Spider's Web (26 page)

It got worse. There was a picture of Tanessa. The article mentioned that she had been used as bait. It hinted that this plan was ill-conceived, and that Tanessa had been chosen because of her family relation to Detective Mitchell Lonnie, one of the primary detectives on the case. The article then mentioned Mitchell’s arrest of Danny Stevenson and Janice Hewitt as suspects in the case, stressing that in fact they had merely played a harmless prank. The reporter’s name was, of course, Ricky Nate.

Mitchell stood up, feeling dizzy. His body was shaking, his teeth grinding. He knew he was about to explode, and a faraway part of his brain screamed at him to get out of there, drive home, let loose there, where it was safe. But he ignored that meek suggestion.

“Damn it!” he screamed, and kicked at his chair, which rolled across the room and banged against the wall. He picked up a mug from his desk, still half full of coffee, and threw it at the same wall, the mug crashing to pieces and leaving a huge stain.

“Relax, Lonnie!” Jacob yelled at him, leaping from his chair.

“How? How did she find out all that?” Mitchell yelled at him “Who told her?”

“I did.”

Mitchell turned around and stared at Hannah. She looked back at him, her face red.

“You?” he said, his voice sharp. “Why?”

“I didn’t know she was a reporter. She said she was from the State Police. She fooled me, Mitchell. I’m sorry.”

“You told her that using my sister as bait was my idea?”

“Of course not,” Hannah said sharply. “That was her own notion. But I told her that Tanessa was used as bait, and that she was your sister.”

“How could you be so stupid?” he asked.

Hannah didn’t even flinch. Her face stayed completely blank as she kept staring at him. But Mitchell had known her for a long time, had gone to the academy with her. The flicker in her eyes told him this was not something she was about to forgive anytime soon.

“Fuck you, Lonnie,” she said. She stood up and walked slowly out of the squad room. Bernard looked at him with disgust.

“You’re a real asshole, Mitchell,” he said.

Mitchell looked at Bernard tiredly, suddenly wishing he could rewind the past thirty seconds. He glanced at the wall, at the coffee stain trickling down to the floor where the mug shards were scattered.

“I know,” he said. He stuck his hands in his pockets. His right hand knocked against something hard. Pauline’s engagement ring, in his pocket ever since the day he had bought it. He felt as if he were suffocating, as if he were being pulled in all directions at once. He strode out of the room and went down the stairs, through the department’s exit, and into the car. He stared at the steering wheel for what felt like an eternity, and then drove home.

Jacob had served enough years in the force to know when a cop was no longer functioning. As far as Jacob was concerned, Mitchell had become completely useless. Jacob wasn’t sure what had triggered it, and for now he didn’t care. Later, he would call Mitchell and try to help him out, as a friend. But as a detective, he had to focus on the fact that there was a killer on the loose and a reasonably good trail to follow. He grabbed the keys from his desk and stood up.

“Where are you going?” Bernard asked.

“Door to door in the killer’s apartment building,” Jacob answered.

“If he really lived there,” Bernard said.

“Well, I talked to Matt this morning. He found a lock of hair hidden in the apartment. This matches our killer’s MO, so for now I’m assuming this was an apartment he stayed at.”

“Oh, okay,” Bernard said. “Does it belong to one of the victims?”

“Matt said that it seems to match Kendele Byers’s hair, but he couldn’t be sure. He said there was something strange about the sample, and that he needed more time to figure it out.” Jacob shrugged. “Anyway, I’ll take our sketch book and see if anyone saw our killer walking around. Perhaps I’ll strike gold. Who knows, maybe he asked his neighbor for a cup of sugar without wearing a disguise. That would be nice.”

“Hang on; I’ll come with you,” Bernard said.

The detectives stepped into the car, Jacob relinquishing the driver’s seat to Bernard. As they drove to Hillside Drive, Jacob became lost in thought, wondering yet again where the killer had gone. He’d been wounded during the fight in the flower shop, that much was certain. Did he get help?

“You called doctors yesterday, right?” he asked Bernard.

