Cut to the Quick (13 page)

“That’s a possibility,” Folke said. “I wanted to discuss it with Nan before we decided what to do with him.” He took papers from the manila folder and handed them to her.

Her mouth went dry as she silently examined the pages, passing them to Kissick.

Chase explained. “Nitro had a drawing pad—”

“Nitro?” Kissick repeated.

“It’s the moniker we gave him, since he wouldn’t tell us his name. He dumped this pot of chili that these old guys were calling Nitro in a Pot. Anyway … So he had this drawing pad and charcoal pencils and one of those soft, gummy erasers. The pad was full of sketches, mostly of animals and flowers and such. And then we saw those.”

They were photocopies of charcoal drawings, all of women, all violent. They were the work of a skilled artist, rendered with precise details and vivid contrast, like something from a graphic novel–style comic book.

One showed what looked like the interior of a tumbledown garage or barn. Sunlight shone through gaps in the walls where wood planks were missing. A nude woman was tied by her feet and hanging head down from the rafters. Her hands were behind her back, as if they were also tied. Blood had drained from a gash across her neck and formed a large pool on the ground beneath her head. Her physique, with small breasts and slender legs, appeared to be that of a young woman. Thick long dark hair, drawn with care, the curly tendrils flying loose, obscured her face.

Also hanging down from her neck was a necklace. The cloud of her hair kept it from slipping off and dropping onto the blood-soaked ground. It was depicted as a series of tiny white circles in a row, like pearls. In the middle was a larger circle standing out from the smaller ones. To Vining, it looked like a pendant.

Another showed a woman wearing a uniform, with a badge and shoulder patch sketchily depicted. On her head was a round-brimmed ranger Stetson. This woman was not dead. Clutched in one raised hand were two thick straps, the ends extending beyond the edge of the drawing. Her other hand was also raised as she was looking down at a man in the foreground who was holding a gun up at her. He was facing her, so only the back of his head and one of his hands were shown.

The woman had narrow dark eyes and a firm strong jaw. Her broad mouth and thin lips were parted, creating a gash across the bottom of her face. The charcoal strokes conveyed both her plainness and fierceness.

In the background was a large rock that had a distinctive domed shape.

Vining took her time with the drawings, lingering on the details, her apprehension building with each image.

“Are these real crimes or imagined?” Kissick asked.

“Look through the rest and then you tell me,” Folke replied.

Vining didn’t like the sound of that.

Kissick took the drawing Vining passed him. He tapped it. “This looks like Morro Rock. You know, in Morro Bay in Central California.”

“It does,” Folke agreed.

Vining looked at the next drawing. It was of a woman lying on the floor of what looked like a storeroom. Her limbs were splayed out. Her back was leaning against shelves stacked with supplies. Her eyes and mouth were
both slightly open in a way that suggested death. A dark stain covered her blouse. She was wearing a pearl necklace with a jeweled pendant in the middle.

Johnna Alwin
, Vining said to herself. Her palms slick with perspiration yet her fingers ice-cold, she handed the drawing to Kissick, wondering if he noticed the slight tremble in her hand.

He set the drawing he’d been looking at faceup on the table beside the others in the grisly gallery.

The color drained from Vining’s face when she saw the fourth and final one, even though she’d expected it. Why else would Folke have brought them to her? Why else would he be standing there, so grave? What had happened in the house on El Alisal Road wasn’t her nightmare alone. The oft-told tale of the ambush attack on Vining served as both a cautionary tale and as the nightmare scenario of every officer everywhere. For the PPD, that unsolved crime was a blot on their common psyche.

Kissick, seeing her face, moved to look over her shoulder.

Folke and Chase, knowing what the paper held, shifted uneasily.

The drawing clearly depicted Vining. It showed her from the shoulders up. A man shown from behind was facing her. He had short dark hair. Shadowy reflections of him were drawn in her eyes. The expression on her face could have been mistaken for rapture, had it not been for the knife protruding from her neck and the blood that made a glistening trail down the front of her uniform.

She licked her lips and swallowed. No one spoke. It was her privilege to break the silence. Her mind was elsewhere.

