Triptych (27 page)

“Sorry I took so long,” Michael said as he unlocked the car doors. “Had to see a man about a dog.”

“Right,” Will mumbled, sliding into the passenger’s seat. He looked out the window, waiting for Michael to get in and start the car. If he clenched his jaw any harder, his back teeth were going to break.

Michael put his arm along the back of Will’s seat as he reversed out of the parking space. He shifted into drive and headed out of the garage, saluting the guard at the gate as they passed.

“What a shitty day,” he said, slipping on a pair of dark sunglasses. “You got kids?”

“No,” Will said, thinking this was the second time Michael Orme-wood had asked him that question. Maybe Angie had told him Will wouldn’t have kids. He had a mental image of her and Ormewood splayed out in bed, postcoital bliss turning into a game of telling secrets. Would Angie do that? Would she betray Will like that?

“I can’t imagine what Phil’s thinking right now,” Michael said. “If something ever happened to Tim, I’d feel like my heart had been ripped out of my chest. He’s a part of me, you know?”

“I can see that.”

“What about a wife?” Michael asked. “You married?”

Will turned to look at him, trying to figure out where he was going with these questions. “No,” he said.

“Seeing somebody?”

Will bristled, but he tried to control it. “No.”

“Gina,” Michael said, oblivious. “She works at Piedmont in the ER. What’s that they always say about cops? They either marry nurses or hookers?”

Considering Michael had left his last assignment under such a dark cloud, Will thought it was pretty dangerous for him to be joking about prostitutes.

Will began, “That Polaski woman…” He tried to think of something an asshole would say about a woman. All he could come up with was, “She’s pretty attractive.”

Michael looked surprised, like he might not have considered Will had a penis. “Yeah,” he said. “Listen-man to man-I’d stay away from that one.”

“Why’s that?”

“She’s got a temper. Know what I mean? She looks real sweet, but inside, she’s a class-A ball-breaker.”

Will leaned his elbow on the door, stared out the side window.

So, he
had
slept with her.

Michael changed the subject. “I’m sorry I kind of lost my shit yesterday when I saw Cynthia. I’ve been doing Homicide for a while now, but you never expect something like that to happen, to actually know the person.”

Will counted the telephone poles, saw the billboards and street signs in a blur of letters that would never make sense at this speed. “Yeah.”

“I’ve gotta tell you, I’ll never be able to do this job the same way again. Notify people, I mean. Puts it in a whole new light when you know the person involved, know the victim and the parent and all.”

“I imagine so.”

“Did you get a chance to look at that Monroe file?”

“I skimmed through it,” Will lied, relying on what Angie had told him about the prostitute. “You arrested her a few times when you were in Vice.”

Michael finally seemed to feel the tension in the air. He gave Will a sideways glance. “Yeah,” he admitted. “Polaski told me that yesterday. I’d forgotten all about it. Those sweeps. You ever work Vice?” Will managed to shake his head. “You can go through a hundred of ‘em in a week. It’s all chasing your tail, no pun intended. You lock ’em up and they’re out on the street an hour later.”

“You never dealt with her pimp before? Baby G?”

Michael shrugged. “Not that I remember. These guys grow up so fast. One minute they’re a little kid skipping school, the next they’re toting a nine-mil and running everything from pussy to meth.” He shrugged again. Maybe that was where Angie picked up the gesture. “Baby G might know me from before, but he didn’t let on if he did. You think he’s got something to do with the murders? I never checked his alibi for Sunday night.”

“He was with us when Cynthia was killed,” Will reminded him.

“I’m sure he’s got plenty of soldiers to do his dirty work.”

Will nodded.

“I need to look through my Vice files. I’ll take them home tonight.”

Will felt the need to offer, “I can help, if you like.”

“No.” His tone had been sharp, but he softened it with an explanation. “You know how it is. You only put down half the information in the reports. The rest you keep in your head so they can’t trap you when you’re on the stand, say you wrote one thing when you meant another.”

