Back on Murder

Chapter 21

Just inside the door, Vance Balinski crouches on a café chair, head ducked between his knees, attended by a semicircle of alarmed women including the one who’d worked the counter on my last visit. Everyone turns when I call his name, a few even jump. He straightens, casting around blindly for the sound of my voice, eyes clenched tight, a wadded towel pressed to his nose. When he takes it away, the fabric glistens with fresh blood. Blond curls frame his punching bag of a face, perfect as a wig fitted after the fact. One eye opens, the blue cornea bright in a red sea of burst vessels.
“You cops,” he says, choking on the words. “Never around when you’re needed.”
After confirming with the shell-shocked women that the police have been called, I crouch down for a closer look at Balinski’s injuries. In addition to the facial trauma, his rib cage has been kicked to shards, so bad that he winces with every labored breath.
“Who did this to you?” I ask.
“Some Mexicans.”
“What did they look like?”
He coughs a plug of bile into the towel. “They looked like Mexicans.”
“What about the box,” I ask, already knowing the answer.
He shakes his head. “That’s what they wanted.”
Between coughing fits and interruptions from well-intentioned bystanders trying to get him to lie down or drink some water, he manages to communicate the gist of the story. He pulled up outside the Morgan St. Café, popped his trunk to retrieve the box Thomson had given him, then heard footsteps rushing up. Before he could turn, they were already on him, hammering away with their tattooed fists. He flailed defensively, slipping backward into the trunk, only to be pulled out by the ankles. Twisting on the concrete, balled in the fetal position, he endured a flurry of bootheels until a stray steel-capped toe connected with his chin, knocking him out. He awakened in the hot dark confines of his own trunk, using the glow-in-the-dark release lever to get out.
“Funny,” he says, showing me what could pass for a child’s juice-stained teeth. “I never thought that release lever would actually come in handy.”
The Mexicans were gone, and so was the box. He tipped himself onto the pavement and managed to get inside, where his mangled appearance rendered him momentarily unrecognizable in spite of his being a regular.
Losing that box is enough to make me want to kick Balinski, too. Given his injuries, I’m forced to restrain myself in the questioning, keeping the tone civil if not solicitous, but I can’t seem to keep the incredulity out of my voice.
“You couldn’t just give me the box?” I ask. “What was the point of bringing it back here?”
He studies his bloody towel, looking for a clean patch, then reapplies pressure to his swelling nose. “When Joe first gave it to me, I just stuck it in the trunk and forgot. But then you called, and I got all curious and took a look inside. The moment I did, I panicked. I didn’t want anything to do with this.”
“So you saw what was in there?”
“Cocaine,” he says. “Just like the movies. Plastic bags full of powder, stacked like gold bricks at the bottom of the box.” He uses his free hand to sketch the size of the box in the air. “And I’d been driving around with this stuff the whole time, not even realizing.”
“The box was full of drugs?”
He nods. “And these blowups. Big pictures, I mean, output from a color printer or something, big tabloid-sized sheets folded over.”
“Pictures of what?”
“Some woman. Not the best resolution, but a naked woman kind of laid out on a couch or some kind of seat, with sort of a sheet, some kind of fabric wrapped around her.”
“With her eyes closed?” I ask, thinking of the repeated portraits in Thomson’s sketchbook. “It was Jill Fanning in the picture, right?”
“Jill?” His red eye blinks. “It wasn’t her. The image was jagged, you know? Pixelated. But definitely not Jill. He wouldn’t have a naked picture of Jill, anyway.”
“They weren’t – ?”
He dismisses all possibility of an illicit relationship with a wet huff, setting off another coughing fit. Someone hands me a fresh towel. I wait until he regains his equilibrium, then gingerly switch it out.
Then a couple of uniformed officers enter, followed closely by an emt. I back off, giving them space to do their job, my mind busy making the necessary connections. If what he’s saying is right, maybe in losing the box I haven’t lost everything. First, using Thomson’s studio keys, I retrieve the sketchbook, tucking it under my arm. That done, I get Edgar Castro on the phone, figuring there’s no point in swearing somebody else to secrecy when I already have a willing accomplice in the crime lab. I explain about the photo on Thomson’s cell phone, asking him to extract it discreetly and make me a couple of prints.
“Should I try and up the resolution?” he asks, his voice trembling with excitement.
A mental image of Castro clicking away in front of a computer screen for the next twenty-four hours, burning time in pursuit of near-invisible photographic enhancements gives me pause. I tell him not to bother with anything fancy. I just want to see the same thing Joe Thomson did.
