Dan Maguire knew Bonnie Parker was dirty in all kinds of ways. Dirty in ways he couldn’t even imagine, probably. And she had something to do with the crime scene at the Coach House, he was sure of that.
He had spent the past hour talking to the manager and to those guests who hadn’t cleared out fast enough. Nobody knew anything. In a crap hole like this, nobody ever did.
Now he stood under the overhang by the parking lot, staring past the cycling light bars of parked cruisers and a sheet of steady rain. On the highway, post-midnight traffic blurred past, headlights and taillights making watercolor streaks. He watched the traffic and tried to figure out what the hell had gone down here.
“It’s a puzzler, huh, Chief?” That was Phil Gaines, the only detective on the Brighton Cove force. “You know we’re going to have to bring the Highway Patrol in on this, right?”
“I know.” The state police had more expertise in these situations. They had a crime lab. They had—no offense to Phil—real detectives, not glorified beat cops who investigated the occasional bicycle theft or late-night break-in.
“Be nice if we had something to give ’em. Some theory of the case.”
“Fire away,” Dan said irritably.
“Sorry. I’m all out of ammo. I mean, it seems clear enough that someone was in that tub, getting shock treatment. And somehow they got away, and a shot was fired. But the who, what, and why is a mystery.”
Dan surveyed the parking lot. “At least four vehicles left before the first officer got here. And naturally we have no description of any of them. It’s enough to make you lose your faith in human nature.”
“One was probably our victim, running away. Another was our perp, fleeing the scene. The other two, or however many more there were, had to be some of the Coach House’s upstanding clientèle, heading for cover.”
“They’re the ones we really need to talk to. They might’ve seen something.”
“Good luck finding them. Nobody wants to admit to checking in here.”
“Then we squeeze the ones who didn’t get away. The hookers and the johns. The manager too. We apply pressure until somebody’s memory improves.”
“If they saw anything in the first place. Most of them say they never even heard the gunshot.”
“How can you not hear a gunshot?”
“Maybe they were preoccupied.” Phil poked his index finger into the curled fingers of his other hand, in and out, in and out, accompanied by a creaking-bedspring noise. He liked illustrating his thoughts with gestures and sound effects. A comedian, Phil was.
“Yeah. Maybe.” Dan turned toward the motel room, blinking in the spill of light from its open door. “What do you say we take one more walk-through, then call in the big boys.”
“Fair enough.”
They lifted the crime scene ribbon and stepped inside. The place was just as Dan had seen it when he arrived, fresh from his fruitless dialogue with Bonnie Parker on the side of the highway. The unmade bed, the nightstand out of place and scarred with a knife blade’s thrust, the discarded phone and lamp. The carpet was damp, and water was pooled on the bathroom tiles near the half-full tub lined with a shower curtain. One wire floated in the cold water, while the other lay tangled on the floor.
“He cut the wires off the lamp and the TV,” Phil said as they stood in the bathroom doorway, “and trimmed the insulation off the ends.”
“Sounds like he wasn’t planning to put on this little show. He had to improvise.”
“Wonder what he used for juice.”
“He couldn’t have plugged the wires into the wall socket?”
“Not without tripping the breaker. No, had to be an independent power source. Something he had with him. A hair dryer, say.”
“Would a hair dryer pack enough punch to torture somebody?”
“That, I don’t know. They say you can fry somebody if you toss a hair dryer into a tub.” His hands fluttered, and he made a sound like a bug zapper. “But it could be a, what do you call it, urban legend.”
“How about that stuff floating in the water?” Dan pointed to two ragged chunks of foam.
“I’m thinking it was used as a gag. To silence the victim, and maybe to prevent him from biting his tongue off.”
“Looks like there’s some blood on it.”
“Maybe he bit his tongue anyway.”
“You keep saying he. What if it was a woman?”
Phil shrugged. “Could have been. Some sexual thing. Maybe consensual at first. Bondage play that got out of hand. Somebody didn’t respect the safe word.”
“Or maybe not like that. Maybe a revenge thing.”
“You’d have to piss somebody off really good to drive them to this kind of revenge.”
“Yeah,” Dan said. “Yeah, you would.”
Who was better at pissing off people than Bonnie Parker? Nobody, that’s who.
He remembered how she’d shivered when the subject of torture came up. Her hand holding the cigarette had been a little shaky. And he sure as hell didn’t believe she’d been meditating on the damn beach in the rain.
He turned away from the bathroom, and his eye picked out a hint of powder blue protruding from beneath the bed.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I dunno.”
“You’re telling me nobody looked under the bed?”
“I instructed our guys to do only a cursory search. Drawers and closets, that’s it. Figured I’d leave the CSI stuff for the bag-and-tag brigade. Otherwise we’ll just catch hell for doing it wrong.”
“You have a rubber glove?”
Phil dug in his jacket pocket and produced one. Dan slipped it on, then got down on his knees and took hold of the item, drawing it into view.
A woman’s hat.
“Now that’s interesting,” he muttered. “That’s very interesting.”
He turned it over, examining the label. The hat had been purchased at Evie’s Consignment Shop in downtown Brighton Cove.
Parker shopped there. He had seen her.
“Think it’s something, Chief?” Phil asked, crouching beside him.
“Could be. See the label? I need to know who bought this hat.”
“We can talk to Evie in the morning.”
“We can talk to her now.”
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Then we’ll wake her up. Put some excitement in her life.”
“I take it you have a suspicion who the hat belongs to.”
“Not just a suspicion, Phil. I know. I know.”
An unhealthy obsession, his wife had said. But she didn’t know about the itch. How it kept him up nights.
And how good it would feel to scratch that itch at last.