Don't Be Afraid Read online

  Juarez squatted next to him and peered at the wound. “No. Edges aren’t frayed. Ice pick?”

  “Maybe, but you’d think there’d be more blood.”

  Sheila Sylvester had been in her late thirties or early forties, a woman struggling with her weight, Juarez thought, noticing the tight fit of the gray suit she wore. Making good money, or just liked to spend it if the designer label in the jacket flap was anything to go by. Expensive shoes, too, and a nice collection of jewelry—several gold rings with precious stones, large gold hoops in the ears, a chain of some sort just visible around the neck.

  “None of the jewelry’s been taken,” he said. Black grunted.

  “Purse is here, too.” Black pointed and Juarez saw a black handbag underneath the window. A cell phone was resting on the sill above it and Juarez made a mental note to make sure that it got checked for recent calls. He looked back down at the victim and saw something else. The ring finger of the left hand was missing. The only sign that it had been there was the bloody hole left behind. That was weird. That didn’t fit with a typical domestic.

  “Did you see this?” Mark pointed at the hand.

  Black groaned as he stood up just as the crime scene investigators walked in with their cases. “Getting too old for this, Black?” one of them said as he set his case on the floor and knelt to open it. He had hair plugs and a lime-green shirt and had fashion victim written all over him. Black just gave him a sharklike grin.

  “You dress up for your date, Dubow?” he said, nodding at the woman’s body.

  “No, that’s for later when he meets your old lady,” one of the other guys said.

  They continued the banter, rude jokes about each other and the victim. From the outside it looked insensitive, unkind. Some of it was unkind, certainly disrespectful of the dead. But they had to do something to deal with what was in front of them. It wasn’t so much the body that they had to distance themselves from, it was the voices inside that compared this victim to their wives, sisters, daughters, mothers. The fear that came with the job was what had to be kept at bay.

  It shocked outsiders if they heard it, which they were never supposed to. But there was the woman in the doorway, still looking green around the gills, her lips pressed tightly together as if she was willing herself to be there.

  “Shut up,” Black barked at the other men. He walked over to her, took her arm. “You don’t need to be here, ma’am.”

  She resisted being turned away. “I-I need to see her. I need to say goodbye.”

  “Not now, not like this,” Black said with uncharacteristic gentleness.

  “But I have to.” She pulled out of his grasp, moving across the room, her eyes on the victim. “I was afraid,” she said in a whisper, voice apologetic. “I’m so sorry, Sheila.”

  Juarez stepped in before Black could react, stopping her forward progress, but not impeding her view. “How did you know Ms. Sylvester?”

  “She was my friend. I mean, we worked together. We’re both agents with Braxton Realty, but we were friends first.”

  Her gaze kept stealing from Juarez’s face to the body and then jumping back again.

  “Do you know of anybody who wanted to harm Ms. Sylvester?”

  “No, nobody.” She shook her head, hair falling forward again and tucked it back. “Everybody loves Sheila.”

  This was a standard answer, but Juarez had been a cop long enough to know that nobody is universally loved. “What about her husband?”

  “Ex-husband.” Recognition dawned; he could see it in her blue eyes. “Okay, I’ll grant you that Trevor didn’t love her. He was abusive, but that was a long time ago. She doesn’t have dealings with him anymore, not since she gave up all claims for child support.”

  “She had children?”

  “Two boys. They’re teenagers. Oh, God, what are Michael and Jason going to do?”

  The coroner’s arrival interrupted them. Rail-thin, with aristocratic features and a manner to match, Dr. Wallace Crane strode into the room clearly fresh from the links, sparing barely a glance at Juarez and Ms. Moran, his interest solely on the body. Juarez turned his own attention toward the coroner long enough to see Black puff up like an angry cock at Crane’s arrival. Their mutual antipathy began years before when Black was a rookie and had inadvertently disturbed a body at a crime scene. Crane had treated him like a rank amateur ever since, according to Juarez’s father.

