Butchers Hill (20 page)

"Uh-huh. The radio said it was a
vacant rowhouse on Fayette." She got herself a Coke, wandered
back to her desk, checked the counter on her answering machine. No
calls. Keyes Investigations, always in demand.

"The radio was wrong on two
counts. The fire backed up traffic on Fayette, but the house was on
Chester. And it was vacant, but it wasn't
unoccupied." Tull tossed an envelope on her desk.
"They found a body in the basement. Guy looked like he was
smoking a crack pipe and he dropped it."

Tull seemed to expect her to reach for the
envelope. When she didn't, he took it back and opened it,
extracting a pair of Polaroids.

"That happens, of course.
I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. These
pipeheads take over abandoned buildings, use them to smoke or shoot up.
Accidents will happen. But according to the medical examiner, this guy
was dead
before
the fire
started. Someone bashed his head in and set the place on fire. We might
not have been able to identify the guy, except he had dental records
from when he was in foster care. State makes all the kids in its
custody get at least one medical checkup."

"Awfully decent of the
state." Tess's stomach clenched. She capped the
bottle of Coke, put it down next to her computer.

"Kid's name was Treasure
Teeter." Tull flicked a Polaroid at her, like a playing card.
Tess let it skim past her shoulder and fall to the floor, but she
couldn't help seeing the charred human shape at the center as
the image flew by.

"You heard of him, right? You were
looking for him, as I hear it. Looking for his sister, too. Destiny?
I'm guessing you never found her, though. Big break for
you—I did."

He flipped the second photo on the desk.
Tess saw the yellow crime scene tape at the edges, the body lying on
the bright green grass, the gash in the throat, a ghoulish echo of the
mouth above. Except it was impossible to see the mouth, impossible to
make out any features in a face that had been battered to the bone.

"Meet Destiny Teeter,"
Tull said. "You may know her better as the prostitute at the
pagoda."

L
uther
Beale was scrubbing his marble steps, a cherished visual
cliché in Baltimore. Even if he hadn't been out
front of his house, Tess would have known instantly where he lived. In
a block where the other brick rowhouses looked wilted and unloved,
Beale's home was painted a soft yellow with white trim. A tub
of yellow daisies sat next to the marble stoop. The paint job appeared
fresh to Tess's eyes, which admittedly were not expert in
matters of home improvement. At any rate, it did not look like Luther
Beale had been planning to leave this house any time soon.

Plans change.

"Pretty flowers," said
Tess. Sometimes, being furious made her absolutely banal.

"Those are my second ones this
season," Beale said, never looking up from his task.
"Someone stole the first tub. I expect someone will steal
this one as well, although God knows why. I can't imagine you
can get more than a dollar selling flowers." Beale dipped his
brush back into the aluminum pail and attacked another spot, rubbing at
it fiercely and methodically, determined to eradicate it.

"Can we go inside? I need to talk
to you."

"Then talk to me while I work. I
got started late today. I'm behind."

"This isn't a
conversation we can have out on the street."

She wished he looked more surprised, that he
would resist a little more, or pepper her with insistent questions.
Instead, he dropped the brush back into the soapy water and stood,
knees creaking.

"I'm on the third
floor," he said, unlocking the outside door, then another
inside the vestibule, a wooden one polished to a high sheen and
smelling of lemon furniture oil. "I used to rent out the
first two floors, but I don't anymore. I'd rather
have my privacy than the money."

Beale's apartment looked like the
kind of place where the occupant spent a lot of time sitting in the
dark. Clean, which Tess had expected, but also quite bare. She thought
old people always had a surplus of stuff, the way her grandmother did.
Beale's apartment, with its empty white walls and clean taupe
carpeting, felt like a gallery waiting for an exhibit to be installed.
She followed him through the living room, which had only one chair, a
computer, and a television set, into the kitchen. Here, at least, there
were two chairs, vinyl padded ones that matched the yellow-topped
formica table.

