Triptych (40 page)

“Aleesha?”

“Yeah. Couple of times, maybe three. I wrote down the dates. You want me to get them? She was part of the sweeps we did, just like I told you. Twenty, thirty girls at a time. I’m not surprised I didn’t remember her.”

“How about Baby G?”

“Nothing on him. He’s pretty new at the Homes. I could’a met him before, but there’s nothing in my files about it and I sure as shit don’t remember. Maybe we should go at him again? Bring him down to the station and see what he knows?”

Will wondered if he knew the pimp was dead.

“So,” Michael continued. “How’s it going? Anything on Aleesha?”

“Nothing big,” “Will answered. ”Tell me about Jasmine.“

“Is that one of the girls?”

“She’s the kid who took some skin off your face.”

“Oh, that one.” Michael’s laugh sounded strained. “Yeah. Little hell-fire.”

“Did she say anything to you before she ran up the stairs?”

“Nothing I want to repeat in front of my wife.”

“Your wife’s there with you?”

He gave that laugh again. “Where else would she be?”

There was a long stretch of silence. Michael had said less than a minute ago that his family was staying with his mother-in-law. Why was he lying?

“Anyway,” Michael said. “The girl-what’s her name? She didn’t say anything. You think she saw something the night Aleesha was killed?”

“I don’t know.” Was he embarrassed? Is that why he lied?

“I’d bring her into the station if you’re gonna question her, man. I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job or anything, but you don’t want some black brat bringing a charge against you. I was lucky I got away with a slap.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Will wondered if Michael had already found out that Jasmine was missing. If he’d lie about one thing, he’d certainly have no problem lying about another. “I’ve been thinking, Michael, how strange it is that Aleesha is so much older than the other victims.”

“How’s that?”

“She’s a grown woman. The other girls were teenagers. Then there’s the tongue. Your neighbor’s was cut out, the rest of the girls had theirs bitten.”

“Yeah,” Michael allowed, his tone measured. “Come to think of it, that is kind of strange.”

Will watched Julie Cooper giving her statement on his computer screen. She was about to ask the detectives to turn off the camera for a minute so she could collect herself. How did a young girl survive that kind of thing? How did she manage to go to school, do her homework like every other teenager, with the knowledge of what she had endured always lurking in her mind?

Michael suggested, “Maybe he’s been visiting the hookers to blow off some steam in between stalking these girls.” He paused. “I remember when I was in Vice how these girls used to talk themselves into trouble with the Johns. Sometimes they’d get in the middle of things and go up on the price. Sometimes they’d negotiate certain acts, positions, whatever, just to get the guy to go back to their place, then they’d change the rules, say they weren’t going to do it or they wanted more money.”

Will hadn’t considered that angle, but it was actually a good avenue to follow. That still didn’t explain Cynthia Barrett, though.

He asked, “Are you sure you didn’t piss somebody off, Michael? Maybe piss them off enough for them to do some kind of copycat thing with Cynthia, bring it to your back door?”

Michael laughed. “Are you being serious?”

“You tell me.”

“That’s fucking crazy, man.”

“How’s that?”

“They’d have to know a hell of a lot about the case,” Michael pointed out. “We didn’t release the detail about Monroe’s tongue to the press. The only people who knew about that were cops.” Michael muffled the phone, but Will heard him say, “Yeah, baby, I’ll be right there.” He said to Will, “Listen, Gina needs my help with Tim. Can I call you back in about ten minutes?”

“No,” Will told him. “I don’t need anything else.”

“Just call if you do.”

Will hung up the phone. He leaned back in his chair as he stared out the window. It had been dark out for some time, but the streetlights cast an unnatural spotlight on the abandoned rail yard next to the building. Will had gotten used to the depressing view.

The computer tooted like a steam train and Will closed the DVD program and opened his e-mail. The state computer wasn’t very sophisticated-the dictionary was extremely limited and the spell-check didn’t know half the words the average law enforcement officer used every day. Even if Will had asked, he knew they wouldn’t let him put any outside programs on the hard drive, so he was stuck with it. Still, like most computers, there was a reading option.

