Ryder rolled over a chair—Brooker’s, which made Winter feel guilty he hadn’t spoken to Brooker in a few days. “These are the photos of unidentified women Gruse photographed,” said Winter. “Organized by clothing.” He clicked though the images one by one. “The last time I saw Upton she was wearing these really tight jeans. Did she have something like that on when you saw her?”
“Let me think. Um, the first time she was wearing yoga pants with a pullover top, like a sweatshirt but not as thick.” Ryder hesitated. “The second time she had on a man’s shirt.”
“With yoga pants again? Or tight jeans?”
“Just the shirt.”
Winter wasn’t following. “I mean, what else did she have on? A skirt? Jeans?”
“I told you. Just the shirt.”
Winter kept his eyes on the screen, he wished he had a witness for this, it was priceless. “Did you put that in your notes? During the interview, the subject wore only a man’s shirt?”
“I can’t help it that’s how she answered the door.”
“Okay. But you should ask Cindy to see if there are any photos of women only wearing a man’s shirt. Just in case.” Winter would want to hear that conversation; Cindy would grill Ryder mercilessly. Winter resumed clicking through the photos, feeling Ryder steaming, knowing he would have been all over Winter if the roles had been reversed.
“Hey, stop there,” said Ryder.
“Can’t be her,” said Winter. “She’s got pants on.”
“Fuck you. That one looks about right, same build, same hips.”
“You can tell that from the back?” But Winter didn’t disagree. The next two photos were of the same woman, walking down a sidewalk that could have been anywhere, but was probably in Marburg by the date stamp. The next photo was obviously of a different woman, bright blonde, so Winter clicked over to the yoga pants folder.
About halfway through the images Winter pointed. “Her.”
This was a side shot, the background blurry, but the subject reasonably sharp. Even in profile it was clearly Upton.
“Son of a bitch,” said Ryder. The next five photos were all of Upton, the pictures apparently taken from across the street. The last one showed her from behind, but on an angle. “Go back to the skinny jeans.”
“Wish we could put them up at the same time,” said Winter.
“Easy, let me.” Ryder took the mouse and placed the images side by side, skinny jeans and yoga pants. “It’s her.”
“You sure? I see the similarity, the hair color and length, the body.”
“I’m sure,” said Ryder.
“Let’s see if there’s anything else.” Winter ran though the rest of the folders, but they couldn’t find another similar photo. “Huh.” He tapped the screen. “I have an idea. A few of them, actually. What if Gruse was following Upton around, taking her photo. Maybe not stalking her in a traditional sense, but just doing what he does. He follows her home, or stakes her out there, and he happens to take a picture of Ayers going in the night of the assault. Gruse tries to blackmail Ayers, and it goes south, Ayers kills him.”
“That’s a stretch,” said Ryder. “Gruse taking a photo of Upton, okay, I buy that.” He jerked his hand toward the screen. “He’s got hundreds of women, it would be more of a surprise if he didn’t have a photo of her because she’s so—attractive.”
“There are other possibilities,” said Winter. “Upton and Ayers might have still been hot and heavy. Ayers could have found out that Gruse was stalking her and tried to warn Gruse off, they get in a fight.”
“That’s even more of a stretch. I know what you are doing. I’ve heard you’re obsessed with imaginary connections.”
“It’s not an obsession, and it’s got nothing to do with imagination. The connections are either there or they’re not.”
Ryder said, “Your theory doesn’t quite fit with Ayers’s story of not being interested in Upton.”
“He’s lied before. And if he killed Gruse, he certainly wouldn’t be pointing out how close he was to Upton if she was the reason he did it.”
“Ayers doesn’t strike me as a guy who would kill someone,” said Ryder. “Why would he? He’s got Suzanne Mance, Ashley Hanna, and Melanie Upton. Even a stuck up Hollywood actor has to see how lucky he is. No way he’d screw up all that over some guy taking pictures of a woman he’s sleeping with.”
