Unpunished

by Lisa Black

  Chapter 11

  “Can you think of who might have wanted to kill him?” Jack interrupted, annoyed by Correa’s hope that a coworker’s murder could increase circulation.

  The reporter thought on this for perhaps a second or two. “No. Who might be angry, everybody, me especially, who might dislike him, everybody, who might want his job, about five people, but kill? No one at the paper hated him that much. Arguing with copy editors is like the FOP asking for a raise at contract time. It’s just expected. Have you talked to his wife? Spouses don’t need much of a motive.”

  “Speaking from experience?” Riley asked.

  “I’ve been a reporter for twenty-five years.”

  “What if someone didn’t want a story printed?”

  “They still wouldn’t kill a copy editor. It’d be like—well, like killing one of you guys because you arrested a criminal. The bad guy kills you, the arrest still stands, he’s still going to go to trial. If he kills the prosecutor or the judge, someone else will take over the case. Kill the copy editor, the paper still hits the streets.”

  Riley asked a few more questions but didn’t get anything new. Correa had disliked Davis, but he couldn’t think of a single person who might want to kill him or what they might think they had accomplished by doing so. As he spoke he rolled his head back and forth, then stuck each arm out and pulled it to the opposite side. Evidently Correa had, at last, tired of talking and wanted to limber up for that day’s battle. He stood. “Anything else I can tell you guys? I do have to get to the paper. It’ll be chaos today. No one likes to gossip more than newspapermen, which I guess makes sense. News is just gossip you can’t be sued for.”

  Riley asked for the names of the people involved in the county advertising scam and wrote them down. “Can you tell us what else you’re working on?”

  “Yeah, sure—um . . . hmm.” He considered them, then shrugged off the hesitation. “Sorry, newsman’s habit—you never want anyone else to steal your scoops. But then I remember that there isn’t a rival paper to sell the scoop to, not in this city. Not for the past, oh, forty years. Besides, you guys don’t look like blabbermouths.”

  “Tight-lipped Louie, that’s what they call me,” Riley said.

  “Don’t believe him,” Jack said. Riley gave him an odd look, not because he’d been contradicted, but because Jack so rarely made any comment that even remotely resembled a joke.

  No matter, because Correa had already led them back into what had been the living room to gesture at the various bulletin boards. The black kid still typed without ceasing, the not-Goth girl watched a video on her phone, the buzz cut pulled one wire out of a tangled mass and plugged it into the black kid’s second laptop, and the German shepherd had curled up against the boy on the pillows. Both appeared to be fast asleep, but then the dog opened one eye, regarded them, and shut it again. Apparently it had decided not to hold Correa to the fifteen-minute promise.

  Correa waved a hand at one of the boards. “The CM ad scam you already know about. East Twenty-second is a building that’s been sold to a company called New Horizons. Supposedly they’re running a halfway house. Problem is no one has ever heard of New Horizons, they have no track record, and their CEO is an ex-GE account executive who flunked Sociology 101. So why is a big-money man involved in a social program? Maybe he’s having a midlife crisis and wants to make the world a better place. Maybe he’s trying to impress a girl, which, let’s face it, is the reason for most of the stupid things men do. Or maybe he thinks he can somehow turn a profit by giving ex-cons a place to shoot hoops that doesn’t have barbed wire marking the boundaries. He wouldn’t be the first. Anyway . . .”

  He moved on to the next board. “ProLabs. Similar situation. The state and the county gave them a huge tax incentive to put their headquarters in lovable, livable Cleveland. Maybe they’ll cure cancer. Maybe they’ll be the final cherry on the sundae to make Cleveland the medical research capital of the world and we can tell Johns Hopkins to kiss our behinds. But so far they’ve been there for a year and have created exactly two jobs, and everybody’s still getting sick, so I think the taxpayers are due for an update. No one in the city seems to care that so far they’ve gotten zero return on a massive investment.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s the question. Maybe a slow start was explained and expected. Maybe the deputy mayor’s daughter is married to the ProLabs CFO. Maybe someone at ProLabs has a picture of the city manager with a goat. Nobody knows, so someone needs to find out. And that someone is going to be Billy.” He nodded at the guy next to the German shepherd, who didn’t look as if he were going to find out anything for at least several more hours, and would smell of dog hair when he did.

