Trace Evidence

by Elizabeth Becka

  “Will he back us up if Neal complains?” David asked.

  “If he’s sure Neal’s the guy and he sees a high-profile conviction in the future, sure. If not, he never heard of us.”

  “How comforting.”

  “Remember the rule,” Riley said. “If you need love and support, join the fire department.”

  Between the fourth and third floors, David’s pager went off. When they cleared the parking garage he called the number, and Evelyn told him what she had learned about Neal’s chloroform order from Beavell Scientific.

  “I wish I’d known this last night.”

  “I had more immediate problems to deal with last night,” she said icily.

  “What’s the matter? Is Angel all right?”

  He could hear the ice melt over the phone. “She’s okay. She gave me a little scare but everything’s cool now. I farmed her out to a friend so I could breathe easy today. Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For asking.”

  He told Riley about the chloroform.

  “Why?” Riley asked. “What would you have done if you knew last night?”

  “Camped outside Mr. Neal’s house, that’s what I would have done.”

  “Can Evie prove he used chloroform on our victims?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then cheer up, it still wouldn’t be enough for an arrest warrant. We’re loading the bases, but we’re not quite ready to swing.” With one hand on the wheel he lit a cigarette with the other, traveling the ice-covered streets as if it were the middle of July. “How do we know Nurse Neal isn’t at work, comforting the afflicted?”

  “Because I called. Letitia says he isn’t scheduled until tomorrow night. Another item I wish I’d asked earlier. If he wanted to leave town, he’d have two days’ head start before anyone missed him.”

  He needn’t have worried. James Neal was at home, but not alone. After they knocked on the kitchen door, banged on the kitchen door, and pounded on the kitchen door, James Neal opened the door and practically threw himself into their arms.

  “Help me!” he cried. “He’s in there!”

  Cursing, David ran past the young man and entered the neat living room just in time to see the front door swing shut. He burst through it only to be stopped short—the guy had taken a second to lock the screen door, and David nearly decapitated himself trying to slam through the frame. He rattled the latch in frustration for a split second before taking out the whole door with a high kick, eyes trained on a solitary figure moving across Neal’s postage stamp of a front yard.

  A black man in a long black coat and a black hat, he moved way too fast for someone that big. It shouldn’t have been possible, but he got in a car parked on the opposite side of the street and drove away in a squeal of rubber before David reached the middle of the yard. He saw only a black Continental, last year’s model, sporting a license plate beginning with BY. David cursed, heaved a deep breath after the unexpected aerobics, cursed again, and got his radio out of the car. He called in an APB for the immediate area on his description, or what little of a description he had. The man had not turned around once.

  He stomped into the kitchen, where Riley looked down at Nurse Jimmy Neal, his face a bright though fading shade of fuchsia.

  “Jeez, can you shut the door?” were the first coherent words out of Neal’s mouth. “It’s freezing in here.”

  David obliged, but not gently. The door shut with window-rattling force; then he took only two steps to get in Neal’s face. “What’s going on?”

  Neal looked at him, literally crying. Enormous tears escaped from his eyes, his chin trembled, his nose ran. He wiped it with the sleeve of a faded CSU sweatshirt. The unmistakable smell of urine wafted up from stained pants.

  “Who was that guy?” David asked.

  “I don’t know,” Neal whispered, his face riven by terror. “I don’t know. He came in here just before you guys got here, and he said—”

  “What did he say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “C’mon, Neal!” Riley shouted, and leaned in further until he and David were fixated on the boy like a pair of jackals over a wounded antelope. “Tell us what’s going on here!”

  “It didn’t make any sense!” he protested. “That’s what I mean. He just walked into my house and said he wanted to ask me something and I’d better tell him the truth.”

  “So what did he ask?”

  “He said people who didn’t tell him the truth regretted it. Such a simple thing to say—I remember thinking that those words were almost polite. It was the way he said it, as if all the tortures of hell would await anyone who refused him, as if nothing I could possibly meet in the rest of my life could be as frightening as this man.” Neal sobbed. “And he didn’t have to say any of that, because I already knew it. I knew it as soon as I looked at him.”

