A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  It would come. Sure as Christmas. But not when they expected, nor how, nor why.

  Before Miller left he asked after the lead CSA, waited while one of the analysts brought him from upstairs.

  ‘You’re the chief on this?’ the CSA asked.

  ‘First one here, that’s all,’ Miller replied.

  ‘Greg Reid,’ the CSA said. ‘Would shake hands but . . .’ He held up his latex-gloved hands, smears and spots of blood visible on them.

  ‘I’ll leave my card on the table here,’ Miller said. ‘Just wanted you to know who I am, my number if you needed me.’

  ‘Have to give us the time we need,’ Reid said. ‘A day or two . . . I got a whole house to process. You speak to whoever you have to speak to and then come back, okay?’

  Miller nodded. ‘Anything immediate shows up, call me?’

  ‘Do have something,’ Reid said. He nodded toward the telephone table near the front door. ‘Bag there has her passport and a library card in it. She went to the library today, looks like she returned some books. The passport is the only picture I can find of her right now. You’ll need a picture for your walkabout. Maybe have one of your people clean it up, make her look like a human being.’

  ‘Appreciated,’ Miller said. ‘Let me know if there’s anything else.’

  Reid smiled sardonically. ‘What? Like we find the guy left his name and address?’

  Miller didn’t respond. He was tired. A CSA’s relationship ended with the crime scene; Homicide would live with this until it was done.

  Roth and Miller left by the rear door, paused once again in the lot and looked at the back of the house. Lights burned. Shadows up against the windows from the men working inside. Miller stood there until he felt the cold getting to him, Roth beside him, neither of them speaking until Miller told Roth to take the car.

  ‘You’re sure?’ Roth asked.

  ‘I’m going to walk. I could use the exercise.’

  Roth looked at Miller askance. ‘You feel like everyone you meet wants to ask you questions, don’t you?’

  Miller shrugged.

  ‘You heard from Marie?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘She didn’t come get her things from your place?’

  ‘I think she’s gone away for a while.’ Miller shook his head. ‘Fuck, who am I kidding? I think she’s gone for good.’

  ‘Amanda didn’t like her,’ Roth said. ‘She said that she wasn’t down-to-earth enough for you.’

  ‘Tell Amanda that I appreciate her concern, but it was simply a fuck-up. We all know that.’

  ‘You figured out what you’re gonna do yet?’

  Miller appeared momentarily irritated. ‘Go home, would you?’

  Roth glanced back at the Sheridan house. ‘This is the last thing you want, right?’

  Miller looked down at the sidewalk, didn’t answer the question.

  Roth smiled understandingly. ‘I’ll go home now,’ he said, and started away towards the car.

  Miller stayed for ten or fifteen minutes, his attention focused on the lights in the Sheridan house, and then he buried his hands in his pockets and started walking. It was close to ten by the time he reached his apartment over Harriet’s Delicatessen on Church Street. Harriet, ancient and wise, would be out back, drinking warm milk with her husband Zalman, talking about things only they could remember. Miller took the rear stairwell up to his apartment instead of his usual route through the deli itself. Such moments as this, wonderful people though they were, Harriet and Zalman Shamir would keep him up for an hour, insisting he eat chicken liver sandwiches and honey cake. Most other nights yes, but tonight? No, not tonight. Tonight belonged to Catherine Sheridan, to finding the reason for her death.

  Miller let himself in, kicked off his shoes, spent an hour outlining his initial observations on a yellow legal pad. He watched TV for a little while before fatigue started to take him.

  Eleven, perhaps later, Harriet and Zalman locked up and went home. Harriet called him goodnight from the stairs, and Miller called goodnight in return.

  He did not sleep. He lay awake with his eyes closed and thought of Catherine Sheridan. Who she was. Why she had died. Who had killed her. He thought of these things and he longed for morning, for morning would bring daylight, and daylight would give distance between himself and his ghosts.

