“I told him Vishnu was the best. I c-couldn’t give him the bill. He w-was the best.”
“Did Vishnu win the fight?”
“Vishnu was the b-best.”
“So your brother told you to give Vishnu a pill, and you didn’t do it? Is that right?”
“Yes.”
Maggie took a long breath. “What happened next?”
“H-he couldn’t bay. B-because I didn’t g-give the bill to Vishnu.”
“Who did he have to pay?”
“A-a lawyer was after him.”
My mind went instantly to the pretentious prosecutor. “Was it Wilhelm Glazer?” I asked.
“N-no. A lawyer.” Then thinking I wasn’t understanding him, he clarified, “A LAW-YER.”
Fuck, this is driving me crazy. “Why was a lawyer after him?”
“B-because Jhuko couldn’t bay. Then Jhuko s-stobbed c-coming to see me.”
Maggie and I tracked along the river, in the direction of the wharf, Sanje Kapasi’s less-than-shack of a house falling out of sight.
I said to Maggie, “How come you helped me manipulate him? That wasn’t exactly police procedure in there. I thought you were the honest cop.”
“I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Don’t even try it, Maggie. You know we manipulated him. And don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy it. I saw you.”
“I just questioned him. You’re the one who assaulted him.” She played it innocent, but her foxy grin betrayed her. Was that a wink? My stomach flipped at the thought, in a good way.
We walked back onto the wharf. Arboreal robotic loading arms lined the water’s edge. The last one had died decades ago. Ivy had greened over the rusted metal, and lizards had nested on hydraulic pistons.
We found the same boat captain at the wharf playing cards on an upturned barrel. He must’ve waited around, hoping he’d catch us for the return trip. We climbed down into the boat and sat next to each other on the shady side, our knees bumping with the river flow. The electricity of each knee bump set my heart sparking.
A flyer launched from behind the wharf. It buzzed the wharf then headed upriver. It was probably filled with offworld tourists who had stopped in Loja for lunch. The sun hung low in the sky as we plowed our way out into the thick water. The temperature was just starting to drop. I tried to fan my shirt, but it was plastered to my body.
I tried to piece things together. My theory went like this: Jhuko Kapasi was running ’guana fights. He got greedy and rigged a fight. He gave good odds on Vishnu and took big bets. He gave his ’guana keeper brother some anticoagulants and told him to give them to Vishnu before the fight. Real simple—Vishnu gets cut, doesn’t clot, bleeds to death; Kapasi makes a killing. But his brother Sanje was attached to Vishnu and didn’t give him the pills. Vishnu won the fight, and Kapasi didn’t have the money to pay out.
Assuming I was right, I was surprised Kapasi was still alive. A guy who pulled a scam like that paid one way or another…and since he didn’t have the money…
He must’ve had enough dough to pay off Carlos Simba. The Loja crime lord totally controlled that city. No ’guana fights would have gone on without a fee going his way. If it was illegal, he’d get his piece. Simba would’ve whacked Kapasi by now if he hadn’t paid. Not even prison could have protected him.
The way I saw it, Kapasi must’ve used the purse to pay off Simba and any bookmakers he was afraid of—fuck everybody else. According to his brother, one of the fuckees was a lawyer, almost certainly Prosecutor Glazer. He wouldn’t have taken kindly to getting stiffed on his winnings. He had Kapasi arrested and sentenced to five years. I still found it hard to believe Kapasi made it through alive. He would’ve had to cough up some serious bucks.
Fast forward three years and Kapasi opted for a stint in the Army rather than serving the full nickel. According to Jimmy Bushong, Kapasi got back to his old tricks running games and supplying brown sugar to his lieutenant. Then he took six prisoners out in a truck for reasons unknown. Lieutenant Vlotsky was forced to cover for Kapasi and came up with a BS story about getting attacked rather than being made for a guy who was dosing on duty. Vlotsky resented being made the fool and armed the unit with bum guns and sent them into combat. The logical conclusion was that Kapasi killed Vlotsky out of revenge.
