Perish

by Lisa Black

  E-mails were routine. She had both a business account and a personal one. The recent business communications consisted of a lunch order and the current Sterling stock prices, a daily newsletter of changes and updates in federal and Ohio laws and regulations. Her last e-mail from Joanna simply asked for a “fact sheet” regarding a possible expansion in New Mexico. Nothing that waved a red flag, nothing that indicated a motive for murder. Nothing that told Maggie why someone had come into Tyra Simmons’s home to brutalize her.

  Maggie’s processing had reached the bathroom, the most intimate place in a person’s home. It didn’t reveal any dire secrets either. A few indications of a male presence remained—a bottle of aftershave in a drawer, a pair of boxers much too big for the slender Tyra at the bottom of the laundry basket—but they didn’t seem consistent or permanent. A boyfriend but definitely not one up to live-in status yet. Tyra’s only prescription meds were birth control pills; otherwise her medicine cabinet held Advil, cough drops, and Band-Aids. Maggie shut the mirrored door to see Jack’s reflection staring back at her.

  “Jeez!”

  “Find anything interesting?” he asked.

  “Nothing. Tyra seemed to be a sweet, hardworking girl.”

  He grimaced. “Yeah, unfortunately what she worked on is incomprehensible to mortal man.”

  Maggie turned her back on him and opened her fingerprint kit. She brushed black powder across the porcelain sink, on the off chance that the killer had used it to clean up.

  “We’re going to talk to the ratings guy,” Jack said, leaning over her shoulder to peer at Tyra’s cosmetics before retreating to the doorway. “Swift alleges bribery, says Carter & Poe have to be in on it.”

  Nothing useable on the sink. She moved on to the tub.

  “You think the killer did a Lizzie Borden? Killed Tyra in the nude, and then took a shower?”

  “I doubt it. It’s hard to wash blood off in a snow-white bathroom without leaving some trace. And he’d still have to get from her body downstairs to here without a trail, so no.” She continued to brush powder, though, “just in case.” Cops were huge on “just in case.” “Swift has a point about the rater.”

  “How so?”

  “Mortgage companies like Sterling have customers’ deposits like banks, so they use short-term funds, uninsured funds, money market, pension funds, and interbank lending overnights.”

  “Mearan mentioned overnights,” Jack said.

  “The collateral for those funds can be mortgage-backed securities—the tranches Lauren described. The ratings agencies weren’t keeping pace with these very complicated funds so their value started to falter when the housing market finally saturated and prices began to fall instead of skyrocket. Suddenly everyone realized that they didn’t really know what their securities were worth. If you know something is worth zero, you know what to do. But if you don’t know what it’s worth, you’re paralyzed. If the economy is an engine, credit is the gas. The banks began to refuse credit to other banks and the investment banks were stuck with money going out but none coming in. They tried to sell the collateral, the mortgage-backed securities, but when everyone was trying to unload them the value fell even further. It was like realizing there’s a bee in your car. All you can do is bail out. So everyone bailed out.”

  “And the world fell apart,” Jack finished.

  “But if credit is the gasoline, liquidity, that is, cash, is the oil. Without it, the engine seizes. That’s why banks have to keep a certain amount of cash on hand for just such emergencies. But because of categories of certain funds—I won’t even get into all that—about every institution in the country didn’t have the cash reserves they should have had. Everything froze. The economy can handle inflation, it can handle deflation, it can handle stock crashes. But it can’t just stop. People lost jobs, retirement accounts, and homes.” She lifted a palm print from the edge of the tub; it probably belonged to Tyra, unless their killer had small, delicate hands, like his victim. “Houses are extremely illiquid assets. Unlike crashed stocks they take a long time to clean up. They can’t sit there until the value comes back up like your share of Apple.com. They have to be maintained, cleaned, the grass cut, etcetera. So kicking all the loan defaulters out of them only created new problems. Banks still had no payments, and now they had a chunk of real estate that no one wanted.” She smoothed out the wide tape with the print on a glossy white card. “The scary thing is, at the start house values had only lost four percent. But when investors withdrew from risk and lenders from lending, they forced up costs and rates for entities that were perfectly stable with good credit, like auto and credit card loans, the ‘good’ prime mortgages, and so on. It became a big downward spiral so that by 2009 we’d lost 6.2 million jobs. No stopping the spiral then. We’re still recovering over ten years later. My point is—”

  “I was wondering.”

