Perish

by Lisa Black

  “And how did you do that?” Jack asked. Something about Kurt Resnick didn’t seem right.

  “What? Decide? It wasn’t difficult.”

  “How did you kill her?”

  Resnick gave him an odd look. “You were there. You saw.”

  “We need you to tell us.”

  “Oh, right. I stabbed her. Again and again.”

  That had not been released to the press.

  “Where?” Riley asked.

  “All over.”

  “No, I meant where, geologically?”

  “Geographically,” Jack corrected quietly.

  “Oh! At her house.”

  That had been in the paper. “Where in her house?” Riley persisted.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t care. I stuck the knife into her a number of times—I can’t be more exact than that because it’s all sort of a blur. I couldn’t believe I was doing it. There was blood everywhere.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “I rang the bell. I said I wanted to talk about my lawsuit and she laughed and turned away. I guess she wasn’t afraid of me, figured she already won so there was nothing more I could do. I wanted to show her there was a lot more I could do.”

  “What time was this?”

  “In the evening.”

  “We’re going to need the details, Mr. Resnick. Please be as specific as you can.”

  “Um, okay. I went over to her house—”

  “How did you get there?”

  “Bus.”

  Jack pictured the narrow, elegant street and took a guess. “Buses don’t go anywhere near her house.”

  “I took the fifty-five and got off at Clifton and 117th.”

  “Oh,” Riley said. “Okay. What time?”

  “About eight-thirty.”

  “The fifty-five stops running at seven.”

  Now Resnick gave Riley an odd look. “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Sorry. My mistake, then.”

  If he could see that the cops were trying to poke holes in his confession, it didn’t bother him. “I rang the bell and in a minute or two she opened the door. She didn’t even remember me at first, but then she did. I told her Rose had killed herself.”

  He choked on these last words.

  “And then what happened?” Riley asked.

  “She said, ‘Who’s Rose?’ And then I stabbed her.”

  “Right there in the doorway?”

  “No—she got scared when I pulled out the knife. She turned and ran.” Now his gaze switched from one detective to the other, no more staring at the floor, as when he recounted his near-marriage.

  Judging his effect? Jack wondered. Or looking for cues?

  Riley pressed, “So where did you stab her?”

  “I told you, I’m not sure. I wasn’t looking at the house.”

  “Where on her body did you stab her?”

  “All over.”

  “All over where?”

  “All over! I don’t remember! All I could see was this red haze and her mocking face through all of it! Nothing mattered except making sure she could never do this to anyone else. Ever.”

  “So she died.”

  “Yeah,” he said, puffing out as if he had been sprinting. “She died. And I was glad.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I left. Went back and took the bus back ho—to the hotel where I live now.”

  “And the other people on the bus didn’t notice you were covered in blood?”

  This suggestion surprised him. “I wasn’t.”

  Riley pointed out, “You said there was blood everywhere.”

  “On her. There wasn’t much on me.”

  That didn’t seem likely. Yet the killer had left the house without either cleaning up or leaving traces of red anywhere, so it could be true. Blood did funny things.

  “Plus I had an outer shirt, a flannel shirt that caught most of the spatters. I took that off, used it to wipe my hands.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “No, I stuffed it in a garbage can on the way back to the bus stop. The next day was garbage pickup. Everyone had their cans out.”

  Jack remembered swerving around a garbage truck on their way to the crime scene and felt his reservations soften. The specific bus line, the trash pickup day, the time of death… they all fit the facts. “Which address?”

  “I have no idea. Harborview Drive, that’s all I remember.”

  “Then how did you find the right house?”

  Again, he seemed surprised at the question, as if it should be obvious. “I’d been there before. I’d followed her home a few times, trying to get up the courage to confront her. Back when I still had a car.”

  “And you’ll sign a statement attesting to all this information, when we write it up,” Riley said.

  “Yes, of course. It’s true. All of it.”

