She sounds more like me every day. “People can’t always be what we want them to be,” Evelyn went on, stroking the long hair scattered like a raven’s broken wing. “You would like to have parents that weren’t divorced. I would like my father not to have smoked all those years so he wouldn’t have died of lung cancer. I’m sure Rick would have preferred that his mother not walk out on her family on his fifteenth birthday. We all wish things could be different.”
“In other words, tough.”
“In other words, learn to forgive people for not being what you want them to be.”
“How?”
“I wish I knew.”
A trace of a smile curved Angel’s mouth before she could stop it. “That’s great, Mom. Give me completely impossible advice.”
“Some things I can’t fix,” Evelyn said simply.
Back to sullen. “I’m going to move out as soon as I’m eighteen. Melissa and me are going to get an apartment.”
Not after you get a load of what rent costs these days. “Okay. But just tonight, no matter how mad you are, I need you to be here, okay?”
Angel turned on her side, looking up.
“No shinnying down the windpipe, no having Melissa or JoAnn or Cindy pick you up. Please. I’ve had all the panicking I can take for one day.”
“Okay.” Angel pretended to be reluctant, but Evelyn could see that her daughter had no plans to go anywhere. Angel had not recovered completely from her surgery and after a very emotional evening looked as if she wanted nothing more than her own bed and a long, dreamless night.
Evelyn got up and reached over the single window frame for a pair of nails.
“What about you?” Angel asked.
“What about me what?” Years ago she had drilled two small holes in the middle sash of the double-hung window. She slid a nail into each hole so that neither the upper nor the lower part of the window could move.
“Do you have any other men? Did you have any other men? And what are you doing that for?”
“Just locking the window. Work has me a little paranoid right now. And failing at marriage kind of put me off men, preferably forever. Go to sleep, you need it.”
That Angel didn’t protest gave proof of her exhaustion. Evelyn waited until her daughter had gone through her nightly routine of washing and toning her face, brushing her hair fifty times, and forcibly throwing her laundry into the hamper. When the bedsprings creaked and all was quiet, Evelyn checked the locks on every door and window, then laid two long pieces of aluminum foil down the upstairs hallway. It could not be crossed or removed without making a sufficient amount of noise. She left her bedroom door open.
The phone rang.
Evelyn dived on it, cursing whoever dared to disturb her daughter’s slumber. It had to be Terrie or Rick, calling for an update. It was neither.
“Evelyn?”
“Darryl?”
“I hope it isn’t too late to call.”
That depends on what you mean. “No, I’m still up. I’m sorry I couldn’t talk before. I had a crisis on my hands, more or less. How are you? I mean, how are you holding up?”
“Barely,” he said. “I just wanted to know what you’ve found out.”
Silence.
“You’re deciding what you can tell me without getting yourself in trouble.”
“That’s right. I also don’t want to raise any false hopes. We’re following some leads. We may have a connection between your daughter and this other girl, but it may turn out to be nothing.”
She expected a flurry of questions, but none came. Finally the mayor of Cleveland said, “What is it?”
“I can’t really say yet. I’m sorry, but I can’t. I do want to ask you a few things, though. When Destiny broke her finger, did you go to the hospital?”
He gave a sigh that sounded oddly like relief. “No. I had an important council vote to attend, and Danielle stayed with her.”
“Do you remember her saying anything about their time there?”
“Like what?”
“Anything at all.”
Obediently Darryl recalled: “Dani said Destiny liked the osteopath and he assured her that Destiny would be unscarred, not crippled, and untraumatized. She also said that the food in the cafeteria appalled her and they had some obnoxious boy for a nurse.”
It’s not fair, Evelyn thought, that just as I begin to relax for the first time in three hours I have to tense up all over again. “Really?”
“I can tell that means something to you. Why?”
“Darryl, I don’t know what to think. I’m completely exhausted, and as far as the case goes, we have all sorts of little facts that don’t add up to any specific answer. All I can tell you is that we’re working on it as hard as we can.”
The silence lengthened, as if he were making a decision. And he did. “Tell me.”
“Darryl, I—”
“Tell me. I don’t give a damn about ethics or justice or the proper way of doing things. Just tell me.”
“We’re not sure of anything yet!”
“Then tell me what it is you’re not sure of.”
“No,” she said stubbornly.
“I need this, Evelyn. This was my daughter. Can you imagine what it would be like if Angel—”
“What would you do with the information anyway, Darryl? There’s nothing you can do! If you tried to interfere, he could use that as a basis for appeal or to have evidence thrown out. Is that what you want?”
“I want to know!”
The time for reason had passed. “No.”
“Damn it, you used to love me! You told me every day how much you loved me!”
“And what did it get me?” she slammed out. “Dropped to the side like a used condom because you loved your ambition more!”
Silence. Then: “Fair play. Now you love your job more.”
A soft click told her he had hung up.
Just as well, she thought, that they finally made the break that neither one of them had the courage for seventeen years earlier. It was too bad. A lot of things were too bad.
