Hush (11 page)

"Done," said the officer who'd introduced
himself as Ramirez.

"I'll be there in a half hour."

Immediately upon ending the call, Max punched
number nine on his speed dial: Chicago's mobile crime lab.

Jeff Ellis was having sex for the third time
in one night with the blonde he'd met at Nightlife, a club just off
Michigan Avenue where all the cool people hung out. He liked to go
there wearing his dark suit, trench coat, and black sunglasses
because women got off on that. For some reason, death and a trench
coat turned women on.

When he was out, he would have people guess
what he did for a living. FBI was what he got most of the time. But
when he went on to explain that he was a mobile-crime-lab
technician, they usually liked that just as much.

He'd tried to get into Quantico, thinking it
would be about the coolest thing to be an FBI agent, but his
application was always turned down. Not his fault, he was damn sure
of that.

He was beginning to ejaculate when the phone
rang near his ear. Without pausing in his stroke, he picked the
black portable off the bedside table and put it to his ear.

"Yeah!" he shouted.

The woman under him grabbed his hips and
lifted herself to him. Flesh slapped flesh.

"We need the mobile crime lab at—"

"Hang on a second." He pushed mute, dropped
the phone on the bed, then thrust himself deep into the woman—he
couldn't remember her name—his semen finally spilling into the
rubber wrapped around his engorged cock. When he was done, he
pulled out, rolled to his back, and grabbed his cell phone.

Once again he pushed the mute button. "Yeah?"
Dead silence. Then he realized the mute button must not have
engaged the first time. "Shit." He pushed it again. "A little
unfinished business," he said breathlessly into the receiver. "If
you know what I mean."

"Get your ass over to 2315 Mulberry Street on
the northwest side."

Detective Irving. A pissed-off Detective
Irving, but then Irving was always pissed off about something.
"What have you got?" Ellis could be called in on anything from a
hit-and-run to undetermined death.

"You'll see when you get here."

Which meant it was something Irving didn't
want to talk about over the phone, in case the call was
intercepted. "Homicide?" Ellis asked, playing dumb.

"Just get your ass over here."

Ellis and Irving had never gotten along.
Irving was so damn serious and had an attitude that rubbed Ellis
wrong. And Irving had trained at Quantico. He wasn't FBI, but he'd
still spent time in the FBI Academy program. It was a tough,
eleven-week course for law enforcement officers from all over the
world. Ellis had applied too, only to get passed over year after
year. He asked Irving to put in a good word for him, but Irving
spouted some bullshit about making it on his own merit. Ellis had
hated the bastard ever since.

In the bathroom, Ellis flushed the rubber
down the toilet, then got dressed. Since it was the middle of the
night, most technicians would have shown up at the scene in
anything they could throw on. Not Ellis. He always wore his suit
and trench coat. No matter what. No matter how hot or how cold the
weather, no matter if it was day or night.

He was double-checking the items in his
technician's case when he remembered the blonde. He glanced up to
see her pouting at him from the bed, the sheet pulled up to her
waist, her breasts large and unnaturally round and high.

"You have to leave." He pulled a twenty from
his billfold and tossed it on the bed. "Call a cab."

At first it seemed that she was going to say
something. Then she pressed her lips together and snatched up the
money.

He made a helpless gesture with one hand,
shrugging his shoulders at the same time. "Hey baby, that's the way
it is."

Reminding her of his important occupation
softened her. "Did somebody die?" she whispered.

His eyes were on his open case, mentally
cataloging equipment. Powders: white and black metallic. Brushes.
Magnetic pencil Forms. Camera. Film. Flash. Black Magic Markers.
Paper evidence bags. Then there were the things that weren't issue,
that he'd added himself. Baggies. Flashlight. Measuring tape.
Tweezers. Scissors. Extra dress shirt. Black cloth for photo
backdrop. Surgical-paper shirt and pants and shoe covers.

He was always adding to his collection.

"Homicide," he said, snapping shut the case,
experiencing some satisfaction at passing Irving's veiled
information along to a total stranger.