  “One more thing, Mr. Resnick,” Jack said. “What about Tyra Simmons?”

  Kurt Resnick blinked. “Who?”

  Chapter 14

  “What do you think?” Riley asked Jack after they booked the very cooperative Kurt Resnick into a holding cell, pending arraignment.

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Me neither. He’s too sketchy on details. Every time we get to specifics like what room of the house, whether lights were on or off, what she was wearing, then the memory gets fuzzy.”

  “Which does happen.” Not to him, but to other killers. They locked on their quarry with tunnel vision that blotted out the rest of the world.

  They certainly wanted Kurt Resnick to be telling the truth. Confessions were a gift and usually provided cops with a deep sense of satisfaction to know that they had it right, that the suspect did indeed do it and the case had indeed been solved. Refusing such a gift felt fractious and unsettling and greatly foolish. Yet accepting with significant reservations could turn out to be lazy at best and corrupt at worst.

  For the moment they would take Resnick at his word. On a probationary basis.

  Jack said, “I looked up those two stabbing cases the doctor mentioned. Both still unsolved. They figure a boyfriend for one, but his alibi’s holding up.”

  “Any connection to Sterling?”

  “None whatever. Nothing to do with real estate, banking, big bucks, or each other. Both worked downtown—that was it. And no disembowelment or ghost-like exit. Whoever did these left plenty of blood trails all over the scene.”

  “Not like our guy.”

  “Nope.”

  They crossed the atrium of the Justice Center, which occasionally flared with spotty sunshine from the glass above. As always, it thronged with agitated citizens either on their way to the courtrooms upstairs or on their way from, whose worried faces contrasted with those for whom this was just another day on the job. The combined voices of the people milling about bounced off the soaring ceilings and glass windows, so Riley and Jack kept their tones low; they didn’t want their conversation echoing to the assorted attorneys and bail bondsmen who perpetually haunted the area. Riley said, “Yeah. I still don’t like it. And where does that leave Tyra Simmons? It had to be the same guy who killed them both. The bodies are practically identical.”

  Jack clutched the stiff piece of paper with Resnick’s fingerprints, which they had collected in the booking area. If he had killed Joanna Moorehouse then the bloody print under her body should match one of his fingers; there could be no other explanation for that print, and that would wrap up their investigation with a neat bow. He pressed the button for the elevator. The bank of moving cars would be impassible minutes before nine a.m. when the court sessions began, but just before lunchtime they had plenty of personal space and the car to themselves. “So if Resnick killed one, he had to kill the other. But why deny it? He’s ready to post Moorehouse’s killing on Facebook with a celebratory emoticon, so why the total blank on Simmons?”

  “If anything, he’d have more motive to kill Tyra. She was the lawyer, she was the one who won the court case
that ruined his life. But he didn’t even recognize her name.”

  Two floors passed by. Jack said, “Suppose he killed Moorehouse and someone else killed Simmons.”

  “But the bodies were cut the same way. And no one saw Joanna’s body except us.”

  It took only half of another floor for them to have the same, simultaneous thought.

  “Jeremy,” Jack said.

  “Except for Jeremy,” Riley said. “Our little boy toy ID’d the body for us. He got a peek at his ex-girl’s chest in the body bag.”

  “So he didn’t kill Moorehouse, but grabs the opportunity to off Simmons in the same way, knowing we’d assume the same killer.”

  They mulled that. The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and neither one of them moved.

  “Risky,” Jack said. “He had no guarantee that we would clear him of Moorehouse, which we didn’t, officially. Not until Resnick walked in.”

  “And why kill Tyra at all? He could have a much better motive to off Joanna. She’s tired of him, tells him he’ll have to start doing a real job or find another boss to slip it to, and he goes off.”

  As the elevator doors closed again Jack said, “He doesn’t know we know about the Panamanian account. With his girlfriend gone he has access to it, or can get access, but the lawyer knew about it, too. He has to get rid of her before she can have an attack of conscience, which would be like her, and tell the IRS or DJ Bryan or whoever about the slush fund.”

