The Price of Innocence (22 page)

Damn, hadn’t she found a few pieces of plastic at the scene? Home-made silencers often utilized a two-liter pop bottle, which flew apart with the first shot. The killer wouldn’t have had time to remove the shards of one and tape on a second in the short interval between the two shots. The second one had been louder, but still muffled, which a shredded two-liter bottle shouldn’t have been able to accomplish. And why hadn’t she found more than a few pieces? No, this killer had moved beyond home-made fixes downloaded from the Internet. He had something more sophisticated.

Also, the killer might have shot Marty through an opened window, retaining the casing inside the vehicle. That would explain why she hadn’t heard a car door slam.

‘I’m missing an appointment for this,’ the son groused again.

‘How important could it be?’ his mother asked. ‘It’s not like you have a real job.’

Theresa bumped into Frank and Angela as she went out the kitchen door.

‘Hold up, there, pard,’ he said. ‘You were supposed to stay put.’

‘I got claustrophobic.’

‘How can a seven-bedroom house be claustrophobic?’

‘Believe me, it can.’ She gave him the results of their experiment.

Frank seemed to mull this over. ‘That supports the idea that this Terry Beltran came up on his bike to get his revenge.’

‘You weren’t crazy about that theory,’ Theresa reminded him.

‘I wasn’t until this morning, when we talked to his parole officer again.’

Angela explained to Theresa, ‘Terry Beltran began to look for his ex-wife and kids the minute his feet hit real pavement. Apparently he doesn’t think restraining orders apply to him. At the end of last week he finally cornered a relative and found out that the ex, who apparently wised up during Terry’s most recent incarceration, had got herself and the kids out of town. No forwarding. Her own mother doesn’t know where she is. The relative took three broken teeth and a sprained wrist before he could convince Terry of it, but Terry finally accepted the fact that he had no way to find her. Then he burst into tears and rode off on his Huffy. So we’re figuring, without the bloodhound work to keep him busy, he turned to revenge.’

‘And he’s got his ex-cellmate to touch for a silencer,’ Frank added.

Theresa said, ‘Where would he get the money? He just got out of jail.’

‘I don’t know, but they always do. Maybe his cellmate owes him a favor.’

‘You can’t put him away for assaulting the relative?’

‘He’s too understanding a guy to press charges. In other words he’s got a stolen credit card business to protect and doesn’t want our help.’ He glanced at her, glanced again. ‘What’s bothering you?’

She scowled at the driveway, the house, the driveway.

‘Come on, cuz, spill.’

‘If Beltran’s on a bike, then he had the sense to pick up the casing before he left.’

‘Maybe he did. Or it flew somewhere in the lawn and we didn’t find it.’

‘We used a metal detector.’

Frank shrugged. Casings and bullets could wind up anywhere, including the shoe treads of EMS staff.

‘Would Marty Davis have let Terry Beltran come right up to him without at least unsnapping his weapon?’

‘Beltran’s been in jail. People look different. We have no idea what he wore, a hoodie, a low cap, who knows? Marty might not have gotten a look at his face until it was too late, and who knows if he would even recognize him then? Beltran was just one more arrest. A guy on a bicycle never looks too threatening, especially in this neighborhood.’

‘But why so quiet? Why use a silencer? We’re isolated from the other houses, why even bother?’

Angela said, ‘He couldn’t know he’d be able to track Davis to such an isolated spot, and had planned for a more populated site. That Davis came here just made it better.’

‘I didn’t hear any raised voices. Wouldn’t he want to tell Marty why he was about to kill him?’

‘And give him time to go for his gun?’

Theresa sighed, glared at the house again. Mother and son glared back from the kitchen window, no doubt wondering when the police department would stop cluttering up their driveway. ‘What’s creeping me out is that maybe he kept quiet because he saw the other car in the drive, and knew Marty was not alone. Maybe he watched us both arrive.’ She couldn’t shake the idea of the killer standing right where she stood, watching for any sign of activity inside the house, any hint that he had a witness he now needed to dispatch as quickly and dispassionately as he had dispatched Marty Davis.

‘He knew you were here,’ Frank agreed.

