Doc Dixon, a big bear of a man with hooded eyes and a wide face, signaled Matthews and won her attention before pointing toward his receptionist, who manned a sliding glass window looking out onto the medical examiner’s waiting room. His sign meant Langford “Lanny” Neal, the possible boyfriend of their Jane Doe, had just arrived and was being kept waiting.
Matthews acknowledged, checked the wall clock, and debated calling LaMoia one more time, resigning herself to the fact that a phone call wouldn’t help the traffic situation. Nothing would help Seattle’s traffic, not even an act of God.
Feeling obliged to do so, she’d left a message at the fish dock where she’d met with Ferrell Walker, providing the time and location of the identification at the medical examiner’s office, hoping the message might not reach the grief-stricken brother in time. But one eye continually tracked to the reception window, wondering if Walker might appear.
Matthews had never liked the medical examiner’s office and avoided it whenever possible. Dixon ran the ME’s more as a doctor than a bureaucrat, displaying a keen interest in each and every body that passed through his doors and the legal system that claimed control of them in death. Matthews didn’t have the same kinship or friendship with Dixon that Boldt shared, but through Boldt she had acquired a profound respect for the man.
Where most of the homicide detectives had developed at least an uneasy comfort at the ME’s, Matthews, a rare visitor, found the basement setting, the medicinal smell, and the overpowering silence repulsive. Perhaps her feelings stemmed from the doctor-office look of the place: tube lighting, gray carpet, white lateral filing cabinets, the efficient young men and women spanning Seattle’s ethnic palate, all dressed in white lab coats, some carrying clipboards, some answering phones. It felt too normal. One expected something more dismal and final-sweating rock walls and bars on the window, a doctor with a speech impediment, a nurse with a limp. This felt more like her OB-GYN’s office.
This setting didn’t work for her at all.
LaMoia entered, his sergeant’s shield clipped to the pocket of the deerskin jacket. He winked at the receptionist, an African American woman who had to be in her sixties, low-fived one of the young docs who made a point of catching up to him, and took Matthews around the waist, steering her toward the double swinging doors that led into the “meat locker”-the primary receiving room that housed twenty-one refrigerated drawers and sported three stainless-steel autopsy tables with drains, lights, and video cameras. There was at least one other autopsy room that she knew of-more of a private surgery suite where Dixon or his chief assistant occasionally tackled a sensitive or particularly gruesome case. She abruptly put on the brakes, not allowing LaMoia to escort her through those doors before it was necessary, and her effort had the unintended effect of turning LaMoia toward her and briefly making contact with her. They bounced off each other, gently, and for a moment there was only that contact lingering in the nerve endings of her skin.
“That our guy out there?” LaMoia stepped back from her, keeping it business.
“Yes. Langford Neal,” she said, giving her jacket a small straightening tug. “Boyfriend, or former boyfriend, if it’s Mary-Ann Walker in there.”
“And the doc thinks it is.”
“The doc got hold of a better driver’s license photo than I did.
One of her eyes, the left, I think, is still where it belongs, and it’s apparently a match for color: blue. Height’s about right. Weight could be right, discounting for saturation and bloat. I’ve got a call in to the brother to try to locate dental records for her.”
LaMoia glanced in the direction of the reception area. “Let me tell you something about our little angel, Neal. Two convictions as well as a number of complaints from previous love interests. This guy plays rough. He served thirty days in county for one of the convictions. The second, he was in for six months, out in four.”
The news moved Neal up the list in both their minds. She understood the added spring to LaMoia’s step now-he loved having the jump on information. “That certainly helps,” she said, “but we shouldn’t lose sight of the brother, either.”
“Ten-to-one she was killed in or near the boyfriend’s pad, given the underwear, the bare feet, and the rest of it.”
“The brother could have harbored jealousy and anger over his being deserted for Neal. That’s powerful stuff.”
“Neal has two convictions for knocking women around. You kidding me? Not losing sight of the brother, that’s okay. But we focus on Neal. If he does, in fact, ID the body as her, then from what you were saying, your take is to run him straight up to the bull pen and have a go at him. Is that right?”
“That, or use a conference room here.”
“You’re thinking that this viewing may put him off-balance-her being so ripe and all-and that we pounce while we have the opportunity.”
“You’re a lot smarter than you look.”
He took it in stride. LaMoia had his timing down to an art form. He kept it business-for the time being. This put her on edge, her defenses at the ready.
“You want to sit this one out, I’m okay with that. You’re way too … sweet … for a floater. Especially one that’s been in the meat locker for a few extra days.”
She knew she could handle it, she’d seen plenty of dead bodies, some in dreadful condition, but it didn’t mean she wanted to. “I’ll take that as a compliment. I think.”
“You think too much,” he said, meeting her eyes to drive home his point. LaMoia had large brown eyes and knew how to use them to effect.
“Meaning?”
“You gotta teach yourself to feel, Matthews.” He leaned against one of the two swinging doors. He wasn’t going to make her follow inside. “You’re all engine. It’s the handling that counts.” Everything came down to cars for LaMoia. “You get that down, you’ll be just about perfect.”
