Trace of Doubt (5 page)

Chapter 7

I
arrived back at my apartment around ten that night. Ordinarily I don’t think much of walking from my car to my apartment, but since the warehouse, since the letter from my mother’s killer, everything had changed.

I let myself in. David and Bo weren’t there. Sometimes David stayed at his dad’s. I was grateful he wasn’t home because my head was swimming—too many diverging theories and possibilities were suddenly appearing in my mother’s case. The trail had been so cold it was icy—and yet now, all of a sudden, it was hot again.

I went to the kitchen and pulled down a wineglass and poured myself a pinot noir. My brother had gifted me a case of a nice Australian vintage—stolen, I’m sure. I learned long ago not to look a gift horse in the mouth with my brother and father. I learned not to look for gift receipts, either. I just smiled and accepted that their hearts were in the right place.

Taking my wine, I went to the bedroom, turned on the light, opened the closet door, and pulled down the box of cards and keepsakes my father had given me.

Sitting down on the bed, I lifted the lid, smelling the musty scent of the attic where he’d kept the box for so long. Pulling out a stack of cards, I started opening them. Most were the Valentine’s cards Dad had sent her. All of them had handwritten notes. It was a side of my dad lost forever when she died:

To My Darling,

Every day I’m grateful you are in my life. If I hadn’t met you, I don’t think anything in my life would be any good at all. You are the reason I get up each day. You and the kids.

Yours always,
Frank

Tears welled up as I pulled out Mother’s Day cards made with macaroni and glitter, and Thanksgiving turkeys traced around Mikey’s little palm print and then mine. She seemed to have saved everything we ever gave her. I grinned at my own child scrawl in crayons. I showed a fondness for purple. Mike seemed to prefer doing his cards in brown and green. He was colorblind.

Next I found a shoebox from a pair of kids’ shoes. I opened it, expecting to find my baby shoes, but instead discovered dried rose petals. I covered the shoebox and looked back inside the bigger carton.

I dug still deeper. Then I frowned. Down at the very, very bottom was a manila file folder. I pulled it out and looked in. Inside were several cards—Hallmarks. I opened one of the red envelopes. It was a mushy card about “Loving you so much” and it was signed “Andrew.”

I dropped the card in my lap. Who the hell was Andrew? And whoever he was, could he be my father? I took a big swig of my stolen pinot noir. Sooner or later, I would have to ask my father about the past. And Frank Quinn was not exactly the most forthcoming man in the world. We had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in the Quinn family.

But now I would have to ask.

And I prayed he would, for once, tell.

The next morning the alarm rang way too early. Between the long round trip to Little Siberia and the mystery of “Andrew” I was exhausted. I’d slept fitfully, and I didn’t feel like getting out of bed, but I never call in sick.

Funny, but my father and brother have never worked an honest day in their lives. They don’t operate in the nine-to-five world. But I’m up before 5:00 a.m. each day. Or pretty close to it. I’ve operated in a very exacting universe. To a criminalist, every analysis has to be painstakingly accurate. Every sample must be treated with sanctity.

I got out of bed, showered and dressed for work. Then I fed my cat and headed to the lab, making it there by quarter after seven. I used my key pass to get in the building, and of course at the log-in sheet I could see that I hadn’t beaten Lewis there at all. Never have.

I grabbed a cup of coffee from the small kitchen on our floor—he always starts a pot when he gets in, and there are usually doughnuts or bagels—and went to his office to say hello.

“Hello, Wilhelmina.”

I rolled my eyes. “Hello, Lewis.”

“How was the rest of your weekend?”

I slumped into one of the chairs opposite him and took him step by step through my weekend, right through to the cards I found.

“Why now? Why has the killer picked now to try to taunt me?”

Lewis shook his head. “And the lock of hair? The blood samples?”

“I put them in for processing. Don’t know anything yet.”

“How are we doing on the rape kits?”

I shrugged. “It’s like shoveling shit against the tide.”

“Well, aren’t you going to ask me how my weekend was?”

“Do I want to know?”

“Mitch and the vice president of the network took me to dinner at one of the restaurants in the Time Warner building. Japanese place.”

I shrugged. “We had Japanese on Friday.”

