“We’ll talk about this later,” he smiled.
Karen felt a cold chill wash through her. Alex stood there a moment longer, as if nothing had happened, then finally turned to where Jason was still doubled over, his arms wrapped around his stomach. Alex laced his fingers into Jason’s hair, pulled him up, and then yanked his head down again as he brought his knee up hard. Karen heard a sickening crack just before Jason toppled sideways to the floor.
Alex walked unhurriedly to the door, the few people in his path backing away to give him room. The other doorman just stood there and watched him coming. It was clear he wanted no part of Stromberg. He stepped away like everyone else and Alex just walked past him.
• • •
Drinks and a floor show, Vince thought. He watched the big useless fuck at the entrance finally get himself unstuck and go to help the other big useless fuck who was still down on the floor. Vince had tracked Karen on a couple of occasions by now but it had always been at a discreet distance, and up until tonight he’d never been able to put her together with where she worked. It had only taken a couple of days to find out, not that it was any great achievement. There weren’t a lot of bars in Strothwood, and this was the one that seemed to have the most activity and the biggest parking lot. The first night he’d been in she hadn’t been there, but that had been a few days ago and he’d figured any of the bars would need at least two or three visits to be sure she worked there.
Now she was moving out from behind the bar and Vince got a closer look at the rest of the body that went with the beautiful face and the arresting bust line. No wonder Tommy had been so fucked up. Vince had been with a few women since he’d gotten out, but nothing and no one like she was. Her hair was dark, almost black, cut severely short and framing an angular face, high cheekbones and full lips. She was wearing jeans and a tight blue nylon t-shirt with a scoop neck, everything calculated to keep the tips coming.
She and the other bouncer leaned over the guy on the floor, finally turned him gently onto his back and then struggled to get him to his feet. The kid looked conscious but dazed. There was blood smeared all over his face so Vince couldn’t tell if his nose was broken or if he’d taken the knee under his chin and his teeth had rammed up into his tongue. Then a few people, mostly girls, closed in around them and Vince lost sight of what was going on.
Floor shows were good, kept the locals from remembering strangers. Vince hadn’t been that worried anyway. The place was SRO tonight, and he hadn’t been the only guy who was watching her. It was more a question of who wasn’t.
He shook himself back into the present. He didn’t know the place well enough to know whether they’d call the cops about something like this, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to hang around to find out.
The waitresses were all gravitating to the bar, making sure the kid was all right and fussing over him. That boy’s going to get fucked tonight, Vince thought, nothing like a little blood to get ’em turned on. Vince still had half a beer left but he set it on the narrow shelf running along the wall behind him, pushed himself up off the stool. Picking up a DUI at this stage of the game would be even dumber than his mistake with the Miata.
Impulse control be damned. If he was going to take that kind of chance again it would be with Karen. If Tommy had never met her he’d still be alive.
37
Edith Springer wasn’t sure what woke her up, but she suddenly came out of a decent sleep with her heart pounding like a trip-hammer. She turned on her side and squinted at the cheap digital alarm clock on the nightstand. It was the middle of the night, and she had to be up for work at seven am. It sounded like Karen and her boyfriend were fighting again and she was sick of it. Past experience told her she’d be lucky to get back to sleep at all.
Karen was a nice girl and Edith liked her, but her man was nothing but trouble. It seemed like they fought all the time, and they fought loud. Not so much Karen, but the man. He had a deep, coarse voice, and some of the language that came out of his mouth – Edith was getting angry just thinking about it.
The last thing Edith wanted to do was get Karen in trouble with the landlord, but if this kept up she’d have to. Edith was in her late sixties now, shouldn’t be working at all but she didn’t have a choice, was lucky she still had her health and was able to do it. She was a waitress in the truck stop up on the highway, and if she kept showing up for work tired out and half asleep it would just give that asshole manager an excuse to fire her. Ninety percent of the customers were men, and the manager liked the waitresses young and cute, even if some of them didn’t know what they were doing. Edith knew the customers liked them that way too, even though after all these years she’d built up a following of her own, a lot of them people who’d been coming in for years and made a point of finding her section.
Edith and Karen didn’t see much of each other, partly because of the difference in their ages and partly because Karen kept really late hours because of her job. She was a nice girl, always had a smile for her, and Edith remembered a couple of times when she’d helped Edith struggle up the stairs with her groceries. About the only thing Edith didn’t like about Karen was her boyfriend, but that wasn’t any of her business anyway. Edith had two grown daughters of her own, both a little younger than Karen and gone away now, and she knew that young women usually didn’t appreciate unsolicited observations about their boyfriends. Her private opinion was that Karen could do better.
Edith thought that Karen was too nice a person to just stand up to this guy and tell him to shape up or ship out. Maybe Edith had been too nice too. Any number of times before when they’d had one of these rows Edith would just lie there in bed waiting for them to end so she could get to sleep. The trouble with that was that Karen finished work late and if there was going to be a fight it usually wouldn’t start until two-thirty or three in the morning. The walls in the apartment building were paper-thin and Edith could make out enough of what was being said to decide that the guy had a huge drinking problem and was jealous to boot.
