Criminal

by Karin Slaughter

  Amanda felt a shock of panic. “Why would Kenny call me?”

  “I gave him your number.”

  For a few seconds, Amanda was too flustered to do anything but stare. “Why would you give him my phone number?”

  “Because he asked for it, silly. Why do you sound so surprised? And why are you just standing there?”

  Amanda shook her head as she got into the car. Men like Kenny Mitchell didn’t ask for her phone number. “That’s very nice of you to put him up to this, but let’s not waste time on something that’s not going to happen.”

  “You can—” Evelyn stopped, but only for a moment before she blurted out, “You can wear Tampax, right?”

  Amanda pressed her fingers into her eyelids, not caring whether or not she smudged her makeup. “If I say yes, can we please change the subject?”

  Evelyn wouldn’t be daunted. “You know, Pete’s a real doctor. He can write you a prescription, no questions asked, and if you slip the guy at the Plaza Pharmacy a few extra bucks, he won’t be a jerk about it.”

  Amanda fanned her face. The heat was even more stifling inside the car. She tried not to think about her telephone ringing in her empty apartment yesterday.

  “It’s legal now, sweetheart. You don’t have to be married to get birth control anymore.”

  Amanda’s laugh was genuine this time. “I think you’re jumping to a lot of conclusions.”

  “Maybe, but it’s fun, isn’t it?”

  It was humiliating, actually, but Amanda tried to hide that fact by looking at her watch again. “Did this consume your entire Sunday, or did you manage to think at all about what we’ve been doing?”

  Evelyn rolled her eyes. “Are you kidding? It’s all that’s been on my mind for the last week. I was so distracted this morning I put salt instead of sugar in Bill’s coffee. Poor man drank half the cup before he realized what I’d done.” She paused for a breath. “What about you?”

  “I’ve been going over Butch’s notes.” Amanda pulled the homicide detective’s notebook out of her purse. “See this here?” She pointed to the page for Evelyn’s benefit. The letters CI were circled twice.

  “Confidential informant,” Evelyn said. She flipped back through the notebook. “Does he say anything else about it? A name, maybe?”

  “Nothing, but a lot of Butch’s cases rely on CIs.” Most of them did, actually. The man was very good at finding criminals and lowlifes who were willing to parlay information into a get-out-of-jail-free card. “He never names his sources.”

  “Oh, that’s sneaky.” She scanned the pages, stopping on a crude drawing of the apartment where Jane Delray had lived. “He left out the bathroom. Did he even search the place?” She answered her own question. “Of course he didn’t. Why would he?”

  Amanda checked the time again. She didn’t want to be late for roll call. “We should go over what we’re doing today. I can call my friend at the Housing Authority when I get to work. Maybe we can find out who rented that apartment.”

  Evelyn paused for a moment as she switched gears. “I’ll call Cindy Murray at the Five and see if she has time to check the confiscated-license box for a Lucy Bennett. At least we’ll have a photograph of her.”

  “I don’t know what good it’ll do. Pete will have to sign off on the ID. It came from her own brother.” Neither she nor Evelyn had the nerve to contradict Hank Bennett’s identification of his sister. “Bennett hasn’t laid eyes on her in five or six years. Do you think he knew it wasn’t Lucy?”

  “I think all he cared about was not being late for his dinner date.”

  They were both silent. Amanda felt a ping-pong sensation inside her head. Thoughts kept bouncing around, getting lost. It was just too much to keep up with.

  Evelyn was obviously feeling the same. She said, “Bill and I started a puzzle last night—bridges of the Pacific Northwest. Zeke picked it out for Father’s Day last month—and I thought, ‘This is exactly how I’ve felt all week. Like there are all of these different little pieces to a puzzle floating around out there, and if I could only put them together, maybe I’d be able to see the full picture.’ ”

  “I know what you mean. All I do is ask myself questions, and I can’t seem to get a satisfactory answer to any of them.”

  “Hey, I’ve got a crazy idea.”

  “You cannot imagine my surprise.”

  Evelyn gave her a sarcastic grimace, then leaned into the back seat of the station wagon.

  “What are you doing?”

