Unpunished

by Lisa Black

“Probably picking out new furniture. Or a comforter set, or dishes. You saw her—she was manic with energy and giddy with freedom. She had the time off work and probably just wanted to get out of the house, away from the neighbors and their condolences and their food. It’s not so strange.”

  They watched Riley supervise one of the patrol officers as he prepared to drive the victim’s car to the police impound lot. They had to keep it, in case it somehow turned out to be involved in the murder, but there was no sense in going through the trouble of a tow in such tight quarters.

  “You checked the back seat with the ALS?” Jack asked. “Maybe our first guess was the right one. Maybe this is all about somebody kissing somebody else’s wife.”

  “I checked. No one has been having sex in the back of that Taurus. I think one of the kids tossed his cookies there once, though.”

  “That glows?”

  “It smells.”

  The other patrol officer approached with a dapper young man. “This guy says he’s the owner of that SUV. Can he take it now?”

  Jack said to the man, “Sure, in a minute. Can you just tell us, when you parked here, was that Taurus—that one, driving away—already parked in this spot?”

  “That’s my car.”

  “Yes, I get that. But did you see the driver of the other vehicle at any time?”

  The young man, however, only stared in horror at the black dust now marring the bright yellow paint. “What did you do to it?”

  * * *

  On their way back to the station, and since they were driving right by it, Riley and Jack found a moment to visit Shania Paulson’s gym of choice—the logical place for downtown-area dwellers and habitués, ReZults Fitness Club. It had, as Maggie had suggested, showers and lockers, as well as extensive daily hours. It smelled of rubber and chlorine and annoyingly robust health. The annoyingly slender girl at the reception desk didn’t blink when they entered—men in suits were probably a large chunk of their clientele—but did a double take when it registered that they were not carrying gym bags. “Can I help you?” she offered.

  Riley seemed too tired to bother with charm. He identified himself and said they were looking for Shania Paulson.

  The blonde looked uncertain. “I’m pretty sure our client list is confidential—”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not,” Riley said. “This is a gym, not a law firm, and Shania is a person of interest in a murder investigation. Is she here now? Yes or no.”

  The woman’s eyes widened. “Murder?”

  “Yes or no?”

  She tapped at her keyboard, chewing her lip at the same time. “She was in her spinning class—”

  Riley and Jack headed for the door to the rest of the facility.

  “Whoa, whoa, hold it!” The girl had regained her sense of authority. “She’s not there now!”

  They turned back. At the same time, a door behind the wide desk opened and another young woman, similarly attired and similarly slender, joined the first.

  “Where is she now?” Riley asked with exaggerated patience.

  “She left. The facility, I mean. About thirty minutes ago.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “She swiped out of that door,” she said, as if that made the situation obvious. Jack figured she knew her layout and that meant that Shania was gone—again. The receptionist didn’t seem to be covering for her customer and even turned to her coworker to inquire further. “Did you see Shania Paulson leave?”

  The other reception desk worker, a girl with black skin and purple hair that somehow looked incredibly sexy on her, said she had. “You were on lunch. I remember she borrowed Jenna’s phone, and like ten or fifteen minutes later some guy pulled up outside and picked her up.”

  The detectives snapped to intense attention at this. “What guy? Did you know him? What kind of car did he drive? Color of car? Color of guy? Did you get a license number?”

  She could tell them that it was a nice-looking gray Lexus, but as for the rest—

  Neither woman could recall Shania ever getting a ride before, but then they didn’t pay much attention to how their customers traveled, only what said customers did in the gym. The membership information they had for Shania matched what the detectives already knew. The phone number matched the Samsung Shania had left in her own kitchen.

  They asked to see Jenna, and her phone with the number that Shania had called.

  The girls looked at each other. “She went home.”

  Riley rubbed his forehead.

  Chapter 32

  “Do we really have to do this right now?” Maggie asked.

  “Yes,” her ex-husband told her. “Right now.”

