The Price of Malice Page 2

  And that was before they reached the main attraction.

  He was in the small living room, spread-eagled on his back, covered with enough blood to make him look more like a slaughtered carcass than a dead human being.

  Even Willy, with his hard-hearted reputation, murmured, “Whoa,” at the sight.

  “Somebody was pissed,” Sammie said quietly.

  Willy reached into the pocket of his Tyvek suit and extracted a cell phone.

  Sam glanced at him, surprised. He was usually ill-inclined to consult others on a case. “Who’re you calling?” she asked.

  She was struck by his tone of voice when he answered her. This was a man used to violence, after all. She knew that much from sleeping beside his nightmares.

  But his words were somber and reflective as he flipped open the phone. He spoke as a man who’d recognized something beyond the simple impulse of most killings. There was a presence crowding around them here—primal, angry, penned up, and very hot.

  It wasn’t the kind of thing for even Willy to confront cavalierly.

  “I think,” he told her, “it’s time to wake up the Old Man.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Joe Gunther was not asleep when Willy called from Manor Court. Nor had he been for hours. He was fully dressed, sitting by the window, and in trouble. At least, emotionally. Lyn Silva, the woman he loved, had gone into an introverted tailspin, cutting him out of her life.

  And he had brought it about. Not directly—not by anything he’d done—but he had been the bearer of bad news from a recent trip to Maine, concerning her family, and was now paying the price.

  “What?” he answered the phone by his side.

  Willy was uncharacteristically brought up short. “Boss?”

  Joe answered in a more neutral tone. “Hey, Willy. What’s up?”

  “You okay?”

  It was an unusual question from this particular man, and Joe immediately sensed Willy’s regret at having asked it. He knew him like a son, and had more than once protected him against those who’d wanted to fire him over trying to figure him out.

  Joe therefore let him off the hook. “Yeah, fine. Just spilled some coffee. Bad timing.”

  Willy bought it, or played along. “Losing your grip. Bad sign. Incontinence’ll probably be next.”

  Joe suppressed a sigh. “Glad you’re concerned. I take it this isn’t a social call. You are not a morning person.”

  “Klesczewski called us for a homicide on Manor Court,” Willy explained casually, keeping to form.

  “Here? In town?”

  “Yeah. Number forty-two, second floor. It’s a bloodbath.”

  Joe was struck by the description, given the jaded source. “We know who did it?”

  “Not a clue. Wanna come out and play?”

  Joe cast his eyes onto the scene he’d been watching emerge from the shadows of night—his own small, pleasant backyard, stuffed with bushes and flowers.

  “Yeah,” he said, in fact happy to apply his mind to almost anything by now. “Be right there.”

  Manor Court had come alive by the time Joe pulled off of Canal Street and into the dead end. People were standing on the sidewalk, along the balconies, and lounging in windows. Not a throng, and exhibiting no particular energy—this slice of society was used to seeing cops stringing crime tape. But whatever had happened at number forty-two was certainly more interesting than the first morning talk shows.

  He parked behind Sam’s car and got out, nodding to Zippo, still stationed on the porch.

  “How’re tricks, Joe?” the latter asked as he approached.

  “I guess you’ll have to tell me,” Joe answered. “What’re you hearing coming off the sidewalk?”

  Zippo glanced at the few people standing outside the yellow tape and dropped his voice slightly. “I don’t know how they do it, but word’s already out who we got up there. You can tell me later if I’m right: Ron hasn’t said word one, but scuttlebutt is it’s Wayne Castine.”

  Joe shrugged. “Willy didn’t give me a name, but assuming it is, what’re they saying?”

  “That we’re wasting our time; that we should dig a hole, throw him in, and call it a day. Another one said if we catch who did it, we should make him chief of police.”

  “You know who’s saying all this?”

  Zippo patted his breast pocket, where most cops keep their notepads. “I wrote ’em down. Couple of local losers; known them for years.”

  “Why the hostility? You know Castine, too? I never heard of him.”

