Red (6 page)

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Authors: Kate Kinsey

BOOK: Red
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Chapter 11
Beat me, beat me, o dear Masetto
Beat your poor Zerlina.
I’ll stand here meek as a lamb
And bear the blows you lay on me.
You can tear my hair out, put out my eyes,
Yet your dear hands I’ll gladly kiss.
—L
ORENZO
D
A
P
ONTE
,
Don Giovanni
(music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
 
 
 
 
R
oger Banks’s murder had made the news, but so far they had managed to keep any mention of the mutilations out. They were holding that in reserve to weed out crackpot confessions.
And now, seven days later, Robyn Ann Macy: a twenty-six-year-old bank teller who still lived with her parents.
There was no semen in the vaginal vault, just some lube. The two used condoms in the wastebasket yielded DNA, but results weren’t back yet. DNA didn’t mean squat unless they had something to match it to.
Robyn’s fingerprints were on one of the Coke cans and the lube; the fingerprints on the other can, the wrapper from the Oreos, and on the tube of lube, had not come up in IAFIS.
They were coming out of the Macys’ tidy little ranch house for the second time. Their first visit, on the afternoon of the body’s discovery, had ended with Mrs. Macy having to be sedated; Mr. Macy had been too shaken to provide much information. Two days later, the conversation had been better, but still yielded little of use.
Hanson felt as if someone had slipped twenty-pound weights into his pockets. Nice people always made him feel this way.
Bad people—the ones always bumping up against the law in one way or another—had an attitude of resignation, as if they had known violent death was coming sooner or later. The nice ones—the ones whose experience with police went no further than traffic stops—were merely lost, unbelieving, always asking:
How did this happen to us?
“Yeah, her folks thought she was their little shining star,” Griggs said, flicking at some dust on his jacket. “But she was a dirty girl who liked to party. Probably with some married guy since they were in a no-tell motel and the guy paid with cash. No credit card bill for the little woman to find.”
“You speaking from experience?” Hanson’s voice was carefully flat. He didn’t like Griggs’s callous glee at the dead girl’s sex habits, but that was Griggs.
He, on the other hand, couldn’t stop seeing those dull blank eyes staring at the ceiling. He got into the driver’s seat and put the key into the ignition.
“Nah.” Griggs grinned, sliding in beside him. “I only fuck the ones with their own apartment.”
“Is that a policy since the first divorce or the second?”
“The second. I’m a slow learner. You think the boyfriend is the doer?”
Hanson sighed. If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras, so they said. But there was something wrong with these hoofbeats.
“It doesn’t feel right,” he said. “Have you got the rope report over there?”
“It won’t make any more sense the twelfth time than it did the first.” But Griggs pulled it out and read it aloud anyway. “ ‘Traces of spermicidal lubricant consistent with several popular commercial condoms. Human sweat from two sources: one male, one female.’ ”
“So it was used at some point, even though it and everything else was put away. As if playtime was over and done.”
“Maybe she and lover-boy had done the deed, all lovey-dovey, and
then
she said something that set him off,” Griggs suggested. “I mean, she was dressed when she was killed, too. Looks like she was on her way out the door.”
The door had a loose mortise plate and some splintering on the jamb. But it was impossible to tell if the damage had happened the day of the crime or weeks before.
And fingerprints? A motel room wasn’t even worth printing.
The techies had found hairs everywhere, all different colors and textures. The long blond ones were probably Robyn’s, but Hanson wouldn’t be surprised to find the sheets hadn’t been changed since the last time the room was rented. The hairs could even be transfer from the spread or, hell, the carpet.
“What’s he do about his clothes?” Griggs looked at Hanson. “Strip naked before he kills? Bring a change of clothes and take the old ones with him?”
“Damned if I know,” Hanson said. Lenny had taken photos of what looked like bloody boot prints all over the carpet. “Big damned shoes, though. Thirteen’s, maybe.”
When they arrived back at the station, they headed for the morgue.
“Have you got the report on Macy finished?” Hanson asked.
Miles didn’t answer. He was too engrossed in digging around the chest cavity of the nameless dead man on his table with a pair of long tweezers.
“Can you at least tell me if it was the same weapon? Baseball bat?” Hanson did not approach the table. This wasn’t his body, and he didn’t want to see it.
“Didn’t you read the final report on Banks?” Miles asked, annoyed enough to finally look up. “Whatever it is, it’s not a baseball bat. The impact impressions are similar, but much smaller. Definitely has a rounded end, though.”
“But you think it’s the same weapon?”
“Yep. It’s probably made of wood, though I didn’t find any traces in the wounds.” Miles lifted a lead slug from the dead man’s chest and dropped it into a bowl.
“Then what makes you think it’s wood?” Hanson asked.
“Because I found flakes of polyurethane. Like the stuff used to finish furniture.”
“So, we got polyurethane.” Griggs shrugged. “On both bodies?”
Miles nodded and went back to probing the open chest.
“Hit in the throat, too?”
“Yep.”
“So you’re almost done?” Hanson asked. “With the final report, I mean?”
Miles looked up again, just long enough to glare.
“You’ll get the report when you get it,” he said. “Now let me do my job.”
Hanson followed Griggs back upstairs, but his spirits sank with every step upward. The media was gonna love this. Even without the details of Roger’s diced penis and missing tongue, the case had already attracted a lot of head shaking from both the mayor and the chief of police. And now they had another victim. A very young, very pretty woman.
“I need coffee,” Griggs muttered, stepping into the break room and reaching for the coffeepot. “Grab a filter out of the cabinet, would ya?”
But Hanson ignored him. He was staring at the television mounted on the wall.
“It’s a terrible,
terrible
thing when a decent, upstanding member of the community falls prey to a
violent
crime,” Milton Daubs, police chief, told Channel Six.
“Christ,” Griggs groaned. “Bastard almost sounds sincere.”
Griggs was right and wrong, Hanson thought. Daubs was a bastard. But he was also sincere. That was what made him so dangerous: his self-righteous sincerity.
And his sincere foot was gonna land up their asses as soon as the media got wind of Robyn Macy’s murder.
The only question was: who was going to say it first? Daubs or the press?
Griggs said it first.
“Well, buddy boy, I think we got a serial killer on our hands.”
 
