the lips as a way to own his victim’s mouth. It’s a control thing. The lips are in his possession where they can’t hurt him anymore.”
Abdul nodded agreement. “Doesn’t sound harebrained at all, Maggie.”
I stayed out of this one. Since my conversation with Paul, I’d been operating on the theory that the lip cutting was just a ruse. Whoever killed Vlotsky just wanted it to look like a serial. “Can you give us anything else to go on, Abdul?”
“I’m afraid not. Your killer was careful…he must have been dressed head to toe. Lieutenant Vlotsky had to have been kicking and scratching, but there’s no skin under his nails. You might ask yourselves how the killer got home. He would have been covered in blood. Oh, and the Orbital returned the results on the porn mag fingerprints. They also returned DNA results from some…ah…stains on the page. No matches in the system. Looks like he doesn’t have a record.”
“Actually, Abdul, the magazine isn’t the killer’s. It belongs to a potential witness.”
“You have a witness?”
“ Potential witness, and since there’s no matches in the system, we don’t even have that.”
Abdul sighed. “That’s all I have for you, Juno. How’s your arm?”
Maggie turned to look at me. She definitely knew.
I said, “It’s okay, Abdul. Just a little stiff.”
Abdul confided to Maggie. “He took a nasty spill a while back and broke his arm. I fixed it up for him.”
Maggie said, “Oh. How did that happen, Juno?” Her expression was pure devil.
I’d never broken my arm. All cops would go through tests every five years to prove you were fit for duty. When mine came up, I passed all the written tests but knew I would never make it through the marksmanship test since this hand started shaking a few years ago. I talked Abdul into putting a cast on it and fooled KOP into waiving the shooting portion. I wore that damn cast for weeks.
I could have gone to Paul. He would have fudged the shooting test for me, but I didn’t want him to know about my hand. I didn’t want him thinking his old enforcer was a weak old man. Now here was Maggie asking how I broke my arm. She’d seen my hand, and she was onto the charade. She was messing with me, wanting to see me squirm my way through this one.
I deadpanned, “I broke it backhanding a surly partner.”
Maggie restrained a smile.
I pulled up a chair for Maggie, and we sat at my desk. We decided to finish canvassing our list of johns from the Lotus. I was still hopeful one of them might have seen something in the alley. After an hour, we succeeded in cutting the original list of thirty-three down to just eight that we still hadn’t talked to. So far, nobody had seen a damn thing.
Maggie looked worn. “You hungry?”
It had been hours since the cafe in Loja. “Yeah…I buy, you fly?”
“Deal.”
I handed her some bills. She took them without pause, like my hand was a normal hand. I tuned into the way her fingers brushed mine. “I’ll get the drinks downstairs,” I said. Then I watched her go, jazzing to the wag of her hips. Now that she’d gone, the vice squad room felt graveyard quiet. Vice was always dead calm during the day-all the action was at night. I stood up. My neck ached from sitting too long. I left the office empty and headed downstairs to the newsstand to buy a couple bottles of soda.
I came back through the lobby. The water-stained ceiling flaked plaster to the floor. Musty flags hung like rags from poles by the door. I passed by Yuan Kim who was hanging with a young officer in uniform. “Hey, Juno. How’s that murder case going?”
I didn’t want to talk to this hump. “Slow,” I said.
He shoved his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. “Got any good leads?”
“Naw, you know how it is.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. Me and Josephs are hitting dead ends at every turn, too. It’s probably just as good that you took that Army case. We’ve got fucking MPs coming out our asses. Two new ones since the last time I saw you and that’s only been what-since yesterday.” MPs: missing persons.
I gave him the kind of uh-huh that said, “Stop talking to me because I don’t care.”
He rolled on, oblivious. “We just got back from Tenttown. There’s a fourteen-year-old girl that’s been missing for two weeks. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this one out. A fourteen-year-old girl from Tenttown, you know she’s a runaway. Only her mother is so grief stricken that she calls the police. When we ask her if her daughter was upset about anything before she disappeared, she said, ‘No, she’s a very happy child.’ I’m thinking, ‘Gimme a break. Nobody’s happy in Tenttown, especially a teenager;’ am I right? You know what kind of hole that place is.”
I almost picked a fight right there. Did you know I’m from Tenttown, motherfucker?
Yuan Kim pushed his glasses up and rambled on. “Even her father thinks she ran away. Let me tell you, she’s no child, either. According to the neighbors, she’ll bang anything with a dick. For two weeks now, we’ve tried to talk the mother out of filing a report, but she won’t hear it. Now Josephs and I are stuck with the paperwork.”
He didn’t even realize how close he was to getting those glasses permanently tacked to his nose. I let out another uh-huh.
“Hey, how’s Maggie doing on her first case?”
“Good.”
The uniform standing with Kim snickered. “Maggie? Is that Magda Orzo?”
Kim said, “Yeah, her real name is Magda. What of it?”
The uniform pointed over his shoulder to the rookie wall. Photos of all the recent graduates grinned in their frames. What-where? Now I saw it…Maggie’s face with the caption “Officer Magda Orzo” underneath. There was a dripping penis doodled next to her smile and nippled breasts drawn over her uniform.
“Who did that?” I wanted to know.
“Josephs. Who else would find that funny?” Kim answered.
“You knew about this?”
“You know how he is, Juno. He doesn’t know when to stop. He screwed around with her picture, then came and got me and told me my girlfriend was in the lobby, waiting for me. I came down here wondering who he was talking about. I mean, I see a few girls, but none of them regular. He followed me down, bringing half the squad with him. I was wandering around looking for whoever she is, and he pointed the picture out and yelled, I mean yelled, ‘She’s right here, Kim!’ Then the dumbass started laughing like crazy.”
“Why didn’t you take the picture down?”
“Trust me, the best way to deal with Josephs is to ignore him. If he knows he’s getting under your skin, he won’t let up.”
“Hold these.” I handed Kim the soda bottles and reached up for the picture-too high. I told the uniform to get it down. He had to stand tiptoe to get it.
I went straight for the stairs, carrying the picture in my right. My hand was quivering-didn’t care. Kim trailed behind, asking me what I was doing. I didn’t answer. My vision narrowed down to a burning red tunnel.
I charged into homicide. Where the fuck is he…? There, sitting at a desk, his back turned to me. The people around him looked up at me and stopped mid-sentence. Josephs sensed something. He started to turn…
I slammed the picture glass side down over his head. Glass shattered, and the frame broke apart. Only the photo itself held it together.
Josephs wheeled in his chair. Shit he’s fast. He swung. Move! My body couldn’t move fast enough. His fist connected with my jaw…
“…Juno! Juno! You in there?”
I opened my eyes.
Yuan Kim knelt over me. “He’s awake, guys.”
I tried to sit up-too dizzy.
A hazy Mark Josephs sat at his desk holding a bloodstained towel to the top of his head. Don’t tell me…Shit! He knocked me out. Shit!
Two Kims pushed their blurred glasses up their blurred noses. “You okay, Juno? You been out for about a minute. He clocked you good. Do you need a doctor?”
“No.” Shit, my head hurt.
