The Ways of the Dead Page 11

  “Our mystery guest. Photog didn’t have a record of her name. So that was about it. File says a uniform went out to Halo. You been?”

  “Once or twice. She was one of the platform girls out there.”

  “So we looked at that. Report says the uniform talked to bouncers, bartenders, the guys in the kitchen. Got nothing. Well. She was scoring a little coke out there, but nothing to make any to-do over. We kept an eye on one or two of the bouncers for a while. No crazy ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends or whoever. She also worked part-time, a lingerie-like shop, over to Union Station. And college at Howard. Marketing major.”

  “What about her car?”

  “Older black Acura, two-door. From what we were told, ripped front seat, a dent in the right fender. Put out tracers. No hits.”

  “Get much on her background, finances, all that?”

  “Nah. Jamaican, came here when she was eight or nine. Not much family around, just a sister. She was the one pushing us to do more.”

  “She did coke; she owe anybody money?”

  “Not so far as I could tell from looking at the report. Look, you got to remember, this was never a criminal investigation. Missing persons only. You know how many of those come in? Pisses family members off, they want us to do more, but there’s only so much we can do if there’s nothing suggesting foul play. She owed a couple grand on the car, maybe about that on a credit card. I’m saying I don’t think the coke was a habit.”

  Sully pulled out a few of the photographs.

  They were black-and-white glossies. These were not hammy boudoir shots; this was art photography. He was impressed. Placing them on his lap between his chest and the table, where he could see them without anyone else doing so, he went through them slowly. There were perhaps two dozen.

  Noel Pittman had honey-brown skin, shoulder-length straightened black hair, lips that formed a natural pout, full breasts, nice hips, and long legs. She seemed, in her regard for the camera, to have a sense of style, of presence. The photographs, her tousled hair, her eyes glittering. He wondered what her voice had been like. The nude photographs—lying across the bed on her stomach, looking back at the camera over her shoulder, wearing a necklace and a thong, leaning against a shower wall.

  “Suspects?”

  “We just got the body, partner. But no, none. At least we know now she’s not doing three-ways for a billionaire in Buenos Aires.”

  “Who’s got lead on it?”

  “Jensen. Good luck. We don’t call him Dick for nothing. He’s liaison to the Reese investigation, as due diligence, but this—look, this is cold-case material. We’ll look at the coroner’s report and if something comes up it’ll be followed.”

  “Spot me Jensen’s cell?”

  “You didn’t get it from me.” Parker consulted his phone and scribbled a series of numbers on a napkin.

  “Who’s the lead on Sarah?”

  “Bill, Billy Hairston. But look, I’m not kidding—not even a phone call to him, you hear? Man is overwhelmed. Can’t take a crap without the bureau guys going in the stall with him.”

  Sully stood up. “Thanks for the glossies.”

  “Perks up the day, doesn’t it?”

  Sully walked outside, called Richard Jensen’s number, got the answering machine, and left a message. He rated his odds for a call back as zero. Jensen was two years from retirement but mentally had a foot out the door. He wasn’t going to do anything to jeopardize his pension, being quoted by some hack at a newspaper.

  sixteen

  The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the District of Columbia sat in a gray concrete lump at the back end of Capitol Hill. It was adjacent to the jail, at the bottom of a small hill that backed down to the Anacostia. The grass lots were filled with knee-high weeds.

  Sully parked in front of the morgue, Building 27, and sat astride the bike while he called into his office voice mail. Thirty-two new messages. John hadn’t been kidding. He clicked it off without listening to them. He didn’t need the hate that people called in to vent, and, actually, if anybody ever bothered to ask him, he would be happy to tell them he had never given a flying fuck what readers thought. He wasn’t running a goddamn wine bar. It was better when he was on one continent, sending stories back to his newspaper on a different one. That was swell.