"Oh my God," she said with a mixture of awe
and horror, pulling the sheet up over her breasts.

"Get up. Get dressed," he said.

"Why can't I wait here until you come
back?"

Now that the sex was over, he wanted her out
of there. "You don't want to be here when I get back," he said.
"You don't want to see me when I get back."

Her eyes grew big and her collagen lips
formed a circle. "Will you have blood on you? The victim's blood?
Like on your shoes or something?"

"Maybe. I never know. But it's more my frame
of mind," he said, injecting his voice with a touch of pathos,
wondering why he bothered when he didn't give a shit about her.
"I'm just really . . . down after spending a few hours at a crime
scene. I need to be alone. You can understand that, can't you?"

The truth was, he didn't feel anything. He
never had. Never. No, that wasn't exactly true. He sometimes felt a
sense of disgust—not directed toward the killer, but the victim.
Somehow, it always seemed they got what they deserved.

A phone rang out in the darkness, making
Ivy's heart race in sleep-drugged panic. At first she thought she
was home, in St. Sebastian, and that Abraham was calling to tell
her there'd been another murder. But then she remembered where she
was: Chicago. Dark, haunted Chicago. And the phone was still
ringing.

Disoriented, she fumbled in the dark,
stubbing her toe, finally finding the screaming phone.

"Hello . . . ?" she mumbled, bent at the
waist to keep from dragging the phone to the floor. The receiver
smelled like grease and plastic, and her own voice echoed back at
her.

"There's been another murder," Max Irving
announced without preamble.

She straightened and the phone slid from the
small table, crashing to the floor while she still held the
receiver to her ear, the curled, sticky cord stretched taut. Jinx,
who'd been sleeping near her pillow, disappeared under the bed.

"Thought you might want to know."

She shut off the ceiling fan, killing all
extraneous noise. "Where?"

She listened intently, chest rising and
falling, heart hammering, ears picking up the sound of a far-off
siren. Nearer, possibly in the same room with Irving, was the sound
of indistinct conversation. Her mind shuffled through various
backdrops, finally settling on the homicide, realizing he was
already at the murder scene.

"No need for you to come out in the middle of
the night," Irving said.

Was she imagining it, or was there a
challenge, a dare hidden behind the smoothness of that delivery?
Perhaps he wanted to be able to tell Abraham that she couldn't be
bothered to leave her bed.

"I'm coming."

She picked up the phone from the floor. With
the receiver to her ear, she reached for her backpack on the floor
near the bed, finally snagging it with her toe. She dragged it to
her, then dropped to her knees, digging until she found her
stenographer's notebook and pen.

She uncapped the pen with her teeth. "Give me
the address."

Surprisingly, he didn't argue. He gave her
the address, then said, "Call a cab. It's not far from you, only a
few miles."

With one finger, she ended the call, then
quickly put in another to Yellow Cab. After hanging up, she grabbed
the clothes she'd taken off just hours earlier—jeans and a T-shirt.
Probably not professional crime-scene attire.

Into her canvas backpack, she jammed the
notebook and pen. Then, slipping her bare feet into a pair of
clunky-heeled leather loafers, she grabbed her apartment keys and
headed out the door.

Downstairs, she waited just inside the double
doors that locked automatically whenever someone came in or out of
the building, straining to see the street through a narrow strip of
beveled glass.

In the distance, she finally spotted
distorted headlights. On the roof was the lighted cab logo. She
watched as the vehicle pulled up next to the curb in front of her
building.

Fresh, cool air hit her in the face as she
stepped outside. The moon was almost full, a few of the brighter
stars visible past the glare of light pollution.

She slid into the backseat of the cab and
gave the driver the address.

They floated through the surreal cityscape,
stopping at traffic signals that continued to function even though
most people were in bed asleep. As they drew closer to the crime
scene a roadblock consisting of a single police car with a flashing
red strobe stopped them. A uniformed policeman shined a powerful
flashlight inside the cab, first at the driver, then at Ivy. She
lowered her window and pulled out the temporary badge Abraham had
issued to her. The policeman took it from her, examined it with his
flashlight, handed it back, and let them pass. Two blocks later,
they were at the scene.

