A Simple Act of Violence (4 page)

Life is so much tougher when you know you should be dead.

It was like a line from a song. There was a cadence and a rhythm to it that made it difficult to forget. It started somewhere in Miller’s mind, and once it had started it just seemed to keep on going. Like the flat-nose .22s the Mafia used. Sufficient punch to get it through the skull, insufficient to make its way out again, and that dime’s-worth of lead just battered and ricocheted around inside, banging off the internal walls of some poor sucker’s head until their brain was chicken soup. The thought went like that, and he wanted it to stop. He thought of the girl who had died, the girl who had left him, the IAD investigation, the newspapers. He thought of these things, just as he had thought of them for the past three months, and he tried to make them inconsequential and irrelevant. He sat in the office of Washington Second Precinct Captain Frank Lassiter. He focused on what he’d seen at the Sheridan house the night before; he waited patiently for what he knew was coming.

Lassiter came through the door like a raid. He banged it shut behind him, dropped into his chair. He shook his head and scowled, and when he opened his mouth he hesitated for a second. Perhaps he’d planned to say something else, and then changed his mind.

‘You know what this is, right?’ was the question he asked.

‘The serial, or this woman specifically?’ Miller replied.

Lassiter frowned, shook his head. ‘This is the proverbial worst case scenario, that’s what it is.’

‘We’re presuming that the MO is the same as—’

Lassiter cut him short. ‘We’re presuming nothing. I don’t have anything from forensics yet. I don’t have a coroner’s report. I have a murdered woman, second in this precinct’s jurisdiction, and because the other two were out of precinct, because this whole system is a jigsaw puzzle of bullshit and bureaucracy, I don’t have anything to hang anything on. All I know is that the chief of police called me at seven this morning and told me that the whole thing was now my problem, that I better put some good people on it, that it better be sorted out . . . you know the speech by now, right?’

Miller smiled sardonically.

‘So here we are,’ Lassiter said.

‘Here we are,’ Miller echoed

‘So what the hell is this crap about transferring out of Homicide?’

‘I don’t know, captain, some crap about transferring out of Homicide.’

‘Sarcasm I don’t need, detective. So you’re gonna leave us then?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps I believed . . .’

Lassiter laughed suddenly. ‘Believed what? It’s dead people, that’s what it is. That’s why it’s called Homicide.’ He placed his hands on the arms of his chair as if to stand. For a moment he looked closely at Miller. ‘You don’t look so good,’ he said.

‘Just tired.’

‘Still in pain?’

Miller shook his head. ‘It was just bruising, a dislocated shoulder, nothing serious.’

‘You get some physio?’

‘More than enough.’

Lassiter nodded his head slowly.

Miller felt the inescapable tension of what was coming.

‘So you ran the gauntlet, eh? You know how many times my name’s been in the papers?’

Miller shook his head.

‘I don’t either, but it’s a lot. A fucking lot. They’re buzzards. That’s all they are. They fly around corpses and pick stuff off of them.’ Lassiter shook his head. ‘To hell with it. This isn’t a conversation we’re having right now.’ He got up from his chair and walked to the window. ‘I’m pissed with the pair of you by the way,’ he said. ‘For leaving last night. I read your report. How long were you out there? Half an hour?’

‘Forensics,’ Miller replied. ‘It was a new crime scene, we were just in the way. We started round the adjacent houses but no-one had anything important to say.’ He paused for a moment. ‘And no, we were not out there for half an hour, we were out there nearly three hours.’

‘Three houses, Robert. Three fucking houses? Give me a break. Only thing that pisses me off is a lack of professionalism. Can tolerate all the moaning and whining about the hours, the low pay, the overtime, the fact that no-one ever gets to see their wives and kids and cats and dogs and mistresses, but when it comes to a lack of care—’

‘Understood,’ Miller interjected.

‘You heard that speech before too, right?’ Lassiter said.

‘I did, yes,’ Miller said. ‘Couple of times.’

‘So what the fuck are you gonna do? You’re gonna quit? Or you gonna put in for a transfer?’

‘I don’t know. I figured I’d look at it at the end of the month, maybe after Christmas.’

‘So I need you to do this one.’

Miller said nothing.

‘Chief wants the whole case transferred here. All four killings. Right now we have nothing that tells us it’s the same perp. From your report it appears that they could be, but apparencies I don’t need and can’t use. The strangulation, the beating, the ribbon with the name tag thing, all that stuff. Seems to be the same MO, right?’

‘It does, yes.’

‘What was the name of the first one . . . Mosley?’

‘Yes, Margaret Mosley, back in March.’

‘Was that your case?’

‘No, not really. I was the first one out there, simply because I was on shift,’ Miller explained. ‘I think Metz took it in the end.’

‘No . . . I remember what happened now. Metz was going to take it and didn’t. It wound up being handled by the Third.’

‘This thing is all over the place isn’t it?’

Lassiter smiled wryly. ‘You have no fucking idea.’