  “So what did he ask, Neal?”

  “Nothing,” Neal said. Riley put a hand on his shoulder. He did not mean to comfort and did not. Neal trembled so violently that his very bones rattled, but he persisted. “Nothing. You guys pounded on the door and he ran out.”

  Riley and David looked at each other. “So after all this buildup about not lying to him, he never got to ask his big question?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who was he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We got our own ways of dealing with guys who don’t tell us the truth, Neal.”

  “I don’t know. I never saw him before in my life.” He looked up at David. “Please, you gotta believe me.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Look, I want to change clothes. I . . . wet myself. You gotta understand, this is the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me. And he didn’t even raise his voice.”

  David’s mind moved so fast it hurt. If he hadn’t known better, he would have sworn that Jimmy Neal’s confusion rivaled his own. “In a minute, Neal. For now, you tell me again the situation here. This guy you don’t know just happened to choose this morning to pay you a visit, to ask you an important question that he never gets a chance to ask. And you have no idea who he is or what he may have wanted?”

  Neal nodded with pathetic eagerness.

  “Who might think you know anything worth telling?” Riley asked.

  “Your drug connection? Are you moving stuff out of the hospital?”

  “No!” Neal insisted, and on this he didn’t seem confused at all.

  “Someone’s husband? Father? You taking advantage of all those pretty girls lying helpless in hospital beds?”

  “No!”

  “Maybe making them a little more cooperative with, say, some chloroform?”

  Neal’s eyes widened at this, worried at either the mention of chloroform or the suggestion he had molested patients, which would surely get him suspended until further investigation. How many parents, David wondered, had complained about his coming on to their daughters?

  “No! I’ve never done anything wrong at work! I am good at my job, a hell of a lot better than those bitches in their white polyester. I don’t know who this guy is,” he finished, his voice calming. He took a deep, forced breath, and his eyes dried. His words grew firmer. “And I don’t know what he wanted.”

  Riley sighed. “I’ll tell you what we want, Neal. We want you to come down to the station and talk to us.”

  The nurse looked at them both for a long minute, and David knew, the way anyone who’s ever interrogated a suspect knew, that Neal had made up his mind to tell them something. “Okay. But I’m going to change clothes first.”

  “I’m not real thrilled about you getting chummy with my upholstery, either,” Riley said. “So go ahead. We’ll be right here.”

  He checked the house quickly to make sure there weren’t any other doors, then allowed Neal to go upstairs and get a change of clothing. David called in for a DMV report on the black Continental’s partial plate. They would run a list of possibles, then narrow it to the Cleveland
area. Maybe he could come up with something that way.

  David believed Neal’s story, which on the face of it wouldn’t convince a ten-year-old. But Neal radiated genuine terror, and besides, David had a pretty good idea why a black guy in an expensive car would suddenly be interested in one James Neal.

  David rocked on his feet, allowing himself a rush of satisfaction. Neal would fess up, plead out, case closed. The other Homicide cops would have to admit he had a few brain cells that weren’t between his legs. Most important, no other young women would be sliding into the Cuyahoga.

  The mayor would be grateful to him. Evelyn would be grateful to him, at least until she lost her job for leaking information to the mayor’s office. The idea erased his satisfaction. He didn’t want that to happen, but realistically couldn’t stop it. Heavy fallout would occur when they traced the car to someone on the mayor’s staff, and David wouldn’t be able to protect her. Damn the woman. They could have been friends. They could have been a lot more than friends.

  Neal returned promptly to the first floor, entered a small bathroom, and locked the door. They listened to the rustling sounds of someone’s changing clothes and then heard the faucet running.

  And running.

  By the time Riley kicked the door down, David had raced outside and around the house to see the open window and the deep shoeprints in the slushy mud underneath it. They continued through the snow and led off to the street, where they faded out on the now-dry asphalt. Neal had escaped.

