Perish

by Lisa Black

  She had come hoping to collect some hairs and fibers from the victim’s clothing—obviously this crime had been up close and personal, and she hoped for some transfer from the suspect—but that idea had been quickly dashed. When the killer had cut open the shirt, pants, and underwear they had flopped to the side and soaked up the blood and fluids seeping from the body. They were now stiffened, saturated planks. The trace evidence specialist had attempted to “tape” them, and passed the tapes (affixed to sheets of clear acetate) over to Maggie, but even with the naked eye she could see there wasn’t much there. Any loose fibers from the suspect were now welded to the late Joanna’s clothing.

  But the pathologist had already completed more than half the autopsy, so Maggie figured she might as well stay for the rest. No surprises cropped up. Cause of death was, as expected, exsanguination—Joanna Moorehouse had bled out, and rather quickly. Before they’d been sliced and diced the stomach had been empty and the lungs had been clear. The liver showed no signs of cirrhosis. Toxicology results would take a few days, but it seemed that Joanna Moorehouse had been a healthy woman with no signs of alcohol or drug abuse.

  “Not exactly an athlete, though,” the doctor muttered, poking at the musculature with one gloved finger. “I wouldn’t say she worked out. She probably kept her figure by simply not eating.”

  “That makes sense,” Maggie said. “I didn’t see any workout equipment at her house. I don’t think she even owned a pair of running shoes. Highly fashionable Mephisto hiking boots, yes, but without even a scuff on the soles.”

  “She worked in an office,” Riley said, visibly wincing as the diener—the assistant—took a scalpel and sliced the scalp open from ear to ear. Then he took a chisel and separated the flesh from the skull, flopping it open so the cranium could be sawed in half.

  Joanna Moorehouse would never be beautiful again.

  “Ever seen anything like this?” Riley asked the doctor.

  “Had a woman stabbed last month, pretty bad, nothing like this but pretty bad. They thought her boyfriend did it, but his pals covered for him.”

  “One in spring,” the diener added. “Chick in Maple Heights. One wound, but it almost took her head off.”

  “Sounds like the mob,” Riley said.

  “Or some foreign shit.”

  “This woman has to have some relatives somewhere,” Maggie burst out, apparently startling the detectives, who turned to glance at her. “Have we even found next of kin yet?”

  Riley said, “No one has a clue. That Lauren woman said Joanna had never, ever talked of her family, not where she was born, not where she went to school. She had Duke University listed on her CV, but that’s as far into her past as she went. We can hope IT finds something in her electronics, a text, an e-mail, anything.”

  “Why?” Jack asked her.

  Maggie shrugged. “It seems … a little pathetic. This woman seems to have been the envy of anyone who saw her, but here she is being sli—autopsied—and no one on the planet seems to give a crap.”

  Riley agreed. “Even Jeremy didn’t seem to regard her as anything more than a good deal. Hot, and the boss.”

  Jack said, “She made her choices.”

  Maggie looked at him. The words sounded harsh, but the tone didn’t… . More regretful. Was he picturing himself on that slab? That someday he would die among strangers, such as herself, who didn’t even know his real name? Who if they knew a few of his secrets, such as herself, might feel only relief?

  We all make choices, she thought.

  The pathologist said, “Hmm,” interrupting the ruminations of everyone else in the room, who then demanded to know what he meant.

  “Hematoma to the back of the head.” He prodded a large dark red mass along the inside of the scalp, between the flesh and the bone of the skull. “Somebody socked her a good one.”

  “Would it have knocked her out?” Riley asked.

  The pathologist sighed. “Why do you always ask me that? There’s no way to tell. It wouldn’t have killed her, I can tell you that. It didn’t get a chance to swell enough to endanger anything and … it didn’t crack the skull.” He peered at the bone, running bloody but gloved fingers over the rounded surface. “I don’t think so, any … maybe a little tiny one, a hairline crack … maybe not.”

  “So he hit her with something,” Jack interpreted.

