The Damage Done

by P J Parrish

  She held up a set of stapled papers and he recognized the updated Prince financial report that Tooki had left for him yesterday. Louis hadn’t had time yet to review it.

  “It’s one of two dozen addresses listed under the heading of something called the Fresh Start Program,” Joe asked.

  That name had been written on a manila folder in Anthony Prince’s office and on a letter in Anthony’s office back at the church. Violet had mentioned it, too.

  “It’s some sort of charity,” Louis said. “Does that say who lives up there?”

  “No,” Joe said. “It’s all leased by the church. No tenant names.”

  “Okay, then,” Louis said, pushing out of the Explorer. “Let’s go knock on the door.”

  Inside the foyer, they found metal mailboxes, but the label for 2B had no name. When they got to the top of the stairs, they froze.

  There was a green sticker slapped across the edge of the door frame on apartment 2B. Louis moved close to read it.

  These premises have been sealed by the Grand Rapids PD pursuant to section 456 administrative code. All persons are forbidden to enter unless authorized by the police department or public administrator.

  “It’s a crime scene,” Joe said.

  The seal was intact, which meant the apartment had not yet been released back to the tenant or the landlord. They couldn’t set foot in this place, even if was unlocked.

  “We need to find out what happened here,” Louis said. “Let’s get back to the car and call Grand Rapids PD.”

  Louis started to the stairs but stopped when he saw a man coming up, carrying cardboard boxes. When the man reached the landing, he paused. He was north of sixty, with a halo of white hair and blue marble eyes.

  “Can I help you folks?”

  “Detective Kincaid,” Louis said, showing his badge. “State police. And you are?”

  “Rudy Piccoli.” He dropped the boxes and kicked them toward the door of 2B.

  “Why are you here, Mr. Piccoli?”

  The man’s face wrinkled. “I’m the owner, here to clean out the apartment. I got permission this morning from Lieutenant Maxwell to unseal it. Man, don’t you guys talk to each other?”

  Louis didn’t want the man asking any questions about why two more cops were here, especially two not connected to Grand Rapids. Piccoli might call this Lieutenant Maxwell and the Grand Rapids PD would show up to stake out their territory. Which meant he and Joe would be shut out. As long as the place was still sealed, Louis had no choice but to go through Grand Rapid PD. But if Rudy Piccoli was going to let them in. . .

  Louis gestured to the door. “You’re free to go in, sir.”

  The man used a key to rip the seal and unlocked the door. He went in, leaving the door open. Louis and Joe stopped at the threshold.

  “An open door implies permission to enter,” Joe said quietly.

  “Yeah, but I’m not going to chance it working for Steele,” Louis said. “Mr. Piccoli, can we come in, sir?”

  “What? Now you need an invitation?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Come on in then. Maybe you can help me clean up the mess you guys made.”

  The small living room was washed in pink sunlight from the drawn red curtains. Cheap furnishings—a worn white futon draped with a fringed, red-patterned throw, a plastic end table holding a brass lamp, its shade covered with a pink, silky scarf, a small rattan chest that served as a coffee table and held a vase of white plastic flowers and a chipped, ceramic incense burner in the shape of a Buddha. No television, stereo or radio that Louis could see. The walls were painted the dirty white of all rental units, and there was nothing to relieve their plainness except for two garish prints of peacocks, the kind of stuff you could find crammed onto the clearance shelves of Pier 1. Smudges of black fingerprint dust were everywhere.

  “Plain sight, Louis,” Joe whispered.

  He glanced at her, mildly piqued she would feel the need to remind him that he didn’t have a warrant to look beyond what was considered “left in plain sight.” The fact that the place had been searched by the Grand Rapids cops meant nothing to the state. If they wanted to search drawers and closets, they needed their own warrant. Or permission from the owner.

  Louis looked back to Rudy Piccoli, who was in the kitchen, standing at the open refrigerator.

  “Mr. Piccoli?”

  He came back to the living holding a white container of take-out food. “Yeah?”

