by Jason Dias
A lot of strange things clicked into place, then. I wasn’t interested in vices, only in murder. Ysabeau made an honestly dishonest living. The evasions made sense, the timing made sense, and even the getup made a certain kind of sense. “A customer with specific tastes?”
“Oui. Yes. Just so.”
“All right, Miss Jean-Baptiste. You’ve been more cooperative than you had to be. I’ll see that Officer Watanabe brings you a cup of station-house coffee and a ride to anywhere in town you might like to go. OK?”
She stood to her full height of four feet ten inches, according to the height strip just inside the door. “I am grateful. Only, I do not drink, not coffee, and I prefer to walk. If you do not mind.”
Actually, I minded a little. Something still bothered me here, and if Ay dropped this woman off, I’d have some definite place to start looking for her if I needed her again. But with no good reason to hold her other than a funny feeling, there was nothing to do but let her go. I handed her a card and an apology for wasting her time and saw her past the front desk, into the lobby. A shabby tree graced that room, dressed in white light and shiny silver garlands. A gold foil mock-up of a police badge occupied the top spot where normal people would put a star or an angel. Fake presents waited under the tree as if kids would wake up in the station on Christmas morning and tear them open.
Ysabeau left through the plate-glass door without a glance to spare for the festive lights. A visitor distracted me from watching her go: a Caucasian female, about thirty-five, build appropriate to a midwestern diet. Dressed for the weather: parka, snow boots, jeans. Dark hair, nice eyes. “Someone helping you, Miss?”
“Oh, just waiting for one of your officers. Must be a busy night. I have been here an hour.”
“Yes, ma’am. Who is it? I can tell him you’re waiting.”
“Officer Watanabe.”
I nodded, concealing mild embarrassment. Of course not every woman was there for a man. People had friends, too. I punched in a code for the secure area, glancing over at Wilcox on the desk. He didn’t seem to have noticed or to care. Back in my office Ay had a pad of paper out, filled with notes.
“Visitor,” I said.
She looked up. Didn’t say anything for a second. If she’d been a witness, I’d have thought her the tiniest bit flustered. “Sorry.”
“For what? Go tell her how you’re doing. Still going to be a few hours.”
“Yes, Detective. Before I go: Coroner says both vics had their necks broken, most likely COD.” Meaning cause of death. “But they were also exsanguinated. Bone dry. Jo – Coroner said she couldn’t find any penetrating wounds on either victim. She doesn’t know how their blood left their bodies or where it went. TOD also tricky. No blood, no liver temp, not much else she can do on that one. It’s creepy as hell.” She glanced at her notes, setting down her tablet. “Been running down CPS and missing persons calls. Two more parents of missing children associated with the Church. Same parish. That makes three, all within the first half of two-thousand-sixteen.”
“Last year.”
“And guess when our retired priest’s lease started on his LKA?” That for last known address.
“There was a key on his nightstand. Looked like a padlock key to me. Didn’t see a shed on the property. Think you can track down if he had any rental units? Later. Go see your friend first.”
This time, she definitely blushed a little. “She’s not my friend, Detective.”
My mouth must have hung open a little. Ay went on in a rush:
“You know I’m getting divorced. Everyone knows. Can’t keep a goddamned secret around here, not from cops. Only this I’ve been keeping secret and I don’t want to anymore. I don’t care who knows. No, that’s wrong: I want you to know.”
“Know what?” I knew. Of course I did. But my frontal lobes just weren’t there to articulate the knowledge in a way I could understand.
“I’m gay, Detective.”
It shouldn’t have felt like a sledgehammer, but it did. I sat down on the edge of the desk, probably too close to Ay. “I guess if I’m going to call you Ay, you ought to call me Dom. At least when nobody else is around. OK?”
Graceful, Sanchez. Real graceful.
“OK.” She smiled, a real smile that competed with the blush pushing up from her neck and down from her hairline.
I watched her go with a promise she’d only be a minute. I thought about her and the woman I’d seen in the lobby, tried to imagine them as a couple: maybe sitting across a little table from one another at an Italian restaurant, smiling, looking into one another’s eyes.
