Last Call Read online

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s it.” She nods. “Nothing. I cry all the time. My shirts are always wet,” she jokes, but not really.

  “It’ll get better, Trace. You saw me go through Maggie. If I can do it, then anyone can.”

  “No kidding.”

  Tracey tries a chuckle, swiping her cheeks. Frank wraps her arms around her best friend’s wife and for a minute they share the load.

  The spring night is balmy, so they picnic on the patio. Tracey confides that they’ve been eating dinner everywhere except in the dining room. She can’t stand seeing Noah’s chair empty. After dinner, Tracey brings fresh beers. Leslie has disappeared into her room, but Mark and Jamie color near them.

  Frank tilts her head, asking so they won’t hear, “How are they?”

  Tracey blows her sorrow and frustration out in a sigh. “Markie follows me everywhere I go, and at some point during the night Jamie joins us in bed. They’re so confused. But at least they’re talking about it. Les just hides in her room. She answers me in monosyllables but won’t volunteer anything.”

  “It’s harder for some people.”

  “I guess.”

  Frank lets Tracey study her.

  “I was always amazed how you just sat and drank. You never said a word about Maggie. I used to push No to get you to talk but he’d just tell me to butt out. He said you would if you wanted to. Did you? Ever?”

  Frank squints into the past. “Couple times. When I was drunk enough.”

  For almost a month after her lover had been killed Frank would come over and pass out on the Jantzens’ couch. Noah would stay up with her until she fell asleep. The poor bastard had almost died trying to match her drink for drink and Tracey finally made him stop. But still he’d stayed up with Frank. They talked about little things, work and news. They shared silences interrupted only by the gurgle of Frank’s bottle.

  Frank asks, “You remember the Pryce case?”

  “Do I? Christ Almighty, Noah lived that case. He ate, drank and breathed it. Why? Did you get a bite on it?”

  Frank’s head shakes in the negative. “I was thinking about taking a look at it.”

  “Good luck,” Tracey says. “Excuse me, but I hated those rucking kids. Noah’d obsess about them all day at work, then when he finally came home he’d go straight upstairs to watch the kids sleep. He’d fall asleep on the floor and I finally stopped waking him up. I’d just cover him with a blanket and leave him there. That’s where I found him Christmas morning. He stuck around long enough to open presents then he spent the rest of the day at work. He stayed with his kids all night then went back to those goddamned dead ones in the morning.” Tracey shivers. “I hated that case.”

  “Kid cases are tough. Worse for people with their own. Joe knew he was taking it hard, but he said every cop’s got to go through it. That it’d either make him or break him.”

  “Yeah, well, it almost broke him. And then when the evidence came up missing? Christ, Frank, I honestly thought he was going to kill somebody. I’d never seen him that angry.”

  “I remember.”

  Most of the physical evidence in the Pryce case had been lost after analysis at the Scientific Investigation Division. Noah had gone on a rampage and practically instigated a lawsuit against SID.

  Frank grins. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him any madder. The SID techs wouldn’t work his cases for months afterwards. Said they’d only work with me or his partner.”

  “That’s right. You’d just gotten promoted.” After a pause in which Frank again reflects on how she wasn’t there for Noah, Tracey says, “It was good to see Joe, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Glad he came.”

  “I assume you’re the one who told him?”

  Frank nods. The beer is mildly anesthetic. Because she fears undoing its tender effects, she focuses on someone else’s pain. “How are No’s folks?”

  “I don’t know. His mom still can’t talk on the phone, and Larry, well, Larry’s Larry. ‘Fine, fine, all right. Everything’s just fine. Awful business, but we’ll get through.’ He’s got that whole Leslie Howard, stiff-upper-lip thing going on. But he’s right. We’ll muddle through somehow, huh?”

  Stretching for Tracey’s hand, Frank squeezes it tight. She see herself begowned and turbaned. She has become Stoic the Magnificent, the Great Bearer of Lies sweet to the ear and a balm to the heart.

  “That’s right,” she assures. “We will.”

