Every Kind of Wicked

by Lisa Black

  “No, but traffic’s backed up for two miles and they’re looking for an exit.”

  Riley groaned as if this inefficiency were a personal affront and turned to Jack. “Why don’t you see if CSU can tell us anything about that swipe card? I’ll stand here and freeze my toes to Popsicles and hear more about Chief Jackspit.”

  “Joc-O-sot,” the patrol officer corrected.

  “I’ll go with you,” Maggie said.

  Both cops stared at her.

  She said, “Cleveland State’s a sprawling campus. It takes a half hour of wandering around to find anything if you’re not familiar with it. It’s only two blocks away.” They didn’t seem convinced, but she added firmly, “Let’s go,” and began to walk.

  After fifteen or twenty feet, Jack glanced back to make sure they were out of earshot, “What was all that about?”

  Maggie said, “We need to talk.”

  Chapter 2

  They exited the cemetery at the west end, across from the baseball stadium, now as frigid and vacated as the gravesites, and did a U-turn onto the short, brick-paved Erie Court. Conscious of their coworkers on the other side of the stone wall, they kept their voices low.

  “What’s up?” Jack asked. He didn’t worry that Riley would find their tête-à-tête suspicious; he and Maggie had let everyone believe they were sleeping together. They weren’t, of course, but it provided a handy explanation for these occasional conferences. And Maggie had thought it might discourage the interest of her ex-husband, another homicide detective named—

  “Rick.”

  “He hassling you?” Rick Gardiner wasn’t the most even-tempered guy.

  “No, but I think he’s planning to hassle you.”

  They emerged onto East 14th. She turned left and he followed.

  “He stopped by to see me this morning, supposedly to pick up a fingerprint report on a case of his, which of course he didn’t need because we always send copies over to your unit as soon as they’re ready. Then he told me a funny story about one of those phone scammers calling and pretending to be his grandson needing money for bail—”

  “He has a grandson?”

  “Of course not. Even if we’d had children, their kids wouldn’t be old enough to get arrested, so that insulted him more than the loss of his credit card information would have. But then he started asking about you. Where you grew up, where you became a cop.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “The truth: I have no idea. You’re not exactly chatty.”

  Strictly true. And even if he were, no chance arose for a heart-to-heart chat about his past since they weren’t really dating. Even if they were dating, Jack thought, Maggie already knew more of his prior activities than she wanted to. Way more.

  “He’s going to Chicago.”

  Jack stepped off the curb, nearly into the path of a tractor-trailer so large, it seemed to brush the lowest prisms of the chandelier demarking Playhouse Square. Maggie grabbed his arm, saving him from death by Peterbilt.

  “He said there were similar vigilante-type murders of scumbags there.” Similar to the men he had killed in Cleveland, she meant. She hadn’t let go of his arm, maintained one steady pull until he faced her. “Were there?”

  He hesitated, but lying to her would not help anything, and nodded.

  This couldn’t be news to her, but still her shoulders slumped in worry.

  The light changed and they stepped into the crosswalk, and she tried to rally. “He did add that it’s hard to conclude anything from that, given the number of murders in Chicago. However—he said he might go on to Minneapolis.”

  Theater marquees provided spotty shelter from the still-falling snow as they passed beneath. “The vigilante case was reassigned to me.” That should have kept Rick Gardiner away from Jack’s handiwork.

  “This trip isn’t official. It’s all on his own. I don’t think I need to describe how rare it is that Rick does anything on his own.”

  Jack agreed. Maggie’s ex would never be known as a go-getter. Not for the first time, he wondered what had ever attracted her to the man in the first place, but stopped himself—not the issue here. What Rick Gardiner might uncover from Jack’s old stomping grounds, that was the issue.

  His reluctant, erstwhile, accidental partner in crime could no longer contain her anxiety. “What are you going to do? What’s he going to find, Jack?”

  “Calm down,” he said—two words one should never say to a woman. He regretted them immediately.

