Every Kind of Wicked (A Gardiner and Renner Novel Book 6)

Saturday, 1:10 a.m.

Shanaya turned over, tangling the sheet and nearly shoving the pillow out onto the dog-hair-covered carpeting. When her girlfriend from the next row of cubicles offered Shanaya a place to flop she hadn’t clarified that her “couch” was actually a love seat, so that Shanaya’s knees had to stay bent at a ninety-degree angle, unless she wanted to stretch her calves over the armrest until her feet fell asleep. She also hadn’t mentioned that every possible surface held a thick layer of animal dander, produced by the Rottweiler now snuffling around her shoes and the at-death’s-door Pomeranian now dragging itself to the water bowl with a series of grunts and wheezes too loud for such a tiny being to produce. Both of them were clearly visible since the thin curtains didn’t even try to block out the streetlights outside the building. She shouldn’t have left the apartment—that had been an overreaction. No one could have found her there. The cops had only done it through Evani’s key card. She hadn’t needed to run to this flea-infested coop.

Still, though, better safe than sorry. That mantra had kept her from serious pain for most of her life. People got caught because they waited too long, downplayed the signs, got too comfortable in place. At least on her friend’s sofa—correction, love seat—Shanaya could close her eyes and take a few easy breaths. And she rather liked the Rottweiler, other than his penchant for shedding, an animal of such heft that the floorboards creaked when he walked. Anyone who came through that door would get a deep-throated growl and two rows of terrifyingly big teeth. She found the animal more reassuring than Evani had ever been.

If she really wanted to be safe, she should stop going to work at the call center, from which all her problems stemmed. But it wasn’t easy to get decent-paying work when you didn’t have much of an education, or experience, or even the correct personal identification. And she certainly wasn’t leaving town without their savings. So she might as well keep showing up for her shift.

To get her mind off her cramping calves, she delineated her problems. There were two: getting Evani’s property back from those two cops, and evading The Guy.

The Rottweiler nudged her hand, and she patted his head. His tail thumped against the wooden floor. The downstairs neighbors often called to complain that the dog made more noise than a herd of buffalo when he ran around the room, claws clicking against the planks. Shanaya had told her friend to ask them how they knew what a herd of buffalo sounded like, but her friend thought that might not be prudent.

Shanaya didn’t know The Guy’s name, or how he had found her, or how he kept getting the correct phone number to the call center. At first he hadn’t seemed threatening at all, more curious than annoyed. Certainly not dangerous.

But that had changed over the past month. Since the scam required people to call “the IRS” back, he just kept calling until he connected to her. And she had to pick up the phone when a call routed to her. If she didn’t, she’d be out on her ass before the next break. The pit bull would see to that.

She thought The Guy had been following her, as well. She would catch a movement out of the corner of her eye, a shadow lingering in a doorway fifty paces behind her, quite noticeable during these days when people hustled inside and out of the cold as quickly as possible. There would be a figure hovering outside the empty ballpark, a burnt-orange car driving slowly behind her as she walked home. She had searched for a back exit to the center, but found only one, with chains and a padlock on it. The bosses really didn’t want workers to leave during working hours, fire safety laws be damned.

She tried to leave with a group each day, and when the other people broke off, she took a different route back to the apartment, going out of the way as much as her paranoia and the frigid temps would allow.

It could be her imagination. Big deal if some former customer who had lost money to them couldn’t get over it. Shanaya had heard of that once—a friend of hers had a target get so nasty and personal occasionally that he made the mistake of calling the man back to berate him. His real phone number showed up on the person’s caller ID and they kept calling. Really ruined his intake for the day with the line tied up like that.

Since he wasn’t getting petted, the Rottweiler wandered away.

She had a risky occupation, she knew that. Most of the time failed calls resulted in obscenities and comments about her personal defects, but when real money had been lost, a customer’s feelings could go way beyond annoyance. And it worried her that she didn’t know what The Guy looked like. If those fleeting shadows were real, they only told her that he was big. Other than that he could be anyone. Even one of those two cops.

But The Guy couldn’t have had anything to do with Evani getting killed, could he? Even if he found her, how could he connect her to Evani? Perhaps he had followed her home despite her efforts, but then why not attack her instead?

But if not The Guy, then who?

She heard the angry-bee sound of her cell phone on vibrate. It started her heart pounding with an instinctive, visceral terror that made no sense, and yet it did, because no one except Evani had her number.

And Evani was dead.

She had spread her coat across herself for warmth and now she reached into the pocket. It would be a wrong number, she told herself. It would be someone exactly like her, someone from some shit country who couldn’t even figure out world time zones, who wanted to lower her credit card interest rates or get her a great deal on satellite TV. That would be hilarious, she decided, and maybe even a little karmic.

