Still As Death (27 page)

“Are you Jason Fowler?”

Now he looked wary. “Yeah?” Quinn took in his skinny young body, the too-long dark hair, and unfashionable glasses. It seemed hard to believe that this sweet-faced, nerdy kid could have brutally sodomized someone and then beaten her to death.

“Cambridge police. My name is Detective Quinn. This is Detective Lindquist. We want to talk to you,” Quinn said. “Can we come in?”

“Okay.” He looked from Quinn to Ellie. “I guess.”

They all sat down in the living room, which smelled of fried onions and musty laundry. There were a couple of dinner plates, still crusted with the remains of what looked like fish and chips, sitting on the coffee table, and they made Quinn feel sick to his stomach.

“Do you know someone named Luz Ramirez?” Ellie asked him.

“Yeah?” It was a question. He looked from one to the other.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Um. A couple weeks ago.”

“Where was that?”

“At the place where I get my hair cut. She cut my hair.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And?” Quinn knew there was an “and.”

He looked down at the ground, and it struck Quinn that he was embarrassed about something. “And … I don’t know why I have to tell you about it. Why do you want to know?”

His confusion seemed genuine to Quinn, but then you never knew. “She’s dead,” Ellie said bluntly. “Someone killed her.”

“Oh, shit!” The kid stood up and Quinn jumped to his own feet, a hand on his holster, thinking he was going to run. But instead he put a hand to his head and sat down again. “Are you serious? Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. No, really?” His eyes, when he looked up at them, were full of tears. “Listen, we were supposed to go out. A couple weeks ago, I guess. But she stood me up. We were supposed to meet at that Momma’s Pizza place on Mass. Ave. I waited for an hour and she never showed.” Quinn took out his calendar and made Fowler show him what night it was. He glanced at Ellie. It was the night before Luz Ramirez’s body had been found.

“Had you gone out with her before?”

“No. This was going to be the first time. I … I thought she was cute, okay? And we used to talk and stuff when I got my hair cut. And some of my friends, they dared me to ask her out, so I did.”

“They dared you, huh?” Ellie asked, an edge in her voice that Quinn had never heard before.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was stupid. I didn’t think she’d say yes. But she did.”

Quinn was about to ask him what time they were supposed to meet when Ellie jumped in again, “What else did they dare you to do?” Her voice was cold, and her face, when Quinn looked over to see what was going on, belonged to someone else. He had seen her play good cop and clueless cop, but he’d never seen her play mean cop. He hadn’t thought she had it in her.

“What do you mean?” Jason Fowler looked at Quinn. “What does she mean?”

“Did they dare you to bag her too? Is that what happened? Were you afraid you were going to lose your bet?”

“No. I … I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He seemed confused.

“She didn’t want to go along with it?” Ellie started again. Quinn had been impressed with her aggressive questioning, but now he wasn’t sure that’s what it was. Trancelike, she watched Fowler, then said, “What did she do to deserve it? Did she fight you, is that it?”

Quinn put a hand up. “That’s enough,” he said, glaring at her.

Jason Fowler turned to him. “No, I didn’t even see her. I thought she just stood me up. I swear.”

Quinn glanced over at Ellie. Her cheeks were pink and she was sitting forward in her seat as though she was going to strangle the kid. She started to talk and he held his hand up again. “Detective Lindquist,” he warned. He didn’t like to dress down a fellow detective in front of a witness, but he had the feeling she might completely lose control.

He turned back to the kid. “Is there anyone who can corroborate that?”

“My roommate. My roommate came into the pizza place like an hour after I was supposed to meet her, and I walked home with him. He made fun of me the whole time, like I couldn’t even get the shampoo girl, you know. I guess I couldn’t. But that wasn’t how I felt about her. She was really smart and she was different from most of the girls I know. She liked me because I’m a hard worker and serious and, I don’t know, I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” He seemed so sincere and so scared that Quinn decided he could feel the case slipping away again. He’d be awfully surprised if it turned out that Jason Fowler had anything to do with the girl’s death. But he had to check anyway. He got the roommate’s name and cell phone number.

“What was that about?” he asked Ellie when they were in the car.

