Unpunished

by Lisa Black

  Ten minutes later, Jack had his answer.

  L. Russo turned out to be Laurine (“Lori, please”) Russo, a brown-eyed, blond-haired beauty who lived in Little Italy, only a few doors from the Algebra Tea House. Her equally beautiful husband had not been at all pleased to find Jack standing on his doorstep at eleven p.m. He had stood in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, for a good five or ten minutes until he felt confident that Jack’s visit stemmed from legitimate police business. Then he straightened and asked his wife, “You want me to pause it?”

  “No, thanks, sweetie, I’ve seen this one before.”

  He gave Jack one last dark look with dark eyes, and retreated up the hall. From photos on the wall Jack assumed they had two matching children, young enough to be fast asleep at the late hour. Lori herself was wrapped in a fuzzy robe and seemed shocked, but not distraught, at the news of Wilton’s death. Apparently he had been liked but, after all, merely a coworker.

  Jack told her the articles she had written about the closure of the alternative high school had been found in the victim’s home. He didn’t add that they had also been found in his office at the Herald. But her face cleared. “Oh, that’s easy. His cousin went there.”

  “Who would that be?”

  The words spilled easily. “His aunt Mirabell’s grandson Damon. Mirabell is such a doll—I talked to her, too, for the story. Apparently her daughter moved to Arizona for a job but left Damon with Mirabell so he could finish up junior year. Why is it that people can have a bunch of great kids, but there’s always one that’s just an asshole from birth?” She glanced up at the photos of her own kids, perhaps thinking that if she stopped at two, it might improve her odds. “Anyway, the second his mom was out of town, the kid never goes to school, starts with the petty crimes, gets kicked out of school, and has to go the alternative, quote unquote, school. You know, there didn’t used to be so many options. It’s so hard for parents to decide now. When we were kids”—she waved her hand, including herself and Jack in the same group—“a school was a school. Private schools were a little more stringent, but pretty much everyone learned the same stuff. Then somewhere along the line some genius comes up with the idea that kids should only have to learn what and when they damn well wanted. We started jumping through hoops to keep them all on the same level, encourage every single one to go to college and be a doctor or a lawyer, which they can’t handle so they drop out and deal drugs. Used to be—hey, you want some coffee? It’s already made.”

  “Yes, thank you.” Caffeine could only be a good idea.

  She jumped up to putter at the counter and then warned, “It’s decaf.”

  Jack swallowed, reminded himself of Riley’s seminar. “Okay.”

  She tapped a large pet bowl out of her way to open a cabinet and take out two mugs.

  “You have a dog?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What kind?”

  She gave him a curious look, but said, “I couldn’t tell you—just a mutt we rescued from the pound when the kids were little.”

  He listened to the silent house. No scratching, whimpering, or barking. Not much of a watchdog. “Where is it?”

  “She sleeps in the kids’ room. Very protective. Anyway . . .” She got back to the topic of schooling as she poured. “Used to be when a kid couldn’t do the work, they flunked, they got D minuses, they figured out school wasn’t for them and they learned a trade, became a mechanic or a plumber. They’d probably end up making more than the doctor anyway.” She returned to the table with two cups. “My kids are in elementary now and I second-guess where we’ve got them every day. Now we have charter schools and magnet schools and alternative schools, and they’ll all tell you they’re great and their kids are brilliant. They’ll tell you things like sixty percent of the kids are on the honor roll. What they don’t tell you is that all you have to do to get on the honor roll is show up. I’ve been writing about education for years—double duty, I guess, for selfish reasons—I wanted a good basis in the facts to make decisions about my own kids. But it’s fascinating, it really is . . . anyway, I was doing a survey of types of high schools. I had to make an appointment to visit this school—Green Market High School, it was called. I couldn’t just pop in, but okay, not unreasonable, security in schools is high these days, especially considering that most of these students used to be drug dealers. I saw sparkling classrooms with obedient children raising their hands and answering intelligent questions. But once in a while one of the kids would glance at me.” She gave a tiny shudder. “The looks on those kids’ faces—”

  “Violent?” Jack asked.

