A Perfect Grave (9 page)

Chapter Seventeen

I
n the twilight hour before dawn, Grace Garner sat alone in the empty homicide squad room, feeling the crushing weight of the case on her shoulders.

It increased with every word of the morning’s headlines.

The
Seattle Times
had
NUN’S MURDER CONCERNS VATICAN
—
HOLY SEE ASKS CHIEF FOR UPDATE
. While the
Post-Intelligencer
had
SISTERS PLAN SHELTER SERVICE FOR SLAIN
‘
ANGEL OF MERCY
,’ and the
Seattle Mirror
had lined
POLICE FOCUS ON WEAPON
—
A KNIFE FROM NUN’S SHELTER
on page one above the fold.

Each of the headlines hit Grace like a blow to her stomach. After digesting every article, she set the papers aside to work. As she reached for a re-canvass report, her cell phone rang. It was her sergeant.

“It’s Stan, you see today’s papers yet?”

“Yes.”

“The heat’s on us to clear this one fast, Grace. My predawn wake-up call came from the chief. He said the commissioner, the mayor, even the governor, have ‘expressed deep interest’ in Sister Anne’s case.”

“I’m writing that down.”

“Grace.”

“And what’s their interest in the murder of a seventeen-year-old hooker? Or, a homeless down-and-out loser—”

“Grace.”

“This kind of political crap sickens me. We go flat out, Stan. We don’t need to be told the obvious.”

“It’s in my job description to tell you the obvious. By the way, we’re bringing in detectives from Robbery to help. Case status meeting’s at 7:30
A.M.
”

After the call, Grace noticed a message that had come last night from Cynthia Fairchild, with the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, requesting an update. Came in about midnight. They were leaning on Cindy, too.

The pressure was coming from all fronts.

Grace had a stack of messages and shuffled them into priority. First things first. She brewed herself some fresh coffee, then began working on her candidates for suspects, so far.

The full autopsy report and observations by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office on the angle and force of the wound suggested that Sister Anne’s killer was strong, likely over six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds. Reviews of the shelter’s staff and client lists had, so far, yielded the following subjects who fell into that category:

Haines Stenten Smith, Caucasian male, age 37, weight 235 pounds, height six feet, six inches. Recently released from Washington Corrections Center after serving time for choking a woman in a Tacoma park. Witnesses said he held a knife to the face of a volunteer at the shelter five months ago but was intoxicated at the time. Smith could not account for his whereabouts the night Sister Anne was murdered.

Louis Justice Topper, African American male, age 33, weight 220 pounds, height six feet, three inches. Recently released from Coyote Ridge. A crack dealer who’d stabbed female crack addicts for nonpayment. Three weeks ago he’d flown into a rage at the shelter and threatened a client with his fists. A friend said Topper had “gone off his medication.”

Johnny Lee Frickson, Caucasian male, age 43, weight 280 pounds, height six feet, two inches. A Level 2 Sex Offender who’d attacked women aged 40–60, in their apartments in Seattle. After undergoing treatment, Frickson qualified for a work-release addiction recovery program. One night, last month, after dessert at the shelter, Frickson lost his temper and shouted threatening gibberish at several nuns. Detectives interviewed him in a downtown flophouse. A neighbor alibied Frickson, placing him in the flophouse that night of the murder. Detectives were seeking more sources on Frickson’s alibi.

Ritchie Belmar Brown, Caucasian male, age 52, weight 240 pounds, height six feet, four inches. Brown was recently released from King County Jail. He’d served several months after trying to run down the organ player in the Seattle church parking lot where Brown was a Bible studies instructor. Legal action had bankrupted Brown’s struggling taxidermy business. He frequented Sister Anne’s shelter, where he began telling anyone who’d listen that the Catholic Church was the cause of his personal troubles. The detectives who’d interviewed Brown strongly recommended they go back on him because he kept changing his account of where he was the night Sister Anne was slain.

Each of them had a connection to Sister Anne. Before their release, she’d visited each of them in jail, as she had visited many prisoners, to offer spiritual guidance.

