The Catch

by Archer Mayor

  “Jesus,” Willy groaned. As Sam well knew, the man—despite his marginal manners—was a neat-freak at heart, and while he spent most of his time working in these environments, his soul quailed at the squalor.

  At the second-floor landing, they were met by a poster boy for the average American male Caucasian.

  Sammie walked up to him and gave him a hug. “Ron, it’s great to see you. How’s the family?”

  Ron nodded to Willy over her shoulder. “Hi, guys. Everybody’s great. How’re you doin’, Willy?”

  Willy frowned and glanced at the open door of the nearby apartment. “I’m doin’. This the place?”

  Ron broke from Sam and bowed slightly at the waist in mock homage. “It is. We’ve staged down the hall, there. You can get a Tyvek suit and booties and the rest from Phil. I also called the crime lab. Their ETA is maybe another two hours.”

  Willy’s frown deepened. “I’ll believe that when I see it. You’re making this sound like a whodunit.”

  Ron nodded. “So far, it is. The dead guy is Wayne Castine, thirty-two. He was stabbed a bunch of times, and maybe shot and beaten, too. It’s hard to tell with the blood. It’s all over him, and all over the apartment.”

  “He live here alone?” Sam asked, as Willy headed for where Phil was waiting with the crime-scene equipment.

  “He didn’t live here at all, and the woman who does swears she doesn’t know who he is.” Ron paused before rephrasing. “Correction—she says she doesn’t know Wayne Castine. Making a visual ID on this guy is a little tough right now. She might know him but not his name.”

  “Do we know her?” Sam asked, in the age-old shorthand for, Is she in the computer for any past misbehavior?

  “Some speeding tickets,” he answered. “Two DUIs over the past two years; a couple of domestics as the victim; a few public disturbances involving alcohol. She’s been a person-of-interest in a dozen or more cases, hanging with a tough crowd.” He held his hands out to both sides, palms up, in a hapless gesture. “Name’s Elisabeth Babbitt—British-style spelling. Calls herself Liz. She’s pretty down and out, like everybody else on the block. Only moved here a couple of months ago. Lived in West Bratt before that; Bellows Falls before that; north of Putney in a trailer before that. And that’s just the past four years.”

  Willy returned, awkwardly zipping up his white suit while holding the hat, gloves, and booties, all with the one hand. Everyone knew better than to offer to help. Sam took advantage of his approach to get outfitted herself.

  “Not to sound obvious,” Willy said, having overheard the conversation, “but if the guy’s too messed up to recognize, how do you know who he is?”

  “Wallet,” Ron explained shortly. “It was poking out of his front pants pocket. I could snag it without disturbing anything else. I had Dispatch run his license through CAD, and there were enough common traits to make it look pretty likely he’s the guy, including a tattoo on his forearm.”

  Willy pursed his lips but withheld comment, pointing toward the apartment with his chin instead. “She find the body?” he asked.

  “Yeah, after a night of bar-hopping.”

  “She share the place with anyone?”

  Klesczewski shook his head. “Not that you can tell. I didn’t get into the nitty-gritty with her—didn’t want to trample too much ground ahead of you guys. But I got the feeling she wasn’t beyond getting help with the rent the old-fashioned way.”

  “She’s a hooker,” Willy restated bluntly, leaning against the rickety railing and pulling on the booties as Sam returned, typically all ready to go.

  “Amateur, I’d guess,” Ron suggested. “Officially, she works at the grocery store.”

  Willy nodded.

  Sam asked, “What do we have on Castine?”

  “He’s a kid-diddler,” Willy said without looking up.

  They both stared at him, taken off-guard.

  “You know this guy?” Sam asked.

  “I know about him,” Willy answered her, intent on his task. “We never busted him when we were with the PD, but he was a person-of-interest a dozen times or more—buying booze for kids, crawling around the edge of underage parties, offering rides after school. One of those scumbags you know is dirty, but you can’t catch him.”

