by Lisa Black
Except if Jack’s true past were revealed, it would become her problem. Very much indeed her problem.
“Let’s go,” Rick said to Will, almost giddily. Maggie handed him the copy of Raymond Winchester’s fingerprint card. When he glanced down to take it, however, the giddiness evanesced as if it had never been. “What the hell?”
Then Will saw it, too. He picked up one of the pictures that Maggie had printed. “What are you doing with a picture of Toner’s sister?”
Chapter 9
Friday, 2:30 p. m.
All four detectives went together to speak to Jennifer Toner, a joint effort that appealed to exactly no one. But their investigations had dovetailed, and they needed answers. Now that Jennifer had her brother back, she didn’t need to be forthcoming with them and instead had the incentive not to be—especially if she’d somehow been involved in Evan Harding’s death.
So now all four of them smelled the jasmine tea and climbed up the worn steps. Roofers were hard at work and Jack felt a prick of amusement when the boom of falling shingles falling echoed up and down the stairwell, making Rick start. He wondered if he shouldn’t be so petty. Rick might be lazy, but nothing worse could be said about him. Then he remembered that the guy had cheated on Maggie, and that made it not petty at all.
Besides, he could handle Rick Gardiner.
To everyone’s relief, Jennifer Toner had remained at home and answered the door, albeit with an unenthusiastic expression. “You brought reinforcements?”
No coffee would be offered this trip, either. She sat in an armchair and let the men form a semicircle around the other side of the room. Will and Rick sat on the sofa, Riley pulled over a kitchen chair, and Jack leaned against a windowsill, caught between chill coming off the glass and heat spilling from the radiator.
As they had agreed before driving over, Rick and Will went first, asking if she knew a man named Raymond Winchester (no), if they could speak to her brother, who was not in any trouble (she’d ask him to call them, but professed no knowledge of where he might be, where he slept nights, or who he might hang out with), or where he found this doctor who didn’t have an address listed on the Internet (she didn’t know).
It took about twenty minutes to exhaust their reexamination, and then Will sat back into the overstuffed sofa and turned it over to Jack and Riley.
Riley said, “Do you ever use check cashing services?” Her expression seemed so baffled at this change in topics that Jack thought perhaps they had all been mistaken, that Jennifer Toner only bore a resemblance to the woman at A to Z. “No. Why?”
“Not even one on Bolivar?”
No, Jack thought, they weren’t mistaken. Jennifer Toner went still from scalp to toes.
They waited.
“What’s this about?” she asked, her voice low and tightly controlled.
Riley spoke with equal calmness. “Were you at A to Z Check Cashing last night?”
Jack saw her calculating chances, weighing possible scenarios in her mind. Then a deep breath and maybe the realization that she hadn’t done anything wrong—at least on camera—prompted her to tell what sounded like the truth. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“That’s where he cashes the checks.”
“Marlon?”
“Yes. That’s why he doesn’t ask me for money—he’s getting checks from Medicare to pay for these medications. Big checks. He told me so to prove to me that the prescriptions are real, it’s a real doctor giving him real meds, and so that’s why I shouldn’t worry about him.”
Riley took his time to formulate a question. “So he’s getting checks you think are for a fraudulent claim.”
“I don’t think. I know. Marlon turns into an addict and then he winds up with a boatload of cash as well? There’s something way shady going on here, more than a doc selling pills on the side.”
“Yes, I see. But what does—what did you say to Evan Harding?”
“Who?”
“The cashier. The guy behind the counter.”
“The cashier? Why, he complain? I didn’t yell at him. I didn’t use any bad language . . . well, not really bad. I mean, seriously—”
“What did you say to him?”
“I asked how they could cash thirty thousand dollars in checks from a drug addict! They had to know they were fake. Did they get a cut or what?”
“Thirty thousand?”
“That’s what the receipt showed—he came ’round here waving bills, acting big. He knew I suspected he was dealing so he showed me the receipt, that it was for medical reimbursement. Nothing to worry about. I said he should take that money and pay for the best rehab facility we could find. He walked out and wouldn’t pick up the phone for a couple days. It made me so mad, I went down there—last night.” Something occurred to her. “How’d you guys know?”
“You were on video.”
She had enough other things on her mind to put off asking why they’d reviewed the A to Z security tapes in the first place. “How’d you get from a video to—did that guy complain about me? Remember my brother’s name?”
“You told him about your brother?” Rick asked.
She glanced at the detective as if he might be a bit slow. “Yes. That’s why I was there. I wanted to know why they kept cashing checks for a Marlon Toner that they had to know were not right. Mostly I wanted to know who issued the checks.” She rubbed her forehead. “I wanted to work backward to Marlon’s source of the pills. I also thought maybe he had to give an address to cash the checks, and that would tell me where he’s staying. But he, the cashier, didn’t tell me anything.”
“So you didn’t know Evan Harding previously?” Riley asked.
Clearly all four of them were a bit slow. “The cashier guy? No, of course not.”
“Had you ever been to A to Z before?”
“No,” she said, then added, “I have direct deposit.”
“Where do you work?”
