17 A LITTLE LOOK AN HOUR BEFORE their scheduled meeting at Martin Friel's office, Sean and Whitey stopped off at Whitey's place so he could change the shirt he'd spilled his lunch on. Whitey lived with his son, Terrance, in a white brick apartment building just south of the city limits. The apartment had wall-to-wall beige carpeting and off-white walls and the same dead-air smell as motel rooms and hospital corridors. The TV was on when they came in, ESPN playing at low volume even though the apartment was empty, and the various parts of a Sega game system were spread out on the carpet in front of a hulking black slab of an entertainment center. There was a lumpy futon couch across from the entertainment center, and, Sean guessed, McDonald's wrappers in the wastebasket, a freezer stuffed with TV dinners. "Where's Terry?" Sean said.
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"Hockey, I think," Whitey said. "Could be baseball, though, this time a year, but hockey's his big thing. At it year-round." Sean had met Terry once. At fourteen, he'd been gargantuan, a huge block of a kid, and Sean could only imagine his size two years later, the fear he must put in other kids as he came smoking down the ice, top speed. Whitey had custody of Terry because his wife didn't want it. She'd left them both a few years back for a civil liability attorney with a crack problem that would eventually get the guy disbarred and sued for embezzlement. She stayed with the guy, though, or so Sean had heard, and she and Whitey had remained close. Sometimes, to hear him talk about her, you'd have to remind yourself they were divorced. He did it now as he led Sean into the living room and looked down at the Sega system on the floor as he unbuttoned his shirt. "Suzanne says me and Terry got ourselves a real guy's fantasy pad going here. Rolls her eyes, you know, but I get the feeling she's a little jealous. Beer or something?" Sean remembered what Friel had said about Whitey's drinking problem and imagined the look he'd get if he showed up for the meeting smelling like Altoids and Budweiser. Plus, knowing Whitey, it could be a test from him, too, everyone watching Sean these days. "Take a water," he said. "Or a Coke." "Good boy," Whitey said, smiling as if he really had been testing Sean but Sean seeing the need in the man's loose eyes, the way the tip of his tongue played against the corners of his mouth. "Two Cokes coming up." Whitey came back out of the kitchen with the two sodas and handed one to Sean. He walked into a small bathroom just off the living room hallway, and Sean heard him strip off the shirt and run some water. "This whole thing is looking more random," he called from the bathroom. "You getting that feeling?" "A bit," Sean admitted. "Fallow and O'Donnell's alibis look pretty solid." "Don't mean they couldn't have hired it out," Sean said. "I agree. You thinking that way, though?" "Not really. Seems too messy for a hit." "Don't rule it out, though." "No, it don't." "We'll need to take another run at the Harris kid, if only because he got no alibi, but, man, I don't see him for this. The kid's Jell-O, you know?"
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"Motive, though," Sean said, "if, say, he had some building jealousy of O'Donnell, something like that." Whitey came out of the bathroom, wiping his face with a towel, his white belly emblazoned with a red snake of scar tissue that cut a smile through the flesh from the lower edge of one side of his rib cage to the other. "Yeah, but that kid?" He wandered back toward a rear bedroom. Sean stepped into the hall. "I don't like him for it, either, but we gotta be sure." "Well, the father, too, and her crazy fucking uncles, but I already got guys talking to the neighbors. I don't see it playing that way, either." Sean leaned against the wall, sipped from his Coke. "If this was random, Sarge, I mean, shit? "Yeah, tell me about it." Whitey turned into the hallway, a fresh shirt over his shoulders. "The old lady, Prior," he said as he started buttoning, "she didn't hear a scream." "Heard a gunshot." "We say it was a gunshot. But, yeah, we're probably right. But she didn't hear a scream." "Maybe the Marcus girl was too busy hitting the guy with her door and trying to run away." "I'll give you that. But when she first saw him? He's coming toward her car?" Whitey passed Sean and turned into the kitchen. Sean came off the wall and followed him. "Which means she probably knew him. That's why she said hi." "Yeah." Whitey nodded. "And why else would she stop the car in the first place?" "No," Sean said. "No?" Whitey leaned against the counter, looked at Sean. "No," Sean repeated. "That car was crashed, wheels turned into the curb." "No skid marks, though." Sean nodded. "She's driving maybe fifteen miles an hour and something causes her to swerve into the curb." "What?" "Fuck do I know? You're the boss." Whitey smiled and drained his Coke in one long swallow. He opened the fridge for another. "What makes someone swerve without hitting the brakes?"
