Broken Saint, The (6 page)

“Did you talk to him about the battery?”

“I remember that.” Saffert nodded. “He said it happened
about eight years ago. Said he was drinking, got into a fight. No big deal.
He’s been clean since then.”

“So his profile is pretty typical?”

He nodded. “We look at the number of offenses, the
circumstances of each, the relationship between the offenses and the job
responsibilities, the length of time between them. And I put a lot of weight on
how the applicant has tried to rehabilitate himself and stay out of trouble. I really
liked that he was upfront about the battery the background check hadn’t
uncovered. He said that was in the past, and I believed him. I’m glad I hired
him. He’s worked out good. But the bottom line is, if I couldn’t hire anyone
with a felony, I couldn’t staff Buildings and Grounds.”

Chapter 7

It was close to four o’clock when we finished interviewing
Hector Cruz’s boss from Building and Grounds and made our way back to
headquarters. Enough time for maybe one more interview before quitting time.

We were looking at Maricel’s phone records for the
past three months.

“You seeing this Amber Cunningham, calling back
and forth to Maricel every day until about a week ago? That’s her Big Sister,
from the university, right?” I said.

“Yup,” he said. “Want to see what happened about a
week ago?”

I nodded. “Maybe one of those two women from the
university can help us with that.”

“I’d try Christine Hardtke.”

“Which one is she, the dean?”

“No, she’s the international students person, the
one with the German accent.”

Oh, yeah, the crimson pants-suit and the pendant.
“You got a number?”

Ryan punched it in for me. “Line 1.”

I picked up and hit Speaker. “Is she a doctor?” He
looked at her business card and nodded.

“Dr. Hardtke, this is Detective Karen Seagate. The
Maricel Salizar case? Got a second?”

“Of course, Detective. How can I help you?”

“You told us this morning that Amber Cunningham was
Maricel’s Big Sister. How does a student become a Big Sister or Big Brother?”

“If they’re a student in good standing and want to
do it, they just sign up and we do a brief orientation. Then we assign them when
we’ve got an international student who we think would be a good fit.”

“What can you tell me about Amber Cunningham?”

“Give me a second. Let me pull up her records.”
She paused for ten seconds. “Okay, Amber Cunningham, junior in General
Business, says she’s pre-law. She has a 3.5 GPA.”

“That’s pretty good, right?”

“Median GPA for our graduating seniors is 3.2. So
3.5 is very good. If she does well on the LSATs, she’ll get into an excellent
law school.”

“And you’ve got her listed at 3501 Hamilton,
Apartment 26?”

“Yes.”

“All right, Dr. Hardtke, thanks a lot.” I hung up.

Ryan said, “Want to take a drive?”

“You bet.” I looked at my watch. “We might be able
to get to her before she hears about Maricel on the news.”

Apartment 26 was on the second floor of a pale
green stucco building that straddled the border between the student slums and
the lower-middle-class neighborhood near campus. Nice thing about the building
was that the staircase was inside, and there was a central hall, which made the
residents feel more like adults. Most of the other off-campus rentals built for
students had the stairs and the hall outside, which encourages male morons to drag
the keg outside, shout at the girls passing by and, Thursdays through Sundays,
piss over the railing onto the parking lot.

I knocked on the door. I didn’t think I’d been out
on a call to this building when I was a uniform. Maybe it wasn’t built back
then, or maybe there just weren’t any guys beating up their girlfriends there when
I was on duty. Third possibility: I lived right here in Apartment 26 for two or
three years during the Jack Daniel’s Era.

“Who is it?”

“Rawlings Police Department.”

“I didn’t call for the police.”

Amber had a pleasantly Amber-centric view of the
world: I don’t need you, so go away.

“Ms. Cunningham, it’s the Rawlings Police Department.
Open the door, please.”

I retrieved my shield from my bag and hung it
around my neck as the deadbolt turned.

She opened the door halfway and tightened the belt
on her green terrycloth bathrobe, looking like she’d just gotten out of bed. Four
in the afternoon. It brought back so many memories of my college days.

Amber Cunningham was a small woman, a bit thick in
the middle. Her face, with no makeup and no earrings, looked puffy and indistinct.
She had long, dark hair, wavy, parted down the middle, a little mussed up from
nap time. She was the kind of girl who looked okay at twenty but would morph
into a potato by the time she hit forty. But now, her eyes were open way wide.

