The Price of Innocence Read online

  ‘You don’t have to lecture me in basic drug chemistry. I did my stint in Vice.’

  She persisted. ‘The person becomes nervous and hyperactive. The problem is, this depletes the body of its supply of neurotransmitters, so once the high starts to fade the person doesn’t go back to normal. They go way below normal, to a sluggish depression. The same chemistry that caused the surge of energy causes a surge of fatigue.’

  ‘But not that fast.’

  ‘No.’ Theresa frowned. ‘She should still have been in the high stage, at least until tonight, maybe for another two or three days. It all depends on how much she took and its purity.’

  ‘Plus she’s been taking meth all her life, and suddenly she gets suicidal? There’s no history of suicide attempts.’

  ‘That we know of,’ she clarified. ‘Maybe she never took that much before, so this crash was worse than anything in her experience.’

  ‘She wasn’t that high. Just enough to be noticeable. You think I would have let her keep walking around if she’d been completely insensible?’

  ‘Of course not. But meth – that’s why it’s so insidious. It’s different from other drugs. Like cocaine, it lurks between the brain’s neurons, blocking the reuptake of dopamines. But only meth actually goes inside the cells to push the dopamines out. These neurotransmitters eventually wear out, making it impossible for a chronic user ever to feel truly good again. Nothing would stimulate Lily like it once did, not a good meal, the love of her family, sex, nothing gets the blood flowing except meth, and that only in larger and larger quantities. So maybe she didn’t take too much, she just didn’t take enough, and finally realized that even with meth life really didn’t hold anything worth struggling for.’

  Frank stared at the floor.

  ‘Look – I don’t know if that’s why she did it. But I can tell you this: I don’t see any signs of foul play here. There’s no sign of a struggle, nothing knocked over. The clothes are in a single pile. There’s no bruises on her arms –’ here she reached one gloved hand to the back of the woman’s skull – ‘no signs of trauma, no one hit her over the head, no petechiae in the eyes or lips to indicate smothering. There’s no sign of forced entry downstairs, right?’

  ‘The kid said he found the back door unlocked. That’s why he assumed Lily was home. She could have let someone in.’

  ‘Unlikely, since amphetamines make the user paranoid as well as hyper.’

  ‘So if she let someone in, it would be someone she knew,’ Frank said, following the thought.

  ‘Or she simply forgot to lock it when she came home. There’s also no sign of overdose, no foaming in the mouth or nose.’

  ‘What if she started to OD, at least became unconscious? Then someone could have put her here and sliced her wrists without creating bruises or signs of a struggle.’

  Theresa checked the dead, open eyes and then the pile of clothing. ‘Actually an overdose would explain taking off her clothing, since it raises the body temperature until the person sweats profusely. But there’s no dampness on her clothes to indicate it, and her pupils are not dilated. That implies that the stimulation had worn off, setting her up for the depression stage. Everything here, cuz, is consistent with this woman coming home, walking up those steps and killing herself.’

  Frank said nothing, but he had that stubborn frown he’d employed since his grade school days.

  ‘What’s bothering you about this victim, in particular?’

  ‘I told you. She comes into a sudden windfall, excited as hell, and an hour or two later, she’s dead.’

  ‘Again, that could be the result of the crash. When the amphetamines pass, the dopamine neuron activity is suppressed for a while, so she might have been physically unable to feel any pleasure over her good fortune. It ceased to be a factor in her thinking.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What else is bothering you?’

  ‘No note.’

  ‘Most suicides don’t leave notes. And who knows if suicide was even her goal. Meth users – especially long-time users – can experience a host of visual and auditory hallucinations. Meth users all over the country report hearing and seeing black helicopters over their homes. Another saw the heads of his former customers sitting in a tree outside his house, monitoring his movements to report back to the police. Another very carefully combined every chemical in his lab together and then set it on fire to destroy evidence. He caught on fire himself, but didn’t think that was a problem until he woke up in intensive care without most of his fingers. In other words, there’s no way to guess what she was thinking. It’s quite possible she thought her blood had turned to poison and she needed to remove it to save herself.’

