by Lisa Black
Evani’s killer had called her. Whoever had killed Evani was trying to find her, and not to express condolences.
What could they have gotten off the phone? The killer, of course, didn’t necessarily know anything about her. The killer still could be, and most probably was, a random mugger who had taken the phone to use or resell. The person now hitting redial might have bought the phone for a few bucks and felt like amusing themselves by trying the only number in its history, the only one Evani should have been calling.
It could be the police. They might have found the killer with the phone, or they had the phone the whole time and lied to her about it . . . but then they would have called right away, and not in the middle of the night. Would that be a better scenario, or a worse one?
Either way, she needed to work fast. A countdown had begun with Evani’s death, but without one of those handy LED readouts with the numbers ticking backward to let her know exactly where she stood.
The Rottweiler reappeared with a tennis ball in his mouth, tail wagging. She took it and tossed the slimy thing to the far corner, listening with satisfaction as his paws thundered across the floorboards. If she couldn’t sleep, the neighbors might as well be awake, too.
Saturday, 1:35 a. m.
Maggie retrieved a sweater from the lab’s closet. The climate-controlled interior stayed at a steady temperature twenty-four /seven, but somehow it always felt chillier in the wee hours of the morning whether winter or summer outside. This must be largely psychosomatic, she thought, but didn’t know what else to do about it besides put on a sweater.
She could be home in bed. Nothing in her job description obligated her to stay up all night to run the bloody fingerprint against the database. But finding the killer’s print in the victim’s blood, well, that was like a real estate agent hanging out a SOLD sign on the most expensive property in the city or an advertising executive landing a contract with a large auto insurance company—merely one part of a professional’s day, but an enormously satisfying part that didn’t come around often.
So she had transferred the best photograph of the print she had to the system, then changed the coloring to gray scale, increased the contrast, used the software’s markers to denote where the friction ridges came to an end or divided into two. Then it was ready to run.
Searching the print against each of ten fingers of each person in the database could take twenty or thirty minutes. Searching it against only ten prints of one person took seconds, so Maggie first set the program to search it against Marlon Toner, and only Marlon Toner. If it matched, her work would be done and she could go home to get a few short but happy hours of sleep. She had already checked and knew his prints were there. She assumed his prior arrests had been drug related, but that information didn’t come up in the fingerprint database and at that time of the night she wasn’t sufficiently curious to look it up in the reporting system.
The search had, indeed, only taken seconds, but also produced only three suggestions by the system how the print might correlate to one of Marlon Toner’s fingers. None appeared even reasonably close. Maggie printed out his ten-print card and examined each finger herself, glancing between the blood print enlarged on her monitor and the paper in her hand. The machine hadn’t been wrong. The blood print ridges formed an incomplete but definite whorl, and all ten of Toner’s prints were arches. In no known universe could he have left that print.
She’d have to look forward to even fewer hours of—she hoped—satisfied sleep, and set the system to run the blood print against all the prints in the database. She got up and made herself a cup of coffee to battle that early-morning-office chill. She made it a priority so that it jumped ahead of the automated, nighttime work, the continual comparison of previously unidentified latent prints to the standards of the new arrestees.
Then she retook her seat, sipped the hot liquid, and stared at the tiny magnifying glass symbol in the lower right corner of her monitor screen, the only visible indication that the system was searching. When the power saving option triggered and turned the screen to black, she jostled the mouse to wake it back up. She could probably get other work done while she was there, but didn’t feel capable of prompting her tired brain to handle anything more than sipping coffee and watching the tiny icon.
Why didn’t Jack seem more concerned about what Rick might find in Chicago? Was there truly nothing to find? Had he covered his tracks that well, or better yet, had never been to the city in his life? Or did he tell her not to worry simply to keep her from panicking? He had been doing this for years, and no doubt had an infallible exit strategy to slip out of town if there were any chance of his fellow officers showing up at his door with anything other than a barbecue invitation. She knew him at least that well, by now.
If he planned to leave, would he tell her?
Would she want him to? Best if she didn’t know, best if she didn’t have to fake her shock and surprise, best to keep that plausible deniability going. But the idea that he would leave without even giving her a heads-up came like a splash of cold water on a hot face. How could he just walk out and leave her to pick up the pieces of what used to be her totally normal life? If there had been one tiny inadequate comfort in bearing the terrible secret she now carried, it had been the existence of at least one other person in the world who knew, who understood what had happened and, maybe, why. That bond had been painfully forged in an unwanted fire, but it remained a bond nonetheless.
The tiny magnifying glass finally turned to an arrow, which meant the tireless automaton had finished one job and waited for the next. She clicked on the spreadsheet line with the information of her blood print. This opened a bisected display with the print on one side and the prints that the system’s logarithms thought most closely matched on the other. She could click on a list at the bottom to change this view to the system’s second choice, then its third, and so on. Parallel lines crossed the screen, pointing up the corresponding areas, the various colors used making the images light up like Christmas trees. It looked good, Maggie thought. At first glance she could see a pile of similarities and no differences.
