BLUE MERCY (28 page)

It was Kay’s pager, vibrating in her lap through her handbag, that startled her out of the abstraction of memories. In the dark hall, she dug out the unit and angled its display.

“Shit.”

“What is it?” Vicki whispered next to her.

“It’s Finn. nine one one.”

FINN HAD TO LOOK TWICE
before he recognized the two women getting out of the two-seater sports car that turned onto Gettings Street. He identified Vicki first, in her figure-hugging red dress and stilettos. Kay’s heels were shorter, but the little black number she wore was every bit as sexy as Vicki’s.

He let out a breathy whistle as they crossed toward him. “Whoa. What did I drag you two away from?”

“Girls’ night out,” Vicki said, smiling in spite of the interruption. “This better be good.”

“Well, just my luck to get both of you down here.” He pointed to Bates’s house. “I want inside.”

“What’s going on?” Kay asked.

Seeing her standing there in the soft amber glow from the streetlamp, he tried to take his eyes off her, but wasn’t having much luck. He remembered the dress too well, remembered the Habitat benefit they’d attended less than a week before the beatdown. And he remembered how he’d peeled that black number off Kay later that night, back at her place.

Leaning against the front fender of the radio car, he gestured to Bates’s house, the windows dark. “Seems our boy was on the prowl tonight. He’s home now though.”

“Where’d he go?”

Finn nodded to the uniform next to him. “Mikey here caught him slipping out the back.” He gestured for the Southern District officer to fill them in and wondered if the rookie could stop ogling Kay long enough to string a sentence together.

“Mike McNally,” he said, extending his hand first to
Kay, then Vicki. “I didn’t actually see him exit the back, but I saw headlights in the alley. Then Bates’s car comes round, he’s got his hand up against the side of his face, like he thinks I won’t recognize him or his ride.”

“You’re on your own here?” Kay asked.

“Yes, ma’am. We’re short-manned. So I called it in, then tailed him. He took me up to Hollins Market, tried to lose me, but I caught up with him on Wilkens and Fulton.”

“Wilkens Avenue?”

“Yes, ma’am. I hung back at first so maybe he figured he’d ditched me. Then he starts cruising the ladies.” He smirked. “Didn’t get too lucky though, with my unit glued to his ass. Girls’d take one look and move on. He led me around again for a bit, trying to lose me, then ended up back on Wilkens. Finally he pulls over, gets out, and walks back to my car.”

“What did he have to say?”

“Not much besides cussing me up one side and down the other about his rights.”

“Do we know for sure he was trying to pick up a girl?” Kay asked.

McNally shrugged. “When I threatened to take him in on a john charge, he claimed he was only trying to score a little H for personal use. Said he prefers dealing with the ladies. I followed him home after that. He parked out back again, and his lights came on inside. There’s been movement, and now it looks like he’s either gone to bed or he’s sitting in the dark watching us.”

Kay studied Bates’s dark windows, assessing. Finn couldn’t help thinking she looked out of place down in this dirty end of Baltimore.

“So what are you thinking?” Vicki asked Finn then.

“I want in that house, Vick. Tonight.”

She was already shaking her head. “You’ve got nothing, Finn.” She turned to McNally. “Did you see Bates go into his house with a possible victim?”

“No.”

“Anyone else enter the premises?”

“Nope.”

“Then you’ve got no exigent circumstances to warrant an immediate search,” she said to Finn.

“What about the fleeing-felon rule?” he asked.

“It doesn’t apply here, Finn. Sorry.”

“But we
can
get a warrant, right?” Kay asked. Finn could hear the edginess in her voice, knew that if she could bust through Bates’s door right now, she would, sexy dress and all. “If Bates is trying to pick up prostitutes, from Wilkens Avenue where Beggs was picked up, we’ve got our PC right?”

“Along with everything else, yeah. I think I can get a warrant signed. Not till Monday though. Yes, the probable cause is there, but it’s shaky. I’m not going to push a judge with anything less than solid on a Sunday.”

“All right, in the meantime, Mike”—Kay turned to the rookie—“you’ll stay here, right?”

“All night.”

“And can you see the back from in your car?”

“Not really.”

“What about getting a second unit down here?” she asked Finn.

