Obsession has been a staple in the recipe book of murder since time immemorial. Sometimes obsession is a major ingredient. Other times, obsession is the oven that makes things too hot to handle.
Some obsessives were taught to be that way through neglect or cruelty. Others developed hatred as the basis of their obsession. This was especially true of organized serial killers. They ritualized their killings, taking their rage out on surrogates for the people who’d spawned their hatred.
But love can be the basis of obsession too, especially if one party or the other is spurned. You see that kind of gradual tick-tick-tick change in a person as he goes from being smitten to being crazy in love to—when he’s rejected—feeling sad, then worthless, then angry, then enraged, and then he grabs a gun because If I can’t have the object of my desire, no one will.
Was that what had happened with JohnnyBoy5? Had he taken the romantic spiral toward homicide and killed Edita and Tommy McGrath, the big guy who’d threatened to break his face? Or was that someone else?
Sampson walked in. “I got something you need to see.”
“Me too,” I said, getting up. “She’s got a stalker.”
“That fits,” he said. He turned and led me into her bedroom.
Big four-poster bed. Matched linens. New dresser. Nice mirror. A walk-in closet with racks bulging with clothes and shelves holding dozens of beautiful shoes.
There were built-in drawers at the far end of the closet.
Sampson had pulled two of them open. The first was filled with fine lingerie. The second featured a wide selection of sex toys and lubricants.
“So she had a kinky side,” I said. “So what?”
He pushed shut the two drawers and opened the ones directly below. I took both in at a glance and said, “Oh, well, that changes things.”
“Damn sure does,” Sampson said, looking into the right drawer, which was filled with hard-core S&M equipment.
I was more interested in the drawer on the left, the deeper one, the one filled with stacks and stacks of banded fifty-dollar bills.
CHAPTER
9
SAMPSON AND I left Edita Kravic’s apartment shortly after seven that evening. We’d found the sex equipment and the cash, which we estimated at forty thousand dollars, but little to explain how a second-year law student had come to have that kind of money stuck away in a clothes drawer.
When you see that much dough and the sex gear, your investigative instincts tend to drift toward hooking or drugs or smuggling or organized crime. But we’d found no direct evidence of anything illegal, not even in the locked file cabinet, which we’d opened after we’d located the key.
The cabinet had more of Edita Kravic’s personal files, one of which revealed that she was from Slovakia and had a green card. Another file showed an account with Bank of America with a balance of fifteen hundred dollars. She owed less than that on her Visa and American Express cards. I found her lease. I’d predicted the rent would be two or three grand a month; it was actually four thousand. But she wasn’t writing checks for the rent, or not any that I could see.
“She paid cash for everything,” I said when we got back to the car.
“Bought high-end stuff with it,” Sampson said. “Classic way to evade taxes.”
“Still doesn’t explain where the money came from,” I said. “There were no files from the Phoenix Club, no record of payments.”
“Maybe the club’s evading taxes too,” Sampson said, starting the squad car. “Where to?”
“Swing by Terry Howard’s place before heading back to the office.”
“Make the chief rest easier?”
“Exactly.”
We drove to a shabby, four-story apartment building off New York Avenue in Northeast.
“This the right one?” I asked.
“Google Maps don’t lie,” Sampson said.
The seedy neighborhood sobered me, made me realize just how far and how hard Tommy McGrath’s onetime partner had fallen since his days with the Major Case Unit. Terry Howard had had a formidable reputation for playing the tough guy. He had never been above intimidating a source to get what he wanted. In fact, he’d been accused of it multiple times, and because of that, and because Tommy had ultimately turned on Howard, we were here.
But the former detective who opened the door of his one-bedroom apartment didn’t look like a tough guy; he looked like a tired man pushing seventy rather than fifty-five. He wore a faded Washington Redskins ball cap, a plain black T-shirt, and jeans that sagged off him. The big frame I remembered was still there, but he’d gone soft and lost weight. His eyes were rheumy. He smelled of vodka.
“Figured I’d see you two before too long,” Howard said.
“Can we come in, Terry? Ask a few questions?”
“Not tonight, I got lots of jack shit to take care of. Sorry.”
I said, “You know we have to talk to you, and you know why. Now, we can continue standing here in your doorway where everyone on the floor will know your business, or we can come in, or we can take you down to the station. Any way you want to do this is fine by us.”