  “I am perfectly calm!” Except she wasn’t, and several other people also waiting for the light at East 18th didn’t think so either as they turned at her sharp tone, their glances then sliding away to give them as much privacy as could be afforded on a busy city street.

  Jack, wisely and promptly, backpedaled. “Yes, okay. Let him go. He won’t find anything.”

  “You’re sure? He asked if I had a photo of you. Not in so many words, I mean. As he pretended to be chatting, he asked why we didn’t have any selfies on Facebook or something. Since I haven’t posted on Facebook since my niece’s birthday last year, that seemed like a stupid comment . . . until I figured out what he was after.” The light changed. The people around them moved and Maggie continued to talk as if she couldn’t help herself, a measure of her agitation. Jack knew that. Maggie represented a walking time bomb, one that could detonate the cover life he’d built for himself in this city. If one more straw of guilt broke the back of her conscience . . . yes, he might wind up in jail, but more likely he’d simply move on. Maggie would at least give him a heads-up before confessing. Wouldn’t she?

  She might figure he had already overstayed his welcome. The person he had followed to Cleveland in order to destroy had been destroyed. He and Maggie had agreed that waiting six months should allow him to leave without causing suspicion. But it had been eight months, and here he remained.

  She was saying, “Obviously he’s trying to come up with a picture of you to take with him. He got called away to an overdose, but that’s what he was angling around to. Rick was always a lousy actor. I figured out he was cheating on me, like, two days after he started—”

  “He did?” Why the hell—

  She waved that away with a gloved hand and no hitch in her stride. “Long story. What can he do if he visits those police departments?”

  Cue the knee-jerk reaction. “Nothing. It will be fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Somewhat sure. Chicago had a huge force, and he had used a different name there. First Rick would have to weasel Jack’s ID photo out of Cleveland’s human resources unit, then happen to show his picture to the very few guys in Chicago who might actually remember him. On top of that, cops don’t care for people outside their agency asking about their guys, even if those people were also cops. And Chicago had been slammed in the news for several years, so they would be doubly reticent to speak ill of anyone who might have once worn their uniform. Yes, he doubted Rick would find anything to connect Jack to the city at all.

  “Positive,” he told Maggie, more calmly.

  She appeared no more reassured than he felt. “What about Minneapolis?”

  A slightly smaller force, and Rick had the name of a lieutenant there. If he got to that man with a photo of Jack or even a thorough description, the man would know it didn’t match the Officer Jack Renner he’d supervised. That would lead them both to ask why the Jack Renner now in Cleveland had been working in Minneapolis under a different name. “No problem.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He stopped, turned to face her. “Maggie. Don’t worry.”

  “Oh, I’m worried.”

  He should have known a simple platitude would hardly dissuade the logical, thorough, and sometimes frighteningly sharp Maggie Gardiner. She had much more to lose than he did. He had designed a fake life in Cleveland, but she had a real one. She had friends, family, career, history. Guilt didn’t often trouble him, but it did now. “Rick isn’t going to find
anything to make him more suspicious of me. Let him go, let him investigate his heart out. When he comes up with nothing it will convince him to give it up once and for all and I’ll be clear for good. We’ll both be clear, for good.”

  She studied his face, and he watched as she debated whether to accept this. The vigilante murders had stopped—or so the city, and Maggie, believed—and the case assigned to him, the one man guaranteed not to solve them. Rick remained the only cloud on their horizon, but even Riley believed that simple jealousy motivated Rick, the common annoyance of seeing his ex-wife with another man. Jack knew what trails he had left in other cities, and if he wasn’t grabbing his go-bag and heading for the city limits . . . the understandable desire to believe that all would be well won her over.

  “Okay,” she said at last.

  “Okay,” he agreed, and looked up at the towering center building of Cleveland State University. “Where are we going?”

  “Registrar’s office, I guess.”

