Nothing to Hide drm-3

by J. Mark Bertrand

  Nothing to Hide

  ( Detective Roland March - 3 )

  J. Mark Bertrand

  J. Mark Bertrand

  Nothing to Hide

  PART 1

  SHOOTER'S PARADISE

  Però, se ’l mondo presente disvia, in voi è la cagione, in voi si cheggia.

  If the present world goes astray,

  the cause is in you. In you it is to be sought.

  When an ulcer of the soul is to be probed, naturalism can do nothing.

  — JORIS-KARL HUYSMANS

  CHAPTER 1

  It’s the uniform’s fault, my fall, for shining his light past my feet to the edge of the gully, flicking the beam back and forth in a skeptical circuit, saying, “Careful there, Detective,” in a cautious, solicitous tone, the same one he’d use if his frail granddaddy reached on tiptoes for a too-high shelf. Hearing the voice, I ignore the distance between the two sides of the gully, ignore the muddy banks and the buzzing mosquitoes and the ripple of ditchwater down the middle. I kick my lead leg out into space, flashlight in one hand and notebook in the other.

  Nothing but net, I think, clearing the gap, but then my foot lands just short of the other side. The ground gives a little, goes all slick, and I’m aloft again, dipping backward, flailing the air until my body crashes spine-first into the mud.

  I glance up into the dark pines, illuminated by moonlight and the Fenix still gripped in my hand. The damp seeps through the back of my shirt, through my pants and up against my hot skin. My gun, torqued by the fall, digs painfully into my flank. I blink a few times, taking inventory, and then the uniform’s up above me, shining his light down.

  “You okay there, Detective March? I told you to watch out.”

  I roll a little onto one hip, then wrench myself over to the other side of the gully. No pain at first, not until I put weight on my left leg, at which point a knife blade runs up the back of my thigh and buries itself in my lower back.

  “You all right?”

  I wince a little, then shake it off. “I’m fine. Now leave me be and get back over there. I don’t need your prints tracking up my scene. My own are bad enough.”

  He smiles at my irritation. I have to wave my hand to get him to go. Don’t mind me, that hand says. I should have known better than to reach for the top shelf.

  After surveying the ditch one last time-it’s just a couple of feet deep and maybe three and a half, four across-I straighten my holster and limp a little deeper into the woods.

  Back there behind me, gathered in the parking lot under the mist-haloed streetlights, a row of cruisers cast blue and red filters over the night, along with the obligatory crime scene vans and support vehicles. Beyond the scrim of officialdom, the news crews are arriving, too, setting up their tripods and adjusting their lamps. There’s nothing for them to see but the coming and going of uniforms and plainclothes detectives. The body’s already been screened off by a tent enclosure erected on the free-throw line of the park’s covered basketball court.

  Whoever dumped our John Doe, he had a sense of humor.

  Between the parking lot and the court, a path runs along a sandlot where several tetherball poles stand with severed cords dangling from their top loops, the balls carried off long ago. Big lights hang under the basketball court’s corrugated roof, but according to the first officers on the scene, they’re no longer operational. To light things up, we had to bring our own equipment, something we’re accustomed to from long experience. Past the court, a cluster of lopsided picnic tables, weathered and sunbaked, separate the park from a thick perimeter of pines, and beyond them the poorly lit gully, and beyond that me.

  I scratch at a fresh mosquito bite on the back of my neck, then limp through the trees a ways, testing my leg. There’s still a twinge. I wipe my waterlogged shoes against a nearby trunk, trying to scrape off the clumped mud. Then I head in deeper, tracing an imaginary line all the way from the body under the tent to here. The brush gets higher, the ground firmer, until finally I hit a tall hurricane fence half threaded with weeds. Beyond it a curving side street, with Allen Parkway in the distance.

  There’s nothing out here. I pass my light over the ground once more to be certain, then hit the treetops with it just in case. Gotta think outside the box. But no one’s been back here in a while. Another false lead.

