2 in the Hat (13 page)

What could he say? She was right. He shouldn’t open his mouth, but once he started talking it was too late to take the words back. “Honey, I understand how you feel, but I know that this neighborhood is safe.”

“Don’t patronize me, Angel.”

“Marcy, the killer didn’t attack anyone in this neighborhood. He could have dumped those bodies anywhere in the city.”

“But he didn’t. He left them right here, practically on our doorstep. He left them for our daughter to find. If he wanted you to find them he could have dropped them off at One Schroeder Plaza.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous.”

“Am I? What would have happened if she had found the bodies while your killer was still tying them up?”

He didn’t allow the thought. It was more than he could take.

“I didn’t think you’d have an answer for that one.” Marcy dumped the rest of her coffee in the sink. “I’ve decided to take the kids and live at my mother’s for a couple weeks. Till you solve the case. Her house is not that far out of your way. You can stop by and visit whenever you’re off duty.”

She left him standing by the kitchen table, his head spinning with the news.

S
ergeant Detective Ray Figgs downed another shot of Johnnie
Walker Red. The Tap in Dudley Square was good for a quick drink. Or eight of them. It was better than going home and watching reality shows until he passed out on the couch. Or sitting with his father in the rehab. First he needed a cigarette. Thanks to the mayor and the city council and the freaking state legislature, he couldn’t smoke in the bar. He’d have to go stand on the sidewalk with the other holdouts, sweating in the summer and freezing their butts off in the winter. It was ridiculous how he and the other smokers were punished for fueling the economy, spending their money in bars, tipping the waitresses and bartenders, supporting half the state’s social programs with the cigarette tax. Not to mention Keno.

Ray Figgs reached into his jacket pocket for his last cigarette, a crumpled-up soft pack of the no-name brand sold at Economy Gas on Blue Hill Ave. As he fumbled for the pack, he felt his pager vibrating. He had five unanswered pages, three from Operations and two from Inch O’Neill, his partner. Inchie was a good detective. Didn’t need babysitting, did things on his own. Figgs checked his alpha pager and saw that a male had been killed on Magnolia Street.

He settled up his tab, grabbed a few handfuls of salted peanuts, folded
them into a cocktail napkin and shoved it into his sports jacket pocket. He took another handful and tossed them in his mouth. He would chew them on the ride. He was really going to need the nuts tonight. He was the on-call Homicide Sergeant and he was already late getting to a crime scene.

C
onnie hung back while Greene, Ahearn and a couple of patrolmen
secured the scene on Magnolia. The house was a single-family colonial with green asphalt shingles and graffiti-covered plywood sheets covering the windows and doors. Connie had spent most of the night in this neighborhood with the detectives looking for Michael Rogers, Ellis Thomas’s friend. Thomas hadn’t given them much information, even after his mother agreed to let him talk. The kid was scared word would hit the street that he was a snitch. The only thing he’d told them was where to look for his pal.

The two patrolmen were setting up the crime scene tape around the property. Greene and Ahearn stood in front of the building, managing the crowd gathering in the street. Ellis Thomas lived across the street. Connie expected the kid’s mother, with Ellis in tow, to show up on the scene.

As Connie moved closer, he could see that Greene didn’t look good. He should have been barking orders. Instead he was quiet. Jack Ahearn, alone, minus his usual swagger, was moving the crowd back.

“Jackie, where’s the body?” Connie asked.

“In back with Detective O’Neill from Homicide. He’s securing things till Figgs gets here.”

A car pulled up across the street. Connie and the detectives watched
as Lydia Thomas—Connie recognized her large frame—struggled to get out of her car. She scanned the crowd, turning her attention to Connie and the detectives. A thin woman in a housecoat rushed to hug her.

“This is going to get ugly,” Ahearn said. He pushed the button on his radio and said, “Where’s the Bravo 902? We need a supervisor and some backup units out here.”

“What’s going on?” Connie asked.

“What do you think?” Greene asked.

