Darkness Descending: A Mimi Patterson/Gianna Maglione Mystery (The Mimi Patterson/Gianna Maglione Mysteries)

by Penny Mickelbury

  Mimi thought she could understand the sentiment.

  The air was a little lighter in the Think Tank, due primarily to the better frame of mind the Boss was in, that change due to the fact that Ray Washington’s Pink Panther was closed until further notice, the fact that Lisa Baker had provided a description of the man who had harassed Natasha Hilliard and of the pick-up truck he drove, and the fact that the Hate Crimes unit was in possession of three video tapes shot by Darlene Phillips’s date at the July 4th barbecue in Rock Creek Park. Darlene hadn’t realized that she’d zeroed in on the hecklers but she was an excellent photographer, and Lisa Baker had excellent recall. Her description of the man who had hassled Natasha Hilliard was almost as perfect as a photograph, which they’d have by tomorrow morning—a still lifted from the video tape. Perhaps one of the dead woman’s family members or friends knew the man—a likely supposition since he’d singled her out by name for his harangue.

  “Too bad the parking lot’s not in the shot,” Eric said, “or we might be able to get the truck, too.”

  Kenny’s eyes lit up. “I could try for that,” he said, always game for a technical challenge of the computer sort.

  A knock sounded. It was rare that they had visitors, even rarer that the occasional visitor knocked on the door, so they all looked up as a plain clothes detective entered. “Lieutenant Maglione?”

  Gianna walked toward him. “What can I do for you?”

  “Detective Schuster, Downtown Division. My boss wanted me to let you know about an incident we had this afternoon. Might not be anything, but the Chief made it clear that anything that gave any hint of being a hate crime was to be brought immediately to you,” he said, and gave her a folder.

  “I appreciate the heads up,” Gianna said. “What happened?”

  “Guy we’re taking to be a Muslim attacked a reporter. He wanted her to stop writing stories about homosexuals—”

  Everybody in the room stood up so suddenly that Schuster backed up in alarm. All eyes were on him. Schuster’s eyes flicked from one to the other of them.

  “What reporter, Detective Schuster?” Gianna asked so calmly that Schuster actually visibly relaxed.

  “That Montgomery Patterson, the one who always writes about the corruption. She’s been writing about homosexuals—”

  “You said she was attacked, Detective. Does that mean she’s injured?”

  He shook his head. “No, Ma’am. At least not bad enough for the hospital. She wouldn’t go. It’s all in the report, Lieutenant. And the perp’s in custody.”

  “Thank you, Detective, and thank your boss for me. Who is, that, by the way? Downtown Division, you said? Shirley McManus still in charge over there?”

  “Yes, Ma’am, she is, and I’ll tell her what you said.”

  Schuster left but nobody moved. Now all eyes were on Gianna. She was thinking—hoping—that if Mimi was seriously hurt she’d have called, but she knew for certain that if the injury was not serious, Mimi never would call her at work.

  “Let’s see what we have here,” she said, overriding her emotions and opening the folder. She read the first page quickly, turned to the second page and couldn’t stop the reaction. “Son of a bitch!” They all crowded around her and looked at the processing photograph of the perp. It was Natasha Hilliard’s attacker.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Michael Howard Nelson AKA Abdul Sharif. And the icing on the cake? They impounded his pick-up truck. He drove it to the paper and left it double parked when he went inside. We ought to see if Lisa Baker wants a job with us.” She headed for the door. “I’m going to give Shirley McManus a call and tell her I want Mr. Nelson AKA Sharif. Eric, get warrants for his home, car and any other personal property he might have and Bobby, you and Cassie sit on his home until the warrant comes. Tim, you watch the truck. Kenny, get on the computer and find out anything you can about him. Linda and Alice, you two stand by. You’ll be with me. I’ll be back shortly.” She barreled out of the room, leaving electrically charged air in her wake.

  They all stood motionless. They knew that she’d gone to her office, not to call Captain McManus, she could have done that in the Think Tank, but to call Mimi Patterson. “Schuster said she was all right, she didn’t have to go to the hospital,” Bobby said. “If something was wrong, she’d be in the hospital, right?”

