The Barkeep (22 page)

“Let’s get moving.”

Cody picks up the stuff he dropped and carries it to the other stuff in the kitchen. Derek glances at the girl and then follows him. It does not take long to carry the stuff down the
outdoor stairs and to load up the van. Derek handles the heavy stuff, sliding in the flatscreen and the paintings. Cody wraps the silver in a blanket so it won’t rattle. When they are fully loaded, Cody twists the handle of the van door even as he shoulders it closed, so it makes almost no sound.

“I need to go back in,” says Derek.

“Why?”

“The lights and the lock.”

“Derek?”

“I need to lock the door and turn out the lights.”

“Maybe you’re right. I can do it.”

“No, I will do it. It will not take long.”

“Okay, go ahead. Thanks.”

“I will be right back.”

Derek climbs the outdoor stairs, his footfalls light on the wood. He steps quietly through the kitchen into the living room, still lit, the girl still lying on the floor.

As soon as Derek heard the sounds outside the front door, he assumed that it would be up to him to handle the situation, but Cody surprised him. Cody moved quickly and decisively, there was no panic in his movements. He looked as nervous as Rodney when he heard the sound, but he handled himself so much better. Derek cannot stop smiling when he thinks of it. This is going to work out, this is going to work out better than he thought. He just has to bring Cody in one step further.

Derek looks at the girl on the floor. She is nice, he can tell. She would have been one of the nice ones who said hello to him when they passed in the halls of the school, and said nice things about his projects or the T-shirts he wore.
Hi, Derek, how are you? It is always so good to see you. Did you have a good lunch?
And she is pretty. And the way her mouth opened, like Derek’s sister singing in the choir at church, he is sure she would have
a nice voice too. He has the fleeting thought of taking her with them, of putting her in the back with the paintings and the flatscreens, but he knows that would never work. That would be untidy, and his Grammy taught Derek to hate untidiness of any kind.

He steps forward to the door, locks it from the inside, and looks around to see if they have forgotten anything. It looks clean, it looks okay. He reaches for the switch and turns out the light.

Then he tidies up.

32.

DEPTH CHARGE

M
ia Dalton was growing sick of this job. She had spent too long toiling in the sewers of the criminal law. Once her doubts about the Chase case were settled one way or the other, she would think about charting a new direction in her career. Maybe Mackenzie Chase’s lawyer had it right, maybe patent law was the way to go. Intellectual property sounded so nicely intellectual. And no matter how deeply she burrowed through the dusty applications at the patent office, she wouldn’t have to suffer through the noxious smell that was swirling around her right now, sweet, ripe, dark and coppery, nauseating in its meaning: the rotten scent of another rotting corpse. This is what her life had become, and no exfoliant was strong enough anymore to scour it from her flesh.

Scott had called her down, and though she had tried to beg off, he was adamant, and so here she was. The scent was faint enough in this room to let Mia know that death hadn’t come so very long ago; this wasn’t some body left to bloat and bleed its fluids all across the floor until it seeped into the level below. But that didn’t make it any easier, because this body wasn’t some lowlife drug-addicted liar like Timmy Flynn. This was a young girl with nothing but promise ahead of her. This
wasn’t just a violation of the penal code, this was a violation of everything that mattered in the world.

“Her name was Rebecca Staim,” said Detective Scott, gesturing at the taped outline of a body sprawled on the floor. The victim was now in the morgue, and the scene was empty except for the two of them. “College student. Her parents say she was a good kid, never in any trouble. We’ve confirmed that she was exactly that.”

“What’s missing from the house?”

“What you would expect,” said Scott. “Silver, some artwork, jewelry, a couple of high-end televisions.”

“Is the robbery real or just a cover?”

“It seems real enough. It matches a wave of burglaries that have hit Center City in the last couple days. I got in touch with a guy I know in Robbery/Burglary. He says these break-ins all have an MO that matches this one: the family out, no sign of forced entry, the alarm disabled, only the most salable stuff gone. They figured a gang of roving burglars has come in to hit what they could before moving on. They’ve seen it before, but never ending with a murder like this.”

