Velvet Dogma About 3300 wds (38 page)

Dr. Tansey straightened, feeling the gazes of the rest of the team. She knew what to do next, of course, but for the first time in her career she couldn’t explain what had just happened on the examination table in front of her.

“Ma
ybe it wasn’t as deep as we thought,” Jeremy suggested. He sounded as unconvinced as she was, but at least it gave them all something to grasp, a lifeline in the midst of inexplicability.

Dr. Tansey stared at the young woman, her eyes narrowing. Yeah, even without the records pulled up, she remembered this patient. It had been awhile, back in the spring perhaps, but recollections like that didn’t die easily in someone trained to hang onto the most minute of details, and when she brushed the girl’s hair away from her jaw line, the doctor’s memory was confirmed.

“Stitch her up,” she said abruptly. She pulled off her gloves and tossed them into the waste receptacle, then pushed back the strands of streaked blond hair that had fallen across her own forehead. “Make sure she’s stable and have her transferred…into the psych wing.”

“W
elcome to another exciting Friday night.”

As he climbed the steps of the apartment building, Detective Greg Jedrek raised one eyebrow at the nearly light-hearted sound of his partner’s voice. Maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad, he thought…then again, a homicide was a homicide, and what could ever be good about something like that? When Greg didn’t say anything in response, Tony Rutland regarded him impassively. The blue bubble lights atop the three squad cars parked in front cut across Tony’s face at half second intervals. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Got my taste of that Friday night spirit you’re so excited about,” Greg retorted. “It’s called DePaul traffic. Must’ve spent fifteen minutes stuck on Fullerton between Clark and Lincoln—nobody gives a damn about lights and a siren anymore.”

Tony nodded, then stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. He jerked his head toward the porch of a small brick apartment building at the end of the short walkway behind him, where a couple of uniformed cops stood unhappily flanking the entrance. Dim light bled out of the doorway and lit two murkily textured windows on either side of the door; something dark was streaked in a semi-circle across the one on the left. “Well, wait’ll you get an eyeful of what’s up there,” he said as he ran a hand through his hair. “I bet it makes you wish you were still sitting on Fullerton and listening to the radio.”

Gr
eg bit back a sharp reply and shouldered past the older man, who made no move to follow. “Aren’t you coming?” Greg finally asked as he paused on the last step.

Tony shook his head and one corner of his mouth turned up in a vaguely cruel smirk. “No, thanks. I’ve already seen enough to make me blow dinner. Your turn, farm boy. Enjoy.”

Greg turned back toward the entrance to the building and said nothing despite his annoyance. What was the use in arguing? Some people were just how they were. Tony wasn’t that much older than him but he’d been on the job here in Chicago a lot longer, had been exposed to levels of brutality that Greg would readily admit hadn’t been found in his hometown of Grinnell, Iowa. Maybe it was the job that had made Tony the way he was, a young guy who radiated the same emotionally dead spirit that Greg had so despised in his own father. In a comparison like that, Tony came out the winner—at least he had a reason for the way he was; Boyd Jedrek had made a lifetime career out of turning away from his wife and children, fine tuning the art of cold-shouldering his loved ones.

The beat cops by the door nodded to him and stepped aside as Greg moved toward the entry door. He frowned when he saw it was open but there were no telltales smears of print dust on it.

“Evidence techs are on the way,” one of the uniforms told him before he could ask. “I don’t know what they’ll be able to salvage, though—the lady who lives on the third floor found the victim, said she had her hand all over that knob when she opened the door. The light was out, too, but she reached up and tapped it with her newspaper and it came on. That’s when…” He shrugged.

“Damn it,” Greg muttered under his breath. Louder, he said, “What else?”

The older of the two took a deep breath. “Female, middle twenties. We can’t tell from the position of the body, but the amount of blood makes it look like her throat was cut. Her clothes are intact and her purse is still inside.” He jerked his head toward Tony, still standing and smoking calmly at the foot of the porch. “Rutland already snapped a couple of Polaroids, but nobody’s moved anything.”

“The woman upstairs—she found her?”

The policeman nodded. “The victim’s name is Eloise Addison. The neighbor was a friend of hers, so she’s pretty freaked. Couple of the guys are up there with her now. Rutland said you’d do the interview.”

Gr
eg nodded. Yeah, Tony would have left it to his softie partner to question the crying witness—which was fine with Greg. If there was ever a classic good cop/bad cop twosome, they sure filled it; too bad they didn’t actually get along and make it a perfect match. “I’ll get to her in a minute,” he said, and toed open the door.

As places to off someone went, this had been a good choice—very little visible from the outside and plenty of space to work with inside. He watched where he was stepping, but the killer had made a clean exit and there were no footprints to worry about. On the floor beneath the mailboxes was a set of keys, and it didn’t take much brainpower to guess the victim had been about to open her mailbox when she’d been grabbed from behind. He could see a line of envelopes behind the slots of the box marked A
DDISON
. She hadn’t made it that far and had probably been grabbed and pulled to the other side so she couldn’t ring any of the bells.

Greg ground his teeth, then turned to look at the other end of the foyer.

At first he didn’t register what he was looking at, then Greg realized what the murderer had done. Mindful of the pool of blood around the small, wooden table over which the corpse was bent, the detective stepped closer. There wasn’t much he could see until the body was moved, and they wouldn’t do that until the techs got here and bagged the victim’s hands, dusted the keys and the other surfaces in the foyer. Lying on its side in the blood beneath the table was a black leather handbag, its zipper closed and clotted with blood—no robbery motive here. Eloise Addison’s skin was a dull, bled out gray and her eyes were slightly open; she’d had her hair, long and dark, twisted into some kind of a chignon and part of it had come loose and was now covering most of her face. From what Greg could tell, the dead woman was wearing an expensive navy blue business suit under a lightweight London Fog trench coat; the coat had gotten tangled to the right when her head and upper body had been forced between the table and the wall. Her skirt and stockings were still intact and tear free, so there’d been no rape. The atrocity that had been committed here had gone down fast and, for what it was, neat.

