Mitch stood there a moment in stunned silence, realizing to his own astonishment that it had finally happened. One door was closing and another one was opening. Today was the day.
As of this moment, I am moving on
. Maisie would want him to do this. Change was healthy. Change was life. It was time to get on with his life. And so Mitch Berger smiled at Dolly Seymour and in a loud, clear voice said, “I would love for you to call him.”
THE CENTRAL DISTRICT HEADQUARTERS of the Connecticut State Police’s Major Crime Squad was located in Meriden across from the Lewis Avenue Mall in what had once been a state-run reform school for boys.
A narrow, unmarked road snaked its way up a hill to the secluded and unexpectedly pastoral campus of gently aged red-brick dormitories and classrooms. The state’s prestigious Forensic Science Laboratory had sprouted up here, under the guiding hand of its nationally eminent director, Dr. Henry Lee. The state’s K-9 training center was headquartered here as well, providing a steady background chorus of barking German Shepherds. Des practically heard them in her sleep. And she had learned never to stroll too near any parked cruisers on her way inside—if a K-9 trainee happened to be stationed in the car, it would lunge at her through the partly open window.
Major Crimes operated out of the old headmaster’s residence, a sober and dignified brick mansion with a slate mansard roof. The entry hall beneath the grand staircase had been converted into a reception area with a desk and mail slots. Also a bulletin board over which hung a crude, hand-lettered sign that read: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE. The district commander’s office was in the ornate dining room. The grand parlors and bedrooms had been partitioned into cubicles.
Des aggressively worked the room as she made her way toward hers, trading frisky, playful banter with her male colleagues. If a man was into pumping iron she remarked on how big his arms looked. If he was trying to take off a few pounds she told him he was looking buff. She admired their new neckties. She even laughed at their bad jokes. The squad room was the land of opportunity. Des was not above a little flirting if it meant she could find a loving home for a healthy, neutered male tabby. A number of the single guys had indeed fallen prey to her charms, adopting one of her strays in the tumid hope that Des would follow up with a visit. No chance. She did not do house calls. As for the happily married ones, they were afraid to so much as make eye contact with her. The word was out: Get too friendly with Desiree Mitry and you get stuck with a feral cat.
The hand-lettered sign that one of them had stuck on the wall of her cubicle said it all: CAT GIRL FROM HELL.
By eight Cat Girl was parked at her desk, hard at work. At age twenty-eight, Desiree Mitry was one of the youngest Major Crime Squad lieutenants in the state of Connecticut. And one of only three who were women. Of those three women, Des was the only one who also happened to be black. This made her the state police’s prized poster girl, its great non-white hope. Des also had pull. She had major pull.
Des had the Deacon behind her.
This made her a magnet for resentment from some white officers. Up to and including her district commander, Capt. Carl Polito, who belonged to the so-called Waterbury Mafia—a tightly knit network of Italian American officers who’d been born and raised in the Brass City and who were, in many cases, related to each other. Capt. Polito’s deputy commander, Lt. Angelo Tedone, was his brother-in-law as well as an academy classmate. And the muscle-bound little preener of a sergeant with whom Des had been saddled, Rico “Soave” Tedone, was Angelo’s kid brother.
Soave was infinitely more loyal to the Mafia than he was to Des. There was no doubt in her mind that he believed she’d been handed her lieutenancy strictly because of her color and gender and pull. That he felt he’d deserved it more than she did. And that he would seize any opportunity he could to cut her long, fine legs out from under her. Anything negative about her that came along, Soave passed directly on to his big brother Angelo. Any slip. Any stumble. Anything. She could not trust the little twerp. But she could not get him reassigned either—not without just cause. Otherwise, it would go down on her record that she couldn’t get along with male subordinates. So she put up with him.
She put up with all of them. In many ways, they were just like a gang of little boys who had their own secret club, their own secret handshake and their own fort. And she, Des, was a g-i-r-l. But she could handle it. She
did
handle it—by routinely outperforming them. She’d cut her teeth on rape cases and bombings when she first joined the squad, but now her caseload consisted mostly of homicides. Homicides were her bread and butter. Captain Polito may not have been in her corner, but he was not an idiot. Every district commander was under constant pressure from Hartford to produce. And that’s what Des did. She produced.
