by Lisa Black
The coroner’s investigator nodded his agreement.
“Altar of his sins,” Patty said. “I like that.”
“There’s no sign of a struggle,” Maggie went on. “Of course we can’t tell just from looking whether he had bruises or not, but the door isn’t broken and his clothing is neat. He let the person in, then either got real obedient once he saw the gun or turned his back on the person without concern. The entry wound is near the base of the skull, so I doubt he was kneeling. Probably standing and the guy behind him was about the same height.”
The coroner’s investigator nodded again. “Just stretched out the gun and bam.”
Patty said, “Someone he let in. A customer.”
“But how do we know it’s him, for sure?” Tim Phelps persisted. “This might be some guy Nickel killed. We had a few other suspects lined up, were going to get them to testify against him in return for reduced sentences. Maybe this is a guy Barry Nickel didn’t want showing up at his trial, and that’s why he skipped town.” He said to Maggie, “We’re going to need fingerprints.”
She looked at the dead man’s fingers, now dried into shriveled chunks as hard and convoluted as glacial grooves. “Oh, crap.”
* * *
Thursday, 9:45 a.m.
Jack Renner watched his partner, Riley, pace the alley where Brian Johnson’s body had been found. With the chaos over Viktor and his smuggled girls the Johnson case had been reassigned to them, which really wasn’t supposed to happen—detectives were supposed to work their cases from beginning to end, but the new chief of Major Crimes either didn’t agree with that tradition or didn’t have the stamina to stick to it, and he kept getting excited by each new case and assigning it to his “best” detectives—Patty and her partner, Tim. Unsolved homicides were passed down like an ugly but hand-knitted sweater by the time they were a week old, to the second-best detectives, and so on until it landed with the alcoholics or the guys just putting in time until retirement. By then everyone would have given up hope of solving it anyway, and feel resigned to yet another tick in their Open category. Thankfully few cases made it that far.
Brian Johnson’s would, if Jack had anything to say about it. And now he did.
Riley stood with his neck craned back, studying the windows overhead, gauging the chance of an eyewitness. From his expression the odds fell below slim. The block held a small factory, a garage, unidentified storefronts, vacant apartments, and a school—none of them likely to have occupants in the late hours when Riley presumed Johnson to have been dumped. He wasn’t happy about either the reassignment or the new chief’s way of doing things. The smuggled girls case had interested him much more than one more dead gangsta. So he grumbled.
“Switching us around like he’s playing Candy Crush . . . how are we supposed to work like that? Never know what I’m running down from one day to the next—you know that guy on the bridge turned out to be some fellow lowlife of Shaw Murdoch? The guy who runs girls out of his bar?”
“Murdoch?”
Riley stopped his pacing to stare at Jack. “Yeah, you remember—Timmy from Vice went on and on about the guy last month at Sonny’s retirement party.”
“Yeah,” Jack said. He tried to sound noncommittal, but that turned out to be the wrong tack since Riley peered at him even harder.
“Geez, the guy talked your ear off for a half hour. I had to tear you away. You said he probably mumbles Shaw Murdoch in his sleep. We razzed him about it all the next week. How can you not remember that?”
Jack shrugged. “Probably because while he was talking, I was drinking. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise anyway.”
“Good point,” Riley said. But he continued to stare at Jack, not moving, his entire process frozen as he puzzled over this one tiny anomaly in Jack’s recall.
Jack found himself holding his breath.
Then, with a physical start, Riley shifted back. “We could check the garage—sometimes those guys work late. Especially if they’re chopping cars on the side.”
Jack’s voice sounded too fervent even to himself: “You have a suspicious mind, you know that?”
“That’s what’s kept me alive,” his partner joked. Riley was a little short, a little round, with a full head of hair and fair Irish-ancestry skin. He had blue eyes and one chipped tooth, the door prize from quelling a near-riot during his uniform days. They had been partners for a little over a year.
