Back on Murder

by Mark J. Bertrand

  Jessica. Her body was just a few doors down, unless they’d already moved her. I wanted to be with her, to stay at her side, her small cold hand clutched in mine. If I kept holding it, she would have to stay, and the doctor, sensing my state, had offered to tell Charlotte for me, to break the news. He’d volunteered reluctantly, stoically, the way a man steps forward for a thankless task, to do his duty to God and country, and I was tempted. But this was my job, not his, so I had unclasped my hand and let my daughter go.

  Now Charlotte’s breathing was steady and deep, like she’d gone to sleep. I glanced at the doorway, wishing someone would come through, too tired to get up and open it.

  “Roland?”

  At the sound of my name, a shiver ran through me.

  “What am I doing here?”

  She sat up in bed, glancing dreamily at her surroundings, smiling with her chewed lip, the bruises purple and bright, like she thought someone was playing a trick on her. Like she’d been transported to the hospital in her sleep so we could all have a good laugh.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, the shine leaving her eyes. “It’s something terrible, isn’t it?”

  “You don’t remember.”

  Her hand reached out. “Tell me what happened.”

  I pushed myself out of the chair, then went to the door.

  “Roland?” she called. The note of ignorant alarm, the terrible suspicion alloyed with hope, was the same as before, her memory resetting to the moment she woke up.

  “Because of her head injury,” I tell Cavallo, “my wife suffered memory loss. Short term. She’d keep forgetting things, and you’d have to tell her all over again. Not who she was or anything like that, but the immediate past. The crash. She’d ask about it. She’d ask about . . . her,” I say, finally getting the pronoun out. “And at first I kept telling her, and her reaction every time was pretty much word for word like she was reading from the same script, her head playing the moment over and over again.”

  Cavallo covers her mouth, peering at me over her fingertips. “That’s awful.”

  “The repetition,” I say, “I couldn’t keep doing it. So for two days almost, until she finally got her memory back, I kept it to myself. She’d ask what had happened, and I’d lie to her. Our daughter’s death, it became my secret. And when she finally did remember, when I knew she wouldn’t ask again, God help me I was actually glad. Because I’d never have to tell her again, your daughter is dead. And I hated myself for feeling that.”

  The bill paid and the story told, I stagger outside, dazed by emotion and blinded by the light, fumbling for the sunglasses I must have forgotten in the car.

  On the curb, after a long pause, I ask for the favor I mentioned before. I need help digging some dirt on Tony Salazar.

  “If you don’t want to help,” I tell her, “I’ll understand.”

  “It’s not that.” She brushes a stray curl from her eyes. “I’m just a little overwhelmed. And to be honest, it makes me uncomfortable not doing things by the book.”

  “Wanda said you were a little uptight.”

  “I’m not. But keeping tabs on a fellow cop . . .”

  “These guys aren’t fellow anything. And listen, I still believe there’s some kind of link.”

  She puts her arm up between us, like she’s checking the distance. “You don’t have to say that, March. I already told you I’d do it. It’s that or waste my time sitting through briefings on white slavery. I’ll do what I can.”

  “In your free time?” I ask, cracking a smile. “Your fiancé won’t be too happy about that.”

  She looks wanly at the engagement ring, its sparkle washed out by the sun. “My fiancé’s in Iraq, March. He doesn’t care what hours I work.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “What can I say?” She starts toward her car, shrugging in profile. “Noboby’s written a book about it yet.”

  I’m still sitting behind the wheel of my own vehicle, soaking up air-conditioning and pondering the turn of events with Cavallo, when my phone starts ringing. Brad Templeton sounds breathless on the other end of the line.

  “I don’t want to talk to you right now,” I say. “Your book is a thorn in my side.”

  “That’s fine. I’m just touching base with all the dirt I dug up on those names you gave me, but if you’re not interested – ”

  “I’m interested. Forgive my uncharacteristic rudeness.”

