Defensive Wounds

by Lisa Black

  The DNA analyst appeared at her elbow. “Something you need to see.”

  Don led the way to the back room of the trace-evidence lab, briskly enough to worry her. As the DNA-analysis equipment hummed around them, he said, “The auburn hair from Raffel had a smooth, complete bulb.”

  “It had finished growing.” Theresa nodded.

  “And so it didn’t have enough skin cells clinging to the root to give us sufficient DNA—mitochondrial is the only hope there, so we’ll have to send it out if and when a suspect is available. But the black hair found on Raffel’s body, that had plenty, so I ran it through the database without doing the quantification step.”

  “But—”

  “Yeah, it’s not proper, but I had plenty of sample and I’ll be rerunning it with all the proper steps, so as long as I call it a preliminary test instead of a conclusive one, we’re good.”

  “And you got a match?”

  “No.”

  Theresa rubbed one eyebrow. “That was what you wanted to show me?”

  “No. This is.” He held up a printout showing two STR profiles, one from the unknown hair, one from a sample already in the database. “I got somebody pretty close. Twelve out of fifteen alleles.”

  She studied the printout. The biochemical phenomenon behind each colored peak meant little to her, but even Theresa could see how many of those peaks lined up between the two samples. “Could that be coincidence?”

  “Possibly. But what’s more likely is that the depositor of the unknown hair is a close relative of this person in the database. But here the plot thickens. The person in the database is a victim, not a suspect. Her name was Tamika Johnson. Any idea who that is—or was?”

  “Sounds vaguely familiar,” Theresa said. “I’ll look it up.”

  CHAPTER 22

  *

  Children, Frank thought, were nature’s great explorers. Nothing pleased them more than something new—new shoes, a new cereal, most of all a new space to run around in. He watched a well-coiffed woman check in with her brood. She wore a running suit that probably cost more than half his closet and carted along two girls and a boy without actually looking at any of them at any time. The children proved his point. In the five minutes since arriving, all three had crisscrossed every inch of the lobby, discovered where every door and hallway led (much to the displeasure of an unseen voice inside the manager’s office), and touched every piece of expensive-looking artwork around, including the paintings, though they had to stand on the cushioned settee to reach two of them. As they did this, they relayed each discovery to one another by a series of very sharp screeches, unrecognizable as speech except perhaps to dogs and birds. Frank avoided children as a rule, but for once this display of overindulged, expensive youth did not irritate him. Instead he tried to recall when something as simple as an unexplored twenty-by-twenty area of real estate could make him so happy.

  He could not.

  Maybe hotels were as magical as fairylands or Disney World to children, a fabulous way station that had all the comforts of home without Mommy and Daddy’s vested interest in same. But to adults they became necessary evils, a foreign territory entered only with a qualified gratitude. An adult could just pretend that the marble floors and the artworks and the turndown service distracted him from laying his head on a pillow slept upon by hundreds of strangers, with nothing more than a thin and presumably well-washed piece of cotton in between one’s face and the germs, bugs, and dead skin cells left by those hundreds. They could only pretend to enjoy the abandon that came so naturally to children. An adult’s unsettled concern hovered until he returned home to bask in his own—benign—germs and bugs and dead cells.

  Then Marcus Dean came by, and Frank stood up to ask, “Got a minute?”

  The former cop studied him for a moment. Frank must have looked grim, for Marcus seemed to sense that this was a less-than-friendly visit, that Frank wouldn’t have come in person only to ask if he’d found out how the Presidential Suite had been breached. “Step into my office.”

  Frank followed the man to a functional, cream-colored square in the maze behind the front desk. He had expected it to look like a cop’s desk or a manager’s office, crammed with papers and files and a manual here or there, all of them balanced in precarious piles on top of boxes, CDs, and old coffee cups. But apparently Dean liked organization; three matching file cabinets along one wall were neat and closed, the desk clear except for a phone, an in-box, and the minimum computer equipment now necessary to everyday life. Wall art consisted of a large framed photograph of a beach, possibly Caribbean, the water so turquoise it looked fake. Frank sat in a well-upholstered chair opposite the desk.

  “How’s it going?” Dean asked, but with a wary manner.

  “Nothing is really panning out. Angela’s talking to your GM again about a few former employees. Any idea yet how the guy got into the Presidential Suite?”

  “Nope. No keys made for it, no passkeys missing.”

  “You said they couldn’t copy a room key because the code is changed after each checkout. What about copying a passkey?”

  Dean rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, that would work. Except that the three of us who have them never let them out of our sight upon pain of death. And none have been lost. And on top of that, we change the pass code every month anyway.”

  “Oh,” Frank said, losing interest. In his experience there were always ways in and out of places for people who worked there. Maintenance men could open many doors, some electronic devices could be overcome with strong magnets or a jolt of power, or the space where the bolt entered could be stuffed with paper so the lock couldn’t close in the first place. “We finished checking out all your people. No red flags. Your head maintenance guy had two DUIs in another state but seems to have straightened out since then. Everyone else is just speeding tickets and divorce cases. No burglary, theft, or violent crimes.”

