J. Bertrand - Pattern of Wounds

“He’s on the hook now,” Aguilar says. “He can’t account for himself after the reverend left-I checked on that, by the way. According to Blunt, they saw each other around eleven in the morning and he has no idea what happened after that. He said he would go to the warehouse, see what got done yesterday, and call back. I gave him your number.”

“Young’s lying about last night, obviously. We know that.”

“You don’t sound excited.”

“There’s one part that doesn’t fit for me. When I showed him the book, he didn’t flinch. Of everything I had in there, that should’ve cut him the deepest. That should’ve surprised him. But it didn’t even register.”

“Maybe you’re wrong about that part.”

According to my watch, it’s half past twelve. My internal clock’s so far off that my stomach hasn’t rumbled. “I’d better get in on the tail end of that search. You mind baby-sitting for me?”

“If he gets antsy, I got your permission to arrest him? We’ve got enough, don’t you think?”

“I guess so. How are the other cases coming along?”

“The drowning is down,” he says. “They’re still looking for the shooter on the other one.”

“We’re still in the running, then.”

“But the clock’s ticking.”

The sleep deprivation starts catching up to me on the road. I stave it off with some drive-thru coffee, pulling up behind the lieutenant’s car in record time. Inside the apartment, he’s sitting on the couch with a laptop opened in front of him, scrolling through emails with a tap of the finger.

“Anything?” I ask.

“His fantasy football team’s doing all right. Apart from that, nothing here.”

Walking through the six-hundred-square-foot apartment doesn’t take long. Young keeps it tidy, everything squared away. The furniture looks cheap but newly purchased, and the colors go together. It’s not an unpleasant place, just a spartan one. The contrast with his dead wife’s room full of consumer goods couldn’t be more pronounced. Only one photo on the wall, a framed wedding shot. Apart from the fridge, the kitchen seems to be mainly for storage, what you’d expect in a bachelor pad, assuming your bachelor’s meticulously neat. I look in vain for a block of kitchen knives with a telltale empty slot.

Mack Ordway is in the bedroom opening dresser drawers. Mack’s the graybeard on our shift, always on the verge of retirement and at the same time always up for a jolt of overtime. I’m not surprised to see him working on Sunday. Sometimes I think he lives in the office.

“What’s the story in here?”

“Bed’s still made, probably hasn’t been slept in. There’s an old shotgun in the closet, but I didn’t see any shells. If you look in that valet thing on the nightstand, there’s a Tanto Folder with a serrated edge. Could be your weapon, but it looks clean to me.”

“Let’s bag it anyway and make sure,” I say.

“Then there’s this.”

He bends down to open the dresser’s bottom drawer. It’s empty apart from glass shards and a half dozen busted picture frames, all of them facedown. Ordway uses a handkerchief from his pocket to pick one up by the edge. It’s a photo of Simone Walker in a powder blue halter top and a floppy straw hat, her smile huge, her eyes hidden behind round sunglasses. He turns over another, showing Simone and Jason arm in arm in front of a Galveston crab joint. The next one is Simone by herself again, looking up from a glossy magazine, her hair spread out on the back of a flower-print couch.

“They’re all her,” Ordway says, “or the two of them together. Maybe he got angry with her for leaving and did all this.”

“Or maybe he did it yesterday before he went to her place and killed her. Let me take a photo, then you can bag those, too.”

I leave him to it and head down the hall. In the bathroom, there are wet towels on the floor and a can of shaving cream on its side by the sink, a puff of foam clinging to the cap. No prescription drugs behind the mirror, though. A slatted door down the hallway conceals a stacked washer and dryer. The dryer’s empty. I pull the washer door open.

“Hello.”

“What you got?” Bascombe calls.

“Take a look.”

He and Ordway both appear over my shoulder. I step back so they can see what I’ve found. A pair of jeans twisted into a ball by the spin cycle, a knotted white shirt.

“How much you want to bet he was wearing these when he came home this morning? Aguilar can say for sure.”

“Did we not check the washer?” Bascombe asks.

Ordway ignores him. “Let’s see what we got here.”

He tugs the shirt and spreads it open in the air between us. “That’s the thing about bloodstains. You can’t just throw something in the washer and get rid of them.”

The dark rusty blots across the front of the shirt do have the look of blood, but not as much as I would have expected from holding Simone against his chest as he stabbed her. Still, blood is blood.

“If this comes back a match for her,” I say, “then I guess we’ve got him.”

“Put that in a bag,” Bascombe tells Ordway.

I pull the jeans out myself, letting the heavy fabric uncoil, then work my hands into the front pockets, turning them inside out. Nothing but lint. From the back pocket, though, I remove a soggy rectangle of card stock about the size of a postcard.

“Someone’s been a very naughty boy,” Ordway says.

The showgirl on the card has been surgically enhanced, her face heavy with makeup, the lips parted suggestively. The words along the bottom read EXOTIC ENTERTAINMENT, with the club’s name in thick cursive across her body: SILK CUT.

“Lieutenant,” Ordway says, snatching the card from me. “I’d like to volunteer personally to follow up this lead.”

Bascombe smiles. “So now we know why the boy was going to church this morning. There was more than one sin he had to confess.”

While the two of them talk this new development over and try to figure out how to check the laptop’s history for any Silk Cut searches, I go through the place one more time with increasing impatience. There’s one thing missing. One thing I was certain to find. I look under the bed, in all the drawers, even digging through a couple of cardboard boxes in the closet.

“You notice something?”

Bascombe shuts the laptop with a frown. “There’s nothing on here.”

“Look around,” I say. “There’s not a single book in here.”

“People don’t read anymore.”

“Can you remember the last time you did a house search and didn’t find a single book? There’s always something. And this guy doesn’t have any.”

“What did you expect?” he asks. “A copy of The Kingwood Killing with a little sticky note saying ‘gotta try this sometime’? Get over it already. I’m all in favor of hunches, March, and your instincts have been good in the past. But trust me, no district attorney is going to hold those pictures up side by side and try to convince the jury there’s a connection. It’s not gonna happen.”

He’s right, but that doesn’t make it any easier to let go.

“You got the autopsy to worry about now, March. Why don’t you go home for a couple of hours, get your head down, and then go to the medical examiner’s office. As of now, you don’t have enough to charge him.”

“I don’t agree. He’s lying about his movements last night.”

“That’s not enough. What this case needs is physical evidence. We’ll get that shirt tested, and if the blood comes back a match, then great. If a witness comes forward to put him at the scene, great again. Maybe forensics will get something, you never know. In the meantime, we can’t keep this guy sitting in an interview room indefinitely.”