BLUE MERCY (9 page)

When the weights came down this time, they stayed. There was nothing left in her. Mopping her pooled sweat off the vinyl bench with her towel, Kay left the grinding pulse of electronic dance music. In the locker room, she didn’t shower, but instead pulled on cool-down pants over her shorts and threw on a fresh T-shirt before heading out.

She thought of Finn. Unlike her, he’d worked a full day shift and then overtime yesterday before he’d ever stepped foot in the warehouse in Canton. He’d looked wasted when he’d left the office this afternoon. As she drove south to Light Street, Kay wondered if he was going over the case
files he’d carted home or if he was finally getting some sleep. Ten minutes and she could be at the marina, walking the plank to his boat. At the lights on Pratt, Kay toyed with the idea.

It wouldn’t be just for the case though, she realized. This morning, on the bench by the water, she’d wanted to touch him. To answer the simple need for a connection. But she hadn’t because she knew she had nothing left to offer him.

So now, Kay drove home.

The converted three-story row house was grander than most in the gentrified neighborhood of Federal Hill, boasting a rare back-alley garden as well as an elaborate roof garden. With Kay’s apartment on the top floor, she’d taken over the planters and terraces on the roof when she’d moved in six years ago, an eager and confident rookie to Homicide. She’d found solace on her roof, puttering in the dirt, staking and deadheading, enjoying the company of Mr. Drummond’s homing pigeons on the neighboring rooftop.

But Kay had let the garden go. Last fall she hadn’t had the energy to plant bulbs, and this past spring, she hadn’t had the heart.

Inside her top-floor apartment the AC hummed in one of the tall windows overlooking the Hill. The air felt cool, but lifeless. Sidestepping a stack of bundled newspapers, Kay dumped her bag and flipped on the stereo.

The solo violin in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 2 filled the apartment. Kay closed her eyes, willing the music to transport her. But it wasn’t the same. She’d bought the CD at the last concert she’d been to with Vicki at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, foolishly imagining she could re-create the oblivion she’d come to find at each performance she attended. But the small speakers of the ministereo
didn’t compare to the acoustics from the orchestra seats of the Meyerhoff.

Kay cranked the stereo anyway and headed for the bathroom. She needed to wash the memory of Eales off her skin.

In the steam of the shower, the stink of nicotine lifted from her hair. Kay envisioned Eales’s lips around the butt of the stale Camel. She suppressed a shudder and started scrubbing.

She tried to focus on the music, but the hatred boiled up again, bile-sour. Kay scrubbed harder, the water scalding her rawing skin.

Only eighteen hours ago she’d picked her way through the emergency-response vehicles and personnel outside the Dutton warehouse and stood over Valley’s body. Eighteen hours, and they still had no concrete lead.
The first twenty-four hours of an investigation are the most critical
. How many times had Spence said that? But until the results from Arson came in, until she figured out who Patricia Hagen was and how Eales fit into the scenario, there was no direction. And exhaustion was winning the battle.

Turning off the water, Kay wrapped herself in a robe and padded barefoot to the kitchen. Harris, the grizzled tabby who shared her living space, stared at her from the last clear corner of the counter. With one eyelid marred by an old split, he observed her with his typical crooked gaze. Judging, Kay always imagined, as though he knew she was responsible for his owner’s death.

He’d been Spencer’s cat for only a few short weeks, until his wife begged Kay to take the animal after Spencer’s funeral. Grace had claimed allergies, but Kay knew better. The cat had warmed to no one but Spence.

The old stray, with his tattered ears and alley-mauled face, had made his appearance at the Annie Harris crime
scene. He’d wrapped himself around Spencer’s ankles the moment they’d stepped inside the vacant row house, clearly seeing Spence as his retirement ticket.

It had been hot that afternoon, fourteen months ago, the July sun relentless as it beat against the pitted asphalt of Edmonson Avenue. But it had been even hotter inside the crumbling house. A hundred degrees at least.

The smell from the second floor had hit Kay like a wall even before she’d stepped through the busted-down front door. In the car, before arriving on scene, Spence had tossed a coin to determine who would lead the case. It was the last time Kay had chosen tails.

