Every Kind of Wicked

Book 6: Gardiner and Renner Novel

by Lisa Black

Genres: Crime Fiction; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Life and death have brought Maggie Gardiner full circle, back to the Erie Street Cemetery where she first entered Jack Renner’s orbit. Eight months ago, she learned what Jack would do in the name of justice. More unsettling still, she discovered how far she would go to cover his tracks. Now a young man sprawls atop a snowy grave, his heart shredded by a single wound. A key card in the victim’s wallet leads to the local university’s student housing—and to a grieving girlfriend with an unsettling agenda. Maggie’s struggle to appease her conscience is complicated by her ex-husband, Rick, who’s convinced that Jack is connected to a series of vigilante killings. Also a homicide detective, Rick investigates what seems like a routine overdose on Cleveland’s West Side, but here, too, the appearance belies a deeper truth. Rick’s case and Jack’s merge on the trail of a shadowy, pill-pushing physician, who is everywhere and nowhere at once, while Maggie and Jack uncover a massive financial shakedown hiding in plain sight. And when Rick’s bloody fingerprint is found at another murder scene, Maggie’s world comes undone in a violent, irreversible torrent of events...

Release date: August 25, 2020

Publisher: Kensington

Print pages: 320

Sample

Friday, 8 a. m.

“Well, that’s less than helpful,” Maggie said of the snow.

The white flakes drifted lazily downward, landing on the frozen grass, the bare limbs of the large trees, the bloodstains sprinkled across the worn stones and the very stiff body of a young man who had not dressed well for the weather. Yet exposure hadn’t killed him—he had been dead long before his body froze.

From the deep red stain blossoming from the center of his chest, Maggie Gardiner assumed a gunshot—or shots—had been the likely cause of death. Something had penetrated his internal systems to leak his lifeblood out across his white shirt and over the stones beneath him, which marked, coincidentally, a grave. But Maggie didn’t say so; declaring cause of death was a pathologist’s job and she worked as a forensic specialist. Her job would be to find the evidence around said death in order to help her colleagues at the police department determine who had walked away from this boy’s last encounter.

Which would be more difficult to do with each passing moment as the snow slowly covered up the body, the blood, and all her evidence.

She had arrived at the scene immediately before the assigned detectives, and now felt them standing on either side of her, Jack Renner to her right and Thomas Riley to her left. Renner, tall, only a bit dark and not so handsome, and his partner, distinctly shorter but lighter in both coloring and personality. And her, an inch shorter than Riley and nearly half his body weight, pale with deep brown hair falling past her shoulders, no gun, no badge, a civilian employee in a department of sworn officers. A uniformed patrol officer hovered somewhere among the graves as well. They made a somber and all too familiar tableau. A frigid breeze lifted her hair, chilled her neck, and moved on.

“A dead guy in a cemetery,” Riley said. “That’s—what’s the word?”

“Weird?” Maggie suggested.

“I was going to say redundant.” He took a step closer to the body and she spread out both arms like a railroad crossing, stopping both detectives. It wouldn’t hold them for long, she knew.

She crouched, looking not at the body but the ground around it, finally poking the ground with a latex-gloved finger.

“Shoe prints?” Jack asked.

She answered with disappointment. The canopy of trees in the cemetery kept the grass sparse, and if the man had been killed during a thaw there might be nice prints in the Ohio clay-mud. But the ground had been frozen much too solid for the killer’s feet to create prints. At least she didn’t have to pour casts, always a chore in any kind of weather, but especially in snow where the reaction as the cast hardened created warmth and melted the print. A forensic Catch-22.

The cops took this as an all-clear and moved closer to the body. So did she. The patrolman stayed where he was. He had already strung yellow crime scene tape across the now-opened gates at either end of the cemetery and the high stone walls protected the rest. Crowd control at an inner-city cemetery on a snowy weekday didn’t present much of a problem. Outside those walls, office buildings towered over the scene, only half a mile from the Public Square. Cars hummed along the surrounding streets, calm now that the morning rush hour had ended. She could work in relative, if chilly, peace.

