James Patterson - 7th Heaven

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

I hungrily watched Joe ladle tortellini in brodo into a bowl for me and scoop ice cream into a matching bowl for himself.

“Where’s the body?” Joe asked me, pulling out a stool and sitting beside me.

“That’s the sixty-million-dollar question,” I said, referring to the reported size of the Campion fortune. I told Joe the rest of it: Junie’s dazed speech about Michael Campion’s dismemberment, the subsequent run up the coast with her boyfriend, and the eventual body dump behind a fast food restaurant – somewhere .

“You know, Conklin read Junie her rights when we brought her in for questioning,” I mused. “And it pissed me off.

“Junie wasn’t in custody, and I was sure if she was Mirandized, she wouldn’t talk. And frankly, I believed what she said at first, that everything she knew about Michael Campion she’d read in People magazine. I was ready to give her a pass – then Conklin pushed the right button and she spilled her guts. It was a good thing that he’d read her her rights.”

I shook my head thinking about it. “Rich has such confidence for a young cop, not to mention an astonishing way with women,” I said, warming to the subject. “And it’s not just that he’s great-looking, it’s that he’s very respectful. And he’s very smart . And women just want to tell him everything…”

Joe reached for my empty bowl and stood up, abruptly.

“Honey?”

“It’s getting so I feel like I know this guy,” Joe said over the sound of water running in the sink. “I’d like to meet him sometime.”

“Sure -”

“What do you say we go to bed, Lindsay?” he said, cutting me off. “It’s been a long night.”

AT AROUND EIGHT the next morning, we found Ricky Malcolm jiggling his key into the front door of a shabby apartment house on Mission Street. He made us as cops and tried to take off, so we scuffled with him on the sidewalk and convinced him to come to the Hall.

“You’re not under arrest,” I’d said, escorting him to our car. “We just want to hear your side of the story.”

Ricky was in “the box” now, glaring at me with his weird, wide-spaced green eyes, tattooed arms crossed over his chest, his face blanched with the nocturnal pallor of a man who hadn’t seen broad daylight in years.

Within the forest of tattoos on Malcolm’s right arm was a red heart with the initials R.M . The heart was impaled on the hook of a crescent moon. Malcolm looked predatory and violent, and now I was wondering if Junie’s story of Michael Campion’s death was true.

Had Campion really died of natural causes?

Or had this freak walked in on Michael and Junie – and killed him?

Malcolm’s sheet showed three arrests, one conviction, all for possession. I slapped the folder closed.

“What can you tell us about Michael Campion?” I asked him.

“What I read in the papers,” he said.

The interview went on in this vein for a couple of hours, and since Conklin’s charms had no effect on Ricky Malcolm, I took the lead. I was trying to get him to say anything, even lies that we could use to trip him up later, but Ricky was stubborn or cagey or both. He denied any knowledge of Michael Campion, alive or dead.

I blinked first.

“I think I understand what happened, Ricky,” I said. “Your girlfriend was in big trouble, and so you had to help her out. Pretty understandable, I guess.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The body, Ricky. You remember. When Michael Campion died in Junie’s bed.”

Malcolm snorted. “Is she saying that actually happened? And that I had something to do with it?”

“Junie confessed , you understand,” Conklin said. “We know what happened. The kid was dead when you got there. That wasn’t your fault, and we’re not putting that on you.”

“This is a joke, right?” Malcolm said. “Because I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“If you’re innocent, help us,” I said. “Where were you on January twenty-first from midnight until eight that morning?”

“Where were you ?” he shot back. “You think I remember where I was three months ago? I can tell you this. I wasn’t helping Junie out of a jam with a dead john. You guys really crack me up.” Malcolm sneered. “Don’t you know that Junie’s playing you?”

“Is that right?” I said.

“Yeah! She’s romantic , you know? Like a girl in the ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’ commercial. Junie wants to believe that she did Michael Campion before he croaked -”

I heard the tap on the glass I’d been waiting for.

Malcolm was saying to Conklin, “I don’t care what she told you. I didn’t cut anyone. I never dumped any freaking body parts anywhere. Junie just likes the attention, man. You should know by now when a whore is lying to you. Charge me, dude, or I’m outta here.”

I opened the door, took the papers from Yuki’s hand. We exchanged grins before I closed the door and said, “Mr. Malcolm, you’re under arrest for tampering with evidence and interfering with a police investigation.”

I fanned the search warrants out on the table. “By this time tomorrow, dude , you won’t have a secret in the world.”

WHILE RICKY MALCOLM SLEPT in a holding cell on the tenth floor at 850 Bryant, I opened the door to his second-floor, one-bedroom apartment over the Shanghai China restaurant on Mission. Then Conklin, McNeil, Chi, and I stepped inside. A faint stink of decomposing flesh hit me as soon as I crossed the threshold.

“Smell that?” I said to Cappy McNeil. Cappy had been on the force for twenty-five years and had seen more than his share of dead.

He nodded. “Think he left one of those bags of body parts behind?”

“Or maybe he just kept a souvenir. A finger. Or an ear.”

McNeil and his partner, the lean and resourceful Paul Chi, headed for the kitchen while Conklin and I took the bedroom.

There was a pull-shade in the one window. I gave it a yank and it rolled up with a bang, throwing Ricky Malcolm’s boudoir into a dim morning light. The room was a study in filth. The sheets were bunched to one side of the stained mattress, and cigarette butts floated inside a coffee mug on the nightstand. Dinner plates balanced on the dresser and the television set, forks congealed in the remains of whatever Malcolm had eaten in the last week or two.

I opened the drawer in the nightstand, found a couple of joints, assorted pharmaceuticals, a strip of Rough Riders. McNeil came into the room, looked around, said, “I like what he’s done with the place.”

“Find anything?”

“No. And unless Ricky dismembered Campion with a four-inch paring knife, the blade’s not in the kitchen. By the way, the smell is stronger in here.”

Conklin opened the closet, searched pockets and shoes, then went to the dresser. He tossed out T-shirts and porn magazines, but I was the one who found the dead mouse under a steel-toed work boot behind the door.

“Whoaaa. I think I found it.”

“Nice door prize,” McNeil cracked.

Four hours went by, and after turning over every stinking thing in Malcolm’s apartment, Conklin sighed his disappointment.

“There’s no weapon here.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “I guess we’re done.”

We stepped out into the street as the flatbed truck pulled up to the curb. CSIs hooked up Malcolm’s ’97 Ford pickup, and we stood by as the truck rattled noisily up the hill on the way to the crime lab. McNeil and Chi took off in their squad car, and Conklin and I got into ours.