The first sign of maggots was on the ground floor. Hundreds had wormed through the floorboards overhead and the light fixture before dropping to the littered ground. Upstairs, the air was electric with the buzzing of flies, and if not for Spencer prying off the plywood from one window, Kay was certain she’d have been sick along with the uniform who’d discovered the remains.

What was left of Annie Harris’s nude body rose from a pool of decomposition fluids and writhing maggots. Through the varying levels of insect activity and the rate of decomp, the ME’s office had made the rough determination that Harris’s body had been laid out for at least eight weeks. Identification wasn’t determined until the FBI labs came back with prints, carefully lifted from the hands they’d sent to Quantico. And the knife wounds to the chest had been indiscernible until the ME had slopped through the entire mess.

Now, as Kay gave the cat a wide berth and took a Corona from the fridge, she tried to block the mental images of that afternoon.

At the stereo she cranked the volume and tried again to surrender to the music. The movement crescendoed to
its climax. In the symphony hall the music would be inescapable; it would crash over her, move through her, until there was nothing but the music. But here in her apartment, with the reality of her life surrounding her, the music was flat. Kay flipped off the CD midstrain and abandoned the stereo.

The second bedroom served as her home office. There, Kay turned on the computer and took several long draws of her beer as she waited for the modem to dial in. She needed sleep, but knew she wouldn’t find it. Not until she’d answered the question that had burned in her thoughts since she’d reviewed Eales’s visitation records: Who was Patricia Hagen?

FINN FELT LIKE AN INTRUDER.
He hadn’t used the key in over a year. Still, he’d kept it. Wishful thinking. Or maybe just a keepsake. Either way, Kay hadn’t asked for it back.

He slid the key home, felt the dead bolt turn, and considered going back down to the car for his cell. But he knew Kay was in. He’d seen her police car at the curb on Hamburg and her 4Runner farther down the block. On the airless landing he’d already knocked for several minutes. And with each minute she didn’t answer, the worry in the pit of his gut grew.

An hour ago he’d gone to the State Pen. After catching some sleep on the boat, then spending several hours reviewing the Eales case files and making some phone calls, Finn had concluded that if anyone needed to be interviewed about Valerie Regester’s death, it was Bernard Eales.

Unfortunately Kay had come to the same conclusion.

At the Administration offices Finn had seen Kay’s signature on the visitors’ log, and he’d felt the first stab of anger. He’d canceled his interview with Eales, and the anger grew as he’d left the Pen and driven south to Kay’s apartment. Only as he neared her Federal Hill address had Finn understood the real root of his anger. It wasn’t so much that Kay had gone alone, but rather that he hadn’t been able to shield her from Eales. Just as she had for the past year, Kay had refused to lean on him or turn to him.

At the lights on Pratt Street he’d considered going home, calling her instead. But Kay could hide a lot when she was just a voice over the phone, and after she’d interviewed Eales, Finn needed to be sure she was all right. Needed to see her to believe it.

Stepping inside her apartment now, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark. Past stacks of newspapers in the foyer and a pair of mud-caked runners, Finn moved to the living room. The coffee table was littered with several empty beer bottles, a pizza box, and a gun-cleaning kit.

He heard the television on in the bedroom, made his way down the hall, past a full laundry hamper and dry cleaning hanging from the bathroom doorknob. He called Kay’s name, but she didn’t respond.

He found her on the bed, the cold pulse of the television washing over her as she lay in a tangle of sheets and case files. He wasn’t sure if he called her name again as he crossed the room to finally stand over her bed. Her robe had fallen partly open, and even though he thought to avert his gaze, he couldn’t.

Next to her, the Harris crime-scene photos came to life in the flicker of the TV. Finn remembered the day Kay had caught the case. Remembered a time before Eales. If he
thought about it, Harris’s murder had been the beginning of the end for him and Kay.

He couldn’t be sure what woke her just then. He hadn’t even seen her eyes open, but in a heartbeat, Kay rolled, reached to the side of the bed, and came back with a .38 Special.

“Jesus, Kay!” He stared down the barrel of the gun, solid in her hands.

“What the
fuck
are you doing here?” she asked, lowering the revolver.

