No Place to Die

by James L. Thane

  Turning to go, he pointed back at Maggie’s chest. “The T-shirt looks great on you, babe. And if you’d like to come over and listen to my record collection some night, just say the word.”

  Maggie rolled her eyes and gave her best impression of a sweet smile. “Your record collection? Jesus, Chris, thanks for the offer, but I’d hate to have to ask you to take your hand off your little tiny dick long enough to crank the handle on the Victrola.”

  Neither of the tips that Maggie and I were chasing panned out, and at the end of the day we were still no closer to finding our killer than we’d been twelve hours earlier. Unfortunately, none of the other members of the team had enjoyed any better luck than we had, and a little after seven P.M., Maggie and I called it a day, hoping that a good night’s sleep might leave us in better shape to get at it again in the morning.

  Once home after visiting Julie, I sorted through the mail and changed into a sweatshirt and jeans. Then I poured a couple fingers of Jameson into an old-fashioned glass and went out to the patio that opened off the kitchen and living room. I dropped into a chair and dragged another around to face me. Propping my feet up in the second chair, I took a large sip of the whiskey.

  Although the temperature had dropped into the middle fifties, it had been another gorgeous day with bright blue skies and the daytime temperature reaching into the middle seventies. However, as was so often the case lately, my mood contrasted sharply with the beautiful weather. It struck me—not for the first time—that these days I probably would have been much more at home psychologically in some dingy northern city where the snow, the cold, and the gray gloomy skies would better match my spirit.

  From my days as a rookie cop I’d been dismayed by the violence that people so casually inflict on each other, and the responsibilities of the job had always weighed heavily on me. But they’d felt especially burdensome during the last few months when I’d been without Julie’s presence to serve as a counterbalancing force.

  On my third day as a member of the department, I’d been the first patrolman to respond to the homicide of a nineteen-year-old woman named Maria Gonzalez, who’d been bound, gagged, raped, and then knifed to death in the tiny apartment she had shared with her mother and her younger sister. The sister, Rosalita, was twelve. She’d discovered the crime when she came home from school, and called 911, screaming and crying into the phone. I’d been on the scene only long enough to survey the situation and call for backup, when the mother arrived home from work and walked in on the tragedy.

  Even though I was eight inches taller and at least sixty pounds heavier than Mrs. Gonzalez, I could barely restrain her as she attempted to reach her daughter. Desperate to safeguard whatever evidence might remain in the bedroom where the assault had occurred, I wrestled her away from the door. She struggled tenaciously against me, scratching, biting, and kicking, all the while pleading desperately with God to undo the catastrophe, until finally the paramedics arrived and gave her an injection that mercifully put her to sleep.

  Two days later, homicide detectives arrested the twenty-five-year-old son of a woman who lived across the hall from the victim, and charged him with the crime. The man had been out on parole for three months, and had two prior convictions, one for burglary and another for statutory rape. He’d used a condom in the assault in an apparent effort to avoid leaving any seminal fluids at the scene that might assist the investigators in identifying him. But then, inexplicably, he’d left two bloody fingerprints on the bedroom doorframe that left no doubt as to his identity.

  The experience had changed my life. I’d joined the force fresh out of college because I couldn’t afford to go directly to law school. My plan was to work hard, save some money, perhaps take a few night-school law courses, and then ultimately go back to school and complete the degree. But I’d been awed by the tenacity, skill, and reverence with which the lead detective had worked the Gonzalez case. Watching him, I understood, in a way that my academy courses had never conveyed, the critical importance—the sanctity even—of the work that he did.

  Within days of the killer’s arrest, I’d abandoned any thoughts of law school and had set my sights on joining the Homicide Unit. I realized, certainly, that there could never be justice for Maria Gonzalez or for her mother and sister. But I also understood more clearly than ever before the fact that someone had to fight for them and for others like them. Someone had to make the effort, however vain it might be, to bring the scales back closer to even.