  “So he slices up Tyra to make her look like Joanna. Doesn’t necessarily get suspicion off him, though.”

  “Unless he has some sort of alibi for Tyra,” Jack said.

  “I guess we need to find out. Time to have a chat with the grieving lover.” Then Riley looked up at the position indicator light on the elevator panel. “Where the hell are we?”

  *

  Maggie sipped coffee as she listened to Jack’s very brief explanation of Kurt Resnick’s confession. She sat at an examination table with her loupes for examining fingerprints, the lighting and the table height adjusted to make the process both efficient and not too hard on the neck. Carol bustled in the DNA lab and crime scene tech Amy argued quietly over the phone with her boyfriend. Denny had gone home for lunch and it was Josh’s day off. “But he says he didn’t kill Tyra?”

  “His exact words were, ‘I don’t know anything about that.’ Didn’t even seem to know who she was, which doesn’t track either because if she was Sterling’s lawyer he should have seen her name on paper a whole lot of times and in the courtroom. But apparently he focused on Joanna Moorehouse. Anything come back on her prints?”

  “Nope. If she’s ever been arrested, it wasn’t in Ohio.”

  “Of course, she’s only been in Cleveland about four years. The IT guy got nothing from her computer—she didn’t have an e-mail or a Word doc that wasn’t Sterling related. She wasn’t on Facebook, Twitter, or even LinkedIn,” Jack said, sounding frustrated. “She didn’t post pics of her decorated cupcakes or her new drapes on Pinterest. As far as her electronic footprint is concerned, Joanna Moorehouse didn’t exist until four years ago when she founded Sterling. How can you drink coffee in this heat?”

  “Caffeine knows no seasons. You think it’s a fake name?”

  “It’s not, actually. Joanna Marie Moorehouse was born in Crossing, Iowa, to a single mother. She lived there until twenty or so, went to the community college. Next thing she’s in Los Angeles working for a real estate broker. All the Ivy League schooling on her resume is fake, she got a slap on the wrist in LA for falsifying her broker’s license, and in a special spot of irony her house there went into foreclosure, but her name is her own. The victim advocate had to work backward from the real estate records. It took her all night, but she said it made a nice change from letting family members cry on her shoulder while she helps them pick a funeral home. She spoke with a sister, who said they hadn’t seen or heard from Joanna in at least ten years.”

  Maggie said, “So she did have a family. She didn’t spring, fully grown, from Zeus’s head.”

  “Don’t know, maybe she did. Her birth certificate reads ‘father unknown.’”

  “Huh. That’s intriguing. So many business wunderkind types have daddy issues.” Maggie caught herself and added, “Or maybe she was really smart and made up for a lack of resources with hard work.”

  “I don’t care why she did what she did. I want to know why it got her killed.” Jack rubbed one eye. “The Graham trial.”

  She blinked at the abrupt change in topic. “Yes?”

  “You’re going to be recalled, I heard.”

  “Yes.”

  “Watch your back. Graham may be in jail, but his clan isn’t.”

  Bizarre on so many levels—her personal foil/nemesis/albatross expressing concern for her safety. Not unappreciated, yet she doubted the average defendant ever learned her name. “Meaning what? They’re going to come gunning for me?”

  “You’re the whole case, Maggie. The ballistics from the casing at the scene implicates him, but your fingerprint ID slams the door on his cell. Without you—”

  “Without me, Amy testifies. She verified my identification.”

  “You think these guys understand the finer points of forensic procedures?”

  “You’re serious?” She still couldn’t wrap her head around it. Ten years in this field and she had never been threatened with physical peril … until, well, a month and a half ago when she’d met Jack Renner. Since then it had become commonplace without exactly being his fault, like two different pressure systems that were harmless until combined. Then, tornados.

