A Study in Sin Read online

  I had paid a little extra attention to our beautiful porcelain-skinned waitress when she took our order. Remy must have noticed me staring. She was short, muscular in a yoga instructor sort of way, with jet black hair and tattoos that spilled from underneath her sleeves.

  “Not my type,” I lied.

  “What, you don’t like young aspiring guitar aficionados?”

  “I don’t know, why?”

  “Because our waitress most definitely had a gig last night.”

  “How could you possibly know that?”

  “The next time she comes over, tell her that you caught one of her shows and ask her when she plays again. Oh, and ask for more tea.”

  A few moments later, Fawn, as her nametag said, came by our table and asked if we needed anything.

  “Can we get some more tea?” I said. I hesitated to ask more, but Remy nodded at me. “Hey, I think I caught one of your shows recently, are you playing again soon?”

  “Oh yea? What did you think?”

  “Would I be asking when you played again if I didn’t think you were good?”

  Fawn tried to hide a smile and grabbed an unused napkin from the table. She pulled out a pen from her apron, wrote something down, tossed it on the table, and said “I’ll get you that tea.”

  Written across the napkin was: Thursday at 10 at the Hamilton. Underneath, she included her phone number and the words: See you there?

  I looked up at Remy who was studying me. “Ok, how’d you do that?”

  “Easy. She’s exhausted from last night’s gig and this morning’s early shift.”

  “She could have been at a party, or studying for a college exam, or maybe she just has insomnia.”

  “The fingernails on her right hand are cropped short, but the ones on her left hand are longer and freshly hardened with a layer of acrylic, a common technique for experienced guitar players who use the nails to pick the guitar strings. My assumption is further backed by the small tattoo on the back of her left calf that reads ‘I heart Jimi’, a reference to famous left-handed guitar player Jimi Hendrix. Then there’s the guitar pick lodged between the laces of her shoe.”

  “Damn, that’s impressive.”

  “Easy as two plus two,” she said, turning her attention back to her waffles and reading her phone which had been vibrating during her explanation. I thought I caught a glimpse of pleasure in her cold response, though.

  “Wait,” I said, realizing something, “You know Jimi Hendrix played the guitar left-handed, but you didn’t know Pluto wasn’t a planet?”

  “Hmm, fair point,” she conceded. “Here, take a look at this email,” using her napkin to wipe the chicken grease off her phone before handing it across the table.

  It was from Detective Lambert. I read through the email twice before looking up at Remy. It explained that, during the night, a body was found in an empty rowhouse on Capitol Hill. A patrol car had seen a beam of light shining through the first floor window. The home was being renovated and the officer thought it seemed suspicious, so he investigated. The front door was ajar and as soon as he entered, he saw the body on the floor of the front room. Lambert asked Remy if she could meet him at the house. There were a few odd details that he had never experienced before and it was obvious he was asking for her advice.

  “I always love when Lambert emails asking for help,” she said as I handed back the grease covered phone. “He hates asking me for anything. He’s actually a good investigator, very thorough; his problem is that he lacks the imagination necessary when things aren’t immediately obvious. And he gets no help from his asshole partner.”

  “Who’s his partner?”

  “A crotchety old bastard named Arruda. Just looking for a pension.”

  “Well I guess I’ll get to-go boxes from the counter. And I’m paying for breakfast this time.”

  “There’s no rush. I’m not sure I want to get involved with this one.”

  I stopped, half hanging out of the vinyl booth, and laughed.

  “Oh, you’re going. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve been a bit of a crotchety old bastard yourself lately.”

  “No, I’m working on another case that is much more important.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve been contracted to investigate the bloodline of a rich importer who died recently. A group he worked with contacted me because they’re hoping to find an heir. If I can’t locate a living relative, all of his assets will be donated to charities and the group would much rather not see that happen. I still have plenty to learn in the fields of genealogical and financial studies. Not to mention, DC Metro doesn’t pay my fees.”

  “Come on. This will get you out of the apartment and maybe it will be interesting. Lambert did say something about odd details. That sounds promising.”

  “Not this time, Watts.”

  “Look, from what I can tell, you’re no more than two days out from another one of your episodes where you lay around and mope while you stare out the window. And I know neither of us wants to deal with that again, right?”

  Remy stared back at me with her wide glossy eyes, without an ounce of emotion to be found. She blinked. Then there was a quiver at the corner of her mouth.

  “You think you’ve got me figured out or something?”

  “Whatever, Remy, I just don’t want to pick up all those balled up tissues off the floor.”

  She laughed and I counted it as a victory.

  “Well you’re driving,” she announced.

  “You don’t even have a license,” I snapped back as we walked out of the diner and into the sound of late morning traffic.

  I remember it being exceptionally bright as we drove to meet Detective Lambert. The rays of the sun beat down on the road and shimmered back at us, turning the streets from dark pavement into paths of iridescent movement. Remy’s newfound mood matched the intensity of the day as she rambled on about tracing bloodlines and offshore bank accounts. As she described the difficulties of tracing any family line that traveled through Ellis Island, my thoughts drifted and all I could concentrate on was the thought of seeing a dead body in person. For all that I had seen and done in the Air Force, most was relegated to the screens we stared at. There were a few injuries I witnessed, some more gruesome than others, but it was never death itself. I had never seen a dead body in person outside of a funeral. I couldn’t shake the image of a bloody mass of flesh and bones as we continued on towards the address Lambert had emailed over.

