Dancer's Rain

by Doug Sutherland

  “That’s it, Karl. That’s all there is.”

  “No ID?”

  “Nope. She was in the water for a while.”

  Jamieson thought on that for a moment, had the grace to squirm a bit.

  “You’ve got to give me more than that.”

  “You want me to make something up?”

  “You’re holding something back.”

  “No, I’m not—but she has a family somewhere and we don’t even know who she is yet,” Jamieson wrote that down too, “You get into all kinds of bullshit details you’re just going to upset a lot of people without needing to.”

  Not that Jamieson would care about that. He tried to crane his neck around Frank again, get a better look. Frank shifted his weight to get in front of him again. Jamieson looked back at Frank, tried a knowing look that had nothing to back it up.

  “That bad, huh?”

  “The kid’s dead, Scoop. How much worse can it get?”

  9

  Frank despised autopsies. In his previous life he’d attended too many, and it was yet another reason why finally he’d had enough and taken the job back here. He knew he’d still have to deal with them, just not as often, and for the most part he’d been right. The new job would be what it sounded like—he was the chief now, not a line doggie, and his duties would be mostly administrative.

  The trouble with that was he had more experience with violent death than the rest of the department combined, and on the rare occasions when it occurred here he knew his duty lay in bringing that experience to bear—as well as passing it on to the others in the department.

  He brought two officers with him. Brent, who’d been around for a long time, and Wheelock, who hadn’t. He knew virtually everyone in the department could benefit—strange word—from observing the procedure, but the facilities were limited in terms of physical space and Wagner had balked at any more than that. For some reason it had taken two days to set up. Frank suspected it had something to do with Jeff Wagner just not wanting to do it.

  Brent had been reluctant to go but Frank had pressed him into it. Unless Frank planned on spending the rest of his life inside the town limits he knew he’d need a reliable number two. In spite of his seniority Brent had been passed over by the town when they decided to hire Frank—but Frank had never detected any resentment at all.

  At first Frank had been very careful with him, but it finally became obvious that Brent was exactly where he wanted to be. Less pressure.

  Wheelock was something else again. Frank didn’t like Wheelock much. He was in his mid—twenties, a product of a police college downstate, and way too cocky. Frank had brought him along for a reason.

  He wanted to see him squirm.

  In the end, everybody squirmed. The body was in such horrific shape from the water that on cursory examination there’d been no way of telling how she’d died.

  He glanced over at Brent and Wheelock, half expecting to see Wheelock on the floor the moment Wagner started his cut. Wheelock looked...uncomfortable was the best way to describe it, but not much beyond that. Frank reminded himself that apart from the university crowd just about everyone in this part of the world was a hunter, used to blood and viscera.

  It occurred to him that in spite of his big—time homicide background he might be more bothered by the procedure than anyone else in the room.

  There’d been no ID of any kind on the body, and strictly speaking the autopsy had been inconclusive—the girl had been perfectly healthy, in her late teens—but given the condition of the body Wagner couldn’t find anything definitive, other than the obvious. She’d already been dead when she went into the water and there’d been intercourse—either rape or pretty rough sex—beforehand. No semen, though, so no help there, although there was always the possibility of matching some DNA material from elsewhere. That would take time and depended on whoever it was already being in a database.

  At this point Wagner couldn’t conclusively say that somebody had killed her, but for exactly the same reasons he couldn’t say that somebody hadn’t. Realistically both he and Frank knew that was splitting hairs. Best bet was strangulation and that somebody had killed the girl and then dumped her.

  They’d been able to eliminate the possibility she was local—nobody had gone missing in town or the surrounding area. Frank knew the numbers of missing kids—hell, missing people - in North America had long ago reached epidemic proportions but it was a phenomenon that had left this part of the world relatively untouched. This wasn’t the kind of place kids ran away to—or even from. From what he’d seen so far most of the local kids’ imaginations ran out at the time limits.