She paid the driver. Too distracted to
mentally compute the tip, she gave him what she thought was
adequate. It must have been too much, because his bored-out-of-my-
mind attitude vanished and he flashed her a big grin before she
stepped away.

It was a poor neighborhood, with converted
three- story houses that came almost to the street, all looking
alike, with hardly enough room for a person to squeeze between
them. Most were shingle-sided with tar-paper roofs, but the
apartment building Ivy was looking for turned out to be brick.
People gathered on their front steps, watching, whispering. Some of
them must have been there awhile, because a few yawned and shuffled
back into their homes.

Just another homicide. Go back to bed.

In the yard of an adjoining house, a pit bull
barked deeply in its barrel chest and lunged at a chain-link fence,
its feet and nails stirring up a cloud of dirt as it continued its
display of aggression. Yellow crime- scene tape surrounded what
there was of the yard, taking in the entire sidewalk and part of
the street where more patrol cars pulled up, lights flashing,
strobing off the apartment windows, giving the area an even
weirder, unreal carnivalesque feel.

One uniformed policeman stood where the
yellow crime tape wound around a streetlight.

He took a step toward her, his expression
stern. "No press allowed."

Once again, she pulled out her temporary
badge. "I'm not press."

He squinted at the badge, then straightened,
his shoulders relaxing. "Oh, yeah. Detective Irving said you might
be coming."

She clipped the plastic photo badge to her
T-shirt, then lifted the crime-scene tape with one hand as she
ducked underneath.

A policewoman was stationed at the door.
Other officers were scattered about, tablets in hand, interviewing
people, hoping to find an eyewitness.

"Second floor," the policewoman said.

"Thanks."

Even though the building looked to have been
built about the same time as Ivy's, it was in much worse condition.
Names had been carved into the plaster walls with a sharp knife.
Behind a dark-stained door with dripping, yellow varnish, a woman
sobbed uncontrollably while someone in a low voice tried to comfort
her.

Ivy's heart hammered as she moved up the
flight of stairs. She put her hand out to steady herself, grabbing
the sticky railing; it shifted precariously and she let it go.

Up, up, her footsteps echoing.

It was eerily quiet inside the building
except for the fading sound of muffled crying.

The apartment door stood open, another
policeman stationed there. Once again, she gave her name and lifted
her badge. The policeman nodded.

Just inside the door was a combined living
room and kitchen. The wooden floor was scuffed. It creaked when she
moved across it. On the wall above the couch was a watercolor of a
Japanese garden, in one corner a small rock fountain flowing with
soothing contentment. Next to it, on the floor, was a tiny bonsai
tree, spilled, its roots exposed, black dirt in a little pile next
to it. From the ceiling hung a beautiful lantern made of rice
paper. Letters had been cut in the lantern. They probably meant
things like "happiness," "prosperity."

She couldn't quit looking at the objects in
the living room, each telling a more personal story about the
owner. Origami; more watercolors, these of flowers; a black
lacquered box; a silk pillow.

A world of their own. A sweet, safe
haven.

God damn it. God, God damn it.

She wanted to reroot the bonsai tree, but she
knew she wasn't to touch anything. Normally a crime scene remained
a crime scene for two or three days. After that, the plant could be
picked up. By then it would probably be too late. It was probably
too late already. Roots could only be exposed to the air for a
short time before the plant died.

In the kitchen area, on the refrigerator, was
a birth announcement.

Years ago, Chicago papers used to routinely
publish all the births within Cook County. That was done away with
during the reign of the Madonna Murderer, and even though the
murders stopped, the announcements never resumed. Most people
didn't even think about it. Most people wouldn't have been able to
tell you why birth announcements were no longer in the paper. But
Ivy knew.

She forced herself to look elsewhere, to move
in the direction of the hallway. Low voices could be heard floating
from the bedroom. From inside came the click and whir of a camera
shutter. A white flash lit the hall again and again and again.