The Greeks of Beaubien Street (25 page)

Other night owls passed by her, clerks or cops working swing shift, and they acknowledged her as someone who was familiar, who was there to stay. She took the stairway instead of the elevator. The officer at the desk looked at her badge and buzzed her into the section in which Jacob was being held. A chaplain had recently visited to tell Jacob about Marianne’s suicide and Jill could hear sniffing and soft crying sounds.
Poor Jacob
.

He could hear footsteps coming toward his cell and just as Jill came into view, he wiped his nose with the back of his hand and stood up. Jill dug through her pocket for a tissue and stuck it through the bars. He took it from her.

“Did you hear?” he asked. “I can’t believe it.” Jill got a definite feeling from him that worry about placing the blame for Gretchen’s death on his late wife bothered him more than her suicide.

“I did hear. I’m sorry for your loss, Jacob. Do you feel up to talking to me about Gretchen, or would you like me to come back later?” Jill was keeping her facial expression as neutral as she could, but there was a tick in her left cheek, a muscle that wouldn’t stop twitching. She often got the tick when she felt she could pummel someone with her fists.

“I can talk now. What’s the point of waiting? They are both dead. There is nothing left for me to live for.” Jacob lowered his head, plunked down in his chair and started to blubber again. “Gretchen was my life. I loved her like a man loves a woman. But I swear to God I never had sex with her. My wife was like a maniac about finding her in the casino and she’s the one who did the bat thing. I would have never been able to hurt her like that! Oh my God!” He dissolved into a mess of tears, a real show of emotion. Jill was disgusted.

“Pull yourself together, Mr. Parker,” Jill said with as much compassion as she could muster, glad he was behind bars for his own safety. “Falling apart won’t do either woman any good now.” She wondered if his attorney told him about the video of him with Gretchen. “Tell me about you and Gretchen,” she asked, stomach turning. “You were a devoted father, but what’s this about ‘loving her like a man loves a woman’? That’s not okay, you realize that, right?”

“So what are
you
gonna do about that? She’s dead! My wife killed her!” He started sobbing again. Jill decided that she was feeling too antagonistic to interview Jacob without making him the same way. She turned to walk away from him, but he called out for her not to go. “Don’t leave! I’m sorry!” Then, more crying. Jill had about had it with him, dead family or not.

“I’ll stay if you start talking about what happened in that storage locker. And don’t lie. The blood spatter told a story that will hold up in a court of law. You’re a cop. You know what I am talking about.” Jill picked up her phone and dialed the guard.

“Can I get a chair in front of 226?” she asked. She put her finger up to Jacob to signal
one minute
and walked toward the guard who was waiting at the gate for her. She thanked him and started walking back to Jacob’s cell. She remembered the jail scenes in
Silence of the Lambs
and snickered. Placing the chair against the wall in front of Jacob’s cell, Jill sat down and got out her notebook to take notes. She set a small recording device on the floor next to her chair. Albert had already interrogated Jacob, but that was before Marianne died.

“Tell me about Sunday night,” Jill said. She waited for Jacob to start talking, doodling while he composed himself. “Take your time.” She let a little breath out, just enough to let him know she was losing patience.

“This isn’t easy,” he said defensively.

“I’m sure it isn’t,” Jill replied.

“We were sure she was already dead when we hadn’t heard from her by Sunday morning. But I needed to know what happened to her. I left the house again Sunday evening and stopped by a bar on Michigan Avenue near Greenfield. It was one that I knew Gretchen had gone to with Mike. Not many people from the west side of town go there.” That was Jacob speak for
Arab hangout
. “I got into an argument. A cop I know from my time on the force came in to break things up before it got physical. He’d heard about Gretchen and suggested I check out the casinos. We’d never thought of that. It wasn’t Gretchen’s style. But because she had been with Mike, we didn’t know what to think.

“We went to Greektown. I couldn’t believe it when I found her there. I almost didn’t recognize her. The look on her face, well, she was shocked, to put it mildly. ‘Daddy?’ she said.” Jacob laughed. Jill could picture the scene, the young woman caught by her perverted father, because she had seen it in a vision. The realization gave Jill goosebumps. Mike Ahmed would be the next person she would visit that day. Dana’s funeral in Novi slipped from the top of Jill’s priority list.

