Nun Too Soon (A Giulia Driscoll Mystery Book 1) (6 page)

Eight

Two hours later, her butt numb and her fingers cramping, Giulia set down the police report on break-ins similar to the one at Fitch’s apartment. Bulleted lists filled three pages of the legal pad on her lap. Multi-colored fluorescent Post-it notes fattened the report’s right-hand side. She got to her knees to relieve the muscles in her thighs and picked up the autopsy report. The crime scene and autopsy photos, too, since lunch was long digested.

The top photo: Loriela mostly naked and strangled on the small apartment balcony. The next, a close-up of her face and neck. The pathetic image of the soaked, draggled blouse and hair—brown according to the autopsy but looking black in the early morning rain—made Giulia’s throat close up. So vulnerable. So final. And according to the information they’d gleaned from AtlanticEdge, Loriela Gil radiated confidence and energy when she was alive.

Frank would lecture Giulia about getting too involved with the case, with emphasis on her bleeding-heart tendencies.

“Guilty. So what?” She bit back a smile. “Now I’m copping attitude.”

Several more photos of Loriela’s body from different angles. Giulia divorced herself from the pathos of it and put on her detective hat. She treated the imaginary fedora like an actor putting on a costume: When she wore it, Giulia Falcone the ex-nun who was still a Franciscan at heart up to, and including, working with homeless humans and animals, took a vacation. Giulia Falcone-Driscoll, who’d started as DI’s admin and now ran the business, took her place. Professional Giulia fought for justice and made a living doing it.

She stepped over the circle of documents and spread out the eight-by-ten photos on the floor beneath the window. If she treated them more like a PowerPoint slide show than a puzzle...

Starting at the upper left-hand corner of the narrow end of the office, she sat on her heels and placed the photo taken at the farthest point away from the apartment. Then, as though she was walking alongside the apartment building, the photos of the footprints, of the broken barberry bushes, of Loriela’s shirt and hair drooping off the edge of the second-floor balcony. Then, as though she too had used the bushes as a stepping stone up to the wrought-iron railing, Loriela’s body lying in the corner, the open glass door, the neat circle cut from the glass above the deadbolt. In the third row, the soaked carpet from where the rain had blown in when the killer had opened the door to steal, according to the police report, wallets and laptops.

The footprints on the carpet trailing mulch and bits of grass. The rumpled bedcovers. The open purse on the kitchen counter. In the office-slash-den, two rectangles of dust-free table where two laptops used to be.

The rest of the photos covered the square footage of the entire apartment. Master bedroom, hall, spare bedroom turned into the den which still contained an Xbox and flat screen TV, kitchen with marble-topped island and dining space, living room with another flat-screen TV. Walk-in closets in each bedroom, one and a half bathrooms, a tiny laundry room off the kitchen.

“Their rent must be as much as our mortgage.”

A knock and the door opened. “I’m heading out to my baby checkup,” Sidney said.

“It’s four o’clock already? No wonder my muscles have locked up.” Giulia un-knotted herself. “See you tomorrow.”

“I promise not to drive over any railroad tracks.” Her slower than usual footsteps retreated ’til the main door closed behind her.

Giulia twisted left and right, easing her back and shoulder muscles. So much left to read. She’d filled seven and a half pages of the legal pad. At this stage she liked to scribble and rewrite and draw lines between connections rather than type into her tablet.

She’d had to keep the window closed so the papers wouldn’t blow all over and the air in her office was dead. Plus she didn’t want to spend the night on this hard floor.

That settled it. She stacked the photos in reverse order and slid them into their envelope. Returning all the documents to the shipping box went much faster now that she had a handle on their order. Her first action after closing the box was to open the window.

“Brr. False spring lived up to its name.” She inhaled the fresh air.

When she opened the door, Zane’s right hand flailed at her. Her evil imp whispered that she ought to buy a hand-held flag at the dollar store for him to wave. Her good angel whapped the imp with its wing. Zane was sloughing off the insanity of his year in telemarketing, but it wouldn’t help to push things too soon.

“Yes?” she said to him.

“Ms. Driscoll, check this out.” He turned his monitor toward her. “The dumbed-down version of their proprietary software, the one sold online and in stores? There’s something off with the numbers.”

Giulia grinned. “Excellent. Do you know what?”

Zane’s shoulders slumped, emphasizing his weightlifter’s neck muscles. “No. But I will.”

“I have perfect confidence in you.”

Her admin looked up, his eyes studying her for sarcasm.

“Yes, I mean it. I’m heading home for a quiet evening with cinnamon coffee and DNA reports.”

“I can stay—”

“No. We’re not on deadline with this job yet. Let it percolate.”

His shy smile appeared. “I was hoping you’d say that. I’ve got a date.”

Nine

“Are you going to work all night?” Frank’s voice hovered between plaintive and annoyed.