  “Withering. Like, you’re just as much of an idiot as every other adult in our lives, lady, so what exactly the hell do you think you’re going to do?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I met up with a few of them outside school, befriended them . . . okay, I bribed them with cigarettes . . . and through thorough and skillful questioning”—she made a face—“discovered that they couldn’t name a Founding Father, describe the difference between an atom and a molecule, or knew that Iowa was a state. They spent most of their time in the building on their phones, surfing the web, or drawing, which was actually the only thing I liked about the place. Those kids could benefit from a little art therapy.”

  She seemed to realize that she’d been talking for a while, coughed, and paused. But Jack didn’t mind. At least it made a break from The State of Journalism in America Today.

  Lori described how she had located a few parents who gave a crap whether their kids learned anything or not, and got a reluctant state board involved. Jack asked a few more questions, but it seemed clear that either Lori Russo was a very good liar, or Jerry Wilton’s interest in her work had been purely due to his family connection.

  Jack had closed his largely empty notebook and put it in his pocket when she said, “But I’m so glad to talk to you.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Have you gotten anywhere with our murdering vigilante?”

  Jack could not have been more surprised. Of course the paper had covered the story, and nothing captured the public imagination like a murder room. But the attention didn’t worry him—the paper couldn’t know anything the police didn’t, and since he hadn’t been killing pretty girls, interest should fade quickly. “The investigation is ongoing, of course.”

  She leaned forward over her coffee cup, the long hair snaking over her shoulders. “Any suspects?”

  “I can’t talk about an open—”

  “You know about the others, right?”

  Jack felt a little less unsurprised. “Yes, we are examining prior deaths—”

  “I’ve been helping Isaac Mills with the story, and we looked up unsolved homicides for the past five years. There are a lot—no offense, I mean the usual gang bangers, plenty of witnesses but no one saw anything, they just solve the case in their own way. Like the Mafia. But, see, most of them were shot where they fell. Because of the murder room, we looked at ones where the body had obviously been moved.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There was a Marcus Day, a Brian Johnson—can you get me some details on that murder room? Public goes nuts over weird stuff like that. If I could get in there with a camera—we have to take most of our own photos these days—get the details—anyway, I started looking in other cities.”

  “Oh,” Jack said. “Did you?”

  “There were at least five in Chicago? Shots to the back of the head, twenty-two caliber, body moved. And there are four in Atlanta that I think are the same pattern. Isaac doesn’t agree, but I say . . . I mean, these were all scumbags who washed out of court a couple of times . . . do you ever think that maybe it’s a lawyer?”

  “Huh,” Jack said. Yeah, let’s go with that. “You think?”

  “Or a judge. Or—no offense again—a cop?”

  Jack smiled but tried not to make it mocking. Nothing would spur a reporter to action like laughing at their theory. “None
taken.”

  “I think there were a few in Phoenix as well.”

  Jack tried not to choke on his last swig of the awful coffee. “So you think he’s moved on?”

  Unhappily, she said, “That seems to be his pattern—maybe the murders begin to attract too much scrutiny so he leaves town, starts again somewhere else. And they definitely attracted attention here—he left a witness this time. So I’m sure he got the hell out of here.”

  Yeah, let’s go with that.

  Jack thanked her for her time, got back into his car, and drove away, hoping that in the future Lori Russo would stick to the education beat.

  Chapter 18

  Maggie drank the coffee even though it had long stopped working its magic on her corpuscles. She had managed a few hours of sleep after leaving the Herald’s offices, but they did not come near making up for the previous night and day. When she yawned for the third time in as many minutes she received a sharp poke in the ribs. “Hey!”

  “Cut that out,” Zoe told her, before returning her hand to her mouse. “You’re making me sleepy.”

