BLUE MERCY Read online

  She tried to focus on the music, but the hatred boiled up again, bile-sour. Kay scrubbed harder, the water scalding her rawing skin.

  Only eighteen hours ago she’d picked her way through the emergency-response vehicles and personnel outside the Dutton warehouse and stood over Valley’s body. Eighteen hours, and they still had no concrete lead. The first twenty-four hours of an investigation are the most critical. How many times had Spence said that? But until the results from Arson came in, until she figured out who Patricia Hagen was and how Eales fit into the scenario, there was no direction. And exhaustion was winning the battle.

  Turning off the water, Kay wrapped herself in a robe and padded barefoot to the kitchen. Harris, the grizzled tabby who shared her living space, stared at her from the last clear corner of the counter. With one eyelid marred by an old split, he observed her with his typical crooked gaze. Judging, Kay always imagined, as though he knew she was responsible for his owner’s death.

  He’d been Spencer’s cat for only a few short weeks, until his wife begged Kay to take the animal after Spencer’s funeral. Grace had claimed allergies, but Kay knew better. The cat had warmed to no one but Spence.

  The old stray, with his tattered ears and alley-mauled face, had made his appearance at the Annie Harris crime scene. He’d wrapped himself around Spencer’s ankles the moment they’d stepped inside the vacant row house, clearly seeing Spence as his retirement ticket.

  It had been hot that afternoon, fourteen months ago, the July sun relentless as it beat against the pitted asphalt of Edmonson Avenue. But it had been even hotter inside the crumbling house. A hundred degrees at least.

  The smell from the second floor had hit Kay like a wall even before she’d stepped through the busted-down front door. In the car, before arriving on scene, Spence had tossed a coin to determine who would lead the case. It was the last time Kay had chosen tails.

  The first sign of maggots was on the ground floor. Hundreds had wormed through the floorboards overhead and the light fixture before dropping to the littered ground. Upstairs, the air was electric with the buzzing of flies, and if not for Spencer prying off the plywood from one window, Kay was certain she’d have been sick along with the uniform who’d discovered the remains.

  What was left of Annie Harris’s nude body rose from a pool of decomposition fluids and writhing maggots. Through the varying levels of insect activity and the rate of decomp, the ME’s office had made the rough determination that Harris’s body had been laid out for at least eight weeks. Identification wasn’t determined until the FBI labs came back with prints, carefully lifted from the hands they’d sent to Quantico. And the knife wounds to the chest had been indiscernible until the ME had slopped through the entire mess.

  Now, as Kay gave the cat a wide berth and took a Corona from the fridge, she tried to block the mental images of that afternoon.

  At the stereo she cranked the volume and tried again to surrender to the music. The movement crescendoed to its climax. In the symphony hall the music would be inescapable; it would crash over her, move through her, until there was nothing but the music. But here in her apartment, with the reality of her life surrounding her, the music was flat. Kay flipped off the CD midstrain and abandoned the stereo.

  The second bedroom served as her home office. There, Kay turned on the computer and took several long draws of her beer as she waited for the modem to dial in. She needed sleep, but knew she wouldn’t find it. Not until she’d answered the question that had burned in her thoughts since she’d reviewed Eales’s visitation records: Who was Patricia Hagen?

  16

  FINN FELT LIKE AN INTRUDER. He hadn’t used the key in over a year. Still, he’d kept it. Wishful thinking. Or maybe just a keepsake. Either way, Kay hadn’t asked for it back.

  He slid the key home, felt the dead bolt turn, and considered going back down to the car for his cell. But he knew Kay was in. He’d seen her police car at the curb on Hamburg and her 4Runner farther down the block. On the airless landing he’d already knocked for several minutes. And with each minute she didn’t answer, the worry in the pit of his gut grew.

  An hour ago he’d gone to the State Pen. After catching some sleep on the boat, then spending several hours reviewing the Eales case files and making some phone calls, Finn had concluded that if anyone needed to be interviewed about Valerie Regester’s death, it was Bernard Eales.

