Nothing to Hide (A Roland March Mystery Book #3)

by Bertrand, J. Mark

  “You know for a fact.”

  “That’s right,” I say. “’Cause all he knows is what I tell him.”

  Jerry laughs and puts the notepad away. A certain amount of ribbing is good for him. Makes him feel like he’s worth the effort.

  It’s almost midnight and the streets downtown are relatively empty apart from the occasional car heading home late and the occasional homeless guy pushing a cart along the sidewalk. Jerry leans against the passenger door, silent, and I gaze up at the forest of skyscrapers overhead, thinking about my ill-judged leap across the gully, my pointless ramble through the pines. I may be the old man of my homicide squad, but I am not an old man. Just middle-aged, a few years shy of fifty. But my throbbing leg tells a different story. You are old, Roland March, far too old to find yourself—how does the saying go?

  In a dark wood wandering.

  CHAPTER 2

  Operating on two cups of coffee and three hours of sleep, I meet Lorenz outside the medical examiner’s office at half past eight. He already looks haggard, his brow damp with sweat. The June sun crouches on the horizon, bringing the blacktop to a boil, and as we cross the lot the heat radiates up through the soles of my shoes. My leg, still sore from last night, drags a little. On principle I’m fighting the urge to limp.

  Bridger quizzes us for a few minutes in his office before the autopsy begins. Lorenz fields most of the questions, consulting his notes when in doubt. Once he’s satisfied, Bridger leads us down the hall, where one of his many assistants is already prepping our John Doe.

  It takes a couple of hours, with Bridger working slowly, methodically, making crisp clinical observations, occasionally translating them into layman’s terms for our benefit. He keeps hedging on time of death, noting signs that the body was kept on ice. This means it could have been transported from some distance, and as long as a week after the killing.

  “There are a lot of variables,” he says.

  On cause of death he’s much more precise. Pausing over the open chest cavity after removing the heart for examination, he declares that our thirty-something victim died of cardiac arrest, probably brought on by torture. There are ligature marks on the wrists, he points out, as if the victim strained mightily against the bonds as his hands were sliced up.

  He pauses to let the image sink in.

  “And the head?” I ask.

  “The decapitation was postmortem. Probably done with a small axe. It took more than one blow—but, see, they all seem to come from the same direction.” He chops his gloved hand in the air, matching his slow-motion strokes to the cuts in the neck. “There’s none of the sawing back and forth you’d get if it were a knife or something like that.”

  “So you’re thinking he was tied up?”

  “In a chair, maybe, with his wrists secured to the arms. That’s my guess.”

  Lorenz stands at the foot of the autopsy table, writing it all down. “And the murder scene could be pretty much anywhere. On the other side of the world, for all we know.”

  Once the procedure’s done, Bridger leads us out, stripping off his gloves as he shoulders through the swinging door. He washes up, then runs a damp hand through his regal, prematurely white hair.

  “Walk with me,” he says.

  We follow him down the stairs and out a side door to the concrete landing designated for smoke breaks. How he can stand it in this humidity, I don’t know. I put my hand to the steel railing and it’s hot enough to scald.

  “Here’s what won’t be in the report,” Bridger says, lighting up. He exhales a lungful of smoke before continuing. “Pure speculation on my part, but don’t you think this has a Mexican mafia feel to it? The torture and beheading. Things are going crazy down there.”

  “I was thinking of those al-Qaeda videos,” Lorenz says.

  “In Houston?” I shake my head. “Anyway, when al-Qaeda cuts your head off, you’re alive to see it happen. They post the video online, too. They don’t drop off the body at the nearest basketball court.” I turn to Bridger. “Neither do the cartels, for that matter. If this was Brownsville or Laredo, then maybe. But who would this guy have to be for them to do him this way, then dump him on our doorstep? There’s no tats on him, so I doubt he’s in a rival gang—and if he’s just an innocent bystander, why carve him up? Why bring him all the way up here?”

