Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

“Oh yeah,” Hadley confirmed. “I saw the body. He was worked over. Let me show you.” Hadley moved down the hall, waving me after him.

In Cicero ’s sanctuary, the photos on the low dresser were undisturbed, but the drawers had been taken out and overturned, like those of the filing cabinet. On the floor, at the foot of the bed, the carpet had been stained dark red in an irregular area around three feet in diameter.

“He died in here,” Hadley said. “I think Doc knew his attackers. At least, he let them in. There’s no sign the front door was forced. They make a surprise attack in the front room, get him down and out of the chair. He fights enough that there’s some blood out there. Then they drag him into the bedroom. This is where the serious beating took place.” Hadley pointed at the blood spatters on the wall. “See that? That’s a lot of blunt force. Either it was personal animosity, or, more likely, he wasn’t giving his visitors what they came for.”

Something was wrong about Hadley’s theory, I thought. Cicero needed the money his practice brought him, but he was too practical to die for it. He would have surrendered it. If he’d been beaten to death… I shook my head. Hadley had suggested personal animosity, but I couldn’t fathom it. Cicero had had no enemies; I would have staked any amount of money on that.

“We already bagged the weapon. A twenty-pound weight, one of a set. Are you okay?” Hadley said.

On the mirror, a dark hair was trapped in dried blood.

“I’m sorry,” Hadley was saying. “I forget you don’t see as much of this as I do. You want to go back out in the front room?”

“No,” I said, finding my voice. “I’m okay. I want to help with this investigation, if I can.”

Hadley nodded, finding nothing unusual in the request. “Be glad to have you,” he said.

A woman’s voice called for Hadley; it was the crime-scene technician in the other room. “Excuse me,” Hadley said.

I looked toward the photos on Cicero ’s altar and thought of what he’d said after he’d written me the prescription.

I do not need to get arrested, Cicero had said. But he’d been wrong. Even if he’d served jail time, it wouldn’t have broken him. Cicero might never have forgiven me for turning him in, but at least he would have been alive. He was dead now because I’d overruled my better instincts and obeyed his wishes.

When he’d told me the story about the troubled young psychiatric patient and the night she’d called him to her home, Cicero had said, I was probably pretty goddamned lonely, although I couldn’t have seen it back then. The same could be said of me. I’d needed Cicero ’s friendship and feared living with the memory of his anger, so I’d shielded him from arrest. At the core of it, I’d spared him out of selfishness and, in sparing him, had killed him.

From the array of photos, a younger, untroubled Cicero and his brother Ulises regarded me. Dead now, both of them. One killed by cops, the other by a cop’s leniency.

For the nexthour I immersed myself in work. Hadley went out to do quick preinterviews with the neighbors, in order to separate out those who, like Soleil, knew enough to merit taking them downtown for a formal statement. I stayed in the apartment and, using one of the technicians’ cameras, meticulously photographed Cicero ’s apartment, every object, every bloodstain, detaching my mind from what I saw through the viewfinder.

I was nearly finished when Hadley strode back though the front door. “Pribek!” he said. The tone in his voice was urgent enough that Malik dropped the pencil he was writing with. I lowered the camera.

Hadley was holding his cell phone in his hand. “We’ve got to suspend things here,” he said. “A couple of officers got a call from a drugstore over on University Avenue. A pharmacist called them about a suspicious prescription. A couple of kids tried to pass it off, but the pharmacist knew right away it was a fake. The writing on it didn’t mean anything. It was just some Greek-looking scribbles.”

Of course. The prescription pad.

“And the doctor’s sig on it? Cicero Ruiz, MD. ” Hadley flashed me a humorless smile, like a shark’s. “Got to hand it to the doc. He shafted ’em.”

Hadley had been mistaken, earlier. There was no hostility behind the beating, no personal hard feelings, like he’d theorized. They had needed Cicero to write prescriptions for them. When he’d refused, they’d hurt him to break down his resistance.

Hadley spoke again. “The kids wised up and fled the scene just as the cops were getting there. There was a little footrace in the store, and one of the suspects fell. He’s in custody.” Hadley shook his head. “His friend left him behind. No honor among thieves.”

I barely heard him.

I could understand Cicero being targeted for his money. Everyone he’d ever treated knew he ran a cash business, plus everyone those patients might have spoken to about the unlicensed doctor in the towers. But the prescription pad-

“Sarah?” Hadley’s voice was impatient.

“Sorry,” I said.

“They’re holding the kid from the drugstore. The word’s going out to pharmacies to be on the lookout for the other guy, but we’ve just got a description, not a name. Only his friend can ID him.” Hadley slipped the cell phone into his jacket. “So let’s go lean on him.”

From the windowof Hadley’s car, I watched the flow of traffic, pedestrians filing through the crosswalk, the sun glinting off the high buildings in the distance. I felt as if a membrane were separating me from the outside world. Crumpled in my hand was a piece of paper: my medical history, written in Cicero ’s hand. It had my full name on it and, had it been found in Cicero ’s place, would have been impossible to explain to my superiors. Even so, I’d felt cheap and petty when I’d retrieved it from the overturned filing cabinet, like I was betraying Cicero by doing so.

Hadley touched my hand with the backs of his ring and middle fingers, the lightest of touches. “Hey,” he said. “I think you’re taking this one too hard.” He looked away from the street just long enough to make eye contact, then veered around a furniture delivery truck. “Is it because this guy was a paraplegic that this bothers you so much?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just…” I hesitated. I had to say something, but I didn’t want to pierce the membrane and let my feelings out. “It seems like such a waste of a life.” I pushed the medical history into my shoulder bag. Please don’t let him want to talk about it anymore.

“I know,” Hadley said. “According to his neighbor, he was-”

“Can we talk about interrogation strategy, before we get downtown?” I interrupted.

Hadley swerved around a slow-moving Oldsmobile. “That’s probably a good idea,” he said.

It was atime-honored tactic: when two people commit a crime, get one to turn on the other. Give him a chance to get a jump on his partner, implicating him in everything. Appeal to his self-preservation, and imply that his partner would do the same to him, if the chance presented itself.

It was Hadley’s investigation; I’d agreed to let him take the lead. I was supposed to take the gentler, good-cop role.

The young man waiting in the interrogation room didn’t look like much of an outlaw: about five-seven, with hair the color of straw and a scraggly chin beard. The lower lids of his blue eyes drooped a bit, giving him a listless appearance, but there was a glint of hostile pleasure in his gaze, as if he were looking forward to not helping us. He wore oversized jeans of dark, coarse denim and a red hooded sweatshirt. A bluish tattoo hid in the webbed fold of flesh between right thumb and forefinger, and it seemed to crawl like a spider when he moved his hand.