“Okay, try this. Gruse is stalking Upton, and she gets in a fight with him.”
“And what? She kills him? You know how many men probably follow her around, come on to her?”
“Wait a minute,” said Winter. “Weren’t you the one who had that idea? That Gruse was a stalker?”
“That was before you were connecting it to Upton. Besides, it’s the woman being stalked who usually gets hurt, not the stalker.”
“Maybe they had something going.”
Ryder looked at Winter in disbelief. “There’s no way that woman,” he pointed to the screen, “was with Gruse.”
“We don’t know that. We deal with people every day, but we don’t know anything about them, really. We see them mostly in times of stress. We don’t know what’s going on in their lives, what makes them tick, what reasons they have for doing anything. Not with just a glimpse. It’s like Gruse’s photos, just a snapshot.” Winter was thinking about Upton being an actress, about how she had tried to play him. “And sometimes we’re only seeing what they want us to see.”
“Next you’ll be telling me it was Gruse who assaulted Upton, and she somehow confused him with Ayers.”
Winter hadn’t thought of that, but it was a possibility. “One thing we can do is run Gruse’s DNA against Upton’s SAFE kit. That will tell us whether they were together the night of the assault.”
“It’s a waste of time,” said Ryder. “These cases aren’t connected.” He rolled his chair back out of Winter’s cubicle. “I’m going home. Monday I’ll get back on the drug angle. I’m expecting the lab report on what was in those capsules we found in Gruse’s pocket.”
Winter stared at the image of Upton on the screen, tuning Ryder out. He needed to get back to his house, stare at his ceiling. Upton, Gruse, Ayers.
A lot of dots to connect.
CHAPTER 34
Winter spent most of Sunday in his lounger, staring at the ceiling, mulling through possible connections between the Gruse murder and the Upton assault. There was now a clear connection between Gruse and Upton through the photographs, but that was no proof of a criminal link. It would have been different if Upton had been the only woman Gruse had photographed, or if his hard drive had been filled with her images. She actually appeared less often than many of his other subjects.
Still, it was a link, and while Winter wouldn’t jump to any conclusions, it was worth thinking about what other connections there might be. Gruse and Upton both went to the Marquee night club, but so did just about every other Millennial in town. Neither Upton nor Ayers had admitted knowing Gruse, but Gruse might know someone connected to either one of them, an agent, a publicist. Winter used his imaginary pencil to draw blank boxes next to Upton and Ayers, connected by a dotted line to Gruse.
Jealousy was a common enough motive for murder, especially one so personal as the Gruse stabbing. Ayers didn’t seem like the jealous type, he was cheating with a cheater himself. Yet the Ayers/Upton relationship appeared complicated, as emotional relationships often were. That would explain Ayers’s interaction with Upton that had been caught on film.
Gruse and Upton did seem an unlikely couple, but Winter had seen stranger relationships.
Unless Gruse had something Upton wanted . . . That made Winter again think about a photo: Gruse with evidence of Ayers assaulting Upton. Would Upton sleep with Gruse to get such a picture? That would give Ayers a possible motive to kill Gruse; to get the photo himself.
If Ayers hadn’t known about such a photo, but had found out about Upton and Gruse—maybe Ayers was one of those men who slept around, but couldn’t deal with
their girlfriends doing the same.
So it was certainly plausible that Gruse and Upton had something going on. That idea was worth pursuing. He’d go back to some of the places where Gruse had been seen, try to find out if Upton had been there as well, put them together in spots other than the Marquee.
Now and again Winter fell asleep, sometimes waking with a new insight, other times just needing to get up to get a drink or stretch. By late afternoon he was tired of not moving around, so he went down to the basement and fiddled with a broken dehumidifier. He concluded the compressor was shot, hauled it up the stairs and into the back of his old pickup, and drove it to the dump.
