Unpunished

by Lisa Black

* * *

  She heard a coo beside her as Denny’s small daughter talked in her sleep. “I think the coffee’s done,” her boss told her. “You’ve been staring at the full pot for three circuits now.”

  “It is three o’clock in the morning, you know.”

  “Believe me, I do.” He took the cup she offered, turned his head, and sipped, keeping the hot liquid as far from Angel as he could without dislocating his neck.

  She studied the infant, the dark eyelashes, the teensy fingernails. “Let me know if you need someone to spell you and Angel’s mom. Walking around in a circle—even I could handle that.”

  “Not tonight, missy. Finish up and get out of here. You’re falling asleep on your feet.”

  “Okay, boss. Maybe you’re right,” she told him . . . though her mind roiled too strongly for sleep to be an option. Not tonight. Maybe not ever again.

  Chapter 39

  “Zoe,” Maggie said. “Jack. Jack, Zoe.”

  “Good evening,” he said. In the lowered light of the electronic evidence room, the forensic computer tech studied him before returning the greeting. “Are you getting anywhere?”

  “No,” both women said in unison.

  Maggie summed up. “We’ve spent all day getting Shania’s e-mails, bank accounts, the online trading account. Everything seems to be just as she told you. She e-mailed Jerry Wilton and he e-mailed her. No one else. All her other communications deal with dinner, shopping, family gossip, and the Indians’ spring schedule. She didn’t talk to anyone else about the stocks, at least not via e-mail.”

  Zoe added, “Unless she’s got some secret code worked into the price of sports bras at Macy’s and her new nephew’s birth weight. I never understand why people tell you how much a baby weighed when it was born. What do I care? And isn’t that a violation of privacy anyway? The kid’s got the rest of his life to be obsessed with weight, does it have to be his label from day one?” Noting their stares, she said, “Oops. Sore subject with me, I guess.”

  Jack asked, “Did she communicate with anyone else from the Herald? This Tyler Truss, for instance?”

  “Nope. Unless she used smoke signals, or, you know, snail mail—”

  “Or actually talked to them,” Maggie said.

  “Yeah, barbaric stuff like that; otherwise, no.”

  An officer appeared in the doorway and told Zoe he had a phone to submit. She told him, “Forget it. It’s way past quitting time.”

  He said, “But you’re still here.”

  “Yeah, what is up with that?” She gave Maggie a good solid glare before pulling herself out of her chair, leaving Jack and Maggie alone. When the sound of her footsteps in the hall faded away, Jack said, “You look tired.”

  She knew it, although she had grabbed a few hours at home to the point of coming in late that morning. But the day had become an endless cycle of evidence processing, computer analysis with Zoe, more caffeine, and wondering when Alex would begin to suspect there might be more to her story. “Never tell a woman that. You might as well say I look like crap and get it over with.”

  “Okay. You look like crap. What’s happening with those fingerprints?”

  “From Johnson Court? So, you are a little concerned.”

  “No . . . just . . . did you pull any prints of mine?”

  “All taken care of.”

  “What if you missed one?”

  “I didn’t.” She wondered why he seemed so worried about it. Somewhere out there must lay one hell of a crime spree, its latents humming along in the FBI’s unsolved files—or else he wouldn’t care. She felt a twinge of regret for not giving in to temptation and sending one from Johnson Court along . . . then stomped on that twinge. This wasn’t a game she was playing. This could put her in jail for the rest of her life.

  Jack sat back. He did not look reassured, but put it aside to muse aloud on the Herald murders.

  “So Jerry is doing a little insider trading. But what does that have to do with Robert and Stephanie Davis? They didn’t have funds to invest and all of their paychecks went to bills.”

  “Maybe Jerry’s stocks have nothing to do with it,” Maggie said.

  “Maybe we have two murderers.”

  “That would complicate things,” Maggie understated. “If there are other people trying to get the inside edge, how could we ever find them? You can’t subpoena the financial records of everyone who works at the Herald—”

  “And that wouldn’t even have caught Wilton. He used Shania to conceal his purchases.”