  “Right,” Cassie said.

  “So probably nothing to worry about,” Tim said, worry etched all over his face.

  “We’ll know in a minute,” Alice said, concealing her own worry about the woman she’d still like to get to know a lot better. If only she had a different lover...

  Mimi had a fierce headache, her butt and side hurt where she’d slammed into the hard marble column and then the floor, and her back hurt where Nelson had hit her, but her real pain was caused by the fact that both her micro recorder and her laptop were more seriously injured than she was. Her pride also sustained a bit hit. Here she was at home at five o’clock in the afternoon taking aspirin and drinking herbal tea. She wiggled around on the sofa trying to find a comfortable position, then gave up. Every movement caused some part of her body to hurt, even reaching for the remote control. She flicked on the TV and muted the sound while she flipped around looking for something inoffensive to watch. She settled on the early edition of BBC News and turned up the sound a bit, but found she couldn’t concentrate. She cast a baleful glance at the little stack of cassettes and diskettes that represented her shattered tape recorder and battered laptop computer, and wondered what was happening with the SOB responsible. The phone rang and she almost fainted from the pain caused by reaching for it.

  “You don’t need to work, Mimi, you need to rest,” was Gianna’s response to her grousing about the busted equipment.

  “You could be right,” Mimi said, stifling a groan.

  “Why? What’s wrong?” Gianna said so quickly Mimi would have laughed had she not known instinctively not to.

  “I’m just agreeing with you.”

  “That’s what’s wrong. I wish I had time to come look at you in person, to be certain that you’re all right, instead of having to rely on a police report description of your injuries. Dammit, Mimi, that’s what cell phones are for!”

  Mimi winced. Gianna had been really angry that Mimi had left messages on her home and office phones instead of calling directly. “You know I don’t like to disturb you when you’re working, Gianna. And it wasn’t an emergency.”

  “We’ll discuss what disturbs me and what doesn’t later. Right now, you rest. And, by the way, thanks.”

  Something about her tone of voice... “Thanks for what?”

  “We’ve been looking for Mr. Nelson, only we didn’t know what his name was or where to find him. All of which means I may not get home tonight but I’ll call and check on you periodically.”

  “Don’t worry about me, but I would appreciate it if you’d explain to Mr. Nelson why beating up on reporters isn’t—” For some reason the image of Edgar Whitfield popped into her mind. “— isn’t acceptable behavior,” she said, ending her call with Gianna and placing one to the white-haired gentleman himself.

  Acceptable behavior wasn’t of particular interest to Michael Nelson. He spit at Gianna, tried to kick Bobby, and called Tim a devil. It was clear they’d get nothing useful out of him.

  His truck and apartment, however, were proving much more forthcoming: A diary, half a dozen fat spiral notebooks filled with rambling anti-homosexual writings, a map of American University with the History Department circled, a city map with Lander Street marked, fishing gear and a tackle box with several knives, a set of carving knives with one knife missing, a huge cache of anti-homosexual literature, a Beretta semi-automatic, a photo album containing photographs of the entire Hilliard family, and a divorce decree, filed in D.C. Superior Court last year, ending the two-year marriage between himself and Felicia Hilliard.

  “The man had threatened your daughter and it never occurred to you to ment
ion that to us? Even after you knew that we were considering her death a hate crime, it never occurred to you to mention Michael Nelson?” Gianna was furious. “The first thought in your heads, the first words out of your mouths upon learning of Natasha’s death, should have been ‘Michael Nelson’.”