  “Damn!” David shouted. His voice echoed uselessly down the street.

  Chapter 27

  “DID YOU CANVASS THE neighborhood?” Evelyn asked as she stood in James Neal’s kitchen, too edgy to sit. Neal’s flight had given Rupert enough for a search warrant, and she came to collect fibers from his house and car. Tony had left his office to attend, more out of curiosity than for any interest in making a professional contribution.

  “Immediately. We called for backup and got more guys, searched thoroughly. A uniform finally found his trail cutting through the backyard of a house across the street, but lost it again in the woods. The trees blocked the snow and there were no tracks,” Riley told her.

  “Has he got a girlfriend?” Evelyn asked. “Friends? Someone who would hide him?”

  “He’s got two brothers,” Riley answered. “Both moved out of state, but we’re still checking them. If he’s really on the run he wants out of the state. He’s got a few girls he goes out with, a bunch of boyfriends, and four or five cousins.”

  “How’d you find all that out?” Tony asked.

  “The fair Letitia. We grabbed his address book and patrol is contacting them, but nothing so far and who’s to say they’ll tell us the truth? We can’t search the house of everyone he knows.”

  Evelyn looked at David, who looked as if he’d won the lottery and then lost the ticket. She couldn’t help but feel sorry for him; he had tried so hard. On the other hand, a suspect in multiple murders who knew her daughter’s name and address now walked free.

  “So he’s on the loose.”

  David slammed the door of the cabinet he’d been absently nosing through.

  “Nobody got what they wanted here today, Evie,” Riley said, in a tone that sounded suspiciously as if he were coming to David’s defense.

  “It’s all right.” Her words lacked conviction. “I’ve packed Angel off to her friend Melissa’s house with strict instructions and our Blockbuster card. I’ve hidden our address books over at my mother’s. Angel thinks I’ve completely overreacted and that she isn’t in danger of anything worse than getting a C in math, but she’s not in the mood to be around either of her parents right at the moment anyway.”

  “There’s something else, Evelyn,” David said, his voice trapped between misery and anger as he slumped into a kitchen chair. “Neal had a visitor here when we arrived.” He explained about the strange man.

  “I don’t want to ask this,” he went on simply, “but let’s face it. Why do you suppose a big black guy would suddenly be interrogating Jimmy Neal?”

  She gave all three men a blank look. “I don’t know. Because he’s been dealing drugs out of the hospital?”

  “Too well-dressed,” David said. “Why would an upstanding-looking black man suddenly be scaring the shit out of Jimmy Neal?”

  Tony’s head did the tennis-match swivel, fascinated. Riley looked ill.

  Evelyn began to feel even worse than she already felt, without knowing why. There were too many sickening factors to the situation to even tell which one held the pole position. “I don’t know. What are you asking me for?”

  “Come on!” David shouted, and jumped to his feet so fast he knocked his chair backward. “Don’t be stupid. Who else would take such an interest, who would have the information and the muscle to make Neal pay for killing his daughter?”

  “Darryl? You think Darryl sent this guy over? How would Darryl know about Neal, anyway?”

  “Because you told him.”

  This can’t be happening, she thought. This can’t be happening. Finally she spluttered: “I didn’t tell Darryl. Besides, Rupert knew, too. You told him.”

  “We had just left Rupert. Besides, Rupert isn’t his ex-girlfriend.”

  “He’s more in bed with him than I’ll ever be, and I’ll thank you to stop throwing my past in my face. It has nothing to do with . . . Besides, why would Darryl go after Neal if he thought we were going to arrest him anyway?”

  Riley interrupted. “Evelyn—”

  “Don’t be so naïve.” David looked around as if he wanted to pace but couldn’t find enough room. “Pierson doesn’t care about a trial. He just wants revenge.”

  “I didn’t tell Darryl anything about James Neal. Do you want me to repeat that? I didn’t tell—”

  “You talked to him last night,” Tony said in a puff of cigarette smoke.

