“Some more than others, I suppose,” Izzy said.
Deacon went back inside, and Izzy drove off, circling back toward the interstate and feeling like he hadn’t really gotten anywhere at all.
Eight
“Lost forty,” Sandy Chen said. “Yeah, I recall that.”
Izzy crossed his legs, letting his eyes wander over her bright, open office.
“You’ve been there?”
“Just the once, for that case I told you about. Bad vibes.”
“The guy I talked to, the head guy Mike,” Izzy said, “seemed almost like a cult leader.”
“I got the same feeling,” Sandy said. “But talking to him and some others, there wasn’t any dogma being thrown around that I could see. Nobody seemed to be there against their will, or too dazed to leave. I’ve been around other squats and punks houses and they don’t typically have a rigid hierarchy, but apart from that I couldn’t get at anything but the bad vibes.”
“I talked to a kid called Deacon.”
“Don’t know him.”
“Shaved head, ring through his septum. Claimed to be a friend of Cynthia’s. Anyway, when I brought up dope he was surprised. I think genuinely so.”
“That makes three of us, then,” Sandy said.
“I sort of tricked him into showing me his arms, and there were no tracks or marks. None on anyone else I saw in there, either.”
“Curiouser and curiouser.”
“It’s just off, you know? I remember talking to a patient with a dope problem a few years back, a frequent flyer. A lot of the time he came in because he OD’ed, but he was just sick. One of the things he told me that really stuck was that drug awareness education had really failed him as a kid.”
“That’s a no-brainer.”
“Well, yes. But he said the way they always made it sound like drugs would wipe you out immediately was a big problem for a lot of addicts and users, because that’s almost never the case. You use, and it feels great at first. So you know they lied to you to keep you from doing something that makes you feel good, and it’s easy to disregard everything else they said.”
“And you’re thinking if that night was Cynthia’s first try at dope…”
“That it’s possible she’d overdo it and OD right off that bat, but really, really difficult to swallow.”
“And there’s still the question of where she got it.”
“Who gave it to her,” Izzy specified. “I still think that house is a link, but I can’t figure how.”
Sandy ran her fingers through her hair and said, “Maybe you ought to talk to the police department. Has Alana made a ruling on cause of death yet?”
“I’m not sure,” Izzy said. “She’s with them on it, though. And the officer who brought her in was a serious dickhead.”
Sandy grinned in spite of herself.
“Just another dead junkie to him,” Izzy said. “And should they discover Cynthia used to hook? Forget it. They’re not going to follow up on something they can shut down easy. Their job is to close cases, just like a prosecutor’s is to secure convictions. Facts only get in the way of the goal.”
“Gracious,” Sandy said. “I didn’t realize you’d gotten this bitter about the system so early. There might be hope for you yet, Bishop.”
“Please don’t call me that,” he said. “You’re starting to sound like Forbes.”
“And I call her by her first name. Strange world.”
“That’s one word for it,” Izzy said, when the phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked it immediately and said, “Speak of the devil.”
“Alana?”
“Says I can get some crime scene experience if I want,” he said, reading her text. “Though I’m supposed to be on a forced mental health holiday.”
“You still chasing that FNDI brass ring?”
He nodded, letting his thumb hover over the screen.
“Haven’t had you around the crisis center much lately,” Sandy added. “I know it’s volunteer stuff, but…”
“I’m going to do this,” he said, tapping out a reply. “And I’ll be around here, too. Give me a call.”
With that he stood up and went for the door.
Sandy called after him, “Let me know if you find anything out.”
Izzy said, “Will do.” And, plugging the address Forbes sent him into his map app, hurried to the car.
The GPS led him to an shabby acreage back of State Highway 71, past the airport toward Bastrop, on which a dilapidated barn sagged and not much else—apart from the police cruisers, Sherriff’s Department SUV, and the Medical Examiner’s meat wagon. Izzy parked as far as the dirt road went and footed it through the yellow grass and bluebells to the congregation on the south side of the barn. Gnats, mosquitos, and bees swarmed around him, dissipating only when he reached the site.
