Perish

by Lisa Black

  Mearan seemed to pale even further, which shouldn’t have been possible, at the mention of his ex-boss-slash-girlfriend. “She’d have killed me. But Joanna’s gone. That’s why I finally decided to do it. No one else at Sterling deserves my loyalty.”

  Riley guessed at some math. “But you’d been carrying on with Anna before Joanna’s death. Did she know, or suspect? Is that why you killed her?”

  Mearan seemed to need a minute to work through those two questions before arriving at bafflement. “Kill who?”

  “Joanna.”

  “I didn’t kill Joanna!” He seemed stunned at the very idea. “I loved her. That’s why I couldn’t give Anna what she wanted … until now … because it didn’t matter anymore. Without Joanna, there’s no point… .”

  “Anna, then,” Riley moved on. “Why did you kill Anna?”

  “What?”

  Jack said, “Wait. What did Anna Hernandez want?”

  “The manual,” Mearan said.

  “The employee manual.”

  “Yes.”

  “You came to her apartment late at night to bring her an employee manual? Why couldn’t you have given it to her at the Sterling offices, where, by the way, you both happen to be all day long?”

  “I didn’t want anyone to know.”

  “Where is this manual?” Riley demanded. “You’re not carrying a book.”

  “It’s on the thumb drive. I handed it to you with my cell phone.”

  Riley glanced at the clear bag for personal property sitting on the coffee-stained counter.

  Jack said, “Let’s get this straight. Were you having a sexual affair with Anna Hernandez?”

  “No,” Mearan said, his voice suddenly very normal. He sounded like a tween girl offered broccoli for dinner. “Of course not! Why on earth would I be doing that?”

  “Why not? She’s young, very attractive…. In fact she looked a lot like Joanna.”

  Either they had woken the upstairs neighbor or that tenant had a very early whistle because footsteps creaked the ceiling over them. Meanwhile Mearan said, “Maybe. But she wasn’t.”

  “Attractive?”

  “Joanna.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  “No!”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “No! I … don’t think so, anyway. It has to be someone at Sterling.”

  Jack thought. “Why?”

  “Who else would know about the manual?”

  “What is this manual? How can it be so important?” Riley asked in exasperation.

  “Because it’s illegal.”

  The two cops exchanged frustrated glances. Jack said, through partly gritted teeth, “Start from the beginning, and explain your relationship with Anna Hernandez.”

  Another run of the hands through the hair, and Mearan sat back to give it his best shot. “When Anna first started as our regulator, she told us to feel free to pass on any concerns we had and she would respect our privacy—a polite way to say that if we wanted to do any whistleblowing, the Fed would protect our identities. I ignored her. I think everyone did. But on her second visit I—I had just been attacked in the parking lot by a guy I had put into an ARM a few months before. The intro rate had run out and his payment had doubled. He wanted to refinance but we’d have lost money on the loan, or rather not made enough.”

  “Imagine that,” Jack said.

  “Hadn’t the loan been sold by then?” Riley asked, with visible pride in having gotten the hang of this.

  “No, with power loans we milk the interest for at least six months.”

  “So what did he do?”

  “He waited on the sidewalk outside the lot and reamed me out, swung at me, but I jumped inside the building and locked the door. I felt pretty shaken up. I immediately went to Joanna, but she basically told me to suck it up and shoved me out of her office. I mean … I respected Joanna’s focus, but I couldn’t even pour myself a coffee because my hands were shaking. It freaked me out, this guy. His face got so red, I don’t know who I felt more scared for, me or him. In fact, it was that guy—that Resnick guy.”

  “Kurt Resnick?”

  “Yeah, him.”

  “The current face of mob violence against Sterling? And you didn’t think to mention that before?” Riley demanded.

  Mearan blinked at him.

  Jack got it. “Because his experience is commonplace, isn’t it? Sterling has screwed so many people that they all melt together. Right?”

  Mearan considered this question as if it were a piece of modern art. “You tell yourself that they can afford it, that they deserve what they get for not doing their own due diligence, that they’re poor anyway and this won’t make their lives a lot different, but … that’s not really true.”