“I’ve been knocking for ten minutes.” He nodded to where the CNN newscaster highlighted the latest unrest in the Middle East.

Kay searched for the remote and muted the TV. When she slid the Chief’s Special back into its holster on the bedpost and stood, Finn saw she was shaking.

“I could have shot you.” She used anger as a disguise as she brushed past him.

“I hadn’t considered you armed and dangerous. Since when do you take a five-shooter to bed with you anyway?” But Finn knew the answer.

She started down the hall, turning on lights as she went. “What time is it?”

“Almost ten.”

In the kitchen she took a glass off the counter and filled it under the tap. Finn spotted the empty bottle of Silent Sam.

“So you saw Eales today,” he said.

When she turned, he saw a defensiveness in Kay’s eyes. “I was going to fill you in, in the morning.”

“That’s not the point, Kay.”

“Look, I cleared it with Vicki. Eales signed the waiver. Besides, Vick agreed I’d likely get more out of Eales if I went alone.”

“And did you? Get anything out of him?”

She held his gaze for a moment, and Finn tried to keep his eyes from wandering to the low V of her robe. “No,” she answered.

“I should have been with you,” he said, imagining Kay alone in the interview room with the son of a bitch.

“Come on, Finn. With how much you hate Eales, your anger would have compromised the interview, and you know it.”

She was right, but he wasn’t about to concede it.

And then Kay was onto him. “Wait”—she set her glass on the counter a little too hard—“it isn’t procedure you’re pissed about, is it?”

“Never mind.” He took a step back, needing to distance himself from Kay, and from the truth. “Who’s this Patricia Hagen?” he asked, starting into the living room. “Her name’s all over Eales’s visitation record.”

“Eales’s girlfriend.” Kay followed, then led him to her office. “I logged on to the Department’s system from here. I can’t find anything on her. No criminal record, no traffic or parking tickets, not even a Maryland driver’s license.”

She flipped on the green banker’s lamp at her desk, and Finn surveyed the extent of Kay’s yearlong obsession. Dozens of crime-scene photos had been tacked to the wall: Annie Harris, Roma Chisney, and the Jane Doe from Leakin Park. Over a year later, the dead girl still didn’t have a name.

There were shots of the exterior of Eales’s row house, and the patch of lawn where Joe Spencer had bled out from the gunshot wound to his chest. A wide swath of blood spread across the sparse grass and mud. And finally the aftermath of the assault on Kay, her own blood staining Eales’s walkway.

A light layer of dust covered the photos and Kay’s desk, and Finn hoped it meant Kay’s obsession was waning. But his memory of that night had never waned. Every detail rang as vivid as if it were just last week he’d paced the tiled corridor outside the surgery suite at Johns Hopkins Shock-Trauma Unit, praying Kay would come out. Only once before in his life had he felt so terrified, so helpless. Five summers ago, he’d paced a similar hallway, only then it was his son’s life he’d been praying for. And Toby hadn’t come out.

He would’ve done anything to have traded positions with his son, to have turned the wheel right instead of left so the car had taken the impact of the transport truck on the driver’s side rather than the passenger’s. For the rest of his life, Finn would replay the accident that had claimed his son’s life, in the same way he’d replay those days fourteen months ago when he’d almost lost Kay.

“I figure we should pay Patricia Hagen a visit tomorrow,” Kay said. “In the meantime”—she pushed aside case folders and spread four photos across the cleared top—“I keep coming back to these.”

“The knife wounds?”

“They’re definitely similar,” she said, then pointed out each photo in order: “Annie Harris, seven cuts. Roma Chisney, ten. The Jane Doe, more than a dozen and a half. And Valley, five. And with each one the cuts are deeper, Finn. He’s actually driving the knife into the sternum.”

“But there’s no pattern, Kay.”

“Patterned or random, they mean something.”

“Could be nothing more than a by-product of the abduction, a means of subduing them.”

“No. With Valley being burned and Harris too decomposed, the ME’s office wouldn’t say for certain if the cuts were made pre- or postmortem. But with these other two,
the cuts were
both
before
and
after death. What’s he doing to them after they’re dead?”