by Rex Burns
Sitting in the Trans-Am in the dim parking lot, Wager thought about that death to hold off thinking about the other: Mrs. Green’s shock and sadness seemed genuine. Even if she had not told the full truth about the other times her husband stayed out all night, Wager would swear from his own knowledge of it that her grief was real. Slowly, he let the car’s steering wheel take him where it would as his mind focused on the death of Councilman Green. Work was Wager’s therapy, Golding had said once; and maybe the man was right. Even Golding could be right about something once in a while.
Wager wasn’t surprised to find that the car, of its own, gradually worked its way toward nearby Denver General and the morgue, and he realized that somewhere in the back of his mind he had been counting the hours until the autopsy would be completed.
“Putting in overtime, Wager? Or do you have night duty?”
Doc Hefley, the department’s forensic pathologist, peeled off the disposable rubber gloves and dropped them in the bag to be washed. That was another of the economies the hospital practiced now, reuse of items once thrown away. Except for two areas, a grinning Hefley told Wager: gynecology and proctology; their gloves were not reused.
He tossed the sheet half-over the cadaver stretched under the white lights of the dissecting room. It was a middle-aged Caucasian woman with no visible scars and an oddly featureless face that seemed to have a beard. Then Wager saw that the beard was really the woman’s hair and her features were muffled beneath the glistening underside of a scalp peeled down off the skull and laid out of the way across her face.
“It’s that V.I.P. killing. The one the chiefs interested in.”
“Tell me he’s interested. He pulled me out of private practice this afternoon to work on it.”
“Is the path report done yet?”
Hefley went to a tall filing cabinet in that part of the room partitioned off for a small office. “It may not be typed up. I told them to rush it, but you know how that goes.”
“I know.”
The doctor ran a finger along the thick documents and grunted happily. “What do you know—it’s here.” He handed Wager the heavy sheaf of forms and sprinkled talcum on his hands before pulling on another set of gloves. “Take it out to the lounge to read before you start asking questions, OK? I’ve got four of the damned things to cut up tonight and no time to waste being sociable.”
Wager said OK, and Hefley strode quickly back to the cadaver to speak into the foot-operated recorder whose microphone dangled over the body. His voice was a lone, clinical benediction as Wager closed the door behind him. Then the small saw used to slice through the skull began its shrill whine.
A lot of the information in the pages of the pathology report wasn’t any use at all to him; he scanned through the physical description of the dead man for any notations of something out of the ordinary. But there was nothing—Green had been generally healthy, with no indications of substance abuse or of any evident medical abnormalities in his organs. Death, the doc had concluded, was caused by a single, large-caliber bullet to the back of the head. The damage to the brain was detailed as the words followed the path of the bullet, which had gradually expanded from impact until it erupted out of the victim’s face. No fragments of the bullet were found in the skull. The approximate time of death, and Wager started making notes in his own little green book, was between 9 P.M. and 2 A.M., and that fit with the witness seeing a car parked there around eleven. The stomach contents indicated that he had eaten chicken, peas, and rice some two to four hours before death—between 5 and 10 P.M., Wager figured. Coffee and a trace of alcohol were found, but no other abusive substances, including tobacco. The man’s musculature … Wager glanced over the next few pages, which dealt with body fluids and internal organs in detail, and noted that all were checked as normal. He paused to study the section on lividity. The blood patterns indicated that the man might have been moved after he died, but no definitive analysis could be made. The blood had settled in the corpse’s low parts as the body had lain on the ground, but there were indications of a secondary lividity of mild intensity. The doc offered no conclusions as to what all that might mean; all he did was list the facts and let them speak. But Wager knew the man would have some ideas about it.
The sheet was back in place, but the pungent sting of newly sawed bone lingered in the air. Hefley, sipping a cup of coffee at the small desk, put down a ballpoint pen and leaned wearily against the squeak of his chair back. “Well?”
“Was he moved or wasn’t he?”
“Good question. I think he was, but it could be argued the other way, too: that the secondary lividity was the result of the body shifting as rigor set in.”
Wager gave back the thick report. An orderly, his tennis shoes making wet, squelching noises on the waxed concrete floor, trundled the gurney and its load off the silver wink of a freshly hosed floor drain and out through wide doors. “Could somebody have put him back in the same position he died in?”
“If he was moved, then, yeah, I’d say that’s what had to happen. It would have been natural for the body to fall forward—it was shot from behind. If he was moved, he was dumped in pretty much the same position he fell in initially.”
“Why was he twisted up like that?”
“I don’t know.” Hefley thought a moment, gazing at the brown tiles of the wall. “For some reason, he didn’t stretch out when he fell. Wasn’t he found in an open field?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he should have stretched out—the bullet killed him instantly, and his body should have kicked itself straight.”
“Could he have been shot in a cramped place, like a car, and then stiffened before he was dumped?”
“If he was dumped, Wager—if. And no, not necessarily. In fact, I don’t think so, but I’m only guessing. My guess is that he was either shot there and stiffened in that odd position, or—if he was moved—he was killed very shortly before he was dumped. The rigor was intact in all the toes and fingers. That’s consistent with the body not being moved after rigor set in.”