Intrusive. I knew I’d never have wondered if I’d met her boyfriend. Never wondered about her husband. None of my business. I was even a little disappointed in me. The closing days of 2017 and I still confronted biases most people had done away with a decade ago.
I woke up my tablet to check the time. 0655am. The sun would be up in twenty minutes. From the roof, if I were so inclined, I could watch false dawn lighting up the eastern horizon. They say it’s always darkest just before the dawn but if you’re ever up before dawn, you know that’s bullshit. It’s always darkest halfway between nightfall and dawn.
Regardless of the state of the sky, paperwork awaited.
Crime
Sunup.
The world felt different. Lighter, yeah, but also lighter. Like something had been lifted off my chest that I had forgotten was there.
I headed home for a nap and a shower. My car boasted as many miles as the pool car. A big Caprice, it filled up the lane. Ate gas but handled great in snow. This morning, black ice marred the streets, made me slow down.
My eyes wandered the sidewalks and the verges. Old habit. Cop habit. This morning, though, I wanted someone in particular. Knew I wouldn’t see her. Wondered a little why. She was weird but probably not worth obsessing over.
The case was, though.
A retired priest, maybe a pedophile, maybe worse than a pedophile. A retired secretary. What’s the connection? The obvious, or something unseen?
The police-band filled with chatter about a robbery at a north side convenience store. Too distracting. I switched to the regular radio, hoping for some music. I heard the news instead. 07:56, twenty-eight degrees. The president Tweeted something at somebody unimportant, provoking a banal conflict. Another celebrity sex-abuse scandal. Then a death notice: Cardinal Law passed away at age 86.
Cardinal Law.
Didn’t mean anything to me. When it comes to world affairs and entertainment and so on, I’m pretty out of it. But the newsreader, a woman with an even voice, explained:
“…accused of covering up child sex abuse a decade ago by moving accused and suspected members of the clergy to new parishes, out of the range of authorities. In other news, Puerto Rico lacks power to thirty percent…”
New parish. I did vaguely remember allegations of a cover-up. Just like the news lady had said. Back then I’d thought people were paranoid. Or it was a smear campaign. I just kept my nose in my work. But things fit together: Carrington gets moved from New York, retired early to protect him – and the church – from allegations, and also to remove him from his position of trust. Maria Burton does his in-processing. She knows about him and she doesn’t warn anybody.
And then what?
Carrington hurts some kid. Their parents do a little detective work and want revenge. Or maybe a kid grows up and tracks him down…
Car behind me honked. I’d been caught idling at a green light. I waved and moved my foot from the brakes to the gas. The Caprice eased into motion. Two blocks from home.
Not a kid who grew up. No need to go after the cover-up in that case. Just find his address, go there, take care of it.
But it was all so weird. Broken necks, piled bodies, bloodless corpses. Sucked the blood out without opening their veins in any way. No external injuries. Who would do that? Who even could? I thought about a mad parent. Angry, a little crazy. The door would be busted in, the sce
ne disturbed. An inexperienced killer, a revenge-killer, would stab or shoot. An accidental killing – an assault that escalated – should have left a lot more evidence.
I parked in my garage, pushed the button so the door would close behind me. Went into the house through the door in the garage. Started coffee brewing. Ignored the envelope on the table. The DNA results provoked unreasonable anxiety. I’d look at them another time – I told myself that every time I picked up the letter.
I told my tablet to wake me up in ninety minutes. Not an hour, not two hours; sleepers’ brain wave patterns follow a ninety-minute cycle, so you’ll be most alert coming out of sleep at the end of that cycle. Anything else and you’re groggy, under-rested, not ready for consciousness.
That was the theory. I threw my clothes on the floor and slipped into the cold bed, a twin I’d picked up at Goodwill for a few bucks last year. Ten years I’d shared a bed with Enrique. Walked out two weeks before our anniversary. Even now I couldn’t have said exactly why. Everything had been right. Good. Not exciting, maybe; but stable. Caring. Enough.