Maggie observed their young victim. He lay facing the sky, eyes unable to shut against the precipitation. He wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a satin jacket that would have been at home inside a disco circa 1985, with thin padding unlikely to be much protection against Cleveland weather in mid-December. Maggie put his age at about twenty-five. He had brown hair, brown eyes, and a deeper hue to his skin even with the pallor of death over it, possibly mixed-race. His hair was cut short, no apparent piercings or tattoos that she could see.

“Any ID?” Riley asked. “Wallet? Phone?”

She patted his pockets—empty—and they couldn’t turn him over to examine any rear pockets until the Medical Examiner’s investigator arrived.

But under the open jacket he wore a white badge pinned to his shirt. It had rounded edges and red letters which said only “Evan.” A streak of red dots crossed right over the v and continued along the shirt. Maggie noted some round stains on his chest and abdomen, and an irregular blotch over his collarbone.

Riley said, “So somebody shot him—”

“I’m not so sure. See those drops? Round spots imply blood fell on him when he was already laid out. I don’t know why a gun would be that bloody when it wasn’t close enough to leave a jagged hole or the powdery soot of fouling. Unlikely that enough tissue would get on the barrel to drip off later.”

Jack had followed her reasoning. “So you think it’s a stab wound?”

“That is my guess, but I can’t be positive either way. Autopsy will tell. But a stab wound would make more sense, if the killer stood here for a second while blood dripped off the weapon and caused those spots. They didn’t come from the victim’s hands—they’re clean.”

“So the killer waited,” Jack said. “Making sure he was dead.”

He ought to know, Maggie thought.

She said, “No injury to our victim’s hands. Either he can’t throw much of a punch, or he was swinging a weapon himself and the killer took it away with him, or this was a blitz attack. He didn’t even have time to put a hand up and feel his own wounds.”

Jack looked around. “So the guy walked out of here with a bloody weapon.”

“Or not,” Riley said. “We’ll have to check those cans at the exits.”

The patrolman had been checking his social media but listening as well, because he immediately put the phone away. “Me?”

“Lift the lid off, but don’t touch anything inside.” As the young man walked off, Riley said, “If it’s not there we’ll have to search the whole grounds. Lucky for us it’s not a big cemetery.”

Maggie continued her usual crime scene examination. She took close-up photos of the victim’s hands, without moving them. His right lay palm up, his left palm down. As she had noted, no torn nails, no bruising, no bloodstains. They seemed in fairly good shape, the skin smooth—whatever the guy did for a living probably didn’t involve heavy manual labor. They were bare, something she never understood since she pulled her gloves out of the closet as soon as the temperature dipped below sixty, and wished she could get them out of her pocket now—even two layers of her thin latex gloves didn’t begin to insulate against the chill.

Riley said, as if thinking out loud, “We should check the entire cemetery anyway. This guy was probably walking home from work or from the bar, and somebody saw a target. There could be homeless camping in here—handy stone walls to hide behind, nice and dark at night, not a place that cops or pedestrians would be scoping out on a regular basis.”

Maggie said, “In winter? I’d think they’d want to be near a steam grate, or up against the window of an occupied building. I can’t imagine anything colder than a cemetery in winter.”

“Yeah, the only people around have zero body warmth.” Riley chuckled at his own joke. “But break into one of those little mausoleums and you could probably start a small fire without anyone noticing. Or maybe your standard mugger saw this guy taking a nice, isolated shortcut . . . it would have had to be before this place closed, though, or our victim couldn’t have gotten in. Unless they both jumped the fence.”

Maggie took in the victim’s pants and shoes, free of scrapes. But then the cemetery had the high stone wall only on its two long sides. The east and west walls consisted of a shorter iron fence. The young man looked agile enough, especially if he found something to climb on first to allow him to clear the spiky finial at the top of each picket.

