Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem (16 page)

was a setup where the microphone ran back to a tiny digital
recorder, some of them as small as a nine-volt battery, concealed
somewhere on the body.
Sticking the pen out once again, I slid it beneath the free end of
Rabold’s shirt and lifted. The bottom of his shirt rose a few inches,
and I cocked my head, straining to see. There, against Rabold’s pale,
fat belly, was the end of the microphone cord, leading to . . . nothing.
At the end of the wire a bit of bare copper was exposed. The
wire had been cut, and whatever recorder it had led to was missing.
The proximity to the corpse got to me then, in a sudden, overwhelming
wave. I slid back out from under the pool table and stood
up. I made it three steps toward the stairs before my vision blurred
and it seemed my heartbeat was suddenly coming from my temples.
I put my left hand out and found the wall, leaned up against it, and
bit down hard on my lip. The burst of pain cleared my head.
I kept one hand on the wall while I went up the stairs, my knees
unsteady until I was near the top. When I came out into the living
room, Joe was sitting on the floor beside the couch. The blond girl
was still curled up, breathing in ragged gaps. I couldn’t see her face,
just the jerking rise and fall of her chest. Joe’s hand rested gently on
her knee. Her own hand was wrapped around his wrist, painted
fingernails biting into his flesh.
I stood and stared at Joe. His eyes were distant. Cop eyes. Cop
mode, now. I needed to get back into it, myself.
“You make the call?” I said.
He nodded, said, “Is it. . . ,” but didn’t finish the question, because
he didn’t want to say Rabold’s name. Not with the girl who
was probably Rabold’s daughter a few feet away.
“Yeah,” I said.
I couldn’t look at the girl anymore. I walked away from them, to
the front of the room, and peered out the window, waiting for the
police. I stayed on my feet. Somehow, it felt stronger than sitting. I
needed to feel strong, right then.