As she climbed into bed, she thought that she didn’t really believe that Jimmy Neal or whoever their killer might be would come to kidnap her daughter. Strongsville was a good distance from downtown Cleveland and Warrensville Heights (but right off the freeway) and Jimmy had been genuinely scared by their visit that afternoon (but it might just put him over the edge). He had to encounter a lot of girls at the hospital (but how many were beautiful teenagers?), so why Angel? He would almost certainly believe that the police would now follow him if he left his house (unless he could lose them). Besides, Evelyn was home and Lia and Destiny had both been alone (though Destiny had been with a group of friends). No logical reason existed to worry over Angel.
All the same, when it came to her daughter she had no intention of being logical.
Evelyn slept through her alarm the next morning, not waking until Angel came in, turned it off, and shook her, saying, “Mom? Why is there foil in the hallway?”
Chapter 26
EVELYN’S MORNING COULD BE described as merely lousy if the Sahara could be described as just a patch of sand. She had no time for makeup or breakfast. It took five tries to wake her daughter since, after discovering the foil, Angel had gone back to sleep. Only the threat of having ice water dumped on her head convinced her to emerge so that Evelyn could drop her at Melissa’s house. If Angel had briefly considered forgiving her mother for concealing her father’s behavior, this hour before dawn changed her mind.
It took fully an hour and a half to get to work through the slush-filled freeways. Her favorite radio station had fired its morning program personnel overnight and replaced them with two goons who thought they were funny. The last thing Evelyn wanted to hear first thing in the morning was a man who never matured past the age of fourteen and thought he was funny. She would have preferred even her daughter’s sullen silence.
The news did not improve matters. The media playe
d Destiny Pierson’s murder—Lia Ripetti did not command the same attention—to the hilt and talk-show callers were positive the killer would prove to be a Ku Klux Klan member, the rival mayoral candidate from the last election, or a rogue cop protected by a conspiracy of his fellow officers. In other news, the council would vote today on the new ME’s office contract. The mayor had already postponed the vote twice and council members were determined to pin him down, family tragedy or no family tragedy. Evelyn turned the radio off and wedged her car into a space at the edge of the lot.
Then Marissa called in sick and Jason took the last cup of coffee before he closeted himself in Tony’s office. Through the glass window she watched their huddled conversation, resenting her lack of caffeine. But at least it kept both of them out of her way.
She walled herself up in a cubbyhole with the stereo comparison microscope and her bags of chains. It went more quickly than she expected, since most were easily eliminated by their size, thickness, and shape; some links were twisted, some were flattened at both ends, some were flattened and grooved to lie flat when extended. Two sets, one from Home Depot and the other from Home Warehouse, seemed to match the chains found on the victims. A company called SteelWorks manufactured the chain from Home Depot and George Industries made the chain from Home Warehouse, but that didn’t necessarily mean they hadn’t come from the same vat at the same factory. Manufacturers often sold the same items under different names. This allowed retail stores to have their own distinct brands and created the illusion of competition. X-ray diffraction, or EDX, could analyze the steel further. The FTIR wouldn’t work—the beam would simply reflect off the shiny steel instead of penetrating. Unfortunately, they didn’t have an EDX, and without further elemental analysis she would not be able to say for sure where the killer had bought his chains.
She set the purchased chains aside and returned to the evidence chains. The ones used on Destiny and Lia had been excavated from the concrete. Some of the end links had deep scratches on them, as if he had tried to cut the chain at that point, then gave up and cut a different link instead. If she found tools she could compare the marks. The short chain used to strangle Destiny Pierson matched the others in every respect, so it was not likely that she had escaped one madman’s icy grave just to run into another psychopath down the road.
Surrounded by chains, Evelyn suppressed a shudder. They were so hard, unchanged, impersonal. Heavy and cold. She couldn’t imagine how it would feel as the links bit into the girls’ skin, pulling them into the freezing water. Or maybe she didn’t want to.
“Didn’t have breakfast, did you?” Riley asked David as he watched the younger detective pilfer a third banana-nut bagel from a bag next to the scarred coffeepot. This earned David a dark look from the unit secretary.
“I haven’t had breakfast in two weeks.” He slumped into his seat and glanced around the unit. An untidy convention of desks that should have been sold at auction twenty years earlier crowded a view of the parking garage. David’s chair had a broken axis and lacked one wheel, but today he didn’t care. “I also need some energy. I couldn’t sleep, so I began the day at an obscenely early hour.”
“Really? Why?”
“I had to do something while I waited for you,” he said slyly. “So I looked at Lia Ripetti’s medical chart.”
Riley eyed him over a chipped coffee cup that bore an embossed gold shield labeled Metro-Dade Police Training Facility. “You’d have to have a court order to get those.”
“I got it. Judge Fallon is a health nut. Gets up and jogs around the John Carroll U. track at five every morning. I caught him on the fourth lap. I think I pulled a muscle, but he signed the warrant.”
“And did Riverside turn over the file?”
“I bought the senior records clerk a cup of coffee. That and the court order softened her considerably.”
Riley sniffed in suspicion, as if surprised that someone with a reputation that smelled as bad as David’s would show such gumption. “You’ve been busy.”
“You’re telling me.” He basked in a moment of self-satisfaction. “Did you know the freakin’ birds start singing at four A.M.? Four! I thought for sure they’d all be in Florida or something, but no. Pitch-dark outside and they—”
“So?” Riley demanded.
