The Church of the Holy Child Page 6

  “You did the right thing,” I said.

  “Not according to Keith.” Her voice went up an octave and she stood. “He came at me and knocked me down again. He kept asking me why Shirley had left him, like he couldn’t figure it out.” She started pacing the room. “Why had she gone to the Amtrak station, he wanted to know. What was she doing? Where was she going?” Beth stopped and looked at me, her eyes crazy with grief. “I said he should have asked Shirley all that before he killed her. You know what he said?” She started laughing, cackling in a crystal-shattering pitch. “He said he didn’t kill her. He said he was home in bed, asleep.” She kicked a wooden rocking chair onto its back with enough force to splinter a few of its spindles. “That son-of-a-bitch,” she screamed. “He said he didn’t kill my sister.”

  “Beth.” I wrapped my arms around her and held on while she flailed against me.

  “I knew what was happening and I didn’t help her,” she sobbed into my shoulder.

  “She couldn’t have left if you hadn’t taken Brooke.”

  “Left? Is that what you call it?” She pushed me away. “She’s dead. She never left.”

  I looked at the floor at a rare loss for words and let her cry. Knowing too well that guilt like that would stay with her forever. “The best thing you can do now,” I said, “is to make sure Keith is punished.

  “I want that bastard to pay.”

  I took her hand and lifted her chin so that we were face to face. “He will. I promise you. He will.”

  The uniformed cop came through the open front door. “There’s a cruiser here to escort you, Ma’am.”

  Griff stood, motioned the cop back outside and stepped with him onto the front porch.

  “I need to get to the children,” she said.

  I followed her down the hallway and into the bedroom where a bag she’d been packing lay open across a floral comforter.

  She threw in a pair of jeans and then looked at me. “I’ll sell this house if I have to. I need you to prove that he killed her.” She closed the top of the suitcase. “I’ve got to get to the kids,” she said again as though the phrase had become her mantra.

  We left the house and the locks fell into place behind us.

  She turned to me when we’d reached the driveway. “Do whatever you have to, to put him away.”

  “We will, I promise.”

  She was visibly trembling. “Thanks,” she said and touched my arm.

  “Thanks for what?” I asked Griff as we walked toward his car. “Her sister’s dead and she just got beat up by the guy who was let out on bail by our wonderful justice system. Why’s she thanking me?”

  “You made her a promise.”

  I got into the car and pulled the door shut, praying it was one I could keep.

  “Hello, Father. I’m back.”

  “What are your sins?”

  “I told you before. I have no sins.”

  “No one is without sin.”

  “Don’t give me your religious bullshit, Father. That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “To give you an update.”

  “I don’t want your update.”

  “You don’t want to hear it because you can’t do anything with it. And that’s precisely the reason I’m here.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will.”

  “I want you to leave my confessional, now.”

  “Not your call, Father. You have to listen.”

  “My role as a confessor is to absolve you of your sins and provide God’s forgiveness. You’ve said yourself that you’re not here to be forgiven. So there’s nothing I can do for you.”

  “You can listen. And you will.”

  “I don’t want to hear about your desecration of human life.”

  “Is it too much for you? Good. This one was prettier than I expected. She’s not so pretty now. I thought maybe, with her social status she’d be different, but it turned out she was just like all the rest.”

  “She had a child?”

  “Two-year-old daughter.”

  “Where did she leave her?”

  “At a safe house. She said she was planning to send for her later, but I knew better. That was her mistake. She said she thought the child might get hurt.”

  “That doesn’t sound selfish to me. It sounds like love.

  “Love. What do these women know of love? They’ve been beaten black and blue. That’s what love means to them. They don’t know how to love a child.”

  “And weren’t you beaten as well? To that way of thinking, you can’t know love either.”

  “Don’t get philosophic on me. I’m doing what has to be done. To kill is to punish and punishment is necessary. They did it in the Bible. But our society doesn’t give a fuck about the children. They get shipped off to foster homes where the abuse just begins again.”

  “If you kill their mothers, they’ll go to foster homes anyway.”

  “Sooner or later the mothers will see what’s happening. It’s quite simple. If they leave their children behind they die.”

  “How many more?”

  “That depends on how smart they are. And so far, I’ve found that they’re no smarter in Maine than they are in the mid-west.”

  “You’ve done this in other states?”

  “I go where my work takes me. It’s my mission, Father, to save the children. I’m their hero.”

  “You’re no hero. You’re on a path to hell.”

  “Path to hell. Ha, ha, that’s a good one, Father. But it’s the mothers who are on that road. I’m trying to show them a better way.”

  “By killing them?”

  “I do what I have to.”

  “And when will it end?”

  “When I reach my goal.”

  “And that is?”

  “Close enough to touch.”

  TWELVE

  Sunday mornings usually involve lots of sex, coffee and newspapers until at least noontime. So when Griff’s cell rang at nine-thirty I was surprised, and I can speak for both of us when I say, more than a little irritated at the timing. Since the start of our relationship we’ve had precious few hours to lounge in each other’s arms. Maybe that’s what keeps it interesting. When we do get time, we use it to the best of our ability.

