Unsolved Page 14

  On the east side of the street, south of the car wash, the grainy footage shows a tall, thin man in dreadlocks with what looks like a microphone in his hand, gesturing and apparently singing as people pass by.

  “That’s Mayday,” says Ciomek as she drives. “Marlon Mayberry. He had one of those old Mr. Microphones and sang all the time. Made some decent money doing it too. Part of that was his talent and charm. He’d make folks laugh, sing silly songs or tell jokes, and people would reward him. The guy was a fixture on that block. He put in full days. He’d stay until it was long past dark.”

  I watch him for a while, fast-forwarding through some of the video. I can’t make out anything specific about Mayday save for his dreadlocks, but it’s easy to see that he’s good at engaging passersby. I count at least a dozen people who dropped some money in his collection box, and he always gestured ceremoniously and seemed to serenade them in response.

  And Ciomek’s right. According to the time stamp on the video, he’s still there at nine o’clock at night.

  “The other reason for his success was that he was fiercely protective of his turf,” she says. “Nobody else got to work Broadway from Balmoral to Catalpa. Nobody.”

  “Okay. This video is from last Thursday,” I say.

  “Right. And if you look at video from Wednesday or Tuesday—and that’s as far back as they went—you’ll see Mayday there all the time, at least until eight or nine o’clock.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “So look at Friday,” she says. We stop at a light, and she reaches over and works the computer to pull up the video from Friday.

  I fast-forward through it. Mayday is there at eleven in the morning. And at one in the afternoon…and three…and five…

  And then he’s gone.

  I rewind to where he left the camera’s field. Just after six o’clock. At 6:02 p.m., he turns and starts walking—briskly, as if agitated—south, going down the street and out of the camera’s view. He returns thirteen minutes later, at a quarter past six, walking calmly, even a skip in his stride. He picks up his collection box and walks north until he’s out of range of the camera.

  “He called it a night early on Friday,” I say.

  “And that’s the last we see of him.” Ciomek pulls the squad car over to the curb. “Alive, at least.”

  I ask, “So what made Mayday leave his spot so early on Friday?”

  Ciomek puts the car in park and reaches for her door. “Let’s go find out,” she says.

  50

  WE ARE parked outside a bagel shop, the smell of warm bread and pungent coffee unexpectedly making me hungry. I haven’t eaten much since we arrived in Chicago. People brought in bagels—from this place, I think—and then, later in the day, sub sandwiches, but I could hardly bring myself to look in the direction of food, much less put any in my mouth.

  We get out of the car. Ciomek goes to the trunk and emerges with a couple of granola bars and a plastic storage bag of items. “Care package,” she tells me, and inside of it I see some antibacterial hand wipes, one of those pre-toothpasted toothbrushes, travel-size bottles of soap and shampoo, a water bottle.

  What’s sustained me over the past twenty-four hours, even more than my determination to catch the bomber, are the acts of goodness I’ve seen, big as well as small—people risking their lives rushing into blasting-hot wreckage to save people they’ve never met, cops hugging and crying with the victims’ friends and loved ones, neighbors in the area bringing cases of bottled water or food for the rescue teams and even us.

  “You hand these out?” I ask of the care package in her hand.

  “My kids put them together at Sunday school. I see more homeless people than your average person, so…”

  At first I don’t even notice the homeless man seated against the brick wall of the bagel shop. He is African-American and young, though his eyes are droopy and unfocused. He lights up with a smile of bad teeth when he sees Officer Ciomek.

  “Sperry!” Ciomek says in her upbeat way. She squats down and hands him the granola bars and the care package. He takes them without comment and stuffs them into a grocery bag resting next to the ratty plaid coat that serves as his blanket. “How you doin’, kiddo?” she asks.

  “Girl, know’m sayin’, it’s bad, girl, bad,” he says, his head lolling. He can’t be more than twenty-five. The sides of his head are shaved and the hair on top has a scarecrow look to it. His face is marked by acne, and his skin is weathered well beyond what his years on this earth should have done. He’s wearing a T-shirt with no sleeves and a filthy pair of beige slacks that don’t reach his ankles.

