Coyote (9 page)

“Why the hell didn't you tell me?” I demanded, not giving Mooney a chance to say hello or what's up or get out. “Why isn't it in the papers? Because they're poor women? Because they're illegals, Hispanics, nobodies? Somebody kills off a bunch of rich white Brahmin ladies, I bet it makes the morning news.”

The corners of Mooney's mouth tightened. “We've caught—what—seventy-eight homicides so far this year,” he said flatly. “Some of them hardly rate a paragraph. You know that.”

“Maybe if I'd known that other killing was part of a string, I would have looked harder for Manuela.”

“You think we weren't looking for her? You think there wasn't an APB?”

“But if—”

“If,” Mooney interrupted, his voice harsh. “Didn't you grow out of ‘if' when you were a cop?”

I sank into the wooden chair on the far side of his desk. There was a long silence, punctuated by breathing and the distant sound of ringing phones. I finally broke it. “Sorry, Mooney,” I said. “Driving here in the car, I got so mad, I had to blow up at somebody.”

He nodded and I took that to mean we were still on speaking terms.

I jerked my head back to indicate the map on his door. “Four dead.”

“I hope you didn't read it in the
Herald
.”

“No.”

“Four months, four corpses. We didn't get a lot from the first one. It was badly decomposed by the time we found it, so it may be just three—”

“Three's enough,” I said.

“Plenty,” Mooney agreed, “but there could be more. Now that we're pretty sure we're dealing with a serial, we put out the alarm. Calls will start to come in. The bodies we've got were all found in urban parks, the Emerald Necklace chain, but every hick-town officer who finds a dog bone will get in touch.”

“M.O.?”

“Strangles them, then uses a knife to carve them up.”

“Molested?”

“Can't be sure on most of them. This last one, no. We got to the body soon enough to tell.”

“How soon?” It was a question I wasn't sure I wanted to ask.

“Three hours, maybe.”

That fit with the time of Manuela's call. Again I wondered what would have happened if I'd been home to answer the damn phone. I dug into my bag and handed Mooney the cassette with Manuela's call, wishing Sam's voice weren't on it as well. Mooney knows about Sam. He doesn't approve.

“How'd you find the body?” I asked.

“Dumb luck. Late-night jogger spotted it. He's clean.” Mooney's hand swallowed the cassette and he carefully placed it in one of the few rectangles where his desktop showed through. “Thanks. I don't know how it's gonna help, but thanks.”

“You want me to try the ID again?” I asked reluctantly. “Maybe with her face cleaned up …?”

“The M.E. did his best. Got somebody in from a funeral home. We got a video you could look at.”

“Here? Pretty high-tech.” I was relieved. The smell at Southern Mortuary is not something I relish.

“Interrogation Room Two,” Mooney said. “We moved a set in there. It's some federal-funds stunt, but I like it. We don't have to keep sending guys over to Southern.” He pushed back his chair. “Well, wanna get it over with?”

“Sure.” I followed him out the door.

Mooney turned out the lights in the windowless interrogation room. The TV square seemed to float in darkness. I waited, trying not to think about Manuela, while Mooney pressed buttons and cursed. The screen suddenly showed her face, the dark hair fanned out against a stark white cloth. Cleaned up, most of the cuts seemed superficial. One cheek had been sutured together. Her skin was mottled.

“Yeah,” I said.

On the way out of the room I realized I'd been holding my breath, trying not to smell odors that weren't there.

“Coffee?” Mooney asked.

“Nah.”

When we were seated on opposite sides of his desk again, I said, “It's too clean. I'd almost rather go to the morgue. The morgue's real. This feels like some TV show, like it didn't really happen, only I know it did.”

“Next round of budget cuts, we'll probably have to sell the videocam,” Mooney said. “That ought to make you happy.”

“Delirious,” I said unenthusiastically.

“So how'd you dope it out?” Mooney asked after a long pause. “The serial angle. You see the map on the door?”

“Cops showed crime-scene photos to a Cambridge Legal Collective lawyer,” I explained. “Too many crime scenes. I take it this is not for publication.”

