At Risk wg-1

by Patricia Cornwell

  Better get used to it, he said as if the stench, the insects didn’t bother him at all, said it as if she didn’t know squat. Dead people aren’t nice to work with and they never say thanks. Maggots are good. Just little babies. See? He picked one up, put it on his fingertip, where it perched like a grain of rice, a wiggly one. Snitches. Our little friends. Tell us time of death, all kinds of things.

  I can hate maggots all I want, Sykes said. And I don’t need you treating me like I just fell off the turnip truck.

  She gets up from her pickle bucket, surveys layers of boxes, wondering which ones contain more old cases that walked out of the office with Detective Barber. Selfish, pinheaded idiot. She lifts a box four layers up, grunting under the weight of it, hoping she doesn’t pull something. Most of the boxes are open, probably because the old goat couldn’t bother re-taping them shut after going in and out of them over the years, and she starts rummaging through charge-card statements and phone and utility bills going back to the mid-eighties. It’s not what she’s looking for, but the funny thing about bills and receipts is that they often reveal more about a person than confessions and eyewitness accounts, and she entertains an idle curiosity as she imagines August 8 twenty years ago, the day Vivian Finlay was murdered.

  She imagines Detective Barber going to work that day, probably as if it were any other day, and then getting called to Mrs. Finlay’s expensive riverfront home in Sequoyah Hills. Sykes tries to remember where she was twenty years ago in August. Getting divorced, that’s where. Twenty years ago she was a police dispatcher in Nashville and her husband worked for a recording company, exposing himself to new female talent in a way that turned out to be a little different from what Sykes thought was acceptable.

  She pulls out files sloppily labeled by month and sits back down on the pickle bucket with credit-card receipts and utility and telephone bills. The address on the envelopes is the one for the house that belongs to this hellhole of a basement, and as she looks over MasterCard charges, she begins to suspect that Barber lived alone back then, most of his charges made at places like Home Depot, Wal-Mart, a liquor store, a sports bar. She notes that throughout the first half of 1985, he made very few long-distance calls, in some months no more than two or three. Then in August, that abruptly changed.

  She shines the flashlight on a phone bill and recalls that twenty years ago cell phones were these big, cumbersome contraptions that looked like a Geiger counter. Nobody used them. Cops didn’t. When they were away from their desks and needed to make calls they asked the dispatcher to do it and relay the information over the radio. If the information the detective needed was confidential or involved, he returned to headquarters, and if he was on the road, he charged the calls to the department and then had to fill out forms for reimbursement.

  What cops didn’t do was make case-related calls from their homes or charge them to their home numbers, but beginning the evening of August 8, when Mrs. Finlay was already dead and in the morgue refrigerator, Barber started making calls from his home phone, seven of them between five p.m. and midnight.

  7

  Win’s condo is on the third floor of a brick-and-sandstone building that in the mid-eighteen-hundreds was a school. For someone who had so much trouble getting into schools, it’s strange that he ended up living in one.

  It wasn’t premeditated. When he was hired by the Massachusetts State Police, he was twenty-two, had nothing to his name but a ten-year-old Jeep, secondhand clothes, and the five hundred dollars that Nana had scraped together for a college graduation present. Finding an affordable place in Cambridge was out of the question until he happened upon the old schoolhouse on Orchard Street, abandoned for decades, then being converted into condominiums. The building wasn’t habitable yet, and Win made a deal with Farouk, the owner: If the rent was sufficiently cheap and Farouk promised not to raise it more than three percent per year, Win would live there during the extensive renovation and provide security and supervision.

  Now his police presence is enough. He doesn’t have to supervise anything and Farouk lets him park his Hummer H2 (seized from a drug dealer and sold at auction for a song), his Harley-Davidson Road King (repossessed, gently used), and his unmarked police car in a small paved area in back. None of the other tenants have parking, fight it out along the narrow street, get dinged and crunched and scraped.

