by Rex Burns
Wager asked if the woman had been to Denver General to legally identify her husband, and she shook her head, lips tight as she stared at her twisting fingers.
“Horace’s brother went, Mr. Wager.” Mrs. Simpson’s long fingers stroked her daughter’s arm. “Chief Sullivan said it would be better if Hannah didn’t have to see him yet.”
He didn’t even want to say “Yes, ma’am” to that; instead, he shifted topics. “Were your husband and his brother close?”
Mrs. Simpson again answered for her daughter. “Not like when they were children. But the families see each other a lot.”
“May I have his name and address?”
She told him, and Wager went to the next item. “Did your husband have an appointment book, Mrs. Green? Something we might use to piece together his activities?”
“You sit here, honey, I’ll get it.” Mrs. Simpson’s low heels made muted thuds on the Turkish carpet as she headed for another room.
“Mrs. Green,” Wager asked, “can you tell me what kind of car your husband was driving?”
“The Lincoln.”
“A Lincoln Continental?”
“Yes.”
“What color?”
“Black.”
“Do you happen to know the license number?”
“Yes—it’s one of those vanity plates: HRG-1. Horace bought them. Mine’s HRG-2.”
“Do you know where his car might be now, ma’am?”
The car wasn’t something that had been on her mind. “No … no, I don’t.” Then, with a faint hope of understanding, “Is that why it happened? Someone wanted that car?”
Stubbs jotted the vehicle’s description to call into DMV as soon as they were in the patrol car.
“That’s one possibility we’ll look at,” said Wager. He tried to think of an easier way to ask the next question but couldn’t come up with one, and he wanted the answer while her mother was out of the room. “Did your husband have any enemies?”
“Enemies? Enough to … to kill him?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her dark eyes, round and brimming with tears, stared deeply into Wager’s, and she seemed to settle within herself as if something had been confirmed. “He was black.”
Wager thought that over. “You think he may have been killed by a racist?”
“That’s what that man on the phone said.”
“What man? When?”
“The one who called just after the mayor and the chief of police left.” The neck tightened again and the words came out slowly, like pebbles tossed one by one into an echoing bucket. “I didn’t even know what he was saying at first …”
“Now, Hannah—shhh, now, girl.” Mrs. Simpson handed Wager a small leather-bound appointment book and sat close beside her daughter.
“Exactly what did he say, Mrs. Green?”
“‘Uppity niggers.’ He said that’s what happened to uppity niggers.”
“Can you describe his voice?”
“No … I just listened. I didn’t really understand him until after he hung up.”
“Did he say anything else? Anything at all?”
She nodded, swallowing hard to be able to talk again. “He said the rest of us were going to get it, too.”
CHAPTER 3
THURSDAY, 12 JUNE, 2040 Hours
It was long after twenty-hundred hours, and Lieutenant Wolfard, like everyone else who crowded into Crimes Against Persons during the day, was long gone. The desks were empty of all but the nightshift and a few strays like Wager. Stubbs had hurriedly signed out to sprint over to the school for his son’s parents’ night. This one was especially important, he apologized again; it was new-student night for junior high—you know, introduction of students and parents to the rules and the buildings and teachers before the next school year started. Kenny was nervous enough about moving into the larger and older group, and he really wanted his father to meet his teachers.
“You’ve put in your time,” said Wager.
Stubbs glanced at the clock. “Ain’t that the truth.” He must have seen Wager’s thought, because he added, “If there’s something you really need me for, I can stay.”
“There’s always tomorrow,” Wager told him.
And there would be plenty to do, he told himself as the man nodded and hustled down the gray carpet to the location board. Before leaving the Greens’ home, they had warned the two officers on duty about the telephone call, and neither patrolman was happy to hear of it. “Holy shit, was it a bomb threat?”
“No. It was probably just your basic racist harassment call. But take a look around back every now and then.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
They hadn’t been able to report the threat to Wolfard, but Wager left a memo for him to see when he came in at eight. Then he wrote another for the Tactical Section of the Intelligence Unit. They were gone for the day, too; and Wager didn’t have much faith anything profitable would come of it. But that was departmental procedure: Threats to public officials and their families, agencies, court witnesses, were reported to Police Intelligence so they could see if any kind of pattern existed. It was probably a crank call. City Council members had to vote on a lot of issues and some of the votes stirred up a lot of feelings. Wager hoped it was a crank call, because if racism was a motive in Green’s killing, that brought even more pressure to solve the case quickly. Denver had a lot of prominent blacks, and the killer might not stop with just one.
When he finished logging and filing what little they had so far, Wager shoved his name across the location board to the OFF-DUTY slot. From one of the desks sitting under the empty, glaring fluorescence of the night watch came the familiar voice of Golding, who shared this tour with Max: “Orange … That’s right, orange-colored foods.” The man looked up from the telephone and waved good night as Wager passed, his hand a wink of light from a lodge ring. “It’s a social color—it carries Vitamin A and clears the mind and stimulates enthusiasm … No, red food brings nervousness, she said. Stick to pomegranates, sweet potatoes, cantaloupe, and you get the stimulation without the nervousness.”
