The Ways of the Dead (19 page)

On April third,
Noel had breakfast at the Hunger Stopper for $4.37 (she’d noted a two-dollar cash tip) and went to work at Satin and Lace, parking at Union Station’s garage for six hours, punching out at 5:19 p.m. She bought groceries at the neighborhood Giant, apparently on the way home, the $38.15 receipt time-stamped at 6:43.

She had been frugal, and she had to be. The lingerie store was paying her about nine dollars per hour, and Halo was two hundred dollars per night plus tips, but she was paying her way through school, paying for her own place, her own car, the works.

Sully and Lorena had been back at the files, building the chronology for hours. The evening was getting on, the delivery pizza demolished, nothing left but bits of crust on the cardboard. Lorena was still in her work outfit, the two of them plowing through datebooks, receipts, everything Noel had left behind. Lorena had run out to a copy shop, and now there was a blown-up street map of the city leaning against the couch. The map’s center, like a bull’s-eye target, was Noel’s apartment on Princeton Place. There were red, blue, yellow, and green pins stuck into the map, with tiny bits of paper flagged to each one, tagging her movements based on receipts that had a time/date stamp. Blue was for the first week of April, yellow the second, green the third, and red for the last week, up until the twenty-fifth, when she disappeared.

“I went by Satin and Lace right after you left this morning,” Lorena said.

“I thought you were going into work.”

“I called in. I wanted to work on this. You’re the first person who’s shown any interest.”

“Okay. What’d they say?”

“I walked in and talked to the girl on the floor, got fifteen seconds into saying something about Noel turning up dead and she used to work there and this girl cuts me off. Said she started six months ago and didn’t know anything. So I asked for the manager. She says, ‘What for?’ You know, with some lip to it. I said, ‘To ask about my sister.’ She goes in the back, comes back out. Says the manager’ll be right with me. Ten minutes later, this redhead with her hair in a bun comes out, said she’s called corporate and says she can’t say anything. I said, ‘This is my sister I’m talking about.’ She puts her hand on mine—bitch put her
hand
on me—and says, in this whisper, personnel laws, privacy, she was sure I’d understand. I said I sure as fuck did
not
understand that somebody murdered Noel, her employee, and all she could say was not a fucking thing.”

“I don’t think that—”

“She called security.”

“Ah.”

“I was asked to leave.”

“You can apply for your press card now.”

“I went two steps outside the door and called Detective Jensen, left a message that Satin and Lace had information about Noel’s disappearance and they were concealing it.
Real
loud. They were standing there staring at me, I was standing there staring at them. Three women in heels, looking like we were ready to take it outside.”

“So what did Jensen do?”

“Called me back fifteen minutes later and asked if I was alright.”

“Were you?”

“I was sitting in my car in the parking garage shaking.”

He looked at her, staring off into space, her face tight, clenched.

“Then I was going to go out to Halo,” she said. “Playing Nancy Drew. Like somebody’s going to tell me something. They’ll see I’m her sister, tell me everything.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But they’re more likely to be more nervous around you for all the same reasons. Why don’t you let me head out to Halo, see how it goes.”

“You think they’re going to talk to
you
?”
Yooouuuu
. The sarcasm.

“I have been known to be persuasive.”

She hunched her shoulders, as close as he was going to get to an agreement.

“Well,” he said. “Sometimes I’m persuasive. I got Regina Blocker, owner of the dance studio, on the phone? Our conversation was shorter than yours at Satin and Lace. But I think you should let me go to Halo.”

“Well,” she said, “if you’re making the rounds.” She was looking in her purse, her bag, then pulling out and tucking a business card into his palm. It was for the Eric Simmons Photography Studio. It took him a second: the man who shot the nudes.

“Thanks,” he said, putting it into his back pocket. That he had already seen the pictures, leaked to him by a police executive, seemed to be something that might be good to forget to mention.

Now he looked down at the chronology. “I’m not seeing anything for the last few days before she disappeared.”

She looked down at the paperwork, reached out and touched it, like she was trying to jog a memory. “I was trying to—to stick to doing it sequentially, and I haven’t gotten that far yet. And besides—” She was sitting on the couch, but her spine had curled and now she was hunched over.

“Too much in one day?”

“Confronting her death? Like this, following her around, her old jobs? It’s morbid. If this is what you do for a living . . .” She blinked, went in another direction. “My mother, she had to leave us in Jamaica when she first came here. My dad was off working in Kingston, then he followed her here when she could sponsor him. We got left in Maidstone, our village, with Mrs. Bailey, who lived down the road. This is up in the hills.
Way
up in the hills. We went to Nazareth All-Age School. It was one building, yellow and blue, concrete block, with a courtyard. The boys could play and get dusty and dirty, but the girls couldn’t. In the mornings, you had to clean the floors, which were also concrete, and in the afternoons, the teachers would open the windows and there was this breeze, I guess coming up from the ocean, and it was just the best thing you’ve ever felt in your life. We were there two years, maybe three, with Mrs. Bailey. There were phone calls from Mommy twice a month, on Saturday mornings. I wound up more like Noel’s mom than her big sister. Mommy finally flew back to get us when they could afford to rent a big enough place for all of us here.”

