The Damage Done

by P J Parrish

  “Yes, she is. Tenth in her class,” Newton said, his voice slow and questioning.

  “I hear she’d like to join the K-9 unit.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s what she wants to put in for.”

  “I started my patrol career in K-9,” Steele said. “Great place to work. I still have a lot of good friends over there.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Now, to business,” Steele said. “You guys found a body over your way in a field last week, a young Asian girl named Tuyen Lang, stuffed in a suitcase.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’d like you to hand that case along to us.”

  Newton went quiet. When Steele looked up at Louis his eyes gleamed in the low light, eyes that all but shouted I am in control. And Newton’s lengthening silence proved it.

  “I don’t know about that, captain,” Newton said finally. “From what I hear, this poor girl was killed in her apartment and that would make it Grand Rapids’ jurisdiction.”

  “We don’t yet know for sure where she was killed,” Steele said. “And until we do, jurisdiction remains with the agency that found the body.”

  “But I already gave it to GRPD,” Newton said. “What do you want me to do? Just call them up and take it back?”

  “Yes.”

  The phone went silent again, then came a few heavy, resigned breaths. “I’ll look like a fool if I snatch a homicide case back from another department,” Newton said softly.

  “On the contrary,” Steele said. “You’ll be a hero.”

  Another long pause from Newton. Louis knew what Newton was thinking but wouldn’t say—a hero to whom?

  “Tara will make a fine K9 officer,” Steele said. “Do we have a deal?”

  “Yes.”

  Newton said goodbye and hung up.

  Louis knew Steele had wanted him to hear the bribe, to impress him or teach him, maybe both. He remembered hearing that Steele once wanted to be attorney general. Steele had chosen to remain a cop but the politician in him was alive and well.

  “Tell the others I’ll be down in a minute,” Steele said, picking up his suit jacket from the back of his chair.

  “Yes, sir.”

  When Louis got downstairs Joe was standing at the murder board, looking at the photos, and she turned when she heard him coming.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “I don’t know how long this will take,” Louis said. “Wait for me at my place and we’ll have a late dinner and—”

  “No, I have to go home, to Echo Bay,” Joe said.

  “I thought you said you could stay until Tuesday?”

  “I know. I thought so, too. But I’ve been called to testify tomorrow morning in a domestic abuse case. I know the woman involved. I have to be there. It’s important.”

  So are we. That’s the first thing that came to his mind, but he didn’t say it because it was selfish. What did he expect? That Joe would be here waiting whenever he wanted? That her job was less important than his own?

  “I called a cab,” she said. “It’s probably outside by now.”

  “I’ll walk you out.”

  Outside, they paused on the church steps. Joe glanced at the taxi idling at the curb and when she looked back at Louis she let out a deep sigh.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “Leaving you right now.”

  “Joe, look, we both have—”

  “No, it’s not about the jobs,” she said. “We can work that out. I know we can.” She took a breath. “I think you need me here with you right now. I don’t know why, but I feel it.” She paused again, as if weighing every word that was in her head. It made Louis tense, like he felt something bad coming.

  “Last night, you had a nightmare,” she said.

  He didn’t remember it. But he could guess what it was about.

  “I feel bad that we didn’t talk. I feel bad that I have to go right now,” she said.

  “I’m okay,” he said quickly. Too quickly, he knew.

  The cabbie honked his horn. Joe waved in irritation toward him then looked back at Louis. She hesitated then brought up her hand and gently laid her palm against his cheek. It was more devastating than a kiss. Louis shut his eyes.

  She buried her head in his shoulder. “Call me,” she whispered. And then she pulled away quickly and there was just cold air where she had been.

  Louis watched her jog to the cab and get in. When the cab disappeared around the corner, he went back into the church.

  Steele was standing at the head of the conference table and turned at the sound of the door banging shut. Louis could feel his eyes on him as he approached. Emily and Tooki, seated at the table, were watching him as well.

