by Rex Burns
Wager had spoken to himself, but Baird misunderstood. “If you get a suspect, and if the suspect doesn’t clean his shoes, and if we can find those shoes, then we may have a link through soil sample. That’s about the best we’ve got.”
“None of it’s worth a damn without a suspect.” Wager turned to the morgue pictures of the nude torso. These offered different angles of the body on the open plastic garbage bag. In a few, an attendant propped it up as it had been found. The remainder were of the torso straightened as much as possible on a morgue slab and washed of the thick smears of old blood in order to reveal any wounds and identifying marks or scars. Maroon patches of flesh like massive birthmarks showed where the blood had settled as she lay wadded up. In one shot, the morgue attendant pointed to the severed neck; in another, to the chest just below the left breast where a one-inch puncture wound swelled black and taut with decay. Wager looked closely at the wrists and arms, but no marks of violence were visible. The photographer’s initials on the I.D. slate were “L.W.J.”
“Who’s L.W.J?”
“Lincoln W. Jones. He’s on the afternoon shift this month.”
“What’s the doc say?”
“He hasn’t had time for the complete autopsy—he’s doing it now. So far, it looks like she was dead for twelve to sixteen hours before being put in the car. You can see lividity here on the hip points and breasts—that’s the marks from blood settling before she was moved for the last time. The rigor of these joints here and here was broken in order to stuff her into the bag.” He looked up to explain to the new man in homicide: “Once the rigor’s broken, a joint won’t stiffen up again.”
“How long was it in the first position before it was moved?”
“Can’t say for sure—it depends on characteristics of the body as well as temperature and so on. The guess is eight to twelve hours. Then she was transported to the junkyard. The darkest marks along the upper back and here, in the hands and forearms, came after she was positioned in the car’s trunk.”
“Could the marks be bruises?” Wager asked.
“No tissue damage. It’s lividity.”
“So that stab wound is the probable cause of death?”
“The pathologist wants to finish running tests on the fluids and organs before he says for certain. But it looks to me like it was.”
“Why?”
“Well, the lividity marks indicate that a lot of blood was left in the body—I figure that means the heart stopped pumping before the neck artery was opened. That’s a heart wound there. But of course I’m just a flunky, not the expert.”
“Any signs of sexual assault?”
“The doc’ll let you know in good time, Wager. Denver’s a small town—we go at a slow pace. And we all want to live long enough to collect our pensions.” Baird poured himself a cup of coffee from a beaker steaming over a Bunsen burner. “Do you know that stress-related diseases are the number-one cop killer? Your life expectancy, Mr. Cop, is fifty-seven years.”
“The Motor Vehicle Division has no prints for her?”
“If they did, we’d have an I.D. by now, wouldn’t we?”
He was halfway back to his office with the duplicate set of pictures when the radio pack called his number.
“This is X-eighty-five.” The detective division’s prefix was “X”; the 800 series meant homicide. Wager was detective number 5.
“You got somebody to see you in your office. What’s your ten-twenty?”
“I’m in the building. I’m on my way.”
“Ten-four.”
It was Gargan, in the same black turtleneck that he always wore. Wager occasionally wondered if that was its original color or if it had soiled that way. Now the reporter was trying to grow a moustache that framed his mouth in a horseshoe of bristling orange hair which had snagged a crumb or two of his supper. “Gabe! Lay it on me, man—what’s new on the horseless headsman?”
“Here. Get a laugh out of this.” He tossed the pictures on the desk.
“Oh, Jesus.” The reporter’s face twisted, and he pushed them back at Wager. “The wire services can’t use these. How about names or numbers? Got an I.D. yet?”
“No. All I can say is that it looks like the head and the torso go together, but you better wait for a complete report from the pathologist before quoting that.”
“Was the—ah—severing the cause of death?”
“The lab doesn’t think so. The doc said it was a sloppy job, and there’s no indication on the torso that the hands were tied. Nobody would just stand there and let some guy saw at their neck.”
