Will wanted to say, because it’s not TV. He had heard these questions so many times, often from grieving family members desperate for news, any news. “I’m out of the loop, believe me. Dodds doesn’t want my help. I’ll tell you this much: the first forty-eight hours after a homicide are the most important. It’s been more than two weeks now.
“Every day that passes after that makes it less likely that the case will be solved. That’s when the real drudgework of homicide begins-don’t believe all the crap you see on TV about the miraculous forensic breakthrough. Usually it’s just grueling footwork. But there are a lot of cases that are never solved.”
“But this was a doctor, at the hospital,” she blurted. “It’s not like some drug killing down in Over-the-Rhine.” She stopped herself with a sharp intake of breath. “Oh, God, that sounded awful. I’m sorry.”
“I’ve heard worse,” Will said. “To be honest, I don’t know why they don’t have somebody in custody.” He was conscious of the alien word they instead of the familiar we. “I know there was another high-profile killing. The city’s on track for a record number of homicides this year. The detail is short-handed. There have been budget cuts.” He shook his head. “Excuses. Bullshit.”
She reached out for his hand. “Do you believe me, as a police officer, when I tell you I had nothing to do with this?”
Her hand felt warm and fragile inside his. He squeezed it. “I do.”
She drew it back and pulled a white envelope from her coat. “I’ve been feeling that if I didn’t try to play amateur detective, they were going to try to make me the bad guy. Maybe I went too far.” She handed him the letter. By habit he took it lightly by the edges, holding it as if between the calipers of his fingers. It was addressed to Christine Lustig and the stamps had been canceled.
“I need latex gloves,” he said.
“Oh, hell, I touched it. I am truly a stupid person.” She buried her head in her hands momentarily, then reached into a coat pocket and pulled out a whitish bundle. He rested the letter on the table and slid his fingers into the gloves, as he had done so many times before. Cheryl Beth quietly cursed as he pulled out a sheet of white stationery and read the neat script in black-ink handwriting:
Chris,
You’ve betrayed me for the last time. I’m going to put a stop to you.
There was no signature. “Where did you get this?” Will asked, and she told him the story of seeing the envelope on the front seat of Judd Mason’s car, and how she fished it out of his trash.
“I was really dumb to do this, wasn’t I?”
Will thought about it, the layers of what had seemed like a simple case getting deeper. “Maybe not. Dodds said he saw you picking in the trash.” He thought it through for a moment as she watched expectantly. “I want you to take this to Dodds. Don’t tell him you showed it to me.”
She nodded, hesitantly. Will could imagine the hell Dodds would raise. He asked, “Who wrote this note?”
Cheryl Beth pursed her lips. “I think Mason did, then tried to get it back after she was killed. Which might mean he killed her. How about this, I can find out where Mason works, get one of his charts, check his handwriting.”
“Don’t,” Will said, a little too hard. He softened his voice. “Don’t do that. He’s already seen you.”
“So you think he might have…”
They both let it hang between them. Finally, Cheryl Beth said, “She didn’t like to be called Chris. The only other person who did that was Gary, and he did it because he knew it bugged her.”
“Just tell Dodds the truth. Don’t jump to conclusions.” Will studied the letter one more time and then leaned over and slid it into her coat pocket. No Slasher case had involved a threatening letter. Suddenly the pain returned, emerging from his back and wrapping around his ribs in a pincer movement. He couldn’t stop himself from visibly wincing.
“You’re still hurting,” she said. “I’m going to talk to your doctor. And I want you to take what I give you. Don’t worry about becoming a drug addict. That’s not going to happen.”
He smiled in spite of the sharp stabs he was enduring. Finally, he made his face relax, got his breathing down.
“What were you guys doing in the morgue last night?”
He hesitated for only a moment. “I’ll tell you, but don’t tell Dodds. First I need you to answer a few more questions about that night.” He went through it with her and the answers were chillingly reassuring. He had seen it before. The doctor had been on the floor, naked and bloody, knife wounds on her arms and torso-slashes-and the deep cut to her throat. Her ring finger was gone, chopped off. Her clothes had been neatly folded on top of a small filing cabinet, as if she had undressed for a lover. Cheryl Beth began shaking her right leg as she recounted the details. By the end, she was sniffling and teary, reaching for hospital paper napkins to dab her eyes and nose.
“Those might not have even been her real clothes,” Will said. “I found bloody clothes in the old morgue last night and her ID card was pinned to them. Jeans, a blue wool top, a black leather jacket. Would she have worn something like that?”
“Yes…” Cheryl Beth was almost whispering. “If she had come in late, she wouldn’t wear something fancy. She owned a black leather jacket.”
“That means you may have just missed seeing the killer,” Will said. “He killed her, planted the folded clothes, gathered up her real clothes and went down the hallway to the morgue, where he stashed them. Then he took an old elevator up and out.”
“Oh, shit.” She seemed stricken, her body slumping back, seeming to lose five pounds in front of his eyes. This was not the body language of a killer.
“Are you sure the hall was deserted? Think back.”
“I’m sure.” She reached for her bagel but her hand shook.
“What?”
“A couple of days after the killing,” she said, “I noticed footprints in the flower bed by my window at home. I had only cleared the leaves out the day Christine was killed, and those footprints weren’t there.”
“Is there any chance…?”
“No,” she cut him off. “I don’t have a gardener. It’s not near the meters. It wasn’t the cable guy. I told all this to Detective Dodds. He didn’t care. He said call nine-one-one if I see a prowler.” She furrowed her brow. “There’s something else. I forgot about this. A couple of days after Christine was killed, I saw my desk had been opened. Somebody had gone through it. I’m scared.”
Will reached across and took her hand and held it a long time. She didn’t resist. They sat that way as Will conducted a silent debate with himself. But in the end, there was only one thing to do, only one right thing. He had drunk nearly the entire Diet Coke and yet his mouth was suddenly dry.
“Cheryl Beth, do you remember the killings in Mount Adams two years ago?”
Chapter Twenty
Cheryl Beth walked down the middle of the busy hallway, dazed, barely acknowledging the nurses and docs that said hello. She had three new consults and half a dozen follow-ups. She wanted to get as many of her patients over from IVs to oral pain drugs as soon as possible. People were hurting: stabbings, shootings, chest tubes, every kind of mayhem in the belly. Will was hurting, the pain etching deep ravines around his eyes. He was a young man, her age. She had to argue with one of the surgeons about continuing to use Demerol-it was a crappy pain drug, even if it gave the patient a buzz. Slow drip Dilaudid, that was a wonderful drug. How many years had she spent teaching them about it? The patients had to be watched closely for side effects or irritation to the vein, but most of the time it was very effective. Then the afternoon would get really busy with new consults, as people came out into the recovery room. Some of them would come out of surgery, wake up, and hurt so much they’d rather be dead. Did some of the anesthesiologists care?