  “I need to be up front with you,” Louis said. “We have nothing to do with the Grand Rapids PD. My partner and I were chasing a lead on another case and we tracked our suspect here.”

  Rudy Piccoli’s eyes narrowed, like he felt he’d been conned.

  “Can you tell me what happened here?” Louis asked. “Why the apartment was sealed?”

  Piccoli’s eyes ricocheted between Louis and Joe. “If I do, are you guys going to lock it up again for another week?”

  “I can’t promise we won’t,” Louis said. “But I really need to know what happened here.”

  Piccoli tossed the take-out container to the trash. “Jesus H. Christ,” he muttered. “Try to do a good thing for the church and this is what I get. Lost rent and a mess to clean up.”

  “Mr. Piccoli, please,” Louis said.

  He came into the living room. “All I know is the cops came here last Friday morning with a warrant and told me to let them in. They said the woman who lived here got killed.”

  Louis heard the crinkle of Joe’s leather jacket as she moved closer in behind him, and he knew she was thinking the same thing he was. If Anthony had come here two months ago, there was a good chance he might have returned the night of his father’s murder, the same night someone else was killed here.

  Piccoli was still talking. “So I called the lady at the church that I deal with for the rentals and told her that was it, I was ending their lease.”

  “Did the police say how the tenant was killed?” Louis asked.

  Piccoli shook his head. “They didn’t tell me nothing. But I overhead one of the cops say something about her getting murdered. Then I was told to leave.”

  “What was her name?” Louis asked.

  Piccoli had gone to the door to pick up one of the cardboard boxes and didn’t look back at Louis. “I don’t usually pay much attention to tenant names because the church signs all the leases and sends rent checks. But I think the secretary lady called her Sue . . . or maybe Lynn or Sue Lynn or Linda Sue.”

  “Did you ever meet this woman?” Louis asked.

  “Nope. She was only here six or seven months. The family before her was real nice. I met them and would’ve liked to have them stay longer but the church lady told me they went home to China. Didn’t like it here in America, I guess.”

  “China?” Louis asked.

  “China, Japan?” He waved his hands in the air. “I don’t know. I just know they were refugees.”

  Louis looked around, his gaze moving over the room. It struck him that a single woman, a refugee, might want to surround herself with familiar symbols of her home culture. But with its cheap red drapes and sad attempts to disguise its shabbiness, the apartment seemed more like some young woman’s notion of a place of seduction.

  Louis couldn’t see Anthony here, a man who needed to fold his hand towels and line up his pens. But then again, some guys got off on a whiff of seediness.

  “Mr. Piccoli,” Louis said. “You said you terminated the church’s lease?”

  “Yeah.”

  With no renter and no lease, Piccoli could give them permission to look anywhere they wanted.

  “Can we do a full search, Mr. Piccoli?” Louis asked.

  “Yeah, I guess,” he called out.

  “And could you wait a few minutes before packing stuff up?”

  Piccoli’s head appeared from the kitchen opening. “Good grief,” he said. “I’m going down for a cig. Call me when you’re done.”

  After he was gone, Joe looked to Louis.
“I’ll take the bedroom.”

  Joe wandered off and Louis did a quick search of the living room. The Grand Rapids police had been looking for evidence that this apartment was a murder scene, but he was looking for any evidence that Anthony Prince had been here.

  But even if he found anything, this was still going to be Grand Rapids PD’s case. And if Anthony Prince was tied to this, there was no way GRPD would relinquish control of a career-building case, not even to Steele’s team. Louis had to know what he was dealing with before let anyone else in.

  He moved to the kitchen and looked in the fridge. Juice, milk, yogurts, and more take-out containers from a place called Pho Anh Trang’s. He opened the cupboards and saw a lot of canned chow mien, soy sauce, lime juice, sesame seed oil, and a bottle of Vang Đàlat wine. Nothing else.

  He sighed. A bottle of Hendrick’s gin would have been nice.

  Louis,” Joe called. “Come here.”

  Joe had opened the drapes and the tiny bedroom was flush with sunshine. It was a drab canvas of beiges and browns, with a small bed and a boxy dresser with tarnished knobs.

