Don't Look Now (8 page)

‘It’s beautiful, sweetie,’ Paris said, ‘Thanks.’ He kissed her on the top of her head in the instant before she grabbed her basket and raced into the living room, leaving a trail of a dozen or so Jelly Bellies in her wake.

‘She worked really hard on that egg,’ Beth said, crossing the kitchen with the coffeepot. She topped off Paris’s cup. ‘All I got was a plain white egg with a “Mom” sticker on it.’

Paris crouched down and began to pick up the jelly beans. ‘She’s getting so big. I nearly walked right by her at the Olive Garden.’

‘Junior high next year.’

The words filled Paris with disquiet. Junior high. His little angel. Paris stood up and dropped the jelly beans into his pocket. ‘Wasn’t it just a few weeks ago she went running up to the glass wall at Sea World yelling “Samoo, Samoo” and got splashed and screamed her brains out?’

Beth smiled. ‘Or, remember the time – I think she was about two, maybe two and a half – when you told her that airplanes were exactly the same size as they looked in the sky, and that they could fly really low and get tangled up in her hair. And then she heard the plane that one day and—’

‘She ran out of the house with a saucepan on her head.’

‘I could’ve killed you for that,’ Beth said, laughing. ‘I think she got over that one about a week ago.’

They went quiet for a few moments, Paris turning the handle of his coffee cup around and around. It had been so long since they’d laughed together the sound was foreign to him. Finally, he asked. ‘So how is she, Beth?’

Beth shrugged. ‘She’s still adjusting. She doesn’t cry every day anymore and she’s doing better in school. Her friends are coming around more now. But she still talks about you all the time. Her daddy, the cop. Even
with
the karate lessons, it’s still her most effective playground threat.’

‘She isn’t … she doesn’t have a boyfriend or anything, does she? Like some kid who walks her home or something? Or some kid she goes to the library with or somewhere?’

‘Jack, she’s
eleven
. You think she’s dating?’

‘Well,’ Paris began, feeling a little stupid, ‘she’s going to be twelve and that’s one year away from being thirteen and that’s a teenager. And teenagers
date
.’

‘You are too much, John Paris. I’ll try to keep the little Lotharios in line for a few more weeks. Keep those raging hormones in check.’

Paris tried to keep a straight face, but it was hopeless. They both laughed.

It didn’t last long, though, and soon they were back to their awkward postures. Paris stood up. ‘Gotta run. Thanks for the coffee.’

‘You don’t have to …’

They stood face to face for a few moments, clumsily out of love. ‘Happy Easter,’ Paris said. He leaned forward to kiss her. On the other side of the huge apartment a key turned noisily in the lock.

‘Bethy?’ It was a man’s voice.

Paris made Dr Bill to be about forty, trim and tanned, collegiately handsome, perhaps an inch or two taller than himself. He wore a navy-blue suit with some kind of club tie, and the standard wing tips that befitted a man of his standing.

‘You must be Jack,’ William said, his hand leading him the entire twenty or so feet between the front door and the entrance to the kitchen. Paris waited until the man’s hand was in the same zip code as his own before reacting.

‘Someone has to be,’ Paris said with a smile. ‘I must have lost the coin toss.’ They shook hands. ‘And you have to be William, right?’

‘Yes … yes …’ He looked at Paris, at Beth, back again, not really sure how to react to this rumpled ex-husband-cop-daddy stranger. ‘Hi hon,’ he said to Beth, but didn’t dare lean across and kiss her.

‘Hate to just run off like this but duty calls, I’m afraid,’ Paris said, immediately thinking that he was starting to sound like a TV cop. ‘Nice to have met you,
Bill
,’ he added. ‘Take good care of my girls.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ William said. His frozen grin remained in place and unthawed.

‘Or I’ll arrest you,’ Paris added with a wink. He kissed Beth on the cheek, and once again shook the rather limp right hand of Dr William Abramson, pediatrician, surrogate daddy and brand-new boyfriend.

Paris stopped at Arabica on the Square and picked up a pair of mega-muffins and two large coffees for Tommy and himself. The coffee at the Justice Center on Sundays was generally a lot worse than during the week, due to the fact that one of the detectives was responsible for brewing it. In line he heard two women discussing the morning’s
Plain Dealer
cover story about the killings. They seemed to think that the killer was a mother-hater, sadly deprived of affection when he was weaned, someone from whom the legal and psychiatric communities could learn a great deal if they would only see the poor man as a victim, not some sort of devil.

