedicated her every waking moment to getting him out of Coastal.

  All because of Michael Ormewood.

  Michael might as well have killed Emily after he finished with Mary Alice. He should have reached into Joyce’s chest and squeezed the life out of her heart. Oh, God, John wanted to kill him. He wanted to beat him senseless, then wrap his hands around Michael’s neck and watch the other man’s eyes as he realized he was going to die. John would loosen his hands, taking him to the edge then bringing him back just to watch the fear, the absolute fucking terror, as Michael realized he was completely helpless. Then, John would just leave him. He’d leave him alone in the middle of nowhere and let him die all by himself.

  “John?” Joyce said. She had always been intuitive, always known when something was bothering him.

  He opened the notebook again, skimmed his mother’s writing. “What’s this?” he asked. “Bradycardia. What does that mean?”

  Joyce walked over to the closet and opened one of the file drawers. “When they arrested you,” she said, “you were too weak to stand on your own.”

  “Yeah.” He had been terrified.

  “They took you to the hospital. Mom kept insisting something was wrong with you.” She searched through the files. “She made them do an EKG, an EEG, bloodwork, MRI.”

  John had a vague recollection of this. “Why?”

  “Because she knew that something was wrong.” Joyce finally found what she was looking for. “Here.”

  He took the medical report, carefully reading the words while Joyce waited. The numbers on the tests made no sense to him, but John had worked at the prison infirmary. He knew the section to look for. He read aloud from the handwritten doctor’s notes under the box labeled “conclusions.”

  “ ‘Resting heart rate below sixty, ataxic breathing and general physical condition indicate drug toxicity.’ ” He looked back at Joyce. “I took drugs, Joyce. I never said I didn’t.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Read the rest.”

  John read to himself this time. The doctor had indicated that John’s symptoms were not consistent with an overdose of cocaine and heroin. He suspected another drug was involved. Further blood tests were inconclusive, but testing was recommended on the powdered substance found at the scene.

  The powdered substance. Michael had given him the baggie. John had never done heroin in his life. He had assumed good old Woody was trying to do him a favor, when in fact he had been trying to knock him out. Not just knock him out. Maybe there had been something else in that bag besides cocaine and heroin. John knew from prison talk that the labs could only find what they were specifically looking for. Michael could have spiked the speedball with something even more potent, something that would finish the job in case the volatile mixture didn’t.

  “What?” Joyce asked.

  John’s surprise must have registered on his face. He had been focusing on Mary Alice all this time. Had Michael meant to kill John, too? Had he thought to make it easier for himself to do whatever he wanted with Mary Alice and leave the blame at the foot of John’s grave?

  Two days after Mary Alice’s body had been found, Michael and his mother had come by to visit. John was laid up in his room, feeling like shit, hiding behind a story he told to his mother about having a bad cold when in fact he could barely breathe every time he thought about Mary Alice’s body lying beside him in her bed.

  Michael had been the same as always, at least as far as John could recall. His cousin had stayed with him in his room, talking about—what?—John couldn’t remember now. Something stupid, he was sure. John had fallen asleep. Was it then that Michael had planted the knife in his closet? Was it then that Michael had formed his plan? Or had somebody else worked it out from the beginning, sent Michael upstairs with the knife, told him to put it in John’s closet so that there would be something concrete that tied him to Mary Alice’s bedroom?

  “Johnny?” Joyce said. She hadn’t called him that since they were kids. “What is it?”

  He closed the folder. “What do you remember about Aunt Lydia?”

  “She was your lawyer.” Joyce added, “She quit criminal law and went over to corporate after what happened to you. She said she lost her stomach for it. She never forgave herself for not being able to help you.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Joyce was obviously taken aback by the hatred in his tone. “I’m serious, John. She came to see Mom at the hospital.”

  “When was this?”

  “I guess it was the day before Mom passed away. They had just put the tube down her throat so she could breathe.” Joyce paused, collecting herself. “She was in a lot of pain. They had her on a morphine drip. I’m not even sure she knew Kathy and I were there, let alone Lydia.”

  “What did Lydia say to her?”

  “I have no idea. We left them alone.” She added, “She looked really bad. Aunt Lydia, I mean. She hadn’t seen Mom in years but she couldn’t stop crying. I never thought they were close, but maybe during the trial…I don’t know. I was so upset back then that I wasn’t paying much attention to anybody.”

  “You didn’t hear anything?”

  “No,” Joyce said. “Well, just at the end. I came back too soon, I guess. Lydia was holding Mom’s hand. We’d told her the doctors said she didn’t have long, maybe a day at the most.” Joyce paused, probably thinking back on the scene. “Mom’s eyes were closed—I don’t even think she was aware that Lydia was there.” She tilted her head. “But Lydia was sobbing. Really sobbing, John, like her heart was broken. She was shaking, and she kept saying, ‘I’m so sorry, Emily. I’m so sorry.’ ” Joyce concluded, “She never forgave herself. She never got over losing your case.”

