by Rick Reed
Walker looked accusingly at Jack. “We’re standing outside a stinking trash dump, and he’s talking about food. Don’t you ever feed him?”
“Hey, he ate a whole cake today at Katie’s. Besides, I don’t even know what a roux is,” Jack lied, knowing that it was the base of almost every Cajun dish. Liddell had missed his calling as a chef—he loved cooking and eating almost as much as he loved his wife.
Fifty yards away, at the main entrance to the landfill, a gaggle of reporters hovered. They jostled each other each time a car slowed to see what was going on. Cameramen and reporters would rush the passing car and, seeing it was no one of consequence, fight their way back to the entrance, anxious to get the gory details. Fear sold TV airtime and newspapers.
“Let’s see the body.” Jack noticed the other officers were wearing boots, and he glanced down at his deck shoes. He would have to throw them away after this.
Seeing his distress, Walker reached in the back of his SUV and came out with two pairs of yellow knee-high rubber boots. “Not a body,” he informed them. “Body part. A head, to be exact.”
Jack slid the boots on—they were large enough to swallow his shoes—and he and Liddell followed Walker down the shoulder of Laubscher Road. Walker pulled up where orange marker flags had been stuck in the ground inside a roped-off area of chain-link fence. Half of the flags were inside the fence, the other half outside.
It was over one hundred degrees, the sun was directly overhead, and the smell hit them first. Decaying human flesh has an unmistakable sickly sweet odor. Jack had smelled it as soon as they parked, but hadn’t been able to pinpoint the source.
Walker pointed toward the edge of the fence where a head seemed to melt into the uneven vegetation and garbage. The skinless right side of the face, teeth, and jaw faced upward, and a piece of scalp with long dark hair flapped away from the top of the skull.
“How long?” Jack asked. The rate of decomposition suggested the head had been there for weeks, but he wasn’t the expert here.
“There are five stages of decay,” Walker said. “This is in the fourth or advanced stage.” He pointed at the blackened vegetation around the skull, resembling an oil patch. “The body fluids purge and seep into the soil. The grass around the head looks like it’s been cooked.”
“Gee, thanks, Mr. Wizard,” Liddell said. “But that doesn’t tell us much.”
“Sorry,” Walker said, seeming to realize how technical he was sounding. “I just returned from a medicolegal death investigation school, and they brought in a forensic anthropologist who taught all this stuff. To determine the time of death, I have to factor in temperature, location, and any other preservation factors, plus age of the victim, manner of death—”
“In other words, Mr. Wizard, there are a plethora of factors to consider,” Liddell interjected.
“Plethora? Did you really say that, Cajun?” Walker grinned. “Anyway, the short answer to your question is she’s been down two days or less. The head was brought here in a plastic contractor’s bag. We won’t be able to tell until the autopsy if the head was stored somewhere else, maybe refrigerated or frozen, or if it was just done.”
Jack looked closer and saw the black pieces of plastic that he had assumed were just more trash. The contractor’s bag suggested the victim—a woman, judging by the length of the hair—had been killed somewhere else and dumped here.
“What lucky soul made this discovery?” Jack asked, but before Sergeant Walker could answer, a uniformed officer walked up holding a portable radio.
“Dispatch,” the officer said, and handed the radio to Jack.
Jack punched the transmit button. “Two David five four,” he said, giving his radio call sign.
“Two David five four. Call Captain at home,” the police dispatcher said.
“Will do.” Jack handed the WT back to the patrolman, who motioned over Jack’s shoulder.
“Little Casket’s here.”
As Jack punched in the captain’s cell phone number, he saw the coroner’s familiar black Suburban arriving. It just missed striking a cameraman who had unwisely run into its path. The phone stopped ringing and the sound of someone cursing loudly in the background came through the line.
“Jack. Jack,” Captain Franklin yelled over the noise.
“Captain, is everything okay?” Jack asked. Captain Franklin was in charge of the detective’s office.
