by Blake Banner
Dehan was frowning and shaking her head. “Hang on. You had an alibi for Friday night.”
I nodded. “That had me stumped until I remembered something Sammy Gupta, David’s landlord, had said.” I turned back to Katie. “He said you turned up several times with your sister. Then we discovered that you were Kathleen O’Connor, and your sister had been killed at the same time as your parents. It followed logically that Sammy had seen you on a couple of occasions with a friend who was more or less similar to you. So I’m guessing, you invited her and her boyfriend out to dinner, made an excuse for not being able to join them, and gave her your credit card…”
“I told her I wanted to thank her for being so supportive when I split up with Dave. She and her boyfriend had been having difficulties. I suggested an early Valentine’s dinner for them and gave her my card. I trusted it would be enough to confirm my alibi.”
“You know I have to arrest you now, Katie.”
“I know. But at least Hennessy will finally be exposed for the murdering parasite that she really is.” She looked around at her living room. “I inherited this from my parents, you know.” She sighed and stood. “Shall we go?”
And outside the gray rain persisted among the cold, naked trees.
EPILOGUE
Newman had ordered us both to take at least a couple of weeks holiday, more if we needed it. I think he was terrified of what we might turn the next cold case into, and it was he who needed a holiday from us.
I had managed to light the fire and Dehan had put a chicken in the oven and fixed us a couple of very dry martinis. I was lying on the sofa with my eyes closed, listening to the soft patter of raindrops on the sidewalk outside, and the occasional, desultory rustle of paper as Dehan turned the pages of the magazine she was reading.
After a while, I heard the magazine drop to the floor. She stretched and yawned and I counted back from five to one. I knew she’d talk on one.
“Say, Stone. Aren’t you sick of the rain?”
I nodded. “Mm-hm…”
“Wouldn’t it be nice to go somewhere with sunny beaches, nice restaurants, big steaks…”
“Yup.”
“And god knows you’ve earned it!”
I shrugged. “Nyah… I’m no good at going on holiday on my own. I get bored.”
She was quiet for a while. She was behind me and couldn’t see me grinning to myself. I heard her pick up the magazine again and turn a couple of pages. “I could keep you company. I don’t mind…”
“Oh… well… I guess that would be OK…”
“Dork.” She was quiet a little longer, then said, “I always wanted to go to Goa.”
“You want to go to Goa?”
“It’s in India. It looks amazing.”
I shrugged. “Okay. Book it. My card is in my jacket.”
There was a stunned silence.
“Seriously?”
She sounded so much like an excited kid I had to open my eyes and turn to look at her. Her face was radiant. I laughed. “Seriously.” I flopped back and closed my eyes. “I learned in the last week that you can’t take anything for granted in this life. Let’s do it. Goa, here we come!”
She jumped up and astonished me by kneeling beside me and planting a big, messy kiss on my cheek. Then she was off to get my wallet and her laptop. A minute later, she was back in her chair rattling at the keys on her computer. I lay, with my eyes open, looking over at the breakfast bar and the kitchen and smiling, enjoying the sound of her.
“You know how long I have wanted to go to Goa? Years.” She rattled a little longer, then went on, “Say, Stone, the other night, just before you got shot…”
“Uh-huh…”
“You said you wanted to talk to me about something. Something Shelly had said. What was that?”
I didn’t answer for a moment. Then I smiled. “Nothing important. Maybe I’ll tell you in Goa.”
BOOK 8
UNNATURAL MURDER
ONE
When you see it on TV, it has drama. But in the real, three-dimensional world, the steady throb of the red and blue lights in the darkness, the way they wash the walls of the house with their dull colors, the way they make the black windows look hollow and empty, like dead eyes—that has no drama. And the pain and the convulsive weeping of the girl who loved the victim, and now sees him lifeless and gaping behind the wheel of his cheap Toyota, the numb, expressionless faces of the uniforms who have seen it all before, the ME and the CSI team, who just want to go home to bed—all of that, all of it, it has no drama. The true horror of that scene, of all the scenes like it, lies in the fact that it is banal, it is horrifically ordinary.
We climbed out of Dehan’s Focus and ducked under the yellow tape that hung across Bryant Avenue, segregating two houses from the rest of the world, because here somebody had been killed, murdered. Sergeant Solano met us as we crossed the line. Dehan was frowning at him; at three AM, she’d brought her attitude with her.
“You want to explain to me why I’m here, Sergeant?”
Solano made a face like sheepish turning to worried and said, “I wasn’t sure what to do, Detective. It’s three AM and the Inspector’s not at the station. It ain’t a cold case exactly, but it might be connected. And I knew you… your mom… So I told dispatch…”
He trailed off. The expression on Dehan’s face might have made Godzilla trail off. It made intimidating look like a welcome respite. So I said, “You did the right thing, Sergeant. Walk us through it.”
He gave me a grateful smile and pointed at the Toyota. It was parked under a streetlamp. I glanced at what lay beyond it: a rundown terraced house with steps rising to a large veranda behind wrought iron railings, a red brick wall and peeling green paint on a cheap door and a window frame; a girl, Latina, sitting on a wooden chair, in her twenties, barefoot, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, crying; a female cop hunkered down by her side, trying to comfort somebody who can never be comforted.