To hell with it, Edith thought. Maybe it was time she forgot about being nice and did both herself and Karen a favor. She forced herself out of bed and reached for her housecoat, then went to her own door and opened it just in time to see Karen’s boyfriend turn away from Karen’s door and stalk down the hallway. She’d forgotten how big he was, but she’d only seen him a couple of times and then usually when she looked out the window and saw the two of them out in the parking lot.
Good, Edith thought, he’s gone. She thought this even though sleep to her was a rare commodity and she’d actually been sleeping soundly for once when all this started. Edith was a kind person and she thought of going to comfort Karen but she was still half-asleep and just too tired. She was still really mad, too, but whatever the fight had been about it wouldn’t have been Karen’s fault. It looked like they were done fighting for tonight, maybe for good. She could always hope. She wasn’t angry at Karen – a lot of women made bad choices in men. Maybe now she was done with this one and she could find one who treated her right.
38
“Is she all right?”
Raycroft followed Wagner’s questioning look to where Kelly Randall was sitting with her back against the wall. She wasn’t making a sound but her head was down and Wagner could see a slight, spasmodic heaving of her shoulders.
“Yeah,” Raycroft said finally. “She knew her from somewhere, that’s all.”
That’s all, Wagner thought, no big deal. Just walked into an apartment and saw someone she knew dead. He felt bad for Randall. He didn’t know her well but he didn’t think she’d appreciate solicitude on his part, at least not in front of her fellow cops. He doubted Raycroft was feeling too great either, but he’d felt no sudden urge to comfort him. Besides, he had work to do.
“In there.” Raycroft waved a hand in the general direction of the bedroom, made no effort to go inside himself. Wagner remembered that in spite of his bulk and experience Raycroft was on the squeami
sh side. Wagner just nodded. The door to the bedroom was partially open, but there was no sign of a break-in. He didn’t bother thinking about it. He was an M.E., not a detective, the conventions of old TV dramas notwithstanding.
For some reason Wagner had expected to see the girl’s body on the bed, but instead he nearly stepped on her outstretched hand as he went through the door. He looked down, saw her sightless brown eyes staring back up at him, her beautiful face contorted in a rictus of recent horror and her head canted at an impossible angle along one shoulder. She was naked except for an oversized grey Penn State football jersey.
“What do you think, Doc?”
Wagner looked up, startled. Brent Williams was standing on the far side of the bed, as if he’d been trying to stay as far away as he could from the body but still be in the room.
“I just got here,” Wagner told him.
You didn’t need a medical degree to see what had killed her. The cause of death was probably just as obvious to Brent Williams as it was to him. Wagner had already seen all he needed to see, at least until he got her into the morgue. There might be other wounds but Wagner didn’t want to subject the poor thing to the indignity of even a cursory examination in front of Brent or anyone else, not here. His probing fingers on her neck had been enough.
“What kind of animal ….?” Brent growled.
Spare me, Wagner thought. If Brent wanted to express righteous outrage Wagner didn’t need to hear it.
• • •
“You okay, kid?”
Kelly looked up, saw the massive form of Jimmy Slade towering over her.
“Yeah, Jimmy.” She felt sheepish, embarrassed. “Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” the EMT shrugged, “except that poor little girl in there. You don’t have to be a hard case for me, babe.”
She managed a small, grateful smile. Jimmy had positioned himself so that he blocked her from the view of anyone else in the hallway. Maybe it had been deliberate, maybe not, but at least she wouldn’t be exposed to the usual sexist bullshit from the handful of cops milling around in the corridor. She looked up at him. Six-four or six-five, black, had to be over three hundred pounds, looked scary as hell unless he smiled the way he was smiling at her now.
“You should have been the cop, Jimmy, not me.”
“Fuck that. There aren’t that many brothers in town and I’m related to at least half of them. Better off where I am. I want to take care of folks, not shoot ’em.” He glanced back at the door to Karen Dennison’s apartment. “Too bad I can’t do anything for her.”
She used his turn away from her to dab at her eyes. He turned back in time to catch her at it, didn’t react at all. She tilted her face up for inspection.
“I look okay, Jimmy?”
“Hell yeah,” he smiled, “like nothin’ ever happened.”
Dr. Wagner showed up beside Jimmy and tapped him on the shoulder.
“You can take her now,” he said.
“Okay, Doc,” Jimmy told him.
Wagner was already walking down the hallway. Jimmy glanced down at Kelly.
“Gotta go.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
She dug out her notebook and went to see the neighbor lady.
39
Stromberg was slouched against the wall in the hallway, his eyes fixed in a thousand yard stare. Brent glanced reproachfully at Raycroft on the way down the hall. Raycroft should have been joined to Stromberg at the hip, but instead he was just standing around in the hallway of the apartment building. He’d left one of the junior officers to keep an eye on Stromberg, one of the two young replacements Brent had hired. The boy was in his early twenties, a big strong kid named Scofield, but from what Brent had seen so far he wasn’t ready to be left alone with anybody. Raycroft was senior to everybody on the force except Brent, and he should have figured that out for himself.