The inside door on the right was slightly open and beyond it Greg could see a stairway leading up. He nudged the door with his shoulder so he could get inside, though he knew the neighbor had probably turned the doorknob when she’d run to her apartment to call the police. The detective climbed the stairs slowly, his mind turning over what he’d seen so far. No robbery, no rape, no break in. What was the motive here?

W
hen he got to the third floor landing, that door was also open so Greg walked inside without knocking. It was a nice place and probably had the same layout as the victim’s directly below, but they’d have to contact the landlord to let them in before they could look around down there—that was standard procedure, and no doubt one of the uniforms had already called. He was standing in a living room that had been painted a cheerful yellow to complement a feminine looking living room set. Vases with silk flowers were set here and there amid lots of floral paintings and china and crystal knickknacks, Victorian lace curtains and embroidered pillows. Nice place but it made him nervous; he wasn’t a big man, but he felt like he could move the wrong way in here and break something without even trying.

He heard voices down the hall and turned that way, followed an oak-floored hallway to a kitchen that could have come right out of a Martha Stewart magazine. More yellow—lots of it—trimmed with a generous motif of tiny pink and white roses. A border of the stuff encircled the room at the juncture of the wall and ceiling and on one wall hung a four foot square cabinet with an exhibit of collectible miniature teapots and matching plates. The counters showed off an assortment of carefully placed cookie jars and serving dishes in colors that matched the kitchen and the ruffled, painfully floral curtains at the windows. By the time Greg’s brain had taken in all this, he’d resigned himself to dealing with someone his grandmother’s age.

But the woman who sat clutching a cup of tea at the table was only a few years older than the victim, in her mid-thirties at the most. Built a little round at the edges, her attractive face was pale and streaked with tears below a messy head of reddish curls that fell to her jaw line and she’d thrown a dainty crocheted sweater over a ribbon-trimmed dress that Greg wasn’t surprised to see was in another heavily flowered pattern.

When he saw Greg, one of the officers in the kitchen stepped forward. “This is Mary Kidman,” he said. “She found the victim.”

“Eloise,” Mary Kidman said. Her voice was a little loud and brittle, like little pieces of wood being shaken in a bag. “Her name was
Eloise
.
She was my best friend.”

Ow, thought Greg, but Mary didn’t lose it. “I’m sorry,” he said simply, then squatted in front of her. “I’m Detective Jedrek. Can you tell me what happened here?”

Mar
y shook her head. “I don’t know.” Her eyes, strikingly gray beneath reddened lids, filled up and a double line of tears joined the moisture already on her cheeks. “I just…found her like
tha
t
,
in the hallway, when I came home. I didn’t see anyone and I could tell that she was—” She gulped air and dropped her hands to the twisted Kleenex in her lap, then managed to keep going. “She was already dead.”

Greg nodded and gave her a second or two before asking his next question. “Do you know if there was anyone who would do this to her? Was she married, or did she have a boyfriend?”

The woman worked her fingers together. “She wasn’t married, and she didn’t have a steady boyfriend.” She bit at her bottom lip for a second. “There was this one guy she had a little trouble with, but I don’t think he knew where she lived—she said she’d never told him and her phone number was unlisted. And she hadn’t heard from him in almost two weeks, since she told him off.”

Greg’s eyes narrowed and he pulled a small notebook from his breast pocket, flipped it open and readied his pen. “What kind of trouble? Did you meet him?”

“No. And I just know what she told me.” She dabbed at her eyes with the tissue.

“And what was that?”

Mary frowned as she tried to remember. “Eloise was an account executive at Leo Burnett Advertising,” she told him. “They’re downtown and she met this guy, Blake, in line at one of those fast food places everybody goes to for lunch. They had lunch a couple of times—nothing more serious than that—then she couldn’t go the next time he called her at work and asked her out. She was busy and wanted to call him back, but he wouldn’t give her a number, said he wasn’t reachable because he was out in the field or something.”

Greg scribbled a few notes on his pad. “Where did he work?”

“I don’t know. I remember it was some kind of security company, but when she called there, they told Eloise they’d never heard of him. So she put it all together and decided he must be married, and when he called her back, she told him not to call her again.” Mary looked vaguely embarrassed. “Eloise was rather…
outspok
en
sometimes,
and I’m afraid she was rather crude when she did it.”

Greg resisted the urge to smile. There wasn’t anything about this that was funny, but he found it amazing that the fragile Mary Kidman could
be best fr
iends with someone like Eloise Addison, whom he suspected had been a polar opposite. “Then what happened?”

Mary blinked. “He kept calling her, at work, at home, at least twice a day. Finally she told him that she was going to call the police on him if he didn’t stop.”

“And did he?”

She nodded. “Yes. Eloise was on edge for a couple of days, but her threat must’ve worked. She never heard from him again.”

Oh, yes she did, Greg thought without looking up. One last time. “Did she mention what he looked like?”

“She said he was tall, with dark hair and blue eyes. Handsome.”

Just like a million other guys in Chicago. “All right, Ms. Kidman. Thanks for your help.”

She looked up at him, her wide, gray eyes penetrating. “I wasn’t really much help at all, was I?” Her voice trembled.

“Don’t be so certain of that,” he said, but it was an automatic response. He’d run the Addison woman’s phone records, but the wannabe boyfriend had likely called from pay or untraceable cell phones, especially if he had murderous tendencies. Greg glanced at the two uniforms. “Is there someone you can call to…?”