DEAD BY WEDNESDAY (4 page)

She pulled her cell phone from her purse, intending to check in with Liz. There was a missed call and a voice mail. She didn’t recognize the number.

She listened to the voice mail and felt sick. She played it again. Then let her phone drop back into her purse.

“What’s wrong?” Robert asked, checking his rearview mirror.

There was no reason to tell him. She’d been handling things on her own for a long time. She’d handle this, too.

“Carmen?” he said, his voice soft. “Was that Sage?”

She was so tired of being strong and so damn worried about Raoul. “That was Raoul’s homeroom teacher. She wanted me to know that Raoul is failing two of his classes. He rarely turns in homework and on the last essay test, over half of his answers were wrong.”

Robert nodded. “Is he a pretty good student, usually?”

“He’s always made the honor roll. Oh, my gosh, I’ve never gotten a call like this. Never dreamed I’d get one.”

“So talk to him. You’re good at that,” Robert said with an encouraging smile.

Carmen chewed on the corner of her lip. “It’s not just the grades. There’s something else going on but I have no idea what it is. He’s changing. Right in front of my eyes. He won’t talk to me. It’s as if he doesn’t even like me.”

Robert slipped the car into a parking place in front of her apartment, shut it off and turned toward her. “Look, take it from somebody who used to be a boy,” he said with a smile. “It’s tough being a freshman in high school. He likes you. He just doesn’t know how to show it.”

“That’s what Liz says.”

“She’s right.”

Carmen shook her head. “I know Raoul better than I know anybody. It’s been just the two of us for a long time. Our older brother, Hector, died when I was eighteen and Raoul was barely four. About a year later, our parents were killed in a car accident. I raised Raoul from that point.”

“You were really just a kid yourself. That was a big responsibility you took on.”

“I guess. It never entered my mind to do anything different. I was in college by then. We both did our homework at the kitchen table,” she said, smiling at the memory.

“Good bonding time,” Robert said.

She nodded. “I know him as well as I know myself. That’s how I know that there’s something else going on here. I just have to figure it out before it’s too late.” She swallowed hard. “Hector was shot by a rival gang member. He had just turned twenty.” She closed her eyes for just a second, then opened them and looked at him. “I can’t lose another brother. I just can’t.”

“You lost a great deal in a short period of time. Yet you went on, made a good life for yourself and your brother. It could not have been easy.”

He seemed so sincere in his praise. She hadn’t told him to impress him. She’d just wanted him to understand.

“I’ll figure something out,” she said, trying to change the subject.

“I could talk to him,” Robert said.

It was a nice offer but it wouldn’t work. “He doesn’t know you. He’s not going to trust you.”

Robert shrugged. “Okay. So I get to know him. Invite me over for dinner tonight. I’ll pick something up on my way—maybe Chinese?”

“That’s impossible,” she blurted out.

“Okay. No Chinese. Italian? Although we just had pizza,” Robert said.

He was deliberately misunderstanding her. “I’m sure you have better things to do than have dinner with a paranoid twenty-nine-year-old and a snarling teenage boy.” When Liz had first started dating Sawyer, she’d confided that Robert was a bit of playboy.

“You’re not paranoid, and unless he’s rabid, I can take a little snarling from a fifteen-year-old.”

“I don’t know why you’d want to do this,” Carmen said, shaking her head.

“Come on. It’s my version of community service,” he said easily. “You’re not going to deny me the opportunity for that, are you?”

Chapter Four

From Carmen’s apartment, Robert drove directly back to the police station. When he got there, he saw that Alderman Franconi was in Lieutenant Fischer’s office. The door was closed, but the blinds were open just enough that Robert and every other person in the squad room understood that Alderman Franconi wasn’t happy.

He made eye contact with Sawyer, who was sipping on a cup of coffee and eating some kind of pastry. He had a newspaper spread out on his desk. The headline said it all. Police Frustrated with Lack of Progress.

