Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

“Not exactly,” Berwell answered. “The way he first came to the department’s attention was on a surveillance. There were some gentlemen who were being watched by the D.E.A. The agents were taking videos, and the department was cooperating-running license plates, identifying people these guys met with, and so on-and he got himself on a couple of tapes. We identified him, so he got a file. Nobody ever got anything on him to add to the file, and certainly there was nothing illegal about what he was doing on the feds’ tapes: he was talking to people in a bar. So he was forgotten until he was murdered.”

“Do you have any idea who killed him, or why?” asked Mallon.

“You can die just by hanging around with the wrong people,” she said. “The men Romano was seen with had arrests for drug possession, some trafficking charges that didn’t stick, some suspected extortion, some assault, some domestic violence stuff. It wasn’t one crime, it was a pattern, a lifestyle.” She looked at him curiously. “Are you understanding this?”

“I think so,” he said. He understood it perfectly. What she had said applied equally to most of his old clients and all of their friends. This was a logical time to tell her that he had once been a parole officer, but he decided he would learn more if he left things as they were.

“Romano hung out with a social set who knew one another slightly because they went to the same clubs, used drugs, liked certain kinds of cars, and so on. As far as I could tell, the investigation fizzled because it was a search for organized crime, and all they found was a bunch of lowlifes. Most of the connections weren’t even between the men. They were between the women, who stood in front of the mirrors in the ladies’ rooms of bars, talking while they put on way too much makeup. If one of them had been dumped by a boyfriend, one of the others knew somebody who would be interested in taking her out. They invited each other to parties, probably shared drugs. Maybe a couple of them bought and resold small amounts.”

“That’s it?” asked Lydia. She looked disappointed.

“Don’t get me wrong. Some of those people had connections with big, ugly drug networks, and some of them had committed real crimes. But Mark Romano wasn’t one of them. When you ask me if I think I know who killed him, I have to say yes: one of those people. I don’t know whether it was one of the ones he knew who got mad at him, or another one who happened to run into him and didn’t like him. And I don’t know why, exactly. My guess is that it was over a woman, because he was very popular with women, and jealousy is always a potent motive. But sometimes when there’s an investigation, even if it’s done perfectly and there are no mistakes or leaks, the bad guys seem to sense it. If Romano got killed because some criminal guessed there was a surveillance going on and thought he might be a police informant, he wouldn’t be the first. And there’s evidence to support that view. Within a minute or two after Romano was shot, the killer or killers walked into a house nearby and shot a family of four who must have seen what was going on. Jealous boyfriends don’t usually do that. They might open up on whoever they see right afterward-especially friends and relatives of the victim-or even turn the gun on themselves, but they don’t go looking for witnesses.”

She spoke in a tone that seemed designed to make Mallon see the futility of his inquiry, but he became even more attentive. “A whole family?”

“A mother, a father, and two kids, aged ten and six. They were the nearest neighbors who were home at the time, and there was nothing about them that could have gotten them killed except seeing too much.”

“That’s horrible,” Mallon said. He seemed lost in thought for a moment, then looked at Detective Berwell again and asked, “Where does Catherine Broward come in? I assume you interviewed her right after the shooting?”

Detective Berwell shook her head. “No. She wasn’t living with him at the time of his death. The neighbors said there were frequent female guests but no roommate right then. Catherine Broward was not around, and he’d had at least one regular girlfriend for a couple of weeks after her.”

Mallon frowned. “Are you sure?”

She looked at him steadily. “It was a homicide investigation. We do try to get the easy facts straight.”

“It’s just that her sister seemed to be pretty sure that she still loved him. She said that his death was what threw Catherine into a depression, and she never recovered.”

Detective Berwell sighed. “I never met Catherine Broward. She came up only after we searched his apartment.” She looked at Lydia. “Think it’s time?”

“I’d say so,” said Lydia. She stood and waited while Detective Berwell pulled a videocassette from her purse and handed it to her. Lydia stepped to the television cabinet, slipped the tape into the VCR, and started it. The screen showed a few seconds of snow and static, then resolved itself into a dimly lighted bedroom.

Mallon watched while a young woman came into the room. A few seconds later, a young man came into the frame from somewhere in the vicinity of the camera. The woman switched off the bedside lamp, but the man turned it on again, then pushed her onto the bed. He said, “I want to be able to see you,” and she giggled and turned her face away from his, in the general direction of the camera. She did not seem to see it.

Mallon said, “That’s her. That’s Catherine.” He turned to Detective Berwell. “What is this? Can this be a surveillance tape?”

She gave her head a little shake. “Uh-uh. The man is Mark Romano. This is a tape he made himself. We found it when we searched his apartment.”

Mallon watched the screen for a minute or two. The couple were already naked, and caressing each other passionately. The sight made a wave of heat spread up the sides of his neck to his temples and his scalp: he sensed feelings of shame, anger, loss, and jealousy, all asserting themselves in shifting proportions. He turned away from the sight toward Detective Berwell, and saw that she was staring intently not at the television, but at him. He said, “I’m not sure I understand. He made tapes of himself and Catherine. Did she know?”

She shook her head slightly. “Not just her. There were a number of women. There were some tapes where we had a question about whether the woman was fully aware of what was going on. They were all conscious-more or less-but some were obviously under the influence of something. We got the best stills of faces we could from the tapes, identified the women, and asked them about it.” She gave Lydia a tired look and rolled her eyes. “I got to do that, of course.”

She returned her gaze to Mallon. “By the time we obtained Catherine Broward’s name, I had interviewed at least twenty. None of them had known they were being taped, but none of them claimed it was anything but consensual sex. Catherine Broward was out of town while that was going on, and by the time she got back, I had moved on to follow other leads, so somebody else interviewed her, but there are no revelations in the file. It was a pointless issue by then, anyway. None of the women knew about the tapes, so the tapes weren’t a motive for the murder. And even if we’d found a woman who had been drugged without her knowledge or something, we weren’t going to prosecute a dead man for rape.” She looked at the screen again, where Catherine Broward and Mark Romano were now having intercourse. She displayed no discomfort or embarrassment at the sight, only impatience. “Seen enough?”

Mallon nodded. “More than enough.”

Lydia stood up again and walked to the television to stop the tape. She pressed another button, and they could hear it rewinding.