  “Dunno. It seems pretty unformed. No defined edges … a very blunt blunt object.”

  Maggie pictured the gleaming living room. “What about the floor? Marble tile?”

  “Mmm, yeah. If he had smacked her backward good and hard. Or maybe she slipped, feet went out from under her. It could be that simple. I had a grandmother slip on a ceramic tile floor … was mopping it in her bare feet… .”

  He murmured on but Maggie stopped listening. Joanna Moorehouse could have been running away from her attacker—the house had so little furniture or other decor that someone could have chased her through those rooms without disturbing anything. Or the victim could have been in the living room backing away from him and tripped over the dais steps. Or they could have been having a quiet conversation until he abruptly shoved her backward onto the marble tiles. The blow might not have knocked her out, but she could have been dazed, seen stars or simply reacted to the pain. And in that split second, he was on her, stabbing and slicing.

  “Any sign of sexual assault?” she asked.

  “Don’t see any. We took swabs, of course.”

  No apparent motive. No apparent beneficiaries. No apparent suspects.

  Very strange, Maggie thought. Very, very strange.

  *

  The next morning Maggie felt refreshed. She had gone to bed at a reasonable hour after a short conversation with her brother, Alex, currently playing in the San Antonio area. He and Daisy had taken the kids to see the Alamo and bought them cowboy hats. That, he had assured his sister, did not mean his musical genre would be taking a turn toward the cornfields.

  “Maybe you should consider it,” she had told him. “You might get to meet Taylor Swift.”

  “That is incentive,” he had agreed. “Did you get the bowl I sent you?”

  “I did. Thank you so much. I put it on the table next to my door.” She smiled as she said it, to inject some enthusiasm into the statement as she glanced at the large item on her tiny table, an overbalance waiting to happen.

  “Do you like it?”

  She glanced at it again, her gaze automatically moving to the door to be sure she had locked it—which she hadn’t. A shadow moved along the crack at its bottom, one of her neighbors returning home. “It’s … heavy.”

  “It’s basalt,” he said proudly. “Densest stone there is. The girls are learning about density. Cost me thirty dollars just to ship it, so now they know something about postal rates too.”

  “That’s really cool, bro. I’m not sure how it goes with my décor—”

  “You have décor?”

  “Very funny.” The shadow hadn’t moved, oddly. The hallway doors were staggered so it couldn’t be someone waiting to enter the apartment across the hall. Maggie stood up from the couch.

  “But you like it?”

  “Love it totally.” Because it came from Alex. If anyone else had given it to her she’d think it a monstrosity of angles and a complete impracticality of houseware. She snicked the dead bolt into place, then, feeling silly, put her eye to the peephole. But the sliver of hallway within its range stood empty.

  Meanwhile a satisfied Alex rang off to help his elder daughter with her math homework. Daisy homeschooled the kids on the road, darned her husband’s stage outfits, and kept them all healthy. Maggie thought her sister-in-law had the patience of several saints melded together.

  The touring kept Alex too busy to notice how Maggie spoke less and less of her job. She was afraid to, afraid to let something slip in an unguarded moment with her lifelong confidant. She had to think in two worlds now: the one she shared with other people, and her inner one, where
only she knew exactly what she had done.

  Well, she and Jack.

  But Jack would be gone soon and nothing … bad … had happened. No unexplainable homicides had turned up, no one shot in an alley or some new and equally untraceable method of killing surfaced. Jack had kept his end of their bargain. Murders in Cleveland had continued, of course, but even the current unsolveds had strong suspects with none of them a mysterious vigilante. Rick seemed to have given up on the case, as he usually did on anything that proved too difficult. Her lab stayed calm, she and her coworkers worked to further the cause of justice, and Carol had new photos of her twin granddaughters. The sky outside bulged with heavy clouds but she had made it to the station without being soaked. So this morning all was right in Maggie’s world.

  Her outer world, anyway.