“Who said I wanted to be perfect?” But he didn’t answer her.
He left her there to think about it. The door flapped shut behind him. Timing was everything.
Decades earlier, in municipalities across the country, medical examiner and coroner offices had learned to separate the individual making an identification from the room containing the body, as the smell tended to cause fainting and vomiting. Some used video, some a window-most used both, as did the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, where a color TV was mounted to the left of a narrow window that housed a venetian blind controllable from the inside.
Lanny Neal was handsome in a ski bum kind of way, cocksure of himself judging by the rigid shoulders, the smug expression, and his willingness to blatantly check out Matthews, leveling his gaze and drinking her in, head to foot.
She knew she should wait to question him, but he’d fired the first salvo with that rude survey of her topography, and she fell victim to the challenge.
“When did you last see Mary-Ann?” she asked.
The question didn’t rattle Neal in the least-although LaMoia looked a little uncomfortable. Neal remained calm and collected, as if he were there applying for a job. This further irritated Matthews.
“Couple nights ago.”
“How many nights ago?”
“Saturday, I guess.”
“You guess, or you know?” Matthews pressed.
“Saturday night. Late.”
“You weren’t worried about her?”
“Pissed was more like it.”
“You didn’t report her missing. Why’s that?”
“Why should I? She blew me off. Her tough luck.”
Mary-Ann was gone. On to the next. Matthews knew the attitude. She asked him about the last time he’d seen Mary-Ann.
Where they were at the time, what Mary-Ann had been wearing, her mood.
LaMoia interrupted. “I think they’re ready for us.”
A plain white sheet on a stainless-steel gurney filled the video screen. LaMoia knocked on the glass and the blinds came up like a curtain being raised. A hand appeared, on both the video and through the glass, drawing back the sheet and revealing the remains of a woman’s head, at once both pathetic and terrifying. The lips were grotesquely distended, as if pumped full of air. An eyelid had been stitched shut, apparently to spare Neal the sight of an empty socket.
Matthews heard herself catch her breath. LaMoia remained intractable. Neal stared at her for a long time, exhaled slowly, shook his head slightly, and looked away with glassy eyes. It was not the reaction she would have expected of a murderer-she and LaMoia met eyes and she knew he felt much the same-leaving her to wonder just how good an actor Lanny Neal might be. This, in turn, prepared her for the Q amp;A she was already planning in her head.
“Yeah,” Neal said, still looking away from the window.
“Mary-Ann Walker?” LaMoia asked.
Neal looked a little green, his skin carrying a light sheen that hadn’t been there moments before. “You got a men’s room around here?”
LaMoia directed him down the hall, meeting eyes once more with Matthews and communicating his own surprise at Neal’s reaction.
The commotion came from the front of the office, where the receptionist stood out of her chair too late to prevent the entrance of a man wearing a torn sweatshirt and filthy blue jeans.
It took Matthews a moment to identify the late arrival as Ferrell Walker.
Walker paused in the middle of the medical examiner’s central office looking lost yet determined. Matthews immediately picked up on the kid’s frenetic energy. It jumped around the room like sparking electricity. He held the attention of everyone in the office as heads lifted and a silence of apprehension descended. These people had no idea he was a grieving brother.
This was the wild man on the subway, the lunatic in the hotel lobby. Of the employees in the room, only the receptionist made any attempt to intervene, and she reconsidered after taking a few steps toward the kid. Lanny Neal didn’t yet see him.
Matthews left the small hallway that offered the viewing window and moved across the central room toward Walker, who avoided her by closing in on Neal. The fingers of his right hand danced like a gunslinger’s.
“Don’t!” Matthews shouted, but her reprimand had the unintended effect of stopping not Walker, but Neal, allowing Walker to close the distance even faster. Matthews knew, without knowing, what Walker had in mind; knew, without knowing, that for a few precious seconds Walker remained impressionable; knew, without knowing, that she was going to have to talk Walker down.
Walker, now to her left, lunged with reptilian speed, pinning Neal, who was a good deal larger than him. Down the small hallway, LaMoia drew his weapon instinctively, but Matthews waved LaMoia off as the curved blade of Walker’s fillet knife flashed through the air and came to rest against Neal’s throat.
“The question you have to ask yourself,” Matthews began, addressing Walker as if she’d rehearsed for the role, “is not whether you believe Mr. Neal harmed your sister, or whether you think yourself capable of doing harm to him; it’s not even about the prison time you will serve-you’ll get a life sentence for something like this, Ferrell, meaning Mr. Neal will have destroyed both you and Mary-Ann-the question is what Mary-Ann would say to you, were she here at this moment, whether or not she would approve of you destroying your own life in an effort to save hers, a life already beyond saving.” She inched closer, now fifteen feet away.
She won his attention, though with no immediate results. The blade remained against Neal’s throat.