Jack walked around the large headstone behind where the victim lay and alerted her to the slim wallet lying up against the back of the stone, protruding from the gathering snow. After Maggie photographed it in place, Jack gloved up and opened it. Riley, knees creaking, crouched to scatter the snow with one hand to look for any other clues that might be steadily disappearing from view.

The wallet stayed slim because it contained almost nothing. “No DL, no credit cards, and certainly no money,” Jack grumbled, checking all its compartments. Something fell as he did so, and Maggie caught it before it hit the ground. A dark green plastic key card, the magnetic strip clearly visible.

“Credit card?” Jack asked.

She turned it over, showing him that it was blank on both sides. No numbers, no name, only the ghost image, in lighter green, of a scowling face wearing a horned hat.

“A Viking?” Jack asked.

“Cleveland State,” Maggie said.

“Their football team?”

“Basketball. They don’t have a football team.”

“Are you sure? About the school?”

She didn’t take offense at the query. He knew her well enough to know she wasn’t exactly the biggest sports fan in the world. If that were the only thing he knew about her, things would be so much less complicated.

“I went there. Green is their color, too. This must be some sort of student ID card.”

Riley straightened up and looked around at the whitening landscape. “I don’t see anything else. I’d feel a lot better if we could have a sudden, miraculous thaw right about now. Who knows what else is out here?”

Jack dug a few scraps of paper with unlabeled phone numbers and the business card for two area tech stores out of the wallet, then dropped the whole bundle into a paper bag Maggie held out. They would have to follow up those leads later, unless they were lucky and the guy had an ID card in his back pocket.

Maggie could see a mugger taking the cash and credit cards but, assuming the guy had one, why the driver’s license? “Maybe the mugger resembles the dead boy enough to keep the DL in case he needed it to use the credit card, or cards?”

Jack said, “Risky. We could check surveillance videos wherever the cards have been used in the past, say, twelve hours . . . of course that’s if we knew the guy’s name.”

“Maybe that’s why he took the driver’s license.”

Riley said, “Your average mugger isn’t that smart. Trust me on that.”

She did. “So our killer is either really smart or really dumb.”

“Or this guy didn’t carry any identification,” Jack said.

Maggie shivered. She couldn’t stop thinking about her last visit to the Erie Street Cemetery. She had first entered Jack Renner’s orbit that day, eight months and a lifetime ago. The gravesites had been dampened with spring grass and the body of a young girl. Trafficked, abused, murdered, and disposed of.

Jack hadn’t killed the girl, of course. But a day later he killed the man who’d killed her. Maggie had discovered that and done nothing about it. Then Maggie had made her own violent decision and her life had not been the same since.

No one—besides Jack, of course—knew that. But not even he knew that she still woke up every morning wondering how long she could carry this burden before she broke under the weight, told someone—anyone—the truth, and created an opening for both her and Jack at the nearest jail. She had not spoken to anyone about this perfect storm of threat and guilt. Not her friends, not her only sibling, not the assigned department-ordered psychologist. Not even Jack.

Not yet, anyway.

She studied his face, wondering if any of these thoughts churned in his head, whether he made the connection between their first case together and this one. Wondering if they had come full circle, wondering if her period of crazy had ended, if she might be ready to go back to being the person she’d been before.

The uniformed patrol officer interrupted her thoughts. He hadn’t seen anything of any interest in either garbage can, at least not on the surface. “What’s on top don’t look fresh, either . . . I doubt this place gets a lot of traffic in the winter. I mean, you can check, but if you ask me, your weapon isn’t buried in there.”

“Duly noted,” Jack said. “Thank you.”

“No problem. At least I’m not in the middle of a cluster in some apartment building with psycho moms threatening to beat my ass, like, say, my shift yesterday. Much rather be out here with my nose going numb and—hey, you know who this is?”

The two cops and Maggie gave the young cop their full attention. Riley said, “What? You know our victim?”

“No, not him. Whose grave he’s lying on.”

