by Sydney Bauer
2
Twenty minutes later
‘Jesus, McKay,’ said Joe Mannix as he slammed the door of his police-issue sedan and met an overcoated Detective Frank McKay, who stood shivering on the Back Bay sidewalk before him. ‘You look like a freaking Eskimo.’
‘It's one below, Chief, and that's without factoring in the wind chill.’
They were doing it again, Joe knew, falling into the familiar banter that seemed to help dissociate them from the scenes they were forced to view.
‘I know that, Frank,’ said Joe, pricking up his ears to a new sound that seemed to follow them as they walked toward the commotion at the other end of the street.
Joe stopped short. ‘What's that noise?’ He looked at McKay's feet. ‘What the hell are you wearing, Frank?’
‘Golf shoes.’
‘Golf shoes?’ Joe shook his head before picking up the pace again. ‘Did the call from HQ interrupt your midnight putting session? Why are they clicking like that?’
‘Because of the studs.’
‘What studs?’
‘The studs on the soles. They help you grip when you swing. Last winter I slipped on the ice on a late night job just like this one and did my back in. I had to wear one of those tight-fitting corsets for close to six weeks.’
‘And there I was thinking you'd just lost weight,’ said Joe, unable to think of a better response to his partner's ramblings.
‘If only,’ replied Frank as they finally reached the house that was the focus of all the attention.
Joe showed his badge to the rookie who lifted the yellow police tape for them to pass through.
*
It looked as though the narrow brownstone was configured in the usual manner – a right-hand side corridor which, if you chose not to take the too-steep staircase to the second floor bedrooms and bathrooms up above, led you on a course to the sitting room and living area and courtyard-facing kitchen located way down back. This place was pricey, especially given its location, Boston's Back Bay being second only to Beacon Hill when it came to the number of zeros hanging off the dollar sign. Its decor suggested it belonged to a younger couple who had made their way ‘in’ but did not yet have the capital to accessorise ‘up’. It said, ‘starting out’ not ‘done and dusted’, which, when Joe thought about it, made matters all the worse.
‘Nice tux,’ said a voice at the bottom of the stairs.
‘O'Donnell,’ said Joe to the middle-aged cop he'd known for close to two decades. ‘Congrats on making Captain.’ Joe shook O'Donnell's outstretched hand.
‘Thanks, Deputy Superintendent.’ O'Donnell had always been a stickler for protocol, his off-duty hours being the only ones during which he would call Joe by his first name.
O'Donnell gestured for them to follow him up the stairs, all three keeping to the right as a barrage of fingerprint experts and various other crime scene specialists moved down beside them on their left.
‘The vic is a two-month-old baby girl, name of Eliza Walker,’ said O'Donnell as they reached the narrow landing. ‘Mom is Sienna Walker, twenty-nine, homemaker.’
‘And the father?’ asked Frank.
‘Deceased – James Walker, thirty-two, died in a car accident just before the kid was born.’
Frank shook his head. ‘The Walkers are having a good year then,’ he said.
‘Looks like,’ replied O'Donnell, as Frank shook his head once again.
‘The husband's accident on our watch?’ asked Joe, not meaning to dismiss the obvious depth of the Walkers' tragedy but knowing it was his job to keep on top of all the details. Joe did not recall a fatal collision involving any James Walker, which was unusual given Homicide was usually called to all losses of life as a matter of protocol – even those deemed accidental.
‘No. Walker's Beemer head-butted an eighteen wheeler on Highway 1, just north of Baltimore. The truck driver says Walker drifted over to his side of the road. Coroner found Walker must have fallen asleep at the wheel.’
Joe nodded, gesturing toward the bedroom door. ‘That the kid's room?’
‘Yep,’ replied O'Donnell, squeezing his back against the wall as a lighting technician moved past with another transportable.
‘Someone blew the wire for the electricity supply at the top back end of the house before they took the kid. We have an electrician working on it now.’
Joe's dark brown eyes met O'Donnell's. ‘This was an abduction?’ he asked, glancing left to Frank who also shrugged in confusion. ‘The brief from HQ suggested it was a homicide.’
