Speak for the Dead (7 page)

“No! We keep our curtains closed at night.”

“Thank you.” And on to the next “O”.

It was nearing ten. The women who now answered had faces scoured of make-up and the men wore sport-shirts with little alligators on the front or shiny robes tied over their pajamas. Wager moved to the last apartment on the fourth floor. There the answer was different.

“That was last Tuesday, you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You know, I did see something weird. I kind of wondered about it at the time.”

“You did? What?”

The man’s half-face in the doorway was thin, with dark, bushy eyebrows that lifted as they approached each other. At first, Wager thought the man was puzzled; then he realized that the eyebrows stayed that way. “A light. But not like they have sometimes. A flashlight, maybe. I couldn’t sleep, and went out on the balcony for some air. I saw this light moving around in the conservatory. Our balcony looks almost right down on it.”

“Can I come in? Can I see this balcony?”

“I guess.” The chain slipped to let him into a narrow living room. The man said, “Just a minute,” and shut a side door. “The wife’s in bed.”

“Is this it?” The far end of the living room was a panel of orange-and-blue drapes that seemed to go either with or against the square, glossy white sofa and low glass-and-chrome table. Wager wasn’t quite sure which.

“Yes.” The man pulled open the drapes and rolled back the thick glass door. The balcony was wide enough for two folding chairs and a small charcoal grill; over the lip of its wire-and-wood panel, the grounds of the Botanic Gardens were a large, dark hole surrounded by city lights and the swirl of traffic.

“Right down there’s the conservatory.”

The diamond-shaped faces of its roof glinted in the dark, and from the far end, toward the lobby section, a purple glow shone fuzzily. That would be the moss section; apparently the fluorescent wands were on all night. At this end, where the head was found, all was dark.

“Can I have your name, sir?”

“What for?”

“It’s just routine. Any information I get, I’m supposed to have a name for.”

“Mikkelson. Ronald Mikkelson.”

“Want to tell me what you saw, Mr. Mikkelson?”

“Like I said, I came out for some air and was leaning on the railing right where you are, and I happened to look down… . No, wait a minute—something caught my eye. That was it—there was a flash right down there, and it caught my eye, and through the roof of the conservatory I saw this dot of light. It was a flashlight, I’m sure of it.”

“Did it do anything?”

“Let’s see… . It moved around a little and then got dim. Then it was still for a real long time, like it was propped somewhere. Then it moved again and went out.”

“Did you see anybody in the light?”

“No. You can’t really see through the glass—it’s tinted or something. You can see lights on the other side, but you can’t see much detail.”

“About how long would you say the light was on?”

“Ten minutes. Long enough for me to start getting cold.”

“How long were you out here before you saw the flash of light?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe five minutes.”

“Did you hear anything before the light came on?”

“Like what?”

“A car. A door. Somebody walking in the alley.”

“There’s always cars.” He thought hard. “No—I really can’t say I heard anything.”

“Have you ever seen anything like that before?”

“Not just like that, no. Sometimes they have the lights on at night for working or when they’ve got a bunch of people coming in for something or other. But this was different.”

“Did you think about telling the police what you saw?”

“No. I didn’t make much of it at the time. Do you really think it was somebody putting that head there?”

Somebody with a key that fit silently into locks, somebody with a flashlight who crouched and stared. “It could be.”

“I didn’t hear about it until yesterday. I saw it on the news last night—they said you guys found the rest of her in a car over on the west side.”

“Yes, sir. About what time did you see this light?”

“Two. Maybe two-thirty in the morning. Can we go back in now? It’s getting chilly.” He rolled the balcony door shut and pulled the drapes across the glass.

“Did you notice any people in the area?”

“No. It’s too dark to see anything in the alley.”

Wager was finishing his notes when the bedroom door clicked softly open to show a blinking, frowning woman pulling a feathery dressing gown over her shoulders. “Ron? Who is this? What’s going on?”

“He’s a detective from the police.”

“Police! My God—what’s happened? What’s he want with you, Ron?”

“Me? Nothing! He was asking about the lights I saw in the conservatory. Remember? I told you about them last night.”

