He struggled to breathe.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” I asked. “Do you want others to die like this? Because it will happen again. And soon. This guy’s losing control at a lightning rate. Maybe because he left his safe haven in Paris and now he’s like a hunted wild animal with no place to run? And he’s enraged, desperate. Maybe he feels challenged and he’s taunting us,” I added as I wondered what Benton would have said. “Who knows what goes on inside a mind like that.”
Harris cleared his throat.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“A press release, and I mean now. We know he speaks French. He may have a congenital disorder that results in excessive hairiness. He may have long pale hair on his body. He may shave his entire face, neck and head, and have deformed dentition, widely spaced, small, pointed teeth. His face is probably going to look odd, too.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Marino needs to handle this,” I told him, as if it were my right to do so.
“What did you say? We’re supposed to tell the public we’re looking for some man with hair all over his body and pointed teeth? You want to start a panic like this city’s never seen?” He couldn’t catch his breath.
“Calm down. Please.”
I put my fingers on his neck to check his pulse. It was running away with his life. I walked him into the living room and made him sit down. I brought him a glass of water and massaged his shoulders, talking quietly to him, gently coaxing him to be still, until he was soothed and breathing again.
“You don’t need the pressure of this,” I said. “Marino should be working these cases, not riding around in a uniform all night. God help you if he’s not working these homicides. God help all of us.”
Harris nodded. He got up and moved in slow steps back to the doorway of that terrible scene. Marino was rooting around in the walk-in closet by now.
“Captain Marino,” Harris said.
Marino stopped what he was doing and gave his chief a defiant look.
“You’re in charge,” Harris said to him. “Let me know if there’s anything you need.”
Marino’s gloved hands went through a section of skirts.
“I want to talk to Anderson,” he said.
40
Rene Anderson’s face was as hard and glazed as the glass she stared through when attendants carried Diane Bray’s pouched body past on a stretcher and loaded it into a van. It was still raining.
Dogged reporters and photographers poised like swimmers on blocks, all of them staring at Marino and me as we approached the patrol car. Marino opened Anderson’s passenger’s door and poked his head inside.
“We need to have a little chat,” he said to her.
Her frightened eyes jumped from him to me.
“Come on,” Marino said.
“I’ve got nothing to say to her,” she said, glancing at me.
“I guess the doc must think you do,” Marino said. “Come on. Get out. Don’t make me have to help you.”
“I don’t want them taking pictures!” she exclaimed, and it was too late.
Cameras were already on her like a storm of hurled spears.
“Just put your coat over your head to cover your face like you see on TV,” Marino said with a trace of sarcasm.
I walked over to the removal van to have a word with the two attendants as they shut the tailgate doors.
“When you get there,” I said as cold raindrops fell and my hair began to drip, “I want the body escorted into the cooler with security present. I want you to contact Dr. Fielding and make sure he supervises.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And we don’t talk about this to anyone.”
“Never do.”
“But especially not this one. Not one word,” I said.
“We sure wouldn’t.”
They climbed inside the van and backed out as I walked to the house and paid no attention to questions and cameras and flashes going off. Marino and Anderson sat in the living room, and Diane Bray’s clocks said it was eleven-thirty now. Anderson’s jeans were wet, and her shoes were caked with mud and grass, as if she’d fallen down at some point. She was cold and trembling.
“You know we can get DNA off a beer bottle, right?” Marino was saying to her. “We can get it off a cigarette butt, right? Hell, we can get it off a damn pizza crust.”
Anderson was slumped on the couch and didn’t seem to have much fight left in her.
“It’s got nothing to do with . . .” she started to reply.
“Salem menthol butts in the kitchen trash,” he continued his interrogation. “Believe that’s what you smoke? And yeah. It does have to do with it, Anderson. Because I believe you was here last night not long before Bray was murdered. And I also believe she didn’t struggle, maybe even knew the person who beat the shit out of her back in the bedroom.”
Marino didn’t believe for a nanosecond that Anderson had murdered Bray.
“What happened?” he asked. “She tease you until you couldn’t take it no more?”
I thought of the sexy satin blouse and lacy lingerie Bray had been wearing.
“She eat a little pizza with you and tell you to go on home like you was nothing to her? She dis you for the last time last night?” Marino asked.
Anderson silently stared down at her motionless hands. She kept licking her lips, trying not to cry.
“I mean, it would be understandable. All of us can only take so much, isn’t that right, Doc? Like when someone’s fucking around with your career, just as an example. But we’ll get to that part a little later.”
He leaned forward in his antique chair, big hands on his big knees until Anderson’s bloodshot eyes lifted and met his.
“You got any idea how much trouble you’re in?” he said to her.
Her hand shook as she pushed back her hair.
“I was here early last night.” She spoke in a flat, depressed voice. “I dropped by and we ordered pizza.”
“This a habit of yours?” Marino asked. “To drop by? Were you invited?”
“I would come over here. Sometimes I dropped by,” she said.
“Sometimes you dropped by unannounced. That’s what you’re saying.”
