With Malice

by Rachel Lee

  "You're good people," Grant said. "Look, I need to get back home. I'll call you when I think the girls are ready to get back to school."

  "We'll look forward to it," Art said. "Take care of your family."

  Grant looked up into a graceful live oak, as if trying to divine the secrets of the universe from its gnarled limbs. "I don't know if it's a matter of me taking care of them or them taking care of me."

  Art clapped a hand on his shoulder. "I know, Grant. I know. Get on home to them."

  "Thanks, Art."

  "A friend?" Karen asked when he returned to the car.

  "A friend."

  "You seem to make close friends, Senator."

  He studied her eyes for portents of an ulterior motive but saw none. "I do, I guess. In the end, what else is there but those we love and the memories we make with them?"

  She nodded, glancing toward Art Wallace as he walked back around a copse of trees toward his house. "That's a beautiful sentiment, Senator. Do you ever disagree with any of your friends?"

  "What are you suggesting?"

  Those clear gray eyes of hers returned to him. "I just wondered if you ever had any disagreements with your neighbors. People are human, after all. This neighborhood can't be Eden before the fall."

  "No, it's not. Of course we don't all see eye-to-eye on everything. Fortunately, we're all too civilized to get nasty about it."

  She nodded. "What kinds of things do you disagree about?"

  He gave her a crooked smile. "Politics, mainly. Given my position, I'm a lightning rod for such discussions. But they're my constituents, too, so I listen. Matt Witherspoon, across the street, cordially dislikes my position on gun control. I have no doubt he votes against me."

  She nodded. "And the guy you just talked to?"

  Now a look of faint amusement brightened his gaze, momentarily erasing his grief. "Art? Art and I have been close friends for about ten years now. It doesn't bother me in the least that he volunteers for Randall Youngblood."

  "Youngblood?"

  "The head of the cane growers' association. He's lobbying against my environmental bill."

  "And your neighbor volunteers for him?"

  "Why not? It's his constitutional right to oppose legislation." He cocked his head. "You know, Detective, it's entirely possible for gentlemen to disagree and still be friends. In fact, I don't believe Congress has settled legislation at gunpoint once in its entire history."

  Her face revealed nothing. "It's my job to ask these questions."

  He felt a twinge of embarrassment. "Of course it is. I'm sorry. It's just that I've never had a disagreement with any of my neighbors that's even reached the level of raised voices."

  She nodded, still expressionless.

  "Thank you for your help, Detective."

  "It's my job, Senator. I'll keep you posted."

  He drove away, headed back to grief, but for the moment feeling only shame at his overreaction to Detective Sweeney's questions. He usually displayed more self-control than that.

  But there had been enough ugliness in the last twenty-four hours, and he was damned if he was going to start suspecting everyone he knew.

  At least not until he had evidence.

  6

  After the senator disappeared down the street, Karen decided it might be a good time to try to interview the neighbors again. This morning, by the time she'd sent some uniforms around to ask questions, everybody appeared to have gone off to work. Or maybe they weren't answering their doors. But now it was late afternoon, and surely some of them would be home.

  Unfortunately, most still weren't. She worked her way up and down the street, and managed to talk to only two women, both of whom denied having seen or heard a thing. That left the senator's next-door friend, the guy who said he'd heard a car. He'd been gone, too, when they'd gotten around to trying to question him.

  But he was home now, and he invited her inside pleasantly. He even offered her a cup of coffee. Ordinarily she would have declined, but she decided instead to accept, wanting to make this interview as comfortable and friendly as possible in the hope that this friend of the senator's would relax enough to grow chatty.

  As he gave her a mug of coffee and sat facing her across the coffee table between two sofas, he said, "I suppose you want to know if I know anything more about that car I heard last night."

  "That's one of the things, yes. Delicious coffee."

  He beamed. "I can't take credit for that. It's a Starbucks blend."

  Of course. Starbucks. In this neighborhood she was rather surprised it wasn't something even more exotic. "Well, you brewed it perfectly," she said, and smiled.

