The Survivors Club

by Lisa Gardner

  Griffin liked the Major Crimes office. Not nearly as dreary as other law enforcement facilities, say, for example, the Providence station where Fitz worked. That place ought to be condemned, and maybe would be once the new headquarters was completed across the highway. It was a thought.

  Griffin stuck his head across the hall, where Lieutenant Morelli had her office. Nobody home. Perfect. He’d sit down, whip the case notes into order and know exactly what was going on in the Eddie Como homicide file by 8:00 A.M. Just like a good case officer. Hell, maybe he’d surprise them all and actually have the case solved by 9:00 A.M. Oooh, he was a cocky son of a bitch.

  Griffin’s optimism lasted until 7:00 A.M., when his cell phone rang. It was Fitz, and he didn’t sound good.

  “You gotta get down here,” Fitz said without preamble.

  “Where’s here?”

  “Providence,” Fitz said tensely. “Hurry.”

  “Has there been another attack?”

  “Just get here. Now. Before the press finds out.”

  Fitz hung up the phone. Griffin sat there a moment longer, staring at his silent cell phone. Ah, shit.

  He grabbed his jacket and headed for the door. Halfway down the hall, he ran into Waters, who was just getting in for the day. Mike was moving a little stiffly this morning, which under other circumstances would’ve made Griffin proud. Now, however, he simply swapped notes.

  “I gotta run to Providence. Something’s up.”

  “Another attack?” Waters asked immediately.

  “I don’t know. Have you heard the morning news?”

  “Drive time was quiet.”

  “Well, then, whatever it is, we’re still one step ahead. That’s worth something. Listen, can you follow up with the other detectives? See if they’re making any progress with the rape-crisis groups. Oh, and take a few more bodies with you to the Cranston bars. I’m guessing we’re going to need progress, mmmm, now.”

  “Got it. You’ll let us know?”

  “When I know what I know, you’ll be the first I’ll let know.” Griffin headed down the hall.

  “Hey, Griffin,” Waters called out behind him. Griffin turned. “I’ll call ACI. Just in case.”

  Griffin hesitated a fraction of an instant. “Yeah,” he said more slowly. “Just in case.”

  He went out the door, no longer feeling so good about the day.

  The Providence Police Department was located right off I-95 in downtown Providence. The rapidly aging building took its role as an active urban police station quite seriously. Ripped-up gray linoleum floors, water-stained drop ceilings, scuffed-up walls, exposed pipes. The Providence detectives liked to joke that their offices were straight out of Barney Miller. For interior decorating, their color options were dirt, dirty and dirtier.

  Definitely a far cry from the state police’s White House in North Scituate. Not that there was any resentment or anything.

  Griffin arrived shortly after seven-thirty. He parked his Taurus in the tow-away zone near the front entrance. A Providence uniform would ticket him out of spite. Fitz would make it go away. Every organization had its rituals.

  He walked through the exterior glass doors, passing three black youths in baggy jeans and sleeveless sweatshirts who glared at him balefully. He stared back and, by virtue of size, got them to look away first. Inside was a small dark foyer. Griffin took the door to the left into another small dark foyer, where three receptionists sat behind bulletproof glass. This room was crowded with various people pleading various cases. “Man, I gotta see so-and-so.” “Hey, this parking ticket’s bogus!” The receptionists didn’t have the power to do anything, of course, but that didn’t stop the masses from trying.

  Griffin pushed to the front, flashed his shield and was promptly buzzed through the main doors, into the heart, or rather, bowels of the police station. Lucky him.

  He took the stairs up. He’d tried the elevator only once and it had groaned so badly and moved so painfully he’d vowed never again. The way Griffin saw it, the Providence police would be lucky to get out before the whole building came down on their heads.

  The Detective Bureau was on the second floor, adjacent to the Bureau of Criminal Identification. Griffin tried the main room, didn’t see Fitz, then moved down to the locker room. Still no Fitz, but plenty of artwork; the detectives liked to hang photos of their more interesting cases on their lockers. The victim who was folded in half when hit by an oncoming train. The badly decomposed body of a victim who wasn’t found for several weeks. A pair of hands, covered in marijuana leaves, found in the trunk of a car after it was pulled over for a routine traffic stop. The body, found a day later, that went with the hands . . .

