by Harvey, JM
“His mother knows judo,” she reminded him as she grabbed his coffee cup and took a slurp before kneeling down and dragging the twins in for slobbery kisses. “And daddy can’t hit a lick. That’s why they kicked him off the softball team.”
“Hey. They didn’t kick me off. I got promoted. I’m the coach. A planner.” Valentine tapped his temple.
Victoria laughed. “You went three and nine last year. Good planning there, Mr. DiMaggio” she stood and gave him a toothpaste flavored kiss. “You got the autumn off.”
“Four and eight,” Valentine corrected as she headed for the back door.
Her cell phone rang before she reached it. What Val heard of the conversation wasn’t very informative.
“Victoria Justice.” She listened for thirty seconds, her brow furrowed, then said, “Shit—” biting off the word too late. Her eyes jumped to the boys who were staring up at her intently. She cut her eyes to Val and shrugged sheepishly.
Val grinned back. At least it wasn’t him this time. Last Monday, on the way to the library downtown, he had muttered ‘douchebag’ at another driver and Max had immediately decided that ‘douchebag’ was the word of the day. The ladies at the library had been less than impressed.
“Where?” Victoria asked followed by another long pause. “I’ve got no idea. Depends on traffic. Soonest possible.” Another pause. “Right.”
She clicked off and gave Val a grim look. “Birch,” she said, referring to the City of Dallas’ top homicide detective and Val’s ex-partner, Lieutenant Jack Birch. “Dead girl on the levee. Same approximate location as Rusk’s victims.” She glanced at her watch and was out the door before Val could form a reply.
“Shit!” Kyle yelled as he beaned Valentine in the forehead with an orange block. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
Val rolled his eyes, but he didn’t reprimand the boy. Any discussion of ‘bad-words’ versus ‘good words’ was pointless with a two year old. Making no response was the best you could do. He bent down to pick up the scattered blocks and caught another one in the ear.
The kid might have a filthy mouth, but he did have an arm…have to check the sporting good aisle at Target…
“Bath time,” Valentine said, getting to his feet. “All stinky butts to the poop deck.”
3
Victoria climbed behind the wheel of her Jeep Wrangler and cranked the engine. As the Jeep warmed up, she eyed Val’s sun-faded ‘68 Mustang. An oil puddle had formed under the engine, its rear end was sagging and one of its taillights was cracked. She wished Val would trade in that pile of junk. A station wagon or a minivan would be far more practical. But Val was stubborn about the old car. An American classic, he called it. A classic piece of crap is what she called it. It spent more time on a mechanic’s lift than it did on the road.
Victoria shifted her gaze and stared at the front door of her home for a long moment. This was the toughest part of the day; leaving the boys behind. All three of them. And it wasn’t getting any easier. She knew how much she was missing. The twins were growing up so fast. A new word popped into their vocabulary every day and she wasn’t there to teach it. She had missed their first steps and the emergence of their first teeth. Too often she felt like an observer in her own home. The way the boys gravitated to their father, clung to him, made her envious. She knew they loved her, but she wondered if they would miss her if she were suddenly gone? If the few hours she spent with them each day were really making an impression? If she was being a good mother? She somehow doubted it.
Her shoulders slumped and her fingers strangled the steering wheel as guilt crawled all over her. The same drill, different day. Once again she reminded herself that earning the money to feed, clothe and educate the children was just as important as changing their diapers or teaching them to tie their shoes, but those justifications rang just as hollow that morning as they did every other.
But there was a dead girl on the levee that morning. One of the countless victims that Victoria had sworn an oath to defend and protect.
She slid the gearshift into reverse, her mood shifting almost as quickly as the Jeep’s transmission. There was no place for her personal woes at a homicide scene.
Canyon Street was a narrow track of humped and broken asphalt lined with rundown two-bedroom bungalows that hunkered in the shadows of downtown Dallas’ glass skyline. Dead grass in every yard and burglar bars on every window. There were no people in sight, except for a uniformed DPD officer with a cell phone jammed to his ear who was leaning against the front fender of a squad car that was parked at a skew, half blocking a narrow gravel road that angled off the pavement. Beyond the squad car, the road led across an open field to the tall earthen levee that bordered the north side of the Trinity River.
