by Rex Burns
“Nope. But that’s all the evidence says, Wager. The pathologist thinks the head was severed right after death, maybe within an hour. He’d have to see the rest of the body to be certain, but he can’t declare the actual cause of death with what we have.”
“Was a knife used?”
“It looks that way. The folds of skin indicate a cut made from behind and between the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae, but the doc says that whoever did it sure as hell wasn’t a surgeon.”
“Why?”
“They tried to cut straight through instead of angling the blade. He found scratch marks on the lower tip of the fifth vertebra where the blade sawed before slipping between the bones. Apparently the victim was face down on a hard surface, and that compressed the vertebrae. Which makes sense—he wouldn’t have to look her in the face while he hacked away.”
“The doc thinks it was a man’s arm?”
“A strong woman could do it. But most likely a man.”
Wager jotted the information in his green notebook. “Could the doc get an idea of the time of death?”
“He needs the rest of the body to be certain.”
Which no one had located since the head had been found this morning. His next call was to missing persons; after a dozen rings, a woman officer answered.
“This is Detective Wager in homicide. Has anybody reported a missing female, Anglo, around twenty-five, short blond hair?”
“Do you have a description of her clothing, sir?”
“No. All we got is the head.” He was getting tired of saying that.
“What? Oh, yuk! Is that the one they found at the Botanic Gardens? I read about that in this afternoon’s paper.”
“Yes. The report probably came in during the last two or three days.”
“Just a minute.” It took her longer than Wager thought it should; she was probably covering four or five offices for the graveyard shift and didn’t know the missing-persons layout. “Detective Wager? We have maybe a dozen reports on missing teen-aged girls in the last week, and three for elderly women. But nothing in that age group.”
“If anything comes in, would you let me know?”
“Yes sir. I’ll put it in the request file.”
And that, he thought, would be the last anyone ever heard of his request. He drained a cup of coffee from the machine in the hall and then headed for the records section. Chances were against him on this, but it was a thread and, like all the others, had to be tugged. A tall brunette, whose starched blue police shirt swelled out nicely, smiled at him. Wager filled request slips for Solano, Duncan, Mauro, Mazzotti, and Sumner, and pushed them with his I.D. card across the small shelf toward the hovering breasts that bore the chrome name tag, “J. Fabrizio.”
“Just a minute, please.”
Beneath the dark uniform skirt, her slender legs slowly unveiled as she leaned further and further over the open trays of records. From around the large center block of pillars and wiring boards that was the communications center of records strolled a tall uniformed cop, another one whose blond curly hair looked too long for Wager’s liking. He said something to J. Fabrizio, his voice lost in the clatter and humming of teletypes, police frequencies, typewriters, and the inevitable radio music; but the hand he placed on the curve of her hip spoke more than words. She pulled straight, the profile of her mouth saying “not here.”
“We don’t have anything on most of these, Detective Wager. Here’s an old file on Mauro, Dominick Steven. It’s the only Dominick Mauro we have. We can put the others on LETS, if it’s real important.”
That was the Law Enforcement Teletype System used to request information from police agencies all over the country. But there was no sense wasting time looking somewhere else for people who had lived in Denver most of their lives. As for Mauro, Wager stared at the old-style folder with its black-and-white photograph and realized now that he’d half expected a jacket on the man. It had not been just the weariness that made Wager think Mauro was keeping his distance. “Let me have this one.”
“Yes sir. If you’ll just initial here.”
He signed out the file and took it to one of the narrow reading shelves. It was a thin folder, the last entry dated some twenty years ago. Mostly kid crap and hotheaded stuff: stolen car, assault (dismissed), disturbing the peace, assault (conviction); time served—seven months at Buena Vista reformatory. Nothing after that. The parole officer’s reports were favorable, and his last entry cleared the file. It wasn’t much, but it was a record; and Wager, like most cops, knew that a record meant a troublemaker.
Just beyond the entry to records was the contact card file, a large gray machine that cranked four-foot bins in alphabetical order past the viewer. He pushed the advance button until the revolving tray labeled “M-N-O” swung down. Then he thumbed through the “Ma——” listings twice. None of the white cards bore Mauro’s name; for the past five years, no cop had any reason to remember him.
Sitting once more at the wooden desk that must have been military surplus—it was like so many of those he had seen in various company headquarters during his eight years in the Marine Corps—he leafed through the pages of his small notebook as the same questions came up again and again. Why just the head? How did the killer get a key? Who was the victim? Maybe when they found out who she was, he’d get answers. But on the midnight-to-eight shift, no office was open for him to hassle into moving a little faster.
