by Rex Burns
“You find any needle tracks?”
“No. But the doc’ll have to look at the organs to know for sure if he was a user.”
“You figure he’s around fifty?”
Baird looked up from rummaging in the shelves of his open kit and squinted at the face. “Yeah—he looks like it. We’ll try to pin it down a little closer for you.”
He laid out his equipment on a wheeled table and began to fold a pair of disposable rubber gloves over his fingers. “I’m not sure how long this is going to take, Wager. There’s bound to be some decay already set in. A whole day lying in that sun…”
The statement called for no reply. Wager watched as Baird cupped a crooked forefinger in his hand and pressed with his thumb on the victim’s knuckle; the flesh under Baird’s thumbnail whitened and after a moment he grunted with pent breath. “Have to use the knife.”
“Does the rigidity give you a better idea what time he was killed?”
“A little. But lividity, digestion, ocular fluid—all those things have to be figured in, and the pathologist will get to them. One thing at a time, okay? You were crapping your pants to get fingerprints; fingerprints you’re gonna get.”
Baird always got prissy when he defended the technicalities of his work. Wager shut up and watched. The lab man’s scalpel sliced deeply under the second joint of the fingers and between thumb and forefinger. “Might as well do both hands while the knife’s dirty, right?” A paper towel soaked up the seepage. Baird levered each finger straight with a quick motion, as if punching open a can. Then he began gently washing the fingers with soap and water. He used a small toothbrush to lightly work any foreign matter out of the ridges of the fingers and then dribbled a solution on a cotton swab and dabbed at the fingertips. The wet cotton tip followed the swirls and ridges of gray flesh. “Xylene,” he said. “Cleans away any oils or grease that soap and water miss.” Bending over the awkwardly stiff arms, he rinsed and dried each finger. “All right, now we can go to work.”
He picked up a tool like a long, shallow spoon and threaded a strip of fingerprint paper through the notched end. “We’ll try the easy way first.” He rolled ink on a spatula and pressed that around the bulb of the forefinger; then he slipped the spoon beneath the carefully lifted digit and pressed it firmly down. Raising it carefully again, he drew out the fingerprint and bent over the flattened paper with a magnifying glass.
“Well?”
“Take a look.”
Wager did. In the lens, the print of black swirls and ridges had numerous gaps and empty patches, as though someone had half erased the man’s fingertips. “Will this be good enough?”
Baird was already filling a syringe from one of the kit’s bottles. “No. The fingers have dried out too much—dry climate, hot sun. We’ll do a little tissue builder.” He jabbed the needle into the underside of the first joint and down beneath the ball of the fingertip. “This is good stuff. Glycerin and water’s okay, but they leak out after a while. This stuff sets up. Undertakers use it to fill out sunken tissue.” His hands busy, he nodded toward the victim’s face. “Like around his eyes. You see where it’s already sunk in?”
“I see.”
“Expensive, though.” He finished and tied a wide thread around each finger below the needle hole. “So the tissue builder won’t leak out. It’ll be a few minutes.” He began rinsing the syringe. “You want some coffee?”
“No.” Wager checked the time; he and Axton were supposed to be on the street by now, making rounds. “How long’s this going to take?”
“Christ, Wager, it could take all day! If this doesn’t work, I try something else. A sodium hydroxide bath, maybe. Sometimes I’ve had to peel off the fingertips and wrap them around my own. If it’s real bad—worse than this one—I have to send both hands to the FBI and they do the work. That may take a week or two before they come back with a good impression. Check with me this afternoon, okay?”
“I’ll check at lunch time.”
CHAPTER 2
BAIRD FINISHED HIS work by noon, but that didn’t do Wager much good—the prints cleared both the state and FBI files with no identification; and despite Wager’s daily calls, Missing Persons listed no one closely matching the victim’s description. After one day, the small article—”Unidentified Man Found Slain”—dropped out of the local news section; after two days, radio and television stopped mentioning the case. By the end of the week, it rested in the “active” drawer, one more thin manila folder with no new information, deserving little attention compared with the steady demands of current stabbings, shootings, bludgeonings. And one garroting, which was sure to make the front page because it broke the routine mayhem.
“Wager, I hate to ask you this—in fact, I hate to ask you anything—but can you give me some reason why a guy would be strangled like that?” Gargan held his reporter’s notebook ready. As always, he wore a black turtleneck pullover, a color Wager swore he chose to hide the dirt.
“Maybe somebody didn’t like him.”
“I knew you were going to say that. I just knew you were going to say something as corny and predictable as that.”
“Then don’t ask me anything, Gargan, and we’ll both be happier.”
The reporter shook his head in disgust. “It’s my job to ask, Wager. My goddamn job. And, whether you like it or not, my right, too. The public pays your salary and they’ve got a right to know just how good, or in your case how lousy, you do your job!” He wandered out of the homicide office in search of anyone else.
A satisfied smile tilted the corners of Wager’s mouth as he dialed the number for Vice and Narcotics. The garroting had all the signs of a drug killing, and Politzki over in Johns and Junkies was a good place to start. But Gargan didn’t have to find that out from Wager. If the reporter had a right to know, he also had a duty to work for his stories, and over the past years each man had done what he could to make the other’s work a little harder.
