Perish

by Lisa Black

  Tyvek made a lightweight but not terribly breathable wrap, used to protect houses under construction and make envelopes for overnight express mailings. It also formed booties, lab coats, aprons, sleeves, and full-body suits for forensic or medical personnel, to keep them from contaminating the scene and keep the scene from contaminating them.

  Riley had joked that the killer may have worn a Tyvek suit in order to get away without leaving a trail of blood, and Maggie had responded that either woman would not have opened her door to someone suited up like a CDC member responding to a mass epidemic. Maggie still believed that, especially in Tyra’s case. After Joanna’s murder the young lawyer would have been on edge.

  And among the many things made out of Tyvek for forensic use were the small drawstring bags used to protect the hands until the nails could be scraped or gunshot residue could be collected. They were slid over the hands and the strings pulled and tied around the wrists and were much easier to use than paper lunch bags. One of Tyra’s long nails had probably caught on the inside of the bag during this process.

  That must be it.

  She moved on to the other miniscule items on the wet mount. Aside from the Tyvek and the pink fiber, a clump of something green appeared to be vegetation and a small piece of animal hair. It lacked a root and had a very thin diameter. The medulla—the central channel in the hair—separated into a distinct series of rounded boxes, the “string of pearls” look characteristic of animal fur. These were the soft, fuzzy hairs that provided warmth and softness and, unfortunately, often looked alike in cats, dogs, rabbits, and many other mammals. The thicker, coarser guard hairs were more easily distinguished.

  The piece of vegetation didn’t provide much help, simply seemed to be a tiny part of leaf. It could be anything from a maple leaf to a piece of lettuce to a blade of grass.

  She wrote up these vague and unhelpful observations and carefully set the wet mount aside. When the water evaporated she could scrape the items back into their paper. Something might come up in the meantime that would make her want to take another look.

  For the moment she got a fresh stick of gum to chew off some of her frustration, then looked up to see her ex-husband stride into the lab. As always her heart sank a little and she reminded herself not to be unfair. Rick was not a bad person, only a tedious one. But they got along fine now that she no longer had to serve as his personal flunky, so she summoned up a smile to greet him.

  “Good news.” He collapsed into the task chair Carol had vacated and explained how a detective in Phoenix told him about a pedophile coyote who might have been a victim of their vigilante, and how the only cooperative witness had been this seven-year-old girl. “And this Daley guy found her! She’s almost thirteen now, still in the area, got adopted by a couple of bleeding hearts, learned English, and remembers this whole drama like it happened yesterday. Still wakes up screaming now and then.”

  “Poor kid.” A witness.

  He didn’t mention the shooting, so the news must not have filtered back to him. Her lab coat covered her arms and she kept her chin tilted down toward her work.

  “Yeah. So anyway I e-mailed that sketch you gave the artist and Daley’s going to see if the girl can ID him.”

  “Oh.” The girl wouldn’t, of course, because Maggie had described a slightly obscure but favorite actor of hers, Michael Ironside, as the vigilante killer. But that might be a good thing if the sketch didn’t match the girl’s recollection, breaking the tie between Jack’s work and the deaths in Phoenix. Maria Stein’s abuse of the elderly would remain a weird coincidence. On the other hand, perhaps the girl would believe her sketch matched the man—she had only been seven, traumatized, and maybe any intimidating-looking male could be made to fit the horrible memory. That would be good, too. It would confirm Maggie’s story in a way nothing else could, put her firmly on the side of the very honest angels. Here was a serial killer and he had pulled the trigger, not Maggie. In case anyone had any doubts.

  Anyone like Rick. “What’s the matter? I thought you’d be excited.”

  “Well, it’s interesting. I’m not sure how it’s going to help, though—it’s been, what, five years now? This one little traumatized girl, even if she can positively ID him—does that really get you closer to identifying him?”

  “Maybe not. But it’ll be confirmation that he had operated in that area. We can reopen all the similar unsolved and see if they had anything in common, how he’s picking them. Even if not we could still get a free trip to Phoenix out of it.”

