Puffles had a soaking red beard.
CHAPTER 2
Corrine took the call-in from Jackson, which he made from his cell phone to shield his report from the geeks out there with police scanners. He summarized his actions: entering 3 Hollis Street by forcing the front door, he at once saw the scarlet lake in the living room and tasted the cannabis stench floating above the blood spoor. He gathered up the hysterical poodle and shut him in the powder room.
“I’ve got a 10-66 and likely a 939 Delta,” Jackson reported. Corrine considered telling him to keep to English, since he was on a fairly secure mobile line. A 10-66 denoted a “major crime alert,” and 939 told her that drugs were involved; “Delta” indicated a possible fatality. None of this made sense, but cumulatively the codes convinced her of the urgency of the call-in.
“What do you need out there, Officer?” She sensed his near-panic.
Jackson would have preferred that Corrine, a veteran on the desk, sort out that particular question, but now she had thrown the decision back onto him. He sucked it up. He surprised himself: he knew what to do.
“I don’t need backup units per se,” he said. “For now, I’d prefer a team from Homicide. There’s about two quarts of blood pooling on the hardwood.”
It was Corrine’s turn to feel uncomfortable. Jackson’s statement was oddly genteel (“per se”?) and threw her off. She told him to stand by and looked for the duty officer, Sergeant Blaine, but he had gone out back to catch a smoke. She hastened to the squad room of the precinct. The men lounging there ignored her, so she brayed, “Got a possible fatality! Assist officer on the scene but no immediate threat. But a possible 939 large.”
At that moment, there were ten patrolmen but only two detectives in the big room, Phil Mohlman and his junior partner, Henry Pastern. All the men looked up now. A 10-66 in itself wouldn’t have diverted them from their coffee break; a lot of cops first at the scene will exaggerate the “major crime” they find. But a combination of a 10-66 with a drug bust pricked their interest. It had been a slow morning, and the officers sensed a chance of excitement. Maybe a dead body somewhere in all this.
Henry Pastern at his beat-up desk failed to recognize the 939 code and reached to fetch the cheat sheet from his drawer. But something, instinct or a spark of electricity running through the air, made him stop and check with Phil across the room.
Phil was smiling, and Henry understood telepathically that his partner already had a thorough read on the call-in. Phil had noted Corrine’s failure to wait for the duty man, Blaine, who had final authority over the dispatch of assistance. It must be serious. As Homicide detectives, Phil and Henry could expect a violent case to flow down to their level within a day, but a 939 signalled drug trafficking and the case could as easily be snatched away by the West Valley Narcotics Unit. Phil had also noted Corrine’s waffling on the question of a dead body: maybe the investigating officer had found an ounce or two of blood, or maybe a corpse beckoned. Phil wasn’t going to wait for the death certificate. He grinned at Henry and pressed the plunger on an imaginary syringe. Henry grasped that if they moved fast, they could scoop the case. The uniforms in the room saw the gesture; their hopes of latching on to the investigation, with the chance of scoring a drug bust collar, were now pre-empted. Henry closed his desk drawer.
Phil, who hailed from Boston and loved to play the Easterner card, as usual went too far and called out to the uniforms as he and Pastern left the room: “Don’t get enough homicides in cowboy country. At least someone out there’s making the effort.”
Phil insisted on taking the wheel. He seemed to know where they were heading and he drove fast, though was not, Henry saw, in a frenzy to get there.
“Hollis is a dead end over in Forest Vale.”
“A cul-de-sac?” Henry said.
“Yeah, but builders out here don’t use the term; it implies a trap, going nowhere. Jesus, they think it’s fancy French. Christ, these cowpokes!”
Henry could have argued that “dead end” wasn’t an alluring term either, but, as subordinate man on the team, he avoided being contentious. He didn’t know if Phil’s double blasphemy was a shot at him. Henry was lapsed Latter-day Saints.
“Oh, I know the area,” he said. “Forest Vale. Theresa and I looked there when we scouted the market last year. For about five minutes.”
