Every Kind of Wicked

by Lisa Black

  She held up bare hands, telegraphing helplessness. “I could only take what I can carry. His stuff was just—stuff. Nothing sentimental, so—I have to be practical. I’ve learned to travel light.”

  Riley handed her his notepad and a pen. “Write down the address. We have to be able to get hold of you, in case we have more questions about Evan. You can’t bail like that.”

  She took it but didn’t write anything. “You have my phone number.”

  “You didn’t answer.”

  “We’re not allowed to take personal calls at work. Look, this”—she gestured toward the building behind her, then wrapped the sweater around herself more tightly—“is a sweatshop. A decent sweatshop, but still a sweatshop. I’m going to be docked pay for coming back five minutes late from break. But I need to ask about Evan’s—”

  “Did Evan work here?” Jack asked.

  The question plainly surprised her. “No.”

  “Did he visit you here?”

  “No, never.”

  “Why did you tell us Evan worked at the movie theater?”

  Her eyelids flickered, but she didn’t skip a beat. “He did.”

  “He worked at A to Z Check Cashing.”

  No hesitation. “He used to. He quit there and went to the theater.”

  “When?”

  “About a month ago.”

  “No, he didn’t. He still worked at A to Z.”

  She bounced on her toes, probably to keep the blood flowing rather than any concern at his statement. “Well, that’s what he told me.”

  Jack ground a tooth in frustration. He couldn’t challenge her on this, because they hadn’t asked Ralph exactly when he had last seen Shanaya at A to Z. She had purposely lied to them about the movie theater, just as she absolutely lied to them now. But why did she want to steer them away from A to Z? “Are you sure Evan never worked here? We found evidence from this building on his clothing.”

  Bafflement that wasn’t a lie, for a change. He thought he could see the wheels working in her head, the spark of interest in how they managed to trace a person to a building, then the spark ground under her heel in the need to move forward before she got docked another five minutes. “That’s not possible. He’s never been here. Mr. Hawking doesn’t allow personal visitors.”

  “What is it you do here?”

  “Customer service.”

  “Computer interface issue support?” Jack knew vague, non-answers meant to befuddle him when he heard them. He’d invented enough for himself over the years. But this girl could give him lessons.

  “Yes.”

  The stuff had probably come off her clothes, and transferred to Evan’s when they hugged, made love, hung their coats in the same closet. Still, Jack now distrusted nearly anything the young woman uttered, so he filed that denial away as she finished by asking a question of her own.

  “Evani’s stuff—the things he had with him when he died. Can I have them back?”

  Jack’s mind went to the key.

  “He had a ring—I bought it for him when . . . well, it’s silly. But I’d like to have it. I’d like to have one single thing to remember him by.” Her voice broke, tears welled up and threatened to spill. It would rend hearts, her standing there shivering in the snow with her cheeks turning red, a picture of young love in all its fresh, tragic beauty.

  “Of course, we can get you his ring back,” Jack said. “Come to our office when you get off work. You still have my card?” No, he knew, because she’d abandoned it in her old apartment along with her boyfriend’s clothing. He handed her a new one. “Call anytime, to make sure we’re there. Then you can come in and we’ll sign Evan’s property over to you.”

  Except maybe for that damn key, he thought. He itched to ask her what it opened, but even if she answered he wouldn’t believe what she said. Patience. Come into my parlor, little fly, drawn to the bright light of that winking little key.

  She nodded miserably, then turned without another word and trotted back up the sidewalk, a precarious pace on the icy walkway. One foot slid too far as she turned the corner, but she recovered, incentivized by either the warmth of the call center or the hope of getting back to her cubicle before her supervisor noticed her absence.

  Jack and Riley exchanged a glance but didn’t waste time with conversation that could be had inside the shelter of their vehicle. It had cooled to the same temperature as the outdoors, but at least it kept more snow from sneaking down Jack’s collar. As the engine warmed up, Riley said, “Okay. Now I’m really confused.”