“I put my arm out for her to take like we were at a prom,” Jacob continued. “Truthfully, I wasn’t as angry as Marianne was. She was steaming. Of course I found out later, just why. She had videotaped me horsing around with Gretchen. It was innocent, I swear to you. We never kissed, or anything like that. We were like a couple of kids playing doctor.” Jill couldn’t believe her ears. Didn’t this asshole know he was admitting to a crime? It didn’t make any difference that the victim was dead. She told him that he should have an attorney present. He refused, saying “I have nothing to hide.

“She took my arm and I lead her out of the casino. I felt proud to have her on my arm, she was that gorgeous. My wife was waiting in the car. I didn’t realize that she had brought a bat with her,” he lied. “When we got to the car she said it was to ward off any thugs who might take exception to our taking Gretchen with us back home. When she saw the way Gretchen was dressed, and heard that she had gone there with a man after signing on with an escort service, my wife went crazy. She yelled to Gretchen to tell me where to go to get her clothes. She wanted to know what Gretchen had done all weekend. The poor kid started to tell Marianne, not understanding she was digging her own grave. She said she thought she was signing on with a modeling agency, but that it turned out to be a legitimate escort service. I laughed. There is no such thing. But even with Marianne freaking out, I wanted her to keep talking. I needed to know who set her up. Of course it was Mike Ahmed but I wanted to hear it from Gretchen’s mouth.

“She said she’d had two dates so far and the men were very respectful. A weird name with a ‘B’ and a guy named Tommy. I thought Marianne would have a heart attack. We got to the hotel and went to Gretchen’s room. Marianne was on a witch hunt. She insisted on checking Gretchen to see if she was a virgin. She swore neither man had touched her inappropriately, but Marianne was livid. She used the bat on my daughter!” Jacob lowered her head and started crying again. “It was awful. I could hear her screams coming from the bathroom. Marianne yelled at me to turn the TV up. I could still hear her, begging her mother to stop.

“When Marianne was finished, we went to the storage locker. We were afraid someone would have heard the noise and called the police. Marianne said she was going to question Gretchen about the evening and didn’t want the child’s recriminations heard in our neighborhood. We had gone to the locker for arguments between the two of us in the past; I didn’t think anything of it.” Jacob lowered his head again. Jill felt that he was making a decision here. He was going to either tell the truth or fabricate a lie. When he raised his head again, she knew she was not going to get the truth. His face gave him away.

“I heard Gretchen arguing with my wife and Marianne threatening her to shut up. I left the car then and just as I opened the door to the locker, I saw Marianne take my service pistol out of her pocket and shoot our daughter.” He lowered his head and the sobbing started again. Jill knew that if she replaced Jacob with Marianne, she would have a scenario closer to the truth. She closed her notebook and stood up.

“What’d you do with the body?” she asked. He was struggling with his answer.

“We washed her off in the bathroom at the facility. Or Marianne did. She didn’t want me to see Gretchen naked. I still don’t understand why she wanted her clothes off. That was the worst part for me. When you asked me Monday morning what she was wearing and I got so upset about her being naked, that was real!” Jill understood then that the parents may have hoped the naked Gretchen’s body would be more difficult to identify than the one clothed in sweatpants brought from home. They had forgotten to bring her evening gown; the lovely one Jill saw her wearing in the hallway surveillance video to the place where they would murder her. “There was a tarp in our locker and we rolled her body in it. We took her back into the city and left her where you found her. It was the most difficult thing I have ever done.” Jill found that hard to believe but didn’t respond.

“Okay, Mr. Parker, that’s enough for today. If you can think of anything else, have the guard call me.” She smiled a big fake smile, picked up the chair, and walked away from Jacob Parker. Having to relive Gretchen’s last moments spent with her disrespectful, insane mother and father made Jill sick to her stomach. A memory came to her of when she was just seven years old, having forgotten to bring clean underwear into the bathroom where she was taking a bath, and of her mother knocking on the bathroom door and reaching through with her arm to hand her daughter what she needed without invading her privacy. The idea that Gretchen submitted to Marianne’s vaginal exam, the total invasiveness of it, was shocking. Why did she? Had Jacob and Marianne cultivated every bit of self-reliance out of their daughter so that she would expose herself in such a way? Or was she used to baring it all to her parents? And why didn’t Jacob stop his wife from using the bat on his daughter, instead listening to her screams and trying to cover them up with the television? Jill found that she was more angry than sympathetic about Marianne’s suicide. She wouldn’t suffer punishment now for what she put her own flesh and blood through.

