The sergeant looked at his steno pad. “The daughter knows her as Keesh. Been with the old man for almost two years.”
“Is she known to the department?”
“Yeah, KTD as Takeesha Falls. Thirty-six. Born in-”
“Priors?”
“Only a shoplift in New York. But-”
“Gotta be half a hooker.”
“No half about it, Mike. Full-on pros in DC and the great commonwealth of Virginia. Like ten times over, in her younger days. And an arrest for armed robbery in Baltimore that was dropped because of her cooperation against her codefendant.”
“Got it. A woman of great principle and dignity. Another fit in Reverend Hal’s fucked-up flock. You got an APB out on Keesh?”
I was face-to-face with the dead man, kneeling at the head of the bed. He didn’t seem to notice my presence. His eyes were shut-as they had probably been at the time of his murder-and rigor still locked the muscles of his jaw. That fact confirmed that he had probably been dead less than thirty hours, but the medical examiner would ascertain that point with greater certainty.
“Yeah. We went with it about an hour ago.”
“She’s had a full day’s jump on us,” I said. “That sucks. Either of them own a car?”
“Nope. Guys are checking Port Authority and the train stations, as well as all her local haunts. As soon as Lieutenant Peterson gives me backup from your team, we start hitting her friends and contacts here.”
“She works other than hustling?”
“Braids hair occasionally. Makes ’em into dreadlocks. That count as work?”
“It’s a look, Sarge.”
“You see some of those pro ballplayers? You can bring them down by their dreads instead of a full-on tackle.”
I reached my right arm in under the mattress. I’d done it enough times that even the ME wouldn’t have a clue I’d been there.
“Keesh got it all, Chapman. All the cash.”
“You know that how?”
“Well, I, uh, the first cops on the scene did exactly what you’re doing, and then I tried my own luck when I got here.”
“Damn it, Sarge.”
“You want me to turn my pockets inside out? You think I’d take-?”
“Don’t wet your pants, Sarge. It’s not the money. I’m just worried about whether all your digging in the box springs rocked the body. This case looks pretty much straightforward. I don’t want to screw it up with postmortem artifacts like bruises on Wilson’s gut ’cause there was a treasure hunt going on beneath him. I don’t want to set Keesh up with a self-defense argument by having her claim he was face-to-face with her, threatening her, so she had to shoot just as his back was turned.”
No one was supposed to touch the body until the medical examiner arrived. But the natural instinct of good cops to look for identification in the clothing of a deceased found in a park or deserted apartment, the curiosity to see whether there were bullet holes or stab wounds that caused the death, or the desire to be the first to find a clue that might solve the crime drove many investigators to break the most basic rules.
“You got a rock crusher here, Chapman. Don’t look to blame me if you can’t nail Keesh for murder. There’ll be fingerprints and DNA of hers all over this pad.”
“She’s been banging the guy for two years, Sarge. Of course Keesh has left junk all over the place. That won’t be dispositive of anything. What’s the daughter’s name?”
“Wilson’s daughter? Angela. Twenty-eight years old. She’s good people. Works as a home health-care aide for an old lady up the block.”
“Is that her wailing?”
“Yeah. I stashed her with the next-door neighbor so you could talk to her. I didn’t want her to leave.”
“Thanks.”
“She’s been howling on and off the whole time. I thought Pops here might actually open his eyes from the commotion. I’d get to her soon if I was you.”
“You would have told me if there was any sign of a gun.”
“None. And neither Keesh nor the deceased had permits.”
“You say Wilson was bagging money for Reverend Hal but he wasn’t known for packing?”
“In this part of town, you couldn’t have a safer job than working for Hal. He’s got an army of ex-cons in his stable, doing all his dirty work, keeping the skeptics in line. Mess with his moneyman and you’re not likely to make it out of church.”
“So Keesh has a history of partnering in at least one armed robbery. She’s a girl who can find her way to an illegal gun,” I said, walking around to the far side of the bed and sliding my hand in again. “And Wilson would have been stupid not to have one.”
“You’re ignoring what I just said about the scuttlebutt on the street. No need.”
“I put it in the category of ‘nice to know,’ Sarge. Maybe he didn’t carry,” I said, pulling open the drawer of his nightstand with a gloved finger, “but my bet is when he was holed up in this dump, he had heat at the ready. Just a matter of finding it.”
“We didn’t do a search.”
“Glad of that,” I said. “We’ll take care of it. Just thinking Keesh would have known where he kept it. Another arrow in her quiver to claim he pulled his own gun on her while he had a load on from the Rémy and she had no choice but to protect herself.”
“You work for the defense team these days?” the sergeant asked.
“Gotta think like the best lawyer money can buy. Best lawyer the Reverend Hal’s missing money can buy, ’cause that’s who Keesh will have.”
My father had taught me most of what I know about investigating a case. He knew-and I had learned firsthand from watching Coop in action-that the point wasn’t just to make an arrest. It was to arrest the right guy and to make sure you got the evidence properly so it held up in the courtroom, no matter who the mouthpiece was for the accused.
“How old was Wilson?” I asked.
“Sixty-six.”
“So maybe she was cheating on him,” I said. “A little more than half his age. Or he thought so and they fought over her possible infidelity.”
“I’m telling you he was sound asleep. What does it matter if they argued before that?”
“May not matter at all if the ME is sure Wilson died right where you found him.”
“You’re just playing ‘worst-case-scenario homicide dick,’ right, Chapman?”
I went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. There were blood pressure pills and Tums-nothing stronger.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” the sergeant asked, standing in the doorway. “Gets to be a senior citizen with some dough to spend, enough to hook up with a broad in her thirties, and he don’t even need Viagra. Wilson’s the man.”
“So much for the idea that you didn’t search the place.”
“Well, the medicine cabinet,” he stammered. “Just wanted to see if he was on heart pills or had any complications like diabetes. The doc will want to know.”
“There’s not a health condition known to medical science, Sarge, that complicates a hollow-point bullet through the cerebral cortex. Don’t juice me.”
“Hey, I didn’t disturb anything. It was a preliminary-”
“You must have thought there would be a few bills stuck to the denture cream,” I said, brushing past the uniformed sergeant to head to the kitchen. “How about in the cookie jar? You stick your nose into that, too?”
“I opened the fridge. Only thing in it was a meal Wilson never got to eat that his daughter cooked for him. My mother had this habit, Chapman, of hiding her extra dough in the freezer when she went upstate on vacation. Figured burglars would never look there.”
“Wouldn’t have worked at my house. The freezer was the most popular spot. Ice cubes never lived to be two days old, once Brian got home from the squad,” I said, pulling open drawers and looking on shelves between cans of soup and packages of ramen noodles.
“Brian was aces, Chapman. Nobody better.”
I played cool to the comment, but truth to tell was that I couldn’t hear it enough. My father had been hero to more victims than I could count, but he was even larger than legend to me.