“Of course,” he says. “It might not be until tomorrow. I’m already gone for the day.”
“Maybe you could go back to the office and take care of this? Time is of the essence.”
He lets out a huff of consternation. “I guess so,” he says. “Should I call you on this number?”
“That would be fine.”
After driving back from the medical examiner’s office, I zone out in my cubicle for a few minutes, eyes closed, resting my head in my hands. Then I call Charlotte again and make sure she’s all right. She says she is, but adds that what happened is just beginning to sink in.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”
“Don’t even say that word. Sleep. I’m gonna come see you later. Tell Ann not to worry-I’ll make sure I don’t have a tail.”
We laugh together, and then Bascombe comes up behind me.
“Gotta go,” I tell her.
It takes ten minutes to bring the lieutenant up to speed on the case, and another ten to relate the highlights of my New Orleans trip. He’s intrigued by the story Bourgeois told about the envelopes, annoyed that we conducted the interview while a drugged prostitute was tied up and bleeding down the hall, and uninterested in Gene Fontenot’s protestations of innocence in the Fauk confession. I leave out his admission of guilt in the recent case.
“So what are you doing now?”
“Waiting,” I say. “The crime lab’s supposed to be getting back to me on the prints, and I’ve got the knife dealer checking his receipts from the gun shows.”
“Have you briefed Aguilar?”
“I was just about to.”
“Well, do it.”
When I poke my head over his cubicle wall, there’s no sign of Aguilar, but the photos from my house, this morning’s crime scene, are spread in a semicircle. The forced back door, the splintered bathroom entry, washed-out flash photography of Carter’s injuries, and of the bruising on Charlotte’s face. The knife. I pull the last one from the stack. If Carter was right about the man wearing gloves, then the prints on the handle probably belong to someone else. If the expert’s speculation is right, they’re bound to be from the same woman whose dried blood was under the grip scales. The coffin handle. I turn the photo so that the point aims down. The stag handles are bone-colored with rough furrows of brown. The prints would have come from the smooth parts on either side of the exposed tang.
“Detective.”
I turn to find Eric Castro in the cubicle entrance, a report clutched in both hands like he’s afraid of it getting away.
“You have the fingerprint results?”
He nods. “The criminal databases came back with nothing.”
“Figures.” I rub my eyes with the heel of my palm, suddenly tired.
“But. .” he says. “When we ran them against the immigration database, we got a hit.”
“Give me that.”
I snatch the report away, scanning the page while Castro peers over my shoulder. The original check went through HPD to the Sheriff’s Department and from there to DPS. I flip the page and find the immigration results, complete with Green Card photos of a fair-skinned, blue-eyed blonde in her twenties and a full set of prints.
“The name, the name-”
Castro points to a line near the top, then smiles. “How you’re supposed to pronounce that, I don’t know.”
I say the words out loud: “Agnieszka Oliszewski.”
The Polish grad student who lived with Joy Hill, the one who had a relationship with Dr. Hill’s husband. What were her prints doing on the handle of the knife? What was her blood doing under the scales?
Aguilar stands on one side of the red door, hand on the butt of his pistol, and I take the other. My second knock goes unanswered, so I try the bell. The chime sounds inside. I listen for movement, my ear close to the door.
“Police,” I say, pounding a third time.
The house is on Sheridan a block off of W. Holcombe, the opposite side of Kirby from where Dr. Hill lives. Quaint single-family homes, mostly postwar construction evoking classic styles, with the occasional duplex conversion. Agnieszka Oliszewski’s name is on the lease for the bottom unit of the two-story duplex, with the top unit still for rent. The original brick is clotted with recent white paint, the fake shutters black as oil. In the yard, a Realtor’s clear plastic display box contains a few damp flyers with interior photos and a monthly rent that suggests Oliszewski’s financial situation improved after she left Hill’s house.
I bend down, conscious of a twinge in my leg, and take a peek through the brass mail slot. Some bills and a couple of red Netflix envelopes lie in a pile on the carpet.
“Maybe she’s not home,” I say.
We exchange a look.
We take the stairs up to the vacant unit and give the door a try, despite the key box hanging from the knob. This time Aguilar stoops down, pushing the mail slot open with his finger. He shakes his head.
“Empty,” he says. “No furniture or nothing.”
“Let’s go around back.”
Before we left downtown, Aguilar looked up the address online, pulling up a Google satellite map of the property. Scouting the lay of the land. Some kind of outbuilding-a shed, a one-car garage-screened the yard on one side, leaving just a sliver of green grass before the neighbor’s fence encroached. We follow the driveway around, a melting glacier of concrete chips overrun by a sea of grass and weeds. The outbuilding, a wood-framed single stall garage, leans slightly with a mold-black line of water damage reaching about a foot high. I peer through the grimy glass window and see nothing but grease stains on the slab and a jumble of rusted rakes and shovels in one corner.
“Check this out,” Aguilar says.
Just inside the fence that separates the driveway and the yard, a pale blue Vespa scooter rests on its kickstand, the tan leather seat speckled with flecks of dried mud. Pinned under the front tire, a blue tarp meant to protect the machine from weather twists gently across the grass.
I reach over the fence to unlatch the gate.
“What’s that sound?” I ask.
A low, rumbling murmur, like a distant engine or maybe a washing machine cycle.
Following the noise, we move over the lawn toward a screened porch where the second level overhangs the rear entrance. A flimsy old structure of wood frame and wire mesh. The screen door springs squeak softly as I pull. Inside, situated against the exterior wall of the house, there’s a teak-slatted octagonal hot tub. The cover rests slightly askew. I can hear the water bubbling like a slow boil.
Without a word we step to either side of the tub. On my signal, Aguilar dons a pair of gloves and draws the cover open another foot or two.
I get my first hint of the smell. The wet heat on my face.
The water churns dark and polluted, and a body bobs toward me, the skin veiny and translucent but pinkish purple, a lock of yellow-white hair swirling from the head.
A freckled shoulder, the spinal ridge, and the same half-crescent punctures I remember from Simone Walker’s corpse.
I step back as the body rolls in the water.
Her mouth is set in a snarl of pain, the glassy blue eyes glistening. Between her breasts, the sawing, twisting gouge where the bowie knife entered.
Portable lights illuminate the yard as the Crime Scene Unit conducts its grim inventory, a fingertip search of the surrounding area, a catalog of every inch from the birdbath near the back fence to the sun-faded gnome lying facedown in one of the flower beds. The investigators from the ME’S office have given the okay for Agnieszka Oliszewski’s body to be removed, leaving the stretcher team to figure out how best to do it. Meanwhile two fatigue-clad techs from the HPD crime lab prepare for the task of draining the hot tub. Every ounce of water must be sifted for evidence and the tub’s inner walls scrubbed. A still photographer is on hand to snap pictures as needed. A separate videographer gets everything on tape.