Triptych2

  When John had finished telling her the story, Aunt Lydia had tears in her eyes. She took his hand—grabbed it, actually—so hard that it hurt.

  "Don't worry, John," she had said. "I'll take care of everything."

  And she did. The bitch certainly did.

  Joyce was still looking at him, waiting. He could tell she was tired, maybe exhausted. Makeup couldn't hide the dark circles under her eyes. Her shoulders were slumped in defeat. Still, John could not help but notice that she had stood here in her office talking to him for around thirty minutes without once yelling at him or accusing him of anything.

  He asked, "Did they ever test the drugs? The white powder?"

  "Of course. Lydia sent it to a private lab. Mom was on pins and needles for a week. They didn't come up with anything unusual, though. It was cocaine and heroin."

  John felt a stabbing pain in his jaw. He had been clenching his teeth again.

  "Johnny," Joyce said, sounding tired. So tired. "Tell me."

  He closed his mother's notebook, the last notebook she had used on his case, the last thing she had ever held in her hands that connected her to her son.

  "Get Kathy back in here," John said. "I think she needs to hear this, too."

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  9:22 pm

  Will sat in his office, trying not to twiddle his thumbs. He had paid a visit to Luther Morrison, Jasmine Allison's... what? What did you call a thirty-year-old man who was having sex with a fourteen-year-old girl? Sick God damn bastard was what Will had decided on, and it had taken everything in him not to punch the animal in the face.

  After that pleasant visit, Will had returned to City Hall East and caught up Amanda Wagner on the case. She hadn't offered any staggering insight but neither had she taken him to task for not having a lot to say. Amanda could be demanding, but she knew a difficult case when she saw one.

  The one thing she had told him was to not focus so much on the missing girl. Will's case was the murder of Aleesha Monroe and how it connected to the other girls, not a runaway named Jasmine Allison. All he had was a ten-year-old boy's story and a bad feeling, and while Amanda respected his gut instinct, she wasn't about to waste time and resources based on either. She summed it up for him with her usual heartwarming pragmatism: the girl had a history of running away. She was dating a man who was twice her age. Her mother was in prison, her father was who knows where and most days, her grandmother couldn't get out of a chair without assistance.

  The only way this would be news is if she hadn't run away. The DeKalb cops hadn't moved an inch on Cynthia Barrett's case and they weren't keen to share their notes with Will. The DNA obtained from the vaginal swab Pete had taken was too contaminated to test. Toxicology had not yet come back, but Will wasn't holding his breath for a miraculous revelation.

  As for Aleesha Monroe, Forensics had reported nothing more earth-shattering about her apartment than what Will had seen for himself: the place was remarkably clean. He'd even sent back the techs to test the spot he'd found in Monroe's doorway the night Jasmine was reported missing. There had not been enough of a sample to determine anything other than the spot was human blood.

  All Will had to follow now was the stack of papers Leo Donnelly had left on his desk. Will had counted out the pages so that he would know what was ahead of him. About sixty rap sheets, two or three pages each, all detailing the lurid crimes of the metro area's recently released sex offenders.

  He wasn't that desperate yet.

  Will opened the fluorescent pink folder on his desk and found a recordable DVD in the back pocket. He slid this into the tray on his computer and clicked play.

  The monitor showed two women and a man sitting at a table with a teenage girl. The man spoke first, identifying himself as Detective Dave Sanders of the Tucker police department, then giving the names of the two women before saying, "This is the statement of Julie Renee Cooper. Case number sixteen-forty-three-seven. Today is December ninth, two-thousand-five."

  Julie Cooper leaned toward the microphone. The camera angle was wide and Will could see the girl's feet swinging back and forth over the floor.

  "I went to the movies," the girl began, her words difficult to understand. Will knew that when the recording had been made, her severed tongue had only recently been reattached. "There was a man in the alley." Will had watched the teenager's statement so many times that he could almost recite the story along with her. He knew when she paused to cry, her head down on the table, and the point where she got so upset that the recording had to be stopped.

  Her abductor had dragged her into the alley. Julie had been too frightened to scream. He was wearing a black mask with holes for the mouth and eyes. She tasted blood when he put his mouth over hers, shoved his tongue past her lips. When she tried to turn her head away, he punched her in the face.

  "Kiss me," he kept saying. "Kiss me."

  Will jumped at the sound of his phone ringing. He picked up the receiver, said, "Will Trent."

  There was a pause on the other end, but no words.

  "Hello?" Will asked, turning down the volume on the computer speakers.

  "Hey, man," Michael Ormewood said. "Didn't think you'd be there this late."

  Will sat back in his chair, wondering why Michael had called if he'd thought Will wasn't going to be there. "Why didn't you try my cell?"

  "Couldn't find the number," Michael explained, though how that was possible, Will did not know. He'd given all his numbers—even his home—on every message he'd left for Michael since Monday night. At first, Will had just wanted to talk to the man about Jasmine; now, he wanted to know why Michael had been avoiding his calls.

