Читать книгу The Next Killing - Rebecca Drake - Страница 13

Half the pictures taken of Morgan Wycoff’s body were fuzzy. “Idiot says the camera wasn’t working,” Oz said, slapping them down on the table in the squad room with disgust. “Guess what I bet we find if we check it out?”

“There’s no problem?” Stephanie said.

“Bingo.”

“He’s a new CI, right?” Detective Sean Cone flicked one of the pictures with his finger.

“Yeah. Stupid kid. So freaked out he couldn’t hold the camera straight.”

Detective Joe Frangione shook his graying head. “Don’t they have age requirements? Jesus, why is this place crawling with snot-nosed kids lately?”

He glanced meaningfully at Stephanie and Sean and she gave him an evil smile. “Didn’t they offer you the retirement package already? Maybe they figure some of us need to be here to wipe your ass if you won’t leave.”

“Whoa, someone’s sensitive!” He held up big hands, warding her off. “Warn me next time when you’re on the rag.”

“Sure thing, but I thought Depends would be a better choice for your problem.”

Oz grinned as Joe muttered something about getting coffee and stalked away. “A little testy today?”

“Don’t start with me. The guy’s a dickhead.” She looked at the pictures over and over again and went through them one by one, lining them up on the table and pulling out the case notes. She was a little testy. She’d been tense, tired, and in need of a drink by the time she’d left work last night and coming home to find Alex still sulking hadn’t made her feel any better.

“Do you seriously think one interrupted fuck is worth all this?” she demanded after he’d answered her in monosyllables for ten minutes.

“One, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t refer to our lovemaking as ‘fucking’ and two, you’ve got the mouth of a trucker. That’s really attractive.” He’d been standing with his back to her in the kitchen, chopping vegetables to throw into a stir-fry with some tofu. She hated tofu.

“One, I wish you wouldn’t itemize everything and two, I hate tofu and you should know that by now.”

His back went rigid, then he stalked past her to the silverware drawer, grabbed a spoon, and spent five minutes laboriously removing all the tofu and flinging it into the sink.

She should have laughed, she could laugh about it now, but at the time it just further pissed her off because it seemed so trivial compared with everything she’d dealt with that day.

So she’d called him a jackass and he’d responded by saying that he refused to talk to her when she cursed at him and she responded to that by calling him every foul name she could think of—and after seven years as a cop she knew quite a few—and he responded by shaking his head and giving her his patented disappointed look, at which point she slammed out of the house.

Cooling her temper over a beer at the nearest dive bar, conveniently located one short and fast drive around the corner, she pondered just how weird it was that she was in some sort of gender reversal with her soon-to-be-spouse. She was the cop, he was the gardener. Okay, landscape architect, but it was all about playing with plants. She loved action movies, he preferred comedies and could get misty at so-called chick flicks. She enjoyed cursing and resorted to it under stress, yet she’d never heard him say more than one muttered “shit” when he couldn’t get something to work, and he’d never cursed at her.

All her girlfriends envied her. Alex was so kind and caring, so compassionate, so everything that their apparently Neanderthal boyfriends and husbands weren’t. She might have wondered about his sexual orientation if it weren’t for the fact that he obviously enjoyed sex with women and more importantly with her.

In fact, sex—making love—was the one area where they’d always been in complete agreement. Until lately. Until he’d gotten his license and a job with a great local firm and seemed to wake up to the fact that his girlfriend’s job didn’t come with such regular hours and never would. He’d been proud when she made detective a year ago, but he must’ve misunderstood the job because he seemed to think that she should be home with him at a regular time every night and spend her weekends with him.

And since they’d gotten engaged it was even worse. Snide comments every time the phone rang or her pager beeped. If they were in the middle of something and she answered the phone, he took it as a personal affront. It was as if she’d struck a blow to his manhood when she wasn’t so blinded by his prowess as a lover that she could even hear a summons from the job.

After twenty minutes and two beers, she’d lost the anger she brought with her to the bar, but then she waited another twenty minutes before venturing out on the roads. She had seen enough DUIs to know it was never worth the risk.

The house was dark. Alex was sitting alone in the living room watching a ball game on TV and drinking a beer. He didn’t look up when she came in the room.

“I’m sorry.”

He turned his gaze to her, but his face was cold. Even his eyes, and she loved his brown eyes, were cold.

“I shouldn’t have cursed at you, I’m really sorry.”

He nodded and turned his gaze back to the game. She stood there, feeling stupid for a moment, then went to take a shower.