“We’re lucky to have this one,” he told her.

“Look,” McNally interrupted, “I’ve got the place covered. If he tries again, I’ll see him. There’s only one way out with his car, and it’s past me.”

“And what if he heads out on foot? If he goes out the back, he can hoof it over to Decatur and hail a cab down on Fort Avenue. I don’t like this, Finn.”

Finn walked several yards down the street, studied the angles, and returned. “Just pull your unit up a hundred feet or so,” he said to McNally. “You should be able to see if he comes out the back then.”

Still, Finn could see Kay wasn’t satisfied. “You need another coffee?” she asked the uniform.

“Detective Finnerty’s already taken care of me.” McNally tipped the oversize take-out cup at her.

Kay offered the rookie a parting nod. “All right then. Have a good night.”

“So Monday morning, right?” Kay asked Vicki as Finn walked them back to Vicki’s sports car.

“First thing.”

“Good, cuz I wanna hit this guy before reality does,” Finn said. He held the car door for Kay as she folded herself into the tiny car.

Vicki nodded, no doubt considering the work that lay ahead of her, and the judge she’d have to bat her blues at for a predawn signature on Monday. “All right. Let me see your paperwork tomorrow and have a team ready to go. We’ll see what this slimeball’s all about.”

JERRY BATES NEEDED A HIT.
He paced, beating a path the length of his foyer between two uniforms, his fingers drumming his hips, his eyes blinking spasmodically. Kay almost felt sorry for the junkie as the search team flipped his house.

Bates must have been sleeping when they arrived at 6:30 a.m. Or he’d been hiding his stash because, when the ram busted through the front door, the team found Bates
shaking in the middle of the living room. Kay thought he was going to piss himself.

For over an hour they’d gone through the narrow row house. And in that time Kay had tried to get a read on Bates. If the former funeral-home employee had been capable of helping Eales a year ago, she couldn’t say. Any evidence of his once-organized life had decayed into the chaos of drugs.

For Kay—thinking of Valley and Beggs, both murdered in the past eleven days, both conscientiously disposed of— nothing fit.

From upstairs the thud of boots marked the progress of the uniforms as they dissected the place, and beside her, Finn foraged through papers littering the kitchen table.

Kay moved in next to him. “He’s not our guy.” She kept her voice low.

“Why do you say that?” he asked, but she guessed he already knew.

“He’d keep souvenirs. There’s nothing here. Where’s Valley’s driver’s license?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s got it stashed someplace else. Maybe he got rid of it.” Anger had crept into Finn’s voice, sharpening his words. “Maybe he doesn’t kill them here. This place is a fucking sty. How the hell do you live in this shit?” But he didn’t expect an answer from Bates.

When Finn pushed aside more junk, a six-pack of empty Milwaukees fell to the floor, several rolling away across the old linoleum.

“You got no right, man. No right,” Bates chanted from the door. “Bustin’ in here like this. Messing with my shit.”

“Do I need to come over there and show you the warrant again, asshole?” Finn’s patience had worn thinner than Kay’s. “Now just shut the fuck up.”

They’d worked long into Saturday night and most of
Sunday morning putting together the search-and-seizure warrant for Vicki to process. Then Finn had surprised Kay with lunch on the boat. He’d taken her out onto the bay after, wrapped her in one of his wool sweaters as the sails of
The Blue Angel
unfurled to catch the crisp, autumn gusts that whipped around Wagners Point. For a few hours, she’d been able to forget about Bates, Hagen, and especially Eales. Finn too seemed to relax as they sailed, and Kay had felt the shift in their relationship, the beginnings of normalcy.

But this morning, assembling the team outside Bates’s house, faced once again with the case, Kay had shared a mutual frustration with Finn. It had only intensified when each room they searched produced nothing. There were no ties to Eales, to Valley or Beggs, or any of the three previous victims. And Kay knew the task force weighed as heavily on Finn’s mind as her own.

“Here.” Finn held up three fat blunts, pinched between his gloved fingers, and dropped them into the evidence bag Kay provided. “And we’ve got more.”

He pushed aside magazines and flyers to reveal hypodermics, a burned spoon, and several dime bags of heroin.