  Riley nodded. “And TM?” He glanced at the last board.

  Correa’s already flushed face darkened even further. He spoke with a voice usually reserved for child molesters. “TransMedia. The conglomerate that has swallowed or strangled most of the major dailies in this country and half of the minor ones. And the Herald is next on their list.”

  “You’re going to be bought?”

  “According to downstairs—that means the business offices, which are actually upstairs in our building—no. They say TM made an offer and the Herald isn’t interested. But they’re lying.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The publisher had lunch with TM execs three times in the past month. He makes at least two phone calls to their numbers a day—I know because the . . . never mind,” he added before giving up the name of whomever he had spying for him.

  “Jon Tamerlane?” Jack asked. “I thought he was never around.”

  “He’s not, works mostly out of New York or the Isle of Nice or whatever, but he still owns the paper. He may not know an adjective from apple pie, but I’ll bet he can read a balance sheet upside down and backward. TransMedia has to show him the courtesy of pretending he has some idea of what the Herald does, what the Herald is. It’s like shaking hands with your girlfriend’s father, when you both know his opinion really doesn’t matter. But then the dealing can be passed on to the next level. In this case, our advertising director met with their advertising rajah in Atlantic City last Thursday.”

  “How do you—”

  “That’s what happens when your entire staff is trained in one skill—finding stuff out. Because we have contacts and informants and access to something magic called Google. Yeah, something’s up, and obviously all us schlubs will be kept in the dark like mushrooms until the boot comes down. We’ll walk in one day and find out half of us will be laid off, and the other half will be required to write whatever the TM stockholders tell them to write. And that, gentlemen,” Correa finished, “is The State of Journalism in America today.”

  He showed them to the door.

  Jack and his partner climbed into the battered Crown Vic. “I thought writers preferred writing to talking,” Riley said. “Information overload, big-time.”

  “I think my ears are bleeding.”

  “Mine too.” Riley shook his head. “Let’s go get noodles.”

  Jack didn’t argue.

  Chapter 12

  The alley in question turned out to be off East 55th, around the corner from a magnet school full of economically poor but college-bound achievers and a body repair shop that had been shut down three times for chopping. Around the other corner sat a Dunkin’ Donuts. The smell reminded Maggie that she needed lunch, particularly since she hadn’t had breakfast.

  “Hi, Maggie,” a uniformed patrol officer greeted her.

  “I have to have a doughnut.”

  White teeth glistened in his black face. “I hear you.”

  “I mean, I have to have a doughnut. Like, right now.”

  “Don’t worry. If they run out, they’ll make more.” She followed him into the alley as he filled her in, her mind on the crime, stomach still thinking about doughnuts. “A parent dropping off their kid at the school noticed the feet
sticking out. Cash taken from the wallet, but ID and cards still here. He’s a major frequent flier, so probably a drug buy gone bad, falling out with a compatriot, what have you. His car’s parked up the street, unscathed. His parents’ car, actually. He’s not old enough to drive yet.”

  “Wow,” she said, stomach forgotten. “Short life.”

  “Thug life usually is. Detectives are canvassing, they should be back soon.”

  The alley smelled of oil, urine, and rotting food, but did not have much clutter—coffee cans outside doorways to be used as ashtrays, the Dumpster, two empty beer bottles that had been there a while, and one scrawny cat with a calm, freezing cold gaze from her perch on a fire escape.

  “Funny thing is,” the cop went on, “today is garbage day. If they had tossed the body in the Dumpster, the forklift would dump him, body goes to the landfill with the rest of the trash, maybe no one notices it at all. Kid becomes a missing person, not a murder.”

