Every Secret Thing Read online

  “I don’t know,” Nancy said, playing along. “I like the Chicago style with the thick crust that they serve over on Pennsylvania Avenue. You know, the place we go to eat on our court days.”

  “That’s not pizza,” Infante said. “That’s, like, a quiche with pepperoni. New York pizza is the best, and New York hot dogs, and New York deli and New York bagels and New York taxi drivers and New York baseball—”

  The last was undeniably true, so all Nancy could say was “Oh, fuck you.”

  “If the sergeant knew how much you cursed when he wasn’t around, he’d be so disappointed in his sweet little Nancy.”

  “Double-fuck you.”

  “Is that like Doublestuf Oreos?”

  Nancy felt her color rising. That was the drawback to working with a partner, even for just a few months: they learned your weaknesses awfully fast, down to the brand names. Kevin Infante knew some things about Nancy that her husband didn’t know, and Andy had been part of her life off and on since high school.

  Then again, she was learning Infante’s weaknesses, too: J&B, Merit Lights, the Mets, real redheads.

  “Stop talking about food, okay?”

  “You started it.”

  “I know. God, I hate stabbings. Give me a shooting every time.”

  Infante gave her a funny look, but didn’t say anything. Nancy knew it would never occur to him to have a preference about methods. To Infante, in Homicide for five years now, there were only two types of cases, gimmes and what he called career-enders, although they never did. Not his, anyway.

  And this one was clearly a gimme. The scene screamed stupidity—an absence of coolness, the telltale signs of a plan gone awry, and so much trace evidence that they could clone the whole gang of them, not that anyone but a mad scientist would want to replicate this group.

  Infante crouched down next to a particularly large stain. “The blood patterns are weird, don’t you think? Were they chasing him? Was he trying to get away? Then why didn’t he run toward Route 40? No one was going to help him back here.”

  “He fought,” Nancy said. “It’s instinctive, to fight back when someone comes at you with a knife.”

  “Women don’t fight.”

  “He wasn’t a woman. He was the New York Fried Chicken Employee of the Month seven out of the last twelve months. Maybe he even got the weapon away from them. Maybe he pulled the knife on them, and they took it away from him.”

  “Them?”

  “Definitely a them. One-on-one, I think this guy had a shot.”

  Franklin Morris had been found in the Dumpster by the morning crew, lying on top of the previous day’s garbage. He would have looked peaceful if it weren’t for the multiple stab wounds and the fluids that had leaked out of him throughout the early morning hours. He was, by his boss’s account, a model worker in every respect. Perhaps a little humorless, but not a hard-ass, not a guy whose attitude might invite what looked to be a truly sadistic death, even by stabbing standards. Later, the medical examiner would catalog the number of stab wounds, calculate the eerily exact numbers in which his science specialized. He would note which wounds were defensive in nature, specify which cuts were superficial and which were lethal. He would take out the organs, examine and weigh them. The need for this precision was sometimes lost on Nancy. Eyeballing the scene, all she could think of was a magician passing a sword through a wicker basket again and again.

  The victim’s boss, a sixty-something white man, had fallen to his knees in the parking lot and started to cry after making the ID. “He’s been with me three years,” he said. “He’s the best worker I ever had.” Nancy, conscious of the camera crews arrayed along the perimeter of the yellow crime scene tape, had hustled the boss into his restaurant, seating him at a table where he wouldn’t get in the way of the lab techs. The reporters kept trying to get her attention, flag her over, elicit a tidbit or quote, but she ignored them. That was the unofficial protocol in the county department. No one talked to the media. Not on the record, not off the record, not on background, or whatever term reporters used when wheedling. Nancy wouldn’t be caught dead talking to a reporter.

  It was going on eleven o’clock now and the television trucks were in place, ready to go live at noon. The Beacon-Light reporter had come and gone, was probably already stalking the dead boy’s mama. Nancy saw the tall young corporal who handled media, Bonnie something. Nancy and Bonnie were about the same age, although Nancy had started in city PD and Bonnie had always been out here in the county. She was said to be good police, fairly solid, and an excellent marks-man, not that county cops drew their weapons very often. Yet she had asked for the communications office when the number two job had opened up. Nancy couldn’t imagine wanting a job in which you did nothing but talk to the press. She especially couldn’t imagine being smug about it, as Bonnie seemed to be. “Corporal of communications,” Infante liked to say. “Corporal of crap.”

