Still As Death (6 page)

The WAWAs were a campus women’s group and Sweeney couldn’t remember what the acronym stood for. Women Angry, Women Active, something like that. She’d gone to a few meetings when she was an undergraduate, and she’d attended a rally where women stood up and shouted the names of men who had date-raped them. It had made her uncomfortable, though she hadn’t told anyone but her best friend, Toby, that at the time.

“So, can I put you down?” Jeanne called up as she disappeared around the corner.

“I’ll have to think about it,” Sweeney called back, not at all sure that Jeanne had heard her.

Exhibition prep staff were in the galleries, putting the finishing touches on the display cabinets and temporary walls. The paint had dried and Sweeney was pleased with the creamy ecru color she’d chosen. She had a list of things she needed to check with Tad, so she
went over to the annex and found Fred and Tad in the main office, standing outside Willem’s office door, obviously eavesdropping. From behind the door, Sweeney could hear Jeanne’s voice rising in anger.

“Poor Willem,” Sweeney whispered. Tad raised his eyebrows and Fred tried not to laugh.

They all turned away as Willem and Jeanne came out of Willem’s office, Willem looking annoyed and Jeanne vaguely triumphant.

“There a party I don’t know about?” Willem asked them.

“Hmmmm?” Tad had a good way with Willem. He knew when to engage and when to ignore him. “Sweeney, did you need something?”

“Couple of things. The proofs of the wall labels for the postmortem photos look ever so slight blurry to me. Is that possible?”

Tad looked annoyed. “Yes. We’ve been having some problems with the printer. I’ll take care of it. What else?”

“Any word on the collar? I can’t wait to see it. And we’ll have to get a wall label for it. I thought Willem might want to write it.”

Tad looked slightly uncomfortable. “It may be a little while. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be in storage when I went to get it this morning. The numbers must have been wrong or something. It happens. I’ll let you know.”

“But we have it, right?” Sweeney panicked all of a sudden. She had gotten excited about the collar, and she wanted to make sure she’d be able to show it.

“Have you gone and lost a piece of art again, Tad?” Jeanne asked loudly.

Tad noticed the two interns who were making copies at the other end of the office and gave Jeanne a severe glance. “No, Jeanne. It’s just been mislabeled is all. We’ve revamped the directory and …”

Sweeney exchanged a glance with Fred, who raised his eyebrows. If someone didn’t kill Jeanne by the time she had finished with her show, it would be a miracle. She laughed and disappeared into the staff kitchen in a cloud of victorious energy. Whatever she’d gotten
Willem to agree to, it had ruined his day. His face looked like the prairie just before a thunderstorm.

Sweeney returned to the galleries and got back to work on the exhibition. She made good progress, and by the time she decided to break for lunch at one, she was feeling like it might actually be possible that she would be ready for the opening in three weeks’ time. She treated herself to the moo shu pork luncheon special at the grimy Chinese restaurant around the corner from the museum, then stopped for some wine to take home for dinner, bringing the bottles with her so they wouldn’t get too hot in the back of her car.

At least it was cool inside the museum, she thought, as she climbed the stairs back up to the third floor. The museum felt very quiet and very empty, and outside the galleries she stood at the balcony for a moment looking down on the courtyard. It was a good forty feet down, and staring at the swirling marble floor below she felt dizzy all of a sudden and stepped away from the railing. She wondered suddenly if anyone had ever fallen. The railings weren’t that high. A child could easily climb over. But she supposed that children didn’t often run around the museum unattended. She entered the gallery again.

“Okay, Sweeney,” she said out loud in the empty space. “Back to work.” She followed her own admonition and sat down at the table, resolving to finish at least five labels before getting up again.

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime
.

Tim Quinn skipped ahead to the end again.

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

HE GRINNED. NOW HE GOT IT. This guy, the guy who was narrating the poem, was trying to get his girlfriend to sleep with him, and he was telling her that time was passing and they’d better hurry up before they were dead. He wasn’t sure what the guy meant by “sweetness,” but there was kind of an interesting image there, tearing through the “iron gates of life.” It was like the gates were protecting the woman. Or the gates … maybe the gates
were
the woman.… That Marvell was a dirty bastard. It sounded like some
kind of flowery language that you’d use only to say beautiful, romantic things, but he was just putting the moves on a woman.

