No Mercy--A Mystery

by Joanna Schaffhausen

  Home. Just the thought of it was tempting. Her warm, soft bed was far across town but she could feel it, with its clean white sheets and weighty quilt that could erase her from the world if she pulled it high enough. She leaned her back against the cold brick wall and took deep, steadying breaths until the knot in her stomach released itself. Tomorrow was another group session, and she would either have to skip it or face Wendy, knowing she’d abandoned the poor woman to Manganelli’s whims. Bed wasn’t safe for Wendy. She had red-rimmed and haunted eyes, as though she might never see a peaceful sleep again. Ellery steeled her spine, squared her shoulders, and went back around the corner, past the front of the bar until she found a bus stop with its half-shell shelter. From this vantage point, she could see anyone coming or going from the bar, but they could not see her. She shoved her frozen fingers in her pockets and sat down on the hard metal bench to wait.

  It took another hour before Murphy appeared, just before closing time. He staggered out onto the icy sidewalk and swayed slightly. Ellery had been right in her assessment: he was big, close to six and a half feet—all of him in danger of toppling over. He turned abruptly and started walking right toward her, so she quickly slid behind the bus stop and held completely still, not even breathing as Murphy lurched on past. When she dared peek again, she saw him heading down the block alone. Carefully, she edged out from her hiding spot and started a stealthy pursuit. He was slow, possibly from the liquor, with an uneven gait and a periodic cough that halted him a few times. Once, he glanced back over his shoulder but Ellery caught his head turning and tucked herself into the nearest doorway. Her heart thrummed in her chest as she waited out the ticking seconds to see if she’d been made, but Murphy did not double back. She heard his cough again, fainter in the distance, and realized he’d continued on his way.

  Tentatively, she emerged from the shadows once more, like an animal scenting the air, and crept along after him. The streets were slick and silent. She could hear her own heightened breathing as she tried to keep her footsteps light. Suddenly, Murphy made a sharp turn down a more residential street. Her stomach dropped when he disappeared from view, and she scrambled to catch up to him. The side street was darker, thanks to a burned-out streetlamp, and her eyes struggled to adjust. She heard more than saw him: a scuffling noise down the block. She proceeded cautiously, turning her head this way and that to try to locate the source of the sound she’d heard. That barking cough reverberated through the night, and she whipped around to find him. The street appeared empty.

  Waving tree branches cast moving shadows on the ground. She inched forward some more and heard footsteps—not in front of her but to the side. He’d gone between the houses, she realized, down an alleyway that had access to the fire escapes. Maybe he was climbing up the side of a building right now. Ellery took out her gun and plunged into the darkness after him. She went slowly, her attention focused on the fire escapes on either side of the alley. Murphy was huge; he had nowhere to hide among a collection of iron bars. She passed an industrial-sized Dumpster and a chest-high pile of snow. No sign of Murphy.

  She was just about to give up, lowering her gun, when out of nowhere came a lead pipe. It caught her squarely on the forearm, and she cried out as the gun fell out of her grasp. She heard it hit the ice and go sliding toward the street. There was no way to go after it because Murphy was swinging at her again. “You following me, you little bitch?” he hissed at her.

  She ducked one blow but he just kept coming with the pipe.

  “You want a piece of this? Yeah? Come and get me.”

  He caught her arm again, then her shoulder. She jerked to the side and his next blow caught the Dumpster instead, sending an unholy clang through the alley. “You don’t fuck with me,” he said as he took a fierce cut. Her arms throbbed but the pain didn’t touch her. She was wild-eyed and determined to get to the gun.

  “No woman wants to fuck you,” she yelled back, breathing hard. “That’s why you have to go out and rape them.”

  He howled something nonsensical and swung the pipe at her head, barely missing. He swung again, and again, and she dodged him twice before he caught her on the backswing and knocked her off her feet. When he careened forward, she raised her boots to his groin level and kicked with all her might. He screamed when she connected, then he reeled back against the bricks. Ellery used the momentary freedom to get back on her feet, but before she could go search for her gun, Murphy was coming at her again. She caught the end of the pipe with her hand, blocking his attack. She shoved hard and he actually stumbled backward. It was a ray of hope: for a huge man, he didn’t seem especially strong. He redoubled his efforts and tried to shake her free from the pipe.