“Yeah. But not bluefin tuna. Exotic sushi. Bill was six hundred dollars each. Each. Not that they let me pay. You need to put four hundred dollars on a credit card just to reserve your table.”

“Since when were you impressed by money? You don’t spend the money you have now!”

“I know, but it’s nice to be wined and dined like a big-shot once in a while instead of fielding calls from crabby prosecutors and assorted politicos who want to bitch at me.”

“Lewis, please don’t abandon me.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted them. “I’m sorry. That’s not fair.”

“What if you came with me? What if I told them I’d only do it if you were part of my team? Can’t you just see us having our own television show? And honey, you’d be a helluva lot better than that Nancy Grace. My God, but it’s all I can do but reach through the television and squeeze her neck.”

I shook my head. “Lewis, I’m a lab rat. Always have been.” I sipped my coffee, then stood up. “I better go.” I left Lewis’s office and wandered over to my own. Lewis was a lab rat, too. Albeit a more flamboyant one. I just hoped he realized that. I looked around the lab. I couldn’t imagine this place without him.

Chapter 8

K
enora Simmons lived in a much nicer place than I did.

I sat outside her house and tried to fathom how a twenty-year-old girl from the projects with, as the cops might say, “no visible means of support,” owned an attractive Tudor with four bedrooms and an expansive yard in Englewood Cliffs. I’d looked it up on the Internet. The house was worth nearly seven hundred thousand dollars.

The trees on her property were in full bloom, and pink roses grew up a trellis leading to the second floor. I had been watching her house since I left work at six that Monday. I was just about to call it an evening and go grab some takeout. One of the members of the camera crew was with me to get some footage of the “leg work” involved with cold cases and the Justice Foundation. We’d been driving each other crazy with hunger, trying to decide what kind of food we wanted for dinner. We had settled on Thai and my mouth was watering.

I had tracked down Kenora through one of her old pals from the projects. Just as I checked my watch yet again, Kenora drove up to her house in a flashy red Mustang. Something wasn’t right here.

“Nice wheels,” the cameraman said. His name was Charlie.

“Nice wheels indeed.”

She exited her car, and I climbed out of mine. “Kenora!”

She turned her head toward me. I was stunned. The Kenora of the trial was a plain, African-American girl with hair braided at home by her aunt and a cheap wardrobe. She had been a bit overweight, and the word that came to mind when I saw photos of her was
sloppy.
The prosecutors had encouraged her to dress demurely, I’m sure. And she had tried. But, simply put, taken as a whole, she’d appeared slovenly, as if she hadn’t been able to quite figure out how to pull all the elements together.

The woman in front of me now was stunning. If she hadn’t had Kenora’s hazel eyes, I would have assumed I had the wrong person. She had lost forty pounds, I guessed. Her outfit was impeccable, clearly designer all the way, right down to her “it” bag of the moment, a Chanel. Her hair had been chemically straightened and lightened to a champagne blond, and the effect was gorgeous. Her hair looked silky and swayed across her back as she walked.

She glared at me. “Who are you?”

I crossed the street and walked closer to her. “My name’s Billie Quinn.” When I was a few feet away from her, it was clear her clothes were absolutely top designer—not knock-off. I was pretty sure she was wearing a Versace pantsuit. But it was the cut, the fit, that told me it was a real name label. It draped her like second skin.

“And?” She stuck her hand on her hip. “You from a record label?”

“No. I’m from the Justice Foundation. We absolutely want to respect what you’ve been through, Kenora.”

She eyed me suspiciously. “Huh?”

“We’ve reopened the Marcus Hopkins case in an effort to clear his name.”

She blinked hard a couple of times, then turned on her Manolo heels and started toward her house.

“Please, Kenora. I just need ten minutes to review your story.”

She wheeled around and charged toward me. “I said everything I’m going to say. Everything I was supposed to say. Now you get the fuck away from me, bitch.”

“Supposed to say?” I asked her incredulously. “What does that mean?”

She took three strides to me and raised a hand. She was about to claw me with two-inch acrylic nails.

“Whoa, what are you hiding?” I snapped, then I ducked. She then grabbed me by my hair. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Charlie running his camera.

