The Ties That Bind (3 page)

She also gave her a rundown of all her colleagues,
cataloguing their foibles, eccentricities and, most of all, their hot buttons
and vulnerabilities. There was no need to dwell again on matters of class
distinction. They both knew what that meant and how those waters were
navigated.

Even as Fiona spoke she felt that her information was
overkill to a woman like Gail Prentiss, whose formidable intelligence easily
accommodated facts and quickly absorbed understanding.

Gail had listened closely to her explanation while Sherry
waddled by again to fill their coffee cups.

"Got it," Gail said, when Fiona had finished. She
looked at her watch.

"Morning call," Fiona said. "He needs to
berate us on Monday mornings. We all consider it his therapy. The weekend for
him has been horrendous. The corpses have rolled in at their usual accelerated
weekend pace. Mostly gang and drug-related killings with the usual innocents
that got caught in the crossfire. There's not enough personnel to do the job.
But his nerves are jangling from his home life as well, his bitch of a wife
singing her song about the man's failure."

Gail shook her head in sympathy.

"Both of us come in fresh," Fiona muttered.
"I was off duty this weekend and this is your first day. So be forewarned
about the culture shock."

Gail slid out of the booth and stood up to her full height,
her ramrod straight posture emphasizing her bosom. Standing, Fiona, who was a
mere five-seven, was able to see the full extent of the woman's size. As they
walked past the booths, all heads turned to inspect Gail, this magnificent
phenomenon.

Fiona had, at first, expected to feel some sense of
sympathetic embarrassment for the woman because she was so conspicuous, but as
she followed in her wake and watched the shocked inspection of the gauntlet,
she felt, instead, pride, pride in her gender.

Outside, as they moved in tandem toward the headquarters
building, Fiona could not contain herself.

"You are something, Gail. I'm going to enjoy seeing
the looks on the faces of our colleagues when I introduce you around."

Gail made no comment. Her thoughts seemed elsewhere.
Certainly, she had learned years ago how to cope with other people's reactions
to her, although, watching her peripherally as they walked, Fiona could sense
that there was something else that went with this territory of lofty
magnificence.

She wondered if that something else was loneliness.

As expected, the various members of the homicide division
could not take their eyes off of her, men and women alike. Fiona knew, of
course, that those that affected the personas of insatiable studs, the crotch
grabbers, would fantasize challenges. Others might be contemptuous, perhaps
even jealous of her commanding physicality.

The Eggplant managed to conceal his Monday morning
irritation for a brief polite moment in which he made his general introduction
of welcome to the new officer.

"We welcome you to the fold, Officer Prentiss, and
wish you luck. You'll need it here in the murder capital of America. We are the hired hands of an indifferent society, modern civilization's human
garbage collectors. We are the avengers of those who dare to violate the sixth
commandment, 'Thou Shalt Not Kill.'"

He took a deep breath, impressed with this little homily to
the newly arrived. His nostrils quivered and he patted the side pocket of his
pants in a reflexive search for matches to light his once ever-present
panatelas, now outlawed in the building. He chewed them unlit now.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we have had ten murders this
weekend, our usual fare." The statistic had already been posted in the
squad room. It was no mystery to most of those present, some of whom had worked
on them over the weekend. A number, the obvious ones, had already been closed,
the killers apprehended. Others, they all knew, would never be closed.

The Eggplant droned on, cataloguing the most difficult
cases, describing the circumstances. Two children had been killed by drive-bys
and the leads had already evaporated in the melting fear of the eyewitnesses.
After about a half-hour of this recital, his message became a harangue and he
worked himself into a sweating stew of frustration and anger. He was obviously
tired and overworked, overwrought and besieged.

One of the children was a nine-year-old female and it fell to
them, under the Eggplant's new dictum, to take the case, following up the scene
work done by colleagues during the weekend mop-up. The child had been playing
in an alley beside her house in southeast Washington. Suddenly there was a
spray of bullets from a semi-automatic and another innocent child was caught in
the crossfire, a common by-product of the city's gang wars.

Both Fiona and Gail knew the drill. There would be no
credible witnesses. The parent, usually a single mother, would be paralyzed
with shock, the grandparent, invariably a single woman not quite out of her
thirties, would be livid with uncontrolled rage and a great-grandmother,
church-going, law-abiding, self-sacrificing, would view the spectacle with
resignation and despair, a family of female victims.

Heading southeast, Fiona used the car phone to call Dr.
Benson, the medical examiner, and her closest friend in the department. He
always took her call, whether at the forensic lab or in his office.

In this case, the call had added significance. Dr. Benson
always personally performed the autopsies on child homicides, hoping that the
secrets he meticulously uncovered in the dead tissue would whip up enough anger
in the squad to speed the apprehension of the killers. It invariably
accomplished the former but rarely the latter.

