The Children of Eli

by Mike Cranny

“He’s not on Tran’s payroll, is he?”

  The expression on Dolan’s face didn’t change.

  “Not that I know of.”

  Archie figured that Dolan was close enough to retirement that he wouldn’t want to do anything that might interfere with his pension. Dolan seemed to read his thoughts.

  “Pared’s clean as far as I know. Anyway, I’m pretty sure it was your man at the Lin’s restaurant the other night, and it was definitely Bill Tran he was talking to. Tran had some of his guys there too and like I said, the Vietnamese woman was there too.”

  “Did you hear any of what they were saying?”

  “I could guess but that wouldn’t be much help to you. Your man looked nervous to me. Tran looked pretty serious.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “I’d say he was looking for something from Bill. The woman seemed to be doing a lot of the talking. She looked upset.”

  “I guess Robbie figured that since she’s Bill’s sister, Bill might do something for her. Did it look like she was asking for money?”

  “She was scared, is what I’d say, or very nervous.”

  “You think they needed to patch things up with Bill perhaps?”

  “Like maybe they got messed up in some Triad gang stuff accidently, you mean? That I couldn’t say. I only saw them for a minute or two.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “They left.”

  Archie wondered about the wisdom of apprehending Bill Tran and questioning him. He mentioned that to Dolan who shrugged. He thought that Archie would be wasting his time, that Tran wouldn’t say anything, and that his word that he had seen Tran wasn’t worth much to the powers that be.

  “Myself, I’ve hauled him in more times than I’ve got fingers. Now Pared and some of the others think I got a fixation.”

  “You say you thought Robbie looked scared.”

  “Scared is the wrong word. He was nervous, edgy, I’d say. The woman was too.”

  Archie had more questions but Dolan said he had to get his stuff ready to go on holidays and it was obvious he wanted to terminate the interview. Archie thanked him and went to put on his boots. Dolan was seeing him out the door when Archie’s phone rang. Somebody had found another dead body.

  CHAPTER 18

  As Thomas Lee and Patsy Kydd watched the body being placed on a gurney, two divers stood nearby, dripping water on the asphalt. One looked pale, like he was going to throw up — understandable under the circumstances since the woman’s body was missing its head. Archie, who had just returned following his visit to Empire City, had watched the retrieval from his car.

  He shut off the engine and got out, legged over the parking lot fence, and walked to where Lee was standing making notes.

  “Not a pretty sight.” Lee said. He indicated the dripping corpse being wheeled up the ramp. “Not the worst thing I’ve seen in this business but it’s right up there. Worse for the guy who found the body. He’s sitting over there if you want to talk to him.”

  Archie looked towards a pile of driftwood logs where a middle-aged man sat, chin in wind-reddened hands, staring fixedly out to sea. A little dog sat near him, looking in the same direction but with one eye cocked to check up on the condition of his master.

  “I’ve talked to him,” Lee said. “He doesn’t know anything. Apparently the dog ran under the wharf after a stick. When the dog didn’t come out, he went under himself — saw the body floating there. He’s kind of shaken up. Like I told you, the head was missing from the body.”

  “Not what you want to find when you’re out for a stroll,” Archie said.

  He felt suddenly, and embarrassingly, light-headed. He could see Lee was watching him like a hawk.

  “You look pale.”

  “I’m okay.”

  Patsy came by. Her step was light and her demeanour seemed almost jaunty. She stopped, looked at Archie and frowned.

  “What’s up?”

  He was relieved that the light-headedness had started to pass.

  “I get taken by surprise sometimes.”

  “Dead bodies don’t really bother me.”

  “Well they bother me — a lot.” He turned from her to Lee. “Any idea who the victim is?”

  “Her name was Rochelle Arnesto. She worked in a bar in Rochville.”

  “How can you tell without a head and without clothes?”

