None of the neighbors seemed too impressed to have the law knocking on their doors for the second time in two days. They’d all made it clear the day before that they’d had minimal contact with Lorraine, but Jericho had hoped some of them would at least have noticed if she had a cat, and if so, what color it might be.
“We really don’t have anything to do with people like her,” he was told by a woman whose stark navy dress only partly covered her full sleeve of tattoos. “There are cats in the neighborhood, sure, but I have no idea who they belong to.”
Nobody else knew, either. Jericho should go back to the station and work on getting Lorraine’s phone records. If he had those, he could sort through the calls, looking for clients, or friends. But, he realized, he already knew one of her friends. Possibly her only one.
Sandi Granger was living in an apartment above a variety store on Main Street. The lock on the street-level door was broken, and Jericho pulled it open and headed up the stairs, expecting to find another door, the one to the actual apartment, at the top. Instead, he found himself standing in a living room, a woman glaring at him from the couch in front of the TV.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Wade’s mother growled at him, “or show me your warrant. You got a fucking warrant?”
Excellent start. “No, ma’am. I apologize for intruding—I didn’t understand the layout of the place.”
“Thelayout? You think having a floorplan would make it okay for you to invade my home without a warrant?”
In a way, it was nice to know that Jericho’s general sense of befuddlement around Wade wasn’t solely due to raging hormones. It honestly seemed that there was something in the Granger nature that made Jericho feel like he was always being caught flat-footed. “I’m not here to cause any trouble,” he tried, and held his hands out, palms up. “I don’t know if you remember me, ma’am, but I’m Jericho Crewe. I went to school with Wade?”
“You did a hell of a lot more than go to school with him,” she retorted. “But who you were then hasn’t got a damn thing to do with who you are now. And just like I’ve told every other pig who wallows his way in here, I’ve got nothing to say.”
“I’m not here about Wade, ma’am. Mostly not. But he did mention that you were a friend of Lorraine Mackey’s, and I’m investigating her death. I was hoping I could ask you a few questions about her.”
“I don’t talk to cops,” Sandi growled.
“I can understand that, but I’m truly hoping you’ll make an exception in this case.”
“Because you and Wade are soclose?” Her sneer made Jericho think she knew exactly what had happened at his apartment the night before, but that was probably paranoia.
“No, ma’am. Nothing to do with Wade. I just thought you’d want to help me find the man who beat your friend with a two-by-four and then strangled her to death.”
There was a short pause. “Is that supposed to shock me?”
“It shocked the hell out of me. I didn’t know Lorraine that well, but seeing her like that, in her own damn house? It definitely made me want to catch whoever did it.” He gathered his strength, then used his best bait. “I want that bad enough that I’m over here, humbling myself in front of someone who obviously has no use for me. I’m asking for your help, ma’am. I need it.”
Apparently Sandi was either less perceptive or less bitter than her son, because she bit. “What do you need to know, exactly?”
“Let’s start with the obvious. Do you have any idea who might have killed Lorraine?” Her sneer made her answer obvious, so he added, “Any difficult clients, anyone who had a grudge against her? A pimp or a dealer? Anyone?”
She squinted at him. “The Mountaineers used to send her some business, I think, before they all got busted. No one stepped in to pimp for her, not that I heard of.”
“So no pimp. Maybe a dealer?”
“Mostly she drank, but the Mountaineers gave her some drugs too. But since they went away? I couldn’t say where she was getting her stuff from.”
Couldn’t say because she didn’t know, or because the new source was connected to Wade and she wouldn’t turn in her son? Either way, pressing her wasn’t going to make her change her mind, not unless Jericho was willing to get a hell of a lot more aggressive than he could justify. “What about clients? Anyone giving her a hard time?”
Sandi appeared thoughtful. Might just be an act, or might be he’d earned himself a bit of credit with her by not pushing too hard about the drugs. Finally she said, “Nobody lately. There was a guy a few months ago who got weird. She ended up spending a few nights down at the Lutheran church, hiding out from him.”
The Lutheran church ran the only women’s shelter in town, a couple of rooms in their basement that were available as needed. “Do you know the guy’s name?”
Sandi shook her head. “No. She said he worked at the park. A ranger or something. But she hasn’t mentioned him for a while.”
“Anything else you can tell me about him?”
“She said he couldn’t get it up. That’s why he was such an asshole to her. Blamed her for it, said he wanted his money back, or else she had to give him a freebie some other time.”
“I guess she probably didn’t report any of that to the police, huh?”
“Probably not,” Sandi agreed pointedly.
“Okay, well, anyone else you can think of?” Sandi shook her head, and he said, “Did she ever mention Will Archer to you?”
