Eight in the Box (10 page)

CHAPTER 27

R
ichter crept down the hall of the bungalow. Ahead of him, he could
see that the bedroom door was slightly ajar. The electronic melody of a cell phone being activated chimed somewhere in the darkness. She was in her bed, blankets pulled over her head. She must have heard him moving around. And now she was calling for help.

He hadn’t expected her to be awake. He lunged toward her, holding her down with the full weight of his body. She tried to scream, but the sound was muffled by Richter’s left hand pressing the blankets firmly over her face. Reaching under them with his right hand, he grabbed for her throat. He regretted having to wear the latex gloves. When he was sure he had a firm grip on her, Richter pulled the blankets off her face. With his free hand he ripped the phone away. No one on the other end of the line. He’d gotten to her before she made a call. He flipped it shut. For that one instant when the illuminated blue buttons on the phone lit both of their faces, Richter felt that she might have recognized who he was, but he wanted to be sure.

He scanned the room for a light and spotted a lamp on the bureau on the other side of the room. He lifted her off the bed by her neck. She struggled to push his hand away, pounding him in the chest, her feet scissoring in the air as she tried to kick him. Richter carried her across the room and turned on the small lamp. He wanted her to see him at the moment of her salvation. He wanted her to appreciate what he was doing for her. As the light came on, she saw Richter’s face, and he saw a moment of recognition come into her wide eyes.

She tried to speak, her mouth sliding, opening, closing. No sound. If Richter loosened his grip, she would probably beg him to take whatever he wanted and leave her alone, promising she’d never tell anyone.

But Richter had no intention of releasing her. He’d never hear her say anything. It wouldn’t have mattered anyway. He wasn’t there to steal or rape. His was a nobler intention. Richter had come to her to free her from her ordinary existence.

He placed his other hand on her neck and began to squeeze firmly. The expression on her face said “Please let me live. Please spare me.” Richter felt no anger or hatred. He did feel joy, even though she didn’t understand what he was doing for her.

She made one last effort to elbow and kick him, but her body was already weakened, the blows ineffectual. Richter felt as if his two hands would come together. He could simply have snapped her neck, but that would’ve been much less meaningful. This way he could watch the life leave her body slowly. She’d have more time to see and appreciate him.

Then he saw the look of thanks in her eyes. Her struggling eased, her body sagging onto the side of the bed. Richter loosened his grip and placed her head gently down on the mattress. The pillows were on the floor and the bedding was twisted. The struggle had been more violent than he’d realized. He leaned down and felt faint puffs of air from her nose and mouth. She was still alive, but unconscious. Richter had to hurry now. He picked her up, threw her over his shoulder and carried her toward the bathroom.

Richter had a full night of work ahead.

CHAPTER 28

M
ooney stepped out onto the back deck of Robyn Stokes’s house.
The cool air was refreshing, just what he needed. It was finally starting to feel like winter again. Winter had always been his favorite season. As a kid, the changing seasons dictated what sports he and his friends would play: baseball in the spring, basketball in the summer, football in the fall and hockey in the winter. But there was nothing like the cold winter air, chilling his lungs during a pickup ice hockey game on a frozen pond. Tonight was perfect weather for one of those games. What he’d give to be a kid again, flying around on a sheet of ice. No need to worry about women being murdered. No need to think about families being devastated. No need to feel the pressure of being the one person with the responsibility to stop the killing.

Mooney looked up into the cloudless sky, the only obstruction to his view the steam from his breath. Entranced by the crescent moon, the bright stars, he wondered how this could have happened. He’d known there would be another victim if he didn’t catch this lunatic, but he hadn’t expected one so soon. The 911 call had come in five days after the one placed from the McCarthy house.

Mooney had been at his desk when Operations notified him of the call. A monotone voice informed him, “I think your killer’s back.” A wash of darkness swept through him. “Who’s our victim? What’s the address? Who is the supervisor on scene?” he’d asked. Only a few hours earlier he’d sent Alves home to spend some time with his wife, maybe make up for taking him away from her birthday party.

Mooney didn’t tell Alves the victim’s name over the phone. He would have to tell him this one in person. He needed to keep an eye on him to make sure he could still do his job effectively. If Alves became emotionally involved, Mooney might have to take him off the case. But he didn’t want to do that. Not now. They were so far into the investigation and Alves had worked too hard to be thrown aside like that.

Mooney took another deep breath of the cold air. Now he and Alves would have to tell another family, this time a friend, that their daughter, granddaughter, sister, aunt was dead; that from this moment forward their lives would never be the same. A homicide survivor had once told Mooney that losing a child was like losing a limb; that it never gets better, you just kind of get used to it not being there.

A star shot across the sky and he thought of Robyn Stokes, her soul released from her mortal body. He said a prayer for her and her family before sliding the glass door and walking back into her house.

