Sorrow's Anthem Page 15

  Joe went down first. I followed, wishing he hadn’t taken the knife from me. My heart was thumping, my hands clenched into fists, my muscles tense. We reached the bottom of the steps and came out in a finished basement room with another couch and television, a bookshelf on the wall. Everything looked normal. Joe was still looking in that direction when I turned right and went around the wall.

  There was a pool table there, and a dead man beneath it. The body was slumped on the floor, the legs exposed and the torso shoved under the table. Blood was pooled around the body, more of it on the wall behind the pool table, along with bits of flesh and tissue, splattered remnants of a large-caliber gunshot blast.

  I opened my mouth to say something to Joe, but he was already beside me, inhaling a long, sharp breath between his teeth.

  “The girl,” I said. “Get back upstairs. Get an ambulance down here, a doctor or therapist or someone to help her.”

  He turned and went up the stairs, his footsteps loud, the wall beside me trembling as he hurried back up to the living room.

  I moved forward.

  The blood was still wet in the center of the pool, sticky at the edges. It had puddled against the man’s legs, and a coppery smell was heavy near the body. I dropped to one knee beside his legs, and as I did, the smell came up stronger, overwhelming me, and I gagged. I leaned forward, lifting a hand to my mouth as I choked, thick bile rising in my throat. I fought it down, closed my eyes, and covered my mouth and nose. I was not a homicide detective, and while I’d seen bodies before, I hadn’t seen so many that my brain and my body were trained not to react. I took a few seconds with my eyes closed, concentrating on a slow, shallow breaths, and then I felt ready. I opened my eyes and leaned under the pool table.

  It was Larry Rabold. Three-quarters of his face was visible, but the upper left corner, beginning above his cheekbone and extending to his eye and temple, was gone. Blown away. A bloody mess of pulp left in its place, no skin or bone visible.

  He’d been shot once in the face, a close-range shot with a high-caliber gun. I’d seen small-caliber gunshot wounds before, and this was not one of them. The close range was obvious both from the extent of damage and from a speckling of tiny hemorrhages on his cheek and jawline. That’s called stippling or tattooing, and it’s the result of burned powder and fragments driven into the skin. You don’t get those marks when the gun is held far away from the victim.

  When I could finally bring myself to look away from his face, I realized he’d been shot twice more. There were large holes torn through his torso, one in the chest just above the heart, another in the stomach. Blood still leaked out of the chest wound, and a part of his insides, some thin black organ, ran through the mess. I felt the rise of vomit again, but then I realized the black strand I was looking at wasn’t part of his body, at all. It was a wire.

  I leaned forward, the desire to understand what I was looking at overriding the nausea, and then I noticed that half of Rabold’s shirt had been pulled free from his pants. He’d had it tucked in, but the right side was free.

  There was a ballpoint pen in my pocket. I took it out and reached out to Rabold’s body, gingerly slipped the tip of the pen between his shirt collar and his neck, and pulled it back. The collar slid away from his neck only an inch or so, but it was enough. Clipped to the inside of Rabold’s collar was a seed microphone—an extremely tiny, extremely sensitive microphone that is used for covert recording. Son of a bitch.

  I moved the pen away and let Rabold’s collar fall back in place, then rocked onto my heels and thought about it. A seed microphone like that could be outfitted with a wireless transmitter that sends the conversations to an off-site recorder, but those units were sophisticated, rare, and damn expensive. Far more common was a setup where the microphone ran back to a tiny digital recorder, some of them as small as a nine-volt battery, concealed somewhere on the body.

  Sticking the pen out once again, I slid it beneath the free end of Rabold’s shirt and lifted. The bottom of his shirt rose a few inches, and I cocked my head, straining to see. There, against Rabold’s pale, fat belly, was the end of the microphone cord, leading to . . . nothing. At the end of the wire a bit of bare copper was exposed. The wire had been cut, and whatever recorder it had led to was missing.