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"Something in the road," Sean said. Whitey lifted his fresh Coke in acknowledgment. "But there was nothing in the road by the time we got there." "That was the next morning." "So a brick, something like that?" "Brick's too small, don't you think? That time a night?" "A cinder block." "Okay." "Something, though," Whitey said. "Something," Sean agreed. "She swerves, hits the curb, her foot comes off the clutch, and the car kicks out." "At which point, the perp appears." "Who she knows. And then, what, he just walks up and caps her?" "And she hits him with the door, and?" "You ever been hit with a car door?" Whitey lifted his collar and slid his tie around it, started working on the knot. "Missed out on the experience so far." "It's like a punch. If you're standing real close, and a woman weighs one-ten pushes a shitty little Toyota door into you, it ain't going to do much but annoy you. Karen Hughes said the shooter was maybe six inches away when he fired his first round. Six inches." Sean could see his point. "Okay. But maybe she falls back and kicks the door. That would do the job." "Door's gotta be open, though. She can kick it all day if it's still closed and it ain't going to go nowhere. She had to open it, by hand, and shove off with her arm. So either the killer stepped back and caught the door when he wasn't expecting it, or? "He doesn't weigh much." Whitey closed his collar back over the tie. "Which brings me back to the footprints." "The fucking footprints," Sean said.
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"Yes!" Whitey yelled. "The fucking footprints." He closed his top button, slid the knot up to his throat. "Sean, the doer's chasing this woman through a park. She's running full-out, he's gotta be charging after her like a raped ape. I mean, he's booking through that park. You telling me he's not going to dig in at least once?" "It rained all night." "But we found three of hers. Come on. Something's screwy about that." Sean leaned his head back against the cupboard behind him, tried to picture it?Katie Marcus, arms pinwheeling as she came down the dark slope toward the drive-in screen, skin scratched by bushes, hair soaked with rain and sweat, blood dribbling down her arm and chest. And the killer, dark and faceless in Sean's mind, coming up over the rise a few seconds behind her, running, too, his ears pounding with bloodlust. A big man, though, in Sean's mind, a freak of nature. And smart in a way, too. Smart enough to put something in the middle of the street and get Katie Marcus to bang her front tires into that curb. Smart enough to pick a spot on Sydney where few people would be likely to hear or see anything. The fact that Old Lady Prior had heard something was an aberration, the one thing the killer couldn't have predicted, because even Sean had been surprised to learn anyone still lived on that scorched-out block. Otherwise, though, the guy had been smart. "Smart enough to cover his tracks, you think?" Sean said. "Huh?" "The perp. Maybe he killed her and then went back and kicked mud into his own tracks." "Possible, but how's he going to remember every place he stepped? He's in the dark. Even, let's say, he had a flashlight? That's still a lot of ground to cover, a lot of footprints to identify and make disappear." "But the rain, man." "Yeah." Whitey sighed. "I'll buy the rain theory if we end up looking at a guy weighs a hundred fifty or less. Otherwise? "Brendan Harris didn't look like he tipped the scales at much over that." Whitey groaned. "You honestly think the kid has that in him?" "No." "Me, either. What about your pal, though? He's a slim guy." "Who?" "Boyle." Sean came off the counter. "How'd we get to him?"