  That was my job now, as it had been for the last seven years. During that time, I’d worked scores of cases, and friends—often well-meaning but at other times just morbidly curious—asked how anyone could do it. In particular, they wondered how I could avoid being slowly but inevitably consumed by the depravity and the brutality that were central to my every working day.

  There was, really, no way to respond. I could try to describe the satisfaction I took in clearing a case. I could talk earnestly about the importance of getting a killer off the streets before he could claim another victim. I could respond glibly that it was a nasty job but that somebody had to do it. But I could never begin to explain the hold that Maria Gonzalez still exercised over me.

  Twelve years after the fact, the memory of that afternoon haunts me still. Late at night, deep in my dreams, I see her lying there on the bed in that pitiful apartment, so horribly abused. My heart breaks again as I listen to her mother, sobbing and begging God to bring her daughter back.

  I feel Mrs. Gonzalez’s indescribable pain even more sharply now than I did on that terrible day so many years ago. But then, I now understand something myself about the futility of attempting to bargain with God.

  Chapter Twenty

  Carl McClain spent most of the weekend away from the house, and for that, at least, Beverly was grateful. She was also thankful for the fact that the frequency and intensity of his sexual assaults had diminished, at least for the time being.

  After viciously raping her three times within hours of her abduction, McClain had taken her only once or twice a night in the time since. And after the first night, he had not been nearly as brutal with her. As a result, the physical damage she suffered as a result of the attacks had declined somewhat.

  The psychological damage was another matter altogether.

  Save for her outburst during the pizza “dinner” on the second evening, Beverly had spent the first three and a half days of her ordeal in a virtual stupor. The shock of the abduction, her confinement, and the repeated sexual assaults was exceeded only by the trauma of having watched David die so violently in front of her. And the sudden onslaught of these horrors had literally overwhelmed her, shutting down her senses as though some psychological circuit breaker was protectively tripping switches in a desperate effort to head off a total emotional and intellectual meltdown.

  She finally hit rock bottom around midmorning on Sunday. McClain left the house a little before eight, telling her that he would be gone until late that evening. The next thing Beverly knew, it was ten thirty. She returned to consciousness to find herself naked and shivering on the bed, even though the temperature in the house had to be somewhere in the midseventies. She realized that she hadn’t been asleep exactly. Rather, she’d been drifting in a state of suspended animation, her eyes open, staring blankly at the door that McClain had closed and locked behind him two and a half hours earlier.

  The hopelessness of her situation was suddenly too great to bear, and she burst into tears. Weeping uncontrollably, she crawled across the bed and found her skirt, which had wound up on the floor beside the bed. She pulled the narrow leather belt out of the loops and let the skirt fall back to the floor.

  Dragging the cable behind her, she grabbed one of the folding chairs from the card table, carried it into the bathroom, and set it in the shower stall. In her mind’s eye, again she saw David falling to the floor of the garage as if in slow motion.

  Shaking and a bit unsteady, she climbed up onto the chair and fed the belt thr
ough the buckle, creating a small loop. She tied the end of the belt around the shower-curtain rod and said a silent, desperate prayer that both the belt and the rod would be strong enough. She cinched the knot tight and spread the loop in the belt as wide as it would go. Then she forced the loop over her head and leaned forward slightly, taking the slack out of the loop.

  Crying harder now, she thought of her mother and father. And one last time, she thought of David. Beverly did not believe in God or in Heaven, and she had no vain hope of seeing David again in a glorious afterlife of some sort. But she did believe in hell—of this she could offer witness. And death would be a blessed release from its dreadful grip.

  She wrapped her hands around the shower rod and pulled herself up, raising her knees and lifting her weight off of the chair. A wave of relief, totally unbidden and completely unexpected, suddenly swept through her. “I love you, David,” she said aloud.

  She lowered her right leg, preparing to kick the chair away. But then, as suddenly as the wave of calm had materialized, it receded, only to be followed by a sense of rage and anger that Beverly had never before experienced.