  “I’m going by age and size. She has a mermaid tattoo on her upper thigh. You can see it on the body. That tattoo, and the woman wearing it, went missing a few days back. The missing persons report was called in by her place of employment, the bar in Rochville. The barman working with her that night remembers her talking about meeting up with a customer who’d been there earlier on the evening she disappeared. Problem is, nobody can remember him or his vehicle.”

  “And now she’s dead — brutalized,” Patsy said.

  Archie nodded. He looked at the body as the gurney passed. The coloured mermaid tattoo was clearly visible on the unearthly white of the skin. He had no idea what this murder meant in the scheme of things or why the killer had beheaded the victim. He had a hunch that it was related to the Donaldson murder but he couldn’t figure out how. He tried to muscle his thoughts­ — demanding more of his brain but getting less.

  He had some notions about gangs and triads, but nothing conclusive, nothing that would even begin to say, yes, this is what happened. And without a hypothesis to test, he didn’t have a clear path to follow.

  Jim Stone drove up, got out and went over to look at the body. He walked over to talk to Archie.

  “Ray says that what happened here has to be retaliation for something,” he said. “He says if you want he’ll try to find out if the victim had any ties to gang activity.”

  “Thanks, Stoney. Tell Ray we’re okay for now.”

  “If you say so.”

  Archie saw that his rebuff had confused Stoney.

  “It does look like the stuff from those Mexican gangs in Juarez you hear about,” Stoney continued.

  “I’m not ruling it out. I’m just letting you — and Ray — know what the deal is. If I want help, I’ll ask for it.”

  Stoney shrugged, rolled his eyes. He walked away, went to talk to the divers who were out of their wetsuits and getting dressed. After a few minutes, he got back into his squad car and drove away.

  “Wonder what’s up with Stoney?” Patsy said.

  Archie shrugged.

  “Who knows? Let’s think about this for a bit. Anything suggest itself?”

  “If anything it reminds me of those John Does from years back,” Lee said. “The skeletons the biologists found on Parcelle Island.”

  Archie shot him a questioning look. He had never heard of any headless John Does and said so.

  “You were barely out of high school back when it happened,” Lee said. “This is maybe fifteen years ago. I think Ray Jameson handled the case. Nobody claimed them so Ray decided that they were squatters and that they’d starved to death.”

  “And they didn’t have their heads?”

  “They were in a bad state. Ray said animals probably dragged the heads away. We put out a nationwide — missing street people and the like. You know how those things are. We didn’t get anything definite. It’s the only other time I’ve seen the results of a decapitation.”

  “How long before Ray closed the file?”

  “Not long.”

  Patsy spoke up.

  “It’s not reasonable that animals would take the skulls and not disturb the other bones. Porcupines chew bones up; rats scatter them. I can’t think of any animal that just takes skulls and hides them.”

  “Except for human animals?”

  “Mind if I take another look at the body?” Patsy asked.

  Archie looked at her in surprise.

  “It’s what I’m trained for.”

  “Then be my guest.”

  She walked over to the back of the ambulance, spoke to the attendants and then unzipped the bo
dy bag. If she had any qualms about examining a gruesome corpse, she didn’t show them. She took out her loupe and studied the horrifying edges of the wound. Archie stood at her side. She pointed to the neck of the corpse with the pen she had taken from her pocket.

  “See this line here?”

  Archie tried to quieten his squeamish mind, He looked where she was pointing, swallowed hard and nodded.

  “The blade the killer used was not straight. It was curved or wavy and very sharp. The killer knew exactly what she or he was doing. She was cut from behind. The cut between the cervical vertebrae is clean. It’s how a butcher would do it.”

  Lee leaned over the gurney and grunted. Archie swung his gaze out towards the sea, away from the body before he looked at the wound again. He glanced at Patsy.

  “Good — I hadn’t considered the edge of the weapon yet,” he said. “I’d like you to see if you can determine if the blade used on Nick Donaldson was similar to the one used on our victim here. I also want to take a look at those skeletons from Parcelle.”