“Think it would do any good?” Mooney asked. “Giving the guy free publicity?”

There's practically nothing I hate more than sensational serial-killer headlines. They're so goddamn misleading. First of all, the overwhelming number of murder victims are male, mostly young black males killed in gang violence or drug disputes or just because they live and work in the wrong place. Do they wind up on page one? No way. But let some weirdo start killing women and it's everywhere, in eighteen-point screamers. And the victims are always described as “attractive” and “young,” as if the weirdo were auditioning bathing beauties or something, as if the women had incited the crimes.

Go ahead, show me an account of a male murder victim that uses the word
handsome
.

“Well,” I muttered lamely, “women who fit the pattern might be more cautious about who they go out with.”

“What's the pattern?” Mooney asked.

“You tell me.”

“I'd have liked to ask your Manuela Estefan,” he said.

“Me too,” I murmured, shaking my head.

“When the papers do get this, we'll be up to our ears,” Mooney said, “mostly backlash from the Weld Square stuff. Nobody picked up on that till there were six dead and I don't remember how many missing.”

“How come?”

“Bodies found in different areas. Different cops, different medical examiners. Victims connected to prostitution and drugs, not women who led regular nine-to-five lives, not ladies the suburban reader would relate to. And there's stupidity,” he added, glaring at the phone on his desk as though he'd already received too much of that commodity over the receiver. “You can't rule that out.”

I said, “You called the dead woman, the woman I just saw,
my
Manuela Estefan. Do you think that was her name?”

“Carlotta,” he said, reaching across the desk as if he could pat my hand and make it all better.

“Jesus,” I said, drawing back. “A simple yes or no will get me off your back.”

“Goddamn, what's eating you?” he said. “If I had a simple yes or no, I'd dish it out. But you're asking a tough one. Was your Manuela really Manuela? Well, let me ask you a few of the ones that go with that. Who is Manuela? Who is Aurelia Gaitan?”

I'd forgotten the Gaitan name for a minute, had to remember that it was the name of the basement-apartment tenant with the bloody bed.

“Nobody's seen Aurelia Gaitan since the dead woman was found,” Mooney continued.

“Her prints must be in the apartment.”

“And what have we got to match them to? The Manuela Estefan green card, right? Well, what's on a green card? One lousy index print. We've sent over to INS for the full set, but even if we got a match, it would only mean that the woman on the green card was in that apartment sometime within the last six months or so.”

“I'm asking about my Manuela. Could the green card be hers? She doesn't look exactly like the photo, but, hell, I'd hate to think people could identify me from my driver's license shot.”

“We couldn't match fingerprints. The killer took care of that. I thought we'd be able to check ears; when you get photographed for your green card, your right ear has to show. But your lady's ears were carved up too. So we brought in a photo expert. He blew up the Estefan shot and matched the features—distance between the eyes and stuff like that. He says your woman was not Estefan. If, of course, that's Manuela Estefan's picture on the green card.” Mooney blew out a deep breath. “Four women dead and we don't have a decent ID on one of them. How the hell can people just disappear and nobody cares enough to fill out a form?”

He didn't expect an answer. I said, “Well, do you have anything on the killer?”

He tapped a precarious stack of paper on one corner of his desk. “About a million things that don't add up to shit,” he said. “
Número uno
, the guy is smart.”

“Guy?”

“You know the stats on serials,” he said.

“Why smart?”

“Because he washes up, that's why. He's real neat. Compulsive. There's not a trace of him in that room so far, except maybe some smudged prints on the underside of the toilet seat.”

“I want to know about the other women. Is there a connection to—to my Manuela?” I couldn't think about her without a name.

“Goddammit, if there were, I couldn't tell you about it. Carlotta, you aren't a policewoman, right? So you can't get into this, even if the woman was more to you than you say.”

“Fishing for something, Mooney?”

“I'm assuming you didn't leave anything out of your story.”

“Why?”

“Because you know what withholding evidence can do to a case.”

“Is the INS following me?” I asked.