  “Like I said, just speculation. It could always be some nut job serial killer.”

  After a pause, I ask him to rush the DNA lab work.

  “Everything is rushed these days, which means nothing is.” He stares at me through a cloud of smoke, pleased with this pronouncement.

  We stand around for a bit, soaking up the UV rays and the secondhand carcinogens; then I thank Bridger for the help and get going.

  “That wasn’t much,” Lorenz says.

  “No. But just to be thorough, let’s check with the Mexican Consulate. Maybe somebody important’s gone missing south of the border. If this is the cartels, they don’t seem to think twice before dusting cops and politicians.”

  Lorenz adds yet another task to the end of his lengthening list.

  ———

  At the Consulado General de México next to I-59, no one seems sure what to do with us at first. We have to explain ourselves to a series of increasingly senior officials until a small, elegant man in a dark suit and gold watch suddenly appears, ushering us into a small, elegant office. From behind the desk he makes a number of phone calls, swiveling his chair so we can only observe him in profile, speaking softly into the receiver.

  “I am sorry,” he says finally. “But leave your card with me, Detective, and if I am able to obtain any additional information . . .”

  Outside, Lorenz pulls at his shirt collar. “Was that the runaround?”

  “No,” I tell him. “That was Old World charm.”

  We stop for an early lunch, wolfing down burgers at a Five Guys chain under the highway—the default choice for Lorenz unless I beg for a change.

  Back downtown we check in on the sixth floor. The daily news has already prompted a respectable quantity of joggers and cyclists who passed through the park yesterday to phone in their details. I glance over the sheets, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary. No one spotted a suspicious-looking man lugging a headless body. Nobody wrote down the license plate of a van with blood dripping out the back door. We’ll have to compile an index of vehicle makes and models, following up any leads we get, but I have a feeling this won’t add up to much. A project for one of our rookie homicide detectives.

  Lorenz comes back from the restroom with his tie loosened and his shirtsleeves rolled up.

  “I’m gonna go hit up Terry Cavallo,” he says.

  “I’ll come along.”

  He shakes his head, but doesn’t object.

  Cavallo is the raven-haired, dark-eyed beauty of Missing Persons, her mess of exotic curls the result not of Hispanic descent—my first assumption—but Italian, which I should have figured out from her aquiline nose. Her boss, Lt. Wanda Mosser, used to be my boss once upon a time, and a couple of years ago Cavallo and I found ourselves partnering up on a missing persons task force that turned into a homicide investigation. In addition to being easy on the eyes, Cavallo’s a sharp detective, sharp enough for Captain Hedges to notice and offer her a position. But she decided she much preferred hunting the living to avenging the dead.

  When we turn up, Cavallo’s in a conference room talking to the parents of a long-missing kid. Through the blinds I see her on the far side of the table, her hair pulled back, her olive-skinned arms exposed by a short-sleeved blouse. At her throat, the flash of the silver cross pendant she always wears. One of her colleagues invites us to wait. After ten minutes, Cavallo ushers the parents out, following them all the way to the security door, maybe even as far as the elevator.

  “You think she’s coming back?” Lorenz asks, checking his watch.

  “Not if she saw you.”

  But she does come back after another minute, b
riefly staring us down. “The two of you together? This can’t be good.”

  “We might surprise you,” I say. “Do you happen to be looking for any unscarred, untattooed, mid-thirties white boys at the moment?”

  “When am I not?” She frowns at her own joke, then forces a laugh. “Just kidding. You wanna come to my desk and take a look?”

  “Lead the way.”

  Maybe she’s still on edge from the conversation with the parents, but there’s something constrained in Cavallo’s voice. The cheap joke, the forced laugh. There’s always been a certain reserve about her, an aloofness—a necessary defense mechanism looking like she does in a shark tank full of red-blooded cops. But we’ve worked together enough for her to drop that around me. In my book, we’re friends. Maybe having Lorenz here with me is ruining the vibe.

