by Stan Jones
She was much more choreographed than the other two, and much more athletic, prowling the stage like a tiger, blowing a police whistle, mime-firing the prop automatic at imaginary crooks. After each shot, she would blow imaginary smoke away from the muzzle of the gun, then work it into the folds of the tunic and unsnap another button.
Active had ample time for a close inspection of her breasts only a few minutes earlier, but he still found it mesmerizing to watch her uncover herself with the gun.
“Hell of a show, huh?” Dennis shouted over Feather’s theme. “The rest of ‘em, they just come out and peel and jump around naked. But Feather, she makes you wait.”
“Hell of a show,” Active said. He picked up the two pictures of Grace Palmer, studied them briefly, put them in his shirt pocket, and stood.
“Yeah, and it’s not over,” Dennis complained as he too rose and turned to leave the club.
Instead, Active headed for the back corner of the bar and pushed through the men’s room door. He turned the cold water tap on full strength and splashed it into his eyes and ears and hair, rubbing it into his face as hard as he could.
When he finally turned off the water, Dennis spoke from behind him. “What next, pal? Haven’t we kind of run out the string here? Maybe it’s time to go see the John Doe guy.”
Dennis ripped a length of paper towel from a roll sitting on the toilet tank and handed it to Active. Then he put down the lid and sat on the toilet.
Active dried his face, then pressed the towel hard into his eyes. It was damp and cool, and felt good. He stared at himself in the grimy mirror over the sink. Who was that red-eyed stranger staring back, and what the hell was he up to?
“You get anything from the manager at that flophouse where she was living?”
“Nah, he was out.” Dennis shook his head. “I left my card.”
Dennis sounded sympathetic, which irritated Active. He turned and looked at his friend, tried and failed to think of a way to tell Dennis to drop the sympathy, and finally shrugged.
“See if you can set up something with the John Doe guy at lunch tomorrow, OK?”
Dennis nodded.
CHAPTER NINE
At Peer Instruction Training the next morning, Neil of the frenetic Adam’s apple had mysteriously been replaced by someone new from Redmond, a dark-haired woman named Rita who was in her forties and all business as she helped Christie with the presentation.
Active wondered idly how Christie had pulled this off. Maybe she was tight with someone in the training office at Microsoft, had called down there and asked this person if there wasn’t some assignment somewhere that only Neil could handle, promising some favor in return, maybe that she, Christie, would take the next class in Fargo or Gary or Newark without whining, and suddenly Neil was on his way back to Redmond and Christie wasn’t being hassled anymore.
Active sighed and tried to pay attention to the class but all he could think of was what was coming up at noon. At the first coffee break of the morning, the good-looking female Tlingit Trooper from Sitka he’d been bantering with all week asked him what he was doing about lunch, but even then he didn’t consider, not even for a moment, calling off his appointment with Walter Cullars, the Anchorage Police Department’s John Doe man.
Cullars worked out of a basement office at Anchorage police headquarters, down two flights of stairs, along a hallway lined with white cardboard file boxes marked for shipment to the department’s archives offsite. Cullars’ was the second door to the left, labeled “Missing Persons”.
“Walt Cullars, Nathan Active,” Dennis said as they went in.
Active took the hand Cullars extended and studied him in some surprise. Not at all the file-clerk type he had expected, but someone who looked like a senior cop, a detective lieutenant perhaps. Trim, medium height and build, fifty-something, neatly clipped salt-and-pepper mustache, graying hair just long enough to show a little natural curl, a firm quick handshake. Cullars didn’t look the part of someone who would end up working Missing Persons in the basement, and Active wondered what his story was. Well, maybe Dennis would know. He’d ask later, if he remembered.
“Dennis has told me a little about your project, Nathan,” Cullars said as the two visitors dropped into yellow plastic chairs before his dented gray Steelcase desk. “But why don’t you sketch it for me, while I get us some coffee. With, without?” He raised his eyebrows in the white expression of inquiry.
“Black,” Active said. “Brown, no sugar,” Dennis said. Cullars nodded and busied himself at a Mister Coffee on a file cabinet behind his desk.