“Ms. Cunningham, I’m Detective Karen Seagate. This
is my partner, Detective Ryan Miner. We’d like to talk to you.”

“What is it? Did something happen to my parents?”

“No, nothing like that,” I said. “We just want to
talk to you about your friend, Maricel Salizar.”

Amber sighed a big breath, obviously relieved that
it wasn’t anything important. She shook her head. “She’s not exactly my friend.”

“Do you mind if we come in?”

She stepped back, pulling the door open all the
way. It was a standard cheapo apartment, one bedroom off to the left, a living
room with a kitchenette. There was a half-size refrigerator and small
four-burner electric stove, a tiny round breakfast table and two folding metal
chairs. A dark brown corduroy-covered futon, with a glass coffee table in front
of it. A metal TV stand supported a big flat screen, with a DVD thing next to
it. On the far wall was a screw-it-together bookcase with some books, some
DVDs, CDs, and an iPad docking station on top of it. The one big window had vinyl
vertical blinds, no curtains. A few framed photos and posters hung on the
walls.

“You want to sit down?” She pointed to the futon.
Ryan and I sat down on it, and she took an imitation bentwood rocker with thin
blue cushions.

“Is Maricel saying I did something to her?” She
was wearing a smirk.

“No. We just want to understand your relationship with
her a little better.”

“Why? What is it?” she said, with a little more curiosity
behind it.

“It’s in relation to a case we’re working on.”

“Okay,” she said, impatient that we were taking
her time. “What do you want to know?”

“All right, you’re Maricel’s Big Sister, is that right?”

She laughed a little. “Yeah, I guess that’s true.
Officially.”

“You two don’t get along?”

“We used to,” she said, shaking her head.

“Something happen?”

“Nothing in particular. We didn’t have much in
common.”

“It wasn’t something she did?”

“More like something she was.”

“What was that?”

“Kind of a bitch.”

“How so?”

“Hard to point to any one thing. Just that she was
so into herself. Didn’t really care about anyone else.” She shifted in the
rocker, like she didn’t see any need to fill in the details. That would have to
do for me.

Ryan said, “Is that why you haven’t talked to her
on the phone for the last week or so?”

She turned to him. Now that she was done being
scared, she could concentrate on me and Ryan. The way she leaned forward, I
could tell she decided it would be more fun to focus on Ryan. “Yeah, that’s
right. I just decided I didn’t want her in my life anymore.” She said it with a
little pride, like she’d recently realized she was an adult and therefore got
to decide who she let into her life. It wasn’t my place to take her aside and
tell her you don’t always get to choose.

I heard some noise from the bedroom. “Is there
anyone else here in the apartment?”

“Yeah,” she said, her chin up. “That’s my
boyfriend, Jared.”

“Do you mind if we speak to him for a minute?”

She called into the bedroom. “Jared, can you come
out here a sec?”

Jared came out, not in any hurry. He was a tall
guy, thin. His medium brown hair was cut in a fauxhawk, short on the sides and
combed so that it stuck up straight on the top of his head. He wore a goatee
and a soul patch. His left earlobe had a broad black plug stretching it out.
The plug was hollow in the middle, like a tire on a toy truck. The kind of thing
my son, Tommy, would think is cool, but anyone with an 80 IQ or better would
think is just stupid. Jared’s right earlobe was covered in a bandage. Wearing
only plaid boxers, he leaned against the TV stand and began to scratch his
stomach.

Ryan and I stood up. “Jared, I’m Detective
Seagate, my partner, Detective Miner.”

He nodded, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

“What’s your last name, Jared?” Ryan said.

“Higley,” Jared said.

“You at the university?”

Jared nodded again.

“Do you know Maricel Salizar?” I said.

“Think I met her once or twice.” He yawned. “Don’t
really know anything about her.”

I looked over at Amber, who was gazing down at her
hands. She couldn’t see my look, which was just as well. It was obvious I
wasn’t the first adult who was curious about why she would fuck this idiot. “Amber,
when was the last time you saw Maricel?”

She put on a face like she was thinking. “I don’t
know, maybe ten days, a week. Saw her in a class.”

“And Jared? How about you?”

