Malevolent (18 page)

Thirty minutes ago, a hysterical Hispanic woman had been picked up on West 44th for cutting up her lover. She told arresting officers that he’d tried to kill her but that she loved him madly.
Madly
being the operative word.

Ah, Sex Crimes.

Those were just three of the warm files back on her desk, so why had she wasted a couple hours at the memorial service for a man who’d died an unsuspicious death? And what was she now doing, burning up even more valuable time at the front door of a highly disturbed woman who’d almost certainly faked a rape charge?

Melinda had plenty of time to ponder those imponderables while standing outside of the Marberry residence. She’d knocked, she’d rung the bell, she’d all but shimmied up a rainspout, but the freak-house inhabitants did nothing but huddle in the pitch-dark within and talk about her.

“Just go,”
she’d heard someone whisper.
“You have to let her in.”

A male voice, it had prickled Melinda’s skin. Only the television, she convinced herself. Or the radio, an announcer whose soothing, late-night tones just happened to sound a little like Vincent Applegate. That’s all.

Come on, she’d just left the minister and a few stragglers. Just a couple minutes ago she’d witnessed that uncomfortable scene between Tim Brentwood and his girlfriend after he’d stopped Melinda to talk. He’d wanted to know what she’d felt about the church and its congregation, but Melinda hadn’t gotten a word in before the girlfriend had come out, and it had become immediately apparent that there was something heavy between the two of them.

Anyway, Vincent and his wife (something terse going on
there
too) had still been saying their good-byes to their congregation when Melinda got out of Dodge in her Dodge Charger. It would have been all but impossible for him to have left his wife and raced ahead to the Marberry place, even if he’d had reason to do so.

So Melinda stood there, smiling at her paranoia as she listened to the whispers, and absently ran a hand across her tender right breast. From inside, she finally heard footsteps.

Coming toward her.

Metal groaned as a dead bolt was released. A metal bolt got dragged across a chain-mount channel and a key was twisted in a lock while Melinda cleared her throat and rehearsed her lines. My, it took a long time to unlock that door.

It finally rasped open, slowly, with all of the melodrama of a bad thriller. Germaine Marberry stood there, blinked into the night. “Yes?” she said. “What is it now?”

On previous visits, Melinda had judged the woman to possess a potential for attractiveness. She was tall and slender, her features fine and skin possessing the smoothness of a woman unfamiliar with smoke, drink, late hours or harsh sun. It was only her drab style of dress and lack of makeup or self-esteem that detracted from what nature had tried to give her.

Tonight, however, Germaine Marberry’s problems went much deeper. Her mouth was slack and eyes empty smudges in a face that had grown too taut. Her firm, angry posture was gone, replaced with the hunch of the unwell.

Melinda’s prepared comments were gone, as well. She said, “Ms. Marberry, I think you should come with me to a hospital.”

The cat sprang from nowhere and sank its teeth into the back of Melinda’s hand.

For a moment, that’s all that happened. Time slowed as Melinda examined with almost detached curiosity the long black cat still dangling from her hand. Germaine watched too, her slack expression disturbed only by an upward tilt of her eyebrows and a hand that fluttered near her throat. Even the cat seemed to do little more than see what was going to happen next.

To Melinda, in those first few disorienting seconds, the animal hanging from her flesh reminded her of a car-chasing little dog who’d actually caught one.
Now what?
It seemed to say.

“No, Battle, no!”

The shrieking woman-child came from deep within the house, a tennis racket in hand which she swung wildly, sending a table lamp reeling and cat-soiled newspapers skittering across the floor in the stirred-up breeze. Light danced over the walls as the lamp debated whether or not to topple.

Melinda Dillon, now well aware of the pain communicating loud and clear between the torn hand and her brain’s nerve center, thought,
Oh God, no, not the light.
She couldn’t bear the thought of facing this house, those people, the cats, in the dark.

