LITMIR.BIZ

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That’s why he kept trying to tell me he wasn’t an addict, it was medicine; a doctor said he should take them. He had a real prescription from a real doctor, got the stuff from a real pharmacy, nothing illegal about it. I said he sure as hell looked exactly like the guys who live in the stairwells around St. Malachi’s so I don’t see what difference a prescription makes. We—” Her gaze fell to her lap, and she finished in what was surely an understatement, “We had a fight.”

      “We found him with a syringe,” Will said, gentle but straightforward—she seemed like a chick who appreciated straight talk—but left out how it had still been in his arm. “So he had graduated from pills, or started shooting them.”

      Again, the flick of an eyebrow. Not surprising. The rise and fall of a drug addict’s life had been witnessed so many times by people stuck in a certain milieu that small children could probably sketch it out for show-and-tell.

      Jennifer Toner straightened, clearly deciding that enough of her family’s dirty laundry had been sufficiently aired for one day. “Where is he now? Can I bail him out? Or is he at St. Vincent?”

      The two cops exchanged a glance instead of answering, and grief invaded with the speed of lightning. “Oh no. No, no, no, no—”

      “Ms. Toner, I’m sorry to have to tell you—”

      “No, no, NO!”

      This went on for a while. Will murmured soothing comments, made her some tea, offered to call in a Victim’s Advocate to help make funeral arrangements and contact family members.

      Rick spent the time surreptitiously checking his phone. He half expected Maggie to call or text, to try in some subtle way to find out more about his trip west. Surely she had clued the new boyfriend in, told him that Rick planned to check out Chicago and Minneapolis and follow the trail of that woman’s nightmarish nursing homes and, with luck, pick up the trail of the vigilante who might have been stalking and finally killed her. Then behind him the trail of the guy who followed him from city to city, appropriating other cops’ names in order to hide his obsession. That would be quite the coup for Rick—catch the vigilante, and expose Jack Renner as a lying, phony psycho.

      He realized he was smiling and stopped before the grieving sister could catch him at it.

      “What doctor?” he heard his partner ask.

      She sniffled into a paper towel Will had fetched for her. “He showed me a pill bottle last week, trying to convince me that he wasn’t taking drugs, it was medicine. Percodan. The doctor’s name was Phillip Castleman. I Googled, looking for an address. I planned to go to his office and read him the riot act about being a pill pusher. Except he don’t exist, at least not in Cleveland.”

      “Huh,” Will said. “Unfortunately fake scripts can be gotten from all sorts of outlets, even mail order.”

      “No, the pharmacy had an address on East Fifty-fifth. I can’t remember the name, something-something-pharmacy— I know that doesn’t help—but I remember Fifty-fifth. He’d get Medicare checks to pay for them. He told me all that, trying to convince me it was all legit, because I kept expecting him to ask me for money—that’s how it always goes, right? But he never did. But he also wasn’t old enough for Medicare, so I have no idea what that was all about.”

      “Not Medicaid?” Will asked.

      “He said Medicare.”

      Rick found this less than fascinating. He and Will could tell the guys in Vice about it and be done. It was their job, not the homicide unit’s.

      Perhaps Will thought so too, because he finally got back on track, nailing down the standard details to include in the report. “When was the last time you saw your brother?”

      “Two, two and a half weeks ago. That’s when we argued—well, every time I see him now we argue—about the pills and where he was getting them.”

      “Okay. Had you spoken to him since then?”

      “Yeah, couple times.”

      “When was the last?”

      “About an hour ago.” Her voice cracked. “I knew something was really wrong this time. He was talking crazy, like totally out of his head—”

      “An hour ago?” Rick asked.

      “Hour, hour and a half,” she said, then noticed the cops’ expressions. “What? What is it?”

      Rick gulped.

      Because the dead man behind the West Side Market had probably been dead since the evening before.

      He got to his feet, took the victim’s driver’s license from an envelope in his pocket, and crossed the four feet of space in a blur of uncharacteristic speed. “Ms. Toner, is this your brother?”

      She stared at the rectangle of laminated plastic. She turned it over as if an explanation may have been printed on the back. Then she turned it to the front, stared again.

      The tears dried up as if under a heat lamp. Hope brightened her face and she nearly smiled. “I congratulate you two on your lack of stereotyping,” she said, holding the card out to him, “but my brother Marlon is black.”

      “Then who’s this?” Rick asked.

      “Gentlemen, I have not the slightest idea.”

      Friday, 1:15 p.m.

      The Medical Examiner’s office staff had only begun the autopsy on Evan Harding when Maggie arrived. They had been delayed due to a contamination threat, a possible case of spinal meningitis, which had turned out to be a false alarm. Still Maggie entered the autopsy anteroom with light steps, her body automatically assuming that if she stayed very quiet perhaps the germs would not notice her.

      The staff, however, did. They greeted her as a familiar face and asked where the detectives were.

      “They should be right behind me.”

      “We’re not waiting,” one warned absently. Autopsies waited for no man, woman, or detective and the cops knew it.

      Maggie knew it too and doubted the examination would present any information they couldn’t already guess from the deep stains over the victim’s chest. Maggie wanted to tape the clothes, so she watched as the autopsy assistants—called dieners—removed the victim’s lightweight jacket and hung it on a disposable hanger. It would be damp from the now-melted snowflakes and the few trails of blood that never had a chance to dry in the cold, but there was nothing she could do about that. The tape would still work even on slightly damp material. The T-shirt, hung next, would not be as cooperative. Any loose hairs or fibers might now be glued to its surface by the sticky blood. But she’d try for whatever she could get. Even with all the advances of technology over the years, forensic science still required a large amount of luck.

      “What did this guy get stabbed with?” one asked Maggie.

      “I don’t know. It wasn’t left at the scene.”

      “Not a knife?” suggested the second diener.

      The first disagreed, poking at the bloody chest to get a better look at something in that mass of red. “It’s so small. And not linear.”

      Maggie moved closer. As the diener wiped the chest off with a sponge and a squirt bottle of dish detergent, she could see what he meant. The wounds—two of them—were small and round, the size of a cigarette burn.

      “An ice pick?” the second diener tried.

      “In the library with Professor Plum?” the first chortled. The second joined in. Evidently they had a standing joke of relating crimes to the Clue game. He checked the pants pockets—carefully, the risk of syringes or other sharp objects ever-present—and found an empty white envelope with nothing written on it and a tube of mint ChapStick in one, an open pack of gum and a toothpick in the other. These items were spread out on a tray to be photographed and stored under personal property,

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