Defensive Wounds Read online

  “I had the same thought. Problem is, our two victims knew each other, dated each other. Kind of takes ‘random’ off the table. The killer meant to kill these two in particular. Which brings us back to the beginning: How could either Marie Corrigan or her killer get into that suite without the key card?”

  The big man’s shoulders slid downward. “That’s the other thing I lay awake most of last night wondering.”

  “Get an answer?”

  “Just this: Nobody could. Unless he was some kind of genius superhacker.”

  “But it’s just a magnetic strip—”

  “Yeah, I know, and kids out on Quincy who never made it past the eighth grade have those zippers to copy credit cards. But he would still have to get a card in the first place, and even then it would take some serious geek skills to copy.”

  “So he rents the room—”

  “The room code is changed after every checkout.”

  “So how did he do it?”

  Marcus shrugged, an elegant gesture of resignation. “The old-fashioned way. Stole or bribed a key from someone who works here. Bribed, it would have to be, because all the pass cards are accounted for. Except that I spoke to every single person who has one—eighteen people, including me. Every one of them could produce his or her card, and they all swore up and down they didn’t give it to anyone else, not even another worker. So who’s lying?” He shrugged again. “I don’t know. Even on the job, I never got that human-lie-detector ability down.”

  Frank sipped his now-cold coffee. “On the other hand, maybe we just narrowed the suspect pool to eighteen—seventeen—people.”

  Marcus snorted a laugh. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, man, but I’m the only one of the eighteen who even knew Marie Corrigan. The rest of them got nothing to do with lawyers. Half are kids, and the other half have been working here so long that I really don’t think it’s likely they just decided to up and start killing people.”

  “Could somebody have stolen one off a maid’s cart, then put it back before she noticed?”

  “Maids don’t keep their key cards anywhere but in their pockets. Leaving it on the cart is grounds for instant termination.”

  “How many masters are there?”

  “Three. Me, Karla, and the owner.”

  “What about him?”

  Marcus just laughed. “Lives in Miami. Therefore doesn’t even need his card, but he likes that feeling of privilege.”

  Frank pondered that for a moment and then, at the risk of implicating his own niece asked, “Can’t staff make a new key at the front desk?”

  “Yeah, but they didn’t. When a card is written, it’s recorded in the computer, including when the key was made and when it’s scheduled to shut off.”

  “Could someone hack the computer instead of the door lock?”

  Another snort. “Unlikely. I keep the passwords to the computer system.”

  “What if you get hit by a bus?”

  “Then Karla takes a bolt cutter to my cabinet. Besides, even if someone had my password, he’d still need to be one hell of a hacker. Anyone who could pull that off would have better things to do than murder lawyers. I would be noticing supplies going missing and customer complaints of lost items going up. Nobody who works here is that computer-savvy. Including me.”

  Because he could no longer help it, Frank asked, “What’s it like? Working here?” Meaning, What’s it like to be something other than a cop, and does it suck as much as I think it would?

  The question did not seem to offend Marcus. He stared into the liquor bottles, their labels and colored liquids reflected in his eyes, which were nearly as dark as the granite bar. Then the wrinkles in his forehead cleared as if he had surprised himself with the answer: “Not bad. At first I was like, shit, what have I done?”

  Frank nodded, imagining feeling the same way.

  “But it’s not bad. The hours are so much better. In Vice, man, it seemed like every friggin’ search warrant we served had to be done in the middle of the night, like it was a rule or something: Search warrants couldn’t be done during hours when people might actually be awake. Of course, no overtime hours means no overtime pay, but I’m divorced now, so I don’t need so much extra cash. The job ain’t bad, though. It’s not as boring as I thought it would be. Being a cop was all about reacting. Somebody’s selling drugs, so we take him down. A dude beats another dude, so we take him down. But this is all about trying to figure out what could happen and then preventing it. I have to step back and think, if I wanted to rob these rooms, what would I do? Pop in while the maid is cleaning, pretend it’s my room? Tag along behind a maintenance man, catch the door before it closes? If I wanted to appropriate a few cases of booze from the storeroom, how would I do it? How do I move them, how do I try to keep them from being missed? It’s all logistics.” He tapped his temple. “I like the head part of it.”