  "Thank you." He managed a look of embarrassed pleasure to perfection. She found herself wondering if it was real or practiced. Then she chided herself for being unnecessarily suspicious.

  "But about the car," he said. "I'm not sure it had anything to do with what happened to Abby." His lips trembled a bit at the outer corners, and he paused a moment, clearly gathering himself. "I mean, how would I know?"

  "Of course you don't know," she said reassuringly. "But I have to follow every possible lead."

  "Of course." He nodded and put his own coffee mug on a coaster on the highly polished table. "Well, I don't really know anything except what I told you. I think it was about one o'clock. I seem to remember glancing at the digital clock on the headboard. Anyway, I can't be certain of the exact time."

  She nodded and pulled a pad from her jacket pocket, making notes. "You said it had a loud muffler."

  "Yes. One of those things some people seem to like. But it did have a muffler. I've heard cars without one. There's no mistaking that sound."

  "No, there isn't." She nodded pleasantly. "Did it start or stop?"

  He cocked his head, thinking. "No, I don't think so. Or at least I didn't hear it. What woke me up was the gunning of the engine." He nodded to himself. "Yes, that's what it was. The car's engine gunned at least a couple of times. Then it drove away down toward Mulberry."

  Karen scribbled a few more notes, then glanced at the toys in one corner of the room, a dollhouse with dozens of pieces of furniture. "Did your wife hear it, too?"

  He seemed to jerk, an almost spastic movement. His face grew as rigid as a mask. "My ex-wife," he said shortly, "is taking a world cruise with her new husband."

  "I'm sorry. I assumed, because of the toys…"

  He glanced toward the corner, then nodded stiffly. "It's all right. It's a natural assumption. My daughters are staying with me until their mother returns."

  She nodded, making another note, although it didn't seem relevant. "I understand you disagree with Senator Lawrence over S.R. 52."

  He looked a little startled, then laughed. "Oh, yes. I suppose Grant told you that. We've disagreed about quite a few things politically over the years. But people can disagree about politics without becoming enemies."

  "That's what Senator Lawrence indicated."

  Art Wallace nodded. "In fact, I'm volunteering for Randall Youngblood right now. You know, the group lobbying against the bill? Grant knows that."

  Again she nodded. "Why are you opposed to the bill?"

  "Because I think it will devastate farmers. It's just that simple."

  Karen slipped her coffee, smiled at him again. "Since you know Senator Lawrence so well, I was wondering if you know his enemies."

  His eyes widened a shade, and he chuckled. "He's a politician, Detective. He probably has hundreds of enemies."

  "Of course." She smiled deprecatingly. "I just wondered if you know of any who might go this far."

  "To kill that wonderful old woman? No way. Politics can get dirty, Detective, but not to that extent. I can't imagine that anyone I know would do such a thing under any circumstances."

  Just then twin girls of about seven bounced into the room, trailed by a middle-aged woman in gray.

  "Daddy, Daddy!" they bubbled over. "Nanny took us to the zoo. And we saw lions!"

  Ka
ren waited while Art Wallace hugged his daughters to him as if he never wanted to let go. They beamed and chattered, utterly oblivious of her presence.

  Finally, quietly, she excused herself, not wanting to interrupt the happy scene. And not at all sure she needed to ask Art Wallace another single thing.

  She had something else to do, anyway. Something equally important, at least to her.

  * * *

  Karen drove back to the alley where the unidentified woman had been found. As expected, Dave Previn was nowhere to be seen. Not that there was much he might have learned by staring at this alley.

  Still, it seemed wrong that the trail of the woman's death would be left to grow stale, so she paced the alley and remembered the horror that had been visited upon the woman whose body had been found here. Found here. She'd all but let that slip out of mind in the flurry over the Lawrence case. This woman's body had almost certainly been moved. Had she even put that in her report?