“Vice and Narcotics, Sergeant Politzki.”
“This is Wager in Homicide. I think we’ve got a victim you might know: Ellison, Michael David.”
“Ellison…? Black kid? Around twenty-five?”
“That’s him.”
“Where’d you dig him up? Ha.”
Politzki enjoyed making the kind of jokes he heard on television. And like his favorite television shows, he provided his own laugh track. “Over near the Zuni power plant. What can you tell me about him?”
“Not much, Wager. He’s not heavy—a chipper and a mule, mostly. What’d he do, get ambitious?”
“It looks that way.”
“Happens all the time.” And if he was dead, he was no longer Vice and Narcotics’ worry. He was Wager’s. “He’s got a jacket. That’ll tell you more than I can.”
“Thanks, Ski.”
“My pleasure, Gabe. I mean that, ha!”
Wager, like Gargan, would have to get his own story. Sighing, he stood and gathered up the homicide report in its secondhand manila folder and went down to Records.
Where Policewoman Josephine Fabrizio smiled as she caught sight of Wager leaning over the wide shelf looking for her.
“Hi.” That’s all she said, but the smile and the way she sounded told Wager a lot more, and he felt again that surprised sense of warmth and completeness he rediscovered every time they saw each other.
“You are one very sexy cop, Policeperson Fabrizio.”
“That sounds more like monkey business than police business, Detective Sergeant Wager.”
“Right—we don’t want to waste the taxpayers’ money. But when you get out of that uniform …”
Jo glanced at the clerks busy in front of computer terminals and telephones. “I know what’s on your mind—and I love it.”
That was the use they gave to the word “love.” They loved things about each other, but neither ever said “I love you.” They had worn those words thin before they met each other, and, Wager knew, the words still opened doors that neither wanted to ex
plore yet.
“Has the weekend roster been posted?”
She nodded. “I get off at five, Saturday.”
“I’ll see you at five-oh-one.” He told her about the Axtons’ invitation. “We don’t have to go,” he said. “I don’t even think I want to.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Polly worries so damn much about people having a good time that I’ve never had one there yet.”
“Polly invited you? Or Max?”
“Max.”
“I thought so. He’s trying to patch things up.” She added, “He knows you’re too stubborn to make the first move.”
Wager stifled the angry impulse to say that his partner was his business and his business only. But Jo meant well, and, after all, Wager had let her in on it. During one of those rainy dawns when they lay half asleep and still sweaty and clinging to each other, Wager had described how he had ruined Polly’s dinner that time by fighting with his partner. But that was all he told her. If a cop as good as Max could feel guilty about sharing the knowledge of Tony-O’s execution, Wager wasn’t going to burden Policewoman Fabrizio with it.
“Or didn’t you want me to tell you that?” She smiled.
“You don’t have to tell me, Querida. All us Hispanos are stubborn. That’s how we preserve our colorful heritage against you Anglos.”
“Uh-oh—there’s that Spanish accent. But don’t forget, Pancho, I’m not Anglo. I’m Italiana.”
The accent always betrayed his anger. And Jo always seemed to defuse it. He slid his hand across the shelf in mute apology and touched her fingertips. “I’ll think about Polly and her damn barbecue. Here, Policeperson Wop, see what you’ve got on this dude.” He showed her the form with Ellison’s name.
She glanced down the report. “Strangulation?”
“Low-budget homicide.”
“Yuk! It’ll take just a minute.”
He watched her lean toward the scanner, the taut blue skirt showing the long curve of leg that his hands knew so well. Her dark hair, regulation length and shorter than he liked it on his women, curled to her shoulders and showed the coppery light that some brunettes had. And despite her slimness and the stiff uniform shirt, her breasts showed fully, too. Wager remembered when he first saw her, the chrome name tag, Fabrizio, J., riding above one of those round breasts while a tall blond cop leaned familiarly against her. That guy was gone now, and she never talked of him. Wager never asked.
He shuffled through the Ellison jacket for a list of known associates and the names of various arresting officers who might remember the youth and the people he hung around with. That was where this kind of case usually found its solution, and the tiny whir of the office’s electric clock over the entry underscored the routine quality of Wager’s work. When the telephone rang he automatically noted the time—twenty to eleven—and pulled a pad of paper to him as he answered. “Homicide, Detective Wager.”
But it wasn’t another death report; it was Doyle’s secretary telling him that the Bulldog wanted to see him as soon as possible. When Wager entered the homicide chief’s office, the man’s lower teeth in the underslung jaw glinted in a polite way.
The Bulldog motioned Wager to one of the black Leatherette chairs with its embossed seal of the Denver Police Department. Visitors to the offices of division chiefs got to sit on those chairs; molded plastic rested the backsides that visited lesser offices.
“You making any progress on that strangulation case?”
Wager eyed the man. The Ellison case promised to be a garden-variety homicide and not worth Doyle’s special notice. “He was a small-time pusher. I’m working on a list of known associates now.”
“Keep it legal.”
That was Doyle’s prejudice against ex-narcs. Wager knew his business. He did not bother to answer.
