Triptych (6 page)

It was all going out of Hartsfield; they were moving them through there like cattle. Your buddy’s team cracked it open in a month. Gal gets a big promotion, Trent stays where he is.“

“He was head of the team?” Yep.

“”Why didn’t he get promoted?“

“Have to ask him that.”

“If I could ask him, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”

Leo’s eyes flashed, like his feelings had been hurt. “That’s all I got, man. Trent’s a straight arrow, knows his job. You want more, you need to call somebody downtown and find out yourself.”

Michael stared at his cigarette, watching it burn. Gina would kill him if she saw him smoking. She’d smell it on his hands as soon as he got home.

He dropped the butt onto the ground, grinding it in with his heel. “Is Angie still working Vice?”

“Polaski?” Leo asked, like he didn’t quite believe his ears. “You don’t wanna go fucking with that pollack.”

“Answer the fucking question.”

Leo took out another cigarette and lit it from the first. “Yeah. Last I heard.”

“If Trent comes looking for me, tell him I’ll meet him back down here in a few minutes.”

Michael didn’t give Leo time to answer. He ran back up the steps to the third floor, his lungs rattling in his chest by the time he opened the door. Vice was a mostly nighttime endeavor, so half the squad was in the room filling out paperwork from last night’s sweep. Angie had obviously worked catch. She was wearing a halter-top that stopped three inches above her belly button and a blonde wig was splayed on her desk like a dead Pomeranian.

He waited for her to look up, and when she did, she wasn’t exactly
happy to see him. As Michael walked over, she leaned back in her chair,
crossing her legs under a skirt so short he looked away out of decency.

“What
are you doing here?”
she
demanded. “Jesus, you look like
hell.”

Michael ran his fingers through his hair. He was sweating from the sprint up the stairs. The smoke was still in his lungs and he coughed something that sounded like a death rattle. Christ, he’d be joining Ken in a wheelchair if he kept this up.

He said, “I need to talk to you a minute.”

She looked wary. “About what?”

Michael leaned over her desk, trying to keep the conversation between them.

“Uh-uh,” she said, pushing him back as she stood up. “Let’s go out into the hall.”

He followed her, aware that the rest of the squad was watching. The truth was that Michael had liked working Vice. You watched the girls, you picked up the Johns, you seldom got shot at or had to tell a parent that their son or daughter had been found floating in the Chattahoochee. He hadn’t left because he wanted to. Angie had been a problem for him. They hadn’t exactly gotten along, and the fact that she was agreeing to talk to him now was up there with the world’s biggest surprises.

She tugged at her skirt as she stepped into a nook across from the elevators. Beside her, an ancient vending machine hummed, the lights flickering. She asked, “You here to talk about Aleesha Monroe?”

“The pross?” He hadn’t even thought to pull her record.

“You don’t remember her?” Angie asked. “We banged her up a couple of times until she hooked up with Baby G.”

Michael answered “Yeah,” though Angie shouldn’t really expect him to remember one hooker out of the thousands they had arrested on the weekend sweeps. Some Saturday nights, they called out a wagon just to transport all the girls to the station. Cabs lined up outside the precinct to take them right back out onto the street a couple of hours later.

Michael began, “I just-”

The elevator door dinged behind him. Michael looked over his shoulder and saw Will Trent.

“Shit,” Michael muttered.

“Kit Kat,” Trent said, and Michael’s brain took its sweet time figuring out what the fuck the guy was talking about. Trent stood in front of the vending machine, digging in his pocket for change.

Michael decided to make nice. “This is Angie Polaski,” he said. Then, as if it wasn’t obvious from the way she was dressed, he added, Vice.

Trent was sticking coins into the machine. He gave her a nod, but his eyes didn’t quite meet hers. “Good morning, Detective Polaski.”

“Trent’s with the GBI,” Michael said. “Greer called him in to give us a hand with the Monroe case.”

Michael was watching Trent, waiting for the guy to point out that Greer hadn’t actually called him, that he’d shown up at the lieutenant’s doorstep on his own. Trent, for his part, was tracing his finger along the glass front of the machine, trying to read the code under the Kit Kat bars so he could press it into the control panel. He was squinting; Michael figured the guy needed glasses.