  Will asked, "Everything okay?"

  "Yeah. Thanks for asking." Will heard the click of a lighter. Michael inhaled, then said, "Been making myself useful around here. Knocked out some of those chores Gina's been ragging me about."

  "Good." Will was quiet, knowing Michael would fill in the silence.

  The detective said, "I talked to Barbara like you asked. My mother-in-law? She says she never saw Cynthia skipping school. Maybe the kid just wasn't feeling good that day?"

  "Makes sense," Will allowed. He wasn't used to talking to people like Michael unless he was interrogating them, and Will struggled not to let his hatred come through. That's what it was—hatred. The man beat his wife. To Will's thinking, he raped prostitutes. God only knew what he had done to Angie.

  Will asked, "How's your family?"

  Michael hesitated. "What?"

  "You said the other day you didn't feel safe. I was just wondering if they were doing okay."

  "Yeah," Michael answered. "I got them over at my mother-in-law's, like I said." He chuckled. "Tell you what, she spoils Tim. There's gonna be a major adjustment when he gets back home."

  Will thought about Miriam Monroe, the huge difference between the loving way she talked about her children and the way Michael talked about Tim. Michael was just giving it lip service, saying the words he thought a good father should say. The man beat his wife. Did he hurt his mentally retarded son, too?

  Michael said, "You still there, man?" Yes.

  "I said, DeKalb PD is shutting me out." He paused, probably to give Will room to respond. When he didn't, Michael asked, "You hear anything from them?"

  He was fishing about the restraining order. Will gave him a non-answer. "They don't exactly have a reputation for flashing their cards around the table."

  "Right, right," Michael agreed. He blew out a stream of smoke. "Phil's real broken up about this. I tried to see if there was anything he knew, but the guy's just shattered, you know?"

  "I appreciate your trying." Will decided to take a risk. "Detective Polaski told me she helped you go through some of your Vice files."

  Michael was silent for a beat too long. "Right, she did. Great chick. You hook up with her?"

  "Did you find anything in the files?"

  Michael paused, blew out some more smoke. "Nothing. I ran her in a few times,
like Polaski said."

  "Aleesha?"

  "Yeah. Couple of times, maybe three. I wrote down the dates. You want me to get them? She was part of the sweeps we did, just like I told you. Twenty, thirty girls at a time. I'm not surprised I didn't remember her."

  "How about Baby G?"

  "Nothing on him. He's pretty new at the Homes. I could'a met him before, but there's nothing in my files about it and I sure as shit don't remember. Maybe we should go at him again? Bring him down to the station and see what he knows?"

  Will wondered if he knew the pimp was dead.

  "So," Michael continued. "How's it going? Anything on Aleesha?"

  "Nothing big," "Will answered. "Tell me about Jasmine."

  "Is that one of the girls?"

  "She's the kid who took some skin off your face."

  "Oh, that one." Michael's laugh sounded strained. "Yeah. Little hell-fire."

  "Did she say anything to you before she ran up the stairs?"

  "Nothing I want to repeat in front of my wife."

  "Your wife's there with you?"

  He gave that laugh again. "Where else would she be?"

  There was a long stretch of silence. Michael had said less than a minute ago that his family was staying with his mother-in-law. Why was he lying?

  "Anyway," Michael said. "The girl—what's her name? She didn't say anything. You think she saw something the night Aleesha was killed?"

  "I don't know." Was he embarrassed? Is that why he lied?

  "I'd bring her into the station if you're gonna question her, man. I'm not trying to tell you how to do your job or anything, but you don't want some black brat bringing a charge against you. I was lucky I got away with a slap."

  "I'll keep that in mind." Will wondered if Michael had already found out that Jasmine was missing. If he'd lie about one thing, he'd certainly have no problem lying about another. "I've been thinking, Michael, how strange it is that Aleesha is so much older than the other victims."

  "How's that?"

  "She's a grown woman. The other girls were teenagers. Then there's the tongue. Your neighbor's was cut out, the rest of the girls had theirs bitten."

  "Yeah," Michael allowed, his tone measured. "Come to think of it, that is kind of strange."

  Will watched Julie Cooper giving her statement on his computer screen. She was about to ask the detectives to turn off the camera for a minute so she could collect herself. How did a young girl survive that kind of thing? How did she manage to go to school, do her homework like every other teenager, with the knowledge of what she had endured always lurking in her mind?

  Michael suggested, "Maybe he's been visiting the hookers to blow off some steam in between stalking these girls." He paused. "I remember when I was in Vice how these girls used to talk themselves into trouble with the Johns. Sometimes they'd get in the middle of things and go up on the price. Sometimes they'd negotiate certain acts, positions, whatever, just to get the guy to go back to their place, then they'd change the rules, say they weren't going to do it or they wanted more money."

