Rite of Wrongs (7 page)

T
WELVE

Friday, 11:00 p.m.

Curled up in the corner of her sofa, Miriam reached to the side table for the bowl-shaped margarita glass that held ice, tequila, and a jalapeño mixer. The bottled concoction didn’t turn out drinks half as good as the ones made with fresh peppers. But she was tired, and it was late, and those two components added up to lazy.

She’d been scheduled to meet her best friend for drinks after work, but Nikki had canceled due to a family emergency. The truth was more drama than disaster. Nikki’s older brother had earned himself a drunk and disorderly when he’d parked outside his ex-wife’s condo and serenaded her at the top of his lungs.

Just as well. Nikki had been busy. With Miriam’s evening free, she finally had time to dig deeper into Gina Gardner’s diary. She hated that her caseload had gotten in the way of her job. But she was just one woman. And her days, as much as she wished otherwise, gave her only twenty-four hours to work with.

She’d like to be using some of those hours to sleep. Instead, she pulled the diary from its folder onto her lap. The first page was dated more than eleven years ago. She would’ve been twenty-seven when a forty-four-year-old Gina Gardner had started this record of her life. Thinking about all the things that she’d done during that time . . .

I’m pregnant.

Those were the first words written beneath the date.

I’m forty-four years old, and I’m pregnant. I gotta say, I never saw that coming. Jeff and I have been married for twenty years. We stopped trying to get pregnant, what was it? Ten ago? We made all these plans to travel, and now that money is going to go to the new house.

I’m still trying to decide how I feel about that. Not just motherhood at this stage of the game, but putting off the life we’ve worked so hard for. We were THIS close to having it. How unfair is that? Jeff taking early retirement. Our storing what belongings we didn’t want to get rid of.

Five years visiting every country we could. Taking nothing with us but clothes. Buying what we needed. So many sites to see. So much culture. So much to learn. Cooking classes. Making cheese. Pasta. Wine. We were going to be fat and happy and without a care.

Now I’m going to be the fat one. We’ll be staying put, and Jeff will keep working for years. Who knows if either one of us will be happy.

Dr. Gardner had mentioned their first child being unplanned, but nothing about what he and his wife had given up to start their family. Miriam wondered how long it had taken Gina to come to terms with the upheaval.

Had she broadcast her uncertainty in such a way that someone had followed her journey as a parent? Judged her based on her early misgivings rather than on the cookies and cupcakes and volunteer hours she’d donated?

Curious, Miriam paged ahead nine months, then a year, then another. The tone of the entries did change, Gina accepting her
lot in life as a late-blooming mother
with a joyous grace.

The last several days of interviews—Miriam’s
and
Ballard’s—bore that out. Everyone they’d talked to agreed: Gina Gardner had been a model mother. Involved, attentive, interested, available. Which made Miriam wonder if any part of Gina’s life was her own.

At the sound of Thierry’s key in the front lock, Miriam looked up from her reading. He caught sight of her as he walked through the door, pushing it closed with one palm, then locking it. Her heart didn’t thump. Her breath didn’t catch. Sad, when he was such a beautiful man.

He dropped his key ring into the bowl on the entry table and set his laptop bag on the floor. His hair, the color of perfectly browned toast, fell over his forehead. He raked it back with one hand. “What’re you still doing awake?”

She nodded toward the glass and the diary. “Working. Drinking. Trying to decide if I’m going to shower before I go to bed.”

“I got a whiff of my pits on the drive home. I’m doing that now,” he said, tugging off the white T-shirt he wore with his scrub pants. They hung low on his hips, and she drank him in . . . his abs that were flat, his chest that spoke to the laps he swam at the Y.

He came closer, lifting her glass and draining it, his T-shirt balled up in his free hand. “Want me to make you another?”

He sounded beat, and maybe a little bit frustrated, but mostly like he’d just gotten off a forty-eight-hour shift. She shook her head, and instead of asking him about the past two days, she said, “I’m good, thanks.”

He left her with a nod, setting the glass in the sink as he headed for the shower.

She wanted to feel bad for him, and she did, but it was the bad she would feel for Melvin, or Nikki, even. A genuine concern, but not what she should feel for someone she’d tried to convince herself she loved enough to trust with her heart as well as her body.

