Damaged Goods (13 page)

“Yes, I keep hearing that,” Hannibal said. He didn't mean to be unkind, and he regretted the remark as soon as he made it. “How long did you date?”

Marquita became quiet for a moment. The rising sun shifted its beam of light lower in the room, taking the spotlight off Marquita. Without that glow she now looked more like an ordinary, vulnerable woman. But now the light was on her hand, locked in Sarge's at the edge of the bed.

“There was no dating. Not really. We came here that same night. I didn't intend to invite him in but he came in anyway. We drank. We kind of… well, he spent the night, you know. Then he…”

“You don't have to do this,” Sarge said.

“He was just here, and he never left. He just took my life over. At first, I admit it; it felt good in a way to have someone take over. To have no responsibilities except just to do what he thought was best. Then he introduced me to the lifestyle.”

“The lifestyle?” Hannibal repeated, implying that he needed more of an explanation.

“He taught me how to be a submissive. And as long as I was good, did what I was told, he was so good to me and I was so happy and…”

The tears were back, but in an eerie way her breathing remained quiet. One sob shook her body. Sarge looked from Hannibal to Marquita, mouth partially open. He looked scared, an expression Hannibal had never seen on that dark, round face. He appeared to be waiting for Hannibal to do something, but Hannibal could not imagine what that could be.

“Marquita, I know this is difficult for you,” Hannibal said. “But knowing any of Mantooth's contacts would be very helpful. You mentioned other men who came here?”

“Jesus, Hannibal, you don't need to go into all that,” Sarge said. “And she don't need to dredge it all up again. Just go find this bastard.”

“It doesn't matter,” Marquita said, sending a dark laugh through her tears. “I'm sure it's no secret. He brought his friends in here and treated them. Made me treat them. And I treated them good, I'll tell you. They all had me. Every way you can imagine. Ways I never imagined before. Then after he left, he still sent them. Said if I was obedient he'd be back for me. So you see I'm just a whore, a common whore.”

Marquita was about to collapse, but Sarge gathered her in one of his big arms. “You are no such thing, Markie, this guy just knows how to manipulate people. Hannibal, you just get
out there and find this guy so I can kill him. You hear me? Now, where'd the doc put those pills he left you, baby?”

While Sarge tried to calm his charge with one hand and searched the end table for medicine with the other, Hannibal stood.

“Yeah. Listen, I'll check in a bit later. I'm going to get with the client and see if I can get any kind of lead on this guy. Listen, I'm sorry Marquita. I didn't mean…” Words seemed pointless, so he stopped dropping them. Sarge was right. Hannibal needed to find this man before he broke one more spirit.

Anita opened the door to Hannibal the way she might greet an auditor from the Internal Revenue Service. Hannibal remained pleasant, because he understood. He was now a symbol of her problems, branded with the smell of her garbage, which he was poking through out of necessity. He was a walking reminder of all the things she had done, the things almost no one else even knew about. He was used to it. People hired him to go through their garbage, even when they themselves couldn't stand the smell.

After declining her offer of coffee, Hannibal returned to the office downstairs. Anita followed, her eyes focused on him with a new intensity. He resisted an urge to tear through books and papers. Instead, he turned to Anita with a small, soft smile.

“Now, Ms. Cooper, You know I'll be discreet with everything I learn, right?”

Sensing an incoming request, she smiled, lowered her lids and gave a shallow nod. “What else do you need to know?”

“I'm convinced the prize Rod took is something your father brought from work,” Hannibal said. “I've got to find out what your father was working on. To do that, I'll need to speak to people who knew your father at work.”

“But I don't know any of father's coworkers.”

“I know,” Hannibal replied. “I need to find them, and that means I need to see correspondence. Where did he keep his letters, Anita?”

Anita lowered her head and slowly paced to one side of the room, as if searching for a memory on the floor. Then she turned, seeming to scan the bookshelves for input.

“I don't think father ever wrote letters,” she said. “He had few distant friends, and he saw the people at the lab every day. I don't think he ever communicated with them from home. Unless…”

Her voice trailed off as her head turned to her right. Hannibal's eyes followed hers to the desk, and the keyboard that rested on it.

“Of course. E-mail.” Hannibal started toward the chair, and just as quickly backed off. “No. You. Sit down, Anita. You know the passwords and stuff.”

Anita dropped her slender frame on to the seat, her fingers poised over the keys.

“How many e-mail accounts did your father have?” Hannibal asked, standing close behind her, hands on knees.

“Only one, I'm sure.”

“Well, open it up,” Hannibal said.

Anita stared straight ahead at the screen. “You want me to open my father's private e-mail?”

“What, don't you know the password?”

“I do.”

“Then open it.”

His words prompted Anita's fingers to immediate response. She was a puppet, and it was altogether too easy to pick up her strings. Hannibal resolved to make requests of this woman, rather than demands, from then on.

As the Microsoft Outlook window blossomed onto the screen it looked at first as if Anita's father had never deleted a message. The list of received e-mails filled several pages. In some cases that would mean an exhaustive search to narrow down good targets for questioning. In this case it would not be that difficult. As Anita scanned down the list Hannibal saw that at least eighty percent of the messages were from her.
Hannibal realized that he knew next to nothing about Anita's father. The fact that he had kept every e-mail his daughter sent him from college suddenly cast him in a very different light from the overindulgent and obsessive biology nerd Hannibal had imagined up to that moment.

