The man looked at Harvath like he was crazy.
“Go ahead,” said Harvath. “Take a deep breath. It can be a tough odor to detect. Let’s just be one hundred percent sure before we rule it out.”
The man threw it back at him. “Blow me.”
“She can’t hear you,” Harvath said, pointing down at the tarp. “She has no ears. Plus, she’s kind of dead.”
Cordero could see her partner’s blood pressure rising just by watching his face. He was overprotective and had a short fuse. She’d seen him get rough with suspects and even occasionally other officers. Harvath, on the other hand, seemed eerily patient and willing to goad his opponent into making an emotional mistake. Either way, she didn’t need these two bulls going at it, especially over her. It was becoming clear that if they couldn’t play nice, they’d need to be separated.
She was just about to suggest a few minutes to cool off when one of the patrol officers came down the dock talking over his radio. A few feet from the tarp, he stopped. Cordero recognized him and waited until he was done speaking.
“Officer Kaczynski, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. It’s good to see you again, Detective.”
Cordero turned to Harvath and said, “Officer Kaczynski was first on scene. When the dive team brought up the body, he made the tentative ID.” Looking at the patrolman, she stated, “Isn’t that correct?”
“I’ve arrested her multiple times; twice last month. Her name is Kelly Davis.”
“All for prostitution?” Harvath asked.
“Prostitution, drugs, petty theft. It’s all tied together.”
“Is there anyone who may have seen her with our potential killer last night?”
The young officer nodded. “That’s the call I just took on the radio. Ms. Davis ran with a couple of other girls. They like to work the tourist areas downtown, but all three of them live in the Old Colony public houses on East Ninth Street. Southie.”
“Southie?” said Harvath.
“South Boston,” Cordero explained. “It’s a working-class neighborhood.”
“These girls are meth heads, you know, tweakers. They stay up for days at a time,” Kaczynski continued. “When I saw that Kelly was the victim, I radioed a couple of guys on patrol and asked them to keep a lookout for her pals.”
“And they found them?” Harvath asked.
“Yes, sir. One admits she even saw Kelly with a john last night.”
“How about the other one?”
“That’s the thing. The other one was giving both officers a hard time. I know my rights. I don’t have to talk to you. She was a real piss-and-vinegar type—right up until her friend started describing the john that Kelly was last seen with. Suddenly, Ms. Piss and Vinegar was as quiet as a church mouse and as white as a sheet. The officers think she definitely knows the guy. I figured you detectives would want to hear this right away.”
“He’s not a detective,” Cordero’s partner piped up, glaring at Harvath.
“Leave it alone, Sal,” Cordero replied, and then asked the patrolman, “Are the two officers still with the ladies right now?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Kaczynski. “Over by Park Street Church near the Granary Burying Ground.”
“Tell them to hold on to them until we get there.”
“Yes, ma’am. Will do.”
As the patrolman walked away, Cordero turned to her partner. But before she could say anything, he offered, “I’ll process the scene here. I want Popeye the Sailor out of my sight anyway. Take him with you to visit the Southie lasses.”
“Are you sure?”
“Go,” he replied. “Before I change my mind.”
CHAPTER 31
“When we get there,” said Cordero as they approached Park Street Church, “let me do the talking. Unless, of course, you also have interrogation experience.”
Harvath held up his thumb and forefinger close together. “One or two. But I’m lost without jumper cables and a bucket of water. Why don’t you do the talking when we get there.”
She was starting to believe there might be more truth to the remarks he made than he let on.
They parked in front of the Orpheum Theatre and played dodge-car crossing Tremont Street. Harvath had never seen a tweaker in person before. In fact, the only reason he was familiar with the term was because a buddy of his at Taser had told him about them. Before the company learned to lock their dumpsters up, local tweakers used to dumpster-dive behind their facility and scavenge parts.
Twitching for days on end with tons of energy and fine-motor skills, they had figured out how to, sort of, rebuild Tasers from the broken and discarded parts they had found in order to resell them on the street for drug money.
The Frankenstein devices they created were not only incredibly unreliable, but also incredibly dangerous. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating, albeit scary accomplishment.
Harvath had seen pictures of the ravages meth could visit upon people. Some of the before-and-after photos of young women were particularly heartbreaking. Not only did the drug rob them of their good looks, but it rapidly aged them, with some looking like they were seniors when they were only in their twenties and thirties. It was described as a high so irresistible that it hooked nearly everyone on the first try.
Despite being exposed to them all the time growing up in Southern California, Harvath had never been a drug guy. The only better-living-through-chemistry he allowed himself was from the three B’s—beer, bourbon, or the occasional Bordeaux. You always knew what came out of a bottle. Not many alcohol companies got nailed for “stepping” on their product.
Walking up to the two ladies from South Boston, Harvath immediately noticed their overabundance of nervous energy. It had been drilled into him to look at people’s hands and they were both doing oddball things. If he had been working a rope line as a Secret Service agent, he would have bounced both of these two. One was scratching her thighs raw while the other touched the tips of the fingers of her right hand to her thumb and then reversed the process and did it again.
The closer he got, the more makeup he noticed they were wearing. Skin lesions were a nasty side effect of the drug and they were both covering up some big problems. You’d have to be out of your mind to pay either one of these women for sex. He could only imagine what their teeth looked like. “Meth mouth,” as it was known, was a rapid decay of tooth and gum and a hallmark of crystal meth abuse.
Cordero introduced herself to the two officers and then to the two young women. They appeared to be in their mid-twenties. One was tall, but skinny as a rail, with stringy blond hair. Her name was Agnes. She looked like a local college girl who gone away on spring break, partied every night with no sleep, and was now home looking for the party to continue.
The other girl, Brittany, was shorter and still had a little bit of meat on her. Now that Harvath could see her up close, he realized her skin wasn’t that bad. She just wore a lot of makeup because that was her style. She had hair blacker than Cordero’s—undoubtedly made possible only by some very serious dye. She complemented it with black nail polish, black lipstick, and lots of eyeliner and mascara. It was the full-on Goth look and she had a short black miniskirt, tight black top, and vintage flea market jewelry to match.
Right away, it was obvious that Agnes was the talker. She was so loquacious Cordero almost couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Normally, standard procedure with witnesses was to split them up so they didn’t pollute each other’s stories. Agnes, though, was the only one who had seen the deceased with her customer last night. Brittany hadn’t seen anything and Harvath favored keeping them together. Cordero had explained what she was going to ask and he wanted to study how Ms. Piss and Vinegar reacted.
Cordero was amazing. Not only was she an excellent interrogator, she was also a pro at understanding the Southie dialect, much of which was like a foreign language to Harvath’s ear—all except the F-word, which this young woman dropped with abandon. She used it as a verb, a noun, an adverb, and an adjective. Not even in the military had Harvath heard someone’s speech so peppered with it. Cordero was old-school and didn’t care for it and warned the young woman to clean it up. To her credit, she did, though it was obviously difficult for her and she still slipped up from time to time.