Trace of Innocence (5 page)

O
n the way home, I pulled my Cadillac off the turnpike and meandered my way through New Jersey back roads toward Hoboken. I like back roads. I think better behind the wheel of a car.

I stopped at a Greek diner. My father’s love of diners had rubbed off on me. Something about Greek diners, their menus as thick as novels with huge pages, and the ability to get pie or scrambled eggs at any hour of the day or night, made them seem magical to my little-girl eyes. Now I was all grown-up, and I still often stopped for a cup of coffee and pie or breakfast
food late at night. I sat down in a booth in the back and ordered scrambled eggs and hash browns with a cup of coffee, even though it was long past dinner, without even looking at the menu. The waitress, all legs and frizzy blond hair, called back the order to the cook and brought me coffee. I stared into my mug, like an old-fashioned gypsy reading tea leaves.

Who was the mystery man in Cammie’s apartment?

What was on her mind when she invited both men over at the same time?

What was the relevance of the suicide king?

What did a ritualistic murder imply about the relationship between Cammie and her killer?

What were her dark secrets that made her feel evil, compared to David Falco’s innate goodness?

I ate my eggs, then I left and got into my car, driving down a narrow, two-lane country road. The sky was dark, and the road was unlit. I drove slowly, worried the light drizzle that had started would cause my car to skid on fallen leaves, as the trees were nearly bare.

The headlights of the car behind me were far off in the distance, and I wasn’t paying attention. I was thinking. The next time I looked in my rearview mirror, the car was barreling up
and soon tailgating me. I picked up speed, and the car picked up speed with me. It was a big SUV, and I wondered if the driver was drunk or in a hurry because of an emergency.

“Get off my ass,” I muttered, feeling nervous. There was nowhere to turn off the road, and I looked at my speedometer. I was pushing sixty-five on a road that was slick. I should have been driving thirty-five, tops.

I used my rearview mirror to check out my road companions. The driver appeared to be a man, but I couldn’t be positive. I looked at my speedometer again. Seventy. I had no idea what Uncle Sean’s Caddy could do, but even if it could go 120 miles per hour—and it was a smooth ride, I gave it that—it was still an unwieldy land tank.

The driver rode me still closer, knocking into my back rear bumper. My car started to fish-tail. It then dawned on me the Caddy was a “classic.” No air bags. If this idiot forced me off the road and I wrapped around a tree, I was likely to just end up good and dead. I wondered if that was the plan. Had Harry followed me? I regretted now not telling Lewis about the incident in the parking garage, but I had assumed that mention of my father would cause Harry to think twice about messing with me. I couldn’t
be sure it even was Harry. I felt at the end of our “conversation” that some of his rage had been spent. But who, then?

Ahead of me, I saw the lights of a convenience mart. I floored it. When I approached the store, I could see the parking lot was empty—who was out on a chilly rainy night but me? And the psycho in back of me. I cut my wheel sharply to the left and drove screeching into the parking lot, fishtailing nearly out of control. I slammed on my brakes and plowed out of the parking lot, up a curb and into a bush. I slammed against the steering wheel, and I thought I heard the blowout of a flat, but when the car stopped moving, I was still alive.

I opened the door and climbed out. The SUV was on the road, stopped, as if the driver wanted to see how I was. Maybe it was just a drunk driver, or a guy who got off on scaring women driving alone at night. That theory was blown to hell when the window rolled down and a bullet whizzed past me. I dived back into the car, and opened the glove box. I hadn’t yet done anything with Harry’s gun; it was still there.

Climbing back out into the parking lot, I held the gun, steadied it with two hands and fired off a shot. I hit the rear driver-side window and shattered it. The car sped off, the engine gun
ning as fast as it could. I hurried to the road and got the plates: JDV-611. New York plates.

A teenage boy in a polyester uniform poked his head out the door of the convenience mart.

“You okay, lady?”

I nodded.

“I’ll call 911. I saw that guy fire at you.”

“Do me a favor, kid, let me call a personal friend of mine. He’s a cop. I’d rather he handle it, okay?”

The kid hesitated and then nodded and went into the store. I walked around the back of my car. I did have a flat. I took out my cell phone and called Detective Jack Flanagan.

An hour later, my Cadillac was being towed to a garage near my apartment, and Jack was yelling at me in the parking lot of the convenience store. I had woken him up—he told me he’d been dozing on his couch. By the look of his bloodshot eyes, I guessed that he might have had a stiff bourbon or two. He was wearing jeans and sneakers, and the most wrinkled flannel shirt I’d ever seen, with a denim jacket over it. His hair, dark brown with streaks of gray, was wet from the drizzle, and he hadn’t shaved. He looked tired, and the crow’s-feet around his eyes were accentuated.