  Nancy’s stomach growled. She had been sitting down to her breakfast, a sorry little mess of sunflower seeds and carrot juice, when the call had come in. It had almost been a relief, getting an excuse to flee that breakfast. But now she was hollow.

  “Cast-iron Connie rides again,” Infante said with a twisted grin. She accepted the gibe for the compliment he thought it was. Actually, it worried her that she never got nauseous on the job, never had, not even the first time she had seen a dead body. And if that didn’t make her sick, what could?

  “I didn’t have any breakfast,” she said.

  “Well, we could get you some biscuits to go,” Infante taunted. He knew she was on a diet, because she had munched her way through a green salad, dressing on the side, at Applebee’s yesterday. “I’m sure the staff wouldn’t mind whipping up something for you. Let’s walk through this again. I feel like we’re missing something.”

  They were. On their next trip across the parking lot, Nancy spied a shell casing. This was her trademark, her gift—and sometimes her failing as well, according to her sergeant, who called her the Goddess of Small Things, which Nancy didn’t get, but the sergeant said it had something to do with a book his wife once read for her book club. Nancy always did have an eye for details. Back in the city, where she had started, she had been credited with psychic, almost otherworldly powers. In the county, it was understood as a skill, no different from Infante’s ability to break people down in interrogation, or Lenhardt’s amazing hunches. But it was understood as a weakness, too. A detective could get lost in details. Or so her sergeant kept telling her.

  “Could be from another time, another robbery,” Infante said.

  “Could be,” Nancy agreed.

  “Who brings a gun, fires it once, and then ends up cutting the guy?”

  “Morons,” she said. “Really mean morons.”

  The dead boy had owned a four-year-old Nissan Sentra, a year from being paid off, according to the records at the MVA. That was pretty much all the registration records told, but Nancy could fill in the rest, just from what the manager had told her about his employee. It would be spotless, with a pine-tree deodorizer hanging from the rearview mirror, a folded road map in the seat pocket, and a decal of some sort on the back window—a sticker for the college he had been attending part-time, Coppin, or his fraternity, if he belonged to one. Nancy had a hunch he did and that initiation had been one of the happiest days of his life.

  A Ford Taurus pulled up and their sergeant, Harold Lenhardt, got out. Nancy wondered if she should take that personally. She couldn’t recall him showing up when Infante was the primary. Baltimore County averaged about thirty homicides a year, and this was only her fourth in eight months in Homicide, so it was hard to establish a statistically accurate sample. Still, it irked her, seeing Lenhardt here. He was checking up on her.

  “City cops found the car,” he said by way of a greeting. “They didn’t dump and run, but parked it in a shopping center lot over near Walbrook Junction. I guess they were trying to make it hard for us. Only the Laundromat owner no
ticed it hadn’t moved for six hours, got pissed, and called to have it towed.”

  “Does the other kid, the one who worked here last night, happen to live within walking distance of where the car was found?” Nancy asked.

  “No. But—go figure—he’s been truant four days out of five at Southwestern High School most of this semester. So I checked with the principal’s office and he was present and accounted for at roll this morning for the first time in a week.”

  “What time do city high schools get out?”

  “Two-thirty,” Lenhardt said. “But I don’t think we can wait. We’re going to have to deprive Junior of his day of book-larning.”

  “Yeah,” Nancy said, seeing it. The kid thought he was smart, showing up for school today. He was counting on them to check attendance and be complacent, wait for the end of classes to talk to him. Then he’d try to cut out by lunch, find a place to lie low for a while, avoiding the cops for as long as possible. They would find him eventually, but it would still slow them down, screw up their momentum if they didn’t get him today.

  “The goddess found a casing,” Infante said, and she shot him a look. She would take that from the sergeant, but not from her partner. “But I don’t think the ME is going to find a bullet in that kid. I think it’s all slices.”

