BLUE MERCY (5 page)

“Son of a bitch.” Kay stepped back from the oil-stained engine.

“If this girl is as street-smart as you say, Kay, how’d he get her into his car?”

“She wouldn’t have caught a ride with a stranger. He took her by force. Or …” Kay scanned the deserted grounds again, grasping for a scenario that felt right. “Or she knew the scumbag. We better get Mobile out here to dust the car,” she said, even though she doubted they’d find much. If Valley’s killer had put such orchestration into her abduction, he’d hardly leave prints.

They waited twenty minutes for a Mobile Crime Lab unit, sitting together on the hood of the Lumina, first exchanging awkward small talk, then sharing silence. They watched the white Crime Lab van circle a couple times before locating the lot behind Fourier Hall. Leaving the tech to dust the Nova, they headed downtown. Kay let Finn drive, enjoying the rare luxury of being chauffeured through the streets that usually passed her in a blur.

Baltimore wasn’t her city. From its glittering tourist-infested Inner Harbor to the crumbling projects where heroin and cocaine perpetuated the decay, from boarded-up row houses to the gluttony of Guilford and Roland Park with their private schools and stately shingled homes, all of it felt foreign to Kay.

There had been no rhyme or reason to her coming here thirteen years ago. Out of college, needing a job and knowing there was no future for her back home in Jonesport, Maine, she’d followed a friend to Maryland on a whim, with two hundred bucks in her wallet and a suitcase in the trunk of her Honda. And when the Department advertised for recruits, the money and benefits looked better than any other prospects at the time.

Thirteen years … Another eight and she could retire from the force. If she actually
made
it to retirement. Eight
years could seem like a life sentence when the passing of weeks and months was counted by the number of murders up on the board, by the endless list of victims, and the plea bargains for lesser sentences granted by the state simply to keep the system from clogging. Even at the best of times, murder was a thankless business.

Still, she made a difference. It wasn’t a view shared by many in her squad, but it was the one thing Kay clung to over the years: the notion that what she did helped people, even if in the end it was only a handful. As a murder cop,
she
was entrusted with the pursuit of the worst possible crime—the taking of a human life.
She
spoke for the dead. And for the survivors.

Even so, after her twenty were up, she’d retire. She’d made a vow to herself: no drop program, no tempting departmental bribes to stay on board just a few more years with the promise of a tidy bonus at the end. She wouldn’t let the stress eat what little soul was left. When her day came, she’d be gone. Maybe she’d go back home to Maine. Back to the fishing-village atmosphere, untouched by the plague of violence she saw drugs exert on the city. Away from the crack holes and seedy side streets, from the hot spots where crime seemed to incubate and spread like some terminal disease.

Studying Finn’s profile now, Kay remembered a time when the city hadn’t seemed so bleak.

“So, have you had lunch with Jimmy Carter lately?” he asked, perhaps sensing her eyes on him.

“No. You?”

Finn shook his head. Smiled.

Together they’d worked with the Habitat for Humanity organization within Baltimore, helping to restore vacant row houses for low-income families. They’d seen several projects through completion in the Northeast District and
even took part in a lunch with the former president as part of the groundbreaking ceremonies.

Kay missed the camaraderie of the crew, missed the hard labor and the sense of accomplishment, and she missed sharing something outside the job with Finn.

“You gonna be okay with this?” Finn focused on the traffic congesting along Greenmount. “You and me working together?”

“Sure. You?”

He shrugged. “I don’t have a problem. As long as you do the typing.”

It wouldn’t have been the first time Finn had solicited her writing skills. Before Spencer’s death, they’d often found themselves in the Homicide offices together. One or the other working overtime, their hours deliberately overlapping in spite of their alternating shifts. These days, though, Kay did her best to be out of the offices before Finn’s squad came in, avoiding him when she could. Obviously Finn had been doing the same.

“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll do the typing if you don’t babysit me through this entire investigation.”

“Deal.” And in his voice she sensed she’d been right about why Sarge had put Finn on the case. Finn was Sarge’s safety net, his way of ensuring that she didn’t screw up, that she didn’t get someone else killed.