He drew off another cup of coffee and sat down again to think. Entry to the conservatory—that had to be with a key. And whoever did it was telling somebody something—himself, the victim, the world—something. Wager closed his eyes to recall the paths and plants and sculpted earth and stream inside the long building. There were maybe three other grottoes like the one where the head was found: a moss area against the wall near the delivery door, the fern-draped wishing pond across from the mosses, and, halfway up the conservatory, a little bridge fringed with bamboo. But the largest and prettiest and most private corner was where it had been set. Whoever had done it knew his way around the conservatory, and he had done it with care: the place was visible only from the short path across the stream; he had placed it in a frame of living plants. With his eyes still closed, Wager could almost see a man—he kept thinking of the person as a man—carefully step from the main path and lean far down the forward slope of the steep bank above the stream, gently prop the head beneath the soft green of one of the room’s largest plants, and then carefully comb its hair. Next, flashlight in hand, the man had crumbled the earth packed by the weight of his feet and dragged it smooth with his palm. Then—and Wager would have sworn to this—he went around and up the short path on the other side of the stream to look at the head. He probably shined the flashlight on it; the foundation was shoulder-high at that point, so he wouldn’t be afraid of being seen from outside the glass walls. If he went to so much trouble to place the head, to comb the hair, then he wanted to admire his work. There he stood or squatted—he could see better if he squatted—for how long? With eyes closed, Wager could almost touch the figure in his mind: a man squatting silhouetted from the back by the dim glow of a flashlight, the beam catching here and there on jutting leaves that glowed translucent and still and formed a ragged shadow to surround the small circle of light thrown against the far bank. And in the center of that bright circle, white against the black earth, the head gapped silently back at the crouching man. Saying what? And what did he say to the head? For Wager knew that, too: they had talked to each other.
The telephone’s rattle jarred him from his thoughts and it took a moment to understand the male voice on the other end of the line. “Who?”
“Gargan—with the Post! Come on, Wager, you know who I am!”
He knew the police reporter, all right. “I didn’t hear you the first time.”
“I thought maybe you didn’t want to talk to your old buddy.” Gargan’s voice said he still thought that.
“Not so,” lied Wager. “It’s alway
s nice.”
“Yeah—I know how you love us hard-working reporters. Listen, I’m told you’re the officer in charge on that head found out at the Botanic Gardens this morning—yesterday morning, now. You got anything more on it?”
“We haven’t been able to identify the victim yet.”
“What’s taking so long?”
“We don’t have a large body of information, Gargan.”
“Oh, that’s sick, Wager. That isn’t even funny.”
“I didn’t mean it to be funny!”
“Yeah … I think I really do believe you. How about letting me know when you get something? The story’s been picked up by the wire services and they want a follow-up.”
“Check with the public information officer in the morning.”
“You people don’t have a public information officer! It’s just you and me, baby, and a wire-service story.”
“Gargan, maybe I’m new in this division, but I damn well know we don’t have favorite reporters. You call me, and if I have something, I’ll let you know. Just like I will any other reporter. I’m sure as hell not going to take time to call you, because I’ve got too goddamned much work to do.” He started to hang up.
“Hey! Wager!”
“What?”
“Being on the narc squad makes people a little flaky, you know? I sure hope you got your transfer in time. But I doubt it.”
Wager hung up; perro que no muerde, ladra—a dog barks when he can’t bite. In that saying, he heard his mother’s voice smoothing away the taunts and gibes from neighborhood kids who had called him a coyote—a half-breed. And here he was still a half-breed—half cop, half something else, even in the eyes of other cops. Still yapped at by shitbirds like Gargan. He belched loudly from the warm fumes of the coffee; he’d like to tell Gargan and every other reporter to stick it, but Doyle’s procedure manual said the taxpayers had a right to know and that officers would cooperate with the press wherever possible. Fine. But, like Ross, Gargan would have to keep up if he could.
Wager closed the little notebook and returned the Jane Doe folder to the active drawer. Then he holstered his radio pack and finished the coffee. It was time to be on the street, time to put in his eight hours as backup for the uniformed officers. He had specific areas of the city to cruise: Five Points, various housing projects, the Curtis Park region, East Colfax. That was where most of the trouble would be found, and if he was on the scene, he could prevent a hell of a lot instead of having to sweep up the shit afterward. And on the midnight-to-eight shift, routine patrol was most of the job—which was why Doyle had put him on it to start with. In a way, it was like slipping on a pair of old, comfortable shoes that had been lost in the closet for a long time. It was like strolling an old beat after years away from it: some things were changed on the surface—buildings, faces, names—but underneath it still felt the same because it was the same. Wager slipped into it with the comfortable feeling of coming home.
CHAPTER 5
IT TOOK THREE more days, until Sunday night, before Wager found a copy of an offense report bearing his name in red pencil waiting for him on the twenty-four-hour board. The top line, “Event,” was homicide; the square for marking “Original Report” had been scratched over and a new check put in the square for “Additional Report,” with Wager’s initials printed beneath in the same red pencil. He skipped past the other information sections marked off by alternating pale blue and white panels to “Narrative.” There was, of course, no statement from the victim; the witness, twelve-year-old Rubio Valdez, reported finding a body wrapped in a large plastic garbage bag and stuffed in the trunk of a junked car at a wrecking lot at above address. Witness said he and other kids were playing in cars at the junkyard, and he pulled out the back seat of said vehicle and saw through a hole in the trunk paneling a bundle of some kind. Witness then pried open trunk lid and found heavy black plastic bag that smelled bad. Peeked inside and saw knees. Witness ran home and mother called police. Reporting officer arrived at scene and discovered an Anglo female, age unknown, nude, missing head. She appeared to be dead. Called homicide. Detectives Ross and Devereaux responded with medical examiner at 15:00 hours.
