Perish

by Lisa Black

  “The Fed regulator,” Riley told her. “Anna Hernandez.”

  Chapter 27

  Perhaps it had simply been one shock too many in a short period of time, a combination of the lack of rest, the gnawing concern over her ex-husband’s investigations, a defendant dying ten feet from her, but Maggie’s knees went out and her bottom smacked against the Crown Vic’s front fender.

  “Hey,” Jack said, and grabbed her arm.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Riley asked.

  When she found her breath again, Maggie said, “She was nice. Anna. I—I liked her.”

  “Yeah, that’s tough,” Riley said, his voice conveying “It’s a truly rotten break,” not “Too bad, suck it up.”

  Jack still studied her. “Are you going to be okay? Can you work this scene?”

  “Yes,” she said without hesitation. She had been at the first two murders, knew what to expect and what might be alterations in the pattern. No one would tear her from this crime. She owed it to Anna.

  She pushed herself off the car and made herself straighten up. “Let’s go.”

  “There’s more,” Riley said. “We’re holding the guy who found the body because he also works at Sterling. Jeremy Mearan.”

  “Mearan.” Maggie felt her forehead crinkle into a deep frown.

  “That’s the same reaction we had. What connection would Mearan have to Anna Hernandez? We’ve got no clue, but as soon as we have a chance we’re going to ask him. And he’d better have a damn good answer.” He held the door for her as she carted her camera and two toolboxes inside the lobby.

  This would be the first time Maggie had to investigate the murder of a friend, even a brief one. She hoped it would be the last.

  The building at 1675 East 12th Street had a clean, pleasant lobby with a small waiting area; a panel to buzz apartment intercoms; and a small, creaky elevator that smelled of Murphy’s Oil Soap. And nothing else. The hallway leading to Anna’s fifth-floor apartment likewise sported pleasant décor and relatively fresh carpeting, but on the whole it underscored the difference between public-and private-sector incomes, particularly once Maggie had crossed the threshold into the small foyer with Anna’s jacket hanging by the door. Joanna had lived in a mansion that would rival those of A-list actors, whereas Anna rented a two-bedroom with a galley kitchen. Honest work did not pay as well as the other kind.

  Though it usually came with fewer risks. Usually.

  At first it seemed as if nothing was amiss. From the door Maggie saw a dining area and the small kitchen to her left. Anna had not been a neatnik. Assorted mail piled up on the dining table and dishes sat in the sink. A half-table under the clothing hooks held a metal bowl with a key ring and Anna’s slouchy, many-pocketed purse. On the floor below it sat her briefcase, made of worn but real leather and bulging with papers, booklets, and stapled reports, one handle fixed with an oversized paper clip.

  But to Maggie’s right, a sofa, coffee table with a balcony beyond it, the lights of the city twinkling behind panels of sheer fabric, and Anna’s bare foot lying on the carpet. Maggie took another step past the foyer wall and saw the rest of her.

  Anna, like Tyra, had changed for comfort, into a camisole with a soft shelf bra and thin cotton pajama pants. Those had been shredded, along with her skin and the organs of her torso. She lay on her back, arms flung out, palms upturned, with deep gashes in all those surfaces. Her head had landed near an armchair, and the wooden foot of it kept her head tilted to one side, looking away from Maggie toward the wide windows and the city lights, with an expression of both concern and sadness. No fear, no agony—only a mild perplexity and a deep disappointment.

  In what? Maggie wondered. In the brevity of her young life? In the identity of the killer? In me? I let her assume that I would keep fighting the good fight just as she did, that I would do something about the deaths of her coworkers. I didn’t tell her the truth: Whatever fight I’m in, it isn’t good.

  I am no longer on the side of the angels.

  “You going to be okay?” Jack asked, cutting into her thoughts. “Are you sure you’re going to be able to do this?”

  “Yes,” she said, as firmly as before. “Stop asking.”

  “I have to. You don’t look so good.”

