by Chris Bauer
“Glad you could break away from your gabfest, Ibáñez,” Detective Montgomery said. “I was about to remind Mr. Trout here that the dead body in here means this crime scene hasn’t been released yet.”
She ignored the comment, made direct eye contact with Philo on her approach. “Detective Rhea Ibáñez. I had someone call you about this job.”
“Yes, you did, Detective, and we’re glad to be here. Blessid Trauma is ready to go, which means we’re on the clock. If you want us to sit until you complete additional forensics, sure, we’ll sit, but like I said, we’re on the clock.”
Striking ebony eyes and glossy black hair in a bun—both were impossible to miss because she’d gotten right into his face, at least as best as her diminutive stature would allow. A close talker, with butterscotch on her breath.
“Great, another smartass,” she said, staring Philo down as best she could from her disadvantaged position. “What should have happened here was one coroner should have been able to process both bodies, but there was a complication. Sorry, we were too aggressive in guesstimating the time we needed you here. You say you’re on the clock so have at it. Two homicides. You can take care of the first bed; that crime scene is released. Just make the space presentable; the city owns the property. But stay away from the last bay. Another medical examiner is due here any minute.”
“Will any of these garage doors open?” Philo asked. “I want to back our truck inside.”
“Probably haven’t been opened in twenty years.”
Philo scanned the garage door nearest them, the framing cracked, screws and metal plates holding the door’s panels together. The black paint on its plastic windows, thick with multiple coats, was chipped in spots, tiny rays of sunlight slanting through them.
A noisy snap-clack pierced the service area. They turned, watched Patrick engage an upturned latch, and listened as horizontal levers disengaged from one garage door’s side rails like swords releasing from their sheaths. Patrick then worked a crowbar between the door and the smooth floor. The framing creaked as the door’s steel rollers moved, raising it off the floor by six inches. He dropped the crowbar, grabbed a door handle and lifted.
Philo joined him. Flecks of cracking black paint rained on their heads and arms while they shouldered the door up until it would budge no more. Philo sized up the opening, decided there was room enough for the step van to fit underneath. Patrick grunted his approval, his adrenaline still coursing—“WOOOT!”—and followed it up with a primordial yell that dropped a few octaves—“WOOOOT! Woooot!” The celebratory display turned physical, foot stomps and bent knees moving him outside the garage, one heavy stomp at a time, his hands slapping his chest, his crows misting into cold-air breaths like a chugging steam train. It ended with him in a crouch and his hands on his knees, another caveman grunt piercing the quiet behind the dealership.
“WOOOOT!”
“What the hell was that?” Detective Montgomery said.
“My guess is it’s a ram-it-up-your-ass war chant from a twenty-plus-year-old Alaskan,” Philo said, not fully convinced.
The abandoned dealership’s water wasn’t turned off, and according to the detectives the Philadelphia Water Department was stymied as to why. A gift horse, as far as Blessid Trauma was concerned. Functioning spigots and drains, a serviceable sink and a toilet would make treating the space a hundred times easier.
Detective Ibáñez chatted Philo up. “We got lucky on this case, Trout. Teen goths looking for somewhere to do their goth stuff discovered the crime scene.”
“Light slivers” was how one of the goth girls explained their discovery, the detective said, checking her notes. “They investigated lights in the building around midnight, wanting to ‘understand their origin,’” Ibáñez air-quoted. “Slivers of light that, and I quote, ‘punctured the dark nightscape, interrupting our midnight campfire time. We crossed the frozen tundra because we had to know what was in there, creating all that negative energy,’ end quote.”
The detective pointed to the horizon a few hundred yards away. “They live there,” she said, “in that neighborhood, were hanging outside on one of the cul-de-sacs when they decided to investigate.”