  Unfortunately Kay had come to the same conclusion.

  At the Administration offices Finn had seen Kay’s signature on the visitors’ log, and he’d felt the first stab of anger. He’d canceled his interview with Eales, and the anger grew as he’d left the Pen and driven south to Kay’s apartment. Only as he neared her Federal Hill address had Finn understood the real root of his anger. It wasn’t so much that Kay had gone alone, but rather that he hadn’t been able to shield her from Eales. Just as she had for the past year, Kay had refused to lean on him or turn to him.

  At the lights on Pratt Street he’d considered going home, calling her instead. But Kay could hide a lot when she was just a voice over the phone, and after she’d interviewed Eales, Finn needed to be sure she was all right. Needed to see her to believe it.

  Stepping inside her apartment now, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dark. Past stacks of newspapers in the foyer and a pair of mud-caked runners, Finn moved to the living room. The coffee table was littered with several empty beer bottles, a pizza box, and a gun-cleaning kit.

  He heard the television on in the bedroom, made his way down the hall, past a full laundry hamper and dry cleaning hanging from the bathroom doorknob. He called Kay’s name, but she didn’t respond.

  He found her on the bed, the cold pulse of the television washing over her as she lay in a tangle of sheets and case files. He wasn’t sure if he called her name again as he crossed the room to finally stand over her bed. Her robe had fallen partly open, and even though he thought to avert his gaze, he couldn’t.

  Next to her, the Harris crime-scene photos came to life in the flicker of the TV. Finn remembered the day Kay had caught the case. Remembered a time before Eales. If he thought about it, Harris’s murder had been the beginning of the end for him and Kay.

  He couldn’t be sure what woke her just then. He hadn’t even seen her eyes open, but in a heartbeat, Kay rolled, reached to the side of the bed, and came back with a .38 Special.

  “Jesus, Kay!” He stared down the barrel of the gun, solid in her hands.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked, lowering the revolver.

  “I’ve been knocking for ten minutes.” He nodded to where the CNN newscaster highlighted the latest unrest in the Middle East.

  Kay searched for the remote and muted the TV. When she slid the Chief’s Special back into its holster on the bedpost and stood, Finn saw she was shaking.

  “I could have shot you.” She used anger as a disguise as she brushed past him.

  “I hadn’t considered you armed and dangerous. Since when do you take a five-shooter to bed with you anyway?” But Finn knew the answer.

  She started down the hall, turning on lights as she went. “What time is it?”

  “Almost ten.”

  In the kitchen she took a glass off the counter and filled it under the tap. Finn spotted the empty bottle of Silent Sam.

  “So you saw Eales today,” he said.

  When she turned, he saw a defensiveness in Kay’s eyes. “I was going to fill you in, in the morning.”

  “That’s not the point, Kay.”

  “Look, I cleared it with Vicki. Eales signed the waiver. Besides, Vick agreed I’d likely get more out of Eales if I went alone.”

  “And did you? Get anything out of him?”

  She held his gaze for a moment, and Finn tried to keep his eyes from wandering to the low V of her robe. “No,” she answered.

  “I should have been with you,” he said, imagining Kay alone in the interview room with the son of a bitch.

  “C
ome on, Finn. With how much you hate Eales, your anger would have compromised the interview, and you know it.”

  She was right, but he wasn’t about to concede it.

  And then Kay was onto him. “Wait”—she set her glass on the counter a little too hard—“it isn’t procedure you’re pissed about, is it?”

  “Never mind.” He took a step back, needing to distance himself from Kay, and from the truth. “Who’s this Patricia Hagen?” he asked, starting into the living room. “Her name’s all over Eales’s visitation record.”

  “Eales’s girlfriend.” Kay followed, then led him to her office. “I logged on to the Department’s system from here. I can’t find anything on her. No criminal record, no traffic or parking tickets, not even a Maryland driver’s license.”

  She flipped on the green banker’s lamp at her desk, and Finn surveyed the extent of Kay’s yearlong obsession. Dozens of crime-scene photos had been tacked to the wall: Annie Harris, Roma Chisney, and the Jane Doe from Leakin Park. Over a year later, the dead girl still didn’t have a name.

