Famished Read online

  He ignored the itch to grab the bottle and hauled himself through the doorway into the kitchen, where his daughter’s old princess nightlight lit up the stovetop in rose. He swallowed away the ache in his chest and flicked the light switch. Cabinets that had glowed dusty pink now showed their true state, covered with nicks and dings over top of the three refinishing jobs completed at the behest of his ex-wife. She had left the month after Julie’s death—before the last coat of paint had dried—still screaming: “Why can’t you find who did this to her?”

  Julie’s thirteen-year-old body had been found broken and mangled after being ravaged for two days by feral dogs. She’d been strangled to death and discarded like a piece of trash. Petrosky had left the room before the coroner could finish with the details—probably the only reason he was still functioning at all. His ex-wife certainly hadn’t helped him stay sane. Or sober.

  “If we didn’t live down here, this never would have happened!” had been her favorite assault because she knew it cut him deepest. And she was right. That shit happened far less to rich folks. He should have worked harder. Now he had less reason to. He fucking hated irony.

  He grimaced at the cabinets and shut off the overheads. On the wall, the nightlight flickered, the only candle on his pathetic cake. Petrosky grabbed his keys.

  Happy birthday to me.

  His unmarked Caprice smelled like stale fries, old coffee and resentment, like any respectable cop’s car should. Through the windshield, the clouds were pregnant with rain—or maybe snow. You never could tell. October around Metro Detroit was a crapshoot: sometimes warm, sometimes frigid, usually miserable. In the distance, the sun peeked through heavy layers of cloud cover and bathed the street in light. But Petrosky saw the sickness the sun illuminated. The sun’s rays couldn’t wash away the grime that covered humanity, couldn’t conceal the barbs in people’s brains that led them to strangle their children, beat their wives, or leave their best friends lying in the gutter, life shimmering from their limp bodies through the manhole covers. By now, the blood underneath the city probably flowed like a hematic river.

  Out the passenger window, the Ash Park precinct grew larger, two stories of the dullest dirt-colored brick, home to donuts, pigs and paperwork. On the other side of the street, a matching building proclaimed Ash Park Detention Facility, only partially visible behind the lake fog that crept over their tiny part of the city every morning.

  He swung into the lot in front of the precinct—an acre of cement, and not one close spot. Typical. Stray pebbles crunched and spun from under his tires as he drove to the back of the lot and parked under a streetlamp. It blinked out for the day as he killed the engine and opened the door.

  Petrosky glowered at the light and shoved his keys into his pocket. The air brushed at his cheeks with damp fingers, the wet seeping into his sneakers as he clomped toward the building.

  On the sidewalk, two familiar silhouettes stood close—not close enough to arouse the suspicion of the masses, but Petrosky knew better. Shannon Taylor was a firecracker of a prosecutor with a perpetual knot of blond at the base of her neck and an ice-blue stare that could cut you in half. Severe black and white pinstripes covered a bony frame that could probably use more home-cooked meals, or at least a few donuts. She wouldn’t get either of those with Curtis Morrison.

  Morrison was a rookie in the detective unit and still wore pressed blue slacks, though he’d at least traded in the traditional blue uniform shirt for a black crew-necked sweater. He’d relocated from California after getting some fancy English degree. Since they’d met last year, the guy had spent their down time trying to feed Petrosky granola and hounding him to join his gym. Petrosky was perfectly content with carrying twenty years of stake-out donuts around his waist. He assumed he would continue to decline until he finally retired, and then it would be too late to give a shit anyway.

  Not that he gave a shit now.

  Petrosky stepped onto the curb.

  “Leave my rookie alone, Taylor,” he barked.

  Morrison jumped like he’d heard a gunshot. He was more physically imposing than Petrosky at a chiseled six foot one, but he had a surfer-boy smile in a perpetually tanned face, and blond locks too long for any self-respecting cop. Perfect for beach going, though. All that was missing was the bong.

  Taylor smirked. “That still works on him, eh?”

  “Still.”

  Morrison grinned. “I always get jumpy when I see that ugly mug of yours.”