  The old beat cop raised his eyebrows. “Me? Nope, which kind of surprised me. But according to these guys, he was a child molester.”

  Joe patted him on the shoulder. “Well, I guess we’ll find out. Thanks, Zippo. I’ll let you know if you get the Kewpie doll. I wouldn’t doubt it, though. I mean, how many apartments are there on the second floor, right?”

  Zippo gave him a knowing look. “Ah-ha, but that’s the catch, see? It’s not Castine’s apartment. That I do know—it belongs to a woman who has no idea who the body is.”

  Joe pulled a face. “No kidding? Curiouser and curiouser.”

  “Still, I bet I get that doll,” Zippo said, bending over his clipboard to enter Joe’s name. “These people know the drumbeats.”

  Joe entered the building, paused in the lobby to get his bearings and absorb the place’s familiar atmosphere, and then slowly climbed up the creaky, dusty stairway to the second floor.

  Looming above, a wide smile on his face, Ron Klesczewski watched him come, waiting until he’d almost arrived to stick out a hand in greeting. “Hey, boss. Good to see you. I can’t believe we work in the same building and never meet up.”

  Joe shook his hand, laughing at how Ron still addressed him. In the old days, Joe had indeed been his boss, as chief of detectives. “I know,” he agreed. “Pretty dumb.”

  The PD and the VBI shared a roof in the town’s municipal building, with the latter renting a one-room office on the second floor. But Ron’s comment was well put—they were more likely to bump into each other at a place like this than around the water cooler.

  “I’m running a survey,” Joe said before Ron could begin his briefing. “Zippo told me that folks on the street have already ID’d the dead man as Wayne Castine. They right?”

  Ron scowled and shook his head. “Unbelievable. Yeah, they are. I don’t know how they found out, though.”

  Joe tilted his head and smiled. “Well, somebody killed him. Maybe the fact that word’s already out will make this a lot easier than we think.”

  “I knew you believed in fairy tales,” said a familiar voice.

  Joe glanced at the apartment’s front door and saw Willy standing in the entrance, clad in Tyvek.

  “Looking at you, I believe in the Easter Bunny—minus the ears.”

  Ron burst out laughing, making Willy scowl. “Well, you’re next,” he said. “Assuming you actually want to help with this mess.” He turned on his heel to reenter the apartment.

  “Oh, oh,” Ron whispered, his eyes theatrically wide. “Now he’s all upset.”

  Joe picked up a white suit he found draped across the railing and began putting it on. “What about the neighbors, Ron? You done any canvassing yet?”

  “Mostly collecting names for you to chase down later. Not,” he added quickly, “that I won’t assign whoever you want to help out. You’re doing me the favor here.”

  “Appreciate it,” Joe grunted, bending over to slip on the booties.

  “Anyhow,” Ron resumed, “so far, we haven’t got much. Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything. The usual.” He pointed upstairs. “There are two apartments per floor, six in all. The two above us are rented, the largest one, across the way, is empty, and the two below are full. But there are a lot of people involved, just so you know, and they’re complicated to sort out. Everybody’s living with everybody else; all the kids have different last names; people married and not, or married to people who aren’t who th
ey’re sleeping with. Same ol’, same ol’, if you ask me. I’ve got names, birth dates, and phone numbers for a bunch of them, but there’re several who aren’t here who might have something to say later. Speaking of which, everyone here’s agreed to stay in their apartments to preserve the overall crime scene, or ask for an escort if they want out.”

  Joe nodded as he pulled on his latex gloves. “Who lives with the woman who rents this place?”

  “Nobody,” Ron told him. “She’s alone. It’s the smallest apartment in the building.”

  “Zippo said she had no idea who the body was.”

  “Correct, at least not by name. They took her to the hospital to calm her down, so I haven’t been able to show her his photo ID.”

  “Did you run that by any of the other renters?”

  “No, nor his name, although I guess that’s a moot point by now. At the time, I didn’t want to foul your game, ’case you were looking for reactions.”

  “Good thought. Anyone living here with obvious red flags, like a mass murderer?”

