by Lisa Black
“But that’s the morgue, right?”
“Yes.”
He puffed for a moment, holding her gaze with either concern or curiosity in his eyes. “So Jillian really is dead?”
Frank cut in. “Only missing. When was the last time you saw Jillian?”
“A week after the wedding. She came in to pick up her last check, from a tech conference last month-three days of holding up a big microchip on a revolving stage, not real classy, but I don’t design the shows, just staff them. I told her I had a cocktail party coming up, a real estate developer wanted to entertain some Japanese investors. They love blondes, and Jillian was good at that sort of thing. Smart enough to hold up her end of the conversation but too sweet to do much other than agree with whatever was said. She laughed and said no, she was out for good, and left. That was it.”
“She say anything about her husband, her baby? Troubles at home?”
“We didn’t chat. Just business.”
“She have any repeat customers? Other than Drew?”
“Drew ain’t a customer, he’s a problem. Besides, Jillian don’t have customers. I have customers.”
“And you get feedback from them, right? Anyone comment on Jillian in particular? Request another performance?”
“Nope.”
“Never?”
“No. Look, everyone liked Jillian, I’m not saying otherwise, but they like all my girls. Why not? They’re quality.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t.” Georgie seemed to be working on a good case of righteous indignation. “You think I’m still a pimp. This is different. These girls are the ones who aren’t pretty enough to be models but aren’t desperate enough to be hookers. They don’t want to be hookers, and they don’t have to be. All they have to do is stand up straight and look pretty, laugh at a guy’s joke even if it’s in another language, and occasionally hold up a product or lean against a car. That’s it.”
Frank remained impassive. “They never take on side jobs?”
“No. Not like you mean. Do they sometimes date guys they meet through a job? Sure. Doesn’t everyone?”
Theresa caught herself nodding, stopped, and coughed. The smoke-scented air had grown oppressive, and the space heater only made it worse. She wanted to leave.
“Did Jillian?” Frank pressed.
“I wouldn’t know.”
“What did she tell you about her fiancé, when she worked here?”
“You’re not listening to me, Detective. I saw Jillian maybe once a week or less. We didn’t confide in each other about nothing, not her baby, not the dresses she picked out for the bridesmaids, not nothing.”
“If I find out you know more about Jillian than you’re telling me, Georgie-”
“What? You’ll what? There’s nothing you can do. I’m legitimate now.”
“Nobody’s legit when it comes to murder.”
“Jillian’s not dead.” Georgie stood up, apparently to signal the end of the interview and his patience. But then his expression changed and that look returned, the slight frown and the glittering eyes, worry combined with excited curiosity. “At least I hope not.”
Theresa wasted no time in plunging out to the street, sucking in the cold air until her sinuses hurt. Frank had lingered to speak to the receptionist, and he had the car keys, so she stayed close to the storefront door and tried to blend in. She eyed anyone who passed, without making eye contact, then felt slightly ridiculous as two little girls walked by without, apparently, a care in the world. West Twenty-fifth might not be Pepper Pike, but it was hardly a war zone.
Frank emerged but waited until they got in the car, doors shut against the chill and the poverty. “What do you think?”
“That guy was a pimp?”
“You think I’m making that up?” Frank cranked up the heat, nearly hard enough to break the knob. “Yes, he was a pimp. Don’t let that roly-poly friendly-guy act throw you off.”
“He just didn’t seem that bad to me.”
A stop sign gave him a chance to turn and face her. “For five years he worked from a crib in the warehouse district. During that time I fished two of his girls out of the Cuyahoga-and his fiancée, Diana? Found her in a Dumpster behind Tower City. Don’t let him fool you. Not for one second.”
Her sinuses ached even more. “Then what’s your plan here? Did you think you could ask him if he killed Jillian and he’d say yes, here’s where you’ll find her body?”
“You never know, cuz.” The huge stone men holding up the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge looked down upon them as they passed. “You never know.”
“His affect when he talked about that other girl, Diana, seemed totally different from when he spoke of Jillian. If the idea that Jillian is dead didn’t come as a surprise, then he’s a hell of an actor. Plus, Jillian’s picture hung on the wall with the others, but another girl’s partially overlapped it. That doesn’t speak of any elevated status.”
“This guy isn’t about sentiment, Tess. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“What did Vangie say?”
“She backs up her boss, says Georgie didn’t pay more attention to Jillian than to any of the other girls. And that this Drew’s last name is Fleming. He’s been calling Jillian for over a year. Vangie thinks they might have met at a ‘company function,’ as she puts it, but she’s not sure. She’s never met him. She thought he sounded sweet at first, but now hears his voice in her sleep and is damn sick of it.”
“And what did Vangie think of the husband?”
“That Evan is the catch of a lifetime. Not the politest guy on the phone, but his income made him worth it.” Frank let her ponder this through downtown Cleveland and out to University Circle. After maneuvering the Crown Vic through the tight parking lot behind the county medical examiner’s office, he paused behind the loading dock to let her out. “So where’s your money? On the husband or the stalker?”
