“I told you Detillier did right by me,” Atkinson said. She pulled a folded piece of paper from inside her coat and handed it to Maureen. “He helped with tracking the print. Said it was a Watchmen thing. Which it is, technically.”
Maureen opened the page. It was a copy of a photo. A mug shot of a young woman. Hardly more than a girl. Her bony shoulders were bare. She had a Mohawk haircut. Two red streaks adorned her right cheek. Not blood or bruises, but stage makeup. She’d also painted a red band over her eyes like a bandit’s mask, or like war paint, Maureen thought. Under the face paint bloomed a freshly inflicted black eye. The girl’s bloody top lip curled in a swollen sneer. Maureen wondered if the arresting officers had knocked the girl around. She looked the type who’d resist, not just arrest, but everything.
The girl in the picture looks very familiar, Maureen thought, around the eyes and nose, especially, but she couldn’t place her. Like an actor in a movie, she thought, and you can’t remember where else you’ve seen her before, but that face, you know you know it.
The initials scrawled across the bottom of the photo read “LAPD.” That didn’t help. “California?”
“The photo is a couple of years old,” Atkinson said, nodding, “so you have to use your imagination.”
Maureen looked again. At second glance, the name that went with the face arrived. It clicked. Of course she knew that face. Her mouth fell open and she turned to Atkinson. “Is that who I think it is?”
“Officer Coughlin, meet Natalie Sparrow. You know her as Dice.”
“Wow,” Maureen said, handing Atkinson the paper. “Damn. Her fashion sense has improved somewhat. I wonder if I looked so furious at that age.” She noticed Atkinson was not amused. Something in the air around them had changed, darkened. “Oh, you don’t think…” Maureen grabbed the paper, checked the back for additional information. She looked at Atkinson. “This photo, what was the charge?”
“Multiple.” Atkinson fought back her grin. She restrained all of it except for a tiny twitch at the corner of her mouth. “Homicide. Three counts. She crushed three guys against a bus with a stolen car.”
“Allegedly,” Maureen said.
Atkinson laughed. “What? Young Sparrow doesn’t look like that kind of girl to you?”
“We’re all that kind of girl,” Maureen said, “when we have to be.” She blew out a long sigh. “She and Leary were friends. She admitted that to me. It’s why I started working with her in first place. It’s not so outrageous her prints were on the razor.”
“What if Madison Leary never killed anyone?” Atkinson said. “What if someone else killed Leon Gage’s son, Clayton, and the Watchmen body we found before him, Edgar Cooley? Just consider the possibility Leary didn’t commit those two murders.” She paused. “It’s fucking genius, if you think about it. The best lies are wrapped around a grain of truth. What if everything Dice told us about Madison Leary was her life story, pieces of it, at least.”
Maureen did think about it. She thought about how Dice was the only person who seemed to know anything about Madison Leary, about her mind and her history. She thought of Dice sneaking up on her on Frenchmen Street. Had she been hiding that razor then, in a pocket of her long coat? “You think Dice, this Natalie Sparrow, killed Leary?”
“I think Sparrow killed Cooley, Gage, and Leary. I think she was Leary’s avenging angel when the Watchmen came to town looking for her.”
“Hell of an angel,” Maureen said, “who cuts the throat of the woman she’s protecting.”
“Leary must’ve weakened,” Atkinson said. “She might’ve become a threat, maybe started talking of getting help. Sparrow might’ve tired of watching her suffer. One thing for sure, she didn’t like doing this one. That’s why she left the razor behind this time.”
“There’s still a ton of evidence that points right at Leary being the Watchmen killer,” Maureen said, but her mind had turned, she’d felt it, from disbelieving Atkinson to simply playing devil’s advocate. “We have everything that Dice said about her, for example.”
“Exactly,” Atkinson said. “We have only the stuff Dice told us. Did anyone talk to Leary about any of it?”
“Talk to Leary?” Maureen said. “How exactly were we going to talk to her? She was a paranoid schizophrenic living on the streets and off her meds.”