Acts of Mercy: A Mercy Street Novel Read online

  “How ’bout we stop by Pilgrim’s Place first?” Coutinho asked. “It’s not far from here. Couple blocks down.”

  “Sure.”

  Three minutes later, Coutinho pulled his unmarked car up in front of the building from which several hundred hungry people were fed every week. Pilgrim’s Place sat in the middle of a row of two-story wooden storefronts, its name painted in red on the glass windows with plain white drapes hanging behind them. The store to the left was unoccupied, and the one to the right had a sign that read SORRY, WE ARE CLOSED.

  “The alley runs behind all the buildings?” Sam got out of the car and looked around.

  “Yes. But we weren’t able to find anyone who was in the alley that night. There’s not a whole lot going on down here at night, and by the time Mrs. Walker realized her husband was missing, any place that had been open had already closed up.”

  Sam followed the detective through the front door. Inside, long tables covered with sheets of white paper lined the room. A man in late middle age came out of the kitchen. He was tall and thin with sparse white hair atop a broad forehead and a bland round face.

  He stopped halfway across the room, a smile spreading slowly. “Hey, Detective Coutinho. How are you?”

  “Good, good, Bob. How’s everything?”

  “We’re okay.” The man’s face clouded. “You here to give us some news about Ross?”

  Coutinho shook his head. “Sorry. There’s been nothing new.” He gestured in Sam’s direction and said, “Bob, this is Sam. He’s a private detective who’s working for Mrs. Walker. Sam, this is Bob Taylor. He runs Pilgrim’s Place.”

  “You think you can find the guy who did Ross when the police couldn’t?” Bob asked somewhat skeptically.

  “I’m only going to be working on this one case,” Sam explained. “Detective Coutinho doesn’t have that luxury. So no promises, but I’m going to give it a go.”

  “Anything we can do to help. Ross was a good man.” Bob’s head nodded up and down. “A damned good man. Didn’t miss a Tuesday night in over three years.”

  “Ross volunteered here for the past three years?” Sam tried for a conversational tone.

  “He was one of the first to sign up. Wondered why a guy like him—good family, lived in one of those nice areas outside of town, had a real good job—why he would leave that nice house and that pretty family to drive down here.”

  “You ever ask him?”

  “Said he’d been really lucky in his life, that any one of these guys, that could be him. Never wanted to take his good fortune for granted.” Bob nodded again. “Like I said, he was a good man.”

  Sam glanced around the room. “This is where you feed everyone?”

  “Yeah. Anyone who comes in, we’ll feed. No one is ever turned away from Pilgrim’s Place.”

  “You have a pretty regular crowd?”

  “Oh, yeah. Times have been tough here for the past few years for some folks. We do have some who have been coming steadily, practically since we opened. Others have been able to move on.”

  “So you know most of the people who come in?” Sam asked.

  “Most of them, sure. Sometimes we get someone who’s just passing through, but for the most part, we recognize or know the names of just about everyone who shows up.”

  “How many each day?”

  “Maybe forty for breakfast—we got families bringing their kids in every morning—then about the same for lunch. The older kids are in school but the adults who show up for lunch often aren’t here earlier in the morning. Dinner time, we can feed sixty to eighty on any given night. Sometimes last winter, we’d run close to one hundred on the weekends.”

  “Do you have anyone on the door, checking IDs, for example?”

  “We do have someone at the door, but no one checks IDs. What would be the point in that?” Bob frowned, the idea clearly foreign to him.

  Sam didn’t bother to explain. “What does the person on the door do?”

  “Just makes sure there’s seating for everyone. If we’re filled, he’ll chat up the next person in line for a while until there’s an opening. We don’t turn anyone away, Sam.”

  “So your doorman would know if someone had come in the night Ross Walker was killed who hadn’t been there before? Anyone who stood out, maybe a stranger?”