  “Nasty,” Lenhardt said. “These are some nasty mother—” He remembered Nancy was there and stopped himself. He would not curse in front of Nancy, in front of any woman, under any circumstances. Nancy tried to accept this as the simple courtesy it was. But she worried there were other things Lenhardt wouldn’t say in front of her because some things could not be expressed without profanity. And these might be things she needed to know if she was ever going to be a good homicide police.

  “Stabbing takes time,” Lenhardt said. “You’ve got to have a taste for what you’re doing, you stab a guy to death.”

  Even Nancy knew that. That was Homicide 101.

  Her cell phone rang, which was weird because hardly anyone had her cell number, only Andy and her mom. The detectives still used pagers for official work and didn’t give those numbers out to anyone if they could help it. She pulled the phone out of her purse—there was no getting around it, she had to carry a purse because she couldn’t fit her life in her back pockets and breast pockets like the guys did. Her skirts didn’t even have pockets, and the blazers she bought were hit-and-miss when it came to breast pockets. She tried to answer the call, but there was no one on the line. Then she noticed she had a small text message on the screen:

  I’M COMING HOME

  So what, she thought. Of course Andy was coming home. It was his day off and he had been heading out to the gym when she left for work this morning. Why would he call and tell her that? Then she thought: he wouldn’t. And her mother wouldn’t know how to text-message if you gave her a year-long course. Her parents’ VCR had been flashing 12:00 for about a decade now.

  Still, she had been getting a lot of wrong numbers of late, for some girl at Kenwood High whose number was one digit off from hers. They hadn’t text-messaged before now, but it was probably inevitable. Nancy was only twenty-eight, but she already had the habit of shaking her head and thinking, “Those kids.” She couldn’t understand their desire for access, for 24/7 connectedness, their need to always be hooked up to something, anything.

  Her stomach growled again, making a noise like a squeaky yawn. Lenhardt and Infante shared a smile at her expense, but didn’t invoke the nickname.

  “Do we have time for a pit stop?” Nancy asked.

  “Depends on where,” Lenhardt said. “We’ve got city uniforms standing by waiting to escort us into Southwestern. So we can’t dally long.”

  “Something fast. Dunkin’ Donuts. Burger King.”

  “Is that on the blood-type diet?” Infante asked, brow furrowed. “Or is it cabbage soup this time? Do they have cabbage doughnuts?”

  Nancy waited until Lenhardt’s back was turned, then mouthed at her partner “Fuck you.” Infante shot her the finger. It was all harmless. They were kids, squabbling behind Daddy’s back, which made the job bearable for some reason. Especially when they knew it was going to be a long day, a long week. The case may have been a gimme, but even gimmes extracted their price. Nancy had still been in the academy when she learned that it wasn’t the clever perps who kept you up at night, it was the indifferent types who didn’t bother to cover their tracks, literally or figuratively. The ones who were too stupid, or too young, or maybe both.

  She shook the memory off, tried to concentrate on what kind of doughnut was going to have the honor of wrecking her diet in the thirty-sixth hour.

  “So,” Lenhardt said, his tone supercasual, “you let Bonnie handle the press?”

  “Yeah,” Nancy said. “Absolutely.”

  “Good girl.”

  She loved those words. Lord help her, she loved those words.

  Thursday,

  April 9

  3.

  There are no seasons in the basement of the Clarence Mitchell Courthouse, and Sharon Kerpelman sometimes had to glance at her clothes to remind herself what kind of weather she had passed through on the way to work that morning. No seasons, no weather, no sense of time passing. Today’s date was vivid in her mind because of the arrangements she had made to free her afternoon, but the day had no reality beyond her schedule; it was not connected to spring or even the day of the week, which also had a way of slipping her mind. She’d hate for anyone to know how many Saturdays she had schlepped into the shower and been half dressed before she realized the masculine voice on her radio was saying Weekend Edition, not Morning Edition.