“Oh, fer fucksakes,” Angie muttered. “It’s E-six.” She punched the code in herself, her garishly long fake fingernails clicking on the plastic keys. She told Michael, “I’ll get the file on Monroe.”

She was walking back toward her squad before Michael could think to say anything else. He saw Trent watching her walk, the way her ass moved in the high heels.

“I worked with her a while back,” Michael told him. “She’s all right.”

Trent peeled back the wrapper on the candy bar and took a bite.

Michael felt the need to explain. “She’s kind of got an attitude.”

“If I had to dress that way for work every day, I don’t imagine I’d be very cheerful.”

Michael watched Trent’s jaw work as he chewed. The scar on his cheek seemed more pronounced. “How’d you get the scar?”

Trent looked at his hand. “Nail gun,” he said, and Michael could see a pink scar cutting through the skin on the webbing between the man’s thumb and index finger.

That hadn’t been the scar Michael had meant, but he played along. “You into home repair or something?”

“Habitat for Humanity.” Trent shoved the last of the Kit Kat into his mouth and tossed the wrapper into the trashcan. “One of my fellow volunteers shot me with a galvanized nail.”

Michael felt another piece of the puzzle slide into place. Habitat for Humanity was a volunteer group that built homes for low-income families.

Most cops eventually ended up volunteering for something. Working the streets, you tended to forget that there were actually good people out there. You tried to salve this wound in your psyche by helping people who actually wanted your help. Michael had worked at a children’s shelter before Tim had been born. Even Leo Donnelly had volunteered with the local Little League team until they’d told him he couldn’t smoke on the field.

Trent said, “I’d like to see the crime scene.”

“We tossed her place last night,” Michael told him. “You think we missed something?”

“Not at all,” Trent countered. Michael tried to find any guile in his tone but came up empty. “I’d just like to get a feel for the place.”

“You do this with the other cases?”

“Yes,” Trent said, “I did.”

Angie was back, her high heels click-clacking on the tile floor. She held out a yellow file folder. “This is what I’ve got on Monroe.”

Trent didn’t reach for the file, so Michael took it. He flipped open the cover, seeing Aleesha Monroe’s mug shot. She was attractive for what she was. The hardness in her eyes was a challenge as she stared straight into the camera. She looked irritated, probably doing the math, figuring how much money she was going to lose before she made bail.

“Her pimp’s Baby G,” Angie told them. “Mean motherfucker. Been up for assault, rape, attempted murder-probably ordered a hit on two other guys, but there’s no way they can pin it on him.” She indicated her mouth, showing her front teeth. “Has a gold grill with crosses cut into them like he’s Jesus’s own.”

Michael asked, “Where does he hang out?”

“At the Homes,” she said. “His grandmother lives in the same building as Aleesha.”

Trent had tucked his hands into his pockets again, and he was staring at Polaski like she was a Martian from space. His silence was annoying, and he exuded an air of superiority, like he knew more than he was saying and thought it was some kind of joke that they couldn’t figure it out.

Michael asked him, “You got anything to add to this?”

“It’s your case, Detective,” Trent answered. He told Angie, “Thank you for your assistance, ma’am,” flashing what might have been a smile on someone less patronizing.

Angie looked at Michael, then Trent, then back at Michael. She lifted an eyebrow, asking a question Michael couldn’t answer. “Whatever,” she muttered, holding up her hand in the universal sign of dismissal. She turned her back on both of them, and Michael was too pissed to admire the view this time.

He asked Trent, “What’s your fucking problem?”

Trent seemed surprised by his tone. “I’m sorry?”

“You gonna just stand there all day or are you here to get your hands dirty?”

“I told you-I’m just here to advise.”

“Well, I’ve got some advice for you, Mr. Here to Advise,” Michael said, his fists clenching so hard he could feel his fingernails digging into his palms. “Don’t fuck with me.”

Trent didn’t seem threatened by the warning, but considering Michael had to crane his neck up to give it, this didn’t come as a complete surprise.

