Sideways In Crime

by Sideways In Crime v2 lit

  By contrast, the man had met his end in a very expensive suit, possibly made to order, along with the silk shirt. No tie--either he hadn’t been wearing one or someone had taken a souvenir. Ruby estimated that he was about her own age, making him perhaps twenty years older than the woman next to him, dark-haired and a bit heavy-set, as if he had just started to put on weight. There was something familiar about his face but she couldn’t place him.

  “Do we know who they are?” she asked.

  “The manager ID’ed her as Emmeline Lilliana, professional psychic. The other two employees confirm that,” Pasco told her. “None of them recognized the man.”

  Ruby frowned, thinking. “I could swear I’ve seen him somewhere before--”

  “You have,” said Ostertag, pushing himself to his feet. Ruby waited for him to continue. Instead he began walking slowly in a wide circle around the bodies. She turned to Rafe Pasco; his face was carefully composed, impossible to read. The irritation she would have felt was all but completely overridden by the Dread, the awful feeling of utter certainty that she was about to find herself at the mercy of something unstoppable, unbearable, and incurable. Because one or both of the dead people on the floor didn’t belong here. She wished Ostertag would go off and have his ulcer somewhere else so she could talk to her partner alone.

  All at once she noticed that Ostertag had several faint shadows radiating in all directions and looked up. The original ceiling had been raised several feet and track lighting installed; four tracks, with a lot more lights than the room really needed. Ruby looked around and there was also an indirect lighting system running along the perimeter of both the floor and ceiling.

  “Is it me,” she said, “or is it warm in here?”

  Ostertag glanced at her but didn’t answer.

  “Seriously,” she prodded, “what’s with all the lights?”

  The lieutenant still didn’t say anything. He had finished his circuit of the bodies and was now standing at their feet again with his hands in his pockets.

  “Okay,” she said, taking out her notebook and pen. “We’ve got an ID on the woman but nobody knows who the guy is--”

  “I didn’t say that.” Ostertag eyed her darkly. “The manager and the other two don’t know who he is. But I do. That’s Phil Cannizzarro. Career criminal, convicted felon. Family man.”

  Ruby had to think for a couple of seconds before she remembered. “I thought Phil Cannizzarro died four or five years ago while he was serving time for bribery.”

  “I know he did,” Ostertag said. “I saw the body myself.”

  “Then this is just some guy who looks like--”

  “I don’t want anyone talking about who he is or isn’t or who he looks like,” Ostertag added, going on as if she hadn’t spoken. “I told DiCenzo and Semente and the uniforms who saw the body the same thing. That’s four other people besides you two and me. I don’t want anyone else in here who hasn’t been in here already.”

  “What about the coroner’s office?” Ruby asked. “How long do you think they’ll keep a lid on it?”

  “Long enough to prove this isn’t Phil Cannizzarro.”

  “That’ll be easy. One DNA test, end of story.”

  Ostertag’s mouth twitched. “It better be,” he said. “Because I don’t know how I’ll take it if it turns out Phil Cannizzarro has an evil twin. Or an even more evil twin.”

  “Had a twin,” Ruby corrected him. “Evil or more evil, he’s dead now, too. It’s still end of story.”

  Ostertag shook his head slowly and emphatically. “It’d be an evil omen.”

  Ruby’s eyebrows went up; in the eight years she had known him, Ostertag had never shown any sign of being superstitious. She turned to her partner who was studying a palmtop computer with a deeply furrowed brow. Before she could say anything to him, Ostertag’s cell phone rang, sounding exactly like the phones from a certain TV series about a counter-terrorist agency that her grand-kids were crazy about.

  Ostertag noticed her reaction and said, “My daughters” before answering. He left the room with the cell clamped to the side of his head.

  “He didn’t even say hello,” she said.

  “Probably didn’t have to,” Pasco replied. He was taking photos of the bodies from several different angles with his palmtop. “By the time this is over, he’ll have to have his phone surgically removed from his ear. Someone ought to tell him about Bluetooth.”