A uniformed deputy saw him and approached, hands out, until Forbes hurried over and said, “It’s all right, Rich, he’s with me.”
Rich gave Izzy a look over and wandered back without a word. Forbes motioned Izzy over with a blue-gloved hand. She had a pale dollop on her upper lip.
“Come on, Bishop,” she said. “Get a look before I haul him off.”
She held out an open jar of Vick’s to him. He swiped a bit off the top and wiped it beneath his nostrils.
“Ripe one,” Forbes advised.
“I’ve changed a few colostomy bags in my time,” he said. “I’m not stranger to stench.”
“Good for you.”
She commenced a brisk walk back to the barn.
“Appreciate the text,” he said, following her.
“Kind of a rare one,” she said. “Didn’t want you to miss it.”
“Rare one?”
“Come see.”
They wove between the officers, deputies, and detectives milling about until they came to the barn. One of the two doors was standing open, the other flat on the ground, rotting. Just inside the opening, half shaded by the drooping structure, was the body.
A forensic nurse stood by, a broad-shouldered brunette woman who also wore blue gloves, tapping away on a tablet.
“Dwyer,” Forbes said, pointing at Izzy, “Bishop.”
The FN offered a curt nod. Izzy said, “Hi,” but kept his eyes on the corpse.
It belonged to a man, stocky and short, who lay on his front with his arms and legs spread out. He was shirtless, heavily tattooed. The back of his head was a tangled mess of hair, blood, bone, and brain matter, all abuzz with flies. Pale larvae wriggled inside the broad wound.
Izzy stepped into the barn to get the sun out of his eyes and leaned over for a closer look.
“Almost looks like he had his skull smashed in with something heavy and sharp, like a fire poker,” he said. “But I think this is multiple gunshots in more or less the same place.”
“Good eye,” Forbes said.
“In fact,” Izzy said, “My guess is there’s two shooters, firing from either side. Probably they dropped him with one shot, then unloaded into him once he was down. The impact area looks like a figure eight if you see it right.”
“I’m impressed, Bishop,” Forbes said.
Dwyer said, “I’d already said as much.”
“You’re already certified, so zip it,” said Forbes.
Izzy raised an eyebrow at them, then returned his attention to the corpse.
“Personal as hell. Whoever killed him was angry. Any shell casings?”
“No such luck,” Forbes said. “Whoever it was, they picked them all up.”
“Can we turn him over?”
“I’ve got all my photos,” Dwyer said. “Something from the nails looks like skin, too. We’ll get a profile and plug it into CODIS, hope for a cold hit.”
Forbes nodded, handed Izzy a pair of gloves from her back pocket. He snapped them on, and together they knelt and turned the body over onto its back.
“Nice swollen belly,” Izzy said. “Purple like a huge grape.”
“What do
es that tell you?”
“Putrefaction,” he said. “This fella’s been dead two or three days. Explains the greenish tinge along his back, too. Veins aren’t really visible, so I wouldn’t think it’s been longer than that. Just the gaseous formation…”
He trailed off, knitting his brow.
“Yes, Bishop?”
“Was there an arterial blood gas done on Cynthia Ramos?”
“We do an ABG on everyone, Bishop. Standard autopsy procedure. You know that.”
“So nothing unusual was found there?”
Forbes sighed.
“This,” she said, pointing at the putrefying cadaver between them, “is not Cynthia Ramos. I called you out as a favor. Don’t blow it.”
“Right,” he said. “Well, I’m not up on instars of blue bottle flies like I’d like to be, but I’d collect some of those larvae, too. I’d wager they back up the two or three days and will narrow it down closer still.”
Forbes looked to Dwyer, who frowned.
“I’ll get some evidence bags,” she groused, heading to the meat wagon.
Forbes smiled at Izzy.