  “Not so much. The stuff on his clothes came from her. Evan Harding’s link to this building was his girlfriend, that’s all.”

  “Which means we’ve spent an hour without getting a whit closer to who killed Harding.”

  “What is a ‘whit,’ anyway?”

  Riley ignored this. “I’m confused about why she bolts the second we leave her apartment, but then flags us down when we had no idea she worked here.”

  “She didn’t know we had no idea. For all she knew, we came here looking for her.”

  Riley said, “Preemptive strike. The most direct explanation for her fleeing their apartment is that she’s afraid. She and Harding were faking status to get cheap rent, maybe the check cashing place isn’t totally on the up-and-up, and who knows what the hell they’re doing in there, but I’ll bet it isn’t guiding customers through warranty claims or telling middle managers how to access their e-mail. Everything about her is shady—but then she seeks us out.”

  Jack said, “So whoever it is she’s afraid of, it’s not the cops.”

  Friday, 7:10 p. m.

  Maggie had been tying the last bow on a gift for one of her nieces when the phone rang. She wanted to get the box in the mail so that Alex and Daisy could nestle the toys and dresses under the tree for Christmas morning, or whatever sort of tree or wreath or candle sufficed as tradition in the life of a traveling musician. Her brother usually tried to fit in a visit to Cleveland around the holiday, or she would go to them. But this year he had a gig too lucrative to pass up in Idaho, where at least the landscape of snowy mountains would be picture-perfect on December twenty-fifth even if their family had to stop at only its nucleus. Maggie didn’t feel able to take time off—Amy had been so looking forward to opening presents with her toddler, Carol had her granddaughters, Josh faced the first major holiday as a newlywed, and Denny’s house would be a damn Norman Rockwell painting with his kick-ass wife and three gloriously vibrant kids.

  Still, the idea of pristine snow—not the slush grayed by city streets—in what she imagined would be the quiet wilderness of Idaho made her wish she could fly out and meet them, take a quick vacation outside her life, not to mention reconnect with the only family member she had left. Maybe remember who she used to be. It would be good for her. She had felt unmoored after that first violent conflict, when she learned who and what Jack Renner was. That had been April. It was now December, and she got herself to sleep every night by telling her brain how she had made her peace with it. She had done what she had done and nothing remained to be said about it. They were both doing good work now, functioning firmly on the side of the angels for the protection of society.

  Then she would wake up each morning and know that peace remained an illusion, a pretty picture from another world, as far away as the snow-capped mountains of Idaho.

  And Alex might see that, the unease, the change in her. He knew her too well.

  Best to leave well enough alone. She put the ribbon down and picked up the phone.

  “Has Dispatch called you?” Jack asked, which immediately let her know he had not called for personal reasons—which would have been unusual.

  She said no, not looking forward to going out to a crime scene for reasons that had nothing to do with Jack Renner and the conflicts he represented. It was freakin’ cold out there. “What’s up?”

  “Remember that woman in the video, the one your ex had interviewed?”

  “Yeah.”


  “We’re going to need you to come to her apartment.”

  Chapter 14

  Streetlights blocked out the stars and reflected off the ice. Maggie drove the city car to West 29th as slowly as the traffic around her would allow, and still it fishtailed slightly at two different corners. She gave herself plenty of time to brake often and carefully in order to tuck it in at the curb in front of the small plaza. The shops on the first floor were empty and dark, dim lights glowing only for security. The second floor, by contrast, had lights on in nearly every window.

  Jack waited on the sidewalk, hunched into his jacket, hands stuffed in his pockets.

  “Too bad the tea place isn’t open,” she said by way of greeting, and pulled her camera bag and her crime scene kit out of the trunk.

  “Only if you like a lot of jasmine.”

  She had no idea what that meant but didn’t bother to ask. “Lead on, MacDuff.”