The body part was so easy, and it took no more than hearing the water come on and picturing Thierry naked to make up her mind. She needed badly to unplug from this case. To let her subconscious work while she slept. To wake up fresh, with a jump on the burnout.

She returned the diary to its folder, turned off the lamp, and made her way down the hall to Thierry’s bathroom. The door was unlocked. She pushed it open.

He was clothed only in gray boxer briefs, and she drank him in . . . the hair on his legs, the thickness behind his fly. He looked her over with the light-brown eyes that had given her so much hope when she thought she’d lost everything. Then he stripped and pulled the curtain aside.

“You getting in?”

He didn’t have to ask more than once.

The very idea of having him at her beck and call, her own private feel-good stress relief . . . she nodded, and he stepped into the tub, his naked body big and hard. She undressed and followed, shoving away the guilt. They’d been using each other for years. He knew it, she knew it, yet here they stood, his back to the spray, his mouth at her neck, his chest hair tickling her tits.

His dick, already hard, pushed between her legs. He lifted her unceremoniously, driving deep. She let her head fall against the wall and gave in to the mindlessness. Steam rose, the hot water stung her skin, and Thierry took her apart until nothing else in the world existed.

Until the only thing left to do when they were done was close her eyes and sleep.

T
HIRTEEN

Monday, 11:00 a.m.

The human head weighed eleven pounds.

He thought he’d read that somewhere. Or maybe he’d heard it said in a movie. Not that it really mattered. More important was the pressure it took to cave in a human skull.

He’d also heard it said that head wounds bled like crazy. Boy, was that ever right, and the truth worked in his favor. As did the fact that Franklin Weeks was too lazy to be bothered with a proper yard and had landscaped the green space behind his condo into a desert terrain.

If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:

Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;

And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.

And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear. Deuteronomy 21:18–21

The passage could’ve been written with Franklin in mind. The second sentence of the final verse would serve as a fitting epitaph. Minus the part about Israel.

Franklin would’ve argued the point, or laughed it off, saying one man’s evil was another’s practical joke, and anyone who hadn’t known he was joking needed to have their head examined.

Easy enough to do with a huge, gaping hole in the middle of it.

No more using those eyes for cutting glances. Or that mouth to smirk. The mocking had been relentless. The jokes had been cruel. Franklin hadn’t cared whom he had stepped on, or whom he had hurt. Instead, he’d made a game out of being spiteful.

Now the joke was on him.

Franklin paid a service weekly to clear his desert of weeds. Monday happened to be that day. And as beautifully as Monday had turned out for slitting Gina’s throat, it had been equally perfect for Franklin’s stoning.

He only wished he’d chosen a better Scripture for Gina. One with instructions for doing away with her kind. One as perfect for her sins as Franklin’s was for his. But both of them were gone, and that was what mattered.

Getting into the yard had been easy; on Mondays, Franklin left the gate unlocked for the wetbacks who did his dirty work, then locked up behind them just before lunch as he headed for the restaurant he and his pervert boyfriend owned.

Even at noon, he’d reeked of alcohol.

No doubt what he drank these days—or what he’d drunk when he still had a mouth—cost a lot more than the forties he’d paid bums to buy him in high school. It didn’t matter how many times he’d been punished for his drinking, or his love of boys.

He would not obey.

It was his own fault he’d have to have a closed casket. He’d turned into the rock just as it was coming down. His forehead had shattered, his eye socket, his cheekbone, his nose.

Needing only the one rock rather defeated the purpose of the stoning, but Franklin was dead, and his evil had been put away at last.

It should’ve been done a long time ago, but better late than never.

And as vain as he’d always been, losing his pretty face added a bit of karma to the justice that had been so bloodily served.

F
OURTEEN

Monday, 12:00 p.m.

“Detective Rome,” Vikram said, smiling as he held up a brown pastry bag Miriam feared contained her lunch. He dangled it as one might a carrot on a stick. “This blueberry muffin can be yours for the extremely reasonable price listed on the menu card, along with a ransom of five bucks thirty for last week.”

With a roll of her eyes, Miriam dug into her crossbody for a ten and laid it on the counter. Then she set a five on top for good measure and used her index finger to push both toward her favorite barista. “Add a large coffee with room for cream, and keep the change for your trouble. Sorry about last week.”

Vik handed her the bag and rang up her order, pocketing the change, then turning to fill her cup. “No yoga today?” he asked, looking back over his shoulder.

