The Path of Silence (2 page)

“Jazz?” he asked.

We’ve been partners for three years. He could read my face.

“Yep.”

“Torching the house?”

“Not this time.”

“Drowning the cat?”

“The theory about nine lives is true. She gave up on that.”

“Drinking bleach?”

I laughed. “We’ve exhausted that threat.”

“The father issue?” He averted his eyes. He knew this topic would not grow into a discussion.

“Let’s go. We’ll be late,” I said.

We had a good time at the Carmine Steakhouse. What seemed like the entire Homicide Section was there. Audrey was well liked. She tempered her administrative clout with common sense and compassion. It was her second marriage to a cop. She had buried the first one after twenty happy and loyal years. We wished her and Barry Grant from Traffic, all the best.

At quarter to ten, I said to Ken. “I ought to be going. Do you want to stay? I’ll take a taxi.”

He shook his head and said he would drive me home.

We headed west on Fayette, when I remembered that with three guests, there better be enough pancake mix and syrup to feed the army in the morning.

“There’s a convenience store just up the Woodbrook,” I told him. “Mind if I run in? I have to pick up some stuff for breakfast.”

“No problem. You know, they have these mediators. They’re not expensive. They charge fifty, maybe sixty dollars an hour. They come to your house. You tell them what the problem is and they sort of ease the two of you into it…”

“Ken! No mediation. When I’m ready, I’ll talk to my daughter about her father.”

“She’s ten years old, Meg. She should know. It’s natural.”

“Natural? How long have you been dating Brenda—since college? You’re thirty-five years old. Do you think dating a woman for fourteen years is natural?”

“I’m a cop. Marriage statistics for cops are…”

“I know damn well what marriage statistics for cops are. People like Audrey are part of those statistics. Hell, if her husband hadn’t died of cancer she would still be happily married to a cop. Don’t abuse words like ‘natural’, all right?”

“Do you know who her father is?”

“No.”

“At least I don’t lie to Brenda—or my partner.”

“Brenda is a diamond-in-the-rough I can’t figure out,” I laughed.

“She understands,” he said, defending his peculiar lifestyle choice.

“Or just likes her freedom as much as you do. Of course, with a woman, you never know when that glorious feeling of independence is going to fade and a nesting instinct will take over.”

“What?”

“Would you marry her if she wanted to start a family?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“We’ve never discussed…it’s not an issue.”

“Are you sure?”

“We’ve never discussed…” His voice trailed off.

“Take a walk on the wild side, Ken. Try it—but make sure Brenda has smelling salts ready to revive you.”

“Why didn’t you ever get married?”

His question surprised me. The answer was—I still am. There are two more names hiding beneath Meaghan Stanton but that’s been buried so deep there’s no chance it will ever rise to surface.

“I’m a career woman. One day I’d like to see ‘Detective Colonel’ as part of my job title, along with a division full of productive police officers, like you.”

“You’re thirty-two. In nine years you rose from a police cadet to Detective Sergeant,” he chuckled. “Another year or two and you can make your bid for a Squad Supervisor.”

“Make a right here,” I interrupted him, pointing at the street sign that said Woodbrook Ave.

We pulled into a little strip plaza with a 7-Eleven. He decided to come inside.

Ten minutes later, shopping bags in hand, we stood rooted to a spot on the sidewalk, outside the store.

It was after ten o’clock and the little plaza was deserted. Ken’s Malibu was the only car parked there. Off to the side was an asphalt apron. It belonged to the neighboring gas station. I saw a car parked at the fuel pump but no one was pumping gas. The body lay sprawled on the hood of our car, hands stretched, palms down, as if he was embracing the front of the vehicle. It occurred to me that someone could have tossed him across the car hood.

We were not in a police frame of mind and didn’t move for a few moments. We’ve seen our share of dead bodies but I doubt there was a homicide detective in BPD who had ever exited from a 7-Eleven to confront a dead man sprawled across the hood of his car.

“Jesus!” Ken dropped the shopping bag and fumbled in his pockets for gloves.

My training kicked in. I dropped my groceries and managed to find one glove.

We turned the body over. Ken tried to find the pulse. When he couldn’t, he motioned for me to climb on the hood. He tossed me another glove.

