Chapter 3 - The Inventory of Bones
The living room smelled of burnt toast and spilled cabernet.
It was nearly midnight before the crime-scene technicians finished their preliminary sweeps of the ground floor. They moved through the brownstone with heavy Pelican cases, their rubber boots squeaking on the heart-pine floorboards that Daniel had spent forty thousand dollars restoring with Swedish wax.
They were methodical, unimpressed by the architectural pedigree of the house. They photographed the indentation in the plaster beside the front coat rack—the three-inch crater where Daniel’s signet ring had left a crescent mark during an argument about the symphony tickets three weeks before Thanksgiving. They swabbed the edge of the kitchen island where the wine had pooled. They used small wooden dowels to measure the distance between the floor and the bruised tissue on my chin, documenting the angle of incidence with an amber laser level mounted on a carbon-fiber tripod.
Reed sat on the low mahogany coffee table, his overcoat unbuttoned, his notebook resting on his knee. He was drinking cold black coffee from a paper cup he had brought from the 7-Eleven on Light Street.
"The search warrant for the foundation offices was signed twenty minutes ago," he said, not looking up from his notes. "Judge Higgins was on call. When he saw the transcript from the wire, he didn't even ask for a secondary affidavit."
"Higgins was on the board of Mercer House until last year," I said, my voice hoarse from the pressure on my larynx. I was sitting on the edge of the sofa, wrapped in a gray fleece blanket that Officer Vasquez had retrieved from the second-floor linen closet.
"Higgins resigned because Daniel refused to provide an external audit of the gala receipts," Reed replied, his ballpoint pen making a dry, rhythmic scratching sound against the paper. "He knew something was rotting in the ledger, but he didn't want to get his robes dirty trying to find the dead rat. Now that we've opened the floorboards, he's more than happy to hand us the crowbar."
He closed the notebook with a soft, leathery slap.
"Your sister is downstairs in the cruiser," he said. "She drove down from Frederick the minute Lena called her from the clinic. She wants to take you out of the city."
"Not yet," I said.
Reed frowned, his gray eyebrows knitting together over the bridge of his broken nose. "Clara, Daniel is in central booking. His attorney—Julian Vance—is already filing an emergency bail petition with the district commissioner. Julian has sixty years of family money behind him and half the appellate bench on his Christmas-card list. We’ll hold him for twenty-four hours on the domestic felony, but by noon tomorrow, he’ll have three character witnesses from the municipal council testifying that he’s a pillar of the community."
"He won't have Julian," I said.
Reed paused, his pen hovering two inches above the pocket of his shirt. "Julian has represented the Mercer family since Daniel’s grandfather built the freight terminals at Locust Point. Why wouldn't he have Julian?"
"Because Julian thinks Daniel borrowed that forty thousand dollars to cover the shortfall on the annual gala," I said. I pulled my hands from beneath the fleece blanket. My fingers were bruised along the knuckles from where Daniel had pinned my hand against the stone, but they were steady. "Julian doesn't know about the second account at Chesapeake Trust. He doesn't know that Daniel has been using the foundation’s executive housing fund to pay the lease on a loft in Harbor East."
Reed’s eyes narrowed until they looked like two pieces of chipped flint. "Whose name is on the Harbor East lease?"
"Tricia Miller," I said.
The name dropped into the quiet living room like an iron bolt down a dry well.
The technician with the camera stopped mid-frame, his flash unit illuminating the wisteria wallpaper in a blinding burst of white light.
"Tricia Miller?" Reed repeated, his voice dropping into that quiet, terrifying register he used when an investigation turned from a street brawl into an institutional homicide. "The former client from the transition program? The one who testified before the state legislature about the Mercer House recovery model?"
"She was twenty-two when she entered the program," I said, looking out through the bay windows at the rain dripping from the ailanthus trees in the alley. "Daniel gave her a job in the administrative office three months later. He told her she was his greatest success story. He told her she owed him her sobriety, her apartment, and her life."
I reached into the pocket of my navy trousers—the trousers Daniel hadn't torn—and pulled out a brass key with a red plastic tag numbered 404.