Performing them always left him deeply depressed. At times,
it fell to Fiona to nudge him back to, if not tranquility, at least normality.
He knew that he could avoid the whole process by delegating the duty to others,
but for his own inexplicable reasons, he insisted on doing them.

"Yes, Fiona," he said, his deep bass pervading
the car. She had the phone on mike.

"I'm here with my new partner, Gail Prentiss, Dr.
Benson."

"Please to meet you, Doctor," Gail said.

"I am very fond of your father, dear," he said.
Dr. Benson was always well tuned in on what was happening in the homicide squad
and invariably knew the buzz before Fiona.

"Thank you, Doctor," Gail said. "You know,
of course, that Dad is not very well."

Dr. Benson sighed.

"Yes, I do."

"We're on this Thompson girl," Fiona said softly.

"Beyond belief. Her face was gone."

"Poor thing," Fiona said.

There was a long pause.

"Why the innocent children?" he sighed.

Fiona and Gail exchanged glances of understanding. It was a
question that could never be answered.

"No leads?" Dr. Benson asked.

"Not so far," Fiona said. It was rare to find any
in this type of crime, unless one of the witnesses eyeballed the perps. Most,
unless they were very close relatives, were too frightened to come forward.

"Are you alright, Doctor?" Fiona asked gently.

"In despair, ladies. In despair."

His feelings were genuine.

Fiona wanted to tell Gail more about Dr. Benson, how his
compassion and wisdom sustained her, how much she loved him and worried about
him, but she was forestalled by another call.

"FitzGerald and Prentiss." It was the Eggplant's
voice.

"You're off the Thompson case. Bigelow and Phipps will
take it. We've got something else for you. Female Caucasian, early twenties,
Mayflower Hotel, Room 737."

"Nothing more?"

"Messy sex crime. The assistant manager just hung up.
He was hysterical."

"Be there in ten," Fiona said, swinging the car
around and heading back to Connecticut Avenue.

"Make it five," the Eggplant said, signing off.

Fiona made it in eight, sirens blazing. They got to the
hotel's entrance just as the uniforms arrived in three squad cars. Rushing
through the lobby, they made it to an elevator bank and crowded into an
elevator keyed in by the ashen assistant manager to circumvent the computers.

"You won't believe this," he cried. "You
just won't believe this. There's a woman in there ... Christ ... I never saw
anything like it. You won't believe it. Checked in Thursday night."

"Calm down," Gail said. "Just the woman in
there? No one else, dead or alive."

"Isn't that enough? Oh, my God. You'll see in a
minute."

Six uniforms, the two female detectives and the assistant
manager stormed out of the elevator into the corridor. In front of the door,
Fiona turned and raised both hands as the assistant manager, with nervous
fluttering fingers, attempted to open the door with a key.

"Just myself and my partner, people," Fiona said,
turning to the others, taking instant command. "Keep everyone out until we
tell you," she barked to the senior uniform. "And secure the
corridor." She took the key out of the hands of the assistant manager, who
had continued to be unable to get his fingers to master the door-opening
process.

"Sorry," the assistant manager said. He was a
thin, balding man with round glasses, impeccably dressed and giving off the
scent of heavy, sweetish after-shave lotion. His facial skin was dead-white. He
stepped aside and leaned against the corridor wall. "I'll wait, if you
don't mind."

After putting on plastic gloves, Fiona and Gail opened the
door, pushing it aside slowly and not passing over the threshold until it was
fully opened. Alert to any surprises, they unsnapped their holsters as a
precaution, although they did not draw their weapons, each taking a swift
single step inside the room.

"No wonder the man is freaking out," Gail said.

Dominating the room was a queen-sized bed. Beside it, a
bedside lamp suffused the room in an eerie yellowish light. In the center of
the bed, spread-eagled, was a woman, yellowed flesh floating on a pool of
blood, sunken, unseeing, terrified eyes fixed in a frozen stare. The woman's
last life image was obviously one that triggered a sense of mortal fear.

Her arms and legs were tied to the bedposts with a kind of
silky rope and a wad of washcloth was stuffed into her mouth as a gag. Stab
wounds covered her torso from her neck to her pubic hair and seeping blood had
dripped over the vertical edges of the sheets, leaving specks of blood on the
flowered carpet that suggested the beginnings of a Jackson Pollack painting.

It was one of the worst murder scenes Fiona had ever
covered and for a moment her detective's eye seemed clouded over, her alertness
blunted. She felt physically and mentally immobilized by the sight.

"You okay, Fiona?"

It was the soft, assured voice of Gail Prentiss, who,
towering beside her, was surveying the scene with a far more controlled and
analytical eye than Fiona was able to muster. Unable to function, Fiona turned
away and went into the bathroom, noting instinctively through her numbness that
the room seemed overly clean, a sure sign that the perpetrator had expended a
great deal of energy concealing his tracks.