  Use a knife. Knife killings are personal. Almost invariably per Multiple stab-wounds to chest, stomach, throat - some shallow, glancing off the ribs, others deep, sufficient to leave oval bruises where the blade ends and the shaft begins. Suggest uncontrollable rage, the fury of hatred or vengeance. Such things to confuse, to muddy the waters and cloud issues of forensic pathology, criminal psychology, profiling. Everything needs to appear as if something else.

  Did you know that less than half of all rapes are actually resolved by the police? And this despite the fact that in the vast majority of cases the perpetrator is someone well-known to the victim? That less than ten percent make it to the Crime Lab? In only six percent of those cases is DNA recovered and tested. With the total tests running at something in the region of a quarter of a million cases per year, do you realize only fifteen thousand victims will ever find justice?

  There are people who know this stuff. You can find it on the internet. It ain’t rocket science. On the almighty world wide web you can find a hundred different ways to cover up the crime. Household bleach will remove fingerprints, saliva, semen, DNA. Wear gloves for God’s sake, and not leather ones with a grain. Wear latex gloves like a doctor, a surgeon, an orthodontist. They’re not hard to find. Cost next to nothing. Don’t wear your own shoes. Buy new sneakers. Cheap ones. Don’t go out killing folks in three hundred dollar Nikes, for with all physical objects you have two basic characteristic: class and individual. A cheap sneaker has class characteristics. It’s a mass-produced item. There are millions of them in circulation, and to all intents and purposes they are absolutely identical. The more expensive the sneaker the more unusual the tread, and the fewer the people who have them. And before you go out, check those treads yourself. Treads pick things up. Carpet fibers, bits of crap from the street, from your own apartment. Like I said, it ain’t rocket science. Some objects, car tires for example, have both class and individual characteristics. The class is the basic shape of the tire, the indents and grooves and patterns. Then you have different elements and angles of wear dependent upon the type of vehicle and the kind of terrain it has traversed. These factors can sometimes create a uniqueness that can be attributed to one car, and thus one driver. That’s your individual. Watch those guys on TV - CSI, you know? - and it looks like they have all this stuff down cold. Do they, fuck. You just have to be careful. Use your common sense. Think the thing through. Don’t get complex. The more complex you get the more things can go wrong. Trick is to look at it from the end back to the beginning. Get what I mean? Look at the aftermath, the scene as someone else will find it, and more than likely you’ll remember the cigarette you smoked at the end of the street, the butt you flicked into the shrubbery, the gum wrapper, the foil that’s smooth and shiny and great for prints . . . You getting the drift now? You understand where I’m coming from?

  And if you don’t want blood, then strangle them. Choke them to death. No weapon better than your own hands. Then disappear. Disappear fast, ’cause if they can’t find you they can’t find the weapon.

  Could run a seminar. How about that, friends and neighbors? Run a seminar at George Washington University. Mayhem and Murder 101.

  Bitch of a thing.

  TWO

  Life is so much tougher when you know you should be dead.

  It was like a line from a song. There was a cadence and a rhythm to it that made it difficult to forget. It started somewhere in Miller’s mind, and once it had started it just seemed to keep on going. Like the flat-nose .22s the Mafia used. Sufficient punch to get it through the skull, insufficient to make its way out again, and that dime’s-worth of lead just battered and ric
ocheted around inside, banging off the internal walls of some poor sucker’s head until their brain was chicken soup. The thought went like that, and he wanted it to stop. He thought of the girl who had died, the girl who had left him, the IAD investigation, the newspapers. He thought of these things, just as he had thought of them for the past three months, and he tried to make them inconsequential and irrelevant. He sat in the office of Washington Second Precinct Captain Frank Lassiter. He focused on what he’d seen at the Sheridan house the night before; he waited patiently for what he knew was coming.

  Lassiter came through the door like a raid. He banged it shut behind him, dropped into his chair. He shook his head and scowled, and when he opened his mouth he hesitated for a second. Perhaps he’d planned to say something else, and then changed his mind.

  ‘You know what this is, right?’ was the question he asked.

  ‘The serial, or this woman specifically?’ Miller replied.

