“I’m in Vice, so I’ve got a beard and long hair and generally look like I invented the grunge look. So deep down I want to impress this guy, let him know policing is more than eating doughnuts, and maybe a little more exciting than investment banking. So I told him about this child porn thing, something that just me and Jack were working on. I didn’t mention any names, I didn’t give any specifics. Except Detroit, I mentioned that.” He paused. “That was enough.”
He looked away from her, at the wall, the ceiling, anything inanimate. “The problem was, the child porn ring happened to be one of this guy’s investments. He laundered all the money it made, and he got excited about my job, all right. So excited that he shot Jack Imler the next day as Jack came home from the grocery store. He died carrying a box of Frosted Flakes. He died because Mr. Investment Banker didn’t know where I lived. He died instead of me.”
Okay, sympathy. She couldn’t help it. She gazed at him, sharing his horror. “I’m so sorry.” The words sounded hopelessly, stupidly inadequate.
“Oh, that’s not the icing on the birthday cake,” David went on. “He was a better banker than a murderer, so I caught up with him in about two hours, solved the murder, closed down the ring, and arrested Mr. Investment Banker. He denied it to the last, so he couldn’t reveal how he found out about Jack. He didn’t make it three months in jail before getting a shiv in the back. I got promoted to Homicide. Happy endings all around, except for Jack and Carol, of course.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Evelyn said weakly.
“I know I couldn’t. That’s exactly why I should have kept my own damn mouth shut.” He paced around the small room as if he wanted to crawl out of his own skin. “I’m telling you this because I want you know that I mean it when I say I know how it is. So if you told Darryl Pierson about James Neal, just tell me so. I’ll understand,” he insisted through gritted teeth.
“I’m sorry for you, David.” She got to her feet. “I really am. But I didn’t tell Darryl. If he knew about Neal, I have no idea how he found out. I swear it. That’s all I can tell you.”
He tried, it seemed. But then logic took over and the angles of his face hardened into granite planes. “You don’t know how much I want to believe you. You don’t know how much I want you, period.”
She had the sinking feeling of loss, of some vitally important piece of her life slipping through her fingers like a cold draft. “But you don’t. Believe me, that is.”
“No,” he told her coldly. “I don’t.”
She brushed past him with fury and regret and made her way downstairs. “I’m going back to the lab,” she said to Riley as he smoked a cigarette at Neal’s kitchen sink. Tony had long since departed. “I’m going to get started on these samples.”
He tried to be kind, which only infuriated her further. “Don’t worry about it, Evie. It’s the final score, not the point spread.”
“Fuck you, too.” She opened the door, grateful that her mother wasn’t in earshot. Her mother wouldn’t believe Evelyn even knew those words.
Riley’s cell phone rang, and the sound reminded Evelyn to call Angel and make sure she remained inside Melissa’s home instead of hitting the teen clubs in order to pointedly disobey her mother. As she hesitated, hand on the knob, Riley’s unhealthy complexion began to pale further at the news he received.
Muttering several soft curses, he closed the phone and looked at Evelyn. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said. “They just found James Neal’s body.”
Chapter 28
JAMES NEAL HAD BEEN unceremoniously dumped by the side of a park road, five hundred feet from a picnic area, several miles from the nearest body of water. He had been found by a fit young man determined enough to jog in six inches of snow. Every once in a while the trees towering above would slide a pound of wet snow off their limbs to hurtle downward like a missile.
Evelyn climbed out of the car, mind and body numb. Her body had not warmed up since the hour she spent over James Neal’s unheated garage, and her mind busily slammed doors to keep out the fact that she now found herself in a great deal of trouble. That it was not her fault did not change anything.
Neal lay between the tree line and the bike path. His death had not been pretty or quick. His arms were convulsed in crooked bends and his pants were ripped at one knee. He had been strangled, but unlike in Destiny’s case, the killer did not leave the murder weapon for them.