  She didn’t answer, but with exaggerated precision she balanced carefully to slip booties over her shoes. Then she removed her camera from its case, attached the large flash, and began to document the scene.

  She kept the rest of her equipment in the hall until all the preliminary photos were taken. Two patrol officers kept guard out there, standard procedure for crime scenes, to handle crowd control, minor canvassing, and any criminal elements who might decide to return to the scene of their exploits. But all five personnel kept their voices low, nearly whispering, and not out of concern for the neighbors’ beauty sleep. They didn’t need a bunch of curious looky-lous stopping by. As Maggie bagged and tagged items of evidence she kept them right inside the apartment door.

  It seemed a clear repeat of Joanna’s and Tyra’s murders. In her brief photographing of the rest of the apartment, nothing else seemed disturbed. A single glass of wine with a half inch of Moscato left in it sat on the counter. The spare bedroom had been outfitted with a desk and bookshelves, knickknacks, and an opened laptop that, when jostled, came back to life to reveal an e-mail to someone named Wayne, never sent, bearing a single sentence: “How about Lola for dinner tomorrow night?” Because it hadn’t been sent, Maggie saw no way to tell when it had been written. Maybe the IT department would have a way, but she didn’t and did not intend to touch anything on the keyboard to try to find out. The electronics specialists had one simple rule for the collection of computers, cell phones, tablets, GPSs, and any other digital evidence. The rule consisted of: “Don’t touch anything!”

  The spare room also had a litter box on the open closet floor, and from the smell it had been used recently.

  “Where’s the cat?” Maggie asked.

  “What cat?” Riley asked.

  It had found a hiding space during the terror, no doubt. The animal lover in Maggie resisted the urge to search for it. It would come out when it wanted, or when it got hungry enough.

  Satisfied that nothing else in the apartment presented an obvious clue to the intruder, and with no indication that he had progressed past the body, she returned to the entryway. She used a paper cone and a can of spray powder that could give much better results on doorknobs than a brush, but found nothing but smudges on both the inside and outside knobs. The doors’ surfaces also had nothing but smudges except for one fairly clear set of prints from a left hand on the inside edge, where someone inside the apartment would push the door shut. She tried the metal bowl, the table it sat on, poked around in the purse, where the wallet, cash, and cards Anna had carried remained in their tidy compartments just in case Anna had made a note of a meeting, a phone number, anything to indicate who had arrived at her apartment that evening. She brushed powder on the walls and the kitchen floor, even though the investigators had probably obliterated any shoeprints, and photographed any that didn’t belong to Riley, whose shoes she demanded to see. Jack’s, for some reason, didn’t leave marks on the tile.

  Of course they don’t, she thought crossly.

  When she had exhausted the entryway she started on the living room area, and Anna’s still body. The blood pool around her hadn’t even finished drying.

  This time Maggie didn’t let herself stare, or pause, or even think about breaking down. She didn’t want more inquiries from Jack or anyone else. So she got her numbered markers and her measuring tape and her clipboard and began to sketch the small living room.

  “What was Mearan doing here?” she asked of no one in particular.

  “That’s what we’re about to go ask him,” Jack said. “As soon as the EMTs clear. Apparently finding the body shocked his system.”

  “She had mentioned a boyfriend. Could that be Mearan?” She couldn’t quite picture Anna
with Joanna’s boyfriend.

  “Don’t know,” Jack said.

  “They kind of looked alike,” Riley observed. “The two women, I mean. Skinny, dark hair, same age. That could be his type.”

  “Totally different personalities, though,” Maggie said, as her eyes fell on a framed photo next to the television.

  “Maybe personality isn’t as important to him as a good pair of—um, physical characteristics,” Riley said.

  Maggie picked up the photo, which showed Anna and an unfamiliar young man, faces pressed together blowing out candles on a cake that read, “Happy Birthday Wayne.” “I’m willing to bet this is the boyfriend.”

