by Mike Knowles
“Easy, baby. Let’s go somewhere quiet.”
Dennis left his hand on Ellen’s leg and pulled away from the curb. He made it three blocks before flashing lights behind him caught his eye. Dennis swore and pulled to the curb. There was no sense trying to run; his plates were in the system. All he could do was hope that he could talk himself out of the situation.
Dennis squeezed Ellen’s leg hard enough to make her yelp. “You say nothing. Not a fucking word. Understand?”
Ellen nodded.
“Say it.”
“I understand.”
The squad car parked behind him and the driver’s side door immediately opened. Dennis blew out a relieved breath. The door opened too fast for anyone to have run the plates. In the side mirror, Dennis watched an attractive female constable approach the car. She was tall and thin, and when she got to the window Dennis saw that she was just a kid. He went straight for a bluff. He flashed his badge and cleared his throat.
“What the fuck, girl? I’m trying to pick up a confidential informant and you pull me over?”
The uni bent down and looked at the badge. “That was what this was?” She wasn’t at all fazed.
Dennis just about shit a brick. He kept it up—going for broke. “Goddamn right that was what it was. What the hell else would it be, Constable . . .”
“Owen,” she said.
“Owen, you lucked out ’cause it looks like no one is around to see your screw up. So get the fuck out of here before this whole thing goes way south, and I have to put in a complaint about you.”
Dennis watched her hand come off her hip and unstrap her flashlight. The beam hit Dennis in the face.
“You just got off shift. I saw you drop off your partner a few minutes ago when I was picking up my car.”
The beam jumped to Ellen, and Dennis saw the young constable’s eyes change. They looked confused at first, then sad. She kept looking at Ellen, who smiled back at her.
“Hello, officer.”
Dennis brought his hand up and rubbed his eyes. Not only had Ellen forgotten what Dennis had said, she had forgotten her gender-neutral voice when she said hello.
Owen looked at Dennis again while she put the flashlight away. “If you’re going to work overtime, let the car in the area know so we don’t make this mistake again. Alright?”
Owen was staring right into Dennis’s eyes with a sad look on her face when she spoke. Dennis held the gaze for as long as he could, then looked at his knees and nodded. Owen walked back to her car, and Dennis waited until it had left to tell Ellen to get out.
“Why, baby? She bought it. We’re in the clear.”
“Just get the fuck out.”
Owen hadn’t bought anything. She saw right through Dennis and soon everyone else would too. Ellen got out, and Dennis drove the car home. He spent the rest of the night drinking. He took all of his sick days and a few funeral days until he had no other choice but to go back to work. He was ready to go in and quit—just pack up his shit and go home. He’d find a job in another city.
Dennis showed up early his first day back to check his desk. When a shitstorm was brewing, a cop’s desk was the eye of the brown hurricane. Cops loved to play practical jokes and leave embarrassing photos or jokes on the intended victim’s desk or in a drawer. Dennis walked into the quiet early morning squad room and approached his desk like it was a tiger sleeping on the jungle floor. He stopped five feet away, surprised at what he saw. The desk was clean—everything was exactly where it had been before he left. Standing back from the untouched desk, Dennis was sure the drawers must have been tampered with — probably loaded with dildos. Then Sal Espisito walked by and told Dennis it was about time he got back to fuckin’ work. If there was something to say, Sal would have said it. His bullshit comment on Dennis’s absence was as welcome as Merry Christmas. Dennis smiled, flipped off Sal, and sat down.
Dennis saw Owen a week later in the parking lot. Her face didn’t brighten when she saw him; it stayed impassive, except for her eyes. Those damn eyes looked so sad again. Dennis nodded at her, too embarrassed to say anything, and the pretty young constable said, “You let me know if you’re going to be around picking up informants again anytime soon.”
“I’m done with that case. I won’t be around,” Dennis said.
“Ri-ight. Well, if the need comes up again, just let someone know. You might get pulled over by someone louder than me, and your cover might get blown.”
“I told you, I’m done.”
Julie nodded and got into her cruiser. “Right.”
Dennis hadn’t seen the young constable again until he saw that same sad look again on the face of the woman on the bed.
“Owen,” he said.
The big mean cop suddenly activated like a robot turning on. “You know her?”
Dennis nodded without looking away from the woman’s eyes. “Met her when she was first riding patrol. She was good.”
“Good what?”
Dennis could tell Os was looking for a fight.
“Good police, Os. She was good police.”
She was better than good police; she was an angel with sealed lips. The answer seemed to satisfy Os.
Dennis said, “Too good to end up like this. In front of everyone like this.”
“Then we do right by her and figure out who did this,” Woody said.
Dennis nodded. “Let’s get started.”