Besides, she did not want to go running to the Deacon. Not unless she absolutely had to.
From the moment she sat down at her desk, she was totally focused on her caseload. Nothing interrupted her concentration.
On this morning, Des was zoned in on the Torry Mordarski file. The shooting had attracted considerable media attention. When a young, attractive white woman was found shot to death in the woods, it inevitably did. And, just as inevitably, there was considerable pressure to find her shooter. It had been Des’s top priority for several weeks. She, Soave and up to a dozen uniformed troopers had expended hundreds of man-hours on the search. But it had grown cold. And Des could not accept that.
So she pored over the ongoing investigative report one more time, sifting carefully through the details from beginning to end. The autopsy findings continued to puzzle her. In Des’s experience, when a pretty girl died violently it was about sex. Always. But Torry was clean. No traces of semen. No vaginal secretions. No bruises or abrasions. No bites. No saliva. No scratches. No tissue or blood under her nails. No hairs not her own. No one else’s fingerprints were found on her skin. There was no evidence of human contact whatsoever. When toxicology had come through a few days later, it showed no trace of drugs or alcohol in the dead girl’s system.
A botched robbery attempt? Not a possibility. The first troopers on the scene had found her purse on the front seat of her 1987 Isuzu sedan, which had been parked nearby in a gravel parking area. There had been ninety-seven dollars and credit cards in her wallet. And no other discernible tire marks in the gravel.
No one had seen or heard a thing. The body had been discovered by a jogger early the following morning. Time of death was estimated to be between midnight and one A.M.
After a painstaking search of the primary crime scene, technicians had recovered one .38 caliber slug embedded in the base of a tree eight feet behind the victim. Based on the trajectory of the entrance and exit wounds—the shot had entered her frontal lobe from above, angled sharply downward through the temporal lobe and exited through the cerebellum—it appeared that she had been seated while the shooter had been standing. A laboratory examination of the twists on the slug yielded characteristics consistent with it having been fired by a Smith and Wesson .38 caliber revolver. No similar markings had been found on any .38 slugs recovered in any other major crimes listed in the computer’s database. Nor was there a record of any killings of a similar nature that had gone unsolved in the state in the past three years.
A search through the victim’s car revealed a few fibers caught in the wheel hub of the spare in her trunk. The fibers were a coarse wool-nylon blend typically used for inexpensive blankets. No blanket had been found at the scene, but a few matching blanket fibers were found snagged on twigs on the ground near the body. The underbrush and dead leaves adjacent to the body appeared to have been flattened, consistent with a blanket having been laid across them. It was Des’s belief that Torry had come to the Reservoir with the intention of meeting a man she knew. She had carried the blanket from her car into the woods and stretched out on it. Instead of joining her, he had shot her. Then he had taken the blanket with him because it might contain traces of his hair or semen from previous trysts.
Her killer had been careful. But he had left one piece of transient evidence behind—a man’s partial shoe print had been discovered in the damp earth next to Torry’s body. A plaster cast of the impression had been made. The pattern of the sole was consistent with that of a Vibram sole used on work boots made by numerous manufacturers. The depth and length of the impression indicated that the wearer had weighed between 180 and 200 pounds and wore a size eleven or twelve shoe. Based on this information a common formula was applied to yield the wearer’s probable height—in this case, six foot two. But Des had never placed much stock in this formula. She felt it misled an investigator just as often as it proved helpful. There were, after all, plenty of short men around who were overweight and had big feet.
She had not released the shoe print information to the media. Nor had she revealed that two of the primary crime scene technicians had come down with a vicious case of poison ivy. One of them had experienced such a severe outbreak that he’d gone to see his doctor, who had prescribed betamethasone dipropionate in cream form. On a hunch, Des had canvassed the area’s clinics and drug stores for any adult males who might have sought similar treatment or medication in the days immediately following the murder. The search had proven fruitless.