  Suddenly it felt as if a lead weight were pressing on her heart. She couldn't remember. She probably had. She remembered making extensive notes of it, here in the alley, and she would have referred to those notes as she made out the report. So of course those observations would be in the report.

  Still, that she couldn't remember including them showed just how far the Lawrence case had driven this one from her mind. From her mind, and she had seen the woman's body lying broken and torn in an alley, something no other detective would see except in photographs. If she had to press herself to remember what she'd included in her report, what hope did that leave for Dave Previn giving this case the attention it deserved?

  Karen let out a breath and shook her head at her own feelings. Raised in an Irish family, she sometimes missed the days when she had been a practicing Catholic. Back then, she would have gone to a priest, dumped her load of guilt in the confessional and received absolution. She would have had no reason to go on kicking herself. Mea culpa mea maxima culpa. Teo absolvo. Get on with life.

  Alternatively, she missed her early days in the department, when she would have lit a cigarette, affected the diffident shrug of someone who is too ignorant to realize how little she knows and figured it would all come out in the wash. Life sucks, and you deal with it.

  Instead, she'd quit going to church, and she'd quit smoking, and she'd come to believe that cynicism was simply the ugly twin sister of idealism, both born of ignorance. Which left her with no psychic defense against her feelings of inadequacy and sorrow as she stood in that alley and remembered the horrible images she'd seen.

  "I'm sorry," she said to the chalk outline on the pavement. "I'll try to do better."

  It wasn't confessional, but it was what she had left.

  * * *

  She returned to the office to find Previn pouring the dregs from the office coffeemaker into a mug that read I'd rather be thinking. The mug had been given to him when he'd left the fraud squad and moved up to homicide. It was a cop joke. Previn was always thinking. Thinking about his wife. Thinking about his kids. Thinking about some article he'd read that week in Science Weekly. Thinking about the fact that he thought too much. The book on him was that he had no instincts and tried to make up for it by spinning his mental wheels until he dug his way through to the bottom of a case. The approach worked, but the people around him had to dodge a lot of flying mud.

  "Where are you on the woman in the alley?" she asked without preamble.

  He smiled. "If it isn't the TV star. They just ran a teaser for the evening news."

  Karen would rather they had lost the videotapes, but that was too much to hope for. Lawrence was front page, film at six and eleven news. Which meant that, for a while, at least, she was, too.

  "How lovely. So where are you on the woman in the alley?" she repeated.

  "I reviewed your files and notes this morning," he said, plunking his mug on his desk. "I put a call in to the M.E., but they're ass deep in everything else. Said they hoped to get to the autopsy this evening. The crime scene techs will call back later or tomorrow, they said. Missing persons has no one recent who matches the general description, so we're dead in the water on an ID. I walked the scene this morning, knocked on doors. Zero, zip, zilch, nada."

  "Keep pushing it," she said. "I don't want her to slip through the cracks."

  "There's not a lot to push until I hear back from the M.E. or the lab, or we get an ID. I don't want her to slip through the cracks, either, Karen. But right now I've got nothing to push against."

  She nodded and picked up the phone, stabbing numbers by rote memory. "Yes, this is Detective Karen Sweeney. You have a Jane Doe of mine. Any idea when you'll get to her? She's in now? Thanks. We'll be right over."

  Previn looked stung, resentment smoldering in his dark eyes. "They'd have called me when they were done."

  "Maybe, maybe not. They're busy, like you said. And we're not going to wait for them to finish. We're going to be there as it happens."

  "I've never…"

  "Then get used to it," she said, grabbing her jacket and purse. "Welcome to homicide."

  * * *

  Previn was a weasely looking young man of about thirty, with a long, narrow nose and thinning hair. His normally ruddy skin went utterly pale the instant they stepped into the autopsy room.

  The smell, of course. Even now, Karen wasn't completely used to it, but at least she expected it. Previn didn't. White, he turned away immediately from the sight of a corpse opened from collarbone to pubic bone with a Y incision, but that wouldn't get rid of the smell.

