by Lisa Black
Maggie had not been so successful in tracking the other two suggestions of the boys in the gym. “Burke Lakefront” wasn’t an address she could search in RMS and she had no access to East Cleveland’s records to find the “Mexican dude.” She’d have to ask Patty about the former and maybe search newspaper articles for the latter. Her great good friend Google . . . what would she do without him?
She spread out the pair of Ralph Lauren blue jeans. Their pockets, of course, had been emptied by investigators and they smelled of things best not thought of, but not overly terrible considering that a dead man had lain in them for two days. She pressed clear tape over the surfaces, front and back, and placed the tape strips on the clear acetate sheets—all loaned by the coroner’s office. She would have to bring the Trace Evidence department doughnuts on her next visit.
The clothing had not been taped at the time of the examination and autopsy because the victim died of a gunshot wound; clothing would only be taped in cases indicating a physical struggle—rapes, stranglings, bludgeonings. There had been no signs of a struggle in Marcus Day’s case, no abrasions, no bruises. His clothing had not been disarrayed. And he had been found in his own car, indicating that he had been shot while standing outside it—perhaps reaching in to the backseat for something—and then pushed, or crawled, inside. The bullets had not exited his skull, explaining why they had not struck the vehicle. However, there had been no blood spatter on the vehicle and only a few stains inside the vehicle, but then his heart would have stopped beating almost instantly. Lying facedown, gravity kept most of the blood in his body.
She wrapped the pants back up and started on the shirts. The victim had worn three T-shirts, a sweater, and a sweatshirt. Drug dealers had to spend a lot of time outside, and Cleveland in November is not the most comfortable place in which to do that. Remembering to layer became quite important.
Over all that he had a heavy leather Indians jacket with embroidered lettering and logo across the back. It seemed to weigh almost as much as she did, and getting it back into the thin brown paper bags proved a challenge. By the time she finished she had had to repair the bag in three places, using the same packaging tape she used to collect the hairs and fibers, then putting the tamper-proof, highly breakable red evidence tape over it. The tech brought her a chain of custody sheet. If the case ever came to trial, he wasn’t going to be the one explaining the condition of the evidence to a skeptical defense attorney.
After she had collected tapings from all the clothing—she skipped the socks and the underwear, seeing no need to get ridiculous—she turned her attention to the Air Jordans. The white athletic shoes gleamed, only a slight white line of salt marring the leather. Another pitfall of Cleveland in the winter. Not a drop of blood. How does a guy get shot in the head and leave so little blood behind?
After she sealed up the shoes, signed the form, and helped the tech return the items to the underground storage room, she took her jars of fingers and her sheets of acetate and left, wondering how she could explain to Denny that she had taken it upon herself to look at a six-month-old homicide that no one had asked her to reexamine. But she didn’t worry about it much. Denny, she knew, had the same insatiable curiosity she did. He just hid it better.
Chapter 17
Thursday, 11:05 a.m.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Riley said as he stared at the apartment building off Miles Avenue. Graffiti covered the walls for the first seven feet and fully half the windows on each of the ten floors were broken. Four young boys were lounging around the wide stone steps of the entryway, with serious expressions that said they weren’t playing a game or talking about girls. They were working, either dealing or serving as lookout for those who were.
“You wanted to come here,” Jack reminded him.
“I didn’t realize it was in East Fallujah. Do you think if I asked the captain for an armed escort, he’d send one?”
“No. He’d let us get shot and then assign the case to Patty and Tim. What, are you scared? You’re a cop.”
“Exactly,” Riley said.
“Miss”—Jack consulted the file folder Riley had brought along—“Latasha Greene, twenty-one, and her three children wake up to this neighborhood every day. If they can do it, so can we.” He wasn’t kidding. It took an outstanding amount of fortitude to be poor in this world. He commended any Miss Latasha Greene for having the courage just to set foot outside her own apartment each morning.
Baby mama number one had slammed the door in their faces, and number three had gone back to her people in North Carolina the previous year. Number two, of course, remained missing and presumed dead, her child living with his maternal aunt. Greene was number four.
Riley opened the door and got out. Jack followed. They walked past the kids, who should have been in class at the local middle school, making eye contact but not speaking—no point to it, the boys would only lie or talk trash, probably both, leaving residual irritation to linger over both groups for the rest of the day. So the cops said nothing and the boys said nothing.
They climbed four sets of steps to the floor where Latasha Greene lived. Riley didn’t trust elevators and Jack preferred the exercise; they were both breathing heavy when they reached apartment 412. At least they assumed it was 412; the numbers had long since fallen off but it sat between 413 and a door marked 11, so it seemed a safe assumption. Riley knocked, firmly but not loudly. Immediately a baby inside cried.
The peephole turned dark, and then the door opened the four inches that a thick gold chain allowed. A young woman with dark skin and darker curls peered out. “What?”
“Latasha Greene?”
“Speakin’.” A little boy of perhaps three shoved two hands in between his mother’s thigh and the wall, ratcheting open a space for himself to get a look at their visitors.
