Название: All White Girls
Автор: Michael Bracken
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Зарубежные детективы
isbn: 9781102339199
isbn:
“On the bed. There’s no evidence that the body had been moved after death. There’s lividity in her back, buttocks, and the backs of her legs. The sheets and the mattress are blood-soaked and, despite the condition of the room, there’s nothing to indicate that the body was transported.”
The shorter officer looked up and saw where the Lieutenant’s hand rested. “Lieutenant,” he said, “we haven’t dusted there yet.”
Castellano jerked his hand away from the dresser. “Sorry.”
* * * *
At 6’4,” Rickenbacher appeared inconspicuous only in a big and tall men’s shop; at the bus station he towered over the ticket takers and the bag ladies. He used this advantage to extract answers from even the most reluctant potential witness. Even so, none could identify the girl in the photo he repeatedly displayed for their examination.
“When you say she come through here?” A stringy black man the color and texture of a raisin squinted at the photo, his brow furrowed in concentration. The seventeen-year-old blonde in the photo had since turned eighteen, but to the man holding the photo it didn’t matter. He saw a young white woman wearing her best beige blouse. It had been buttoned demurely, revealing no hint of cleavage. She also wore a pair of gold chains around her neck, each bearing a tiny gold cross that nestled in the valley of cloth between her breasts. Her wavy blonde hair had been sun-bleached the color of honey and it cascaded loosely over her shoulders, ending nearly halfway down her back. Her pale blue eyes sparkled and the corners of her lips were pulled up in a coy smile as if she’d remembered the punchline to her favorite joke just as the photographer captured her image on film.
“Month ago,” Rickenbacher prompted.
“She pretty. Real pretty.” The black man looked up. “Lotsa pretty girls come through here.”
“Yeah. This one?”
Shaking his head, the black man returned the photo to Rickenbacher. He’d crumpled the edge and Rickenbacher carefully smoothed the photo as he listened.
“She come through here, I never see her.”
Rickenbacher nodded his thanks and moved on.
A moment later a uniformed police officer stopped him. “You’ve been asking a lot of questions, bothering a lot of people.”
Rickenbacher pushed the baseball cap back on his head and waited.
The cop touched Rickenbacher’s forearm, unwilling to make a scene when he had no backup, but wanting to encourage the bigger man to cooperate. “I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
Rickenbacher’s gaze slowly swept the interior of the bus depot, taking in the flatulent old women huddled under layers of Goodwill clothing, the young Puerto Rican pushing a broom across the broken tile as he bounced to music only he heard through the headphones of a Walkman radio, and the trio of adolescent Marines laughing at each other’s scatological jokes as they awaited their Greyhound limo back to camp. Then he walked with the officer toward the glass doors at the southern end of the building.
As they stepped outside, the officer asked, “What’s got you bugging all these people?”
Rickenbacher showed him the photo of Katherine Cove.
“Good looking girl.” The officer looked up from the photo. “Your daughter?”
Rickenbacher said she wasn’t.
“Then check the stretch. She’s probably giving head for twenty bucks a pop.” He laughed as he nudged Rickenbacher with his elbow. “If you don’t find her, you’ll find one just like her.”
Rickenbacher stared down at the blue uniform, wondering how long the city had been hiring children to patrol the streets. Then he pocketed the photo and turned away.
The officer called after him, “This place is like a cherry tree. We do our best, but we can’t keep the pimps from picking the ripe ones when they arrive.”
Rickenbacher had parked his van a block away from the bus station. On his way to it, he stepped into a noisy diner and used the pay phone to call Colette Rees and make an appointment to meet her at the Muff Inn later that afternoon.
Rickenbacher had a list of places to visit after he completed the call, and he began with the nearest one and worked his way down the list. While he visited the main offices of the gas, electric, and cable television companies, the police were busy working on another case involving a young girl.
In various locations around town, uniformed patrol officers and plainclothes detectives talked to their favorite snitches and collected a motley group of men informally known as the usual suspects, seeking information about the previous evening’s murder of a brunette teenager. Within a few hours all but one of the known violent sex offenders had been released, and the remainder waited patiently for yet another interrogation.
* * * *
The smell of desperation hung in the air like the cloyingly cheap perfume of redneck women. The habitual criminals had long since moved on, leaving only the hard-core alcoholics sleeping off their latest binges and the first-time offenders whose families were too poor to raise bond or post bail.
Lieutenant Castellano walked down the center of the aisle without really noticing the two dozen men crowded into a cell designed for twelve. He’d never seen the holding tank when it wasn’t overflowing with society’s effluent, and he’d long since passed the point where he noticed or cared. He did notice the wiry blond sitting behind a scarred wooden table in a cramped room on the north side of the building, just past the holding cell. Behind him stood a beefy sergeant whose expansive gut strained the glittering gold buttons of his blue uniform.
The Lieutenant slipped easily into the remaining chair, adjusted the creases on his precisely pressed black slacks as he settled in, and then asked the sergeant without looking at him, “Read him his rights?”
“Twice.”
Lieutenant Castellano looked a question at Sergeant Kowalski.
“I don’t think he understood me the first time.” The sergeant ran a handful of sausage-thick fingers through his closely-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. On the street he had busted heads with his billy and his bare hands long before criminals had rights, but Kowalski had changed with the times and knew just how far he could go before Internal Affairs would question him.
The Lieutenant returned his gaze to the man on the other side of the table. Gilly Boy Thomas stared back through a tangle of greasy blond hair that fell over his forehead and nearly hid his cobalt blue eyes. Gilly Boy’s hands were folded neatly on the table before him, his wrists held only inches apart by a pair of stainless steel handcuffs.
“You like to cut women?”
“You’ve read my sheet,” Gilly Boy responded. “I’ve cut a few.” He seemed alert but wary, with no indication that he had any difficulty hearing or understanding the Lieutenant’s question.
Lieutenant Castellano had carried a slim manila folder into the room with him and he placed it on the table. From it, he withdrew a pair of 8”x10” glossy photos of the dead woman found at the Grafenberg Hotel and he slid them across the table. “You cut this one?”
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