Every Kind of Wicked

by Lisa Black

  “I don’t know. They weren’t great friends, just needed a place to split costs.”

  The detectives kept asking questions in an attempt to find any sort of hard fact, but according to Shanaya she didn’t know where Evan had been born, where he’d gone to school, any former address, any doctor, dentist, or prison he might have visited, or a single name of a blood relative. “He didn’t talk about anything before we met. I got the impression his life had not been a happy one. I don’t think his parents were very kind.”

  When they began to ask the same details about her own life, she noticed the time growing late. She needed to go and didn’t care to talk about herself anyway. Her past hadn’t always been pleasant either. So could she have Evan’s belongings now, please? She would feel so much closer to him if she could have his ring.

  “Well, that’s the problem,” Riley said, dragging out the words in a way Jack knew would irritate her. He could feel the slight vibration in the table from the way her foot drummed on the floor beneath it. “We can’t release the victim’s property, except to his next of kin.”

  Jack saw an expression flare behind the girl’s eyes. Not anger . . . more like despair. A soul-crushing, final-straw overwhelming of hopelessness, quickly shoved out of the way by a wave of fresh resolve. “I am his next of kin.”

  “Not according to the law. We need a relative, and you two weren’t married. You aren’t even on the lease.”

  “He didn’t have anyone else.”

  “Forgive me for saying so, but we have only your word for that. I’ve never had a victim with less of a—well, presence. We can’t find any sort of record, not school, residence, nothing in his name. The social security number he gave his employer was bogus. You two faked your enrollment to get the apartment so the college doesn’t have anything for us. So unless you can flesh out Evan’s life for us, we may have to keep his personal property . . . forever.”

  A full second of stunned silence. “You can’t do that.”

  “We don’t have a choice, Ms. Thomas. There are laws that govern this sort of thing.”

  Jack watched, waiting for her to break, waiting for her to figure out that the only way she could get that stuff was to level with them.

  Provided she hadn’t killed him, of course.

  She hesitated so long that he began to think he’d been wrong. Perhaps she did only want the boy’s ring as a memento, some small comfort to the deep grief she couldn’t express because an unhappy life had taught her to keep her thoughts hidden. The guy might have kept the key taped to his ankle to hide it from her, and she truly didn’t know of its existence.

  Then she straightened and stood up. She said she understood and would try to find out from what few friends they had if Evan had mentioned relatives. Jack took this to mean she had not given up, not by a long shot—only that she would regroup and come back to them again.

  He didn’t want to wait. “Evan had a key.”

  A startled, wary look.

  “A small, plain one. Do you know what it unlocks?”

  Hesitation. Then: “No.”

  “You never saw a key, he didn’t mention it?”

  “ No. ”

  She held his gaze.

  “All right, then,” he said. “This way—we’ll show you out. Incidentally, we’re getting Evan’s cell phone records from his carrier. It requires a subpoena, but we got one.”

  Perhaps the disappointment over the key had worn her down, because she did an uncharacteristically bad job of hiding her worry over this. “Oh.”

  “We should get the full record in a day or two. With luck that will give us a direction to look in, to find out who might have wanted to harm Evan.”

  “Oh,” she said again. “I hope so.” And she left.

  “No, she doesn’t,” Riley said as soon as she had disappeared into the elevator. “Why did you mention the key? You think it’s got something to do with his death?”

  “It’s the only unexplained thing about the victim.”

  “You kidding? Everything about this victim is unexplained.”

  “Yeah,” Jack admitted. “But we’re not getting anywhere and she’s stonewalling her black little heart out. She wants that damn key, which makes it the only leverage we have.”

  Riley cocked an eyebrow. “Yet it still didn’t budge that boulder.”

  Chapter 20

  Monday, 10:15 a.m.

  “What is it?” Maggie asked Carol, a maelstrom of foreboding welling up in her heart. The fact that Carol sat down as well, as if this would be a long conversation, did nothing to calm it.

