Her again. “Yeah, it moved. Okay, one thing at a time,” she says, getting stressed, irritable. “First, you want the police file.”
“Got to have it, Sykes.”
“So I’ll try to track it down first thing in the morning.”
“Can’t wait. Whatever you can get your hands on now. E-mail it to me.”
“And who do you think’s going to help me out at this hour?” She is already opening her closet door, yanking a pair of blue cargo pants off a hanger.
“The Academy,” Win says. “Call Tom, get him out of bed.”
* * *
He drives fast toward Mount Auburn Hospital, turns off Brattle Street, headed to Monique Lamont’s house so he can ruin the rest of her night.
I quit.
Maybe he’ll sign on with the TBI, the FBI, the FYI—for your information, Monique, nobody jerks me around like this.
I quit.
Then why are you sending Sykes on a mission in the middle of the night? another part of his brain asks him. A minor technicality. Just because he quits Lamont doesn’t mean he’ll quit the Vivian Finlay case. It’s personal now. Some man in scarlet screws with him, insults him, and it gets personal. Win drives through an intersection, barely slows at the stop sign, turns left near the fire station, onto the narrow street where Lamont lives on a sliver of an acre in a nineteenth-century pale plum house, a Queen Anne Painted Lady, showy and intricate and formidable, like its owner. Her property is dense with crepe myrtles, oaks and birch trees, and the dark shapes of them rock in the wind and water drips from branches and leaves.
He parks in front, turns off his headlights, cuts the engine. The front porch light isn’t on, no lights along the property are on, and only one window is lit up, the one on the second floor to the left of the front door, and he has one of his feelings. Her Range Rover is in the cobbled driveway, and his feeling intensifies. If she’s not home, somebody picked her up. Well, big deal. She could have anybody she wants, so her date du jour picked her up, maybe took her to his place, big deal, but the feeling persists. If her date du jour is inside the house with her, where’s his car? Win tries her home phone and gets voicemail. He tries her cell phone and she doesn’t answer. He tries it a second time. She doesn’t answer.
Some man in a red scarf sending him on a wild-goose chase, making a fool of him, threatening him, taunting him. Who? Win worries about what’s going to appear in the news. Maybe Lamont’s idiotic press release is screaming through cyberspace, landing all over the Internet. Maybe that’s how the man in the red scarf found out about At Risk, about Win, but it doesn’t make sense. As far as he knows, Vivian Finlay wasn’t from New England, so why is some man in New England interested enough in her case to go to all the trouble to call Win, set up a phony meeting, and taunt him?
He continues staring at Lamont’s house, at her densely wooded property, looking up and down the street — for what, he doesn’t know. For anything. He grabs the flashlight and gets out of his grandmother’s prehistoric-looking car, keeping up his scan, listening. Something doesn’t feel right, feels worse than not right. Maybe he’s just rattled, expecting something not to feel right, getting spooked the way he did as a boy when he started imagining monsters, bad people, bad things, death, having premonitions because it’s in his blood, as his grandmother so often declared. He has no gun. He follows the brick walk to the front porch, climbs the steps, looking, listening, deciding that what he’s really uneasy about is Lamont.
She won’t be nice about this. If she’s with someone, she’ll have Win’s head. He starts to ring the bell, looks up at the same time a shadow moves past the curtained, lighted window directly overhead. He stares up, waiting. He shines the flashlight at the brass mailbox to the left of the front door, lifts the lid. She didn’t pick up her mail when she came in, and he remembers what she said about a key box. He doesn’t see anything like that.
Water drips in big, cool drops from leaves and smacks the top of his head as he goes around to the back of the house, where it is thickly wooded and very dark, where he finds the key box open, the key still in the lock, the door ajar. He hesitates, looks around, listening to water dripping, shining the flashlight in the trees, the shrubbery, directing the beam back to something dark red between two boxwoods, a gas can with rags on top of it, wet from the rain but clean. His pulse picks up, begins to race as he silently steps into the kitchen, hears Lamont’s voice, then a male voice, an angry male voice, on the second floor, the room with the lighted window above the front door.