He accelerated through the amber light at Biddle. “Listen, I don’t know what you’re feeling about this girl, Kay, but if you want to sit out the autopsy this morning—”

“I’ll be there. Thanks for the concern though,” she added.

As they crossed Eager Street, Kay felt the familiar tightening of her spine. It had started two blocks away, but now, with Maryland’s State Pen to her right, the tension twisted in her empty gut.

The rough-hewn granite of the Transition Center loomed beyond the twenty-foot Cyclone fence topped with accordion coils of shining razor ribbon. Kay wondered if other cops looked at the Pen as they passed it. If they thought about the men they’d put there.

As the Lumina shot past the cluster of buildings, there was only one man Kay thought of.

Bernard Eales felt his feet first. Arches pressed against the cold iron bar at the end of his low cot. The bunk was too small. With no room to roll over, he generally woke in the same position he lay down in when lights went out each night in A Block, the starched sheet still pulled to his chin.

From the farther reaches of the cellblock he heard the echoes of catcalls, distant slammings, even muffled cries. Nothing in particular defined mornings in his corner of the State Pen. No sun. No alarm clocks. But Bernard always recognized morning in his gray double cell: his bladder was bursting and his mouth was stale.

With effort, he hauled himself up. Shambling barefoot across the cement pad to the stainless-steel urinal, he loosened the drawstring of his prison trousers and groped for his cock.

From the top bunk, Darnell Brown whimpered. One month in and the crack-selling street tough still cried for his mama. Especially in his dreams.

Bernard checked his watch, then remembered he’d traded it for smokes last week. He’d ask Patricia for a new
one. Nothing pricey. And some more Marlboros. He hated bartering. Always got the shit end of the stick.

Not that it mattered much when he had Patsy, he thought, his urine at last striking the steel bowl. She took care of him. Two visits a week. More, if they’d let her. And always with a little something. All he had to do was smile, nod while she talked about her cats, and pucker a few blown kisses from behind the visitation-booth Plexiglas before she left.

Patsy and her fucking cats … If he ever got out, the first thing he’d do would be to get rid of the fucking cats. He kicked the flush with his heel. Darnell stopped whimpering.

Bernard turned within the twelve-by-fourteen cell to the narrow window. Like all the cell windows in the Pen, it was welded shut, its frame painted a bright orange. They did that so the guards could see if you fucked with it.

Next to it hung a calendar, stuck up with shreds of masking tape. Patsy had given it to him, from the garage her old man took the Beemer to. Photos of classic cars. Nothing that turned him on though. Nothing as sweet as his ’59 StratoChief. He wondered where the Strat was now. Still in police impound probably. The gleaming black paint job dulling in the glaring sun. The white walls drying out and flat. The battery dead. Sons of bitches.

On the calendar, Darnell had been crossing off the days with bold red
X
’s. Bernard let him. It was Thursday. In his left-handed chicken-scratch Bernard had made a notation to remind him of today’s meeting with Grogan. With the trial starting in two weeks, the defense attorney was itching to talk strategy, jury selection, and witnesses.

All a waste of time. Even if Grogan
did
manage to convince a jury he’d shot the cop in self-defense, that he hadn’t known they were police at his door that night, and he’d
been protecting his home against presumed intruders, even
then
that ball-busting, blond state’s attorney bitch was going to have his nuts on a platter for the hookers’ murders.

Bernard returned to his bottom bunk, flopped down onto the sweat-dampened sheet. He kicked at the top mattress when Darnell started whimpering again. Then he closed his eyes, rooted a booger out of one nostril, and flicked it across the cell while he imagined himself behind the wheel of his shiny black StratoChief.

AFTER A HALF HOUR
in the cutting room of Maryland’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner at 111 Penn Street, Finn still hadn’t desensitized to the reek of Valerie Regester’s remains. Neither the chemical air fresheners nor a constant flow of purified air through the morgue’s ventilation system could compete. Kay, on the other hand, had surrendered. The paper face mask hung from her neck, and two smears of Mentholatum sat under her nostrils.