It was a year ago June. She was walking up the flower-lined
brick path of the two-story colonial home on El Alisal Road in an upscale Pasadena neighborhood. It was Sunday and she was in uniform, having taken an overtime shift to earn extra money on a weekend when Emily was with her dad. It was nearly the end of her shift and she was about to head into the station when the call came in. Suspicious circumstances. A local realtor, Dale David, was watching a house for the vacationing owners and noticed a window open that he was certain he’d left closed. The man Vining had met at the home resembled the realtor, whose face adorned bus benches all over town. It was all innocent and reasonable. Mundane, even. There was nothing to raise her suspicions until she’d waited a few seconds too long. He had sent her on a journey from which she had yet to fully return.

It happened in the kitchen, where she’d followed him to look at the open window. There things took a strange turn. He began rambling, making much of a set of poetry magnets affixed to the refrigerator. He’d peeled off a single magnet, printed with a tiny word in black on white, and displayed it in his palm.

“Do you see this? Officer Vining, I want you to see this.”

The way he’d said her name gave her a chill. He was panting, as if sexually aroused.

She’d already discreetly called for backup, and was waiting, biding her time. She was unnerved but calm. She vowed not to draw her gun too quickly. The last time she’d drawn her gun on a man, she’d shot him to death. This was different, she told herself. That man had drawn on her first. This man’s hands were in full view. This was not at all the same.

She couldn’t see what he held in his palm and would not move closer to do so. He was already too close,
shortening her reaction time if he came after her, which he did, grabbing a knife from a set of cutlery in a wood block on the kitchen island. She’d fired and missed. He hadn’t. The knife had sliced the back of her gun hand and then it was in her neck.

He’d held her close, his arm around her waist. She felt his breath on her face. She could almost feel it now, moist and warm and scented of mint. They’d held each other’s gaze, like lovers. Had she ever again looked at herself in the mirror and not seen his shadow there?

When the house exploded with pounding feet, he released her, letting her body slump to the floor. He escaped, though just barely, using a carefully planned route.

Sergeant Terrence Folke had been the one to try to keep her calm, to keep her still, to keep her from crawling, trailing a slick of blood, into the kitchen pantry. Among her dense memories of that day, some crystal clear, others cloaked in fog, was the barely controlled panic in Folke’s voice.

But she kept crawling, the knife jutting from her neck as she bled to death. Before she lost consciousness, she reached the object of her desire, the poetry magnet that he’d tossed aside, that T. B. Mann had tossed aside when he’d come at her with the knife. It said one word: pearl.

She blinked.

They were all watching her, waiting.

Blood pounded in her ears as if trying to escape, some of it strangers’ blood transfused to save her life. It had been a year and three months. Was the blood now hers?

“He could have drawn this based on news reports.”

Her ears still drummed but her voice was controlled. She felt disconnected. Everything seemed disconnected, as she had been from her life.

“It was all over the news that I was stabbed in the neck by an intruder in that house.”

She didn’t believe it, but only she knew that. Whoever had made these drawings knew about Tucson detective Johnna Alwin.

She caught Chase looking at the long scar down her neck, T. B. Mann’s incision improved by a surgeon’s scalpel. The angry red hue of that scar and the smaller one on the back of her right hand, her weapon hand, where he had first sliced her, had diminished. They were now pink, an innocent color.

Chase looked away.

She set the final sketch on the table beside the other three. “Where’s the drawing pad? The originals?”

Folke said, “We’ve booked it as evidence in a crime investigation. We’ll have it fingerprinted.”

Kissick pointed toward the four sketches. “It’s possible this Nitro didn’t draw those. He could have found or stolen the drawing pad.”

Vining stood with her legs apart and her hands behind her back. It was a solid stance, in counterpoint to her shaken well-being. “What does Nitro look like?”

Chase responded. “Caucasian. Six feet. One sixty. Blond over blue. Twenty-five to thirty. His hair is dyed nearly white, but the roots are dark brown.”

Kissick said to Vining, “Your guy was six feet and Caucasian.”

Vining was studying the carpet. She had to clear her throat before she could speak again. “I got a good look at the man who attacked me. I’d recognize him if I saw him again.”