“Christ, Jerry, I don’t know
why
you thought you had to score the other night. Look at all this shit,” he said.

Kay handed the evidence to one of the uniforms and turned her attention to a small chest of drawers in the alcove between the living room and kitchen. She pulled one drawer, but the catch was broken and a mess of bills, pens, coins, and other junk clattered to the ground.

“Jesus!” Bates worked his nails into his scalp, then tugged at the ends of his buzz cut. “You gotta trash everything?”

“Then make it easy for me, Jerry. Tell me where you keep your stash of ketamine,” Kay said.

“My what?”

“You heard me. Your Special K. Vitamin K. The stuff you use to shoot them up with.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he whined.

“Fine.” She pulled out the next drawer, letting its contents spill around her feet as well.

“Fuckin’ bitch. You did that on purpose. You—” He started to come at her, but Finn was across the room in an instant.

“What did you call her, Jerry, hmm? Did I hear you right? Did I just hear you call a decorated officer a ‘fucking bitch’?” He smacked Bates on the back of his head with his open palm and the junkie teetered a couple steps. “Now, unless you’re gonna cooperate here, just shut the fuck up. You’re giving me a headache with all that whining.”

Only when Finn’s cell phone rang did he turn from the junkie. He took the call in the kitchen, listening intently, and finally his eyes went to Kay.

“We’ll be there,” she heard him say, and he snapped the phone shut. “We might have another one,” he said to her.

“What?” Kay dropped the papers she’d been searching.

“Leakin Park.” He spun to face Bates again. “Where the hell were you last night, Jerry, huh? Where’d you go?”

“I was right here, man. The whole night.”

“Bullshit. You’re a lying fucking asshole. Where were you?”

“You got a goddamned car on my house, you
know
I was here.”

“D’you go out the back, Jerry? Is that what you did? Fuck.” Finn turned to Kay. “Come on. We have to roll.” And then to the uniforms: “Everything in this place gets taken apart. Everything!”

At the door Finn borrowed a set of cuffs off one of the officers and spun Bates against the wall. “I want you to take
this lying piece of shit downtown and book him,” he said to the uniform.

“On what?” Bates squealed as the cuffs snapped.

“Oh, I don’t know, Jerry. But with all the smack and the reefers you’ve got lying around your crib here, I’m sure we can drum up something, huh?”

“This is bullshit!”

“Yeah, right, Jerry.” Finn grappled with Bates again, pushing him aside, maybe a little too hard, to make way for Kay. “We’ll talk to your lying ass later,” he told Bates.

At the car, Kay could still hear Bates screaming profanities.

“Let’s go see what they’ve found,” Finn said as they got into the car. “And pray to God this one isn’t related.”

THE BODY IN LEAKIN PARK
had come to rest at the bottom of a dry ravine, surrounded by decaying leaves and rotting stumps. By the time Kay and Finn arrived, several radio cars crouched in the mist along the shoulder of Franklintown Road, which cut through the three hundred acres of park.

She’d been discovered by a jogger, her white skin a beacon between rain-blackened trunks. She’d been dumped sometime in the early-morning hours and didn’t have a name until Kay stumbled down the steep pitch with Finn and looked into the mangled face.

“Jesus Christ, are you sure it’s her?” Finn asked.

Kay nodded, as shocked as Finn. Squatting over the body, she pointed to the diamond on Patricia Hagen’s muddied finger.

“What the hell happened to her face?”

Rain pooled in one of Hagen’s hazel eyes; the other had been mashed in. The left side of her head had been crushed, and her hair was matted with blood and brain matter.

“You think that happened on the way down?”

Kay gauged the embankment. “No. Looks more like he kicked her face in. Must have done it after she was dead. There’d be more blood otherwise. But it’s him.”

Water had also settled in the shallow knife wounds on her chest and in the long gashes that ran halfway up the inside of her arm. Kay guessed that this morning’s heavy rains had washed away most of the dirt and leaves that would have collected on her body during her long tumble down the slope.

The uniforms had given way to Kay and Finn, and other than the distant squelch of police radios up on the roadway, the ravine was silent. Water dripped from the golden leaves still clinging to the branches overhead and drummed the carpet of spent foliage.