Laura Lippman: Every Secret Thing

Rosalind was satisfied with the simplest truth: “Olivia.” She repeated the name, patted the photo, and promptly forgot about it. All Rosalind wanted was a way to categorize and identify. That is a cow and that is a dog and that is Olivia. The cow goes moo and the dog goes bow-wow and Olivia goes… “Livvy.” Her first word, her only word, uttered a few days before she was taken. They had joked about it at the time, how the daughter was just like her mother, so sure of her place at the center of the universe, or only a few inches to the left.

Now Cynthia couldn’t help thinking it was as if Olivia knew she might never get to say her name otherwise.

On the video, the bad fairy was throwing a fit over her missing invitation. Uninvited, sent home early-it all ends the same way, doesn’t it? The bad fairy reminded Cynthia not of Alice and Ronnie but of Sharon, and their last face-to-face meeting outside Columbia Mall summer before last.

Cynthia had been struggling with Rosalind’s carriage, a European model that was a pain in the ass-so heavy, so not-portable, so impossible for any eleven-year-old to roll away. Sharon had stood, hands empty, chattering away, never offering to help. Did Cynthia miss City Hall? What did she think of the new mayor? Sharon had finally given up, moved to the suburbs, just to have the security of knowing she had a place to park after a long day. Was that so much to ask? Did that make her a hypocrite?

Then that obtuse woman had leaned into the carriage and uttered her own form of a curse: “Why, Cynthia, I didn’t know you had a baby to replace Olivia.”

The minute the words were out, even insensitive Sharon realized she had gone too far. Her cheeks burned red in a rush of blood so bright that it washed out the odd markings on the left side of her face. She scurried away, making excuses.

Not a week later, a reporter called, her voice round with fake empathy, asking Cynthia if she wanted to tell the Beacon-Light’ s readers about this bittersweet happy ending, about her triumphant second act-those had been the reporter’s words-to let Baltimoreans know how she and Warren had recovered from their horrible, horrible tragedy. Those had been her exact words, too, horrible, horrible, as if repeating the word would prove that she really understood Cynthia’s plight. That was the reporter’s term as well. Plight.

Cynthia wasn’t fooled. She was a freak, the mother of the replacement baby, the idiot who had moved back into the same trailer park after a tornado tossed her first mobile home. They wanted to put her on parade so the paper’s readers would feel safe and secure. Their babies would never be stolen, their babies would never be killed, because Cynthia Barnes had taken the fall for all of them.

The grease smell hanging in the air behind the New York Fried Chicken on Route 40 was at least six hours old, but it still juiced Nancy Porter’s appetite as she walked back and forth between the restaurant’s rear door and the Dumpster, studying blood spatters. She had started a new diet yesterday and she was already having severe cravings, especially for anything deep-fried. To her way of thinking, there was nothing on earth-no vegetable, no meat, no piece of bread-that could not be improved by being dipped in a basket of hot oil.

Here on the part of Route 40 near where the state park began, the scent of frying oil bumped right into the generic green smells of an April morning. Cut grass, an undercurrent of lilacs, something else wild and sweet. Combined, the fried and the floral odors managed to trump the other smell on the breeze, the decadent, protein-laden fast food debris, mixed with the ferrous hangover of a young man’s death.

“What is New York Fried Chicken, anyway?” she asked her partner, Kevin Infante. “I mean, I’ve heard of southern fried chicken and Kentucky Fried Chicken and even Maryland fried chicken, but what’s New York Fried Chicken?”

“It’s a way of saying it’s better,” the Bronx-born Infante said with a lopsided grin. His chauvinism was a running gag with them, whether the topic was food or baseball, a way of bridging the ten-year gap in their ages while defusing any boy-girl stuff. Not that he was her type, under any circumstances. Infante had glossy black hair and wet-looking brown eyes, and if Nancy ’s Polish grandfather were alive, nothing in the world could have stopped him from leaning in, pretending to run a finger across the top of Infante’s head, and announcing: “Quart low.” Josef Potrcurzski may have learned to live alongside Italians and Greeks in Highlandtown most of his adult life, but he had never learned to like it much.

“I don’t know,” Nancy said, playing along. “I like the Chicago style with the thick crust that they serve over on Pennsylvania Avenue. You know, the place we go to eat on our court days.”

“That’s not pizza,” Infante said. “That’s, like, a quiche with pepperoni. New York pizza is the best, and New York hot dogs, and New York deli and New York bagels and New York taxi drivers and New York baseball-”

The last was undeniably true, so all Nancy could say was “Oh, fuck you.”

“If the sergeant knew how much you cursed when he wasn’t around, he’d be so disappointed in his sweet little Nancy.”

“Double-fuck you.”

“Is that like Doublestuf Oreos?”

Nancy felt her color rising. That was the drawback to working with a partner, even for just a few months: they learned your weaknesses awfully fast, down to the brand names. Kevin Infante knew some things about Nancy that her husband didn’t know, and Andy had been part of her life off and on since high school.

Then again, she was learning Infante’s weaknesses, too: J &B, Merit Lights, the Mets, real redheads.

“Stop talking about food, okay?”

“You started it.”

“I know. God, I hate stabbings. Give me a shooting every time.”

Infante gave her a funny look, but didn’t say anything. Nancy knew it would never occur to him to have a preference about methods. To Infante, in Homicide for five years now, there were only two types of cases, gimmes and what he called career-enders, although they never did. Not his, anyway.

And this one was clearly a gimme. The scene screamed stupidity-an absence of coolness, the telltale signs of a plan gone awry, and so much trace evidence that they could clone the whole gang of them, not that anyone but a mad scientist would want to replicate this group.

Infante crouched down next to a particularly large stain. “The blood patterns are weird, don’t you think? Were they chasing him? Was he trying to get away? Then why didn’t he run toward Route 40? No one was going to help him back here.”

“He fought,” Nancy said. “It’s instinctive, to fight back when someone comes at you with a knife.”

“Women don’t fight.”

“He wasn’t a woman. He was the New York Fried Chicken Employee of the Month seven out of the last twelve months. Maybe he even got the weapon away from them. Maybe he pulled the knife on them, and they took it away from him.”

“Them?”

“Definitely a them. One-on-one, I think this guy had a shot.”

Franklin Morris had been found in the Dumpster by the morning crew, lying on top of the previous day’s garbage. He would have looked peaceful if it weren’t for the multiple stab wounds and the fluids that had leaked out of him throughout the early morning hours. He was, by his boss’s account, a model worker in every respect. Perhaps a little humorless, but not a hard-ass, not a guy whose attitude might invite what looked to be a truly sadistic death, even by stabbing standards. Later, the medical examiner would catalog the number of stab wounds, calculate the eerily exact numbers in which his science specialized. He would note which wounds were defensive in nature, specify which cuts were superficial and which were lethal. He would take out the organs, examine and weigh them. The need for this precision was sometimes lost on Nancy. Eyeballing the scene, all she could think of was a magician passing a sword through a wicker basket again and again.