  “And they’re not about to fess up. Insider trading is a crime, isn’t it?”

  “Why do it at all? What made Jerry Wilton believe that the stock price would increase?”

  Maggie said, “An impending sale to TransMedia, of course. That would raise the stock price, and everyone there seems to think it’s in the offing.”

  “Riley and I should talk to TransMedia—they’re in the catbird seat, maybe they’d feel free to be honest. But I have no idea who to approach, and Roth won’t even admit they’re in negotiations.”

  Maggie thought of something. “Ask Roger. You said he’s been keeping tabs on the editor’s lunch dates. He’d know their names.”

  Jack raised one eyebrow. “Roger?”

  “Yes.”

  “You shouldn’t hang around that guy.”

  The absurdity of him telling her that made her laugh, and she considered asking him again whether or not he had killed Ronald Soltis. She decided not to—whether he had or not, she doubted his answer would change.

  “He’s been remarkably educational. He could probably give you the TransMedia guy’s phone number and arrange an introduction.”

  “He’s our best suspect.”

  “All the more reason to listen to anything he says.”

  “Hmm,” Jack said. “I’d ask the same question of TransMedia that I’d like to ask Jerry Wilton. His coworkers thought a sale would finish the paper for good. Why did he think the stock price was going to skyrocket in an industry that’s pure doom and gloom, and he believed it so much that he sunk every penny he had into it.”

  “Good question. According to Roger, before the ink is dry on the contract, they’ll cut back all spending at the paper, lay off most of the staff, and get by with a skeleton crew. They’ll coast for a few months on the backs of the habitual readers, farm out the best writers and managers to jobs in other concerns, find buyers for the physical stuff including the presses and the building. Then they’ll announce that the paper’s problems were too profound for them to overcome and shut down.”

  “Assuming Correa is playing for your sympathy, what else would make them want to buy the Herald?”

  “TransMedia would want a high profit margin. Low cost, steady income. They have to be able to sustain the kind of ROIs to which their shareholders have become accustomed.”

  “ROI?”

  “Return on investment.”

  He considered her. “You got a secret MBA, Maggie?”

  “I knew a lot of business majors in college.”

  “According to everything we’ve been told, the Herald’s profit margin is not all that enticing.”

  Something occurred to her. “Jerry Wilton was juggling the circulation numbers.”

  Jack’s stare told her that he had forgotten about that. “Yes, making it seem like the paper had more print readers than it does. Why?”

  “Circulation is what brings in advertisers. Advertisers produce profit. High profit margin equals good investment.”

  “Yes. But would that be enough? Enough for Jerry to invest every penny he had?”

  “Why not? Even a small increase could—wait a minute.” She leaned forward. “You’re right, it’s not enough, because print is only part of the equation. Even Roger admits that the number of print readers is never going to grow. It’s a habit of earlier generations, which young people have never formed. If a newspaper is to survive at all, it will be as a largely digital publication.”

  Now
Jack leaned forward, his face intense and lit by the glow of Zoe’s computer screen. “Wilton had to know that just increasing the print circ numbers wouldn’t be enough. Digital readership would have to increase even more.”

  “But he couldn’t fake that, could he?”

  “I’ll bet his buddy Tyler could, though.”

  Again, a shadow appeared in the doorway. “What are you two doing sitting in the dark?” Riley asked.

  “Waiting for Zoe,” Maggie said.

  “We need to talk to Truss again,” Jack told his partner.

  “That,” Riley said, “is going to be difficult.”

  Chapter 40

  It should have given her a feeling of déjà vu, to be met in the lobby by Printing Supervisor Kevin Harding. But this time the chipper personality that had seen him through the surprise of Robert Davis’s death had fled, leaving a haunted expression of shock. He stared at Maggie, Jack, and Riley as if he had never seen them before.

  “Kevin?” Maggie asked.

  “It’s awful,” he told her, but straightened up and led the three people through the building. As before, rooms were largely empty. A lone reporter sat at a desk and barely glanced up as they walked by, too far away to hear Kevin Harding’s account of finding the body.