  Lassiter frowned, shook his head. ‘This is the proverbial worst case scenario, that’s what it is.’

  ‘We’re presuming that the MO is the same as—’

  Lassiter cut him short. ‘We’re presuming nothing. I don’t have anything from forensics yet. I don’t have a coroner’s report. I have a murdered woman, second in this precinct’s jurisdiction, and because the other two were out of precinct, because this whole system is a jigsaw puzzle of bullshit and bureaucracy, I don’t have anything to hang anything on. All I know is that the chief of police called me at seven this morning and told me that the whole thing was now my problem, that I better put some good people on it, that it better be sorted out . . . you know the speech by now, right?’

  Miller smiled sardonically.

  ‘So here we are,’ Lassiter said.

  ‘Here we are,’ Miller echoed

  ‘So what the hell is this crap about transferring out of Homicide?’

  ‘I don’t know, captain, some crap about transferring out of Homicide.’

  ‘Sarcasm I don’t need, detective. So you’re gonna leave us then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I believed . . .’

  Lassiter laughed suddenly. ‘Believed what? It’s dead people, that’s what it is. That’s why it’s called Homicide.’ He placed his hands on the arms of his chair as if to stand. For a moment he looked closely at Miller. ‘You don’t look so good,’ he said.

  ‘Just tired.’

  ‘Still in pain?’

  Miller shook his head. ‘It was just bruising, a dislocated shoulder, nothing serious.’

  ‘You get some physio?’

  ‘More than enough.’

  Lassiter nodded his head slowly.

  Miller felt the inescapable tension of what was coming.

  ‘So you ran the gauntlet, eh? You know how many times my name’s been in the papers?’

  Miller shook his head.

  ‘I don’t either, but it’s a lot. A fucking lot. They’re buzzards. That’s all they are. They fly around corpses and pick stuff off of them.’ Lassiter shook his head. ‘To hell with it. This isn’t a conversation we’re having right now.’ He got up from his chair and walked to the window. ‘I’m pissed with the pair of you by the way,’ he said. ‘For leaving last night. I read your report. How long were you out there? Half an hour?’

  ‘Forensics,’ Miller replied. ‘It was a new crime scene, we were just in the way. We started round the adjacent houses but no-one had anything important to say.’ He paused for a moment. ‘And no, we were not out there for half an hour, we were out there nearly three hours.’

  ‘Three houses, Robert. Three fucking houses? Give me a break. Only thing that pisses me off is a lack of professionalism. Can tolerate all the moaning and whining about the hours, the low pay, the overtime, the fact that no-one ever gets to see their wives and kids and cats and dogs and mistresses, but when it comes to a lack of care—’

  ‘Understood,’ Miller interjected.

  ‘You heard that speech before too, right?’ Lassiter said.

  ‘I did, yes,’ Miller said. ‘Couple of times.’

  ‘So what the fuck are you gonna do? You’re gonna quit? Or you gonna put in for a transfer?’

  ‘I don’t know. I figured I’d look at it at the end of the month, maybe after Christmas.’

  ‘So I need you to do this one.’

  Miller said nothing.

  ‘Chief wants the whole case transferred here. All four killings. Right now we have nothing that tells us it’s the same perp. From your report it appears that they could be, but apparencies I don’t need and can’t use. The strangulation, the beating, the ribbon with the name tag thing, all that stuff. Seems to be the same MO, right?’

  ‘It does, yes.’

  ‘What was the name of the first one . . . Mosley?’

  ‘Yes, Margaret Mosley, back in March.’

  ‘Was that your case?’

  ‘No, not really. I was the first one out there, simply because I was on shift,’ Miller explained. ‘I think Metz took it in the end.’

  ‘No . . . I remember what happened now. Metz was going to take it and didn’t. It wound up being handled by the Third.’

  ‘This thing is all over the place isn’t it?’

  Lassiter smiled wryly. ‘You have no fucking idea.’

  ‘So why us? Why the Second?’

