Rite of Wrongs (4 page)

S
IX

Monday, 6:30 p.m.

Returning from the evidence lab with a copy of Gina Gardner’s diary, Miriam glanced through the window of the soft-interview room on her way to her desk. Through the slats of the mini blinds, she could see Dr. Gardner huddled on the couch with his children.

The walls were painted a cheery butter yellow and hung with framed photos of hot-air balloons. As if the brightly colored orbs could clear the air of emotional wreckage, lifting the cumbersome weight up, up, and away.

Miriam wanted to choke the designer. This wasn’t a nursery school.

The three little ones were tucked beneath their father’s long arms, blond corkscrew curls and layered blond strands and blond cowlicks looking like feathers. Four clear cups filled with water sat on the side table, barely touched, if at all.

A box of tissues sat there, too. Dozens of used ones littered the floor and the couch cushions and Dr. Gardner’s lap. One was shredded and stuck to the lowest button on his shirt. His glasses sat askew on the bridge of his nose, one earpiece sticking out from his head like an antenna.

Miriam was glad the room’s door was closed. Even imagining the sounds of their sorrow was making it hard to breathe. Her throat felt like she’d choked on a piece of bread. Spread with peanut butter. Balled into a wad of thick, white flour like Play-Doh.

Kids.

How did parents handle the responsibility? Worrying over doing the right thing, saying the right thing, getting their bundles of joy from diapers to diplomas in one piece? And it never stopped. She knew that from seeing her own parents fret over her siblings.

Her mother was always atwitter about Erik’s child-support obligations leaving him next to nothing to sustain his bachelor life. And Esther . . . Esther’s life was a steaming pile of stink. The men she dated because she needed to feel pretty. The men she married because she needed to feel loved. The men she divorced because they would never earn enough to give her things as nice as her mother had. Her mother,
their
mother, who was happiest when, at sixty-nine, she was mistaken for their sister.

That always made Miriam rethink her lack of a skin-care routine.

Sometimes she wondered if she even had it in her to be a good sister and daughter. She knew she didn’t have it in her to be a parent. She’d decided that a long time ago. Getting herself from one day to the next was all she was capable of—though a whole lot of that had to do with her chosen profession.

Why had she chosen it again?

She shook her head, shedding the tightness gripping her skull as she made her way through the squad room to her cubicle, extra glad today to have the privacy walls instead of desks in some trendy, open format.

Ballard’s cube abutted hers. They could talk through the fabric panels, or roll their chairs into the aisle between the rows for some face-to-face. They rarely needed to.

But with a half-dozen detectives in training today, Ballard’s partner recovering from a torn ACL, and hers on vacation, they were stuck with each other.

Miriam missed Melvin Stonebridge like she would an arm or an eye. He’d transferred into CID six months after her ex-partner exited stage left, just about the time the entire division had started taking bets on whether she’d end up flying solo.

From day one, it had been a match made in heaven. And that was why she was counting the days until Melvin got back. He’d been in Hawaii long enough, though she couldn’t imagine Violet, his wife, agreeing.

Talk about a couple who had the parenting thing down. Their kids gave her hope. On so many levels. In ways she wasn’t sure her nieces and nephews ever would—

“Rome!”

Crap.
The bellow stopped her in her tracks, and she turned for the glass-walled offices on the building’s south side. “Yes, boss.”

Deputy Chief Chris Judah stood in his open doorway. He wore a white shirt, navy pants, and a blue-patterned Jerry Garcia tie. Hands on his hips, he frowned at Miriam, his forehead furrowed beneath his military buzz, which was peppered with gray. “Do you want to explain what you’re wearing?”

This from the man being choked by the Grateful Dead?

She glanced briefly at the uniformed officer behind him—the man was trying so hard not to laugh—then looked back to Judah. “I got Dispatch’s text right after my yoga class. Coming here for the clothes in my locker or going home to change would’ve meant an hour’s delay. Seemed more important I get to the scene.”

Judah’s gaze raked over her. “Next time I see you, you’d better look the part,” he said, turning away and slamming the door. He circled his desk, and the officer with him waited until he sat before doing the same.

Miriam finally made it to her cubicle, which had her passing Ballard, cocked back in his chair. “Wonder what he wants you to look the part of? Lone Ranger? Wonder Woman?”

She’d been called both while without a partner. She’d been called worse, too.
Holster humper
, for one, which didn’t make a lick of sense. Yeah, she’d slept with her ex-partner, but since she’d also been a cop . . .

The badge will get you pussy, but the pussy will get your badge.

She nodded toward the Gardner clan. “Is someone coming to get them?”

Tugging at his collar, Ballard followed her gaze. “His brother’s on his way.”