  Ron shook his head. “Nope, at least not yet. Cumulatively, though, you might be looking at a few dozen pages of rap sheets, and they run the gamut. Which isn’t to say the guy wasn’t done in by a newbie ten-year-old.”

  Joe had moved to the apartment’s entrance and now looked back at his old colleague and raised his eyebrows. “Ron, you’ve turned into a cynic.”

  Ron smiled, but sadly. “Say it ain’t so, boss.”

  Joe didn’t say anything.

  He proceeded as Willy had earlier—slowly, methodically, not touching anything, trying to read whatever story might be available. He saw blood spatter on the floor, with directionality heading the same way he was, implying a wounded person retreating from the front door. Bloody handprints indicated the same thing.

  He paused, considering the possibility that Castine had answered the door of an apartment not his own, and been struck, stabbed, or shot by whoever had been on the other side.

  But the blood didn’t begin precisely at the door; its first appearance was about five feet inside. That could mean a hand covering the wound, delaying the blood flow, or an attacker hiding in the kitchen or hallway closet. If that was true, maybe Castine had been the one on the landing, letting himself in only to be assaulted once the door was closed.

  Joe left it there, open to all theories, married to none.

  He resumed his survey until he’d reached the cramped living room. Sam and Willy were both there, chatting softly. Beside them lay the remains of Wayne Castine.

  Neither of his colleagues interrupted his silence, not even Willy, who could have repaid any cracks about resembling an earless rabbit.

  Joe stayed on the butcher paper a moment, before carefully and slowly putting one white-clad foot down on the bare floor beside the body, so that he could crouch beside it, immediately above the head.

  Castine was open-eyed and -mouthed, halfway between looking startled and dreamy. He needed a shave and a haircut; his clothes were old and worn—a T-shirt, jeans, and a cheap pair of running shoes. His hands were calloused and scarred by a life of manual labor, and perhaps a few fistfights. He had several tattoos.

  He was also so covered in blood that the sole standout was a single patch of pale, bare skin along his left cheekbone—as artificial-looking as if it had been painted in place.

  Joe gazed along the body’s length, noting multiple “defects,” as they called them forensically, on the front of the shirt and pants, put there by knife or gun. Most noticeable were three wounds to the groin—rare enough in a homicide, and usually never found without, as Willy might have put it, “a good story.”

  But Joe didn’t ask him—not yet—instead returning to the victim’s face. That had received several hard blows. One eye was deformed, its supporting orbit presumably crushed; the nose was bent awkwardly; the upper lip split; three teeth were broken, their jagged profile adding a grotesque element to Castine’s peculiarly passive expression.

  There are multiple theories about how homicide victims retain telling details of their fate, including the old saw that the last image to strike the retina remains forever, ripe for discovery. Some, even now, claim a body’s facial expression can tell if the killer was friend or foe. In court, Joe had heard it said that a corpse’s look of “peacefulness,” or lack thereof, reveals if pain was a factor.

  To Joe’s eye—which had studied hundreds of bodies over the decades—none of this had merit. In Wayne Castine’s case, for example, everything but his passive expression told of an agonizing death, delivered by one or more people hell-bent on making it so.

  Joe finally rose, stepped back, and commented, “Not that much blood around the body; he must’ve bled out by the time he dropped.”

  “From one of the groin wounds, alone,” Sammie rejoined, taking up the Socratic invitation. “You can see where the left pants leg is soaked all the way to filling the shoe.”

  “Could even be the primary cause of death,” Willy added. “The shoe print matching that sneaker begins about halfway down the hall. Probably the femoral artery.”

  They all paused a moment, configuring the scene as it might have happened.

  Joe then said, “Ron told me the renter didn’t know him, even though everyone else seems to. You want to fill me in?”

  They did so, taking turns. In short order, Joe learned about Liz Babbitt, her possible alternate source of income, her peripatetic lifestyle, Willy’s anecdotal knowledge of Wayne’s carnal interest in children, and the fact that he had an apartment on Main Street, now under guard.