8
It was unbelievable how fast the room came to life. Woody began checking out the apartment while Os checked the bedroom. Woody didn’t fight to stay in the bedroom when Os volunteered to stay and look around. Woody noticed the tension between Os and Dennis. He could tell his partner was on edge with him around. Woody took Os’s offer to stay in the bedroom as a cue to get Dennis out. He told him to get downstairs and figure out when the coroner and forensics would be on scene. Dennis seemed happy with the job, judging from the speed with which he left the apartment. Woody followed him to the door, closed it behind him, then walked into the kitchen. The cuts in Julie’s stomach were deep, but they weren’t surgical. Woody figured the incisions were done with something from the apartment. Julie was tied to the bed with sheets from her own place—if the killer had been following a plan, he would have brought rope or tape, not relied on whatever he could find. Not bringing anything to tie her up with made it logical to think that he also didn’t bring a knife of his own.
Woody couldn’t tell if everyone in the world wanted to be away from Dennis or if he might have actually had a skill for managing people, but the coroner was up within minutes and forensics wasn’t far behind.
Woody told the two detectives from forensics what he knew and then gave them time to organize the team of scenes-of-crime officers they brought along. While SOCO got to work taking pictures of everything, Woody busied himself in the kitchen. His mind was clear and his wife hadn’t shown up in the apartment again. The Adderall had finally fully kicked in and brought him up from the heroin. Inside the small apartment kitchen, there were cupboards above and below six feet of counter separated into halves on either side of a coil top stove and range hood. On the other wall, there was a garbage can next to a narrow pantry that was probably from Ikea, and a cork board on the wall that Julie used to post notes, business cards, and a calendar.
Woody thought about Julie. She obviously first went down from a severe blow to the head. If the plan was to cut her open, the knife came next. The sheets felt like a last minute addition to keep her down. Plus, the sheets looked to be cleanly cut, not ripped. So the knife was in the bedroom before she was tied to the bedposts.
Woody took the pen from his pocket and slid open the drawer to the left of the stove. The drawer was full of cutlery. There wasn’t anything sharper than a butter knife. Woody used the bottom of the pen to shove the drawer closed and moved to the other side of the stove to open the n
ext drawer. The weight of the drawer made it stick and the extra force Woody applied made the metal objects inside rattle against the walls confining them.
There was no order inside the drawer; no spot where a knife was clearly missing from its designated space. The drawer was a jumble of useful and useless things. Woody thought about what he knew about kitchen knives while he listened to the sounds of crime officers snap pictures in the bedroom. The room down the short hallway was oddly quiet. Usually, crime scenes were loud and boisterous, filled with men and women trying to convince people that the death on display didn’t bother them or with people so jaded that death had lost all sense of reverence. It was different when it was a cop in front of the lens—they were all suddenly aware of how vulnerable they all were.
Woody listened to the snap of a high-speed lens while he ticked off the kinds of knives he had at home. He got stuck on four, so he started poking through the drawer with his pen trying to pair up Julie’s knives with his own. He matched the chef’s knife, a serrated bread knife, and a cleaver, but he couldn’t find a paring knife or a pair of scissors. The handles of the three knives all matched and they looked to be part of a set. It was possible that Julie didn’t own a paring knife, but it was more probable to Woody that it had been taken. The choice of knife said the killer wanted something controllable—something that wouldn’t go too deep.
“The scissors were probably for the sheets,” he said to himself.
Woody checked the other drawers to be sure the paring knife and scissors weren’t misplaced, and then he found one of the SOCOs holding a camera.
The officer was a tall woman wearing the kind of tortoise-shell glasses that no one wore anymore. Her hair was pulled back and looped through a scrunchy. Woody was no fashion expert, but he was a murder cop and murder cops noticed things, even fashion trends—at least, the good ones did.
“What’s your name?”
“Deborah,” the officer said. She was mousy up close, and Woody doubted there was a pretty girl hidden underneath the glasses and scrunchy—she was Deborah, plain and tall. Her chin was pointy and so was her nose. Worse still, she had just one long eyebrow. If she had a decent body under the police windbreaker, Woody couldn’t tell.
“Deb, I need you to get prints off this drawer handle and pictures of everything in the drawers and all of the cards on the cork board. Get the shots before you take them down.”
“It’s Deborah, not Deb?”
Woody ran his tongue along his molars. “Oh, I get it,” he said. The comment wasn’t for her; he was thinking aloud.
Deborah shouldered the camera and put her hands on her hips.
“Get what?”
“Nothing. Sorry, Deborah. Can you just get the prints and the shots?”
“I want to know what it is you think you get. What, you think I’m some ball-breaking feminist? Some bitchy girl. That it?”
Woody closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I don’t want to start a whole thing with you. Can you just get the shots?”
“No, I want to know what it is you get.”
“Fine, you’re a woman working in a predominantly male profession. Every day you are subjected to a lot of off-colour jokes and awful innuendo. Cops working the streets aren’t formal, and I’d guess they aren’t much different than the ones working a camera. You probably started off letting people call you Deb. You were one of the guys, but as one of the guys you became the butt of most of the jokes. You wanted to be accepted and probably wrote off the jokes as the cost of being one of the guys who wasn’t a guy. I’d guess it was okay for a second, uncomfortable for a while, and then all at once it became intolerable. After that, you probably switched back to Deborah and started grabbing the camera first so you could move around a bit more and that way you were out of the crude line of fire. How am I doing so far?”
