The Night Caller (9 page)

It was the kind of unseasonably warm October afternoon that made everyone wish at least for the moment that there were no winters to come. Coop sat at an outdoor table at Seconds, just beginning to feel a fall chill creeping in from the bay. On Billard’s recommendation, he’d ordered the crab bisque and wasn’t disappointed.

Billard had something going here, Coop decided. He’d hired the right chef, composed the right menu, and chosen a beautiful spot overlooking the inlet. The restaurant might make for a good retirement for Billard, and department politics being what they were, maybe sooner than he suspected.

Billard appeared on the wooden deck and talked briefly with a table of about six diners who were oohing and ahing over their lunch; then he walked smiling over to where Coop sat at a corner of the wood railing. He was still smiling as he sat down opposite Coop in one of the green plastic chairs. Behind him Coop could see the white hulls of pleasure boats bobbing in the marina down the shoreline, the fall sunlight sparking silver off the water. It was a world he didn’t want to leave.

“So did I steer you right on the bisque?” Billard asked.

“It’s delicious, Art,” Coop said honestly. “I was just thinking, you’ve got something here to retire to when you’re ready.”

“Yeah. I like the restaurant business, and if this place flies it’ll take up more and more of my time. But I’m not quite ready to retire. I’m still a cop at heart.”

“Aren’t we all?” Coop said.

A waiter arrived and placed a glass of white wine before Billard, who waited until the man had departed before answering Coop. “I’ve got a feeling you didn’t come here just for lunch, old friend.”

Coop took a sip of the Beck’s dark he was having with his lunch, enjoying it all the more because of Dr. Gregory’s advice to limit himself to one glass. “No, I came to fulfill my part in the bargain about Bette’s murder. Remember, I promised to keep you posted.”

He filled in Billard on his visit to Haverton and his arrangement with Deni Green. He was glad to see that Billard was listening closely; he’d even pulled out a pen and was diligently making notes on a napkin.

“Will you see what information you might have on Lloyd Watkins?” Coop asked, when he was finished and Billard had clipped his pen back in his shirt pocket.

Billard nodded. “It’ll be done.” He took a slow sip of wine and swished it around in his mouth before swallowing. “Listen, Coop, I don’t much like this deal you have with the writer. Think you can trust her not to royally screw up the investigation?”

“No. And that’s pretty much the way I’m going to deal with her. I don’t want Bette’s…I don’t think my daughter’s private life should be in a book.”

“Nobody’s should,” Billard said. “Not even the ones who want their private lives there and think everybody else’ll be fascinated reading about them.”

“Deni Green might prove useful, though. She’s not stupid, and she brings her own slant on things.”

“She given you a new slant on the case?”

“I don’t know for sure, Art. There’s the interview with Sue Coppolino. It wasn’t what I expected.”

Billard rolled his eyes. “She’s the only one in the place who’s innocent, right?”

“Sure. That I expected. It was more how she acted. Her attitude toward Deni Green. Toward me.”

“You think she might not have killed her tennis star lover?” Billard sat back and watched Coop, knowing a cop’s answer to that kind of question about a convicted killer wouldn’t be given lightly.

“I’m not sure she’s guilty,” Coop said.

Both men sat silently and watched a small pleasure boat carrying a man, woman, and teenage girl set in at the restaurant’s dock. It was a fiberglass fourteen-foot runabout with no closed cabin and no room below the deck. Though the day was warm, it must have been cold out on the water. All three of the boaters were bundled in sweaters and wearing baseball caps pulled down tight above their ears.

“What about you?” Coop asked, as they watched the three leave their boat tied at the dock and enter the restaurant.

“Me?” Billard asked.

“What are the developments on your side of the bargain?”

“The truth is there are none,” Billard said. “Not that we haven’t been working. There’s nothing on the plastic saints. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to match the partial sole print with its manufacturer.”

“Maybe the shoe was made by a foreign manufacturer.”

“Probably it was. Most shoes seem to be made overseas these days. NAFTA or some such thing, I guess. We’re still checking and might come up with a match. But I have to stress
might.
”

Coop paused with a spoonful of bisque halfway to his mouth. “You still don’t think the two prints in those photos were made by the same shoe?”

“C’mon, Coop, you know the prints aren’t all that conclusive. If they were, there’d be no doubt we’d have the same doer in both crimes.”

“What about the powder from latex gloves?”

