Perish

by Lisa Black

  Jack lied best when he had time to prepare. He didn’t excel at ad lib. So as he pulled open the lobby door—the front sidewalk now inexplicably clear of protesters—he took out his phone and checked the call history. No call from Maggie, but he told Riley that there was, that he hadn’t picked up because he’d been talking to Nebraska.

  “Oh,” Riley said as they piled into the elevator. “Glad you didn’t have a fight.”

  He didn’t ask what the private chat in the ME’s parking lot had been about. Pointedly so.

  Jack tried to think of ways to say that he and Maggie hadn’t argued, though they had, and that they weren’t in a relationship, though they were in a weird, messed-up way. When the doors opened at their floor he still hadn’t come up with anything.

  Nothing, it seemed, affected the Sterling offices. Jack thought if the killer worked his way through their entire workforce, the last man would be at his desk, on the phone, alternately cajoling and threatening his regional directors to do more, produce more, make more loans, and bring in more fees. “You only did a million and a half last month,” he heard one man, who barely seemed old enough for a legal drink, shout into the receiver. “That’s nothing. Your counterpart in Lansing did three. And this month it’s going to be four, or you know what? I’m going to fire him. So what do you think I’m going to do to you if you’re not at least at two by next week?”

  No one appeared upset over Anna’s death. True, Anna had not been one of them; she had worked largely by herself and had been there only for a few weeks. And she had been an enemy of sorts, working to uncover whatever dirty little secrets the Sterling clan preferred to keep. In that way Anna’s death was a boon for them—now the merger would be over and done with long before a new regulator could be brought up to speed.

  Lauren Schneider certainly hadn’t paused to grieve. She hummed at her desk as if her body were a finely tuned violin string. The small amount of papers on her blotter had grown to messy stacks and a legal pad in front of her had been covered with elaborate scribbles of to-do tasks. She spoke quickly on the phone while glowing lights on its console spoke of two calls holding. And she seemed more animated than they had ever seen her. She seemed happy. She seemed ecstatic.

  She didn’t even look annoyed when the two detectives entered her office without knocking.

  “Triple-A. That’s what I said, triple-A. Call Carter & Poe if you don’t believe me. Look, Bob, I have to go. Say hi to Jeannie. Bye. Bye.” She hung up. “Do you have him? Whoever’s been killing us?”

  “Not yet,” Jack told her. He didn’t sit, uninvited or otherwise. “Do you know a Patrick Caldwell?”

  She blinked, thought. “No.”

  “We’ll need to check your employee rolls. Especially from Nebraska.”

  She didn’t argue, still processing the implications of a name—any name. “Is that who it is? The killer? How do you know?”

  “It’s the name of someone we’d like to speak to.”

  “Is he one of Ned’s crew?”

  “We checked that. We need to know if he is or has ever been an employee of Sterling,” Riley said.

  “I can have my assistant check.”

  “Or a client.”

  “I can do that,” she said, and immediately began typing on her keyboard. Lauren Schneider wasn’t stupid. Three people from the Sterling office had died and, Jack realized, they had all been women. Females were scarce at Sterling—cutthroat loan brokering remained largely a man’s game. Aside from a petite blond manager at a cubicle in the main room and Deb Fischer, with her husband and big dog, Lauren was the only woman left.

  Maybe the guy didn’t feel confident about going up against someone his own size, Jack thought. Or maybe he just liked killing women.

  “We did a refi for a Patrick Allen Caldwell in Cheyenne,” Lauren said. “Last year.”

  “No, it was Patrick …” Riley paused.

  “Jason,” Jack supplied.

  She scanned her screen. “Patrick Jason Caldwell. Home equity line in Sarasota. Male, black, married … sixty-eight years of age.”

  “Not our guy,” Jack said.

  Lauren shrugged and searched again. “I have a Patricia Caldwell in Nebraska. Lincoln. Caucasian, schoolteacher … seventy-two.”

  “Mother?” Riley speculated.

  Lauren said, “Refi with line of credit … defaulted … huh.”