The tears came when she was under the water and she tried to hold them back. Shitty, shitty day. She was a bad cop for taking it home with her. You weren’t supposed to do that. Cops who did that imploded. You had to separate, find a place inside you that the violence couldn’t touch, only she couldn’t do that with death.

Kids were always the hardest. She didn’t think any cop ever got past the kids. You tried not to think about what they’d suffered, you tried to be objective when you had to catalog bruises blossoming like flowers on a small body or write down which limbs were misshapen from a child being shaken or thrown. You swallowed your anger when you questioned the asshole sitting across from you who’d inflicted those injuries. You played the game because that’s what you were sworn to do—uphold the law—even if the law seemed to protect the rights of useless fuckers while failing to protect their innocent victims.

This girl had been right on the brink. Not a girl anymore, but not a woman yet. Her body changing every day at that age. She’d been pretty, but she probably didn’t know it. Not yet, not ever. Probably thought she was too fat or too thin or that her hair should’ve been straight or a different color. Skin that pale wouldn’t tan. Had that been another part of her body that she’d grieved?

She heard the bathroom door click open while she was gulping back more tears and then the shower curtain slid back and Alex stepped in behind her and wrapped his arms around her.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, turning in his arms so she could get her own around his neck. She wasn’t apologizing to him this time as much as to the girl, but he didn’t need to know that. He held her and kissed her head and bent to kiss her face and they stood there, rocking for a long minute before he said, “I’m sorry, too.”

He’d brushed a hand across her breast and then bent to take her nipple in his mouth and she moaned against him, feeling herself respond the way she always did to his touch. She grabbed him with her hand because she didn’t have much use for foreplay and he shifted her up against the wall so he could slip inside her and then they fucked, made love, whatever either of them wanted to call it, and afterward she’d fallen asleep in the safety of his arms.

So why was she testy again today? Because she knew they should’ve talked? Because he’d made another comment this morning when she’d left early, grabbing an apple for breakfast instead of the eggs he’d offered to make? They would have to talk, but that took energy and time and right now she needed both those things for this case.

Oz picked up the clearer photo of the pentagram and tapped it. “I think this is all the evidence we need to say this was some weird Wicci ritual gone bad.”

“Wicca,” Stephanie said. “I don’t know. Look at the way she was tied. That rope was digging into her skin. I don’t think she was voluntarily participating in this. This looks like a Matthew Shepard thing to me.”

Detective George Wacker, known as Wackjob to his peers, groaned. “Christ Jesus, please don’t go spreading some Broke-back Mountain theory around.”

“Yeah, we don’t need some faggot from the Village Voice up here.” Joe “Fuck-off” Frangione was back with his coffee.

“Really sensitive,” Sean said and then he flushed. He was the youngest next to Stephanie. Midthirties and baby-faced enough to look at least a decade younger.

Everyone paused to look at him for a moment and then Oz laughed and Wackjob said, “Shut up, Puff Daddy.”

“I don’t know why you keep calling me that—it’s Sean Cone, not Sean Combs.”

“Yeah, yeah, Puff Daddy.”

“It’s not like I even like rap.”

“And you’re pretty white, white boy,” Wackjob, who was black and proud, said with an indulgent smile.

Sean flushed again, an embarrassing line of red climbing up his face from his collar. Stephanie’s unsympathetic response was to be glad it wasn’t her.

“Can we focus on the case?” Fuck-off said in between slurps of his coffee. Of the four other detectives in the department he was the only one Stephanie actually disliked. A big man, at least six-four and probably 250 on a doughnut-free day, he liked to throw his weight around with suspects and made no bones about the fact that he thought the only work suitable for women was domestic. He was an asshole, but he was an asshole with a gold badge and a gun and she had enough wisdom to know just how scary that was.

“I didn’t say anything about gay, I just said it looked like harassment,” she said. “Who would allow themselves to be tied up like that?”

“You’re forgetting what we found around her.” Oz tapped the faint circle visible in the photo. “Her own mother said she was into this whole Wicci thing. And let’s not forget that she was drunk.”

That had been one interesting find from the autopsy. Harriet Wembley found traces of alcohol in the girl’s bloodstream. “A trace amount,” Stephanie said.

“It could have dissipated over time. She and her friends do some drinking and then they play this whole little witch game and then they leave her tied to the tree.”

“They forgot her?” Fuck-off took a final gulp of coffee and then pitched the cup behind him into a metal trash can. “Hey, two points! Some friends.”

