What the Night Knows

37

AFTER SECURING THE WOBURN HOUSE, LIONEL TIMMINS WENT to Reese Salsetto’s apartment building with keys he had taken off the dead man’s body. He hoped to find photos or other evidence to confirm that Salsetto had been erotically obsessed with his niece. The man was dead. Brenda Woburn would not be charged in such an obviously justified act of self-defense. But Lionel abhorred loose ends even in open-and-shut cases certain never to be brought before a judge.

The limestone-clad exterior of the building featured carved window surrounds, and the interior of the lobby offered marble on every surface except the faux-silver-leafed ceiling. This was not a residence for old money, catering instead to the look-at-me rich.

Ronald Phipps, the night doorman—sixtyish, white-haired with a neat white mustache—was so distinguished in appearance and manner that Lionel was saddened to see him in a tacky uniform better suited to the foppish colonel of a banana republic in a comic operetta. He looked like a once-wealthy banker supplementing his Social Security income after losing his fortune.

Phipps appeared not the least surprised to hear that Reese Salsetto had shot someone and, in return, had been shot dead. Nor did he seem worried about the reputation of the building, perhaps because Salsetto wasn’t the only or even the most colorful resident at this address. His concern was that proper procedures be followed. He called the non-emergency number for the police to confirm that the ID Lionel presented was legitimate. In spite of the hour, he phoned the general manager of the building to get permission to allow the detective to enter the Salsetto apartment.

Lionel could have asserted his authority and gone at once to the twelfth floor, leaving the doorman to follow procedures in his wake. Six years in prison taught him patience, however, and he was loath to demean the old man.

These days, human dignity was everywhere under assault. Lionel chose not to contribute to that war effort.

When he received permission and went up to Salsetto’s apartment, he found the door unlocked and ajar, as if Reese had left in a hurry.

According to Phipps, Salsetto lived with his “fiancée,” Ms. Brittany Zeller. Although fiancée had not been given the slightest ironic inflection, Lionel suspected, because of a quickening of the doorman’s blinking, that the title had just then been conferred on her for propriety’s sake.

Standing on the threshold, he called out to her twice. No one answered.

He entered the apartment, switching on lights as he went. In the living room, a well-dressed blonde sprawled on the floor, on her back, the carpet under her dark with blood.

Cautious about contaminating evidence, Lionel stepped just close enough to the woman to be sure that she was dead. Her wide-open right eye stared fixedly and her left was more than half closed, as if she had winked seductively at Death when suddenly he loomed.

Retreating to the hallway, Lionel phoned headquarters, reported the crime, and triggered the dispatch of the medical examiner’s and the crime lab’s crews. This was going to be a long night.

While waiting for the criminalists, Lionel went to the master bedroom. This seemed the most logical place to begin searching for photos of Davinia Woburn or other evidence that Reese Salsetto had been erotically obsessed with her. Within two minutes, he came across extensive evidence of other crimes.

Immersed in what he found, Lionel didn’t hear the techs arrive until one of them hailed him from the bedroom doorway. None of them had been at the Woburn house earlier, so he brought them up to date, explaining how the two crimes were connected.

As the M.E.’s team and the lab crew set to work, Lionel returned to the bedroom. Before he could continue to examine the evidence he had uncovered, his cell phone rang.

The caller was Nelson Burchard, chief of detectives. “I’m at St. Joseph’s Hospital. I need you here quicker than a goose can crap. One of our jakes, Andy Tane, he was at the Woburn house, he followed the family to the hospital and murdered them all.”

Lionel thought of the sweet boy with Down syndrome and the angelic girl, and he felt as if he had taken a punch in the stomach.

“I need someone here to cover my position,” he told Burchard, and explained that he had found a dead woman in Salsetto’s apartment.

“What the hell’s happening?” Burchard wondered. “Are we becoming the murder capital of the country in one night?”