Keeper

by Greg Rucka

  “They’re already covering the clinic, waiting to hear from Romero. I explained that they weren’t going to be needed for close coverage, but that didn’t sit too well with the deputy who’s running the show,”

  “I talked to Felice about it,” I said. “She wants us to remain on duty.”

  “I’ll pass that along. They won’t like it.”

  “I can deal with bruising a few egos.”

  “Let’s hope that’s the only bruising that’ll happen.”

  Natalie was waiting when we arrived at the Romero apartment, and as I closed the door she helped the doctor out of the bulletproof vest. We walked up the short flight of stairs to the main floor, Natalie and Dale in front of Felice, Rubin and me behind her.

  When she reached the top of the stairs, Dr. Romero stopped, wavered. I put a hand on her shoulder to support her if she fainted, but she didn’t.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “Oh, Atticus, look at what they’ve done to my home.”

  There were toner stains on the kitchen counter and around the remains of the sliding door from where the CSU technicians had tried to lift fingerprints. On the floor were tom wrappers from all sorts of equipment, both forensic and medical. The spilled orange juice had dried to a sticky stain on the linoleum, and the whole room stank of juice and blood and chemicals, and just the memory of perfume. The bloodstain on the sofa where Katie had fallen had dried dark, and the smear from where I’d pulled her into the kitchen looked like a drunk had dragged a giant paintbrush across the floor.

  “This . . . this was a bad idea,” Felice said.

  I put an arm around her and led her to her bedroom. At least that room was untouched. Once beyond that door, Dr. Romero went straight to the bed and sat down.

  “We can take you back to the studio,” I said.

  She shook her head, and her mouth was clamped shut so tightly the blood left her lips, draining them white.

  “You want me to leave you alone for a couple of minutes?” That earned a nod, and I said, “You just call my name, okay, Felice?”

  Another nod.

  I closed the door as I went out.

  Dale, Natalie, and Rubin were all looking at me.

  “She’s right,” Dale told me. “This was a bad idea.”

  I nodded.

  “What were you thinking?”

  “She wanted to come home,” I said.

  They all kept watching me, until finally Natalie turned her head and looked the apartment over again. She sighed, said, “Let’s get this place cleaned up.”

  We got to work, and it wasn’t until I was moving furniture back in place by the bedroom door that I heard her crying. It was a soft and lonely sound, and it wanted no company.

  After we finished, Natalie got on the phone to her father again, spoke quietly to him, and then hung up. She simply shook her head at me and went back to her seat on the sofa beside Rubin, who had started reading a magazine. Dale sat at the table, idly sliding the salt and pepper shakers back and forth. I tried not to pace.

  Then Felice screamed, high and terrified, and I ran into the bedroom and saw only her clothes, folded neatly on the bed. Pivoting to my left as Dale came in after me, I went to her bathroom door and tried the handle; it was locked. Felice screamed again. I kicked the door just below the knob, and it flew open, rebounding back off the wall so I had to stop it from shutting again with my right hand.

  She was standing in her bathrobe with a pool of bloody water spreading around her feet from where it was flowing out of the toilet. The water looked pink as it spilled past the white porcelain, then went to red on the darker floor. Dale said something as I reached for Romero, pulling her to me. Felice turned to me as I drew her in, shutting her mouth, cutting off her scream, and her eyes were wide and uncomprehending. I lifted her up in my arms and Dale moved aside as I carried her out of the bathroom, past Natalie and Rubin at the doorway, back to her bed.

  Felice wouldn’t let go of me, and I had to pry one hand free to reach into my pocket. I held out the business card Bridgett had given me and said, “Natalie, call her, ask her if we can use her place, bring Dr. Romero over there now. Then call Fowler and Lozano.”

  Natalie took the card and I turned my head to look back into the bathroom. Dale had removed the top of the toilet tank and was reaching inside, trying to stop the flow of bloody water. I looked to Rubin and said, “Get a bag together for the doctor—clothes, stuff like that.”