Evelyn’s eyes filled with tears, though for Neal or herself or simply from the cold she couldn’t say. “Tough way to die.”
“Yeah,” Riley said. “But he was pretty tough on Destiny Pierson and Lia Ripetti.”
Neal wore a sweater but no coat, since he had not had time to grab one when he fled his own home. Evelyn bent closer to his neck and tried not to look at the eyes, bulging with both knowledge and terror. “The killer probably used a chain. You can see the marks of the links.”
“The same kind of chain? Can you tell?” David asked.
It pained her to have him so close, yet with a world of misunderstanding between them, but she forced herself to be professional. “Not for sure. The pathologists can tell us if it’s the same general size and shape.”
“He used a chain on the women, so someone used a chain on him?” David asked of no one in particular.
“Revenge murders usually leave some kind of calling card,” Riley told him. “Using a chain could be symbolic.”
The snow continued to fall, silently but inexorably, and would eventually cover James Neal and all his sins if they didn’t interfere.
If Neal killed them both, Evelyn thought, and Darryl had Neal killed, then I’m in deep trouble, but at least Angel is safe.
“When his clothing dries, I want hairs and fibers.” David paced a few steps, then turned, speaking to her and Riley in a deliberately toneless voice. “Neal might have been a brutal multiple killer, but that doesn’t mean the mayor can just have him killed and dumped. Not on my beat.”
“Yeah,” Riley said with dark humor. “If he had any common courtesy, he would have made the body disappear. Doing it this way puts us in a real bind.”
“He didn’t do it.” Evelyn spoke without hope. “He’s not like that.”
Both men stared at her.
At the ME’s office, Evelyn immediately set to work with the fibers from Neal’s house and car. At the moment she had less interest in who killed Neal than in making sure Neal killed Destiny Pierson and Lia Ripetti. He had known both of them and ordered the chloroform—but she wanted to prove it, to know for sure.
A flash of color caught her attention.
She refocused on a thick green fiber that looked familiar. She shuffled through the reference slides she had made of just about every piece of carpeting and upholstery in James Neal’s house, and reminded herself that she really should leave, just in case Angel deigned to come home.
The green fiber collected from Destiny Pierson’s shirt looked exactly the same as the green fibers from James Neal’s tablecloth. She’d have to run it through the FTIR to make sure they were the same substance. She removed the fiber from the taping and cut it in half, mounting half with a drop of PermaMount. Sixty seconds with the polarizing microscope and she saw the pale pinks and greens that indicated a synthetic with a high refractive index. Polyester. The tablecloth fibers gave the same result.
But the tablecloth still lay on Neal’s table. Did he eat his dinners off a cloth he had used to wrap Destiny’s body?
“Ewww,” she said aloud.
But then Destiny had not yet been dead when he transported her from wherever he had placed the cement on her feet to the river. And maybe it appealed to whatever sick-as-hell impulses drove someone like him.
She pulled out the tapings from Neal’s clothing, which she had not yet had time to examine. In no time at all she found another green fiber; in fact, there were five of them on the front of his shirt alone. This told her nothing at all. He owned the tablecloth. Perhaps he had a habit of folding his
laundry on his kitchen table or even laundered the items together. Perhaps Destiny had been at his house, joined him for dinner, leaned on the table? Destiny and Neal? Not likely.
What had he said about the tablecloth? “I got it for free.” How did one get a tablecloth for free? Had he won it? Stole it? Lifted it from work? And where in a hospital would they use full-size tablecloths? She had been to Riverside’s cafeteria. It wasn’t that fancy.
She couldn’t imagine what a tablecloth had to do with anything, yet the fibers existed, small but solid. Any physical link between Neal and one of the dead girls deserved more study. Neal had to be the killer. The possibility that he had not done it was too confusing to contemplate.