  “Cam’s running late,” Steele said. “We will get started anyway.”

  Louis retrieved his binder from his desk and sat down next to Emily.

  Steele pulled a paper from his binder and laid it in the center of the table. “I got this faxed over from immigration about an hour ago. Here’s our victim.”

  It was a date-stamped visa photo, taken three years ago when Tuyen first arrived in the U.S. The contrast between the bruised face Louis had seen in the morgue and the one in the photo was striking.

  In the visa photo, Tuyen’s face was rounder, her eyes brighter, as if reflecting hope for a new life. Her black hair flowed like silk to her slender shoulders, making her look fourteen or fifteen instead of her true age of twenty-two.

  Louis pulled the photo closer. How did a girl go from this to being a hooker? The records check he had run on her earlier showed her single arrest for prostitution had come only six months after she entered the country when she was busted during a sweep on the city’s west side. There was nothing for her after that, but she had entered the church’s Fresh Start program a year later. Louis was positive that was all Anthony’s doing, maybe first finding her on the street then stashing her at the apartment under the guise of the refugee program so he had easy access whenever he wanted.

  “Did you tell Cam about Tuyen Lang?” Louis asked.

  “No,” Steele said. “I want him here with us when we tell him. Louis, bring everyone up to speed, please.”

  Louis opened his binder and started laying out the day’s events, including the latest development that Tuyen had a car, a 1982 silver Civic, that hadn’t been found.

  A loud bang drew everyone’s attention to the door. It was only as the man came closer that Louis realized it was Cam, wearing a tweedy brown sports coat, checkered tie and a brown wig.

  Cam dumped his binder on the conference table, wiggled out of the jacket and yanked off the wig. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I wanted to get back here and find out what the big break was.”

  “What’s with the disguise?” Emily asked.

  Cam peeled off his moustache. “The captain asked me to shadow Anthony today. I didn’t want the guy to make me so I threw on my Wonder Bread wrapper. I blended right in at that church.”

  “You went to the evening service?” Emily asked.

  “Sure did,” Cam said. “Man, what a long freakin’ sixty minutes.”

  “Did Anthony give the sermon?” Louis asked.

  Cam didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to have heard him. He was looking at the visa photograph of Tuyen on the table. He picked it up, stared hard at it, then looked to Louis.

  “Is this Angel?” Cam asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Cam was standing there like a coiled spring. Louis knew Cam was making the connection but didn’t want to believe it. “Did that fucker kill her?” Cam asked tightly.

  Louis did a quick look around the table before he answered. “We think so, yeah,” he said.

  “She was his . . .” Cam didn’t finish.

  Louis nodded. “It’s complicated, but we made the connection with this.” He slid the bagged Vietnamese scarf across the table to Cam. The scarf was folded so the tag was visible.

  Cam didn’t pick it
up, but he stood there staring at it, his fists clenched. Louis stole a glance at Steele. His expression was deadpan, watching and waiting. Waiting for what, though? For the cracks to widen?

  The urge was powerful, to call Steele out on his ugly game, right here in front of everyone. But Louis knew he couldn’t. It would jeopardize the case. He would wait. The right moment would come.

  Louis touched Cam’s arm. “Sit down,” he said.

  Cam pulled his arm away, yanked out a chair and sat down. He was still holding Tuyen’s photograph, but he was looking up at the altar to the murder board where Anthony Prince’s photograph hung in the center of all the others.

  A few silent seconds ticked by.

  “Cam,” Steele said. “Did Anthony give the sermon today?”

  Cam set the photograph on the table, face down, and drew a heavy breath. “Yeah,” he said, “but I wouldn’t call it a sermon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It sounded like more of a eulogy for his father. But Anthony’s right about one thing—he is definitely not a chip off the old block. He sounds like one of those noise machines that is supposed to put people to sleep.”

  Cam fell silent, pulling in long, slow breaths. Louis could tell he was trying hard to get a grip on himself, not fall apart in front of everyone. Finally, Cam sat up straighter and opened his binder.