Riley explained that they were investigating the murder of Brian Johnson and could they please ask her a few questions.
“I don’t know nothin’ about that.”
“He’s the father of your little girl, isn’t he?”
The boy wedged his head into the space, gazing at them with a child’s quivering excitement and seemingly impervious to any discomfort caused by shoving his skull into a vise.
“That don’t have nothin’ to do with him getting killed.”
“No, but could we please talk to you anyway?”
The girl sighed as if greatly put upon, but shoved the boy back with one hand over his face before shutting the door and releasing the chain. Then she allowed them into the apartment without further argument. Her initial refusal would have been for show; this would probably be the most interesting thing that happened to her all week. And, since they had not even fully entered before she began to ask about her little girl’s rights to the Victim of Crime Compensation program, possibly beneficial.
She had the baby on one hip, a chubby thing with huge eyes and something tasty in one fist. The little boy raced from one end of the room to the other, fulfilling some pattern he had invented. He touched each of the opposite corners when he reached them, then looked at the cops each time he passed to make sure they were observing this display of athletic prowess. Jack caught sight of a movement at the back of the short hall, tensed, then relaxed when he realized the person there could not be more than three feet high. Probably Brian Johnson’s little girl.
Latasha waved them to the couch, a sagging, torn lump of stained upholstery. Jack would have been happy to stand rather than risk picking up a cockroach or two from the sofa but that would have been impolite, so they perched on the very edge of the seat cushions and kept a wary eye. Latasha sat on a wooden kitchen chair missing one of the tines of the back. The broken window had been repaired with tape and had no curtains but the forty-inch television had an HD label. Every surface in the tiny kitchen was covered with dirty dishes, clothes, and boxes of cereal and macaroni. It smelled like it looked, of years of neglect, a vague miasma instead of a sharp, specific odor.
“When was the last time you saw Brian?” Riley began. Latasha Greene answered his questions in a bored monotone that did not match the quick awareness in her eyes; she either cared very much about the man’s murder, or she cared very much about looking out for her own interests regarding the man’s murder. She had last seen Johnson the week before when he came by to bring Dannie—the little girl—a bag of candy. He had no particular schedule to his visitations; he showed up when he felt like it. She was not allowed to call him and did not have his cell phone number. As she spoke it became clear that she felt torn between loyalty to her milieu, with its lack of any interest whatsoever in helping the police, and the temptation to, finally, speak freely about her abusive, deadbeat baby daddy ex.
Loyalty won out, especially once the small girl emerged, inch by inch, from the doorway.
She was four, nearly five, with brown eyes and pigtails, as bright as a diamond and as perfect as a rose. She padded into the room silently, gaze never leaving the two strange men; her brother veered around her like an electron, without touching. Every step of hers seemed gentle and hesitant as if they were two wild animals she wanted to tame. Finally she alighted on the edge of the sofa, her back pressed into the armrest, keeping them both fully in her field of view.
“Hello,” Jack said.
“Who’re you?” she asked, her voice as soft and clear as her face, and for one moment Jack thought he might answer honestly, such was the effect her purity could have. I’m the guy who killed your father.
Instead he coughed, and then said he was a police officer.
“She’s his,” Latasha Greene confirmed. “Never gave me a penny for her, but he all right to her when he come around.”
“Did he have any enemies?” Riley asked. Latasha Greene laughed so genuinely that Riley joined in, for a moment. Then he rephrased: “Anyone lately? Any threats he mentioned, seemed to take seriously?”
The woman rolled her eyes. “He never mentioned nothin’ unless he was braggin’ about something. He actually worried, he wouldn’ta told me.”
Jack hadn’t taken his gaze off the little girl, couldn’t. And she continued to watch him.
“My daddy’s gone,” she told him.
And—what? You’re better off? But was she?
It was possible. Johnson had been a sick and violent man. Staying in his orbit might have exposed this child to who knew what depravities and pain. Of course she still could be. . . Latasha might take up with someone just as bad, someone who, when it came to Dannie, wouldn’t have even the slightest affection of biology to hold him back. And wasn’t any parent better than none at all, even if all he did was bring her a bag of candy once in a while?
Of course this way she could remember him as a loving father cut down before his time, never have to grow old enough to see the truth. Johnson could remain forever sainted in her eyes, a memory to prove how once a man had loved her, unconditionally.
He doubted that came as a comfort to her.
“I’m sorry about that,” he said.
She tilted her head slightly, as if trying to make sense of his words.
If this were a nightmare, she would now say: “Then why did you do it?”
Jack realized that not once since he began this . . . sideline . . . had he ever felt afraid. Alone in a locked room with the most depraved and violent criminals America had to offer, he had never really feared. Surrounded by cops, friends, people whose job it was to find people like him had never caused him to sweat. He wasn’t afraid of hell. He wasn’t afraid of God. But now, under Dannie Johnson’s solemn gaze, he trembled.