“Shit,” she said. “You’d know that from prime time TV.”
“Guess Dwyer doesn’t watch those shows.”
The FN collected about a dozen maggots, which she added to the evidence already collected, and soon the body was ready for transport to the Medical Examiner’s morgue. Izzy had spent precious little time there, or in its morgue; most of the field work he’d seen so far was concentrated right in the hospital. He wasn’t invited along for this ride, either. But Dwyer lingered a bit longer to smoke a cigarette, delaying their departure. Izzy walked up to her, interested in making a slightly better impression than he already had.
“What do you think?” he asked her. “Gang thing?”
“Could be,” she said, exhaling a pillar of smoke. “Had a Mexican Mafia tat on one arm. But we don’t see a huge amount of gang activity here. You never know. Murder either way.”
“They’ll sort it out,” Izzy said, motioning at the police. He tried to keep the sarcasm light in his tone, but wasn’t sure he was very successful.
“Austin proper is one of the safest cities in the country,” Dwyer said, reflectively. “Pretty consistently about thirty murders a year, which is crazy low. Thing about that is when things get nasty here, they get plenty nasty.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean this town had one of the world’s first serial killers in the 1880s, never caught, but really gruesome. We had the UT Tower shooting in the Sixties. Those kids who were killed in that yogurt shop in the Nineties. Big bursts of violence out of nowhere in an otherwise super safe city. Like it bubbles just below the surface for a few decades until it has to burst.”
“Makes it sound like you’re not really safe anywhere,” he said.
“That’s about the long and short of it,” she said. “You never really are.”
I would feel safer with you, Izzy thought, and he shuddered.
“Nice talking to you,” he lied, and started his walk back through the brush and weeds to his car on the road.
Nine
He wrote a reminder on the back of his left hand in blue ball point ink: ABG. When Trish noticed it, she asked what it meant.
“Arterial blood gas,” he explained. “It’s a blood test that determines things like the pH of the blood, pressure of oxygen and CO2, concentration of different proteins and gases. Sometimes in an autopsy it can tell you things that you might not have been able to figure out otherwise.”
“Oh,” Trish said. “So why is it on your hand?”
“Something I want to remember to check into.”
“Is it something to do with that Ramos girl?”
“It is, yes.”
“Of course it is,” Trish said, and she climbed out of bed in a huff, shrugging into her robe and flying from the room.
Izzy remained as he was, stark naked under the blissful breeze of the ceiling fan, and groaned. After a few minutes of listening to her rattle around in the kitchen, he got up, stepped into a pair of boxers, and went to her.
She was heating the teakettle and grimacing furiously.
“All right,” he said, “what’s the matter?”
“Competing for your attention with a dead hooker,” Trish said. “That’s the matter.”
Izzy stared, affronted.
“That wasn’t necessary,” he said. “She was my friend, and this is my job.”
“You’ve never brought them home with you like this before,” she said. “I’ve had to drag details out of you when I’m interested or curious. You compartmentalize your private life and your nurse life—except when it comes to this Cynthia person.”
She took a mug from the cabinet and slammed the door shut. Izzy jumped.
“I keep telling you she was my friend, damnit.”
“Yeah, a homeless dope fiend hooker who overdosed in the fucking ghetto. Who needs friends like that, Izzy? What in the world makes her so special?”
“Jesus, Trish,” he gasped. “First of all, I’m going to expect an apology for that, because you’re way out of line. But also, you’ve got male friends. Loads of them. I don’t act like this about it.”
“I’ve got normal friends, Izzy. I associate with normal people, and I don’t obsess about any of them. I get that you have to interact with scum at that hospital all the time. I do. But you don’t have to befriend them, and you certainly don’t have to go all Sherlock Holmes when one of them burns themselves out on drugs like they’re bound to do.”
Izzy’s brow darkened his eyes and he stepped back.
“Cynthia wasn’t scum,” he said. “She was a good person with a lot of problems. Maybe the opposite of you.”
