Parallel Lies (29 page)

Despite having called it home for the last twelve years, Tyler didn’t like being back. Too many troubled memories. The Chester Washington assault had ruined it forever. As a victim of a legal system that had used racial bias to nail him for excessive force, he had been hurt by this city in ways that could never be reversed. Tyler would never again call this place home.

The December rain was falling more heavily, switching before his eyes to a wet snow with flakes the size of nickels. The cab’s wipers swept them aside, pushing them into lines of slush. Twice, Tyler directed the cabbie to take him fully around a huge city block—four consecutive right-hand turns—as he watched for headlights following. Deciding they were not being tailed, he directed the cabbie to a location within walking distance of Stuckey’s apartment building, not wanting to land at the exact address.

He’d probably driven past this twelve-story condominium dozens of times without noticing it. A blight of similar housing had been constructed in the early ‘70s, ruining the charm of a brownstone neighborhood with boxy, concrete bland-ness. For a cop, and for the residents, too, the District was a city of contrast—a few blocks this way or that and one crossed into dangerous neighborhoods. More often than not, these same street boundaries were along racial lines as well. He had phoned Stuckey from New York, identifying himself as a telemarketer for a long distance phone company, his intention merely to confirm that the man was at home, that it was worth the trip. If the man now wasn’t at home, he would wait. Inside a small lobby used for mailboxes, he approached the columns of apartment call buttons and found Stuckey as 5B. His finger found the buzzer but did not push it, honoring his pact with Nell to wait for her. It was warmer inside than out, so he stayed in the small foyer, awaiting a call from her or her arrival.

Five minutes passed.

Ten.

As he was debating what to do, a pizza delivery boy hurried inside and buzzed an apartment.

Tyler, seeing a way inside, said to the delivery boy, “You’d think she could hurry it up a little, knowing I’m down here. Probably stuck in front of a mirror.”

The pizza boy was buzzed through. He held the door for Tyler. “So surprise her,” the kid said.

Tyler’s claustrophobia demanded the stairs. He reached the fifth floor, feeling good about the pounding in his chest. Passing apartments F, E, and D, he turned left past C and finally arrived at B. The hallway smelled strongly of cigarettes. In front of the apartment door, he stepped onto a thin, rubber-and-felt welcome mat and rang the bell. The mat felt spongy—wet—beneath his shoes.

Tyler looked down, lifting a foot. It wasn’t wet, but tacky. It wasn’t water, but
blood!
He stepped back off the mat immediately, a detective’s response to resist contaminating a possible crime scene. Both of his shoes tracked and smeared the blood onto the worn hallway floor. Tyler’s pulse quickened. He reached for a handkerchief and turned the doorknob, ever the cop. The door opened to the smell of blood and excrement, and he thought: someone’s dead. He knew that this involved him—stepping into blood and leaving his shoe prints on the hall carpet was only a part of it. He knew immediately that whatever had happened here tied directly to his and Nell’s questions at NUR, knew immediately that Nell had been right to fear those security monitors, knew immediately that O’Malley was sticking not thumbs but whole fists into the dike. It wasn’t exactly guilt he experienced so much as responsibility. His actions had caused harm to another human being, whether he had drawn the sword or not. Regret stung him.

Tyler eased the apartment door open but did not step inside, his cell phone already in hand at the ready. He briefly
considered the address here because unlike other major cities, Washington, D.C., was policed by four large-scale police departments and another half dozen smaller ones: D.C. Metro, Capitol Police, U.S. Parks Police, and the FBI. Jurisdiction was a constant concern and occasionally a battleground. The cop in him immediately thought he should call Rhomer or Vogler or Vale—a fellow homicide cop with whom he could work without prejudice. The NTSB agent in him wanted to call Nell or Rucker.

I should have waited for her!
he thought.