“What’s the theory?”

“The family was away, the burglars broke in, started ransacking. One of the neighbors noticed a van in the back alley, which matched what was observed at some of the other sites that were hit. The girl was in college and must have come home unexpectedly. She was killed before she could make a call or, if the neighbors can be believed, before she could even scream.”

“Poor thing. So why am I here?”

“Some of the prints found at the murder scene match prints found in the other burglaries.”

“No surprise, based on what you’re telling me.”

“But then the computer spit out another possibility, and
our analyst confirmed the finding. Prints from this murder scene match prints we found at Timmy Flynn’s apartment. Prints on the phone that didn’t belong to Flynn.”

“Shut up.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“No, I mean shut up, you can’t be serious.”

“As a heart attack,” said Scott. “And at my age, at my weight, that’s serious as hell.”

“The same phone that called Justin Chase at about the same time Flynn died?”

“That’s right.”

“Shut the fuck up. Flynn’s house is nowhere near the region where these other burglaries were perpetrated, right?”

“Right.”

“Was anything of value taken from that shit hole?”

“No.”

“So it’s something else.”

“The motive?”

“The connection. Was there any relation between this girl and Mackenzie Chase? Or Justin Chase? Or any relation at all between the families?”

“I don’t know. We’re just getting started here.”

“Find out. Fast. Kingstree should be on this.”

“He didn’t pull this homicide.”

“I don’t care, there’s a connection here, somewhere, and we’re going to find it. Get him on the horn and get him down here. And make sure there’s someone looking hard for anything that was taken in any of these thefts. All we need is one link to solve both cases at once.”

“Will do.”

“And you keep your eye on that Justin Chase. Maybe he got himself a new flatscreen TV.”

“He didn’t.”

“How are you so sure?”

“He doesn’t watch television.”

“Everyone watches television.”

“The kid doesn’t. He doesn’t drink or use drugs or seem to want anything material. It’s just not his way.”

“No one’s too pure for money. Keep your eye on him.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want.”

“One more thing,” said Scott. “And this is peculiar and speculative, but something you should know. The fingerprint analyst I talked to mentioned something interesting in what she found. She said it offhandedly, like it was just an amusing piece of information, but it might be something to keep in mind.”

“Go ahead.”

“She said the prints that matched the phone were a little unusual. There was a larger-than-expected incidence of loops that pointed toward the pinky, something called ulnar loops, coupled with a lower ridge count than usual.”

“So?”

“Well, she said it was interesting, is all. It’s the kind of thing you sometimes find in Alzheimer’s patients and might be a way to detect the disease before symptoms manifest themselves.”

“Let’s catch him first, and then cure him, okay, Detective?”

“But she said, and this might be more interesting, you also sometimes find these patterns in individuals with some sort of intellectual disability. The patterns weren’t as obvious as you find with severely handicapped patients, so his mental functioning would be relatively high, but they were there nonetheless.”

Mia felt a chill ripple down her spine. She tried to make sense of this and couldn’t. Rikki had a niece named Julia who had Down syndrome, a lovely girl Mia often cared for. It was more than a pleasure to be with her; Julia was so full of love and joy it was almost as if Mia were touching something sacred when she ran her fingers through the girl’s silken hair. But from the very first time she sat for the girl, she realized how strong Julia was, almost freakishly strong.

“How did this Rebecca Staim die?” said Mia.

“It’s preliminary, but it looks like first she was banged in the head, because there’s a pretty decent crease in her skull. But that didn’t kill her.”

“What did?”

“After she was down, someone lifted her head, took it in both hands, and twisted hard enough to snap her neck in two.”

33.

AMERICAN SOUR

J
ustin spied the SUV standing outside his alleyway at the end of his run, the vehicle a monstrous black thing of the kind you don’t spot much in the city because it is near-impossible to find a spot big enough to park it.