Philo saw sunlight glinting off roof flashing in the distance, could picture what she described, considering the spot the detective had directed his attention to even now had someone silhouetted near it, a lone figure facing their way. But the teens could see this far only if they…
“…used binoculars,” the detective offered. “Without them, they wouldn’t have noticed the light from inside the building ‘puncturing’ anything.”
“But then again, what about—”
“I know, electricity. There’s water here, but no electric service. Whoever was in here had their own power source. A car battery would handle it.”
“Not your problem, Philo,” Grace said, entering the conversation. “Let’s stay on topic, shall we, Detective? We’ll clean up that bed, and then we’ll wait for the other M-E to do his thing so we can clean up the second one. Thanks for the input. Let us get to it.”
Grace had more feedback for Philo and delivered it privately. “Here’s my take. Whoever was here last night was doing what we’re doing now, cleaning up after a bloodbath, but was doing it for a different customer. The mob, a gang, or whatever they want to label them—some kind of criminal element. The teens surprised him.”
“How you figure that?” Philo asked.
“Follow me.”
Grace retraced her steps, reached an iron grate embedded in the floor between the seventh and eighth car bays. Hank was there, crouching next to it, said to them, “Check this out.”
He’d removed the grate with a socket wrench, exposing the mouth of an embedded drainpipe eight inches or so across. Philo squatted and looked in, grimaced, and quickly snapped his head back. “Grace, you got any more—”
“Yes. Here.” She handed him a jar and Philo two-fingered more of the balm onto his upper lip. He leaned back in, saw a stubby log of brown human flesh wedged inside.
“That’s not a hot dog wearing a helmet in there, is it?”
“Nope,” Hank said.
Hank raised his head, gazed the length of the service area; Philo did the same. The grates between the bays were all off and to the side; Hank’s doing. “No more human remains, no nothing in the rest of them. Clean as a whistle. ”
“So the other four drains are—”
“Spotless.” Hank said. “Only one is clogged. What are the chances any of the drains in a building this old would be squeaky clean without someone’s intervention?”
Zero, Philo thought.
The areas around them, the floor, the hydraulic lifts in all eight of the other bays, looked clean also. Too clean.
“Christ. Whoever spooked the guy here last night,” Grace said, “caught him in the act. Otherwise all ten bays would have been cleaned and there’d be no crime scene.”
Five large drainpipes serviced the ten bays. Two were clogged with human remains, the other three with no obstructions other than some interior rust, like they’d been bleached, maybe even snaked as well.
“My money says those other car bays had activity,” Grace said, “just like these last two. Someone cleaned ’em up.”
The two detectives were across the room, huddled by the bed with the body left behind. Philo called to them. “Hey. You guys need to see this.”
Detective Montgomery escorted the second medical examiner to the remaining body. Detective Ibáñez responded to Grace’s summary about the drains. “Appreciate the insight, ma’am, but we already luminoled the other lifts and the rest of the garage.”
“And it showed nothing, right?” Grace said. “All he had to do was use oxygenated bleach as the cleaning fluid. It screws up the hemoglobin so luminol won’t pick it up. But my guess is you already knew that.”
“Thank you, Ms. Blessid. We’ll take it from here. And keep your thoughts about special bleaches and penises in drainpipes to
yourselves, please. If anyone on your team chirps to the media about this, you’ll never get another gig with the city. Do I make myself clear?”
“Sure, Detective, no worries. But if the luminol didn’t show any blood, that’s telling me something else.”
“And that would be?”
“That you’re dealing with a professional. A fixer. A Victor the Cleaner type.”
“Yes, same as it told us.”
Patrick popped his head out the back door of the step van, the truck’s rear now inside the garage opening. “Victor the Cleaner! Harvey Keitel! I saw the movie!”
“Yes, Patrick sweetie, Harvey Keitel,” Grace said. She shrugged an apology at the detective. “He’s kind of a patron saint for this business. We like him even though Victor was one of the bad guys.”
“And we detectives don’t,” Detective Ibáñez said. “Don’t forget, Ms. Blessid. Privileged info. No leaks.”