  The Hilliards were stunned. They sat side-by-side at a table in the Think Tank, gripping each others hands, alternating between looking forlornly at Gianna, looking helplessly at each other, looking around the room, bewildered by their surroundings. They’d driven down to D.C. from Philadelphia in response to her summons, and they looked a hundred years older than when she’d last seen them, the day after their middle daughter’s murder. Then, less then three weeks ago, they were shocked, stunned, grief-stricken. They now looked...Gianna wasn’t sure. It was more than shock and grief, though. Destroyed is the word that came to mind. They were a handsome couple, or should have been. Robert was a six-footer and looked like the scientist he was: Silver-haired, bespeckled, wearing a three-piece suit with a watch chain visible on the vest. Gianna wasn’t sure what women ministers should look like, but the Reverend Doctor Christine Hilliard, in a long-sleeved cranberry knit dress, sheer black stockings, black high heels, and discreet gold jewelry at ears, neck, and hands, looked like one of those magazine ads for the perfect over-fifty woman. Only the gold cross on the long chain, resting against her breasts, gave hint to her calling.

  “Nobody in the family ever took Mike seriously,” Robert Hilliard said. “Of course we never wanted Felicia to marry him. They’d both just started graduate school.” He put his head in his hands and sobbed. Christine Hilliard put her arms around him and they sat that way for a long moment. Bobby poured them some water. They drank it down and seemed calmer.

  “Believe me I’m very sorry to have to put you through this,” Gianna said more gently. “And I wouldn’t if there were another way to get the information we need, but there just isn’t.”

  “Part of what we’re feeling, Lieutenant, is guilt. Bob said we didn’t take Mike seriously, but more than that, we...diminished him, I think.”

  Gianna pulled up a chair close to the Hilliards. “What does that mean, Mrs. Hilliard? I need facts here, not...psychology.”

  “We embraced Natasha as we embraced our other two daughters, and we made certain he understood that we expected him to embrace her, too. We also made certain that he understood that while we respected his choice of religion, he could never expect Felicia to be anything but a Christian. He felt we weren’t taking him seriously.”

  “We weren’t!” Bob Hillliard, composure regained, behaved like the father of a murdered daughter. “How do you take seriously a grown man in twenty-first century America who thinks his wife should defer to him?” Hilliard jumped up, fists balled at is sides. His wife pulled him back down. “It’d be different if he’d been born in the Middle East, been born a Muslin. But he was a Tennessee Baptist, converted to Islam four or five years ago! I thought he was full of crap and Christine told him he was!”

  Gianna looked at Christine and she nodded sadly. “Though not in those exact words. I merely questioned his interpretation of some of the Koran’s passages. He didn’t seem to really know very much about Islam.”

  “He was just using that as an excuse to be a bully,” Bob Hilliard stated.

  “Anyway,” Christine said, “a year into the marriage, Felicia had had enough. She literally ran away from him.” Christine Hilliard wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “And it didn’t do any good. Didn’t make any difference.”

  The Hilliards drifted off into a grief-stricken silence. Gianna looked from one of them to the other, waiting for one of them to continue. It was Robert who did.

  “Because the rest of us were at home, in Philadelphia, it was Tasha who was there for Felicia. It was Tasha she called and who came running when there was trouble between Felicia and Mike. It was Tasha who always took her side and supported her, and not necessarily against Mike, but that’s how he read it: If Tasha was supporting Felicia, then she was against him. What he never really understood was that our girls would have supported each other against Jesus Christ, and that’s the truth, Lieutenant. Tasha didn’t like or dislike Mike, she just adored her baby sister and the feeling was mutual.”

  Gianna eyed them closely. Something was wrong. She still wasn’t getting the entire story. “Did Mike ever threaten Tasha in any way, verbally or physically?”

  Both Hilliards hung their heads. Gianna waited. Christine finally looked up. “Most of the time his abuse was verbal, quoting from the Koran about the duties of wives, and spewing hatred about the evils of homosexuality and the penalties for offending God. But he started to get worse after the divorce. Felicia was living with Tasha while she finished her masters and Mike would come around, begging her to return, cursing her when she refused. One Saturday night Tasha was having a party. Nothing elegant, just a group of her friends. They were listening to music in one room and dancing, watching movies in another, popping corn. Casual.”

  “Were these professional friends, University friends?” Gianna asked, knowing the answer but needing to ask anyway.

  It was Bob who answered this time. “Personal friends. All women. Felicia was there, too, laughing and enjoying herself. She knew Tasha’s friends and they knew her. Mike went crazy. That night was the first time that he threatened to kill Tasha.”