He put the book aside. This was something he’d noticed about the class already. A lot of the poems they read seemed complicated, but all they were saying was stuff that regular people said all the time. It was the way they said it that made it literature rather than just some guy talking to his girlfriend.

Tim Quinn had been enrolled in his beginning English literature class for a couple of weeks now, and it still gave him a thrill to open up the textbook and see all those words covering the thin pages. It was like they had crammed as much literature into that book as they could, and somehow it made him feel that anything was possible, that he had all these words at his disposal and that he could read them all, if he wanted. It was the same … what was the word?
Openness
, maybe, the same openness he felt when he walked into class on Tuesday nights, assuming he wasn’t out on a case and Patience, his daughter’s babysitter, was available that night. He came in and sat down and felt the bigness of the future. Of his future.

“So what, are you going to be an English teacher now?” Havrilek had asked him when Quinn had told him about the class. Quinn didn’t think he wanted to be an English teacher, but even the possibility of it was exciting to him. It made him think about all the other things he could be: a chef, a lawyer, a ship’s captain. He wasn’t sure why he was thinking this way. He loved being a cop. But there was something about considering other possibilities that made you feel free, he decided. That was how his class made him feel: free.

The door of his Honda opened and Detective Ellie Lindquist poked her head in. “You ready?” she asked. She and Quinn had been taking a lunch break, Quinn getting homework done in the car and Ellie reading the papers at a Starbucks in Central Square. But lunchtime was over and they were back on duty. Quinn tossed his textbook into the backseat, and Ellie got in and stuck a huge paper cup into Quinn’s cup holder. She liked the Starbucks concoctions that tasted more like candy than coffee, and he could smell the sweetness
steaming out of the cup, vanilla and caramel and milk. It was hot out, too hot for coffee, and he wanted to ask her how she could stand to drink it, but she saw him looking at it and smiled. “Hey, you want me to go get you one?”

Quinn suppressed the urge to snap at her. “No, no. That’s okay. We should get back.” She pushed a strand of dirty blond hair behind her ear and looked away as though he’d hurt her feelings. Ellie had a sharp little face that emotions couldn’t hide on, happiness and anger and discomfort broadcasting across her wide blue eyes and thin lips as though she didn’t have any control over them.

He wasn’t sure why she irritated him so much. Ever since Marino had wrecked his back and taken early retirement, he’d been without a partner, and he’d happily worked with a bunch of different guys while they did some kind of internal restructuring of the department. When Havrilek had told him that Ellie was going to be his new partner, he’d had to stop himself from protesting. She was about twelve years old, for Christ’s sake, or at least she looked it, and she’d been a detective for only a couple of months, since coming to Boston from somewhere out in Ohio. Even her accent irritated him, with its nasally vowels, “kyen” instead of “can.” It drove him crazy.

“That’s the point, Quinny,” Havrilek had said when Quinn politely mentioned that she seemed awfully young. “You’re a more experienced detective and she’s a less experienced detective. She’s smart as shit, though, and I want you to help her out.”

Quinn pulled out and was heading back to headquarters when the radio in the car came to life and the dispatcher’s voice came on. “We’ve got a suspected homicide. Young female.” The voice gave a location in east Cambridge. “Quinn and Lindquist? You there?” Quinn looked over at Ellie, who suddenly looked a little scared. She’d never been first on the scene for a homicide before. For the month they’d been partners, they’d been working outstanding cases back at headquarters, on the phones, on the computers, in the interview rooms. But this was the real thing and he found himself worrying about how she was going to do.

“Yup, Sylvia, we’ve got it.” She gave them the cross streets. “We’re on our way.”