“Let me get this straight. You didn’t feel the need to fucking call me when this lunatic showed up in the parking garage with a gun.”

“Correct, Detective Flanagan.”

“Cut the Detective Flanagan crap.”

“Look, Jack…he was drunk, he was upset…and I don’t blame him.”

“Give me a fucking break, Billie. Sure…I get it. He’s upset that this guy may be walking, but you don’t shoot the messenger, Billie. Killing you…what good would that have done?”

“Well, he didn’t kill me.”

“Only because you pulled all that karate crap on him—”

“Krav Maga.”

“Speak English.”

“I never took karate. I took Krav Maga.”

“Fine. You pull your little Hong Kong Chop Suey on him—”

I shook my head. “Do you
try
to be this ignorant?”

“Anyway…you wrestle the gun away from him. Suppose you didn’t?”

“But I did.”

“Suppose you
didn’t.
”

“But I
did.
”

He threw up his hands and turned his back to me, walked about ten paces away, and then
came back. I’d learned this was a technique he had for calming down.

“Okay, Billie…so Harry ran away from the garage. You kept his gun. Today you head down to Rahway and visit the suicide king killer.”

“No.”

He sighed. “I’m trying here, Billie. You
just
told me, not ten minutes ago, that you went to see the suicide king killer.”

“But he’s not the killer. He’s innocent.”

“A jury of his peers found him guilty. Can we just
call
him the suicide king for a moment?”

I folded my arms across my chest. “Fine.”

“And on the way back, when most
normal
—and I use that term loosely in any sentence associated with you—people would want to get home on a rainy night, you drive all over God’s fucking creation in search of a Greek diner.”

“Yes.”

“Why? Craving a gyro or something?”

“No. They remind me of my father and brother.”

“Okay, so moving along, you order eggs and coffee. You get back in your car. You drive all back roads. Someone comes and tailgates you. You assume it’s a drunk. Until he forces you off the road and then fires a gun. You fire back, shattering the window, and get the plates. And
now we need to pick up Harry, because it appears he still wants you dead.”

“I don’t think it was Harry.”

“Well, we’ll run the plates and see.”

He stared at me. His eyes were a pale blue that, to me, looked perpetually sad. His only child, a little girl, had died of leukemia seven years ago—long before I met him. The strain broke up his marriage, and he took to drinking to get over it all. Add working murder after murder, and he was a cop on the edge. Part of me thought I even loved him, but he held on to his sadness, except for brief moments, and that sadness threatened to suffocate us both at times.

“Billie…I…listen, I can’t have anything bad happen to you.”

“Nothing will.”

“You don’t know that.” He looked past me, out into the night. “Come stay at my place tonight.”

“No. I have to feed my cat. Why don’t you come stay the night with me?”

“Fine.”

We walked to his car, a Chevy TrailBlazer with a hell of a lot of rust on it. We climbed in and drove in near silence to my place. We parked the car on the street maybe two blocks away and walked to my apartment. When we
got there, Raphael meowed and came over to us. I reached down and scooped him up, giving him a kiss on the nose. Putting him down, I went to the kitchen and filled his bowls with food and water. I didn’t offer Jack a beer.

“Make yourself at home,” I called out.

I turned around, and he was right behind me. I jumped a bit. “You startled me, Jack. Why don’t you sit on the couch?”

He didn’t answer, but kissed me hard on the mouth, pulling me into him. His kisses are always hungry, the way a man who feels alone might kiss, as if he’s somehow found an island to cling to.

My hands traveled up to his face. Next I wrapped my arms around his neck. Furiously, he unbuttoned my blouse, and I moved my hands down and undid his flannel shirt.

He cupped my breasts, still kissing me as if he truly
needed
me. We moved toward the bedroom. I unbuttoned his jeans, and we tumbled onto my bed. Wriggling out of my jeans, I was breathless. He climbed on top of me, his chest against me, and slid inside me. Finally, he stopped kissing me and moved his lips to my ear. “I would have died if anything had happened to you,” he whispered, then moaned.

We made love, the fever building, until we
both came at once. He collapsed against me. That’s how lovemaking always was with Jack. I rolled onto my side and allowed him to wrap his body around me. I felt a cold autumn breeze, and I noticed for the first time that my bedroom window was slightly open. I squinted in the reflected light from the streetlamps outside. Suddenly, I bolted upright in bed. “Oh, my God!”

“What?” Jack sat up, wrapping an arm around me.

“My laptop. It’s gone.”

J
oe Franklin and C.C. sat with Lewis and me in my living room over a good bottle of Australian pinot noir and a platter of cheese and crackers.

