A Cup Full of Midnight (3 page)

He didn’t have to put it together for me. A cannonball settled in my gut, and suddenly I cared who had killed Razor. I cared a hell of a lot. “They think you were with Absinthe. That you were in on it together.”

“They didn’t say it, but I could tell, yeah.”

“And that’s why you . . . ?”

He turned his head away. “I don’t want to talk about that. Promise you won’t tell Mom and Dad about the cops.”

“Josh, they’re going to find out.”

“Not if you catch the guy first.”

The room was silent except for an irritating buzz in one of the fluorescent lights. Josh gnawed at his lower lip. I thought about my brother, how he’d feel if he found out I’d kept a thing like this from him. I sneaked another glance at Josh’s wrists.

“All right,” I said finally. “I’ll see what I can do.”

The corners of his mouth tugged upward. “Thanks, Uncle Jared. You won’t be sorry.”

I thought of my brother again. Forced a smile and kept my mouth shut.

I was already sorry.

CHAPTER THREE

A
t eleven-thirty the next morning, I pushed through the double doors of the West precinct house and flashed my ID through the safety glass of the information booth in the lobby.

“Frank Campanella,” I said.

The guard inside, a skinny acne-scarred kid I’d never seen before, gave me a curt nod and went back to his dog-eared paperback. He’d get reamed for that if anybody who mattered caught him, but I wasn’t anybody anymore.

Frank Campanella, my former partner, should have been in charge of Nashville’s Murder Squad. Instead, the new police chief had disbanded the unit, leaving only a small core of investigators to carry on as the Cold Case Division. Frank and the rest of the Homicide and Murder Squad detectives were sent to other precinct houses and served an entrée of break-ins and vandalism with an occasional murder or missing persons on the side. It was like feeding a grizzly on nothing but tofu and alfalfa sprouts.

The idea was to make everybody equal, put an end to specialized investigations, get the guys out in the neighborhoods where they’d be working. It sounded good on paper.

Frank’s new sergeant was a thirty-four-year-old green-eyed redhead named Kelly Malone. Until the shake-up, she’d never worked a homicide, but she was brassy and ballsy and looked good on the six o’clock news, where my ex-girlfriend, local anchor Ashleigh Arneau, made syrupy references to her as the “Debutante Detective.”

Frank had the highest solve rate on the squad and more years on the force than Malone had been alive, but nobody cared about that. He was Old School, which meant he was Old News.

His cluttered cubicle was two doors down from Malone’s office. He looked up and scowled when I rapped my knuckles on the edge of the cube. He had an open file in front of him and a Styrofoam cup in one hand. The cup had holly leaves printed on the side.

“Let me guess,” he said. “You need a favor.”

“What makes you think I didn’t just come by to visit an old friend?”

“Don’t make me laugh.” He closed the folder and pushed it away. “I know that look.”

I took the seat across from him, a black vinyl office chair with stuffing peeking from a split seam, and said, “I need to see the Parker file.”

“The Parker file.”

“You know. Sebastian Parker. Vampire wannabe. Ritual killing. Called himself Razor.”

“I know who he is. What I don’t know is why you think I’m gonna get myself fired for giving you case files when you don’t work for us anymore.”

“I’m not asking you to give it to me. I can look at it right here. We could go in the copy room and lock the door, if that will make you feel better.”

“Not even if I wanted to.” He slumped in his chair, raked his fingers through his silvering hair. “I don’t have it. It’s not my case anymore. Malone gave it to Gilley and Robbins.”

“Who the hell are Gilley and Robbins?”

He barked a bitter laugh. “Fucking parking meter detectives. Part of some master plan to make us do the things we suck at.” He plucked a fat file folder from a sloppy stack of papers and shoved it across the desk at me.

I picked it up and rifled through it. Peeping Tom. “You gotta be kidding me.”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?”

I slid the file back toward him. “So they get the homicides, you get the scut work?”

“Malone sent them on a new case today. Dead guy on the porch, pissed-off wife with a shotgun. The Parker case, Gilley lost his lunch, and Robbins broke down and cried like a baby. So she sends them out to see some poor schmuck with his brains all over the porch.”

“Amateurs.”

“Don’t get me wrong. They’re good investigators. But what do they know about homicide? You know what our solve rate is these days? Forty percent.”