Oz nodded. “Let’s see if we can’t find someone who can tell us exactly what that circle and those words mean.”

Janice Wycoff had given Stephanie and Oz a short list of names of her daughter’s friends and it was this list they had in hand when they made their way back into the main building of St. Ursula’s.

They were met, almost immediately, by the headmistress. She exuded the same calm that she had the day before, moving almost soundlessly on her plain low-heeled shoes and wearing what looked like the same suit as the day before. Perhaps it was. The blouse this time had lace at the collar. It seemed incongruous.

“I’m sure you understand how upsetting this has been for all of us,” she said, leaving the list untouched between them on her desk, a piece torn from a yellow legal pad, the words scrawled across it in black ballpoint. “I can’t tell you if these girls are students here. That would violate their privacy.”

She touched the list then, picking it up and offering it back to them. “Morgan’s unfortunate death has already disrupted the beginning of the school year and we’re trying very hard to keep things as normal as possible.”

“We understand your concerns, Sister,” Oz said and Stephanie squirmed slightly, thinking that there was something too placating in his tone. Where did this woman get off thinking that she could decide who they could question?

“But we really do need to talk to these girls,” Oz continued. “It’s essential for our investigation.”

Sister Rose let the list hover a moment more and then, seemingly resigned to the fact that they wouldn’t take it back, let it flutter back onto her clean desk surface. She sighed and pressed a hand to her throat for a moment in an absent-minded gesture that reminded Stephanie of someone choking.

“I’ll need to secure parental permission,” she said. “That could take a while.”

Stephanie coughed and Oz glanced at her and gave an imperceptible nod. “Listen, Sister, we don’t have a while,” she said, trying to sound as sympathetic as Oz, but knowing that her impatience was probably not well hidden. “The first hours of an investigation into any crime are the most important.”

“Crime? What crime?” Sister Rose’s voice climbed and for a moment the placid mask cracked and the fear shone through, her pale eyes widening until Stephanie could see the veiny whites fully circling the pupils like variegated marble. “Morgan’s death was an unfortunate accident,” she said. “But it has nothing to do with the school. She made choices that were different from the ones offered here—”

She stopped short and the hand crept to her throat again and then down to fiddle with the edge of the leather blotter on which the list sat.

“Either I or our guidance counselor, Mr. Ryland Pierce, will need to be present,” she said. “That’s the only way I can allow it.”

“Who does she think she is, the Pope?” Stephanie complained when the older woman left to find the counselor.

“She’s just protective,” Oz said. “She’s been at the school a long time. Almost thirty years, I think.”

Which had to make her what? Around seventy? She seemed younger than that, Stephanie thought, or maybe not younger but ageless. Timeless.

A short time later, as they walked through the halls to the library where they’d be conducting the interviews, Stephanie noticed the pictures on the walls of other girls, other classes, other years. There was a strange uniformity to it all even though time and hairstyles had changed. And habits. The nuns in the old pictures wore the scary-looking penguin costumes, their faces the only part of their bodies revealed, other than their hands, which always seemed to be folded as if in prayer.

It was clear within ten minutes of interviewing the girls that Janice Wycoff hadn’t been as clued in to Morgan’s life as she thought.

Several of the girls on the list denied being friends with Morgan at all.

“We had, like, one class together,” one of the girls said, twirling a strand of straight brown hair around her finger. She looked at them with vapid eyes.

“What class?” Stephanie said.

“Religion. But we talked maybe once.”

“What was that about?”

The girl shrugged with one shoulder as if she couldn’t be bothered to raise both. “I don’t know. I think it was something about there being no women priests. Something like that. Just how stupid it was, just bullshit—”

She covered her mouth, eyes widening with the first real interest they’d seen and an angry flush covered her pimply face. “Sorry.”

Of the girls who conceded that yes, they had in fact been her friend, only one of them had anything of any significance to say.

She was short and dumpy, the boxy uniform skirt and kneesocks further shortening her body. Heather Lester, according to the list. She looked at them with suspicion, one pudgy hand fiddling with the strap of her messenger bag.

“Hey, Heather, come have a seat,” Oz said, doing the whole fraternal thing, just one of the guys. He grinned, pointing to the chair at the table across from them, but while Heather took a seat, she didn’t return his greeting or his smile. She had a pretty face, Stephanie thought, and then wondered how many times the girl might have heard that. Her features were small and even, her eyes round and outlined in heavy black liner. Her mouth was clearly and carefully outlined in a deep red shade of lipstick. Along with her short dark hair, which was pulled into little knots—sort of mini-ponytails—on either side of her head, it gave her the appearance of a child playing dress-up. Small silver earrings in a geometric shape hung from her ears. Around her short neck was another shape hanging from a leather cord.

