Love Notes

by Penny Mickelbury

  “We’ve got to get into Ellie Litton’s place.”

  Eric nodded. “I know, Boss, I’m working on it.”

  “And we’ve got to talk to the personnel people where she worked.”

  “I’ve got an appointment first thing Monday morning.”

  “And who are these other women? How can so many women be dead and nobody cares? I’ve got to believe that at least one of them lived in the city and I want to know the who and the where.”

  “But those cases are all older and colder than Cartcher. So what good does that do us?” Cassie asked, too intense to worry about interrupting her boss. “Even if we find ‘em, Boss, there won’t be any evidence left for us to investigate. Their places would have been cleaned out months ago.”

  “But it’ll give us a legitimate reason to nose around in the other cases, those that don’t belong to us,” Gianna replied.

  “I wish we didn’t have to keep going through this,” Kenny groused. “Nobody wants these cases, nobody gives a shit about the vics but us, but we keep having to prove ourselves, to earn the right to claim the investigations.” Kenny let the argument go. It was an old, familiar one and nobody needed to hear it again, especially since everyone in the room agreed with him.

  They were seated around the conference table in the Think Tank, a stack of files in front of each of them as voluminous as those piled atop each of the five desks. It was Friday evening, way past quitting time; way past dinner time. They all were exhausted and ravenous, yet they couldn’t leave. Didn’t want to leave. At least, not to go home; and they all were too tired to do more work. Bobby and Alice had staked out the Eight Rivers bar until after two that morning, the same time Tim had left the Shamrock, and they reported that drunk Irishmen and drunk Jamaicans stumbled home to their respective abodes, the only guns visible those in their pockets. No sign of a cache of illegal weapons. Cassie and Linda had bar-hopped, too, until well after midnight, without finding anyone who recognized Ellie Litton’s photograph, or anyone who was aware of anyone who’d disappeared. Gianna, Eric and Kenny had spent most of the night sifting through the files in the medical examiner’s office for the third night in a row, and marveled that cases ever went to trial in the city with sufficient forensic evidence.

  Gianna had had several conversations with the ME and had secured his grudging support for treating the six cases as hate crimes and the six women as victims of the same killer. While he wasn’t willing to stipulate that all six were lesbians, he agreed that the fact that all six had been garroted, that two of them had intact hymen and another two were without evidence of recent vaginal penetration, was more than mere coincidence. “But what I really want to know,” he growled at her, “is why the hell the murdering son of a bitch left ‘em here for us to deal with!”

  Gianna thought she knew the answer to that one, but since she needed his cooperation, she refrained from sharing what she was thinking. After all, it wasn’t his fault that the meddling bureaucrats in the Federal Government never budgeted sufficient funds for the city to properly function. And anyway, she was glad “the murdering son of a bitch,” whoever he was, left the victims for D.C. to deal with since D.C. was the only local jurisdiction with a separate Hate Crimes Unit. Not that anybody willingly gave them their due...but they’d already proven their worth. They’d apprehended the woman who, driven by revenge and insanity, had mutilated and murdered five wealthy, deep-in-the-closet homosexuals, and the bored rich boys who made the killing of prostitutes an initiation rite into their group. All of those murders were committed in D.C., giving the Hate Crimes Unit jurisdiction, even though none of the murderers lived in the city. In this case—and Gianna was calling it a case—the murders all occurred in D.C., though deliberately on Federal property, which Gianna thought...believed...felt...meant that the perpetrator knew enough local law to know that the half dozen or so local enforcement agencies got in each other’s way more than they helped each other.

  Alice said, “You think the perp knows a lot about the city and about the law don’t you, Lieutenant?”

  Gianna gave her a long, hard look, and Alice held it. She wasn’t much older than Bobby or Kenny or Linda, but she was much more experienced, having spent most of her career in a variety of undercover assignments. Alice Long was a good cop, smart and tough and resourceful and, apparently, insightful. “The thought crossed my mind.”

