by Leigh Jones
“Ah, yes. She’s a regular. Been around the island for as long as I can remember.”
“She was telling me that things have been particularly tough in recent months.”
“Oh? I know someone roughed her up a few weeks ago. Did she tell you about that? We had to take her to the clinic to get a few stitches.”
“She did mention it, although she left out the part about the stitches. Do you see that kind of thing a lot? It seems a little excessive.”
“Everything about life on the streets is excessive, unfortunately. They’re not normally violent, but sometimes they get into fights about the most random things. One time, I had to break up a brawl between two older men who were arguing over who should get to rummage through a particular trash can. So, you never know.”
“But Miss Kitty said it was a pimp who roughed her up, someone new in town. Did she mention any of that to you?”
“She didn’t give us any specifics about what happened. She refused to let us call the police, even though I certainly think she had grounds to press charges. And we would have stood by her through the process. But she didn’t want to bring attention to herself, and we didn’t push. It’s not always good to push someone to do something they don’t want to do, even if it’s the right thing to do.”
“Do you think she might have been scared to report what happened?” Kate asked. “Scared of the guy who attacked her, I mean, not just of the police.”
“It’s possible,” Lyons said. “She did seem pretty paranoid about the whole thing, but she often talks about people coming after her. I didn’t think anything of it.”
“Yeah, toward the end of our talk she started telling me about the men in white.”
“That’s one delusion we hear from her a lot. It probably has some basis in her visits to the mental hospital, but it’s hard to know for sure. Sometimes the delusions are all manufactured.”
“So she’s definitely schizophrenic?”
“And bipolar. It’s a bad combination. When she’s on her meds, she’s completely rational, and she’ll talk about trying to go home and see her family. But as soon as they release her from the hospital, she stops taking her meds and reverts back to life on the streets. It’s the same cycle we see over and over again with most of the people we serve.”
“But do you think there’s any truth to what she says?” Kate asked, her confidence in her source waning.
“I think there’s a kernel of truth to everything she says. It’s just a matter of figuring out which kernel it is.”
Brian interrupted their conversation when he handed Kate her cup of coffee and shook hands with the deacon.
“It looks like Kate’s pumping you for information,” Brian said, flashing Kate a knowing grin.
“Oh, I don’t know. Were you?” Lyons asked with a quizzical smile.
Kate appreciated his discretion. “Not really. We were just discussing topics of mutual interest.”
Brian sighed and shook his head. Kate wondered whether he realized why she’d put up so little resistance to coming to church.
“I did have one other question for you though,” Kate said. “Have you heard anyone else talking about this guy? I mean, anything that might lead you to believe he’s real?”
Lyons paused and pursed his lips before answering. “Not that I can think of. But I have noticed a certain level of tension on the streets when we’re out talking to people. It’s not anything definite I could put my finger on. It’s just a feeling. I realize that’s not very helpful.”
“No, it’s fine,” Kate said. “I appreciate your insight, as always. Thanks for your help.”
When Lyons wandered off to go talk to someone else, Brian took Kate’s hand and pulled her toward where Gage was standing near the door.
“I’m starved,” he said. “Let’s go get some dinner. Unless, of course, there was someone else you needed to interview?”
Kate grinned. “Nope. All done. We can go now.”
After promising Gage he wouldn’t wait so long before coming back to visit, Brian led Kate out the door and down 23rd Street toward her building, just a few blocks away. The sun had sunk below the skyline, offering some relief from the blistering heat. They walked mostly in silence, with Kate preoccupied by what Lyons had said. She still had no confirmation that this new pimp even existed, just the suspicions of a waiter with a bent for sensationalism and the claims of a delusional crackhead.
Brian didn’t interrupt her thoughts, a level of self-control that endeared him to Kate more than almost anything else. Most men would push and prod, trying to figure out what they didn’t know. They couldn’t stand to be left in the dark. But Brian never pushed. He almost always waited for Kate to come to him. A hint of her earlier uneasiness fluttered in her chest. She refused to fall in love with him. The flutters turned into a full-fledged throb when she realized she was dangerously close.
