Night Songs

by Penny Mickelbury

  Carolyn King stood and paced the small room, rubbing her hands together as if trying to warm them. Mimi studied her, trying to understand who she was, for she was too young to fit the stereotype she resembled—that of a grandmother scarred by the weight of generations of injustice—yet the fatigue that emanated from her was palpable, as were the sorrow and the sadness which distorted her underlying handsomeness.

  “And she was putting money in the bank. She had money, you see, because she wasn’t buying those drugs any more. She was saving to go to computer school...”

  The woman stopped talking. It seemed that she just ran out of words. Mimi found the woman’s pain almost too much to bear.

  “Was Sandra your only child, Mrs. King?” Mimi asked, picking up the framed photograph.

  “She was my only girl. And I had so much hope for her.” And Carolyn King began to cry softly as she told Mimi how it happened that at age fifty she’d buried two husbands, three sons and a daughter. The first husband, whom she married when both were just nineteen years old, came back from Viet Nam literally in pieces, in a body bag. The son of that marriage, born while his father was in Southeast Asia and who never saw his father, drowned in a boating accident as a teenager. The second husband and one son died in a car crash ten years ago. The remaining son died from a drug overdose. And now Sandra. “All I have left is Sandra’s baby and I’m scared to death I might do something to hurt her.”

  “Why would you think that?” Mimi said tightly.

  “Look what happened to all the others. It must be something I’m doing to make them all die.”

  The woman’s words, spoken so simply and so devoid of emotion, devastated Mimi. She could think of nothing to say; and, in truth, the woman expected no response. So Mimi said what she’d come to say. “Your daughter wanted to tell me something, Mrs. King, did you know that?”

  “I knew it. And I knew she wanted some money from you.”

  Mimi ducked dealing with that issue. “I think if I could find out what she wanted to tell me, I could find out who killed her.”

  “You think it had something to do with those boys?”

  “What boys?”

  “Sandra said there was some boys who had a club and they had to kill one of the girls to get in the club.”

  The buzzing inside Mimi’s head was so loud she couldn’t think for a moment, because it was competing with the guilt that was washing over her in waves. Why the hell hadn’t she just paid Shelley—Sandra—for the story? Why hadn’t she just given her the money? The girl would be alive today.

  “Did she know the boys, Mrs. King?”

  “Oh, no, they weren’t from around here. These were white boys, Sandra said, rich ones. From the suburbs.”

  Gianna moved through the early part of the day on automatic pilot. Every hour she called the hospital for an update on Cassie, and every hour she was told that Cassie remained in a coma, that the swelling in her brain still constituted a grave danger. At noon, she had lunch with the Chief in his office. She told him about Cassie’s unchanged condition; then she told him about the newest murder and about the black Jeep registered to the Utah Congressman, and he cursed for a full minute without stopping and without once repeating himself. He told her to keep Tony Watkins and Alice Long and use them however she needed them and for as long as she needed them.

  And then he told her that Sophie Gwertzman had committed suicide when she heard what happened to Cassie Ali. And it was Gianna’s turn to curse, though not for as long nor nearly as proficiently as the Chief.

  After their meeting, she paid a quick visit to the hospital and got a full briefing from the doctor who’d just completed a check of the Cassie, who was still comatose but holding her own.

  When she returned to the Think Tank shortly after two, Tony and Alice were waiting for her, and she required another adjustment period, for today they were dressed in regular street clothes.

  “We heard about your Officer Ali, Lieutenant,” Alice said, “and if there’s anything we can do...?”

  “There is,” Gianna said quickly, offering them both what passed for a smile these days, and taking a seat opposite them at the table. But before she could tell them what she wanted, the door opened and a huge box appeared in the doorway, followed by an officer in uniform, such a rarity for the Think Tank that she wondered whether he’d come to the wrong place.

  “You Lieutenant Maglione?” he asked in her general direction.

  “What’s all this?” She pointed to the box that he’d dropped heavily on to the floor and which was loaded with files.