This was not the first time Jack had been assigned to investigate his own handiwork. His third “client,” and in another state: a woman who kept taking in foster daughters only to rent them out for twenty minutes at a time, and the case file regarding her murder had landed on his own desk. He had done just as he would do now, questioned friends, neighbors, her numerous boyfriends-slash-clients. He had Forensics examine her car—which he had never been near—and her home—which he had never entered. He had Children & Families talk to the girls, gently, and made sure that they were never mentioned as suspects and also that they got plenty of follow-up counseling and care. And the case had remained unsolved.
Though after that he decided to focus on cases that would not be directly assigned to him, and became more methodical about seeking and choosing potential clients. It was safer. Many clients came from outside the homicide unit—it had been unfair to victims to ignore their pain simply because it had not landed in the homicide department. Destroying someone’s life was just as heinous as ending it. And his grandfather had dragged him to enough church projects and soup kitchens to instill the importance of generosity. Jack may have begun to kill out of sheer anger, the frustration of Maria Stein slipping from his righteous grasp, but now he did it only because it needed to be done. In this way the tragedy that Maria Stein had created would have a purpose, some sort of cosmic point to it.
And so now he helpfully accompanied his partner to the garage on the corner.
Three guys with greasy hands were bent over the engine of a Chevy Cobalt, using a string of obscenities to commiserate with each other over the difficult position of whatever it was they were trying to remove. Riley called out before entering, politely enough, but still one knocked his head against the hood trying to straighten up.
The owner had red-rimmed eyes and just kept saying, “No idea, man,” to every question. He didn’t remember being here late the night before last, or any of his guys. Not no, just didn’t remember, so perhaps Riley wasn’t so far off about the chop shop idea. None of the three saw anyone dump a body. They didn’t recall hearing an argument or a shot. They didn’t recall any suspicious cars. They didn’t recall anything like that happening in the area before this.
Jack watched Riley ask the same questions as many different ways he could think of, hoping to leap on some inconsistency, and watched the men give answers that he assumed to be honest. He felt sorry for both parties. Riley was a good cop and a good guy. Divorced, but on decent terms with his ex and doing everything he could to stay involved in his daughters’ lives. He went to every soccer game, every ballet recital, fixed a leaking sink in a house he no longer owned. He took his job seriously but not obsessively. He could be as cynical as the next guy but didn’t believe that every word a man said was a lie just because he’d been arrested once or twice or even three times.
While his own partner lied to him practically every day. Lies of omission, but lies just the same.
This caused Jack a twinge now and then but not enough to keep him up at night. He liked Riley, respected the man, but they hadn’t been partners long enough to love him like a brother. And what Riley didn’t know couldn’t hurt him. Knowing what he didn’t know could seriously screw up his life.
Of course Riley might be completely down with Jack’s activities, once he knew of them. But he might not. Too many guys talked a good game but didn’t have the stones for follow-through, which made it too big a risk to take. Jack had been around outlaws long enough to know the countless ways to get caught, and having a partner hovered near the top of the list
.
And Riley proved helpful without even knowing it. He chatted with people. Then he chatted some more. Between him and having a drink at the cop bar once in a while, Jack didn’t have to look far for potential clients. All he had to do was listen.
“Fine,” his partner said now to the three mechanics. “Thanks.”
They returned to their vehicle, Jack saying cheerily, “Where to now?”
Riley shot him an irritated glance, probably wondering what there was to be so damn perky about. Then he said, “I’ve got baby mama numbers one, three, and four on tap. Who should we visit for a warm and effusive welcome first?”
Jack tamped down a prickle of worry and said, “Might as well go in order.”
Chapter 16
Thursday, 10:31 a.m.
“So how you gonna do this? Can you really get fingerprints from these?” the pathologist asked Maggie. She was a new one, fresh from taking her boards, all glowing skin and long hair that snaked down her back in a single braid. She held the desiccated corpse’s index finger between two of her own, sawing the arm up and down. It would only move about an inch.
Maggie said, “There’s a couple of different ways. First I’ll soak the fingertips in dishwater—I mean, water with a little bit of dish soap in it. In some ways Madge the manicurist was right.”