  “Do you know Trevor’s address?” Juarez turned his attention back to the victim’s friend.

  “No. I know he lives in a nearby town. Lewiston?”

  Juarez jotted that down in a small notebook. “What about Ms. Sylvester’s address?”

  She rattled it off and gave him the address of the realty office as well. Her face was still pale and she was crying again, swiping at the tears in an impatient way. Juarez thought she should be treated for shock, and over her protests had one of the paramedics take her pulse.

  “Is there someone I can call? A spouse?”

  “No, I’m separated.” A blush stained her face as she said it. “I’ll be okay.”

  “We’ll get an officer to escort you home,” he said. “You’ve had a shock and probably aren’t safe to drive.”

  At last he got her to concede to having one of the uniforms drive her car home while a black-and-white followed. He walked her to the door and handed her over to the uniforms. Officer Janice Kingston was warm, putting an arm around her, walking to the patrol car slowly. Feeney was clearly disappointed to be given the job of driving the witness’s car, but he left his post without arguing.

  Juarez looked at the front door. There was no sign of forced entry, no sign that anyone but Sheila Sylvester had been in the house, which didn’t mean much. If it was the ex, then she might have let him in, or he might have forced his way in as she was getting the key from the lock box.

  He thought about that for a few minutes and spent some time studying the front door, but there were no scuffmarks, no impressions in the wood frame, nothing that gave any indication that a struggle had taken place. He traced what could have been her journey through the house and back upstairs.

  “Missing ring finger,” Crane intoned in his microcassette recorder. “Signs of vaginal penetration. Bruising.” He moved through the stages of his preliminary examination.

  Juarez plucked the leather handbag from the wall and began going through its contents, bagging each item separately. Most of it was standard stuff—wallet, keys, Kleenex, breath mints, a train pass, reading glasses and hand lotion. There was a PDA, too, and to this he gave particular attention.

  It took only a few seconds to find the address book and then a quick scroll through the listings to reveal that there was no Trevor Sylvester. Of course there wasn’t. Did he really expect to see the ex’s name in here? He scrolled back up, pausing when he saw Amy Moran’s name, and noting her address before he continued.

  It was likely to be the ex, despite what Ms. Moran said. It usually was the spouse or the ex-spouse or a neighbor or friend who’d been jilted. Much of police work was paint-by-the-numbers: predictable domestic situations, known-to-victim homicides, break-ins prompted by drug habits, shoplifting, car heists and the occasional ill-conceived bank robbery.

  It was the same here as in the city. Oh, the domestic situations were a bit different, say, from what he’d witnessed in housing projects in the city. More muted, sometimes, but otherwise virtually identical. Alcoholic husbands who beat their wives looked pretty much the same everywhere, even if the assailants wore hand-tailored suits and drove BMWs instead of riding the city bus to low-paying jobs.

  Most police work involved getting enough evidence to arrest and convict the sons-of-bitches who committed these crimes. It wasn’t particularly glamorous, but it sure was satisfying to lock up some of these excuses for human beings.

  Still, there was something niggling him about this killing. Something that didn’t fit with the usual sort of homicide. That snipped-off finger kept coming to m
ind.

  “Entry point at the base of the head centered near the spinal column,” Crane intoned. “Entry wound not consistent with a gunshot. Wound approximately one-eighth in diameter. Perfectly cylindrical suggesting a single thrust that must have impacted with the brain stem. Death probably instantaneous. Limited discharge from the wound, also inconsistent with gunshot.”

  Black held up a hand to interrupt and Crane switched off his machine. “What about an unusual gun—Japanese model or something high-powered?”

  Crane shook his head. “It’s just not consistent.”

  “Ice pick?”

  “Possibly. I won’t rule that out at this stage.”

  “Well, what else could it be? It’s pretty damn round.”

  “I’m assuming you’ll keep looking for a murder weapon, detective,” Crane said. “Now let me do my job.”

  Black stepped back, arms folded. Juarez moved beside him. “What about the finger?”