She found Neal’s name in the White Pages and dialed his house, which of course still crawled with cops. She explained herself to the rookie who answered the phone. His young voice sounded even younger when presented with a chance to do something other than mill about. “Oh, yes, ma’am. What can I do for you?”
“This is going to sound odd, Officer, but I need you to look at the kitchen table.”
“Oh-kaay.” From his tone this must have ranked pretty high on a list of the oddest requests he’d ever received.
“Is there a green tablecloth on it?”
“Yes.”
“I need you to look along the edge of it, see if there’s a tag or something.”
“Oh-kaay. Hang on.” Apparently he couldn’t reach the table from the phone. “Yeah, there’s a tag.”
“And,” she asked, “what does it say?”
“It’s kind of faded. But I think it says Monitor, then it says Marquis Royale, 64 by 48.”
“And that’s it?”
“I think so.”
“Look again. There should be an RN number, a five-digit number.”
He set the phone down and she waited, rattling her fingernails on the counter.
“It says 38619. Oh, it also says polyester. Does that help?”
“I’m not sure yet,” she told him.
She could contact the FBI library for information on Monitor, but that might take a few days. Instead, she called the Textile Publication Company, which published a directory of RN numbers. At least all this activity kept her mind off her disintegrating career and her arguments with David. After she assured the operator that she worked at a government forensic laboratory and therefore could be issued the information without purchasing their $600 directory, she learned that Monitor was a division of MasterFabric, a textile corporation out of St. Paul, Minnesota.
Armed with phone numbers for both corporations and a lack of concern about the county’s long-distance bill, she called Monitor, and after wading through a voice-mail jungle actually managed to converse with Velma, a real live human being who had a real live knowledge of her job and company. In a soft southern accent (Monitor manufactured its products in northern Alabama) she happily claimed the Marquis Royale line of tablecloths as their own. In fact, it made up 10 percent of their linen sales in the higher-end market.
“What stores would carry it up here?”
“We don’t sell retail, ma’am,” Velma corrected, as if Evelyn had made a substantial but forgivable faux pas. “Our products are for the restaurant and housekeeping industries. They’re sold directly to businesses.”
“What kind of businesses?”
“Restaurants,” Velma repeated patiently. “Hotels, banquet centers, caterers. They purchase through our catalog, though a lot of sales are made at trade shows.”
“Can you tell me what businesses in the Cleveland area bought these tablecloths?”
A pause ensued. “That would be Billing, ma’am. They’d have to run all the order numbers against inventory. When did they place this order?”
“I have no idea. Some time in the past couple of years.”
Velma choked on another disapproving pause. “You’ll have to talk to Billing about that request, ma’am. But I’m sure it would take a while.”
Velma transferred her to a man in Billing who did not have his coworker’s social skills. He whistled at every third word she uttered and made it clear that Evelyn asked for something on the level of a full-scale model of the Taj Mahal made entirely out of cheese and Popsicle sticks and delivered by Friday. He seemed to think that they might be able to have a list by the end of the month. Evelyn gritted her teeth, but did not know the official phrases to make him work more quickly. It would make no difference to James Neal.
Chapter 29
“THAT WASN’T VERY SUBTLE.”
“That’s because I didn’t do it,” Mario Ashworth said, and Darryl wondered how many times in his life he’d repeated that phrase.
“What?”
“I didn’t kill him. We were following him, yeah. My guy found out the cops were looking at him, that they figured he took out Lia and your daughter.”
“How did you—”
“Do you really want to know that, Darryl?”
Did he? “No, I don’t. But why didn’t you tell me first? Why didn’t you just make him disappear, never be found? Like this—my sources tell me that the cops are positive I had the guy killed.”
“Why would they think that? You can’t be connected to Neal.”
“Evelyn.”
“Oh.”
“They think she told me about Neal and I had him killed.”
“Did she?”
“I never heard of the guy until I turned on the TV this morning. Something like this could follow me for the rest of my career, Mar. God, listen to me. I can’t believe I’m talking about my position when my daughter’s dead.”