  A few steps took him to the front glass doors, their surfaces reflecting his image, wobbling in a funhouse effect. Once inside, the faint, cloying smell of formaldehyde and chemical compounds permeated his nose, his clothes, his skin, and his mind suddenly flashed a picture of Noel, the brain matter, the sticky sheet . . .

  The receptionist looked up at him with a flat stare.

  “Hey, now,” he said, reaching out to the counter to steady himself, the image fading now. “Is the man himself in?”

  She said, “Haven’t seen you around here since you got rid of the last man himself.”

  “I think it was the city council that did that.”

  “After that thing you wrote. Jason’s back there, you want to talk to him. You still riding that motorcycle?”

  Sully looked down. He had the helmet in his right hand. “Every day,” he said.

  “Be seeing you in here soon enough,” she said. Then she spoke into the phone. “Dr. Reitman? Your reporter friend is down here.” There was a pause. “The one with the motorcycle.”

  Jason appeared a few moments later, loose limbed, lanky, goofy grin, pushing open a steel door and holding it open for Sully to enter.

  “Let me guess. Sarah Reese,” he said.

  “Noel Pittman,” Sully said, limping down the hallway. Jason fell in step, his white lab coat over a dress shirt and tie, walking heel to toe, rising off the toe on each step.

  “Pittman? You get demoted? Nobody’s talking about Pittman. Everybody is all over the Reese thing.”

  “I’ll let them run with it. Let me guess, though: no signs of sexual trauma on young Miss Reese?”

  Jason looked straight ahead, still walking, tapping his clipboard on his hip, that rolling gait. “The office has no comment on any pending case, particularly not any case currently the subject of an intense media circus. So I couldn’t possibly comment on your completely unfounded but totally correct assertion.”

  “Didn’t think so. Nasty, though, the throat slitting.”

  “In the mood for news on that?”

  “Could be.”

  “Like before? I trusted you before and you were straight up. I don’t know any of these other guys, and I’m not about to go sticking my neck out. But it’s weird, dude, really weird.”

  “Not for attribution,” Sully said. “Possibly to a ‘law enforcement official with knowledge of the matter.’”

  Jason considered. “There’ve been so many suits through here that will probably stand up. But I’d rather you get someone else to confirm it.”

  “Alright already.”

  They had reached Jason’s narrow office and turned in. Jason plunked in his chair, swiveling side to side.

  “The throat slitting?” he said. “It was postmortem.”

  Sully frowned. “Somebody slit her throat after they killed her? What was the cause of death?”

  “Asphyxiation. Somebody suffocated her. Looks like they shoved something in her mouth—there are fiber matches to something like a tennis ball—and then put their hand or a pillow over her face. The hyoid was broken, too.”

  “So they suffocated her and then cut her throat?”

  Jason nodded. “Very little bleeding, at least for that kind of cut. Usually you’d have buckets, spray, splatter, the works.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “You’re asking me? A thrill. They liked the sight. Wanted to send a message. She died too soon. Anything.”

  “But she wasn’t raped?”

  “Not for publication or attri
bution, no. No bruising, no tearing. Panties in place. She did appear to be experienced in this area, though. She wasn’t a virgin . . . but you didn’t come to hear about that.”

  Sully paused. “Actually I didn’t. I came to see if you could not comment on Noel Pittman.”

  “I could not comment very well on Miss Pittman, as I did the autopsy, such as it was, yesterday.”

  “That quick?”

  “I actually had some time. Old cases are more interesting, besides. Autopsies of twenty-three-year-old men with an extra hole in their heads are not, what do I want to say, professionally challenging.”

  “So what can you not say?”

  “Alas, Yorick, I did not know her well. Decomposition is an unpleasant fact of afterlife. Insects and rodents and bugs, you know, all God’s creatures have to eat. Some of the skin had—you’d call it mummified, but there was very little flesh left.”

  “Could you get a cause of death?”

  “Not from the cut. She didn’t have any broken bones. Nobody shot her in the head, I can tell you that.”