  “Someone did,” said Ruby. “He’s got a thing about walking around talking to nobody.” She let out a long breath. “So this is why I woke up feeling like shit this morning.”

  Pasco finished taking pictures and thumbed the small keypad with the expert rapidity that made Ruby feel old and in the way every time she saw it. Except for today, of course; nothing trumped the Dread.

  “What kind of identity theft is this?” she asked, just for the sake of saying anything at all instead of standing silently in a room with two corpses and the Dread growing inside her like a tumor on fast-forward.

  Pasco’s attention was still on his palmtop. “Not the usual. Maybe not even mainly identity theft.” He glanced up at her briefly. “Sorry, I’m looking up some...” His voice trailed off before his lips stopped moving. Ruby waited. In the eleven months since he had transferred to homicide from cybercrime--the Geek Squad, as everyone called it, including the people in it--she had gotten used to him. To say that he was nothing like her old partner Rita Castillo was an understatement. When Ostertag had assigned him to her after Rita’s retirement, she’d had a few misgivings and they were as much about her own ability to adapt to working with somebody her son’s age as they were about Pasco’s being able to switch from virtual crime to real violence with real blood and guts and worse.

  But there was more to it than that. His arrival in homicide had coincided with the arrival of the Dread, which hadn’t actually been a coincidence at all. And from there--well, she might not have believed any of it, not even what she saw with her own eyes. Except for the Dread. It was like a mix of every bad feeling she had ever experienced, heavily salted with the certainty that there was worse to come. In fifty-four years of life (fifty-five next October), she had never had any idea that it was possible to feel so awful and not be in physical pain.

  Regret, Rafe Pasco had told her, was like that.

  She took his word for it; regret was something she had never allowed herself to give into, not in any serious way, not even when the Dread took hold of her. Because when the Dread did take hold of her, the regret trying to find its way into her wasn’t exactly her own. Pasco had told her that, too and she wouldn’t have believed it except for Rita Castillo--not the one who had been her partner for so many years but the one who had worked out of some other precinct and had never met her at all.

  Her gaze fell on the corpses again and she felt her stomach do a slow forward roll. “Aw, shit,” she groaned.

  Pasco looked up from his palmtop, mildly surprised. “I know, but anything in particular?”

  “This is just what we need,’ Ruby said. “The Mob working an angle with identity theft. Evil twins, more evil twins, terrifyingly evil twins--who knows, maybe even good twins. That would really be something. This is like a dream come true for them. They can alibi each other, dump bodies, tamper with evidence, witnesses, juries--” She made a disgusted noise, wiping one hand over her face. “Once they really get their hooks in, they’ll have everything so fucked up we won’t know what world--system--universe--we belong in. They’ll take over the best ones and force people to pay them to live in it. Jesus, I better put in for my retirement while I still know which end is up.”

  Her partner started to say something when they heard a terrified scream from someone out in the main part of the store. She automatically reached for her gun but Pasco put his hand on her arm and shook his head.

  Several voices were talking at once; she could hear DiCenzo telling someone to calm down, calm down and come over here, please come over here right now and s
it down while a man’s voice said Omigod, Omigod, Omigod over and over with the same inflection, like a machine. Underneath the commotion, Dave Maqsood was asking someone to step outside, please just step outside for a few minutes and a woman wanted to know what had happened. Keeping her hand on her weapon, Ruby went out to see what was going on.

  On one side of the store, DiCenzo was trying to calm the manager who was gesturing at the door and then toward the treatment rooms. The other two employees were in a far corner with some uniformed officers; Ruby could hear the rapid whooping pant of someone hyperventilating. She looked around, caught the eye of Dave Maqsood’s partner Jean Fletcher; Jean shook her head and shrugged.

  Pasco tapped her on the shoulder and pointed at the display window. Through the glass, she could see Maqsood talking calmly but firmly to someone whom he was preventing from coming into the store. Ruby moved closer and saw that it was a young blonde woman dressed in a yellow sleeveless top and a ruffly peasant skirt; draped over one arm was something long and white, covered in plastic from a local drycleaner.