  Right, John thought. Aunt Lydia was probably plenty over it now. Nothing like unburdening your sins to someone who wouldn’t live to tell them.

  He asked, “How was Mom after she left?”

  “Still out of it,” Joyce answered. “She slept all of the time. It was hard for her to keep her eyes open.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “She couldn’t, John. She had the tube down her throat.”

  John nodded. It was all making sense now. The first thing Aunt Lydia had done as his lawyer was sit John down and make him tell her everything about that night, everything that had happened. John had been terrified. He had told her the absolute truth, fuck whatever code of honor you were supposed to have about ratting out other kids. He told her about Michael tossing him the bag of what John thought was coke, about walking Mary Alice home and climbing through the window into her bedroom. He told her about the kiss, the way his brain had exploded like a rocket had gone off in his head. He told her about waking up the next morning lying in a pool of Mary Alice’s blood.

  When John had finished telling her the story, Aunt Lydia had tears in her eyes. She took his hand—grabbed it, actually—so hard that it hurt.

  “Don’t worry, John,” she had said. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  And she did. The bitch certainly did.

  Joyce was still looking at him, waiting. He could tell she was tired, maybe exhausted. Makeup couldn’t hide the dark circles under her eyes. Her shoulders were slumped in defeat. Still, John could not help but notice that she ha
d stood here in her office talking to him for around thirty minutes without once yelling at him or accusing him of anything.

  He asked, “Did they ever test the drugs? The white powder?”

  “Of course. Lydia sent it to a private lab. Mom was on pins and needles for a week. They didn’t come up with anything unusual, though. It was cocaine and heroin.”

  John felt a stabbing pain in his jaw. He had been clenching his teeth again.

  “Johnny,” Joyce said, sounding tired. So tired. “Tell me.”

  He closed his mother’s notebook, the last notebook she had used on his case, the last thing she had ever held in her hands that connected her to her son.

  “Get Kathy back in here,” John said. “I think she needs to hear this, too.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  9:22 PM

  Will sat in his office, trying not to twiddle his thumbs. He had paid a visit to Luther Morrison, Jasmine Allison’s…what? What did you call a thirty-year-old man who was having sex with a fourteen-year-old girl? Sick God damn bastard was what Will had decided on, and it had taken everything in him not to punch the animal in the face.

  After that pleasant visit, Will had returned to City Hall East and caught up Amanda Wagner on the case. She hadn’t offered any staggering insight but neither had she taken him to task for not having a lot to say. Amanda could be demanding, but she knew a difficult case when she saw one.

  The one thing she had told him was to not focus so much on the missing girl. Will’s case was the murder of Aleesha Monroe and how it connected to the other girls, not a runaway named Jasmine Allison. All he had was a ten-year-old boy’s story and a bad feeling, and while Amanda respected his gut instinct, she wasn’t about to waste time and resources based on either. She summed it up for him with her usual heartwarming pragmatism: the girl had a history of running away. She was dating a man who was twice her age. Her mother was in prison, her father was who knows where and most days, her grandmother couldn’t get out of a chair without assistance.

  The only way this would be news is if she hadn’t run away.

  The DeKalb cops hadn’t moved an inch on Cynthia Barrett’s case and they weren’t keen to share their notes with Will. The DNA obtained from the vaginal swab Pete had taken was too contaminated to test. Toxicology had not yet come back, but Will wasn’t holding his breath for a miraculous revelation.

  As for Aleesha Monroe, Forensics had reported nothing more earth-shattering about her apartment than what Will had seen for himself: the place was remarkably clean. He’d even sent back the techs to test the spot he’d found in Monroe’s doorway the night Jasmine was reported missing. There had not been enough of a sample to determine anything other than the spot was human blood.

  All Will had to follow now was the stack of papers Leo Donnelly had left on his desk. Will had counted out the pages so that he would know what was ahead of him. About sixty rap sheets, two or three pages each, all detailing the lurid crimes of the metro area’s recently released sex offenders.

  He wasn’t that desperate yet.

  Will opened the fluorescent pink folder on his desk and found a recordable DVD in the back pocket. He slid this into the tray on his computer and clicked play.

  The monitor showed two women and a man sitting at a table with a teenage girl. The man spoke first, identifying himself as Detective Dave Sanders of the Tucker police department, then giving the names of the two women before saying, “This is the statement of Julie Renee Cooper. Case number sixteen-forty-three-seven. Today is December ninth, two-thousand-five.”

  Julie Cooper leaned toward the microphone. The camera angle was wide and Will could see the girl’s feet swinging back and forth over the floor.

  “I went to the movies,” the girl began, her words difficult to understand. Will knew that when the recording had been made, her severed tongue had only recently been reattached. “There was a man in the alley.” Will had watched the teenager’s statement so many times that he could almost recite the story along with her. He knew when she paused to cry, her head down on the table, and the point where she got so upset that the recording had to be stopped.