  “Everything all right?” I ask under my breath.

  She brushes the question off. “Everything’s fine.”

  The last time I saw Cavallo was months ago, when her husband came back from his last tour in Afghanistan. They threw a party at their new house, which she’d finally managed to unpack. Smiling and brown from the sun, her husband struck me as a great guy. And she hung from his broad shoulder like a schoolgirl showing off her first boyfriend.

  Sometimes, though, in the middle of conversation, he’d stare blankly into the distance while she talked. Not looking haunted exactly—he’d volunteered for tour after tour—but like he might still be over there in his mind, like he might go out on patrol once the rest of us had left, his cheeks black with face paint and his .50 caliber Barrett slung for action.

  Later in the evening I got Cavallo alone and asked how things were going. She let out a long and satisfied sigh, but then her eyes clouded. “I’m just happy he’s finally home.” Her voice sounded like it did just now when she told me everything was fine.

  After Lorenz explains about our John Doe, she sits at her terminal and punches up a couple of files. None of them look like a match. Either they’re too old or the descriptions aren’t right. Cavallo’s missing persons, unlike JD, do have distinguishing marks, tattoos, and other identifiers. Just to be thorough, she digs through the filing cabinets near her cubicle and shows us a few more photos. Nothing.

  “Well,” Lorenz says, “it was worth a shot.”

  As we head out, I fall a little behind him, pulling Cavallo closer. “Are you sure everything’s all right? You seem a little—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. Tense.”

  She repeats the word, tight-lipped: “Tense.”

  “Is everything all right at home? We haven’t seen you guys in a while—”

  “March,” she says. “What’s the deal? You walk in out of nowhere and decide I’m acting strange? You’re the one who asked for help, not me. As always.”

  “Is that what this is about? It seemed like a good lead to follow up, if you ask me.”

  “Never mind.” She touches my arm. “Forget I said anything. You’re right. I’m all worked up. It’s nothing to do with you—and it’s nothing to do with my personal life, okay?” She smiles. “But your fatherly concern is duly noted.”

  “Fatherly. Ouch.”

  “Anyway, how is Charlotte? You’re right, we haven’t seen each other since . . . It was the party, right?”

  I nod. “Charlotte’s out of town again. The new job.”

  “Ah.”

  My wife, Charlotte, after nearly a decade of working from home, marking up legal documents for her old partners, accepted a new position at one of the big law firms, almost doubling both her salary and the amount of time she spends on the road. She’s traveled so much in the last six months that we went to the Galleria on her birthday and bought all new luggage, a shiny set of ribbed aluminum rolling cases like something out of a sixties science fiction movie. And we bought new phones as well, with cameras front and back so we can talk face-to-face from opposite ends of the globe, something we tried once or twice early on before lapsing into the occasional old-fashioned phone call.

  Over by the exit Lorenz taps his watch.

  “The clock’s ticking,” Cavallo says.

  “It always is.”

  I catch up with my partner, giving Cavallo a last look from the threshold. She’s standing where I left her, but with her back resolutely turned. Something’s not right between us.

  ———

  The afternoon grinds on, one false lead after another. Then the shift ends and the next one starts and it’s the same all over again. We have a body without an identification, no witnesses, and no likely avenues to pursue. So we pursue the unlikely ones, roping in the rest of the squad in twos and threes, exhausting leads, exhausting detectives, exhausting the patience of my long-suffering lieutenant.

  “There’s always the DNA,” Lorenz keeps saying.

  Yes, there’s always that. The long shot chance that somewhere in the FBI’s massive computerized index, there’s a strand of chromosomes waiting to be matched. Even that would only get us so far. Knowing a victim’s name doesn’t automatically unmask his killer. It might, though. Why bother making the identification so difficult, removing the head and mutilating the hands, if having a name won’t make any difference?

  By the end of the week I’m starting each day with a conference in Bascombe’s office.

  “Whatever you need,” he says. “Anything at all. ‘You have not because you ask not.’”