  She nearly swallowed her gum. “We?”

  “Sure! You’re my only witness. I might be able to wheedle the budget into sending us so you can look at mug shots, maybe even compare notes with the little wetback.”

  “Rick!”

  “Fine, Hispanic child. People in this city have not forgotten about these killings, which means the captain isn’t about to let me forget. If I don’t come up with something he’s going to think I’m twiddling my thumbs and transfer me back to property crimes, where I’ll be chasing smash and grabs until I retire. Besides—look, I ain’t trying to get back together or anything—this is a legitimate lead.”

  “I know that, I … of course I’ll do anything the department needs.”

  “Besides, I remember how much you like to travel.”

  She made herself smile. “Guilty. But Arizona—I’ve heard it’s awfully hot. Like, really, really hot.”

  “Yeah, but it’s a dry heat.” He studied her suddenly, with a new and uncharacteristic sharpness. “What gives with you? Since when do you not jump at the chance of an expense-paid trip? You always moped because your brother was in San Francisco or Houston or Miami or Timbuktu and you weren’t.”

  “I didn’t mope.”

  He leaned forward, nearly falling out of the wheeled task chair. “You think I’m some kind of bumpkin who can’t see past his own front yard, some idiot who couldn’t find a clue if a Hooters waitress handed it to him, I know.”

  “Rick—” she said, and stopped, since on the whole she did think that.

  “But I know you, Maggie. I know you better than you think.”

  His words chilled her. Words that would have sounded comforting and even endearing under other circumstances only produced a sense of inexorable dread. She could feel her eyes widening and turned her face down. Breathe. Carry this off.

  She faced him again, firmly, having decided to play the trauma card. “Because I still wake up at night too, okay? I’m used to coming onto crime scenes after everything is over, not being part of one. It’s taking some … adjustment.”

  Weak and vulnerable should work on Rick. He had never realized that she had held their household together, that she had all the self-discipline he lacked. But it didn’t seem to be cutting through his misgivings right now, so she added, “However, I can handle it. If you need me to go to Phoenix, let’s go. I’ll just pack lightweight clothes.”

  He gave a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “That’s my girl.”

  “I’m not your girl, Rick.” She went back to her microscope, gazing through the lens at nothing, adjusting knobs that didn’t need to be adjusted. “Keep me posted.”

  She listened to his footsteps leave the room.

  Chapter 23

  Jack and Riley pulled up behind a knot of cars parked willy-nilly in the wide drive of Joanna’s mansion and stepped onto the grass. Most of the vehicles had seen better days, some with plastic taped up in lieu of windows, and in the midst of them sat the Channel 15 mobile news team van. Off to the side a perky female reporter faced the camera, her back to the twenty or twenty-five protesters milling about the drive that curved along the porch. One pounded on the front door when the mood struck him. The entire assembly seemed oblivious to the gathering rain clouds overhead.

  Jack had seen most of the same protesters in front of the Sterling building on previous days, but now they moved with more agitation. A few signs read, KURT RESNICK MARTYR TO PREDATORS and FREE
KURT and MOOREHOUSE WAS THE REAL MURDERER. In the midst of them stirred Ned Swift.

  The reporter stopped Riley as they circled toward the crowd, her black skin glowing with the hum of energy all reporters possess. Underneath her trim dress she wore Reeboks—feet don’t appear on the camera, after all. “Hey, Detective. How about an interview about what’s happening here?”

  “Good morning, Shanti. How about you tell me what’s up? I just arrived.”

  She obligingly turned and waved at the crowd. “Newsworthy Ned called and told us about the guy you arrested for Joanna Moorehouse’s murder. The victims of Sterling are here to support him.”

  “Let me guess. They say he’s innocent.”

  “No, no, they told me he did it but it’s justifiable homicide.”

  “Seriously,” Riley said. It wasn’t a question.

