Sly Fox: A Dani Fox Novel (15 page)

“There’s no shame in it. We’re all girls here. Many a night we’d sit in this room, having coffee and a smoke afterward, and he’d say, ‘Rebecca, you’re the sugar in my cup.’ Now that’s how it’s supposed to be. I told Mary Margaret that. But no, she never listened. She took up with that no-good Rudy Hitchins. And look what happened.”

Mary Margaret gave her mother an angry look as I stood and moved toward the door.

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I was sleeping so soundly when the telephone rang that I thought it was part of my dream. Fumbling for the receiver, I said, “Hello?” The light on the nightstand clock showed it was just after four a.m.

“This is Dispatcher Henderson at the Elmsford P.D.,” a male voice announced. “I’m trying to reach Danny Fox.”

“Yes.”

“Can you get him on the line?”

“I’m Dani Fox.”

“Sorry, ma’am. But I need to talk to Mr. Fox. A Detective O’Brien told me to notify Assistant D.A. Danny Fox. Is he available?”

“There is no Mr. Fox. The only male in this house is a pot-bellied pig and he’s not talking right now. What’s O’Brien want?”

“Urr, ah, um, well, we’ve got an emergency west of Elmsford near the interstate and I was told by O’Brien to get Danny Fox out there ASAP. Here’s directions.” I grabbed some dark chocolate on the way out the door.

It was only a five-minute drive to Elmsford at this predawn hour, but it took another ten minutes to find the rural road that the dispatcher had described. I’d traveled about a mile down it when I came upon an Elmsford police car blocking my path.

“Sorry, lady, but you’ve got to turn around,” he said. “There’s a crime scene up ahead and it’s going to be a while before this road opens again.”

“I’m from the D.A.’s office.”

“Sure you are.”

I fished out my credentials.

“I didn’t know they had girl prosecutors in Westchester,” he said. “You’ll find the detectives up the road.”

A few minutes later, I arrived at a spot where three cars were parked side by side across the road with their headlights on. Their beams cast a spotlight on four men standing in front of them. I didn’t see O’Brien.

“I’m Assistant District Attorney Dani—”

“We know who you are,” one of them said gruffly. “O’Brien’s in the woods. He wants you out there.” He nodded to his right but didn’t offer any additional information.

“What’s this about?”

“Go see for yourself,” he snapped, handing me a flashlight. “About a hundred yards through the trees.”

I took his flashlight and walked into the pines that edged both sides of the road. The ground was flat and soft here because it was covered with pine needles. The trees shot up as if they were a giant fence. I shined the flashlight to my left and then swung it to my right. Every damn tree looked the same. I stopped and listened, but didn’t hear anything except my own rushed breathing. Was I lost? I had no idea where I was going, but I continued forward, fighting a growing sense of alarm.

I moved quietly across the needles. I continued going straight, and in another five minutes, I heard voices, and in another twenty feet, I emerged into a clearing where I could see beams from other flashlights. I shined my light toward them and spotted O’Brien along with three other figures about thirty yards in front of me. One of the men was Carl, the detective who’d beaten Hitchins on the sidewalk outside O’Toole’s. They reacted to my flashlight by shining their lights at me, temporarily blinding me.

Unlike the barren ground in the woods, the clearing was covered with knee-high grass that was swaying in a morning breeze. I heard O’Brien tell someone to “walk away, Detective Jones” and then I heard another man utter a profanity. I realized it was Carl who was now breaking away from the threesome.

“What’s going on?” I asked when I reached O’Brien. I shined my flash-light at his face and he glanced down, pointing his beam into the tall grass at his feet.

A bloody Mary Margaret was sprawled naked in the grass.

“One shot in her head,” O’Brien said. “Another directly into her heart. Her clothes are over there.” He swung his light to his right where her terry cloth bathrobe and her flannel pajamas had been tossed.

I felt horrible. The last dead person I’d seen was my father. Complications from cancer had killed him and ravaged his once-strong body. But he’d looked peaceful dressed in his best suit in his casket at his funeral, as if he were sleeping. Mary Margaret’s empty eyes stared blankly ahead. Her face was frozen in a groan with her mouth gaping open. Her lips were twisted in a grotesque position. I’d seen plenty of autopsy photos of murder victims, but this was so much more real. This was someone I knew. Someone whom I had just been speaking to a few hours earlier. I had to turn my head to catch a breath of air.

“Hitchins must have brought her here,” O’Brien said. “Forced her to strip, probably to humiliate her or maybe make her beg for her life. Maybe he just wanted a last fuck. Who knows? I figure he got them after they’d gone to bed.”

“Them?”

“He killed Mrs. Finn, too. We got officers at the apartment. They found her in her bedroom with her throat slit. He must have broken in, killed her, and then surprised Mary Margaret and brought her out here.”

My revulsion turned into anger. Daughter and mother murdered.

“The baby?”

“No heartbeat.”

I turned my face back toward him, then peered down again at Mary Margaret’s nude corpse. Three lives ended at Rudy Hitchins’s hands.

“Why’d he have to do this?” I asked.