  Frank watched the waitress bring the old lady another coffee, then flounce off before he could catch her eye for a refill.

  “It’s a different story every minute,” Marcus Dean continued. “People do weird stuff, man, just weird. I had a guy check in, dressed nice, platinum credit card, quiet and respectable. In twenty minutes we’ve got all sorts of traffic to his floor—non-guests, people coming and going. A call to my old co-workers and they pull the guy out of the room with a stock of coke, Ecstasy, and meth. And that’s not the funny part. The funny part, the cops don’t hold the undeclared guest in the room, so his buddy asks if he could keep the room since it’s paid for, and the arrested guy says okay. He goes off to jail, and his buddy calls room service every hour, ordering an eight-dollar can of pop or a fifteen-dollar bowl of soup, charges it to the room. Which was on the first guy’s credit card. The first guy finally thinks better of this and calls the card company from jail to shut off the card. Then we could finally toss out guy number two.

  “And the kids, man. Rich people do an even worse job of looking after their kids than poor people. That’s what made me craziest about working in the projects, seeing these toddlers in filthy clothes, more or less fending for themselves, but here I’ve found kindergarten-age kids wandering to the gift shop. Their clothes are cleaner, that’s the only difference. Last month we had a sports team, one of those exclusive schools, younger kids. The boys were fine, really. Their parents turned the hallways into their personal lounge, getting drunker and louder with each case of beer. Night manager kept talking to them, but no one on three floors got any sleep that night. It’s always something. Just like being a cop,” he said, eyebrows lifting with this sudden revelation, “except no one gets shot.”

  “Usually,” Frank joked.

  “Usually.”

  “Why’d you leave the department?” Frank asked. Maybe too personal, but surely Marcus had been asked that question before. And Frank really wanted to know how someone could walk away from the job. It sounded impossible to him.

  Marcus studied the bottles lined against the glass wall, maybe deciding on an answer. In the end he only shrugged and said, “Got tired of the BS. The whole freakin’ war on drugs—let me tell you something about our fine pharmaceutical representatives. They know what they’re doing. They structure their work so there’s no paper trail, all verbal cues and quick handoffs. No evidence. We’d work months to get a conviction on a guy, and by the time the lawyers got done with it, he’d get the minimum sentence. His assistants would take over until their time was up, and the whole trade goes on without a hiccup. Working Narco is not quite like anything else. At least when you got a guy for murder, either he goes away or he sure ain’t likely to do it again real soon. But drugs, it don’t even pause.”

  Nothing Frank hadn’t heard before, but something he knew to be gospel true and therefore deserving respect. “Frustrating.”

  “You got it.” Marcus frowned at the bottles now, apparently focusing on the Crown Royal.

  Frank hastily pressed on. Technically, Marcus was a suspect, and not only because of the key card
s. “I heard you beat a guy half to death.”

  Marcus glanced over at him, and Frank couldn’t help the tiny frisson of fear that comes with seriously ticking off a behemoth. But the anger in the other man’s face quickly faded into melancholy. “That’s marking the truth up about two hundred percent—as usual. I hit a guy, yeah. Arrested him in the park with a bag of pills and two underage girls, and he got smart with me. I shouldn’t have done it, sure, but half to death? More like a bruise and one loose tooth.”

  “That was it?”

  “We’re cops,” Marcus said, slipping into the inaccurate tense. “That’s never it. So I could have gone before the board, given up my gun, get loaned to the front desk or the property room for a few months, but I—” He stared at his own reflection long enough for Frank to run through eleven or twelve different endings for that sentence, then said, “I didn’t feel like it.”

  He got up and walked around the bar, plucking the paper ball from between the two bottles and dropping it into a trash can. “I just didn’t feel like it.”