‘So why us? Why the Second?’

Lassiter shrugged. ‘First one was in our precinct, second in the Fourth, third one in the Sixth, now this fourth one is back in the Second. We have two of them. The chief loves us, hates us maybe. Jesus, I don’t know. He wants us to handle it, be the central point for all four investigations. It’s become an issue. He needs it dealt with as one case. Makes sense. To date it’s been dealt with - not dealt with actually - by three different precincts. Newspapers have gone crazy for it, as we all knew they would, and maybe he thinks that after all the crap that you stirred up we can repair our reputation by making this mess go away.’

‘This is such horseshit—’

Lassiter raised his hand. ‘Politics and protocol is what it is, nothing more nor less than that. It feels personal, but it isn’t.’

‘And did the chief suggest I do this because of what happened?’

‘Not exactly . . .’

‘Meaning?’

Lassiter walked from the window and sat down again. ‘Thing you have to understand here is that there’s always going to be some social-conscience bullshit liberal that assumes we do nothing but kick the crap out of innocent civilians for fun.’

Miller smiled sarcastically. ‘I know about police department politics. I don’t need a lesson—’

‘Fine, so I don’t need to explain myself. If you’re here then you’re on duty. If you’re on duty then you have an obligation to accept the cases I assign to you. I’m assigning this thing to you, and short of handing in your resignation right here and now there’s very fucking little that you can do about it.’

‘Love you too, captain,’ Miller said.

‘So go and talk to the FBI.’

Miller frowned. ‘The what? The FBI?’

‘I’m afraid so . . . chief has asked for help from the FBI. They’ve sent someone to teach us how to do this shit.’

‘This isn’t federal . . . what in God’s name do they have to do with this?’

‘It’s a helping hand, Robert, and I sure as shit could do with one. The chief spoke to Judge Thorne . . . gotta remember we have our election party coming in the New Year. No-one’s gonna be losing their job over this, let me assure you. I need someone to head this thing up, and you’re the man. Afraid that’s the way it’s gotta be. Maybe it’ll give you something to get your teeth into, eh? Maybe it’ll remind you why you worked so hard to be a detective in the first place.’

‘I have a choice?’ Miller asked.

‘Fuck no,’ Lassiter replied. ‘When the hell did any one of us have a choice about this kind of thing? You had three months’ vacation from this shit. You’ve been back a week. I need you to go make nice to the FBI, and then you and Roth pull all the files together, go through them, get this thing moving. We have four dead women, I have the chief all over me like a rash. There are more column inches about this than Veterans Day, and I need you to be a fucking hero and save the day, alright?’

Miller rose from his chair. He felt the weight already. He felt the sense of impending pressure that would bring the delicately balanced house of cards that was his life crashing down around his ears. It would fall silently. There would be no warning. He would just wake up one morning incapable of stringing a sentence together or making a cup of coffee. He did not need a serial killer. He did not need to be responsible for a headlining multiple homicide case, but even as he considered this he wondered if he hadn’t created his own justice. Perhaps it was a way out of his indecision. It could be the end of him, or perhaps his salvation. He looked at Lassiter, opened his mouth to speak, but Lassiter raised his hand.

‘You asked if you had a choice. You got your answer. Go see the FBI and make some sense of this bullshit would you?’

Miller started toward the door.

‘One other thing,’ Lassiter said.

Miller raised his eyebrows.

‘Marilyn Hemmings is the coroner on this. You will have to deal with her. The press will get wind of this for sure. After that picture in the Globe I don’t need to tell you—’

‘I get it,’ Miller said. He opened the office door.

‘If I had someone better . . .’ he heard Lassiter call after him as he closed the door gently behind him.

Know the feeling
, Miller thought to himself, and made his way towards the stairs.

 

Several miles away, the outskirts of Washington, a young woman named Natasha Joyce stood in the doorway of her kitchen. She was black, late twenties perhaps, and there was something on the TV that caught her attention. She backed up from where she’d been washing crockery in the kitchen. She had a plate in her hand, a drying towel, and she tilted her head and squinted at the screen through the doorway while the anchorwoman spoke.

A face appeared on the screen.

A moment’s hesitation, perhaps something close to disbelief, and then the plate slipped from Natasha’s fingers, and even as she stared at the face on the tube she was aware of the plate falling in slow motion toward the floor.

Her daughter, a pretty nine-year-old named Chloe who was playing on one side of the room, turned around to see her mother standing in the doorway, her eyes wide, her mouth open.

Everything went slow. Everything felt insubstantial. Everything that should have taken a second took a minute or more.

The plate reached the ground. It too seemed to hesitate for a heartbeat, and then it exploded into twenty or thirty pieces. Natasha screamed in surprise, and because she screamed her daughter screamed, and for a moment Natasha was puzzled because she knew she’d dropped the plate, she knew it would reach the ground and break, but nevertheless the sound still came out of left field like something unexpected.