Blood Passage (29 page)

“
Please, sit down. Can I get either of you a cup of coffee?”

Butternut shook her head.

“
No, thanks,” Hank said. He looked around the room at the antiques on the fireplace mantel and side tables. “Are you a collector?”

“
Yes, I specialize in bisque figures.”

“
How long did Mr. Gregg live here?”

“
Just over three years now.”

“
Did the place come furnished or did he move in with his own stuff?”

“
All our condominiums are unfurnished,” Boublil replied. “Our clients are not interested in other people’s leftovers. Of course, Mr. Gregg didn’t have very many things when he first moved in, but he’d been adding to his collection since then. I loaned him a few books on antiques to help him out, and he asked my advice a few times.”

Boublil described ShonDale as a serious-minded and polite young man who obviously came from humble means but was doing everything he could to better himself. He spoke well, lapsing into ghetto slang only for humorous effect, often wore expensive tailored suits, and had to be reminded only once that when he entertained he was expected to keep the noise down and observe decent hours.

“
What type of tenants do you generally get around here?” Hank asked.

“
Our
clientele
, Lieutenant, represent a cross-section of the more successful members of our community. All races and religions are welcome. I’m a Jewish Moroccan, we have Muslim-Americans, Anglo-Saxon Christians, you name it. If you’re asking whether Mr. Gregg stood out here because he was African-American, the answer is no.”

“
He have any friends in the building?”

“
No.”

“
Do you know if he ever associated with anyone named Gary?”

“
I have no clue who he associated with, let alone their names.”

“
Did you see anyone unusual come in yesterday or last evening, or see Gregg go out with anyone unusual?”

Boublil shook his head. “No, sorry.”

“
Maybe the people across the hall saw or heard something.”

“
Mrs. Weems isn’t home,” Boublil said. “She’s been in Indiana for a month visiting her daughter.”

Okay, so much for that. “I noticed a surveillance camera downstairs in the lobby. Is it real?”

Boublil scoffed. “Of course.”

“
Any chance I could see the tape covering the past twenty-four hours?”

“
There are no tapes anymore, Lieutenant. Our system’s connected to a computer with a video capture card using MPEG-4 compression. The data’s stored on a digital video recorder. I noticed the search warrant mentioned surveillance video. It’s no problem to make you a copy on DVD.”

“
That’d be nice,” Hank said.

“
Would you like the video from the hallway on Mr. Gregg’s floor as well?”

“
There’s a camera in the hallway?”

Boublil smiled. “It’s in the head of the fire sprinkler in the ceiling.”

“
I’ll take it.”

“
No problem. I’ll copy that as well and have them ready for you when you leave.”

Boublil rode up with them in the elevator and opened Gregg’s door. Hank took the key, thanked him and shooed him back downstairs.

As soon as they stepped inside the door of the condo they made their first discovery. The foyer was about fifteen feet long and six feet wide. A doorway on the left at the end led into the rest of the condo. The floor was covered with expensive carpeting. At the end of the hall was a table. On the table was a vase in the center and a figurine on the right. There was nothing on the left. Hank saw the missing figurine lying on the floor beneath the table, broken in several pieces.

“
Slowly,” he said to Butternut, pointing.

She approached cautiously, examining the carpet before her. “Fragments.” She unslung her SLR digital camera from over her shoulder. “A piece that was stepped on and crushed.”

After a careful search to ensure there was no one in the condo, Hank returned to the front entry where Butternut crouched before the pieces of the figurine ground into the carpet. “There’s probably fragments in someone’s shoe.”

“
Gregg’s?”

