Don't Be Afraid (2 page)

Detective Mark Juarez was getting his second cup of coffee in the squad room when the call came. The throbbing in his head had reduced itself to a dull roar and with this cup, he hoped to banish it at least until the afternoon.

If anyone had asked him if he’d had too much to drink the night before, he would have answered honestly: yes. Nobody did ask him, though, and nobody would because he was clean-shaven, his shirt was pressed and none of these officers knew the difference between this man and his less hungover self.

“Hey, Juarez,” his partner called to him, drawing the name out as if it was unfamiliar to him, and hadn’t been the name of the desk sergeant, Mark’s father, who’d sat downstairs for more than twenty years running the front show.

Mark turned to look inquiringly at Detective Emmett Black, stirring the coffee with a calmness that he knew irritated the older man. They looked like a study in contrasts, or as another detective had commented, like the before and after on one of those extreme makeover shows. Emmett Black was forty-two and five feet, nine inches, if he stood up straight. Paunchy around the middle and jowly around the face, he tried to comb the remaining strands of his thin blond hair to cover as much of his dome-shaped head as he could. His surname belied the color of his skin, which was a pasty white, and he hid his small, watery-blue eyes behind glasses frames that had gone out of style ten years before.

Mark was twenty-six and six foot, three inches, and hard-muscled from hitting the department gym at the end of every shift. His skin was olive-colored, his jaw was firm, his eyes were a large, dark brown and he was convinced that he could have earned his partner’s animosity solely because of his full head of dark brown hair.

“We’ve got a call, let’s go.” Black didn’t give him any information, as usual treating Juarez like he was a raw recruit. And Juarez responded as he usually did, purposely taking an extra sip of coffee, slowing down just to aggravate the older man. Each knew what the other was doing; it was an unspoken standoff they’d been engaged in since Juarez transferred from the NYPD six months ago.

He grabbed his jacket and followed Black out of the station at a sedate pace, taking the passenger seat in the unmarked because Black needed the testosterone boost that came with being behind the wheel.

“What’s the call?”

“Homicide. Out off Tepley Road.”

“Victim?”

“White female.”

“Domestic?”

“Probably.”

They drove in silence for several miles, leaving Steerforth’s town center behind them and heading out past the clusters of older frame houses into the Connecticut countryside.

It was a gray, damp morning and Mark couldn’t help but contrast the rain-soaked rolling lawns and low stone walls with the city neighborhoods he used to travel. He knew that most people would say that this was prettier, but he missed the encompassing feeling of all those tall buildings of concrete and brick and limestone and the way the streetlights would be reflected in puddles on rain-slicked streets.

Not that there wasn’t a city center in Steerforth. There was, after a fashion. Converted colonial boxes turned into high-end office space sitting next to modern corporate headquarters of brick and steel and a state-of-the-art courthouse. It was a small area. The rest of it was residential housing and countryside swiftly being converted into bigger residential housing.

“Shit, that’s it.” Black passed a driveway occluded by trees and screeched to a halt, backing up and turning into it. At first there was nothing but a long canopy of green, but then Juarez could see an updated farmhouse ahead. One of the properties that the wealthy seemed to cherish for its historical value, paying fortunes to preserve rotting frames and sinking extra money into securing the foundation so it could hold their whirlpool tubs. A real estate sign was leaning askew on the front lawn, a little swinging SOLD sign attached to it. They parked behind two black-and-whites that were blocking in a small blue Toyota Camry.

An ashen-faced woman in a black skirt and white blouse was huddled on the front steps talking to one of the uniforms. October wind was whipping strands of her long, black hair around her face. As Juarez and Black approached, she moved one trembling hand from its grip on her waist to push it back.

Another uniform stopped wrapping yellow tape around the front of the house and intercepted them. He was young, probably no more than twenty, moon-faced and acne-scarred, his gray eyes alight with excitement under the brim of his cap.

“Body’s on the second floor. Shot. No sign of the weapon or the perp. Victim’s friend found her.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the witness.

“Her name, Officer Feeney?” Black asked.

