Текст книги "The Chill of Night"

Автор книги: James Hayman

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

‘Anything I oughta know?’

‘I don’t know much myself. A uniform discovered the body during a routine check. No positive ID yet. Young female Caucasian. Stuffed into the trunk of a car, possibly her own, parked illegally on the pier. She’s dead, naked, and frozen solid.’

The frozen part was no big surprise if she’d been in the trunk a while. Unfortunately, a frozen body meant there’d be no decomposition. No decomposition meant there’d be no way to establish time of death. No time of death meant no way to check alibis. Somebody knocked on the restroom door. ‘Be right out,’ McCabe shouted to the knocker. He faced away from the door and turned on the taps to drown out the sound of his voice. ‘Anything else?’

‘Only that the car’s a brand-new BMW convertible. Registered to an Elaine Elizabeth Goff of Portland. A marine insurance guy who works on the pier spotted it yesterday morning, parked where it shouldn’t be. He didn’t call it in until today. About an hour ago.’

‘You call Fortier?’

‘Yeah. Told him what I just told you. He said he’d brief Shockley.’ Chief Shockley wanted to be kept up to the minute on any homicides. There weren’t many murders in Portland, and when they happened he hated to look dumb in front of reporters. Especially the one he was sleeping with.

The knocker knocked again. ‘Just a damned minute,’ McCabe yelled at the door. Then he said into the phone, ‘Okay, Mag, I’ll be right there.’ He hit end call and exited the men’s room. The knocker gave McCabe what he figured was supposed to be a withering look. McCabe smiled back sweetly. ‘All yours.’ He threaded his way through the crowd and out the door. He called Kyra from the street.

‘Don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘I can guess. You’re not coming.’ She sounded more disappointed than angry.

‘No, I’m not, but not for the reason you think. I was on my way to the gallery when Maggie called. They found a dead body dumped on one of the piers.’

‘Murder?’

‘Looks that way.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Me, too. About everything. I want you to know that. And I want you to know I want to be there. How’s the turnout?’

‘Great, considering the weather.’

‘Any reaction from the other major Maine artists?’

‘Actually, Marta Einhorn’s being very gracious. The others haven’t said much. Oh, and Joe Kleinerman from the Press Herald –’

‘The arts critic?’

‘Yeah. He wants to do a piece about my work.’

McCabe spotted a PPD black-and-white unit heading east on Congress. He stepped into the middle of the street and flagged it down. ‘That’s great. Listen, I’ve got to go now. I love you. I wanted you to know that as well.’

‘Yeah. Me, too.’

McCabe hung up. A young Asian patrol officer pulled up. McCabe leaned in and flashed his shield in case the guy didn’t recognize him. It wasn’t necessary. The Lucas Kane case last year had made McCabe a minor celebrity, not just in the department but pretty much all over the city. He’d even gotten some press in New York. ‘Hiya, Sergeant. What do you need?’

The cop’s name tag identified him as T. Ly. Probably the shortest last name in the history of the department. Cambodian, McCabe guessed. There were quite a few Cambodians living in Portland. Most resettled as refugees back in the nineties.

‘Ly?’ McCabe asked, pronouncing it Lee. ‘Right pronunciation?’

The man nodded. ‘It’ll do.’

‘Can you get me to the Fish Pier? Like fast?’

Three

McCabe squeezed into the front seat, space made tight by the unit’s onboard computer. Ly flipped on lights and siren, pulled a U-turn on Congress, and took off. It took less than two minutes to reach the Fish Pier. A sprawling waterfront complex off Commercial Street, the Portland Fish Pier was home to businesses serving the city’s working waterfront, especially its struggling groundfish industry. A PPD unit blocked their way. Ly cut the siren and rolled down the window. The wind was howling even louder than before. A cop leaned in. ‘Hiya, Sergeant. Go on down to the end of the pier.’ He pointed. ‘You’ll see a bunch of units pulled in by the Vessel Services building. Can’t miss ’em.’