  “When’s the last time you scored?” Ciomek asks.

  My eyes instinctively go to his skinny arms, which are tattooed up and down but have track marks too.

  He bursts into laughter and then starts coughing. He settles down and shakes his head, a smile flitting across his face.

  She nudges him gently. “When? I need your help, Sperry.”

  “Brother gots to get his amp on, know’m sayin’?”

  She isn’t getting anywhere, so she nods and keeps going. “You heard about Mayday?”

  “Fuuuuuuck.” He turns his head away from her, not that he was focusing on her to begin with. He looks up at me, standing next to the squatting officer, his eyes large and bloodshot, but there’s a small trace of youthful innocence in his hardened, drugged-out gaze.

  “Who the biddy?” he says.

  “This is my friend Emmy.”

  I squat down alongside Ciomek. He looks at me and nods.

  “Mayday,” Ciomek repeats. “You heard about him?”

  “Yeah, man, everybody heard ’bout Mayday.” Sperry’s eyes fill; his mouth turns downward. He crosses his outstretched legs and bows his head. I can only imagine what a kid like this sees and how he’s learned to process it. But the death of Mayday has affected him. Ciomek chose this guy for a reason.

  “Do you know what happened to him, Sperry? Any idea?”

  “Last I saw.” He flips a hand, sniffs. “He got his gwop, girl. He’s all into cranberry and all like, ‘I got me a rental, I got me a rental.’”

  He’s imitating Mayday’s voice, I suppose, deep and husky. He raises his head again, tears on his face, but he licks his lips and gestures with his hands. “He all ’bout this white-boy astro-naut, know’m sayin’? Says he got his sorry-ass self a rental. I say let a muthafucka eat his beans and rice in peace, know’m sayin’, but he all about his rental.”

  “He showed up at Cranston with some money,” says Ciomek, translating for me, then she turns back to Sperry. “What’s this about a rental?”

  “That’s what the brother said, know’m sayin’? Says this is how the rich folk do it. Ain’t gotta hustle if you the muthafuckin’ landlord, see. You be gettin that gwop for nothin’.”

  I think it through—the video, Sperry’s words. “Are you saying he was renting the space where he worked on Broadway?”

  “Broadway Cat,” he says.

  “Broadway and Catalpa,” says Ciomek. “Mayday was renting his block to another person?”

  He points at her.

  “When was this?” I ask.

  “Woman.” He tilts his head up to me. “I look like a damn calendar? Last time I saw’m.” He gives a conclusive nod.

  “It was Friday night,” Ciomek says. “You said you were eating beans and rice, right, Sperry? That’s Friday-night dinner at Cranston.” She looks at me. That was the night we saw Mayday leave his post on Broadway early. The last time anyone saw him.

  What the camera missed during those thirteen minutes when Mayday walked south out of its view and then returned and packed up his gear to leave was someone renting the city block from Mayday.

  It’s him. The man I’ve been tracking. I can feel it like I’ve never felt anything.

  “You said the man who rented from Mayday was…a white-boy astronaut?” I ask.

  Sperry waves a hand. “Tha’s just us playin’, girl, know’m
sayin’.”

  “You were joking?” Ciomek asks. “But—I don’t get the joke. Why an astronaut?”

  “’Cause of what he said,” says Sperry. “Says he got his self a rental. Says the man got a moon on his face.”

  51

  BONITA SEXTON, looking slightly like a cartoon character through our Skype transmission, tilts her head as she takes in what I’ve just told her.

  “What does that mean, a moon on his face?”

  “We don’t know any more than that,” says Elizabeth Ashland, who’s standing next to me and Officer Ciomek inside the old bakery that’s our command center. “It could be a tattoo of a moon. It could be a skin discoloration or a scar.” She shrugs. “It could be a circle, a half-circle, even a crescent shape. Any of those could describe a moon.”