  His own response puzzled him. His tenure as chief so far had been...the only word for it was uneventful, and a homicide or suspected homicide should have drawn him in to the point of obsession until it was cleared. When he’d left, arrived back here...the truth was that professionally speaking he’d been lucky. The chief’s job in Strothwood had come along just in time—he’d been slipping in Pittsburgh, only enough that he was vaguely aware that something was wrong, and he’d managed to make it out of there before the deterioration was apparent to anyone else—or at least he hoped so.

  There was an undercurrent of surprise in the department—although nobody other than Brent openly expressed it, and then only to him—when he delegated the investigation to Brent with the instruction to put Raycroft and Wheelock on it, then as a virtual afterthought added Kelly Randall. Randall was a bit of an anomaly—she’d joined the force five years before, and she’d joined when she was already in her late twenties. That was a little unusual in itself—most people, if they were interested in police work at all, made the career choice early. In Randall’s case Frank had the feeling there were other factors that had more to do with making a living and supporting a family in a town with limited options. Before that she’d been—Frank struggled to remember—a bookkeeper and receptionist for a local plumbing firm.

  That background had caused Frank doubt, and it still did. Frank had routinely done one—on—ones with all of his officers when he’d first come in as chief, and his overriding conclusions after talking with Randall were that 1) she was on the force for the wrong reasons—security, pension etc. and 2) to stay the hell away from her in anything but a strictly professional capacity. She was attractive, bright, and more than a little cynical.

  Brent’s eyes had widened slightly with doubt when he told him his plans. Frank knew that technically or administratively he was doing the right thing—or that at least it was defensible and logical. As chief his job wasn’t to run around on investigations, and he told himself that an important part of it now—especially in a rare instance like this—was to expose his younger officers to situations where they’d gain experience and learn something.

  “What about Wheelock?” Brent asked him. He knew of Frank’s reservations where Wheelock was concerned. Frank shrugged.

  “What about him?”

  “I didn’t think you’d want him on this.”

  “That’s why you’re there,” Frank told him, “ Keep an eye on him—see what he’s got.”

  Brent paused, gave him an appraising look.

  “You don’t think they’re going to find anything, do you?”

  Frank looked back at him for a long moment, suddenly careful. Unlike the others Brent was experienced enough and smart enough to know that like most dump jobs—if that’s what it was—there was very, very little to go on.

  “I didn’t say that, Brent—and we can’t have those kids out there thinking that way.”

  Karl Jamieson had run his story—heavily padded, short on facts, long on speculation—and even so Frank knew it would probably get picked up by media elsewhere. Randall would be better at dealing with the inevitable onslaught of fearful calls that would follow from the parents of missing kids across North America—knowing that the best case they could hope for was that the girl wasn’t theirs. At least they’d still have the thin and desperate hope th
at by some miracle their own child was still alive, even though it meant someone else’s was dead.

  There were other factors. Computer skills—a lot of agencies had to be dealt with—and, political correctness be damned, potential witnesses were usually more likely to talk to a woman than a man. It all sounded perfectly reasonable, but when he called her into his office Randall saw through him.

  “This is a big deal, Chief,” she asked, “I’ve been here for years and you’ve never given me something like this before.”

  He could hear the resentment in her voice. Maybe she was more career-oriented than he thought. She was watching him, and he brought himself back to the conversation.

  “Give yourself some credit,” he smiled, “I thought you’d look at this as an opportunity.”

  “It sounds like it’ll take up a lot of time,” she said. So that was it. She was a single parent with a couple of kids, although Frank couldn’t think of their ages or names.

  “It’s police work,” Frank said, brusque with her now, “it’s the nature of the business.”

  In the end he just cut the whole thing short, made it the order it should have been in the first place. Frank had to admit to himself that the real reason he was taking a back seat, at least for the early stages, was that he needed a buffer between himself and the parents—he’d been there, done that too many times in Pittsburgh, and no matter how much you armored your soul it just took too much out of you.