  The proximity to the corpse got to me then, in a sudden, overwhelming wave. I slid back out from under the pool table and stood up. I made it three steps toward the stairs before my vision blurred and it seemed my heartbeat was suddenly coming from my temples. I put my left hand out and found the wall, leaned up against it, and bit down hard on my lip. The burst of pain cleared my head.

  I kept one hand on the wall while I went up the stairs, my knees unsteady until I was near the top. When I came out into the living room, Joe was sitting on the floor beside the couch. The blond girl was still curled up, breathing in ragged gaps. I couldn’t see her face, just the jerking rise and fall of her chest. Joe’s hand rested gently on her knee. Her own hand was wrapped around his wrist, painted fingernails biting into his flesh.

  I stood and stared at Joe. His eyes were distant. Cop eyes. Cop mode, now. I needed to get back into it, myself.

  “You make the call?” I said.

  He nodded, said, “Is it . . . ,” but didn’t finish the question, because he didn’t want to say Rabold’s name. Not with the girl who was probably Rabold’s daughter a few feet away.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I couldn’t look at the girl anymore. I walked away from them, to the front of the room, and peered out the window, waiting for the police. I stayed on my feet. Somehow, it felt stronger than sitting. I needed to feel strong, right then.

  CHAPTER 16

  By the time Cal Richards got there, we’d learned Rabold’s daughter, Mary, had probably been home for almost thirty minutes before we’d arrived. A neighbor remembered seeing her drive in, alone, and told the cops this in a high, hysterical voice that Joe and I could hear plainly from where we stood beside one of the squad cars. When we had the timetable for the girl’s arrival, our imaginations could handle the rest of the sequence. She had probably gone downstairs, seen her father, and gone into shock. She’d made it back upstairs, but then the terror had overwhelmed her. She couldn’t think to call the police or even leave the house. Instead, in that shock, in that terror, she’d hid. She’d crawled behind the couch and curled into a ball and waited, with her father’s body in the basement beneath her. I’d never heard of anything like it, but then I’d never seen anything like the scene in Rabold’s basement, either. His daughter was sixteen.

  Richards came onto the scene early, because Joe had requested him with the initial call. They’d sent out another homicide team first, but Richards was given control once he got there. The other cops knew Cal, that was for sure. Mary Rabold was gone, taken away in an ambulance, a detective riding with them.

  Richards came out of the front door of the house about twenty minutes after he’d gone in. He walked through the yard to where we stood beside the evidence tech’s van. Three cruisers were parked in front of the house now, along with the evidence van and Cal’s unmarked car. Neighbors stood across the street, but there was no media presence yet. That wouldn’t last long.

  “Let’s walk around the house, gentlemen,” Richards said. Somehow his face was even more impassive now than normal. He’d seen what I’d seen in the basement, but somehow he managed to keep it off his face, shut it down, and trap it inside him. I couldn’t do that—not in the same way that he could, at least. Maybe that wasn’t the worst thing in the world, though.

  We followed Richards back up the driveway and around the black Honda that was parked there. A screened-in porch was off the rear of the house, and a couple of uniformed cops were working it and the yard, taking photographs and scanning for evidence. Richards stopped around the corner, out of their way but also out of sight of the watchers on the street. He leaned against the wall, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. He took a few drags, flipping idly t
hrough the notebook he held in his hands.

  “This gets messy,” he said. “Dead cop. Murdered in his home, found by his daughter. Kid can’t even talk now. Wouldn’t say a word. Just stared with those eyes, man . . . those eyes.” He took another drag on the cigarette, a long one, then tapped it out against the wall and carefully put it into his jacket pocket. Couldn’t contaminate the crime scene.

  “Messy,” he said again. “All right, you tell it to me, boys.”

  We told it to him. While we talked, the uniforms continued to move around the yard, combing the grass and taking their pictures. Everyone was silent. Back out on the street, there was some mild commotion, doors opening and closing, voices raised. This would be the media arrival.

