by Claire Booth
Raker nodded and pulled on latex gloves just as the guys arrived with the gurney and the body bag. They both stepped into the room and moved to a corner as the men maneuvered around the victim. After shifting positions several times, they finally got him up off the floor without stepping in anything. The older paramedic started to zip the bag closed.
‘Wait,’ Hank and Raker said at the same time. Hank bit back the whole list of instructions he wanted to give. Taking a backseat on this was going to be harder than he’d thought.
Raker didn’t notice his gritted teeth. He started going through the pockets, finding a handful of change in the front right pocket of the man’s jeans and a wad of tissues in the left. Hank quickly put on gloves and grabbed a couple of evidence bags from Handlesman. He held them open and Raker dropped the items in.
Raker gently shifted the body to reach the back. He sighed.
‘No wallet. There’s a wear pattern on the right pocket, but no wallet. Damn.’
That sure would have made things easier. Hank lowered the evidence bag he’d been holding out hopefully. Raker rolled the body a little farther and slid his hand into the last pocket. And froze.
‘What do we have here?’
Hank, standing on the other side of the gurney, couldn’t see. He peered over the body and Raker gestured for him to hold the victim. ‘It’s soaked in blood. I need both hands.’
He carefully pulled apart the sticky denim and wiggled free a piece of paper. Or rather, a folded brochure. They both stared at it. Raker held it as far away as possible.
‘Shit. I don’t have my glasses. Can you read it?’
Hank took the tacky, almost black, paper and turned it over. It was a trifold for the Gunner Spectacular at the Classic Country Song Theater on Branson’s Strip. Hank had never heard of the show. Raker said he hadn’t either.
‘Yo. Can we take him now? Before he gets even riper?’ the younger paramedic said. Raker nodded. Hank slipped the brochure into the evidence bag without unfolding it. He didn’t want to rip it.
Raker sighed again. BPD had great evidence techs, he said, but they weren’t exactly suited to the delicate work of separating soaked sheets of paper to see if anything had been written on them.
‘I’ve got just the person,’ Hank said. ‘I’ll send her over to your department so we don’t affect the chain of custody.’
‘Great,’ Raker said, just as Handlesman beckoned them from over in the far corner. He had straightened out and unzipped the sleeping bag. Now he held up a shoe.
‘This was at the bottom.’
A grungy black Nike with grey laces. Men’s size 10. Both Hank and Raker swung toward the departing gurney. Handlesman laughed.
‘No. That guy had both shoes on. Converse. I don’t know what size, though. Could be the same as this one.’
Hank, who was getting quite good at evidence-bag holding, opened one for Handlesman. The tech dropped in the shoe. ‘That’s all I got. There’s nothing else in the sleeping bag. I’ll have it tested and everything, but … that’s it for you guys right now.’
They walked back into the living room to find Sheila telling another technician that yes, he did indeed need to book the McNugget into evidence.
‘We don’t usually analyze old food,’ he snapped at her.
‘When it’s the only thing in the apartment, you do,’ she said evenly. ‘Oh, hey, Dale.’
‘Chief Deputy Turley,’ Raker said and moved forward to shake her hand. He didn’t even need to look at the BPD tech, Hank noticed, and the man got the point. He immediately started bagging the fast food and then moved well out of the way. Hank was starting to like Raker.
He and Sheila asked after each other’s families and then Sheila said the paramedics had mentioned the dead man had no wallet.
‘I miss the days when Branson was small enough that I’d know the dead guy,’ Raker said. ‘Or if I didn’t, someone else on the force did. And if that wasn’t the case, then we’d know he was from out of town. Now, there’re just too many damn people around.
‘Did you know that our population is more than four times bigger than it was when I was a kid?’ he said. Hank had not known that. Sheila nodded.
‘Yep, but we’re still only up to about eleven thousand people,’ she said. ‘So we’re not exactly a metropolis yet, Dale.’
He grinned. ‘That’s still too many for a small-town boy like me.’