He moves fast up wooden stairs that creak, three stairs at a time, cuts across a hallway that creaks. Through an open doorway he sees her on the bed, nude, tied to the bedposts, a man in jeans, a T-shirt, sitting on the edge of the bed, stroking her with a pistol.
“Say it, I’m a whore.”
“I’m a whore,” she repeats in a shaky voice. “Please don’t do this.”
Left of the bed is the window, the drapes drawn. Her clothes are strewn on the floor, the same suit she had on hours earlier at dinner.
“I’m nothing but a filthy whore. Say it!”
Overhead is a large art glass chandelier with painted flowers — blue, red, green — and Win hurls the flashlight and it crashes into the chandelier and it shatters and sways and the man jumps up from the bed, whips around, and then Win has him by the wrist, struggling to get the pistol away from him, the man’s breath in his face, reeking of garlic, and the gun fires into the ceiling, just missing Win’s head.
“Drop it! Drop it!”
His voice sounds muffled and distant in his ringing ears as he struggles, and the pistol fires again and again and the man’s grip suddenly goes limp. Win grabs hold of the gun, shoves him hard and he collapses to the floor, blood flowing out of his head, pooling on the hardwood, quiet on the floor next to the bed, bleeding, not moving, a young, Hispanic-looking man, maybe in his teens.
Win yanks a comforter over Lamont, frees her from the electrical cords lashing her to the bedposts as he repeatedly says, “It’s all right. You’re safe now. It’s all right.” He calls 911 on his cell phone and she sits up, pulling the comforter around her, gasping for breath, shaking violently, eyes wild.
“Oh God,” she says. “Oh God!” she screams.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re safe now,” he says, standing over her, looking around, watching the man on the floor, blood and bloody shards of colorful art glass everywhere.
“Is he the only one?” Win yells at Lamont as his heart pounds and his eyes dart around, his ears ringing, the pistol ready. “Is there anybody else?” he shouts.
She shakes her head, her breathing rapid and shallow, her face blanched, her eyes glazed, about to pass out.
“Deep, slow breaths, Monique.” Win takes off his suit jacket, places it in her hands, helps her hold it up to her face. “It’s all right. Breathe into it like it’s a paper bag. That’s good. Good. Deep, slow breaths. No one’s going to hurt you now.”
5
Monique Lamont wears a hospital gown inside an examination room at Mount Auburn Hospital, but a few blocks from where she lives.
It is a nondescript room, white, with an examination table, the kind with stirrups, and a counter, a sink, a cabinet filled with medical supplies, swabs and specula, a surgical lamp. Moments earlier, a forensic nurse was alone in the room with Lamont, examining the powerful district attorney’s orifices and other very private areas of her body, swabbing for saliva and seminal fluid, plucking hairs, getting fingernail scrapings, looking for injuries, taking photographs, gathering whatever might be potential evidence. Lamont is holding up amazingly well, maybe bizarrely well, playing the role of herself, working her own case.
She sits in a white plastic chair next to the white paper-covered table, Win on a stool across from her, another investigator with the Massachusetts State Police, Sammy, standing near the shut door. She had the option of being interviewed in more civilized surroundings, her home, for example, but refused, made the r
ather chillingly clinical observation that it was best to compartmentalize, keep related conversations and activities to the confined spaces where they belong. Translated: Win seriously doubts she’ll ever sleep in her bedroom again. He won’t be surprised if she sells her house.
“What do we know about him?” she asks again, the prosecutor who seems to have no feelings about what just happened.
Her attacker is in critical condition. Win is careful what he tells her. It is, to say the least, a highly unusual situation. She is accustomed to asking the state police anything she wants and having nothing withheld from her. She is the district attorney, is in charge, is programmed to demand details and get them.
“Ms. Lamont,” Sammy says respectfully, “as you know, he had a gun and Win here did what he had to do. Things happen.”
But that’s not what she’s asking. She looks at Win, holds his gaze remarkably well considering that just hours ago he saw her nude, lashed to her bed.
