Friday morning, Petrosky met Morrison at the precinct and they rode to Salomon’s house together, the weight of the gray sky pressing down on every inch of the car like a dirty blanket. Morrison had his usual hippie peace sign cup and had brought Petrosky another stainless steel mug since Petrosky had misplaced yesterday’s. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.
Petrosky took a slug, saw Morrison watching him, and grimaced for good measure. Morrison snorted, turning to the window as Petrosky’s cell rang.
“Petrosky.”
“There’s a pest control truck outside Elmira’s house! She’d never—”
He set the coffee mug in the cupholder. “Who is this?”
“Mrs. Frazier. You said to call you if—”
“A pest control vehicle strikes you as unusual?”
“Oh, yes, Elmira wouldn’t use those chemicals. Said they gave her a headache. And she was bothered by the poisons they give mice too. Cats could get into them.”
No wonder Salomon hadn’t called anyone in for the basement. OCD cleaning meets OCD chemical avoidance. He glanced at Morrison’s mug. Or hippie-eco-obsession. Shunning rat poison in favor of varmints and black plague. Who wouldn’t love that?
“Her daughter ordered the truck,” Petrosky said. “It’s under control.” He pocketed the phone and Morrison raised an eyebrow. “Step on it. Pest control’s already there.”
True to Frazier’s word, there was a Speedy Kill Pest Control truck outside the Salomon house when they arrived, along with a black Mercedes that had to be Courtney’s. Inside, they found Courtney sitting at the kitchen table with a man in green coveralls. Olive skin, bushy eyebrows, hairy as a gorilla. A knee-high plastic tank with a long snake of tubing ending in a nozzle sat at his feet next to a set of three metal cages—empty, for now. Courtney and the pest control man stood when Petrosky and Morrison entered, the man’s eyes darting everywhere but at them.
“You didn’t go downstairs yet, did you?” Petrosky asked him. The guy shook his head and gazed at the floor, fingering the nozzle on his tank.
“No, we were waiting for you,” Courtney said. “I thought I’d have him check out the rest of the house first. Spray. Need to do it for resale anyway.”
She was wasting no time with her dead mother’s estate—moving suspiciously quick. But he wasn’t getting that psycho vibe from her, and how depraved would a daughter have to be to tear apart her mother, then go after some kid? “The key to the basement?” Petrosky asked, narrowing his eyes at the freshly mopped floor.
Courtney held up a yellow key ring, five keys dangling like miniature knives: two small and metal, perhaps for the safe deposit boxes or a shed, two larger metal door keys, and one with the top sheathed in black plastic, probably for the car.
“We’re going to check the car too.” That’d take five minutes, and if Petrosky was honest, he was in no hurry to creep downstairs and mingle with a bunch of rodents. “Keys to anything else here on that ring? A safe here in the house? A shed?”
She pursed her lips. “No. One of them is to the safe deposit box at the bank. Once I have the death certificate and her will I’m sure I can get in.”
“We can make it happen sooner if we need to,” Petrosky said, trying to ignore the way the pest control man kept looking at his watch. Murder infringing on your screwing around? He’d make the twitchy asshole wait.
Petrosky extended his hand and she thrust the key ring at him, probably angry at the intrusion—or else it was the grief. He knew as well as anyone how the anger bubbled up to keep the sorrow from eating your goddamn heart.
“I’m making coffee,” she said. “I’m not going back out in the cold.”
Thank fucking god. Petrosky turned to the pest dude who was shuffling his feet like a bored little kid. “And Mister—”
“Spiros.” He met Petrosky’s eyes finally—his whites were bloodshot like he was stoned out of his gourd. His hands worked the chemical tubing. Fucking high-on. Figured. Not that Petrosky had the time—or desire—to arrest some jerk-off for possession, but shit.
“Mr. Spiros, feel free to take care of the rest of the house. When you’re done, wait here.” Petrosky ignored the dazed look in Spiros’s eyes and led Morrison out the front door to the driveway. “She didn’t even offer us coffee. Rude.”
Petrosky coughed, like his lungs were angry at the icy air in his throat, and unlocked the door to the old Bonneville. The door hinges squealed. “Someone doesn’t like WD-40.” Consistent with her not liking chemicals, at least.
He slid into the driver’s seat, banged his knee on the wheel, and cursed. “Get in here, Kid.”
Morrison went around the passenger side and climbed in, popping the glove box as Petrosky opened the center console.
“Damn, she’s organized.” Morrison flipped through what looked like a small leather checkbook. “Insurance papers and tag information, even the receipt from the Secretary of State. She’s a street cop’s dream.”
Petrosky turned and looked into the backseat where the blue cloth actually bore vacuum tracks. Tracks like that would stay for a long time if no one sat back there—and likely, no one had. Most of the neighbors described her as a homebody. Didn’t go out. Even her hairstylist came to her.
Petrosky exited the car and headed for the back. The trunk contained a roadside kit that included jumper cables, flares, and fuses, all still in sealed packages. Nothing else. Not a single speck of lint. But beneath the backseat he found one lone dime. She wasn’t perfect after all, and this was oddly comforting.