  “I figured what he talked about might be a good indication of his state of mind, so I made some notes.”

  “Good thinking,” Steele said.

  Cam scooted his chair closer and squinted down at his notes as he picked at the glue on his lip. “He started out talking about his father, how he walked with God in every aspect of his life and how his father’s devotion to God came at the cost of unspeakable personal sacrifices.”

  “Did he elaborate on those sacrifices?” Emily asked.

  “No,” Cam said, turning the page. “Then he talked about how his father’s legacy should live on through all of God’s channels. I guess that meant he should still get that TV gig. But the weird thing was, at the end, he suddenly stopped talking and he just stood there for maybe half a minute like he’d lost his train of thought. Then he threw out a Bible verse and told us all to go home and pray.”

  “What was the verse?” Louis asked.

  Cam looked at his notes. “Job 13:26. ‘Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.’”

  “How did he behave afterwards? Anything odd?” Steele asked.

  Cam shook his head. “Seemed okay. Shook hands, accepted hugs. I followed him to make sure he went home, then I headed back here.”

  Steele looked around the table. “Okay, it looks like Anthony’s not onto us, and that buys us some time, but not much. What about prints from the apartment, Louis?”

  “Our techs re-dusted the whole place,” Louis said. “But I checked and Anthony’s not in the system. He’s never been printed so we have nothing for comparison.”

  “Do you think he’d volunteer them? Tooki asked.

  Emily shook her head. “By offering anything, he’d have to relinquish some control and he’d never do that.”

  “And we don’t have enough for a warrant,” Steele said. “We need something to put him inside that apartment.”

  “He was inside Tuyen,” Cam said tightly. “Did the autopsy turn up any semen?”

  Steele hesitated. “We don’t yet have the autopsy report, but I talked to the ME. There was no semen found in or on her body.”

  The nave was quiet. Cam was staring at Tuyen’s photo again, Emily was scribbling something in her notebook, and Tooki was slowly flipping through some papers on a clipboard.

  “Tooki, did you get anything new from the tip line?” Louis asked.

  Tooki pushed his glasses up his nose and flipped back to the first page on his clipboard. “We have troopers following up on three white Isuzu trucks seen around the cathedral and a couple tips we’ve already discounted. But calls have dropped off considerably.”

  “Maybe we should release the sketch of the man seen outside Jonas’s cottage,” Emily said.

  Steele was quiet, tapping his pen lightly on his pad.

  “Sir,” Louis said, “if nothing else, we need to rule that man out as a suspect in Jonas Prince’s murder. If we nail Anthony, we don’t want some defense attorney holding this guy out there as another suspect.”

  “Okay,” Steele said. “Tooki, see if you can get the sketch in the morning paper.”

  It was quiet again, except for the low moan of the wind in the organ pipes.

  Louis struggled to organize his thoughts, figuring out what their next move could be. It occurred to him that they were too hung up on the details of fingerprints, semen, sketches. But facts didn’t always tell the story or give you the answers. What did they know for sure? That they had two murders, committed within hours of each other. One victim was a man of God, the other a girl of the streets. What was the big picture here? What connected them? And what connected them to Anthony Prince the night of the murder?

  He looked at Cam, who was looking at the photograph of Tuyen again. Louis thought again about Steele’s head games. Cam’s mother. Emily’s suicide attempt. Louis’s childhood in foster care. Cracked jugs . . .

  Who didn’t have fault lines in their past?

  Louis hesitated, a memory tugging at his brain, something buried in his notes. He opened his binder and flipped through the pages. He was looking for his interview with Bushman.

  There it was.

  Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.

  “Sir, I think I might have something,” Louis said.

  Everyone looked up.

  “I think Violet Prince knows something and wants to tell us.”

  Steele sat back in his chair. “What makes you say that?”