  The other three turned to him.

  “Well, yes, I did.” Evelyn lost some of her forcefulness. “But how . . . oh, Jason.” She gave Tony a look usually reserved for the gunk left at the bottom of a garbage disposal. “Your little spy.”

  “Did you tell him about the investigation?” Riley asked tonelessly.

  “I—I did ask him about Riverside Hospital,” she admitted. “I just asked what Danielle’s impressions of the place had been. He mentioned an obnoxious male nurse. But I didn’t ask any more or give him any idea of our interest in the nurse. That was it.” She looked at them one by one, and said what she never thought she’d say, the trite phrase repeated in every B movie. “You have to believe me.” Her desperation didn’t feel trite to her. She couldn’t lose her daughter. But she also couldn’t lose her job.

  She didn’t deserve this. Did she? Had Darryl figured it out from her question? He always said she’d make a lousy actress, that she couldn’t help communicating her innermost feelings. Was it her fault?

  No. Not even the mayor could have tracked James Neal down that quickly, with nothing but her vague question to go on. They were wrong.

  The silence seemed as loud and irritating as nails on a blackboard. She began to stalk out when Riley spoke. “It can’t be helped at this point anyway. What’s done is done. The ball is out of the field.”

  She turned. “I didn’t tell him. Don’t you believe me?”

  The old cop looked at her for a long moment. “Yes, I believe you, Evie,” and she wanted to hit him for being so completely unconvincing. She couldn’t look at David. Tony remained scarily silent.

  “Fine.” She retrieved her kit from the county station wagon.

  Three hours later they had covered the house from top to bottom and found very little. Evelyn had photographed, cataloged, and examined everything she could find from the loft over the garage space to Neal’s collection of Playboys, but there were no chains, no cement, and no chloroform. She had collected a number of tools, particularly ones strong enough to cut chain. Neal may have gotten rid of the cement and the chains, but he would not have thro
wn away the tools used to cut them. She could still compare the tool marks. David appeared in the doorway as she gathered swatches of the bedroom carpeting. She ignored him. She would be civil and professional, but in her mind he had been labeled persona non grata forever.

  “Find anything?” he asked.

  Civility and professionalism evaporated like spring fog. “Get bent.”

  He seemed unsurprised. “I should be saying that to you, frankly. This is my first big investigation and it’s about to be declared a disaster area.”

  She concentrated mightily on labeling the manila envelope.

  “It’s not that I blame you. I don’t want to see this come back on you, but once they trace that Continental to Darryl’s staff . . . We all do favors for friends. I have, too. I know how it goes.”

  She placed the carpet fiber inside and sealed the flap with tape.

  “I mean, I really know how it goes,” he whispered, his voice strangled with bitterness.

  She looked at him, but he stared at the floor; only the tremor of his shoulders gave witness to the hidden tension. A transparent struggle took place to hold back something that had been held back for far too long, and when it broke, the words surged forth on a wave of self-loathing.

  “It started with a birthday party,” he began. “Just a birthday party, that’s all. I worked in Vice with a guy named Jack Imler. He threw his wife a party for her fortieth birthday.

  “At the time we were investigating a ring of massage parlors, busting the girls—standard Vice stuff. I could practically do it in my sleep and I’d only been there a year. But we had a tip on a child porn racket, stuff coming in from Detroit. Jack and me, we were kind of excited. Stuff like that is high profile, gets you all sorts of kudos from the higher-ups. Gets you noticed.”

  Evelyn waited.

  “So,” he went on, “I’m standing in his kitchen eating a piece of Carol’s friggin’ birthday cake and talking to their neighbor. A neighbor, an investment banker by trade. This guy showed up at this stupid little party in a three-piece suit.”

  Evelyn waited, frowning. His words took her toward the first few pangs of sympathy and she didn’t like it. It would be so much easier to despise him. Her anger needed someplace to go.