  “You don’t say,” Jack drawled.

  “We steal. We rip people off right and left. We make up fees, charge them much higher interest than they could have gotten elsewhere and tell them that’s the best they can do. We encourage them to lie on their income verification, and when they don’t, we do it for them. We tell them they’re getting a fixed rate and then change the paperwork to make it adjustable. We do exactly what Ameriquest and FAMCO were doing in the early 2000s. We are crooks,” he said wearily. “We are beyond crooks. And suddenly I couldn’t do the mental gymnastics to hide that fact from myself anymore, all because Joanna didn’t want to listen to me whine. If she hadn’t shoved me out of her office, she could have talked me down. That woman could talk me into anything.”

  “And Anna Hernandez?” Riley prompted. “Did she listen to you whine?”

  “Exactly. She noticed my hands, poured the coffee for me. I couldn’t help telling her what had happened.”

  “So another dark-haired beauty—”

  “Not like that,” Mearan immediately corrected. “There was never anything between me and Anna except her investigation. I told her about that particular case, only that, but dropped a few hints that situations like his might be widespread. We kept in touch after that. I fed her the grunts a couple times.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Like I told her I saw Joe McKinnon faking a W-2 form with Wite-Out and a copy machine, because he’s an asshole anyway.”

  “And what did she do?”

  “Nothing. She’s gathering information to ask for a full-scale investigation of Sterling. That takes a while. Things have to be pretty egregious before the feds will investigate. Anna knew I was hedging my bets, and she hedged hers, gathering what she could, trying to pull me into being a whistleblower. At the same time I tried to keep her on line to use against Joanna if she tried to go to New York without me.”

  “You do have a way with the ladies,” Jack said before he could help it.

  “I’m a shit, okay?” Mearan snapped. “You think I don’t know that?”

  Riley pulled them back on track. “How many times had you been to Anna Hernandez’s apartment before?”

  “A couple of times. The last about two weeks ago. I told her a few more things about Joe McKinnon, and Artie switching the papers on a duplex, and Helen convincing a guy that a credit score of 650 only qualified him for eleven percent. But she was getting tired of my dancing. I couldn’t make up my mind what I wanted to do—turn myself and everyone else in, or double down and throw in with the devil for good.”

  “So Anna—”

  “She wanted the manual. It’s used for training new account managers. We have a weeklong orientation at a conference center in their area. The newbies usually have a sales background, cars, insurance, not usually real estate, so they don’t have much to unlearn before they can learn our way of doing things.”

  “The shady way,” Jack said, just to clarify.

  “Exactly. It’s a little insane to have stuff like that written down, okay, but it creates consistency. Our people move around a lot, especially at the managerial level, so we need to have everyone on the same page.”

  “And if this manual fell into the wrong hands�
�such as Anna Hernandez’s and the Fed’s—it could be used against you,” Riley said.

  “It would sink us. It’s predatory lending written in stone.”

  “And Joanna knew about this manual?”

  Mearan snorted. “Joanna wrote it. Of course, she copied most of it from the Ameriquest one. It’s amazing what you can find online these days.”

  “Does Lauren know?”

  “Are you kidding? She runs the on-site training.”

  “And you have it, this manual?”

  “Joanna had it on her laptop. I copied it to my USB one night while she was sleeping.”

  Jack could picture the comely Joanna tangled in the sheets, while Mearan tiptoed down to her kitchen or her office to steal a file from her computer. He wondered if Joanna knew…. The odds of Jeremy Mearan putting something over on Joanna Moorehouse seemed slim. Jack would have bet the woman had slept with one eye literally open. She might have let Mearan have his little intrigue, knowing all the while that it didn’t matter what he did. A merger, a clingy boyfriend, a federal investigation—she would be escaping from all of them, into the arms of her offshore bank account plus whatever profit the CDSs made.

  Perhaps that’s what had made Mearan so angry when they told him of the Panamanian account.

  “And you gave this manual to Anna?” Riley was asking.