“Ever since I took on this suicide king case it’s been trouble.” I hadn’t seen the point of filing a police report on my laptop—I knew the chances of finding the thief were slim to none. Jack had been both angry and concerned. I tried to tell him that it was no relation to the case, but we both knew that, at least on the surface, it appeared someone didn’t want us digging around
in the suicide king case. Dusting for fingerprints on the windowsill of my bedroom provided nothing useful—just masses of prints, mostly my own, since I used the window to combat the overactive radiator in my room.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before,” C.C. assured me when she and Joe arrived the next night to discuss the incident.

“What was on your laptop?” Joe asked.

“Not much. I use it for e-mail and some Web surfing. I had recently done a search on Falco—but I didn’t turn up anything anyone else doing a Google search couldn’t come up with. Whoever took it doesn’t know that. He may have assumed I kept a lot on it.”

What I didn’t say was I researched my mother’s case constantly—all right, obsessively—but I always did a backup and stored a ZIP disc and CD-ROM copies of my work in a second location—namely a safe in Quinn’s Pub.

“What did your detective friend turn up?” C.C. asked.

“Dead end. The plates, the car itself, appear to have been stolen.”

“I’d say the real suicide king wants our boy to remain in prison,” Lewis said.

“Either that or the brother is more nuts than I thought. I just didn’t read him as anything
more than a distraught relative who’d just discovered that there was a chance his sister’s murderer might go free on a technicality.”

“A technicality?” Joe said, a little irate.

“I don’t mean it like that,” I said calmly. “It’s just that the average person has no idea of the accuracy of science. If people understood DNA evidence, then O.J. would be in prison instead of playing golf.”

Joe Franklin shook his head. “Whether it’s Harry or the real killer, it’d take a lot more than that to keep me from pursuing this—especially now.”

“Well,” Lewis drawled. “I’m rather fond of Billie, so much as I’d like to see your Mr. Falco released, I’d like to make sure we don’t get Billie here killed in the process.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have come to you. I never would have intentionally put anyone in danger,” Joe said.

“The surest way to keep us
all
safe,” I said, “is to process the DNA sample ASAP so the results are out there. The bottom line is once we have those results, whoever is looking to stop us will have to realize there’s no putting the cat back into the bag. They could kill me or Lewis or you or C.C.—” I looked at Joe “—but it wouldn’t change the results. Science always speaks for itself.”

“Unless it’s the O.J. trial,” Lewis sniped, re-hashing another of his pet peeves. “Then some fancy-pants lawyer will find a way to twist the science into so much bullshit. Oh. Sorry about the lawyer thing, Joe. And pardon my language, Sister.”

“Trust me, Lewis,” C.C. replied. “You can’t work a prison ministry if you have any sensibility at all about language. Besides—” she winked at him “—I think even Jesus Christ himself would agree there are some occasions and injustices when only a well-placed
f
-word will do.”

Lewis laughed out loud. “A woman after my own heart.”

I bet,
I thought. I had never seen him so goofy over anyone.

“And I’ve heard every lawyer joke there is. But remember, I’m one of the few good ones. I’m quite concerned, though, because it seems like Billie’s a target,” Joe said, his rich baritone filled with worry.

“What about asking your father for a bodyguard?” Lewis asked.

“No chance. I don’t need some overgrown steroids-ridden leg-breaker babysitting me.”

“Oh. Too late.”

“What?”

“Too late. I already called your father and someone by the name of Tommy Salami is going to be minding you starting tomorrow.”

“Lewis!” I snapped. “Give me a break. Not Tommy Salami.”

“Sorry, Billie, dear. Your dad insisted, and I think it’s a good idea. So we’ll test the damn evidence and at least know where we stand. Until then, you get Tommy Salami.”

I sighed.

Lewis gave me a dirty look. “I’m ignoring you, Wilhelmina, darling.”

Joe howled. “Is that your real name?”

“No,” I snapped. “It’s Billie, for real—after my grandfather. But Lewis likes that little joke. Now half the lab thinks that’s my real name…. Let me ask you, Joe, have you and C.C. ever taken on a case only to discover the man was still guilty as sin?”

C.C. nodded. “But only once. We get requests to look at cases every week—dozens of requests. From there we ask the person or his or her relatives or supporters to fill out an extensive form. I also meet people in the course of my ministry. Between the forms, phone interviews and my own contacts, we weed through and take a very limited number of cases, with the priority given to men on death row.
After a while, you do get intuitive about guilt or innocence. The guilty ones always have similar stories—it’s never their fault, and by that I mean nothing is their fault. If they beat a woman but didn’t murder her, according to them, even the beating was deserved—‘But I didn’t kill her.’”

