Perish

by Lisa Black

  Now the woman hefted the glass. “Be a dear and top me off, would you?”

  Maggie pulled out a chair at the heavy oak table with her foot, and set her fingerprint kit on the seat. “Sorry. We’re not supposed to touch anything—”

  “Too late.”

  “—until we finish processing the scene.” Maggie explained herself and her job. Talking to witnesses was not part of her duties and she avoided it, but, on the other hand, perhaps giving the woman an outlet would keep her from drinking herself silly before the detectives had a chance to get her story down.

  “Grace,” the woman said. “Pleased ta meetcha.”

  A patrol officer Maggie didn’t know appeared in the doorway, saw Maggie, gave the woman’s glass a sharp look, and retreated, hovering between the kitchen and the front door. Maggie tried to frown at him. He had a witness sitting in the middle of a crime scene—the victim’s phone and laptop were sitting on the counter, for crying out loud—and he should not let her out of his sight for anything other than a bathroom break, instead of trying to eavesdrop on the detectives’ interview.

  But he had already gone, so she brushed black powder onto the granite countertop where Joanna Moorehouse’s cell phone and laptop lay connected to their chargers and tried to think of something to say that didn’t have the potential to derail a future trial. She opened her mouth to ask how long Grace had been with Pretty Perfect.

  “Quite a sight,” Grace said.

  “I’m sure it must have been a shock.”

  “No, walking out of my house last month to find someone had stolen all four tires off my new car, that was a shock. This was—I don’t even know what this was. I couldn’t even be sure that was her. I only met her the first day I came here. That would have been about four, five months ago. Since then—she ain’t never here. I come about nine on Tuesdays and Fridays, she’s at work, that’s it. She don’t have any pictures of herself around. I’d forgotten what she looked like.”

  “The officers used her driver’s license photo to identify her,” Maggie said.

  “Not bad.”

  Maggie waited, hoping to sort out what Grace referred to with that comment.

  “This job, I mean. Some of the places I go aren’t any nicer than where I live. I do a few offices, too, on Wednesday nights. But as huge as this place is, it wasn’t too much work. I just clean the two bathrooms she’d use and the kitchen—and she didn’t cook, let me tell you, takeout everything, precut veggies, that’s all she’d eat—bedroom, that was it. Touch up the floors. Once a month I’d use the floor cleaner on all the marble—that was a job, let me tell you. Not hard but took some time.”

  “Uh-huh,” Maggie said.

  Grace nodded at the dark powder now coating most of the kitchen counter. “You going to clean that stuff up?”

  Maggie apologized sincerely. “Sorry. That’s not part of our services. But it wipes up easily with soap and water off a hard surface like this, and besides … your agency won’t ask you to come back here, will they? The estate will probably have to get a crime scene cleaning company to deal with … the biohazards.”

  The woman considered this and her face relaxed. “Yeah, that’s true. ’Cause I’ll quit before I’ll go back into that room. Funny … this was my best assignment. Until now.”

  Maggie spotted a few decent prints, usually overlapping others, and covered them with wide transparent tape.

  “Quiet. No kids running around because their mama thinks while I’m there I might as well provide day-care services at the same time even though she ain’t paying for that. Hardly ever any kind of mess to clean up. The floors could tire me out because there’re so many of them, but other than that … only place I couldn’t go was the office. She kept that locked. Don’t want the help stealing her secrets, I guess. Okay by me. One less thing to do.” She drained the Jack Daniel’s.

  Maggie transferred the transparent tape to a glossy index card and jotted a few notes on its back.

  “Gave me a nice bonus at Easter—I thought that was special of her. Lots of people give bonuses at Christmas, but Easter? And she left it in cash in an envelope with my name on it, right here.” She patted the tabletop. “That way the agency didn’t take a cut.”

  Maggie examined the sink, photographed, tried a UV light, and saw no signs of blood. She brushed the stainless fixtures with powder and lifted a few prints. “So she paid well?”

