Unknown Means (28 page)

A sigh. She turned her bruised face back to Evelyn. “Nothing I can put him in jail for. He arranged the schedule so I’d always be

working alone, and then he’d put his hands in every nonprosecutable spot on my body every minute I was there. He held my grade over my head when I began to complain—after all, he didn’t cop feels, he gave my shoulder a friendly pat. If I went to my professors, he’d have made me look like some hyper spic trying to get rich on an easy lawsuit.”

She had been younger then. A man who tried that on the adult Marissa would have finished his day in the local ER. “He never tried to rape you?”

A tiny shake. “I’ve kept thinking about it over the years—I probably will until the day I die, damn the snake—and I don’t think he wanted to. He never tried to see me outside the lab, never called me at home. He didn’t want sex—he wanted control. He liked jerking me around. He liked watching the blood drain from my face every day I had to walk into that lab. He liked knowing he could take someone and make six months of her life miserable. It was control.”

Evelyn reached over, stroked a stray lock out of Marissa’s face.

“Sorry to bring it up. Don’t strain your voice.”

“What I hate most is that I let him get away with it. I didn’t do a thing.”

“You were young, Marissa. Besides, somebody did something, because he’s not head of the Pathology Lab anymore.”

“It’s not enough,” the girl said grimly. “And who’s dead?”

“What?”

“You said two women were dead. Who?”

Evelyn hesitated; then her Nextel trilled its little merengue beat.

“Yo.”

“Evelyn,” David said. “You won’t believe this.”

Her heart sank. “No. I don’t want to hear it.”

“We’ve got another one.”

I can’t do it, she thought. I’m exhausted, I’m out of ideas, and I need to go home and make dinner. I can’t catch this madman who is cutting a swath through our city like a smart bomb. Leave me alone. It’s not my responsibility. “Where? Who?”

Marissa lifted her head. “What’s up?”

“It’s Kelly Alexander. We’re at the salt mine.”

“Kelly Alexander!”

“Now that name,” Marissa whispered in a thoughtful rasp, “I do recognize.”

C H A P T E R

26

THE BRICK BUILDING ON THE SITE OF THE DEFUNCT

Fagan’s already had the forlorn look of long abandonment, though work had ceased only three days before. No attendant patrolled the lot, no workers bustled near the time clock, no employees at all except for the plant manager, Phil Giardino. He waited on the ground floor with the two homicide detectives and a uniformed officer.

“I found her,” he whispered to Evelyn. He sat in the secretary’s chair off the lobby, hands clasped between his knees. “I went up to get the ADT sheets, and—she’s—”

David held her gaze with eyes so bloodshot they could have been diseased. Had he slept at all the past three nights? “She’s in her office on the second floor. She came here straight from the jail to approve the payroll.”

“The guys still have to get paid, you know?” Giardino explained.

“We don’t know how long it will be before they see another paycheck. Kelly, she was concerned about that.”

“Who else—”

“No one else in the entire building,” David said. “Her husband dropped her off about two p.m. and went to their lawyer’s office to draft a press release.”

“She came here to work all alone?”

Giardino seemed to find it odd that Evelyn found that odd.

“This is her building. She helped design it, she had it built, she owned it. Kelly’s been around the mine since she was a little kid. I used to take her down the shaft to visit her old man. Such a cute kid.”

Watching a six-foot, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound veteran miner dissolve into tears nearly undid her. Another second and she’d have been crying with him, picturing a blond toddler clinging to the fingers of a young Phil Giardino, descending into the black pit with a happy giggle. This same toddler grew into a smart entrepreneur who quit her safe haven to see to her employees’ needs. “By the second floor, you mean upward, right? Not down?”

“Up, yes,” Riley confirmed, to her relief. “I’ve got a team clearing each floor of the building. We can’t enter the mine unless OSHA says it’s safe.”

“It wasn’t safe before?” Evelyn asked, recalling her recent trip to the depths.

“It’s routine,” Giardino told her. “There’s no gas—faulty dynamite caused the explosion—but they still have to go through an integrity checklist before the workers can come back. That’s what the press release is going to explain.”