  He sighed, rubbed his neck. ‘I know. But a cop and his beneficiary both wind up dead in the same week? That’s adding up to way too many coincidences for me.’

  She gave up on subtlety. It never worked on men anyway. ‘I know you hate coincidences. But you seem to be personally upset over the death of a woman you only met yesterday.’

  It occurred to her that she had only met David Madison the day before yesterday, and already felt quite personal about him. She couldn’t define it any more clearly than that, just … personal.

  ‘Maybe because I called her a dealer’s crack whore mule last time I saw her?’ Frank suggested.

  ‘Oh.’ Theresa looked at the dead woman, then back to her cousin. ‘Well. You’ve said harsh things to people before. Sometimes it’s the only way to get them to talk.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure.’

  ‘Between her kids, her drug habit and the logistics of trying to get a big-screen back to her house, I’m sure she had more on her mind than a passing insult from a cop.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He shook it off, literally and apparently figuratively. ‘So it’s clearly a self-inflicted, as far as you can see.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Me, too,’ he said. ‘I doubt her children did her in to get their hands on Marty’s vast estate.’

  Theresa added, ‘Maybe it’s not coincidence, the deaths coming so close together. Maybe thinking about Marty and their college days only made her feel worse, magnified the gap between her teenage dreams and the reality of her life. Crashing from the meth gave her the last little push she needed to fall over the edge.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘But just to be sure—’ Theresa began.

  ‘But I have to look under every rock. A cop is dead, and I don’t want to have to explain to other cops how I missed the solution by blowing off a possible connection. Sorry, what were you saying?’

  ‘I think I’ll fingerprint the edge of the tub before I start manipulating the body. Just in case.’

  Frank gave the first hint of a smile she’d seen in days. ‘Thanks, cuz.’

  ‘That’s my job.’

  Theresa disliked fingerprinting, a messy and tedious task. The fine black powder got everywhere and she could never train herself to keep her face well away from the surface as she applied it, so that the tiny particles would settle on her skin until some itch or jostle smeared them into a black streak. No one would ever tell her so, and she’d discover the marks only by accident the next time she entered a ladies’ room. She’d also be sneezing black powder for the next few days. Didn’t coal miners get black lung from carbon dust?

  But of all surfaces to fingerprint, white porcelain is the best. Smooth and glossy and intrinsically cool, it holds prints beautifully and its whiteness only makes the blackened ridges easier to see. The edge of the tub gave up several palms and fingertips, most with a distinctive whorl in the hypothenar area at the outer edge of the palm. Theresa glanced at Lily’s upturned palm. It had the same whorl.

  Frank had disappeared and she heard him rustling in the bedroom.

  Encouraged by this success, Theresa quickly covered the tiled wall of the tub with powder, working quickly but trying not to let too much fall on to the body. She found mostly water spots but retrieved a few prints
, of lesser quality than the ones on the edge. Lily must have cleaned the tub once in a while, but not the backsplash.

  Theresa pulled off the blackened gloves and got a fresh pair, and wrestled the body to its side just enough to view the back. Lividity had turned the skin a dusky rose color where the blood pooled, the pressure points – such as the bottom of the buttocks, on which the weight of the body had been resting – a stark white. This, too, appeared consistent with Lily dying in exactly the position in which she’d been found.

  Theresa placed a brown paper lunch bag over each of the victim’s hands and secured them with tape. She would scrape the fingernails at the lab, not something she’d normally do in such a clear-cut suicide case, but having already gone the extra mile with the fingerprint powder she might as well go another one. The box cutter went gently into a small cardboard box. Theresa would probably fingerprint that too, though the surface had too much grime and too many ridges and convolutions to hold anything good. A thin line of blood traced along the cutting edge of the blade, which didn’t look too sharp. Lily Simpson must really have wanted to die.

