Black In White Page 2

  Given that I was still nursing my first cup of coffee, I wasn’t sharp enough yet to get anything but annoyed at the glint of denser meaning in his dark eyes.

  Then again, I’ve always hated cagey, hinting crap.

  It even annoyed me coming from Nick.

  Despite the tiredness I could see around his eyes and the blood on his shirt and suit jacket, Nick looked amped up and almost on edge, even for him. I knew Nick ran every day before work. He left his apartment like clockwork at four a.m.––unless he happened to be working, like today. He also surfed, at least on the mornings he didn’t get called in, and was a member of the same martial arts club as me.

  Unlike me, Nick also lifted weights, went mountain biking, played basketball.

  He was one of those cops.

  He also lived almost entirely for his job. Nick was in his early forties at least, but he’d never been married, which probably helped with the near-singular focus. He was just one of those intense, burn-the-candle-at-both-ends kind of guys.

  Driven, I guess would be the non-clinical word.

  I continued to cradle my coffee cup for a few seconds more, not moving in the half-broken down, leather office chair I still hadn’t managed to get Gomey to either fix or declare dead and replace. Glancing around at the papers strewn across my desk and the filled-to-overflowing in-box with its beat up manilla and dark green folders, I could only sigh.

  My one and only office plant looked like it was screaming silently at me, possibly in its death throes since it had been so long since I’d remembered to water it.

  I knew Gomey hadn’t been doing that, either.

  “Why?” I said finally, when all Nick did was grin at me. “What’s his deal?”

  “Oh, don’t let me spoil it...”

  “Seriously?” I said. “What are we, twelve?”

  “Trust me,” Nick said. “You’ll want to talk to this one in person, Miri. I don’t want to say anything until you see him. I don’t want to... bias anything.”

  Realizing he wasn’t going to let me off the hook, and further, that he was actually waiting for me, expecting me to just drop everything I hadn’t yet started for the day and follow him to whatever piss-smelling interrogation room where they were holding this clown, I sighed again.

  “You can’t give me a few minutes?” I said.

  “No.”

  “I have an appointment coming in at nine, Nick.”

  Frowning, Nick looked at his watch, as if a ticking bomb were counting down somewhere in another part of the building.

  “Any chance you could cancel it?” he said apologetically, shifting his feet. “We’re pretty sure he’s the guy on the thing last week. That mess at Grace Cathedral.”

  I glanced up sharper at that.

  He meant the wedding guy.

  Once more glimpsing the more serious look behind the humor in Nick’s eyes, I nodded my defeat and rose to standing from behind the broken chair.

  Sadly, I guess there’s a reason Nick counts on me.

  I’m a sucker.

  THERE WASN’T A lot of pre-work on this one.

  Well, not yet.

  No one wanted to debrief me on much in the way of details, presumably because Nick told them not to. So I didn’t get handed the usual cobbled-together file of scribbled notes and photos and whatever else from the preliminary interrogations, or much in the way of details of what they’d found at the actual scene.

  Nick gave me the bare bones story only.

  Three fifteen-year-old girls stumbled upon the suspect at the scene of the crime. According to them, he’d been covered in blood. He also looked like he’d just finished––or maybe remained deep in the process of––doing “something” to a woman’s dead body. Their testimony was pretty vague on details, according to Nick.

  He admitted to me that he couldn’t really get a sense if they’d seen anything concrete, apart from the suspect himself... as well as the victim, a white dress, a lot of make-up and a lot of blood... all of which were damning enough, under the circumstances.

  Well, that and what had been done to the victim herself.

  I only got the bare bones on that, too, and didn’t ask for more. Truthfully, I’ve never gotten used to seeing that kind of thing, not even in pictures.

  The three girls ran like hell once the suspect spotted them.

  Even so, more than an hour passed before they called in what they’d seen, although they freely admitted they all had smart phones with them at the time. The latter had been confirmed by the presence of photos they’d taken on the walkway leading up to the Palace before they reached the dome where the body had been displayed.

  From what Nick told me, the delay on calling had more to do with the girls’ fears of getting caught by their parents than fear of the suspect himself, who hadn’t bothered to chase them. Something about being out all night and drunk while crashing at the home of an out-of-town parent. Nick said they admitted to arguing amongst themselves about what to do after they arrived back at a Marina residence.

  They finally called it in around five o’clock.

  A black and white had already picked up the suspect by then, as it turned out.

  They saw him crossing Marina Boulevard towards the promenade, presumably to reach the coast. Bad luck on his part, Nick said with a wry grin. He figured the guy had been heading for the yacht harbor north of the Palace of Fine Arts, either to hop a boat or to wash off the blood, or maybe both. If he’d succeeded in either, they might never have got him.

  As it was, they pulled guns on him to get him to comply.

  From what I could tell, they pretty much lifted this guy off the street and parked him in an interrogation room while they called the coroner and forensics to the scene of the murder. I knew someone must have talked to him... and likely cleaned him up... probably Nick and whatever officer arrived first on the scene. But they couldn’t have gone through the whole range of the usual song and dance, either.

  Which meant Nick was bending the rules a little, bringing me in now.

