Defensive Wounds

by Lisa Black

  CHAPTER 14

  *

  Frank went back to work, promising to get in touch with the detective who’d investigated the death of Jenna Simone. Perhaps, he pointed out as they waited by the elevator bank, there was a valid reason the kid got off. Maybe he really didn’t do it.

  “Sure,” Theresa said with controlled despair, “maybe there’s a perfectly rational explanation for why he was found next to her body with her blood on his hands.”

  “Yeah.” Frank pressed the “down” button. “Maybe.”

  She left him there and proceeded to the front desk, each step taking longer than it should. The thirty or so feet to the marble counter seemed to have tripled. She did not see Rachael. Please, she begged the angels, please don’t let her be waiting for William on the tower observation deck, fifty-two floors above the earth.

  Behind the desk stood the skinny black girl she’d met the day before—Lorraine.

  Upon request, however, Lorraine produced Rachael with a speed that had Theresa melting in gratitude. She’d merely been in the ladies’ room. Since the front-desk area seemed well populated, Theresa asked only that Rachael remain there until Theresa could collect her at the end of her shift. No delivering things to rooms, no leaving the lobby for any reason.

  “Whatever. I hardly ever do anyway, unless someone drops off flowers or something. I think I’m safe, Mom. I’m not a lawyer.”

  “No one’s safe at the moment. Just promise me, okay—”

  A firm hand grasped her elbow, and a harried-looking Neil Kelly asked if she wanted to come back to the crime scene. The body snatchers had arrived for the corpse.

  She went with him, giving only a backward glance to her daughter. Rachael watched them, suspicious. Children knew when their parents were holding back, and Rachael could sometimes read Theresa as easily as if she were a fast-food menu.

  “You all right?” Neil Kelly asked once the elevator doors had closed.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Just tired.”

  “I knew it,” Powell said as Theresa helped the two body snatchers, one as tall and muscular as the other was short and undernourished, bundle Bruce Raffel into a white plastic body bag. “I figured these shysters would be into something kinky.”

  “Only Bruce.” Theresa taped the carpeting underneath where the body had lain. “There’s no reason to think Marie had any unusual habits.”

  “But she dated him, so it follows. It’s a power thing, I’m telling you. Dominating in the courtroom, dominating in the bedroom. She wouldn’t give up any details about how Raffel liked it?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “We’ll get subpoenas—for her, the partners of both victims, assistants, paralegals.”

  The idea pained Theresa. Bad enough she’d told them about Sonia and Bruce, though Sonia would expect that. She stopped taping the carpeting that had been underneath Bruce Raffel’s body to ask, “Do you have to?”

  Neil Kelly looked at her with a touch of pity. “Two bodies piled up, and this woman knew both of them. She may be able to connect the dots for us. How much should we worry about people’s feelings? Especially since they’re the same people who are going to say we didn’t solve these murders because we don’t like them?”

  “You’re going to subpoena her to compel testimony about a casual hookup that occurred two or three years before the crime. I’m glad I don’t have your job.” Theresa could imagine few things more depressing than listening to endless rationalizations of how these strangers were perfectly okay with such an empty emotional life that mindless pairings became an acceptable substitute. Poor Sonia. But then Neil Kelly had probably heard much more depressing stories than that, and there were worse factors than mindless. After discussing it further, he and Powell decided, with obvious disappointment, that they’d never get a judge to sign off.

  Surely cops were no strangers to the lifestyle themselves, when out with cop groupies and other hangers-on. Lots of late nights, unpredictable locations … She thought of her cousin. Would Frank …?

  Hell, Frank would probably lead by example. Her cousin needed something real in his life. Theresa had been half hoping that something romantic would develop between him and his smart, attractive partner ever since they’d been assigned to work together, but nothing had—so far. Maybe Frank knew better than to get involved with a co-worker. More likely Angela knew better than to get involved with Frank.

  What about Neil Kelly? Theresa watched him surreptitiously, wondering what his fantasies might entail.

  Neil startled her from this dangerous reverie by asking, “She tell you anything else?”

  “Yeah—she said I should ask Dennis Britton how his first wife died.”

