The Price of Malice (3 page)

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.

But the fragile shell of tradition had been smashed for Lyn, leaving only questions, doubts, and a nagging disillusionment. Joe might have been only the proverbial messenger in the affair, but he was taking the full brunt of an untold quantity of baggage that she was choosing to keep to herself.

As a result, although they were now both living and working in Brattleboro—she as a bar owner, and he as the field force commander of the VBI—they hadn’t spoken or seen each other for over two weeks.

Joe hated it. His age alone put him at the top of his profession’s food chain. Most of his police academy classmates had long ago retired and a couple had died. He had witnessed much of what life had to deliver—the bloody chaos of combat, a young wife taken by cancer, a career of dealing with the destructive impulsiveness of a violent and selfish species. He had resisted becoming a hard man, but he had certainly become an experienced one.

All of which helped him resent the hell out of now feeling like a jilted teenager.

He blinked and refocused on the remains of Wayne Castine, struck by the absurdity of even thinking about such things, here and now.

Time to get a grip.

J
oe paused at the emergency-room reception window at Brattleboro’s Memorial Hospital and waved to the white-haired nurse on the other side of the glass.

He leaned over so that his mouth was near the slot. “Hey, Elizabeth. Haven’t you retired yet?”

Elizabeth Pace looked up and smiled broadly. “You old goat. You should talk. At least I tried it once—did you know that? Lasted about three weeks.”

She hit the electronic button opening the sliding-glass door into the ER, and swiveled her chair to face him as he stopped at her counter.

“That’s a little friendlier,” she said, reaching up for an awkward hug.

He patted her shoulder and kissed her cheek. “You must have maxed out your retirement years ago,” he said.

She laughed. “Six, to be exact. I think I’m working for thirty cents an hour by now. You, too?”

He shrugged. “Something like that. I don’t bother counting.”

She shook her head. “Warhorses. What a breed. I’ll take a wild guess and say you’re here to interview Ms. Babbitt.”

“I am. How’s she doing?”

“Better now. She was pretty worked up when they brought her in. Is the scene as bad as she’s saying?”

Joe grimaced. “Maybe worse.”

Elizabeth’s face saddened. “What a shame. The things we do. Take a left at the corner, Joe, second room on the right. We thought we’d give her a little privacy.”

Joe pushed himself away from the counter. “Thanks. She been medicated with anything?”

“Amounts to a sugar pill, really. Nothing that’ll get in your way.”

Joe thanked her again and walked down the short hallway, following her directions. He had ambivalent emotions about this hospital—what the locals called BMH—despite the fact that the town’s small population and his own familiarity with it virtually guaranteed that he could have found ten other friends on this floor alone.

But his wife, Ellen, had died here of cancer, decades ago, when his career as a cop had barely begun. His youthful sense of invincibility had undergone daily batterings entering a building that had come to embody a shrine for the dying. He respected the people working here, knew that Ellen got the best care possible, and had been coming here himself ever since, for any number of reasons. But like a well-trained Pavlovian dog, he’d never forgotten the place’s initial role in his life, and it always made him uneasy.

He reached the door in question, knocked quietly, and pushed it open slowly, allowing whoever was behind it time to adjust for a visitor.

At first sight, Liz Babbitt struck him as more caricature than human being, especially in the ER’s sterile, starkly mechanical setting.

Her eyes were red-rimmed and heavily made-up, a steel stud gleamed against one nostril, her hair was teased, carefully chaotic, and dusted with something sparkly, and her emaciated, nervous body was clad in a garish mismatch of tight-fitting, exotic, borderline punk evening wear. She was bright and angular and a little bit wild, and—in this monochromatic environment—struck him as a hapless, endangered life-form, en route to some awaiting nature preserve.

“Ms. Babbitt?” he asked, his voice soft.

She nodded once, quickly, the gesture matching the furtive look.