Blue Molly (Danny Logan Mystery #5) (8 page)

She stared at me for a second, then said, “I presume your parents will corroborate your story?”

“Certainly.”

“Okay. I’ll expect a copy of that gas receipt in my e-mail later this afternoon.”

I nodded. “I’ll send you the ticket stubs, too.”

She looked at me for a second, then she turned to John and rolled her hand in a “now what” gesture.

John chuckled. “Well, that didn’t take long, did it? Inez, do you mind if I tell Danny what happened?”

She shook her head. “No.”

“So then,” John started, “Eduard Markovic gets arrested Wednesday afternoon at twelve forty-five along with three of his friends, plus you and your associate and the fellow later identified as the male victim, a Mr. Mike Lyon. Unlike you, Markovic and his boys actually get charged for D&D. He doesn’t get out until nine a.m. yesterday after his arraignment and bail hearing. He posted five hundred dollars cash bail. Then, apparently while you were enjoying the symphony, sometime between nine and ten p.m. yesterday, he was murdered. His body was left in one of the Dumpsters in the parking lot at your apartment complex early this morning, where a homeless man who was looking for aluminum cans found it a little later, at nine thirty. He flagged down a patrol car.”

“You’re sure of the times?” I asked.

“Reasonably sure, yeah. The ME established the time of death. And the city says they picked up the trash yesterday at five fifteen a.m.—Dumpster was emptied then. Our patrol unit got flagged down at nine thirty-five a.m. Dumpster wasn’t empty anymore—Eduard Markovic was parked inside. So sometime between five fifteen and nine forty in the morning, the body got dumped.”

“Cause of death?”

“GSW. Single shot to the chest. Large caliber.”

“Murder weapon?”

“Not recovered. No slug, no casing either.”

“So when you asked about my sidearm being a .45 and all, you don’t actually even know for sure that it was a .45?” I said, giving Inez a little stinkeye.

“We know it was big,” John said. “Big exit wound.”

I nodded. “Okay. Was he murdered right there?”

“ME says not. Not enough blood. Also, there was no spent slug or casings lying around anywhere. Looks like he just got dumped there.”

I looked at Inez. “You don’t really think I’d kill someone, do you? And then be so dumb as to dump the body in the trash can where I live?”

She stared at me for a few seconds, then smiled. “I’d say not likely. Especially now that you seem to have an alibi.”

I nodded. “‘Seem to have an alibi’—thanks for the vote of confidence there, Inez. What if I’d been home watching TV?”

She smiled. “Then maybe we’d not be talking so nice.”

“But,” David said, “since Danny does in fact have an alibi, is SPD still considering him a suspect in this case?”

Inez smiled again. “Oh, come on, gentlemen. He was never a suspect, more a person of interest. I know him well enough not to think the worst of him. But you must see why I needed to talk to him?”

I nodded. “Fair enough. So are you ready for me to talk?”

She nodded. “By all means. Start by filling us in as to your involvement with this man, Markovic.”

I shook my head. “Easy. There is no involvement. None. I never saw him before Wednesday. I will say that as of yesterday morning, my new clients are Sylvia and Mike Lyon. Someone is trying to buy the building they own in Pioneer Square, called the Lyon Building. It’s on Main across from Occidental Park. We’re thinking that whoever’s trying to buy the building is trying to harass them to get them to agree to sell. Markovic
may
—and I repeat,
may
—have been part of the harassment team, but we don’t know for sure. It’s also possible that Markovic might work for a man named Pavel Laskin—we met him yesterday morning. He said Markovic was his employee. He apologized to us for his actions. He said it was a mistake. We have no reason not to believe him.”

“So what you’re saying is that the incident in the bar might not have been random?” Inez asked.

I shook my head. “Almost certainly not.”

“What makes you so certain?”

“Markovic started the fight in the bar for some reason. It’s possible that when he did that, he violated some sort of order by Laskin.”

John and Inez looked at each other. Then John turned back to me. “And violating that order might have led to punishment by Laskin?”

I shrugged. “It’s possible.”

John nodded as Inez leaned back in her chair and stared at the wall for a solid minute. Then, she looked at John and shook her head. “Guess we’ll need to be tracking down this Pavel Laskin character, won’t we?”

