Chapter 20

Interrogation Three

On the way to HPD, Nancy nodded as she drove. “You’re good with women, Justin. I couldn’t get old Doris to open up at all.”

“You’re better with guys.”

“It’s this personal thing you do. Yeah, I’m like you that way with guys. You noticed?” She glanced over and the car swerved.

I asked her, “Hasn’t Cuddy talked to you about having only one finger on the steering wheel?”

“A good finger,” she said and used it to make the turn into the municipal lot. “But listen, where I’m best is young guys. You grow up in East Hillston and you got younger brothers, you better be. Let me do Mister Johnny Walker Black Leather, okay?”

“He’s all yours.”

• • •

Nancy’s husband Sergeant Zeke Caleb was supervising the desk. He passed release forms to a remorseful DWI before acknowledging us with a stiff hello. (He and Nancy keep a formal distance between work and love, and if you saw them on HPD property, you’d never know they’d ever met, much less been married for years.) He told Nancy, “Officer, you got a phone call from a guy called Dermott Quinn, wants you to call him back after six, okay?”

“Okay, thanks, Sergeant,” she said. “The Lieutenant and I are going to talk to this kid we’re holding, John Walker. I’ll take him to Three, Justin.” She waved as she walked off.

I asked Zeke if the task force had reconvened in Room 105, and he said no. Cuddy was in the district attorney’s office and some of them had gone out to interview the coroner, Osmond Bingley.

“I hope they ask him why he keeps ruling suicide on victims with multiple gunshot wounds to the head.”

Zeke was too good a soldier to joke about city officials. He said only, “I hear there’s a break on G.I. Jane. I hear you got a photo.”

“Thanks to your wife,” I said. He tried to stop his smile but couldn’t.

• • •

We looked through the glass of Interrogation Room 3 at the pouty fidgety young suspect seated in the plastic chair with his lizard-skin boots up on the table, his arm in a cast. Nancy nodded at me. “Okay, go crazy, show me what you got.”

“Just watch me.”

It took only five minutes to scare the bravado off John Everett Walker’s pretty face and replace it with a green jellyish anxiety. I knocked his legs off the table, cuffed one of them to the chair leg, and told him he was the best thing to happen to me in months because he’d solved two big problems of mine. I was under pressure to book a suspect on the Lucy Griggs murder and here he was—a prime candidate. Plus, I really needed to clear the Guess Who killings, and here he was again. I could tie him to G.I. Jane’s homicide through his mother’s hair salon.

As Walker fought to hold on to his skeptical sneer, I fell forward onto him and hit him hard with my elbow as his chair went over. “Lost my balance,” I smiled.

On his side, trapped by the leg cuff, he held his cast in air and heaved for breath, shocked and gagging, his eyes darting desperately to Nancy. “What’s the matter with him? I didn’t kill Lucy! What’s going on? First these two FBI bitches are all over me, now this freak?”

Nancy stepped between us and helped Walker pull himself upright in the chair, patting his back kindly as she did so. “Lieutenant Savile, hey, take it easy. You okay, John?”

I snarled, “This s.o.b. murdered three women and you want me to take it easy with him?”

She stared at me dubiously. “Think we can make him for all three?”

“Three women? Jesus, what the fuck are y’all talking about?” The young man looked like someone who’d suddenly been abducted by aliens.

I stepped close to his face, squeezed his chin in my hand and stared into his eyes. Flinching, he pulled his head back as far away from me as he could. “Yeah. He killed them all,” I told Nancy. “I can see it all over him. It makes me sick, what he did to Lucy and Jane, butchering them like that, cutting out their tongues and eyes.”

Walker’s own eyes swelled, pushing open his thick-lashed lids. “You’re crazy! He’s crazy!”

“You think so? Give me a reason not to strap you down and slide the needle in. Give me a reason!” I shoved hard at his chair with every few words until I knocked it over again against the wall.

Tilted backwards, Walker twisted himself frantically toward Nancy. “Get him away from me! I didn’t kill anybody!”

Nancy pushed me across the room, pleading with me to calm down, take a break, leave her to talk to the suspect alone for a while. Finally I was persuaded to go have a cup of coffee. As I slipped out the door, she whispered, “Better. I mean, you got a ways to go, but you’re getting there.”

“From you,” I told her, “high praise.”

Usually I’d be the one protecting the suspect from Nancy’s outbursts. She thought her “mad dog cop” was scarier than mine, and she was right. The stepfather who’d tried to rape her when she was a teenager came out of the hospital in a wheelchair two months after he went in.

While Nancy was comforting John Walker, I checked by District Attorney Mitch Bazemore’s office. There was no need to wonder if Cuddy was still in there because he exploded like a bull out of the closed door just as I walked by it. Mitch, swollen with anger, chased after him, waving a letter at his back. “You don’t tell me! I tell you! There’s a chain of command here and if Ward Trasker, the attorney general of this state—”

Cuddy wheeled around on Mitch. The veins in his neck were so distended I could see his pulse beating there. “Ward Trasker ought to be indicted and you know it, you goddamn coward!”

