by Mike Omer
“Y-yes,” Hannah said hesitantly.
“It is very difficult! Makes me think we should have stayed in Egypt. Did we really have it so bad there? Mein Got. And my wife just bought twenty packages of pasta. Twenty! She said she had coupons. Of course we eat pasta every day, we have to get rid of the hametz before Pesach. Even I am constipated by now!”
He sat down, breathing deeply, while Hannah tried to recuperate from the realm of too much information she had been thrown into.
“Right,” he finally said. “So you have a murder investigation. Okay. Go on, shlep. Find your murderer, so that we can sleep safe at night, knowing the police are looking after us.”
“Rabbi,” Hannah said. “The killer. We think he is the man who kidnapped the Lisman child.”
The rabbi looked at her sharply. “Abigail Lisman?” he asked.
Hannah nodded.
The rabbi began caressing the beard again. “I see,” he said.
“Her bat mitzvah is next year,” Hannah said.
“Yes,” the rabbi said shrewdly, looking at her. “And you thought you’d come here with your Jewish-cop, Goy-cop shtick and the rabbi will help?”
“She’s just a little girl,” Hannah said.
“Harrumph,” the rabbi said. It was the first time Hannah ever heard someone say Harrumph. “Okay, give me a moment. I don’t know how I can help with drug dealers, of course, but someone from the congregation might know something.” He stood up, opened the door, and walked out of the room.
“Did you see his face when she said chicken soup?” Mitchell whispered.
“Shut up,” Hannah hissed at him. “Not now.”
“I thought Jewish people liked chicken soup!”
“It depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“Depends if your parents make you eat the chicken. Now shut up.”
They waited for several moments more until the rabbi returned. “Okay,” he said. “I made a few calls. I don’t know about any drug dealer. But a man I know works nearby, and he didn’t see anything. However, he said there was a homeless nebech wandering around. Peter something?”
“Peter Bell?” Mitchell asked.
“That’s right.”
“And does the… man you know think that Peter saw something?” Hannah asked.
“He wasn’t sure. But he thought it was possible.”
Hannah stood up, and Mitchell followed suit. “Thank you, Rabbi,” she said.
“You’re welcome, meydale,” he said, nodding. “I hope you find little Abigail and get her home safely.”
“There,” Hannah said, pointing at the sidewalk. Twenty feet ahead of their car, Peter Bell paced along with his usual, shambling gait.
Peter Bell was one of Glenmore Park’s biggest failures. Due to Massachusetts’s freezing winters, the mayor had decided to divert funding to make sure that shelter was supplied to all the homeless in the city between October and April. It worked reasonably well. A flexible timetable for signing in and a blind eye for pets made sure no one slept outside in the winter.
Except for Peter Bell.
He refused to explain why he wouldn’t stay in any of the shelters. He didn’t drink too heavily, and didn’t do any drugs. Occasionally, on particularly cold nights, the cops would be instructed to keep an eye for him, and arrest him for loitering if spotted. Once in jail, he’d be supplied with warm soup and admonished for his incessant loitering. He’d be released the next morning.
Hannah, like the rest of the cops, knew him from her days as a patrol cop on the graveyard shift. She still saw him here and there, though she hadn’t had a good reason to talk to him for the past three years, since she became a detective.
Mitchell parked the car, and they both hurried after Peter. He was walking hunched over, hugging himself like he always did, his long legs jerking sharply as he paced, as if his control over them was not absolute. When they caught up to him he halted, looking at them with his soft eyes.
“Hello, Peter,” Mitchell said.
He stared at the flagstones. “’ello,” he muttered.
He was dressed in a thick black coat, a gift from one of Glenmore Park’s merciful citizens. His head was a tangled mess of long, gray-brown hair that grew all the way to his chin, where it intermingled with his beard. His lips were cracked, his teeth yellow.
Right now, he looked even more tired than usual. Hannah’s heart panged, and she wondered yet again if there had been a moment in time at which Peter could have been saved. Maybe there was. Maybe he could still be saved even now.
