by Lisa Black
“Yeah. She comes in here sometimes, stops by to say hi to him. They say sweet nothings through the plexiglass. I don’t let people in the back unless I’m paying them to be here. I don’t let my guys screw around on the clock, no holding customers up, but she was okay, never stayed long. Hi, how’s it going, and she’s back outside.”
“What does she look like?”
Ralph grew solemn under their intense stares. “Black hair, maybe to here, straight. About so high. Maybe a hundred pounds, hundred-twenty. White skin. Not much breasts.”
After that they could think of nothing else to do but thank him for his time and leave.
Outside on the sidewalk, again, the frosty air felt good for the first few minutes after the near-sauna of the A to Z offices, a sop to Jack’s blossoming irritation. “Girlfriend lied to us from start to finish. She sent us to the movie theater purely to screw us over.”
Riley agreed, not even complaining about the short hike back to their car. “If we hadn’t noticed the name on those stubs, hadn’t grasped at that straw, our victim would have stayed a ghost. Why? What’s she hiding?”
“I suggest we go and ask her.” Jack snapped open the car door with a bit more force than necessary. They drove the three city blocks, and promptly realized it would have been faster to walk by the time they located the entrance to the parking facility, got their ticket, and found a space. But this let them enter the building from the side and avoid the too-watchful girl at the building office. Jack had gotten away with retaining the victim’s key card, and used it after a series of knocks went unanswered. Perhaps bursting in on Shanaya Thomas could be considered an unauthorized entry, but Jack had the strong feeling it wasn’t going to matter.
They entered the room.
No, it wasn’t going to matter.
Because Shanaya Thomas wasn’t there. Neither were her clothes, her makeup, the photo of herself and Evan Harding.
“She bolted,” Riley said in amazement, as if no other suspect or witness had ever done that to him before. “Why?”
“We find that out, we’ll probably find out why Evan Harding is dead.”
Chapter 7
Friday, 9: 50 a.m.
With a sauerkraut dog happily swirling in his stomach, Rick Gardiner approached a trim two-story building on West 29th. The victim’s apartment sat over a tea shop, and scents of jasmine and muffins wafted out to the street. Three bundled-up workers moved along the flat roof. One dropped a sheet of tar paper or melded shingles, Rick couldn’t tell, off the end of the building to a dumpster on the ground below. It appeared to land smack in the center, the noise of impact increased by the vibration of the dumpster’s walls.
“Who the hell gets a new roof in the winter?” Rick mused aloud.
“Someone whose ceiling leaks melted snow?”
“Those guys have got to be colder than a witch’s tit.”
Will opened the front entry door. It led them through a narrow hallway between the tea shop and a hair salon. “Just think, next time we have to cuff a guy with breath like a garbage can or chat up some punk or respond to a decomp, you can think, Damn glad I’m not a roofer.”
Rick had no intention of conceding toughest job status. “Don’t know. They probably make more money.”
A stairwell took them to the second floor. His partner, Will, had long been one of those health nuts, the kind that always wants to take the stairs instead of the elevator, even up to five or six flights. He often abandoned Rick in lobbies, and more annoyingly, still beat him to whatever floor they sought. But Rick didn’t argue in dinky places with what might be questionable maintenance. The last thing he wanted to do was get stuck in an elevator until he was starving or dying of thirst or needing to pee, waiting on some pretty boy fireman dying to try out his ax for rescue.
They found the relevant door and knocked. The victim hadn’t had any keys on him, and they wanted to try the simple approach before hunting up a building super and convincing him or her to open the door for them.
It paid off. The bright spot of the peephole darkened, and a woman’s voice called out, “What is it?”
Rick and Will held up their badges and asked if they could speak with her.
“What about?”
“About Marlon Toner.”
They heard the locks sliding open, and the woman opened the door. “What’s he done now?”
After another check of their badges, she let them in to a small but tidy living/dining area with classic wooden moldings and thick area rugs over the hardwood floor. She gave her name as Jennifer Toner, then waved them to her sofa but didn’t sit herself, standing in the middle of the room with her arms crossed. About thirty years of age, she had black skin, wavy hair to the middle of her neck, a medium build, and wore a thick sweater over dark blue jeans. She fixed them with a look that wavered between angry and hopeless. When Will suggested she sit down, she refused. She didn’t offer them any coffee, which Rick could have used after that sauerkraut dog, but that was just as well. No need to drag this process out. He’d had family members spend twenty minutes puttering in the kitchen, grasping at any activity to put off the moment when they were told the very bad news.
No, this wasn’t a social call.
Will asked if she were the wife of Marlon Toner.
“Sister.”
Rick said nothing, and neither did Will for a moment. Jennifer Toner was definitely African-American, and the dead Marlon had been pale long before dying in the cold. But sometimes kids took wholly after one parent or the other, or perhaps they were stepsiblings. Whatever.
Will, always more—what do they call it, Rick thought, in-clusionary? —went on. That’s why they made a good team, Rick believed. Will handled all the touchy-feely crap, with Rick there to take down the bad guys when necessary. “Does he live here?”
“No.”
Will said, “He has this address on his driver’s license.”