  Her brain rattled inside her head but she held fast. He cursed at her again and twisted sharply so the end of the pipe caught her in the jaw. The flash of pain was enough to loosen her grip and he had the pipe to himself again. She saw the gleam of victory in his eyes as he raised it high. Desperate, she hurled herself backward out of his reach, only to catch the sharp edge of the Dumpster with the back of her head. Pain and dizziness overwhelmed her; she felt herself falling into the snow. She saw Murphy’s enormous shadow. Darkness was coming up on her fast. This is it, she thought hazily, bracing for the final blow. Instead, she heard a gunshot. Am I hit? The thought flitted through her just before unconsciousness swallowed her up, and then she thought no more.

  * * *

  When she came to, blue lights from the police cars were spinning crazily at the end of the alley. It hurt just to look at them. “Police,” called an authoritative male voice from the darkness. She heard the squawk of their radios. “We have a report of gunfire.”

  Ellery held the back of her head as she tried to sit up. Her arms ached and a surge of nausea overwhelmed her. She turned to the side and dry heaved into the snow. Only when the officer’s flashlight shone over her did she see she was retching into a pool of blood. Her hand was wet and cold, and she saw her fingers were stained with blood. “Ma’am, are you hurt?”

  “I—I don’t know.” Her head felt cracked in two. “What happened?”

  “Easy. Just stay down there,” he said when she tried to get up. “I was hoping you could tell me what happened. Starting with: who is this?”

  He trained his flashlight just a few feet away, and she saw Mick Murphy lying motionless in the street. He’d landed on top of his pipe. “Oh my God,” she breathed, inching backward away from him. “Is he dead?”

  “Lady, you were the one who was here. Are you okay? Did you see who shot him?”

  Another officer came tramping down the alleyway. He was holding a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other. “I think I found the weapon in the garbage can just outside,” he said. “This is recently fired.”

  “That’s—that’s my gun,” Ellery said.

  There was another wail of sirens as the ambulances arrived on the scene. The first cop trained his flashlight on Ellery’s face, making her wince. “I don’t think you’d better talk no more,” he advised her grimly. “Not ’til you get your head examined.”

  The cops accompanied her to the hospital, where they were all met by a Detective Natasha Rhodes from the Cambridge PD. The first thing Rhodes wanted to do was run a gunshot-residue test on Ellery’s hands. It came back negative. “Everything else will have to wait,” said the ER physician, a thin bald guy with wire-rimmed glasses. “Unless you’d like her to bleed to death while you’re interrogating her.”

  Rhodes held up her hands. “Do your thing, doc. I can wait.”

  Ellery looked up from her place on the stretcher in alarm. “Bleed to death?”

  His mouth twitched in a small smile. “Got her to leave the room, didn’t it? Now please try to follow my finger using just your eyes—don’t turn your head. That’s good.”

  Rhodes had to cool her heels in the waiting room for a few long hours while the doctors gave Ellery the full workup. They X-rayed her arms, which proved to be badly bruised but not br
oken, stitched up the wound at the back of her head, and gave her a CT scan to make sure her brains hadn’t turned to mush. When it turned out she wouldn’t need surgery of any kind, they blessedly let her have a Coke and a pair of pain pills. She was sitting propped up in a hospital bed with several ice packs pressed against her body when they let Detective Rhodes back into the room.

  Rhodes carried a Styrofoam cup with smudgy brown lipstick prints on it. Ellery had to give it up for a woman who had the wherewithal to put on makeup before arriving at a middle-of-the-night crime scene. Her well-styled Afro and form-fitting black suit told Ellery that Rhodes took her fashion seriously. Ellery knew her own appearance was a complete mess, from the big scrape on her chin to the bloodstains dotting her light gray T-shirt. Was it her blood or Murphy’s? Ellery figured that was what Rhodes was keen to find out.