“That’s Stinson raising hell,” Franklin explained. “He’s in the sand trap and about to break an iron over his caddy’s head.”
Jack had to grin at the mental picture of the former commander of the investigations unit swinging a golf club wildly and cursing.
“Look, Jack, I got the call from dispatch. What have you found out?”
“Walker said the murder is recent—one or two days at most. We’ve got a female head. Just a head and it’s not a pretty sight. Looks like it was dumped here in a garbage bag and animals had a go at it, so it’s going to be hard to say when she died. But Little Casket’s here, and hopefully the autopsy will tell us more.”
“Do you need more detectives or uniforms for the search?”
“Crime scene is setting up a search grid. I’ll pass this on to Walker and see if he needs more people.” Jack didn’t have to tell the captain what the chances were of finding the rest of the body. It was a working landfill. That they had even found the head was pure luck.
“I called the chief. We’ll both be at headquarters in an hour. Keep me posted.” Franklin hung up.
There was a chain of command in police work, just like in the military. The brass was supposed to assist the investigator get the needed men or equipment, or to give the media a talking head—usually a lieutenant or above—to pass on information. This, in theory, allowed the detectives to work unobstructed.
In Jack’s experience, though, the chain of command did just the opposite. Every time he followed SOP and called the brass, they felt compelled to come in, and would make him stop whatever he was doing and come to headquarters to have a meeting. They wanted to make their suggestions, worry about the media, and then sit around useless as a bra on a bull.
But Captain Franklin didn’t interfere or try to direct the investigation from a telephone. He’d served in the field and knew what it was like. Plus, he would take the blame when Jack screwed the pooch, like a good leader. Of course, he got an extra twenty-four percent pay for his troubles.
Jack saw a familiar figure wearing hospital scrubs—complete with green medical cap, green paper booties, and a surgical mask—heading their way. Lilly Caskins, chief deputy coroner for Vanderburgh County, was a diminutive woman who had been dubbed “Little Casket” by local law enforcement officers because she was tiny and evil-looking and associated with death. Her large dark eyes stared out of thick lenses of horned-rimmed glasses that had gone out of style in the days of Al Capone.
Jack respected her work for the most part, but she had an annoying habit of being blunt at death scenes. He found it surprising that a woman could have no compassion for the dead, and no love for the living. She wasn’t trying to protect herself. She just didn’t like people.
“Who found her?” Lilly asked.
Liddell looked at the notes he’d been given by the first officer on scene. “A man and wife were dumping a mattress this morning. Apparently he stepped on it.”
“They wouldn’t have cut the fence,” Lilly said, looking at the section of fencing that had been spread wide by the crime scene squad. She frowned at the busy crime techs. “Walker and his team are here, so there’s nothing for me to do. I’ll wait in the Suburban until they’re done.” Lilly turned and marched promptly back to her vehicle.
“Look at this, Jack,” Walker said, motioning for a tech to bring the camera.
“Start taking pictures. I’m going to get a closer look.”
On hands and knees, Walker crawled into the circle of flags toward the head, his arms buried up to his elbows in the stinking trash and uncut weeds.
He stopped and tugged something, then lifted the object for the others to see.
“What the—!” Liddell’s eyes widened.
Walker pulled an evidence bag from his belt.
“We need to back up, folks,” he said. “The scene just got bigger.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Let’s talk to the couple who found the victim’s remains,” Jack said, and they looked toward the St. Joseph Avenue entrance to the landfill, where a man and woman were sitting inside a yellow Chevy pickup.
A black Lexus sedan with dark-tinted windows approached the gate and was waved through by another uniformed officer.
“The eagle has landed,” Liddell said under his breath.
“More like a vulture,” Jack murmured.
