River of Glass (19 page)

“And you want to brainstorm about why?” It was how we’d often worked, one of us handling the interrogation, the other taking note of anomalous responses and making suggestions for the next round of attack.

“I do. But leave your shadow at home.”

“Hold on a minute.” I looked down at Paul, whose head was bent, tongue stuck out in concentration. I sighed. “I’ll be right there.”

Khanh looked up. “Be right where?”

“They picked up Karlo Savitch. Frank wants me to watch the interrogation. Can you take care of Paul until I get back?”

Her chin came up. “I go you.”

“Either you watch Paulie, or we both stay here.”

She lowered her head, but not before I saw the flash of anger—or maybe desperation—in her eyes. “Okay,” she said, finally. “I stay Paul. You find out where Tuyet.”

“I just watch. I don’t get to ask questions. Don’t worry. We’re getting close.” I knelt beside Paul, whose face was puckered with disappointment.

“Police stuff?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, buddy. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Your Aunt Khanh will help you.”

He turned his face away, laid his head on the table, and coughed. “Don’t want Aunt Khanh.”

“I know, Sport. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” I ruffled his hair, kissed the top of his head, and left them to their mutual disappointment.

K
ARLO SAVITCH
was built like a tent peg—big head and broad shoulders tapering down to a narrow waist and long, thin legs. While I watched through the two-way mirror, he shook a tangle of mud-brown hair out of his eyes and smoothed his mustache with a thick finger. That done, he folded his hands on the table in front of him. His sleeves were rolled up, the skin of his forearms unmarked. It had been more than a week since the Asian girl’s murder, but I would have been happier to see the tracks of her nails in his skin.

Savitch lowered his head. Picked at a nail. Wiry black hairs crept down the back of his neck and into the collar of his wrinkled button-down shirt.

Frank went in and sat across from him. Savitch unfolded his hands and leaned back in his chair, teeth bared in a mocking grin. A man barely pretending to be civilized. Even taking into account that he had gamed the system before and won, he was too cocky for a guy who’d left DNA at a murder scene.

Frank said, “We can end this right here, Karlo. We have skin and blood under the dead girl’s fingernails. So all you have to do is let us do a little DNA swab, and we can rule you out. No reason not to, right? Unless, of course, you’re guilty.”

Savitch shrugged. In a thick, Eastern European accent, he said, “Go ahead. Take your DNA. You will find nothing. I did not kill this girl.”

“You were recognized, identified by a witness.”

Savitch leered. “Little blonde stripper I see on TV? No one believe that little whore. Especially when she say she did not get good look at face. Especially since no proof man she saw is even killer.”

Especially since she’s dead
, I thought. And wasn’t that convenient?

Frank said, “We know you were there, Karlo, and we know the girl was killed around the same time.” He looked down at the file in his hand. “Says here ‘aggravated assault.’ ‘Assault with a deadly weapon.’ ‘Assault and battery.’ Looks like you have a temper, Karlo.”

“I am a passionate man. So what does that matter? I was never convicted of these things.”

“Because the victims were afraid of you. This here is what we call a pattern, a pattern of losing control. So maybe this woman did something that ticked you off, made you lose control. We’ve all been there with our women, right?”

Frank’s voice was solid, but one eyelid twitched, and I knew he was thinking of Patrice and the forty years of marriage in which he’d never raised—or wanted to raise—a hand to her.

Karlo said, “I never lose control.”

“The guy who killed her put his forearm around her throat, like this.” Frank pantomimed the action with an invisible victim. “Picked her up off the ground so she couldn’t breathe and squeezed so hard the bone in her neck broke. You were in control when you did that?”

“I did not kill this woman.”

“If you didn’t kill her, maybe you saw something that could help us find the guy who did.”

“I mind my own business. Why should I care who kill this girl?”

“You don’t think a woman’s life is worth a few minutes of your time?”

Karlo shrugged again. “World is full of women. Always more where that one came from.”

“You realize that’s not exactly the viewpoint of a morally evolved human being. Or even just a human being.”

“I see news report. This girl is nobody. Is not like somebody kill doctor making cure for cancer.” Savitch leaned back, tipping up the front legs of the chair. “You take DNA now. You see. Then I want lawyer.”

And just like that, it was over.

24

B
ack in the observation room, Frank said, “What do you think?”

“You were right. He’s too calm.”

“You think he’s the guy?”

I looked at Savitch, who sprawled in the uncomfortable chair, humming something that might have been a Ukrainian folk song. Smug smile, butcher’s hands, the tattoo Lupita had described cutting across his face.

World is full of women. Always more where that one came from.

“Yeah, I think he’s the guy.”

“I think so too. We got a search warrant based on the picture and his past history. It was iffy, but we got a sympathetic judge, and Malone pushed hard on the way the victim had been tortured and the possibility that he might have another girl stashed somewhere.”

“Malone? You’re kidding.”

“She’s a pain in the ass, but she takes kidnapping and torturing women as seriously as the rest of us.”

“Point taken. Find anything?”

“Couple of beers in the fridge, a few skin magazines lying around. Mostly run-of-the-mill stuff, with one Bondage & Domination rag thrown into the mix. Nothing to link him to our victim or your missing girl. But he had a veritable arsenal. Guns and knives in every room, and I’m not talking your grandma’s BB gun.”

“Does he live in a house or an apartment?”

“Apartment.”

