Now or Never (5 page)

Harry laughed again. He stood up and slapped him on the back. “Thanks for the compliment. But a person needs time to build a relationship. I called, she called back—we had a drink, an evening here, an hour or two there. It’s just not enough.”

He called for the check, laid the money on the table and added a five-dollar tip. He had a soft spot for waitresses—they worked hard for their money, and he knew most of it came from tips.

The young woman smiled appreciatively at him as she scooped it up. “Thanks a lot,” she called. “You have a good day now.”

Rossetti turned and gave her a wink and she laughed.

“See that,” he said to Harry. “One encouraging word and you’d have had yourself a date.”

Harry sighed exaggeratedly. “Rossetti, Rossetti, you’re the self-confessed Casanova, not me. It was you she was smiling at. Besides, she probably has a husband and three kids.”

“Since when was that a problem?” Rossetti looked smug.

Harry laughed. “Shame on you, a good Italian Catholic boy. If only your mama could hear you. And your priest.”

“Believe me, he hears it all. Including how I feel about rapists and killers and how I want to rip the balls off them.”

Squeeze was tied to the post outside the café next to an almost-empty dish of Alpo. Harry unhitched the leash. “Meet you back at the car,” he said to Rossetti.

“Sorry about this, boy,” he muttered as the dog
tugged him down the road. “But it’s been a tough couple of days. I’ll make up for it with a good long run later.”

Squeeze wagged his tail, sniffed the grass, and did his duty. Harry guessed that whatever went down it was all right with Squeeze.

In the car, driving back to Boston, he thought about the woman he had taken out to dinner three weeks ago. She was attractive, charming, cultured and very self-assured. She came from a good Boston family and her parents knew his.

“It’s a put-up job between them,” she had said when she called and left a message on his machine. “I’ve been away, working in Paris for a couple of years, and my parents think I’m out of the social swing. And your mother seems to have given up all hope. This may be our last chance as far as they’re concerned, so why don’t we make them happy? Won’t you please have dinner with me, one evening next week?”

He had been charmed when he played back the message, and charmed by her. She was tall and slender with a good body, and she wore her long dark hair pulled back, Spanish style, in a knot at the nape of her creamy neck. Her brown eyes sparkled and so did her wit. Dinner had been fun, and so had the drink a couple of nights later at her place. But he had pulled the eight-to-four shift and had to run. He had seen the regret in her eyes and heard it in his own voice.

His mother had called the other night to say that the woman was seeing an old friend from college and they seemed made for each other.

Harry shrugged. Such was the life of a busy cop—especially a dedicated one.

He glanced at the clock on the glossy burled-walnut dashboard of the Jag. If he put his foot down, he might have time to take a shower and change before he went back to the hospital for the autopsy.

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, at seven thirty in the morning, Harry was in the squad room, his hands clasped behind his head, his feet propped on the desk, his eyes closed. He was thinking about Summer Young.

He and Rossetti had just emerged from a grueling meeting with the irate police chief. He had said the mayor was getting restless, he had to answer to the public. Was there a serial killer on the loose in his city? If so, what were the police doing about it?

“What does he
think
we’re doing? Sitting on our butts? Just letting the guy get away with it?” Rossetti demanded indignantly.

Harry sympathized. They were both feeling the pressure. “We’re doing everything we can,” he had told the chief. “We’re doing our best to catch the bastard.” He would never forget that “bastard” was what Summer had called her killer just before she died.

“Yeah.” The chief was upset. “Well, Harry, your best is just gonna have to get better. And fast. The mayor wants this killer caught. Boston is famous for its colleges and he needs their image kept clean. He doesn’t want college girls raped and slashed and dead. Besides, he has a girl of his own at Northeastern. He has a personal concern, you might say. He wants action, Harry. Now.”

Harry swung his legs off the desk and switched on his PC, summoning up his list of evidence.

The local crime-scene officers had done a thorough job. They had found kneeprints in the sand where the killer had crouched over his victim. From them they had been able to deduce he was a short, stocky man, possibly five foot seven or eight.