  “OD’d?”

  “Toxicology not possible.”

  “Strangled? Throat cut?”

  “What, you’re thinking she and Sarah went out the same way? Yeah, well, no—no way to tell. Flesh from that area was all gone. You really want to picture a skeleton in some rotted clothes.”

  “What were the clothes?”

  “Appeared to be jeans, a belt—there was a metal buckle—maybe some sort of jacket or coat.”

  “Was she killed there? In that basement?”

  “Ask MPD. Nothing I saw on her suggested anything one way or another. And back up just a second, while I’m not saying anything. Based on the material we have, you can’t say someone killed her.”

  Sully blinked. “You’re saying being stuffed in a hole in a basement isn’t a sign of a violent and unnatural end?”

  “It’s a sign of a violent and unnatural burial. But we’re about what happens to people before they die. For all you or I know, she overdosed and her coke buddies wanted to keep using the house, so they arranged for a private burial. That violates city code, I’m sure, and probably some sort of misdemeanor about death notification, but that would be about it.”

  “This sounds like bullshit, Jason. You guys are always pulling this. Dead body turns up and an ‘undetermined’ cause of death. The torso found in the dumpster by the waterfront, what, last year? You guys called it ‘undetermined.’ A torso in a dumpster, and nobody says ‘homicide.’ It keeps the murder rate down. I’m not blaming you, I mean, I know the politics of—”

  “Nope. That was the old administration. Peter pulled that stuff all the time, in addition to the embezzling you wrote about. He was a real piece of work. I’m happy to label it homicide if there’s evidence. On this one, you can say the autopsy was inconclusive as to a cause of death, but that we described it as suspicious.”

  “You think that’s what happened?”

  “What happened?”

  “OD’d and a friend panicked.”

  “Are you writing about this? Or we just girl-talking?”

  “Wanting to write about it. Bosses are less than thrilled. You’re still off the record, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m just looking for direction.”

  Jason made a face.

  “You look constipated, Jason. Look. I’m interested in your irresponsible speculation. It’s better than mine.”

  Jason leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He swiveled back and forth for a moment.

  “I don’t. I don’t think she overdosed. If you’re interested in unfounded speculation, I think it’s highly likely someone raped her and killed her and hid the body. She was young, gorgeous, known to take liberties with portraying herself as a sex object, and was apparently known to do drugs. So you take anyone with that background and stuff them in a hole in the basement of an abandoned house in a crappy neighborhood, my first instinct is that she ran into Ted fucking Bundy. But I don’t know that, and there’s nothing in the autopsy to point to it as a forensic standard of proof.”

  “What if you’d examined the body the day after she was buried?”

  “Fibers, signs of bruises, cuts, bleeding—all that would have been available. Whoever buried her, or stuffed her beneath that trash pile or whatever, did a good job. Well, I should say buried her the first time. She’s being reburied today.”

  Sully sat up. The funeral—pathos, symbols, a lead anecdote to the story. This he needed, what with the heat R.J. was putting on him. He needed something he didn’t have, which was family, which was emotion. You want emotion, you go to a funeral.

  “Today? The funeral’s today?”

  “Funeral home claimed the body as soon as we were finished. And I don’t think this is so much a funeral as a burial.”

  “They—they just found her yesterday morning,” Sully said.

  Jason shrugged. “Jews, we bury them quick. She’s not a member of the tribe, but maybe there was a family rush.”

  Family. Her sister would be there, the one who’d put out the flyer, who had called him.

  “Got the name of the funeral home, Jason? For a carrion-feeding media vulture?”

  seventeen

  The rain started falling.

  It had started slowly, before he got to the cemetery, a cold and desultory spattering. It fogged the visor; it dripped off the back of the helmet and landed on his neck and coursed down his back. He could feel the tires spinning the water up from the road onto his thighs.