Where Mayor Samir fit in, I had no idea.
twelve
BY the time we made it back to Koba, early afternoon darkness had already fallen. Seventeen hours of darkness before the sun would rise again.
We hit the station. The basement was naturally cool. Condensation seeped from the walls, and the ceiling had sprouted dense green growths. The stone floor was ridged for better footing. Even so, muckish puddles had to be avoided. We entered the morgue. “Seen Abdul?”
“He’s in room four.”
We pushed our way through the swinging doors into room four. My eyes burned from the smell of morgue-sterilizing acid. Frigid air gusted from the overhead cooling unit. Bright lights shone on a steel table that was topped by an open body. Abdul Salaam was ripping the rib cage apart.
He looked up and spotted us through his thick glasses. His magnified eyes lit. “Juno.”
“Hey, Abdul. This is Maggie Orzo. You remember her from yesterday.”
“Yes, yes—of course I remember.” He tore his gloves off, revealing bony hands creviced with age. Maggie and I followed Abdul to his office, grabbed up a couple mugs of coffee, and took seats on wooden chairs.
Abdul pulled a folder from a squeaky drawer. “Your vic bled to death.” He held the folder out for me to take, but I had coffee in my left! Put the coffee down first; take the folder with your left—that’ll look strange…quick snatch with my right? Take the folder.
Maggie took the folder. I’m off the hook.
I set my coffee down.
Maggie said, “What am I thinking? You should probably look at this first, Juno. I can look at it when you’re done.” She passed the file to me.
What just happened? She knew about my hand, and she was covering for me. That was what happened. She thought I was trying to hide my hand from Abdul, when it was her I was hiding it from; Abdul already knew. I wrenched my mind off the horror of Maggie knowing about my hand and forced my attention onto the horror of the crime.
Abdul said, “The throat wounds did the trick. He hardly lost any blood through the stab wounds. He was well on his way to dead by then. The recovered maggots were eighth generation since the wounds were opened. That puts the time of attack at twenty-two minutes after midnight. Time of death about two minutes after that.”
“How about the murder weapon?” I wanted to know.
“I won’t be able to help you much there. The perp used a regular butcher knife. We only have one company on Lagarto that makes them. The problem is they sell thousands of them every year. This one was definitely not new or recently sharpened. Even if you find the exact one the killer used, I won’t be able to give you a positive match with the wounds; the maggots did too much damage to the flesh around the openings. You better find prints on the handle and your lieutenant’s blood on the blade.”
“How about the perp?”
“Based on the incision angles on the throat, I can determine that your killer is right-handed. The killer was strong, almost certainly a male. He put the vic in a headlock and cut his throat. That means he’s tall. Now, Lieutenant Vlotsky was slightly shorter than average, so put the killer at above average height.”
“Do you think it could be the work of a first-time killer?”
“It’s possible, but I don’t think so. I can see a first-time killer sticking the body fourteen times…make sure he’s dead, maybe a fit of rage. What I can’t see is a first-time killer mutilating the face that way. He took his time cutting off the lips. He did some delicate cutting. That’s hard to do with a butcher knife. Even with a lase-blade, it would’ve taken a steady hand. I really don’t think a first-time killer is going to have that kind of patience. He’d be too w
orked up. I think this guy had practice.”
An image flashed in my head of six dead POWs, lying in the jungle with lipless smiles.
Maggie decided to push the point. “What if he used a butcher knife for the stabbings then used a scalpel for the face?”
“Nope. He used the butcher knife on the face. I found small pieces of the vic’s liver in the face wounds. He used the same knife for everything. Any ideas on why he took the lips?”
Maggie answered, “I’ve been thinking a lot about that, but everything I come up with sounds harebrained.”
“Like what?” asked Abdul.
“The killer is clearly fixated on the lips, and lips are for kissing, right? Maybe his mother never kissed him, and this is some twisted reaction to that. Or it could be that he was seriously verbally abused as a child, and he takes the lips as a way to own his victim’s mouth. It’s a control thing. The lips are in his possession where they can’t hurt him anymore.”