  They had reached the corpse.

  “But if it was one guy, probably couldn’t lift him,” the cop went on. “He’d have needed help from another guy, maybe two. This kid didn’t miss too many meals.”

  Maggie snapped photos in quick succession.

  The dead boy wore a burgundy sweatshirt over a black T-shirt, neither of which was tucked into the leather belt around the baggy blue jeans. Scuffed-up tennis shoes, wallet lying on the damp concrete next to the right hip. He had fallen on his face, the brown hair at the back of his head now a mass of dried red clots. His brain had ceased to function before he could even put a hand to his wound; his fingers, nails bitten to the quick, were clean and empty, fingers lying loose, palms up. Black lines had snaked underneath his skin as his blood died and decayed. Two rings, both gold, still glittered against the pale skin.

  “ME investigator is on the way,” the cop told her.

  “I know, I talked to her before I left; she was just finishing something up, which gives me time for a doughnut.” Maggie made a few notes on her clipboard, sketching the walls, the Dumpster, the body, adding an arrow pointing north to orient her drawing. The cop crouched to reexamine the victim’s head.

  “Looks like a small caliber,” he mused. “Maybe a twenty-two.”

  Maggie’s pen stilled over her notes. Jack’s choice of caliber, but, as he and other officers had pointed out to her, a popular choice for many people on either side of the law. Cheap, in these days of expensive ammunition, and the guns used to fire them could also be gotten at a good price. Small and easy to conceal. It meant nothing.

  “What’s his name?” She detected a slight quaver in her voice, but the officer didn’t seem to notice.

  He consulted his notepad to make sure he had it right. “Ronald Soltis, aka Reign, but the detective said no one called him that except himself. Spoiled rich boy with delusions of life in gangsta’s paradise.”

  Coincidence, Maggie thought. Just a coincidence that Jack had been all too aware of Ronald Soltis.

  But she no longer wanted a doughnut.

  * * *

  Maggie got back to the Justice Center in time to make an afternoon meeting in the homicide unit. Her presence was not always required or requested, but since the detectives hadn’t made it to the autopsy, Patty Wildwood asked her if she would sit in. That suited Maggie, who wanted a chance to talk to Jack.

  Though she had no idea what she would say. Did you kill Ronald Soltis? Did she even want to know?

  She transported her steaming cup of coffee—her only source of nourishment in the past eighteen hours—into the conference room/storage area that the detectives used when they needed to spread out. She moved a few reams of copy paper off a folding chair and sat down next to Jack, surprising him. He and Riley were finishing off cartons of Asian dishes and the smell did not calm the butterflies in her stomach.

  “Hello,” he said, as if she were a skunk in the neighbor’s yard. Nothing to worry about, but then it could change direction at any moment. So best be ready to run.

  To make things worse, her ex-husband walked in.

  Rick Gardiner and Maggie were on amiable terms, not friends but not enemies. Still she couldn’t help but tense up in his presence. Speaking of skunks . . .

  Patty Wildwood and her partner, Tim, arrived and sat. Patty dropped a file folder on the table and said, “Okay. What do we got on this Herald thing? We’re sure it’s a murder?”

  Maggie repeated what the pathologist had told her.

  “So it’s probably a man,” Rick said.

  “It doesn’t take that much to strangle someone,” Patty’s partner, Tim, said. “Not from behind.”

  “But to carry them up four flights of steps?”

  “He could have already been up there,” Riley said. “It almost had to be someone who worked at the paper, so it wouldn’t have been hard to get the guy up there. C’mon, I want to show you something. What? Just come on. He’d have gone. If it’s somebody he knew, somebody he’d been working with for years—no matter how much he bitched, if the person insisted, he’d have gone. Anyone would.”

  “But then they had to pitch him over a railing,” Rick pointed out. “Right?”

