by David Hosp
Cassian leaned in and examined the woman’s body more closely. He started at the feet, which were blackened on the soles and toes, the skin having been largely burned off. “They’re regular,” he said of the wounds, directing the comment to no one in particular.
“Maybe where you come from,” Deter replied.
“No, I mean there’s a pattern to them. It’s like they’re made up of lines and dots.”
“We’re pretty sure they were made with either a butane lighter or maybe an acetylene torch,” Train posited. “They’re popular with the crack crowd. Great for sparking rock. Our perp spent some time on the woman’s hands and feet. By the time he got to her face, there’s a chance she wasn’t even conscious.”
“Jesus Christ,” Cassian whispered as he moved up to examine the woman’s face.
“Yeah, I know,” the technician said. “Effective torture, though. I’m guessing the guy got what he was looking for.”
Cassian leaned in and took an even closer look at the facial wounds. “The magic question is: what was he looking for?” he said after a moment, looking up at Train.
“Money.” Deter voiced his opinion. “You get a guy whacked out on crack or meth for a couple days, and they’ll do anything to get what they need to buy their next fix.”
“Maybe.” Cassian mulled it over. “Let’s walk through the chronology. It looks like the first wound was to her abdomen, that’s probably the one inflicted downstairs. It was serious, but not serious enough to cause death; it just incapacitated her. Then, when the perp brings her up here, he takes out the torch and gets whatever information he’s looking for. Finally, when he was done”—he pointed to her throat—“he kills her.”
“Sounds right to me,” Deter agreed. Train kept quiet and let Cassian continue.
“So how does he keep her still while he burns her?” Cassian asked. He ran his hand down along the woman’s leg, toward her ankle. “There we are,” he said at last, pointing to a light pink striation above the heel. Then he moved up to her arms. “And I’m guessing, if we look close enough . . .” He started examining the woman’s wrists and forearms. “Here it is,” he said, pointing at a spot just above her right wrist.
“Ligature marks,” Train assumed.
“Yeah. They’re faint, but they’re there.”
“She was tied up?” Deter asked.
“She had to have been,” Train pointed out. “Otherwise, it would have been too difficult to inflict this kind of damage while she thrashed around.”
“I wonder whether our boy was smart enough to take whatever it was he used to tie her up. Have your people looked under the bed?” Cassian asked Deter.
“I don’t think anyone’s been there yet,” Deter replied. “We started with the rest of the room first.”
Cassian looked around the room and located a cardboard box filled with latex gloves that had been brought in by the technicians. He pulled on a pair and then bent down at the side of the bed. He pulled up the bed skirt and looked underneath, careful not to disturb anything. Scanning the area near the wall behind the headboard, he hoped to find the rope that had been used to bind Elizabeth Creay, but there was nothing there. He was about to stand up when he noticed something else lying near the bottom of the bed.
“Sweet Jesus, tell me I’m this blessed. You got a camera, Deter?” he asked.
“Joe does,” Deter replied, motioning toward one of the other officers.
“You wanna get a shot of this for me, Joe?” Cassian asked, still bent. The officer with the camera walked over to the side of the bed and bent down next to Jack. He put his eye up to the camera and snapped two shots in quick succession. Then he withdrew and Cassian reached under the bed to retrieve the object. He held it up so Train could see that it was an ornate silver lighter with a skull and crossbones on it. With a gloved hand, Cassian flipped open the cover and pressed down on the igniter. An angry, sharp blue flame hissed up, compact and controlled.
“I’m guessing Ms. Creay wasn’t a crack smoker?” Jack asked.
Train shook his head wearily. “No indications like that. Christmas must’ve come early this year. What are the chances the perp is stupid enough to leave that behind? We’ll know whether we’ve been naughty or nice when we see if we can pull a print off that.”
“It’ll suck if we get nothing but coal,” Cassian agreed. He handed the lighter to Deter. “Tag that and put a rush on it to check for fingerprints.”
“You got it. I’ll have the prints run overnight.”
“We found anything else interesting?” Cassian asked.
“Nothing yet, but we’ve still got some work to do before we get out of here,” Deter replied.
Train nodded. “Let’s make sure we’re thorough. I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.”
“Like always, Sarge,” Deter confirmed. “Like always.”
z
It was another hour before Cassian and Train emerged from the house, pausing on the stoop to catch their breath. The crowd had dispersed, and only a few onlookers remained, packed in tight groups, whispering to one another as the police detail started to break down the scene. The last rays of sunshine were filtering through the trees that lined the quiet little street in southeast D.C. Train raised his face to them and closed his eyes, letting the sun soak into his skin. It was almost as if he hoped the sunlight would wash away the reality of the horror he’d seen inside.
“You thinking about the daughter?” Cassian asked.
Train nodded. “How do you come back from that? From finding your mother like that?”
Cassian had nothing to say. There was nothing to say, and both of them knew it. Some things were out of their control, and to pretend otherwise was folly. There was always the slim hope that if they did their job well, they might provide some closure; perhaps conjure a face for the young girl to look at and say, That’s the one—that’s the man who took my mother from me. But even that was cold comfort. The damage was always permanent before they were called to the scene, and Cassian and Train knew that better than most.