  She passed it to the detectives. Riley wondered aloud why Anna was also blowing out candles and said perhaps she and Wayne were fraternal twins. Jack said that in that case the cake would read, “Wayne and Anna,” and Maggie said according to the e-mail they had a dinner date the following evening—tonight, actually—at Lola on East 4th and Anna hadn’t mentioned having any family living in town.

  Riley asked, “Any idea of a last name?”

  “An e-mail address.”

  “Wayne will be in her phone,” Jack said. “IT can get it for us.”

  “We’ll check him out, but my money is still on Mearan. Maggie, you need anything else from us before we go downstairs for a chat?”

  She shook her head.

  “Call if the ME investigator turns up something earth-shattering. Otherwise we’ll be back sooner or later, depending on what the boy toy tells us.”

  They left and she turned to the unpleasant task of doing what she could with Anna’s decimated body. She took more close-up photos of the torso, the hands, the area around her. The clothing, as before, had been ripped from neck to ankle with something very sharp and then flung open. Both hands had wounds, a deep stab in the center of the right palm and a slicing cut along three of the left fingers. Her left bicep and right forearm had slashes. One, from the position, seemed to have been postmortem, in line with a stab to the outside of one breast. The knife must have slid down a rib and continued into the arm. Anna’s breasts had taken a great deal of abuse; her chest was now a mass of torn skin and blood. Once the rib cage ended it got worse.

  The stomach had been pierced and the contents filled the air with a smell that the neighbors would be complaining about once they started leaving for work. Colon, small intestines, all had been breached, and a sickly brownish fluid mingled with the darkening blood in the peritoneal cavity and on the floor. The liver glistened with a dark red color. It was such a mess, Maggie thought with unwelcome despair. She could see no way to determine what came first or second or last. And what did it matter anyway? Someone had come in and stabbed Anna to death before she could do anything beyond throwing up her hands in self-defense. The blood loss came too fast and too severe; her life force flowed away before she could … what? Grab a phone? Scream?

  How had he managed to completely and quickly overpower a healthy young woman in a populated apartment building? It happened in the evening, obviously. People were home. These were nice apartments but not luxury condos and couldn’t be that well soundproofed. Maggie gazed at Anna’s throat and thought she could detect a slight bruising in the parts that weren’t smeared with blood. She would need the pathologist to tell her more, but it wouldn’t surprise her to learn that he had silenced Anna with a blow to the throat, as he had done with Tyra.

  It seemed an iffy way to keep someone quiet, hugely risky in a busy building.

  Maggie took copious photographs of Anna’s throat and used her superbright flashlight to examine it, her face coming way too close to her new friend’s drying bodily fluids. But she did not see finger marks or prints in the blood on Anna’s neck. It seemed to have been dabbed on here and there by contact with bloody clothing, either the suspect’s or her own, not by his hands as he choked her. Her face had stayed clean except for a few drops of red spray. Perhaps he had choked her into unconsciousness before the carnage began. Maggie would like to think so, but then why were her eyes open? More likely he had managed to damage the larynx enough to keep her from crying out, from shouting for help to the people to the sides, above and below, while her killer plunged a knife into her body again and again.

  Why? What could someone gain by killing these three women? Joanna and Anna had been on opposite sides of the business. It had been Anna’s job to force Sterling to toe the regulatory line, and Joanna evidently felt it had been her job to move that line to her own advantage whenever possible. Tyra had been in the middle, an honorable girl working for a less than honorable client. Who could be working against all three simultaneously?

  She got out her handheld crime scene light, a flashlight with a vaguely gun-like shape. The combination of wavelengths emitted would cause a number of things to fluoresce and glow—fibers with certain optical properties, luminescent paints, bodily fluids such as semen and, to a lesser extent, saliva. She didn’t expect to find much. Swabs from Joanna and Tyra had not shown any sign of sexual contact. Or rather, Maggie corrected her thought, they had shown no reaction for semen, which was not the same thing.

  Wearing a pair of orange goggles, she warned the two patrol officers outside that she would be dousing the lights in the apartment. She would leave the apartment door open, however, to give her just enough illumination to keep from stumbling around.

