Lisa Scottoline - Lady Killer

“It’s only ten blocks north, Elvira, and she’s wrong. They all are.”

“I know, that’s what I tell ’em. You and Celine Dion, I always fight for.”

“Okay, Ma, say good night.” Anthony stopped the car in front of the Rotunno house and after Mary had kissed Elvira good-bye, he got out to walk her up the steps. When he got back in the car, he asked Mary to come up front, and she took the passenger seat, stiffly. Anthony looked over, his smile warm in the darkness. “Please forgive her.”

“It’s okay.”

“Now I see what you meant at dinner the other night, about the neighborhood. Maybe I was too glib.” Anthony cocked his head. “You wanna get a coffee? Or go straight to the impound lot? Up to you.”

“Unfortunately, neither.” Mary tried to stay in control. She hardly knew him and she didn’t want to lose it now. “Can you take me somewhere else?”

“Sure, why?”

Mary gave him the address. “There’s been a murder.”

This section of the city was normally deserted after dark, but tonight it was alive with activity. The full moon was a bullethole in a black sky, and people filled the street. Anthony double-parked down the block, but almost before he braked, Mary was in motion, opening the car door, grabbing her bag, and climbing out onto the sidewalk. “Thanks,” she called out. “I’ll get my own ride home.”

“I’m coming with you.” Anthony unclipped his safety harness and got out of the car.

Mary hurried heedless into the crowd. People stood smoking and talking on the sidewalks, swigging beer from a can or watching the scene at the end of the street, their arms folded over their paunches. She threaded her way through them, toward where police cruisers had been parked and wooden barricades had been erected. She got to the uniformed cops behind the sawhorses and picked one, his face shadowed by the black patent bill of his cap, then went up to him.

“I’m a lawyer and I got a call from Mack Brinkley, and he told me to come down here right away.” Mary ducked under the barricade, and Anthony followed, until the cop grabbed him by the elbow.

“Wait a sec, sir.”

“Let him go, he’s with me.” Mary dug for her wallet and flashed her bar admission card, and the cop waved Anthony ahead, and he kept going.

“Thanks,” Anthony said, on her heels, and they passed groups of uniformed cops talking in tight circles, silhouetted in the headlights from the cruisers. Up ahead, she spotted the calcium white of klieg-lights and headed straight for them.

Ahead had to be where they’d found the body.

Mary screened out the noise and the curious stares and reached the TV lights, like electrified trees on their aluminum stands, with black cables that stretched like roots to boxy generators. The press was kept at bay behind the barricades, but they had cameras and lights, too, and she picked up the pace as she went toward the light, past the brick rowhouses, decrepit in this part of South Philly. On the right, next to a house with a sagging front porch, a tall, boxy white truck was parked, its side reading CRIME SCENE UNIT in reflective blue letters. The truck sat near the mouth of an alley, and Mary remembered Brinkley saying that the body had been dumped in the back of an alley.

“Almost there,” Mary heard herself say, her heart racing.

“Right behind you,” Anthony said, thinking she was talking to him, but she wasn’t. There was noise and talking around them but she didn’t hear it. She heard only her own heartbeat and the echo of Brinkley’s voice:

I have bad news. We got a body.

Mary felt her mouth go dry when she spied Brinkley, slim and well dressed, talking with a crowd of men in suits and loosened ties, undoubtedly from the DA’s office. He stood with his partner, Stan Kovich, big, brawny, and gray-blond, whom she remembered as open and friendly as Brinkley was reserved and self-contained. She made a beeline for them, giving a discreet wave to catch their attention, in case they didn’t want to acknowledge her in front of the suits.

Kovich bent his head over some notes, and Brinkley spotted her first, then broke from the group to meet her. A gleaming black van stood on her right, its white MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE letters shiny in the lights, more reflective paint. The two back doors of the van hung open. It meant the gurney was out, pressed into service for the body.

Mary had gotten here as fast as she could and she guessed they would be finishing up about now. The reporters swelled toward the barricades, sensing it, too. They held cameras high over their heads, trying to get the “bag shot.” Mary had been to some crime scenes, but not like this. Not where she knew the body.

“Mare, how you doin’,” Brinkley said quietly, reaching her. “Sorry we didn’t get there sooner. We could’ve prevented this.”

“You tried. We all did.” Mary forced herself to say it, but she knew she should have tried harder.

“You sure you can handle it? I thought you should know.”

“Sure.” Mary glanced over, distracted. More lamps had been set up inside the alley, flooding it with light. Men in ties and coroner’s assistants in dark blue jumpsuits crammed the alley, and others working at its mouth made shifting shadows, blocking Mary’s view of what lay beyond.

“Who’s this?” Brinkley meant Anthony, coming up next to her. “He with you?”

“Yes,” Mary answered quickly, and while Anthony introduced himself, she kept her gaze on the alley. She caught a glimpse of a crumbling brick side wall, and when somebody in front of her moved aside, she could see that the wall was behind an overflowing trashcan. Strobes fired from a still camera, taking photographs, and there was the sound of men talking and counting off. She sensed the coroner was closing up for good, his assistants slipping the body on top of the black vinyl bag, then doing their practiced pitch-and-roll to bag the corpse with efficiency and a modicum of dignity.

Mary did and didn’t want to go into the alley. She had to see, yet she didn’t want to see, and in the next instant, before she realized it, she had pushed her way to its mouth as if she belonged there. Brinkley called to her from some faraway place, then Anthony, too, but she ignored them both to see. When the way cleared, she looked down at the sight.

He looked exactly the same, except that his skin was now as gray as marble, and he lay in the black body bag, which was half zippered up. His blue eyes were open, staring sightlessly at the black sky. His head lay slightly to the side, and his bangs lay fanned across his forehead, just like they always did, soft and brown. She flashed on him raking his hair back with his fingers at the kitchen table. It was so hard to believe that those hands had pummeled a woman, but Mary had seen the pictures herself. Now the coroner’s assistants were tucking those same hands, each bagged in transparent plastic to preserve evidence, inside the black body bag and zipping it closed.

“He took a bullet to the back of the head,” Brinkley told her in low tones. “We think it’s a Mob hit, and so do the feds. I told them about the skimming.”

How did it all go so wrong? How did he turn up dead? And where was Trish?

“Mare?” Brinkley put a hand on her shoulder just as the assistants zipped up the body bag.

A shadow blocked Mary’s view, but it didn’t matter. The image had been seared into her brain. She would always see him lying there. In the next second, she became aware that Brinkley was looking at her funny.

“Mare? You losin’ it here?”

“No, of course not,” she answered, but it didn’t ring true, even to her. “I’m just confused. When you told me you had a body, I couldn’t believe it was him who got killed. It’s Trish I was worried about.”