“I worked on the case, yes. And call me Emmy.”
“Worked on the case.” He chuckles and sizes me up, probably looking for scars. I’m wearing a scarf that covers my neck, so there’s nothing to see here.
“You brought the coroner’s findings?” I ask.
“There was no autopsy,” he says. “No need for one. But we have her initial investigation notes, yes. And I brought the photos too.”
That should be good enough. I turn to the house. Nora Connolley lived in a one-story, stucco A-frame with tomato-red and lime trim. The tiny front yard is enclosed by a wrought-iron fence. A red, white, and blue For Sale sign from a real estate company called Jensen Keller is attached to the fence.
“Wanna go inside?” he says, opening the gate and walking toward the front porch.
“I want to go in the back way,” I say. “Let’s start with the detached garage.”
Crescenzo turns to me. “There’s a detached garage? How did you know that? That Google Earth thing?”
“The video on the real estate agent’s website,” I say. “That’s how he knew it too.”
“He being the killer.” Not hiding the skepticism in his voice.
I walk around the house, following the wrought-iron fence, which encircles the whole property. The backyard is far larger than the front yard.
“Nothing was taken from the home,” Crescenzo says, keeping pace with me. “No sign of sexual assault. No sign of struggle.”
I can’t blame him for thinking this was exactly what it looked like, a slip-and-fall in a shower. He has no reason to think otherwise.
“Were there unexplained puncture wounds on her torso?” I ask.
“How—” He stops in his tracks. “Now, how in the hell did you know that?”
“Lucky guess.” I stop and look over the area. She kept a nice yard. A vegetable garden in one corner, a neat cobblestone walkway leading from the garage to the back patio.
“Needle punctures,” he says.
“Two of them.”
“Yes, Emmy, two of them. You know a lot.”
“How big a woman was she?” I ask.
“The deceased? Oh, she was a tiny woman. Maybe five two, five three. Not thin like you, but not heavy either.”
She looked petite from the photos I saw on Facebook, but you can never be sure.
We reach the detached garage, a small, windowed structure with aluminum siding. We walk through the fence into the alley. The garage door is closed and locked. We walk back around to the door that leads into the yard. The door is locked from the outside.
“I didn’t ask the real estate agent to open the garage up,” says Robert. “Just the house.”
I push on the handles of the window and it gives. I lift the window as high as it can go. Then I turn to Robert Crescenzo.
He raises his hands. “Don’t look at me.” He’s well over six feet tall and broad-shouldered. No way he could fit through that opening.
“Okay if I slip in?” I’m tall myself, but I’m skinny as a rail these days.
He thinks about it a moment but probably realizes there isn’t any harm.
It’s easier than I expect. I slide in headfirst, facing up, and when my torso is through, I reach out, grip the interior frame of the window, and bring my legs in. I grit my teeth and ignore the pain in my ribs. My landing on the garage floor won’t qualify me for the Olympic gymnastics team, but I stay on my feet.
I take my first breath inside and I’m hit with the smell of gas and lawn clippings. With the light coming through the window, it isn’t hard for me to navigate around the parked car and open the door into the yard. I flip on a light switch too. The garage is small, only enough room for a single car, a bicycle, and assorted lawn equipment.
Robert Crescenzo comes in through the door I opened. He shines a flashlight into the car’s interior. He tries the door, and it’s open, so he pops the trunk, goes around, and lights that up too.
“Nothing obvious, at least.” He looks at me. “Did you think there would be? You think, what, she was ambushed in her garage?”
No, that’s not what I think. But I say, “Maybe,” and gesture to the car. “You mind if I get in?”
“Suit yourself.”
I get in on the driver’s side and sink back into the seat. I don’t want to touch the steering wheel, but I reach for it, noting that I can barely touch it with my fingertips even though my arms are fully extended. My feet don’t reach the brake and gas pedals.
“Could we trade places?” I ask.
“Okay…”
I get out, and Robert gets in, settles in the seat, puts a hand atop the steering wheel.
“Pretty comfortable fit for you,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“But not for a woman who’s a foot shorter than you.”
Sergeant Crescenzo blinks twice, thinks about it, then turns and looks at me.
“Someone other than Nora Connolley drove this car last,” he says.
8
SERGEANT ROBERT CRESCENZO and I leave the garage and go back to the patio. He walks along the cobblestone path. I walk in the grass next to him.
“At the risk of stating the obvious,” he says, “just because someone else drove her car last doesn’t mean that that somebody killed her.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I agree.
“Maybe one of her kids drove it. She had two children, I think.”
“Three,” I say. “Mary lives in Oklahoma, Sarah lives in Baton Rouge—”
“But her boy, Michael, lives here in New Orleans. An officer spoke with him.”
“Yeah, but he was in Dallas the week she died.”
Sergeant Crescenzo stops walking. I turn to look at him.
“You’ve been contacting witnesses on my case?” he says.
“I didn’t contact him. I saw his trip on Facebook. Besides,” I say, “I thought it wasn’t a case. Her death was an accident, right?”
He gives me a sidelong glance.