  “When I interviewed Walter Bushman, he told me he got a phone call from a Grand Rapids woman who refused to identify herself, but she left a Bible verse with the call screener.” He looked down at his notes. “Listen to this: ‘Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.’”

  “Why do you think it came from her?”

  Louis paused. “Let’s call it a hunch.”

  “When did this call come in?”

  “The Saturday after Jonas was murdered.”

  “But this woman caller never referenced the murder?” Steele asked.

  “Not directly but—”

  “Wait!”

  Tooki had spoken, so much louder than his normal near-whisper that everyone stared at him. Tooki rifled through the pages on his clipboard then looked up. “A woman called our tip line yesterday and left the same verse. Here it is. Anonymous call, 10:15 a.m. ‘Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.’”

  “She’s not going to turn him in. She’s a minister’s wife,” Cam said.

  “That doesn’t mean she can’t feel frustrated, sad, or angry,” Emily said. “She might be doing it because she’s had enough but doesn’t feel she can confront him. Classic passive-aggressive.” She looked at Louis. “You’re the only one who’s talked to her. Did you get that vibe from her?”

  Louis nodded. “I got the sense that she’s lonely. And that she knows more about her husband than she’s willing to admit, maybe even to herself.”

  Violet’s voice was in Louis’s head. When you have no words of your own, the Lord will provide.

  “Okay,” Steele said, tossing his pen on the table. “This is what we’re going to do.” He looked around the table, his gaze stopping on Cam. “Tuyen Lang belongs to you. You’ll have her case file by tomorrow and I want you to go through everything GRPD put together and then start digging on your own. Track her clothes, groceries, anything that might have been purchased by Prince on his credit cards. Find a connection between them.”

  “Got it,” Cam said.

  “Tooki, Emily,” Steele sa
id. “I want you working on all the background you can get on Violet.”

  Louis knew where this was going. And where he was going—right back to Violet Prince.

  “Louis, you already have a rapport with Violet Prince,” Steele said. “I need you to find out what she knows. All right, that’s it.”

  The others were moving toward their desks. Louis remained seated, thinking while it was his idea to talk to Violet, and that it was a primo assignment, a part of him wasn’t looking forward to it. A part of him felt it was . . . cruel.

  “Louis.”

  Steele was staring at him. There was a softness in Steele’s face, and Louis thought he might be getting ready to drop a compliment about the long day’s good work.

  “Anthony Prince’s entire life is about to come crashing down around him,” Steele said. “Once that happens, he may panic and turn violent. He might hurt someone else.”

  “I understand,” Louis said.

  “You have one shot at Violet,” Steele said. “Make it your best.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  When Louis got to the church at 7:30 the next morning, Emily’s report on Violet was there waiting for him on his desk. Emily was there, too, arms folded, head down on her own desk, fast asleep. Louis suspected she had been there all night working to get the report done.

  He decided not to wake her and slipped out. He drove to the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts and ordered two sprinkle donuts and a large black coffee, intending to kill some time reading the file. If Anthony stuck to his usual routine, he wouldn’t leave his house until 8:45 a.m., and Louis wanted to make sure Violet was alone when he confronted her.

  Confronted . . .

  That wasn’t the right word, of course. If he was going to flip her, he had to tread carefully because they had no proof that she was the one who had called Bushman and the tip line, and by all appearances she didn’t seem like an aggrieved wife. But then, you never knew what dark currents flowed below the surface of a marriage or in the heart of a woman.

  Louis opened the file and began to read.

  Violet had been born in Vandalia, a small town an hour and half south of Grand Rapids. Her father James Tripp was the pastor of the Community Church of God, and her mother died when Violet was twelve. Emily hadn’t found much on the Tripp family, other than Violet was a steady presence at her father’s side in the church. One interesting fact struck him: Violet’s great-great-grandfather had worked closely with the local Quakers who harbored slaves on the Underground Railroad, which ran through southwestern Michigan to Canada from 1840 to 1850.