“So, what?”
“Did Jimmy Neal work on Lia Ripetti?”
“I’ll assume you mean in the medical sense. Yes. He did her preliminary history, took her vitals, and, I presume, held her head while she puked her guts out. His signature is on five of her eleven forms. He very definitely met Lia Ripetti.”
Riley’s brown eyes took on an unhealthy gleam. “Well, well.”
“I think Evelyn might be right. We do have enough to pick him up.”
With deceptive calm, Riley said, “Incidentally, you leave her the hell alone. She’s worth ten of you. Just because you’re jealous over some ex-boyfriend of hers—”
“I’m not jealous.”
“—doesn’t mean you can pick on her. She knows what she’s doing. She just worries about her kid.”
Two cops across the aisle busied themselves with their desktops. The secretary wrapped up a phone call to be able to listen. Everything he said, David knew, would be taken down and used against him.
“I know she’s worried,” he snapped. “I know she’s the Homicide Unit’s best friend and I’m some screwup—”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“That’s the whole reason I can’t have this case fall apart.” David hated the desperation he heard in his own voice. “I need it.”
Riley just stared at him for a long moment. The secretary started to type.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“To see Jimmy Neal?”
“To talk to County Prosecutor Rupert.”
“Why? Jimmy Neal could be sliding out of town as we speak.”
“He had all night if he wanted to slide. We need Rupert’s support if we’re going to move on Neal, not that I’d ask Rupert for so much as a cigarette or take it if he offered one, which the cheap SOB would never do.” He gave David a surly grin. “You said you didn’t want to hit a foul here.”
David sighed.
They took the walkway from the police headquarters to the Justice Center. As they walked, David added that he had called Lia’s boyfriend, Durling, about the ring Evelyn found in her pocket.
“You really have been busy.”
“According to him, Lia’s always had it—meaning she’s had it longer than six months, which is how long they’ve been dating. It belonged to her mother.”
“That’s a sweeter story than the truth.”
“You think she and Ashworth broke up, that’s why she’s dating Durling?”
“Who knows? Maybe her and Ashworth aren’t star-crossed lovers, he’s just a handy source of income for a working girl. Or he doesn’t make it an optional part of her duties—she wants to keep her job, she puts out.”
“Obviously Durling doesn’t know, so that just leaves Ashworth, and he’s got no reason to tell us anything. Besides which, if Neal killed her, it’s all a moot point.”
“I’ll bet the point will never be moot to Mrs. Ashworth,” Riley pointed out.
The prosecutor’s offices were on the ninth floor. Their lobby—they had a lobby—had a wide receptionist’s desk and overstuffed chairs, but David felt maliciously glad that the magazines were a year out of date and the carpet had a stain.
The prosecutor’s office, large and airy, boasted a corner view of Cleveland from nine stories up and unstained carpeting, but a curious lack of adornment. The walls were bare, and not out of respect for the wallpaper. The shelves held a haphazard row of legal volumes and the desk hid beneath files and folders. Three filing cabinets, one with a dent in it, and three chairs of worn leather completed the room. David couldn’t decide if he found this appealing or simply odd.
What the room lacked in decor, it made up for in personnel. Prosecutor R
upert had an entourage, in the form of a slim, dark-haired man with a permanently harried expression, a pasty-faced assistant, and a giggly blond girl, obviously a college student intern whose parents, David hoped, were keeping a very close eye on her work activities. Impressionable young things and the weaselly Rupert could not be a healthy mix.
“Detectives!” Rupert greeted them as if he assumed they were bringing good news. Where he would have gotten that impression, David couldn’t guess. He explained about James Neal and watched as the intern’s eyes lit up with visions of Court TV. Rupert wasn’t quite as impressed.
“It’s not enough for an arrest.” For once he made a non-camera face. “It’s enough to bring him down to the station as a potential material witness. But it’s not enough for an arrest.”
“But—”
He held up an imperial hand, which only inflamed David more. “All you’ve managed to establish is that he met both victims. You haven’t tied him to the location or the murder weapon—I mean the cement and the chains.”
“He’s lying about something,” Riley said. “Just ask the right questions and it’s obvious.”
“I can’t list a hunch on the arrest warrant. Even if you arrested him, you wouldn’t want him to come up for trial while you’re still scrambling to figure out exactly what, if anything, he’s lying about.” Rupert didn’t mention how stupid he’d look if they arrested one person, only to find out that they were wrong, or worse yet, that they were right but lacked the evidence to convict. Rupert wanted his ducks in a row before he took a shot. “Good luck, gentlemen. I’m sure you’re on the right track.”
Riley sighed in defeat. David said nothing.
“Just keep on it,” the prosecutor advised in a portentous tone. “This case can make or break a lot of people.”
“Gee.” Riley led their way out of the lobby toward the elevators. “What do you think he meant by that?”
“I think he meant ‘solve this in a hurry or I’ll have your badges,’ but he didn’t want to sound like a total asshole in front of his groupies.”
“At least we have permission to lean on Neal.”
Trace Evidence Page 19