Deprivation? The only thing Paris wanted to deprive this sick asshole of was air.

He drove up Fairhill, cut across University Circle and got on Chester Avenue just as the churches let out their nine o’clock Easter masses. Paris noticed the families dressed in their finery: snug little units that sauntered up the avenue, renewed and renewing. They all looked so happy, so together, so cohesive.

He pulled into the lot at the Justice Center just as Tommy was getting out of his car, a year old Camaro. Word had it that somehow Tommy had managed to buy a new Chevy every two years since high school and each one of them had been some combination of white, black and gray. It was only one of Tommy Raposo’s quirks, pulled from his bottomless bag of superstitions. ‘Hey Jack,’ Tommy said. He was dressed casually, much the same as Paris – jeans, polo shirt and deck shoes – but somehow it looked a lot better on him. ‘See the
Plain Dealer
yet?’

Paris shut off the engine of his car and listened to the post-ignition do its drum solo for about twenty seconds. ‘You believe it?’ he finally said, stepping out of the car.

‘You earned it.’

‘I need you big-time on this one,
paesan
.’

‘You own me, Jack,’ Tommy said. ‘I don’t eat, I don’t sleep. I’m yours twenty-four, seven, three-sixty-five till this fucker’s in jail or dead or both.’

‘Let’s hope it ain’t three-sixty-five.’

The two men stepped inside the Justice Center and were met with total chaos.

Sunday morning is the time of the week, especially in law enforcement and emergency-room care, when the brilliant ideas of the previous Saturday night cash in their vouchers. Drunk tanks are always full, assault and drug charges always lead the way among complaints. Everybody is bitchy and sleepy and strung out and hung over and not about to recover anytime soon.

‘Hey
Serpico
…’ someone yelled in Paris’s direction. ‘When’s the movie coming out?’ Paris heard some greasy laughter from the other side of the room. The noise had come from a junkie named Scotty Delfs, whom Paris had used as an informant while working Narcotics.

Paris just nodded his head at Delfs as he and Tommy quickly wound their way through the crowded booking area, holding their coffee cups high.

On the way up, Paris caught a glimpse of something even more ominous than the milling dregs of Cleveland’s underworld. Even though the press conference wasn’t scheduled for another six hours, Paris could see the media already setting up.

The sixth floor was a lot quieter, with only two secretaries on duty and a handful of detectives. Paris looked into the common room and saw Greg Ebersole and Bobby Dietricht talking animatedly about something. It was probably Dietricht bitching about the politics of interdepartmental cocksucking that resulted in him – King Collar – not getting this cherry of an assignment. Paris was going to enjoy running Dietricht ragged.

Paris checked the messages on his desk. Nothing pressing. He started to gather the files when Miriam Bostwick, the secretary whose services he shared with Tommy and Greg Ebersole, poked her head into his office.

‘Congratulations,’ she said in a loud whisper. She made a fist and shook it in the direction of Bobby Dietricht’s office. ‘Go
get
him.’

‘Thanks, Miriam.’

Miriam Bostwick, an old navy pilot’s wife, gave him a quick thumbs-up. ‘I’ve made five sets of copies of the important files,’ she said, pointing toward the copier table. ‘They’re ready whenever you are.’ She winked, walked down the hall.

‘I think she digs you, Jack,’ Tommy said.

‘I’m too old for older women, Tommy. You add up the numbers, it’s frightening.’ He put the files under his arm, grabbed his coffee and exchanged a woeful glance with his partner.

‘This is it, boss,’ Tommy said. ‘Start of something big, eh?’

‘Start of something.’

The commanding officer of the Homicide Unit was Captain Randall Elliott, but everyone in the department referred to him as Oscar Meyer. Behind his back, that is. It seems that one night Elliott, in the throes of passion with his wife,
in flagrante delicto
, heard a noise in the kitchen, threw on a pair of pants, surprised the perpetrator and chased him out the back door. After some hand-to-hand combat Elliott collared the man and took him into custody as three patrol cars arrived at the scene.

Elliott, fired up from the chase, emboldened by the act of besting the intruder, had no idea that a certain part of his anatomy was swinging in the breeze as he dragged the suspect to the patrol car – in plain view of at least thirty neighbors and six cops – his little back-up unit dangling freely from his unzipped station door.

