Defensive Wounds (19 page)

“How's it going?” Marcus asked, his voice rolling out of him, a slow but deadly tsunami.

“No breaks yet. The guy went back to his room and someone killed him, that's about all we got so far.”

“What about the bitch?”

Frank didn't ask who Dean meant. He referred to Marie by the same term himself. “Nothing there either. Autopsy says she was negative for semen, so that screws us. We could be chasing our tails trying to connect it to this convention when we've just got a run-of-the-mill psycho on our hands.”

“I was up most of the night thinking about that,” Marcus said. “If they'd been killed in their own rooms, then maybe some predator decided to make my hotel his hunting ground. Half of my rooms are rented to lawyers this week, so he can knock on any door and have a fifty-fifty chance that it will be opened by a lawyer—and anyone will open the door. Wear something that looks like a uniform, say something that sounds like a valid reason, and they'll open it. People feel too much at home in hotels, like they've stepped into a very tastefully designed playpen where they can't be hurt.”

“I had the same thought. Problem is, our two victims knew each other, dated each other. Kind of takes ‘random' off the table. The killer meant to kill these two in particular. Which brings us back to the beginning: How could either Marie Corrigan or her killer get into that suite without the key card?”

The big man's shoulders slid downward. “That's the other thing I lay awake most of last night wondering.”

“Get an answer?”

“Just this: Nobody could. Unless he was some kind of genius superhacker.”

“But it's just a magnetic strip—”

“Yeah, I know, and kids out on Quincy who never made it past the eighth grade have those zippers to copy credit cards. But he would still have to get a card in the first place, and even then it would take some serious geek skills to copy.”

“So he rents the room—”

“The room code is changed after every checkout.”

“So how did he do it?”

Marcus shrugged, an elegant gesture of resignation. “The old-fashioned way. Stole or bribed a key from someone who works here. Bribed, it would have to be, because all the pass cards are accounted for. Except that I spoke to every single person who has one—eighteen people, including me. Every one of them could produce his or her card, and they all swore up and down they didn't give it to anyone else, not even another worker. So who's lying?” He shrugged again. “I don't know. Even on the job, I never got that human-lie-detector ability down.”

Frank sipped his now-cold coffee. “On the other hand, maybe we just narrowed the suspect pool to eighteen—seventeen—people.”

Marcus snorted a laugh. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, man, but I'm the only one of the eighteen who even knew Marie Corrigan. The rest of them got nothing to do with lawyers. Half are kids, and the other half have been working here so long that I really don't think it's likely they just decided to up and start killing people.”

“Could somebody have stolen one off a maid's cart, then put it back before she noticed?”

“Maids don't keep their key cards anywhere but in their pockets. Leaving it on the cart is grounds for instant termination.”

“How many masters are there?”

“Three. Me, Karla, and the owner.”

“What about him?”

Marcus just laughed. “Lives in Miami. Therefore doesn't even need his card, but he likes that feeling of privilege.”

Frank pondered that for a moment and then, at the risk of implicating his own niece asked, “Can't staff make a new key at the front desk?”

“Yeah, but they didn't. When a card is written, it's recorded in the computer, including when the key was made and when it's scheduled to shut off.”

“Could someone hack the computer instead of the door lock?”

Another snort. “Unlikely. I keep the passwords to the computer system.”

“What if you get hit by a bus?”

“Then Karla takes a bolt cutter to my cabinet. Besides, even if someone had my password, he'd still need to be one hell of a hacker. Anyone who could pull that off would have better things to do than murder lawyers. I would be noticing supplies going missing and customer complaints of lost items going up. Nobody who works here is that computer-savvy. Including me.”

Because he could no longer help it, Frank asked, “What's it like? Working here?” Meaning,
What's it like to be something other than a cop, and does it suck as much as I think it would
?

The question did not seem to offend Marcus. He stared into the liquor bottles, their labels and colored liquids reflected in his eyes, which were nearly as dark as the granite bar. Then the wrinkles in his forehead cleared as if he had surprised himself with the answer: “Not bad. At first I was like, shit, what have I
done
?”

Frank nodded, imagining feeling the same way.

“But it's not bad. The hours are so much better. In Vice, man, it seemed like every friggin' search warrant we served had to be done in the middle of the night, like it was a rule or something: Search warrants couldn't be done during hours when people might actually be awake. Of course, no overtime hours means no overtime pay, but I'm divorced now, so I don't need so much extra cash. The job ain't bad, though. It's not as boring as I thought it would be. Being a cop was all about reacting. Somebody's selling drugs, so we take him down. A dude beats another dude, so we take him down. But this is all about trying to figure out what
could
happen and then preventing it. I have to step back and think, if I wanted to rob these rooms, what would I do? Pop in while the maid is cleaning, pretend it's my room? Tag along behind a maintenance man, catch the door before it closes? If I wanted to appropriate a few cases of booze from the storeroom, how would I do it? How do I move them, how do I try to keep them from being missed? It's all logistics.” He tapped his temple. “I like the head part of it.”

Frank watched the waitress bring the old lady another coffee, then flounce off before he could catch her eye for a refill.

“It's a different story every minute,” Marcus Dean continued. “People do weird stuff, man, just weird. I had a guy check in, dressed nice, platinum credit card, quiet and respectable. In twenty minutes we've got all sorts of traffic to his floor—non-guests, people coming and going. A call to my old co-workers and they pull the guy out of the room with a stock of coke, Ecstasy, and meth. And that's not the funny part. The funny part, the cops don't hold the undeclared guest in the room, so his buddy asks if he could keep the room since it's paid for, and the arrested guy says okay. He goes off to jail, and his buddy calls room service every hour, ordering an eight-dollar can of pop or a fifteen-dollar bowl of soup, charges it to the room. Which was on the first guy's credit card. The first guy finally thinks better of this and calls the card company from jail to shut off the card. Then we could finally toss out guy number two.

