by Lisa Black
Everything took longer when a police officer had died. Not because there was more to do than any other homicide, but because no one wanted to make a mistake or be seen to give less than 200 percent. The ME investigator took copious pictures and whispered a tome’s worth of notes into an app on his phone—so much easier than trying to write with freezing ink and freezing fingers and in the snow, which had once again begun to fall.
But nature provided a limit to how many i’s and t’s they could dot and cross. Lingering became impossible when the temperature hovered below five. Maggie shivered no matter how close Jack held her, and he thought his fingers might fall off later along with both ears and the tip of his nose. The investigator wrapped up his investigations much more quickly than anyone expected, including the body snatchers who had been staying warm inside their van. They wasted no time in climbing up and inside the bin, carting a body bag with loops of mesh straps at intervals all around, so that it could be carried between several people, as pallbearers carry a coffin. The two men, with Denny and the investigator, managed to hoist the corpse over the side without actually falling out themselves. Jack had no idea how they did it.
Cops stood ready on the ground to bear the weight the rest of the way. Jack found himself in a paroxysm of indecision. Should he show solidarity with his fellow officers and shoulder some of the burden? Would that be considered insincere since he hadn’t even liked the guy and now dated—they thought—his ex? Would staying by Maggie’s side be the higher duty? For once he truly needed the advice of his de facto life coach: Riley.
He turned to his partner, who said, “Let’s go.”
Jack let his arm fall from Maggie’s shoulders, and walked with Riley to the group of officers. They all reached upward, palms open and flat, as the men inside the box lowered the bag as best they could. Body bags were always transported flat, to maintain the corpse as close to their original position as possible. But since the men inside the dumpster couldn’t walk on air, the bag had to be held at its ends like a hammock. Jack grabbed a strap, held it up until the other ones were grasped so they could lower the whole bag at the same time. It wasn’t only to preserve evidence. It was to preserve dignity.
Truthfully, they tried hard to preserve that for each and every victim, but today they would be especially cognizant.
Once on the ground, with the dumpster on one side and a phalanx of cops forming a protective barrier from the media and other prying eyes on the other three, the investigator zipped the bag open. Cameras clicked, the investigator’s and Denny’s.
Rick wore the same clothes she’d seen him in on Friday, black denim pants, scuffed brown leather athletic shoes, and a lightweight maroon parka zipped to the collarbones. Only a tiny red stain on the parka, middle front, gave any indication of how he died.
“What killed him?” someone in the group asked.
Denny stated the obvious: “There’s no signs of a struggle. No injuries to the hands or face.”
“Clothing intact,” the ME investigator added.
Someone crouched next to the body reached out a latexed hand and pushed at the parka’s cuff. “His watch and ring are still here.” Jack realized it was Maggie, examining her ex-husband’s murdered corpse. Her arm was steady but her voice trembled ever so slightly.
The investigator must have decided that decorum might be all well and good but they had neither the time nor the climate for it, and began to unzip the parka.
“Wait,” Maggie said. Everyone froze. She said, “Wait, wait, wait,” and bustled off, the men behind her parting instantly to create a path. No one else moved. They waited.
She returned with clear tape to press on Rick’s maroon parka, at his left shoulder. She muttered something about powder.
Denny peered. “Are you sure that’s not snow?”
“Too fine.”
She folded the tape in on itself, then dropped it into an envelope. The investigator finished unzipping Rick’s parka.
Underneath his coat Rick wore a long-sleeve polo shirt with a T-shirt showing beneath it. More pictures, this time of the clear wound to Rick’s center mass.
“Shot,” someone behind Jack said. Will stood by Rick’s head, one hand at his mouth, and said nothing.
“Bullet wound?” Maggie asked.
The investigator pulled Rick’s shirt and T-shirt out of his belt to reveal the pale, rounded belly. “It’s a circular hole. Smallish caliber.”