  “Yes, Maggie,” he snapped. “I’m serious.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll watch my back.” What did that even mean? She had neither a weapon nor a black belt and couldn’t afford to hire a bodyguard.

  Jack must have come to the same conclusion because he didn’t look satisfied. “Just knock off the midnight rambles for a while.”

  She liked to pace the city streets—the main, well-lit, occupied downtown streets—in the evenings, especially when things in her life were frustrating her as badly as this case was. Her turn to be unhappy. But she agreed, in order to pacify him as well as usher in a topic change of her own. She double-checked the lab to make sure none of her coworkers were around. “Speaking of … murder … Rick is still investigating the vigilante killer.”

  That was hardly news. “Yeah? So?”

  She cradled the coffee mug in her hands, heart beginning to pound. “That reporter from the Herald is nagging him to look at similar crimes across the country. He said he had found some in Detroit, Chicago, and Phoenix. And apparently she … she had been in Phoenix.”

  If Maggie sought some bizarre kind of reassurance, she didn’t find it. Jack’s face might as well have been carved from basalt for all the reaction he showed. “So let him. Let her. It’s not a problem.”

  She didn’t ask if he was sure; he ought to know what kind of trail he had left or not left in those places, and there had not yet been the slightest suspicion that the killer could be a cop. There would be no reason for Rick to think in that direction. But Maggie couldn’t quite let it go. “Twenty.”

  Jack raised one eyebrow.

  “He said there were at least twenty victims.”

  Jack didn’t respond, and the scalding cup of liquid did nothing to warm her.

  “Are there twenty, Jack? Thirty? Forty?”

  He didn’t look away. “Do you really want to know?”

  This was not a rhetorical question, and it didn’t take her long to answer. Her heartbeat slowed.

  “No. I don’t want to know.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because I felt I should admit that I don’t want to know.” Anything less would be cowardly.

  Jack leaned forward, as if to impart a confidence, and she automatically came closer as well … an odd reaction, when she thought about it later.

  But he only said, “Stop feeling compelled to admit thing
s, Maggie.”

  They stayed frozen like that, for a moment longer, his face only inches from hers. Then she withdrew with a sigh, annoyed without knowing at what.

  She set down the coffee and turned back to Resnick’s inked fingerprints. By their side she put the photo of the bloody print from under Joanna’s body underneath one magnifying loupe, and refamiliarized herself with its ridges and pattern. Or rather lack of same.

  She went through all ten of Resnick’s fingers, explaining to Jack how the simplicity of the pattern in the bloody print made it extremely difficult to compare, and that she may only be able to identify a possible suspect, not convict him.

  “But the computer made matches?” Jack asked.

  “The computer brings up its ten best. Only human beings decide if they match—you know that.”

  “Yeah, but …” His voice trailed off before she had to remind him that there was no but. Computers did not match fingerprints, or DNA, or bullet casings. Only human beings could make those decisions.

  So this human being went through the prints again. Examined the tips of each finger. Examined the assorted curving areas of the palms in case she’d been way off and the print under Joanna actually came from a tiny patch of palm rather than a finger.

  “Maggie,” Jack complained.

  She ignored him. This could not be rushed. She went through them all again.

  Deciding a latent print matched a set of known prints was actually much easier than deciding one didn’t match. One felt peacefully content when every ridge lined up. But when they didn’t you could never feel quite sure—were they completely different, or were you just not looking in the right place?

  Jack shifted his weight again.

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “What? It’s not his print?”

  She sat up, distinctly unhappy. But this was her job, to establish the facts, and everything she could see established one single fact: the bloody print by Joanna’s body had not been made by Kurt Resnick.

  Jack’s shoulders sank a little. “Shit.”

  He didn’t sound surprised.

  *

  “So we’re back to square one,” Riley moaned. “Then how come Resnick knew she was stabbed? And how did he know the exact bus route to her house and that it was garbage day? And why did he friggin’ confess to it, if he didn’t do it?”