Authors: Kate Kinsey

Red (3 page)

BOOK: Red

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Here we go, Hanson thought, steeling himself. The genital mutilation.

The man’s pride and joy had been cut into strips of meat. It hung loosely together by gristle, and something that looked . . . well, spongy.

Hanson felt his balls shrink up into his body, as if trying to hide.

“Oh, not that,” Miles said dismissively. “I was saving that for last. No, look here—”

Miles pried the corpse’s mouth open.

Roger’s tongue was missing.

“Perimortum,” Miles said.

“You mean he was still alive?” Hanson asked.

Miles nodded, and whatever professional gleam might have been in his eyes faded.

“So, what’s our cause of death?” Griggs asked.

“I’m still working,” Miles said. “But if I had to give you a COD now, I’d say massive blood loss. He’s practically dry.”

Jesus. Someone had beaten the hell out of him, cut out his tongue and shredded his penis . . . And then left him, barely alive, to bleed to death.

It was enough to make a guy wanna get drunk.

But first somebody had to go tell Roger’s wife that her husband wasn’t coming home.

Chapter 5

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

—W
ILLIAM
F
AULKNER

H
anson hated this part of his job.

Secondary victims of a crime all had the same look when he first met them. They might be confused and polite (a middle-class soccer mom), or pissed and suspicious (the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder who have no reason to trust a badge), but there was always hope and a question in their eyes. He knew that the words about to come out of his mouth would change everything, forever. As soon as he spoke the words, that flicker of hope was snuffed out like a candle.

Marla Banks had answered the door like she’d known something was wrong. Car accident, that was most likely what she thought. No one ever expected murder, certainly not this well-dressed woman in a pricey gated community.

She simply sat down on the sofa as if her legs could no longer hold her upright. She blinked first at Hanson, then at Griggs.

Hanson had to repeat it twice before some comprehension came into her eyes.

“Are you sure?” she asked in a childlike voice.

They always asked that.
Please, please, it’s a mistake. It’s got to be a mistake.

“I knew something was wrong,” she said, still in that tiny, thin voice. “He called around six thirty and said he probably wouldn’t make it home for dinner.”

“Does that happen a lot?” Hanson asked.

“But then it got later and later,” she went on. “I kept trying to think of all kinds of reasons. Like, maybe a client had taken him to dinner or they had gone for a drink after work . . .”

“Mrs. Banks, did Roger work late a lot?” Hanson repeated.

She didn’t respond, just stared at the book of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings on the coffee table.

He didn’t mind her silence. It was better than what would come next.

“What happened?” she asked finally. “Was he robbed? Was it a mugging?”

Hanson wondered how much she could handle right now. It was better that she heard the details from him than from the six o’clock news.

“It doesn’t look like a mugging. He still had his wallet, and his cash and credit cards were still in it.”

“I called the police last night,” she said hurriedly, as if fearing what he might say next. “They told me Roger had to be missing for at least forty-eight hours before I could file a report.”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s standard procedure.”

“Was it a car-jacking?” she continued. “Were they after the car?”

“No, ma’am,” Hanson explained. “His car is still in the parking garage where we found him.”

“Did you call him when he didn’t come home?” Griggs asked.

“I called the office around nine,” she said, turning to stare at Griggs, “but I just got the answering machine. I called his cell, but it went to voice mail. I must have called him a dozen times, every hour.”

The tears started, just a slow ooze from the corners of her eyes.

“When did you last see your husband?” Hanson asked.

She looked up at him blankly.

“What?”

Hanson repeated the question.

“At lunch,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “It was my birthday . . .”

Christ.
More birthdays will come, Hanson thought, but he doubted she’d ever celebrate another one.

“Where was that?”

She blinked and hesitated.

“Where did you and your husband have lunch?”

Hanson hated this part, too. Looking at a widow and wondering if she had done it. He doubted it, just from the violence of the attack, but she could have hired someone.

“Caesars.”

He nodded, making a note. Trendy little Italian place downtown, a few blocks from Roger’s office.

“And he seemed okay? Nothing bothering him?”

“He was fine.” She started to say something else, but then covered her face with her hands and began crying in earnest.

“Is there someone we can call for you?”

She shook her head. The two detectives stood there until she looked up again, drawing in a great hiccupping breath.

“What happened?” she asked, stronger this time, almost angry. “Will you just tell me what happened to Roger?”

“It looks like someone was waiting for him in the garage. They attacked him with something, most likely a baseball bat—”

“Oh, my God—” Marla was on her feet, hand over her mouth, rushing from the room.

Hanson could hear her retching just down the hall. He looked over at Griggs, who just shrugged.

“Nice house,” Griggs said softly, eyeing the flat-screen and stereo system; the family portrait above the fireplace; the Oriental rug on the hardwood floor.

Hanson looked around the room as well, trying to get a feel for Roger Banks’s life. Tidy, prosperous, comfortable.

“She’s a nice-looking woman, too.” Griggs squinted at a photograph on the mantel. “I mean, she’s probably attractive when she’s not, you know. Crying and all.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Hanson groaned softly.

“Hey, I’m a guy, I can’t help it,” Griggs whispered. “She’s a little on the plump side, but nice curves, if you know what I mean.”

Hanson knew exactly what he meant. Griggs was a self-confessed “tit man,” and Marla Banks did have a generous bosom.

“Oh, excuse me,” Griggs grumbled low. “I forgot, she ain’t your type. No, you like ’em with long legs, red hair, and handcuffs—”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Griggs had become his partner after Gina left the force, and Hanson had spent the first two weeks listening to his adolescent bullshit with gritted teeth and throbbing temples. Finally, Griggs had brought up her name (her tits, actually) one too many times and Hanson had punched him in the face.

