“Was she beaten or—”
“I can’t be sure, but it doesn’t look as if she was sexually assaulted and the bruising there around her mouth seems to be the only apparent damage. There’s one other strange thing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Someone cleaned her up a little and changed her clothes before placing her in here like this.”
“Cleaned her up. Maybe to cover an assault?”
“I don’t think so, but I’ll know for sure when I get her on the table.”
Jesse considered the things Tamara had just told him. Some killers, most often serial killers, presented bodies in certain ways either to satisfy some fantasy or obsession or as a display for the police. Sometimes it was a function of remorse. At this point, before the autopsy and forensic results were in, it was unwise to draw conclusions about motive. But Jesse knew his own gut, and what his gut told him was that this was more of a train wreck than the handiwork of some Hannibal Lecter wannabe. He was thinking it through when he heard heavy footfalls on the staircase.
“Hey, Doc. Hey, Jesse,” Lundquist said, standing in the hallway just outside the bedroom. “Is it all right if I come in?”
Jesse saw echoes of Suit in Lundquist. A tall, sturdily built man with reddish hair, warm blue eyes, and a boyish aw-shucks smile, Brian Lundquist seemed as if he would have been right at home showing his prize pig at the Minnesota State Fair. Similarities in appearance to Suit notwithstanding, Jesse knew Lundquist to be an excellent detective, a cops’ cop. You didn’t rise to the rank of detective lieutenant because you were unfailingly polite or friendly. And they didn’t make you acting head of Homicide because you were somebody’s pal.
“Why don’t you fellas talk somewhere else while I finish up in here?”
Jesse nodded to Lundquist that he was coming out.
“Okay, Doc. Lundquist and I will be downstairs if you need us.”
When Jesse stepped out of the bedroom, he extended his right hand to the detective.
“My forensics unit’s outside, Jesse. All I’m waiting on is your say-so.”
“Get ’em in here.”
After Lundquist had given the go-ahead, Jesse detailed Tamara Elkin’s preliminary findings. He explained that he thought the old woman’s death didn’t seem, at least on the surface, to be a purposeful act. Lundquist kept his thoughts to himself as they went down to the basement to talk the crime scene over with Peter Perkins, and Perkins got right to it.
“They had her tied up to this lally column with duct tape,” he said, pointing at the tape still stuck to the metal pole. “I also think she probably died here.” He pointed at stains on the slab at the base of the pole and held up an evidence bag containing the sock used to gag Maude Cain. “As to the mess upstairs . . . I don’t know.” He held up another evidence bag, this one containing the strip of tape used to cover the old woman’s mouth. “Looks like there’s blood on this, too.”
Jesse spoke up. “ME says there’s tape residue on the vic’s mouth and that her lip was split. All right, Peter, the state Forensics Unit is here. Go upstairs and fill them in. Lend them a hand.”
When Perkins reached the top of the stairs, Lundquist asked the question Jesse knew was coming: “What do you think went on here? The upstairs looks like a demolition team got hold of it, and it doesn’t look any better down here.”
Although Jesse knew homicide detectives were supposed to follow the evidence, it didn’t mean their brains didn’t work overtime once they got a good look at the crime scene. He had learned the hard way about the danger of falling in love with any single scenario before the evidence was in. Even then, he had seen colleagues ignore the facts in favor of their predetermined scenarios. He’d done it himself, but experience had also taught him not to completely ignore his gut. He looked around at the mess that was the basement. He remembered his first thought at seeing the chaos and blood upstairs.
“You’ve seen the house, how it was torn apart? The person or persons that did this were looking for something and they didn’t know where to look for it. It takes a long time to go through a house like this, and they had to keep the Cain woman out of their hair while they searched. Maybe they got a little rough with her to see if she knew where it was before tearing the walls apart. My guess is the vic’s death was, if not exactly an accident, unanticipated. Same as the delivery guy showing up.”
“But neither thing stopped these perps from ripping the place apart.”