“And you got all that from my name?” She kept her voice low, but she couldn’t keep the annoyance out of her tone.
Woody figured he’d hit a nerve. Most of what he said was just an inference based on what he knew about the turnover rate of women on the job. But what was police work other than making inferences and lying? Woody went for the lie next.
“Your name and what everyone already told me about you.”
“You’re a fucking asshole.”
Woody smiled. Name calling was as close to “you’re right” as he was going to get.
“Problem here?”
Os had come into the kitchen in that scary silent way of his and was standing behind Deborah.
Woody watched her turn around, ready to unleash more of her disgruntled rage only to deflate in the face of Os. Deborah was tall, but she only reached Os’s shoulder. She looked up into his eyes and instead of mouthing off, her shoulders came up and her head turtled as she freed the camera.
“No problem. The detective was just telling me to get some pictures of the kitchen.”
Os lifted his chin and looked over Deborah’s head at Woody. Woody nodded at his partner, and Os looked back down at the SOCO.
“Thanks . . .”
“Deborah,” she said.
“Thanks, Deb.”
Woody squeezed by Deborah and followed Os into the living room. Deborah had let the name thing slide with Os. Like most people, she seemed to instinctually know that it was best to avoid pushing Os’s buttons.
“Coroner just came in,” Os said.
“Bedroom?”
Os nodded.
“Let’s go.”
Neither man moved. Woody was waiting for Os to go first, but his partner didn’t budge. After a few seconds, Woody walked into the bedroom. The coroner was on one knee going through a black bag. Marie Green had been a coroner for fifteen years—she held degrees in medicine and forensics and dominated every game of trivial pursuit she played. She was a woman of average height and average weight with a little extra around the middle. She kept her red hair short and rarely wore jewellery. Her most distinguishing characteristic was a recent one; Marie got braces last year. The coroner wasn’t the type to do anything half-ass—she got the top and bottom done and wore at least ten elastics connecting the two sets.
“Hey, Woody,” Marie said. The greeting was as warm as it could have been inside the bedroom. Woody and Marie went way back; they used to be poker buddies until Woody gave it up to pursue other nighttime activities.
“Os.” Marie’s hello to the big man had less familiarity and a bit of stiffness to it.
“Hey, Marie,” Os said. “You know anything yet?”
Marie stood. “I won’t be able to tell you time of death with any degree of certainty. Whoever did this to her left everything exposed, and that screws up the numbers. Forensics will have to go on the blood. Most of it is still tacky; the edges have just barely begun to crust. I’d guess three, four hours ago. How was she found?”
“Jerry told me the door was open,” Os said. “Neighbour came in to check on her. Thought maybe she had left it open because her water broke or something and she had to get to the hospital. She found the body and fainted. Called nine-one-one when she came to.”
“Surprised we haven’t had more fainters,” Marie said.
“Do you think the baby could still be alive?” Os asked.
Marie looked at the umbilical cord. “Judging from the size of the cord and the placenta, I’m guessing the baby was close to term.”
“Had to be if the neighbour thought her water broke,” Woody said.
Marie nodded. “Makes sense. There’s a chance the baby could be alive.”
“Like this?” Woody said.
“Babies are born by caesarean all the time. The trauma is worse on the mother than the baby.”
“But you’d need to be a doctor,” Woody said.
“Not if the health of your patient wasn’t a priority. If the killer was careful, there is a cha
nce, a slim chance, the baby could have come out alive.”
“Were the cuts surgical?”
Marie moved to the side of the bed and leaned over the body. It was an awkward way to stand because the coroner had to keep her pant legs away from the blood soaked sheets and mattress. Marie lifted one of the flaps of shin and examined the edge. “The cuts weren’t done by a scalpel. They’re uneven. Something tried to cut through the tissue multiple times until it finally got through. There’s more to go through than most people think. Plus, the way this was done is not at all medical. Caesareans are done just below the waistline. No one gets opened up like this. This looks more like. . .”
“A dissection,” Os said, finishing her sentence.
Marie nodded. “Someone with medical training would have at least made better cuts.”
“But someone would have to know something about something to get the job done,” Woody said.
“Like I told you, if you don’t care about the mother, pulling a baby out wouldn’t be the hardest thing in the world to do.”
“So we go with the baby is alive,” Woody said.
Os nodded.
“Hold on,” Marie said. “I said if the cuts were made carefully, the baby could have been alive when it was born. That’s a big if, Woody. Look at her. And even if the baby, by some miracle was born alive, I didn’t say it would stay that way. Her water didn’t break; this baby was born early. An early caesarean birth in a medical setting still has plenty of risk involved. The baby has an increased chance of developing respiratory problems or persistent pulmonary hypertension. I could go on. And those are complications from a procedure completed by a physician. A baby born like this—” Marie nodded towards the bed, “would need immediate time in a neonatal ICU. Without that, the baby’s chances are slim.”
“How slim?” Os asked.
“On its own, the baby probably wouldn’t last more than a day.”
Woody looked at the body, then at Os. “Get Jerry to issue an Amber Alert. If he tries to fight you on it, tell him the doc here confirmed that the child is alive.’