‘It was both.’
‘You don't have a body?’
O'Donnell shook his head.
‘So how do you know the kid was …?’
But O'Donnell gestured for Joe and Frank to follow him.
‘I feel bad,’ said O'Donnell to Joe, ‘dragging you away from the party you must have been enjoying to attend a call like this.’
And Joe had two mental responses to O'Donnell's comment, the first one of self-admonishment given he knew he had no right to feel relieved by an alert from HQ no matter how many peacocks were rubbing him the wrong way at the fancy black tie event, and the second being that there was no need for O'Donnell's apology given Joe, in his twenty-five years on the force, had effectively seen it all.
But then he and Frank rounded the doorway into the kid's now well-lit bedroom, and Joe understood, that at least on the second count, he was wrong.
*
‘The perp cut her throat,’ said Joe, focusing on the blood-soaked pillow in the small whitewashed cot. The spatter was everywhere, over the cot and on the walls. There was also a pool of it soaking into the plush cream carpet, as if someone had lifted the child while it was bleeding and held it still for a while.
O'Donnell nodded. ‘Looks like.’
Joe took off his jacket and handed it to a uniform standing by the door, feeling suddenly hot, uncomfortable, claustrophobic.
‘Did you call the ME?’ asked a paler-faced Frank. It was a good question. Medical examiners were usually called in to examine the victim, but they were also incredibly useful even when there was no body, given their experience with matters such as blood loss and other anatomical clues left behind.
‘Svenson is running late,’ said O'Donnell, referring to Boston's Chief Medical Examiner, the Swedish-born Gus Svenson. ‘He was headed up to New Hampshire to go fishing for the weekend but in the end we called him back.’
Joe nodded. ‘And the K9s?’ he asked, guessing an experienced cop like O'Donnell had already thought to call the dog squad.
‘They're on their way. If there's a body nearby they'll find it.’
Joe nodded again before stepping over a crime lab tech who was swapping brushes in his fingerprint kit. He moved to the centre of the crowded space, his eyes scanning the meticulously painted pale-pink walls and the yellow and white ducks that circumnavigated the room in some sort of stencilling. He looked down at the white skirting, up again toward the blue fish mobile that hung above the meticulously arranged change table, across to the white laminate dresser with drawer handles the shape of sunflowers, and over toward a pink and white-striped armchair with two matching teddy bears cuddling softly in its seat.
‘The girl an only child?’ asked Joe, trying to get a take on how a slaughter such as this could have happened without anyone hearing. His eyes were drawn to the copious amounts of blood, figuring if the baby was only two months old, she must have completely bled out.
‘Yes,’ said O'Donnell. ‘The mom and dad had only been married a year.’
‘No nanny?’ he asked.
‘No nanny,’ repeated O'Donnell.
‘Does anyone else have a key to the house?’
‘Just a housekeeper – the mom said she was here earlier today, but that she left at four.’
Joe moved to the window, the screen attached to it was slightly ajar. ‘He came through here,’ he said as he poked his head out the window to see three more evidence experts now collecti
ng whatever they could from the fire escape.
‘Looks like,’ responded O'Donnell. ‘The guy brings a screwdriver, removes the screen, climbs in, kills the kid, and takes her back out the same way. I told our guys to keep a lookout for the missing screws down below.’
Joe nodded, staring at the empty screw holes at three corners of the screen. ‘The mom hear anything at all?’
O'Donnell shook his head. ‘No. Says her daughter was a bad sleeper so mom takes a dive when baby crashes. Says her body was on the baby's clock though, so when she didn't wake for a feed at around eleven-thirty she went in to check.’
‘The lights working at that point?’ asked Frank.
‘No.’
Joe looked to the dust-covered light switch on the wall near the door and pointed. ‘Your guys been playing with that?’ he asked O'Donnell.
O'Donnell shook his head. ‘Not my guys. When Mrs Walker told us the lights weren't working I gave the command not to touch the switch until fingerprints got here.’
Joe nodded, grateful for O'Donnell's diligence. ‘They pick up a print?’
