Sorrow's Anthem

CHAPTER 16

By the time Cal Richards got there, we’d learned Rabold’s daughter, Mary, had probably been home for almost thirty minutes before we’d arrived. A neighbor remembered seeing her drive in, alone, and told the cops this in a high, hysterical voice that Joe and I could hear plainly from where we stood beside one of the squad cars. When we had the timetable for the girl’s arrival, our imaginations could handle the rest of the sequence. She had probably gone downstairs, seen her father, and gone into shock. She’d made it back upstairs, but then the terror had overwhelmed her. She couldn’t think to call the police or even leave the house. Instead, in that shock, in that terror, she’d hid. She’d crawled behind the couch and curled into a ball and waited, with her father’s body in the basement beneath her. I’d never heard of anything like it, but then I’d never seen anything like the scene in Rabold’s basement, either. His daughter was sixteen.

Richards came onto the scene early, because Joe had requested him with the initial call. They’d sent out another homicide team first, but Richards was given control once he got there. The other cops knew Cal, that was for sure. Mary Rabold was gone, taken away in an ambulance, a detective riding with them.

Richards came out of the front door of the house about twenty minutes after he’d gone in. He walked through the yard to where we stood beside the evidence tech’s van. Three cruisers were parked in front of the house now, along with the evidence van and Cal’s unmarked car. Neighbors stood across the street, but there was no media presence yet. That wouldn’t last long.

“Let’s walk around the house, gentlemen,” Richards said. Somehow his face was even more impassive now than normal. He’d seen what I’d seen in the basement, but somehow he managed to keep it off his face, shut it down, and trap it inside him. I couldn’t do that—not in the same way that he could, at least. Maybe that wasn’t the worst thing in the world, though.

We followed Richards back up the driveway and around the black Honda that was parked there. A screened-in porch was off the rear of the house, and a couple of uniformed cops were working it and the yard, taking photographs and scanning for evidence. Richards stopped around the corner, out of their way but also out of sight of the watchers on the street. He leaned against the wall, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. He took a few drags, flipping idly through the notebook he held in his hands.

“This gets messy,” he said. “Dead cop. Murdered in his home, found by his daughter. Kid can’t even talk now. Wouldn’t say a word. Just stared with those eyes, man . . . those eyes.” He took another drag on the cigarette, a long one, then tapped it out against the wall and carefully put it into his jacket pocket. Couldn’t contaminate the crime scene.

“Messy,” he said again. “All right, you tell it to me, boys.”

We told it to him. While we talked, the uniforms continued to move around the yard, combing the grass and taking their pictures. Everyone was silent. Back out on the street, there was some mild commotion, doors opening and closing, voices raised. This would be the media arrival.

“He was wearing a wire,” I said when Joe and I had gone through the basics. It was the first Joe had heard of it, and his face registered surprise. Richards, on the other hand, was impassive.

“Was he?” he said.

“Come on, Cal. You were down there. You saw it.”

He frowned and looked away, not liking it that a civilian had been on the scene first.

“He was wearing a wire,” he admitted. “And it was cut. The recorder’s gone. Do you have it?”

“No.”

He gazed at me hard, and I said, “Are you insane? No, Richards, I didn’t steal a recorder off the man’s corpse.”

“Okay.”

Joe was watching with interest. “Rabold’s a street officer,” he said. “What the hell’s he doing wearing a wire? And in his own house?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Richards said, “because I don’t know.”

“He was requesting files on old fires this morning,” I said. “And now he’s dead. You think that’s unrelated?”

Richards’s face showed nothing. “I’m not a guess-maker, Perry. I’m a detective. We’ll see where it goes.”

“Sure.”

“Look, you know we’re going to need to sit down and get an official statement recorded,” he said. “And we’re going to have to separate you. Makes me look bad if I keep witnesses together for an interview. Baker’ll handle that. You’ll be seeing both of us, but I’m going to have to give you up to him now.”

“Who’s Baker?” I asked.

“My partner.”

“You actually have one?”

“We’re a good team,” Richards said, “provided we spend plenty of time on separate courts.”

He took us around to the front of the house, and as we cleared the corner, I saw Jack Padgett shoving his way through the crowd, snarling at a uniformed officer to get out of his way. He was in street clothes, jeans and a brightly colored golf shirt, and his face was flushed with fury.

“Shit,” Richards said. “The last thing I need is that crazy bastard in my crime scene.”

He moved toward Padgett, who turned to look at him and spotted me. His face darkened, and he stepped forward, shoulders squaring and rising, like a boxer stepping away from the ropes.

“What’s this guy doing here?” he said, pointing at me.

