The Price of Innocence (7 page)

‘When was the last time you saw Da— Marty?’

Lily pulled a half-empty bottle of beer from behind the washtub and took a mouthful to think with. Frank wondered how close it had been to the overflowing tub, and tried to catch the expression on his face before it puckered up at the thought of drinking dog bath water. Not that it mattered. Lily’s gaze focused only on the past.

Finally she said, ‘A year ago, maybe more? After Christmas, but we still had snow on the ground. He dropped off a friend somewhere around here after a cop party – someone’s retirement, or bachelor party or something – and saw my house. He’d do that once in a while, come by for old times’ sake – well, more for a beer and a lay, I guess. But those
were
our old times, and I guess he’d get sentimental now and then. I do, too. Did.’

‘Did he ever mention a Terry Beltran?’ These were probably stupid questions, since she hadn’t even spoken to the victim in over a year. But they were standard questions and if he didn’t ask them then for sure at some point in the future he’d be asked
why
he didn’t ask them, and Frank despised being asked why he
hadn’t
done something because there was never any way to answer without looking either lazy or stupid. So he asked.

She looked at him again, coming back to the present, and drank another swallow of Pabst. ‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘Did he ever mention being afraid of someone, or perhaps worried about them? Maybe someone threatened to get back at him over something?’

He must have imagined the faint, sharp, startled look that shocked her eyes into full attention, so quickly did it evanesce only to be replaced by a frown. ‘What do you mean? Wasn’t he shot in a hold-up or by an escaping prisoner or something? Car accident? You know – regular cop work?’

‘Had he ever been threatened?’

‘No. I mean, not that he ever mentioned to me. Marty wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything. I always thought – no offense, I loved him – he just didn’t have the brains to be.’ She shrugged. ‘If he was, he probably wouldn’t admit it to me. I’m just the bimbo, remember. If a guy talked trash to him and he laughed it off,
that
he would tell me, but any real problem, no. Why? Who killed him?’

‘We’re not sure yet. That’s why we’re exploring all possible avenues of investigation. Are you sure you can’t think of any past incident that might help us?’

He waited for that startled look, that flash in her eyes that meant a name had popped into her head, but she showed nothing but confusion which gathered and massed into agitation. Best to get out before she demanded every detail down to the bullet’s caliber. Frank held out a card. ‘This is the number of our legal department. They can advise you how to claim the estate. I have to warn you there isn’t much,’ he added as a wild hope came into her eyes. ‘He rented his apartment and cracked up his car last month. He had a small amount in the bank – about four thousand dollars – but we haven’t found any other assets.’

She took the card. ‘Marty wasn’t much of a saver. I’m sure he signed his paycheck over to the bartender every week.’

‘Our condolences on your loss,’ Frank added. His condolences weren’t much, but then it didn’t look like her grief, other than those first few tears, amounted to much either. At least she’d come out of it with a few extra bucks to keep her dog in shampoo, and maybe spare some for the kid.

Angela, true to form, popped up with another question. ‘What do you do for a living, Lily?’

‘I work for Downtown Courier. I deliver stuff.’ She gave a smile, which seemed to be meant only for herself. ‘Been doing that most of my life. Why?’

‘That sounds like a good job.’

Frank knew his partner’s habit of working up to her questions, and left her to it.

‘I don’t like to sit still,’ Lily said.

‘What did you mean when you said you were from the first half of Marty’s life?’

Lily scooped the dog from Frank’s feet, regardless of its wet fur. ‘From the bad half. The young and crazy half. The half when crack and meth were part of our study habits, before he saw the light and decided to become a cop.’

She didn’t exactly say ‘cop’ the way most people said ‘child molester’, but it came close.

‘What made him see this light?’ Angela asked.

‘At the end of sophomore year—’ the woman began, then stopped, reassessed, and clearly changed her course. ‘Sophomore year, Marty got tired of both drugs and studying. They didn’t work well together. When we were high we thought we were studying our brains out, expected to ace every test, you know how it is when you’re cranked up—’

Frank, who didn’t, nodded.

