Sympathy Between Humans

36

The girl who opened the door at Ghislaine’s apartment looked like her country cousin: a little shorter, a little heavier, with hair that was as white as corn silk, and small, apprehensive blue eyes. She was braless under a V-necked white T-shirt, her pale legs in cutoffs, barefoot. Behind her issued the mindless noise of a television talk show.

“I’m here to see Ghislaine,” I said.

“She’s not here,” the girl said.

“You don’t mind if I come in and verify that, do you?” I took out my shield. Her eyes widened fractionally, and she stepped backward. “I was just feeding the baby,” she said as I came in.

“Shadrick?” I said.

She shook her head. “My baby. Shad’s with Ghislaine.”

A six-month-old infant, dressed in fuzzy, androgynous yellow, sat in a high chair on the border between kitchen and living room, linoleum and carpet.

“Did Ghislaine do something wrong?”

Yes. “No,” I said. “I need to ask her some questions. She’s a material witness.”

I moved toward a short half-hallway, like the one in Cicero ’s apartment. The bathroom didn’t take long to check out. A ghost of steam hung in the air from an afternoon shower, and creams and cosmetics cluttered the sink. There was no one behind the rippled, frosted glass of the shower door.

In the first bedroom, the bed was unmade, but not so much that I couldn’t see the giant, yellow face of Tweety bird on the rumpled comforter. On the wall was a Packers pennant, and below that bookshelves with no books on them except high school yearbooks. Model horses lined two of the shelves in their entirety, and a stuffed dog lounged on its side on a third shelf. I’d come to an apartment inhabited by children.

“That’s my room,” the girl said.

“I didn’t catch your name,” I said.

“Lisette,” she said.

Another improbable Gallic name. Lisette’s heritage, as evinced by her looks, seemed to be pure Saxon; I didn’t think she was French.

“Are you and Ghislaine related?” I asked.

Lisette shook her head. “Just roommates.”

I moved on to the last bedroom.

Ghislaine, I was guessing, was a year or two older than her roommate. It showed in her room, more feminine than childlike. Ghislaine’s bed was made up, a pale-pink eyelet comforter pulled taut with cheap lace-trimmed throw pillows carefully arranged, and Ghislaine’s toys were more expensive: an MP3 player, a cell-phone charger, a row of CDs. The closet door was open, and inside I saw leather coats and party dresses. A bulletin board like Marlinchen Hennessy’s showed photos of Ghislaine, mostly with boys or Shadrick, rarely other girls.

Lisette was still watching me from the doorway. “Which one of these boys is Marc?” I asked.

“None of them,” she said. “He didn’t do things like that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Get his picture taken with Gish,” Lisette said. “Or act like a boyfriend. He was too cool for that.”

“Oh, yeah?”

Lisette nodded. “Gish loans him the keys to her car, so he can go to these parties he doesn’t even take her to. He leaves his laundry here for her to take to the Laundromat, and his clothes smell like other girls’ perfume.”

“How does Ghislaine take that?”

“She just keeps trying harder to please him. She bitches to me, but never to Marc. And when I tell her, ‘So dump him,’ she does a complete turnaround.”

“Like what?”

“She’ll say, ‘He’s changing. I know he really cares about me, inside.’ Ghislaine thinks that because he gives her stuff. But it isn’t anything he cares about, just things he steals. Marc likes to think he’s thugged out.” Lisette rolled her eyes. “Anyway, Gish won’t quit him. She keeps trying to think of something else she can do, to impress him.”

Right. Then she did think of something, something really good, and all it cost was Cicero ’s life.

“Was Marc here today?” I asked.

Lisette shook her head.

“Thanks,” I said.

A more impartial observer than I would stand in the doorway to Ghislaine’s bedroom and look at the pretty objects she surrounded herself with, the sweet pastels, and mistake these things as signs of her innocence and harmlessness. They’d see a girl barely out of her teens, who liked pretty things and clothes and shopping, who kept her room with its Target-brand furnishings in perfect order, and they’d wish her well. They’d say it was Marc’s fault she was so desperate to please him; they’d say it was society’s fault that girls her age gave and gave to the boys around them, provided them with sex and money and support and got nothing back, until they were desperate.

I’d thought all these things too, when I’d first met her. I’d dismissed Shiloh ’s opinion of her as grounded in his streak of judgmentalism. I’d been taken in by her chatter and her infectious warmth, and not recognized something malignant as a tumor that grew underneath it.

The truth was, Ghislaine’s love of pretty things and nice clothes was at the heart of her malice. She wanted what she wanted, and if other people were hurt in the getting of those things, that wasn’t real to her. Because they weren’t real to her. Shadrick was, it seemed, and so was Marc. Everyone else was a resource to be used. Like Lydia, who she’d sold to the Narcotics task force. Like me, whose name she’d used to get out of a shoplifting bust. Like Cicero.