Maggie folded the parka back and together they found the corresponding hole in it. Without the small bloodstain it would be easily lost in the puffy folds of the coat, the slight protrusion of fiberfill stuffing hidden by the dusting of snow.
Maggie said, “So he still had his coat on. Badge and gun right here on his belt.”
“He didn’t see it coming,” the investigator said.
Denny, also crouching, mused aloud: “He didn’t have a clue. For whatever reason, he did not feel threatened.”
“Neither did Jennifer Toner,” Maggie pointed out.
“Who leaves a gun?” one of the cops mused aloud.
“Too risky to be caught with a cop’s gun,” theorized another.
“How come nobody in this building heard a gunshot?”
“How come nobody noticed a body getting thrown out a window?”
Someone else found this wording a little cold and hissed Dude! at the speaker. Rick Gardiner was not, would never be, “a body.” He was a cop. He would not be put in the same category as all the other homicide victims they investigated.
The man from the ME’s tried to heft Rick onto one side—not an easy task, so Maggie and Denny helped. Jack wondered what it must feel like to hold on to your ex-spouse’s hip so an investigator can check their back for an exit wound. The guy had to be as cold as a Popsicle. Nearly forty-eight hours . . . he must have been frozen solid, or rigor mortis had been slowed by the low temperatures. He’d have to ask—
Maggie stood up, nearly knocking into the men crowding behind her. Jack followed her gaze.
The tenants had indeed taken advantage of the dumpster’s presence and two strands of sauce-covered spaghetti had adhered to the back of Rick’s head, frozen to his short hair, one end curled over his ear. This final indignity broke the back of Maggie’s resolve. A strangled sob escaped her lips, both a cry and a whisper.
“That’s it,” Denny said, with enough resolve for the two of them. He turned to Jack. “Get her out of here.”
Jack put one arm around her shoulders and pulled her from the scene. She let him.
Chapter 22
Monday, 12:10 p. m.
She had thought the ride would be silent, but they hadn’t even reached the Lorain-Carnegie bridge before Jack said, “How are you feeling?”
A curious question, she thought. She answered honestly: “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel, what I’m supposed to do, how I’m supposed to act. But really, none of that is important.” She lapsed back into silence, tapping the envelope on her lap. When the nerves in her fingers thawed enough to allow sensation, she realized she still carried it. The smear of lighter color on Rick’s jacket had looked like powder; it might be the same powder as on the windowsill. She didn’t have the instrumentation to analyze any old substance. . . it had to be something the machinery had already been programmed to recognize, such as DNA, adhesives, or nylon fibers. The mass spectrometer might be able to tell her something. If it were an illegal drug, cocaine or fentanyl, the toxicology department could identify it as easily as she could flick a light switch. A powerful drug might explain why two people who had been searching for an addicted man were now dead....
Jack switched off the car and turned to her. “Maggie—”
She hadn’t noticed, but they had entered the police department parking garage and now sat tucked in a dark corner space.
He actually took one of her hands, and said her name again, as if he had to speak and yet didn’t want to. Jack was rarely uncertain about anything, and right now
he seemed as uncertain as she’d ever seen him.
The words came out in a rush. “I didn’t do it.”
She blinked.
He clarified. “I didn’t kill him.”
He meant Rick.
After a pause she found her voice: “Do you really think I’d be sitting here in a car with you if I thought you did?”
Surprise erased the lines on his face, then a puffed breath of relief. “I hope not.”
It wasn’t as if the idea hadn’t occurred to her. Of course it had.
Jack had feared what Rick might find in Chicago and Minneapolis, no matter what he’d told her. Rick had been the only person in Cleveland who suspected Jack had something to do with the vigilante killings. Rick had motivation to pursue his suspicions, and enough bloody-mindedness to keep pursuing. Jack was the only person she could think of who had any motive to kill Rick at all. He could have known of Rick’s plan to re-interview Jennifer Toner, could have suggested it in the first place. Jack had no hobbies, no weekend activities, no one at home to whom he had explain an absence on Friday afternoon. Neither Jennifer nor Rick would have been on guard against another police officer. Jennifer would have let him in, Rick wouldn’t have felt the need to keep his gun in hand. And if anyone on the planet knew how to kill without leaving any clue behind, it was Jack.