Shaking her head, she glanced down at her belted and low-rise navy gabardine pants and blue-oxford button-down. She wasn’t about to give Judah a reason to write her up. She wiggled her toes in her boots. “I have to stop by the station, so I figured it was best to look the part.”

Wonder Woman? The Lone Ranger?
The echo of Ballard’s words rang in her ears.

“I thought Monday was your day off,” Vik said, securing a top onto her coffee, then spreading his hands on the counter and leaning toward her.

She picked up the cup and the bag. “It is. But my partner’s sunning his fat, black ass in Maui, and the detective I’m working with lost his partner to a torn ACL, so we’re both scrambling, and days off are iffy.”

“Next time you’ve got a free one for sure, let me know. My family has a beach house—”

The ring of her phone cut into the fantasy. She lifted one finger and pulled her phone from the clip at her waist. “Hold that thought.
Please,
hold that thought.” At least the ringtone hadn’t been the one assigned to Dispatch, though looking at the display . . .

“Fuck. Rome,” she said, moving to the condiment counter.

Ballard huffed. “‘Fuck Rome?’ What kind of way is that to answer your phone?”

“Where are we going, and why?” she asked, pouring half-and-half into her cup. She really needed Melvin to get back from Hawaii, and Seth Branch to finish his physical therapy and stop trying to prove he could play basketball with his wunderkind son.

“We got another one.”

“Another what?” she asked as she stirred her coffee. Then she stopped stirring, watching the near-black liquid turn the brown of Vikram’s skin.

“What do you think? Another Old Testament verse. This one painted on a fence.”

She closed her eyes, then looked back to her coffee as she reseated the lid. What the hell was wrong with people? What kind of sicko used the Bible to justify murder? Or thought themselves judge and jury and God? “Are you kidding me?”

“I wish. Every Monday, dude locks his condo’s back gate behind his lawn service before he goes into work. He was due in at noon.”

“Let me guess,” she said, shouldering open the door as she held her coffee and muffin in one hand, her phone in the other. She gave Vikram a shrug that said it just wasn’t to be. “He never showed.”

“And when he didn’t answer his phone, his boyfriend went home to see what was wrong.”

She thumbed her key fob to unlock the Juke. “And there was a whole lot wrong.”

“Yep. A stoning of biblical proportions.”

F
IFTEEN

Monday, 12:30 p.m.

It wasn’t biblically bad, but it was bad enough. Miriam stood over the body of Franklin Weeks and grimaced. The stoning had taken place outdoors, and most of the blood had seeped across the decorative-stone walkway and into the dirt to be slurped up by the succulents.

At least the blood that wasn’t still pooled on the huge blue tarp beneath his body.

And that which had been used to paint a Scripture on the eight-foot cedar fence surrounding the small, square yard:
So shalt thou put evil away from among you. Deuteronomy 21:18–21

The victim’s boyfriend sat on the steps leading up to their Regent Park condo’s back door. He’d been uncooperative with the uniformed officer who’d tried to take him to the station. Rather than insisting, the officer had waited for the two detectives to arrive.

Miriam understood the man’s desire to remain at the scene. Understood, too, the officer not wanting to upset him further. But now she was going to have to be the bad guy, and she doubted anyone but Ballard realized how much she was going to hate that.

She took a deep breath. The man’s arms were crossed on his knees, his head resting on his wrists. He was shaking, and sobbing, though Miriam only knew that because of the jerky movements of his shoulders and back.

The sobs were silent, which somehow made them worse. As if his pain was too personal to vocalize, his grief too heavy to shed. His sorrow too consuming to share for fear he would explode into little pieces all over the yard.

Right. That was the blood talking.

Miriam opened her notebook and clicked her pen, jotting down the boyfriend’s name: Alejandro Maldonado. He wore black pants and a white chef’s coat, as did the dead Franklin Weeks. Since she had yet to see Alejandro’s face, and Franklin no longer had one, she couldn’t say what either man looked like.

Franklin appeared to be of average height and build, his hair dark and cut short. His shoes clean and well made. Expensive. Shoes for long days of standing. Alejandro wore the same.

Miriam looked at her notes, then looked at Ballard. “The Paisley Cricket. They own it together?”

He nodded. He’d left his jacket in his SUV, and stood cuffing up his shirtsleeves, having already loosened his tie. “Co-owners. Co-chefs. Same with the condo. Lots of
co
going on in their lives. You’d think they could co-figure out a more appetizing name.”

