Coyote

by Linda Barnes

  “Quit stalling me, Lieutenant.”

  “I can give you everything we’ve got in a teaspoon,” Mooney said through clenched teeth. “Listen up. The FBI hasn’t come up with more than fifty similar crimes yet. The medical examiner says the women were all killed in a similar manner. I gave you that hot flash before. The M.E. can’t say they were killed by the same man, he can’t say not by the same man. I can tell you they were killed by the same man. How do I know? With my gut. We’re going through mountains of missing-persons reports, from Kansas City, from Oregon, for chrissake, but so far we got no matches.”

  Jamieson consulted a small wire-ringed notebook. “Were the women raped?” he asked.

  Mooney shrugged his shoulders.

  “Drugs?”

  “No evidence.”

  “How did the killer get the body from that apartment to the park? Without anybody seeing him?”

  “He’s lucky and smart. The FBI’s got a word for these guys. They call them ‘organized’ killers, and they’re a bitch to catch. There’s an alleyway behind those buildings on Westland. He must have pulled a car close to the back door, wrapped the body in a sheet or a plastic tarp. Burned the tarp or stuck it in a dumpster. I’ve got guys looking. D.A.’s got guys looking. State police are looking.”

  “What about dental records?” Jamieson insisted.

  “We have the remains. You get me some records to try a match with, and I’ll get you the best damned forensic dentist you ever saw.”

  “These women,” the INS man said angrily. “If they’re illegal, they come here with nothing. No identification. No jobs. No family. No dental charts. No one to file a report when they don’t show up.”

  “Probably,” I said sweetly, “they don’t expect to get killed. Inconsiderate of them.”

  Jamieson glared. I watched the pushpins on the map.

  Mooney broke the silence. “Anyway, we’re trying two dental matchups that aren’t going to work. We’re not doing them because of interagency pressure, we’re doing them because we’re thorough, got that? Very thorough.

  “The thing I want to tell you is that the guy is going to be very hard to catch. Because he knows a lot of the same stuff cops know. Christ, he could be a cop. He’s like that Atlanta child-murderer guy. He washes up afterward. He’s careful. When we find him, he’s going to have a library full of books on forensic medicine, stuff like that. Because this guy is not dumb and he’s not ignorant, and he seems to know what he’s doing—if anybody who does this kind of shit knows what he’s doing. You want to write that down?”

  “I want the reports,” Jamieson said stubbornly.

  “Me too. How about you answer some questions? Why haven’t I gotten a full set of prints to go with that green card? A set of documents? You gotta have prints, a medical report, a letter from a bank, from an employer, all that crap on file. At least I’d know if one of these stiffs is really named Manuela Estefan.”

  “I told you we’re working on it.”

  Mooney got to his feet slowly. He’s a big man, and when he stood, the tiny room got even smaller. For a minute I thought Jamieson was going to stand and challenge him, but he shrank back in his chair, and muttered, “First thing in the morning, then.” He didn’t say good-bye to me when he fled.

  Mooney looked at me after a moment’s silence. “Shit,” he said, “I feel like the schoolyard bully.”

  “How long’s he been here?” I asked.

  “All day,” Mooney said. “He wants to move in.”

  “Mooney,” I said, “it’ll be justifiable homicide. I’ll testify.”

  “Take me out to dinner?” he said.

  I was suddenly ravenous. “Sure, let’s go,” I said, thinking only of my stomach.

  “You mean it?” I could tell from his eyes that he hadn’t given up. Sam or no Sam. Gorgeous INS guys be damned.

  “Yeah,” I said less than graciously, “but it’s not a date or anything.”

  “My treat,” he said.

  I wouldn’t go till he agreed to split the bill.

  23

  We had three arguments before we left the station, which is about par for Mooney and me. First came the split-the-check controversy, followed closely by the where-to-eat routine, capped by the who-should-drive finale. I haven’t figured out whether Mooney’s insistence on driving is purely a macho thing or not. Could be he hates the way I drive, or it might be he thinks that if he drives, he’ll get to take me home, wangle an invitation for a beer, and some night I’ll extend the welcome up to my room. Who knows?

