by Lisa Black
“No lump on the head?” Riley asked. They hadn’t had a chance to ask about the autopsy.
“No other injuries at all. Bruised toes, probably from kicking her own car. Scratches at her throat, probably from her own nails. DNA is working on the scrapings. With luck there will be somebody else under there.”
“So he didn’t feel the need to subdue little Mrs. Davis with a wang to the head first,” Riley said. “He’s bigger than her.”
“Wang?” Tim smirked again.
Riley made a bludgeoning motion with an imaginary weapon. “Wang.”
“Don’t they have kids?” Patty asked. “The Davises?”
Everyone at the table spared a thought of silent sympathy for the two very young men who had just lost both their parents in the same week.
“What’s going to happen to them?” Maggie asked. Stephanie had said they didn’t have much family. She glanced at Jack, but his face stayed blank. He had his emotions under control.
Riley said, “There’s a cousin in Kansas who’s going to come and see what she can do. Apparently she’s recently divorced. She’s already talking about staying here so that the kids can finish high school in familiar surroundings.”
“Three murders. And our suspect is a big guy with a dog,” Patty summed up.
“And a willow tree,” Maggie added. At the bemused looks around the table, she explained, “The pollen. I think it’s a weeping willow. Near as I can tell—I can’t find anyone who compares pollen anymore. I could send it to the McCrone Institute, but that would take weeks.”
“So how did you figure willow?”
Maggie admitted with reluctance, “Google.”
“Okay. Any idea how many willows there are around here?”
“They’re one of the top ten most common trees in Ohio.”
Patty moved on. “Anything else?”
Jack said, “Only that something is going on over at that paper. And no one is talking.”
Patty suggested borrowing a few detectives, including herself and Tim, to write warrants for financial records and to conduct interviews at the paper’s building. They had a large pool of both suspects and potential victims. “Help is all around if you need it. What’s your plan?”
Riley looked at his partner. “I think we’re going to have to wang somebody.”
Chapter 34
“I’m glad you came back for more,” Roger Correa told her.
“I felt like getting out of the office,” Maggie said. Between her lack of progress on the murders, her ex-husband’s questions, the too-knowing eyes of Dr. Michaels, and one dead and two orphaned boys, she felt ready to spend an hour or two listening to Roger Correa talk about job security and mundane government corruption.
“Me too.”
“So I heard.”
They sat in his car, again dining on nutritionally bereft fare, but this time they faced a pricey little bar on Euclid Avenue, not too far from the university. The one bad apple, board member Elliott, had pulled open its heavy wooden door and disappeared inside fifteen minutes ago.
“He is, you know,” Correa said, almost absently, “going to sell the paper. Our esteemed editor is lying through his teeth.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the world has changed, and the old one isn’t coming back. Reporters that used to work for the same paper long enough to retire from it with union pensions are the farriers and elevator operators of our time. Reporters are now ‘content creators.’”
“What does that mean?”
“Instead of having a beat and reporting on one general topic, like local crime or state politics, we’ll have to write a few stories for this paper, maybe a column for another—change to what they call a ‘gig’ mentality, have a bunch of little jobs instead of one big one. Some forward thinkers insist that this switch to permanent freelancing is ‘exciting’ and ‘freeing’ and it’s a better time to be a journalist than ever.
You know what freedom means? It means no money, that’s what it means.” He leaned toward her, as if the closed interior wasn’t already intimate enough. “The ones I really feel sorry for are the print crew—who prints anything on that type of scale anymore? Those guys will never find another job.”
It had been a long time since she’d been close enough to a man to identify his aftershave and notice his eyelashes. Maggie backed up an inch and waved her waxed paper cup at the bar. “What are we waiting for, exactly?”
“For a girl,” he said, apparently serious. “She’ll be here soon. It’s the lack of objectivity that really gets me. The future of journalism is online, but there’s a different expectation of accuracy for online stuff. If it’s printed on a piece of paper for all to see, for someone to clip out and carry into a lawyer’s office, it had better damn well be the truth. But online? Well, it’s the Internet—what do you expect? They’re in such a hurry to be first, to be ‘maverick’ and bold and daring that they’ll print anything. Rumor. Innuendo. They don’t care, they’ll just say, we didn’t say that, we just said someone told us that. They’re proud of it. No independent confirmation and nothing’s on any kind of record. Online is simply not held to the same standard as print. And I don’t believe it ever will be.” He turned to gaze at her, dark eyes roaming her face as if memorizing its features.
He said, “On TV, or radio, or in the paper, someone will interview two experts. One says one thing, the other says the polar opposite. The media says, there, we did our job, we presented both sides. But the audience or reader or ‘content consumer’ has just spent whatever amount of time listening to two people argue and come out with not one iota more information than they had before. The best you can hope for is that they were entertained by the fireworks for a moment or two.”
“Sounds kind of scary.”
“People want to understand. And with issues today as complicated as they are, they need to understand. Instead, news—and I use the term loosely—is intent on making everything as simple as possible. Us versus them. Good versus bad. If we can’t trust what we’re being told, it’s the same as being stuck inside a black hole, cut off from everything, with no idea where to go or what to do—oops, there she is.”