‘—and we’d bomb. Then we’d get all concerned and stop the drugs and really try to learn the stuff, but it was so damn
hard
, and harder still without a pop here and there to cheer you up. It wore Marty down. It wore me down. Marty decided to trash it all, including me, to work on the side of the friggin’ angels. By the time summer came he had enrolled with you guys and I was pregnant.’

‘That was it?’ Angela pressed. ‘No one particular incident that made Marty turn to police work?’

‘He said he figured he could put other people in jail or go himself, and he preferred it to be them.’ His wording still made her laugh. ‘
Preferred
. He’d get flowery once in a while.’

‘Thanks for your time,’ Frank said, and turned to go.

‘Hey.’

‘Yes?’

‘I get all his stuff?’

‘You’re apparently his beneficiary, yes. Once it goes through probate.’

‘Did he have a TV?’

‘I don’t know,’ Frank lied.

Angela, too soft-hearted, said, ‘Yes. A big screen, probably fifty-two inches.’

‘Plasma?’

‘No.’

‘Oh. That’s still cool, though.’ She scratched the dog’s ears. ‘Thanks.’

They left her standing in her damp kitchen and moved carefully down the wooden steps. ‘Nice to brighten someone’s day,’ Frank muttered.

‘It’s not like they were that close,’ Angela pointed out. ‘She was going to say something else, about why Marty became a cop, and then didn’t.’

‘I noticed. But I don’t really care what happened to him twenty-five years ago. I’m more interested in what happened to him two days ago.’

At least, he noticed, their new car appeared unmolested, and he used the remote to unlock the doors. As they pulled away from the curb, a
thump
at the rear made him jump. Braking, he and Angela craned their necks round to see a browned, rotting apple splattered on to the trunk, its mushy guts glistening against the deeply black paint.

And from his sagging roof, his ample butt depressing the shingles underneath him, Lily’s son Brandon grinned until the afternoon sun reflected off his teeth.

T
he death toll from the explosion had been arrested at seven and the various sets of initialed agencies working the scene seemed fairly certain that all the victims had been found. Theresa had not had the time nor the inclination to revisit the area but would have to, and soon. They needed a plan to excavate their stuff. She wondered if any other crime lab in the country had ever had a similar situation. What did the New Orleans PD do after Katrina? She should make some phone calls …

She’d spent all morning drafting a written plan of attack to excavate, move and store their stuff. Leo had requested the SOP and she had nearly finished expanding ‘dig the stuff out, pack it into boxes, truck them back here and put the boxes into the garage’ to three pages in true civil service tradition. Once she had completed it, Leo glanced over it, told her that the average fourth-grader could have produced a more comprehensive plan, demanded that she start over with a more clear focus on her professional responsibilities. So she changed five or six words and altered the font from Arial to Times New Roman. Leo grumbled while shuffling out of earshot, then went to the second floor and presented it to M.E. Stone as his own work. After fifteen years, Theresa knew the process.

Hence freed to get back to work, she hovered absently around portly Dr Banachek’s autopsy table. He detailed this particular victim’s injuries on a preprinted diagram as Theresa examined the body for any trace evidence left after the clothing had been removed. The dead person, a female in her forties wearing hospital scrubs, had worked in the building’s fitness center. Beams from the collapsing upper floors had crushed part of her skull and compressed her chest into her backbone. She had not been burned, however. The fitness center had been located at the back of the building to the west, and the blast apparently originated between the center and the front, possibly in one of the lower levels. No other information had been released. The Feds were playing their cards close to the chest. They had only now released these bodies for the county to autopsy.

She pulled a white sliver from a gash on the woman’s arm.

‘What’s that?’ Christine Johnson asked. Her lab coat a snow white against the black skin, the pathologist stood at the next table over a body that only loosely resembled a man. Christine was young, fit and gorgeous, but Theresa tried not to hold that against her.

‘Looks like ceramic tile to me,’ Theresa said. ‘I wish I knew what the rest of the building looked like before the blast. I never went anywhere in it besides sublevel two. And the suicide’s apartment.’

‘You sure he didn’t set a fuse but then wanted a more certain death for himself?’

‘No apparent connection.’

