Skin Deep

by Gary Braver

  “We already checked that. No calls in, no calls out.”

  “Okay.”

  “The thing is, I think she was kind of hiding, if you ask me.”

  “Hiding?”

  “Yeah, kind of embarrassed maybe.”

  “Embarrassed?”

  “Well, her face. It was kind of messed up.”

  “Messed up?”

  “Well, my first thought was that she’d been in a bad car accident, you know, bruised and cut up. Which is why nobody recognized her at first. But I was her waiter, because her cabin is one of my assignments, so I saw her more than the others. It’s the same woman.”

  “You’re positive.”

  “Yeah.” There was a pause. “But, you know, I mean given the circumstances, I’m starting to think that maybe it wasn’t an accident but that somebody beat her up.”

  59

  “This is turning into a goddamn public relations nightmare,” Captain Reardon growled as he eyed the group around the conference table.

  It was ten the next morning, and Reardon’s jacket hung on the back of his chair, his tie was loosened, and his sleeves were rolled up. His face was an aspic of frustration. Copies of The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald sat next to him.

  “The papers are accusing us of trumped-up charges against Pendergast, of coercive interrogation, unlawful seizure of property, false arrest, and wrongful death. That’s the good news. The fucking lawyers are threatening to bring suit against the city and the Department of Corrections and its officers for insufficient monitoring during his incarceration. They’re also citing cases going back ten goddamn years of the ill-treatment of suspects and excessive force by our officers. Not to mention op-ed columnists yowling about the city murder rate like it’s fucking Baghdad. Before Amnesty International jumps up our ass, I want some answers.”

  Steve had rarely seen Charlie Reardon so ballistic. Usually he was the phlegmatic image of the Boston Police whose starched press conference image gave solace to the home audience and assurance to city administrators. Sitting with him at the table with Steve were Dacey, Hogan, and Vaughn.

  Reardon picked up The Boston Globe. “And the first thing I want to know is why the hell wasn’t he put on suicide watch? He was on medication for depression and anxiety. He was a high-risk candidate for suicide.”

  Reardon was right. Most suicides were educated people arrested on their first offense and took place within the first seventy-two hours—the window when they’re most distraught by shame brought on themselves and their families.

  “Maybe the psychiatrist didn’t think he was a danger to himself,” Dacey said.

  “I checked,” Reardon said. “It’s because the arresting officer failed to alert the correction authorities he was being treated for anxiety and depression. Seems rather convenient if you ask me.”

  No one said anything as they were all thinking the same thing. Then Steve said, “The D.A.’s office is saying his suicide suggests a consciousness of guilt.”

  “Yeah, and that’s nice to think so, but I’m not buying that just yet.”

  They had reviewed Pendergast’s phone and credit card records for the last nine months and found that he had made only three calls to Terry Farina’s cell phone, around the time of their only date. Likewise, he had received one call from her, apparently in response to the date. Since then, no other records of correspondences, no purchases relevant to the case. Notes of interviews with friends yielded nothing new connecting him to the victim—no complaints of stalking, no reports of dates or calls or harassment. Nothing linked him to the murder scene.

  Reardon made an audible sigh. “I’m asking Lieutenant Markarian to conduct an internal investigation of Detective Sergeant Neil French. He’s scheduled to return in a week.”

  Steve’s stomach squirted acid. It was any cop’s nightmare to investigate his own partner. And although he was prepared to review what they had on Neil, his mind kept flicking flash card images of him hugging his daughter, holding forth on a Red Sox play, tearing up over his wife’s demise, his resigned anguish over Lily’s problems, his eyes puddling when he thought of Terry Farina murdered. His cracking up at something Steve had said. Also him scarlet with rage at Pendergast, the instant heat at the college girl with a bare midriff, the scathing contempt for DeLuca and his strippers, the stocking attack of Pendergast. The only thing worse was sending the dogs on yourself. “Yes, sir.”