“It’s only nine-thirty,” Giulia said from their living room floor. “I want to get a better handle on this DNA report.”

With a deep sigh, Frank sat beside her. “Let me see it.”

“I knew you’d say that.”

“I have an ulterior motive,” her husband said as he studied the graphs and numbers. “I want dessert.”

Giulia batted her eyes in the best cartoonish manner. “I’ve lost my allure so soon?”

“Your espresso cake hasn’t.” Frank looked down at her. “I’m joking. Don’t look like that. But seriously I want a honking big piece of that cake before I take you to bed, wife of mine.”

“Then reveal some secrets to me so I can fit it in with these photographs and other reports.”

Frank unstapled the pages. “Come closer, my child, and let Papa Driscoll explain forensic DNA to you.”

Giulia sat cross-legged next to him. “My spirit is open to absorb your wisdom.”

Frank’s eyes skewed sideways at her. “Don’t use your Sister Regina voice. It freaks me out.”

She kissed his cheek. “All part of my plan to keep our marriage fresh by keeping you slightly off-balance.
Cosmo
says so.”

“I don’t trust that magazine.”

“Focus, Mr. Driscoll.”

“Right. DNA. Let’s start with this table of alleles for a nasal mucus sample.”

Frank took her through alleles and loci and short tandem repeats. “STRs. Easier to say and most cops and lawyers know what they are nowadays. This table shows samples from—damn—eight people—the dead girlfriend, the suspect, the cleaning lady, the apartment building manager, the landscaper, and one—two—three other names, probably the friends who hung around most.”

“Those suspects are so obvious they’re cliché.”

“Don’t knock every cliché. There’s a reason the obvious suspects became cliché.”

“Yes, O guru.”

“Stop it. Okay, see where the numbers of the dead girlfriend are the only ones that match the mucus sample exactly? Sometimes the chart shows matches that are too close to call, but not here. See how it says that sample two—the piano player—is ‘included’ and everyone else is ‘excluded’ as possible matches?”

Giulia raised her finger from the page where she had been following Frank’s explanation. “All right. I’ve got the basics of this chart. What about the electropherograms over here?”

Frank described peaks and “off-ladder” loci and ambiguities. “There’s also what’s called ‘noise.’ You’ve got a little of that here in this urea crystal sample on page four.” He picked up three different pages from the initial charts and after that two more pages of electropherograms. “None of the samples appear to be degraded. That’ll make things easier for you.”

A few minutes later, as Giulia was repacking the shipping box, she gave Frank her best “stop the erring student in his tracks” stare.

“You’re giving up much easier than usual.”

Her husband’s eyebrows raised in comic innocence. “What do you mean?”

“Come on. Recall last year when we ran DI together. How many times did we argue over method versus means?”

“Forget that. What about justice versus logic?”

“Exactly.” She set the box on the hall table. “So allow me to rephrase my observation: Why are you so calm and cooperative tonight? Yesterday you treated this case like it was a joke whose punch line I didn’t get.”

“Oh,
muirnín.
I’m sorry.” Frank jumped up from the couch and wrapped his arms around her waist. “I have a mouth like an
asal
.”

Giulia snorted before she could stop herself. “You are not a jackass. You do, however, lack a reliable internal censor.”

Frank turned her around and kissed her. “Then I won’t mention how unladylike it is to snort.” Before Giulia could protest, he said, “Seriously, you know I’m all for giving you any advice or bits of knowledge I have if it’ll further DI’s reputation. Gotta keep my reputation for incisive sleuthing intact.”

“
Your
reputation?” Giulia’s voice jumped half an octave.

Frank wrestled her onto the couch and tickled her into gasping submission.

Ten

Roger Fitch arrived at Driscoll Investigations at nine o’clock Thursday morning dressed in jeans and a Steelers jersey under a leather jacket. He clutched a V8 energy drink like it alone could drag him into communication with his fellow human beings.

“Good morning,” Giulia said, mentally contrasting his hangover-chic to her neat brown wool trousers and jade-green sweater. “Please have a seat. I’ll be with you in a minute.” She indicated Zane’s client chair.

Sidney disappeared into the bathroom for the second time since eight-fifteen. Fitch ignored Giulia’s invitation and paced between both desks, drinking and staring first out the window, then at Zane and Giulia, then at Sidney when she emerged from the bathroom.

“Zane, can you give more reasons to justify items
b
,
d
, and
g
? I don’t want to give Monsignor Jerome any reason to cut us off before we complete the presentation.”

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure.” He added notes to three header cells in the spreadsheet on his screen.

Sidney eased herself into her chair, both she and the chair creaking.

“Ready to pop, huh?” Fitch said.

Sidney gave him an excellent imitation of Giulia’s “frost in July” smile.