“What about that John Doe found east of town Monday? Anything?”
He shook his head. “No i.d. yet. Coroner’s report, pathology findings. We’re still waiting on the dental check. With no i.d., we’re not going to get very far.”
“Uh-huh.” Doyle pushed a leaf of paper across the shiny dark wood of his desk. “Does this look familiar?”
It was the sketch of an angel, domed wings spread and sword upright.
“Another one?”
“It came in the mail this morning. It was found on a victim in Pueblo a couple days ago. Give me everything you’ve got so far.”
Wager told Doyle the findings of the coroner: death by gunshot, an exploding bullet of heavy caliber—probably .44 or .45—sometime in the early morning of the day he was found. No FBI record, no military service, no missing-persons report. The Salt Lake City store that sold the victim’s suit did not remember the man’s description. No laundry marks.
“Possible motive robbery? Maybe a dope deal?”
“The pathologist found no traces of dope in his organs. The summary says he was very healthy for a man his age.” Wager shrugged. “He was robbed, yes. But robbers don’t usually leave a note on the victim.”
“So outside of that little drawing, we got a lot of nothing.”
“Yessir.”
Doyle pulled the drawing back across his desk, his square fingers tapping it lightly. “The Pueblo victim is unidentified, too. A white male, mid-to-late thirties, shot once in the heart with a large-caliber handgun. Robbery victim, but this was found stuck in his hand. Pueblo sent copies statewide to all agencies to see if it turned up anywhere else.” The Bulldog’s fingers stopped tapping. “Did we send a circular out?”
“No, sir. I should have.”
Doyle nodded. “That’s right, Wager. You should have. It was sloppy not to. So do it now. Start working from this angle.” He tapped the drawing again. “It’s the same m.o. and looks like the same kind of drawing. See what the lab can come up with on the picture you found. Get in touch with …” he read from a letter “… Detective Orvis down in Pueblo and see if he has any other replies to his circular.”
“Yessir.”
Doyle’s fingers tapped again, holding Wager in the chair a moment longer. “I don’t know how it was in Narcotics, Wager; but in Homicide, routine can be good and it can be bad. It’s good when it makes you work systematically and cover all the bases. It’s bad when it makes you think every murder’s just another day at the office. You understand?”
“Yessir.”
Doyle was right: Wager had screwed up, and the anger he felt was at himself. Back at his own desk he called Baird in the lab. “Have you run any tests on that angel drawing yet?”
“Let’s see. … No, we haven’t got to it. I was hoping we’d get an i.d. to work with before we did any more on that one. We got about eight cases pending with viable suspects.”
“Doyle wants the tests run as soon as you can.”
“Crap. Well, the chief gets what he wants, doesn’t he?” Baird added, “I can tell you one thing about it without any tests, though.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a copy. Xerox, maybe. But a plain-paper copier was used. I took it out of the evidence bag and looked at it in the light. You can see the difference in the embossing.”
“A Xerox? It looked real to me.”
“It is real. But it’s not an original. It just looks like an original. Hell, some of these new copiers can photograph a dollar bill close enough to fool a change machine. My son told me some of the kids in his junior high are working that little scam.”
A copy. There could be tens of copies. Hundreds.
“I don’t think the paper’s going to tell us much,” said Baird. “We already dusted it for prints, of course, but there weren’t any. I’d have let you know if there were.”
“Do what you can.”
“I always do.”
His next call was through the WATS line to Pueblo, one of the string of growing cities that ran down the east face of the Rockies from Wyoming to New Mexico. All Wager could remember of the town was the wall of towering steel blast furnaces and the mo
untains of coal piles that lined I-25 as it arced past the small and usually hot and dusty city. After two or three voices he finally reached Detective Orvis.
“This is Detective Wager, Denver Police, Homicide. I’m calling about that inquiry you sent out—the angel with the sword.”
“Right! Do you have anything for us?”
“A similar killing. And a similar drawing.”
The line clicked somewhere in the muffled distance. “A white male? One shot in the heart? Possible robbery motive?”
“And no identification yet. Has anyone else called you?”
“No, no … You’re the first.”
Wager understood why Orvis said “first”; the idea of multiple murders had crossed his mind, too, when he talked to Baird. “Is your drawing a Xerox copy?”
“Yeah. That’s why I sent out an inquiry. How about yours?”
“It’s a copy, too.” He gave Orvis the date and circumstances of his John Doe killing. “Let me know if you get an i.d. on yours—or anything else. I’ll give you my office and home number.”
“Fine. You’re the case officer up there?”
Wager noted the stress on “up there”; Orvis was telling him that it was his case, too; that the Denver PD might be the state’s biggest department, but it had no jurisdiction in Pueblo. “Right. Me and Detective Axton.” He spelled Max’s name. “We’ll keep you informed of what we come up with.”
After he hung up, Wager finished the list of Ellison’s known associates and phoned them to Records and the Crime Information Center for any addresses they might have. Then he and Axton would start down the list and shake trees until some clue fell out. But the real thing on his mind was that angel and sword. One here; one in Pueblo. Maybe one or more in other states, too.