But the display showed Evani’s number. Not his name, of course. They both used burners and kept all personal information off of them. No data plan, no selfies, no texts that would reveal anything more than what they wanted for dinner. Definitely no names, not even their nicknames. Only their numbers.

Evani was dead. This meant that whoever had made him dead had taken his phone, knew what they’d been doing and was now trying to find her.

It stopped vibrating.

Shanaya threw off the blankets and coat and padded to the kitchen. She flicked on the light and ripped open the back of the cell phone—lucky for her it was such a cheap one that she could remove the battery and the chip thing that had all the information on it. She looked around for tools, wanting to smash it with a hammer but had to content herself with a pliers. With that she snapped the chip in two. A dirty popcorn bowl sat in the sink; Shanaya filled it with water and dropped the rest of the phone inside. That should do it, right? With the battery out, the phone couldn’t do anything and it didn’t have a GPS or “find my phone” ability anyway. The chip looked irreparable but to be safe she could drop it in a garbage can on her next trip to work…. On second thought she fished it out and put it in the old and noisy microwave. The circuits sparked and made a bad smell. She stopped when a tiny flame appeared, so that the chip left only a small brown mark on its rotating plate. She inspected the few melted spots with satisfaction and dropped it into the bowl’s sparse soapsuds. Then she turned out the light and bundled herself back into the couch.

Evani’s killer had called her. Whoever had killed Evani was trying to find her, and not to express condolences.

What could they have gotten off the phone? The killer, of course, didn’t necessarily know anything about her. The killer still could be, and most probably was, a random mugger who had taken the phone to use or resell. The person now hitting redial might have bought the phone for a few bucks and felt like amusing themselves by trying the only number in its history, the only one Evani should have been calling.

It could be the police. They might have found the killer with the phone, or they had the phone the whole time and lied to her about it . . . but then they would have called right away, and not in the middle of the night. Would that be a better scenario, or a worse one?

Either way, she needed to work fast. A countdown had begun with Evani’s death, but without one of those handy LED readouts with the numbers ticking backward to let her know exactly where she stood.

The Rottweiler reappeared with a tennis ball in his mouth, tail wagging. She took it and tossed the slimy thing to the far corner, listening with satisfaction as his paws thundered across the floorboards. If she couldn’t sleep, the neighbors might as well be awake, too.

Saturday, 1:35 a. m.

Maggie retrieved a sweater from the lab’s closet. The climate-controlled interior stayed at a steady temperature twenty-four /seven, but somehow it always felt chillier in the wee hours of the morning whether winter or summer outside. This must be largely psychosomatic, she thought, but didn’t know what else to do about it besides put on a sweater.

She could be home in bed. Nothing in her job description obligated her to stay up all night to run the bloody fingerprint against the database. But finding the killer’s print in the victim’s blood, well, that was like a real estate agent hanging out a SOLD sign on the most expensive property in the city or an advertising executive landing a contract with a large auto insurance company—merely one part of a professional’s day, but an enormously satisfying part that didn’t come around often.

So she had transferred the best photograph of the print she had to the system, then changed the coloring to gray scale, increased the contrast, used the software’s markers to denote where the friction ridges came to an end or divided into two. Then it was ready to run.

Searching the print against each of ten fingers of each person in the database could take twenty or thirty minutes. Searching it against only ten prints of one person took seconds, so Maggie first set the program to search it against Marlon Toner, and only Marlon Toner. If it matched, her work would be done and she could go home to get a few short but happy hours of sleep. She had already checked and knew his prints were there. She assumed his prior arrests had been drug related, but that information didn’t come up in the fingerprint database and at that time of the night she wasn’t sufficiently curious to look it up in the reporting system.

The search had, indeed, only taken seconds, but also produced only three suggestions by the system how the print might correlate to one of Marlon Toner’s fingers. None appeared even reasonably close. Maggie printed out his ten-print card and examined each finger herself, glancing between the blood print enlarged on her monitor and the paper in her hand. The machine hadn’t been wrong. The blood print ridges formed an incomplete but definite whorl, and all ten of Toner’s prints were arches. In no known universe could he have left that print.

She’d have to look forward to even fewer hours of—she hoped—satisfied sleep, and set the system to run the blood print against all the prints in the database. She got up and made herself a cup of coffee to battle that early-morning-office chill. She made it a priority so that it jumped ahead of the automated, nighttime work, the continual comparison of previously unidentified latent prints to the standards of the new arrestees.

Then she retook her seat, sipped the hot liquid, and stared at the tiny magnifying glass symbol in the lower right corner of her monitor screen, the only visible indication that the system was searching. When the power saving option triggered and turned the screen to black, she jostled the mouse to wake it back up. She could probably get other work done while she was there, but didn’t feel capable of prompting her tired brain to handle anything more than sipping coffee and watching the tiny icon.