  Chapter 7

  Cases are redistributed, detective teams are rearranged, and work at the nine-three proceeds over the next few weeks, albeit haltingly at times, without Noah Jantzen. The cluckhead who suffocated her baby was turned in, although not from altruism, as Frank predicted. The junkie’s sister is a cluckhead too and rats her out to Lewis for a twenty. Bobby and Darcy catch a domestic grounder and close a corner slice-and-dice. Foubarelle throws make-work at Frank while hounding her for stats. It’s all s-squared, d-squared—same shit, different day.

  The Pryce murder books perch on a corner of Frank’s desk. She’s stared at them without the guts to open them. They seem like they’re still Noah’s. This case is the last she has of him. She doesn’t want to pore over the binders without him peering over her shoulder.

  What if he is, she thinks. Tracey likes to think so. The idea embarrasses Frank. Not so much because it’s ludicrous, but because she finds an edge of comfort in it.

  The day is over. Only Frank and Darcy remain upstairs in Homicide. Darcy types outside her office and the tap-tap of his keystrokes is reassuring. Frank chides her superstition, but the admonishment is halfhearted. Since the day that Darcy inexplicably saved Frank’s neck from a crazed Santerist’s knife, she is willing to allow that things may exist ‘twixt heaven and earth which she can’t explain with only five senses.

  She arranges papers and folders to one side of the desk, clearing a space to work in. Then she puts one of the Pryce binders in the empty spot and pulls her wooden chair close. She takes the crime scene pictures out and sorts them to reflect how the responding officer and subsequent personnel would have approached the scene. She studies the first picture for a long time.

  It is a wide-angle color shot taken from the street. The bottom foreground includes a sidewalk spilling over into a weedy, garbage-strewn lot. A house lies in a charred pile in the center of the lot, the rubble having been heavily scavenged over time. Gutted, overstuffed furniture and rusted appliances dot the property. Plastic sacks and potato chip bags hang like flags from weed poles.

  The lot is delineated on the left by a house with plank and corrugated fencing. Dead banana leaves drape over the fence at the rear of the lot. A plywood fence starts at the left rear corner and continues to the right rear corner of the lot. Along the right side of the lot, a four-foot chain link encircles a neatly kept house. Roofs are visible behind the houses and the plywood fence. All the roofs are roughly the same height. Three windows in the house on the right overlook the lot.

  The next picture is a closeup of the ruined house. A handful of moldered sheetrock panels affixed to blackened 2 x 4s suggest the building’s basic structure. Rubble and tall weeds obscure the interior. She scrutinizes the flotsam and jetsam. Nothing jumps out as extraordinary.

  She flips to a new photo. Taken from the right side of the house, it looks into the shell of a large room. The skeletal framing suggests the photographer is shooting into what was the living room. Differently-sized footprints stand out against a concrete foundation overlaid with detritus from junkies, trannies, kids and taggers.

  Almost unnoticed among the clutter, two heads jut from a dull green blanket spread on the right side of the room. Ashy faces jut toward the camera. Frank wants to see more, but aware of the luxury of time, she patiently resurveys the presented debris. Broken glass, twisted rebar, water-warped papers, a busted lawn chair, bottle caps, fresh candy wrappers, age-silvered cigarette packs—nothing in the litter seems unusual. She doesn’t see it in this picture, but
she is sure the trash obscures condoms, syringes and fading skin mags.

  But that’s speculation, which comes later. Right now Frank wants to see the scene as if she’s walking into it for the first time. The first inconsistency she sees is the garbage splaying from under the carefully covered bodies. If the perp was thoughtful enough to arrange the kids side by side and cover them with a blanket, why didn’t he clear away the garbage first? Frank puts the question to paper, studying the photo a few minutes more. When she places it facedown, a fresh one stares from the stack.

  Two black children lie next to each other, on their backs, eyes closed, covered to their chins with the blanket. Their mouths are wrapped with duct tape. Above the tape, patches on the right side of the boy’s face appear blanched, as if he were cheek-down while his blood settled. The girl’s hair twists out from a barrette in wild tufts. The boy’s skull is shaved close, but his head is oddly bent. Frank studies the girl’s neck where there are marks in the flesh. She’ll see closeups of the marks in the autopsy photos.

