He leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and let it out. “It don’t really matter anymore.”
“What doesn’t matter?”
His eyes were red and wet. “All of it. Everything. I been headed here a long time, and now that I am here, it don’t matter anymore.”
Her clients rarely told her the truth, especially the first time she met them, even when they were confronted with persuasive physical evidence, like DNA and fingerprints. The street-smart ones who’d spent their lives perfecting the arts of deception and denial would tell her without flinching that they knew it looked bad but it wasn’t them, that the eyewitnesses were liars and the lab tests were wrong, that they’d been at their mother’s house watching television when the crime occurred. When she’d tell them to get real, they’d ask what kind of deal they could get, not admitting their guilt but offering to testify against somebody. Who? she’d ask. Anybody, they would say. Whatever it took.
Jared Bell told her something she didn’t hear very often from her clients. He was where he belonged. Maybe because he was guilty and nothing he could do would change that or maybe because he was innocent and nothing he could do would prove that.
“Well, it matters to me,” she told him.
On her way out, Alex stopped to talk to Calvin Lockett, one of the corrections officers. Alex had cultivated a friendship with him, making it a point to ask about his family, sharing news of hers. It had paid off more than once when Calvin let her know about an inmate too eager to testify against one of her clients.
He had worked the jail for twenty years, using the time to become an unofficial jailhouse psychologist, adept at diagnosing what he called an inmate’s roots, the tangle of bad breaks, bad judgment, and plain meanness that put them in his charge. He grew up poor and black like many of them, puzzling about how he ended up on the other side of the steel bars. Rail thin and graying, he watched over the inmates, shaking his head and clucking his tongue.
“Hey, Calvin,” Alex said. “How’s it going?”
“Same old, same old.”
“I’ve got a new client, Jared Bell. What’s your take on him?”
“Boy’s a midnight screamer. Wakes everybody up with all his racket.”
“Nightmares, huh? Any idea what they’re about?”
Calvin shrugged. “Some people say dreams don’t mean a thing. I don’t buy that. Man dreams of making love to a beautiful woman, that’s what he needs. Man dreams he can fly, he’s trying to escape his troubles. Man that’s a midnight screamer, well, that’s his demons trying to get out.”
“You talk to him about his nightmares?”
“Don’t need to talk to him. I heard enough.”
“What did you hear besides his screaming?”
Calvin paused, looking around to make certain they wouldn’t be overheard. “Whoever that girl, Ali, is-or was-you ask me, he killed her. That’s what’s waking him up. He’s calling her name, saying he’s sorry.”
Alex’s heart picked up a beat. According to Rossi’s report, Jared said he didn’t know the victim’s name and Rossi hadn’t identified her. Knowing her name would jump-start Alex’s investigation.
“What, exactly, did Jared say?”
“He kept calling her name, saying ‘I’m sorry, Ali, I’m sorry.’”
“I don’t suppose he mentioned her last name.”
Calvin smirked. “You ever hear of a demon with a last name?”
Alex thought about her recurring nightmares, the ones in which Dwayne Reed appeared out of the darkness, reaching for her with one hand, the other clamped around Bonnie’s throat.
“I can think of at least one,” she said.
Chapter Thirteen
Rossi got back to his desk in the homicide unit, playing out in his head his next visit with Alex Stone, wanting that encounter to appear as accidental as the one at the Zoo actually had been. He was trying to figure out how to make that happen when his boss, Mitch Fowler, hollered at him from the door to his office.
“Rossi! My office! Now!”
Fowler was the commander of the homicide unit. He yelled at Rossi because he could and because it was his idea of strong leadership. Fowler lived in and by the book, while Rossi used the book as a doorstop. Fowler spent his days crunching numbers on overtime and closed cases, his hair thinning as his waistline swelled, frustrated that Rossi’s name was always at the top of both lists. Rossi’s overtime cost their unit too much money, but his closure rate made it impossible for Fowler to dial him back.
Rossi grabbed his cell phone, holding it to his ear, pretending to be talking to someone on the other end, one finger in the air signaling to Fowler that he’d be there in a minute. No one was on the other end, but he couldn’t resist pimping Fowler. He watched Fowler from the corner of his eye, waiting until Fowler’s face blossomed red before he pocketed his phone, slow walking to Fowler’s office. By the time he got there, Fowler was behind his desk, thumping a pencil against his belly. There were two chairs on the visitor’s side of the desk, one of them occupied.
“Hey, Rossi,” Charlie Wheeler said. “How’s it hangin’?”
Wheeler was Rossi’s first partner when he joined the homicide unit. His parents were wealthy physicians who sent him to Pembroke Hill, Kansas City’s private prep school, and to Princeton, where he got an engineering degree. He’d disappointed them when he enrolled in the academy the day after he graduated, telling Rossi he never grew out of playing cops and robbers. Rossi nicknamed him Mr. Mayor since he shared the name of a popular former holder of the office.
He was black, which would have given him a leg up with the brothers on the east side if they trusted the cops and if they couldn’t sense his upper-class, Ivy League background a mile away. Despite the badge, he was an engineer at heart, more pen-and-paper problem solver than throw-down motherfucker.
One day they chased a suspect into an abandoned house, Wheeler taking the front, Rossi going in the back. The suspect put a bullet in Wheeler’s left leg before Rossi took him out. His wife, Lorraine, reminding him that their two kids needed their father, convinced him that it was time he stopped chasing bad guys and used his engineering degree. Wheeler didn’t want to quit the force, so they compromised and he transferred to the traffic investigation unit and started reconstructing accidents.
Rossi occasionally used him as a sounding board, appreciating how Wheeler could deconstruct a case, finding the flaws and pointing him in the right direction. Rossi bought him a beer after Alex Stone was acquitted, running the case past him. Wheeler told Rossi he agreed with him but since Alex had been acquitted, he had no choice but to let it go. Rossi said he couldn’t, and Wheeler said that was the difference between an engineer and a homicide cop.
Rossi shook his hand. “Free and easy, Mr. Mayor. How’s the leg?”
Wheeler patted his thigh. “Still got a limp, but Lorraine says it’s not enough to get me out of mowing the lawn.”
Rossi laughed. “I hear that. What brings you over here?”
Wheeler pointed at a file on Fowler’s desk. “Like I told the commander, I’ve got a case I’d like you to take a look at. My boss said your boss would have to okay you doing that.”
Rossi turned to Fowler, whose perpetual scowl notched another downturn. “He said take a look, not take it over. Are we clear?”
“Clear as ever, boss,” Rossi said. “Follow me,” he said to Wheeler.
Rossi pulled a chair next to his desk, motioning to Wheeler to take a seat, Wheeler sighing as he did, rubbing and stretching out his left leg.
“Just a limp? Looks like it feels worse than that,” Rossi said.
“Depends on the day. Sometimes I get pins and needles that won’t quit. Sometimes it gives out on me and sometimes I can mow the lawn.” He patted his stomach. “But it’s a good excuse for packing on the weight.”