The Off Season (27 page)

“That’s what I’m here to find out, ma’am. We have some questions for him. Unfortunately, he displayed some poor decision making after his mother showed us to his room. Hit one of my officers in the face.”

“Is he all right? The officer, I mean,” she asked, the concern in her voice sounding genuine. But then, she’d just spoken at Frank Fiorelli’s funeral, a reminder to all of them how dangerous the work of law enforcement could be.

“She’ll have a shiner, I’m sure, but she’s a pretty tough one,” Harris assured her.

“And you’ll treat this young man with kid gloves?” Stella asked him. “Everything by the book? Because the council’s already impatient to get this crime wave behind us. If
Reg Edge
”—she pronounced the nickname with all the affection usually reserved for wads of phlegm—“convinces the rest of them you’re targeting his son because of some personal grudge, I won’t be able to protect you any longer. Do you hear me, Harris?”

“Loud and clear, ma’am,” said Harris, turning so his suspect’s parents could hear what he was saying. “I’ll be certain to show Mr. Edgewood and his family every courtesy. But I also promise you, I’m going to get some answers to what’s been happening around here. And I’m going to put a stop to it, wherever my investigation leads.”

Back at the station, Harris left Eric Edgewood cuffed to a table in the interview room and then encouraged Zarzycki to get herself a bag of ice for her eye. “Unless you’d rather go to the ER, get yourself checked out for fractures or a concussion.”

She made a scoffing sound. “I can write my report any way you want, but truth is, the little weenie only caught me with an elbow while he was trying to escape.”

Harris nodded. “I saw that, too.
And
that he feels bad about it.” Something he wasn’t above using to get answers. “So why don’t you bring your ice pack into the interview room while he’s being questioned?”

She ducked a nod, and he grabbed a cup of coffee that tasted old enough to vote. But he slugged down a few swallows, sludge or not, before deciding it wasn’t worth the effort.

Like interview rooms in every station he’d been in, Seaside Creek’s was decorated as if the object was to bore the suspect into a confession. Always on the cold side, with cinder-block walls painted a grimy-looking beige and a few uncomfortable chairs around a table bolted to the floor, it also contained a camera with audio capabilities.

Once Zarzycki settled herself, he asked Eric’s permission to record their discussion digitally. “Unless you want to do like Daddy says and wait for his lawyer to tell you what to say.”

“Or we could just clear things up now,” Zarzycki said, lowering the ice enough to peer through the slit of her left eye at the young man slumped onto his elbows. “Let you explain what really happened.”

Well played,
thought Harris.

After a moment’s hesitation, the kid said, “I never meant for this—for anyone to get hurt.”

Taking it as permission, Harris switched on the equipment and Mirandized Eric before asking him to repeat what he’d said before.

His eyes red and his hands shaking as he looked at Zarzycki, he said, “I wasn’t thinking, just freaked out. All I wanted was to get away. Sorry you got hurt.”

“I know you didn’t mean it,” she said quietly, adding a little shrug. “We all make mistakes, don’t we? Things we’d give anything to take back.”

Now certain that she was no stranger to an interview room, Harris teased out the thread. “You didn’t mean for anybody else to get hurt, either, did you? But things—sometimes they spin out of your control.”

A tear slid down the kid’s face. “That poor old man,” he said. “That address I gave them—I reversed two of the numbers in the text. I swear to you—I
swear
it—I’d done my part. My job was to make sure nobody was home, and I did it. I just screwed it up. Big-time.”

As was so often the case after a person had held the truth back for so long, he seemed relieved to tell his story, even though he had to know it would mean jail time. The more facts that came out, the straighter Eric sat in his seat. “I only meant to do it once.” He explained that it had all started as a favor for a friend, who’d promised to reward him with whatever drugs they could score. At first, it gave Eric a rush, thinking of assholes like his old man coming home to find their crap gone. He’d figured they’d get newer, better versions of things, anyway, once their insurance companies coughed up. So he’d taken part again and again, he and his buddies laughing about it as they got high together later. It had made him feel like some kind of genius, the guy who kept his hands clean but still got to enjoy the after-parties and what seemed like harmless fun.

Harmless fun
that
Harris was more than half-convinced had led to the deaths of not just one but two people, and to heartbreak for so many more. An image slipped up on him, of Christina’s shock when he’d found her, her bewilderment and confusion. How she’d gone limp in his arms, as if something vital inside her had irreparably shattered.