A bloody path led from the doorway. Tyler didn’t need a road map. A lamp had been knocked to the floor. There was blood on the ceiling, blood on the walls. He saw a smear on the carpet—Stuckey had either dragged himself across the floor or been moved after the beating. The body was a swollen mass of contusions. Tyler had seen worse, and yet always the same. DOA. The man’s nose had been pushed back into his head, his right eye collapsed under a jigsaw of broken bone, and Tyler knew one of those blows had killed him. He didn’t bother checking for a pulse—the unmoving open-eyed stare told the whole story. Out of habit, Tyler was already processing the scene.

The attack had been immediate—no hellos, no small talk. A man answers the door, gets shoved back into his own apartment, and gets a blow to the head.

Now his gut twisted as he absorbed the blame. With a cop’s attitude he’d gone charging into NUR despite Priest’s warnings.
Damn them all,
he’d thought at the time, not seeing far enough ahead to realize it was a man like Stuckey who would be damned, not the people he’d hoped for.

Tyler looked around for a possible weapon. And there it was: dark, round. Wood or metal. Lying by the victim’s left leg, as it was, and with the light in the room only from the open door, Tyler leaned to move his own shadow out of his way.

The dark stick had a knurled handle and a loop of leather. His chest knotted in pain. It felt as if all the air had suddenly been sucked from the room. That shape, that length of stick, was too familiar. Any cop knew that shape: a nightstick, a billy club. Standard issue for any cop. Tyler’s vision dimmed, and his head swooned as he caught a closer look at the very end of that club where every rookie cop carved his initials.

Unsteady, he reached out and supported himself with the doorjamb, jerking his hand back as he felt something cold and sticky between his fingers, only to see them smeared in blood. He’d left a handprint behind. His
own
handprint.

He glanced back at the stick—the murder weapon—and the initials carved into its end: P. T.

He recognized them only too well.

He had carved them himself in his rookie year on Metro.

“Where are you now?” Tyler asked her. He faintly heard Nell speak to her cabbie, and she answered that she was less than a mile away.

“You were right about O’Malley playing hardball,” he informed her. He wondered how much to share with her. O’Malley had made it personal, had made Tyler the scapegoat—Tyler the cause and the effect. He seethed with anger, for failing to see his own vulnerability and how he might be taken advantage of. But O’Malley had leveraged it all only too cleverly. The stakes had changed. It was no longer an assignment, a job opportunity, a chance for income. O’Malley had singled him out, made him a target, had capitalized on the Chester Washington assault, and in doing so had picked the wrong person.

“Peter?”

He’d left the line open; he wasn’t sure for how long. He
stood on the fifth-floor landing of the fire stairs debating whether to call Homicide.

“Peter?” she repeated, her voice warm with concern.

He told her, “Stuckey’s dead. My rookie nightstick’s lying under him. It’s my M.O.—it’s Chester Washington all over again. They probably knew I’d called him from New York. They certainly knew I came down here. So now it’s made to look as if I lose my temper and pound the guy clear to heaven. Maybe they meant to kill him, maybe not. Doesn’t matter now. All they needed to do was steal my stick. The rest was timing.”

“You’ve got to get out of there,” she said.

“Run from a crime scene?” asked the former homicide cop. “With this kind of evidence stacked up? Are you kidding me?” He mumbled, “That’s the final nail in the coffin. That’s what they
want
me to do.” He tried to settle himself, for he knew intuitively that the next few decisions he made would dictate the next few weeks, months, maybe years of his life. He said, “Either way, I’m screwed. If I call it in and stay, they win: I’m out of the picture, which is what they want. If I run, and this thing’s connected to me, which it’s going to be, I’m a fugitive. I’ll tell you one thing: they must have a lot to hide, Nell.”

“Get that nightstick and get the hell out of there,” she encouraged. “You must still have friends on the department. Call them. Explain it—” He heard her talk to the driver. “I’m here. Where are you?”

“Stairwell. But the entrance is locked.” He could barely see straight.