A tiny stifled sob returned Hannibal's focus to the woman before him. Anita had opened the last e-mail on the list and was reading her final electronic communication with her beloved father. Her head shuddered, and he sensed that he would lose her completely if he didn't force her to move on.

“All right, Anita, I need you to close that.”

“Daddy loved me so much.”

“Yes he did,” Hannibal said. “Now, I need you to get back to the list please and put those messages in order by the date, most recent on top.”

Scanning down the list, Hannibal saw only three or four other names that recurred on a regular basis. “Let's take these three. Hathaway, Gaye and Trumble. Open each e-mail you see from them. Let's see what we can find out.”

Hannibal scanned the notes as quickly as he could. He wasn't looking for details, just to get a feel for the relationship. All three were apparently past coworkers, and after seeing a couple of notes from each of them it was clear that Trumble would be the first contacted.

“Why can't they all be like you, Mr. Trumble,” he asked the computer monitor, “with a nice e-mail tag line with their phone number and address? It won't be so easy to find the other two.”

“I don't understand,” Anita said. “Can't you just push reply and e-mail them?”

“It's a nice thought,” Hannibal said, “but people don't generally share information about their friends with strangers through e-mail. Still, it might not be real important if Trumble stayed in touch with all his old buddies the way your father did.”

“I was over optimistic,” Hannibal said while shaking small dots of steak sauce onto his porterhouse. “The phone call was pleasant, but it was a dead end.”

“I'm sorry.” Cindy brushed an errant strand of hair back and shared a broad smile that deepened her dimples. “Haven't been able to get my brain away from work. What were you saying?”

Hannibal had hoped that a good steak would get her mind off her job. Bobby Van's and one or two other places were contenders, but for his money Morton's served the best aged, top-prime porterhouse steak in the city. Or, more accurately, for their money. Cindy always insisted they go Dutch at places like this.

“Just that this lead to Anita Cooper's father didn't pan out. This Ron Trumble character.” Hannibal took a deep, relaxing breath. It wasn't the expensive appointments that drew him to a restaurant like this, or the attentive service. Hannibal loved being wrapped in the red meat smell of a good steak place. The smell hinted at so much: freshly cracked peppercorns, sautéed onions, mushrooms, and the scent that arises when flames meet a well marbled cut of beef.

“Oh, yes,” Cindy said, sliding her knife through her steak. “This is the girl who likes it rough.”

“I don't know if that's really true. But this guy she was with sure did a number on her.”

Cindy waited to speak until she finished chewing. She was beautiful in her navy blue power suit and Hannibal briefly wondered how many she owned. She wore her hair up that day, but by six o'clock a few locks always shook themselves loose from captivity. When she looked up, she seemed surprised to find him hanging on her words.

“You make her sound like a victim, and maybe she is. But trust me, my gallant knight, there are plenty of women out there just waiting for a man to come along and hand them just what you described this Rod character did. There's a market for muy macho hombres with plenty of machismo.”

That doesn't justify it, he thought. Aloud he said. “Weak women.”

“Maybe just different tastes.” She pointed at him with her fork. “You are so limited in your view of humanity. And judgmental.”

The juices filling his mouth as his teeth pushed through the black crust surrounding rare meat numbed Hannibal to what could be an insult.

“Well, no man could ever do that to you, right?”

“Oh, hell no,” Cindy said, adding her lilting laugh. “Some man came at me with all that master shit, I'd have to stab him in his sleep.” She put her fork down beside her plate, placing her fingers together in front of her face. “But then again…”

“Then again what?”

“Well, you know, as play,” she said, her eyes wandering out the window behind Hannibal, reflecting the night-lights on Independence Avenue. “I mean, don't you ever think about, you know.”

“Not sure I do know, babe.”

Cindy dug into her baked potato. “Well, like, being tied to the bedposts with silk scarves. That kind of thing sometimes does sound a little exciting.”

“Right, and I'm sure you're just waiting for a man to tie you down and beat you.”

“Well, hold up a minute,” Cindy said, warming to her subject. “Think about it. There's a world of difference between a beating and a spanking, isn't there?”

“Okay, change of subject.” When her eyebrows rose he said, “I am not comfortable talking about that stuff with you. I know we'll both be working tomorrow, but where would you like to go tonight?”

Cindy's eyes went down to her plate. “Sorry sugar, I can't go out partying tonight.”

He slid his hand across the tablecloth to take hers. “Worn out, hon? I know it's been a long day. Why don't we just pick up a nice bottle of wine and go back to my place?”

“No, you don't understand, baby. I've spent so much time on the DPO that my other cases have gone by the boards. I need to get back to the office for a few more hours.”

“Excuse me?”

Cindy's shoulders dropped. “I am so tired. But at that firm, anybody who's not putting in ninety hours every week just isn't going to move up. And then you have stuff like this cocktail party we're all expected to be at tomorrow night. It just gets to be too much. Damn it. They think they own you. They think four hundred grand per entitles them to your whole life. And you know what? They're right. They own me.”