  “Jesus,” Griff said into his cell. “I’m on my way.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “That was John. There’s another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Dead woman.”

  “That’s the department’s issue, not ours,” I said. “We don’t investigate murders unless we’re hired to.”

  “Estranged wife, husband with a history of domestic violence, sound familiar?”

  “Yeah, except Shirley Trudeau wasn’t estranged.”

  “Still, similarities. John thinks there could be a connection, wants me to meet him at the scene.” He tossed back the sheet and sat on the edge of the bed. “What the hell’s going on with these guys?”

  “Pack mentality,” I said.

  “Seriously,” he turned to look at me. “Why would a husband kill his wife after the fact?” He picked up his jeans from the floor beside the bed. “John said she’d left him a month ago.”

  “First of all, you’re not sure yet that it’s connected to the Trudeau case and second, contrary to what people think it’s more often a decision not an argument that leads to the worst violence. Seventy-five percent of husbands kill their wives after they leave.”

  “Because they have time to think about it?”

  I nodded. “They’ve lost control and will do whatever it takes to get it back.”

  He walked into the bathroom and then came to the doorway brushing his teeth.

  “So should I assume you’re working this case with John if it grows beyond Shirley Trudeau? You can’t straddle the fence on this one. It’ll be a conflict of interest.”

  He shrugged and walked to the sink, spit toothpaste into
the running water and came back to the doorway. “We’ll run it by Haggerty. See how he feels. Since it’s not looking as cut and dry as he thought. He might welcome the help.”

  “You’re pretty quick to jump ship when John needs you.”

  “I’m not jumping ship. We’ll still be working together just not on paper and I’m confident that you can handle the case for Beth Jones without me. So what’s the problem?”

  I played with the sheet between my fingers asking myself the same question. “I don’t have a problem with you helping John. I just don’t want to enable him. He’s doing a half-assed job at work because he’s drinking. You’re not doing him any favors by bailing him out and allowing the behavior to continue.”

  “You want him to sink or swim?”

  “I think you let nature take its course.”

  Griff sat back down on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor. “If you died and then I lost Allie, I don’t know if I could go on. But if someone reached out and kept me moving, even if they had to carry me for a while, I think with time I’d regain my footing. I’m just trying to throw John a life jacket. He’ll take it off when he’s ready.”

  I dropped my gaze and stared at the geometric pattern on the sheets. “Okay, you’ve sufficiently made me feel like an ass.”

  Griff kissed the top of my head and rumpled my hair. “You want to come with me?”

  “If you’ll have me.”

  “Pull up your bootstraps and let’s get going,” he said.

  We followed church traffic down Brighton Avenue and out toward the old exit eight. Driving from Portland’s Old Port to Riverside was like going from Pottery Barn to Family Dollar. This end of the city was working on a facelift, but still had a ways to go. Recently, stores like Kohl’s and Shaw’s and Staples had moved in and begun to draw a more eclectic clientele than the worn-out Howard Johnsons and the infamous strip club, Mark’s Showplace, both hanging on past their prime.

  When we got to Barlow’s Boys Club, (no shit, that’s what it’s called) John waved us in and we ducked under the police tape to join the milieu of cops processing the scene. Camera shutters clicked behind us at a frenzied pace, the media’s bottom dwellers. I didn’t envy Haggerty’s task of having to choose what to feed them.

  Christian Goodnow, the owner of Barlow’s, stood on the top step of a flight of stairs that led from the lounge’s back door to the alley behind his establishment clutching a Styrofoam cup filled with what 7-Eleven passed off as coffee. He smoothed greasy, black hair from his forehead then rubbed his eye with the back of his hand. “Jesus,” he kept saying over and over. “She was in the fucking dumpster.”

  From her license, her nametag and what we could gather from the owner, the woman lying under the black drape on the asphalt in front of us had transformed herself from an everyday, Karen Westcott, to a one-word caricature, Cleo. The name rang a bell and I knelt beside the body and drew back the tarp, taking in the tie-dye, Lycra leggings, lemon yellow tube-top and silver stilettos. Some people change their name for clout and sophistication or even ethnic anonymity. Karen had gone for the cliché, and nailed it. Griff and John stood over me casting a shadow across her body. I looked up at them. “I know her.”

  “Thought you might,” John said. “Your card was in her wallet.”

  “Legal advice?” Griff asked.

  I nodded. What was left of the right side of her head was matted with hair. The skin over her pulverized, right cheekbone looked like an over ripe peach, black at the edges with dried blood and twice the size of the left. There was a patch of hair missing above her left ear. The front of her once yellow tube top was now maroon and I knew it would be sticky to the touch. I glanced at her hands. They looked clean, maybe even freshly washed.

  “An employee pulled her out of the dumpster,” John said.

  A couple of uniformed cops were inside the lounge’s metal trash receptacle filling plastic bags with last night’s leftovers and I was grateful that I had a PI license and not a PD badge.

  “Husband came in last night,” Goodnow said. “When he saw her, he started to climb on stage. A couple of my guys escorted him outside.”