  She followed him though the narrow hallway and up a stairwell. The second floor held all the activity the first floor lacked, with a uniformed patrol officer and Riley standing outside an open door and random neighbors either peeking or openly watching from their own doorways. One used an oversized cell phone to film the authorities’ milling around. Riley greeted Maggie by waving at the open door and saying, “In there.”

  She set her cases down to attach the external flash to her camera. Without a word the patrolman and Riley stepped back from the doorway so they wouldn’t be in the shot when she photographed the door with its numbered placard. Then she stepped into the opening.

  A table lamp gave the room a cozy glow. Maggie swept the camera slowly from side to side, snapping a photo of each section of the apartment. A tidy living area, couch, end tables, framed pictures, a table with a few dishes and pieces of mail on it, an armchair, a vase on the windowsill with silk flowers, a counter framing the kitchen. Everything neat and orderly, nothing out of place, other than the dead woman in the middle of the floor, lying faceup with a patch of red staining the center of her chest.

  But Maggie ignored the body until she finished her preliminaries, and continued to take photographs of the kitchenette, the bedroom, the bathroom, a smaller second bedroom that served as a combination office and repository of spare items. Nothing anywhere raised a red flag. No visible traces of blood in the kitchen sink or the bathroom with its snow-white shower curtain, towels, and tile walls. If the killer had cleaned bloody hands in that room, he had to be a complete genius at leaving no signs of it. The medicine cabinet contained nothing stronger than Midol, the wastebasket had no pile of empty bottles, the refrigerator had one half-full bottle of Moscato. No evidence of an unhealthy or self-destructive lifestyle, no illegal activities that might beckon danger in.

  She returned to the body. Jack and Riley had moved back into the room, discussing what they needed to do next. Apparently neighbors had not seen anything, heard anything, noticed anything, had not seen Jennifer Toner since the day before. In many neighborhoods this would be the de rigueur answer, but these people seemed sincere. It made Riley propose aloud that Jennifer had been killed before her neighbors returned home from work. Maggie would see if rigor mortis bore out that theory.

  But first she took more focused photos of the dead woman on the rug, being sure to take close-ups of her face and hands. The victim wore jeans and a thick-knit white sweater, the entire middle of which had turned to a dark red. Maggie assumed there must be a wound in there somewhere, but couldn’t see the defect in the heavy knit yarns. Nothing on her feet but warm socks. Her face tilted toward the sofa, her skin unmarred, eyes open and an expression more of disappointment than fear or anger. Her left arm lay by her side, her right folded up with fingers resting against her right shoulder. The fingernails were clean of blood, filed and painted with a snowflake decal at the end of each one, still perfect.

  Jennifer Toner had not seen it coming. Or she had, and had not put up a fight.

  Maggie bet on the former.

  “This was Gardiner’s case,” Jack observed. “I’m not complaining, but why are we here?”

  Riley said, “Gardiner already started his vacation and Will took his family skiing for the weekend for his kid’s birthday. He called in but I told him we’d handle it, since this victim had that weird connection to our victim.” He filled Maggie in on their visit to Jennifer Toner’s apartment, including a summary of Rick and Will’s visit before that.

  “So she’s got a drug-addicted brother,” Jack said.

  “Who just became suspect number one,” Riley pointed out. “But only because we don’t know of anyone else involved in her life. Evan Harding would make a good suspect, since she got in his face. Unfortunately he was already dead.”

  Maggie cheated a little on the don’t-touch-the-body-until-the-ME-investigator-arrives rule by tugging on the woman’s jaw with firm, latexed fingers. Then she poked one of the fingers. Rigor had begun. That meant it had been, on average, between two and six hours since death. She couldn’t make the guess any more specific without testing rigor in other areas of the body, and she couldn’t do that without moving it more than her bend in the rule would allow.

  Still crouched by the body, she said, “Sounds as if this Dr. Castleman might have a motive, too. Maybe she got in his face.”

  Riley said, “If she found him. As of this morning, she hadn’t.”

  “Perhaps she had more success after we left,” Jack wondered. “We might be able to tell if we could find her phone.”

