Lie Down with the Devil (15 page)

“Feds, huh?” Gloria said darkly.

“Yep.”

“And she said this Danielle Wilder is the woman Sam’s supposed to have offed? I thought you said the murder bid was about something that happened in Las Vegas?”

“Sam said Las Vegas. I’m sure he said Las Vegas. But there was something about a woman on the Cape. I know that.”

“How?”

“How do I know? I remember he said something.”

“You weren’t listening? What? How could you not listen to something like that?”

“It wasn’t like that. It was like food or a movie, like last summer he went out to dinner with this woman or to see some show.”

“I would have listened,” Gloria said.

I was almost sure I remembered the woman’s name. Danielle was a fairly uncommon name.

“What now?” Gloria asked. “How much are you gonna share with the Macs?”

“Yeah, here’s the problem: They were pretty nasty when I didn’t get Jessica—my client—Julie’s ID right. So how are they going to react when they find out she’s related, even in a very oblique way, to me?”

“It was a car accident.”

“Hit and run. But only after the guy ran over her two or three times to make sure she was dead. They’re treating it as a homicide and I don’t like it. I mean, this woman comes to me out of the blue and hires me under an alias, and then it turns out she just happens to be the best friend of a woman Sam’s supposed to have killed? If I were a cop, I’d say that stinks.”

“Put it like that, I can see why you don’t want to run it by the cops.”

“Hostile cops.”

“Why not go to Mooney?”

“What I want—what I need is to find out everything I can about Danielle Wilder. How she died and exactly when she died and why Sam’s on the hook for her death, if he actually is. What the feds think they’ve got on him. Why they haven’t made it public.”

“Politics,” Gloria said. “Feds, they got their own agenda.”

Someone tapped lightly on the glass door and Leroy
came in smiling. Even smiling, he looks threatening. It’s his size.

“Hey,” he said with a nod at me. “You’re in the money.”

“Me?”

“You gonna drive it around here? In this stinking weather?”

“I rented it, Leroy. I know it’s a piece of junk, but I’m gonna make up my mind soon and buy something serious.”

I wanted a fire engine red Miata. I wanted to live someplace where the weather was always sixty-five degrees with sunny skies and a gentle offshore breeze.

“No, no, I’m talking about the Jag,” Leroy said cheerfully. “I’m talking about that deep blue chunk of heaven. Gianelli’s XK smooth-ass ride.”

“I don’t know where it is.”

He gave me a look. “Well, I do. You didn’t park it in the garage, the old garage? I figured you put it there for safekeeping. I wasn’t gonna tell anybody else.”

“Wait a frickin’ minute. Sam’s Jaguar is in the back garage?” Gloria said.

“Come see. Either that or I’m having some kind of weird delusions, hallucinating and shit. Ask me have I been drinking, why don’t you?”

Gloria couldn’t leave the phones. I followed Leroy out the door and down the gravel path.

When Gloria had the garage rebuilt, only one part of the old building was salvageable, a brick three-door garage that she kept mainly to remember how ugly the place used to be. It was currently used for storage, mostly tools and old records. I hadn’t been inside it in months.

While Leroy yanked up the old-fashioned garage door, my cell rang.

“Cops are here,” Roz said. “Outside in an unmarked, waiting.”

“You know them?”

“Same guys here before, to ask about Jessica Franklin. One black, one white.”

“They didn’t ring the bell?”

“No, just waiting.”

Sam’s car was dusty. I circled around to the front of the Jag. The bumper was bent.

Roz’s voice seemed to reach me from a distance. “Carlotta?”

“Don’t tell them you talked to me,” I said. “You don’t know where I am or when I’ll come back.”

I hung up without waiting for a reply.

The bumper was crumpled where it might have hit something or someone. The car was where I might have parked it. I had the car keys.

There was a connection between my phony Jessica Franklin and the woman Sam was supposed to have killed.

There were cops parked outside my house.

I couldn’t go home.

No lock on the office door. Mooney considered wedging a chair under the offending doorknob. He decided against it, eased the folder out of the second drawer on the right, and emptied it on his desktop. Afternoon sunshine, slanting through the grimy window blinds, felt like prying eyes.

