The Dead Detective Read online

  I stop. I’m on a commercial street, a pizza parlor to one side of me, a hairdresser’s salon to the other. I get out of the car―my Toyota, not a department Crown Vic―and walk through the door in the narrow brick wall between them. There’s a wooden sign outside it: “Madame Rosy”, it says. “Palmistry and Tarot reader. Your fortune tolled.” Up a flight of stairs, through a curtain. It smells of mildew and cigarette and marijuana smoke. A middle-aged man and woman are sitting at a dimly lit table with a crystal ball on it, counting money. Somehow, my gun is in my hand. I shoot them. Twice each in the middle of the forehead. First the man, as the woman screams. She flings herself out of the chair and crawls on all fours toward a backroom, trying to get away. He topples heavily to the floor. I go after the woman, who is overweight and clothed in a bright red dress with a long print skirt. I stomp on the back of her leg, then yank her head around by the hair. I put the muzzle to her brow and pull the trigger twice. Tap-tap. Four shots, loud in the night; there is no silencer on the Glock. The gunshots echo like hammer-strokes inside the room.

  Then I turn around and walk down the stairs the way I came. I get in my car and drive off. At some point, I fall asleep for real behind the wheel.

  nd wake up inside my chalk circle back at the warehouse. It must be later, because it’s darker in here now; half the candles have gone out and the others are sputtering inside their Gerber jars.

  My head is pounding, and my nose is filled with the stench of sweat and gasoline. I feel like puking. You’d think you wouldn’t have problems like that when you’re dead, but I totally can’t catch a break.

  There’s a monster peering down at me upside down. No, not a monster; the old ghost guy, McGuiness. That’s when it all comes back to me. What I’ve just done, I mean: gone out and murdered two people in cold blood. Unless it was all just a nightmare.

  God, my head is splitting. I sit up and quickly wish I hadn’t.

  “You okay, kiddo?” McGuiness actually sounds worried. I try nodding my head. Just to, you know, see if falls off. “Because you just drove over to Rosedale and capped two citizens. Pow-pow, pow-pow, right in the middle of the noggin.”

  I groan; so much for the nightmare theory. “How―how do you know?”

  “Because I was there―how else? Hopped a ride in the back of your little car. Pretty fuckin’ weird behavior for a straight-up lady cop, if you ask me. Somebody pay you to do the hit? Or you just possessed?”

  For the first time since all this has happened to me, I feel like just breaking down in tears. My mind is racing too fast to think. I open my mouth…but no words come out.

  “Okay, Okay, toots, take it easy,” he says soothingly. “Can you stand up? ‘Cuz there’s two things you need to do now. First is get your ass outta here. Second is drive back to where you left the two stiffs and dig your bullets out, get me? Maybe wipe for prints. I’d help you out there if I could.”

  Shit, he’s right. My bullets are still in those corpses, or at least somewhere in the room―at that range, they almost certainly blasted right through the two vics. The two people I just murdered. So I’ll probably have to dig the slugs out of the wall. And he’s right about prints, too―he probably hasn’t heard of DNA, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I rise unsteadily to my feet.

  “Good girl.”

  There’s blood everywhere, as if it had been deliberately splashed around like a theatrical effect. And like stage blood, it doesn’t look quite right, not like real human blood somehow. Animal, maybe? I don’t have time to figure it out. Whatever happened to me―whatever took me over and made me kill―can happen again. Anytime. And if somebody heard the shooting and called the cops, I’m already screwed, anyway. I won’t just lose my job. I’ll go to jail.

  Actually, I’ve been to jail before. Of course, they don’t call it that when you’re nine years old, but that’s what it amounts to. Cop stations. Child Protective Services. Group foster-care houses. Lawyers. Court rooms. It feels a lot like jail to a little girl. Luckily, they gave custody of me back to my mom after I went through all that; I say “luckily”, but actually, there’s an asterisk there, too. It’s always been kind of a toss-up whether I’d have been better off with or without her. But I guess Mom loves me in her way, and she generally means well. She’s just…herself. And she’s got really shitty taste in men. But then, who doesn’t? I should talk, right?

