Hate Crime (7 page)

“It has been a while since we had a lead.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Of course it does. Unless you’re a dunderhead.”

“You know, Baxter, I always enjoy sparring with you. Really I do. But I am somewhat busy at the moment. Don’t you have any work that needs your attention?”

“As a matter of fact,
we
do.” She tossed a newly minted manila file on top of his littered desk. “Blackwell just sent this over. As of this moment, you’re officially off the Metzger case. And on this one.”

Mike frowned, fingered the edge of the file. “Where are we going?”

“Sapulpa, I’m afraid. I know you were probably hoping for Paris.”

“What’s the case about?”

Baxter pulled a face. “Do the words
power drill
mean anything to you?”

“That’s the most inhumane killing I’ve heard about in my entire career. And I’ve seen some pretty damn bad ones.”

Mike drove crosstown while Baxter read him the salient details of the murder. It would’ve been more sensible for him to read the file himself, but that would have required Baxter to drive, and only he drove his Trans Am. No exceptions.

This was the part of the job Mike hated most. After the crime scene—that was the fun part. Then it was all Sherlock Holmes logic and Popeye Doyle browbeating and all the other good stuff. But the crime scene itself! Well, the fact that he still got sick every time he saw a corpse—after seeing more than three dozen of them—told the whole story.

“Consider yourself lucky you can’t see the pictures,” Baxter said.

True, but he was about to visit the crime scene. And even if the coroner had preceded him, there was bound to be a mess. Something like this would take days to clean up. “Any likely suspects?”

“They don’t even know who the victim was.”

Mike swerved into the fast lane behind a Jag coupe. “This SOB is speeding.” He reached into the back for his siren.

“Morelli. We’re on our way to a homicide.”

“But he’s speeding!”

“Focus, Detective. Leave it to the traffic cops. We have pressing business.”

He dropped the siren. “Spoilsport.”

“This reminds me . . .” Her eyes drifted toward the passenger side window. “There’s something I’d like to discuss.”

Uh-oh. In Mike’s experience, in a normal conversation, if people wanted to discuss something, they just did. When someone prefaced it by saying they wanted to discuss something, that was a sure sign of trouble. “Do we have to?”

“If we’re going to work together.” She corrected herself. “
Since
we’re going to work together.”

He sighed. He liked Baxter—really, he did. Sure, the first days had been rocky, but they’d come to a mutual understanding. Even more than that, you might say. But her penchant for overanalyzing everything and talking it to death made him crazy. He liked to think of himself as a sensitive soul, but he couldn’t bear these constant exercises in personal relations mediation. “If we must.”

“I think we need to establish some rules.”

“We’ve already had this conversation, remember, Sergeant? On your first day. You gave me your rules. I remember it distinctly. ‘No grabass in the patrol car.’ ”

“Well, I thought I should raise the issue again. After . . . you know. What happened.”

He didn’t need a more detailed reference. He knew what she was talking about. The Grand Lake stakeout. Late at night, in his car. Lots of coffee, nothing to do. They’d started talking, warming up to each other, for the first time. And the next thing he knew, their lips were touching.

Not that he minded exactly. Kate Baxter was a fine-looking woman, even if she was a pain in the ass as a partner. He went for that honey blond hair in a big way. But it did complicate the working relationship.

Baxter cleared her throat. “We need an agreement. That it won’t happen again.”

“We do? All right. We do.”

“I’m not saying it was unpleasant. My lips went willingly. But we have to keep our heads clear. Unmuddled.”

“Of course.”

“There’s no telling what Blackwell would do if he found out. Probably suspend us on the spot.”

“Quite possible.”

“But most important—I can’t afford to let the word get out about this. Not after what happened in Oklahoma City.”

Mike had no problem placing that reference, either. She’d had an inopportune affair with the OKC chief of police—a man much older than she was and married to boot—and once it was known in the department, she was hopelessly compromised. Not to mention the butt of scurrilous jokes and sexist remarks.

“I understand entirely,” Mike said. “So what are you thinking? We should ask Blackwell to split us up?”

“I’m just thinking there can’t be any more smooching. Can you handle that?”