  As we turned onto the street and passed the three story homes, one after the other, I could see the cars parked in front of one of the buildings at the far end of the block. It looked exactly like all the others. The low hanging branches of the trees that grew on both sides of the road hung overhead and encapsulated us in a tunnel of shaded browns and greens. The day no longer felt bright as we approached the house where Lambert waited.

  This particular rowhouse sat back a few feet farther from the street than its neighbors. It gave the house a reserved, un-inviting look. Two of the windows on the second floor had plywood covering them and another had a plastic tube that emptied into a large garbage bin on the side of the house.

  The only spot to park the car was around the corner. Remy and I walked back towards the scene and I realized she was still talking about the other case. She didn’t seem to have any feelings towards the body that lay inside the house or the oddities that bothered Detective Lambert.

  “So that’s what causes most people to mistake the Indians of Central America with the Spanish settlers that have just recently inhabited the areas over the last few hundred years. Easy to catch if you know what you’re looking for,” she said, smiling to herself.

  “Mmm, interesting,” I grunted back.

  We reached the front of the rowhouse and the small front courtyard area was a muddy mess. It had rained a number of times over the last week but it appeared to me that most of the damage to the front area was from the contractors.

 
Remy reached down to finger the brick, continuing on with her monologue.

  “See it really all comes down to enforcement with places like Cayman. Their assets are shielded there,” she said as she bent and groped along the front steps of the house. She kept talking as she dropped to her knees and felt around in the mud, picking a handful up before moving on to the neglected flower bushes that sat beneath the windows.

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s money laundering, since it’s not technically illegal, but I’m still wondering why a man of his stature would need to move his money around like that.” She strained to look into the first floor windows above her, felt around the window ledges, and then lay down on her stomach, apparently searching for something under the bushes which she didn’t seem to be finding. Suddenly, she shot to her feet.

  “Watts!” she yelled, “Was it the partners? Was he hiding his partners’ own assets?”

  “Was who – What?”

  Remy peered back at me, half of her small body hidden by the shrubs that were mostly dead. “Well, I’d say this place is in serious disarray, don’t you think?”

  Before I had the opportunity to answer, the thick black front door swung open. A well-built young man stood in the doorway. He had dark circles under his eyes and his expression said he could use some serious time off, both made him look older than he was. Still, there was no mistaking that he was the same guy I had watched Remy with weeks before.

  “Remy, what the hell are you doing?” Lambert said.

  “Something your men have already done apparently. One day, you guys miss the evidence right under your nose, the next you trample everything in sight looking for something that wasn’t there in the first place.” The sarcasm was heavy in Remy’s voice.

  “It’s been a long morning. One of the damn neighbors walked right through the front door as we were searching the place and screamed when she saw the body.”

  Remy burst into childish laughter. It was short lived, though, and I had a feeling she did it just to screw with Lambert.

  “After one of the officers took her home, she must have called everyone she knew because news vans and bloggers were showing up an hour later. We just got rid of the last one twenty minutes ago. Told them it was a squatter who OD’d. Shit, it might be true.”

  “Is the body inside?” I blurted out at the first opportunity. Remy and Lambert both looked back at me as if they just realized I was standing there.

  “Ian, this is my roommate Jacob Watts –”.

  “Don’t call me Ian. I hate that,” he interrupted.

  “Watts is ex-military. He’s helping me with a few cases.”

  Lambert peered down at me from the doorway of the brick house. His look was more than just pure acknowledgment.

  “No, they bagged it a few hours ago,” he said after the brief pause. “Come on, let me show you what we’ve got so far.”

  I had decided I wasn’t in the right mood to see a dead body at that exact moment so I breathed a silent sigh of relief.

  Remy and I were barely through the front door when a loud, deep voice came thundering from the next room.

  “Jesus, what the hell is she doing here?” the man bellowed. He was a short, squatty man that had wrinkles on top of his wrinkles.

  “Shut up, Arruda,” Lambert snapped back at his partner, “I asked her to come.”

  “Of course you did. Now you need help to ID a suicide?”

  “It’s not a suicide,” Lambert said.

  “Ridiculous. You know what, I’ll be in the car, you girls have fun,” he grumbled as he pushed past. Gary Arruda smelled like an ashtray that hadn’t been emptied in years.

  “Sorry about that,” Lambert said after Arruda had slammed the front door behind him.

  The interior of the house was completely destroyed. Multiple walls were stripped to the studs and debris was scattered in piles, strewn about wherever you looked. A layer of dirt and dust covered every surface that remained intact.