“What do you know about him.” She poses it not as a question but a command.
“This much,” Win says. “Your office prosecuted him in juvenile court about two months ago.”
“For what?”
“Possession of marijuana, crack. Judge Let-’em-Loose Lane gave him a reprimand.”
“The prosecutor certainly wasn’t me. I’ve never seen him before. What else?”
“Tell you what,” Win says. “How about letting us get our job done first, then I’ll tell you anything I can.”
“No,” she says. “It won’t be what you can. It will be what I ask.”
“But for now…” Win starts to say.
“Information,” she demands.
“I got a question.” It is Sammy who says this from his remote position near the wall. “About your getting home last night.”
His ruddy face is grim, something in his eyes. Maybe it’s embarrassment. Maybe talking to the district attorney after she’s been through something like this somehow makes him a voyeur. Lamont ignores him, ignores his question.
“I had dinner with you,” she says to Win. “I got in my car and drove back to the office to finish up a few things, then drove straight home. Because I didn’t have my keys, I went around to the back of the house, put my code into the key box, got out the spare key, and was unlocking the back door when suddenly a hand clamped over my mouth and someone I couldn’t see said one sound, you’re dead. He pushed me into the house.”
Lamont does a fine job reciting the facts. Her assailant, now identified as Roger Baptista of East Cambridge, an address not far from the court building where Lamont works, forced her up to her bedroom, began yanking electrical cords from lamps, from the clock radio. Then her home phone rang. She didn’t answer it. Then her cell phone rang. She didn’t answer it.
Win calling her.
Her cell phone rang again and she thought fast, said it was her boyfriend, he was getting worried, might show up, so Baptista told her to answer the phone and if she tried anything he’d blow her head off and then kill her boyfriend, kill everybody, and she answered. She had the brief, peculiar conversation with Win. She says she ended the call and Baptista forced her to undress and tied her to the bedposts. He raped her. Then put his pants back on.
“Why didn’t you resist?” Sammy asks her as delicately as possible.
“He had a gun.” She looks at Win. “I had no doubt he would use it if I resisted, probably would use it, regardless. When he finished with me. I did what I could to control the situation.”
“Meaning?” Win asks.
She hesitates, her eyes cutting away from him, says, “Meaning, I told him to do what he wanted, acted as if I wasn’t frightened. Or repulsed. Did what he wanted. Said what he told me to say.” She hesitates. “As calm and noncombative as I could muster under the circumstances. I, uh, I said it wasn’t necessary to tie me up, I, well, I worked with cases like this all the time, understood them, knew he had his reasons. I, well, I…”
The small room echoes with the ensuing silence and it is the first time Win has ever seen Lamont’s face turn red. He suspects he knows exactly what she did to stall Baptista, to calm him, to connect with him in the remote hope he would let her live.
“Maybe you acted like you wanted a little,” Sammy suggests. “Hey, women do it all the time, make the rapist think it’s okay, they’re good in bed, fake an orgasm and even ask the guy to come back another time like it’s a date or…”
“Out!” Lamont fires at him, pointing her finger. “Get out!”
“I’m just—”
“Didn’t you hear me?”
He leaves the room, leaves Win alone with her, not his first choice. Considering he critically injured her assailant, it would be preferable and prudent to interview her with at least one witness present.
“Who is this piece of shit?” Lamont asks. “Who? And do you think it’s a goddamn coincidence he decided to show up at the house the same night my keys mysteriously disappeared? Who is he?”
“Roger Baptista…”
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
“When’s the last time you saw your keys?” Win says. “You lock up with them when you left for work this morning? Actually, yesterday morning.”
“No.”
“No?”
She is silent for a moment, then, “I didn’t come home that night.”
“Where were you?”
“I stayed with a friend. Left there for work in the morning. After work I had dinner with you, checked by my office. That’s the chronology.”
“You mind telling me who you stayed with?”
“I do.”
“I’m just trying…”
“I’m not the one who committed a crime.” She stares coldly at him.