“Right.” Will stole another glance at Michael Ormewood. He was not as tall as Will but he had the usual dark good looks and a solid build Angie was always attracted to. He obviously didn’t work out as much as Will, but he hadn’t gone to seed, either. Maybe he had played football in high school. Will had loved football, but he’d been too ashamed to join any team sports that would require him to strip down in the locker room. Ormewood had probably been some kind of all-star, the captain of the team, the one all the other guys looked up to.

Will took another deep breath and let it out slowly.

This was really great. One stray thought about Angie sleeping with Ormewood and suddenly Will was reliving his failed high school sports dreams. Will knew that Angie would never tell any man much about anything. Meeting new conquests was a game she played, a game where she got to reinvent herself. Telling them the truth about her past would spoil her fun. If she wanted to be with someone serious, someone who knew her inside and out, she would stay with Will.

Michael tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Greer told me I could take some personal time. I don’t know. Sitting on my hands isn’t something I’m good at. I’d never forgive myself if I missed something and this guy took another life. He could be out there right now looking for a new victim.”

“Yeah,” Will agreed, realizing that in his personal quest to emasculate himself he’d failed to notice that Michael was talking to him as an equal rather than an adversary.

Michael drove through the Homes, passing the same teenagers on their bikes that Will had noticed the day before.

“We should bust them up,” Michael said. “They should be in school.”

“Why wasn’t Cynthia in school?” Will questioned.

“I dunno. Maybe she wasn’t feeling well.”

“What’s her attendance record like?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Her father was out of town most of the time. She was alone a lot without parental supervision.”

“Gina and I did the best we could looking out for her.” He had taken Wills words as a condemnation.

“Did your mother-in-law often see her at home during the day?”

“You’d have to ask Barbara that,” Michael said, parking the car in front of building nine.

“Do you mind if I do?”

“Barbara and I are pretty close, and she never mentioned anything to me about Cynthia being home. I’ll ask her, okay? But I think that’s a dead end. Cyn was a good kid. She got great grades in school, never got in trouble. Phil always said she was an angel.”

“You seem to know a lot about her.”

Michael looked at his hands on the steering wheel. When he spoke, it seemed he was confiding in Will. “We tried to look out for her. Phil was never home. His wife ran off with some loser about six years ago, never looked back. He did his best, but I dunno…” He turned to Will. “Your best isn’t good enough when you have a kid-you have to do better. You change your priorities, don’t drive a new car every two years, don’t wear expensive suits and go out to dinner and movies all the time. You sacrifice.”

“Phil didn’t do that?”

“I think I’ve said enough,” Michael told him, taking the key out of the ignition. “He’s got enough in his life right now without his friends talking about him behind his back.”

Michael opened the car door. He said, “The BMW’s gone,” meaning the pimp was probably not home.

Will followed him to the grandmother’s flat, which was on the bottom floor. They knocked several times but even though they could hear a television blaring inside and the old woman laughing along with the studio audience, no one answered.

Will asked, “Monroe’s apartment is on the top floor?”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “I wouldn’t take the elevator if I were you.”

Will followed Michael up the stairs. Except for the grandmother’s apartment, the building was quiet. People were either at work or sleeping off last night, and the only sound was their footsteps making scuffing noises against the stairs.

Toward the top, Will slowed his pace, stopping where Aleesha Monroe’s body had been found. Blood stained the stairs, despite the fact that someone had obviously tried to clean up the marks.

“She died here,” Michael told him, stopping on the landing to catch his breath.

Will knelt to look at the pattern, the bloody ghost of the handprint climbing the stairs. The crime scene photos were bad enough, but there was something eerie about being in this place where the woman had died.

“I don’t think he meant for her to die,” Michael said.

Will looked up, thinking the man had said this at least twice before. “Why is that?”

“She rolled onto her back.” He indicated the outline where Monroe had lain. “The blood must have pooled and she choked to death.” He waited a second, looking down at the bloody stairs. “It’s sad, but it hap-pens.

Will didn’t think he’d ever had a case where this had happened before, but he nodded as if people accidentally died this way all of the time. He asked, “What do you think happened?”