  “—that a good rating on a security isn’t a bonus, like getting a gold star from your teacher for extra credit. They are a globally accepted measure of a bond’s value. They’re important. And when they can’t be trusted, bad things happen.”

  She could feel his gaze boring into her back as she finished powdering the white porcelain. “How do you know all that?”

  “I read the papers,” she said gently. Cops had very tricky egos. One verbal misstep could make her working life difficult—which, where Jack was concerned, was already difficult enough.

  Jack said nothing while she gathered her equipment and closed up her fingerprint kit. Then he asked, “Maggie, who played in the Super Bowl this year?”

  She blinked at him in bewilderment. “I don’t know. Why?” “Just checking.” A corner of his mouth flicked upward, which in Jack passed for a smile.

  But a moment later a sudden wail made them both start; it sounded as if a wounded animal had been set afire. “What—?”

  Jack turned away. “Sounds like the family has arrived.”

  Chapter 12

  Someone at Sterling had been close enough to Tyra to alert her parents, who had rushed to her home with various siblings on their heels. There is no good way to learn that your child is dead, but standing on that child’s front lawn in the harsh light of a beautiful summer day while her eviscerated body cools inside had to be one of the worst. Her mother collapsed onto the grass, sobbing. Her husband slumped more gradually, but joined her there. Two sisters did their best to physically envelop their parents while one of the brothers made a dash for the house, only to be caught by the emerging Jack. He restrained the strong young man without apparent effort, and Maggie could suddenly understand how he had dumped all those dead bodies single-handedly.

  She watched from the high window of Tyra’s bedroom, feeling like the coward she knew she was when it came to grieving family. Tyra had opened the window to the cool night air and now Maggie heard Jack say, “Do you want us to catch who did this? Then you have to let us do this right.” He guided the brother back to his family, now and forever minus one.

  Watching the sobbing group, Maggie couldn’t help but feel that between Tyra and Joanna, Tyra had been the lucky one. At least Tyra had had people in her life who cared deeply for her. Joanna’s circle hadn’t shed a single tear.

  Maggie turned away and went back to work, feeling not only guilty but ineffective. As at Joanna’s—although at Joanna’s it had been more difficult to tell because of the sheer lack of items present—nothing indicated that the killer had even entered the second floor. At both locations it appeared that the killer had entered the house without needing to break in, killed its occupant, and left again without either cleaning up or leaving a trail of blood out the door.

  How?

  Maggie returned to the body. Joanna’s house had been isolated in a thicket of trees and space that money could buy. She could have shouted for help all night and no one would have heard her, but Tyra lived in a tight neighborhood of cute homes with small yards. Only the one upstairs window had been open, but still, she must have screamed
as she fought her attacker, as he put deep gashes in her arms on the knife’s path to her chest. But if he had been smart, and focused, and learned from Joanna, that slice to her throat may have been his first. Take out the vocal chords and then he could work without fear of alerting the neighbors.

  Maggie still crouched next to the body when the Medical Examiner’s staff arrived.

  *

  Jack and Riley moved the family to the backyard, where Tyra had a small patio set in the shade of a maple tree. Obviously they couldn’t use the front porch, where anyone could look through the sheer curtains to see Tyra’s body. The budding leaves weren’t full yet, but the branches were better than nothing against the sunshine. The day grew even more humid and airless, or perhaps it only seemed that way. The dazed parents were settled in chairs, their children flanking them like overprotective Secret Service operatives. Riley opened his notebook and plunged in with the standard questions.