She tossed her crossbody and notebook to her desk, then leaned a shoulder against their shared cubicle wall. It was business time. “The kids. They’re all blond. The victim had dark hair. And her skin . . .” She reached back and flipped open her notebook, looking at the small family photo she’d taken from the entryway floor with Karen Sosa’s blessing. “She might be part Hispanic. Or Middle Eastern, maybe?”

“And she was on the far side of fifty,” he said, looking at the picture Miriam handed him. “You ask the doc about that?”

“He said the first kid was a late-in-life accident.”

“And they just kept going?”

She gave him a
guess-so
shrug, and returned the three-by-five to her notes, thinking about the children again, motherless now. Thinking about the victim losing out on the rest of their lives. Recitals, sporting events, birthdays—

Shit.
She needed to get out of here before there was nothing left of her niece’s party to attend. “Anything yet from the canvass? Neighbors with security cameras?”

“Not yet. Family across the street has one on the garage, so it could have something. Vince is picking up the footage from the guardhouse at the neighborhood entrance, too.”

“Good, good.” She nodded and rubbed at her forehead, thinking about her mother’s addiction to Botox. Then she stopped rubbing. “What are we thinking?”

He swiveled side to side, shaking his head. “Random religious nut?”

Random left them nowhere to look beyond witnesses. Trace evidence. Case files with similar markers. There’d be pavement to pound. Doors to knock on. Neighbors to talk to. Much of which the uniforms were doing even now.

Man, she wished her job was as easy as cop-TV made it seem. “Religious nut, maybe. The random, I’m not so sure about. That tarp . . . did that belong to the doctor? Did we ask? Crap, why didn’t I ask?”

She turned for her desk, grabbing her notebook and pen. What was wrong with her? How could she have missed something so obvious?

“Relax, Rome,” Ballard said with a lot less attitude than he usually showed. “I asked him earlier. The tarp isn’t his.”

“Good. Maybe the lab will find something there we can use,” she said, then added, “Thanks.” Ballard performed best when rewarded, and until Melvin got back from vacation, she needed Ballard at his best. “Okay, so how did he get the tarp inside? How did he get her on it? There weren’t any ligature marks, were there?”

“None that were obvious, but we’ll have to wait for the postmortem.”

She hated waiting. Hated it as much as not knowing. “Did he walk in, shove the knife in her face, or a gun, maybe, spread out the tarp, and cut her there on top of it?” The forensic investigator thought the edges of the wound looked clean, as if the knife blade had been straight. That is, if it
was
a knife, not a razor or a scalpel or a cleaver, which had Miriam shuddering. “Did he ring the bell? Did he wear gloves when he did? Did he knock?”

“Some of those things we’ll never know,” Ballard said, then huffed. “Unless when we catch him, he spills his guts, thinking it’ll bring him all kinds of glory.”

“He didn’t leave any obvious trace, which makes me think nothing about this is going to be easy.” She swept a hand beneath her ponytail and moved from forensic science to forensic psychology. It was where she did her best thinking. “The doctor said the victim grew up in foster care. How does that play with honoring her father and her mother?”

Ballard laced his hands behind his head and continued to swivel. “Someone knew her in the past? Didn’t like how she treated her birth parents?”

Not a bad theory, except . . . “According to her husband, she was taken away from them when she was five.” Miriam thought about her other nieces and nephews. Haven was five; Lissie, six. Both were capable of doing what they were told, but that was less about their parents’ wishes and more about the promised reward of iPad time or Mickey D’s.

She wasn’t buying it. “I don’t think a five-year-old knows anything about honor. Obey, sure. Listen to, probably. Respect might even be a stretch.”

Ballard held her gaze while his narrowed. “A social commentary on her parenting skills? Someone doesn’t like the way she and the doctor are raising those three?”

She turned to look again at the foursome waiting in the interview room. Nothing she’d learned led her to believe the family was anything but what they appeared to be.

The nice, clean suburban home and yard. The bikes and the cars. The dog. The mother’s involvement in the children’s school and extracurricular activities. The father’s indignation at the idea of children so young being bullied, when he was a pediatrician . . .

She stopped right there. Union Park wasn’t utopia. He had to know better. He couldn’t possibly be that naive. “Those two options both assume this is not random and not a stranger.”

“Then maybe a stranger had a rage issue to work out, and our victim was in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“Weirder things have happened,” she said, trying to blow away the tickle of suspicion. This wasn’t the wrong place or the wrong time. This wasn’t rage. This was methodical. This was planned. Meaning someone out there had a motive and a really sick way of making his point.

Ballard ran both hands down his face, obviously not liking the train of thought he was traveling, either. “Problem is, nothing about this looks that kind of weird. And wrong place, wrong time plays hell with the tarp. That required planning.”

Now they were on the same page. “Yeah.”

“Fuck,” he said, slamming a fist on his desk. “I hate it when shit turns out personal.”

S
EVEN

Monday, 7:30 p.m.