  Griffin continued through the labyrinth of tiny gray rooms until he came to the end of the hall. There, Providence had their evidence-processing center, basically two adjoining rooms, each the size of a coat closet, crammed full of cabinets, tables, gear and AFIS. Fitz was standing in front of the folding table, deep in hushed conversation with a sharply dressed black man whom Griffin recognized as Sergeant Napoleon, head of the BCI. Both men looked up the minute he filled the doorway.

  “’Bout time,” Fitz muttered.

  “You rang, I ran,” Griffin said lightly. Fitz’s face had an unhealthy flush. His eyes had sunk deeper into the folds of his face and his sparse hair stuck up in unusual disarray. He’d finally changed clothes since yesterday, so he’d obviously managed to make it home. Unfortunately, the break didn’t seem to have done him any good.

  “Griffin, Napoleon, Napoleon, Griffin.” Fitz made the introductions.

  “We’ve met,” Griffin said as he and the sergeant obligingly shook hands. In contrast to Fitz, Napoleon appeared excited. He had a light in his eyes, a fervor to his face. Oh no, Griffin thought immediately. When the forensics guys got excited . . . Oh no.

  “You got the reports back,” Griffin said abruptly.

  “Uh huh,” Fitz said.

  “The DNA?”

  Fitz looked at the open door. He dropped his voice to nearly a whisper. “Uh huh.”

  Griffin leaned forward. He lowered his voice as well. “And?”

  “We got a match,” Fitz whispered.

  “A good match,” Napoleon emphasized.

  “We know who raped Sylvia Blaire,” Fitz said grimly. “According to the Department of Health, it was Eddie Como.”

  “This has got to be a mistake,” Griffin declared five minutes later. He, Fitz and Napoleon had commandeered the lieutenant’s office, shut the door and resumed their earnest huddle. They kept their heads together and their voices down. In a police station, there were eyes and ears everywhere.

  “Of course it’s a mistake!” Fitz snapped, then immediately dropped his voice again. “A dead man did not rape and murder Sylvia Blaire. Now do you want to tell me who did?”

  Griffin turned to Napoleon. “Could it be a family member? What about an uncle, a cousin, a father? Hell, what about a long-lost brother?”

  Napoleon shook his head. “We got a preliminary match in seven out of seven sample sites. We’ll send it out for further analysis, but we’re looking at a dead-on hit.”

  “Okay, a long-lost identical twin brother.”

  “Identical twins don’t have the same DNA. It would be close, yeah, but again, seven out of seven sample sites . . .”

  Griffin raked his hand through his hair. “Shit,” he said.

  “It is not Eddie Como,” Fitz muttered. “It is not fucking Eddie Como.”

  “Okay, okay, okay.” Griffin held up his hand. “Let’s be logical about this. Assume for a moment that the DNA from the Blaire crime scene really does match the sample taken from Eddie Como. What if someone else had somehow saved semen from Eddie Como and smeared it at the scene?”

  He and Fitz promptly stared at Napoleon, who at least seemed willing to consider the possibility.

  “Swabs are first tested for semen, to see if we have something for DNA testing,” Napoleon mused. “Now, spermatozo
a only tests positive for seventy-two hours, so if someone had gotten a Como ‘sample,’ so to speak, it would have to be fresh. Otherwise the spermatozoa would be dead, the swabs would test negative for semen and nothing else would be done.”

  “The man’s been behind bars,” Fitz growled. “How do you get a fresh sample from a man in prison?”

  Griffin just looked at him.

  “Hey,” Fitz said. “I know there’s more sex in prison than in most bordellos, gimme a break. But we’re not talking about someone smuggling out a stained sheet and dropping it at the scene. The match was seven out of seven sample sites, meaning they found matching DNA on the sheets, the nightgown, vaginal swabs, etc., etc. You wanna explain that scenario to me?”