Quinn knew this part of east Cambridge well. It was the part of the city that didn’t make it onto the walking tours or calendars, a neighborhood where many Cambridge residents had never been and one they probably didn’t know even existed, though, like every neighborhood in the city, it was gentrifying by the day. As a patrolman, he’d frequently responded to domestics and brawls over here, and he knew there had been an increasing amount of gang activity, but there were also young couples moving in and fixing up houses and more and more Saabs on the streets. The dispatcher hadn’t given them much to go on, assuming they’d get what they’d need from the guys on the scene.

He parked in front of a liquor store and followed the line of uniforms to an alley between an empty storefront and a 7-11. “That’s where she is,” he said, pointing.

“What should I do?” she asked quietly, in a way that bugged him.

“Don’t do anything,” he said, too harshly, then added, “Wait ’til I say.”

The small body appeared to be that of a young girl, though on his second look, noticing her hips and rounded backside, Quinn realized she was more likely to be a young woman. She had been dumped—Quinn knew immediately by the way she was lying and because there was a black plastic bag underneath her—at the end of a dismal little alley filled with overflowing trash cans and piles of garbage. She was facedown, wearing black pants that had been pulled down around her thighs and a flowered pink blouse that was bunched up under her arms. Her back was smooth and brown, a small, perfect mole in the very center, between her shoulder blades. The outfit struck him. It wasn’t the kind of thing he’d expected to find, more like what you’d wear to a job interview than … than what?
Face it, Quinn
, he said to himself.
You were thinking she was going to be a hooker, weren’t you?
Because of the neighborhood. He hated it when his prejudices crept up on him like that.

He and Ellie checked in with the young sergeant who was guarding the scene and went to work. Once the crime scene technicians arrived, it was a matter of getting all of the information they could from the people who were still here. She’d been found by a guy who lived on the street and had happened to glance into the alley as he walked by. From the brown bag in his hand, Quinn figured he had gone out for his first drink of the day, but to his credit he’d called it in from the only working pay phone on the block and waited until the cops arrived. Usually you looked at the person who’d reported finding a body, but Quinn knew there was nothing here. This guy was too straightforward, just a sad, out-of-work guy who was now itching for whatever he had in his bag. Quinn was tempted to tell him to go ahead, but he couldn’t very well encourage his best witness to get plastered before they’d had a chance to question him.

Once they were ready to turn her, he told Ellie to join him. “You can see she wasn’t killed here, can’t you?” he said offhandedly.

“Yeah, the bag kind of tipped me off.” It wasn’t sarcastic, just sort of matter-of-fact, but it annoyed him anyway.

“Good.” He brushed past her and knelt by the body, looking at the girl’s face staring up at the hot gray sky. She had light brown skin, and in life she had been pretty, dark haired, dark eyed, small and round. She was wearing quite a lot of makeup, a too-dark foundation that showed along her jawline, apple-red blusher on her cheekbones, pink eye shadow that matched the blouse, and bright pink lipstick that had smeared along one side of her face.

After the body, the first thing crime-scene services would look at would be the trash bag. They would hope to find something on it that might tell them how it—and the girl—got there. If they had been carried in a car, there might be fibers from the carpet, or traces of oil. If a man, or men, had carried the load, there might be hairs or microscopic pieces of skin on the bag. Then, of course, if the girl had been raped, as it appeared she had, there would be a treasure trove of evidence there, semen, hair, maybe DNA under her fingernails.

The truth was, though, that the crime might be prosecuted with
all the forensic evidence in the world, but it was much more likely it would be solved from finding out who the girl was, what she had been like, who she had hung out with, what she had liked to do on the weekends. You didn’t find your killer with the scientific stuff, Quinn had learned. You just used it to pin it on him. It was the regular old cop work that got you into court in the first place.

And that would start with finding out what her name was. He called his witness over and asked him if he knew her. The guy looked like he was going to throw up, but he choked out, “Luz Ramirez. Her family lives over there.” He pointed to a dismal-looking brick apartment building across the way.

“Okay.” He turned to Ellie. “That’s our first thing. We gotta talk to the family, find out where she was going, then we’ll want to start doing door-to-doors, that kind of thing, see if anybody saw her last night.” He looked again at the victim’s face. She looked younger and younger the more he stared at her. “She’s dressed up like she was going somewhere. We gotta figure out who the hell she was going to meet.”