  “I’m pretty careful about that.”

  “I can imagine.”

  Dean nodded, and his shoulders relaxed by about a millimeter. “Sometimes I feel more like a lawyer than a cop in this job. My first thought in any situation isn’t about catching the bad guy or even preventing future crimes, but ‘Is the hotel liable?’ ”

  “You’ve got high-dollar customers here. I’m sure they can afford high-dollar lawyers when something goes wrong.”

  “The kicker is this: When something does go wrong, it’s usually their own fault because they’re so damn careless. They’re too used to having people to watch their belongings and their safety and their kids. You find anything else about my staff?”

  “Two flags came up for juvenile records. We’re still trying to get a peek at those.” The juvenile-court judge had dragged his feet, and the records remained sealed, so Frank did not inform Dean of William Rosedale’s past. They had a more pertinent suspect to discuss at the moment. “Something else came up, though.”

  “What?”

  “Tamika Johnson.”

  Dean gave no sign of surprise or even worry, only the thoughtful gravity he’d carried in his face since Frank met him the day before. “I thought it might.”

  “The young mother shot to death at the ATM for the fifty dollars she’d just withdrawn, while her kids screamed in the backseat. Bruce Raffel represented the defendant. A lot of people in Cleveland thought the guy should have gotten the death penalty, but he didn’t. Thanks to Raffel.”

  Dean cut the recap short. “She was my sister.”

  “Tamika Johnson.”

  “Half sister, actually. Three and a half years younger than me. My dad—My mother had disappeared somewhere into junkie heaven, and my dad took up with Tamika’s mother. I guess we were typical birth-order kids, I worked hard in school, tried to be sensible, listened to all my dad’s stories about keeping away from the drugs, a man’s got to provide for his family, how you’ve got no real life if you can’t be proud of what you see in the mirror every morning. Tamika, she was the bouncy one, the one
who made other kids laugh, the one who avoided her textbooks like the plague and passed all her classes anyhow.”

  Frank let the man tell it his way. The insulation in the offices equaled that in the guest rooms, and only a low hum of noise from the lobby crept in.

  “My dad—better at giving advice than taking it—was a good guy, but with real questionable taste in women. Tamika’s mom didn’t turn out a whole lot better than my own, not for a long while at any rate. For too many years there, we had no one to rely on but each other.”

  “And you were her big brother.”

  A snort, then a melancholy smile. “Lord knows I tried, but Tamika didn’t need much protecting. She proved no better at picking out a spouse than our dad had, but otherwise she did okay. Worked hard. Had cute and completely uncontrollable children just like herself.”

  When he didn’t continue, Frank said, “Until she was murdered.”

  “Yeah. I was working Vice at the time, on nights, so I’d been at work about an hour when I got the call. I went lights and sirens to the hospital, but it was …”

  Too late. “What happened at the trial?”

  He snorted the melancholy away. “No one expected Raffel to do much. We had ballistics, a witness, and DNA. The best he could hope for would be to keep the guy out of the electric chair. But he came up with this mens rea thing and somehow talked the jury into manslaughter. Manslaughter, for murder in the commission of a felony. Now Tamika’s mom is making an effort to be a better mother to her grandchildren than she was to Tamika. I see them three or four times a week, trying to be some sort of dad, but it’s not enough. Her mom and me together, we’re still not enough. And her killer will be out in another ten if he behaves.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Britton I would have expected it from. But Raffel? That’s like you hopping on a boat to Paris with your trusty ten-speed and winning the Tour de France. I mean—”

  “When I haven’t been on a bike since I was twelve. Yeah, I know what you mean. So … uh, you weren’t a big fan of Bruce Raffel.”

  Marcus Dean stared over the top of his pristine desk until Frank felt like sinking into his chair, worn down by that laser-beam gaze. He knew the moment he saw Dean’s name on that witness list that he’d have to come here, have to ask these questions, and have to face his fellow officers after treating a former fellow officer like a suspect. Neil Kelly had been especially vehement. He’d known Marcus Dean, had worked with him in Vice. Only the rankest fool would think the ex-cop had suddenly transformed into an S&M-oriented psycho killer.

  However, facts remained. Access to the passkey cards gave Dean the most opportunity of anyone who had motive. He had the most motive of anyone who had opportunity. And it didn’t take a lot of method to hit someone over the head with a chair.

  “I’ve got to check it out,” Frank said now to Dean. “You know that.”

  The man nodded, still more sad than angry. “I didn’t kill him. I didn’t even know he was here until we found his body. If I was going to kill someone, I would wait another ten years and kill the guy who pulled the trigger and blew my sister’s brains all over her kids’ winter coats. I’m not saying I might not still do that.”

  “I believe you,” Frank said truthfully, thinking, But then I want to.

  “Sure. What do you need, an alibi or something? I don’t really have one. I’d already had one murder on my watch, so instead of going home last night I walked the halls, reviewed the lobby cameras—again—and hunted up everyone on duty to make sure they were where they were supposed to be. I went home to catch a few z’s at about two, came back at five. The rest of the time I was here, there, and everywhere, so no, I don’t have any sort of alibi.”