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"We're getting to him now." "No, wait a sec?" Whitey held up a hand. "He says he left the bar around one? Bullshit. Those car keys stopped that fucking clock at ten of. Katherine Marcus left that bar at twelve-forty-five. That's solid, Sean. This guy's alibi's got a fifteen- minute gap that we know of. How do we know when he got home? I mean, really got home?" Sean laughed. "Whitey, he's just a guy who was in the bar." "The last place she went. The last place, Sean. You said it yourself." "What'd I say?" "We could be looking for a guy who stayed home on prom night." "I was?" "I'm not saying he did this, man. I'm not even in the ballpark of saying that. Yet. But there is something wrong about the guy. I mean, you heard that shit about this city needing a good fucking crime wave. He was serious about that shit." Sean put his empty Coke on top of the kitchen counter. "You recycle?" Whitey frowned. "No." "Not even for a nickel a can?" "Sean." Sean tossed the can in the wastebasket. "You're telling me that you think a guy like Dave Boyle would kill his wife's?what??second cousin because he's pissed about gentrification? That's the stupidest thing I ever heard." "I busted a guy once killed his wife because she gave him shit about his cooking." "But that's a marriage, man. That's shit building up between two people for years. You're talking about a guy saying. 'Damn, these rents are killing me. I should go kill a few people until they drop back to normal.'" Whitey laughed. "What?" Sean said. "You put it that way," Whitey said. "Okay. It's dumb. Still, there's something about that guy. If he didn't have a hole in his alibi, I'd say okay. If he didn't see the victim an hour before she died, I'd say okay. But he does have a hole, and he did see her, and there's something off about the guy. He says he went right home? I want his wife to confirm that. I want his first-floor neighbor to have heard him walking up the stairs at one-oh-five. You know? Then I'll forget about him. Did you notice his hand?"
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Sean didn't say anything. "His right hand was almost twice the size of his left. That guy got into something recently. I want to know what. Once I know it was just a beef down the bar, something like that, I'm good. I'll let it go." Whitey drained his second Coke and tossed it in the wastebasket. "Dave Boyle," Sean said. "You seriously want to take a look at Dave Boyle." "A look," Whitey said. "Just a little look." * * * THEY MET in a third-floor conference room shared by Major Crimes and Homicide in the DA's office, Friel always preferring to hold his meetings here because it was cold and utilitarian, the chairs hard, the table black, the walls a cinder-block gray. It wasn't room that gave itself to witty asides or rambling non sequiturs. No one hung around in this room; they did their business and they got back at it. There were seven chairs in the room this afternoon, and every one was taken. Friel sat at the head of the table. To his right sat the deputy chief of the Suffolk County District Attorney's Homicide Unit, Maggie Mason, and to his left Sergeant Robert Burke, who ran Homicide's other squad. Whitey and Sean faced each other across the table, followed by Joe Souza, Chris Connolly, and the other two detectives from State Homicide, Payne Brackett and Shira Rosenthal. Everyone had stacks of field reports or copies of field reports on the table in front of them as well as crime scene photos, the medical examiner's reports, CSS reports, plus their own report pads and notebooks, a few napkins with names scribbled on them, and some crudely drawn crime scene diagrams. Whitey and Sean went first, running down their interviews with Eve Pigeon and Diane Cestra, Mrs. Prior, Brendan Harris, Jimmy and Annabeth Marcus, Roman Fallow, and Dave Boyle, whom Whitey, to Sean's gratitude, referred to only as a "witness from the bar." Brackett and Rosenthal went next, Brackett doing most of the talking but Rosenthal, Sean was sure if past history was any indicator, having done most of the legwork. "Coworkers at her father's store all have solid alibis and no evident motive. To the man, they all stated that the victim, far as they knew, had no known enemies, no outstanding debt or narcotic dependency. Search of the victim's room yielded no controlled substances, seven hundred dollars in cash, and no diary. A review of the victim's bank records showed the victim's deposits were in statistical keeping with the amount of money she earned. No large deposits or withdrawals until the morning of Friday the fifth when she closed out the account. That money was recovered from the dresser drawer in her room and is in keeping with Sergeant Power's discovery that she was planning to leave town on Sunday. Preliminary interviews with neighbors have yielded nothing to support any theories of family strife." Brackett stacked his pages together against the table to indicate he was finished, and Friel turned to Souza and Connolly.