Giulia inhaled sharply enough for Roger to hear her. He turned, but Giulia’s face showed nothing but polite welcome. As recently as last year, she would’ve laughed out loud at Sidney’s mimicry. Now? Not a chance. One, she liked Sidney too much. Two, it wasn’t professional. Three, it was an excellent imitation of Angry Giulia and she wanted to see more. So she cut Roger off before he could do any real damage.

“Thank you for waiting, Mr. Fitch. Please come into my office. Zane, I can take calls.” She closed the door behind them.

Roger dropped into Giulia’s client chair and slugged more of his V8. “Okay. Thirteen days ’til my trial starts. What’s the strategy?”

Giulia’s professional mask never cracked, even as she catalogued Fitch as a typical problem child. Well
,
she didn’t spend ten years teaching high school students in challenging settings to allow a client like this to disturb her equilibrium. Besides, the attitude was most likely slapped on to cover his fear of that looming antiseptic death chamber with its poison-filled needle.

Out loud, she said, “I’ve worked up a multi-step plan. It’s labor-intensive, but the time constraints give us no choice.”

“I knew it. Laid in a stock of these V8s and single malt and steaks to get me through.”

She opened her spreadsheet on her desktop rather than the tablet, for the sake of using her ergonomic keyboard.

“I want to go over some of the ground that the police have already walked.”

“Good God, why?”

“Because my team will look at it in a very different way than the police did. See these DNA reports?” She handed those papers out to him.

He made a puking noise. “I remember those giant Q-tips they stuck in my mouth and in Lori’s.”

“They’re going to be just as much use to us as they are to the prosecution. So are the police reports and all the crime scene photographs.”

A shrug. “You’re the boss.”

“True. First of all, I would like more background on you and Loriela. Specifically, the restraining order.”

Fitch’s eyes narrowed. “Scheming bitch. Lori’s mother, that is. Ever read up on Alexander the Great? His mother was a real piece of work. Pushed, pushed, pushed; killed off rivals; thought up more schemes than contestants on reality shows. Lori’s mother could’ve been her star pupil.”

Giulia typed it all up with a straight face. “And?”

“I wasn’t good enough for Madre Cassandra’s little princess. Forget the fact that Madre Cassandra raised her princess in a two-room welfare apartment because Madre Cassandra spent her career cleaning second-rate office buildings.”

“There is nothing demeaning about working with one’s hands,” Giulia said.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Honest wages for honest labor, yada yada. Lori got a full ride to Temple because of her kickass grades combined with Madre’s extremely limited income, so it all worked out.” He shook the V8, drank the dregs, and tossed it dead-center into the trash can. “Oh, no,” Fitch continued. “Nothing less than a CEO was good enough for the princess. Of course Lori wasn’t like that. If she was here, she’d tell you I was the guy that made her get a clue.” He stood up and started pacing the narrow space. “Lori inherited two things from her mother: legs up to here—” he stopped pacing and gestured at the level of his lowest ribs—“and love for the bad boys. She broke a guy’s nose in high school and brought a successful sexual assault suit against a guy in her junior year at Temple.”

Without breaking her typing rhythm, Giulia headed up a new column for the college incident.

“Madre Cassandra conveniently ignored her own tastes in male companionship and became suspicious of anyone who wanted to date her daughter. Lori moved into a better neighborhood and started her own catalog of Bad Choices. Thought she could handle anything when AtlanticEdge recruited her right out of college.”

Fitch leaned on the windowsill and stared out.

“They got decent pizza at that place across the street?”

“Yes, they do. I gather you’re about to tell me Loriela made some poor choices when she started out on her own.”

With a brief laugh, Fitch faced into the room again. “You’re right. I don’t have time to get distracted. Lori hooked up with a bartender with baby-blue eyes and a head full of muscle. Lots of muscle on the rest of him, too. Lori found that out fast enough.”

“Name, please?”

“Jonathan Stallone, no lie. ‘Yo, Adrian’ and all that. Cops should have his address. He only called Lori once when I knew her, and she shut him down pretty fast.” He waited for Giulia to finish typing. “The guy I shouldered out of her life hates my guts, but who cares? He thought he was tough ’til I kicked his ass. Then there’s the other manager who got passed over for promotion when Lori was named head of bookkeeping. She got transferred to the unemployment line.” He spelled out both names.

“Thank you.” Giulia stretched her arms above her head. “Mr. Petit mentioned a restraining order against you.”

“Didn’t think you’d forget about that.” He put on an air of repentance. “Happened when Lori took me to stay with Madre Cassandra our second Christmas together. Couple days after Christmas, I got bored, Lori started arguing with her mother, with me, with the nosy neighbors across the hall. So I bailed and got wasted at the corner bar—real trash heap, but good beer. Lori came after me. I didn’t want to go back to that rat-trap of an apartment. Then, would you believe it, her mother followed her to the bar. Started nagging Lori, who started nagging me. Who the hell needs that?”