  Maggie hadn’t exaggerated the time he might spend wandering around before he found answers. The campus sprawled, signs and directionals of limited help in the network of buildings and walkways, all pulsing with forced air heat and vivacious students. The Registrar’s office sent them to Security, who said the card appeared to be for student housing, and they trouped through several buildings to reach that main desk. It was much quieter there than the chaotic Registrar’s, with the quarter close to ending and final tests and grading scheduled. Only one slouching boy waited ahead of them.

  Once at the counter, the bright young lady recognized the card immediately.

  “Oh yes, that’s a unit key. That’s why we don’t put the address on it, or even the unit number—so if someone found it, they’d have to try it in every door in every building to break in or burgle the place or whatever. Thank you so much for turning it in. I’ll be sure to find who it belongs to and see that they get it back. They’ll probably be coming in here looking for a replacement anyway.”

  “No, he won’t.” Jack pulled out his badge and explained that the former holder of the key card had died. The girl’s face plummeted into a look of such sympathy that he hoped she wouldn’t burst into sobs.

  “That’s awful! What happened? Car accident?”

  Jack made his voice sympathetic but ignored her question. “We need to know the name and address associated with this card.”

  “But I can’t tell you that—I mean, the cards are usually made up at each individual facility. They, um, they would know who lives there . . . but I might, should, be able to tell you the building.”

  “That would be really helpful,” Jack said, perhaps too sweetly. Maggie gave him an odd look; the girl gulped and swiped the card though a reader tucked behind the desk.

  Then she told him that that card belonged to the Domain at Cleveland, two blocks away.

  “Thank you,” Jack said.

  “It’s a neat old building,” she sniffed, handing the card back. “It used to be a YMCA.”

  “Very interesting,” he offered.

  “Built in, like, eighteen hundred something.”

  “Thank you,” Maggie told her.

  “Have a nice day,” the girl said, inconsolable, and went to hunt up a tissue. Jack and Maggie plunged back into the frigid winter air.

  “I think we ruined that poor girl’s day,” Jack commented. Anything to keep the conversation away from Maggie’s ex-husband and his potential damage.

  “Might not be a bad thing,” she said, which surprised him. At his look she added, “Everyone can use the occasional reminder that life is short.”

  He hoped this meditation on mortality did not stem from a lack of confidence in their future, but figured it was merely Maggie being sensible. People who work around death a great deal tend to lose the sentimentality and increase the respect. She pointed to the building they sought, looming through the falling snow at East 22nd and Prospect.

  The girl at the desk had known her stuff. Built in 1889, the structure had once been the city’s YMCA, those letters still engraved in the stone frontispiece. More interesting to Jack, it stood only one block from the Erie Street Cemetery. It could explain why the victim hadn’t been dressed for a longer trek through the cold. He might have been making a beer run or returning from a meal out . . . though the name tag indicated a part-time job.

  A clean, tailored lobby included a door labeled OFFICE, and their luck held. The tiny space held one occupant, a wisp of a young woman with pink tips on her brown hair and too many piercings to count. She didn’t bat an eye when Jack produced his badge and handed her the key card. Without a word she swiped it through another reader, then stared at the minuscule screen for so long, he thought it had malfunctioned.

  “Does the card belong here?” he finally prompted.

  “Yeah.”

  “Great. Whose room is it?”

  She switched her gaze to him. “I think that’s confidential.”

  “I think you’re wrong. Your resident is dead, and we need to identify him.”

  She said nothing, still trying mightily to reconcile her responsibility to protect a fellow student from The Man with any legal ramifications said Man might lower on her, first, and her facility second. It took Jack painting a picture of this poor dead boy ending up in an unmarked grave, plus two phone calls to a supervisor, but she finally consented to give Jack a name: Evan Harding. Also his unit number, the better to fill in a search warrant with because there was no way she was going to let him enter the apartment without one. Whether the stipulation came from her or her supervisor didn’t matter. Jack had figured he would need to get a warrant, so he may as well drop off Maggie and pick up his partner first.