  There were shots of the exterior of Eales’s row house, and the patch of lawn where Joe Spencer had bled out from the gunshot wound to his chest. A wide swath of blood spread across the sparse grass and mud. And finally the aftermath of the assault on Kay, her own blood staining Eales’s walkway.

  A light layer of dust covered the photos and Kay’s desk, and Finn hoped it meant Kay’s obsession was waning. But his memory of that night had never waned. Every detail rang as vivid as if it were just last week he’d paced the tiled corridor outside the surgery suite at Johns Hopkins Shock-Trauma Unit, praying Kay would come out. Only once before in his life had he felt so terrified, so helpless. Five summers ago, he’d paced a similar hallway, only then it was his son’s life he’d been praying for. And Toby hadn’t come out.

  He would’ve done anything to have traded positions with his son, to have turned the wheel right instead of left so the car had taken the impact of the transport truck on the driver’s side rather than the passenger’s. For the rest of his life, Finn would replay the accident that had claimed his son’s life, in the same way he’d replay those days fourteen months ago when he’d almost lost Kay.

  “I figure we should pay Patricia Hagen a visit tomorrow,” Kay said. “In the meantime”—she pushed aside case folders and spread four photos across the cleared top—“I keep coming back to these.”

  “The knife wounds?”

  “They’re definitely similar,” she said, then pointed out each photo in order: “Annie Harris, seven cuts. Roma Chisney, ten. The Jane Doe, more than a dozen and a half. And Valley, five. And with each one the cuts are deeper, Finn. He’s actually driving the knife into the sternum.”

  “But there’s no pattern, Kay.”

  “Patterned or random, they mean something.”

  “Could be nothing more than a by-product of the abduction, a means of subduing them.”

  “No. With Valley being burned and Harris too decomposed, the ME’s office wouldn’t say for certain if the cuts were made pre- or postmortem. But with these other two, the cuts were both before and after death. What’s he doing to them after they’re dead?”

  “Whoa. What do you mean them, Kay? Someone killed Regester. Singular, not plural. Eales killed those other women.”

  Kay gathered the photos and started to put them away. “They’re the same, Finn.”

  “Come on, we got the right guy. You saw the reports. I know you went over them a million times. How can you doubt the evidence?”

  Kay shook her head, examining the photos again. There was a naked confusion in her face. As if she wanted an explanation, needed it, but knew it was out of reach.

  “I know you didn’t see the evidence, that you didn’t see Eales’s house. But I did, Kay. I was in that hellhole. We got traces of the women’s blood from everywhere. Living room, hallway, bathroom. Even in his bed for Christ’s sake. They found hair samples that matched the Jane Doe and the Chisney girl, and they found Harris’s underwear in his goddamned dresser—with her blood on them.

  “Bernard killed those women, Kay. I know it. And so does every other cop who set foot in that house.”

  “Then how do you explain these?” She held up the photo of Regester’s chest.

  “I don’t know. We’ve got a copycat. Christ, Kay, except for those knife wounds, the MO doesn’t even fit.”

  Kay shook her head and tossed the photo onto the desk with the others, her gaze lingering on them. “I just want to understand, Finn. I want to know why he cuts them.”

  “Why? I can tell you why. Because Eales got off on it. Because he liked to victimize women and it made him feel powerful. Because everyone at school laughed at him when he had his first public hard-on in gym class. Or maybe because his junkie mother locked him in the closet with a rubber band around his dick when he was a kid. Who the hell knows? And why does it matter? We got him.”

  Finn left her office, moving through the cluttered hallway to the living room. Kay followed.

  “We got Eales,” he said again. “And there’s boxes of shit from his house down in Evidence Control that prove it. As for Regester, fine, I’m willing to work with the possibility that it’s related to Eales. Maybe she was killed because of her testimony. Or maybe she was more connected to Eales than she let on. But it’s a fresh murder, Kay.”

