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Checkpoint Charlie’s is located pretty much right on the spot where the French Quarter fades into Faubourg-Marigny; which was to say, right on the spot where most tourists turn on their heels, because their guidebooks mark the edge of the Quarter as the edge of the known world, with bohemian Faubourg one of those uncharted territories on medieval maps emblazoned with the warning Here Be Monsters.
Patrese ordered an Abita and looked round. It was somewhere between a biker bar and a college hangout; pretty empty at the moment, but doubtless hopping in the small hours, even hotter and sweatier than it was already, if that were possible.
A blackboard announced live bands later that night. Somewhere to his left, pool balls clacked against each other. A ceiling fan moved lazily overhead.
He’d tried to work out a hundred times how to play this, and still had no clear answer. But sitting here, listening to other people’s laughter, Patrese decided just to go with the flow; trust his instincts, take it from there. Cindy had called the meeting. Let her make the running.
Eight o’clock came and went.
He wasn’t especially bothered. New Orleanian attitudes to time are pretty loose; not surprising, perhaps, when half the city’s bars are open round the clock.
Maybe Cindy had been held up at work. Maybe she was plucking up courage, which round here usually involved a couple of daiquiris. Maybe she was playing hard to get; make him wait, establish her terms.
There was a fire station right across the road, and a bunch of firemen were sitting out front, admiring the girls who walked past. Most of the girls seemed happy to admire them right back.
Eight thirty.
Patrese would have rung, but he didn’t have Cindy’s number. She hadn’t given him her cell. If she was still at work, Varden would be there too, so she wouldn’t be able to talk. He could see if she was in the phone book, but that might appear too creepy, finding out where she lived and ringing up.
He was hungry. The menu said that Checkpoint Charlie’s burger and chips were famous as far as Berlin – Berlin, Germany, not Berlin, Connecticut – which made him laugh, so he ordered that, medium rare.
A dark-haired girl came in. For a moment, Patrese thought it was Cindy, but she was too tall, and not nearly as attractive. She had a bag of laundry slung over her shoulder, and he watched with mild surprise as she walked straight through the bar and into a laundromat out back.
What a great idea. Separating lights and darks would be much more fun with a few tequilas inside you. Why had no one else ever thought of that?
Unlike some people, Patrese didn’t mind sitting in a bar on his own, but only if he’d gone there alone to start with. Waiting was something else entirely. He dropped his shoulders, told himself to relax.
‘Here you go, baby,’ said the waitress, setting his burger and another Abita down on the table.
The menu was right; the burger was well worth its international fame.
Nine o’clock.
She wasn’t coming; he was sure of that now. An hour late meant no-show, even in New Orleans. The disappointment surged in his throat. He’d really wanted to know what she’d found so terrible.
And to see her again too, of course.
Sirens out front, the endless two-tone urban soundtrack. A cop car streaked by, an ambulance hard on its tail, pushing through behind before the traffic could reform.
The moment the clock ticked nine thirty, he paid the check and got up to leave.
‘Do you have a phone book here?’ he asked, so suddenly it surprised him.
‘Surely.’ The bartender nodded toward a payphone in the corner. ‘Should be one right there. Probably covered in graffiti by now. Everyone’s a comedian, you know?
The directory was indeed there, and it was indeed covered in graffiti.
Patrese flicked through to the ‘R’s.
Rojciewicz, C. Only one of them. An address on Spain Street, five minutes’ walk from the bar. Presumably why she’d chosen it as a meeting-point in the first place.
Patrese entered the number into his cell and walked outside while it dialed.
It rang eight, nine, ten times. No one home.
He was about to hang up when a woman’s voice answered. ‘Hello?’
‘Cindy?’
A slight pause – and call it years of experience, call it having been on the other end of this plenty of times before, call it whatever, but in that moment, Patrese knew what the woman’s next words were going to be, and that having to say them was one of the worst things in the world.
‘Are you family?’ she asked.
Bee-striped tape, rotating blues and reds, radio chatter, stern-faced cops, neighbors crowded wide-eyed and soft-voiced; the tropes of a homicide scene, unvaried from Anchorage to Key West. Patrese felt at home; he knew his way round such places.
He flashed his Bureau badge, ducked under the tape, and went inside. The building was a nineteenth-century town-house subdivided into condos. Cindy’s was on the top floor, and Patrese was sweating by the time he reached her apartment door.
Not just from the heat, either. No matter how many times a man inhales the rank sweetness of death, he never becomes used to it, not really, not properly. Especially not in the sauna of a Louisiana summer.
Selma appeared in the doorway. She was half a head shorter than Patrese, and her eyes blazed with an anger that he instinctively thought of as righteous.
‘Who the heck are you?’ she snapped.