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"We ran down the lists acquired from the bars the victim was seen in, her last night. We interviewed twenty-eight of the patrons so far out of a possible seventy-five, not counting the two Sergeant Powers and Trooper Devine took, ah, Fallow and this David Boyle. Troopers Hewlett, Darton, Woods, Cecchi, Murray, and Eastman took the remaining forty-five and we have preliminary reports from them." "What's the word on Fallow and O'Donnell?" Friel said to Whitey. "They're clean. Don't mean they couldn't have hired the job out, though." Friel leaned back in his chair. "I've worked a lot of contract hits over the years, and this doesn't look like one." "If it was a hit," Maggie Mason said, "why not just blast her there in the car?" "Well, they did," Whitey said. "I think she means more than once, Sergeant. Why not just unload?" "Gun could have jammed," Sean said. And then to the narrowing eyes in the room, he said, "It's something we haven't considered. The gun jams, Katherine Marcus reacts. She knocks the guy down and takes off running." That quieted the room for a bit, Friel thinking into the steeple he'd made of his index fingers. "It's possible," he said eventually. "Possible. But why beat her with a stick or a bat or whatever it was? That doesn't speak of a professional to me." "I don't know that O'Donnell and Fallow run with that professional a crowd just yet," Whitey said. "They could have hired it out to some pipehead for a couple of rocks and a Bic." "But you said that the old woman heard the Marcus girl greet her killer. Would she do that if a crack addict was approaching her car, all jacked up?" Whitey gave what could have been a nod. "That's a point." Maggie Mason leaned into the table. "We are going on the assumption that she knew her killer. Correct?" Sean and Whitey looked at each other, then back at the head of the table, and nodded. "So, not that East Bucky doesn't have its share of crack addicts, particularly in the Flats, but would a girl like Katherine Marcus have associated with them?" "Another good point." Whitey sighed. "Yeah." Friel said, "I wish for everyone's sake this was a hit. But the bludgeoning? That says rage to me. That says lack of control." Whitey nodded. "But we can't rule it out entirely. All I'm saying." "Agreed, Sergeant."
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Friel looked back at Souza, who seemed a bit pissed by the digression. He cleared his throat and took his time looking back at his notes. "Anyway, we talked to this one guy?a Thomas Moldanado?who was drinking at the Last Drop, the last bar where Katherine Marcus went before she dropped off her friends. Seems they got one toilet in the whole place, and Moldanado said there was a line for it just as he noticed the three girls leaving. So he goes out back into the parking lot to take a piss, and he saw a guy sitting in a car, lights off. Moldanado said this was at one-thirty, on the dot. Said his watch was new and he checked to see if it glowed in the dark." "Did it?" "Apparently." "The guy in the car, though," Robert Burke said, "could've been sleeping off a drunk." "First point we made, Sergeant. Moldanado said that's what he thought at first, too, but, no, the guy was sitting upright, eyes open. Moldanado said he would have taken him for a cop, but the guy drove a small foreign car, like a Honda or a Subaru." "A little banged up," Connolly said. "Dent in the front passenger quarter." "Right," Souza said. "So then Moldanado figured he was a john. Said that area's popular at night for hookers. But if that was the case, what was the guy doing in a parking lot? Why not just cruise the avenue?" Whitey said, "Okay, so?" Souza held up a hand. "One sec, Sarge." He looked over at Connolly, his eyes bright and jumpy. "We took another look around the parking lot, and we found blood." "Blood." He nodded. "If you walked past it, you'd figure it for some guy was changing his oil in the lot. It was that thick, all pooled in mostly one place. We start looking around, we find a drop here, a drop there, all moving away from the spot. Find a few more drops on the walls and the floor of the alley behind the bar." "Trooper," Friel said, "what the fuck are you telling us?" "Someone else got hurt outside the Last Drop that night." "How do you know it was the same night?" Whitey said. "CSS confirmed. A night watchman parked his car in the lot that night, covered the blood, but also kept it from most of the heavy rain. Look, whoever the vic was, he's hurt bad. And the guy who attacked him? He's hurt, too. We found two types of blood in the lot. We're checking hospitals now, and cab companies, in case the victim hopped a ride. We found bloody hair fibers, skin, and some skull tissue. We're waiting on callbacks from six