  “That’s the stuff you asked for.”

  “What stuff who asked for?” she said frowning.

  “From WASIS. Didn’t you request a run on a black Jeep—”

  “Good God!” Gianna jumped up from the chair and rushed across the room to the officer and the bulging box. He took a step backward, his hand on the doorknob. “All this from one license check?”

  “And this isn’t all of it. You only got a level eight access. You need a ten to get the rest of it. Sign here,” he said, giving her a form and a pen. She signed, he tore off the back copy of the form, gave it to her, saluted, and left.

  Before she could do or say anything, Tony crossed the room, scooped up the box, and hauled it to the table where he stood peering into it warily, as if expecting something from within to attack. “This is the file on the black Jeep Wrangler?”

  Tony couldn’t keep the disbelief out of his voice, and Gianna didn’t blame him. She could hardly believe it herself. What the hell had they all just stepped in? This thing had a bad smell to it.

  “I assume no mistake was made on the license number?”

  “You assume one hundred percent correctly, Lieutenant.” Alice’s soft, Southern voice had an edge to it that was new to Gianna, and her gaze was fixed steadily on the box of files. “And you know somethin’? This doesn’t surprise me. All those boys in that car, just ridin’ around night after night. Why? Never pickin’ up a woman? Uh uh,” Alice said, shaking her head in a way that sharply and painfully reminded Gianna of Cassie’s way of responding when the shit was piling up too high.

  “Well, let’s see what we’ve got,” Gianna said, putting on her reading glasses to study the index of what was in the files. She saw that they were arranged by date. One by one, she removed them as she checked to make certain that they corresponded to the index. Then she apportioned them among the three of them and they grouped themselves around the table to begin the process of building what Gianna believed could be the foundation of the case against the killer—and now it certainly seemed that it would be killers—of nine women.

  They were deeply engrossed in the files when Lynda and Bobby returned. They stopped short at the sight of the two strangers working at the table with Gianna. She introduced Tony and Alice and explained the piles of documents and what they were doing, and watched as the four young cops sized up each other, Lynda and Bobby definitely in a territorial stance, Tony and Alice holding their own, but clearly the interlopers. She restored the calm and unruffled the feathers by involving Lynda and Bobby in the work, and the five of them worked in silence until Eric returned with Tim and Kenny precisely at five thirty. She made the introductions of Alice and Tony again and again explained the mess of documents. But with Eric’s return, what she wanted was an update on the Cassie investigation.

  Eric quickly and succinctly walked her through the work the lab had done in record time, primarily because everybody in the lab wanted to get rid of Tim as soon as possible. Eric said Tim’s ominous presence made everybody wish he were being a screaming queen again instead of the cold, silent avenger that he’d become. Tony and Alice stared at Tim, looking for signs that he was a screaming queen, then gazed at Eric looking for signs that perhaps he was joking. They shrugged at each other and listened as Eric continued. According to the lab reports, Cassie had significant samples of skin, hair and blood under her nails from at least two different sources. And there we
re two different types of blood on her clothes, other than her own. There was also significant blood in the alley.

  “She shot one of the bastards,” Tim said coldly, which caused Bobby to stand and silently raise a clenched fist.

  “Way to go, Cassie,” Lynda said almost reverently.

  The trail of blood, Eric continued, led down the alley, through a yard, and into the next street where it stopped in the grass at the curb, suggesting that the victim had gotten into a car parked there.

  “Did anybody see anything?” Gianna asked.

  Eric’s jaw tightened. “A woman who was washing her dishes saw two white males...”

  “I told you, Lieutenant, it was the fuckin’ Nazis,” Tim said.

  “Don’t interrupt me again, Tim,” Eric said calmly, and continued, “...run through the alley behind her house. One seemed to be supporting the other, almost carrying him, were her words. They both wore dark or black clothes—shirts and pants—and one wore a cap and the other had short hair. She would not recognize them again. It was too dark.” Eric snapped his notebook shut.

