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Choir Boy
31
JOHN SAMPSON RAN HIS tongue along the inside of his cheek before clucking in disgust. “Makes you wonder what’s going on behind Choir Boy’s sunglasses, you know? Is he leering down at her, plotting this?”
I put the dead girl’s phone into an evidence bag and used a marker to note the time and place of discovery and my badge number. I nodded and said, “We need to find this Choir Boy guy ASAP. And I’m more interested than ever in what got him booted out of a seminary.”
“We need a name,” Sampson said as a pickup truck pulled into the parking lot.
A bulldozer of a woman in khaki pants, a blue polo, and a ball cap advertising the tool-rental facility came out of the truck and strode toward the Metro crime scene van.
“You can’t park here!” she shouted, waving her arms wildly at Lillian Danville. “I have customers coming! This is still a goddamn place of business, despite whatever the hell has happened back in that ravine now!”
I told Sampson I’d handle it and went quickly to the confrontation. Danville was holding up her nitrile-gloved hands and saying nothing as the woman continued to rant.
“I call the police like every other day because of the damn useless people back there, and no one does a thing! They take dumps in my parking lot at night! I got to clean it up every damned morning! And—”
“Ma’am,” I said, sharply enough to stop her yelling. I held up my credentials. “This is a murder scene. So please step back from my fellow officer and take a few deep breaths or you’ll be charged with obstruction of justice.”
She gave me a look of deep frustration but did in fact step back. She stared at the ground, trembling slightly.
“Hey there,” I said in a friendlier tone. I went over to her and saw MIMI WALLACE sewn on the front of her polo. “Ms. Wallace, can you take a walk with me while you calm yourself?”
Wallace crossed her arms but nodded grudgingly and walked with me to the front of the rental operation. I said nothing until we reached the door.
“You better now, Ms. Wallace?”
“No, Detective, I am not,” she said, her voice shaking. “I got two kids, both down with colds, and I’m the manager here and I got no one to cover for me. And this constant thing with the folks in that ravine—I know they got a raw deal, but I am just getting tired of it.”
I said, “I completely understand. You’ve had a lot of problems here, Ms. Wallace?”
She wiped a tear from her cheek. “Every day. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve called the police. Sometimes they come. Sometimes they just drive through the parking lot and that’s all! I try to get them to look at the security footage for what goes on back there at night, but they just shrug it off.”
“You have footage from last night?” I asked.
The woman rolled her head, then shook it. “I shut it off.”
My heart sank. “Why?”
The tears came again. “I’m a God-fearing woman, and they’re crapping in the open like dogs, having sex in the open like dogs, fighting like dogs, plus drinking and smoking meth. I just could not look at that kind of thing anymore, so I turned the rear camera off.”
“Front camera?”
“No, that was on,” she said. “But you never see things like that out front.”
“Just the same,” I said, “can I take a look, Ms. Wallace?”
“I’m not in trouble?”
“Not for turning off a camera to protect your sanity,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said, wiping at her tears before letting me into the shop.
She led me to a back room with a desk and a computer and brought up the video footage from the night before. I had her start at midnight and run the film in semi–fast forward. Buses and cars went by. A few of the vehicles turned into the Avid Eyeball’s parking lot, but more cars and pickups left the strip club the later it got.
At twelve fifty-nine a.m., a Toyota Prius pulled over just beyond the turn into the Avid Eyeball’s lot, and a waifish figure wearing a short skirt, high heels, and a light-colored hoodie climbed out. She turned and walked a little awkwardly toward the club, as if unsure of her balance in the high heels, pulling back her hood as she did.
“Pigtails,” I said, freezing the frame.