He patted the breast pocket of his shirt, stuck the despised reading glasses on his nose, and began, never skipping a word, working slowly, the way he always worked, but conscious that his heart was pounding too quickly in his chest. He wanted to move, not sit. He had a gift for street work, but paperwork was different, a slow, plodding task, sifting and resifting other officers’ reports for tiny golden nuggets. Still, he kept going, because occasionally, mercifully, there came a click, a moment of grace, when a fact shifted in time or space and he saw the case in a new light.

Danielle Wilder’s death wasn’t his case. It hadn’t occurred in his jurisdiction. He’d had to call in favors just to obtain the paper. The resulting file was incomplete; he didn’t even know what was missing, and that made him edgy.

Not so edgy as he had felt doing nothing, not so edgy as he had felt when the Macs barged in with the
news: the hit-and-run vic identified, and get this, she was a witness—no, maybe not a wit—but the best friend of that broad got herself killed over in Nausett. TV called it the “Red Ribbon Killing”? Remember? FBI snatched the case; something major, something to do with organized crime.

There were news clips from Cape Cod and Boston papers. The initial stories made Danielle Wilder’s death seem the sort of lurid sex crime that kept mothers up nights waiting till they heard the familiar tread on the steps or got the reluctant, dutiful phone call:
I’m home, Ma, safe and sound. What did you think would happen to me, huh?

Mooney had no children, but in some way he didn’t understand or particularly want to examine, he thought of them all as his kids. He was glad he hadn’t been called out to look at the body.

At twenty-seven, Wilder would have been insulted by the word
kid.
The photo in the
Cape Cod Times
, probably a high school graduation shot, made her look demure and utterly defenseless, blond and lovely. Young and never to grow old; Mooney hoped there was some kind of grace in that, but the longer he stayed on the force, the more he doubted the Catholic certainties of his childhood. And he was sure as sure could be that when he finally lost his faith, he’d lose his calling, too.

It was a calling, the blue brotherhood, a variation on the priesthood his mother would have chosen for him. If he lost his calling now, after so many years on the force—well, it was late in the day for alternatives.

The Macs were not his favorite team, but they were decent cops. It wouldn’t take them long to make the connection. The FBI had labeled the Nausett killing
mob-related. Nausett was mob; mob was Gianelli; the hit and run was Carlyle; Carlyle and Gianelli were an item. Once they followed the dots, Mooney expected an explosion:
Red Ribbon Killing linked to Boston hit and run.

He pushed the clippings aside, turned to the slim section labeled
NAUSETT.
The first officer at the scene, Jerold Heaney, dispatched in response to a 911, Wednesday morning, 6:17
A.M.
December 20. Five days before Christmas, it would have been barely light. Cold. Heaney had called for backup, strung yellow crime-scene tape. Heaney’s superior, R. Thurlow, had arrived at 6:29 and set the machine in motion, making the call to the state police. A small-town force like Nausett’s knew its limitations. When it came to murder, they called in the troopers. The state police had the CSU, the personnel.

Thurlow. Mooney pondered the name, wondered if he’d caught a break.

The scene had been sketched, diagrammed, photographed, videotaped, and searched by a four-man state team. Mooney studied the diagram, committing it to memory. The three-by-five color glossies were divided into three packets. The photographer had set the scene with wide shots showing sparse grass and gravel, dotted with old tombstones. In the distance, a small wooden building was sheathed in scaffolding, undergoing repairs. As Mooney flipped through the first packet, the focus narrowed to a small circle of rocks. The second packet detailed the placement of the body.

Mooney inspected the last packet, the close-ups, seeing them as from a distance, turning the ravaged body into a test dummy instead of a father’s child. Later, after he had cleared the case, he could bring
back her personhood, her outraged self. Whether he could bring himself back, he no longer knew.

Both knees raised and bent to her left side. Naked, except for black thong panties dangling from her right ankle. Part of him, the part that could never have taken the vows, noted the curves of breast and thigh, the faded tan lines from last summer’s bikini. The cop in him said: no sexual positioning. So easy to spread those lifeless knees, but the killer had moved them, almost modestly, to the side. Mooney noted the dark bruising along the left side of the body, the swollen and distorted face, the thin red ribbon looped around the neck.