  She closed her eyes and swallowed hard. For a few more seconds, she clung to the rod. Then, reluctantly, she set her feet back down on the chair and slowly let her legs take her weight again. “I love you, David,” she whispered.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  On Friday and Saturday, Chris Doyle made a halfhearted effort to assist the rest of the team in interviewing the relatives, friends, and coworkers of the victims in our continuing quest to find something—anything—that would link the victims together. Having apparently exhausted himself in the process, he insisted on taking his regular day off on Sunday, leaving Maggie, Pierce, Chickris, and me to continue the effort without his assistance. The fact that we had to do so was certainly no great handicap, and we all fervently hoped that Bob Riggins would be back to work ASAP, relieving the four of us of Doyle’s company. Maggie and I were on our way to an interview early Sunday afternoon, and I asked her if she’d heard anything from Abernathy, the minister.

  “Yeah. He took me to the Rhythm Room last night to hear Bad Sneakers, the Steely Dan tribute group.”

  “That sounds like a good time. Those guys are on my short list of local faves.”

  She nodded her agreement. “Yeah, well, the music was very good. We danced and had a few drinks. Actually, I had a couple of glasses of wine. He had one gin and tonic and then switched to club soda, so that he could preach with a clear head this morning.”

  “Did he say anything more about the ex-wife?”

  “Yeah. He asked me what had happened with me and Timothy, and so I gave him chapter and verse. More than anything else, I did it to impress upon him the thousand and one ways this job can fuck up an otherwise pretty good relationship, even if there aren’t any kids involved.

  “Anyhow, once I showed him mine, he figured he had to show me his. Apparently, while he was overseas in the army, the missus had a torrid affair with a sexy jazz musician who lived down the street. Once Patrick got back, she confessed her sins and begged his forgiveness, promising that nothing like that would ever happen again.

  “It obviously hit him pretty hard, but he sucked it up, did the Christian thing, and took her back. He says he did it partly because of the kids, and partly because he still loved her in spite of what she’d done. Then, ten months ago, the jazz musician left Tennessee for a gig in Chicago, and Mrs. Abernathy went right along with him. She left a note for Patrick and didn’t even say good-bye to the girls.”

  “Jesus, that’s not too cold, is it?”

  “No shit. Anyhow, Patrick and the kids were all pretty devastated. He filed on the bitch, asking for custody with no visitation rights for her, and she didn’t even contest it. A judge granted the divorce and Patrick decided that the best thing for all concerned would be to get the hell out of Memphis. The job at my mom’s church came up and he applied. The church board offered him the job, and he ‘accepted the call.’ I wanted to ask him what sort of god would put some poor son of a bitch through a hell like that just to ‘call’ him to a new ministry, but I managed to hold my tongue.”

  “There’s a first,” I laughed. “So, you gonna see him again?”

  Maggie shook her head. “Hell, Sean, I don’t know. On the plus side, he is a nice guy. He’s attractive. We like the same music, and he’s got a good sense of humor. If it weren’t for all the baggage he’s carrying, there might be a chance that something could happen between us. But he’s obviously been badly wounded, and I really don’t want to be the woman who catches him on the rebound, and then breaks his heart again when it doesn’t work out.

  “On top of that, of course, there’s the kids. I tried to make it clear that I don’t relate very well to children and that unlike my mother, I’m not a churchgoing kind of woman. I also told him that I loved my job and that it would never allow me to take on the responsibility of a couple of kids in addition to a husband.”

  “How’d he react to that?”

  “He said that he wasn’t expecting me to make a lifetime commitment on the basis of a couple of dates and that he understood that my job would make it hard to have a family. But he insisted that lots of cops do have families and successful relationships and that I shouldn’t rule out the possibility that it could happen for me. He said he’d like it if we could continue to see each other without any pressure or expectations and just see where things might go.”