He scrolled through some spam before finding a new e-mail from Pete Hanson. He highlighted the text, clicked the menu bar, then selected “speak.” A stilted voice read him Pete’s message. The toxicology report had come back on Cynthia Barrett. Her last meal had been eggs and toast. There was a high level of nicotine in her system. There were also traces of alcohol and cocaine in her bloodstream.

Another dead end.

Will took out the copy he’d made of Aleesha Monroe’s letter to her mother, and he spread it out on the desk, pressing the folds open so it would lay flat. Her looping cursive was a nightmare but Will had already memorized the letter, so it was easier to read than if he’d come to it cold. Now, he went line-by-line, checking each sentence against his memory. Except for Monroe’s tendency to capitalize when it suited her, Will didn’t find anything new.

He folded up the letter and tucked it into his pocket. He glanced at the parole forms Leo had culled. A photograph was stapled to the corner of every profile, each inmate looking into the camera as he held up a black signboard that gave his vitals: name, crime, date of conviction, date of parole.

Reluctantly, Will slid open the top drawer to his desk. He found the staple remover and detached the photograph from the first offender profile. His office door was closed, the lights in the hall turned off. Still, he kept his voice to little above a whisper as he sounded out the first name.

After about an hour of this, he’d barely made a dent in the pile. His head was pounding and he dry-swallowed a handful of aspirin, thinking he would rather die of aspirin poisoning than from the headache hammering behind his eyes. Leo Donnelly had taken half the stack. He’d probably finished reading through his group in under an hour.

Will stood up and put on his jacket, thinking the task was probably a pointless one. If there was an offender in the database who had a habit of biting off tongues, Will would have pulled it when he first read about Monroe’s case and did a keyword search in the computer. Leo’s offender reports were from different districts and sometimes different states, so there was no uniformity in the description of the crimes. Some of the arresting officers had listed little more than the offense and age of the victim, others went into lurid detail, intimately describing the convict’s predatory actions. Unless one of the photos had a guy standing with a severed tongue in his hand, Will was pretty much looking for a needle in a haystack.

Still, he grabbed the files before he took the elevator down to the garage. The reports sat on the passenger seat as he drove home, and Will found himself glancing down at them every so often as if he could not quite understand why they were there. He parked in the driveway behind his motorcycle, Betty’s barks greeting him before he even made it up the porch. The little dog rushed out the door as soon as he opened it. Will snatched up the leash, prepared to track her down, but she did what she needed to do right on the front lawn and darted back inside before he could make it down the porch steps.

He turned around to find her enshrined on the couch pillows.

“Good evening to you, too,” he told her, shutting the door. He stopped it before it caught and went back out to the car to fetch the files. Will dropped them on his desk, glancing at the answering machine. The message light was solid, but he picked up the phone just to make sure it was working.

The dial tone buzzed in his ear.

Supper was the same as breakfast, a bowl of cereal he ate standing over the sink. All he really wanted to do was lie down on the couch and fall asleep watching television. The files were stopping him, though. A man who could read well would have finished those summaries hours ago. A cop who was doing his job would’ve scanned them over lunch, knowing he was probably wasting his time but also knowing that good police work meant exhausting every lead you had.

Will could not abandon the work halfway through.

He took off his jacket and draped it over the back of his swivel chair. This shouldn’t take too long, maybe three more hours at the most. Will wasn’t going to quit just because it was hard and he sure as hell was not going to show up at work tomorrow knowing that he had left something undone. He should have come home earlier and tackled the reports in earnest. There were certain things he could not do at work without giving himself away.

The staple remover was in his coat pocket and he put it beside the stack of reports on his desk. He took two rulers out of his desk drawer and adjusted the shade on the desk lamp so that the bulb faced the wall, casting little more than a sliver of light onto the work surface.

“All right, handsome,” Will mumbled, looking at the photograph stapled to the top of the next report. The guy had about three teeth and the kind of greasy, thin hair that you only ever found in your lesser trailer parks.