Dehan had moved to the window of the car and was peering in. I said to Solano, “OK, what’s the story?”
“Two victims, Detective.” He moved toward the vehicle and I went and stood beside Dehan, looking through the shattered window. There was a young man, maybe mid twenties. He was slumped over on his right side. He looked uncomfortable. There was a lot of blood from two bullet wounds in his head, and at least three more in his arm and chest.
Solano was saying, “This is Sebastian Acosta, resident at the Jacobi…”
On the other side of the car, crouching by the passenger seat in the open doorway, I could see Frank, the ME, looking back at me. “Good morning, Frank.”
“I knew them.” He said it in a dead voice that masked his anger.
I turned back to Solano. “Thanks, Sergeant. I’ll give you a shout if I need you. You canvassing the neighbors?”
“Yeah, we’re on it.”
“OK, I’ll talk to you in a minute.”
Dehan had moved around the car. Frank stood and I joined them. There was blood on the sidewalk and on the stairs leading up to the veranda. Frank looked unhappy.
“Sebastian Acosta, twenty-six, wanted to be an ME.” He pointed at the blood on the stairs. “His friend, Luis Irizarry, twenty-five, was going to be a plastic surgeon. He said there was more money in it and you didn’t have to watch your patients die.”
Dehan voiced the question I was wondering. “Where is he?”
“In a coma, in an ambulance on his way to the Jacobi.”
She screwed up her face. “They were both residents?”
He nodded. “They’d been through med school together and they were doing their residency together.”
I asked, “How bad is Luis?”
“Pretty bad. We won’t know till he gets there. He took two rounds to the chest. Sebastian took the brunt of the attack. He has two shots to the head and three to the body, point blank. There are powder burns on his face.” He pulled out his cell. “I’ll get Personnel to email you their addresses.”
I walked back around to the driver’s side and stood where the shooter must have stood, with my arms outstretched as though I was holding a gun. Dehan came and stood beside me.
“I think I remember them.”
I glanced at her. “Yeah?”
She nodded. “And that girl,” she jerked her head at the veranda. “I think she’s Rosario’s daughter, Angela.”
“Rosario?”
“My mom’s friend. Rosario Rojas. That’s what Solano was talking about. Rosario was raped and murdered in this house. That’s her daughter. When they were kids, she used to hang out with these two.”
“How’d Solano know?”
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Stationhouse gossip. We are paid to snoop, Stone.”
I made a face. “I guess you’re right. You OK with this?”
“Sure. I’m going to talk to Angela.”
The female police officer had given up on her attempts to console her, and now just stood by her side. As we approached, Dehan asked the cop, “Has she made a statement?”
The officer shook her head. “I’m afraid not, Detective.”
Dehan nodded. “OK, we’ve got this.”
She hunkered down in front of Angela and I rested my ass on the wrought iron railing. Angela looked away. Her face was wet with tears and her bottom lip was trembling. Dehan said, “Hey Angela, you remember me?”
She looked at her sidelong for a moment, then shook her head.
Dehan smiled. “My Mom was Marta. She was a real close friend of your mom’s.”
“Marta…?”
“Yeah” she pointed up toward Garrison Avenue. “We lived up on the corner of Garrison and Faile. We had the café. You remember? My mom was always over here, having coffee with Rosario.”
She nodded. “Yeah, I remember.”
“Did you make the call?”
Angela nodded.
“OK, let’s get you dressed and take you down to the station. C’mon, I’ll give you a hand.”
She led her inside and a light came on in the window. I sat a moment, looking at the door. About two feet from the bottom there were what looked like two bullet holes. I logged the fact for later consideration, stood, and looked down at the scene in the street. I wondered where the gunman had come from. I caught Solano’s eye and called him up.
He was talking as he climbed the steps. “We got two 911 calls within less than a minute of each other. We were already on the way when the second call came through, reporting shots fired. From what we can make out, the victims arrived, the shooter must have been waiting, approached the car and fired through the window. Five of the seven shots hit the driver, two hit the passenger. He got out and tried to make it to the house, but collapsed on the stairs. Then the shooter must have taken off, because we got here very shortly afterwards.”
“What do the neighbors say?”
He sighed and looked apologetic. “So far a few people heard shots—between five and seven—but nobody saw nothing.” He shrugged. “This kind of neighborhood…”
“I know, Sergeant, there is not a lot of trust. Between five and seven, huh? OK, you called Crime Scene?”
“They’re on their way.”
He left and I went and pushed open the door. It gave onto a hallway with a broad, wooden staircase rising along the right wall and a passage on the left that gave on to a front room, a back room, and a kitchen. I walked back down the steps to the sidewalk. I counted nine of them. Then I turned and faced the door, holding out my arm like I was shooting. The angle was wrong, so I lay down on the road. A couple of the uniforms looked at me and smiled. I ignored them and held out my arm again, like I was shooting from a prone position. After that, I got to my feet again and climbed back to the hall. There I got on my knees and inspected the wall. After a moment I found what I was looking for, a bullet hole. But I only found one.