Each of these men had access to a shelter knife. Each of them was a smoker, which fit with Grace’s single witness account.

Still, Grace did not like any of them for the murder. Nothing registered with her. They were all violent, dangerous men, but her instincts had not locked on to any of them.

And these four heroes were not her only potential suspects.

The shelter had people who were not regulars, those who drifted in and out. Sister Anne could have been stalked. And there were also “walk-ins.” Strangers who appeared every day, like anonymous ghosts.

Sister Anne also counseled abused women who sought sanctuary. Through these situations, she often came in contact with their vengeful partners. Threats were common in these cases.

Grace faced many possibilities.

She needed solid evidence, a fingerprint that put someone at the crime scene. DNA. A credible witness. Something.

Grace went to her notes and reviewed Sister Anne’s last moments. After leaving the shelter, she took the bus. No one indicated if she was alone, or was followed. Grace and Perelli interviewed the bus driver, who’d helped them find his few passengers. They were regulars and the driver pinpointed their stops and buildings, too. But it had yielded nothing. No one got off anywhere near Sister Anne’s stop.

And the one witness account from Bernice Burnett, who lived next door to the nuns, suggested a stranger had been in Sister Anne’s apartment when she arrived—and was a smoker. She recalled him lighting up in the alley when he left.

Grace flipped through other files. It would take time to collect and analyze cigarette butts from the alley to compare with possible DNA from the suspects who could already be legitimately placed in the vicinity of the crime.

That made for a weak case against the four men she was considering so far. All of that evidence would be challenged in court.

Okay, back to square one.

So the guy’s in her place like he’s looking for something. But what? Nothing’s missing. Nuns have nothing; they vow to live a nonmaterialistic life. Maybe that’s it? He’s a two-bit criminal. Has no idea she’s a nun. He’s getting pissed off that she’s got squat to steal. Sister Anne discovers him and boom, he kills her.

There was the tip from a couple of confidential informants that someone had been talking on the street about a gang thing. It was the same line Jason Wade was working on. Some kind of revenge thing, because Sister Anne had helped some banger in trouble. The fact was she helped anyone who needed it. The “gang connection” to the murder was just talk coming from a gangster named Tango whose crew was devoted to the Sister. About five weeks back, she had comforted one of the members who got stabbed outside the shelter by a rival gangster. Sister Anne had called an ambulance and saved his life. Tango just wanted to put the word out that if it was an act by an enemy, his people would exact vengeance.

So far, nothing came of the gang angle.

It might’ve been a false lead, but it showed how much people loved Sister Anne.

Grace put her head in her hands and took stock of the empty squad room. Perelli and his family smiled at her from the framed photo on his desk. The other detectives had pictures of their kids on their desks, even the divorced dads who lost custody.

No one smiled from a photograph at Grace. Suddenly she felt utterly alone. Everybody had somebody. Everybody belonged to somebody.

It hit Grace that her life was similar to that of the nuns. They had taken a vow to give up any chance of ever getting married, of having children, of growing old with a husband and grandchildren.

But they belonged to the church, worked together doing God’s work. In a sense, Grace worked for God, too. The God of Justice. But outside of being a homicide cop, Grace had no life. Even her attempt to find one with the FBI agent ended in disaster.

He was a married lying bastard.

Grace caught Jason Wade’s byline and felt something stir.

She did have a thing for him. He was a few years younger but she was drawn to him. Something about him attracted her, his intensity, his razor-sharp intelligence. The guy exuded some kind of heat. It felt so right with him. Maybe that’s what scared her. They were both loners, both intense. So why did she break it off with him?

Had she made the biggest mistake of her life?

A wailing siren pulled Grace from her reverie to underscore the urgency of her case. She needed a break, something to put her on the right investigative path.

Grace shook her head at her notes on Sister Vivian, who had yet to provide her with more files on Sister Anne’s past.
CALL HER THIS A.M.
! Grace underlined in her notebook.

She stared at Sister Anne’s photograph in the newspapers.

A kind, smiling face.