The nickname never went away.

But you never said it to his face. Especially on a day like today. This day, Captain Randall Elliott had the look of a man with a ten-ton mayor on his back.

The task-force was made up of five detectives, including Paris and Tommy Raposo. There was also Greg Ebersole and Cynthia Taggart, on loan from the Fourth. Last, last but not least – certainly not in his own opinion – there was Robert Dietricht, who seemed to be taking the news with a surprising amount of tact and team spirit. Paris wondered what he was up to.

Five big-city detectives, combining their respective Rolodexes of informants, stool pigeons, crackheads, their networks of fringe players, cast a rather wide net, reaching far beyond the city or even the county’s borders. In all, it amounted to a few thousand people who, when push came to shove, could be pressed into action.

In this case, push came to shove the moment the razor descended upon Karen Schallert.

‘We think we have a psychopath on the loose, people,’ Elliott said in his slaggy Midwest brogue, bringing the group to order. ‘Three women, nearly six months, no leads. And we’ve been averaging a half-dozen calls an hour since the
Plain Dealer
broke the story this morning. How do we tell them it’s okay to leave the house? Or that it’s okay to stop at the corner tavern for a drink?’ He turned and looked at Paris. It was Elliott’s awkward way of passing the baton.

Paris rose, opened his portfolio. ‘Let me first brief you on what we have so far. All three women were white and in their twenties but, as you’ll see, they all looked much younger.’ He placed the crime-scene photos on the easel at the foot of the table. ‘Karen Schallert was twenty-three, Emily Reinhardt was twenty-four, Maryann Milius was twenty-two. They were all working women, no criminal records. No drugs, no gang affiliations, no intrigue.’ Paris placed the last of the photos on the easel and stepped to the side. ‘Neither Milius nor Reinhardt were seeing anyone special at the time of their deaths. Maryann Milius had an ex-boyfriend, but he has an airtighter in Phoenix the week of her murder. As far as Schallert goes, we haven’t interviewed her family yet as to the woman’s personal life.’

‘What about murder weapons?’ asked Cyndy Taggart.

‘It looks like a straight razor,’ Paris said. ‘All three had patches of skin removed, but Karen Schallert’s was the only one recovered at the scene. On it was a tattoo of a pair of roses. I spoke with Emily Reinhardt’s father and he told me she had a rose tattoo on her shoulder, which is consistent with the patch of skin that was missing.’

‘Were the other two patches of skin ever found?’ Dietricht asked.

‘No,’ Paris said. ‘What else appears to link these three murders is that the victims were all found with carefully applied make-up on their faces – powder, blush, lipstick, eye-shadow, the works. Reuben believes that in two of the cases the make-up was applied
after
the time of death. Lab’s working on a comparison study which we should have by Tuesday or Wednesday morning. The crime scenes were covered in prints and hair and fiber, along with everything else secreted in a cheap motel room, so it will be a while until it is all sorted out, if ever.’ Paris leaned against the wall. ‘All three women went out to a nightclub alone and were never seen alive again.’

‘It sounds like we’re going undercover,’ Greg Ebersole said.

‘I’m afraid it’s the only way,’ Paris said. ‘This psycho is cruising the bars and that means we cruise with him.’

Paris placed the sketch of the suspect as described by the night clerk of the Quality Inn on to the easel. The oversized Irish walking-hat effectively hid the upper half of the man’s face, and the rest was taken up by tinted glasses and a big mustache. The man’s nose was straight, his jawline square.

‘That’s our boy?’ Tommy asked.

‘That’s him,’ Paris said. ‘White male, thirty, over six feet. Checked into the rooms at both the Quality Inn and the Red Valley Inn. Paid cash for both, of course.’ Paris distributed the files to each of the detectives. ‘Looks like we’re going to be spending some time at the meat-markets.’

‘Could be worse,’ Tommy said. ‘I saw that movie
Cruising
, you know.’ He was referencing the 1980 film where Al Pacino goes undercover into the gay leather culture.

‘What, like heteros don’t get vicious?’ said the politically correct Bobby Dietricht.

Tommy turned slowly and glared at Dietricht. The feud between these two was three months running already, and everybody in the room rolled their eyes because they knew exactly what was coming next. ‘I’m sorry. Did you take that
personally
, Bobby? Because if you did, I apologize. I didn’t mean to offend you.’