Behind them in bay number ten, the coroner did his work, his phone to his mouth recording his observations. “Deceased is a dark-skinned male, possibly Latino, appears to be late twenties to early thirties, found reclining in a bed. Fresh stitches along one side, climbing to the middle of his back. Gaping chest cavity.” The doctor touched the stitch marks. “Probable organ donor, not a recipient, similar to deceased Doe Number One.”
This, Philo understood now, was the complication Detective Ibáñez had mentioned. Organ donors here, as in plural. An illegal organ trafficking operation, where two people died. The deaths appeared unintended judging from the deceased’s fresh stitches on one part of his body prior to someone cracking open his chest cavity and leaving it that way. But how many other surgeries had there been? Chances were, judging from the attempt to sanitize the other car bay areas and drains, as many as eight. If the cops hadn’t already suspected how busy this place had been, they did now.
Patrick hauled the last few red hazmat bags of gore-soaked rags into the back of the van, the Blessid team finishing up the first bay. He, Philo, and Hank sat on the truck’s bumper on a break, munching snacks. After the body was removed, they’d get back to it. Grace took a catnap in the truck.
Espresso-coffee-bean-energy power bars: a caffeine fix for Philo, considering there were no Dunkin’ Donutses close enough for a visit. “Not bad, Patrick,” he said, eyeing his half-eaten snack. “Good choice.”
Philo ran his gaze around the interior of the repair area. Battered wooden workbenches with vises lined the service area perimeter. A gray-brown pegboard clung to the wall, with one fan belt, a tin funnel, and a sixties Chevrolet calendar affixed to it with the See the USA in Your Chevrolet tagline at bottom, a Norman Rockwell reprint.
“I like the cinnamon,” Patrick said, chewing the snack bar.
“Me too, bro.”
And facing them across the service bay, Philo now noticed a cinnamon-colored door, the one that brought them into the service area. On the PARTS counter side, the door was yellow and free of significant blemishes, but on this side the paint was cinnamon-y, a chipped and pounded reddish-brown coat nicked enough to expose its gray primer underneath in spots. He hopped off the truck bumper and crossed the bay to get a closer look.
Philo ran his hand over the door’s battered metal plating. Long scrapes and scratches and dents, some of the dents deep enough to expose the bare metal beneath. Wear and tear marks common for a service garage, decades’ worth of them, some of the battering probably dating from as far back as the fifties. Except—
He pulled back to study it from a few paces away. He knew this door.
“Detective Ibáñez,” he called. “Over here.”
The detective left her partner’s side, self-conscious, Philo thought, of Philo’s interest in her approach. He hadn’t meant to stare, but she was a small woman who really filled out her blouse.
She arrived, got into his face again. “What is it?”
Her close talking—it made sense. At this close a distance, a person could only appreciate her face.
“This door here,” Philo ran his hand over a few of the dents. “You guys know about the Amtrak train deaths from the other day? The female suicide had a photo in her pocket. This door was in it.”
9
Kaipo raised her binoculars. Her toothache was gone because her problem molar had been neutralized: an emergency root canal this morning. The fallout, aside from the anesthetic wearing off, was that it made her late to this surveillance. She stepped up from the blacktop onto the curb, then onto a lush, residential grass lawn.
The curb connected two sprawling split-level homes on a cul-de-sac, part of a large Bucks County housing development at least a few decades old. She adjusted the glasses, using them to peer between two homes on large lots with mature plantings and meticulous landscaping. The view was unobstructed across an empty cornfield that ran behind the houses. This side of the field was lower Bucks County, the other side Philadelphia, where she and her toothache had been last night, cleaning the service bays of an abandoned auto dealership. With this sightline she understood, could now fully see, how a distant light source against a black backdrop might prove too enticing for bored suburban teenagers to ignore.
