Back on Murder

by Mark J. Bertrand

  Mrs. Mayhew stares down at her open Bible. “This line of inquiry. Is it something I don’t want to know about?”

  “I’ll tell you if you do.”

  “But is it . . . ?”

  “A very remote possibility,” Cavallo says. “Just something we’d like to check off the list.”

  Donna Mayhew reaches forward, easing the book shut. “What do you need me to do?”

  While Cavallo explains the process, producing the buccal swab kit from her bag, I wander back into the corridor to allow them some privacy. This woman still dreams of her daughter returning home safely, while I’m trying to establish the girl’s a homicide victim. I’d rather not witness what I’m putting her through.

  Across the hall, another door stands open. Glancing inside, I find Carter Robb sorting through boxed reams of paper, shifting the stacks on his desk, his back to the door. Unlike Mrs. Mayhew, he occupies a tiny, spartan office, almost entirely devoid of decoration apart from the cheap particleboard bookcases lining the walls, the shelves bowing from the weight of ragged, stringy hardcovers and creased paperbacks. The books seem at odds with his carefully ungroomed appearance. I wouldn’t have figured him for a reader.

  “Tell me something,” I say, hoping he’ll jump. He turns, holding his hands slightly out, like I’ve caught him in the act. “What exactly is a youth pastor?”

  A slight smile. “Most days? A glorified baby-sitter.”

  He seems to expect me to laugh, but I make a point of keeping a straight face. “You want to elaborate on that a little?”

  “Well, what I do is, I oversee the youth group. The teens, I mean. We have a service for them on Sunday nights, and some activities during the week, mostly after school.”

  “And Hannah’s part of that?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, yes.”

  To his credit, he looks me straight in the eye. Set deep in that uncomplicated face, its perfect symmetry exuding all-American innocence, his gaze seems incongruous, darkened by an unearned seriousness, the sort brought on by books and too many grave conversations. This man, who has never killed and probably never even had to fight, whose only suffering up to now has been the failure to live up fully to all his grandiose teenage ambitions, somehow manages to project an old man’s world-weariness, an acquaintance with pain that contradicts his unlined skin. The stress could do that, agonizing over the fate of his missing charge, but I get the feeling it’s a preexisting condition.

  “You two are pretty close, her mother says. Is that right? I was wondering if she ever said anything to you about gangs.”

  “About what?”

  “La Tercera Crips,” I say, flashing my best approximation of the appropriate sign. “A dude named Octavio Morales maybe?”

  His mouth gapes open, but he doesn’t answer. I might as well be speaking Greek. Or Sanskrit in his case, assuming they still teach Greek in seminary.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says finally. “Hannah never mentioned anything like that, not to me.”

  “What did she talk about?”

  Before he can answer, Cavallo’s voice booms in my ear. “March, what’s going on?” She dangles the bagged swab in the air, motioning for me to come along quietly, then gives the glorified baby-sitter a high-wattage smile. “Hi, Carter. We’ve got to get going. The flyers look great. You’re doing a wonderful job. Just keep it up, okay?”

  Robb looks from me to her in mild confusion, nodding in a bemused if baffled way. Before I can fire off another question, she starts pulling me down the corridor, a forced smile on her lips.

  “What was that all about?” she whispers.

  “There’s something not right about that guy.”

  “The way you were eyeballing him, I’m not surprised. You can’t run roughshod over these people. They’re doing everything they can to help.”

  “You’re telling me you didn’t see that? The way he tensed up? I swear he was about to break into a sweat. And the mother, the way she talked about him, there was something she wasn’t saying.”

  “Just keep walking,” she says.

  Once we get outside, basking in the orange sunset, she finally slows her pace. Unlike me, she’s not impervious to the heat. She shucks off her jacket and pulls her blouse away from the small of her back. The way her heels snap out the cadence, I know she’s telling me off in her head.

  “At least you got what you wanted,” she says.

  Before I can answer, a couple of city cars roll up. In the passenger seat of the lead car, I recognize Wanda Mosser’s snowy dome. She hops out, spry as ever, fixing me with her pearl gray smile.

