“Cameron,” he said. “The name was on Constable Childress’s list.”
Hazel released Baichwell’s file. “You mean Brenda was one of the renters?”
“No…” He fell silent a moment and then got out his cell. “It was another name.”
“Hold on-did it start with a J?”
“Joanne,” said Wingate, remembering immediately. “You saw it on Childress’s fax, right?”
“No… I saw it…” She got out her PNB and opened it to the most recent page. Her hand was tingling. She turned the notebook to him where she’d written down the names on the tenant list at 32 Washington Avenue. He marked the J. Cameron she’d written there, and then lifted his eyes to meet hers.
“Joanne Cameron.”
“We are the same,” she said.
“Paritas is Brenda Cameron’s mother.”
“Oh my God, James. She’s renting the same apartment Eldwin was in for those eight months under the name Clarence Earles. She’s living at the scene of the crime.”
“What she thinks is a crime scene,” Wingate said.
“‘Eternal cry here,’” said Hazel, and he looked at her strangely. “ Cherry Tree Lane was an anagram. Andrew worked it out. This is it, James. Brenda Cameron is the one we’re looking for.”
“Okay… okay, I buy that. So we know who Paritas is then.”
“Yes.”
“But who is Belloque?”
“He’s the boyfriend.”
“Are we sure?”
“I don’t know. But the man I met in Gilmore seemed to care a lot for her. Maybe he wants to prove his worth?”
“Kidnapping and torture is a pretty extreme way to show you’re boyfriend material. Whatever happened to chocolate and roses?”
“Shows what you know about modern courtship.”
He scanned Cameron’s postmortem report again. “Well, I think our next step is to have a discreet conversation with this investigating detective.” He ran his finger across the names at the top of the file. “Detective Dana Goodman caught the case. You want me to see if Toles can track her down for us?”
Hazel put her hand over the cell he was getting ready to dial. “Hold on a second. Did you know this Goodman?”
“Never heard of her, actually. I didn’t make detective until the spring of 2003. That’s when I got my placement at Twenty-one. But there was no Goodman here then.”
“What if she wasn’t here because she blew this very investigation? Paritas-I mean Cameron-and Bellocque obviously feel it was a cock-up. I think we keep this Goodman out of the loop unless we absolutely need her. In fact, I don’t think we should talk to anyone yet.”
“This isn’t our house, Hazel.”
“We’re so close, James. But there’s still something missing, something we need before we can be sure we’re safe talking to the people here.”
“You think there was a cover-up?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ilunga’s a hard-ass, but I don’t think he’s -”
“Do you feel strongly enough about him that you’d go to him right now with what we have? You’re that sure he wouldn’t show you the wrong side of his door?”
He thought about that for a moment. “Well, you’re not sure, and you’re my commanding officer. But what are we doing then?”
She was staring at the Cameron report, flipping pages. “Maybe now that we have a name, we expand the canvass. Start talking to other Camerons. Where’s the father, for instance?”
“If he’s not totally in the dark, then I doubt contacting him will do anything but blow our cover.”
“Fine. Maybe we can get Toles to dig some more for us.”
“For what, though?”
“Find out what happened to Goodman. How the investigation went. Maybe there’s something internal, something that got hushed up -”
“If that’s where this is all leading, we’ve got more on our hands than a misfiled suicide.”
“Do you have the stomach for it if we do?”
“We’ve come this far,” he said.
“That’s what I…” She frowned. “That’s…”
“Skip?”
She spun the file back toward Wingate. She’d idly flipped up two pages while she was thinking aloud, but now she creased them down and held her finger against a name on the third page. “What the hell is that?”
“Cameron’s arrest record.”
“No… that.”
He leaned in. “Oh shit.”
Her finger was on the name Constable D. Goodman. “What’s the likelihood that there was a Constable D. Goodman and a Detective D. Goodman working here pretty much at the same time?”
“Pretty low.”
“So constable in 2001, detective in 2002?”
“There’s nothing strange about making detective, Hazel.”
“But she’s a beat cop with a link to a future suicide and then she makes detective and catches the case? A case that-later- at least two people think was botched?”
He started reading the file again. Cameron had been arrested too many times to count between 1998 and 2002, all misdemeanour drug busts. The ones made in ’98 and ’99 and a couple final arrests in 2002 were by a series of different officers, but almost all of the many dozens that were made in 2000 and 2001 were by Goodman. James locked eyes with Hazel. “So what’s the connection, then? Are we looking for Goodman? You think Goodman murdered Cameron?”
“No, James. This Goodman arrested Brenda Cameron -” she craned her neck to look at the rap sheet “- like eighty times in a two-year period. Never charged her. Just kept her two hours, three hours, overnight once in a while. Why?”
“I don’t know!” He sounded exasperated.
“You can’t stop a dumb kid like this from destroying herself. But you can slow her down. Goodman was getting Cameron off the street. Giving her a cup of coffee and telling her there was help if she wanted it.”
“She was protecting her.”
Hazel could see it in his eyes. He was getting to the place she’d already got to.
“Oh Jesus…”
“Go on…”
“Dana’s a man’s name too, isn’t it?”
“There you go,” she said.
“Bellocque.”
She smiled at him tightly. “It’s not chocolate and roses, is it? Goodman’s working the Corridor and there’s a few of them out there that break his heart. Then he makes detective and next thing he knows, he finds one of them in the drink. Comes up a suicide, he’s not happy, and he’s still working the case. He must have pissed your boss off pretty bad to get turfed, too.”
“Why’d he try for detective if he had his hands full in the Corridor? If he was some kind of Mother Goose down there, why would he opt to leave the beat?”
“Maybe he wanted to go after the cause? Maybe he got kicked upstairs. I don’t know.”
Wingate had a far-off look. “And does he think it’s a murder because he can’t accept that someone he was protecting slipped past him? Or does he really have a case?”
“He’s convinced Joanne Cameron that he has a case.”
“Has he convinced you?”
She stared at him without blinking for a few moments. “No,” she said at last. “Not yet. And I don’t see the connection to Eldwin either. But I have to admit…”