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Mack stared at it for a moment before shaking. He flicked his chin at his compatriots, and they hopped into the vehicles and backed them up, allowing just enough room for a car to pass through.
Evan went around to the driver’s door of the Buick Regal and knuckle-tapped. Ruby unlocked it. She was still wearing her seat belt.
Evan drove slowly through the gap toward the end of the cul-de-sac, faces watching them from either side.
Ruby blew out a breath. “That was incredible.” Her voice was ratcheted high, the excited afterglow of fear. “You backed that guy down. All of them. That was badass.”
“I didn’t back anyone down. I asked for permission.” Evan pulled to the curb in front of Angela’s building. “And, besides, I’m surprised that impressed you. I mean, as an ‘empowered woman.’”
“We want our men to be modern,” Ruby said. “We don’t want them to bepussies.”
35
The Kill Site
The super was a fastidious little old man, his apartment crammed with supplies stacked in small labeled boxes. Door latches, drain cleaner, toilet flappers, caulking guns, paint. The place smelled intensely of dust, or perhaps he did. He stood blocking the doorway with his body, which Evan assumed was just habit since he couldn’t imagine that he and Ruby looked like a problematic duo.
“Angela Buford,” the super said. “The double murder upstairs. Right. Right.” He had a pair of wire-frame glasses that he took off and polished on his shirt. On top of the dust, he smelled of shaving cream and aftershave. “It was a mess. Can’t rent her room out no more. It was awful. That poor young woman, like so many here.”
“Can we see the apartment?”
The man had no eyebrows, but the shiny patches above his eyes knitted together. “You’re not PD,” he said. “So why would I let you do that?”
Evan started to answer, but Ruby clasped his arm gently andleaned forward. “The boy whose body was dumped there. He was my brother.”
“Right.” The man’s eyes peered out earnestly through the round lenses. “I’m … I’m very sorry. Hold, please.” He stepped away, running the tips of his fingers along a row of keys hanging on tiny brass hooks on the wall. Plucking one off, he shouldered past them. “Let’s go.”
On the way up the stairs, Evan asked, “What can you tell me about Angela?”
“Well, aaaaah. She wasn’t really known as Angela around here.”
“What was she known as?”
“Desiree.”
“Desiree?”
“What I said.”
Evan remembered what Echo had told him about Angela—wrote poetry on driftwood, shot it in sepia filters, that sort of shit. “Was that her influencer name?” he asked.
The super came to the next landing and leaned on the rail a moment, winded. “Influencer? I wouldn’t say that.”
“What would you say?”
The man straightened up, all five foot four of him, his glasses fogged from exertion. He pressed through onto the next floor and paused by the first door on the left. “She was a working girl,” he said.
Ruby looked at Evan, puzzled, and then she got it.
“She wanted to be more,” the super said. “But this is what she had.”
He unlocked the door and armed it open. They eased inside.
It wasn’t really an apartment, more of a room, as he’d said. Sparse decorations still in place. A faded pink bedspread over a twin bed. Moth-eaten silk pillowcase. Plastic set of drawers. The door to the tiny bathroom was open, a blow dryer resting on the floor, still plugged in. A poster of a Jamaican beach thumbtacked to the wall showed teal waters and white sand. Evan wondered if she’d ever been.
There was an amoeba-shaped splotch on the floor near the window.
Evan had the crime-scene photos in his RoamZone. Angela had been thrown onto the bed, facedown, left arm twisted beneath her. The shoulder had been pulled from the socket posthumously, no doubt when her body was hauled from the kill site. Johnny had been discovered right there at their feet, his head over the stain in the floorboards. There hadn’t been a lot of bleeding since his body was moved, but there’d been drainage from his slit neck and orifices as his body had decomposed.