  Ruby turned to Pasco, mystified.

  “Who said anything about the Mob?” He chuckled. “What we’ve got is a case of job sharing without the employer’s knowledge or permission, by a con artist running a psychic scam.”

  Ruby stared at him flatly.

  “Although I will admit that the presence of a Mob figure is definitely disturbing,” he added.

  “Oh, no shit, Sherlock?” Ruby gave a single, mirthless laugh.

  “Still, she’s at the center of this,” Pasco insisted. “Not him.”

  “What makes you so sure?” Ruby asked, still skeptical.

  “Because if she weren’t, there’d be two identical women back there.”

  Ruby wanted to appreciate the sight of Ostertag looking as bad as she felt, possibly even worse, except it did nothing to relieve the Dread weighing her down.

  “I give him points for not going back to the precinct and hiding out in his office,” Pasco said as they watched him directing the cops outside to tighten the cordon from where they stood near the front door.

  “Are you kidding?” Ruby said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, he calls confrontation a lifestyle. And he’s not gonna let go of this Phil Cannizzarro thing until he gets some answers.”

  Pasco’s faint smile was wry. “If he gets any, you think he’ll believe them?”

  “I have no idea.” Ruby sighed. “It depends on what they are, I guess.” She saw Ostertag pause at the back door of the ambulance where the hysterical employee was now lying down. A paramedic came out to have a few words with the lieutenant, then went back inside. The ambulance had arrived at the same time as the crime scene techs who were now crawling all over the back rooms, including the one marked Employees Only; Ruby had managed to get a quick look at it before they had chased her out complaining about contamination. Half the room served as the employee lounge with a couple of cheap vinyl sofas and a dented coffee urn; the other half was the manager’s office. Not what she’d have called a great arrangement. She tried to imagine having to take coffee breaks in Ostertag’s office and felt nothing but the Dread.

  “Here, look at this,” Pasco said, giving her a nudge. He was holding the palmtop in front of her. She had to lower it six inches and when that didn’t help, made him wait while she took out her reading glasses.

  “What am I looking for?” Her eyes focused on a mug shot of a woman. She was dark-haired and very disheveled, with a swollen lower lip and the start of a black eye but Ruby recognized her. “Okay, is that the dead one or--” she looked around, spotted DiCenzo with the manager in the astrology section but no one else.

  “Semente is babysitting her over in the self-help corner,” Pasco told her. “I thought we might ask her that.”

  “Fine, but I’d like to know if you know,” Ruby said. “I think at least one of us should know if she’s lying.”

  “You don’t think you’d be able to tell?”

  Ruby frowned. “What, if she doesn’t belong here I’ll feel worse? I didn’t think it worked that way.”

  “Once you know what to look for, you can see the differences.”

  “Fine. You look for the differences. I’ll back you up.”

  “All right,” said Pasco genially.

  The self-help corner was furnished with several wicker chairs. Semente and the woman might have been two customers having a chat about biorhythms or some other mystical thing except that Semente had positioned himself so she had no unobstructed avenue of escape. As soon as he saw Ruby and Pasco, he excused himself. The woman watched them with wide, anxious eyes as they sat down, Pasco taking Semente’s place. Ruby had to force herself not to push her own chair farther away. If the Dread was any worse, she couldn’t tell; it certainly wasn’t any better.

  “Why won’t anyone tell me what’s going on?” the woman said, looking from Pasco in front of her to Ruby on her right. “What happened?”

  “You’re Emmeline Lilliana?” Pasco said, glancing down at his palmtop.

  The woman looked at him, then at Ruby with her notebook and pen. “Yes. Is someone ever going to write that down? You people keep asking me that.”

  “Is that your real name?”

  Now she frowned at Pasco, offended. “What kind of a question is that?”

  “Is that your real name, or is that just the name you do business under as a psychic?”

  She glanced at Ruby. “It’s my legal name. My full legal name.”