“Morgan was fed up with the hypocrisy of this hellhole,” she said. “All the rah-rah for St. Ursula’s, one big happy family.”

“It isn’t one big happy family?” Oz said casually.

The girl rolled her eyes. “Hardly. All that school spirit is such shit.”

Unlike the other student, she didn’t seem concerned that she’d cursed. “Morgan was one of the few real people here.”

Her eyes unexpectedly teared up, softening her harsh assessment of her fellow students.

“We’ve heard that Morgan believed in Wicca,” Stephanie said. “Do you?”

The girl shook her head. “No way. I’m not into anything organized. It’s all just one control system or another, isn’t it?”

“But Morgan believed in it?”

Heather nodded. “Yeah. I don’t know how serious she was. She liked the whole feminist thing, the goddess within us stuff. I think that’s what appealed to her.”

“Did the other girls accept her beliefs?” Oz asked.

The girl gave him a look that suggested she questioned his intelligence. “Hardly. They’re all conformists. They made fun of her.”

“How?” Stephanie asked.

“They called her ‘witch,’ ‘satanist,’ that sort of thing.”

“Was it just name-calling?”

“No, sometimes it was more. Someone left a broom outside her door once, like it was her broomstick, and they used to leave nasty notes on her door, like ‘You’ll burn in hell,’ that sort of thing. Just the kind, Christian response to a nonbeliever.” The sarcasm was heavy in her voice.

Oz frowned. “Did she tell someone about it?”

“Like who?”

“The headmistress or the guidance counselor?”

Heather snorted. “No way.”

“Why not?”

“Look, they don’t listen to people like us.”

Oz exchanged a look with Stephanie. She pulled her eyes back up from an examination of Heather’s footwear. The shoes were dark leather, outlined with yellow stitching. Mary Janes on steroids. The soles looked rugged, different than the ones they’d found at the crime scene.

“People like us?” Stephanie prompted.

“Nonconformists. Me, Morgan, Beau Steuben. People who dare to ask questions about what these stupid rituals have to do with real life.”

“What about Wiccan rituals? Were they stupid?” Oz asked.

The girl frowned at him. “Not to Morgan.”

“Who’s Beau Steuben?”

She shrugged. “Just this boy in town. He and Morgan went to school together when they were like five or something.”

“Did you and Beau participate in any rituals with her?”

Heather shook her head. Stephanie studied her face closely, looking for a flicker of eyes or tilt of the head that could indicate lying. The girl was stolid, impassive.

“No. I told you—I don’t do rituals.”

“What about Beau?”

“How would I know?” She looked offended. “Do I look like his keeper?”

“Where were you two nights ago, Ms. Lester?”

She rolled her eyes. “My room. Where else would I be? There’s nowhere else to go.”

Stephanie suppressed a sigh and glanced down at the list of names. Next.

They wouldn’t call her name; there was no reason. She passed by the library several times throughout the day just for the pleasure of catching a glimpse of the two detectives and their futile questioning.

Once the male detective came out to the hall to get a drink at the fountain and passed right by her. He was a large, lumbering man who gave her a goofy grin, pulling at his ugly pale blue tie as if it were choking his beefy neck.

He hardly looked competent enough to catch anyone. It was almost tempting to play with them, but she resisted the urge. Better to wait and watch and see what developed.

Later in the day she passed again and saw the female detective talking on a cell phone in the hall. She wore cheap shoes. They looked like they were hurting her feet. Her trousers were good quality but they needed to be pressed. She was young and attractive and her eyes were sharp.

They flicked over her while saying into the phone, “Nothing so far. I don’t think we’re going to get much.” She resisted the urge to return the detective’s gaze, walking down the hall at her same leisurely pace. Nothing, she thought. They had nothing and they would have nothing. She would use the detective’s words when she told the others. It was the good news they needed. She hadn’t doubted, but the others didn’t have her strength or her gifts.

She had to lead them in all things. A minor irritant, this self-doubt. She’d never experienced such a disability herself. They looked to her as bleating sheep to a calm shepherd. And she would lead them, just like she always had.

The police would look, but they wouldn’t find. She’d learned long ago that she could count on her own careful planning and the general principle that no one ever spotted anything hiding in plain sight.