Unpunished

by Lisa Black

  “You work there.”

  “Yes, in the digital division. I have faith that online news can be made profitable, but history has not yet borne that out. I think it will. I intend to try my hardest. But I’ll wait until we have a number of quarters in the black before I invest my IRAs in Herald stock.” He reconsidered his candor. “Don’t tell Roth I said that, though. Seriously, don’t.”

  The cops stared at him. Jack said, “According to you no one in their right mind would invest. But Jerry did. And he seemed in his right mind.”

  The man crossed his arms. “Yes, he did. Obviously he had a plan he didn’t let me in on, or he knew something I don’t. I can’t explain it.”

  He spoke openly, without squirming or looking away, but Jack still didn’t believe him. Or rather, he did and didn’t. Truss sounded a bit outraged when talking about the stock, perhaps annoyed that his friend had seen a sure thing and hadn’t let him in on it. But as to Wilton’s motives for trying to corner the market . . . it seemed that Truss might have some solid theories on what his friend had been thinking. Dots had begun to connect in his mind.

  Under this scrutiny Truss did squirm. “I’m telling you, Jerry and I were friends to have a drink now and then after work, or compare fantasy football picks. But we weren’t BFFs. I had only met Shania once or twice before she showed up on my doorstep last night.” That comment fell with a thud and he hastened to cover her hand with his own again, speaking to her directly. “But I’m glad you did. Anything I can do to help. My couch is yours as long as you need it.”

  The gratitude in her smile seemed to make him forget Jerry Wilton and his stock deals. “Thank you. But I’m ready to go home, sleep in my own bed, wash in my own shower—”

  “Miss Paulson—” Riley started.

  “I don’t think you should,” Tyler Truss said. “Whoever killed Jerry is still out there. If they knew about this stock deal, they might know about you, too.”

  “That is a point, Miss Paulson. We think you should come with us. We can provide protective custody for you.”

  “You can stay here,” Truss said.

  She appeared to think this through—quite rationally, to judge from her next comments. “How would that benefit the killer, though? It’s not like he’s going to get access to Jerry’s stock. I have a will, if I died all my assets would go to my mom, and after her to my sister Cindy. Unless they want my laptop, figure they could get to the site from my browser history. But they couldn’t withdraw from the stock accounts without my password. I suppose maybe a hacker could find it in there—is that possible?”

  “I don’t know,” Riley said, weariness from the long day showing in his voice. “And until we do, you shouldn’t be alone.”

  Shania said, “Okay,” to Truss, not to Riley.

  “Miss Paulson—”

  “It’s okay. I’d rather stay here than be stuck in a hotel room with some cop—no offense. But I wouldn’t know them.”

  Riley visibly struggled with a way to point out that she didn’t know Tyler Truss, either, and gave up. “Nothing against Mr. Truss, here, but he is almost a total stranger as well.”

  “Ty’s been great! He brought me right in and—”

  “Could we have this discussion in private, please?”

  “No, Ty was Jerry’s friend, and he didn’t know anything about this stock business. I know that.”

  She stood up, arms crossed over her chest, relatively large for her slight frame, and pushed the hair back where it brushed her firm jawline. Whatever else Tyler Truss might be, Jack thought, he wasn’t blind. But he by no means had been struck from their list of suspects, either . . . even though he didn’t have a Rottweiler or a willow tree, or—“Is that tie silk?”

  Truss reacted as if Jack had suddenly spouted words in Swahili, and the other two people in the room stared as well. Truss’s chin dipped; he picked up the end of the multicolored tie as if wondering why it sat on his chest, dropped it, and said, “Uh—yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  Riley brushed off his partner’s odd outburst and pressed on. “Something is going on at your cousin’s paper, Miss Paulson, and until we know what it is, everyone who works there is a suspect. Again, we mean no offense to Mr. Truss, but we can’t in good conscience leave you here under those circumstances.”