Her exit from the last night’s scene had been premature, precipitating this cop-sponsored biohazard response. The new cleaners were still there, had arrived before she’d found this distant vantage point from which to observe them. She had no idea how long their truck had been in place behind the dealership, backed up to one of the garage doors; doors she knew from the inside only. She made another binoculars adjustment.
Movement, but not what she expected: a garage door lifted. The doors to the bays were painted shut, and so old she thought opening them would be impossible without the wood frames crumbling. One person in a biohazard suit drifted outside, next to the truck. She traded her binoculars for her phone, zoomed in, pressed Record. Here was an excited cleaning tech whose job seemed to really do it for him, overly demonstrative, dancing—as the cliché suggested—like nobody was watching. She waited, soon recorded more video that included three more cleaning techs, two men, and a woman.
Last night, while inside the building, muffled voices, young, serious, had surprised her only a few feet away, on the other side of a garage door. She and her monster toothache were not in the mood. She had handguns powerful enough to obliterate whoever was out there, plus the door in between, but those guns were in her van. The handgun she carried might or might not have done the job. Either way it would have been sloppy, creating more work. Plus, there was this other thing: she wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer. So she’d taken a simpler approach, had banged against the doors like a disgruntled elderly neighbor, which scared them off. Then she picked up after herself in a rush, the job not done. The two bodies she’d been cooking left with her, crammed into the cooker; the other two she’d had to abandon. After she had driven off the property, she stuck around to watch from across the street, to see if anyone had called in the building trespass, and they had, because it generated a police response.
Her phone away now, she swung the binoculars right then left along the rear of the building. More activity: two people carried a body bag out an exterior steel door, over to the coroner’s vehicle. A knot twisted in her stomach thinking about that corpse. Latino male. Someone who’d decided on a risky, drastic way to make a pile of cash by selling a part of his body.
Unfortunately for him, the surgery went south, the host on his way to becoming a corpse. The mob surgeon had quickly harvested more of his organs, guaranteeing that outcome. There’d been four dead she’d needed to address—out of how many total donors, she didn’t know—left by the surgeons or butchers or whatever the hell these people were. It had prompted her to text her mob contact Olivier about it overnight. His response had been quick:
Disposables. Plenty more where they came from.
Her next text fessed up about the dead donor she’d been unable to remove from the scene. Olivier made her wait twelve minutes for his answer.
Incompetence. It does not become you. Pono ʻoe ke hana maikaʻi.
The translation was, “You must do better.”
What was this? Absolution? Would there even be a next time? Or would she not see any more new business, which could then only be interpreted one way: she was a dead person walking. Until she received a new assignment, she’d sleep with one eye open.
She stayed another five minutes with her binoculars raised. Her new focus was the police van arriving, parking next to the biohazard truck. What she had hoped to avoid, she hadn’t: the cops were doing another sweep of the bays. They’d soon learn the operating theater had been crammed with considerably more organ donors than three.
There was also the matter of the two decomposing bodies she’d been forced to take with her. They were still in her van, only partly cooked.
10
Philo dozed in and out of sleep on the loveseat recliner in his living room, a few feet from the front picture window. His Sig Sauer lay across his lap.
CRASH.
Upstairs. The house shook, the second floor jolted by a thunderous thud. Shattered glass ricocheted off hard surfaces in a confined space; had to be the bathroom.
He launched himself from the recliner, groggy as fuck, bounced off a tall lamp, then a bookcase, stumbled his way toward the stairs in his swim shoes, a sleeveless tee and camo pj bottoms.
At the foot of the steps he still processed the noise, his head clearing enough to feel the steel of the Sig in his hand. He leaned a shoulder against the wall, the handgun arms-length and chest high, with him listening, concentrating, willing away the remaining cobwebs.
“Lola, that you? Lola, honey? You okay?”
No, no, it wasn’t Lola, his girlfriend was gone, had left earlier, pissed off when Philo just wasn’t feeling it. He checked his watch. One forty-seven. He needed to focus.