  “No. Like I said, I hedged. I thought if Jo tried to dump me before the move to New York, I’d blackmail her with it, threaten to give it to Anna if she didn’t make me an assistant director at least.”

  What a charming relationship. “And you argued?” Jack asked.

  “With Joanna? No. It never came up—we were still working on the merger and then … she got killed.” He stopped dead, staring at nothingness, an expression of not only sadness but utter hopelessness on his face. Their lives had been hard-core sociopathic but he had been in genuine love, or something very much like it, with Joanna Moorehouse.

  “So why did you come to Anna Hernandez’s apartment tonight?” Riley asked.

  “To bring her the manual,” Mearan said, as if that should be obvious. “Without Joanna, protecting Sterling didn’t make any sense. I guess you could say I finally made up my mind. I called her, told her I would bring it over. She said fine.”

  Riley asked, “She say anything else? That she’d be out, or in, or had someone over? Voices in the background?”

  “Nothing.” He said he had arrived around 9:30, knocked on the door, saw the body, called 911.

  But hapless Jeremy Mearan had still appeared at the site of two brutal murders of women he had known well. When all the smoke cleared, those were facts not easily pushed aside.

  But if he had killed Anna Hernandez, how did he do it without a single drop of her blood flying back onto himself? Mearan’s T-shirt remained immaculate. The jeans had faded to a light blue and had no dark spots; neither did the worn loafers. His arms were clean, the nails manicured. He would have had to bring a change of clothes, moved into them—perhaps inside Anna’s apartment—then disposed of them and returned to Anna’s door, all without being seen. Jack made a mental note to check the building’s garbage chute and Dumpster but didn’t expect to find anything.

  Jack’s gut instinct said Mearan did not kill the women, but gut instinct could go badly wrong.

  “What about Tyra Simmons?”

  Mearan blinked.

  “Did she know about this manual?”

  The guy shrugged. “She knew of it. But we let her think it was more an oral structure than a written document. She’d have told us to get rid of it. To a lawyer, writing down how you instruct your employees to lie and defraud, well, you might as well shoot yourself.”

  “So why is she dead?” Jack asked.

  Mearan blinked harder. “I have no idea. You think they’ve all been killed over the manual?”

  “Why not? It could have put the whole lot of you in jail, right? People have been murdered for less.”

  “But the manual has been around for years. It’s not that big of a deal.”

  “Wholesale fraud is not a big deal?”

  “In this line of work,” Mearan assured Jack wearily, “it’s nothing that hasn’t been seen before.”

  “So then why are they dead?”

  “I don’t know.” Mearan leaned forward, letting his face fall into his hands again. His muffled voice escaped, both hopeless and desperate for hope. “I just don’t know. And it’s killing me.”

  Chapter 29

  Jack returned to the apartment in time to see the body snatchers zipping up a body bag with what remained of Anna Hernandez inside. They had to strip off their bloody gloves and don new ones to do so—there had been no way to neatly remove her from the pool of bodily fluid surrounding her form like a sick aura. The ME investigator stood making notes on a clipboard. Two plastic crates full of brown paper bags, numbered but not sealed—she would do that at the lab—had been stacked neatly on the dining room table, and all the furniture now sat slightly out of place, evidence of Maggie’s obsessive searching for something, anything, that the killer might have left behind. Maggie herself waited next to the coffee table, her gaze on the body bag being hefted onto the gurney. She held a mottled brown tabby cat in her arms and cried.

  Jack looked again.

  Yes, Maggie was crying. Very subtly, of course, the way she would, but her cheeks were definitely wet and a new tear rolled down them as he watched. He hoped for a moment that it could be sweat, but the temperature had fallen with the sun and a clammy breeze rolled through an open window.

  This irritated him greatly. Maggie remained a threat to him. Their uneasy truce had held so far but it could dissolve at any moment. It only required Maggie to have one wrong moment of remorse or conscience or too much to drink with too close of a confidant or melancholia like that that had obviously struck her now, and his carefully constructed world could blow up. And he had no way to predict that, no method of monitoring her in order to have an early warning. No time to pack up and get out.

