Sinnerman (8 page)

I brushed the rough patch of dirt back and forth with my hand. It was loose, and in no time, I’d dug a good three inches at least. I extracted the mound of dirt into my hand and stared down into the miniature hole I’d formed. I felt like a kid in grade school who had nothing better to do to pass the time at recess. I tilted my hand to the side and watched the dirt tumble back into the hole and with it, a little piece of debris about the size of a nickel dropped into the hole as well. It was dirty and crumpled and had been folded at least five times to get it to its current size. I scooped it out of the hole and opened it.

I ALWAYS KNEW YOU WERE BETTER THAN THEM.

THAT IS WHAT I LIKE ABOUT YOU.

YOU DON’T THINK LIKE A COP.

YOURS ALWAYS, SINNERMAN

P.S. YOU’RE GETTING WARMER.

Did he mean them—the guys on the case, or them—the women. Or both?

“Excuse me,” a voice said, “are you a cop?”

I stood up and came face to face with a woman dressed in a pair of fluorescent yellow shorts and a tank top that was cut so low I caught more than a glimpse of what a little breast enhancement can do for a person. On her eyes she donned a pair of hot pink sunglasses which hid a fraction of her face from me.

“Something like that,” I said.

“I feel just awful about what happened to that poor young woman yesterday,” she said.

And yet, here she was parading herself around like a nosy tourist.

Taye Diggs approached from the right. I tried to indicate that I didn’t need him, but he charged forward anyway. I made a fist with my right hand and concealed the note I’d found within my palm. This one was mine.

I looked at the woman.

“Is there something I can do for you?” I said.

“Actually, there is,” she said. “After I got home last night, I got to thinking about everything, and I thought I might be able to help.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“I might be able to give you a description.”

I looked at Taye and tried to restrain the urge I felt to give him a high five. We both stared back at her, speechless.

“Were you at the park last night?” I said.

She nodded.

“Around what time?”

“Oh, I got here about a quarter to eight and then went around the track a couple times and then went home. You see, I don’t usually come out to the park. I like to get my workouts in at home, but a couple days ago my treadmill broke. I bought another one, but my husband has been too busy to set it up for me, and I’m too small to lift it.”

I wondered how long she would go on with her personal life story if I didn’t stop her.

“Did you see anyone or anything suspicious while you were here?” I said.

She nodded again.

“I saw a strange man.”

“Where?” I said.

“When I was running.”

“On the track?” I said.

“That’s right. He ran beside me for a minute.”

This was the first time in Sinnerman’s history that there was an actual sighting—if it turned out to be true. Could he have slipped up?

“He talked to you?” I said.

“Not in so many words,” she said. “But he did say hello and mentioned something about the weather we were having that day and how summer was his favorite season of the year. He was going on and on about the arts festival—you know the one where people display their paintings on Main Street?”

“Yeah—that was a couple months ago. Anything else?”

“When he finished, I looked over to respond, and he frowned at me and took off.”

It wasn’t hard for me to see why. She wasn’t his type. From behind, he may not have known it, but once he got close, he wouldn’t have chosen her. I was sure of it.

I reached for the card-sized notepad in my back pocket and a pen.

“What did he look like?” I said.

“That’s what I thought was strange. Here this guy was gushing about how warm it was at the festival and he was wearing a charcoal hoodie with the hood over his head. It didn’t make sense to me. I mean, it must have been 80 degrees at the time of day, and he was jogging no less.”

Her eyes shifted from me to a bird that flew by in front of us. I needed to speed things up.

“How tall would you say he was?” I said.

“Well,” she said, “he was taller than me for sure. Not by much though. He only had about three inches on me.”

“So around 5‘10?”

“That’d be about right.”

“What about hair color, eye color?” I said.

“He wore dark glasses that made him look like a beetle, and I don’t mean the car. And his hair was perfect.”

“How so?” I said.