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ERs. The rest have turned out negative, but I'm still betting we find a victim who walked into an ER somewhere with blunt head trauma on Saturday night, early Sunday morning." Sean held up a hand. "The same night Katherine Marcus walks out of the Last Drop, you're telling us someone caved in someone's skull in the parking lot of the same bar?" Souza smiled. "Yup." Connolly picked up the ball. "CSS found dried blood, types A and B neg. A lot more A than B neg, so we figure the victim was A." "Katherine Marcus's blood was type O," Whitey said. Connolly nodded. "Hair fibers indicate the victim was male." Friel said, "What's the operating theory here?" "We don't have one. We just know that on the night Katherine Marcus was killed, someone else got his head handed to him in the parking lot of the last bar she went to." Maggie Mason said, "There was a bar fight in the parking lot. So what?" "None of the patrons at the bar remember any fights?in or out of the place. Between one-thirty and one-fifty, the only people to leave the bar were Katherine Marcus, her two friends, and this witness, Moldanado, who went right back in when his piss was finished. No one else entered. Moldanado sees someone staking out the parking lot at approximately one-thirty, guy he describes as 'regular-looking,' maybe mid-thirties, dark hair. Guy was gone when Moldanado exited the bar at one-fifty." "At which point the Marcus girl was running through Pen Park." Souza nodded. "We're not saying there's a clear connection. Maybe there's none at all. But it seems pretty coincidental." "But again," Friel said, "what's your operating theory?" Souza shrugged. "I don't know, sir. Let's say it was a hit. The guy in the parking lot, he's watching for the Marcus girl to leave. She does, he makes a phone call to the perp. The perp's waiting for her from that point on." "And then what?" Sean said. "Then what? He kills her." "No, the guy in the car. The lookout. What's he doing? He just up and decides to beat some guy with a rock or something? Just for the hell of it?" "Maybe someone came up on him."
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"Doing what?" Whitey said. "Talking on his cell phone? Shit. We don't know if this has anything to do with the Marcus homicide." "Sarge," Souza said, "you want we should just blow it off? Say, fuck it, there's nothing there?" "Did I say that?" "Well?" "Did I say that?" Whitey repeated. "No." "No, I did not. Show some respect for your elders, Joseph, or we might send you back to working the crystal meth corridor around Springfield, hanging out with bikers and chicks who smell bad, eat lard straight from the can." Souza checked himself with a slow exhalation. "I just think there's something to this. That's all." "Not disagreeing, Trooper. Just saying you've got to bring us that something before we redirect manpower on what could turn out to be an isolated, unrelated incident. Also, the Last Drop's in BPD jurisdiction." "We made contact," Souza said. "They tell you it's their case?" He nodded. Whitey spread his hands. "There you go. Keep in touch with the detective in charge and keep us posted, but otherwise, leave it be for now." Friel said, "Since we're on the subject of operating theories, Sergeant, what's yours?" Whitey shrugged. "I got a couple, but that's all they are. Katherine Marcus died from the GSW to the back of her head. None of her other injuries, including the bullet wound to her left biceps, were considered life-threatening. Bludgeoning was committed by a wooden instrument with flat edges?some kind of stick or two-by-four. ME has conclusively stated that she was not sexually assaulted. From our own legwork, we know she was planning to elope with the Harris kid. Bobby O'Donnell was her ex-boyfriend. Problem was he hadn't accepted the 'ex' part yet. The father didn't like either O'Donnell or the Harris kid." "Why not the Harris kid?" "We don't know." Whitey glanced over at Sean and then back again. "We're working on it, though. So, best we can figure, she's planning to boogie on out of town in the morning. She has a pseudo-bachelorette party with her two friends, gets run out of a bar by Roman Fallow, and drives her friends home. It's starting to rain now and her wipers are for shit, the windshield dirty. She either misjudges where the curb is because she's drunk, nods off for
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a second at the wheel for the same reason, or swerves to avoid something in the road. Whatever the cause, she drives her car into the curb. Car stalls and someone approaches the car. According to our old lady witness, Katherine Marcus says, 'Hi.' That's when we think the perp fired his first shot. She manages to hit him with her car door?maybe his gun did jam, I dunno?and she takes off running into the park. She grew up there, maybe she thought she had a better chance of losing him there. Again, we can't even surmise why she chose to run for the park, except for it being a straight run in either direction on Sydney and not a lot in the way of neighbors to help her out for at least four blocks. If she'd stepped out into the open, the perp could have run her down with her own car or shot her pretty easily. So, she bolts for the park. She goes in