The cop looked up as the Jeep approached, recognized Victoria and waved her through without pausing his conversation.
The Jeep’s tires popped gravel as she swung around the patrol car and headed for the levee. She followed the gravel road up to the top where, a half mile to the east, a cluster of cars, vans and SUVs were grouped together like vultures swarming a dead deer. She headed that way and parked in the weeds just off the road, behind the ME’s gray van. She grabbed a raggedy pair of tennis shoes from behind her seat, kicked off her courtroom heels and shoved her feet into them before she climbed out and walked toward the crime scene.
To her right, the levee’s steep slope dropped away to a broad, flat channel that was a sea of browned-out prairie grass. The river itself was a half-mile away, a muddy ribbon winding sluggishly down the center of the flood plain, almost hidden by the cottonwoods that overhung its steep banks. The Trinity River sure didn’t look like much in the arid month of June, but the spring floods often filled it from levee to levee, inundating many low-lying areas of the city.
She hadn’t walked ten feet before she broke into a sweat that made her just-washed hair go as limp as overcooked pasta. It was already over ninety degrees and the humidity this close to the river made it even more oppressive.
And the heat wasn’t doing the dead girl any favors. Victoria could smell the corpse long before she saw it.
Homicide detectives Jack Birch and Phil Bastrop stood ten feet upslope from the corpse, watching silently as a trio of crime scene techs dressed in white cotton jump suits picked through the trampled grass adjacent to the body. The girl was an Anglo, slightly built, lying face down. A black T-shirt had been shoved up to reveal a dozen deep stab wounds to her upper back. Rib bones shown through torn flesh gone black as rotten fruit. Flies swarmed over the wounds and clouded the air above the body. Ten feet further down-slope, an overturned wheelchair lay half buried in the weeds.
As Victoria neared, Bastrop glanced up at her, turned and mouthed something to Birch. Jack nodded, but he didn’t look up as she stopped beside him.
“Counselor.” Jack stuck his hand out without shifting his gaze from the dead girl.
“Jack.”
Shaking Jack’s hand was like gripping a bundle of steel rods covered in leather. Birch was tall and angular with the bone structure of a big man, but only half the weight. His black suit jacket hung formlessly from his broad shoulders, his tie was skinny and black and three decades out of style and so was his bristle-short gray buzz-cut.
Jack’s partner, Sergeant Phil Bastrop, was short and squat. He wasn’t an attractive man under the best of conditions, but today he looked truly awful. His eyes were runny and she could smell the vodka sweat pouring off him. His shirt and tie were wrinkled, his jacket’s lapel was turned up at the collar and his shoes were untied. He looked like he’d just been dropped to earth by tornado. Or yanked out of bed at 5:00 AM by a dead girl.
“Good morning, counselor,” Phil said as his eyes skidded over her breasts and hips. Victoria’s dark jacket and skirt hid her figure. Courthouse clothes. Bastrop looked disappointed.
“Good morning. Pervert,” she replied.
Bastrop gave her a leer. Phil was a sexist pig, but he was a good detective.
“We got another one,” Phil said as he looked back down at the girl. He sounded excited. Serial killers were every homicide cop’s fantasy and nightmare. “Just like the others.” He ran his fingers through his messy hair. “I think this proves that Rusk had a partner.”
Birch shook his head, his bleak gaze remaining on the bloated body lying face down at the center of the activity. “If Rusk had a buddy, this ain’t his work.” He flicked imaginary ash off the unlit cigarette that was clamped between knuckles stained mahogany. Smoking, eating or drinking were forbidden at crime scenes, but Jack Birch was rarely seen without a cigarette in his fist.
“What do you see?” Bastrop squinted at the body. “Why a different guy?”
Jack nodded at the wheelchair. “Rusk targeted prostitutes and there ain’t much call for handicapped hookers.” His gaze returned to the girl as he ticked off a series of observations in a detached west Texas drawl. “Her jeans are still on, so she probably wasn’t raped. The knife wounds look mostly postmortem to me. And she was shot. Rusk was a choker, he never used a gun.” Birch shrugged. “We’ll know for sure when they autopsy her.”