Mohlman shot him a skeptical look. He had been in the Pasterns’ new house out in the desert, and it couldn’t have been more of a contrast to what he remembered of this second-, maybe third-rank neighbourhood.
There was nothing sylvan about Forest Vale, and no valley was in evidence, unless you counted the broader Salt Lake Valley in which it squatted. Phil turned onto Hollis, and Henry, like Jackson, noted the unfinished stone pillars. The crime scene at Number 3 was the first house on the left, although Officer Jackson’s cruiser sat across the way, in front of Number 4. Henry was surprised that no one had emerged from the other houses to gawk or confront the police presence.
They sized up the real estate in the afternoon glare. Number 3 sat peculiarly distant from the wider avenue off which they had just turned. The stone posts served no purpose, Henry judged; they merely used up half a lot each and ceded the other halves to 3 and 4, expunging Numbers 1 and 2 from the blueprints. Henry looked down the row. All the houses on either side of Hollis were bungalows until the street widened to a circle, where four two-storeys crowned the dead end. The neighbourhood stood deaf and mute.
Jackson, nervous and apparently fixed in place in the vestibule of the Watson home, opened the aluminum door. Phil barged inside, followed by Henry.
They were almost at once at the living room. A taupe area rug bore a nasty red stain in its exact middle. On the polished maple floor beyond, a bigger pond of blood was refusing to dry; from there, crimson paw prints travelled up the hallway and out of sight.
“Where’s the dog, Jackson?” Mohlman said.
“I locked it in the can,” Jackson replied.
The forensics boys won’t be pleased, Henry thought, but he supposed there were worse places to store a mutt with a panicky bladder and Jackson Pollock tendencies.
He scanned the room, charting the mix of vile smells. The blood scent rose in a metallic fog in the unventilated centre of the room, but the acridness was complicated by the sweetness of marijuana coming from the rear of the dining area. Two plump green trash bags lay on the floor under the back window, only one of them twist-tied. Jasmine perfume fought for his attention.
“Any more grass in the kitchen?” Mohlman barked.
“No, sir,” Jackson said. “I went upstairs to check for … bodies. None there — bodies, blood, or bags.”
Mohlman glanced over to check that Jackson wasn’t being alliteratively sarcastic.
Henry examined the staircase for the first time. This wasn’t a strict bungalow; there was a half floor above them. The house presented other contradictions. A repository for drugs but not actually a grow op. A killing ground but not Gabriella or Tom Watson’s final resting place.
“There’s no basement,” Phil added.
“None of these places have basements,” Henry said. “A lot of homes in the West skip the cellar, opting instead for big garages and man-cave storage sheds out back.”
Phil shook his head. “In Boston, a basement is somewhere to keep your victims in.”
The living/dining room stretched from the front of Number 3 to the back. Phil put on a pair of thin cloth gloves and circled through the hallway, avoiding the blood spill, to the trash bags by the back window. In Henry’s view, it was already time to call in the forensics techies. The living room wasn’t getting any fresher. The pool was turning gummy and rank, and someone was going to step in it. The poodle in the bathroom hadn’t made a sound, but who knew, it might be chewing through the fixtures.
Phil opened the twist tie on the second bag and smelled deeply of the
weed inside. The rich curl of marijuana hit Henry’s nostrils.
“Whew! The real thing,” Phil said. We need to check for drug processing paraphernalia. Our family — the family name again, Jackson …”
“Tom and Gabriella Watson,” Henry replied, and Jackson nodded.
Mohlman brooked no disagreement as he summed up. “The Watsons are dealers, but small-time. This is quality weed, but it wasn’t processed in this house.” He stared at the blood and reflected, “So far as I know, no grow facilities have ever been busted before in Forest Vale.”
Jackson had been listening deferentially, but now he jumped in. “Do you think they’re trying to retain a credible possession argument? That amount of uncrushed marijuana, the courts might be persuaded it isn’t trafficking.” Jackson was on a roll. Mohlman nodded for him to continue. “I checked, sir. There isn’t a school, community facility, or shopping centre within a thousand feet of here.” What might be a trafficking misdemeanour automatically turned into a felony if the grass were sold near a place frequented by kids.