  “That makes it trickier,” Griffin confessed. “Eddie could’ve preserved a sample somehow. I don’t know, jacked off in a Dixie cup and sent it out?”

  It was Fitz’s turn to stare at him. “Now why the hell would he do that? This is a guy who’s been swearing to anyone with a microphone that he’s innocent. Wouldn’t he kind of wonder about a request for, gee, seminal fluid?”

  “Conjugal visits?” Napoleon tried.

  “Not at Intake,” Griffin said.

  “This is crazy,” Fitz muttered.

  “This is nuts,” Griffin agreed. “Okay, what if we’re going about this backward? What if the swap wasn’t made at the scene? What if the swap was made with Eddie Como’s sample?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the samples from the crime scenes are showing a match with another sample labeled Eddie Como. But what if that is where we have the mistake?”

  “No way,” Fitz said immediately.

  “Couldn’t happen,” Napoleon seconded. “Standard operating procedure for executing a search warrant for DNA samples: Detective Fitzpatrick and Detective McCarthy picked up Eddie Como and brought him to the Reagan Building, where two clinicians and I were waiting. The clinicians drew two vials of blood, plucked several strands of hair from Como’s head, then took additional combings from his pubic region. I personally packaged each sample and labeled it as evidence to preserve chain of custody. So that’s what, five people who can vouch that Eddie Como was in the room—”

  “I’m not saying you guys had the wrong man,” Griffin interrupted.

  “And four samples,” the BCI sergeant continued relentlessly, “all properly sealed and labeled that you would have to swap. What are the chances of that?”

  “It would be difficult,” Griffin said grudgingly.

  “Try impossible,” Fitz countered hotly. “Try fucking impossible. We know how to do our goddamn jobs!”

  “Then how did we get this match?” Griffin’s voice was rising.

  “I don’t know! Maybe it was Eddie Como. We haven’t seen his body.”

  “Eddie Como is dead! The ME already confirmed his fingerprints. The guy is dead, deader and deadest. So once again, how the hell did his DNA wind up at another rape-murder scene?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Someone is fucking with us,” Griffin said. “Someone is playing a game.” And then, on the heels of that thought. “Shit!”

  “What?” Fitz asked wildly.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit! I gotta make a phone call.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, now. Where’s a landline? How the hell do I dial out?”

  “Who are you calling?”

  “The Easter Bunny, who do you think?” Griffin impatiently punched in the number. “Detective Waters,” Mike said thirty seconds later.

  “Mike, Griffin. You talk to ACI? What did he say?”

  “Price said . . . Price said, he told you so, and he’s still waiting for your visit.”

  He told you so . . . Who murdered Sylvia Blaire, David? Eddie Como.

  Ah shit. Griffin hung his head. The room simultaneously closed in on him and fell away. Eighteen months later. Eighteen painful, careful, deliberate months later, here he was again. Knee-deep in some strange, twisted David Price game. Griffin took a deep breath, struggled to pull it together. A dead man couldn’t have killed Sylvia Blaire. Something else had to have happened. Something else that put Como’s DNA at the scene.

  And then he was thinking back to Monday afternoon and his conversation with Fitz: “So why did Eddie, who left behind no hair, no fiber, and no fingerprints, leave behind ten latex strips? Why did he on the one hand, learn how to cover his tracks, and then on the other hand, leave you a virtual calling card?”

  Fitz had angrily declared that the Providence police had not framed Eddie Como. Now, Griffin finally, horribly, had an idea who had.

  Games. Games didn’t sound like Eddie’s style. But Griffin knew another man, a young man with an even younger face, who loved to play games. Who also sent notes and made phone calls, except they never declared his innocence. A man who had spent two days now claiming insider knowledge and had even graciously sent Griffin a note welcoming him to the case.

  And then Griffin was back to thinking about that stupid DNA, the only evidence that had pointed at Eddie Como. DNA that was supposed to have been washed away by Berkely and Johnson’s Disposable Douche with Country Flowers . . . Except . . . What’s the worst thing a detective could do? Make an assumption. And what was the major assumption they had all made? That the douche had been used in an attempt to remove DNA from the scene. Son of a bitch.

