This was how I understood the lecture, anyway, but I ordinarily am bored to tears by these sorts of discussions. This whole digital age schmiel-I mean, it’s a wonderful thing, right? Without it, I wouldn’t get all those football games piped into my TV on Sunday afternoons. But spare me the frigging details, you know? But that offer of three-quarters of a million a year in salary and bonus did stiffen my interest in matters technological. Tiffany’s presence sort of stiffened something else.
But all good things must come to an end, and she next deposited me back in the conference room. The packet she promised arrived shortly afterward and gave me something to amuse myself with as the accountants chattered and babbled.
At four o’clock the door opened again and I looked up, hoping to see my new friend. But it wasn’t Tiffany, it was a receptionist from downstairs, escorting a nasty little runt who looked amazingly like Daniel Spinelli in a very bad mood.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A major Police Convention was being held around a long, shiny black limo. A platoon of Virginia state troopers, and scads of uniformed and nonuniformed locals, were being bullied around by short-haired, clean-cut guys in gray and blue suits who might as well have “FBI” stamped on their foreheads. Fifteen news vans and an army of reporters, cameramen, and photographers stood in a raucous pack being briefed by a good-looking Fed in a natty suit. Several news helicopters circled overhead.
Only two things draw reporters in such numbers-free booze and a particularly raunchy death.
I stood beside Spinelli in the small parking lot abutting the Iwo Jima monument, and it struck me that the statue hadn’t attracted such a crowd since the day it was unveiled. Five minutes after we arrived, a taxi stopped on the road above us and Janet Morrow stepped out. I had followed Spinelli over in my leased Jag, which was really convenient because it meant I had an escape.
Anyway, I watched Janet walk down the hill, and I sensed from her expression that we shared the same deduction-someone profoundly newsworthy was experiencing rigor mortis inside that limo. Flies, after all, will flock to any corpse. Reporters are slightly more discriminating.
Spinelli stared gloomily at his own feet, jaw muscles bunching and unbunching, and I was left with the impression that he was annoyed with me, very annoyed with her, and his balls were really on fire about that limo. But I didn’t press him. When one is standing beside a man who looks pissed and has a gun, patience tends to be a particularly worthy virtue.
Janet nodded politely at me and said to Spinelli, “Who died, Danny?”
He ignored her question and stiffly instructed both of us, “Follow me.”
He led us directly to the limo, flashing his badge and cursing at a pair of naive state troopers who foolishly tried to stop him at the yellow crime scene tape. The front and rear doors of the limo hung open on the hinges. We went first to the driver’s door, where I noted a heavy Hispanic man in a dark suit curled up on the floor. A small dribble of dark, dried blood ran down his forehead, and there appeared to be a swath of black electrical tape over the wound.
Next we peered inside the rear doors, where a young woman’s upright, naked body was sprawled across the backseat. Her position, like Julia Cuthburt’s, appeared to me to have been posed, her arms and legs spread wide apart-a bizarre display of complete vulnerability, and possibly another message to the police. Her ankles and wrists were chafed and raw, and a lipstick tube and hand mirror lay on the floor. As I mentioned, she was naked, and clothing articles were also on the rear floor, but were folded and stacked neatly, by her killer, the circumstances suggested. She had apparently been tied up and had struggled fiercely, yet no rope or other restraints were present that I could see. The killer, as before, was tidying up the loose ends and leaving no clues. In fact, I suspected the reason he had parked the car on the tarmac was to ensure there’d be no footprints for forensics to pick up.
I bent forward and examined the female victim more closely. Numerous bruises were evident on her torso, arms, and legs. Also, I observed some scorch marks on her arms and torso, made by something small and red-hot; possibly a lit cigarette, possibly a lighter. Her skin was waxy, and the inside of the car smelled awful, understandably, as her body had begun to bloat with gas. From these indications, she and the driver had been dead at least twelve hours. The female victim was brunette, quite pretty, and vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t place her. Ending the description, and apparently her life, her head was twisted to the right at a wildly unnatural angle. Her death mask, if you will, was a snarl.
“Know her?” Spinelli asked Janet.
She failed to reply.
In fact, her head was still inside the car, inspecting the murder scene. It struck me that Spinelli had brought us here and arranged this viewing to elicit shock or astonishment. His expression indicated that he was now both angry and frustrated.
“I asked, did you know her?” he repeated.
Janet peered over her shoulder and replied, coolly, “Everybody knows her, Danny. Carolyn Fiorio.”
Sounding quite annoyed, he repeated, “Do you know her?”
“I’ve seen her on TV and read about her in magazines. That’s all.”
“You, Major?”
“I’ve heard of her. The talk-show chick, right?”
Back to Janet, he asked, “Did your sister know her?”
“If she did, I wasn’t aware of it.”
He chewed on something, possibly his tongue. “Come with me,” he ordered. So we did, following him to a clump of oak trees about fifty yards away from the corpses in the car. He looked around to make sure he wasn’t overheard.
He picked at something on the tip of his nose and stared menacingly at Janet. “Fiorio was supposed to be at some big shindig last night at 7:15. The limo was ordered by her network staff and picked her up at the studio, about five after. The dead guy on the floor, that’s Miguel Martinez… wife, three little kids, the regular driver. When she never showed at her gig, her studio was contacted, the studio called the limo service, and the limo service tried to contact Martinez on the car radio. About midnight, the studio called the D. C. cops and reported her and the limo AWOL. Three hours ago, the NBC and CBS D. C. affiliates got an anonymous call saying the car was here.”
His tone as he described this hinted that we were high up on his shit list, or low on his popularity list, though in his case there might be no distinction.
Janet started to say, “I-”
His finger shot up to her face. “You listen to me, lady.”
“I’m listening.”
“You know things-I smell it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“My ass is on the line here. As the investigating officer of the first murder, I’m part of this task force, and I’m catching a world of shit. So quit fuckin’ me around.”
Janet calmly replied, “What is it you think I know, Danny?”
“Don’t play that game with me.”
“Game?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“No, enlighten me.”
He kicked a clod of dirt with his foot. We actually get instruction on this at law schools; how to piss people off. Miss Morrow, I suspected, got very good grades.
He was frustrated and said, “Don’t you get it? There’s been two more murders since your sister. We don’t get this asshole off the street, there’s gonna be more.” He gave her a probing look and added, “Come on. You know somethin’, don’t ya? Tell me.”
“Like what?”
“Ah, fuck.”
So we stood like this, Spinelli, Janet, and I for thirty more seconds with nobody saying a word. An acorn fell from a tree and landed at our feet. A plane left a long contrail in the sky.