And yet this kid, this tattooed loser of a mama’s boy, sat here making excuses.

“After listening to my dad chew my ass every single night, it felt great,” he told them. “And when you’re buzzed enough, the idea of smashing out a few walls and plugging up some drains and turning all the taps on sounds hilarious.”

“Some of those places,” Harris told him, “ended up with over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of damage. Damage you and you alone will be financially liable for—and I don’t mean your daddy—unless you share these friends’ names.”

“They’re my—they’re my crew. My buddies.”

Harris slapped his hand on the table, making the kid jump. “They’re goddamned arsonists and killers, Eric.”

“No! They wouldn’t kill anybody. They’re not like that.”

“Tell that to that old man they beat half to death. You’ve already admitted you know they did that—”

“Only because he came downstairs with a freaking baseball bat in his hands, so they just took it away from him and . . . things got out of hand.”

“Like they got out of hand the night they burned that big Victorian on Cape Street?” Zarzycki said, allowing a feminine softness, like Edgewood’s mother’s, to creep into her voice. “The night they killed your uncle after he confronted you?”

“It wasn’t them! They were never there. They swore they were finished with the kid stuff—we all were, after Uncle Frank ripped us a new one when he figured it out.”

At the confirmation that Frank not only had known the vandals’ identities but had taken it upon himself to let them off, Zarzycki sent a loaded glance toward Harris.

“Then let them swear it to me,” he yelled, no longer just playing the Bad Cop but well and truly pissed. Because it was all too much, the memory of Frank’s widow at the funeral, the sad-eyed relatives—this lying loser among them. And Christina, who’d cried herself to sleep with her sister and her daughter, and all so a bunch of numbnuts could get cheap kicks and buy dope. “Or screw it—I’m just going ahead and charging you with the murder of Officer Frank Fiorelli. My officer. Your own blood. You think his death has hit your mom hard? How the hell do you think your being named his killer will—”

“You can’t!”

“I can, and I will,” Harris said, standing up and pacing the room. “You know what? Your uncle didn’t like me, and I didn’t always care for the man, either. But he was a cop—one of
my
crew—and I took it as my personal responsibility to always look out for him, to always make sure he went home to his wife.”

The kid was crying now, choking on his own sobs. But Harris was beyond caring.

“And that wasn’t your pals’ first murder, either, was it? Your friends decided they had to kill your uncle to cover up what had happened when somebody finally found that poor woman on Columbus Street.”

“W-what woman? What are you talking about?
Columbus
Street? I never—I swear I never gave the guys any addresses over there.”

Gritting his teeth until his jaws ached, Harris kicked a chair and sent it clattering to the floor.

Someone, probably the night clerk, knocked at the door, but breathing hard, Harris didn’t answer. He was too busy running through an exercise he’d learned—and taught others—in counseling, one designed to help him regain control so he didn’t tear this little shit apart.

Zarzycki put down her ice pack and said, “Maybe you should step out, Chief. Take a break for a few minutes while I help Eric put together his list. I have the phone I took from you right here in my pocket,” she said to the kid. “We can get this sorted out tonight. Who knows, maybe we can even get you before the judge so you can bail out and get home first thing in the morning.”

Wildly optimistic as her suggestion was, a light came on in Eric’s frightened eyes. A glimmer of hope as he sensed the possibility of freedom.

“I’ll be back in ten,” Harris said with a nod. But there was another knock at the door, this one more insistent. When he opened it, Harris found his wheelchair-bound night clerk/dispatcher. When he looked past her, Harris saw the reason for the apology in her brown eyes. A rumpled-looking little man with a patch of fuzzy fair hair crowning an otherwise bald head.

Adams, a defense attorney who did a good business making the problems of the sons and daughters of the area’s wealthy go away, immediately lit into Harris for speaking to his client without him present. Clearly trying to intimidate the boy, judging from the shouting and banging of furniture he’d heard from outside the room.

“You and I both know that
boy’s
long past legal age now,” Harris said as he blew past him, not caring that word of this was sure to get back to Reg Edge, the mayor, and the rest of the city council in record time, “so you can kiss my ass.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Harris was still kicking him himself for losing his temper when someone knocked at his office door. Figuring it would be Zarzycki, he called for her to come in.