  “What’s this man doing here?” she demands.

  Cavallo rests a hand on her pistol’s jutting handle. “Causing trouble, boss.”

  “I’m surprised he still knows how,” Wanda says, pulling me to one side. Then, lowering her voice: “What’s the deal, Roland? You looking for work or something?”

  “Not me.” I explain about the dna swab and how Cavallo invited me along.

  “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

  I glance at Cavallo, who dabs at her damp forehead with the back of her hand. “Not really.”

  “Ah.” Wanda smiles shrewdly. “You did notice the engagement ring, didn’t you?”

  I nod.

  “And the cross?”

  I nod again.

  “Roland,” she says, shaking her head. “I never figured you for something like this. Aren’t you happily married?”

  Suddenly I do feel the heat. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “It’s all right, Roland.” She gives me a knowing smile. “We’re all entitled to make fools of ourselves from time to time. But I have to tell you, you couldn’t have picked a less likely candidate. Cavallo’s straight as an arrow.” She leans closer. “And to be honest, a little uptight.”

  I peel away. “Thanks for the warning.”

  We rejoin Cavallo and the other detectives milling around the newly arrived vehicles.

  “What up?” Cavallo asks. “You need me to stay?”

  Wanda shakes her head. “You better get this one back to the office. I’m just here for a chat with the mother. If I can, I’m going to get her on TV.”

  “Good luck.”

  The drive back into town proves awkward. Maybe Cavallo overheard some of what Wanda said, or at least picked up on the body language. If I could think of anything to say, I would. But my old boss was right. I’ve made a big fool of myself. In addition to pursuing this long shot of a hunch, ditching a perfectly reasonable assignment from my lieutenant, I’ve been as transparent about this newfound attraction as a fifteen-year-old boy.

  I can sense a load of bad karma coming my way. To balance the accounts, I call Mitch Geiger again. I leave another message.

  The moment I put my phone away, it starts to ring. The caller id displays Lorenz’s name.

  “You’re not going to answer that?” Cavallo asks.

  “I better not. It could only mean trouble.”

  She sniffs. “Then I’m sorry for dragging you out here.”

  “What do you mean? I wanted to come. And listen, you can just give me the swab and I’ll take it from here. I have a contact at the ME’s office who can process it for me – ”

  “This isn’t your case,” she says quietly. “It’s mine. I’ll handle it from here.”

  I try arguing the point, but she’s solid, and not going to be worn down. Whatever she heard or inferred, whatever thought process my interaction with Wanda set off, Cavallo’s determined to have her way.

  “I can get it done fast,” I say.

  She laughs. “Believe me, nobody has more priority right now than we do.”

  “So you’ll follow up quick? I need the result as soon as possible.”

  She gives me a cloudy look, so cloudy I’m afraid to ask what’s going on behind it. My phone starts ringing again.

  I switch the ringer off.

  CHAPTER 7
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  The back wall of Mitch Geiger’s office features a network of stick-pinned mug shots and surveillance photos, some of them labeled and connected by lines but most marked with circles and question marks. Layered over them, frayed adhesive notes covered in ink. The display could be the work of an enterprising narcotics sergeant trying to map the local landscape. Then again, it could pass for evidence of a psychotic break, the kind of thing you find in the retrofitted garage of a perfectly average neighbor, along with the butcher knives and the stack of severed limbs.

  Either way, it sparks my interest in Geiger. Unfortunately, he’s not at home. Eight in the morning isn’t the best time to find the narcs up and at it.

  “You know where your sergeant is?” I ask a nearby stoner in a denim vest. If it weren’t for the badge around his neck, I’d assume he escaped from lockup. He scratches his head something furious, then smiles behind his brush-like mustache. Even if he did know, he might not share. In my jacket and tie I’m obviously Homicide. We might as well be wearing gang colors. When you work murder, you assume everybody who doesn’t wishes they could. We’re the first string, and murder is the big show. But a certain type of police sees Narcotics in the same light. There’s no accounting for taste.