The dim lighting makes her white skin gray, and all the details punctuating the monochrome bareness are rendered indistinct, a blurred lip, a smudged eye, the vague shadow of an exposed breast. And like a classical nude, some kind of winding cloth envelops her. Not the casual disarray of bedsheets as I’d first assumed, glancing at the photo on the tiny phone screen, but a more deliberate wrapping, a makeshift hammock for quick transport, an improvised shroud.
And although the sketches still resemble Jill Fanning and the photo resembles the sketches, somehow the photo does not resemble the woman herself. For Balinski, who knows her, that much would have been obvious. It takes some back-and-forth scrutiny for me to arrive at the same conclusion.
She is not sleeping, either, as I had supposed. Her eyes are closed, but there’s a pallor to the face, a slackness to the expression. Perhaps I’m seeing what isn’t there, reading details into the pixels, but I have no doubt the woman in the photo is dead.
Try as I might, I can’t match the image to Hannah Mayhew’s features. The cheeks are rounder, the skin pale, the hair apparently raven black, though the darkness might be the result of poor lighting.
“What are we looking at here?” Castro asks.
He’s been sitting so quietly at my elbow that I’d forgotten his presence. I place the photo facedown on my desk, overtaken suddenly by an impulse of modesty, not wanting her to be exposed to eyes other than my own, to anything but a clinical gaze.
“I think this is the missing victim from the Morales scene, the woman who was strapped to the bed.”
“Then what’s her picture doing on Detective Thomson’s phone?”
I give him a chilly stare. “I assume Thomson took the photo. After they removed her body from the scene.”
His lips part, but he doesn’t speak. I can hear his breathing, suddenly coming fast and heavy, like he’s just finished a sprint. After glancing through the cubicle entrance to make sure no one else is watching, he leans forward, flipping the photo faceup, and traces his finger along a series of vertical lines on the dark background, just over the woman’s bare shoulder.
“See that?” he whispers. “You know what I think that is? It looks like a leather car seat, doesn’t it? Those stitched seams right there. She was lying in the back seat.”
I examine the photo, then nod. He might just be right.
“Only why would they take the body?” he asks.
That’s the question. Assuming Keller led the crew and Thomson was there, assuming they’d come for drugs or money, what purpose was served by taking the dead woman with them? If she was dead before they arrived, assaulted and killed by Morales and his entourage, removing her body would make no difference. Same thing if she’d been killed during the shooting, either by Morales or by someone on Keller’s team. Only one scenario makes sense to me.
“She must not have been dead when they took her,” I say.
“So, what, they were bringing her to the emergency room?” He chews over the possibility, shaking his head. “Then again, maybe she’s the reason they were there in the first place. Maybe they were trying to rescue her.”
“Maybe,” I say, not believing it.
I doubt this photo, grainy as it is, will be enough for a positive identification. The sketches attest to that. Thomson must have been trying to reconstruct the woman’s features from memory, using the cell-phone photo as a prompt. Looking at the successive attempts, there’s almost a desperation in the pencil strokes, a despairing black frenzy in the haphazard shading. He would have done the series in quick succession, frustrated at his inability to get the face right, perhaps unconsciously substituting the features of Jill Fanning, who might have been at work across the hallway as he drew. An hpd sketch artist might have been capable of doing the job, but of course Thomson couldn’t take this to any of his colleagues, not if they’d hustled the woman out of the house after lighting up the other occupants, rushing into the night as she bled out in the back seat.
“She died in the car, that’s my guess. He must have taken the picture afterward.”
Castro rubs his hands together. “Why?”
All I can do is shrug.
To remember her, maybe. The moment he leaned between the front seats and snapped her photo, he might not have had a clear intention in mind. Acting on impulse, the body sure to be disposed of somehow, the cop inside him insisted on some kind of documentation. And afterward, eating away at him like a slow-working acid, the logical next step: identification. Putting a name to the face, which required getting the face right first, prompting the futile sketches.
When he’d given up on identification, Thomson couldn’t let go. The dead woman must have haunted him, because his next move was irreversible, the kind of thing you don’t do if there’s any other option. He came to me, willing to give evidence against the people who’d been with him in that house, knowing that after that he could never go back.
To get her face out of his mind, he’d risked everything. It worked, I suppose, though not in the way he’d intended. He was dead now, too, his mind blank, erased by a fellow officer’s bullet. Either that or, lying in the bowels of eternity, his final sin inexpiable, her image tormented him still.
The seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks, though solemnly anticipated, lacks the necessary immediacy to eclipse Hannah Mayhew’s ongoing plight, especially once the story of the missing girl metastasizes into that of a botched task force investigation. Stoked by rumors of a Fontaine lawsuit and steady leaks from the Sheriff ’s Department, the story grows more legs than a caterpillar, forcing a series of awkward press conferences in which Mosser and Villanueva stand awkwardly behind a cluster of microphones, fielding increasingly strident accusations from both the local and national press.