  “What’s ‘huh’?”

  “Says here the local Legal Aid brought a lawsuit against us for not disclosing the payment bump when the intro rate ran out. But Mrs. Caldwell died before the case got to court.”

  “Could be a motive.”

  Lauren stared at him. “For killing people?”

  Riley said, “If someone ruined your mom’s life and drove her into an early heart attack? Yes.”

  “There’s no evidence that happened. She could have had cancer, for all we know,” she scoffed.

  “Any mention of a son or husband?” Jack asked.

  “No. Only what I told you.”

  “Any other Caldwells? Past clients as well as current?”

  “This is everybody.” She nodded at the screen. “We have a number of Caldwells, but no other Patricks. Two in California, a LaVerne, widow, seventy-eight, and a John and Maybelle, both eighty-one.”

  Jack pulled out his phone and showed her the mug shot Maggie had e-mailed. Lauren stared carefully at the image, frowned, and continued to frown.

  “You know him?” Jack asked.

  “No … I don’t know. I don’t think so.” She placed a finger across the phone’s small screen, blocking out the lower half of the man’s face with its bushy beard. “Something about the eyes—no, honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen him before. He certainly isn’t someone I know.”

  “We’ll need to ask the rest of your staff. Everyone, down to the parking lot attendant.”

  A sharp exhalation passed for a chuckle. “Good luck with that. But go ahead—ask any one of my employees anything you need. This has to be resolved, if this merger is ever going to get done.”

  “And if you want people to stop dying,” Jack added.

  “Yes,” she said. “That too.”

  Just to be thorough they went through the same process with Maxwell Jacob Demuth and Aaron Michael Modesto. Demuth and Modesto being less common surnames than Caldwell, it didn’t take as much time. Sterling had no employees named Demuth and only two clients, a Connie in Utah, black, widow, sixty-nine, and a Thomas in Atlanta, white, widower, seventy-seven. A few more Modestos, but they proved no more suspicious. Most were elderly.

  “You do like to help out those senior citizens, don’t you?” It was Riley’s turn to scoff.

  “Older people are often house rich but cash poor. We help them use their assets to maintain a healthy standard of living,” she said primly.

  He said, “Is that from page five of your manual? The section on catchphrases and rationalizations?”

  She didn’t react to the mention of the manual. She either didn’t care or assumed his question had been rhetorical. So Jack got specific and asked her if she knew of the existence of the manual. She denied it. He asked if she knew that Jeremy Mearan had been about to hand it over to Anna Hernandez. The quick widening of her eyes told him that she had not known and now that she did she felt pretty damn ticked off about it, yet her mouth told him she didn’t know anything about any manual and certainly not what Jeremy and Anna had been up to on their own time.

  Meanwhile the tightening of those lips said that Jeremy Mearan had better start looking for another job. Immediately.

  Jack couldn’t believe they had hit another dead end. He felt fairly certain they had the guy’s name and picture, and they were still floundering in the dark.

  On their way out the door he turned back. “Ms. Schneider, do you live alone?”

  “No. Husband and two daughters, remember?”

  Jack hadn’t. “Tell them not to answer the door tonight. To anyone.”

 
At first she didn’t seem to understand him. Then she did, and the blood drained from her already pale face, turning it a ghostly, translucent white from her expertly supported cleavage to her slight widow’s peak of dark hair.

  He shut her office door.

  *

  “You love me,” Carol said to Maggie.

  “Always,” Maggie said, looking up from her microscope. She had spent the past fifteen minutes gathering fiber samples from the lab’s supply of booties, sleeves, jumpsuits, and disposable lab coats to see if she could tell a difference between manufacturers. So far, not so much. “But why in particular at this moment?”

  “I pushed our semen through CODIS.”

  Maggie sat up. “Already?”

  “What can I say? I have mad skills. I also promised to send a guy in Virginia a full pan of cinnamon rolls. Have you ever had my cinnamon rolls?”

  “Got a result? Does it match?”

  The older woman held out a sheet of paper like a velvet-clad herald reading a decree from the king. “Results of CODIS database search number C-L-one-five-one—”

  “Carol!”

