Laslo warned, “You stay away from the old lady or I will fuck you up.”
“You’d better bring a ladder.”
“Don’t think ’cause you’re a cop I won’t take you down.” Laslo put his hands on his hips, which Will thought was only appropriate for a man if he was standing on the sidelines at a game. Laslo’s tight shirt gaped open. The material was stretched so thin that he could’ve saved his dry cleaning bill and painted it on. He glared at Will, asking, “What’re you lookin’ at, faggot?”
“That’s a nice shirt. Does it come in adult sizes?”
The conference room door opened.
“Thank you so much,” Amanda called to Goldfinger. She smiled at Will, triumph putting a twinkle in her eyes. Marcus Rippy was important, but not as important as a $2.8 billion deal that everyone wanted a piece of.
Amanda asked Will, “Ready?”
Laslo jabbed his thumb down the hall. “This way.”
“Thank you, Mr. Zivcovik.” Amanda took the lead toward the lobby. She asked Laslo, “Did you manage to find the phone number for Ms. Polaski?”
He didn’t look away from Will as he passed her a piece of folded notepaper.
Amanda glanced at the number, then handed it to Will.
It was for the same disconnected line that was on everything.
Laslo yanked open the lobby door. “Anything else I can do for y’all’s?” He put on a hick accent that, layered on top of his Boston accent, made him sound like he was recovering from a stroke.
Amanda said, “Young man, surely you’ve lived down here long enough to know that y’all is a second-person-plural pronoun.”
The comment was meant to be the last, but Will had a question for Laslo. “Did you know Angie?”
“Polaski?” A toothy grin spread across his round face. “Sure, I knew her.” He gave Will a knowing wink. “She had a cunt like a boa constrictor.”
“Had?” Amanda asked.
He slammed the door in their faces.
Chapter Six
Faith sat in an uncomfortable plastic chair across from the nurses’ station inside the Grady Hospital ICU. There were armed guards at either end of the hall. The ward was full. Grady was Atlanta’s only public hospital, a level-one trauma center that saw most of the bad cases the city had to offer. At any given time, at least a quarter of the patients were handcuffed to their beds.
She glanced up at the whiteboard behind the desk. Olivia, the head nurse, was updating the status of one of the patients. Grady admitted a lot of Jane Does, but Faith only cared about her potential witness, Jane Doe 2. She was still marked critical. The junkie’s surgery had taken four hours longer than planned. They’d had to rebuild her nose and throat. So much blood had been replaced that they’d basically put her into rapid detox from the coke. And now she was pumped full of morphine. She would be out of it for at least another hour, minimum.
At least Faith hadn’t let her time go to waste. She had tackled Dale Harding’s financial documents and phone records. Not that the task got her anywhere closer to a solution, let alone a clue to follow. Harding’s phone calls were all for pizza or Chinese delivery, so he must have used a burner phone for business. As for his bank records, it didn’t take a forensic accountant to understand the figures. Harding kept less than one hundred dollars in his checking account, a number that hadn’t fluctuated much over the last six months because he had used a gold MasterCard to charge everything, from his Gorditas at Taco Bell to the support hose that kept the circulation going in his legs. The cumulative balance on the card for the last six months was forty-six thousand and change. Harding had stopped making payments on the bill. Faith assumed this was by design. He’d stopped dialysis, basically signing his own death warrant. He’d obviously planned to screw as many people as he could on his way out.
The question was, had one of those people been Delilah Palmer? Faith couldn’t stop thinking about the porn photos, the dead look in the girl’s eyes. Even back to ten years old, Delilah seemed to show the resignation that it was her fate to be used by every man who crossed her path. Not just any man, but Dale Harding. A cop. A father. The one person she should have been able to trust and he kept nasty photos of her in his attic and married her because—why?
Delilah had to be the key to both murders. Faith didn’t buy Collier’s feminist theory that the girl was behind their deaths. Harding had always taken care of Delilah. She would have known that he didn’t have much time left. Why kill the guy when she could just wait a few days and dance on his grave?
Faith could think of a lot of people who would want Angie Polaski dead, so she kept the focus on Dale Harding. He was a gambler. He took risks. He had likely taken a final risk before his death, something with a big payout, which meant that Delilah, his legal wife, would be the beneficiary. Unless there was something illegal about the payout. That made more sense. And it also explained why Delilah’s life would be in jeopardy.
And Faith had put that imbecile Collier in charge of finding her.
She scrolled through the sixteen different texts Collier had sent her since she’d left him at the Mesa Arms. If he was overtalkative in person, he was a freaking Bible in the printed word. He peppered his texts with so much useless information about the weather, the songs on the radio, and his dietary habits that Faith felt the need to distill the information into bullet points before her head exploded.
She reached into her cargo pants pocket and found her spiral notebook and pen. She flipped to a fresh page. At the top, she wrote four headers: palmer, harding, polaski, rippy.
She tapped her pen on the blank columns underneath the names. Connections. That’s what she needed to see. Delilah was married to Dale Harding, possibly his daughter. Harding worked for Rippy. According to the briefing Faith had gotten from Amanda, Angie worked for Kip Kilpatrick, which meant she really worked for Rippy.