“Maybe last month. Don’t remember.” I’d call his
expression defiant, but defiance requires a little more energy than Jared was
putting out. Call it “assertive indifference.”

Amber said, “Can you tell us what this is about?”

“Maricel was found dead this morning.”

Amber pulled back. “Oh, my God, what happened?”

“Not sure yet. She was attacked.” I glanced over
at Jared, but his head was turned and I couldn’t get a read.

“I can’t believe that,” Amber said. Her hand was
up to her mouth.

“Can you help us with anyone who’d want to hurt
her?”

She began to cry. “No, I really can’t.” She wiped
at her nose. “Oh, my God.”

“Anyone else you know thinks she was a bitch?”

“Listen, when I said that,” she said, crying more
now, “I just meant she wasn’t really my friend. I didn’t hate her or anything.
She just wasn’t a friend anymore.” She wiped at her eyes with the end of the
belt on her bathrobe. “You don’t think
I
killed her, do you?”

“We’re just beginning our investigation, Amber,” I
said. “We don’t think anything yet.”

I looked over at Jared. He was gazing at the
kitchen, scratching his stomach, like he wanted to get something to eat. “All
this murder talk boring you, Jared?”

He looked at me. “What?” Then he figured out what
I’d said. “Just hungry, that’s all.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Go get yourself something
to eat.”

He walked over to the kitchen, opened the
refrigerator, bent down and looked in. He started shoving things aside to see
what there was.

“Amber, can you tell us about that shiner?” Her
left eye was bruised, a neon green, which was about a week old. Plus she had a
faint white line on her cheek about an inch long, from some kind of cut.

She started to blush. “This?” Her hand came up to
her cheek, touching it gently. “I had a little too much to drink one night last
week, stumbled on the steps up to the apartment.”

I nodded.

Ryan said to Jared, “Having a problem with the
earring in that ear?”

“Yeah,” he said. He had a slice of cheese in his
hand. “Got infected. I tried to stretch it out a little too fast, broke the
skin.”

Apparently, Ryan had hit on a topic Jared considered
worthy of his participation.

“Okay, Amber, Jared.” I stood. “Let me give you
both my card. You think of anything that can help us in this investigation, you
give me a call?”

Amber nodded. I looked over at Jared, who was
chewing on the cheese.

Ryan and I left the apartment. “You buy Amber’s
story about that shiner?” he said as we made our way to the cruiser.

“Tripping and falling? I’ve done that once or
twice. Maybe ten times, tops. What about Jared and his earring?”

“He could be telling the truth.”

“What’s with those earrings?” I looked at Ryan’s
left ear to see if there was a closed-up hole in his lobe. Him being a
well-behaved Mormon, I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t see one. “Is the guy so
stupid he assumes he’s never gonna grow up and wanna get a job?”

Ryan laughed. “Really can’t say. I saw on TV how
you have to get plastic surgery to get those big holes filled in. But I think
you’re right. Being stupid might have a lot to do with that decision.”

“You believe Amber not knowing about Maricel
getting killed?”

“Absolutely,” he said. “Otherwise she wouldn’t
have called her a bitch.”

“And Jared? He hears she’s dead, doesn’t say a
thing. And he doesn’t even go over to Amber to comfort her? He just stands
there, scratching his stomach.”

“I didn’t see much on his face,” Ryan said. “But
like you said, he doesn’t look like the most evolved primate, anyway.”

“Yeah, what’s Amber doing with a moron like that?
She gonna bring him along to law school?”

“One of my sisters went through a phase with a
knuckle-dragger like that.”

“How’d that turn out?”

“When she decided she’d punished my parents
enough, she moved on.”

“So there’s hope for Amber after all.”

“There’s hope for us all, Karen.”

We got in the cruiser. “For most of us, maybe,” I
said. “Not for Maricel.”

Ryan buckled his seatbelt. “No, not for Maricel.”

I looked at my watch: 4:43. “Let’s call it a day,
huh?”

Chapter 8

“Wanna head over to the hospital to see if they’ve got a
record of Amber coming in with her shiner?” It was 8:01
am
, and I’d had a bad night. That happens sometimes. Last
night, I’d felt shitty about missing my AA meeting and opened the emergency
bottle of JD I keep just in case. I don’t remember going to bed.

“Can’t we phone them?” Ryan said.

“No, they won’t talk to us unless they see our
shields. It’s policy.”