“So Alexander mining is off the hook?” David asked.

The plant manager snorted. “Are you kidding? This is America, there’s no such thing as an accident. We’ll be sued by everyone from the families of the seven guys to men who weren’t even at work that day to the labor union.”

“I hope it’s not the responsibility of the geologist,” David said.

“He’s already going to have to deal with his wife’s death.”

“He inspects the dynamite, but there’s no way he could have known that it was bad.” Giardino stared at the floor, eyes unfocused.

“ ‘The danger’s so prevailin’ that no one ever knows.’ ”

“What’s that?” Evelyn asked.

“It’s an old mining song. I used to sing it to—” He broke off in a nearly silent sob.

Over his shoulder, Riley said to her: “David can show you the crime scene. I’ll stay here and finish Mr. Giardino’s statement.”

She hitched her camera bag over her shoulder and followed David to the elevator. A few more strands of gray had appeared in his black locks; somehow he had lost several pounds without her noticing. Had that happened only in the past few days? “How are you?”

“I feel like we’re under siege.”

“Marissa’s going to leave the hospital soon, David, and head right back to the fortress that didn’t protect Grace Markham. He got in there, he got in here. How?”

The elevator began to move. “The place is locked up tight, with monitored alarms on all the exits except the front. No one has a key to the front except for Giardino, Kelly, her husband, and her father, who is also at the lawyer’s office. There’s a camera on the front, but surveillance only shows her coming in, no one else. Husband dropped her off about two, got to the lawyer’s at two-ten. Her dad was already there. Giardino came here from lunch at Pat Joyce’s about three, and camera surveillance confirms it. We’ll track down his lunchmates, but I bet they’ll tell the same story. I can’t see that guy killing this girl.” The elevator doors opened, and they stepped into the hallway, turning to the right. Down the hall to their left, she heard footsteps.

“Another uniform,” he explained. “Three of them are checking the other floors for things out of place, windows unlocked, that sort of thing.

“Giardino says Kelly called this morning and told him she would approve the payroll before going home and leave it on her desk for him to pick up and take over to ADT. He walked in and found this.”

They stopped at the doorway. Kelly Alexander’s modest office had been lovingly decorated with art deco flair and framed photographs showing the history of the original salt mine. Plush carpeting and leather armchairs filled the small space, leaving room only for the polished cherry desk behind which the victim now sat, strapped to her ergonomic chair. Her hands lay on the desktop, palms down.

A trail of blood and the haphazard pile of items on the floor, apparently swept from the desktop, belied the sense of calm.

Evelyn flicked on the light, touching only the very edge of the switch. Clouds had once again gathered to block out the sun, turning the ambient light a misty gray. The single window faced the Terminal Tower instead of the lake, and did not have the soundproofing of an apartment. The blare of a horn sounded clearly from the street below. “These dark tracks in the carpeting, are they from Giardino?

Or us?”

He turned up the bottoms of his shoes. “Mine seem clean. We can check his.”

Evelyn turned her camera on, focused on the spots in the carpeting. “He drew blood this time. He’s escalating again.”

“Maybe not.” David followed her into the room as she snapped photos. “We haven’t checked under her clothes, but I see blood on her hand only, and no injuries.”

“You think she got him?”

“There’s a community development award under the desk with blood on it.”

She knelt down. A clear blue crystal award in the shape of a star on a pedestal rested on the carpet, partially under the desk drawers.

Crusted blood covered two points of the star. “Looks like Kelly here clocked him one. Good for her.” The emotion faded before it had barely begun. Kelly’s spunk hadn’t saved her. Evelyn put the camera away and began her examination.

Forty-five minutes later she paused, sitting on her knees in the middle of the room. David leaned against the windowsill.

“It’s hard to tell from the carpeting,” she began, “but I think he grabbed her elsewhere in the building—maybe he got in because she let him in—and then they got into a fight. Or he made entry on his own somehow, she heard him and got up from the desk to see who it was. I found the payroll sheets in this pile of stuff, but there’s no marks in pen or pencil anywhere. I don’t know what ‘doing payroll’

looks like, but I’m willing to bet she didn’t get to it. He caught her almost right away. What’s that noise?”

