The Price of Innocence (3 page)

‘Wife left him,’ the stocky cop told her. ‘Which is why I never married.’

Theresa dropped her
Support the Troops
water bottle into the console and pulled her basic crime scene kit from the trunk. Every movement brought to life a scratch, cut or bruise left over from the day before. ‘I find it very disappointing that money can’t buy happiness.’

‘I’d sure like to give it a try, though.’ He led her into the house, past the stainless steel appliances and Persian rug. The man of the house had sat in a brown leather armchair and flicked on the TV before taking a handful of prescription Xanax and washing it down with a Manhattan. Half of the drink remained in the glass with the cherry.

‘He’s fifty-five, two grown kids, owns all the Circuit Warehouse stores in northern Ohio. The soon-to-be ex-wife called us, said he hadn’t answered the phone since yesterday morning and missed a meeting with their attorneys at nine. Door was unlocked when I got here. A detective should be out in a while, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. They’re all jockeying around trying to get in on the Bingham investigation. Did you see that place?’ The cop stood about six-four with a few too many pounds attached to it, but plenty of muscle as well. He had curly brown hair and the requisite mustache and she guessed his age at a few years past hers.

‘Yeah, I saw it.’ She turned on the digital Nikon and took a picture of her clipboard with its form detailing the date, time, location and her name.

‘Big, smoking hole in the ground.’

She suppressed a shudder. ‘Yep.’

‘I’ve been a cop for twenty-three years, never saw anything like that. What could take out a whole building? I mean, that thing was
solid
.’

She snapped a picture encompassing the man, the chair, the end table with the drink and pill bottle. ‘No idea. Explosives are not my area.’

‘They think it’s that Arab guy. They have his name, I forget what it is exactly. I haven’t seen his picture yet.’

‘I don’t think they think it’s him.’ Theresa felt compelled to interject some reason. ‘There were other people there. And he wasn’t Arab.’

‘Why would they blow up the place they worked in?’

‘Why would he blow it up if he was in it at the time?’

‘He’s probably nuts,’ the cop said, looking away in a hurry as she caught him studying her rear end. ‘All terrorists are nuts. I think they were trying to take out the Lambert place, get rid of all the technology that might keep us safe from them. Didn’t work, not with how tough the Bingham is – was – and their stuff wasn’t powerful enough. Stupid ragheads.’

‘It looked pretty powerful to me. Didn’t scratch the Lambert place, though, except for a few windows.’ And there were so many better targets for politically motivated murderers – like the State Capitol in Columbus, where Rachael now attended OSU. Bad enough to fret constantly about school shootings, now this … how far did the campus sit from the Statehouse?

Rachael had called last night. She had no idea how close Theresa had been to the blast – Frank and Theresa would keep that their little secret, especially from Frank’s mother – but was now worried because her mother worked in Cleveland.

There would always be a reason to agonize about loved ones, and a reason for them to worry that you’re worried – unfair, the pressure we put on others. No wonder so many cops were divorced.

A further thought occurred to the one in front of her. ‘But you know what else? The FBI stored stuff there. They say it was just old training manuals and stuff, but you know they’re lying. I bet it was the mob. The FBI probably had all the witness relocation information there and the mob stole it and then blew the place so they wouldn’t be able to tell it was stolen.’ He rocked as he spoke, as if impatient, but his gaze bespoke only enthusiasm for his theories – or her figure, she couldn’t tell.

Theresa finished photographing and took a closer look at the victim’s face. No foaming appeared in the nose or mouth, characteristic but not always present in a drug overdose. ‘Seems like a lot of work to find somebody.’

‘Not just one somebody. A whole list of somebodies, everyone who’s ratted them out since the beginning of time. That might be worth taking out a whole building for.’

‘It’s as good as any other theory, I guess. I’m still holding out for a gas leak.’

He smirked as if at her naivety, running one hand through his short hair. Two deep but obviously old scars ran up his forearm, leaving furrows in the hair. ‘Do you need me for anything in here? I was going to canvass the neighbors, find out if anyone’s seen him since yesterday morning. Though how they’d see anything at this house, two hundred yards up a wooded driveway—’

‘Money might not buy happiness, but it sure buys privacy. No, I’m OK in here. Just don’t leave for good without telling me first.’

