The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  Given the extreme volatility – the report used those exact words, extreme volatility – of the environment, the fire expanded quickly. Too quickly for him to get out, she surmised, though the report did not go out on such a limb and left the reader to imagine the scene for themselves. Perhaps the glassware exploded, spraying him with solvent. Perhaps he’d been overcome with fumes before that point.

  It did point out that there were no indications of a secondary point of origin, or the presence of any sort of booby trap. It had been an accident, pure and simple.

  She read the report through again but still had only Lily’s vague insinuation that Marty had anything to do with this fire or Joseph McClurg. Theirs had probably not been the only meth lab operating at that time. So why would McClurg’s parents or siblings or ex-girlfriend blame Marty Davis for this death, or come to extract revenge twenty-five years later?

  Unless it turned out Marty Davis had been one of those other students treated for burns at the scene, and someone had decided, albeit belatedly, that Marty bore responsibility along with the scars Theresa had seen on his arm.

  Theresa picked up the ring again. Twenty-five years. Perhaps McClurg had fathered a child just before his death. He or she would now be at a perfect age for violence – young enough to feel reckless, old enough to have the brains to track down the target.

  Theresa wet a cotton swab with some distilled water and scrubbed at the inside surface of the ring. Perhaps she’d get really lucky and there would be some sort of engraving … but the only marking told her that the ring had been made from sterling silver. She folded up one of the preformed boxes for the swab and sealed it up anyway, having already collected it. She’d give it to Oliver later, and invent an intriguing enough story to make him test it. Or maybe the truth would suffice.

  Leo appeared at her elbow, having shimmied in on little cat feet designed to give no warning to loafing staff. ‘What’s that? Stuff from Bingham? You know you’re supposed to turn over any rubble to the Feds. They take a dim view of people filching their evidence.’

  ‘Relax. I had enough work there to keep me busy last night without trying to do their jobs for them.’ She explained, very briefly, about Marty Davis, Ken and Lily, the building on Payne Avenue and the dead student.

  Leo listened without expression, and certainly without enthusiasm. ‘Let me get this straight. We had a building blow up last Monday and scatter our evidence to the winds where any Tom, Dick or Harry could contaminate it—’

  ‘That’s an exaggeration. It remained under the protection of the proper authorities at all time. We just weren’t those authorities, that’s all.’

  ‘—and then we had a cop shot, and then we had a few more suicides and a homicide just to round out the week, and all the clothing and evidence and accouterments from those cases are sitting in the drying room while you poke through a box from a twenty-five-year-old accidental fire?’

  ‘Just curious,’ she told him.

  His face began to flush to an ominous shade of puce. Not the dangerous red yet, only the puce, but it meant she had better pull up.

  ‘OK, OK. I will take care of the clothing examinations and then—’

  ‘Not right now you won’t. Your cousin’s here. He says he needs to get enough for a search warrant on some guy named Terry Beltran and wants to borrow you for an experiment. I can only hope it involves needles, and maybe electric shock.’

  She blinked at him. ‘My brain has been up all night and is distinctly unhappy about it, so I’m not tracking very well. You said Frank—’

  ‘His word, experiment. He’s in the lobby. I’ll take your box, and I took the liberty of bringing this down for you.’ He held out her tote bag with two fingers on the straps, as if the bag or the water bottle sticking out of the top might somehow contaminate him, which, given the places to which she dragged it, was not entirely impossible. ‘And then, Theresa – get some rest.’

  Good Lord. For a moment there actual empathy flickered across Leo’s face.

  Forget appearing tired, exhausted or even cadaver-like. Her looks had obviously deteriorated to a new, as yet unnamed category.

  And she had a date tonight.

  TWENTY

  The house in Bratenahl where Marty Davis had died appeared exactly the same as when Theresa had last seen it, except for the two cars in the drive which hadn’t been there on her last visit. They belonged to the dead owner’s wife and son, the latter of whom did not appreciate their visit. ‘We just buried my father, you know,’ he said, a pale, slender man in his thirties. ‘Is this going to take long?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ his mother, the nearly-ex-wife of the victim said. ‘This is kind of interesting. What’s going to happen?’