Sergeant Early returned and joined them. Folke gave her a summary of what had gone on.

Early asked, “Does he look like he was living on the streets?”

“His clothes were dirty, but he didn’t look street-hard,” Chase said. “He looks like he just got out of an institution or a dark hole. He’s pasty pale. He’s thin, but not malnourished. Good teeth. He’s had dental work. Wasn’t hungry.”

Folke added, “His clothes were good quality. Wool gabardine slacks, lined. White dress shirt, button-down collar. Clean new BVDs. Good shoes and socks.”

“Labels?” Early asked.

Folke raised his index finger, remembering a detail. “The labels were cut out. Someone went to a lot of trouble to hide anything that might identify him.”

“No one saw him get off a bus or out of a car?” Kissick asked.

Both Chase and Folke shook their heads.

“We could post flyers with his picture around Old Pasadena,” Kissick said. “Release it to the media. See if anybody recognizes him.”

Early raised her hand and let it drop against her thigh. “This guy is either faking or he’s crazy. If he’s crazy, he needs to be at County. If he’s faking … What’s his motive? How hard did you try to get him to communicate?”

“We got in his face,” Folke said. “He acts afraid. Skitters off into a corner. Crouches down on the floor. Tries to hide behind his hands. We pressed him hard. If he’s faking, he’s good.”

Early pursed her lips. “Nan, go down there and see if he’s your guy. If he’s not, I don’t know where we can go with this. We don’t have the time or resources to I.D. some mentally ill transient, especially when we’ve got two people at the morgue and one of them in pieces.”

“I’ll go with you,” Kissick offered.

As they filed from the room, Officer Chase was unable to resist reliving his takedown of Nitro, which was
destined to become a favorite among the stories he’d collect during his career. “You should have seen it. We both slid face-first into chili, and we were covered in it head to toe. Here I’m trying to get cuffs on Nitro and this old guy who looks like Santa Claus was complaining that we’d ruined his chance to win the cook-off. The old ladies are covering their eyes because Nitro’s buck naked, except for shoes, socks, and get this, a pearl necklace.”

Vining turned to look at him. “A pearl necklace?”

“Yeah, a woman’s necklace.” Chase gestured toward his chest. “Pearls with a stone on it.”

Vining gaped at him, stumbling into a chair in her path.

Kissick grabbed her arm to steady her. “Whoa. You all right?”

She quickly moved away from him, nervously smoothing her hair. “I’m fine.”

He asked, “Does a pearl necklace have some significance? A couple of the women in those drawings had necklaces.”

She responded crisply, “I don’t know any significance,” but her cheeks colored. She kept her eyes straight ahead as they moved toward the elevator. She hadn’t told anyone what she’d learned about murdered Tucson police detective Johnna Alwin and the mysterious gift Alwin had received, a pearl necklace with a pendant. Only Emily knew about Vining’s similar necklace, how she’d come to own it, and who she believed had left it. These were tiny leads and she guarded them fiercely. She would reveal all at some point. Her theory about T. B. Mann was still embryonic. It might not survive if exposed to the air. There was too much at stake. Everything in its time.

She hated being deceitful to Kissick, but still, she did
it. Perhaps this test proved that she held her relationship with T. B. Mann above all others.

“It’s just strange,” was all she said.

TWELVE

O
nly recently
had Vining opened the files on her attempted murder. It had taken her more than a year to gather the courage. She thought that enough time had passed, and that she would be able to look at the evidence with a cool, analytical eye. She was unprepared for her visceral reaction. Seeing for the first time a photograph of the copious blood on that kitchen floor, her blood, had filled her with rage. Now she was facing the possibility of having her fervent fantasy realized: T. B. Mann in a cage within her grasp. She did not feel invigorated and in command. She felt light-headed and queasy.

They took the elevator. Folke inserted a key to gain access to the basement. Chase got off on the first floor, where he had work to do in the report-writing room before his shift ended.

Exiting the elevator into the jail, they approached a set of gun lockers. Kissick and Folke stashed their weapons, removing the key from the lock when closing the small metal door.