  If Randall and her partners came up with anything he’d be there, but for now he didn’t want any part of it.

  That disappointed him.

  10

  Emily couldn’t quite believe where she was. Jimmy had told her that the owner didn’t worry too much about how old you were, just as long as it wasn’t too obvious, and she had enough confidence and self-awareness to realize that people usually took her as being older anyway. Besides, Jimmy had grinned, the worst they could do was throw her out.

  She almost hoped somebody did. The place looked dirty, for one thing. A small dance floor separated the bar where she and Jimmy were standing from a haphazard cluster of pool tables - dirty linoleum, cheap woodwork and bad lighting the underlying theme that tied it all together. There was a bank of slot machines in the corner off to one side, their operators the only people in the room who hadn’t stared at her when she and Jimmy had walked in only a couple of minutes ago.

  The old man behind the bar—Jimmy said his name was Saunders, tried to make it sound like they were friends or something—had looked hard at her for a moment and then went back to his customers. The place was crowded and he and three or four girls in identical outfits—scoop necklines, tight sweaters, swelling breasts inside push-up bras, tartan schoolgirl skirts on the ones she could see waitressing the surrounding tables—looked busy.

  There was a huge bouncer sitting at a stool near the door and he’d simply waved them through, his eyes all over her, either believing she was old enough to be there or just not giving a shit. Jimmy made a big deal out of the fact that he was a regular, like being a regular in this dump was some kind of accomplishment. The age range inside was all over the map, anywhere between nineteen and dead. It looked like somebody had emptied out a Wal Mart.

  Emily had only taken a few steps inside the bar when she realized Jimmy wasn’t with her. She turned and saw him talking to the bouncer, both of them smirking as the bouncer said something to him. They bumped knuckles, a gesture Emily hated. He glanced up, saw her looking at him impatiently and then reddened. The bouncer grinned as Jimmy hurried to join her.

  “What was that all about?” she asked him, knowing the answer and knowing he wouldn’t have the balls to tell her.

  “Pick your eyeballs up off the floor,” Sherry told him.

  Kenny Langdon grinned and kept his eyes exactly where they were. Jimmy Nesbitt was a cocky little piece of shit but he had a way about him where skin was concerned. He’d outdone himself this time, Langdon thought, watching the girl walk into the bar, a haughty look on her face that didn’t quite mask her nervousness. She was tall, long legs going on forever...Sherry whacked him on the arm again. He kept his eyes on the girl a moment longer just to aggravate Sherry. Finally he turned to her.

  “What?” he asked, his eyes wide in a parody of innocence.

  “You know damn well what,” she hissed.

  “Just lookin’, babe.”

  “Like hell you were.”

  Sherry glanced back at Saunders behind the bar. She’d just started her break, but from the people crowding into the place it would be her last one of the night. Once she started serving again Kenny would be able to do whatever he damn well liked—he always did anyway—and even though she could still keep one eye on him she couldn’t do it all the time. She looked over at the girl again and that little hero-worshipping Nesbitt jerk. He’d be over here soon to show her off, the stupid fuck, and from her own experience she knew that would be all the opening Kenny Langdon would need.

  She looked back at the bar. Saunders and the girls were going flat-out, and for a while they wouldn’t have time to be anywhere else but where they were. They’d known it would be a busy night so Saunders and the bouncer had taken a load of beer up from the storage room around an hour ago.

  She saw Jimmy waiting for drinks at the bar and knew once he got them he’d come over. She slid a hand across Kenny’s crotch. That got his attention and he looked back at her. She got up from the stool and reached over, hooking her fingers inside his belt. She pulled him toward her and he stood up.

  “Come on,” she said, parting her lips and running the tip of her tongue lightly across her teeth. She released her grip and turned around, knowing he’d follow her. By the time she got through with Kenny he wouldn’t be able to do anything to that girl no matter how much he wanted to.