She said, “Mr. Neal identified Mary-Ann just now. She’s here, and you can see her for yourself if you want.” She pounced on what she believed would be his greatest desire-to see his sister again-never taking her eyes off Walker as she pointed toward the hallway where LaMoia waited. She had to steer him back into his grief and away from anger and blame. “Do you want to see Mary-Ann again, Ferrell? That would be nice, wouldn’t it? Believe me-you keep up like this, you’ll never see her again. You’ll be in prison when it comes time to bury her, and your actions here, right now, will have delayed any possible prosecution of Mr. Neal, for whatever role he may or may not have had in your sister’s death.”
Lanny Neal strained through clenched teeth, “This … is …
bullshit.”
Walker’s eyes danced.
Matthews moved yet another step closer. Twelve feet now.
“You’re lying to yourself, Ferrell, if you think you’re doing Mary-Ann a favor. You think murdering a man in cold blood is going to help her? How? Do you think it’s going to help your situation in any way? You’re making a lot of trouble here.” She nodded at LaMoia. She wanted Walker’s attention divided.
“John! Is this going to save you trouble?”
“Me? I’m looking at writing up reports for the next week if this guy makes the wrong choice. Not doing me any favors.”
“No,” Matthews agreed. She extended her open hand toward Walker. “Once you pass me that knife, this incident is closed.
Do you hear me, Ferrell? Closed. There’s only Mr. Neal’s word against your own. The sergeant and I, the people in this office: No one saw anything. A grieving brother got a little out of control. Big deal.”
LaMoia said, “Where’s the foul?”
“He did this to her!” Walker said, his voice raw.
“Bullshit I did,” Neal groaned.
“We don’t know what happened,” Matthews said. “That’s still being determined. If you’re right, then you’re right. But it’s a risky assumption on your part. And what if you’re wrong, Ferrell? What then? What if you kill an innocent man here today? Where’s that leave you? Mary-Ann’s killer at large, and you, in jail, behind bars, where you can’t do anything to help us. We need your help here, Ferrell. You’re her only surviving kin-that’s hugely important to our investigation.”
Walker tensed instead of handing over the knife.
A man’s thunderous voice boomed from the far side of the room. “Put down the knife, young man!” Doc Dixon, sounding like God himself. Behind Matthews, and to her right.
Walker glanced over in that direction, increasing the pressure on Neal’s throat as he did so.
Dixon said, “You don’t use a knife as a weapon in the basement of a hospital.” It sounded so convincing. “There are a few hundred trained doctors in the floors immediately above us.
Emergency rooms. Surgical suites. I’m a doctor. Several of my assistants in this room are also doctors. We’re not going to let him die. No matter what you try, we’re going to save him. The moment you try anything, Sergeant LaMoia over there will either put a bullet in you or break every bone in your body. And another thing to think about: No one here is going to be in any great hurry to help you, believe you me.”
LaMoia was maybe ten feet behind her now. “This is one way, do not enter.”
Matthews said, “There’s a legal process that’s meant to handle this. It’s a process that works, Ferrell. Knives don’t work.
Trust me.”
“Knives are messy,” Dixon said. “You mess up my carpet and I’m going to personally beat the spit out of you.”
Dixon moved for the first time, growing ever larger in her peripheral vision, cobra-like, as he approached. Matthews had somehow overlooked Dixon’s formidable presence all these years. Suddenly she understood much more clearly the attraction between Dixon and Boldt-birds of a feather.
Walker’s pale eyes flipped between Dixon and Matthews.
“Stop right there,” he warned.
Matthews took a step and said, “Hand me the knife and it stops. That’s the only way it stops. Put Mary-Ann in this room, Ferrell. Take the rest of us out of here. It’s only you, Mr. Neal, and Mary-Ann. Put Mary-Ann right here where I’m standing-you can do that, I know you can-and then ask yourself what she’d say. How would she react to your threatening Mr. Neal this way? What would she tell you to do?” She took yet another step toward him. Six feet. “Don’t listen to me; don’t listen to Doc Dixon; you just listen to her, to Mary-Ann.”
Walker stared at her. She said, “Drop the knife, Ferrell.”
To her amazement, Walker dropped the knife.
LaMoia rushed him, tackled him, and had him on the floor, Dixon assisting.
Lanny Neal leaned over him. “You worthless piece of shit.”
Matthews retrieved the knife from the carpet. It was heavier, sturdier, than she had imagined.
LaMoia cuffed Walker out of routine but then wondered aloud if they should book him, and Matthews put it onto Neal to make the decision to press charges or not. A grief-stricken brother facing a possible viewing of his murdered sister’s body.
How tough would the legal system be on Walker?
“Murdered?” Neal said, repeating her.
“Well, at least you’re listening, Mr. Neal. That’s a good place to start.”
10 The Debt
“Where is he?” Ferrell Walker asked. He occupied one of the two guest chairs in Doc Dixon’s spacious office.
Matthews patrolled the area behind Dixon’s desk, where, at head level, the room’s only window looked out at ankle-height to the sidewalk above.