  She snaked her body around into the back seat. Her legs went up. Amanda swatted the woman’s feet out of her face. She scanned the parking lot, praying they were not being watched.

  “Evelyn,” she said. “What on earth?”

  “Got it.” Finally, she shimmied back into her seat. She had a pack of construction paper in her hands. “Zeke’s crayons melted into the carpet. Bring your pen.” She pushed open the door.

  Amanda got out of the car and followed her around to the front of the wagon. Evelyn took a piece of paper off the top of the pack and, using Amanda’s pen, wrote, “HANK BENNETT” on the page. Next, she took another page and wrote, “LUCY BENNETT,” then on another put, “JANE DELRAY.” She added “MARY” and “KITTY TREADWELL” into the mix, then “HODGE,” “JUICE/DWAYNE MATHISON,” and finally, “ANDREW TREADWELL.”

  “What are you doing?” Amanda asked.

  “Puzzle pieces.” She spread the multicolored pages out on the Falcon’s hood. “Let’s put it together.”

  Amanda took in the disparate words. The idea wasn’t so crazy after all. “We should do it chronologically.” She moved the names around as she spoke. “Hank Bennett came into the station, and then Sergeant Hodge sent us to Techwood. Make a new one for Tech.” Evelyn scribbled the word onto a new sheet. “We need to subcategorize these.” Amanda took the pen and started filling in details: dates, times, what they’d been told. The Fury’s engine clicked in the heat. The metal hood singed her skin.

  Evelyn suggested, “I’ll make a timeline.”

  Amanda handed her the pen. She pointed to the different pages as she called out the sequence. “Hank Bennett goes to Sergeant Hodge last Monday. Hodge immediately sends us out to Techwood to take a rape report.” She looked at Evelyn. “Hodge won’t tell us why he sent us in the first place. Obviously, there wasn’t a rape. Why did he send us there?”

  “I’ll ask him again this morning, but he wouldn’t tell me the last four times.”

  Amanda felt the need to tell her, “You were very brave to do that.”

  “Fat lot of good it did.” Evelyn waved away the compliment. “Juice, the pimp, doesn’t belong in here.”

  “Unless he’s the one who killed Jane.”

  “That doesn’t seem likely. Juice was probably in jail when it happened. Or having the crap beaten out of him for resisting arrest.”

  “Okay, let’s push him up here as a remote possibility.” Amanda moved Juice to the periphery. “Next: We’re at the apartment in Techwood. Jane tells us that there are three girls missing: Lucy Bennett, Kitty—who we later find out is Treadwell—and a girl named Mary, last name unknown.”

  “Right.” Evelyn wrote down the information, shooting their names off Jane Delray’s.

  “Then, a few days later, Jane is murdered.”

  “But she was misidentified as Lucy,” Evelyn corrected. “I’ll put an asterisk beside her name, but we should keep it this way just for clarity’s sake.”

  “Right. A person who is thought to be Lucy Bennett is murdered.”

  “I wonder if the brother had a big life insurance policy on her?”

  Amanda supposed being married to an insurance man put these ideas into Evelyn’s head. “Is there a way to check? A registry?”

  “I’ll ask Bill, but just talking it out, I think given Lucy’s life, why murder her when she would eventually kill herself with drugs?” Evelyn looked down at the timeline. “It’s not much of a motive.”

  “Motive.” There w
as something they hadn’t considered. “Why would someone want to murder Jane?”

  “Are we assuming the killer knew it was Jane whom he was murdering?”

  Amanda’s head was starting to hurt. “I think we have to assume that until we find out otherwise.”

  “Okay. Motive. Jane was very annoying.”

  “True,” Amanda agreed. “But the last person she annoyed other than us was Juice, and if there’s one thing I know about pimps, it’s that they don’t kill their girls. They want them working. They’re product.”

  “I’ll call the jail and see when Juice got out, just to make triple sure.” Evelyn tapped the pen against her chin. “Maybe the murderer was someone who saw Jane talking to us at Techwood? The whole compound lit up when we arrived. There’s no way it wasn’t broadcast to the rooftops that Jane was talking to two police officers.”

  Amanda felt unsettled by the thought that she might’ve been partly responsible for the girl’s death. “Write that down as a possibility.”