  He chuckles. “It wasn’t easy, my friend, because you had me looking in the wrong direction with all that Internal Affairs stuff. There’s nothing there. But what I did find is a lot juicier. Did you know your friend Keller filed incorporation papers for a private security firm earlier this year?”

  “Do tell.”

  “He’s connected, I’ll give him that. The corporate officers are a who’s who. Looks like he had some backers with deep pockets.”

  “Had? As in, doesn’t have anymore?”

  “That’s where it gets interesting,” he says. “Remember that guy Chad Macneil?”

  The name is familiar, but I have to reach back all the way to last week’s headlines to make the connection. “The financial planner?”

  “The guy who went missing, that’s right. Sunning himself on the beaches of South America, or so the story goes.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s on the papers, too. The treasurer.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not. And the crazy thing is, I’m not so sure the investors realize it. I had a chat with one by phone – don’t worry, I didn’t tip my hand – and he seemed oblivious.”

  “Are you saying Macneil stole the money out of the corporation?”

  He laughs. “It’s a private company, March. I don’t know how I’d find something like that out. But don’t you think it’s an intriguing possibility?”

  Yes, I do. Thomson reached out with the promise he could name shooters in the Morales case. Morales was, among other things, a money man – Lorenz even floated the ludicrous idea that since there were no drugs in the house, maybe the crew that hit it had come for the money. Now that notion doesn’t seem quite so ludicrous anymore. Not if Keller’s treasurer, when he absconded, took the company’s capital with him.

  In fact, a lot of things suddenly start looking like they might connect. Mitch Geiger’s rogue crew jacking dealers left and right, showing no respect for the territorial boundaries. The tactical know-how of the shooters at the Morales scene, with Castro’s theory about the flanking maneuver outside the bathroom window. It would explain how Thomson could be so certain about naming the bad guys. Maybe he knew them. Maybe he was there. Something like that, it could easily eat away at the conscience of a supposedly reformed man.

  “Anything else for me?” I ask.

  “That’s it. Now, what have you got for me?”

  “All in good time, Brad. Just keep digging for now.”

  After I get him off the phone, I check my messages and find that the elusive Vance Balinski has gotten in touch. He sounds nervous, either because he’s not accustomed to leaving voicemail for a homicide detective, or because he knows what’s in the box Thomson gave him. According to the message, he’s on his way to the Morgan St. Café right now, dropping the package off at the counter. I can pick it up there anytime.

  I check my watch. If I drive recklessly, I might just get there before he leaves.

  CHAPTER 21

  Just inside the door, Vance Balinski crouches on a café chair, head ducked between his knees, attended by a semicircle of alarmed women including the one who’d worked the counter on my last visit. Everyone turns when I call his name, a few even jump. He straightens, casting around blindly for the sound of my voice, eyes clenched tight, a wadded towel pressed to his nose. When he takes it away, the fabric glistens with fresh blood. Blond curls frame his punching bag of a face, perfect as a wig fitted after the fact. One eye opens, the blue cornea bright in a red sea of burst vessels.

  “You cops,” he
says, choking on the words. “Never around when you’re needed.”

  After confirming with the shell-shocked women that the police have been called, I crouch down for a closer look at Balinski’s injuries. In addition to the facial trauma, his rib cage has been kicked to shards, so bad that he winces with every labored breath.

  “Who did this to you?” I ask.

  “Some Mexicans.”

  “What did they look like?”

  He coughs a plug of bile into the towel. “They looked like Mexicans.”

  “What about the box,” I ask, already knowing the answer.

  He shakes his head. “That’s what they wanted.”

  Between coughing fits and interruptions from well-intentioned bystanders trying to get him to lie down or drink some water, he manages to communicate the gist of the story. He pulled up outside the Morgan St. Café, popped his trunk to retrieve the box Thomson had given him, then heard footsteps rushing up. Before he could turn, they were already on him, hammering away with their tattooed fists. He flailed defensively, slipping backward into the trunk, only to be pulled out by the ankles. Twisting on the concrete, balled in the fetal position, he endured a flurry of bootheels until a stray steel-capped toe connected with his chin, knocking him out. He awakened in the hot dark confines of his own trunk, using the glow-in-the-dark release lever to get out.