As he jogged toward the truck, he could see the back of the driver’s head, a woman with silken blonde hair streaked with all kinds of expensive highlights and cut in a perfect line at the shoulders. It was like a glossy helmet, that hair, designed to be no different than thousands of others just like it, designed to look designer. And he imagined the face on the other side, hard and pretty and entitled, with big round sunglasses. All these suburban bottle-blondes had the same round sunglasses, as if purchased en masse from the Jackie O collection on QVC. When he passed her, he noticed that the sunglasses were exactly as he had imagined, forcing a smile at another vile prejudice confirmed.

Only a moment later did he recognize the face behind them.

He stopped, turned around, stared for a bit, wondering what she was doing there. When she saw him and smiled tightly, he knew she was there for him. He stood and wiped his face on the bottom of his shirt as he waited for his sister-in-law
to open the door and climb down from the behemoth. She was wearing slacks—that’s what they’re called when you buy them at Neiman Marcus—and a string of pearls that peeked out from beneath the fashionably raised collar of her blouse. She had been earnest and pale and decidedly unstylish when she married Frank.

“I knocked at the house first,” said Cindy. “When you weren’t in, I decided to wait.”

“I’ve been running,” said Justin, and then he laughed at the obviousness of the comment. “What’s up?”

“Do you have a minute?”

Involuntarily he looked around, as if for an escape route. He had never had a conversation with Cindy outside the confines of a family event and wasn’t certain he wanted to. As he scanned the street, his gaze caught on a strange car parked at a meter on the edge of the square. There was someone sitting inside, which was a bit peculiar. He turned back to Cindy and thought about sending her off. He was already behind schedule for meeting up with Annie at Austin Moss’s house; whatever Cindy wanted to get into, he didn’t want to go into it now. But despite her obvious nervousness, there was a determined set to her jaw that told him he didn’t have much of a choice.

“Sure,” he said.

“Can I park the car here?”

“Car?”

“Well, technically it’s a truck.”

“I guess you and Frank are doing okay.”

“Can I park here?”

“No.”

“Will cops ticket me?”

He glanced back at the parked car with the figure inside. The car was brown and boxy, the figure had a big head and
sloped shoulders and looked a bit…
Damn.
He waved at the figure sitting in the car.

“There’s a cop sitting right there,” he said.

“Staking out the parking spot?”

“Something like that. Give me a moment, okay?”

He headed over to the car, watching the man inside watch him as he walked on over. When he reached the driver’s door, he scooted low so that his head was equal height to the window. He waited for it to roll down.

“Neighborhood watch?” said Justin.

“Of a sort,” said Detective Scott. He sat slumped in the front seat, looking at Justin over reading glasses perched low on his nose. A folded newspaper was in one hand and a pencil in the other.

“I feel safer already,” said Justin.

“Not too safe, I hope. People are dropping like stones in the big city. I’m keeping my eye on things, hoping I might be able to avert another tragedy.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“The morgue is full of folks who could take care of themselves.”

“What are you really doing here, Detective?”

“The Jumble.”

“You any good?”

“Not really. Here’s one, see if you can help. R-Y-S-W-E-C.”

“Harassment?”

“No, that’s not it, there’s only one S. Did that guy who gave you the warning come back yet?”

“No.”

“He will. You have any idea who sent him?”

“No.”

“You’d tell me if you did, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Leastways you’re honest. Can you describe him for me?”

“I only got a glimpse.”

“A glimpse might have been enough. And if he’s the guy I think he might be, you’re lucky you’re still alive.”

“I guess I’ve got good karma.”

“Your father thinks he’s going to find a fall guy for your mother’s murder. You have any idea who he has in mind?”

“No.”

“I’m supposed to find out. And to hound you if necessary until I do.”

“Then it’s a good thing you’re a hound dog. Can you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“See that big black SUV parked illegally on the corner there?”

“The Escalade.”

“Right. Could you make sure it’s not ticketed?”

“Who’s the girl?”

“My sister-in-law.”

“I must say, Chase, you get around.”