  Will hadn't considered that angle, but it was actually a good avenue to follow. That still didn't explain Cynthia Barrett, though.

  He asked, "Are you sure you didn't piss somebody off, Michael? Maybe piss them off enough for them to do some kind of copycat thing with Cynthia, bring it to your back door?"

  Michael laughed. "Are you being serious?"

  "You tell me."

  "That's fucking crazy, man."

  "How's that?"

  "They'd have to know a hell of a lot about the case," Michael pointed out. "We didn't release the detail about Monroe's tongue to the press. The only people who knew about that were cops." Michael muffled the phone, but Will heard him say, "Yeah, baby, I'll be right there." He said to Will, "Listen, Gina needs my help with Tim. Can I call you back in about ten minutes?"

  "No," Will told him. "I don't need anything else."

  "Just call if you do."

  Will hung up the phone. He leaned back in his chair as he stared out the window. It had been dark out for some time, but the streetlights cast an unnatural spotlight on the abandoned rail yard next to the building. Will had gotten used to the depressing view.

  The computer tooted like a steam train and Will closed the DVD program and opened his e-mail. The state computer wasn't very sophisticated—the dictionary was extremely limited and the spell-check didn't know half the words the average law enforcement officer used every day. Even if Will had asked, he knew they wouldn't let him put any outside programs on the hard drive, so he was stuck with it. Still, like most computers, there was a reading option.

  He scrolled through some spam before finding a new e-mail from Pete Hanson. He highlighted the text, clicked the menu bar, then selected "speak." A stilted voice read him Pete's message. The toxicology report had come back on Cynthia Barrett. Her last meal had been eggs and toast. There was a high level of nicotine in her system. There were also traces of alcohol and cocaine in her bloodstream.

  Another dead end.

  Will took out the copy he'd made of Aleesha Monroe's letter to her mother, and he spread it out on the desk, pressing the folds open so it would lay flat. Her looping cursive was a nightmare but Will had already memorized the letter, so it was easier to read than if he'd come to it cold. Now, he went line-by-line, checking each sentence against his memory. Except for Monroe's tendency to capitalize when it suited her, Will didn't find anything new.

  He folded up the letter and tucked it into his pocket. He glanced at the parole forms Leo had culled. A photograph was stapled to the corner of every profile, each inmate looking into the camera as he held up a black signboard that gave his vitals: name, crime, date of conviction, date of parole.

  Reluctantly, Will slid open the top drawer to his desk. He found the staple remover and detached the photograph from the first offender profile. His office door was closed, the lights in the hall turned off. Still, he kept his voice to little above a whisper as he sounded out the first name.

  After about an hour of this, he'd barely made a dent in the pile. His head was pounding and he dry-swallowed a handful of aspirin, thinking he would rather die of aspirin poisoning than from the headache hammering behind his eyes. Leo Donnelly had taken half the stack. He'd probably finished reading through his group in under an hour.

  Will stood up and put on his jacket, thinking the task was probably a pointless one. If there was an offender in the database who had a habit of biting off tongues, Will would have pulled it when he first read about Monroe's case and did a keyword search in the computer. Leo's offender reports were from different districts and sometimes different states, so there was no uniformity in the description of the crimes. Some of the arresting officers had listed little more than the offense and age of the victim, others went into lurid detail, intimately describing the convict's predatory actions. Unless one of the photos had a guy standing with a severed tongue in his hand, Will was pretty much looking for a needle in a haystack.

  Still, he grabbed the files before he took the elevator down to the garage. The reports sat on the passenger seat as he drove home, and Will found himself glancing down at them every so often as if he could not quite understand why they were there. He parked in the driveway behind his motorcycle, Betty's barks greeting him before he even made it up the porch. The little dog rushed out the door as soon as he opened it. Will snatched up the leash, prepared to track her down, but she did what she needed to do right on the front lawn and darted back inside before he could make it down the porch steps.

  He turned around to find her enshrined on the couch pillows.

  "Good evening to you, too," he told her, shutting the door. He stopped it before it caught and went back out to the car to fetch the files. Will dropped them on his desk, glancing at the answering machine. The message light was solid, but he picked up the phone just to make sure it was working.

  The dial tone buzzed in his ear.

  Supper was the same as b
reakfast, a bowl of cereal he ate standing over the sink. All he really wanted to do was lie down on the couch and fall asleep watching television. The files were stopping him, though. A man who could read well would have finished those summaries hours ago. A cop who was doing his job would've scanned them over lunch, knowing he was probably wasting his time but also knowing that good police work meant exhausting every lead you had.

  Will could not abandon the work halfway through.

  He took off his jacket and draped it over the back of his swivel chair. This shouldn't take too long, maybe three more hours at the most. Will wasn't going to quit just because it was hard and he sure as hell was not going to show up at work tomorrow knowing that he had left something undone. He should have come home earlier and tackled the reports in earnest. There were certain things he could not do at work without giving himself away.