“You’ve got to keep going, Dare. Besides, your popularity will probably go up. People will think you did just what they wish they could. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t have that man killed. I knew they suspected him and my guy went to lean on him, but was interrupted before he got the chance. We don’t know what happened to him after that.”
Darryl Pierson cursed quietly to himself, but he didn’t doubt it. If Mario had killed James Neal on Darryl’s behalf, he would say so.
“Yeah,” Mario said. “I know. If I didn’t kill him and you didn’t, then who did?”
“No matter what, will the city believe I did?” Darryl wondered aloud, and hung up.
Ashworth sounded quite friendly for a gangster, she thought, but perhaps he employed better manners with an attractive and gullible forensic scientist than with Homicide cops. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
“I’m sorry to bother you at home,” Evelyn said. “I just have one very quick question and it might sound odd. I tried to call your branch office, the one Lia Ripetti worked in—”
“What is it?” he interrupted, friendly but still efficient. “I’ll be happy to help you.”
“Ashworth Construction hosted a grand opening ceremony at which Lia Ripetti got food poisoning. Do you remember that?”
In the silence she wondered if he was examining the question from all angles for hidden dangers. Apparently he found none and answered, “I remember the grand opening ceremony. I don’t remember Lia being there, but I know a lot of people got sick afterward.”
“What catering company did you use?”
He laughed, probably because the question seemed both irrelevant and absurd. “Sorry, you just caught me unawares.” She could hear brushing sounds as if he had moved some items on his desk. “Hold on just a moment, won’t you? Don’t hang up.”
He did not provide music for those on hold. Evelyn spent the time looking at the tapings from Lia Ripetti’s clothing. No green fibers, but then there were hardly any fibers at all. She had been in the water much longer than Destiny Pierson.
Ashworth came back on the line. “We used Kopecki Catering. I remember the name now. I didn’t hire them, but I remember it because a lot of my guys were bugging me to sue them afterward. Construction workers can be whiners sometimes.”
“Thank you.” Christine Sabian had worked at a catering company. She couldn’t remembe
r the name of it, but Kopecki sounded strangely familiar.
“That’s it? That’s all you wanted to know?”
“That’s it. Thank you very much.”
“You’re an interesting woman, Miss James.”
“Mrs.” She had learned during two years of singleness to smell an approaching date request a mile off. “I have to go now, my boss is signaling me. Thank you for your time.”
She hadn’t lied. Tony loomed in front of her like a cloud full of rainwater on the day of the company picnic. Behind him, Jason flashed her a frighteningly triumphant grin before he flitted off.
“What are you doing?” Tony asked.
“Looking at the fibers from the Neal house.”
“Finding anything?”
“Just one thing. It’s a little bizarre, but if I can nail it down then I’ll know that James Neal killed those two girls.”
“Stop trying.”
“What?” She peered at him.
“You’re in trouble,” he said, and for once seemed genuinely pained by the idea. He sat on a high benchwork stool, holding the counter as the wheeled base tried to scoot away from his bulk. “With the suspect dead, Rupert saw his big Court TV trial go down the tubes. It would have been televised just in time for reelection. He’s talked to the ME. The ME says you’re suspended pending an investigation.”
“What?”
“I tried to talk him out of it, Evelyn.” He probably had, though not with as much vehemence as he implied. Tony had to be torn between malicious delight in her misery and the unhappy knowledge that he might lose his best employee. He avoided her eyes and wiped at a stain on his ample chest, from which the overstretched Izod shirt would not recover.
“But—”
“But what? The guy’s dead. The case is blown. Yeah, we can wrap up Pierson and Ripetti, but no one’s going to be happy about how we did it.”
Evelyn fought the sick, sinking feeling that washed over her. She couldn’t lose her job. She could not lose her job. “Why don’t they just ask Darryl?”
Trace Evidence Page 21
