Aquarium

by Steven Henry

  “Yeah, I guess. The bartenders.”

  “What were the names?”

  “How the hell do I know that? They’re bartenders. They’re not my friends. I don’t know these guys.”

  “Not the bartenders, wiseass. The bars.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Where did you go after you left the last bar?”

  “I dunno. Walked around a bit, then I went home.”

  “When did you leave?”

  “I dunno.”

  “That’s your story? You went to a couple of bars you don’t remember, alone, and then you went home at some time or other? That’s the worst alibi I’ve ever heard, and that’s saying something.”

  Schilling shrugged. “What the hell do I need an alibi for? I didn’t do nothing.”

  “Why were you fighting with Sarah?” Erin demanded, shifting topics with deliberate speed to throw him off.

  “I wasn’t fighting with her!”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “Who the hell told you that?”

  “Doesn’t matter how I know,” Erin said. “Were you fighting about this girl here? Or another girl?”

  “I have a name,” the girl said. “It’s Tawny. Well, that’s my working name. My real name’s Nicole.”

  Neither Erin nor Schilling was listening to her. Tawny pouted. They didn’t notice that either.

  “She was riding me,” Schilling said sullenly. “About… some shit I was doing. Come on, it’s not like we were exclusive or nothing. She didn’t have no right to tell me what to do.”

  “I bet she wouldn’t leave you alone,” Erin said, nodding.

  “Mouthy bitch wouldn’t shut up,” Schilling agreed.

  “But you showed her who was boss,” Erin said. “I get it, a man’s got to do that sometimes. Otherwise he’s just whipped.”

  “Yeah,” Schilling said. “I had to show her a thing or two. Girl didn’t understand nothing. Comes from some hick town and thinks she’s gonna be famous, like her shit don’t stink. So she’s pretty. Pretty faces are everywhere. You turn around, you trip over a pretty face. No goddamn homecoming queen can just waltz into New York and be famous. It don’t work like that. And she thinks she’s better than me? Screw that, and screw her. I don’t need that in my life.”

  Erin kept nodding. “So you shut her up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then you stuffed her in the fish tank.”

  Schilling nodded. Then he blinked. “Wait, what?”

  “The aquarium. At the hotel,” Erin said patiently.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You killed her and dumped her in the aquarium.”

  “Sarah’s dead?”

  “That’s what happens when you’re stuck underwater all night. One question, Randy. Was she dead before she went into the water, or did you just slam the lid and let her drown?”

  “You’re crazy! I didn’t do nothing!”

  “You just told me you shut her up, Randy. I suppose you want me to believe you gave her a kiss on the cheek and a glass of warm milk?” Erin pulled out her cuffs. “Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

  “Ooh,” Tawny said. “Kinky.”

  “This is nuts!” Schilling said. Then he moved. He was fast, lunging at Erin.

  Crooks never understood. Cops put cuffs on guys all the time. They’d seen the tricks. She was ready for him. She didn’t know whether he was trying to fight her, or to push past and make a run for it, but it didn’t matter. He put out an arm and shoved at her. She grabbed the extended arm, used her hip as a pivot, and tossed him in a judo throw. Schilling made a short, surprised flight through the air that ended when his back smacked into the clothes rack. He went down in a clatter of coat-hangers and kimonos.

  Rolf, hackles standing on end, barked excitedly. He wanted in on the action.

  “Stay down,” Erin warned Schilling.

  But Schilling had just been humiliated in front of a girl he’d been trying to impress and he wasn’t badly hurt. He came up with a roar of fury, hands reaching for Erin’s throat.

  “Fass!” Erin ordered.

  Rolf sprang. His teeth snapped shut on Schilling’s right arm.

  The man’s roar turned into a wail of surprise and pain. He went down again, dragged to the floor by ninety pounds of muscle, fur, and teeth. This time he stayed there.

  Webb and Vic hurried back to the Eightball, arriving just as Erin was finishing booking Schilling. She left him in the interrogation room and met her fellow detectives in the observation room next door. Webb was amused and Vic was annoyed.