  Her abductor had dragged her into the alley. Julie had been too frightened to scream. He was wearing a black mask with holes for the mouth and eyes. She tasted blood when he put his mouth over hers, shoved his tongue past her lips. When she tried to turn her head away, he punched her in the face.

  “Kiss me,” he kept saying. “Kiss me.”

  Will jumped at the sound of his phone ringing. He picked up the receiver, said, “Will Trent.”

  There was a pause on the other end, but no words.

  “Hello?” Will asked, turning down the volume on the computer speakers.

  “Hey, man,” Michael Ormewood said. “Didn’t think you’d be there this late.”

  Will sat back in his chair, wondering why Michael had called if he’d thought Will wasn’t going to be there. “Why didn’t you try my cell?”

  “Couldn’t find the number,” Michael explained, though how that was possible, Will did not know. He’d given all his numbers—even his home—on every message he’d left for Michael since Monday night. At first, Will had just wanted to talk to the man about Jasmine; now, he wanted to know why Michael had been avoiding his calls.

  Will asked, “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. Thanks for asking.” Will heard the click of a lighter. Michael inhaled, then said, “Been making myself useful around here. Knocked out some of those chores Gina’s been ragging me about.”

  “Good.” Will was quiet, knowing Michael would fill in the silence.

  The detective said, “I talked to Barbara like you asked. My mother-in-law? She says she never saw Cynthia skipping school. Maybe the kid just wasn’t feeling good that day?”

  “Makes sense,” Will allowed. He wasn’t used to talking to people like Michael unless he was interrogating them, and Will struggled not to let his hatred come through. That’s what it was—hatred. The man beat his wife. To Will’s thinking, he raped prostitutes. God only knew what he had done to Angie.

  Will asked, “How’s your family?”

  Michael hesitated. “What?”

  “You said the other day you didn’t feel safe. I was just wondering if they were doing okay.”

  “Yeah,” Michael answered. “I got them over at my mother-in-law’s, like I said.” He chuckled. “Tell you what, she spoils Tim. There’s gonna be a major adjustment when he gets back home.”

  Will thought about Miriam Monroe, the huge difference between the loving way she talked about her children and the way Michael talked about Tim. Michael was just giving it lip service, saying the words he thought a good father should say. The man beat his wife. Did he hurt his mentally retarded son, too?

  Michael said, “You still there, man?”

  “Yes.”

  “I said, DeKalb PD is shutting me out.” He paused, probably to give Will room to respond. When he didn’t, Michael asked, “You hear anything from them?”

  He was fishing about the restraining order. Will gave him a nonanswer. “They don’t exactly have a reputation for flashing their cards around the table.”

  “Right, right,” Michael agreed. He blew out a stream of smoke. “Phil’s real broken up about this. I tried to see if there was anything he knew, but the guy’s just shattered, you know?”

  “I appreciate your trying.” Will decided to take a risk. “Detective Polaski told me she helped you go through some of your Vice files.”

  Michael was silent for a beat too long. “Right, she did. Great chick. You hook up with her?”

  “Did you find anything in the files?”

  Michael paused, blew out some more smoke. “Nothing. I ran her in a few times, like Polaski said.”

  “Aleesha?”

  “Yeah. Couple of times, maybe three. I wrote down the dates. You want me to get them? She was part of the sweeps we did, just like I told you. Twenty, thirty girls at a time. I’m not surprised
I didn’t remember her.”

  “How about Baby G?”

  “Nothing on him. He’s pretty new at the Homes. I could’a met him before, but there’s nothing in my files about it and I sure as shit don’t remember. Maybe we should go at him again? Bring him down to the station and see what he knows?”

  Will wondered if he knew the pimp was dead.

  “So,” Michael continued. “How’s it going? Anything on Aleesha?”

  “Nothing big,” Will answered. “Tell me about Jasmine.”

  “Is that one of the girls?”

  “She’s the kid who took some skin off your face.”

  “Oh, that one.” Michael’s laugh sounded strained. “Yeah. Little hellfire.”

  “Did she say anything to you before she ran up the stairs?”

  “Nothing I want to repeat in front of my wife.”

  “Your wife’s there with you?”

  He gave that laugh again. “Where else would she be?”

  There was a long stretch of silence. Michael had said less than a minute ago that his family was staying with his mother-in-law. Why was he lying?

  “Anyway,” Michael said. “The girl—what’s her name? She didn’t say anything. You think she saw something the night Aleesha was killed?”

  “I don’t know.” Was he embarrassed? Is that why he lied?

  “I’d bring her into the station if you’re gonna question her, man. I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job or anything, but you don’t want some black brat bringing a charge against you. I was lucky I got away with a slap.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” Will wondered if Michael had already found out that Jasmine was missing. If he’d lie about one thing, he’d certainly have no problem lying about another. “I’ve been thinking, Michael, how strange it is that Aleesha is so much older than the other victims.”