  “He didn’t come back?” John asked.

  Goodnow shook his head. “You wouldn’t either if you saw my guys.” He gave us both a grin that could have paid a dentist’s salary for a year.

  “What about after work? Did someone walk her to her car?” I asked.

  “Yours truly,” he said. “I take care of my girls.”

  “You got cameras out here?” John nodded toward the back of the building.

  Goodnow smiled, a gold tooth glinted from the corner of his mouth. “Don’t need ‘em. What my clientele want is on the inside. They sure as hell ain’t hangin’ around out here.”

  “Looks like they were last night,” Griff said.

  Goodnow gave him a dirty look. “I was the last to leave and when I did it was quiet. No one in the alley.” He nodded toward Cleo or Karen. “Seven-thirty this morning my prep-cook called me. When he went to dump last night’s grease into the dumpster, there she was. He pulled her out and called me. I told him to call the police. It didn’t look like a robbery. Her tips were still in her bag.”

  John glanced at Griff. “So much for the crime scene.” He turned back to Goodnow. “How long has she worked for you?”

  “’Bout a month. She came in lookin’ like some kid’s soccer mom. I told her she didn’t fit the image. She said if I gave her a chance she would and when she came back the next day, she did.” He laughed. “So I hired her.”

  “You’d never seen her husband before last night?” Griff asked.

  “No sir.”

  “She give you an address when you hired her?”

  “I don’t give out my girls’ addresses.”

  John put his hands on his hips and leaned into Goodnow’s face. “I’m the fucking police, smartass.”

  Goodnow shrugged and kicked the toe of his patent leather loafer against the asphalt. “Thirteen Harwick, right around the corner. Apartment number seven.”

  “You got time to check that out?” John asked. “I’m going to track down her ex.”

  Griff nodded. “Yeah, but I don’t think Haggerty will be too happy about that. He was a little hesitant with the Trudeau case.”

  “The idiot’s got a bunch of rookies out here,” John said. “Let ‘em tag along. Maybe they’ll learn something.”

  John handed Goodnow his card then motioned for Griff to do the same. It wasn’t unusual for a guy like Goodnow to prefer talking to a PI over a cop. John was covering his bases. “Call one of us if you think of anything else.”

  Goodnow stuck the cards in the pocket of his pants and flashed another grin. I wanted to tell him that one was enough. Instead I turned my back and walked to the car beside Griff, leaving John and the crime scene team to do their thing. Gina Wellington and her assistant were just pulling up.

  “What do you think?” I asked Griff.

  “She left an abusive husband and hid somewhere she thought he’d never find her. That much tells me that she’s nothing like what we just saw.”

  “She wasn’t. Bozo said she looked like a soccer mom the first time she came in for a job. That’s how I remember her too. And if I’m right, her husband has money. She just couldn’t get her hands on it.”

  “So what’s the advice for someone in that situation?”

  “Get a job somewhere he’ll never look. Put together enough money to buy a way out. It doesn’t take much. There are plenty of people who help along the way. If there’s a child, leave it with someone safe. As soon as she can, get out of the state then send for the child.”

  “Except that somehow Westcott did know where to look, which means someone tipped him off.”

  “We need her home address, her real one.”

  “First let’s check out lucky number seven,” Griff said.

  I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. Another one was dead. But I couldn’t second-g
uess myself. I felt Griff’s hand on mine and opened my eyes. He looked at me, reading my thoughts.

  “Hundreds of women get killed by their spouses or boyfriends every day, all over this country. The fact that these two happened to have crossed your path means nothing. You’ve given a lot of women ways, means, connections and guts. Don’t forget that.”

  “I won’t, but it’s not just that.”

  “What then?”

  “What are the chances that two husbands committed identical murders?

  “I’m not going there,” he said.

  “I’m surprised your gut hasn’t dragged you kicking and screaming.”

  “It’s trying.”

  “So what are you doing about it?”

  “Maalox,” he said.

  We pulled up alongside a cruiser at the four-story apartment building and got dirty looks from the uniforms inside. “PI business a little slow?” one of them asked, eliciting a chuckle from his partner as they stepped from the car.

  “Detective Stark sent us,” Griff said.

  “Touché.”

  Griff ignored the remark and the four of us climbed each sagging tread that lead from one landing to the next, checking both apartments on each level until we found an upside down seven hanging from a metal door. One of the uniforms knocked.

  When the door opened a Hispanic girl, no more than six-years-old, stared at us from inside. In the crook of her arm sat a tow-headed toddler rubbing something resembling scrambled eggs through her hair. She smiled and took the child’s hand in hers.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Does Karen Westcott live here?” I asked.

  Her eyes widened and she backed away from the door.

  Below us another cruiser stopped beside Griff’s car and two more uniforms hurried up the way we’d come.

  “Is this her baby?” I asked the girl. There was obviously no resemblance between the two children.

  “This is Cassie. I’m babysitting.”

  “Who is Cassie’s mother?” I asked.

  She took another step back and her grip tightened on the child.