Perfect Grave

Chapter Three

J esus Christ revealed his bleeding heart wrapped with thorns in the painting above Isabella Martell’s couch as Detective Grace Garner listened to her lie about her grandson.

“No, Roberto, he no come here.”

Grace threw a glance to Detective Dominic Perelli, her partner, tapped her pen in her notebook, then exhaled her disappointment.

“And you have no idea where he is?”

Isabella shook her head, blinking behind her thick glasses while staring into her hands, nearly arthritic now from years of scrubbing toilets in the Mutual Tower. Roberto beamed from his framed high school picture atop her Motorola TV. Nothing in his grin foretold that he would become a twenty-six-year-old drug-dealing pimp, who, at age twenty-three, would do nine months in prison for beating one of his girls.

According to an informant, Roberto was the last to see Sharla May Forrest alive before she was discovered behind an Aurora Avenue pawnshop.

She’d been strangled.

She was a teenage prostitute whose corpse had been found several weeks ago. And Grace still had next to nothing. No solid witnesses. Nothing but fragments and partials of trace evidence, nothing concrete. Nothing but a tip from a rival dealer happy to tell the SPD that “Sharla May owed Roberto and people saw him with her.”

Whether the lead was valid or not, Grace needed to talk to Roberto Martell. Despite the fact that two days ago a neighbor had called police to complain about loud music coming from a Mustang with Roberto’s plates idling in the street at this address, while a man matching Roberto’s description had walked into this house, there was no way Isabella was going to give up the whereabouts of her flesh and blood.

“Hell, before she came to this country, she stared down the death squads who murdered her father,” Perelli said later into a laminated menu at a Belltown diner where Grace brooded over coffee and everything else.

The Forrest case was growing as cold as the headstone on Sharla May’s grave. It seemed destined to remain unsolved like the last three murders Grace had caught. It was the same for the other detectives. Morale was flagging. In the last twenty months, eight veteran investigators had either retired or transferred out of Homicide. The toll was written in the unit’s clearance rate, which had dropped from 80 percent to 55 percent.

“These sad stats say that killers stand a good chance of getting away with murder in this city,” a Seattle Mirror columnist charged in a full-bore attack on the SPD.

This perception concerned the Commission, which concerned the chief, who pressured the deputy, who told the assistant chief, who summoned the captain, who instructed the lieutenants to issue an edict to the sergeants to pass to detectives.

“I’ve been ordered to tell you the obvious,” Sergeant Stan Boulder, biting back on his anger, advised his team at the start of a recent shift. “We need a win and we need it fast.” As his people grumbled, Boulder crumpled his memo, then pulled Grace into his office for a private moment.

“We’re getting pissed on from every direction over this clearance crap.”

“You paint a pretty picture.”

“People are getting distracted, second-guessing, they need to stay focused, Grace.”

“Yeah, we get that.”

“You’re one of my brightest, it’s why we brought you on. We need to pull one out of the fire.”

“Which one? I’ll just run out and solve it, now.”

“You know what I mean.”

She did.

Grace always came at things with a fresh angle, a talent that had evolved during her teens, when her quick thinking had helped save lives during a shooting at her high school. In the aftermath, Grace knew she was going to become a cop.

She had graduated from college in the top 5 percent and considered applying to the FBI before deciding on the Seattle PD. As a patrol officer, she was decorated for tackling and disarming a fleeing robbery suspect. She soon made detective and worked in several units where she’d earned the praise of her commanders before becoming one of the youngest investigators to join Seattle’s homicide squad.

She gave everything to the job, putting in sixty hours a week, allowing nothing else in her life. She was a loner. Had been ever since the school shooting. That’s just the way it was. But over the last few years, as she grappled with death twenty-four hours a day, she didn’t think she could stand being alone much longer.

Yet her attempts to do something about it hadn’t really gone anywhere.

She went out with Jason Wade, the guy from the Mirror, a few times. There was chemistry, something electric between them, but work always seemed to get in the way. Or maybe they let it get in the way. Anyway, she broke it off before it got serious but he seemed hurt. She saw it in his face. Had she made a mistake?

She didn’t know.

Then there was her disaster with Drew Wagner, the FBI agent. Upon transferring from Boston he pursued her with animal ferocity. God, he was so smooth, so good-looking. She never saw it coming. First, he says he’s single because there’s no ring, but she points to his tan line, so, all right, all right, he admits, he’s divorced. She buys it, as he tells her about the heartache, and he does it so well. Later, she overhears him on a phone call to his wife and it’s, all right, actually he’s separated. The heartache stuff again and maybe Grace wants to believe him but she does a little checking and finally gets the truth. Turns out her all-star is only biding his time until his wife sells the house in Charlestown and moves to Seattle with their kids.

Some detective she was.

How could she have been so stupid? she asked her reflection in the diner’s window, letting the question go into the night and back to Jason. Was she wrong not to work on something with him? There was just something about him that she liked. A brooding, brilliant honesty.

Stop it, Grace! Stop this “poor me” garbage!

Passing headlights stabbed at her for being selfish, hurling case images at her. Of Sharla May Forrest, a runaway not-yet-out-of-little-girlhood who was addicted to crack but kept a stuffed teddy bear on her bed and signed birthday cards to friends with happy faces. Of Sharla May’s naked corpse in the urine, vomit, and dog shit alley, with a metal hanger garrotted around her neck, twisted at the back with a lead pipe so tight it nearly decapitated her.

And of Isabella Martell lying about Roberto while Jesus watched.

And of Special Lying Bastard Agent Drew Wagner at the mall with his wife and kids. And of Grace Garner alone with her unsolved murders, trying to get a handle on it all as someone was speaking her name.

“Grace. Grace,” Perelli nudged her, holding out his cell phone, “It’s Stan, he says your phone’s dead.”

“Garner.”

“It’s Boulder. We got a fresh one and you’re the primary.”

“Cripes, Stan, we got our hands full with the Forrest case. Can’t Marty and Stallworth take it?”

“It’s yours. Take down the address, it’s near Yesler Terrace.”

Grace pursed her lips as she jotted down the information.

“Who’s the vic?”

“Anne Braxton. This will get profile. Big time.”

“Why?”

“She’s a nun, murdered in her residence.”