Slipping Into Darkness (35 page)

well,
because what could he do at this point? But one of these days, after all this was over, he was going to pull Paul over and say,
Dude, get your knife out my back, I hate sleeping on my side.

 

“Think I should go in and lay the good news on her?” Paul raised his eyebrows, backing up the close-cropped hairs on the crown of his head.

 

“Nah, let my man Rashid keep going. He’s doing all right.”

 

———

 

Detective Ali put the swatch of khaki linen that he’d shown Hoolian earlier back on the table, with three dark overlapping blots of different sizes and slightly different coloration on it, a series of dark moons half eclipsing one another.

 

“What am I looking at?” Ms. A. asked.

 

“Well . . .” Ali yawned. “As I’m sure you know, there’s been a lot of talk about the chain of evidence in this case. People are getting some crazy ideas. So yesterday we decided to take one last run out to the warehouse and see if we could come up with something besides a pillowcase.”

 

“And so this is . . . ?”

 

“This is part of a slipcover from Allison Wallis’s couch. The one, in fact, she was lying on when they found her.”

 

“Which you should’ve had in the first place,” Ms. A. snapped. “And more important, which
I
should’ve had in the first place.”

 

If Ali was bothered by the fact that she was addressing him like a lazy sales clerk, he wasn’t letting it show. “We all strive for perfection, Ms. Aaron. Only some of us achieve it.”

 

“Where are you going with this, Detective? My client’s been in here a long time. If you’re going to charge him for resisting arrest or some other nonsense like that, let’s go to the arraignment and get it thrown out. I looked at that warrant you got Judge O’Brien to sign. He must have been half asleep.”

 

“So the first stain we’re looking at is blood.” Ali ignored her and touched the material with a shiny buffed fingernail. “The forensic examiner was able to determine it was a female. Mostly likely the victim herself.”

 

“So stop the presses and hold the back pages.” Ms. A. put her hands on her hips. “You found the victim’s blood at her own crime scene. Congratulations, Francis.” She stared right at the one-way glass. “That’s the first thing you’ve done right in this case.”

 

“
Welll . . .
not so fast.” Ali drew the pause out like a drumroll. “We’ve still got two other blots to deal with.”

 

“I can’t wait.”

 

The detective smiled and pointed to the second-biggest stain. “Now this one here is blood too. Except it doesn’t belong to the victim. We had the medical examiner analyze it last night and come up with a DNA profile. And guess what? It matches the saliva sample your client Mr. Vega so generously provided for Detective Loughlin a few weeks ago.”

 

Ms. A.’s eyes crept over, reminding him how furious she’d been about his spitting in Loughlin’s face.

 

“Excuse me, Detective, but
So What, Part Two
?” she said, without dropping a stitch. “My client stated in the original interview that he’d been doing work in the victim’s apartment, fixing her toilet before he sat down on the couch to watch TV with her. Obviously, he could’ve cut himself while he was working with tools.”

 

Hoolian watched, impressed; the only signs that she was thrown were the little fanlike lines radiating from the corners of her eyes.

 

“Good point.” Ali nodded. “Only one thing.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“The last stain here.” His finger hovered over the largest blot. “Would you like to know what it is?”

 

“I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

 

“It’s Mr. Vega’s semen. As you can see, it’s quite a sizable amount. And it’s touching both his bloodstain and Dr. Wallis’s bloodstain.”

 

In a tiny twitch, Hoolian saw a three-act drama unfold on his attorney’s face: shock, hurt, betrayal. Then she shut down for a moment, to try and process it. With anybody else, it would barely register as a pause. But coming after her usual breathless fusillade of words, the silence was deafening.

 

“Oh, I get it,” she said finally.

 

Her mouth twisted into a bitter smile as she turned back to the one-way, shifting all her anger from Hoolian to the men on the other side.

 

“You guys thought you’d bring my poor client in here, threaten him with arrest over these phony charges, and shove this crap under his nose to try and get a rise out of him before his attorney arrived.”

 

“Nobody forced him to answer any questions after he said he wanted his lawyer,” Detective Ali said. “We were just sharing some information, hoping he could help us out. If he wanted to make a statement about why his semen would be mixed up with Dr. Wallis’s blood, that’s up to him.”