  “Right,” he said, and headed for her closet.

  I knelt down beside the bed, pulling a comer of her bathrobe back over Felice’s legs.

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “It’s just water, somebody just backed up the pipes. It’s okay.”

  Her mouth was still open, her lower jaw shaking, her whole body trembling. But her eyes came back to me from wherever she had been looking. I stroked her hair and repeated, “It’s okay, Felice, it’s just water, it’s just water.” She put her other hand back around me and pulled her face to my chest, hiding and crying.

  Natalie came back. She said, “Bridgett’ll be waiting for us.”

  I nodded and told her to keep an eye on the door until the police came.

  I heard Dale say to Rubin, “Cruel motherfuckers who did this, very cruel.”

  After the police arrived, I left Natalie alone with Dr. Romero and gave Dale and Rubin their brief. Natalie had copied Bridgett’s home address onto a piece of paper, and I handed it to Dale, saying, “You’ll take Felice to Logan’s place, and you’ll lock it down. Take the car. Natalie and I’ll catch up after we’re done here. Call if anything happens, if anything turns up. Make sure Felice gets whatever she needs, but do not let her out of your sight.” Normally, one of the two of them would have given me a smart-ass answer—“What do you think we are, stupid?”—or along those lines. But this time neither of them did. Dale collared one of the cops, and the two of them went down to the car. Scott Fowler came in as they were leaving, and he took the stairs up slowly, looking around. “You didn’t clean the apartment, did you?” he asked. “Yeah.”

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. By being conscientious, we had effectively destroyed any forensic evidence.

  Fowler went to talk to the officer in charge of the scene, and a few minutes after that Dale came back without the cop. He grabbed the vest off the coatrack before he came up the stairs, handing it to me as he said, “I’ve got the cop watching the car.”

  Then the bedroom door opened and Felice came out, Natalie with her. Fowler and the cops stopped speaking when the door opened, turning to look, then politely turning back away. Dr. Romero was dressed now, a pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt, holding a leather briefcase with both hands.

  “Ready?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  I held up the vest, and Felice handed her briefcase to Natalie. She slipped into the Kevlar and I made certain it was securely fastened. After she had her briefcase back, Felice said to me, “Thank you.”

  Fowler and two other cops helped us with the egress, and we got her in the car without trouble. Rubin and a cop sat on either side of the doctor in the backseat, with another uniform in the front next to Dale.

  “Call me when you get secure,” I told him. “Understood,” Dale said. I shut his door and backed away. Felice was looking at me as the car pulled out.

  I stopped to get her mail on the way back upstairs, and amongst the bills and mailers, saw an envelope that looked all too familiar. I showed it to Fowler and he took it and bagged it without bothering to open the envelope.

  “We’ll read it at the lab,” he said. “Maybe get a better chance of working some useful information off it.”

  “Have you pulled DNA off any of them?” Natalie asked. “Not off these latest ones. Whoever’s doing it is using a sponge or washcloth to wet the glue, not their tongue.” Scott pulled his cellular and made a quick call, asking for a courier. “Who knows?” he told us after he hung up. “Maybe this one’ll be di
fferent.”

  “Only if our luck changes,” I said.

  ——

  The police didn’t find anything significant. The toilet had been backed up with butcher’s cuttings and blood, and forensics determined the blood wasn’t human, and surmised that the cuttings were from pigs. Other than that, there was nothing. Best guess was that whoever had clogged the pipes had come in through the broken terrace door.

  Two hours after Dale called to tell us they were in, Natalie and I left to join them at Bridgett’s. Fowler said he’d call us when he had details on the latest letter. We said thank you, and then took the stairs down to the street. It was nearly eleven in the morning, Friday.

  On the subway, Natalie said, “Conference is tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You been to the Elysium yet?”

  “I’ll go over there this afternoon, do a walk-through,” I said.

  She took her notepad from her jacket pocket, pulled out a folded sheet, and handed it to me. “You’ll need this. It’s the convention schedule.”