Now I lay alone, daylight streaming in around the edges of the heavy curtains. Stared at the ceiling. Mulled over the murders.
Enrique had been Catholic. Not crazy about it, even though he worked for the Diocese. Went to mass once a month or so, twice over the holidays. Never tried to pull me into it. He did his thing and we didn’t share it. His family was a little weird about it. Kept their distance from me. His mother cried when we married at the county office and not in some gaudy church affair. I’d never missed it. Enrique didn’t complain. But they wanted something from me. Participate in a ritual; join the club or the tribe.
He’d asked me about it one day when we were dating. Some Italian place, like I’d pictured Ay sitting in with her girlfriend. Checkered tablecloth over a table just big enough for two, a candle between us in a little jar. Pasta and seafood and outrageous sauce in Technicolor red. “Are you an atheist?”
“Never really thought about it.” I’d enjoyed his smoky dark eyes, his Texas drawl. “No, I guess not. Only Christians are atheists.”
He’d laughed at me, looking away and then back again. “What does that mean?”
“I mean, ‘atheist’ is a word religious folks throw around at other religious people who don’t track their ideology. I think it’s a lot simpler than that though.”
“Tell me.”
“I’m not an atheist because there’s no god to not believe in.”
He’d laughed again and asked the waiter for a whiskey and a beer back. That was our relationship. He believed what he believed and left me out of it. Me: same.
Maybe that’s what had gone wrong. Two lives lived together at home but not in any other way. Shit. Philosophy is for the living.
Now these murders. I’d been sucked into church business after all. Scandal, trauma and drama.
A priest who would hurt children was a special kind of sick. Any pedophile, yeah. But Sidney, if he turned out to be what I thought, he was the atheist I’d been talking about to Enrique a decade ago.
My alarm sounded. Time to hit the showers and no rest accomplished. Upside: the aroma of fresh-brewed coffee. Nothing for it but to roll back into the grinder.
My work email abounded with messages. From Ay: “Napped and coffeed up, ready to reengage. Records says no next of kin. Working storage facilities now.”
From the lab: “Sample is old and degraded. However, some of the individual units have epithelial cells attached to the inside surface. Because of age, DNA is very unlikely. Given the low probability of success, there is a correspondingly low priority on testing the samples. Wait list position is 944; estimated delivery 1 year 1 month 3 weeks.”
Interesting. I slipped on a pair of slacks and a collared shirt, tweed jacket and heavy shoes. My detective outfit. All the time, I mulled things over. Coffee helped the brain start making connections. Black, strong, and hot as blazes.
Epithelials. Skin cells. That confirmed Sidney as more than a collector. Those socks had been worn. Given their size, they had been worn by children.
As for DNA, that didn’t trouble me. The TV makes it seem like crime scene techs solve crimes but that’s bullshit. Cops solve cases, most commonly by breaking alibis and eliciting confessions. Crime scene techs win cases in court. And lawyers secure plea bargains when we can’t break a case any other way.
It all reminded me of my own ancestry test, still waiting on the table. Jo had handed me the kit last Christmas. It would just have regional information, no data about defects or deficits. Still, it went unopened. But I took one step: I folded the envelope in thirds and stuffed it in my back pocket.
I called Ay while tying my shoes. “Ay. Socks have skin cells on them.”
Smart woman. She caught on right away. “Then those missing persons leads are a priority. I’ll set up interviews through the morning. Meet you at the station.”
She sounded cheerful. Then again, she wallowed in the middle of not just a rancorous divorce but an adventurous love affair. On my way out the door, I briefly tried on what it might feel like to be in love again.
And I couldn’t do it. I’d never really been in love, not the way it appears in Sandra Bullock movies, not the way teenagers talk about it when no adults are listening. Maybe Enrique had deserved better. I wished him happiness. Somewhere out there, there had to be a woman who would dote on him, give him the love he merited.