She sat miserably in the front seat, hunched over and staring out the window like a little kid. He wanted to grab her by the collar of
her blouse and pull her up, tell her to sit up straight. “I thought he was lying,” she said coldly.

“Then you’re not as good at this as I thought you might be. But even if he was lying, where does freaking out on him get us? It just puts his back up, makes him more likely to keep lying.”

She stared out the window. “Guys like that, they won’t just come out and admit it. You have to make them.”

He gaped at her. “Ellie, have you gone completely crazy? You know that’s not how you get a confession. A guy who really had done something like that, you think he’s going to admit it because
you
got in his face?”

“Because
I
got in his face? Or because
someone
got in his face?”

He hesitated. “Look, we all know that people respond differently to different personalities. In our line of work, we can’t be sensitive about that kind of thing. There are qualities women cops have that men don’t, and vice versa. Right?”

“If you say so.” She had turned in on herself. She curled up in the passenger seat, as though she was trying to take up as little room as possible.

“Where do you want to go? I’m done for the day.”

“My car.” She nearly whispered it.

They drove back to headquarters in silence, and he found her car in the lot. She still had Ohio plates on it and a bumper sticker from the Ohio Police Benevolent Society.

He turned to her. “I just don’t understand. What was going on back there? If there’s something you need to tell me, then tell me.”

She hesitated for a minute, as though she was weighing something, then she went to open the door. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I won’t let it …”

Quinn’s cell phone rang. When he looked down, he saw it was Steve Kirschner and he put a hand up. “Hang on,” he told Ellie, answering the phone, “Yeah. It’s Quinn.”

“Look, I found out something for you, I think. That guy, Naki Haruhito. We investigated him after the 1979 theft. There was word
on the street that he had some of the Egyptian pieces that were taken from the Hapner. But we were never able to nail him. Here’s the thing, though. A couple years ago, we did get a good lead on this guy Martin McMaster. He’s from Belfast and he was supposed to have carried out this other thing and he’s had some connections with Haruhito that we know about. He had two known associates in Boston, though. This guy Michael Fox and Fox’s brother-in-law, guy named Vinnie Keefe, they didn’t come up in 1980, but some intelligence we’ve gotten recently says they were involved.”

“Yeah. Wait a minute. Did you say Keefe?”

“Yeah. Like the security guard.”

“Do you think—?”

“I know,” Kirschner said. “He’s Denny Keefe’s cousin. We checked it out.”

“He was the inside guy. What are you doing?”

“I’m on my way to the museum. Meet me there.”

Quinn put the phone back in the glove compartment. There was a long silence, and then Ellie said, “I’m really sorry. I just …”

But Quinn had turned the Honda around and was heading back toward the university. “Later,” he said. “We’ll talk about it later.” He stopped at a red light, then thought better of it and went through, sounding his horn as he went.

“But I …”

“Later,” he said. “Listen. Remember in the file, when it said that the police were already on their way because of the silent alarm? Well, I just thought of something. Keefe wasn’t behind the desk when he was attacked. So how’d he set off the alarm? The button’s back there, hidden away, right? So how’d he set it off?” He looked at her. “He must have been in on it. We’re going to the museum.”

TAD MORAN PUT DOWN THE BOX and went over to the window, taking a moment to get himself together before he finished packing up Willem’s desk. He’d known he was going to have to do it, but seeing Willem’s things, neatly organized in his desk drawers, had been so much sadder than he’d thought it would be. And then he’d come across the spare pair of running shoes that Willem had always kept in the bottom drawer. Standing in front of the window, Tad held the shoes for a moment, feeling the weight of them, smelling the new shoe scent. Willem had hated to have anything on his shoes and he had kept the spare pair in case he stepped in a puddle or something.

He had been a scrupulous person, Willem. Well, about some things, anyway. His clothes had always been perfectly pressed. It was the thing that had struck Tad about him the first time he’d seen him, teaching a class on museum exhibition during Tad’s first year of graduate school. Willem’s blue shirt was as pristine at the end of the four-hour class as it was at the beginning.