‘So why didn’t he kill me?’

F
rank and Angela went to try to find out how Terry Beltran had been spending his time since his release, leaving Theresa to her own devices. Before they left, however, she asked to know what they had found out about Kenneth Bilecki, in addition to the basic rap sheet information Angela had looked up the evening before. Frank shrugged, but Angela, with the endless curiosity about the people she encountered in their investigations, had dug a little further. Bilecki subsisted on the kindness of strangers and by working at various unskilled jobs long enough to get laid off, stringing out the sparse unemployment checks. When asked for an address he often gave a street and number off Addison, which apparently belonged to a soft-hearted friend who let him flop there once in a while. His only other appearances on the official record occurred at a methadone clinic on Carnegie, which he would visit at least twice a month. This made no sense to Theresa, as doctors used methadone to treat dependency upon opiates, such as heroin or morphine, not a stimulant like amphetamines. Apparently, when Bilecki would crash down from the high of meth, the resulting discomfort and depression convinced him that he felt pain. Since pain was usually treated with opiates – most patients at any methadone clinic had become addicted to prescription painkillers like OxyContin – Bilecki assumed that methadone would help him feel better. He very rarely convinced the medical personnel of this, but he kept trying, especially in the winter when the waiting room gave him a warm place to sit and drink free coffee. Angela had an extra copy of the appointments, which Theresa took to give to Dr Banachek. Given that Bilecki and Lily Simpson were friends, perhaps she frequented the same clinic for the same reason. It might shed some light on her medical history.

At least that had been Theresa’s first, and innocent, goal. But as the taillights of the detectives’ shiny car wound up the drive, Theresa realized that Bilecki liked to make his visits to the clinic on Fridays. Sometimes a Thursday, but usually Friday, around three or four in the afternoon. Maybe this fit into the schedule of whatever else he did with his time, or he had some theory that doctors would be more liberal with the prescription pad when they were trying to get out of the office and start their weekends. Today was Friday, and – Theresa checked her watch – coming up on three p.m.

It couldn’t hurt to swing by. It wasn’t
so
far out of her way, really, and Leo would believe her tied up with Frank and his sound experiment. Bilecki might be talkative, looking for a little comfort after hearing of his friend Lily’s death. If not, no harm done.

She drove away from the expensive home. Two faces in the window watched her depart.

Twenty minutes later, having wound through the plentiful downtown traffic – rush hour began at any time after noon on Fridays – she passed between the baseball park and the Erie Street Cemetery and turned right on Carnegie, named after steel baron Andrew Carnegie. Several industries had built Cleveland, but steel led the pack … especially in Theresa’s mind. It had fed and clothed her for much of her life.

The methadone clinic existed on one of those one-way streets so that she had to make several turns before she could approach it from the right direction. The old stone building could have been anything before being pressed into service for the clinic – apartments, a store, offices. The front steps were still bracketed with granite banisters that ended in a swirl, but the people resting against them appeared anything but classic. Two women and a man waited and smoked, their clothes old and their faces worn. All three gave Theresa and her car only the barest of glances as she fed a few coins into the meter and went inside.

It could have been a waiting room in any low-rent hospital. One bathroom, one white-jacketed woman behind a Plexiglas window, and one closed door leading into the rest of the building. Patients would not be permitted to wander the halls. Chairs ringed the room and made a line down the center. Every human being present turned to look at Theresa as she hesitated in the doorway, wondering who she might be and if she had an appointment, and either way would she get in before they did? The only person who did not look up was the woman behind the Plexiglas.

Most of the – her mind didn’t know what to call them: junkies? clients? patients? – lounged back against the walls and more than one appeared to be asleep. Others stared with unblinking eyes at the television, streaming twenty-four-hour news with the volume turned down so low it might as well not be on, leaving viewers with nothing to do but read the cryptic tickers at the bottom of the screen. One unlucky woman had to make do with the ring of chairs in the center of the room. Without a wall to rest her head against, she had doubled forward and laid her head on arms crossed over her crossed knees. I would need pain medication after two minutes in that position, Theresa thought.