  “I know we’ve got this written somewhere, but is Sergeant French left-handed or right-?”

  “Right-,” Steve said. Then in Neil’s defense he added, “So is a majority of the human race.”

  “Yeah, but so far he was her only known lover.”

  So far. The syllables made little flares in Steve’s brain.

  “I asked Lieutenant Markarian to review the time line of Neil’s activity surrounding the killing.”

  Steve nodded. “If the time line is correct, Terry Farina was murdered sometime between 5:47 P.M. and 10 P.M. on June second. On that day, Sergeant French had checked in to work at 11:15 A.M. and left around 4:30 P.M. He had two tickets to the Sox-Yankees’ game, which started at 7:05 P.M. Originally he was going to bring his daughter, but he gave his ticket to her girlfriend, leaving him free and unaccounted for until around 10 P.M. when he claimed to have picked her up. If he dropped them off at 6:15 as claimed, that gave him four hours to drive to Jamaica Plain to kill Farina and still be back to get the girls. Lily’s phone records showed that she had called Neil at 9:47, possibly for the ride home.”

  The others jotted notes and asked a few questions while guilt bubbled in Steve’s gut.

  “We’ve got this other lead,” Reardon said. “Witnesses claim that Farina spent the week at a resort in Ontario recuperating from some trauma to her face. We checked, and there was no report of an accident with her car or crime report, so we’re going on the theory that she was assaulted by someone she knew.” Reardon checked his notes. “The thing is, her stay up there comes just days after Detective French was seen roughing her up at the Kingsbury Club.” He looked at Steve. “I want you to check into that.”

  Steve nodded.

  Yeah, check and see if that’s you who had sent her up there with a battered face. Just may be that you had a little more going with her than a few coffee breaks. Maybe the same lamp-smashing id twin who wanted to pound the lights out of Sylvia Nevins took it out on poor Terry Farina.

  So why didn’t she report it? another voice protested.

  Because maybe you pulled a one-man blue-wall thing and threatened her with worse if she did.

  Then how come I don’t remember any of that?

  Because you pickled your memory nodes with scotch and Ativan like the night you dropped up there with the Taittinger to finish her off.

  “In the meantime, we’ve got this Cobbsville case which Lieutenant Markarian will review.”

  Reardon nodded to Steve, who flushed down the voices with the rest of his coffee and did all he could to maintain the autopilot.

  He got up, adjusted the overhead projector, and moved to his laptop. With the help of Sergeant Dacey, he had put together a PowerPoint review of the overlaps with the Farina case. Copies of the Novak file had been distributed around the room earlier.

  Displayed on the overhead screen were both victims’ photos, their personal data, forensic data, and common MOs. Each was a single white female three years apart. They were similar in body size, in appearance, and had red hair of close shades, both dyed. Each lived alone and had separated from a boyfriend. Each was found dead at her apartment, hanging from a black lace-top stocking—Farina from her bedpost, Novak in her closet.

  “The problem is there were no signs of forced entry, foul play, or sexual activity,” Steve said.

  “If she was murdered,” Dacey said, “the killer had to have strangled her someplace else then set her up in the closet. That’s where I’m having problems. He’d had to have moved her pretty fast because the forensics say she appeared to have di
ed in place.”

  “We get confirmation of the stocking brand?” Hogan asked.

  “No.”

  “Maybe we can get them to go back into the evidence box and do a lab check.”

  Steve nodded. “My guess is that the stocking might be a coincidence.”

  “Yeah, but there’s the demographic overlaps, plus the hair and general appearance,” Hogan said. “Plus the parents and case officer said they didn’t buy the autoasphyxia.”

  “True, but there’s also nothing hard to prove foul play or a connection,” Steve said.

  “I agree,” Reardon said. “And it’s not incumbent upon us to disprove the official ruling on cause of death. At this point, I think it’s best to consider the Novak case coincidental.”

  Steve nodded, feeling the pressure in his chest ease up.