  Forearms folded over the granite, he stared Frank down as if daring him to dispute the story.

  Which Frank had no intention of doing. “You have this same convention here last year?”

  “No, it rotates. Sure wish they could have picked Moline or something this time.”

  “Any of these attorneys frequent this place even before the convention?”

  “Not that I noticed. I know some of ’em, and I don’t remember seeing them here before. Why, you thinking about the sex-club idea?”

  “You heard about that?”

  Marcus laughed and straightened. “Everybody’s heard about it, man. But these rooms don’t rent by the hour. This is the Ritz. People come here for one of three reasons: because it’s a real special event, because they want to impress somebody, or because they’ve got so much money they don’t care what the rate is. Lawyers make a good buck, but not that good. If their little club had regular meetings in this place, no one could afford to be a member. Except maybe for Britton.”

  “That was my thinking, too. What about Marie Corrigan?”

  “What about her?”

  “Ever see her around here?”

  “Nope. Doesn’t mean she wasn’t. I don’t see most of the guests, unless they raise some kind of ruckus.”

  “See her anywhere else?”

  This time the momentary irritation didn’t melt into melancholy. “What do you mean?”

  “I heard you asked Marie Corrigan out. More than once.”

  A pause ensued. Frank had encountered that pause in every interview he’d ever conducted. Every one, every time. Sometimes more than once during the conversation, but always at least once. It ensued as the person being questioned debated about whether or not to lie to him. People calculated the damage if they didn’t and the risk if they did and, most important, the odds that Frank would find out anyway. And then they usually—

  “Yes.”

  —realized that those odds were really, really good.

  “Where’d you hear that?” Marcus asked.

  “Around.” Actually, it came from nothing more than a vague rumor passed to Angela from a friend of hers in Records whose brother-in-law’s stepdaughter clerked in the PD’s office. Something like that.

  “But it was a couple of years ago,” Marcus went on. “I’d just gotten divorced, and—You ever get divorced?”

  Frank shook his head. “Never married.”

  “Not that I was happy about splitting up—I wasn’t—but still, when you’ve had that ring around your finger for a lot of years and suddenly you don’t, you’re like a kid getting out of school for the summer. I can ask out anyone I want! I can take anything in a skirt back to my apartment, and there ain’t nothin’ nobody can say to me about it!” He laughed, and it seemed genuine. “Eventually I figured out that hot young things don’t want to go back to some broken-down cop’s crappy apartment, but for a while there I was like a stupid dog, the kind that barks at anything that moves. And say what you like about that vicious bitch, but she was hot.”

  “What happened?”

  “She wasn’t interested in a broken-down cop’s crappy apartment either. Or a cop. Or a black cop. Or a guy who didn’t drive a Beemer, I don’t know.”

  “Harsh.”

  “She was good at harsh. Once she mocked out the spelling errors in my partner’s report. So okay, cops aren’t hired for their literary abilities, but she kept on it until she convinced the jury that he didn’t know a bloodstain from a glass of orange juice.”

  “She did that to me, too,” Frank admitted. “At least mine was only a deposition. Made me paranoid about i before e for a while.”

  “Yeah. So I hope you wrap this up here—or just get all these lawyers out of my hotel, that would be fine, too—so my job can go back to telling unruly guests when to quiet down. But if you do find who killed Marie Corrigan, give me a minute with him before you slap on the cuffs.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I want to shake his hand.”

  CHAPTER 16

  *

  While the records of live juveniles—such as fingerprints, affidavits, and court proceedings—are kept strictly separate from the adult files, the records of deceased juveniles are not segregated in any way. Privacy has become useless to them, and since all autopsy reports and attendant information are considered confidential, there’s no reason to consider the medical examiner’s records on children any more confidential. So, as a frequent visitor to the records department, Theresa could find the file on Jenna Simone’s homicide as easily as she could the record of a fifty-two-year-old heart-attack victim.

