Cut to the Quick (18 page)

Removing the metal pin that bolted the door, she slid the door open and stepped onto the terrace into the cool air. Her bird’s-eye view gave her a clear shot of the distinctive towers of General Hospital. Decidedly unglamorous during the day. At night, the massive complex added to the twinkling lights. Today, it gained new significance. Nitro was there. For three days, he’d be there. Then he’d be released and would walk onto the streets and disappear.

Nitro had shown up the same time that a psycho killer was flexing his muscles in Pasadena. The worst possible time for her. The best time to throw her off guard, to rattle her equilibrium. He had shown up in Pasadena and behaved in a manner that was likely to earn him detention at a mental-health facility. Coincidence?

Hardly
.

Nitro’s pearl necklace and drawings eliminated that possibility.

Those eyes. There was something there that she couldn’t name, but it seared her soul. Why when she looked into Nitro’s eyes did she sense something of T. B. Mann?

She closed her eyes on the lights of General Hospital. A residue of the outline of the towers remained in her mind. Slowly it was replaced by another memory, one on which she could not close her eyes.

Standing on her balcony a few months ago, after she’d tested her health and vitality and found both strong, she’d issued T. B. Mann a challenge.

Game on, she’d told him.
Game on
.

Then it was summer. The hot days and warm nights had lulled her with their simple pleasures. Lulled that
bullet of rage if not to sleep, then into that twilight state where the edges got fuzzy. She could almost,
almost
accept that T. B. Mann might always run free.

Did T. B. Mann know that? Did she and he now share that blood bond, as powerful as parent and child, husband and wife? Was there an equal bond between murderer and victim?

Clearly, he was not through with her, and consequently, she could not be through with him. “Who is Nitro, you asshole? A messenger?”

In the still air, two steel tubes of the wind chimes softly and harmoniously rang.

Vining didn’t turn to look, knowing nothing she could see had sounded the chimes. Instead she looked at the lights of the Big G until the soft high notes had dissipated on the air.

SIXTEEN

V
ining went
around turning on lamps and fluffing pillows, irritated that she cared. She took a shower.

She craved vegging out in pajamas, but dug through her closet looking for something that looked nice but not like she’d spent a lot of time preparing. She found a black sundress with a shirred bodice that she’d bought for a barbecue at the home of her mother’s latest beau and slipped on flip-flops decorated with sparkling plastic jewels that her grandmother, who liked that sort of thing, had bought her. She twisted up
her hair and fastened it with a banana clip, leaving tendrils loose. Makeup would shout that she cared. She swiped on a little lip gloss. It wasn’t about love, she told herself, it was about pride.

She took the photocopies of Nitro’s drawings from her briefcase. In the kitchen, she paused to forage through the refrigerator, grabbing a slice of leftover pepperoni pizza and a bottle of sparkling lemonade. Her diet was miserable when Em was gone. Em had taken to doing much of the cooking, having declared it her new hobby. That was fine with Vining. Em was her anchor in so many ways. More than she wanted to admit. More than she dared share with the teenager. That was too big a burden for a daughter, and Vining knew it.

She went downstairs to the large former rumpus room that Wes had helped her transform into a bedroom and work area for Emily. Wes had bought Emily’s computer equipment and paid the bill for a broadband connection.

Vining sat at Emily’s desk. She was nearly face-to-face with a framed photo of herself when she was Emily’s age. Her daughter had dug it out of some cardboard box in a back closet. The resemblance between mother and daughter was striking, down to the long straight nearly black hair, green-gray eyes, and Mona Lisa smiles. Neither were fans of cameras. Vining had adopted a closed-lipped smile to hide her overbite and the gap between her teeth. Emily’s teeth were perfect, yet she didn’t flash them. Both were reserved that way. Ironically, Vining had been in the camera’s eye, her image published and broadcast, more than she ever thought possible.

