The Survivors Club

by Lisa Gardner

  Griffin, who was about to pop open the car door, stopped and stared at Fitz.

  “Bites?”

  “Yeah. And sometimes she scratches, too. She’s got these nails. They’re about three inches long. She likes to paint them with little palm trees and flamingos. Then she sharpens them into points, so that you’re thinking about Key West right before she goes for your eyes.”

  “Is there a back door?”

  “A kitchen door.”

  “Good, because we absolutely, positively, can’t have that kind of reunion scene in front of the press.”

  Fitz looked down the street at the news vans. “Good point. No wonder they pay you state boys the big bucks.”

  Griffin opened his door. “We also get better cars.”

  He and Fitz had no sooner headed down the quiet street than the doors of the news vans slid back and two reporters, armed with cameramen, poured out. Griffin and Fitz said no comment a dozen times each before they finally reached shelter behind the tiny white house. There they paused, exchanged grimaces, then knocked on the back door. After a moment, a faded yellow curtain covering the window on the top half was drawn back. They found themselves face-to-face with a small Hispanic woman who regarded them somberly with deep black eyes.

  “Mrs. Como.” Fitz gave a little wave, a nervous smile. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m afraid we need to speak with you.”

  Mrs. Como made no move to open the door. “I know what happened,” she said from behind the glass. “Tawnya, she was there. At the courthouse. She told me.”

  “We are very sorry for your loss,” Fitz said.

  Mrs. Como snorted.

  “We’re here now to investigate what happened to Eddie,” Fitz continued bravely. “I know we’ve had our differences in the past, but . . . I’m here about your son, Mrs. Como. Surely you could give us just a moment of your time—”

  “My Eddie is dead. Go away, Mr. Detective. You have hurt my family and I don’t have to talk to you anymore.”

  Right about then, a strikingly beautiful girl rounded the back corner of the house. Griffin had one moment to think, Whoa—she looks just like Meg Pesaturo, before the young lady was hurling herself at Fitz with neon pink nails unsheathed and white teeth flashing.

  “Hijo de puta!” Tawnya cried.

  “Ahhhhhh!” Fitz said.

  He threw his arm up to defend his face just as Griffin snaked out one hand and caught the girl around the waist. He hefted her into air, where she kicked out her legs and beat at his forearm with her puny fists.

  “What do you weigh, about ninety-five pounds?” Griffin asked conversationally.

  “Son of a bitch! Miserable shit-eating pig—”

  “I got a good hundred and ten pounds on you,” Griffin continued. “That means I can pretty much hold you like this all day. So if you want to get down anytime soon, maybe you should take a deep breath. Cool the language. We’re just here to talk.”

  Tawnya whacked his arm again. Then she lashed out with her leg. When he still didn’t flinch, she finally eased her struggling, though her dark eyes remained locked on Fitz, who was now huddled against the house with his hand cupped protectively around his cheek. Mrs. Como stood behind the closed door, watching it all with an impassive face.

  “Ready to play nice?” Griffin asked when a full minute elapsed without Tawnya trying to kill anyone.

  She nodded grudgingly.

  He released his hold.

  She bolted for Fitz, who managed to grab one of her attacking arms this time, twist it behind her back and slap on a pair of handcuffs.

  “That’s it!” Fitz exclaimed, breathing heavily. “You’re in bracelets until I leave. Just be happy that I don’t charge you with assaulting a police officer.”

  “It’s not a crime to kill a swine,” Tawnya spat at him.

  “Jesus, girl, the father of your child just died. Haven’t you had enough violence for one day?”

  The bruising words did the trick. Tawnya’s shoulders sagged. Her chin came down. For just one moment, it looked to Griffin like Eddie’s little spitfire was going to cry. She didn’t, though. She pulled it together, then nodded at Mrs. Como, who finally opened the door.

  Inside, the house was pretty much as Griffin had expected. Cramped kitchen with a ripped-up vinyl floor and stacked-up flats of baby food. A living room with threadbare gold carpet and a sagging brown sofa. The most expensive item in the room was easily the powder-blue playpen, positioned in front of the window. Tawnya headed for it immediately, then turned and glared at Fitz when she realized she couldn’t pick up her son. She rattled the handcuffs.

