"You sound wistful."
"You don't understand. We met people, real people. We made good sources in those bars. Not like your age group. All you guys do is go to the gym. No wonder we can't find the terrorists." He swiveled to the baseball game. "Never mind. It's not worth complaining. Two months and I'm out of here. Take my retirement and never look back."
The Braves pitcher walked two Orioles. The third hitter drove the ball down the third base line. John let out a sigh.
"You're dying to tell me about the 44. I can see it."
I nodded.
“Game’s over anyway." He clicked the remote, turning off the television, and set his beer on the coffee table. Water rings circled the cheap wood. “Don’t say I never did anything for you.”
I began by telling him about Detective Falcon's "ghost"—the cold case he wanted to solve. I told him that first because under John’s hard shell, I believed his heart craved justice, the same way mine did. Once upon a time, he was more like me and less like the man who drowned in an ocean of paper among people who didn't care that much. I told him about Hamal Holmes paying for the dead girl’s funeral, and how he made a family with her little sister.
"Busy guy."
"John, hers wasn’t the only funeral. He paid for dozens. All murders, too. And every single one turned into a cold case.”
"So he felt bad for the families. What do you have a problem with?"
"The cold case files say every victim was either shot execution style with a .38, like the girl, or beaten to death."
“You’re out where the buses don’t run. This is a civil rights case, remember that?"
“Remember those fibers I collected from the factory wall?”
“Don’t tell me.”
“They don’t match Holmes or Detective Falcon’s clothing.”
He squinted. “What?”
“But the fibers match a nylon sweat suit that belongs to a kid at Holmes’ boxing gym. Which means that kid was there, at the factory."
Before he could say anything I barreled forward. The shoes, the soils packed with acrylamide. “It’s a synthetic mineral used in disposable diapers. Where do we keep used disposable diapers? In landfills. And there’s only one place around here to get that kind of acrylamide, with that particular soil. It’s on both of their shoes.”
“So?”
“So the question is, why would both men go to a landfill?”
John drained his beer. "That's not the question.The question is, How could you send clothing samples to the lab after you were suspended?"
I didn't even bother defending myself. Because what came next was worse.
"I had a dream tonight."
He groaned. “We have to go back to that factory?”
I shook my head, and described the birds and the garbage. How my dad told me to look. “John, the seagulls were tearing open the trash bags, and pulling out body parts. They were flying around with them in their beaks.”
"And your dad told you to look at that?" He stood and walked into the kitchen.
I heard a pfff-fft of a bottle opening.
"Let me guess,” he said. “You're going to tell me why he wanted you to see that."
"Yes."
He downed half the bottle. “Alright. Now you can tell me.”
"There's a dead body in that landfill."
He finished the rest of the beer, then placed a fist on his sternum, pressing into the belch. But when he drew a long deep breath, I knew something else was coming up.
The Senior Agent Lecture.
"Raleigh, it's great that you stuck to this case. You stuck even when Phaup tried to take you out. That tenacity shows some real character. And I'm proud of you. Really. I don’t agree with you, but I hope you never change."
"There’s another ‘but’ coming."
He nodded. "But you gotta know when to cut bait. I mean, the case is a 44. Civil Rights. What did I tell you, that first day on Southside?"
"Close it."
"Because Civil Rights goes nowhere. And now you're beyond nowhere. Suspended, chasing down wild leads. And you look like crap -- no offense. You see what I'm saying?"
I saw.
I saw a fifty-six-year-old man who looked like he was seventy. I saw two divorces, two kids who didn't speak to him, and a studio condo with the square footage of a dog kennel. And I saw that first day on Southside. When he called in that pink bicycle. His heart beat.
"Okay, I think I understand now,” I said. “From now on I’m only working the easy cases. Which reminds me, I better call the Richmond PD and tell them to forget about what happened to my dad. His case is so hard to figure out, I don't want to burden anybody with real work."
"That's not what I meant." He lowered his voice, sounding angry. "You know that's not what I meant."