Frustrated? Oh, yeah.

As was the alderman, who spent another three minutes in the lieutenant’s face before turning and leaving. When he walked through the squad room, he didn’t look at or talk to anyone. Once he was out of the room, all heads turned toward the lieutenant’s office. The man was standing in the door, not looking any worse for wear. It would take more than a frustrated alderman to rattle him.

“Well,” Lieutenant Fischer said, his tone dry. “As you may have gathered, Alderman Franconi wants us to find the killer and string him up at Daley Plaza. Or we’ll all be looking for new work.”

Nobody reacted to the last line. It was this particular alderman’s style to threaten jobs. He did it when the crowd control at the summer festivals didn’t go well. He was certainly going to do it now. The alderman was a jerk about most things. He did have a dead nephew, however, so everybody was more inclined to cut him some slack.

Robert didn’t have to have family to understand family. It had just been his mom and him, with a progression of husbands and live-ins over the years. His mom had been married five times, no, make that six. He sometimes forgot number four. That one had lasted less than six months. One had continued on for five years but Robert was convinced that was because the man was an over-the-road trucker and gone most of the time. That was actually the one guy he’d liked.

The weird thing was, his mother wasn’t a bad person. People generally liked her. She was the life of the party. Had a good sense of humor, knew how to tell a joke. She drank too much, perhaps. But she was a pleasant drunk, not a mean one. She mostly made bad choices. Because she couldn’t stand being without a man, couldn’t stand being alone. And so whatever loser came along got credit for having testosterone, and was immediately a viable prospect.

Robert had been three when his biological dad had been killed in a car accident. His mother, who had been a beautiful woman with her blond hair and green eyes, had remarried within the year, although Robert didn’t even remember that guy.

Now, if he felt inclined to ever look back, which he did not, the only way he could keep the parade straight in his head was to go to the pictures that his mother had stuffed in a shoe box. Every year, on his birthday, she’d taken a picture. And the man of the hour had always been in one of the shots.

None of them had been inclined to adopt him, or maybe his mother had never wanted that. He wasn’t sure. From a very early age, before he even knew what the word meant, he’d considered them boarders in his home. There but not important. Certainly not family.

Her latest husband was retired military. He wore black shoes that always had a nice shine and he grew orchids in the small garden behind their house. His name was Norman. She called him Normie.

The man didn’t say much when Robert visited. But then again, getting a word in edgewise was a feat when his mother was revved up. As Sawyer would say, she could talk the ears off a chicken.

Robert sat down at his desk and was surprised to see two pink message slips in Tasha’s scrawling handwriting. Hardly anybody left messages anymore. They either knew him well enough to call his cell phone or they left a voice mail on his office line.

These were both personal. One from Mandy, the other from Janine. They both had his cell number.

But then again, he hadn’t been answering any of their calls for the past couple of weeks. He looked up when a shadow crossed in front of his desk. Tasha, an unlit cigarette hanging from her mouth, was buttoning her coat. Every morning at exactly ten o’clock, their department clerk went outside to smoke. It didn’t matter how hot or how cold. “Who’s the lucky one tonight?” she asked.

He shrugged.

“When in doubt,” Tasha said, “use FIFO. First in, first out. Janine gets the nod. Your phone was ringing when I got here this morning. If you ask me, she’s a bit needy.”

He folded the slips and put them under his stapler. “I’ll give them both a call later.”

Tasha frowned at him. She leaned over and laid the back of her hand against his forehead. “Are you sick?”

“I’m fine. Busy.” Robert yanked open a file drawer so hard that it jarred the pencil holder on his desk.

Sawyer folded his paper and frowned at him. “Everything okay?” he asked. Then his expression changed. “Damn. Something happened at the coffee shop, didn’t it?” He pushed his chair back and started to stand up.

“I handled it,” Robert said, motioning for Sawyer to sit back down. “Everybody is okay, but I don’t like the dad. Frank Sage is a big guy and I think he’s used to intimidating people with his size.”