At the front door, Lisette realized her indiscretion. “Listen,” she said, “you aren’t going to tell Ghislaine what I told you about Marc, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I won’t.”

Lisette looked relieved. “What do you want me to do if Ghislaine comes home?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll catch up with her eventually.”

“Hadley.”

“It’s me,” I said, sitting in the car outside Ghislaine and Lisette’s building. “I didn’t find the girlfriend. I’m coming back in. Have you thought about what you want to do next?”

“It’s past six,” Hadley said. “I’m going home.”

“I thought we were looking for Marc,” I said.

“There’s not much more we can do,” Hadley said. “A unit’s been to his place, but like we figured, he didn’t go back there. He’s probably on the run, but his description’s out there. Someone will catch him.”

Hadley didn’t sound tired, but he’d probably been on the job since eight that morning. And he was right. In a situation like this, detectives didn’t cruise around after hours in a radio car, vainly hoping to run across a suspect.

“Look, you want me to wait for you to come in?” he asked.

“Why?”

“Your car’s still at that building, isn’t it?” Hadley asked me. “I could give you a lift over there to get it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I might hang out downtown awhile, see if any likely reports come in. I’ll pick up my car later.”

“Sarah, I know I said something like this earlier, and usually I wouldn’t repeat myself, but I really think you’re working this too hard.” Hadley paused. “Did you know this guy? Was that not your first time up there, when you came by?”

I am sick of lying to people. I just want to tell the truth to someone I like and respect, for a change.

“I was supposed to get evidence so we could charge him,” I said, evading the specific question. “If I’d moved faster, he’d be alive and in jail right-”

“No,” Hadley interrupted. “This is not your fault. Those kids just blew Ruiz out like a match they were done with. It pisses me off, too. I’m angry enough at them without having to think that they’ve caused someone I like to be sitting around a precinct house after hours, eaten up with guilt over what she might have done differently.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I won’t stay too late. I promise.”

I stayed at the precinct for two hours that night, drank coffee, talked with the midwatch people. Garden-variety crimes, or activity that might or might not be criminal, were reported over the radio. Along Nicollet Mall, a panhandler was harassing shoppers a little too hard. At the airport, a child who was supposed to be on a flight didn’t get off. On the 35W, a car was pulled to the side without flashers, the driver drunk, sleeping, or slumped behind the wheel. Eventually, I gave up and asked a patrol officer who was heading out to give me a lift to Cicero ’s building. Before I left, I checked out a handheld radio. Just in case.

The patrol officer and I didn’t talk much on the road, and we didn’t talk about crime at all.

“Funny, isn’t it?” he said. “Look, it’s after nine and the sun’s just set.” He took a hand away from the wheel to point at the bath of golden light in the west.

“Tonight’s the summer solstice,” I reminded him.

“I know,” he said. “But I still can’t get used to it. I’ve lived here almost all my life, and it still gives me a thrill to see the sun setting at this hour.”

When we got to the building, I didn’t look up at the empty eyes of the windows above me. “Thanks,” I said, shut the car door, and walked straight across the parking lot, where the Nova waited for me. I almost sensed a rebuke in its low-nosed posture: the Nova and I were getting separated a lot these days, a pilot and wingman out of sync with each other.

It was just as I was crossing into Northeast that the call came over the quietly crackling radio on the passenger seat beside me. In the careful language of over-the-radio communications, the dispatcher’s voice reported a request for backup, shots fired at a small liquor store up Central Avenue. Not very far at all from where I was heading now.

I pressed the accelerator down.

When I’d heard the dispatcher’s voice, a small shockwave had risen from deep in my body, heat rising to the surface of my skin. It was recognition.

The business wasn’t a pharmacy, but that didn’t surprise me. Whether or not Marc realized that Cicero ’s forged prescriptions were nonsense, he knew better than to try again to cash one in, at least not in the Cities. But Marc needed money, and so he was turning to a profession that he knew. Marc likes to think he’s thugged out, Lisette had said.

He had laid low until nightfall, and now he was moving. One score, and then he’d leave town.

The Nova’s front end bumped down and surged up as the car dove into a low parking lot. There was a single squad car outside.

I got out of the Nova, flashed my shield as I approached. “What’s going on?” I asked.

The officer looked up at me, and I saw that she was very young indeed. I knew her: Lockhart, from the drowning scene, who’d taken me downtown to have my statement taken. Roz had been with her then, but now she was nowhere in sight. Lockhart had graduated to working alone, but she didn’t look quite in control of the situation.

She was trying, though. She responded to my question with a clipped nod, just a lift of her chin, and then cut her eyes toward the store. “I think I’ve got an armed assailant in there,” she said. “The sole customer said he ran when the shooting started. Shooter was a young white male, he thinks.”