She turned on the cold tap and splashed her face, letting
the drying process cool her further. The shock was mildly reviving, returning
her somewhat to alertness. She forced her concentration.

There was not a spot in the bathroom to suggest to the
naked eye that a bloody mess was lying on the bed just a few feet away. A
number of wrung-out towels lay in a corner of the room, suggesting that the
effort to eliminate evidence was thorough and meticulous.

A cloth case stood on the Formica counter. Fiona unzipped
it. At first glance, it contained the usual articles used by any traveling
woman. She made a mental note to go through it thoroughly after bagging it as
evidence.

Carefully picking up the bathroom telephone, Fiona punched
in the Eggplant's private number. She cleared her throat and fought for calm.

"A bloody pig sticker," Fiona said. "The
work of a real sex weirdo."

"The tech boys are on their way," the Eggplant
sighed.

"You want to be a spokesman?" Fiona asked. Of
course, he did, she knew, but the pause that followed indicated that he was
more reticent than usual.

"Really ugly, is it?"

"The worst," Fiona said.

"White lady?"

"As the driven snow," Fiona said. "It's an
uptown case."

"Any theories?" the Eggplant asked.

"Too early to tell. Could be a serial killer. The perp
seems to have done a thorough cleanup. The only filthy piece of work is the
deceased and her immediate surroundings."

She felt herself talking more than she normally did upon
arriving at a murder scene. Her reactions since entering the room were, for
her, professionally uncommon. She knew exactly why.

"Bare bones to the press, FitzGerald. But only if
necessary. Keep the lid tight, and see me when you get back here. If I were
there, I'd be drowning in shit."

To Fiona, it seemed a rare example of his total trust. Of
course, he knew that she was fully aware of all the public ramifications. A
murder in a prime hotel meant sending ugly signals for the tourist business,
which was suffering enough with the murder-capital moniker. Aside from the pure
business aspect, it was the kind of murder that wasn't good for the image of
the country. It sent bad messages about crime and violence and the safety of
people, especially to young women visitors coming to the capital of the only
superpower left in the world.

There also seemed another ploy at work. The Eggplant was
putting her out front on this one. There would be no place to hide. She
supposed there was a gender twist to it as well.

Hanging up the phone, she gave her face a passing glance in
the mirror. Her skin looked pallid and a nerve was twitching in her cheek. This
was the face of a distressed woman.

Back in the bedroom, she noted that Gail had placed a small
footstool next to the bed to minimize any disturbance to the floor. She had
also put plastic booties over her shoes, which emphasized the preparation and
attention to detail she invested in her work. She was kneeling on the footstool
and writing in her notebook. When she saw Fiona returning, she looked up and
began to read from her notes.

"A Caucasian woman, twenties, hard bod. Name is Phyla
Herbert, from Chicago. Two suits, one skirt, three blouses, all hung up like soldiers
in the closet. Underwear in top drawer of chest. Small empty suitcase in closet
as well. Beside it, a briefcase. Lots of résumés and other paraphernalia of a
job seeker. Should be easy to trace her movements using the hotel telephone
log."

Fiona listened carefully to Gail's recitation, but kept her
eyes averted from the body, hoping her action or lack of it would go unnoticed.
She was bluffing and knew it. This was not like her. She would have to force
herself to look.

"I told you, my dad was a surgeon," Gail said.
Nothing escaped her. "I've watched him operate."

Fiona ignored the comment. Squeamishness seemed her only
logical cover. Gail appeared to relish the inspection. Fiona noted her
intensity, her large yellow-flecked brown eyes studying the body and
surroundings with laser-like thoroughness.

She felt an odd resentment, as if her authority was being
usurped, although she knew that Gail would be deferential, respectful.
Nevertheless, the feeling was there. Yet, there was no escaping that she had to
deal with the body and its implications, including the personal aspect. She
was, after all, a homicide detective, the senior officer in charge of the crime
scene.

"Suck," Gail muttered.

"What?"

"Suck," she repeated. "Here, printed under
her bangs. And over here on both thighs, 'scum' on one thigh and 'cunt' on the
other."

She must force herself to look, Fiona cried inside herself,
her head turning, eyes focusing. There it was, the body dead-white under its
blanket of speckled, browning blood. And the words Gail had spoken were clearly
printed in cherry red lipstick in block letters on the dead woman's forehead,
inner thighs and arms. Her areolas, too, were reddened by lipstick, unevenly,
like a child's crayoning.

And more. A long red streak led down from her neck to below
her navel with the word "whore" printed in a crude semi-circle around
her pubic area. For a brief moment Fiona's eyes clouded, then, by force of
will, cleared again. Was it possible? Déjà vu, or fate playing an ugly game.