  Today—a Thursday, definitely a Thursday, a fact ascertained by a quick look at the date book in her lap—she was meeting with a family in the hallway when she saw a secretary walking past with a basket of colored eggs and chocolates, and thought, Oh, yeah, Easter. Had it come and gone, or was it about to happen? And didn’t that mean Passover was somewhere around here as well? Had she missed it? But no, her mother would never allow that to happen. Passover must be late this year, for Sharon had not yet received the annual phone call about the Seder and whether she was going to bring a date, and what would she think if her mother invited the Kutchners’ son, who had just moved back to Baltimore and was very nice.

  Her client’s little sister, no more than five or six, followed the basket with a gaze full of longing and guilt, as if she knew better than to yearn for anything. The client himself, twelve years old and facing his second charge for selling drugs, was staring at the ground, bored by his own fate. His mother stood over Sharon, hands on her hips, jittery from want of a cigarette.

  “Cullen,” the mother was wailing. “How’m I gonna see him if he’s all that way out there? I got no car. I thought he was going to Hickey, if he went at all. You said probation, maybe home detention. You promised.”

  “I promised I’d try. It’s his second offense. Didn’t help that it was on the school grounds.”

  “So why not Hickey?”

  “Cullen has a bed in its unit for kids with addiction problems. Gordon’s not going to stop selling drugs until he stops using them. Besides, it’s smaller. He’d get eaten alive at Hickey.”

  “Cullen won’t do,” the mother said, as if she had a say in the matter. She was furious, with the kind of fury peculiar to the nonpaying client. Those who can’t afford private attorneys, Sharon had learned in her decade as a public defender, assumed legal aid was incompetent. Do-gooders were simply losers in disguise.

  “Hit’s only his second offense,” the mother hissed in the strange mountain accent that had somehow survived for decades in Baltimore, the legacy of the West Virginians who flooded into the city during World War II. Sharon secretly thought of their descendants as the fish-white people, evolutionary holdouts holed up in the city’s last white precincts. She knew these people better than she wanted to, for she had tried living in some of the neighborhoods they favored, beguiled by the old stone mill houses i
n one, the cheap loft spaces in the other. In the end, her hillbilly neighbors had driven her out, all the way to the suburbs, to a sterile condo behind a gate. At least she had tried.

  “Look, your son started sniffing spray paint when he was eight. He has been smoking marijuana since he was ten. It’s only a matter of time before he moves on to speed or OxyContin.”

  “I don’t use. I just sell a little,” Gordon said, primed to tell the lie over and over. His idea or his mother’s? Sharon wondered. His mother couldn’t honestly believe that her son didn’t use. Every time Sharon saw him, he had watery, bloodshot eyes and this spacey can’t-give-a-shit demeanor. Not that she blamed him. Hell, she’d use, too, if this were her mother, her life.

  Sharon ignored his rote excuses. “I know it’s hard for you, Mrs. Beamer, him being so far away. But it’s the best thing. There’s something to be said for getting him out of the city. Kids at Hickey don’t get that same culture shock, that sense of displacement. Besides, Hickey’s too…too…”

  The bailiff called them to court. Sharon stood, finishing the thought for herself. More and more, Hickey seemed to her an internment camp for teenagers, the place where Maryland was holding its potential enemies until some undeclared war finally ended. She hated to send anyone under fifteen to Hickey. Boys Village, near D.C., was worse still, Middlebrook the worst of all.

  She shook out the folds of her dress, creased from sitting for so long. The saffron-colored dress was high waisted, with a long, voluminous skirt falling to her ankles. Heavy cotton, more of a winter dress than a spring one. The forecast for today must have been unseasonably cool for her to have chosen this dress. Or was it because she wanted to look nice, for later, and this was her best dress?

  Gordon’s mother studied the way Sharon smoothed her skirt, the self-satisfied pats to the rich fabric.

  “You pregnant?”

  The question was supposed to hurt, and it did. The woman was punishing Sharon, getting back at her the only way she could. Send my kid to Cullen? Fine, then I’ll make you feel fat. Sharon actually had a good figure. She just preferred to keep it to herself, enjoying the glad surprise on her dates’ faces when she finally disrobed.