BLUE MERCY (6 page)

“Nothing suggests she was dragged. No abrasions or contusions to the back. Nothing on the shoe she was still wearing.”

“So he carried her into the warehouse?”

“That’s a big guy to be able to lift her out of a car and carry her through all the junk that was in that place,” Finn said.

“Then maybe he forced her to walk in herself.” Kay’s eyes never left Regester’s remains. “What about the hands? You get anything from her nails?”

Jonesy shook his head and drew the mask from his face. “Nothing visible, but we took clippings. We’ll see.”

Over the blackened body on the slab, Finn watched Kay while Jonesy droned on. She didn’t look well. Her complexion was sallow, and he wondered if she wanted to throw up, but she remained intent.

He admired that intensity. Until he’d actually met her, he’d only heard about her being a hound dog. Not just a detective in a suit, sporting a gun, but a real nose-to-the-ground, dog-with-a-bone murder cop. During the year they’d been lovers, he’d seen the effects an investigation could have on her. And he’d worried about the obsession that consumed her with each new case.

“What about doxycycline?” she asked Jonesy. “She had a prescription for it. What would she take that for?”

The ME shrugged. “It’s usually prescribed for chlamydia.”

“So she was sexually active then?”

“Not necessarily. She could have picked it up long ago and was only recently diagnosed.” Jonesy stepped back from the table and seemed to admire his morning’s work. “Oh, and another little tidbit. Your boy’s got a knife.”

“A knife?”

The ME nodded, and behind the silver-rimmed glasses his eyes lit up. Word around the OCME was that if you wanted a gunshot expert, you talked to Tam Nguyen, but if you needed the final word on a stabbing, Jonesy was the top blade man. The man even collected knives.

“Looks like a single-edged knife. Probably something like a lock-back. Straight blade and damned sharp. But not big. The kind that fits in the palm of your hand. It’s got a narrow hilt, which suggests a thin handle. And I’m estimating a three-inch blade, based on one of the stab wounds that wasn’t as direct as the others. The tip of the blade slipped, skidded up the sternum. Left an impression of the hilt on the tissue.”

“A stab wound to the sternum?” Kay had gone even paler.

“Yeah. Actually, several.” Lifting back the thin flap of muscle and charred skin that had covered Regester’s sternum, Jonesy pointed out a half dozen shallow notches along the white bone.

“Can you tell how they were sustained?” Finn asked.

“Not really. I can say the blade’s cutting edge was down, and the thrust was upward. Assuming, though, that she was standing.”

“So what then? He was taunting her? Or was it part of the abduction?”

Jonesy shrugged. “Wish I could help you on that one, but with the burning I can’t even say for certain if the cuts were made pre- or postmortem.”

When Kay finally spoke, her voice was thin. “I need shots of these. Close-ups, showing the placement of them.”

“Not a problem.” Jonesy gestured to his assistant. “I’ll have them sent up along with the autopsy report.”

“I need them sooner.” Kay didn’t wait for an answer. Stripping off the paper gown she wore over her suit, she started for the doors. “And I need this kept quiet. Thanks, Jonesy.”

Catching up with her, Finn pulled the mask from his face and asked, “What’re you thinking?”

Kay’s mouth was a tight line as her gaze went back to Regester’s remains, the legs still bent, the blackened knees rising above the stainless-steel slab. In that moment Kay looked lost.

“What is it about those stab wounds?” he prompted her.

But she didn’t answer. A muscle flexed along her jaw as she swung open the morgue’s heavy door and tossed the paper gown into the biohazard bin. “I’ve got to get to the office,” she said.

“You’ve seen them before, haven’t you? The stab wounds.”

There was a distant look in her eyes when she nodded. “I have to pull some files.”

“Which ones?”

“Bernard Eales.”

WITH THE REEK OF THE MORGUE
still on them, Finn convinced Kay to grab some take-out breakfast with him down in Fells Point and found a bench across Thames Street. Down by the water, surrounded by the tourist traps
and souvenir shops, preppie bars and the Broadway Market, Finn could almost forget what they’d been witness to this morning. And with Kay next to him, unwrapping her usual fried egg on rye, he could almost dismiss the fourteen months of silence that separated them.