Connie looked back at Miss Thomas. She lurched out of the thin woman’s embrace. In an instant she went from concerned mother to angry bear. She walked toward them, quicker than Connie thought a woman her size could move. “You did this!” she shouted, pointing at Connie. “You killed my son!”

Connie turned to the detectives. He could see it in Greene’s eyes. Ellis, her only son, was dead. The same son that Connie had promised to protect.

Greene tried to pull him back, but Connie was stronger. He stood his ground and waited for her. She stopped a few inches away from him. Almost as tall as he was, close to six feet, she was intimidating.

“I’m sorry,” Connie said. There was nothing else he could say.

She slapped his face. He didn’t turn away or try to block her hand. She was right. He
had
killed her son.

Then she started to cry. Not quietly, the way she had cried up the grand jury earlier. She was wailing. She wasn’t afraid of losing her son anymore. He was lost. Her knees buckled. Connie thought of big timber crashing during a storm. Violent. Dangerous. He caught her in his arms and led her back toward her house.

A
lves lay in bed with his eyes open, watching shadows move back
and forth on the ceiling, the moonlight intercepted by the trees swaying outside the window. Marcy had fallen asleep right away. Or pretended she had. The news that she was packing up the twins and moving over to her mother’s—even if only temporarily—had blindsided him. He had hoped the regular rhythm of her breathing would help him sleep. It usually did. An hour later he was still awake.

Alves closed his eyes. He was getting caught up in a cycle that was going to wear him out. Trying to sleep. His mind racing. Thinking about his marriage, the case. When he did fall asleep, the alarm would sound and it would be time for another day.

He opened his eyes again. It was a shame to waste the mental energy. He knew everything there was to know about the investigation. But he knew nothing about the killer. He didn’t know why he killed or how he selected his victims, the two most important pieces of the puzzle.

Alves thought about Mooney’s plan to draw the killer out, to get him to communicate. Get him to make a mistake. He remembered the website promnightkiller.com. Mooney had talked about the cult following that the killer had developed over the years. How could someone have a fan club based on the murders of innocent couples? The BRIC was
monitoring the site, but Alves hadn’t had time to go there himself. This was as good a time as any to check it out.

Alves slid out from under the sheets and quietly made his way back downstairs. The family computer was set up in the den. He logged on and saw that the site was active. He scrolled down the long list of messages posted on the message board, wondering how many of them had come from the officers at the BRIC. The killer’s groupies seemed to know quite a bit about the murders. Someone running the site must have known enough to file a request under the Mass Public Records Law, because the actual police reports were posted. Mooney had been careful to leave out any references to the fortunes and the Tai-ji from every report, so at least that information was not available to these kooks.

The people who visited the site had an unhealthy obsession with trying to discover everything about the killer and his crimes. They posted any information they could find about the victims, much of it unflattering, hoping that the more they knew about the victims, the closer they’d get to understanding the killer. It didn’t seem to matter who the source of information was. The victims and their families were being victimized again.

Someone using the screen name printsofdarkness had posted the message: “The killer is known to police. Like old Jack the Ripper. A friend or relative of someone high up in the department, same old story. This is the biggest COVER UP!!! in history.”

Shortnsassy wrote, “He’s out there now. Waiting for the right time. Then he will begin his work in earnest.”

Alves could feel the fog of a headache settling in behind his eyes.

Two days ago, the only people who thought about the unsolved murders were Wayne Mooney, the families of the victims and the losers on this website. Now everyone in the city was thinking about the killer, locking their doors.

Alves logged off. Looking at the site convinced him that the killer had to be one of the visitors to the site, maybe not a contributor, but certainly an occasional visitor. So maybe they could draw him out and get him involved in a dialogue. It had to work. So far, they had nothing else.

But for now, he would make another attempt to get some sleep.