  “But just for the record,” Reardon added, “I want you to check Neil’s whereabouts when the Novak woman was killed. He was at the Gloucester P.D. at the time, which is only ten miles from Cobbsville. The same with Pendergast. I also want French’s office computer examined for any correspondences with either victim, et cetera.”

  “What if he decides to drop in for something and the techs have his PC?” Hogan asked. “He’s going to know he’s being investigated.”

  “That’s not going to happen because I want a surveillance on him,” Reardon said. Then he took a deep sigh. “I don’t even know if he’s our guy, and I’m praying to God that he’s not. But while he’s on the road, I want a search of his place. Lieutenant, we’ll need a warrant. Coordinate with Sergeants Dacey and Vaughn so you can do it when he and his daughter are away. If need be, we’ll get the state to provide extra manpower for different shifts, different teams—people he doesn’t know.”

  “When do you want us to start?” Vaughn asked.

  “Immediately. He’s back in the office next Wednesday, and I want him covered day and night.”

  Nobody in the room knew what Steve was sitting on—that nagging fear that it was he who owned the death of Terry Farina. And while every survival instinct in him screamed to go with the flow, he could not suppress a reflex of conscience on Neil’s behalf. “Captain, is all this necessary? We’ve got only circumstantial evidence connecting him to Farina’s murder and nothing on the Novak case.”

  “I understand that, and we may not even have enough to get a paper. But circumstance is all we’ve got. Believe me, I don’t like it any more than you do, but consider the investigation not a means to indict him but to exonerate him. Look at it that way and it’ll go down easier.”

  Steve nodded.

  “What do we know about his wife?” Vaughn asked.

  “We found the obit from The Gloucester Gazette,” Dacey said, glancing at her notes. “Ellen Gilmore French worked as a registered nurse before her daughter was born, died three years ago of cancer.” Dacey looked up. “I checked with the coroner, she was a brunette.”

  Steve wondered what he would have thought were she a redhead.

  “Captain,” Vaughn said, “do you really think he’s a danger?”

  “I’m telling you I don’t know,” Reardon said. “But what bothers me is that Sergeant French is a man who’s not at ease, who’s known to be volatile. God forbid, if it is him, he’s feeling the pressure of his suspension. And if there’s one thing that my years in this business have taught me it’s that bad guys under pressure will pop. It’s merely a precaution.”

  After a moment’s silence, Dacey said, “You’re saying you think his daughter might be at risk?”

  “I’m saying he may be prone to violence, and she’s the closest body, which is why I want her under surveillance also.” Reardon tapped the table with his knuckles to say the meeting was over. “Okay, you’ve got your assignments. It goes without saying, no screwups. No blowing cover. And I need not tell you how this department would look should word get out we’re investigating one of our own.”

  Heads bobbed around the table.

  “It also goes without saying that he can’t know we’re on him, that the case did not end with Pendergast’s death. You don’t tell other cops. You don’t tell family. You don’t tell anybody.”

  When the meeting was over, Reardon called Steve aside. “I know how you feel about this. If you’d prefer being taken off the case, I’ll understand.”

  “I appreciate it, but I’m okay.”

  Reardon nodded. “I was hoping you’d say that, because I know you’ll do this right.”

  Yeah, you’ll do this right. And better him than me, hey, Bub?

  Steve nodded and left.

  60

  “Hey, Dana, nice eagle beak.”

  The words were the witless comeback for some offense she could no longer recall and hurled by little Billy Conroy, a mean kid she hadn’t seen since junior high. But she had dated the calendar from that moment a quarter of a century ago. Eagle beak—a dumb insult on tap, but it left a scab that she had picked at every day until Lanie drove her to Aaron Monks’s that Sunday morning.