  By the time he reached Everlasting Cemetery—it was a good four miles outside the Beltway, way the hell out New Hampshire Ave., the northern edge of the burbs—it had picked up to a steady downfall and he was soaked to the bone. The graveyard was off to his right, at the crest of a long, slow hill. He downshifted into first, kept the bike as quiet as possible, eased toward the back of the place, and there it was. Two cars and a hearse pulled to a stop near a green awning, a hole yawning beneath. The casket, white, was raised on the bier.

  A woman in a black dress and a stylish black hat and two men in suits were getting out of the cars. They were all beneath umbrellas. Sully pulled to the roadside and switched off the engine. He pulled his feet up onto the pegs and folded his hands across the gas tank.

  The woman and the two men in suits went beneath the green awning. There were only the three of them. Until he saw one of the men produce a Bible, open it, and apparently begin to read, he didn’t realize the dynamic. There was a pastor and there was a cemetery official and there was Noel’s sister and there was no one else.

  “Christ almighty,” he said. It was too goddamn sad to look at.

  They all stood beneath the awning for a while. Then the woman and one of the men sat in the plastic lawn chairs the cemetery had provided. The other man in the suit, who did not sit, approached the casket and apparently pressed or pulled something. The casket slowly lowered into the ground, disappearing into the red dirt. The woman dropped long-stemmed roses into the hole after it. The pastor rose and held both of her hands, facing her. They prayed for several minutes. Then their hands released. The woman sat down again. The two men remained standing.

  After a while, the woman stood. The trio stepped out from under the awning and raised their umbrellas and started back toward the road and their cars.

  Sully took a deep breath, cursed, and cranked the bike. He rolled downhill slowly, until he was several yards behind the last car, and stopped the bike and killed the engine. Dismounting, he took off his gloves and then his helmet and put the gloves inside the helmet and then set it down on the roadway. He unzipped his jacket and walked forward and pulled a hand back over his hair, brushing it out of his face. The rain was coming down harder now. He hated himself for being here, for intruding in this way. He made eye contact with the men first, giving them a s
light nod, and then he looked at the woman in the hat.

  That it was Noel Pittman’s sister was beyond question. She was tall and had the same honey-brown skin. She had high cheekbones and straightened hair and deep brown eyes. She was looking at him.

  “Pardon me, everyone,” he said, taking them all in with a glance, but then looking back at her. “Ma’am? My name is Sully Carter. I’m a reporter. I’ve been trying to reach Noel Pittman’s sister. If that’s you, Ms. Bradford, I apologize for just showing up, but I believe we exchanged phone messages.”

  The trio stopped, the men looking at him and then, almost at the same time, back at the woman. She regarded him blankly. One of the men started walking toward him, a serious expression crossing his face. His eyes stayed on Sully but then his focal point shifted, a small tic, the scars, always the scars.

  Sully did not back up. He returned his gaze to the woman.

  “I recently called the number on a flier about Noel Pittman’s disappearance. A woman called back to my newspaper, but there was some confusion, and she wound up leaving a message with a different reporter. There was a number and I called back but didn’t get an answer. I left a message. Again, if that was you, Ms. Bradford, I would like—”

  The man in the dark blue suit stepped directly in front of him, no more than a foot from his nose, breaking his eye contact with the woman. He had a good seventy-five pounds and two inches on Sully; the man had girth. “This is a private service,” he said in a hushed tone. “You’re going to need to get out.”

  “Cemetery gates were open, and I’m not talking to you, mister,” Sully whispered back, meeting his gaze. “If the lady doesn’t want to—”

  “What does he want, Mr. Robinson?” the woman called out. She was beneath her umbrella, and she had stopped walking. The man did not take his eyes off Sully, but moved his head slightly to the right. “He says he’s a reporter. He says he called you.”

  She was still standing in the grass of the cemetery, not yet on the roadway. Her heels were sinking in the mud. She looked down at her feet, then at the pastor, and then back at Sully and Mr. Robinson.