  After they finished, Joe checked his watch.

  “Got a date?” Willy asked. “Better be for lunch.”

  In fact, the sun had begun to assert itself with confidence, and was beginning to drive a bright shaft into the room across the body, further darkening the congealing blood. It would be another hot and humid day, and Wayne wasn’t going to improve with time.

  “No—I’m just wondering how to manage decomposition and keep the place intact for the crime lab,” Joe admitted. “They may still be an hour or more out.”

  Actually, while the point was cogent, it wasn’t why he’d checked the time. He’d wondered what Lyn was doing just then—whether she was still fast asleep, or having breakfast in the kitchen he’d grown accustomed to sharing with her, at least from time to time.

  “We can’t get an air conditioner in here without screwing everything up,” Sam said, bringing him back. “But why not drop a blanket or something across the window at least?”

  Joe nodded. “Get Ron’s people to do that. Why don’t you two start interviewing neighbors? I’ll get Lester to come in early and have him check out Castine’s past—see who he might have ticked off enough to deserve this. I’ll go chat with Liz Babbitt.”

  “What’s that gonna produce?” Willy asked with his usual lack of decorum.

  “Maybe nothing, but she still hasn’t been shown the guy without the bloody makeup,” Joe said. “Could be she knew him by a different name.”

  Willy wiped his forehead with his sleeve, revealing the source of some of his irritation. “Whatever. I just want to get out of this damn sweat suit. I hate this weather.”

  “It’s going to be a long day, Willy,” Sam advised him gently as she headed toward the hallway.

  He fell in behind her. “You’re telling me. I say we arrest everybody on the block and interview them in some air-conditioned cellar. They’d probably thank us.”

  Joe stayed behind, letting the silence settle back, as he imagined it had after Castine’s last breath. Somebody—or maybe several people—had no doubt stood as he was now, considering their handiwork. But had the feeling been triumphant? Guilty? Stunned that some plan had gone wrong? One possible motivation had already surfaced, linked with Castine’s sexual appetites. Would it end up being the right one?

  He let out a sigh. Only serious digging would reveal that, but while therein lay one of the job’s rewards, he found his
enthusiasm flagging. Lyn’s struggles with what he’d inadvertently brought her were proving surprisingly distracting, which in turn reinforced how fond he’d become of her.

  That was largely good news, of course. For a couple of decades, Joe had kept company with a woman named Gail Zigman, whom he’d loved dearly—and still did platonically. But she’d broken it off, partly because of her own political ambitions, and partly because of the occasional perils of his job. Lyn’s appearance had greatly eased the resulting loneliness. That he’d now done something through his work to throw her for a loop was no subtle reminder of what had befallen him and Gail.

  For several years, Lyn, the daughter of a Gloucester lobsterman, had believed that her father and older brother had been consumed by a storm at sea like so many fishermen before them—lock, stock, and fishing boat. It had been a complete and utter heartbreak, uprooting and transforming the remnants of the family, but it had at least shared with so many other similar losses a touchstone of commonality. The survivors of dead fishermen, like those of slain soldiers, had the knowledge that they were not alone in carrying their burden. It wasn’t exactly a comfort for Lyn, but it eased her isolation, if only fractionally.

  That, however, was before Joe, chasing a drug case in faraway Maine—some two hundred miles from Gloucester—discovered the Silvas’ boat, the Maria, covered with algae but fully intact—its name carefully painted over—tucked away in a very bad man’s boathouse.

  Gone was the time-honored legend of decent men lost at sea, replaced by the haunting, corrosive possibility that everything about father and brother—including their disappearance—might have been a corruption of lies.

  To Joe, her brooding withdrawal had seemed extreme. The two men were just as missing, and their reputations—so far—just as inviolate as before. All he had found was the Maria. Even the bad guy had claimed to have found it afloat and empty long ago, and to have applied the salvage-of-the-sea convention to his own selfish and illegal advantage by hiding it. There was nothing to say that the two men still hadn’t perished at sea, in poor weather.