  “And smart enough to target women who live in the ‘burbs, lure ‘em into the city, and kill ‘em on Federal property, screwing up the jurisdictional authority?” she asked in a musing tone.

  “No asshole perp’s that smart!” Bobby shot at Alice, and they all looked to Gianna for confirmation of his assertion.

  “Depends on the perp,” she said slowly, “and what he’s after.” She wasn’t ready to have this conversation. She’d been mulling over a few possibilities, but nothing had taken shape or form yet. She changed the subject. “Cassie, tell me again exactly what you’ve got on the possible girlfriend of the Cartcher woman.”

  Cassie dug her notebook out of her purse, flipped some pages, read for a moment, then repeated what she’d heard from Marianne and three other witnesses. Before they opened The Bayou, Marianne and Renee had owned a bar in Columbia, Maryland, Happy Landings, which drew its patrons primarily from Baltimore and surrounding Maryland towns, and most of whom were older, professional women. Marianne met Millie Cartcher in March or April of last year—nineteen months ago. She came into the bar three or four nights a week, and was warm and outgoing, a real Southern charmer. She liked people and people liked her but she’d never go out with anyone, giving Marianne the impression that she was involved with someone. Her intuition was proved correct, Marianne said, on the first mild day of the season, when the patio was opened. On that evening, Marianne brought Millie’s whiskey sour out to the patio. She said Millie was flushed and excited, but the bar was busy and Marianne didn’t have time to chat. Then, about an hour later, remembering that she hadn’t seen her, Marianne returned to the patio, to find Millicent in a lip-lock with a woman she hadn’t seen before.

  Gianna interrupted. “When does it get warm enough for restaurants to open their patios and gardens?”

  “After last winter? The first day it was warmer than freezing!” Eric said, and made a note to himself to check with the weather service for last year’s first sign of spring in Columbia.

  “So,” Gianna mused, “Millie Cartcher began frequenting Happy Landings in Columbia, Maryland, when she’s just bought a beautiful condo on the lake in Reston, Virginia—how many miles away? And on the other side of the Potomac, a hellish drive either out 495 or across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge. Who in their right mind would do that three or four times a week? Aren’t there any women’s bars in Virginia?”

  “Nope,” Eric, Cassie, Kenny and Linda said in unison, surprising Gianna and interrupting her thought flow momentarily. “You’ve gotta go to Richmond to find a women’s bar in Virginia,” Cassie added.

  “Which would probably be a much shorter drive from Reston than driving all the way to Columbia,” Alice threw in, again following Gianna’s thought pattern.

  “So, Millie drives to Columbia from Reston to have a drink, and meets a woman who’s also a stranger to the bar. And then, a few months later, Ellie Litton leaves Iowa and moves...”

  “To Columbia!” Cassie shouted. “Just about the time Millie Cartcher’s body was found behind the marina!”

  Silence reigned and Gianna was grateful for it. She’d done too much talking before she was ready. She’d been trying to fit all the pieces together in her mind, and what was taking shape definitely was ugly, though it still largely was unformed.

  She was developing a physical description of the six women whose files they had pulled, and cataloging all the information from the post mortems and the death certificates. The similarities were striking. The six victims all were in their fifties: the youngest, according to the ME, about fifty-three and the eldest close to sixty. Four of them were wh
ite and two were Black and all had been killed from behind, without a struggle, by a length of piano wire stretched so tightly around their necks as to sever the esophagus; and the two who were identified were new arrivals to the area, leading directly to the speculation that the others were strangers, too, since their bodies hadn’t been identified or claimed. And both known victims had ties to Marianne’s bars.

  “Forget about the bar hopping,” Gianna said to Cassie and Linda, “and focus on The Bayou.” Then another thought stopped her. “Marianne and Renee sold that place in Columbia, they didn’t close it.” She looked at Bobby. “You’re going to have to go solo on the Jamaicans for the time being, but do it from a distance. Do not, under any circumstances, go inside that bar alone. I’ll get you some backup.” Then she looked at Alice, who was looking at her, nodding.

