“Hey, what’s that smell?” Elaine Books jerked her head back. “Oh God, oh God.”
“Stay back,” Delion said. He turned to Dane. “Keep them here, all right?”
But it was too late. Before Dane could force Elaine Books and Nick Jones back out of the apartment, Nick saw two white legs sticking out from behind the living room sofa, a really pretty sofa, all white with even whiter pillows strewn across it. All over that white were dark stains, as if someone had dipped a hand into a paint can and just sprinkled the paint everywhere.
“Oh no,” Nick said. “It’s not paint, is it?”
“No,” Dane said, “it’s not. Don’t move from this spot, you understand me?”
Delion went behind the sofa and knelt down. When he straightened, he looked hard, sad, and angry.
“I think we’ve found Valerie Striker. She’s been garroted. I’d say she’s dead a couple of days at least.” He nodded to Dane, who herded the two women back into the hallway. He heard Delion on the phone, speaking to the paramedics.
Elaine Books leaned against the corridor wall and started crying. “I’m so sorry,” Nick said. “She was your friend. I’m so very sorry. I liked her. She was kind to me, despite-despite how I look.” Very slowly, Nick drew the woman into her arms and let her cry on her shoulder.
Nick looked up at Dane. “He killed her. He must have seen her, worried that when she found out about Father Michael Joseph’s murder, she’d remember seeing him. He either knew who she was or he found out, came here sometime during the night on Sunday and killed her. That’s exactly what happened, isn’t it?”
Dane nodded. “Yes, that’s probably right.”
Elaine Books continued to weep, softly now, her head still on Nick Jones’s shoulder.
Valerie Striker was dead. Chances were that she hadn’t seen a thing, but that hadn’t mattered. She couldn’t tell them anything now. Nick closed her eyes as she rocked Elaine Books against her and thought, I’m the one who’s supposed to be dead, not her. If only she’d waited for the cops, she would have remembered to tell them about seeing Valerie Striker, and they would have come here, maybe before the killer did, and they could have saved her.
It was her fault.
EIGHT
“She can’t stay in the shelter,” Dane said. “Do you have a safe house where we can stash her?”
“Yeah,” Delion said, “but I don’t know if the lieutenant will approve it for her. There’s no real threat of danger here.”
“You’re wrong, Delion. When our guy sees this description-and I bet he will-he’ll try to find out about the person who gave it, knowing that if he’s ever caught, she can identify him. She’d be a sitting duck at the shelter.”
“If she would just tell us her real name and address, we could send her little ass home.”
Dane looked over toward the small kitchen where Ms. Nick Jones stood waving a tea bag in a paper cup of hot water, the frayed cuffs of her thick red sweater falling over her fingers. He could still see the tear streaks on her cheeks.
“Look, Dane,” Delion said, “you’re a cop. You know that since she isn’t a teenage runaway, it means she’s running from something or someone. That, or she’s a druggie-that’s the most likely. You notice she’s wearing all those sweaters? She’s probably hiding needle tracks on her arms.
“Maybe she’s wearing them to keep warm. Whatever, it’s unfortunate because our Ms. Jones seems bright and speaks well. She’s well educated. It was just her bad luck that she was in Saint Bartholomew’s on Sunday night, that is, if you believe the story she told us about why she was actually there.”
Dane didn’t say anything, kept looking at Nick Jones. “She has very nice teeth,” he said. “Good dental hygiene.”
“Yeah, I noticed. And that means she hasn’t been on the street all that long. What? A couple of weeks? Not a month, I’ll bet. She doesn’t smell and her clothes aren’t stiff with dirt.”
“No.”
“All right, Dane, I’ll ask the lieutenant. Now, we’ve got four murders, all possibly committed by the same perp. We have a pretty fair description of him. Now we need to figure out why he did this.”
“Well, we think he meant to do the first three-the old woman, the gay activist, and finally, my brother. Valerie Striker was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Yes, and once we have the why, we’ll have him. Let’s go meet with the chief, tell him about Valerie Striker. It could have been one of her johns that killed her.”
“You don’t believe that for a second.”
“All right, I don’t.”
“If the ME pins her murder down to sometime Sunday night, then we know with about ninety-eight percent certainty that the same guy killed her,” Dane said. “You go see the chief. I’ll speak some more with Ms. Jones.”
“You know, I’ve always wondered why folks can’t come up with better aliases. Jones, for God’s sake.”
“Nick is her real first name though,” Dane said. “But it’s not short for Nicole.”
“You picked up on that lie as well, huh?”
“Oh yes. I wonder what it really is.”
A few minutes later, Dane strolled over to the small kitchen. The single donut was gone. Finally tossed? Or was Ms. Jones so hungry that she ate it? He hoped she hadn’t. From the looks of that critter, it would have given a buffalo food poisoning.
“Would you like some peanuts? Inspector Delion tells me that’s the snack of choice here.”
“But I just saw one of the men snag a donut that looked like it died last week.”
Good, she hadn’t eaten it.
“At least the Medical Examiner is close. Peanuts?”
She shook her head and kept waving the tea bag in the water.
“It’s nearly black.”
“I like tea strong,” she said, but pulled out the bag and tossed it in the open trash bin. “It’s hard to get really strong tea unless you do it yourself.”
“You know I’m Father Michael Joseph’s brother, Dane Carver. There’s something else, something I don’t think you’ve caught on to yet. I’m also a special agent with the FBI.”
She dropped the cup. It splattered hot tea all over her, him, and the Virginia peanuts.
“Oh no, look what I’ve done. Oh no.” She was grabbing paper towels, wiping him down, finally on her knees, wiping up the floor. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” he said, pulled off another paper towel and joined her. “It’s all right, Nick. I’m the one who’s sorry.”
“Not your fault,” she said, staring down at that towel wet through with tea now.
“Hey,” an inspector said, coming around the corner, “who took that last donut?”
Dane laughed, just couldn’t help it. She didn’t.
“No can do,” Lieutenant Purcell said, standing in her doorway. “No clear and present danger to her. You know that our budget’s stretched to the limit, Delion. I’m sorry, but she’s on her own.”
Dane wondered if it was because she was homeless, and had less worth than someone who had a job and a bit of standing in the community. He didn’t say anything. He’d already known the answer would be no and he’d also known what he was going to do.
He hadn’t let Nick Jones out of his sight. She looked, quite simply, like she was ready to run. After he left the lieutenant, he went back to the small kitchen. She was still wiping up tea from the counter. “Enough,” he said, took her arm, and guided her over to Delion’s desk. Delion was in the lieutenant’s office. Dane could see him gesticulating through the glass windows. He sat her down, came down beside her on his haunches. “Okay, tell me why you freaked out when I told you I was FBI.”
“It was just a surprise, that’s all. Your brother is a priest. You’re at the other end of the spectrum.”
She’d had time to come up with an answer, not a bad one either.