  Win unlocks the back door and walks up three flights of stairs to a hallway lined with units that once were classrooms. He lives at the end of the hall, number 31. He unlocks the heavy oak door and steps inside a private enclave of old brick walls that still have the original chalkboards built into them, and fir floors and wainscoting and vaulted ceilings. His furniture isn’t of the period, a brown leather Ralph Lauren couch (secondhand), a chair and Oriental rug (eBay), a Thomas Moser coffee table (floor sample, slightly damaged). He looks, listens, engages all of his senses. The air seems stagnant, the living room lonely, and he retrieves a flashlight from a drawer, shines it obliquely over the floor, the furniture, the windows, looking for footprints or fingermarks in dust or on shiny surfaces. He doesn’t have an alarm system, can afford just the one in Nana’s house. Doesn’t matter, he has his own way of dealing with intruders.

  Inside the coat closet near the front door, he opens a safe built into the wall, gets out his Smith & Wesson .357, model 340, internal hammer, or “hammerless,” so it doesn’t get snagged on clothing, and constructed of a titanium and aluminum alloy, so lightweight it feels like a toy. He tucks the revolver into a pocket and walks into the kitchen, fixes a pot of coffee, looks through mail Farouk has stacked on the counter, most of it magazines, thumbs through Forbes while coffee drips, skims an article on the fastest cars, Porsche’s new 911, the new Mercedes SLK55, Maserati Spyder.

  He heads into his bedroom with its brick walls, another chalkboard (for keeping score, he tells some of the women he dates, winks at them, just kidding), sits on the bed, sips coffee, thinking, his eyes heavy.

  * * *

  Sykes wishes she had thought of bringing a bottle of water with her and something to eat. Her mouth is dry, tastes like dust. Her blood sugar’s dropping.

  Several times she has thought about venturing upstairs again and asking Detective Jimmy Barber’s widow for a little hospitality, but the one time she went up to inquire if she could use the bathroom, Mrs. Barber, who was supposed to be asleep, was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking straight vodka and as unfriendly and unpleasant as a skunk.

  “Go on.” Drunk as hell, jerks her head toward the bathroom down the hall. “Then get on with your business and leave me the hell alone. I’m sick and tired of all this, done my bit.”

  Alone and exhausted in the basement, Sykes continues studying Barber’s baffling phone bills, trying to make sense of his charging so many of them to his home phone. Five of them have the area code 919, the same number each time, and Sykes tries it, gets an answering service for the North Carolina State Medical Examiner’s Office, someone asking if she wants to report a case.

  “No. Oh, I’m sorry,” she says. “I must have the wrong number,” and she hangs up.

  She notes that at least a dozen other calls Barber charged to his home phone over the days after Vivian Finlay’s murder have the area code 704. She tries the number and gets a recording — the area code has been changed to 828. She redials.

  “Hello?” a groggy male voice answers.

  Sykes checks her watch. It’s almost seven a.m., says, “Really sorry to bother you so early, sir. But do you mind telling me how long you’ve had this phone number?”

  He hangs up on her. Maybe it wasn’t the best approach. She tries again and says right off, “I promise this isn’t a crank call, sir. I’m an agent with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and I’ve come across this phone number in a case I’m looking at.”

  “Good Lord,” he says. “You’re kidding.”

  “No sir. Serious as a heart attack. A case that happened twenty years ago.”

  “Good Lo
rd,” he says. “You must mean my aunt.”

  “And that would be…?” Sykes asks.

  “Vivian Finlay. This number was hers. I mean, we’ve never changed it.”

  “So I’m assuming she had another home besides the one in Knoxville.”

  “That’s right. Here in Flat Rock. I’m her nephew.”

  Sykes calmly asks, “Do you remember Jimmy Barber, the detective who worked your aunt’s case?”

  She hears a female voice in the background: “George? Who is it?”

  “It’s all right, honey,” he says, then to Sykes, “My wife, Kim.” Then back to his wife, “I’ll just be a minute, honey.” Then to Sykes, “I know he tried hard, probably too hard. Was downright territorial about it, and I kind of blame him for it not going anywhere. You know, the case of his career, him not sharing information, working in secret. I bet you’re familiar with things like that.”

