Dust Up: A Thriller Read online

“Yeah. Ron got me a job at Energene a few years ago. It didn’t last long, but that’s where I met Miriam. Ron’s a bit of a bigwig there. Miriam and I were peons.”

  “Are you two still close?”

  “Pretty close, yeah.”

  “Has she called you?”

  “No. I wish she would.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “So I could tell her we know she didn’t do it, that we’ll help her any way we can.” He sniffed, and I realized he was crying.

  I gave him a few moments to get himself together. We talked a little more after that, but I didn’t get anything much more out of him. When we were done, he said, “If you see her, tell her we love her, okay? And that we’re here for her, that we’re all mourning together.”

  By the time I got off the phone with Brian Hartwell, I had an absolute certainty of Miriam’s innocence. It lasted the whole way back to the Roundhouse.

  “The gun’s a match,” Suarez said as I walked in. He was standing outside his office, talking to Mike Warren, who was leaning—practically sitting—on my desk. Suarez held up a sheaf of papers. “The prints are a match, too.”

  Warren gave me the finger but quickly pulled it down as Suarez looked back at him. As I approached, he pushed himself off my desk.

  “There’s another match, too, Carrick,” he said, snapping his fingers as he walked past me. “My ass and your face.”

  “Hey, Lieutenant,” I called out as I sat in my chair. “Someone got stupid all over my desk!”

  “It was already there, Carrick,” Warren called over his shoulder.

  Suarez laughed, then his face turned serious. “Both matches. It’s definitely the murder weapon, and her prints are all over it. She did it. Now we just need to find her. Can you let it go now?”

  “Nothing to let go, Lieutenant.”

  “It wouldn’t be so bad if some other fool was out there obsessed with doing your job the way you’re so obsessed with doing Warren’s. But there isn’t. So you need to let Mike Warren do his job, and you need to focus on your job. Okay?”

  “Like a laser beam, sir.”

  He took a deep breath and shook his head. Then he turned and went back into his office.

  Ten minutes later, I was in the basement with Bernie Lawrence, one of our ballistics experts.

  “Definitely a match,” he said. “You can see for yourself if you’d like.” The two slugs were still mounted on the comparison microscope.

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “Not what you were expecting?”

  I shook my head. “What type of gun was it?”

  He reached behind him and handed me a gun in a sealed plastic evidence bag. “SIG Sauer P223.”

  I smoothed out the plastic so I could see it clearly. I was familiar with the SIG P223, but I wasn’t familiar with this one.

  “Standard?”

  He shook his head. “Not even close. Combat grip, custom rail, night sight. And the numbers have been removed. And not half-assed filed off, they’re gone gone.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Looks like a pro. Why?”

  “This is from the shooting on my front steps a couple nights ago.”

  “Oh yeah, right. Sorry to hear about that. But it seems like Mike Warren wrapped it up pretty quick for you. Probably a record for him. That’s got to be a relief.”

  “Kind of, I guess.”

  “Something bothering you about it?”

  “A couple things. He’s saying the wife did it and her prints are on the gun. But this looks like something a pro would use, not a five-foot-tall, hundred-pound nurse with no priors.”

  He grunted at that.

  I held up my hands. “I’m not saying a woman can’t be a gun nut or an assassin or anything, but it doesn’t seem to fit, you know?”

  “No, I hear you. Actually, the rounds were special, too. Jacketed, custom made.”

  “Right. Okay, well, thanks. Good information.”

  The prints and ballistics were pretty damning, but I couldn’t reconcile the petite nurse with the souped-up SIG P223 and the custom rounds. And I was having a hard time believing that she would kill her husband in the midst of ongoing fertility treatments. Not impossible, but unlikely.

  And none of it explained why Ron Hartwell had my address in his GPS.

  13

  I’d said I was going to leave it alone, but Suarez had said Warren had the case under control. I guess we both lied.

  Ron and Miriam Hartwell had lived in a rehabbed brick warehouse on South Street, west of Broad. Not too many years ago, the neighborhood had been crime-ridden and decrepit. Now the street was lined with expensive townhomes and high-end apartments filled with well-paid young professionals. I still couldn’t get used to it, even though the sidewalk trees planted by the developers were almost fully grown.

  It wasn’t on my way home, but I stopped on my way home, anyway.

  I pressed the button for the building super, and two minutes later, a short, stressed-out Hispanic-looking guy in his fifties appeared, flashing a polite smile that almost hid his annoyance at the interruption.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  I held up my badge, and he let out a sigh. The smile went away.

  “Are you the super?”

  He nodded. “Gonzalez.”

  “I’m Detective Carrick. Just a few questions.”

  “Happy to help,” he said, “but I’m really busy, man.”

  “I’ll be quick.”

  “Okay. You mind walking?”

  “No problem.”

  He turned, and I followed, up a short stairway and down a first-floor hallway. It was an effort keeping up with him.

  “You found the gun this morning?”

  “Yeah, in the laundry room, under the change machine.”

  “Can you show me?”

  He closed his eyes, summoning patience. “Yeah, sure. First, I have to check on something—in the Hartwells’ apartment, actually. You want to wait here, or you want to come with me?”