  I knew Nick had a tendency to pull me in when he had a gut feeling, so I figured that must be the case with this guy, too. Despite the overwhelming evidence, at least in terms of the Palace of Fine Arts murder, Nick probably wanted me to help him crawl into the guy’s head, maybe so he could get a sense of his connection to the Grace Cathedral killings, or maybe to build evidence against an insanity plea, like he said.

  Maybe he liked him for other, possibly-related crimes.

  They’d do the DNA testing thing and everything else, of course, but Nick tended to be thorough. He probably wanted me to confirm or deny his working profile on the guy before he started running up blind alleys.

  I peered through the one-way glass of the interrogation room, sipping my now lukewarm coffee and trying to assess the scene before me objectively.

  “So you like this guy for the Grace Cathedral murders?” I said, as much to myself as Nick, who stood right at my arm.

  “I like this guy for Jimmy Hoffa,” Nick said, glancing at his partner, Glen Frakes, who snorted from the other side of him. “I like him for the Zodiac killings... and the death of my Aunt Lanai in Tokyo, God rest her soul.”

  Rolling my eyes, I nodded, getting the gist.

  I continued to look through the one-way glass, trying to get a sense of what I might be in for when I went in there.

  The guy just sat there, not moving.

  I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone sit so still in an interrogation room before. His eyes didn’t dart to either the door or the cameras, which just about everyone looked at, seemingly without being able to help themselves.

  No one liked being watched.

  No one liked being trapped inside a featureless room, either.

  This guy wasn’t trying to be clever, either, staring at us through the one-way glass, which a lot of them did to show us they knew they were being watched.

  Nick’s suspect didn’t seem to care.

  I got noth
ing. A blank wall.

  That didn’t happen to me very often, truthfully.

  Maybe thirty, thirty-five years old.

  Muscular. Obviously in good shape, but not bulky like Nick with his weight-lifting and kung fu and judo and whatever else. This guy had the lean musculature of a runner or a fighter, not an ounce of excess flesh on him anywhere. I’d seen criminals and even addicts with that kind of body type of course, but I wasn’t getting any of the other signs of career criminal or addiction or living on the street on Nick’s new favorite perp.

  His eyes were clear, as was his skin, which was on the tanned side, but still light enough to be ethnically ambiguous. He looked healthy. He was handsome, actually, if in a feral kind of way. He had black hair, high cheekbones, a well-formed mouth, and some of the lightest, strangest-colored eyes I’d ever seen... so light they looked gold, and strangely flecked.

  Those eyes reminded me of a tiger. Or maybe a mountain lion... or an actual lion... although I couldn’t remember what color eyes either of those had in real life.

  Even those oddly riveting eyes weren’t the most noticeable thing about Nick’s new friend. Not at that precise moment, anyway.

  No, the most noticeable thing about him now was that he was covered in blood.

  Unlike with Nick, I couldn’t even pretend to not know what it was.

  A good portion of his visible bare skin wore a mostly-dry layer of reddish-brown smears and spots. It covered his hands and arms from his fingertips up to his rock-hard biceps, just below the cuffs of the stretchy black T-shirt he wore, which also accentuated the size of his chest. More smears and splatters of the same covered his neck and one side of his face. I could see it on the rings he wore, where his wrists were cuffed together and resting on the metal table.

  I also saw blood smearing the face of his military-style watch.

  I wasn’t an expert of course, but even if Nick hadn’t already told me how they’d found him on the street, I would have known just by looking at him. It was definitely blood.

  He’d practically been bathing in it, this guy.

  It explained how Nick came to have it on his own shirt, too.

  The suspect’s clothes, which included that form-fitting black T-shirt, black pants and black leather shoes, the last of which I could just see under the table, absorbed most of the color and texture of what decorated his bare skin. I’d already been assured by Nick and Glen that blood covered a good portion of his clothes, too, visible or not.

  I was kind of surprised they hadn’t stripped him yet, to pull evidence.

  They’d even left his shoes, rings and watch, which was unusual when they had a suspect cuffed like this and chained to the floor.

  As if he’d read my mind, Nick said, “We’ve got forensics coming up here in an hour. They’re at the scene now. We thought we’d give you a look first... while we wait.”

  I gave Nick a skeptical stare.

  That time, he had the grace to blush.

  “Okay,” he said, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I wanted you to look at him, Miriam. He won’t talk to us. I thought you might be able to give me some suggestions. Before we go all Guantanamo on his ass.”

  Frowning, I pursed my lips.

  Then I looked back at Nick’s blood-covered suspect.

  That time, I tried to push aside the emotional impact of the blood and assess the man himself. I still couldn’t get anything off him in the usual way. Even so, his war-paint aside, he had something about him, this guy. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, not in those first few seconds, but I found it difficult to look away from his face. He looked surprisingly calm, and those odd-colored eyes shone with intelligence.

  If anything, he looked alert.

  Not quite waiting, but expectant... even as he seemed to be using the time in some more complex mental exercise I couldn’t see. That sharpness he wore had a calculating quality, as if he were otherwise occupied in some further reach of his mind.

  I also distinctly got military.