  Black turned his glare on him. “What about the finger?” His voice was heavy with sarcasm.

  “Doesn’t fit the angry ex-spouse.”

  “Why? He’s pissed, he wants the ring back, and he cuts it off. It’s a show of power.”

  “Then why not leave it. And why so clean? It doesn’t look bitten off or hacked off. It looks snipped off. Too neat.”

  Black grunted. “Well, you can ask this bastard Sylvester that when we catch him. You get the number?”

  Juarez shook his head. “General idea of where he lives, though. And that’s another thing. Why here, in this house? Wouldn’t he confront her in her own house?”

  “Christ, Juarez, I’m not this poor woman’s drunken ex, how the hell should I know? People do stupid things all the time. It’s the reason you and I have a job.”

  Crane finished describing what he could about the injuries to the victim’s hands and shut off the recorder for a moment, stepping to one side to allow Black to bag them.

  “Be careful not to lose the blood,” he said to Black, who growled in response. Juarez hid a smile.

  “Yeah, be careful,” he said under his breath, but loud enough for Black to hear him. The older detective shot him the finger and Juarez laughed.

  Lab technicians moved in to help. Black attempted to pick up one hand and immediately stopped. “What the hell?” he muttered. Dubow tried to lift the other hand and also stopped.

  “What’s the matter?” Crane said.

  “We can’t move her,” Black said with astonishment in his voice. “She’s nailed to the fucking floor.”

  Chapter 3

  The finger was a beauty. Guy smiled at the cleanly severed bone and removed the ring, careful not to damage the skin around it. The jewelry interested him less, but he polished the band nonetheless, admiring the cut of the marquis diamond before setting it aside.

  He attached the finger, nail up, to a small padded clamp, suspending it so that any blood that hadn’t been soaked up by the white cheesecloth would spill into a glass bowl. The skin was already changing color and becoming waxy.

  He pulled out a small tin box he kept in a drawer and carefully arranged the seven colors of nail polish it held on the desk’s surface. The newest, an orangey shade called “Tangerine Mist” was still unopened. He didn’t know why Violet had never worn it. Perhaps she’d regretted the purchase, but he opened it now before adjusting the clamp so the nail was horizontal.

  Applying the polish evenly took a steady hand and he hummed a little Mozart under his breath. While he waited for the first coat to dry, he fixed a drink.

  He tended to follow a very similar routine when he got home: take care of souvenirs, have a drink, shower, change and eat something light that wouldn’t upset his stomach before going to bed. Sometimes he was so excited that he skipped the eating, but he always had the drink.

  He fixed a vodka tonic and took a couple of sips before sitting back down to finish his work. A second coat of varnish and the nail was a lovely shimmery orange. As soon as it was dry, he carefully undid the clamps and laid the finger on a bed of cotton in a small cardboard box. He sealed the box and marked it with the name and date and then he opened the small freezer and moved it in next to the others. Things were getting crowded. He might have to invest in bigger storage.

  The ring went in a separate box, large, flat and velvet-lined, that he kept in the bottom drawer in his desk. He took a moment to play with the other pieces he’d collected, trying to conjure up tangible memories as he held them in his hands, but there was nothing beyond a pleasant sensation. It had been this way for several years now. He needed to touch flesh to relive those glorious moments.

  When everything was away and his drink finished, he retired to the bathroom and took a long, leisurely shower. Violet hated that. She used to hammer on the door to hurry him along. As always when he thought of her, there was a dull pain, like his stomach was being pinched from the inside out. He took a casual measure of it as he toweled off and realized that the ache of that loss was still there, but not nearly as strong as it had been even a week ago.

  There was still a picture of her on the nightstand, one of the few things she’d left behind. She was smiling in it, openmouthed, as if she’d been laughing at something funny, just as she’d been when he first met her. He first spotted her at the movies, caught by the sound of laughter as the lights came up, turning to see hair like a cascade of rippling black water, eyes a shade of blue that made him think of violets and a smile of welcome that seemed brighter when she talked to him.

