The apartment had been torn up. The chest holding Cicero ’s medical instruments and supplies had been overturned, and notes from the filing cabinet were strewn on the floor. The wheelchair lay tipped forward in the middle of the living room. Nearby were some streaks and droplets of dried blood on the short, hard carpeting, as if someone had shaken a paintbrush.
The first of the technicians, a man named Malik, was starting a sketch that would eventually capture the layout of the apartment, as well as the position of every relevant object and bloodstain. The other tech, a full-bodied, red-haired woman I hadn’t met, was making notes. The detective was standing off to the side. It was Hadley.
He’d been my last boyfriend, pre-Shiloh. He’d worked closely with Shiloh, when they’d been on the interagency Narcotics task force, and I’d once raided a meth lab near Anoka with both of them. A black man, Hadley wasn’t particularly tall, but he had quick reflexes that I remembered from games of one-on-one. His hair was shorter now than in his undercover-Narcotics days; it was a look more suitable to his new role as a Homicide detective.
His dark eyes took me in, and he lifted his chin in acknowledgment. He could do no more while talking on his cell phone.
“When the techs are through… Yeah, I don’t know,” he said. He shifted his weight, and light flashed off the.40 he carried in a shoulder holster. “Good, okay.” With that, he disconnected the call.
“Pribek,” he said. “The county sent you?”
“What happened here?”
“Victim’s name is Cicero Ruiz,” Hadley said, ignoring my failure to answer his question. “Looks like a robbery-murder. Neighbor says he was doing some kind of cash business from the apartment.”
I warned you, I thought. I warned you.
Hadley nodded toward the door, where Soleil was out of sight. “The same neighbor called us this morning,” he said. “She saw the print outside the door.”
On my way in, I’d missed the sight of half a reddish shoe print, where someone had tracked blood on the way out.
“She got a bad feeling about it, so when he didn’t answer her knock, she called us,” Hadley finished.
“Have you interviewed her at length?” I asked.
“Not yet. That’s why she’s in the hall, waiting,” Hadley said. He took out his notebook but didn’t open it. “The rest of the neighbors say they didn’t see anything.” He indicated the medical instruments on the floor. “It looks like the guy was a doctor, but that can’t be right; not in a building like this.”
“He was a doctor,” I said. Cicero was beyond needing my promise of silence now. “Prewitt asked me to track him down. He was practicing out of his apartment.”
“He saw patients here?” Hadley said.
I nodded. “That’s what we were hearing. I was supposed to get evidence for an arrest.”
“Well, we’re a little too late for that,” Hadley said.
I swallowed against the solidifying muscle in my throat.
“Sarah?” Hadley said.
Homicide detectives, more than most police, have to rely on an article of faith: that victims of crime can be helped even after they’re dead. I’m not sure I ever fully believed that. But now a voice in my mind said, Do your job. And at the moment, I didn’t question it. I swallowed a second time, and then I could function again. “What do you know?” I asked.
“Not much,” Hadley said. “It looks like there might have been two people involved,” Hadley said. “I’ll let the technicians decide that, based on the shoe prints and any fingerprints they find. Like I said, robbery is the probable motive.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I don’t know how much money the doc was making, but I don’t think he gave it up easy.”
“He was beaten?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Hadley confirmed. “I saw the body. He was worked over. Let me show you.” Hadley moved down the hall, waving me after him.
In Cicero ’s sanctuary, the photos on the low dresser were undisturbed, but the drawers had been taken out and overturned, like those of the filing cabinet. On the floor, at the foot of the bed, the carpet had been stained dark red in an irregular area around three feet in diameter.
“He died in here,” Hadley said. “I think Doc knew his attackers. At least, he let them in. There’s no sign the front door was forced. They make a surprise attack in the front room, get him down and out of the chair. He fights enough that there’s some blood out there. Then they drag him into the bedroom. This is where the serious beating took place.” Hadley pointed at the blood spatters on the wall. “See that? That’s a lot of blunt force. Either it was personal animosity, or, more likely, he wasn’t giving his visitors what they came for.”
Something was wrong about Hadley’s theory, I thought. Cicero needed the money his practice brought him, but he was too practical to die for it. He would have surrendered it. If he’d been beaten to death… I shook my head. Hadley had suggested personal animosity, but I couldn’t fathom it. Cicero had had no enemies; I would have staked any amount of money on that.
“We already bagged the weapon. A twenty-pound weight, one of a set. Are you okay?” Hadley said.
On the mirror, a dark hair was trapped in dried blood.
“I’m sorry,” Hadley was saying. “I forget you don’t see as much of this as I do. You want to go back out in the front room?”
“No,” I said, finding my voice. “I’m okay. I want to help with this investigation, if I can.”
Hadley nodded, finding nothing unusual in the request. “Be glad to have you,” he said.
A woman’s voice called for Hadley; it was the crime-scene technician in the other room. “Excuse me,” Hadley said.
I looked toward the photos on Cicero ’s altar and thought of what he’d said after he’d written me the prescription.
I do not need to get arrested, Cicero had said. But he’d been wrong. Even if he’d served jail time, it wouldn’t have broken him. Cicero might never have forgiven me for turning him in, but at least he would have been alive. He was dead now because I’d overruled my better instincts and obeyed his wishes.
When he’d told me the story about the troubled young psychiatric patient and the night she’d called him to her home, Cicero had said, I was probably pretty goddamned lonely, although I couldn’t have seen it back then. The same could be said of me. I’d needed Cicero ’s friendship and feared living with the memory of his anger, so I’d shielded him from arrest. At the core of it, I’d spared him out of selfishness and, in sparing him, had killed him.
From the array of photos, a younger, untroubled Cicero and his brother Ulises regarded me. Dead now, both of them. One killed by cops, the other by a cop’s leniency.
For the next hour I immersed myself in work. Hadley went out to do quick preinterviews with the neighbors, in order to separate out those who, like Soleil, knew enough to merit taking them downtown for a formal statement. I stayed in the apartment and, using one of the technicians’ cameras, meticulously photographed Cicero ’s apartment, every object, every bloodstain, detaching my mind from what I saw through the viewfinder.
I was nearly finished when Hadley strode back though the front door. “Pribek!” he said. The tone in his voice was urgent enough that Malik dropped the pencil he was writing with. I lowered the camera.
Hadley was holding his cell phone in his hand. “We’ve got to suspend things here,” he said. “A couple of officers got a call from a drugstore over on University Avenue. A pharmacist called them about a suspicious prescription. A couple of kids tried to pass it off, but the pharmacist knew right away it was a fake. The writing on it didn’t mean anything. It was just some Greek-looking scribbles.”