Defensive Wounds

by Lisa Black

  Theresa fiddled with the plaque on her desk that read NON ILLEGITIMI CARBORUNDUM—faux Latin for “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”—and debated briefly with herself. Then she said, “When Sonia was in high school, her dad split. Sonia’s older brother, unsurprisingly, began to act out.”

  “Let me guess. He was a good kid, just fell in with the wrong crowd.” Every parent’s stock answer. Theresa and Frank had heard it so many times they could recite it in their sleep. No parents ever wanted to face the fact that their kid was the wrong crowd.

  “More or less. He and some buddies stole beer and cigarettes from a 7-Eleven, flashed a gun at the clerk, and ran out the door, tripping over two patrolmen who had stopped for coffee. There’s a scuffle, and her brother got a billy club in his left eye.”

  “He lose the eye?”

  “Yep. Then he got a judge who wanted to teach these boys a lesson and put them in adult lockup. Her brother was a naïve eighteen-year-old with one eye and didn’t last long. He hung himself after three weeks.”

  “Tragic,” Frank said, and she knew he meant it to a certain extent. “So this is the fault of all cops?”

  “She figures her brother got a death sentence for stealing beer.”

  “It was armed robbery, not joyriding in Daddy’s car. What she sees as youthful high jinks looks to me like the first act of a budding career criminal.”

  “I hear you. But according to her, she’s seen the same story a million times since. She spends most of her time trying to get her clients into drug programs and halfway houses and places that might actually help them become more productive citizens, and she’s stymied at every point by cops, prosecutors, and judges who think these kids are incorrigible and worthless. Yes, some are, but she figures she has to try—for the sake of the few who aren’t and for the sake of the taxpayers who have to pay for all these trials and jails.”

  “My heart bleeds. You want frustration? Try arresting the same guy for assaulting every girl he dates over and over because his charges get pled down to nothing. You want a sob story? The last woman that got mixed up with him lost her baby.”

  “I know, hon,” she sympathized. “You’re preachin’ to the choir here, and I know the answer is that there is no easy answer. But it broke something inside Sonia that’s never healed. She would still cry in her sleep sometimes, five, six, seven years later. But look, back to William Rosedale. Would juvenile records show up on your database?”

  “No. I can’t get into them without a reason. Have to protect those sweet children’s rights.”

  “What kind of a reason do you have to have?”

  “There’s a variety, but my niece sorta kinda liking this boy at work is not one of them.”

  Theresa examined the sense of urgency she felt, trying to decide if she was a paranoid or a simply conscientious mother. Unfortunately, the paranoid explanation seemed to have more going for it. “Isn’t there anything else you can do, without getting in trouble?”

  “You make it sound like my boss will send me to the principal’s office. I’m a cop. We live to get in trouble. Just get some more information out of your lawyer friend so I can figure out where to look.”

  “I’ll try, but—Damn, my phone’s ringing. Can you hang on a minute?”

  “Only a minute.”

  Theresa flicked open her Nextel. “This is Kelly,” the cop said without preamble, “and you’re not going to believe this.”

  “Okay, I promise I won’t believe it.”

  Her humor went unappreciated, or perhaps unregistered. The words tumbled from him as if personally painful. “We’ve got another one. Another freakin’ dead lawyer.”

  CHAPTER 10

  *

  The lobby of the Ritz, true to the genteel, blue-blooded roots from whence Theresa imagined it sprang, had not changed much in the past twenty-four hours despite having had two murders in about that same period. Rachael continued to hand out room keys with only a shadow of tension behind her bright smile, the older lady in the pink sweater accepted another Bloody Mary from a waiter who didn’t look old enough to serve it, and Sonia crossed the elegant carpet clearly ready to embody her last name.

  “They’re killing us, Theresa,” she began, as if laying out her argument before this jury of one. “Someone’s declared war on defense attorneys. Yesterday that would have sounded completely insane to me, but after seeing the response to Marie’s death I believe it absolutely. The news, the paper, things I hear on the rapid transit—people don’t hate al-Qaeda as much as they hate us. Surfer Girl even started leaving death threats on my answering machine again.”