“I just used public information,” I say. I turn back to the patio. It is no wider than the sliding glass door but it’s large enough to allow for a small table with an umbrella and a gas barbecue grill.
“The patio is immaculate,” I say.
Sergeant Crescenzo stands next to me. “A clean patio? If that doesn’t say murder, I don’t know what does.”
“It’s not just clean, Robert. It’s spotless. Like it was scrubbed down.”
He takes a look and lets out an equivocal hum, conceding the possibility without conceding the importance.
I step from the grass to the patio, walk to the sliding glass door, and look back down at the path I just made.
“See my shoe prints on the concrete?” I say. “All I did was walk from the garage to the back door on the grass, and the dirt on my shoes made faint marks. And the grass is dry.”
The sergeant doesn’t seem impressed.
“She was found dead in the morning, right?” I ask. “By the cleaning lady?”
“Right.”
“The day before that, did it rain?”
Robert looks up, trying to remember. “I don’t recall.” He closes his eyes. “But something tells me you already know the answer.”
“It rained the day before she was found dead,” I say. “It rained just over half an inch. It stopped by four p.m.” I point to the concrete. “I made a faint impression on the patio after walking on dry grass. If she came home after four and walked from the garage to the back door on wet grass, she would have marked up the patio. And it hasn’t rained since then, so don’t tell me a later rainfall washed it off.”
“Hey, I’m not telling you anything,” he says a bit defensively. “You don’t know that she went out at all the previous day. And even if she did, you don’t know that she took this same walk from the garage to the back patio. And why wouldn’t she walk on the cobblestone path, which would keep her shoes drier? Hell, you don’t even know that she drove her car that day. Maybe she took the
bus. There’s a bus stop a block away.”
“You’re right,” I say. “I don’t know any of those things. But neither do you, Robert.”
He does that double-blink thing again.
“That’s why you should open an investigation,” I say.
9
SERGEANT CRESCENZO opens the back door to Nora Connolley’s house.
“You’re not gonna find anything in here,” he says. “The place is immaculate.”
“Like her patio.”
“She was selling her house, Emmy. She kept it looking nice.”
“One of many reasons she was a good target,” I say. “Nobody wonders why it was cleaned up so neatly.”
We open the door to the kitchen. It is a simple square shape. The cabinets are dated. The tile floor is clean but not just-washed clean. No doubt the responding officers were inside here, and the cleaning lady wouldn’t have come again once she discovered her boss dead. Everything is in order. No dishes in the sink, no crumbs on the counter. There is a small silver garbage can by the dishwasher. I put my foot down on the lever, pop the top, and look inside. Empty.
“What time did the medical examiner give for her death?” I ask. “I assume, based on lividity and all the stuff they do, they put her death at the night before, not the morning.”
I look at Robert Crescenzo, who allows a grudging smile. “That’s correct. She slipped in the shower the night before. The shower was running when the cleaning lady found her the next morning.”
“So she took a shower at night.”
“Some people do that, Emmy.”
True enough. I look in the refrigerator. There is a gallon of skim milk, unopened. A full bottle of orange juice, the top still sealed. The fruit drawer below is filled with apples and strawberries, not quite fresh anymore. A pound of ground turkey, still wrapped in plastic, rests next to a six-pack of yogurt.
“Looks like she’d just picked up some groceries,” I say. “Never got a chance to eat them. Y’know, Robert, if we did an autopsy, we’d know about her stomach contents. Whether she ate dinner the night she died.”
“Right,” he says. “If it turns out she didn’t eat dinner the night before, we’ll know for sure she was murdered!”
“Robert, Robert, Robert.” I close the refrigerator. “I’m not saying that. But who comes home and takes a shower before eating dinner?”
“I’m sure some people do.”
I raise my eyebrows. Robert leads me out of the kitchen and into the master suite, the bedroom and bathroom. The dresser has a hairbrush on it and several photographs, presumably of Nora’s children and grandchildren. On the bed is a pile of clothes—probably the ones she took off before the shower—and a cane.
The master bath is small. A single vanity, a toilet, a bathtub/shower. A terry-cloth robe hangs from a hook on the door.
I step carefully toward the shower. A dark spatter of blood near the top curve of the tub and a drip downward. By all appearances, she was facing the shower fixture, slipped, fell back, and hit her head. As she lay there dying, her body slid farther down into the tub.
We leave; Robert locks the front door behind him.
“There’s a visitation tomorrow,” he says. “Funeral’s the next day.”
“You need to do an autopsy,” I say. “And open an investigation.”
Robert uses his arm to wipe away some sweat on his forehead. “Emmy, listen. You know how this goes. You can throw out plenty of theories that I can’t disprove. You could say that a Martian did this, and I couldn’t prove that that didn’t happen. But I also couldn’t prove that it did happen. There’s an innocent explanation for everything you’re saying. And even if you’re right about all of this, a defense lawyer would tear our case to shreds.”
“I’m not trying to convict him,” I say. “I’m trying to catch him.”