  “I tested the blood from the scene, the spot where you say Rick’s fingerprint was—”

  “The victim’s blood.”

  “Not the victim’s.” The older woman took a deep breath. “It’s Rick’s.”

  Maggie heard the words. She waited for them to rearrange themselves in some order that would make sense. “Rick’s.”

  Carol carefully enunciated each word. “Yes. The blood on those swabs belongs to Rick.”

  Maggie gave herself a minute to think over the scene, visualize each relevant factor in her mind. Jennifer Toner had no blood on her hands, so she had not drawn any from Rick if they had, for whatever unknown reason, struggled. Unless she had struck him with some object, which he then took away with him. But most likely—“It’s what I’ve been saying. He interrupted her murder, and the killer attacked him.”

  “Sure,” Carol said. “But then, where is he now?”

  The foreboding turned to dread, and panic threaded through her veins in a warm rush. “I don’t know, but wherever he is, he’s bleeding.”

  “Not much,” Carol comforted with determinedly cool reason. “You only found that one smear.”

  “We have to tell Denny, and he has to tell Jack and his chief,” Maggie said, getting to her feet. It seemed to require more effort than it should. “Wait . . . Carol . . . how did you have Rick’s DNA profile in the first place?”

  “The positive controls.”

  “Ah.”

  All scientific assays, especially biological tests, were run with both positive and negative controls. A negative control would be a sterile, unused swab of the same type so that if there were some contaminant or material in the fresh-from-the-factory item, it would show up in the results. A known sample, something that was definitely blood or definitely semen, would be used to make sure the test and its reagents were working properly. If the results showed no DNA present on the crime scene sample but the expected profile from the control, they would know the test had worked properly and there was, indeed, no DNA at the scene. For most labs, a secure, known, consistent, unlimited and best of all free source of positive control material came from their own staff. Employees could spill their blood, swab their mouths, and daub their nether regions without even waiting for a purchase order. When they had still been married, Maggie had contributed “mixed” samples of semen and epithelial cells, and so Rick’s profile remained on file. Rick had been caught between feeling proud of his prowess and slightly skeeved at the whole idea, but more than willing to do his part for the cause of forensic science.

  Maybe, she thought, it would end up saving his life.

  She hoped so, with a fervor that caught her by surprise and turned her voice harsh as she marched into Denny’s office and demanded to return to the crime scene. “Tell the chief we have to go there now.”

  Denny gaped. His mouth opened and closed, but he began dialing the phone before he could even form words. Technically he did not have the authority to tell the homicide unit to do anything, but this revelation involved injury to one of their own and the man would hardly object.

  “What do you expect to find?” he asked Maggie while the phone rang on the other end.

  “I don’t know. But it’s where I have to start.”

  “Where we have to start,” Denny said.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later Maggie and Denny stepped out of the city station wa
gon and stared up at the second floor of the small building. Weekday mode on the street, with the tea shop brewing up a menu of smells, the hair salon busy coloring and pinning. Three men worked on the roof, which seemed like a dangerous place to be this time of year when ice coated everything and a biting wind gusted off the lake. The roof barely peaked, but still, any incline could be treacherous.

  Denny’s gaze followed hers. “That’s got to be a damned miserable job.”

  “They probably say the same about ours,” she said, trying hard—and failing—to act as if this were just another crime scene.

  He held the door for her. “Not today, I’ll bet they don’t.” That remained to be seen.

  They toted all the equipment they could carry in two hands each, a phenolphthalein kit, an alternate light source, a jug of water and the mix to make Bluestar, a reagent that would make blood glow, and Amido Black, a dye stain that turned even the faintest of blood prints to a deep purply black.