She stepped into the half-frozen air once more, pulling her camera bag from the passenger-seat floor. “My money is on Jillian getting tired of washing dishes and changing diapers. Girls who work for guys like Georgie don’t come from happy backgrounds and they don’t lead stable lives. You’ll find her crying on the shoulder of the persistent Drew.”
“Then why would Drew be calling Georgie?”
“Some other guy, then. Hey.” She leaned in and peered at her cousin. “Weren’t you going to buy me lunch?”
He turned his watch toward her. “It’s already one thirty, cuz. I don’t want to get you in trouble with Leo.”
She narrowed her eyes with a technique she had worked on until it flustered most men and some women. “I’m going to tell your mother you took me to visit a pimp.”
“He’s not a pimp,” Frank corrected her before driving off. “He’s a businessman.”
CHAPTER 3
Theresa didn’t wait to watch him leave, but merely pulled her coat closed long enough to get through the back door and into the loading dock area. The smell of the building greeted her along with its warmth, but she had long grown used to the mix: the tinny smell of blood, the sharp odor of formalin, and the month-old garbage tang of decomposing flesh. A white-coated deskman blocked her way as he helped two funeral-home transport men to zip the M.E.’s white plastic body bag into a plush burgundy one so that the dead could be dressed for the trip with a little more dignity. The deskman moved to let her pass with a quiet “good afternoon.” It occurred to her that it had been eight months and her coworkers still treated her gently. This was an unfair burden on them; M.E. staff members, who spent all day around the dead, were never solemn except in the presence of family members and news reporters, and not even the latter most of the time. Her mother was right. She had to get her life back to normal. Or at least learn to fake it more convincingly.
One of these days.
She took the elevator instead of the stairs and hung her coat up just before the trace department supervisor found her. Leo had two inches of height on h
er but thirty less pounds, as if his nervous system had taken over and sucked the juices from all other body tissue. He waved a sheaf of papers. “We have a problem.”
This didn’t impress her coming from a man whose personal-threat assessment level remained permanently stuck on red. “I’m a little busy, Leo. I have to photo and tape the clothing from yesterday’s homicide-that woman they found in Rockefeller Park.”
“She came in yesterday morning and you’re just now getting to her clothing?”
“It was drying.”
“Yeah, right. Richard Springer wrote the judge and said you refused to comply with the court order for defense testing.”
Theresa headed for the coffeemaker, and not even Leo dared to get in her way when on that path. Of course, since Leo insisted on keeping the machine in his office, this move didn’t get rid of him either, and he followed. Springer, a defense-hired expert, had visited the lab weeks before to perform his own examination of fiber evidence.
“He said you were uncooperative.” Leo rattled the sheets for emphasis.
“Because I let him make his own slides? How else would he know they were from the real evidence unless he prepared them himself? It’s not my problem if he doesn’t like to get his fingers in the mounting media.”
“He says you created a, let me quote this here, ‘unfairly prejudicial work environment.’ What the hell does he mean by that?”
“Probably that I told him his client is guilty as hell.” She stirred in creamer with a wooden stick; they used to use the sticks for blood enzyme work, now supplanted by DNA. She continued to order the sticks. They made great coffee stirrers.
The secretary strolled in, caught a glimpse of Leo’s face, dropped some typed reports on his desk, and sidled right out again, not even risking an empathetic glance in Theresa’s direction.
“Terrific. Nothing like demonstrating an inability to be objective.” Leo crossed his arms and stared her down. “Is that what he’s referring to when he says you were blatantly hostile?”
“Well-” She sipped her coffee as if trying to remember, when of course she remembered perfectly. The human mind seemed perverse in that way; it recalled moments of misery with photographic precision, but pictures of happy times got fuzzy around the edges. Or maybe it was just her.
“Well, what?” Leo demanded.
“I may have wondered aloud how he shaved in the morning, what with the difficulty he must have looking at himself in the mirror.”
Leo’s mouth twitched, almost in a grin, but he stifled it. “And you thought he’d just let that slide? You think the judge will wink at a charge of interfering in a criminal defense?”
“He got to do the analysis he wanted to do. No court in the world says I have to be friendly.”
“Not friendly is a world away from outwardly hostile.”
She twirled the loose knob on Leo’s barrister’s bookcase. The books and papers inside pressed against the glass as if pleading for escape. “This was after he started asking where I went to school, how long I’d been in forensics, why I hadn’t poured a cast of the shoe print found under the window, crap like that.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Why didn’t you pour a cast of the shoe print?”
“Because it was two o’clock in the morning, because the budget wouldn’t allow us to order more dental stone, because it wasn’t a homicide so we had a live witness.”
“And maybe you just didn’t care.”
She stirred her coffee.
“Not caring is a dangerous condition in this line of work.”
“I care.” Now. In the middle of the night, when you hadn’t slept well for months, when dying sounded like the only reward for living, caring had proved much more difficult. But she couldn’t confess that to herself, much less to Leo. “He was fishing for weaknesses so he could report back to his client and collect his fee.”