She got up, went to a stand by the window that was filled with family pictures and small houseplants. The picture she handed him was a worn five-by-seven in a simple frame. It was a close-up, showing two little girls and a mom, the girls’ hair done to perfection, a plane in the background. They must have been on the tarmac.

“This is the trip to the U.S.?” he asked.

She came to sit beside him. “Yes. Noel and I had never been to an airport before, much less on a plane. You’d have thought we were flying to the moon, we were so excited. I had bought—look, see right there? I had bought Noel that necklace with the charm on it, her name, for the trip. You can’t see the rest, but we were in blouses, skirts, white lace socks, black patent leathers.”

“When people dressed to travel.”

“I thought the streets here were made of gold. I really did, the way people in Maidstone talked about America. You have to realize this was a place of maybe four hundred people, without a streetlight or a traffic signal. There were five or six shops on the main street, with tin roofs. Two of them were pink. Mrs. Bailey ran one. Hers was one of the pink ones. Then we came to America.”

“And?”

“And we lived on Kennedy Street. Don’t get me started. Point is, Noel loved that necklace. Wouldn’t do anything without it. And when I was cleaning out her place, it wasn’t there. She must have been wearing it when—when—”

“—she died—”

“—she died. But it wasn’t with her, her body. It’s just gone.”

“Could have been stolen. Could have been lost there at the bottom of that house.”

“Or whoever killed her could have snatched it off her neck, thinking it was worth a lot more than it is. But that’s what has been sending me over the edge all afternoon. Her necklace. I can’t find her necklace. Since she died, it’s been like my temper, my patience, goes off in weird directions, and today it’s this. The damn necklace.”

“Maybe it got lost in—in the dirt down there.”

“It was silver. I asked the police to do the metal detector search. I asked them to go back and look.” Her body turned awkwardly and her hands fluttered.

Before he could stop himself, he reached out to touch her hand, catching himself, then leaning forward, going ahead with it, but then he felt a rush of heat to his face when her shoulder twitched away from him, just half an inch. She looked at him, then down.

“So—so I’ve pretty much got the receipts in order, the ones close to the date of her disappearance. I just haven’t keyed them in yet,” she said, sniffling, blowing a strand of hair away from her eyes, getting it back together, giving him cover to pull his hand back. “There are some others that don’t have a store name on them, so I didn’t really know what to do with those.”

Sully turned and saw a stack of receipts on the floor. The laptop was on the coffee table. He started thumbing through the receipts, sweat pooling in his armpits. He pulled his arms away from his sides to keep the sweat from showing in the folds of his shirt, embarrassed in a way he hadn’t felt in years. Had he really been reaching out to touch a murder victim’s grieving sister?

He looked through a box of sheets and papers she had set out apart from the others and came across the story written in the campus paper, the
Hilltop
, about Noel’s disappearance. He’d seen one piece they’d done, but not this.

Noel had made her last class of the week, MKTG 544, Marketing Research and Strategy. It was on the third floor of the School of Business, at 2600 Sixth Street NW. The story noted she carried an A average and quoted a classmate, Alicia Mabrey, who said she sat next to Noel and had seen her walk out of the building and into the courtyard. He entered this on the chronology, then went on with the receipts Lorena had left out, immersing himself in building the timeline.

He had lost track of time when he got up, went into the kitchen.

“Bourbon, by any chance?” he called out.

“Chardonnay’s in the door of the fridge. It’s all I got.”

He found a glass, opened the refrigerator door, noting the paucity of food inside, and saw the wine front and center. All that was left was a slosh at the bottom. He turned to see if she was looking, then turned the bottle straight up, draining it. The digital numbers on the microwave showed it was almost nine.

Dusty was supposed to be working at Stoney’s tonight. To go or not to go. She was great, sure, but . . . the gap yawned wider. He didn’t want it to be so but it did. Who made him this way? God? Darwin? He wasn’t particularly fond of either at the moment. Flicking off the light in the kitchen, he walked to the opening that led to the dining table on his left, and the wider open area of the living room off to his right. Lorena was still there, not looking up, keying in more facts, more figures, all in the belief that it would help him write something that would lead to the arrest and conviction of her sister’s killer.

There was a remote buzzing.

“You left it in there,” she said.

He hitched himself up and limped back into the darkened kitchen, the stone floor cool beneath his feet.