  “You gotta have all the fun without me?” Vic demanded.

  “Wasn’t that much fun,” Erin said. “He jumped me, Rolf and I took him down. You want, I can have Rolf bite you, too, and you can see what you missed.”

  “I’ll pass.” Vic had helped train Rolf before. He had no desire to put the bite suit back on.

  “We haven’t even ruled it a homicide yet,” Webb said. He was smiling. “And you already busted a perp. That’s got to be a new record for closure, solving a crime before it’s officially a crime. You sure he’s our guy?”

  “He practically confessed to it,” Erin said. “The only thing is, he seemed surprised about the aquarium.”

  “How do you mean?” Webb asked. His smile vanished.

  “I was leading him just fine through a confession. He admitted to beating our victim up, admitted he was mad at her. Classic crime-of-passion stuff. But he didn’t seem to know how we found her.”

  “If I killed a girl that way, I’d remember it,” Vic said.

  “I’d hope you’d remember whoever you killed,” Erin said.

  “I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, the way she looked in that tank was eerie as hell. Just floating there like that. I’m gonna have nightmares about it.”

  “Just drink until you can’t remember,” she suggested. “You know, Schilling said he had some drinks. You think maybe he blacked out some of the evening?”

  “Could be,” Vic agreed. “And maybe he had some more after, to forget.”

  “If we could put the alcohol abuse on hold for a few more hours?” Webb said. “Neshenko’s right. It’s strange he wouldn’t know how the body was found, but maybe not impossible. If he was at the hotel, and somehow got access to that back room, he might’ve just thought he was stashing the body somewhere out of the way. If he was never in the ballroom, he might not have known what it’d look like. Or he might’ve had an accomplice at the hotel. We have too many unknowns right now.”

  “So let’s interrogate him,” Erin said. “Find out what else he knows.”

  “Take it easy, O’Reilly,” Webb said, pointing at the one-way mirror that showed the adjoining room. “Look at him.”

  Schilling was drumming his feet and hands. If he hadn’t been cuffed in place, Erin was sure he would have been pacing the room.

  “He’s restless,” she said. “Edgy.”

  “Exactly,” Webb said. “And it sounds like he’s impulsive. A guy like that, if we leave him to stew for a while, who knows what he might spill? He’s not going anywhere. We’ve got him cold on assaulting an officer, so that’s plenty to hold him. Put him in holding overnight. We’ll take a run at him first thing in the morning. I’m guessing he won’t get much sleep, and that’ll make it even easier.”

  “What do we do in the meantime?” Erin asked.

  “Unless I’m mistaken, O’Reilly, you’ve got some DD-5s to fill out. And the arrest report, of course. And…”

  “I get the idea, sir,” Erin sighed. She’d had her fun. Now it was time to pay for it.

  “You oughta teach Rolf to read and write,” Vic snickered. “Then he could do your paperwork for you.”

  “All his arrest reports would say the same thing,” she said. “’Found bad man, bit bad man, got toy, good boy.’”

  “That’s poetic,” Vic said. “I mean, it’s not Russian poetry or anything, bu
t it’s a start.”

  “Of course not,” she agreed. “If it were Russian, it’d be full of stuff about vodka.”

  “And we’re back to alcohol abuse,” Webb said.

  “What do you expect, sir?” Vic asked. “We’re Russian and Irish. They build liquor stores on account of people like us.”

  “On the subject of depression and alcoholism,” Webb said, “someone also needs to do family notification.”

  “I was just saying how much I love doing paperwork, sir,” Vic said promptly.

  “Damn,” Erin muttered.

  Given the choice between paperwork and death notifications, it was really a question of a short, extremely unpleasant job versus a long, tediously unpleasant one. But the work had to be done.

  According to the receptionist at Ethereal Angels, Sarah Devers came from Athens, Georgia. She had a mother there. Erin had a phone number and an address. She couldn’t very well fly down to the deep South on the NYPD’s dime, so it would have to be a telephone notification. She picked up her phone and dialed, thinking it would be easier if she got a voicemail. On the other hand, maybe Mrs. Devers would know something that would help crack the case.