Victoria’s eyes followed Jack’s as he inventoried the corpse. She forced herself to see it all, collecting a fresh supply of footage for her worst nightmares.
“She looks younger than the others,” she said. “Though it’s hard to tell without seeing her face. If that wheelchair’s hers, I’d agree that it most likely rules her out as a prostitute.”
“There’s freaks that like ‘em that way,” Bastrop argued, unwilling to give up on his serial-killer-strikes-again theory. “Maybe Rusk’s buddy is picking cripples because he doesn’t have a partner to back him up anymore?”
“Let’s drop the speculation, detective,” Birch replied, flicking Bastrop a bland look. Birch’s eyes were dark, almost black, in a face that was deeply lined. “We have one body, that’s all. Stick to that.”
But Bastrop wouldn’t let it go. “Shit, he might have done ten more and dumped them out there.” He jerked his chin at the flood plain. “We wouldn’t see them ‘til next spring’s floods float them down to Lake Livingston. Some redneck in a bass boat will reel one in.”
Birch said nothing more. The three of them watched silently as Dizzy Parker, DPD’s lead Crime Scene technician, slid plastic bags over the dead girl’s hands and cinched them closed with twist ties. Dizzy’s bald scalp was shiny with sweat, his lab coat dark under the arms. At just over three-hundred pounds he wasn’t built for the Texas heat. He unrolled a blue body bag beside the woman, unzipped it and then glanced up at Birch.
“We’re ready to move her, lieutenant,” he said, swiping at his forehead with one sleeve. Two of the coroner’s men, burly guys dressed in dark green polo shirts, were already drawing a metal gurney from their van’s cargo bay. There was a thin rubber pad on the gurney, though if you were riding on it you were long past being comfortable.
“Let’s roll her over first,” Birch said. He tucked the unlit cigarette into his coat pocket, picked his way down the slope and knelt beside the body, waving a bony hand at the swarm of flies hovering over it. “Get her on her back.”
“Sure thing,” Dizzy replied. He knelt down, took the girl by the shoulders and rolled her up on her hip then carefully over onto her back and into the spread-open body bag. Flies settled immediately on the woman’s breast and stomach, which were dark with settled blood. And the smell got worse.
Much worse.
Victoria swallowed hard, biting back the gag reflex that threatened to hurl her bacon and eggs breakfast straight back up her throat. Bastrop fished a dirty handkerchief from his jacket pocket and pressed it over his nose, but Birch didn’t seem to notice the stench.
Weeds and dust clung to the wounds that littered the young woman’s breasts and stomach, but her face was almost unmarked, though gray and bloated from decomposition. Still, it was a face that all three of them recognized.
“What the hell?” Bastrop said through the handkerchief, “That’s Abby Sutton.”
Too stunned for words, Victoria continued to stare at Abby’s distorted features. The girl had been beaten badly, but there was no doubt that it was her. Lamar and Lemuel Sutton’s baby sister. Victoria’s eyes jumped to the overturned wheelchair. The sunlight blasting off the chrome wheels was dazzlingly bright.
Jesus Christ.
Birch stood. “Bag everything in sight,” he said and Dizzy nodded.
“That does it then,” Bastrop said, deflated, “It ain’t him. Abby was a murdering bitch, but she wasn’t a whore.” Neither Birch nor Victoria acknowledged Bastrop. They watched silently as Dizzy zipped Abby inside the bag.
“Last I heard Abby was running her Daddy’s old motorcycle gang, the Condom Syndicate.” Bastrop laughed at his own joke, though neither Jack nor Victoria joined in. The Confederate Syndicate MC was no laughing matter; the gang was a violent clique of drug dealers with a penchant for automatic weapons and car bombs. And Abby Sutton had been a full patch member.
“Probably a dope deal gone bad,” Bastrop added. “Real bad.”
What Jack said next jarred Victoria out of her reverie.
“I’m going to have to talk to Valentine about this,” he said almost apologetically. “Considering his and Abby’s past history, he’ll be at the top of our suspect list.” Jack didn’t mention the court case or the deaths of the Sutton brothers, Lamar and Lemuel, but he didn’t have to, Bastrop did it for him.