Petrosky was reaching to open the compartment for the spare tire when he heard a scream from inside the house. Courtney. He jolted upright and smashed the back of his head against the inside of the trunk. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
Morrison was already running, and Petrosky hauled after him up the walk and through the front door. Courtney was standing at the opening to the basement, eyes wide with terror.
“What the—” Petrosky began, but the scream came again, high and long. Not Courtney—from the basement. Mister we-kill-all-the-fucking-bugs.
Goddammit all to hell.
Morrison ran down the stairs, nearly busting his forehead on the ceiling in the narrow descent. Petrosky huffed after him, hand on the railing as if it would help ease the tightness around his heart, and watched Morrison hit the bottom stair like a fucking gymnast. And here came their screamer. Spiros ran smack into Morrison’s barrel chest, bounced off like a rubber ball, and landed on his ass on the cement floor. He bounced up just as fast.
“Oh lord Jesus, oh lord Jesus.”
Morrison put a hand on the man’s shoulder. “Mr. Spiros, you’re going to have to calm down and tell us—”
Spiros’s gaze flicked up the stairs, then back to the dark bowels of the basement. “Let me out—”
“What seems to be the—”
“Jesus, let me out of here!” Spiros wheezed. He tried to escape up the stairs, Morrison’s hand falling from his shoulder.
Petrosky grabbed Spiros by the shirt and slammed him against the wall at the foot of the stairs, his forearm and elbow across the guy’s throat. Deaf prick. “What part of ‘wait for us to go down’ did you not fucking understand?”
“I forgot, okay? I forgot. Please—”
“You ignored the police. I should take you in.”
“No, I forgot, I really—”
“You high, asshole?” Petrosky put his face close enough to Spiros’s that he could smell his coffee breath and the fear radiating off him. And the hint of musty pot smoke beneath his breakfast. “Thought you’d get stoned before you showed up to work?”
“I have a bad back and—”
Petrosky pulled him off the wall and slammed him back hard enough that the fucker’s head hit the cement.
Spiros made the sign of the cross and choked back a sob. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, please, just let me go upstairs.”
Petrosky felt pressure on his arm as Morrison grabbed him. All right, Kid, all right. He loosened his grip and the exterminator fled up the stairs, tripping twice before he disappeared through the door into the kitchen. “Go find out what the fuck happened, Surfer Boy, and make sure he doesn’t leave.” Spiros was probably just paranoid—wouldn’t be the first time bad weed made someone freak out.
Unless Salomon really had been hiding something down here.
Morrison lurched after Spiros. Their footsteps made it up the stairs, through the kitchen, and stopped near the front door. Low murmuring from Morrison, Spiros, and Courtney. Someone retched and then softer footfalls out the front door as if Morrison was walking them outside.
The sudden silence was eerie but welcome. Petrosky steeled himself and surveyed the basement, hand resting on his gun. The dim light from a single overhead bulb cast stark shadows along the wall and the neatly swept cement floor. For a room supposedly locked away due to vermin, the basement was surprisingly clean—all items placed in orderly piles. Not the kind of place you’d expect to have rodents, but halfway through a long Michigan winter, those bastards would sleep anywhere warm.
The broken window he’d listened at yesterday was at the far end of the basement. He approached the back wall. Beneath the window, four stacks of boxes sat in a tidy row, all labeled. Two bookcases stood to his right, the books individually wrapped in brown paper to protect the covers, and labeled with a label maker, like anyone needed to spend hours typing when you could buy a fucking Sharpie. As he got closer to the back, he noticed that the piles of boxes weren’t perfect. Two stacks just beneath the window had been moved out, though they were still close enough to the wall that he wasn’t going to find the body of some ex-boyfriend or Courtney’s husband hidden behind them. Just … askew. From the severe order of the rest of the place, the ramshackle stacks must be where Spiros had been moving things around looking for rodents when he freaked out and contaminated the scene.
Petrosky drew his eyes to the wall above the boxes where the window gaped, one side dingy but intact, the other sporting jagged glass like teeth, the frigid air huffing through the hole like the breath of a Yeti. But even as the cold sliced through Petrosky’s thinning hair and chilled his scalp, it didn’t cut the stale dank in the basement. Though the heavy air might have been a reflection of the utter lack of life as opposed to an actual smell.
Then—
Scratch, scratch.
Petrosky jerked around, his gun drawn on reflex, searching for the source of the sound. A mouse ran from an old bookcase to take refuge in the corner adjacent to the shattered window. He lowered his gun, heart hammering. Fucking high-on exterminator had him antsy too.
He turned back to the stacks along the far wall, frowning as he peered through the crack between the brown boxes. The shadows on the ground behind the stacks were deep but … there was definitely something back there. Small. Probably a nest. What kind of exterminator was Spiros anyway? Not like a family of mice could hurt you—way better to have mice than rats.
But why would mice build a nest under the one place there would surely have been a draft? He stepped back to examine the row again. All the boxes were positioned at least a foot from the cement exterior, presumably to avoid the dewy walls of an unfinished Michigan basement. But below the window, those two crooked stacks were pulled out a few inches farther … .Spiros? Or was Salomon actually hiding something in the dark behind the cardboard?