Richards reached him then and said something that I couldn’t hear. Padgett answered, his own voice softer, and all I caught of it was an obscene reference involving my mother. Then Richards had his hand firmly on the taller man’s shoulder and was guiding him away from us, back toward the ring of cops watching the perimeter of the yard. Inside the house, the evidence techs were probably still hunched over the body of Padgett’s partner. I wondered when he’d heard, and where he’d been. Crooked cop or not, having your partner murdered had to hit deep.

Richards had disappeared into the crowd before I remembered that I hadn’t told him what I’d learned about Sentalar and Corbett. A few hours earlier, that was huge news. A few hours earlier, Mary Rabold’s father was still alive.

Joe and I spent a while talking to Baker, a short guy with a military haircut and a sunburn, but Richards never returned. Baker took us back to the station and interviewed us separately, on tape. Then we filled out a witness form, and he told us we could go.

“What about Cal Richards?” Joe asked. “Is he coming down here?”

Baker shrugged. “Don’t know. He told me to get your statements on tape and get back down to the scene, myself. Didn’t say anything about holding you for him.”

“He knows where to find us,” Joe said.

A patrol officer drove us to my apartment. Joe’s car was going to be searched by police, of course. They might not think there was a gun in the trunk or bloody fibers on the floor mats, but they had to check.

When the cop dropped us off, we stood together in my parking lot and looked at each other. It was evening now, the sun gone, the night air beginning to cool. A few cars were in the gym lot, but it was quiet outside.

“That poor damn kid,” Joe said.

“Yeah.”

He sighed and ran both hands through his hair and over his face. “What the hell is going on, LP? What was your friend into?”

I shook my head. I didn’t have any answers. It was just twelve hours ago that I’d stood on the street in front of this building and formed my idea that Rabold and his partner had killed Ed intentionally. Now Rabold was dead. That didn’t change my previous theory, but it sure as hell complicated it.

“You tell any of the other detectives about Corbett and Sentalar?” Joe asked.

“No. It’s Cal’s case. He’s the only one who would have understood what it might mean. I’ll tell him.”

“Okay. We’ll tell him in the morning. Get some sleep, maybe some dinner. A few hours of normal life, get our heads back together. We’ll see where it stands in the morning.”

“They shot him three times, Joe,” I said. “Blew a piece of his face off, shot him in the chest, shot him in the stomach. That’s not a killing for killing’s sake. It wasn’t a hit, a guy getting whacked just to be eliminated. There’s a lot of anger in those wounds.”

“I wonder if his wife is with that girl yet” was all he said.

“I hope so. You want me to give you a ride home?”

“No, thanks.”

“You sure?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I need the walk tonight.”

He left, and I went upstairs and took a long, hot shower, my muscles slowly loosening under the spray. I dried off and changed clothes. By then it was almost ten, well past dinnertime and closer to sleeping time for normal people. Since I clearly wasn’t normal, I thought I’d go ahead and eat breakfast for a very late dinner. I fixed an omelet but couldn’t find any appetite for it, ended up tossing it in the garbage, and drinking a glass of orange juice.

After a while, I took a bottle of Beck’s out of the refrigerator and went up on the roof. There’s a trapdoor with folding stairs in the ceiling just outside my apartment that provides access to the roof, and I’ve dragged a couple of lounge chairs and some potted plants up there. It’s a nice place to spend a summer evening.

I sat alone, listening to the traffic noise and sipping my beer and thinking about old friends and a terrified sixteen-year-old girl hiding behind a couch. When the beer was empty, I went back downstairs to get a fresh one. I stood at the door for a moment, hesitating, then grabbed the cordless phone as well and took it onto the roof with me. The connection had some static up there, but you could hear well enough for a conversation. I set the beer down unopened and dialed Amy’s number.

“Hey,” I said when she answered, “you asleep yet?”

As soon as she recognized my voice, she launched into me.

“You know, you’re a real jerk, Lincoln. I shouldn’t have walked away last night as easily as I did. The more I think about it, the more pissed off I get. I mean, I don’t walk into your office and tell you how to do your job, and that’s basically what you did to me last night. Yes, I realize Gradduk was your friend, but the moment I start changing my approach to reporting based upon friendships is the moment I sacrifice whatever professional integrity—”

“One of the cops that tried to arrest Ed was murdered today,” I said, interrupting. “I spent the whole day trying to prove he and his partner set Ed up, and then I found out he was dead. He was shot three times, in his basement. Joe and I found the body. His daughter had already seen it. She was hiding behind the couch upstairs. She couldn’t talk to us. Couldn’t get a word out.”

Silence, then: “You at home?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ll see you in ten.”