Maggie looked up to see a woman with long red hair and a raincoat down to her ankles enter the bar. “Who?”
“Linda. I call her Linda Lou.”
“That’s nice. Why are we watching Linda Lou visit the Sugar Cane?”
“Because when we walk in, with luck, she will be deep in conversation with Mr. Elliott.”
“And that’s significant?”
“Well”—he sat back—“that depends on what the conversation is about. We’ll give them a few minutes.”
“What do you mean, we’ll walk in?”
“Charming as it is, I didn’t ask you here just for the pleasure of your company. You’re going to be my beard.” At her blank look, he added, “Sort of a disguise. Just something to help me blend in. We enter, everyone will be looking at you, not at me. We can join Elliott before he realizes I’m there.”
“I see. A beard.”
“And a lovely one at that.”
* * *
Rick Gardiner had a new girlfriend and a six p.m. dinner reservation, so when the phone on his desk gave an annoying little trill, he considered ignoring it. But Patty’s partner, Tim, sat only ten feet away and glanced over. He had already referred to Rick as “lazy as hell” on more than one occasion according to several sources, so Rick figured he’d better not give The Power Couple any more ammunition.
A police department had a great deal of personnel and many different positions in which to place them. Cops who annoyed the higher-ups were punished by involuntary transfers to shifts and departments and responsibilities they didn’t want and didn’t like. Such punishment could be sold to the public as a reorganization or even a promotion, but every cop knew better. Rick could wind up doing school outreach or something equally torturous. So he picked up the phone and identified himself.
Some chick on the other end said, “Detective Gardiner? This is Lori Russo with the Herald. I wanted to talk to you about the vigilante killings.”
“That’s an open investigation, so as you’re well aware, I can’t comment.”
“Oh, I know—I’m not asking for any new information on the crimes in Cleveland. I wanted to see if you had run across the similar series of murders in Chicago seven years ago.”
“I can’t comment on any aspect of the investigation,” Rick said. He had no idea what she was talking about.
“Five men were murdered there, all shot in the back of the head with a small caliber, bodies apparently moved, no suspects.”
“Chicago has a lot of murders, Miss Russo. It’s a big city.”
“These men had all been arrested multiple times, brought to trial multiple times, and always got off. Just like our murders here.”
“Again, that happens in every city every day. Evidence disappears and witnesses are afraid to testify. It’s a sad fact of life, but it is a fact.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” The hack was blowing smoke up his ass, like that was going to help. “I reached out to our affiliate papers in other cities, friends of mine, anyone I had a phone number or e-mail for. There were similar murders in Phoenix.”
“As I just said, there are going to be similar murders everywhere. Urban gun violence is hardly new.”
“There was a man there who made a habit of buying young illegals from coyotes—boys and girls. He’d keep them in cages in his basement and—”
Rick glanced at his watch. He had ten minutes to get to Lola or his date would order for him—something he loathed, but if he argued with her menu choices he’d be sleeping by himself that night.
“—found him facedown in an arroyo,” she finished, as if this proved something.
“Good for him,” Rick said, before remembering that he spoke to a newspaper reporter. “I mean, we will continue to investigate every avenue. I can assure you I will get in touch with the Phoenix cops to see if there are any usable ballistics.” That ought to get her off the phone. Rick pictured some pudgy do-gooder in Birkenstocks with Nancy Drew fantasies.
“That would be great if you did, because they wouldn’t speak with me.” Big surprise. “So I called a friend of mine at the Arizona Republic and I was telling him about our serial killer and he was trying to look up some stuff for me, and I happened to mention that our guy came to our attention only because his last victim was a woman who ran a horrific, illegal nursing home of sorts—”
“Mm-hmm.” Rick straightened up his desk and put his keys in his pocket, preparing to bolt for the door in five more seconds, no matter what. If he didn’t, he’d be eating scallops for dinner and they always had sand in them.
“And he said they had a similar case there.”
“A vigilante killer?”
“A bunch of elderly victims dead in a house.”
Rick stopped looking at his watch. “Huh.”
“Yeah, I thought that was kind of weird. He said they never caught the people responsible. Seems like a weird coincidence that we would have both a vigilante killer and a case of extreme elder neglect as well, doesn’t it?”
Hmm. Maybe. Maybe not. “Did they investigate some of the murders as a serial vigilante killer?”
A pause, which told him all he needed to know. “No.”
“Then they were probably not connected. Crime is a dangerous line of work. Those involved always have a high mortality rate.”
“But if you spoke with the Phoenix police—”
He now had five minutes to get to Lola or resign himself to scallops. “Thank you for the input, Miss Russo, but there is an issue here and I have to go.” He heard her spluttering as he put the receiver down.
He hustled out the door, thinking that he could call his counterparts in Phoenix, just to look busy, just to see what they had to say. Serial killers on the loose could lead to expense-paid vacations to other states in the name of investigation. But then—Phoenix. He had heard it felt like being on the surface of the sun, too damn hot. If the reporter had contacted police departments in San Diego, or Myrtle Beach, that might be different. . . maybe he would call them.
Maybe not.