  “Hey, next time think before you scratch,” Fitz called back from the kitchen.

  Griffin, who had a soft spot for babies—he really loved their smell—crossed over to inspect the playpen himself. Tawnya’s son—and Eddie’s too, he presumed—was sleeping soundly on his stomach, his diapered butt stuck up in the air as little bubbles blew contentedly out of his mouth.

  “Name?” he asked Tawnya.

  “Eddie, Jr.,” she said grudgingly.

  “How old?”

  “Nine months.”

  “He’s a cutie. Sergeant Griffin, by the way. State police.” Griffin flashed a smile.

  “Have you arrested those bitches for killing my Eddie?”

  Griffin took bitches to mean Meg Pesaturo, Carol Rosen and Jillian Hayes. “No.”

  “Then fuck you.” Tawnya turned and stormed down the hall. So much for playing good cop. Griffin returned to the kitchen, where Mrs. Como was banging around pans, probably to have something to do. Now sitting at the worn kitchen table and obviously not sure how to proceed, Fitz was chewing on his lower lip.

  “Hey, state boy.” Tawnya again, yelling from the other end of the house. “Come here. There’s something I want to show you.”

  “Watch the nails,” Fitz muttered. “And the teeth.”

  Griffin walked warily down the narrow hallway. But it seemed that Tawnya no longer had death and destruction on her mind. Instead, she was gesturing awkwardly with her cuffed hands at a brown-and-gold photo album sticking out from a sagging bookshelf.

  “Get that. There’s something I want you to see.”

  Griffin inspected the rickety bookshelf. Seeing no sign of booby traps, he gingerly removed the album. When Tawnya still didn’t bite him, he followed her back to the kitchen, where she informed him where to place the album, how to open the album and what photos to look at. Griffin was beginning to wonder if Eddie hadn’t gone to prison in order to escape.

  “Look!” Tawnya told him when he’d finally turned to the desired page. “See that. That’s Eddie and me. Look at that face. That the face of a rapist?”

  “They don’t come with stamps on their forehead,” Griffin said mildly, though he got her point. Eddie was a good-looking guy. Small, but trim, neatly dressed in tan khakis and a dark-blue shirt. Clean-cut features, tidy black hair. If you passed him on the street, you wouldn’t think twice.

  “Now look at me,” Tawnya ordered, jerking her chin toward the photo, where she posed in a skimpy black dress, draped luxuriously over Eddie’s arm. “I’m hot. Plain and simple. Been beating away the boys since I was twelve. And I know how to make my man happy. A guy has a girl like me, you can be sure he comes home for his meals.”

  “How much cooking were you doing six months pregnant?” Fitz spoke up.

  Tawnya shot him a look of pure venom. “I made Eddie happy. I made Eddie fucking delirious.” She glanced at the stove. “No offense, Mrs. C.”

  Mrs. Como didn’t say anything. Her expression had scarcely changed the entire time they’d been here. No grief, no rage, no denial, no fear. Now she stirred something in a giant metal pot. It smelled to Griffin like bleach. Then he got it. She was preparing to wash diapers by boiling them on the stove. He looked around the kitchen, the cramped quarters filled with baby food, baby clothes, baby toys. And he got the rest of it. For Mrs. Como, Eddie had already been gone for nearly a year.
Now her life was about her grandson.

  Two Como males gone, one left to go. Did she wonder about that late at night? Did she cry when no one was looking? Or was it simply a fact of life for a woman like her, in a place like this? Seemed like too much of Griffin’s job was spent dealing with these kinds of scenes. He felt suddenly, unexpectedly, sad, and that bothered him even more. You needed walls for this kind of business. You needed to compartmentalize if you were going to be a cop and maintain your peace of mind.

  He should go for a run soon. Find a punching bag. Beat at the heavy leather until all the tension was drained from him and he had no emotions left. Then he could pretend that sad old ladies didn’t twist his conscience and that two years later he didn’t desperately miss his wife.

  “You were with Eddie the nights the women were attacked?” Griffin asked Tawnya.