  “I’m already there, Lieutenant. I want to find out for myself how long it takes to drive from Reston to Columbia. I’m sure the bartender fixes a mean drink, but I’m betting that only a lover would make somebody drive that distance that often.”

  Bobby, who so far had contributed little to the discussion, raised the index finger on his right hand—after first giving the knuckles a good crack—his signal that his thoughts were formulated and he was ready to speak. “And maybe that lover was tired of making that trip all the way to Columbia, too. Boss, I’m thinking like Long Legs on this one, that our killer has ties to the city, and I’d sure as hell rather be looking for his ass than sitting on some damn Jamaican drug dealers!”

  “If it’s a lover, it ain’t a he, Gilliam,” Cassie said, and Bobby gave her a look. “You said you’d rather be looking for ‘his’ ass. We’re talking about lesbians. Their lovers would be shes, not hes.”

  Bobby snorted. “What kind of woman would be strong enough to sever somebody’s esophagus with a length of piano wire?” He caught looks from Cassie, Alice and Gianna that stopped him for a moment, but only for a moment. “I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that a woman is doing these killings.”

  “Women get more like men every day, Bobby, and that’s no compliment,” Linda said, launching a discussion that supported itself without Gianna’s intervention or participation. Gianna welcomed the respite. She was really feeling the negative effects of having too many thoughts and not enough time and space in which to process them. And now there was the focus on Marianne and The Bayou. Not that Marianne was a suspect, but her bar was, and she needed to talk to her about that. But not at the bar, and before Mimi returned.

  The thought of Mimi caused her breath to catch in her chest. They hadn’t talked for three days, largely because Gianna had been working practically around the clock and had not been in a private enough environment for a real conversation, even on her cell phone. Mimi was angry with her for not making the time to talk, and she was, if not angry with Mimi, at least still annoyed that she had questioned Renee about Millicent Cartcher. But mostly she missed her, and would be glad to see her and be with her.

  Everybody in the room jumped when the phone rang, then they all checked their watches. It was after nine on a Friday night. They looked quizzically at each other, then at the phone. Just before the third ring, Eric answered it, and they all watched his face change expressions, their own registering a variety of emotions, ranging from apprehension (Tim, Linda and Alice), to excitement (Cassie, Bobby and Kenny), to dread (Gianna.) He said, “Yes, Sir,” three times, and after the final time, added, “She’s right here. I’ll tell her right now and she’ll be on her way.”

  “I’m on my way where?” Gianna asked as Eric hung up the phone.

  “To the ME’s. He’s got another one, and this one’s ours. She was found in an alley a block from The Bayou early this morning by a sanitation crew.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The chief was raising hell and there was nothing Gianna could do but sit and take it. He was telling her, for the third time, how she should kneel down and thank the Almighty that she hadn’t caused any jurisdictional problems for him—and for herself—by launching an unauthorized investigation into the murders of Millicent Cartcher and Ellie Litton, no matter that the Cartcher case was inactive in Fairfax County, Virginia or that the Litton case had barely rippled the waters in Frederick County, Maryland, or that the Park Police didn’t even know what he was talking about when he broached the subject with them. He had talked to the chiefs in all three jurisdictions and formally indicated an interest in the cases and requested their cooperation, based on the discovery Thursday morning of the Jane Doe in D.C., and on the Medical Examiner’s conclusion that the latest victim was part of a pattern of potential victims of hate crimes. He had done everything but lie to conceal the fact of her previous involvement in their jurisdictions, and she was lucky that his good rapport with the other chiefs meant that they took him at his word. He didn’t tell her, because he didn’t need to, that the other three chiefs welcomed his intervention because they had more than enough to worry about on their own without some dead lesbian Jane Does to gum up the works. But their indifference to the murders of the six women only served to fuel the fire he had burning.

  “And if you ever make this kind of mess for me again, Maglione, I personally will walk your papers over to the retirement board and watch while somebody accepts ‘em, if I have to sign ‘em myself!”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, waiting to see if he was finished or if there was rant and rave still left within him. It was hard to tell because he was pacing back and forth, hands stuffed into his pockets jiggling the change. Damn, she hated it when he did that.