  “I deserve to be sleepy. My head hit the pillow for about three hours last night, total.” It hadn’t spent much of that time in a REM cycle; instead her mind kept going over Ronald Soltis’s death in an alley, with no evidence and no witnesses and no gang taking credit for it. As if, like Day and Johnson and the others, some unknown force had arrived, taken his life, and melted back into the city’s society without leaving a trace for her to find. An uncomfortably familiar death.

  “More than me,” Zoe said, not that the young woman showed it. Her ponytail bobbed as she cocked her head at the screen, and even in the dim light of the darkened room her eyes showed no signs of redness or drooping. The resilience of youth.

  “Hot date?”

  “Sure. With a troll and a wizard. Online tournament of the War of the Roses.”

  “I thought the War of the Roses was fought by human beings.”

  “Different war.”

  “So you work on computers all day and then go home and play on computers all night?”

  “Why do you think I’m fifty pounds overweight?”

  A regrettable but accurate statement, so Maggie said nothing. Wilton’s computer sat in front of them, connected to Zoe’s equipment and from there to Zoe’s computer, the web of wires and thin cables making it look as if the victim’s laptop had been placed on some sort of electronic life support.

  Zoe went on, shifting her frame. “So this case gets to jump the line just because the guy who owned this laptop got his guts splattered across the floor?”

  “Yep.”

  “I got no problem with that.” She slurped something out of the bottom of a tall plastic cup and rattled the ice cubes. “Please tell me this thing wasn’t in the room or anywhere within splashing distance.”

  “Different room entirely.”

  “Yay,” Zoe said with intense relief. “Okay, what do we got? E-mail?”

  “The lifeblood of modern communications.”

  Zoe chuckled, and after a few clicks they were looking at Jerry Wilton’s inbox.

  Maggie scanned the message list, ignoring the spam and the advertisements. Zoe started clicking again.

  Messages from the lovelorn Natasha, inviting Wilton to a wine tasting and a football game. He had not replied.

  “Poor Natasha,” Zoe sighed. “That’s just how I am with Jeff.”

  There were also messages from a Suzanne, with similar invitations, carefully worded to be friendly but not overtly romantic. Suzanne either knew the value of subtlety, or she was simply a friend or the significant other of a mutual friend. Wilton replied to her, and very nicely, too, but nothing about their messages mentioned the Herald, stocks, or circulation figures.

  Then they hit on one that asked simply, “How much do you want me to buy?”

  Wilton had promptly written back to that person: “4000 this week.”

  The e-mail address was “prettyshania” at a free e-mail site.

  “Well, well,” Zoe said. “Let’s see what else pretty little Shania has been up to.” She searched the e-mail program for messages with that address, and a long list appeared. They began to read through them in reverse chronological order.

  Wilton had instructed Shania to buy shares in amounts ranging from two hundred to nine thousand. Sometimes she prompted him for that week’s assignment, but most of the time he e-mailed her first and she wrote back simply “okay” or “got it.” Maggie made a list for herself of the dates and amounts in the e-mails, but nowhere did he explain shares of what. “They must have met in person as well,” Zoe said.

  “Actually talking to someone face-to-face. The one thing that doesn’t leave a record.”

  Shania would occasionally ask about “the account,” as in, “the account doesn’t have enough for that.” Wilton would then promise to take care of it, and apparently he did because no follow-up appeared.

  “Look at this one,” Zoe said.

  Shania had asked her common question—“How much should I buy?”—but then skipped a line and added: “Don’t forget about Tom’s B-day.”

  Wilton had not responded, so they didn’t learn any more about Tom and his impending birthday, but still the comment changed the tone. Then they got as far back as the Christmas season, and Shania used the missives to ask where he would go on Christmas Eve, that dinner was at five-thirty, and had he gotten Sophie a present because she hadn’t. She didn’t, as she put it, “feel the need.”

  “This isn’t just a business relationship,” Zoe concluded.