He knew what the religious types would say: that he had prevented Brian Johnson from repenting before his death, from making his peace with the Lord—though, so did capital punishment, and that was legal. But what could they say to Brian Johnson’s future victims who were brutalized because society allowed them to be, and all on the off chance that Johnson might have seen the light in time to save his immortal soul? The people he killed might have wanted some more time to settle their affairs, too. They didn’t get it. Nor did Jack’s grandfather.
Jack hadn’t done what he did to protect Dannie. Dannie was simply collateral damage, damage that, one way or the other, had been inevitable, and he would not allow it to distract him from his work.
“He called me that night,” Latasha Greene suddenly said.
“Which night?” Riley asked, not too interested.
“Monday night. He said he just got out of lockup. Wanted to know if it was Dannie’s birthday.”
“Was it?”
She shook her head, mouth twisting. “Not for two months. He could never keep that straight.”
“What else did he say? He had been arrested for assault.”
“Nothin’ about that. Said he posted his bail, was about to walk. But he had to talk to a guy first.”
Jack turned his gaze from her daughter back to the young woman, making himself do it slowly. He didn’t ask what guy, not wanting to trust his voice right then.
“What guy?” Riley asked.
“Dunno.”
“So he was going to stop off to talk to someone, and then come here?”
“He wasn’t going to come here,” she said, enunciating her words to make that perfectly clear. “And he didn’t. I told him Dannie’s birthday wasn’t for a while and he said, ‘Okay, later then.’ That was it.”
“What was he going to talk to this guy about?”
Jack still hadn’t said a word. Sweat pricked his pores, but then the apartment got the full brunt of the morning sun and had no circulation with the window closed and locked.
“I don’t know. He said he was bonding out and waiting for his clothes. Then he had to talk to another guy there and then he could walk. That was when I said about Dannie’s birthday and he said ‘k’ and hung up. That was it.”
“Another guy there. At the jail?”
Trust Riley to pick up on that.
“Dunno.”
“So he was still in custody. Where did he get a phone?”
“Borrowed it from a guard.”
Riley snorted. Cell phones were the new contraband in jails, way more precious than cigarettes or shivs. And corrections officers were woefully underpaid. A tip here or there helped with the bills, and all the guy wanted to do was find out about his little girl’s birthday. Or so he would have told the guard.
“What’s his phone number? Brian’s?” Riley asked.
“Tole you, never had it.”
“You got caller ID on your phone?”
Without a word she got up, baby still on hip, and retrieved a cell phone from somewhere in the kitchen. Holding it out of reach of the baby, she handed it to Riley. “Won’t help. He only uses burners. Always a different number.”
Riley nodded. “But if he borrowed someone else’s phone for that last call, maybe his isn’t a burner and we can find it, ask him about it.”
Latasha shrugged. When asked she directed him to some other calls and a text that were from Johnson and Riley made a note of those numbers. The baby got bored enough to struggle for freedom, its arms and legs straining outward like a bug flopped on its back, face contorting with the concentration this required.
“Do you know where he is?” the little girl, Dannie, asked Jack.
Hell, probably, popped into his head. He bit his tongue hard enough to taste blood.
Latasha sighed. “I told you, Dannie, he gone to be with Jesus.”
The girl glanced at her mother, as if to say: I was speaking to him. But Jack knew that was the paranoia talking.
“And he didn’t say anything else about being in jail, or who he was with or who he had to meet?” Riley asked.
She repeated what she’d already told them. Once Johnson had cleared up the matter of Dannie’s birthday, he’d hung up. Period. She didn’t know nothin’ about his friends or business meetings and didn’t want to know. Hadn’t wanted to know back when they were together, didn’t want to know now. “You axe m
e, it’s good—”
Her gaze fell on her daughter, and she stopped.
“Thank you, Ms. Greene,” Jack said, “for your time.” He had to get out of there before he suffocated. He said nothing to Dannie. He owed her a courteous good-bye, an acknowledgment that even as she might benefit in some ways because of Brian Johnson’s death, she suffered in others. But no words came, and he merely nodded to her before walking out.
The two cops clomped down the steps with an air of relief they didn’t try to hide from each other, though Jack knew his stemmed from more than just a distaste for cockroaches. They emerged into the fresh air just as two of the boys from the stoop were approaching their car with a tire iron. The boys stopped, studied the cops for a brief moment, then turned away, swinging the iron as casually as if it were a stick against a picket fence.
“Perfect timing,” Riley said as he clicked the locks open and wasted no time in pulling away from the curb. “Chief said if I lose any more tires, he’ll take it out of my pay.”
“So Johnson was off to see a man,” Jack said.
“About a horse?”
“About his supply of meth?”
Riley went on: “Corrections processed him out, he walked through the exterior doors and they didn’t see where he went. We need to get like London, have cameras on every street. Odd, isn’t it—they’re so concerned about their priv-uh-see, but they got cameras everywhere and no ACLU up their ass about it.”