“What in the
blazes
did you
say
to her?”
Milton Daubs always seemed to be wound tight as a jack-in-the-box just before it sprang, but today he was in rare form. He wasn’t a particularly big man, but his lungs were gigantic—and when he yelled, walls vibrated.
Hanson looked not at Daubs, but at the big damned warning on the wall behind his head:
Fear God and give glory to Him, for the hour of His Judgment is come
.
The cross-stitched Bible verse held a place of honor in the middle of Daubs’s vanity wall, surrounded by plaques, awards, and photographs of the chief shaking hands with important people. After all, they lived in the buckle of the Bible Belt, and the separation of church and state was only an ugly rumor started by communists and liberals.
Staring at the wall was preferable to looking at the chief’s face, growing an ugly, splotchy red. A vein in his left temple, just under his receding hairline, was throbbing.
“Look, we had to check it out.” Griggs jammed his hands in his pockets. “She lied to us about having lunch with her husband that day, and we had those hairs—”
“Roger Banks and I went to college together,” Daubs thundered. “We played golf together. We were
fraternity
brothers!”
Hanson nodded, all the while sending desperate telepathic messages to Griggs to shut up.
“I sent him a
Christmas
card every year for the last twenty years! That means he wasn’t just a friend of mine, he was an
old
friend of mine, do you get that?”
“Yes, sir,” Hanson said quietly. “And we’re very sorry for your loss.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass with me! I don’t need your sympathy, I
need
you to find the bastard who killed him.”
It was a measure of Milton Daubs’s sincere outrage that he’d used profanity. For Daubs, swearing belonged in the gutter with the criminals. He’d actually passed out memos asking everyone to watch their language in the squad room.
“Yes, sir, I understand—”
“What I
don’t
need is you two asking his wife stupid questions that will only
upset
her.” Daubs fell heavily into his chair behind the desk.
Hanson wondered if Daubs knew that they mimicked him behind his back, the way he seemed to talk in italics. It wasn’t just when he was
pissed off
; he talked this way
all
the time.
“Marla is
devastated
. Just
devastated
. Roger was her
world
.” Daubs spoke in a more reasonable tone now, but Hanson knew better than to relax. “Now, tell me what you said to send her into hysterics.”
“Hysterics” was an exaggeration. Sure, she’d been upset. People usually were when they were caught in a lie. Even a little one. Especially when it was an embarrassingly personal one.
“She said she had lunch with her husband at Caesars on the day he was killed,” Hanson explained. “The reservation book said they’d had lunch there on Monday, not that Thursday.”
The waiter had remembered them, too. Roger and Marla were good tippers who ate there often.
“So? I can’t tell you what
I
ate for lunch
yesterday
! She’d just learned that her husband was dead, for Pete’s sake!”
“Yes, sir, it’s an understandable mistake,” Hanson agreed. “But we wouldn’t have been doing our job if we hadn’t followed up on it.”
That was always the best defense with Daubs. Bring up duty. Honor. The American Way.
“All right,” Daubs said with a sigh. “You’re
right
. But what difference would it make whether she had lunch
that
day with him or not?”
Hanson exchanged a quick glance with Griggs and saw his partner’s eyes roll. Was Daubs serious? What
anybody
had been doing in the twenty-four hours prior to being murdered was important.
“Well, if it had just been whether or not they’d had lunch together, it might not matter.” Hanson knew he would have to be very careful here. Daubs wasn’t just sincere, he was a sincere prude. “There were also the hairs we found.”
“What
hairs
?”
“We found three long brown hairs wrapped around the dead guy’s dick,” Griggs said.
Hanson resisted the urge to punch him.
“The poor man is
dead
!” Daubs roared. “Show some
respect,
do you understand me?”
“Sorry. But we found three long brown hairs wrapped around Mr. Banks’s
penis
. What was left of it.”
Daubs paled, his face tensing for a millisecond in what Hanson assumed was shock at such a graphic image. How long it had been, he wondered, since Daubs had actually seen a dead body?
“We found another hair, the same type, snagged in his watch band,” Hanson said, plunging forward to prevent Griggs from speaking again. “We had to make sure it didn’t come from the killer. That’s all.”
“Did they?” Daubs asked.
“No, sir. Based upon the sample we took from Mrs. Banks, the hair was hers.”
“Turns out she
did
have lunch with her husband that day,” Griggs grinned. “Only food wasn’t on the menu. That’s why she lied.”
For a moment, Daubs didn’t say anything. Maybe it took him a minute to put the pieces together. Maybe he was too embarrassed to speak.
“Thank God, it was
Marla’s
hair,” he said finally, pushing papers around his desk.

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