Chapter Thirty-One

DETECTIVE ELLOISE SHARMAN let me and Susan into Roger Dorrich’s apartment in South Boston. She wasn’t happy about it, pushing the door open with a pained look on her face. I’d known Elloise on the beat, had gotten drunk with her a bunch of times as a probationary officer, had once smashed through a plate glass window with her while pursuing a thief. But none of that removed the stink of my supposedly corrupt history. I hung back while Susan went in.

“Thanks for doing this,” I told Elloise, trying to decide how I was going to convince her everything she’d heard about me in the past was untrue. I didn’t get the chance.

“Whatever it is you’re doing,” Elloise said, “do it fast. Roger Dorrich’s family thinks this has all been shut down and signed off on as a suicide. I don’t need some grieving relative turning up and wondering why we’re still poking around.”

“We’ll be quick,” I assured her.

Elloise left to get a coffee and I went in. I stood in the small kitchen, looking out over the living room toward the view over Boston. The apartment was typical of military guys I had known. The view was expensive—army guys especially like to be high up so they can see the horizon, get the lay of the land. But the furniture was cheap, functional, mismatched, bought quickly and as needed by someone used to sleeping rough. Dorrich’s fridge was empty except for condiments, and his cupboards were stacked with protein powders. I guessed he was so ravaged emotionally by his time at war that he had trouble keeping any potential romantic partners around long enough for them to have any effect on his living space.

Susan was leafing through a wallet she found on the edge of a flimsy coffee table. She pulled out some receipts and started flipping through them.

“Well, here’s your first clue,” she said, handing two to me. “When did Dorrich die again? Thursday?”

“Yeah. Morning,” I said.

“Well, seven o’clock that same morning, he fills the car with gas,” she said, pointing at the papers in my hand. “He buys a Diet Coke at the gas station and gets fifty bucks out of the ATM.”

“What’s this a clue to?” I asked.

“Dorrich not meaning to kill himself,” Susan said. “Who fills the car with gas when they know they’re going to go home and end it all? And what’s the cash for?” She pulled the fifty out of the wallet and showed it to me. “And what’s with the Diet Coke? Why not go full sugar? Come on. It’s the last day of your life.”

“I see where you’re going with this. It’s good. But it’s not enough,” I said.

“It’s not?”

“You’re ex-FBI,” I said. “So you’re going to try to use your behavioral science witchcraft to lock down Dorrich’s mental state based on a few bits of paper from his wallet.”

“Right,” she said.

“Where I come from, people aren’t columns in a textbook.”

“Oh, I see.” She folded her arms and cocked a hip, smug. “Please, go on then. School me.”

“Outside the pretty offices and classrooms, on the street, where the real cops work,” I said, “I dealt with stuff like this. Suicides. Mystery deaths. People do weird things, OK? Maybe Dorrich got the cash out at the gas station because he always got cash out. It was habit. Maybe he preferred Diet Coke to regular. Maybe he didn’t want his family members to have to deal with a near-empty car when they were cleaning up his life after he was gone.”

“OK. OK. Fine. So where’s your razor-sharp, street-experience-hardened mind telling you we should look, then?” she asked. “Without a body, and without Dorrich’s phone or laptop, we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel for what actually happened here.”

“Keep scraping.” I shrugged. “Just keep scraping.”

I went to the bathroom, where Elloise had told me Dorrich’s body was found slumped in the tub with a bullet in the brain, entered through the right temple. The room was clean now. I leaned in through the doorway and tried to imagine Dorrich in his final moments, driven to the brink by some supposed threat to expose or punish him for the massacre that had unfolded in Afghanistan. But there was so much I couldn’t know without a body, or at least pictures of it; whether he’d crouched there naked, as I’d seen many men do, trying to conceal the mess and shame of his ending. Or whether he had fallen there, fully clothed, as someone came through the door and snuffed him out of existence. I decided, as I stood there, that the priority was finding out who exactly had been threatening Dorrich. Maybe Dorrich had ended his own life in fear of this person, or maybe that someone had done the deed for him, but either way, I needed to know who I was dealing with. Who’d been coming to “make him pay”? I turned and was about to leave the room when my boot crunched on a piece of broken tile on the bathmat.

I bent down and picked up a tiny triangle of glossy-white tile, held it against the wall. It was the same style. I scanned the walls, first around the door, then over the tub, then against the back wall where a sink stood beneath a mirror cabinet. I went there and pushed aside bottles on the vanity, trying to match the shard with the corner of a tile just above the sink.

There was blue gunk in the grout of the cracked tile, more blue gunk in the rubber sealant joining the vanity to the wall. The spilled gunk had been wiped up hastily, leaving smears. I picked up the bottles on the counter, looked for something blue. There was tea-colored aftershave here. Yellow hair wax. Clear roll-on deodorant. I followed the side of the vanity down to a wastepaper basket. It was open and empty, lined with a clean white plastic bag.

I went to the kitchen and fished around in the cabinets until I found the trash can. It was also empty and relined, with a larger purple bag.

I found Susan sitting on Dorrich’s bed, going through the contents of the nightstand drawer.

“You’ve got to come with me,” I said.

“What? Where?”

“Downstairs. Parking lot, probably. We’ll have to go together—I can’t see Ell being happy with one of us hanging around up here and one of us hanging around down there.”

“What’s in the parking lot?” Susan asked.

“The garbage room,” I said.

Susan’s shoulders slumped.

“It’s time to be a real cop now, babe.” I grinned.

“I just bought these shoes,” she sighed.

Within about ten minutes, Susan and I had set up a dumpster search system that functioned perfectly, as though it was something we’d done together a hundred times before. Being the athletic one, with the sure-footedness of a mountain goat and the work ethic of a mule, Susan clambered into the dumpster and began loading bags into my arms, while I placed them into piles on the cement floor. Among the bags were the random discarded items apartment-block garbage chutes tend to attract. Old shoes. A dead peace lily in a broken pot. Half of a broken broom.

I was interested in bags that matched the pale purple kind Dorrich used in his kitchen, and smaller, white supermarket-style bags like the one in his bathroom bin. Susan voiced her concerns as we worked, and they matched mine. We couldn’t be sure, without asking Dorrich’s family or another resident of the building, when the dumpster was emptied, and therefore if any garbage from Dorrich’s apartment was likely present. We couldn’t be sure Dorrich’s family had even dumped his garbage here, or if they’d taken it someplace else. And we couldn’t be sure the broken tile and mysterious blue gunk in Dorrich’s bathroom even meant anything, or if we were interrupting a more useful search of his personal possessions to follow my hunch. But I had a feeling. A weird, unsettling instinct. I didn’t like the chipped tile. I didn’t like the blue gunk and its proximity to the chipped tile.

My stomach hitched, excited, when I tore open a small white bag and obviously bathroom-related content poured out onto the ground at my feet. I sorted through the tissues, used razors, clumps of hair and empty pill boxes, then seized upon a small plastic bottle of men’s shaving gel. At the bottom of the bottle, a teaspoon or so of gluggy, bright-blue liquid remained. As Susan landed on the cement beside me, having climbed out of the dumpster to take a break, I showed her the bottle and the small but unmistakable bullet hole in the side.

“So what happened?” I asked. “He took a shot at himself and missed?”