by Mike Markel
I won’t say it to Ryan because he’s only twenty-nine and therefore shouldn’t have to hear stuff like this, but I think the trick to getting older is to ask for less out of life. Right now, although I’ve lost most of the feeling in my toes standing out here in the alley, I’ve got bladder and bowel control, I’ve got a job and a car, the bank hasn’t thrown me out of my house, and nobody’s shooting at me. This is me celebrating.
Barlow came back and nodded his head.
“What model?” Ryan said.
“A 7 series,” Barlow said.
“Knew it,” Ryan said, and the two boys turned to go check out the car. I followed.
It was a beauty. Black paint that seemed to be 3-D, with little gold flecks in it. And clean, too, which is pretty rare here in Montana, where the air is mostly dust and the wind howls so bad the tumbleweed flies more than it tumbles. I shielded my eyes from the new sun coming up and peered through the tinted windows. The inside was all black leather, with a dashboard full of swirly burled walnut and enough gauges to outfit a jet cockpit.
“Want me to open it up?” Ryan said.
“No,” I said. “I want to let Robin check the door handles for prints.”
“Let me just see if we’ve got the right car.” He pressed the remote control on the key ring, and the four knobs rose silently. “Okay, this is it.”
“Call Robin, tell her she’ll want to arrange to have the car brought in.”
Ryan nodded, handing the key ring back to Barlow and pulling his phone out of his inside jacket pocket.
A beat-up old green minivan rolled up slowly toward the three of us. Harold Breen put down his window. “Can I park at the end of the alley?”
I nodded, and Barlow started walking to the spot to show Harold where to park.
“Robin’s on her way.” Ryan put his phone away. “Three or four minutes.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go see what Harold says.”
We made it over to the minivan as Harold was starting to get out of the driver’s seat. Harold weighs something north of three-fifty—I don’t think anyone knows the exact number—and with his bulky down coat pushing up hard against the steering wheel, it took him a little while to wrestle himself free, the seat groaning all the while. The van rose a couple inches, and Harold shifted his feet on the pavement to get his balance.
Ryan and I led him over to the crime-scene tape. “No booties?” he said.
“Don’t bother.” I lifted the tape high for him. He doesn’t bend well.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, looking down at his feet as he lumbered over toward the body.
I squatted next to the body and pulled the coat back to reveal the knife wound. “Would this be enough?” I said to the medical examiner.
“Sure.” He was breathing hard from the walk. “If the blade hit the liver or a kidney and he wasn’t on the table within a half-hour, he’d be gone.”
“So the cold wouldn’t have saved him? You know, shut down his systems?”
He shook his head. “All the temperature’s done is give him frostbite. If he starts out at room temperature and cools down over an hour, the internal bleeding would have killed him before he got cold enough to prevent tissue death.”
“Can you call a time of death?”
“Not really,” Harold said. “I can’t test for rigor in this temperature. I might be able to figure it out back at the lab, but at the moment I’ll have to say sometime before now.”
I nodded. “Okay, that’s good.”
“Unless you’ve got a knife with some sticky stuff on the blade. That would help me.”
“I’ll be sure to let you know if we find something like that.”
“I’ll see you later.” He turned and headed back to his minivan.
I turned to Ryan. “Barlow already looked for a weapon, right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “In the alley, but not yet in the dumpster or in the garbage truck.”
“Call in to headquarters, will you, and request a team for that?”
“Two uniforms?”
“Ask for four. Hope for two.”
Ryan was taking out his phone when Robin came walking up to us. She was wearing a red wool ski hat, a powder-blue, tight-fitting ski jacket, and black spandex pants that showed off her long legs and her young ass. “Look at all this shit,” she said, giving me a cheerful smile.
“There’s no shortage of shit, that’s for sure,” I said.
“Excellent.” She pushed a strand of blond hair back behind her ear. “This’ll take me a couple of hours, easy.”
“Well, good,” I said. “I’m glad you’re looking forward to it.”
She walked over to the body. “Robbery?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Wallet and watch are gone.”
Robin looked around and pointed toward the wall of Johnny’s Lounge. “He could’ve been buying himself a blowjob.”
“Blowjob. Robbery.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Blowjob, then robbery.”
“Great,” she said. “I’ll get started with the photos.”
“How much of this shit you gonna collect?”
She looked around a little bit, then paused. “I think I’ll leave the shit. But I’ll grab anything that isn’t frozen to the ground. Except for all the used rubbers and the wrappers. I’ll chip them out if I need to.”
I followed her as she walked over toward the wall of Johnny’s Lounge and bent down to study a used condom. “That frozen cum down there?” She pointed. “That could be our guy’s. And the blood and the pubes on the outside? That could be his killer.”
“All right, then.” I nodded my approval. “So you’re gonna call me with the killer’s name in, what, forty-eight hours?”
“I’m going to shoot for thirty-six.”
“I’ll catch up with you later, okay?” I said, but she was already trotting off to get the cones and the camera.
I have very mixed feelings about young people.