  “I don’t care about your conscience! I—” She snuck an embarrassed glance at Truss, then continued. “I like Ty. I trust him, and if he wanted to murder me he could have done it last night when no one knew I was here, or after he picked me up at the gym today. He could have dumped my body—”

  “Shania,” Truss said, as if ill at ease with the talk of bodies. He was either a really nice guy who had fallen immediately in love with Jerry Wilton’s cousin, or he was a really good actor.

  “—and gotten completely away with it. You can’t tell me what to do.”

  “We can arrest you as a material witness. On paper, Miss Paulson, you are the most likely suspect in your cousin’s murder.”

  “What?”

  “By your own admission you and he shared funds that are now yours alone.”

  “You’re going to put me in cuffs? Just because I won’t do what you want? You have no idea how many lawyers I know—”

  “Not as many as I do,” Riley snapped back.

  “Shania,” Truss said.

  “—and we can sue you for harassment—”

  “Shania, they’re right,” Truss said, and his capitulation startled her into silence. “You may be in very great danger, and I don’t even have a gun. If some knife-wielding, strangling psycho breaks in here, I can’t guarantee your safety.”

  “I can,” she said, still puffed up with the adrenaline of stress and annoyance.

  “You’ll be safer with them.” He played his last card. “I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

  She gave up. “Okay. Maybe you’re right.” She rallied long enough to fix Riley with a glare. “It had better be a nice hotel.”

  Riley, wisely, said nothing.

  But as Shania Paulson moved around to gather up her backpack, Jack’s partner hissed to him, “I could have taken her.”

  Chapter 38

  Too wound up from the night’s activities, Maggie went back to her lab. In the cool silence she could reexamine her trace evidence and maybe see something she hadn’t before. But then she picked up Jack’s fingerprints—his real fingerprints—and sat down with all the latents collected from the Johnson Court building and the house on East 40th. She wouldn’t have a better opportunity to weed his out without Carol or Denny or Amy seeing her work on a case she wasn’t supposed to be working on. Josh wouldn’t notice, or care, that she had done half his task for him. Josh had enough to do.

  Several prints had been identified as belonging to prior victims such as Marcus Day, but many remained unidentified. Jack had been good about wiping down the table and more permanent structures of his “murder room,” like the Plexiglas he had put over the windows, but not the collection of alcoholic beverages or the battered work desk in the corner. She found four that were his, neatly identified three of them as “Det. J. Renner,” and put them back in their envelope. They would not be sent on to any federal agency. They would not be sent anywhere. Jack’s past would not be exposed, not to the Cleveland Police Department, and not to her. Jack could go on killing the Ronald Soltises of the world.

  And how did she feel about that?

  The same way she’d felt about it for the past few weeks. She was protecting a murderer, and therefore protecting herself, because she had become a murderer, too. As simple as that. The law said that murder was murder. But it also said that the purpose of people like Jack and herself was to protect citizens. Trying to figure out which declaration took priority ran her around in circles and she had tired of that. Her brain couldn’t handle any more calisthenics.

  Still she sat there, the fourth latent print under her fingers. What would happen if she sent it on? What if some toiling FBI fin
gerprint analyst scanned it into their database, let the massive servers compare its tiny ridge endings and divisions to the hundred million sets of people’s fingerprints but, more importantly, to the millions of unidentified crime scene prints. The servers churned twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, every week of every year. Someday they might spit out a match. This match would tie their series of murders to—what? More murders? Crimes even more horrific than a pattern of cold executions?

  It wouldn’t necessarily incriminate Jack. It would simply tie their unknown vigilante killer to murders in other places, other times, which she knew and everyone else suspected must exist.

  Perhaps it would hit on his 10-prints, a set collected long ago before he had crimes to hide. Perhaps it would be filed under his real name. She wondered what that might be.

  That still wouldn’t lead to the man she knew as Jack Renner, with his fake name and fake prints in the official file. But it might fill in his past for her, tell her exactly whom she was dealing with.

