"It's routine. Nothing special." He checked his watch. "I have to go. Business meeting."
I didn't want to speculate on the nature of his business meeting.
* * * * *
I BUZZED THE television on, but couldn't find anything to watch. No hockey. No fun movies. I went to my shoulder bag and pulled out the large envelope from the copier. I'm not sure why, but I'd made color copies of the pictures before meeting Morelli. I'd been able to fit six photos to a page and had filled four pages. I spread the pages on my dining-room table.
Not nice stuff to look at.
When the photos were laid out side-by-side, certain things became evident. I was pretty sure there was only one body and that it wasn't the body of an old person. No gray hair. And the skin was firm. Difficult to tell if it was a woman or a young man. Some of the pictures had been taken quite close. Some were from further away. It didn't look like the parts were ever rearranged. But the bag was sometimes pulled down to reveal more.
Okay, Stephanie, put yourself in the photographer's shoes. Why are you taking these pictures? Trophy shots? I didn't think so, because none showed the face. And there were twenty-four pictures here, so the roll was intact. If I wanted a remembrance of this grisly act, I'd want a face shot. Ditto for proof that the job had been done. Proof of a kill required a face shot. What was left? A visual record by someone who didn't want to disturb the evidence. So maybe Uncle Fred happened on a bag of body parts and ran out and got himself a point-and-shoot. And then what? Then he put the pictures in his desk drawer and disappeared while running errands.
That was my best guess, as weak as it was. The truth is, the pictures could have been taken five years ago. Someone could have given them to Fred for safekeeping or as a macabre joke.
I stuffed the prints back into their envelope and grabbed my shoulder bag. I thought searching the neighborhood around Grand Union would be wasted effort, but I felt the need to do it anyway.
I drove to a residential area behind the strip mall and parked on the street. I grabbed my flashlight and set out on foot, walking streets and back alleys, looking behind bushes and trash cans, calling Fred's name. When I was a kid I had a cat named Katherine. She showed up on our doorstep one day and refused to leave. We started feeding her on the back porch, and then somehow she found her way into the kitchen. She went out at night to roam the neighborhood, and slept curled up in a ball on my bed during the day. One night Katherine went out and never came back. For days I walked the streets and alleys, looking behind bushes and trash cans, calling her name, just like I was doing now for Fred. My mother said cats sometimes wander off like that when it's their time to die. I thought it was a lot of hooey.
* * * * *
I STUMBLED OUT of bed at four-thirty, staggered into the bathroom and stood in the shower until my eyes opened. After a while my skin started to shrivel, and I figured I was done. I toweled off and shook my head by way of styling my hair. I didn't know what I was supposed to wear for interior decorating, so I wore what I always wore . . . jeans and a T-shirt. And then to dress it up, just in case this actually turned out to be interior decorating, I added a belt and a jacket.
Ranger was waiting in the parking lot when I swung out the back door. He was driving a shiny black Range Rover with tinted side windows. Ranger's cars were always new and their point of purchase was never easy to explain. Three men took up the backseat. Two were black, one was of indeterminate origin. All three men had Marine buzz cuts. All were wearing black SWAT pants and black T-shirts. All were heavily muscled. Not an ounce of fat among them. None of them looked like interior decorators.
I buckled myself into the seat next to Ranger. "Is that the interior decorating team in the backseat?"
Ranger smiled in the predawn darkness and cruised out of the lot.
"I'm dressed different from everybody else," I said.
Ranger stopped at the light on Hamilton. "I've got a jacket and a vest for you in the back."
"This isn't interior decorating, is it?"
"There's all kinds of interior decorating, Babe."
"About the vest—"
"Kevlar."
Kevlar was bulletproof. "Rats," I said. "I hate getting shot at. You know how I hate getting shot at."
"Just a precaution," Ranger said. "Probably no one will get shot."
Probably?
We rode in silence through center city. Ranger was in his zone. Thinking private thoughts. The guys in back looking like they had no thoughts at all—ever. And me, debating jumping out of the car at the next light and running like hell back to my apartment. And at the same time, as ridiculous as it sounds, I was keeping an eye peeled for Fred. He was stuck in my brain. It was like that with my cat, Katherine, too. She'd been gone fifteen years, but I always looked twice when I caught a glimpse of a black cat. Unfinished business, I guess.
"Where are we going?" I finally asked.
"Apartment building on Sloane. Gonna do some house cleaning."
Sloane Street runs parallel and two blocks over from Stark. Stark is the worst street in the city, filled with drugs and despair and feed-lot housing. The ghetto gentrifies as the blocks march south, and much of Sloane is the demarcation line between the lawless and the law-abiding. It's a constant struggle to hold the line and keep the pushers and hookers off Sloane. And word is that lately Sloane's been losing the battle.
Ranger drove three blocks up Sloane and parked. He nodded at the yellow-brick building across the street, two doors down. "That's our building. We're going to the third floor."
The building was four stories tall, and I guessed there were two or three small apartments on each floor. Ground-level brick was covered with gang graffiti. Windows were dark. No street traffic. Wind-blown trash banked against curbs and collected in doorways.
I glanced from the building to Ranger. "You sure this is legal?"
"Been hired by the landlord," Ranger said.
"Does this housecleaning involve people or is it just . . . things?"
Ranger looked at me.
"There's a legal process involved in getting people and their possessions out of an apartment," I said. "You need to present an eviction notice and—"
"The legal process is moving a little slow," Ranger said. "And in the meantime, the kids in this building are being harassed by the people who come to shoot up in 3C."
"Think of this as community service," one of the guys in the back said.
The other two nodded. "Yeah," they said. "Community service."
I cracked my knuckles and chewed on my lower lip.
Ranger angled from behind the wheel, walked to the rear of the Range Rover, and opened the door. He gave everyone a flak vest, and then he gave everyone a black windbreaker that had SECURITY printed in large white letters on the back.
I strapped my vest on and watched while everyone else buckled on black nylon web utility belts and holstered guns.
"Let me take a wild guess here," Ranger said, slinging an arm around my shoulder. "You forgot to bring your gun."
"Interior decorators don't use guns."
"They do in this neighborhood."
The men were lined up in front of me.
"Gentlemen," Ranger said, "this is Ms. Plum."
The indeterminate-origin guy put his hand out. "Lester Santos."
The next man in line did the same. "Bobby Brown."
The last man was Tank. It was easy to see how he'd come by the name.
"I better not get into trouble for this," I said to Ranger. "I'm going to be really bummed if I get arrested. I hate getting arrested."
Santos grinned. "Man, you don't like to get shot. You don't like to get arrested. You don't know how to have fun at all."
Ranger shrugged into his jacket and set off, crossing the street with the band of merry men closing ranks behind him.