  “ ’Fraid so.”

  “As best I recall, he seemed to have this notion he was onto something, hot on the trail, wouldn’t say just what that trail was, guess nobody else knew what it was, either. That’s probably one reason it never got solved. That’s always been my belief.”

  Sykes thinks of the calls made from Barber’s home phone. Maybe that’s the explanation. He was secretive, didn’t want any dispatchers or his fellow investigators to catch the scent of what he was following. Maybe Barber wanted to solve the case himself, didn’t want to share the glory. Yes, she’s all too familiar with that MO.

  “Honey,” George is talking to his wife again, clearly trying to soothe her. “Why don’t you go make us some coffee? It’s all right.” Back to Sykes. “Kim took it the hardest, was as close to my aunt as a daughter. Oh Lord, I hate all this has to come up.” He keeps sighing.

  Sykes questions him a little further. George was in his early forties when his aunt was murdered, is the son of her only sibling, Edmund Finlay, and when Sykes tries to make sense of how George and his aunt could have the same last name, he explains that she was quite strong-willed, proud of her distinguished family name, and refused to give it up when she married. George is an only child. He and his wife, Kim, have two grown children who live out west, the couple spend all of their time in Flat Rock, left Tennessee for good not long after the murder, just couldn’t be there anymore, couldn’t handle the memories, especially Kim couldn’t, practically had a nervous breakdown afterward.

  Sykes promises to get back with him or, more likely, an investigator named Winston Garano will. George doesn’t sound very happy when he hears that part.

  “It’s just awfully painful to open up all this,” he explains. “You mind my asking why it’s necessary after all these years?”

  “We’re just looking into a few things, sir. I appreciate your cooperation.”

  “Of course. Whatever I can do to help.”

  He’d rather eat dirt than help, Sykes thinks. When the anger goes away and the ugliness fades, a lot of people don’t care about justice anymore. They just want to forget.

  “Too bad,” she mutters to Barber’s dark, wretched basement. It’s not like I’m having fun, either.

  She ponders and contemplates, perched on the pickle bucket like that statue The Thinker, resumes going through more bills, finds a MasterCard bill for September, pulls out what is in the envelope, finds something that gives her a disk error, as she calls it.

  “What the hell?” she mutters, staring at a document with a cover sheet stamped with an autopsy case number, then another case number, this one a police file number sloppily scribbled in pencil: KPD893-85.

  The page underneath it is a medical examiner’s inventory of Vivian Finlay’s personal effects, and stapled to it is a Polaroid photograph of mutilated male body parts, grimy and gory: feet, arms and legs, pieces and parts, guts, a decapitated head, arranged on top of a steel autopsy table covered with a green sheet. The case number written on a six-inch ruler used as a reference scale indicates that the death occurred in North Carolina in 1983.

  * * *

  Win wakes up with a start, for an instant not sure where he is. He realizes he’s been asleep for more than two hours, still in his clothes, his neck stiff, the coffee on his bedside table cold.

  He checks his phone messages, skipping over the earlier ones left by Sykes when he was too busy with Lamont to deal with the Finlay case. Sykes has left him another message: She’s sent him files over the Internet and he needs to look at them right away and call her. His computer is neatly centered on a Stickley desk (yard sale), and he sits down, enters Sykes’s number, gets her on her cell phone.

  “Good God!” She hurts his ear. “I just heard!”

  “Whoa,” he says. “You near a landline?”

  She gives him a number he recognizes as the Academy. He calls her back.

  “Good God!” she starts in again. “It’s all over the news. Good God, Win! What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you about it later, Sykes.”

  “You get in a shootout and you’re going to tell me later? At least you killed him. Goddamn, and her. How’s that gonna work? The DA? That’s all anybody’s talking about down here.”

  “Can we move on, Sykes?”

  “The part I don’t get is how you ended up at her house, walked right into it. She invite you there for a nightcap or something?”

