Playing God (15 page)

He nosed into a tight space behind Stan's car, shoved the Explorer into park, and grabbed gloves and evidence bags from the back seat. Two fire trucks were still parked in front of the building—Portland's history of catastrophic fires had left a bit of a paranoid legacy. Despite the cold and the late hour, a small crowd clustered behind the yellow tape, trying to get the officer controlling the scene to tell them what had happened. He identified himself, slipped under the tape, and went inside. Climbing the stairs, he was assailed by acrid smoke and chemical smells.

Stan came out on the landing and gestured him into the room with one gloved hand. "Looks like they piled everything on the bed and set it on fire."

"They?"

"He. She. It. The perpetrator."

"We know it was set?"

"Gasoline. Can't you smell it? Fire Department's going to have their arson guys in tomorrow. They're pissed as hell we want to take stuff."

If he'd been the fire department, he'd have been pissed, too, but if they waited until after the arson investigation, vital evidence might be lost. Might end up in
their
evidence bags instead.

"Anyone see anything? Like who set it?"

Perry shook his head. "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil."

"Meaning they're all shit scared of O'Leary?"

"Got it in one."

"Where's Terry?"

"In the bathroom, sifting through the trash and bagging condom wrappers."

He looked around. Wink was carefully putting something that looked like the charred remnants of a bedspread into a paper bag, moving with the ponderous slowness of exhaustion. Where he'd absently swiped at it, his pale skin was streaked black.

Burgess pulled on gloves. "Where do you want me to start?"

"Wink and I have this room. You got the kitchen."

He sloshed across the soggy carpet to the kitchen. Although the fire had been confined to the bedroom, everything here, even the light fixture, was coated with oily black grime. It didn't look good for fingerprints. There were some glasses in the sink but they were black. He moved the top layer of trash and bagged bottles and fast-food wrappers. On the counter was a blinking answering machine. He bagged the machine. Plucked a few more likely bits from the trash and bagged them, too.

He lugged his treasures into the bedroom, found Perry and Wink finishing up and Kyle coming out of the bathroom. "You guys ready to call it a night?"

"Twenty-four hours ago," Devlin said.

Burgess looked around for something to load their evidence in, settled for a plastic milk crate. "Let's drop this stuff at the lab and go get some sleep."

"Sleep?" Perry said. "What's that?"

"Something civilians do," Wink said sourly, staring down at his filthy shoes. "Jeez, I hate fires. My shoes are wrecked, my clothes are wrecked."

"Your disposition's wrecked." Burgess lifted the crate, watching Kyle, stiff and skeletally thin, heading for the stairs. "I'll have patrol drop this off. You guys go home."

Burgess followed them down the stairs and out past the crowd. With their slumped shoulders and dirty clothes, they looked more like perpetrators than investigators. He watched them fumbled with their keys, load their tired bodies into their cars, and drive off in clouds of exhaust. He took one last look at the second floor. Tomorrow they'd have to get the drug people involved. What had O'Leary been so worried about that he'd torched his own place, if O'Leary had done it. And where the hell had he gone?

Chapter 12

He left his blackened shoes by the door, dropped his jacket and tie beside them to go to the cleaners, and made his way across the cold apartment. The bathroom was warmer. He dropped the rest of his clothes in the hamper, showered, set the alarm for seven, and fell into bed. He'd slept five hours when his alarm clock exploded like the Day of Judgment. He dragged an eye open, stared blearily at the gray morning, and decided to give himself another half hour.

Ten minutes later, the phone rang. Captain Cote, dispensing with civilities like hello or good morning, burst out of the receiver. "Where the hell are you?"

"In bed. Asleep."

"O'Leary's apartment," Cote said. "The Fire Chief's furious that you were messing with their crime scene."

He lay back down, phone to his ear, and counted to ten as he deleted the expletives from his reply. "It was our scene first. It's where Pleasant was partying the night he was killed. We're looking for anything that'll help us find O'Leary or that second girl. We pulled the warrant before the fire." Cote knew this, should have told the Fire Department. Sometimes he wondered whose side the guy was on.

"How come I haven't got any reports from you?" Cote continued. "How am I supposed to stay on top of things?"

"Because I've been out interviewing people."

"Then get your ass down here and write them."

"My ass was just working on its fifth hour of sleep in two days. We were up 'til two, working O'Leary's place." God, he hated starting out with a headache. Not that Cote'd care if he had limbs dropping off or was in a body cast. Cote was the new breed of rank—all about management techniques and procedures, solve rates and stats, willing to leave his cops hanging in the wind. Burgess was a by-the-book cop, but he knew sometimes rules were a poor fit and good cops needed some slack. A lot of the job was about judgment.

Ignoring everything he'd said, Cote snapped, "See me as soon as you get in."

Right. As long as you get your beauty sleep, asshole. Burgess cradled the phone and lay back down, but Cote had murdered sleep. Now that the case was oozing back into his brain, he might as well get up and go to work.

He pulled on socks and underwear, and shaved, hearing Alana's voice. "Dumb ass." So he was one of those guys who looked better without their clothes. He wondered if the guys at the station would agree. If naked interrogation would get better results. Guy in the mirror didn't look like he'd give the Calvin Klein models any competition. He dressed, grabbed some painkillers for his knee, found dry shoes, and left.

