With Malice

She nodded and pulled a pad from her jacket pocket, making notes. “You said it had a loud muffler.”

“Yes. One of those things some people seem to like. But it did have a muffler. I’ve heard cars without one. There’s no mistaking that sound.”

“No, there isn’t.” She nodded pleasantly. “Did it start or stop?”

He cocked his head, thinking. “No, I don’t think so. Or at least I didn’t hear it. What woke me up was the gunning of the engine.” He nodded to himself. “Yes, that’s what it was. The car’s engine gunned at least a couple of times. Then it drove away down toward Mulberry.”

Karen scribbled a few more notes, then glanced at the toys in one corner of the room, a dollhouse with dozens of pieces of furniture. “Did your wife hear it, too?”

He seemed to jerk, an almost spastic movement. His face grew as rigid as a mask. “My ex-wife,” he said shortly, “is taking a world cruise with her new husband.”

“I’m sorry. I assumed, because of the toys…”

He glanced toward the corner, then nodded stiffly. “It’s all right. It’s a natural assumption. My daughters are staying with me until their mother returns.”

She nodded, making another note, although it didn’t seem relevant. “I understand you disagree with Senator Lawrence over S.R. 52.”

He looked a little startled, then laughed. “Oh, yes. I suppose Grant told you that. We’ve disagreed about quite a few things politically over the years. But people can disagree about politics without becoming enemies.”

“That’s what Senator Lawrence indicated.”

Art Wallace nodded. “In fact, I’m volunteering for Randall Youngblood right now. You know, the group lobbying against the bill? Grant knows that.”

Again she nodded. “Why are you opposed to the bill?”

“Because I think it will devastate farmers. It’s just that simple.”

Karen slipped her coffee, smiled at him again. “Since you know Senator Lawrence so well, I was wondering if you know his enemies.”

His eyes widened a shade, and he chuckled. “He’s a politician, Detective. He probably has hundreds of enemies.”

“Of course.” She smiled deprecatingly. “I just wondered if you know of any who might go this far.”

“To kill that wonderful old woman? No way. Politics can get dirty, Detective, but not to that extent. I can’t imagine that anyone I know would do such a thing under any circumstances.”

Just then twin girls of about seven bounced into the room, trailed by a middle-aged woman in gray.

“Daddy, Daddy!” they bubbled over. “Nanny took us to the zoo. And we saw lions!”

Karen waited while Art Wallace hugged his daughters to him as if he never wanted to let go. They beamed and chattered, utterly oblivious of her presence.

Finally, quietly, she excused herself, not wanting to interrupt the happy scene. And not at all sure she needed to ask Art Wallace another single thing.

She had something else to do, anyway. Something equally important, at least to her.

Karen drove back to the alley where the unidentified woman had been found. As expected, Dave Previn was nowhere to be seen. Not that there was much he might have learned by staring at this alley.

Still, it seemed wrong that the trail of the woman’s death would be left to grow stale, so she paced the alley and remembered the horror that had been visited upon the woman whose body had been found here. Found here. She’d all but let that slip out of mind in the flurry over the Lawrence case. This woman’s body had almost certainly been moved. Had she even put that in her report?

Suddenly it felt as if a lead weight were pressing on her heart. She couldn’t remember. She probably had. She remembered making extensive notes of it, here in the alley, and she would have referred to those notes as she made out the report. So of course those observations would be in the report.

Still, that she couldn’t remember including them showed just how far the Lawrence case had driven this one from her mind. From her mind, and she had seen the woman’s body lying broken and torn in an alley, something no other detective would see except in photographs. If she had to press herself to remember what she’d included in her report, what hope did that leave for Dave Previn giving this case the attention it deserved?

Karen let out a breath and shook her head at her own feelings. Raised in an Irish family, she sometimes missed the days when she had been a practicing Catholic. Back then, she would have gone to a priest, dumped her load of guilt in the confessional and received absolution. She would have had no reason to go on kicking herself. Mea culpa mea maxima culpa. Teo absolvo. Get on with life.

Alternatively, she missed her early days in the department, when she would have lit a cigarette, affected the diffident shrug of someone who is too ignorant to realize how little she knows and figured it would all come out in the wash. Life sucks, and you deal with it.

Instead, she’d quit going to church, and she’d quit smoking, and she’d come to believe that cynicism was simply the ugly twin sister of idealism, both born of ignorance. Which left her with no psychic defense against her feelings of inadequacy and sorrow as she stood in that alley and remembered the horrible images she’d seen.

“I’m sorry,” she said to the chalk outline on the pavement. “I’ll try to do better.”

It wasn’t confessional, but it was what she had left.

She returned to the office to find Previn pouring the dregs from the office coffeemaker into a mug that read I’d rather be thinking. The mug had been given to him when he’d left the fraud squad and moved up to homicide. It was a cop joke. Previn was always thinking. Thinking about his wife. Thinking about his kids. Thinking about some article he’d read that week in Science Weekly. Thinking about the fact that he thought too much. The book on him was that he had no instincts and tried to make up for it by spinning his mental wheels until he dug his way through to the bottom of a case. The approach worked, but the people around him had to dodge a lot of flying mud.

“Where are you on the woman in the alley?” she asked without preamble.

He smiled. “If it isn’t the TV star. They just ran a teaser for the evening news.”

Karen would rather they had lost the videotapes, but that was too much to hope for. Lawrence was front page, film at six and eleven news. Which meant that, for a while, at least, she was, too.

“How lovely. So where are you on the woman in the alley?” she repeated.

“I reviewed your files and notes this morning,” he said, plunking his mug on his desk. “I put a call in to the M.E., but they’re ass deep in everything else. Said they hoped to get to the autopsy this evening. The crime scene techs will call back later or tomorrow, they said. Missing persons has no one recent who matches the general description, so we’re dead in the water on an ID. I walked the scene this morning, knocked on doors. Zero, zip, zilch, nada.”

“Keep pushing it,” she said. “I don’t want her to slip through the cracks.”

“There’s not a lot to push until I hear back from the M.E. or the lab, or we get an ID. I don’t want her to slip through the cracks, either, Karen. But right now I’ve got nothing to push against.”

She nodded and picked up the phone, stabbing numbers by rote memory. “Yes, this is Detective Karen Sweeney. You have a Jane Doe of mine. Any idea when you’ll get to her? She’s in now? Thanks. We’ll be right over.”

Previn looked stung, resentment smoldering in his dark eyes. “They’d have called me when they were done.”

“Maybe, maybe not. They’re busy, like you said. And we’re not going to wait for them to finish. We’re going to be there as it happens.”

“I’ve never…”

“Then get used to it,” she said, grabbing her jacket and purse. “Welcome to homicide.”

Previn was a weasely looking young man of about thirty, with a long, narrow nose and thinning hair. His normally ruddy skin went utterly pale the instant they stepped into the autopsy room.

The smell, of course. Even now, Karen wasn’t completely used to it, but at least she expected it. Previn didn’t. White, he turned away immediately from the sight of a corpse opened from collarbone to pubic bone with a Y incision, but that wouldn’t get rid of the smell.

Nothing got rid of the smell. There was something about a dead body, even a relatively fresh one that had recently been in the cooler, that smelled just plain awful when you opened it up. Fishing around in her purse, she found a small jar of Vicks VapoRub. She’d carried it for years but hadn’t used it in a long time.

“Here,” she said to Previn. “Rub some of this right under your nose.” He might even manage to do it, if he didn’t lose his lunch first.

His hand was shaking as he accepted the small jar. A second later he bolted. Karen shrugged and stepped nearer to the table.