“Why’s that?”
“Technically? Technically, because rigor depends on the pH of the muscle and its glycogen reserve at the time of death. Joints with less muscle mass set up more rapidly than heavily muscled joints. Fingers, toes, jaws set up before elbows or shoulders, and movement tends to break their rigor. For the rigor to remain intact in those small joints, the body would have to be moved shortly after death, before they set. The livor mortis could support this: not long enough for the blood to settle in any secondary cavities or uncompressed low spots. There are those traces of secondary lividity. We can’t be certain of movement, but if so, the move was within an hour of death, and then the blood drained into the primary locations. But like I say, we can’t be certain.”
Doctors always moved from “I” to “we” when they weren’t sure. “If he wasn’t moved, how do you account for the traces of secondary lividity?”
Hefley’s clean, short fingernails rasped in the bristles of his jaw. “Like I said, the body could have settled as it stiffened. Temperature, that could have some effect on lividity. There are half a dozen reasons why we can’t say from this lividity alone whether the body was moved.”
“What about its position? Would the photographs tell you something?”
“Maybe. Bring them by—let me take a look.”
“OK. But say the body was moved, it was within an hour after the killing? You’re sure?”
“Less than an hour, is my guess. Maybe less than thirty minutes. But I won’t go into court with that.” He thought a moment and then nodded. “I’d say it wasn’t more than forty-five minutes, max, from the first position of death to where you found him. Any longer than that and the blood patterns would be more definitive. And the rigor in some of the small joints would probably be broken by handling.”
“None of the neighbors heard shots last night.”
“Well, that fits the possibility of movement, doesn’t it? Bu
t all I can do is give you the medical facts from the corpse. You’re supposed to make them fit with the other facts, right?”
“What about the size of the bullet?”
“Again, that’s just a guess because the skull shattered at the point of impact. A .44 or .45. Anything smaller wouldn’t be likely to exit the skull in a single piece.”
“Magnum?”
“Possibly. I can’t say. It was close-range—you saw that note about powder burns on the scalp?”
“I saw it.” Wager asked, “You think the round hit him with full velocity?”
“What are you getting at?”
“A silencer. It slows the bullet a lot. Would it have come out the face like that going slower?”
Again the doc dragged his fingernails across the bristles. “I don’t know, Wager. That’s interesting, but there are too many variables, so I just don’t know. That’s a pretty big slug, silencer or not, and I don’t really know what the impact might have been.” He drained his coffee as the orderly shoved another sheeted bundle through the double doors. “I’ll get the summary done tonight and over there in the morning. Good enough?”
2137 Hours
It would have to be good enough, of course. Wager, feeling the numbness of the day’s pummeling events begin to invade his mind as well as his body, guided the Trans-Am the dozen or so blocks up Sixth toward Downing and over to his apartment. Despite the welcome blur to his thoughts, questions began to arrange themselves like entries in his notebook: Why was the body dumped in a place as public as that? What happened to Green’s car? Green’s valuables were still on him, so more likely, it wasn’t a robbery-homicide; the killer just needed wheels to put quick distance between himself and his victim. That fit with the big chance he took in dumping the body there instead of out in the country. Frightened? Was that the reason for the rush to get rid of the body? Green is shot in the back of the head and, within forty-five minutes, transported from X, dumped in that lot, and then the murderer, or murderers, drives off without bothering to make it look like a robbery. Just anxious to get rid of the body and be away from the scene. Anxious to get back to an alibi. Unplanned. That was the word Wager tentatively thought of: It looked like a hastily planned homicide, maybe even an impulse shooting—though it took a hell of an impulse to carry a heavy forty-five around before suddenly deciding to use it. Rage? Fear? Threat? A weapon that big, handy for use, but a rush to kill so that all the actions following the death—secrecy, escape, alibi—had not been clearly thought out.
He unlocked the door to his silent and dark apartment; the red gleam of his answering machine’s light caught his eye. Before flipping the tape on, he went past the refrigerator for a beer and then into the bedroom to take off his tie and shirt and slip out of his hot shoes. Then, cooling feet splayed in the short nap of the carpet, he screened the message tape.
Most of it was blank, the caller hanging up without leaving word. Finally, a garbled voice stopped him and he reversed to get it from the start: “Wager, you know who this is. Call me now.”
He knew who it was, but he finished the tape first, finding the same voice two more times. Then he dialed a number from the back page of his little green notebook. As expected, a different voice answered, giving the name of the bar.
“Is Fat Willy there?”
“Who wants him?”
“Gabe.”
“I’ll see.”
A minute later the lurch of the big man’s breath came over the wire. “Wager, I hate that fucking answering machine of yours.”
“It got your message to me, Willy. What’s the problem this time?”
“The problem is I need to collect.”
“Collect what?”
“What you owe me, Wager: a favor.”
He didn’t deny that he owed, but his question was, how much. “What kind of favor?”
“A couple of my people. They been busted. I want them out.”
What Willy wanted and what he got were two different things. “Who’s got them and what’s the charge?”
“That Nick-the-Greek, son of a bitch. Papalopoulos, or whatever his name is. How come the Denver police ain’t hiring Americans no more?”