“Peter,” Mitchell said. “Can we ask you something?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Were you on Cypress Street last night?”
He raised his eyes and looked first at Mitchell, then at Hannah. “Yeah,” he finally said.
“Did you perhaps… see a man park a Honda in the middle of the night?” Hannah asked, lowering her expectations. Even if he had, he probably wouldn’t remember.
“Yeah,” he said.
“You did?” she asked in surprise.
“Yeah. I was cold, because someone stole my blanket, so I was walking, instead of sleeping. I saw the man park the Honda.”
“Do you remember what he looked like?”
“Yeah.”
Hannah stared at him in amazement. She could hardly believe their luck. “Really? How?”
“He wore a black mask. That’s why I remember him. People usually don’t wear masks.”
“Oh,” Hannah said, deflating. Damn. “Can you tell us what he did?”
“Yeah,” Peter said. “He parked the car. Then he got out and closed the door. And then he walked away from the car.”
“That’s it?” Mitchell asked.
“After walking a few steps away from the car, he took off his mask,” Peter said.
“And you saw his face?” Mitchell asked.
“Yeah.”
“And he didn’t see you?”
“People mostly don’t see me,” Peter said. “Even if they do, they don’t really notice.”
“Can you describe his face?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you describe it to a sketch artist?”
“Yeah, I guess. Do we need to go to the police station for that?”
“It would be better, but if you don’t want to—” Hannah began.
“I don’t mind.”
“Okay.” She nodded and gently put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, we’ll take you there.”
The sketch artist agreed to come in, despite the fact that it was the weekend. He showed up at the station half an hour later with his laptop, and chatted with Peter as he turned it on. Peter answered his questions hesitantly at first, then his confidence slowly grew; his tone became more certain. The artist began making a series of sketches on screen, matching faces to Peter’s detailed descriptions. Hannah watched the process, hoping Peter’s memory was as good as he claimed.
She remembered that he’d said someone stole his blanket, that he was walking around because he was cold, so she left the station and drove over to the local Walmart, about ten minutes away. She hesitated in the bedding section, torn between several blankets.
When she bought bedsheets for herself, she was mostly concerned about the patterns and colors. Trying to buy a blanket for a man sleeping on the street was quite different. She needed something that wouldn’t draw attention, that wouldn’t make him a target. But she also wanted a blanket that wouldn’t tear easily, and that wouldn’t look terrible when grime inevitably began to cling to it.
She finally found a grayish-brown blanket that she decided would do the trick. She bought it and returned as fast as she could to the station.
Mitchell was there alone; the sketch artist and Peter were gone. Mitchell held a sketch in his hand: the face of a middle-aged man with thinning hair, thick lips, and a strong chin. Mitchell tried to match it to their collection of mugshot pictures. He told Hannah that Peter had left only five minutes b
efore she got back.
She ran back outside and got in her car, circled the nearby streets several times. The sun set, plunging the streets into another cold night. Peter Bell was nowhere to be found.
Chapter Seventeen
On Monday morning, Hannah began working on the case whiteboard in the squad room. To avoid contaminating the case with preconceptions, she decided to address it as the Glen Haney murder case. She avoided any mention of Abigail, aside from the Reddit thread Glen had been involved with. First she drew the timeline, starting three days before the murder so she could add the time of his first post on the Reddit thread.
She also included the last post on the Reddit thread; him leaving his parents’ home on Saturday the 21st; the murder, between eight a.m. and two p.m. that day; and the discovery of the body on Cypress Street the following night.
She opened Violet’s e-mail containing the crime scene pictures and sent a few to the printer. Then she located the sketch of the man Peter Bell had described. They hadn’t succeeded in getting an exact match in the mugshot book. The sketch had been distributed to all patrol cops, with no result so far. She taped it carefully to the board. Then she made herself a cup of coffee as a reward for a good start.
She was standing over the printer, coffee cup in hand, when Mitchell entered the room.