Regester’s body had been wheeled out earlier, photographed, weighed, and finally prepped in the autopsy room’s sterile expanse of ceramic tile and stainless steel. What remained of her clothes had been peeled from her charred skin and laid out on an adjoining slab. They’d watched Eddie Jones work on her, removing and weighing organs, his gloved hands slick with body fluids as he droned observations to his assistant. Louis Armstrong played on a boom box in the corner, and from behind his mask the ME hummed along with “What a Wonderful World.”

“So, finally out from behind the desk then, huh, Kay?”
Jonesy asked as he slid Regester’s liver into the scale.

Finn glanced across the table in time to see Kay nod.

“Yeah. My coffee-making wasn’t winning me any points. I think they figured I’m less of a hazard out on the streets.”

The corners of the ME’s eyes creased, revealing the smile hidden behind his mask.

Eddie Jones was a little younger than Finn, closer to Kay’s thirty-three. At six-three and with a full head of sun-bleached hair, he was the easiest ME on staff to spot if he was on the floor. He looked like a bird, Finn had always thought, with close-set eyes and a sharp Roman nose. An albino vulture, poised over the city’s carrion and waste.

From the moment they’d walked into the morgue, Finn had sensed a rare easiness and familiarity between Kay and the ME. Although he’d never worked a case with Kay before, Finn had witnessed Kay enough on the job to know her briskness. Civil but professional, Kay’s social graces sometimes took a backseat to whatever case she was working. He’d seen some of the guys on the unit take that frostiness the wrong way. And even
he
had wondered about her until Joe Spencer had introduced them two years ago.

Kay had been working a new case caught on the four-to-twelve shift when Finn had come onto the midnight. Standing on the eighth-floor terrace of headquarters at 3 a.m., the lights of the city reflecting off the humidity that lifted from steamy streets, Kay had been having a smoke with Joe Spencer. He’d made quick introductions, then left, while Finn and Kay stayed, sharing a half dozen Camels and light conversation as they watched the sun rise.

They’d shared smokes a few more times after that, running into each other by accident, then on purpose. Until one night they ended up at some waterfront bar. Finn couldn’t remember which one. They’d gotten drunk, then
capped it off back at Finn’s boat, and Kay had stayed the night.

In the morning they’d agreed they’d made a mistake, but he was in her bed the very next night. And for countless nights after that. For almost a year.

From the start Finn had known his feelings and his illusions of the relationship went deeper than Kay’s. Still, he’d always hoped she’d come around. Even after Bernard Eales, after she’d refused to take Finn’s calls and her avoidance of him became painfully clear, he’d waited for Kay. Until several months ago, sitting at O’Reilly’s, staring at a double shot of bourbon, on the verge of taking that first drink after twenty-one months of being dry, Finn had finally given up on Kay.

He missed her. But it was getting easier.

“All right, boys and girls.” Jonesy leaned back from the table at last. “Here’s what you’ve got so far. Obviously we’re talking major charring. Deep burning that was assisted by flammables being poured onto the clothing. She was definitely dead before the fire started. There’s no evidence of smoke inhalation, and no traces of carbon monoxide in her blood.”

“Can you tell if she was raped?”

“No visible indications of forcible sexual activity. But you do have what appears to be evidence of strangulation. Petechial hemorrhaging in the mucous membrane lining the inner surface of the eyelids. And it looks like she bit her tongue. Both signs of asphyxiation. And then”—he pointed to the back of the neck, high up, where a narrow section of the skin had been protected from the flames— “it looks like you’ve got some bruising back here. Fingertip impressions.”

“He strangled her?” Kay asked.

Jonesy nodded, then circled both his hands around an
imaginary throat. “From the front. I’m looking at a fractured hyoid bone, hemorrhaging in the voice box, larynx and the neck muscles, as well as damage to the thyroid and cricoid cartilages.”

“Manual strangulation’s usually about power,” Kay pointed out. “Anger. Hatred. And if it was a frontal assault, then maybe it was about watching her die. Unless she was already unconscious. What about drag marks?”