“Get back to the apartment. Get the nightstick. Buzz me through.” He cracked open the door to the hallway. His bloody shoe prints formed a slowly fading route toward the fire stairs. Then he looked down at his hand on the door pull: more prints to worry about. Evidential quicksand: the more he moved, the deeper he sank.

The cell phone still to his ear, he heard the doorbell buzzing from Stuckey’s apartment. In the phone he heard, “I’m here. I’m buzzing you. Peter? Get me in. I can help you.”

“Don’t touch anything,” he said. “Wipe down the buzzer. Get well away from here and give me a minute. I’ll find you. Must be someplace to wait for me. I’ll call you.”

“Let me in!”

“No. One of us is enough. You have to be clean, Nell, or they take both of us out. I’ll meet you in a minute.”

“Peter!”

“No arguments.” He disconnected, reconsidering his options. Could he trick them? Get out of the city, leave some crumbs for them to follow, and then return to clear this up? On the surface, taking the nightstick seemed the thing to do—it would no doubt be carrying prints of his, and latent prints could not be dated. He could smear the handprint on the doorjamb, the shoe prints in the hall, and dispose of the nightstick forever. But he had made the long distance call to Stuckey only hours earlier; he’d ridden in a city cab arriving close to here. He could hear a detective like himself making hay over the fact he’d asked the cab to stop a block away. If O’Malley’s people made a few anonymous calls, the evidence would stack up no matter how Tyler compromised the scene.

Detective Eddie Vale answered on the second ring. “Vale.”

“It’s me: Tyler.”

“Pete? God damn!”

Tyler cut right through old home week. “There’s a body going cold on a floor of apartment five B, fourteen-twenty-seven R, Northwest. Guy has been beaten to shit. Latents matching my prints are no doubt going to be found on what turns out to be my rookie nightstick, and on the doorjamb, too. Shoe prints, in the dead guy’s blood, outside the front door will match my size. I stick around, I’m looking at a
couple months in and out of court, and probably some serious time in lockup because it’ll be viewed as a second offense. And that’s if I’m
lucky.”

Vale repeated the address and said, “Where are you now?”

“On the scene.”

“Stay there.”

“No can do, though I wish I could. It’s supposed to mirror Chester Washington so you guys can fit the square peg in the square hole. It’s supposed to take me off the case I’m working for Rucker over at NTSB. I’m going to flee the scene, Eddie, but I’m making this call first to try and set things straight.”

“Do
not
flee the scene,” Vale protested. “Let me get there. Just me. Alone. Let’s look at it, Pete. Use your head here. You run and what’s it going to look like?”

Tyler theorized, “If a friendly face arrived here first, maybe he’d think I’m too smart to leave my own nightstick under the body, too smart not to wipe down the doorjamb and smear the footprints. I’d have to explain how so much blood got on the outside mat when there’s only splatter on and around the doorjamb. How’d all that blood walk itself outside onto the mat? I’ll tell you how: it was transferred there to make sure I left shoe prints for you guys.” He added, “Never mind that I don’t have a drop of blood on my clothing. If I stuck around, it would be to show you that. I rode the Metroliner from New York tonight—you can check on that—and chances are someone on that train or the cabbie who picked me up at Union Station and dropped me here might remember these same clothes I’m wearing.” He paused a moment, giving Vale time to take the notes that Tyler knew he was taking. “But all that’s a little thin, you know, Eddie? That’s not exactly ice I want to skate on. And no matter what, if I pause a moment—even to make this phone call—whoever did this wins, because the object is to tie me up so badly that I bail on the case I’m working.”

The connection hung between them, neither man speaking.

“I ain’t your attorney, Pete, but it’s damn stupid to flee the scene, and you know it.”

“I’m going to flee the scene, only to pull these guys off. They have the power to arrest. They could move me away from my friends like you, Eddie. I made this call first, and I want that in the jacket.”

“The nightstick? Your place broken into?”

“I haven’t been there in a week. It must have been hit. Is there evidence of that? I would doubt it. That would make the case against me pretty thin, and that’s not the intention here.”