It was warmer, but the lead gray sky promised snow by noon. He liked snow, but when he had to drive around talking to people it was a huge pain, slowing things to a snail's pace. Tragically, it looked like his New Year's diet was going to be postponed again. He couldn't do eighteen-hour days on veggies and sprouts. Breakfast would be courtesy of the golden arches. Cop cuisine. Drive through, bag a coffee and a bagel sandwich, gulp it down at his desk.

He hoped, as cops always did in a hard case, that something had broken open while he slept, knowing that it was a false hope.

Stan and Terry weren't in. Neither was Wink, but Dani had left a message that she had something to show him. He scarfed down his breakfast, and went to the lab. Found Dani bent over a microscope. "Got something for me?" he asked.

"I've got a lovely footprint." She carefully lifted a cardboard box. Underneath was a shoe impression cast in dental stone. "Found it beside the passenger door." Her smile was hopeful. "It is yours? It's not Aucoin's and you guys got the scene sealed off before anyone else could muck it up." He shook his head and the smile faded. "What's the matter? I thought you'd be pleased."

"Looks like a man's foot," he said.

"Man's size eleven. Reebok. That a problem?"

"I was thinking our killer could be a woman."

"Maybe she has big feet."

"Maybe. But our witness says she was wearing very high heels."

"Oh," she said. "FMPs."

"Which are?"

"Fuck me pumps. Shoes with heels so high you have to stick out your chest and ass to stay balanced. They're supposed to make the legs look good. Or so I'm told." She looked at her own feet, in sensible shoes at the ends of her blue jumpsuit-clad legs, smiled her sweet smile and got back to business. "I haven't gone over the photographs yet. There were some other prints—your FMPs. Nothing I could get a cast of, though. The working conditions were less than optimal, if you get my drift." She picked up a stack of pictures from her desk and held them out. "You can look through these, but don't expect much. Heels that high just punch little holes in the snow. And don't mix them up or I'll stab you myself. I'm not feeling sunny."

At his raised eyebrows, she explained. "Had a visit from Captain Cote, who was visibly and audibly disappointed that I don't have as many arms as Shiva or move as fast as Superman. He couldn't understand why Wink wasn't here. You sure he was ever a cop?"

"I'm not even sure he's human."

"Hey, I heard that." Wink set down a bag of take-out and a coffee and pulled off his jacket, then handed Dani a muffin. The sagging shoulders and weary tread echoed the way Burgess felt. "Hope you weren't talking about me," Wink said.

"Cote," Dani said. "You got a magnifying glass for Joe?"

"Why? He looking for clues?"

"More like a hooker in a haystack. You really think it was a woman?" she asked.

Burgess took the magnifying glass, snapped on a bright light, and started looking at the pictures. "It could have been. Witness says the other woman who was partying with Pleasant—the one he left with—wasn't one of O'Leary's regular girls, but someone who came looking for him. Why would a classy hooker go looking for a sleazy pimp?"

"Classy hooker in Portland, Maine?" Wink said. "City really is going upscale."

Burgess nodded. "Slim, blonde and gorgeous, if Alana's telling the truth."

Wink pried the top off his coffee, unwrapped a bagel oozing with cream cheese and bit into it. "People wonder how we can eat in the midst of all this blood and guts. Hell, if I can't sleep, I've got to eat. Have to have something to keep me going. You getting any closer, Joe?"

"Not yet. You ever strip wallpaper off an old house? You've got a layer of cowboys and Indians, and beneath that some pink thing with trailing ribbons and beneath that old blue flowers, all the way back to the old horsehair plaster, and in those layers is the story of the house. Pleasant's life is like that. Work life. Family life. Secret life. Maybe secret lives. All layers of the same man. Somewhere in one of those layers, one of those patterns, is the answer. But which layer? It's hard to get a handle on him."

Dani gave him an odd look. "That was so poetic, Joe."

Poetic, phooey. He'd let his guard down, a side-effect of too little sleep. Last thing he wanted was to be considered poetic. He was here to do a job. He shrugged and bent to look at the photos again, going through them one-by-one, looking for signs of other footprints. Kept coming back to the same one. He handed it to Dani, pointing at some small depressions in the snow. "Did you mean these?"

She took the picture and the magnifying glass. "Yup, those are your footprints. High heels. Really high heels. So that'll be your hooker. I've got some close-ups but they're not processed yet." She handed the picture back, embarrassed. "Sorry they're not ready. But they didn't photograph well with all the blowing snow. Don't look like much more than rabbit tracks. We were lucky to get that one good cast of the man's shoe."

"Let me know when they're ready," he said. "And keep on with the rest of this stuff. No telling what may be important."

"We found the money," she said. "Boone's working on it." She nodded at a big, hulking man hunched over a terminal. "Boone hates us all right now, don't you, Boone?" The man gave no sign he'd heard.

"Thanks, Dani." He wanted to get out and talk to people, find the one who'd say something that would open this up. Say it or not say it. Eyes and body told a lot, too. But first, he had to write reports, meet with his team, go see Cote. The man was probably pissed because he hadn't genuflected upon arrival. As if bureaucracy took precedence over solving crime. He found Perry and Kyle and Berman and called them into the conference room, frustration sitting as tangible as a fifth person in the room.

He reported Alana's observations: that the mystery woman, Karen, might have contacted O'Leary; that she didn't seem to have much experience and might not even be named Karen; that O'Leary videotaped sexual encounters at his apartment and might have been blackmailing johns. Burgess also told them about the two sets of footprints.

Kyle handed around a mug shot. "Lucas Brown."