“The library. Downtown branch.” Their emphasis on the check cashing store instead of her brother confused her, and they kept up the questions to keep her from pondering the connections. If she had killed Evan Harding, this would be the best way to trip her up. If she hadn’t, she’d stay perplexed.
“What did Ev—the cashier say?” Riley asked.
“He played dumb. Didn’t know who I was talking about, they cash checks, they wouldn’t cash the check if it wasn’t good because they all know what government checks look like and they have lists of what the address should be and the numbers that are supposed to be in the routing, blah, blah, blah. No matter what I asked—what I really wanted was this Dr. Castleman’s phone or address or anything—he kept saying he didn’t know, didn’t have any information about where the checks come from, they won’t know anything about the claims that prompt the payments, he just works there, more blah. I wanted him to find the check so I could see if it had the doctor’s address, or an account number or patient number or anything, but he insisted he couldn’t do that. First, he said it would be impossible to find it in all the checks that had come in, especially if I didn’t know the exact date and time cashed, and even then the memo information would be confidential, and so on and so on. I finally gave up. I didn’t hit him or anything,” she added. “No matter what he says. Well, if you’ve got the cameras, you know.”
“He looked awfully worried. Are you sure that’s all you said?”
She straightened her spine. “I didn’t threaten him.”
But her face didn’t seem as certain.
“Are you sure?” Will pressed, his voice gentle but implacable. Jack saw how Will was clearly the people person in that partnership, as Riley took that role in theirs. The idea that he, Jack, might have something in common with Rick messed with his world a little bit.
“I said I would call the police. That could hardly be considered a threat.”
“Was that all to the conversation?”
She considered this. “Yes. Obviously he wasn’t going to
tell me anything, so I left.”
“You gave up?”
“I’d never give up on my brother,” she declared with grave dignity. “I thought I would contact the medical license board, the A.M.A., whoever might be able to give me contact information on this Dr. Castleman. I was going to start on that today, but—then you guys showed up.”
A pause. Jack felt pretty certain that this woman had nothing to do with Evan Harding’s impalement in the Erie Street Cemetery, but he couldn’t be 100 percent certain. He had been fooled by an innocent expression before . . . albeit not often.
Will said, “Evan Harding was murdered last night.”
The slightest hesitation while she recalled his name once more. “The cashier guy?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, how awful.” Instantly her face lost its angry cast and turned to deep sympathy. “Somebody shoot him? Rob the place?”
“No.”
That caught her up short. The vulnerabilities of a cash store open during the late night were easy to picture. “Then what happened?”
“It’s an open investigation,” Riley answered without answering. He asked if she had seen anyone or anything suspicious during her visit, not necessarily in the store but on the street, if Evan had said anything to indicate he expected either company or trouble, how long she had been in the area afterward. A chorus of nos; she had left the street immediately.
Jack moved away from the radiator, now scorching his thigh. A bizarre coincidence that two deaths in one night seemed to be vaguely connected by one Jennifer Toner, but that had to be all it was. A coincidence. They did occur, even in police work.
Just not often.
Chapter 10
Friday, 2:30 p. m.
Maggie, fortified by sandwiches and the calm that had descended on the unit once all the detectives left, wrote up her identification of the West Side Market victim as Raymond Winchester and set it aside for either Josh or Amy, both also trained in latent print analysis, to verify her conclusion. Now she had time to look at the tapings from Evan Harding’s clothing.
Tapings were akin to opening a book, an introduction to the person’s life and current situation, their backstory written in fur from their pets and paint crumbles from the worn walls of their apartment and a long, wavy hair with colored tips from their last date. But without those corresponding facts in hand, the lines she drew from the tiny trace evidence went nowhere, so tapings were more like an ancient tablet crammed with cuneiform: interesting to look at, but impossible to read.
She tried to make out what she could.
She quickly screened the tapings with a stereomicroscope. Its large lens functioned as a magnifying glass, lights aimed onto the surface from adjustable side bulbs. But the focus could waver with the not-perfectly-applied piece of tape, so to really get a good look at something she had to use xylene to dissolve the tape adhesive and transfer the hair or fiber or fragment item, very carefully, to a glass slide. There she could drop it into a tiny pool of mounting media and trap it forever between the slide and a cover slip, made of an incredibly thin slice of glass. Then the item could be viewed with transmitted light, and the hardened liquid media and the glass substrates worked with the optics of the microscopes instead of against it.
Evan Harding’s girlfriend, Maggie guessed, had longer hair than his, hence the single, undulating strand of jet black on the sheet from his jacket. He didn’t have a cat or a dog. He had the general conglomeration of random fibers that everyone had on their clothes—cottons, synthetics that glowed under fluorescent light, larger, thicker ones from a carpet or some other heavy-duty upholstery. Flat, brown fragments with desiccated veins running through them—dead winter leaves, no doubt from lying in the cemetery with its collection of graceful magnolias. There were many smaller ones, flakes of old leaves. Perhaps the groundskeepers had mulched them at some point. There were a lot of those, as if he’d been rolling around on the ground . . . while keeping his clothing remarkably clean at the same time, plus leaving the blood in one place at the scene.
