Monday, December 14, 2003
The woman hadn't died very quickly. The bullet, when it finally did end her life, had come as a welcome end to the pain she had endured for at least a day. A woman had been murdered on Monday; a tall, blonde-haired woman in her late 20s who'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Five days later, a woman with the same description, same hair color, same build, was found in an alley not too far from the previous victim, only, the marks on her skin indicated she hadn't died there. She had been somewhere before that, been held somewhere and tortured and maybe been whispered promises that she could live if she just did these few things.
Whatever the circumstances, she'd ended up here. Another victim. The city had claimed another face in its trap, in its dark, secret corners and alleys and dilapidated neighborhoods, its ghettos and slums. The city breeded the evil that grew up and dealt the crack, the heroin, robbed, assaulted, and murdered the other people the city breeded to be hard-working decent people.
The city breeded both spectrums of humanity and sometimes they clashed together and this, this was what happened.
A half-naked body covered in dried blood, bruises, with rope burns on her wrists.
"Leslie Mitchell, " Lex called from where she sat hunched over the body, white gloves thumbing through the victim's wallet.
"Won't be sure until we get next of kin to ID the body, but from the looks of it, that's her, " she said, showing him the license picture. It was one of the few normal looking pictures he'd seen on a license and that struck him for some reason. Seemed worthless, this death. Then again, they always did.
Matt turned to one of the forensics lackeys, got a feel for the kind of case they were building here.
"You gettin' anything?"
"Pretty good prints, but they could be the victim's, could belong to any hack job walkin' up and down here day and night, pissin' on the wall, shakin' off a high. If it's the same guy, he's pretty careful, I doubt we'll lift any of his."
Matt nodded, wandered back to his partner, and knelt down beside her.
"What're you thinkin', Matt?"
"I don't what to think anything just yet. You give me another dead body like this one, I'll call it something. You ask me now? I'd say we've got two murders, both victims just happen to look like each other."
*
"Sandy Granson, age 29. Working as a waitress at O'Reilly's in Midtown. Neighbor reported her missing. No kids, no husband, parents are dead."
No one wanted to say it, to ask why they were working a case like this when there were other people out there, missing, just like Sandy Granson, who did have kids, who did have significant others; someone's child, someone's friend, someone who was loved by at least one person. Who did Sandy Granson have?
They wanted to ask.
But they didn't.
"Viv, I want you and Samantha at O'Reilly's, talk to the boss, the customers, coworkers, get to know her. Martin, I want you checking out her bank account, financial records, anything that might indicate she would've wanted to disappear. Danny, we're going to her apartment, talk to the neighbor."
*
The neighbor, as it turned out, was a real genius. Couldn't understand how a guy like this could end up in such a low-end apartment building, feeling out his life instead of using his intellectual talents to pursue a career in business, perhaps.
"Look, man, I don' really talk ta 'er, ya know? She just -- she just come and go, like that. Whateva', right? She just usually come home around one in the mornin', she didn' last night, didn' come home. I call her work, says she left and all, but she not here, right? What you gonna do?"
He leaned against his wall, his bony, pale, white arms pulling a slow drag from his mouth as he rubbed his free hand periodically against his left eye. There were dark circles beneath the eyes, both bloodshot. The slim body of a coke addict, the needle marks of a heroin user. Danny and Jack agreed without even looking at each other that what they had here was just a stellar witness, the best they could ask for.
Oh yeah, you couldn't get better than this.
Right, man. Whatever.
Jack coughed a laugh into his fist, flipped his notebook open.
"Well, that was nice of you to call, see where she was."
"Sure, yeah."
"You say you called this morning around nine, they said she had left at two in the morning, and she still wasn't home?"
"That's what I say, yeah."
"And what time did you report her missing?"
"Oh, 'bout one, I say. Figured I better. If nothin's wrong, well, that's your job, ain't it?"
"Sure is, " Danny said.
They both stood, Jack folding his notebook back into his trenchcoat, reaching out to shake the drug case's clammy hand.
"Well, if we find anything, we'll be sure to let you know, Mr. Anelson."
"Right, sure. She's alright, you know? Brings me beer sometimes."
Jack nodded.
Beer and friendship. What a standout guy.
*
Sandy Granson had been missing fifteen hours and the leads were coming up shallow. She didn't have any ties to where she'd been, no real reason to stay, but no real reason to leave either.
So just as Vivian and Samantha walked in from finishing up their questioning with a former employer, Jack got the call.
Sandy Granson had been found in an alley about ten blocks away from O'Reilly's. And just as they'd started the case, there it had ended. With no real suspects, no probable cause of anything, it was undoubtedly one of the stranger cases they'd dealt with.
"Just unlucky one night walking home. It happens. If the boys in blue want to take it further, it's their case now, " Jack said to his team as they collectively stood around the conference table or at their desks.
Jack looked at his watch. It was nearly nine o'clock.
"All right, not a lot of paperwork for this one. Let's wrap it up and head out of here."
*
They had closed up and Samantha had left before him, heading, as he figured, home. Last night, he had gone to Church. Tonight, he felt like going to her.
Find your faith, he had been told.
Find your faith.
How do you do that? How do you just find something intangible? You can't see love, can't touch it as something solid and whole. You can't find something you can't see. Isn't that right? Isn't that what he'd learned all these years, finding people, finding missing people. If you can't see them, you can't find them.
If you can't see them, how can they be real?
Maybe he could only feel it. If he felt it, then it was there. And how would he feel it? How would he know the second it started being real to him again?
He walked to the door of her apartment, heard her on the other side with Martin, talking and laughing so casually, so comfortably with one another. He didn't have to look to see that comfort. The comfort they had once had...almost two years ago. Two years and time had aged, not so gracefully, a period of his life he still hadn't decided was the worst thing that he could've done or the best.
The television was turned on, not so loud, and he could hear her trying to cook. Maybe that chicken casserole her mom had taught her to make; the one she'd made for Jack one night, one night when they tried to pretend what it was like if they could really be together, if they could really be Jack and Sam.
He wanted to knock and walk in and take her away from this apartment, this city with its lies, this life with its pain. He wanted to raise her above the ugliness of the world, the ugliness of his own mistakes, and decide on something for once in his life. He wanted to make a choice once, just once, that he could live with. He wanted to make a choice that he could sleep with at night.
He thought he had, but he wasn't sleeping any better with Maria.
Jack's hand hovered above the door, waiting to knock. So maybe he still wanted her, maybe he did. But maybe she had stopped waiting like a demure little lover, hoping her king, her prince, would come back. He couldn't, in honesty, have expected her to wait that long, could he? And yet, he had hoped maybe they would both find themselves waiting for each other, each apart but together in that need.
It didn't sound that way now and he thought of all the lies he'd waded through in this line of work, the lies that built upon each other, one after the other until the framework unraveled and you had this horrible wreckage of a life, or lives, things falling apart left and right.
Most of the time, lies were the things that destroyed you.
He would've been happy, just for tonight, if Samantha stepped outside, pulled him in softly by the hand, lied to him and lied to him until they weren't lies anymore. He would've been happy to hear her say she hadn't moved on, she hadn't started this thing with Martin, that she had wanted him all along.
Tonight, he would've been her bright fool.
Deceive me, he thought. Deceive me tonight with a faithless whisper and I can sleep for a few hours.
Lie to me.
Lie to me.
I'm getting so damn tired of being awake.