We drove over to the hospital. I hate hospitals,
this one in particular. It’s where I lied to an old man that we were going to
get the two guys who killed his wife with a length of chain when the home
invasion went bad. Where I spent a few days last year after I’d been beaten up
and gang raped out at the neo-Nazi compound. Where I visited this little girl I
almost killed when I’d been drinking and T-boned a minivan.

The big automatic doors opened for me and Ryan.
The unmistakable hospital smell hit me as we walked over to the reception desk
and I asked the ancient volunteer woman how to find Medical Records. She had a
nametag that said Betty and Volunteer on it. I had my shield around my neck.
She pointed down the main corridor and told us room 1170 was on the right. She
smiled sweetly at me. “Make it a great day,” she told me. I nodded.

“What’s with her?” I said as we headed down the
hall.

Ryan looked at me, confused.

“I mean, we’re cops. We’re in a hospital. We need
to talk to someone in Medical Records. Is there any way, under any circumstances,
this could possibly turn out to be a great day?”

We walked up to the counter at Medical Records.
Ryan said to me, “You want me to bite this woman’s head off, or you got it?”

I gave him a look and turned to the middle-aged
dumpling on duty. “I’m Detective Seagate. This is Detective Miner.”

Arlene from Medical Records nodded and said, “What
do you need?” Apparently we weren’t her first cops.

“Have you got a patient, Amber Cunningham, in the
system? We’re thinking she came to the ER five or six days ago?”

She hit some keys and watched the system churn. “I’ve
got two Amber Cunninghams. One’s about twenty, the other’s around twelve.”

“Twenty. Could you print me a copy of that record?”
She hit a button and out it came. She handed it to me. “Thanks.”

I looked at the form. Five days ago, at 2:15
am
, Amber Cunningham came in to the ER.
She was seen at 3:47 by a Dr. David Tristan, who bandaged a laceration on her
cheek and performed a visual examination of her eye. She told him her vision
was a little blurry. He said that should clear up within a day. If it doesn’t,
she should go see an optometrist. She left at 3:52
am
.

“Can you tell me if she was here alone?”

She shrugged. “No idea.”

“Can you tell me if this ER doc, David Tristan, is
on duty now?”

She hits a few keys. “Not yet. He does ten
am
to midnight today.”

“Thanks.” I turned to Ryan. “Wanna wait till ten
or go to his house?”

“I’d go to his house, so he can talk to us,” Ryan
said. “We wait till he gets here, he might have a case right away.”

“Okay, but he might be cranky if we wake him up
before a shift.”

“Don’t you hate having to deal with cranky people
on the job?”

I looked at him. “Screw cranky people, I say.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“Go back and get his address from the woman, would
you?”

I stood there, bleary-eyed, waiting for my
caffeine to kick in as Ryan walked back over to the desk and returned in thirty
seconds, waving a slip of paper.

“One other thing,” I said, “before we go. Wanna
see if there’s CCTV of the ER entrance? To see if Amber came in alone or with
Jared?”

“Good idea.”

He turned and went back to the woman in Medical
Records, then spun on his heels and came back over to me.

“Facilities, room 2300.” He pointed down the hall to
the staircase.

We walked down the long hall, past docs and nurses
and assorted clerical people. I pulled myself up the flight of stairs. Room
2300 was on the right.

“Ma’am,” I said, pointing to my shield. “Detective
Karen Seagate, Rawlings Police Department. Can we talk to the senior person on
duty now?”

She picked up the phone. “Arnie, can you talk to
two detectives?” She hung up. “Arnie Hastings, first door on the right.”

He rose to meet us.

I introduced us, and we shook hands. “Mr.
Hastings, do you have CCTV of the entrance to the ER?”

“Yeah, we added that two, maybe three years ago.
After a baby was left at the ER.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember reading about that. Can you
call up a particular date and time?”

“Absolutely. It’s digital. What do you need?”

Ryan said, “Early Wednesday morning, starting at
2:10
am
, until about 2:20.”

He hit some keys on his computer, which also lit
up a large flatscreen on the wall to his left. “Okay, what are we looking for?”

“A twenty-year old girl, dark hair, maybe holding
her face.”

Arnie hit fast forward, bumping it to 2X and then
8X. A couple of trees rimming the circular drive in front of the Emergency Room
entrance started shaking back and forth real fast.