  “You got me,” Neil said. “I didn’t know there was a first Mrs. Britton.”

  “Car accident,” Powell said, much more seriously than Theresa would have expected, so that both Neil and Theresa stared at the man. “Before your time, pard. His wife missed the end of a parking lot and drove down a hill, stopped short. Nothing mysterious.”

  Still, Theresa sensed a touch of hesitation. “Are you sure?”

  “We made sure. Nothing would have delighted my unit more than arresting Dennis Britton for the murder of his wife. We looked at everything—the autopsy results, the parking-lot video, the guy’s alibi, the position of the driver’s seat. Everything. It would have to be the perfect murder, and he’s not that smart. Your gal pal really got a hard-on for Dennis Britton, doesn’t she?”

  Neil said, “He was the victim’s boyfriend, and Marie and Brucie here had been serious at one point. Maybe the two of them used this conference to get together for old times’ sake and Britton didn’t like it.”

  “So he kills her in a fit of pique but then comes back to finish the job with Raffel, after having a day to cool down?”

  Neil elaborated his theory. “Or Raffel killed Marie and Britton got revenge. Or Raffel knew that Britton should be the number-one suspect and why, so Britton needed to shut him up. I’ve been here long enough to testify in a couple of Britton’s cases, and I’ve figured out one thing: The guy doesn’t like to lose.”

  Powell nodded. “I know. He was trying to get some guy off on self-defense one time, insisting that his client had grabbed the gun out of this cheesy gun locker because he felt threatened, when the locker was all the way at the back of the house. The day of a jury visit, we walk into the house, jury in tow, and lo and behold suddenly the locker is in the front hallway. Britton insisted it had been there the night of the murder and his client had moved it later. So they only moved it back. But somehow this detail had slipped his mind until just before the jury visit. Every attorney bends the truth, but he just drops it in the can and flushes.”

  Theresa pushed herself off the wall she’d been leaning on and rubbed her lower back. The scent of dried blood, sharp and dusty, filled her nose. She’d had enough of these cut-off, too-quiet rooms, the pervasive insulation sucking out not only noise but thought, and feeling, and life. “You said Britton had an alibi for Marie’s murder.”

  “For most of the evening. But unless you can be sure she died sometime before eleven o’clock or so, when he finally sent his entourage away and returned to the humble abode his wife paid over two million for, then we can’t really be sure, can we? He could have swung upstairs to meet Corrigan for a quick one before heading home.”

  “And Marie waited all that time?”

  “No, she would have been up to her own devices. But she’d have waited because she needed his coattails to climb. He could always get another piece on the side. The balance of power favored him.” Powell added, in ponderous tones, “It’s all about power. Who has it, who wants it.”

  “Sounds to me like it’s all about sex,” Neil said.

  “Sex is power.”

  “I’m suspecting your divorce wasn’t quite as unfair as you led me to believe, partner.”

  Theresa said, “I’ll talk to Christine. Maybe she can narrow it down. Did you ever find
Marie’s cell phone? If they did meet up, there might be calls or texts.”

  On cue, her phone buzzed at her waist.

  “She had locked her purse in her trunk,” Neil told her. “I guess she didn’t want to carry it. Still no phone, though. We’re going to subpoena the cell company for the call history.”

  A text, from Rachael: TAKING BUS. LNG NUFF DAY!

  Damn it, the girl had left without her. But if she were on public transportation, surrounded by people … assuming she’d made it to the bus, assuming William hadn’t offered to walk her to the station. I’m getting off now, too, he might have said. I’ll walk you.

  “So the killer took her phone,” Powell was saying. “Why? Because he’d called her to hook up. Maybe even texted like our scientist here.”

  Theresa barely heard him. Through a series of frantic and misspelled texts—afterward she wondered why she didn’t just call—she learned that Rachael had indeed boarded the bus and would get together with her grandmother to coordinate dinner. Theresa breathed out, texted back how pleased it made her to have a daughter who liked to cook, hung up, and tried to recall what the detectives had been talking about. “How long will it take to get that information from the cell company?”

  “That depends on them. Days, if we’re lucky. Otherwise weeks.”

