Mystic River (15 page)

“He beat her?” Sean said.

“Looks that way. The blood from the top of her head? That’s from a split on the crown. Guy probably broke whatever he was hitting her with, he brought it down so hard.”

Piled on the other side of her, filling this narrow corridor behind the screen, were wooden pallets and what looked like stage props—wooden schooners and cathedral tops, the bow of what looked like a Venetian gondola. She wouldn’t have been able to move. Once she got in there, she was stuck. If whoever had been chasing her found her, then she’d die. And he’d found her.

He’d opened the door on her, and she’d curled tight into herself, trying to protect her body with nothing more substantial than her own limbs. Sean craned his head and peered around her clenched fist, looked into her face. It, too, was streaked with red, and her eyes were clenched as tight as her fist, trying to wish it all away, the eyelids locked by fear at first and now by rigor.

“That her?” Whitey Powers said.

“Huh?”

“Katherine Marcus,” Whitey said. “That her?”

“Yeah,” Sean said. She had a small scar curving underneath the right side of her chin, barely noticeable and faded with time, but you’d notice it on Katie when you’d see her around the neighborhood because the rest of her was so unblemished, her face a flawless record of her mother’s dark, angular beauty combined with her father’s more tousled good looks, his pale eyes and hair.

“Hundred percent positive?” the assistant ME asked.

“Ninety-nine,” Sean said. “We’ll have the father do a positive at the morgue. But, yeah, it’s her.”

“You see the back of her head?” Whitey leaned in and lifted the hair off her shoulders with a pen.

Sean peered back there, saw that a small piece of the
lower skull was missing, the back of the neck gone dark with the blood.

“You telling me she was shot?” He looked at the ME.

The guy nodded. “That looks like a bullet wound to me.”

Sean leaned back out of the smell of perfume and blood and mildewed concrete and sodden wood. He wished, for just a moment, that he could pull Katie Marcus’s clenched fist down from her ear, as if by doing so those bruises he could see and the ones they were sure to find under her clothes would evaporate, and the red rain would ascend from her hair and body, and she would step back out of this tomb blinking sleep from her eyes, a bit groggy.

Off to his right, he heard the sounds of a commotion, several people yelling at once, the rustle of mad scrambling, and the K-9 dogs snarling and barking in a mad fury. When he looked over, he saw Jimmy Marcus and Chuck Savage burst through the trees at the far side of the grove, where the land turned green and manicured and sloped gracefully down toward the screen, the place where summer crowds spread their blankets and sat in the grass to watch a play.

At least eight uniforms and two plainclothes converged on Jimmy and Chuck, and Chuck went down right away, but Jimmy was fast and Jimmy was slippery. He slid straight through the line with a series of quick, seemingly illogical pivots that left his pursuers grasping air, and if he hadn’t stumbled coming down the slope, he would have made the screen with no one to stop him but Krauser and Friel.

But he did stumble, his foot slipping out from under him on the damp grass, and his eyes locked with Sean’s as he belly-flopped on the grass, his chin punching through the soil. A young trooper, all square head and high-school-tight-end body, landed on top of Jimmy like he was a sled, and the two of them slid another few feet down the slope. The cop pulled Jimmy’s right arm behind his back and went for his cuffs.

Sean stepped out onto the stage and called: “Hey! Hey! It’s the father. Just pull him back.”

The young cop looked over, pissed and muddy.

“Just pull him back,” Sean said. “The both of them.”

He turned back toward the screen and that’s when Jimmy called his name, his voice hoarse, as if the screams in his head had found his vocal cords and stripped them: “Sean!”

Sean stopped, caught Friel looking at him.

“Look at me, Sean!”

Sean turned back, saw Jimmy arching up under the young cop’s weight, a dark smudge of soil on his chin, whiskers of grass hanging off it.

“You find her? Is it her?” Jimmy yelled. “Is it?”

Sean stayed motionless, holding Jimmy’s eyes with his own, locking them until Jimmy’s surging stare saw what Sean had just seen, saw that it was over now, the worst fear had been realized.

Jimmy began to scream and ropes of spit shot from his mouth. Another cop came down the slope to help the one on top of Jimmy, and Sean turned away. Jimmy’s scream blew out into the air as a low, guttural thing, nothing sharp or high-pitched to it, an animal’s first stage of reckoning with grief. Sean had heard the screams of a lot of victims’ parents over the years. Always there was a plaintive character to them, a beseechment for God or reason to return, tell them it was all a dream. But Jimmy’s scream had none of that, only love and rage, in equal quantity, shredding the birds from the trees and echoing into the Pen Channel.