  I had the advantage. My Toyota would get ticketed, towed, or stolen if I left it where it was, whereas Mooney’s Buick was safe for all foreseeable eternity in the cop lot. I won.

  We wholeheartedly agreed to eat at Mary Chung’s in Central Square, each of us pretending the other had pulled a fast one and picked the restaurant. I can go without a hit of Mary’s Suan La Chow Show for a week before I start getting withdrawal symptoms. It’s a bowlful of plump wontons resting on beansprouts in a hot, spicy sauce that will cure whatever ails you. Sometimes I order two bowls. If the government declared it a restricted Class-A substance, I’d go outlaw.

  I parked in the back lot after a fairly uneventful trip during which I exercised my horn only once. We made our way through a trash-strewn alleyway that seems narrower and smellier every year. A gang of young Haitians hangs out there, using it as a combination clubhouse and urinal. They grew quiet when we approached. Mooney doesn’t look like a cop, but he looks like somebody you don’t want to mess with. When I take the alley alone, they make comments. Usually that bothers the hell out of me, but it’s harder to take offense at sexist slurs voiced in liquid French.

  We had to wait twenty minutes for a booth, which is nothing. I wondered if M.I.T. was on vacation. Usually the place is clogged with Techies. You can tell from the decor that people come for the food.

  Mooney does not eat Suan La Chow Show. It’s too spicy for him. He ordered spring rolls. I’ve tried to educate him, but there it is.

  We compromised on the rest of the order because I like everything spicy and Mooney likes everything bland—except he wouldn’t call it bland, and he’d describe my taste as fiery. Lemon chicken, mostly for him; and hot stuffed eggplant, batter-fried and hot-pepper-sauced, mostly for me. The waitress left a pitcher of water on the table as well as a pot of tea.

  “Just how much are you cooperating with Immigration on this investigation?” I asked. “Was that a sample?”

  “A hundred and ten percent,” Mooney answered disgustedly. “Word came down from on high. Do we have to talk about it?”

  “You tell them everything,” I murmured flatly, thinking about Marta’s threat to leave town, taking Paolina away.

  “Empty the whole bag,” Mooney agreed. “Why?”

  I poured steaming tea, dribbling it on the tabletop.

  I wanted him to know about Hunneman’s. I didn’t want INS to rush in, raid it, and close it down.

  “Is the cooperation a two-way street?” I asked when I’d fussed with the tea long enough for Mooney to start wondering whether I’d gone deaf. “I mean, why is it taking Jamieson so long to come up with the Manuela Estefan stuff?”

  “Bureaucracy, pure and complex, far as I can tell. Other than the background on Estefan, they’ve got nothing.”

  “You know what kind of car Jamieson drives?”

  “No.” He took a tentative sip of his tea and set it down quickly. Too hot. “Why?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t like him.”

  “And usually you like everybody you meet on a case?”

  “Sure,” I said with a straight face. “You know me. Easy to get along with.”

  He opened his mouth, closed it, picked up his teacup, and tried again. He was grinning at me with his eyes.

  The appetizers arrived, and we dug in like starving orphans. The wonton broth made my eyes water.

  Mooney said, “Jamieson is the fastest paper-pusher I’ve ever met. He’s
filed so many goddamn interagency request forms, I could use a full-time liaison just to keep up with him. I don’t have time for that crap, and I figure if he files the forms, he should at least have the decency to wait for us to file the responses instead of haunting my office. I don’t like him much either. And now that the press has the story, they’re breathing down my neck, yapping about how we should have called it a serial killing when we had the one body, or maybe before any corpses showed up, and the politicians want to get into the act and show how committed they are to the Hispanic community and—”

  He stopped, shook his head like a wet dog, forked a bite of spring roll, and made a half-hearted stab at a grin. Then he said, “And how are you?”

  I smiled ruefully, recognizing his attempt to turn the working motor off. “Okay. I don’t think I’ve stopped running since seven this morning, and I can’t remember the last time I sat down and ate a meal. Today lasted about two weeks.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.” He reached over and touched his fingertips to my cheek. “And tell me about this.”