  Theresa wanted to offer sympathy; she could see how upset Sonia felt in the way she obviously hadn’t combed her hair since early that morning, hadn’t noticed a large run on the inside of her left calf, and her blouse, never well tucked into her conservative skirt, hung in a lopsided pouf. But when Theresa opened her mouth, all she could think to say was, “Why do you call her Surfer Girl?”

  This distracted Sonia, but only momentarily. “Because I happened to notice her surf-shop T-shirt in the split second before she punched me in the mouth. Why?”

  Theresa shifted her grip on the equipment she carried in both hands. “Just wondering. How are you doing?”

  “They’re killing us off—how do you think I’m doing?” Sonia gave her a piercing glance that moved her right from the jury box to the witness stand. “You’ve heard about Bruce?”

  “Is that the guy they just found?”

  “Yeah. Your two cop buddies are up there now, I think dancing a jig over his body.”

  Enough. “That’s unreasonable, Sonia. They were doing everything possible to investigate Marie’s death—with, I might add, no cooperation at all from her office—and those cops are the ones who will be up most of the night again tonight to find this new guy’s killer while you’re in bed dreaming up ways to make them look like idiots on the stand.”

  Sonia had the grace to flush, a faint rose that spread to the roots of her lank blond hair.

  “And who’s Bruce?” Theresa demanded.

  “Bruce Raffel. He’s the one whose body they just found. He’s from Atlanta, but—”

  “Don’t tell me you know him, too.”

  “Sort of.”

  “Theresa!” Neil Kelly appeared at her elbow. “Body’s upstairs.”

  “Okay. Sonia—”

  He added, “The hotel doesn’t want us hanging in the lobby. They’re worried we might scare the guests.”

  Theresa popped Sonia’s cell phone from the plastic clip at her waist.

  “Hey!”

  “This is my number I’m putting in here, missy. I want you to call me before you go home for the day. I need to talk to you.”

  Neil looked at her in alarm. “You’re not discussing the case with—”

  “Who? The enemy?” Sonia snapped.

  “Not the case,” Theresa said over them, and then, with a glance at Rachael thirty feet away, “about William Rosedale.”

  The flush left Sonia Battle’s face.

  Theresa followed Neil Kelly to the elevator bank, shifting her crime-scene kit to her other hand. She would probably need more equipment out of her car before she finished, and she’d have to rouse the fresh-faced valet to bring it around for her for yet another fee. The county would not be happy with the expenses, but what could she do? The traffic cops wouldn’t let her park it on Public Square. Neil jammed his finger into the “up” button with a violent snap; exhaustion had probably set in.

  “Who’s William Rosedale?” he asked as soon as the doors closed.

  “Personal matter. Who’s Bruce Raffel?”

  Neil paused just a beat before responding, no doubt debating whether to push her to define “personal.” Sometimes cops got a little too accustomed to interrogating witnesses and felt free to ask anyone about anything. Lord knows Frank did. But then part of that was due to their having grown up together, and an even larger part due to Frank being Frank.<
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  Neil apparently—and wisely—decided to err on the side of caution, swallowing his curiosity with a heavy gulp. “Victim number two. Defense lawyer from the firm of Jones, Klein and Washington in Atlanta. Thirty-six, divorced, two children, checked in Tuesday. At least there’s no mystery about how he got into the room.”

  The elevator car stopped on the fourteenth floor. “Why not?”

  “It’s his. Standard king, no smoking, single, paid for by a credit card issued to Jones, Klein and Washington. Can I carry something for you?”

  She handed him her ALS and stopped asking questions, preferring to see the rest for herself. They emerged into the hallway. It stood empty except for the bland but tastefully framed artwork on the walls and, she could swear, the same two cops who’d stood guard outside Marie Corrigan’s room. After they recorded her name on the contamination list, she donned two Tyvek booties and went through the door Neil held for her. She tried to observe everything around her as she went but really saw only the dead man’s knees, protruding from the other side of the bed and pointing their empty faces at the TV set.

  She drew closer, careful to check the carpeting beneath each step before placing her foot, until she reached the far corner of the bed.

  In the space between the bed and the deeply burnished end table next to the window, a man lay facedown, his hands and feet tied together behind his back with what looked like a black dress sock. No other clothing interrupted the expanse of naked skin. His head had taken more than one blow, and dried blood seeped through the carpet underneath it.