“Where’s the witness?” I asked.

“Across the street. I told him to stick around, then I yelled for everyone to vacate the parking lot and stay clear.”

She must have had a bigger voice than her size suggested, because while a small crowd of witnesses were watching us, none of them had tried to breach the territory Lockhart had put off-limits.

“The customer just saw it out of the corner of his eye, the guy drawing the gun, then he ran,” she went on. “He heard the shots as he made the door. Didn’t see the shooter come out.”

“What about the other customers?” I asked.

“He’s pretty sure he was the only guy in there,” Lockhart said. “Except the owner, who was behind the counter.”

“The owner didn’t come out?”

Lockhart shook her head. Her brown hair was clipped up against the back of her skull, but a small rooster tail was free enough to shake along with the movement. “Neither of them,” she said.

“There could be a back way out,” I said.

The store was a boxlike structure, with bars on the windows and posters for Minnesota ’s lottery games behind the bars, taped from the inside. Jostling with them for the attention of passersby were posters for cigarettes, for beer, for flavored liqueur, and for phone cards. I couldn’t see a goddamned thing that was happening inside. If anything was.

For the robber to flee through the back and not be seen again was one thing, but the owner should have made himself known to us, if he could walk.

Lockhart said it aloud. “I think the owner’s down. I want to go in.”

“No,” I said. “There are paramedics on the way, right? With the backup?”

“That could be too late,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I’ll go in.”

“We’ll both go,” she said.

“No,” I said again. She was young and untried, and I didn’t want her on my conscience. “Just me.” Before she could protest, I said, “Stay here and cover the door. I’m going to check out the back.”

I was setting a lousy example for Lockhart, not waiting for the backup, but I took out my.40 and circled the building, slowly.

It was strange to think that we were coming up on ten o’clock. Even Venus hadn’t been able to break through the pale blue light of the northern sky, and the store’s neon sign seemed weakly lit, as though low on energy.

When I turned the corner, into the back alley, I saw a car parked there. An old blue sedan. I glanced down at the tag, the number unfamiliar to me. It wasn’t Marc’s.

The back door was open. This was the heart of it.

I stood to one side. “Sheriff’s officer!” I yelled in. “If anyone inside can hear me, please identify yourself!”

Only silence.

“Okay, I’m coming in, and I’m armed!” I went on. “I’m prepared to use deadly force if threatened. Last chance!”

I sounded like the training manual for deadly force situations. I felt like a teenager pretending to be a cop, sweat breaking out on those bits of skin that are the first to dampen, under the eyes, the back of the neck.

Still nothing. I moved inside slowly.

Immediately inside the back door was the inventory room, wooden shelves piled with cardboard boxes. There was no motion in my line of sight, no human forms. To my left I saw an open door. A bathroom, with a few cases of inventory piled up even in there, next to the dirty toilet and towel dispenser. A smell of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Otherwise empty. All this took only a second to register.

Before I even got into the salesroom, I smelled it. Not blood, but the barroom smell of spilled liquor, sweet and corrupt.

It was all in the salesroom: fallen shelves, broken bottles, disaster. A millimeter of liquid spread along the pale linoleum floor, glimmering in the light from the fluorescent fixtures overhead. The creeping spill was still moving, heading toward my feet even as I stood looking at it. Within the nearly colorless spill were rust-colored rivulets of blood.

I followed these rivulets up to their source, turned reflexively away, made myself look again.

He was young and male and white. Beyond that I didn’t know. He’d been wearing a nylon stocking over his head as a mask, and now it had turned into a thin sack of blood and brain matter. There was nothing in the sack that could be called facial features. His handgun, a.38, was on the floor at his side.

I turned to follow what logically was the course of the gunshot. It seemed to have come from the counter, which made sense if the owner had shot him. The owner was nowhere to be seen, but the counter was waist high. It wasn’t hard to piece together.

For good measure, I spoke again as I approached the counter. “I’m a Sheriff’s detective,” I repeated, circling the far end of the barrier. “I’m coming around the counter now. If you’re hiding down there with your weapon, please let go of it now. It’s all over.”

The owner lay on the floor before a wall of pint and ounce bottles, not moving, eyes closed. His clothes were sodden, but not with blood. With alcohol. Shattered glass lay all around him, and what little blood trickled from his superficial cuts obviously came from the bottles that had shattered. His chest rose and fell serenely as a sleeper’s, fallen shotgun near his side.

He was balding, with light-brown Mediterranean skin. He looked a little like Paul, the frugal john, whom I vaguely remembered meeting about a hundred years ago. Here a third smell competed with the blood and alcohol. It was urine, from the stain on the front of the shopkeeper’s cheap trousers.