Outside, the crime scene team had arrived and I walked down to meet them. Joe, the team leader, was suiting up at the back of their van.
“Stone. I thought you only did cold cases these days.”
“Yeah, so did I. Listen, looks like the crime scene is out here, but do me a favor, will you? Have a look at the door. There are two bullet holes at about two feet. Inside, slightly to the left, there is one bullet hole in the wall. To me, none of it looks fresh. I’d like to know how old they are and what caliber we’re looking at.”
He nodded. “Sure, no problem. Say…” He smiled. “How’s things with your partner? Still teamed up with Detective Dehan?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, why?”
He grinned. “Just making polite conversation, John. I’ll catch you later.”
I watched him walk away toward the car, followed by the three members of his team, all in white plastic suits, like B movie aliens. He gestured with his hand and said something, and one of them climbed the stairs as Dehan and Angela came out the old, peeling green door.
They joined me and Dehan asked, “We done here?”
I looked up and down the road, still trying to work out where the shooter came from. There were plenty of spaces where a car could have parked. I walked away, so I was standing in front of the Toyota, about five yards distant. The streetlamps made an amber glow on the windshield. There was a look of desolation about it.
“Solano!”
He turned to look at me.
I pointed at the car. “Was the engine running?”
“No, Detective. It was just like that when we arrived.”
I walked to the nearest space behind the car. Then I looked across at the other side of the road, where a steel fence blocked off a stretch of overgrown garden. Every parking space on that side was occupied. I stared at Dehan. She was watching me, with her right hand on Angela’s arm. I said, “OK, let’s go.”
Back at the station, we put Angela in interrogation room three and went to get some coffee. At the machine, I leaned against the wall while Dehan filled the polystyrene cups.
“Did you notice the holes in the door?”
She glanced at me. “No,”
“Joe’s having a look at them for me. They’re low down, about mid-shin. Two of them. Aside from that, any initial thoughts?”
She frowned and leaned against the wall opposite me. “Yeah. The shooter knew his victims, knew their car, it was kind of an execution, but he was real mad, too.”
I nodded. “Knew them why?”
“Because I watched you. You were checking if you could see in through the windshield, or the side window. He would not have been able to see their faces from the front because of the glare from the streetlamps, or the back simply because it’s impossible. And from where he stood to shoot, unless he was a dwarf, their faces were hidden by the roof of the car. Plus, he shot through a closed window, which, under the lamp, would have made it doubly hard to see them. Ergo, he knew who they were, and he knew their car. Obviously he was waiting for them, popped them when they arrived, and then made off.”
I nodded. “What about Angela?”
She shrugged. “I was thinking maybe she’s just a random witness. You know…” She spread her hands. “Med students, access to chemical substances, tempted to help pay their fees with a little private enterprise. Maybe they thought they were meeting a buyer and instead they met with somebody whose toes they were treading on.”
I sucked my teeth. “Mm-hm, that crossed my mind too. And they just happened to meet outside her house.”
“But your bullet holes in the door suggest the connection might be more than that.” She hesitated a moment. “Especially as they knew each other.”
“I agree. Witnesses in the street say they heard between five and seven shots. There were seven shots in the victims. The two in the door would have made it nine. I found a bullet hole in the wall, but no slugs.”
“Just one?”
I nodded, then shrugged. “Suggests somebody got injured, but there was no blood. I’m pretty sure those two shots were not fired tonight. If I’m right, ther
e ought to be a police report. I’m interested to hear what Angela has to say about it.”
We stared at each other for a long moment. Then she gave a small smile and said, “Let’s find out.”
TWO
She didn’t look at us as we sat down. Dehan placed the cup of coffee in front of her and smiled.
“It’s not exactly coffee, but it’s hot and sweet and it will help with the shock.”
Angela nodded but still didn’t make eye contact. After a moment, she said, “Will I be able to go home soon?”
Dehan didn’t answer for a moment, then she said, “Of course, whenever you like, but we need to get a statement from you. It shouldn’t take long.”
Angela went to speak, stopped, then said, “I didn’t really see anything.”
I scratched my head. “Did you make the 911 call?”
She nodded.
I went on, “What made you call?”
“I heard shooting.”
“How many shots did you hear?”
She fiddled with her fingertips, looking at her coffee, like she hoped it would tell her how many shots she’d heard. After a bit, she shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I bobbed my head slowly a few times, like I was thinking. “More than one?”
“Yeah. More than one.”
“Less than twelve?” She nodded again. I went on. “More than three?”
“Yes,”
“Less than, say, ten?”
She gave a small sigh and reached for the coffee. “Probably five or six.”
“Good, that’s very helpful, Angela. Now I’d like to ask you something else. Did the shots come all together, kind of bang, bang, bang! Or were they spaced out?”
“All together, like, one after another, real quick. Like, one two three, one two three, and then one. So I guess it was seven.”
I smiled at her. “That’s very good. That’s excellent. Were you in bed?”