  “We already talked about that, me and Arnie. He works the door. He said there wasn’t nobody he didn’t recognize. As a matter of fact, we were down in numbers that night. Anyone odd would have stood out.” Bob turned to Coutinho, who stood by quietly. “You talked to Arnie yourself. He tell you anything different?”

  “No.” The detective shook his head. “I spoke at length with him about who was here and who came in when, when they left. It’s all in the report, Sam. There’s a copy in the file I gave you.”

  “Appreciate it.” Sam turned back to Bob. “Mind if I take a look at the kitchen?”

  “Right this way.”

  Bob led them through an open doorway into the back room, where two large stainless steel stoves stood side by side. Two refrigerators and one upright freezer took up most of the space on the opposite wall, and down the center of the room was a stainless steel counter. The room was, as Coutinho had told Sam, L-shaped, with oversized double sinks in the short leg of the L.

  “What was Walker’s job?” Sam asked.

  “Everyone’s job changes from night to night. The volunteers arrive, they look at the menu, see what has to be done, they’ll just start to work. You come in first, you start the thing that takes the longest, see?”

  “What did Walker work on that night?”

  “He and Lynne were a little late that night, only maybe by ten minutes, but most of the entrée and dessert work had already been taken up by someone else. Ross started on the salad, washed up some veggies. I think we had squash that night. Someone brought in a basket of yellow and green from their garden. In the summer and late fall, we get a lot of donations from private gardens,” Bob explained. “Lynne didn’t cook that night. She served.”

  “Anyone working back here with him?”

  “No. He worked pretty fast on his own.”

  “So no one noticed exactly when he went missing?” Sam continued.

  “Everyone was doing their own thing. The best we can figure out, when he finished with the salad prep, he put it out on the counter here for the servers to take, and then he must have taken the bag of scraps out to the Dumpster.”

  “He always take out the trash?”

  “No,” Bob told Sam. “Everyone cleans up after themselves. If you have scraps or garbage, you take it out yourself. At the end of the night, everyone helps out with the general cleanup.”

  “The bag of scraps was found in the Dumpster,” Coutinho added, “so we know he made it that far. We’re thinking the killer was hidden behind it, waiting.”

  A flicker of a frown crossed Sam’s face as he gestured to the back door. “I’m assuming this is the way?”

  “Yeah. He would have gone out here …” Sam and the detective followed Bob through the door. “There’s the Dumpster out there by the fence.”

  “That’s where it was that night?”

  “That’s not the same Dumpster, but it’s always in the same place, yeah.”

  “And the light there over the back door is the only light there is out here at night?”

  “Yeah. It’s only about seventy-five watts, I think.” Bob pointed to the brass socket with the bare bulb.

  “And nothing at all back there, by the Dumpster?”

  “Nothing. It’s really pretty dark out here at night. I mean, you can see the Dumpster, and make out where to toss stuff, but if someone was back there hiding, you wouldn’t see them.”

  A worn dirt path ran through the yard of straggly grass dotted with dandelions and chickweed and led straight to the Dumpster, and Sam followed it. He turned to the detective and said, “Show me where you found Walker.”

  Coutinho walked around the back of the D
umpster and pointed to a section of fence. “He was here. Back against the fence, legs straight out in front of him. You saw the photos, so you know how he was posed.”

  Sam bit the inside of his cheek and scratched the back of his neck, looked back toward the house, then back at the Dumpster again.

  “We might be wrong about something,” he told the detective.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not sure the killer came here looking for Walker. How could he have known that Walker would be coming out to the Dumpster that night, or that he’d be alone?”

  “I thought we agreed that the nature of the attack, the preparedness of the killer, all indicated that this was personal, a revenge killing.”

  “Oh, it’s personal,” Sam told him. “Personal to the killer, but not to the victim. We know that he came totally prepared to kill that night, but he wouldn’t have known who would be coming out here. I think what mattered was that he was able to kill that night in the manner he’d prepared for. I don’t believe it mattered to him who his victim was.”