  I glanced over the sheet. It listed panels and talks by title, but didn’t tell where the events were going to be held in the hotel. “When’d you pick this up?”

  “Couple days ago,” she said. “Romero had a stack of them at the clinic. When you’re done with the walkthrough, give me a list of the changes you’ll want and I’ll make sure my father gets them done.”

  “It’d be easier if you came along.”

  “Maybe,” Natalie said. “But one of us should stay on the principal from now until the conference is over, and it’d be better if that’s me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Felice is starting to rely a little too heavily on you,” she said. “And you know how that can affect the op. She can’t forget that there are other guards around her.”

  It took me a second to recognize how correct she was. “I wasn’t seeing it,” I said. “But you’re right.”

  “Transference is normal, Atticus, you know that. It’s one of the by-products of our job. Yesterday she hated you, today you’re her salvation.”

  “I thought it was because I’m so roguishly handsome,” I said.

  “And witty,” Natalie said. “It’s not too bad yet, but we might want to head it off.”

  “Sort of flattering, really.”

  “I wouldn’t rely on it as a method of meeting women,” she said.

  Bridgett’s apartment was in a small brownstone in Chelsea on the fifth floor. The building was recently renovated, clean, and the stairs didn’t creak. Natalie knocked on the door, saying, “It’s us.”

  Several locks turned and Rubin pulled the door back, letting us through. The door opened into a hall that ran to the left to a tiny living room. After Rubin locked up he led us down the hall.

  It was a comfortable, if cramped, apartment, with photographs framed on the walls and a lot of old, perhaps antique, wooden furniture. There was a lumpy easy chair and a faded sofa arranged facing one wall in the living room, a small television and VCR unit that sat on an oak bureau. The television was tuned to CNN.

  Dr. Romero was on the couch, her briefcase open beside her, a legal pad on her lap. She said, “Atticus,” when I came in, and tried a smile that almost worked, but never reached her eyes. Dale rose from where he was filling the easy chair.

  “You’re feeling better?” I asked Dr. Romero.

  “Showered and had some food,” she said. “Working on the funeral preparations. It’ll be Monday, the day after the conference. It’s keeping my mind busy, you see.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry about the apartment.”

  “That’s nothing you should apologize for,” I told her.

  “If you say so.”

  “I do,” I said. I looked around at everyone. “Let’s have a powwow.”

  Natalie and Rubin joined Felice on the couch, and I motioned Dale back to the easy chair. Bridgett came in from another hall, past the kitchen. She was wearing a black T-shirt and tom black jeans today, flashing skin at thighs and knees, and she said, “Hey, stud. This private?”

  “No, stay. You should hear this, too.”

  “Bitchin’,” she said, and leaned against the door frame.

  “The conference is tomorrow,” I said. “And the threat is still active. It may come from SOS, it may come from another quarter entirely, but I think everyone can agree that an attempt will probably be made. Security for the conference will be good, but that is no guarantee; it never is.

  “Do you still plan to attend?” I asked Felice.

  She capped her pen and set it on her legal pad. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “They killed my little girl trying to keep me quiet, trying to keep me still. They’ve won enough off me; I won’t give them another victory.”

  Bridgett shook her head. “Excuse me, but if they kill you, isn’t that their final victory? At least in this battle?”

  “If they kill me,” Felice said.

  Bridgett pulled the tin of Altoids from her hip pocket and popped a mint, offering the container around. Natalie and Rubin each took one.

  “I’m going to attend,” Felice said. “Damn them.”

  “All right,” I said. “Then you will do the following, to the letter, until after the conference. From now until tomorrow night, you go nowhere, do nothing, without at least one other guard with you at all times. This means everything, from sleeping to showering to eating.” I looked at my crew. “This means one of you is on her at all times, no excuses.”

  “When are we going hot?” Rubin asked.