  Grace shrugged. “The agency pays me the same no matter where I work. I don’t have any idea what they gouged out of her every month—they keep that sort of thing to themselves.”

  “She didn’t have any pets?” This seemed a safe topic, and relevant to the work at hand. From the counter Maggie moved on to the door leading to the garage, where Joanna had parked her car for the last time.

  “Not even a goldfish.” The crystal tumbler thumped back onto the oak. “Emptiest house I ever saw. ’Cept one time. I’d been coming here, I don’t know, about three weeks. I walk in, right through that door there, and see a fair-haired boy poking around the refrigerator shelves! I nearly screamed. He looks at me like he knew I’d be around and says, ‘She got anything to eat in this house?’”

  “Who was he?”

  “Dunno. Some gigolo, that type you look at and know he never had an honest job in his life, oozing germs out his damn pores. After he left I made sure all the doors were locked. I’d have counted the silver if she had any. And I thought, uh-uh, I am not going to be walking in on your nasty men all the time; I’m going to have to have a word with my bosses. But it never happened again.”

  She rotated the glass with her fingers, eyeing one of the cabinets thoughtfully. Maggie applied powder to the alarm panel mounted on the wall next to the garage door and kept the conversation going. “The doors were locked when you got here today? Alarm on?”

  “Yeah. Yes.” Grace appeared to think on this. “I guess so. I have a remote for it, see. I come in through the front, press the Unlock button. If it says anything I can’t hear it out there, so I guess I don’t know whether it was armed or not. I used my key, don’t know if the knob was locked or not. Might have been able to tell if I’d been paying attention, but I wasn’t. It was just another day, you know?”

  Her eyes abruptly filled with tears, whether shock, pity for the victim, or pity for herself, Maggie couldn’t tell. Probably all three. “She was a pretty girl—I mean … when I met her that one time. She should have been married, having pretty children. What’d she do to get somebody that mad at her?”

  The alarm panel, that pesky plastic like the light switches that looked smooth but actually wasn’t, gave her nothing. Then Maggie heard a murmur of voices and Jack and Riley strode into the room.

  “ME’s here,” Jack said to Maggie.

  Grace stood. She spoke calmly, though her voice quavered in spots. “You can let me go, or you can pour me another drink,” she said. “Those are the two choices.”

  The cops absorbed this. Then Jack clapped his partner on the shoulder and said, “Detective Riley will be happy to finish up with you. Maggie?”

  As they left she heard Grace say, “Sure I can’t get you a glass, Detective?”

  “Don’t tempt me,” Riley grumbled back.

  *

  Jeremy Mearan’s day had been off from the start. He’d had a trainee in to observe a sale and the guy had taken a bath in Axe body spray. The client they met had been an old lady complete with pilled cardigan, thick glasses, and plenty of equity in her slightly dilapidated house. Mrs. Wattle reeked of rosewater, so between the two people at his desk he had been skirting a migraine. But he had to show the new guy how they did it, so he gently explained to the old biddy how she wasn’t alone, so many lovely older Americans were cash poor but equity rich, and he could make that money pile she lived in work for her. All she needed was to put a new roof on, but of course since the monthly payment would be practically nothing, she might want to take out extra money and pay off some bills … but she didn’t cooperate with
his spiel. She didn’t need more money. Credit cards? Didn’t have a balance. New car? She didn’t drive. Dream vacation? She didn’t like to travel. College tuition? Her children were long grown. Mearan had cast about with increasing desperation to find a reason to increase the loan amount and finally hit on her ne’er-do-well grandson, chronically in need of bail money and a good rehab program. Perfect. He got her to triple the loan amount, then left her to dream of saving both her home and her flesh and blood and excused himself to “check her credit score.” He and the trainee moved to the espresso machine in a corner of the room.

  The trainee bubbled over with questions, voracious and snapping. “What is—”

  “Seven-eighty. It would be higher if she had more debt, but when she pays cash for everything—”

  “That’s good.”