When they got back to her apartment, Brian offered to make mushroom and onion omelette and a salad. While he started to cook, Kate opened a bottle of pinot noir and finally told him about her unproductive stakeout, Miss Kitty, and her suspicions.
“If this woman can be believed, her story corroborates what Slava told us,” she said. “Now I just have to figure out whether any of it’s true.”
“I don’t suppose you could just go talk to the hotel manager,” Brian said, his back to her as he swirled the eggs in the pan.
“And tip him off?” Kate scoffed. “Not likely. There’s no way he doesn’t know what’s going on.”
“I wonder who owns the hotel. This could be a big scandal for them when the story breaks.”
“I don’t know,” Kate said, draining her glass as she got up to set the table. “But I’ll find out. In the meantime, I think I need to plan another stakeout. I wonder whether Slava would introduce me to the friends who told him about this in the first place.”
“I think Slava would do anything for you,” Brian said with a grin, sliding the omelet out of the pan and onto a plate. “Just be careful, okay?”
Kate rolled her eyes. “I don’t even think my editors would tell me to be careful.”
“Well, they have less of a vested interest in your well-being than I do.” Kate’s heart stuttered in dismay. Brian definitely had grown too close for comfort. She smiled weakly.
While they ate, Brian told her about some of the patients he’d seen that day. The backyard grilling accidents and home improvement mishaps were pretty standard fare for a Sunday. He’d seen one little boy with a marble stuck in his nose, also not unusual. But the prize for the most interesting case of the day went to a fisherman with a long and very sharp lure embedded in his backside. After a few too many beers and too many hours spent standing on the pier, he’d gotten confused about which way he was supposed to cast his line.
“He brought the fishing pole and his tackle box with him into the ER,” Brian said, laughing. “He wanted us to be sure not to bend the lure when we took it out. It was one of his best ones.”
“Did he drive himself to the hospital? How could he even sit down?”
“None of us could figure it out. Maybe it didn’t hurt that bad. It was in there pretty deep. He went home with stitches.”
“But did the lure survive?”
Before Brian could answer, a siren started to wail outside the window. Kate listened as it faded in the direction of the seawall. She was about to pour another glass of wine when she heard another siren start up a few blocks away, in the direction of Fire Station 1. Soon she could hear yet another siren wailing in the distance. When she turned on the police scanner, it immediately crackled to life with chatter about something happening on the beach. Kate listened until she heard one of the officers say there was no need to send an ambulance. She was about to turn off the scanner when he spoke again.
“This one’ll go straight to the coroner. Go ahead and call them out. Tell them to pull up in front of The Clipper. You can’t miss us. We’ve got quite a crowd gathering.”
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A jolt of surprise shot through Kate as she ran to grab her notebook and her keys. That was right where she’d been just a few hours before. A spasm of panic gripped her throat. Miss Kitty. The new pimp had roughed her up once. Had he come back to finish the job?
Chapter 16
Johnson had already settled into his recliner with a well-worn copy of C.S. Lewis’ The Problem with Pain—his Sunday night ritual—when his scanner went off. The dispatcher said tourists out for a late evening stroll had spotted what they thought was a body on the rocks at the base of the seawall. At first, Johnson guessed it was the man who went missing in the surf the day before. Often drowning victims took a little while to float back to shore, if lifeguards couldn’t find them right away. But when the responding officers radioed back to dispatch, Johnson slammed his book closed.
“No need for an ambulance.”
“10-4. Do you need additional units on scene?”
“Better go ahead and roll out the lieutenant and one of the detectives.”
“10-4. Anyone else?”
“This one’ll go straight to the coroner. Go ahead and call them out.”