When she got back to the precinct, Albert was there waiting for her. They would talk to Mike Ahmed together one more time. He had been warned to stay in town or else. Aaron Barry ended up being a godsend; he made regular passes by Mike’s house and often followed Mike’s car when he was driving through town.

“What happened to your funeral?” Albert asked her as they got into the unmarked car; Jill was driving.

“I didn’t want to drive into Novi this afternoon when we had this last interview to do. I heard that he may be asked to testify on behalf of Jacob and I wanted to make sure that we had what we needed from him before the defense got their claws into him.” When Jill heard that it was possible that Mike would be called as a witness for the defense, it made her skin crawl. The prosecution needed every bit of evidence that was used to facilitate ending Gretchen’s life. If the defense could prove that Mike Ahmed was in any way connected to Gretchen’s murder, it would cast reasonable doubt on Jacob.

When Mike Ahmed came to the station for questioning the night before, he’d sworn that once he handed Gretchen over to Soud he had left and never saw her again. The video tapes clearly showed Mike bringing Gretchen into the Greektown hotel late Friday night but then leaving again within minutes. Jacob and Marianne said they found him at his house in east Dearborn early the next morning and that it had appeared like they woke him up. A search to find Soud was underway; she was wanted for questioning. The hotel clerk who looked the other way of the comings and goings to room three forty-six was interviewed and swore that she didn’t know Soud or that Mike Ahmed was a regular. The hotel was a dead end. Jill felt defeated. She had a horrible feeling that Jacob Parker was going to walk free. Then out of the blue, a wonderful discovery; his service pistol was found in a safe box screwed into the undercarriage of Gretchen’s bright red Malibu. It was covered with Jacob’s prints; Marianne’s were absent. The empty case was missing, but the projectile had been found buried among the boxes spattered with Gretchen’s tissue and blood. It matched the gun.

Albert said it first: “I am so fucking sick of this case. Thank God it’s over for us,” he said. He had his arm around Jill’s shoulder as they walked to the car.

“Do you want to come to my dad’s for dinner tonight? Greek food.” She promised. He nodded his head
yes
.

In three days they’d put together a case that would win a guilty verdict if all went according to plan. Jill could get back to her life for a while.

Chapter 33

Dana’s funeral was heartbreaking; her parents were inconsolable. They agreed with Andy that it would be too overwhelming for Dana’s boys, so the two stayed back at the grocery store with Maria. Big Andy and Anna and their son went in the same car with Gus. Jill decided she could make it after all; Dearborn and Mike Ahmed were not that far from Novi.

Dana’s family declined coming into the city for dinner. Jill was going to go by Alex’s beforehand to see the painting, her curiosity getting the best of her. As she pulled in front of his apartment, she saw him pull up behind her in her rearview mirror.

“Hey! I beat you!” she said joining him on the walkway. He kissed her, taking her hand as they walked, and when they got to his apartment could hear Fred breathing hard on the other side of the door.

“I’ll take Fred for a walk,” she said. “How was it today?”

“Three posts,” Alex said, referring to the number of autopsies they had. “One natural, one gunshot wound, one motor vehicle. I thought I might see you.”

“It must have gone to one of the other teams,” she said. “I ended up by going to Dana’s funeral.” Alex helped her put Fred’s collar and leash on. “We are invited for dinner tonight. Aunt Maria’s cooking, so you know it’s going to be over the top.”

“Okay, we’ll see. Hurry and take him before it gets dark,” Alex admonished. Jill took Fred to the driveway at the side of the house while Alex prepared the showing of his latest work and glanced out the window every minute to make sure Jill was safe. He was ready for her when she came through the door five minutes later. The easel faced the doorway so when Jill came in it would be the first thing she would see.