Nick Papadopoulos worked out of Assault in the Crimes Against Persons division. Wager knew the man but not very well. “What’s the charge, Willy?”
“Arson and assault. But that’s only what the police say.”
“They don’t have to say a hell of a lot more than that. That’s a couple of felonies.”
“It’s a bunch of bullshit, is what it is. You don’t know nothing about it, Wager—I’m telling you it’s bullshit and I want them out. You owe me!”
“Willy, you’ve got a couple cruds beating up on people and burning down their property and you want them sprung? I don’t owe you that much.”
“That’s not the way it was, God damn it all!”
“If that’s what they’re charged with, I don’t care how it was. They don’t need me, they need a lawyer. Besides, if the charges have been filed, there’s nothing I can do about it, anyway.”
“They ain’t been filed—they was just arrested. They being held for questioning—ain’t no charges filed on them yet. That comes Monday.” He added, “And don’t give me no shit about you not being able to do nothing. I know and you know the police drops charges all the time, Wager. You owe me—you owe your ass to me. And now I want to collect!”
It was bound to come sooner or later, Wager knew. He’d used Willy and his information to solve an earlier series of homicides along the Colfax strip, and now the fat man was calling in his marker. “Have they been arrested before?”
“Who ain’t?”
“Convictions?”
“That’s the problem, man. They get convicted on this, it’s the third conviction inside ten years. Shit, six more months and they be past the ten-year limit on their first one—that goddamn Papalopoulos!”
A third felony conviction within ten years meant an automatic twenty-five-to fifty-year sentence. A fourth felony, regardless of how much time passed, meant life. Willy and his people were right to be worried. “I’ll ask.”
“You do better than that.”
“No, I won’t. I’ll see what I can find out. Then if I can help you, I will. If I can’t, I won’t.”
“Damn you, Wager—”
“I know, you’ve told me: I owe you. I’ll see what I can find out.”
He dropped the receiver on another squawk and stretched against the stiff pull of his back. Slowly finishing his beer, he stood in the cool night air of the small balcony above Downing and gazed out without seeing the flickering restlessness of the city. Maybe, by now, he was tired enough to sleep.
There had been times when he was this tired that he and Jo would just hold each other, their naked bodies pressed tightly together beneath the thin protection of the sheet, not thinking sex but only wholeness. Together—her eyes even larger and darker in the room’s dimness and only the twitch of lips against his cheek to tell him she was smiling. Those were times so good he didn’t think they needed words, the union of their slow breath and heartbeat making the only statement. But he should have told her how nice it was; how—despite his silence—he found a kind of peace in those times that existed nowhere else. But he’d said nothing, until the chance for saying anything was gone.
CHAPTER 4
FRIDAY, 13 JUNE, 0802 Hours
Lieutenant Wolfard called him and Stubbs into his office two minutes after he arrived. “What’s this about threats to Mrs. Green?”
Wager told him.
The lieutenant swiveled his chair around to gaze out his narrow window and into the busy Friday traffic below. Wager had noticed that before—when administrators searched for words they usually did it without looking you in the eye. Maybe that way you wouldn’t see they didn’t know everything. “You think she needs further protection?”
“She’d probably feel better with it. And if something happened to her, there’d be a
lot of questions about why she was given none.”
“Yeah. Shit. Operations Division’s so shorthanded they didn’t want to let me have those two yesterday.” He looked glum. “I know what they’re going to say about posting a twenty-four-hour on her house.”
Interoffice cooperation was the lieutenant’s worry; catching the murderer was Wager’s. He settled against the molded-plastic chair and sketched some organization to his morning while Wolfard talked mostly to himself. First the call to Motor Vehicles for the trace on Green’s car. Then Green’s associates: the furniture store, the City Council offices. Get the lab people’s report on the crime scene. Forensic’s report on Green’s clothes and body. The afternoon would be for any leads turned up. And sometime early he should work in Green’s brother.
“Well”—Wolfard swiveled back—“they won’t argue with the chief. And I’m certain he’ll say we should put some officers over there, right? Any idea when that pathology report’s coming through?”
“The abstract’s on its way this morning. I went over the preliminary last night.” From the corner of his eye, Wager saw Stubbs’s round face turn his way. “The cause of death was the shot in the head. The doc can only guess whether he was killed somewhere else. If the body was moved, it was within forty-five minutes of death.”
“He can only guess?”
Wager shrugged. “He won’t even go into court with that.”
“Is it possible that we are dealing with a racist killing?”
“That phone call’s the only motive so far, Lieutenant.”
Wolfard tapped a sharp pencil against the wooden box that held a stack of blank memo sheets ready for use. It was that kind of desk, an orderly arrangement of papers with reference works placed at carefully measured distances, the most-used closest to the chair. Wager wondered if the man spent as much time working as he did getting ready for work. “Something like that could explode the whole black community. We could be right back in the sixties and seventies.” Wolfard’s pencil drew a series of precisely interlocked boxes on a blank memo sheet. He peeled off the sheet and folded it carefully before placing it in the wastebasket. “Are you sure that’s the only motive?”
