“Tim McNally.”
“Detective Steel.”
Tim turned to Marisa and shook.
“Detective Tulli.”
“Oh,” the woman said, butting in, “I’m Ashley. Sorry, didn’t introduce myself.”
Ashley’s brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail and away from her pale skin and her thin and slender frame definitely had been shaped with the help of a personal trainer several days a week. But the few creases next to her eyes and wrinkled skin around her lips showed her age, probably mid-thirties, although she’d lead you to believe ten years younger than that. She wore a black on black North Face outfit—skin-tight pants with toned legs, zipper jacket with a collar, and also wore gray Nike running shoes with white soles. Her sneakers probably cost more than Steel’s entire suit, the North Face outfit more than a year’s worth of clothing. Flashy clothes weren’t his thing. He liked to look nice and presentable but didn’t spend a lot on his wardrobe. Pair of cheap but nice jeans and solid-color T-shirts or plain, generic jackets were all he needed. Low-key was Steel’s style.
Ashley turned and stared at Tim, her eyes narrow and firm, more like a supervisor than what Steel assumed to be his wife. He knew instantly who wore the pants in this marriage.
“Where is Corey?” Ashley said.
The man twirled his neck toward the kitchen. “Corey, come in here, honey.”
“Babe, don’t demand our son. Tell him nicely. Build his self-esteem, don’t tear it down,” Ashley said.
Tim grinned but gritted his teeth as well, politely, of course. “Babe, I didn’t even raise my voice. I was considerate.”
Fucking yuppies, Steel thought.
Within seconds, tiny footsteps slapped the hardwood floors and little Corey, who couldn’t have been older than six, ran toward his father with outstretched hands. His dad bent down on one knee and scooped him up, smiled at Ashley, then Steel and Marisa. “Corey, honey, say hello to these nice detectives,” Tim said.
Steel inwardly chuckled and tried to imagine an outcome if one of his friends’ fathers in his old neighborhood would have repeatedly called their son “honey.” Those fathers were truck drivers and construction workers and bookies and supervisors of production lines in factories or middle management in warehouses and distribution companies and liked to drink an occasional beer and bust balls. The poor friend whose father would have done that would have never heard the end of the jokes. But Steel had grown up in the late Eighties and Nineties, before political correctness, before a kid could give another kid a wedgie and have it make a national news network and run as a top story for a week straight. He had gotten bullied a few times by older kids, nothing major, mostly in jest and to test his merit and toughness, as had almost everybody in his neighborhood growing up, but it toughened him, taught him not only to stand up for himself, but also not to treat others that way. He didn’t condone extreme or relentless bullying and had picked up for a few kids during his childhood who had been victims of it. But he felt kids had to go through some confrontations to grow, because being sheltered as children would only lead to lack of problem-solving abilities and survival later in life, because adults in the real world and workplace could be the biggest bullies on the planet. He believed some exposure and experience as a kid could help a person down the line. But not too much, of course, he’d tell people.
Marisa broke Steel from his train of thought. “So, may we have a word with you two?” She looked at the pair. “Mr. and Mrs. McNally, I’m assuming?”
“Oh, yes, sorry…we’re married,” Tim said. He pointed over to the navy sofa. “Have a seat.”
They walked and listened to the hardwood below their shoes creak and sat on the cold leather seat cushions and a chill pushed through their clothing and pressed to the flesh and cooled it.
Steel angled his body toward Mr. and Mrs. McNally on the couch, opposite him and Marisa, watched Tim point Corey toward the kitchen, telling his boy to wait for him there.
“I’m sure you’ve heard about your neighbors, Desiree Jones and her mother,” Steel said.
Ashley frowned and flashed droopy, sad eyes. “What a shame.”
“How well did you know them?” Steel said.
Ashley spun her head left, right, and flipped her eyes toward the ceiling. “Um, Tim and I moved here about a month ago. Didn’t really know them that well. We’d say hello in passing but that’s all. Seemed like very nice people.”