  The second-floor hallway seemed as innocuous as ever, tidy, all the doors shut except for one at the far end where a woman of some advanced age watched them. Her apartment faced the road and she had probably seen them pull up. Maggie gave her a little wave, which garnered no response whatsoever, and made a mental note to tell—suggest—to the homicide cops that they interview the woman to see if she saw anything. Even though that had most likely been done the same night they found Jennifer Toner.

  They reached the victim’s doorway and stopped. No keys, of course, and no one from homicide had arrived yet. As Denny piled their equipment along the wall Maggie examined the hallway for signs of blood, a struggle, a weapon, anything. She had only been there in the dark, and even with all the lights turned on that was never the same as seeing a place in daylight . . . especially today’s daylight, blessed with a rare spot of winter sunshine that reflected off the snow-covered surfaces and poured through the windows at each end of the hall with the brilliance of a nuclear blast. She couldn’t wait to see the apartment under these circumstances, but contented herself with the hallway before it became overstuffed with cops.

  The carpeting had been there for a while, thin indoor-outdoor stuff that had worn its floral pattern nearly bare in spots. It had plenty of stains, most unnoticeable and lost in the color scheme until she really looked, but nothing appeared to be recent blood. No fresh rips. No new-looking scuff marks along the walls.

  She traced the path from Jennifer’s apartment to the stairwell, and then from the apartment to the elevator. No blood, at least none she could see. Depending on what she found inside, they might have to spray the Bluestar up the hallway, and blocking out the light from those two windows would not be a picnic. Her mind raced, bouncing from possibility to possibility like a top bouncing off random barriers without losing speed. They might wait until nighttime for that. And it would probably annoy, greatly, the woman at the end of the hall.

  There were a few dark stains that could be blood, though she doubted it. After all her years in forensics Maggie still couldn’t identify a car or a gun or a shoe brand with one look, but she could tell blood from tomato sauce or paint or rust or cough syrup under nearly any circumstance.

  Still, a phenolphthalein test couldn’t hurt and would give her something to do until the cops showed up. She unsnapped her kit, but then the stairwell door opened and the cops showed up.

  Jack, followed by Riley, followed by Will, followed by two other patrol officers Maggie knew by sight only. The area instantly became very crowded. Jack, to her surprise, approached her immediately. “You all right?”

  “Of course,” she said. There was nothing the matter with her. But he was trying to be empathetic to her conflicted emotions, and she briefly touched his arm before elbowing her way to the front of the line as Riley unlocked the door. No one would go inside until she had photographed the area. Yes, she had already photographed the area, but circumstances had changed. She would approach this crime scene as if she had never been there . . . even if that didn’t make a lot of sense.

  She felt Jack’s hand on her shoulder. “No. Her brother is the main suspect, and he could easily have a key to the place. You have to let us clear it.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, then shut it. He was right. She shouldn’t even be standing there—Marlon Toner would hear the commotion in the hallway and, if armed, could shoot through the door. She stood aside, moved to a spot well behind the officers. Denny did the same.

  The cops formed a phalanx outside the apartment door, the patrol officers in the front.

  A sudden thump made Maggie start, until she realized it came from above them all. The roofers, moving over the planks or tar paper or whatever covered the building. She hoped they wouldn’t fall through a weak spot and collapse it into her crime scene.

  Jennifer Toner’s apartment, however, remained exactly as she’d left it on Friday. The items she and the detectives had moved in their search were where they’d placed them, the deep bloodstains on the floor having hardened and filled the air with the faint but unpleasant smell of rotting garbage. No one hid in the closets or under the bed or behind the shower curtain, to the disappointment of the two patrol officers who had entered with guns drawn and a wild excitement in their eyes. They now withdrew to the hallway to stand a sort of loose guard, await further requests from the detectives, and decide where to eat lunch.

  Maggie made a beeline for the credenza, this time determined to cut a chunk from it if not seize the entire item. The bright illumination streaming through Jennifer’s filmy window treatments lit its surface with much more clarity. After close exam she realized, with both relief and disappointment, that she hadn’t missed anything on Friday night. That one blood smear with the fingerprint truly was all there was to see. Ditto for the floor, the doorway, the rest of the apartment. She could find no additional clues to say that Rick had ever been there, what had happened to him, or where he might be now.