  Then her ex-husband walked in.

  Not a big deal, certainly. They were on amicable terms and got along well now that they no longer had to live together. Despite that, her heart still sank a little every time he showed up, especially when he wore the grumpy face that meant he’d shortly be yelling about something. Usually at her.

  “Morning,” she said. “What’s up?”

  He pulled over a task chair from the next bench and dropped himself into it, then pulled himself up to the high table she bent over with the latent prints from Joanna’s crime scene. Her heart sank a little more at the idea he planned to stay a while.

  “I was upstairs with the Graham trial,” he said. “I interviewed one stinking witness, and I gotta go testify about it.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Everything about court sucks. Then they took my granola bar.”

  The non sequitur startled Maggie away from her fingerprints. “What?”

  “I’m first on, so they want me there at eight, right? No time for my usual bagel, so I grabbed a granola bar that someone left on the counter in the report-writing room and took it up there, made it on time. Went through the metal detector, my keys set it off, they pat, find my breakfast and confiscate it. Turns out our poor innocent killer has a peanut allergy, so they have to make sure you don’t even open a bag in the courtroom. The bailiff told me he thinks it’s a ploy to put Graham in segregation at the jail. He thinks he’s tough with his women, but general population would make mincemeat of that douche.”

  “Crazy.”

  “Yeah, the Latin Kings can’t kill this guy but Mr. Peanut can wipe him right out. Go figure. Meanwhile, my stomach is rumbling. Want to get some lunch?”

  “Sorry, I’m pretty swamped here.”

  “Besides, you just brown-bag an apple and yogurt, right?”

  She had to smile. “Yep.”

  “Figured. Okay, well, I stopped in because I’m still working the vigilante killings.”

  “Yeah?”

  She took the picture of the bloody print from under Joanna’s body and placed a jeweler’s loupe on top of it, which kept her from having to look at him.

  “Is there anything you haven’t told me about this guy? Any little detail?”

  “No, of course not.” Maggie figured it was reasonable to sound annoyed. She had gone through her story a number of times with all the detectives, and more than once with Rick and his partner. She had filled out a lengthy statement. She had completed all her required visits with the department psychologist. She had done her best to imitate a trauma victim trying hard to put it behind her.

  “You said you didn’t see his car.”

  “No. Only that woman’s car, and I didn’t really look at that.”

  “And the gun?”

  “Twenty-two. I think, anyway. All black, no chrome.”

  “Ruger? Smith & Wesson?”

  “Big and loaded. That’s all I needed to know right at that moment.” She gave a tiny shudder, a real one.

  But Rick asked more. “A scar? An accent? A smell?”

  “Smell? Seriously?”

  He shrugged. “I’m grasping at straws here. I’ve got some damn reporter nagging me about other murders, kinda similar ones. I know she’s trying to embellish a story but …”

  Maggie carefully placed a set of ten-prints, rolled at the Sterling offices yesterday, next to her photo of the bloody print. She kept her voice level, polite. “Other murders?”

  “Chicago, and Phoenix. Maybe Detroit. It’s probably fantasy, I know. Finding gangbangers shot in alleys is a daily occurrence everywhere.”

  Maggie adjusted her loupe. “How many altogether?”

  “I dunno. Twenty, maybe. That we know of.”

  Twenty. She had never asked Jack. She hadn’t wanted to know and he wouldn’t have told her anyway. He’d told her nothing of his life before they met. Hell, he’d told her nothing of his life since they’d met. They were hardly drinking buddies.

  Twenty.

  And she could solve them all, if she simply opened her mouth.

  She looked up, opened her mouth—

  “The guy’s a killing machine, in other words,” Rick went on. “And yet he didn’t ki—hurt you. He left a witness who could identify him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You have to ask why.”

  “No, you have to ask. I’m just glad to be alive.”

  Her ex held up a hand. “Not trying to make you feel bad or anything. I know this isn’t fun to talk about. But why did he let you go? It couldn’t be because he wanted to get in your pants.”