“So how have you been?” He had to at least try.

“Fine.”

“Sarge says you’re working cases again?”

“Just dunkers.” Resentment bristled in her voice as she stared at her sandwich. “I get every slam dunk that comes in. Sarge’ll send me out with one of the guys, and if there’s a lineup of eyewitnesses and a murder weapon waiting for us when we get on-scene, all of a sudden it’s my case. Domestics. Street fights. Stickups.”

He wanted to say something about it taking time, about how some cops—after a beating like that—would
never
have come back to the job. He wanted to tell her that it wasn’t just her who’d suffered; it was everyone on the unit. Trust had to be reestablished. Rebuilt. But Kay knew that, was living it.

“Well, you look good,” he said instead. “I like the haircut.”

From the corner of his eye he caught her quick side glance. Saw the skepticism. “What? I can’t give a compliment without you thinking it’s a come-on?”

Kay’s silence verified he’d guessed right.

“You know, just cuz I say something nice doesn’t mean I’m aiming to get you in bed.”

“So you’re telling me you don’t want to get me in bed?” she asked, and Finn liked how the amusement softened her features.

“Well, I didn’t say that.”

More silence, and Kay looked away. “Thanks,” she said. “For the compliment.”

He followed her gaze out over the bay. The sun’s light scattered in the wake of an early-morning water taxi shuttling tourists from the Inner Harbor to Fells Point.

“So, what am I missing on the Eales case?” he asked. “I never heard about these chest wounds.”

“We kept it quiet,” Kay said. “The cuts were supposed to be our hold-back, because it was so bizarre.”

“And they were on all three of the previous victims?”

Kay nodded. “That’s how we finally linked my Harris case to the others.”

Finn remembered the photos she’d shown him of the Annie Harris crime scene. Easily the worst decomposition case he’d seen. Based on the tox screen, Kay and Spencer had initially figured Harris was an OD, having gone into the vacant row house to shoot up. Kay had talked about the case, telling Finn how she and Spence had come onto Eales’s name on the street, people saying he was an acquaintance of Harris’s and that they’d get high together once in a while. That’s why she and Spence had gone to see the son of a bitch, to talk to him as a witness, find out if he might shed light on Harris’s last days.

“With the decomp we didn’t see the chest wounds, but when the ME found the nicks to her sternum, we knew there was a connection to Jimmy Holewinski’s dead prostitute dumped in Leakin Park, and Varcoe’s Jane Doe a month after his.”

Tourists spilled out of the water taxi across the way at Henderson’s Wharf and began to fan out along the pedestrian walks.

“But Harris was Eales’s first victim?” Finn asked.

“Because of the decomp, the ME put her time of death prior to the other two. So, yeah, she was the first. At least, the first that we know of.”

Kay went silent after that, ignoring her breakfast, drinking
her coffee and staring at the water. Finn knew her mind was on Eales’s South Baltimore porch.

He waited. The water taxi backed away from the pier, its engine revving, before it shuttled back across the harbor.

“So the stab wounds were the same as the ones on Regester?” he asked her.

“I think so. On all the victims, the wounds were shallow, nonfatal. They made no sense to any of us.”

“So you’re saying, besides the burning, she’s like Eales’s victims?”

“No. There is another difference. Eales’s victims actually looked like suicides at first.”

“Because of the heroin?”

“Not just that. Their wrists had been slashed,” Kay said. “They’d all been bled to death.”

“And what did Eales have to say about that?”

“Nothing. According to the interview transcripts he doesn’t remember a thing.”

Finn balled up the wax paper from his sandwich. “Well, there is the one other obvious difference between Valerie and those other victims,” he said. “Valerie sure as hell wasn’t picked up by Bernard Eales.”

VICKI DIGRAZZIO,
the assistant state’s attorney, was waiting for them at Headquarters. In her red pumps, she paced the floor outside the elevators, a death grip on her leather briefcase.

“Sarge just called over with the news,” she said, tossing loose blond curls over one shoulder, a movement Kay knew fueled more than a few male fantasies within the
Homicide squads. She doubted Finn was immune. “I still can’t believe it.”