  Maybe you remember reading about my story or seeing it on TV, if you’re old enough; it made CBS and ABC. I never knew my father―he left us when I was two―then Mom got involved with a string of losers, each one worse than the one before. But the second asshole she married, Jack, my stepfather, made all the others, before and since, look like winners. When I was nine, he raped me. Mom was no use; by then, he’d reduced her to a piece of bleating meat. He didn’t mark her face, so she could still go to work―she was a dental hygienist and supported him, pretty much―but he beat the hell out of her every place else. And, you know, tortured her. Tied her up, used broom handles, coat hangers, that kind of shit. He did those same things to me whenever I rubbed him the wrong way.

  Then one night, he came home drunk and dialed the abuse meter up from bad dream to nightmare―he raped me. And he made Mom watch. Of all the things he ever did to me, that was the worst.

  However, Jack then made a really dumb mistake. He fell asleep. He was the kind of guy who slept with a gun at his bedside. And even stupider, he kept gun magazines around the house. The next morning, I snuck out of bed early, read up on how to release a safety catch and blew his fucking brains out. As you may or may not recall, I was acquitted, but it took several months―and six months more before Mom got custody of me back. I bet you’re wondering how this ridiculous a case ever made it to a trial in the first place, trying a sexually abused nine-year-old girl as an adult. Because the DA bluffed it right up the chain hoping to cop a plea bargain out of my mom, that’s why. Even though all the forensics pointed to me, they thought she’d confess to spare her daughter the trauma of being put on trial.

  Shows how clueless they were about my mother… if you’re wondering where I get my asshole side from, now you know. Which reminds me; it’s her birthday tomorrow night, and I better pick her up a present.

  Believe it or not, I was initially barred from the police academy sixteen years later because of having the justifiable manslaughter on my juvie record, even though my identity was supposedly kept sealed; I had to hire a lawyer to get accepted. But I didn’t go into The Job with any illusions about prosecutors. Or shrinks.

  Incidentally, that’s the last time I’ve ever killed anyone in cold blood. Until tonight. But something tells me, I won’t get acquitted so easily on this last one. Two. Although I may now be immune from the death penalty, I guess. But I really, really don’t want to find out the hard way. I doubt Harper will still carry that torch for me if I get fried in the chair…

  Back to the crime scene―my crime scene, the one I created. I get there maybe an hour too late. Someone has called it in, and there are cop cars and EMVs parked everywhere, and yellow tape draped around, even out into the street. This is an even crappier neighborhood than I’d remembered, full of boarded up strips, even a couple of old-fashioned massage parlors and a convenience store with signs in Arabic and barred windows.

  “Whaddya think?” Caspar the friendly ghost asks me, coughing up a cloud of etheric green smoke in my face when I park out front. Crooked, of course, like we cops always park; it’s a point of pride. “You might still be able to do some tampering if you go up there―and smear your prints around some more, at least.”

  That’s actually pretty good thinking. If I contaminate the crime scene, it explains away my DNA. But nothing will get me past the fact that it was my gun―which is on file with the department. Unless by some miracle, nobody’s bagged the bullets yet. It’s not my precinct, but Rosedale is at least inside the city limits, so I won’t be out of my jurisdiction. I flash some tin at the uniforms outside and go upstairs. By now
I know the layout pretty well.

  Shit. The first thing I see when I get to the top of the staircase and sign in on the Crime Scene Attendance sheet, is that forensics is already there. The second thing is Detective Kasiaris, who’s been hating on me on and off and on for years. Some male cops like having women on the force a little too much; others like Kasiaris still resist the basic idea of having us on the job at all. “Saw the lights and thought I’d swing by,” I tell him lamely. There must be five people in the three tiny rooms. Aside from the two stiffs. “Any wits?”

  That means witnesses. There was a small crowd on the sidewalk when I got there trying to peer past the patrolmen. Could one of them have seen me earlier?

  He shakes his head. “Not a thing. The Koreans next door wouldn’t tell us anything anyway, even if they could speak English. And the pizza place is all Arabs. They called it in but claim they saw nothing.”