They had also found traces of skid marks where the killer had gunned the car in his escape, but the area was too sandy to leave much impression. The crime lab was analyzing the minute particles of rubber that had been scraped from the road, but they didn’t hold out much hope for matching tires from them. As for the parking lot near the college, it too had shown a dusty scuffle of unidentifiable tire marks.

But Summer’s car told a whole other story. They knew that the killer had hidden in the back of the Miata. He had taken her by surprise with a karate-type blow, evidenced, the police surgeon told them, by the purple bruises on her neck over the carotid artery and on her forehead, where she had fallen forward and struck her head on the steering wheel.

Forensics was leaving no stone unturned. The whole basis of forensic science was that a criminal
always
leaves something of himself at the scene of the crime. And that he
always
takes something from there, on his clothing or on his body: minute particles of skin or dust, a thread, a hair, a flake of paint. Forensics looked for evidence in impossible places.

They had hoped to raise a footprint in the Miata, using an electronic mat. They placed a sheet of foil between two sheets of black acetate and ran a weak electrical current through. The electricity would attract the dust particles to the surface in the shape of a footprint, if there was one. They were unlucky—there was no print—but they collected the dust anyway and took it away to be analyzed.

They had also found a tiny black fiber on the backseat of the Miata, and a couple of hairs that didn’t match the
victim’s had been removed from her clothing. The crime lab was running tests and Harry expected to hear the results soon. Of course the tests would prove nothing by themselves but Harry had learned to respect such evidence. Forensics was the modern-day equivalent of Sherlock Holmes. If the butler did it, they could confirm it.

They were also testing the saliva taken from the bite marks on her breasts, and a forensic odontologist was reconstructing the killer’s teeth and dental work from the bite marks.

But the most vital piece of evidence was the semen found on the victim. When the results of the DNA tests came through, it could link the killing to the two other murders. DNA evidence was as damning as any fingerprint. It was what would put this killer behind bars for life.

Meanwhile, a week had gone by since Harry and Latchwell had gotten the photo-fit. The local TV stations had shown it on every news program and all the newspapers had front-paged it, morning and evening. Calls had flowed in, from the usual cranks as well as from the genuinely concerned who thought they might have seen the killer. Every possible lead had been followed. And—nothing.

Harry was beginning to doubt the accuracy of the picture. Maybe he had pushed those fishermen too hard, put ideas in their heads.

Harry thought about what Summer had said before she died.
Staring dark eyes … soft hands
. She was the only one who really knew what the killer looked like.

Even Doc Blake, after the autopsy, had seemed skeptical. “Are you sure this is a true likeness?” he had asked. “How can you be certain? Only the girl could have told you, and unfortunately she didn’t live long enough.”

Dr. Blake was right, he thought, swinging his legs down from the desk and running his hands wearily through his dark hair. Either the photo-fit was not a good
likeness, or the killer was not a local man. The case needed more public awareness if they were to keep him from striking again—it needed more nationwide publicity.

“What we really need,” he said to Rossetti, “is Mallory Malone.”

Rossetti raised his dark eyebrows. He stared at his partner as though he’d gone crazy. “Yeah. Sure we need her. She’d make us look like a couple of dumb cops on network TV, while she batted her baby blues and told the nation that if we were smart and did our job properly, we would have caught this killer first time out. In other words, buddy, you and I would take the rap publicly for three murders. The media would latch on to us like piranhas in a feeding frenzy.” He shrugged. “Think again, Prof. That’s my advice.”

“But what if she displays the photo-fit on her show? Maybe she’d snag the one person who knows who this guy is. In California, perhaps. Or Florida or Texas or Montana. Jesus, Rossetti, we need help, and we need it now. Before the trail goes cold.”

“What trail?” Rossetti glared at him. “Why go looking for trouble? Aren’t we in deep enough already? Don’t we have the chief on our backs, to say nothin’ of the mayor and the college presidents … hell, all of Massachusetts. So why not Mallory Malone as well? Might as well make a party of it.”