Ly followed the road that looped around to the end of the pier. On their left, McCabe noted the boxy silhouette of the Portland Fish Exchange. A few years ago it would have been lit up and busy. Tonight it loomed dark and empty. A once thriving auction market where trawlers working out of Portland and a handful of other Maine ports sold their catches, the exchange had fallen on hard times. Federal regulations aimed at replenishing fish stocks cut trawlers’ days at sea to a bare minimum. Catches and income were way down. Adding insult to injury, McCabe remembered reading, legislation backed by Maine’s powerful lobstermen’s lobby was keeping the fishermen from making a few extra bucks by selling the lobsters they snared in their nets. They had to throw them back. Or sneak them home to share with friends.

Without enough fish coming in, the Fish Exchange auctions, once held daily at noon, had become intermittent. Half the time they didn’t happen at all. Some longtime Portland fishing families were being squeezed out of the business. Others moved down the coast to Gloucester, where selling stray lobsters was allowed. The captains who remained weren’t happy.

Near the end of the pier, McCabe could see a pack of PPD units, light bars flashing. They were clustered next to the Vessel Services facility. Behind them yellow crime scene tape cordoned off the far end of the pier. Ly joined them. Half a dozen cold cops, clouds of breath streaming from their mouths, were stamping their feet, clapping their hands, or just moving around to keep warm. Two had positioned themselves by the tape to keep unauthorized visitors out of the active crime scene area. The others were keeping them company. A MedCU unit was just leaving. A dead body meant there was nothing for the paramedics to do.

‘Hey.’ Maggie Savage greeted McCabe as he emerged from the car. She was bundled in a dark blue Gore-Tex parka, hands in her pockets, a wool watch cap pulled down around her ears, her shield pinned to the outside.

‘Hey, yourself. What’s going on?’ McCabe borrowed Ly’s Maglite, and they headed toward a bronze BMW convertible parked facing in toward the city from the far end of the pier. Its driver’s side door and trunk lid gaped open. Senior evidence tech Bill Jacobi and one of his guys were busy taking their pictures and measurements, drawing their diagrams, and writing their notes. The car was elegantly framed at a three-quarter angle between two concrete arms that poked out from the end of the pier into the Fore River, the tidal estuary that formed the far end of Portland harbor. Its rear wheels were two or three feet from the edge, leaving just enough room for the techs to walk behind the car without falling in. McCabe could see reflections of ambient light from nearby buildings as well as the more distant Casco Bay Bridge bouncing off the showroom-shiny fenders. Like an ad in a glossy magazine, the damned thing practically shouted, Hey, look at me! Ain’t I sexy? To McCabe, it seemed too artfully placed for it to have been accidental. Someone wanted the car to be noticed.

As they stood there, Maggie handed him a plastic box of Tic-Tacs. ‘Here. Before you breathe on anyone else, you might want to suck on a couple of these.’

‘That bad, huh?’

‘Not for anyone who appreciates the finer qualities of single malt. I just don’t think it’s something you want Jacobi noticing. Or the uniforms either, for that matter. Big night on the town?’

‘I guess I had a few.’ He left it at that and tossed two white pellets into his mouth. If truth be told, he felt a bit sick. He might have trouble walking the proverbial straight line. He handed the box back. ‘Anything new?’ he asked. He wondered if he was slurring his words.

‘Just what I told you on the phone. Woman’s body is stuffed in the trunk,’ Maggie said. ‘Frozen solid.’

McCabe shivered. ‘I know how she feels.’

‘She’s packed in there so tight, I’m not sure how we’re gonna get her out. At least not till she thaws.’

‘Who called it in?’

‘Guy named Doug Hester a little after six.’

About the time he was deciding to go to Kyra’s show.

‘Hester’s office is over there,’ Maggie continued. ‘The one with lights on on the second floor. He runs a one-man marine insurance agency. Says he could see the car from his desk. It’s been sitting there, illegally parked, since at least seven thirty yesterday morning when he came to work.’

Thirty-six hours. ‘What took him so long to call it in?’

‘It wasn’t just him. There must have been fifty people who saw that car parked where it shouldn’t be, and for two solid days none of them called it in. Either to us or to a towing service. I asked Hester why. He said people on the waterfront don’t like to pry into other people’s business.’