Sean went back over and looked down at Katie Marcus. Connolly, the newest member of the unit, came up beside him, and they looked down for a while without saying anything, and Jimmy Marcus’s scream grew more hoarse and ragged, as if he’d sucked in kernels of glass every time he took a breath.

Sean looked down at Katie with her fist clenched to the side of her head in the drench of the red rain, then over her body at the wooden props that had kept her from reaching the other side.

Off to their right, Jimmy continued to scream as they
dragged him back up the slope, and a helicopter chopped the air over the grove as it made a hard pass, the engine droning as it turned to bank and come back, Sean figuring it was from one of the TV stations. It had a lighter sound than the police choppers.

Connolly, out of the side of his mouth, said, “You ever seen anything like this?”

Sean shrugged. It wouldn’t matter much if he had. You got to the point where you stopped comparing.

“I mean, this is…” Connolly sputtered, trying to find the words, “this is some kind of…” He looked away from the body, off into the trees, with an air of wide-eyed uselessness, and seemed on the verge of trying to speak again.

Then his mouth closed, and after a while he quit trying to give it a name.

S
EAN LEANED AGAINST
the stage below the drive-in screen with his boss, Detective Lieutenant Martin Friel, and they watched Whitey Powers give direction to the coroner’s van as it backed down the slope that led to the doorway where Katie Marcus’s body had been found. Whitey walked backward, his hands raised and occasionally cutting left or right, his voice sniping the air with crisp whistles that shot through his lower teeth like puppy yelps. His eyes darted from the crime scene tape on either side of him to the van tires to the driver’s nervous eyes in the side-view like he was auditioning for a job with a moving company, making sure those fat tires never strayed an inch or more from where he wanted them to go.

“A little more. Keep it straight. Little more, little more. That’s it.” When he had the van where he wanted it, he stepped aside and slapped the rear doors. “You’re good.”

Whitey opened the rear doors and pulled them wide so they blocked anyone’s view of the space behind the screen, Sean thinking it never would have occurred to him to form protective wings around the doorway where Katie Marcus had died, and then reminding himself that Whitey had a lot more time put in on crime scenes than he had, Whitey an old warhorse going back to a time when Sean was still trying to cop feels at high school dances and not pick at his acne.

The two coroner’s assistants were both halfway out of their seats when Whitey called to them. “Ain’t going to work that way, guys. You’re gonna have to come out through the back.”

They shut their doors and disappeared through the back of the van to retrieve the corpse, and Sean could feel a finality in their disappearance, a certainty that this was his to deal with now. The other cops and teams of techs and the reporters hovering in their copters overhead or on the other side of the crime scene barriers that surrounded the park would move on to something else, and he and Whitey would bear the lion’s share of Katie Marcus’s death alone, filing the reports, preparing the affidavits, working her death long after most of the people here had moved on to something else—traffic accidents, larcenies, suicides in rooms gone stale with recirculated air and overflowing ashtrays.

Martin Friel hoisted himself up onto the stage and sat there with his small legs dangling over the earth. He’d come here from the back nine at the George Wright and smelled of sunblock under his blue polo and khakis. He drummed his heels off the side of the stage, and Sean could feel a hint of moral annoyance in him.

“You’ve worked with Sergeant Powers before, right?”

“Yeah,” Sean said.

“Any problems?”

“No.” Sean watched Whitey take a uniformed trooper aside, point off to the stand of trees behind the drive-in screen. “I worked the Elizabeth Pitek homicide with him last year.”

“Woman with the restraining order?” Friel said. “Ex-husband said something about paper?”

“Said, ‘Paper rules her life, don’t mean it rules mine.’”

“He got twenty, right?”

“Twenty solid, yeah.” Sean wishing someone had gotten her a stronger piece of paper. Her kid growing up in a foster home, wondering what happened, who the fuck he belonged to now.

The trooper walked away from Whitey, grabbed a few more uniforms, and they headed off for the trees.

“Heard he drinks,” Friel said, and pulled one leg up onto the stage with him, held the knee up against his chest.

“I’ve never seen it on the clock, sir,” Sean said, wondering who was really on probation in Friel’s eyes, him or Whitey. He watched Whitey bend and peer at a clump of grass near the van’s rear tire, pull up the cuff of his sweatpants as if he were wearing a Brooks Brothers suit.

“Your partner’s out on that bullshit disability claim, pulled something in his spine so he’s recuperating on Jet Skis, parasailing in Florida, what I hear.” Friel shrugged. “Powers requested you when you got back. Now you’re back. We going to have any more incidents like the last one?”

