Sykes promises to get back with him or, more likely, an investigator named Winston Garano will. George doesn’t sound very happy when he hears that part.
“It’s just awfully painful to open up all this,” he explains. “You mind my asking why it’s necessary after all these years?”
“We’re just looking into a few things, sir. I appreciate your cooperation.”
“Of course. Whatever I can do to help.”
He’d rather eat dirt than help, Sykes thinks. When the anger goes away and the ugliness fades, a lot of people don’t care about justice anymore. They just want to forget.
“Too bad,” she mutters to Barber’s dark, wretched basement. It’s not like I’m having fun, either.
She ponders and contemplates, perched on the pickle bucket like that statue The Thinker, resumes going through more bills, finds a MasterCard bill for September, pulls out what is in the envelope, finds something that gives her a disk error, as she calls it.
“What the hell?” she mutters, staring at a document with a cover sheet stamped with an autopsy case number, then another case number, this one a police file number sloppily scribbled in penciclass="underline" KPD893-85.
The page underneath it is a medical examiner’s inventory of Vivian Finlay’s personal effects, and stapled to it is a Polaroid photograph of mutilated male body parts, grimy and gory: feet, arms and legs, pieces and parts, guts, a decapitated head, arranged on top of a steel autopsy table covered with a green sheet. The case number written on a six-inch ruler used as a reference scale indicates that the death occurred in North Carolina in 1983.
Win wakes up with a start, for an instant not sure where he is. He realizes he’s been asleep for more than two hours, still in his clothes, his neck stiff, the coffee on his bedside table cold.
He checks his phone messages, skipping over the earlier ones left by Sykes when he was too busy with Lamont to deal with the Finlay case. Sykes has left him another message: She’s sent him files over the Internet and he needs to look at them right away and call her. His computer is neatly centered on a Stickley desk (yard sale), and he sits down, enters Sykes’s number, gets her on her cell phone.
“Good God!” She hurts his ear. “I just heard!”
“Whoa,” he says. “You near a landline?”
She gives him a number he recognizes as the Academy. He calls her back.
“Good God!” she starts in again. “It’s all over the news. Good God, Win! What happened?”
“I’ll tell you about it later, Sykes.”
“You get in a shootout and you’re going to tell me later? At least you killed him. Goddamn, and her. How’s that gonna work? The DA? That’s all anybody’s talking about down here.”
“Can we move on, Sykes?”
“The part I don’t get is how you ended up at her house, walked right into it. She invite you there for a nightcap or something?”
It doesn’t take a detective to pick up on her jealousy. The beautiful, powerful Lamont, all the more formidable because Sykes has never met her, and now she imagines him heroically saving her life, probably thinks Lamont is devoted to him forever, wants to quit her job for him, get married, have his children, throw herself on a funeral pyre when he dies.
“Tell me what you’ve got,” he says. “You find the file?”
“After spending half the night in Barber’s damn basement, everything but.”
He sips his cold coffee, goes into his e-mail, sees files from her, converts them to documents as she talks fast, hardly takes a breath, tells him about MasterCard and phone bills, about Barber’s probable territoriality and glory-hunting and secrecy, what Mrs. Finlay’s nephew had to say. Then gets to the part about some man who had a bad encounter with a train in Charlotte two years before Mrs. Finlay’s murder.
“Whoa, slow down,” Win interrupts her, scanning a document on his screen. “What’s a train death got to do with anything?”
“You tell me. You looking at the picture?”
“Looking at it now.” He studies the photograph on his screen, not very good quality, a Polaroid of raggedly severed limbs and intestines and chunks of flesh piled next to a mutilated torso and severed head, what looks like black grease and dirt everywhere. White guy. Black hair. Pretty young, as best Win can tell. “You checked it out with the ME’s office?”
“You know, I didn’t realize this was my case.”
His cell phone rings. He doesn’t answer, impatiently silences it.
“Hey,” Win says to Sykes. “You sound pissed at me.”
“I’m not pissed at you,” Sykes says angrily.
“Good. Because I’ve got plenty of people pissed at me and don’t need you added to the list.”
“Like who?”
“Her, for starters.”
“You mean after what you did…?”
“Exactly. I’ve tried to tell you. She’s borderline, a sociopath, Bonnie without Clyde, doesn’t need a Clyde, thinks all of us are Clydes. Hates Clydes, actually.”
“You saying Lamont doesn’t like men?”
“Not sure she likes anybody.”
“Well, it’d be nice if you’d say thanks.” Sykes tries to sound gruff. “I’ve been up all night running down crap for you, and I’m supposed to be in class in five minutes and where am I? In the damn media room sending files to you, trying to call people, mostly getting cussed at. I’m going to look at the case later today, on a flight to Raleigh, the ME’s office in Chapel Hill.”
“Who cussed at you?” He smiles a little. When she gets riled, she sounds like a little kid, one as Southern as pecan pie.
“Some damn Charlotte cop. And who’s going to reimburse me for my plane ticket, by the way?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything,” he says, scrolling through another file, information that came from Detective Barber’s basement, puzzled by a medical examiner’s inventory of personal effects removed from a dead body in the morgue. “What did the damn Charlotte cop who worked the train fatality have to say?”
One pair of ruffled blue tennis panties with ball pocket, he reads the inventory.
One Izod white tennis skirt and matching shirt, bloody…
His cell phone rings again. He ignores it.
“The big jerk.” Sykes continues to vent all over the map. “He’s the police chief now, you know what they say about what floats to the top.”
He zooms in on a number written in pencil on the upper-right corner of the personal effects report.
KPD893-85.
“Sykes?”
“… Said I’d have to submit my request in writing if I want copies of the reports, which by now would probably be on microfilm,” she is saying. “But he said he didn’t understand the interest, there was nothing to it…”
“Sykes? KPD893-85. Vivian Finlay? She was wearing tennis clothes when she was murdered?”
“Try telling that to him, the guy smashed to smithereens by the damn freight train. Nothing to it…”
“Sykes! This inventory is Vivian Finlay’s personal effects when she came into the morgue?”
“That’s the next bizarre part, the only thing I could find from her case file. Where the hell’s the rest of it?”
“These bloody tennis clothes are what’s been in the Knoxville PD’s evidence room for twenty years, what’s being tested for DNA in California?”
The autopsy report Lamont gave him depicts a tiny seventy-three-year-old lady.
“You sure this personal-effects form is from her case?” Win asks.
“That’s her case number for sure. I looked at every damn thing in every damn box while that Roller Derby drunk wife of his rattled around in the kitchen upstairs, stomped around, made sure I knew how unwelcome I was. There’s nothing else.”