Johnson’s cat, an aged tabby more crotchety than any old woman he’d ever met, protested loudly when he scooped her off his lap and stood up, setting her back down in the chair. She continued to yowl as he tugged on his shoes and clipped his gun to his belt. His three dogs, pit bull mixes rescued from the animal shelter, looked on half expectantly, their big brown eyes rolling between their master and the hook where their leashes hung by the door.
“Not this time, fellas,” he said as he pulled the door closed behind him. “This time, it’s work.”
Johnson lived in an elevated row house about four blocks from the beach on 12th Street. From his front porch, he could see red and blue lights flashing on the seawall. He briefly thought about walking but decided he’d better get to the scene before the lieutenant, if possible. After two dead-end cases—or botched cases, as some of his colleagues called them—he wanted to be ready to field a barrage of questions when his supervisor arrived.
Johnson couldn’t see anything at first when he pulled up behind the two other units lined up along the street. A crowd of tourists, some eating ice cream cones, had gathered on the sidewalk, craning their necks to see what was happening on the sand below. He had to push his way through them to get to the long flight of concrete steps carved into the wall. It almost looked like they were daring each other to be the first to attempt a descent to get a closer look.
“Hey, man!” a shirtless teen in board shorts and flip flops called out. “What’s going on down there?”
“That’s what I’m here to find out,” Johnson said. “Give us some room to work, folks. Unless you want to spend the rest of the night sitting in the county jail, you’d better not try to set foot on this beach.”
Below him, Johnson spotted two uniformed officers standing next to a rock groin that stretched out into the water from the base of the wall, 16 feet below the street. They talked and laughed quietly, not even making an attempt to canvass the scene for evidence. Plastic bottles, seaweed and cigarette butts—the detritus of another successful summer weekend—littered the thin strip of sand. And about 12 feet from where families had splashed and sunbathed the afternoon away, a body lay splayed on the sharp granite boulders.
She was on her stomach, with her head turned slightly to one side. Her short, frizzy hair lifted gently off her exposed cheek each time the wind puffed a saturated gust across her face. Her arms were stretched out on each side, almost as though they had tried to break her fall but crumpled under the force of the landing. A thin line of blood ran out of the corner of her mouth.
Johnson felt the familiar ache tighten his chest. He saw the evidence of human brokenness every day. But he never got over the feeling that it shouldn’t be like this. Another senseless death made the world a little bit darker.
“Hey boss, looks like we’ve got a jumper,” one of the officers called out when Johnson got close enough to hear them over the steady swoosh of the low surf.
“It’s like Papa Doc all over again, except there’s no wheelchair and no half empty bottle of Jim Beam,” the other one said with a laugh.
Papa Doc was a well-known homeless man who panhandled along the seawall, playing on the sympathies of visitors who just wanted to enjoy a day of fun without being reminded of others’ suffering. After a diabetes-related amputation confined him to a wheelchair, he almost doubled his daily haul. He usually made enough to get a hotel room at least once a week, and keep himself supplied with his favorite bourbon. Last winter, an early morning jogger found him at the base of the seawall, his wheelchair and a broken bottle about 5 feet away. The official report said he likely passed out and rolled off the edge accidentally. But many officers, who knew him pretty well after talking to him every day during patrols, thought he might have decided he’d just had enough.
Johnson just grunted as he scanned the rocks. A few feet away from one of the woman’s outstretched arms he spotted a bag wedged in a crack.
“Did you look through her bag for an ID?”
“Naw, no need. We know who she is. Goes by Miss Kitty, but I think her real name’s Sharneece something. We’ve hauled her in enough times. She’s in the system.”
The name didn’t ring a bell, but Johnson had never patrolled the seawall and only knew the prostitutes his undercover teams rounded up in sting operations. Those girls usually moved on to another city to start over, or pick up where they left off.
“Did she work this area?”
“Used to, but she hasn’t been regular for a while. We mostly bust her for drugs now. She’s crazy as a loon and almost always high.”
Johnson looked back at the broken body. Even if she spent her whole life crazy and high, she didn’t deserve to die like this.