He showed his badge again. ‘Franco Patrese, from the …’
‘I can see where you’re from. The Federal Bureau of Interference.’
‘Hey, there’s no need for that.’
‘No? How about Freaking Bunch of Imbeciles? You like that one better?’
‘Listen, I’m here because …’
‘Yes. Why are you here? Picked it up on the scanner and had nothing better to do? Let me tell you something, Agent Patrese. We, the NOPD, are perfectly capable of solving homicides all by ourselves, you know? It’s not like we don’t get enough practice. So don’t call us, yes? We’ll call you.’
Patrese recognized Selma from coverage of the Marie Laveau trial, which meant he knew why she was pissed at the Bureau. Marie had managed to cast doubt on the legality of the Bureau’s surveillance procedures: technicalities, sure, but things the Bureau should have made certain of to start with. And that doubt had played well with the jury. It might not have made the difference, but it had certainly made a difference.
So Patrese didn’t blame Selma. In any case, he’d been the other side of the fence himself, and he knew that, even without high-profile trial fuck-ups, pretty much every police force in the land resented and envied the Bureau in equal measures. It was a turf war, simple as that, as atavistic and ineradicable as all conflict. The turf caused the war, and there would always be turf; therefore there would always be war.
‘I was supposed to meet her tonight,’ he said.
The woman cocked her head. ‘You the one who rang just now?’
‘Yes.’
‘You a friend?’ She said it in a tone which suggested disbelief that Bureau agents would ever have friends.
‘Business. She, er, she said she had something to tell me.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. She never showed. Now I know why.’
‘This something – you think it was important?’
‘I’m certain it was.’
‘I mean, was she the kind of person who’d know something important?’
‘You don’t know who she was?’
‘Sure I do. Cindy. Cindy Rojciewicz.’
‘That name doesn’t mean anything to you?’
‘We’ve only been here a half-hour or so.’ The police car and ambulance he’d seen, Patrese thought. ‘We’re still getting things straight. You want to stop messing around and tell me?’
‘She was St John Varden’s PA. And her dad’s a bigshot congressman.’
The woman puffed her cheeks and blew through pursed lips. ‘Sheesh.’ She stuck out a hand. ‘Selma Fawcett. Homicide.’
‘I used to work the same beat.’
‘Not round here. I ain’t never seen you.’
‘Back in Pittsburgh.’
Selma narrowed her eyes. ‘Patrese, you said? Mara Slinger? That the one?’
Mara Slinger. The case which had wrecked him. ‘That’s the one.’
She thought for a second. ‘OK, Agent Patrese, here’s the deal. You go in there, you take a look around, tell me if you see anything that might … I don’t know. Anything. Anything that might help you, anything that might help me. But you don’t touch, you don’t take pictures, and most of all, you don’t forget, not for a second, that this is my scene and you’re here on my say-so. You understand?’
‘I do. Thanks.’
‘Good. And I’m sure I needn’t tell you this, but … it’s not pretty in there.’
‘It never is.’
‘No. But this one really, really isn’t.’
Selma wasn’t wrong.
The one saving grace was that it hardly looked like Cindy any more. Her vibrant beauty had drained away with the blood that was everywhere; spread out in oily slicks on the floor, dripping from tables, and splashed in patterns of arterial fury across the walls. It seemed impossible that anybody should have had so much blood in them.
Cindy was lying on her back in the living room, naked. Her left leg was gone entirely; cut clean through, high on the thigh. Much of the blood must have come from here, Patrese thought, where the killer had sliced through the femoral artery.
Something had been left in place of Cindy’s leg. With all the blood, Patrese had to peer closer to see what it was. When he did, he made an involuntary start backward.
A snake.
A rattlesnake, to be more precise; and clearly as dead as Cindy was.
As far as he could make out, her other leg and torso were untouched.
Not so her face. A mirror had been smashed into her forehead with an axhead.
Patrese liked to think he’d seen his fair share of the unusual, the warped and the downright depraved, but this was right up there – rather, right down there – with anything else in his experience. No psyche he’d ever come across, even the most damaged, could have done something like this.
Cindy’s right arm lay crooked across her chest. Patrese looked for injuries.
Nothing.
In particular, no defense wounds, where she’d tried to fight off her attacker.
But the spatter patterns on the wall indicated she’d been alive when her leg had been severed. Arteries didn’t pump out huge pressurized waves of blood when their owner was dead.
Alive and passive meant unconscious, with or without sedation.
Patrese walked through the condo, dodging the crime-scene officers in their hazmat suits. It was small, two rooms masquerading as four; a kitchenette with an outside door off the living room, a bathroom off the bedroom.
The living room apart, there was no blood. Cindy had been killed where she lay.