The doctor looked blank, too young to be familiar with the old Palmolive commercials.
“The soap can sometimes help to rehydrate the skin. There’s also combinations of salt solutions—using sodium hydroxide with glycerin, or sodium carbonate with ethanol, etcetera, that may do the same thing. Or simply boiling water can work.”
“Glad you’re dead,” the doctor remarked to the corpse.
“It takes a while,” Maggie went on. “They might have to soak for a week. Sometimes they rehydrate sufficiently that I can just ink and roll. Sometimes I can powder and then put tape over the fingertip and lift them like a piece of evidence—of course then the prints are reversed from the way they would be on a card, but we can adjust for that. I can mix up some Mikrosil putty and spread it over the fingers and let it harden to make a cast. Again, it’s reversed from an ink print, but I can photo and flip the image. If none of that works, then it gets even messier.”
“Sounded messy enough already.”
“I’ll have to remove the skin, try working with it that way. If I still have no luck, then I’ll flatten each tip out between two glass slides and backlight it to see the ridges.”
The doctor pulled on a pair of gloves. “And if that doesn’t work?”
“Then I give up. And you’ll have to pull his femur and the DNA section will have the cops get samples from his home or parents or children. Then it becomes a YP instead of an MP,” Maggie said, meaning Your Problem instead of My Problem.
“Harsh.” The doctor shook her head. Then her smile faded. “So, how do I do this?”
Maggie felt as blank as she knew she must look. “Do—?”
“Collect his fingertips for you.”
“Oh. I brought the jars with the solution I’m going to start with—the soap and water, as I said—and I’ve already labeled them. So you just remove the fingertips and I’ll do the rest.”
Maggie set her case—a plastic toolbox with the upper tray removed—on the edge of the dissecting counter and opened it. Then she helped herself to some latex gloves and selected the jar labeled LT.
When she turned, the pathologist seemed to be still mulling this over. “I just cut them off?”
“Yes.”
The deiner picked up a pair of pruning shears from the tray of gleaming instruments and handed them to the doctor, unable to hide his smirk.
The young woman looked from the shears to the desiccated hand, rigid and floating in the air next to the victim’s thigh. “Okay.”
“Whenever you’re ready,” the deiner added. Even the doctor and assistant at the next table had stopped excavating a middle-aged white man to watch.
“I don’t suppose you’d want to do it?” the doctor asked Maggie.
“No. I mean—no.”
“It’s an MJ, not a YJ, huh?”
“I’m just here to observe.” Maggie certainly wasn’t squeamish after this many years in her field, but she did have lines. Getting up close and personal with a dead person was nothing new. Actually dissecting one would be. Besides, this wouldn’t be the last time this young doctor would have to remove fingers from a corpse, and these—like dried twigs—would be much less squishy than fresh ones. Those were usually frozen first, to make them more solid.
The doctor apparently came to the same conclusion. She glanced at the label on Maggie’s jar, grasped the corpse’s thumb firmly with one hand, and let the shears encircle the bone with the other. “Really glad you’re dead,” she added to the corpse, and squeezed.
Snip.
She made a face, and held the now-loose digit out to Maggie as if it were a live insect. It plopped into the liquid and Maggie screwed on the lid.
“So gross,” the doctor opined. She snipped the next, adding “Ew” to that sound and each one thereafter. The deiner grinned openly. The pair at the next table again buried themselves in the hefty man’s torso.
Finally the doctor dropped the right pinky into the last jar, and said, “When my parents ask me what I’m doing with that med school education they paid for, I think I’ll leave this part out.”
“Thank you,” Maggie said, sincerely, and closed up her kit.
The doctor tossed her head, causing the braid to arch back and forth like an agitated scorpion. “Well, let’s get started.” She began to make the Y incision, plunging a scalpel into the sunken chest, its skin now the consistency of tanned leather. The scalpel blade promptly snapped off. She looked at Maggie, then back at the now-headless scalpel.
“Sorry,” Maggie said. “I got nothing.”
