The Price of Malice (2 page)

Willy’s frown deepened. “I’ll believe that when I see it. You’re making this sound like a whodunit.”

Ron nodded. “So far, it is. The dead guy is Wayne Castine, thirty-two. He was stabbed a bunch of times, and maybe shot and beaten, too. It’s hard to tell with the blood. It’s all over him, and all over the apartment.”

“He live here alone?” Sam asked as Willy headed for where Phil was waiting with the crime-scene equipment.

“He didn’t live here at all, and the woman who does swears she doesn’t know who he is.” Ron paused before rephrasing. “Correction—she says she doesn’t know Wayne Castine. Making a visual ID on this guy is a little tough right now. She might know him but not his name.”

“Do we know
her
?” Sam asked, in the age-old shorthand for, is she in the computer for any past misbehavior?

“Some speeding tickets,” he answered. “Two DUIs over the past two years; a couple of domestics as the victim; a few public disturbances involving alcohol. She’s been a person-of-interest in a dozen or more cases, hanging with a tough crowd.” He held his hands out to both sides, palms up, in a hapless gesture. “Name’s Elisabeth Babbitt—British-style spelling. Calls herself Liz. She’s pretty down and out, like everybody else on the block. Only moved here a couple of months ago. Lived in West Bratt before that; Bellows Falls before that; north of Putney in a trailer before that. And that’s just the past four years.”

Willy returned, awkwardly zipping up his white suit while holding the hat, gloves, and booties, all with one hand. Everyone knew better than to offer to help. Sam took advantage of his approach to get outfitted herself.

“Not to sound obvious,” Willy said, having overheard the conversation. “But if the guy’s too messed up to recognize, how do you know who he is?”

“Wallet,” Ron explained shortly. “It was poking out of his front pants pocket. I could snag it without disturbing anything else. I had dispatch run his license through CAD, and there were enough common traits to make it look pretty likely he’s the guy, including a tattoo on his forearm.”

Willy pursed his lips but withheld comment, pointing toward the apartment with his chin instead. “She find the body?” he asked.

“Yeah, after a night of barhopping.”

“She share the place with anyone?”

Klesczewski shook his head. “Not that you can tell. I didn’t get into the nitty-gritty with her—didn’t want to trample too much ground ahead of you guys. But I got the feeling she wasn’t beyond getting help with the rent the old-fashioned way.”

“She’s a hooker,” Willy restated bluntly, leaning against the rickety railing and pulling on the booties as Sam returned, typically all ready to go.

“Amateur, I’d guess,” Ron suggested. “Officially, she works at the grocery store.”

Willy nodded.

Sam asked, “What do we have on Castine?”

“He’s a kid diddler,” Willy said without looking up.

They both stared at him, taken off guard.

“You know this guy?” Sam asked.

“I know about him,” Willy answered her, intent on his task. “We never busted him when we were with the PD, but he was a person-of-interest a dozen times or more—buying booze for kids, crawling around the edge of underage parties, offering rides after school. One of those scumbags you know is dirty, but you can’t catch him.”

Sam glanced at Ron, who shrugged and said, “He’s right. I don’t have much to add. He lives in a one-room efficiency on Main Street—or lived, I should say. I have someone sitting on that. He worked as a part-time stacker and loader at one of the lumber companies. I got someone else getting a list of coworkers and buddies there, along with anything that might be interesting.” He added carefully, seeing Willy’s
expression darken, “Nothing too intense. We’re not conducting interviews—just collecting data.”

Willy laid one latex glove on the railing, wriggled inside of it with four fingers, and finished pulling it on with his teeth. “How screwed up is this scene, with all the pickpocketing and whatever?” he then asked.

Ron was ready for that one. “Babbitt found the body, used the phone to call 911, and then waited right here. The responding officer—Rich Matthews, who deserves a high five as far as I’m concerned—grilled her first for a couple of minutes, and then literally tiptoed in to determine that Castine was really dead and alone. He didn’t touch anything; came out the same way he went in; and then sealed the place up. He even took his boots off before he went in.”

Willy scowled. “That’s weird. He nuts? What if somebody had been hiding in the closet?”

Ron tilted his head to one side. “I know, I know. A little over the top. But he’s fresh out of the academy and a little paranoid about scene preservation. I already talked to him. Anyhow, the scene’s pretty good.”

“Except for you,” Willy commented.

“True,” Ron admitted. “I suited up to confirm what Rich had seen, mostly because he is new. And along with the wallet, I took some baseline shots. But that’s it.”

“You call the ME?”

“Him and the state’s attorney, but I also told them to hold tight until the crime lab arrived.”

Sam reached out and patted her old colleague on the arm. “You did good, Ron. Like always. Thanks.”

Willy didn’t say anything, but moved to the apartment’s door and glanced over his shoulder at his partner. “You ready?”

It wasn’t much, Wayne Castine’s last resting place. A hallway with a bathroom on one side and the kitchen opposite, leading to a small living room and a bedroom beyond. There were a couple of closets, with nobody in them, and a smattering of mismatched furniture. It wasn’t terribly dirty, smelled mostly of cheap soap and makeup, and bragged of an awkward Middle Eastern motif, or maybe South American, consisting of gauzy scarves and odd pieces of fabric draped across the windows and over lamp shades.

Sammie studied Willy as he preceded her slowly down the hall, keeping his feet on the strip of brown butcher paper that Ron had laid out on the floor. She could sense through his body language—as he paused here and there, his latex-clad fingers sometimes extending as in a failed effort to reach out—a desire to absorb what might have happened in this now dull, quiet, otherwise mundane little home.

It was an understandable ambition, since what they could see, in the absence still of any dead body, spoke of grim and relentless violence. On the hallway’s floor, smearing the walls and doorjambs, splattered and dripped and swiped as in a child’s finger painting, was more blood than either one of them had witnessed in a long while.

Whatever else was left behind from the events of the night just past, certainly the lingering ghost of pure rage loomed large.

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.”

J
oe 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 they’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.”