Chapter 2
“The John Doe from this morning?” Robert Murtaugh took his seat behind his desk and motioned for me and Ryan to sit in the two upholstered chairs facing his desk. As usual, he was wearing a dark suit, this one navy, pinstriped, an ivory button-down and a dark green tie with a small gold tie tack holding it in place.
His expression was noncommittal. He wasn’t broken up that a guy bit it, but he wasn’t excited, either. He’s been a cop for three decades. For Chief Murtaugh, the job was all about procedure. There was a right way and a wrong way to do everything. You do it the right way, good chance you’ll clear the case.
“Yeah,” I said. “We identified him.”
“Close the door, will you, Ryan?”
One thing I really like about the chief is he doesn’t make you stand so you know he’s more important than you, and when you talk to him he actually listens. He never sneaks a look at his computer screen or takes a phone call.
“Guy’s name is Lee Rossman, age sixty-five.” I looked up from my notebook.
The color drained from the chief’s face. He didn’t say anything for the longest while. “You sure on that?”
I didn’t quite understand where he was going. “Well, not DNA sure, but he was driving Lee Rossman’s car, and when we pulled up his driver’s license, it looked just like him.” I glanced at Ryan, who shrugged his shoulders, then back at Murtaugh. “What are we missing, Chief?”
Murtaugh turned to Ryan. “You think it’s Rossman?”
Ryan nodded. “Absolutely. I did a Web search. Must have seen twenty photos of him. It’s him.”
“Shit,” the chief said. He put his elbows on his desk, his fingers tented underneath his chin.
I’d never heard the chief curse. He’s very big on setting the right example for his cops. That starts with important stuff—how we can’t shake down drug dealers, can’t plant evidence, can’t lie on the stand—which I agree with, in principle, anyway. But it extends all the way down to trivial stuff, including dressing and talking like professionals.
So he leaves his suit jacket on all day at headquarters. Once Ryan and I and a bunch of uniforms were putting on our gear before heading out on a meth-house raid. Murtaugh wanted to come with us. He took off his jacket, buckled himself into his tactical vest, then slipped the jacket back on.
I wasn’t sure exactly why he’s so anal retentive about the rules, but I would guess it has to do with being a recovering drunk, like me and half the other detectives. Of all of us, he’s wound the tightest, which might explain why he’s been sober for nineteen years. Me, it’s been more than a year, except for a few episodes when I curled up to relax in a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
“Lee Rossman was the main reason I took this job.” The chief ran his hand through his thick salt-and-pepper hair and exhaled. “He was a very good man.” He shook his head. “Damn it.”
“You knew him from California?” I said. Murtaugh was assistant to the chief in Sacramento before coming here.
He shook his head. “I met him during the hiring process. The mining business in eastern Montana was taking off at the time, and he told me he understood how it was going to introduce all sorts of challenges for law enforcement. He was a big supporter of the department. Donated money for training, equipment, for the Benevolent Association.” He looked at me like I should have known this. “You didn’t hear about that from Chief Arnold?”
This guy Arnold was the chief’s predecessor. “He wasn’t really that into communicating with cops.”
“Remember that human-trafficking bill that was introduced last year?”
“Yeah,” I said. Ryan nodded. The chief was referring to the law that would overturn prostitution convictions if the girls could show they were coerced into hooking.
The chief nodded. “Lee offered to donate a hundred thousand dollars to set up training and counseling for the girls, statewide.” He paused and looked down at his desk. Then he lifted his gaze and looked at me. “What do we know?”
“It was a homicide. Stabbed once, outside a bar, then left to die overnight in the cold.” I paused. “Harold’s not sure yet which killed him. His face and hands were all frostbitten, and his abdomen near the stabbing wound was bright pink, which is hypothermia, but he says Rossman probably died from internal bleeding from the stabbing. There was a bump on his head, probably from when he went down, but not big enough to have done any real damage.”
“Harold hasn’t done the autopsy yet?”
“We talked to him a few minutes ago,” I said. “He can get to him this afternoon or tomorrow morning.”
“You said outside a bar?”
The chief liking Rossman, I knew he wasn’t going to like this answer. “On Harrison, Chief. In the alley next to Johnny’s Lounge.”
The Chief’s eyes closed slowly and stayed shut for a few seconds. “We know what he was doing there?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Harold said he didn’t see any defensive wounds on Rossman’s hands. And one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“His zipper was down.”
“We have any evidence of sexual activity in the alley?”
“There’s lots of evidence that people are into all kinds of shit in the alley. There’s condoms, wrappers, baggies, a couple needles. Robin’s still cataloging it all. But nothing to say Rossman was doing any of that. Nothing that would put a girl there with him—or a guy or anything.”
“So it could’ve been a robbery that went bad.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Could’ve been. Wallet and watch are gone.”
“Have you made contact with the bar manager?”
Ryan looked down at his notebook. “We got a name off the liquor license. Philip Vinson. We put in a call to him at home. We’re going to meet up with him a little later this morning.”
“Have you canvassed the scene?”
“Not yet, Chief,” Ryan said. “I didn’t see any businesses or residences that overlook the alleyway, but we’ll give it a try.”
“I’ll assign you whatever manpower you need.”
