Back on Murder (27 page)

A large square table, another refugee from bygone days, hosts a half-dozen middle-aged ladies crowned in various stages of blond, each of them clutching a copy of the same book. They pause in mid-discussion, turning to watch me pass. Judging by the volume of ink on skin, the multiple piercings, they’re doing their best to keep up with their daughters.

Over the counter, the menu’s inscribed in chalk on four large blackboards suspended from the rafters. I missed my morning coffee, so the first order of business is testing the house blend. The girl on duty is short and lithe, upholstered in nubby fabric from the developing world, dreadlocks tied back, a stack of tribal bangles protecting her wrists. But her glasses say ARMANI on the side.

The coffee is better than good. After two gulps I’m seeing the world with new eyes. My elbow on the counter, I scan the room, realizing I’m one of only three men present. Everyone else is female and white, affecting an affluent version of grunge. The girl behind the counter hovers a few feet off, seeming uncertain how to deal with my lingering presence.

“You have some studios here, is that right?”

She raises a pierced eyebrow, like she wasn’t expecting someone in a jacket and tie to know about the studio space, or even art in general.

“Umm,” she says. “Yeah.” Her ringed thumb indicates a set of double doors to the right of the counter. They’re painted the same matte black as the walls, so they blend in nicely apart from the crack of light running between them. “There aren’t any shows or anything today, though. And the studios are actually private.”

“Nothing is actually private.” I slide a card across the counter, then finish the last of the coffee.

She holds the card close, staring at the words through her designer glasses. It’s a while before she processes the significance.

“You’re a cop?”

“I’m a homicide detective.” I dangle the keys to Thomson’s studio, a long silver door key and a shorter brass one that looks like it might fit a padlock. “I need to take a look inside.”

“My manager’s not here,” she says.

“That’s okay. As you can see, I have the keys.”

“Well, but . . . I mean, don’t you need a search warrant?”

I lean across the counter, making eye contact. “Not actually.”

The double doors swing open at the first push. As I pass through, I half expect her to rush after me, but mine are the only footsteps along the tiled floor. The featureless hallway turns right, then dead-ends at a locked door. This is where the building renovation seems to have ended. Through the glass panel over the lock I see a long corridor of raw sheetrock lit by a string of exposed bulbs, the walls pierced by a series of garage-style openings sealed off by the same segmented metal pull-downs that secure self-storage units, each with a shiny padlock at its base.

The silver key opens the door. The pull-downs are numbered sequentially, but only some of them are labeled. Near the end of the corridor, one of the doors is slightly raised and I can hear music playing on the other side. Sarah McLachlan. That one I steer clear of. I check the names on the other doors for Thomson’s, but he isn’t listed, which means I have to go one by one, testing the brass key in every padlock.

I’m a quarter of the way down when the music stops and the raised door rattlesnakes toward the ceiling. A small black-haired woman peers out, wiping her hands on a pair of paint-mottled jeans.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

“Sure.” I cast a hopeless glance along the corridor. “You wouldn’t happen to know which one of these belongs to Joe Thomson?”

She leans against the doorframe, crossing her arms skeptically.

“Joe’s not here. Nobody is but me.”

“I know he’s not here,” I say, walking toward her. “I’m not looking for him, just his studio.”

Her eyes dart to my hand, where the keys glisten. She’s in her twenties, attractive in a candid, wide-eyed way, her hair wrapped in some kind of scarf, maybe to keep it clear of the paint. The baggy plaid shirt and loose-fitting jeans give her a squared-off look, hiding any figure she might have. Her feet, mostly concealed under a puddle of denim, appear to be bare.

“Are you a friend of his?” she asks.

I hand her one of my cards, giving her a moment to look it over. “Could you point me to the right door, please, ma’am?”

“I don’t understand,” she says, still looking at the card.

“A little help here is all I’m asking for.”

“I mean, what do the police want with Joe? Has he done something? He’s such a nice guy, always helpful. He’s, like, my art buddy. I can’t believe he’d do anything . . .”

Her reaction doesn’t seem right. There’s nothing strange about one cop showing up on another’s doorstep, no reason to assume there’s any guilt involved. Unless.