“I’ve known you for a long time, Robert, and I’ve never seen you intimidated by anything.”

Good thing Sawyer had no idea how nervous he’d been last night, when suddenly it was just him and Carmen sitting in Sawyer’s living room. He’d felt as if his tongue had grown until it was too big for his mouth. Then she’d broken the tension and everything had been fine.

Better than fine. It had been one of the nicest nights that he’d spent in a long time. And he hadn’t wanted it to end. When it had and he’d offered to follow her back to her apartment, he’d been afraid that she might have been offended.

She’d been on her own for a long time, successfully supporting her brother and herself. He understood feminism. Other than Sawyer, his two best other partners had been women. Both highly skilled and competent as hell.

And Carmen Jimenez was likely every bit as smart as they had been. But she didn’t have the same training and she sure as heck wasn’t packing a gun. A lone female, traveling at night, was a target.

It had just made sense for him to offer to follow her home. What hadn’t made sense was that for the entire drive he’d debated whether he should ask to come in. In the end, he’d decided against it. Maybe it had been the memory of her running into the bathroom to avoid dancing with him. Maybe it had been that the night had been so nice that he didn’t want to take the chance of spoiling it with a refusal.

Maybe it was because he hadn’t figured out what to do about Carmen. He’d spent months trying to forget how she’d felt in his arms but he hadn’t been able to. What the hell did that mean?

So, he’d made sure she got inside safely and he’d gone home. He’d gone to bed thinking about her, had dreamed about her, and when he’d gotten out of bed at the crack of dawn, he’d known that he was going to be waiting in that coffee shop.

Good instincts.
That’s what his boss had written on his last performance appraisal. Robert liked to think that he listened to his gut. And his gut had been telling him to be there.

Those instincts had been front and center when he’d pushed for the invitation to have dinner tonight with Carmen and Raoul. And he’d been happy when she’d finally said yes, insisting that she would cook.

But for some reason, he didn’t feel inclined to share that information with Sawyer. “What’s the plan today?” Robert asked.

“More knocking on doors. Somebody saw something.”

“Maybe not. The body was found early Wednesday morning. It was below zero on Tuesday night. There probably weren’t that many people out and about after midnight, not like they would have been on a summer evening.”

“Well, we have to hope somebody was taking their dog out, or maybe they made an emergency run for cigarettes. We need a witness,” Sawyer said.

They needed something. Right now, Robert would settle for some old-fashioned luck.

* * *

W
HEN
R
AOUL
UNLOCKED
the apartment door, he could smell the sauce. Something else, too. Something chocolate.

“Raoul,” his sister greeted him. She pinched his cheek as he walked past. “How was band practice?”

“Okay,” Raoul said, leaning his trombone case up against the counter. “Some girl who plays the flute had a meltdown. We had to stay late to make up the time.”

“No problem. I’m running behind, too.”

“Something smells good,” he said. He started to reach for the brownie pan.

She stuck out her wooden spoon and tapped his hand. “You have to wait. It’s for dessert.”

“You never make dessert.”

She shrugged. “We’re having company.”

They never had company. Well, almost never. Sometimes Old Lady Curtiss from down the hall ate with them. She smelled like lilacs and cough medicine.

“An acquaintance I met through work,” Carmen said.

“Who?”

She turned her back to him and stirred the sauce. “His name is Robert Hanson.”

A man? The only man at OCM was Jamison, his sister’s boss. “What does he do there?”

“He’s a police officer. A detective. You might remember him from Liz and Sawyer’s wedding. He was the best man.”

“Oh, yeah. He gave a funny speech at the reception.”

“Yes, that’s him.”

“Why is a cop coming for dinner?” He walked around to the other side of the stove so that he could see her face.