Grace covered Sister Anne’s mouth with her fingers and looked into her eyes.

I need you to help me. Tell me what to do, where to look. Help me.

Grace’s phone rang and she answered it without removing her eyes from Sister Anne.

“Good, Grace,” Kay Cataldo said. “I figured you’d be in.”

“What’s up?”

“Got a break with the evidence that brings us a step closer to the killer.”

Chapter Eighteen

A
fter Jason looked at his grease-stained menu, with higher prices penned over lower ones, he counted four dead flies on the windowsill of his booth at Ivan’s.

He didn’t mind; it was his kind of place. A small, twenty-four-hour diner on a side street off Aurora. The smell of bacon, onions, and coffee mingled with the soft conversations of working people, weary night crews who’d just clocked out and sober-faced day crews about to punch in.

In one corner, a biker couple had fallen asleep. No one cared. No one needed their booth. Jason’s old man said he’d meet him here at 7:30
A.M.
It was 7:50
A.M.
Give him a bit more time, he was likely tied up in traffic.

Jason looked through the window’s grime to the street and thought, maybe this would be it? Maybe his dad would tell him whatever it was he was trying to tell him the other night at the Ice House Bar. Before the nun’s murder had eclipsed everything.

“You have to help me, son, I don’t know what to do here.”

Jason shuddered at the memory of his dad poised over a beer. It triggered a torrent of searing images from his life: his mother walking out, his old man showing up drunk in the newsroom that night a few years back.
“Where’s my boy? How come you don’t call me, don’t I matter anymore, Jay?”
The shame from the final humiliation had forced his old man to face his problem, to get help and to start turning his life around.

And was it all because of what had happened to him when he was a Seattle cop?

For years, Jason had secretly tried to learn more about his father’s past. He’d dug up a few scraps of information here and there but never enough to get a full sense of the events that had forced him off the job. His dad had refused to discuss whatever had happened. With anyone.

Ever.

All that Jason knew, sitting here this morning, was that he would do all that he could to help his father confront his demon, kill it, and bury it forever. Because his old man had already paid too great a price, had already come too far, to surrender to it now.

While waiting, Jason took his empty coffee cup to the counter.

The gum-snapping waitress topped it off with a “thanks, sweetie,” before Jason returned to his other problem: how to pursue the nun murder story today.

He studied this morning’s front page.

Okay, so he’d already used the knife angle in print. But he held back on how the guy who stole it from the shelter supposedly had some kind of heated discussion with Sister Anne.

Was that guy her killer?

Jason needed to dig up more, then consider taking it to Grace to see if he could leverage it into a major exclusive, so the
Mirror
would own the story. He entertained pleasant thoughts about her until his father arrived.

Jason ordered a BLT, milk, and more coffee.

“Just coffee,” Henry Wade told the waitress.

“I’m sorry that I kept blowing you off when you wanted to talk,” Jason said.

His old man shrugged off his apologies.

“You’ve got the big story, I understand.”

“All right, so let’s talk. Are you ready to finally tell me what happened to you when you were a police officer? Why you left the force?”

As his father rubbed his chin, Jason saw that he’d nicked himself shaving.

“This is all about the thing you wanted me to help you with, Dad, right?”

Henry looked out the window searching for the place to start. “I don’t expect the name Vernon Pearce to mean much to you.”

“He was your partner when you were a cop.”

“How did you know that?”

“Look, after all these years, all the crap our family, well, what’s left of it, has been through, do you think I was going to let you keep your secret locked up?”

“You know everything, then?”

“No. But I tried to learn everything, without you finding out. I dug wherever I could. I dug carefully because I didn’t want anything getting back to you because I thought you’d stop me.”

“So what more did you find out?”

“Not much, just that something happened because you quit and Vern kind of disappeared, or something.”

“Vern was a seasoned uniformed police officer. A Vietnam veteran. A diehard street cop who took me under his wing. He taught me everything about police work. How to handle myself when someone takes a swing at me, or if I was outnumbered. Taught me the basics of investigations, about police politics, how to make a judgment call, when to let somebody go with a warning, or when to be the meanest mother on the street.”