Feeney took a notebook out of his back pocket. “Moran,” he recited. “Amy Moran.”

“I’ll go on up, you talk to the woman,” Black said, moving up the steps without waiting for an answer. He gave the woman an appraising look as he passed her. Mark introduced himself and she extended a trembling hand to shake and he saw that she was very pretty, even sick to her stomach as she clearly was.

“You knew the victim, Ms. Moran?”

The woman nodded, opened her mouth to speak and closed it again, struggling for composure. “Sheila Sylvester,” she managed after a minute. “She’s a real estate agent. Was a real estate agent.” The past tense made tears well in the already red-rimmed blue eyes. “We were supposed to meet here to do a walk-through and I was late—” She stopped and blinked rapidly to hold back the tears.

Juarez asked if she’d go through the house with him, and show him exactly what had happened. They started with the door and she showed him how it was open, the lock box still there but not closed.

She walked him through the house, trying to remember what she’d done. But when she got to the part where she described how she’d found her friend by following the ringing of her phone, she hesitated halfway up the stairs and settled for pointing in the direction he should go.

Every homicide scene required a few seconds for Mark to adjust. Always, there were warring emotions coursing through him of revulsion and excitement. Here was a dead body, someone’s sibling, spouse or child. But here, also, was a puzzle, a set of clues that he had to connect to find the bad guy.

A woman’s body was lying in the center of an empty bedroom, her skirt hitched up, her panties ripped off and left on one thigh. She’d been arranged face up, her arms carefully out to the sides, her legs tight together, ankles bound by nylons. Her clothes were on, but everything was in disarray: the blouse ripped open, the bra cut open, the breasts spilling out, and the nipples strangely red at the tips.

Juarez pulled on a pair of latex gloves, took a few deep breaths, and joined Black, squatting on the far side of the body near the woman’s head. The older cop waited until the crime photographer had taken his pictures and then he used one gloved hand and the tip of a capped pen to gently turn the victim’s head to the side.

“Does this look like a gunshot entry to you?” he asked, nodding at a small dark hole with dark red blood surrounding it.

Juarez squatted next to him and peered at the wound. “No. Edges aren’t frayed. Ice pick?”

“Maybe, but you’d think there’d be more blood.”

Sheila Sylvester had been in her late thirties or early forties, a woman struggling with her weight, Juarez thought, noticing the tight fit of the gray suit she wore. Making good money, or just liked to spend it if the designer label in the jacket flap was anything to go by. Expensive shoes, too, and a nice collection of jewelry—several gold rings with precious stones, large gold hoops in the ears, a chain of some sort just visible around the neck.

“None of the jewelry’s been taken,” he said. Black grunted.

“Purse is here, too.” Black pointed and Juarez saw a black handbag underneath the window. A cell phone was resting on the sill above it and Juarez made a mental note to make sure that it got checked for recent calls. He looked back down at the victim and saw something else. The ring finger of the left hand was missing. The only sign that it had been there was the bloody hole left behind. That was weird. That didn’t fit with a typical domestic.

“Did you see this?” Mark pointed at the hand.

Black groaned as he stood up just as the crime scene investigators walked in with their cases. “Getting too old for this, Black?” one of them said as he set his case on the floor and knelt to open it. He had hair plugs and a lime-green shirt and had fashion victim written all over him. Black just gave him a sharklike grin.

“You dress up for your date, Dubow?” he said, nodding at the woman’s body.

“No, that’s for later when he meets your old lady,” one of the other guys said.

They continued the banter, rude jokes about each other and the victim. From the outside it looked insensitive, unkind. Some of it
was
unkind, certainly disrespectful of the dead. But they had to do something to deal with what was in front of them. It wasn’t so much the body that they had to distance themselves from, it was the voices inside that compared this victim to their wives, sisters, daughters, mothers. The fear that came with the job was what had to be kept at bay.

It shocked outsiders if they heard it, which they were never supposed to. But there was the woman in the doorway, still looking green around the gills, her lips pressed tightly together as if she was willing herself to be there.