Mooney fingered the video; he didn’t want to requisition a viewing room only to have some eager rookie, or worse, one of the Macs, ask which case he was reviewing.

He wasn’t much of a believer, but he believed this: If a homicide wasn’t cleared in the first twenty-four hours, the chances were good it would never get cleared. The first twenty-four were crucial. In the first twenty-four, if cops moved quickly, identifying the vic, collecting the evidence, interviewing the witnesses, they had their best shot.

A few of the cases that stayed stubbornly unsolved were whodunnits, but most of Boston’s open uncleared cases were nothing of the kind. Mooney was in political trouble and he knew it. Last year’s stats were bad and this year’s likely to be worse. He couldn’t guarantee even a forty percent clear rate, and anything under forty was unacceptable. Seventy-eight percent of his cases came from the same neighborhoods, from Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan, and figured in brief newspaper paragraphs where the victims went unnamed, referred to as young black males. The stories
didn’t make the nightly news. Witnesses openly refused to speak to cops. Last week, the family of a fourteen-year-old victim had refused to allow the police in the house.

Mooney realized his lips were pressed into a thin line, his hands clenched. He sucked in a deep breath and made an effort to relax his neck muscles. This Cape thing wasn’t one of those cases. The paper on his desk showed initial progress: the vic ID’d right off the bat, identification made at the scene by the responding officers. That was the thing about small towns: The cops knew the locals.

But evidence at the scene had been sparse; the winter ground rocky and hard. No useful footprints. The man who had called in the body, a cemetery worker named Gordon, hadn’t seen the crime. There were no nearby doors to bang, seeking witnesses.

Mooney paged through the state police documents. Troopers had interviewed the decedent’s acquaintances, but Mooney found no mention of any argument, any violent conflict that might predictably end in murder. Small-town residents, unafraid of gang retribution, they had seemed eager enough to talk about Danielle Wilder. Still, the clock had ticked past deadline on this one; the case had taken on a refrigerator chill. The FBI had abruptly taken over. Then silence.

Mooney had learned about the secret indictment by luck: A woman he used to date, Magda, was a court reporter. Daily, he had anticipated the arrest warrant, the headlines:
MOB BOSS GIANELLI NAMED IN CAPE KILLING.

The headlines never came. The feds might have been hoping that if they kept silent, Gianelli would reenter the country, get caught before he knew they were on to him.

That wouldn’t happen. Mooney had seen to it personally. Not because he owed Gianelli; he didn’t owe Gianelli an ounce of spit. He’d done it for Carlotta, so she wouldn’t prove her stubborn loyalty by giving her lover a phony alibi. Failing that—Mooney had to admit, even given her remarkable blind spot about Sam, she probably wouldn’t go so far as perjury—failing that, so she wouldn’t spend her days at Cedar Junction, never quitting the man who lived for her visits.

At the time, he’d thought he could live with it. Now he wasn’t sure.

When he’d made the split-second decision, he hadn’t known the facts. Mobster and murder; that was all Magda had told him, that Gianelli was connected to a murder, and Mooney had made the easy link and assumed the murder was a mob affair. Murder was murder, sure, but the crooked men who worked the game knew the risks. His informant hadn’t mentioned that this victim was young, female, and lived outside the world of organized crime. She had never hinted that the case was Nausett’s “red ribbon” murder.

Did he know the facts now?

He squinted at the close-ups of the corpse. Was it plausible that the cops had made the ID? He reread the statements, both uncertain, both grounding the identification on a small rose-shaped tattoo on the woman’s ankle. He could buy it; men noticed women’s legs. The woman worked as a paralegal; she’d visited the station on business.

He fingered the piles of paper. No notification of grieving parents, no interviews with stunned siblings. He separated the reports, dividing the interviewees into groups, grouping them by category: family, friends, neighbors, colleagues.

Colleague, colleague, neighbor, colleague. If the
mix spoke to the vic’s life, it said she’d worked too many hours.

She had been a legal assistant. Most of those interviewed were personnel from the law office of Hastings and Muir, one of the oldest Cape Cod firms, headed by a Hastings still. Bradley J. Hastings, forty-eight years old, former town selectman, had made the formal ID. Again, Mooney wondered about the girl’s lack of family.