Before the big upheaval, it had been eighty. You couldn’t blame Malone or the precinct commanders for that. Not entirely. There were other factors. Politics. A new police chief who didn’t understand that homicide was a different kind of crime and homicide detectives a different breed. I’d seen good beat cops broken by the sight of a butchered body, unable to leave their own houses without getting the shakes. Not the guys in homicide. In homicide, we know how to detach.

“When it gets down to thirty,” I said, “maybe you’ll get your office back.”

“If it gets down to thirty, I’ll die of shame and they can have the fucking office.”

“But then I’d miss the pleasure of your scintillating conversation.” I leaned forward, put my hands flat on his desk, and said, “Frank, I need to see that file.”

His eyebrows bunched together, wild silver bristles that made him look like a disgruntled badger. “I just told you, I don’t have it.”

“But you could get it.”

“Sure, if I wanted to spend my golden years saying, ‘Welcome to Walmart.’”

I looked down at my lap. I knew Malone would pounce on an excuse to cut him loose, and I was asking him to risk both his pension and his reputation and give her one. It was a lot to ask. “I know I’m putting you on the spot,” I said. “But you know the case. I need to know what angle your guys are working.”

“My guys?”

“Your guys, Malone’s guys. Whoever they belong to, two of them went to Josh’s school yesterday and questioned him about Razor’s murder.”

Frank raised an eyebrow. Rocked back in his chair. “S.O.P. You know that. He was intimate with the victim.”

“He was molested by the victim.”

“Okay.” His voice softened. “I misspoke. But he hung out with the guy for a long time. You don’t think he could shed some light?”

“They called him out of the cafeteria in front of the whole school and then they made him think he was a suspect.”

“You think they crossed the line?”

“He went home and cut his wrists. What do you think?”

His face went perfectly still. “What?”

“He’s going to be okay, probably. If he doesn’t try it again.”

“My God.”

“So I need to know, Frank. Is he a suspect?”

He rubbed his hands over his face, as if he’d just walked through a cobweb. “My best guess?” he said. “Probably. The O’Brien girl didn’t kill Parker and pose him on that pentagram all by herself. She had to have help. And witnesses place Josh and the girl together near the victim’s house an hour before the murder.”

I tried to keep my expression neutral, but he knew me too well.

He said, “Josh didn’t tell you about that?”

“He told me he ditched school.”

“That’s all?”

“He didn’t do this, Frank. You’ve known him since he was, what, seven? You know he isn’t capable of this.”

He gave a slow nod, as if his head were too heavy for his neck. I wiped my palms, suddenly clammy, along the outside seam of my jeans. I wondered if he was remembering, like I was, the scrape-kneed, sunburnt, laughing boy Josh had been. If he was imagining, like I was, what prison might do to that same boy charged with a vicious crime and old enough to be tried as an adult.

Then, “Wait here,” Frank said.

A few minutes later, he came back and handed me a thick manila folder. “Do something with that and come on,” he said. “I gotta get out of here.”

I stuffed the folder under my coat and zipped it inside. The coat was an Australian duster with a fleece lining. I liked the bomber jacket better, but I couldn’t get the bloodstains out. “What about Malone?” I asked.

“Fuck her,” he said. He leaned across the desk and picked up the Styrofoam cup, downed the last of his coffee and crumpled the cup into a shapeless wad. “For this, I need a beer.”

CHAPTER FOUR

W
e pushed out onto the freshly salted sidewalk and into a skin-chapping cold that briefly glued my nostrils shut. The sky was a bitter gray, and needles of sleet stung our bare faces. I looked at Frank and said, “Where to?”

“Let’s go to Tootsie’s. You drive.”

Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge was a famous dive on Lower Broadway in the heart of downtown. We parked the Silverado in a public lot four blocks away. In good weather, it was a pleasant stroll. Today, the wind knifed through my coat and brought tears to my eyes. Halfway across the street, my ears were already numb.

“You’re gonna give me pneumonia,” I groused. “Worse, you’re gonna
get
pneumonia, and then Patrice is gonna kill me.”