  It won’t be the last.

  Back under the tent, Jerry Lorenz crouches a few feet from the body, rubbing his chin in contemplation. He holds a ballpoint in the other hand, clicking out a preoccupied beat. While the photographer works, our bosses hold a confab in one corner-Captain Hedges, sweating through his summer-weight wool suit, briefs a uniformed assistant chief while my shift commander, Lt. Bascombe, nods in the background. Only the lieutenant seems to notice my arrival, giving me the slightest of nods.

  As I approach the body, he comes over.

  “Where you been?” he asks, not waiting for an answer. “I assume you feel okay about this?” He tilts his head doubtfully in Lorenz’s direction.

  “Compared to the rest of the guys on our shift, he’s practically an old-timer.”

  “Even so, I want you on top of this one, March. You feel me?”

  “I’m all over it, sir.”

  He gives my shoulder a pat, then pulls his big hand away, noticing for the first time that I’m caked in mud. Before he can ask, I limp over toward Lorenz.

  Jerry glances up, eyebrows raised. “You find it?”

  “There was nothing out there.”

  “Find what?” Bascombe asks.

  The hunch that led to my fall had been Jerry’s idea in the first place, so I let him explain. The body was dumped, no question about that. If the killing had taken place here, there would have been a lot more blood. But whoever made the drop took the trouble to arrange the corpse, settling it down all neat and tidy like a body in a coffin, except for one arm extending in the direction of the woods, the skinned hand shaped into a fist apart from the index finger.

  “Like it was pointing,” Jerry explains. “I thought if we followed the line, we might find. .” His voice trails off. “You know. The head.”

  The three of us stare down at the nude, headless corpse of a Caucasian male, several days dead-though the medical examiner has yet to render an opinion on the exact time. The gray-green pallor of the muscled trunk leads to a jagged line over the neck, all crusted and glistening. Decapitation. A fine Latinate word for distancing ourselves from the mortal shock of the sight. The cap being the head, presumably, so the literal sense is something like having your cap removed. A polite-sounding way of describing a brutal-no, a feral act.

  We have a whole vocabulary for such offenses. The crushed jumper doesn’t plunge to his death from a high window, he’s defenestrated. The teenaged abductee isn’t raped and butchered, she’s simply dismembered. And this particular victim, our headless John Doe, has suffered a further indignity. It wasn’t enough to doff his cap. Whoever did this went to the trouble, starting above the wrists, of slicing through the back of the hand and peeling the skin back, revealing the now-black muscle, bone, and cartilage underneath.

  What we call de-gloving.

  Presumably this was to make identification harder, though once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to imagine any motive other than sick delight. Whether it was done pre- or postmortem we don’t yet know, but I hope for his sake it was after.

  The early evening cyclist who called the body in, not taking a close enough look, had told the emergency dispatcher that the hands were burned. He’d been so shocked by the sight that he failed to mention the body’s lack of a head. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed.

  Gazing down at the victim, Bascombe’s voice is hushed. “Okay, so look. This goes witho
ut saying, but I want you both to put everything else on the back burner. We’re working this and this only until I say otherwise, and any resources you need, you bring them to me and I’ll make it happen. Nobody drops a body on our back porch and goes on about his business. That’s not how we roll, all right?”

  He wanders off once the pep talk is done. Ordinarily it would be Captain Hedges giving the speech, but the captain’s been distracted of late, spending more and more time shut up in his office, working the phones. Even now, he’s here without being here, bending the assistant chief’s ear in an effort to impress, to look like what he hasn’t been in a couple of months: in charge.

  But I can’t worry about Hedges now.

  “We’ve got our work cut out for us, Jerry,” I say. “It’s not like our squad is brimming with experience at the moment. If we leave anything important to somebody else, odds are it won’t get done right. So you and me, we’ve got to follow up on everything. If one of us doesn’t sign off, then it didn’t happen.”