a pretty consistent southeast pattern from that point on, cutting through the garden co-op, then attempting to hide in the ravine under the footbridge, then making a final beeline for the drive-in screen. She?" "Her path consistently brought her deeper into the park," Maggie Mason said. "Yes, ma'am." "Why?" "Why?" "Yes, Sergeant." She removed her glasses and placed them on the table in front of her. "If I'm a woman being chased through a city park, whose terrain I'm familiar with, I may begin by leading my pursuer into it in the hopes he'll get lost or held up. But the moment I can, I'm going to start heading back out. Why didn't she cut north toward Roseclair, or double back toward Sydney? Why keep going deeper into the park?" "Shock, maybe. And fear. Fear makes people forget how to think. Let's remember, too, her blood alcohol level was at point-oh-nine. She was drunk." She shook her head. "I don't buy it. And here's something else?from your reports, am I to surmise that Miss Marcus was, in fact, faster than her pursuer?" Whitey's mouth opened a bit, but he seemed to forget what he was going to say. "Your report, Sergeant. It states that on at least two occasions, Miss Marcus seemed to choose hiding over running. She hid in the garden co-op. And she hid under the footbridge. That tells me two things?one, that she was faster than her pursuer, otherwise she wouldn't have had the time necessary to attempt to hide. And two, that she paradoxically felt that keeping ahead of her pursuer wasn't enough. You add that in with her lack of attempt to run back out of the park, and what does it tell you?" No one had an answer for that. Eventually, Friel said, "What does it tell you, Maggie?" "It presents the possibility to me, anyway, that she felt surrounded." For a minute, it seemed to Sean like the air in the room went static, popping with electrical currents.
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"A gang or something?" Whitey said eventually. "Or something," she said. "I don't know, Sergeant. I'm just going on your report. I can't for the life of me understand why this woman, who apparently was faster than her attacker, would elect not to just run right back out of the park unless she thought someone else was flanking her." Whitey hung his head. "All due respect, ma'am, but there'd have been a hell of a lot more physical evidence on- scene in such a scenario." "You yourself cite the rain in your report several times." "Yes," Whitey said. "But if you got a gang of people?or hell, even two?chasing Katherine Marcus, we're going to see more than we did. At least a few more footprints. Something, ma'am." Maggie Mason put her glasses back on and looked down at the report in her hand. Eventually, she said, "It's a theory, Sergeant. One that I think, on the basis of your own report, bears looking into." Whitey kept his head down, though Sean could feel the contempt rising off his shoulders like sewer gas. "What about it, Sergeant?" Friel said. Whitey raised his head and gave them an exhausted smile. "I'll bear it in mind. I will. But gang activity in that neighborhood's at an all-time low. We pass on that, then we consider two guys as the perps, which brings us back to the possibility of a contract hit." "Okay? "But if that's the case?and we all agreed at the outset here today that it was a long shot?then the second shooter would have emptied his piece the moment Katherine Marcus hit his partner with the door. The only way this makes sense is if it's one shooter and a panicked, drunken woman maybe growing faint with blood loss, not thinking clearly, and having a lot of bad luck." "But you'll bear my theory in mind, of course," Maggie Mason said with a bitter smile, her eyes on the table. "I will," Whitey said. "I'll take anything right about now. Honest to God. She knew her killer. Okay. Anyone with a reasonably logical motive, thus far, has been all but discounted. Every minute more that we work this case, it seems all that more likely the attack was random. The rain destroyed two-thirds of our physical evidence, the Marcus girl didn't have enemy-goddamned-one, no financial secrets, no drug dependency, nor was she a witness to any crimes on record. Her murder, as far as we can tell, benefited no one." "Except O'Donnell," Burke said, "who didn't want her leaving town." "Except him," Whitey agreed. "But his alibi's tight and it doesn't look like a hit. So who's that leave for enemies? No one." "And yet she's dead," Friel said.
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"And yet she's dead," Whitey said. "Which is why I'm thinking it's random. You take away money or love and hate as possible motives, you're not left with much. You're left with some dumb fucking stalker type who might have a Web site devoted to the victim or something stupid like that." Friel raised his eyebrows. Shira Rosenthal chimed in: "We're already checking that, sir. So far, nada." "So you don't know what you're looking for," Friel said eventually. "Sure," Whitey said. "A guy with a gun. Oh, yeah, and a stick."