‘Not a one. If the perp cut the power he had no use for the switch. If he checked it by flicking it, he must have wiped it good.’
Joe nodded once again, storing the detail in his brain. ‘So the mom wakes up and goes to the cot to check on the kid … and then she sees she's missing.’
‘No,’ contradicted O'Donnell. ‘It's so dark she can't see squat, so she goes by instinct, reaches down to pick her up.’
Joe ran his hand through his thick brown hair. ‘So the bloody prints on the cot are the mom's,’ he said, gesturing at the cot railing.
‘Looks like,’ repeated O'Donnell for what seemed like the umpteenth time before pointing toward the floor. ‘And the barefoot prints on the carpet.’
Joe had noticed these on entry – they spoke of disorientation and panic and fear. ‘The mom up to talking?’ he asked, knowing, as difficult as the process was going to be, speaking with Sienna Walker was their immediate priority.
‘She gave us what she could when we arrived, but she was distressed so her doctor arrived and took her downstairs for a spell.’ O'Donnell gestured for them to follow him outside the room.
‘This woman loses her husband and her baby in the space of a few months,’ said Frank as they weaved their way around the technicians who moved silently, heads downcast, around little Eliza Walker's room. ‘Two tragedies like that – it's enough to kill a person.’
‘Looks like,’ repeated O'Donnell once again. ‘Looks like.’
3
Roger Katz had a brand new car.
The Suffolk County District Attorney had traded in his red corvette for a black Audi S5 convertible which said successful but conservative – but conservative in a good sense, not in a narrow-minded, die-hard Republican sense. This was Massachusetts after all.
Katz lived a mere ten-minute walk from the historical Taj Hotel on the upmarket Arlington Street, the venue for the fundraiser he had just ‘worked’ with seemingly effortless professionalism. In fact, he could have walked to his Copley Place apartment faster than he drove considering the traffic and the one way streets. But tonight he had decided to valet the Audi so people would see him arriving and leaving, giving them an eyeful of the prestigious vehicle which Katz saw as a fitting metaphor for his rise through the ranks of the Suffolk County DA's office – an office which, as of about two years ago, he was officially in charge.
Katz turned the key in the ignition and revved the engine just enough to catch the attention of the Mayor, who was waiting in the valet queue behind Katz with his homely-looking wife. The Mayor waved and Katz returned the gesture before applying that little extra pressure on the accelerator with his shiny Italian brogue, giving evidence of the car's impressive responsiveness – 0 to 60 in 5.2 seconds, or so the brochure had claimed.
He turned on the radio and flicked through the airwaves until he found one of those monotonous but useful 24-hour-a-day news stations. He was actually hoping to hear his own sound bites – victory comments he'd made on the steps of the Superior Court earlier this afternoon after a successful conviction in a high-profile rape case (comments he had since caught on the radio and TV several times), but all he got was a newsflash about the possible abduction of some baby from a house in Back Bay – just blocks from where he now sat in traffic, at the corner of Arlington and Newbury.
An abduction, he thought, the slightest of smiles now creeping across his freshly shaven face. There was nothing better than an abduction to titillate the press and enhance the reputation of the prosecutor involved, in the eyes of the media and the public.
Of course, he was somewhat miffed that the detectives who had obviously been called to the scene had not yet had the courtesy to fill him in on the particulars. In years past, when he was Assistant District Attorney, he would have been on to this like a spider on a fly. But now that he was top dog he could afford the luxury of that fraction of distance. He now had the power to hand pick the prosecutions he wanted for himself in any case – something he always did when an advantageous crime walked through his door.
So he resisted the temptation to ‘chase the ambulance’ – to show up uninvited and attend the scene unannounced – partly because any reporters who had caught the call on the police wires could interpret his presence at this early stage as grandstanding, and Katz knew that the best grandstanders grandstood subtly, and partly because experience had taught him that abductions often turned out to be non-events in any case, given they were usually a matter of some disgruntled divorced parent having borrowed the kid for a night. No, Katz would wait until he had been officially informed of the details of the case which, if it ticked all the boxes for his own stringent criteria for personal involvement, he would commandeer and prosecute, taking advantage of a stroke of luck that would guarantee him vote building media coverage leading up to his re-election in the later part of the year.