  Theresa gathered her tapings, stowed them in an envelope. “I’m done here.”

  Neil thanked her, then walked her to the elevator. “Heading home?”

  “No, back to the lab.”

  “Going to get right to work on dead lawyer number two?”

  “Sort of.”

  CHAPTER 15

  *

  Frank never wanted to see another lawyer as long as he lived. He thought so most of the time anyway, but today it felt particularly apt. Yesterday the conference attendees had been shocked by Marie Corrigan’s death but assumed it to be the result of random violence or some bad situation of Marie’s own choosing. Interestingly, out-of-town strangers favored the first theory, while those who had actually known Marie tended toward the second.

  With Bruce Raffel’s death, however, the events became anything but random, and each of the gathered attorneys was torn between fear of becoming a suspect and fear of becoming the next victim. It made them conflicted, which in turn made them more flippin’ annoying than ever before in Frank’s experience. The ones from out of town weren’t quite as bad. They would almost certainly never be seen in this town again and were therefore free to simply answer the questions asked. When did they last see Bruce Raffel? Did they speak with him, did he express any fear or anger toward anyone, did he mention any plans for the evening or the rest of the convention? The Cleveland lawyers, though, could not let even fear of brutal murder sway them from their smarmy “I’m smarter than you” stance and did their best to ask more questions than they answered, and they answered only after examining each question from every angle. An attorney Frank had encountered at an armed-robbery trial said he’d talked with Bruce during a coffee break but wouldn’t say what they’d discussed because it involved an open case.

  “He seem worried about anything?” Frank asked, a standard question.

  “Hell no. He kept saying how great it was to be back in Cleveland. You ask me, the guy was lonely. He thought he’d dumped us losers for the sunny South, but they didn’t roll out the red carpet for him. That southern-hospitality thing is a crock, he said. At least for him.” The guy shook his head. “Kinda pathetic.”

  Another had seen Bruce and Marie in the hallway between the first and second sessions on Tuesday but would not characterize their conversation as friendly, neutral, or antagonistic. He told Frank, “That’s your job, to know what everybody’s thinking just from looking at them. I don’t claim to be clairvoyant, like our fine officers of the law who consider ‘knowing’ that a guy has drugs in his trunk to be sufficient probable cause.” He did admit that the two were not shouting, frowning, or kissing. An attorney Frank remembered from a drunk-driving case during his rookie days tried to make a Hannibal Lecter—like tit-for-tat trade and would tell whether he’d ever spoken to either victim if Frank gave him a complete description of Marie’s body, including any attendant hardware.

  Frank got through the list, sent the last lawyer away—a surprisingly sweet girl whose vacant stare made him think her brain was powered by a gerbil running in a plastic wheel—and glanced over at his partner. Angela Sanchez sat with one hand propping her chin, listening with apparent dismay to the convoluted CSI-induced theory of a lawyer from, if Frank correctly placed the accent, Jersey. She gave Frank a “kill me now” glance, sat up, and focused anew on her interviewee. Frank checked out the other table, where Detective Powell spoke to a teased blond attorney, trying without success to keep his eyes from wandering to her low-cut blouse. Frank decided that he needed a drink. Himself, not Powell, though the older cop probably did, too.

  He got up and went down to the lounge.

  Of course he couldn’t drink, being on duty, so coffee would have to do. He took a seat at the short black-granite bar, empty except for a discarded straw wrapper, and waited a good five minutes for a ’tender to show up. It was two in the afternoon, not a big time for meals or drinks, so staff appeared in the lounge area only sporadically. She took his order and went to fetch it, leaving the straw wrapper. The same girl returned five minutes later, plunked down a lukewarm cup, and disappeared again, still ignoring the discarded wrapper. Wasn’t this supposed to be a super-fancy, too-perfect, expensive hotel? “God is in the details,” Frank muttered, and shot the paper ball off the granite with a flick of his finger. It flew across the space behind the bar and lodged between a square container of Jack Daniel’s and a squat bottle of Crown Royal.