“I’d like to get this guy,” the sergeant said after a moment.
Jack squinted up into the sky. “I know.”
“I mean I’d really like to fuckin’ get this guy.”
Jack looked over at his partner. Officer Wozniak had been right; this one had gotten to the old man. His face was deadly serious, and the lines around his eyes had grown deeper over the course of the day. It was the first time he had ever really looked his age. Cassian took out his sunglasses and put them on. He reached over and slapped his partner on the shoulder in a gesture of understanding. “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”
Chapter Three
SYDNEY CHAPIN SAT hugging her knees on the couch in her mother’s living room—the living room in which she had grown up, in the house she had fled for college nine years before, vowing never to return. She played idly with the fraying cuffs of her jeans, unconsciously pulling and twisting on the loose threads. A white button-down oxford shirt hung haphazardly on her frame, the shirttails falling untucked over the denim. She was used to adversity, and considered herself a person who relished a challenge, but right now she felt numb.
She had been back in D.C. for three weeks, living in a basement apartment as she got settled in at her job as a research assistant for a law professor at Georgetown. It was a summer job; she had one year left in law school at Stanford, and she had originally planned to work for the summer at a large San Francisco law firm, but things had changed.
She’d begun talking to her sister, Elizabeth, more and more over the previous winter, which was unusual. They were nine years apart in age, and had never been particularly close. Yet that winter the bonds of sisterhood seemed enough to overcome nearly a decade’s age difference and three thousand miles’ separation. They had found, over the phone, that they had much in common, and Sydney came quickly to realize that she missed the connection she had once felt to her family. After much deliber
ation, she had decided to come back home to face her demons. She thought that together she and Liz might reunite the family. Now all of that was gone.
She’d been at the law school’s library when one of her mother’s assistants reached her to tell her about her sister’s murder, and she’d gone immediately to the hospital to be with Amanda. Her first breakdown had come in the waiting room, unexpectedly, the tears streaming down her face as she sobbed silently, leaving ragged tracks on her cheeks. The second had come shortly thereafter as she was allowed into the hospital room to visit Amanda—the enormity of her niece’s situation gripping her as she caught herself at the door, trying to stem the flow of her tears before she entered the room.
Since then, she’d felt nothing. It was as though she’d turned her emotions off to prevent them from overwhelming her completely. It was an unusual reaction for Sydney, who prided herself on her strength and compassion.
She barely heard her mother enter the room from the marble foyer, where the grand staircase to the second floor swept around in a regal ellipse, its carved oak banister smelling of rich wood polish. Lydia Chapin walked over to the bar at the far end of the room and began fixing herself a stiff drink.
“Do you want one?” she asked her daughter after a moment.
Sydney looked up. Everything seemed muted to her, as if she were under water. “No.” She shook her head.
“Do you not drink?” Lydia asked. “Or is it just that you won’t drink with me?”
Sydney rubbed her forehead. “I just don’t think my system could handle it right now. I don’t know how to feel.”
Lydia stared off into space. “Yes, I think there’s a lot of that going around.”
“How’s Amanda?” Sydney asked.
Lydia’s shoulders dipped as she set her drink down on the marble bar. “Who knows? She’s sleeping now, thank God. The doctors think she will be all right, eventually. They gave her some sedatives, and they think after a long rest she’ll be ready to talk.” She picked up her drink again and took a long sip.
“Should we have kept her at the hospital?”
“Certainly not.” Of this, at least, Sydney’s mother seemed sure. “I’m not going to allow her to wake up in a sterile environment surrounded by strangers and doctors and nurses. Dr. Phelps will stop by early in the morning, and he said I should call him if she wakes before then—although he said that was unlikely to happen. Right now Amanda needs to be with her family.”
“Her family,” Sydney repeated in a hollow voice. So odd, she thought, that she and her mother should be all the family left for the fourteen-year-old upstairs.
“Yes,” Lydia said firmly, as if reading her daughter’s thoughts. “Her family.” She locked her daughter in a hard stare. “Like it or not, we are the only family that girl has in the world.” She brought her drink over to the sitting area and settled stiffly into one of the high-backed Queen Anne chairs, taking a deep breath before she continued. “You need to think about that. I know that we have had our . . . disagreements ... in the past. But we need to put all of that behind us now. Whatever you think of me, Amanda needs you—needs us— and Lord help you if you shirk that responsibility.” As you have in the past, was left unspoken, but hung in the air between them.
Sydney held her mother’s gaze, searching her eyes—for what, she didn’t know. Her mother still had a leathery disposition, but with it came a strength that Sydney had always admired in spite of herself. Only hours after learning of Elizabeth’s murder, Lydia had already regrouped and composed herself sufficiently to think of the future. Sydney still couldn’t even grasp the reality of the present. “She has you,” Sydney said after a moment. “I’ve no doubt you’ll get her through this, no matter what.”