  “So where do you suggest we go from here then?”

  Seeing her standing in the middle of her apartment, hands on her hips and her thin robe revealing just a little too much, the memories twisted in his mind, unbidden. How many times had he wished those memories away, wished there’d never been that spark, that fire between them, leaving so many ashes for him to sift through?

  “I want to talk to this Patsy Hagen broad. And anyone else Eales is connected to,” he said, drawing his gaze from her at last. “Including the knucklehead’s brother.”

  “William Coombs? He can’t tell you anything.”

  “He’s the son of a bitch’s brother. And someone’s paying Eales’s legal fees.” James Grogan was one of Baltimore’s top defense attorneys. The man hadn’t lost a case in years. That kind of slime cost big bucks. “Unless Grogan’s taking Eales pro bono, someone’s forking over the greenbacks.”

  “Well, even if it is Coombs, he and Eales haven’t spoken in years.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “Because I talked to him a year ago. On the phone. So did Varcoe and Jimmy Holewinski. Even back then Coombs hadn’t seen his brother in years. He didn’t even know about his brother’s arrest until he read it in the papers. And he’s never visited Eales in prison. He doesn’t know anything, Finn.”

  “Well, then, he can tell us that himself tomorrow morning. I’ve set up a meeting with him.”

  17

  THE DINER JUST SOUTH of the Maryland line on the old York Road catered to a smorgasbord of truckers and locals, with the occasional traveler blown off course from the I-83. The diner being less than a couple miles east of the former North Central Railroad, someone had decided on a train motif as the decor. An electric engine and cars rattled along a track suspended one foot below the ceiling and running the circumference of the dining area, while the walls boasted an array of clocks in a locomotive theme.

  In his pressed suit and crisp tie, William Coombs looked patently out of place seated in a corner booth at a heavily lacquered maple table. He had waved them over the second they stepped through the door, and Kay decided then that she and Finn looked far too much like cops.

  The arrangements Finn had made with Eales’s half brother accommodated the car salesman’s schedule, forcing him to take only a minor detour off his route to Philly on business. Still, he seemed mildly put out by the meeting, but Kay guessed it had nothing to do with the early hour or the detour.

  When he’d pushed aside his breakfast and stood to greet them, Coombs’s expression was taut. In his narrow shoulders Kay sensed tension, and a muscle along his jaw twitched a
s he sat down with them.

  She searched for recognition, but found none in Coombs’s unsettled expression. If he did recognize her from the papers or by her name from over a year ago when they’d spoken briefly on the phone, he didn’t let on.

  He was a small man, fine-boned and lean, the polar opposite of Eales and clear proof of their different fathers. His face was pleasant, with a neatly trimmed beard, chiseled features, and a cleft chin. His perfect teeth capped the winning smile that Kay didn’t doubt sold a steady stream of high-end cars. The only feature he shared with Eales was the eyes. They were the same blue, but on Coombs they worked.

  “I’m really sorry, the name doesn’t ring a bell,” he told them, flashing that endearing smile to the waitress as she collected his plate.

  “Valerie Regester was a witness in your brother’s case.”

  Coombs nodded, fastidiously dabbing at the corners of his mouth with a napkin while the electric train took another pass above their table. “The girl the papers mentioned?” he asked. “The one who says she saw him in the park?”

  Finn nodded.

  “I remember now. And you say she was murdered?”

  “Two nights ago.”

  “You’re not thinking my brother had something to do with her death, are you?”

  “It’s just one possibility we’re exploring,” Finn said. “If there is a connection, we’re trying to figure out who might have done it for him.”

  “Well, Detective Finnerty, I’m not sure how I can help. I honestly don’t know Bernard’s circle. I haven’t seen him in years.”

  “When was the last time?”

  Coombs’s gaze fell to the coffee cup he cradled in his hands as though his mind was tracing back over the years. “I guess it would have been six …no, more like seven or eight years ago. Around the time I bought him the house on Gettings Street.”

  “Pretty generous of you for a brother you never see,” Finn suggested.