“Then prove it.”
“What.”
“If that's not what you meant, then prove it. Help me out. I’ve got evidence, I just can’t solve the whole puzzle."
He shook his head. "I should’ve taken holiday leave that day. But, no, I went to Southside with you."
"And you'll help me?"
He moved his jaw side to side, scrunched his nose, scratched his chin. Then another long breath. “If we find nothing, you'll leave me alone?"
"Of course.”
“Liar,” he said.
Chapter 41
John arrived at the landfill Sunday morning looking groggy. And grouchy. I had already been there an hour, going over Al Gibson's log books once more and sketching a rough stratigraphy of the garbage, using deliveries as my time line. I also went through my notes and checked what was said by Mrs. Saunders. Her daughter Cherrie disappeared sometime before Holmes fell from the roof. Less than two weeks ago.
But two weeks of garbage was an enormous amount of waste.
Wordlessly, John and I stood at the base of the bluff. We wore rubber boots and heavy latex gloves and waited for Al Gibson to maneuver the backhoe. Swinging twenty feet above us, the metal basket dripped with landfill juices.
"You owe me, big-time,” John said.
I nodded. I also owed DeMott, who convinced his dad to cooperate for one more day.
The basket grazed the sky then released its ugly confetti. Torn plastic jugs. Oily paper bags. Coffee grounds, moldy cold cuts. Juice cartons. And dirty diapers.
Diapers, diapers, diapers.
I pulled a bandana over my nose and mouth, tying it in back. But the smell poked the back of my throat, triggering the gag reflex. I hoped it would go quickly.
But an hour later, it was only more of the same. Soggy newspapers. Crushed plastic water bottles. Music cassettes, all of it marinating in a fluid whose ingredients I didn't want to consider. The stench seemed endless. The search futile.
I waved at the backhoe, signaling Al to stop. Walking into the main pile, I surveyed the stinking mess.
“Hey,” John called.
I reached down, ripping open a Hefty bag. My throat convulsed. Yellow maggots were crawling over a brown mush, burrowing against the daylight.
“What are you doing?” John came up behind me.
I didn’t want to tell him I was following the dream, so I pointed.
He plunged his right glove into the maggots. I decided his refrigerator contained furry specimens that once were food because this didn’t even bother him.
"Ground beef."
"You're sure?"
He offered a handful for my inspection. I turned my face away, verging on vomit.
"See the plastic tray?" He kicked it with his boot and dropped the rancid meat back into the pile. The worms panicked, squirming.
“Raleigh, if all we find out here is hamburger, you're the dead meat."
He walked away.
I stared at the back of his T-shirt. It said: "Pull Up Your Shorts."
I continued ripping open the bags. The hair on my arms felt prickly from the odors, tacky with airborne particulates. When John approached me again ten minutes later, I c
ould read his second thoughts, the ideas that obliterate any good first thought.
I knew, because I was having second thoughts myself.
"I'm suspended," I said. "So she can’t do much more to me."
"Hey, nobody told me anything," he insisted. "You were concerned about some landfill connection to the detective. And Phaup was out of town. So I couldn't ask for her permission. And she never told me -- in so many words -- that you were suspended."
"You can say I lied to you. It won’t matter at that point."
“I can retire faster than they can fire me."
"I know."
We had sifted through twenty-five feet of the main pile, and ten feet remained, a soupy mixture of mostly unrecognizable objects. Except the diapers. They were indestructible. From my back pocket, I pulled out my chart made with the delivery logs. Checking the timeline again, I figured this layer was from about ten days ago.
"Maybe we could slow down," I said. "It's hard to tell what anything is anymore."
John looked over at me. “Slow down?” His right hand held a clump of paper. Cell phone receipts. “You mean like this?”
He peeled away the wet gray pulp, moving so slowly it was excruciating. Underneath the paper was a shoe. A sandal. A woman’s sandal. The four-inch heel tapered to lethal punctuation. The sparkly blue strap was torn.