The grumbling McNugget tech walked outside, and Dale quickly moved to shut the door behind him.
‘OK, let’s get down to brass tacks here. We all need to get moving on this thing.’
Hank nodded emphatically. ‘I think—’
Sheila stepped on his foot.
‘Go on, Dale,’ she said.
‘I’m going to go talk to the folks at the Gunner Spectacular, whatever the hell that is. And get on to running the dead guy’s prints. And keep tabs on the autopsy.’
Hank opened his mouth again, and Sheila ground her heel into his foot again. Dale kept talking.
‘How about you, Hank, take the Johnny Gall angle, since he’s one of your vics. Do you have the personnel to canvass this complex? See if anyone else can ID him as the guy who lived here?’
Hank shot Sheila a quick look before daring to answer.
‘Yes. We do. Absolutely. I’m also going to talk with the high school. All of the other crash victims were students. I want to know if Johnny Gall was, too. And see if anyone recognizes the John Doe.’
Both men froze. Sheila chuckled.
‘I know, you forgot to take even a preliminary mug shot of the dead guy.’ She held up her phone. ‘Shall I forward it to you?’
TWELVE
‘I wasn’t going to get all pushy, you know.’
They reached the bottom of the building’s staircase, and Sheila put her hands on her hips. She was tired and hungry and not in the mood for finessing her boss right now.
‘What you think is low-key isn’t necessarily what other people think when you start talking,’ she said. ‘You can come across as … emphatic. Which occasionally comes across as pushy.’
He sighed.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘Dale is a really decent guy, and a good cop. He’s less territorial than most, but he’s still a cop, and you are on his turf. So put a lid on your everything-interesting-belongs-to-me fixation, and play nicely with others. I know you can do it.’
She paused. ‘Besides, I plan on tagging along for his theater interviews.’
A grin split Hank’s face. Then he frowned.
‘Wait, so you get to be pushy?’
‘Dale and I’ve known each other for twenty years. I asked, nicely, if I could just observe.’
‘You never “just observe” anything,’ he said.
‘True,’ she laughed. ‘And he knows that, too. But it’s all about how you word it. And I told him I’d buy him breakfast.’
Hank snorted in response and then turned as DeRosia called across the parking lot and waved him over. The two began talking by her Highway Patrol truck as Sam appeared from the other direction. While Sheila waited for him to reach her, she watched the Highway Patrol sergeant, who was pointing out things in what looked like a sheaf of notes. Hank said something and her laugh carried across the pavement. She shook his hand and climbed into her truck. She was rolling down the window to say something else when Sam stepped in front of Sheila.
‘You really should warn a person before you text them a mug shot of a corpse,’ he said.
‘Ah. I probably should’ve,’ she said. ‘But now you’ve got it, so you can show it when you canvass this place.’
‘I’m the one who has to do the canvassing?’
She knew he was still trying to get back on an even keel after Ted Pimental’s shooting, which the poor kid still blamed himself for. And she knew something like that took a good amount of time. But she wished he would hurry up with it. She wanted her old Sammy back. The one who jumped enthusiastically at any opportunity. The one who was alwa
ys trying to improve his policing skills. The one who would tease her – when no one else dared – about her old-fashioned white board work schedule, or her penchant for comic books, or her sometimes passing off take-out as her own cooking. She missed him.
‘Why do I have to do it?’
Also, she hated the shaved head.
‘Because you’re holding a printout of the tenant list in your hands,’ she said, trying to stay calm. ‘And because you’re good at it. And because canvassing is one of the bedrocks of investigation.’
He rolled his eyes. She put her hands on her hips.
‘I can keep lecturing, or you can get started,’ she said.
His indignant shoulders slumped, and he slouched away. She shook her head. She didn’t know how much longer her patience would hold.