“
There was a bunch of stuff on the soles of his shoes,” she recalled. “We’ll see.” She pointed. “The table is a card table, Regency. Really nice rosewood cross-banding, see? From about 1810 or so, worth about four grand. The top of the table swivels open so you can keep visitors’ cards in it. People gave them out when they came calling. Cartes de visite and so on. That’s why they were called card tables. We’ll see if ShonDale kept anything inside it.” She picked up her camera. “The vase is Staffordshire, about fifty years older than the table, and worth about five grand. The figurines are Royal Dux, a shepherd and shepherdess, about 1880. Probably paid two grand for the pair.” She shrugged. “Antiques are a hobby of mine.”

“
Eleven thousand dollars just to decorate the hallway,” Hank said.

“
Look, Lieutenant, we need to cover our bases here. I called Tim and he’s sending me some help, but we’ll need to do the front entrance and both elevators before anything else. The intercom button,” she held up a hand to count off on her fingers, “door frames, door handles, mailbox, the entire inside of each elevator.”

“
I understand,” Hank said.

“
I’ll go back down and look at the video first,” she said. “If I can spot them coming and going, it’ll narrow down the surfaces we need to cover.”

After she left, Hank stepped across the hall and knocked loudly on the door of the condo belonging to Mrs. Weems. There was no answer. There were two other condos on the floor, farther down the hall. The one on the same side of the building as ShonDale was occupied by a man named George Claddy. A widower with a bad leg, he was lonely enough to be starved for company and kept Hank for twenty minutes, although he had nothing of value to offer as far as his next-door neighbor was concerned.

“
Seen him in the elevator once or twice, that’s all. Big bastard. Scared the hell out of me, but he was polite enough. Not the kind you’d borrow a cup of sugar from, though.”

The other condo belonged to a married couple. The wife, Janice Townsend, was sick in bed with the flu. The door was opened by the housekeeper, who explained that Mr. Townsend was away on business in Atlanta and had been gone for three days, leaving his ill wife to fend for herself. Hank talked his way inside and briefly questioned Mrs. Townsend, who assured him that she had taken a flu remedy last evening that had knocked her out from nine o’clock onward. She hadn’t heard a thing.

By the time he came back out into the hallway Butternut had returned from downstairs. Help had arrived and someone was processing the south elevator in which, according to the security video, two men had ridden up to ShonDale’s floor and ridden back down with ShonDale between them. Butternut had already finished the hallway and had moved into the kitchen.

“
Half-finished glass of orange juice,” she said, pointing, “half-eaten sandwich, looks like ham, cheese and tomato. He was interrupted while eating a late snack and forcibly taken out.” She watched him remove a pair of latex gloves from his jacket pocket. “We’ve photographed the living room, master bathroom and master bedroom.”

Hank wandered into the living room, unzipping his portfolio to remove his notebook and a copy of the documents Karen had received from ShonDale’s parole officer. ShonDale was 27 years old, six feet, six inches and two hundred and forty-five pounds. Two years at State University, majoring in business administration and starting defensive end on the football team as a sophomore before he dropped out because of academic problems. Priors included marijuana possession, disorderly conduct, careless driving and the conviction for assault.

RaVonn Pease was the only employer listed in ShonDale’s jacket. It mentioned his part-time job at the En-R-G Club but nothing else. Hank mulled it over. A typical street punk with gang connections who got noticed for his size and aggression, began working his way up in the R Boyz and then started associating with Asian gangsters on the side. The two years at State didn’t seem to fit until it occurred to him that Tommy would have gone to State at the same time as ShonDale. They must have known each other.

According to the file, ShonDale’s mother died six years ago from lung cancer and his father’s whereabouts were unknown. He had four sisters: Cynthia, age 30, now living in Phoenix; Marissa, age 28, whereabouts unknown; Candie, born in 1986 and deceased in 1996, shot to death in the street by a playmate; and Patti, born in 1987 and deceased in 1997 from a staph infection. A note from the Parole Officer said that he had no contact with his sister in Phoenix. There was no steady girl friend. “He says he’s still playing the field,” the PO had handwritten in the margin for Karen’s attention.

