by Lisa Black
Problem.
Nothing stretched between the bridge floor and the framework below it, not a beam or a railing or anything except air. He could probably jump the five- or six-foot gap—Viktor had made it while dead at the time—and, if he scrambled quickly enough, grab hold of its edge or platform to keep from slipping into the water. Then he could complete the job and shove Viktor over the edge. But he could not be sure that he would be able to get back up again; he might find the road above just out of reach with nothing to climb on.
His head swiveled from side to side. One beam stretched from top level to bottom, in the center of the bridge; or surely he could slide down the bank to the lower shelf. Fingers turning numb, he tried to climb the mesh, feet swinging and scrabbling for a toehold, and just as he feared his hands would give up and go to sleep his palm closed over the upper railing.
He hiked one knee over the railing and heard the car engine. The other car’s engine.
Headlights came his way, on the road from the island back to the Flats. Jack had, at most, a few seconds before a witness would happen upon him, caught in the glare and looking as guilty as any man possibly could.
All decisions were made without conscious thought. Adrenaline had seemed to spur him before, but that had been a mere sniff of its wafting aroma. Now he leapt over the railing and slipped on the tarp he had dropped before snatching it up and bundling it into his trunk, then slammed the lid and leapt into the driver’s seat. He moved with the door still open and his foot still protruding, not gunning it but accelerating slowly, smoothly, just another citizen enjoying a trip through the quieter areas of their city. Nothing to attract their notice.
Pull in foot, shut door. Slowly. Smoothly.
Elm to Center Street. Cross Center Street Bridge. Wind up the hill and out to Public Square.
Unless an incredible gust of air blew Viktor from his perch, eventually someone would notice his body. The homicide unit would respond out.
One of his colleagues would try to identify the victim. Good luck with that. When Jack had asked if Viktor was his real name the man had just smiled.
Only Clyde had seen them together, and he might not have realized that Viktor was dead. Clyde might not be able to remember or describe Jack. Clyde might not have realized that Viktor or Jack actually existed.
His lungs ached, and he reminded himself to breathe. Once he dropped off the soiled cleaning supplies at some handy Dumpster, he promised himself, he could head home and forget that he had ever heard of Viktor Boginskaya. He would locate Maria and free her victims, bring his whole project full circle. Focus. Think. Breathe. He could master the details. They would not master him.
First, though, he used the stoplight at Huron to call the police with an anonymous tip about the illegally occupied apartment off East 16th. Otherwise there were eighteen Russian teenagers who were going to starve to death before someone found them, locked in a room to which only Viktor—now Jack—had the key. That would also be an embarrassing piece of evidence to be caught with, he knew. He had meant to drop it into the river along with Viktor’s body, but as things turned out, of course, he hadn’t had time.
Perhaps he should just go there, unlock the door, walk away, and let the girls escape on their own time. If he turned them in, they would be deported. But if they had to survive on their own they would probably wind up in exactly the situations into which Viktor had been about to deliver them. A question, like so many, with no easy answer.
Jack cruised past the statue of the city’s founder, surprised that there were still people walking along the streets. It seemed as if it had been hours since he’d pulled up alongside the skinny Ukrainian.
He was about to stop at the red light when a woman waiting at the corner glanced to her left, her face illuminated by the streetlights. It was Maggie Gardiner.
Jack stopped breathing again.
What the hell was she doing here, walking around the streets long after quitting time? She wore jeans and a leather coat with her arms crossed, either against the spring chill or because she felt peeved at someone. She didn’t look happy, staring at the intersection with a slight frown.
Jack hit the brakes fifteen feet short of the light, not willing to pull up level with her. Not that he needed to hide, really—they were a block from the police station and he could invent any number of plausible reasons to be in the area. That was if she even noticed him, if she recognized him, and if she even remembered his presence tomorrow.
