The Enemy Inside (10 page)

Mortified at what she had done to all of them, Berg felt tears threatening to form behind her eyes. “Sorry . . .” she whispered.

Jay nodded briskly, trying to rein in his temper.
 
“Can’t you just tell
 
her—”
 

Berg shook her head, pressing her lips together. “It’s private.”

Jay frowned before he stared at her pensively. “Fine. Whatever.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Berg said softly, seeing his frown and misinterpreting it. “Maybe you don’t have to . . . can’t you just go over her head and ask—”

“No,” Jay said firmly.

“I’m just so sorry . . . I’m not worth your job . . .” She looked away, tears forming.

“Hey, I know you didn’t do it.” He pulled her in for a bear hug and wrapped his arms around her thin body like a vice. “So it’s worth it to me.”

It was the first time the detectives ever had any kind of physical contact that wasn’t strictly necessary. Berg shut her eyes and allowed herself to feel warm and safe for just a moment before pulling away. Jay dropped his arms quickly.

An eerie hush settled across the room as Berg started collecting her personal items from her desk.
 

Jay stood next to her and glared at all the detectives in the room, as if daring any of the curious officers to speak. It was only a matter of seconds before her pitiful collection of personal items, consisting of a hairbrush and some headache tablets, were tucked away in her purse.
 

“What are you going to do now?” he asked.

Berg shrugged. “Go home, feed my dog, go for a run, get drunk. What else?”
 

“Well, do you have family or friends you could stay with, you know, just for a night or two? I don’t think you should be alone right now.”

“Don’t have any of either,” Berg said over her shoulder as she left the station.

Chapter Eleven

Berg sat wrapped in a terry cloth robe on her couch, eyeing her clean apartment, contemplating her very dirty career ending.
 

The new bottle of Grey Goose stood half empty on a wooden side table next to the couch, but she had found no solutions in its contents. Purchasing the bottle on her way home and not bothering to mix or even chill it, Berg had been downing straight shots since she arrived home from the station.
 

She reasoned alcohol seemed to work for everyone else, after all.
 

A knock on her door momentarily caught Berg’s attention. She opened it to her neighbor, Vi, who was dropping Jesse home after his usual midmorning walk. Taking one look at Berg’s dejected, tear-streaked face, Vi unclipped Jesse’s leash and left without a word. A kind of doggy sympathy in his eyes, Jesse followed Berg back to the couch and licked her face with a quiet whine.

Unfortunately, the alcohol was not having the effect she was after. She was still annoyingly conscious and all too aware of her predicament.
 

You knew this would happen eventually. You’re a fraud,
the voice in her head whispered.
 

Berg put her hands over her ears, as if that could somehow dampen the unwelcome internal commentary.

She shifted on the couch, curling her legs until she sat crouched in a fetal position, arms around her shins. The movement made her muddled head swim and bile rise in her throat. She swallowed with a grimace and laid her head on her knees.
 

Clearly not inheriting her mother’s addiction of choice, Berg was not a good drinker. She found it made her feel sick far faster than it provided any numbing comfort. She was not sure why she persevered, but if there was a better time to get drunk than now, she didn’t know when it was.
 

She absentmindedly fingered the faded scars on her inner wrists and thighs as she continued to drink. The white, lumpy scars were remnants of an old life, when a teenage Alicia had found release with a razor blade and peroxide. As an adult, she had discovered new and even more damaging ways to deal with her demons.
 

Fortunately, those newer scars didn’t show on the outside.

Moving to stroke Jesse’s head, she contemplated her life, potentially as a civilian. She loved being a cop, and the prospect of life without it, more so even than the idea of being in a federal prison with more than a few offenders she herself had incarcerated, left her bereft. It was her identity, how she escaped herself and made up for old and new mistakes. Helping people made her feel worthwhile. What was she now?
 

This time the shadowy voice didn’t need to chime in; she knew the answer.
 

“I’m nothing,” she muttered.

Racking her addled brain, she tried to figure out how her DNA had ended up on a murder victim. Of course, people shed hairs all the time, and one could have settled on Rogers’s shirt when she examined him at the crime scene. But under it? She couldn’t help but suspect Consiglio had somehow set her up.
But he was nowhere near the body
.
 

Then there were her cell records. How could she have been so stupid to take her department cell with her?
 

The ring of her home phone interrupted her mulling. The old answering machine kicked in.
 

Leave a message after the tone,
her disembodied voice said.

“Hi, Berg? It’s me, Jay. Why is your cell off? If you’re there, can you pick up? Pick up . . . pick up! Okay, don’t pick up, then. Anyway, just thought you might want to know that I got the lowdown on Melissa’s autopsy report from a friend this afternoon, seeing how I direct traffic now,” he said.
 

Berg tensed, waiting for the results.

“She was killed execution style with a single shot to the head, as we thought. The bullet was mostly intact, and the examination of the lands and grooves, direction of twist—well, you know how we examine them—anyway, the bullet came from a Sig nine millimeter. It was a contact wound, so there would be significant deposits of bone, skin, blood, and gray matter in the perp’s gun barrel due to blowback. No evidence of rape or torture, no stun gun burns. She had some older, healed facial fractures. Lividity shows she was killed somewhere else and dumped in the forest later. No extraneous trace evidence pointing to a particular killer, but time of death is about the same as Rogers’s.”
 