  “Um … I’ll come with you.”

  The apartment was small but nice. “I just need to check the faucet, make sure it’s not dripping again,” he said. Then he paused. “The other police said not to touch anything.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was asking for permission to stop the drip or reminding me not to disturb anything. “It’s fine,” I said, giving us both a pass.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for, because I hadn’t intended to be looking. But I didn’t want to waste the opportunity. I scanned the bookcases. On the table by the door was a carved wooden bowl with some mail, a set of keys, three twenty-dollar bills, and some loose change.

  In the bathroom, both toothbrushes were in their holders. I peeked in the cabinet but didn’t touch anything. The usual variety of tweezers, old razors, first-aid supplies, and several prescriptions—Lipitor for Ron, Xanax for Miriam. Anxiety medication. If I was going on the lam, I wouldn’t leave that behind.

  When I closed the cabinet door, Gonzalez was standing in the door looking at me. “You ready?”

  I followed him down the first-floor hallway.

  “Have you seen any sign of her in the last couple days? Miriam Hartwell, I mean.”

  He shook his head and looked over his shoulder as he walked. “Nah. I saw her a few hours before it happened, though. Kind of creepy, you know? You see the guy, the two of them, walking along, alive and well, a few hours later, he’s dead.”

  “How did they seem?”

  He shrugged as he opened the door to the basement steps. “I don’t know. Not dead, you know? I mean, they seemed all right. Kind of stressed out.”

  “Angry at each other?”

  “No, nothing like that. Maybe worried or something. Anyway, here’s the laundry room.” He pointed at the far corner. “There’s the change machine.”

  The laundry room was small, not terrible but nothing fancy. Three washers, three dryers, one change machine. Linoleum and cinder block under
fluorescent lights. The change machine sat on legs maybe two inches off the floor.

  I got on my hands and knees. Even with my head near the floor, it was hard to see more than a few inches back.

  “So, what, you were cleaning back there or something?”

  He laughed. “No, man. One of the tenants called and told me it was there.”

  I looked up at him. “Which tenant was that?”

  “Don’t know. They didn’t want to say.”

  “How do you know it was a tenant?”

  He shrugged. “They said it was. Who else is gonna call about it?”

  14

  When I got home, Nola was getting dinner ready. She smiled when I walked in, and she came toward me, drying her hands on a dish towel. She took two steps and paused, studying my face.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Weird day.” I told her about the gun, about the prints and ballistics.

  It seemed to deflate her. “Wow,” she said sadly, her eyes darting over my shoulder at the front door. The scene of the crime. “So Miriam did it?”

  I was struck by the way she called her by name, like she knew her. She’d never laid eyes on the woman. I’d barely seen her myself—a second or two at most—but it seemed like I was so determined to figure out how she could be innocent, I’d not only talked myself into it, I’d convinced Nola, as well.

  “I don’t know,” I said, pulling her toward me. “I don’t think so.”

  I told her about how the gun and the rounds were customized. About the fertility treatments. About the anonymous tip. “And no one can say why they were coming to our place.”

  “But the gun had her fingerprints on it, right?” she said. “And they found it at their building, right?”

  “That’s another thing.” I told her about going to the apartment, about the cash by the front door, Miriam’s anxiety meds left behind. “If she’s going on the lam and she goes home first—and for some reason she hides her gun there—why doesn’t she grab her cash? Why doesn’t she grab her anxiety pills? If she suffers from anxiety, now would be the time she’d need them most.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t thinking straight.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  * * *

  I couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about all the ways the case was going wrong, all the ways it was tricky, all the ways Mike Warren was trying to keep it simple.

  All the ways I was getting myself in trouble over it.

  I’d said I was dropping it, and maybe that was what I needed to do. Sometimes things were that simple. You hear doctors talking about looking for horses before zebras. Maybe this was a horse. A wife killed her husband. It happened all the time. Maybe Warren was right. Yes, there were loose ends, coincidences, but maybe there were explanations for all of them. Explanations that had nothing to do with anything other than the fact that a woman murdered her husband. Maybe he was banging on my door because that’s just where it happened. Maybe he had my address by accident. As I finally drifted off to sleep, I convinced myself that maybe if Nola and I were going to get over it, maybe I needed to drop it like I’d said I would and let Mike Warren work his case.

  * * *

  First thing the next day, I went into Suarez’s office and closed the door. “I’m letting it go,” I said.

  He looked up at me from behind his desk. “The Hartwell thing?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s a pretty tight case,” he said.

  “Not my case. I’m letting it go.”

  “Good,” he said, as if the constant burning sensation I provoked in his chest had cooled a half a degree.

  “But,” I said, and he grimaced. “I just want to tell you a couple things. You can decide what to do with them.”

  He raised one eyebrow, waiting.

  I told him about the custom gun and ammo, about the fertility treatments, about what the coworkers had said about Ron and Miriam, how close they seemed. “And I haven’t looked into the angles or anything, the bullet trajectories and where the Hartwell woman was when I saw her, compared to where the bullet came from. Presumably, Mike Warren is all over that, right?”

  He didn’t move a muscle, staring at me stone-faced.