  “You’re preachin’ to the choir, man. I don’t trust these new kids any farther than I can throw ’em.”

  I nod, feeling the same way, but not without appreciating the irony. A couple of years ago, Jerry himself was a Homicide cherry, a high flyer from the outside who still couldn’t be trusted to add two and two at a murder scene. He’d come in thinking he would soon be running the place, even gunned for my job at first. Then he crashed and burned, had a kid, put on some pounds, and watched his hairline start to recede. Now he’s all right. He has to be. A lot of the veterans on the squad have moved on.

  Mack Ordway finally retired, after threatening for years to do it, finishing the night of the party with a Bushmills in one hand and a Jameson in the other, declaring his love for all men and the end of every grudge. He slept for a week after that, then started up a blog to post photos from his fishing excursions on the Gulf. Then José Aguilar, my sometime partner, a quiet and efficient detective with a pockmarked, expressionless face, got pulled into some drug task-force work, where he impressed the right people and was headhunted by the DEA.

  He calls me sometimes just to brag about their budget, which seems to have no bottom.

  As Ordway and Aguilar left us, new detectives joined the squad, until one day I looked out over my cubicle wall and realized I was the old man of the unit. Bascombe started treating me like it, too, not wanting anything important to go without my say-so. And I’d taken an unlikely shine to Jerry Lorenz, who just about knew what he was doing these days, except when he didn’t.

  “What happened to you anyway, March?” he asks. “You go for a swim?”

  “In heat like this,” I tell him, “a man’s gotta keep cool.”

  Behind the driver’s seat, the pain shifts into my left thigh, just above the knee. It feels like a nerve, a thin, taut strap of numbness running up the leg, around the hip, and into my spine. No matter how I sit, the pain’s still there, only it moves sometimes like it’s determined not to be pinpointed. Inside the glove box there’s a bottle of generic ibuprofen. Jerry shakes a couple of pills into my hand and I down them with bottled water.

  “Better?” he asks.

  “Not yet.”

  JD, which is Jerry’s nickname for our John Doe, will be transported, sampled, and run through the system. It could take some time to get anything back, assuming there’s anything to get. If there’s no criminal record, no government work or military service in his background, then JD might elude us for a while. We’ve kept others in cold storage for years without being able to name them-and they reached us with head and hands intact, dental work, fingerprints, every option open. JD didn’t even have the courtesy to pick up any unusual tattoos or scars before meeting his end. He won’t be easy to identify.

  “We can cobble together a physical description of sorts,” I say. “Maybe there’s a missing white guy of approximately six feet and we’re already looking for him. Theresa Cavallo would know about that.”

  “I’ll give her a call,” Jerry says.

  “Let me do that. We’re pretty close. She might check a little harder for me than she would for you.”

  “What are you talking about? Terry’s one of my biggest fans.”

  “Fine, you do it.” My leg flares up on me again. “But tell her I’m the one who’s asking, just in case you’re wrong about the size of your fan club.”

  He flips his notebook open in his lap and scrawls a new item at the end of the list he’s been making. The past couple of months we’ve settled into a kind of rhythm. I make the assignments and Jerry does the legwork whenever I let him. He functions well with a little direction. Left to himself, he can’t always think what to do next.

  If Missing Persons doesn’t have an open case on JD, then we’ll be stuck waiting for a DNA match. Since the Houston Police Department’s DNA section tends to be overwhelmed and still somewhat embattled after years of public controversy, results can be slow in coming. And when they do come, I prefer if the case is important to have them double-checked, usually with the help of my brother-in-law Dr. Alan Bridger over at the medical examiner’s office. Since Bascombe said to pull out the stops, I ask Jerry to add this to his list, as well.

  “So I don’t forget,” I tell him. “But I’m the one who’ll make that call. Maybe you’re right about Cavallo, but I know for a fact that Bridger thinks you’re an idiot.”