“Yup. Doctors, nurses, vets, retired doctors, medical students… It was a damn long list.”

“Find anything?”

“Not really. No one that admitted to taking care of a man with a bullet wound, anyway.”

“Hm.”

“Say, what’s wrong with Mitchell?” Bernard asked.

“I don’t know,” Jacob said, his voice sharp and final.

Bernard didn’t push the issue.

They reached the apartment building. It looked even shabbier in the daylight, the sun emphasizing the places where the plaster had peeled off the walls completely, exposing the bare bricks. One of the window panes on the first floor had been broken; rather than fix it, the tenants had simply boarded the window up.

“Do you want to split?” Bernard asked.

“Nah, let’s do them together,” Jacob said. “There are only three floors.”

They started at the third floor, where the killer had been staying. No one answered the first door they knocked on, and the other apartments were opened by hostile residents who made it perfectly clear they had never heard anything, seen anything, or smelled anything that could be of interest to the police. If the killer had asked them for some sugar, they weren’t about to share. The second floor was pretty much the same.

An old woman opened the first door they tried on the bottom floor. For an instant, Jacob was sure he knew her from somewhere. Then he realized why she was so familiar. She looked just like Sophia from
Golden Girls
, a TV series he used to watch with his wife every week when he was much younger. She had a round blob of gray hair and obscenely large glasses, behind which sharp eyes stared out at them. She was dressed in something that could have been a dress, a gown, or a tablecloth; it was hard to tell. It was blue, and spotted with the occasional flower. She was comically tiny, less than five feet, her hands and feet small as a child’s. Since Bernard was almost six feet tall, she looked up at him like someone staring at a bird flying in the sky.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Ma’am, I’m Detective Bernard Gladwin,” Bernard said, flipping open his badge. “This is my partner, Detective Cooper. We wanted to ask—”

“Detectives, huh?” she said. She looked at Jacob. “Nice fedora.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” he answered. “We wanted to ask you some questions about a man who lived here not long ago.”

“Yeah?” she frowned. “Come in, I was just making tea.”

“We really don’t want to come in, we just wanted to ask—”

“Well, I’m not about to stand out here in the hallway and answer questions, so you might as well come in, drink some tea, and eat apple strudel.” She turned around and walked inside, leaving the door wide open. Bernard hesitated for a moment and then walked in, followed by Jacob.

Her apartment stood in complete contrast to the way the building looked outside. It had recently been freshly painted; the walls were white and clean. All the furniture looked well taken care of, though old. A rocking chair and a sofa stood around a small round wooden coffee table on an intricately-patterned red and green Persian carpet. All the walls were hidden by immense bookcases containing hundreds of books, except for one wall which was covered by framed photos of numerous kids. Her grandchildren, Jacob guessed.

“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

Right back
turned out to be a quite flexible concept, as the woman moved at a pace that seemed to ignore the existence of time. Jacob didn’t check, but it felt as if serving them tea and a freshly-baked apple strudel took her about two days. She breathed through her nose the entire time, her face a mask of deep concentration. Finally, they each had a cup of lukewarm tea and a plate with a small slice of strudel.

“I love strudel,” she said. “You know what’s the secret to a good apple strudel?”

“No,” Jacob said. “What is it?”

“The recipe,” she said, and laughed. Or at least he thought she laughed. It sounded as if someone was torturing mice. He had a feeling it wasn’t the first time she had told this joke.

“Ma’am, we are looking for information about a man who used to live here not long ago,” Bernard said. “He lived on the third floor.”

“Oh?” she said.

“We wondered if you had seen him.”

“Maybe. I see people going up and down the stairs, occasionally. What did he do?”

“We’re not sure,” Jacob said. “But we would like to question him.”

“I see.” She glanced at his plate. “Don’t you like the strudel?”

Jacob cut a small piece with his spoon and put it in his mouth. It was, in fact, delicious. He chewed it carefully and swallowed. “It’s very good,” he said.

She nodded, satisfied. “So,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

He pulled the folder with all the sketches out of his briefcase and handed it over to her. “There are some sketches there,” he said. “We wanted to know if you recognize any of these men.”

