Night Work (13 page)

“What?”

Still looking at me. Listening and shaking his head.

“What’s her name? Hold on … How do you spell that?” He grabbed the pad and pen by the phone and began writing.

“And this was where?” He kept writing.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Do they have him now? They do. Yes. Yes, I know. Yes, I will. Okay, goodbye.”

He hung up the phone.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Do you know a woman named Sandy Barron?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so … Wait. Sandy as in Sandra? She lives over on Dewitt Street?”

“Yeah, that’s her.”

The way he said it. I could feel the cold needles all the way down my back.

“Howie, don’t tell me …”

“She’s dead. They just found her.”

“No. No way.”

“They’ve got her husband at the station …”

“This isn’t happening,” I said. “Please tell me this is a bad dream.”

“Come on,” he said. “They say they need your help again. Right now.”

Howie drove. We crossed over the bridge, the Rondout Creek far below us, the lights of the waterfront, the people down there, eating, drinking, just walking around, having normal lives with their loved ones.

He parked behind the station. I should have my own designated spot back here, I thought, and while I’m at it, a special red phone on my desk for calls from the chief.

Mike was sitting at his desk. “Detective Borello,” he said, with more energy than I’d ever heard from him. “Mr. Trumbull.” If manning the night shift was usually a boring job, it sure as hell wasn’t tonight. “They’re waiting for you upstairs.”

The chief was already coming out of his office when we hit the hallway. “Joe,” he said to me. “Sorry to drag you down here again.” He turned to Howie. “Detective, I need to see you in my office.”

“What happened?” he said. “Where’s the husband?”

“I’ll fill you in,” the chief said, “while the BCI men are talking to Joe.”

“BCI
men?
There’s more than one of them now?”

“In my office,” the chief said. “Joe, I’ll take you down to the interview room.”

Howie stopped him. “Can I talk to them, at least?”

“No, Detective. You cannot talk to them. You lost that privilege the last time Shea was here, remember?”

“That’s some privilege.”

Brenner looked at him for a long moment. Maybe he was counting to three in his head before saying anything, one of the essential skills of a police chief.

“Go sit down in my office,” he finally said. “I’ll be there in one minute.”

I could see Howie’s face getting red. Never a good sign for whoever he was mad at, going all the way back to the playground. Didn’t matter who it was, even a teacher or, most memorably, his boss at the ice cream stand. I guess he’d grown up a little bit, though, because he swallowed whatever he wanted to say and went into the chief’s office.

“This way,” the chief said to me, his voice instantly back to a perfect calm. “The same room.”

“You should start charging me rent.” That sick feeling was starting to come back.

He smiled but didn’t say a word.

“Her husband killed her,” I said. “Is that what you’re telling me? She came back to him today and he killed her?”

“It may not be as simple as that, Joe.”

“What do you mean?”

He opened the door to the interview room. I was surprised to see it was empty.

“They’ll be with you in a moment,” he said.

“Chief, tell me what happened to her. I need to know.”

“They’ll be right with you,” he said, looking me square in the eye. “Just have a seat.”

He closed the door again. This time I sat down. There was nothing to look at in the interview room, nothing to distract me. It was just me and everything going on inside my head. Two women dead now, one after spending the last few hours of her life with me, the other apparently because I tried to help her get away from an abusive husband.

I saw Marlene on the ground, an image I knew would stay with me for the rest of my life. If she had been curled up in that tall grass, or lying with her arms and legs stretched out randomly in every direction … Somehow it would have made more sense to me. I could have processed it and moved on. To see her carefully posed like that, as if a mortician had prepared her for a funeral…

I closed my eyes, wondering if I was about to throw up right there in the interview room. I leaned back in my chair and wished for a cold bottle of water.

I had no image for Sandra’s death. I could only imagine. She went back to her house … Did he kill her right away, the moment she stepped through the door? Or did he wait for the darkness? Did he have to work himself into a rage, fueled with alcohol, before he could take the life of the woman who loved him?