  The blanket is army-issue green. Not torn or stained, though slightly smudged with what looks like dust. Frank thinks the perp brought it with him. Because men kill more often than women, Frank will stick with the masculine pronoun, but she will not exclude the possibility that the offender is female.

  Frank draws a line down a sheet of legal paper. On the left she lists ideas, on the right, supporting facts:

  Dump job, killed elsewhere | Garbage not disposed, no mud, debris in hair

  Perp brought blanket | Blanket’s clean

  Perp knew kids, feels remorse | Spontaneity of attack, took time to cover them arrange them

  Perp lives nearby – not mobile? | Kids carefully positioned but left in garbage

  Wants them to be found?

  (Remorse again) – no alternate disposal options?

  Frank has more thoughts but decides to wait until she’s seen the rest of the pictures before committing them to paper.

  The next shot is tighter, closer to the bodies, and the blanket has been removed. The boy is smaller than the girl, who’s between nine and twelve, Frank thinks. She knows her age but has forgotten and doesn’t want to remember. The boy looks to be from five to seven. The girl is thin and gangly, but the boy still carries his baby fat. He appears fully clothed, in blue jeans, sneakers and a plain blue wind-breaker. Under the jacket he wears a red sweatshirt. A white T-shirt pokes from beneath the sweatshirt, and white socks cover his ankles.

  The girl wears a mustard-yellow sweater over a pink blouse, a sky-blue skirt, pink socks and one sneaker. Her arms and legs are straight. Postmortem lividity darkens the posterior edges of her thighs and calves. There appear to be smudges on her legs but the girl’s clothes and skin are relatively clean. Frank thinks the kids were carried, not dragged.

  She adds the last fact to the column opposite where she’s written dump job. She also adds that the offender is likely male because the victims were carried to the site. A woman could have brought them, but she’d have to be pretty strong to pick her way through the rubble, probably in the dark, carrying at least a fifty-pound load each, more if the kids were carried together.

  On the sheet underneath, Frank writes these reminders:

  Sneakers? Panties?

  Blood on site. Perp tripped (cut himself)?

  Frank is fairly sure there is no blood, but she’ll double-check. She also thinks the other sneaker was found on the lot. The panties are a different story.

  She examines the tape covering their mouths. It appears to be standard duct tape. Interestingly, and this could be a significant MO if this perp has committed similar assaults, the tape is wrapped at least twice around their heads, maybe three times. She looks at the boy’s wrists. They are bound in front of him and wrapped at least twice around, as are his calves. The perp’s thorough. The visible ends of tape are neatly torn, not cut. She thinks the perp is used to working with his hands.

  The girl is bound only around the mouth. He must have felt he had control of her. Frank feels herself slipping into the perp’s skin. It’s like sinking her feet into sticky, sulphurous mud—not a completely unpleasant experience if one accepts the mud for what it is. Frank is willing to sink further, but not now.

  First she has to court her suspect, woo him to her. She can initiate foreplay once she has assembled the facts about him. The climax of their union comes when she walks through her reconstructed scenario as the perp, when she is the perp, feeling what he felt, doing what he did and thinking like he thought. Ninety-eight percent of the cases landing on her desk are unsuitable for this level of involvement and Frank regrets she doesn’t have the opportunity to profile more often. She’s often dallied with the notion of applying to the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit where she could profile full-time. She meets all the criteria—an older individual with extensive time in service; objective; analytical; can think like a perp; practical…

  Aware that she has strayed from the case, she is pleased anew with the luxury of being able to do so. Though she has time to kill, Frank’s habit, training and tacit need to immerse herself in a life other than her own sends her back to the pictures.

  She taps Ladeenia Pryce with a forefinger. She’s the case. Clothed and secured, the boy is inconsequential. The perp focused his energy on the girl. Frank is so immersed in the photograph she doesn’t notice Darcy standing in the doorway. She jumps when he growls, “Good night.”