  “Exactly. That’s why I’ll tell her it’s 720. Maybe 700. You can’t get too crazy in case they go storming off to a spouse or another family member to see who ruined their credit.”

  “But—”

  “This regretfully pushes her into the next interest rate bracket. And increases the up-front points. But, I add, a good appraisal could lower them again.”

  “The appraiser—”

  “Works for us. Different name on the letterhead, of course, but they’re a trusted firm with whom we’ve worked for years; that’s why we recommend them so highly. Ninety-five percent of the time they’ll go with the first name on any list you give them. People are lazy. Just tell them what to do and they’ll do it.”

  Instead of appreciating this font of accumulated wisdom the guy barely listened to Mearan’s answers before asking more questions—which weren’t even questions, more like check marks on his own invisible worksheet. The trainee came from an auto megastore—a used-car lot, in other words—and thought himself to be pretty hot shit. Every other sentence began with the phrase “At AutoGlobe we …” as if he had owned the damn place. His mouth opened to do it again but Mearan turned away and returned to the client.

  He explained how she qualified only for a higher interest rate but that wouldn’t be a problem with an adjustable rate mortgage and its low monthly payments. The rate couldn’t go up more than 2 percent a year and could be locked in at any time. He didn’t mention that the “lock-in” rate was a completely different rate, already at a higher number than if she simply got a fixed rate in the first place. He didn’t tell her about the massive prepayment penalty.

  Sterling loved elderly clients, who came from another time when banks didn’t lie to their customers. They loved immigrant clients, who couldn’t get through the wall of fast words thrown at them. They loved minority clients, who had been trained not to question authority. They loved clients who lacked the sophistication or experience to crunch the numbers themselves.

  But again this widow didn’t cooperate. Mrs. Wattle wanted to show the paperwork to her granddaughter, who had made her promise to do exactly that. Before signing.

  Loans available changed by the day, Mearan told her, full of sincere concern for her financial well-being. By the hour. And their appraiser happened to have an opening that afternoon. They could get this taken care of today.

  Mrs. Wattle chewed her lip. Her granddaughter had given her strict instructions.

  Mearan understood. What a sweet girl she must be, looking out for her nana. But the appraiser’s schedule stayed packed…. If they couldn’t get this done now, it might be weeks. And according to an SEC report the interest rates were about to skyrocket. He would hate to see her miss this opportunity.

  She signed.

  He took his trainee off to the copy machine with a bottle of Wite-Out. Let Mr. AutoGlobe demonstrate his mad skills at fluffing up a client’s income. Mearan hated getting white stains on his fingers, and the guy did have a deft hand at it, which only annoyed Mearan more. At least the guy didn’t ask if the appraiser really had such a tight schedule (of course not) or how they’d get him to the property that afternoon (if he even bothered; either way a bonus hidden in Mrs. Wattle’s closing costs would ensure a prompt report in the range they needed). He did ask which of the forms Mrs. Wattle would be taking home.

  “The cover sheet showing her low, low rate,” Mearan told him, “and our privacy policy.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Are you kidding? If that sweet, loyal granddaughter reads the fine print—screw that.”

  “Done deal.” The trainee nodded his approval.

  This irritated Mearan. He didn’t need the guy’s approval. “Our dear Mrs. Wattle is a grown-up, fully capable of researching her options. We’re helping her achieve her goals.”

  “Yeah,” the guy said. “Right. At AutoGlobe we—”

  “Don’t care,” Mearan told him.

  A completely routine morning, yet somehow everything had felt off, from Mrs. Wattle’s deep brown eyes to the presumptuous trainee to the taste of the coffee. Maybe he’d known as soon as he looked through the walls and didn’t see Joanna at her desk. Maybe he had a premonition.

  Dead.

  How could she be dead?

  And how long would these idiots keep him here before he could get back to the office?