  Unless there weren’t any other crime scene prints to find. Maybe this had been the first time he hadn’t had time to clean up after himself. Maybe he hadn’t left prints anywhere else.

  Unlikely, she knew. People touch more than they think they touch.

  It was awfully tempting, to get a glimpse of who Jack Renner had been before he became Jack Renner . . . tempting, but dangerous. For both of them. If the police caught him, the first thing he would do would be to make a deal by giving her up. He owed her nothing, and once his secret became known she had nothing with which to buy his silence.

  She labeled the fourth latent and dropped it into the envelope. It wouldn’t be going to the FBI. It would stay here, locked in a file, neatly identified and written up and with no reason for any person to ever look at it again.

  “What are you doing here?” said a voice at her elbow, causing her to both die of a massive coronary attack and scatter latent print cards across the floor.

  “Sorry,” her boss told her.

  “Denny! What are you doing to me?”

  “I thought you’d hear me walk up. You usually do.” The head of the forensic unit wore a thin sweatshirt, what looked suspiciously like pajama bottoms, and a child. Said child slumbered against her father’s chest in a soft fabric carrier so comfortable-looking that Maggie had to stifle a feeling of envy. “I guess you were really concentrating.”

  Maggie rubbed her face before picking the cards up from the floor. “You do realize it’s two a.m.”

  “She wouldn’t sleep.”

  Maggie peeked at the week-old child, slumbering with mouth agape, tiny ebony hands curled into fists. “She sure looks like she’s sleeping.”

  “Now, yes. But she won’t sleep if anyone else is sleeping. We haven’t been able to so much as blink at the same time since she came home. The kids can’t stay awake through their classes, and my wife is getting that scary look.”

  “She’s scared?”

  “She scares me.”

  “So you brought the kid to a forensics lab?”

  “Look at her—she doesn’t care. As long as at least one of her parents is not sleeping she’s happy, the sadistic little demon spawn. I thought I’d check my e-mail. Why are you here?”

  “I couldn’t sleep, either.”

  Denny slumped against Josh’s desk, knocking over a battered action figure of Boba Fett, and patted the back of his small offspring. “Has that been every night, or—”

  “Come on, Denny, not you too. I’ve got enough with Carol practically wanting to take my temperature and BP every hour.”

  He didn’t smile. “I know you’re tough, okay? Believe me, I know. But—”

  “It’s not a matter of tough. I’m just not traumatized, at least not that I can figure. Even if I were, there’s not much I can do about it. I’m up because I had a late call—cops finally located a suspect and I needed to bring her laptop in. I’m not having night terrors or anything like that.”

  Although she had. The nightmares came, and often. But she considered that, as Dr. Michaels would say, typical, and not cause for alarm.

  “Okay,” Denny reassured her. “I just care about you, okay?”

  “I thank you. But I’m all right. You seem more strung out than I am right now—no offense.”

  “I can’t take offense to the truth. Did you have your appointment with the counselor?”

  “I did. Nice lady. Don’t you have e-mail to check?”

  “Plenty of time. If I go back to that house before dawn my wife will construct a barricade. My kids will help her slide the couch in front of the door, and the neighbors would probably pitch in for good measure. How did it go? Your appointment?”

  “Just fine. As I said, nice lady.” They stared at each other, Maggie feeling at a loss, Denny studying her with those too-observant eyes. “If you’re waiting for me to relay my feelings for my mother, you’d be better off pacing the lobby. Your kid’s stirring.”

  Indeed, baby Angel pounded her fist gently against her father’s shirt, her hand so slight it didn’t make a sound. Denny jumped up as if the desk had caught fire and walked in a circuit around it, weaving past Maggie’s for good measure.

  But he kept talking. “The department requires it, you know. Liability. So she’s nice, but does she seem like she has a clue?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Uncomfortably so, Maggie thought.

  “What did she say?”

  “Confidential.”

