BLUE MERCY (22 page)

Dust motes danced in the light as she turned several times in the center of the room. Taking it in. Everything was as she remembered from the case photos: the threadbare sofa with its sagging cushions, the green Naugahyde recliner, the veneered coffee table, the grimy banister and railing. All of it covered in black smudges of Magna fingerprinting powder. Magazines flowed from a shelf in the corner: vintage cars, hot-rodding, and porn.

At the back of the house was the kitchen. Light streamed through the warped slats of an acrylic blind. More carbon dust here. The sink was jammed with crusted dishes, and when she neared it, there was a sudden burst of scurrying. Cockroaches. Kay shuddered, wondering how many generations had lived here with no human contact.

Over the wall phone, a calendar from a South Baltimore garage featured antique cars and big-busted blondes. It still hung on last July. Kay looked at the empty box of the twenty-first, as though there should be something there, some indication of the horror of that night. There was nothing. The only entries on the calendar were pay dates every second week and the word
roach
scrawled on the twentieth. Given the state of the kitchen, she wasn’t surprised Eales had had a pest-control problem prior to his incarceration.

“The guy’s probably a clean freak,” Constance had said.

It didn’t fit.

Kay headed upstairs. The back bedroom had been used for storage. Car parts, dash gauges, even a couple of old
vinyl-covered seats. In the corner sat a twin-size bed with an unmade mattress.

Taking a final survey of the room, she crossed the hall to the bathroom. The blind there had come off one bracket. This room was relatively clean. Still, the linoleum was scarred and lifting in places, the enamel of the tub and sink dull. The toilet seat was up, the bowl dry and ring-stained. Most of the evidence had been documented from this room. But nothing spoke to Kay.

The second bedroom to her left was larger. And darker. Kay discerned the outline of the low bed, a chair, and a dresser along the east wall. She crossed to the window overlooking the street. The heavy roller blind spun up slowly, the vinyl cracked, the springs gone slack. It stopped partway up.

She’d barely turned in the half-light to inspect the room when instinct drove Kay’s hand to the grip of her nine. First fumbling with the safety strap, then fighting with the hem of her blazer. She drew the weapon and went into a crouch, and only when the Glock’s muzzle cleared the leather holster did Kay comprehend what she was seeing.

With her heart still in her throat, she studied the dim outline in the corner of the bedroom. The figure against the back wall didn’t move. And when Kay stepped away from the window, allowing the light to reach the corner, she recognized it as a mannequin.

She swore, crossed the room, and squatted before the fiberglass figure. A blond wig sat askew on its bald head, and the fuchsia-colored bra was at least two cup sizes too ample for the pert plastic breasts. Kay remembered Roma Chisney’s panties logged into evidence and wondered if it was a matching set.

Nothing else was on the mannequin except black smudges left by the Crime Lab, where the carbon powder
had come in contact with the oils no doubt left by Eales’s hands. The son of a bitch sure loved his mannequin. He must have stolen it from Dutton’s years ago when he’d worked there, taken her with him when he moved.

Standing over the mannequin and the sunken mattress on its low metal frame, Kay felt disgust. The sheets had been stripped, and the faded blue polyester of the double Beautyrest was stained—one spill overlapping the next. Blood? Urine? Semen?

This is where he slept. The man who almost killed you with his bare hands. This is where he spent his nights. Maybe sometimes with his mannequin. Maybe others with Annie Harris’s body. Or Chisney’s
.

Kay stepped away from the bed. In the corner, next to a shadeless lamp, were more porn mags and an overflowing ashtray. She imagined Eales smoking in bed. If only he’d accidentally set the old mattress on fire one night. Roasted himself while he slept.

She thought of Valley’s burned body. One smoldering butt on Eales’s bed and she might be alive today. Along with the others.

Kay crossed the red and orange shag. The carpet had been vacuumed, but not by Eales. The Mobile Crime Lab had gone over the entire house with the 3M vacuum, sucking up trace evidence too small for the naked eye.