  The room Lambert pointed us towards was situated in the front right corner of the house. The walls were covered in hideous red and gold filigree paper that someone had starting tearing off in large strips. Pieces and corners of the wallpaper hung off the wall exposing the faded drywall beneath. There was a hole in the ceiling with exposed wiring where an overhead fixture had once hung. The wooden floors bowed in spots and creaked with each footstep. In the middle of the room, directly in front of the fireplace, which appeared to be the only thing in good shape, was a large pool of blood, with smaller streaks and smudges that emanated out from its center.

  Lambert stood nearest to the gore and took out his camera.

  “Here are the pictures I took,” he said, holding the camera out towards Remy as her eyes darted back and forth across the room.

  Although the thoughts of a physical body threw me off my game a little, seeing one on a screen was something I was more than used to, something I had become numb to. It seemed less real, more cartoonish. Even so, the state of this particular body left an impression I found hard to shake. The man on the tiny screen lay upon the floor covered in blood. His fists were clenched tight, and his arms and legs were peeling off in odd directions. It appeared as though he had been having some sort of seizure and had suddenly dropped dead in the middle of it, not allowing his body to come to rest. It stayed in that tense, buckled pose.

  The victim looked to be in his late forties, short, and carried a few extra pounds around his waist. He was dressed in a black suit, and a white collared shirt, both of which were too long for his short limbs. They only accentuated the ridiculousness of the way he looked in the photos.

  But the worst of it was the expression he wore. One of the photos was a picture of nothing but the man’s face. I’ve never seen anything like that and I doubt I’ll ever come across an image that matches. The look of pure, unadulterated rage and horror that was painted across the man’s features looked so outlandish that it was hard to imagine even a comic book character in the throes of death showing such emotion. The way his face was contorted, combined with the bluntness of his features and his bulging hate filled eyes, made him look more like an animal than a man.

  “The part you’re going to love is that, all this blood, none of it is the victim’s,” Lambert started.

  “You’re sure?” Remy asked.

  “Positive. We searched the entire body. I had the techs triple check. No gunshot wound, no stab wounds, not even a puncture wound from a needle. I’m thinking it’s the suspect’s. Maybe the victim had a weapon and didn’t go down without a fight. We’re going to check it for matches; maybe we’ll get a hit.”

  Remy slumped down, busy looking at the edges of some of the blood smears on the floor. Her fingers were her eyes as she poked, prodded, felt, and examined different spots on the wood floors. Those fingers were alive with action and bolted from one area to the next, while her eyes gave her a far off look, the same look I was accustomed to seeing when she would sit silently, deep in thought. The speed at which she worked was dizzying, and after only a short wait, she stood erect and looked directly at Lambert.

  “What else did you find?”

  “The lit flashlight was on the mantle there. That’s what caught the patrol officer’s attention. Nothing else was in the room. The victim’s name is Finton Cormack. He had a wallet and a phone on him. Wallet had a New York ID and a few credit cards, nothing else. We’re tracing the cards, and we’ll see if anything turns up. There was nothing else on him, not even a ball of lint in his pockets.”

  “His phone, did you search it?”

  “Yep. I went through everything I could but it doesn’t look like he used the phone much. No emails, a few searches for local bars, we’ll check on those later. But, he’s had seventeen missed calls in the last twelve hours, all from the same number. We’re pulling the call records, but I’m going out on a limb and saying the calls came from a man named James McKeague.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “
Because he’s got three text messages that he didn’t respond to from a man by that name. The first was a reminder to be at the airport on time, the others were asking where he was and why he wasn’t answering his phone.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Just one thing; when the guys came to take the body down to the morgue, a gold ring was underneath his right thigh.”

  Lambert pulled a plastic bag from his pocket. Remy quickly snatched the bag and opened it, holding the small ring up to the light.

  “This is a woman’s ring.”

  “I thought so too,” Lambert said.

  “There’s an inscription,” Remy continued, “CC.”

  She turned the simple ring over a few more times in her hand, placed it back in the evidence bag, and gave the bag back to Lambert.

  “I’d like to talk to the patrol officer that found the body.”

  “I don’t know Remy. You know how much trouble I could get in just for letting you in here.”

  “Come on, Lambert. Let me talk to him and I’ll have this thing wrapped up for you by Friday, I promise.”

  Detective Lambert shook his head, in apparent agony. I knew he would give in.

  “Fine. His name is Barrera. I’ll get you his address. But he’s been up all night, so make it quick. And don’t be –” He didn’t finish his sentence. “Just be quick.”

  “Yes sir, Detective sir,” Remy said.

  “Arruda is calling nearby hospitals to see if anyone by the name James McKeague came in during the night. He thinks McKeague murdered Cormack, and then made the calls to cover his tracks.”

  “That’s a waste of time, and it’s utterly absurd,” Remy said. “If there’s nothing else, I’m going to take one last look around the room and then we can go.”

  “Take your time,” Lambert said.

  Remy walked around the room, carefully taking short steps, followed by larger strides. She would stop, spin on her heels, and then walk off in the other direction for a few paces. When she had had enough of that little dance, she went to the fireplace and gave it a quick once over. Next, she went to the windows in the front of the room and checked the sills and the lock. Satisfied, her last place to check was the walls themselves. Her hands ran over the awful wallpaper and the spots of bare drywall. She looked all but finished when she made her way to the front corner of the room.