  Joe gestured to the bed, where she had laid out two pairs of faded jeans and a couple of wrinkled men’s cotton shirts. “I think a guy was living here, too,” she said.

  Louis picked up the jeans and checked the size. They were definitely men’s jeans, but small—size fourteen slim. It was how boy’s jeans were sized, not the standard men’s waist sizing.

  “Maybe she wore them,” he said.

  Joe moved to the dresser and opened a drawer. “Think she wore these, too?”

  She held up a pair of white briefs, small, with a wide elastic band and a fly. Men’s underwear.

  Louis tossed the jeans on the bed, disappointment swelling inside him. It was still possible this woman was Anthony Prince’s mistress and that he had killed her. But the fact that she had a boyfriend, or that any male lived here, complicated the investigation. It gave the police a second viable suspect.

  Joe started to the door. “I’m going to check out the bathroom,” she said.

  He turned to the dresser and started opening drawers. He found women’s blue bikini panties, a couple pairs of plain white socks, some filmy pastel nightgowns, and in the bottom drawer, a soft tangle of women’s scarves in bright colors and gaudy patterns. He was about to close the drawer when one piece of fabric caught his eye.

  He pulled it out. It was a long and narrow like a scarf but was made of rough cotton in a black and white checkered pattern. It looked like a kitchen dish towel. He peered at the small white tag on one end. It had some odd symbols on it, but it was the line at the bottom that he focused on—Fabriqué en Vietnam.

  Linda Sue . . . Sue Lynn.

  Su-Lin . . .

  For a second, he didn’t move because his mind was suddenly somewhere else—in an autopsy room in Ionia. He looked around for Joe but she was nowhere to be seen, so he headed back to the living room. Piccoli was just coming in the open door, trailing a stink of cigarettes.

  “Mr. Piccoli, the woman who lived here,” Louis said. “You called her Sue Lynn. Could her name have been Tuyen Lang?”

  “Huh?”

  Too-yin,” Louis said, pronouncing the name as close as he could to the way Cam had said it. “Too-yin, not Sue Lynn.”

  “Sue? Too? Shit, I don’t know,” Piccoli said with a shrug. “I told you, I didn’t pay much attention to their names because they all sound alike, you know?”

  “Did anyone from the church ever say she was from Vietnam?”

  Piccoli frowned. “Yeah, maybe. It’s all Oriental to me.”

  Joe came up next to him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Her name was Tuyen Lang,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  Louis was remembering his first thought when he saw the body lying on the table, that he was looking at a boy not a girl.

  “There was no male living here,” Louis said softly to Joe. “Those men’s clothes in the bedroom? They belonged to her.”

  Louis took Joe’s arm and walked her toward the bedroom, out of earshot of Piccoli.

  “I think that Anthony Prince likes boys, Joe,” he said. “But he couldn’t cross that line to children because that would be too big a sin for a man in his position. So, he found a woman who looked like a boy.” He remembered how Tuyen’s hair had been chopped short. “Maybe he even had her dress up like a boy.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because I saw her,” Louis said. “In a morgue in Ionia.”

  Tuyen’s face was there in his head now—her hair that looked like someone had chopped it off with an axe and her skin, mottled with old bruises. Two months ago, Anthony had evaded the PI and probably had come here, to his boy-woman mistress. Had he also come here last Wednesday after murdering his father, and driven by rage or guilt or something else, killed this woman?

  He realized he was still holding the black and white scarf, and he ran it through his hands now, testing its rough texture, thinking how it might match the ligature marks on Tuyen Lang’s neck.

  “Louis,” Joe said. “Her murder is not your case.”

  “It is if I can pin it on Anthony,” Louis said. He turned to Piccoli who had picked up a box and was starting back toward the kitchen.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Piccoli,” he said. “We’re going to be locking this place up again.”