But the lamp held its ground, and so did the cat, at least until the mentally disabled woman with the tennis racket served up a clumsy but effective forehand that sent it packing.

“Goddamn Battle,” the woman muttered.

“Wasn’t Battle,” Germaine said, voice weary. It looked as though she’d been snoozing in the easy chair still imprinted with her form. “It was Bandit. I get them confused sometimes too, Dolly.”

She sounded more than merely tired. She leaned against a wall, her lids half closed.

Melinda stared at the back of her hand where three red trickles crawled toward her wrist. “I’ve got to…where’s your bathroom?” Amazing herself at how calm she sounded.

Neither woman seemed to have heard. Germaine remained propped, glassy-eyed, against a wall while her sister assumed a defensive pose, scowling at three more cats crouched at the foot of the stairs. Dolly took a slow step toward them and made a strange, guttural sound. The three cats disappeared, leaving a trail of threatening murmurs behind them.

Melinda wandered off without awaiting a response. She swiftly passed by the stairwell, vigilant for movement or glowing eyes. The odor of unwashed fur and overflowing litter boxes clung to the air.

She followed a narrow corridor along the side of the stairwell, followed it into the depths of the home. Attracted like a moth to a single feeble light source, she found herself standing outside a door where a nightstand lamp threw a little light on a bed and a still figure under bed sheets. The heavy brocade paper had been shredded from the walls in long strips. Melinda followed a tiny sound to a very pregnant calico chewing the paste from a slash of wallpaper dangling to the floor.

Melinda backed out of the room. She flicked on a hallway light to reveal more shredded wallpaper. A few framed photos had been knocked down, the glass shattered. They were a few of many lining the hallway walls, all featuring some combination of the three women of the house, and no others. She stepped delicately around the shards and found another door.

This was the right one. She dragged her hand across the wall in search of a switch and prepared herself as much as possible for another set of needle fangs. Found the switch and was rewarded with the bright glare of fluorescent tubes framing a medicine chest.

She turned a tap with an elbow to avoid contact with the moldy porcelain. The sink had a fuzzy gray film. Her nose wrinkled against the human waste odor hanging heavily in the air.

Even the water looked grimy as it splashed lukewarm over her torn hand to slip, pink with blood, down the drain. Her hand throbbed, but the cut wasn’t as deep as she’d feared. Melinda skidded a lump of soap over the flesh and let the water run until it ran clear. She dabbed the skin dry with a wad of toilet paper, relieved to have a series of tasks to complete to keep her mind from reviewing the cat’s attack and the figure in the bed.

She jumped, gasped, when a hand snaked in front of her.

“Band-Aid,” Dolly said. Her face was expressionless, the features oddly tilted. She stood there, gawking at Melinda, banging her tennis racket absently against her shins.

Melinda had remembered the impaired woman to be grotesquely overweight, but that wasn’t actually the case. Dolly was plump, but hardly obese.

She took the offered adhesive bandage, thanked the woman and applied it to her wound. “Dolly, your cat is dangerous,” she said quietly. “Are they all like that?”

Something flickered in her eyes. A light of recognition, a spark of intelligence and…something else. Fear? The mentally impaired woman opened her mouth, but a voice cut in from behind her in the hallway.

“Dolly, it’s bedtime.”

Germaine sounded like she was still trying to wake up. The way she leaned against the wall out there brought to mind the shattered photos just feet away. A person shambling along, leaning on the wall for support, could bring on such destruction.

“Nuh-uh,” Dolly cried. “The cats ain’t all right ’cuz Vincent says—”

“Dolly! Shut up and go to your room,” Germaine snapped.

The tone startled the handicapped woman to silence. Her eyes grew wide and she took off, wailing, down the hall. Melinda could hear her banging her tennis racket against both walls on her trek to banishment. A door slammed.

Melinda watched Germaine swaying slightly, still standing there right outside the bathroom door.