Faith tapped the pen again. Angie probably knew Harding from way back. Bad cops stuck together. They told themselves they were outsiders because they were the only ones who could get the job done, but the truth was that good cops wanted nothing to do with them.
Faith turned to the next page and wrote questions at the top.
Why did Angie and Harding meet at Rippy’s club?
What does Delilah know?
Who would want to kill Harding?
Who would want to kill Angie?
If Harding and Angie knew each other from before, it made sense that one would tap the other for a job with Kip Kilpatrick. Harding had moved into the Mesa Arms six months ago, so Faith could reasonably assume that’s when he’d started working for Kilpatrick. Angie’s bank account had big checks coming in four months ago, so that meant she had worked for Kilpatrick at least four months.
Faith flipped back to the first page.
All of the arrows pointed to Marcus Rippy.
Her phone buzzed. Another lengthy text came in from Collier. Faith skimmed the lines for meaning, skipping over a report about the indigestion he’d gotten from a gas station hot dog. On Saturday, the day before the murder, Delilah Palmer had rented a black Ford Fusion from a Hertz location on Howell Mill Road. No security footage existed of the transaction. She had used her Visa card. Collier had put out a BOLO on the rental car. He’d also reiterated his heroin-mule theory, pointing out that dealers rented cars because they knew that their own rides would be seized by the cops if they were caught dealing out of them.
Again, Faith tapped her pen against the notebook. She didn’t buy Collier’s drug angle. He was a hammer looking for a nail.
Delilah had rented the car Saturday, not Sunday or Monday, which implied that she had lined up the car before Harding was murdered. Which could also imply that she knew ahead of time that Harding was in jeopardy and that she might need an escape. But she had used her own license and credit card to book the car. Delilah had been on the streets for years. She was too savvy to use her own name for a getaway.
Faith’s phone vibrated again. Another tex
t, blissfully short.
girlz say souza od’d 6 mos ago. dead end. dead, get it?
Faith had to scroll back through her texts to remind herself who Souza was. She found the pertinent missive time-stamped two hours ago. According to some of Collier’s sources in zone six, Virginia Souza was another whore for whom Harding had called in a handful of favors. She worked Delilah’s street corner. She was fairly violent, considering she had been twice charged with assault against a minor. Faith wondered if that minor had been Delilah Palmer.
She looked at the text again. Collier’s sign-off was to say that he was going to talk to the younger whores who might know something or someone who could point him toward Delilah Palmer’s whereabouts. Or, he was talking to young whores because he was Collier. He had signed off with a series of eggplant emojis that, going by Jeremy’s Facebook page, were a stand-in for a bunch of penises.
Faith returned to her notebook. Lots of arrows connecting back to Rippy. Lots of questions. No answers. She should’ve let Collier rot here at the hospital while she tracked down Delilah Palmer. That was the problem with murder cases. You never knew which lead would take you to the solution and which one would sink you into a black hole. Faith was getting the feeling that she had given Collier the good lead. She was going to throw herself off the roof of this building if he ended up lucking into their bad guy.
Her phone vibrated again. She didn’t want to read another dissertation from Collier’s awesome gumshoe file, but ignorance was a luxury she did not have. She looked at the screen. call from wantanabe, b.
Faith stood up and walked down the hall for privacy. “Mitchell.”
“Is this Special Agent Faith Mitchell?” a woman asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m Barbara Wantanabe. Violet told me you wanted to talk?”
Faith had almost forgotten about Harding’s next-door neighbor. “Thanks for getting back to me. I was wondering if you could tell me about Dale Harding.”
“Oh, I could give you an earful,” she said, and then she proceeded to do just that, complaining about the smell from his house, the way he sometimes parked his car with the wheels on the grass, his foul language, the loud volume on his television and radio.
Faith followed along as best she could. Barb was even more verbose than Collier. She had a way of saying something, then contradicting herself, then restating the first thing she had said, then equivocating, and by the fifth time she’d wound herself into a rhetorical knot, Faith started to understand why Harding had hated her so much.
“And don’t even get me started on the music.”
Faith listened as she started on Harding’s music. The same rap album, morning, noon, and night. Her grandson said it was Jay Z, something called the The Black Album. Faith was familiar with the record, which her own son had played loudly behind the closed door of his room because it was the perfect backdrop to his white male privilege and early acceptance to one of the most prestigious universities in the country.
Faith tuned back into Barb, looking for a chance to jump in. Finally, the woman had to stop to take a breath. “Did he have visitors?”
“No,” Barb said, then, “yes. I mean, I think so, yes. He might have had a visitor.”
Faith covered her eyes with her hand. “I sense some uncertainty.”
“Well, yes. That’s true. I am uncertain.”
She had to float Collier’s drug-mule theory. “Did you see people coming in and out? Like a lot of people who looked like they didn’t fit in with the neighborhood?”
“No, nothing like that. I would’ve called the police. It’s just that I thought there might be someone else, another person, over there at some point.”
“At which point?”
