King City (14 page)

Lefcourt’s cheeks turned bright red and her nostrils flared. He allowed himself another look at her freckled chest. There was a blush there too. He wasn’t entirely sure if she was furious or having an orgasm.

“I’m going to call Chief Reardon about this,” she said.

“Please do.” He finished off the candy bar, but the slight sugar rush was no match for his fatigue. “Be sure to give him my best.”

She marched to the door, the two deputies following her. Wade watched her go, yawned, and without saying a word to Charlotte, headed upstairs to go back to sleep.

He closed the door, got onto his mattress, and pulled the bedding over his head to shield his eyes from the daylight. As he lay there in his dark cocoon, he caught Mandy’s scent on the mattress and all his troubles seemed to drift away, taking his consciousness along with them.

____

Wade awoke on the floor, the sheets twisted tightly around him, the phone ringing again. He was less groggy this time when he answered.

“Yeah?”

“You were right,” Billy said.

“About what?” Wade checked his watch. It was 3:00 p.m.

“Our first call is a corpse,” he said.

Wade was instantly alert and sat up straight on the floor. “Where are you?”

“Outside the gates of the old King Steel factory,” Billy said.

“Don’t move. I’m on my way.”

He hung up and called the dispatcher, asking her to send the paramedics, homicide detectives, the medical examiner, and a forensic investigation unit to the scene.

Wade put on his uniform, hurried down the stairs to the station, and grabbed the keys to a squad car from his desk drawer.

He drove out of the parking lot, got out of the car, locked the gate behind him, and then flicked on the lights and siren as he sped off.

Wade didn’t use the siren because he was in a hurry and needed to clear a path in the traffic ahead of him. He did it to attract attention, to let people know that the police were there and responsive. He wanted the community to get accustomed to the sound and draw some security from it instead of fear.

He got to the factory in less than five minutes.

Billy’s car was parked on the street, blocking the gate into the desolate, weed‐choked parking lot. He sat on the hood, warily eyeing a dozen men who stood outside a bar across the street, watching what was happening, which so far was just the breeze fluttering the yellow crime scene tape that encircled the rusted hulk of a stripped Honda Accord in the parking lot.

Wade parked beside Billy’s car and got out. Billy was idly fingering the scorched hole in his shirt.

“What have we got?” Wade asked.

“A dead woman,” he said. “She’s in that car.”

Wade nodded. Billy seemed a bit dazed, either because he’d been shot by his boss or because he had just seen his first corpse or maybe a combination of the two. It was understandable.

“Who called it in?”

“The birds,” Billy said.

“Excuse me?”

“I was cruising by and saw all these squawking crows swarming that junker,” Billy said. “I was curious what the birds were so interested in. I found out.”

“Did you touch anything?”

Billy shook his head.

Wade slipped on a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket and walked slowly over to the junked car, surveying the cracked asphalt and clumps of weeds for evidence. There were lots of bottle caps, broken glass, and fast‐food trash around, but he doubted that any of it came from the killer. The flock of crows watched him warily from their perch on the fence twenty yards away.

The Honda had been picked clean by human vultures years ago, leaving only the metal skeleton to rot away, used as a toilet by every man and four‐legged animal that passed it.

A young woman, in her late teens or twenties, was splayed out on the exposed coiled springs of the backseat, her bare feet sticking out of the open door. He didn’t see a purse, wallet, cell phone, or her shoes.

She was dressed in an elbow‐length cropped cardigan sweater over a V‐neck T‐shirt that didn’t quite cover her stomach and a pair of denim mini‐shorts not much larger than panties. Her feet were soft and clean, just like her hands. Her nails, on both fingers and toes, were manicured and polished.

All of that told Wade that she wasn’t a street person. She had a home and probably a job.

Her skin was pale, as if she’d completely bled out, but Wade didn’t see any large wounds that would account for that much blood loss. Her hair was matted with dried blood from a gash on her scalp, just above her forehead, and there was some light spatter on her clothes, but that was it. There were no large bloodstains on her clothes and no visible blood in the car.

Her left leg was swollen, blue, and bent at an odd angle, as if she had an extra joint between her knee and her hip. The flesh around her thigh was blue‐black and engorged. Her arms, legs, and face were covered with divots pecked out by the crows.

She wasn’t a woman anymore. She was carrion.

Wade had been at this long enough to know where all the blood had gone and what had probably killed her. But that didn’t put him much ahead of the game, which was OK. This wasn’t his crime to solve.

He heard a siren and turned to see a paramedic unit heading their way.

“Why did you call them?” Billy asked. “There’s nothing they can do for her now.”

“She’s not officially dead until a medical professional says so, even if her head is across the street.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

“Someone dumped her here after she was hit by a car, or took a beating, or had a bad fall,” Wade said. “Whatever happened, she died from internal bleeding.”

“If it’s internal,” Billy said. “How can you see it? You got X‐ray vision?”

“Did you see her leg?”

“Yeah,” Billy said, grimacing with disgust at the memory.

“She broke her femur, a sharp edge or a bone shard punctured an artery, and she bled out into her leg,” Wade said. “That’s why it’s all bloated and blue, while the rest of her is so pale.”

“I thought she was pale because she’s dead,” Billy said.

“The thigh can hold a lot of blood,” Wade said.

“I don’t want to know how you know that.”

“You learn a lot of things you don’t want to on this job,” Wade said.

The paramedic truck pulled up behind Wade’s squad car, and two guys in their twenties who looked like they hadn’t slept in days got out. They put on their gloves as they approached the officers.

“What’ve we got?” one of the paramedics asked. His hair was disheveled and his face was covered with stubble that looked like tar.