“Good morning!” he said. There was a slight uptake in her heartbeat as he spoke. She hated herself for it, and resolved to call Clint and set a date for that very night.
“Hey,” she said, focusing intently on the printer. The thing was ridiculously slow.
“Filling the whiteboard?”
She nodded. “Yeah.” She needed to feel the sense of progression that came with populating the board. She was getting somewhere. Specifically, to a point where there would be no space left on the board.
“Talk to Matt and Annie yet?” he asked.
She glanced at the clock. “Not yet. I’ll do it now.”
“I can call them if you want.”
She smiled at him briefly. She wasn’t used to working with him, and they didn’t have assigned roles in the partnership yet. But when she worked with Bernard, calling the morgue and the crime investigation unit was her thing. “It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll do it. You should start with the…” she hesitated. Would he feel like she was dominating the case if she told him what to do? Who was lead detective here? “Uh…”
“Then I’ll look into the subreddit where Haney was active,” Mitchell said, already sitting by his computer. “See if there’s any clue to what he was doing in Glenmore Park.”
“Good,” she said, relieved.
He was acting so casual and cool. Was she the only one bothered by their roles in this investigation? Usually, the experienced detective took lead in the investigation. That meant Bernard was lead detective in their partnership, and similarly, Jacob was lead with Mitchell. But she and Mitchell had gone to the police academy together. She’d been promoted to detective only six weeks before him.
Perhaps the choice of lead detective should be dictated by the case? She was probably the one in charge of the kidnapping case… but Mitchell caught the call for the murder case. And anyway, the kidnapping case was now primarily being investigated by the FBI. So it should probably be Mitchell.
Would it have bothered her if it was someone else, someone who didn’t make her feel weird whenever he stepped into the room?
She ground her teeth in frustration. This neurotic mind loop was getting her nowhere. Mitchell was already deeply focused on his monitors, and she was doing nothing. She snatched the crime scene printouts and began tacking them to the whiteboard with vengeance.
Once she was done, she sat down at her desk and picked up the phone. She dialed Annie’s number and waited. It rang for a long time, and she was about to hang up when Annie finally answered.
“Hello?” Annie said, sounding out of breath.
“Annie? It’s Hannah. Is this a bad time? I thought you were working.”
“Yeah, no… I mean it’s a good time. Uh… I can talk.”
“Right,” Hannah said hesitantly. “I was calling about Glen Haney’s autopsy report.”
“Yeah?”
“You never sent it to me. And usually we meet at the morgue, to go over the findings, and—”
“Right! I’m sorry, I’m a bit out of focus this week. Sorry. There’s no real reason to come to the morgue. The cause of death was loss of blood. The victim was stabbed four times. The first two stabs were in his chest. The first tore through his right lung. The second wasn’t deep; the blade hit the ribs, making a superficial cut. The third and fourth were in his abdomen—one hit his kidney, the other his liver.”
“Okay,” Hannah said, thinking. “How tall was the victim?”
“Just under six feet,” Annie said.
“So the killer was tall, if he stabbed him in the chest, right?”
“That’s what I thought at first,” Annie said. “But actually, the angle of the first two stabs indicated he would have to be seven feet tall.”
“That’s very tall.”
“Yeah. I think it’s more likely the killer was standing above him. The third and fourth stabs weren’t as deep as the first stab. That seems to indicate that the killer found it a bit difficult to plunge the knife into his stomach from where he stood, which also indicates higher ground. Also, he had several abrasions all over his body, indicating a very rough tumble.”
There was a short pause in the conversation.
“Stairs,” Hannah finally said.
“That would be my bet,” Annie said. Her breathing became strangely husky. Hannah suddenly suspected Annie wasn’t in the morgue at all.
“Do you have a more accurate time of death?” Hannah asked.
“Um…” Annie’s tone became a bit high. “Hang on, I need to… uh… I’ll just… give me a second…”
Hannah waited for a bit. She heard some fumbling, and a male voice saying something. Then there was the sound of a door shutting. “Okay,” Annie finally said. “Right. Time of death.”