  Taylor leveled her gaze at Petrosky. “I was just filling in your better half on Gregory Thurman.”

  “That asshole needs to go away forever,” Petrosky said.

  “He won’t. Few months maybe, based on the physical evidence we had. Child abuse, but not rape.”

  “I gave you the girl! What the hell happened?”

  “She told you he raped her every day for five years. But she won’t tell me, and she sure as hell won’t tell a jury.”

  “Fuck.” Petrosky glanced at a stray piece of concrete near his shoe. He fought the urge to kick it.

  “You have a way of getting female vics to talk, Petrosky. If you figure out a way to keep them talking, let me know.”

  Petrosky glared at her. In his peripheral, Morrison opened his mouth, closed it again, and looked at his shoes.

  Taylor adjusted her bun and brushed imaginary lint off her suit jacket. “Speaking of talking, I’ve got a date with a working girl later. She’ll serve some time. Keeps asking for you, Petrosky. Says you bailed her out before, thinks you’ll do it again.”

  “I didn’t do shit.”

  “You don’t even know her name.”

  “I plead the fifth.”

  “I have the paperwork.”

  “I’m sure she was innocent that time. And anyways, sex isn’t a crime.”

  “It is if you get paid for it.” Taylor glared at him. “And it’s dangerous. If we get them off the streets, we can help them.”

  “How very utopian. But it isn’t her fault when someone else is abusing—”

  “I prosecute the abusers too.”

  “Right. Sometimes.” Petrosky’s phone buzzed in his back pocket. He ignored it in favor of watching Taylor’s left eye twitch.

  “If you want out of sex crimes, bailing out working girls is the way to do it,” she said.

  “Who says I want out of sex crimes?”

  Taylor crossed her arms as Petrosky’s back pocket buzzed again. He snatched out the phone, glanced at the text message and jerked his head from Morrison to the direction of the parking lot. “We’ve got a call. Get moving, California.”

  Morrison nodded goodbye to Taylor and stepped off the curb. Petrosky followed.

  “I’ll be down in a little while to get your working girl, Taylor,” he called over his shoulder. “Do me a favor and have her ready, would ya? And remind her to put the wrong address on her paperwork so she’s harder to find when she skips bail.”

  “Fuck you, Petrosky.” Her heels clacked away until the only sounds against the pavement were Petrosky’s sneakers and Morrison’s rubber-soled somethings, probably made out of hemp or whatever the hell they made shoes out of in California.

  “Consorting with the enemy, Surfer Boy?”

  “She’s on our side, Boss.”

  “That she is. But she’s still a fucking lawyer.”

  “I guess.” Morrison didn’t look convinced. “So what kind of call did we get?”

  “Some kids found something over on Old Mill. If we hurry we’ll beat the medical examiner.”

  The cemetery was in an older part of town where residents had started demolishing abandoned homes and raking up the dirt to plant gardens. Across the street, a defunct workout facility sat next to a Chinese food restaurant, each furthering the need for the other, yet both one step away from being turned into a cabbage patch.

  Petrosky parked in the road. The entrance gate to the cemetery hung from one hinge and shrieked as Morrison pulled it open. Petrosky winced. Whispe
ring Willows, my ass. The gravestones were cracked and crumbling, etched with faded epitaphs about the beloved deceased: William Bishop, forever in our hearts, though the barren grounds around the plots suggested that poor Mr. Bishop had been very much forgotten. Through the fog, toward the center of the grounds, stood a small stone building—a poor man’s Taj Mahal.

  Crime techs milled about in the brown grass outside the building, tweezing bits of dirt and leaves into baggies. One—a kid with insect eyes and boy band hair—saw Petrosky and Morrison and waved them over. “You won’t be able to get in with anyone else. It’s pretty small.”

  Hooker heels and a tiny swath of cloth, maybe a tube top, lay discarded outside the door. Probably the reason they’d called him. Sex crime or not, no one else cared about prostitutes.

