“Powder, what is so important that it can’t wait till the morning?”
“I hoped you would be intrigued,” he said.
“What?”
He sighed. “Kids these days need everything spelled out. I want you to go talk to her in the morning. Since you’re a slow roller, I thought I’d better let you start off from here. County Hospital, fifth floor.”
“And what do you want me to do?”
“Just talk to her. Make friends with her. There’s no way she’s going to crack in a hurry, but I’m probably too gruff and rough for someone in a delicate condition.”
“Your sudden discretion surprises me.”
“Any more beer?”
“Look, is this a social call or a business call? I still don’t see what’s so important that you had to stop by tonight instead of waiting for office hours.”
“OK,” Powder said. He rose. “I’m on my way. I’ll leave you to the Starsky and Hutch reruns.”
At the door he turned to her. “But the only way you’re going to last is as a better cop than the rest of us. And to be better you use whatever hours on the clock are handy. You may not realize it yet, but you’re lucky. You got me to work for.”
“How lucky can you get?” Fleetwood asked, as Powder closed the door.
Chapter Fourteen
Powder came in early to see if he could extract some information about Uncle Adg’s insulation leaflet.
But he didn’t get a chance, because three red slips in his message box demanded that he go to the detectives in Homicide as soon as he arrived.
Powder put the red slips in his pocket and went downstairs to prepare for opening Missing Persons.
Agnes Shorter appeared ten minutes ahead of time and Powder worked out with her what routine work should be handled that morning.
Brightly, Agnes informed Powder that she now could use their computer to get into the American Legion’s newsletter mailing list.
“Groovy,” Powder said.
“I’ve got this friend in class who helps them out over there. It was just a matter of working out the right numbers so that our computer can unlock theirs.”
“You can’t get into cab company records with that thing, can you?”
“This what Sergeant Fleetwood is working on?”
“You know about that?”
“There’s a draft report here,” Agnes said. She began leafing through papers in her receiving tray. “I don’t think cab companies use computers yet,” she said. “But I can try.”
“Never mind,” Powder said.
Agnes shrugged.
“What about tapping into the Open Case file to see if you can find a pattern of thefts from rented rooms. Short-stay places. Things like televisions and video recorders.”
Agnes made notes on a pad.
“If anybody wants me, I’ll be in Homicide,” Powder said.
“Homicide? Hey, is something up, Lieutenant?”
“I think they’re overworked and want us to take on some cases for them.”
In Homicide and Robbery with Violence, Powder sought out Sergeant Bull, the name on the red slips. He had a thin neck supporting an overlarge head and looked like he could only have been out of high school a couple of weeks. Powder had never seen a detective look so young.
Disgustedly, Powder waved the slips at him. “What’s so important?”
“Got a body. I want to know if you got any possibles, ’cause I’m having trouble with the ID.” Bull pushed an open file across the desk. “Discovered yesterday evening. Female Caucasian, age hard to tell. Fifteen to forty-five. DOA. Body burned, probably after death. Autopsy today. Only partial prints, no joy.”
“Where was it found?” Powder asked.
“Scrubland beside a farm road, off Mills Road. Southwest corner of the county. Near Antrim, West Newton.”
“So you don’t know how long the body had been there?”
“Week or less.”
“And from me you want a match-up with the Known Missing file? Pretty wide open on fifteen to forty-five. I don’t see the height or the weight here. Picture?”
“Not much left to photograph,” Bull said. “Autopsy was due to start at nine. Details to you when I have them.”
Fleetwood was in the office when Powder returned to Missing Persons. His face showed his surprise, but he said to Agnes, “We are looking to identify a woman before they do upstairs. Her body was found last night in a field. See how many we’ve got with connections in the southwest corner of Marion County, or in adjoining counties—Hendricks, Morgan, Johnson. Any age.”
“OK, Lieutenant.”
Powder turned to Fleetwood. “Now, you,” he said belligerently. “What are you doing here?”
“They didn’t want to allow visitors.”
“And?”
“So I only talked to her for a few minutes.”
Powder looked at her.
“Don’t hassle me. Powder,” Fleetwood said. “I haven’t got her name.”
He shrugged.
“I don’t understand what business this woman is of ours.”
“The hospital asked us to try to identify her,” Powder said. “What’s her face like?”
“Bandaged, but I talked to a nurse who says they’ve I worked on it to minimize scarring and that a little cosmetic surgery will clean it up pretty well.”
