River of Glass

by Jaden Terrell

  “No, but now that I’m here, the question has crossed my mind.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Or was, until you stopped by.”

  “I’ll try not to take that personally.”

  “It’s not personal. You know what they say about shooting the messenger. You have your bad news face on.”

  “I have a bad news face?”

  “It’s like your regular face, but squintier.”

  He let that pass. “Did you go to the office today?”

  “What are you, the office police?” I tugged the cinch loose and lifted the saddle and pad from Crockett’s back. There was a saddle-shaped patch of sweat beneath. I ran my hand over it, checking for tenderness, and found none. “I did a skip trace and a couple of background checks. Nothing I couldn’t do from here.”

  He cocked his head. Gave me a narrow look. “Skip traces. Background checks.”

  “It’s honest work. Pays well. Plus, I can do it from my couch.”

  “You’re wasted on it.” He jammed his hands into his pockets, pretended to study Crockett’s saddle. “Jared, what happened to Josh wasn’t your fault.”

  A vision of my nephew lying limp in a tub of bloody water shot a sharp pain through my temples. If I’d done things differently . . .

  “I know that,” I said. “But you didn’t come here to tell me that, either.”

  He looked pained, but let it pass. “A situation’s come up. Malone asked me to come by and ask you to take a look at a crime scene. A courtesy.”

  “From me to her, or from her to me?”

  “From the department to you,” he said. “And vice versa.”

  “Paul has a Cub Scout meeting tonight.” I slung the saddle over the saddle rack and looked pointedly at my watch. “I’m just about to go pick him up.”

  Frank shook his head, his lips pressed tight.

  “Aw, shit,” I said.

  He held out a clear plastic evidence bag, and in it was a sepia-toned Vietnam-era photo of a young guy in fatigues, a small Asian girl on his shoulders and an infant in his arms. The photo was creased, as if it had been crumpled in a fist, and there was a rust-colored stain on one corner. He flipped it over, and I saw another stain, like a bloody thumbprint, across the back. Scrawled in pencil beneath the thumbprint was a phone number and address. My office number and address.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  “You know who this is?”

  “Of course I know who it is.” The crooked grin, the shock of buckskin-colored hair, the slant of the jaw . . . I saw them every day in the photo on my bedside table, saw similar features in the mirror every morning. So like him, my mother used to say, and trace my cheekbones with her thumbs.

  I reached for the bag, as if a closer look might prove me wrong, and after a moment he handed it over.

  “You know the routine,” he said. “Don’t open it.”

  I knew the routine. I looked at the picture, smoothing the plastic over the photo with my thumb to reduce the glare. “Where’d you get it?”

  “We got a call, one of those Strip-o-Gram girls works downstairs in your building.”

  I worked out of an office on the top floor of a former boarding house. One of the downstairs offices belonged to a grandmotherly type who ran a call-out strip business. Bachelor parties. Birthday parties. Boys’ nights at the office.

  “They prefer to be called women now,” I said, because I

  couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Or so I’m told.”

  “This one looked like a girl,” Frank said. “Eighteen, nineteen, maybe. But then, they all look young to me these days. She went out to toss a trash bag in the dumpster—guy who works on the second floor carried it out for her—and when they opened it, there was a dead woman inside. Asian.” He nodded toward the photo in the evidence bag. “That was in her hand.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “And yet, there it is. So what we need to know—what I came here to ask you—is why this dead girl in your dumpster had a picture of your father in her hand?”

  I studied the photograph. It was my dad, all right. Late teens, early twenties. Tall and rangy, like my brother and me. A few years younger than in the photo I had on my dresser. In that one, he was standing on our front porch, staring out toward a coming storm. In this one, he stood in front of a reed shack with a sloped roof and stilts that raised it a few feet off the ground. An attractive Asian woman in a white blouse and a long dark skirt leaned against him, one hand on his forearm, the forefinger of the other hand clutched in the baby’s fist.