CHAPTER
16

By the time Cal Richards got there, we’d learned Rabold’s daughter,
Mary, had probably been home for almost thirty minutes before
we’d arrived. A neighbor remembered seeing her drive in, alone, and
told the cops this in a high, hysterical voice that Joe and I could hear
plainly from where we stood beside one of the squad cars. When we
had the timetable for the girl’s arrival, our imaginations could handle
the rest of the sequence. She had probably gone downstairs,
seen her father, and gone into shock. She’d made it back upstairs,
but then the terror had overwhelmed her. She couldn’t think to call
the police or even leave the house. Instead, in that shock, in that terror,
she’d hid. She’d crawled behind the couch and curled into a ball
and waited, with her father’s body in the basement beneath her. I’d
never heard of anything like it, but then I’d never seen anything like
the scene in Rabold’s basement, either. His daughter was sixteen.
Richards came onto the scene early, because Joe had requested
him with the initial call. They’d sent out another homicide team
first, but Richards was given control once he got there. The other
cops knew Cal, that was for sure. Mary Rabold was gone, taken
away in an ambulance, a detective riding with them.
Richards came out of the front door of the house about twenty
minutes after he’d gone in. He walked through the yard to where
we stood beside the evidence tech’s van. Three cruisers were parked
in front of the house now, along with the evidence van and Cal’s
unmarked car. Neighbors stood across the street, but there was no
media presence yet. That wouldn’t last long.
“Let’s walk around the house, gentlemen,” Richards said. Somehow
his face was even more impassive now than normal. He’d seen
what I’d seen in the basement, but somehow he managed to keep it
off his face, shut it down, and trap it inside him. I couldn’t do
that—not in the same way that he could, at least. Maybe that
wasn’t the worst thing in the world, though.
We followed Richards back up the driveway and around the
black Honda that was parked there. A screened-in porch was off
the rear of the house, and a couple of uniformed cops were working
it and the yard, taking photographs and scanning for evidence.
Richards stopped around the corner, out of their way but also out
of sight of the watchers on the street. He leaned against the wall,
pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. He took a few drags, flipping idly
through the notebook he held in his hands.
“This gets messy,” he said. “Dead cop. Murdered in his home,
found by his daughter. Kid can’t even talk now. Wouldn’t say a
word. Just stared with those eyes, man . . . those eyes.” He took
another drag on the cigarette, a long one, then tapped it out against
the wall and carefully put it into his jacket pocket. Couldn’t contaminate
the crime scene.
“Messy,” he said again. “All right, you tell it to me, boys.”
We told it to him. While we talked, the uniforms continued to
move around the yard, combing the grass and taking their pictures.
Everyone was silent. Back out on the street, there was some mild
commotion, doors opening and closing, voices raised. This would
be the media arrival.
“He was wearing a wire,” I said when Joe and I had gone
through the basics. It was the first Joe had heard of it, and his face
registered surprise. Richards, on the other hand, was impassive.
“Was he?” he said.
“Come on, Cal. You were down there. You saw it.”
He frowned and looked away, not liking it that a civilian had
been on the scene first.
“He was wearing a wire,” he admitted. “And it was cut. The
recorder’s gone. Do you have it?”
“No.”
He gazed at me hard, and I said, “Are you insane? No, Richards,
I didn’t steal a recorder off the man’s corpse.”
“Okay.”
Joe was watching with interest. “Rabold’s a street officer,” he
said. “What the hell’s he doing wearing a wire? And in his own
house?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Richards said, “because I don’t know.”
“He was requesting files on old fires this morning,” I said. “And
now he’s dead. You think that’s unrelated?”
Richards’s face showed nothing. “I’m not a guess-maker, Perry.
I’m a detective. We’ll see where it goes.”
an ť
Sure.
“Look, you know we’re going to need to sit down and get an official
statement recorded,” he said. “And we’re going to have to separate
you. Makes me look bad if I keep witnesses together for an
interview. Baker’ll handle that. You’ll be seeing both of us, but I’m
going to have to give you up to him now.”
“Who’s Baker?” I asked.
“My partner.”
“You actually have one?”
“We’re a good team,” Richards said, “provided we spend plenty
of time on separate courts.”
He took us around to the front of the house, and as we cleared
the corner, I saw Jack Padgett shoving his way through the crowd,
snarling at a uniformed officer to get out of his way. He was in
street clothes, jeans and a brightly colored golf shirt, and his face
was flushed with fury.
“Shit,” Richards said. “The last thing I need is that crazy bastard
in my crime scene.”
He moved toward Padgett, who turned to look at him and
spotted me. His face darkened, and he stepped forward, shoulders
squaring and rising, like a boxer stepping away from the ropes.
“What’s this guy doing here?” he said, pointing at me.
Richards reached him then and said something that I couldn’t
hear. Padgett answered, his own voice softer, and all I caught of it
was an obscene reference involving my mother. Then Richards had
his hand firmly on the taller man’s shoulder and was guiding him
away from us, back toward the ring of cops watching the perimeter
of the yard. Inside the house, the evidence techs were probably
still hunched over the body of Padgett’s partner. I wondered when
he’d heard, and where he’d been. Crooked cop or not, having your
partner murdered had to hit deep.
Richards had disappeared into the crowd before I remembered
that I hadn’t told him what I’d learned about Sentalar and Corbett.
A few hours earlier, that was huge news. A few hours earlier, Mary
Rabold’s father was still alive.

Joe and I spent a while talking to Baker, a short guy with a military
haircut and a sunburn, but Richards never returned. Baker took us
back to the station and interviewed us separately, on tape. Then we
filled out a witness form, and he told us we could go.
“What about Cal Richards?” Joe asked. “Is he coming down
here?”
Baker shrugged. “Don’t know. He told me to get your statements
on tape and get back down to the scene, myself. Didn’t say
anything about holding you for him.”
“He knows where to find us,” Joe said.
A patrol officer drove us to my apartment. Joe’s car was going to
be searched by police, of course. They might not think there was a
gun in the trunk or bloody fibers on the floor mats, but they had to
check.