Disappointed, Maggie tried to read the large stone looming up from the snow, but the elements of too many years had worn down the surface. Then she noticed, for the first time, that the slab the victim sprawled across had broken and slightly separated, with grass springing up in the cracks as if they were flagstones. “Somebody famous?” she asked, to be polite, since the two detectives showed no interest.

“Chief Joc-O-sot.”

She squinted. Indeed, the raised letters of the broken slab spelled that out in a line above the victim’s head.

“He was an Indian chief in the Black Hawk War.”

Now Riley did show some interest. “What the hell was the Black Hawk War?”

“I have no idea, but it sounds cool, don’t it? He wasn’t actually from Cleveland. He came here with some friend of his and became sort of a media darling. Queen Victoria had his portrait painted when he visited her in England.” Now that all three of his companions stared at him, he explained, “My kid had to do a history report on this cemetery.”

“Ah,” Maggie said.

He spoke more quickly, recognizing short attention spans when he found them. “Supposedly he haunts this area. The trip to England aggravated an old wound, and he was trying to get to his old home to be buried with his tribe, but only made it back to Cleveland before dying. So his spirit doesn’t really want to be here. Supposedly.”

“I doubt a ghost gutted this guy,” Riley said.

“Doesn’t have to be the Indian,” the cop mused aloud. “This cemetery used to be a lot bigger, but when downtown real estate needed to expand, they moved a bunch of graves. Might have ticked off a lot of spirits. Like in Poltergeist.”

Riley argued, “No, in the movie they built over the graves. Here, as long as they actually moved them it should be cool.”

“Tell that to the ghosts.”

“If you guys are finished discussing the supernatural,” Jack said, “I see the ME is here.”

The Medical Examiner’s Office investigator, a middle-aged man with very dark skin and zero body fat, prodded the body but discovered no new insights. Maggie helped him turn the now-stiff corpse over, but the back pockets were as empty as the front. No phone, no further items, no ID. The jacket similarly held nothing of interest.

“The body snatchers are going to be a while,” he told them. “They’re stuck at a four-car pileup at Dead Man’s Curve.”

“Bunch of fatalities?” Riley asked.

“No, but traffic’s backed up for two miles and they’re looking for an exit.”

Riley groaned as if this inefficiency were a personal affront and turned to Jack. “Why don’t you see if CSU can tell us anything about that swipe card? I’ll stand here and freeze my toes to Popsicles and hear more about Chief Jackspit.”

“Joc-O-sot,” the patrol officer corrected.

“I’ll go with you,” Maggie said.

Both cops stared at her.

She said, “Cleveland State’s a sprawling campus. It takes a half hour of wandering around to find anything if you’re not familiar with it. It’s only two blocks away.” They didn’t seem convinced, but she added firmly, “Let’s go,” and began to walk.

After fifteen or twenty feet, Jack glanced back to make sure they were out of earshot, “What was all that about?”

Maggie said, “We need to talk.”

They exited the cemetery at the west end, across from the baseball stadium, now as frigid and vacated as the gravesites, and did a U-turn onto the short, brick-paved Erie Court. Conscious of their coworkers on the other side of the stone wall, they kept their voices low.

“What’s up?” Jack asked. He didn’t worry that Riley would find their tête-à-tête suspicious; he and Maggie had let everyone believe they were sleeping together. They weren’t, of course, but it provided a handy explanation for these occasional conferences. And Maggie had thought it might discourage the interest of her ex-husband, another homicide detective named—

“Rick.”

“He hassling you?” Rick Gardiner wasn’t the most even-tempered guy.

“No, but I think he’s planning to hassle you.”

They emerged onto East 14th. She turned left and he followed.

“He stopped by to see me this morning, supposedly to pick up a fingerprint report on a case of his, which of course he didn’t need because we always send copies over to your unit as soon as they’re ready. Then he told me a funny story about one of those phone scammers calling and pretending to be his grandson needing money for bail—”

“He has a grandson?”

