The Deepest Cut (13 page)

She found the one of the woman on the floor of the storage closet, her blouse stained with blood.

“This is an accurate drawing of an actual murder that happened three years ago. The victim is Tucson Police detective Johnna Alwin. I learned Alwin’s name when I was on leave and doing my own investigation into murdered policewomen. Her last assignment was vice. She was killed on a Sunday evening. She was off-duty, dressed to meet her husband for dinner at the hotel where he worked. On her way there, she received a surprise call from her informant, Jesse Cuba, a recovering heroin addict. He asked her to stop by the medical building where he had a job as a janitor. Alwin relayed this to the watch commander and assured him that Cuba wasn’t dangerous. He probably just wanted money.

“Alwin’s body was found the next day. She’d been stabbed seventeen times. Cuba’s body was later found in a fleabag motel where he was living. He was dead from an overdose of high-grade heroin. Alwin’s purse and blood were in his room. Case closed.

“Whoever made this drawing had inside information about that crime scene. The media knew Alwin was found in a storage closet in that building, but photos were never released. The person who drew this knew she had been wearing that particular necklace. It’s a string of pearls with a pendant made of a garnet surrounded by fake diamonds. I have it at home.”

Kissick’s eyes didn’t waver as he listened. He seemed to be peering into her soul. She understood how unnerving it would be to be interrogated by him.

“I own a nearly identical necklace.” From her purse, she took out the satinette bag. She pulled open the drawstring closure and dumped her necklace onto the table.

Kissick picked it up. “Haven’t I seen you wearing this?”

“I wore it just once to work, right after I came back from my leave. Months later, when Nitro showed up wearing his similar necklace, I was afraid someone might remember mine, but no one did.”

“Everyone was wrapped up in that double homicide we were working. You were the only one who cared about Nitro. Now I understand why. Nan, if you’d only come forward about how important Nitro was, we could have put somebody on him to make sure he didn’t just walk out of that psych ward and disappear.”

“I agree.” She knew it had been a stupid decision on her part.

He compared Vining’s necklace with the necklaces in the drawings of Johnna Alwin and Cookie Silva. “A big clue right in front of me, and I missed it.” He picked up her necklace and dangled it from his fingers. “If you’d worn only this and a pair of high heels, I might have remembered it.” He playfully wiggled his eyebrows.

He was trying to cheer her up and she appreciated it. She smiled crookedly. “Or maybe not.”

“Maybe not,” he agreed. With a grin, he sat back in the booth. “So what do you know about these necklaces?”

“Mine and Johnna Alwin’s are high-quality costume jewelry. I had mine appraised. The jeweler said it was well made and worth about five hundred dollars. Five years ago, someone dropped it into my home mailbox. It wasn’t wrapped. It had this card attached to it.”

She fished inside the satinette bag and pulled out the small panel card with its message in fountain pen: Congratulations, Officer Vining. A red ribbon was threaded through a hole punched into the corner.

“Five years ago,” he said. “That was around the time of the Lonny Veltwandter incident.”

Lonny Veltwandter, better known to legions of 1980s heavy-metal fans as Lonny Velcro, was the man Vining had shot to death in a controversial
incident. Velcro had pulled a gun on Vining after she’d responded to his call claiming that a young actress-model had committed suicide with a gun at his home. The shooting had been found to be in policy, but the media and angry Lonny Velcro fans had dogged Vining for ages.

“The Veltwandter shooting gave you your fifteen minutes of fame,” Kissick said. “Do you think that’s what drew your bad guy’s attention to you?”

“Absolutely. I received tons of cards and gifts after that, but everything was sent in care of the Pasadena Police Department. All except the necklace.”

“Why didn’t you turn it in?”

Vining shrugged. “I don’t know. Partially because it came to my house and no one knew about it. Partially because I didn’t know what it meant. If I had a stalker on my hands, I wanted to keep everything. A nice piece of jewelry like this … Things have disappeared from evidence. Years went by and no stalker surfaced. I put the necklace away in the back of my dresser drawer and there it sat for years. I’ve only recently taken it out and I wore it just that once to work.”

Kissick asked, “How did Alwin come by her necklace?”