He forced his fingers around a middle box and pulled, shifting the top three toward him, and peered into the dim space. The nest seemed … rounder, at least on one side—was it a nest? Maybe the little girl had used another rock to smash the glass and it had landed on the rodents’ home. Good news—they might get some prints. If Spiros hadn’t fucked it up.
Petrosky bent to the floor, gripped the bottom container and tried to shift the entire stack of boxes farther from the wall, but nothing moved. Too heavy. He jerked the top box from the pile and set it on the floor behind him. Then the next, so light it surprised him until he spied cloth—blankets—through a slit in the cardboard. He jumped again as something made a sound, a tiny squeak.
Goddamn, he hated mice.
He grabbed another box and heaved it aside, one more, and—finally—leaned over the remaining waist-high stack. He froze. Not a rodent’s nest. Not a rock.
Fucking hell.
He tossed the next box onto the floor behind him. It toppled over, and a wrapped teacup rolled free of the paper and shattered on the cement. His stomach knotted as he shoved the last box aside so he could get to the mound on the floor.
The infant was nude, its bottom half covered in what looked like black tar but was probably newborn poop. The kid’s shriveled skin was purplish like a bruise in some places, grayish in others, and coated in waxy white stuff. A crusty umbilical cord curled against its abdomen. He peered closer. Her abdomen. Shit. Far too young to have survived on her own. And her left arm was cocked at an unnatural angle, U-shaped, broken. The boxes might have eased her fall but not nearly enough—she’d suffered before she died. He eyed the window above. No blood apparent on the windowsill, but with the state of the body, the feces, no wonder the rodents were climbing back here—she’d be good eating.
Petrosky thumped one meaty fist against his chest where ribbons of sharp pain were radiating into his shoulder. “Fuck,” he whispered.
Morrison’s footsteps echoed on the stairs. “Spiros is at the table. He said he was shoving things around to spray the perimeter and saw a—” He stopped behind Petrosky. “Holy shit.”
Morrison pulled his cell as Petrosky knelt beside the child, touching her cheek. Cold. Then her skin lit up abruptly, the beam shaking so much it appeared like a roving spotlight against her flesh. Morrison’s flashlight app. Petrosky listened to Morrison’s sharp intake of breath and the light stilled.
Marks on her belly. Her arms. Tiny punctures surrounded by bruising—like little needle pricks. Not from the fall. Had someone drugged her to keep her quiet? But there was no reason to shoot a tranquilizer into a kid’s belly. And a doc sure as hell didn’t give newborn vaccinations in the chest or the groin.
“That’s why the girl broke the window,” Morrison said. “She wanted to hide the baby.”
Hide her. If a little girl had kidnapped her infant sister in order to protect her, the parents would be out in full force to find their younger daughter. Except—
These kids were neglected. Abused. The father, if that’s what he was, would be brought up on charges if he claimed the baby now. And where the hell had the newborn come from? Not from a hospital—she’d still had the umbilical cord attached. Home birth gone wrong?
Petrosky reached into the box behind him and felt for a blanket. Poor baby.
“Boss—”
“Gonna yell at me for messing up a crime scene, California?”
They locked eyes. Morrison shook his head.
Petrosky laid the blanket on the baby just below her neck and pressed his fingertip to the carotid artery. He knew what he was going to find, but … He felt nothing. Pushed harder.
“Boss …”
“Gotta make sure.” He was sure. He just didn’t want to accept that he’d lost another kid. Would she have been alive last night? But they’d had no reason to think someone had tossed a baby inside the house. No reason to think the basement was actually a crime scene. He’d let Courtney Krakow-whatever-the-hell-her-name-was convince him not to do his fucking job with her sad eyes.
He was a fucking pushover. Maybe he’d lost his touch.
Petrosky pulled the blanket over the baby’s face and started for the stairs. “Call the techs. Ask for the black-haired one.” Maybe he didn’t care enough anymore. About anything. No matter what he did, he failed.
“Katrina? Why?”
“She’s smarter than the others.”
Morrison pocketed his phone and the light went with it, reducing the room to an orange-washed tomb. “How do you know?”
“I’m a fucking genius. That’s why you should feel luck—” Petrosky turned back to the window. “Did you hear that?” Morrison stared, wide-eyed, at the back wall.
Petrosky bolted back to the window and hit his knees. The blanket was still, unmoving, the outline of the child barely visible in the dim. Same as when he’d left. But—
The noise came again, the sound of mice. Of kittens? But it wasn’t kittens.
Oh god.
He yanked the blanket off the kid. Her mouth was moving, tiny gasps, barely there. Behind him he heard rustling, the beeps of three dialed numbers, and Morrison’s voice: “Need a bus.”
Petrosky tucked the blanket around the child and over her head like a hood. She was limp, way too gray and way too cold. Nothing else moved. Just her mouth.
He cradled her in his arms and stood. “It’s all right, baby girl. It’s all right.”
The infant opened her mouth and mewled.