"I found it in his golf bag behind the spare spikes," I told Reed. "The maintenance receipts for the HVAC system at 1200 President Street were billed to our home address for fourteen months. Daniel told me it was an auxiliary storage unit for the Christmas donation drives. When I went down there last Friday while he was in Annapolis, Tricia was sitting on the front stoop with an eight-month-old child in her arms."
Reed stood up from the mahogany table. The paper cup crumpled in his fist, the cold coffee leaking over his knuckles without him noticing.
"Did she talk to you?" he asked.
"She didn't have to," I said. "The baby has his bottom teeth, Detective. The crowded ones. The ones that don't fit the gum line."
Reed turned toward the hallway. "Vasquez!"
The female officer appeared in the archway, her notebook already open, her ballistic vest creaking against her ribs.
"Call the state's attorney's financial crimes team," Reed barked, his voice carrying the full, unvarnished weight of twenty-five years on the Baltimore street. "Tell them to pull the incorporation documents for Mercer House Foundation subsidiaries from twenty-twenty-two to present. Specifically, any residential leases held under the title of 'Presidential Holdings LLC.' And get a protective unit over to twelve-hundred President Street before Julian Vance gets off the phone with the night clerk."
"On it," Vasquez said, disappearing down the corridor toward the front door.
Reed looked back at me. The cynical, exhausted cop had vanished; in his place stood an investigator who had just realized that the man he had arrested wasn't just a domestic abuser with a good public relations firm.
He was a predator who had built his entire empire out of the wreckage of the women he claimed to rescue.
"Your sister is coming up the steps, Clara," Reed said, his voice softer now. "Go to Frederick. Let Rachel put some soup in you. Let the doctors look at that jaw again in the morning."
"I’m not going to Frederick," I said, standing up from the sofa. The room swayed slightly, the gray wool blanket falling away from my shoulders, revealing the torn blue silk and the yellowing purple hematoma that stretched from the line of my collarbone down toward the sternum. "If I go to Frederick, Daniel’s lawyers will file for an emergency protective custody order on the marital estate. They’ll claim I abandoned the domicile. They’ll say I took the records under duress and compromised the evidentiary chain."
"Clara—"
"I stay in the city, Marcus," I said, using his first name for the first time since we had met in the urgent-care consultation room. "I stay at the hotel across from the courthouse. I want to be in the second row when the district commissioner calls the bail docket at nine o'clock."
He looked at me for five seconds. He didn't argue. He had seen enough survivors to know the difference between shock and steel.
"The Tremont," he said. "Room four-twelve. It’s registered to the department’s witness-services account under a dummy LLC. I’ll have two uniformed officers on the elevator bank until the arraignment."
The front door opened with a sudden, wet gust of wind from Montgomery Street.
Rachel was through the entryway before the storm door could swing shut. She hadn't taken off her yellow slicker; her brown hair was plastered to her forehead with rain, her face white and sharp with the frantic, helpless terror that sisters carry when the telephone rings after midnight.
She stopped at the threshold of the living room.
Her eyes took in the chalk marks on the baseboards, the spilled wine on the quartz island, the technician packing his tripod into a canvas bag, and finally, the dark, swollen crescent along the side of my face.
She didn't scream. She didn't cry.
She crossed the heart-pine floor in three long strides, her wet coat smelling of cold road water and pine needles, and wrapped her arms around my neck with a force that pressed her cold, rain-soaked cheek against my burning ear.
"I have the car outside," she whispered into my hair, her voice vibrating with a fury so deep it felt like an electric charge against my ribs. "I have your winter boots in the trunk. I have the papers from the safety-deposit box. We’re leaving this cemetery, Clara. We’re leaving it tonight."
I held her. I buried my face into the rough, wet nylon of her shoulder and let the first real breath of air enter my lungs since Daniel had turned the brass deadbolt five hours ago.
"We're not leaving the city, Rach," I whispered back.
She pulled back an inch, her dark eyes searching my face, her hands coming up to cup my elbows with an iron grip. "What do you mean we're not leaving? Look at this house! Look at what he did to your mouth!"
"We're going to the courthouse," I told her.
May you like
I reached out, my fingers catching the torn edge of my navy silk blouse, smoothing the fabric down over the small black wire that still hummed against my collarbone.
"We're going to watch them take his shoes," I said.
