While family traveled from the distant airports of Los Angeles and New York, the bereft chief and her sons went through closets and dresser drawers, carrying out the painful task of dividing and disposing of Seth's clothing and other personal effects. Hammer could not look at her late husband's bed, where the nightmare had begun as he got drunk and fantasized about what he could do to really hurt her this time. Well, you did it, Seth. You figured it out. Hammer thought. She folded extra-extra-large shirts, shorts, underwear, socks, and placed them in paper bags for the Salvation Army.
They made no decision about Seth's valuables, such as his four different Rolex watches, the wedding band that had not fit him in more than ten years, the collection of gold railroad watches that had belonged to his grandfather, his Jaguar, not to mention his stocks, and his cash. Hammer cared nothing about any of it, and frankly expected him to zing her one last time in his will. She had never been materialistic and wasn't about to begin now.
"I don't know the details about any of his affairs," she said to her sons, who cared nothing about them, either.
"That figures," said Jude as he removed another suit from a hanger and began folding it.
"You would think he might have discussed his will with you. Mom."
Tart of it is my fault. " She closed a drawer, wondering how she could have endured this activity alone.
"I never asked."
"You shouldn't have to ask," Jude angrily said.
"Part of the whole point of living with someone is you share important things with each other, you know? Like in your case, so you could maybe plan for your future in the event something happened to him? Which was a good possibility with his rotten health."
"I've planned for my own future." Hammer looked around the room, knowing that every molecule within it would have to go.
"I don't do so badly on my own."
Randy was younger and angrier. As far as he was concerned, his father had been selfish and neurotic because he was spoiled and made no effort to think about others beyond what function they might have served in his wasteful, rapacious existence.
Randy, especially, seethed over the way his mother had been treated.
She deserved someone who admired and loved her for all her goodness and courage. He went over and wrapped his arms around her as she folded a Key West shirt she remembered Seth buying on one of their few vacations.
"Don't." She gently pushed her son away, tears filling her eyes.
"Why don't you come stay with us in LA for a while?" he gently said, holding on to her, anyway.
She shook her head, getting back to the business at hand, determined to get every reminder of Seth out of this house as fast as she could, that she might get on with life.
"The best thing for me is to work," she said.
"And there are problems I need to resolve."
"There are always problems. Mom," Jude said.
"We'd love it if you came to New York."
"You know anything about this Phi Beta Kappa key on a chain?" Randy held it up.
"It was inside the Bible in the back of this drawer."
Hammer looked at the necklace as if she had been struck. The key was hers, from Boston University, where she had enjoyed four very stimulating years and graduated near the top of her class, with a double major in criminal justice and history, for she believed that the two were inexorably linked. Hammer had grown up with no special privileges or promise that she would amount to much, since she was a girl amid four brothers in a household with little money and a mother who did not approve of a daughter thinking the dangerous thoughts hers did. Judy Hammer's Phi Beta Kappa key had been a triumph, and she had given it to Seth when they had gotten engaged. He wore it for a long time, until he began to get fat and hateful.
"He told me he lost it," Hammer quietly said as the telephone rang.
West felt terrible about bothering her chief again. West apologized on the cellular phone inside her police car, as she sped downtown. Other units and an ambulance roared to the heart of Five Points, where another man from out of town had been brutally slain.
"Oh Lord," Hammer breathed, shutting her eyes.
"Where?"
"I can pick you up," West said over the line.
"No, no," Hammer said.
"Just tell me where."
"Cedar Street past the stadium," West said as she shot through a yellow light.
"The abandoned buildings around there. Near the welding supply company. You'll see us."
Hammer grabbed her keys from the table by the door. She headed out, not bothering to change out of her gray suit and pearls. Brazil had been driving around, in a funk, when he'd heard the call on the scanner. He got there fast, and now was standing beyond crime-scene tape, restless in jeans and T-shirt, frustrated because no one would let him in. Cops were treating him as if he were a reporter no different than others out foraging, and he didn't understand it.
Didn't they remember him in uniform, out with them night after night, and in foot pursuits and fights?
West rolled up seconds before Hammer did, and the two women made their way to the overgrown area where a black Lincoln Continental was haphazardly parked far off Cedar and First Streets, near a Dumpster.
The welding company was a looming Gothic silhouette with dark windows.
Police lights strobed, and in the far distance a siren wailed as misfortune struck in another part of the city. A Norfolk Southern train loudly lumbered past on nearby tracks, the engineer staring out at disaster.
Typically, the car was rented, and the driver's door was open, the interior bell dinging, and headlights burning. Police were searching the area, flashguns going off and video cameras rolling. Brazil spotted West and Hammer coming through, reporters moiling around them and get ting nothing but invisible walls. Brazil stared at West until she saw him, but she gave him no acknowledgment. She did not seem inclined to include him. It was as if they had never met, and her indifference ran through him like a bayonet. Hammer did not seem aware of him, either. Brazil stared after them, convinced of a betrayal. The two women were busy and overwrought.
"We're sure," Hammer was saying to West.
"Yes. It's like the others," West grimly said as their strides carried them beyond tape, and deeper inside the scene.
"No question in my mind. MO identical."
Hammer took a deep breath, her face pained and outraged as she look at the car, then at the activity in a thicket, where Dr. Odom was on his knees, working. From where Hammer stood, she could see the medical examiner's bloody gloves glistening in lights set up around the perimeter. She looked up as the Channel 3 news helicopter thudded overhead, hovering, its camera securing footage for the eleven o'clock news. Broken glass clinked under feet as the two women moved closer, and Dr. Odom palpated the victim's destroyed head. The man had on a dark blue Ralph Lauren suit, a white shirt missing its cufflinks, and a Countess Mara tie. He had graying curly hair and a tan face that might have been attractive, but now it was hard to tell. Hammer saw no jewelry but guessed that whatever this man had owned wasn't cheap. She knew money when she saw it.
"Do we have an ID?" Hammer asked Dr. Odom.
"Blair Mauney the third, forty-five years old, from Asheville," he replied, photographing the hateful blaze- orange hourglass spray-painted over the victim's genitals. Dr. Odom looked up at Hammer for a moment.
"How many more?" he asked in a hard tone, as if blaming her.
"What about cartridge cases?" West asked.
Detective Brewster was squatting, interested in trash scattered through briars.
"Three so far," he answered his boss.
"Looks like the same thing."
"Christ," said Dr. Odom.
By now, Dr. Odom was seriously projecting. He continually imagined himself in strange cities, at meetings, driving around, maybe lost. He thought of suddenly being yanked out of his car and led to a place like this by a monster who would blow his head off for a watch, a wallet, a ring. Dr. Odom could read the fear the victims had felt as they begged not to die, that huge. 45 pointed and ready to fire. Dr. Odom was certain that the soiled undershorts consistent in each case were not postmortem. No goddamn way. The slain businessmen didn't lose control of bowels and bladder as life fled and bled from them. The guys were terrified, trembling violently, pupils dilated, digestion shutting down as blood rushed to extremities for a fight or flight that would never happen. Dr. Odom's pulse pounded in his neck as he unfolded another body bag.
West carefully scanned the interior of the Lincoln as the interior alert dinged that the driver's door was ajar and the lights were on.
She noted the Morton's doggie bag, and the contents of the briefcase and an overnight bag that had been dumped out and rummaged through in back. US Bank business cards were scattered over the carpet and she leaned close and read the name Blair Mauney III, the same name on the driver's license Detective Brewster had shown her.