“What’s this he’s pointing to, a stab wound?”
“Yes. But it might not be the cause of death. We’ll know more when the doc files his report.”
“Jesus. Whoever did it must be totally bug-fuck.”
“Or maybe wants us to think so.”
“Yeah. Believe me, I think so.” Gargan slapped his feet from the rung of a neighboring chair. “And of course you don’t have any suspects?”
“We don’t even have any witnesses, Gargan. But we are working on the case.”
“Denver’s citizenry can sleep better for knowing that.” He stood by a bulletin board and tapped the pen-and-ink composite of a face on a circular from New Mexico describing the suspect in an Indian turquoise robbery and murder. “This looks like my brother-in-law. And I wouldn’t put it past the bastard to do something like that. Except he’d get caught sooner.” The reporter paused in the doorway. “Well, I’ll just have to say that you think the head and body are the same person, but you’re waiting verification from the lab.”
“That’s about it.”
“I’d appreciate hearing if you get something—don’t forget, we’re old buddies, Gabe.”
“Right.” He stayed at his desk until Gargan had time to clear the police building; then he went on the street to put in another eight hours.
CHAPTER 6
MONDAY BROUGHT ONE of those afternoons that made Wager’s small apartment feel empty no matter how much he prowled it. He straightened the NCO’s sword he’d hung on a wall and the two sling chairs he seldom used and the small photograph of a single dead tree that was a souvenir from an earlier case. Strange how the restless emptiness came most often when a lot of work was going for nothing—and how it seemed even stronger now that he was in homicide. Maybe because in narcotics there had been no clear victims, only scum everywhere—users who turned pushers when they had enough to sell, buyers who bought because they had to, pushers who worked for you or against you depending on the money. But homicide had a victim who lay there waiting for an answer and whose silence was an accusation against Wager.
He flipped the television set from one channel of squealing contestants to another and then snapped it off and padded barefoot into the kitchen to begin chopping onion for a small breakfast steak. Despite years of rotating day and night shifts, he had never adapted to a combination of eggs and late-afternoon sun.
And, as usual, the apartment’s faint echo made him think of Lorraine. Which was silly, because the victim didn’t look anything like Lorraine. His ex-wife’s hair was reddish brown and long, and turned gold only when she fanned it smoothly over her shoulders in the sun. He wondered if it was still that way, if she still wore it straight down her back. And he wondered why he bothered wondering; two years was a long time, and even then he had not often seen her hair spread in the sun like that. Una mujer sabrosa. That’s what he called her—a savory woman. And she had been. But she was not a cop’s wife.
On his last visit to his mother’s, his sister had been sure to tell him—using the voice that went all the way back to the smell of chalk dust and oiled schoolroom halls, to the pervasive rotting-apple-and-wet-paper-bag smell of third grade—that Lorraine now had a boyfriend. Who was not a cop.
“What’s he do?” Wager couldn’t help the question.
“What business is it of yours?”
It wasn’t, any more. But what business did his sister h
ave to say anything in the first place? Not that it ever stopped her. “It’s a cop’s question. I’m a cop.”
“You sure are.”
The rest of the dinner had been very strained.
He poured himself another cup of coffee and wandered out on his apartment’s small balcony thrust over Downing Street ten floors below. Behind Denver, the tops of the shadowed mountains merged with piles of cloud pushing in from Utah to make the peaks seem even taller, even darker. Above the heavy cloud banks, an orange streak of contrail caught the sun as an airplane left Stapleton International for San Francisco or Los Angeles. Wager had been to California once. Camp Pendleton. He remembered the hills lying tawny and empty to a steady wind; and the ocean, even emptier, which moved and writhed wherever his eye rested, and which, despite its name, was never peaceful. Maybe he would take a vacation someday and see more of California. God knows he had the time coming. He drained his coffee and padded back to the kitchen to rinse the cup out. Crap on a vacation. He didn’t really want one. He didn’t know anybody in California. What he really wanted was the victim’s name. There wasn’t one more goddamned thing he could do until he knew her name, and the longer that took, the longer the odds were against a conviction.