  He called her “Violet” and she called him “Guy.” These were their private names for each other. From the beginning he knew that she was his destiny and he proposed on their third date.

  She laughed. Afterwards, he would think about that laugh and wonder what it meant, whether it was a warning he should have heeded. At the time he was mesmerized by her and incapable of doing anything but begging for her response. “Yes, Guy,” she said finally with a deliberation that told him she was careful. Later he would think she was calculating. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”

  When he got his next paycheck, he spent it all on a spectacular diamond engagement ring. He planned the wedding with her down to every detail, including what sort of flowers they should have: cascades of violets.

  He didn’t share his avocation with her. Not initially. Like any artist, he was sensitive about opening himself to the public’s criticism. Plus, he knew that it would frighten her. Someday, she would be ready, but until then he would practice his skills in private so that it wouldn’t disturb her, waiting until she’d gone to sleep before slipping out of their bed to watch the neighbors.

  Except she caught him at it. Surprising him one night when he was fingering the jewelry he’d taken, misinterpreting this and his obvious absence from their bed. She thought he was cheating on her and resisted his efforts to explain, albeit obliquely.

  She didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand. Was this the moment he knew it wouldn’t work? Certainly, it was a moment of great disappointment. He’d anticipated being able to share the experience with her, but she wasn’t open to it. He began thinking of her less as a flower and more as a closed bud.

  The dream of the house tied them together. Ultimately, it was the only thing they had left, but that bitch of a realtor intervened at every step. There was always something else to consider, some other expense they hadn’t foreseen. Violet thought he wasn’t working hard enough, but she didn’t know that he worked double the hours of most men. She closed her eyes to the evidence that he was gone at night. She refused to discuss the special room he wanted in the basement. She told Sheila about it, though. He’d overheard her on the phone laughing about “Guy’s fantasies.”

  After it was over, after she’d left him, after he’d finished crying over what he couldn’t make work, he realized that this was the cost of his gift. He couldn’t have the life of other men because fate had seen to it that he didn’t live like other men.

  In this realization came
strength. If he couldn’t be like other men, he’d be stronger. How many athletes over time had eschewed sex because it drained them? He would be like that. He would be stronger without her.

  Taking down Sheila had been a pleasure. She was so oblivious to his planning, the selfish bitch. He’d followed her several times in his car and she’d never been aware of him. Getting her schedule had been trivial—a simple phone call. Breaking into the house was only slightly more of a challenge. In disguise at an open house, he’d discovered that the security system was disabled while the house was on the market. All he had to do that morning was pick the lock and that was a skill he’d perfected over the years. It took him barely five minutes.

  He’d been waiting for her in the master bedroom, knowing that her own compulsive behavior would ensure that she’d check every room in the house. He’d picked the master bedroom because it was a statement about what she’d destroyed in his own life, though he doubted that she or anyone else understood the symbolism.

  He’d stepped out of the shadows in the closet and softly called her name and she’d screamed, just as he’d thought she would. But then she’d laughed, trying hard to be brave, acting as if his being there made some sort of sense and asking what he needed, as if it had been just yesterday that she’d seen him and not months before.

  Justice was meted out with careful deliberation, just as it should be. He’d shown her the nail gun and told her how he’d found it at the abandoned building site. He’d silenced her skillfully, holding her trembling head still with one hand wrapped tightly around her blond hair. She’d been scared when she felt the pressure at the base of her neck and he’d relished that fear, pressing his erection against her. He took his time, running the nail gun along her spine, whispering about the damage it could do to her body, letting her believe that maybe he’d let her live.

  She begged him. She would have done anything he asked if only he’d let her go, but he didn’t. Once he’d shot her, staggering under the sudden weight as her body sagged in his arms, he laid her carefully on the floor. He arranged her to his liking, pinning her to the floor and plugging out her eyes, her breasts. It was all very simple.