MASS MURDER (51 page)

“Where are the children?”
she asked after a long moment.

Her voice was like a breeze on a summer afternoon, no force behind it, just a gentle movement of air in an otherwise still environment.

“They’re with Mrs. Greenspan.”  He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.

She nodded and when he reached for her hand again, she drew it away and curled into a fetal position turne
d to the wall.

“I’m sorry, Angie,” he practically swall
owed the words. “I’m so sorry.”

The tears began to flow
,
and he buried his head and wept. The doctor had said that she’d fallen hard, landing on her back across the bottom step. The small embryo in her womb, barely ten weeks old, had split open. The news had swelled his heart so that he found it hard to breathe. How could this happen to his Angie?  He
’d
promised her only the other day that she’d never lose a chil
d.

His tears soaked the sheet until a feather-light hand reached out and stroked the top of his head. He lifted his chin to see her soft gaze and reached up to brush her cheek with the back of his hand. He knew the rough texture of his skin had to fe
el like sandpaper against hers.

“I love you, Angie.”

She gave him a half smile. “I know. When God is ready, Joe, he’ll bless us with another child. Perhaps this little one was just a wake
-
up call.”

“What do you mean?”

“Telling us to be more careful, Joe. To cherish each day. That life is precious.”

“Oh, Angie,” he choked, cli
mbing onto the bed next to her.

They curled into each other’s arms and cried together until he rocked her back to sleep, smoothing her hair with his hand.

Later, as Giorgio lay in bed at home, he reached out to the spot where Angie usually lay beside him. The sheets were cold
,
and the room felt empty. He stared at her pillow wondering how he could heal this hurt. No dog would fix this. This was a life-changing event. He didn’t pretend to understand a woman’s need to have more children. Giorgio only knew that Angie had desperately wanted this baby. And now he wanted the baby, too.

His mind began to ponder a variety of solutions, including taking a cruise, buying new furniture, or a car. But it wasn’t about all of that. It never had been. With An
gie, it was all about children.

Giorgio continued to concentrate, sifting through potential options until his head began to throb. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, letting his mind play across the last few days. The murders. The monastery. The theater. By the time his eyes began to close, he
thought he
had an
answer
.
       

C
hapter Thirty-Six

The next morning, Giorgio moved about the house on autopilot, doing what had to be done without registering pain or pleasure. The doorbell rang around seven-thirty. It was Mrs. Greenspan returning the children. She asked about Angie and said she’d stop by later in the afternoon. Breakfast with the children was a quiet affair. No yelling or fighting. No running after Grosvner. Only cereal and bananas and then Giorgio bund
led them off to the school bus.

He returned
to
clean the kitchen and put clean sheets on the bed. He even threw a load of laundry into the washer before going to Angie’s garden to find a mixture of red and pink camellias. These he arranged in a shallow bowl and placed on her nightstand. Grosvner followed him wherever he went as if he somehow understood Giorgio’s despair.

Swan called to say they had arrested Poindexter earlier that morning. He did, in fact, have an open cut on his left cheek. He was scheduled for a line up as soon as they could bring Oliver in for identification. There was no sign of Marvin Palomar or his car but they were still looking. With a silent prayer, Giorgio hung up and left to pick up Angie at the hospital.

He brought her home around noon, carefully helping her up the stairs and into bed. Her face was as pale as the clean sheets he’d just laid out. They hadn’t spoken at all in the car, letting a suffocating pressure build around them. Now Giorgio wasn’t sure what to say, so he just tucked her into bed and kissed her gently on the forehead. Her eyes found his for a brief moment, but there was no message in them, only a deep pain. His fingers stroked her cheek before he turned to leave the room.

“Joe,” her voice stopped him. “You knew why, didn’t you?  About the baby?  The kids are growing up. They don’t need me anymore. That’s why.”  She turned to the window, endin
g the short-lived conversation.

He left the room and made it to the head of the stairs before stopping and grasping the banister in a vice-like grip. All his life, he had taken the good with the bad.
“Take it one day at a time,
” his dad had always said.
“Things
will
always look better the next day.”
  It was a motto he’d lived by. From the time he was rejected by the most popular girl in the ninth grade, to when he was cut from first string football, to when his father died. But this was different. This was Angie. As far as he was concerned, his father’s motto didn’t apply to Angie. For Angie, he expecte
d life to be good all the time.

G
iorgio took a deep breath and descended the stairs, thinking about fixing Angie some lunch when the doorbell rang. He hurried to open the door and found Mrs. Greenspan standing there. She was a short, spry woman, approximately thirty pounds overweight, with quick movements and bright, gray eyes. She stood straight as a pin, with her knitting bag in one hand an
d a recipe book in the other.

“I saw you bring the missus home.”

“We’ll be okay, Mrs. Greenspan. The children are in school.”

“I’m here to take care of Angie, not the kids. You go on to work.”  She brushed past him, heading for the kitchen.