  “Wow,” Theresa said.

  “Not exactly my response, but I know what you mean,” Neil said.

  “Some sort of sex club gone wrong?” Theresa said aloud. “Or maybe Sonia’s right.”

  “Right about what?”

  “Someone’s declared war.”

  The battered body of Bruce Raffel had been discovered by an already nervous maid at approximately nine-thirty that morning. She had knocked, announced herself, received no answer, and entered. After seeing the body, she’d screamed, caught her breath, screamed again, screamed a third time and maybe a fourth (she lost count), and run out. She assumed the door had shut behind her but couldn’t be sure. She hit the button for the elevator, decided she didn’t want to be stuck in one with a homicidal maniac in the event he got in on another floor and found an unarmed maid waiting to be murdered, so she ran to the stairwell. One look down fourteen flights of dingy, isolated concrete steps and she changed her mind about the elevator, returning to it just as the bell dinged and the doors opened. Inside were an elderly man and his equally elderly wife, in town from Phoenix to visit their daughter, and by the time the car reached the lobby they were as agitated as the maid by her hysterical and largely incoherent tale. Upon entering the lobby, she shrieked at the desk clerks until they summoned the unlucky day manager. The maid informed her of the situation and, almost in the same breath, of her intention to quit just as soon as they could cut her a check to include that morning’s hours. From there she went directly to her locker. By the time the cops arrived, she had all her belongings stowed in a cardboard box that had once held frozen fries and had decided not to wait for the check.

  Bruce Raffel’s body was cold, Theresa observed, the purplish lividity on his dorsal surface fixed. She guessed he’d been dead since the evening before. The bed appeared to have been slept in, covers rumpled and shoved completely to the opposite side; half of the heavy comforter rested on the floor. Theresa could see a few dark hairs—possibly the victim’s—scattered on the snow-white sheets. Small blotches of dried blood, the castoff of several blows, traveled upward across the side of the bed. The weapon of choice, again, was the desk chair, a straight-backed wooden job with a seat cushioned in beige tapestry-look canvas. Perhaps Bruce Raffel had not been as hardheaded as Marie Corrigan, or maybe the killer grew weary—Theresa could see only three distinct gashes in the man’s scalp. The black hair had already begun to thin; in another few years he would have worried about how to hide his bald spot from the jury. With his head turned slightly toward the window, Theresa could see that he had small brown eyes, fleshy cheeks, and did not go in for the five-o’clock shadow currently considered fashionable. He had shaved closely enough to nick his chin in two places.

  His limbs had been bound by a pair of socks, she could now see—one had been knotted around his wrists and then the other looped through it to truss up the ankles. He wore no rings, only nails bitten to the quick and a few ink stains. Bruce Raffel had been taking notes in the past day or two, trying to get the most out of the conference.

  Theresa straightened and looked around. Raffel had used the desk as a luggage rack, and clothes spilled out of the leather bag. One of the water glasses had been used and still had water in it—she would swab that for DNA. The plastic laundry bag sat on the floor next to the desk but seemed to hold only two pairs of socks and two pairs of cotton boxers, size XL, with the logo of some sports team Theresa didn’t recognize. Not surprising, of course—there were only a few team logos she would recognize, all of them based in Cleveland.

  Next to the bed, a man’s watch and wallet and forty-two cents in change had been left on top of a Cleveland magazine, the watch carefully on its back, strap stretched out. Next to it sat a framed picture of two young boys, one behind the other on the back of a Jet Ski too big for them. One trail of castoff blood had gone by the photo, and the blue water and sky were speckled with tiny red dots. Theresa’s gaze lingered over the two small children who were never going to see their father again. She hoped their mother would invent some more palatable story to explain Bruce Raffel’s death—a car accident, a heart attack—anything but hog-tied and bludgeoned in a cold hotel room in a strange city, anything but an S&M lark gone badly awry. Considering her line of work, Theresa did not have the horror of lies that perhaps she should. Sometimes the only humane option was to tell anything but the truth.