  The detective in charge of the forensic unit came by and Archie consulted with her. Then he went to his car, glad to have a good reason to leave the body. He left further instructions before he drove away.

  Back in his commandeered command room, he studied the pictures on the bulletin boards. He’d put up a full spread, showing the murder scene with close-ups of Nick’s body and his wounds. He thought about how he’d reorganize around the photos of the latest homicide. While he was pondering, Delia John interrupted him with a message from Fricke. She handed him the pink memo; he tossed it on his desk without reading it.

  “The Chief wants to see you right away. He’s over at Mayor Estes’ office.”

  “Pretend you didn’t see me.”

  “Didn’t see who? I hear voices but there’s no one there.”

  She grinned, lifted her chin, shook her long, black hair. Then she turned her back to him and walked away, swinging her hips. He glanced after her. He returned to the board and his mental organizing. After a few minutes, he left his office and walked down the hall in the direction of the lab.

  CHAPTER 19

  Patsy was waiting for him at the lab. She had retrieved two folders from the Cold Case files, turned the one she’d just been looking at to face Archie. Decapitations weren’t all that common and he wondered about a link between the murdered woman and the bodies found fifteen years earlier. He knew that an expert could identify the marks of different cutting edges on bone. He hoped that Patsy would be able to do that. He picked up a photograph of a skeleton — complete except for the skull. She handed him a second photo showing the other skeleton, which was also without its skull.

  “These are slightly out-of-focus. Photography seems sloppy or hurried. In general, the crime site recording is lousy.”

  “That’s not good. These are no help at all.”

  Patsy looked relaxed, more confident than usual — bone work was more in her field of expertise. Lee brought in two large cardboard boxes on a trolley, set them on the stainless steel tabletop. Patsy lifted the bones out of one and expertly arranged a skeleton on the table. Then she turned to the second box and a second skull-less skeleton materialized on the table adjacent to the first. She took bones from the one and switched them to the other; made a ‘tsch’ sound, tongue on teeth.

  Lee looked at her over his reading glasses. Archie could see that he was impressed.

  “Like I said — two John Does,” Lee said. “The one in the second box looks like it has been around much longer, judging by the stains on these bones. A biologist found these skeletons on Parcelle Island. He was there to study bats.”

  Patsy picked up a long bone from the first skeleton, looked at it, and switched it with one from the first.

  “Not two John Does,” she said finally. “A Jane Doe and a John Doe.”

  She held up the pelvis for them to see. Archie tried hard to see the difference.

  “This is a female,” she said.

  “Not what I expected,” Archie said.

  She put it down, took a little tape measure out of her pocket, measured the long bones. Then she used her loupe to examine the pelvis.

  “Obviously a woman, epiphyses fused, pelvic striations show children — two of them. She was between twenty and twenty-five — a small woman, slender, not more than five foot four. She did some hard work, but the bones show no signs of significant disease. She was healthy.”

  Lee beamed. Archie looked at him and shook his head.

  “I guess this is the one they thought was put there first. I don’t think so. The stains are water stains. They probably say more about where the bones were in the cave than anything else. If anything, the woman’s skeleton was out there much, much longer. There’s more deterioration, more weathering of the bone. I’d have to get a better sense of the microclimate within the cave to do that; I ought to go to that island and have a look.”

  Archie grunted and pointed to the bones from the first box.

  “What can you tell us about him?”

  She ran her long fingers through short curls.

  “He was a big guy. He had his leg broken and set. The right femur had a healed fracture. It healed up fine except he might have had a little limp. He was muscular. You can see the size of the attachments. He had a slightly twisted back and a touch of arthritis. He had Chicken Pox when he was a kid. I’d say he was in his fifties when he died.”

  She measured a long bone with her tape and did a quick calculation.

  “He was a little over six feet tall.”

  “What about these marks here on the cervical vertebrae? Could they be made by the same kind of blade used on Rochelle?”