  On the third ring, a soft, drawling female voice came on the line.

  “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Devers?” Erin guessed.

  “Bless your heart, that makes me sound as old as the hills. Nobody calls me that. Who is this, honey? You’re not from around here, I can hear that in your voice.”

  “Ma’am, my name is Erin O’Reilly. I’m a detective with the New York Police Department.” She took a breath. “Are you the mother of Sarah Devers?”

  “Of course I am. Oh, dear. My girl hasn’t gone and gotten herself in trouble, I hope. I knew when she went to the big city, she’d be in for all sorts of temptations.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I have some bad news. We found her this morning in a hotel in Manhattan. She died.”

  “Honey, please speak up. I think I lost the connection for a moment.”

  Erin sighed inwardly. Sometimes people wouldn’t hear something if it was news they didn’t want. “Sarah is dead, ma’am.”

  “Oh sweet Jesus,” Mrs. Devers said softly. “My baby girl. My poor baby girl.”

  “I’m sorry,” Erin said again.

  “What happened to my little angel?” the woman asked.

  “We’re working on finding out what happened. At the moment, it appears she may have drowned. Did your daughter have any problems with drugs or alcohol?”

  “My Sarah? Absolutely not!” Mrs. Devers sounded more shocked by that suggestion than she had been by the news of Sarah’s death. “She wasn’t even old enough to drink! And she would never touch drugs. That devil’s poison had no hold on her.”

  “Ma’am, Sarah’s seventeen, correct?”

  “That’s right. Oh dear Lord, my poor girl.”

  “What was she doing in New York on her own?”

  “My Sarah is such a pretty girl,” Mrs. Devers said. “Ever since she was very young, all she wanted was to be beautiful. She always had the loveliest eyes, the most marvelous smile, and that long, silky hair. You know, she won her first beauty pageant. How old do you think she was?”

  “How old?” Erin asked, not sure she wanted the answer.

  “Seven,” Mrs. Devers said proudly. “We tried to give her a normal childhood, within the constraints of the pageant circuit. But she was home-schooled, of course. She won titles in both glitz and natural competitions. My Sarah could charm anyone in the room, male or female.”

  Erin swallowed and realized she was squeezing the phone too hard. She tried not to think what her dad would say if he heard this woman talk. “And New York?” she heard herself ask.

  “Her first adult contract,” Mrs. Devers said. “Well, not strictly adult, legally speaking. She got special permission. I had to sign in her name. I leased a small apartment in SoHo. I was planning to move up there with her, but my Sarah wanted to spread her wings. She insisted I stay home. She is so grown-up for her age, so…”

  The woman’s composure abruptly cracked as the reality of the situation finally came home to her. Erin gave her a few moments to regain her equilibrium.

  “I’ll put you in touch with someone to help you sort through things,” Erin finally said. “In the meantime, we’re trying to nail down the events. Do you know anything about Sarah’s boyfriend?”

  “Boyfriend?” Mrs. Devers echoed, horror breaking through her grief. “My Sarah would never! Not at her age! Keep the boys looking, I always told her, but don’t ever let them touch. Touch destroys your mystique. A young lady is to be admired, but from a respectful distance.”

  Erin’s heart sank. From the sound of things, Mrs. Devers had no idea what her daughter had been up to in New York. This conversation wasn’t going to be any help.

  “I’ll give you my phone number,” she said. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, please contact me. And talk to the person I’ll connect you to. She’ll help you with everything.”

  “My poor girl,” Mrs. Devers said again. “All she ever wanted was for people to see how beautiful she was.”

  After that, it was almost a relief to go back to the paperwork. It was probably a good thing they weren’t allowed to throw random people in jail without filing all sorts of official justifications, but that didn’t make it less annoying for the arresting officer. She was used to it, however. Every job had something like it, and she reflected it could be worse. She could be doing a job that was nothing but paperwork, in which case she’d probably go clean out of her mind.