If not for Charlotte, I would remain blissfully ignorant of these developments. While I quietly labor away on the Thomson case, hoping the lack of closure will be taken by my colleagues as a sign that I’m overly thorough or perhaps a bit rusty, she spends each night in front of the television, switching from the local broadcasts over to cable, then back to the local stations when they wrap up for the evening. On the rare occasions I’m home, nothing I do can wean her off the remote control.
“There’s hardly anything about it,” she says, meaning the anniversary. “It’s like they’ve all forgotten and don’t want to be reminded.”
“It’s Hannah Mayhew’s fault.”
She frowns. “Don’t blame her.”
We sit together in silence, bathed in the screen’s flickering blue light, not speaking of the anniversary’s private significance because we almost never do. Not that we’ve forgotten. Our omission signals many things, but not that.
On the day itself, we will keep our annual vigil, returning together to the graveside, leaving behind fresh flowers and tears and knee prints in the soft grass. Our grief will feel especially acute because it will be ours alone, unobserved by a world whose attention will be rightly fixed on commemorating the day’s larger tragedy. The Pearl Harbor of our generation will swallow up all the rest, including the random passing of a ten-year-old Houston girl, killed instantly when a drunk driver T-boned her mother’s car.
“Dying that day,” Charlotte once said, when the event was still fresh enough to talk about, “it’s like being born on Christmas, isn’t it?”
Meaning people have bigger things on their minds. There’s only so much room in the ledger, and some entries require it all, leaving no space for smaller tragedies, even as footnotes.
Tonight something has changed, though. As Charlotte flips through the channels, instead of Hannah, everyone’s talking about the latest hurricane brewing out in the Gulf, picking up speed as it approaches. Since Katrina, every swirl of clouds on the Doppler screen merits reverent attention, and the weathercasters speak almost hopefully about the potential for a Category 5 landfall, putting the New Orleans debacle to shame.
“It’ll fizzle out like all the others,” Charlotte says.
“Maybe.”
Deep down, I find myself rooting for the storm, or at least for the breathing space it will afford people like Wanda Mosser and Theresa Cavallo. Fewer press conferences would mean more time for investigation, not that I hold out hope that any amount of extra effort will produce Hannah Mayhew, safe and sound or otherwise.
To my surprise, Cavallo’s pledge to devote her free time to spadework on Salazar pays quick dividends. He rents a thirty-foot slip at the Kemah Boardwalk Marina, housing an old but well-maintained cabin cruiser, a more substantial and significantly pricier boat than I’d imagined. A call to the marina confirms the whole place is monitored by video cameras. After explaining who I am to the head of security, who has his hands full preparing for the impending hurricane, I get an open-ended invitation to review the footage.
“You have Labor Day weekend on tape?”
“I’ll spool it up for you,” he says. “But do me a favor and leave it till next week, huh? We’ve got our hands full at the moment.”
“I wish I could oblige, but . . . How about tonight?”
He pauses long enough for me to consider the various ways he could make my life difficult, like demanding a warrant or hitting the delete key to save himself the inconvenience. But some people will bend over backward to cooperate with the police, and he happens to be one of them. We agree on a time and I drive down to Kemah full of hope, imagining a video image of Keller and Salazar hoisting a shrouded corpse aboard the boat.
The fantasy is dashed the moment the security chief, a gray-haired man in white shorts and a potbellied polo shirt, cues up the appropriate footage. Like the surveillance tape from the Willowbrook Mall parking lot, like Joe Thomson’s cell-phone snap, the image is grainy and indistinct.
“Is there a particular slip you’re interested in?” he asks, stroking his chin.
“I’ll know it when I see it.”
He’s disappointed, but in spite of the man’s willingness to help, I don’t want to single out Salazar’s boat. There’s always the chance they know each other, and the last thing I want to do is put my suspect any more on guard than he already is.
We buzz through the footage, which is displayed in split screens on a computer monitor, starting midday on Thursday even though the shooting off West Bellfort didn’t go down until later. Approaching ten, the chief pauses.
“The marina lights go off at ten,” he says, and sure enough the screens go black.
After that, the only usable footage is of the well-lit parking lot. We fast-forward through a whole lot of nothing, and then he stops just after three in the morning, running the tape back a bit.
“Look at that.”
A black extended-cab pickup rolls into the parking lot, the truck bed enclosed by an aftermarket hardtop, turning into an empty space. Two figures get out, moving around to the tailgate. They’re too far from the camera to identify, but I’m certain the truck is Salazar’s, and there’s nothing about the figures to suggest they aren’t Keller and Salazar.
“What’re they doing?” he asks.