Handgun versus shotgun. The young robber had probably pulled his piece at a decent shooting distance for a weapon like that, two feet away, on the other side of the cash register. The store owner had probably played along until he could reach down on a pretext and pull out his shotgun. When he had, the boy had been startled into the wrong reaction. He’d stumbled backward first, to get away, then remembered to fire his own gun. But by then it was too late. He was too far back, and too rattled, to hit the owner. The slug had hit the wall of short bottles, which had shattered. The store owner, having been fired upon, pulled his own trigger, to deadly effect. Maybe more than once, judging by the mayhem he’d turned his store into. Then, seeing the results of his own work- the kid’s head seeming to explode red behind the thin nylon- he’d fainted, losing control of his bladder on the way down.

The shopkeeper was fine; the robber was dead. The only thing for me to do was to not disturb the scene any more than I already had. I needed to go back outside and tell Lockhart everything was all right.

That was when I saw the leg.

It protruded from behind the end of the second aisle. The foot ended in a sandal, and the toenails were colored a deep scarlet, too smoothly and regularly for the color to be blood. These toenails were painted. But the little octopus arm of red that was inching slowly from behind the endcap… that was definitely blood. It seemed the shopkeeper had gotten off more than one shot before making his swan dive.

Coming around the counter, I went to the end of the aisle and got the full view. Ghislaine Morris lay on her back, eyes closed, one leg folded up and backward at the knee. The blood that was spreading from her body came from her chest.

Lisette had said that Ghislaine had loaned Marc her car so he could go to parties he didn’t even take her to. Now he’d borrowed her car again, the blue one in the alley, and taken her to a shootout. A ragged hole at the center of the bloodstain on Ghislaine’s chest bubbled noisily, and the surrounding material fluttered wetly. A sucking chest wound; they’ll get you pretty quickly. I still hadn’t heard sirens in the distance.

Ghislaine had set herself on this course. She’d had more choice than she’d given Cicero.

No sir, I told an imaginary future inquisitor. I didn’t see her. I was attending to the owner of the liquor store. I had no idea that there was a third victim.

Ghislaine’s wound bubbled again. Her mouth was turning blue around the lips. She wouldn’t make it to the ambulance.

Yes sir, I imagined saying. It’s just a terrible tragedy.

But all along I knew I couldn’t do it. “Goddammit, Cicero,” I said aloud, and then I ran behind the counter for a plastic bag to seal the wound with.

I’d gotten the lung reinflated as best I could when a pair of hands pulled my shoulders back. I looked up and saw the fine, calm features of Nate Shigawa.

“We’ll take it from here, Detective Pribek,” he said.

Glad that he remembered me, I nodded and got up, out of his way. And since I was in motion, I just kept moving back, toward the storeroom. His partner, Schiller, was attending to the store owner. Everything was under control.

I walked away, out the back door, and found myself standing alongside Ghislaine’s car. This time I noticed something I hadn’t before. A child’s safety seat, in the back. I bent and looked through the window. Surely not.

But Shadrick was inside, his small head nodded forward. He’d slept through the whole thing.

The back door was unlocked, and Shadrick wakened as I opened it. He was silent as I unhooked the restraining straps and lifted him from the car seat.

With Shad in my arms, I walked around to the front of the store, and once again I was in the middle of the whole 911 circus. A radio coughed and crackled, and emergency lights flickered off the pavement and the front wall of the liquor store. Emergency workers trotted past, doing their jobs, but no one seemed to need me. No one was looking at me, in fact. Except for one person, standing at the very edge of the scene, inventorying me in a way that was familiar from my prostitution detail, long ago. Gray Diaz.

He was slightly rumpled, in shirtsleeves, and there were deep lines underneath his eyes. He looked tired, I thought, like he’d been working too hard. He didn’t have a warrant in his hand, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t gotten one.

“Detective Pribek,” Diaz said, meeting me halfway. “I heard I might be able to find you here.” He looked more closely at me. “What happened to your face?” he asked.

“I fell,” I said. “At the scene of a structure fire.” Now he’d get on with it.

“I just came around to say goodbye,” Diaz said. “I’m going back to Blue Earth.”

“You are?” I said.

“My investigation here is over,” Diaz said. “The Stewart case will remain open, officially, but inactive.”

He looked around at the other officers, our peers, none of whom seemed to be paying any attention to us. Then he turned back to me.

“I know you killed Royce Stewart, Sarah, I just can’t prove it,” Diaz said levelly. “I guess you thought a life like Stewart’s didn’t matter, and in terms of the system, it seems you were right.”

He did not wait for me to respond, nor did he say anything else. That was his leavetaking.

Shadrick chose that moment to put both his soft, slightly cool hands on my face, turning my attention from Diaz’s departing figure. Shad looked into my face, as if to receive instruction or counsel.

“Don’t look at me, kid,” I said.