  For good measure I give Geiger’s mobile number a ring before leaving. By now I could recite the man’s recorded greeting from memory. No point in leaving another message. I’ve done what I can on this one for now.

  En route to my desk I’m intercepted by a sullen twenty-year-old in tactical cargo pants and an hpd polo shirt, who waylays me just outside the elevator. He introduces himself as Edgar Castro from the crime lab, claiming to recognize me from the Morales scene, though I don’t remember him.

  “I’ve been trying to get through to Detective Lorenz,” he says, “but he’s not returning my calls.”

  As much as I sympathize after this morning’s fruitless errand, there’s a tribal imperative to observe. Crime-scene technicians can’t expect to have homicide detectives at their beck and call. The food chain runs in the reverse direction.

  “He’s got his hands full at the moment,” I say.

  He brandishes a shiny-covered report. “So can I leave this with you, then?”

  “You wanna tell me what it is?”

  So he starts explaining, turning the pages as he goes. “It’s actually pretty interesting. The victim in the hallway, the one sticking halfway out the bathroom? Hector Diaz – ?”

  “Little Hector,” I say, remembering what the girl across the street had called him.

  “Originally, we thought he must have been leaning through the door pretty far, because he was hit three times in the side. Right here.” He uses his fingertips to indicate holes above his left kidney and between the ribs. “But I had a hard time making sense of that. I mean, if somebody’s taking a shot at you, and you’re returning fire, do you turn your flank toward them like that? For a right-hander like him, that’s not the best use of cover.”

  I wonder if Castro’s ever been in a firefight, or for that matter any kind of fight. Making best use of cover, that’s a lesson they don’t teach on the streets.

  “So I went back to the scene,” he says, “and took a harder look. The bathroom window is busted open – that’s on the original report – but it looks like it happened a while back. No loose glass on the floor or anything like that. So nobody paid much mind. But when I went outside and started looking through the shrubs, I recovered a 9mm shell casing.”

  “Just the one?”

  “Maybe the shooter collected the rest of his brass.”

  “So you’re saying Little Hector was shot from outside?”

  He nods. “What must have happened is, he was holding them off from the bathroom door, so they sent someone outside to . . . you know, flank his position.” He makes a gun out of his fingers and jams it through an imaginary window. “That would make sense of the angles. He was crouched in the doorway, firing down the hall, when suddenly he starts taking fire from the window.”

  The report includes a three-dimensional computer rendering of the action, one stick figure outside the window with red lines streaming out of his stick pistol, intersecting the torso of another stick figure in the wire-frame doorway.

  “That’s a pretty sophisticated move, don’t you think? For gang-bangers? The guy with the shotgun must have kept Diaz engaged while they sent the other one outside. That’s fire and maneuver, isn’t it? Basic tactics.”

  The cynic in me wants to squash Castro’s enthusiasm, but the kid has a point. In a standoff like this, I’d expect the players to empty their clips and get out of there. Under fire, tunnel vision kicks in. Most people don’t think much beyond the immediate threat. So if this crew managed to improvise on the go, I’m impressed.

  Then again, they might have left a driver on the street, and maybe he noticed flashes in the bathroom window and went up to investigate, pumping a couple of rounds through the conveniently busted glass.

  “I’ll look this over,” I tell him, tucking the report under my arm. “Good work, Castro.”

  He grins ear to ear, making me wonder how long ago his braces came off.

  I catch up to Lorenz in Bascombe’s office, and all at once I realize I’ve been outplayed. The two of them sit listening to a third man, hardly acknowledging my arrival. Ginger-haired, with deeply furrowed cheeks and a handlebar mustache, I’m betting this is the elusive Mitch Geiger. His voice trails off when he notices me. Bascombe snaps his head my way, hawkishly predatory.

  “Just sit down and listen.” He points with a talon-like finger.

  I sink into a chair in the corner.

  “Should I recap?” Geiger asks in a scratchy rumble of a voice.