  Theresa had been perfectly comfortable in the room with the dead man, but not with these two people watching her as if waiting for her to launch into a tap dance. She tried to explain, though it sounded lame even to her. ‘I was inside when the officer was shot. They want to see if I can hear a car pulling into the drive from this room, and also what the gunshot sounds like with and without a silencer.’

  ‘They’re going to shoot a gun out there?’ the son asked, despite the fact that Frank had gone over this with them twice already. An expensive education obviously didn’t guarantee a sharp mind.

  ‘Only blanks. It’s just the sound we’re looking for. I’m sorry to take up your time.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ The mother appeared more rounded, in both appearance and effect, yet avoided so much as glancing at the chair where her husband had died. She kept her back to it and watched out the window, informing them all as to what the officers were doing. This might affect the experiment – if Theresa’s mind was alerted that a car had pulled into the drive, wouldn’t she be more likely to hear it only because she knew it was there? What did they call it, that by observing a phenomenon you could not help but affect it? Was it the Rosenthal effect? Or Heisenberg?

  Theresa kept her back to the window and purposely gazed at the chair, as if she and the dead man’s ghost were partners in this endeavor. There were people who said they could talk to the dead – and if ever there was a line of work for which that would be an advantage, this would be it.

  ‘Why didn’t you guys do this when you were here the first time?’ the son asked. ‘I had to cut an appointment short for this.’

  ‘You didn’t have to be here,’ his mother pointed out.

  ‘I need to keep an eye on things.’

  ‘Like the silver?’

  Theresa could answer the first question: because Frank had received a tip that Terry Beltran, the paroled felon who bore a grudge against Marty Davis, had lost his driver’s license and been reduced to getting around via bicycle. The question of whether Theresa had or had not heard a vehicle drive into the yard suddenly took on more importance, and Frank wanted a definite answer. Theresa had argued that, either way, the results would not be conclusive – she could miss a plane buzzing the house if sufficiently involved in work – but he had wanted to try.

  On top of that, Mr Beltran’s recently paroled former cellmate had been a talented gunsmith who specialized in making silencers. His burgeoning business in the illegal and the untraceable was how he came to be Terry Beltran’s cellmate at the Youngstown state pen in the first place.

  Of course, she would not be mentioning a suspect by name to these two civilians, and so said nothing. They continued without her input anyway.

  The mother said, ‘You’re wasting your time, trying to guard your trinkets from me. Your father and I were still married. It’s all mine now anyway.’

  ‘Not if he got specific in the will.’

  ‘Your father wouldn’t make out a grocery list. What on earth makes you think he could be bothered to write a will?’

  ‘No one was talking last time I was here,’ Theresa pointed out. ‘It was quiet.’

  The faces of mother and son, eerily similar, made it clear that the police department and its dead cop did not f
igure highly on their list of priorities, but they fell into a cooperative and most likely short-lived silence. Through the stillness Theresa heard the unmistakable sound of an internal combustion engine making its way toward the house.

  It sounded distinct and louder than she expected. On her first visit she had been busy with the dead man, her thoughts, as usual, spinning in their own orbits, but still it seemed to her that she would have heard a car if it had approached. It was hard to tell, to adjust for the everyday autopilot of all functioning humans. One could drive home from work and not remember anything on the route, have a conversation and completely forget it five minutes later. Could she have heard the car, and her mind filtered it out as background noise?

  She didn’t think so. Her mind would have listened, worried that a hysterical family member had appeared on the radar. To the best of her knowledge, then, the killer did not approach by car. At least that had been—

  ‘I hear that,’ the mother said. ‘You can’t miss it. I’d always know when he came home.’

  The son said, ‘This place always had crappy insulation. The wind off the lake in the winter can kill you.’

  A gunshot cracked through the air, startling her, making the mother jump and the son gasp. Yes, she would have heard that, too.