  In reality, self-consciousness about her nose had predated Billy Conroy. For as long as she could remember, her nose never looked right for her face. It was too big and looked nothing like the cute noses of other girls. By the time she was in her middle teens, she was convinced her nose made her unattractive. That belief crossed with anger and guilt—anger that she had inherited her father’s Attic feature; guilt for resenting it. Her mother had a perfectly normal nose, so why hadn’t she gotten that? she had lamented. Her mother quietly sympathized. Her father offered only useless consolation. “It gives you character”—an expression equivalent to “She has a great personality”—a feeble attempt to make people with a problem feel better as in, your scar, bald head, birthmark, gap between your teeth, mole, suffering, financial destitution…gives you character. She had enough character, she had told her father. What she wanted was to be pretty.

  To make matters worse, her father had claimed that she should be proud of her nose for its ethnic identity. Back in Thessaloníki it would have bespoken a noble heritage, serving as a major asset of her dowry. That would have been funny were he joking. But part of him was serious—the part that didn’t accept the mobile and fluid society of America, where it was not an asset to have a big Greek nose. On the contrary, all the noses in her teen magazines were adorable little pixie pugs that made her hate her own all the more. Likewise, the most popular girls were those with “reasonable” noses. Unfortunately, this was not Thessaloníki but the image-frantic American Northeast, where the proboscis was not an erogenous zone.

  When she heard about cosmetic surgery it was like discovering the key to the magic kingdom. Something could actually be done. Not only could a surgeon transform her face but her damning self-perception. The more she researched the subject, the more she realized it was no big deal. Women got nose jobs all the time. Here was an alternative to a life of eagle beakness.

  By her senior year, she had come to regard her nose as a birth defect—a kind of homely second self. Cosmetic surgery, it followed, would be the way to kill that self, that half that imperiled her potential for confidence. When she raised the issue, her mother empathized. But her father was against it: cosmetic surgery was an act of vanity, something that a good Catholic girl should be above. Besides, he was already paying thousands of dollars for her college education. If she wanted a nose job, she could get it when she was gainfully employed.

  By the time she reached college, she moved beyond emotional desperation and accepted her face. It helped that she was lean, athletic, and attractive. She was also preoccupied with her studies. She had met Steve, who loved her the way she was. After graduating college she took her teaching job at Carleton High, which was barely gainful employment. So she tucked away her Sleeping Beauty fantasies and grew up around them.

  As she looked back, it occurred to her that in all their years together—five years of dating and twelve of marriage—Steve never seemed to notice that she even had a nose.

&nb
sp; Steve had called while she was getting ready for Lanie to pick her up. He had said that he wanted to get together, that he had had a change of heart and wanted to talk. He was off the booze and was ready to commit to having a child. She had told him that this was not the right time. She was on her way to getting her nose fixed—something she had wanted to do for more than half her life. And that for the next few days she’d be in no condition to take visitors or to think beyond postop recovery. He said he’d call to see how she was doing. Before he hung up, he asked, “Do we still have a chance?”

  “This is not the right time to ask.”

  “You mean you want to see what life is like with your new face.”

  “I really have to go.”

  “Are we still in the trial stage of separation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then please explain the trial part because I’m beginning to see it as a false dawn.”

  “Steve, I don’t want to discuss this now.”

  “Just give me some idea where we stand.”

  “I want to be on my own for a while.”

  “Because you want me to help pay for your nose job before you file for divorce.”

  “No, that’s not the reason.”

  “Then what is?”

  After a long moment of silence, she said, “I’m not ready to end it with you, okay.”

  “Because we have something that you don’t want to break?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m putting words in your mouth, and that’s not what I want to hear.”

  “Jesus, Stephen.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “I’m enjoying my freedom.”

  “Then why is this still a trial separation and not the real thing?”

  “Because I still want you in my life but I’m not ready to get back. Okay?”

  “Well, I’m here when you are.”

  She heard the relief in his voice. “Thanks.”

  Dana and Lanie arrived at Dr. Monks’s clinic an hour before the operation. Lanie said hello to the staff then left. She’d return in two hours to bring Dana home.