  “The conference starts at ten-hundred tomorrow morning,” Natalie said. She pulled her notepad out of her jacket pocket and flipped a couple of pages, then found the entry she wanted. “It’s scheduled to run until twenty-hundred.” She asked Dr. Romero, “When do you plan to arrive?”

  “I’m speaking at the opening with Veronica,” Felice said. “Then I’m scheduled for a panel at noon and a talk at three. The talk should finish by five.”

  “Do you know the locations of those talks?” I asked her.

  “The panel will be in the Imperial Ballroom, and my talk is to be held in the New York Room,” she said. As she spoke, Natalie wrote this new information down. “I believe that Veronica and I are to speak in the Imperial, as well.”

  Natalie tore the sheet from her pad and handed it to me. I folded it and put it in my pocket next to the schedule. “We’re going to need a general briefing with all the agencies involved,” I said. “And the only time I see when we’ll have a chance to do that is before the conference itself starts. Figure we’ll go hot at oh-seven-hundred. Transport at oh-seven-thirty, and we place Dr. Romero in the command post by oh-eight-hundred. We’ll hold the general briefing there at oh-eight-thirty. Egress at seventeen-hundred if possible. We return to normal coverage only after Dr. Romero is secured at the safe apartment tomorrow night.” While I was speaking, my pager went off, and I silenced it, then checked the number.

  “How are we covering in the hot zone?” Dale asked.

  “When Dr. Romero is speaking or in any group, all of us. Otherwise I’ll be on the principal unless needed elsewhere, in which case one of you will sub in. Dale, you’ll be responsible for evac and exits,” I said. “Rubin will cover entrances, and Natalie will be the floater. As always, the chain of command will run from me to Natalie to Dale to Rubin.”

  “Joy,” Rubin said.

  “Understood?” I asked.

  Everyone gave me a nod, even Bridgett.

  “Good,” I said, and checked my watch. It was almost twelve-thirty. “I’m going to head over to the Elysium now, do the walk-through, and plan the routes.”

  Bridgett pushed off the door frame and said, “You need a phone? Use the one in my office.”

  I followed her down the hall. The floor was hardwood, highly polished. She guided me through a door on her right into a small office with an oak desk in a comer. The desk was huge, and I wondered how she had fit
it into the room. Its surface was covered with papers, a Macintosh computer stuck in one comer, cables, running from it to the printer on the floor. She pointed me to the chair in front of it, pulling a seat for herself from the comer. Both of the chairs were backless, the kind where you rested your knees on pads below the seat. I picked up the phone and dialed.

  “Who you calling?” she asked.

  “Fowler,” I said.

  She made a face, then said, “I’ve got a friend, a reporter. Did some digging for me. You know that Veronica Selby has published four books about abortion and how to protest it?”

  “She’d mentioned as much to me.”

  “Lectures, articles—she’s very busy.”

  “And?”

  “She and Crowell were at one point engaged.”

  Fowler answered his phone before I could respond further, and Bridgett just grinned at my shock.

  “Got a preliminary report on the letter,” Scott told me. “It reads: ‘Dear Butcher Bitch, two down, one to go. Not twins, not triplets. Murdered babies, punished mothers. I will have justice.’ That’s it.”

  “Read it again,” I said, and grabbed a pen and one of the scraps of paper on Bridgett’s desk. Fowler read the letter again and I copied it down, then handed it to her to read, saying to Scott, “Did you find anything on the letter?”

  “That’s the good news,” he said. “The lab pulled fiber traces from the envelope, blue. Could have been carried inside a coat pocket or something. It’s not a lot, but it’s progress. I’m still waiting for the lab to finish.”

  “Not a mail carrier’s jacket?” I asked.

  “No, definitely not. That was the first check we ran. What do you make of the letter, that ‘two down’ business?”

  “No idea.”

  “Sounds like the writer is Katie’s murderer,” Fowler said.

  “Then who’s the second victim?”

  “That’s a good question. Felice have any other children, anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe Katie was pregnant?”

  “Are you kidding? Absolutely not,” I said. “Besides, she was having her period when she was shot.”