  “So everything points to there being two of them?”

  “So far, Anna.”

  “And Cassie marked both of them.”

  “The CID guys have our list of known Nazis, neo-Nazis, Aryan Nationites, skin heads, white supremacists—all the ones we know about, they know about, and they’re running them to ground. Believe me, if they spot one of those punks with so much as a razor burn, they’ll haul his ass in.” Eric sighed and rubbed his hand back and forth against the stubble of growth on his face.

  Gianna watched him, thinking idly that men’s beards often grew in a different color from their hair.

  “All right,” she said abruptly. “Let me bring you up to speed on the hooker thing...”

  “But what about Cassie?” Tim asked plaintively. “Is that all we’re gonna do?”

  “That’s all we can do, Tim. It’s not our case.”

  “Not our case?” Tim jumped up with a force that sent his chair skidding out behind him. “Cassie is ours! Doesn’t that make it our case?”

  Gianna saw that he was close to tears. She stood, went and got his chair and brought it back to the table. “Sit down, Tim.” She pointedly waited until he sat before she continued. Allowing team members to express their emotions was one thing. Allowing them to get out of control was quite another.

  “Every one of us is thrown out of whack by what happened to Cassie. But we investigate hate crimes, not assaults on police officers. Now, everybody cut us some slack today—that’s why the lab guys put up with your evil ass all day, Tim—because they all know how we feel. Now we have to cut them some slack by staying clear so they can do their jobs. We have our own work to do and I expect you—all of you—to do that work. Am I clear?”

  She looked around the table and met and held everybody’s eyes, including Tony’s and Alice’s, until she got a “Yes, Ma’am” or a “Yes, Boss,” from each of them. Then she stood, walked to stand in front of the blackboard and the map, and told them what was in the WASIS file produced by the license plate of one black Jeep Wrangler.

  The vehicle was registered to Utah Congressman Earl Allyne but belonged to his son, Errol Allyne, a twenty-year old junior at the University of Virginia, who had been dismissed the previous year from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. “Errol and three of his nearest and dearest—Todd Haldane, Jerome Wilson and Clarke Andrews—have been arrested a total of twelve times, individually and collectively, on a variety of charges ranging from drunk driving to attempted rape. Eight of the twelve incidents involve assaults on women. In every one of those cases, the charges were dropped by the complainant. Two of the incidents involve the possession of a controlled substance, specifically cocaine, and the others are destruction of property resulting from drunk and disorderly. Haldane, Wilson, and Andrews are the sons, respectively, of a United States Senator, a Foreign Service officer, and an Army brigadier general who is assigned to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. All of the incidents involving Allyne, Haldane, Wilson, and Andrews occurred in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs, specifically in McLean and Fairfax in Virginia, and in Bethesda and Gaithersburg in Maryland. All of the incidents occurred within the last three years.”

  Gianna had been pacing slowly back and forth in front of the blackboard. Now she stopped and faced them. “I need a higher clearance to access the rest of this file, but I’ll bet I know what’s in it: These guys’ juvenile records.” She paced some more. “These boys didn’t turn bad on the morning their eighteenth birthdays.”

  What she thought but didn’t say was that if these boys had been born poor or Black or Hispanic, they’d be buried under a jail by now, not transferring from one prestigious university to another. She struggled to control the disgust she felt for their fathers who had peddled a lot of influence and spread around a lot of money to keep their sons out of jail. And if she didn’t turn up more than the circumstantial evidence she had so far, there would be nothing she could do to change that pattern.