  “Maybe it’s an orphanage,” I said, a queasy feeling settling in my stomach. “Didn’t a lot of soldiers volunteer in orphanages?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I’ve never seen this picture, and I don’t know your dead girl.”

  “How do you know?”

  Crockett nuzzled my shirt pocket, and I reached inside it for a peppermint. “I don’t know any Asian women. Not to speak of.”

  “Could be she’s one of the kids in the photo. One of those . . . orphans.”

  “I wouldn’t know. So why are you here?” I asked. “Why you?”

  “Dispatch gets a call. Dead body in a dumpster. A couple of uniforms go in, check it out. One of ’em sees the photo and dials the number on the back. Gets your office. Calls Malone, who sends Harry to the crime scene and calls me in to—”

  “You and Harry are back on homicide?”

  A new commissioner had broken up the Homicide and Murder Squads, leaving only a small core of cold-case investigators in the downtown detectives’ offices. The rest, he’d spread out among the precincts with the idea that generalization was preferable to specialization. It might have sounded good on paper but had sent the homicide solve rate plummeting. Homicide investigation requires some special skills, not the least of which are the abilities to compartmentalize and detach.

  Frank said, “The Squad’s still defunct, but most of the precinct commanders are starting to wise up and let us do what we do best. Unofficially, at least. Anyway, we get there and I take a look at the photo and whattaya know, it’s a picture of your dad.”

  He’d have recognized it. For the seven years we were partners, I’d kept a picture of my father on my desk to remind me of the kind of cop I’d hoped to be.

  “So Malone sends you to sweet talk me into coming in. I told you, I have a Scout meeting. Paul’s getting a progress bead tonight. One more, and he gets his Wolf patch.”

  “Jared,” Frank said. “The scene’s being processed even as we speak. You know how important those first forty-eight hours are. We need you to come down there and take a look at this girl.”

  “I’ve been down this road before, Frank. Am I a suspect?”

  “Not in my book.”

  “In anybody’s book?”

  He shrugged. “Dead girl found in a dumpster behind your office with a picture of your father and your phone number in her hand. Somebody’s gonna think you’re a suspect.”

  I cued Crockett to step back, and when he did, I fed him the mint from the flat of my palm. I wanted to feel angry or indignant, but all I could manage was tired. After a minute, I sighed and said, “Guess I’d better call Maria and tell her I’ll be late to the meeting.”

  Frank said, “There’ll be other meetings.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  He didn’t answer, just nodded and put his hands back in his pockets, waiting. I sighed again and said, “Am I riding with you, or can I take the truck?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  He wasn’t treating me like a suspect, which made me feel marginally better. I put Crockett into the paddock with Tex, stepped inside to tell Jay I was going out, then climbed into my black and silver Silverado. Frank slid into the Crown Vic.

  As I followed him down the driveway and past the mailbox, I heard the distant rumble of thunder.

  2

  Traffic was light on I-40, so I dialed my ex-wife, Maria, on the way.r />
  “Hey, Cowboy,” she said before I had a chance to speak. Once, I might have called it ESP, but now it seemed more likely to be caller ID. The warmth in her voice made me smile and ache at the same time. “How’s everything?”

  “There’s a situation.”

  I told her about the dead woman in the dumpster, and when she said, “Who is she?” her voice had lost some of its warmth.

  “I don’t know. That’s what they’re hoping to find out.”

  “Paulie’s been looking forward to this all week. He’s been wearing his uniform since he got home from school.”

  “I’m sorry. Can D.W. take him?”

  “Of course.”

  There was no anger in her voice, only resignation. Maria understood about the job. She hadn’t been able to live with it, but she understood. I didn’t like the way she said it, though, the unspoken message behind the words: D.W. would never miss his son’s Scout meeting because of a dead woman in a dumpster.

  Of course he wouldn’t. D.W. was safe. Dependable. Duller than dishwater. That was why she’d married him.

  A baby’s cry broke the silence on the other end. With a heavy sigh, Maria said, “I’ve got to get Sofia. Come when you can. I’ll explain to Paul.”