His wife’s name evoked a grudging smile. “Damn straight. Can’t you hear it? ‘What were you thinking, dragging an old man out in the cold like that?’ ”

“Not so old,” I said, trying to count it up. What was he? Sixty, sixty-one? Didn’t they say fifty was the new thirty? That would make sixty the new forty. Which would make me, what? The new sixteen?

After awhile, he said, “I always thought I’d die in the traces.”

“Things get too rough, you could come and work with me,” I said.

“I’ve seen your office. That damn desk. It should have its own country. There’s not enough space for me and it in the same room.”

“I love that desk,” I said. “It’s got character.”

“So did Margaret Thatcher. But I wouldn’t want to share my office with her.”

We pushed open the front door of Tootsie’s, and a gust of warm air rolled over us. It smelled of beer and grease and a hint of old cigarette smoke. The musicians at the front, a Dixie diva and a concrete cowboy, were singing a decent version of Garth Brooks’s “I’ve Got Friends in Low Places” to a half-empty room. They nodded in acknowledgement as we stuffed a pair of fives into the tip jar and made our way to a table for four at the back. We shook the sleet out of our jackets and tossed them into the extra seats. Then we both moved our chairs so we could see the exit.

I plucked a handful of napkins from the dispenser and dried my hands and face as well as I could, then waited until the waitress had taken our orders—a Bud and an order of fries for Frank, onion rings and AmberBock for me—before taking out the file and opening it on the table between us. A full-color photo of Razor’s butchered body lay on top of the stack, and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe it was a good thing we’d come at a slow time.

The photo showed a naked young man stretched across a pentagram drawn in blood. His own blood, according to the lab results. Drawn postmortem—though how you could sacrifice a guy who’d already bled out was beyond me.

The next photo was a candid shot taken a few weeks before Razor’s death. He had high cheekbones and a straight, narrow nose and, except for a few faint lines at the corners of his eyes, he looked younger than his years. Thick hair dyed onyx juxtaposed with blue-white skin and a sullen, effeminate mouth that had probably seduced dozens of boys like Josh.

I studied the picture, trying without success to muster some sympathy for the dead man, but all I could think was,
Flirt with the devil, and don’t be surprised if he asks you to dance.

Suddenly queasy, I shoved the photograph to the bottom of the pile. Sifted through the haphazard stack of papers. Crime scene photos, the medical examiner’s report, police reports, transcriptions of interviews, including Absinthe’s confession. Razor’s death, laid out in front of me like a hand of cards.

“How about an overview?” I said.

Frank took a swig of beer, took his time swallowing. “We found traces of blood in the tub,” he said, finally. “Looks like they carried your buddy Razor upstairs and hung him up to drain the body.”

“Hung him up where?”

“Chin-up bar in the upstairs hall. We found a little spatter on the wall there. We think they drained the blood into a bucket and rinsed it out in the bathtub when they were finished with it. They disinfected afterward, but you know how that is.”

I knew. Chemiluminescent compounds could reveal traces of blood years after the fact. The newer ones worked just like Luminal, only better.

Frank went on. “After they drained the blood, they went downstairs and drew the pentagram with it, splashed the rest around the room, posed the body, then used some kind of vacuum on the couch and carpet.”

“They leave the bag?”

“I wish. They did leave a couple of footprints—looks like somebody stepped in the blood and tracked it around some—but even if we could pull prints from the carpet, they’re too smeared to be of any use. Can’t even tell what size they were.”

“You think they smeared the prints on purpose?”

“We’re pretty sure they did.”

I picked up the next photo, a close-up of Razor’s forearm, arcane symbols carved into it, dark slits between whitened edges of skin. “Ugly,” I said.

“Aren’t they all?” He tapped one of the symbols with a forefinger. “Some of these are defensive cuts. The symbols were carved on top of them later. Like somebody didn’t want us to know he fought.”

Somebody.
Not Absinthe. Not Josh. Just somebody. The muscles in the back of my neck loosened a bit.

I rummaged through the stack and plucked out the medical examiner’s report. Cause of death was a jagged throat wound. Its size and shape showed that the blade had gone in straight, then jerked sideways, slicing through the jugular; but there was no way to tell whether the killer had planned it that way, or whether Razor had widened the wound in an instinctive attempt to pull free of the blade. The forensic pathologist called it a compound wound. Like the defensive cuts, it indicated a struggle.