  “Run through everything, Rabbit,” I tell Bonita. “Every driver’s-license photo from every license plate we tag from CCTV and tollway cameras. Every image at the airports. Every image captured by local CCTV. Every bit of facial-rec we can get.”

  “I’m on it.” Rabbit kills the transmission.

  Ashland blows out a sigh. “What are the odds this is a real lead? This is hearsay, from one homeless person to another.” She turns to Officer Ciomek for the answer.

  “The part about the moon on his face—I don’t know,” says Ciomek. “But I do know that Mayday owned that part of Broadway. It was his block. He didn’t let anyone else work it. And that surveillance footage tells us that the day before the bombing, he left his spot much earlier than usual. That’s real.”

  “And now he’s dead,” I add. “Not from the bomb. That’s also real. And a pretty big coincidence.”

  “We can’t confirm that he took cash from someone to rent the spot,” says Ciomek. “But it would have taken something to make Mayday leave his post. He wouldn’t have just surrendered it. And I can’t imagine why Sperry would lie to me about what Mayday told him.”

  Ashland peers over our heads, thinking it over. “Why would anyone pay him for that spot?” Ashland asks rhetorically. She looks at me. “It’s our man, isn’t it? Has to be. Surveilling the payday-loan store before he plants the bomb.”

  “He paid Mayday for the spot,” I say. “He staked out the place, made his plan, planted the bomb. And he killed Mayday so he couldn’t identify him later.”

  I don’t continue. Ashland needs to reach the conclusion herself. It needs to be her idea. If I jump in with my theory that this bombing wasn’t the work of Citizen David, that it was the Darwinian killer I’ve been tracking on my own, I’ll lose all the momentum I’ve gained with her. If I so much as mention my side work, it’s over.

  “We can’t confirm his death was a murder,” Ashland says.

  You’re getting warm, Elizabeth…

  “Not yet, no,” I say.

  “I’ll go to the morgue and get Mayday’s belongings, whatever was on him when he died,” says Ciomek.

  Ashland nods.

  C’mon, Elizabeth, get there.

  “We’ll need an autopsy of Mayday,” she says.

  Boom.

  Finally. At long last, we’ll be able to probe one of his victims, see how he’s killing them, find out what he’s injecting in them.

  “That’s a great idea,” I say.

  Ashland glances at me, her lips slightly upturned. I may have oversold it with the compliment. She seems to recognize she was being steered. She didn’t get where she is at the Bureau by being dim. I’ll have to keep reminding myself of that.

  But for right now, it doesn’t matter. She’s just been roped and tied. I’ve got my autopsy. I’ve got the Bureau officially investigating my killer.

  Whether the Bureau knows it or not.

  52

  ON THE flight back to DC on Wednesday morning, Elizabeth Ashland and I are quiet. We are decompressing, in our own ways, from the carnage we just witnessed. Neither one of us would say it, but there is a certain relief in getting some distance from the mass graveyard, the stench of human death, the anguish on the faces of the rescue workers and the families. There is also guilt at feeling relieved.

  But we have done what we needed to do at the crime scene. It’s time for me to get back to doing what I do best. With Rabbit and Pully at the office, and with an autopsy on the way, I am closer than ever to—

  “…getting married, aren’t you?”

  I snap out of my thoughts and turn to Elizabeth, who is looking out the window. “You’re getting married, isn’t that right?” she says again. “I’d heard that.”

  “I was engaged, yes,” I say, feeling the ache in my chest when I use the past tense. “Not anymore.”

  She turns to me. “No?”

  “Didn’t work out. Married to my job, I guess,” I add, not that she asked and not that I owe her any explanation. I begin calculating how long it will take the flight attendant to scoot that alcohol-laden beverage cart down the aisle.

  “Sorry to hear that,” she says, resuming her view out the window.

  I doubt that she’s sorry. But she’s making an effort, at least, which is a first for her. It’s natural that there would be a bit of de-thawing in our relationship after this trip, though we are far away from sharing our most intimate secrets with each other.