“You got along, then?”

“We were like brothers.”

“So what happened?”

“We’d been partnered for just over a year, in uniform and on patrol. In total command of our zone. Handling crap, the thin blue line. I loved my job and being Vern’s partner. God, it was good. Then one day we get called to an armed robbery in progress and—”

Henry rubbed his face.

“I’ve never really talked about this.”

“I know, Dad, take it easy.”

“The call went all weird on us. It ended with a person getting shot. The suspect was arrested and pleaded guilty.”

“Can you tell me who got shot, Dad?”

His father stared at him, his eyes clouded with fear.

“Can you tell me the date?” Jason pulled out his notebook.

“Put that away, son. Please and let me finish.”

“Why?”

“Please.”

Jason tucked his notebook away.

“More coffee?” the gum-chewing waitress asked.

They both accepted refills from her.

“Dad,” Jason said, after she left, “I looked through the old clippings from the time you were on the job, armed robberies, shootings. Your name never came up.”

“Not every cop who responds to a call gets named in the news reports,” Henry said. “All I can say is it was tragic.” He rubbed his lips. “It took a toll on me and it took a toll on Vern.”

“What happened?”

Henry stared into his black coffee.

“We gave so much to the job, we became the job. We put our lives on the line every time we went out. And in a split second, in a heartbeat, everything changes. Your life changes.”

“Dad, what happened?”

“Vern took things very hard. But he never said a word to me. So I never realized how things were eating him up, until that day.”

“What day?”

“The last day I saw him.”

“When was that?”

“One day, a few months later. Vern was late for work. I told the sergeant that his car had broken down, then I called Vern at his home. He answered. He was home alone. I told him I was swinging by to pick him up for our shift.”

“What did he say?”

“He said—” Henry stopped to blink several times. “He said sure, pal, come and get me. So I got to his place. Knocked. No answer, so I tried the door. It was unlocked. I got in and the first thing I heard was the loud static scratching of an old vinyl record that had played to the end. I called for Vern but heard nothing.

“The place was a mess. It smelled kind of bad, like nothing had been washed, or cleaned. Clothes were heaped, the TV was on but muted. Vern never had a hair out of place.

“I called for him again, heard a muffled sound from a bedroom. The door was half open. When I entered I saw Vern in his uniform and he had this strange look on his face. He was holding his off-duty gun, a Colt. I thought he was cleaning it or something. Vern looks at it, looks at me—says ‘sorry, Henry’—sticks the gun in his mouth, and pulls the trigger. A portion of his skull and brain matter splashed over his wedding photo on the wall.”

“Jesus.”

“I don’t recall what happened after that. They told me that when they found me, I was on the floor cradling his head in my lap.”

“Dad, I’m so sorry.”

“Maybe a piece of me died with Vern that day. I was finished as a cop.”

“Did he leave a note? What was he sorry for?”

“No note. His wife walked out on him. That call had taken a toll on Vern and me.”

“Well, what happened?”

“I don’t want to get into that. This is hard for me.”

“Sure. Sure.”

“The thing is, after I packed it in, I got a small disability pension and started drinking. I swore I never ever wanted to touch a gun again.”

“I understand.”

“Now here I am, a private detective with Krofton and he’s issued this order for all of his people to get themselves licensed to be armed. I’m having a very hard time with it all.”

“Are you going to do it?”

“It’s done.”

“It’s done? Wow. Well, think of it as a good thing, that you’re strong enough to stare this business down and put it behind you and hope you’ll never have to use the damned gun.”

Henry embraced Jason’s encouragement because it was what he needed to hear.

“That’s what I’ll do.”

Jason patted his father’s hand.

“Thank you for telling me this, Dad. I understand things now.”

“Thank you,” Henry said, “for not giving up on me, son.”

“Are you kidding? We’re partners.” Jason spun the newspaper around with his story on the front page.

“Maybe you could help me with this story, Dad?”

Henry looked at the headline and Sister Anne Braxton’s picture.

Jason ordered more coffee.