  Maggie said, “Not necessarily. The strangling came first, so he was either dead or unconscious when the killer tied the noose around his neck. All they’d have to do is snake the other end under the bottom rung to the outside of the railing. Then they could just roll or push the body under the bottom rung and off the platform and the strap would be on the outside just as if he had jumped over the top.”

  “And it was some kind of strap, not a rope?” Patty confirmed.

  Maggie nodded. “Nylon.”

  “He was a big guy? And it didn’t break?”

  “An inch-wide nylon strap can usually hold up to a thousand pounds.”

  “Any chance of tracing that to its source?”

  “Honestly? I doubt it. It’s regular old Nylon 6 fiber; you can buy it for sixty cents a yard from any number of manufacturers.”

  “But why use that instead of a rope?” Riley mused aloud.

  “Because they had that, and didn’t have a rope,” Patty mused back.

  “Because it’s easier on the hands,” Rick said. “The flatter surface wouldn’t cut into the skin like a rope would if you wrapped it around your palms once or twice.”

  “Why strangle at all?” Riley asked. “You could have emptied a clip in that room without anyone hearing it, so being quiet wasn’t a factor. Why not shove him off the platform?”

  Maggie said, “The railing is in the way, and the fall might not be fatal. It’s impossible to calculate the distance necessary to kill someone.”

  “Because it’s not the fall, it’s the sudden stop at the end?”

  “People can fall eight feet and die, and others can fall a hundred and eight feet and live. It’s not a certain way to kill someone.”

  “And somebody wanted to make damn sure this guy was dead,” Riley finished. “Besides, strangling’s so . . .”

  “Personal?” Patty suggested.

  Maggie agreed. “It’s personal, but it could also be a logical choice. The most common methods for murder are gunshot, stabbing, beating, and strangling. Everything else runs far, far behind those categories. If he—or she—didn’t have a gun or a knife—”

  “Or a baseball bat,” Riley put in.

  “That leaves strangling. It’s less messy and even easier than stabbing or beating, once you’ve got that ligature around the neck,” Maggie said. “The killer only had to compress the carotid arteries and Davis could have been out in under fifteen seconds—but a lot of victims who are strangled survive. The hanging solved that problem since it guaranteed the victim would never regain consciousness. Quick and certain.”

  “Fifteen seconds is a long time with a full-grown guy like Davis thrashing around,” Riley said.

  Maggie told them about the bruise on Davis’s head.

  “Okay, forget that. No cameras and nobody saw or heard anything?” one o
f the other detectives asked.

  Riley confirmed it.

  “Outside cameras?”

  Maggie said, “Nothing that stands out, no disturbances, no fights, no one running away. Of course, I have no idea whom to look for.”

  “Anything on the body?”

  “Dirt smudges on the clothes, probably from the platform. Various fibers, a few dog hairs. A few wood grains, like sawdust.”

  Riley leaned forward to look around Jack. “Dog? What kind of dog?”

  “Don’t know yet. I haven’t had a chance to mount them.”

  He looked at Jack.

  “Why?” Patty asked.

  “Possible suspect has a German shepherd.”

  “I doubt it’s a German shepherd. They’re kind of short for that . . . though it’s possible. Some breeds, like Labradors, always have short hair. Poodles always have long. Most other ones can have either, so it could be a short-haired German shepherd that also has double dominant black alleles—”

  “Never mind,” Riley said.

  Jack added, “The victim had a dog, too.”

  Patty asked about the possible suspect and they described Roger Correa, which took some time. Maggie sat and thought about Ronald Soltis instead. Then they described Stephanie Davis, the editor, and the printing supervisor, which took much less time.

  “Okay,” Patty said. “I guess we’ll all keep canvassing until something breaks. Tim and I will help, too. Rick, you and Will are on the Soltis thing.”

  Rick said of his partner, “He’s at the autopsy now.”

  “Maggie? You were at the body—what can you tell us?”

  Other than your most likely suspect is sitting right next to me? she thought. “Shot in the back of the head, small caliber, been there at least a day. Cash robbed, but nothing else. No signs of a struggle.”