She opened the folder and looked at the first sketch. “That’s a nice sketch,” she said. “Did you draw this?”

“No,” Jacob said. “It was a sketch artist.”

“My granddaughter Bella goes to art school,” she said, looking at the sketch. “She’s very talented. She draws.”

“That’s nice,” Jacob said.

“She draws on the computer,” the old woman said. “She’s very smart.”

“Can you look at the rest of the sketches, please?”

She flipped a page. “This one is also very nice,” she said.

Jacob began wondering if she thought he was one of her grandchildren, showing her the picture he had just painted.

“Have you seen this man?” he asked her, but she didn’t answer right away.

Jacob glanced over at Bernard, who was leaning back, sipping from the small cup of tea. His fingers could barely squeeze through the teacup’s handle. He looked as if he was playing with a kid’s plastic tea set. He didn’t seem restless at all, but then again Jacob had never seen Bernard restless. The man had the patience of a Galapagos turtle.

Jacob, however, was getting impatient. They were wasting time. This woman was just looking for company; she hadn’t seen anyone. He leaned forward to take the folder from her hands, but she flipped another page and finally spoke again.

“Oh,” she said. “I thought you said you were looking for a man who lived here recently.”

“That’s right,” Jacob said.

“Well, you’re wrong.”

He blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“He lived here, but not recently. They moved away twenty-five years ago.”

“No, ma’am, we’re looking for someone who lived here until a week ago. If this sketch reminds you of someone you knew long ago, it’s just a coincidence—”

“I’m old, Detective, but I’m not senile,” she said, her voice becoming sharp. “Pete Stokes lived here with his family for almost fifteen years. The sketch doesn’t remind me of him. The sketch is him. Or at least, him as he looked thirty years ago.” She flipped the folder back at him, open at a sketch of the killer wearing a toupee of smooth black hair combed to the side, and a large fake mustache. “That’s Pete Stokes. But he was a nice man. I’m sure he didn’t do anything wrong.”

“How old was Pete when he lived here?” Jacob asked.

“About fifty, I think,” she said, leaning back in her rocking chair. “He was always very polite. And he did live in the apartment on the third floor, so you got that right.”

“Which apartment?” Jacob asked.

“Apartment 15. The one the cops broke into yesterday,” she looked at them, her face crinkling with a smile that exposed way too much gums. “What? Did you think I didn’t know? With the noise you people made?”

Jacob and Bernard glanced at each other. Bernard raised his eyebrows as if to say this was a dead end; she was talking about a man who would now be seventy-five, maybe eighty years old.

Jacob turned toward the old woman, his mind suddenly whirring.

“What family?” he asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“You said he lived with his family. Did he have a wife?”

“Yes. A wife and a son. I used to exchange recipes with his wife, Meggie. She could appreciate my baking,” she added, glancing at their still-unfinished strudels.

“How old was the son when they left?” Bernard asked, leaning forward. He was getting it.

“I’m not sure. He left for college a bit before, I think,” she said. “When they left he must have been about… twenty. Maybe twenty-one.”

“What was his name?” Jacob asked, his fingers tightening around the plate.

“His name was Jovan. Jovan Stokes. Such a sweet boy.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Mitchell arrived late to work, and entered the squad room in the midst of a meeting. It was nearly noon. He was hung over, and tired after hardly sleeping the night before. There was lonely drinking, and there was lonelier drinking. Then he had almost drunk texted Pauline, but he was pretty sure he’d decided not to do so, which was probably his proudest recent achievement.

As he entered, everyone turned to look at him, though Hannah quickly looked away, disgust on her face. Even without their previous exchange, he knew he had earned the disgust. He wore the same clothes as the day before, he was unshaven, and, judging by the taste in his mouth, his breath stank. He wasn’t even sure why he had come to work. Jacob, who stood near the rolling whiteboard, looked at him and raised an eyebrow. There were no chairs available. Mitchell’s own chair was taken by Captain Bailey, so he leaned against the wall.