Kenora yanked my hair for all it was worth, and I screamed and felt tears burning my eyes. With my left hand, I shot my fist into her stomach, hoping to get her to release my hair. She did, as she doubled over, and I stood up and backed away, but she wasn’t done yet. She hurled a few curses at me and then swung her bag, which landed against my face. And I guessed by the pain she’d managed to hit me right where her cell phone was.

Charlie pulled out a cell phone of his own. “I’m gonna call the cops.”

Somehow I always cringe at the thought of the cops. I backed away. “Just a minute, Charlie. Look, Kenora, we’re just going to leave. Let’s just calm down.”

Suddenly, though, a burly bodyguard-type in a suit came bursting out of the house. I ducked to avoid Kenora’s flailing hands as she came at me again. I backed up out of her range as the guy in the suit came charging at me, barking at Kenora to go inside the house.

“You’re on private property. Get off before I call the cops,” the burly guy said, a veritable Sherman tank of muscles.

“I just wanted to ask her a question. And I’m in the street. It’s public property.”

“You can contact her lawyer if you got questions.”

“Who’s that?”

“Tony Gergen.”

I blinked. Gergen was an awfully high-priced lawyer for a girl from the projects who’d some how hit it big.

Kenora was now standing behind this big guy, who, I could tell from the bulge under his suit jacket, was packing a weapon.

“Tell that bitch to go home, T.C.”

“Go in the house, Kenora,” he ordered.

I figured I had one last chance to make an appeal to her conscience. “If Marcus didn’t do it, Kenora, you ruined one man’s life for things, for money. It’s not worth your soul.”

I saw her face react—her eyes closed slowly and she inhaled and then tightened her lips—but she turned away. T.C. watched as she huffed and then reluctantly went inside like a two-year-old with a tantrum. Then he came close to me. “I see you again, it’s trouble.”

He patted his side, where he was wearing his gun.

“If she lied, I don’t care who you are or what kind of gun you’re wearing, big guy,” I said icily.

I turned around and stormed toward my car. Charlie had caught everything on videotape—and at that moment, the big guy realized it.

“I want that film.”

“Yeah, right,” I snorted, turning around again.

He jogged over to Charlie and me. “I said give me the fucking film.” He jabbed his index finger right below my collarbone.

“No!” I snapped back and tried to raise myself an inch or two in height. “So back off.”

He shoved me, hard, against the car, then grabbed the lens of Charlie’s camera and pulled.

Charlie, with the camera mounted on his shoulder, was off balance and he tumbled to the road. I kicked the big guy in the shins. He returned that move with another shove, and I fell back against the hood of my car and wrenched my back.

I watched as he kicked the camera and then opened up the side and yanked out the film. I jumped on his back.

“That belongs to us!” I tried to reach around and grab the film, but he threw me off like I was a tiny spider riding on his back. I fell to the ground.

By this time, Charlie had gotten up. I scrambled to my feet, but the guy was already crossing the street and not looking back.

“Should we call the police?” Charlie asked.

“Nah,” I shook my head. “By the time they get here the film will be destroyed already. Besides, we got what we needed.”

“We didn’t get anything,” Charlie said, looking down at his camera and making sure it still worked.

“Yeah, we did. We know she lied. For money. Now we just have to figure out for whom.”

“Jesus!” Charlie said, his voice a little hoarse. “This camera’s worth a fortune.” He pressed some buttons. “It still works, thank God.”

Charlie and I got back in our car. I was moving kind of stiffly, and my back hurt like hell. “You still want Thai?” I asked him.

“Yeah, I’m still starving. Upset, but starving. Pissed, but starving.”

I drove toward Ft. Lee. “I’m buying. Sorry about that whole thing. I wish it had gone better.”

“Are you kidding? Too bad he got the tape. It was awesome footage. Kind of like
Cops.
”

“Great,” I said unenthusiastically.

“No, you don’t understand, Billie. Every time we run a Justice Foundation piece, we get tons of e-mails and stuff at the show. You and Lewis and Joe are getting pretty damn famous. You’re getting a lot of attention. And some of the e-mails…you’ve got some male admirers.”

A bolt of realization went through me.

I had an epiphany.

That was why I got the letter from my mother’s killer. He wanted fame. And when he saw me on television, he realized that what had eluded him all these years was within his grasp. The Suicide King case, the Marcus Hopkins case, were making the Foundation team household names. And now the killer wanted to be one, too.