  No one had seen Tyra the evening before, but she had e-mailed one of her sisters around dinnertime and spoken with her mother around seven p.m.

  “She’d come by at least a few times a week,” her mother said, as her husband nodded in agreement. “We’d usually go shopping together on Saturdays. But we’d talk every day whether she stopped in or not.”

  Tyra had sounded tired and a bit stressed but had only said that work had been “crazy” that day and she couldn’t keep up with everything that was going on. “I took that to mean she had some project she didn’t think she could do, some deal where she had to check the laws in other states and she might miss one. Tyra never failed at anything but always thought she would. I told her she’d figure it out…. I always said that. I don’t suppose I paid a lot of attention; Tyra always got uptight when she didn’t have any cause to. I should have listened better.” The older woman abruptly burst into a geyser of self-recrimination.

  Her husband rubbed her back. “Not your fault. Tyra fussed about her job every day.”

  “But this time she said, ‘I don’t know, Mama. I don’t think this can be fixed,’” the woman wailed.

  “Do you know what she meant?” Riley asked, in his handling-the-family-gently voice.

  “No! I should have listened.”

  “I don’t think she liked that job,” one of the brothers offered. “But it paid well.”

  “What didn’t she like about it?”

  For some reason five members of the family turned to stare at the sixth, a sister a few years older than Tyra named Sophie.

  “What?” she squeaked.

  “She always talked to you about it,” her father said. “Did she tell you anything she didn’t tell us?”

  Sophie sighed, then explained to the detectives, “I’m a lawyer too, in-house counsel for AIG insurance. Tyra and I talked shop a lot, shooting the breeze most of the time. Sterling’s had some lawsuits over predatory lending and insurance companies always get sued, so we’d trade strategies sometimes.”

  “Anything specific? Recently?”

  Sophie appeared to make an effort to think. Jack could see the family resemblance between her and her pretty sibling. “She mentioned a case coming up, a guy named Kurt Resnick. He had taken out an ARM with a balloon payment and lost his shirt. His wife committed suicide. Tyra knew they’d lose in court—no jury is going to look at this grieving father of two and side with the evil corporation. But huge judgments are usually reduced or even vacated in appeal, so we talked about a plan for the second round, but … Tyra was too damn softhearted to be a lawyer. That’s why she went into white-collar stuff instead of trials, but still … it really wasn’t the job for her.”

  “She wanted to be like you,” her mother said softly.

  Sophie began to cry, and Riley moved to other questions to give her some time.

  They had no idea who could have meant Tyra harm. She had always been popular and sweet, beloved by everyone. She had an on-again off-again boyfriend she had met in law school. He worked at a firm downtown that handled estates and corporate law—nothing to do with mortgages or investment banks. “A very nice boy,” the mother said. “A player,” the father sniffed. The other sister rolled her eyes and said that the guy would run back to this controlling bitch of a girlfriend, then come crying to Tyra when it didn’t work out yet again. They had encouraged Tyra to end it once and for all and she would go out with other men, but never quite gave up on her ex-schoolmate. Someone without the backbone to stand up to the other woman seemed an unlikely candidate for this kind of slaughter, but Riley dutifully recorded the name of the controlling bitch girlfriend. Except that wouldn’t explain—

  “Do you know Joanna Moorehouse?”

  The men of the family looked blank. The other sister said, “I think that was the woman she worked for.” Sophie and her mother nodded. When asked what, if anything, Tyra had told them about Joanna, words spilled out.

  “She’d gotten filthy rich,” the mother said.

  “She was the opposite of softhearted,” Sophie said. “She told Tyra that people make their own decisions in life, and intelligent adults should do their homework before they agree to the largest purchase they’ll ever make.”