  “So how’d you leave it?”

  “I told him that I’d enjoyed the evening, and that if he wanted to go out again sometime I would. But I also told him straight out that I wasn’t interested in anything beyond that, and that if he was, then he needed to be looking for some other woman. He said he understood and insisted that he wasn’t going to put any pressure on me. Then he took me home, walked me to the door, and left me with a very chaste kiss. I don’t know if I’ll be hearing from him again or not.”

  I signaled a turn and said, “I know you’re trying to be fair to the guy, Maggie, but do you think there’s a chance here that you’re not being fair to yourself?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, maybe you’re so concerned about making sure that his feelings aren’t hurt that you’re not willing to give this thing a fighting chance. I confess I have a hard time imagining you keeping company with a minister. But if you like the guy—and it seems that you do—why not chill out a bit and see where it goes? Maybe it works and maybe it doesn’t. But the guy’s an adult. I’m sure he knows the emotional risks as well as you do.”

  She sat quietly for a minute or so, staring out the window at the traffic passing in the opposite lane. Then she turned to look at me. “How in the hell did you manage it, Sean—you and Julie, I mean? Do you mind my asking?”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s okay. How do you mean?”

  She gave a small shrug and went back to looking out the window. “This job. The hours. The things you see. How did the two of you build such a solid relationship around it? God knows Timothy and I couldn’t do it.”

  “I’m not sure I really know, Maggs,” I sighed. “Thankfully, it wasn’t something that we ever had to work at. For openers, Julie respected the job. Unlike her mother, she never thought that being a homicide detective was beneath me—that I should aspire to something ‘better,’ or more socially respectable. I think it also helped a lot that I was already working homicide when Julie and I met and so she knew exactly what she was getting into from the start.”

  Smiling at the recollection, I said, “Second date. I’m trying to make a good impression, right? I made a reservation at Vocé—dinner, then Khani Cole and her band in the lounge after. Julie’s dressed to kill. It’s gonna be a great night, and two minutes after the waiter puts the salads in front of us, I get called out to a murdersuicide.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Maggie laughed. “I’ll bet that made the big impression you were after.”

  “Yeah, well…I put
Julie in a cab and fell all over myself apologizing. But she took it right in stride. She’s apologizing to me because the evening got ruined, and that’s when I knew she was a keeper. She always understood that the hours were unpredictable, and she knew that in the middle of a case like this, there’s precious little time in your life for anything but the case. She gave me the space I needed to do the work, and she never worried that I didn’t love her or that maybe the job was more important to me than she was.

  “Certainly it also helped that Julie was a very independent woman—comfortable not just in her own skin, but in her own company. On those nights when I couldn’t make it home for dinner on time, or when she had to spend the occasional evening alone, it wasn’t a major crisis; there wasn’t ever any drama. She was content to lose herself in a book or a movie, knowing that we’d make up the time together later.”

  “Yeah, well, that damned sure doesn’t sound like Timothy. He didn’t mind that I was a cop. Hell, to tell the truth, I think the fact that I was a woman in a uniform with a gun and a pair of handcuffs really turned him on. But the man liked his dinner, his sex, and his social life to be right on schedule. And once I made detective and the hours became increasingly unpredictable, it upset the balance of his whole world. He thought that cops and robbers should work a sensible nine-to-five schedule just like everybody else. And when it became clear that they didn’t, things started to go downhill in a huge fuckin’ hurry.”

  She hesitated for a moment, then said, “Is it hard for you to talk about her? Would you rather I didn’t ask?”

  I shook my head. “No, Maggs, it’s okay.”

  She nodded. “It’s just that every once in a while you suddenly disappear into yourself for a few minutes. I’m pretty sure I know where you’re going when that happens, but I never quite know how to react. My sense is that you’d really rather not talk about it, and so I usually just shut up and wait for you to come back into the moment. But I hope you know that even though I might not say so very often, I really do care about the situation you’re in.