Christine leaned closer to the burned and shredded man than Theresa would have been comfortable with. ‘We’re lucky the place didn’t have more people in it.’

‘The tenants are all yuppies, I guess, out at work. Another thing that makes me think the explosion itself was accidental, that someone had stored stuff there that shouldn’t have been stored there. Why purposely blow up a mostly empty building with no political or financial significance?’

‘Yeah.’ Dr Banachek, ungloved, used a plastic stick to prod the jagged edge of the dead woman’s broken mandible. ‘I see a whole lot of crushing injuries here and not much else. No burns or signs that she got too close to explosives, no signs that she was tortured into cooperating with terrorists. She doesn’t even smell as nasty as some of the other ones. I’d say she was a good distance from the explosion. Just not good enough to survive.’

‘Hmm.’ Theresa used disposable tweezers to pluck a bundle of white fibers from the woman’s ankle into a small Manila envelope. Then she sealed it up, smiled at Dr Banachek, took her collected samples into the amphitheater to store on a lab tray, changed gloves and returned to the autopsy room to start on the next victim.

‘He ain’t looking so good,’ she pointed out to Christine.

‘Nothing a little aloe and lanolin won’t fix,’ the doctor said absently. ‘Maybe. This is Nairit Kadam, born in Pittsburgh, family from India. Fairly or unfairly, he is the closest the Feds have to a suspect, simply because he is the only victim who didn’t live or work in the building and he was obviously closest to the explosion. Of course, if you were going to blow someplace up, you’d think you’d take great pains to be the
farthest
person from the explosion. Oh, and the Middle Eastern name isn’t helping his case any.’

The cleaning agent odor filled her nose. Theresa stared at the blackened husk, trying to sort the charcoal-colored protrusions into parts of a body she could recognize. ‘The blast took off his hands and feet.’

‘Maybe. Or they were crumbled to dust by falling concrete.’

‘Why was he there?’

‘For the same reason you go there, to store stuff. That’s how they know who he is – or at least how they’re making a guess at who he is; we’ll have to wait for DNA results because I don’t think dental is going to be completely accurate,’ Christine said, squinting at the decimated skull. ‘A little bird told me that Nairit here had signed in to visit his storage unit just before the blast, and we only know that because the building manager had been chatting up the receptionist when Nairit came in.’

‘The same building manager who then left for a doctor’s appointment?’

The doctor nodded. ‘Which saved his life.’

‘So what did Nairit store in his storage facility?’

‘According to the lease, files and miscellaneous paperwork from a data entry company called Blount Enterprises.’

‘Doesn’t sound too explosive.’ Theresa used a fresh pair of disposable plastic tweezers to pull a melted glob from the man’s rib. He might have been wearing a polyester shirt, or he might have been standing near plastic when the explosion occurred. Or it fell on him from one of the eight upper floors.

‘Except that Blount Enterprises doesn’t exist.’

Theresa nearly lost the glob before dropping it into an envelope. She had been so hoping for a rational, accidental, non-malicious explanation. Life didn’t often strike her speechless but right now she could come up with nothing more than, ‘Doesn’t exist?’

‘That’s all I know.’

‘So he has a fake company, but not a fake name?’

‘Apparently.’

‘Who is this little bird?’

Christine smiled, without bothering to lift her eyes from her work, only made a scribble on the anatomy diagram to represent a fracture of the man’s right ulna. Hadn’t Leo said one of the Feds observing the autopsy had been single and handsome? Christine had only to look at the average man and he would chatter away simply to have an excuse to stay in her presence. If she smiled, he might cough up anything, from his own bank account numbers to gossip straight from the corridors of power.

‘Can you tell if that occurred before or after death?’ Theresa nodded at the right arm.

‘Like maybe terrorists tortured him and then left him to die with his own explosives? Man, I wish I could say you’ve been watching too much TV.’

‘I have,’ Theresa said grimly. ‘The non-fiction type.’

They both leaned over the broken bone until their heads bumped. After a few moments, Christine said: ‘I can’t be positive, but I don’t think so. I don’t see any change in what’s left of the tissue around the break or any healing at the end of the bone. Most likely it’s a post-mortem crushing injury.’