But still. Best to minimize all possible complications. Let her cross and walk away—
The bus behind him blew its horn, startling Jack so badly that the top of his head brushed the car’s roof. Maggie Gardiner turned. He pressed the gas and leapt forward, took the corner only a foot from her body on the curb, managing to keep the noise to a minor squeal as tires gripped the road. Then he was accelerating, slowly, smoothly, hands at ten and two, his heart pumping an acid of pure fury through his veins, at Viktor and his uncooperative body, at Maggie Gardiner, and most of all at himself. He had not mastered the details tonight.
The rearview mirror showed her still on the curb, staring after him, arms still crossed, still looking faintly pissed. But had she seen him or just his car? Did it matter? He had a handful of excuses prepared in advance should anyone notice him downtown, and besides, homicide detectives worked uncertain hours. Although if he had been doing things correctly he wouldn’t need excuses. He had to be more careful. All the t’s were crossed but a few of his i’s needed dots.
She probably hadn’t recognized him, and if she did, wouldn’t think anything of it.
Probably.
It wasn’t until he had gotten on I-90, heading for Euclid, when he realized he’d made an illegal right turn in the center of Public Square. Focused on Maggie, he had moved over into the “Bus Only” lane.
Good thing there hadn’t been a cop around.
Chapter 10
Wednesday, 8:30 a.m.
The next morning Maggie Gardiner sat at her microscope, peering through the ocular at a wide, dark-colored hair with a spade-shaped root.
The building seemed to be having a crazy day, beginning with a fistfight between an attorney and a bail bondsman in the lobby atrium, right in front of the coffee kiosk. Maggie nearly spilled a large Daily Blend down her pants in order to avoid the carnage.
Then the court witnesses, defendants, and plaintiffs all decided to be unusually prompt for the 8 a.m. court commencements and teem into the elevator bank en masse until she gave up and climbed fourteen flights of steps to get around them.
Then she spent forty minutes on hold with a doctor’s office trying to get them to fax a form to authorize Marty’s wife to see an out-of-network oral surgeon who had experience in bone grafts, to whom her in-network oral surgeon had referred her, but the nurses manning the office either felt this to be impossibly complicated or an assault on their boss’s authority and livelihood and left her in Call Transfer Purgatory. For forty minutes. Maggie wondered what had prompted her to help out a woman she had never met simply on the basis of a brief nightly shooting of the breeze with her husband. Then she wondered what overwhelmed young people or old people or poor people unversed in the art of bureaucratic bulldogged-ness did when a crisis occurred. Other than die.
Then Denny’s wife, normally a bastion of calm, decided that she couldn’t face bringing another child into the household unless Dennis Jr. stopped teasing his sister and Denny had now been on the phone for fifteen minutes trying to talk her out of getting into the car and dropping both of their offspring at the nearest Department of Children and Families for placement in foster homes.
That made Maggie think of her brother, so she sent a quick text to ask if he liked playing Seattle and if it really did rain there all the time. Alex played bass guitar in a cover band, his wife and two children trooping from city to city with him like modern-day gypsies. It seemed a strange way of life to Maggie, but Delores—Daisy—managed the funds, mended his stage clo
thes, and had home-schooled their boy and girl to precocity.
“Tomorrow is chocolate-covered cashew day,” said a voice to Maggie’s right.
“Sounds good.”
“What are you looking at?”
“Stuff I lifted from Brian Johnson’s tapings.” She didn’t have to explain the term tapings to Carol. Carol had more or less pioneered their use in the Cleveland area.
“What’s he got?”
“A pit bull.”
“Didn’t that girl have dog hair on her?”
“Yeah, but totally different dog. This one has longer fur and is a darker color. Johnson also has a few cat hairs, red nylon, blue polyester—trilobal, so I think it’s carpeting—and asbestos. And some powdery mineral, don’t know what that is. Maybe quartz.”
“Hope the cat stays away from the dog.” Carol settled one plump hip on the edge of Maggie’s workstation, bumping the computer mouse and its pad. “And obviously the MOs are totally different. The girl’s murder couldn’t get more personal and the guy’s couldn’t get more cold.”
