and cancelled checks. She’d had a checking account with Fleet Bank that held a current balance of $271.16. No savings account. She’d had a Visa card that she used sparingly-to buy gasoline at the Amoco minimart down the street or toys and clothing at Ames, where she enjoyed an employee discount. She had never fallen behind on any of her payments. And currently owed nothing. Her wardrobe was modest and casual. She owned no furs and no jewelry of any value. In fact, she owned nothing that cost more than a hundred dollars. A check of her phone records revealed a handful of toll calls-to the Ames in Waterbury-but no long-distance calls whatsoever.
Des had started to think Torry Mordarski had had no life at all. Until she’d knocked on the door of Torry’s next-door neighbor, Laura Burt, who turned out to be the dead woman’s closest friend. And Des’s most valuable source of information.
It was from Laura Burt that Des learned that Torry had dropped out of high school in New Britain when she’d gotten pregnant with Stevie. Torry’s mother had not spoken to her since, according to Laura. Laura was reluctant to volunteer why-but one look at Stevie’s dusky coloring gave Des a pretty good idea. She sent Soave to talk to the mother, figuring she’d be more candid with a white officer. She was. She told him that Torry’s ex-husband, Tyrone Dionne, was “ghetto trash.” Dionne’s own family likewise had little use for him-he was presently serving time in North Carolina for armed robbery. Neither the Dionnes nor the Mordarskis would consider taking even temporary custody of the boy. It was, Des felt, quite deplorable. Only Laura Burt, who’d frequently baby-sat for him, seemed at all concerned about what would happen to him. Des referred her to the Connecticut Department of Children and Families, the agency that would be charged with placing him in a foster home.
Whoever killed Torry Mordarski had also destroyed the life of an innocent child. That was one reason why the case bothered Des so much.
Soave had worked the North Carolina angle. There was a possibility that Torry’s killing had been a reprisal by a criminal associate of her ex-husband’s. Someone he had cheated out of money or ratted out in exchange for a reduced sentence. But neither the arresting officer nor the prosecuting attorney could offer any encouragement in that direction. Tyrone Dionne was not known to operate with a crew. He had not given evidence against anyone. There were no vultures circling him. He was a loner.
Des, meanwhile, had kept after Laura Burt. Even induced her to adopt Sir Mix-a-Lot, a long-haired adult male. It was Laura, with extreme reluctance, who finally turned Des on to the boyfriends. They were older men, married men. Laura suspected that some money had changed hands, although she insisted that Torry was not a prostitute. Torry had never had more than one of them at a time. And she had never told Laura their last names.
Laura knew them only as Al, Dominick and Stan.
Al and Dominick had been somewhat careful. Just not real careful. They had been worried about their wives, not the law. Al had bought Torry a new sofa bed. Laura, who was home during the day, had let in the deliverymen. They were from Bob’s Discount Furniture, she recalled. By tracking down the delivery invoices and matching them to Torry’s address, Des was able to determine that the sofa bed had been purchased by Albert Marducci, the embattled state legislator from Waterbury. Al Marducci was already under fire for having been stopped twice for DWI in the last six months, the second time after leaving a strip club. Des had shown the legislator the courtesy of questioning him at his office, rather than his home, so as not to humiliate him in front of his wife. Yet she still found him to be belligerent and deceitful. He claimed he had never heard of Torry Mordarski. He claimed he had never bought a sofa bed at Bob’s. The man was pure sleaze. He had even busted a move on her-invited Des out on his boat for a little nude sunbathing some weekend.
“Since you have no connection to the case,” Des had stated coolly, “you won’t mind if I give this element of my investigation out to the press, will you?”
He was real cooperative after that. Admitted he’d known Torry. Claimed the relationship had ended two years prior. Gave Des a full accounting of his whereabouts the night of the murder. He could not have been more helpful. Although he did phone his old pal Carl Polito, her district commander, to complain about her insolent manner. Polito, in turn, had called her into his office to deliver a stinging lecture on the meaning of the word “professionalism.” A rebuke she had suffered in smoldering silence. In the end, it had all been for naught. Al Marducci had been home with his wife and family the night of Torry’s murder. Two neighbors had seen him out walking his dog at around midnight.