He promised not to and she picked up the pill bottle as the cop’s footsteps trailed off through the kitchen. The prescription had been written for sixty pills, a thirty-day supply, filled three weeks ago. Twelve remained. If he’d been taking them as prescribed that left only six unaccounted for. What Theresa didn’t know about pharmacology could fill several books, but she didn’t think six ought to kill him. Unless he hadn’t taken them as prescribed, and swallowed all forty-eight right together. But she didn’t see any other signs of overdosing. Perhaps the man had simply had a heart attack.

She heard a sharp sound, not quite a bang but more like a sudden snap of air, and then another one, louder and more like a bang. Maybe a car had backfired, though she didn’t think cars backfired any more, and certainly not the cars in this neighborhood. Perhaps someone had dropped something, something heavy.

The man’s jaw muscles were rigid in rigor, and the reddish lividity in the lower extremities had fixed itself in place. Early yesterday, she thought, and began to sketch the room on her crime scene form, the victim represented by a round head with sticks for limbs.

Could it have been a car door slamming, that noise she had heard? No, it had sounded too concise, too sharp. Perhaps a neighbor liked to shoot targets. Probably not legal, but maybe the wealth in this area let residents do whatever they wanted.

Without any conscious decision she found herself setting down her clipboard and retracing her steps back through the house. The door from the kitchen opened on to the driveway, with her county station wagon parked neatly on the concrete, directly behind the officer’s marked patrol car. No humans or animals were in sight, and only the new spring leaves moved in the breeze off the lake, their surfaces a bright Kelly green against the weathered wood of the trees. No voices, not even a bird.

Theresa moved off the small porch, the soles of her black athletic shoes scratching loudly against the driveway, feeling every step in her aching muscles. The shade from the towering pines and oaks dropped the temperature in the yard several degrees and the chill reminded her that summer had not yet arrived.

She kept going until she rounded the front of the patrol car. Then she saw him.

The officer lay on the ground, face up, not moving. A pool of blood spread out from under his head.

She ran to him, took in the shredded forehead and the globs of brain leaking on to the concrete, flowing along with the blood, even before she noticed the open, lifeless eyes and the growing stain in the middle of his shirt. Then she did the only sensible thing under the circumstances – she pulled her phone from her belt and called Cleveland’s police dispatch.

‘Police Department. Can you hold?’

‘No. This is Theresa MacLean from the M.E.’s office. Your officer is down, he’s been shot, he’s signal 7. Send help to forty-seven Sunrise Drive, it’s off Lake Shore.’ There, that sounded pretty calm. Coherent, even.

‘Forty-seven?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Which officer?’

She had no idea. He had just been another uniform, generic and interchangeable. By twisting her neck she read ‘Davis’ off the silver bar above his badge.

‘He’s shot?’ the dispatcher asked, after shouting to someone else to send units to their location.

‘Twice. He’s dead.’

‘Can you render aid?’

‘He’s dead,’ Theresa repeated, knowing as she said it that the dispatcher would not accept that from anyone except professional EMS, especially not when it was a cop, so she didn’t bother pointing out that Davis’ brains were now coating the driveway. She also didn’t confess that she’d never felt more reluctance to touch a dead body in her life, probably because up until now she’d never been chatting with one just a few minutes before he became one.

‘Can you get him on his back? We’re going to need to try CPR.’

‘Sure,’ Theresa said. ‘OK.’ At least he was already on his back. She couldn’t help but fret about moving the body before photographing it; the policy had become that ingrained.

The dispatcher had a question first. ‘Are you in a safe location?’

‘What?’

‘Is the shooter still there? Who shot him?’

Theresa did a hasty three-sixty, scanning the area for movement, a flash of color, a madman with a smoking gun aimed at her, but the trees were alone and the only sound came from a now-relaxed chickadee. The lake breeze ruffled her hair.

‘I don’t know,’ she said into the phone.

L
eo, her boss, showed remarkable compassion when she returned to the office, which meant he gave her a cup of coffee before starting in with the questions. ‘You didn’t see
anyone
?’