  Chapter 4

  Maggie walked with Jack to the other end of the building, through the gleaming hallway and past the empty rooms. They didn’t speak, didn’t make any reference to their shared history; they had no reason to. The situation had been laid out and nothing had changed. It had been thirty-five days since Maggie had been pushed off the cliff at the edge of her comfort zone and all she wanted was to claw her way back to the center of that space … except it didn’t seem to be where she had left it and wouldn’t come when called.

  And the only person on the planet who shared the secret of her turmoil was the man who had created all this chaos in the first place. The man now walking alongside her.

  But the past could not be rewritten, not by either of them.

  She doubted this case would affect their delicate balance. Jack would not be gunning for the killer of Joanna Moorehouse, no matter how brutal. Even if he were a budding serial killer, the crazed and blatant monster who had done this would not escape notice for long. Jack targeted the career criminals, the ones who had left a long pattern of mayhem but kept up a human cushion of deniability that enabled them to escape prosecution time and again. Jack always gave the justice system several chances first. The psycho who killed Joanna Moorehouse would not have that defensive structure in place. Once found, he would be convicted.

  Unless, she reminded herself as they joined the ME investigator in the room with the body, a killer who could walk away from a decimated corpse without leaving even a wisp of a trail had his own version of a defensive structure in place. One as brilliant as his exit.

  Then, all bets might be snuffed out.

  “How’s the arm?” Jack asked her.

  A few weeks before, her right shoulder had been dislocated in order to save his life. Since then he had studiously avoided her, and she him. “Peachy.” Then she thought that could be interpreted as sarcastic so she added, “It’s just fine.”

  The responding ME office investigator was a young man with black skin and a world-weary expression. He stood on the other side of the body, in between the sofa and love seat, on the corner of the Persian rug, making notes on a form attached to a clipboard. Maggie said, “Morning, Keshawn. How’s it going?”

  “Need my coffee.”

  “It’s eleven o’clock.”

  “I know. I’m two cups behind. Why’re you always bringing me this craziness?”

  “I like to make your life interesting.”

  He paused in the notes to glance down at the corpse. “It sure made her life interesting. At least for a little bit.”

  He repeated all the work for his agency that Maggie had already done for hers, photographing every inch of the body, observing it from every angle. Then he poked and prodded it a bit, observing the stiffness of the muscles and the red patches of lividity. “Not
much, since she bled out for the most part. Didn’t leave much to coagulate at her low points. Rigor’s full. I’d say twelve to twenty. It’s cool in here, so that might slow things down. We got a last contact?”

  “Left work nine-thirty last night. We’ll have to get the alarm company to tell us when she deactivated the panel and take a look at her phone. According to the boyfriend, this fits the description of what she wore yesterday.”

  They observed the body once again.

  “So,” Keshawn began.

  Maggie said, “She gets home from work, shuts off the alarm, is here long enough to kick off the heels and probably lose a suit coat, but not long enough to get ready for bed.”

  “Of course, she could be the kind that goes to bed at three and gets by on a couple hours of sleep. Don’t understand that, myself.”

  “Cause of death?” Jack asked.

  Keshawn eyed him. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I meant other than the obvious.”

  “In this case the obvious is pretty damn obvious. Extreme trauma causing fatal blood loss would be my guess. Sure, it could turn out to be a heart attack, because watching someone hack my body open, I’d have a heart attack, too. But she looks a bit young for that. There’s no sign of petechiae or trauma to the neck, other than the stab wounds, which probably severed her vocal cords and crushed her larynx, in case the lungs filling up with blood wouldn’t asphyxiate her quickly enough.” A muscle pulsed under his left eye. He crouched next to what was left of Joanna Moorehouse just as Maggie had, getting a closer, more methodical look. “Her state of undress is a bit concerning. Of course we’ll do swabs. Maggie, you have everything you need before we move her?”

  “Yes.”

  Riley guided the two ambulance crew—aka “body snatchers”—into the room and said to Jack, “I cut the cleaning lady loose.”

  “Grace,” Maggie supplied.