Slung over the corner of the frame was the actual necklace that Vining was wearing in the photograph, a confection of crystals on web-like chains, a style popular at the time. It touched Vining that her daughter wanted
those mementos. Vining guessed that she was a decent role model, but she didn’t see Emily following her path into law enforcement. She thought the Job, although tough for women, made a good career, but Emily was too emotional. Emily was excited about the prospect of college, and was talking about big-name schools in other states. Vining guardedly encouraged her, privately praying she would decide to stay close to home. Emily was still toying with becoming a photographer or maybe a chef. This week, anyway. But lately she had decided that chefs spent too much time on their feet and worked crazy hours. Happily for Vining, Em had already loved and discarded two other occupations, ghost hunter and thanatologist.

Vining turned on the computer, logged on to her e-mail, and downloaded the photos Kissick had sent of Nitro and his necklace.

She looked at the shot of Nitro cowering on the bed, his head barely visible above his bent knees. She enlarged the image, zooming in on his eyes, making them larger and larger, until they disintegrated. She reversed the process, until they again had shape and substance. Smaller, smaller, until … 
there
. She again caught a glimpse of that nameless something that made her think of T. B. Mann.

She’d watched Emily crop photos, and she fooled around with the software until she figured it out. She clipped out Nitro’s eyes and eyebrows and printed the image.

Next she printed the photograph of the necklace being held between her hands.

She looked at Nitro’s drawings.

One woman was not dead, but was being held at gunpoint. She was the only one wearing a uniform that suggested she might be a police officer.

One woman was trussed like a deer being bled out before
butchering. She was wearing something resembling a pearl-and-pendant necklace. So was the one who had been stabbed to death in the closet, the one who Vining was certain was meant to be Johnna Alwin. The fourth drawing unmistakably depicted T. B. Mann’s murder attempt on Vining.

The drawings included telling details. The nude woman hanging by her ankles was inside a ramshackle wooden building. The officer in uniform stood against a distinctive domed mountain that Kissick had thought was Morro Rock. Vining had since found a photo of Morro Rock on the Internet and agreed.

Then there was Detective Johnna Alwin of the Tucson P.D., stabbed seventeen times in a storage closet of a medical office building, as shown in the drawing.

The settings for all the drawings except the one of her were specific. Her drawing showed no background at all. But it did show how close T. B. Mann had stood to her.

Vining had learned about Alwin’s murder while she was doing her private investigation into untimely deaths of female police officers. She’d been drawn to Alwin’s case when she’d learned that the Tucson police detective had also been involved in a high-profile incident that had put her in the news, like Vining. As part of an undercover operation, Alwin had shot and killed a local drug dealer with mob connections. Vining had learned through a phone conversation with Alwin’s husband that his wife had been given a pearl-and-pendant necklace after the shooting. It was accompanied by a small card with a handwritten note: “Congratulations, Officer Alwin.”

The circumstances too closely mirrored Vining’s to be coincidence.

Vining logged on to the Internet, brought up the Tucson
Police Department’s Web site, and looked at the memorial page for fallen officers. It included a photo of Alwin. The face in Nitro’s drawing was a good rendition, done in the same hard-edged style of the other three drawings. Whoever drew it could have patched the details together from news reports.

Except for the pearl necklace.

During Vining’s research on the Alwin case, in which she’d accessed information available to any citizen, she’d turned up no crime-scene photos.

Alwin’s husband had told Vining his wife had been wearing the necklace when attacked. She was dressed to meet him for dinner when she was waylaid by an unexpected phone call from an informant.

Months ago, Vining had spoken to the lead detective on Alwin’s homicide, Lieutenant Owen Donahue. He told her the case had been long closed, the murder attributed to Jesse Cuba, a drug addict informant whom Alwin had gone to meet. Cuba was later found dead of a heroin overdose in his seedy motel room. Also in his room was Alwin’s purse with her blood on it.

The way the case had been tied up seemed too pat to Vining.

And there was the issue of the necklace.

It was presumably still in the Tucson Police Department’s evidence room. Alwin’s husband had his reasons for never having retrieved it. She didn’t know the type of stone in Alwin’s necklace. If Emily’s death stone theory held, it would be garnet.

She looked at the photo of Nitro’s necklace with its imitation sapphire.

She did a search on “birthstone sapphire” and learned that it was the stone for September.