  “I hate to think we had anything to do with it. Then again, she wasn’t exactly baking cookies for the PTA.”

  “No,” Amanda agreed, but Evelyn had only seen the pictures. “Have you ever had a manicure?”

  Evelyn looked at her fingernails, which were clear-coated, just like Amanda’s. “Bill treated me to one last Christmas. I can’t say that I enjoyed having a stranger touch my hands.”

  “Jane’s fingernails were perfect. They were filed and polished. I couldn’t’ve done a better job myself.”

  “That manicure was ridiculously expensive. I can’t imagine Jane having the money.”

  “No, and if she did, she’d spend it on drugs, not getting her fingernails polished.” Amanda remembered, “Pete said something interesting about the attacker. He said the man was angry, uncontrolled.”

  “How in the world can he tell that?”

  “From the way Jane looked. She was beaten all over.” Amanda tried to think it through, but she found it was easier to talk it out to Evelyn. “I guess we should be asking ourselves what kind of person is capable of this. And then, ask how he would do it. He obviously used his fists, but he had the hammer, too. He busted open the lock on the access door to the roof. But then, we need to consider how he was able to get the better of someone like Jane. She wasn’t bright, but she was street-smart.”

  “Who, how, and why,” Evelyn summarized. “Those are very good questions. If Juice isn’t the answer to them, then who is? Someone Jane has seen before. A regular customer who knows where she lives.” Evelyn tapped the pen again. “But, then, this is what we’re saying: He knocked on the door. He gave her a manicure. Then he threw her off the roof.”

  “He strangled her before he threw her off the roof.”

  Evelyn asked, “Pete told you that?” Amanda nodded. “That seems like a more plausible scenario. Jane screamed like a stuck pig when you kicked her, and that was barely a tap.”

  “You didn’t say that at the time.”

  “I was scared,” Evelyn admitted. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Amanda told her. “Maybe we could ask around and see if any johns are into choking.”

  “I know a gal who works undercover downtown. I’ll see what she knows. But even if there is a guy out there who likes choking women—and something tells me there’s more than one—how are we going to find his real name? And if by some miracle we do find his name, how on earth would we link him to Jane?”

  Amanda offered, “Pete scraped some skin out from under Jane’s fingernails. He said he could match the blood type against a suspect. See if he’s a secretor or a nonsecretor.”

  “Eighty percent of the population has secretor status. Nearly forty percent is type O-positive. That’s hardly narrowing it down.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Amanda admitted. Evelyn was much better at statistics than she was. “Let’s go back to the puzzle before we’re both late for work.” Amanda picked up where they’d left off in the timeline. “Next, we met Mr. Blue Suit, aka Hank Bennett, at the morgue. He admits he hasn’t seen his sister in years, which might explain why he couldn’t identify her.”

  “Or, he’s just too arrogant to admit that he can’t.”

  That seemed far more likely. “I still find it odd that Lucy Bennett didn’t have a record. She’s been on the game at least a year, probably more.”

  “Neither does Kitty Treadwell.” Evelyn looked sheepish. “I radioed dispatch on my way here. They ran through all the variations for me. There was no record for a Kitty Treadwell.”

  “How about Jane Delray?”

  “She had two pick-ups several years ago, but nothing recently.”

  “Then her fingerprints are on file.”

  Evelyn frowned. “No, they’re not. I asked. A lot of the older records have been purged.”

  “That’s convenient.” Amanda updated the information under each girl’s name. “We need to work on Andrew Treadwell. He’s a lawyer. He’s a friend of the mayor’s. What else do we know about him?”

  “Jane intimated that he was Kitty’s uncle. She point-blank said that Kitty was rich, that her family was connected.”

  Amanda said, “That article in the newspaper listed Andrew Treadwell as having only one daughter.”

  “He’s one of the top lawyers in the city. He’s politically powerful. If he has a daughter who’s been pimped out on the streets by a black man, do you really think that’s something he’d advertise? He’d more likely use his money and influence to keep her hidden away.”