“Similar to me. Her husband said it had shown up in their mailbox about a year before Johnna’s murder, with a panel card attached. He thought the note had said, ‘Congratulations, Officer Alwin,’ but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t keep the note. Alwin had also been involved in a high-profile shooting. She killed a local mob associate. The media couldn’t get enough of her girl-goes-up-against-the-mob story.”

The waitress came by with a coffeepot in each hand. Seeing the necklace on the table, she commented, “Isn’t that pretty!”

Vining nearly said, “Thank you,” but felt the impulse was twisted. Not wanting to ignore her, she said, “It’s unusual, isn’t it?”

They turned down more coffee and Kissick asked for the check.

Holding both coffeepots by their handles in one hand, she yanked checks from her back pants pocket, shuffled through them, and set one in front of him.

“How does Nitro’s necklace fit into this scheme?” he asked, after the waitress had left. “As I recall, it was pretty beat-up.”

“It’s older and more cheaply made than mine or Alwin’s. I wonder if it has something to do with where it all started. Based on what we found out today, Cookie Silva might be T. B. Mann’s first victim.”

Vining took the drawing of Cookie Silva strung up by her ankles and moved it to the left on the table. “Cookie was murdered ten years ago. Next is Marilu Feathers, eight years ago.” She moved the drawing of the park ranger to the right of Cookie’s.

“Then Johnna Alwin, three years ago. And me, a year and three months ago.” She put those two drawings in order.

“You said that Alwin’s necklace had a garnet in the pendant. Yours has a pearl. I don’t remember Nitro’s that clearly.”

“His has what looks like a fake sapphire,” Vining said. “They’re all birthstones. Garnet is the stone for January. Sapphire is September. Pearl is June.”

“But pearl isn’t your birthstone. Your birthday’s in April.”

“True. But T B. Mann attacked me in June.”

He thought about that. “What month was Johnna Alwin murdered?”

She felt herself getting worked up, excited by talking about her hypotheses. “January. See, these aren’t birthstones, they’re
death
stones.”

She could tell he wasn’t as enthused.

“Jim, don’t you see the connection?”

“I see the connection, but I think we need to take a step back.”

She didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t buy criminal mastermind theories. Sure, there are serial killers who target a certain type of victim, who stalk them and execute a planned attack, but what you’re proposing takes this to a whole other level. Frankly, to an absurd level, in my opinion.”

“Absurd?” She was shocked.

“Think about it, Nan. According to your theory, your psycho carefully picked his victims, perhaps from news reports, had jewelry made for them with gems that foretold the month in which he was going to kill them, and then expertly pulled it off. Not killing streetwalkers or runaways or housewives, but
policewomen,
trained to do battle with bad guys.”

Vining glowered at him.

“Nan, the impulse to murder for these guys is an itch they have to scratch. They’re not spending years planning, tracking, having jewelry made.” He poked at the necklace.

She remained silent.

“I’m sorry, Nan, but I have to be honest with you.”

“What about the profile of T. B. Mann we’ve developed? There’s not a single piece of evidence that goes contrary to it. He appears to have a law-enforcement connection. He could be a cop. He could be a clerk, a technician, or even a police volunteer. We found a police scanner in the house on El Alisal Road where I was attacked. Street gangs use scanners to keep track of who’s on patrol, so we can’t assume he’s on the inside. He could be a clever police groupie. He’s methodical and patient. He carefully plans before he acts. He planned everything when he ambushed me, even an escape route.

“He’s definitely hunting female cops, but not just any female cop. Johnna Alwin and I both killed a man in the line of duty. Most cops never even fire their gun in the field, but Alwin and I both killed a man. We don’t just have the aura of being dangerous and fearless, we’ve proved it. What’s Marilu Feathers’s and Cookie Silva’s history? Further, the four women in these drawings aren’t just cops, but we’re also wives, sisters, mothers, girlfriends. Who is he killing over and over? We have to get inside his head.”

“I’ll track down leads and follow the evidence.”

“But we
have
evidence and it all points to a serial killer of policewomen.”

He tapped the drawing of Johnna Alwin. “Tucson P.D. told you she was murdered by her informant.”

“The informant was conveniently found dead of a drug overdose. I say he was framed.”