Nitro’s necklace was old. Did it belong to a woman murdered years ago? Was it the prototype for the others?
Had Nitro himself been a victim of T. B. Mann? Or was Nitro the messenger, delivering the necklace for someone who was to be murdered in September? Vining wondered if she was the intended recipient. Or was it all a ruse, designed to mess with her head?

Nitro wasn’t T. B. Mann, but he had to have a connection to him, even if T. B. Mann had paid him to carry out the deranged-silent-man charade.

Vining had never gone to Tucson to follow up on the Alwin lead. She checked flights to Tucson on the computer. There were many available. She couldn’t leave town now, during the critical initial hours of a homicide investigation. Plus, she’d come close to losing her cool with Nitro in the jail earlier that day. Kissick hadn’t mentioned it afterward, but cops were always watching. Especially each other. She’d worked hard to put the past behind her. The fact that she’d regained her old desk in Homicide showed that she’d succeeded. It could just as quickly be taken away again. There was a lot at stake in their line of work. Like a game of tiddlywinks, when pressure is put on an officer, you want to be confident that you know which way he or she will jump.

She heard a car stop in front of the house and doors open and shut. She quickly gathered her materials and closed down the computer. She jogged upstairs and stashed the drawings and photos in her bedroom. She lingered in the living room until she heard the key in the lock and the front door opening, then walked into the entryway.

“Hi, baby.” Vining fiercely hugged her daughter.

“Hi, Mom.” Emily unloaded the shopping bags that weighted her arms onto the floor.

“I’m glad you’re home. Missed you.” She gave Emily’s dress a quick once-over and then said hi to Wes. She didn’t move to make physical contact. Years ago, she had
decided that a handshake was too formal and a hug was too personal, so she’d settled on a wave. He had never indicated that it bothered him.

“Sorry we got Em home so late.” He lingered in the doorway, holding the handle of the girl’s rolling suitcase.

“It’s all right. I’ve been working late anyway.”

“The big case. I heard.”

“Sounds like everyone had a nice vacation. You did some shopping.…” Vining looked at the bags.

“You know Kaitlyn,” he said.

“Mom, we saw an awesome photography exhibit. Dad bought me a print to put in my room.”

“You want me to take this downstairs?” Wes indicated the rolling suitcase.

“That’s okay. Just leave it there.” She hated that she still found him attractive. He was thirty-five, but he had changed little since high school. He’d filled out, taking on a more manly physique, and his hairline had receded slightly. He’d started wearing his sandy blond hair trimmed closer to his scalp. He’d recently acquired an elaborate, colorful tattoo of bamboo trees on one upper arm. Kaitlyn had influenced his wardrobe. The entire presentation was decidedly hipper than when he and Vining had been married.

The way he looked at her made her glad she’d fixed herself up. Part of her still grieved. Part of her wanted him to suffer. She’d become reconciled to the fact that she might never get over being dumped by him. While she and Emily rarely spoke of it anymore—it was a fact of their lives, nothing to do about it, might as well fret over the weather—Vining knew that her father’s abandonment was a scar Emily would always carry with her.

Emily did an angry pirouette to display the dress. “Well …?”

It was strapless with a short jacket, white with embroidered black swirls around the hem. It made Emily look sophisticated. Vining had to admit it was cute, and it definitely looked more expensive than the frock they’d bought at J. C. Penney.

Vining shrugged, “It’s cute, Em.”

Wes hooked his thumbs into his slacks pockets. “Kaitlyn didn’t mean to step on anyone’s toes. She loves having a daughter to shop for.”

It rubbed Vining wrong when Kaitlyn referred to Emily as her daughter. It wasn’t inappropriate, but it still ticked her off.

“Mom, Kaitlyn said the dress we bought was tacky.”

“Em, she didn’t say tacky,” Wes protested.

“That’s what she meant.”

“Emily, you were rude to Kaitlyn when she was only trying to be nice.”

“
I
was rude?” Emily’s eyes flared. “Kaitlyn said we were going to an
exclusive
restaurant and she wanted me to look
nice
in front of her parents. She picked up the Penney’s bag like it had dog poop in it before she even saw the dress Mom and I bought. Then
you
got mad at
me
and said
I
hurt Kaitlyn’s feelings. What about
my
feelings?”