“He isn’t going to stash the girl there.”

“So if he’s the guy, he’s got another place. But we couldn’t find any record of one.”

“The guy who took Tuyet is part Asian, so there are at least two of them. Maybe they use the other guy’s place. And maybe the DNA belongs to him.”

“If it does, you’d better come up with that witness. Because without that DNA, we’ve got nothing.”

While I was trying to figure out how to convince Lupita to come back from Mexico and testify, the observation room door banged open and Malone burst in. When she saw me, she stopped short and jerked a thumb toward the center of my chest and said to Frank, “I don’t remember saying you should sell tickets.”

“I’m bouncing a few ideas off him, that’s all. He has good insights. And he knows how to keep his mouth shut.”

“He got fired for not keeping his mouth shut.” That was both untrue and unfair, but now didn’t seem to be the time to say so. She stalked over to the glass. Scowled at Savitch even though he couldn’t see her. “But as long as he’s here . . . how about it, McKean? Is this the guy who tried to kill you?”

“It’s the guy, 99 percent.”

“Ninety-nine percent won’t hold up in court. You’ve got to be 100 percent.”

“It was dark. He wore a mask. I could swear it on a stack of Bibles, and any prosecutor worth his salt would tear me to shreds.”

She blew out a disgusted breath. “So basically, you’re no help at all.”

My face burned, and I felt my nostrils flare. “What do you want me to say? The build is right. The accent sounds right. But even if he hadn’t been whispering, he didn’t say enough to get a good handle on the voice.”

“I wish to hell you hadn’t lost that witness.”

Frank said, “A scared illegal sees a guy for half a minute in the dark? She’d crumble like tissue on the stand.”

Malone shot him a glare that could have melted glass. “So if this DNA thing comes up bad, we’ve got nothing, and he walks.”

“So we sit on him awhile, until he leads us to the girl.”

“Only we tipped our hand early. He’ll be more careful now.”

“It was a gamble,” Frank said. “We knew that when we brought him in.”

Malone slapped the wall in frustration. “Yeah, well, we lost.”

The door to the observation room burst open, and a young cop in uniform blurted, “We got a call from Channel Three, they got a message from the
For Justice
guy and are filming live from the crime scene.”

“Hold on,” Malone said. “There’s been another bombing?”

The officer looked sick. “Not this time.”

T
HE ADDRESS
Channel Three had left was in another district, well out of Malone’s jurisdiction, so we crowded around the TV in the break room while the blonde who’d shadowed Ashleigh at my office stood in front of a modest suburban ranch house and described the unfolding events in a breathless, solemn tone. A ribbon of text scrolled across the bottom of the screen, identifying her as Portia Ross.

The screen split, and Ashleigh, perched behind the anchors’ desk, said in a brittle voice, “So, Portia, what can you tell us about the series of events that led you to this gruesome discovery?”

She looked flawless, as always, but the stiffness in her shoulders said she was upset. Probably felt she should be the one on the scene, where all the action was.

Portia was saying, “. . . a call received by this reporter just twenty minutes ago. A man claiming responsibility for the
For Justice
bombings said there had been another killing.”

She’d rushed to the address he gave her, expecting to find the smoldering husk of a dope factory. Instead, she found a well-kept home in a well-kept neighborhood, front door unlocked with an envelope taped to it. Inside, she found the victims shot at close range and laid out in the living room like railroad ties. This time, they weren’t disenfranchised dope dealers. They were a Metro police officer and his family. Wife, three kids. The oldest was fourteen. The usual message had been scrawled across the officer’s forehead:
For Justice
.

Malone said, “Just when I think I know how bad things can get, somebody goes and does something worse.”

“He’s changed his M.O.,” Frank said. “Bombs for the meth heads, bullets for the cops?”

The name of the murdered officer—Kevin Bannister—scrolled across the bottom of the screen, and my stomach did a little flip. “Jesus.”

Malone’s eyebrows lifted. “You know him?”

“We met.” I shook my head, trying to dispel the images that flashed across my mind. “Once on a case and once at a precinct picnic. We were both still uniforms. Played a couple rounds of Frisbee golf.”

He’d won both rounds, a stocky guy who jumped like a pit bull, overcoming gravity by sheer determination.

I closed my eyes, tried to imagine how it could have happened. How
For Justice
had managed to overpower an entire family, including an athletic young cop.

Portia Ross went on. “Inside the envelope was a manifesto accusing Metro Nashville’s police department and court system of corruption and vowing to bring the wrongdoers to justice. The document included a list of names . . .”

We stared at the screen as the list scrolled down it. Portia must have snapped a photo with her phone and sent it to the station before dialing 911.

It was a long list. Two or three more dope dealers. A couple of defense attorneys. A couple of prosecutors. And cops. Lots of cops.

“She’s finished,” Malone said. “Obstruction of justice at the very least. Tampering with evidence.”

Frank scrubbed his palms across his face. “She’ll say she had to check it out before she called. She’ll say she opened the envelope because it was addressed to her, or she thought it might be a prank, or . . . Who knows what she’ll say, except that she’ll be full of shit.”

“Shit,” Malone repeated, sourly. “It’s what’s for dinner.”

I reached over and tapped Frank’s bicep with the back of my hand. Pointed to the screen.

Two names below the murdered cop’s was Harry Kominsky’s, and right beneath it:
Frank Campanella.