“You need to convince me, Mr. Walker, that we’re making the right decision concerning your release.”
“The other guy’s got him, right? The guy who tackled me?”
“You’re not helping your case any.”
“If I was going to do anything to that piece of shit, it would already be done. Okay? You think I’m going to have a chance like that again?” He tracked her constantly as she paced, his deep eye sockets fixed onto her every movement. “You saved me.”
“I didn’t save anyone. I intervened, and on Mr. Neal’s behalf, not yours.” Do not twist this around to your liking. “If we release you, we need some reassurance that you’re capable of controlling your emotions, your anger.”
“I lost my head.” He grinned at her, cool and collected, like so many of the street kids they dealt with. “Is that what I’m supposed to say?”
“There is no ‘supposed to,’ ” she lied. In fact, that, or something close to it, was what he was supposed to say, but she didn’t appreciate the irreverent tone. “And it’s not what you say but what you do that matters to us.”
“Okay. I get it now. If you let me go, then I owe you,”
Walker said. “You’re saying I owe you something. Like a snitch.
That kind of thing. Right? Listen, no problem.”
“That’s not at all what I’m saying.”
“I get it. It’s okay. I want to help you nail Lanny.”
“It’s not okay. You do not owe me, you owe it to Mary-Ann to let us do our jobs. You owe Lanny Neal the right for us to bring evidence against him or not. He is not guilty simply because he was her boyfr-”
“He hit her. Did things to her.”
“And we’ll look into all that. But in point of fact, Mr. Walker, a homicide investigation typically looks at the immediate family first, relationship partners second, and close friends last.
You are the immediate family, the one we should be looking at first, not Mr. Neal.”
“So look at me,” he said, opening his arms to her.
“Did you kill your sister, Mr. Walker?” For Matthews it was a question that begged to be asked. She studied his body language carefully.
He stared at her, dumbfounded, cocked his head and said, “Who are you people? He beat her. He said he’d do this, and now he’s done it.”
He displayed none of the reactions she might have expected from a guilty party-a pregnant pause, rapid eye movement or breaking eye contact, adjusting himself in the chair. Even so, the idea would not leave her entirely and lingered in the back of her mind. Neal had the more likely motive, Neal the opportunity. And, if what they knew about Neal was true, he had the sordid history as well. Walker’s rage, his vengeance, was so prevalent that it filled the room. Assigning guilt was an easy jump for her.
He said, “From what I’m hearing I owe you a favor for helping me out. Stopping me like that. I’m good with that. I didn’t want him seeing Anna before I did. I was … upset. Okay? I can’t thank you enough for what you did.”
“It can’t happen again,” she said.
“I realize that. I’m sorry.” The student cowering to the teacher; the little boy who knows better.
She cautioned him, “We will instruct Mr. Neal to file a restraining order against you. It’ll be his choice to do that or not.
That doesn’t bring charges against you, but it serves to put you on notice. It draws a line in the sand that you’d better not cross.”
“Anna and I, we repay our debts,” he said.
“There is no debt. Are you hearing anything I’m saying?”
“I’ll be a good boy.”
“Don’t push me, Mr. Walker.”
“Lanny Neal is the one who needs restraining. You see to that, Lieutenant Matthews, and you’ll have no problem from me.”
“It’s not how it works,” she said. “You’re damned close to threatening a police officer.”
“She was murdered. You said so yourself. You have her killer in custody. So do something about it. You need help, I’ll help. You helped me out. I won’t forget that.”
“You’d better forget it. That is not the point!” She’d lost her patience and her composure. Walker seemed to take this as a victory.
“He broke her legs, didn’t he?”
Matthews felt a stab of surprise in her chest.
“You see? I can help you, if you’ll let me. He said he’d do that … said he’d break both her legs if she ever tried to leave him.” He watched her reaction, confirmation, and his eyes welled with tears. “He broke her legs, didn’t he? Oh, God, poor Anna.”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the particulars.”
He sat back. “Look at it this way: I didn’t want your help either. Just now, I didn’t want you getting in my face, in my head like that. But you did and it worked out for the better.
Right? See? All I’m saying is … sometimes we get help when we don’t see it coming. It’s a good thing. I can help you like that.”
“We’re done here,” she announced. “We’ll want to speak with you again, and when we do we’ll find you at your work-place.”
“Unless I find you first,” he said childishly, meeting eyes with her and straining to communicate something more.
She winced. “Go back to work. Go back to your life. If anything comes up regarding the investigation I’ll make sure you’re informed.”
“You see? Another favor.”
“That’s standard procedure, Mr. Walker. That is not a favor.
None of my actions should be construed as personal favors. Any such misinterpretation-”
“Save it,” he said, rising quickly to close the gap between them. She could smell the overpowering fish odors and his sour perspiration. She nearly retched. “The only question I have is whether or not you give me back my fish knife.”
Matthews glanced down at Dixon’s desk where the gun-smoke gray blade rested by Dixon’s pen stand.
“That knife has history,” Walker said. “Family history.”