“Monique, I assume your alarm was set when you unlocked the door with your spare key,” Win pointedly says. “Baptista clamps his hand over your mouth as you’re unlocking the door. So what about the alarm after that?”
“He told me if I didn’t disarm it he’d kill me.”
“No panic code that silently alerts the police?”
“Oh for God’s sake. And you would think of that if it were you? See what security precautions you revert to when someone’s got a gun to the back of your head.”
“You know anything about a can of gasoline and some rags found by your back door, in the bushes?”
“You and I need to have a very important conversation,” she says to him.
* * *
Sykes drives her personal car, a ’79 blue VW Rabbit, through the Old City, as Knoxville’s historic downtown is called.
She passes Barley’s Taproom & Pizzeria, the Tonic Grill, deserted and dark, then a construction site that was shut down the other day when a backhoe dug up bones that turned out to be cow, the site having been a slaughterhouse and stockyard in a long-ago life. Her uneasiness — the jitters, as she calls them — gets worse the closer she gets to where she’s going. She sure hopes Win’s insistence that she track down the Vivian Finlay case records immediately is really urgent enough to merit her waking up the Academy director, then the chief of the Knoxville Police Department, next several other people with the Criminal Investigative Division and Records, who couldn’t find the case, only its accession number, KPD893-85.
Last and most unpleasant of all, Sykes woke up former detective Jimmy Barber’s widow, who sounded drunk, and asked what her late husband might have done with his old files, paperwork, memorabilia, et cetera, when he retired and packed up his office at headquarters.
All that crap’s in the basement. What you people think he’s hiding down there, Jimmy Hoffla? The damn Da Vinshay code?
I sure am sorry to bother you, ma’am. But we’re trying to locate some old records, careful what she said, mindful that Win made it clear something unusual is going on.
I don’t know what’s got such a bug up y’all’s butt, Mrs. Barber complained over the phone, swearing, slurring, nasty. It’s three damn o’clock in the morning!<
br />
In what the locals call Shortwest Knoxville, the city begins to fray around the edges, disintegrating into housing projects before it improves a little, not much, about two miles west of downtown. Sykes parks in front of a small rancher, vinyl siding, the yard a mess, the only house with empty supercans haphazardly parked near the street because Mrs. Barber is too lazy to roll them back to the house, it seems. The neighborhood has very few streetlights and a lot of souped-up gaudy old cars — Cadillacs, a Lincoln painted purple, a Corvette with those stupid spinning hubcaps. The crapmobiles of dirtbags, drug dealers, no-account kids. Sykes is mindful of the Glock .40-caliber pistol in the shoulder holster under her jacket. She follows the sidewalk and rings the bell.
Momentarily, the porch light blinks on.
“Who is it?” a voice slurs from the other side of the door.
“Agent Sykes, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.”
A burglar chain rattles. A dead-bolt lock snaps free. The door opens and a cheap-looking woman with dyed blond hair and makeup smudges under her eyes steps aside to let Sykes in.
“Mrs. Barber,” Sykes politely says. “I sure appreciate…”
“I don’t get what all the fuss is about, but go on.” Her housecoat is buttoned crooked, eyes bloodshot, smells like booze. “The basement’s thataway,” she indicates with a nod, fumbles to relock the door, has a very loud voice with a very strong twang. “Rummage through his junk all you want. You can load it in a truck and haul it the hell away for all I care.”
“I won’t be needing to load it in a truck,” Sykes says. “I just need to look through some police files he may have had in his office once.”
“I’m going back to bed,” Mrs. Barber says.
* * *
Lamont seems to have forgotten where she is.
It crosses Win’s mind that she’s delusional, believes she’s in her big office surrounded by her big glass collection, maybe in one of her big-ticket designer suits, sitting at her big glass desk instead of in a hospital gown, in a plastic chair, inside a hospital examination room. She acts as if she and Win are doing their usual thing, working a high-profile case, a bad one destined for a lot of complications and press.
At Risk wg-1 Page 4