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

Monday, 12:10 p. m.

She had thought the ride would be silent, but they hadn’t even reached the Lorain-Carnegie bridge before Jack said, “How are you feeling?”

A curious question, she thought. She answered honestly: “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel, what I’m supposed to do, how I’m supposed to act. But really, none of that is important.” She lapsed back into silence, tapping the envelope on her lap. When the nerves in her fingers thawed enough to allow sensation, she realized she still carried it. The smear of lighter color on Rick’s jacket had looked like powder; it might be the same powder as on the windowsill. She didn’t have the instrumentation to analyze any old substance. . . it had to be something the machinery had already been programmed to recognize, such as DNA, adhesives, or nylon fibers. The mass spectrometer might be able to tell her something. If it were an illegal drug, cocaine or fentanyl, the toxicology department could identify it as easily as she could flick a light switch. A powerful drug might explain why two people who had been searching for an addicted man were now dead….

Jack switched off the car and turned to her. “Maggie—”

She hadn’t noticed, but they had entered the police department parking garage and now sat tucked in a dark corner space.

He actually took one of her hands, and said her name again, as if he had to speak and yet didn’t want to. Jack was rarely uncertain about anything, and right now he seemed as uncertain as she’d ever seen him.

The words came out in a rush. “I didn’t do it.”

She blinked.

He clarified. “I didn’t kill him.”

He meant Rick.

After a pause she found her voice: “Do you really think I’d be sitting here in a car with you if I thought you did?”

Surprise erased the lines on his face, then a puffed breath of relief. “I hope not.”

It wasn’t as if the idea hadn’t occurred to her. Of course it had.

Jack had feared what Rick might find in Chicago and Minneapolis, no matter what he’d told her. Rick had been the only person in Cleveland who suspected Jack had something to do with the vigilante killings. Rick had motivation to pursue his suspicions, and enough bloody-mindedness to keep pursuing. Jack was the only person she could think of who had any motive to kill Rick at all. He could have known of Rick’s plan to re-interview Jennifer Toner, could have suggested it in the first place. Jack had no hobbies, no weekend activities, no one at home to whom he had explain an absence on Friday afternoon. Neither Jennifer nor Rick would have been on guard against another police officer. Jennifer would have let him in, Rick wouldn’t have felt the need to keep his gun in hand. And if anyone on the planet knew how to kill without leaving any clue behind, it was Jack.

And yet she felt calmly positive that he had not.

Was it because she had bought in so deeply to his world that she could no longer reason freely? Had she become so lost in the woods he created that she would never find her way back to the path?

No. It was because—

“I could be wrong. I won’t know until—”

Jack, still leaning toward her in the front seat of the car, seemed to be breathing in her air, drawing the thoughts out of her. “Wrong about what?”

“I don’t think Rick was shot. A hot bullet at that range should have melted some of the synthetic fibers around the entrance on the parka, just has it would have to Jennifer’s sweater. I think he was probably stabbed, exactly as Jennifer Toner was stabbed.”

“Okay . . . that would make sense. No loud noise to attract attention, giving him time to get the bo—body up the hallway to the window.”

“And I’m betting he was stabbed with something long and thin, like Jennifer. And just like,” she added, “Evan Harding.”

* * *

Jack escorted Maggie back to her lab, guiltily relieved to leave her there. He sucked at the whole emotion thing—and, truth be told, Maggie wasn’t terribly expressive herself—and thus didn’t feel he could help her navigate the potential minefield of mood in the wake of the death of an ex-spouse. Plus, he could see the lab served as her refuge, not merely her workspace, and more comfortable for her than probably any other place on earth. Her coworkers knew her and would know better than to assume she grieved deeply. Indeed, as he left, he heard Carol say, “Well, this has to be a weird feeling.”

By the time he returned to the two-story building on West 29th, the emphasis and the atmosphere had shifted. The body was gone, Denny now packed up his equipment and the cops had formed a huddle, for warmth more than for privacy. The chief of police barked out orders; the captain of homicide hovered at his elbow with a stern expression and kept his mouth shut. Shock had passed; now an abiding anger, colder than the thermometer could measure, took its place. One of their own had fallen. His killer would be pursued with a dedication and vigor that bordered on caricature, so deeply was it felt.