Chapter 35
“Let’s go,” Roger Correa said to Maggie. “Bring the camera.”
Maggie got out of the car, digging lip gloss out of her coat pocket in a desperate attempt to, as Correa suggested, blend in. Her heart pounded as if she were about to rob a bank. Playacting had never come easy for her—a game of charades felt like torment. “You realize I am about the worst actress in the world?” The irony of the statement struck her.
“No worries. Just be exactly who you are. Maggie Gardiner, forensic tech and supremely hot chick.”
He opened the wooden door, and a blast of music and liquor fumes tumbled out.
“Mockery will get you nowhere,” she told him.
“I am never less than accurate,” he insisted as he waved her inside. “Stewardship, remember?”
The Sugar Cane worked hard to live up to the motif of its name, with neon flamingos on the walls and a plastic palm tree in one corner. But the ornate and heavy wooden bar said Irish Pub more than Tiki Hut. Clean, softly lit, and if music played she couldn’t hear it over the murmurs of conversation. They did blend in, she admitted, herself in neat slacks and Roger in his reporters’ uniform of jeans, dress shirt, and loosened tie. For a weeknight, a good amount of people occupied the seats, talking quietly, drinking, eating high-calorie foods, and in the case of one table, arguing over whether or not it would be possible for a “superstorm” to form over Lake Erie. The pro side demonstrated the clash of pressure systems with the salt and pepper shakers, creating an extra cleanup job for the waitress.
Correa put a respectful hand on the small of her back and guided her to a seat at the bar. With only one open he gestured for her to sit down, and he stood at her elbow where the counter made a ninety-degree turn. She kept her large Nikon tucked under one arm; she had no place to conceal it—with a 10mm lens it would never fit in her purse, which she had left tucked under the car seat.
Maggie located Elliott and the woman named Linda at a booth on the other side of the bar. They chatted over beers. It didn’t seem like a super-friendly conversation, but at least they weren’t throwing the shakers.
“Can you get a picture of them from here?” Correa asked her. “Without the flash, obviously.”
“If I had a tripod and my shutter cable. And if they sat real still.”
“Do what you can,” he said, one arm along the back of her chair, the other leaning on the bar—either playing a man possessive of his date, or trying to shield the Nikon from view. She set it on the counter, adjusting the settings for low light. When someone at the superstorm topic table burst out with a loud exclamation and all heads turned toward him, she lifted the camera long enough to focus on Elliott and click. She set it back down before normal conversation resumed.
The barmaid appeared, didn’t even glance at the camera, and took their order, a beer and a tonic water. The couple next to Maggie talked about the tax implications of 401(k)s versus IRAs, and on the other side of them, two intoxicated men noisily conversed in a long series of non sequiturs.
Maggie pressed the shutter button a few times, then asked Correa, “Now what?”
He kept his face turned to her instead of toward their target, his nose nearly brushing her hair. “Now we wait. Shouldn’t be long. Is he looking this way?”
“No. Yes.”
He pressed in even closer. “Then this is when I kiss you to keep from blowing our cover.”
“Try it and you’ll lose a finger.”
He seemed to stifle a chuckle. “Damn. That always works on TV.”
“What are we—hey.”
He remained outwardly captivated by her jawline. “What?”
“A young man just sat down with them.”
“Yep.” He moved his mouth to no
more than a centimeter from her ear. “Take some more pictures.”
“Who is that?”
“My unpaid colleague, Brandon. He is pretending to be an unofficial lobbyist who can get a board member at Rehabilitation and Correction to sign off on New Horizons, keep Barkley’s little cash cow going so Elliott can keep getting his milk. Can you do a video on that thing?”
Maggie adjusted the dial and pressed her shutter button, thinking she should push Correa away, but, in truth, his body heat felt good. She only had a sweater for outerwear and had gotten chilled sitting in the car. She also wondered how one scheduled drinks with a corrupt county official. “So he came here to meet Brandon?”
“Yep.”
“Does a halfway house really bring in that much money?”
“It’s not the money, the funding, so much. It’s the jobs it creates. Political corruption has always been about jobs. Ask Andrew Jackson.”
“Who’s he?”
He gave her a look. “The seventh president of the United States.”
“Oh, for—goes back that far, does it?”
“The spoils system? Goes back to the Roman Empire, I’m sure. Maybe the Mongols and the Sumerians. One of those inevitable facts of life.”
“Okay, fast forward to now. Where does Linda Lou fit in?”
“She set up the meeting, and vouched for Brandon.”
“Why did she do that?”
“Because I asked her to.”
Maggie turned to him in surprise.
“I can be quite charming when I want to be.”
She ignored that. “So you’re setting this guy up?”
“Brandon offers a price for keeping New Horizons in the budget, Elliott agrees to pay it, maybe throws in another trip to Vegas. All while he’s surrounded by witnesses.”
The video timed out. “Then what?”
“We publish a transcript of the conversation on the front page. Oh, and we’ll give a copy of the audio tape to the cops, just to show my heart’s in the right place. I want you to be proud of me.”
“You’re taping him?”
“Brandon’s got it tucked into that smart suit coat he’s wearing.”