Maybe, Wager thought, he should start munching carrots, because he could feel the letdown that came when the adrenalin began to ebb and coffee tasted like hot, sour water. It was that time of day when the body and even the emotions sagged, but the mind—ill-governed from weariness—was perversely active, stirring up old memories and re-creating past mistakes that you tried to keep buried under the day’s tumult of business. As the elevator’s musty quiet carried him down into the still-mustier and dimly lit garage, Wager kept his mind on the image of food even though his stomach hadn’t generated the idea. He could use a little enthusiasm. In fact, he could use a little nervousness. But most of all, he could simply use something to focus his thoughts on besides Jo.
Nosing the black Trans-Am through the thinning traffic on Thirteenth, he pulled into Speer Boulevard, which straddled the shallow sand of Cherry Creek. The city had added bike paths down below the concrete abutments that walled the stream bed, and in the cool of the long evening, steady columns of bright-shirted bikers wove along the wide path. Some pumped hard to get the day’s workout, others pedaled slowly to feel the breeze of their motion; both groups managed to keep pace with Wager as traffic lights periodically halted the flow of automobile traffic, while the bikes glided under the bridges. Slowing, Wager turned into the parking lot that served Racine’s, a restaurant he had begun to like, not only because of its food and prices but also because the waitresses left you alone. Mostly he liked it because he had not come here often with Jo when she was alive. He’d found himself swinging wide of those places that held a lot of sore memories, and that meant a lot of once-favorite spots that he had enjoyed with her. He knew damned well he wouldn’t enjoy them now; it was better just to leave them alone.
He had a glass of wine with dinner, a habit he’d picked up when he and Jo went out to eat or had a fancy meal at her place; and, as usual, the first sip was a si
lent toast to the memory sitting in the empty chair across the table. Followed by an equally silent snort at his sentimentality. The dead were dead, despite that little superstition or hope that returned to him in the long nights when he would think that maybe their spirits still lived as long as someone remembered them. A lot of people thought that, Wager knew; the cemeteries were full of photographs and fresh flowers and visitors on quiet Sunday afternoons. Maybe it was good that the river had never surrendered her body; that way her marker was a place in the mind rather than a forgotten slab under a cypress. No, it wasn’t better; at least with a grave, memory had a place to rest. Irrationally, her mother kept believing that she would return—that she had not drowned but suffered amnesia, and someday the doorbell would ring and there would stand Jo. But the dead were dead and no one came back, not even to help fill that breath-stifling emptiness that spread like black cancer in the middle of his chest when a picture of her smile or an echo of something she’d said crossed his mind. The dead were dead. When you realized that, you gradually came to believe it, and you could stop pretending to yourself that the world you lived in was only a temporary state between two realities: when she had been alive, and when she would return.
He paid the bill and slowly finished the last of a second glass of wine.
That was a lesson Mrs. Green was learning; it was a lesson most of us learned sooner or later, Wager was discovering. The dead were dead.
Sitting in the Trans-Am in the dim parking lot, Wager thought about that death to hold off thinking about the other: Mrs. Green’s shock and sadness seemed genuine. Even if she had not told the full truth about the other times her husband stayed out all night, Wager would swear from his own knowledge of it that her grief was real. Slowly, he let the car’s steering wheel take him where it would as his mind focused on the death of Councilman Green. Work was Wager’s therapy, Golding had said once; and maybe the man was right. Even Golding could be right about something once in a while.
Wager wasn’t surprised to find that the car, of its own, gradually worked its way toward nearby Denver General and the morgue, and he realized that somewhere in the back of his mind he had been counting the hours until the autopsy would be completed.
“Putting in overtime, Wager? Or do you have night duty?”
Doc Hefley, the department’s forensic pathologist, peeled off the disposable rubber gloves and dropped them in the bag to be washed. That was another of the economies the hospital practiced now, reuse of items once thrown away. Except for two areas, a grinning Hefley told Wager: gynecology and proctology; their gloves were not reused.
He tossed the sheet half-over the cadaver stretched under the white lights of the dissecting room. It was a middle-aged Caucasian woman with no visible scars and an oddly featureless face that seemed to have a beard. Then Wager saw that the beard was really the woman’s hair and her features were muffled beneath the glistening underside of a scalp peeled down off the skull and laid out of the way across her face.
“It’s that V.I.P. killing. The one the chiefs interested in.”
“Tell me he’s interested. He pulled me out of private practice this afternoon to work on it.”
“Is the path report done yet?”
Hefley went to a tall filing cabinet in that part of the room partitioned off for a small office. “It may not be typed up. I told them to rush it, but you know how that goes.”
“I know.”
The doctor ran a finger along the thick documents and grunted happily. “What do you know—it’s here.” He handed Wager the heavy sheaf of forms and sprinkled talcum on his hands before pulling on another set of gloves. “Take it out to the lounge to read before you start asking questions, OK? I’ve got four of the damned things to cut up tonight and no time to waste being sociable.”