“Ma’am,” I say. “You realize Joe’s a cop, right?”

She blinks. “What do you – ? No, I didn’t realize. How could he . . . I mean, we shared a . . . No, never mind what we shared. He’s a cop? Joe? You’re not making this up?”

“He was.”

“Was? He’s not anymore?”

“No,” I say. “He’s not anymore. Now, can you tell me which door is his?”

She holds the card in both hands, thumbs squeezing it into a parabola. Without speaking, she nods toward the lockup directly across from hers. I stoop to the ground, fitting the lock inside, twisting until the hook unclasps. The lock fits tightly. Once I work it free, the door springs up a couple of feet, then sinks several inches. I give the handle a good yank, lifting the metal skin clear.

“The switch is on the wall,” she says.

I flick the lights on. Thomson’s studio is narrow, not more than twelve feet across, but it’s almost twice that length. One wall is covered in shallow gunmetal shelving units that hold, in addition to a few cardboard boxes, an inventory of crude busts executed in plaster, clay, and in a few cases stone. Vaguely human heads on rustic pedestals, mostly looking – intentionally or not – like victims of blunt force trauma, with swollen lips and cratered eye sockets and half-formed ears. I stand there looking at them, uncertain what I’m seeing.

“Joe’s heads.”

I turn. “We haven’t been introduced. I’m Roland March.”

“My name’s Jill,” she says. “Jill Fanning?” Turning the name up at the end like it’s a question. Either she isn’t sure who she is, or she thinks maybe I will have heard of her.

“These heads, that’s what he made?”

There must be thirty of them at least, lined up with methodical precision like cans on the grocery store shelf. On its own, I doubt any of them would be that remarkable, but it’s another story taken together. A kind of primitive power resides in their collective stare. This was therapeutic? Somehow I doubt it. Not so much the work of a man chasing away his demons as courting them, but then I’m no critic of art.

Turning from the sculpted glare, I take in the rest of the studio. The opposite wall houses a series of tables – folding metal jobs with dust-covered tops, a couple of tall, narrow wood platforms straight from the planting shed, some boards propped between sawhorses. Chisels and hammers of various sizes litter the surfaces, along with awls, files, and a rust-red saw.

A couple of scrap-metal sentinels stand in back, figures composed haphazardly of random parts. The welding gear sits in the corner. As I approach to inspect it, Jill Fanning gives one of the iron figures a tap with her knuckle, sending a vibration through its limbs.

“He’s been experimenting with this stuff recently. It’s nice to see him branching out.”

On one of the tables I find a black sketchbook underneath a smooth kidney-shaped rock. The pages are filled with portraits – creaky, literal-minded, two-dimensional sketches that hover somewhere in the gray zone between folk art and simple inability. The pictures are all of the same woman, round-faced with flowing black hair, full lips and closed eyes. If the misshapen heads elicit revulsion, these earnest attempts at photo-realism induce pity. I turn the book so Ms. Fanning can have a look.

“I’ve never seen these before,” she says, taking the sketchbook in hand, flipping the pages slowly. She bites her lip.

“I think they’re meant to be you.”

She laughs. “I doubt that.” Then, frowning. “They don’t look like me, do they?”

I answer with a noncommittal shrug. But yes, they do. Stephanie Thomson’s suspicions come to mind, the fear that her husband had gotten involved with one of his fellow artists. Maybe there was more truth to this than she realized.

“How often would you say Joe was down here?” I ask, glancing into a couple of boxes on a nearby shelf, which contain mostly clay-covered books and abandoned tools.

She’s still transfixed by the sketches. “I don’t know. Maybe once or twice a week. I’ve been here constantly – I’ve got a show coming up – and I’ll typically see him early in the morning, sometimes late at night. He’s unpredictable, I guess you could say. The way it seems to work for him is, he gets this inspiration and rushes over here to do something about it.”

“Always the same inspiration, it looks like.” I pick up one of the heads. It’s surprisingly light. Plaster dust transfers to my hands.

“He’s one of those people who can’t get it to come out right. So he keeps doing it, different variations, like he’s obsessed, you know? There’s a shape in his mind, a certain face, and he keeps trying to capture it again and again.”