Abdul nodded agreement. “Doesn’t sound harebrained at all, Maggie.”
I stayed out of this one. Since my conversation with Paul, I’d been operating on the theory that the lip cutting was just a ruse. Whoever killed Vlotsky just wanted it to look like a serial. “Can you give us anything else to go on, Abdul?”
“I’m afraid not. Your killer was careful…he must have been dressed head to toe. Lieutenant Vlotsky had to have been kicking and scratching, but there’s no skin under his nails. You might ask yourselves how the killer got home. He would have been covered in blood. Oh, and the Orbital returned the results on the porn mag fingerprints. They also returned DNA results from some…ah…stains on the page. No matches in the system. Looks like he doesn’t have a record.”
“Actually, Abdul, the magazine isn’t the killer’s. It belongs to a potential witness.”
“You have a witness?”
“Potential witness, and since there’s no matches in the system, we don’t even have that.”
Abdul sighed. “That’s all I have for you, Juno. How’s your arm?”
Maggie turned to look at me. She definitely knew.
I said, “It’s okay, Abdul. Just a little stiff.”
Abdul confided to Maggie. “He took a nasty spill a while back and broke his arm. I fixed it up for him.”
Maggie said, “Oh. How did that happen, Juno?” Her expression was pure devil.
I’d never broken my arm. All cops would go through tests every five years to prove you were fit for duty. When mine came up, I passed all the written tests but knew I would never make it through the marksmanship test since this hand started shaking a few years ago. I talked Abdul into putting a cast on it and fooled KOP into waiving the shooting portion. I wore that damn cast for weeks.
I could have gone to Paul. He would have fudged the shooting test for me, but I didn’t want him to know about my hand. I didn’t want him thinking his old enforcer was a weak old man. Now here was Maggie asking how I broke my arm. She’d seen my hand, and she was onto the charade. She was messing with me, wanting to see me squirm my way through this one.
I deadpanned, “I broke it backhanding a surly partner.”
Maggie restrained a smile.
I pulled up a chair for Maggie, and we sat at my desk. We decided to finish canvassing our list of johns from the Lotus. I was still hopeful one of them might have seen something in the alley. After an hour, we succeeded in cutting the original list of thirty-three down to just eight that we still hadn’t talked to. So far, nobody had seen a damn thing.
Maggie looked worn. “You hungry?”
It had been hours since the café in Loja. “Yeah…I buy, you fly?”
“Deal.”
I handed her some bills. She took them without pause, like my hand was a normal hand. I tuned into the way her fingers brushed mine. “I’ll get the drinks downstairs,” I said. Then I watched her go, jazzing to the wag of her hips. Now that she’d gone, the vice squad room felt graveyard quiet. Vice was always dead calm during the day—all the action was at night. I stood up. My neck ached from sitting too long. I left the office empty and headed downstairs to the newsstand to buy a couple bottles of soda.
I came back through the lobby. The water-stained ceiling flaked plaster to the floor. Musty flags hung like rags from poles by the door. I passed by Yuan Kim who was hanging with a young officer in uniform. “Hey, Juno. How’s that murder case going?”
I didn’t want to talk to this hump. “Slow,” I said.
He shoved his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. “Got any good leads?”
“Naw, you know how it is.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. Me and Josephs are hitting dead ends at every turn, too. It’s probably just as good that you took that Army case. We’ve got fucking MPs coming out our asses. Two new ones since the last time I saw you and that’s only been what—since yesterday.” MPs: missing persons.
I gave him the kind of uh-huh that said, “Stop talking to me because I don’t care.”
He rolled on, oblivious. “We just got back from Tenttown. There’s a fourteen-year-old girl that’s been missing for two weeks. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this one out. A fourteen-year-old girl from Tenttown, you know she’s a runaway. Only her mother is so grief stricken that she calls the police. When we ask her if her daughter was upset about anything before she disappeared, she said, ‘No, she’s a very happy child.’ I’m thinking, ‘Gimme a break. Nobody’s happy in Tenttown, especially a teenager;’ am I right? You know what kind of hole that place is.”
