The Poisonous Ten (8 page)

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. You want a reason, then pick one of those. I won’t know for sure until—”

“You complete your autopsy,” Wilkes finished for her as he waved her off. “Son of a bitch. All right. So when will that be?”

“The autopsy?” Tanaka knew she was about to disappoint the man. “Sorry, but I have a backlog a mile long. On top of that, it’s Monday evening and today’s Labor Day. Half the department’s working overtime already, and it isn’t exactly a slow time with it being a holiday. Probably won’t get to it until Wednesday. Maybe Thursday.” 

Wilkes breathed deeply to let it be known he was disa
ppointed. But this wasn’t his first homicide, and it wouldn’t be the last time she would tell him to wait. He usually had someone he could call somewhere and get strings pulled and people pushed around. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to be done about a line of dead bodies.

“All right,” Wilkes said, giving in. He wasn’t done with this yet, but as far as she needed to be concerned, he was. “One last thing. I need to know how to pursue this investig
ation. Was our guy here possibly the victim of homicide?”

Tanaka stared at Wilkes, feeling sorry for the man. “Look . . . officially, I can’t tell you anything just yet. Off the record, the door and windows were locked, so how did someone get out of here? Then again, it appears there was some sort of violent spasm by the victim before he died. Was that from contact with another person? I have no idea. There are no obvious markings or lacerations on the body an
ywhere to show signs of violent trauma. So who’s to say? For everything that says this is a homicide there’s something that says it isn’t. Have I ever seen anything like this before to suggest one way or the other, homicide versus accident? No, I haven’t. But my gut, based on other crime scenes, would say this is.”

“Thank you.” Wilkes smiled sarcastically. “That will do just beautifully for me for now. Contact me as soon as you know anything definitive.”

“Will do, Detective.”

“You get all that down, Boy Scout?” Wilkes asked Parks as he walked by the man and out of the room.

Parks shrugged at Tanaka who rolled her eyes and went back to her body.

Thirty minutes later she finished her inspection of the body and backed off to make room for the members of Wilkes’s team.  Detective Cal Ramirez was a family man with a pockmarked face and beady eyes who always had a joke ready to be told. The third man in Wilkes’s team was Detective Lewis Hayward, who had been with the depar
tment for almost two years, though, at forty-five, he was far from its youngest member.

Hayward relayed that he had been going door-to-door to interview Ian Harris’s neighbors, checking for signs of an
ything out of the ordinary, from suspicious people lurking around the building to vehicles that didn’t belong, which along that area of Beverly and Western wasn’t all that uncommon. An hour later he had come to the conclusion that while Ian Harris may have been a dick from time to time, most of his neighbors knew little about him.

No one appeared to be holding any grudges.

No one appeared to wish him any ill will.

Overall, most people didn’t know him.  

“All right,” Wilkes said, addressing his two men in the front room of Ian Harris’s loft. The forensic people had finished with the scene, having lifted numerous fingerprints and other hairs and fibers, all labeled and ready to be taken back to the lab to be analyzed. There were several glasses of half-drunken booze and a brown-paper-wrapped package that was empty of whatever it had contained. Hopefully they would get lucky with the fingerprints that were all over the box.

Unfortunately, he had to wait for the autopsy results b
efore he could give any definitive direction to the case, but until then they would hit all of the usual channels. Family. Friends. Neighbors. Business associates. The works.

“Tomorrow, I want you two to hit up the vic’s work space. Hayward, you’re better with computers than Ramirez or me. I know he was a freelance photographer, but get a hold of his agent and manager if he has one. See if he has any shows in any galleries. Assignments he may have been working on. See if he’s pissed anyone off lately or if he’s behind on anything. There’re a few photos around the place that make it look like he might have been hanging with the paparazzi lately, and we know how loved they are. Then, if you can, go over his financials and see if there’s anything outstanding there. I want to know if he was in any sort of trouble. I’ll be notifying the family and coming up with a timeline leading up to his death. Okay. Any questions?”