She hung up.

Fifteen minutes later gravel spun and tires squealed below me—Amy’s trademark entrance. I’d left the door to the steps unlocked, and now I heard it open and close, and then Amy was knocking at my apartment door.

“I’m up here,” I called down to her. The steps on the trapdoor creaked as she worked her way up, and then her head poked above the surface of the roof and she shot me a concerned look. I didn’t say anything. She marched across the roof, took the bottle of beer out of my hand, and downed a third of it, then gave it back to me.

“Okay,” she said. “What the hell happened?”

It took me a long time to tell it. It had been that sort of day. When I was through, she sat quietly and stared out at the night sky.

“I’m sorry, Lincoln,” she said after a while. “That’s an awful, awful thing to experience.”

“For the daughter.”

“And for you. Awful for you because you had to see both the body and the daughter. I bet it was almost harder to see her.”

“Yeah.”

“You heard any ideas on what happened?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. We gave our statements and they sent us home. I’m kind of surprised you hadn’t heard about it.”

“I left early today because I worked late last night.”

“Right.” I didn’t want to bring up her article. Somewhere between Larry Rabold’s living room and basement I’d lost my capacity to be angry over something like that.

She brought it up, though. “Look, Lincoln, I didn’t suggest Gradduk was some sort of perverted loser who killed the woman because she’d rejected him. I just put out what I knew—”

“And let the readers determine he was a perverted loser who killed the woman because she’d rejected him,” I finished, but there was no hostility or bitterness in my voice.

“I’m sorry if that’s how you feel,” Amy said softly.

“It’s okay, Ace. I didn’t like it. I still don’t. But you did your job, and you’d do the same thing again, and I guess it’s easier for me to take because I know that’s the case.”

“I think your day mellowed you out, Lincoln.”

“That’s one word for it.” Hollowed was another one, but I didn’t want to say that out loud.

We sat together and watched a few courageous stars try to make themselves visible in a sky clouded with a city’s light pollution. Traffic hummed along the avenue beneath us. I finished the beer and wanted another, but didn’t get up.

“So Anita Sentalar knew Mitch Corbett,” Amy said. “And he’s been missing for a few days. A couple cops were looking for him, too. The same cops that killed Ed Gradduk and filled an incident report about it with lies. And now one of those cops is dead. Is that the gist?”

“Basically.”

She leaned back in the lounge chair and made a light clicking noise with her tongue. “What a mess.”

“That’s what Cal Richards said.”

“Well, he was right. What’s your plan now? I assume you haven’t decided to take up permanent residence on this roof.”

“Some nights, it doesn’t seem like that poor an idea. But I’ll probably come down eventually. And when I do, I’ll have to get back to work. Because we haven’t done anything yet. Generated a hell of a lot of questions today, and got damn few answers to go with them.”

“Where do you start?”

I raised my eyebrows and stared at the sky, wondering that myself.

“I suppose we’ll have to start with the fires,” I said. “I don’t know what connects fires that happened almost twenty years ago and fires that happened last week, but it seems something does. The only link we had is dead now, though.”

“Well, if you need any help, just ask.”

I started to thank her, then realized she could actually help. I reminded her about the house that had burned on Clark Avenue and explained again that it had belonged to the same group that owned the home on Train Avenue.

“I want to know more about the Neighborhood Alliance,” I said. “Run them through the paper’s archives and fax me any article that mentions them, would you?”

“Sure. And I’ll see if we ran a story about this fire on Clark.”

“Thanks, Amy.”

Her face was lost in shadows, but even so her eyes looked intense. “That’s pretty damn interesting, Lincoln. Two fires to these houses in one week, both of the homes vacant?”

“There’s more,” I said, remembering now details I’d left out the first time. “Mitch Corbett has a background in demolitions. He’s experienced with fuses and explosives, would have a good idea of how to go about setting a fire.”

“You think he killed Anita Sentalar?”

“Could be. But why the other fire?”

“Arson for profit?”

I shook my head. “These houses are old, broken-down homes in a low-rent neighborhood, Ace. Insurance claims on them wouldn’t be worth a damn.”

“So why the second fire?”

I shook my head. “Like I said before, I’m coming up with questions, not answers. That has to change.”

She didn’t stay long after that. When she left, she gave me a hug, and somehow the softness of her hair and the smell of her seemed to cleanse some things from me, like the coppery odor of Larry Rabold’s blood and the chilling sound of his daughter’s scream. There was no more discussion of her article, and I knew there wouldn’t be again. It was done now, and I was glad. True friends are precious, and lost friends are the kind of ghosts that never wander far away. I knew too much about both ends of that.