“He’s dead, Ken,” I said. “Let’s not mess around with the crime scene.”

“I think I saw his chest rise,” he said. “We can’t be negligent…what if he’s still alive?”

“Seriously…!” I mumbled and carefully touched his chest. Even under my light touch it sounded as if I stuck my hands into a washing machine, redistributing soaking laundry.

The 7-Eleven was well lit. So was the gas station. The victim’s sweatshirt was dark but I saw the blooming brown splotch when my hands probed his chest. The Malibu was light metallic gray. There were blood smears and rivulets streaming from the body. They beaded on the hard-shine waxed surface. I couldn’t see an obvious point of bullet entry. His entire chest felt ragged, spongy.

It had to be a large caliber projectile. When discharged, it should have awakened the whole neighborhood. We didn’t hear anything while inside the 7-Eleven. The clerk had been playing somber, classical music, a dirge. The bullet that had left the man’s chest feeling like a freshly ploughed field had to have been accompanied by a sonic boom. The 7-Eleven should be a windowless shack by now.

Why didn’t we hear anything,
I wondered? The victim could not have walked here without a rib cage. That’s what it felt like under my touch.

“His chest is caving in,” I said and raising my hands, stepped back. This was now medical examiner’s territory. We were out of it…at least for now.

“I should try…” Ken puffed and reached for the victim’s nose.

“Stop it. There’s no negligence here. There’s nothing more we can do…not that we were able to do anything in the first place. Back off. The coroner will take over when he gets here.”

“I just thought if I could find something!”

“There’s nothing more we can do here, Ken,” I sighed and ripped off the bloodied gloves.

Ken finally straightened up and backed away.

I found my cell phone. “I’m calling it in. You should have called for ambulance the moment you saw him.”

“Hold on. His pockets look full.” He hadn’t taken off his gloves so he reached around the bloody mess to search the man’s pockets. “Wallet.” He held out a fat black square.

“I don’t have a plastic bag. And I doubt either of us has another pair of gloves. Put it down on the hood. Nothing else? No car keys?” I hefted the cell phone. We had to call it in.

“Just a stuffed wallet.” He looked through the bulging portfolio.

I glanced at the gas station again. “Maybe that’s his car.” I pointed at the vehicle standing at the gas pump.

“Meg!” his voice rang sharply. “Take a look at this.”

I went over. “Are all those his…” Ken was going to leave bloody prints on the plastic but for once I was too surprised to remind him of basic procedures. We could have made a couple of fans with the amount of plastic the victim carried in his wallet.

“Six driver’s license IDs, five credit cards, four plasticized birth certificates, seven social security cards. Meg?”

I looked at the dead man. The fatal brown rose had spread and started to soak into his jeans. His face was rigid, like a monument. His cold stare looked up toward heaven. I hoped he would not get stuck in the waiting line.

“A con artist, Ken?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe—but look at this and tell me I’m not crazy?” He plucked two plastic squares from the wallet.

One was a plasticized social security card. It wasn’t legal to cover documents in plastic but people did it for convenience and protection. The other was a Maryland driver’s license.

“Jonathan Anderson Brick,” I said, dryly. The mountain of paperwork on my desk sculpted in my head.

“He disappeared four years ago from a convenience store in Dundalk,” Ken murmured.

In my mind’s eye, I saw him smoothing out the papers, closing the folder and stacking it neatly between the metal partitions on my desk.

“His was the third cold case file we worked on this morning.”

Ken turned to look at the convenience store, “You don’t think that…”

“No, Ken. Don’t you dare to even whisper it! He disappeared from a 7-Eleven in Dundalk. We’re in Baltimore.”

“We’re in front of a 7-Eleven.”

“Ken! No one would spend four years, browsing through snack aisles in a 7-Eleven. The selection is just not that great. I’m calling it in.”

Chapter 2

I
phoned Mrs. Tavalho. She knew what my job was.

My daughter and her friends were asleep—in a tent they’d pitched in the living room. I thanked her and closed the cell. I dared not imagine the mess of bedclothes and sheeting I would find in the morning.