Active tried and failed to imagine how Grace Palmer’s story could be compressed into a sketch, so he just told the back of Cullars’ head her name and the date of her last known contact with officialdom, the encounter with Special Ed at Aurora Bingo three winters ago.
Cullars returned to the desk, set down two Styrofoam cups of coffee and one ceramic mug that said, “Life’s a Bitch, Then You Marry One.” He scrawled the Aurora Bingo date on his desk blotter and frowned at it. Absently, he opened a desk drawer and came up with five paper packets of sugar. He clamped them in the crotch of a thumb and forefinger, ripped off the tops, and emptied them simultaneously into the Life’s a Bitch mug, stirred the result with a ball-point, and took a long swallow.
Nathan picked up one of the Styrofoam cups and took a sip, looking over the rim at Dennis with his eyebrows raised. Dennis rolled his eyes and gave his head a tiny shake of mystification.
“We’ve had two since then that might work,” Cullars said finally. He pushed back from the desk and stood. “Hang on a second, let me get them.”
He pulled out a drawer under the Mister Coffee and came back with two folders, one red and one blue, neither very fat. “Never got far on either one of these. Maybe we can close one of them today.”
He opened the blue folder and laid it in front of them. Active started to read the report on top of the stack, but Cullars waved his hand and Active sat back to listen.
“Some kids found this one the spring after your bingo date, leaning up against a birch tree in a little park near East High School. She was wearing winter clothes and pretty decomposed, so it seemed like she had been there a while.”
He moved the report aside to uncover a small manila envelope of photographs, closed with a metal clasp. “Weird deal,” he said as he opened the envelope. “No sign of foul play, no I.D. on the body, no one ever reported her missing, nothing with her but an old Bible and an empty vodka bottle. I figure she took shelter under the birch one winter night and just never woke up. Nobody noticed she was gone, I guess.”
Active waited uneasily as Cullars opened the envelope and spread the five-by-sevens across the desk, some from the scene, others from the autopsy.
The pictures from the autopsy showed nothing Active could recognize. Those from the scene showed a decaying mummy slumped under a tree in a ragged gray parka, dark sweatpants, and a pair of worn purple snowmachine boots. The woman had dark straight hair, no trace of gray, and Native features, but the face was too far gone to tell anything more.
Active winced and looked away. “How old was she?”
Cullars pawed through the file and read from an autopsy report. “Twenty-two to twenty-seven years of age at time of death, an old break in the left tibia, well-healed, probably no pregnancies, smoked heavily. No gross evidence of trauma or disease except for a probable enlarged liver, probably due to alcohol abuse, but no guarantees on any of the soft-tissue stuff because of the condition of the body. Think this is your Grace Tucker?” He looked up at Active.
“It’s Palmer. Grace Palmer.”
“Right, Palmer.” Cullars shook his head ruefully. “Anyway, you think it’s her?”
Suddenly the mug shot from the prostitution arrest flashed into Active’s mind. “Any teeth missing?”
Cullars flipped to the second page of the autopsy report, then back to the first. “Molar, upper right,” he said. “That’s it.”
“The one we’re looking for has a tooth missing here.” Active touched his lower jaw in front to show the spot. “Unless the pathologist overlooked something pretty obvious, this isn’t her.”
Cullars looked at the signature on the autopsy. “Nope, this was Dr. Kenders. He never misses anything.”
He sighed and scooped the reports and pictures back into blue folder. “I guess the file on Birch Tree Doe stays open.”
“What kind of tree?” Active said. “Let me see the pictures again.”
Cullars handed him the envelope from the file and he looked through the photographs till he found one with a clear view of the woman’s tree. He nodded to himself, then looked at Cullars.
“This isn’t a birch, it’s a spruce.” Active pointed to the tree in the picture. “See?”
Cullars glanced at it briefly. “Looks like a birch to me.”
“No, a birch has regular leaves and smooth, white bark.” Active pointed again. “This one has needles and rough, black bark. It’s a spruce.”