It was easy to track down Bill Narwall since he was the only one in the phone book. It had been considerably harder to get the principal to come to the high school on a Sunday and open up the enrollment records. So Hank called Marv Sedstone, his favorite Branson County Circuit Court judge, who was only too happy to do a little work that early on a weekend morning. He met Hank on the doorstep of his colonial two-story, pen in hand.
‘Son, after what you told me, you can absolutely get into those school records. If nothing else, you got to notify next of kin. Plus,’ he said, signing the search warrant with a flourish, ‘it’s just damn weird. Go figure out what’s going on.’
Hank smiled and shook his hand. Sedstone patted him on the arm.
‘Too bad your mother-in-law isn’t still alive. She was one-of-a-kind, Marian was. That high school never ran better than when she was principal.’
Hank, who had heard this from many people since Marian’s death a year and a half ago, thanked the judge. Sedstone smiled.
‘She wouldn’t have given you trouble about seeing those records.’
‘Well,’ Hank said, ‘to be fair, she would’ve needed a warrant, too, before letting me look at them.’
‘Yeah, but she would’ve been charming about it.’ He winked. ‘So, Godspeed, son. Go get what you need.’
As he drove out to Branson Valley High in Sam’s Bronco, the vise that had been around his chest since the crash started to loosen. Not much, but enough to breathe semi-normally again. Because he was doing something. Investigating. Not standing on the sidelines, forced to watch impotently while other people handled what he was responsible for. Because if he’d taken more time, if he’d run every passenger’s DL, he would’ve known that there was no record of a Johnny Gall. And he would’ve brought whoever-it-was in for questioning and called everyone else’s parents. And they’d all still be alive. Not dead in some suspicious car crash. He couldn’t fix that, but he could damn well figure out what was going on with the unknown teen and the dead guy in his apartment.
On the seat next to him, he had color printouts of the pictures Sheila had taken of Johnny Gall’s driver’s license photo and John Doe’s face. And the warrant, which was the first thing he handed Narwall when he climbed out of the Ford in the empty school parking lot.
The principal was a small, nebbishy man he’d met in February when he interviewed students about the murder of Mandy Bryson, a former track star who’d been found strangled on the Branson Beauty showboat. At that point, the guy’d been fairly timid and let the office staff take the lead in dealing with Hank. Now, though, he seemed to relish his authority. He stood stiffly and looked down his nose at the paperwork.
‘I still don’t see why this couldn’t wait until tomorrow,’ he said after letting them into the deserted office.
‘Johnny Gall is dead,’ Hank said, exasperated. ‘All of the students whose names I gave you are dead. There is no waiting in a death investigation. We need everything immediately.’
‘Wait. What?’ He sank into a chair. ‘When you called, you said you were investigating this one kid. Not that he was dead.’
Hank was pretty damn sure he’d mentioned that six kids had died, seeing as it was all he could think about. What, had Narwall been too busy reading the Sunday comics to pay attention? The guy started wringing his hands. Then he looked at Hank, whose glare sent him scurrying for the computer.
Johnny Gall was a senior. He’d enrolled in the school district on the first of August, which meant he been there since the beginning of the school year later that month. His school photo showed the same thin-faced, tousle-haired teen Hank had met last night. And all of the information – birth date, address – was the same as that listed on his now-bloodied Missouri driver’s license.
Hank stared at the computer screen. None of this explained how this guy was also John Kalin, renter of Apartment 213.
‘Where are the documents that he needed to enroll? Birth certificate, proof of residency?’
Narwall pecked at the keyboard for a minute and pulled up scanned documents. The residency information was a power bill for the apartment dated July 26, in the name of John Kalin. The birth certificate information had been entered into information fields in the computer system. Johnny Lee Gall was born in Louisville, Kentucky, seventeen years ago in February. Hank wrote down the parents’ names.
‘Who would have been the one to look at the actual document when it was brought in for enrollment?’ he asked.
‘Somebody at the district office,’ Narwall said.
‘And would the parents have to have been with him?’