Why didn’t Jack seem more concerned about what Rick might find in Chicago? Was there truly nothing to find? Had he covered his tracks that well, or better yet, had never been to the city in his life? Or did he tell her not to worry simply to keep her from panicking? He had been doing this for years, and no doubt had an infallible exit strategy to slip out of town if there were any chance of his fellow officers showing up at his door with anything other than a barbecue invitation. She knew him at least that well, by now.

If he planned to leave, would he tell her?

Would she want him to? Best if she didn’t know, best if she didn’t have to fake her shock and surprise, best to keep that plausible deniability going. But the idea that he would leave without even giving her a heads-up came like a splash of cold water on a hot face. How could he just walk out and leave her to pick up the pieces of what used to be her totally normal life? If there had been one tiny inadequate comfort in bearing the terrible secret she now carried, it had been the existence of at least one other person in the world who knew, who understood what had happened and, maybe, why. That bond had been painfully forged in an unwanted fire, but it remained a bond nonetheless.

The tiny magnifying glass finally turned to an arrow, which meant the tireless automaton had finished one job and waited for the next. She clicked on the spreadsheet line with the information of her blood print. This opened a bisected display with the print on one side and the prints that the system’s logarithms thought most closely matched on the other. She could click on a list at the bottom to change this view to the system’s second choice, then its third, and so on. Parallel lines crossed the screen, pointing up the corresponding areas, the various colors used making the images light up like Christmas trees. It looked good, Maggie thought. At first glance she could see a pile of similarities and no differences.

Then she looked at the list at the bottom of the screen, to see to whom this print belonged.

That couldn’t be right.

She gazed at the two prints again, followed each line of correspondence. This ridge ending to that ridge ending. Two ridges in between, then a fork in a ridge forming a bifurcation. Another ridge in between and slightly upward to a short ridge. And so on, and so on, until she got to the edges of the bloody print and ran out of ridges to look at.

She printed out the ten-print card and a glossy hard copy of the bloody print she had photographed, laid them side by side on her desktop and used two jeweler’s loupes to examine them without the aid of the computer. She used two old-fashioned picks, skinny metal sticks with a point at one end and a wooden handle at the other, the whole instrument more narrow than the average ink pen. She used those to hold her place in one print while she examined the corresponding location in the other print. Same result.

This isn’t necessary bad, she told herself. Confusing, yes, but it doesn’t have to be bad.

But her body knew better. Her heart had begun to pound the minute she saw that name at the top of the list. This was bad, all right. It couldn’t not be bad.

Her fingers reached for the phone and she found herself scrolling to Jack’s name in her contact list before she even realized it, and made her thumb stop a millimeter from the phone icon, with only the tiniest bit of atmosphere keeping the electrical charge in her skin from activating the call.

The need to speak to him was urgent, primal. She had been pondering how he had turned her world turbulent and unpredictable and then in the next breath he became, illogically, ironically, the foundation to which she needed to cling.

She could dial. Or she could do what was right.

She sat frozen in that chill, dark hour of the night, in a silent office on a silent floor, trapped in her little bubble of existence, cut off from the rest of humanity.

Then her hand moved.

The cheery ringing tones seemed to last an eternity, but finally a voice sounded on the other end of the digital connection.

Maggie took a breath and used words she had probably never spoken to him. “Denny, I’m so sorry to wake you up in the middle of the night, but I didn’t know what else to do.”

Her boss shrugged off the slumber that quickly, his tone firm and worried. “Maggie? What’s wrong?”

“I have something here I don’t know what to do with. I mean, I do, but—”

“Slow down. Start from the beginning.”

She could hear rustling sounds, Denny slipping out of the bed and bedroom to avoid disturbing his wife any further, padding to the kitchen or living room as he kept his voice low to avoid waking one or all of their three children. Maggie quickly outlined the evening’s murder case and crime scene. She told him that Rick and Will had questioned the woman early that day about her brother, that they had gone back with Jack and Riley about Evan Harding, and then Jack and Riley went back again in the evening after a neighbor found her dead. She explained in one sentence the location and condition of the print in blood. Denny made encouraging sounds, patiently waiting for her to get to the part that required dragging her boss out of bed on this cold December night.

“It didn’t match the brother so I ran it against the whole database, of course. And it found a match. I’ve looked and looked, but it’s really a pretty good print so I don’t see how I could have gotten this wrong. Unless I’ve totally lost my mind—”

Even Denny’s patience had a limit. “Maggie. Why did you call me? Whose print is it?”

“I don’t understand this,” she said. “No matter what sort of explanation I come up with, it doesn’t make sense, not even a little.”

“Maggie. Whose?”

“That’s just it,” she said. “It’s Rick’s.”