  He laughed. “Sorry, I wasn’t asking for details. I mean, she didn’t make any noises like she’d recommend a leave of absence or anything, did she?”

  “No . . . sort of implied that I’d better cooperate or she’d start making such noises.”

  “So you’ll—”

  “Aren’t I always cooperative?”

  A small puff of air. “If you say so.”

  “We got on famously,” Maggie assured him. “We chatted for quite a while. I even asked her what she thought the vigilante’s motivations were—”

  “Wait. You asked her? I thought she was supposed to be asking you stuff.”

  Maggie rubbed the back of her neck, aching after hours with the prints. “I figured since I had to spend time with her, might as well put it to use. She’s the one with the PhD in What Makes People Tick. What?”

  Her boss swayed from side to side, keeping the baby in soothing motion, so perhaps he only appeared to be shaking his head at her. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. You’re the only one who would take a therapeutic counseling session and turn it into a research exercise.”

  “Maybe I find research therapeutic.”

  He kept up the motion. “With anyone else I wouldn’t buy that, but you—so okay, did you learn anything interesting?”

  “Just what we’d already guessed. He thinks of himself as a hero. He believes that he’s doing the right thing.”

  “Crazy, in other words.”

  “Dr. Michaels doesn’t like to use words like crazy,” Maggie informed him. She had a problem with it herself. Jack struck her as anything but insane . . . except in certain moments, when demons threatened to overtake him, demons he wouldn’t admit to having. Was that insanity?

  “Anything else? Wait, I’ve got to have some coffee or I won’t make it back home. You want some? You shouldn’t have any. You should go home and get some sleep.”

  “Let me do it. I can’t have a sleep-deprived man dangling an infant over a hot plate.”

  Angel kicked, so Denny kept walking as Maggie got out the filters and the grounds. She could talk to Denny, she knew she could, without worrying that he would store her admissions away to be used against her when he needed a wedge. She trusted him. But there were topics she didn’t want to discuss with anyone, not a close friend and certainly not a trained psychiatrist. The trained psychiatrist asked too many uncomfortable questions.

  * * *

  “Do you feel guilty, Maggie?”

  “Because he got away? Disappointed. Not guilty.”
r />   “I meant because he killed that person and not you?”

  The concept had stunned her. Survivor’s guilt—no. She had much more immediate factors to feel guilt over. Like pulling the trigger, like committing murder. Like helping Jack cover up his crimes. Like knowing that he could be out there committing more, and all because she had done nothing to stop him.

  “That’s normal, you know. Or typical, if you prefer.”

  “Yes,” Maggie said, keeping very still in the midst of her personal minefield, not daring to move more than an inch in any direction. “I understand that.”

  “You might even feel grateful to him.”

  “Grateful?”

  “For not killing you. He spared you—twice. Why do you think he did that?”

  “Because killing me would have been against his code,” Maggie said, but absently. Her mind had already leapt ahead to her own actions. Is that why she let him go? Because he had saved her from Dillon Shaw and she felt she owed him? Did she kill his final victim so he wouldn’t have to? To return a favor by sparing him? Or to get herself so enmeshed in the crime that the question of turning him in, or not, simply went away?

  If she hadn’t pulled that trigger, she would have no reason to protect his identity. She could have told the cops the complete truth. Even Jack had been prepared for that outcome.

  But by doing so, the question became not should she protect him, but what did she need to do to protect herself?

  She thought she had done it out of rage, hatred, a desire to step out of her cocoon and take action. Those were selfish reasons. But perhaps her reasons had been even more trivial: to make one tough decision purely in order to avoid another. She didn’t want to work against Jack because she appreciated his motives, his urge to protect, and so she made it impossible for herself to do so. She had forced herself into a box, limited her choices. And it had worked very well. Jack walked free. And so did she.

  Was she grateful?

  Did her simmering anger and discomfort with him stem from the knowledge that she had walked herself into that box?