  Petrosky ducked into the building. The air was thick, heavy with the tang of metal and rotting meat and other noxious fumes he didn’t want to consider. A row of tiny doors the size of apartment mailboxes, presumably niches for ashes, lined the back wall, keeping silent vigil over the cement room. Below the niches sat a waist-high stone table on concrete pillars, probably used for flowers. But there were no flowers today. Only the girl.

  She was on her back on the slab, arms and legs bent awkwardly and tied together between the table legs. Her swollen tongue protruded over blackening lips that pulsed as if she were trying to talk, but that was only the maggots, writhing in her mouth. It had been a few days. How long exactly would be determined by the medical examiner, but he was guessing at least four or five days based on the lack of rigor mortis and the blisters on her marbled skin. Deep gouges that looked more like knife wounds than split flesh scored her arms and legs. Someone had beaten her badly before killing her. If she had been untied then, they’d at least get some skin samples if she had slashed him with her nails.

  Someone’s baby girl. Petrosky’s stomach roiled and he patted his front pocket for a spare antacid but came up empty. He inhaled through his nose and clenched his jaw.

  The knife wounds continued onto her torso. Her abdomen had been torn apart. On top of her thighs lay coils of intestine, some of them shredded like strips of bacon. Another organ, black and jelly-like, sat on her chest, the side wall torn, fluids oozing from beneath it.

  Petrosky bent to examine the restraints binding her wrists and ankles. Metal cuffs, easy to come by, though forensics would have more on the specifics later. Dark stains dripped over the slab and onto the floor, which appeared clean, or at least bore no discernible prints. She had bled a great deal in that little room. Hopefully she had been unconscious.

  From the doorway behind Petrosky, Morrison’s camera phone clicked. “Holy shit.”

  Petrosky straightened. “Suck it up, California, this is the job.” Not that Surfer Boy would be getting the full brunt of the smell halfway outside the room.

  “Got it, Boss.” Morrison aimed the phone again and snapped a photo of the letters on the right wall, inky and dripping.

  A boat beneath a sunny sky

  Lingering onward dreamily

  In an evening in July-

  “Is that paint?” Morrison asked.

  “I doubt it.” Petrosky backed out into the cool, muggy air.

  “Detective!” The bug-eyed tech stood near the corner of the building, holding out two plastic bags. “Got a purse with I.D. We’re dusting the area now.”

  Petrosky noted the purse, laying on the ground next to a tube of lip balm and a pen. “Needles?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Pills?”

  “No, sir. Just some condoms, a little makeup. And this.” He held up one of the bags.

  Petrosky peered through the clear plastic. “Meredith Lawrence. Morrison, you got your notebook?”

  “You know it, Boss.”

  “Seventy-three eleven Hoffsteader, apartment one-G.” Petrosky nodded to the tech and headed up the path toward the car.

  Morrison fell into step beside Petrosky, hippie shoes squishing through the grass. “You think it’s like … a psychopath?”

  “Maybe. He’s calculating. Aggressive. Not what you’d normally see in a crime of passion. I think we can be certain that he took her here to kill her since he had the cuffs. And there aren’t any clear signs of struggle around the building. Even the clothes by the door are in one piece. Either she knew him and trusted him enough to follow him in, or she was already unconscious when they got here.”

  “What would motivate someone to—to cut her open like that?”

  Petrosky shrugged. “Whatever she did, she didn’t deserve this.”

  “I can’t imagine anyone does.”

  Petrosky ground his teeth and studied the mournful clouds.

  Thursday, October 8th

  It’s okay, Hannah. Just breathe.

  I breathed. It didn’t help. Probably because there was a big difference between entering employee files into a computer database and telling someone to get the hell out.

  The paperwork rustled with a thick swoosh that sounded like the whisper of a thousand jerks before me getting rid of inconvenient people. It was the swoosh of the executioner’s axe over Marie Antoinette, the swoosh of Hitler throwing a swastika like a ninja dagger at a disobedient soldier. Though I was probably nicer than Hitler. I hoped.

  I pulled the phone to my ear and punched in the numbers. “Mr. Turner?” My voice quavered. Darn it. “We need to see you down in HR … yes, I will meet you here … Thank you.” Clunk went the phone receiver, like Marie Antoinette’s head.

