Jonathon King - A Visible Darkness

The woman looked at me when I reluctantly stepped out of the house. Her eyes stopped me. She'd seen too many men in her house in the last few hours. Richards turned and nodded at me and I took a step back and waited.

"So you just laid still and fooled him?" Richards asked, turning back to the woman.

"I don't know about fooled," she said. "Only one been made a fool is me. I stayed still. Left that pilla on my face and prayed to the Lord. Then I felt him put George down next to me. He covered him up like he was layin' him to rest and I guess he was.

"I heard him leave and I still laid there, not movin' a muscle, a dead man next to me. But I knows when to keep my head down, young lady. An' when to get up and holler and that wasn't no time for hollerin'."

The woman turned her head and looked down at the empty tabletop. A single tear formed at the corner of her eye and then rolled down her cheek and disappeared into the wrinkles of her face. For some reason, it seemed out of place to see an old person cry. My own mother had always hidden that aspect of her sorrow.

This woman was unashamed.

"When I was truly sure he was gone, I called y'all on nine-one- one," she said, still not looking up. "And I waited right on the bed, watchin' after George."

Richards let it go, touched the back of the old woman's hand and got up quietly. Back in the house she crossed her arms in front of her. I put my hands in my pockets.

"The first guys on the scene had to take down the front door to get in," she said. "Luckily, it was an experienced patrolman who checked the other doors and windows first and eyeballed everything. The place was tight. No signs of forced entry."

She must have seen the frown on my face. "You saw the burglar bars on the windows?"

"And the deadbolt and chain on the front door," I said.

"The utility room door leading to the carport is the only other entry not covered. The bolt was tight. Even the chain was hooked. But the crime scene guys studied the shit out of it this time," she said, and I could see her eyes taking on the grayer cast that came with either anger or challenge.

"The clips on the jalousie panes, four of them, had recently been bent out, and then back."

"Which means he put them back?"

"Carefully. Took his time. Had to figure both of them were dead and he had time to cover."

"Jesus."

I thought about Gary Heidnik in North Philly. Heidnik was a self-styled minister who'd been abducting mentally handicapped women for years and keeping them chained in his basement. When police finally discovered his "house of horrors," they found one woman still alive and body parts of another in his freezer. Each day his neighbors saw him. Each day he carefully locked up his house to go out. Each day, careful and meticulous like a business.

"So that's the husband?" I asked, hooking my thumb to the body bag. "It doesn't fit my guy's motive or yours, going after a couple."

"Boyfriend," she said, and she couldn't keep a sardonic smile from pulling at the corners of her mouth.

"Excuse me?"

"George Harris is, was, Ms. Thompson's boyfriend. He lived three blocks away. A widower. She'd been seeing him for about a year." Richards was flipping through a narrow notebook. "Younger man. Seventy-four."

Ms. Thompson was closer to eighty. She was in the same generation as the others on Billy's list. Her living arrangement didn't bother me. It was the change. If this was meant to be part of the string, the guy had screwed up on his surveillance. Which meant he was slipping.

"So the killer comes in, thinking she's all alone and gets surprised?" I said.

"Ms. Thompson says George was very discreet," Richards said, but her eyes were past me, caught by something out past the front window.

Outside one of the cops was having an arms-crossed discussion with two black women on the curb. One already had her hands up on her hips, not a good sign. The other was trying to see past him, as if just a glimpse of her friend inside might change the mask of worry on her face. I turned back to Richards.

"So, have you got anyone on the paper trail? The insurance?"

"That's why you're here, Freeman," she said. "You and Billy already have an inside track on that. You could find out a hell of a lot faster than we could. If it fits with your theory, it's a whole different case. But I'm not going to bring this whole idea to Hammonds without a more solid connection."

She was a good detective, willing to look at the long odds if there was a possibility, but smart enough to play the game by the book. It was something I had never learned.

"Give me Ms. Thompson's date of birth and social security number and we'll work it," I said.

She was already tearing a slip from her pad, and looking back outside.

"Thanks, Max," she said, moving now to the front door.

When she left I wandered back through the house. It had the same feeling as Ms. Jackson's, a place caught in the past. High school graduation pictures of the grandkids, propped up to form a small altar on the console TV. A threadbare runner over the worn carpet in the hall. Hand towels, faded with age, snapped around the handles of drawers. I kept my hands in my pockets and went into the utility room. The scene techs had dusted the door casings and all of the jalousie panes. They'd left smears of black powder on the white enamel of the washer and dryer. But there was something in the air, an odor that wasn't an old person's. It wasn't a detergent or bleach smell. It wasn't the sweat of men gathered here to do their technical work. There was one small window in the room, sealed and barred and facing the backyard and the alley behind. I stood staring and closed my eyes and took a full, deep breath into my nostrils. It was the smell of the streets, the subway passage deep below Philly's City Hall, the heating grate after midnight at Eleventh and Moravian, the pile of stained and oily blankets piled around the homeless guy a block from the bus terminal on Thirteenth, and the acrid odor at the brick shack only a couple of miles from here.

I could feel it in my nose and it was a smell that did not belong here.

On my way out I passed Richards, who was escorting the two black women from the curb to the back patio where Ms. Thompson still sat. She pointed them in a direction they already knew and turned.

"You alright?" she said looking into my face.

"Yeah. I'll call you when I get something," I said. "Your guys check the alley?"

"Of course."

"Nothing?

"Trash. Why? You expect anything?"

"No. Not with this guy," I said and walked away.

Back in my truck I called Billy at his office. I gave him a rundown on the overnight killing and the information on Ms. Thompson.

"I'll start as much of a paper chase as I can," Billy said. "But you're going to have to get this over to McCane."

"Yeah. I'll page him next," I said. "I already owe him a call."

Billy, as usual, was right. McCane's resources would be better and faster than even he could get out of public records, though it wasn't a collaboration I relished. Billy listened to my silence.

"Are you turning into a believer yet?" he asked.

"Maybe."

"And now we've got a survivor."

"But she didn't see a damn thing, Billy," I said in frustration. "There was a pillow over her face the whole time."

"Max. Max," he said, waiting for my attention. "I didn't say witness, Max. I said survivor. Survivor is a good thing."

I beeped McCane. Punched in my cell number and waited. My truck cab was hot, the glare of the sun snapping off the hood and windshield. Out in front of me the trio of men I'd seen earlier had taken up a position across the street in the shade of a tree. I started the truck and kicked up the A.C. My cell chirped.