  “We had started the printing, so the sheets and rolls room was empty. Me and my two guys were monitoring the rollers and the folder, of course . . . then the rolls started getting low, so I went to put another on the shoe. Our lights—the lights are on motion sensors to, you know, save money. So I didn’t see anything in the . . . dimness . . . but I heard a little splash.”

  He glanced down at his feet. Maggie saw flecks of dried, dark liquid along the tops of the brown leather, and knew that whatever they were going to see would be, indeed, awful.

  “I thought one of the ink tanks had leaked, one of the pipes got a hole in it—it’s happened before, made a terrific mess and wrecked the whole run—so right away I went to the tank to shut down the valves. Then the lights came on. And I saw . . . it wasn’t ink.”

  He led them past the room with the aluminum sheets, into the pen of huge paper rolls.

  Beyond them, the rollers were still. The run hadn’t finished—continuous streams of newsprint formed their spiderweb from one to another and into the next room. They hung in midair as if under a magic spell. She caught a glimpse of Roger Correa’s byline and a story about New Horizons . . . just a few paragraphs, a taste of what would come. The deafening cacophony of the moving rollers would have been preferable to the blanket of eerie silence that now lay across the space.

  The overhead lights sprang into action, bathing the room in an unforgiving glare. Infected by Kevin Harding’s sense of horror, the cops and Maggie moved slowly past the rolls of paper. They seemed almost sentient to her, waiting, watching for a command to come to life. Past them she saw the red that wasn’t ink, spread across the concrete.

  Tyler Truss lay next to a roll that had been placed on its side, as several others in the space had been in preparation for loading onto a shoe. His arms were flung wide, the roll still resting on his left hand, and his body caved in from shoulders to knees. The limbs remained connected, but that was the best Maggie could say for them. His chest looked as if someone had taken a fist to a bag of chips. Some of his small intestines lay piled to one side, having burst out of not only his abdomen but his shirt as well. His clothes had soaked in fits and starts, not a solid stain but a spreading patchwork of red.

  A roll had obviously gone right over him. But had he just lain there and waited to be crushed?

  “They weigh nineteen hundred pounds,” Kevin murmured from behind them, as if facts and figures would explain what they saw. “Unrolled, one will stretch for 8.4 miles.”

  “Then who did this?” Riley demanded, his voice strangled. “The Incredible Hulk?”

  “They’re not that hard to push,” Kevin said. “Maggie could probably push one across the room once she got it moving, and since we were halfway through the run he had space in here to get some speed up.”

  “He?” Jack asked.

  “Whoever,” Kevin said.

  Jack turned to him. “And no one saw anything?”

  “Once the rolls are lined up, we’re done in here. No reason to . . . come back . . .”

  “And he could have screamed his head off without anyone hearing it over the printing,” Riley finished for him.

  They could hear murmurs from the loading dock area around the corner and past the roller towers. At least Truss got a measure of privacy from curious coworkers. Maggie felt sure this would not make him feel a whole lot better.

  She moved closer, mindful of the tacky puddle on the concrete. She would have to get some plastic steps to be able to work around the body. The blood had spattered as far as the roller towers, leaving a fine mist across the concrete and up the machinery frame.

  The dead man’s feet and head were soaked with it, but otherwise unscathed. He stared out at the roller towers without expression, the laces on his shoes still neatly tied. Somehow that seemed more horrifying, and more sad, than the dripping entails and drenched paper.

  “How do you know this is Tyler Truss?” she asked Harding.

  He pointed to the crushed torso, where an ID tag still clung to the pocket of a formerly blue dress shirt. It said TYLER TRUSS and bore the photo of a smiling young man Maggie had never met.

  Jack grasped her arm. She turned to see that look again, the one that frightened her. She had grown more accustomed to him in the past few days, able to forget the past long enough to fit him into a normal part of her workday. Now all that hard-won relaxation dried up as if it had never been.