  “You think he would have killed whoever came out back?” Bob frowned.

  Sam nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  “But why? You think this guy has an ax to grind with someone here?” Bob was clearly shaken and confused. “We do good things. We feed hungry people. That’s all we do here. Why would someone want to hurt someone—anyone—here?”

  “I can’t answer that yet,” Sam said.

  “Yet?” Coutinho raised an eyebrow. “You think you will find the answer?”

  “If I look in the right place, chances are I will.”

  “You sounded pretty sure of yourself back there,” the detective said after they’d said their good-byes and were back in the car.

  “It’s all a matter of interpreting the evidence, of paying attention to what the killer is saying.” Sam rolled down his window and rested his right arm. “And no, right now, I don’t know what he’s saying. Right now, I don’t hear him at all.”

  “Well, you be sure to let me know when you do.” Coutinho turned the key in the ignition. “What time is your appointment with Lynne Walker?”

  Sam glanced at his watch. “In about ten minutes.”

  “You’re going to be a little late.”

  They rode in silence for several minutes. Finally, “You have any ideas on why Pilgrim’s Place?”

  “No. It could be there’s a connection to the killer. Like maybe he ate there on a regular basis at one time. Maybe someone there pissed him off.” Sam sighed. “Or maybe this guy just got up that morning and said, ‘I think I’ll kill someone today’ and went off looking for a place where he could find a victim.”

  Sam caught the sharp glance the detective gave him, so he added, “And no, I’m not being a smart-ass. I don’t know why he did what he did because I don’t know him.”

  There was another period of silence, during which Coutinho pulled up in front of a pale yellow bungalow and turned off the engine.

  “Maybe I’ll try looking at this from a different angle,” he told Sam. “We’ve been looking for a connection between the killer and the victim. Maybe the connection is to the facility. Maybe we’ll take another look at the regulars and the former regulars. Arnie can probably help me out there.”

  Sam nodded. “Sometimes you just have to step back and look at things from a different viewpoint. The bottom line is to find out what happened.”

  Sam got out of the car before the detective could respond. The front door of the house opened, and a woman in her midforties stood on the top step. As the two men approached, the woman extended her hand first to Coutinho.

  “Chris, it’s good to see you again.”

  To Sam, she said, “Detective DelVecchio. I’m happy to meet you.”

  Sam took her hand and noticed that it trembled. He figured it had to be hard for her to be still dealing with the details of her husband’s death, all the questions and no answers. He hoped to make this as quick and painless as possible, but looking in her eyes, he realized that painless was a long shot. Quick was probably doable.

  “The kids are all with their grandparents this week,” she explained as she showed them into the living room. “When they’re all here and they’re loud and fighting, you wish for just a little bit of peace. Then they all leave at the same time, and the silence rips you apart.”

  She gestured for them to take seats on the sofa as she sat on a dark blue wing chair that looked as if it had survived several of those fights she’d mentioned.

  “How many children do you have?” Sam asked, even though he knew there were four Walker offspring.

  “Three boys and a girl. The youngest is eight. Ryan.” She turned to the detective and added, “He was the one who answered the door the day you came to …”

  “I remember.”

  “May I offer you anything …” she said. “Coffee?”

  “Nothing, no thank you,” Sam replied. “I just wanted to stop in to meet you while I’m here in Lincoln.”

  “Will you be going to Pilgrim’s Place?”

  “We just came from there,” he told her.

  “Ross and I used to look forward to our Tuesday nights there. Now I can’t even drive into that part of town without getting an anxiety attack.” Lynne Walker shook her head from side to side. “I don’t understand it. I will never understand it. My husband was a good man. A great father, a wonderful husband. How someone could hate him enough to do this terrible thing …”

  “I am very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Walker.” Sam felt like a hypocrite uttering those clichéd words. After Carly’s death, he’d heard that same phrase repeated over and over until he thought he’d punch the next person who uttered it, and now here he was, uttering those same words to someone else.