I almost picked a fight right there. Did you know I’m from Tenttown, motherfucker?
Yuan Kim pushed his glasses up and rambled on. “Even her father thinks she ran away. Let me tell you, she’s no child, either. According to the neighbors, she’ll bang anything with a dick. For two weeks now, we’ve tried to talk the mother out of filing a report, but she won’t hear it. Now Josephs and I are stuck with the paperwork.”
He didn’t even realize how close he was to getting those glasses permanently tacked to his nose. I let out another uh-huh.
“Hey, how’s Maggie doing on her first case?”
“Good.”
The uniform standing with Kim snickered. “Maggie? Is that Magda Orzo?”
Kim said, “Yeah, her real name is Magda. What of it?”
The uniform pointed over his shoulder to the rookie wall. Photos of all the recent graduates grinned in their frames. What—where? Now I saw it…Maggie’s face with the caption “Officer Magda Orzo” underneath. There was a dripping penis doodled next to her smile and nippled breasts drawn over her uniform.
“Who did that?” I wanted to know.
“Josephs. Who else would find that funny?” Kim answered.
“You knew about this?”
“You know how he is, Juno. He doesn’t know when to stop. He screwed around with her picture, then came and got me and told me my girlfriend was in the lobby, waiting for me. I came down here wondering who he was talking about. I mean, I see a few girls, but none of them regular. He followed me down, bringing half the squad with him. I was wandering around looking for whoever she is, and he pointed the picture out and yelled, I mean yelled, ‘She’s right here, Kim!’ Then the dumbass started laughing like crazy.”
“Why didn’t you take the picture down?”
“Trust me, the best way to deal with Josephs is to ignore him. If he knows he’s getting under your skin, he won’t let up.”
“Hold these.” I handed Kim the soda bottles and reached up for the picture—too high. I told the uniform to get it down. He had to stand tiptoe to get it.
I went straight for the stairs, carrying the picture in my right. My hand was quivering—didn’t care. Kim trailed behind, asking me what I was doing. I didn’t answer. My vision narrowed down to a burning red tunnel.
I charged into homicide. Where the fuck is he…? There, sitting at a desk, his back turned to me. The people around him looked up at me and stopped mid-sentence. Josephs sensed so
mething. He started to turn….
I slammed the picture glass side down over his head. Glass shattered, and the frame broke apart. Only the photo itself held it together.
Josephs wheeled in his chair. Shit he’s fast. He swung. Move! My body couldn’t move fast enough. His fist connected with my jaw….
“…Juno! Juno! You in there?”
I opened my eyes.
Yuan Kim knelt over me. “He’s awake, guys.”
I tried to sit up—too dizzy.
A hazy Mark Josephs sat at his desk holding a bloodstained towel to the top of his head. Don’t tell me…Shit! He knocked me out. Shit!
Two Kims pushed their blurred glasses up their blurred noses. “You okay, Juno? You been out for about a minute. He clocked you good. Do you need a doctor?”
“No.” Shit, my head hurt.
“Is your jaw broken?”
“I don’t think so. Help me up.”
“Maybe you should wait a few minutes…take it easy.”
I sat up. This time I was less dizzy. Kim pulled me wobbly-legged standing.
“Where’s my soda?”
“Here, right here.”
I grabbed the bottles and took short steps to keep upright. I walked down the hall, found the toilet, and rained vomit on floating cigarette butts. I made my way back to vice, got to my desk, and dug around for aspirin. I cracked open a soda and washed down the pills. I felt my teeth with my tongue—all there, one a little loose. How the fuck did Josephs get so fast?
Maggie came in wielding a fresh loaf, a chunk of cheese, and a hell-bent attitude. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
“You heard?”
“I just ran into Kim. He told me what happened.” She launched into a string of rants. “I can take care of myself…I don’t need you to protect me…I can fight my own battles…You’re not my father.” That last one hurt.
I hung my knotting head and took it all. Why did I go after Josephs like that? It was the way that asshole treated Maggie. It just set me off. You don’t treat women like that.
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