  “The first time?”

  Christine gave a weary nod. “He made so many threats after that, we lost track, and we stopped paying attention to him. We’ll never forgive ourselves.”

  “Did he kill Tasha? Did he tell you that he killed Tasha?”

  “He told Felicia that he did.”

  “We need to talk to Felicia.”

  Christine Hilliard broke then, completely and totally. She screamed and beat off her husband when he tried to comfort her. “You can’t! He’s got her! He’s got her!” The screams became wails became sobs as she dropped to the floor and curled into a ball.

  Gianna processed the behavior and the words, fully understanding yet yielding to a moment of pure denial. Then she got control of herself and tried to get control of Christine. She knelt down beside her. “Michael Nelson has Felicia? Against her will? He’s kidnapped her?”

  Christine moaned louder. Gianna jumped up and grabbed Bob and shook him. “Does Michael Nelson have Felicia?” He nodded. His head bobbed up and down like a bobble head doll on a car dashboard. “When?” Gianna asked, “and from where?”

  “We think Friday, from her apartment—”

  “Friday! That maniac has had your daughter since Friday and you haven’t reported it? What is wrong with you people! He’s taken one daughter and you give him another!”

  “He said he’d kill her, too, if we told anybody!” Christine was hysterical now, pounding the floor, first with her fists, then with her head. Her husband grabbed her and held on. “He said he’d kill Felicia, then he’d go get Jill and kill her too!”

  Gianna’s fury propelled her out of the door. Eric and Cassie followed. It was Monday night. Felicia Hilliard had been gone for seventy-two hours, abducted from her Philadelphia apartment by a man arrested in Washington, D.C. just a few hours earlier. So where was Felicia? Still in Philly? In D.C.? Stashed in one of the hundreds of motels on the highways and toll roads between the two? Or dead like her sister?

  Gianna had taken the stairs, two at a time, up to her private office. One hand held the phone to her ear, the other held her head. Her conversation was hurried and intense. Then she listened for what seemed like a long time, nodded, and ended the call. After a moment, she released her head and turned around. Eric and Cassie were there, waiting. “Special Ops and Hostage Negotiation are on their way here. We’ll hand off to them.”

  Eric took a breath. “We’re just going to turn it over to them?”

  “They know better than we do how to find a girl who’s been missing for three days. Anyway, our part in this is over. Michael Nelson killed Natasha Hillard.”
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  “They’ll just give it to the Feds,” Cassie said, “and we all know they can’t find their own asses with their own hands.”

  Gianna hadn’t felt so dispirited since attacks on Mimi a couple of years earlier. “It’s procedure. You know that. We follow the rules. We don’t get a choice.”

  “She’s ours, Boss,” Eric said. “Felicia’s ours.”

  “Because Tosh is ours,” Cassie said.

  “Joyce Brown is ours, too,” Gianna said. She felt so weary she had to hold on to the desk or she felt she’d collapse.

  “And we’ll get who did her,” Eric said. “You know we will.”

  “But we can’t be finished with Michael Nelson. We can’t be,” Cassie said.

  But they were finished with Michael Nelson. The Feds had him and the Hate Crimes Unit of the D.C. Police Department would be lucky to get back him back long enough to charge him with the murder of Natasha Hilliard.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MURDER SUSPECT IN CUSTODY;

  SECOND SISTER KIDNAPPED

  By M. Montgomery Patterson

  Staff Writer

  Michael Howard Nelson, a 26-year old graduate

  student at Howard University, was arrested late

  yesterday and charged with the September 19

  murder of Natasha Hillard. Nelson also is suspected

  of having kidnapped Hilliard’s younger sister, Felicia,

  who is his ex-wife. A convert to Islam, Nelson, who

  also goes by the name Abdul Sharif, reportedly

  believed that Natasha, a lesbian, turned Felicia against

  him. He allegedly murdered and mutilated her in

  retaliation. He so far has refused to disclose Felicia’s

  whereabouts. Because kidnapping is a Federal offense,

  the FBI has assumed jurisdiction over the kidnapping