Keep Them Close(13)
My knees bob nervously, my fingers rubbing together as if trying to create fire. “You don’t know my brother. He’ll never point the finger at Trinity. He’d sooner take the rap.”
Vivian argues the point, but I know I’m right. Luke will take the fall. And despite having no record, despite having been a law-abiding citizen his entire life, despite being a fitness freak who would never touch an illegal drug, Luke will serve time for this. His world will be shattered. He will never coach baseball again. Everybody and everything that he’s ever cared about will be gone.
He will do all of that for Trinity.
But he still has me. It will be up to me to fix this. It’s always up to me to fix things.
And fix things, I will.
* * *
Outside the police station, while Vivian tries to get in touch with the prosecutor assigned to his case, I dial Harp.
“We’ll need to talk very soon,” I say. “A…sensitive conversation.”
Harp laughs into the phone. “Do we have any other kind?”
After April Fools’ Day
10
Louise
—Investigation, Day 1—
The day after the body is identified, Louise Pratt likes to observe. Watch the behavior of the people close to the victim. See who comes to visit the bereaved and how long they stay.
Her decades in Homicide with Chicago P.D. have taught her much about reading patterns and body language, identifying the one thing that isn’t like the others, honing her instincts. She thought her edges would dull when she moved to Grace Park three years ago but, if anything, with the slower pace, the chance to reflect, they’ve sharpened.
As she sits in her unmarked Dodge Charger, a block from Allison Brice’s house on Easter Sunday, Louise doesn’t know much for certain yet. Between the missing-persons report Allison filed the day before they found her husband and the brief conversation Louise had with her at the morgue, she knows only this: They were separated; Finley had moved into their downtown condo; they were fighting over money; she believed Finley had committed adultery during the marriage; and she last saw him on April 1 at the condo around 3 p.m., the same day the medical examiner believes he died.
At first blush, this screams domestic. Bitterness, jealousy, hurt, humiliation, the standard cocktail of a marriage gone awry. All things being equal, you start with the wife and rule her out—or in—before going further. Allison herself said so to Louise.
But all things are not equal here. Your average person doesn’t wrap a body and toss it in a dumpster. To say nothing of the fact that Finley was a big guy compared to Allison’s relatively average size.
Then again, Allison Brice is not average. Polished, educated, successful—she may not register as the likeliest of candidates. But people don’t act in character when they commit murder. A murder like this one, a stab to the heart, could be either premeditated or spontaneous. But the aftermath, the panic, the desperation to cover up the crime can drive the most composed person to make extreme choices.
Allison Brice is not only intelligent generally but police-smart. Dropping a body in a dumpster injects all kinds of doubt into an investigation before it even begins. For one, it buys time. The body, if properly concealed, won’t be found until days later in a landfill or sorting facility. The offender composes herself, plans for the ensuing investigation, gets her ducks in a row. Maybe relevant evidence on the victim becomes compromised by the passage of time or by natural interference like insect intervention.
And time of death becomes far more tenuous. Allison would surely know that a medical examiner wouldn’t be able to pin down time of death to more than a range, possibly as wide as twenty-four hours, like the M.E. here, who said Finley died anywhere from forty-eight to seventy-two hours before his discovery. The wider the range of time, the more doubt, the greater the opportunity for an alibi, the easier to suggest alternative scenarios.
Not to mention that you don’t know where Finley was killed. You don’t have a crime scene yet. And wherever it is, the offender’s had days to clean it up.
In the several hours Louise has sat here, four different neighbors have stopped by Allison’s house to give their condolences, each with food. Allison’s brother, Luke Rankin, the baseball coach with some legal troubles of his own, stopped by just after Louise arrived around 7 a.m. with Starbucks in hand and hasn’t left yet.
Otherwise, it’s been Allison at the door, dressed in a simple sweater and blue jeans, receiving hugs and trays of food and brief visits.
Louise checks her phone. A text from Marly, her daughter and the reason Louise left CPD and moved to Grace Park. Marly was diagnosed with cervical cancer three years ago, when her twins—the first two of Louise’s seven grandkids—were still in elementary school.
It had been time to leave, anyway. Thirty years at CPD was enough. Homicide was a humming conveyor belt in the city, mail guaranteed to arrive daily. The bodies came fast, the brass and media prioritized speedy resolution over truth—there was no time for nuance, for dissecting motives, for getting a real taste for a case when you were drinking from a fire hose.
Before she can respond to her daughter’s text, the phone buzzes. A name pops up that she recognizes but hasn’t uttered or even thought about for well over a decade. A prosecutor with whom she worked twenty years ago.