“Of course not. Even if we’d had children, their kids wouldn’t be old enough to get arrested, so that insulted him more than the loss of his credit card information would have. But then he started asking about you. Where you grew up, where you became a cop.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“The truth: I have no idea. You’re not exactly chatty.”

Strictly true. And even if he were, no chance arose for a heart-to-heart chat about his past since they weren’t really dating. Even if they were dating, Jack thought, Maggie already knew more of his prior activities than she wanted to. Way more.

“He’s going to Chicago.”

Jack stepped off the curb, nearly into the path of a tractor-trailer so large, it seemed to brush the lowest prisms of the chandelier demarking Playhouse Square. Maggie grabbed his arm, saving him from death by Peterbilt.

“He said there were similar vigilante-type murders of scumbags there.” Similar to the men he had killed in Cleveland, she meant. She hadn’t let go of his arm, maintained one steady pull until he faced her. “Were there?”

He hesitated, but lying to her would not help anything, and nodded.

This couldn’t be news to her, but still her shoulders slumped in worry.

The light changed and they stepped into the crosswalk, and she tried to rally. “He did add that it’s hard to conclude anything from that, given the number of murders in Chicago. However—he said he might go on to Minneapolis.”

Theater marquees provided spotty shelter from the still-falling snow as they passed beneath. “The vigilante case was reassigned to me.” That should have kept Rick Gardiner away from Jack’s handiwork.

“This trip isn’t official. It’s all on his own. I don’t think I need to describe how rare it is that Rick does anything on his own.”

Jack agreed. Maggie’s ex would never be known as a go-getter. Not for the first time, he wondered what had ever attracted her to the man in the first place, but stopped himself—not the issue here. What Rick Gardiner might uncover from Jack’s old stomping grounds, that was the issue.

His reluctant, erstwhile, accidental partner in crime could no longer contain her anxiety. “What are you going to do? What’s he going to find, Jack?”

“Calm down,” he said—two words one should never say to a woman. He regretted them immediately.

“I am perfectly calm!” Except she wasn’t, and several other people also waiting for the light at East 18th didn’t think so either as they turned at her sharp tone, their glances then sliding away to give them as much privacy as could be afforded on a busy city street.

Jack, wisely and promptly, backpedaled. “Yes, okay. Let him go. He won’t find anything.”

“You’re sure? He asked if I had a photo of you. Not in so many words, I mean. As he pretended to be chatting, he asked why we didn’t have any selfies on Facebook or something. Since I haven’t posted on Facebook since my niece’s birthday last year, that seemed like a stupid comment . . . until I figured out what he was after.” The light changed. The people around them moved and Maggie continued to talk as if she couldn’t help herself, a measure of her agitation. Jack knew that. Maggie represented a walking time bomb, one that could detonate the cover life he’d built for himself in this city. If one more straw of guilt broke the back of her conscience . . . yes, he might wind up in jail, but more likely he’d simply move on. Maggie would at least give him a heads-up before confessing. Wouldn’t she?

She might figure he had already overstayed his welcome. The person he had followed to Cleveland in order to destroy had been destroyed. He and Maggie had agreed that waiting six months should allow him to leave without causing suspicion. But it had been eight months, and here he remained.

She was saying, “Obviously he’s trying to come up with a picture of you to take with him. He got called away to an overdose, but that’s what he was angling around to. Rick was always a lousy actor. I figured out he was cheating on me, like, two days after he started—”

“He did?” Why the hell—

She waved that away with a gloved hand and no hitch in her stride. “Long story. What can he do if he visits those police departments?”

Cue the knee-jerk reaction. “Nothing. It will be fine.”

“Are you sure?”

Somewhat sure. Chicago had a huge force, and he had used a different name there. First Rick would have to weasel Jack’s ID photo out of Cleveland’s human resources unit, then happen to show his picture to the very few guys in Chicago who might actually remember him. On top of that, cops don’t care for people outside their agency asking about their guys, even if those people were also cops. And Chicago had been slammed in the news for several years, so they would be doubly reticent to speak ill of anyone who might have once worn their uniform. Yes, he doubted Rick would find anything to connect Jack to the city at all.