“Recently. Well, no, that’s not right. Last month.”
“You thought someone was visiting at Dale’s house last month?”
“Yes. Well, maybe staying there? Visiting might not be the right word.”
Faith gritted her teeth.
“I mean to say that there could’ve been someone living over there. I think. When Dale was gone. Now, he was usually not there during the day when he first moved in, but later, he was always there. Which was when the problem started. When he was there. Which sounds mean, but there you go.”
Faith tried to wrap her brain around all the information. “So, when Dale first moved in six months ago, he was never home, but then you noticed that changed last month?”
“Exactly.”
“And around the time that changed, you heard sounds from next door that indicated someone other than Dale might be living there?”
“Yes.”
Faith waited for the contradictory no, but it never came.
“I heard sounds, you see.” Barb paused before the next hedge. “Not sounds, per se. I mean, they could’ve been from the television. But who watches television and plays a rap album at the same time?” She immediately went back on herself. “Then again, some people might do that.”
“They might,” Faith said. Especially if they wanted to cover up a noise, like a junkie beating on the closet door demanding to be let out. She asked, “Did you ever hear any banging?”
“Banging?”
“Someone banging on a wall or banging on a door?”
“Well . . .” She took her time considering the question.
Faith called up a mental image of the Tahoe floor plan at the Mesa Arms. The guest room was against the shared wall of the duplex. The master was to the outside, which gave the room more windows, but it also afforded more privacy.
Large master closet ideal for keeping women!
Barb said, “I guess you could say the noise sounded like a hammer.”
“Like a hammer pounding something?”
“Yes, but repeatedly. Maybe he was hanging pictures.” She paused. “No, that would’ve been a lot of pictures. Not that it was constant—the noise—but it was long enough. I suppose he could’ve been assembling some furniture. My son does that for me. But only when he can find the time. My daughter-in-law, you see. But really, with Dale, the excrement was the real problem.”
Faith felt her mind boggle. “Say what, now?”
“Excrement. You know”—she lowered her voice—“doo-doo.”
“Waste?”
“Human.”
Faith had to repeat the two words together. “Human waste?”
“Yes. In the back yard.” She sighed. “You see, Dale would rinse out this bucket every evening, and at first I thought that he was painting inside, which made sense, because you would listen to music while you paint, yes?”
Faith threw out her hand. “Sure.”
“And so I assumed that he was painting his walls, and not a very nice color, but then my grandson went into the backyard one day looking for twigs for Mr. Nimh to chew on. Their teeth grow constantly, you see. Oh!” She sounded excited. “Thank you, by the way, for finding him. I was persona non grata with my daughter-in-law for that particular crime. Believe me, she keeps a list. Now, I wasn’t a big fan of my own mother-in-law, but you do what you have to do, yes? It’s called respect.”
Faith tried to get Barb back on track. “Let’s go back to the excrement.” There were six words she never thought she’d say. “You saw Dale cleaning out the bucket every night?”
“Yes.”
“Starting when?”
“Two weeks ago? No.” She doubled back. “Ten days. I would say ten days ago.”
“A large bucket, not the kind you’d use to mop your floor?”
“Right. Yes. For paint. Or I suppose solvents, but that size. Big.”
“And one day your grandson went into the backyard and he found something? Smelled something?”
“Yes. No. Both. He smelled something, and then he walked over. It was a slime, sort of? Whatever it was, it got all over the bottom of his shoe.”
The rat must have been thrilled.
Barb said, “I had to wash the sole with the hose. It was disgusting. And his
mother was furious at me. Now, she’s my daughter-in-law, and I know that I have to play by her rules, but honestly—”
“Did you ask Dale about the excrement?”
“Oh, no. I couldn’t talk to Dale about anything. That would be pointless. He would just curse at me and walk away.”
Faith understood why. “Did you ever see a different car at Dale’s house other than his white Kia?”
“Not that I recall.” She showed an unusual certainty. “No, I’m sure I never did.”
“Are you home much?” Faith tried to tread carefully, because a lot of times even well-meaning people stretched the truth. “I’m asking because you weren’t home this afternoon.”
“I’ve been volunteering more at the YMCA. I fold towels, help keep things straightened up. I’m very clean, you see, which is why I had some issues with Dale. I don’t like things messed up. There’s no reason not to pick something up and put it right back where you found it, yes?”
“Yes.” Faith covered her eyes with her hand again. The woman never met a tangent she didn’t travel. “So you stepped up your volunteering to get away from Dale?”
“Correct. At first, volunteering was just a way to get out of the house for a few hours. And to help people. Of course to help people. But then it became my only respite away from the noise. And the odor. You smelled the odor, yes? I couldn’t live with it all day, you see. It was unbearable.”
Faith wondered if Barb’s absence had been the very thing Harding was pushing for all along. If he was keeping Delilah locked in the closet to dry her out, he would want to make sure no one would hear her screaming and call the police.
Faith asked, “When did you start spending more time away?”
“Last week.”
“So, seven days ago?”
“Yes.”
Which meant that Dale had managed to drive her out after three days of relentless torture.