  “What happened?” I ask, trying to stay calm. Because I’ve just spotted the two people I killed standing right behind him. Or maybe I should say the two angry vengeful ghosts of the two people I just killed. They’re gesturing and screaming at me, faintly but ferociously, shit like “Ka xile ma pe tute!” and “Kaa mogo cod, transpirate mish!” I’d ask, but I really don’t want to know. Besides, I bet I can guess. I’d get out my cell phone and apologize to them, but I don’t think that would cut much ice.

  Bull McGuiness to the rescue, though. He walks right through me and Phil Kasiaris and wades into the two screamers, kneeing the guy-ghost in the groin and twisting the poor woman’s hair, slapping them both a few times and then dragging them out onto the landing. “You!” He shoves a finger in the man’s face. “Talk.”

  “Any ID on the vics?” I ask Kasiaris meanwhile, ignoring the ghostly altercation.

  “Nah. And I doubt there ever will be. They’re Gypsies―or Rumi or whatever the fuck we’re supposed to call them these days. They’ve got like their own Mafia, and crime is pretty much all they’re into. The women run these crystal ball parlors all over the city, the men pimp and sell drugs. And they all thieve and shoplift, even the kids. I’ve seen ‘em in malls even as young as five or six come running out of their mother’s skirts and picking locks to get into the back offices of stores. I busted one bitch who had a tiny chair strapped between her legs if you can believe that. After her kid stole twenty-five grand out of a desk drawer.”

  I walk around a little, spreading my DNA and prints around like confetti on New Year’s Eve. The place hasn’t been completely powdered with graphite for prints yet. I spot the bullet holes in the wall along with some brains and a lot of blood spattering from the first victim, the bearded middle-aged Romani guy; SID has already dug one of the bullets out and bagged it, so I’m too late.

  “Hey—booties and gloves!” Kasiaris calls after me, meaning my paper crime scene slippers and latex evidence gloves, so I stop and snap them on from my pocket, making a big deal of leaning on the table and dropping one on the floor first. Then I make a grab for the baggie with the bullet in it, pretending to examine it through the plastic, but the tech says, “Last one—just like the others. Nine mil para. Full metal jacket.”

  Now that’s weird. It’s a twin of the one that killed me, I notice, holding it up to the light, but I never load my piece with jacketed rounds. I’m strictly a Teflon hollow-point girl. So this was already loaded in my police Glock when I got it back from the Cap…

  I hand the baggie back. He’s already got the other three; might as well let him keep the set. Which means I’m royally fucked on the physical evidence. But it might take ballistics a day or two to make the match. Too late to report my gun stolen―but maybe not too late to hunt down whoever’s doing this to me.

  “Department shut down the Gypsy Crime Unit three years ago,” Kasiaris tells me. “Well, it was just two guys on the fourth floor, really. But Val Tabori’s still our go-to guy downtown. He’s the expert; maybe he’ll know who these two are.”

  “Names are Dorothy Uwanawich and Bobby Marks,” McGuiness tells me the moment I step back out onto the landing. “I held onto them for as long as I could, but they disappeared on me. Stiffs do that a lot once they figure out how. Anyhow,” he continues, following me down the stairs, “they reckon somebody called the ‘kris’ put out a hit on them on behalf of the Horvaths, whomever they might be. That’s all I got out of ‘em. Oh, and they put a curse on me.”

  It’s obvious that somebody’s put a curse on me, too. A really big one. And very possibly that somebody was named Horvath. I can see I need to talk to this guy Tabori.

  ut it’s well after midnight, and Detective Tabori is not at his desk. So I leave a voicemail.

  “That the Gypsy guy?” asks McGuiness. He has this habit of just appearing suddenly, like in the passenger seat next to me right now.

  “Yeah…” And that’s when it finally hits me. What this is all about. How it happened. It was the fucking Gypsies out in East Orange…

  “I’d forgotten all about it,” I tell him, turning the Toyota around and heading back toward the freeway. “Because it wasn’t in the case files or anything. It was off the record. A favor for Ayon―my partner, the woman you saw me with in the bar.”