Sure, he thought. I’d rather skip ahead to third base anyway. “Not a problem.” He kept his eyes dead ahead.

“Good. Well, I just thought we needed to get that established.”

“Right you were.” He turned the wheel hard to the left. “Break out the barf bags. We’ve arrived.”

When Mike opened the door to the toolshed behind the house, he uncovered a grisly tableau that defied his powers of description. He had never seen anything like this before. And he’d seen a lot of homicide in his time.

After an initial glance, he excused himself, stepped outside, covered his mouth with a handkerchief, and did his level best to keep from being sick. When he returned, Baxter had already begun gathering some preliminary information. She seemed remarkably undisturbed by the scene around her. In fact—was he imagining it?—there was a tiny smirk on her face.

“You okay?” she asked.

“No, I’m not okay. If anybody can see this and be okay, they’ve got serious problems.”

“I can cover if you want to wait outside.”

“Thank you, Sergeant, but I think I’ll do my job myself, just the same.”

What had he expected anyway? A power drill inserted into the cranium—no way that was going to create a pretty picture. Like a firecracker tossed inside a jack-o’-lantern. Now the shattered shell lay at his feet, and the seeds and stuffing covered the walls.

Mike closed his eyes. “Philip Larkin was right. ‘Man hands on misery to man / It deepens like a coastal shelf.’ ”

“God, not with the poetry again. I feel like I’m going to hurl as it is. Don’t push me over the edge.”

Happily, Mike didn’t hear her. His eyes were fixed and all his other senses were focused on the tiny toolshed that surrounded him.

“Are you doing something?” Baxter asked, after enduring a minute or so of this.

“I’m listening.”

“To what?”

“The room.”

“Oh, cool. I love this part.”

He stood in one place by the door, absorbing everything around him. “The best way to get a grip on what happened. Even better than forensics. Open your eyes and ears and drink it all in.”

“Sure. So what are you drinking?”

Mike paused before answering, giving every syllable slow and deliberate emphasis. “This . . . is the victim’s toolshed.”

“That much I got.”

“He loved this place. It was his favorite room. His retreat.” Mike moved through the small space. “He came here to be alone. For peace of mind. To calm himself.” Mike smiled. “He knew his killer.”

“I’m glad to hear it wasn’t a random drilling.”

“It had to be someone he knew well.” He paused a moment, lost in thought. “The killer let himself in, came back here, and found the guy working on his shelves.”

“So it was a close friend.”

“I doubt it.”

Baxter frowned, arms akimbo. “You’ve lost me.”

“I don’t think it was a friend. I don’t think it was someone he wanted to see at all.”

“Given how it turned out, I don’t blame him.”

“Something bad was going on. Something that got him killed.”

“And the room told you all this?”

“Yup.” Mike did a small pirouette in the center of the room. “Do you smell anything?”

“Are you kidding? Someone was killed in here.”

“Something else. Musk, I think.”

“Musk?”

“Probably a cologne or aftershave. And if I can still smell it, he must’ve put it on pretty heavy.”

“Who? The victim, or the killer?”

“That would be a good thing to know.”

Baxter rolled her eyes. “Great. Musk. Now we’ve got a lead.”

“Did anyone see anything? Hear anything?”

“We’ve got uniforms blanketing the neighborhood. So far they haven’t turned up anything.”

“The killer used a power tool, for God’s sake. Someone must’ve heard something.”

“Yes, but it wouldn’t sound like a murder. More like someone . . . mowing their lawn. Nothing to get alarmed about.”

Mike stood to one side and watched the crime scene technicians go about their work. He always tried to give them a clear field; he knew they wouldn’t tolerate interference, not even from a senior homicide detective. There was a time when these guys considered themselves ancillary technicians, subordinate to the detectives, and behaved accordingly. Then that TV show—
CSI
—became a hit. Now they all thought Mike worked for them.

Which was not a problem for Mike. They had the hard job, as far as he was concerned—the videographers, the hair and fiber team, the prints man, the coroner. The guys in coveralls crawling around on their hands and knees looking for trace evidence. Their work paid off. More often than not, if a case didn’t have an obvious suspect, it was forensic evidence that would lead him to one.

“Check his wallet?” Mike asked.