  Only after I’d been looking at him for a few seconds more did I realize that the alertness told me more about his demeanor than the calm he wore over it. Something about that calm of his was deceptive, in fact. Behind it, he looked high-strung.

  Like, really high-strung.

  Like he was remaining where he sat through sheer force of will.

  I reassessed my “not a drug addict” summation briefly, but then went back to my original conclusion a few seconds later. What I was seeing didn’t come from drugs. He looked like he wanted to be elsewhere, without looking the slightest bit afraid, or nervous, or even angry. He didn’t look smug, either, like most psychopaths I’d seen.

  Instead, he seemed to view his being here as a colossal waste of his time.

  Once I’d seen that, I couldn’t un-see it. Further, it occurred to me that he didn’t even seem to be hiding his impatience particularly well.

  I might have noticed it before if I hadn’t been trying so hard to read him in other ways.

  “What’s his name?” I said.

  Again, Nick and Glen exchanged a look.

  “What?” I said. “What’s the joke now?”

  “If you can get a name out of that guy, I’ll buy you dinner,” Nick said. Grinning, he gave me a teasing once-over. “Of course, I’d do that for free, doc... just name the day.”

  Glen snorted again, folding his thick arms over his chest.

  Raising my left hand to Nick in what had recently become a running joke with us, I tapped my engagement ring with my thumb. Nick grinned, feigning disappointment, then motioned with his head towards the man sitting in the other room. My eyes followed his stare back to the guy with the flecked, gold-colored eyes, even as Nick’s voice grew more openly cop-like.

  “He won’t give us a name. No ID on him. His prints aren’t in the system.”

  “Mystery guy, huh?” I said.

  I said it casually, even with a lilt of humor. Still, I was puzzled. Television aside, that almost never happened, not anymore.

  You couldn’t get anywhere anymore without some kind of ID.

  “We’re running facial rec on him now,” Nick said, almost like he heard me. “We’ll give him to Interpol if we don’t find him here. He’s got to have at least an alias... somewhere.”

  “No military record?” I said.

  “Nothing on the books.”

  I nodded, only half-hearing him as I frowned at the suspect.

  Nothing. He really was a blank wall.

  That was pretty rare for me, like I said.

  Not unheard of, but yeah... rare.

  “What makes you think he’ll talk to me?” I said finally, looking back at Nick.

  Nick just smiled, shifting his weight on his feet.

  “He probably won’t,” Glen volunteered from Nick’s other side. “But Nicky here seems to think you walk on water, doc, so he wanted to give it a shot.”

  Shrugging, even as I gave Nick an annoyed look, I tossed my paper cup of coffee in the plastic-lined bin under the desk and made a somewhat overdone motion towards the other room.

  “Well?” I said. “We might as well kill time until forensics shows up, right? I canceled my morning’s slate for this dog and pony show.”

  I added that last part with more bite, giving Nick a harder stare.

  Grinning at me, Glen, who was a good five inches taller than Nick and built like a linebacker, or maybe some kind of throwback to his Viking roots, nodded. Motioning for me to follow, he aimed his feet for the door so he could let me inside the interrogation room.

  As I walked past him, though, Nick caught hold of my upper arm.

  “Don’t fool around with this guy,” he warned.

  The smile vanished from Nick’s face, leaving my friend, the guy I knew behind his schtick.

  I remembered that look from Afghanistan, too.

  “...I mean it, Miri. He’s probably a serial killer. At the very least, he likes dead bodies a little too mu
ch. We’ll be right outside that door. If you want out, get out. Right away. Don’t play tough for the cop crowd... hear me?”

  Normally I would have chewed him out for the whole damsel-needing-protection crap, which I thought we were well past, given everything we’d been through together. Normally I also would have thrown in a few cutting reminders about just how many murderers, rapists, child molesters and other pillars of society I’d interviewed for him already.

  Something about the way he said it diffused my anger though.

  “I hear you,” I said, giving him a mock salute.

  As I did, I glanced at the guy on the other side of the one-way glass.

  The suspect just sat there, a faint frown touching the edges of his dark lips.

  For the first time however, he was staring at the one-way mirror.

  It looked like he was staring directly at me.

  Seeing the speckle of blood to the right of where that sharp mouth ended, I felt my pulse rise, in spite of myself.

  Nick might just be right about this guy.

  He usually was.

  Pushing the thought out of my mind, I looked away from the glass, following Glen out into the corridor. As I did, I let my face slide into a blank, professional mask and hoped that this time it would protect me.

  Two

  FIRST INTERVIEW

  HE LOOKED ME over when I walked in.

  Unlike a lot of people I’d interviewed in this room, suspects and witnesses alike, he didn’t hide his appraisal. He also didn’t do anything to try and get me on his side––like smile, or make his body language more accommodating or submissive.

  He didn’t try to intimidate me either, at least not that I noticed.

  Again, the predominant emotion I saw in his assessment remained impatience.

  He seemed, more than anything, to assume I was here to waste his time, too.

  At the same time, I got the sense there was more there––more in relation to me specifically, I mean. Nothing sexual, at least I didn’t think so.

  What that “more” was exactly, I had absolutely no theories at that point.