  “Funny,” he says, showing me what could pass for a child’s juice-stained teeth. “I never thought that release lever would actually come in handy.”

  The Mexicans were gone, and so was the box. He tipped himself onto the pavement and managed to get inside, where his mangled appearance rendered him momentarily unrecognizable in spite of his being a regular.

  Losing that box is enough to make me want to kick Balinski, too. Given his injuries, I’m forced to restrain myself in the questioning, keeping the tone civil if not solicitous, but I can’t seem to keep the incredulity out of my voice.

  “You couldn’t just give me the box?” I ask. “What was the point of bringing it back here?”

  He studies his bloody towel, looking for a clean patch, then reapplies pressure to his swelling nose. “When Joe first gave it to me, I just stuck it in the trunk and forgot. But then you called, and I got all curious and took a look inside. The moment I did, I panicked. I didn’t want anything to do with this.”

  “So you saw what was in there?”

  “Cocaine,” he says. “Just like the movies. Plastic bags full of powder, stacked like gold bricks at the bottom of the box.” He uses his free hand to sketch the size of the box in the air. “And I’d been driving around with this stuff the whole time, not even realizing.”

  “The box was full of drugs?”

  He nods. “And these blowups. Big pictures, I mean, output from a color printer or something, big tabloid-sized sheets folded over.”

  “Pictures of what?”

  “Some woman. Not the best resolution, but a naked woman kind of laid out on a couch or some kind of seat, with sort of a sheet, some kind of fabric wrapped around her.”

  “With her eyes closed?” I ask, thinking of the repeated portraits in Thomson’s sketchbook. “It was Jill Fanning in the picture, right?”

  “Jill?” His red eye blinks. “It wasn’t her. The image was jagged, you know? Pixelated. But definitely not Jill. He wouldn’t have a naked picture of Jill, anyway.”

  “They weren’t – ?”

  He dismisses all possibility of an illicit relationship with a wet huff, setting off another coughing fit. Someone hands me a fresh towel. I wait until he regains his equilibrium, then gingerly switch it out.

  Then a couple of uniformed officers enter, followed closely by an emt. I back off, giving them space to do their job, my mind busy making the necessary connections. If what he’s saying is right, maybe in losing the box I haven’t lost everything. First, using Thomson’s studio keys, I retrieve the sketchbook, tucking it under my arm. That done, I get Edgar Castro on the phone, figuring there’s no point in swearing somebody else to secrecy when I already have a willing accomplice in the crime lab. I explain about the photo on Thomson’s cell phone, asking him to extract it discreetly and make me a couple of prints.

  “Should I try and up the resolution?” he asks, his voice trembling with excitement.

  A mental image of Castro clicking away in front of a computer screen for the next twenty-four hours, burning time in pursuit of near-invisible photographic enhancements gives me pause. I tell him not to bother with anything fancy. I just want to see the same thing Joe Thomson did.

  The dim lighting makes her white skin gray, and all the details punctuating the monochrome bareness are rendered indistinct, a blurred lip, a smudged eye, the vague shadow of an exposed breast. And like a classical nude, some kind of winding cloth envelops her. Not the casual disarray of bedsheets as I’d first assumed, glancing at the photo on the tiny phone screen, but a more deliberate wrapping, a makeshift hammock for quick transport, an improvised shroud.

  And although the sketches still resemble Jill Fanning and the photo resembles the sketches, somehow the photo does not resemble the woman herself. For Balinski, who knows her, that much would have been obvious. It takes some back-and-forth scrutiny for me to arrive at the same conclusion.

  She is not sleeping, either, as I had supposed. Her eyes are closed, but there’s a pallor to the face, a slackness to the expression. Perhaps I’m seeing what isn’t there, reading details into the pixels, but I have no doubt the woman in the photo is dead.

  Try as I might, I can’t match the image to Hannah Mayhew’s features. The cheeks are rounder, the skin pale, the hair apparently raven black, though the darkness might be the result of poor lighting.