  She gave Tony and Alice the night off and ordered her Team to get a good night’s sleep as well, warning them that another such opportunity would not present itself in the near future. She called the Chief and requested, and immediately received, a level ten clearance to access the rest of the WASIS file, which was promised to her the following day. Then she drove across town to the Washington Hospital Center to see Cassie and to meet her parents, and was surprised at how relieved she was at the warmth of their greeting, before she identified the source of the relief: She had been afraid that the Ali’s would blame her for what happened to their daughter. She studied them, noting which of her traits Cassie had inherited from which parent. The young police officer was the spitting image of the petite, pretty, dark brown woman who was her mother; but where Cassie was always angry about something, her mother looked as if she’d never been angry in her life. She was the most peaceful, serene looking person Gianna had ever seen. Cassie’s non-stop energy came from her father. He was half a foot taller than his wife and wiry and strong looking. And though he stood perfectly still at the foot of Cassie’s bed, Gianna could feel the energy coursing through him. He clinched and unclenched his hands and Gianna imagined that the man was thinking what he’d do if he could get his hands on the men who’d hurt his little girl.

  They quietly left the room and Gianna stood beside the bed looking down on the battered face, looking for the beauty she knew was there but obscured by the destruction, looking for some sign of the sparkling intelligence that still lived, she was certain, somewhere within the swollen, damaged brain. What she sought she could not find. But what she certainly knew still existed was the fighting spirit that endeared Cassandra Ali to her heart. She knew the spirit was still there because the girl now was breathing evenly, deeply, without the assistance of a respirator. Her one good eye, the right one, fluttered gently behind the closed lid. Officer Cassandra Ali was still there. Gianna was certain of it.

  Mimi’s car was in the parking lot when Gianna arrived at the gym, so she rushed in, quickly changed into her workout clothes, and hurried into the spacious room. The music was pumping and Gianna quickly got caught up in the energy of the place. She spied Mimi running on the treadmill and, stopping to chat briefly with a couple of women, and waving to several others, she worked her way across the floor and came up unnoticed behind Mimi.

  “I love it when you sweat,” she said, just loud enough for Mimi to hear, and she turned and grinned.

  “Prove it,” she challenged, not breaking her stride.

  “Your place or mine?” Gianna asked, starting the treadmill next to Mimi’s, setting the speed at maximum, and starting to run.

  “Yours,” Mimi answered, and they ran in step for the next half hour, each lost in her own thoughts, thoughts that included the other as well as those portions of their day that had caused them pain and frustration and sadness.

  Mimi preferred to work her upper body with free weights when
she was stressed, and Gianna preferred to work the machines, so their workout was separate except for the leg machines. They alternated sets of leg presses and curls, squats, and lunges, and then separated again when Gianna opted for standing calf raises while Mimi preferred seated ones. They came together again for abdominal work, each doing a hundred crunches, cross crunches, and leg lifts, and finishing with long, slow stretches. They took a long steam, during which neither of them spoke very much except to agree that Mimi would stop and pick up Chinese food for herself and pizza for Gianna, and meet Gianna at her place.

  They ate in bed, watching a video that should have been returned a week ago, still not talking very much but each very much feeling the presence of the other. Though they rarely drank during the week, Gianna had a beer and Mimi a glass of wine. Finally, full and relaxed, Mimi gathered Gianna in her arms.

  “How’s Cassie?”

  “Still in a coma. I saw her before coming to the gym. I think...I know it sounds crazy, but I think she’s going to pull out of it. Soon.”

  “Doesn’t sound crazy at all.” Mimi rubbed Gianna’s neck and shoulders, trying to work out some of the tension knotted there.

  “How are the others taking it?”

  Gianna sighed. “About like you’d expect. Except Tim.”

  “The good looking one? What’s he doing?”

  “Coming apart at the seams. He lost it this afternoon. He and Cassie are very close.”

  “They’re the only gay ones, right?”

  “Yeah, but their bond is deeper than that. Despite Tim’s display of outrageousness and Cassie’s cutting cynicism, they’re both such idealists. They really became cops to make the world a better place and it really gets to them that most days the bad guys win.” Gianna sighed, reached for her beer, and took a long pull. “They’re a lot like you.”

  Mimi arched her eyebrows and her voice. “Like moi? And whatever do you mean by that, Lieutenant, Ma’am?”