  After a nod from Bascombe, the narcotics sergeant repeats what I already know from the folder Lorenz passed along yesterday. There are rumors on the street about an independent crew hitting stash houses, disrupting the flow of product. Some of the gangs are using the hits as an excuse for drive-bys – not that they’ve ever needed one.

  “But it’s not about one gang putting pressure on another,” Geiger says. “I’ve been mapping it all out, trying to connect the various dots. This crew is no respecter of persons. They’re hitting everybody in Southwest, and not just the low-hanging fruit, either.”

  Lorenz leans forward, looking very serious. “Is there some kind of modus operandi with these guys? Something their jobs have in common?”

  “Well . . .” Geiger draws the word out, glancing at Bascombe.

  “Without examining the scenes,” Bascombe says, “that’s probably tough to determine. One question we need to ask, though, is whether they’ve killed anybody before now.”

  “From what I’m hearing out there, I’d have to say no. These sound like clean operations to me. In and out, just like that. Of course, assuming the same guys hit your scene, they might have run into unexpected trouble.”

  If Bascombe wants me to sit down and shut up, that’s probably what I should do. But I just can’t help jumping in. “There’s a problem with what I’m hearing. Morales wasn’t sitting on a stash. As far as I know, Morales handled the money, not the product.”

  “So maybe there was a brick of cash,” Lorenz says.

  “In that case, we should be hearing about it on the street.” I look to Geiger. “Is that the story you’re picking up out there?”

  He glances sideways, gives me half a shrug. “Right now, we’re not hearing much of anything.” The words come reluctantly, like he’s been warned in advance not to interact with me too much. The question is, was it Lorenz who gave the instructions or Bascombe? And did the orders include not returning my calls? Because this is feeling a lot like a setup.

  “This isn’t about a drug stash,” I say, “and it’s not about money. The girl on that bed, she’s what it’s about. She’s why they were there.”

  “March,” Bascombe snaps. “You wanna shut up a second?”

  “Somebody has to say it.”

  �
�Well, you lost your chance. This was your job to do, but you didn’t. So now I’m having to do it myself. Why don’t you just sit there looking clueless. It’s what you do best.”

  I should let it go, but I don’t. “Either we can sit here trying to make a square peg fit a round hole, or we can start looking for a match to our female victim’s blood sample. That’s the lead we should be following.”

  Lorenz glares at me, bloated with contempt, while Geiger takes a sudden interest in the carpet. Bascombe, though, he’s smiling, an unspoken thank-you on his face. He turns to the other two.

  “Will you gentlemen excuse us a moment?”

  They don’t have to be asked twice. Once they’re gone, Bascombe hops off the desk and pushes the door shut.

  “You can’t help shooting your mouth off.”

  “Hedges put me on the case,” I say. “I’m going to work it. The politics mean nothing to me. I don’t care if Lorenz likes me, or even if you do. There’s a lead to follow and I’m going to follow it, no matter what you drop on my lap. You have to respect that.”

  “Respect?” he says, circling around the desk, slipping into his chair. “Oh, I do respect it, March. Now, I happen to know that after we talked yesterday, you went straight to Missing Persons, ignoring everything I said. I had to ask myself, Why would he do something like that? And all I could come up with was this: He really must believe in that connection. Crazy as it sounds, you’re convinced the woman in that house is the girl from tv. You’re so sure, you don’t need any instructions from me, isn’t that right?”

  I shrug, not sure where he’s going with this.

  “So I give the whole situation some thought. And you know what I see? There’s an opportunity here for a win-win.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Nothing good, judging by all the teeth he’s showing. After shuffling through the paper on his desk, he slides a document my way. The first thing I see is the captain’s initials in the margin.

  “Wanda Mosser has requested more manpower for her task force, March. First thing this morning I discussed it with the boss, and together we decided you’d be a good fit for her team. You’ve already shown such an interest in the case. And clearly” – he gestures toward the chair recently vacated by Lorenz – “you still haven’t learned how to play well with others. You’re an anchor as far as your partner’s concerned, but Mosser will be happy to get an experienced homicide man such as yourself.”