McCabe nodded. A familiar scenario. Citizens not wanting to get involved. Too polite. Too fearful. Too lazy. It was a problem for police departments across the country. It bugged the hell out of McCabe, but it was tough to figure out what to do about it.

‘He said the car wasn’t bothering him,’ Maggie continued. ‘Didn’t seem to be bothering anyone else. So he, quote, didn’t pay it no never mind, unquote. Also he says it’s not that unusual for the wife of one of the captains to leave a car for her husband for when his boat gets in.’

‘So what made him change his mind?’

‘He started thinking how none of the fishing families he knows is likely to have a brand-new BMW convertible. Not with the business in the dumper the way it is now. And, even if they did, they sure as hell wouldn’t leave it sitting at the end of the pier for two days. So, at long last, he walks over and takes a closer look. Sees the keys in the ignition. Tries the door. It’s not locked.’

‘Getting his prints all over everything?’

‘Probably. Though he says just the door. Anyway, he gets suspicious and finally decides to call.’

‘Okay, so the car wasn’t here when Hester left work Wednesday night, but it was here when he arrived Thursday morning. So sometime during that twelve-hour window somebody, presumably the killer, but possibly the victim, drives it in and parks it in the most prominent position on the pier.’

‘Looks that way.’

‘Why?’

‘We don’t know.’

‘Hester pop the trunk?’ asked McCabe.

‘No. That was the responding officer. Uniform named Joe Vodnick. He popped the trunk and found the body. Little over an hour ago.’

‘Was there probable cause for opening the trunk?’

‘I think there may be some question about that.’

McCabe thought about it. Opening the trunk was no big deal if the car belonged to the victim. Elaine Goff or whoever it was wasn’t going to complain about illegal search or seizure, dead as she was and stuffed inside. On the other hand, if the dead woman wasn’t Goff, if Goff was the killer or somehow connected to the killer, the investigation could be compromised even before it began. ‘Which one’s Vodnick?’

‘The big guy over there on the right.’

Vodnick was big alright. Six foot six. Built like a linebacker. Probably weighed 260, maybe more. He was busy bullshitting with a couple of the other cops. ‘Did you ask him about probable cause?’

‘He said the car roused his suspicions.’

‘Roused his suspicions? That’s nice. Anything a little more substantive?’

‘Nope. He just said here was this expensive car, parked in a place it shouldn’t have been for two days. Doors unlocked. Key in the ignition. He checked with Dispatch, and the car wasn’t reported stolen. So he looked in the trunk. Listen, Mike, I don’t know what a judge would say about probable cause, but I do know we probably wouldn’t have found her otherwise. Hell, she could have been sitting in a tow yard until she thawed and somebody noticed the smell. I say he made a good call.’

‘Assuming some slick-ass lawyer doesn’t have the whole case thrown out on a technicality. I assume Vodnick’s prints are on the car as well?’

‘He says just the outside door handle and trunk release button, which is under the dash to the left of the wheel. Claims he was careful. Tried not to smear other possible prints.’

McCabe stood silently for a long minute, breathing in cold, damp air that smelled like seaweed and rotting fish, scanning the scene, burning its details into the hard drive he carried in his brain. A brand-new Beemer, unlocked, keys in the ignition, sitting there for two days. Amazing nobody tried to steal it. In New York it would’ve been gone in the blink of an eye. Maybe that was the bad guy’s intention. Have some clueless kid take it for a joyride. Get his prints all over it. Get blamed for the murder when he was finally caught, nobody believing his denials. Not a bad plan. Might’ve worked. Except this was Maine, and nobody bothered stealing it.

He could see half a dozen trawlers tied up, two abreast, on either side of the pier. All good-sized commercial fishing boats. Some of the names were visible. The Emma Anne. The Katie James. The Old Jolly. They looked dark and empty, and none of them looked very jolly. McCabe wondered if any of them might have been here the night the car was driven onto the pier. If anyone might have seen anything. Probably not. Trawlers must be in and out of this place all the time. Taking on ice and fuel. Unloading fish for the auctions. Worth checking, though.