She flexed an eyebrow, a tiny reaction that told Rick she hadn’t known that, but it also didn’t surprise her.
She asked, “Has he been arrested?”
“You knew he had a drug problem?”
She didn’t seem to notice the use of the past tense. “Yes—he didn’t always. He was clean his whole life. Even in high school he wasn’t part of that mess, no gangs, no dealing. Football kept him busy and that was all he cared about. Got a job, everything going good. It was that doctor.” She sat down after all, absently sinking into an armchair.
“What doctor?” Rick asked.
Jennifer Toner settled back in her chair and rubbed one temple with long fingers. “It started five, six months ago. He stopped by—we’re close, you know? There’s only the two of us since my parents passed. Talkin’ and catching up, but I could tell something wasn’t right. He said he had a summer cold, but finally I asked him if he was high. He said no, then left. Couple weeks, he stops by work, looks the same . . . I know the signs. Called me all dragging because his girlfriend had left him but all perky by the time he showed up and it wasn’t because I cheered him up, ’cause I told him he was an idiot, she had been great for him and he should get her back. Three months ago, he loses his job. Like I said, the signs.”
Will bobbed his head sympathetically.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Rick thought. Same old story. If he had five bucks for every time a family member said but he was turning his life around . . .
“The next time I saw him, I asked where he was living since he broke up with Taya and he wouldn’t quite answer me. I told him flat-out he was a junkie and needed help, that I wasn’t going to watch him die like practically everyone else we grew up with.”
“Do you know what he was on?”
“Pills. That’s why he kept trying to tell me he wasn’t an addict, it was medicine; a doctor said he should take them. He had a real prescription from a real doctor, got the stuff from a real pharmacy, nothing illegal about it. I said he sure as hell looked exactly like the guys who live in the stairwells around St. Mal
achi’s so I don’t see what difference a prescription makes. We—” Her gaze fell to her lap, and she finished in what was surely an understatement, “We had a fight.”
“We found him with a syringe,” Will said, gentle but straightforward—she seemed like a chick who appreciated straight talk—but left out how it had still been in his arm. “So he had graduated from pills, or started shooting them.”
Again, the flick of an eyebrow. Not surprising. The rise and fall of a drug addict’s life had been witnessed so many times by people stuck in a certain milieu that small children could probably sketch it out for show-and-tell.
Jennifer Toner straightened, clearly deciding that enough of her family’s dirty laundry had been sufficiently aired for one day. “Where is he now? Can I bail him out? Or is he at St. Vincent?”
The two cops exchanged a glance instead of answering, and grief invaded with the speed of lightning. “Oh no. No, no, no, no—”
“Ms. Toner, I’m sorry to have to tell you—”
“No, no, NO!”
This went on for a while. Will murmured soothing comments, made her some tea, offered to call in a Victim’s Advocate to help make funeral arrangements and contact family members.
Rick spent the time surreptitiously checking his phone. He half expected Maggie to call or text, to try in some subtle way to find out more about his trip west. Surely she had clued the new boyfriend in, told him that Rick planned to check out Chicago and Minneapolis and follow the trail of that woman’s nightmarish nursing homes and, with luck, pick up the trail of the vigilante who might have been stalking and finally killed her. Then behind him the trail of the guy who followed him from city to city, appropriating other cops’ names in order to hide his obsession. That would be quite the coup for Rick—catch the vigilante, and expose Jack Renner as a lying, phony psycho.
He realized he was smiling and stopped before the grieving sister could catch him at it.
“What doctor?” he heard his partner ask.
She sniffled into a paper towel Will had fetched for her. “He showed me a pill bottle last week, trying to convince me that he wasn’t taking drugs, it was medicine. Percodan. The doctor’s name was Phillip Castleman. I Googled, looking for an address. I planned to go to his office and read him the riot act about being a pill pusher. Except he don’t exist, at least not in Cleveland.”
“Huh,” Will said. “Unfortunately fake scripts can be gotten from all sorts of outlets, even mail order.”
“No, the pharmacy had an address on East Fifty-fifth. I can’t remember the name, something-something-pharmacy— I know that doesn’t help—but I remember Fifty-fifth. He’d get Medicare checks to pay for them. He told me all that, trying to convince me it was all legit, because I kept expecting him to ask me for money—that’s how it always goes, right? But he never did. But he also wasn’t old enough for Medicare, so I have no idea what that was all about.”
“Not Medicaid?” Will asked.
“He said Medicare.”
Rick found this less than fascinating. He and Will could tell the guys in Vice about it and be done. It was their job, not the homicide unit’s.
Perhaps Will thought so too, because he finally got back on track, nailing down the standard details to include in the report. “When was the last time you saw your brother?”
“Two, two and a half weeks ago. That’s when we argued—well, every time I see him now we argue—about the pills and where he was getting them.”
“Okay. Had you spoken to him since then?”
“Yeah, couple times.”
“When was the last?”
“About an hour ago.” Her voice cracked. “I knew something was really wrong this time. He was talking crazy, like totally out of his head—”
“An hour ago?” Rick asked.
“Hour, hour and a half,” she said, then noticed the cops’ expressions. “What? What is it?”
