A Simple Act of Violence

by R.J. Ellory

  There was silence in the kitchen for quite a while, and then Miller rose from his chair and handed Natasha Joyce a card. ‘If you do remember anything else . . .’

  Natasha took the card, looked at it, turned it over. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, pushed herself away from the edge of the sink and started toward the kitchen door.

  Miller and Roth got up, followed her to the front.

  Miller paused in the half-open doorway. ‘I understand,’ he said quietly. ‘I might not have kids, but I understand.’

  Natasha nodded, tried to smile though there were tears in her eyes. There was a moment of gratitude in her expression, and then it was gone.

  Miller and Roth made their way out toward the stairwell. Natasha watched them go - all the way down the steps and out of sight.

  Chloe appeared in her bedroom doorway as she locked the front door.

  ‘Who was that, Mommy?’

  Natasha fingertipped away her tears. ‘No-one sweetie . . . just no-one at all . . .’

  Chloe shrugged, turned, disappeared.

  Natasha Joyce stood there for a while, her heart heavy, a sense of coolness around her, and realized that she knew almost nothing of what had ultimately happened to Darryl King, father of her child.

  EIGHT

  They stopped to get coffee on the way back to the Second. Miller knew they were killing time until lunch. He wanted to see Marilyn Hemmings. He wanted the autopsy results. He wanted to pursue the fact that Natasha Joyce had seen Catherine Sheridan five years before.

  Back at the precinct he stood motionless at the window of the office. Roth was down the corridor fetching a soda. Right hand wall now carried two corkboards - large things, maybe six by four - and on them were pinned photos of all four victims, their respective houses and apartments, a map of the area covering the crime scenes, notes and reminders and the yellow delivery order bearing the number 315 3477.

  Roth came in, handed a can to Miller.

  ‘The fucking number,’ Miller said. ‘I can’t think . . .’

  Roth stood for a moment. He sipped Sprite noisily. Kind of tilted his head sideways. ‘Seven numbers,’ he said. ‘Coordinates for something?’

  ‘What do you know about coordinates?’

  Roth shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Same here.’

  ‘What about backwards . . . 7743513?’

  Miller frowned, thinking. ‘Stick a zero before it and you’ve got a case number,’ he said. ‘The 077 prefix . . . they’re all three-three-two sequences with the same prefix, right? Try it on the system.’

  Roth set his can down on the edge of the desk, fired up the computer. They waited, anticipatory like kids at Christmas. Punched in the number. Waited some more. CPU whirred furiously.

  Miller was at the window. The sky was white and featureless. Fleeting thoughts through his mind: Kind of a life is this, for God’s sake? Chasing people who do this kind of shit to other people.

  ‘Fuckin’-A,’ Roth said.

  ‘What you got?’ Miller asked.

  ‘Our friend again . . . our very interesting friend. Darryl Eric King, born June 14th, 1974, arrested Thursday, August 9th, 2001 for possession of cocaine. Case number 077-435- 13.’

  ‘You’re fuckin’ kidding!’

  Roth shook his head. ‘Serious as it gets. Look . . . Darryl King . . .’ He shifted back so Miller could see the screen more clearly. ‘Case number 077-435-13. Darryl Eric King.’

  Miller was silent for a moment, his words lost amidst his disbelief. ‘This I cannot get my head around,’ he said quietly. ‘This is too much altogether.’ Again he paused for a moment, shaking his head, scanning the screen trying to comprehend the significance of what he was looking at. ‘Where was it?’ he eventually asked.

  ‘Seventh Precinct.’

  ‘Who arrested him?’

  ‘Arresting Officer was one Sergeant Michael McCullough . . . you know him?’

  Miller shook his head. ‘What happened?’

  Roth clicked pages. ‘Released the same day, eight hours later. No formal charge.’

  Miller frowned. ‘How can there have been no formal charge? He was arrested with . . . how much?’

  ‘Three grams . . . three and a half actually.’

  ‘He has to have been an informant, either that or he turned something over for this McCullough guy. Maybe he gave up the dealer or something.’