  “Yeah. I was. Not that Detective Dickwad believed me.” She gave Fitz another dark look. Fitz smiled sweetly. “We had an apartment then,” Tawnya went on. “A decent place, over in Warwick. Eddie, he made good money with the Blood Center. That’s not easy, you know. He had to get special training, take some courses. Eddie was smart. He had plans. And he really liked what he did. Helping people and all that. We were doing all right.”

  “No one saw you two together those nights.”

  “Mierde! You sound just like him.” Chin angled toward Fitz. “Come on, Eddie had a tough job. He was on his feet six, eight hours a shift. He got home, he was tired. He wanted to relax. You know what Eddie liked to do best? He liked to stretch out on the sofa, watch a rented movie and place his hand on my belly so he could feel his baby kick. Yeah, that’s your College Hill Rapist. Hanging out with his pregnant girlfriend and telling stories to his baby. And now . . . now. Ah, fuck you all.”

  Tawnya turned away. In front of the stove, Mrs. Como picked up a pile of cloth diapers and threw them into the pot. Round and round she went with a big metal spoon. The kitchen filled with the smell of bleach and baby powder and urine.

  “You know he called the women,” Griffin said quietly.

  Tawnya whirled back around. “Of course he called them! They fucking ruined his life. Railroaded the police into his arrest. Worked the public into a frenzy talking on the news about this horrible, horrible rapist, gonna kill your daughter next. You know we got death threats, thanks to those women? Even Mrs. C. here, and what’d she do? One day, some guy called a radio station saying that if there was any justice in this world, Eddie, Jr.’s, little penis would fall off before he could turn into his father. Jesus Christ! Someone should lock that man up, threatening a baby like that. I couldn’t bring Eddie, Jr., to the courthouse ’cause I was too afraid of what people might do. What the fuck is up with that?”

  “You don’t think Eddie did it.”

  “I know Eddie didn’t do it. He was just a poor dumb spic working in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s the way the world works. White girls get hurt, some yellow or black man loses his ass.”

  “The state found Eddie’s DNA at the crime scenes.”

  “Bah! Cops fake DNA all the time. Everyone knows that.”

  “Cops fake DNA?” Griffin glanced over at Fitz as if to ask if such a thing could be true. Fitz shrugged.

  “Cops don’t handle the DNA,” Fitz said. “And in this case, we had two different nurses and one medical examiner handing evidence over to three different couriers to be sent to the Department of Health. That’s a lot of people for conspiracy, but hey, I’m just the poor dumb cop who gets accused of corruption anytime I do my job. You know—that’s the way the world works.” He looked at Tawnya, his voice dripping sarcasm.

  “Why would the cops tamper with evidence?” Griffin asked Tawnya more reasonably.

  “The pressure, of course! Come on—three white women, attacked in their homes. One in a big fancy house on the East Side. Cops can’t ignore that kind of thing. Then one dies and the whole state goes apeshit. Cops gotta arrest someone then. Next thing you know, cops are looking at blood drives and there you go. Young Hispanic male. Can’t even afford an attorney. Eddie was guilty before they ever asked him a question. Cops got their arrest, mayor got his headline, and hey, who gives a fuck about the rest of us?”

  “Eddie was victimized by the state?”

  “Damn right.”

  “Because he was a minority?”

  “Damn right.”

  “So if the state already had him on the rapes, who do you think shot him this morning?”

  Tawnya finally drew up short. She inhaled deeply, held the breath in her lungs, then blew it out all at once. “Everybody thinks Eddie’s a rapist. Everybody wants a rapist dead.”

  “The threats on the radio station?”

  “Yeah. And in the newspaper. And in prison.” She added hotly, “Tell me the truth, you really gonna do something about this?”

  Griffin thought of the bank of microphones outside. He said honestly, “As of this morning, we had every state detective working this case.”

  Tawnya narrowed her eyes. She wasn’t dumb. “It’s ’cause he was shot at the courthouse, isn’t it? If they’d got him in prison, you wouldn’t even be here right now. But they shot him in public. In front of cameras. That makes you guys look bad.”

  “Murder is murder. We’re on the case. I’m on the case.”

  Tawnya snorted again, unimpressed. She did know how the world worked.

  “Do you have any specific names?” Griffin asked. “People you know of who threatened Eddie? People you heard say they wanted him dead?”

