THE PHOTOS WERE EIGHT-BY-TEN color glossies, six of them.
One was all it took. A thick, rancid rush filled my mouth and I swallowed, over and over, until the vomit finally slid back to where it had come from and stayed there. Then I paged through the remaining pictures.
Tina’s coat was open and the top part of her blouse was ripped away from her neck. It was the same white blouse—with the same plaid vest—she’d been wearing at The Captain’s Choice. There were two head close-ups and four full-body shots. She was sprawled on her back on a cement floor, beside a messy table equipped like a workbench. I thought at first it was a basement, but another photo showed it was a garage. There was a car that looked like the car she’d driven when she left the restaurant.
Her mouth was wide open, and so was her right eye. The left eye was half closed, swollen and ringed with bruising. Her nose, upper lip, and chin were all smeared with blood. There were more dark bruises on both of her cheeks, and some on her neck. A thin line of dried blood ran from her left ear.
“I have just read you your rights, amigo,” Sanchez said, and he might have, for all I knew. “You wanna talk about it?” he asked.
“You answer a couple questions?”
“That depends.”
“I mean, she’s been beaten up. But … but people don’t usually die from that.”
“Maybe that’s what you wanna talk about, amigo. Maybe it was an accident. You were just slapping her around a little. Trying to get some information or something, I don’t know. Or maybe there was an argument. She’s a pretty woman and maybe you wanted … Anyway, maybe she slipped and hit her head on something, and then fell down and didn’t get up, you know? And you were scared and you just took off and—”
“Let me look a minute,” I said, and I paged through the photos again. There was a vise attached to the edge of the cluttered workbench above where she lay, and this time I saw the blood smeared on it—and maybe a clump of hair. “Are there more pictures?” I knew there had to be, including close-ups of the vise.
Sanchez grinned—a treacherous, feline grin. “Just tell me what happened.”
I looked again at the photos. The garage seemed quite large, and was a mess. The floor was grimy and oil-stained, and there were half-open cardboard cartons, lawn tools, and miscellaneous junk piled everywhere.
“Is this Dominic’s garage? Is that where it happened?”
“You tell me, amigo. That’s what I’m here for. You explain what happened, maybe how you didn’t really mean to hurt her at all, but she fell. And maybe the doc will agree with you. Maybe it isn’t first degree. Of course, you don’t cooperate, maybe it is. I dunno. So … whaddaya say, amigo?”
I put the pictures facedown on the table and aligned them into a very careful pile, then laid my palms flat, one on each side of the pile, and looked across at Sanchez. He grinned again, looking like a sly cat. It was as though this was about Sanchez and me, not about a sad, pretty woman whose teenage daughter had no mother any more—and still had Dominic Fontana for a father. I knew Sanchez was doing the best job he could, the best way he knew. And I wanted to kick his sly grin straight up his ass.
But I didn’t do that. I said, “Chingase, amigo. But first, show me the telephone.”