  So the killer had used a silencer, which worried her. Silencers were common on TV but not so much in real life. They could be made at home but only for a single use, and did not work at all the way TV portrayed. The bang made as a gun is fired results not so much from the bullet leaving the barrel, but from the fireball of burning gunpowder behind it. The gases from that fireball burst out of the end of the barrel with a loud noise. A silencer gives these gases a contained place to go, which contains some of the noise but not all. Gunshots by no means become truly silent, not a discreet phut but more like the slam of a car door. The gun also needed to be an automatic (the gaps in a revolver’s chambers defeat the purpose of a muzzle silencer), and she had not found an ejected casing.

  In addition the bullet, usually moving at supersonic speeds, creates its own little sonic boom. The safety slug could have been a low-powered round designed to travel at subsonic velocity. It had been used in relatively close quarters and designed to stay in the first target it struck, so a lot of power would not be necessary.

  Damn, hadn’t she found a few pieces of plastic at the scene? Home-made silencers often utilized a two-liter pop bottle, which flew apart with the first shot. The killer wouldn’t have had time to remove the shards of one and tape on a second in the short interval between the two shots. The second one had been louder, but still muffled, which a shredded two-liter bottle shouldn’t have been able to accomplish. And why hadn’t she found more than a few pieces? No, this killer had moved beyond home-made fixes downloaded from the Internet. He had something more sophisticated.

  Also, the killer might have shot Marty through an opened window, retaining the casing inside the vehicle. That would explain why she hadn’t heard a car door slam.

  ‘I’m missing an appointment for this,’ the son groused again.

  ‘How important could it be?’ his mother asked. ‘It’s not like you have a real job.’

  Theresa bumped into Frank and Angela as she went out the kitchen door.

  ‘Hold up, there, pard,’ he said. ‘You were supposed to stay put.’

  ‘I got claustrophobic.’

  ‘How can a seven-bedroom house be claustrophobic?’

  ‘Believe me, it can.’ She gave him the results of their experiment.

  Frank seemed to mull this over. ‘That supports the idea that this Terry Beltran came up on his bike to get his revenge.’

  ‘You weren’t crazy about that theory,’ Theresa reminded him.

  ‘I wasn’t until this morning, when we talked to his parole officer again.’

  Angela explained to Theresa, ‘Terry Beltran began to look for his ex-wife and kids the minute his feet hit real pavement. Apparently he doesn’t think restraining orders apply to him. At the end of last week he finally cornered a relative and found out that the ex, who apparently wised up during Terry’s most recent incarceration, had got herself and the kids out of town. No forwarding. Her own mother doesn’t know where she is. The relative took three broken teeth and a sprained wrist before he could convince Terry of it, but Terry finally accepted the fact that he had no way to find her. Then he burst into tears and rode off on his Huffy. So we’re figuring, without the bloodhound work to keep him busy, he turned to revenge.’

  ‘And he’s got his ex-cellmate to touch for a silencer,’ Frank added.

  Theresa said, ‘Where would he get the money? He just got out of jail.’

  ‘I don’t know, but they always do. Maybe his cellmate owes him a favor.’

  ‘You can’t put him away for assaulting the relative?’

  ‘He’s too understanding a guy to press charges. In other words he’s got a stolen credit card business to protect and doesn’t want our help.’ He glanced at her, glanced again. ‘What’s bothering you?’

  She scowled at the driveway, the house, the driveway.

  ‘Come on, cuz, spill.’

  ‘If Beltran’s on a bike, then he had the sense to pick up the casing before he left.’

  ‘Maybe he did. Or it flew somewhere in the lawn and we didn’t find it.’

  ‘We used a metal detector.’

  Frank shrugged. Casings and bullets could wind up anywhere, including the shoe treads of EMS staff.

  ‘Would Marty Davis have let Terry Beltran come right up to him without at least unsnapping his weapon?’

  ‘Beltran’s been in jail. People look different. We have no idea what he wore, a hoodie, a low cap, who knows? Marty might not have gotten a look at his face until it was too late, and who knows if he would even recognize him then? Beltran was just one more arrest. A guy on a bicycle never looks too threatening, especially in this neighborhood.’