Torry Mordarski had worked two jobs—cashier at an Ames in Waterbury and barmaid at the Purple Pup, a roadhouse on the outskirts of Meriden. She’d had male admirers at both places—the Purple Pup’s owner, Curtis Wilkerson, and her immediate supervisor at Ames, Wade Stephenson. She had spurned both of them. However, each man could account for his whereabouts at the time of the shooting. Wilkerson was behind the bar at the Pup. Stephenson had gone to a microbrewery in Willimantic with three friends, where they remained until closing at 2:00 A.M. Wilkerson had a gun permit—for a Baretta .9 mm semi-automatic. Stephenson had none. Neither man had a police record.
The crime scene technicians had scoured Torry Mordarski’s apartment for evidence, but the search had turned up nothing. No trace of a man was found there. Not even in the girl’s vacuum cleaner bag. In fact, her apartment was uncommonly free of personal effects. She’d kept no address book, no letters, no photographs. There were no business cards, no scraps of paper with phone numbers scrawled on them. They did find bank statements and cancelled checks. She’d had a checking account with Fleet Bank that held a current balance of $271.16. No savings account. She’d had a Visa card that she used sparingly—to buy gasoline at the Amoco minimart down the street or toys and clothing at Ames, where she enjoyed an employee discount. She had never fallen behind on any of her payments. And currently owed nothing. Her wardrobe was modest and casual. She owned no furs and no jewelry of any value. In fact, she owned nothing that cost more than a hundred dollars. A check of her phone records revealed a handful of toll calls—to the Ames in Waterbury—but no long-distance calls whatsoever.
Des had started to think Torry Mordarski had had no life at all. Until she’d knocked on the door of Torry’s next-door neighbor, Laura Burt, who turned out to be the dead woman’s closest friend. And Des’s most valuable source of information.
It was from Laura Burt that Des learned that Torry had dropped out of high school in New Britain when she’d gotten pregnant with Stevie. Torry’s mother had not spoken to her since, according to Laura. Laura was reluctant to volunteer why—but one look at Stevie’s dusky coloring gave Des a pretty good idea. She sent Soave to talk to the mother, figuring she’d be more candid with a white officer. She was. She told him that Torry’s ex-husband, Tyrone Dionne, was “ghetto trash.” Dionne’s own family likewise had little use for him—he was presently serving time in North Carolina for armed robbery. Neither the Dionnes nor the Mordarskis would consider taking even temporary custody of the boy. It was, Des felt, quite deplorable. Only Laura Burt, who’d frequently baby-sat for him, seemed at all concerned about what would happen to him. Des referred her to the Connecticut Department of Children and Families, the agency that would be charged with placing him in a foster home.
Whoever killed Torry Mordarski had also destroyed the life of an innocent child. That was one reason why the case bothered Des so much.
Soave had worked the North Carolina angle. There was a possibility that Torry’s killing had been a reprisal by a criminal associate of her ex-husband’s. Someone he had cheated out of money or ratted out in exchange for a reduced sentence. But neither the arresting officer nor the prosecuting attorney could offer any encouragement in that direction. Tyrone Dionne was not known to operate with a crew. He had not given evidence against anyone. There were no vultures circling him. He was a loner.
Des, meanwhile, had kept after Laura Burt. Even induced her to adopt Sir Mix-a-Lot, a long-haired adult male. It was Laura, with extreme reluctance, who finally turned Des on to the boyfriends. They were older men, married men. Laura suspected that some money had changed hands, although she insisted that Torry was not a prostitute. Torry had never had more than one of them at a time. And she had never told Laura their last names.
Laura knew them only as Al, Dominick and Stan.
Al and Dominick had been somewhat careful. Just not
real
careful. They had been worried about their wives, not the law. Al had bought Torry a new sofa bed. Laura, who was home during the day, had let in the deliverymen. They were from Bob’s Discount Furniture, she recalled. By tracking down the delivery invoices and matching them to Torry’s address, Des was able to determine that the sofa bed had been purchased by Albert Marducci, the embattled state legislator from Waterbury. Al Marducci was already under fire for having been stopped twice for DWI in the last six months, the second time after leaving a strip club. Des had shown the legislator the courtesy of questioning him at his office, rather than his home, so as not to humiliate him in front of his wife. Yet she still found him to be belligerent and deceitful. He claimed he had never heard of Torry Mordarski. He claimed he had never bought a sofa bed at Bob’s. The man was pure sleaze. He had even busted a move on her—invited Des out on his boat for a little nude sunbathing some weekend.