"You want a cold drink?"
Beale asked. She had asked Tull the same question not even a half-hour
ago. Perhaps it was instinctive, this offering of beverages to
forestall unpleasantness.

"No, thank you," She
paused, and still couldn't find a place to begin.
"Your place is pretty spare. I like it, though."

"People broke in while I was in
prison, stole what they could and broke the rest. Once I got the walls
painted and the new carpet done, it seemed easier to keep it
simple." He looked at her sternly. "You
didn't come here to talk about my interior decorating. What
do you want?"

"Why didn't Destiny
matter?" It wasn't where she had meant to start,
but it would have to do.

"Destiny?"

"Destiny Teeter, the girl twin.
You said she didn't matter, that it was okay if I
couldn't find her. Was it really because she was just a girl?
Or was it because you knew she was dead? Knew she was dead because you
had killed her."

"The girl's
dead?" He sounded more confused than surprised. He rubbed his
temples, as if his head suddenly hurt.

"She's the one whose
body was found in the park a few weeks back, before you hired me. Her
brother, Treasure, was killed in an arson fire yesterday. Someone hit
him over the head, then set a fire, hoping to make it look like an
accident. When the cops ID'ed him through the dental records,
they had the inspiration of trying to match Destiny's records
to the dead girl."

She had hoped her torrent of words might
provoke a similar stream from Beale. He merely looked thoughtful.
"Well, that's a shame. But the others are still
alive, right? Didn't you go out to the skinny boy's
school yesterday? How's he doing? Besides, the fat one still
might show up. Those boys don't stay away forever when they
run. They always come home. They don't have the imagination
to start over somewhere else."

His coldness, his obtuseness, infuriated her
even as it gave her new hope. If he had killed the twins,
wouldn't he be stammering excuses or alibis by now?

"Mr. Beale, I don't
think you understand the significance of what I've just told
you. Destiny and Treasure Teeter were murdered, and the police are
going to be here with a warrant for you real soon."

"Me. They always blame me.
Doesn't anyone else in this city ever do anything? It
doesn't make much sense, paying money to find children just
so I can kill them."

"The police believe you killed
Destiny in a rage—that you didn't plan it, but when
it happened, it felt good, cathartic. So you decided to kill the
others, too, to punish them for testifying against you. But you
didn't know how to find them, did you? That's where
I came in. I would find them, thinking I was doing a good deed, and
then you'd kill them."

If Tull was right, Beale's plan
had been ingenious and multilayered. After his chance meeting with
Destiny, he had sought Tess out to locate the others. He had insisted
on not meeting the children face-to-face, so he could then have
plausible deniability when the bodies started turning up. According to
Tull's theory, Beale had broken into her office and stolen
his own file, in order to find out what she had learned while still
declaring his ignorance. But the file he would have printed out early
Saturday morning had only the information about the Teeter twins. She
hadn't had a chance yet to summarize Jackie's
findings about Sal and his scholarship to the Penfield School. Lives
often hinged on such coincidences. So Treasure Teeter was dead and Sal
Hawkings was alive. He would have been harder to get to, anyway. Beale
would have needed to think long and hard about finding a credible death
for Sal.

"The police are going to arrest
you today," Tess said. "They'll be here
any minute with a warrant. But I wanted to talk to you first, see what
you had to say for yourself."

Beale walked over to a wall calendar hanging
by his kitchen door, the kind given out at hardware stores. This
month's picture was a covered bridge, the reminder beneath it
was to buy gardening supplies. Each day in June so far was
X'ed, except for yesterday. He took a black pen and carefully
crossed off that square as well.

"Forgot to mark my calendar. Like
I said, I got a late start this morning. I've been out of
prison for sixty-seven days now. Do you know how many days I was in
prison?"

Tess was pretty good at doing math in her
head, the byproduct of having to know her checking account balance
almost to the penny over the last few years. "Five times 365,
for a total of—1,500 plus 300 plus 25, 1,825."

