Perfect Grave

Chapter Forty-Seven

S omething about the shoes gnawed at Kay Cataldo.

It had cost her a night’s sleep, had compelled her to get to her crime lab just after dawn and tear through her files.

It’s the shoes. Think, Cataldo! Think!

John Cooper possessed used tennis shoes issued to offenders by the Department of Corrections. But they were not the shoes that had made the impressions at Sister Anne’s murder scene. That ruled him out.

Okay, but she’d seen that pattern recently in another open file.

Hadn’t she?

Yes.

But where? Where, damn it? She struggled to retrieve it from her memory and her computer, gulping coffee while searching her files. Something blurred by.

Stop.

This one.

Sharla May Forrest.

The teen hooker.

This was the one.

Cataldo examined the crime-scene pictures. There was Sharla May, the runaway, naked on the ground in a back alley with a metal hanger garrotted around her neck. She was so young. It broke Cataldo’s heart. There was the Dumpster, the trash, and the semidry mud puddle that had captured a partial right shoe impression.

Here we go.

She called up the cast and the image filled her computer monitor. Very familiar. This is looking very familiar. She called up the file notes, read through them, then called up the image of the shoe impression.

“Hold on,” Cataldo told herself.

She loaded her computer with shoe files from Sister Anne’s homicide, including the work Chuck DePew had done over at the Washington State Patrol’s Crime Lab. She called up the images of the shoe impressions, then split the screen of her computer monitor.

How in the world did she overlook this?

Biting her bottom lip, she aligned the photograph from the hooker murder with the sharpest image of the right shoe impression from the nun murder, so that they were in identical scale and attitude.

Cataldo transposed one over the other and set out to look for comparisons.

“Oh boy.”

The wear, edges, channeling, the waffle pattern, right down to the fifth ridge with the nice little “X” cut, aligned perfectly.

Cataldo reached for her phone to alert Grace Garner.

They had a multiple murder suspect.

Grace was at her desk at the homicide unit, mining her notes on Cooper’s account of the stranger at the shelter.

She was panning for details, anything to aid the Washington Department of Corrections in its search for a con who could fit Cooper’s scenario. Trouble was, Cooper’s description was just too vague.

Once Perelli clocked in, they were going down to the shelter to recanvass the breakfast crowd. Grace turned to her notes and reports on Sister Anne’s work as counselor at prisons and women’s shelters.

Damn. The DOC was supposed to get back to her on the prisons Sister Anne had visited and the names of offenders she’d counseled. It ticked Grace off that they had not gotten back to her yet. She would get on their case, she told herself as her line rang.

“Garner, Homicide.”

“It’s Kay at the lab. Are you sitting down?”

“I’m sitting down.”

“Our nun killer also did Sharla May Forrest.”

“What?”

“Shoe impressions match at both scenes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“But we already looked at Roberto Martell.” “Better look again. He’s an ex-con.”

Within minutes of Cataldo’s call to Grace, a Seattle police emergency dispatcher issued a citywide silent alert to mobile display terminals for Roberto Martell. A couple of days ago, Grace had merely wanted to question Roberto about Sharla May Forrest’s murder. Now, the twenty-six-year-old drug-dealing pimp was a suspect in two first-degree homicides.

He was Seattle’s most wanted man.

The alert with his physical description and details on his Chrysler and tag were also quietly circulated to every law enforcement agency in King County and the state. At the time it came up, Seattle police officers Dimitri Franz and Dale Gannon were inside a 7-Eleven getting fresh coffee and sugar donuts.

They were unaware of the bulletin when their attention was seized by the screech of rubber in the parking lot and the doom-boom of a car stereo playing at an illegal level. It had interrupted Officer Franz’s story about his fishing trip to Montana and disturbed Officer Gannon’s enjoyment of a quiet morning.

A gum-chewing girl in her late teens, wearing too much makeup and not enough clothing, unless you counted her thigh-high spike boots and micro mini, strode into the store looking for mouthwash.

Dimitri exchanged a look with Franz, nodding to the girl’s man, waiting in the lot behind the wheel of a Chrysler. The exhausted driver’s head was thrown back to the headrest. His eyes were closed. He was too tired or too stupid to realize he’d rolled up alongside a marked Seattle police car.