She’d give him that. Crickets gave her the creeps. Though she’d take the little singsong bugs over cockroaches any day. “And the murder weapon came from the yard here?”

Ballard pointed to a spot along the fence. It was obvious a rocky arrangement had been disturbed. Dirt and organic detritus had left a clear outline where a rock nearly the size of a basketball had been, along with several that were smaller.

The big one now rested near the body and was covered in blood. The others clustered around it as if waiting their turn, but didn’t have any obvious spatter. “The rocks can probably be puzzled into place there.”

Miriam took the long way around the yard, traipsing the full length of the circular walkway to talk to Alejandro. Then she stopped, turning and retracing her steps, and counting to ten as she did. She pointed at the Scripture written in blood.

“Eighteen through twenty-one is four verses,” she said to Ballard, lifting a hand to shade her eyes from the sun. Why did she keep leaving her sunglasses in her SUV? “That message can’t be more than one.”

“Don’t look at me,” he said, sweating and grumpy because of it. “I’m not the Bible scholar here.”

Half the time, he wasn’t even a common-sense scholar. “No, but you do own a phone. Did you think to look it up?”

Holding her gaze, he dug his Android from his pocket, then swiped the screen to life and brought it close to his mouth. “Okay, Google. Deuteronomy twenty-one, eighteen through twenty-one.”

Miriam pulled out her own phone and photographed the message on the fence. Then she photographed the rock garden and the succulents. Then she photographed the label on the tarp.

It was the same color and fabric as the one found at the Gardner scene. The same size. The same wear and tear. She needed to check with Karen for updates on the first one, see if there’d been any new chemical trace: turpentine or paint or pesticide. Gasoline.

Something that didn’t come from a dog.

“It’s the last of the four verses,” Ballard said. “The others are stuff about a stubborn and rebellious son who won’t obey his parents getting stoned by the men of the city. Oh, and he’s a glutton and a drunkard.”

Frowning, Miriam looked back at the body. Franklin Weeks was certainly not overweight. “Maybe the gluttony is metaphorical?”

“Could be it’s more about greed. Unless he’s an alcoholic.”

Nodding, Miriam jotted a note to put a rush on the tox screen.

Ballard waved an arm as if he were ready to get the show on the road. “You want to question the boyfriend while I check out the condo? The warrant arrived just before you did.”

“I’ll want to take a look inside, but yeah,” she said. “Why not? And make sure no one touches that tarp until Karen finishes with it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

They made for the back steps where Franklin Weeks’s domestic partner waited. None of the details she’d been given so far said the two had taken advantage of the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality and tied the knot.

She wondered if they’d planned to do so. Or if their status quo worked just fine and they had no interest in changing it. Wondered, too, if that had mattered to the killer.

“Mr. Maldonado? Alejandro? I’m Detective Miriam Rome. This is Detective Ike Ballard.” She made the introductions, then Ballard walked away to talk to the crime-scene tech as Karen juggled her gear. “Please accept our condolences for your loss.”

They were pretty much the same words she’d spoken to Jeff Gardner. She wondered if she’d be saying them again next Monday to another victim’s partner or spouse.

The steps were wide enough that she was able to sit on the one beneath his and turn to face him. “Is there anyone you’d like us to contact for you? A relative? An employee?”

That finally brought his head up. His eyes were dark brown and swollen, his lashes long, his face damp and ravaged. He wore just a hint of a beard. The stubble was salted with gray. “The bistro. One of us is always there. One of us needs to be there. I have to be there. I have to close it down.”

“I can have one of the officers do that for you.”

He unfolded further, then got to his feet, shoving aside the duty officer and sending the man scrambling to block his path. “No! I need to do it. I have to be the one—”

“That’s not possible, Mr. Maldonado,” Miriam said calmly from where she sat. “Not at this time. Alejandro . . . may I call you Alejandro?”

He stood with his hands on his hips, his head tilted back, his face raised to the sky. “Alex,” he finally said. “Everyone knows me as Alex.”

“Okay, Alex.” She gestured toward the yard’s back gate. “Why don’t we go to the station? You can walk me through your morning.”

He shook his head. “Can we sit out here? With Franklin? Just for a few minutes, anyway?”