“Well, he had that hood on so it was hard to tell for sure, but at one point while he was talking to me he lifted it a bit and stuck his hand inside and smoothed it out, like a piece had strayed and it bugged him. From what I could see, it was a brownish color, and he had it parted to one side—I’d say twenty-five percent to the left and the rest to the right.”

“Was it thick, thin, receding?” I said.

“Thick.”

“Long or short?”

“Short.”

“Eyes?” I said.

“He never took the glasses off.”

“Oops, that’s right,” I said. “Bad habit. Do you know where he went after you talked to him?”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t pay him any attention after he gave me the brush off. I left.”

Taye Diggs took out his cell phone and dialed.

“I’m going to need you to do something for me,” I said to the woman.

“Alright.”

“Head down to the police station. They’ll take your official statement,” I said. “And I’m sure they’ll want to get a sketch of the guy while it’s still fresh in your mind.”

I took her name, address and phone number down and then sent her on her way. What a day it had been already, and it was just getting started.

When I arrived back to my car, a silver Aston Martin idled behind it, which blocked me from backing out. The window tint was so dark on the driver’s side, I couldn’t have seen in even if I had a flashlight. Taye Diggs opened my car door and took his hand and shoved me inside and drew his gun with the other.

“Get down,” he said, “until I find out who this is.”

I squatted low enough in the seat that I was well below the window but still high enough that I could watch all the action through the side mirror. The window of the Aston Martin came down and unveiled a face I hadn’t seen in months, and I gasped loud enough for everyone on the street to hear.

I opened the door of the car.

“I told you to stay inside,” Taye said through clenched teeth.

I looked toward the other car.

“Giovanni?” I said. “What are you doing here? How did you find—”

“It’s nice to see you again Sloane,” Giovanni said.

Taye looked over at me and then at Giovanni.

“Are you gonna tell me who this dude is or what?” Taye said.

Giovanni stuck out his hand to Taye. “The name is Giovanni Luciana,” he said, “can I speak with you for a moment?”

Taye looked at me.

“It’s alright,” I said. “We know each other. You can put your gun down.”

The truth was I didn’t know him. Not well, anyway.

Taye made the most of his muscular frame and held his arms at his side the way an ape does while he walked over to Giovanni’s car. Once there they engaged in small talk that wasn’t audible enough for me to hear. From the look on his face, Taye wasn’t happy. He made a phone call and frowned and then looked at Giovanni like he wanted to inflict blunt force trauma to various parts of his body.

“She’s all yours,” Taye said to Giovanni.

What was that supposed to mean?

Giovanni stepped out of the car and walked over to the passenger side door and opened it and gestured inside with his hand.

“Come with me please,” he said to me.

“What—why?”

“You’ll see,” he said.

“It’s fine,” Taye said. “He’ll explain everything, just go with him.”

I was both reluctant and exhilarated, which up until then, I didn’t know could be experienced at the same time. I walked over to the car and got in and looked at Taye who nodded at Giovanni and then turned and went.

What was happening?

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” I said to Giovanni.

“We’re going for a drive,” he said.

“May I ask where?”

“You’ll see.”

Why was it that everything surrounding him was always shrouded in secrecy? I was unnerved, but not enough that I didn’t absorb everything about him—the way he was dressed in an expensive charcoal suit with light grey pinstripes, the Montblanc watch on his wrist; even his mannerisms and the way he flicked his wrist when he shifted gears with his long, bony fingers had an element of fascination to it.

“Why did you hang up on me yesterday?” he said.

“How did you know I’d be here today?”

“You first,” he said.

“Alright. Someone came in after I dialed your number, and I decided I didn’t know why I called in the first place, so I hung up.”

He held his pointer finger up in the air.

“Ah, but you do know, don’t you? Something compelled you to call me,” he said. “I can hear it in your voice now as you talk to me. What was it?”