Sean had been expecting to eat shit, particularly from Friel, so he kept his voice perfectly contrite. “No, sir. A momentary lapse of judgment.”

“Several of them,” Friel said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Your personal life’s a mess, Trooper, that’s your problem. Don’t let it bleed back into your job.” Sean looked at Friel, caught a charged-electrode sheen in his eyes he’d seen before, a sheen that meant Friel was in a place where you couldn’t argue with him.

Again Sean nodded, sucking it up.

Friel gave him a cold smile and watched a news copter arc in over the screen, flying lower than the agreed-upon distance, Friel getting a look on his face like he was going to be handing someone severance pay before sunset.

“You know the family, right?” Friel said, tracking the chopper. “You grew up here.”

“I grew up in the Point.”

“That’s here.”

“This is the Flats. Bit of a difference, sir.”

Friel waved it away. “You grew up here. You were one of the first on-scene, and you know these people.” He spread his hands. “I’m wrong?”

“About what?”

“Your ability to handle this.” He gave Sean his summer-softball-coach smile. “You’re one of my bright boys, right? Served your penance, ready to get back on the ball?”

“Yes, sir,” Sean said. You bet, sir. Whatever it takes to keep this job, sir.

They looked over at the van as something thumped to the floor inside and the chassis dipped toward the wheels. The chassis bounced back up, and Friel said, “You notice they always drop them?”

They always did. Katie Marcus, zipped in the dark, plastic heat of a body bag now. Dumped inside that van, her hair matting to the plastic, organs softening.

“Trooper,” Friel said, “You know what I like even less than ten-year-old black boys getting shot by bullshit gang-war crossfire?”

Sean knew the answer, but he didn’t say anything.

“Nineteen-year-old white girls getting murdered in my parks. People don’t say ‘Oh, the vagaries of economics’ then. They don’t feel a wistful sense of the tragic. They feel pissed and they want somebody to be led onto the six o’clock in shackles.” Friel nudged Sean. “I mean, right?”

“Right.”

“That’s what they want, because they’re us and that’s what we want.” Friel grasped Sean’s shoulder so he’d look at him.

“Yes, sir,” Sean said, because Friel had that weird light in his eyes like he believed what he was saying the way some people believed in God or NASDAQ or the Internet-as-global-village. Friel was Born Again all the way, although what the Again had been Sean couldn’t say, just that Friel had found something through his work that Sean could barely recognize, something that gave solace, maybe even belief, a certainty underfoot. Times, to be truthful, Sean thought his boss was an idiot, spouting bullshit platitudes about life and death and the ways to make it all right, cure
the cancers and become one collective heart, if only everyone would listen.

Other times, though, Friel reminded Sean of his father, building his birdhouses in the basement where no birds ever flew, and Sean loved the
idea
of him.

Martin Friel had been Homicide Detective Lieutenant of Barracks Six going back a couple of presidents, and as far as Sean knew, no one had ever called him “Marty” or “buddy” or “old man.” To look at him on the street, you would have guessed he was an accountant or maybe a claims adjuster for an insurance agency, something like that. He had a bland voice to go with his bland face, and nothing but a brown horseshoe remained of his hair. He was a small guy, particularly for a guy who’d worked his way up through the state trooper ranks, and you could lose him easily in a crowd because there was nothing distinctive to his walk. Loved the wife and two kids, forgot to remove the lift ticket from his parka during wintertime, active in his church, fiscally and socially conservative.

But what the bland voice and bland face couldn’t begin to hint at was the mind—a dense, unquestioning combination of the practical and the moralistic. You committed a capital crime in Martin Friel’s jurisdiction—and it was
his
, fuck you if you didn’t get that—and he took it very, very personally.

“I want you sharp and I want you edgy,” he’d said to Sean his first day in the Homicide Unit. “I don’t want you overtly outraged, because outrage is emotion and emotion should never be overt. But I want you pretty fucking annoyed at all times—annoyed that the chairs here are too hard and all your friends from college are driving Audis. I want you annoyed that all perps are so dumb they think they can do their heinous shit in
our
jurisdiction. Annoyed enough, Devine, that you stay on the details of your cases so they don’t get the ADAs blown out of court because of nebulous warrants and lack of probable cause. Annoyed enough to close every
case clean and ram these nasty bastards into nasty cell blocks for the rest of their nasty fucking lives.”

Around the barracks it was called “Friel’s Spiel,” and every new trooper to the unit got it on day one in exactly the same way. Like most of the things Friel said, you had no idea how much he believed and how much was just rah-rah-law-enforcement shtick. But you bought it. Or you washed out.