 

Ms. A. kept staring at the glass, continuing the wordless showdown with Loughlin and whoever else was watching.

 

“If you’re not going to charge my client, I’m taking him home,” she said. “It’s obvious that you wouldn’t be trying to sucker punch us if you found anything of substance during your raid this morning.”

 

Ali sat on a corner of the table, barely moving. In his tab-collar shirt with French cuffs and cobalt blue drip of a necktie, he could’ve been a
GQ
model waiting to have his picture taken.

 

“Ah . . . There
is
one other thing I forgot to mention.”

 

“He’s not talking.” Ms. A. shook her head. “You have any more questions, pick up the telephone and call my office for a real appointment. Detective Loughlin and Mr. Raedo both have the number, I’m sure.”

 

“That’s fine.” Rashid half smiled. “We were just wondering why Julian was seen hanging around 294 East 94th Street, that’s all.”

 

Ms. A. looked nonplussed.

 

“Where that other lady doctor lived,” Hoolian muttered.

 

“I don’t understand.”

 

“The building’s superintendent ID’d Julian here from a photograph. Said he’d seen him on the block. Acting ‘suspicious.’ His words, not ours.”

 

“I already done fucking told you, G.,” Hoolian erupted. “I did deliveries in the neighborhood.”

 

“Julian, shut up.”

 

She said it cleanly and nonchalantly, like she was backhanding a tennis ball over a net.

 

“This conversation is over.” She hooked Hoolian under the arm and pulled him up. “I’ll see you in court.”

 

They walked out the door, leaving Ali with his hands in his pockets.

 

In the squad room, a half-dozen other detectives were back at their desks, trying to appear busy, though they’d obviously just been lined up at the glass, listening to every word. Ms. A. steered by a row of green file cabinets, where Loughlin and Paul Raedo had their backs turned, pretending to study a case folder.

 

“Very nice, you guys,” she said. “Trying to hang two murders on my client when you can’t even prove one.”

 

———

 

“So we’re not going to charge him for assault and resisting?” Francis asked.

 

“I just heard from the DA.” Paul shook his head and put the cell phone back in his pocket. “He wants to let it drop. He’s concerned that it looks like part of a continuing vendetta against this guy. And, uh, he also had some questions about the way I filled out the warrant.” Paul looked sheepish. “He thought we might get hung up with the judge on some of the procedural issues.”

 

“Fuckin’ bullshit,” Francis muttered. “In the old days, you didn’t get a pass for throwing crap at a New York police officer. You got an attitude adjustment.”

 

“So, what do you think?” Paul jerked his head in the direction of the empty interrogation room.

 

Francis ground his jaw, already second-guessing himself for not going in there to raise the temperature a little.

 

“I think we got the guy’s blood and semen at the first crime scene. And somebody ID’ing him as being near the second one.
Something
is up.”

 

“I guess you’re right.” Paul nodded. “Up until yesterday, I was ready to write him off because of this Bizarro World thing with the DNA. But now I don’t know what’s going on.”

 

“Neither do I,” Francis admitted. “My brains are coming out of my ears. I’m almost starting to wonder if we did bury the wrong girl.”

 

“So, what do we do now? We don’t even have an operating theory, do we?”

 

“You mean a way of squaring the fact that we got Hoolian’s semen at the first crime scene, the super recognizing him from outside Christine’s, and then the same woman’s blood in both crime scenes?”

 

“Any ideas?”

 

“Not really.” Francis sighed. “But he has to be tied up with it somehow. Though why he wouldn’t just open his heart and blurt it all out, I don’t know. Maybe he really has been keeping some of her DNA around. I mean, he stole her photo album. Maybe he’s been hoarding something, like one of those fetish objects. You know, people get into weird shit with women’s shoes and all that.”

 

“Well . . . I don’t really know about that kind of thing.” Paul’s eyes wandered sideways. “Did the guys ever find that duffel bag anyway?”

 

“No, we did a grid search of the lot in daylight and couldn’t turn it up. Not that it would’ve done us much good if we were going to have a problem with the warrant.”

 

“So where do we go from here?”