And yet she felt calmly positive that he had not.
Was it because she had bought in so deeply to his world that she could no longer reason freely? Had she become so lost in the woods he created that she would never find her way back to the path?
No. It was because—
“I could be wrong. I won’t know until—”
Jack, still leaning toward her in the front seat of the car, seemed to be breathing in her air, drawing the thoughts out of her. “Wrong about what?”
“I don’t think Rick was shot. A hot bullet at that range should have melted some of the synthetic fibers around the entrance on the parka, just has it would have to Jennifer’s sweater. I think he was probably stabbed, exactly as Jennifer Toner was stabbed.”
“Okay . . . that would make sense. No loud noise to attract attention, giving him time to get the bo—body up the hallway to the window.”
“And I’m betting he was stabbed with something long and thin, like Jennifer. And just like,” she added, “Evan Harding.”
* * *
Jack escorted Maggie back to her lab, guiltily relieved to leave her there. He sucked at the whole emotion thing—and, truth be told, Maggie wasn’t terribly expressive herself—and thus didn’t feel he could help her navigate the potential minefield of mood in the wake of the death of an ex-spouse. Plus, he could see the lab served as her refuge, not merely her workspace, and more comfortable for her than probably any other place on earth. Her coworkers knew her and would know better than to assume she grieved deeply. Indeed, as he left, he heard Carol say, “Well, this has to be a weird feeling.”
By the time he returned to the two-story building on West 29th, the emphasis and the atmosphere had shifted. The body was gone, Denny now packed up his equipment and the cops had formed a huddle, for warmth more than for privacy. The chief of police barked out orders; the captain of homicide hovered at his elbow with a stern expression and kept his mouth shut. Shock had passed; now an abiding anger, colder than the thermometer could measure, took its place. One of their own had fallen. His killer would be pursued with a dedication and vigor that bordered on caricature, so deeply was it felt.
Jack joined the circle, mercifully unnoticed for a few minutes, and withstood the tiny shiver of awkwardness that traveled like electricity as soon as he was. He wasn’t everybody’s favorite guy to begin with, too unboisterous for that and a transplant to the area, and he was now dating Rick’s ex. Even though Rick had definitely not been everybody’s favorite guy, now he was dead, leaving the group to wonder exactly where their loyalties should lie. But Jack didn’t expect this undercurrent to rise to the level of a real problem. It would pulse way down low, then disappear entirely in a month or two.
A rough plan emerged. Rick had been interviewing Jennifer Toner in relation to a drug death, so drugs were likely to be the base of these crimes. The narcotics division would rattle every box of syringes, canvas every treatment center—diplomatically—and grill every Confidential Informant they could. The homicide guys would then follow up their best suspects. The rank and file would comb the city to find Marlon Toner, who had just become Cleveland’s number-one most wanted. “Now,” the chief said, “let’s get the hell out of here before we all get frostbite.”
A rookie had been tasked to circle the lot, taking down the crime scene tape. This freed the pretty Channel 15 anchor as well as a couple other news people to fast-walk up to the group and probe for quotes. Jack helped Denny pack the alternate light source in the city station wagon, they exchanged vague statements of concern for Maggie’s emotional well-being, and the forensic supervisor drove away. Riley found Jack, they exchanged more vague statements about Maggie, and Riley told his partner that he and Will and Denny had personally removed and examined every garbage bag, crumpled rag, and weathered asphalt shingle in the entire dumpster. They had found very little. Not even blood since Rick had landed on his back—his heart must have stopped pumping very quickly.
Jack said, “Like Jennifer Toner and Evan Harding.”
“You think Harding’s connected?”