  “Nah. Check the papers. Talk to the prison guards. They should know. If they can be bothered to tell you.”

  “Anyone else we should consider?”

  “The fucking women, of course.”

  “The three victims?”

  “Victims, my ass. Those bitches are the ones who picked Eddie. They pushed for his arrest, harassed the cops all the time. Maybe they wanted to make sure it was done all the way. Eddie can’t defend himself now. And hey, they don’t have to worry about anything unpleasant coming out at trial.”

  “Was something unpleasant going to come out at trial?” Griffin asked sharply.

  “You never know.”

  “Tawnya,” Fitz began warningly. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, but Tawnya shook her mass of dark hair.

  “I’m not doing your job for you, Dickwad. You wanna know what was gonna happen, you figure out what was gonna happen. Now come on. I gotta feed my kid.” She turned around, gesturing at the handcuffs with her fingers. When Fitz still hesitated, she shot out, “I’ll call the ACLU!”

  Fitz grudgingly undid the bracelets, though Griffin noticed the Providence detective now leaned farther away, mindful of his face. Tawnya flashed her teeth at him, then smiled when he flinched.

  “I don’t care what you guys think,” Tawnya said right before she left the room. “I was with Eddie those nights. I know he didn’t hurt those women. And you wanna hear something else? You guys are screwed. ’Cause that dude’s still out there. And now Eddie’s gone. No one to blame anymore. No one to hide behind. It’s a full moon tonight. Perfect weather for when the College Hill Rapist rides again.”

  Fitz and Griffin didn’t speak until they were back on the street, climbing into Fitz’s beat-up detective’s car.

  “Is it just me,” Griffin said, “or is Tawnya the spitting image of Meg Pesaturo?”

  “Wait ’til you see a photo of Trisha Hayes. Oh yeah, Eddie definitely had a type.”

  “She would’ve made a good witness for the defense,” Griffin commented.

  “Yes and no. Eddie’s phone calls to the women . . . One way it could’ve been done was if someone on his approved calling list, say his girlfriend, had a phone feature, say call forwarding, and, ignoring the recorded warning which specifically says do not forward this call, did it anyway.”

  “Ah, so pretty little Tawnya takes her girlfriend duties seriously.”

  “ACI has tapes of the calls if you w
ant to listen.”

  “Anything good?”

  “Only if you buy into conspiracy theories. Eddie seemed convinced that the women were out to get him. Of course, the inmates know their calls are taped, so it might have merely been window dressing for the trial.”

  “That was going to be his defense? That three strange women were picking on poor little innocent him?”

  “The perpetrator as victim. It’s a classic.”

  “And unfortunately, it seems there’s always someone in the jury box who buys it.”

  “Damn juries,” Fitz muttered.

  “Yeah, whatever happened to good old-fashioned mob justice? String ’em up, cut ’em down. Saves a ton of money on appeal.”

  Fitz eyed Griffin suspiciously, probably trying to figure out if he was toying with him or not. Griffin kind of was, kind of wasn’t. The jury system was a royal pain in the ass.

  Fitz glanced at his watch. “It’s three o’clock now. Somehow, I don’t think we’re going to have this wrapped up in time for the five o’clock news.”

  “Doesn’t look it.”

  “In fact, given that nobody seems to want to magically confess, I’m guessing this might take a bit.”

  “It might.”

  “That gonna be a problem?” Fitz’s gaze went to Griffin’s overpumped chest and hard-lined face. Griffin understood what he was asking.

  “Not for me,” he said.

  “I was just wondering—”

  “I’m back. When you’re back on the job, you’re back on the job. You can’t do policing halfway.”

  “I never thought so.” Fitz’s eyes were still narrowed, appraising. “Look, I’m just going to lay it on the table. If we’re going to work together on this, I think I have the right to know a few things.”

  “Such as?”

  “I heard about that Candy Man case, that it went on a little too long, then got a little too personal. Did you really beat up two detectives in the kid’s house? Nearly put one of them in the hospital?”

  Griffin was silent for a moment. “That’s what I’m told,” he said at last.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “It’s a bit of a blur. I wasn’t aiming for Detective Waters or O’Reilly anyway. They were simply doing the honorable thing and throwing themselves in the way.”