CHAPTER 29

A
lves wiped at the tears as he drove. Enough. Now he needed to
be strong.

When Mooney first told him the name of the victim, Alves had tried to convince himself that it was another Robyn Stokes that had been murdered. After all, the Robyn Stokes he knew, with whom he had grown up, was from Mission Hill, not Mattapan. But he hadn’t asked her where she was living when he saw her at the party. He didn’t know about the house she’d bought in Mattapan. Mooney showed Alves her hospital ID photo, the pictures on the mantel, a shot of her and her mother at her nursing school graduation. This was his Robyn.

He would tell Marcy in the morning. It would be tough. But it would be nothing like telling Mrs. Stokes of her daughter’s death. He’d told Mooney that he would do this alone. Mrs. Stokes deserved to learn the news from an old friend, not a stranger. Strangers had come to notify her of her husband’s death years earlier. Mr. Stokes was shot during a robbery of the corner store where he worked. Angel and Robyn were kids at the time, playing catch in front of her apartment when the detectives pulled up. Even at that age, they knew what an unmarked police car was, and they also knew that the police never showed up with good news. The detectives, maybe one of them was a young Wayne Mooney, went inside and only stayed for a few minutes. After they left, Angel and Robyn went in to see what had happened. Mrs. Stokes was on the floor wailing. The sounds were so unreal that Angel first thought she was laughing.

Robyn was not the same after that day. She never wanted to come out and hang out. She stopped playing sports. She had always dreamed about being the first woman professional baseball player. She threw left-handed with a natural curve. At the time, he didn’t doubt that she’d play pro ball if she wanted to.

As he pulled up in front of her mother’s house, Alves could see Robyn Stokes as the young girl with the nasty curveball who was going to play for the Red Sox someday. She wore that bright smile that he never saw again after the day the detectives came to her house.

Now he was the detective coming to tear her mother’s heart out. He wiped his face with his sleeve and took a deep breath before stepping from the car. It was a long climb up the five steps to the door. One more breath before ringing the bell.

He had to ring it a second time before he saw a light come on upstairs. It was a few more minutes before the door opened, and an elderly Mrs. Stokes stood before him in her bathrobe with a momentary smile of recognition. She hadn’t seen him since he’d moved out of the neighborhood. “Hello, Angel,” she said, sleepily. “What are you doing here? You look so handsome in that suit.”

Then her expression changed as she started putting things together. He was sure she knew he was a Homicide detective now. Word travels fast in the old neighborhood, whether it’s good news or bad.

Angel Alves’s eyes began to well up as he stepped forward. He tried to give her a hug.

“No!” she bawled as he got close to her. She started pounding his chest with closed fists. “No. No. No.” She began to sob before collapsing into his arms.

As he held the frail shivering woman close, he knew that everything had changed. This wasn’t just about doing his job anymore. This was about revenge.

CHAPTER 30

T
he shriek from the fire alarm was deafening. Connie and Mitch
followed the trickle of people laughing and chatting as they made their way down the stairs. No one ever took the drills seriously, Connie thought.

Judge Davis trained them on evacuation procedures with his unannounced drills, a response to the September 11th terrorist attacks. As if some terror group were going to target his inner-city courthouse. Word had it that someone had called in a bomb threat at nine o’clock as court was about to begin. “Probably some defendant trying to postpone his trial,” Connie said. “Judge Davis will have the sessions open in an hour.”

As they stepped outside into the crisp February air, Connie was surprised by the number of people who’d been evacuated from the building. With the defendants, the witnesses and courthouse personnel, there were more than two hundred people crammed in the plaza between the courthouse and the police station.

“Hey, Red, breakfast?” said Connie.

“You?” said Mitch. “Eat breakfast? Are you kidding me?”

“I eat breakfast, I just don’t eat the crap you call breakfast. And I don’t want to stand around freezing my ass off with people I’m going to send to jail later. We could sneak over to The Silver Slipper for some hot grits.”

“Sounds good, but I’m in the jury session with Judge Davis.”

“So am I. We’ve got plenty of time. This is a real bomb threat, which means the court officers have to evacuate the building, including all the custodies. That’s a big production, getting everyone shackled up before they lead them out. We have at least an hour before the Bomb Squad clears the building.”

“Let’s go before someone sees us.”

Connie and Mitch walked past the police station, a concrete bunker of a building that didn’t fit in with the rest of the architecture of the square. The façade of the building, facing the Dudley bus terminal, reminded Connie of pictures he’d seen of the Berlin Wall. No wonder the people of Roxbury didn’t trust the police.

They walked across Dudley Street into the heart of the Square. Connie liked to imagine what it was like in its heyday, when all the storefronts were open and you could hear the pitch of street vendors for a half mile outside of the Square, the old elevated Orange Line trains passing overhead with their steel wheels squealing as they made the turn from Washington Street onto Dudley Street and then back onto Washington Street. When he was a kid that slow, serpentine turn was Connie’s favorite part of the ride into Downtown Boston from his family’s home in West Roxbury.