He shrugged.

She turned to me. “You said Pioneer Square?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Occidental Park. He’s hard to miss. Man’s big. And very mean looking.”

Inez nodded. “Good. We appreciate all this.”

“No problem. Maybe next time, you can just call me up.”

She smiled but didn’t answer.

* * * *

Toni has dinner every couple of weeks with her mom and sister up in Lynnwood. The Blair family is very close, brought on, I suppose, by the shared hardships they went through after Toni’s father was killed in an auto accident when she was eleven. The girls not only survived; after much hard work and sacrifice, they eventually thrived.

Toni’s mom never remarried. She blended her role as single mom with the new role of career woman. She took a job as a waitress and now, eighteen years later, she was the regional manager for the same chain with eight restaurants in the Seattle area under her supervision. Along the way, she’d worked her butt off to help the girls through college. Toni graduated from the University of Washington. Her younger sister, Kelli, was nearly halfway through a degree in drama, also at U-Dub. All three of the Blair girls were tall and striking and of similar (feisty) temperament. I didn’t begrudge Toni her time with them even a little bit.

By agreement, Toni called when she arrived to let me know she was okay. I think she thought it was a little silly that I’d insisted, but after yesterday, I was tempted to go with her. She’s highly proficient in Krav Maga, and she’s almost always armed (a crack shot), so I shouldn’t worry about her too much, but what can I say? I’m in love with her, and with a wild card like Maroni and a potential murderer like Pavel Laskin out there, I was concerned.

Nothing I could do about it now, though, so I settled in for three or four hours in which I got to watch TV, listen to music, and play the guitar. The rain had started up again this afternoon and now a quiet but steady drumming of raindrops struck the sliding glass door that led to our patio. The lights from the restaurants around Chandler’s Cove were nearly obscured.

I was kicked back on the sofa with my guitar tuned DADGAD and working on a particularly difficult passage in a Juber song when my phone beeped, informing me I had a new e-mail from Dwayne. Rather than try to read it on my phone’s tiny screen, I walked over to the table and opened it up on my laptop. There was a file attached titled “Enrico Maroni” and a note from Dwayne on the cover that said:

Danny—

You were right. Enrico Maroni is a scumbag. File attached.

Pavel Laskin is worse. Let’s meet in my office, Monday 0800.

—Dwayne

That’s Dwayne’s way of getting right to the point. I opened the PDF file on Maroni and spent the next few minutes reading through it.

When I was all done, I read it again, then I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

Basically, Dwayne was right—Maroni really
was
a scumbag. And it turns out that he’d undersold things a bit when he’d told Toni he’d just gotten out of jail. The fact was, he’d just gotten out of prison in Monroe. He’d been arrested three times before, including once when he was eighteen when he’d been caught masturbating as he peeked through an open window in the girls’ locker room at his own high school. He was sentenced to two years’ probation and mandatory counseling, which he completed. Toni sure as hell didn’t know about this, or I’m pretty sure she’d never have saved his ass in the parking lot.

A year later, he was arrested for burglary, but the charges were dropped when the DA failed to assemble the case on time.

Then, in late 2009, he’d been caught living with a runaway girl who was just fifteen years old. He was twenty-four by then, and the state of Washington takes a dim view of an adult engaged in a sexual relationship with a minor below the age of consent (sixteen in Washington). In this case, it led to a conviction of child molestation in the third degree, which, by virtue of his prior conviction, earned Maroni an eight-year sentence. He’d served four of ’em at Monroe and had been paroled last month with four more years to go. In addition to all his other problems, the guy was now a registered sex offender.

I leaned back in my chair, took a deep breath, and thought about what I’d just read. In my experience, sex offenders are hard to read and, at least at the early stage, hard to predict. Some of them are totally nonviolent. Sad? Yes. Pathetic? Most likely. But cruel and violent? Usually not. But there are exceptions. Some of the most vicious, sadistic, bloodthirsty monsters ever known started out with some sort of sexual deviancy that, given the “right” personality and circumstances, just blossomed into murdering lunacy. Bundy, Gacy, Ridgway, Richard Ramirez—all these guys were sexual deviants who eventually morphed into the most infamous killers we’ve ever known.