“Latex gloves were probably invented in prison. Plenty of bad guys see them as part of their wardrobe these days.”

Coop knew Billard was right, but he didn’t like it. He placed his spoon back in his bowl. “Maybe Maureen’s on target.”

Billard glowered. “Don’t give me that bullshit. You really think a cop might have killed Bette?”

“I didn’t mean about a cop being the killer, or any kind of police conspiracy. I mean about police apathy.”

“I’m going to let what you said pass, and remind you I’m not the one in charge of the investigation.”

Coop pushed his anger, his frustration, to a far part of his mind, but it still roiled in his belly. What he wished was that SID, the NYPD Special Investigation Department, would recognize that a serial killer might be active and take over the case. “I didn’t mean you personally, Art. We both know crime doesn’t take a break just because a murder is tremendously important to anybody. There’s only so much time and so many cops. But that means it’s possible Bette’s murder’s not getting the attention it deserves.”

“I can’t deny that’s true, Coop. That’s why I haven’t asked you as a friend to butt out of the case. She was your daughter, and I understand how you feel. But be careful of your dealings with this Deni Green character.”

“That you can count on, Art.”

Billard forced a smile. “So finish your bisque.”

Coop lifted his spoon again and started to do as Billard suggested, putting on an act to preserve their friendship, trying to change the mood.

“Speaking of Maureen, how’s she doing?” Billard asked. “How’s she handling her grief?”

“She’s mad as hell,” Coop said.

“Anger can be part of the grieving process.”

“She was mad as hell before Bette’s murder. Now she’s got some direction.”

Billard stood up and patted Coop’s shoulder. “Time’ll pass. Things’ll get better for both of you.”

“Thanks, Art.”

He knew Billard was right about Maureen’s anger. She grieved, but she’d do anything now rather than reveal her emotions to Coop. Her anger, her causes, masked a great deal of pain.

Coop watched Billard walk back into the restaurant, pausing to talk again to the diners who’d praised his food as he came out onto the deck. Politician, homicide detective, restaurateur.

In the interest of friendship, he finished his crab bisque before it got cold.

“Georgianna?”

Cindy Romero, Georgianna Mason’s friend from her college days, knocked again on Georgianna’s apartment door, then pressed her ear against the cool wood. She and Georgianna were members of a book club that met once a week. Georgianna hadn’t attended last night to discuss the mystery novel they’d all read. She hadn’t answered her phone this morning. And when Cindy had called her office number at Northwestern Centre Imports, she was told Georgianna hadn’t reported for work the last two days and hadn’t called in. The company had tried in vain to contact her, and would Cindy please call them if she found out where Georgianna was, to reassure them that nothing was wrong.

Cindy hadn’t felt so reassured after that conversation. On her lunch hour, she’d taken a cab to Georgianna’s apartment to see if her friend was home, and to slip a note under her door if she was out.

It was when she stooped to slide the note beneath the door that she first noticed the odor.

She leaned farther forward, supporting herself on one elbow, and sniffed where the door didn’t quite meet the threshold.

Cindy recoiled immediately and stood up, swaying and trying to steady herself with a hand against the door. She swiped her free hand across her face as if she could wipe away remnants of the stench seeping out of the apartment.

Backing away, she leaned against the opposite wall of the corridor, staring at the blank face of the closed door. It was a long time before she was reasonably sure she wasn’t going to vomit. Still walking unsteadily, she made her way to the elevator. On the ground floor, she hurried to the door she remembered marked
BUILDING MANAGER
. The police! Someone had to call the police!

The harder Cindy pounded on the building manager’s door, the more upset she became.

“I probably oughtn’t have left her alone,” said Ida Kling, the Ardmont Apartments manager. “Soon as she came down to get me, I could see how upset she was. So I went upstairs with her right off to see what she was talking about. She sure was right—there was a hellacious odor coming outta that apartment.” Ida paused, made a face, then swallowed. She was a stocky, fiftyish woman who might have been playing Russian peasants in the movies if her life had taken another path. She was as strong a person as she appeared. But what she’d seen today had gotten to her in a familiar way, and one she never wanted to experience again. She’d been affected this way ten years ago when she found her first husband after he’d killed himself with his twelve-gauge shotgun. Waves of nausea, waves of disbelief.
Again!
she’d found herself thinking when she’d gazed at what was in the apartment’s bathtub.
Please not again!
But there were the images bright in her mind, so vivid with color and horror.