No one had any.

“Then get your asses moving, people. We have a dead body that’s getting colder by the minute.” His team members disbursed and he turned to Parks. “You have any questions? No? Good. Not like you’re going to ever touch this case a
nyways. I don’t care what she says. We both know I’m getting fucked here. Thanks.”

9

“Son of a bitch.” Parks threw the binder across the table, and it flew up and slammed against the wall before hitting the ground, most of the papers inside coming free from the three rings that held everything together.

“Sorry,” he mumbled to no one in particular as he picked up his cup of coffee, only to find it empty. He crushed the cup and went to throw it but resisted the urge and dropped it into a trash can instead. He could feel the stress building i
nside, and the endless supply of caffeine wasn’t helping.

The rest of his team was in the conference room going over various aspects of the Tisdale crime scene from five days earlier. So far they had found nothing of any signifi
cance and weren’t any closer to identifying who had murdered Allison Tisdale. There had been no further poisonings or messages delivered to the police or anything of the sort. Parks felt the case coming to a halt. Five days after the fact with nothing to show for it wasn’t a promising start. Apparently he had been wrong about the possibility of a serial poisoner.

Jackie Isley had to go back to the coroner’s office to co
ntinue with her day-to-day activities considering the lack of forward motion on the case. She had informed them that if they needed any further assistance from her, she was only a phone call away and happy to oblige.

They had brought Mr. Tisdale in for further questioning, all of which he passed without signaling any red flags other than the fact that he had no solid alibi. He hadn’t proven himself enough to be wiped completely off their suspect list, but at the same time, Parks knew it was pointless to continue pursuing him when they had other avenues to follow up on. Either way, Doug Tisdale’s photo stayed up on the murder board under their list of suspects. If the department could afford to spare a few lower-level officers, maybe he’d have some men keep an eye on the man just to be sure.

Not to mention the threat of Peter Kozlov’s possible release weighing heavily on Parks’s mind, making his focus and concentration difficult to keep under control. A child killer could be back out on the streets within a week. 

“Sorry,” Parks repeated with a little more force this time.

“It’s okay,” Moore reassured him as she helped pick up the binder. “We understand.”

“It’s just . . . this guy is good. He’s thought of everything. Paper trails. Fingerprints. Evidence. He’s left nothing out of place. It’s like he’s a phantom. A ghost. And there’s been no other murders. It’s almost like Allison Tisdale was an is
olated event. If we don’t discover something soon, I’m not sure what’s going to happen to this case. It’s turning cold and fast.”

“You need some coffee?” Moore asked softly, her m
othering instincts kicking in. She did that effortlessly, a trait Parks found interesting considering the woman had never actually had any children of her own. At least as far as he knew. “Go on. Take a break.”

“Hardwick’s putting us back into rotation today. Let ev
eryone know.”

“We know. It’s not like it wasn’t expected. We were lucky to have as much free time on this case as we did. But the truth is there are homicides every day, and this case can’t take up all our time anymore. It’s okay. We’re ready to work. This case isn’t finished; it’s just on hold pending new information. What’s going on with Kozlov?”

“No idea,” Parks said. “That’s what I really hate. The waiting. I’ve got parents of the children calling here day and night. Hell, they’re even showing up in the parking lot. Accosting me. Asking me how I can let that man who attacked their children go free?”

“They see you as the knight who vanquished the dragon,” Moore said.

“Yeah, well now that dragon might go free and it’s this knight’s fault,” Parks said, shaking his head. “My, how they turn on us so quickly.”

“They don’t blame you. But you stopped the monster once. They just want you to do it again.”

“Yeah, well it’s looking like I’d have to kill the monster in order to achieve that.”

Moore stared at Parks, knowing he woul
dn’t ever do such a thing. That by simply saying the words, putting them out in the universe, was dangerous enough. Parks turned from Moore, not able to handle her glare, glancing over at Fairmont and Tippin. Fairmont was digging through several binders of charts, forms and other various papers that Tippin had printed off for him, while Tippin himself typed away at his laptop.