  “Volleyball, Mooney. It’s nothing.”

  “Boyfriend still out of the country and all?”

  Boyfriend is such a quaint word. What Sam Gianelli is when he’s in town is my lover. On again, off again, granted. But when it’s on, we don’t spend a lot of our time doing boyfriend-girlfriend things. Mooney probably has a quaint word for it. Premarital sex. Sin, maybe. Adultery. I’m divorced and Sam is, too, but Mooney’s Catholic.

  “Yeah,” I said, resenting the sudden turn toward the personal when I hadn’t even figured out a way to tell Mooney what I wanted to say. “You seeing anybody?”

  “They hired a couple new uniforms who look promising,” Mooney said.

  I wondered how I’d feel seeing Mooney with somebody else. Maybe if I could get jealous, there’d be hope.

  “Mooney,” I said, “one thing you didn’t mention when you were talking to Jamieson: the apartment. You find out anything about the apartment?”

  “Huh?” Mooney said.

  “The one on Westland.”

  “Back to business, huh?”

  I inhaled a wonton, sneezed. Sometimes the sauce goes down the wrong way.

  “You okay?”

  “I was just wondering if you found out anything else about the place, Mooney.”

  “We talked to the landlord again,” he said with a sigh. “You remember the skinny guy, name of Canfield. He’s the one who manages the property, and he’s probably pretty small potatoes. It’s owned by a real-estate trust. Canfield, Oates, and Heffernan—and God knows how many silent partners. Tax-dodge shit. But can you hold somebody responsible because somebody got killed on their property? I could harass them if I wanted to, send out city-code violations and stuff. But Canfield says he didn’t know more than one woman was living there, and he says he never even met her. I’ve posted a guy at the door, to be around if any of the other people who used to sleep on those beds shows up. Nobody has. And the room was pretty bare, no clothes except what you saw, no luggage.”

  “Maybe it was a staging area,” I said. “A kind of safe house for illegals. One night’s lodging while passing through.”

  “Could be. We don’t know shit.”

  “I sent Roz over to the Cambridge Legal Collective to see if they’ve heard anything about the place.”

  “Good move,” Mooney said. “Let me know.”

  It made me feel better to tell him something.

  “Do you have any leads you’re not talking about, Moon, any suspects?”

  “Carlotta,” he said patiently, “you know how this goes. No arrest within twenty-four hours and you can figure there’s going to be no arrest for a while. Some of these killings are weeks old; one could be months. Every time the phone rings, I hope it’s not another one, and then I think the only way we’re going to nail the guy is if he tries it again and screws up. And I’m afraid he won’t screw up. You remember the profile of an FBI ‘organized’?”

  “Normal guy,” I responded. “Drives a decent car. Married or has some kind of regular sex life, average or above-average intelligence …”

  “And he’s probably a first- or second-born child. Really helps yank him out of the general population.”

  All through dinner the urge to confess grew, filling my stomach till I barely did credit to the food. I gave him a play-by-play on the last volleyball game, detailing the circumstances of my injury and venting my feelings about Miss Boston College. I asked about his mom, but my heart wasn’t in it. We gossiped about friends in the Department. Every time I’d weaken and get ready to spill it about Hunneman’s, he’d mention Jamieson and I’d hold my tongue. Finally I made a deal with myself. I’d wait a day. One day. Until my business with the Herald lady was done, until it worked or failed.

  There’s a phone in Mary Chung’s vestibule. I excused myself hurriedly, dialed Marta. I’d intended to call earlier, to make sure Paolina had come home safely, to see if mother and daughter had reconciled.

  I let it ring twenty times. Then I called my answering machine, buzzed for messages. Paolina’s clear, high voice sang over the line.

  “I’m okay, Carlotta,” she said carefully, “but I’m not going home. I just don’t want to see my mother, not after what she said. Anyhow, don’t worry. I’m safe and I’ll call you soon. Bye.”

  The machine let out its dismal beep and started up again with a salesman’s pitch for attractive aluminum siding for my home.

  How had Paolina known I’d been at her apartment? Had she eavesdropped long enough to hear my voice? Had Marta called me by name? Had she been hiding somewhere? Had she watched me search for her under the stoop?

