“Police have not made an arrest as of yet, but they are looking into details of how the victim spent his last few hours here in Baltimore. They know from his wife that he went out to dinner, and police say they have found a receipt that places him at an Inner Harbor restaurant this evening, although they don’t know yet if he was dining alone or with a companion.”
“Why was he staying in Baltimore?”
“He had been doing his show from here since the Poe murder, which had captured his attention-”
The channel switched again. “Sorry,” Crow said. “An accident.” But Tess held his wrist before he could click again. On this station, the photographer had managed some arty shots of the scene before police had pushed the media back, and she had picked up the detail that had caught Crow’s eye. Round and red, they looked like blood splatters at first, but these had thorns.
Three red roses. Three… red… roses. Not one or four, not white or pink, not carnations or daisies. Three red roses. Was there a bottle of Courvoisier in the street, too? A bottle in a Baltimore gutter could be overlooked much too easily. Only the upscale brand would make it stand out.
Protective Crow instinctively started to click the remote off, but Tess grabbed it from him, grimly determined to hear the rest.
“And he was coming back from dinner?”
“Yes, he was coming back from dinner in the Inner Harbor.”
“Jesus,” Tess said to the television. “If you don’t know anything, just shut up.”
The phone rang, and she allowed Crow to mute the set. She assumed it would be Tyner, but the number on the Caller ID screen wasn’t a familiar one.
“Yeah?” she said absently, waiting to hear the usual pitch for a credit card or long-distance service.
“They’re worth killing for,” an unfamiliar voice said. The connection was bad, or the receiver had been covered with something.
“What?” Even as her mind was scrambling, Tess was digging for a pen and a piece of paper. When she couldn’t find the paper, she scrawled the number on her hand.
“Now you know what I’ve known all along: They’re worth killing for.”
“What? Who?”
But the call had been terminated with a quiet, dignified click. She dialed the number on her hand, only to hear it ring in the night, over and over again. Finally, on the fifteenth or sixteenth ring, someone picked up.
“You got the wrong number,” a voice told her, a different voice. Or was it? The first one had sounded distant, vague, as if coming from a great distance. This man was cocky, his voice street-hard.
“How do you know it’s the wrong number?” she asked, looking at the seven digits on her hand.
“Because this is a pay phone at North Avenue and St. Paul. It ain’t nobody’s right number.”
“Did you see the man who was at this phone not even a minute ago?”
“Lady, it’s not a neighborhood where people stand still for very long, you know? I was coming out of the KFC, and I can’t walk past a ringing phone. I just gotta know-you know?”
She knew.
Chapter 22
Tess took a large cup of coffee, a pint of orange juice, a bag of bagels, and Tyner Gray with her when she went to meet Rainer on Tuesday morning.
“Why does she need a lawyer?” was the detective’s first question. It did not escape Tess’s notice that she had been demoted to third person. An interesting dynamic. The temptation was to say what her mother used to say in such situations-“She is the cat’s mother, my boy”- but Tess took a sip of orange juice instead. A sip here, a bite there, and she’d come through this just fine.
Tyner had a different strategy, one that didn’t include tact. “She needs a lawyer because you’re a vindictive asshole.”
“Don’t feel you have to sugar-coat it,” Rainer said, helping himself to a bagel. He peered into the bag to see if Tess had brought any cream cheese. She had, but it was ordinary cream cheese-no chives, no vegetables, and definitely none of those sweet sacrilegious flavors. Tess had observed that cops took bagels and tried to transform them into doughnuts, slathering them with blueberry cream cheese or strawberry jam or something even worse. Faced with plain white cream cheese, Rainer decided to eat his bagel dry.
“So,” he said, his too-many, too-small teeth working the poppy seeds like a threshing machine. “What did she know? And, more important, when did she know it?”
“Why is that important?” Tyner ‘s question, not hers.
“Well, for one thing a guy was killed this weekend. Maybe if she”- there was that third person again; sip and bite, sip and bite, sip and bite, don’t rise to the bait-“had been more forthcoming from the beginning, I wouldn’t have two red balls.”
“You the primary on both?” Tyner’s question was civil but shrewd. It served to remind Rainer that they weren’t gullible civilians who would believe one super-cop worked every homicide. Rainer had caught Poe in the early a.m., Yeager had fallen on a Sunday evening. There was no way the same shift was working both cases, much less the same cop.
“Well, no, but I gotta cooperate now. Next thing you know, we’ll have a fucking task force.”
“Are the two killings connected?” Tyner was still doing all the talking.
“I have my suppositions, but I guess it depends on what she’s going to tell me.”
“What Tess tells you will be contingent on what kind of agreement we reach beforehand.”
“What, you talking plea already? I thought she had an airtight alibi for the second one.”
Tyner and Tess, recognizing that Rainer thought of this as high wit, managed wan smiles.
“You made some noise when I called you yesterday to set up this meeting,” Tyner said. “I distinctly remember the phrase ”obstruction of justice‘ being thrown around. But Tess had sound reasons for not coming forward earlier. I’ll assume you were angry and speaking impulsively. But I need to be assured that any such charge is off the table, now and forever.“
“I can’t make promises about the future,” Rainer said. “I mean, what if she continues to interfere with police business? You want, like, carte blanche for things she hasn’t even done yet?”
Carte blanche? In Rainer’s mouth it sounded like one of those freestanding stalls in a shopping mall, run by a woman named Blanche. Oh, Carte Blanche. A blank check, a get-out-of-jail-free card. Yes, that was exactly what Tess wanted.
“No,” Tyner said, low and patient. Funny, he was much more intimidating when he made the effort to keep his voice soft. Tyner keeping himself in check was sort of like a guy walking a pit bull on a piece of frayed rope. If you were smart, you still crossed to the other side of the street. “I’m asking for an agreement. Tess gets immunity. It’s true, she was not completely forthcoming the first time you spoke. But it was only subsequent to your interview that Tess realized she had information you could use, information she developed precisely because she ignored your instructions. And by then she had legitimate reasons not to come forward.”
“Legitimate reasons? Tell that to Bobby Hilliard’s family. And maybe Yeager’s widow.”
“No,” Tess said.
Both men turned to look at her, as if they had forgotten she was in the room. That was the problem with all this she-ing. A girl disappeared.
“I know what it is to have something weigh on my conscience,” Tess said, lifting her eyes from her bagel for the first time. “But I’m not shouldering this one. Bobby Hilliard’s course was set before Arnold Pitts came into my office. And Jim Yeager was snooping around Bobby Hilliard’s apartment in the days after his murder. He put himself in play, a fact that several other people might know-Arnold Pitts, Jerold Ensor, Gretchen O’Brien-”
“Gretchen O’Brien? That sleaze is involved in this case?”
“She works for Arnold Pitts, or did. He’s probably fired her by now. Why is she sleazy?” It was a tangent, but Tess was curious.