“And the kids, man. Rich people do an even worse job of looking after their kids than poor people. That's what made me craziest about working in the projects, seeing these toddlers in filthy clothes, more or less fending for themselves, but here I've found kindergarten-age kids wandering to the gift shop. Their clothes are cleaner, that's the only difference. Last month we had a sports team, one of those exclusive schools, younger kids. The boys were fine, really. Their
parents
turned the hallways into their personal lounge, getting drunker and louder with each case of beer. Night manager kept talking to them, but no one on three floors got any sleep that night. It's always something. Just like being a cop,” he said, eyebrows lifting with this sudden revelation, “except no one gets shot.”

“Usually,” Frank joked.

“Usually.”

“Why'd you leave the department?” Frank asked. Maybe too personal, but surely Marcus had been asked that question before. And Frank really wanted to know how someone could walk away from the job. It sounded impossible to him.

Marcus studied the bottles lined against the glass wall, maybe deciding on an answer. In the end he only shrugged and said, “Got tired of the BS. The whole freakin' war on drugs—let me tell you something about our fine pharmaceutical representatives. They know what they're doing. They structure their work so there's no paper trail, all verbal cues and quick handoffs. No evidence. We'd work months to get a conviction on a guy, and by the time the lawyers got done with it, he'd get the minimum sentence. His assistants would take over until their time was up, and the whole trade goes on without a hiccup. Working Narco is not quite like anything else. At least when you got a guy for murder, either he goes away or he sure ain't likely to do it again real soon. But drugs, it don't even pause.”

Nothing Frank hadn't heard before, but something he knew to be gospel true and therefore deserving respect. “Frustrating.”

“You got it.” Marcus frowned at the bottles now, apparently focusing on the Crown Royal.

Frank hastily pressed on. Technically, Marcus was a suspect, and not only because of the key cards. “I heard you beat a guy half to death.”

Marcus glanced over at him, and Frank couldn't help the tiny frisson of fear that comes with seriously ticking off a behemoth. But the anger in the other man's face quickly faded into melancholy. “That's marking the truth up about two hundred percent—as usual. I hit a guy, yeah. Arrested him in the park with a bag of pills and two underage girls, and he got smart with me. I shouldn't have done it, sure, but half to death? More like a bruise and one loose tooth.”

“That was it?”

“We're cops,” Marcus said, slipping into the inaccurate tense. “That's
never
it. So I could have gone before the board, given up my gun, get loaned to the front desk or the property room for a few months, but I—” He stared at his own reflection long enough for Frank to run through eleven or twelve different endings for that sentence, then said, “I didn't feel like it.”

He got up and walked around the bar, plucking the paper ball from between the two bottles and dropping it into a trash can. “I just didn't feel like it.”

Forearms folded over the granite, he stared Frank down as if daring him to dispute the story.

Which Frank had no intention of doing. “You have this same convention here last year?”

“No, it rotates. Sure wish they could have picked Moline or something this time.”

“Any of these attorneys frequent this place even before the convention?”

“Not that I noticed. I know some of 'em, and I don't remember seeing them here before. Why, you thinking about the sex-club idea?”

“You heard about that?”

Marcus laughed and straightened. “Everybody's heard about it, man. But these rooms don't rent by the hour. This is the
Ritz
. People come here for one of three reasons: because it's a real special event, because they want to impress somebody, or because they've got so much money they don't care what the rate is. Lawyers make a good buck, but not
that
good. If their little club had regular meetings in this place, no one could afford to be a member. Except maybe for Britton.”

“That was my thinking, too. What about Marie Corrigan?”

“What about her?”

“Ever see her around here?”

“Nope. Doesn't mean she wasn't. I don't see most of the guests, unless they raise some kind of ruckus.”

“See her anywhere else?”

This time the momentary irritation didn't melt into melancholy. “What do you mean?”

“I heard you asked Marie Corrigan out. More than once.”

A pause ensued. Frank had encountered that pause in every interview he'd ever conducted. Every one, every time. Sometimes more than once during the conversation, but always at least once. It ensued as the person being questioned debated about whether or not to lie to him. People calculated the damage if they didn't and the risk if they did and, most important, the odds that Frank would find out anyway. And then they usually—

“Yes.”

—realized that those odds were really, really good.

“Where'd you hear that?” Marcus asked.

“Around.” Actually, it came from nothing more than a vague rumor passed to Angela from a friend of hers in Records whose brother-in-law's stepdaughter clerked in the PD's office. Something like that.

“But it was a couple of years ago,” Marcus went on. “I'd just gotten divorced, and—You ever get divorced?”

Frank shook his head. “Never married.”

“Not that I was happy about splitting up—I wasn't—but still, when you've had that ring around your finger for a lot of years and suddenly you don't, you're like a kid getting out of school for the summer. I can ask out anyone I want! I can take anything in a skirt back to my apartment, and there ain't nothin' nobody can say to me about it!” He laughed, and it seemed genuine. “Eventually I figured out that hot young things don't
want
to go back to some broken-down cop's crappy apartment, but for a while there I was like a stupid dog, the kind that barks at anything that moves. And say what you like about that vicious bitch, but she was hot.”