  “And the gun they found,” I said. “Remember I asked Warren if it had been an anonymous tip?”

  “The landlord found it, right?”

  I nodded. “The landlord found it. After he got an anonymous tip. Caller said he was a tenant but wouldn’t give a name.”

  His eyes slowly closed, and he winced before he opened them. “But you’re leaving it alone, right?”

  “That’s what I’m supposed to do, right? Isn’t that what you’re telling me?”

  He let out a sigh. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  I nodded and got up to go.

  As I walked out of his office, he called after me, “I’ll talk to Myerson, Warren’s lieutenant. Make sure he follows up on that other stuff.”

  * * *

  I walked out of his office, past my desk, out of the squad room, and down the steps and onto the street. Part of me was proud of myself, of my maturity, of my willingness to let it go, to get past the stubbornness that I usually allowed to ruin my life and my career. But mostly, I felt like I was giving up when I knew something was wrong, when I knew someone bad was getting away with something, someone good was going down for it, and someone stupid was having their way with how the world should be.

  I wanted alcohol, not for its intoxicating qualities but as a disinfectant, to cleanse myself of the slime that seemed to cover me. Okay, maybe not just for the cleansing properties. But it was nine thirty in the morning—getting loaded might have made more of a statement than I was really intending to make.

  Instead, I got coffee.

  The Roundhouse is on the eastern edge of Chinatown, hemmed in by the Vine Street Expressway to the north and a caffeine desert of museums, monuments, and parks to the south and east. I headed west to Ray’s Café, a Taiwanese teahouse with good, strong coffee made with a strange siphon contraption that one of these years I was going to ask about.

  The girl behind the counter asked me if I wanted one of their little cookies to go with my coffee. I said no. They didn’t seem to match my mood, and I didn’t feel like I deserved a cookie, walking away from a botched case like that. But I regretted it the whole time I sat at the counter drinking my coffee.

  When I was finished, I ordered a coffee to go. And a cookie.

  Stepping back outside, I felt better. The caffeine helped. So did the cookie. My insides were still churning over walking away from the case, basically acknowledging that it would probably never be solved, and we would never learn who killed a stranger on our doorstep.

  I put the last of the cookie in my mouth, trying not to let those thoughts sour the taste of it, when I noticed a black Toyota Corolla pacing me down Ninth Street.

  The driver was wearing a wig and shades, and as she pulled up next to me, she lowered her window.

  “You’re looking for me. You found me. Get in.”

  It was Miriam Hartwell.

  15

  We stared at each other through the car window for a couple of seconds. I’m not easily surprised, but this caught me off guard. I didn’t know whether to turn around and keep walking or arrest her on the spot.

  “Okay, never mind,” she said, putting the window back up.

  “Hold on,” I said, getting in.

  Even through her disguise, I could tell she was terrified.

  “You know the police are looking for you?” I asked.

  She laughed, a ragged bark. “Aren’t you the police? Besides, there’s a lot of people looking for me.” Her voice sounded like a poorly played violin.

  We zigzagged up to Eleventh Street, then north into Fairmount. She turned and looked at me, her bottom lip trembling.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “What?”

  “Ron and I were going to trust our lives with you. He didn�
�t get to. If I’m making a mistake by talking to you, I’d just as soon know now.”

  “I’m not going to kill you,” I said. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened. Why your husband was shot dead on my front steps.”

  She looked back at me, staring for an uncomfortably long time as we sped up the narrow city streets.

  “It’s a long story,” she said finally, looking back at the road, jerking the wheel slightly. “I’ll tell you when we get there.”

  We stayed on Eleventh Street, past once-blighted neighborhoods being gentrified by hipsters and young professionals, through Temple University and the newer public housing projects, houses with porches and window boxes where high-rise horrors once stood. And then into a part of North Philadelphia that was as devastated as it had always been, almost reassuring in its dependable decay, unless you had to live or work there. Eleventh Street ended at a chain-link fence and dense brush that obscured one of the train tracks that cut diagonally through North Philly, making literal the dead-endedness of some of the neighborhood’s streets.

  We turned right, then left, onto Germantown Avenue, a colonial-era highway that cut across the city. It starts almost at the Delaware River and runs through North Philly, then Germantown, Mount Airy, and upscale Chestnut Hill before turning into Germantown Pike at the city limits and eventually ending in Collegeville, fifteen miles away.

  Maybe she was taking a back route out of the city, I thought, but we pulled over two blocks later in front of a fenced-in yard with a bored-looking pit bull. There was a school across the street. I wondered if we were just going to park and talk, but Miriam got out, and I followed.

  That’s when I noticed the blue metal sign rusting in front of the building on the corner. THE LIBERTY MOTEL.

  The pit bull followed my gaze. His head swiveled back at me, tilted disapprovingly, as if to say, “You sure you want to do this?”

  Miriam glanced quickly around us and bustled forward, head down, clutching her pink, tulip-covered cardigan around her. She was scampering up the steps before I even started moving.

  The pit bull looked away, like he’d given up on me.

  16

  I caught up with Miriam in time to open the door for her. She paused and looked up at me, but I couldn’t read her expression.