Lydia shook her head. “Not good enough.” She set her drink down on the coffee table, moving a coaster over so she wouldn’t leave a ring on the expensive mahogany. “I’m old, Sydney,” she said. “I have no illusions about the way you and your sister viewed my skills as a mother; neither of you made any effort to hide your disdain. But I did the best I could. I tried. I may not have succeeded always—or even often—but I made the effort; and everything I did, I did because I thought it was in my children’s best interest.” She looked down at her hands, clasped tightly in her lap, and for just a moment Sydney thought she saw a crack in the veneer her mother displayed to the world at all times. Then she straightened her back and looked up at Sydney again. “But that was a long time ago, and I was younger then. I’m sixty-five years old now, and I’m too old and tired to raise another child—certainly too old and tired to do it by myself.” She looked down at her hands again. “I’m asking for your help.”
Sydney’s eyes never left her mother’s face. Before the summer, she’d been back to D.C. only once in the prior nine years—for her father’s funeral five years before. Even then, she had stayed with a friend rather than at home. She spoke to her mother once a month, if that. Her mother had flown out to her graduation, and they had seen each other on a few rare occasions, but they were strangers now. Nine years out from under her mother’s controlling fist had turned Sydney into a different person, independent and self-reliant. And yet now, here again, she felt insecure and tentative once more.
The years had changed her mother, too, she could see. The strength was still there, but there was defensiveness to it now— as though in the solitude imposed by her children’s estrangement and her husband’s death she had begun to question some of her most firmly held beliefs. Perhaps there was more complexity to her than Sydney had ever suspected.
“I’ll think about it,” Sydney said. She could see the disappointment in her mother’s face—or was it anger? “I’ll stay the night, at least,” she added quickly.
“Good,” Lydia said. “I’ll have your room made up.” She nodded, almost more to herself than to her daughter, and in her eyes Sydney thought she saw a brief look of triumph that brought back a rush of unhappy memories from her younger days, when her mother was able to manipulate her at will. Had this been what her mother had wanted all along—to bring her back under her control?
At the same time, once she agreed to help with Amanda, there was probably no going back. Even by staying for the night, she was sticking her toe in a tar pit from which she might never extricate herself, and as much as she instinctively cared for her niece, taking on the responsibility of raising her would require sacrifices she couldn’t fully comprehend. Yet, did she have any choice? Could she ever leave her mother alone to deal with her niece—and more to the point, could she ever leave her niece alone to deal with her mother? The decision, she realized, had already been made.
She looked over at her mother once more, and noticed that an unusual calmness had settled over her. For just a moment, Sydney wondered if she might regret her decision.
Chapter Four
JACK STOOD NEXT TO his partner on the covered portico at the front door of the Chapin mansion. It was a towering Federal on three acres fronting Wisconsin Avenue, in the heart of Washington, D.C.’s most prestigious neighborhood. “Jesus,” Train said to him. “I always thought this was an embassy.”
“Easy mistake,” Jack responded. “Most of the houses in this area are embassies.”
Train took another look at his notebook to make sure they had the address. “I take it Chapin was Elizabeth Creay’s maiden name?” he asked Jack, who had worked up the preliminary background on the murdered woman.
“Yeah,” Jack replied.
Train looked up from the notebook, his expression prodding for more. “We get any additional info from the searches you did? Any idea what we’re dealing with on the other side of the door?”
Cassian took out his notebook. “Lydia Chapin is the lady of the manor, as it were. She’s Elizabeth Creay’s mother. Also has another daughter who lives in California. Father and husband—”
“She married her father?”
Cassian made a face. “—father to Elizabeth, husband to Lydia—was none other than Al
oysius Chapin—”
“Quite a mouthful.”
“—the well-known industrialist.”
Train’s eyes grew wide. “You mean of Chapin Industries?”
“The same.”
Train let out a low whistle. “I guess that explains the house, then, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess it does. I wasn’t able to get any real research done on the company yet—I’m planning on spending tonight doing that—but I did enough poking around to know it’s one of the biggest, most powerful conglomerates in the United States. Aloysius was the third generation, until he died five years ago of liver cancer at the age of sixty-five.”
Train shook his head. “Damn, too young.”
“How old are you, Sarge?” Cassian asked his partner.
“Fuck off.”
“Thought so. You’ve still got a few years, but you better start watching what you eat. The kind of crap you consume is likely to take its revenge.”
Train glared at Jack. “Lots of ways to die young—food ain’t the only thing that can take revenge. You hearing me?”
“Loud and clear.” Cassian held up his hands in surrender, but allowed a sly smile to tug at the corner of his mouth.
“You ready?” Train growled.
“As ever,” Jack replied, reaching out toward the door.
z
The doorbell startled Sydney, and she turned to look at her mother. Lydia didn’t move, though, and a moment later the doorbell rang again. It was clear that Lydia had no intention of getting up to answer the door, and Sydney rose and walked out into the foyer.
She peered out through the expensive lace curtains that covered the glasswork at the sides of the ornate front door. Two men stood quietly on the other side, with a patience that unnerved her. They didn’t pace, or fidget, or shuffle their feet; they stood perfectly still, as if they were accustomed to long stretches of waiting and watching.