  They returned to the Erie Street Cemetery, moving fast to stay warm. The body snatchers—officially the “ambulance crew” although everyone they picked up would be well past the point where medical attention could help—had finally been freed from the traffic snarl and were loading the white body bag onto a gurney.

  “Have a nice walk?” Riley smirked. He, along with the rest of the department, believed the official story that Jack and Maggie were dating. He even tried to help Jack along where he could, with subtle prompts meant to steer him into proper boyfriend behavior, because Riley was a kindly man and a loyal partner. So much so that Jack felt much more guilty about deceiving him than Jack could ever feel about dispatching violent criminals into the next life.

  “Yes,” Jack said to him now. “Thanks.”

  Chapter 3

  Friday, 8:48 a. m.

  On the other side of the Cuyahoga River, perhaps three miles from where Jack and Maggie stood, Rick Gardiner turned up his collar against the wind off the lake and sniffed the air. They stood outside in the alley between the market and the river, but odors seemed to escape even through the market’s brick walls. A rime of gusting snow covered everything in a thin, unbroken layer, including the corpse. “What is that smell?”

  “Dead body?” his partner suggested.

  “No. I think it’s sauerkraut. I could go for a hot dog with kraut. And a little mustard.” In the winter months the West Side Market worked as a skeleton of its summer persona, but the few stalls open did manage a brisk business during lunchtime. The place always made Rick think of the 1920s scenes from The Godfather; shopping in old-world streets full of carts and vendors and fresh fruits and sausages.

  Will Dembrowski, tall and wiry, pointed out that they had eaten breakfast only an hour before.

  “Don’t matter. Hot dogs are like popcorn. You smell it, you gotta have it.”

  “You want a tube of mystery meat in your stomach, no problem. But what about this guy?”

  Rick looked down past his own slight paunch at the body of the dead man. Straggly dirty-blond beard, straggly dirty-blond hair, skin and features that appeared to be a mix of several different racial categories, clothes that hadn’t been laundered in a month covered with a worn puffy parka. “What about him? The needle still in his arm p
retty much says it all.”

  Will could not deny that the needle pretty much did say it all. There were no obvious injuries, no disturbance to the ensemble other than the rolled-up sleeve. The man had apparently been sitting on an overturned plastic milk crate, maybe leaning up against a surprisingly solid tower of empty wooden boxes that had once held vegetables. A weathered label on the side showed some sort of beet or turnip or whatever—Rick had never been particularly interested in vegetables unless they were deep fried in tempura. And usually not even then.

  Under an overhang and between the boxes and the brick wall, the spot felt surprisingly cozy despite the December weather. None of the boxes seemed out of place, the milk crate squarely flush, two sheets of plywood still propped on their short ends against the brick. If a fight to the death had occurred there, it had been expertly cleaned up. Most likely this was exactly what it looked like: a victim who took one gram too many of an illegal drug and died a lonely death.

  The Medical Examiner’s investigator had declined to respond, reserving their limited manpower for less open-and-shut situations. Because of that, the two cops were free to check the pockets and move the body.

  Rick put on latex gloves for this. He didn’t like touching dead people, or dead people’s stuff, and especially dead homeless people’s stuff. His nose wrinkled just to flip the coat open. “Bet he didn’t smell too good when he was alive . . . certainly not now.”

  Will said, “That’s one helpful thing about the cold. Everything about this would be worse in August. Not only him but old food, rotten meat. Bugs.”

  Rick pulled the pockets open, gingerly searching the insides, wary of open syringes or needles. “You’re one of those friggin’ optimistic people, aren’t you?”

  “Guess so.”

  “I hate that.”

  The victim had something in every pocket, usually crumpled pieces of paper, their edges wearing away, flyers, halves of cigarettes, the occasional coin. Nothing of any significance, no more drugs, no cell phone. Rick grunted and stood halfway up, grasping the right arm. Will understood the shorthand and grabbed the right ankle. They flipped the guy onto his stomach.