Instead, the night clerk wheeled in, wearing the wireless headset she used to handle dispatch. Normally the soul of confidence, the former marathoner and current Paralympic hopeful looked flustered, her light-olive skin a shade paler than normal. “I’m really sorry, Chief. I tried to tell him to wait up front, but he wasn’t listening for anything.”

“Next time Adams tries that,” Harris told her drily, “you have my permission to roll over his toes.”

She flipped her shiny black bangs out of her eyes, mischief in her smile. “How ’bout you lend me your gun instead?”

“For the last time, Maya, no guns for civilian employees.” He sighed. “And the lawyer, he’s basically all right. Just doing his job like the rest of us.”

Even if Reg Edgewood had sent him. And even if Adams ended up talking Eric out of cooperating further.

“So you aren’t worried the suspect you were questioning will clam up about his buddies?” Maya asked, which was no surprise to Harris, since he’d long suspected that the clerk, who often complained of being bored stiff by slow off-season night shifts, had developed eavesdropping superpowers.

“Not really. Adams is no fool. As soon as he gets up to speed, he’ll realize that his client’s best shot at avoiding a long prison sentence is to cough up the names and disavow all knowledge of the murders. Otherwise, one of the friends will roll on his buddies after I bring ’em in.”

Maya beamed, her young face full of admiration. “So you’ve got it solved, then? Everything? The vandalism and both killings?”

“We’re still a hell of a long way from celebrating.”
If I ever feel like celebrating anything again.
“And, anyway, if these leads do eventually pan out, it’ll be because of Frank Fiorelli’s police work”—even if he’d completely, perhaps fatally, screwed up by attempting to keep the nephew he loved out of trouble—“and Officer Zarzycki’s investigative skills.”

“In the online management classes I’m taking,” Maya said, “they tell you the best supervisors deflect credit to their subordinates.”

Harris snorted but said nothing, knowing that if she’d wanted someone to emulate, Maya could’ve chosen a whole lot better. But he knew, too, that young people like his night clerk, who was the same age as Eric Edgewood, needed their role models. Even gods with feet of clay like his.

“Speaking of Zarzycki,” he said, “is she still in the interview room?”

Maya shook her head. “Nope. Came out a few minutes ago and went to her locker for some aspirin for her eye.”

“Ask her to stop by my office when you see her again, will you?”

“You bet.”

Thanking her as she left, Harris opened his laptop, meaning to check the department’s manpower situation for the next few shifts. But he couldn’t focus on his officers’ work schedules, his brain repeatedly circling back to Christina’s suffering.

Or how she’d been made to suffer, with the damage to her car, the burning of her temporary residence, and finally—or more likely, first of all—with the murder of her beloved mother. There was also that other bit of strangeness: the odd things Lilly had been repeating. Statements regarding the death—the killing—of someone the two-year-old called
Katie-Mommy
.

It was almost as if whoever had been pumping the toddler full of stories
knew
. Had known all along that Christina’s—the former Katie’s—adoptive mother had been murdered.

No matter how hard Harris tried, he couldn’t make those pieces fit with the neat scenario he’d suggested in the interview room earlier. Sure, there were often weak spots in any cop’s or prosecutor’s theory, inexplicable gaps that would forever remain mysteries. But in this case, the holes were big enough to drive a bus through. Enough to have him doubting that Eric Edgewood’s friends truly had been involved in Elizabeth Wallace’s murder. Or Frank Fiorelli’s, either, since it was possible he’d been killed not because he’d discovered what his nephew had been up to, but instead because he’d gotten too close to the person out to burn Christina and her child alive.

The same child who would inherit a third of her father’s family money. Harris remembered something that had slipped out when he’d spoken to Doug Paxton’s
previous administration
. Something about the estate finally settling very soon.

If Lilly died before its distribution, wouldn’t that give a larger share to Evelyn Paxton’s two grown children? Or, more to the point, keep any of the money from ending up in the hands of Christina, whose very existence was clearly hateful to the first wife?

It sure as hell sounded like a valid motive to him, one that reminded him to check his e-mail. There—thank God for small favors—he found a message from someone from Delaware River Port Authority, which policed the same Ben Franklin Bridge that had so recently taken him to Philadelphia.