Steel turned his eyes and stared into Marisa’s. He knew some people just didn’t want to get involved in investigations. But Ashley looked sincere.
Marisa crossed her legs and pointed a finger toward Desiree’s apartment next door. “Never had a conversation with her or her mother? Anything?”
Ashley shrugged. “Nope.” She flicked a finger at Tim. “He’s an anesthesiologist at Pennsylvania Hospital, and I’m a physician assistant at Jefferson, and we both work over sixty hours per week…and with Corey, we barely have time to talk to one another, let alone our neighbors.”
Marisa arched an eyebrow. “Understood. We’re all busy, right?” She smirked afterwards.
Ashley raised a hand to her mouth and spread her fingers over her lips, locked eyes with Tim, and he tipped his head in Steel and Marisa’s direction as if to say, Tell them.
Ashley slapped a palm on each kneecap and frowned, nervously laughed a bit. “This is a little awkward, but I, ah, something was strange.”
“Sure it’s nothing we’ve haven’t heard before,” Steel said. “Nothing you tell us will shock us.”
Ashley nodded, a half-smirk across her face out of sheer embarrassment. “Over the past two weeks or so, we, uh, had been hearing loud love-making.” Her milky white cheek streaked with patches of red. “I mean, we felt like they were going to come through our walls at one point. The typical sounds during sex…Desiree’s yelling and the moans, oh my God.” Now her face turned so red it looked like an apple with eyeballs. She gave it a minute until the heat subsided and her face was a light shade of pink. “The sex was every night for a good week or two.”
Steel listened.
“I don’t know,” Ashley said, “just thought you guys might want to know that?”
“Did you ever see a man leaving the house?”
“I used to see a black male when we first moved in. I think he was her boyfriend—”
Tim butt in. “Kevin, I believe his name is, nice guy.”
“I bet,” Steel said.
Ashley stared at her husband just after he’d finished speaking, her lips tight, eyes wide, nodding to his words, but turned back to Steel and said, “…but we hadn’t seen him for three weeks before Desiree passed away? Don’t know if it was him or not with her over the past few weeks, though. Could have been. We’re never home.”
“So you guys hadn’t seen anything suspicious or heard anything the night Desiree was murdered or before her mother was killed,” he pointed toward Desiree’s apartment, “this morning?”
Both shook their heads no, long and slowly, looking back and forth at each other and to Steel and Marisa.
“We knocked on your door the night Desiree was murdered. Where were you guys?”
“Visiting Tim’s family in Ohio for the holidays.”
Steel contorted his mouth upward, nodded. “All right, we’re just about done here. Who lives on the other side of Desiree?”
“Um…no one. It’s for rent,” Ashley said.
“Yeah, no one answered us from that house that night either,” Steel stood up. Marisa followed and smiled at the couple and at Corey as he walked into the living room with chocolate smudges on his round cheeks and a bar of Hershey’s stuck to his tiny fingers.
“You folks have a wonderful New Year’s and we may be in touch if we need anything else,” Marisa said, her eyes and smile soft and sincere. Corey had melted her and she couldn’t be the tough detective after seeing him.
“Thanks, you too. Good luck with the case,” Ashley said.
Tim and Ash
ley trailed behind Steel and Marisa to the door and saw them out into the police chaos, flashed a mixture of half-smiles, frowns and waves under the circumstances.
Steel leaned against Marisa, bumped her, shoulder to shoulder. “See, they’re raising a family in an apartment.”
Marisa shifted her bottom teeth right and squinted. “Don’t start, babe. Their apartment is two bedrooms and bigger than most houses in the city. And you’re not an anesthesiologist making two-hundred-and-fifty-grand a year and I’m not a physician’s assistant making over a hundred. You saw that place. The size,” she clasped her hands together and flung them apart as if a bomb had exploded, “it’s huge. And the location…they’re probably paying over four-grand a month.”
“I won’t start, babe.”