  The picture on its nightstand, the suitcase—nothing showed any sign of a struggle. The desk chair with its one bloody appendage remained the only overturned item in the room. Bruce Raffel had died without the benefit of a pitched battle. A pair of pants, a striped dress shirt, and a pair of satin boxer shorts had been laid over the edge of the armchair next to the window, not left in a heap on the floor the way Marie Corrigan’s were. Did that mean he had taken them off voluntarily?

  The room had that same hermetic quality of the Presidential Suite but a more used smell of old cleaner, dusty carpet, and Bruce Raffel’s aftershave.

  Neil Kelly watched her in complete silence, either letting her draw her own conclusions or lost in his own thoughts. She asked him if they had any sort of timeline.

  “Powell’s working on it. The hotel’s got nothing. This room was last cleaned around eleven o’clock yesterday, same maid, who swears she saw nothing unusual—no contraband, meaning drugs or cigarettes (they take the no-smoking policy very seriously here)—and none of what she called ‘kinky stuff.’ Aside from that, no room service, no requests for extra pillows, no phone messages, nothing.”

  Theresa had returned to the dead man’s side. “They have a record of phone calls?”

  “No, only messages. They can’t have guests insisting a desk clerk didn’t deliver a message. But phone calls from inside or outside the hotel, there’s no record of that.”

  Theresa began to photograph, starting from the door and working through the room before reaching the body. The body, she could be certain, would remain unmolested; the separation of the crime scene—the body belonged to the M.E.’s office, everything else to the police department—had been ingrained over decades. But at any moment, Powell and other police officers could show up and begin a thorough search, and the scene would never again be as it had been when she first arrived. Though that had not been a problem with the first murder.

  Now she noticed a piece of paper underneath the pants on the armchair. It belonged to a spiral-bound notebook, the kind every schoolkid
in America uses, down to the chewed-up ballpoint pen jammed into the spiral. It had been left folded over to a blank sheet with “M” and a phone number scrawled at an angle.

  Neil read over her shoulder, his breath tickling her ear. “Could be Marie.”

  “Yeah.” It could also be Mark, or Mickey, or Marissa.

  Without another word he took out his phone and dialed the digits. Even with the phone pressed to his ear, Theresa could overhear those three tones designed for maximum obnoxiousness, along with the message that the number could not be completed as dialed.

  “Not this area code,” Neil guessed.

  “Probably Atlanta.”

  Theresa turned the book over. Half of the opposite page had been covered with notes, written in a meandering hand that seemed identical to the M notation. She paged back one more sheet and found where the conscientious defense attorney had labeled the top of the paper with the date and “ ‘Litigating Postconviction Innocence Cases Without DNA,’ 3 pm.”

  “So he was alive to attend this session yesterday afternoon at least. That fits with the condition of the body.”

  “Provided that’s his notebook.”

  Theresa had a sudden vision of the killer setting it down before sweetly removing Bruce Raffel’s clothing and then forgetting about the book afterward. She flipped to the front, her fingers stumbling on the pages, Neil Kelly hanging close enough to press his chest to her shoulder, both of them caught in a frenzy of Could it really be that easy?

  Answer: no. Bruce Raffel, a good student to the last, had printed his name and phone number in Sharpie marker, right over the Mead logo. The exchange, she noticed, did not match the number next to the initial M. Theresa turned back to the page with the phone number and left the notebook on the chair. With nothing else to look at in the bedroom, she went into the bathroom. Neil Kelly called someone to request the Atlanta area codes.

  She dusted the bathroom floor, again finding no shoe prints except ones identical to the sneakers under Raffel’s suitcase. Setting down some empty paper bags to stand on—no sense tracking black powder onto the light-colored carpeting, even if it would have to be replaced—Theresa examined the contents of the room. Making the most of the available counter space, the attorney had spread deodorant, a bottle of Lectric Shave, toothbrush and paste, comb, Nexxus hair gel, a bottle of generic aspirin, brush-style hair dryer, and a bottle of Centrum vitamins, its label worn enough to make Theresa suspect that it had been pressed into use as a pill case and now contained something other than Centrum vitamins. A quick peek revealed a variety of pills, none of which appeared familiar to her. She would have to take that along, let Toxicology work on identification.