“Sure.” Because sitting near a bloody dead body was exactly where she wanted to conduct an interview. She clicked her pen and opened her notebook on her knees, ignoring the milling uniforms and Karen Sosa and Ballard. Until he moved to stand in her field of vision, blocking the bloody scene. At that, she looked up and mouthed, “Thank you.”

Ballard gave her a single nod in answer. He could be a real ass at times, but her issue with blood was hardly a secret. It was nice to have a hero. Even a reluctant one.

She scratched two names across the first page of the next insert.
Franklin. Alejandro.
Then she added
Alex
while recalling what she’d been told about the couple’s schedule upon arrival. “Was Franklin always the one who waited for the lawn service?”

Alex sighed, then returned to sit on the step. “I go in for breakfast and work through dinner. He comes in at lunch and works until close.”

She jotted down the information. “That makes a long day for both of you. What? Ten hours each?”

“Closer to twelve.”

“Every day?”

“It’s our business. Our lives.” He gave a shrug as if the hours were nothing. “It’s where we want to be. It’s how we want to spend our time.”

Another note, then a click of her pen. “So, one of you is always there, and from lunch until dinner, say, noon until seven, both of you are.”

He took a moment to respond, then said, “That’s about right.”

“You never switch shifts?” she asked, wondering how many people knew their timetables.

“Franklin’s a night owl.” He looked toward the dead man, then looked away, his breath catching, which had Miriam’s threatening to do the same. “I’m an early bird. It works for us. It’s always worked for us. Ever since college.”

“You’ve known each other that long?” Frowning, she jotted the words
met in college
beneath her notes on their schedules. Then she looked at Franklin’s driver’s license, which she’d been handed earlier. He’d been born in 1963. Making him—she did the math on her fingers—fifty-three years old.

Gina Gardner had been fifty-five.

“We met when we were in the second semester of our freshman year,” Alex said, leaning down to rub at a scuff on the toe of one shoe. “We’ve been together for thirty-four years. That’s my entire adult life.” He buried his face in his hands. “What am I supposed to do now?”

Recover from the loss and get on with the years you still have
. She left the thought where it was, knowing it would hardly be helpful, and started in with the rest of her questions.

Yes, he’d get her the name of the lawn service, but they’d been using them for a decade.

No, he didn’t know anyone who wanted to do Franklin harm.

No, he didn’t know anyone Franklin might’ve had a tiff with.

No, he didn’t know anyone from Franklin’s past. Franklin didn’t talk about his past.

Interesting, Miriam mused. Neither had Gina Gardner.

Curious if the commonality was a coincidence, she asked, “So, you don’t know if Franklin was ever in foster care?”

Alex shook his head.

“Have you ever met his family? His parents? Did he have siblings?”

“All I know is he made his own way through school. He was never offered a dime by his family. He only mentioned that once, and he never said another word about them.”

“He didn’t go home for holidays? Thanksgiving? Christmas? Spring break?”

“Neither one of us did,” he said, reaching up a hand to rub at the back of his neck. “We stayed on campus.”

“Where did you go to school?”

“University of Texas.”

Nice gig for someone making his own way. She glanced up, looking for Ballard. He was hovering over Karen Sosa, jotting his own notes and gesturing toward the tarp. Good man. She’d put him on Weeks’s financials along with the Gardners’ once back at the station.

As for digging into the two victims’ childhoods . . .

A sob at her shoulder brought her back. Alex was crying again. Sitting here with his dead lover at his feet wasn’t doing anyone any good. “Let’s finish this up at the station, okay? It’ll be more comfortable there. One of the uniforms will drive you, and I’ll be there soon.”

He nodded and said, “All right,” as they both stood.

Miriam touched his sleeve before he walked away. “I do have one quick question. Did Franklin have a drinking problem?”

“Excuse me?”

She rephrased the question. “Did Franklin drink a lot? Beer? Wine? Scotch?”

“We like wine,” he said. “Whether or not he had a problem . . . I suppose that depends on how you define ‘a lot.’ He didn’t drink while at the Cricket, unless he was tasting a new vintage. He drank at night, but no more than anyone else would after work. I guess once in a while he drank with lunch, but again, who doesn’t have a glass of wine with lunch?”

Me,
she wanted to say, but that was only because she was a tequila girl.

“Thank you, Alex. You’ve been a great help,” she said, though in reality he’d left her with more questions than answers.