a gaunt black man in his seventies sitting in a wheelchair, a moth-eaten Afghan covering his legs. A bed, a small bookshelf, and a nightstand are the only other objects in the room. Sadly, Demetrius Salters is sitting by the window, equally inanimate. Another furnishing.
And, it is easily ninety degrees in the room. Paris begins to sweat for a wide variety of reasons. “Sergeant?” he asks, thinking that he is probably speaking louder than he needs.
Nothing.
Paris knocks on the jamb again.
“Sir?”
Demetrius Salters doesn’t move or acknowledge him in any way. “Sergeant, my name is Detective Paris. Jack.” He steps around to the front and holds up his shield. For a brief moment, the daylight plays off the badge onto Demetrius Salters’s face and, for that moment, Paris senses that the old man recognizes something. Then, a collapse of his features says no. Paris picks up the old man’s hand, shakes it gently, returns it to his crumb-littered lap. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you, sir.”
Paris glances around the room, searching for a touchstone that might create a link to the here and now. On the bookshelf is a vintage framed photograph of a smiling Demetrius Salters standing on the bow of a destroyer. Another shows Demetrius in a different uniform, this one CPD dress blues. Demetrius is standing near a girder in right field at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, his arm around the slender waist of a pretty, toffee-colored woman.
“Back in the day, eh?” Paris says, wistfully, pointing to the photographs, trying to fill the room with noise, any noise, more for himself than anything. “Yeah, boy. I used to love seeing the Browns at the old stadium. Especially when it was cold as hell. Remember those days? The way the wind would cut off the lake? Man. My father took me to at least one game every year, right up until… yes, sir. Back in the day. The hawk was out.”
Paris glances at Demetrius.
Stillness.
He waits a few moments. He tries a new angle. “So… how long were you on the job, Sergeant?” he asks, shoving his hands into his pockets, rocking on his heels. “I’ll bet it was a completely different town then, huh?”
More silence. The man’s deeply creased, implacable face reveals nothing. Paris crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed. He looks into Demetrius Salters’s eyes, searching for the young man who must certainly still dwell there, the swaggering beat cop who once trolled Hough and Glenville and Tremont instilling respect and fear, the handsome young sailor on watch.
They are gone.
And thus Paris realizes that his pleasantries, however heartfelt, are not really going to be noticed. Might as well get down to business. “Sergeant, I’m working a case that I think you can help me with.”
Then, even though Paris knows it is wrong, even though he feels in his heart it is probably cruel, he does it anyway. He stands, looks up and down the hallway, then clicks open his briefcase. He takes out the crime scene photo of the mutilated corpse lying in the parking lot. He holds it up in front of the old man’s face.
At first, it appears as if Demetrius can’t focus his eyes at the distance at which Paris is holding the photo. But, soon, recognition ascends, like a violent sunrise.
And Demetrius Salters begins to scream.
29
Carla Davis sits at a desk in a small room on the ninth floor of the Justice Center, a pair of computer terminals before her, as Paris knocks on the door.
Paris, having felt like a pimp for showing the crime-scene photo to that harmless old man, made his apologies to the stern-faced nurse and made a quick exit. Michael Ryan’s case, although not officially closed, was dormant. If there is a fact to be had, if there is something lurking that will shake up the inactive investigation, it would have to come to him.
Fact: There is a fucking lunatic loose in his city. Now. Today. And it is his job to catch him. And that job does not include shocking old men to death.
Paris stands behind Carla, looking over her shoulder, trying his best to focus.
“I ran the file with the woman and man talking,” Carla says. In front of her sit two computers. One belongs to the department. One is Fayette Martin’s. “But there is no video portion. Just an audio capture.”
“So, I was listening to what might have been the audio portion of an audio/video session?”
“It seems like it. I’ve listened to it twice myself. Now, the woman could have been watching the video stream and not recording it. Most people do it that way. But there’s no question that the woman could see the man she is talking to. Unless these are extremely creative people.”
“How do you think they hooked up?”
“Most of the commercial, noncorporate usage of videoconferencing is devoted to sex, of course. Lots of pay sites. You can watch women strip, men strip, men and women having sex, men and men having sex, women and women having sex-”
“I get it,” Paris says.
“I was just getting started,” Carla says. “You didn’t even let me get to the barnyard.”
“Spare me the muskrat love, okay?”
Carla hits a button and, in one of the six frames on the screen, the two of them appear. Carla looks stunning, even in the shitty light. Paris looks like he needs a shave, a haircut, and two months’ sleep.
“Most pay sites let you watch, without having a camera of your own,” says Carla. “But most individuals who cruise the Net insist that you have your own web cam.”
“So, what you’re saying is that Fayette Martin perhaps subscribed to one of these pay-per-view sex lines?”
“Perhaps.”
“And that our actor perhaps worked for that sex line?”
“Perhaps.”
“How would we find out which one she may have used? Are these sessions set up over the phone like phone sex?”
“Know a lot about phone sex, do ya, Jack?”
“Not a thing,” Paris lies, knowing full well that he had once rung up a ninety-six-dollar call one Friday night when the Windsor Canadian had a choke hold on his libido. “I read a lot.”
“Well, Internet sex is a little different than phone sex. Most of it is set up online. You click onto a site, give them your Visa or MasterCard number, and they let you in for x amount of minutes, hours, whatever.”
“But there won’t be a phone record?”
“Afraid not. Every time you log on you are given something called an IP address, which is unique to your computer until you log off. So the Internet service provider might have a record of where Fayette Martin went online the night she was killed. I’ll look into it. Most of the pay-per-view male solo performance stuff is gay. But if there’s an adult site that offers solo male performances geared to the heterosexual female, I’ll find it.”
“When do you think that might be?” Paris asks, then immediately regrets it. Carla gives him the look that probably makes her husband Charles-all five-six and one hundred forty pounds of him-roll over, cut the grass, fix the sink, and take out the garbage. Before breakfast.
“When it is, detective.”
Luckily, for Paris, at that moment Matt Sullivan sticks his head in the room. Tall and fair-haired, Matt is the youngest detective in the Homicide Unit at twenty-nine. “You guys hear what happened in Cleveland Heights?”
“What happened?” Paris asks.
“They found a body in Cain Park. Male white. Shot in the head. Hands are gone. Some kids were sledding, saw a foot sticking out of the snow.”
Paris and Carla exchange a glance, the sage look of two veteran cops who know that when hands are missing, someone is serious about delaying identification. However, the challenge of solving this particular murder would never engage them officially. This body belongs to the Cleveland Heights PD.
“Teeth intact?” Carla asks.