She pushed a string of hair up under the pink ruffle of a plastic nightcap and blinked again. “That’s all? You’re sure that’s all?”

“What else do you think it would be?”

“Good night, Mr. Mikkelson. Ma’am.”

Neither answered Wager.

“Well, how would you like to wake up and find a policeman in our own living room talking to me?” she asked.

“I’d sure as hell ask why, Sherri, before jumping to conclusions!”

Wager closed the apartment door behind him, dimming Mikkelson’s rising voice: “And just what the hell did you think I …”

He reported for the Tuesday shift the usual fifteen minutes before midnight. Ross and Devereaux were wrapping up an investigation of discharge of firearms by an officer on duty. It was another of homicide’s jobs to investigate every bullet fired by an officer whether or not injury resulted.

“Here he comes, leaping tall buildings with a single fart.” Ross thumped a date stamp on a document. “If you come in any earlier, Wager, me and Dev can stay at home.”

“It’s my time.”

“Yeah. There’s a note for you from the lab. They said to call.” He gestured at the twenty-four-hour board. “Are you still running around on that mutilation death?”

“And not getting anywhere. We don’t have any identification yet.”

“You’d be better off waiting for that. In the five years I’ve been doing this shit, most cases solve themselves once the victim’s family and friends are known.”

“Ross is right,” said Devereaux. He pointed to a long, detailed chart covering a quarter of one wall. It broke down ten years of homicides into statistics matching the F.B.I.’s Uniform Crime Report. “The pattern’s changing, but most of the killings are still the result of a little excess emotion by friends or loved ones. The stranger-to-stranger stuff comes as part of another crime—rape, robbery, maybe a professional hit. And maybe you just got a loony with this one. Anybody who’d do that must be nuts. But when they come in cold and without witnesses, there’s no sense busting your balls until the victim’s identified.”

That might be all right if someone other than the killer knew she was dead. But so far, it seemed no one even knew she’d ever been alive. “I don’t like sitting on my tail.”

Ross snorted and shoved his papers into an interoffice mailing envelope and whipped the short string around the cardboard button. “No cop does, Wager. You’re not so special.”

“I don’t claim to be. But it’s my way of working. If it’s no good, I’ll hear it from the chief.”

“You sure will.” Ross left.

Wager telephoned the police lab. “Baird? This is Wager. I got a note to call you.”

The voice on the other end of the line said, “Hang on,” followed by a muffled clatter as the receiver was set down. Then, “The coffee was boiling over; these beakers aren’t worth a damn for making coffee in.”

“What do you have for me, Fred?”

“A couple of things. The tissue and blood tests have come back—the head and torso belong together. No question. But the coroner’s report on the torso isn’t so good.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s not as conclusive as we’d like—the trunk of that car got hot in the sun, and the plastic bag kept all the moisture in, so the decomposition and the generation of gases and bacteria was accelerated. It’s hard to be conclusive about what she ate. The guess is this: her stomach seemed nearly empty—maybe some fruit and cheese, but again that’s just a guess. The blood showed a trace of alcohol, but we can’t tell how much. No clear indication of narcotics or poisons anywhere in the system, but they could be there. It comes to damn little that can stand up in court.”

Wager jotted it down anyway. “Could the doc tell how long after death the head was severed?”

“That’s guesswork, too. Maybe an hour.”

“Was the stab wound the primary cause of death?”

“It’s the only clear cause. But because of the decomposition of the organs, some son of a bitch might challenge it in court.” His voice grew almost happy as he moved to more definite facts. “The wound was in good condition, though—it measures three centimeters wide, eleven deep. The shape of the perforation indicates a single-edged knife; all in all, it looks like a butcher knife. A single thrust entered between the third and fourth ribs at approximately fifteen degrees below horizontal plane and thirty degrees left of the sagittal plane. What that means is—”

“That the killer was right-handed.”

A moment of silence. “Right, Wager! That’s pretty good!”

He wondered why the specialists always thought they were the only ones who could read technical manuals. “What damage did it do?”