  “The little Mexican spitfire.” Yeah well, I guess that’s as close as the guy is ever gonna come to a politically correct ethnic description.

  I describe to him what happened. About half a year ago, Ayon got a call from her father saying that one of his uncles, a tiny old man named Sylvestro, had a bizarre problem that the local cops seemed helpless to do anything about. Uncle Sylvestro lived way out in the ‘burbs all by himself in a little retirement bungalow. One day, he answered the front doorbell, and three women barged in past him and literally took up residence. Two of them seemed to speak no English―or Spanish―the third, much younger woman spoke some English, but it seemed to come and go whenever it suited her. They basically just took the place over, sleeping in his beds, sitting in his living room all day watching TV, making long distance calls over his phone in a language he couldn’t comprehend, and eating him out of house and home. Periodically, the young one would demand money from him for groceries and go off shopping; whenever she did, he would notice more and more of his stuff disappearing.

  They took all his money, pilfered his dead wife’s jewelry, and blocked his path whenever he tried to leave. The two older women were large, and their leader, Gana Kali, she seemed to be called, was grossly fat and immensely strong. This went on for days before he managed to call 911. When the police arrived, the young woman told them she was his fiancée and that her mother and aunt had come all the way from Europe for the wedding. He told the cops the truth―that he’d never seen the three women before―but the patrol officers, not ever being sure who to believe in a domestic, just shrugged and told him to file a complaint at the stationhouse. A few days later, he managed to sneak away and do that, but without knowing any of their names, he couldn’t fill out the right forms. The desk sergeant urged him to call a lawyer.

  This went on for several weeks until Uncle Sylvestro thought to phone his nephew, Mr. Ayon, Mal’s father. So Malena and I drove out there one day on our lunch hour. It was outside our jurisdiction, but we managed to enlist plenty of sympathy from the local sheriff’s department and mounted a joint raid on the place.

  If you’ve ever dealt with a Romani group, then maybe you’ll have some idea what we went through. The women scream, flail around, flop down on the floor and have to be carried out; meanwhile, you have to keep your eye on all your pockets―the young one, who turned out to be underage, managed to half get the gun off one of the uniformed cops before his partner spotted what she was up to. The place was stripped bare of almost everything except the sofa and the TV set, and the old man looked half-starved and was covered in bruises. The room―and the women’s bodies―reeked of the odors I later smelled in the warehouse: angelica and gasoline and sweat.

  Finally, we wrestled them, kicking and screaming, out to the cruisers and do
wn to the station, but I have a faint memory that in the process the old fat one, Gana Kali, scratched me. That’s the long scratch down my forearm that Harper said looked infected at the hospital. That’s how it must have happened.

  And now I’m like her bitch…her zombie hit-woman, bumping off her enemies at her beck and call. It’s the only halfway rational explanation I can come up with for what’s happened to me.

  “Fuggety fuggety fuck…” The ghost in the car beside me chomps furiously on his cigar stump after I tell him all this. That pretty much sums it up for me, too. “So what’s your first move, toots?”

  “Track down the crazy evil old bitch who did this to me, I guess. And then do something to her to make sure this doesn’t keep on happening.” Though it’s likely way too late. Clearly, the zombie hit-woman defense is not going to sound too convincing at my arraignment.

  “Problem is…even if you gumshoe her and give her the gun, it might not be in your best interest to pull the trigger. Might just push you on over to my side of the river permanently, if you get my drift…”

  Yeah, there was that.

  But I need to think of something fast. Maybe the toxicology might give some kind of clue, but it’s also a little late to be calling or even texting Harper about the results of the lab work on my scratched arm. Besides, I suspect his marriage is pretty rocky, and I don’t want to play the other woman, waking his wife up with cell phone calls or texts in the middle of the night. Been there, done that―that’s how I met Devon. He was married to someone else at the time, I mean. Kind of a sweetie; an innocent little redheaded fellow-schoolteacher named Jennifer who never knew what hit her. And maybe that’s why we’ve always felt sort of, well, you know…ultimately doomed. When your happiness is stolen at the expense of another person, it’s like your head never really rests easy on the pillow.