  “Men can be married to their work, and it’s fine, it’s normal,” she says. “Nobody criticizes or second-guesses them.”

  And I had one of the good ones, a man who was willing to take his foot off the pedal to have a life, a real relationship. And I sent him packing. But there are only so many times I can have this what-is-wrong-with-me conversation with myself, and I’m sure as hell not having it with her, so I turn the tables.

  “Are you in a relationship?” I ask.

  She lets out a noise, a small rush of air indicating disdain. “You could call it that, yes. I suppose the answer is yes.”

  I haven’t given much thought to Elizabeth Ashland’s personal life, and finding out about it is not high on my list of priorities, but her response all but begs for a follow-up question. And I won’t deny that she’s piqued my interest; this is the first dent I’ve seen in her armor. Her appearance is always immaculate, her confidence unyielding, and her Ivy League résumé is second to none, but maybe human blood runs through her body after all.

  So I say, “Not going so well?”

  “It’s…not going, period,” she says. “Not anywhere meaningful. We both know it. I think we both know it.”

  “Do you want it to?”

  “I…” Her voice trails off. She brings a fist up to her chin as she gazes out at the clouds. Our relationship got off to a terrible start, with her hard-charging criticism and mistrust before we’d so much as shaken hands. It was easy for me to throw up my defenses, write her off as a queen bitch, and leave it at that. But of course, it’s never that simple.

  Every time a woman advances in the macho culture of the Bureau, you hear the same shit from the men, buzzwords like quotas, affirmative action, optics, office politics. Or it gets more personal, with vague references to how “friendly” she is with the upper brass, if not outright suggestions that she drops to her knees in her boss’s office. Anything to imply that the reason for a woman’s advancement has nothing to do with merit.

  I assume that, if I got to know her, there’d be a lot more to Elizabeth Ashland than meets the eye.

  “Most of the time,” she says, “I’m happy to have this career. Most of the time, I don’t think I need a husband and kids. Or want that. But then…”

  I glance at her. Her eyes have closed; her expression is tight.

  “But then you see two hundred people murdered,” I say, “and you see all their families and friends rush to the scene, and you see their heartbreak and sorrow. And as bad as you feel for everyone, as committed as you are to bringing the killer to justice, there is a small part of you that wonders if anyone’s going to grieve for you when it’s your time. And you hope someone will. And you wonder whether you’ve made the right decisions
in your life, whether you’ve prioritized things correctly. And whether it’s too late to change course.”

  Somewhere during my speech, she opened her eyes and turned to me, and she’s watching me as if I’m someone she’s never met.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Exactly. Exactly.”

  “Oh, there’s nothing like a brutal crime scene to make you reevaluate your life,” I say. “When my sister was murdered, half of me wanted to solve the crime, even though it was clear across the country, and the other half thought it was a wake-up call for me to get on with my life.”

  “And?” she asks.

  “And?” I shrug. “This is my life. I can’t let it go. I track serial killers. Knowing they’re out there and that I’m capable of stopping them if I work hard enough, if I look at one more data set, if I plug a few more statistics into my algorithm—I can’t stop.”

  “So you made your choice,” she says.

  “It feels more like it chose me,” I say. “But it’s time that I face reality. I’d love to have a relationship, but this has to come first. It just does.”

  I confidently deliver this speech as if I have all the answers, as if I have taken all the jagged pieces of my life and turned them into a neatly completed puzzle, but I feel a catch in my throat, and heat rises to my face.

  I’ve just delivered a eulogy at a funeral. It’s real—Books and I are finished.

  53

  I WHEEL MY SUITCASE into my cubicle, and my two partners, Bonita Sexton and Eric Pullman—Rabbit and Pully—pop their heads up. I huddle with both of them in Rabbit’s pod.

  “This is for your ears only,” I say.

  Rabbit draws back. That’s the code we’ve always lived by, always keeping one another’s confidences, our team against the world. So the fact that I’m making a point of reminding them has the intended effect.