It felt wrong returning that knife to him, but it felt equally wrong to confiscate the one item that was probably all he had left of his family. “Against my better judgment,” she said, holding it by the blade and offering the knife back.
“I won’t forget this,” he said.
She closed her eyes as he left the office, torn between reversing her decision and watching him go. But then he was gone, the decision made for her.
Crossing the ME’s to a conference room where LaMoia held Neal, she put away her thoughts of Ferrell Walker. As she swung open the door that led out of the offices and into the small reception area littered with magazines, Matthews caught sight of a brown sheriff’s uniform. The medical examiner’s office was a county, not city, department, meaning KCSO had as much or more business here than SPD. Nonetheless, she knew in advance, knew instinctively, who this uniform belonged to.
The wide shoulders turned, the blond head swiveled, and just before the door shut she caught a glimpse of the profile of Deputy Sheriff Nathan Prair.
What business did Nathan Prair have here? Was it Mary-Ann Walker or was it Daphne Matthews? She turned around quickly, hoping he hadn’t seen her. She hurried toward the conference room, a part of her wanting escape; she knocked once, turned the handle, and stepped inside, her heart beating a little too quickly.
“Why don’t you walk us through the events of the night Mary-Ann went missing,” LaMoia said.
Neal’s erratic eye movement, constant swallowing to fight dry mouth, and perspiring upper lip warned Matthews to pay strict attention to the lies she felt were certain to follow. Here was more what she’d been expecting of Walker when she’d put the question to him. By prior agreement, she’d let LaMoia kick things off. At an appropriate time, yet to be determined, she would take over and he would be the one to stay quiet. If they sensed they had a live suspect, they would finish up by double-teaming Neal, at which point Matthews would play the hard-ass, and LaMoia the more patient, reasonable cop, turning ste-reotypes on end and hoping to keep Neal guessing.
“We’d been at my mom’s, the two of us. We’d had a couple drinks. Dinner at my mom’s. My mom likes rum. We’d had a few rums, I guess.”
LaMoia clarified, “This is you, Mary-Ann Walker, and your mother?”
“Right.”
“State your mother’s name, please.”
“Frances. Frances Kelly Neal.”
“You had dinner, the three of you. Which night was that?”
“Saturday.”
LaMoia took a moment to make a point of counting backward. His favorite line of offense was to play the fool to begin with, slowly migrating to the hard-line cop any suspect learned to fear. “March twenty-second.”
Neal said, “We come home after dinner … to my hang, you know? And went to bed. I watched the sports while she … you know, she was busy.”
“Busy, how?”
“You know?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Busy.” He pumped his cupped hand up and down. “Beneath the sheets.”
“Ms. Walker was performing oral sex on you while you watched the sports news.”
Neal grinned proudly, but he couldn’t keep his eyes still.
“That’s it.”
Lies, she thought, as LaMoia caught her attention and rolled his eyes.
“What time would that have been?” LaMoia asked.
“After dinner, like I said.”
“That would be the local news?”
“Q-13.”
“That would be Fox.”
“That would be correct.” He mimicked LaMoia, and the sergeant impressed Matthews with his ability to remain calm and not rise to the bait.
Neal liked to hear himself talk. That played in their favor.
“She wanted some of that action for herself-if you know what I’m saying-and I wasn’t exactly complaining, but-”
LaMoia interrupted. “We’ll skip the play-by-play, if you don’t mind. You did, or did not have intercourse with Mary-Ann Walker on Saturday, March twenty-second?”
“That’s a ‘did.’ For sure.”
Matthews asked, “Using a condom, or without?”
“That would be without.” Neal gave her a tennis pro smile.
LaMoia said, “Following the intercourse, you watched more television, or read, or went to sleep, or what?”
“Slept. At least I did. Mary-Ann might have gone out the window.”
“You want to explain that?”
“For a smoke,” Neal clarified. “Can’t stand that shit. She used the fire escape. Used it all the time. I saw her out there on the fire escape. It was later, a lot later. Probably for a smoke.
Right? I saw her out there, yeah. I just said I did.” Confusion fanned the edges of his eyes.
“Approximately what time was this?”
“Later.”
“Can you be more precise?”
Neal glanced first to Matthews, then to LaMoia, as if hoping one of them might help him out. He pinched his temples between the fingers of his right hand and apparently appealed for divine intervention. She was beginning to put more faith in Walker’s suspicions. Lanny Neal was a self-centered egotist who had a record of abusing his girlfriends. He didn’t lie very well, despite what must have been a great deal of practice.
“I remember her out there … seeing her out there. I didn’t like it when she went out there dressed like that. She never seemed to give a shit what she was wearing. Claimed no one could see her, so high up and all. And that’s another thing-she don’t even like heights, but for a smoke, shit, she’d climb the Space Needle. Anyway, she’d go out there in like a T-shirt and underwear, showing skin and all.