  “What are we looking at here?” Castro asks.

  He’s been sitting so quietly at my elbow that I’d forgotten his presence. I place the photo facedown on my desk, overtaken suddenly by an impulse of modesty, not wanting her to be exposed to eyes other than my own, to anything but a clinical gaze.

  “I think this is the missing victim from the Morales scene, the woman who was strapped to the bed.”

  “Then what’s her picture doing on Detective Thomson’s phone?”

  I give him a chilly stare. “I assume Thomson took the photo. After they removed her body from the scene.”

  His lips part, but he doesn’t speak. I can hear his breathing, suddenly coming fast and heavy, like he’s just finished a sprint. After glancing through the cubicle entrance to make sure no one else is watching, he leans forward, flipping the photo faceup, and traces his finger along a series of vertical lines on the dark background, just over the woman’s bare shoulder.

  “See that?” he whispers. “You know what I think that is? It looks like a leather car seat, doesn’t it? Those stitched seams right there. She was lying in the back seat.”

  I examine the photo, then nod. He might just be right.

  “Only why would they take the body?” he asks.

  That’s the question. Assuming Keller led the crew and Thomson was there, assuming they’d come for drugs or money, what purpose was served by taking the dead woman with them? If she was dead before they arrived, assaulted and killed by Morales and his entourage, removing her body would make no difference. Same thing if she’d been killed during the shooting, either by Morales or by someone on Keller’s team. Only one scenario makes sense to me.

  “She must not have been dead when they took her,” I say.

  “So, what, they were bringing her to the emergency room?” He chews over the possibility, shaking his head. “Then again, maybe she’s the reason they were there in the first place. Maybe they were trying to rescue her.”

  “Maybe,” I say, not believing it.

  I doubt this photo, grainy as it is, will be enough for a positive identification. The sketches attest to that. Thomson must have been trying to reconstruct the woman’s features from memory, using the cell-phone photo as a prompt. Looking at the successive attempts, there’s a
lmost a desperation in the pencil strokes, a despairing black frenzy in the haphazard shading. He would have done the series in quick succession, frustrated at his inability to get the face right, perhaps unconsciously substituting the features of Jill Fanning, who might have been at work across the hallway as he drew. An hpd sketch artist might have been capable of doing the job, but of course Thomson couldn’t take this to any of his colleagues, not if they’d hustled the woman out of the house after lighting up the other occupants, rushing into the night as she bled out in the back seat.

  “She died in the car, that’s my guess. He must have taken the picture afterward.”

  Castro rubs his hands together. “Why?”

  All I can do is shrug.

  To remember her, maybe. The moment he leaned between the front seats and snapped her photo, he might not have had a clear intention in mind. Acting on impulse, the body sure to be disposed of somehow, the cop inside him insisted on some kind of documentation. And afterward, eating away at him like a slow-working acid, the logical next step: identification. Putting a name to the face, which required getting the face right first, prompting the futile sketches.

  When he’d given up on identification, Thomson couldn’t let go. The dead woman must have haunted him, because his next move was irreversible, the kind of thing you don’t do if there’s any other option. He came to me, willing to give evidence against the people who’d been with him in that house, knowing that after that he could never go back.

  To get her face out of his mind, he’d risked everything. It worked, I suppose, though not in the way he’d intended. He was dead now, too, his mind blank, erased by a fellow officer’s bullet. Either that or, lying in the bowels of eternity, his final sin inexpiable, her image tormented him still.

  The seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks, though solemnly anticipated, lacks the necessary immediacy to eclipse Hannah Mayhew’s ongoing plight, especially once the story of the missing girl metastasizes into that of a botched task force investigation. Stoked by rumors of a Fontaine lawsuit and steady leaks from the Sheriff ’s Department, the story grows more legs than a caterpillar, forcing a series of awkward press conferences in which Mosser and Villanueva stand awkwardly behind a cluster of microphones, fielding increasingly strident accusations from both the local and national press.