“All right,” Trent said. Then, as if that had settled everything, he asked, “Would you mind going to the Homes again? I’d really like to see the crime scene.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Everything Will Trent said and did grated on Michael’s nerves, from his “of course,” when Michael said he would drive to the way he stared blankly out the car window as they traveled up North Avenue toward the Homes. The GBI agent reminded him of those geeky kids in high school, the ones who kept slide rules in their breast pockets and quoted obscure lines from Monty Python. No matter how many times he watched it, Michael still didn’t get Monty Python and he sure as shit didn’t get geeks like Trent. There was a reason these guys got the shit beaten out of them in school. There was a reason it was guys like Michael doing the beating.

Michael took a deep breath, then coughed, his lungs still pissed about the cigarette. He thought about Tim, how his son wasn’t normal, how this attracted abuse from other kids. There was already a group of bullies at Tim’s school who had given him some grief-stealing his hat, flattening his sandwich at the lunch table. The teachers tried to stop it, but they couldn’t be everywhere all the time and some of them weren’t real happy to begin with about Tim’s being mainstreamed into their classrooms. Maybe Will Trent was Michael’s karma playing out. He was being tested. Be nice to this freak and maybe Tim would get the same kind of pass.

“Oh,” Trent said, pulling a small tape recorder out of his jacket pocket. “I’ve got the nine-one-one call.” He pressed the play button before Michael could comment. A tinny, high-pitched voice bleated from the small speaker,
You gotta come to building nine at the Homes. They’s a woman being raped pretty bad.

Michael drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited for a red light to change. “Play it again.”

Trent did as he was told, and Michael strained his ears, trying to hear background noise, to figure out the tone and tenor of the voice. Something was off, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“ ‘Raped’,” Michael echoed. “Not ‘killed’.”

Trent added, “The caller doesn’t sound frightened.”

“No,” Michael agreed, accelerating as the light changed.

“I would think,” Trent began, “if I were a woman, that I would be frightened if I saw, or even heard, another woman being attacked.”

“Maybe not,” Michael contradicted. “Maybe if you lived in the Homes, you would’ve already seen your fill of this kind of violence.”

“If that were the case,” Trent said, “then why would I report it?” He tried to answer his own question. “Maybe I knew the woman?”

“If you knew her, then you’d sound more upset than that.” Michael indicated the recorder. The caller had sounded calm, like she was reporting the weather or the score from a particularly boring game.

“It took over thirty minutes for the unit to come.” Trent didn’t seem to be making a condemnation when he pointed out, “Grady has the slowest response time in the city.”

“Anybody watching the news would know that.”

“Or living in the Homes.”

“We’ve checked everybody in the building, did door-to-doors that night. Nobody’s popping up with a big sign hanging around his neck.”

“No sex offenders in the buildings?”

“One, but he was banged up the whole day being interviewed on another case.”

Trent rewound the tape and played it yet another time, letting it run into the emergency operator saying,
Ma’am? Ma’am? Are you there?

Trent tucked the recorder back into his pocket. “The victim’s a little old, too.”

“Monroe?” Michael asked, trying to switch gears. Trent was finally talking to him like a cop. “Yeah, if Pete’s right, she’s probably around my age. Your girls were-what-fourteen? Fifteen?”

“White, too.”

“Monroe was black, living in the projects, working the streets.”

“The others were white, middle to upper class, came from solid families, doing well in school.”

“Maybe he didn’t have time to hunt down a new one,” Michael suggested, feeling like he was walking on a very thin wire. He got that buzzing in his ears again, that something in his head that told him to shut up, don’t trust this new guy, don’t let him fool you.

“Could be,” Trent allowed, but his tone of voice said he didn’t find it likely.

Michael kept his mouth closed as he took a right into Grady Homes. The development looked a hell of a lot better at night, darkness covering the worst of its flaws. It was almost ten o’clock on a Monday morning, but kids were milling around on their bikes like they had been freed for the summer. Michael had done this same thing when he was a kid, straddling his Schwinn as he bullshitted with the other kids on his block. Only, Michael hadn’t been passing dime bags out in the open like these kids were doing now, and he sure as hell wouldn’t have had the balls to toss a wave at a couple of cops as they cruised through his neighborhood.