She forced herself past the sets of eyes, over the dingy linoleum, up to the window. The white-coated woman must have heard her approach and smiled a welcome. She had graying blond hair and not enough muscle or even fat on her bones, a white wimple on her head and a large wooden cross around her neck. A nun. Theresa wondered if she worked out of St Vincent Charity Hospital. ‘Hello, dear,’ the woman – Betty, according to her name tag – said. ‘What can we do for you?’

‘I was wondering if there’s a Ken Bilecki here.’

‘We have no one – oh, you mean a patient?’

‘Yes.’

The nun’s gaze flicked over Theresa, or at least as much as was visible through a waist-high window. ‘I can’t give out any patient information,’ she said, but gently.

‘I don’t need any. I only wanted to ask him if he’s seen a mutual friend.’ This was sort of true. She wanted to ask him about mutual acquaintances, two dead and one a mere possibility, but sort of true didn’t really count with a nun. But surely Sr Betty simply wanted to know that Theresa had not come to harass the patient, which she hadn’t. Bilecki had no current trouble with the law to the best of her knowledge. Unless they got to talking and he confessed to participating in a meth lab that killed a student twenty-five years ago, but Theresa would cross that bridge when the black and yellow gate lifted. ‘I know he usually comes here on Fridays at about this time, and I hoped to run into him here.’

Again the gaze flickered. Theresa could confuse people. She did not have the wariness, the constant alertness, to be a cop, yet there existed a sense of authority. She had grown used to this puzzled look. But it cleared and the woman told her, ‘I still can’t give out any patient information. However, if you care to take a seat, he might pass by.’

Theresa took the hint, smiled her thanks and turned away, nearly bumping into a block of granite thinly disguised as a man. He wore a heavy flannel shirt under a leather vest and tattoos up both sides of his neck. Various metal studs and jewelry pierced parts of his head. Theresa froze, her body warring between fight and flight.

‘Excuse me,’ he said solemnly. ‘Hi, Sister Betty.’

‘Good afternoon, Ralph, dear. What can we do for you?’

‘I got my three thirty.’

Theresa scoped out the seats in the waiting room. No one had moved, so she headed for the chairs in the center. She heard the nun say, ‘I see your new tattoo has healed up nicely.’

The man’s voice brightened. ‘Yeah. It come out good.’

Theresa sat catty-corner to the hunched-over woman, their backs to each other, and focused on the TV mounted on the wall. The pretty heads there continued to talk, with only a background photo now and then to give a hint as to the content. Theresa gazed and thought, not for the first time, what a handy talent lip-reading would be.

After a while, when she felt that her fellow waiters had grown bored with the new arrival and returned to sleeping, reading and staring at their shoes, she dared to examine them.

Across from her sat a woman whose clothing belonged to a twenty-year-old, but the drugs had sucked all the youth from her skin until she appeared nearly twice that. Theresa pegged her as a factory worker and mother of at least two school-age children, a younger one learning to write or draw who had left slashes of permanent marker in two different colors on her right hand, and an older child responsible for the letter on her lap. Theresa read the heading upside down – Cleveland Metropolitan School District – and its paragraphs appeared as ominous blocks even from across the aisle. The woman read it over and over, smoothing it out with battered fingertips, three of which were bandaged. Perhaps her job required working with machines which tended to catch fingers – or her addiction problems made her fingers too careless. Or she had an abusive husband who had designed creative ways to abuse. This was the trouble with clues: they could, almost always, mean more than one thing. That was the problem with forensics, with crime investigation, with life. Interpretations could shift at any moment. Everything depended.

The black man next to the woman read nothing, couldn’t see the TV from his angle and did not care to make eye contact. The premature wrinkles and sagging skin made it impossible to guess his age. The top of his skull rested against the wall and he had scooted forward in his chair to form a forty-five-degree angle with his body, long legs extending well into the aisle. She could not reach any conclusions about him. Too clean to be homeless and yet thin enough to suggest hunger. His clothes had no identifying labels and she couldn’t see his hands, tucked up under his armpits. He stared, unblinking, into the middle distance. The ramrod position did not look restful and Theresa watched his chest for a few minutes to see if he still breathed. He did.