  ‘If he was a CI there’d be a flag on the file,’ Roth said, feeling that this was so very hard to believe. Frowned, leaned forward, peered at the small print on the screen.

  Miller smiled knowingly. ‘And we have the most up-to-date and organized file system in the world, right?’

  ‘So we go ask McCullough.’

  ‘Check him out . . . he still at the Seventh?’

  Roth closed down the King file, opened up other things, typed McCullough’s name, waited a while. Turned and looked at Miller who was standing at the window with his back to the room. ‘He’s gone.’

  Miller turned. ‘Gone? Dead gone?’

  ‘No, out of the department. Quit in March 2003.’

  ‘How many years did he do?’

  ‘Let’s see . . . 1987. That’s sixteen years?’

  Miller nodded. ‘Lost his twenty-year pension. Who the hell quits four years from a twenty-year pension? You can burn out and do four years behind a desk on disability, for God’s sake. That’s one helluva lot of money to throw away after sixteen years on the job.’

  ‘Unless he had to quit,’ Roth suggested.

  Miller shrugged. ‘Who the fuck knows. Not important right now. What is important is that we find him. We need to speak to him. This is a direct link between Catherine Sheridan’s murder and a previous arrest.’ He looked toward the window and shook his head. ‘Jesus,’ he said, more an expression of surprise than anything else. ‘We have to find this McCullough . . . need to get Metz onto it, anyone who isn’t onto something else more important.’ Miller walked across the room and sat down at the desk. ‘So what do we have? Chloe Joyce says she recognizes the Sheridan woman. We find out that Catherine Sheridan went down to the projects to speak with Darryl King five years ago. We can’t speak to him because he’s dead. However, he was arrested about two months before he died by this Sergeant McCullough from the Seventh. And King’s case number corresponds to the number left with the pizza company by Sheridan’s killer—’

  ‘Could it be that McCullough was the one who went to the projects with Sheridan?’

  Miller shook his head. ‘I’m not going that far. I’m wondering why Catherine Sheridan went to see Darryl King in the first place, not just once but twice, maybe three times. And those are just the times she didn’t find him and ended up seeing this Natasha Joyce woman.’

  ‘You figure Catherine Sheridan had a habit?’

  ‘Coroner will know,’ Miller said, taking his jacket from the back of his chair. He found it hard to comprehend what had happened. He had left Natasha Joyce’s apartment annoyed and frustrated. He had walked away with the name of a dead guy, and the dead guy had come back to life in a five-year-old case. The pizza number was not a phone number, it was a case number, it was a lead, it was a great deal more than anything else they had, and it unnerved him.

  Less than a mile away, there beneath the county coroner’s office complex, assistant coroner Marilyn Hemmings stood over the body of Catherine Sheridan and showed her assistant, Tom Alexander, what she’d found.

  ‘You see it?’ she asked.

  Marilyn Hemmings was in her early thirties, young for the job perhaps, but had dealt with sufficient questions regarding her capability for such a position to warrant an edge of cynicism and hardness. Nevertheless she was an attractive woman, but the attraction came more from the air of independence she exuded. Washington’s city coroner was officially on sabbatical until January, and Marilyn had stepped into his shoes with certainty. Today that certainty was evident as she peered into the well of Catherine Sheridan’s chest.

>   ‘A question,’ Tom Alexander said.

  ‘Which is?’

  Alexander shrugged. ‘Just curious I s’pose. How long she would have taken anyway?’

  ‘No way of telling. Different people respond different ways. Depends on a number of things. You find out who her physician was yet?’

  ‘Still no success on that.’

  ‘She’s not on the county medical database?’

  Alexander shook his head.

  Hemmings frowned. ‘So what do we have here? Still no tie-in on the social security number. Her dentals, her fingerprints, her DNA . . . none of it flags anywhere. And now she’s not even on the county medical database.’

  ‘Well, she won’t appear on any of our systems unless she was arrested sometime . . . even then they only take prints and they get lost like you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Don’t get me started,’ Hemmings replied.