So where did Maroni fall on this spectrum? That was the question. I studied his file. If I put my hard-nosed, analytical hat on and decided to throw down some odds, I had to say that statistically, he almost certainly wasn’t in the Bundy category for the simple reason that not many are, thank God. But that was small comfort because when it involved Toni, I didn’t have the luxury of viewing Maroni as a statistic, a sort of data point falling somewhere on the sexual deviancy probability scale. This was personal. I mean, given the guy’s relationship with my girlfriend—the person I loved most in the whole world—he didn’t need to be anywhere near as bad as Bundy to get my attention.

Almost on cue, my phone rang. Toni, sounding a little inebriated, was calling to tell me she needed to spend the night at her mom’s. I could hear loud music in the background and both her mom and her sister laughing.

“Have you guys been hitting the bottle?”

“What’s it to ya, dude?”

I nodded and made a quick decision. “You know, I think it’d be a really great idea if you stayed there at your mom’s tonight. As a matter of fact, I insist on it.”

“Check!”

“Good. And as soon as you hang up, I want you to go check the locks on your mom’s front door. You got it?”

“Check! Roger wilco, Sergeant!”

“I love you.”

“You, too.” She started laughing. “I’ll call you in the morning. Over and out!”

We hung up, then I got up and turned off the light. I hit the sack early and listened to the sound of the rain steadily pounding away on the big bedroom window, and I thought about Rico Maroni and Pavel Laskin until I fell asleep.

Saturday morning, eleven o’clock, I saw Abraham Lincoln Foster sitting on a planter wall by the totems at the center of Occidental Park while I walked across South Washington from the parking lot. He was by himself, staring at the ground, huddled up in his dirty army jacket. His cart was parked beside him. Although still cold, the day was warmer and the park was more crowded than it had been two days ago. I was also by myself—Toni was still at her mom’s. She’d called earlier and said they were going to the mall.

When I was still thirty feet away or so, he looked up and spotted me. I smiled as I approached, but before I could say anything, he stood up and said, “Quick—give me ten dollars.” This took me back a little and I stopped, confused. It had been seven years, and I didn’t know what kind of reception to expect, but I definitely hadn’t expected this.

“C’mon now, Sergeant,” he said, a little more urgently. “Fork it over and make it look good. They’re watchin’ the park.”

I tensed up, focusing on
not
lifting my head and looking around. I started to ask a question, but instead, something told me to just go with it. I smiled and reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet. I dug around and handed him a twenty. “All I’ve got’s a Jackson.”

He nodded and smiled. “Thank you, kind sir. Mr. Jackson will do just fine.” He gave a little bow of thanks and, barely moving his lips, he said, “Meet me on First in front of the Grand Central Bakery in thirty minutes.” He turned and sat down again.

If we were being watched, I couldn’t just stand there—I needed to move. I thought it might look a little suspicious if I just immediately turned around and marched back to the Jeep so, instead, I walked kind of nonchalantly through the park and entered the Grand Central Building using the entry on the east side. Once inside, I ducked into the Grand Central Bakery and jumped in line, watching through the window to see if anyone followed me from the park. No one did. In fact, I didn’t see anyone suspicious looking, inside or out. My immediate thought was that maybe old Abraham had just nicked me for twenty bucks and I’d be unlikely to see him again.

After a few minutes had passed, it became clear that even if anyone had been watching me, Abraham’s ruse had apparently worked, because no one followed me in and no one seemed interested in me now—I was just another local in for late breakfast. I ordered a bottled water and a couple of cookies from the girl at the counter, picked up the sports section of the
Seattle Times
from a rack by the door, and walked out into the lobby, where I took a seat that allowed me to watch both entrances—park side as well as the west entrance on First Avenue.

I read four detailed analyses of the Super Bowl from every possible angle, filling up a solid twenty-five minutes, after which I exited the building onto First. I looked up the sidewalk to the north and Abraham was already there, seated on an iron bench that circled one of the street trees. He smiled and stood when he saw me. “Sergeant Logan! There you are! Man, it’s good to see you after all these years.”