I hope the kid is young – and cute: the next logical thought entered his consciousness as he buzzed open the heavy alloy gates which secured the upmarket apartment building both for himself and for his new Audi S5. If there was one thing DA Katz had learnt in his years as the county's most aggressive prosecutor, it was that appearances were everything, and kids equalled sympathy, and sympathy equalled victory, and victory equalled power in his current position and beyond.
4
‘Coincidence is God's way of staying anonymous.’
It was something Frank would come out with, but Albert Einstein's little piece of wisdom was the first thought that entered Joe Mannix's mind when he moved into Sienna Walker's sparsely decorated living room – that, and the age-old cop's mantra that there was no such thing as a coincidence, that everything happened for a reason, and most things by design.
‘Deputy Superintendent Mannix.’ Daniel Hunt was on his feet, gliding across the rectangular-shaped living room with purpose. Hunt gave Joe a firm handshake – one of those low ones that forced the recipient to take a step forward so that the conversation became private. ‘We're glad you're here,’ he said.
‘We're?’ asked Joe, taking in the other dinner suit now sitting almost too close to the white-faced, blood-smeared, blonde woman who sat straight-backed and still on the sofa.
‘Myself and Mrs Walker's personal physician, Dr Richard Davenport,’ Hunt gestured toward a blonde man behind him.
Joe nodded, not sure what he was supposed to make of the scene before him. ‘Well, this is …’ he began.
‘A horrible coincidence, us meeting again so soon.’ Hunt shook his head. ‘I know, and while I am sorry you were dragged from the fundraiser to be here, I could not be happier to see you. You see, I am aware of your reputation in this city, Deputy Superintendent – your record for diligence, thoroughness, fairness – and I don't like doing business with people I cannot trust.’
Doing business. ‘I'm not here to buy a corporate portfolio, Mr Hunt.’
‘No, but you come h
ighly recommended.’
‘Like a good bottle of wine?’ returned Joe.
‘Like a man who can be reasoned with,’ Hunt said, ignoring Joe's sarcasm. ‘Who listens to the truth and acts on it.’
Joe took the slightest of steps backwards, Hunt's dark eyes never leaving his own.
‘Maybe I'm just slow, Mr Hunt, but you'd be doing me – and my partner here,’ Joe tilted his head toward Frank, ‘a huge favour if you slowed down and started from the beginning.’
Hunt nodded. ‘What would you like to know?’
‘What you are doing here for starters.’
Joe looked toward the sofa once again. A dog barked and the woman shivered. The K9s had arrived.
‘I've known Mrs Walker for the past eighteen months,’ said Hunt, a subtle transfer of his weight acting to block Joe's view of the woman in question. ‘Her husband, Jim Walker, was an employee of mine. Professionally he was one of the best in the business, Deputy Superintendent, and personally, a very good friend.’
‘You were his boss.’
‘His friend, as I said,’ replied Hunt, pressing the point. ‘His recent death was a tragedy. He died undertaking a job for me. Sienna was pregnant at the time, and as such, since the accident, I have tried to make things as easy as possible for her and her daughter given she has no family in the country.’
‘She has no relations in the US?’
‘None. Sienna is British. Her parents are deceased, as are Jim's parents.’
Joe took in how well informed this man was on the Walkers' situation. ‘So you are …?’
‘Friends,’ he said, this time referring to Sienna Walker.
Joe began to wonder just what kind of friendship theirs was. ‘Did Mrs Walker ask you to be here?’
‘Not as such. I came by to check on her after the fundraiser.’
‘You came to check on her at what … 11.30 pm?’
‘Yes. I live in Beacon Hill. Sienna's house is on my way home. I thought she might be up as Eliza tended to wake a number of times throughout the night.’
Joe considered the timing of Hunt's story, given that when he himself got the call from HQ, Hunt was still on the dance floor with his best friend's wife.