  “I don’t make the news,” she told him with a shrug. “I just report it, and it’s been a slow week. Ned’s plan is to petition the court for the money from Joanna Moorehouse’s estate to use for Kurt Resnick’s defense. And also to pay all these people back for losing their homes.”

  “Good luck with that,” Riley said. “Why are they knocking on the door? Do they expect her ghost to answer it?”

  “Oh, someone’s home. A woman poked her head out once and yelled at them to go away. Ned says, anyway. That was before I got here.”

  Riley exchanged a look with Jack. There were only two women likely to be in the house, and they doubted Grace the cleaning lady would set foot on the property for any amount of overtime. They moved toward the steps.

  “Be careful, Detectives,” Shanti called after them. “These people aren’t in a reasonable mood. Why do you think I’m standing over here?”

  She was right. The crowd had seen them pull up and were now waiting for them, a tight cordon between them and the front door. Ned Swift waited on the steps, supervising from the lofts.

  The two cops went to walk around them, but as a group they shuffled to the side like a single awkward organism. It was almost comical. Almost.

  Riley held up a hand and announced that he and Jack were not there to deal with their protest, but simply to continue the murder investigation.

  “Let Kurt Resnick go,” a middle-aged woman said.

  “The bitch deserved to die,” a younger man said.

  “He didn’t do it!” said a voice from the back.

  “But if he did then we all did,” said a man off to the side. “I only wanted a second mortgage to put a new roof on my house. I had perfect credit. But Sterling got a hold of my wife and me and gave us a line of crap about how the interest rate didn’t matter, only the payment, except the payment doubled and they never told us that—”

  “You’re arresting the wrong people!” a young woman cried.

  Jack could feel the adrenaline running through the crowd, infecting anyone who breathed it in. He hated mobs, he hated crowds, and he wasn’t even that crazy about people one-on-one. They were too unpredictable in groups, using the support and implied anonymity to put their brains on hiatus and meld into a mindless hive.

  “We’re not here to arrest anyone,” Riley pointed out. He sounded calm but Jack could see sweat gather on his neck even though the large trees protected them from the sun. The second most dangerous types of police calls, after domestics, were crowds. “We’re trying to do our jobs.”

  A fiftyish black man said, “Sterling talked my mother into refinancing. She only had a monthly pittance from Social Security, left over from my dad, and when the payment went up it took all of that. She starved to death because she didn’t want to ask me for help.”

  “They’re animals!”

  “Then you want us to continue investigating, right?” Riley reasoned.

  “You don’t care about us! You’re trying to hang Kurt Resnick!” a thirtyish soccer mom type insisted. Behind her a short but powerfully built man spooned her back until he forced both of them into Jack’s personal space. He tried to step back but a paunchy and graying man had crowded in and Jack’s foot landed on his toes. The man didn’t move and neither did Jack, letting all the weight of his six-foot-four bulk come to a focus in one heel, and abruptly that area developed empty space.

  “You turn a blind eye to places like Sterling because they have all the money.”

  “We’re investigating a murder,” Riley said again. “That’s the job of this detective and me. We need you to let us do our job. We have no authority over questions of loans and mortgages.”

  A fortyish woman with long gray-streaked hair who looked as if she could bench-press Riley’s entire body blocked the detective’s path. “So you ignore it? While crooks throw us out of our homes?”

  “Sterling defrauds and extorts. That’s criminal court. You need to arrest them,” a man chimed in. He didn’t look old enough to own a house, but ages got tougher to estimate the older Jack got. How close the kid hovered to throwing a punch wasn’t hard to estimate at all.

  “Regulatory agencies are already investigating Sterling,” Riley said. They weren’t listening.

  Jack could feel the ground crumbling at the edge of a violent abyss. It could give way at any moment, swallowing them whole. The sky rumbled with disquiet as well. He asked the crowd, “What about Tyra Simmons?”

  A pause. Most of the people blinked at him with total lack of recognition, but a few recognized the name. One man said, “She deserved it too. She got my case thrown out on some technicality.”

  The man who had spoken of his mother said, “She did Sterling’s dirty work.”