  At five o’ clock, rather than leaving right away, she decided to take a detour to the morgue to see how Levine was coming on the autopsy. She got Rolf and headed downstairs to the cold, sterile basement lair of the Medical Examiner.

  Her timing was lousy. Levine had Sarah Devers on the slab, opened up, and was extracting and weighing organs. Erin suppressed a cringe at the sight. She’d never grown accustomed to seeing a human body being disassembled like a used car torn up for spare parts, and she didn’t want to.

  “Hey, Doc,” she said from behind the protection of a hand over her mouth. The smell of blood and chemical preservatives was overpowering. “Do you know what killed her yet?”

  “Not yet,” Levine said without looking up. “I know some things that didn’t kill her.”

  “That’s a start, I guess. What didn’t kill her?”

  “The lungs have very little water. Cause of death was not drowning.”

  “So she was dead when she went into the water?”

  “She was not breathing when she went into the water,” Levine corrected. “It’s difficult to say whether she was still alive at that point. A heartbeat may have been present. There was no time for decomposition to occur, nor did the fish show much interest in the body. I know of some preliminary research being done into bone proteins as a marker for how long a body has been submerged, but that method is probably several years away from viability.”

  “Can you give me a time of death?” Erin asked. “It’d be nice to know how long she was in the water, but I understand if you can’t do that.”

  “Core temperature readings are useless,” Levine said.

  “Why?” Erin asked.

  “The water was kept at tropical temperatures of twenty-seven degrees Celsius and the body had reached equilibrium with the surrounding medium,” Levine explained. “Standard human body temperature, of course, is thirty-seven degrees. Bodies cool at approximately one point five degrees per hour in the air, but water can accelerate the process. Regardless, once this body reached the same temperature as the medium, that measurement only shows the victim was deceased seven or more hours before I checked the temperature.”

  “Better than nothing,” Erin said.

  “Lividity agrees with the temperature reading,” Levine went on. “She was dead at least eight hours before she was found. Rigor mortis was present, but that can be problematic in waterl
ogged bodies. All I can say with certainty is that the victim has been deceased since at least one o’ clock this morning, and not more than twenty-four hours.”

  “Okay,” Erin said. “What else didn’t kill her?”

  “I found few signs of gross physical trauma. Some of the organs do show signs of light internal damage, but the abdominal flesh shows no significant bruising.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “The victim suffered moderate blunt-force damage to her abdomen, consistent with receiving a beating.”

  “Can you tell what hit her?”

  “My hypothesis is she was struck with bare hands. Most weapons would have left visible contusions.”

  “And she was only hit in the stomach?”

  “These injuries are confined to the abdominal area,” Levine said. “The stomach and kidneys, particularly.” She picked up one of the kidneys in question and held it out for Erin to examine. Erin tried to look interested and impressed. She was definitely going to eat salad for dinner tonight. Meat was off the menu.

  “So someone punched her in the gut?” Erin asked.

  “More than once,” Levine said.

  “And these injuries were inflicted before she died?”

  “Definitely. Unfortunately, I can’t tell exactly how much time elapsed prior to death.”

  “Any other injuries?”

  “Signs of defensive damage on the right hand.” Levine indicated the hand.

  “Yeah, we saw the broken fingernails,” Erin said. “I guess she put up a fight.”

  “Not much of a fight,” Levine said. “I found no damage to knuckles, no scratches. Curiously, I did find one other thing when I cracked the thoracic cavity.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Several ribs have hairline fractures, consistent with repeated hard impacts to the sternum.”

  “Okay, so she got punched in the chest and stomach,” Erin said.

  “Repeated impacts to the sternum,” Levine repeated in annoyed tones, as if Erin was a particularly slow student. “That bone is very near the surface of the skin. Skin will bruise very easily over the sternum, but the victim’s skin does not show bruising consistent with blows from knuckles. These fractures were not caused by blows from a fist. Additionally, I see no sign of bone remodeling. These fractures were inflicted nearly simultaneously with the victim’s death.”