“What’s that tell you?”
“That whatever they were looking for is worth a lot of money.”
“At least they think it—”
Before Jesse could finish, his phone vibrated in his pocket. He looked at the screen and excused himself.
“What is it, Molly?”
“The mayor’s car is coming up the street.”
“I’m heading out.”
“Trouble?” Lundquist asked, as Jesse moved to the stairs.
“Uh-huh.”
“The press?”
“Worse.”
Lundquist laughed a joyless little laugh. “Only thing worse is a politician.”
Jesse laughed, too. “You should have been a detective.”
13
When he was sure Hump was well out of the room, King slipped the oddly shaped safety-deposit box key out of his rear pocket and ran his thumb over it again and again. The ridges of his thumbprint caught on the edges of the brittle Scotch tape holding the key in place against the yellowed index card. The key was tarnished with time and disuse, but it looked like a piece of heaven to him. A piece of heaven shaped like a pot of gold, blond hookers, and a Porsche. He’d had hookers before, all kinds, but never a Porsche. He’d always dreamed of having a Porsche. He had spent endless hours staring up at the photos of 911s and Caymans taped to his cell wall, imagining what it would feel like behind the wheel, the wind whipping his hair. His hair was mostly gone now. The dream remained.
King stared intently at the index card and spoke aloud the name of the bank that held the box as he read it off the card: “First Paradise Union Trust.” He tried hard to decipher the age-faded numbers scrawled on the index card alongside the key. He thought he could make out most of them. He was unsure of one or two numbers in the middle and one at the very end. He wasn’t particularly worried about the numbers, though, because it was the three capital letters handwritten in big block letters that had provided the magic. Tomorrow, before the meeting, he’d make an enlarged photocopy of the key and card and buy a magnifying glass. Then he would definitely be able to read the numbers. But if things went the way he hoped, the way they should, deciphering the numbers and getting access to the deposit box would be someone else’s headache. If things went smoothly, his only problem would be figuring out how to carry his money and where to stash it.
King would make sure Hump got his share, not the pot-of-gold share. He’d pay him his half of the ten grand they’d been promised to do the job. He owed that much to his ex-cellmate. Poor, dumb Hump, he had no clue that King had found the key taped to the underside of a dresser in a second-floor bedroom. Good thing Hump had missed it on his first pass. Truth was that until King had scanned the papers looking for word on whether the cops had found the old lady, he wasn’t even sure he’d be able to squeeze the original ten grand out of the guy who’d hired them to search the house. The old lady dying on them the way she had put them in a weak bargaining position. It was one thing for the cops to want you for assault and breaking and entering. Murder was a different beast altogether.
King was no lawyer, but he knew that even if they got it knocked down to manslaughter, the two of them were looking at a long bid. King didn’t think he could deal with even another year back inside. Anything longer and he’d hang himself with a bedsheet or just cut his own throat. He’d thought about suicide many times during his life inside, but he was never more serious about it
than he was right then. He’d already spent too much of his life in concrete-and-steel boxes, already depleted most of whatever soul he’d come into the world with.
He laughed at himself for his dark thoughts, given his turn of good fortune. He pushed the image of himself hanging from a makeshift noose out of his head. If he hadn’t stumbled across the piece in the paper, King might’ve been willing to throw Hump to the wolves and barter the key away for a few grand and help getting out of the state. But now he didn’t have to worry about sacrificing Hump to the cops or begging for scraps from his employer. His begging-for-scraps days were over.
King stood up and slid the index card into his back pocket. He ripped the article out of the paper, the one that answered his decades of unanswered prayers, and folded it into a neat little square. He put that in his other back pocket. He popped open another can of Coors, stared at it, and smiled. Before sucking it down, he thought, No more Coors for me. No more Coors for the King. Then he scooped up all the papers and went to find the Dumpster. Hump wasn’t usually the newspaper-reading type, but King wasn’t going to take any chances, not when he could almost feel the wind blowing through the new hair he would have transplanted with the money left over from the blondes and the Porsche.