  “Ms. Hathaway,” Rhodes said as she tossed the empty cup and pulled out a small notebook. “How are you feeling? Are you up for some questions?”

  “Sure,” Ellery said, although her voice sounded thin with fatigue. The clock on the wall read 6:08, meaning she had been up for twenty-four hours straight. Only the part where she’d passed out next to a dead guy and awoken to find the cops standing there with her gun as the probable murder weapon gave her the adrenaline to keep up with Rhodes’s conversation.

  “I had some time out there.” Rhodes jerked her thumb back toward the waiting room. “So I looked you up. You like to live your life in the danger zone, don’t you?”

  “Trouble seems to find me,” Ellery muttered as she adjusted the ice pack on her arm.

  “Once, sure. Maybe twice. A third time, and a person might start to think you go looking for it. Why don’t you tell me what happened tonight in that alley?”

  “What happened to the man who was with me?” If Mick wasn’t around to tell his side, Ellery could make up any version she wanted. Of course, Rhodes saw through this ploy immediately, and she shook her head.

  “Uh-uh. I ask the questions, you give the answers.”

  “Fine,” Ellery said with a dramatic sigh, and she decided to hedge her bets with some half-truths. “I was walking by the alley and I heard a noise, like a scuffling sound. I thought I saw a man climbing up the fire escape on the side of the apartment building, so I went to investigate. I got partway into the alley when he attacked me with a pipe.”

  “You were passing by this alley at nearly two in the morning—alone.”

  Ellery held her gaze. “Yes.”

  “Where were you going?”

  “For a walk.”

  “A walk.” Rhodes glanced up from her notes with a skeptical expression. “It’s fifteen degrees out there, and you live downtown. What are you doing walking through the underbelly of Cambridge in the middle of the night?”

  “I can’t sleep most nights. If you’ve looked me up, then you know why.” Ellery had the Coben card in her back pocket, and she’d learned when to play it.

  The strategy worked because Rhodes moved on. “So he hit you with a pipe—then what?”

  Ellery recapped the fight until she got to the part where she slammed her head on the Dumpster. “I fell down, very woozy,” she said. “Everything was swimming and I couldn’t see well. I felt he was still there, and I thought he was going to hit me again. That’s when I heard the shots. I don’t remember anything after that.”

  “So you didn’t see the shooter?” Rhodes looked surprised.

  “No. Was it my gun that was used in the shooting?”

  Rhodes hesitated a moment and then gave a short nod. “Looks that way. Ballistics will have to confirm.”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “I realize that,” Rhodes said, slightly irritated. “You don’t see me with my handcuffs out, now, do you? The shot came from twenty yards away and patrol found you unconscious about three feet from the body. I’d say you’re lucky you didn’t wake up dead! But I’ve had a lot of experience with bullshitters, Ms. Hathaway, and you’re piling it up so deep, I’m going to need hip boots.”

  “I’ve told you everything I can remember.”

  “Yeah, but that isn’t the same as everything you know.” There was a heavy pause, but Ellery didn’t make any move to fill the silence. Finally, Rhodes sighed and made a show of putting her notebook away. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” she said. “Turns out, one of the neighbors in the apartment building caught part of the incident on camera.”

  Ellery sat up with a jerk, and then regretted it as pain lanced through the back of her skull. “Uh, what?”

  “He heard the fight. Ran to the window to try to film the thing.” She shrugged. “Everyone wants to be a viral star these days. From what I can tell, this guy had no hope—the picture is dark and blurry—but it seems to back up your story.” She put a little more emphasis than was necessary on “story.” “There are some images of the shooter at the end. Our tech boys are trying to clean up the video to see if we can get a clear picture.”

  “Oh. Can I see it?”

  “No, you may not. You’re not on the job, Ms. Hathaway. You’d do well to remember that. Because stunts like tonight? That’s not the way to get it back.”

  Ellery opened her mouth to reply but did not get a chance to say anything because the door flew open and Reed burst into the room. He looked pale and disheveled, with his glasses on crooked and his coat hanging open. “Thank God,” he breathed when he saw her.