Trish froze momentarily, and the kettle started to whistle. Her face reddened, and before Izzy could duck the mug went flying past his head and exploded against the wall behind him, shattering into a thousand tiny shards.
“Fuck you, Izzy,” she hissed, and stomped back into the bedroom.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Fuck me.”
She was dressed and gone inside twenty minutes, without another word between them. Izzy sat down on the sofa, still in his boxers, and glared at the broad swath of small, sharp ceramic needles on the carpet. He planned to vacuum eventually, when his head stopped spinning, but he knew it would only suck up the biggest pieces. The tiniest slivers would be much harder to get at, to remove. Probably there were some lodged in the indentation in the wall, where the mug struck. It would be a fairly simple scenario to reconstruct, had he come into the room blind and without context. He wished he had.
His phone buzzed on the table and the screen lit up with a text from Forbes.
Good job today. You’re on your way.
He couldn’t even smile at it, and it didn’t make him feel any better.
When the phone went dark again, he rose stiffly to his feet and got the vacuum from the closet. On the way there, he noticed Trish hadn’t taken the spare key he’d given her.
Ten
The officer from Cynthia’s postmortem eyeballed Izzy from where he stood in the ER, arms crossed over his chest, beside a patient who happened to be handcuffed to the gurney. It happened frequently in there, cops bringing their arrests in for checkups before hauling them off to jail, and from the looks of it the nurse was taking blood to test the guy’s blood alcohol level. To Izzy he didn’t look like a college student, the frat type. Not someone who started some trouble down on Sixth Street after ten or twelve too many Irish Car Bombs, but a career drunk. To some extent, he felt sorry for him, knowing what he knew of the arresting officer. Izzy couldn’t imagine it was a particularly pleasant experience falling afoul of that cop in particular.
After signing in and stowing his backpack in the locker, Izzy returned to the ER to get the lay of the land for the evening. Shannon was behind the half-circle nurse’s station in the center, uploading some photos, her face worn and thin.
“Thought you’d want to know,” she said when Izzy joined her, “we found sufficient evidence on those kids to have put Joseph Stein away, if he hadn’t blown his own brains out.”
Izzy whispered a curse and leaned back against the desk.
“I just wish he’d done it on his own,” he said.
“I wish there weren’t any monsters like that at all,” Shannon said. “But I’m glad it didn’t fall to me to keep him healthy and hale. I don’t know that I could have, knowing what he was.”
“It’s the job,” Izzy said. “It’s somebody else’s job to punish them.”
“I devote myself to the welfare of those committed to my care,” she said derisively, paraphrasing the Florence Nightingale oath. “Except pretty soon you’ll handle both ends of that spectrum, care and punishment.”
“I already do, in some cases. I’ve testified in court.”
“The Cynthia thing.”
“Yeah,” Izzy said. “The Cynthia thing. Which reminds me.”
“Uh oh,” Shannon said.
“Uh oh what?”
She made a face and puffed up her cheeks.
“Heard from your mentor earlier today,” she said. “I’m supposed to remind you that your duties tonight are in the ER and not in the morgue.”
“What, is she building a surveillance team on me?”
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger.”
“I swear that woman has tapped my brain.”
“I’m pretty sure it’ll be sealed by tomorrow,” Shannon said. “OD, case closed.”
“Her body off to the crematorium and that’s that,” Izzy added.
“Sorry, Iz. You can’t save them all.”
“That’s what they keep telling me,” he said.
Officer Woorten finished conferring with the nurse, took the paperwork, and released the guy from the gurney before escorting him out to the hallway. The drunk looked tired and haggard, disinterested in putting up any kind of fight. Izzy thought he had a sad, defeated look about him, like someone who’d given up a long time ago. The entire process was likely muscle memory by now, the drunk tank his home away from home. Fallen through the cracks, churned through the system. Forgotten and lost.
The Irish Goodbye (Izzy Bishop Book 1) Page 5