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“Don’t give me that—C.C.” He pressed the electric button to move his seat way back in the car so he could stretch his legs.
I tried to avoid swerving off the road. “You can’t be serious.”
“What? You don’t think she’s beautiful?”
“Yes, I think she’s stunning. She’s also an N-U-N. Lewis…she’s not available.”
“I know.” He smacked his forehead with his hand. “My luck I finally meet a woman besides you that I’m interested in and she’s a nun. A beautiful nun, not one with a hairy mole on her chin.”
“I’m not even going to ask why that would be your impression of nuns, because I’m sure there’s some demented Lewis LeBarge story having to do with a decrepit old nun and I’m not in the mood.”
“It’s a good story.”
“Save it,” I snapped. “Lewis, be straight with me. Is the reason we’re doing this consulting work revenge against Walter Leighton or is it because you’ve got a crush on a nun?”
“A combination.”
“But it really has nothing to do with wanting to see justice served.”
“Not really, no.”
“You drive me nuts.”
“I know. Listen, do you recall whether the lid was closed on Ripper’s tank?”
About once a week, Lewis lost his tarantula.
“I think it was closed.”
I eased my car into a space on the street.
“You want to crash here tonight?” Lewis asked, looking at me.
“As long as Ripper is in his tank, yeah.”
We climbed out of the car and went into Lewis’s house. I was tired, but I was still thinking about the whole crazy night. Lewis gave me a drunken hug, which for him also usually means planting a very loud kiss on my cheek—an exaggerated form of affection.
“There’s pork rinds and Slim Jims if you’re hungry, and your usual in the fridge.”
“I’ll pass on the snacks, but I think I’ll have a Dr. Brown’s.”
I had long ago developed an addiction for Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda—not always easy to find. The addiction was nurtured by my father, who used to take me and my brother to every diner between Rahway Correctional, where we visited my uncles, and home in Montclair, New Jersey, as well as every town we ever visited that had a diner, for that matter. Lewis always kept a supply of black cherry soda on hand, along with his sickening snack choices.
I heard Lewis climb up his stairs, and then I heard first one boot, then the other hit the floor as he pulled them off. I wandered into the kitchen and pulled a Dr. Brown’s out of the refrigerator. I walked back into the living room. A soft chenille blanket was draped over the back of the very comfortable leather couch. I settled a pillow on the arm of the couch and took the remote and clicked on to Comedy Central. Part of me wanted to laugh. I popped the top on my soda and started drinking. It hit the spot, but then, like the soda often did, it made me start thinking about my father, my brother, my mother and me. It was entwined with my memories of childhood. And then, inevitably, I thought of the night she disappeared.
The lights of a cop cruiser reflected through the window and onto the walls of my bedroom. Red pulsated and filled my room. I rubbed my eyes and sat up as a police officer entered my room, the beam from his flashlight hitting my face. The cop lowered the flashlight immediately.
“Hey, sweetie,” he soothed. “You okay?”
I nodded sleepily.
“Okay, then. You go back to sleep, honey.”
“Is Mommy okay?”
“Why?”
“I heard them arguing.”
“Who?”
I shrugged.
The cop came closer to me. “Think, honey. Can you remember what they said?”
I shook my head. “Where’s Mikey?”
“Your brother?”
I nodded.
“He’s downstairs with Officer Martin. You want to come down there?”
I nodded, and my teeth started chattering. Something was wrong, and I had no idea what. The cop came to my bed, and I saw the shadow of pity cross his face, a shadow I have learned to recognize many times since then. He scooped me into his arms and carried me down in my nightgown to the kitchen where my brother, Mikey, sat eating cookies with Officer Martin. They were dunking Keebler chocolate chip cookies into milk, and Mikey was talking a mile a minute.
I looked around the kitchen, teeth still chattering, and was handed a glass of Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry soda in a highball glass with ice cubes. The officers asked me questions that I no longer remember. All I do remember is the look on my father’s face when he got home that night.