  “Patrick Jason Cald—”

  “Caldwell,” Maggie said. “Patrick Caldwell. Date of birth four fourteen ninety-six.”

  Carol pretended to pout. “Please don’t tell me I have to make cinnamon rolls for nothing. Those suckers are not easy. You have to baby the yeast—”

  She broke off as Maggie leapt up to throw exultant arms around her.

  “Ooof. You’re welcome.”

  Maggie snatched up the phone.

  Chapter 31

  “But I thought there wasn’t any sign of sexual assault,” Jack said into the phone as Riley drove to Ned Swift’s headquarters.

  “A tentative conclusion because the autopsy didn’t find semen.” Maggie’s excitement bled through the super-professional voice she was using with him At least she had called him and not Riley, which should allay his partner’s sidelong glances for another day. “But he cut all their clothes off and sliced up their breasts and uterus.”

  “And heart and lungs and—”

  “Still. Of course it had a sexual motivation. We’ve been saying that from the start—no one kills like that over money. I figure he wore a condom, but at Anna’s it slipped, spilled a little when he removed it.”

  “Along with the Tyvek jumpsuit.”

  “Exactly.”

  “It’s still speculation,” he warned her. Jack did not speculate. In his personal endeavors he did not move until he had proven every accusation, established every fact, down to the last detail. “Patrick Caldwell could be an ex-boyfriend.”

  “Of both Anna’s and her boss’s?”

  “Possibly. Joanna got around, apparently.”

  “If his print was only at her place, yes. But his print was in blood. That can’t have an innocent explanation.”

  “You can’t be positive it is his print.”

  “True,” she said. “But still it defies imagination to think even possible evidence of him could turn up at two different crime scenes.”

  “I agree. We’ll start a dragnet for Patrick Caldwell.” He hung up as Riley pulled up to the curb along the side of the sagging storefront on East 40th near Chester. “Let’s hope these guys can give us a line on who the hell Patrick Caldwell is.”

  “Even if they know, do you think they’ll tell us? They rallied around Kurt Resnick.”

  “Kurt Resnick is their victim-of-predatory-lending poster child,” Jack said as he got out of the car. “Patrick Caldwell is an escaped rapist. They’ll figure it out.”

  “You, partner of mine, are an optimist.”

  “Hardly,” Jack said, and slammed the door.

  *

  Maggie decided to go home. The rest of the city’s occupants were eating dinner and she needed some recharging as well. She had done all she could for the moment, or so Denny kept telling her. The BOLO (Be On The Lookout) had been put out for Patrick Jason Caldwell along with his photo, and every cop in the city would be looking for him. She had written up her reports on the fingerprint and the Tyvek fibers. Carol had made up a preliminary finding on the semen stain from Anna’s carpet, and the detectives had an arrest warrant signed. Now all they had to do was find the son of a bitch.

  In the meantime, weariness tugged at her muscles and brain cells, forcing her to finally admit that she could do no more. She returned to her apartment—more easily because she knew that a meowing ball of fur would be waiting for her. Maggie wasn’t sure her apartment building even allowed pets, as it had never been an issue before. Just a temporary arrangement, anyway.

  She had brought a bag of dry food, a jug of scoopable litter, and a few toys from Anna’s apartment to set up the currently nameless cat. She hoped Alex wouldn’t mind if he ever found out that she used the basalt bowl—densest stone there was—he had paid so much to ship as a cat feeder … but most of her other dishes were in the washer and the cat wouldn’t be able to scoot this one all over the floor. Densest stone, after all. A bowl of water, a flat cardboard box to hold the litter and the animal had spent a leisurely day in Maggie’s apartment. At least it didn’t seem to be complaining when she returned. She dumped her purse and lunch bag and cardigan on the couch and sank to the ground.

  “I think I know who killed your mistress,” she said, stroking the tabby’s head. “But I have no idea why. Or where he is now.”

  The cat listened, staring into her eyes.