  Lassiter shrugged. ‘First one was in our precinct, second in the Fourth, third one in the Sixth, now this fourth one is back in the Second. We have two of them. The chief loves us, hates us maybe. Jesus, I don’t know. He wants us to handle it, be the central point for all four investigations. It’s become an issue. He needs it dealt with as one case. Makes sense. To date it’s been dealt with - not dealt with actually - by three different precincts. Newspapers have gone crazy for it, as we all knew they would, and maybe he thinks that after all the crap that you stirred up we can repair our reputation by making this mess go away.’

  ‘This is such horseshit—’

  Lassiter raised his hand. ‘Politics and protocol is what it is, nothing more nor less than that. It feels personal, but it isn’t.’

  ‘And did the chief suggest I do this because of what happened?’

  ‘Not exactly . . .’

  ‘Meaning?’

  Lassiter walked from the window and sat down again. ‘Thing you have to understand here is that there’s always going to be some social-conscience bullshit liberal that assumes we do nothing but kick the crap out of innocent civilians for fun.’

  Miller smiled sarcastically. ‘I know about police department politics. I don’t need a lesson—’

  ‘Fine, so I don’t need to explain myself. If you’re here then you’re on duty. If you’re on duty then you have an obligation to accept the cases I assign to you. I’m assigning this thing to you, and short of handing in your resignation right here and now there’s very fucking little that you can do about it.’

  ‘Love you too, captain,’ Miller said.

  ‘So go and talk to the FBI.’

  Miller frowned. ‘The what? The FBI?’

  ‘I’m afraid so . . . chief has asked for help from the FBI. They’ve sent someone to teach us how to do this shit.’

  ‘This isn’t federal . . . what in God’s name do they have to do with this?’

  ‘It’s a helping hand, Robert, and I sure as shit could do with one. The chief spoke to Judge Thorne . . . gotta remember we have our election party coming in the New Year. No-one’s gonna be losing their job over this, let me assure you. I need someone to head this thing up, and you’re the man. Afraid that’s the way it’s gotta be. Maybe it’ll give you something to get your teeth into, eh? Maybe it’ll remind you why you worked so hard to be a detective in the first place.’

  ‘I have a choice?’ Miller asked.

  ‘Fuck no,’ Lassiter replied. ‘When the hell did any one of us have a choice about this kind of thing? You had three months’ vacation from this shit. You’ve been back a week. I need you to go make nice to the FBI, and then
you and Roth pull all the files together, go through them, get this thing moving. We have four dead women, I have the chief all over me like a rash. There are more column inches about this than Veterans Day, and I need you to be a fucking hero and save the day, alright?’

  Miller rose from his chair. He felt the weight already. He felt the sense of impending pressure that would bring the delicately balanced house of cards that was his life crashing down around his ears. It would fall silently. There would be no warning. He would just wake up one morning incapable of stringing a sentence together or making a cup of coffee. He did not need a serial killer. He did not need to be responsible for a headlining multiple homicide case, but even as he considered this he wondered if he hadn’t created his own justice. Perhaps it was a way out of his indecision. It could be the end of him, or perhaps his salvation. He looked at Lassiter, opened his mouth to speak, but Lassiter raised his hand.

  ‘You asked if you had a choice. You got your answer. Go see the FBI and make some sense of this bullshit would you?’

  Miller started toward the door.

  ‘One other thing,’ Lassiter said.

  Miller raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Marilyn Hemmings is the coroner on this. You will have to deal with her. The press will get wind of this for sure. After that picture in the Globe I don’t need to tell you—’

  ‘I get it,’ Miller said. He opened the office door.

  ‘If I had someone better . . .’ he heard Lassiter call after him as he closed the door gently behind him.

  Know the feeling, Miller thought to himself, and made his way towards the stairs.

  Several miles away, the outskirts of Washington, a young woman named Natasha Joyce stood in the doorway of her kitchen. She was black, late twenties perhaps, and there was something on the TV that caught her attention. She backed up from where she’d been washing crockery in the kitchen. She had a plate in her hand, a drying towel, and she tilted her head and squinted at the screen through the doorway while the anchorwoman spoke.