“You two got anything new?” Parks asked.

“Nothing so far,” Fairmont said, leaning back, stretching in his chair, raising his hands high above his head before bringing them down and covering his face. “Nothing in their financials to make anyone suspect.”

“And the affair?”

“What affair?” Fairmont shot back, talking through his hands. “Sure she had one? There’s no evidence she ever did anything outside her marriage. No receipts. No secret getaways. No hidden love notes. Text messages. Whisperings behind her back. Nothing.”

“What about coworkers?”

“None of them are suspect,” Fairmont answered.

“Really?” Parks asked, looking to Tippin.

“Of the five men she worked with, two are gay, one is over sixty, and the other two have been there less than a year. Which doesn’t exactly feel like enough time to have had an affair, have the husband find out about it, and all be worked out and forgiven by now . . .” Tippin trailed off. “They’re all in the clear.”

Parks stayed quiet, thinking, staring off into space.

“Parks?” Moore asked a minute later. “You on to something?”

“It’s just while we were searching through the Tisdales’ financial records, I realized something. They loved each ot
her. I believe that. But Mr. Tisdale wasn’t exactly spending the big bucks on his wife. Other than holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries he rarely ever spent anything on her.”

“Okay . . . ?”

“So remember how you said the flowers that we found Allison holding were the same ones she received a few years back for a few months from her husband. What if they weren’t from her husband? What if they were from whoever she was having an affair with?”

The group remained silent for a moment and processed what they had been told.

“Can you guys trace the flower orders?”

“
It was two years ago,” Fairmont replied, unenthusiastically.

“Yes. But I figure a bouquet of flowers every week for three months in a row . . . chances are that was done aut
omatically.”

“Like on a credit card,” Tippin added. “Not sure what company delivered them, but I can do some digging around. Hit up all the usual online retailers and then check with any shops around Allison’s office.”

“Looks like you boys know what you’re doing next.” A smile came to Parks’s face as his cell phone in his pocket began to play the chorus to Poison’s Unskinny Bop. “What the hell is that?”

Fairmont and Tippin both held back laughter as they turned back to the folders and papers spread out in front of them.

“What the flip did you two do to my phone?” Parks barked sharply, though not totally serious, as he retrieved his phone. “One of you, I don’t care who, but one of you better fix this shit,” Parks ordered as he waived his phone in their direction before looking at the screen to see the number was blocked. He answered it anyway. “Hello?”

There was only silence from the other end of the line. Parks sighed. He didn’t know who had been calling him but this was the third time this week. Someone called. Never spoke. Sounding like no one was there until suddenly a child’s laughter could be heard from the other end. Parks never heard more than that, never got an answer when he asked who was calling or what they wanted. He wanted to tell whoever was calling to
piss off but he had a feeling that it would be the one time he would be recorded and then there’d be hell to pay. Though he wasn’t sure why? He was the one being pranked. He wasn’t in the mood and was about to say something when he simply hung up. He was more likely to change his number if this continued. He had done it before.

Moore eyed him with a questioning look.

“Wrong number,” Parks said by way of an explanation.

“You getting
a lot of those lately?”

“There’s worse things going on around us than me getting prank calls.”

“Still, you might want to have IT put a trace on your calls. Or at the very least tell Tippin. I’m sure he knows of some way to find out who’s calling you. We’ve got too much going on around us right now for you to start losing your cool over prank calls. As it is, it doesn’t look like you’ve been sleeping enough. And I don’t care what you’ve told Hardwick, or what she’s willing to believe for the good of the department, I know better.”

Moore finished and stared at him, her eyes grilling into him.

“Fine,” Parks said, giving in. “I’ll have Tippin look at my phone.” Moore raised her eyebrows in doubt. “I promise. Now can we please get back to the case in hand?”

“You’re the boss.”