“Okay, slow it down a little,” Ryan said. Arnie
slowed it down to 2X. “That’s her,” Ryan said to me. She was wearing gray
sweatpants and a plaid wool coat. Her left hand was up to her eye. “Okay, put
it on normal speed, please.” She was walking up to the entrance.

I leaned in to see her face. “Can you freeze it
right there?” The picture stopped. “Looks like she’s holding a tissue or
something to her face.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said, “it’s been bleeding. Okay,
start it up again, normal speed.” He pointed to the screen. “There’s our boy.”

Jared was walking behind her, looking sheepish. We
saw her turn back to him, say something sharp, pointing her finger at him. “Looks
like she’s giving him hell, doesn’t it?”

“That’s what I see,” Ryan said. “Can you freeze it
right there?”

“What are you looking for?”

“Just checking on his earrings.” He walked over to
study the screen on the wall. “They’re both in.”

“You want to see anything else?” I said to Ryan.

“No, that’s all we need.”

“Okay, thanks, Mr. Hastings.”

“Sure thing,” he said, as the big screen went
black.

Back in the cruiser, Ryan looked up the address of
David Tristan, the ER doc. It was inside Ravensmere, a gated community in the
east end of town. It took us ten minutes to get to the million-dollar house
neighborhood. I punched in the number, and the gunmetal gray gate swung open.

“You know the password on this thing?” Ryan said.

“It’s the year, then star.”

“Heck of a password,” he said.

“It’s the same for all the gated communities,” I
said. “So we can get in, and the ambulances and firemen.”

“And the FedEx guys, I bet.”

“Yeah, mostly the FedEx guys.” I parked at the
curb at 4211 Blue Stem. We walked up the brick path. I rang the bell.

A carefully packaged forty-year-old woman, cashmere
sweater, wool slacks, answered the door. She was normal size but seemed small
standing on the marble entryway, beneath a huge cut-glass chandelier hanging
from the double-height ceiling.

I introduced me and Ryan and asked if Dr. Tristan
was in.

“He’s got a long shift coming up,” she said,
looking at her watch, “and he’s got one more hour of sleep. Can you possibly
come back in an hour?”

“Ordinarily, ma’am, we’d be happy to do that,” I
said, shaking my head. “But we’re working on a murder investigation, and this
is time-sensitive.”

“All right,” she said, sighing. “Come in.” She turned
and headed up the large, curved oak staircase with its wrought-iron balusters.

We took in the foyer of the home, which was bigger
than any room in my sorry house. A minute later, Dr. Tristan came down the
stairs, wearing a silk bathrobe and pajamas, leather slippers. He was rubbing
his eyes. I introduced me and Ryan.

“Sorry to pull you out of bed, Dr. Tristan. We’re
only gonna need two minutes, tops.” The wife was standing nearby to hold me to
my word. “Ryan, you got that record?” Ryan handed it to the doctor.

He looked at it a moment, then pulled a pair of
half glasses out of his robe pocket and tried again. “Okay,” he said.

“Do you remember this young woman?”

“Not really,” he said. “She had a laceration to
her cheek. I applied a topical antibiotic, put a butterfly bandage on it. I can
get five of these every shift.”

“So she didn’t need any stitches?”

“No, it wasn’t that bad.”

“And the complaint about blurry vision?”

“That’s typical. When she fell—or whatever it
was—she might have popped the eyeball a little.”

“You say ‘whatever it was.’ You didn’t believe her
when she said she fell?”

“Falling is the number-one bullshit excuse. Unless
it’s a kid or an older person who’s obviously in someone else’s care, we don’t
try to figure out what really happened. But her age, the most likely cause is
just what she said: she was drunk, fell down, hit something solid.”

“All right, Doctor. Thanks. Sorry to get you up.”

He nodded, turned, and headed up the stairs.

Ryan and I apologized to the wife and walked back
to the cruiser.

“Hell, I could’ve done that,” I said.

“Done what?”

“Put a butterfly bandage on her cut and tell her
her vision will clear up.”

“Lucky for him all his cases are that easy,” Ryan
said.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. But our job’s tougher in one
way—”

“Sometimes people shoot at us?”

“Yeah, that, too. But I meant we gotta figure out
how they got hurt.”