  Sam glanced at Ron, who shrugged and said, “He’s right. I don’t have much to add. He lives in a one-room efficiency on Main Street—or lived, I should say. I have someone sitting on that. He worked as a part-time stacker and loader at one of the lumber companies. I got someone else getting a list of co-workers and buddies there, along with anything that might be interesting. Nothing too intense,” he added carefully, seeing Willy’s expression darken. “We’re not conducting interviews—just collecting data.”

  Willy laid one latex glove on the railing, wriggled inside of it with four fingers, and finished pulling it on with his teeth. “How screwed up is this scene, with all the pickpocketing and whatever?” he then asked.

  Ron was ready for that one. “Babbitt found the body, used the phone to call 911, and then waited right here. The responding officer—Rich Matthews, who deserves a high-five as far as I’m concerned—grilled her first for a couple of minutes, and then literally tiptoed in to determine that Castine was really dead and alone. He didn’t touch anything; came out the same way he went in; and then sealed the place up. He even took his boots off before he went in.”

  Willy scowled. “That’s weird. He nuts? What if somebody had been hiding in the closet?”

  Ron tilted his head to one side. “I know, I know. A little over the top. But he’s fresh out of the Academy and a little paranoid about scene preservation. I already talked to him. Anyhow, the scene’s pretty good.”

  “Except for you,” Willy commented.

  “True,” Ron admitted. “I suited up to confirm what Rich had seen, mostly because he is new. And along with the wallet, I took some baseline shots. But that’s it.”

  “You call the ME?”

  “Him and the state’s attorney, but I also told them to hold tight until the crime lab arrived.”

  Sam reached out and patted her old colleague on the arm. “You did good, Ron. Like always. Thanks.”

  Willy didn’t say anything, but moved to the apartment’s door and glanced over his shoulder at his partner. “You ready?”

  It wasn’t much, Wayne Castine’s last resting place. A hallway with a bathroom on one side and the kitchen opposite, leading to a small living room and a bedroom beyond. There were a couple of closets with nobody in them, and a smattering of mismatched furniture. It wasn’t terribly dirty, smelled mostly of cheap soap and makeup, and bragged of an awkward Middle Eastern motif, or maybe South American, consisting of gauzy scarves and odd pieces of fabric draped across the windows and over lampshades.

  Sammie studied Willy as he preceded her slowly down the hall, keeping his feet on the strip of brown butcher paper that Ron had laid out on the floor. She could sense through his body language—as he paused here and there, his latex-clad fingers sometimes extending as in a failed effort to reach out—a desire to absorb what might have happened in this now dull, quiet, otherwise mundane little home.

  It was an understandable ambition, since what they could see, in the absence still of any dead body, spoke of grim and relentless violence. On the hallway’s floor, smearing the walls and doorjambs, splattered and dripped and swiped as in a child’s finger-painting, was more blood than either one of them had witnessed in a long while.

  Whatever else was left behind from the events of the night just past, certainly the lingering ghost of pure rage loomed large.

  And that was before they reached the main attraction.

  He was in the small living room, spread-eagled on his back, covered with enough blood to make him look more like a slaughtered carcass than a dead human being.

  Even Willy, with his hard-hearted reputation, murmured, “Whoa,” at the sight.

  “Somebody was pissed,” Sammie said quietly.


  Willy reached into the pocket of his Tyvek suit and extracted a cell phone.

  Sam glanced at him, surprised. He was usually illinclined to consult others on a case. “Who’re you calling?” she asked.

  She was struck by his tone of voice when he answered her. This was a man used to violence, after all. She knew that much from sleeping beside his nightmares.

  But his words were somber and reflective as he flipped open the phone. He spoke as a man who’d recognized something beyond the simple impulse of most killings. There was eloquence crowding around them here—primal, angry, penned-up, and very hot.

  It wasn’t the kind of thing for even Willy to confront cavalierly.

  “I think,” he told her, “it’s time to wake up the Old Man.”