“No, really, Mrs. Greenspan,” he said, closing the door and following her. “I can stay home. I’m
going
to stay home.”

She ignored him and entered the kitchen, laid the cookbook on the counter
,
and began putting on one of Angie’s aprons.

“I don’t think Angie is hungry right now,” he said, thinking he wanted to be the one to make her lunch. “She’s resting.”

Mrs. Greenspan turned to him, her gray hair curled into tight little knots about her head. “I don’t care if anybody eats it,” she snapped. “It’s the smell I’m after.”  She turned and opened the cookbook and then went to the spice cupboard. “It’s cinnamon and vanilla I want. Cookies and maybe a cake. Maybe even some bread.”

“But Mrs. Greenspan
…”

“The smell will make it all the way upstairs. You’ll see,” she said over her shoulder as she rummaged through the spice shelf. “She’ll feel better for it.”

Giorgio stood in the kitchen doorway feeling helpless for the second time that morning. When the phone rang, he returned to the hallway. It was Rocky, responding to the message he’d left the night before. He passed along the information about Angie and told Rocky he’d see him at the station. Giorgio hung up and went upstairs.

The hospital had given Angie a sedative
,
and she was already asleep
. S
o he left her a note telling her to call him if she wanted him for any reason, and warning her about Mrs. Greenspan. By the time he returned to the kitchen, Mrs. Greenspan already had a large ceramic bowl on the counter and was opening the sugar canister. Grosvner sat behind her. Giorgio snapped his fingers
and the dog reluctantly obeyed.

“I can be reached on my cell phone, Mrs. Greenspan. For
anything
. Please don’t hesitate to call.”

“Yes, yes. I have the number in my bag,” she waved him away without ever turning around. Instead, she deftly cracked an egg with one hand and dumped it into the bowl.

Swan looked up in surprise when Giorgio appeared in the office
doorway
.

“You okay?”

Giorgio didn’t answer. He merely slumped into his desk chair. Swan got up and lifted the glass coffee pot off the burner, poured out a cup and set it in f
ront of his partner.

“Thanks.”  Giorgio started to pick it up with his right hand, but the muscles flared into action. He picked up the coffee with his left hand and took a sip. “Angie is asleep,” he said finally. “Mrs. Greenspan is conducting a one woman aroma therapy experiment and I feel like someone rolled over me with a truck.”  He flexed his fingers again. “Any news on Marvin Palomar?”

Swan replaced the coffee pot and returned to his chair where he picked up his pencil before answering. Giorgio looked up and mentally
braced himself for the truth.

“They just found his car in a ditch. He was in the trunk. Sampson is on his way over to his parents’ house.”

The cup of coffee slipped in Giorgio’s hand, spilling hot liquid onto the desk blotter. He put the cup down and just stared at it, remembering how the janitor felt the night of Olsen’s murder. Swan kept quiet in the background. Giorgio got up and grabbed a paper towel to wipe up the spilled liquid. Then he retrieved
the cup and went to refill it.

“Tell me more,” he commanded, befor
e returning rigidly to his desk.

“The car was wiped clean. Palomar was killed by a blow to the head. No weapon was found, but he was lured down to the theater the same way you were. We’ve been to his apartment and there was a message on his answering machine asking him to come to the theater. The voice is disguised, but the call was made from a pay phone only two blocks from where Poindexter lives.”

“You’ve been busy.”

“Yeah, well, the problem is he was found on Kramer Ave. in
Pasadena
, so we had to bring in the
Pasadena
department.”

“Shit!”

“It’s okay. We’ll have joint jurisdiction since Poindexter probably killed him down at the theater, but I had one of their detectives here for the lineup. By the way, Oliver picked him out about twenty minutes ago. That and your testimony about the note you found in the basement should put him away.”

Giorgio stared out the window. All he could think about was young Marvin Palomar stuffed into the trunk of a car and Angie lying upstairs at home, her dream of a baby gone. His insides roiled to the point he was actually jittery, as if he’d already drunk the entire pot of coffee. He would have to find a way to deal with this. Find a way, or fall apart.

“I want more,” Giorgio snapped. “There were three murders up there. We don’t have any proof that Poindexter killed anyone at the monastery, only that he killed Marvin and tried to kill me.”

Swan tapped the pencil on his desk, eyeing Giorgio as if measuring the extent of his stress. “There were two sets of fingerprints on that flashlight you found in the birdhouse. One was
Dorman’s
. Th
e other was Poindexter’s.”

“We need more than that,” Giorgio snapped before getting up and going to the window. “I want this guy put away for life.”  He was wound as tight as the underpinnings of a tennis ball.

“There’s dried blood on the ridge of the flashlight. It’s being checked, but Poindexter must have killed
Dorman
. Why else would he have come after you?”

Giorgio slammed his fist
into the side of a file cabinet
. “I want this guy to fry!”