“What do you take me for? He didn’t have one.”

“No ID at all?”

“None. This house was being rented to a Philip Norton, but that appears to be a pseudonym.”

“Any photos inside the house? Any photos of
him
?”

“ ‘Fraid not.”

Naturally. That would’ve been too helpful. The victim’s head was such a mess they couldn’t possibly tell what he looked like now. So they had no face and no name. Great.

“Anything of interest in the house?”

“The place has been trashed. Still, I managed to find a noteworthy item or two.”

“Wanna give me a hint?”

“Packed suitcase in the bedroom. Apparently the poor guy thought he was going somewhere.”

Mike grunted. “He was right about that. He had a one-way ticket to ‘the undiscovered country from whose bourn / no traveler returns.’ ”

“Morelli, if you keep going with the poetry, I might have to use a power tool myself.”

“Any idea where he was headed?”

“North.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“He didn’t leave behind a bus ticket, Morelli. But I did notice that he was packing sweaters. So he wasn’t hanging around here and he wasn’t headed for Mexico.”

Mike nodded. “What else was in the house?”

“Fifty thousand dollars in cash.”

Mike did a double take. “Fifty thousand?”

“You got it, tiger. Hidden under a floorboard. Whoever tore the house apart never found it.”

He pivoted and reluctantly glanced again at the mess on the toolshed floor. “Our poor victim must’ve pulled some sort of heist.”

“Looks that way. I’ll start checking the wire reports. See if I can figure out what he did.”

“I don’t know what to think. But it’s very strange. Get some serial numbers off that money and run it past the FBI. They might be able to help you figure out where it came from.” Mike took another long look at the toolshed. He wouldn’t mind having a place like this of his own one day. Except not splattered with blood and brain matter. “Anything else?”

“Yeah—this.” Baxter produced what appeared to be a photocopy of a newspaper article placed inside a clear plastic evidence bag. “Found this in the end table by the bed.”

Mike scanned the headline.
FBI PROBES PARTY DRUG RING
. He couldn’t tell what paper it had come from.

“Why was this of such interest that he made a copy?” she asked.

“Darn good question. Wish I knew the answer. But photocopies can yield information beyond the mere text.”

“You think there’s a connection between the murder and illegal drugs?”

“I don’t know. God, I hope not.” He looked one more time around the shed, then passed through the door. “ ‘And our little life is rounded by a sleep.’ ”

Baxter followed him. “Robert Frost?”

Mike shook his head. “Shakespeare. Again.”

“He was a cheery soul. Aren’t there any poets who are pleasant to read?”

Mike considered a moment. “You might go for Theodore Geisel.”

“Really?”

“Possible.”

“If I learned to spout poetry like you do, you think we’d get along better?”

“Possible.”

“And you’d stop treating me like your ignorant secretary?”

“Possible.”

“And you’d let me drive the Trans Am?”

“Not a chance.”

6

South Side of Chicago
near Jackson Park

Charlie the Chicken was running scared.

That was why he blew town. That was why he was now back, albeit functioning under a different professional name. That was why he had buzzed his hair off, ditched his glasses, changed his look. He wasn’t working the same neighborhoods and he hadn’t haunted the old haunts. Hadn’t gone anywhere near Remote Control. In short, he had burned all his bridges and forsaken all traces of his former existence.

And none of it would be enough.

Charlie recounted the change in his pocket. This was getting ridiculous. He couldn’t make the pathetic fifty-dollar-a-week rent for this hellhole of a room in a part of Kenwood that urban renewal never touched. He couldn’t even feed himself. He was a prisoner, just as much as if he were behind bars, except that behind bars he’d be a lot safer and better fed than he was out here. Safe or not, he had no choice. He was going to have to get out. Go to work. Earn some scratch.

But he had to be careful, too. Because his old friend, the one he had seen on that dark and rainy night, would be looking for him. He was sure of it.

He’d followed the case in the newspapers, of course. Who hadn’t? Every dramatic development. So far, no one had a clue what had really happened. His friend had to be feeling fairly secure right about now. Impervious. About the only thing that could possibly go wrong would be if Charlie the Chicken opened his big mouth.