I looked at my watch. It was after eleven now. I
was just about to get up and look out the door when it opened and Shea came in. Another man followed him. They were both carrying thick notebooks.

“Joe, this is my partner,” Shea said. “Harold Rhine-hart.”

I stood up and shook his hand. Rhinehart was older than Shea by at least twenty years. He was mostly bald, with thin brown hair holding on for dear life over each ear. He wore thick glasses. If Shea looked like a rock star, then Rhinehart looked like a high school science teacher.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Shea said. “We were talking to Mrs. Barron’s parents.”

He sat down across from me, just like he had earlier. It was hard to believe it was still the same day. His partner sat next to him. They both looked tired.

“I was there,” I said. “At her house.”

“At the Barrons’ house?”

“I wanted to check on her. Apparently, she came to see me at the gym today, but I was at work.”

Shea opened his notebook. “When did you go to her house?”

“Around seven thirty. I was on my way over to Howie’s house.”

“That’s Detective Borello.”

“Yes.”

“And when did she come to see you at the gym today?”

“I don’t know exactly. I can ask Anderson. Sometime in the afternoon.”

Shea was writing everything down. Rhinehart just sat there watching me.

“She could have found you at the office,” Shea said. “It’s just down the street, right?”

I thought about it. “Anderson got the impression that she only came by to tell me to leave her alone. That she had a change of heart and didn’t need my help anymore.”

“She said that?”

“I don’t know exactly what she said. Again, I’ll ask Anderson about it.”

“He’s the owner of the gym,” Shea said, writing. “He’s there most of the time, right?”

“Yes.”

“I understand Mrs. Barron came to see you last night. You arranged for her transport to the women’s shelter.”

“That’s right,” I said. I took them through the whole episode. Sandra showing up at the gym. Anderson, Maurice, Rolando, and I, all there after hours, having a quiet drink. Me insisting that we do this right, calling Protective Services instead of going down and taking care of her husband ourselves.

“Sounds like you played it exactly the right way,” Shea said.

“Yeah, and look what happened,” I said. “Howie said you have her husband in custody. Have you charged him yet?”

Rhinehart finally spoke up. “Billy assures me that you’re going to help us, Joe.”

“If I can.”

“This is a second murder in as many days.”

“Yes?”

“Do you think there could be a connection?”

“I don’t see how there could be. Sandra was killed by her husband. Unless you’re suggesting that he was the one who happened to—”

Even as I was saying this, Rhinehart was opening his notebook and taking out a large color photograph. He put it on the table, spinning it so it faced me.

“This was taken an hour ago,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”

A second went by. Then another. Finally, the image came together for me. I was looking at Sandra. She was lying on her back in the middle of what must have been her living room. The edge of a couch in one corner of the frame, a table leg in another. Sandra lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling. Something thin … Shoelaces? Shoelaces wrapped several times around her neck. Her hands folded on her stomach.

The recognition came first, the intellectual comprehension of what I was seeing. The physical reaction came next, the cold, sick wave washing over me. I looked up at Rhinehart, at his unfamiliar granite face. Then at Shea with his six-shooter earring. There was so much more life in that face, so much more empathy, understanding. His was a face not yet hardened by the job.

I tried to say something. I let out a noise like somebody had hit me hard in the gut.

“Let’s start from the beginning,” Rhinehart said. “You’ll have to forgive me, I wasn’t here when you talked to my partner earlier today.”

I kept looking at Shea. I kept waiting for him to say something. To help me make some sense of this.

“Joe,” Rhinehart said, “are you okay? Are you with us here?”

I swallowed hard. “I’m with you.”

“You’ve had some time to think about it. About Marlene Frost, anyway. Now that you see what happened to Sandra Barron, tell me … Do you have any idea who could have done this?”

“No. Like I told Detective Shea, I honestly have no idea.”

“I know. But now if you consider that the same person most likely killed both of them …”

“I don’t see how …”

“You work with a lot of criminals,” Rhinehart said. “Am I right?”

I looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“As a probation officer, I bet you see more criminals in a week than I do in a month.”

“Maybe,” I said. “If you’re counting young offenders as criminals, yes. Anything hardcore and I’m not even going to see them. Probation’s not even an option.”

“You get the minor leaguers,” Rhinehart said. “The first-timers. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Pretty much.”

“And your job is to keep them out of prison.”

“It’s more than that. But yeah, that’s a big part of it.”

“What about the ones you can’t keep out?” Rhine-hart said. “The ones you
shouldn’t
keep out?”

“If they violate their probation, they get sent up. You know that. What are you getting at?”

“You’ve been around the criminal mind,” Rhine-hart said. “That’s all I meant. That’s how I was hoping you could help us.”

He took out another photograph. Another big, eight-by-ten color shot. Another crime scene. This one I recognized immediately. It was Marlene, lying in the weeds, the black band across her throat. The light from the camera’s flash made her skin look bleached out and unreal.

“So what do you think?” Rhinehart said. “What kind of person would do this?”

“An absolute raving maniac,” I said.

“Granted. But it’s too easy to say that and not go any further. Insanity doesn’t mean you stop thinking. Don’t you think that an insane mind can still be quite organized?”

“Sure.”

“So what do you think might have been going through this person’s head when he did this to these women?”

“I can’t answer that. I can’t even begin to go there.”

“Just try. Help us out here. Do you have any kind of gut feeling on this guy?”

I thought about it.

“He’s conflicted,” I said. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from, but somehow it sounded right to me. “He killed them, but then he had regrets about it. So instead of just leaving them in a heap, he poses them like this. Like he wants them to look like they’re at peace.”

Shea started writing in his notebook again. Rhine-hart just kept looking at me.

“Like they’re at peace,” Rhinehart said. “That’s an interesting insight.”

Then he opened up his notebook one more time and took out another photograph. He put it down on the table, next to the first two. I was expecting another shot of either Marlene or Sandra. A different angle, maybe. Or a close-up.

It was something else. Some kind of strange camera trick, I thought, because now everything looked different. The woman in the picture was on a bed now … in a room that was vaguely familiar to me … the same pose, hands folded over her stomach …

Something different stretched across her neck. Something bright yellow.

It wasn’t Marlene. It wasn’t Sandra.

It was Laurel.

God in heaven, it was my Laurel.

I doubled over, hung halfway over the chair, gagging and coughing until a long line of spit started to move down slowly to the floor like a spider on a web. I didn’t throw up, but I stayed folded over like that for
an eternity, seeing nothing but the green carpet on the floor of the interview room. The horrible, ugly green carpet.

“Joe.” A voice from somewhere far away.

Her bedroom. The yellow across her throat … I knew exactly what it was. It was one of the scarves she used to tie back her curtains.

“Joe, are you okay?”

Laurel lying in her old bed. The same bed she had slept in when she was a little girl. When she was a teenager.

“Joe …”

I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. “Why did you do that?”

“You’ve seen this before,” Rhinehart said, “haven’t you?”

“No. I never saw it.”

“I was assuming you had.”

I sat up and pushed all three pictures away, using every ounce of my willpower to avoid looking at them again. “Why would I have ever wanted to see that? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“I owe you an apology,” Rhinehart said, his tone of voice giving me anything but. “I can’t believe the police down in Westchester didn’t show you this before.”

“I had the opportunity,” I said. “I think. It’s hard to remember. In any case, I sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted to see it.”

“They didn’t even describe what had happened to her?”

I had to close my eyes again. I had to take several seconds to breathe, not thinking about anything else except drawing air into my lungs and letting it out.

“Yes, Detective,” I finally said. “Of course they did. The fact that she was …” Steady, I thought. Hold yourself together. “The fact that she was strangled was mentioned.”

Just saying that word. Strangled. The violence of it.

“Again, I apologize,” Rhinehart said. “But now that you’ve seen it, you can understand why we feel there must be a connection.”