Jack joined the circle, mercifully unnoticed for a few minutes, and withstood the tiny shiver of awkwardness that traveled like electricity as soon as he was. He wasn’t everybody’s favorite guy to begin with, too unboisterous for that and a transplant to the area, and he was now dating Rick’s ex. Even though Rick had definitely not been everybody’s favorite guy, now he was dead, leaving the group to wonder exactly where their loyalties should lie. But Jack didn’t expect this undercurrent to rise to the level of a real problem. It would pulse way down low, then disappear entirely in a month or two.

A rough plan emerged. Rick had been interviewing Jennifer Toner in relation to a drug death, so drugs were likely to be the base of these crimes. The narcotics division would rattle every box of syringes, canvas every treatment center—diplomatically—and grill every Confidential Informant they could. The homicide guys would then follow up their best suspects. The rank and file would comb the city to find Marlon Toner, who had just become Cleveland’s number-one most wanted. “Now,” the chief said, “let’s get the hell out of here before we all get frostbite.”

A rookie had been tasked to circle the lot, taking down the crime scene tape. This freed the pretty Channel 15 anchor as well as a couple other news people to fast-walk up to the group and probe for quotes. Jack helped Denny pack the alternate light source in the city station wagon, they exchanged vague statements of concern for Maggie’s emotional well-being, and the forensic supervisor drove away. Riley found Jack, they exchanged more vague statements about Maggie, and Riley told his partner that he and Will and Denny had personally removed and examined every garbage bag, crumpled rag, and weathered asphalt shingle in the entire dumpster. They had found very little. Not even blood since Rick had landed on his back—his heart must have stopped pumping very quickly.

Jack said, “Like Jennifer Toner and Evan Harding.”

“You think Harding’s connected?”

“I can’t for the life of me see how. But it’s a damn weird coincidence if they were all killed by the same type of weapon.”

Riley considered this. “I guess we’ll see after the autopsy. We did find a pair of glasses. Denny got all excited about that. He thinks the guy tossed out the body, leaned out to see his handiwork, and the glasses slipped off his face, and maybe we can trace the prescription. The garbage bags all seemed to be regular household garbage, no bloody rags, mail belonging to people who live here. Nothing belonging to Jennifer. We also found a small stack of empty snack containers, gum, chips, and a few scraps of paper, somebody’s phone number, somebody else’s grocery list. Oh, and a USB drive.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh yeah. We all got real excited about that. Let’s say our killer had it in his shirt pocket and it fell out. Maybe it’s got his whole life on it. Maybe it’s got the landlord’s porn collection, too, but I like to think positive.”

Jack gazed up at the building, feeling the cold work its way into his jaw and make it sluggish. “If the tenants were using it as a receptacle, how did they not notice—?”

“The snow. We figure this happened right around quitting time Friday afternoon. The roofers had knocked off early—Friday, you know—and well before most of the tenants got home from work. It snowed most of the day Friday, melted a little bit Saturday and Sunday but not all, and then started again today. You can’t see inside the dumpster from the second floor unless you actually open the window and stick your head out, which of course no one is going to do in this weather, except to pitch out their own stuff, and then they’d do it quickly and probably after dark. No lights this side of the building . . . so they never saw him. And get this—the bin is scheduled to be picked up every Tuesday. A little more snow, and he might never have been found. We’d have thought Gardiner went on vacation and never came back.”

“Maggie knew,” Jack said. “She knew there was something wrong.”

“Dude,” said a voice behind them. “What’s going on?”

Jack half turned. A man stood there, a heavy stadium coat covering him up to his ears and a knit cap pulled down until it had to impede his vision. His smell placed him somewhere on the homeless spectrum.

“There was a death here,” Jack told him.

Whatever influence the man had fallen under turned him both hyper and mellow, though the bouncing and bobbing could have been him trying to keep his blood from freezing in its veins. “Aw, man. That’s too—who was it?”

“It was a police officer.”

The nearly-hidden eyes grew wide. “True? Wow, that’s—wow. I gotta get in there. I can go in the building, right?”

Riley said yes, he could. “Do you live here?”

“No, I’m just visiting my sister.”

Certainty poked Jack’s heart with one quick icy thrust. “What’s your name?”

“Me?”

“Yes, you.”

The man calmly replied, “I’m Marlon Toner.”