Wager went back to the top of the form and began taking notes. Officer Ronald Pearce had received the complaint at 14:42, 24 October ’76; details at time of offense unknown. Victim, white female, Jane Doe, age undetermined, no suspects, no witnesses to crime. Found in disabled vehicle: 1968 Buick sedan, no plates. Reporting officer looked in bag to examine contents. Victim apparently dead for several days. Cause of death unknown.
On a piece of paper clipped behind the offense report was a note in red pencil: “Wager—no info from lab yet (16:45). But unless we got an epidemic of sloppy barbers, this one’s all yours. Ross. P.S. List of apartments near Botanic Gardens in case file.”
Wager lifted the file from the drawer and began reading the legal-sized sheet of addresses as he dialed the number of the police laboratory.
“Lab. Baird speaking.”
“This is Wager. Do you have a match-up on that torso and head?”
“We can’t go into court with it, but it looks pretty sure. The blood type’s the same, type A; and as far as we can tell from what hasn’t decayed, the edges of the neck and torso fit. Right at the fifth vertebra. But we sent the skin samples over to Denver General’s lab to run the tissue tests. We’re not set up to do that here.”
“Who’d you send it to?”
“Dr. Jaffe. She’s about the best tissue specialist we can get. But don’t go bugging her, Gabe—she likes to give the information direct to us, instead of having a lot of different police officers calling for it.”
“When’s she going to have something?”
“It got there on a weekend, Detective Wager. Not everybody works twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. She’ll get to it sometime tomorrow, and we’ll let you know just as soon as her report comes back. And before you ask, Gabe: right, we are trying to identify the torso; no, we don’t have anything on the dental work; and right, we do have a set of pictures if you want them.”
“I’ll be right down.”
“I wouldn’t be too eager.”
He hung up and finished studying the list of apartment and condominium numbers that Ross and Devereaux had finally managed to interview on their shift. That was another problem of the midnight-to-eight tour: any follow-up work had to be either on your own time, which was all right if you had it, or on somebody else’s time, which was never all right. But people working normal hours didn’t take kindly to answering questions after ten at night. In fact, as Wager scanned the long list of addresses, each with its “X,” meaning no information, or “O,” meaning no one home to respond, he wondered if it was really worth going back to visit all the “0”s—the trespass into the conservatory must have taken place so late that most of the people were asleep. But he folded the sheet into his coat pocket anyway, knowing that he would go back over the list for those not questioned. If he didn’t, his mind would itch.
He tried missing persons one more time; after a long series of rings, the same female voice, less friendly, answered the question he once more asked her: “No, Detective Wager, we still have no requests answering that description.”
Fred Baird was at his small desk fiddling with a rack of four test tubes when Wager came in. He glanced up and pulled a handful of photographs from a file separator. “Any civilians you show these to better have a strong stomach.”
This far from the communications center and the duty watch, no sound of police frequencies or country-and-Western music echoed in the corridors, and the silence of the labs was made deeper by the hum of fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Wager spread the 5” x 7” color photographs along the cool metal of the laboratory bench. The first ones were from the Botanic Gardens, and the glare of the flash bulb made the head’s yellow-white face lean forward out of the dark earth. The bloodstains on dirt and skin stood out more starkly in the photograph than they had i
n the conservatory, and Wager noticed for the first time the faint line of pancake make-up spread like a thin mask from just below the hair to under the curve of the loose jaw. The bloodless neck was white above its fringe of sagging, empty skin, and in the hard light the creases in the neck looked like lines inked on the flesh. The next pictures were the morgue shots. An attendant tilted the head back on an empty slab so the severed neck could be seen clearly; the identification slate in the foreground was chalked with “Jane Doe, 20 Oct. ‘76, F.B.” The initials stood for Fred Baird. If necessary, the photographer could be called upon in court to testify that he had taken the picture and that the object in the picture was in fact the evidence he’d seen with his own eyes.
The photographs of the torso began with general surveys of the junkyard and then moved to the car and the open trunk. After the series of photographs that showed the scene as discovered, a series depicted the victim being unwrapped for identification at the scene. Ross stood beside the open trunk of a rusty dark blue Buick, holding open the black plastic bag in which a pale glimmer showed. Other shots followed each stage of the body’s removal and had a detective or the medical examiner facing the camera to establish a witness at the scene.
“I guess you didn’t find any prints or traces in the area?” Otherwise Ross would have pushed the results as far as possible, trying to solve the case before Wager could reclaim it.
“I wasn’t on duty, but here’s a copy of the lab search findings—nothing.”
The sheet of paper Baird handed him was brief, the entry in most sections a terse “negative.” The remarks space noted, “Heavy rain the night of 23 Oct. Soil and paint chip samples taken. Case number 17815462.”
Wager leafed slowly through the pictures once more, looking not so much at the car or the body, but at the bits and pieces of blurred background—a junkyard littered with weeds, trash, rusting car bodies. Bodies. Tossed away like junk. But not the head. That had been placed very carefully. “There’s got to be something there.”