‘Who takes care of the boats while they’re here?’ he asked Maggie.

‘What do you mean, takes care of?’

‘Services them. Fuel. Water. Ice. Stuff like that.’

‘Actually, I do know. Company called Vessel Services. Right over there. I know someone who works for them.’

‘Suppose they keep a record of which boats were here from Wednesday afternoon into Thursday morning?’

‘Probably. But if you’re thinking witnesses, why would someone spend a freezing cold night on board when he didn’t have to?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘An out-of-town boat, maybe. A Portland boat, I doubt it. These guys spend too much time at sea not to be home with their wives, girlfriends, or whoever they can rustle up. Specially in this kind of weather.’

‘Would you mind calling your friend at Vessel Services anyway? Maybe we’ll get lucky.’

Maggie told him she’d call. McCabe’s mind went back to the scene. The BMW was backed up close to the edge of the pier. Why? Was the killer getting ready to toss the body overboard? If so, why hadn’t he? Maybe it was already frozen into the trunk and he couldn’t get it out. Maybe he was interrupted by someone walking by or someone on one of the boats. Again, a possible witness.

‘Have we learned anything about Goff?’ he asked.

‘Not much. Full name’s Elaine Elizabeth Goff. She’s a lawyer at Palmer Milliken. Twenty-nine years old. Single. Lives’ – Maggie stopped herself – ‘or possibly lived at 342 Brackett Street here in town. Car’s brand-new. Initial registration dated the first of December.’

‘We think that’s Elaine in the trunk?’

‘That’s what we think. Officially, she’s still Jane Doe.’

‘You tried reaching her?’

‘No listed number. Probably only uses a cell. I tried her extension at Palmer Milliken and got voice mail. I’m waiting on the Call Center to come up with a number for the cell. I asked Tom Tasco to track down her landlord.’ Tasco was one of the unit’s senior detectives.

McCabe took another deep breath of cold air. His head was clearing, but he still felt a little sick. ‘Do we know what killed her?’

‘Can’t tell from looking.’

‘No obvious wounds or trauma?’

‘Some marks that look like bruises, that’s all.’ Maggie paused. ‘They don’t look lethal. She’s lying on one side with her knees tucked up tight, so you can’t see that much of her.’

‘Could be a wound on the other side.’

‘Could be. Also her hair’s covering her face, so you can’t see that at all.’

‘Terri on her way?’ Terri was Terri Mirabito, a deputy ME with the chief medical examiner’s office in Augusta, an hour and some away. Because she lived in Portland, Terri was always the first choice when a body turned up at night in the city. She was McCabe’s first choice anyway. He couldn’t stand her boss, Maine’s chief medical examiner, Donald A. Fry, a.k.a. the Donald. A pompous know-it-all who never missed an opportunity to demonstrate to McCabe and his detectives how dumb they were and how smart he was. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mac, it’s obvious what happened here, isn’t it? No, Donald, it’s not obvious. Also he had that habit of calling McCabe ‘Mac.’ It was a nickname McCabe loathed. Even when Fry was right, as far as McCabe was concerned, Fry was wrong.

Maggie nodded. ‘Yeah. I called her cell. She was on her way out for a big evening with some new guy I think she has the hots for.’ McCabe smiled. He enjoyed the image of the short, bubbly pathologist nursing a case of ‘the hots.’

‘Where was she headed?’

‘A night at the opera.’

McCabe smiled again.

‘No,’ Maggie said with a sigh, ‘not the Marx Brothers. The Kirov. They’re singing at Merrill. I caught her just as she was parking her car. Tough ticket to get. She wasn’t real happy hearing from me. Anyway, she said she’d let her friend know and then run home and get her kit.’ Maggie glanced at her watch. ‘Should be here any minute.’

‘Okay. Let’s take a look,’ he said. In spite of Maggie’s concern for his boozy breath, McCabe felt sober, his head clear at last. He slipped under the crime scene tape. ‘You coming?’

‘I’m coming.’