The number was Eva’s cell. He called her back, turning his back to Lorena and walking to the far side of the kitchen.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Meet me at Stoney’s,” Eva said. “I’ll be there in ten.”

“What? What is this? Christ, it’s—it’s nine at night. I’m sort—”

“You’re wasting time,” she said, and disconnected the call.

Half an hour
later, he was slouched back in the booth, a bourbon in front of him. Eva leaned forward and asked, “So how close are you to publishing?”

She meant the story on the missing girls, he was pretty sure of that. She did not know about Reese, and there was no way he could tip her to that. He sipped the whiskey, snuck a look over at the bar, trying to get Dusty’s eye, stalling.

“Maybe not for another week. There are some leads I got to run down. It got a little complicated.”

“It’s about to get a little more.”

“Yeah?”

“We have a confession from one of the Reese suspects,” she said.

He looked at her. “Bullshit.”

“Reginald Jackson. Seventeen and wants to be sentenced as a juvie.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“Says it was a robbery. They bumped into Sarah in the store, she got spooked and ran out back in the alley, they cornered her. She bucked.”

“Oh, come on. I could make this up and I was sitting here with you when it happened.”

“Deland, the oldest, grabbed her and spun her around, pulling her up against him, getting his hand over her mouth. Highsmith put the knife to her throat to keep her still. But she was shaking her head side to side, trying to get Deland’s hand off her mouth. She apparently didn’t see the knife. Ripped her head to the right and—”

“—cut—cut her own throat. How much of this fairy tale do you believe, Counselor?”

“The ‘cut her own throat’ is nonsense, but I do buy the ‘she resisted’ thing and they got pissed.”

Sully was about to say that his information from the coroner’s office was that her throat was cut postmortem, but that was not in the public sphere. She already knew that. She was telling him what Jackson’s story was, without telling him the specific holes in it. If he let her know that the throat was postmortem, it might burn Jason as his source.

He said, “It takes three dudes to hold down one fifteen-year-old chick?”

“She was trying to scream, so the man says. Deland was choking her to get her quiet.”

“And they got out of there without blood on them.”

“Says they had some blood to deal with, but not a lot on them. I already told you there wasn’t a lot on the ground out there. Most of it was in the dumpster. It’s plausible. Says they trashed the clothes, changed, and burned the old ones.”

“And went back to playing basketball.”

“For cover, to establish an alibi.”

“And what does he get out of this version of events?”

“A clean conscience and a juvenile adjudication, if he testifies at trial against his associates.”

“Because, magically, he didn’t participate.”

“He was the youngest accomplice. He could make a fair showing to a jury that he was young, intimidated, didn’t realize this was going to be violent, and, when it turned out to be, was under deadly pressure to go along with what the big kids were doing.”

“So you guys have already cut the deal.”

“Yes.”

Sully sat back, trying to hold his temper in check.

“You didn’t say this was off the record. Any of it.”

“I didn’t. You can source it to a ‘law enforcement official familiar with the investigation.’”

“When’s the presser?”

“Tomorrow. Noon if the chief can get everyone together. Highsmith and Deland will get murder one, assault, robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and a couple of others.”

Sully looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to ten. He could get it in the suburban edition if he quit fucking around.

“Meaning he could skate when?”

She shrugged. “Prisons and parole boards release people, not the U.S. Attorney’s Office. But I would say Mr. Jackson would be celebrating his thirtieth birthday back in D.C.”

“You got the wrong guys, Eva. They’re not on the hook for this.”

“That would be remarkable, buying yourself nearly twenty years in lockup for something you didn’t do.”

“Maybe he thought that deal would be less worse than what would happen to him if he didn’t.”

“Meaning what, life without parole?”

“Meaning a very short life span, for him or someone he knows.”

“He’s not on the wrong side of anybody, Sully. He’s a featherweight.”

“Which doesn’t mean somebody doesn’t have something on him.”

“Are you going to enlighten me? Or are you just talking out of your neck?”

“You can’t tell me everything you know, and vice versa. But I’m telling you, Eva, don’t get tied in tight on this.”

•   •   •

Outside on the street it was dark. He dropped his phone, maybe a little drunk, then stooped down to pick it up, got Tony on the rewrite desk on the phone and dictated a few paragraphs about the impending plea bargain. Tony asked him, stifling a cough, the name of his source and Sully told him that wasn’t going to happen. There was a pause, and Tony asked if he was absolutely certain about the leak and Sully said he could add it to the Ten Fucking Commandments.

He hung up and called R.J. at home.

“Holy shit, Sullivan,” he bellowed. “Beautiful. This is going to lead the paper.”

“Yeah.”

“So . . .”

“So yeah.”

“So now what about Reese and Pittman?” R.J. said. “What about the other, what are we calling them, mysterious deaths?”