  “But the Herald murders—”

  “Are Riley’s job. Not yours. He can live without forensic support for an hour.”

  Maggie slumped into a chair across from the man to whom she had been married for four years, trying to mask her discomfort with annoyance. They were in an interrogation room, but it didn’t resemble the dank, cold cells seen on TV. It had ivory paint and lightly cushioned metal chairs, and smelled of neither cigarettes nor urine. Rick’s partner, Will Dembrowski, also sat across from her, flipping through a few manila folders. She had known Will as long as Rick, and always liked him. A solid family man who kept his thoughts to himself, he seemed unlike Rick in every way. That was probably what made them a successful team. That was also probably why she’d always liked him.

  She didn’t think a little irritation would seem suspicious. “Why again? We’ve gone over this, what, three or four times? I gave you a statement, told you everything I know. And I have a lot to do today. We found Robert Davis’s wife—”

  “Yeah, we know,” Rick said. “But we need to do a follow-up, see if there’s anything that’s come back to you now that a few weeks have gone by.”

  Maggie settled back in her chair. She was one of them, after all, and they would expect her to be cooperative—even if tired, even if busy. Of course she would be cooperative. “Not that I can think of.”

  Will took over, his gentle voice lulling her to remember. “Let’s go through this piece by piece. We know you narrowed down the buildings by the trace evidence on the bodies and then stopped by the one on Johnson Court. You went inside—how did you get inside, by the way? When we arrived, Jack and Riley had propped the door because it locks automatically.”

  “It was propped when I got there.”

  “With a brick?”

  She and Jack had gone over this. “No, with cardboard wedged in front of the bolt.”

  “What happened to the cardboard? It isn’t on the property sheets.”

  “I don’t know.” She let him assume the nonexistent item had been overlooked. In an alley it would have appeared to be just another piece of urban debris.

  “Then you saw this Dillon Shaw.”

  She did not have to fake her shudder. “Do we have to go through that again?”

  “No,” Rick said.

  She gave him a grateful smile. He might be childish and selfish, but he had never been cruel. And he had cared for her once.

  “No,” Will said. “We’re more interested in the man who came in and shot Dillon Shaw.”

  “Okay.” She gave the same description she had before—not the same words, but picturing the same man, who, of course, was not Jack Renner. He had suggested that she picture an actor (“not someone famous enough to be recognized just by description, like Brad Pitt or somebody”). She had chosen Michael Ironside, a long-time favorite of hers who never reached the level of fame he deserved. Though she had always wanted to bed him instead of fear him, he had portrayed a number of baddies over the years and could do the role justice.

  “And nothing came back on the fingerprints?”

  “Nothing—except the victims we already know about. I want to send them to the FBI, but first I have to eliminate our personnel.”

  “Our guys wear gloves,” Rick said.

  “People can slip. No offense, but I’v
e had cops touch things and then swear they didn’t. Sometimes it’s such an automatic reaction that you don’t realize you did it. I can’t waste the FBI’s time running prints we don’t need, and they won’t even accept them unless I can demonstrate that I made every effort to eliminate unknowns.” She wasn’t sure this was true, but it sounded reasonable. “I’ll get prints on everyone who was at the scene and then send the truly unidentified to the Bureau.”

  The two detectives accepted this without further question and she felt her shoulders relax a tiny bit. Will moved on. “So the guy shot Dillon Shaw. Then what happened?”

  “He came in and looked at him, as if he were making sure he was dead. Then he looked at me.” Again, she didn’t have to fake the quaver in her voice. For a few moments there, she had been sure that Jack Renner would kill her. And there were a few more such moments at the house on East 40th. “I thought he was going to shoot me, too.”

  “Are you okay?” Will asked. “Are you having nightmares?”

  She nodded uncomfortably. She didn’t like showing weakness in front of Rick. But anything that might speed up this interview—

  “Why didn’t he?” Rick asked. His partner and his ex-wife both stared at him, and he added, “I’m sorry, Maggie, but I have to ask. Why didn’t he kill you as well? He didn’t know you, and you had seen his face.”