He headed toward the car, watching where he walked, shining Officer Ly’s light on the concrete platform of the pier, flashing left and then right, trying to spot anything that shouldn’t be there. There was nothing visible. Not even any tire tracks on the dirty patches of ice and snow. Too cold. Too hard. He reached the car. He peered in through the open driver’s side door. Moved the light around the interior. Looked clean and new. He noted the key, still in the ignition. No other keys on the ring. No house keys. No office key. Just a plastic membership tag for Planet Fitness, a gym over on Marginal Way. He knew the place. Kyra went there. He wondered if they’d ever run into each other. McCabe squatted down and moved the light slowly across the floor and under the seats. He could just see the edge of a small plastic bag pushed under the driver’s seat. He pulled it out. Pure white powder. Possibly coke. Jacobi could run a field test to be sure, but it looked like either Jane Doe or her killer was a user. Or maybe a dealer? He pointed it out to Maggie. She shook her head, indicating she hadn’t seen it before. Either way, probable cause was established. They just had to let Vodnick know what he’d seen.

A couple of scenarios ran through McCabe’s mind. One, Goff drives here to meet someone. Maybe her dealer. He gives her the coke. She hides the bag under the seat. They have a disagreement. He gets pissed, kills her, and takes off. Possible. But if that was the case, why would the body be naked? Maybe the dealer demands sex for payment. She says no. He rapes her. Panics and kills her and takes off either in a second car or maybe a boat. Again possible, but it didn’t feel right. Not the way the car was positioned in the most public place on the pier. Unless he backed it up to the edge after he killed her to dump the body overboard. So why didn’t he? It wouldn’t have been frozen yet. He could have tossed her into the harbor easily and driven off. Instead, he packs her into the trunk and leaves her. No. None of that felt right. More likely somebody brought the body here already stuffed in the trunk. Somebody who wanted the car to be noticed. Who wanted the body to be found.

Finally McCabe flicked off the light and stood up. He took a deep breath and walked toward the trunk, preparing himself for the first few seconds he’d spend alone with the victim. The cop and the corpse. A unique and strangely intimate relationship. Just the two of them. It didn’t matter to McCabe who the victim was. A gangbanger or an innocent child. Either way, for him, it was this moment of shared intimacy that turned what for some cops was merely a job into an obligation. A sacred trust. To find and punish the killer, to right the wrong, to balance the scales. The Lord may someday get His turn – but for now, McCabe believed, vengeance is mine. I go first.

In the dim light of the open trunk, the woman’s frozen body shone back at him bluish white, her flesh waxen. She was on her side. Head down. Knees and arms curled in. Like the tuck position divers squeeze into after they leap from their boards. Yet even in this position there was something familiar about her.

He flipped on the Maglite and suddenly found himself looking at a body he knew better than his own. Sandy. His faithless bitch of an ex-wife. The one who’d walked out not only on their failed marriage but also on their only child. How many times had he silently wished her dead? Now, somehow, she was. Dead. Frozen. Stuffed in a trunk. What in hell was she doing here? It made no sense.

He moved the beam to the thick waves of dark hair covering her face. It was longer than he remembered, but he hadn’t seen her in a while. He knew he shouldn’t touch any part of her body, not even the hair, until Terri got here. Too bad. Jacobi had his pictures, and there was no way he wasn’t going to look. He felt around in his pockets for the plastic ballpoint he was sure was there. Grasping it by one end, he slid it under her hair, wondering briefly if, like her limbs, the hair would be frozen stiff. It wasn’t. He lifted it off her face, squatted down, and shined the light in. Couldn’t see much, but it was enough. The curve of her lip. The tilt of her nose. Worst of all, one lifeless blue eye staring out. Still mocking him even in death.

‘McCabe, are you alright?’

Maggie’s voice. He didn’t answer. Just raised his left hand and waved her off. The rational side of his brain told him the body couldn’t be Sandy. But if not Sandy, who or what was it? Some kind of delusion? Brought on by what? Too much booze? Too much emotion? Maybe he was going nuts. In his dreams he’d seen her dead often enough. In some of those dreams he even killed her himself. But always with a gun. Never like this. Never without marks. Never left her to freeze in the trunk of a car. Not even a BMW. Though, to be sure, Sandy would rather be found in a Beemer than a Ford.