Narwall thought a minute. ‘Not necessarily. Not at that age. It depends, though. I know when my grandfather taught here, there were kids living out in the woods who hadn’t heard from their parents in months – or longer. So the school didn’t really require things like signatures. And they certainly wouldn’t have turned away a kid wanting to enroll just because his parents weren’t with him.
‘That was quite a while ago, though. You’ll have to ask the district office about it – that’s where you go to enroll.’
Hank planned to. He wanted to talk to whoever had laid eyes on that birth certificate. He had Narwall pull up the records of the other five teens. All of them had been born in Missouri, and enrolled in Branson schools since kindergarten. He asked for everyone’s schedules and said he’d be back tomorrow to talk to their teachers. He was almost out the door when he remembered. He hadn’t needed to show Narwall the DL photo of Johnny, but he did need to show the other one. He pulled out the picture Sheila had taken with her cell phone.
‘Have you ever seen this man?’
Narwall glanced at the photo and then squinted intently.
‘What’s wrong with him? Is he asleep – oh, God.’
‘Yes,’ Hank said. ‘He’s … deceased. We think there might be a connection between him and Johnny, and we’re trying to figure out if anyone knew him.’
Narwall shook his head, looking slightly sick. He’d never seen the man before. Hank thanked him and headed back to the Bronco. He wanted to compare all of the students’ schedules and start to get a feel for how they all knew one another. He was stopped by the ding of his phone.
Where are you? You supposed to make bfast and kick soccer w Maribel. That ball is damn hard. I think I broke my toe.
Hank groaned. He’d completely forgotten his promise of Sunday breakfast with the kids once his patrol shift was over.
And Maggie isn’t home yet either. She called at least. Should I go ahead and make bfast?
He still couldn’t decide if texts were better than the voicemails Dunc used to leave before they got him a smartphone. Those had been a painful stream of consciousness, whereas the texts were definitely more to the point. They could be like a swift kick in the shins, though, that was for sure. He started typing.
Yes, make breakfast. Sorry I forgot. Fatal accident. Investigating now.
He could practically hear his father-in-law grunting in response.
Fine. They’re getting choc chips in their pancakes. So there.
Hank didn’t mind. Chocolate chips made up for a lot with a five- and a three-year-old. He just w
ished he were home to eat with them.
THIRTEEN
No one answered the door. Again. Sam moved on to the next one. So far, he had four unanswered doors and one sleepy night shift motel worker who didn’t know any of his neighbors and had never laid eyes on either Gall or John Doe. Sam sighed and moved down to the next apartment. 113. He knocked twice and was about to move on when someone called out.
‘What do you want?’
He quickly yanked the badge off his belt and held it up to the peephole.
‘Ma’am, I’m with the Branson County Sheriff’s Department and I need to ask you a few questions. Could you open the door?’
The deadbolt slid back and the door opened as far as the still-latched chain lock allowed. One very green eye looked out. Sam smiled encouragingly.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘I was wondering if you’ve ever seen this man around here in the complex.’ He held up the picture of Gall. She shook her head, then paused.
‘Lemme see.’ She stretched two fingers through the crack of open door.
‘Ma’am, please. I swear, I’m a sheriff’s deputy. This is an emergency investigation – that’s why I’m not in a uniform.’ He dug out his photo ID and held it up with his badge. ‘Could you open the door?’
She stared at him for, like, forever and then shut the door. The chain rattled and then she stepped outside. She was about his age and slim and had long, wavy dark blonde hair. Her legs seemed to go on and on … Sam could feel himself turning red. He handed her the photo.
‘I think so,’ she said slowly. ‘Real skinny, right? I think he lives upstairs.’
She’d only seen him twice. Once coming down the stairs, which was why she assumed he lived on the second floor. And the second time was about a week and a half ago. He was getting into a car. A black one.
Sam bit back a groan and tried to make his smile even more encouraging.
‘This could be really important,’ he said. ‘Do you remember anything else about the car? Was he the one driving? Was anybody else around?’
