Broken Angels

64

Jessica and Nicci drove down Eighth Street. It had begun to rain again. Byrne still hadn't called.

"Bring me up to speed," Jessica said, a little shell-shocked. She was used to working more than one case at a time-the truth was that most homicide detectives worked three and four at a time-but she still found it a little difficult to shift gears, to take on the mind-set of a new perpetrator. And a new partner. Earlier in the day she was thinking about a psychopath who was placing bodies along a riverbank. Her mind was filled with titles of Hans Christian Andersen stories-'The Little Mermaid,' 'The Princess and the Pea,' 'The Ugly Duckling'-wondering which, if any, might be next. Now she was chasing a cop killer.

"Well, I think one thing is obvious," Nicci said. "Walt Brigham wasn't a victim of some botched robbery. You don't douse someone with gasoline and set them on fire to get their wallet."

"So you think it was someone Walt Brigham put away?"

"I think that's a good bet. We ran his arrests and convictions for the past fifteen years. Unfortunately, no firebugs in the group."

"Anyone recently released from prison?"

"Not in the last six months. And I don't see whoever did this waiting that long to get to the guy he blamed for putting them away, do you?"

No, Jessica thought. There was a high level of passion-insane as that passion might be-in what was done to Walt Brigham. "What about someone involved in his last case?" she asked.

"Doubt it. His last official case was a domestic. Wife bashed her husband with a crowbar. He's dead, she's in prison."

Jessica knew what this meant. Because there were no eyewitnesses to Walt Brigham's murder, and there was a dearth of forensics, they would have to begin at the beginning-everybody Walt Brigham had arrested, convicted, even ruffled, starting with his last case and moving backward. That narrowed the suspect pool down a few thousand.

"So, we're off to Records?"

"I have a few more ideas before we bunker up with the paperwork," Nicci said.

"Hit me."

"I spoke with Walt Brigham's widow. She said Walt kept a storage locker. If this was something personal-as in, nothing directly to do with the job-there might be something in there."

"Anything to keep my face out of a file cabinet," Jessica said. "How do we get in?"

Nicci held up a single key on a key ring, smiled. "I stopped by Mar- jorie Brigham's house this morning." THE EASY MAX Storage on Mifflin Street was a large, U-shaped, two- story facility that housed more than a hundred units of varying sizes. Some were heated, most were not. Unfortunately, Walt Brigham had not sprung for one of the heated units. It was like walking into a meat locker.

The space was about eight feet by ten feet, stacked nearly to the ceiling with cardboard boxes. The good news was that Walt Brigham was an organized man. All the boxes were of the same type and size-the kind you buy flat at office-supply stores-and most were labeled and dated.

They started at the back. There were three boxes dedicated to nothing but Christmas and birthday cards alone. Many of the cards were from Walt's children, and as Jessica went through them she saw the years of their lives pass and, as the children got older, their grammar and penmanship improve. The teenage years were easy to spot, with just simple signatures of their names, not the gushy sentiments of childhood, as glittery handmade cards yielded to Hallmark. Another box contained only maps and travel brochures. It seemed that Walt and Marjorie Brigham were summer RV people, taking trips to Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, and Kentucky.

At the bottom of the box was on old piece of yellowed notebook paper. On it was a list that contained a dozen girls' names-Melissa, Ar- lene, Rita, Elizabeth, Cynthia among them. They were all crossed out, except for the last one. The last name on the list was Roberta. Walt Brigham's oldest daughter's name was Roberta. Jessica realized what she was holding in her hand. It was a list of possible names for a young couple's first child. She gently returned it to the box.

While Nicci looked through a few boxes of letters and household documents, Jessica sifted through a box of photographs. Weddings, birthday parties, graduations, police functions. Like always, whenever faced with rooting through the personal effects of a victim, you wanted to accrue as much information as possible, while at the same time preserving some degree of the victim's privacy.

More boxes produced more photographs and mementos, all meticulously dated and catalogued. An incredibly young Walt Brigham at the police academy, a handsome Walt Brigham on his wedding day, dressed in a rather striking navy blue tuxedo. Pictures of Walt in uniform, Walt with his kids in Fairmount Park, Walt and Marjorie Brigham squinting at the camera on a beach somewhere, maybe Wildwood, their faces a deep pink that portended a painful sunburn that night.

What was she gleaning from all this? What she already suspected. Walt Brigham was no renegade cop. He was a family man who collected and cherished the touchstones of his life. Neither Jessica nor Nicci found anything yet to indicate why someone had so viciously taken his life.

They continued to look through the boxes of memories, interlopers in the forest of the dead.