Tad had wondered how Willem kept from going crazy when he was in Egypt, where everything you wore ended up covered in layers of dust and dirt. But Willem had been a different Willem there. It
was like he had found a way of not caring about the same things he cared about at home. In Egypt, Willem was looser, younger, more human. He stayed up late drinking on digs, he told stories and jokes and wrapped everyone up in his charismatic charm. He was warmer, more passionate, as though the hot desert sun did something to his personality.

It had been in Egypt that Tad had known he was in love, and it had been as much a surprise to discover that he was capable of this love as to realize that his love was for a man. It wasn’t that he had never suspected this of himself, but in his twenty-three years he had kept it so far beneath the surface of his reality that it had felt genuinely shocking to realize the truth about himself. He had never imagined that he could fall so hard for someone who did not love him in return.

Nothing had happened on that first trip. It was only later, when it suited Willem’s purposes. That had always been the way. It had always been about Willem’s purposes, Willem’s needs, he saw now. If he had fooled himself into thinking that if his love was not returned, perhaps his affection was, he saw now that he had been wrong. Still, he couldn’t fault Willem for deceiving him. Tad had allowed himself to be deceived for a long time. And then, at some point, he had accepted that what happened once a year and then once every three years or less, might never happen again, and it had been a strange kind of relief, not to wonder anymore, to be left only with his love, which burned as bright and as inevitable as the sun.

He thought of Egypt now, of that brutal sun and the way the endless sand had always smelled to him of dry leaves, old wood. It had been a long time since he had been over, and suddenly, for the first time, he saw what Willem’s death meant. He was free. He had his Ph.D. He could get a teaching job now, move somewhere else. He was no longer chained to the museum.

But then he remembered his mother. How could he have forgotten her? She wouldn’t want to move somewhere else, and he had the house to care for. When a lawyer had called him a couple of days after
Willem’s death and asked to speak to him, Tad had almost dared to hope that he’d been left something in the will. But as it turned out, Willem’s considerable assets had been left to his estranged brother. Tad had been left a small limestone statue of a falcon that Willem had kept on his bookcase at home. It had held no particular significance and Tad couldn’t begin to imagine why Willem had left it to him. It had been the final insult, really, the impersonal little piece of antiquity.

He turned the shoes over in his hands. He would give them to the Salvation Army, he decided, putting them aside. And then, turning away from the late-afternoon sun streaming in the window, he went back to work.

SWEENEY DROVE OUT TO GREENFIELD on Tuesday. She’d always liked this part of northern Massachusetts, with the little mill towns close up against the Vermont border, the way the landscape seemed to open up here and offer views beyond the green fields and pine forests, and as she drove, she reflected that while she was grateful for the Jetta’s competence, she was still nostalgic for her old Rabbit’s quirky charm. If she’d been driving the Rabbit, she knew, she’d be nervous the whole time about it breaking down, but this was the first adventure she’d been on without it and she allowed herself to feel a little sad.

After speaking to Susan Esterhaus, she wasn’t sure she knew any more about Karen Philips than she had known before, and though she suspected that there was more to the apparent disappearance of the falcon collar than she yet knew, she didn’t have any idea how to go about learning what it was.

All she knew was that she had talked to Willem about her suspicions and now Willem was dead. And so she had decided to see what she could learn about Karen in the place of her birth. Ever since she had learned about Jeanne’s affair with Trevor Ferigni, Sweeney hadn’t wanted to be in the museum. She wasn’t sure if it was the
memory of Trevor’s desperate face, or the way Jeanne had broken down afterward, but she welcomed the chance to get far away from the university and out of the city heat.

The downtown consisted of a row of little gift shops and cafés, though she suspected they existed to serve the tourist population since she had seen a strip of big-box stores and large supermarkets on her way into town. She stopped at the first restaurant she came to, an authentically vintage little diner with a sign that read,
BREAKFAST ALL DAY
. Sweeney, who loved breakfast, checked her watch and decided that three
P.M.
wasn’t too late for Belgian waffles. When the teenage waitress brought her food, Sweeney, not expecting much, said, “I’m in town looking for the Philips family. Do you know where I might find them?”