“Are you checking the chart?” Hannah asked, smiling to herself.
“No. I remember. The time of death was between eleven a.m. and two p.m.”
Hannah noted it. “Right,” she said. “Anything else?”
“Stomach contents. Not much, just a sandwich. The blade used was quite wide and serrated. It tore his body to shreds with each stab. My bet is a bread knife.”
Hannah shuddered, trying to push away the images this conjured.
“I already mentioned to Detective Lonnie that the body had been moved three to five hours after death, and stuffed into the trunk then.”
“Okay. So you’ll send me the report?”
“I’ll do it in half an hour.”
“Great,” Hannah said. “I’ll be waiting.” She hung up and sighed, then called Matt. He didn’t answer his phone. She rolled her eyes and called Violet.
“Hello?”
“Violet, it’s Hannah.”
“Hey, Hannah.”
“I’m calling about the crime scene report,” Hannah said. “Do you have it?”
“Sure! I’ll send it over.”
“Thanks. Say, is Matt there?”
“No, he had to go for a few hours. I don’t know where. Do you want me to leave him a message?”
“No need, I just…” Hannah grinned. “Forget it.”
“Okay. I’m sending the report as we speak.”
“Awesome.”
“Oh, and there was a gas station nearby, so we got their CCTV footage. Sending a link. It’s still a big file.”
“Thanks, Violet,” Hannah said, and hung up. A moment later the report popped up in her inbox, as well as a link to the CCTV footage video. She started downloading it, then began reading the report on her monitor.
The steering wheel, door handles, and trunk had been devoid of prints; someone had cleaned up after himself. There were a lot of hairs and fibers, and they’d been
sent to the lab. No phone was found anywhere at the crime scene.
There was a page with Violet’s sketch of the crime scene. Violet’s sketches were incredibly clean and accurate. It was a real gift, turning the chaos and horror of a crime scene into a simple, concise collection of black-and-white geometric shapes. Hannah printed the sketch as well, and added it to the whiteboard.
As sad as it was, the fun part was over. She glanced at Mitchell. He was hardly moving, occasionally nudging the mouse and clicking, his eyes glued to the monitors.
She checked the CCTV footage. It had finished downloading. She double-clicked the file and began viewing the video.
The main subreddit devoted to Abigail Lisman’s kidnapping was a tangled mess, and Mitchell took his time processing it. Unlike many others, he did not discount the possibility that someone out there could have found Abigail’s kidnapper. People online could be clever and determined when diving into puzzles and mysteries. But one had to ignore the loud majority, who merely parroted what others had already said, or created their own warped version of the case to match their specific agenda.
He was happy to see that the most insane theories were down at the bottom, sometimes disappearing completely. The shared moderation in the Reddit community worked well, at least here. He scanned the bottom threads quickly, and after becoming acquainted with the alien abduction theory, the Yakuza conspiracy, and a clumsily veiled attempt to sell some kind of body lotion, he started from the top.
The most upvoted post was the one that had found the image which showed Abigail and Grace walking down the street together. Then there were some Redditors who either lived in Glenmore Park or came over to investigate the case, posting images, trying to piece together Abigail and Gracie’s route. Mitchell read it through, impressed. CrazyKid39 appeared to have traced Abigail and Gracie’s route perfectly until they reached the park, just by piecing together the image in which they were seen, a very short statement by the FBI about where Gracie was found, and the Lisman’s street name, which the Redditors managed to retrieve.
Then came the finger-pointing. Several images were flagged by different posts as Potential Suspects, with the so-called suspects marked by a circle or a crudely drawn arrow. As far as Mitchell could see, all the suspects were flagged due to incredibly flimsy reasons, such as suspicious clothing, strange behavior, and various racist reasons. Since the kidnapping had happened on Saint Patrick’s Day, strange behaviors and clothing were rampant. Mitchell counted about a dozen leading suspects, none of which were likely.