He dressed and glanced over the items in his small green notebook, deciding to put off the telephone work until later and to do the legwork while it was still light. His first stop was the area where the torso had been found the previous afternoon. It took him awhile to twist his way over the rough streets and bumpy railroad tracks between grimy columns that lifted the bed of the Valley Freeway above this part of Denver. The old factories and foundries lining the railroad spurs were closed for the day, and the empty remnants of buildings that had been condemned long ago but never torn down were boarded shut with faded plywood or rotten beams. He finally passed the tangle of weeds and willow and stretches of wet sand that was the shallow South Platte River, and turned in to a short street of sagging buildings. Here and there, sprayed graffiti spelled gang names; Wager remembered “Los Lobos” from ten years past. The “Iron Men” had been even before his time. There were no new names. In a small turret capping the second floor of a deserted office building, a square stone held the date 1892. He stopped in the middle of the empty street to listen. Behind, from the Valley Highway on the other side of the South Platte, came the roar of heavy traffic; in front, but out of sight behind a treeless embankment, were the hiss and blat of Federal Avenue, with its neon and glass, its chrome gas stations, its street lights, its drive-in banks. But here, in this short lane of deserted buildings, inert trash, and black, glassless windows, was nothing. Not a voice, not a flower, not even a stray cat. It was one of the few corners of Denver that seemed, to Wager, absolutely dead. And at the far end of the silent street was the junkyard.
Sprawling over half a block and across to the Federal Avenue embankment, the crumpled and rusting cars washed up against a sagging chain-link fence and around the rotting walls of a lone house that served as an office. A single bulb burned whitely over the closed front door where the porch had been ripped away to leave a pale A-shaped scar like a startled eyebrow. Not even a junkyard dog answered when Wager called through the locked and rusted gate. He crossed the brick street to the pile of twisted cars and trucks tossed into the weeds. The dark Buick, one of those round bulging models, sat in an unfenced portion of the lot a short dozen paces from the curb. Wager gazed at it, at the empty buildings. Not far south rose the belching smokestacks of the power company’s downtown plant; if he stood on the Buick’s fender, he could just glimpse the access road that tied this forgotten corner with Federal Avenue. North, but hidden behind the Colfax viaduct, were the basketball arena and Mile-High Stadium. If a person knew which twists of road to follow, he could get here from the stadium’s parking lots. Otherwise it was damned hard to find. Yet someone—in the dark and without much fumbling around—had found it. Somebody had parked close to the Buick, knowing where in the lightless street to stop; he had lifted an awkward body in a slippery plastic bag and carried it to the trunk that he knew would be unlocked. Slammed the lid; maybe cleaned up a bit in the night, even dragged the clay patches that cracked here and there among the weed clumps to smear the trace of his footprints. And had left.
A dead corner that the city had thrown away, stripped and broken cars rusting away in the brown weeds. Wager knew this spot had not been picked by accident. The head was set in a living place, the lifeless body tossed aside with other worthless junk.
Wager could feel that as clearly as he felt the points of shattered bottles beneath his shoes. But to know it didn’t answer why. Or who.
He spent the next four hours visiting the apartments near the Botanic Gardens, knocking at the list of numbers bearing Ross’s “O” that said no one answered the first time. Like Ross and Devereaux, Wager didn’t bother with units above the fifth floor; at that distance in the dark, no one could have seen anything anyway. And, like Ross and Devereaux, he got negative answers. The routine was pretty much the same at each door: a sudden blotting of the tiny light in the peephole after Wager knocked, and a muffled “Yes?”
“Detective Wager,” holding his shield up to the peephole. “I’m investigating a death on some property behind the apartments. Can I ask you a question or two?”