“Because I asked him to. He’s been helpful with a situation at work and I thought it would be nice if I fixed him dinner.” She looked at her watch, then at the clock on the wall. “Shoot. I’ve got to get dressed. He’ll be here any minute.” She thrust the spoon in his hand. “Keep stirring.”

She left the room as Raoul dropped the spoon in the sauce and watched it sink to the bottom.

* * *

R
OBERT
JUGGLED
WINE
, bread and a bouquet of fresh flowers as he walked up the apartment stairs. He stood outside the door and tried to remember that he’d probably gone to dinner at some woman’s house at least a hundred times before.

But Carmen wasn’t just some woman. She was Liz Montgomery’s best friend, for one thing. She was totally hot for another. And when she smiled, it seemed as if the world suddenly became a better place.

Damn. He should take up writing greeting cards.

He’d worried that he might be late. His mother had called just as he’d walked into the florist. He’d stepped outside the small shop and stood in the cold so that he could have some privacy. It had been a short conversation. She’d apologized for bothering him, he assured her it was no bother, and then she’d dropped what might have been a zinger if he hadn’t been waiting for the call for some time.
Normie is leaving.

He’d promised to stop over the following night. That had seemed to make her happy. It was a pattern of behavior they’d perfected over the years.

He’d hung up, bought his flowers and here he was. He glanced at his watch. One minute early.

He kicked the bottom of the door with the toe of his shoe, then stepped back so that he could be seen through the peephole. He smiled and held up the loot. The door opened. A young Hispanic boy, dark and fine-boned like his sister, stood there. He was holding a fat orange cat.

“I’m Robert,” he said. “You must be Raoul.”

The boy didn’t say yes or no. He simply stepped aside and motioned him in. “Carmen’s changing her clothes.”

“No problem. Where should I put this?”

Raoul pointed to the counter. The cat squirmed in his arms and he immediately bent down and placed her gently on the floor.

Robert bent down to scratch her head but she skirted away. Okay. The cat and the kid had the same sort of attitude.

Robert watched the boy walk over to the stove, immediately noting the limp, as though his right leg might be just a bit shorter than his left.

“I hear you play the trombone.” Robert leaned against the counter.

“That’s right,” Raoul said. The kid took tongs and dug a spoon out of the sauce.

“Where do you go to school?”

“Mahoney High.”

“Really? That’s pretty far from here. How come you don’t go to a neighborhood school?”

“Because I won’t let him.”

Robert whirled around. Carmen stood in the doorway. She wore a white sweater and a black skirt. It wasn’t short, but tight enough to be very interesting. Her hair was piled up on top of her head in a haphazard sort of fashion.

He was struck again by how small she was. She couldn’t have been more than five-three and a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet. Not his type at all.

Why was his heart pounding as if he was at the end of a 5K?

“Mahoney High School,” she said, as she walked over to the stove and sniffed the sauce, “graduates more than eighty percent of the students who start there as freshman. That’s almost twice as good as some of the neighborhood schools.”

“Did you go there?” Robert asked, handing her the wine.

She shook her head. “No. I did the neighborhood thing.”

“Looks like you turned out okay.”

She shrugged. “Looks can be deceiving.”

He started to make some quip about liking bad girls, but in deference to Raoul, he kept it to himself. “Should I slice the bread?” he asked.

She nodded, handed him a knife and pointed toward a wooden cutting board on the counter. “The flowers are beautiful,” she said. “Thank you.”

Her tone was almost wary, and he wondered if he’d gone too far. “It’s January,” he said. “We should grasp on to every sign of spring we can.”

She smiled. “You’re right. At lunch today, Liz and I sneaked out and bought spring soap. We put some in every bathroom at OCM.”

“Spring soap?” he repeated. He put the bread that he’d sliced into the basket that she passed to him.

“Yeah, you know. There are winter soaps, like cranberry-apple or peppermint-spice. Spring soaps are totally different. When you wash your hands, you can almost image that you’re somewhere tropical.”

“I never gave that much thought before,” he said.