"A Visible Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (King Jonathon)

11

Billy poured himself another glass of Merlot. I took another swallow of coffee. Both of us had had enough shrimp fried rice. I was ready for a prowl car tour of the area where Billy's women had died.

The beach run had been painful. The humidity of surfside Florida teamed up with the soft sand to make my three miles a fine torture. Most of my life my regular runs had been done on Philadelphia streets, several blocks east to Front Street and then north along the Delaware to Bookbinders and back. I was used to cruising on hard concrete, slapping a rhythm, dodging through intersections. If I went down the shore, I'd do miles on the Ocean City beach at low tide when the sand was wet and brown and hard. Here it was slogging, half your energy used digging out of each footstep. My lungs were burning but I'd sprinted the last hundred yards down in ankle- deep water.

The shower afterwards was always a treat. Out at my shack all I had was a rain barrel above my porch that was fed by water flowing from the eaves and fitted with a hose and nozzle.

Billy filled me in on his paper trace while we ate. His women had come to South Florida at different times and they'd bought their insurance policies at different ages but all within a close time period. They probably knew one another because of their era and proximity, but it would have been on a social basis. None was in business with the other. There were no family connections. No shared churches in the recent past.

"Has McCane been any help to you?" I said.

"He has accessed s-some dates and m-medical questionnaires on the policies his company h-held."

"You talking with him?"

"Only on the phone."

"I'll check with him tomorrow. Maybe I should have asked him along tonight."

We traded sideways glances.

"Maybe not," I said, and we both relaxed.

I pushed the plate away. I'd already bagged my things, planning to get back to the river afterwards. I'd dressed in jeans and a dark polo shirt and black, soft-soled shoes.

"How is Sherry?"

"Looks good," I said.

"W-When are you two going to quit d-dancing around each other?"

Billy was trained to be forward and blunt. But he rarely took that step with me.

"She's still got a ghost in her head."

"She's the only one who's b-been able to p-pull you off the river."

"Liar," I said, fishing out my keys.

"Well, I d-don't count," Billy said.

I drained the coffee and tipped the cup at him.

"Yes, you do."

When I got to the sheriff's office I parked my truck near the front entrance and was starting across the lot when a spotlight snapped on me. When I raised a hand to shade my eyes, the light went off. Richards was backed into a spot and was behind the wheel of a green-and-white. I opened her passenger side and climbed in. She was in uniform. Starched short-sleeved white shirt and deep green trousers with a stripe down the leg. Her hair was pinned up. Her 9mm in a leather holster at her side.

"Regulation," she said. "Got to wear the whole rig if you're driving a squad car," she said in greeting.

"I remember," I said.

She slid a clipboard over to me with a form on top.

"Absolves the office if you get hurt. Sign the bottom."

"I think you've got the wrong impression of me and my propensity for getting hurt," I said.

"No, I don't," she answered, grinning as she shifted into drive.

We pulled onto the street and headed west. The strip centers were single-story and second-rate. A carpet outlet. A fish market. "Jiggles" nightclub with "Girls, Live Girls."

We turned north onto a side street and a block and a half off the main thoroughfare we were into residential.

There were no sidewalks but street lamps were set every two blocks. At this time of night cars were parked in most of the driveways, some on the grassless swale. Richards punched off the headlights and swung onto another cross street. Two houses in she twisted the handle on the door-mounted spotlight and snapped it on. The beam caught the black maw of an open doorway and she swept across the windows that were boarded up with plywood.

"Crack houses," she said. "We try to keep them boarded up. But they rip the stuff down faster than we can get it up. The owner who lives god knows where won't keep it sealed even if it is the law."

She flashed back over the doorway and the light picked up some movement inside.

"You arrest them for trespassing or possession and they're out by Friday."

She flipped off the spot and pulled the headlights back on and kept going. As a patrolman in Philly I'd done the same thing. It was exactly the same neighborhood only one-story instead of two. Less brick. More trees. Same despair.

"Your husband work this zone?" I asked and immediately wondered why the question came into my mouth.

The dash lights gave her jawline a sharp edge. Her nose held a small but not indelicate hump. A touch of mascara showed at the corner of her eye, which stayed focused ahead.

"Sometimes," she finally said. "But he preferred the eastern zones. He wasn't much for the action. He worked a lot with kids in the Police Athletic League."

And got shot by a kid, I silently finished the sentence for her.

She turned another corner.

We rolled through an intersection and Richards slowed again to a crawl. Every city has a dope hole and this was theirs. Nearly eleven o'clock and there was a busy nonchalance that showed in the slow spin each man did as the green-and-white slid by. Drag from a cigarette. "I ain't give a shit about no cop," but the cupped hand helps hide the face. The older ones sitting on empty milk crates, elbows on knees, something too interesting to stare at in the dirt but proud enough to raise their jaws in defiance as the back fender glides by. The young ones who don't hide. They goof and throw signs with twisted fingers and pull at the loose fabric in their crotch and their eyes say "Ain't no big thing" and their justification is "All I'm doin' is bidness."

We got some extra scrutiny; two new faces on the night shift. But I knew Richards wasn't showing me this for the dealers. Dope dealers don't kill old ladies for life insurance money. They also don't need to rape and murder. There are enough addicts who will give it up for whatever the dealer wants. Richards was looking past them, into the back corners and at the side of houses for the desperate ones.

"We tried to set up surveillance, watch the customers drive in and out, check the plates, run the names through NCIC looking for a hit with a sex crime conviction. Nothing.

"We've got some liaison with the community leaders who are trying to clean things up, appealed to their sense of safety, hoping to pick up at least some rumor. Nothing."