She would never have left them alone, he screamed. He shouted what I already knew. In the instant I saw the red lights reflecting on my bedroom walls, in the moments of sipping Dr. Brown’s, the bubbles tingling my nose, I knew. Whereas Mikey always had about him the belief that the world was a safe place, I knew differently.
Like Ripper on the prowl, even as a little kid I knew that sometimes bad things escaped from their hiding places.
Chapter 4
I spent that Monday at work testing a shipment of heroin to determine its purity level. Lewis called me into his office at around four.
“Here’s the file on the suicide king case. We’re supposed to look for something, anything, missed, in terms of DNA evidence.”
“You looked at the file?”
He nodded.
“And?”
“And there was a tiny bit of what could be sperm on the panties. Too small to have been tested that many years ago.”
“Anything else?”
“Well,” he drawled. “I’m no lawyer.”
I howled with laughter. Lewis’s IQ hovered near 170, which I only found out one night over many shots of tequila and a poker game with my father, brother, uncle and Lewis. As I recall, I lost a bundle—and Lewis lost more. When Lewis lost even his watch that night, he bemoaned a man of his IQ being at the mercy of Lady Luck—and the Quinns. And he accidentally cited his IQ score. Like most geniuses, he could be prickly. And like most geniuses, he knew better than anyone else. And that included attorneys.
“And?”
“And the man had completely incompetent counsel, Billie. Guess who his court-appointed lawyer was?”
“Don’t tell me….”
Lewis nodded. “Cop-a-plea.”
Lewis and I may have been scientists residing in a world of DNA. However, we got to know the different cops and attorneys and prosecutors on the basis of their reputations. Cop-a-plea Fred? He had the worst rep of all. He had a serious comb-over, wore sweat-stained polyester suits, and bottles rattled around inside his briefcase.
“If Cop-a-plea was his court-appointed attorney, he didn’t stand a chance in hell. Fred doesn’t care about guilt or innocence, just avoiding actually showing up for a trial.”
Lewis nodded. “This case is a textbook example of how to send an innocent man to prison for the rest of his life.”
“So now what?”
“Now we test the tiniest of specks, evidence that was unable to be tested before. With the newer tests, I’m pretty sure if it’s not too degraded, we can get results. Most of this guy’s chances are pinned on that…we have to hope it’s not so degraded as to be useless.”
“Lewis?”
“Hmm?”
“You read the file, do you think he’s innocent? Or are you still just doing this because you have a crush on the ultimate unattainable woman?”
Lewis didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he swept a hand at his “wall art.” His office also had crime-scene pictures, as well as some scientific prints of cells and blood under microscopes. “You know, it would be real easy, as a man of science, to remain forever detached from what it is we’re actually doing. Over here—” his hand gestured to a crime scene with a body lying under a sheet “—we have the worst of what man can do. And over here—” he swept his hand to a cell photo that had been taken with an infrared camera “—we have cells, DNA and what they tell us. And never the twain shall meet. I mean, that’s how it can be. We just remain in this world—the lab. We can be lab rats. But sometimes, maybe, we have to emerge and go into the other world…. Yes, it’s very possible he’s innocent, Billie. And maybe it bothers me. And if I can do something about that, then I suppose I should.”
“Dear God, does this mean you’re getting a conscience?”
“Don’t let it get out.”
I knew, of course, that when the bayous of Louisiana released a floater who was once his childhood love he had had a determination to do right, using science. But I also knew he and I were both guilty of keeping our universe microscopic and not seeing the bigger picture. Maybe life was easier that way.
“Billie?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think, if we do this, we’ll be doing God’s work?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in God.”
“I don’t, but I thought…I don’t know. Do you think we’d be doing God’s work?”
“God and I are distant friends, Lewis. But yeah, maybe.” I took the case file and turned to leave his office, and over my shoulder, I said, “She really got to you, didn’t she?”
He didn’t say anything, but Lewis LeBarge, the most rascally man I knew, definitely was doing some thinking.
My desk was piled three inches high with papers and files, and I sighed and looked at my watch. I’d be leaving after dark. The end of daylight saving time the previous weekend guaranteed that. I opened the Justice Foundation’s case file and began poring over every detail. Police reports, evidence analysis, witness interviews. My heart raced a bit. I had to admit, like Lewis, that there was definitely something about piecing together a puzzle that was exciting.