  Maggie prodded the woman’s hips, then the edge of the one butt cheek she could reach. “Unless it’s in her left rear pocket, it’s not on her.”

  She stood up. Nothing more could be done with the body until the ME staff arrived. She got her clipboard and made a rough sketch of the room, then examined the door. No signs of prying or breaking around the molding or the dead bolt.

  “Was the door open?” she asked the detectives. “When you arrived?”

  Jack said yes. “A neighbor found it ajar, poked her head in, screamed, and called us.”

  So Jennifer Toner had either left her door unlocked or had let her killer inside, and then he ran out without closing it all the way. Maggie used fingerprint powder on the knobs, even though the cops had already used the outer one. Nothing. She rarely, very very rarely, got a usable print from a doorknob. Or a light switch, even the wide, flat kind—annoying, because those were two items you could be sure someone had touched.

  After that Maggie took a flashlight and examined every surface in the room, holding the flashlight at an angle to look for dust that had been disturbed or an item that didn’t seem to be where it belonged. The mail on the table matched that address and Jennifer’s name. A dish held soggy Cheerios in a tablespoon of milk. Jennifer had been reading a romance novel, perched precariously on the coffee table next to a laptop which, when opened, showed a blissfully password-free home screen.

  “Sweet.” Riley sank into the sofa next to the Jack to look at it. Maggie had to smile at the sight of the two men so close together and so intensely focused on the same thing. They reminded her of old pictures of little boys lying on their stomachs in front of a TV set, entranced by an episode of The Lone Ranger.

  But then Riley said, “She doesn’t send e-mail to her brother. At least not recently. Girlfriends, a guy she is—she was—going to meet for dinner tomorrow night . . . we’ll have to check him out . . . Amazon order notifications, Friends of the Library newsletter.”

  Maggie continued her sweep. The armchair had a few tiny stains along one armrest, too orangey to be blood, more like enchilada sauce. The credenza held an array of items between two heavy bookends—Atlas holding up globes enameled in blue and green. Maggie lifted one a millimeter or two to judge its density. Too bad Jennifer hadn’t been close enough to grab one and smash it into her attacker’s temple. That might have made him think twice about his next actions.

  Behind her, Riley said, “There’s a second e-mail account.”

 
“Looks like work stuff,” Jack said. “Library events, work schedule, shipments.”

  “Let’s try search history.”

  Maggie listened absently as she continued examining the apartment, something that was technically the detectives’ job but since, usually, ninety-nine percent of a person’s home had nothing to do with why they’d been killed, they could always use help. Among the books and manuals and photos between the bookends there were pieces of old mail, a birthday card from someone named Jerome and a mini-calendar from the previous year, with social events and appointments written in below pictures of kittens. Maggie flipped through it very quickly, not seeing what could be learned from appointments now well over a year old. Besides, the minuscule layer of dust over the credenza had not been disturbed.

  Except at the end nearest the door. There, the motes had been swept aside and something else left behind.

  A swath of red-brown color ran from the side edge to the front edge, forming a sort of triangle with the corner. It had been lost against the woodgrain-patterned laminate of the credenza, until the sharp beam of the flashlight caught it.

  “I have some blood over here,” she said aloud.

  The detectives, too engrossed in the victim’s e-mails, ignored her. The presence of blood at a murder scene could hardly be considered earth-shattering.

  But blood so far away from the body held out certain possibilities. Obviously the victim hadn’t staggered over and put out a hand to steady herself, since her fingers were unstained and she hadn’t left any drops on her pants, socks, or the floor in-between. She’d gone down and stayed down after the fatal blow.

  Most likely the killer had gotten some blood on his hand and then used it to steady himself on the credenza. Then he either wiped it off or used the other hand to turn the doorknob, so it stayed clean.

  Maggie looked closer, then got a magnifying loupe out of her crime scene kit.

  At the end of the smear the blood formed a pattern, a rounded set of tiny lines. Each line swooped and swayed and split into two and sometimes came to a stop altogether.