third.
I said, “No booze anywhere else?”
“Nowhere.”
Sakura said, “Big bottles, she bought in bulk.”
I said, “She lived alone but hid her habit.”
“Living alone doesn’t mean she drank alone,” said Milo.
“Then why hide the booze?”
He had no answer for that and it made him frown.
I said, “If she did have a drinking pal, it was someone who wouldn’t pry in the bathroom.”
“Meaning?”
“No intimacy.”
“Behind toilet paper’s not the first place anyone would look. And if she was a solitary drinker, why bother to conceal?”
“Hiding a habit from herself,” I said. “Someone who needed to think of herself as totally in control. And righteous.”
That didn’t impress anyone.
Flores said, “What’s your take on the broken neck, Lieutenant, some sort of karate move?”
“I should be checking out dojos? Asking if they have anyone likes also to cut people up and play with their guts.” He turned to the pizza box. “You guys ready to open it up?”
“Sure,” said Sakura. “We already dusted, no prints or anything else. Didn’t feel like there was any pizza in there. Or anything else.”
“Pop it.”
Flores pried open the top.
Empty but on the bottom surface of the box a piece of plain white paper had been Scotch-taped, margins precise, just like the towels beneath the body. In the center of the paper someone had computer-printed in a large bold-faced font:?
Milo flushed a deeper red than I’d ever seen. A pulse in his neck raced. For a moment I was worried about his health.
Then he grinned and some of the color faded. Like a joke had just been played on him and he was determined to be a good sport.
He said, “What’s this, a fucking challenge? Fine. Game on, you bastard.” To the techs: “Print every damn surface of this. Look for spots where someone would be likely to screw up and leave a partial. You don’t find anything, do it again. You tell me there’s nothing, I want it to really be nothing.”
Flores said, “Yes, sir.”
Sakura said, “You bet.”
Milo walked me to my car, keeping slightly ahead and making me feel I was being ushered away. He leaned in when I started up the engine.
“Thanks for showing up. I’m gonna be tied up with basics: her bank, her phone records, finding next of kin. I’m also gonna try for a face-to-face with the two doctor neighbors, I get lucky they’ll turn out to be Jack the Ripper and his nefarious little Jill. Meanwhile, if you could try that shrink-Shacker.”
“I’ll call him when I get home.”
“Thanks. What you said before, the part about Vita wanting to feel in control, I agree with. Righteous, I’m not so sure. What kind of morally upright person unloads on a little sick kid?”
I said, “Righteous is a broad category. She could’ve seen herself as the guardian of all that’s proper. Restaurants are for eating, hospitals are for sick people, disease is unappetizing, stay away. It’s a common feeling. Most people are a lot more subtle but you’d be surprised how often sick people get stigmatized. Back when I worked in oncology, families talked about it all the time.”
He shook his head. “However she felt about herself, she was a major-league jerk and that means the suspect list just expanded to the entire goddamn universe.”
I shifted into Drive.
He said, “Are there diseases other than cancer that can cause baldness?”
“A few,” I said, “but cancer would be my guess.”
“And if the kid had cancer there’s a good chance she’d be treated at your old turf.”
Western Pediatric Medical, where I’d trained and worked and learned which questions to ask, which to ignore.
I said, “It’s the best place in town.”
“Hmm.”
I said, “Sorry, no.”
“No, what?”
“You’re my pal but I’m not going snooping in the oncology files.”
He poked his chest. “I would ask for such a thing? Now I know what you really think of me.”
“I think you’re being your usual ace-detective self.”
His nostrils flared. “Oh, man, we go too far back to spread the bullshit. Yeah, I’d love for you to dig around. You can’t do it, even discreetly?”
“There’s no way to do it discreetly. And even if there was, I wouldn’t want to be the one pointing a finger at a family that’s had more than enough to cope with.”
He exhaled. “Yeah, yeah, I’m thinking like a hunter, not a human being.”
“You’re unlikely to be losing a lead, Big Guy. Like Veronese said, no way for them to know who Vita was and where she lived.”
“Unless,” he said, “they live in the neighborhood and happened to spot her and were still pissed and decided to act.”
“They go back and carve her up?” I said. “That’s one helluva grudge.”
“True but dealing with a high level of stress could kick up the frustration level, right? What if the poor little thing passed away shortly after the confrontation? That would jam one helluva memory into Mommy and Daddy’s heads. Daddy stewed on it, started eating himself up. Eating his guts out. So to speak. He spots Vita, maybe she even snots off again. He decides to-whatever you guys call it-displace his anger.”
“That’s what we call it.” And I’d seen plenty of it. Families railing against hospital food, a misspoken phrase, anything but the core issue because you can only deal with so much. More than once I’d been called to ease a weapon away from a grieving father. But nothing at the level of the savagery visited upon Vita Berlin and I said so.
Milo said, “So if I wanna go there, I’m on my own.”
“Where I’m going is phoning Dr. Shacker. If he has an opening, I’ll prioritize a meeting.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
“Oh, there are plenty of problems,” he said. “But they’re all mine.”
CHAPTER
6
I drove home thinking about the horror, tried to switch off The Unthinkable Channel.
The body floated back into my head.
Switching on the radio, I amped the volume to ear-bruise. Knowing that each thunder-chunk of noise was ripping loose tiny hairs in my auditory canal but figuring a little hearing loss was worth it. But station-surfing fed me a bland stew of passionless jingly crap and nerve-scraping chatter that failed to do the trick, so I pulled over, popped the trunk, took out a battered black vinyl case I hadn’t touched in a long time.
Audiocassettes.