A moment of startled silence, then the door opening to the end of its safety chain to show half a face. “Who?”
“Detective Wager. Denver Police. Did you happen to notice anything at all unusual taking place in the Botanic Gardens during the night of Tuesday October 19th?”
“No! We keep our curtains closed at night.”
“Thank you.” And on to the next “O”.
It was nearing ten. The women who now answered had faces scoured of make-up and the men wore sport-shirts with little alligators on the front or shiny robes tied over their pajamas. Wager moved to the last apartment on the fourth floor. There the answer was different.
“That was last Tuesday, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know, I did see something weird. I kind of wondered about it at the time.”
“You did? What?”
The man’s half-face in the doorway was thin, with dark, bushy eyebrows that lifted as they approached each other. At first, Wager thought the man was puzzled; then he realized that the eyebrows stayed that way. “A light. But not like they have sometimes. A flashlight, maybe. I couldn’t sleep, and went out on the balcony for some air. I saw this light moving around in the conservatory. Our balcony looks almost right down on it.”
“Can I come in? Can I see this balcony?”
“I guess.” The chain slipped to let him into a narrow living room. The man said, “Just a minute,” and shut a side door. “The wife’s in bed.”
“Is this it?” The far end of the living room was a panel of orange-and-blue drapes that seemed to go either with or against the square, glossy white sofa and low glass-and-chrome table. Wager wasn’t quite sure which.
“Yes.” The man pulled open the drapes and rolled back the thick glass door. The balcony was wide enough for two folding chairs and a small charcoal grill; over the lip of its wire-and-wood panel, the grounds of the Botanic Gardens were a large, dark hole surrounded by city lights and the swirl of traffic.
“Right down there’s the conservatory.”
The diamond-shaped faces of its roof glinted in the dark, and from the far end, toward the lobby section, a purple glow shone fuzzily. That would be the moss section; apparently the fluorescent wands were on all night. At this end, where the head was found, all was dark.
“Can I have your name, sir?”
“What for?”
“It’s just routine. Any information I get, I’m supposed to have a name for.”
“Mikkelson. Ronald Mikkelson.”
“Want to tell me what you saw, Mr. Mikkelson?”
“Like I said, I came out for some air and was leaning on the railing right where you are, and I happened to
look down… . No, wait a minute—something caught my eye. That was it—there was a flash right down there, and it caught my eye, and through the roof of the conservatory I saw this dot of light. It was a flashlight, I’m sure of it.”
“Did it do anything?”
“Let’s see… . It moved around a little and then got dim. Then it was still for a real long time, like it was propped somewhere. Then it moved again and went out.”
“Did you see anybody in the light?”
“No. You can’t really see through the glass—it’s tinted or something. You can see lights on the other side, but you can’t see much detail.”
“About how long would you say the light was on?”
“Ten minutes. Long enough for me to start getting cold.”
“How long were you out here before you saw the flash of light?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe five minutes.”
“Did you hear anything before the light came on?”
“Like what?”
“A car. A door. Somebody walking in the alley.”
“There’s always cars.” He thought hard. “No—I really can’t say I heard anything.”
“Have you ever seen anything like that before?”
“Not just like that, no. Sometimes they have the lights on at night for working or when they’ve got a bunch of people coming in for something or other. But this was different.”
“Did you think about telling the police what you saw?”
“No. I didn’t make much of it at the time. Do you really think it was somebody putting that head there?”
Somebody with a key that fit silently into locks, somebody with a flashlight who crouched and stared. “It could be.”
“I didn’t hear about it until yesterday. I saw it on the news last night—they said you guys found the rest of her in a car over on the west side.”
“Yes, sir. About what time did you see this light?”
“Two. Maybe two-thirty in the morning. Can we go back in now? It’s getting chilly.” He rolled the balcony door shut and pulled the drapes across the glass.
