Every Kind of Wicked. Lisa Black

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СКАЧАТЬ than he felt. “What about Minneapolis?”

      A slightly smaller force, and Rick had the name of a lieutenant there. If he got to that man with a photo of Jack or even a thorough description, the man would know it didn’t match the Officer Jack Renner he’d supervised. That would lead them both to ask why the Jack Renner now in Cleveland had been working in Minneapolis under a different name. “No problem.”

      “You’re sure?”

      He stopped, turned to face her. “Maggie. Don’t worry.”

      “Oh, I’m worried.”

      He should have known a simple platitude would hardly dissuade the logical, thorough, and sometimes frighteningly sharp Maggie Gardiner. She had much more to lose than he did. He had designed a fake life in Cleveland, but she had a real one. She had friends, family, career, history. Guilt didn’t often trouble him, but it did now. “Rick isn’t going to find anything to make him more suspicious of me. Let him go, let him investigate his heart out. When he comes up with nothing it will convince him to give it up once and for all and I’ll be clear for good. We’ll both be clear, for good.”

      She studied his face, and he watched as she debated whether to accept this. The vigilante murders had stopped—or so the city, and Maggie, believed—and the case assigned to him, the one man guaranteed not to solve them. Rick remained the only cloud on their horizon, but even Riley believed that simple jealousy motivated Rick, the common annoyance of seeing his ex-wife with another man. Jack knew what trails he had left in other cities, and if he wasn’t grabbing his go-bag and heading for the city limits . . . the understandable desire to believe that all would be well won her over.

      “Okay,” she said at last.

      “Okay,” he agreed, and looked up at the towering center building of Cleveland State University. “Where are we going?”

      “Registrar’s office, I guess.”

      Maggie hadn’t exaggerated the time he might spend wandering around before he found answers. The campus sprawled, signs and directionals of limited help in the network of buildings and walkways, all pulsing with forced air heat and vivacious students. The Registrar’s office sent them to Security, who said the card appeared to be for student housing, and they trouped through several buildings to reach that main desk. It was much quieter there than the chaotic Registrar’s, with the quarter close to ending and final tests and grading scheduled. Only one slouching boy waited ahead of them.

      Once at the counter, the bright young lady recognized the card immediately.

      “Oh yes, that’s a unit key. That’s why we don’t put the address on it, or even the unit number—so if someone found it, they’d have to try it in every door in every building to break in or burgle the place or whatever. Thank you so much for turning it in. I’ll be sure to find who it belongs to and see that they get it back. They’ll probably be coming in here looking for a replacement anyway.”

      “No, he won’t.” Jack pulled out his badge and explained that the former holder of the key card had died. The girl’s face plummeted into a look of such sympathy that he hoped she wouldn’t burst into sobs.

      “That’s awful! What happened? Car accident?”

      Jack made his voice sympathetic but ignored her question. “We need to know the name and address associated with this card.”

      “But I can’t tell you that—I mean, the cards are usually made up at each individual facility. They, um, they would know who lives there . . . but I might, should, be able to tell you the building.”

      “That would be really helpful,” Jack said, perhaps too sweetly. Maggie gave him an odd look; the girl gulped and swiped the card though a reader tucked behind the desk.

      Then she told him that that card belonged to the Domain at Cleveland, two blocks away.

      “Thank you,” Jack said.

      “It’s a neat old building,” she sniffed, handing the card back. “It used to be a YMCA.”

      “Very interesting,” he offered.

      “Built in, like, eighteen hundred something.”

      “Thank you,” Maggie told her.

      “Have a nice day,” the girl said, inconsolable, and went to hunt up a tissue. Jack and Maggie plunged back into the frigid winter air.

      “I think we ruined that poor girl’s day,” Jack commented. Anything to keep the conversation away from Maggie’s ex-husband and his potential damage.

      “Might not be a bad thing,” she said, which surprised him. At his look she added, “Everyone can use the occasional reminder that life is short.”

      He hoped this meditation on mortality did not stem from a lack of confidence in their future, but figured it was merely Maggie being sensible. People who work around death a great deal tend to lose the sentimentality and increase the respect. She pointed to the building they sought, looming through the falling snow at East 22^nd and Prospect.

      The girl at the desk had known her stuff. Built in 1889, the structure had once been the city’s YMCA, those letters still engraved in the stone frontispiece. More interesting to Jack, it stood only one block from the Erie Street Cemetery. It could explain why the victim hadn’t been dressed for a longer trek through the cold. He might have been making a beer run or returning from a meal out . . . though the name tag indicated a part-time job.

      A clean, tailored lobby included a door labeled OFFICE, and their luck held. The tiny space held one occupant, a wisp of a young woman with pink tips on her brown hair and too many piercings to count. She didn’t bat an eye when Jack produced his badge and handed her the key card. Without a word she swiped it through another reader, then stared at the minuscule screen for so long, he thought it had malfunctioned.

      “Does the card belong here?” he finally prompted.

      “Yeah.”

      “Great. Whose room is it?”

      She switched her gaze to him. “I think that’s confidential.”

      “I think you’re wrong. Your resident is dead, and we need to identify him.”

      She said nothing, still trying mightily to reconcile her responsibility to protect a fellow student from The Man with any legal ramifications said Man might lower on her, first, and her facility second. It took Jack painting a picture of this poor dead boy ending up in an unmarked grave, plus two phone calls to a supervisor, but she finally consented to give Jack a name: Evan Harding. Also his unit number, the better to fill in a search warrant with because there was no way she was going to let him enter the apartment without one. Whether the stipulation came from her or her supervisor didn’t matter. Jack had figured he would need to get a warrant, so he may as well drop off Maggie and pick up his partner first.

      They returned to the Erie Street Cemetery, moving fast to stay warm. The body snatchers—officially the “ambulance crew” although everyone they picked up would be well past the point where medical attention could help—had finally been freed from the traffic snarl and were loading the white body bag onto a gurney.

      “Have a nice walk?” Riley smirked. He, along with the rest of the department, believed СКАЧАТЬ