Dominick had been easier to find. On several occasions Laura had seen him pick Torry up at her apartment in his electric-blue vintage Corvette Stingray. The Viagramobile, Torry had called it. Laura had no trouble recalling his personalized license plate: 65 RAY. Soave tracked the plate to Dominick Salerno, a principal partner of the Jolly Rubbish Company in Middletown. Yes, he had known Torry, Salerno admitted. But their affair had ended a year ago. He had been in Boca Raton the night it happened. And could prove it.
Neither man had expressed the slightest bit of sorrow over what had happened. Their only concern was in protecting their own reputations. To them, Torry Mordarski was a piece of human Kleenex. Someone to use up and discard.
This, too, Des found deplorable.
The trail led her to married boyfriend number three, Stan. But Stan had been much more careful than the others. He had never come to Torry’s apartment. Laura had never seen him. Did not know what kind of car he drove. In fact, knew virtually nothing about him. The owner of the Purple Pup, Curtis Wilkerson, thought he might have seen Stan once, on a rainy night a month or so prior to the murder, but he was unable to give Des any description of him beyond the fact that he’d been white and middle-aged.
Des liked Stan for it. She liked him because he had gone out of his way to leave no traces of himself. It was almost as if he’d been planning to kill Torry. But why? And how on earth was she going to find him? Who was he? Where was he?
She was still poring over the report, looking for answers, when Soave came sauntering up to her desk with his morning coffee. At age twenty-eight Soave was, in Des’s opinion, a man who simply could not outgrow being someone else’s shorter, twerpier kid brother-no matter how hard he tried. And he did try. He had lifted so many weights to pump up his chest and arms that he bordered on reptilian. He had grown a scraggly moustache that he thought made him look older but actually made him look like a petulant little boy with fuzz on his lip. He dressed in dark suits that he thought whispered class but actually shouted low-rung and cheap. If Des had seen him on the street, she would have made him as a limo driver for a funeral parlor. He had picked up the nickname Soave from a Latino rap song by Gerardo that had been a hit back when he was coming up.
“Morning, loot,” he grunted at her. Calling her loot-as opposed to Lieutenant-was his own little way of refusing to acknowledge her authority over him. Rico was not comfortable dealing with Des. She was not his mother. She was not his girlfriend. She was someone who filled a role in his life no woman had ever filled before.
“Back at you, wow man,” she said. “How’s Little Eva?”
“You mean Bridget? She hates me.” He showed her the fresh set of cat scratches all over his hands.
“You’ve got to be more gentle with her, Rico,” she informed him, not unkindly. Spoon-feeding was required with Soave. He was a work-in-progress, not unlike one of her strays. “A feral cat is like a woman. You work your way into her good graces and she will be loyal to you until the day she dies.” Not that he understood a thing about women. He’d been dating the same girl since high school, a manicurist named Tawny. Here is how Des had described her to Bella: picture Lisa Kudrow, only dumb.
“You still wigging on the hooker?” he asked, glancing over her shoulder at the report. “It’s ice cold.”
“Torry was not a hooker, Rico.”
“Well, she wasn’t exactly Suzy Homemaker either.”
“Um, okay, I’m thinking there must be like some kind of point to this,” she said, an edge creeping into her voice. Sometimes Des ran out of patience.
Soave stuck out his lower lip, chastened. “No point, loot. No point at all.” Red-faced, he returned to his desk.
Des went back to scanning the report, chewing on her own lower lip. Maybe he was right-maybe she was wigging on it. But with good reason. It wasn’t just that Torry Mordarski was a young single mother who had fallen through the cracks and had paid dearly for it.
It was Stan. He frightened Des. He was calculating. He was careful. He was good.
And he was out there somewhere, roaming.