I lean closer to the screen. They reach into the bed, sliding out a long white form. I don’t say anything to the security chief, but it looks like a body bag to me. Between them, the two men heft the bag, carrying it off-screen in the direction of the marina. They return hours later, just before daybreak, and drive away, no sign of the body bag they’d been carrying before.
After burning the relevant footage onto a DVD, he hands it over wide-eyed, under no illusions about what he’s just witnessed.
“If you talk about this,” I tell him, “you’ll be jeopardizing an ongoing investigation.”
He promises not to, punctuating the words with a dazzled gulp.
The temptation to board Salazar’s boat is strong, but for that I really will need a warrant, otherwise anything I find will be inadmissible. Still, I gaze out over the marina awhile, the bobbing boats illuminated by strong stadium lights, thinking about how easily I could slip through for a little preview, just to make sure the search warrant is worth the effort. The only thing stopping me is my conscience. That and the thought of the security cameras overhead.
“Seven years,” the captain says, shaking his head at the muted television on the credenza, where a platform of politicians take turns reading memorial speeches before a gathered crowd and the ubiquitous media. The ticker crawling across the bottom of the screen recaps a National Weather Service warning that Galveston, just south of us, is where the hurricane will make landfall, whipping up a catastrophic storm surge.
He turns his chair to face me, momentarily uncertain why I’m here. Then he remembers.
“About Thomson’s body,” he says. “You haven’t released it yet.”
“No.”
“Any particular reason? The man’s wife wants to bury him. It’s hard enough on everyone, a brother officer going out like that. No need to prolong the suffering, March.”
“Maybe there is,” I say.
I take a deep breath, then lay it all out. I start with Chad Macneil, who disappeared, presumably with Keller’s money, and then Mitch Geiger’s rumor about the string of drug heists, perhaps an attempt to make up the loss. He listens impassively with an occasional lizard-like blink of the eyes. When I mention Thomson’s offer and how I took it to Wilcox for help, he raises an eyebrow, nothing more.
The ballistics business, Castro’s theory about the tactics at the Morales scene and later the switched barrels, gets no reaction, but at least he doesn’t interrupt. I explain the photo on Thomson’s phone and end with the footage of Keller and Salazar – I make the identification sound a little more solid than it is – carrying a body bag out to the boat.
“So they dumped this woman’s body out in the Gulf ?” he asks. “And then they shot Thomson to keep him from rolling over?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“And you’re just bringing this to me now?”
I answer with an apologetic shrug.
“You wouldn’t have said a thing if I hadn’t asked about releasing the body.”
“I wanted to be sure first,” I say.
“Because you were afraid I’d take you off the case?” I nod.
“Well,” he says, leaning forward, “you were right. That’s exactly what I’m going to do – ”
“But, sir.”
He consults the calendar on his desk blotter. “As of . . . let’s say next Thursday, the eighteenth. On that date you will conclude your investigation, release the body, and move on. Unless of course something more concrete develops, in which case . . .” His voice trails off and he turns back to the television, dismissing me by unmuting the volume just as a stern-faced woman in red says why we must never, will never, forget, to a ripple of sober applause.
I stumble outside his office with another week on the clock, though it is much more than that, I start to realize. Hedges knows, he knows and approves, willing to give me enough time to develop something solid, assuming I work quickly. There’s an understanding between us now, a faint flicker of the dimly remembered bond. Something akin to trust.
There’s no time to consider the ramifications, though, because Charlotte is waiting.
I clock out early and head home, pausing at the curb with the engine running until she comes out, unsteady on her heels, fixing an earring in place. She wears a black linen skirt and a black cardigan, her hair pulled back in an elegant chignon, as if it’s a dinner date we’re headed to and not a graveside.
Stopping on the steps, she remembers suddenly, ducking inside again and reappearing with the plastic-wrapped flowers. I go around to the passenger door, opening it for her, snapping it shut once she’s safely inside. Circling back, I get behind the wheel. Next to me, the flowers on the floor mat rising up between her knees, my wife covers her face in her hands and sobs.
“It’s all right,” I say, flattening a hand on her back, feeling the gaps between the vertebrae.
She motions for me to drive.
So I drive.
At the headstone of our daughter, kneeling down with our hands clasped, we unwrap the flowers and lay them down, and then we water them with tears. On this day seven years ago, something was taken from us all. What we lost, in the overall scheme, may pale in comparison. But to Charlotte and me, it was everything. She was everything. And on the days, the infrequent days, when my heart clings to a belief in the afterlife, she is the reason, the fragile thought that the small, cold hand I let go of once will be warm once more, warm and with the power not only to be clung to but to cling. What faith I have, and it isn’t much, resides in the grip of that tiny hand.