She closes the sketchbook and returns it to the table, putting the rock back on top. The halting repetition of her own face on the page has given her pause. I can see the wheels turning as she realizes the implications of her own words. Hers was one of the shapes in his mind, the latest obsession. Before letting her leave, I ask all the usual questions, but she can’t say whether Joe seemed depressed or not, whether he’d been behaving differently.

“Had he given away any prized possessions?”

“No,” she says, then pauses. “When he was up here a couple of days ago, I did hear him talking to Vance – that’s the guy next door – asking him to hold on to a box of stuff. He said he didn’t have room for it.”

Glancing along the shelves, I find that a little hard to believe.

“He gave it to this Vance individual, and not you?”

“We weren’t that close.” Her eyes cut to the sketchbook. “Really.”

“You have a number for this guy?”

She crosses the hallway, retrieving a BlackBerry from her purse, scrolling through the numbers to find the right one. I copy Vance’s information into my notepad, then thank her. As she leaves, I have the feeling she hasn’t told me everything. I get that a lot, and sometimes it’s hard to know whether what’s being held back is important or not. One thing I’m fairly certain about. When Jill Fanning said she was not close to Joe, that was a lie.

I leave a message for Vance, asking him to get in touch as soon as possible, then try Cavallo’s number again. She doesn’t pick up, so I call the station, which routes me over to the task force desk, where a secretary asks me to hold. A few minutes later, Wanda’s voice comes on the line.

“Theresa isn’t here,” she says. “She took a personal day.”

“Oh. Well, I guess you heard about my new assignment?”

“Congratulations. I can tell you, your friend Lieutenant Rick is green with envy. He’s been scampering all over the place looking for a way off this sinking ship.” She frames the observation as an ironic joke, but her tone is pure bitter. “I just spent the last half hour listening to him argue why, in spite of being here to handle the media, it shouldn’t be him in front of the camera. He’s afraid having his face associated with this would tank his career.”

I’m not sure what to say to that. There’s a reason why I’ve never had the urge to chase after rank. Listening to the resignation in her voice, I feel guilty for abandoning her team, even if it was at my captain’s request. Guilty but also relieved, which makes me feel even worse.

“I’ll talk to her later,” I say, hanging up.

Downtown, back at my own desk, I start working my way through Thomson’s personal effects, broken down into a series of inventoried evidence bags. Most of these things I examined quickly at the scene, but I have some time to kill before heading over to see the medical examiner, so I might as well use it.

I locate the bag containing Thomson’s phone, then limber up my writing hand for some extensive transcription. We have software to do all this, but call me old-fashioned. I like to do some jobs myself. Every call he placed, every call he received, every call he missed, I record them all. Then I work my way through his programmed numbers, seeing what I can find. Jill Fanning is there, though no calls have been recently placed to her or received from her. There’s no listing for Vance, but the number she gave me is on the list of placed calls two days back.

This morning’s incoming calls are all from Stephanie. Just after midnight, though, he received one from Reg Keller’s home, and then he placed one to a number I recognize, Tony Salazar’s mobile phone.

On the back of the phone there’s a peephole camera. I thumb my way through the menu layers, then find Joe Thomson’s stored photos. They’re the usual jagged, low-quality images, random photos of the skyline, of himself, of the world viewed from behind his steering wheel. There’s one of Stephanie grilling in the backyard, her moving hand blurring her face. Nothing surprising.

The last picture on the roll is the exception.

It’s worse than the others, taken in dim light, the face not much more than a white smudge framed in black, the features vague. The torso, equally washed out, cropped halfway down the chest. If I hadn’t seen the sketches, if I hadn’t just come from meeting Jill Fanning in the flesh, I’m not sure I could have made the identification. All I could have told from the picture is that the woman’s eyes were closed, and she was undressed.

But since I did just see the sketches and meet Ms. Fanning in the flesh, since I heard her tell me the two of them weren’t close and recognized it immediately as a lie, I don’t have much trouble imagining who this woman is, or what it means that Joe Thomson carried around a photo of her in the nude. His wife’s suspicions are more than confirmed. I’ll have to have another talk with the woman now.