“Why didn’t the killers just throw the trash bags in the trunk?” Phil said. “This is top grade.”
“Perhaps the killers didn’t arrive by vehicle,” Jackson said, knowing the second he spoke that this sounded bizarre. The stench was making all three men light-headed.
“I think they were specialists,” Henry offered, earning confused looks. “You know, an execution squad.”
But Henry had to admit that the presence of the two bags made no sense. It was too much for personal consumption, too little for a grow op or distribution hub. Apparently, however, its mere existence was enough to kill for.
They stared at the mess until the odour became oppressive. “Let’s caucus by the front door, gentlemen,” Phil said.
They crowded into the entryway. Jackson was pleased that the detectives weren’t cutting him out of the investigation.
“Officer Jackson, time to call in the cavalry. At least one backup pair of uniforms and a full forensics team. You’re speaking for me. Tell them there’s a small amount of weed. Small. If the Drug Squad wants a piece of this they can pay us a visit, but we defend Homicide’s control. That blood on the floor isn’t a shaving cut.”
Jackson nodded. Henry said nothing. Phil continued his instructions, alternating between the two younger men. “Jackson, you and I will be occupied for the next two or three hours with the crime scene, but then I want you to help me with the door-to-door. I’ll work this side, the odd numbers. I want to command this street. If that’s not enough, Jackson, I suggest your smart move is to complete your report to your supervisor by tomorrow morning, copy on my desk. Henry, you start interviewing the south side, the evens. Go back to Miss Hampson at Number 4, see if what she tells you remains consistent with her 9-1-1 call and her first statement. By the way, Jackson, don’t touch anything in this house. And Henry, if you see Boog DeKlerk or his Drug Squad boys, text me fast.”
Outside, Jackson trotted to his vehicle to contact the precinct. Still none of the residents had come out to the street. Phil and Henry came down the concrete front steps and walked to the centre of Hollis, where Henry turned and took in Numbers 3 and 5 as a pair — the latter obviously vacant, maybe derelict. As Jackson had, Henry remarked on the contrast between the two bungalows. He pivoted and caught Jackson as he was picking up his transmitter.
“Jackson! Hold off.”
The young patrolman stepped back out of his cruiser and gave him a questioning look. Unlike Mohlman, Henry Pastern was a little-known quantity among rank and file; Jackson had never worked with him.
Henry murmured, “Wait five minutes.”
While Henry turned again to stare at the houses, his partner and Jackson waited by the curb. “Notice anything, Phil?”
“Like what?”
“The bungalows are similar but they don’t match.” The lawn at 5 was a bad haircut; ragweed and yarrow grew around the foundation on the west side. Weather-leached plastic toys spilled across the patchy grass between the ungainly bungalow and the Watsons’. Henry looked to the end of Hollis. Every house enjoyed a sightline on every other house. Why hadn’t they mobilized against the owner of the dump at Number 5?
“Can we take a look at next door? Just for a minute.” Mohlman shrugged, and the three men traipsed across to the no man’s land between the Watsons and their absentee neighbour.
“Phil, you think this street is condo’d?”
“Nah. What, less than twenty houses? Awfully small for a condo. Your guess?”
“I agree. Freehold. But everyone works together on the common elements.” The signs of house-pride were evident along the street, but not so much around Number 5. Phil and Officer Jackson stood back as Henry evaluated the second unit. The Watsons’ neat green lawn ended sharply at the property line, replaced by yellow weeds and sandy soil all the way to the wall next door. Ragged shrubs clustered around the neighbour’s crawl space. A fifty-foot extension cord drooped from a scrawny dogwood, part of someone’s effort to hang lights for a long-gone Christmas.
The trio retreated to the centre of Hollis. The sun straight above them made the avenue feel even emptier. “Jesus, it’s Stepford Wives quiet,” Phil Mohlman stated. “Call it in, Jackson. No sirens.”
And then Henry, taking in the slum that was Number 5 Hollis Street, understood. The electrical cord hanging from the dogwood wasn’t for holiday bulbs. Tom Watson employed it to connect his pretty little bungalow to the slum next door. And that was why the east side of the Watson lawn was scruffier than the rest: to conceal the extension cord when it was in use.