“Valentine should have killed Abby four years ago when he gunned down her brothers,” Phil said. “Would have saved everyone a lot of trouble.”
Victoria ignored Bastrop and nodded numbly at Jack. She knew how that meeting would go: very, very badly. The Suttons were not a subject Val was willing to discuss with anyone. And she had mentioned them only this morning…was that coincidence or premonition?
Victoria shook her head and forced herself to refocus.
“How do you think the killer got past the surveillance?” she asked as Birch climbed back up the slope. The levee’s access roads were still under heavy patrol despite Rusk’s capture. The theory that Rusk had a partner had necessitated it. Cops were cruising the fences at twenty minute intervals. A killer would have had to be damned fast to avoid them. Or familiar with the cops’ schedule.
Birch shook his head. “Trying to figure that out myself. We’ll check with the guys who were on duty once we get a time of death.”
“Probably getting their dicks waxed down on Riverfront Boulevard,” Bastrop interjected.
Victoria, Jack and Bastrop were silent after that. They watched the coroner’s men cart Abby’s body up the hill and stow it in the back of their van before slamming the doors closed with a cold finality that made Victoria wince. Even after fifteen years of prosecuting violent offenders outrage still came easy. It was retribution for the victims that was hard to come by. And it didn’t matter that she thought Abby was a murderer and a thief; no one deserved to die like that. No one.
The van backed around in a tight U-turn and drove off down the levee, stirring up a cloud of dust from the gravel that settled over Victoria’s suit like ashes.
The van jounced over the uneven terrain at a funeral procession pace until it reached the junction with the road that climbed the face of the levee where it suddenly braked hard and veered off the gravel into the weeds, barely avoiding a collision with a Sheriff’s department cruiser that had popped up over the top of the levee. The cruiser stopped, blocking the road.
“What the hell are they doing here?” Bastrop said as another cruiser topped the hill followed closely by an unmarked black SUV. The SUV angled off the road and went around the cruisers, plowing through the high grass. It came to a halt beside the van, its doors popped open and two men in dark suits climbed out, one short and broad, the other well over six feet. The pair approached the van’s driver’s side window. After a brief conversation, the driver climbed down and all three men went to the rear of the van. The driver open
ed the doors and stepped aside.
“Hey!” Bastrop yelled as the two men in suits climbed up into the cargo bay and stooped down by Abby’s gurney. “Hey, assholes!”
“That’s enough, detective,” Jack said as he watched the pair unzip the body bag and open it. For a few minutes the two men hovered over Abby’s corpse before the taller one finally zipped the bag closed and both men stepped down. They headed back to the SUV as the van’s driver slammed the rear doors closed.
“What the hell are they doing?” Bastrop said.
“I reckon we’re about to find out,” Jack replied mildly as the SUV cranked to life and came bumping down the track toward them, the two cruisers trailing behind.
“I don’t like the idea of them messing with our body.” Bastrop said angrily.
“Let it go, Phil,” Birch replied, his tone taking on a warning edge. “We’re all on the same team.”
“No we’re not. They’re job is wiping convict’s asses; we’re cops,” Phil said, but he went quiet after that, scowling at the advancing vehicles.
Victoria was only half listening to Phil as she warily watched the convoy of Sheriff’s vehicles approach. She suddenly wished that she hadn’t come out to the crime scene. This was not going to be pretty.
Though the County Sheriff’s Department had the responsibility of patrolling the unincorporated areas of Dallas County, those rural corners that had yet to be consumed by the urban sprawl of interconnected cities that the locals called the Metroplex, their primary function was maintaining security inside the jail and the County courts buildings. The Dallas Police Department patrolled the incorporated streets within the city limits. In theory it was a practical division of responsibility. Unfortunately, jurisdictional tensions between the Sheriff’s Office and DPD too often interfered with the process. And Victoria had to work with both departments. She didn’t want to be caught in the middle of another confrontation, but it was too late to leave.
The SUV came to a stop, taking the spot that the coroner’s van had just vacated. The cruisers parked beside it, bracketing it like bookends. The two men in suits stepped down and headed their way.