“You women don’t fix your shoes?” He tossed it back into the pile.
But I reached down. The silver buckle the size of a dime. And it held fast.
"What are you thinking?" he asked.
"Somebody probably tossed it. Cheaper than fixing it, I guess."
He considered it a moment. “I might need something, to explain this crazy idea. Go bag it." He handed me his car keys. "Open the trunk. Only the trunk. It took me thirty-two years to get a car like that, I don’t want it smelling like a dump. And wipe down the keys when you're done. And don't push on the trunk when you go to close it. It’s automatic."
I carried the sandal across the open area, past the wooden shack, where Al Gibson had gone now that we were at the bottom of the pile. He was wiping his hands on a rag as I passed through the open gate to John's Cadillac. The white car was parked across the street from the dump. I popped the trunk, found some evidence bags and tape. I dropped in the sandal, marking time, date, and location with a Sharpie, then sealed the bag with evidence tape. I sealed it twice, in case anything leaked out and further annoyed the guy who was doing me such a big favor I could never repay him.
"What was that?" Al Gibson had come out of the shack. He was staring at the plastic bag containing the blue sandal.
“Nothing.” I started to push down the trunk. Then stopped. I hit the button on the key.
“If it’s nothing, how come you’re taking it?”
John was yelling. "Raleigh!"
I lifted the key, showing him I was using the automatic close, but when I looked through the fence, he held his gloved hand away from his body, waving me over. Didn't want me chatting over here while he was literally up to his ankles in garbage.
“Don’t worry,” I told Al. “It’s really nothing.”
I hurried back to, where the air smelled like some lower rung of hell. John was pointing at the ground.
Swimming in acid, the plastic baggie protected a moldy sandwich. And a red tricycle was bent, the front wheels mangled. Wet coffee filters wove though the spokes.
“Closer,” he said. “Get closer.”
I squatted down.
The bloat made it almost unrecognizable. Except for the toenail. In the sun, the bright polish was shining, sparkling, fresh as new pedicure. With my gloved finger, I brushed back the edge of the trash bag. Maggots had burrowed into the skin around the toe. I flicked them off.
The nail polish was red, sparkling like rubies. A defiant pedicure denying the rot.
I looked up at John.
"Just my luck," he said. “You were right.”
===============
After a long soapy shower, I drove the Benz to the Jeff Davis Apartments. Today the children were inside #109A, avoiding the noon heat. They were beautiful children, soft-eyed and curious, and they lined up on a floral couch. It had burn holes in the seat cushions. SpongeBob was on the TV. None of them laughed.
“Y'all go watch that in Granny's bedroom,” Mrs. Saunders told them. “Go on."
They ran into the next room. She lit a cigarette. I waited until she had a few drags in her system, then kept my voice low, hoping the children couldn’t hear me.
“We found a body in the P Street landfill. Female. Young.”
Mrs. Saunders exhaled smoke and pulled at her orange hair. "Cherry's not coming home. That's what you come to tell me?"
"We don’t know that. But could you share some items, for identification? A comb, a toothbrush?"
She turned automatically, walking stiffly past the bedroom where the children went. A moment later she returned with a comb. The plastic teeth held dark fragments of hair. I took an evidence bag from my purse, holding it open. She dropped the comb inside. Her lips were pressed together, holding back the quiver in her mouth.
"What'd they do to my girl?"
"Mrs. Saunders, it might not be her.” In my mind, I saw that pedicure, enduring past the end. “Do you happen to know where she got her nails done?"
She held up her hand, splaying her long fingers. And I realized that was the acrid odor in the apartment, that chemical bite hanging in the air. It wasn’t drugs. It was acetone. Nail polish remover.
Once more she walked past the bedroom, then waved for me to follow. She opened a hall closet. It held bags of cotton balls. Bottles of tinted acetone. Full sets of acrylic nails and small bottles of bright colors. She picked up a red polish. "This here’s her favorite. She wouldn’t use nothing else. It's called 'Cherry Dreams.' You know, cause her name was Cherry."
