Music kicked in. Haley stood, set the headset on the table, rubbed his face. A man worn past the tread. The studio door admitted a large and brightly dressed woman. She gave Haley’s hand a squeeze. He appeared in the anteroom seconds later, khakis, sandals, sweater, hands in his pockets.
“I’ll do anything if it helps find the animal who hurt Teesh.”
Through the glass I saw the woman put on the headphones, pull the microphone close. She took a deep breath, a big fake smile rising to her face.
“This is Pearlie Winston, queen of the funky scene…”
Haley reached to a switch, killed the speakers.
“Pearlie’s heart is broken, but she sounds like she’s about to break into song. It’s tough. Taneesha was like my daughter, everybody’s daughter. She was…w-was…”
“Tell me about Ms. Franklin’s job,” Harry said. “At your own pace.”
Haley nodded, composed himself.
“We’re a small station, Detective. When Pearlie’s not on the air, she’s selling advertising time. When I’m not broadcasting or managing things, I’m the electrician. Teesh was our reporter, but sometimes wrote ads.”
“You’re probably not ripe for a takeover by Clarity Broadcasting,” I said. Clarity owned Channel 14, Dani’s employer.
Haley’s eyes darkened. “Everything Clarity touches turns to garbage-profitable garbage, but soulless.”
“Ms. Franklin worked here how long?” Harry said.
“Started as an intern two years back. That girl had boundless enthusiasm.”
“Did she want to be a DJ or whatever, on the air?”
“She did the midnight show for several months. But talking between tunes was too tame for Teesh. Her dream was to be a reporter. Teesh had the aggression, the drive. She just needed more polish. I moved her into our tiny news department. You would have thought I’d given her a job on CNN.”
Harry said, “Was she working a story last night?”
“Not an assignment. But Teesh was always looking to break that big story, find something no one was supposed to know, putting the light on it. I told her we didn’t have money for investigations. But she thought of it as training, kept at it on her own time.”
“Self-propelled,” I said.
“Know who she wanted to be like? That investigator on Channel 14, uh, I can’t recall names…blonde, big eyes, kind of in-your-face, but sexy with it…”
“Uh, Danbury?” I said.
Haley snapped his fingers. “DeeDee Danbury. Teesh spoke with Ms. Danbury a few times, asked questions. Teesh called her a kick-ass lady with a mind all her own.”
“I’ve heard that about Ms. Danbury,” I said.
CHAPTER 4
We left the station and headed for Forensics. We walked into the main lab and found deputy director Wayne Hembree sprawled across the white floor, tie flapped over his shoulder, glasses askew on his black, clock-round face, one bony arm beneath the small of his back, the other flung above his head.
“I’ve been shot,” he moaned.
“Who did it?” I asked. Detectives get paid to ask insightful questions like that.
Hembree nodded to a far side of the room where an older guy in a neon-bright aloha shirt waved a dummy gun and grinned like he’d just discovered orgasm pills.
“Not Thaddeus over there,” Hembree said. “From his angle the momentum would have flung me the opposite direction. My arm wouldn’t have been beneath my back, but across my belly.”
I grabbed Hembree’s hand, pulled him up. He brushed down his lab coat, made notes on a clipboard, then told the shooter they’d act it out from another angle in a few minutes. The Thaddeus guy flicked a salute, faked a couple shots at Harry and me, retreated from the room. Hembree scanned a report and gave us the preliminaries.
“Reads like a robbery gone bad. The car stops at the intersection, the perp runs from the shadows, busts the driver’s side window, takes over.”
“Why the torture?” I asked.
“Motivation’s not my bailiwick,” Hembree said. “Maybe she said something that set him off.”
“Must have been a hell of a something,” I said.
Harry had been listening quietly. He stepped up.
“I got something feels off, myself. How long had she been dead when your people got there, Bree?”
“Under a half hour, I’d bet. Your trucker saw the perp jump out when he arrived. Why?”
“The driver’s side window, the busted one, was windward,” Harry said. “Close, anyway.”
Hembree frowned. “I’m not getting you.”
“I stuck my finger down on the floor. There was over two inches of rain there. I mean, it was raining like hell last night, but four inches an hour?”
Hembree frowned. “Rain fell in moving pockets, the storm-cell effect. If a string of cells went over that location, three or more inches an hour is possible. But a location a mile away might get an inch or less.”
“Makes sense,” Harry said. “One less thing to think about.”
I heard my ring tone, grabbed the phone from my pocket. The call was from the front desk at headquarters.
“This is Jim Haskins, Carson. You and Harry are leads on that robbery-murder last night, right?”
“Ours. What’s up?”
“Got a woman here at the desk who brought in her elderly mother. Mama’s wrought up, mumbling about a purse, an ATM, and a longhair in her car. Thought you’d want to know.”
Harry and I arrived twelve minutes later, the wonder of a siren and flashing lights. The daughter was Gina Lovett, forty or thereabouts, plump and bespectacled. Her mother was Tessie Atkins, late sixties, nervous. She kept her arms tight to herself, as if cold.
“What happened, Ms. Atkins?” Harry asked as we sat.
She tugged at her sleeve. “I had been visiting a friend at the hospital and passed the bank on my way home. I needed to pay bills. Maybe it wasn’t smart at that hour…”
“What hour, ma’am?” I asked.
“Almost midnight. It was late, but there was a restaurant next door, a fast-food place. It made me feel safer. I pulled in and saw something white to the side of the lot. At first I thought it was a cat or some poor animal run down by a car. But then I saw it was a purse. I thought someone’s purse fell out by accident. It happened with my wallet once in the lot at Bruno’s. Some nice Samaritan took it inside the store. I thought…”
“You’d repay the favor,” Harry said.
“I pulled next to it and got out to pick it up. The next thing I knew a hand was across my mouth and I was back in the car. It was a man with all kinds of hair, bad smelling. He got down in the passenger’s side, on the floor, and said if I didn’t perform to expectations, he had a gun.”
“Perform to expectations?” I said.
She nodded, arms crossed, shaking fingers clasping her shoulders. “He made me take six hundred dollars from my account and three hundred from my two credit cards. It’s my limit. I was too shook up to drive. He drove south of Bienville Square a few blocks and jumped out. I just sat there and cried until my hands stopped shaking. I don’t know how I got home.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“He took my driver’s license. He said if I told the police, he was going to come to my house.”
Ms. Atkins looked away. The daughter spoke up.
“I stopped by Mama’s this morning to pick up some sewing. She wouldn’t look at me and I knew something was wrong. She finally told me.”
We spoke to Ms. Atkins for a few more minutes, honed in on details, what few had registered beyond her fear. She consented to have her car checked by Forensics. Though sure the perp had made his threats just to keep her quiet, we made a quick call to the uniform commander in her district, requested his troops keep a tight watch on Ms. Atkins’s house the next few days.
“Bait,” Harry said, setting his can of soda on the hood of the cruiser, leaning back against its fender. “He used a purse as bait.”