  “Lawyers are always the worst,” one man muttered.

  Jack’s patience, not hefty to begin with, faded completely. “What do you want us to do? Right here. Right now.”

  That quieted them again, because, of course, they didn’t know. They only wanted to vent their frustration, their desperation, their rage at how their perfectly reasonable and ordinary lives had been turned upside down until they—employees, parents, citizens—had been turned into hate-spewing zombies.

  “Let Kurt Resnick go,” one said.

  Another immediately disagreed. “No, don’t let him go. He needs to go to trial so he can tell the world about what Sterling did.”

  “Arrest Sterling,” a young woman said.

  Riley said, “Sterling is a company, not an individual.”

  More people spoke up. “Arrest Joanna Moorehouse!”

  “She’s dead, you moron.”

  “Try her in absentia, then.”

  “Excuse us,” Riley said, and gently pushed forward.

  Ned Swift, seeing that his band had lost the battle of both will and wits, descended from the heights to intervene. “We don’t want to hold you up, Detectives, but it’s important that these people be heard.”

  “You’ve got Channel 15 in the driveway as requested,” Riley pointed out.

  “Has Mr. Resnick been arraigned yet?”

  “In the morning. What made you come out here instead of your usual spot in front of the Sterling offices?”

  “This building belongs to us now. We’re petitioning the court to seize Miss Moorehouse’s assets to reimburse the people she bilked.”

  Riley made a show of brightening. “Sounds great. You’ll want us to wrap up this murder investigation then, so the location can be released.”

  “Uh—”

  “Thanks.” Riley pushed past him. Jack did the same on the other side. He felt, rather than saw, the crowd try to follow, but Swift must have nixed the movement. When they reached the front door he glanced back. The cordon remained, but Ned now selected a few members to approach the pretty reporter.

  The seal on the door had been broken. Riley selected the key with the evidence tag from his pocket, but it proved to be unnecessary. The door opened inward as soon as they stepped up to it, and Jessica Moorehouse’s weathered face appeared.

  “Can’t you make them go away?” she hissed.

  “Well, well, Miss Moorehouse,” Riley said. “How d
id you get in? Seeing as we have the only keys to the door.”

  “Just because I’m from the country doesn’t mean I don’t know a few tricks.”

  “You misunderstand. That wasn’t banter—I want to know how you got into this house.”

  She gave a toss of distressed hair. “Get used to disappointment. This is my place now and you have no right to keep me out of it.”

  “Miss Moorehouse—” Riley began, but she pivoted and headed for the kitchen. As they followed Jack noticed that she wore a chiffon peach blouse and a pair of dark capris a size too large, no doubt borrowed from her dead sister’s closet. Simple logic, he knew—as Joanna’s only heir Jessica would own all of it very shortly. So why shell out her limited resources for a fleabag motel when this mausoleum and its closets sat unused?

  Except they still hoped to find some clue to Joanna’s killer among the dead woman’s effects, which her sister had now usurped and possibly compromised. Or simply thrown away.

  And if Sterling’s crimes demanded reimbursement from the estate, the long-lost sibling might be in for a crushing reduction in benefits.

  “At least,” Riley whispered to Jack as they walked, “the VA found out the mother really is dead. We don’t have to worry about her being shivved in the root cellar by darling daughter.”

  “Good to know,” Jack agreed.

  Apparently Jessica spent a lot of time in the kitchen—one of the few rooms with furniture other than the blood-spattered living room. Takeout containers littered the counter along with Jessica’s recharging cell phone and some odds and ends from elsewhere in the house. Little sister had been taking inventory of her newfound estate.

  Riley sounded as if he was still rattled from the near-riot outside, his voice tight. “We do have a legal right, a legal responsibility to keep you out of this house. Not only is—was—it a sealed crime scene, it doesn’t belong to you. We could arrest you for trespassing right now.”

  “But you won’t.” She slumped into a chair, pulled her knees up to let her bare toes hang off the seat, and crossed her arms over her shins. “You know why?”