From the sound of it, I wasn’t going to get away with evading his questions for long, but there wasn’t a level of comfort required for me to open up and spill it all out either. The shield to my circle of trust was up, and he was on the outside.

“I was thinking about the first time we met several months ago,” I said.

“I remember it well,” he said. “That was the day you accused me of murdering that poor excuse for a man who used my sister’s body as part of his daily workout routine.”

“And I still think so.”

That did it. In a moment of haste I’d spoken about the suspicions I had about him over the past several months. The words gushed out of my mouth too fast for me to do anything, like they often did, and now they clung in the air between us like a leaf desperate to stay welded to the branch of a tree.

His eyebrow lifted.

“I shouldn’t have—”

“You say what’s on your mind, and I respect that,” he said. “It’s an admirable quality in a woman such as yourself.”

“When I asked about your involvement, you didn’t deny it.”

“I never admitted it either,” he said. “Don’t you agree that the women of the world are better off without him? Who knows how many more women he would have abused?”

We both sat for a minute, and neither of us said a word. We just drove. Destination: unknown.

After a few minutes of silence he said, “Where does that leave us?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t even know you.”

“Don’t you?” he said.

What was that supposed to mean?

“You checked into my background right after we first met,” he said. “I would say you know quite a bit.”

The man didn’t miss a beat. I thought about asking him how he knew, but then we’d be back to going in circles again. It was unusual. For some reason our exchange made me feel like I was the one being interrogated, instead of the other way around, and in that moment, the tables had been turned—on me.

I glanced in the side mirror at the car a short distance behind that had mimicked Giovanni’s every move. It had been that way for the past two miles or so.

Giovanni looked over at me and then in his rear view mirror.

“Don’t worry about them,” he said. “They’re with me.”

“They were around the last time we spoke as well. What are they, some sort of protection?”

“You could say that,” he said.

“Are you always this elusive?”

He laughed.

“Do you always ask so many questions?” he said.

“Yes.”

“I have eyes and ears everywhere. I make it a point to know what I need to know when I need to know it.”

In a way, he’d answered my question, but in another way, he hadn’t answered it at all.

“Talk to me about this case,” he said, “about Sinnerman. I want to know all about him.”

“I’m not sure why you’re interested,” I said.

His face looked stern, but he didn’t seem dismayed by my comment.

“Let me ask you something—do you believe I can help you?” he said. “Is that why you called me?”

I thought about it for a moment, but it wasn’t necessary for me to answer. From the first moment I’d laid eyes on him when we met, I knew he was a force to be reckoned with, a man in some kind of powerful position. My gut instinct gave me a good idea of what that was, but I didn’t want to believe it. I took a deep breath in and when I exhaled, out came the entire backstory of my sister, Sinnerman, the latest slayings of more innocent women—all of it.

When I finished he said, “What is it you would like me to do?”

It was the moment of truth.

“I hoped you could help me nail the son of a bitch.”

“And when I do—what then?”

“You’re very sure of yourself,” I said. “No one got anywhere close to figuring out who this guy was last time. He knows what he’s doing.” “So do I, and you didn’t answer my question.”

Inside my head the question had already been answered, a hundred times over—maybe more. But to say it out loud? I wasn’t sure I could do it. My job had always been to bring people to justice, find the bad guy and let the cops do the rest. But this was different—it was personal, and now I didn’t just have sympathy for all the families of victims whose lives had been lost for no reason, I had empathy. And empathy wanted a lot more than a lifetime in prison. Empathy wanted revenge.

I’d been so caught up inside myself I hadn’t noticed my finger and the incessant tap dance it was doing on the armrest of the car door. Giovanni took notice and placed his hand on my shoulder. It stopped me right in my tracks.

“Leave everything to me,” he said.

“But you don’t even know me. Why would you—”

“I learned all I needed to the first time we met. There’s something different about you, Sloane Monroe. You have a drive that most people never possess, and you’re selfless. What you did for my sister proved that, and I am in your debt.”