  “Lord deliver me from cops and holy rollers,” he said, waving a hand. “Do want you want. Just don’t make a mess.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  It took an hour for the state forensic team to show up at Tuyen’s apartment. Louis led the search, directing the team to do a thorough dusting for fingerprints as he scoured the place again for any evidence that Anthony had been there. Joe retreated to the hallway, where she sat on the stairs reading the Prince case file. No one had to tell her that she had no jurisdiction to be involved in the apartment search.

  On the drive back to Lansing, they had talked only about the case, and in the silence Louis could almost read her thoughts—that she had no authority here, no place on the team. Louis understood that. There had been other cases, other times, when his lack of a badge had kept him from going places and doing things that she could.

  Four hours later, they pulled into the church parking lot in Lansing. Joe’s eyes lingered on the name ST. MICHAEL’S CATHOLIC CHURCH on the lawn.

  Inside, Louis counted five state troopers hanging out by the coffee machine. Emily was on the phone, gesturing angrily as she talked, and Tooki was hunched over his computer, tapping furiously. Things were heating up. The nave even felt warmer than usual.

  Joe was taking it all in—the computers, evidence boxes, and the large murder board up on the altar. When her eyes came back to him, she smiled. “Pretty impressive,” she said.

  Louis heard a sound and looked up. Steele was standing at the railing of the loft watching them. When he disappeared, Louis turned to Joe.

  “Joe, I’m sorry, but I have to—”

  “Go,” she said. “I need to call in. I’ll wait here.”

  “Coffee’s over by the confessional,” he said.

  She nodded, then picked up the nearest phone.

  Louis hurried up the steps. Steele was alone at his desk, writing furiously on a legal pad. When he looked up, the light from the desk lamp washed over his face, bringing into high relief a stubble of whiskers and deep lines of fatigue around his mouth. His expression was as it always was—somber and serious. But his eyes, nearly black in the low light, shimmered with a euphoric glaze, like a guy in the first seconds after snorting a line of cocaine.

  Louis knew it wasn’t from any drug. It was different kind of high, a kind of high only a few people would understand—the high of a good lead and the chase.

  Steele spoke first. “We’ve confirmed the tenant in the apartment was Tuyen Lang. I don’t have to tell you how big this is. But it seems you’ve started a turf war.”

  “Grand Rapids won’t relinqu
ish the case, right?”

  “Right. They’re pissed you even went in without calling them.”

  Louis knew they could continue to investigate, but without access to what Grand Rapids already had on Tuyen Lang’s murder, it would be almost impossible to link her death to Anthony.

  “Were you able to find anything to put Anthony Prince inside that apartment?” Steele asked.

  Louis shook his head. “Not yet, but we were able to find some prints and fluids Grand Rapids didn’t lift. If we can match them later to Anthony—”

  “What’s that?” Steele interrupted, gesturing toward Louis’s hand.

  Louis had brought an evidence bag. “It’s a Vietnamese scarf,” Louis said. “It’s how I made the connection.”

  “Why’d you bring it back?” Steele asked.

  “It might be what she was strangled with. Plus, I thought Cam might want to see it. It’s only because of him that Tuyen Lang was even on our radar.”

  A glimmer of irritation crossed Steele’s face, but he nodded. Earlier on the phone, when Louis told Steele about the visit to the Ionia morgue, Steele had been silent for a long time then quickly went on talking about securing the apartment. Louis suspected at some later date, Cam would get his ass chewed for the detour, despite the fact it had broken the Prince case wide open. Louis decided to defend him.

  “Sir, about Cam, sometimes we have to go with our gut,” Louis said. “Sometimes—”

  The phone rang. Steele held up a hand to silence Louis and hit the button to put the phone call on speaker.

  “Captain Steele here.”

  “Hello, this is Lieutenant Sid Newton. Ionia S.O.”

  Louis took a step closer to the desk. Steele was making an end run around GRPD to get the file.

  “Thank you for returning my phone call so late on a Sunday night, lieutenant.”

  “Well, it’s not every day a man gets a call from the state’s Special Investigations Unit. How can I help you?”

  “Before we get to business, let me ask you. How is your daughter?”

  There was a brief silence. “Tara? She’s good.”

  “She’s graduating from the Michigan State Police Academy this spring, right?”