Goddamn. He was right to the point.

“’s the same as it was before.”

“That can’t be. I know Reese had the affair, and I hate to agree with Melissa about anything. But we’ve got to have something really solid to go ahead with this right now. Just him having the affair isn’t going to do it. Public sympathy—”

“We already have him nailed.”

“Dazzle me with how.”

“Failure to disclose. Failure to report his knowledge to MPD about a young woman missing and believed dead. He knew damn good and well that she went missing, that the last time anyone saw her was at Halo, and he alone knew she was alive at least eight hours after that. We can establish that he, an officer of the court, knowingly withheld that information from law enforcement to preserve the secret of an adulterous affair. Minimum, judicial misconduct.”

R.J. paused. Sully could visualize him stroking his beard.

“You’re not bad at this. If she was just missing, well, maybe it was just a moral dilemma. But after her body was discovered last week, it’s a game-changer. She was killed—I don’t care if they call it a murder investigation or not—and she was killed in that neighborhood, perhaps on the day of their liaison. Christ, he’s sounding like a suspect.”

“So.”

“So I’ll talk to Edward. I can get you another day or two. I’m not saying we’re there yet. I’m saying we can make a case. I’ll have Chris do the presser tomorrow. But you’ve got to go on this, champ. You’ve got to go hard.”

•   •   •

At home, in the darkness, Dusty next to him in the bed, both of them teetering on the edge of exhaustion, of sleep. Other than it being a long time after midnight, he had no idea of the time. The sex had been something close to violent, and he was trying to let the afterglow lull him all the way to sleep.

“Who is this we’re listening to?” she said.

“Tom Waits.”

“It sounds like he’s gargling.”

“Don’t blaspheme.”

“‘Freeways, cars, and trucks.’ Is this supposed to be profound? What
else
would you see on the freeway?”

“It’s about being in love.”

“Well, I’m not in love with him, I can tell you that.”

“How was class this week?”

“Kicked my ass. I was cranky, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—I mean, really realize—there was so much math to being an RN.”

“Math?”

“Chemistry. Dosages.”

“I can barely add.”

“No kidding. I’ve seen your checkbook.”

He laughed, softly, in the dark, turning to let her leg drape over his. “That’s mostly subtraction.”

“My mother always said”—she yawned, closing her eyes, setting into her pillow—“to date men with at least six figures in the bank.”

“Momma didn’t date me.”

“Obviously.”

“How is she?”

“Playing tennis three days a week, down there at Boca.”

“You feel nice.”

“Mmm,” her voice drifted lower, sleepier. “You’re too amped up about—about this Sarah Reese thing, baby. Feels like I don’t know you.”

He debated telling her about the gunfire, but that was over before it started. He could never explain and she’d never understand.

“These three guys, the suspects?” He decided to go that route. “They didn’t do this. The judge was screwing Noel. These other women, missing, dead . . . something out there is really fucked up. It’s not as neat as what the police are saying.”

“I still can’t believe the Judge Reese thing. What are you going to do?”

The music went off. It was quiet, the occasional passing car, a breeze in the trees outside, the year getting colder.

“I don’t know,” he said, almost a whisper. “Find out who killed Noel. That seems to be the key to the lock.”

“Can’t you just let it go? It’s eating you up. You’re—you’re different.”

“Can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Let it go. It’s—I can’t explain.”

After a while, she yawned and pulled the covers up, the last nesting before sleep. “Can we at least go somewhere when it’s over?” She hated murder and the talk of it, he could tell.

“Where to?”

“You’ve never taken me to New Orleans.”

“‘Never.’ Well, damn. We’ve only been dating, what, not even a year.”

“Still.”

“I took you to New York,” he said, feeling defensive but not wanting to sound that way. “We ran away to Broadway. Stayed at the Algonquin.”

“But New Orleans, though.”

“Okay. Alright. You want to spend Christmas in the Quarter?”

“Sure,” she said. He felt some of the tension release in her shoulders. “We could do that. We could eat beignets.” She was almost asleep, her body heavier on him, her breath slowing. “You could take me to that bar where you used to work. I could check it out. Maybe they’d hire me.”

“I’m not sure getting hired at the Chart Room would be a career destination.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Mumbling, drowsy, dreamy.

He wondered if she’d remember the conversation in the morning.

“Nothing. It’s just a dive. And you’d have to be a who dat.”

“Never,” she said, turning her head away on the pillow, pulling her knees up. “A ’fin to the death.”

“Un-hunh.”

“Only unbeaten team.” She was asleep.

He reached over and touched her nose with the tip of a finger in the dark. “‘Christmas in the Quarter.’ It sounds like a song about being in love.” He wanted it to be true. He really, really wanted it to be true.