She nodded, wetting her lips again.
“Did you do that last night?”
Anderson had to think. I could see yet one more lie condensing like a cloud in her eyes. Marino leaned back in his chair.
“Damn, this is uncomfortable.” He rolled his shoulders. “Like sitting in a tomb. I think it might be a good idea to tell the truth, don’t you? ’Cause guess what? I’m going to find out one way or other, and you lie to me, I’ll bust your chops so bad you’ll eat cockroaches in prison. Don’t think we don’t know about you and that goddamn rental car sitting out there.”
“There’s nothing unusual about a detective having a rental car.” She fumbled and knew it.
“Sure as hell is if it’s following people everywhere,” he retorted, and now it was my time to speak.
“You parked it in front of my secretary’s apartment,” I said. “Or at least somebody in that car did. I’ve been followed. Rose was followed.”
Anderson didn’t speak.
“I don’t suppose your e-mail address would happen to be M-A-Y-F-L-R.” I spelled it out for her.
She blew on her hands to warm them.
“That’s right. I forgot,” Marino said. “You was born in May. The tenth, in Bristol, Tennessee. I can tell you your Social Security number, address, too, if you want.”
“I know all about Chuck,” I said to her.
Now she was getting very nervous and scared.
“Fact is,” Marino stepped in, “we got ol’ Chuckie-boy on tape stealing prescription drugs from the morgue. You know that?”
She took a deep breath. We really didn’t have that on tape yet.
“A lot of money. Enough for him and you and even Bray to have pretty good lives.”
“
He stole them, not me,” Anderson spoke up. “And it wasn’t my idea.”
“You used to work in vice,” Marino replied. “You know where to unload shit like that. I just bet you were the mastermind of the whole fucking thing because as much as I don’t like Chuck, he wasn’t a drug dealer before you appeared on the scene.”
“You were following Rose, following me, to intimidate us,” I said.
“My jurisdiction is the city,” she said. “I cruise all over the place. Doesn’t mean I have some motive in mind if I’m behind you.”
Marino got up and made a rude noise to voice his disgust.
“Come on,” he said to her. “Why don’t we just go on back to Bray’s bedroom. Since you’re such a good detective, maybe you can look at the blood and brains everywhere and tell me what you think happened. Since you weren’t following no one and the drug dealing wasn’t your fault, may as well get back to work and help me out here, Detective Anderson.”
Her face got pale. Terror leapt through her eyes like scattering deer.
“What?” Marino sat next to her on the couch. “You got a problem with that? That mean you don’t want to go to the morgue and watch the autopsy, either? Not eager to do your job?”
He shrugged and got up again, pacing, shaking his head.
“I tell you, it’s not for weak stomachs, that’s for sure. Her face looks like hamburger . . .”
“Stop it!”
“And her breasts are chewed up so bad . . .”
Anderson’s eyes filled with tears and she covered her face in her hands.
“Like somebody wasn’t getting their desires satisfied and just exploded in this sexual rage. A real lust-hate thing. And doing that to someone’s face is usually pretty personal.”
“Stop it!” Anderson screamed.
Marino got quiet, staring at her in a studious way as if she were a math problem written on a chalkboard.
“Detective Anderson,” I said. “What was Deputy Chief Bray wearing when you came over last night?”
“A light green blouse. Sort of satiny,” her voice trembled and caught. “Black corduroys.”
“Shoes and socks?”
“Ankle boots. Black. And black socks.”
“Jewelry?”
“A ring and a watch.”
“What about underwear, a bra?”
She looked at me and her nose was running and she talked as if she had a cold.
“It’s important I know these things,” I said.
“It’s true about Chuck,” she said instead. “But it wasn’t my idea. It was hers.”
“Bray’s?” I followed where she was going.
“She took me out of vice and put me in homicide. She wanted you a million miles out of the way,” she said to Marino. “She’s been making money off of pills and I don’t know what all else for a long time, and she took a lot of pills, too, and she wanted you gone.”
She returned her attention to me and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. I dug in my satchel and handed her tissues.
“She wanted you gone, too,” she said.
“That’s been rather obvious,” I replied, and it didn’t seem possible that this person we were talking about was the mauled remains I had examined moments earlier just rooms away in the back of this house.
“I know she had on a bra,” Anderson then said. “She used to always wear things. Open neck or top buttons undone. And she would lean over so you could see down her shirt. She did it all the time, even at work, because she liked the reaction she got.”
“What reaction?” Marino asked.
“Well, people definitely reacted. And skirts with slits that looked normal unless you were sitting in her office with her and she’d cross her legs in certain ways . . . I told her she shouldn’t dress like that.”
“What reaction?” Marino asked again.
“I told her all the time she shouldn’t dress that way.”
“Takes a lot of nerve for a lowly detective to tell a deputy chief how to dress.”
“I didn’t think officers should see her like that, look at her like that.”
“Made you a little jealous, maybe?”
She didn’t answer.