  He was the fool, he suddenly realized. If Maggie posed such a threat—and she did—the only thing for him to do was to leave town, to resign, say his good-byes, invent a girlfriend who lived in Wyoming or something and get out while the getting was good. Then Maggie could weaken all she wanted, or needed. He would be out of reach.

  He had failed to take the necessary steps, not her.

  He snatched a napkin from a dispenser on the table, crossed behind the gurney, and wiped her cheeks, not too gently.

  She looked up at him in surprise but at least shrugged out of the cloak of sadness enough to ask, “What did Jeremy say?”

  It took his mind a moment to refocus. He summarized, and they were right back where they should be. Working the crime scene, two professionals, nothing on their minds but the murder of Anna Hernandez. “She could have been killed over this manual, but Mearan swears no one had any idea he planned to turn it over. It would make more sense for someone to have killed Mearan. I see you made a new friend.”

  She glanced down at the cat, now getting a little bored with being held. “I’ll take him home until we see if the boyfriend wants him. Patrol made contact—he’s in Atlanta on an overnight trip.”

  “Animal Services can hold him.”

  “No,” was all she said, in a tone that advised him not to argue.

  *

  “You look like crap,” Carol told Maggie two hours later.

  “Thanks. And thanks for coming in.”

  “No prob. I love coming to work in what is technically the middle of the night. Traffic is so much lighter than it is at reasonable hours.”

  Maggie handed her a manila envelope, now properly labeled and sealed. “I did an acid phosphatase and it’s positive.”

  “Semen?”

  “It may be nothing. It may be everything.”

  “I’ll get right on it. But you know, if Denny argues about my overtime, I’m pointing him straight to you.”

  Maggie didn
’t even smile.

  “You okay?”

  Maggie shook her head. “No, not really. I—I liked her. I think we could have been friends.”

  Carol leaned against the counter behind her. “And we’re not used to meeting murder victims before they become murder victims.”

  “Yeah. But it’s not just that.” Maggie ran her hands through her hair, which would make it more unruly than usual but, as usual, she didn’t care. “Someone has killed someone every day and we are no closer to knowing who or even why than we were when the cleaning woman found Joanna’s body. We have no clue. And anyone at Sterling who does is not telling. There’s missing money. There’s a bribe. There’s fraud. There’re damning documents that could take a whole lot of people down. There’s a love affair and cutthroat competition. You want a motive? Pick one.”

  “And normally we can’t find any.”

  “Instead we have too many. Any one of which could be walking up to these people, slicing them up to—to shreds—and walking away. Without a witness, without a scream, without a footprint. How?”

  Her voice raised too much on the last word, let too much anguish escape into it. Carol gave her a look shading from concern to alarm. “You need to get some sleep. The cops are working on it and you can’t save the world by yourself.”

  “I’m not worried about the world. I’m worried about the one person who, if the past few days are any indication, will die tonight between dinnertime and bedtime on their own living room floor.” Maggie stood up. “I’m going to call the feds, see if they expedited my latent request. Can you run that piece of carpet right away? Like—”

  “Like now,” Carol nodded. “On it. But promise me that at some point today you’ll go home for a nap.”

  “Of course,” Maggie said.

  They both knew she lied.

  *

  By noon Maggie had called the FBI twice and talked to a kindly older man. He had indulged her rush jobs in the past and now assured her he would call the moment the search results came through. She had examined every inch of every item she had collected from the apartment and run all the prints she had lifted through the database without much hope that any of them belonged to the killer; none of the surfaces or items she had dusted had given her any reason to think that the killer had touched or moved them. As before, he or she seemed to have entered, murdered, and left. She went to the autopsy purely to collect the fingernail scrapings and to see if what had been done to Anna coincided with or diverged from what had been done to the other two victims. She still felt a pang to think of her potential friend as she had been in life but didn’t feel a compulsion to stay with her body through the outwardly horrific process of autopsy. Anna, the essence of Anna, had moved on and would not feel any concern or interest in the processing of her bodily remains. Maggie felt as sentimental about life as the next person but had long lost any sentimentality about death.