  “They know each other. But they’re not boyfriend-girlfriend,” Maggie mused. Neither of them had ever written words like love, or commented on any activities other than buying or selling, or referred to seeing each other outside cyberspace—other than the holidays. “It sounds like they’re—”

  “Relatives,” Zoe finished. “Let’s find out who Shania is.”

  She wheeled herself a few feet away to her own computer, a massive thing with two monitors, high-resolution graphics, and a fan that made it sound like the space shuttle taking off.

  “Do you have spy techware, like super . . . powered . . . NSA stuff?” Maggie asked. She didn’t know the technical terms.

  “Yeah, it’s mega-secret. I could have you killed just for seeing me use it. It’s called Google.”

  She put Shania’s e-mail address into the search box and hit Enter.

  Several hits popped up. Zoe clicked on the first one.

  Maggie stared. “Shania’s on Facebook?”

  “Isn’t everyone? Social girl. She’s also on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, blah blah blah. Old school. Let’s see—is she a gamer?”

  A figure appeared in the doorway to interrupt this quest. “Maggie.”

  “Mmm?”

  It was Carol, who told her, “IA called. You missed your—”

  “Damn! My meeting with them. I totally forgot—”

  “Don’t worry, I told them you were working a homicide from last night and that homicides take precedence—I didn’t actually say that, but they should know it. She said just to come in tomorrow, same time. Didn’t sound like a big deal.”

  “It shouldn’t. We’ve been over it four times already.”

  “Exactly! I think your ex-husband is just using this as an excuse to see you.”

  “I doubt that. I don’t think he wants to hang with me any more than I want to be around him.”

  Carol leaned against the doorjamb, patting her pockets in succession to locate her cigarettes. She couldn’t smoke indoors, of course, but it seemed to reassure her to know the cancer sticks were available. “Don’t kid yourself. You ignore it, but he still looks at you like—well, like there’s a connection there.”

  “He’s a man. When they sell a car and later see the new owner driving it, a guy will always say, ‘There’s my car.’”

  “What a romantic analogy.”

  “It’s nothing personal. It was a serial
killer and I saw him, so of course they’re going to go over it again and again,” Maggie explained with a sangfroid she absolutely did not feel. “Thanks for running interference.”

  “Well, homicides do take precedence, so IA can wait.” Carol paused, then added, “The shrink, however—you really should talk to her.”

  “I’m going to, really. I just haven’t had time.”

  “Make time. You need to talk to somebody.”

  “I talk to you.”

  “No, you don’t.” Gently. “Not really.”

  * * *

  As she left, Maggie turned to see what Zoe had found, worrying that Rick might track her down and go into one of his epic rants. Then she reminded herself that she didn’t have to care. They weren’t married anymore.

  “Got her,” Zoe interrupted them.

  Shania turned out to be a pretty girl with dark skin, long hair, and a job in the PR department for the Cleveland Indians. Her profile picture showed her in a team jersey holding a GO TRIBE sign. Her last name was Paulson and her page had been stuffed with photos of friends, a boyfriend, check-ins from the city’s hot spots, and no mention of Jerry Wilton, stock trading, or the Cleveland Herald.

  “Can you get her address?” Maggie asked.

  “From Facebook? Of course not. Let’s try something else that’s super secret and incredibly high-tech.”

  “The white pages?”

  “You got it.”

  She meant the online telephone directory, of course. Maggie wasn’t sure the paper books were even produced anymore. They would die along with newspapers.

  “Nope, must be unlisted. But you know her name and where she works. Can’t be that hard to show up at her door and ask her who the hell Jerry Wilton is to her, and by the way did you know that he’s dead?”

  Maggie assured her, “Not me, missy. I’m a lab tech. I don’t show up on people’s doorsteps. We have detectives for that.”

  Chapter 19

  The detectives did, indeed, show up on Shania Paulson’s doorstep. But they needn’t have bothered. She wasn’t home anyway.