“Yeah,” Maggie agreed, but with an uncertain tone to her voice that got Carol’s attention.
“What are you thinking?”
“Three shots to the back of the head. Cold as ice.”
“Hardly unheard of in Drug Dealer World.”
“Yes and no. Dealers are usually either making a point or firing in a rush of panic or anger after a deal has gone south. They favor riddling the body or shooting in the face. This is so controlled, so dispassionate that . . .”
“That what? It almost seems passionate?”
“Yeah . . . I don’t know what I’m on about. Just thinking out loud. It seems weird to me, is all.”
“Why would someone get passionate about Mr. Johnson? Sounds more like hate.”
“Hate is a passion,” Maggie said. “So is revenge.”
Denny emerged from his office, cell phone in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. His short, black hair seemed to be graying as they watched him admit to his wife that naming any offspring “Angel” did indeed demonstrate a frightening capacity for self-delusion. He handed the cell to Carol, said: “You had kids. Talk her through this.” Then he held out the piece of paper to Maggie. “How about some crime scene work? I know you got lots to do here, but Josh is at a bank robbery and Amy has a murder-suicide and I really can’t leave right now.”
“Not a problem. I live to serve.”
“And this is a weird one. I thought you’d like it.”
“Sweetie,” Carol was saying into the phone. “Just take a deep breath.”
Maggie grabbed her crime scene kit and got while the getting was good.
“Fire department checked him out,” a patrol officer told her—a guy with impossibly blue eyes, young, but then all the cops were beginning to look young to her. They both leaned over the tubular railing, farther than could be considered safe, peering at the still form suspended above the greenish, flowing water. A male figure in a red jacket, facing downward, wearing jeans and a crown of red blood that soaked his hair until only the edges of it were still recognizable as a sandy blond. A breeze pushed itself against them, combing her hair back and bringing the scent of water and powdered stone from the industrial depot on the north bank. Firemen chatted behind them, some sitting on the bumper of the truck, some unfolding the crane arm that could raise a gurney with the body in it. They didn’t rush. Nothing could be moved until the coroner’s office investigator arrived.
The cop said, “EMT says he’s been shot in the head.”
“Huh.” She glanced around, took in the structure of the bridge.
The officer explained how the bridge operator, from his viewpoint at the end of the bridge, could not see the body. But across the small fork in the canals sat the euphemistically titled “gentlemen’s club,” Christie’s Cabaret, where a cleaner had reported for work early that morning. “To ‘scrub up after the nasty men’—her words, not mine—and she saw this blob of color stuck on the bridge. The guy’s jacket, I guess.”
The officer followed Maggie, still talking, as she pulled a camera bag and a mini crime scene kit out of her car. She unhooked one end of the long strap of the camera bag, threaded it through the handle of the crime scene kit, and looped the whole thing over her head and one arm. Then she moved to the railing again.
“So she went inside and got her boss, who is apparently one of the nasty men in her opinion. But according to her ‘he done what I told him’ and called us. I felt kind of sorry for the bridge operator over there. He felt like an idiot. I said—” He broke off, evidently having turned to find his companion gone.
Maggie hung from the mesh partition and secured her feet around the center beam, wondering what Denny would say if she ruined yet another pair of uniform pants and briefly reconsidering her plan of action as the river churned beneath her, a longer drop than she had expected it to be. But then she transferred one hand after the other to the edges of the beam, slid a foot or two, and landed on the bottom framework. Getting back up wouldn’t be a picnic. Maybe she could ride the crane along with the body.
The framework was not designed to be walked on and the spaces between the metal bars were larger than she cared for. Looking down caused a minor vertigo, what with the water moving past underneath. She focused on the body instead.
One arm had flopped over the edge, dangling in the air as if its owner had simply fallen asleep. The wind ruffled whatever hairs hadn’t been plastered down by the dried blood and flipped up the loose edge of his raincoat and shirt, revealing a shape written in red and white on his lower back.