  “You know for a fact.”

  “That’s right,” I say. “’Cause all he knows is what I tell him.”

  Jerry laughs and puts the notepad away. A certain amount of ribbing is good for him. Makes him feel like he’s worth the effort.

  It’s almost midnight and the streets downtown are relatively empty apart from the occasional car heading home late and the occasional homeless guy pushing a cart along the sidewalk. Jerry leans against the passenger door, silent, and I gaze up at the forest of skyscrapers overhead, thinking about my ill-judged leap across the gully, my pointless ramble through the pines. I may be the old man of my homicide squad, but I am not an old man. Just middle-aged, a few years shy of fifty. But my throbbing leg tells a different story. You are old, Roland March, far too old to find yourself-how does the saying go?

  In a dark wood wandering.

  CHAPTER 2

  Operating on two cups of coffee and three hours of sleep, I meet Lorenz outside the medical examiner’s office at half past eight. He already looks haggard, his brow damp with sweat. The June sun crouches on the horizon, bringing the blacktop to a boil, and as we cross the lot the heat radiates up through the soles of my shoes. My leg, still sore from last night, drags a little. On principle I’m fighting the urge to limp.

  Bridger quizzes us for a few minutes in his office before the autopsy begins. Lorenz fields most of the questions, consulting his notes when in doubt. Once he’s satisfied, Bridger leads us down the hall, where one of his many assistants is already prepping our John Doe.

  It takes a couple of hours, with Bridger working slowly, methodically, making crisp clinical observations, occasionally translating them into layman’s terms for our benefit. He keeps hedging on time of death, noting signs that the body was kept on ice. This means it could have been transported from some distance, and as long as a week after the killing.

  “There are a lot of variables,” he says.

  On cause of death he’s much more precise. Pausing over the open chest cavity after removing the heart for examination, he declares that our thirty-something victim died of cardiac arrest, probably brought on by torture. There are ligature marks on the wrists, he points out, as if the victim strained mightily against the bonds as his hands were sliced up.

  He pauses to let the image sink in.

  “And the head?” I ask.

  “The decapitation was postmortem. Probably done with a small axe. It took more than one blow-but, see, they all seem to come from the same direction.” He chops his gloved hand in the air, matching his slow-motion strokes to the cuts in the neck. “There’s none of
the sawing back and forth you’d get if it were a knife or something like that.”

  “So you’re thinking he was tied up?”

  “In a chair, maybe, with his wrists secured to the arms. That’s my guess.”

  Lorenz stands at the foot of the autopsy table, writing it all down. “And the murder scene could be pretty much anywhere. On the other side of the world, for all we know.”

  Once the procedure’s done, Bridger leads us out, stripping off his gloves as he shoulders through the swinging door. He washes up, then runs a damp hand through his regal, prematurely white hair.

  “Walk with me,” he says.

  We follow him down the stairs and out a side door to the concrete landing designated for smoke breaks. How he can stand it in this humidity, I don’t know. I put my hand to the steel railing and it’s hot enough to scald.

  “Here’s what won’t be in the report,” Bridger says, lighting up. He exhales a lungful of smoke before continuing. “Pure speculation on my part, but don’t you think this has a Mexican mafia feel to it? The torture and beheading. Things are going crazy down there.”

  “I was thinking of those al-Qaeda videos,” Lorenz says.

  “In Houston?” I shake my head. “Anyway, when al-Qaeda cuts your head off, you’re alive to see it happen. They post the video online, too. They don’t drop off the body at the nearest basketball court.” I turn to Bridger. “Neither do the cartels, for that matter. If this was Brownsville or Laredo, then maybe. But who would this guy have to be for them to do him this way, then dump him on our doorstep? There’s no tats on him, so I doubt he’s in a rival gang-and if he’s just an innocent bystander, why carve him up? Why bring him all the way up here?”

  “Like I said, just speculation. It could always be some nut job serial killer.”