Will removed the photograph and set it aside. He put the two rulers on top of the page and isolated the first line of text. Using the tips of his index fingers, he blocked out individual words so that he could examine them one-by-one. His tendency was to read backward, and separating words with his fingers kept his eyes from darting where they shouldn’t go. Oddly, long words were easiest. Will was always seeing something simple, like “never” and turning it into “very” so that the sentence made absolutely no sense by the time he got to the end.

He picked out the three words at the top of the page, reading the name aloud so that he could better comprehend it. “Carter, Isaiah Henry.” It didn’t come out that easy, though. First, he said Cash, then Ford, probably because of the “car” part at the beginning of the last name. Isaiah was easy. Henry was another matter.

Christ, he was stupid.

Will looked up at the blank computer monitor in front of him, blinked to clear his vision. He turned on the computer just to buy some time while his mind played out the usual taunts, telling him he was probably retarded, that maybe he had something wrong with his brain that no one had ever bothered to figure out. God knew he had been beaten in the head enough times to knock something loose. At the end of the day, none of the possible reasons for his problem mattered and none of it changed the fact that there were kids in third grade who could read better than Will. And he was talking about the stupid ones who sat in the back.

The computer booted up, the fan whirring like the propeller on a model plane. Will clicked open his e-mail program and stared at the in-box for a couple of minutes before deleting an offer to extend the warranty on an appliance he did not even own. There was nothing else to distract him.

He returned to the stack of offenders, trying to make a game of it. The photograph was of a guy in his sixties. His white hair was combed in a neat part and his deep blue eyes made his ordinary face look more interesting. Put a hat on him and he could be a traveling salesman. Give him a Bible and he could be a deacon at the local church.

Slowly, Will slid the rulers down the page, reading line by line. A feed supply salesman by occupation, the man was a rapist who enjoyed torturing his victims. He had been sentenced for twelve years but gotten out in seven for good behavior. What exactly constituted good behavior for a man who pulled the fingernails off the hands of a twenty-two-year-old college student, Will was uncertain.

Another photo came off, another sheet of paper was put under the rulers. Will kept at it for hours, reading all the horrifying details of the sexual predators who had served their time and been paroled for good behavior. None of them did their full time, all but a handful looked like the sort of man you would smile at if you saw him walking down the street. Time crawled by, but Will did not look up until he was three rap sheets away from being finished.

Will stretched back, feeling his spine adjust against the hard edge of the chair. His knee bumped the desk, and the computer monitor flickered on.

It was past midnight. He might as well take a break and check his e-mail before he deciphered the details of the last three offenders.

There was a new mail from Amanda in his in-box, but he had no desire to read it. There were two requests from Caroline, Amanda’s secretary, asking about evidence in a case. Will opened his speech program and used the microphone to dictate a response, then did spell-check and had the computer read it back. When he was satisfied the words made sense, he highlighted the text and pasted it into the body of an e-mail, then did another spell-check before sending it off.

A hot stock tip had come in while he was doing this and Will clicked it into the trash. Next, he went into the trash folder and deleted all the crap he had sent there.

Will figured if there was an Olympic medal in wasting time, he was at least qualified enough to be an alternate. Surely there was more he could do, though. He opened up his spam folder, highlighted everything and slid the cursor over to delete. A message popped up and judging by the shape of it, Will assumed it was asking him if he was sure he wanted to do this. Will clicked the blue button that meant okay, then watched the junk e-mails drain off the list.

He scrolled back into his unread mail, thinking he might take a moment to check out what Amanda had to say. A new e-mail from Caroline had come in. She was probably just making a joke about both of them working so late, but at this point, Will would have opened an herbal Viagra offer to postpone reading reports for even a second.

There was a jpeg file attached to Caroline’s e-mail, and he clicked on download before highlighting the text of the e-mail so he could copy it into his speech program. Betty stirred on the couch, giving a muffled bark, and he turned around to make sure she was okay. The little dog was on her back with her skinny legs kicking in the air as she dreamed about… whatever it was little dogs dreamed about. Cheese?