I opened another evidence bag. She dropped it in, her face stoic, almost passive. But I knew she was waiting. Not for the results. Because a mother knows. A mother can feel that heartbeat when it’s gone.
She was waiting for me to leave. She was waiting to cry.
Chapter 42
The maggots were dead, sprayed with insecticide by the morgue assistants. Their pale opaque carcasses curled beside her body on the stainless steel gurney. Her broken and beaten body. The technicians had washed her skin, placing the amputated foot beside her leg. Like it fell off.
I rubbed my hands up and down my arms.
"Cold?" John asked.
I nodded. The morgue’s temperature hovered at fifty degrees. The thin surgical scrubs covering our shoes and clothes gave no warmth, and the cotton masks over our faces didn’t alleviate the smell. The odors weren’t as overwhelming as the landfill’s stench, but they were more insidious. Playing on the imagination. Almost personal.
The room’s temperature wasn’t the only thing chilling me.
I’d been to the morgue enough times to get used to it, yet I never did. It always seemed like a horrifying weigh station of death. Here, but not here. The bodies lay stiff on cold steel: Death an intransigent fact. And it was a reminder that every heartbeat would eventually stop, sometimes violently. Tragically. Murder. Mutilation. Assaults.
Fathers. Sons. Daughters. Mothers.
"I still can’t believe we made it through that garbage dump," John said.
I nodded again. He was chatty for some reason. Excited or nervous. But he was wondering aloud how long it would take the state lab to match the DNA, where to get the dental records, whether we should send the comb to the FBI lab, risking Phaup’s wrath because by the time she filed any paperwork, John would be retired, fishing in Florida.
John Breit had never spoken so many words.
But as the swinging metal doors flapped open, he went silent.
Richmond's chief medical examiner, Yardley Bauer, burst into the room. She was a petite blond in her mid-forties. I had worked one other autopsy with her -- a joint case, with another agent -- and tha
t experience taught me her personality was on a par with the room's temperature. But I gave her the benefit of the doubt: Maybe it was an occupational hazard.
Bauer picked up the clipboard that hung at the end of the gurney. "How deep was she in the landfill?"
John turned to me. "What, thirty feet?"
"More like twenty-five."
Bauer raised an eyebrow. "Nobody got an exact depth?"
"Agent Harmon?" John smiled at me.
I didn’t know why was he smiling. But I accepted the baton.
"Before we started searching I made a rough stratigraphic record, based on an average of daily deliveries. Heavier loads arrive on Monday, after the weekend, then increase again on Thursday and Friday. Once a month, at the end of the month, the trash is buried using soil from a neighboring bluff. Her body was discovered near the bottom of the pile, placing her among deliveries approximately fourteen to seventeen days old."
John turned to Bauer. He was grinning. She ignored him.
"I doubt the body was there that long," she said dismissively. "The foot, it was with the body?"
John said, "Actually, we found a sandal first. Really, really high heel. Blue, shiny."
I stared at him. Was he leering?
Bauer cleared her throat and snapped on latex gloves. Cradling the rotting foot, she tapped a button on the floor. It started an unseen recorder documenting her preliminary observations.
“Signs of violent amputation. Possible cause of bone breakage was the weight of the garbage, particularly if the body was suffering rigor and decomposition of skin and ligaments." She set down the foot, returning to the body. "My assistant noted one gunshot wound, back of the head. I’ll say now that it’s the probable cause of death, although I see contusions on her face that appear to precede death."
“About that bullet in the head,” John said. “Can you get us anything on the caliber?”
Without a word Bauer walked over to the stainless steel counter. When she lifted an electric saw, I turned around and stared across the room. Sink. Soap dispensers. Laminated documents on the wall. The buzzing triggered my gag reflex which felt almost worn out from the landfill. I wondered how long it would be before I could eat again.
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