“That would be great, Chief,” I said. “There’s a dumpster right near where the victim was recovered. The garbage truck—the driver had already emptied the dumpster this morning when he saw the body.”
“The truck’s been locked down?”
I nodded. “If we could get a few uniforms out there, that would really help Robin out.”
The chief was making notes on his legal pad. “Have you notified his wife?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Did she ever file a missing person?”
“No,” Ryan said. “We checked on that.”
The chief looked puzzled. “That’s odd.”
“We thought so,” I said. The chief didn’t respond. “You know anything about the wife?”
“Her name is Florence. She’s quite a bit younger than Lee. Not his first wife.”
“You met her?”
“Once or twice.” He shook his head. “But I don’t know her well enough to tell you anything.”
“We’re gonna start with Mrs. Rossman, then interview the bar owner. That sound all right to you?”
The chief was gazing over my shoulder. Suddenly, he caught himself and focused on me. “Yeah, that’s good.”
“And you’re going to work on getting us a couple of officers to help Robin?”
“You got it,” the chief said, standing up.
“We’ll keep you in the loop.”
He nodded. “See if you can …” Then he stopped.
I waited a few beats. “Chief?”
He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Let it go where it goes.”
Ryan and I stood up and left the chief’s office. Out past Margaret, the gatekeeper, back down the hall to the detective’s bullpen.
We sat down at our desks, arranged head-to-head in the middle of the bullpen.
Ryan said, “What do you think he meant?”
“When he said, ‘See if you can’?”
“Yeah. You ever hear him say anything like that?”
I thought a second. “We haven’t had a case where he knew the vic, have we?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“I think he wanted to say, ‘See if you can make it so Rossman wasn’t getting his dick sucked by a twenty-year-old Russian girl when her boyfriend stepped out of the shadows, stabbed him, and took his wallet and watch.”
Ryan smiled. “Well, can’t blame him for not wanting to finish that sentence.” He paused. “What do you want to do about it—I mean, that the chief knew Rossman?”
“Nothing. Except enjoy the fact that he’s authorizing the uniforms we need to sort through the shit in the garbage truck.”
“And do the canvass, too.”
“Now you’re thinking like a detective, Ryan.”
“But you don’t think he’s going try to manipulate the investigation.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t. He wants to keep Rossman out of that alley. That’s understandable. But we haven’t seen anything makes me think he’s gonna try to rig the case. Besides, if he does, he’ll probably do it so well we won’t even know about it.”
“So there’s no problem,” Ryan said.
“I’m planning to keep my head down, follow the evidence, and—what did he say we should do?”
“‘Let it go where it goes.’”
“That’s it. Just work the case. On the other hand,” I said, “you find out that while Rossman was getting a blowjob from that Russian girl the chief was at Rossman’s house nailing Florence, and when we interview her this morning she’s got a bloody knife on her coffee table, then we’ll talk some more about whether the chief might want to rig the case.”
Chapter 3
“What are we talking here?” I said. Rossman’s place flickered in and out of view behind the brush and the boulders as we snaked along the road that clung to the bluff a few hundred yards above the reservoir on the Rawlings River.
“Between one point five and two
mill,” Ryan said. He can eyeball real-estate prices, although I have no idea why he even bothers, what with his cop salary and a wife who plans to stay at home not only with their two current kids but also with the next three.
We were a few miles east of town, winding our way along the hairpin turns. The last of the big estates set on a couple of acres was in my rearview mirror. The paved road turned into rutted dirt and gravel flanked by bedrock, scrubby bushes that stayed brown all year long, and the occasional stunted pine or spruce trying to survive on the dry hillside.
A small metal sign announced the end of the public road, which transitioned into what must have been Rossman’s driveway. Another sign said “Private Property,” but nothing about who owned it, and no obnoxious threats about how you’d better not drive up. The roadway was made of some kind of round stones set in concrete, which made the wide tires on our Charger hum.
We continued on for another three- or four-hundred yards. As we got closer, I could see the house was one story, built right into the bedrock, with a flat roof pitched up at an angle as it emerged from the hillside. The whole place was hanging out over the bluff, balanced on what looked like cross-braced steel poles, with a wide deck extending out another fifteen feet. If you decided to take a flyer off the deck, you’d have a good three or four seconds to consider your decision before you became one with the rock.
I had phoned Florence Rossman as soon as we finished up with the chief. She sounded surprised and a little concerned getting a call from a detective—a reasonable reaction—but gracious and suave. She offered to talk to me on the phone so we wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of driving out to her place. I told her it was no trouble. A sophisticated forty-something women talking to an unsophisticated one, both of them working hard to communicate but using different codes.
When I gave her the standard line about how it was in regard to a case we were working on, she must have realized we were going to drive out to her place whether she liked it or not, so she said the only thing a smooth talker can say: that she looked forward to meeting us. Great, I said, trying to keep up, we’d be there in ten, fifteen minutes.
I parked on the driveway in front of the four-car garage built into the rock. The formal entryway to the house was along the side, the double-wide doors flanked by local stone. To the right of the door, the wall was glass, and I could see down the hall the whole length of the house, through the glass walls on the other side, out to the unbroken steel-grey sky.