“Oh—it penetrated the left ventricle and severed the aorta and partly severed the pulmonary artery. It was a good thrust—death was instantaneous. There was also a contained haemopericardium tamponade. Guess what that means, you bastard.”

“Just tell me, Baird.”

“It means the blood didn’t come out of the wound but stayed in the cavity around the heart. Say, did you know that most people are right-handed and have hearts on the left side? God made it that way so people could stab each other easier.”

No, Wager did not know that; and he didn’t give a damn for jokes made to show how tough a person was. “Did the doc check her fingernails?”

“Right. Very clean. No flesh or hair. Heavily painted and carefully manicured. Looks like professional care.”

“Anything else?”

“Right. We ran an adhesive test on the stab wound and came up with what looks like bits of fiber. It looks like the knife cut through cloth before entering the body; we sent the samples on to the F.B.I. lab for identification.”

“Any evidence of sex?”

“Other than the body being stripped, nothing. No tissue damage or indication of sperm traces in vagina, anus, or mouth. That’s about the only examination the condition of the body would allow. Hell, if the killer’s a crock, he probably wouldn’t screw her anyway—he’d cream his pants when he killed her.”

“Yeah. Send me a full copy of the report when you can.”

“Right.”

He poured himself a mug of coffee and stared at the file, the notes, the envelope that held the photographs. A killer stood close enough to make a single thrust with a wide blade. No struggle—no scratching that left traces under the victim’s fingernails, no bruises on the head or body from a preliminary assault. No evidence of sexual relations. And no one yet asking missing persons for her—not even a week later. All right, let’s look at it this way: she’s drinking a little booze, and the killer steps right in front of her to stab her without a struggle—it all points to somebody she knew. To some place she felt comfortable in. Time sequence? The coroner’s evidence puts the body in two positions—face down just after death while the head’s cut off; then, twelve to sixteen hours later, doubled up in the trunk of the Buick. Of course that was a guess. Hell, everything was a guess; Wager could guess, too. According to the witness Mikkelson, the head could have been put in the conservatory around 2
A.M.
Wager counted hours on his fingers back from 2
A.M.
Twelve to sixteen hours back—give or take the time he would need to go from the junkyard to the conservatory or vice versa. Between, say, 10
A.M.
on Tuesday, October 19th, and 2
A.M.
on Wednesday, October 20th. Wager printed the times and date in block letters on a separate page of the little book and absently etched lines around it. The suspect would need an alibi for that time. And a key. That damned key. The victim knew someone who had a key. And a place. Wherever the killing and cutting took place, there would be a hell of a lot of blood. A place to leave the body stretched out until it was bagged and toted to the junkyard. An assault without a struggle, a little butchering without interruption, time to clean up, then transporting the victim at night, and no one asking for her. Hell, Wager almost smiled at himself for wasting time: it added up to a whore making a house call in an apartment with a bathtub. And there were only half a million such places in the city. But the living green and the dead junk; head in one, body in the other. That, too, was a key—and a puzzle.

Still, without a witness, without knowing the victim’s name, Wager felt his mind sketch in things about the killer. But slowly, slowly; “
Quien anda al reves, anda el camino dos veces
.” He could still hear his grandfather warning him when he was anxious and bouncing to be turned loose on some half-baked project, and was answering, “Yes, sir; yes, sir, I understand,” and not hearing a word of the instructions. Wager had long since learned that it was no pleasure to walk the same road twice.

And he did feel something solid forming from the web of his thoughts.

The telephone’s ring pulled him back to the brown box of the homicide office. Gargan was asking what else had been found.

“The tissue test matches the head and torso,” answered Wager.

“Any identification of the victim?”

“Nothing yet.”

“Anything in the coroner’s report about dope or sex?”

“The body was too decayed to be conclusive.”

“Thanks heaps.”

“Anytime,” Wager said.

After he got rid of Gargan, he tried missing persons again. That was something that bothered him as much as the key—no one seemed to know that the person was missing.

“We haven’t had any listing like her, Detective Wager. I really will call you as soon as we do.” The female voice clicked off.