He tapped the drawing of the woman strung up in the barn. “Cookie Silva’s murderer is on death row.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Wasn’t a guy released last week after serving twenty years for a murder he didn’t commit because of testimony from a jailhouse snitch who later confessed that he’d lied?”

“Nan,” Kissick said softly. “I’ll get your bad guy. I’m one hundred percent committed to this. Just because I don’t share your methodology doesn’t mean I’m going to let him slip away.”

“Are you mad because I turned up more leads in your investigation in my spare time and when I was on leave without access to the criminal databases than you did while working on it full-time?”

She saw the dimple again.

She’d resisted spitting out the cruel truth, but she’d had enough of being grilled and having her theories questioned by him.

“What about those leads?” he shot back. “You should have immediately come forward. Why didn’t you?”

“I had to go after T. B. Mann my way and without Sergeant Early, Lieutenant Beltran, or anybody looking over my shoulder. You have to admit, it worked. Think about it. If I’d gone to Sarge right after I learned about Johnna Alwin, the investigation would have been ripped out of my hands and yours, too. Beltran would have beat the drum like he always does about a break in a big case. He lives to stand in the spotlight. He might have called in the FBI, who would have stomped through our business with their polished wingtips. Do you think Nitro would have shown up then? Think T B. Mann would have left that note for me or put the bloody shirt in my garage? You agreed at the beginning of this conversation, no judgment.”

“That cuts both ways, doesn’t it?”

She took a deep breath, trying to calm down. In the space of a few minutes, they’d gone from expressing their love for each other to this. She didn’t think of herself as a fatalist, but had to wonder if they were doomed as a couple. The atmosphere between them had changed as if a noxious gas had seeped into the room.

A shadow crossed his face. He felt the change, too. He looked at his watch and began gathering the photocopies of the drawings. “We’d better get going.”

She grabbed her necklace and put it inside the satinette bag with the panel card.

He held out his palm. “Can I have that, please? I can use it when I go to Montaña de Oro and Colina Vista. Where are the other two necklaces—-Johnna Alwin’s and Nitro’s?”

“At my house.”

“Leave them there for now. This is the only one Sarge might have seen you with.”

He responded to her grave expression. “Don’t worry. I’ll figure out a way to legitimize all the evidence you’ve found. Try my best, anyway.”

His last comment didn’t fill her with warmth.

She handed him the bag. As she did so, she felt a strand of the spider’s silk that bound her and T B. Mann being stretched to the breaking point. Given the psychic toll he’d taken on her, she should have felt relieved to shift the burden onto someone else, particularly onto Kissick’s capable shoulders. She was coming to the sad realization about the extent to which the relationship, even though toxic, had defined her recent life. Who was she now?

THIRTEEN

I
N THE PPD GARAGE, KISSICK AND VINING BOTH GOT OUT OF HER CAR.
“I’m gonna take off,” he said. “You’re rolling with Caspers, right? Let me know how things go, okay? I’ll see you.”

He lingered for a telling second. In that second, she was sorry. Sorry about everything she’d done to contribute to sending her life sideways. Sorry she’d argued with him at the diner. Sorry she’d ended their first relationship two years before. Sorry she’d not called for backup sooner when she’d answered the suspicious circumstances call at 835 El Alisal Road. Sorry she’d worked overtime that day instead of just relaxing at home.

She of all people should understand how a person’s life could change on a dime. How it could change from being fine to being crap in a nanosecond. Still, the utter fragility of life never ceased to amaze her. But after the flesh, blood, and bone were long gone, love remained. And hate.

She had a feeling deep inside that all was not lost between her and Kissick. She had to back off a little. Soften a little. It did not come naturally to her in her relationships with men. She’d had poor models growing up. Her biological father had abandoned her when she was a toddler. Her mother had remarried, giving birth to Stephanie with her second husband, whom she’d later ditched for husband number three.
Thankfully, Vining was out of the house by the time number four had entered the scene.

She couldn’t continue to blame the sins of her mother for her own failings. Everything was her own doing now.

She managed a tentative but sincere smile. Typical lovers would have hugged and kissed. All Vining could offer was her hand. “Good luck, Jim.”