But even as a child, looking down from that train, Connie had missed the opportunity to see a bustling Dudley Square. By the time he was born, this center of black culture and history had already been destroyed by years of racism and neglect. By the early 1970s many of the restaurants and stores had been boarded up and closed, the old, majestic buildings slowly decaying.

The South Bay District Court, a three-story, red-brick building designed to stand out next to surrounding granite and sandstone buildings, had been built as part of an ongoing effort to revitalize the Square. The city was trying to encourage renovation by offering subsidized loans, but it was a slow process bringing back a neighborhood that had been run-down for forty years. The new courthouse was a symbol to the black community that they had not been forgotten by the government.

Despite these efforts, the Square was still far from its original glory. The streets themselves were trash-strewn. Gangs of kids stood around harassing people, scaring away legitimate business. Many of the buildings, abandoned by fleeing merchants, had not been entered in years except by prostitutes and skinny-armed drug addicts. These same addicts spent most of their lives sitting on the benches in the Dudley MBTA bus terminal.

The Silver Slipper was one of the few places that wasn’t marred with bubble-lettered graffiti; instead, the side of the building was graced with a massive mural dedicated to the history of the area. The Slipper was a fixture in the neighborhood. It had been around forever, surviving riots in the 1960s—legend had it that Malcolm X ate his breakfast at the counter—and the drug wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

As always, it was crowded. Connie and Mitch ordered their food at the counter, then sat at a small table.

“What’d you do this weekend?” Connie asked.

“Nothing good. Case prep.”

“That’s it?”

“I went out Saturday night.”

“It’s about time you put yourself out there again. Anyone I know?”

“Just a woman I went to law school with.”

“Her name wouldn’t happen to be Sonya, would it?”

“Very funny. She is friends with Sonya, though, so it’s been a little awkward. We’ve gone out a few times. I like her and I plan on seeing her again, but I’m not rushing into another serious relationship.” Mitch pulled a few napkins from the dispenser and twisted them in his hands. He looked to be lost in thought. Then he cleared his throat and sat up in his chair. “What did you do?”

“I worked at home. Andi was studying all weekend. I did get some interesting news, though. But you can’t tell anyone. There was another murder this weekend.”

“There’s a murder every weekend.”

“Let me rephrase that. The police found another bathtub full of blood early Saturday morning.”

“You’re fuckin’ kidding me. Where?”

“Mattapan.”

“Who’s the victim?”

“Some woman. Robyn Stokes, I think her name was.”

“How’d you find out? I didn’t see anything in the papers.”

“It wasn’t in the papers. I talked with Alves yesterday afternoon. He knew the woman. They grew up together. He and Mooney were able to keep it quiet over the weekend, but that’s not going to work for long. I’m sure ‘an anonymous source familiar with the investigation’ is going to leak it to the press.”

“What did Alves tell you?”

“They think the guy changed his MO.” Connie leaned into the table and lowered his voice. “Robyn Stokes was a professional, but she was never married, had no kids and she was black. He went from divorced white mothers to single black females with no kids. I guess Mooney’s starting to wonder if the guy is just an opportunist, a thrill killer who’s draining their blood to throw off his investigation.”

“They still have no idea why he’s doing this?”

“None.”

“Did they find any evidence, any clues?”

“She did know the guy was in the house before he attacked her.”

Mitch stopped twisting a paper napkin from the dispenser and looked at Connie.

“It looks like she might have tried to call for help from her cell. The crime lab took the phone to be fumed for prints.” Mitch was a great audience. “They’re hoping maybe he grabbed it from her.”

Mitch dropped the twisted paper. “You said Alves knew this woman.”

“He grew up with her. He had to tell her mother the bad news. I feel sorry for this guy if Alves gets to him.”

“There you are.” Nick stood in the restaurant’s door, calling across the crowded room. Right behind him, Connie could see, was Monica, looking irritated. “Thanks for inviting us to breakfast.”

Connie gave Mitch a dip of the head, letting him know the conversation was over, and Mitch nodded.

“Your invitation must have been lost in the mail.”

The waitress deftly slid a plate with a stack of pancakes and cheese grits toward Mitch. “Is this for you or the whole table?” she asked Connie as she put down a serving-sized bowl of grits. “How on earth are you going to eat all that, son?”

Connie offered a smile. “I can handle it. Thanks.”

“What’ll it be for you all?” she said, turning to Nick and Monica.

“Thanks, we’ll eat at the counter,” Nick said.

Monica stood there for a moment, then shrugged her shoulders before following Nick.

Connie winked at Mitch then picked up his spoon and started in on his mountain of grits.