“Positive,” he told Maggie, more calmly.

She appeared no more reassured than he felt. “What about Minneapolis?”

A slightly smaller force, and Rick had the name of a lieutenant there. If he got to that man with a photo of Jack or even a thorough description, the man would know it didn’t match the Officer Jack Renner he’d supervised. That would lead them both to ask why the Jack Renner now in Cleveland had been working in Minneapolis under a different name. “No problem.”

“You’re sure?”

He stopped, turned to face her. “Maggie. Don’t worry.”

“Oh, I’m worried.”

He should have known a simple platitude would hardly dissuade the logical, thorough, and sometimes frighteningly sharp Maggie Gardiner. She had much more to lose than he did. He had designed a fake life in Cleveland, but she had a real one. She had friends, family, career, history. Guilt didn’t often trouble him, but it did now. “Rick isn’t going to find anything to make him more suspicious of me. Let him go, let him investigate his heart out. When he comes up with nothing it will convince him to give it up once and for all and I’ll be clear for good. We’ll both be clear, for good.”

She studied his face, and he watched as she debated whether to accept this. The vigilante murders had stopped—or so the city, and Maggie, believed—and the case assigned to him, the one man guaranteed not to solve them. Rick remained the only cloud on their horizon, but even Riley believed that simple jealousy motivated Rick, the common annoyance of seeing his ex-wife with another man. Jack knew what trails he had left in other cities, and if he wasn’t grabbing his go-bag and heading for the city limits . . . the understandable desire to believe that all would be well won her over.

“Okay,” she said at last.

“Okay,” he agreed, and looked up at the towering center building of Cleveland State University. “Where are we going?”

“Registrar’s office, I guess.”

Maggie hadn’t exaggerated the time he might spend wandering around before he found answers. The campus sprawled, signs and directionals of limited help in the network of buildings and walkways, all pulsing with forced air heat and vivacious students. The Registrar’s office sent them to Security, who said the card appeared to be for student housing, and they trouped through several buildings to reach that main desk. It was much quieter there than the chaotic Registrar’s, with the quarter close to ending and final tests and grading scheduled. Only one slouching boy waited ahead of them.

Once at the counter, the bright young lady recognized the card immediately.

“Oh yes, that’s a unit key. That’s why we don’t put the address on it, or even the unit number—so if someone found it, they’d have to try it in every door in every building to break in or burgle the place or whatever. Thank you so much for turning it in. I’ll be sure to find who it belongs to and see that they get it back. They’ll probably be coming in here looking for a replacement anyway.”

“No, he won’t.” Jack pulled out his badge and explained that the former holder of the key card had died. The girl’s face plummeted into a look of such sympathy that he hoped she wouldn’t burst into sobs.

“That’s awful! What happened? Car accident?”

Jack made his voice sympathetic but ignored her question. “We need to know the name and address associated with this card.”

“But I can’t tell you that—I mean, the cards are usually made up at each individual facility. They, um, they would know who lives there . . . but I might, should, be able to tell you the building.”

“That would be really helpful,” Jack said, perhaps too sweetly. Maggie gave him an odd look; the girl gulped and swiped the card though a reader tucked behind the desk.

Then she told him that that card belonged to the Domain at Cleveland, two blocks away.

“Thank you,” Jack said.

“It’s a neat old building,” she sniffed, handing the card back. “It used to be a YMCA.”

“Very interesting,” he offered.

“Built in, like, eighteen hundred something.”

“Thank you,” Maggie told her.

“Have a nice day,” the girl said, inconsolable, and went to hunt up a tissue. Jack and Maggie plunged back into the frigid winter air.

“I think we ruined that poor girl’s day,” Jack commented. Anything to keep the conversation away from Maggie’s ex-husband and his potential damage.

“Might not be a bad thing,” she said, which surprised him. At his look she added, “Everyone can use the occasional reminder that life is short.”

He hoped this meditation on mortality. . .