  “He was wearing a wire,” I said when Joe and I had gone through the basics. It was the first Joe had heard of it, and his face registered surprise. Richards, on the other hand, was impassive.

  “Was he?” he said.

  “Come on, Cal. You were down there. You saw it.”

  He frowned and looked away, not liking it that a civilian had been on the scene first.

  “He was wearing a wire,” he admitted. “And it was cut. The recorder’s gone. Do you have it?”

  “No.”

  He gazed at me hard, and I said, “Are you insane? No, Richards, I didn’t steal a recorder off the man’s corpse.”

  “Okay.”

  Joe was watching with interest. “Rabold’s a street officer,” he said. “What the hell’s he doing wearing a wire? And in his own house?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” Richards said, “because I don’t know.”

  “He was requesting files on old fires this morning,” I said. “And now he’s dead. You think that’s unrelated?”

  Richards’s face showed nothing. “I’m not a guess-maker, Perry. I’m a detective. We’ll see where it goes.”

  “Sure.”

  “Look, you know we’re going to need to sit down and get an official statement recorded,” he said. “And we’re going to have to separate you. Makes me look bad if I keep witnesses together for an interview. Baker’ll handle that. You’ll be seeing both of us, but I’m going to have to give you up to him now.”

  “Who’s Baker?” I asked.

  “My partner.”

  “You actually have one?”

  “We’re a good team,” Richards said, “provided we spend plenty of time on separate courts.”

  He took us around to the front of the house, and as we cleared the corner, I saw Jack Padgett shoving his way through the crowd, snarling at a uniformed officer to get out of his way. He was in street clothes, jeans and a brightly colored golf shirt, and his face was flushed with fury.

  “Shit,” Richards said. “The last thing I need is that crazy bastard in my crime scene.”

  He moved toward Padgett, who turned to look at him and spotted me. His face darkened, and he stepped forward, shoulders squaring and rising, like a boxer stepping away from the ropes.

  “What’s this guy doing here?” he said, pointing at me.

  Richards reached him then and said something that I couldn’t hear. Padgett answered, his own voice softer, and all I caught of it was an obscene reference involving my mother. Then Richards had his hand firmly on the taller man’s shoulder and was guiding him away from us, back toward the ring of cops watching the perimeter of the yard. Inside the house, the evidence techs were probably still hunched over the body of Padgett’s partner. I wondered when he’d heard, and where he’d been. Crooked cop or not, having your partner murdered had to hit deep.

  Richards had disappeared into the crowd before I remembered that I hadn’t told him what I’d learned about Sentalar and Corbett. A few hours earlier, that was huge news. A few hours earlier, Mary Rabold’s father was still alive.

  Joe and I spent a while talking to Baker, a short guy with a military haircut and a sunburn, but Richards never returned. Baker took us back to the station and interviewed us separately, on tape. Then we filled out a witness form, and he told us we could go.

  “What about Cal Richards?” Joe asked. “Is he coming down here?”

  Baker shrugged. “Don’t know. He told me to get your statements on tape and get back down to the scene, myself. Didn’t say anything about holding you for him.”

  “He knows where to find us,” Joe said.

  A patrol officer drove us to my apartment. Joe’s car was going to be searched by police, of course. They might not think there was a gun in the trunk or bloody fibers on the floor mats, but they had to check.

  When the cop dropped us off, we stood together in my parking lot and looked at each other. It was evening now, the sun gone, the night air beginning to cool. A few cars were in the gym lot, but it was quiet outside.

  “That poor damn kid,” Joe said.

  “Yeah.”

  He sighed and ran both hands through his hair and over his face. “What the hell is going on, LP? What was your friend into?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t have any answers. It was just twelve hours ago that I’d stood on the street in front of this building and formed my idea that Rabold and his partner had killed Ed intentionally. Now Rabold was dead. That didn’t change my previous theory, but it sure as hell complicated it.