Though tolls were currently collected in only one direction, license plates were digitally recorded going both ways. Including the license plate of an Audi registered to Mrs. Evelyn Paxton of Pittsburgh.

The car, it appeared, had crossed over into South Jersey on several recent occasions, including the evening before the damage to Christina’s vehicle and phone line had taken place. His next move would be to contact the New Jersey State Police to check the vehicle’s movement on the Garden State Parkway, which offered the most direct route to Seaside Creek. But that info, he decided, would better wait till morning, when he could call a trooper friend to get his request expedited. Also, he’d want to see whether he could get a CCTV grab from either agency, where he fully expected to find photos of Evelyn Paxton herself behind the wheel.

“Did you come another night, too, you vindictive bitch?” he asked his computer screen, remembering the day circled on poor Elizabeth Wallace’s calendar. But try as he might, that scenario refused to gel fully in his head, either. Christina and Annie’s adoptive mother had been repeatedly bludgeoned, her head and upper body covered in wound after wound. Could a thin woman in her late forties, maybe early fifties, have dealt out that kind of punishment? Even if Evelyn Paxton’s rage had been sufficient to fuel an attack on Christina, could she have worked herself up to the point of going after Christina’s mother?

He closed his eyes, trying to focus. Did Evelyn Paxton want Christina, the woman her obsessive mind cast as husband-thief and killer, to know the pain she was experiencing, facing her own mother’s imminent death?

Another knock snapped him out of his reverie.

“C’mon in,” he called. It was Zarzycki, ice pack still in hand. “How’s the eye?”

“Feels better than it looks. And before you ask, no, I’m not going to the ER. I’m not missing one minute of this. I want to be here when we get the son of a bitch who knifed Fiorelli in the back and beat that poor woman to death.”

“Gotcha,” he said, not sharing his uncertainties with her because he knew she’d harness the energy of her hope—and anger—to see her through this night. And it was still possible that the alternate theory he’d come up with would turn out to be a bust, that they would instead get a confession out of Eric.

“So how ’bout that lawyer,” he asked, changing the subject. “You clue him in on what we had already?”

She nodded. “In the hall outside, yeah. He mumbled something about dumb shits who can’t wait to spill their guts, then pulled out a pad of paper and went back in.”

There was another rapid-fire knock at the door, but this time, Maya didn’t wait for an invitation before wheeling back inside.

“I don’t know where this came from or how long it’s been here, I swear.” The words gushed out of her as she rolled toward his desk. “It was sitting on top of the file cabinet, and all I could see from my chair was one corner sticking out.”

As Zarzycki stepped out of the way, Maya reached toward him, offering a large manila envelope. In large, blue-ink block letters, someone had hand-printed F
OR
C
HIEF
B
OWERS
O
NLY!
across the center. Below, in the same hand, with the words triple underlined, came the second and final line.

U
rgent!

There was no return address, no postage, no indication whatsoever of where it might’ve come from.

“Lay it on the desk, please,” Harris told her. Though it made little sense to think that anyone would risk being spotted hand-delivering a rigged package to a police station, someone who knew this office well might realize there were no security cameras. And with the station so understaffed this time of year, especially at night, it wouldn’t be difficult to walk in and drop the envelope on top of the file cabinet while Maya was outside her office assisting an officer, relaying a message, or visiting the restroom.

“You might want to leave the room,” Zarzycki told Maya.

Maya rolled back a few feet, out of the way, but lingered in the doorway. “It didn’t feel weird,” she said, sounding more worried about being left out than she was of getting hurt or poisoned. “It’s not heavy or lumpy or anything like that.”

Harris lowered his head to eyeball the envelope from desktop level and saw that it was perfectly flat. He was no handwriting analyst, but the printing, he thought, looked feminine, the humped
M
’s and rounded
R
’s somehow familiar, though he couldn’t place them.

“It’s probably nothing,” he declared, opening a lower desk drawer and pulling out a pair of thin nitrile gloves, “but just to be safe, both of you step out and shut that door behind you.”

Once they had complied, he pulled on the gloves and used a letter opener to slit one end of the envelope, careful to keep it turned away from his face. When no dust or powder puffed out, he gently spun the open end to him and noted that the contents consisted only of several sheets of what appeared to be ordinary printer paper.

His pulse accelerated in anticipation as he pulled out the three pages.

Pages that had him recoiling as he read an allegation as explosive as any letter bomb.