Steel played it off cool, carried on with the babe name-calling in jest, but was a little annoyed that she had brought another man’s salary into the conversation. The money discussion bothered him even though he wasn’t a materialist and didn’t care if he made enormous amounts of it. But for some reason his anger was more focused on Tim McNally and not Marisa for saying it. He knew it was probably a little jealously or maybe a perceived threat from his subconscious that Marisa could do better and could choose another man with more money, or a flash of his low self-esteem coming back to haunt him. Primitive rage and violent blood disguised as adrenaline coursed through his body as if he were about to fight an intruder who’d broken into his cave. He wanted to tell Marisa that Tim may have made more money than him, but he’d still ring his scrawny neck and beat him with his nerdy brown shoes.
Steel took a deep breath and let the thoughts pass. Maybe a little jealously, he thought but held his words. Temper, temper. Control yourself.
After a minute, he felt like an ass for getting mad at Tim, an innocent man in the equation, but knew there were three things in a man’s life that couldn’t be fucked with, that were precious and delicate and could turn the mellowest man into a violent crusader: his wallet, his woman, and his children, and even though Tim didn’t even know he was being discussed, Marisa had mentioned him. Fuck that nerd, Steel thought.
They both laughed from the awkward silence, but nervously. Maybe Marisa sensed the slight of her words because she looked away, distant, her hair swaying back and forth with the wind.
“Don’t ever try to control me like Ashley does to Tim, babe,” Steel said, carrying the joking tone, attempting to lighten the mood.
“Don’t ever wear shoes like that, babe.”
Steel smiled and snorted a laugh through his nostrils. Ah, poor Tim, he thought. Nice guy.
But behind the jokes, each had twitching nerves and racing thoughts. Was the man in Desiree’s bedroom the man who killed her? Could it have been a crime of passion? Stories were conflicting.
Steel needed to get a hold of Kevin Johnson.
22
S
teel and Marisa stood outside on the smooth concrete front steps and the hard gray coating sparkled as the sun peeked between a few clouds before disappearing again. A breeze picked up since they had first stepped into the McNally’s. Steel zipped his black peacoat and popped the collar. His warm breath mixed with the cold air and a cloud of steam shot from his mouth. Marisa tightened her jacket as well, only with more grace and without the collar-flip. A stiff wind washed over them and their teeth chattered. Each rubbed their hands and tensed their back muscles, battling the steady stream of frigid air that swirled as though someone were holding a powerful industrial-sized fan that blew ice-cold air in front of their faces. The coldness nipped at their cheeks until they were numb and red and tingly, each could’ve taken a punch from Mike Tyson in his prime without feeling a thing.
Marisa shook her body and dug her hands in her pockets, the wind swinging her hair around, her eyes squinted. “Damn, it’s cold out here. But, anyway, sex. Who’s the guy? Whatda’ya think?”
“First guy that popped in my mind was Kevin Johnson. Maybe he’s not telling us something.”
She shrugged. “But what about Jeanette? She lived with Desiree before she died, was what she told us, remember. Wouldn’t she have known something?
“Yeah, but she worked the night shift.”
Marisa narrowed her eyes in thought. She pouted her lips and they grew in size like small balloons being pumped with air. “True.”
“Or she had a new boyfriend?” Steel said.
“True, again. So you think Kevin could’ve been jealous, killed her out of—” She stopped as Steel’s phone rang.
The mobile device danced against his thigh in his pocket. He reached for it and raised it to his ear. “Hell-oo, Detective Steel here.”
“Is this Detective Steel?”
“Yes, speaking.”
“Hey, it’s Jimmy, ah, James Finndle. From the law firm where Desiree Jones worked. My boss told me you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Steel paused a moment before speaking and looked at Marisa, and she patted down her hair against the wind gusts, and he said, “You watch the news this morning, Jimmy?”
“Man, heartbreaking,” Jimmy said and sighed into the phone.
“Desiree’s—” Steel said before getting interrupted.