  “I get that. But I have to ask about Marie.”

  Dean had taken inquiries about Raffel in stride, but bringing up the other lawyer seemed to throw him. “What?”

  “The partner of your sister’s killer. Marie Corrigan represented him.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Said in a tone of faint surprise, as if he had genuinely forgotten.

  “So—no offense—if you had motive to get some revenge on Raffel, the same goes for Marie.”

  Dean shook his head. “No, the other dude, the partner—he was just some hopped-up kid. He didn’t have a weapon and didn’t know that the other guy did. Marie convinced him to roll on the shooter, and that helped get what bit of a conviction we got. I didn’t resent Marie for that.”

  Frank pursued, just as he would with any other suspect. “Not for that? But for something else? For turning you down when you asked her out?”

  This threw him, too.

  “If I followed that policy, the streets would be littered with corpses,” the man said, though the idea of women turning him down on a regular basis seemed overly modest. “No, I … that’s where I met her, you know. At the trial for my sister’s murder. Watching her strut around that courtroom, her blouse tailored so that it looked like her chest would bust out of it at any moment, trying to set free a guy who participated in the murder of the best friend I’ll ever have. And I wanted her. From the moment they started jury selection, the minute she flicked that long hair over the shoulder of that little body, I wanted her.” He shook his head again, this time at himself. “That’s messed up, that is.”

  “So you asked her out,” Frank prodded, with no wish to prolong this conversation. “And she turned you down. I imagine she could be pretty humiliating.”

  Dean didn’t react immediately to that. He traced the edge of his desk blotter with one finger, avoiding Frank’s gaze. “She didn’t, actually, turn me down. Not at first.”

  “Oh, no, no.” Frank rubbed the bridge of his nose. “No. Don’t tell me you slept with her.”

  Now the man glanced up, then away. “Yep.”

  “Aw, hell.” This hadn’t looked good to begin with, and it had just gotten much worse. Incidences of violence in conjunction with stalking behavior increased greatly when there had previously been an intimate relationship, and everybody knew it.

  “Just once,” Dean added. “I don’t know why, maybe she wanted to try something new, maybe she figured it would mess with my mind, her being all tied up with my sister’s murder trial like that. Maybe no one else offered that particular evening, I don’t know. Just once. After that, she rejected me. In no uncertain terms.”

  “And this was during the trial, two years ago?”

  “Yep.”

  “You could have filed an ethics complaint. She could get disbarred for sleeping with a witness.”

  “I wasn’t a witness. Character witness, maybe. I know I could have screwed with her right back, but—I didn’t.”

  “She was representing the guy who helped kill your sister.”

  “Plus, she booted my ass, yes. But …”

  Frank sighed, decided to pursue it. “But what?”

  “That one night,” Dean began, staring at the blotter, the in-box, anywhere but at Frank, “she woke up sobbing. And it wasn’t because she found herself in a black man’s bed. It was some kind of nightmare.”

  “What about?”

  Dean shrugged. “She wouldn’t say. But everybody comes from somewhere. And something in that somewhere wasn’t good for her.”

  “So you let it slide.”

  “She was wrong, but I was more wrong. You know what they say at the academy: The scumbags we arrest aren’t all bad, the people we protect aren’t all good. I’m just saying the woman had depths. They might have been murky and mean, but she had depths.”

  Frank considered this. He also considered that Dean was simply trying to balance his horror of his sister’s murder with his attraction to her killer’s partner’s lawyer. “So sex with her, it was—”

  “Normal!” Dean said immediately. Typical, for a man to react more strongly to a suspicion of perversion than a suspicion of murder. “Not to mention fantastic. But completely normal.”

  “When did the relationship end?”

  “Once is not
a relationship. I called, pursued. She’d cut my balls off—verbally—but it took a week or two before I got the hint. It took three or four months before I had the guts to pursue anyone else, but maybe that was just as well. My sister’s killer went to jail, I had my little snafu on the job and decided on a career change, and I never saw Marie Corrigan again until this convention started.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “Nope. Saw her flitting around in her world, but I stayed in mine. I don’t know if she noticed me, or would even recognize me if she did. I didn’t kill her, and I didn’t kill Bruce Raffel.”

  “I believe you,” Frank said again, though he didn’t, not really.

  CHAPTER 23

  *

  The sun hovered on the horizon and colored the sky with layers of pink and purple when Theresa stopped by the police station to see if Frank had uncovered anything more about William Rosedale. It wasn’t a conversation she wished to have over the phone. She needed a face-to-face with her cousin, needed a reason to believe that she was overreacting and that everything would be fine. Which was silly to ask of Frank. Her cousin was many things, with even-keeled not necessarily one of them.

  She didn’t quite make it to Frank’s desk before meeting Neil Kelly in the stark hallway, toting a plastic milk crate full of manila folders. “He’s not here—your cousin. He and Angela went to interview a manager the hotel fired two months ago.”

  “Oh.” She stifled her disappointment. “So you think this manager is killing defense attorneys just to make his former employees look bad?”