At Sears, Winter was told that they wouldn’t have dehumidifiers back in stock until spring, even though the weather promised to be hot and sticky for another month at least. That reminded him of his conversation with Melanie Upton, about stores not having the proper seasonal merchandise, and that reminded Winter of Upton’s response when he had asked her about Gruse. Upton had said that guys like Gruse came on to her all the time. The woman at the Marquee had said Gruse was creepy. Maybe Gruse had become infatuated with Upton, which would have led to the stalking, and perhaps Gruse catching a photo of Ayers. Or Gruse had something else on Ayers, or even Upton.
Gruse, Upton, Ayers.
First thing Monday Winter put in the request to match the Gruse DNA to Upton’s SAFE kit. He was wired from mostly sitting around on Sunday, but had no place to direct his energy.
He checked in with Sal Tully’s ex girlfriend to make sure she wasn’t being harassed by the biker. She came to the door with one kid of indeterminate sex on her hip and a wide eyed boy grasping her leg; the two kids didn’t look like each other or like Tully. Winter was a cop, not the morality police, that was none of his business.
She was surprised to see Winter but grateful. “Whatever you did, he hasn’t been around again,” she said. She pushed a wisp of ragged hair behind her ear, giving him a small smile.
Winter wondered at the plight of people whose bright spot in their day was a visit from a cop. “You still have my card? You call me if he bothers you.”
“I don’t—I threw it away. I thought you only wanted me to call you to—,” she glanced down at the boy, who might have been old enough to understand, “—you know, get something in return.”
That pissed Winter off as much as Tully. “Some cop do that to you?”
She shook her head. “No, really. But you know, I hear things.”
Winter gave her another one of his cards. “Don’t be afraid to call me. You want to check me out, just ask around. If you ever hear about a cop asking for those kind of favors, I want to know about it. Or if Tully comes back.”
She nodded, holding the card, the door still open, as if she still expected Winter to come in, demand some recompense. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he left her like that.
Over the next few days Winter cruised the town, touching base with a few of his contacts, not quite informers, just locals who had good eyes and even better ears. Winter wasn’t asking specifically about Gruse—pointed questions made his contacts feel like informers, and that’s not how they saw themselves either. Instead, Winter just soaked it all in, stories of break-ins, assaults, whispers of drug deals, all mixed in with a lot of nothing, talk about potholes and the weather and sports.
He showed the photo of Gruse wherever he thought Gruse might have gone. Cindy was pulling together the last of the numbers in Gruse’s call list, but the pickings were getting slimmer, a camera store, a pawnshop.
If Ryder had been showing Gruse’s photo—Winter had no doubt that Ryder wasn’t bothering—he would have probably mapped the city into a grid and assigned search coordinates to underlings while he sat in his command cubicle on his phone getting updates. Instead, Winter bounced from place to place, more or less geographically, his priorities dictated more by his experience than a regimen. He had previously scoured everywhere he could think Gruse might go near his mother’s house, and aside from Gruse being recognized as a customer who bought cigarillos at a 7 Eleven, Winter had come up empty.
Thursday Winter was working the Irish side of town, more or less. More or less in that there were Irish all over the city, and more or less because this neighborhood was no longer all Irish. Yet all the signs were here, the Catholic churches, St. Patrick, St Brigid; the street names, Murphy, Kennedy; the bars, Cullen’s, Shawn’s Tap.
Winter bypassed most of the bars. These were full of locals, mainly men stopping in for a pint after work, shooting the shit. Winter doubted Gruse would hang out in such a bar; he’d be unwelcome and feel it immediately.
A spittle of rain hit his windshield as he pulled into O’Malley’s. Winter had been here once, reasonably priced beer and food, and also waitresses, all of which were likely to be on Gruse’s personal menu.
Winter had worn his hoody—the day being unnaturally cool—and took advantage of it to cover his head until he dashed inside, the rain picking up. Mid afternoon on a weekday, the place was almost empty, one old guy on the end of the bar with a beer and chaser, two middle aged women in a booth sharing a salad. They both looked up at Winter as he came in, their eyes lingering, Winter picking up a subtle invite. He headed for the bar.