The car rolled to a stop, and Captain Dewey Duncan—who was square-shaped and bald as a baby’s ass with huge spaces between his peg teeth—literally leapt from the driver’s side wearing his dress blue uniform, complete with a police-issue eight-point cap, and rushed to open the door for his boss, Deputy Chief Richard Dick. Duncan seemed to be attached to his boss by an invisible tether. Liddell once remarked that when Dick had his hemorrhoids removed, he promoted them to captain and taught them how to drive.
Duncan was called an administrative assistant, but in truth he was little more than an overpaid driver. Jack had really hoped Richard Dick—aka Double Dick—wouldn’t show up at the scene, but the news media were involved, and the man was a media whore.
The deputy chief of police emerged from the back like a movie star—blond-haired, blue-eyed, tall and lean, every bit the Aryan poster child. He also wore formal dress blues, with a chest full of ribbons, spit-polished shoes, and, displayed on the shiny bill of his eight-point cap, the “scrambled eggs” that indicated the rank of a commanding officer.
Jack had given him the nickname Double Dick, not just because of his two first names, but because he was known to repeatedly “dick” those below him in rank. Dick nodded to Jack and Liddell, but the whole of his attention was on the news media in the distance. “Show me what we have,” Dick commanded.
Liddell snapped to attention behind the deputy chief’s back, giving an exaggerated salute. “She’s over here, Deputy Chief, sir.”
Sensing sarcasm, Dick started to turn in Liddell’s direction, but Jack stepped between them. “You’ll probably want to put some boots on. It’s pretty messy.” To which Dick made a dismissive gesture and nodded for Jack to lead on.
Dick followed Jack to the cordoned-off area. Jack stopped when they were almost on top of the decapitated head. Dick squinted in the bright sun, peering into the trash and weeds in the direction Jack was pointing. “What am I looking for?”
“The blackened area,” Jack said. “A woman’s head. Sergeant Walker found an arm next to the head.”
Dick moved forward cautiously, peering down, then stopped and gasped. He turned and rushed back to his car, crushing several of the markers underfoot on his way past.
“My God,” Dick said, leaning heavily against the car door.
Following behind, Jack felt no pity for the man. After all, he had insinuated himself into the crime scene. If he were anyone else, Jack would have told him to stay the hell out.
“We need someone to deal with the media,” Jack suggested, and wasn’t surprised when Dick quickly recovered his erect composure.
The deputy chief looked down at his dirty shoes, and Jack guessed he was weighing the impact they would make on the media. Not afraid to get his shoes dirty. Dick then snapped his fingers. “I’ll need some details.”
Liddell leaned down and, covering the side of his mouth, said, “We don’t want to give details yet, chief. If we catch the monster that did this, we want him to tell us the details.”
“Right. Good thinking.” The deputy chief slid into the backseat and the Lexus made a U-turn toward the gate.
“Nice move,” Liddell said as Double Dick approached the gathered media.
“Better him than us,” Jack replied.
They turned back to the waiting witnesses, Larry and Donita Cannon. Yet the couple didn’t have any new information that was helpful. They were mainly concerned that, because they hadn’t reported it right away—because they were illegally dumping the mattress—they would be considered accessories after the fact. Jack assured them that the police only wanted their cooperation.
Twenty minutes and as many questions later, Jack watched the Chevy truck drive away, the Cannons’ faith in police restored.
“They found the head about three o’clock this morning, and didn’t call nine-one-one until noon,” Jack said. “Nine hours. If Walker is right about the time of death, they just missed witnessing the killer in the act of dumping the body.”
Liddell joked, “Can you imagine his surprise when he tripped over the head?”
When they made it back, Jack found Walker splashing water from a bottle onto his face. Several white-clad crime-scene techs were in a line, carrying more little flags—yellow this time—and walking off a search grid. They had started one hundred feet from where the cut was made in the fence, and the techs on each side of the line had stuck a flag in the ground to mark where they had already searched. They were about halfway finished.
Jack noticed Little Casket’s Suburban was gone.