  “You tell any of the other detectives about Corbett and Sentalar?” Joe asked.

  “No. It’s Cal’s case. He’s the only one who would have understood what it might mean. I’ll tell him.”

  “Okay. We’ll tell him in the morning. Get some sleep, maybe some dinner. A few hours of normal life, get our heads back together. We’ll see where it stands in the morning.”

  “They shot him three times, Joe,” I said. “Blew a piece of his face off, shot him in the chest, shot him in the stomach. That’s not a killing for killing’s sake. It wasn’t a hit, a guy getting whacked just to be eliminated. There’s a lot of anger in those wounds.”

  “I wonder if his wife is with that girl yet” was all he said.

  “I hope so. You want me to give you a ride home?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You sure?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I need the walk tonight.”

  He left, and I went upstairs and took a long, hot shower, my muscles slowly loosening under the spray. I dried off and changed clothes. By then it was almost ten, well past dinnertime and closer to sleeping time for normal people. Since I clearly wasn’t normal, I thought I’d go ahead and eat breakfast for a very late dinner. I fixed an omelet but couldn’t find any appetite for it, ended up tossing it in the garbage, and drinking a glass of orange juice.

  After a while, I took a bottle of Beck’s out of the refrigerator and went up on the roof. There’s a trapdoor with folding stairs in the ceiling just outside my apartment that provides access to the roof, and I’ve dragged a couple of lounge chairs and some potted plants up there. It’s a nice place to spend a summer evening.

  I sat alone, listening to the traffic noise and sipping my beer and thinking about old friends and a terrified sixteen-year-old girl hiding behind a couch. When the beer was empty, I went back downstairs to get a fresh one. I stood at the door for a moment, hesitating, then grabbed the cordless phone as well and took it onto the roof with me. The connection had some static up there, but you could hear well enough for a conversation. I set the beer down unopened and dialed Amy’s number.

  “Hey,” I said when she answered, “you asleep yet?”

  As soon as she recognized my voice, she launched into me.

  “You know, you’re a real jerk, Lincoln. I shouldn’t have walked away last night as easily as I did. The more I think about it, the more pissed off I get. I mean, I don’t walk into your office and tell you how to do your job, and that’s basically what you did to me last night. Yes, I realize Gradduk was your friend, but the moment I start changing my approach to reporting based upon friendships is the moment I sacrifice whatever professional integrity—”

  “One of the cops that tried
to arrest Ed was murdered today,” I said, interrupting. “I spent the whole day trying to prove he and his partner set Ed up, and then I found out he was dead. He was shot three times, in his basement. Joe and I found the body. His daughter had already seen it. She was hiding behind the couch upstairs. She couldn’t talk to us. Couldn’t get a word out.”

  Silence, then: “You at home?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’ll see you in ten.”

  She hung up.

  Fifteen minutes later gravel spun and tires squealed below me—Amy’s trademark entrance. I’d left the door to the steps unlocked, and now I heard it open and close, and then Amy was knocking at my apartment door.

  “I’m up here,” I called down to her. The steps on the trapdoor creaked as she worked her way up, and then her head poked above the surface of the roof and she shot me a concerned look. I didn’t say anything. She marched across the roof, took the bottle of beer out of my hand, and downed a third of it, then gave it back to me.

  “Okay,” she said. “What the hell happened?”

  It took me a long time to tell it. It had been that sort of day. When I was through, she sat quietly and stared out at the night sky.

  “I’m sorry, Lincoln,” she said after a while. “That’s an awful, awful thing to experience.”

  “For the daughter.”

  “And for you. Awful for you because you had to see both the body and the daughter. I bet it was almost harder to see her.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You heard any ideas on what happened?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet. We gave our statements and they sent us home. I’m kind of surprised you hadn’t heard about it.”

  “I left early today because I worked late last night.”

  “Right.” I didn’t want to bring up her article. Somewhere between Larry Rabold’s living room and basement I’d lost my capacity to be angry over something like that.