Up on the seawall, the crowd had grown as more people stopped to see what was going on. Johnson was about to tell one of the officers to ask them to move on when a woman broke through the front and started purposefully down the steps.
“Hey! You’re not allowed down here. Get back on the sidewalk,” Johnson yelled.
When she paused half way down and looked up, he recognized Kate. Throwing up his hands in frustration, he strode toward her as she continued her descent.
“The scene isn’t secure. You can’t be down here. Stop. Right. There!”
Although she did stop on the last thin slab of concrete, Kate’s whole body strained toward the victim, her eyes wide and her mouth twisted and gaping.
“Johnson, I know her. I know who that is! I just talked to her this afternoon. What happened?” Kate’s question came out in a high-pitched whine, more of an appeal than a request for information. Her chest heaved haltingly and Johnson could count her rapidly beating pulse in the vein raised in the center of her forehead. He’d never touched the reporter before, but he reached out now and grasped her forearm gently but firmly with one hand.
“Kate. Take a deep breath. It’s okay. It looks like she jumped. It’s happened before.”
“Jumped?” Kate squeaked, looking him full in the face with such unveiled horror that he tightened his grip on her arm instinctively.
“Probably. Look, she was a drug addict with mental health issues. Maybe she was trying to commit suicide, or maybe she just got a bad batch of whatever and thought she could fly.”
“But…” Kate looked back at the sidewalk more than one story above them and slowly turned toward where Miss Kitty’s broken body lay draped on the rocks. Johnson followed her gaze. “That’s so far. Do you really think she could have made it that far by jumping?”
Johnson released Kate’s arm and put both hands on his hips as he judged the distance for the first time. He had to admit she had a point. It definitely looked like the woman had help reaching her final destination. But who would want to throw a washed up prostitute off the seawall?
“Look, I don’t know at this point. I really just got here
. Give me a chance to look around, and I’ll tell you what I think once I have more information.”
“Okay, but listen. I talked to her this afternoon, and she told me the same thing the mamasan from your last sting said—there’s a new crew in town. And they’re enforcing territories. Someone roughed Miss Kitty up a few weeks ago. I got that confirmed by David Lyons with Last Hope Ministries. It was so bad she had to have stitches.”
Johnson frowned and pressed his lips together. His simple suicide was starting to turn into a complicated mess.
“Listen! Something’s not right here,” Kate insisted. “There’s no way that woman threw herself off the seawall. I just talked to her this afternoon!”
Johnson wondered whether Kate’s certainty stemmed from her conviction about the dead prostitute’s state of mind or a desperate desire not to have been one of the last people to see her before she took her own life.
“If she did do this herself, there’s no way you could have known it, Kate. She might not even have known it herself at the time you talked to her. You just never know with someone so tortured. Do you hear me?”
Kate nodded slightly. When she turned to walk back up the steps, Johnson thought he caught the glistening trail of a tear running down the side of her nose.
“I’ll wait for you up there,” she said, without looking back.
The vice already squeezing Johnson’s heart tightened by another turn as he watched her trudge slowly back up the steps. He had never seen Kate so involved in a story before. Reporters, like police officers, kept a professional distance, often joking about the victims and circumstances surrounding even the most grisly murder scenes. It was the only way to stay sane, inundated by so much depravity day in and day out. Why was Kate taking this woman’s death so personally?
While he waited for the lieutenant and the coroner to arrive, Johnson walked around the body looking for anything that might indicate a murder. Stepping gingerly across the jagged boulders, he looked carefully into each crack. Small crabs and three-inch-long roaches scurried out of the glare of his flashlight. He spotted a few stray socks, several beer bottles, crushed cans, tangled fishing line, one dead fish and dozens of cigarette butts. A few of them looked fairly fresh, but they weren’t very close to the body. Of course, they could have been flicked from above by someone standing on the seawall. If she had been pushed, would her killer have stood there long enough to finish a cigarette, risking getting caught? That would have taken some nerve.