 

“We just gotta keep our options open. We’ve got a couple of plainclothesmen keeping an eye on Hoolian’s halfway house for the next couple of days, so he probably won’t try anything. Rashid’s going back over the case folders inch by inch, to see if there’s anything else we missed. Yunior’s checking birth records to see if Eileen had another daughter she didn’t tell us about, Jimmy Ryan is recanvassing Christine’s neighborhood, and we got three other detectives reinterviewing every patient and staff member she ever saw at the hospital.”

 

“And what are you doing?”

 

“I’m going home for a few hours to get some sleep before I go completely nuts. I just need to clear my head a little.”

 

“You’re going home?” Paul stared at him as if he’d just announced he was going to spend the weekend molesting Girl Scouts.

 

“Don’t look at me that way, I burned through all my overtime for the year the last few weeks. I’m fucking exhausted.”

 

“Uhhh, I don’t know, Francis.” Paul shook his head. “You’ve changed on me.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“I’m beginning to think you and I aren’t quite on the same page anymore. My father never used to worry about his overtime cap. He did whatever it took.”

 

Francis stared at him, thinking he had to be kidding. Everyone knew Paul’s father was a corrupt old Narcotics detective known as “Shake ’Em on Down” Raedo in the pre-Knapp Commission days. But Paul just stood there, glaring at him, his bristles standing up like porcupine quills.
No,
Francis thought.
We’re definitely not in the same place anymore.

 

“Don’t sweat it, Your Honor. I’m just across the bridge.”

 

“Yeah.” Paul turned his back on him. “I’ll be sure to call you when the next girl gets her face beat in.”

 

 

41

 

 

 

H
OOOLEEEYAAN!!”

 

One joker at the rear of the pack kept chanting his name over and over in a nerve-needling falsetto.

 

“Hooo-leeee-yaaaaannnn!!!”

 

It was like an emery board on his eyeteeth. He put his head down as Ms. A. pushed him past the snake-slither sound of cameras and the wall of taunting voices outside the precinct.

 

“Hey, Julian, over here!”

 

“Julian, why’dja kill her?”

 

“Did they get you good this time?”

 

“Miss Aaron, is your client under arrest again?”

 

She raised a bag in front of his face and tried to hail a cab as they closed in around him like schoolyard bullies, shouting questions and taking pictures.

 

“My client is the target of an ongoing smear campaign by the police and the district attorney’s office,” she called out. “He was not formally charged today and, as you know, his earlier conviction was dismissed.”

 

“Hooooleeeyaaaaannn!!”
The falsetto turned brawny and mock-operatic.
“Hoooleee-oooleee-ooo-leee-yaaannnn!!”

 

He bared his teeth and turned around as a dozen shutters clicked, immortalizing his snarl for the next day’s paper; he’d look like the ape about to be put to sleep for mauling the zookeeper.

 

“Debbie, were they asking Julian about the Christine Rogers case?”

 

A yellow cab finally pulled up and she reached for the handle. “We’re not going to have any further comment at this time. I’m asking you to respect my client’s privacy and direct all your questions to my office.”

 

“What’d she say?”

 

“Where’s her office?”

 

“What’re you doing this weekend?”

 

She yanked the door open and pushed Hoolian into the taxi. “Astor Place,” she said, sliding in after him and pulling it shut, one last
“Hooleeeeeeee —”
following them as they eased away from the howling scrum.

 

The driver, a Sikh wearing a turban and a luxuriant black beard like a mink covering the lower of half of his face, checked them out in his rearview.

 

“You are on TV?”

 

“Now we are,” Ms. A. said grimly.

 

“I thought I recognize you. You are
Fear Factor
?”

 

“Does this partition close?”

 

Before he could answer, she shut it herself and turned to Hoolian. “Is there something we need to talk about?”

 

“What?”

 

“A little spot of your blood on the couch
maybe
I can explain away.” She held tight to the Nantucket basket on her lap. “But your
semen?
”

 

The taxi fishtailed as the driver went around the block and headed downtown on Lexington.

 

“Do I really have to spell it out?” Hoolian reached for a strap to steady himself.

 

“Yes. I’m definitely going to need a little help.”

 

He stared out the window and said nothing until they hit a red light right near Bloomingdale’s.