After that, Griggs had kept his mouth shut, mostly. But every now and then, he just had to get in a little dig. He never mentioned her name again, though. No one ever mentioned her name, not to Hanson.

Marla came back into the room. She steadied herself on a chair as she made her way to the sofa.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“No apology necessary,” Hanson said.

“Did your husband have any enemies?” Griggs asked. “Anybody that had it in for him?”

“Of course not,” Marla said, looking amazed.

“He was a lawyer, right?” Griggs continued. “Maybe a client got pissed off? A nasty divorce case, maybe?”

She went still for a moment, and Tom thought she was about to say something. But she just shook her head.

“Roger didn’t handle divorces. He’s in corporate law . . .” She caught herself. “He was, I mean. Everybody
loved
Roger.”

Hanson had to ask, and he hated that, too.

“What about you? Were you and your husband getting along?”

“Oh, my God—” Marla looked at him with the anguished eyes of the lost. Then her voice broke, and she sobbed. “Yes. Oh, my God, you have no idea how much I loved that man.”

Chapter 6

There are moments when, whatever the position of the body, the soul is on its knees.

—V
ICTOR
H
UGO

B
usiness associates, his paralegal, his neighbors . . . all agreed Roger Banks was a decent guy. More than decent. He was a church deacon who coached Little League baseball and gave money to animal shelters and AIDS hospices.

“He could still be a bastard,” Griggs said, leaning back in his chair and shoving a handful of Cheetos into his mouth. “Churches are full of them. And don’t even get me started on what working with
kids
could mean.”

“He and his wife serve turkey at the local homeless shelter on Thanksgiving,” Hanson said, without looking up. “They’ve done it for the past nine years.”

“So?”

“So, generally speaking, assholes don’t go that far just to look good to the neighbors. You know what those guys at the shelter smell like.”

“So they’re freakin’ Ozzie and Harriet.” Griggs crunched another handful of curls. “Not a damned hint of anything hinky.”

Griggs reached for a manila folder on Hanson’s desk.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Don’t get that orange crap all over everything, all right?”

Frustration made Hanson irritable. Apparently it just made Griggs hungry.

Griggs wiped his hand on the papers spread on his own desk and raised his palms to his partner as if to say,
Look, Ma!
before grinning and pulling the file off of Hanson’s.

“You find anything on the kids?” he asked. “A boy and a girl, right?”

“Yeah. The girl just got married. She’s an ophthalmologist—”

“A what?” Griggs asked, his eyebrows drawing into a single ridge.

“An eye doctor.”

“I thought that was an optometrist?”

“It’s a different kind of eye doctor,” Hanson explained, pawing through the piles of paper in search of a highlighter.

“So they both sell glasses. What’s the difference?”

“An ophthalmologist makes more money. That’s why they get the extra letters.”

The daughter was living in Memphis with her new husband, who was also an ophthalmologist. The son was a senior at the University of Georgia, pre-law, on the dean’s list.

Roger’s bank accounts were neat and tidy as well, with surprisingly little credit card debt. His credit rating was as solid and respectable as the man himself seemed to be.

It was damned annoying. They couldn’t find anybody with a less than kind word to say about Roger Banks.

Griggs was flipping through Roger’s phone records—the local usage details—for the twentieth time.

“Looking at his LUDs, all I can tell is that Roger was paying a fortune in overage charges,” Griggs said. “He needed a better calling plan.”

“This guy knew practically everybody,” Hanson grumbled. “He’s even got calls from the governor.”

“Shit,” Griggs grunted. “That’s all we need. A VIP murder victim.”

“Christ, between his home phone, his office, and cell, we could spend weeks tracking them all down.” Hanson dragged a hand through his hair.

They had already spent three days slogging through his voice mail. Roger’s cell was programmed to automatically save voice mails for thirty days. That was a
lot
of messages.

Most were from his wife, messages like: “What do you want for dinner?” “How late are you going to be?” “Can you bring home a loaf of bread?”
Yada yada yada.

Another twenty or so were from clients and business associates, a mind-numbing litany of meetings, appointments, reschedulings, and tee times.

But there were four messages they couldn’t explain, all from the same person, all nearly identical.

“Lemme hear that last one again,” Griggs said.

Hanson pulled it up on the computer.

“Roger, sir?” It was a female voice, relatively young but uncertain, anxious. “It’s Cherry. I’m sorry to bother you, but please call me back as soon as you can. Okay?”

“She doesn’t leave a number,” Griggs said. “Is it in his phone book?”

“Yep. Saved under Cherry, no last name or other information.” Hanson called out the number 555-471-6696.

“And no leads on the number because it’s a prepaid cell,” Griggs sighed. He leaned back and threw his pencil into the ceiling tile. The pencil just hung there, and he sat staring at it.

Hanson sighed. Sometimes working with Griggs was like being back in middle school.

“So far, we’ve only got three things anywhere near a lead.” Griggs began ticking them off on his right hand. “One, Marla lied about having lunch with her husband the day he was killed—”

“That’s got to be a simple mistake. You heard those messages.”

The last eight messages on Roger Banks’s phone were from Marla on the night he died. They were painful to listen to, moving from mildly concerned to frantic. If Marla was lying, then she could give Meryl Streep a run for the money.

“Whatever,” Griggs grunted. Another finger. “Two, we got a couple of long, light brown hairs.”

“Probably his wife’s. The color matches.”

“We still gotta get a sample to check.” Griggs held up a third finger. “Three, we got this Cherry chickie.”

“Shit.” Hanson sighed. “Let’s go back to Marla Banks’s house and get this over with.”

BOOK: Red

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