  Nothing got rid of the smell. There was something about a dead body, even a relatively fresh one that had recently been in the cooler, that smelled just plain awful when you opened it up. Fishing around in her purse, she found a small jar of Vicks VapoRub. She'd carried it for years but hadn't used it in a long time.

  "Here," she said to Previn. "Rub some of this right under your nose." He might even manage to do it, if he didn't lose his lunch first.

  His hand was shaking as he accepted the small jar. A second later he bolted. Karen shrugged and stepped nearer to the table.

  It wasn't that she was hardened to it; she was just accustomed to it—very different things. It was never pleasant—it would never be pleasant—but she no longer had to fight to maintain control in here.

  "What have you got so far?" she asked the M.E., Dr. Caleb Carter, when he'd finished dictating something into the microphone that hung from the ceiling on an adjustable arm. Right now it was close to his mouth.

  "Female Caucasian, approximately twenty-eight years of age…"

  Karen had already pretty much figured that much out, but she let him run through the stats: height, weight, general health.

  "Diseased right ovary," he continued, "and evidence of at least one not-too-good abortion. I'd say that was a long time ago, though."

  "Okay." She had her notebook out, ready to write down anything that seemed particularly relevant, things she wouldn't want to forget before the report was issued.

  "Proximate cause of death appears to be strangulation from a nylon stocking wrapped around her throat. There are four separate bite marks. From their locations and depth, I'd hazard a guess that there was a lot of rage involved in this act."

  That was worthy of note. "Not ritualistic?"

  "Well, there's always that possibility," he said, looking across the table at her. "I'm not a profiler. But…my guess is this was an act of rage, an instant response to some kind of provocation."

  "Was she raped?"

  "From my external examination, I'd say no. The swabs might say differently."

  "Anything else?"

  "Oh yes. She's got plenty of skin under her fingernails. She must have put up a fight before he got her hands bound behind her back. My guess is that someone is running around with some pretty deep scratches, probably on his arms."

  "So look for a man in an overcoat, huh?"

  Carter chuckled. "Or at least long sleeves."

  Outside, Ka
ren found Previn standing in the hallway, watching from behind the safety of the window.

  He flushed when he saw her. "Sorry."

  "It's okay, Previn. The first one is always hard. Just give me back my Vicks in case I need it."

  Sheepishly, he passed her the small jar. "It didn't sound like he had much."

  "Actually, he gave me a great deal."

  "How so?"

  "He gave me a picture of how the crime was committed."

  "I didn't hear anything."

  Karen looked at him. "Think, Previn. He said she probably scratched his arms."

  "So?"

  "That means he probably came at her from behind, so she couldn't reach his face and had to scratch at his arms."

  Previn nodded slowly. "But how can he know that?"

  "My guess is he's already looked at some of the flesh under a microscope. I'd further guess that he didn't find any sign of beard in the flesh. More likely he found body hair."

  "There's a difference?"

  She looked at him. "Previn, do you ever read?"

  He flushed again. "All the time."

  "Apparently not the right stuff. Read a little about the technical side of the business. You'll get a lot more out of the criminalists' and the M.E.'s reports that way."

  Then she left him, determined to go home and get some sleep. She'd last sighted her bed at nine yesterday morning. She would be lucky if she got home without falling asleep at the wheel.

  * * *

  Grant collapsed into bed as soon as the girls were asleep. It was the same room he'd slept in after he'd outgrown the "nursery" area where his daughters now slept. Although it had been redecorated—his parents weren't the sentimental type, certainly not the type to keep a museum of their son's high school life—it still felt warmly familiar. He wondered why that was. Had he left some sort of imprint here, some sort of vibration he could now sense?

  Because the room looked nothing at all as it once had. The twin bed had given way to a queen; the walls were now a dusty rose to match the curtains and comforter, which boasted cabbage roses. Even the carpet was new, a deeper rose.

  It was a very feminine room, one that spoke of his mother's touch. Maybe that was what made it feel so comfortable after all this time.