“If the attorney general tells me we’re turning the Guess Who investigation over to the sheriff’s department, then that’s exactly what we’re doing because there’s a chain of command here! Turn your files over to Homer Louge.” Bazemore suddenly realized he was in a public corridor and that I was in it with him. By a huge effort of will, he deflated himself as if he’d let out compressed air. “We’ll discuss this later, Mangum.”

Cuddy grabbed the sheet of paper from Bazemore and ripped it in two. “No, we won’t.” He threw the paper at Bazemore’s chest. “The answer’s no. Homer Louge has fucked this investigation already—”

“Don’t you dare use that filthy language—”

“And I’m not turning a fuckshit paper clip over to him. And you fucks fire me you’ll be seeing yourselves on the news more goddamn times than Monica Lewinsky!”

I walked past them. “Hi. How you doing, Mitch? Cuddy. Nice day. Good talking to you.” I kept going.

• • •

The next morning, Tuesday the twenty-sixth, I arrived at Room 105 before Cuddy’s brain trust assembled there. No one was around but Rhonda Weavis, perched on the conference table, eating some egg and cheese concoction out of a cardboard container. Oddly, she looked as if she might have been crying, which was startling in someone so habitually sanguine. As she hopped down to greet me, she forced energy into her voice. “How’s it going, JayJay?”

“Fine, how about you? Where is everybody?”

“Caught in traffic probably. Bunty’s lying down in Cuddy’s office. She was here all night.”

“She okay?”

Years of asking people questions they don’t want to answer has taught me that the ones who don’t like to lie have trouble with their faces when they do it. Involuntary eyelid flickers are a typical giveaway and that’s what Rhonda did now as she said, “Sure, she’s fine, just tired. Works too hard.” She hurried over to some photographs on the conference table. “Good news, buddy!” Showing me a blow-up of the commercial photo of G.I. Jane that Nancy had found at Shear Inspirations, Rhonda pointed out a small insignia on the T-shirt that Jane wore, just visible at the bottom edge of the picture. Bunty had identified it as the logo of a cruise ship line. “We got her!”

“My god, Rhonda, you know who she is?”

“We sure do!”

I held out my hand. “I owe you an apology. I didn’t want you two brought in. It was a slap and I resented it. But you and Bunty have gone further in four hours than we did in four months. Congratulations.”

She looked at me with a quizzical affection. “JayJay, you don’t know what resentment is. Some guys we work with act like we’re shoving their heads down in a toilet full of menstrual blood. Sorry, that’s a little graphic.”

I smiled. “It makes your point.”

She rubbed my back. “So I like working with you. And I appreciate your getting the ego out of it. Besides, hey, you guys are the ones who found the photo. You know how it is, sometimes you catch that first break and then it’s chain chain chain, chain reaction.” She opened a folder on the table and handed me a fax. “So, anyhow, can you beat it? Shipping line runs out of Nassau, but it’s a Scandinavian company.” Rhonda pointed out the same logo above a famous cruise line’s letterhead on the fax. “We fax their headquarters this photo and they match it to this ship of theirs that does island-hops in the west Caribbean. This wallpaper’s in the beauty salon.”

“Could they ID Jane?”

Nodding, she passed me another fax. I looked down at the fuzzy paper at a copy of a young woman’s identification card as an employee of the cruise liner’s “Atlantis Salon.” She had worked there as a hair stylist and it was there that the photograph had been taken that Nancy had found in Shear Inspirations.

I sat down, shaken. After all these months, after all the interviews and phone calls and emails and lab tests, after all the parents who had come to us, hoping and dreading that she was their daughter, then gone away with their grief unresolved, here at last was the woman we had called G.I. Jane. She had a name and a past, she had a job and a family and friends and a life that, for reasons that might finally be traceable, had brought her to a shallow grave of leaves in a muddy ravine.

Her age was twenty-six, her hair was blonde, her eyes were blue, her nationality and passport were Swedish. Rhonda pointed a tan strong finger at the name on the faxed ID card. “But hey, congratulations to you too, buddy. Her name is Christine. Well, it’s Kristin. Just like you called it. Looks like your saints angle gets a follow up.”

Her name was Kristin Stiller. The cruise line had provided Rhonda with the family member’s phone number on file for the girl. This proved to be an only sister who lived in Stockholm. Their parents were dead. When Rhonda phoned the woman, a housewife, she said in perfect English that she and Kristin had never been close and had almost never corresponded so that not hearing from her for more than six months had been no cause for alarm. She had assumed that her younger sister was still working on the cruise ship and wouldn’t return to Stockholm until late summer. But in fact the girl had left the ship last December 6 in Miami, although she’d originally planned to renew her contract through the June transatlantic crossing to Marseilles.

I looked at the young woman’s small smiling face on the blurry fax. “So that’s why nobody missed her. And nobody reported her. And nobody in this country had any kind of record of her, no prints, no dental files. And when we checked foreign, there was no missing persons report on her.”