  “You’re right,” Amanda allowed. She stared down at the diagram. “Don’t you think it’s odd that Lucy and Kitty are both out on the street and one of them has a brother working for the other’s uncle?”

  “Maybe they met at a self-help group.” Evelyn smiled. “Whores Anonymous.”

  Amanda rolled her eyes at the joke. “Are we still assuming that Andrew Treadwell is the one who sent Hank Bennett to talk to Hodge last Monday?”

  “I am. Are you?”

  Amanda nodded again. “Which may support your theory that Andrew Treadwell doesn’t want it to get out that he’s related to Kitty. We could be looking at it wrong. Who does Treadwell want to hide the relationship from if not his buddies at City Hall?”

  “Bennett is quite a piece of work,” Evelyn mumbled. “He’s one of the most arrogant asses I’ve met. And that’s saying a lot considering the guys we work with.”

  Amanda tried to recall Hank Bennett’s terse answers to their questions outside the morgue. She should’ve written them down. “Bennett said he sent his sister a letter at the Union Mission. Do you remember him saying when?”

  “Yes. He mailed the letter to the Mission when his father passed away last year—this time last year. Which reminds me: Jane said Lucy has been missing for about a year.”

  Amanda wrote down this information under Lucy’s name. “When you asked Bennett if he knew the name Kitty Treadwell, he told us to watch where we put our noses.”

  “Trask,” Evelyn remembered. “That was the man he talked with at the Union Mission.”

  “He said Trask or Trent,” Amanda corrected. The exchange stuck in her head because her mother’s maiden name was Trent.

  “We have to call him something for now,” Evelyn pointed out.

  “Trask,” Amanda suggested.

  “Okay, Trask told Bennett that he gave the letter to Lucy, which means he must know Lucy. If he works at the Union Mission, he might know all of our girls. Oh, Amanda—” She sounded devastated. “Why didn’t we think to go to the Union Mission in the first place? All the hookers go there when they need a break. It’s their Acapulco.”

  “The mission is just up the street,” Amanda reminded her. “We can still talk to Trask, see if he remembers anything about Lucy—or Jane.”

  “If we’re lucky, they’ll tell us Lucy’s alive and well and on such-and-such corner, and why are people saying she’s been murdered.” Evelyn looked at her watch. “I have to c
heck in at Model City, but I could meet you there in half an hour.”

  “That should give me enough time to call the Housing Authority and figure out what I’m going to do with Peterson.”

  “I’m sure Vanessa won’t mind taking him.”

  Amanda tucked her pen back in her purse. “I feel that’s a bad situation brewing.”

  “Maybe. Listen, I’ll try to question Hodge again, but I doubt that’ll get me anywhere.” She scooped up the pieces of construction paper and stacked them together. “I just have such a bad feeling about all of this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think Lucy Bennett’s dead either way.”

  “Possibly, but it could be drugs, not malfeasance.”

  “Have you read about all those girls in Texas who disappeared around the I-45 corridor?”

  “What?”

  “A dozen or more,” Evelyn told her. “They’re not even sure where the bodies are.”

  “Where do you hear these things?”

  There was no shame in her smile. “True Crime magazine.”

  Amanda sighed as she watched Evelyn climb into her station wagon. “I’ll see you at the mission.”

  “Deal.” Evelyn slowly pulled out of the parking space. “And I wouldn’t worry too much about Vanessa,” she called through the open window. “Who do you think told me about the guy behind the counter at the Plaza Pharmacy?”

  “Mandy!” Vanessa called as soon as she walked into the station.

  Amanda pushed her way through the crowd. The station was full. Roll call was a few minutes off. Amanda glanced into the sergeant’s office, but it was empty.

  “Hurry!” Vanessa was sitting in back again, practically bouncing in her chair. She was wearing slacks and a flowery blouse. Her gun was holstered on her hip. She was dressed in men’s shoes. Amanda was beginning to wonder if she was worried about the wrong sex where Vanessa was concerned. At least she was still wearing a bra.

  “Lookit what I got.” Vanessa held up a credit card as if it was a bar of gold. Amanda recognized the logo of the Franklin Simon department store. And then her jaw dropped at the punch-typed gold letters spelling out VANESSA LIVINGSTON underneath.