Cullars took the five-by-seven and studied it. “Really? Guess I got them mixed up. I always thought the dark ones were birch.”
Active glanced at Dennis as Cullars put the pictures back in the envelope and slipped it into the blue folder. Dennis was grimacing and tapping his temple with an index finger. Apparently Cullars was a little daft, that must be why APD kept him in the basement, Active decided.
Cullars slid the blue folder under the red one, which he touched with a forefinger. “That leaves Heavenly Doe, but I gotta warn you, there’s not much to work with.”
He flipped open the red folder and pulled out a manila envelope of photographs. He worked the flap loose and removed the pictures, eight-by-tens this time, then spread them across his desk blotter. Active looked, had a brief impression of a collection of bloody red body parts that didn’t add up to a complete human being, and looked away. So did Dennis.
“One of the city’s rotary snowplows hit her out at the east end of Four Street,” Cullars said. “This was in February, around midnight, about six weeks after the contact at Aurora Bingo. Blizzard conditions, the kind of night when there isn’t a soul in Anchorage doesn’t wonder how they hell they ended up here and why they stay.”
Cullars, apparently noticing their discomfort, swept the photographs into a single stack and faced them down. “Rotary operator sees this figure come out of the snow and darkness waving its arms, hears a thunk, and she’s in the screw before he can touch a brake.”
He tapped the stack of inverted photographs. “These pieces here came out of the blower and ended up in the snow trailer behind the rotary. We spent two days raking through the load and this was all we found. But the rig jack-knifed when the driver did hit the brakes and we figure the rest of her got sprayed into the berms along Four Street there and just never turned up.”
Active stared at the stack. “No I.D. on her?”
Cullars shook his head. “Nothing. Of course we never found most of her clothes, so you don’t know.”
“Any witnesses other than the snowplow driver?”
“Not that we could find. Couple minutes later, the driver thought he saw somebody, maybe another homeless woman, come out of the blizzard, take one look at everything, and high-tail it, but he was too shook up to be sure. If somebody else was there that night, we never found her. Or him.”
While Active was thinking dejectedly that he wasn’t too surprised Cullars couldn’t find the blizzard woman, Dennis picked the on-scene report out of Cullars’ folder and thumbed through it. “Homicide ever open a file on this? You know, if somebody else was there and they took off, that would raise questions, right?”
“That’s kind of the way I figured it, maybe she was pushed, but I couldn’t get Homicide interested. They were sorting out some kind of gang war up in Mountain View at the time, a Filipino dead on Pine Street, couple of Vietnamese kids hit, and there was nothing to go on here, really. Some homeless person running from the scene of an accident, what does that mean? They’re not gonna hang around and talk to cops even if they’re innocent. And I’m just a guy in the basement, you know? Homicide’s not gonna listen to me.”
Dennis shrugged. “They’re like that sometimes.”
“All the time,” Cullars said.
“Autopsy turn up anything?” Active said.
“Not much.” Cullars ran his finger down the report and read off the main points. “Twenty-six plus or minus two years, at least one pregnancy, heavy smoker. Pretty drunk and suffering from a fairly severe chest cold when she got hit.”
“Get anywhere with the fingerprints?”
“Didn’t get any,” Cullars said. “Never found the left hand, right hand only had two fingers and they were too mangled to take impressions.”
“How about the tooth?” Active touched his lower jaw again.
Cullars shook his head. “Most of the head was missing, just a piece of scalp with the left ear and about two inches of upper jawbone attached was all we found. No teeth at all.”
“And you think she was Native?” Active said. “Why is that?”
“Maybe Native,” Cullars said. “The skin and hair were dark. Maybe Asian, Filipino, Hispanic, South Pacific Islander, American Indian, you know. Wanna look at these?” He tapped the photographs.
“I guess not, if all you have is an ear and some scalp,” Active said. “Nothing there to go on. I never saw Grace Palmer’s left ear.”
He rose to go, depressed that he was no closer to any answers than when he came in.
“Guess not,” Cullars said. “I guess Heavenly Doe stays open, too.”