Michael squinted up the stairs as if he could see it all unfolding. “I’m guessing they were in the apartment when some kind of dispute broke out. The John left and maybe she didn’t want him to. They scuffled here,” he indicated the steps, “then it went bad.”

“Was the door locked or unlocked when the first cop got here?”

“Unlocked.”

Will played the scene in his mind, thinking Michael’s scenario was as likely as any. “Do you have the key?”

“Yep.” Michael took a plastic bag out of his pocket. He unrolled it and showed Will a key with a red tag. “It was in her purse.”

“Did you find anything else?”

“Makeup, couple of dollars and some lint.”

“Let’s go,” Will said, continuing up the stairs. He could feel the hair on the back of his neck standing up as they got closer to the top. Will had never been one to believe in ghosts and goblins, but there was no denying that a murder scene had a certain feel to it, an energy that told you violent death had occurred.

“Here we go,” Michael said, slicing the yellow police tape with the edge of the key. He unlocked the door. “After you.”

Aleesha Monroe had obviously not been rich, but from the looks of her apartment, she had taken great care of her few nice things. Besides the small bathroom, there were only two rooms in the apartment, a bedroom in one and a kitchen/living room space in the other. What struck Will was that the place was surprisingly clean. No dirty dishes were decaying in the sink and the same stink that hung out in the hall didn’t seem to permeate the walls.

Will asked Michael, “This is how it looked when you got here?” Yep.

Michael’s team had already tossed the place two nights ago. The fact that he now stood back by the door, leaning against the frame, indicated clearly that he thought this was a waste of time.

Will ignored this message as he walked carefully around the room, looking for anything unusual. The kitchen was an efficiency with a single cabinet and only two drawers for storage. One was used for silverware, the other contained the usual household items that found their way into the junk drawer: a couple of pens, an array of receipts and a ring of keys that probably had outlived the doors they opened.

He stopped at a plant by the window. The soil was bone dry; the plant was dead. The glass table by the couch was sparkling clean, the matching coffee table just as pristine. There was a neat stack of magazines beside an ashtray that had obviously been wiped out. There didn’t seem to be any dust on the floor or for that matter any indication that an addict had lived here. Will had been into many a junkie’s home and knew how they lived. Heroin was especially bad. Smack heads were like sick animals who had stopped grooming, and their surroundings generally reflected this.

Will saw telltale signs of black dusting powder on the doorjambs and windowsills, but he still asked, “Did you find many fingerprints?”

“About sixty thousand,” Michael said.

“Not on the glass tables?”

Michael was looking out into the hall as if he’d heard a noise. “She must’a brought her Johns up here. There was enough DNA on the sheets to clone an entire village.”

Will walked into the bedroom, making a mental note to follow up on the question. He checked the drawers, noting that the clothes hadn’t been rifled through. The closet was packed with clothes, an old Hoover tucked in between boxes of shoes. The vacuum’s bag was empty. The scene-of-crime techs had removed it for closer examination. They had probably taken the sheets off the bed, too. Monroe’s mattress was bare, a bloodstain flowering out from the center.

Michael stood in the bedroom door. He obviously thought he could anticipate Will’s next question. “Menstrual blood, Pete says. She must have been on the rag.”

Will was silent, continuing his search in the bedroom, still thinking about the clean glass tables. He could hear Michael walking around in the other room, impatient. Will followed the black dusting powder where the crime scene techs had looked for fingerprints on all the usual surfaces: the edge of the nightstand, the doorknobs, the small chest that held mostly T-shirts and jeans. They must have checked the tables in the other room. The absence of dust indicated that the glass had been clean of prints.

Michael asked, “Did you see the story in the paper this morning?”

“No,” Will admitted. For obvious reasons, he got most of his news from the television.

“Monroe was the second story after some scandal over at the hospital.”

Will got on his hands and knees, checking under the bed. “Did you release her name yet?”

“Can’t until we find next of kin.” Michael added, “We’re holding back on the tongue thing, too.”