The wallpaper here was floral—wide, luscious poppies— faded and nicotine-stained, peeling back at the seams. A vintage-car poster hung lopsided over the veneer dresser. It was an old ad, a painted image of a green-and-white sedan with whitewalls and heavy chrome bumpers. “Pontiac’s Beauty Is Pontiac’s Alone!” It was selling the 1959 Canada-made 7100 StratoChief. Kay guessed it was the same model as Eales’s, sitting in the police impound off the Fallsway.

The top of the dresser was clearly where Eales emptied
the contents of his pockets at the end of each day. Small change, half-used matchbooks, pay stubs, and ATM printouts. All covered in a dense dust.

Past a box of tissues, a man’s ring, and a crucifix on a chain, Kay’s eyes stopped on a worn copy of Webster’s dictionary.

“You think I never owned a dictionary?” Eales had asked her. “There’s more to me than you think, Detective.”

Kay picked up the battered volume, blew a layer of dust off its cover, and opened it. The purple-inked stamp from the Francis Scott Key Middle School inside its cover didn’t surprise her. Fanning through the pages, Kay imagined Eales’s slow brain taking in the words. She stopped at where a folded sheet of lined paper had been inserted between the pages.

Kay removed it, unfolded it. And in the dim light, she scanned the mangled words in the teetering handwriting. Clearly Eales had struggled with the phrasing and grammar, painstakingly crossing out words and battling with his punctuation as he’d composed the letter.

However, its content was chillingly clear. And when her cell phone chirped at her belt, Kay was already feeling the thrill of long-needed answers.

FINN MET HER ON GETTINGS
outside Bates’s house ten minutes after he’d called her cell. She was still shaking as she returned the key to the junkie, and her hands clenched the steering wheel as she drove the six blocks to the Parkview Funeral Home.

With Finn following in her rearview, she turned the
Lumina into the manicured grounds. The place looked deserted. Only one hearse was parked outside the old carriage house where there’d been three before. Kay took several calming breaths as she parked; Hagen
had
to be there.

The front doors were locked, and Hagen took a long time to answer. “I’m on my own,” he explained, leading them back to his office. “I have that list for you.”

As they followed the carpeted corridors, Kay’s excitement thrummed along every nerve.

“That’s everyone,” Hagen said in his office, handing her the list off his barren desk. Only a few remaining boxes and the larger furnishings awaited the movers. “I trust that should satisfy you?”

“Actually, we did have a few questions, Mr. Hagen,” Finn said, and Kay saw the old man’s shoulders stiffen.

“Then you’re going to have to join me downstairs. I’m in the middle of something.”

It was the last place Kay wanted to go. Still, they followed him down the narrow stairwell with its velvet-textured wallpaper and formaldehyde stench. Kay heard a motor and saw the glare of white tile through the open door at the end of the hall.

Hagen had an embalming in progress—a woman spread out on the stainless-steel prep table, its drainage channels brimming with watered-down blood and body fluids. She was young, and as with all deaths in the city of Baltimore that hadn’t been signed off by a medical doctor, she’d already been to the ME’s. If the autopsy hadn’t been violation enough, her remains were now subjected to Hagen’s desecration.

Two thick tubes ran from the girl’s body, one of them carrying dead blood to a three-gallon glass tank, suctioned out by the pump that whined in the corner. Kay guessed
it was the Porti-boy Jonesy had mentioned, replacing the blood with a pink formaldehyde solution.

Hagen donned a rubber apron and gloves and flipped off the pump. Kay watched him remove the hollow metal tubes from the body and plug the holes with beveled plastic screws. She made a mental note then to tell Finn she wanted to be cremated.

Unlike the rest of the place, the embalming room was only partially gutted. Amidst the sinks and workbenches, Kay surveyed the shelves of brightly colored fluids and the horrific apparatuses of the trade.

When she looked to Hagen again, he was massaging the dead girl’s arms. There was nothing tender or deferent about the action, and Kay envisioned the man working late into the night, alone in his embalming room.

“She’s my last,” he explained. “We’ll be operational at the new location after the weekend, but I don’t have the prep room there functional yet.”

“And all the equipment down here?” Finn asked.

“I’m selling off most of this older stuff. So what is it, Detectives?” Hagen was done with the small talk. Impatience seemed to make his movements brisker now.