“Mrs. Kling?” Seattle Detective Sergeant Roy Lyons asked her. “Want to sit down?”

“I’m all right,” she assured him.

“You let yourself and Miss Romero in with your master key?”

“Yes, but you could smell the stench some even out in the hall. Then when we opened the door it was awful, the way it hit us. Wasn’t no doubt where it was coming from. We cupped our hands over our noses and went into the bathroom, and we…saw it and both gagged and backed right out. We both almost fainted. Well, Miss Romero there did faint. I had something to lean on.” She pointed toward a high-backed chair near the bathroom door. “She looked okay enough curled up like she was on the carpet outside the bathroom. I thought she’d stay fainted while I went downstairs to my place to call you. I didn’t wanna touch the phone here, didn’t wanna touch anything. You don’t have to be no cop to know that’s what you’re supposed to do at crime scenes.”

Lyons, a muscular man in a brown suit, nodded somberly, letting her know he thought she’d been wise.

“When I came back up here, Miss Romero was sitting up, and when she saw me she started in screaming. I quieted her down and helped her to her feet, held on to her tight, then got her out into the hall quick as I could.”

Lyons nodded again. Very wise.

After a few more preliminary statements, he thanked Ida Kling and sent her out of Georgianna Mason’s apartment. The crime techs and medical examiner were still crowded into the tiny tiled bathroom, examining the scene of the murder, examining what was left of Georgianna in the crusted brown soup in the bathtub. There was no room for Lyons. He was glad. He didn’t want to go back in there. But he knew he would. Then he would again, in his dreams.

He turned to his partner, plainclothes detective Marty Sanderson, and glanced at what was inside the red smudged plastic bag Sanderson was holding in his right hand. “A can opener,” he said. “Jesus!”

Sanderson, a calm, stocky man with a bushy head of hair still black despite his forty-five years, said, “The bastard kinda skinned her. I bet she died of shock.” Not much got to Sanderson. The dead woman’s features had been incongruously peaceful and composed in her discolored bath, but they’d soon discovered that beneath the water’s surface she’d been reduced to exposed bone and shreds of free-floating flesh. The sight seemed only to have sobered Sanderson somewhat. At least he wasn’t cracking his usual sick jokes the way he often did at murder scenes.

“I hope to God she died fast,” Lyons said.

“Me, too,” Sanderson said simply. “But I bet she didn’t. Whoever killed her probably closed her eyes, too. Maybe her mouth. Ever seen this kinda thing before?”

“Not like this,” Lyons said, purposely veering his thoughts, any mental images, away from the cramped tile bathroom with its palpable horror.

“You can’t smell her so much out here,” Sanderson remarked. “Or else we’re getting used to it.”

“Jesus, Marty!”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“She musta been dead awhile.”

“Yeah. We’ll see what the ME has to say.”

Lyons flipped open the leather cover of his notebook, more for something to do than for any other reason. “The Romero woman said Georgianna had an ex-husband, lives right here in Seattle.”

“I hope it’s him.”

“Why’s that, Marty?”

“I don’t want to see this kind of thing again, ever. And the way I figure it, when you see this sort of killing, the hate and rage it must have taken, always look to the spouse.”

Lyons agreed, knowing that in fact they always did look first to the spouse in these kinds of cases. He reached into a pocket and got out a roll of mints, used his thumbnail to peel one off, and slipped it into his mouth. It was his third since entering the apartment. The strong scent of the mints took the edge off the stench of death and helped hold nausea in check.

“Sure wouldn’t want to see this one develop into us having a serial killer on our hands,” Sanderson said.

The remote possibility made Lyons wince. “There’s no reason to think we have to worry about that.” For the first time, Lyons was aware of traffic noises filtering up from down in the street. He was glad to hear them, reassured that there was a normal world out there beyond the hell of Georgianna Mason’s apartment. He closed his notebook and tucked it into an inside pocket of his suit coat, then glanced around at ground already covered. “No sign of forced entry or a struggle. She probably knew and trusted whoever killed her.”

“Like he was family,” Sanderson said.

“Family,” Lyons agreed. He placed his fists on his hips and shook his head in disbelief. “A goddamn can opener! And maybe while she was still alive. What must
that
have been like? Only a flaming psycho could have done such a thing!”

“Look to the spouse,” Sanderson advised again. “You got another one of those mints?”