  “Actually, that comes up as an alias,” Pasco told her, almost sounding apologetic. “Along with Emily LaDue, Lilly LeFevre, Lillian Emerson, and Emma Casey.”

  The woman took a deep put-upon breath and let it out again. “Don’t you think it’s a waste of time to ask me questions you already know the answers to?”

  “Just want to see if your answers match ours.”

  “Okay, whatever. Look, I’m not trying to be difficult or disrespect you or anything but I just got here. I thought I was coming into work like I would on any other day and instead the street’s blocked off, there are cops everywhere and as soon as Carol lays eyes on me, she goes bananas and has to get sedated. And no one will tell me what’s going on.”

  Pasco shook his head. “Come on, you must have picked up on something.”

  She gave Pasco and Ruby dirty looks. “Yes, all right, I can figure out something really bad’s happened. Someone’s been hurt-- killed?”

  Pasco shrugged, glancing at Ruby; she put up a hand, fingers spread.

  “There wouldn’t be so many cops here if it wasn’t a murder,” the woman said after a long moment. “Right?”

  Pasco shrugged again.

  “Come on, yes or no,” she prodded.

  “I didn’t think you’d have to ask,” said Pasco. “You are psychic, aren’t you?”

  The woman looked heavenward. “I can’t believe I walked into that one again. I never learn.”

  “I figured that out from your record.” Pasco chuckled, glancing at Ruby again. “That you never learn, I mean.”

  “If you were planning on telling the owners of this place about my record, don’t bother. They already know. I didn’t even have to explain. They know the torment that skeptics visit on the sensitive.”

  “Do they,” Ruby said.

  Emily Lilliana’s half-closed eyes swiveled to look at her. “Of course. Both you and your partner must know what it’s like to be picked on just because you’re different. How many other Chinese kids did you go to school with, dear? Did they call you ‘kung fu’ or ‘ching chong,’ pull the corners of their eyes up? Make jokes about slanty-eyed rice-burning cars?”

  “Those are Japanese cars,” Ruby corrected her.

  “As if they knew the difference.” Emmeline Lilliana sniffed and turned back to Pasco. “And you--did you grow up with the black parent or were you forced to try fitting into a world full of people who looked nothing like you? Or are both your parents black and you were the little genetic surprise th
at no one knew what to make of. What did your father think of those freckles?”

  “What’s your point?” asked Ruby. “Other than antagonizing the people who are trying to decide whether to arrest you or not?”

  “Arrest me? What for?” Emmeline Lilliana looked hurt. “For being psychic? I can’t help that any more than you can help those freckles, officer--”

  “Detective,” Pasco said.

  “Of course, detective. My bad--”

  “Do they still say ‘my bad?’“ Ruby said, doing her part to keep the woman off-guard in spite of the increasing pressure of the Dread in her chest.

  “I don’t see any arrests on your record for being psychic,” Pasco told the woman as he studied his palmtop. “A lot for fraud, though. And larceny, of course. A couple of assaults here, too. You’re not going to get violent, are you?”

  “I have never been violent in my life,” the woman said, offended. “All of those charges are complete fabrications. As are the fraud charges. It’s a sad world where you can be thrown in jail for someone else’s lack of faith.”

  “And the two dead people in the back room--is that why they were killed?” Pasco said. “Or was it something else?”

  “I don’t know anything about the people back there.”

  “Even though you’re psychic.”

  Emmeline Lilliana huffed. “It’s not a trick. I’m not a dove-puller. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “‘Dove-puller?’“ Ruby almost laughed.

  “A stage magician,” the woman said, her lips curling with contempt. “Abracadabra, hocus pocus, hey, presto, I found a quarter in your ear. You know, whenever you see one of those flash-bang tricks where a dove disappears in a sudden flame and a puff of smoke, the bird gets killed. And the magician always gets away with it; you never arrest him for animal cruelty. Meanwhile I’m not hurting a soul, animal or not, and I’ve got cops jumping on me just because of who I am.”