  I hung up and eased into the middle lane behind the Vic. By the time the Nashville skyline with its two-pronged AT&T “Batman Building” came into view, the back of my neck had begun to throb. I tailed Frank to the Broadway off-ramp and swung left toward West End and Vanderbilt University. A few blocks later, we turned onto a narrow street jammed with unmarked police cars and blue-and-whites with their lights flashing. At the center of the chaos was the three-story, pseudo-Victorian building I worked out of. A Channel Three news van parked at the edge of the hubbub signaled the presence of news anchor Ashleigh Arneau.

  The throbbing in my neck spread to my shoulder blades.

  In high school, she’d been Ashley Arnold—head cheerleader, drama diva, star reporter for the Golden Bear Claw student newspaper, and a force of burgeoning sexuality that drew in guys like me and turned them to ash. We hadn’t dated then, but a few months after my divorce, Ashleigh and I had a brief but tempestuous relationship. Heated arguments and hotter sex that ended when I was fired for an inexplicable leak of confidential information to the press. I gave Ashleigh the bad news from my cell phone and came home to find her removing the bug she’d planted in the receiver of my home phone. Suddenly things got a lot more explicable.

  Scowling, I parked across the street from the van, then joined Frank on the sidewalk, where a knot of spectators jostled against the crime scene tape. A harried-looking uniform waved them back from the line. He looked fresh out of the academy.

  Ashleigh stood at the front of the crowd, craning her neck to see past the emergency vehicles and personnel. She wore black slacks and a raspberry blazer that reminded me of an ice cream sundae. In the afternoon light, her skin looked like ivory.

  Just behind her stood a skinny cameraman and a pretty young woman in a short skirt. Platinum hair swept to one side. Red lips parted in an eager smile. Blue eyes riveted on Ashleigh like a barn cat eyeing a mouse.

  Interesting.

  Ashleigh tucked a stray lock of chestnut hair behind her ear and shoved her microphone into the young officer’s face. Asked him a question I couldn’t hear. He frowned, and she shook her hair back and flashed him a smile. A goofy grin spread across his face.

  Poor guy. He didn’t stand a chance.

  Ashleigh’s cameraman pressed a button on the side of an oversized camera that looked too heavy for his shoulders.

  I nodded toward the uniform and said to Frank, “You better go rescue that guy. Unless you want to see all the gory details on the five o’clock news.”

  Frank groaned and changed trajectory. He plucked the microphone out of Ashleigh’s hand and glared at the kid in uniform.

  “No comment,” Frank said into the mic, and handed it back to her.

  Ashleigh started to protest. Then she spotted me behind Frank, and her eyes brightened.

  “Detective Campanella. Is Mr. McKean a suspect?”

  Frank ground his teeth together and said, “Mr. McKean is a consultant.”

  “Consultant? Hasn’t he been—”

  “No comment means no comment.”

  The smile slipped off Ashleigh’s face. She glanced over her shoulder at the blonde woman, whose eager grin had turned smug.

  Frank lifted the tape, and I ducked under it. Ashleigh’s voice rose above the hubbub. “We’ve just seen private investigator Jared McKean, whose office seems to be at the epicenter of the activity.”

  Epicenter. For Christ’s sake.

  Frank said, “That woman ought to come with a warning label,” and pointed me toward the office.

  A forensic tech squatted on the entrance walk and snapped a photo of something on the concrete while two more techs stretched a plastic tarp above her head and affixed it to metal poles, creating a makeshift tent. A drop of rain splatted against the plastic, and the woman swore softly and snapped another picture.

  We skirted the photographer, and I knew why Frank had asked me if I’d been to the office. If I’d come in, I’d have seen the drunken line of small bloody footprints that led toward the front steps and ended abruptly in a cluster of smears and droplets. I’d have known they meant bad news.

  On the front porch, an earnest-looking detective interviewed a young blonde woman in jeans and a clingy white tank top. One of the Strip-o-Gram girls. Bridget something-or-other. Probably the one who’d found the body. She fidgeted with her necklace. Shifted her weight. Dropped her hands and toyed with the string of plastic shamrocks someone had wrapped around the porch railings. Yesterday, they’d looked kitschy and hip. Today, they just looked cheap.