  “Even if Patrick Caldwell is one of those loan officers and thought Anna, and maybe Tyra, were a threat to Sterling, how could he think of Joanna that way? She had every reason in the world to protect Sterling until her last breath. And if he had been screwed over royally by Sterling, maybe lost his house, ruined his life, why would he blame Anna? She tried to help the little guy.” The cat crawled into her lap, purring, and seemed to frown as Maggie kept speaking. “Maybe he thought she didn’t do enough. Like abused children, they often blame the nonabusing parent more than the violent one. Maybe he didn’t even know what Anna did, simply saw her there in the offices and assumed she worked for Sterling. Or maybe”—she looked down at the cat, the cat looked up at her—“he just likes killing women.”

  The cat meowed.

  Maybe Jack just liked killing, too. Maybe that was why he couldn’t resist taking care of Gerry Graham, a man who had already been taken care of, who sat in a courtroom about to go to jail. Maybe Jack truly hadn’t trusted her ability to get the job done. Or maybe he enjoyed murder, not as a benign protector of innocents but as bloodthirsty and voracious as Patrick Caldwell.

  And her silence kept Jack free, instead of putting him in a cell next to Caldwell, where he belonged. Where maybe he belonged.

  She looked at her phone, sitting on the coffee table near her outstretched feet. All she had to do was pick it up and dial Denny, or the homicide unit, and tell them she had to amend her statement.

  She could call Rick.

  Rick would believe her. He had been with the department much longer than Jack and would be able to convince the other cops to take her word over that of a fellow officer. He could even help her construct a narrative that might keep her out of jail, some story in which she and Jack struggled over the gun and by accident shot someone directly in the center of the forehead, instead of the truth, that she alone quite purposely aimed the barrel. He could help her put an end to all this.

  But what would he want from her in return?

  Nothing gross like sexual services. He might hint but he wouldn’t exactly blackmail—not even Rick would do that. But he would expect any forensic requests of his to be moved to the top of the pile. He would expect her full attention when he wanted it. He would expect any favor requested, short of sexual services, to be instantly granted. Forever.

  There was no way she’d give her ex-husband that kind of power over her. Not to mention that forcing the burden of her secret onto his shoulders wouldn’t be fair to him, either. Not that Rick had ever felt lying
to be much of a burden.

  No. If she did this, it would be without Rick. Maggie scratched the cat’s ears, considering the same options that had churned through her mind for weeks.

  She would simply have to tell the truth—the whole truth, and nothing but. She could play up the trauma and fear and fish-out-of-water bewilderment involved in her pulling of that trigger. It might sway a jury. It might not.

  Outside, the thunder rumbled in the distance and the cat snuggled itself more deeply into her lap.

  She could not tell a soul without accepting life, or a good chunk of it, in prison. She could never tell Rick or Denny or Carol and certainly not Alex such a thing and then ask them to keep her secret. That would be relieving some of her own burden by shifting it to them and she could never do that. The only person she could talk to, really talk to, in this new reality was Jack Renner. Who would only tell her to stop talking. The only alternative included hard time.

  But all to avenge the murder of Gerry Graham? No, hardly. It was to do the right thing despite Gerry Graham, despite the fact that he had been a scourge on the earth and, in or out of jail, would continue to be. She could see no downside to his death—not for the taxpayers, not for his fellow inmates if he remained incarcerated nor his fellow gang members if he were set free by exceptionally clever lawyers. No doubt colleagues had already stepped up to fill the employment gap in his absence and might have fatally argued a demotion if the system released him.

  Great, Maggie. You’re using the well-being of thugs as a justification for accessory to murder. A new low.

  She needed to pick up that phone. She forced her hand toward it.

  The cat, resenting the interruption to its needs, dug its claws into her thigh.

  “Ow! You might have warned me you still had those before I took you on as a roomie.” She leaned over the cat and snatched the phone off the table.

  The claws dug in again, as if both a warning and a premonition.

  But she didn’t dial it. Something was missing in her mental structure, had been missing all this time. A gap that had kept her silent all this time, about both her own culpability and Jack’s.