“She was talking,” he continued. “At first I wondered who the fuck was out there with her. Then I saw the cordless phone was missing. She was out there on the fire escape on the goddamn phone with someone. Maybe it was the phone ringing that woke me up in the first place. And I do remember what time it was.” This seemed to dawn upon him, and Matthews thought he was making it up as he went. “All twos flashing at me. Two twenty-two. The clock by the phone on her side of the bed. I remember that. Two, two, two. Flashing away. And I looked out the window, and there she was on the goddamn phone.”
“Two twenty-two A.M.”
“You ought to be talking to that brother of hers. Always begging her for money, bugging her. Punk-ass kid, blaming her for everything bad happening to him. Probably him on the phone. Probably him who did this to her.”
“What exactly do you think happened to Mary-Ann?”
LaMoia asked.
“How should I know? All disgusting like that, the way she was. Looked like she drowned or something. Is that right?”
“What exactly was Mary-Ann wearing at the time? Out on your fire escape.”
“I just told you! Next to nothing.”
“A description of that clothing could prove useful to the investigation.”
“Well, she sure as shit wasn’t going to go out there bare-ass again, you understand. Not after the last time. I’d caught her again-”
He stopped himself.
LaMoia met eyes with Matthews, communicating that they had their first real look at Langford Neal’s inner workings. Interrogators lived for such moments.
LaMoia supplied, “You’d smack her around, let her know who was boss.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Did you smack her around that night, Lanny? Hit her upside the head, or knock her off the fire escape, or what? She was bleeding, wasn’t she? She was bleeding and you didn’t know what to do.”
“That’s bullshit. I seen her out there and I went back to sleep.
End of story. She would’a had on butt floss. White butt floss.
She always wore the same thing.”
Matthews said, “Thong panties. And what about on top? A T-shirt? A blouse? A robe?”
“One of those camel-things.”
“A camisole.”
“Two humps right where they belong. Nice and tight.”
Matthews cringed at his reckless confidence. “A camisole and thong underwear. No sweatshirt, no robe?”
“She’s hot-blooded, I’m telling you. Went out there all the time in next to nothing. For a smoke. A sweatshirt-how the hell should I know? Does she own one? Yes. But that night it was a freak show anyway. Warm for a change. You can check that, right?”
LaMoia said, “We’ll check all of your statement, Lanny.
Every last word.”
He looked briefly bewildered, but then regained his confidence and restated that the last time he’d seen her she’d been out on the fire escape. “Woke the next morning and she wasn’t there. Not that that was all that unusual. She went to sleep later than me and got up earlier. Probably headed straight for a coffee hit, a Seattle’s Best, down a few blocks. You should check with them. Right? They open at six, and she’s always one of the first through the door.”
“So her clothes were gone,” LaMoia stated. “In the morning, I’m talking about-when you woke up, whatever else she’d been wearing-those clothes were gone?”
“What clothes? How the fuck would I know?” Clearly flus-tered, Neal shook his arms in front of himself as if his hands had gone to sleep. “She wore them to bed, that’s all I’m saying.”
LaMoia reviewed his notes. “A moment ago you said you fell asleep after having sex with Ms. Walker. That you fell asleep after the sex. Now you’re saying she wore panties to bed?
Can you be more precise?”
“She wore them to bed before I took them off her.” He added, “And that would have been after the sports, after the hummer, to be more precise.”
“And what clothes if any, did she leave behind at your apartment that morning?”
“She’s the one picks up, not me.”
LaMoia said irritably, “So you’re saying she cleaned house that morning, before she left for the coffee?”
“Listen, she had clothes at my place, okay? How the fuck do I know what was there and what wasn’t? She lived there with me, don’t forget. Right? Clothes? What? On the floor or something? How the hell would I know?”
Matthews thought the story was getting away from him. The little pauses. The rapid eye movement. She excused herself and left the conference room, returning a few minutes later with autopsy photographs of two different women.
She wasn’t hoping to win a confession, to cause some Perry Mason moment in which Langford Neal hung his head, weeping, and detailed the events of that night. She did, however, intend to run Neal through a litmus test. If she came away with anything, she hoped to at least identify his lies and to make sense of his motivations for telling them. Making a legal case was not her responsibility. All that she wanted was the truth. Until the attorneys were invited in-Neal had yet to request one-she could basically say anything she wanted, could match him lie for lie. She knew how to use her looks against guys like Neal.
Just before reentering the conference room, she tucked in her blouse and squared her shoulders, emphasizing her chest. Let him look all he wanted to. Let him be distracted.
She placed the photos in front of Neal. LaMoia knew they’d made the handoff-Neal now belonged to her. She said, “We had a similar fatality last year. Also a young, attractive woman.
We’re investigating possible connections.”
“The connections being bridges and water,” Neal said.
“And/or the men these women dated.”
“You’re looking at me for some head case that jumped off a bridge a year ago?”
“No, we’re looking at you for Mary-Ann Walker, Mr. Neal.”
She made a stage show of looking over at LaMoia. “Who said anything about Mary-Ann jumping?”
“Not me,” LaMoia answered.