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘Finish the thing. Do the usual. Then call whoever’s on this, tell them to come down here and get the report.’

  ‘I spoke to them. They’re on the way down. It’s Robert Miller.’ Alexander paused, looked at Hemmings as if waiting for a response.

  She half-smiled. ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing . . . nothing at all.’

  ‘Bullshit, Tom. You’re trying to get a rise out of me.’

  ‘No . . . no, I’m not—’

  ‘You shouldn’t believe what you read in the papers—’ Hemmings started, but was cut short by the telephone on the desk.

  Alexander picked it up, acknowledged someone, thanked them, hung up again.

  ‘They’re here,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll see them,’ Hemmings replied. ‘Finish up the report, and then you can start hosing the gurneys.’

  Hemmings walked from the autopsy theater to her office. She removed her lab coat and took the corridor left to the main entrance. When she arrived she found Miller and Roth already waiting.

  She smiled when she saw Miller. He smiled back, awkwardness evident in his expression.

  ‘Robert,’ she said warmly.

  Miller shook her hand. ‘Marilyn,’ he said quietly, and then nodded at Roth. ‘You know my partner, Al Roth?’

  ‘Detective Roth,’ she said. ‘Yes, we’ve collided a few times.’

  ‘Good to see you,’ Roth said. He broke the tension between them by adding: ‘So, you’re through the worst of this newspaper bullshit, right?’

  Hemmings smiled. ‘Water off a duck’s back.’

  ‘You’re done on the Sheridan autopsy?’ Miller asked.

  ‘Just now,’ she said. ‘Come to the office.’

  Miller was glad to have Roth beside him as they followed her down the corridor. There had been nothing between Miller and Hemmings, and then the newspapers made-believe there was. It was a difficult thing to experience, would have been easier had they perhaps known one another a little better. Now it was just tension and glances, Miller wondering if she felt as embarrassed as he did, if that embarrassment came from wanting to talk about what had happened, or wanting to pretend it had never occurred.

  ‘Interesting thing about this one,’ Marilyn Hemmings said, sitting down behind her desk. ‘Close enough to the previous three, but different as well.’

  She indicated a chair by the door, another against the wall. Roth and Miller sat down.

  ‘Either of you study forensics . . . pathology perhaps?’ she asked.

  Miller shook his head, Roth as well.

  Hemmings nodded understandingly. ‘So a body is found somewhere,’ she said. ‘A dead body, and there are only four classifications of death as far as we are concerned. Those four are accidental, suicide, murder or natural causes. A man cleaning his gun shoots himself in the chest. It opens his aorta and enough blood floods his chest to compress his heart and kill him. The same man could take the same gun, press it against his chest and pull the trigger. The appearance and damage, the cause of death would be the same, but the motivation in that case would be intentional. He meant to kill himself and he did so. His wife, pissed off at him for cheating on her, shoots him in the chest at close range and kills him. Same cause, same appearance, different motive. Lastly we have the guy who smokes too much, drinks too much beer, gets a puncture in a tire while he’s on the highway. He’s stressed, angry, tries to change the wheel by himself, and an inherited weakness in the aorta collapses and his chest is flooded with blood and he dies. What we do in all cases is the same. We determine identity of the subject where we can, we determine the cause of death, the manner, the mechanism or mode, and finally we try our best to work out exactly when the person died. That’s all possible when you have a complete body upon which an autopsy can be performed. ’

  Hemmings looked first at Roth, then Miller. ‘We did the first three here. We did tests on the ribbons, the tags, fibers, hairs, the lot. There was nothing of any significance . . . nothing at all.’

  Miller nodded. ‘You said that Sheridan was close enough to the previous three, but different?’

  Hemmings smiled. ‘I did, yes.’

  ‘How? Different how?’ Roth asked.

  ‘That’s why I told you about the four different types of death . . . there’s no question in my mind that she was murdered, more a question of how she was murdered. The mode and the mechanism. They differ from the first three victims.’