“Look, I hear you. I’ve seen some crazy shit myself. But unless you can give me more—”
“Here’s what I can give you,” I say. “I know of six victims in his current spree. Each victim did charity work of some kind for the poor or homeless or sick. Each of them lived alone. Each of them lived in a single-story house. Each of them had a garage and a private backyard hidden by foliage. Each of them lived very close to a bus stop. Each of them had his or her house for sale and posted photos and videos of the home’s interior on the internet. Each of them had tiny, needle-size puncture wounds on the torso that could not be explained.”
“And what was injected? What did the tox screens reveal?”
I let out a breath. “I can’t get anybody to investigate. Because each of the cases in isolation looks like Nora’s case. The easy explanation is the one the police choose. I don’t blame them,” I say, registering the look on Robert’s face. “It makes sense. But you start putting all these together, and there’s a pattern.”
“Okay, so investigate it yourself,” he says. “You’re the FBI. You can cross state lines.”
I do one of those double-blinks Robert has perfected.
“Oh.” He steps back from me. “Your own agency won’t green-light this.”
“That’s correct, Sergeant.”
“But I should, huh?”
“Yes,” I say, trying to control my frustration. “You should. Because it’s the right thing to do. Just do a preliminary look, Robert. What’s the harm? Check her credit cards. Find out if she went out that day. See if she ate dinner that evening. Do a tox screen and find out what was injected into her body.”
The sergeant chews on his lip.
“I think he knew all about her from researching her online,” I say. “He knew she had a single-story. He knew the interior. He knew her habits. So he traveled here and followed her during the day. He subdued her. Then he drove her back in her own car and forgot to readjust the car seat. He dragged her through wet grass and had to clean up the patio afterward. He slammed her head against the tub to make her death look like an accident. And then he left and took the bus back to wherever his car was.” I nod. “Yes. I think all of that. And he’s counting on you saying, ‘That’s going to an awful lot of trouble,’ or ‘That’s a real stretch, Emmy.’ He’s counting on local cops seeing nothing amiss and moving on.”
“And why is he killing these people? And why only owners of single-story homes?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers.”
Sergeant Robert Crescenzo looks at the house, mulling it over. Probably considering his huge backlog of cases and knowing how little time he has for a wild-goose chase.
“Let me think about it,” he says.
10
FOLLOWING A late dinner at a place down the street, Books returns to the closed store and spends hours balancing the ledgers, switching out inventory, reviewing catalogs, tallying up the day’s receipts. These are the more tedious aspects of owning a business, but he dives into them, hoping to lose himself in the details.
Trying not to focus on what’s coming next tonight.
He kills the lights in the front of the store and heads into the inventory room.
In the corner, his homeless friend Petty is curled up on a sofa that Books moved here from his house, a duffel bag holding all his possessions resting next to him. He’s reading The Art of War.
“I’m out, Sergeant Petty,” he says. He doesn’t know much about Petty other than that he reached the rank of gunnery sergeant serving two tours of duty in Desert Storm. He doesn’t even know his first name. Name’s Petty. Sergeant Petty, the man said the first time they met, on a cold winter day about six months ago. He’d been sitting outside the store, and Books had bent down to talk with him. Petty’s eyes glaze over whenever he gets into any kind of detail about his service overseas, when he talks about the blazing heat or the pressure or the heavy weight of fear, so Books never pushes it.
“Yes, sir, Agent Bookman.” Petty looks over his reading glasses—cheap ones, cheaters from Walgreens—and gives a grateful nod. Books told him long ago to stop thankin
g him for letting him sleep here, that Petty was doing Books a favor by watching over the store a few nights a week. They both pretended to believe that that was true.
“The Art of War, eh?” he says to Petty. “‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’?”
Petty makes a noise, something like a chuckle. He’s wearing his army jacket over a blue T-shirt advertising some street festival. He looks down at his book. “‘He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not will be victorious.’ Yeah, this guy Sun Tzu’s got some good lines.”
But the way Petty says it, with a touch of disdain in his voice, you can tell that for him, they are only lines, just words on paper, that he knows it’s different when you’re the one in the war, weapon in hand, awaiting an enemy who will kill you without hesitation.
Books feels a pang of sympathy for Petty in moments like this, when he sees a trace of the man’s lucidity. He’s a smart man who should have been able to make it out in the world, but something must have broken inside him while he was overseas, and it prevented him from rejoining society in any constructive way. Something had been disconnected or had died.
“See you in the morning,” Petty says to Books, as if he senses his pity and doesn’t want it. “I’m good here.”
Good is probably not the right word, but he has a comfortable, warm, safe place to sleep and a clean bathroom. It’s all relative.
Books leaves out the back door and starts up his car, wishing he could do more for Petty. He took him to a mental-health clinic a couple of times, but Petty wouldn’t stay. He’s taken him to job fairs; he even tried to put him to work in the store, not with customers but with inventory in the back room—something, anything to give him a sense of purpose and a few bucks in his pocket—but it just didn’t stick. Petty, for some reason that Books will never fully understand and that Petty will never share with him, is destined to live on the street. He has gratefully accepted the offer to sleep inside a few times a week, and, yes, he appreciates the coffee, but he won’t take anything else.
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