“Nor did I,” Matthews said.
“Try the papers, the television,” Neal protested.
Matthews said, “Mary-Ann Walker did not jump, Mr. Neal.”
“But you just said-”
“She was beaten badly, possibly raped, and subsequently was discovered in water wearing a torn thong underwear and a cotton camisole top-just exactly as you’ve now described for us. How she arrived into that water remains under investigation.”
Neal lost the shit-eating grin.
“You’re clearly a smart man,” she lied. “A man who understands women. You don’t have to tell me that some women get themselves into difficult spots. Make promises and change their minds. Get a little too drunk and ask for it and then beg off the sex with the old headache excuse. They cocktease a guy and then refuse to put out.”
LaMoia did a double take on Matthews.
Neal looked uncertain.
“Right?” Matthews said.
“Yeah, sure. I’d buy that.”
“And sometimes a guy’s got to tune her up a little, let her know who’s boss. Sober her up. There’s a way this works and there’s a way this doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work when she’s in some drunken, willing mood one minute, and then an ice maiden the next.”
Neal saw the trap then. “I … ah … I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No?”
“No.”
“We’ve got a half dozen prior complaints against you, Lanny.
All of them are for taking a heavy hand with your girlfriends.
You logged a thirty-day stint at county. You put a girl named Eileen Rimbauer in the emergency room with a broken collarbone. Are you aware that Mary-Ann Walker had five such emergency room visits in the last six months? Did she happen to tell you about those? Her brother knows, I’ll tell you that. She claimed to have fallen down the stairs of the boat, said her hand got caught in a winch.” She read all this as if it were printed on the page, which it was not. “Pretty lame excuses, you ask me.
She also had some woman problems that make a lot more sense if some guy is playing it a little kinky and rough. So what you need to look at, Mr. Neal, is not the door, not my chest, not the detective, as you have been, but what happened that night. You need to look at the underlying circumstances that started whatever argument resulted between you, the conditions that escalated that particular argument into violence. We’re cops, yes.
But believe it or not we’re human. We’ve heard it all-there’s nothing you can tell us that will surprise us. This being your third strike, with the battered-woman law in effect you’re facing a serious uphill battle, if convicted. You want half a chance?
Convince us that you and Mary-Ann had a disagreement that night, that things got a little out of hand. A disagreement takes two people, Mr. Neal. That’s a whole lot better than some guy pounding on his woman for no reason whatsoever. Can we start there?”
“She was out on the fire escape. Talking on the phone maybe.
I’m not sure about that. Smoking a cigarette, ’cause otherwise no way would she have been out there. I’m telling you, she did not like heights.”
“Not to get away from you?”
“We had sex is all. Maybe I was rough. I don’t remember. I was pretty loaded that night. But I’ll tell you one thing: You never heard Mary-Ann complaining about the sex, believe me.
She liked it rough. She asked for it rough. That night, out there on the fire escape, that’s the last I seen of her.”
“Two twenty-two A.M.,” Matthews repeated.
“The woman hardly slept.”
“You understand that where there are mitigating circumstances in a case-an argument, for instance-the investigating officer is required to take them into consideration. These things come out in trial no matter what. There’s no sense for a detective to push for capital murder if there’s a domestic case where the girlfriend was complicit-say, acting like a drunken slut one minute and going for a carving knife the next. You need to think about that, because a guy beats up a woman, the sides get drawn long before the jury sits down for the first time. Believe it.”
Neal wore shock in his eyes, which Matthews took as a small victory. “Am I getting through, Lanny?” she asked rhetorically.
“She was all fucked up in the head. All bent out of shape over her asshole baby brother. Said she’d let him down, losing the fishing boat and everything. That she owed him big time.
But shit, he was just working her. Mooching. Crying in his beer.
I wanted her taking care of things around home. For us to get something going. But I’m telling you, she was all fucked up.”
“Okay.” Matthews took a deep breath and savored the surprise that he’d begun to open up.
“She’d been drinking a lot that night, got herself all dumb and loopy. We had the sex, you know, just like I said. Her on top, all angry like. Fast and furious and, I don’t know, mean-spirited, you know? Like she didn’t want to be doing it.”
Matthews didn’t like the next images that filled her head-sweating through the camisole, sticky hair, the slapping of flesh.
“Sometimes it was like that with her,” Neal said, quieter for the first time. “A little strange like that. Like she wasn’t really there, you know? Tripping out. The more I seen of her like that, the weirder it was, to tell the truth. She’d get herself off. It wasn’t about me. It was like I wasn’t there.”
Matthews attempted to wipe those images from her mind, but they wouldn’t fade. She spoke over them. “Was there anything that night in particular that the two of you argued about?
Anything said that maybe’d come up the other times you’d seen her like this?”
“I’m telling you, she got the most pissed off when I brought up Ferrell, and how it was bugging me the way he never left her alone. Jesus, the guy was always showing up at the weirdest times. Sniveling about money and how she’d fucked everything up. And she didn’t like me talking about him. Bitching about him. She’d pretty much taken care of him since their old man bit it. Her mom-I don’t know nothing about her mom. Whether she bolted or croaked, or what. She could be dead, too, for all I know.”