“Shut up,” Black barked at the other men. He walked over to her, took her arm. “You don’t need to be here, ma’am.”

She resisted being turned away. “I-I need to see her. I need to say goodbye.”

“Not now, not like this,” Black said with uncharacteristic gentleness.

“But I have to.” She pulled out of his grasp, moving across the room, her eyes on the victim. “I was afraid,” she said in a whisper, voice apologetic. “I’m so sorry, Sheila.”

Juarez stepped in before Black could react, stopping her forward progress, but not impeding her view. “How did you know Ms. Sylvester?”

“She was my friend. I mean, we worked together. We’re both agents with Braxton Realty, but we were friends first.”

Her gaze kept stealing from Juarez’s face to the body and then jumping back again.

“Do you know of anybody who wanted to harm Ms. Sylvester?”

“No, nobody.” She shook her head, hair falling forward again and tucked it back. “Everybody loves Sheila.”

This was a standard answer, but Juarez had been a cop long enough to know that nobody is universally loved. “What about her husband?”

“Ex-husband.” Recognition dawned; he could see it in her blue eyes. “Okay, I’ll grant you that Trevor didn’t love her. He was abusive, but that was a long time ago. She doesn’t have dealings with him anymore, not since she gave up all claims for child support.”

“She had children?”

“Two boys. They’re teenagers. Oh, God, what are Michael and Jason going to do?”

The coroner’s arrival interrupted them. Rail-thin, with aristocratic features and a manner to match, Dr. Wallace Crane strode into the room clearly fresh from the links, sparing barely a glance at Juarez and Ms. Moran, his interest solely on the body. Juarez turned his own attention toward the coroner long enough to see Black puff up like an angry cock at Crane’s arrival. Their mutual antipathy began years before when Black was a rookie and had inadvertently disturbed a body at a crime scene. Crane had treated him like a rank amateur ever since, according to Juarez’s father.

“Do you know Trevor’s address?” Juarez turned his attention back to the victim’s friend.

“No. I know he lives in a nearby town. Lewiston?”

Juarez jotted that down in a small notebook. “What about Ms. Sylvester’s address?”

She rattled it off and gave him the address of the realty office as well. Her face was still pale and she was crying again, swiping at the tears in an impatient way. Juarez thought she should be treated for shock, and over her protests had one of the paramedics take her pulse.

“Is there someone I can call? A spouse?”

“No, I’m separated.” A blush stained her face as she said it. “I’ll be okay.”

“We’ll get an officer to escort you home,” he said. “You’ve had a shock and probably aren’t safe to drive.”

At last he got her to concede to having one of the uniforms drive her car home while a black-and-white followed. He walked her to the door and handed her over to the uniforms. Officer Janice Kingston was warm, putting an arm around her, walking to the patrol car slowly. Feeney was clearly disappointed to be given the job of driving the witness’s car, but he left his post without arguing.

Juarez looked at the front door. There was no sign of forced entry, no sign that anyone but Sheila Sylvester had been in the house, which didn’t mean much. If it was the ex, then she might have let him in, or he might have forced his way in as she was getting the key from the lock box.

He thought about that for a few minutes and spent some time studying the front door, but there were no scuffmarks, no impressions in the wood frame, nothing that gave any indication that a struggle had taken place. He traced what could have been her journey through the house and back upstairs.

“Missing ring finger,” Crane intoned in his microcassette recorder. “Signs of vaginal penetration. Bruising.” He moved through the stages of his preliminary examination.

Juarez plucked the leather handbag from the wall and began going through its contents, bagging each item separately. Most of it was standard stuff—wallet, keys, Kleenex, breath mints, a train pass, reading glasses and hand lotion. There was a PDA, too, and to this he gave particular attention.

It took only a few seconds to find the address book and then a quick scroll through the listings to reveal that there was no Trevor Sylvester. Of course there wasn’t. Did he really expect to see the ex’s name in here? He scrolled back up, pausing when he saw Amy Moran’s name, and noting her address before he continued.