  I was torn between relief that she’d called and fury that she hadn’t told me where she was calling from, where this safe haven was.

  I went back to the table. My fortune cookie was a bust, one of those good-things-come-to-nice-people, lines. Mooney read his aloud: “You will have a romantic evening.” But when I asked to see it, he wouldn’t let me.

  24

  Mooney insisted on taking a cab home. Of course, I was expecting to drive him, either back to the station to fetch his car, or home, or wherever he wanted to go; otherwise I wouldn’t have let him escort me through the smelly alleyway and walk me all the way to my car, only to backtrack and flag a cab on Mass, Ave. Mooney has a streak of gallantry that irritates me. It’s not that I despise protective gestures; it’s just that they infringe on my freedom. Maybe what I’m insisting on here is the right to get mugged at night in a bad neighborhood, but what the hell, it’s my call.

  I took Mass. Ave. to Harvard Square, executing the required bypass of its main intersection and U-turning my way back onto Brattle Street. I could have taken Huron Avenue, but Brattle’s an attractive street to cruise. You get to pass by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s house.

  Lights blazed in my living-room window. I slipped the car into its spot in back of the house and hurried up the front walk, hoping to greet Paolina in the foyer.

  I got the key in the lock and the door open before I heard the unexpected voice. It slowed my approach.

  “Hello,” said Harry Clinton.

  “Hi,” said Roz with an attempt to stifle a giggle.

  They were seated too close together on the living-room couch. Roz laughed awkwardly. Clinton stood and continued, “I hope you don’t mind me waiting for you inside. Roz said you wouldn’t.”

  He must have been there a while. Two empty glasses on the end table told the tale. Knowing Roz, I wondered if the encounter had progressed to intimacy. Most likely not; she had her clothes on, or at least she was wearing a subtle fuchsia T-shirt. Stretched tight across her chest, black letters said: AUNTIE EM, HATE YOU! HATE KANSAS! TAKING THE DOG. DOROTHY.

  She got up and made a retreat toward the stairs, stammering meaningless, polite things like “Nice to have met you” and stuff. The T-shirt seemed to be all she had on, if you didn’t count shoes. It was long enough for decency but
not something I’d have recommended for answering the door to strangers. Her footsteps clattered up a flight. I listened to them fade.

  “You keep weird office hours,” I said briskly. “What can I do for you?”

  “The bruising’s not bad, and it doesn’t look swollen.”

  My hand went automatically to my nose, touched my cheek.

  “See a doctor?” he went on.

  “No, Mom,” I said.

  “Okay, forget it. I hope you don’t mind the late visit.”

  “Long as it’s brief,” I said.

  “Blunt, aren’t you?”

  “Direct,” I said. “I prefer direct.”

  He took two steps forward. He was tall, maybe three inches taller than me. He wore a white-and-blue plaid shirt tucked into jeans, both cut with a Western flair unobtainable in Harvard Square. “Well, then, directly,” he said, “I came to tell you to lay off Hunneman’s.”

  I swallowed air. “That’s pretty blunt.”

  “It’s an official Department request. If you don’t back off, at least for a couple days, you’re going to screw up a major undercover operation that’s taken a hell of a lot of time and effort to set up. It’s almost ripe, and the last thing we need is amateurs spooking the place.”

  I licked my lips and tasted Szechuan peppers, along with the residue of that hated word amateur. “Why the hell don’t the cops know about this?” I asked. I never thought for a minute that Mooney might have kept it from me, which was dumb. If he had orders to shut up, he’d shut up.

  “Key people know. No need to spread the word. We want to make sure the sleazeballs aren’t warned—or alarmed by strange visitors.”

  Nobody had tailed me to Hunneman’s. That meant an inside man, an undercover agent. Man or woman. I quickly reviewed the faces I’d seen at the factory.

  “Who’s this?” Clinton’s drawl startled me. He’d moved across to the mantel, where he stood holding up a silver-framed photo of Paolina.

  “My sister,” I said.

  “You don’t look alike,” he commented.

  “She’s my Little Sister from the Big Sisters organization.”