“So you argued about the brother,” Matthews said.
“That night? Not that I remember. I’m telling you: We got back to my place and she went all horny on me. She’s half undressed and going down on me practically before I got the tube on.”
“According to you, she was out on your fire escape in her panties and a camisole top. Maybe a sweatshirt; you don’t know.
Can’t remember. I’m assuming barefoot. And now, fast-forward, she’s in the water.” Matthews paused. “There are problems with your story, Mr. Neal. Are you aware of that? We started out with you and Mary-Ann pretty much in the same miserable condition. You watching your sports broadcast while she services you. Now you say she was oversexed and practically raping you.
We started out with her getting up in the morning and heading out for coffee. But we know for a fact she ended up in the water the night before. How’d she get there?”
“How’d she get to the water?” Neal asked, as if he was suddenly on their side. “I’m telling you, I saw her out on the fire escape. Heard her talking on the phone.”
He appeared less confident now. If there was a part of his story to exploit, it was Mary-Ann out on the fire escape. Matthews tried again. “How about this? Maybe she’s still drunk out there on the fire escape. Maybe you’ve got the time wrong.
Maybe she’s drunk, tired, a little shaky still from the sex, and she smokes a cigarette and goes a little dizzy and goes right off that fire escape.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m with you,” LaMoia said.
“It wasn’t like that,” Neal objected.
“She’s trying to help you out here,” LaMoia said.
“She goes off the fire escape and she isn’t getting up, and you, Mr. Neal, realize with your history this is not going to look right. Not good at all. Your half-naked girlfriend, carrying your sperm, at the bottom of your fire escape? How you gonna explain that one?”
LaMoia said, “But the condition of the body-that fits: going off the fire escape. That’s good thinking, Lieutenant.”
“It wasn’t like that,” Neal repeated.
“But to a jury? What you’ve got to ask yourself is how it’ll look to a jury. ’Cause I’ve got to tell you-it’s pretty damn convincing to me.”
“To me too,” LaMoia chimed in.
Neal wore a full face of sweat now, his eyes jumping between his two interrogators.
Matthews leaned into the suspect where he could smell her, where he couldn’t avoid her. “But sadly for you, the truth always plays better. You know what I think? I think you hit Mary-Ann.
I think you got angry with her and you struck her, and things went badly for you. You thought she was passed out like the other times, but she never got up. Sometime that night, or the next morning, you discovered she was dead. You’d killed her.
And now what? Maybe for whatever reasons, it turned you on.
Maybe you’re like that. Maybe you did things to her after she was dead.” She lowered her voice. This was her ground now.
“There’s nothing quite like that anger of yours, is there? It gets away from you, that kind of anger. It turns back on you, doesn’t it? Bites back. Then comes the moment you don’t understand.
You’re riding a rocket while your little sweetheart’s gone all limp. You’re all over her with your stuff, because that’s how the arguments always end-right? — the two of you in the sack, clawing at each other and starting out all ugly before the sex starts to heal things. Only this time it doesn’t heal, does it? This time she isn’t coming awake.”
“Who the fuck are you?” he asked, his eyes dilated.
“I’m your way out of this mess. We are-the sergeant and I. You want out of this, don’t you, Lanny?”
LaMoia dragged his palms across his pants. The jangle was in the air like the smell before a thunderstorm.
She said, “I want you thinking about the lab tests. When that nasty bruising occurred. When she broke those bones-before or after she died. What? You didn’t think we knew that yet?
Seventeen broken bones, Lanny. What? You thought we’d think her hitting the water did that? And speaking of water, what about when the water went into her lungs? Before or after death?
You’ve got to consider the jury and how this could turn out for you, because this meeting, right here, right now, this is a good chance for you to help yourself. We don’t deal in stories. We process the facts and let them tell the story. And that’s the story the jury believes. The one and only story. The more you bend it around, the worse your chances of cutting a deal with us.”
Matthews stood up and made a point of smoothing the wrinkles in her shirt, as if she’d picked up some of his filth by sitting a little too closely. Lanny Neal remained fairly composed, maintaining an air of self-importance that he wore on his face along with the good looks he didn’t deserve.
Interrogations were as much about timing as the questions asked. She and LaMoia exchanged looks and LaMoia cut Neal loose, asking that he “stay close to home.” No travel outside the city without notifying the police.
“Impressive,” LaMoia said after Neal was gone, “if a little unorthodox.”
“What’d you think of him?” Matthews asked.
“Mixed review,” LaMoia said.
She felt disappointment seep through her. She wanted so badly for this to be over, to wrap it up and put Mary-Ann Walker to rest. But her review was mixed as well-Neal seemed something of a contradiction. “We wait for the lab results. Both SID’s and Dixon’s. Maybe that’ll clear it up for us.”
Wishful thinking, and they both knew it.