“Do I look like a psychic? Ask them.”

“Why is INS involved? Why not the FBI?”

“INS. FBI. Everybody's involved now. It's alphabet soup. You wanna see the paperwork? I got VI-CAP crime sheets coming out of my ears, and most of the stuff they want to know, I got to leave blank because I haven't got the faintest idea.” He pulled another stack of papers over in front of him and started reading aloud angrily, his index finger stabbing the page. “The stuff on last days of the victim is where I really shine, because we don't know where the hell any of these women spent any of their days. Think we should maybe put their pictures in the paper, the way they looked dead, so people could identify them? Think the mayor would like that? Then maybe I could do these goddamn profile sheets and send 'em off to Quantico and everybody'd get off my case. Here. You want to fill out the recent-life-experience sheet? Just keep checking the ‘unknown' box.”

I stood up and went around behind his desk. The familiar set of his shoulders and the nape of his tanned neck looked very dear to me, and I considered rubbing his back, thought about the hard muscle underneath the blue broadcloth.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “You haven't slept at all, have you?”

“What's that got to do with it?”

“Nothing,” I said, and I turned around and walked out. I could hear him calling after me but I didn't stop.

Someday Mooney and I may get our gears in sync, but for years now it's been like this. I get sympathetic, he gets defensive; he gets sympathetic, I boil. Chemistry. It's the damnedest thing.

14

I reclaimed the car. The expired meter said I'd violated the parking laws, but no one had caught me at it. I felt a warm glow at the sight of my ticketless window.

My satisfaction lasted the length of the B.U. Bridge, which I almost always choose over the Longfellow. Longfellow's too crowded. I could have taken the Mass. Ave. Bridge, the one closest to Marta's apartment, but construction's got the traffic so fouled up, I haven't crossed it in years. The Mass. Ave. Bridge, which is really named the Harvard Bridge, is a joke. It's right near M.I.T., but rumor says the Techie engineers didn't want their name sullied by such an architectural botch and gracefully allowed Harvard the honor—and the snickers that accompany it each time the bridge needs to be closed for repairs. Now the state's in the process of rebuilding it completely, and the real confrontation is over whether or not to renew the Smoots.

Smoot was an M.I.T. student in the early sixties or so, and one night his frat brothers got the idea of spray-painting the bridge in Smoot-lengths. Whether they picked him up and carried him along, lying him down and using him as a gigantic ruler, or whether they made him roll over the bridge—marking his shoulder-to-shoulder width as a single “Smoot—” is an item of hot debate. It made both local papers, proving the late Andy Warhol right.

Smoots kept my mind clicking most of the way to Marta's, so I didn't start worrying about whether she'd lied to me about knowing Manuela until I started looking for a parking place. Sometimes it seems as if my days are one continual search for a parking place. That's probably why I like driving a cab. You never need a space.

A car pulled out up the street, maybe five hundred yards ahead, and I gunned the Toyota into the slot before somebody could ace me out of it. A sign at the curb read
RESIDENT PARKING ONLY
. I parked even though I had the wrong color resident sticker. My area of Cambridge has a different color code. Resident parking stickers follow a bizarre color code even most meter maids can't crack. I hoped the one on this beat hadn't figured it out.

The car in front of me was a white one, late-model, boxy. It reminded me of the white Aries.

Either Marta wasn't home or she wasn't answering the damn door. I thought she might be ignoring the bell, what with her arthritis kicking up, so after pounding on the door for fifteen minutes I found an unvandalized pay phone and punched her number. I let the line ring twenty times, then slammed the receiver back into the cradle.

The door to Marta's building opened, and an old man came out, bent and stooped, with a jaunty hat covering his head. His skin was beaded with liver spots, but behind heavy glasses his eyes seemed bright.

“Hi,” I said.

He seemed to shrink within himself and hastily clasped the pocket of his worn tan windbreaker. I now knew where he kept his wallet.

“Hello,” I said again, quietly.

“What do you want?” I couldn't make out the accent at first. He didn't look Hispanic or anything. He just looked old, a country all its own.