After breaking two more scalpels the doctor decided to use the shears again, and eventually removed the equally tough and desiccated organs. The lungs showed him to be a smoker. The liver indicated a drinking problem. The stomach held the remains of a moderate last meal including calamari. And the brain gave up, with some struggle, three deformed lumps of lead.
“Small caliber,” the deiner pronounced. “Looks like twenty-twos.”
“Three of them.”
“Yep. Practically in the same hole, but not quite.”
“A lot of that going around,” Maggie repeated.
The pathologist perked up. “Really? Like, we’ve got a serial killer running around?”
Maggie didn’t encourage the idea. Brand-new pathologists tended to be worst-case-scenario prone.
The three rounds to the head had struck her as too carefully dispassionate, not the results of a falling out among lowlifes and not, she now thought, of revenge. No one would need revenge against all four, quite disparate, individuals. No, if the same person killed all four—and she did not feel ready to assume that since .22 was a very common caliber—they had something else in mind, something she had not yet thought of. What had these four murders accomplished? What had they gained, for anyone?
Other than justice.
Or vengeance.
Some might say those two were one in the same.
She made her way out of the autopsy suite, took a chance, and moved one door over to the small teaching amphitheater. When no students were assembled, which was most of the time, Trace Evidence utilized the space for examinations. Right now she found a tech poking at the clothing removed from the late but not bemoaned Barry Nickel, the items dried nearly as stiff as their owner. Noticing Maggie, the technician put on a friendly but slightly strained smile that made it clear she stood about four steps from wearing out her welcome.
She apologized for interrupting him, but didn’t waver from the point. She needed to examine and tape the clothing on both Barry Nickel and a previous victim.
The guy sighed, and she didn’t blame him. Everyone in the vast justice system network, from paralega
ls to pathologists to cops to DNA analysts, always had enough to do without someone adding more. But you never knew what might crack a case, so . . .
“Okay,” he sighed. He waved a hand at the orange-colored polo and khaki pants, flipped out his cell phone, and took advantage of the break to text his girlfriend.
After she collected her samples from the items, including the leather loafers Nickel had been wearing on his feet, the tech flipped the cell phone shut and sealed up the clothing.
Then he made her come with him in order to, as he put it, descend into the bowels of the edifice—by which he meant the basement. Accessible only by one of two elevators, it contained huge oak doors with equally huge hermetic-seal-type latches on them, leading to rooms that used to be refrigerated but were now just used as very large closets. She saw two rows of crypts, each with its own square door and latch, which also used to be refrigerated but now just sat there looking creepy while today’s bodies were kept on gurneys in the walk-in cooler on the first floor.
The tech unlocked a door at the end of the hallway. Inside a cavernous room with uneven flooring he grumpily pushed aside paper bags until he found the ones he wanted, using some system Maggie didn’t understand and didn’t ask about. Then he piled the dusty items in her arms and led her out, locking the door behind them.
Up in the lab on the third floor he spotted her a disposable lab coat and an exam table, then left her to it and went back to his own work, glancing up from the infrared spectrometer every so often to make sure she wasn’t absconding with Marcus Day’s pristine Air Jordans.
Marcus Day, she had found out from the online report system, had been found in the back seat of his own Lexus, windows rolled up, doors locked, parked neatly at the curb several blocks out of his neighborhood. No one had disturbed the car, stolen the tires, reported it missing or suspicious or, apparently, so much as knocked on the windows until a city worker needed the parking spot to put his bucket truck underneath a streetlight in order to install a new bulb. Not being from that quadrant of the city, the worker did not have the healthy fear of disturbing Marcus Day’s beauty rest or eternal slumber or whatever and had banged on the roof for attention. Then he called the cops. By then Marcus Day’s veins had begun to turn green and fluid seeped from several orifices, but the cold Thanksgiving-week weather and the sealed vehicle had helped to slow the decomposition. He had been lying on his stomach, so the various fluids soaked into the upholstery instead of his clothing. For the most part. Not completely.