  It doesn’t take a detective to pick up on her jealousy. The beautiful, powerful Lamont, all the more formidable because Sykes has never met her, and now she imagines him heroically saving her life, probably thinks Lamont is devoted to him forever, wants to quit her job for him, get married, have his children, throw herself on a funeral pyre when he dies.

  “Tell me what you’ve got,” he says. “You find the file?”

  “After spending half the night in Barber’s damn basement, everything but.”

  He sips his cold coffee, goes into his e-mail, sees files from her, converts them to documents as she talks fast, hardly takes a breath, tells him about MasterCard and phone bills, about Barber’s probable territoriality and glory-hunting and secrecy, what Mrs. Finlay’s nephew had to say. Then gets to the part about some man who had a bad encounter with a train in Charlotte two years before Mrs. Finlay’s murder.

  “Whoa, slow down,” Win interrupts her, scanning a document on his screen. “What’s a train death got to do with anything?”

  “You tell me. You looking at the picture?”

  “Looking at it now.” He studies the photograph on his screen, not very good quality, a Polaroid of raggedly severed limbs and intestines and chunks of flesh piled next to a mutilated torso and severed head, what looks like black grease and dirt everywhere. White guy. Black hair. Pretty young, as best Win can tell. “You checked it out with the ME’s office?”

  “You know, I didn’t realize this was my case.”

  His cell phone rings. He doesn’t answer, impatiently silences it.

  “Hey,” Win says to Sykes. “You sound pissed at me.”

  “I’m not pissed at you,” Sykes says angrily.

  “Good. Because I’ve got plenty of people pissed at me and don’t need you added to the list.”

  “Like who?”

  “Her, for starters.”

  “You mean after what you did…?”

  “Exactly. I’ve tried to tell you. She’s borderline, a sociopath, Bonnie without Clyde, doesn’t need a Clyde, thinks all of us are Clydes. Hates Clydes, actually.”

  “You saying Lamont doesn’t like men?”

  “Not sure she likes anybody.”

  “Well, it’d be nice if you’d say thanks.” Sykes tries to sound gruff. “I’ve been up all night running down crap for you, and I’m supposed to be in class in five minutes and where am I? In the damn media room sending files to you, trying to call people, mostly getting cussed at. I’m going to look at the case later today, on a flight to Raleigh, the ME’s office in Chapel Hill.”

  “Who cussed at you?” He smiles a little. When she gets riled, she sounds like a littl
e kid, one as Southern as pecan pie.

  “Some damn Charlotte cop. And who’s going to reimburse me for my plane ticket, by the way?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything,” he says, scrolling through another file, information that came from Detective Barber’s basement, puzzled by a medical examiner’s inventory of personal effects removed from a dead body in the morgue. “What did the damn Charlotte cop who worked the train fatality have to say?”

  One pair of ruffled blue tennis panties with ball pocket, he reads the inventory.

  One Izod white tennis skirt and matching shirt, bloody…

  His cell phone rings again. He ignores it.

  “The big jerk.” Sykes continues to vent all over the map. “He’s the police chief now, you know what they say about what floats to the top.”

  He zooms in on a number written in pencil on the upper-right corner of the personal effects report.

  KPD893-85.

  “Sykes?”

  “… Said I’d have to submit my request in writing if I want copies of the reports, which by now would probably be on microfilm,” she is saying. “But he said he didn’t understand the interest, there was nothing to it…”

  “Sykes? KPD893-85. Vivian Finlay? She was wearing tennis clothes when she was murdered?”

  “Try telling that to him, the guy smashed to smithereens by the damn freight train. Nothing to it…”

  “Sykes! This inventory is Vivian Finlay’s personal effects when she came into the morgue?”

  “That’s the next bizarre part, the only thing I could find from her case file. Where the hell’s the rest of it?”

  “These bloody tennis clothes are what’s been in the Knoxville PD’s evidence room for twenty years, what’s being tested for DNA in California?”

  The autopsy report Lamont gave him depicts a tiny seventy-three-year-old lady.

  “You sure this personal-effects form is from her case?” Win asks.