Giulia typed it all as though she was transcribing nothing more interesting than a term paper.

“I had at least three boilermakers in me. Wasn’t at my best, you know? Lori grabbed my arm and dug her pointy nails into my skin. I shoved her off me and she crashed into a barstool. Cut her scalp. You know how head wounds gush blood. Her mother screamed and cussed at me in Spanish. I helped Lori up, the bartender handed me a towel and some vodka, and I cleaned her up. Hurt her like hell. She said a few choice words to me, too.”

Giulia reminded herself not to judge.

“We ignored Madre pitching a fit and headed back to the apartment together. I patched Lori up and we had a heart-to-heart.” He walked behind her desk and read over her shoulder. “Open up YouTube, will you? Type in ‘Mother-in-Law Trouble.’ There it is. Third from the top.”

Giulia clicked the link. A shaky video began. The ceiling lights reflected in the mirror behind the bar showed the standard row of hard liquor bottles, a line of bar stools, several beer bottles on the bar itself, and a few tables off to the right and left. Something by Metallica played in the background, but Giulia couldn’t tell which song because of the full-volume brawl in the foreground.

A tall woman with blonde-streaked black hair screamed Spanish curses in a progressively higher voice. Fitch stood opposite her, arguing with both her and an equally tall woman with short auburn hair. Giulia recognized Loriela Gil from the police photos. Loriela’s voice was pitched lower than her mother’s, but every so often it jumped up and the two sounded identical.

Fitch’s lines cycled through “Shut up!” “Leave me alone,” and “Fuck this. Just fuck this.”

Then Loriela grabbed Fitch’s arm and he cursed louder. When he shoved her off, five circles of blood appeared on his t-shirt sleeve. A crash and several gasps and noises covered the music. The camera swung left. Loriela lay on the floor, a bar stool on top of her and two more rolling away in opposite directions. Her mother’s voice reached new heights. Loriela held one hand to the back of her head and told Fitch exactly what she thought of him with the middle finger of the other.

Male laughter much closer to the camera drowned out all the other noise for a moment. Fitch’s back filled the screen and then he was helping Loriela onto one of the still-upright stools. The bartender handed him a towel and a vodka bottle. Fitch wet the towel and wiped Loriela’s hair. It came away covered with blood.

“Ow! Asshole.” Loriela took the bottle and gulped from it.

Her mother hadn’t stopped yelling. One of the closer male voices translated, “He’s the son of a whore, she’ll cut his
cojones
off if he ever touches her daughter again, he’s lower than a fly on a dung heap, and back around to his questionable parentage.”

Fitch took Loriela by the waist and together they walked around her mother and out the door. The camera followed them until Loriela’s mother’s furious face filled the entire screen.

“You have recorded this? You will send it to me, yes?”

“Uh, sure, lady.” The voice tried to be soothing.

Her mother shook Loriela’s bloody towel at the screen. “I will make him pay for this.”

She ran out of the bar. The male voice said, “Should’ve checked out the mother before he married the daughter.” The video ended.

What Giulia wanted to say was, “Could you possibly make this any more difficult?” What she said was, “The restraining order followed directly after the incident in the video?”

“Yeah.” Fitch took two folded papers out of his back pocket and spread them on Giulia’s desk. “I brought it for you to see. Colby has the original. He wasn’t going to give it to you because he said it put me in a bad light. Heh. Like you couldn’t find this out on your own.”

She read through them. “Based on the Affidavit and Petition for an Order for Protection in this matter, an Order for Protection should be issued...Refrain from assault, stalking, harassment...” She looked up at him when she finished the second page. “Since your relationship continued, what exactly happened with regard to this?”

“Len Tulley, he’s one of Lori’s co-workers, sent me the YouTube link. Don’t know how he saw it and didn’t care. I went straight to my VP at eight the next morning. It helped a lot that he and I were regular drinking buddies and spotted each other on weights at the company workout room. I put a good spin on it and got Lori on speakerphone. What saved my bacon is we never used each other’s names on the video. Nothing searchable linked me or the company to the bar fight.”

Giulia allowed her skeptical expression to speak for her.

“No, no, really. My VP took it to Lori’s VP and they took it together to the weekly steering meeting. Management always likes proactive rather than reactive plans. ’Course, what really helped is that Lori and I’d posted increasing ROI and on-budget projects for the past seven quarters straight. We both got an official warning with a copy in our employee files.”

Giulia typed like a machine.

“A cop showed up at my apartment with a summons a couple of days later. Lori went with me to the hearing and totally took my side against Cassandra.” Triumph filled his voice. “The judge tossed it out. Cassandra cursed at me, but the judge threatened to charge her with contempt or some such, and she shut up. It was funny.”

Giulia pressed her lips together. She saved her working document and reminded herself, again, not to judge the client.