Читать книгу The Broken Souls - J. Kerley A. - Страница 10

We left the station and headed for Forensics. We walked into the main lab and found deputy director Wayne Hembree sprawled across the white floor, tie flapped over his shoulder, glasses askew on his black, clock-round face, one bony arm beneath the small of his back, the other flung above his head.

“I’ve been shot,” he moaned.

“Who did it?” I asked. Detectives get paid to ask insightful questions like that.

Hembree nodded to the far side of the room where an older guy in a neon-bright aloha shirt held a dummy gun and grinned like he’d just discovered orgasm pills.

“Not Thaddeus over there,” Hembree said. “From his angle the momentum would have flung me the opposite direction. My arm wouldn’t have been beneath my back, but across my belly.”

I grabbed Hembree’s hand, pulled him up. He brushed down his lab coat, made notes on a clipboard, then told the shooter they’d act it out from another angle in a few minutes. The Thaddeus guy flicked a salute, faked a couple shots at Harry and me, retreated from the room. Hembree scanned a report and gave us the preliminaries.

“Reads like a robbery gone bad. The car stops at the intersection, the perp runs from the shadows, busts the driver’s-side window, takes over.”

“Why the torture?” I asked.

“Motivation’s not my bailiwick,” Hembree said. “Maybe she said something that set him off.”

“Must have been a hell of a something,” I said.

Harry had been listening quietly. He stepped up.

“I got something feels off, myself. How long had she been dead when your people got there, Bree?”

“Under a half-hour, I’d bet. Your trucker saw the perp jump out when he arrived. Why?”

“The driver’s-side window, the busted one, was windward,” Harry said. “Close, anyway.”

Hembree frowned. “I’m not getting you.”

“I stuck my finger down on the floor. There was over two inches of rain there. I mean, it was raining like hell last night, but four inches an hour?”

Hembree frowned. “Rain fell in moving pockets, the storm-cell effect. If a string of cells went over that location, three or more inches an hour is possible. But a location a mile away might get an inch or less.”

“Makes sense,” Harry said. “One less thing to think about.”

I heard my ring tone, grabbed the phone from my pocket. The call was from the front desk at headquarters.

“This is Jim Haskins, Carson. You and Harry are leads on that robbery-murder last night, right?”

“Ours. What’s up?”

“Got a woman here at the desk who brought in her elderly mother. Mama’s wrought up, mumbling about a purse, an ATM and a longhair in her car. Thought you’d want to know.”

Harry and I arrived twelve minutes later, the wonder of a siren and flashing lights. The daughter was Gina Lovett, forty or thereabouts, plump and bespectacled. Her mother was Tessie Atkins, late sixties, nervous. She kept her arms tight to herself, as if cold.

“What happened, Miz Atkins?” Harry asked as we sat.

She tugged at her sleeve. “I had been visiting a friend at the hospital and passed the bank on my way home. I needed to pay bills. Maybe it wasn’t smart at that hour…”

“What hour, ma’am?” I asked.

“Almost midnight. It was late, but there was a restaurant next door, a fast-food place. It made me feel safer. I pulled in and saw something white to the side of the lot. At first I thought it was a cat or some poor animal run down by a car. But then I saw it was a purse. I thought someone’s purse fell out by accident. It happened with my wallet once in the lot at Bruno’s. Some nice Samaritan took it inside the store. I thought…”

“You’d repay the favor,” Harry said.

“I pulled next to it and got out to pick it up. The next thing I knew a hand was across my mouth and I was back in the car. It was a man with all kinds of hair, bad smelling. He got down in the passenger side, on the floor, and said if I didn’t perform to expectations, he had a gun.”

“Perform to expectations?” I said.

She nodded, arms crossed, shaking fingers clasping her shoulders. “He made me take six hundred dollars from my account and three hundred from my two credit cards. It’s my limit. I was too shook up to drive. He drove south of Bienville Square a few blocks and jumped out. I just sat there and cried until my hands stopped shaking. I don’t know how I got home.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“He took my driver’s license. He said if I told the police, he was going to come to my house.”

Mrs Atkins looked away. The daughter spoke up.

“I stopped by Mama’s this morning to pick up some sewing. She wouldn’t look at me and I knew something was wrong. She finally told me.”

We spoke to Mrs Atkins for a few more minutes, honed in on details, what few had registered beyond her fear. She consented to have her car checked by Forensics. Though sure the perp had made his threats just to keep her quiet, we made a quick call to the uniform commander in her district, requested his troops keep a tight watch on Mrs Atkins’s house the next few days.

“Bait,” Harry said, setting his can of soda on the hood of the cruiser, leaning back against its fender. “He used a purse as bait.”

“It’s brilliant,” I said. “Who can resist a purse? The good want to help, the bad see money and credit cards.”

We were parked on the causeway connecting the eastern shore of Mobile Bay with the city. Twilight was an orange lantern hung below the horizon of an indigo sky. Fresh stars shimmered in the east. A hundred feet distant, three elderly black men fished from lawn chairs, frequently consulting the brown bags beside them.

“After pushing her back into the car, he didn’t touch Mrs Atkins,” I said. “Didn’t lay a hand on her.”

“He threatened her with death,” Harry reminded me.

“He said he had a gun. Two hours earlier he’d just butchered a woman with a five-inch knife. Why didn’t he threaten to stab her, slice her? Why didn’t he ransack the car? And what’s with that ‘perform to expectations’ line? It sounds like a damn stockbroker.”

Harry looked south at the dark horizon, the mouth of Mobile Bay thirty miles distant.

“He probably tried the purse bit with Taneesha but she heard him running up. She closed the door, locked it. Maybe that’s what pissed him off.”

“Something sure did. How many wounds did Ms Franklin have?”

“Over thirty. But he broke her fingers first. I don’t get it. Why he’d kill one woman, two hours later give another a break?”

I forced myself to revisit the Franklin crime scene: the Wookiee breaking the young woman’s fingers, getting off on her pain, then going wild with the knife – poke, slash, jab. Then, interrupted by the sudden appearance of the semi, the perp bails out, runs wildly into the truck’s headlights, veers away into the night.

“Did Forensics find any blood in Mrs Atkins’s vehicle?”

Harry said, “No blood, no hair, no trace of any evidence.”

“At least we got a knife.”

Harry finished his can of soda, crumpled the can like paper, bouncing it in his hand. “With nada on the prints. An uncharted whacko.”

“Is this going to turn weird, brother?” I asked.

“Going to?” he said.

We heard a ship’s horn and turned to watch a freighter slipping from the mouth of the Mobile River. The ship’s bridge was at the stern and lighted. The only other light was at the bow. Somewhere between the two points were hundreds of feet of invisible ship. A minute later, its wake reached us, hissing against the shoreline with a sound like rain.