“In answer to your question, Lilly is taking the remains to the morgue,” Walker said. “And she’s calling Dr. John,” Walker added, referring to the forensic pathologist, Dr. John Carmodi, who performed autopsies for Vanderburgh County.
“Find anything else?” Liddell asked.
Walker pointed to a white truck parked near the entrance. “That’s the general foreman for the landfill,” he said.
Jack and Liddell went to meet him.
“Sherman Price,” the man said, pulling his bulk from the little truck and taking Jack’s hand. He obviously didn’t want to get any closer to where the remains were found. “I’m foreman here.”
Sherman’s name fit him well. About thirty years old, with a buzz cut, he was the size of a Sherman tank. Muscles strained the material of his T-shirt.
“When was the last time someone checked the fence?” Jack asked.
“We check about once a week. Do it myself,” Price said. “It’s fenced all the way around with solid fence or chain-link, and the only easy place to get inside is along St. Joseph Avenue. Someone coming in that way would have to walk past the scales and the office. But it’s happened before. The fence doesn’t keep them out if they’ve a mind to come in.”
“Keep who out?” Jack asked.
“Thieves.” Price spit on the ground, then looked at Jack. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have spit down there, should I?”
“It’s okay,” Jack said, wishing shows like NCIS and Cold Case had never been aired. Everyone was a forensic specialist now.
“There’s no reason to come in here,” Price went on. “We put up lights and dummy cameras to keep people honest.”
“Well, they came in this time,” Jack said, “and they left what they considered garbage.”
Price’s eyes drifted to the blackened ground where the head had been found.
“I never seen nothing like this . . . this . . .” His words trailed off.
Jack understood. Most people never saw anything like this. He gave Sherman Price one of his business cards. “Pass word on to your crews that there may be more pieces out there.”
Price didn’t understand at first, but then the light went on in his eyes. “I’ll sure tell them. We’ll call right away if we come across something.”
Jack turned to leave and then thought of another question. “Mr. Price. Those are dummy cameras near the recycle bins, but are there any security cameras that do work?”
Price scratched his head. “Nothing like this has ever happened around here.”
Price agreed to get the work schedules and contact information for employees who would have been in the yard over the weekend, squeezed into his truck, and headed for the offi
ce.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dressed in the same dark slacks, deck shoes, and mauve polo shirt he had worn to his engagement party, Eric Manson sat in the chief of police’s office. The impressive display of diplomas and awards on the walls all bore the name of Marlin H. Pope.
“I guess congratulations are in order, Eric,” Pope said with a smile.
“Yes, I’m a lucky man.”
“Katie will be good for you. Have you two set a date?”
Manson and Pope knew each other, having crossed paths at many political events and fund-raisers. Pope attended to protect budgetary concerns. Manson went because he was running for his boss’s job—prosecutor of Vanderburgh County.
Eric had come to Evansville from Pennsylvania and started at the bottom, doing scut work, working weekends and long hours, while taking the cases no one else would touch. But in six short years he had moved up through the ranks, and was now the second in command of the most powerful office in the county. He’d survived a ball-busting divorce settlement eight years ago from his cold fish of a wife, and was now getting what he so richly deserved for his hard work and sacrifice. The only thing that had held him back from attaining the top spot was the scandal caused by his divorce.
Now, with a woman like Katie, things would be different. She possessed charm and poise, not to mention drop-dead gorgeous looks that turned many a head and loosened many a donor’s grip on their wallets in his bid to replace the current prosecutor, Trent Wethington.
Trent was his mentor, his father figure, and a powerhouse himself. Trent, who was running for governor, had announced that he was stepping down at the end of this year, and had thrown his ample support behind Eric to replace him. Of course there were challengers, but none of them had Eric’s qualifications, passion, or drive, and none had the one thing they would require to win—Trent’s backing.
And that thought brought him back to the real reason he was paying a visit to the chief of police on a Sunday afternoon.