  “Jesus,” she breathes.

  “No, just me,” he says, a thin grin under his moustache.

  The clock over her door reads six-thirty and Frank says, “You put in a long day.”

  Darcy shrugs under a leather jacket. “They’re all long.”

  “Roger that,” Frank says. She almost offers to buy him a cup of coffee. If he drank, she’d offer beers at the Sizzler, but she withdraws the invitation even before it’s issued. Darcy gets his reports in on time, can handle himself on the street and works well with Bobby, but he keeps his distance from the squad. Frank respects his privacy and doesn’t want to put him in the awkward position of refusing his boss. Instead she asks, “How’s Gabby?”

  His daughter has cystic fibrosis and lives with her mother in Orange County.

  “Not so good. She was in the hospital Sunday night.”

  Frank thinks back. “But you were here Monday.”

  “She was out by ten. We took her back to Margarite’s and I stayed until she fell asleep.”

  “Darcy, take the time if you need it.”

  “Oh, I will,” he vows. “Believe me.”

  Frank nods. “See you tomorrow.”

  Darcy lifts his Harley helmet and she listens to him leave. She’d told Gail she’d make dinner tonight, but now that she’s started on the Pryce case she’d like to get through the photographs in one sitting. Plus, Frank has been living on doughnuts and Del Taco burritos. She has no interest in cooking or eating. But drinking’s another story.

  Frank tries Gail’s office with no luck. She dials Gail’s home number and leaves a message, then leaves the same message on her cell phone—that she has to work and will be home later, sorry about dinner. Gail will probably be disappointed but not surprised. Activities planned around a homicide lieutenant’s and chief coroner’s schedules are always hopeful and rarely realized.

  Frank is about to return to the photographs but thinks better of it. Eyeing the wall clock, she decides if she wants that drink, she’d better get it now. Gail will forgive Frank for working late, but not for stopping at the Alibi. Tucking the photos under a binder cover, Frank cradles the Pryce books under her arm like a newly sprouted appendage.

  Chapter 8

  Alone in a booth, Frank retrieves her stack of photographs. She gulps a double while looking at additional scene shots. From a different angle, she sees there is a mattress only a few feet from the bodies.

  Wondering why the perp didn’t put them there, she’s again struck by the incongruity of the tenderness with which the kids were
placed on a garbage pile. She surmises it is dark when he dumps the bodies, and though he may be familiar with the lot’s location, he’s not intimate with the interior. He doesn’t know the mattress is there.

  Boards, flattened boxes and sections of large appliances wedged between the remaining 2x4s create partial walls. The pseudo walls are covered inside and out with tags, taunts and warnings to stay out. Frank particularly likes TRESPASERS WILL BE SMOKT. Because the graffiti is amateurish and lacks authority, she thinks wannabe bangers with no established ties are using the gutted site as a hangout.

  She writes this down even though the Pryce case doesn’t appear gang-related. With a fresher case she might not bother with least likely scenarios, but on this one she has nothing to lose. On the contrary, eliminating as many possibilities as she can will narrow her search field of suspects.

  Delivering Frank’s second drink, the waitress warns, “Okay. Time to order dinner.”

  Frank has promised Nancy she’ll eat after her first drink. Frank settles on a BLT and Nancy is satisfied. She’s made a career of fussing over Frank.

  Finished for the time being with the crime scene, Frank starts on the autopsy reports. Trevor Pryce is a normally developed six-year-old boy. He has numerous scrapes, scabs and contusions but none relative to his cause of death, which the reporting coroner listed as gross disarticulation at the first and second cervical discs. Torn ligaments and spiral fractures indicate the boy’s head was twisted until his neck snapped.

  Nancy brings Frank’s sandwich, returning a moment later with a Coke. Frank would rather have a beer but doesn’t want Gail to smell it on her. She picks at her French fries while searching the document for an entry that might indicate signs of a struggle or fall. There’s nothing—no evidence of assault, no cranial laceration or contusions, no twist fractures. Just a broken neck.