  With a sigh, Frank wished he and Angela could have caught this case, been the lead detectives. He hated assisting. It wasn’t that he begrudged other detectives their cases and their collars, even high-profile ones like this. It was just so boring. All drudge work, asking the standard people the standard questions, establishing a timeline, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s, knowing that even if the guy is caught, it won’t be you who gets to slap on the cuffs. Boring.

  But for all his inner whining, he had to admit that they’d learned most of what they needed to know. Last time he compared notes with the other detectives, they could establish that the final sighting of Bruce Raffel had been at approximately five-fifteen. After the luncheon he had attended a workshop entitled “Offensive Defenses”—Frank wondered if they’d really thought that title through—from two to three and then something called “Litigating Postconviction Innocence Cases Without DNA” until the conference wrapped up at 5:00 P.M. Long day, Frank had to admit. From there, Bruce had stopped in the lounge and glad-handed a few people but couldn’t get near the bar for the line and didn’t see, or wasn’t invited into, any groups. “Seemed to me,” another Atlanta attorney had confided to Frank, “he wasn’t one of the Cleveland gang anymore. Not shut out, but not welcomed in. Sort of at loose ends.”

  “And not in the Atlanta gang yet?”

  The man had shrugged. “It’s a pretty big gang, and he’s only been there a year. I don’t really know him, but what I do know I don’t like. He breezed down there thinking we’d all be a bunch of hillbillies. The guy had no clue how many Ivy League grads we have in my office alone. I think he got his license by mail order.”

  Bruce had sidled out of the bar by ten after five or so and gone to the elevator. No one saw him after that. Correction: No one admitted seeing him after that. No one, male or female, admitted to having sex with him on that evening or any prior evening, and no one admitted to killing him.

  With no signs of forced entry or even a struggle, Frank assumed that Bruce Raffel had let his killer into his room. But that would be easy—a man in a fancy hotel would open the door to anyone who knocked. Why not? All the other person had to do was mumble something about a delivery, or the convention, or room maintenance, and he would open the door.
The killer could work without neighbors peering through the living-room curtains, without leaving a strange car parked at the curb. A convenient peephole to make sure the coast was clear before leaving. A hotel, Frank had begun to realize, is a very handy place to kill someone.

  The killer had gotten into the Presidential Suite the day before—the killer or Marie, that is, and either way the killer would still have the key card used—so perhaps the killer had been waiting in Bruce’s room.

  Frank had given up on that and turned back to the question of motive, pondering who would want to kill lawyers (answer: everyone), when Marcus Dean walked into the lounge. At least six foot five, his scalp shaved down to peach fuzz, military posture. He nodded at Frank and surveyed the room—not much to survey, the only other occupants being a frail lady in a pastel sweater and a sullen teenager listening to his iPod. So the head of security settled into one of the high stools at the granite bar. Dean had been very helpful during this investigation, but not particularly friendly. Uncomfortable, yet Frank thought he could understand why. Marcus had gone from a Vice detective, poised to move into SWAT if he wanted it, to a hotel gumshoe. It was a good, honest, and, given the Ritz-Carlton’s budget, probably quite lucrative job, but it had to be the emotional equivalent of being a teenage boy and having your friend catch you washing dishes with your mom. Nothing wrong with it, exactly. But not cool.

  “How’s it going?” Marcus asked, his voice rolling out of him, a slow but deadly tsunami.

  “No breaks yet. The guy went back to his room and someone killed him, that’s about all we got so far.”

  “What about the bitch?”

  Frank didn’t ask who Dean meant. He referred to Marie by the same term himself. “Nothing there either. Autopsy says she was negative for semen, so that screws us. We could be chasing our tails trying to connect it to this convention when we’ve just got a run-of-the-mill psycho on our hands.”

  “I was up most of the night thinking about that,” Marcus said. “If they’d been killed in their own rooms, then maybe some predator decided to make my hotel his hunting ground. Half of my rooms are rented to lawyers this week, so he can knock on any door and have a fifty-fifty chance that it will be opened by a lawyer—and anyone will open the door. Wear something that looks like a uniform, say something that sounds like a valid reason, and they’ll open it. People feel too much at home in hotels, like they’ve stepped into a very tastefully designed playpen where they can’t be hurt.”