  “Any word on the ID of the woman?”

  She nodded. She, Cassie, Linda and Alice had descended on The Bayou within moments after receiving the call from the ME and, armed with a verbal description of the victim, had canvassed the place, which was packed to the rafters on a Friday night. Marianne, Renee, Trudi the bartenders, and Peggy, the doyenne of the piano bar, all identified the victim, based on the verbal description, as Sandy Somebody, newly arrived in D.C. from one of the upstate New York college towns—Buffalo, Albany, Syracuse—and that she lived in the general vicinity of the bar. She was “fifty-something” and a college professor, Trudi the bartender thought at Morgan State University in Baltimore, though Peggy the singer believed at Howard University in D.C. It was certain, though, that Sandy had been in The Bayou on the previous night; Peggy said she’d been in the lounge listening to her sing and play. All agreed that Sandy was pretty and pleasant but shy and a bit reserved.

  “Goddammit! Some son of a bitch is luring these women here to kill them! What the hell kind of sense does that make? If the bastard just wants to kill somebody, why not kill people already here? What do you make of this one, Maglione?” And he looked at her as if he really expected a rational response.

  I don’t make anything of it, Chief. Not yet.”

  “Well, you’d better, and soon. He’s killed two women in less than a month when it was taking him at least six months before, which means he’s starting to unravel, and you know what that means.”

  “You keep saying ‘he,’ Chief.”

  “Damn right. This isn’t a woman’s crime, Maglione, yoking people from behind, not to mention being strong enough to cut a wind pipe in half. A man’s doing these murders.”

  Gianna squeezed her eyes shut and massaged her temples. She wished she could agree with him. “These victims were all lesbians, or at least frequented a lesbian bar on a regular basis. Three of them were seen in intimate circumstances with women, and no men have been inside either of the bars in question. Everything points to a woman perp.”

  He shook his head in disgust. “These are men’s crimes, and you know it.”

  “What I know is that women get more like men every day,” she replied, quoting Linda Lopez and receiving the same deadening silence that Linda had drawn. “I agree that it would require a woman of considerable physical strength, but there are women more than capable, Chief, and you know that.”

  “What I know is that I
want those damn Irish guns, and Goddammit, I want whoever is bringing women to my town just to kill ‘em! I’ll give you every resource on this one, Maglione.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that, Chief, because resources definitely will be required. We’re going to have to backtrack these women to their local addresses in Maryland and Virginia, and then back to their hometowns.”

  “You can have Tony Watkins back. Put him with Gilliam on the Jamaicans. He knows as much about them as Long does since they worked that undercover drug task force together. Long’ll be more useful to you on the lesbian angle anyway.”

  She gave him a hard look. Did he know Alice was a lesbian? And if so, how? Probably the same way he knew about her, though she never was certain that he did. How would he know? And why would he care? He had too many other things to think about than which of his cops were gay, though his facility for knowing everything about everything was legendary. And as if to demonstrate the point, he asked, “Where’s your girlfriend, and are we going to be able to keep her out of our cases and keep our cases out of her newspaper for a change?”

  The truth was that Gianna didn’t know where her girlfriend was. She’d received a message from Mimi that she had missed her Sunday afternoon flight and that she’d catch the next available plane. It now was Monday morning. She’d worked all night and endured a dressing down by the chief, and she still hadn’t heard from Mimi. She’d left messages at both her own home and at Mimi’s, and on Mimi’s cell phone and office phone voice mails, saying that she was working all night, and she’d called several times to see if Mimi had arrived. Now, in addition to being sleepy, hungry and irritable, she was worried about Mimi. Where the hell was she? She had turned in her rental car; this Gianna knew because she could check rental car records. What she could not do—would not do—was call Sue and Kate or Tyler and ask where Mimi was. She’d wait until ten o’clock and call her at work, where she would be if everything was all right.