Lividity caused the skin to stay white where there had been pressure on it while the surrounding areas turned red as gravity pulled the blood to the body’s lowest points, where it coagulated and began to decompose. In the red on his lower back—indicating that he had been dead before landing on the bridge shelf—she saw two white arches, one with a faint inner line. The scalloping design suggested nothing to her, and neither did a plain white bar on the other side of his back. Then the wind shifted, the coat settled to restore the modesty of the corpse. Not that the corpse would care about overexposure anymore. The time for caring had passed.
“Hey!” shouted an irritated voice from above. She gave a cautious peek out to see two of the firemen looking down at her. “You’re not supposed to be down there without a harness! You were just supposed to observe the body retrieval.”
“Sorry!” she called, sincerely.
Then she caught sight of the dead man’s shoes.
* * *
Wednesday, 7:01 a.m.
Jack slipped into the report writing room on the second floor, now helpfully empty. Staggered shifts began at six and six-thirty; their roll calls were over and the men in their uniforms were out on the street. Unless something happened very quickly they would not yet be back to enter an incident report, and the hour remained too early for the volunteers, community service aides, administrative assistants, and others to be using the terminals. And there were no cameras in the, at times, busy room. Prisoners and public were never there and it would help no one to have the officers’ more uncensored moments on video.
Occasionally Jack would encounter a cop from the night shift finishing up his account of an arrest, but they were already late going home and not inclined to chat. They certainly weren’t inclined to ask why a detective wasn’t using his own terminal. Such haste also increased the odds that they would forget to log out, allowing Jack to research names, addresses, and prior arrests under someone else’s login on their own Report Management System, or RMS. This was the workaday information database that all the officers and admin staff used, and no one would get too concerned about any sort of search done on it. Once he went outside their own system, however, the consequences got more dire.
The DMV, for instance, held a great deal of information—names, addresses, utilities used, other vehicles, alien IDs—and could be searched in a myriad of ways, with o
nly a partial tag or make and model. Sometimes that would be all Jack had to go on, after witnessing exchanges, meetings, and petty crimes of his targets. However, to do so an officer had to be registered with their own login, and penalties for accessing the DMV files without a valid reason could end a cop’s career. For this reason he had constructed a fictional officer with his own digital history and his own login. It had simply been a matter of filling out the right forms. There were so many cops on the force and new ones constantly replacing the retired and terminated, that a ghost could file the proper paperwork as easily as a real officer.
The subterfuge wouldn’t stop a determined investigation, should anyone ever get curious about the fictional officer. And once they started looking, or worse—set a trap for him—it wouldn’t take too much legwork to track it all back to him. But if that happened he would get some kind of warning, since cops couldn’t keep a secret to save their lives, and then he would simply have to move on. Jack lived on borrowed time, always, everywhere. He knew that. When it came to an end, he would accept his fate.
As long as that didn’t happen before he caught up with Maria Stein.
Now he searched the name Dillon Shaw to see if any new entries had been made since his original search the previous week. He had overheard some disturbing facets to the man from a Vice cop while waiting for a court case and felt obligated to check into the matter. He might have a lot on his plate right now and knew better than to overextend his reach, but once the information had fallen into his lap he couldn’t ignore it. Whether God, karma, fate, luck, or sunspots had prompted the chance exchange didn’t matter. Dillon Shaw had come to his attention now, and Jack could not look away. It wouldn’t be right.
With only a few keystrokes, and his fake login, Jack searched the name through the Department of Motor Vehicles, the state database, and NCIC at once. After that, if he wished, he could go on to LexisNexis, utility departments and court records, DHS/ICE and others, but didn’t think that would be necessary with this guy—his reach didn’t extend much past his own neighborhood. Jack had the right spelling and date of birth from RMS and so did not have to wade through a list of possibilities. Nothing had changed—no new complaints had been made, no new charges filed, no “field information” stop-and-talk meetings had occurred.