  Well, perhaps one. Under the credenza, near the end by the bloodstain, she saw a scrap no more than half an inch long and a few millimeters wide. She pulled it out, found it to be rubber-band flexible—it seemed to be a scrap of latex, a little dusty but otherwise unstained. A piece of glove, or unused condom? It could even be something she’d left herself, except she didn’t recall ripping any gloves on Friday night and her department didn’t stock ones that color of aqua. The cops, she knew, used black ones. She had seen purple and a sky blue on the ME staff, nothing quite like this. It could easily have been there on Friday and she’d missed it in the dim lighting. She dropped it into an envelope but planned to check Jennifer’s cabinets, expecting to find a match to the victim’s cleaning supplies.

  Then she saw what else she had missed on Friday night.

  The area rug in the living room left about three feet of hardwood floor showing all the way around between this rug and the walls. A more functional welcome mat took up the space inside the doorway to catch the melted slush of winter shoes, and a second mat behind the door gave those shoes a place to stay. From where she knelt in front of the credenza, Maggie saw a long, straight disturbance in the fibers of the doorway mat like the furrow of a tire through fresh grass. It had been broken up and loosened by their trampling but retained enough shape to seem recent. Maggie tried to think if she and Denny had brought in any piece of equipment large enough to have a roller on the bottom, but they hadn’t. Nor had she brought anything of that sort on Friday night. The body snatchers had left the gurney in the hallway instead of making the tight turn into the apartment, so they hadn’t left the tracks. Jennifer Toner might use a roller case or briefcase for work or have one of those fold-up canvas shopping bags with two wheels. She might have dragged a can out to the garbage, who knew.

  But Maggie followed it.

  Tracks like that were all about angle and light. Tire tracks through a field might be invisible when viewed from the south but clear as a typewritten word from the west, and so on. She knelt by the door and ducked her head so her view could
skim the surface, looking something like a jaguar scouting a tapir through the reeds. The two patrol officers must be staring down at her as if she’d lost her mind, their conversation awkwardly truncated. She saw nothing. But when she reversed the viewpoint, from the spot where Jennifer had been to the door, she could see the mark. It began near the credenza’s end.

  From a child’s pose in the doorway she gazed up and down the hallway. The peculiar mark ran definite and straight to the left of the apartment door. Now there seemed to be two of them, roughly parallel.

  It’s probably a vacuum cleaner, she thought, and I’m wasting time with it. But since she had no better ideas, she kept wasting. She moved up the hallway and crouched again, thinking that if it had been a vacuum cleaner, she wished it had done a better job, because getting her face close to the average apartment building’s public hallway carpeting was not how she preferred to spend her days.

  A wheeled case, someone dragging something—they should head toward the stairwell, right? Apparently not interested in the elevator, which sat at the opposite end of the hallway, to the right from the doorway and down by the nosy neighbor. But the tracks didn’t veer toward the stairwell door, only continued straight past it.

  The boots overhead had been stomping back and forth as if the cold and unhappy workers outside wanted to make sure everyone knew of and felt guilt over their presence. But she heard one set come to an abrupt halt at the edge, nearly over Maggie’s head.

  A shout erupted as one called to the other; even though the words were unintelligible, it had a sense of urgency that made the hairs on her arms quiver. The men had been shouting to each other all morning, but suddenly the tone became very different.

  And suddenly she knew, with absolute certainty, what had caused the marks on the rugs.

  From her spot on the floor she looked up at the window, bare and blazing with light. Then without thinking she stood, moved to it, and undid the latch. She touched only the edge of the slide and pulled the handle up with two fingers, a decade in crime scene work keeping her hands from any surface large and smooth enough to retain prints. It slid upward easily and had no screen.