  “Around back,” Frank said, and I followed him along the side of the building and into the alley behind, where more tarps flapped in the breeze and a team of forensic detectives worked the scene with a sense of urgency heightened by the threat of rain.

  Frank nodded toward one of the techs, who handed me a paper jumpsuit, cap, and booties sealed in a clear plastic bag. We suited up and went to join Harry beside the dumpster.

  The dumpster had a sliding door on each side, and Harry Kominsky stood at the near opening, pointing a Nikon digital camera inside. On the other side, a forensic technician in a paper suit bagged a soiled disposable diaper and labeled it with a Sharpie, while another photographed a tattered leather shoe with a ruler beside it for comparison.

  Measure, photograph, bag, label . . . Processing a crime scene is tedious work. It’s done in layers, each item and its relative position documented in such a way that, years from now, an investigator could take the stand and tell how many quarters had been in the victim’s purse. If the girl had been alive, it would have been different. Saving her would have trumped preserving evidence. But she wasn’t alive, and they could take their time with the scene.

  The technicians looked grim, and I couldn’t blame them. I was none too happy myself, and I wasn’t the one who was going to have to tag and bag a half ton of garbage.

  Harry glanced up as Frank and I rounded the corner. “You gonna ID our victim for us?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “But move over and I’ll take a look.”

  Harry edged to his left, and I stepped into the space he’d left behind. The stench of sour milk, soiled diapers, and rotting vegetation rolled over me. No smell of decomposing flesh. It was too soon and the weather too cool for that.

  I realized I was already detaching, preparing myself for what was in the dumpster.

  “He killed her quick at the end,” Harry said. “But before he did . . .” He shook his head.

  I put my hands in my pockets and leaned forward to look inside, feeling Frank’s solid presence at my back.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  She was a small woman. Thin legs. Small breasts. Her collarbone stood out against her skin as if she’d been starved. She lay cur
led on her side in a pile of bulging garbage bags, the dark plastic a stark contrast to her magenta hair and the stained white slip that had ridden up her thighs. Bruises in various stages of healing patterned her body in purple, yellow, and a sickly green.

  Looking closely, I could distinguish flat facial features and epicanthal folds over the eyes, but the face was too swollen to tell how old she was or how pretty she might have been. Young, I thought, from the smoothness of her skin. Something past puberty, not more than twenty. Too young to be either of the children in the photo Frank had shown me.

  “Poor kid,” I said.

  Frank nodded. “He wanted to hurt her. But he didn’t want her permanently disfigured. Looks like he’s been at her for at least a month or so.”

  Her eyes were open and had begun to flatten as the fluids in them dried out. Fresh bruises at her throat and small broken capillaries in her eyes said she’d been strangled, though it was too early to say if that was what had killed her. Her head lolled at an impossible angle, a tell-tale bulge at the throat where her killer had broken her hyoid bone.

  One hand lay open, fingers curled toward a bloody palm. Probably the hand that had held the photograph. The other arm was twisted behind her, where it must have fallen when her killer pushed her in.

  Horrible way to die. But then, the list of good ways to die was a short one.

  Harry said, “Look at her feet.”

  They were bare, crusted with dirt and blood, bits of glass and gravel embedded in the flesh. “She walked a long way,” I said. “But from where? And why come here?”

  “You don’t know her?” Frank said.

  “I don’t know her. When did she die?”

  “Sometime between one and five this morning. Much earlier, and the rain would’ve washed away the footprints. Any later, and someone would’ve seen him dump her.” He nodded to a small clapboard house across the alley. “The woman who lives there came out at five to eat breakfast on the back patio. Not much chance to dump the body after that.”

  I nodded. The neighborhood wasn’t exactly a bustling metropolis, but with Vanderbilt’s campus and West End Avenue just a few blocks away, we got our share of joggers and other foot traffic.