The girl pecking at the register looked way too young to be serving, a poster child for an Irish tourist agency, straight blond hair, bright green eyes, freckles.
Winter waited until she’d finished whatever she was doing, then introduced himself. She gave him a genuine smile and said her name was Kathy. Winter showed her Gruse’s photo.
“He was here once,” she said, her smile vanishing.
“Give you a problem?”
“You know guys.” Her eyes tried to hold Winter’s, failed.
“He bother you?” Winter looked around. “You here alone?”
“My dad’s in the back. This is his place.”
“Your dad help when guys get a little drunk, toss them out?”
“We don’t get many drunks here. It’s mostly families, people come to eat. The bar is more for looks.”
She really hadn’t answered Winter’s question, so he said, “This guy was an exception? He got drunk?”
“A little.”
Winter waited her out, she might be old enough to serve beer, but he bet she had a youthful sense of self control, which meant she didn’t have much.
Sure enough, she asked, “He claiming something?”
“No, that’s not it. Look, if he got drunk and your father shoved him out the door, good for him. He’s got to protect you, and his business.” Winter let that sink in. “I’m just looking for information on the guy.”
“It wasn’t my dad,” said Kathy.
“What happened?”
“Your guy, he might have been a little drunk, but I swear he only had a few beers here, we really watch that. Anyway, he’s being a jerk, interrupting me—I’m talking to another customer—bragging about being from California, telling me he’s going to take me for a ride in his car. Then he grabbed my arm.”
Winter had been in enough bars to fill in the rest, especially the parts Kathy had purposely skipped over. “This customer, a friend, maybe? He helped you out?”
Kathy pursed her lips. “I don’t want to get him in trouble.”
“Then don’t give me his name. Just tell me what happened.”
“My friend told the creep to take his hands off me, and one thing led to another, and you know, there was a fight.”
Winter figured a lot had been left out of that too. He’d do some checking and circle back; he didn’t want to blow his investigation if it turned out that Gruse had been stabbed by Kathy’s boyfriend over a bar fight. “Your friend, did he know this guy?”
“No. He would have told me.”
“The guy left on his own?” Winter was trying to find out if Kathy’s friend had followed Gruse out the door to finish whatever had started.
“Pretty much. Maybe he got a little help, he wa
s groggy and his nose was bleeding pretty bad. I had to clean it up off the floor and it was all over his shirt.”
“When did this happen?”
“A few months ago.”
“Are you sure?” That would be odd, a bar fight carrying on for months, Kathy’s knight in shining armor mixing it up with Gruse after all that time.
“Yeah. There was a party here that night, people watching an awards show on the tv, they were doing this thing where people put ten dollars in a hat, and whoever picks the most winners gets the pot.”
“The Oscars?”
“No, the other ones.”
“The music awards?”
“No, those are the Grammys. I watch those.”
Winter couldn’t think of any other award shows. “Okay, thanks.”
Back in the car, Winter mused over the timeline. It was certainly possible that Kathy’s friend had known Gruse, and Kathy was just covering for him. But if that were the case, why mention that she knew Gruse at all? Maybe there was a security camera, and Kathy had to fess up about the fight because she knew there would be evidence, or at least other witnesses. Still, months had passed. Usually bar fights were spontaneous explosions set loose by alcohol, not festered over for months.
Winter almost went back in to ask the father about a camera, but first dialed the station and got connected to Cindy. “Can you look up if any awards shows were on tv, two, three months ago?”
“Don’t have to look it up. The Tony’s.”
Something clicked at the back of Winter’s mind, where had he heard a reference to the Tony’s before? “What are they for?”
“Plays, stage stuff.”
“You know that how?”
“What, you don’t think I’m cultured, go to the theater?” Cindy pronounced theater in a fake French accent.
“Do you know the date?”
Random Revenge (Detective Robert Winter Book 1) Page 38