David glanced out the window. “Two news vans and a bunch of reporters with microphones. That Clio Helms is right out in front.

Just as well,” he added with a sigh. “Maybe they’ll leave her husband alone long enough for us to tell him his wife’s dead.”

“You feel sorry for him, don’t you?”

“His wife loved him,” he said simply. “Even though he didn’t have much to offer her.”

Evelyn caught her breath. A particularly heavy cloud dimmed the already weak daylight; the features of his face became indistinct.

“David—”

“What?”

A faint ding sounded from down the hallway. The elevator had arrived, and in another minute they would no longer be alone.

“I love you,” she said. “I may be an overprotective mother, and that’s my right. I may be intransigent about a lot of things, and that’s my right too. But I love you.”

His shoulders slipped downward as if he’d let out a deep breath.

“Why do we keep having these conversations over dead people?”

She smiled for the first time that day. “Hazard of the job, I guess.”

Riley appeared in the doorway. “The media is running with the idea that our culprit is one of the dead miner’s family members, angry that Kelly here walked out of jail this morning. I’m going to let them round all four bases with that if they want. It will keep them out of our hair. So what went on in here, Evie?”

“Well,” she said. “From the marks in the carpeting, that chair nearest the door is an inch out of place, as if they shoved it on their way in. She must have been struggling. They moved behind the desk, where Kelly grabbed the award from that filing cabinet in the corner.” She pointed at the dust-free spot on its surface, the same diameter as the base of the award. “She whaled on him with it, probably either upward to the head or downward to the thigh. The little bit of blood spatter on the wall behind the desk would be about thigh high.”

“Ouch,” David said.

“But he strangled her, she dropped the award, and he positioned her at the desk. Some of this debris might have been pushed off the desk in a struggle, but I don’t think so. It isn’t thrown off and scattered—her folders, pens, clock are all in one pile right next to the desk, as if he moved them to clear the desktop because he wanted to place her hands like that. Or he wanted to wipe his prints off the top, because I don’t find any. And on top of the pile of desk stuff, what do we find?”

She held up the picture.

David sighed again. “I didn’t even see that there. This just gets better and better.”

The child had sketched a car, with large round wheels and an antenna. Stick figures with sad faces stood next to it. The pavement had been colored magenta, and the headlights glowed lime green.

Tall buildings with empty windows lined the street. “He likes street scenes, I guess—houses, people on a road.”

Riley studied it. “And our guy did that?”

“Our killer’s child. Or our killer himself, drawing like a child.

Don’t ask me, because I don’t have a clue.”

“Neither do I. All the doors and windows are locked, no signs of prying. The maintenance tower on the roof might have been used—the rain leaves dirty water marks all over the door, and the area

around the handle looks disturbed. The bar latch sticks, so we can’t be sure if he has a key or the door couldn’t lock.”

“How could he get up to the roof from outside? Is there a fire escape?”

“Yeah. Plus we’re practically on top of the building next door—it would only be a ten-foot jump or so.”

“Five stories up.”

“Five stories up,” he confirmed.

“This guy’s a bloody Flying Wallenda,” David said.

“I sent a uniform over there to check their roof, see if there’s signs of disturbance. It’s the Stadium office building, and they’re pretty busy over there even in the off-season. Wouldn’t be hard for our guy to slip in and out.”

“He’s good at that,” Evelyn said.

“There’s two maintenance guys on staff who might have a key to the tower. I’m going to check with them now.” Riley pulled out his Nextel and a cigarette. “After I catch a smoke, if it hasn’t started raining yet.”

Evelyn slid the drawing into a brown bag and placed a sticker on the front, moving with the lethargy of exhaustion. “What are we going to do, David? You can’t guard Marissa forever, and this guy isn’t going to stop. Why should he? We’ve been on this case round the clock for over three days now, and we don’t know anything more about him than the day we found Grace Markham.”