Then she looked at the list at the bottom of the screen, to see to whom this print belonged.
That couldn’t be right.
She gazed at the two prints again, followed each line of correspondence. This ridge ending to that ridge ending. Two ridges in between, then a fork in a ridge forming a bifurcation. Another ridge in between and slightly upward to a short ridge. And so on, and so on, until she got to the edges of the bloody print and ran out of ridges to look at.
She printed out the ten-print card and a glossy hard copy of the bloody print she had photographed, laid them side by side on her desktop and used two jeweler’s loupes to examine them without the aid of the computer. She used two old-fashioned picks, skinny metal sticks with a point at one end and a wooden handle at the other, the whole instrument more narrow than the average ink pen. She used those to hold her place in one print while she examined the corresponding location in the other print. Same result.
This isn’t necessary bad, she told herself. Confusing, yes, but it doesn’t have to be bad.
But her body knew better. Her heart had begun to pound the minute she saw that name at the top of the list. This was bad, all right. It couldn’t not be bad.
Her fingers reached for the phone and she found herself scrolling to Jack’s name in her contact list before she even realized it, and made her thumb stop a millimeter from the phone icon, with only the tiniest bit of atmosphere keeping the electrical charge in her skin from activating the call.
The need to speak to him was urgent, primal. She had been pondering how he had turned her world turbulent and unpredictable and then in the next breath he became, illogically, ironically, the foundation to which she needed to cling.
She could dial. Or she could do what was right.
She sat frozen in that chill, dark hour of the night, in a silent office on a silent floor, trapped in her
little bubble of existence, cut off from the rest of humanity.
Then her hand moved.
The cheery ringing tones seemed to last an eternity, but finally a voice sounded on the other end of the digital connection.
Maggie took a breath and used words she had probably never spoken to him. “Denny, I’m so sorry to wake you up in the middle of the night, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
Her boss shrugged off the slumber that quickly, his tone firm and worried. “Maggie? What’s wrong?”
“I have something here I don’t know what to do with. I mean, I do, but—”
“Slow down. Start from the beginning.”
She could hear rustling sounds, Denny slipping out of the bed and bedroom to avoid disturbing his wife any further, padding to the kitchen or living room as he kept his voice low to avoid waking one or all of their three children. Maggie quickly outlined the evening’s murder case and crime scene. She told him that Rick and Will had questioned the woman early that day about her brother, that they had gone back with Jack and Riley about Evan Harding, and then Jack and Riley went back again in the evening after a neighbor found her dead. She explained in one sentence the location and condition of the print in blood. Denny made encouraging sounds, patiently waiting for her to get to the part that required dragging her boss out of bed on this cold December night.
“It didn’t match the brother so I ran it against the whole database, of course. And it found a match. I’ve looked and looked, but it’s really a pretty good print so I don’t see how I could have gotten this wrong. Unless I’ve totally lost my mind—”
Even Denny’s patience had a limit. “Maggie. Why did you call me? Whose print is it?”
“I don’t understand this,” she said. “No matter what sort of explanation I come up with, it doesn’t make sense, not even a little.”
“Maggie. Whose?”
“That’s just it,” she said. “It’s Rick’s.”
Chapter 16
Saturday, 7:45 a. m.
Okay, so Jack became her second call, and she let him sleep most of the night before she made it. Denny hadn’t even tried to convince her to go home and get at least a little rest; instead he came in and verified the print for her. They quadruple-checked the paperwork before he disturbed the head of the homicide unit at breakfast to tell him that one of his detectives had, inexplicably, become a suspect in the murder of a woman he’d known less than a day.
“What?” Jack said. “What?”
She repeated herself.
“I’ll be right there.”
And he was, behind the chief of detectives and ahead of his partner, Riley. The chief of detectives asked Maggie and Denny seven times if they were sure, and, having received the same answer each time, went off shaking his head in bewilderment.
Riley now asked the question and got the same answer.
“Did you try calling him?” Jack asked.
She hadn’t even thought of it. The implication struck her immediately and with the shock of an ice bath. Had it been Jack, she would have called instantly, demanded an explanation, warned him that trouble brewed, thereby committing a crime by interfering in an investigation. She hadn’t even considered doing so in Rick’s case, but she would have protected Jack.
Her very bones seemed to tremble.
Had she fallen that far?
Take a breath. Maybe she wouldn’t have—if she thought Jack had murdered an innocent woman, stabbed her to death on her own apartment floor, that would violate their unholy agreement. So after some thought, perhaps she wouldn’t warn him. Even though to expose Jack would expose herself, in the end.
“Maggie?” he asked. “You okay? Do you want to sit down?”
He touched the fist she had pressed to her mouth while thinking. She unwrapped her arms from her torso, where they’d been getting a physical and mental grip and told herself this, firmly: what is different in Rick’s case is that Rick, she could be certain, had not murdered anybody.