Wager said OK, and Hefley strode quickly back to the cadaver to speak into the foot-operated recorder whose microphone dangled over the body. His voice was a lone, clinical benediction as Wager closed the door behind him. Then the small saw used to slice through the skull began its shrill whine.
A lot of the information in the pages of the pathology report wasn’t any use at all to him; he scanned through the physical description of the dead man for any notations of something out of the ordinary. But there was nothing—Green had been generally healthy, with no indications of substance abuse or of any evident medical abnormalities in his organs. Death, the doc had concluded, was caused by a single, large-caliber bullet to the back of the head. The damage to the brain was detailed as the words followed the path of the bullet, which had gradually expanded from impact until it erupted out of the victim’s face. No fragments of the bullet were found in the skull. The approximate time of death, and Wager started making notes in his own little green book, was between 9 P.M. and 2 A.M., and that fit with the witness seeing a car parked there around eleven. The stomach contents indicated that he had eaten chicken, peas, and rice some two to four hours before death—between 5 and 10 P.M., Wager figured. Coffee and a trace of alcohol were found, but no other abusive substances, including tobacco. The man’s musculature … Wager glanced over the next few pages, which dealt with body fluids and internal organs in detail, and noted that all were checked as normal. He paused to study the section on lividity. The blood patterns indicated that the man might have been moved after he died, but no definitive analysis could be made. The blood had settled in the corpse’s low parts as the body had lain on the ground, but there were indications of a secondary lividity of mild intensity. The doc offered no conclusions as to what all that might mean; all he did was list the facts and let them speak. But Wager knew the man would have some ideas about it.
The sheet was back in place, but the pungent sting of newly sawed bone lingered in the air. Hefley, sipping a cup of coffee at the small desk, put down a ballpoint pen and leaned wearily against the squeak of his chair back. “Well?”
“Was he moved or wasn’t he?”
“Good question. I think he was, but it could be argued the other way, too: that the secondary lividity was the result of the body shifting as rigor set in.”
Wager gave back the thick report. An orderly, his tennis shoes making wet, squelching noises on the waxed concrete floor, trundled the gurney and its load off the silver wink of a freshly hosed floor drain and out through wide doors. “Could somebody have put him back in the same position he died in?”
“If he was moved, then, yeah, I’d say that’s what had to happen. It would have been natural for the body to fall forward—it was shot from behind. If he was moved, he was dumped in pretty much the same position he fell in initially.”
“Why was he twisted up like that?”
“I don’t know.” Hefley thought a moment, gazing at the brown tiles of the wall. “For some reason, he didn’t stretch out when he fell. Wasn’t he found in an open field?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he should have stretched out—the bullet killed him instantly, and his body should have kicked itself straight.”
“Could he have been shot in a cramped place, like a car, and then stiffened before he was dumped?”
“If he was dumped, Wager—if. And no, not necessarily. In fact, I don’t think so, but I’m only guessing. My guess is that he was either shot there and stiffened in that odd position, or—if he was moved—he was killed very shortly before he was dumped. The rigor was intact in all the toes and fingers. That’s consistent with the body not being moved after rigor set in.”
“Why’s that?”
“Technically? Technically, because rigor depends on the pH of the muscle and its glycogen reserve at the time of death. Joints with less muscle mass set up more rapidly than heavily muscled joints. Fingers, toes, jaws set up before elbows or shoulders, and movement tends to break their rigor. For the rigor to remain intact in those small joints, the body would have to be moved shortly after death, before they set. The livor mortis could support this: not long enough for the blood to settle in any secondary cavities
or uncompressed low spots. There are those traces of secondary lividity. We can’t be certain of movement, but if so, the move was within an hour of death, and then the blood drained into the primary locations. But like I say, we can’t be certain.”
Doctors always moved from “I” to “we” when they weren’t sure. “If he wasn’t moved, how do you account for the traces of secondary lividity?”
Hefley’s clean, short fingernails rasped in the bristles of his jaw. “Like I said, the body could have settled as it stiffened. Temperature, that could have some effect on lividity. There are half a dozen reasons why we can’t say from this lividity alone whether the body was moved.”
“What about its position? Would the photographs tell you something?”
“Maybe. Bring them by—let me take a look.”
“OK. But say the body was moved, it was within an hour after the killing? You’re sure?”
“Less than an hour, is my guess. Maybe less than thirty minutes. But I won’t go into court with that.” He thought a moment and then nodded. “I’d say it wasn’t more than forty-five minutes, max, from the first position of death to where you found him. Any longer than that and the blood patterns would be more definitive. And the rigor in some of the small joints would probably be broken by handling.”
“None of the neighbors heard shots last night.”
“Well, that fits the possibility of movement, doesn’t it? But all I can do is give you the medical facts from the corpse. You’re supposed to make them fit with the other facts, right?”
“What about the size of the bullet?”
“Again, that’s just a guess because the skull shattered at the point of impact. A .44 or .45. Anything smaller wouldn’t be likely to exit the skull in a single piece.”
“Magnum?”
“Possibly. I can’t say. It was close-range—you saw that note about powder burns on the scalp?”
“I saw it.” Wager asked, “You think the round hit him with full velocity?”