Rick gulped.
Because the dead man behind the West Side Market had probably been dead since the evening before.
He got to his feet, took the victim’s driver’s license from an envelope in his pocket, and crossed the four feet of space in a blur of uncharacteristic speed. “Ms. Toner, is this your brother?”
She stared at the rectangle of laminated plastic. She turned it over as if an explanation may have been printed on the back. Then she turned it to the front, stared again.
The tears dried up as if under a heat lamp. Hope brightened her face and she nearly smiled. “I congratulate you two on your lack of stereotyping,” she said, holding the card out to him, “but my brother Marlon is black.”
“Then who’s this?” Rick asked.
“Gentlemen, I have not the slightest idea.”
Friday, 1:15 p.m.
The Medical Examiner’s office staff had only begun the autopsy on Evan Harding when Maggie arrived. They had been delayed due to a contamination threat, a possible case of spinal meningitis, which had turned out to be a false alarm. Still Maggie entered the autopsy anteroom with light steps, her body automatically assuming that if she stayed very quiet perhaps the germs would not notice her.
The staff, however, did. They greeted her as a familiar face and asked where the detectives were.
“They should be right behind me.”
“We’re not waiting,” one warned absently. Autopsies waited for no man, woman, or detective and the cops knew it.
Maggie knew it too and doubted the examination would present any information they couldn’t already guess from the deep stains over the victim’s chest. Maggie wanted to tape the clothes, so she watched as the autopsy assistants—called dieners—removed the victim’s lightweight jacket and hung it on a disposable hanger. It would be damp from the now-melted snowflakes and the few trails of blood that never had a chance to dry in the cold, but there was nothing she could do about that. The tape would still work even on slightly damp material. The T-shirt, hung next, would not be as cooperative. Any loose hairs or fibers might now be glued to its surface by the sticky blood. But she’d try for whatever she could get. Even with all the advances of technology over the years, forensic science still required a large amount of luck.
“What did this guy get stabbed with?” one asked Maggie.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t left at the scene.”
“Not a knife?” suggested the second diener.
The first disagreed, poking at the bloody chest to get a better look at something in that mass of red. “It’s so small. And not linear.”
Maggie moved closer. As the diener wiped the chest off with a sponge and a squirt bottle of dish detergent, she could see what he meant. The wounds—two of them—were small and round, the size of a cigarette burn.
“An ice pick?” the second diener tried.
“In the library with Professor Plum?” the first chortled. The second joined in. Evidently they had a standing joke of relating crimes to the Clue game. He checked the pants pockets—carefully, the risk of syringes or other sharp objects ever-present—and found an empty white envelope with nothing written on it and a tube of mint ChapStick in one, an open pack of gum and a toothpick in the other. These items were spread out on a tray to be photographed and stored under personal property, to be released to the family if they weren’t wanted as evidence. The clothing would be retained until a trial or plea occurred.
Then they removed his shoes, socks, and pants, working quickly and efficiently. They had stripped nude so many dead that it seemed no different than putting more paper in the copier, yet there was always that unspoken twinge of empathy, that unavoidable pathos in seeing a fellow human so helplessly vulnerable. They could only get it over with as briskly as possible. A bit of distraction never hurt, either; today the two men discussed the current incarnation of a popular video game, and whether it would be an appropriate Christmas gift for their respective children.
“I don’t think so,” one said as he unzipped Evan Harding’s jeans. “Those aliens, man. My girl woul
d be okay, but my boy’s too little. He’ll have nightmares. When he has nightmares, then he’s in bed with my wife and me.”
“It’s a trade-off,” the other agreed, helping him pull the pants off with a sharp downward yank. “Bug you in the middle of the night, maybe, but you got peace all evening while they’re glued to the TV.”
“I’m not going to say anything about your parenting—what the hell is this?”
Maggie moved forward and craned her neck to see around the two large men. Evan Harding had something on his ankle. For a second she thought it might be a tattoo, but then the shape defined itself.
A key. The victim had a small, flat key taped to his ankle with a piece of clear packaging tape.
“Don’t see that too often,” the first diener said.
“You’ve seen it ever?” Maggie asked.
“You’d be amazed at the things people wear under their clothes,” he intoned, and waited for the photographer to get a picture of it before peeling the tape, with the key adhered to it, away from the skin. Maggie thought of fingerprints and best preservation techniques, but didn’t worry overmuch. The dead man appeared healthy, other than the damage to his chest. No injuries, no major scars, no bruises, nothing to suggest that he’d been abused, coerced, or trafficked, so she had no reason to think he hadn’t taped the key to his ankle himself. She held out a sheet of the clear acetate, to which she placed tapes from clothing, and the diener spread it on the sheet, adhesive side down.
Mosler had been engraved on the body of the key. Maggie assumed it to be the name of the manufacturer. She doubted anyone else would put a decorative engraving on such a utilitarian object.
“What kind of key is that?” she asked.
“Hell if I know. Padlock? Safe deposit box? Locker?”
“Maybe it opens his diary. His little black book of secrets.” the other joked.
Maggie held the transparent sheet with the key up to the light. “Maybe it does.”