  ‘But why so quiet? Why use a silencer? We’re isolated from the other houses, why even bother?’

  Angela said, ‘He couldn’t know he’d be able to track Davis to such an isolated spot, and had planned for a more populated site. That Davis came here just made it better.’

  ‘I didn’t hear any raised voices. Wouldn’t he want to tell Marty why he was about to kill him?’

  ‘And give him time to go for his gun?’

  Theresa sighed, glared at the house again. Mother and son glared back from the kitchen window, no doubt wondering when the police department would stop cluttering up their driveway. ‘What’s creeping me out is that maybe he kept quiet because he saw the other car in the drive, and knew Marty was not alone. Maybe he watched us both arrive.’ She couldn’t shake the idea of the killer standing right where she stood, watching for any sign of activity inside the house, any hint that he had a witness he now needed to dispatch as quickly and dispassionately as he had dispatched Marty Davis.

  ‘He knew you were here,’ Frank agreed.

  ‘So why didn’t he kill me?’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Frank and Angela went to try to find out how Terry Beltran had been spending his time since his release, leaving Theresa to her own devices. Before they left, however, she asked to know what they had found out about Kenneth Bilecki, in addition to the basic rap sheet information Angela had looked up the evening before. Frank shrugged, but Angela, with the endless curiosity about the people she encountered in their investigations, had dug a little further. Bilecki subsisted on the kindness of strangers and by working at various unskilled jobs long enough to get laid off, stringing out the sparse unemployment checks. When asked for an address he often gave a street and number off Addison, which apparently belonged to a soft-hearted friend who let him flop there once in a while. His only other appearances on the official record occurred at a methadone clinic on Carnegie, which he would visit at least twice a month. This made no sense to Theresa, as doctors used methadone to treat dependency upon opiates, such as heroin or morphine, not a
stimulant like amphetamines. Apparently, when Bilecki would crash down from the high of meth, the resulting discomfort and depression convinced him that he felt pain. Since pain was usually treated with opiates – most patients at any methadone clinic had become addicted to prescription painkillers like OxyContin – Bilecki assumed that methadone would help him feel better. He very rarely convinced the medical personnel of this, but he kept trying, especially in the winter when the waiting room gave him a warm place to sit and drink free coffee. Angela had an extra copy of the appointments, which Theresa took to give to Dr Banachek. Given that Bilecki and Lily Simpson were friends, perhaps she frequented the same clinic for the same reason. It might shed some light on her medical history.

  At least that had been Theresa’s first, and innocent, goal. But as the taillights of the detectives’ shiny car wound up the drive, Theresa realized that Bilecki liked to make his visits to the clinic on Fridays. Sometimes a Thursday, but usually Friday, around three or four in the afternoon. Maybe this fit into the schedule of whatever else he did with his time, or he had some theory that doctors would be more liberal with the prescription pad when they were trying to get out of the office and start their weekends. Today was Friday, and – Theresa checked her watch – coming up on three p.m.

  It couldn’t hurt to swing by. It wasn’t so far out of her way, really, and Leo would believe her tied up with Frank and his sound experiment. Bilecki might be talkative, looking for a little comfort after hearing of his friend Lily’s death. If not, no harm done.

  She drove away from the expensive home. Two faces in the window watched her depart.

  Twenty minutes later, having wound through the plentiful downtown traffic – rush hour began at any time after noon on Fridays – she passed between the baseball park and the Erie Street Cemetery and turned right on Carnegie, named after steel baron Andrew Carnegie. Several industries had built Cleveland, but steel led the pack … especially in Theresa’s mind. It had fed and clothed her for much of her life.

  The methadone clinic existed on one of those one-way streets so that she had to make several turns before she could approach it from the right direction. The old stone building could have been anything before being pressed into service for the clinic – apartments, a store, offices. The front steps were still bracketed with granite banisters that ended in a swirl, but the people resting against them appeared anything but classic. Two women and a man waited and smoked, their clothes old and their faces worn. All three gave Theresa and her car only the barest of glances as she fed a few coins into the meter and went inside.