Back in the Juke, Miriam reached into the glove box for the flask of Sauza she kept there and splashed a half ounce into her unfinished coffee, figuring the tequila would kill off any bacteria in the milky drink she’d left sitting in her cup holder all day.

She wasn’t sure when she’d started drinking at inappropriate times. And in inappropriate ways. She was smart enough to realize this was not healthy, this needing a crutch, though it was something she’d been doing more and more often over the past five years.

And as much as she wanted to say she had no one to blame but herself, she blamed her ex-partner just as much. He’d left her in the lurch over nothing more than a case gone south.

Who did that?

“A sane person, Rome,” she muttered, checking her rearview and side mirrors before pulling out of the station’s parking lot and switching lanes.

She was starving. She hadn’t eaten anything since the muffin she’d wolfed down at noon on her way to the crime scene. Her dad had made lasagna for the adults at Lori’s party, and she couldn’t wait. In the meantime, she lifted her cup and sipped.

She supposed it was a good sign she still had it in her to recognize drinking wasn’t a particularly smart way to deal with her past. At least she didn’t have to deal on her own . . .

Her dad helped, telling her often how happy she seemed working with Melvin.

Her best friend helped, reminding her regularly of how strong she was.

Even the man she lived with helped, the man she’d once thought she loved, leaving her weightless and breathless and exhausted enough to sleep when work kept her mind racing.

And she was really going to need sleep before dealing with three young kids burdened with old-soul names and their father, who at any moment would lift those long crane arms and take flight. How was he going to manage his practice and take cupcakes to class parties? How could a man so devastated ever be the parent his children needed?

Why was she wasting her emotional reserves even wondering such a thing?

For a long moment, she focused on the traffic, watching the sprawling suburbia of Union Park contract into a tight urban landscape. She navigated onto Interstate 10 and sped past strip malls and extended-stay hotels and car dealerships and a multistoried hospital with a spire that pierced the sky. Houston. It was impossible not to love.

After another few miles spent on the twelve-lane freeway, she exited for her parents’ neighborhood. The closer she got, the slower she drove, and when her palms began to sweat from the day’s stress—what she’d already been through and what was yet to come—she punched the call button on her steering wheel.

“Call Nikki,” she told the Juke, then listened to her best friend’s phone ring.

“You have reached the voice mail of Nikki Logan. Please leave a message.”

She waited for the tone, signaling a right turn onto her parents’ oak-shaded street. “I need a drink, Nik. Call me when you get this.”

Ringing off, she pulled into the driveway behind her father’s Volvo and her mother’s Cadillac CTS. Neither Erik’s nor Esther’s cars were to be seen.

Oops.

Grabbing her crossbody, her coffee cup, and the princess-printed gift bag from the backseat, she headed up the sidewalk for the kitchen door. She had only just stepped inside and pulled off her sunglasses when her mother appeared from the dining room, the detritus of popped birthday balloons and their ribbon tails in hand.

“What in God’s name are you wearing, Miriam? This is a birthday party. Or it
was
a birthday party.” Her mother gave her a thoroughly judgmental once-over before throwing the trash into the can behind the pantry door. “You missed the presents, and the cake and ice cream, not to mention your niece. And your feet . . . you’re wearing booties? Is that blood?”

“Sorry, Mom. I forgot,” she said, bending to take the protective covering off her feet, earning another gasp.

“Flip-flops? You worked a crime scene in flip-flops?” Her mother sniffed. “And I know that’s not coffee in that cup.”

Double crap.
Miriam upended the cup, swallowing the rest of the contents, then tossed it along with the booties on top of the dead balloons. “There’s nothing in the cup at all. Feel better?”

“No. I do not.” She pulled tight the trash bag’s drawstring ties, as if hiding the evidence of Miriam’s life of debauchery. “Why are you drinking in the middle of the day?”

Was it? She glanced at her watch. “It’s almost eight. And I wasn’t really drinking—”

“Miriam.”

“Fine. Because it helps?” The words fell into the room, brittle and heavy enough to splinter when they landed.

Her mother reached for the most damaging shard. “You know alcoholism runs in your father’s side of the family.”

And . . . that was it. “Can we talk about something else?”
Like, how messed up your other two kids are?
“How was the party? Did Little Lori get plenty of swag Esther can return? I know she’s more fond of cash than store credit—”

“Miriam!” Her mother’s voice snapped, probably because she’d stomped her foot too hard on her new travertine tile, but she pulled it together and asked, “Why are you so hateful to your sister? She hasn’t had an easy life.”

Miriam rubbed at the throbbing ache in her tired eyes. Exhaustion had her lashing out, and wrongly so. Wrong time. Wrong place. Wrong target. “I’m sorry—”

“I don’t think you
are
sorry.” Her mother disappeared into the dining room, returning moments later with what remained of the cake, and setting it on the kitchen’s island. She kept the barrier between them and fought back. “You’ve bullied your brother and sister since the day you were born.”