Patrese went into the bedroom. It was where he always headed at a crime scene. People tend to keep the truly revealing things about themselves in the bedroom, as it’s where they’re most vulnerable. Sleeping or making love, that’s when defenses are lowest; that’s when people are exposed, flayed, softened.
In the top drawer of Cindy’s bedside table, Patrese found, in order, a pack of rubbers, a folded square of paper which he knew would contain cocaine even before he opened it, and an envelope of what turned out to be nude photos of her. Amateur shots, probably taken by a lover and printed off of a computer. They weren’t exactly hardcore, but nor were they the kind of snapshots you took to pharmacy developers.
When he looked up, Selma was standing in the doorway.
‘What do you reckon?’ she asked.
He rubbed his eyes. ‘Where do you want me to start?’
She gave a wan smile, the first he’d seen. ‘Ain’t that the truth.’
He showed her what he’d found.
‘Quite the party girl,’ she said. Her voice was flat, unimpressed. ‘Pathologist reckons she’s been dead twelve hours, give or take. Hard to tell, it’s so hot in here.’
Pathologists estimate time of death according the cadaver’s temperature, working on the principle that the body loses a degree or two every hour postmortem; but a room as warm as this one would skew the readings. Body temperature is ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit, give or take. New Orleans summer, no aircon, and windows closed, presumably to keep the smell from escaping; the room certainly felt about that hot.
‘Twelve hours dead means she wouldn’t have gone into work today.’
‘Yup.’
‘She was PA to the richest man in the city. She didn’t turn up without explanation, he’d have wanted to know why.’
Selma nodded. ‘Last call made from the apartment phone was eight thirty this morning. We dialed the number. An office extension, now on voicemail.’
‘Calling in sick?’
‘Could be. The voicemail message is an electronic one, no name given, so we won’t know who it belongs to till tomorrow morning.’
‘But if she called in sick herself, she was either being forced to, or she must have known her attacker and had no idea he’d come to kill her. If her attacker called in pretending to be her …’
‘…her attacker must have been a she.’
‘Yes. But even then … You work with someone, you know their voice. You can’t just ring up and pretend you’re someone else. So she let her attacker in. There’s no forced entry, is there? And he made her call her office …’
‘…or it was a lover, and they were going to have some fun together.’
‘The neighbors see any men come round?’
‘One last night, around ten o’clock. But he left a few minutes later.’
‘Description?’
‘Vague. Black. Six foot, hundred and eight pounds.’
‘Could be half the guys in this city.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And no one this morning?’
‘Not that no one saw.’
Patrese thought for a moment. ‘The kitchenette has an outside door. Where does it go to?’
‘I haven’t checked.’
They went back through the living room, where the crime-scene officers were bagging Cindy’s cell phone for evidence, and into the kitchenette.
Patrese pushed down on the handle of the outside door with his knuckles, so as not to confuse the fingerprint testers.
The door swung gently open. Unlocked.
Patrese looked out. Fire escape, running down into the rear courtyard. He turned back to Selma.
‘Fifty bucks says that’s how he got in.’
‘I don’t gamble.’
He looked at her. She was serious. He held up his hands. ‘I didn’t mean to offend.’
‘Accepted. Now, tell me. The snake. Why?’
‘Is this a test?’
‘I’m asking your opinion. That’s all.’
‘OK. The snake – well, evil springs to mind, doesn’t it? The serpent in Eden. Forbidden fruit. Temptation. That kind of thing.’
‘Pretty much my thoughts too. The leg?’
‘Well, if we’re still looking for the obvious imagery – if thy hand offends thee, cut it off. That’s somewhere in the Bible, no?’
‘It is indeed.’
‘A hand, I could understand. But a leg … why would you cut off a leg?’
Selma shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The mirror? The axhead?’
‘Those, I have no idea.’
‘Again, me neither. So I’m not even going to theorize, you understand? I’m going to wait for what Forensics say, and turn every corner of Cindy’s life upside down, and see what comes of that. The data never lies.’
‘Do you disapprove?’
‘Of what?’
‘Of her. Of Cindy. Photos. Drugs. Sex.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘You didn’t look too thrilled when I showed you the photos. You don’t gamble. I’m guessing you’re a – you’re a woman of faith.’
‘She’s dead, Agent Patrese. What she did when she was alive doesn’t matter.’
‘That’s what Homicide cops always say.’
‘Maybe. But I happen to believe it’s true. Everyone’s equal above the ground, and everyone’s sure as heck equal beneath it. I’ve handled cases of murdered whores and murdered nuns, and I’ve given as much to one as to the other. I’ve given it everything I’ve got. You don’t believe me, you walk out of that door now and never come back.’
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