  Her heart pounded, with a steady, hard thumping. “I don’t know. I guess he didn’t care. That I had seen his face, I mean.”

  “You’ve been through every mug shot within the parameters, and he’s not in there.”

  “No, maybe that’s why he didn’t care if I saw him.”

  Will said, “All the people he killed were scumbags. It’s probably against his code, quote unquote, to kill someone innocent.”

  Rick persisted. “But he didn’t know she was innocent. She might have been Shaw’s accomplice.”

  “Shaw had been about to kill me!”

  “I know. I’m sorry, honey,” Rick said, the endearment slipping out without much emphasis. “I’m just trying to make this make sense.”

  “He’s a psycho,” Will said. “Who knows why he does anything?”

  Maggie said, as if she had given this careful thought—and she had, “He thinks of himself as a hero. Killing me would go against the principles he’s upholding. Or thinks he’s upholding.”

  “How does someone get that screwed up?” Rick asked.

  “I don’t know. I wish I did.”

  Without warning, Rick changed the subject. “So what’s up between you and Jack Renner?”

  “What?” Rick might not have been very good at guessing her thoughts, but that only meant Maggie had never had to get very good at hiding them. The fact that he had caught her totally off guard had to be painfully obvious. “What do you mean?”

  “All of a sudden you’re having little private chats all over the place.”

  “Bro dawg,” Will protested, “we’re here to talk about a serial killer who’s still on the loose, not quiz your ex about her love life.”

  “What love life! I have no love life!” she protested. She was finally telling the truth, and a kindergartener wouldn’t have believed her. Clearly, Will and Rick didn’t.

  She made herself take a breath. In a less hurried tone, she said, “We’ve been working together nearly twenty-four hours a day, every day for the past four. Truth be told I’m bloody sick of him. And Riley. Don’t tell them I said that.”

  Will chuckled. Rick did not.

  She left it at that. The more she argued, the more curious he would get. The door flew open to reveal a rescuer, in the unlikely form of Patty Wildwood. “You guys done in here? We need Maggie for a powwow on these Herald murders.”

  Will stacked up his manila folders. “Yeah, we’ve got all we need. And good luck with that. I hear the bodies are stacking up.”

  Rick did not say good-bye to her. He simply sat with his arms folded, gazing sternly at Maggie and her flushed face as she hustled out of the room. He might not know exactly what he suspected, but he sure as hell suspected something.

  And that was not welcome news.

  Chapter 33

  Patty sort of ran the meeting, just as Patty sort of ran the homicide unit, since the chief of the homicide unit spent most of the day in loftier meetings, drinking coffee in the report-writing room and, for some reason, watching his detectives testify in cases taking place in the network of courtrooms throughout the Justice Center. If asked, he would say that he liked to keep in touch with the rank and file and personally witness his people in action, but most of “his people” assumed that he had perfected the art of doing nothing while appearing to be intimately involved. No one really minded that Patty had taken over in his absence, since she tended to be straightforward, fair, sensible, and brisk, all the things the chief was not—and her salary had not gone up one penny for this added but unacknowledged responsibility. Therefore, the other detectives were perfectly okay with it.

  “Robert Davis,” Patty began. “What do you have?”

  Riley duly reported that the man had lots of minor enemies but no major ones, no mysterious sums of money, no lovers, and his cell phone records came back to Herald business. He had called Tyler Truss, editor Roth, and a third number that had not yet been identified, probably a burner. He apparently contacted the first two men often in an effort to keep his job, a topic that caused everyone at the Herald great concern on a regular basis. The burner, at the moment, seemed their only clue.

  “Maggie?” Patty asked.

  “Huh?” She had been thinking about Rick. “Oh, Davis. No fingerprints at the scene. On the body, various fibers, including red silk, pollen, and dog hair. Some is from his own dog, but some is not—apparently a mixed breed, possibly Rottweiler.”