C
onnie stayed with Lydia Thomas until the EMTs arrived. They gave
her a sedative and took her by ambulance to Boston Medical Center. She had wanted to go back outside and see her son, but Connie had convinced her that she could see him later, after they processed the scene. “We can’t miss any evidence,” he had told her. “Not if we’re going to catch Ellis’s killer.” Even before the sedative had kicked in, she had looked at him with hopelessness in her eyes.

When Connie finally stepped back outside he could see that the scene was more controlled, a half dozen cruisers on the street, enough patrol officers to control the crowd, and supervisors giving orders.

“Is Figgs on scene yet?” Connie asked Ahearn, shaking his head. “He’s had a problem with the bottle as long as I’ve known him. Hasn’t solved a case in how long?”

“Luck of the draw,” Ahearn said. “We don’t decide who’s on the pager.”

“We need to make sure this one gets solved.”

“It’s his case, Connie.”

“I can’t let this one go. I’m responsible for that kid’s death.”

“You brought him up to the grand jury as a witness. He barely cooperated. It’s not like his testimony was floating around in the neighborhood. He gave you nothing.”

“But I promised his mother he wouldn’t get hurt.”

“We don’t know what happened here. Would it have been your fault if he got hit by a car?”

“He died because I brought him in to the grand jury.”

“You don’t know that. For all we know this could have been a drug deal gone bad or a botched robbery. Let Ray Figgs do his investigation, and we’ll see where it goes.”

“But I’m telling you right now. I can’t sit and watch Figgs do nothing.” Connie walked into the middle of the street and put in a call to the DA. He would need to know what was going on. That one of their grand jury witnesses had been murdered not twelve hours after his appearance in court.

S
leep vacuumed the house, the hardwood floors, the area rugs, the
runner on the stairs. Then he polished all the woodwork, the piano and the mantel. That was how Momma liked it done. The house hadn’t been very dirty. But it had to be cleaned every week, as Momma had taught him. He didn’t want to live in a pig sty, did he? He would clean the kitchen and bathroom last, everything spic and span.

He enjoyed cleaning, bringing back order from chaos. As he cleaned, he thought about her. Not Momma.
Her
.

He remembered when she tried to push him out of her life. He was upset at first, until he realized why she’d done it. She had tried to set him free because she loved him. But he could never leave her. He was forever hers.

That summer, so many years ago—they were still teenagers—he was finally enjoying life. He was getting paid to do the work that he loved. The old man had been dead close to a year, so there was no one to criticize him. So what if he liked to play with his Little Things? That didn’t mean that he was gay. How could he be gay if he was in love with Natalie?

She was the reason he had gone into the city. It was the beginning of the summer and she had left home, taking an apartment in the South End, working at one of the boutiques on Newbury Street. He had missed
seeing her every day, so he’d spent hours walking, window-shopping, getting a cup of coffee, pretending to read books, hoping to bump into her.

He would use the window in the store across the street from Natalie’s shop as a mirror, hoping to catch a glimpse of her in the reflection. That was how he’d met Ronald.

HE’D BEEN STARING INTO
the window when Ronald appeared and began undressing the mannequins. He remembered the way Ronald looked the first time he met him—tall, slender, with tight jeans and a silk shirt, open halfway down his chest. Sleep felt small looking up at him
.

Momma would have said that Ronald was a handsome man with his dark shining eyes and neat white teeth. A man who would take his girl for a romantic picnic. Maybe at Jamaica Pond, maybe Olmsted Park. That first time, Ronald smiled, gave him a wink and went back to work. Sleep was fascinated by what he was doing with the mannequins. For a while anyway, he’d forgotten about Natalie. He watched for close to an hour as Ronald dismantled the old display and set up the new one with a beach theme—brightly colored starfish, antique sand buckets, striped umbrellas. About halfway through the job, Ronald came out and introduced himself. Soon Sleep was working as his assistant. Lifting and carrying the things Ronald needed. incredible, he thought. A dream. He and Ronald set up displays in half the stores on Newbury. It was perfect, getting paid to do what he loved and having the chance to see Natalie every day, the way he used to
.