  “Do you know what it’s like to have someone you love murdered?” Lynne Walker’s question took him completely offguard, and for a moment, he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly, until she repeated it. That she was looking directly at Sam made it clear she was addressing him.

  “Ahhh, actually, yes. Yes, I do, Mrs. Walker.” He felt his skin flush red, and his throat began to close. He cleared it, then nodded slowly.

  “May I ask …?” She appeared as flustered at his response as he’d felt at the question. It was obvious she’d anticipated a “No.”

  “My wife.” Sam could feel Chris Coutinho’s eyes on him but couldn’t bring himself to turn to look at the detective. Talking about himself had always made Sam feel vulnerable. Talking about Carly made him want to walk away.

  “I’m so sorry.” Lynne Walker reached out to him and squeezed his arm. “Do you have children?”

  “No.”

  “How long has it been?”

  Days. Hours. A lifetime. How do you measure the time between the last time you said good-bye and now?

  “Three years.” Three years, two months and four days.

  “Ross has been gone almost half as long,” she murmured. “Did they ever find your wife’s killer?”

  “Yes.” He sat more stiffly than he’d like, but didn’t seem able to relax. In the past, Sam had been spared direct dealings with the grieving families. He had rarely had to deal with the heartache, and was finding he wasn’t very comfortable with this aspect of his new job. He had yet to become comfortable with his own heartache. “He’s in prison appealing his death sentence.”

  “Then you understand completely,” she said softly. “What it’s like …”

  “I do, yes.” Sam tried to cut her off, afraid she’d keep talking about it. He didn’t want to talk about his own loss. Right now, he wasn’t sure he even wanted to talk about hers, but he had a job to do.

  “I think it’s even harder on the children. They really have no conception of good and evil, of life and death.” She paused, as if reflecting. “I suppose that’s no longer true. They understand now how quickly things can change.”

  “It’s a tough lesson for anyone to learn,” Sam told her.

&nbs
p; “Indeed it is.” Lynne Walker cleared her throat. “If I could think of anything that could help you, believe me, I’d do it. I lay awake at night, trying to think back on anyone who Ross might have had words with, or anyone who might have a reason to dislike him, but I swear, I can’t think of a soul. He wasn’t confrontational and he disliked conflict. Went out of his way to compromise and to avoid hurting anyone else’s feelings. So I can’t think of anyone.”

  Her eyes began to fill. “I’ve thought back to every single person I remember seeing at the mission, going as far back as the first week we were there. I can’t think of one single instance where there was any kind of adversarial conversation that involved my husband, or one time when he had something negative to say about anyone.” She looked at Sam and shrugged. “People liked Ross. They gravitated to him. I can’t think of one single reason why someone would want to kill him.”

  “Sometimes there is no reason,” Sam said softly.

  Ross Walker’s widow excused herself and left the room, returning with a tissue she used to blot under her eyes.

  “I’m so sorry that you made the trip all the way out here and I haven’t been able to tell you anything at all.”

  “Mrs. Walker, I didn’t come here to question you,” Sam told her. “I came to meet you. As a Mercy Street client, I just wanted you to know that we’re going to do whatever we can. There are no guarantees …”

  “Oh, I know that.” She waved a hand impatiently. “I don’t expect a miracle. But I saw Robert Magellan on TV and he was talking about how he was putting together this crack team of investigators and how it wouldn’t cost anything if they picked your case, and I figured, what do I have to lose? I appreciate that someone there thought our case was worth looking into.” She turned to Coutinho. “Chris, I know how hard you worked on this case. You’ve become almost like a member of the family. I need to know that you understand that my submitting Ross’s case to Mercy Street didn’t mean that I thought you didn’t do your job.”

  “I understand completely, Mrs. Walker,” the detective replied. “I’m really fine with your decision. I’d love to see the case solved, you know that. If Sam can do that, I’ll be the first on the phone to congratulate him.”