Me, I had something missing. Maria hadn’t decorated because she couldn’t, or didn’t know what season it was. Sidney hadn’t decorated because he was a neat freak, a control freak, everything in its place and no place for shedding pine needles. Or maybe he was just alone in the world and there was no point. Like me: alone, lonely, no eye for aesthetic or cheer. Something missing.
I strapped into the Caprice then pushed the remote button to open the garage. Daylight flooded the space behind me, blinding and painful. Took a minute to adjust, backing out into the street and pushing the gear lever to D.
The bright light of day. A clear sky whispered lies about warmth and a spring months-distant. Meanwhile, I ran heat over the window to keep it from fogging.
The donut shop called but a long line of cars waited outside. No time for that. I drove the three miles to the station and pulled into the back lot.
Eleven AM. Maybe I’d have time to hit the range for thirty minutes. Shooting always helps me think. It’s meditative. But Eads stood outside my office with a middle-aged woman. Shit. I’d forgotten the second Meals on Wheels witness.
“Detective Sanchez,” I said, and shook her hand.
“Molly. Uh, Molly White.”
Eads just nodded and went back to work. “Come on in, Molly.” I had on my best friendly face despite feeling vaguely flustered. Molly sat where Ay had set up camp last night and I took my usual position behind the desk. The tablet talked to me in beeps but I ignored it.
“You called in Sidney’s incident last night.”
“Yes, Officer.”
“It’s Detective, actually. Did you see anyone else at the scene, Ms. White? Inside the house or on the street? Any strange cars or other traffic?”
“It’s a busy street, uh, Detective.” She wiped her palms on her thighs. Her woolen slacks would provide a comforting, scratchy sensation, give her something to focus on besides me. “It was already dark when I arrived. Cars coming and going. There’s a nursing home across the road. It might have been shift change there.”
“You have some nursing experience.”
“Yes. How did you know?”
I leaned back in my chair and tried on a smile. “Nobody else would notice shift change across the road at the nursing home. Was Sidney well?”
“Not really. He was older than his years. Sort of sordid. I don’t know what I mean by that. Just… threadbare. His clothes all needed repairs and he needed a good haircut. His shoes had holes in the bottom. And it seemed like his memory was going.”
“Tell me why yo
u think that.”
“He could never remember my name. Always called me Marie. Always called Cindy Molly. Always seemed surprised when I showed up.”
“I see.” A sexual predator who could keep his tracks covered couldn’t be absent minded. It sounded like protective coloration to me.
“Who would want to murder him?”
“What makes you think it’s murder?”
“Nurse, remember? I’ve seen a lot of death, and a lot of elderly people die. If we had to come to the station house every time a retiree died alone at home, well, we’d never have time to care for the living.”
“You’re very perceptive,” I said. “Do you remember anything else?”
“Well, it’s probably nothing.”
“Nothing is nothing, Ms. White. Anything could be helpful.”
“Well, I think there’s another witness. A homeless girl.”
I resisted the urge to lean in. Kept the friendly smile on my face. “Go on.”
“Small. Dressed funny. A Victorian dress or something. Maybe she was Amish. I don’t know. I worried that she must be very cold because she didn’t have a coat, only that dress that left her arms and neck bare. And she was so pale. Homeless people walk up and down that street all the time. It’s not far from the soup kitchen. I didn’t think much about it. But if she was around, maybe she saw someone come in or go out.”
“Thank you, Ms. White.”
“Molly.”
“OK. That’s very helpful.” Then I handed her a card with the “if you think of anything else” speech and hustled her out the door. I went back to the office and found Ay sitting there as if she’d never been away. Except for her clean hair.
“Morning,” she said.
“Yeah. That lady we let go last night?”
“Yeah?”
“Meals on Wheels Molly puts her at the scene. Or at least scene-adjacent.”
She processed that. After a pregnant pause: “Techs cleared the scene an hour ago. Wilcox came up with receipts for a storage unit. AAA Plus, Hancock Avenue.”
“Not far from here.” Tablet said 11:17am. “You line up the parents?”