  After that, Theresa could see nothing else to do. She went back into the bedroom and collected the box with the drug use odds and ends, in case the tox screen came back with a bizarre result and the pathologist wanted to compare the residues found in the house. She tilted it toward the light before dropping it into a paper bag. The box and its contents all had a layer of dust on them at least an eighth of an inch thick. But Lily had apparently taken a large dose only that morning.

  She found Frank downstairs, going through the mail on the table. ‘You thought she bought her meth with whatever she stole from Marty’s apartment this morning, probably this cell phone? Took, I mean, since the items legally belonged to her anyway?’

  He chuckled. ‘That’s OK, you can say she stole it.’

  Theresa checked the garbage can, which sat next to the back door and had been filled to the top with beer cans, paper towels and chicken bones. No drug paraphernalia. Theresa went back upstairs, kicking herself for forgetting such an obvious move, and checked the pockets of the jeans Lily had been wearing. She did so gingerly, in case Lily had moved from smoking her drugs to taking injectables. But nothing pricked Theresa’s fingers, and she did find a baggie and a tiny glass pipe in the back pocket. It didn’t have the pretty blue filigree running through the center, but it also didn’t have quite so much blackened residue, either. Theresa dropped it into a Manila envelope.

  She checked the hooded sweatshirt and found twenty-six dollars and seventy-five cents in the right pocket. The left pocket held a pawn slip, an item that had so much more cachet in the pages of old detective novels, when it was only a small ticket with a number on it and no other information. Running down a pawn ticket had been like a treasure hunt, with no idea what item you might uncover. Today’s pawn slips were a detailed form on a full-sized piece of paper, containing everything you could want to know from a complete description of the item to the name and address of both the pawn shop and the person selling the item, as well as their thumbprint. Since stolen property often wound up in pawn shops, having the burglar leave their print behind had become an extremely helpful addendum to the legal process.

  Lily had pawned a gold Armitron watch, a silver chain necklace and a silver chain bracelet that morning at 11:53 a.m., at a branch of Goldie’s Pawn on East Seventy-Fifth. No cell phone. The shop had given her thirty dollars for all three items.

  Theresa could feel her brows coming together. She didn’t know what a rock of crystal meth cost, but she bet it was more than $3.25.

  After photographing the items, she put the slip and the money into separate envelopes and took them downstairs. Frank had moved on to the open drawer and now paged through a worn address book. Theresa told him what she had found. ‘I need someone to witness the money for me, and I don’t want it to be you.’

  He didn’t look up from the address book. ‘You don’t trust me?’

  ‘You’re my cousin. I don’t want internal affairs saying that because of our personal relationship we conspired to rob Lily Simpson’s children of her twenty-six dollars and seventy-five cents. Dot every i.’

  ‘And cross every t,’ he muttered. ‘So if Lily didn’t buy drugs this morning with the money from the pawn shop, how did she buy them?’

  ‘Maybe she already had money. She has a job.’

  ‘Then why go directly to the pawn shop?’

  ‘Maybe she thought she’d need more. She was still working out how to get that big-screen home.’

  Angela walked in from the living room, snapping her phone shut. ‘I’ve got that, believe it or not. I sent patrol to Lily’s workplace and one of her friends ’fessed up right away, a woman named Monique. Lily called her at lunchtime. Monique had three deliveries in this area and in between the second two she picked up Lily and her TV set at Marty’s apartment building. She even helped Lily wrestle the TV from her trunk to inside the house and on to the stand. She insists the whole trip didn’t take her longer than ten or fifteen minutes or more than a few miles out of her way, so the boss didn’t get too upset about it – at least not in front of our officer.’

  ‘So we’ve solved that mystery,’ Theresa said.

  ‘Lily didn’t work today?’ Frank asked.

  ‘Wasn’t scheduled to,’ Angela said. ‘And the son, Brandon, is asking when he can come home.’