‘Peaceful as a cemetery, and just as tidy.’ She took another sip to lubricate the lump in her throat. It had begun to rain again and the dampness settled into her bones, only aggravating the leftover aches and pains from the explosion.

A frown had long since become permanently etched into the skin over her boss’s bushy eyebrows, and he had clothed his skinny frame with ill-fitting pants and a long-sleeved shirt in unfashionable plaid. With a tie. ‘And no casings, no tire tracks?’

‘No casings, concrete clean and dry.’

‘Any reporters there?’

‘Channel 15 showed up just as we drove away. Everyone else is still at the Bingham, I’m sure.’

‘Did the officer fire?’

‘He hadn’t even unsnapped the holster strap.’ The twenty-three-year veteran had not been concerned. The assailant had either caught Officer Davis completely by surprise – difficult to do in the middle of a driveway with yards of visibility all the way round – or had appeared utterly unthreatening.

‘What did you collect at the scene?’

Only Leo would leave unconsidered that perhaps she might not have felt up to working the scene. They spent every day hip-deep in dead bodies and had no reason to be freaked out by one. But she knew about and prepared for the dead people she encountered in her job. Stumbling on a body without expecting to, especially one she had met, spoken with …
that
turned out to be another category of experience altogether.

Of course, she
had
worked the scene.

‘Only what I found right around the body – a hair that looks like mine, a cigarette butt that’s probably been there since last summer, a piece of foam or lint or something, and a few pieces of dirty plastic. I processed his car, got some prints. I swabbed a sample of the blood from the driveway, even though it’s obviously his. Officers searched the rest of the driveway and the lawn and into the trees, but didn’t find anything worth collecting. I had no indication that he, the cop, had walked any distance – no shoe prints, no crushed grass in the yard or path through the trees.’

‘Weird,’ Leo summed.

She leaned one elbow on her desk. Blue-covered lab reports swam up against a photo of Rachael’s high school graduation and a framed cross-stitch reading
Non illegitimi carborundum est
. (Don’t let the bastards grind you down.) ‘That’s one word for it.’

‘What if he came from the house?’

‘Huh?’

‘The killer. Maybe that’s why you didn’t hear a car.’

She thought she’d finished freaking over the incident, but the idea of some malevolent being moving silently through the house she’d been in prompted a few last shudders.

Leo indulged the theory for a moment. ‘The family has a lunatic son they keep hidden in the basement, and the father can’t take it any more. He swallows all his pills, distressing the son, who sees a stranger in the driveway and decides to defend the household.’

‘And overlooks me, though I’m actually inside.’ Theresa swallowed hard, and felt stupid for doing so. ‘Besides, they cleared the house.’

‘Yeah, it was just a thought. Probably some scumbag this cop put away, who just got out.’ Leo dismissed it, moved on. ‘I drove by to get a look at the Bingham, but it’s still a pile of rock. It will take the Feds another day or two before they get close to uncovering what’s left of our stuff.’

At least Leo had abandoned the idea of having her and Don camp out as a twenty-four-hour guard for the evidence stored in the lower levels of the building. Technically, the chain of custody had been broken for every bit of it, since the location could no longer be considered secure – as if an intrepid criminal could get underneath the crushing layers, first to find and then to tamper with the evidence relevant to his or her case. But Leo wasn’t exaggerating their concern. In any older case that came to trial the defense attorney would waste no time in pointing out, accurately, that a building had fallen on the clothing, slides and items of evidence stored there, and if that could not be defined as contamination, what could?

The thought made her heart sink, and she thought she saw a tear glisten in Leo’s eyes. The loss was personal to him, she knew. Unmarried, childless, and without any hint of a family, a hobby or a social life, the M.E.’s lab defined his existence. Just because this consuming devotion failed to translate into some kind of a work ethic did not lessen its sincerity.

Then he shrugged and suggested she carry on. ‘Any minute now the samples from the Bingham building bodies are going to be coming up here, so clear your desk.’

‘How’s Christine doing with strangers in her autopsy room?’

Leo chuckled, always vocal in his belief that the assertive doctor was too smart for her own good. ‘Not happy at all. But apparently one of them is both unmarried and good-looking, so she decided to cooperate. Work. Now.’