  “She’s shady,” the mother said. “Tyra had a party once, when she bought this house, right? Maybe about a year and a half ago. And she invited people from work too, and introduced me around, and I remember asking if her boss lady was there and she said she hadn’t asked her. ‘We’re not friends,’ she told me. ‘We get along okay, but she doesn’t have friends.’ I said then maybe she should invite her, this poor woman with no friends; me being a mama and all I’m picturing this lonely little girl. But Tyra said something like that woman is as shady as the day is long, and I don’t want to get any closer to her than I have to.”

  Riley asked, “Did Tyra ever explain what she meant by that?”

  “No.”

  He looked at Sophie, who had calmed enough to explain, “She thought Sterling had a lot of unethical practices. Lots. But they were all legal, and she felt it her job to keep it that way and prove that in court when necessary. Every company does scummy things. That’s just life.”

  “Tyra wouldn’t have let her do anything wrong,” her mother asserted. “Tyra would never help someone break the law.”

  “Of course not,” Riley soothed. “But maybe that’s why Tyra worried so much about work, because she thought Joanna was doing something wrong?”

  “Maybe,” Sophie said. “But honestly? Probably not. Tyra took things too seriously. She always did.”

  This did not seem to be getting them anywhere. Jack said, “Can you remember anything else she said or did about Joanna Moorehouse? Specifically?”

  They all shook their heads.

  “Did she tell you Joanna has also been murdered? Yesterday?”

  This news stunned them. All six family members stared at Jack as if he had begun dancing on the tabletop.

  “What?”

  “Murdered like Tyra? The same way? How was she killed? Shot? Stabbed?”

  “Wait a minute—you think Tyra was killed over work? What she did at work?”

  “Why didn’t I talk to her more last night?” her mother wailed again. “I should have asked more questions. She sounded upset—”

  This latest shock had pushed the family over the edge into complete bewilderment. What could Tyra’s death have to do with a boss she didn’t socialize with and didn’t even particularly like? The boss had never set foot in Tyra’s house, and it didn’t sound as if Tyra had ever been to hers.

  Beleaguered, Sophie explained again that Tyra had not confided anything more about Joanna or Sterling than she had already told them. Sterling’s legal troubles were routine for the industry, and unlikely to cause it any real difficulty. The merger with DJ Bryan would almost certainly go through and Tyra looked forward to it, thinking it would be just as well if her position was eliminated or the entire office moved to New York. It would force her to quit a job she didn’t really like that much anyway, and pe
rhaps find a client more suited to her sensibilities. Maybe even someone in the public sector, a charity or an NGO.

  Riley wrote down the names of Tyra’s close friends while Jack played waiter and brought them bottles of water from Tyra’s fridge. Riley needed to keep them talking until the victim’s advocate arrived to walk them through the process of what happened next and to help them make arrangements for Tyra’s funeral. This would also keep them out of the way and blocked from view while the ME staff removed their very much loved Tyra’s body from where she had been slaughtered on her dining room floor.

  *

  Jack and Riley returned to the bustling offices of Sterling Financial, which didn’t seem any more affected by Tyra’s death than they had been by Joanna Moorehouse’s. Managers fidgeted at their chairs, phones glued to their ears as they pecked at their keyboards. Perhaps, Jack wondered, they were trying to impress their possible new boss from DJ Bryan with their industriousness in times of stress, but Pierce Bowman didn’t appear to notice. With his chair swiveled toward the window, feet propped on the desk borrowed from Tyra, he had his nose buried in that day’s Wall Street Journal. Jack entered his office without knocking while Riley took a phone call in the lobby.

  Bowman glanced up. “Yeah, I heard.”

  “Heard?”

  The guy finally swung his feet down and faced him. “About the in-house counsel. Too bad—sweet kid, not to mention gorgeous. Her and Joanna both. You got anybody in mind? Never mind—can’t tell me, right?”

  Jack said, “One theory is that Joanna might have been engaging in illegal activity and Tyra knew or found out about it. You’ve been looking at this company pretty closely because of this merger.”