Kay bit her tongue. She’d agreed to let Finn lead. After all, he had a daughter himself, and she knew that his abhorrence of the implications of Bernard’s letter would get them farther in the interview.

Finn took the letter from his pocket then, but didn’t open it. “When exactly did Mrs. Hagen pass?” he asked.

There was an inappreciable pause in Hagen’s work. “My wife passed twenty-four years ago.”

“So your daughter would have been how old?”

“Nine. What’s this about?”

Finn ignored the question. “And so that’s when you started molesting Patricia? Or did it start even before that?”

Hagen froze, his expression as cold as the girl’s flesh he held in his gloved hands. “Where the
hell
do you get off coming in here with such—”

Finn unfolded the ragged letter and held it over the embalming table for Hagen to read. Kay watched the old man’s yellowed eyes take in Bernard’s accusations.

Patsy told me everything,
Bernard had written in the letter addressed to Hagen, then called him a
sorry-ass diddling fuck. She’s not yours to diddle anymore,
he wrote.
I told you before, I’d do whatever it took to keep your hands off her…. Just because you fired me doesn’t mean I still can’t get you. I’ll let everyone know about you. I’ll tell the media …

But in the end it was money Eales was after. How much though, he hadn’t figured out yet. In the final paragraph of the letter he’d asked for $10,000 then scratched it out and written $20,000.

Hagen stepped back from the letter. “Bernard would do anything to get money. In fact, this doesn’t even really surprise me.” He waved a hand at the letter, dismissing it as he might a parking ticket. “I’ve never laid a hand on my daughter, Detective.”

Finn refolded the letter, then nodded down to the dead girl on the table. “Right, but the corpses can’t talk back, isn’t that right?”

“I would never—”

“The way this looks to me,” Finn went on, “is that Bernie came and took your daughter away from you. And when you didn’t have her anymore, you turned to your
clients
here in the basement.”

“Please. More unfounded accusations from Bernard.”

“Accusations that would have ruined you,” Kay pointed out.

Hagen’s anger was peaking now. She could see it in his eyes, even though his face maintained that funereal calm.
“Do you mean to tell me that you believe the rantings of a man who’s presently sitting in prison for killing three women and a police officer?”

“So, then, Bernie just made all of this stuff up?” Finn asked, waving the letter. “I gotta tell you, he doesn’t strike me as being that imaginative.”

“Of course he made it up.”

“And why would he do that, Mr. Hagen?”

“Because I wouldn’t let him see my daughter. When I knew him, he was a kid with a temper. Nothing but a bully. Besides”—Hagen nodded at the letter that Finn was pocketing—“I didn’t see any date on that. Bernard could have written that fifteen years ago, after I fired him and told him to stay away from Patricia.”

“Sounds to me like he just wanted you to leave your daughter alone.”

“I told you, Detective Finnerty, I never touched my daughter. Why don’t you ask her? In fact, why don’t you show
her
that letter, so she can see exactly what kind of reprobate she’s got herself tangled up with. Now, if you’ll excuse me …” The old man turned back to his work, massaging the dyed formaldehyde through the girl’s dead veins, bringing an artificial color to the pale flesh.

The subject was spent. Kay turned to the employee list Hagen had handed her upstairs. Unfolding it, she scanned the almost three dozen names, then stopped on one. “Wait a second, Jerry Bates worked for you?”

“Yes. For twelve years.”

“Jerry Bates who lives over on Gettings Street?”

“If that’s where he still lives.” Hagen’s words were crisp and he refused to make eye contact.

Kay studied the list. “He quit a year ago?”

“I let him go, last August.”

“Why?” Finn asked. “I mean, twelve years is a long time.”

When Hagen looked across the table this time, the lines in his face seemed to relax marginally, as though he was relieved he was no longer the subject of their interview. “Jerry developed a drug habit.”

“When exactly did Mr. Bates start using?” Kay asked.

“You’d have to ask him that. All I can say is, he was one of my best employees, and then he wasn’t.”

“And what did he do for you? Did he help out down here?”

“No. He kept my books, organized inventory and supplies, and managed all the accounts. He used to be extremely competent.”