Rhonda shrugged as she gathered the debris of her lunch into a paper bag. “Right. Zip. All she’s got’s this sister off in Sweden and this sister doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Who’s gonna wonder why she’s headed up the Southeast corridor of the USA?”

I compared the ID with the hair salon photo. Despite the differences, the girl with the buzz cut was clearly the same person as the longhaired blonde on the cruise line employee’s card. Kristin had gotten her haircut at Shear Inspirations on Christmas Eve. She left the cruise ship on December 6 and was—for some reason—in Hillston, North Carolina, on the twenty-fourth. Dick Cohen estimated that she’d been murdered in late January or early February. All we had to do now was fill in the rest.

Rhonda suddenly lunged around the table to grab a fax coming off the machine. As she did so, her elbow snagged the side of Bunty’s briefcase, spinning it off the table edge. We both knelt to pick up the spilt contents. Among all the loose papers and file folders, there were at least four different bottles of prescription drugs.

“I got it, I got it,” Rhonda backed me away and I moved over to the fax machine, pretending that I hadn’t seen the name “Barbara Crabtree,” and the label of the chemotherapy drug, “Cytoxan” on one of bottles of pills. Bunty’s weight loss, paleness, weakness, her thin hair and sudden sweats now made sense. I’d seen the worry in Rhonda’s eyes as she helped her friend to sit or stand, but I wasn’t sure she would want to talk about it, just as I had never wanted to talk about losing Copper, not even to Alice.

We talked about the fax instead. It was from the cruise ship’s purser’s office and informed us that Kristin Stiller had cashed paychecks amounting to $983 a day before leaving the ship. I said, “Think Kristin was running out of money by the time she got to Hillston? Maybe she took this photo to Shear Inspirations to apply for a job.”

While Rhonda and I were talking about John Walker, son of the evasive Mrs. Doris Nutz, the phone rang. It was Zeke at the desk, saying that Cuddy wanted me down the hall in the forensics lab. “I think maybe the chief just got another one of those sick presents from Guess Who.”

• • •

In the white organized clutter of Room 107, the forensics laboratory of the Cadmean Building, Etham Foster perched on a stool, his long legs folded under him like a crane, carefully dusting a baggie for prints. The delicate precision of his enormous hands was hypnotizing, and Cuddy, staring at his work, didn’t notice my entrance. “Nope, nothing,” Etham said.

Cuddy bent over to look at the bottom of a plastic container. “How ’bout a laser wand, Etham? Could we use a wand on them?”

Our head criminalist grumbled at him, “You’re driving me crazy.”

“You wanted to see me?” I called.

Cuddy made no reference to the outburst I’d witnessed yesterday between him and Mitch Bazemore in the hall. Instead, he held up a small box whose brown paper wrapping had been neatly opened. On the paper, red block letters now sickeningly familiar addressed the package to “Captain C.R. Mangum, HPD.” Although hand-delivered (there were no stamps or post office markings), it had somehow found its way into the morning pouch of HPD mail that was left as always on the station sergeant’s desk. When Cuddy arrived this morning, he’d checked through the mail Zeke had set aside for him. As soon as he saw the red magic marker on the box, he’d called in Bob Zolinsky, our explosives expert. But there was no bomb inside. So they’d brought the box down to Etham to dust it for prints. Inside they’d found two plastic zip-lock baggies. In the bag on the bottom was the discharged shell of a single brass-capped bullet, thirty-eight caliber. It proved to have blood of Lucy Griggs’s type on it. Inside the other bag, there were two viscous filmy globules of tissue and nerves that had once been human eyes.

I said, “Eyes on a shell.”

Cuddy said, “What?”

“It’s a pun. Remember Paul Madison told me about the pictures of St. Lucy where she’s carrying her eyes on a shell.” I pointed at the bullet shell in the second baggie. “Eyes on a shell. It’s another one of his puns, like headshot. Guess Who. It was in the police mail pouch? Jesus.”

Cuddy took a long breath and slowly let it out. “Goddamn bastard.”

There was a knock at the door, then Zeke Caleb stuck in his warrior’s head with its long black ponytail, and waved an envelope at Cuddy. “Chief, sorry to bug you, but the mayor needs you to look at this and get back to him.”

Cuddy took out a single sheet of paper, read it, balled it up in his fist and tossed it in the trashcan as he strode angrily out of the room. Etham swung silently back to the quiet safety of his microscope. I fished the letter out of the trash, straightened the page, and read it. It was a formal letter from the Hillston city council asking C.R. Mangum to submit his resignation as chief of police. I showed it to Etham. We both saw the important thing right away. The twelve signatures of the city council members were stacked neatly on top of one another. (Three of them were friends of Tyler Norris’s parents; two others had been trying to get rid of Cuddy since the day he arrived.) But to force the chief of police to resign, in other words to fire him, required a formal request from Hillston’s mayor as well as its city council. And Mayor Carl Yarborough had not signed the letter.