After mounting some of these brittle items on a slide, she rotated the oculars until she could see the surface of the leaf fragment with as much magnification as possible. The lab lacked a scanning electron microscope, but that seemed a silly thought because even with one she still wouldn’t know what she was looking at. Aside from marijuana with its distinctive hairs and sticky surface, she could identify vegetation as vegetation and no more than that. There would be no determining a silver maple from a New Zealand Kauri, certainly not from a dead, barely two-millimeter square flake.
These flakes had hairs, she noticed, but they didn’t taper to an end like marijuana. They seemed to end in a stump or a ball-like shape.
Also among the flakes and the fibers she saw a number of frilly sticks, thin slivers with even thinner slivers branching on each side in a uniform pattern. More leaves, with the lamina overlay decomposed away, leaving only the ribs and veins? But veins in vegetation were randomly spaced. She rotated the oculars, increasing the magnification from 10x to 20x.
If this came from a leaf, it was the most obsessively uniform plant structure she’d ever seen. The main center rib had side ribs coming off it, each at a perfect forty-five-degree angle, each equidistant from the next like slats in Venetian blinds. At the higher magnification she could see a second set of ribs emitting from the entire length of the side ribs, also at forty-five-degree angles and also equidistant. This second set branched again, structures so tiny she could only see a suggestion of texture rather than the actual construction.
There were a great many of these fragments as well, but not all chopped to similar sizes like the leaves.
Maggie sat back, her neck beginning to ache from bending over the eyepiece, and considered. She knew what they were. But what were they doing all over Evan Harding?
* * *
Jack appeared at the door shortly afterward. “You texted?”
“I did.” She let him in, after he dutifully signed the entry log. He said nothing until sinking heavily into a spare swivel chair near her desk. Then he glanced around to see who might be in earshot.
“Rick didn’t say anything to me about his field trip,” he began. “But as I said before, if you try to convince him not to go, it will only make him more suspicious. I don’t care what he does, but even if there’s a worst-case scenario and I have to bail, then I have to bail. Nothing he would find could damage you anyway so . . .” His voice trailed off as he noticed her slightly perplexed expression. “That’s not what you texted about?”
She couldn’t help but smile. “Nope.”
“Okay . . . what, then?”
“This is going to sound a little crazy.”
He rubbed one temple. “The whole day so far has been a little crazy.”
“Did Evan Harding have any pets?”
He blinked, but it didn’t hold up his answer. “No.”
“Or his girlfriend?”
“It was a one-room apartment, and pretty bare. We would have found a puppy hiding under the bed.”
“What about a bird?”
He blinked again.
She told him about the tapings, the leaf fragments and the other type of fragments. “They’re feathers. The soft, downy feathers that keep birds warm and cushioned. And there are a lot of them. We’ve been to his workplace and Ralph didn’t have a cockatiel in the office or anything like that, so if he didn’t have a bird in his apartment, where are all these feathers coming from?”
“Pigeons?”
“If he’d been sleeping in a coop, or even on the street near a statue, maybe. But his clothes were clean. Of course he might have a mother who keeps parakeets and she does his laundry twice a week . . . that would explain it.”
Jack said, “It’s going to be difficult to find family with the girlfriend in the wind—and according to her he didn’t have any. So far, ‘Evan Harding’ doesn’t really exist. No credit history, no record, no social media, no phone record
s, no prior addresses have turned up. Social Security said the number he listed on his employment application isn’t fake, but they’re running it down now.”
So a bunch of feathers on the victim’s coat and pants seemed unimportant . . . but with such a lack of available information, every little bit might help. Besides, Maggie loved coming up with theories, answers to the puzzle. It was why she had become a forensic specialist in the first place. “Then there’s the leaves, or flakes of leaves. I think they’re tobacco. I can’t be a hundred percent sure because there are a number of leaves that have sort of spiky stalks on their surface—”
Jack seemed even less impressed by leaves than he did by feathers. She spoke more hastily. “But the victim wasn’t a smoker, I didn’t get a whiff off his clothes. Did the girlfriend—?”
“No.”
“And Ralph’s workplace, bless his heart, smelled of curry and week-old coffee but not smoke. So I started to think, I’ve got feathers and maybe tobacco, leaf tobacco, not the tinier, twistier cured tobacco that’s in cigarettes. So I called up my friend Quesha at the Historical Society—”
“The what?”
“The Cleveland Historical Society,” she explained, not patiently. She had told him many months ago that she was on the board . . . but at that moment they’d been caught between a murderer and her dying victims so perhaps he could be forgiven if her choice of extracurricular activity had slipped his mind. “Quesha looked up past and current cigar manufacturers. Cigars are usually rolled from the whole leaf. Tobacco used in cigarettes is minced up before its rolled . . . though of course this debris could be from precut leaves. . . .” She paused, feeling how absurd this theory must be, but unwilling to forget it now that she’d put the work in.
“Go on,” he told her. “Evan Harding had tobacco and feathers on his clothing.”
“Exactly. Two things that don’t normally go together. After she found a long list of defunct cigar manufacturers, I asked her to check if any of those buildings had also housed down factories.”