Butternut appeared in the doorway holding up two kitchen canisters decorated with chickens. “Test indicates coke,” she said, dipping the canister in her left hand. “About 200 grams.” She lowered the other can. “Right next to it, a little kitchen protection. HK45. Another canister has a spare magazine and loose ammunition.”

Hank put the file and notebook back into his portfolio. He wandered around the room. There was artwork hanging on the walls, tastefully selected stuff that no doubt would have pleased Boublil, if he’d been consulted, but Hank could see nothing personal in the room. No framed photos on the wall, no photo albums. He walked over to a cabinet that contained a sound system and looked at the compact discs on the shelves. He saw rap and hip hop, some names that he recognized and many that he did not. There was also a small collection of classical music, including Berlioz, Tchaikovsky and Grieg, next to Lionel Ritchie, Earth Wind and Fire and Kenny G. Easy listening for the ladies of the field with whom he was playing, classical music for people he wanted to impress, and street music when he was alone and wanted to be himself.

He walked into the master bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. He looked at the usual assortment of pain relievers, deodorant, hemorrhoid ointment, shaving cream, razor blades, razor, adhesive bandages, condoms, toothpaste, toothbrush and mouth wash. There was a bottle of diuretics and a box of prescription medication for the reduction of cholesterol. Hank saw another drugstore label and used his pen to move aside a bottle of ibuprofen for a better look. It was migraine medication, the kind taken once a day.

He made a note of the pharmacy and the prescribing doctor. ShonDale suffered from migraines and apparently had also come under fire from his doctor for his excessive weight. Hank could imagine the blood tests coming back with high cholesterol levels and the ensuing lecture about heart disease. ShonDale had filled the prescription almost three months ago but the bottle looked virtually untouched, so he’d gone through the motions and then shoved the medication in here, forgetting about it. The migraine medication had been filled at the same time but was about half-empty; ShonDale apparently took his headaches more seriously than the condition of his arteries.

Hank went on into the master bedroom and looked at the king-sized bed, which had been inexpertly made up, the bedspread showing a few bumps and wrinkles where the bedclothes underneath had not been completely straightened. The pillows were tossed into place at the head of the bed but were a little crooked. The rest of the room looked spotless. Hank took a quick walk back to the bathroom, looking at the shower and toilet. Everything was clean. He came back up the hallway and checked the top of the picture frames on each wall. No dust. Must have had a housekeeper who came in a few times a week. He re-entered the bedroom and looked again at the bed. Apparently he possessed enough self-discipline to attempt the basics himself and was self-conscious enough that he didn’t want the housekeeper to think he was a slob. No way, though, that he would do his own dusting and keep his toilet that spotless. If he did everything himself, the bed would look like something in an army barracks.

On the left of the bed was a night table holding a lamp and nothing else, while on the right was a matching night table that held a matching lamp, an open can of Budweiser that sounded empty when Hank tapped it with his pen, and the base of a portable phone. The phone was gone. Curious, Hank pressed the button labeled “Locate Handset” with the end of his pen and nearly jumped out of his skin when the handset began to wail underneath one of the pillows on the bed. He lifted the pillow carefully, pressed the red button on the phone with his pen to shut it off and lowered the pillow over it again. He heard voices behind him and left the bedroom.

Talking to Butternut in the kitchen was CSI Jon Beverley, a 53-year-old former patrol officer with a degree in chemistry who’d been shot in the arm while on duty just after the expansion of Criminalistics and had decided that a switch in career path might be in his best interest. He was short, stocky and balding, and he had a grouchy, negative disposition that had earned him the nickname “Mini-Byrne” behind his back. He grinned at Hank, showing long yellow teeth.

“
Screwing up my scene back there, Lieutenant?”

“
Trying not to. Have you been out on the terrace?”

“
Just came from there.”

Hank went out onto the terrace to look around while Beverley went back into the master bedroom. There was nothing of interest on the terrace other than a deck set that included a table and four chairs. The view of the river was spectacular.