“You’re the big expert,” O’Brien replied mockingly. “Power. Control. What did all those Ivy League experts tell you about men like him?”

Before I could respond, a voice coming from behind O’Brien said, “It’s your fault.” Detective Jones was returning.

“I told you to walk away,” O’Brien said.

“She needs to hear it. We could’ve put that son of a bitch in prison but she had to do it her way.”

“Bullshit,” O’Brien said. “The guy was a walking time bomb. It was only a matter of time.”

“You keep telling yourself that,” Jones replied, directing his comments more at me than O’Brien. “If it helps you sleep at night, you believe it. But take a good, hard look at what he did to her. ’Cause no matter what your friend here says, in my book, lady, you and that fucking judge who turned him loose are as much responsible as Hitchins is.”

I said, “You’re blaming me? I’m the one who wanted to put him in jail. Or is it because I refused to prosecute him on trumped-up charges? You called me here to make me feel guilty?”

“We called you because you always follow the rules,” Jones said snidely. It was standard procedure for an assistant district attorney to be called to the scene of every homicide. Because I worked in the appeals bureau, however, I wasn’t on the list and had never been called before.

“Mary Margaret was your case,” O’Brien said.

Jones added, “We called you because she was your responsibility.”

“What about you? I thought you had someone watching Hitchins.”

“They thought he was with his girlfriend,” Jones said.

“Enough of the blame game,” O’Brien said. “Pisani is personally coming out here. This case is too big for you now.”

I could feel my face turning red. But he was right. This was a triple homicide and Pisani would be all over it. He wouldn’t want me as a partner. Still, I would ask. I owed Mary Margaret, her mother, and her unborn child that much. I’d promised to put Hitchins in jail.

“I was talking to Mary Margaret and her mom a few hours ago,” I said. “In their apartment.”

“Then you’re damn lucky he didn’t nab you, too,” O’Brien said. “You could still be a target. It would be best if you stayed out of sight this weekend until we get Hitchins. Is there somewhere safe you can go?”

Safe? I wasn’t sure if he was worried about Hitchins coming after me or Jones and his buddies from O’Toole’s.

“I’m not hiding. I want to talk to Whitaker about this case.”

“It would be better,” O’Brien said, “if you just went somewhere and let this situation play itself out a little. By Monday, the dust will settle, and if we’re lucky, Rudy Hitchins will no longer be a problem.”

From his tone, it didn’t sound as if he was talking about an arrest.

“Don’t you get it?” Jones snapped. “This isn’t your problem anymore. You’ve done enough damage. Now why don’t you just get lost?”

“Let me know where you’re going to be,” O’Brien said.

“Why? So you can have your officers watch me like they did her?”

Before he could answer, I said, “I’ll go to my mom’s place.” But as soon as I said it, I knew that was a mistake. Hitchins had just killed Mary Margaret’s mother, and I didn’t want him murdering mine, too.

“I’ll go out of town. Albany. A friend.”

“Then get the hell out of here,” Jones said.

I glanced at Mary Margaret, whispered, “I’m sorry,” and walked toward the woods. I was so preoccupied that I’d gone about a hundred feet before I realized I had no idea if I was headed in the right direction. I stopped and turned off my flashlight. I thought I might be able to see the headlights from the squad cars parked on the dirt road. Like a lighthouse, they could guide me in. But everything was pitch-black.

Just as I was about to turn on my flashlight, I heard a sound and saw a sliver from a flashlight cutting through the woods about sixty feet to my left. I started to call out but suddenly caught myself. What if it was Rudy Hitchins? Like an arsonist who lingers at a fire to watch the carnage that he’d caused, was Hitchins still prowling the woods? The flashlight beam moved quicker as the figure picked up speed. He seemed in a rush. I stayed frozen, not sure how to react. I couldn’t make out a face.

As soon as the figure disappeared in the darkness, I began walking without my flashlight. “Ouch.” Something had pricked my calf. I flipped on my light and saw that I’d wandered into a patch of thorny vines. I was bleeding. Damn it.

Dani, I told myself, stay focused. The road is minutes away. Don’t let your imagination run wild. I never knew how frightening a forest could be. Maneuvering around the thorns, I continued walking, and in another thirty feet, I finally emerged from the pines. The three police cars were about a hundred yards north of me. When I reached them, I didn’t bother to speak to the officers. There was another car parked next to mine and I assumed it belonged to Pisani. That must have been who’d passed by me in the woods—not Hitchins.

As I was unlocking my car, one of the officers yelled, “Hey, did you see those two guys from your office in the woods?”

Two guys? I’d only seen a lone man. I yelled over to the cops, “Did you get their names?”

“Yeah, it was Paul Pisani and your D.A. They came personally.”

I walked over and explained that I had just seen an unknown man in the woods.

“Did you arrest him?” one of them said, laughing.

“You might want to see who it was.”

“Okay, sure, we’ll get right on that,” another said.

Idiots. I got into my car and drove away. When I got to the interstate, I finally released my emotions. Tears filled my eyes, forcing me to pull over. I opened the car door and vomited.

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