14th Deadly Sin

CHAPTER 53

WHEN I WALKED into our apartment and kicked off my shoes, Jimmy Fallon was on the tube and I no longer felt like the same woman who’d spent the day with windblown dog ears in my face, who had walked and talked with my sister and nieces, who had cuddled with my husband and baby, laughed over nouvelle cuisine, and slugged down beer with two of my best friends.

I briefed my husband on the aftermath of the torture and murder of a cop I knew, and his family, and gratefully accepted a glass of wine and a neck rub.

Then I got on the phone. My first call was to Dr. G., followed by a conference call with Brady and Conklin. After that, I called Ted Swanson, who was not only emotionally involved, but had also been part of the Robbery Division team working the Windbreaker cop case with Vasquez and Calhoun.

When I had all the available information, I called Jacobi, our chief, my dear friend and former partner, and brought him up to the minute. He already knew parts of the Calhoun tragedy, but I gave him a few details he didn’t know.

“A roll of garbage bags had been left on the kitchen counter,” I told Jacobi. “I think the perps changed their clothes and took their bloody ones with them, along with their cigarette butts, shell casings, and sharp instruments.”

Jacobi said, “So let me guess. No prints. No DNA.”

“Nothing yet,” I said.

Jacobi used strings of expletives in combinations I’d never heard before. The gist of the F-bombs was that all the freaking over-the-top TV crime shows had taught the freaking criminals what not to freaking do.

“They knew a few things from experience,” I said. “It was a very buttoned-up operation.”

I let Jacobi rant for a while, then told him good night, and when I finally hit the sheets, I couldn’t sleep.

I was organizing the case in my mind, getting ready for the squad meeting in the morning, doing all that thinking while lying with my head on my husband’s chest, listening to him sleep. My thoughts circled in and around the Calhoun house, where people had been sleeping in their beds.

I had a bad fantasy of the same guys breaking into our nest on Lake Street. I heard locks being shot off doors. In this bad fantasy, I got my hands on my gun, but it wouldn’t fire. My fantasy didn’t go any further, thank God.

But sleep became an impossible dream.

When Julie woke up at three, I walked her around the living room and looked out at the street below to see if anyone was lurking in an idling car. At six I took Martha for a quick run, and by seven fifteen I was at my desk in the Homicide bullpen.

Conklin arrived a few minutes later. He hung his jacket behind his chair and said, “I had a dream.”

I looked up at him. He wasn’t kidding.

“I woke up thinking there’s a connection between what happened to Calhoun and the Wicker House shootings.”

“What was the connection?” I asked.

“I’m still thinking about it.”

“OK,” I said. “Your subconscious is making a link. Probably from all the dead bodies. All the blood.”

“Probably,” my partner said. “But there is something sticky about those two things together.”

Just then, Richie got a call from Cindy, and then a ragged-looking Brady dropped by our desks. He said to me, “At eight o’clock. You can brief everyone, right?”

“No problem.”

The squad room filled with cops. Some sat behind their desks, others parked themselves in spare chairs, and more cops stood three deep at the back. The room was packed with the day shifts from Homicide, Narco, and Robbery.

Swanson and Vasquez stood at the front of the room with me and I introduced them. Then I told about sixty of my fellow officers what we knew about what had gone down in the green Victorian house on Texas Street.

Brady gave out assignments. And then we went to work.