  “The strap?” Riley prompted.

  “Clean, cut with a knife, three-ply, I have no idea where it came from. I haven’t had time to check hardware stores, marine supplies, or Home Depot.” And I doubt I ever will, if bodies keep turning up.

  “That all?”

  “DNA came up empty, but the strap was so long they couldn’t be sure exactly where the killer’s hands would have been during the strangulation, and the hanging wouldn’t have needed the same pressure.” Maggie kept her comments as brief as possible, remembering that detectives had short attention spans.

  “Jerry Wilton,” Patty went on.

  Riley said, “No apparent connection to Davis other than working at the same paper. Wilton was higher up on the organizational chart, but no apparent enemies. Loving family, couple of ex-girlfriends, but no crazy ones. A pal of Truss, who Davis called a lot, but no apparent connection there. No mysterious sums of money, no lovers, etc. We’re still checking phone records—Jerry was a popular fellow—but most of them seem to come back to the Herald. Possible avenues, he may have been juggling the circulation numbers, and had been buying stock with his cousin. She’s in the wind and is either a suspect or a witness.”

  “This Shania who you can’t find?” Patty clarified.

  “Do you have to put it like that?” Riley whined. “Way to make me feel even worse than I do already.”

  “Heard she outran you,” Patty’s partner, Tim, said with a smirk.

  “You heard that from me, nimrod,” Riley said, but without rancor. Every meeting required a certain amount of banter, but no one had much time for it today. “Her locker didn’t have anything in it except shampoo and three kinds of face cream. And, you know, feminine stuff.”

  Patty and Maggie stifled giggles. The three men in the room looked disgusted.

  “But we’ve got a line on her, a girl from her gym who loaned her a phone, but said girl didn’t go straight home and isn’t answering her phone, either.”

  “Suddenly everyone in the city is unavailable. Maggie?” Patty asked.

  “Unidentified prints but no hits, same dog hair, same pollen, same red silk, a blue nylon that might be the same as on Davis, or not, I’m not sure. Same strap. Caro
l says an insufficient amount of DNA on the ends to get a profile.”

  “Shit,” Patty said.

  “Yes.”

  “The knife?” She meant the knife used to disembowel Jerry Wilton, plucked from his own knife block and left at the scene.

  “Nothing. I think the guy washed it in the kitchen sink and then put it back by the body.”

  “Why? Sort of an F-U?”

  “Maybe it seemed sensible to him. He wouldn’t want to get caught with it or caught trying to dispose of it, but wanted to make sure he hadn’t left any of his own DNA on it.”

  “Why the blood and guts at all? Nothing like that at Davis or Mrs. Davis. What was different about Wilton?”

  “He really didn’t like Wilton,” Riley said.

  Maggie said, “He was letting us know that he knew we knew Davis wasn’t a suicide.”

  “Time,” Jack said. “Opportunity. He had privacy.”

  Patty said, “But then he goes back to simple strangling for Mrs. Davis.”

  Jack said, “Neither time nor opportunity. He was in a public place.”

  Maggie said, “The first two, he found the victims in their natural habitat. But he didn’t attack Stephanie in her home, even though she was alone there. Somehow—”

  “He got her to come to him,” Jack finished.

  Patty hmmed, they all thought on this and then she moved on. “And now we have Stephanie Davis to add to your workload. What do you have on her?”

  Riley said, “Normal mom, liked at work, no mysterious sums of money, no lovers that we can see. Things weren’t hunky-dory with her and the hubby, but why the killer would care, I don’t know. Purse is missing.”

  “So we’d think this is a mugging?” Tim suggested.

  “Then he wouldn’t have used his signature strap. No, he probably wanted to collect her cell phone and didn’t want to stand there in the parking garage rooting around in her bag for it.”

  “Maggie?”

  “Same dog, no red silk, no pollen, same possible blue nylon. Same strap. DNA is working on it now.”

  “Autopsy?”

  “Strangled. One deep furrow, pure and simple.”