  She set it on the small reading table crammed to one side of the records office, under the watchful eye of two secretaries. Both women had worked there long enough to settle into firmly defined and complementary personality profiles. One was a jumbled mass of curly hair and sweetness, always with at least fifteen disjointed files and a bowl of candy on her desk, who knew all the people in the building, their children, and their pets and would ask after the welfare of each one upon every visit. The other sat sternly, impassively, her desk bare except for one file at a time and a framed photo of her daughter, who, on the lone occasion Theresa dared to glance at it, appeared as stern as her mother. Attempts at small talk were met with a stony silence. Theresa often wondered what each would be like if she had a different office mate, if each woman hadn’t been assigned such an extreme to play off. Would the stern one relax a bit? Would the grandmotherly type allow herself to get snappish once in a while?

  Theresa opened the file. She acted only out of idle curiosity, she told herself; no crisis or even worry existed. Rachael did not date this boy, merely worked with him. It could all be a mistake; Sonia had briefly met him at a younger age, and surely William Rosedale could not be that uncommon a name. Frankly, Theresa should be working on the evidence gathered from around Marie Corrigan and Bruce Raffel as the taxpayers of Cuyahoga County paid her to do, instead of indulging her own overprotective tendencies. But her gaze fell on an eight-by-ten glossy photo of Jenna Simone, naked, dead, her hair soaked in a dried red liquid, her face blotted out under this coating of her own blood. And Theresa forgot all about the taxpayers of Cuyahoga County.

  The girl lay on the floor of a stylish living room, furnished with gray Berber carpeting and charcoal leather couches. Pale gray sheers covered the window next to the edge of a fireplace. The girl’s body rested in between a coffee table, its picture books still spread out in a real-estate agent’s vignette, and an overstuffed sofa. Facedown, head turned slightly to the right, legs spread, her left hand disappearing under the couch and her right flung out, fingernails digging into the thick carpet as if trying to gain traction, to crawl out from under the force that had battered her skull. Something in bright turquoise had been tossed under the coffee table, probably her shirt, and a dark blob near her feet appeared to be her pants.

  The blood had formed a pool un
derneath her head, soaking into the carpet and spreading out, with a series of dots and blobs around it—on the carpet, the sofa, and even the coffee-table books. Just like Marie Corrigan. Just like Bruce Raffel.

  Why don’t I remember this? Theresa wondered again. She checked the date—June 27, three years prior.

  Oh.

  She had been home from work on June 27, three years prior. She had been home from work for most of that July, too, because her fiancé had just been killed during the investigation of a bank robbery at the Federal Reserve.

  At least that explained why she had no memory of such a brutal murder. She had no memory of the rest of that summer.

  Theresa shrugged and went back to the file. The autopsy report came next.

  It was not lengthy; it didn’t need to be. Jenna Simone had been a perfectly healthy sixteen-year-old until someone took a blunt object to her skull. She had not been a virgin prior to the attack. Small tears indicated rape, but no sperm was found and no DNA obtained. She’d been struck three times on the back of the skull with something thin, straight, and hard. No weapon had been submitted for comparison, the doctor noted—not as a comment on the investigation but because it might be years before the case came to trial and the pathologist would need an answer when the defense attorney asked why the wounds had not been compared to a weapon. By then it would be hard to remember any theories about what could have caused the wounds when time and many more autopsies came in between. So the doctor had also noted that the fireplace poker had disappeared and that a rod of such size and strength could have been used to cause the defects in the girl’s cranium. Theresa instantly saw the prosecutor’s problem: The suspect was present, but without the weapon. If he’d gotten rid of the poker, why not get rid of the body? If the body would be too difficult to dispose of, why not keep the poker and invent a story about a bushy-haired stranger who’d invaded his home in a botched robbery, found William passing out, and a vulnerable Jenna? A story that wouldn’t fool a five-year-old but couldn’t exactly be disproved either. Men had beaten a murder charge with less. Perhaps William really had been in a drunken haze, unable to summon up even a slightly good plan to cover up his guilt—and yet able to make the weapon disappear.