“Charming,” Lewis said sarcastically.

“Like I said, we’ve only been wrong once. And with David Falco, I’m not only one hundred percent sure. I’m one thousand percent sure.”

“Well, DNA won’t lie, so let’s hope you’re right,’ Lewis said. “Let’s hope this guy is worth all the trouble.”

“I still marvel at the DNA aspect,” Joe said.

“I admit that I still don’t understand it completely,” C.C. added. She picked up her wineglass and took a sip, her fingers delicate around the goblet. She looked as if she would be at home in a Botticelli painting, rather than a twenty-first-century murder case.

“Basically, C.C., DNA is like your own personal bar code.” I used the metaphor I often utilized when I lectured at colleges on DNA technology. “Now, as humans, you and I and Joe and Lewis share certain DNA versus, say, a lion or a snail. We share our human DNA. But we have about three million base pairs of DNA
that are unique to us—every person’s is different except for identical twins. And so a person who leaves the tiniest of DNA fragments at a crime scene—under fingernails or a small swab of semen—leaves his or her genetic fingerprint. The problem—or actually, you could consider it a good thing if you feel paranoid about Big Brother—is that there’s no massive database with everyone in the world in it. So there has to be a match with someone already in the system. If you don’t enter the system and you fly under the radar, you won’t necessarily get caught—unless you’re a clear suspect.”

“So why didn’t they test this speck all those years ago?”

“Well, first it was lost. Then, it was too small. My guess is whoever raped Cammie wore a condom. This may have leaked when he took it off. Now we can use a technique called PCR—polymerase chain reaction.”

“I don’t follow,” C.C. said.

“Years ago, we relied exclusively on RFLP, which required larger amounts of DNA, and pretty high-quality DNA at that,” Lewis chimed in. “Now we can get by with a much smaller amount and duplicate it in the lab to arrive at our DNA fingerprint.”

C.C. looked at Joe. “If the sample shows
he’s not the man who left the sperm inside her, then what?”

“While they’re testing the DNA, we’ll be building on our interviews and trying to discredit testimony, along with the god-awful counsel he got. If the DNA fragment is enough to show he wasn’t the rapist, coupled with the fact that he doesn’t match the partial print on the knife—which the prosecution explained away as a latent print—it should be enough to overturn the conviction. He passed two lie detector tests, but the D.A. at the time was hell-bent on not having a serial killer case. He didn’t want a panic in an election year. He wanted to close that case.”

“Here’s to DNA.” I lifted my glass.

“Here’s to Tommy Salami keeping you alive long enough to get it done, Billie Quinn,” Lewis said as the four of us clinked wineglasses.

Tommy Salami was waiting for me the next day when I went out to my Cadillac.

“Hey, Tommy.”

“Hi, Billie.”

He looked about as wide as my car, and I could tell by looking at him that he was wearing a gun in a holster around his waist. His biceps, beneath a black leather jacket, were the size of my thighs. Tommy was an oversize pit
bull who worked for my father, doing what I’m not sure and have no intention of asking.

“Do we really have to go through this exercise in stupidity?”

“Your father said I’m to stay on you like white on rice. Those were his exact words.”

“Eloquent.”

“Might as well agree, Billie. ’Cause you know I can’t go back to your father and tell him I lost you again.”

Tommy Salami—and Salami wasn’t his real name, though I had no idea what was—had once been assigned to watch over me during an extended period of warfare with the Murphy brothers, in which it seemed they were smashing all Quinn cars with baseball bats and in general wreaking havoc in our lives. However, I was in no mood for any of it. So I gave Tommy Salami the slip—and my father was not amused.

“All right then, Tommy. Let’s go.” I opened up the Cadillac and climbed in. Tommy took the passenger seat.

“I’d rather drive.”

“I’m sure you would, but it’s my car and I’m driving.”

“Mind if we stop for breakfast? McDonald’s drive-through?”

“Nah. I don’t mind.”

I took Tommy through the McDonald’s drive-through, where he ordered four Egg McMuffin sandwiches, eight hash browns, one large coffee and an orange juice. He munched away on breakfast while I drove to the lab.

When we got to the parking garage, Tommy made a move to get out of the car.

“Sorry, Tommy. Without one of these—” I pointed to my photo ID badge “—you can’t come in. If you need the restroom, there’s one in the gas station across the street. Good luck and I’ll see you at six.”

I wondered how long it would take for the coffee to run through him. It was also chilly out. I took pity on him and handed him my car keys.

“Here. You can run the heat if you need to.”

“Thanks.”

I climbed out and rolled my eyes as I walked away. I hoped the DNA replication would result in the evidence we needed. I wanted my old life back—and quickly.