  Turner was one of seventy or so engineers the Harwick Technical contract house employed, and one of thousands we contracted out worldwide. He would be at my desk in five minutes, or as long as it took to get from his floor of big projects and design deadlines to my tiny piece of Hell.

  Human resources: where happiness goes to die.

  I rustled through the papers one last time, stood, and took a step toward the entrance of my office.

  Well, not really an office. Unlike in the rest of the building, where you could touch your neighbor from your desk, the cubicles here were spaced for privacy—little islands in each corner further segregated by chest-high opaque acrylic. The partitions were low enough that you could still see who picked their nose while they typed. You could also tell who liked their dogs, who had children, and who was in that awkward in-between phase where a new child made a previously devout pet owner decide that it was just a stupid dog after all, leaving them to tuck Chihuahua pictures behind fresh shots of chubby babies. Maybe it made them feel less guilty about their shifting priorities.

  The wall to the side of my desk was covered by an old cork board. I had put it there just in case I ever got a dog, though worrying about Jake was enough for now. On my side of the room, my best and only friend Noelle stared at the computer in her corner. Across the room from Noelle, Ralph’s bookish glasses wobbled as he attacked an acne eruption on his cheek. In the corner behind Ralph, Tony was nearly invisible, his chalky skin and pale blond hair disappearing into the white of the room. I had never spoken to him, not once in four years. When I’d first started at Harwick, I tried smiling at him, but he swiveled his chair away. Noelle had said he was autistic—but maybe I just had spinach in my teeth. Neither would have surprised me.

  The only other person in the room was Jerome, the security guard, who was summoned on an as-needed basis to our part of the building. His ebony skin and shaved head glistened under the fluorescent lights. I often wondered how much trouble I would get into if I were to rub his head like a shiny Buddha, but I didn’t have the guts to find out.

  Jerome watched the door, Noelle watched the computer, Ralph glanced at the fingers he’d pulled from his pimply face, and none of them noticed me and my shaking hands. Maybe I had already started to fade.

  Through the glass wall between my office and the hallway, David Turner approached the door. Turner was tall, with protruding eyes, a beak-like nose, and thin lips pulled into an uneven line. In contrast to his unimpressive face,
his gray suit and tie were neatly pressed and impeccably matched. He strode with the confident gait of a man who knew his own worth.

  He would not maintain that confidence for long; they never did. It was like watching a balloon deflate every time. I usually deflated with them, leaving me feeling spent and hollow.

  Turner pulled the door open and looked at the other workers, who steadfastly pretended not to hear him or know why he was there. Clearly unaware of the nature of my job, he smiled at me and marched to my cubicle.

  I drew myself up to my full five-foot-four inches. I wished I were taller. Magic beans. I needed magic beans. Or an earthquake. I paused, hoping for some catastrophe to strike, so someone else could pick this up later. Nothing.

  Figures. Way to go, Michigan.

  He sat, and I did too, lest I end up looking like even more of an overbearing asshole. My heart scampered around like a pissed-off weasel. I cleared my throat, readying my speech from the training manual script. “Mr. Turner, unfortunately your services are no longer needed. As of today, you will no longer be an employee of Harwick Technical Solutions. We will mail your final paycheck to the address on file. You will have fifteen minutes to gather your belongings and make your way to the parking lot. Security will assist you.”

  The color drained from Turner’s face. “But … I haven’t had any complaints since I’ve been here. I have a wife, two kids. There must be a mistake.”

  I averted my eyes, hoping he’d think I was giving him time to process, but my motivations were selfish: I needed to focus on something else before my heart blew up. In the middle of the desk was a corner of paper I must have torn from the folder earlier in a subconscious attempt to curb my anxiety. Across the top of the desk, the three ceramic owls that usually stared at me quizzically were glaring like I had shit on their waffles. My favorite was a horned owl missing an ear. I had stowed the ear in a desk drawer, intending to glue it back on, but had since decided I rather preferred his one-eared imperfection. Plus, it made him look less smug.