After the papers were disposed of, King headed to the motel office as Hump had done not a half-hour earlier. Only he wasn’t going there to Google local churches. He was going to Google blond girls and German sports cars. He imagined the price of both had gone up since the last time he’d thought there was a serious chance he might get close to either one.
Just as he got back to the room, his cell phone rang. The man on the other end was anxious.
“Write down this number.”
King found the motel notepad and pencil and wrote the number down. “I got the number.”
“How did it go?” the man asked. “Did you locate the package?”
But King didn’t answer. He hung up. The Porsche and the blondes were now almost close enough to touch.
14
As Jesse passed Molly on the way out of the house, he told her to have someone start looking into locating the next of kin.
“She didn’t have any family left that I know of, Jesse. She might have had an older sister, but she’s probably dead, I’m thinking. Maude was in her nineties. Her husband died a long time ago. They never had any kids.”
“We’ve got to try.”
“Can’t we officially ID her with dental records if we have to?”
“True, but we can’t ask her dentist what the guys who wrecked the house were looking for. Maybe there’s a relative who can shed some light on it.”
“I never thought of that. I guess that’s why they pay you the big money and you get to wear that fancy uniform.”
Of course Molly was referring to the fact that her boss used the privilege of his title to make every day his version of casual Friday. Full uniform for Jesse usually consisted of his cop shirt—tucked in—with jeans, work boots or running shoes, and a blue baseball cap with the letters PPD stitched across the crown in white. In colder weather he wore his lined cop jacket.
“When the mayor cans my ass and you inherit the job,” Jesse said, “you can dress however you like. You can wear your old high-school uniform for all I care.”
Molly got a sick look on her face as if it never occurred to her that she would be Jesse’s natural successor.
“No, thanks, Jesse. I’m happy right where I am. Besides, I gave away all my old clothes a long time ago.”
“Shame.” He winked at her, a smile on his face.
Still smiling, Jesse shook his head at her and immediately regretted it. His initial adrenaline rush was fading into a distant memory and the pills Tamara had given him were no longer doing the trick. If the mayor wasn’t right outside, he would have gone back upstairs and begged a few more Fiorinal from the ME. Even with Her Honor so close, Jesse didn’t exactly snap into action. Molly noticed.
“Jesse, don’t you think you better get out there?”
“It’s a crime scene. She can’t come in without my say-so.”
“Can’t avoid her forever, and you really don’t look any worse than anyone else who was at the wedding reception. The mayor was putting it away pretty good herself before she split.”
Jesse said, “I didn’t notice. Let me get out there. Remember, have—”
“I know, Jesse. I’ll get someone working on next of kin.”
Jesse stepped out onto the old wooden porch and noticed that the crowd around the crime scene tape had grown considerably since he’d entered the house. He also noticed the mayor scowling at Alisha, who was refusing to allow Her Honor to come beneath the tape. The mayor’s new assistant and political adviser, Nita Thompson, a slick-looking early-thirtysomething out of Harvard who was working her way up the consultant ladder, was staring up at Jesse shaking her head at him. There’d been a bull’s-eye on Jesse’s back since she arrived.
Things between Mayor Walker and Jesse hadn’t been great over the last several years. First there was the discovery of the remains of two teenage girls who’d gone missing from Paradise twenty-five years earlier, and an ugly spate of violence that followed. The violence had nothing to do with Jesse, who, in the end, solved the case and brought the last remaining killer to justice. It didn’t seem to matter to the mayor. Crime focused the wrong kind of attention on Paradise, and whatever made Paradise look bad made her look bad. Their relationship really deteriorated after Diana’s murder. That violence was directly tied to Jesse. When rumors about Mayor Walker’s political ambitions began circulating and a political consultant showed up in town, Jesse knew he was in for a hard time. It was pretty clear that Nita Thompson meant to hang as much bad baggage around Jesse’s neck as possible.