  Which is the first time I can remember him quoting anything other than the criminal code.

  “All I need is a hit on those test results.”

  “You’re making the calls? I’m making them, too. Believe me, the pressure’s on to push this thing through the system. I don’t know what the holdup is, but I’ll call again right now if you think it’ll help.”

  He reaches for the phone, then waits for my answer.

  “It can’t hurt,” I say.

  But it doesn’t help. He puts the phone down five minutes later, giving me a shrug. “We’ll get the results when we get the results. Maybe something by shift’s end.”

  So I check back with him a few hours later before clocking out, just to see if anything’s come through. He looks me up and down, deciding what to say. “Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll go at it fresh again in the morning.”

  “All right.”

  He glances at the monitor on his desk. “I’m thinking, while we’re waiting on the DNA to come back, it’s not a bad idea if you and Lorenz catch up on your other open cases. We’re not giving up on this, March. We just need to use our time as efficiently as possible.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In other words, barring intervention from on high, JD will keep clocking time in the refrigerator while Lorenz and I move on to other cases. It’s not the first time I’ve had to put a victim on the back burner, not the first time a case has gone cold on me. They say there are things you don’t get used to, like seeing a headless corpse or an autopsy in progress, but the fact is you get used to them just fine. They even become a little fascinating from a professional standpoint. What I can never get used to is this: giving up. Gathering all the paper and filing it away for what might be the last time.

  Whoever he was, this man was strapped to a chair and tortured, was put through such agony that his young healthy heart finally gave out. What would he have thought if he’d known in those final moments that after a handful of days, I’d be consigning him to a cardboard filing box and preparing myself mentally to move on?

  I take the elevator down to the secure garage, tracing the way back to where I left my car. Sliding between two vehicles, my foot catches on a drain grate and twists. The old pain, fading steadily every day since the night of my fall, stabs through me. I steady myself against the hood of a car and try to shake it off. It feels just like a knife, or maybe a surgeon’s scalpel. And then it dulls down to a throb. I take a step and it’s still there. There, but manageable.

  Not so bad that I can’t function.

 
A pain I can live with.

  CHAPTER 3

  When I’m not working, I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. The house is too empty, too quiet with Charlotte gone. The first time she left—a weeklong stay on the East Coast—I’d find myself opening drawers and checking that her things were still there. An hour later, one of her silk slips would still be clutched in my hand, or a little piece of jewelry, and I’d be sitting in the dark thinking about . . . nothing.

  “Go visit the Robbs,” Charlotte would say over the phone, sensing something wasn’t right, but not wanting to probe too deeply into what. Her new position made her happy, more than she’d ever anticipated, and by instinct she steered away from any conversation which might call the decision into question.

  In front of the muted television I try calling Charlotte. She’s in London now for some kind of high-level negotiation meant to last through the weekend, after which her plan is to pick up her sister Ann, Bridger’s wife, who’s flying into Heathrow for a couple of days of sightseeing. It’s hard to imagine what the two sisters will do alone together in a foreign land. They can hardly get through dinner together without some kind of argument flaring up. My call goes to voicemail, but I don’t leave a message. She’ll get back to me when she can.

  I check the time, then try to watch the History Channel for a while. Back when they ran Hitler documentaries all the time, I could tune out in front of the tube for hours. Now there are too many reality shows with only a tenuous connection to the past. I switch off the TV and go to the bookshelf, taking down the thick middle volume of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War, which I’ve been reading intermittently for about ten years, hoping to finish before I’m dead. Not tonight, though. After flipping a few pages, I put it back.

  In the old days on nights like this, when I wanted desperately to shrug off the pressures of work, I’d end up in the parking lot of a bar called the Paragon, wondering what it would be like to take a drink. Sometimes I’d go inside and order one, then let the glass sweat untouched on the table, testing myself. But the place changed hands a few times and finally closed. Now there’s just a darkened storefront.