His dark eyes met Harry’s angrily for a minute, then he shrugged, defeated. “Ah, what the fuck, of course you’re right. What’s a guy’s career worth anyhow if he can’t finish the job he set out to do. Call Malone if you have to, but leave me out of it. I’m off to Ruby’s to punish myself with eggs and a short stack, and their ‘special’ ungenuine maple syrup. You comin’?”

Harry grinned. “I’ll let you kill yourself with Ruby’s kindness on your own. I’ll settle for another cup of that black death they call coffee around here.”

Harry shouldered through the crush to the coffee machine at the end of the hallway. It smelled of sweat and cigarettes and stale pizza, and even this early in the morning the squad room was buzzing. The graveyard shift had been busy: a domestic dispute had ended in a stabbing—not fatal yet, but odds were it would end up that way; a drug-related shooting and a drive-by. The holding cells were crowded with drunks and domestic-violence and public-nuisance cases, and weary cops were typing up case sheets and answering the constantly ringing phones. Not a bad haul for an eight-hour shift. For the umpteenth time Harry wondered why man never learned that when it comes to violence, nobody wins.

From years of practice, he shut out the racket and sat at his desk contemplating Mallory Malone.

On television she was a hunter. Twice she had uncovered information that led to photo-fit pictures. Twice she had displayed those photo-fits on her program and the suspected criminals had been captured.

Malone made it her business to know everything about the people she was investigating and her research team seemed endowed with second sight. She had contacts in high places and was adept at uncovering even the best-kept family secrets. People joked nervously that your slate had better be as clean as the day you were born if Malone came after you. Even the cops said she was a toughie. They said she sank her teeth into her victims like a rottweiler and she didn’t let go.

And the only reason she got away with it was because she looked like an angel.

Her blue eyes always had an innocent and slightly surprised expression, as though she couldn’t quite believe what she was doing. In her Donna Karan suits, she looked like corn-fed Middle America hitting the big time, and she had an ingenuous, sunshiny quality that concealed a steely shaft of ambition.

The public might love her, but her relationship with the cops was definitely love-hate. They appreciated it when she helped them get the killers and the crack dealers and the drug runners, but they hated the fact that she made it look as though she were doing their job better than they did it themselves.

Harry shrugged—he was between a rock and a hard place. He picked up the phone and dialed the number of Malmar Productions.

“This is Homicide Detective Harry Jordan of the Boston PD,” he told the woman who answered. “I’d like to speak with Ms. Malone.”

“One moment, sir. I’ll put you through to her assistant.”

After a few minutes of surprisingly gentle piano music on hold, another voice said, “Beth Hardy here. How can I help you, Detective Jordan?”

“I have a case I’d like to discuss with Ms. Malone. The murder a couple weeks ago of a young college student.”

“Oh, the girl from BU?”

“Then you read about it?”

“I did and I felt especially bad about it. BU’s my own college. I’m not much older than she was. I couldn’t help thinking, there but for the grace of God goes little old me. Poor kid.”

“That’s why we could use Ms. Malone’s help.”

Beth sighed regretfully. “Sorry, Detective Jordan, but your timing’s off. She just got back from London yesterday, and for once she’s taking a break. Anyhow, the programs are all set for the next six weeks.” She hesitated, remembering Mal’s telephone call about the case. By now, the research team had probably dug out the information she had requested.

“Tell you what,” she added. “I’ll give her a call. Maybe she’ll be interested, maybe she won’t.”

Harry frowned. Rossetti had been right.
He already felt like a fool for calling, and Malone was just an arrogant TV celebrity. “Thanks a lot, Ms. Hardy,” he said skeptically. “I won’t wait for her call.”

Beth’s laugh was mocking. “The chip on your shoulder’s showing, detective. No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.”

M
AL DID NOT
pick up her phone when Beth called. Instead, she lay on an overstuffed sofa in the sitting room of her exclusive Fifth Avenue apartment, staring blankly at the puffy gray clouds building up over Central Park.

She had hyped herself up for the London interview, working on sheer nerves and adrenaline. The billionaire had proven tougher than she expected. But she had set the cat among the pigeons all right, and when the program aired later tonight, it would cause a sensation.