Obviously the girl and her man had been working it all night.

While the music assaulted the air, Franz had slipped into the patrol car and typed into the small computer keyboard to query the Chrysler’s tag. His eyebrows climbed a titch when it came back and he saw what they had.

“Oh, my.” He pivoted the terminal so his partner could see.

The two cops set their coffees down gently.

Murder suspect Roberto Martell felt the barrel of a police pistol against his head and opened his eyes to see a second pistol leveled at him. He was arrested without incident, except for the sound of a bottle of mouthwash hitting the pavement.

Roberto’s girlfriend had not expected her night to end like this.

Less than an hour later, Perelli folded his arms and looked hard at the man sitting across from him and Grace Garner at the table in the homicide squad’s interview room.

“Don’t lie to us, Roberto,” Grace said. “You were the last to see Sharla May alive.”

“No.” The chains around Roberto’s neck chinked as he shook his head. “Your information is incorrect. The last person to see her alive would be the person who killed her. I swear the truth to you on this.”

“What size shoes do you wear?” Perelli asked.

“What? What size? Why?”

“Give me your right shoe.”

Roberto looked at Perelli, then at Grace, who nodded.

“I do this, then you let me go?”

“Just give it to me.”

Roberto put his sneaker on the table.

“Size eight.” Perelli and Grace exchanged a look. No way could Roberto be the killer. Perelli passed it back. “Man, you’ve got very small, stinkin’ feet, Roberto.”

“People saw you arguing with Sharla May,” Grace said.

“Yes, sure, I’m going to tell you what happened.” Roberto slipped his foot back into his shoe. “She owed me two large for her habit.”

Grace made notes.

“I was getting angry with her. I’m not her banker, I’m her agent.”

“Her agent?”

“She had talent and I introduced her to talent scouts.”

“You were her pimp and you beat her,” Perelli said.

Roberto held up his hands and appeared offended.

“Okay”-Grace shook her head-“you’re her agent.”

“In a business sense. And she owed me and, yes, I make my point that she has to pay me.”

“You make your point?”

“She brought it on herself. But I can understand how people in the community might misinterpret things, give you incorrect information, make you think I killed her.”

“You don’t seem too choked up about losing her.”

“I’ve come to terms with my pain in my own way.”

Perelli had to restrain himself from drilling his fist into Roberto’s head.

“So who was her trick, uh, the last talent scout?” Grace asked.

“I set her up with some guy I met around the ID, at a bar. The Black Jet Bar.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know, two, three months ago, like before you found her dead.”

“You have a name on this guy?”

Roberto shook his head.

“What did this guy look like?”

“White guy, forties.”

“Height? Facial hair?”

“About six feet. He was clean-shaven as I recall.”

“His build?”

“Good. Average, but muscular, like he worked out. He was an ex-con.”

Grace and Perelli maintained poker faces.

“How do you know he did time?”

“You’re forgetting that I was unjustly incarcerated due to the lies a slut told the prosecuting attorney.”

“Was her broken jaw also a lie?” Perelli said.

“You want to know about the last man to see Sharla, or do you want to call me a lawyer?”

“Go ahead.”

“I got that he’d been inside for a stretch from our little conversation. He was having a beer by himself, looked kind of depressed. I said he’d feel better if he met someone like Sharla May, someone with talent, and that I could set him up.”

“Where did this guy live?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did he work?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was he in for?”

Roberto shrugged. “We didn’t become soul mates. I just pointed to Sharla May, who was picking songs on the jukebox, doing that little sexy dance she always did, and that sealed the deal. I could see him come alive, once he set eyes on her talent.”

“You’re a fine slab of humanity, Roberto,” Perelli said.

Roberto nodded. “I help girls in trouble.”

“Sure, you do,” Perelli said. “You’re just like the nuns at the shelter.”

Grace defused the tension with a question.

“Where did this guy do his time?”

“It was not a subject of conversation.”

“Did he have any tattoos?”

“Maybe, on his neck.”

“What was it, do you remember?”

“I don’t recall, just that maybe he had something on his neck.”

Grace threw an over-the-shoulder glance to the one-way glass and Stan Boulder, who was on the other side.

This may have brought them one step closer to the killer.