  Which is the only reason any man would show her courtesy, she supposed. “You’ve asked me that. The shrink asked me that. Everyone, in one way or another, has asked me that. Because I didn’t fit his criteria. He may be … crazy … but he has a code. I didn’t fulfill it. There weren’t any others? Witnesses in other cities? Ones who got away?”

  Rick shrugged and said he didn’t know before returning to his previous topic. “The only real interesting one is Phoenix, because they also had a woman running an illegal nursing home, left the people there to rot. Just like here.”

  Maggie’s jaw clamped shut. Maria Stein. Jack had been on her trail but she had slipped away to come to Cleveland and spread her poison among the innocents there. If anyone had ever deserved to die … but “deserve” didn’t enter into it. Maggie had to stay silent now because if she told the truth she would go to jail. And she didn’t want to spend half her life in prison on behalf of Maria Stein.

  “Really. And the person who did that was killed?”

  “No, she got away. But the reporter looked for circumstances similar to our spree, I guess. I’m checking with departments in Chicago and Detroit to see if they had anything like that. They nearly laughed me off the phone at first, since their homicide rates make Cleveland look like Disneyworld, but they’re putting their crime analysts on it. They’re searching both methods of murders and types of victims. And elder abuse.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Good.”

  It would be normal, Maggie reminded herself, to be curious. After all, she’d been both saved and “nearly killed” by this mysterious vigilante. She abandoned the prints entirely and gave her ex-husband her full attention. “So you think he was following that horrible woman?”

  “Yeah, it would make sense. Who knows? But this reporter is going to keep making a stink until I come up with something. I need to find out where he went. Then I can point her there and it can be some other city’s problem.”

  Maggie nodded. “Unfortunately, he didn’t share his plans with me. Other than the description and sketch I already gave you and that he probably owned a cat, I can’t help.”

  He studied her, gazing at her with more intensity than she remembered from their brief marriage. “You’re sure.”

  “Yes! Yes. You’ve wrung every last detail out of me. Believe me, if there was anything else I could tell you, I would.”

  This was, of course, a bald-faced lie. But Rick had never been attuned to anyone’s thoughts but his own. He wouldn’t start now.

  Would he?

  She didn’t like the coolly appraising stare. Ric
k didn’t do cool appraisal. He did noise, force, bombast.

  “Okay,” he said at last, and she had to physically restrain herself from puffing out a held breath.

  “Let me know what you find out,” she said.

  “What? Oh … okay.” He got up to leave, but then turned back. “In that murder room. The one on Johnson Court.”

  “I remember.” She wasn’t bloody likely to forget.

  “Did you see his car outside when you went in?”

  She plunged her face back into her matching loupes, staring at the prints as if the dark flowing lines would give her a picture of what to say. She tried to remember the details of her original statement. She had a copy in her drawer for that exact reason. “Um … what I said before, dark sedan with one busted taillight. It was parked farther up the alley, so I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it.”

  “Huh,” Rick said. “Okay.”

  She kept her eyes glued to the small lenses until she heard his steps leaving the room, then let her forehead rest on them for a brief moment. Lying was hard. No wonder detectives simply kept asking the same questions until their targets slipped up. It would happen, eventually. It always did.

  She couldn’t change the past, couldn’t take back her decision. She told herself to focus on what she could do, such as find Joanna Moorehouse’s killer. The bloody print would not be easy to compare—the ridges were clear, but generic, probably from the upper part of the finger where the pattern settles out into simple lines coming from one side and exiting the other. The middle to lower parts of a finger usually contained the more distinctive patterns: loops, whorls, arches, and the attendant deltas where the ridges diverged in a roughly triangular shape. Absent all that activity, the bloody print lacked a particular “starting point”—a close-knit combination of, say, a bifurcating ridge and a short ridge—that could give her something to look for in the sets of ten-prints, an anchor from which to efficiently eliminate possible matches.