  She blinked in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been calling you for a day and a half! Last night, the phone finally picks up only it’s not you on the other end, it’s some guy who identified himself as Officer Pisarro. He tells me you’ve been taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Then he hung up! What the hell else was I supposed to do?”

  “I’m sorry, you are?” Rhodes was frowning at the man who had crashed her party.

  “Reed Markham, FBI.” He flashed his credentials at her but his eyes were still on Ellery, looking her over to assess her injuries.

  “He’s my official biographer,” Ellery supplied as she leaned back in the bed with a tired grimace, but Reed did not look amused.

  “What happened?” Reed asked, advancing toward her. “You look like you got hit by a truck.”

  “By a lead pipe,” Rhodes said. “A man named Michael Murphy was swinging the pipe.”

  Reed looked at her sharply. “Mick Murphy?” he asked.

  “Yeah? You know him?”

  “I, uh…” Reed glanced back at Ellery, who tried to signal with her eyes that he should just stop talking. He was pissed, though, because he ignored the signs. “Yes,” he said firmly, turning back to Rhodes. “He’s a sex offender. An especially vicious one.” That last part was pointedly aimed at Ellery. “I did some consulting work for the Somerville Police Department related to a string of rapes, and Murphy’s name was on the short list of suspects.”

  “I see.” Rhodes narrowed her eyes at Ellery. “Anyone else have a copy of that short list?”

  Here, Reed pulled back a bit, because he answered: “I couldn’t really say who had the list. Why?”

  “Because someone took out Mick Murphy tonight. He’s now down at the morgue.”

  Reed shot Ellery a what-the-hell-did-you-do glare, and she raised her hands in self-defense. “It wasn’t me! Ask her. She knows.”

  “Ms. Hathaway wasn’t the shooter,” Rhodes agreed. “But whoever it was used her gun.”

  “I didn’t see who did it,” Ellery explained to Reed.

  Rhodes made a beleaguered gesture at Ellery. “That’s because your girlfriend here was lying in the snow with a gaping head wound at the time.”

  “I’m not his girlfriend.”

  “Oh, really! That’s the part of your statement you want to clarify?”

  A fresh wave of exhaustion crashed over her, and Ellery shut her eyes. She didn’t have the energy to fight with this woman anymore. Reed must have sensed this, too, because he stepped between Ellery and the detective. “Ma
ybe we could continue this conversation another time,” he said. “She looks like she could use some rest.”

  “Sure,” Rhodes said with false cheer. “And maybe with some rest, her memory will come back to her and she can explain what she was doing in that alley with Mick Murphy.”

  Ellery kept her eyes shut as she heard Rhodes make her departure, because this would mean she was now alone in the room with Reed, and frankly, between the pair of them, she’d rather keep Rhodes. She felt Reed standing there, staring at her. “What on God’s green earth were you thinking?” he said finally.

  She forced her eyes open. Reed was blurry. “Manganelli wasn’t even investigating,” she murmured. “He’s too busy. I couldn’t keep going to group every week and telling Wendy there was nothing new on the case, not when we both know this guy is out there, stalking a new victim.”

  Reed raised his hands in frustration, wordless with disbelief at her apparent stupidity. He scrubbed his face several times and took a deep breath. “It’s my own damn fault,” he said, sounding morose. “I handed you that list. I should have known what you’d do with it.”

  She felt guilty now. “I’m sorry.”

  He gave her an annoyed look. “No, you’re not.”

  Honestly, at that moment, she really was. She hurt all over and her brain felt like it was sparking inside her head. “Here’s the ironic part,” she said to Reed. “It wasn’t him. Murphy. He’s not our rapist.”

  Despite everything, Reed looked intrigued. “How do you know?” he asked in a low voice.

  “He has a limp. Initially, I thought he was just drunk from his time at the bar, but when we were fighting, I could tell he had crappy lower body strength—the blows didn’t have the force you would expect from someone his size. If it weren’t for that Dumpster, I probably could’ve taken him down, and he had almost a foot on me in height. There’s no way he was scrambling up the sides of apartment buildings like some cat burglar.”