"You forgot the leap year, so
1,826. I figure I have to live to be seventy-two to get all those days
back. And I never really get them back, do I? You never get anything
back in this life, once it's taken from you. My wife Annie,
the babies who died inside her. We tried five times to have children,
but she just couldn't carry a baby. She was all messed up
inside. Nowadays, you're like that, the doctors can do
things, as long as you got money. Isn't that a
fact?"

"Yes, I guess it is."
Tess hadn't known how this conversation was going to go, but
she surely hadn't envisioned discussing modern obstetrics.

He sighed. "Children, children,
children. Truth is, I was disappointed only for Annie's sake.
The way I see it, children are one of the shakiest investments
you'll ever make. You spend all this money on 'em,
spend all this time and there's no way knowing how
they're going to turn out. Now that boy Treasure, he was a
cute little boy once. Mouthy, in with bad company, but a real
good-looking boy. The girl was pretty, too, or would have been if she
had worn nice clothes. All those children, always dressed so shabby.
I'm sorry they're dead, but I didn't kill
them."

"But you never intended to help
them, did you? This was never about helping these children at
all."

"I believe I'll have
some iced tea. You sure you don't want some?" When
Tess shook her head, Beale took a jar of presweetened, instant powder
from the top of the refrigerator and stirred it into a tall, amber
glass filled with tap water. He took a long time stirring, as if making
instant iced tea required a great deal of precision.

"You ever listened to a child tell
you the plot of a picture show?" The teaspoon was still
hitting the sides of his glass, tap, tap, tap. "You know how
they get all mixed up, forget the important parts, double back to the
beginning? And no two children will tell the story quite the same way.
It likes to drive you crazy, listening to them."

Tess waited. It seemed to her that Luther
Beale wasn't a much better storyteller himself.

"Now the children who saw Donnie
Moore die all saw the exact same thing. They all told the jury the same
story, almost word for word. Me, standing there with my gun out,
looking like the devil. The girl saw it, although she was around the
corner and heading up the alley before Donnie went down. Her brother
was right behind her, but he saw me, too. The fat one saw it, although
his back was to me. Yet they all told the same story, almost word for
word. Now isn't that something?"

"Their testimony had probably been
rehearsed to some degree," Tess said. "They were
children, after all, the prosecution had to prepare them for taking the
witness stand. You'd expect a certain similarity."

"Which would be fine, except for
one thing. I
didn't
kill Donnie Moore, Miss Monaghan."

What had Tull told her, when they watched
the moon rise over Locust Point?
He wanted to
take the witness stand in his own defense. Luckily, his lawyer
wasn't that crazy
. How had she ever
gotten involved with such a crazy old man?

"You mean someone else with a gun
just like yours happened to be on Fairmount Avenue that night and just
happened to shoot Donnie after you opened fire and it just happened
that no one heard the other shots? You'll have to do better
than that."

"I heard two shots. At the time, I
thought it was a car backfiring. Later, I realized they were gunshots,
probably came from the car I saw coming round the corner."

"But the bullet they found in
Donnie matched your gun, right?"

"The bullet passed through Donnie.
They never found it. But then they weren't looking for it.
They didn't need to find any bullets. They had me, they had
my just-fired gun, they had four children saying I did it."

"It still sounds pretty incredible
to me. But okay, I'll play along. Someone else shoots Donnie
Moore. Why?"

"It wouldn't be the
first time a child was shot when some drug dealer was trying to hit
someone else. See, it's gotta be drugs, because if it
wasn't, why didn't the folks in that car slow down?
Why didn't they call the prosecutor and offer to testify,
too? And if there was someone else there they were trying to kill, that
person's not going to help me out. He's just going
to run. The children say it was me because they don't want to
go against the drug dealers."

"But after Donnie died, the other
children were separated. They were put in different foster homes. They
couldn't have conspired to tell the same story even if they
wanted to."