“I can’t for the life of me see how. But it’s a damn weird coincidence if they were all killed by the same type of weapon.”
Riley considered this. “I guess we’ll see after the autopsy. We did find a pair of glasses. Denny got all excited about that. He thinks the guy tossed out the body, leaned out to see his handiwork, and the glasses slipped off his face, and maybe we can trace the prescription. The garbage bags all seemed to be regular household garbage, no bloody rags, mail belonging to people who live here. Nothing belonging to Jennifer. We also found a small stack of empty snack containers, gum, chips, and a few scraps of paper, somebody’s phone number, somebody else’s grocery list. Oh, and a USB drive.”
“Seriously?”
“Oh yeah. We all got real excited about that. Let’s say our killer had it in his shirt pocket and it fell out. Maybe it’s got his whole life on it. Maybe it’s got the landlord’s porn collection, too, but I like to think positive.”
Jack gazed up at the building, feeling the cold work its way into his jaw and make it sluggish. “If the tenants were using it as a receptacle, how did they not notice—?”
“The snow. We figure this happened right around quitting time Friday afternoon. The roofers had knocked off early—Friday, you know—and well before most of the tenants got home from work. It snowed most of the day Friday, melted a little bit Saturday and Sunday but not all, and then started again today. You can’t see inside the dumpster from the second floor unless you actually open the window and stick your head out, which of course no one is going to do in this weather, except to pitch out their own stuff, and then they’d do it quickly and probably after dark. No lights this side of the building . . . so they never saw him. And get this—the bin is scheduled to be picked up every Tuesday. A little more snow, and he might never have been found. We’d have thought Gardiner went on vacation and never came back.”
“Maggie knew,” Jack said. “She knew there was something wrong.”
“Dude,” said a voice behind them. “What’s going on?”
Jack half turned. A man stood there, a heavy stadium coat covering him up to his ears and a knit cap pulled down until it had to impede his vision. His smell placed him somewhere on the homeless spectrum.
“There was a death here,” Jack told him.
Whatever influence the man had fallen under turned him both hyper and mellow, though the bouncing and bobbing could have been him trying to keep his blood from freezing in its veins. “Aw, man. That’s too—who was it?”
“It was a police officer.”
The nearly-hidden eyes
grew wide. “True? Wow, that’s—wow. I gotta get in there. I can go in the building, right?”
Riley said yes, he could. “Do you live here?”
“No, I’m just visiting my sister.”
Certainty poked Jack’s heart with one quick icy thrust. “What’s your name?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
The man calmly replied, “I’m Marlon Toner.”
Chapter 23
Jack and his partner, in unison, looked at each other, at the group of cops at the end of the lot, at the Channel 15 van with its mounted camera, back at Marlon Toner, and made an instant, unspoken decision.
“Mr. Toner,” Jack said, “you’re going to want to come with us.”
The man didn’t feel that mellow. “Wha? No, I don’t got to—”
Jack stepped in closer, speaking quietly, hoping he could penetrate the drug-induced fog. “You see that group of cops over there? They are ninety-five percent certain that you are the one who killed their fellow cop. Come with us right now and we’ll get quietly into our vehicle and drive downtown and we can talk there. Because if you stay here, we cannot guarantee your safety. Do you understand me?”
Marlon Toner didn’t; that was clear. He seemed about as perplexed as a man could get and still be upright. But despite the confusion, the abruptness, the fog, Jack’s tone spoke to something primal in him, some survival instinct that helped him recognize true danger. A few officers turned to see what Jack and Riley were doing, frowned as if trying to read an unfamiliar code, and Marlon Toner’s face paled from more than the cold.
“Okay,” he said.
All three men pivoted and, Toner between the two detectives, strode toward the unmarked cars parked along the curb. They walked slowly, calmly, purposely keeping every step unhurried and casual. Jack guided Toner into the back seat, shut the door on his most cooperative arrestee ever, and heard a voice shout, “Hey!”