Cammie Whitaker was the suicide king’s victim—his only victim.
I took out a pad and pen and started writing questions as they came to me.
Why the suicide king playing card?
Suicide?
King = Power?
Cammie Whitaker was a beautiful redhead, a former college cheerleader for St. John’s with blue eyes and pale, freckled skin. In her college yearbook photo there was an aloofness, something unknowable to her as she stared at the camera. In the crime-scene photos, her blue eyes stared upward, and a knife was plunged into her temple. Her body was perfectly arranged, and there were thumb-prints and finger marks in mottled red-purple around her neck. She had been strangled, as well. Everything else about her, though, was serene. Her nightgown was beautifully splayed out just so, as if, when the detectives walked in, she had simply been sleeping.
Her apartment was in Ft. Lee, a town that faced Manhattan and was an easy commute from Jersey. Rents weren’t cheap—and her apartment reflected that. The place was stunning. The furniture was all French country, tasteful. If they weren’t actual antiques, they looked like pretty good reproductions. She was twenty-three. Pretty expensive stuff for someone that young.
Old money?
I looked through the file folder. Occupation…bartender. That place would need a hell of a lot of tips, but then again, I tended bar at Quinn’s Pub every once in a while when they were short a bartender on a shift, or to cover for my cousins when they took vacation. I never ceased to be amazed at how much cash I took home.
I read interview after interview, some of them new ones done by Joe Franklin or C.C., about David Falco. Each one focused on how gentle he was, how he always took care of his neighbors—the kind of guy who, when it snowed, shoveled the walkways of the elderly woman next door as well as his own, throwing down rock salt and making sure there was no remaining ice that could cause her to fall. It was hard to reconcile that image with the one of Cammie, knife plunged in her head. Then again, my uncle Sean could regale a roomful of nieces and nephews with stories and amateur magic tricks, help us catch fireflies and give me a quarter for every A on my report card—and then go out and shoot a man in the head. I knew about men who could compartmentalize their family lives with their mob lives, keeping them separate.
I looked at photo after photo of David Falco, from his trial, his mug shot, family photos of him as a boy, as a teen. He was sent away when he was twenty-two. He had worked as a stonemason, and on the side he did restoration projects. He was apparently a very talented painter. Rough childhood, from the wrong side of the tracks, but he had made something of himself. Until he met Cammie Whitaker.
Lewis dropped by my desk. “Want to get a bite?”
“Nah,” I said. “I want to go home and put on my pj’s. I’m really beat. What time is it?”
“Seven-thirty.”
“Ugh. Yet another twelve-hour day. How is it that you manage to work me like this?”
“You’re in love with me.” He winked at me.
“Uh-huh. Yeah, that’s it…. Go on home, Lewis. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“See you, Billie.”
After Lewis left, I shoved the Falco file into my briefcase and grabbed the keys to my monstrosity of a souped-up Cadillac. I headed to the parking garage. My heels echoed on the cement. A few pipes overhead dripped dirty water.
My Cadillac was easy to spot. It even had a little orange pom-pom attached to the antenna that I kept forgetting to take off. I walked to it and inserted my key into the lock when I heard the unmistakable sound of a clip being inserted into a gun. I froze, my back to whoever had the gun.
“Turn around real slow, Billie Quinn.”
Ordinarily, it really pisses me off when someone tells me what to do. However, a gun changes things in direct proportion to how likely it is I think the person might use it.
I turned around very slowly, my arms in the air. Whoever it was knew my name, so it wasn’t a random mugging. When I finished turning around, I recognized the twin brother of Cammie Whitaker. I couldn’t remember his first name. He had sat front and center at the trial and was in photo after photo. And he was the last person I wanted to see with a gun.
I nodded. “Hello,” I said softly, cautiously.
His eyes were bloodshot, and I thought I smelled scotch. “You’re a whore. You know that? You’re a fucking whore.”