“The homicide chief did,” she said in answer to Jack’s question. “No answer. They tried Will but he doesn’t answer either; probably has his phone turned off for family time. Since it’s only a weekend trip, he didn’t mention where they were going. They’ll try all the resorts within driving distance; there aren’t that many.”
“Maggie,” Riley said, “let me get some background. As crazy as this all seems, it’s still our case and we have to investigate it like we would any other.”
“I know that.” Why would he think she didn’t know that?
“Let me take a load off. That was a pretty short night, and I guess it wasn’t a night at all for you.” He pulled over one of the task chairs and made a show of planting his decently broad girth into its seat. She knew he hoped this would prompt her to sit down rather than having to sound condescending by suggesting that she might need to sit down in order to deal with the trauma of answering questions about her possibly murderous ex-husband.
Purely because this was Riley, she cut him some slack by sitting without an invitation. “He didn’t do it, you know.”
Riley glanced up from his notepad. “What?”
“I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t for a minute believe that Rick killed that woman. Come on, Riley, you’ve known him for years. Can you see Rick killing anyone?”
He said, carefully noncommittal, “He’s got a pretty short fuse.”
She almost laughed. “Verbally, yes. But physically? Rick was all bark, no bite. He was never, ever, ever violent with me, not even during our worst fights. And why would he kill some woman he barely knew? You had been there earlier—-was there any indication that they had met before?”
Riley glanced at his phone, almost certainly to avoid having to tell her that he was supposed to be asking the questions. “No. Nothing about her or her apartment seemed familiar to you?”
“Me? No. Not in the slightest.”
Riley asked his questions without relish, and without expecting Jack to help—which he didn’t. Jack sat like an uncertain lump, his gaze never leaving her face.
“She was a pretty girl. Is there any chance he—”
“Went there to make a pass at her and went crazy when she refused? No. Rick may have been a teenage boy where women were concerned, but he wasn’t a complete Neanderthal. Besides, he was basically, well, a racist.”
“Sometimes that’s why they think they can get away with it,” Riley said, painstakingly gentle.
“Seriously?” Maggie demanded—with astonishment. She didn’t even bother with anger.
He spread his hands. “No, I don’t seriously think that. I’m throwing out possibilities because I don’t know what else to do. Let’s hope Rick can clear it up when we find him. I just got a text—they made entry to his apartment but he isn’t there.”
Maggie goggled. “You broke into his apartment? He’s going to be mad.”
“That’s the least of his worries right now,” Jack said quietly, and with that, more than anything, the shock settled in completely. The worry that had been churning at the bottom of her stomach rose and blossomed into a panicky flower that unfurled in her chest.
“Maybe they got the building manager to let them in,” Riley soothed. “We need his contact information—he doesn’t have any kids, right, or any other exes? Do you know his current girlfriend? No? What about parents?”
“They live near Dayton. He’s got two sisters and a brother, but they’re scattered in different states, last I heard.”
Riley persisted. “Do you think, if he were in trouble, he’d go to his parents?”
Absolutely, she thought. Running home to Mama is exactly what Rick would do. “Yes, but please don’t bother them . . . I hate to see you . . . they’re not bad people. And I don’t believe Rick is in trouble, I mean that way. Obviously he’s in some kind of trouble because no one can find him, but—”
Jack reached out and took her hand. She looked at him in surprise—she must sound more discombobula
ted than she realized. After a brief squeeze he let go and she forced her words into logical sentences. “I don’t believe, at all, that Rick is guilty of murder. He must have gone there to follow up on something and walked in on Jennifer’s killer, tried to help her, and then gave chase.”
For once, Jack and Riley had the same look on both their faces.
Pity.
The poor little sweet wife, believing in her (ex) man despite all evidence to the contrary.
But she could be angry about that later. Right now she reasoned through the scenario. “The guy must have still been there, or Rick thought he was there . . . that’s the only reason he wouldn’t have at least called an ambulance before pursuing. Rick could be—in real trouble. He could be hurt somewhere.”
“We have a BOLO out on him and his car,” Riley said. “Look—try calling him.”
“The chief said—”
“Yeah, I know, but . . . maybe if he’s screening calls, he’ll pick up for you.”
Because if he is a murderer on the run, he might get sentimental enough to talk to the woman he still carries a torch for. She didn’t hide the eye-roll but cut it short. They were only following the evidence. She pulled out her cell and found him in her contacts. If it might help, she’d try anything.
The ringing tone sounded and sounded again. Eventually Rick’s digital answering app came on.
She didn’t leave a message. He’d see the number—if he could.
Chapter 17
Saturday, 9:15 a.m.
“What do you think?” Riley asked as soon as they were alone, which didn’t occur for a number of hours. There had been much activity in the homicide unit, all of it stilted and awkward and seriously confused.