  “Gutting Wilton was bad enough,” he said, his voice so low she could barely make out the words. “Making the Davis boys into orphans was bad enough. But this—”

  She couldn’t come up with a response. No one killed like this over a business deal, and yet this killer wasn’t crazy. As the scent of Tyler Truss’s last drop of blood wafted up to her nose, she knew—this was evil.

  She agreed with Jack on that.

  She only feared what he might do about it.

  Maggie turned to the three men. In a level voice she said, “I need to get some stuff out of my car.”

  Chapter 41

  She didn’t start out with high hopes for the crime scene, as far as fingerprints went. Every inch of machinery in the place required a great deal of oiling and lubricants that coated the surface and were then overlaid by the handling of a few dozen print crew workers and especially the dust. Even fresh paper had tiny fibers that abraded with each movement, each pivot, each fold, each cut, and turned into an incredibly fine dust that settled on every surface in the printing area.

  In fact, vacuums collected the dust from various points in the process and transferred it to a large metal box the size of several refrigerators put together, next to the ink tanks. Every so often it gave a shuddering clang that took several months off Maggie’s life, despite Kevin Harding’s warning that the huge filter within had to be shaken now and then to make the tiny particles fall off it to the bin at the bottom. For all the noise it didn’t do a good enough job to suit her, because everything she examined seemed to be coated with a fingerprint-preventing coating of the stuff.

  Riley and Jack had gone to canvas the loading dock area, to find out who had been present when and what they might have seen. Kevin Harding, an ashen cast over his dark skin, returned with the Medical Examiner’s investigator. He then hovered, approaching them, getting a glimpse of the body, turning a little green and then retreating to the roller towers. Perhaps compelled by loyalty to his coworker, he would wander back until accidentally catching sight of the body. He didn’t want to stay but would feel ashamed if he left—Maggie had seen it before. He was in her crime scene, but that was all right. The alien landscape prompted a lot of questions, and it saved time to have him present to answer them.

  The ME investigator, still statuesque and sti
ll very pregnant, took in the scene with one glance. “That’s not something you see every day.”

  “Tell me about it,” Maggie said.

  They placed plastic sheets over the blood puddles—Maggie had inspected them as best she could with shoe coverings and halogen lights and found nothing of interest. The ME investigator also found nothing that surprised her on Tyler Truss’s body. His torso made a crackling sound whenever she touched it, the noise of broken bones grating against one another. She also retrieved his wallet and a set of keys.

  “No phone,” Maggie said aloud. “The killer always takes the phones. But what happened before the crushing—did Truss just hand over his phone and then lie obediently on the concrete?”

  “I doubt it,” the investigator said, her hands in the silky black hair. “He’s got a lump back here and maybe, a chip of bone. Someone hit him pretty hard.”

  “That fits the pattern as well,” Maggie said. “And explains a lot. He must have been unconscious—”

  “Then why are his eyes open?”

  “I-I don’t know. Do you think—”

  “I think he woke up at a very inopportune moment,” the investigator said, leaving Maggie with a mental image she tried hard to dispel. Instead, she looked around for more clues.

  The killer had nearly twenty-five feet of vacated space to get the roll of paper up to sufficient speed to go over Truss’s body instead of merely pinching one side of it. She crouched down and held her flashlight at a forty-five-degree angle to the floor that hadn’t been stained with his blood. Dust, a myriad of shoeprints, paper shavings, a dead fly sprang into view. A few hairs, which she collected in a glassine paper fold. A tuft of something dark—she took a quick look with a loupe, trying not to breathe and blow away the lightweight fibers or fuzz or feather down that made it up.

  She turned her attention to a lump of what looked like dried mud. Nothing seemed helpful. The killer almost certainly worked in the building, and thus could easily explain away any trace he might have left in the crime scene. Even if his fingerprints appeared on the paper roll—her best bet, once she could remove the outer covering and get it back to the lab to be plied with ninhydrin—it might not necessarily prove anything. The printing area wasn’t exactly locked down. Traffic was discouraged for reasons of safety, not security, and the loading dock area had a number of vending machines that any employee might decide to access.