When the cop dropped us off, we stood together in my parking
lot and looked at each other. It was evening now, the sun gone, the
night air beginning to cool. A few cars were in the gym lot, but it
was quiet outside.
“That poor damn kid,” Joe said.
“Yeah.”
He sighed and ran both hands through his hair and over his
face. “What the hell is going on, LP? What was your friend into?”
I shook my head. I didn’t have any answers. It was just twelve
hours ago that I’d stood on the street in front of this building and
formed my idea that Rabold and his partner had killed Ed intentionally.
Now Rabold was dead. That didn’t change my previous
theory, but it sure as hell complicated it.
“You tell any of the other detectives about Corbett and Sentalar?”
Joe asked.
“No. It’s Cal’s case. He’s the only one who would have understood
what it might mean. I’ll tell him.”
“Okay. We’ll tell him in the morning. Get some sleep, maybe
some dinner. A few hours of normal life, get our heads back together.
We’ll see where it stands in the morning.”
“They shot him three times, Joe,” I said. “Blew a piece of his
face off, shot him in the chest, shot him in the stomach. That’s not
a killing for killing’s sake. It wasn’t a hit, a guy getting whacked just
to be eliminated. There’s a lot of anger in those wounds.”
“I wonder if his wife is with that girl yet” was all he said.
“I hope so. You want me to give you a ride home?”
“No, thanks.”
“You sure?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I need the walk tonight.”

He left, and I went upstairs and took a long, hot shower, my muscles
slowly loosening under the spray. I dried off and changed
clothes. By then it was almost ten, well past dinnertime and closer

to sleeping time for normal people. Since I clearly wasn’t normal, I
thought I’d go ahead and eat breakfast for a very late dinner. I fixed
an omelet but couldn’t find any appetite for it, ended up tossing it
in the garbage, and drinking a glass of orange juice.
After a while, I took a bottle of Beck’s out of the refrigerator
and went up on the roof. There’s a trapdoor with folding stairs in
the ceiling just outside my apartment that provides access to the
roof, and I’ve dragged a couple of lounge chairs and some potted
plants up there. It’s a nice place to spend a summer evening.
I sat alone, listening to the traffic noise and sipping my beer and
thinking about old friends and a terrified sixteen-year-old girl hiding
behind a couch. When the beer was empty, I went back downstairs
to get a fresh one. I stood at the door for a moment,
hesitating, then grabbed the cordless phone as well and took it
onto the roof with me. The connection had some static up there,
but you could hear well enough for a conversation. I set the beer
down unopened and dialed Amy’s number.
“Hey,” I said when she answered, “you asleep yet?”
As soon as she recognized my voice, she launched into me.
“You know, you’re a real jerk, Lincoln. I shouldn’t have walked
away last night as easily as I did. The more I think about it, the
more pissed off I get. I mean, I don’t walk into your office and tell
you how to do your job, and that’s basically what you did to me last
night. Yes, I realize Gradduk was your friend, but the moment I
start changing my approach to reporting based upon friendships is
the moment I sacrifice whatever professional integrity—”
“One of the cops that tried to arrest Ed was murdered today,” I
said, interrupting. “I spent the whole day trying to prove he and his
partner set Ed up, and then I found out he was dead. He was shot
three times, in his basement. Joe and I found the body. His daughter
had already seen it. She was hiding behind the couch upstairs.
She couldn’t talk to us. Couldn’t get a word out.”
Silence, then: “You at home?”
r
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll see you in ten.”
She hung up.

Fifteen minutes later gravel spun and tires squealed below me—
Amy’s trademark entrance. I’d left the door to the steps unlocked,
and now I heard it open and close, and then Amy was knocking at
my apartment door.
“I’m up here,” I called down to her. The steps on the trapdoor
creaked as she worked her way up, and then her head poked above
the surface of the roof and she shot me a concerned look. I didn’t
say anything. She marched across the roof, took the bottle of beer
out of my hand, and downed a third of it, then gave it back to me.
“Okay,” she said. “What the hell happened?”
It took me a long time to tell it. It had been that sort of day.
When I was through, she sat quietly and stared out at the night sky.
“I’m sorry, Lincoln,” she said after a while. “That’s an awful, awful
thing to experience.”
“For the daughter.”
“And for you. Awful for you because you had to see both the
body and the daughter. I bet it was almost harder to see her.”
“Yeah.”
“You heard any ideas on what happened?”
I shook my head. “Not yet. We gave our statements and they
sent us home. I’m kind of surprised you hadn’t heard about it.”
“I left early today because I worked late last night.”
“Right.” I didn’t want to bring up her article. Somewhere between
Larry Rabold’s living room and basement I’d lost my capacity
to be angry over something like that.
She brought it up, though. “Look, Lincoln, I didn’t suggest
Gradduk was some sort of perverted loser who killed the woman
because she’d rejected him. I just put out what I knew—”