“That’s his job.”
“No, his job is to report facts and form an expert opinion. It’s the lawyer’s job to impeach me, and it’s not even his job, it’s his job to present his client’s case in the best possible light, not to use the most underhanded tactics he can think of to shred an impartial fact finder just so he can get a rapist out on the street again. Do any of these guys ever wonder how they’d feel if one of their former clients moved in next door? Would they still let their kids play in the backyard?”
“Theresa-”
“So he was hostile first,” she finished.
“Is that what you’re going to tell the judge? He started it? Sure, the school-yard defense never fails to impress the court.”
“His client raped a teenager at knife point. And I should guard the feelings of some hired whore trying to get him off?”
“That’s what jury trials are for. What you’re for is to maintain the reputation of this lab.”
“No, I’m here for the teenager, and to make sure the guy who did that to her goes away and never comes back.”
Then you should have cast the damn shoe print, shouldn’t you?
Leo’s elongated, sallow face exhibited several tics at once. One jumped at the outer edge of his left eyelid. A second prompted the muscles to bunch around the vein in his right temple. A third caused his mouth to open and say, “All the bad guys will come back if the work of this lab is not completely above reproach.”
Leo spoke the truth, even if the trace evidence department provided his only raison d’être, until he could not distinguish between the prestige and reputation of the lab and himself, and vice versa, though she would not say so, because if she did, she would surely be fired. Leo could weather any disaster except a blow to his ego. She wondered if it would be worth it but knew it wouldn’t, not with Rachael’s college tuition looming on the horizon. Her exhaled breath sent the surface of her coffee into ripples and she thought of student loans and the young female victim: “I know. Sorry.”
“Sorry? He’s coming back here on Friday with the friggin’ defense team and the judge and you’re sorry?”
“He’s dragging a judge here? Who the hell is this guy?”
“I expect we’ll find out.” A good supervisor would have let her stew for a while, think it over, but while Leo had his talents, supervising had never been one of them. So the man who spent at least one day each week red-faced and screaming added, “You didn’t used to have control issues.”
Again, he spoke the truth. Strict self-control had gotten her over the speed bumps of life, from her father dying a few days after her fourteenth birthday, to her husband racking up more girlfriends after their wedding than before, to raising a teenager. But it couldn’t get her past watching, via security cameras, her fiancé bleed to death on the marble floor of a bank building.
Don’t think. Just keep going.
“Maybe it’s age,” she told Leo. “I’m getting cranky as I push forty.”
His tone softened. “Maybe you’ve got that posttraumatic stress stuff from someone putting a gun to your head during that bank robbery. Just be ready to be nice to this guy when he comes back here on Friday. No comments on anything but the weather, got it?”
Nothing could be quite as deconstructing as unexpected empathy. “Sure.”
“And go take care of that homicide clothing.”
She took her coffee with her, down three flights of steps to the amphitheater, and retrieved the dead woman’s clothing from the locked trap room. Her name had been Sarah Taylor-the killer had emptied her wallet of money but not ID. A movie-star name but not a movie-star life. The thirty-year-old had supplemented her welfare checks with sporadic work as a prostitute. The killer had left her body propped up against the statue of Goethe and Schiller in the German section. The Cleveland Cultural Gardens in Rockefeller Park, begun in 1916, had areas dedicated to twenty-four different nationalities. Despite the park’s beauty, hers had not been the first body to appear there. Theresa wondered what the two poet-philosophers would have had to say about that.
Until her body turned up at Edgewater Park, two days later.
CHAPTER 4
“I hope you weren’t planning on going home anytime soon,” the DNA analyst, Don Delgado, said to her at four o’clock that same Wednesday.
“It’s always a bad sign when you begin conversations that way.”
“You ain’t kidding. We got a dead kid.”
Everyone in law enforcement cringed at those words, perhaps because it made them think of their own children, perhaps because even bad kids were still kids, perhaps because they saw too many of them. Like most of her responses, Theresa had learned to stifle this one. “Sure, I can use the overtime. Rachael will be picking out a college soon. When will the kid get here?”
“They want us to go there. Apparently the circumstances are unusual.”
She folded up the last of the murdered prostitute’s clothing and sealed the bag with red tape, adding her initials and the date. “Unusual how?”
“He’s fifteen and he’s in the woods behind the zoo. That’s all I know.”
“The woods, as in outside?”
“It’s kind of hard to have a woods inside.”
“And the temperature is?”
“Five. Fahrenheit. And I didn’t wear my parka today either,” he added with deep gloom.
She gathered up the sealed paper bags into one larger one, to store on the shelves of the trap room, puzzling over this statement. Usually only one person from the lab went to a crime scene-they lacked the manpower to work in teams. “Are you joining me? Who is this boy? Somebody…?” She hesitated at the word important. Every human was important. Unfortunately, some people would always be considered more important than others, and this remained as true in death as in life.