“And I bet she knew it made you jealous, made you really squirm, just fucking miserable and mad, right? Bray got off on it. She’s the type who would. Wind you up and then take your battery out so what you want don’t go nowhere.”
“She had on a black bra,” Anderson said to me. “It had lace around the top. I don’t know what else she had on.”
“She used the hell out of you, didn’t she?” Marino said. “Made you her drug mule, gofer, little Cinderella on the hearth. What else she ask you to do?”
Anger was beginning to warm up Anderson.
“She make you take her car to be washed? That was the rumor. She made you look like a sucking-up, moonstruck ass-kisser nobody took seriously. Sad thing is, maybe you wouldn’t be such a shitty detective if she’d left you alone. You never even had a chance to find out, not with her keeping you on a leash the way she did. Let me tell you something. Bray was no more going to sleep with you than the man in the moon. People like her don’t sleep with anybody. They’re like snakes. They don’t need nobody else to keep them warm.”
“I hate her,” Anderson said. “She treated me like dirt.”
“Then why’d you keep coming here?” Marino asked.
Anderson fixed on me as if she hadn’t heard Marino. “She’d sit right in that chair where you are. And she’d make me get her a drink and rub her shoulders and wait on her hand and foot. Sometimes she wanted me to give her massages.”
“Did you?” Marino asked.
“She’d have on nothing but a robe and lie on that bed.”
“Same one she was murdered on? Did she take her robe off when you massaged her?”
Anderson’s eyes were blazing as they turned on him.
“She always kept herself covered just enough! I took her clothes to the dry cleaner and filled her fucking Jaguar with gas and . . . She was so mean to me!”
Anderson sounded like a child angry with her mother.
“She sure was,” Marino said. “She was mean to a lot of people.”
“But I didn’t kill her, good God! I never touched her except when she wanted me to, like I already told you!”
“What happened last night?” Marino asked. “You stop by because you just had to see her?”
“She was expecting me. To drop off some pills, some money. She liked Valium, Ativan, BuSpar. Things that made her relax.”
“How much money?”
“Twenty-five hundred dollars. Cash.”
“Well, it ain’t here now,” Marino said.
“It was on the table. The table in the kitchen. I don’t know. We ordered pizza. We drank a little and talked. She was in a bad mood.”
“Over what?”
“She heard you’d gone to France,” she said to both of us. “To Interpol.”
“I wonder how she found that out?”
“Probably your office. Maybe Chuck found out. Who knows? She always got what she wanted, found out what she wanted. She thought she was the one who should have gone over there. To Interpol, I mean. That’s all she would talk about. And she started blaming me for all the screw-ups. Like the restaurant parking lot, the e-mail, the way things happened at the Quik Cary scene. Just everything.”
The clocks all chimed and gonged. It was noon.
“What time did you leave?” I asked when the concert stopped.
“Maybe nine.”
“Did she ever shop at the Quik Cary?”
“She may have dropped in there before,” she replied. “But as you could probably tell from looking around her kitchen, she wasn’t much into cooking or eating at home.”
“And you probably brought in food all the time,” Marino added.
“She never offered to pay me back. I don’t make much money.”
“What about that nice little allowance from prescri
ption drugs? I’m confused,” Marino said. “You saying you didn’t get a fair cut?”
“Chuck and I got ten percent each. I’d bring her the rest once a week, depending on what drugs came in. Into the morgue or maybe if I got some from a scene. I never stayed long when I came over here. She was always in a hurry. Suddenly, she had things to do. I have car payments. That’s what my ten percent’s gone to. Not like her. She doesn’t know what it’s like to worry about a car payment.”
“You ever fight with her?” Marino asked.
“Sometimes. We’d argue.”
“Did you argue last night?”
“I guess so.”
“Over what?”
“I didn’t like her mood. Same thing.”
“Then?”
“I left. Like I said. She had things to do. She always decided when a discussion or argument was over.”
“You driving the rental car last night?” Marino wanted to know.
“Yes.”
I imagined the killer watching her leave. He was there, somewhere in the dark. Both of them had been at the port when the Sirius had come in, when the killer arrived in Richmond using the alias of a seaman named Pascal. He probably saw her. He probably saw Bray. He would have been interested in all of those who had come to investigate his crime, including Marino and me.
“Detective Anderson,” I said. “Did you sometimes come back here after you’d left, to try to talk to Bray some more?”
“Yes,” she confessed. “It wasn’t fair for her to just push me out like that.”
“You came back often?”
“When I was upset.”
“What would you do, ring the bell? How did you let her know you were here?”
“What?”
“It seems the police always knock, at least when they come to my house,” I said. “They don’t ring the bell.”
“ ’Cause half the rattraps we go to don’t have doorbells that work,” Marino remarked.
“I knocked,” she said.
“And how would you do it?” I asked as Marino lit a cigarette and let me talk.
“Well . . .”
“Twice, three times? Hard, soft?” I kept going.
“Three times. Loud.”
“And she would always let you in?”
“Sometimes she wouldn’t. Sometimes she’d just open the door and tell me to go home.”
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