“Bullied?”
Wait a minute.
“You think my worrying about the choices they’ve made”—
let’s ignore mine for the moment
—“is bullying?”

“When have you ever worried about them? Except when they’ve been in your way. Think about that next time Little Lori’s birthday rolls around.” And at that, her mother spun around, leaving the room, this time Miriam knew for good.

She stared down at the cake, a huge half sheet decorated with princesses wearing pink-and-yellow tiaras. Because being a princess was the most noble goal a girl could strive for. Or so, according to Evelyn Rome.

Miriam’s mother had gotten her princess with Esther, her second born, who’d gone on to give her three more and a prince to boot. Erik, the oldest of the three Rome siblings, apparently shot nothing but Y chromosomes. He had five boys: two from his first wife, two from his second, one from an extramarital affair. That one was Haven, Miriam’s favorite.

The weekends Erik had visitation with Haven—which was never the same as the other boys—and Miriam was free, she made a point to stop by and borrow her nephew. On their to-do list: Chuck E. Cheese’s. Pixar DVD marathons. Dr. Seuss puzzles spread across her hardwood floor and solved while crawling around on hands and knees. Making themselves sick on ice-cream sundaes and caramel popcorn.

Her nieces and nephews were enough. Nothing about her life was good for kids. It was barely good for her.

She reached into the gift bag she’d left on the island and pulled out the plush pink piglet wearing a pink tutu and tiara and waving a pink plastic wand, thinking she’d had enough pink today to last a lifetime. “Whaddaya think, pig? Cake for all?”

She didn’t even bother with a knife or plate. She dug in with a tiny plastic fork, then switched it out for a grown-up piece of flatware.
Grown-up.
The thought had her snorting.

If princesses grew up to be queens, did that mean nonprincesses got to be homicide detectives? With bloody polypropylene booties instead of glass slippers? Service weapons instead of magic wands? Kevlar vests instead of ball gowns?

An ex-partner turned priest instead of a handsome prince?

She scooped up a bite of mostly icing and was licking it from the tines when her father walked in. “Is it safe?” he asked, looking at her over the rims of his tiny black reading glasses.

“I don’t know about safe,” she said as she waved her fork in a whoop-de-doo circle. “But it’s cake.”

And because he was a knight in shining armor at heart, Cyril Rome said, “Let me pull up a fork and you can tell me about your day.”

She stabbed hers into the icing, chopping off a princess’s head. “I’m not sure you want to hear about it. I’m not sure I want to talk about it.” But at least her father asked. Her mother never did. Her mother never wanted to know.

He nodded toward the stuffed animal watching them with beady eyes. “Talk to the pig. I’ll listen.”

The shiny black gaze pulled her in. But even if it hadn’t, resisting her dad was impossible. He had always been her champion. He had never doubted her. Thinking of his unwavering support had her eyes tearing up, her throat constricting.

“It was the kids. The victim was a mother of three. Seeing them with their father, all those blond heads together, and the five bikes in the garage, knowing one of them would never be ridden again . . .” She looked around for her coffee cup, forgetting it was empty. “I need a drink.”

Her dad got up, dropped a pod into the coffeemaker, and set a carton of fat-free half-and-half and a box of sweetener packets on the island while the coffee brewed. Then he handed her the mug and a spoon. “No more booze. You’re a cop. And you’re driving.”

“I’ll call a cab.”

He shook his head and set his hands at his trim waist above his khaki chinos. “No more booze. You’re my daughter. And you’ve had enough.”

“A day like today? There’s never enough,” she said, adding to her coffee what served as cream and sugar in her parents’ home. “I shouldn’t be talking about any of this.”

He waved off her worry and picked up his fork. “My lips are so sealed, Super Glue wants a patent.”

She smiled, watching him close his mouth around a huge bite of cake. Where he put the things he ate . . . “The killer. He slit the victim’s throat. Then he used her blood, or I assume her blood”—
wouldn’t it be great if he’d actually made the statement with his own DNA?
—“to paint a Bible verse on the wall. ‘Honor thy father and thy mother.’”

It took her dad a couple of minutes to respond; during that time she came to regret having said a word. Even with the thick skin she’d grown to deal with the day in and day out of homicide, the kids always got to her, and she wasn’t even a parent. What her dad must be thinking . . .

He reached for her hand, lacing their fingers together. “You know your mother’s very proud of you. In her heart of hearts, she knows you would’ve been here for the party if you could.”

Several seconds passed before Miriam’s chest eased enough for her to talk, and she still had to swallow twice to get out the words. “It would be nice to hear her say that. Instead of hearing her complain about my footwear.”

He squeezed once, then released her. “She’s a stickler about her floors. And she never has been a fan of blood.”

Miriam was pretty sure that was the only thing she and her mother had in common.