“So,” Brent prompted Stromberg, “the two of you had a fight last night, she comes back here by herself and you just went home, is that right?”
“Yeah.”
Stromberg’s voice was a low monotone, his eyes never wavering from a fixed spot on the scarred wall of the hallway.
“Then you came back here this morning to kiss and make up,” Brent saw an infinitesimal flicker of anger spark in Stromberg’s eyes, “and she doesn’t answer her door so you let yourself in and you find her dead on the floor. And then you called 911.”
“Yeah.”
Brent stared at him for a long moment, but Stromberg was out of it. Either he was telling the truth or he was a hell of an actor. He thought he could see tears glistening at the corners of Stromberg’s eyes. Somebody like Stromberg in this situation, normally he’d want him cuffed, but Stromberg was a mess, all the life sucked out of him. Still, it wasn’t his first rodeo. If he saw cuffs coming out he’d yowl for a lawyer and clam up. Better to keep him the way he was and if he had actually done this maybe he’d let something slip. Brent turned his head, glared at Raycroft again. Raycroft finally got the message and sidled a few feet closer.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” Brent told Raycroft, went next door to where Kelly was interviewing Edith Springer. Everybody on the force knew Edith, if not by name then by sight. The truck stop she worked at was a frequent stop for all of them, a place to get a decent cup of coffee and usually one of the first places they went looking for runaways.
The door to Edith’s was partly ajar, and he was just about to go in when he nearly ran into Kelly on the way out. She backed up a step, then motioned him through to where Edith was crying her eyes out in the tiny living room. Kelly went over and sat down beside the woman, put an arm around her.
“Edith,” she said softly, “tell Chief Williams what you just told me.”
Brent was trying to remember when he’d last seen Edith, realized it had probably been at least a couple of months. He didn’t spend much time in patrol cars anymore, but he’d been on the force more than twenty years and he’d known Edith longer than that, going back to when he’d been running around town as a high school kid and she’d been working in one of the local diners, long before they’d built the truck stop out on the highway. She’d still been a good looking woman then, good looking enough to be the subject of some teenage fantasies, including his own. Now she was sitting here in a dingy one bedroom apartment wearing a threadbare dressing gown and old slippers, unkempt graying hair framing a lined, kindly face that practically defined the failure of dreams.
Brent waited patiently while the woman tried to stifle her tears, her skinny shoulders heaving with the effort. Then something passed across her face and she looked up at Brent.
“I saw him,” she said, and her voice was hard with certainty, “the man out there, her boyfriend. The walls in here, they’re thin, and I heard them arguing and I need my sleep and I was just going out of my door to get them to stop and he was already leaving. I saw him going down the stairs.”
Brent didn’t catch Kelly’s warning look.
“Did you go to see Karen afterward?” he asked.
“No,” Edith told him, her eyes welling again with tears. “I should have, I’m a stupid old woman. I could have called the ambulance, I should have done something.”
Her voice trailed off and she leaned into Kelly and buried her face in Kelly’s shoulder.
“You couldn’t have done anything, Edith,” Brent said. “She was already gone.”
He left them there on the couch, went out the door and back down the hallway to where Stromberg was still slouched against the wall. He brushed past Scofield and Raycroft, got right up in Stromberg’s face.
“We’ve got a problem here, Alex.” It was a struggle to keep his voice under control. “The problem is that you were here last night, not just this morning. Someone heard a commotion coming from Karen’s apartment last night and then saw you leaving and going right down those stairs over there.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“They say it was.”
“That’s a fucking lie. I’d never hurt her.”
He’s even tearing up again, Brent thought. You have to be good to pull that off. Raycroft and Kelly Randall had been the ones who’d first responded to the 911 call, and they’d found Stromberg whimpering on the floor beside Karen Dennison’s body. They both knew all about Stromberg’s temper, had probably seen it firsthand in one scuffle or another, and even with all that they’d been totally taken in. Hell, the act had even been working on Brent until he’d talked to Edith Springer.
“You know what I think, Alex?”
Stromberg didn’t answer.
“Karen Dennison was a beautiful young woman and you’re a jealous fucking sonofabitch. I think you thought she was fucking somebody else and you just lost it and killed her.”
Stromberg went incandescent in a heartbeat. He launched himself at Brent, his right fist driving upward into Brent’s chin and snapping Brent’s head back against the wall. Brent was already out when the combined weight of Raycroft and Scofield drove Stromberg to the floor on top of him.
40
Henry Whittaker spent a lot of time at his cottage in the summer. It was an easy commute from town and his usual routine was to set his own hours, come in to the office on his own schedule. Everybody knew how to reach him when they needed to. The work got done, and it got done on his terms.
He’d been driving back toward town when the call came in and the bottom fell out of his heart. Annika, the young woman Henry anachronistically referred to as his secretary, had been completely unaware of his interest in Karen Dennison and she’d done no more to soften the news than she would have done with anyone else.
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