“Yeah, I heard, mother.” Jimmy sighed harder. “Terrible, terrible situation. I almost threw-up this morning when I heard it. I’m still nauseous. I just can’t believe someone would—” He paused a few seconds. “It’s just crazy. People are crazy. What a sick world.”
Steel cleared his throat. “What do you say you and me get together today, talk about a few things? You were close with her, right?”
“Yeah, okay. I usually take an hour for lunch.”
“Tell you what,” Steel said, “meet me halfway. Instead of coming down to the station, I’ll meet you at The Gallery at noon. Sound good?”
“That’ll work.”
“Talk to you in a couple of hours, Jimmy.”
“Yep, take it easy.”
Steel pressed the end button on his phone. He lifted his eyes and stared into Marisa’s. Both knew talking to Jimmy was a start—a start to a case they had little to go on. But he also couldn’t help feeling that he had already found his man in Kevin Johnson. Something about Kevin’s story was off. Steel knew he’d find it. Somehow.
23
T
he revolving doors with vertical borders of stainless steel and smudged glass spun open, and Steel walked through and jogged down a few cream-colored stairs and into The Gallery, a shopping mall right in the middle of Center City, Philadelphia. This was the main entrance on Ninth and Market because that’s the only block he found parking ten minutes before noon on a weekday.
Crowds moved across the floors and were mixed of office workers in suits and ties, construction workers with dirt-stained jeans and T-shirts, casual shoppers on their day off, and high school-aged kids with headphones plugged in their ears or laughing and joking around with one another, enjoying their break from school for the holidays—and the groups were diverse, of every ethnicity that lived in the city of Philadelphia—Black, White, Mexican, Asian, Puerto Rican, and so on. Loud chatter circulated throughout and the newest Katy Perry song burst through the speakers overheard but was almost drowned out by voices, children crying, and occasional laughter.
Steel scooted past Books-A-Million and got a whiff of fresh paperbacks and hardbacks and glanced at John Grisham’s newest courtroom thriller. He continued walking and scurried through the food court. Sizzling beef and chicken and fries from McDonald’s shot clouds of smoke through the air, and the scent of oil and grease and mustard and burned cow clogged his nostrils. McDonald’s and its signature grease-smell, he figured, without looking up for confirmation. It smelled so good, though, and he thought how he’d once gone a month in his early twenties eating two cheeseburgers a night from the drive-thru near his home. He pushed through the masses some more, who still shopped in large numbers after Christmas looking for deals, past Modell’s Sporting Go
ods and stared through the glass windows at shelves on a wall filled with Nike running sneakers, past Lid’s and saw red Phillies hats hanging from the racks, and hooked a left and jumped on silver steps of the up escalator that glided to the second floor.
Greasy footprints stained the shiny stairs, and the black rubber handle jerked up and down against his hand. A woman behind him, about thirty, holding several bags curled in between her crooked fingers, tapped him on the shoulder and ran past him. The escalator moves for a reason. Why do people need to walk or run up it? he thought and shook his head.
He leaped off just before the silver spikes at the top of the moving stairs swallowed the metal and clipped his shoes. He stood in front of Old Navy, ran his eyes across the navy blue bubble-letters of the store’s front sign, and walked and sat on a cold wooden bench just outside.
He was away from the majority of shoppers and off near the corner, just a few stragglers strolling by him. He still heard voices in the distance, but they were low, a quiet wave of fading echoes, as though they were coming from a tunnel.
After shifting his head and looking around for Jimmy, he leaned over, elbows on knees, and thought, God, I love Marisa. Hope the marriage goes well. What time is it? Look at Old Navy, maybe they have those dark blue jeans that fit me right that I wanted. Maybe not, probably Macy’s. Maybe Target. Whatever. I don’t give a fuck about stupid jeans. Who the fuck invented jeans, anyway? Wait, you know this. They made them for the working-class, for comfort at work or something, and they became a trend, right? Come on, think…better look that up on Google before you tell other people that and try to sound intelligent and then look like an asshole when you’re wrong.
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