They took the elevator up to the sixth floor. In the blurred reflection of the stainless-steel doors, Kay recognized Vicki’s distress. Even though Vicki DiGrazzio was a workhorse, regularly juggling a dozen of the state’s tougher prosecutorial challenges for the Homicide Division, Kay imagined the ASA managed to sleep most nights, that she wasn’t haunted by the same ghosts Kay was. As a prosecutor, she was one step further removed from the victims than Kay.

With Valley, however, it was different. It was Vicki who’d helped Kay secure the job for the girl. Typing. Filing. Answering phones over lunch. And even though Valley’s charm was reserved for few, Vicki had liked the girl.

Kay and Finn filled her in on the initial autopsy results, saving the news of the signature nicks on the sternum for more private quarters. When the elevator car jostled to a stop and the doors shuddered open, Kay could already hear the phones bleating from Homicide.

Down the corridor to the Homicide offices, with its vomit-green walls and yellowed tile flooring, the air was thick with the odor of stale coffee, old lunches, and men’s cologne.

Over the past months, though, a new smell had invaded the sixth floor: moldy air conditioners. With extensive renovations under way on the seventh and eighth floors, portable AC units had been installed to alleviate the interruption of the ventilation system. In the side office, one monstrous unit butted up to the bank of west windows, a plank of plywood replacing one pane and supporting an outtake vent. Tape and wire suspended flexible ducts from the ceiling, all leading to or from the rumbling unit, giving it the appearance of some oversize life-support system. But
if there was any oxygen in hundred-degree humidity, it could hardly be considered life-sustaining.

They led Vicki through the tight maze of putty-colored government-issue desks. Electric fans oscillated from the tops of file cabinets, rustling papers and stirring the thick heat as if it were soup. Kay’s desk sat at the far wall, edged into the corner she protected vehemently from the encroaching squalor of the male-dominated unit. Here she found privacy behind the rattling AC unit and maintained her clear view of City Hall two blocks over.

Kay pulled her chair around for Vicki. “Couple more months of this,” she said, clearing a corner of her desk, “and they say we’ll finally be upstairs in the new offices.”

Finn interrupted, “Listen, while you catch Vicki up, I’m going to pull those Eales files.”

“Eales?” Vicki asked, but Finn was already on his way out. “What does he mean the Eales files? What’s going on?”

“There’s something else,” Kay said, knowing the AC unit would shield their conversation. “Something that showed up at the autopsy. Valley’s killer used a knife.”

“You said she was strangled.”

“She was. The knife wounds were nonfatal. Just like with Eales’s victims.”

Vicki’s face tightened. “Wait a second. How the hell is that possible? We kept that back. It wasn’t even in the reports.”

“Someone’s gotten it. Somehow. Whether it was a leak departmentally or came from Eales himself.” Kay perched on the cleared corner of her desk. “Either way, Vick, Valley’s murder looks like a copycat, or—”

“No, Kay.” Vicki raised both hands as though to fend off the possibility. “No. We got the right goddamned guy. All the evidence is there. It’s the most airtight case I’ll ever prosecute.”

“Not anymore.”

Vicki was silent for a long moment. Clearly processing. “Son of a bitch,” she said finally. “You realize if Eales’s lawyer gets ahold of this, he’s got his entire defense? You
know
how James Grogan works. This is all he needs to establish doubt in a jury’s mind that the prostitutes’ killer is still out there.”

She stared past Kay and out the window, but Kay doubted Vicki focused on anything. She was seeing months of work slipping away from them. She was seeing justice in the case of the women’s murders going unserved. And Kay knew Vicki DiGrazzio didn’t take that well.

“This is a copycat, Kay. That information got leaked, and I want to know how. What else have you got?”

“We still need to see what Arson came up with, and if the Crime Lab got any prints off the car Valley was driving last night.”

“A witness or two would be helpful.”

“We’ll go up to the campus again. And back to the warehouse neighborhood.”

“There’s no way Eales didn’t murder those women.”

“Something will surface.” But Kay could tell Vicki’s confidence wasn’t bolstered.

“And what about you and Finn? You okay?”

“Sure.” Kay wondered if Vicki sensed the lie. Besides her shrink, Vicki was the only person Kay had confided in about her past relationship with Finn.