  ‘What home?’ Frank tossed the address book on the table. ‘There’s a whole fifteen people listed here; only seven have addresses, and none of them are named Simpson. Unless some kindly grandma comes out of the woodwork, it looks like foster care. His mother’s dead and his sister’s in jail. That kid’s chances in life were slim to begin with and just plummeted to none.’

  Theresa and Angela said nothing, unable to offer any hopeful words. They’d both seen it too many times. Children learned what they were taught, and those that grew up surrounded by crime and drug activity spent their lives in crime and drug activity, scraping by from day to day, watching beautiful lifestyles on television without the slightest idea of how to get one, or maybe they’d even been denied a chance to do that. Theresa’s sister, a school nurse, had a term for these kids. Doomed.

  Someone rapped at the back door, startling them all.

  FOURTEEN

  His voice called out, ‘Lily!’ a split second before he pulled the frame open and walked in.

  They definitely startled him more than he startled them, and Theresa could swear the only reason he didn’t bolt like a rabbit was because his short, undernourished body couldn’t outrun an arthritic Chihuahua. That, and he needed an answer to his now-obvious question: ‘Where’s Lily?’

  The other three people in the kitchen stared. The man wore stained denim pants held up with a leather belt and a T-shirt advertising a band Theresa had never heard of. A scruffy growth of light brown beard disguised some of his old acne scars. His hands fluttered without cease, on his hips, shoved into pockets, scratching his head. She recognized him instantly. The squirrelly guy from Marty Davis’ funeral. The one who had given both cops and reporters a wide berth.

  ‘Where’s Lily?’ he repeated, putting more insistence into his quavering voice.

  Frank asked who he might be and he gave his name as Ken Bilecki, friend of Lily’s. He had taken his customary approach through the back yard, so he had missed the cop stationed at the front door. Frank hadn’t posted one at the back, not for an apparent suicide.

  When told that Lily had died, the man reacted. Violently. He burst into tears, moaned ‘No, no, no, no,’ and sank to his knees, then rocked himself and sobbed. The dog came up and licked his fingers, but he didn’t seem to notice. Theresa noticed her feet backing slowly away, away from someone else’s grief. Times like these were why she chose to work with dead bodies and not live ones, why she opted for the lab instead of becoming a cop.

  Frank and Angela waited for the storm to subside without much expression. They had, no doubt, no
ticed the man’s eyes, the disproportionate fear of strangers and the scabs on his arms. Chronic methamphetamine users grew paranoid and often scratched at their skin, feeling as if bugs were running underneath the epidermis.

  ‘Sit down,’ Frank said when he could be heard over the sobbing, and pulled out a chair. The dog wandered into the next room. The man wiped his face with both grimy hands, and then used both again to crawl into the seat. Only then did he look up.

  ‘Who killed her?’ he asked.

  Frank told him no one had, she killed herself. This set off a fresh burst of cries and again Theresa thanked her lucky stars that she had never become a cop. She couldn’t take exposure to this kind of raw emotion on a regular basis. That the drama had been no doubt intensified by drug use did not make it any less heartfelt.

  Again Frank waited, but this time the man spoke first.

  ‘No way.’ He shook his head with a fierce power. ‘Lily would never have done that. She had her life together. She had a job and kids.’

  ‘She took meth,’ Frank stated.

  ‘Well, yeah,’ Bilecki agreed without hesitation. ‘But just a little.’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Seriously. She had it under control. Not,’ he added in what might have been a moment of rare insight, ‘like me.’

  ‘You take more than a little?’

  The man turned his face away, his gaze glancing off everything except Frank. ‘Where’d the dog go?’

  ‘Never mind the dog. How do you know Lily?’

  ‘I’ve known Lily for years.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘What do you mean, how? We’re friends. We were friends.’ Forcing himself to use the past tense produced another round of sniffles. Theresa plucked a nearly empty box of tissues from the counter and held it out to him. He looked at it as if wondering what it could be, glanced at her as if wondering when she had arrived, and took a tissue. He didn’t use it on his nose, however, merely turned it over in his hands.