He wondered again about calling Richard Wolfe, the psychiatrist. Maybe it was time. He’d first seen Wolfe a little over a year ago, right after the end of the Lucas Kane affair, after Casey’s first one-on-one encounter with her mother in more than three years. It was Kyra who urged him to go. He’d been getting the shakes and having trouble sleeping, and when he did sleep, his sleep was disturbed by violent nightmares that more often than not included Sandy. Kyra thought he might be having a nervous breakdown. Wolfe told him no, it wasn’t a breakdown. Just the aftermath of a high level of stress combined with anxiety about Casey and Sandy getting together again. He prescribed Xanax, which seemed to help, and though Wolfe recommended continuing therapy, either with him or someone else, McCabe decided that was that. He wouldn’t take it any further.

‘McCabe. You feeling okay?’

‘Yeah. Fine.’

‘You don’t look fine.’ Maggie was directly behind him. If he moved too fast he’d knock her right in the water. Once again, he felt her hand on his shoulder. ‘Can you talk to me?’ She was using her gentle voice. So effective in interrogations. All the bad guys fell for it. ‘McCabe?’

He didn’t answer. Instead, he examined the body one more time, finishing up by running the Maglite along her leg, searching for the small mole on the outside of her knee that should have been there. It wasn’t. At least not where he could see it.

No, this wasn’t Sandy. He was sure of it now. Just someone who looked like her. To prove it, even to the doubting little voice that inhabited his brain, he took out his cell and punched in her number in New York. It rang. Once. Twice. Four times. Hello. You’ve reached the Ingrams. Sandy and Peter. Please leave a message, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

‘Sandy, it’s me. McCabe. Call back as soon as you can. It’s important.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘Oh, it’s not about Casey. She’s fine.’ He clicked off and tried the house in East Hampton and then her cell. Same result both times. He left messages.

No, he told himself again, this wasn’t Sandy. She was in New York, safe and sound. On a Friday night she and her rich-as-Croesus husband were probably at the theater. We request that everyone in the audience please turn off all cell phones for the duration of the performance. Thank you very much. Or maybe they were home lying in front of the fire in their West End Avenue co-op, not answering the phone because they were otherwise engaged. He pictured Sandy having sex with Ingram. Without warning, the image changed and it wasn’t Ingram on the floor by the fire, wrapped in the familiar scent and feel of Sandy’s naked body. It was McCabe himself, thrusting into her over and over in a ferocious surge of desire. He was shocked by how much he still wanted her. Equally shocked by how much he hated her. It struck him that the need to exorcise the ghost of Sandy once and for all might be the real reason he kept pushing Kyra toward a marriage she wasn’t ready for. That was something he’d have to deal with. Something he’d have to resolve. He loved Kyra too much to use her that way. Perhaps he should stop seeing her. At least until the exorcism was complete. He wondered what a therapist like Wolfe would say about all this. He wondered if he could even tell Wolfe. But maybe he would. He sure as hell couldn’t tell anyone else.

As suddenly as it began it was over. Even the little voice in his brain accepted the fact that the woman in the trunk wasn’t Sandy. She was a look-alike, most likely one named Elaine Elizabeth Goff. Yes, the resemblance was strong, but that’s all it was, a resemblance. Maggie was still behind him, her hand still on his shoulder. ‘I’m okay,’ he said.

‘I’m not even going to ask.’

McCabe focused the light once more on the body in the trunk, looking this time not for moles but for evidence. For something that might tell him who had killed this woman and how. He noticed reddish marks on the one wrist and one ankle he could see, suggesting she’d been physically restrained prior to death. He saw the bruising Maggie mentioned on the visible portions of her legs, buttocks, and arms. Maybe she’d been beaten as well. Or maybe the marks were nothing more than freezer burn. He hadn’t seen any bruising around her face, and there was no sign of blood, either on her body or in the trunk.