“The body is in the car over there,” Wade said. “Be careful, it’s a crime scene.”

“This isn’t our first day on the job,” Stubble‐face said and went over with his partner to take a look. He leaned over her body and did a cursory check of her vital signs, and they came back to Wade. “She’s very dead.”

“Internal bleeding,” Billy said.

“You think?” Stubble‐face said.

Billy nodded sagely. “Thighs can hold a lot of blood.”

Wade sighed and turned to the paramedic. “I just need an MT slip and you can be on your way.”

Stubble‐face reached into his back pocket for a pad that resembled a traffic ticket book. He quickly filled out a medical treatment form, tore off the top copy, and handed it to Wade.

“Have a nice day,” the paramedic said.

“You too,” Wade said.

The paramedics left. Billy watched them go. So did the dozen people across the street.

“What now?” Billy asked.

“We secure the scene until the homicide detectives get here.”

“How long is that going to be?”

“Another ten or fifteen minutes,” Wade said. “Forensics might take as long as an hour if they are stretched thin. Then it’s out of our hands.”

“So we’re basically just guarding a corpse.”

“Pretty much,” Wade said.

Billy sighed. “Still beats standing at the door of a Walmart checking receipts.”

They were still waiting an hour later for someone to show up.

The crowd on the street had doubled, even though all there was to see was two cops leaning against a police car.

“I’m impressed by your coply intuition,” Wade said. “Most rookies wouldn’t have stopped to check out the car.”

“I don’t have coply intuition,” Billy said.

“You stopped, didn’t you?”

“I was bored and wanted to stretch my legs.”

“Coply intuition,” Wade said.

Billy shrugged. “If you say so.”

“You did a good job securing the scene too,” Wade said. “I almost feel guilty about shooting you.”

“You shouldn’t,” Billy said. “I’m glad to know what taking a hit in the vest feels like. Now I’ll be prepared when it happens again.”

“That’s the right attitude,” Wade said, checking his watch again.

“But if you’re really torn up about it, you can buy me a new uniform shirt.”

“Done,” Wade said and got on the radio to the dispatcher. He requested an estimated time of arrival on the homicide detectives and was told that they were busy in the field. He asked when the forensics unit and the medical examiner would arrive on the scene and was told they were also busy and would be indefinitely delayed.

Wade clicked off and glanced back at the stripped Honda. The woman’s pale foot was sticking out of the open door.

“Whoever she is,” Wade said, “she doesn’t deserve this.”

“Deserve what, Sarge?”

“More cruelty and disrespect than she’s suffered already,” he said.

Wade went back to the scrapped car and began walking slowly around it in an ever‐widening circle, looking for evidence and drawing a rough map of the crime scene in his notebook as he went along.

____

Another hour passed. The crowd across the street had tripled in size. Some people were even sitting on folding chairs as if they were watching a sporting event. But all there was to watch was two cops standing outside an abandoned factory doing absolutely nothing.

On the other hand, Wade supposed it was probably the first time in decades that anybody had seen cops stand around, out in the open, on a street in Darwin Gardens for two hours without getting killed.

That was something to see.

“I feel like I should start singing or something,” Billy said, looking at the people. “Maybe stand on my car and give a speech. It’s like they are waiting for the show to start.”

Or the killing
, Wade thought.

He stepped out of Billy’s earshot and made a call on his cell phone.

“Homicide, Shrake,” a detective answered in the stiff, no‐nonsense tone common among all police officers.

“Hello, Harry,” Wade said.

There was a long silence. Wade imagined Shrake debating with himself whether to hang up or not. But curiosity got the better of his former partner, who gave in with a long, bone‐weary sigh.

“What do you want, Tom?”

“I’ve been reassigned to a community substation in Darwin Gardens.”

“I heard,” Shrake said.

“I’m down here now, sitting on a dead woman.”

“Yeah,” Shrake said. “So?”

“I’ve been sitting on her for two hours and nobody has shown up.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“She didn’t die from natural causes, Harry. She’s broken up bad and it didn’t happen here. Someone is trying to cover their ass. It’s a homicide case.”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. We’ll wait for the medical examiner’s report before we jump to conclusions.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Wade said.

“She could have fallen out of her window or thrown herself in front of a bus and some Samaritan dragged her body out of the way and didn’t stick around to get involved. Any number of things could’ve happened.”

“And you won’t know until you investigate,” Wade said. “Isn’t that what you do?”

“A lot of people get themselves killed in this city in all kinds of ways, not all of them criminal. We have limited resources. We’ve been told to prioritize.”

“You’d be all over her case if her body was found in Meston Heights.”

“But it’s not,” Shrake said.

“What happened to you, Harry?” Wade asked. “You used to be a cop.”

“I still am,” Shrake said. “And unlike you, I’d like to remain one.”

Shrake hung up.

Wade called the medical examiner’s office and asked the man who answered when they were coming.

“We can’t make it,” the medical examiner said. “Have the body transported to the morgue by ambulance when the detectives are done and I’ll get to it when I can.”

The ME hung up.

Wade stood there, shaking with rage.

It had been more than two hours since the body was discovered. It was clear now that the homicide detectives weren’t coming. The medical examiner wasn’t coming. And Wade assumed the forensics unit wasn’t going to show up, either.

It would be dark soon.

Enough was enough.

Wade marched over to Billy. “Go back to the station. I bought some plastic sheeting. Bring me a roll, some more evidence bags, some empty moving boxes, and a box cutter.”

Billy drove off. Wade went to the trunk of his car and took out his camera and a large case containing his evidence collection kit.