Sean had been in the State Police Homicide Unit two years, during which time he’d amassed the best clearance rate of anyone in Whitey Powers’s squad, and Friel still looked at him sometimes like he wasn’t sure about him. He was looking at him that way now, gauging something in him, deciding whether he was up to this: a girl killed in
his
park.

Whitey Powers ambled over to them, flipping through his report pad as he nodded at Friel. “Lieutenant.”

“Sergeant Powers,” Friel said. “Where are we so far?”

“Preliminary indications put time of death at roughly two-fifteen to two-thirty in the morning. No signs of sexual assault. Cause of death was most likely the GSW to the back of the head, but we’re not ruling out blunt trauma from that bludgeoning she took. Shooter was most likely a righty. We found the slug embedded in a pallet to the left of the victim’s body. Looks to be a thirty-eight Smith slug, but we’ll know for sure once Ballistics takes a look. Divers in the channel are looking for weapons now. We’re hoping the perp might have tossed the gun or at least what he beat her with, which looks to have been a bat of some kind, maybe a stick.”

“A stick,” Friel said.

“Two BPD officers on the house-to-houses along Sydney spoke with a woman claims she heard a car hit something and stall out at one-forty-five
A.M
., roughly a half an hour before T.O.D.”

“What sort of physical evidence do we have?” Friel asked.

“Well, the rain kinda fucked us there, sir. We got some pretty shitty footprint casts that may belong to the perp, def
initely a couple belong to the victim. We pulled about twenty-five separate latents off that door behind the screen. Again, could be the victim’s, the perp’s, or just twenty-five people who have nothing to do with this and come down here at night to drink or take a breather during a jog. We got blood by the door and inside—again, some of it might be the perp’s, might not. A lot of it definitely came from the victim. We got several distinct prints off the victim’s car door. That’s about it for physical right now.”

Friel nodded. “Anything in particular I can report to the DA when he calls me in ten or twenty minutes?”

Powers shrugged. “Tell him the rain fucked my crime scene, sir, and we’re doing the best we can.”

Friel yawned into his fist. “Anything else I should know?”

Whitey looked back over his shoulder at the trail leading down to the door behind the screen, the last ground Katie Marcus’s feet had touched.

“The lack of footprints pisses me off.”

“You mentioned the rain…”

Whitey nodded. “But
she
left a couple. I’m willing to bet the house they were hers, anyway, because they were recent and she was digging her heels some places and springing off the balls of her feet in others. We found three, maybe four like that, and I’m pretty sure they belonged to Katherine Marcus. But the perp? Nothing.”

“Again,” Sean said, “the rain.”

“Accounts for why we found only three of hers, I’ll grant you. But not
one
of this guy’s far as we can see?” Whitey looked at Sean and then Friel and then he shrugged. “Whatever. Pisses me off is all.”

Friel pushed himself off the stage and clapped some grit off his hands. “All right, guys: You have a six-man task force of detectives at your disposal. All your lab work has been bumped to the head of the line and given priority status. You’ll have as many troopers as you need for the grunt work. So, Sergeant, tell me how you plan to utilize all this manpower we’ve gotten for you in our wisdom.”

“I suppose we’ll talk to the victim’s father now and find out what he knows about her movements last night, who she was with, who might’ve had a beef with her. Then we’ll talk to those people, reinterview this woman said she heard the car stall out on Sydney. We’ll Q-and-A all the winos they pulled out of the park and off Sydney, hope the tech support teams give us solid latents or hair fibers to work with. Maybe his skin is under the Marcus girl’s nails. Maybe his prints are on that door. Or maybe he was the boyfriend and they had a spat.” Whitey gave another of his patented shrugs and kicked at some dirt. “That’s about it.”

Friel looked at Sean.

“We’ll get the guy, sir.”

Friel looked like he’d been expecting something better, but he nodded once and patted Sean’s elbow before walking away from the stage and down into the bowl of seats where Lieutenant Krauser of the BPD stood talking with his boss, Captain Gillis of the D-6, everyone giving Sean and Whitey their best “Don’t fuck up” stares.

“‘We’ll get the guy’?” Whitey said. “Four years of college, that’s the best line you can come up with?”

Sean’s eyes met Friel’s again for a moment and he gave him a nod that he hoped exuded competence and confidence. “It’s in the manual,” he said to Whitey. “Right after ‘We’ll nail the bastard’ and before ‘Praise the Lord.’ You read it?”

Whitey shook his head. “Sick that day.”

They turned as the coroner’s assistant shut the back doors to the van and came around the driver’s side.