He called down from the porch. “Alisha, let the mayor up. Only the mayor.”
Jesse didn’t have to see the look on Thompson’s face to know her eyes were burning a hole right through him. He had other things to worry about, like the mayor racing up to him, a less-than-friendly expression on her face.
“Chief Stone, why is your officer keeping me off—”
“Chief Stone?” He cut her off. “Yesterday during our dance it was Jesse. Have we broken up?”
“Not funny, Chief. Not funny. And as I was saying, why—”
He cut her off again. “Because Alisha was doing her job as she’s been trained to do it. This is a crime scene, almost certainly the scene of a homicide and a serious assault. Evidence is being gathered by our people and the state Forensics Unit. The ME is still upstairs with the body. We need to limit the number of people who might unknowingly contaminate the scene.”
Mayor Walker was unmoved. “I’m the mayor of Paradise, Chief Stone. You had better instruct your officers, old and ridiculously new, that when I want access to anything in this town, I expect to get it. And why did I have to find out about this from the fire chief and not the chief of police?”
Because, Madame Mayor, I am not interested in kissing your ass.
“What are you smiling at, Stone? Did I say something amusing?”
“Was I smiling? It must have been a random thought. Sorry.”
“Answer my question.”
“Before I alert you, Your Honor, I need to gather information and have my facts straight. I was in the process of doing that.”
Just then, the two men from the ME’s office came up the front steps, one carrying an empty body bag under his arm. Jesse and the mayor stepped aside. After they passed, the mayor gestured toward the crowd that had gathered around the house, as well as the satellite dish–equipped news vans that had pulled to the curb.
“Well, we need to tell them something,” she said, pointing at the vans. “So give me the facts you have.”
“We wouldn’t have had to tell them anything yet if your people hadn’t called them.”
&n
bsp; “Are you accusing me of something, Chief Stone?”
“Yeah, of being a politician. And don’t worry about the press,” he said, now smiling broadly at her in spite of his pounding head. “I’ll handle the press.”
With that, he turned and walked down the porch steps.
15
Exhausted and still hungover, Jesse fell back on his black leather couch. He stared across the room at the bar, at the neat chessmenlike assembly of glasses: the cut-crystal rocks glasses that broke up the light like static kaleidoscopes, the frosted highball glasses that Suit had given him for his birthday five years ago, the hand-blown wineglasses that rang long and loud if you tapped them just right, the squat shot glasses with the single air bubbles in their thick bases, and the sleek champagne flutes that mostly collected dust. Functional alcoholics like Jesse found romance in all the aspects and rituals of drinking. To think otherwise was like believing that sexual pleasure was strictly about the act itself.
No, the clinking of the ice in the glass, the pour of the rich amber fluid, the peaty aroma, the hiss when he twisted the bottle cap, the glug of the soda pour, the swirling of the glass were as much foreplay as anything else. It was also, as Dix had pointed out, as Jesse knew deep in his soul, a distraction. It was a way for him to fool himself that since Diana’s murder, he really didn’t want to just grab the bottle and pour the Black Label down his throat until the relentless guilt and hurt and emptiness dulled a little.
It was worse than in L.A., worse than when Jenn had cheated on him. He loved Jenn, but it was almost like he had been in love with the idea of Jenn rather than who Jenn actually was. From the outside, Jenn was everything Jesse had ever wanted: beautiful, blue-eyed, and blond; an actress; more social than he was ever comfortable being. But inside she was never who he imagined her to be, and that wasn’t really her fault. The sex between them was good, never great. And only after years of separation, divorce, and therapy did he come to realize what had actually drawn them together was a kind of unhealthy yin/yang. Jenn could be terribly needy and Jesse was born to be needed by a beautiful woman. He was born to fix things. His career was about that, about righting wrongs, doing justice. In the end it turned out their pas de deux bound them together more powerfully than love ever did, and it took a very long time to undo the knots.
Robert B. Parker's the Hangman's Sonnet Page 5