"Too scared?"

"And distrustful," she replied.

"And scared," I repeated.

"And probably tired as hell of nothing ever changing."

She tightened her jaw and we turned again. She seemed to have a destination in mind. A few more blocks and we pulled to a stop next to a dark, undeveloped field of overgrown grasses and brush. The orange glow of the street lamps had little effect on the interior of the empty land.

"Not exactly an urban park," I said.

"The land was originally bought by the city for some kind of trash transfer station," she said. "But the commissioner who represents this area fought it. So now they're waiting for someone to come up with the money to develop it."

"Been waiting long?"

"Years."

She flipped on the spotlight and swung it into the darkness. A few tree trunks took shape. A clump of saw palmetto. A squat bunker of gray concrete with a single black window.

"This is where we found the last body," she said, reaching down to grab a long-handled flashlight and her riot baton. "Take a look?" she said.

It wasn't really a question as she popped open the door. I got out and as I walked around she closed and locked the car, leaving the spotlight on. I followed her into the brush.

"The report came in on a pay phone back up near the dealer's corner. First time that line has been dialed to the police station. Patrol and a rescue responded. Girl had been dead eight, ten hours."

I was watching Richards's feet, following in her tracks, wishing for a flashlight of my own.

"She was ID'ed through fingerprints. We had her on file for some minor possession charges, loitering. She was basically a heroin addict. Her sister kept kicking her out and taking her back in."

Richards unsnapped the holster of her 9mm as we approached the bunker, stepped around the wall and found the doorway. Inside the squad car's spotlight painted a square on the wall opposite the window. I stepped in and the stench hit my nose and made my eyes water. It had been a while, but the reek of stale sweat, rotting food and wet mold was not unlike some corners I'd had to stick my head in down in the Philadelphia subway tunnels. Richards's flashlight beam sprayed across the walls and into all four corners and then settled on the mattress.

"They found her face up, skirt pulled up and top pulled down around her waist, just like the others. This one had fresh bruises on her ankle and one wrist."

"Toxicology?"

"She was high but the twist in her neck and the bruises around her throat were so obvious they knew before the M.E. got here she'd had her windpipe crushed."

Around our feet there were half a dozen empty plastic lighters strewn among the trash. Pipers, I thought. When I was a young cop my Philadelphia sergeant had been standing with me at a magistrate's walk-through at the roundhouse and he grabbed the shackled hand of a guy in line and twisted his thumb up for me to see.

"Bic thumb," he called the clubbed and thickly callused digit. "From spinning the lighter so many times trying to keep the crack lit."

I reached out and pushed Richards's light back to the mattress. Stains and burn marks and ripped fabric where the rats had gnawed holes.

"You guys ever consider taking this thing to the lab for a DNA sampling?"

"Jesus, Max. You want to type every scumball and user in a fifteen-block radius? They're all in there somewhere," she said. "A defense attorney would have a field day."

She had a point.

We got back to the car and she unlocked and switched off the spot, started the engine and kicked the A.C. up.

"That was the third of the most recent ones," she said, reaching into her back seat and bringing out a bottle of water. Then she reached back again to get a thermos.

"Coffee?"

"You're a mind reader."

"Doesn't take much," she said and I watched her take a drink and then continue.

"The victim before that was in a stand of bushes near the overpass. One before that was in an abandoned press box at the high school. All the crime scenes were places that the addicts know and use. But nobody's come forward with credible information, even the confidential informants looking for a few bucks."

"Maybe even they're afraid," I offered, pouring the coffee into the plastic top of the thermos.

She was staring out into the orange glow on the pavement ahead.

"They're never more afraid than they are hungry."

We cruised the area for another hour, down a handful of alleys, up behind an old style drive-in theater where movies were flashing away on three different giant screens and along a street that she called the border. Even in the dark you could see that on one side of the street were modest but well kept homes, trimmed grass, planted palms and nice sedans in the drives. It was, Richards said, a neighborhood where middle-class blacks had come together to make a stand and a community. On the other side of the street were the scrub-and-dirt yards, the lot with two broken cars alongside the drive, the open lot with a pile of discarded sofas and trash.

"Don't ask me how you get from one side to the other," Richards said. "Smarter people than me have been trying to figure it for a long, long time."

We drove back to the sheriff's building and pulled into a spot next to my truck. Light from the poles all around poured in through the windshield.

"So that's the nickel tour," she said, turning off the ignition and unsnapping her seatbelt.

"I appreciate the time," I said.

She leaned back into the corner of her seat and door. The light had an odd way of playing in her eyes. Sometimes they were a light gray, sometimes a deep green. The shadows in the car kept me from seeing them now.

"So."

"So?" I could feel her grinning at my awkwardness.

"You staying at Billy's tonight?"

"No. I need to get back out to the river."

"Ahh. Back to the frogs and gators."

"Yeah, well," I said, my time to smile. I let the moment sit for a while. "Billy says we're dancing, you and I."

"Billy's right," she said.

"So am I dancing too fast, or too slow?"

"You're being very careful, Max. I like that in a man."

She sat up straighter in her seat. The onboard computer was between us. She raised her eyebrows to the building facade, as if she needed to remind me where we were.

"See you later, officer," I said.

I popped the handle on the door and started to put the thermos down in the seat.

"Why don't you just take that with you for the ride back," she said. "It'll keep you company."

"I'm not sure when I'll get it back to you."

"I'm guessing soon enough," she said and I watched her eyes, trying to find the color.

"OK," I said, stepping back and closing the door.