  “You’re going to work in a dark room with a dead body?” one of them asked her.

  “It will hardly be the first time.” She hit the switch.

  Blood did not fluoresce by itself; it had to be treated with a product such as luminol or Bluestar first, and then it did not need a light source to glow. Instead it absorbed the ultraviolet rays from her light and turned even darker, so that parts of Anna’s body seemed to disappear into a vast background. Other parts, like the few sections of unstained skin, appeared quite ordinary. There were a few spots of fluorescent light; some errant fibers, the tag inside her pants, the elastic in her underwear all glowed—as well as a spot about the size of a dime on the thin carpet next to Anna’s right thigh.

  That it might be from the killer seemed too much to hope. It could be a cleaning product, or if it was semen, it could be from a boisterous but past encounter with the absent Wayne. Still Maggie wasted no time in getting a sterile scalpel from her kit and cutting a square that included the stain from the carpet. She dropped it into a manila envelope, sealed it, and then used a fresh scalpel to cut another square a few inches away and unstained from the carpet as well. That would be their reference sample to show that whatever the glowing stain turned out to be, it could not be intrinsic to the carpeting itself.

  She still worked in the dark. She hadn’t wanted to take a chance on losing the spot or getting too close to it with a Sharpie, and the hallway lights gave her enough illumination to work. About to stand up and flick the switch, she caught a brief glance of two small glowing orbs watching her from the kitchen.

  “Well, hello, kitty,” she said.

  Chapter 28

  Jeremy Mearan sat in an empty apartment on the second floor that the building manager had donated to the cause of American justice. Mostly, Jack figured, to avoid loaning them his office, with its precisely ordered desk accessories and vintage Indian memorabilia. The vacated efficiency, however, still had coffee rings on the laminate counter from the former tenant, and said tenant’s parakeet had let a pile of down accumulate in one corner. No furniture remained, but the manager, determined to make the space workable, had scrounged up three folding chairs of varying condition. Jack’s wobbled. So did Jeremy Mearan’s, but he didn’t seem to notice. In his current state he wouldn’t notice if the ceiling were abruptly removed by alien life forms.

  He sat with his face in his hands, straightening only when Riley shut the door behind them with an audible clack. He still appeared to have stepped from the pages of a magazine but in an ad for more casual clothes, with his faded jeans, clean T–shirt, and perfect five o’clock shadow, bu
t without the poise and sense of entitlement models radiate in those posed photos. The two cops took their places across from Mearan. Riley read him his rights and had him sign the Miranda card.

  “What were you doing at Anna Hernandez’s apartment?” Riley asked.

  Mearan kept one fist propped against his chin as if his head were too heavy to keep upright otherwise. He wore an expression and spoke in a tone of utter hopelessness. “I went to see her.”

  “We could have worked that out for ourselves,” Riley said, his tone even.

  “I had … decided to give her the book.”

  “The book?”

  Talking seemed to require great effort on his part. “The employee manual. For Sterling Financial.”

  Jack said, “You went over to the Fed regulator’s home late at night to talk about Sterling’s company policy? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when you did, you just happened to stumble over her dead body?”

  “The door wasn’t shut all the way. When I knocked, it opened a crack and I could see—her.”

  He looked as if he would throw up. Jack kept up the questions, partly to avoid the puking. “Did you see anyone else? In the hallway, the elevator?”

  Mearan shook his head.

  “Did you go into the apartment?”

  “No! I … couldn’t … get any closer to her. I left the door where it was and called nine-one-one from the hallway.”

  “Anyone in the lobby? On the street?” Mearan kept shaking his head. “Where did you park?”

  “At a meter on the next block. The spaces are free this time of day.”

  “I’m aware of that, thanks. How often do you pay a visit to Anna Hernandez’s apartment?”

  “Um … this was maybe the fourth time.”

  “Does her boyfriend know?”

  “No. No one knows.” Mearan ran his hands through his short hair. Weirdly, mussing it only made it more perfect.

  “Did Joanna know? Was she angry?”