  They’d been in there over an hour and Emily was bored already. She and Jimmy were standing in a cluster of people by one of the pool tables. Jimmy had gone through three or four beers in the time it had taken her to get through her first, and after only a few minutes she’d tuned out the mindless conversations surrounding the games at the table. They all seemed to revolve around how much people had to drink the night before, vapid gossip about who was either hooking up or breaking up, plans for the weekend—nothing beyond that, and only a slight variation on what she heard in the hallways at school, even though the age range was far wider. Not for the first time it occurred to her how much like her mother she was—disconnected, imperious, ignoring the mindless conversations around her, smiling politely when someone directed a comment in her vicinity. She didn’t like drinking much anyway—like her mother in that, too. Dear old Dad’s escapades had taken care of that. She looked around her with ill-disguised contempt and realized Jimmy was talking to her.

  “...this is my buddy Kenny Langdon,” he was saying, “ Kenny, this is Emily Simmonds.”

  She turned back to Jimmy and in spite of herself her stomach lurched a little when she saw the guy standing beside Jimmy, and she could tell from his amused expression that her reaction had been obvious, at least to him.

  She felt suddenly nervous—not a feeling she was accustomed to. There was something about this Kenny person that was different. He didn’t look like he was drinking much, for one thing, and there seemed to be some kind of zone around him that made people give him space. She wasn’t sure why that was, but it was there. He wasn’t physically imposing—she was tall, like her mother, and he was only an inch or two taller than she was. He wasn’t especially big, either, although from what she could tell he had a kind of ropy muscularity about him. He was wearing a denim shirt and jeans, faded well past their original blue, and she guessed he was in his mid to late twenties. She looked at his eyes, trying to decide what color they were in the dim light of the bar, and after what seemed like a very long moment she realized they were looking back at her, tiny lines crinkling at the corners. Embarrassed, she was about to say something, ask a question, anything to cover herself, when
one of the waitresses—she couldn’t tell which one—shouldered herself between them, her back to Emily, and started talking to him. Only a second later Jimmy was tugging her close.

  “C’mon babe. Time to blow this pop stand.”

  “I haven’t finished my drink yet,” she told him. The waitress wasn’t moving. The guy—Langdon, was that his name?—shot a glance over the waitress’s shoulder and shrugged, a wry smile on his face. Caught off guard, she slid her eyes away from his for a moment. When she brought them back the waitress he’d been talking to was glaring at her over her shoulder. Then the waitress turned back to him and from the look on his face Emily could tell she was saying something to him. He lowered his head a bit, then looked sheepishly at the waitress from under lowered eyelids. It was a little-boy move, completely out of keeping with anything else about him, and Emily knew that it had worked for him before. It was working on her now, even though she was one degree removed from it.

  Jimmy Nesbitt was oblivious to all of it. He put his arms around her from behind and ground himself into her ass. Normally she would have given him a swat for trying that in front of everybody, but this time she didn’t resist, letting her hips move with him. She let him get away with it for a few moments, long enough to feel other eyes on her, then reached behind and swatted him away.

  She knew what little Jimmy Nesbitt wanted—wanted to get her out of there, wanted her alone—and maybe she’d give it to him. She put down her drink, slowly and deliberately, and turned to smile at him.

  He was practically wagging his tail on the way out.

  Adrienne had fallen asleep on the couch in the living room. She came to slowly, with no idea what time it was. Some kind of documentary was flickering on the History Channel, the sound low. She pulled the blanket aside and the remote control for the TV, tangled up in the folds of the blanket, clattered to the floor. She picked it up and put it on the coffee table, hoping she wouldn’t have to reprogram the thing, and squinted at her watch. watch. Nearly midnight—she’d been asleep for at least a couple of hours. She listened to the house for a few moments—other than the low murmur of the television, nothing. She was a light sleeper where her daughter was concerned, always had been, and she couldn’t remember Emily coming in. Or sneaking in.