Jay paused, as if unsure whether this was good or bad news for Berg. There was nothing linking Berg to Melissa’s death, but the proximity of her and Rogers’s bodies was still of concern, particularly if Consiglio wanted to push his case against Berg further.
 

“Anyway, as you know, Sig nine millimeters are police issue, but plenty of perps have them nowadays, so that shouldn’t mean anything for you, and if it comes right down to it, an examination of your gun will eliminate it as the murder weapon . . .”
 

Jay paused again, and Berg realized he wasn’t sure what the outcome of any examination of her weapon would be. She felt nausea welling up again at the thought that Jay could imagine she murdered not one, but two people, one of whom was an innocent young woman.
 

“The good news is it doesn’t look like Rogers and Melissa are linked. I think Arena is going to interview Rogers’s wife tomorrow, and we hope she might be able to shed some light on his habits and any enemies. No other news, or any explanation about how your DNA got on Rogers. Uh, I guess that’s it. Gimme a call?” He hung up.
 

Berg looked blankly at her phone. In the hours since her suspension, he had called three times, each time leaving a hopeful message, the first containing an update on her cases and the second to assure her of support from the other cops at the station. The third message now joined the previous two, and the message light blinked frantically, as if illustrating her anxious thoughts.

As the reality of Jay’s report and suspicions sunk in, she jumped up and ran for the bathroom to puke for real.

Jay walked into the ground-level entrance of the station late the next afternoon, a chorus of wolf whistles and applause exploding from his colleagues at his uniformed appearance. The captain wasn’t kidding about patrol duty, so he had dragged out his old, faithful blues from the back of the closet.
 

He had just spent a very stimulating morning driving around in a marked Crown Vic issuing traffic fines downtown. He spent much of the time wishing Leigh had confiscated his weapon, too. Shooting himself out of sheer boredom was now way too tempting.
 

Even though his uniform was a little snugger around the waist than it used to be, he still felt he looked pretty hot, and he remembered how well he had done with the ladies in his first years as a cop.

Nothing like a man in uniform to get the ladies all moist
.
 

“Yeah thanks, guys,” Jay replied in response to all the gleeful cheers and applause. “Thanks. ’Preciate it. Fuck you all later?”
 

More wolf whistles rang out, and he headed down to the morgue.

Jay stepped into the elevator and hit the button for the basement. It had been twenty-four hours since Berg’s suspension, and he needed some answers. Dr. Dwight was his first port of call.

“Ah, Detective,” Dwight said as Jay strode into the cold morgue. “I’ve been expecting you. I thought you’d be here yesterday.”

“Detective no longer, sadly,” Jay said. “I wanted to talk to you about the hair you found on Rogers. I guess you heard who it belonged to?”

“Yes, I had to give the chief the results. He was so smug it was almost obscene. I’m quite sure Detective Raymond didn’t do this, but the evidence doesn’t usually lie.”

Jay looked grim. “Well, that’s just it. Any other explanation as to how it got there?”
 

“If the hair had been found on top of the clothing, simple evidence transfer could have been to blame. Don’t tell Halwood I said that—he’d have a stroke. But because it was found on the skin under the clothes following a careful examination, that’s less likely.”

“Could someone have planted it at the scene?’ He didn’t say it, but it was clear to whom Jay was referring.

“Not unless they were at the crime scene prior to the hair’s discovery, which would have all kinds of other implications.”

“Damn. What about Melissa? There was a suggestion she was killed with a police-issue weapon?”

“Same style of gun and ammunition, but the class characteristics don’t match Detective Raymond’s weapon.”
 

Jay nodded in relief.

“There is one problem, though. The stun gun used on Taylor could be police issue. But again, it’s a common weapon within the community. Any grandma can get one online, so it’s not conclusive,” Dwight said.

“Fuck. Doesn’t really help Berg, though, does it? The hair, the gun, the stun gun—this is getting worse by the second. You know Consiglio will try and pin all three murders on her.” Jay stepped a few paces away and ran his hands through his thick hair. “It would wrap everything up very neatly for him—a troublesome detective fired and three local murders solved by dinnertime, just the way Joe Public likes it.”

“I know, and it does unfortunately appear that the killer of Taylor and Rogers has knowledge of evidence transfer. But in a sense, this actually helps Detective Raymond. After all, there was no other evidence whatsoever on the bodies, except for one erroneous hair. Raymond’s smarter than that. When you think about it, it seems strange that a single piece of evidence pointing to a suspect shows up on only one of a pair of very violent crimes. Crimes such as these usually yield much in the way of trace and DNA evidence. I think the person who carried out the murders is more careful than that. It’s evidence transfer. It has to be.”
 

Jay nodded in agreement. With his back still turned, he pondered what to do next.
 

“How is Detective Raymond, by the way? I’m concerned about her,” Dwight asked.

“I have no fucking idea.” Jay turned around. “She’s not taking any of my calls, and I haven’t seen her since it happened. I was thinking of going over to her place tonight and making her talk to me.”

“Good idea. She needs to know she has support here,” Dwight said before wandering into one of his labs.