“Wait one more minute, Officer,” Henry called.
Phil regarded Henry’s shaved skull, shiny with sweat. “You in a Zen trance, partner, or heatstroke?”
Henry marched over to the shrubbery that obscured the crawl space. Kneeling down and parting the bushes, he spied the end of the cord running through a hole in the lattice screening. A lifeline — a death line? — between the properties?
“Phil, what do you get when you put two bungalows together?”
“One decent-size house?”
“Correct. You get a main floor that serves for a basement.”
CHAPTER 3
The detectives wasted ten minutes debating the legal niceties of entering Number 5 without a warrant. A cord and a pipe feeding into a crawl space didn’t justify forcible entry. They could knock on the front door, but no one would answer, and it would take hours to find the owner.
“Could be some poor son of a gun alive in there,” Henry suggested.
“Don’t curse like that, you’re a Mormon.” The tired gag showed Phil’s jitters. The sun and the smells of the killing ground addled both of them fleetingly. Phil said, his voice hard, “We’re cops. We rescue people.”
To which Henry responded, “Sometimes the dead must be rescued, too. We need to get inside.”
“Let’s work it through,” Phil stated. “The houses are connected like with an umbilical cord. Can we argue they’re one unit?”
“Doubtful, but we could consider them one active crime scene. Doesn’t that trump the privacy of both owners?”
Finally, they agreed that the still-wet puddle in the Watson house made this a “crime in progress.” It was thin, but Phil said he’d had enough of the Salt Lake City heat.
After telling Officer Jackson the plan, they went around and jimmied the back door. More blood and cannabis hit them, even stronger than next door. Henry, pistol drawn, led the way through the kitchen to the living room. He had seen grow ops before and wasn’t surprised that Watson had stripped the walls out to the frame — the ceilings, too. The grow trays were gone, but the pungency of marijuana was embedded in the joists. The house cruelly mocked the Watsons’ neat bungalow, to which it was tethered by the electrical cord.
Two long trestle tables remained in the centre of the room.
A headless female body lay on one of them.
“Are you assuming what I’m assuming?” Phil said from behind Henry.
Neither had any doubt, but Henry said what had to be said. “It’s Mrs. Watson,” he intoned.
Phil moved around him and leaned over the woman. He bumped his head on a steel cone-shaped grow lamp that hung directly over the corpse, as if surgery had just been completed. Gabriella’s blood and cerebrospinal fluid, except what she had left behind in her own living room, had spouted from her neck onto the wood floor in an almighty mess. The killer had hacked off her head, and not in a single guillotine slice.
Phil assumed control, and Henry watched his cool assessment of the crime scene.
“Here’s all the reasons we need to keep Narcotics out. Homicide trumps weed.”
“I’m surprised no one smelled the grass from the sidewalk,” Henry said.
“I’m wondering if anyone ever goes outside on this mean little street,” Phil answered.
Henry noted the heavy curtains on the front and back windows. He glanced into the kitchen and saw the painted-over windows above the sink. Gone were the days of tinfoil taped over the glass. “How do you figure it, Phil?”
Phil scanned the living and dining rooms. “Cold-blooded. It appears no one panicked … I guess.”
“Except Mrs. Watson here,” said Henry, whistling in the graveyard.
Gabriella Watson wore tan slacks and a floral top, now soaked monochrome crimson. Henry marvelled at his own hardness as he leaned over her to examine the wounds up close. He saw that the knife blow to her heart would have been fatal in itself. Sexual abuse apparently wasn’t involved.
“Phil, here’s the way I see it. The killers took their time — and that’s important to note. A crew showed up at Number 3, stabbed Mrs. Watson, and left her on the rug while they entered this house. Let’s call this the Second House from now on. They cleaned out the grow trays and the product, except for the last two bags, then went back for her body. Like some demented back-and-forth ritual. It must have taken them, what, two, three, four hours?”
The Verdict on Each Man Dead Page 2