  The final pieces started clicking into place and for a moment . . . For a moment, Griffin was so mad, he couldn’t speak.

  “What’s going on?” Waters was asking on the other end of the phone.

  “Who? Who?” Fitz was saying beside him.

  “What day was the first reported rape?” Griffin asked harshly. “When was Meg Pesaturo attacked?”

  “Eleven April, last year,” Fitz replied. “Why? What do you know?”

  April eleventh. Five months after David Price’s November arrest. Five months after Griffin’s little meltdown. It seemed impossible. And yet . . .

  “He’s playing us.”

  “What do you want to do?” Mike asked on the other end of the line.

  “Who? What?” Fitz was still parroting wildly.

  “The guy who saw this coming.” Griffin closed his eyes. “The guy who somehow knows more about this case than we do.”

  “Who saw this coming?” Fitz pleaded.

  “David,” Griffin said quietly. “My good old sexual-sadist neighbor, David Price.”

  CHAPTER 31

  Price

  GRIFFIN WAS DIALING HIS CELL PHONE, NAVIGATING HIS way furiously through tiny Providence streets to the I-95 on-ramp while Fitz clutched the dashboard and continued cursing colorfully under his breath. Jillian answered the phone, and Griffin immediately started talking.

  “Jillian, I need you to tell me something and I need you to be honest.”

  “Griffin? Good morning to you, too—”

  “I know you’re angry with the police,” he interrupted steadily. “I know you think we failed your sister and I know you haven’t had a lot of incentive to cooperate with us. But I need your help now. I need you to tell me if you ever met a man named David Price. And don’t lie, Jillian. This is deadly serious.”

  Silence. He gripped the wheel tighter, wondering what that silence meant, and wishing that his stomach wasn’t beginning to turn queasily while the ringing picked up in his ears. Breathe deep, release. Eighteen months of hard work. Don’t lose sight of the ball now.

  “The name sounds familiar,” Jillian said finally. “Wait a minute. Wasn’t he your neighbor? Griffin, what is this about?”

  “Did your sister ever mention his name?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Ever get any correspondence? Maybe something in the mail?”

  “No. Wait a minute.” There was a muffled clunk as she moved the receiver from her ear. Then he heard her voice shout out, “Toppi. Have you ever received anything from someone named David Price? Check with Mom.” Another muffled thunk, then Jillian w
as back on the line. “They both say no. Griffin, you arrested him, right? You sent him to jail . . . a long time ago. Why are you asking about him now?”

  Griffin ignored her question, and instead asked one of his own. “What are your plans for the day?”

  “I told Mom I would take her to see Trish. Griffin—”

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t?”

  “I want you to stay close to home. Or better yet. Load up Toppi and your mom and take them to the Narragansett house. I’ll arrange for a pair of uniforms to meet you there.”

  “Did he get out of jail?” Jillian asked quietly.

  “No.”

  “But you’re targeting him. Is he involved in all this? Did David Price somehow hurt my sister?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Any word on Carol?”

  “I was just about to call the hospital.”

  “I should send uniforms there as well,” he muttered out loud, then wished he hadn’t.

  Jillian’s voice grew even more somber on the other end of the line. “Something’s happened, hasn’t it? Something bad.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Griffin told her. “And Jillian. Be careful.”

  He flipped shut his phone. Mostly because he didn’t know what else to say. Or maybe because he did know what he wanted to say, and now was not the time or place, especially with Fitz sitting red-faced and haggard beside him.

  He took the on-ramp for 95 South, headed for the ACI and simultaneously tossed his cell phone to Fitz. “You’re up.”

  Fitz dialed the Pesaturo residence. Thirty seconds later, they both heard Meg’s mother pick up the phone.

  “Detective Fitzpatrick here,” Fitz said roughly, then cleared his throat. “I, uh, I need to speak to Miss Pesaturo, please.”

  “Detective Fitzpatrick!” Meg’s mother said warmly. “How are you this morning?”