  Archie pointed to a number of striations on the bone, each about half an inch long.

  “Cut marks, Archie. I saw them — maybe.”

  “What about with the woman?”

  Patsy didn’t have to look.

  “She’s has them too — again maybe.”

  “Two more murders,” Lee said. “How could Ray have missed this?”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” Patsy said.

  Archie scratched his head. He didn’t want to get side-tracked.

  “Is there anything else you see that might help identify them?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about the coroner’s report and the examining doctor’s notes?” Archie asked.

  “Nothing,” Lee said. “I couldn’t find them. I think they were the same individual at that time. It could have been Doctor Wainright, Streya’s father, but I just don’t know for sure.”

  “Keep all this to yourselves for now,” Archie said.

  He would have liked to have had more time — and more data too — but both seemed in short supply at that moment.

  “You’re going to revisit what we know about the wound on Donaldson’s corpse, Patsy. We can’t spend too long on this; it might not be our case soon anyway. But headless bodies and almost headless bodies —that’s too much of a coincidence not to check out. I need a link, soon. Thomas, I want you to look for any links between Rochelle and Donaldson.”

  Lee nodded, shrugged on his Burberry, grabbed his tablet, turned away and left the room. Patsy informed Archie that she was going to examine the skeletons further before she returned them to storage. Archie wondered how much more information could be got out of the old bones. He had lots to think about once he had got through his meeting with Fricke.

  CHAPTER 20

  Fricke took his time getting started — unusual enough to put Archie on edge, that and the act of offering Archie a mint from the bowl he kept on his desk. He was wondering about the wait until Ray Jameson joined them. Jameson walked past Archie and took a handful of mints from the bowl and popped one into his mouth. Then he picked some files up off a chair resting against the sidewall of the office, dropped them on the floor and took a seat. Archie would have to turn his head to look at him. Fricke harrumphed and cascaded into his big chair.

  “
Shit, Ray, I had those files organized,” he said.

  “There’re fine, Cal,” Jameson said. “Can we get on with this?”

  Fricke harrumphed again and then he looked past Archie toward the still-open door.

  “You been doing a good job, Archie, right?” he said.

  He had picked up a thick-barrelled fountain pen from his desktop. Archie watched him take the cap off, replace it and then repeat the operation.

  “I’ve got to meet Lee, so if this is going to take awhile, I’d like to do whatever it is later.”

  “Thomas is part of what I’m going to say. He’s been up at the archives wasting time. You got Patsy Kydd doing God knows what. You got a pickup belonging to a suspect spattered with blood, you got no suspect in custody or even close, right? You been down to Empire City and stirred the pot. You also got no idea about where you’re headed with this thing and that’s putting it mildly.”

  Archie leaned back in his chair and glanced over his shoulder at Jameson. Jameson grinned and shrugged his shoulders.

  “I’m not worried,” Archie said. “If Robbie’s not dead, I think he’s not that far away. Ray thinks he can do better. You obviously think so too. Why don’t you get to the point?”

  “Alright. Here’s the deal. You got until next Friday. After that, Ray takes over and you might or might not be part of the team, depending on what he thinks is best. I got the mayor and the media to worry about. If you would have nailed Robbie, things would be different. Anyway, it happens all the time that guys get reassigned.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “That’s a fact.” This came from Jameson. “You got no experience, Stevens. You only got the job because it looked good — Indian cop gets big case and that kind of shit. It takes more than ambition and good intentions to do this job. You got to know what you’re doing from day one.”

  Archie kept his eyes on Fricke. He rose from his chair.

  “I’ve still got a few days,” he said. “I don’t see much point hanging around here.”

  He stalked out of Fricke’s office, leaving the two of them to amuse themselves — by going over his failings most likely. He still had time, a little less than a week. He should call Lee and update him but decided instead that his priority was to find Lars Norgard. For some reason, he sensed that figuring out Norgard was key.