Joe Smeddin had finished fencing with his tools above the victim’s body. He stood aside, snapping the wrist band of his gloves, steeped in thought. I knew that forensic pathologists must not be disturbed when ruminating—lest they feel threatened and draw their gun. Joe did it to me in the morgue, when I crept closer to peek over his shoulder. I settled for evaluating the Malibu’s hood ornament from the concrete sidewalk.

As a medical examiner, Joe abhorred educated guessing. When he said something, it was gospel. He was over forty, tall, athletically wiry and unpredictable. He could be as cranky as an ancient wizard, or as spritely as an elf. When he slouched, his humor was napping and caution was advised. Squared shoulders and forward thrust head meant he was ready for a challenge. The forensic staff was digitizing the scene and snapping pictures. It was a routine procedure, calming like all steps that defined the infrastructure of police work. It gave us an illusion of control. I doubted they would find any other smudges, besides ours and the victim’s.

A couple of our colleagues were inside the 7-Eleven, placating the owner with clichés. They urged him to play more classical music.

We’d already checked the gas station and come back. The night attendant was a college kid. He liked his school crest so much that he had the colorful Maryland globe tattooed above his wrist. He was morbidly delighted with the flashing police lights. Then again, his job probably didn’t stimulate anything but his bank account.

The black Pontiac Grand Prix, sitting by the pumps, belonged to the victim. According to the attendant, the customer never came in.

“Well, he got out of the car, reached for the pump and then sort of looked up my way—surprised,” the attendant told us.

“Was there anything happening around here that might have caused his reaction?” I asked.

“Nah.” His eyes skipped over my bloodstained pants. “He was shot, wasn’t he?”

“Did you hear any unusual loud noises?”

“Nah. It’s been pretty quiet since I came on shift at six o’clock. Gas prices shot up this morning.”

“So there was nothing unusual going on?”

He shrugged. “I guess he was surprised because his gas tank lid was on the other side. You know, he pulled up the wrong way. A lot of people do that, especially when driving someone else’s car.”

We had already searched the Pontiac—and would do so again. We just wanted to get the attendant’s first impressions, before the incident became influenced by anyone’s imagination.

We had found three more IDs in the car—ownership and insurance papers for Jonathan Anderson Brick and a business card for Mr. Jonathan Anderson Twain, Assistant Sales Manager, Guilford Fine Cars, Import and Domestic, Roosevelt Park, the Jamieson Car Market.

The car belonged to the victim. Whether anything else was true, would be confronted later when we checked the car’s registration and the insurance. Brick’s strange reaction had to be on account of something else.

“Did he look happily surprised or shocked?” I asked.

He blinked. “Well, no, I mean like he looked startled…worried.”

“But you didn’t hear any loud noise?” I thought he might have been shot as he got out of his car. Ken looked at me and I knew what he thought. With a caved-in chest, Brick couldn’t have walked fifty feet to collapse on top of the Malibu. Besides, if he were shot as he got out of his own car, there would be blood and fragments all over the gas pump.

“I think I’ve seen him around here before, gassing up. He was probably scoping out this place. Do you think he wanted to rob me and decided to check out the convenience store first, you know, make sure there were no witnesses around?” The kid was shopping for a story to spin for his buddies.

“Do you have a habit of leaving this place unattended?” I asked crisply.

“Of course not. I never leave my station when I’m on duty, never. You have nothing on me…”

“Then if he had scoped out the place before and was coming back to rob your station, he would know that you never leave your post. He wouldn’t have looked surprised when he saw you.”

The kid grimaced. “He might have pulled up, thinking the place would be empty, you know, an attendant takes a washroom break.”

“So you do leave your station after all.”

“Never!” he replied indignantly.

“Then you have a good bladder,” I left him with that compliment.

We went outside. The Pontiac had been already packaged in yellow tape, to make sure it would not be disturbed. The tow trucks should be coming. I didn’t think we’d find anything revealing in Brick’s car. We already had a ton of IDs, for Maryland, New York, Virginia and DC. We didn’t need more false identities. We were going to be busy checking out those we already had.

“No sound, no chest, no clue,” I murmured.

“No luck,” Ken sighed. He looked to where his car sat, also covered with police tape. The victim’s body still lay on the hood because the photographer hadn’t finished. The vehicle would be taken for detailed analysis. Its hard-wax shine probably wouldn’t survive. I could tell that Ken was worried.