“What about Vincent?” She’d meant to interrogate the woman, browbeat the information from her, but Melinda found she could manage no more than a whispered plea.

Germaine was suddenly so close to her face that Melinda could see the blue vein throbbing in her forehead. Jutting her jaw so that her small teeth flashed, the woman said, “If you have a warrant, show it. If not, get the hell out of my house.”

Melinda backed up, hard against the porcelain sink. She could hear Germaine’s stomach growling, long and insistently. Feeling trapped in the smelly little room, Melinda forced herself to move forward, brushing the other woman back. She moved slowly out of the bathroom and back into the shadowy hall. Six pairs of eyes glittered at her from different heights of the stairwell she passed. She moved quickly to get out of leaping range.

Melinda turned to keep Germaine in sight. “How’s your mother doing?”

“She’s sleeping.”

“If you want to talk more about what happened the other night—”

“I don’t. The subject is closed.”

Even with the nine millimeter in her purse, the badge in her wallet and a car radio just outside the door, Melinda felt helpless against Germaine and her pitiful sister and the hungry-eyed cats and the still shape under the sheet in the back bedroom.

She stared down more cats as she crept closer to the front door. She made it out and onto the stoop and into the night and through the weed-choked sidewalk to her car at the curb beyond. She turned the ignition over. Fired up the headlights, clutched and slammed the Charger into gear and got the hell out of there.

Didn’t stop until she saw the crowd drawn by the blue and red flashing lights on Broadale.

Chapter Thirty

“Then you know Wanda Gates,” the homicide sergeant boomed. “She works in your unit, don’t she?” He craned his heavy neck into the crowd. “Hey, Mitch, this’s Melinda—what was it, Dillon?—in Sex Crimes. She knows Wanda.”

His partner, leaning over the corpse, didn’t seem half as impressed by the small world in which they all worked. He grunted and continued to direct the efforts of the police videographer documenting the American drama at his feet. Uniformed cops were holding the crowd back, a louder, more boisterous gathering than the similar crime scene Melinda had attended the previous week.

“To answer your first question, Melinda, we can’t move her till we shoot the scene, but I got a look at her neck. Rubbed raw by a rope or something on that order. The ME’s going to say it’s strangulation.”

The sergeant said this in the hearty, confident delivery of someone who likes his work. He was a muscular jet-black man, his sculpted body only marred by one too many chins. He apparently hadn’t figured out how to bench press some shape into that area.

He stood by his cruiser, radio mic in hand, having been intercepted by Melinda in the act of reporting in. Now he finished up with a few mumbled words and said, “Come on, I’ll show you, but only because you were in the neighborhood and you know Wanda.”

Melinda didn’t think she’d ever met a Wanda in her life, but this was no time to voice that particular thought. She followed the booming homicide cop as he kept up the chat and waded through the onlookers like they weren’t there.

There she was, the bent, lifeless body in the circle of white light set up by the videographer. Center stage. Melinda swallowed hard. Her heart tripped at the possibility that she’d see a familiar face once the corpse got repositioned. The young woman in khaki shorts was facedown, the neck at an odd angle, limbs sprawled like only the dead can sprawl. Melinda’s mind raced back to scenes from earlier in the evening. Most of the women had worn shorts or casual skirts with bare legs and sandals.

“I’ve got to see her,” she said softly. “Her face, I mean.”

“Really? Well, she doesn’t at this point appear to be one of yours, but…”

What the loud sergeant meant was that the victim’s clothing didn’t appear to be in disarray. No panties hanging from one ankle or gone altogether. They couldn’t rule out anything without the medical examiner, but it didn’t look even to Melinda like a sex crime.

The sergeant sighed. He appeared to be a star in his own movie as he slowly applied plastic gloves under the bright lights and the videocam’s steady gaze. He carefully tilted the victim’s head for a better view.

“Enough?” he said, repositioning the corpse exactly as found and rising to his feet.

“Enough,” Melinda said.

“You know her?” the sergeant barked.