  ‘In what way?’ Roth asked.

  ‘First three were beaten and then strangled, the ribbon tied around the neck post mortem. This one, the Sheridan woman . . . she was strangled beforehand.’

  ‘Beforehand? What d’you mean beforehand?’ Miller asked.

  ‘There is a very specific type of bruising that occurs when a person is alive. It is quite different from the bruising that occurs after a person is dead.’

  ‘And what do we have here?’

  Marilyn Hemmings kind of half-smiled. ‘We have something that even I don’t fully understand, unless I look at it from an entirely different perspective. The subcutaneous bruising - a lot of subcutaneous bruising - and the way those bruises have discolored, it appears that the injuries were sustained post mortem.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Miller said. ‘You’re saying that in the previous three cases the beatings took place before they were strangled, and in this case the beating took place afterwards.’

  ‘Yes, that would appear to be the case.’

  ‘And the strangulation . . . she still died as a result of the strangulation?’

  ‘Yes, strangulation was definitely the cause of death. In the second one it was difficult to tell. Ann Rayner, the legal secretary. The beating was so relentless she could have died moments before she was strangled. There was haemorrhaging in the brain, in the optical cavities, at the base of the neck. It was a very, very brutal assault, and though there were clear signs of asphyxiation I think she would have died regardless.’

  ‘So what do you see here?’ Miller asked.

  ‘I see a very similar death but a different sequence to the attack. I see a woman strangled, and then beaten violently, but unlike the others her face wasn’t marked.’

  ‘And your intuition? Your feeling on this thing?’

  ‘What do I think? I don’t think I could answer that question, Robert.’

  Miller shot her a look at the sound of his name. The way she said it. There was no denying the fact that he felt in some way beholden to her. Her evidence had exonerated him from something that could have been the end of his career. She had saved him from something. Was it simply gratitude that he felt, or was he experiencing some other unexpected emotion?

  ‘You don’t have to write it down,’ he said. ‘You can deny you ever said anything. I’m just interested in what you think might have occurred.’

  Hemmings glanced at Roth. Roth nodded as if to reassure her.

  ‘I think someone . . . I think someone wanted this to look like the first three. Really wanted it to look like the first three.’

  ‘But it wasn
’t the same person?’

  Hemmings hesitated. ‘Opinion, nothing more than that?’

  ‘Nothing more than that.’

  ‘It was someone else, Detective . . . I think it was a copycat.’

  Miller looked at Roth; neither spoke.

  ‘There’s three other things,’ she said. ‘First and foremost, there’s the fact that we have not been able to formally identify her—’

  Miller started to say something but Hemmings cut him short.

  ‘Her passport? Yes, we have that. We even have her driving license, but there is no vehicle registered with DMV.’

  ‘That’s not so unusual,’ Roth said. ‘There’s many people who have a license but don’t own a car.’

  ‘I know, but that wasn’t all,’ Hemmings said. ‘So far her social security number doesn’t tally with her name. Gives me the name of some Spanish woman or something. I wrote it down over there.’

  Miller shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand . . .’

  ‘What I said,’ Hemmings replied. ‘I have her social security number, at least what is supposed to be her number, and when I put it through the system I come up with someone else entirely.’

  ‘This is like the others,’ Miller said.

  Hemmings looked up.

  ‘There are identification issues on the others,’ Miller said. ‘Victim identification is the first thing we try and do,’ Hemmings went on, ‘and in this case nothing has panned out. No DNA, no fingerprints, no dentals, and when her social security number came up with a different name—’ She shook her head. ‘I also had a reason to check for her in the county medical database.’

  Miller frowned. ‘She was ill?’

  ‘She was more than ill . . . she was dying of cancer.’

  The expression on Miller’s face said everything. A sense of disorientation, as if he was being given too much information to process. ‘How serious?’ Miller asked.

  ‘In her chest . . . well, in her lung specifically. Right lung. Significantly advanced, but more importantly she wasn’t registered on the CMD, and that means she wasn’t seeing a registered practitioner.’