Active sat down again, an alarm bell tinkling in a distant corner of his mind. “I meant to ask, why do you call her that? Heavenly Doe?”
Dennis, who had also risen, sat down, too.
“The tattoo, of course.” Cullars gazed at them idly. “I mentioned the tattoo, right? You saw the pictures of the tattoo?”
They stared back uncomprehendingly. Cullars suddenly looked embarrassed and said, “Fuck, I’m sorry, I thought I told you. She had a jailhouse special.”
While Dennis tapped his temple and grimaced again, Cullars turned the photographs face up, flipped through them, and slid two of the color eight-by-tens, one above the other, across the desk.
In the top one, the frame was filled by a headless, mutilated female corpse, left arm severed in mid-biceps, right arm complete but mangled, left leg intact, right leg gone below the knee, a gaping diagonal slash across the abdomen. She had had a pretty nice figure once, though she had developed a little pot belly, probably from drinking.
Cullars tapped the corpse’s left breast, where an image of some kind was visible on the skin, then slid out the bottom photograph. “This is why I call her Heavenly Doe.”
Active studied the close-up of the image just above the areola– a pensive, androgynous angel hovering over the dead woman’s heart. It was done in a fine, if unschooled, black stroke that captured a kind of yearning or loneliness in the face. “This was done in jail, you said?”
Cullars nodded. “Most likely. Apparently they’ll take some toothpaste, mix in some cigarette ashes or melt down a plastic checker, tattoo each other with a sharpened guitar string and the motor out of a cassette player, whatever they can find. Some of ’em get pretty good, when they get out they actually go into legitimate tattooing, if there is such a thing.”
Active pushed the photograph away, feeling at a loss. An angel tattoo, that street name—Amazing Grace. It could be. Or it couldn’t. “You check around with the tattoo parlors, see if anybody recognized the work?”
“Yeah, I hit a couple.” Cullars shook his head. “They don’t like to talk to cops any more than street people do, but they claimed not to recognize the hand. They’re the ones told me it looked like jailhouse work.”
Dennis bent his head over the angel for a closer look. Cullars stood and refilled his cup from the Mister Coffee and was just ripping the tops off five more sugar packets
when Dennis said, “Hey, what’s this?” He was pointing at a dot between the angel’s feet.
Cullars bent for a closer look, then waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, that. A mole maybe. Or maybe the needle slipped.” He dumped the sugar into his coffee.
Active bent over and studied the dot, wondering how he had missed it earlier. Dennis’s head came down to hover beside his own.
The dot didn’t look like a mole, or like a solid blob of ink. Was there some linework inside it? “You got a magnifier?” he and Dennis said together.
Cullars fished one of out the same drawer where he kept his sugar and passed it over. Dennis held it over the dot while he and Active squinted at the fuzzy little image. Definitely something in there, Active thought, but hard to make out. The details of the dot were just at the limits of resolution of the lens used to take the picture.
“Looks like letters,” Dennis said finally. “One inside the other. O-R, maybe.”
Active looked at Cullars. “These jailhouse artists ever sign their work? Ever hear of one named O.R.? Maybe we can find him or her, ask who this was.”
“I never heard of one of ’em signing a tattoo.” Cullars took a long, savoring pull at the coffee cup, sucked wind through his side teeth. “Sometimes they’ll name the picture, though.”
“Name the picture? Shit.” Active grabbed the magnifier from Dennis and bent over the dot again. “G.P. That’s what it says. Not O.R., but a G with a P inside it. Shit.”
Active felt his stomach heat up, conviction growing inside him. He threw down the magnifier, took a last look at the other eight-by-ten, the shot of Grace Palmer’s mutilated torso with its weirdly nice breasts and its sad little boozer’s paunch, stood and went to the door, breathing rapidly to fight down the nausea.
Dennis, who had picked up the magnifier and was now studying the initials again, nodded. “Yeah, I think you’re right, Nathan. Definitely a P inside a G.” He sighed, a big whooshing sigh, and laid down the magnifier.