“So tell me about the woman.”
“She found it hard to talk.”
“When she overcame the difficulty, what did she convey?”
“That,” Fleetwood said pointedly, “she wants to be left alone.”
Powder sighed histrionically. He began to turn away but then said suddenly, “Something I forgot to ask last night. About this guy Capes.”
“What?”
“He was your partner?”
“Yes.”
“And he’s out of the force now, right?”
“Yes.”
“It’s unhealthy.”
“I don’t know what it has to do with—”
“He was a cop, and now he isn’t. He can’t face it. He looks at you and he looks back and he wishes what happened didn’t. Guys who look back, who want you to look back, they’re no good to you because they’re no good to themselves. You get that piece of wisdom for nothing.”
Bull telephoned the preliminary autopsy findings shortly before eleven.
The time of death was set as probably forty-eight to sixty hours before discovery. Which made it the Sunday night or Monday morning. The most likely age of the victim was between twenty and thirty, height about five feet five, weight in the vicinity of a hundred thirty-five pounds, race white, hair brown, eyes brown.
The dead woman had had sexual relations not long before her death, and showed mild bruising on unburned parts of her body. No bones were broken. She had never borne a child. There were no distinguishable birthmarks or scars.
Cause of death was a heart attack. The burns on the body had all occurred after death.The pathologist found no additional factors contributing to the death, although a number of laboratory tests were being performed to screen for various drugs.The blood alcohol level was nil.
“Problem is damned cause of death,” Bull said. “Heart attack. Not murder.”
“You sound disappointed,” Powder said.
“My first body,” Bull said. “First in charge. But probably just somebody screwing some guy she shouldn’t. And, goddamn! she dies! Could happen to anyone, eh? He doesn’t know what to do. The usual mechanisms of deception all messed up. Panics. Doesn’t see why he should get in a lot of trouble when he hasn’t done anything wrong. Maybe too right, eh? Only thing he thinks about is not being caught, only it isn’t us he’s afraid of.”
“Sounds conceivable,” Powder said stiffly. “But setting fire to the body? And what about the bruises?”
“Doesn’t have to be assault,” Bull said.
“What are you going to do?”
“Oh, try for identification. Hope for a lea
d. I haven’t written it off, but I’m not optimistic. If my theory’s right, her relatives might contact you.”
Powder said,“I’ll send up details from my records on s everybody who might fit.”
When he hung up he said, “I don’t like the bruises.”
Fleetwood and Agnes both turned to face him.
“Sergeant,” Powder said to Fleetwood. “Please liaise with Ms. Shorter and assemble a list of every missing white woman on our books between fourteen and forty, five four and five six, who hasn’t had a baby but does have all fingers and toes.”
Powder rubbed his face.
He continued, “Agnes will list the file numbers. You pull them. Good to get familiar with our records. Did I ever tell you about the time I located a missing kid because I recognized him on the street?”
“No.”
“He’d been gone for seven weeks, and I saw him on the corner of Sixteenth and Central. Made his mother so happy, I can’t say.”
Fleetwood watched as Powder picked up his telephone.
“Get a move on,” Powder said before he dialed. “What’s the matter? Your wheels need pumping up?”
He called Mrs. Woods and explained that a body had been found that might, conceivably, be that of Marianna Gilkis.
“You want me look,” she said.
“Yes. It is in Marion County Hospital.”
“No use,” Mrs. Woods said.
“Why not?”
“I not know Marianna, not from twelve years of age.”
“Is there anyone in Indianapolis who does know what she looks like?”
“Not here. St. Paul, her momma.”
Powder thought.
“Serious,huh?”Mrs.Woods said. “How this body die? Murder?”
“From a heart attack, but the body was hidden and disguised.”
Mrs. Woods frowned. “Disguise body? Funny clothes?”
“Someone set fire to it.”
Mrs. Woods made a sound of distaste.
“Not very nice,” Powder said.
“You want me get sister?”
Powder thought. “We are trying to identify the body in other ways, and it may well not be your niece. If those identifications don’t work out soon, then we’ll see about bringing in someone from St. Paul.”
After hanging up Powder sat at his desk and stared into space.
Agnes interrupted him by offering a few sheets of paper.
“What’s this?”
“That stuff about whether the guy with the missing TV and video is a pattern. I worked out how to extract the information from the central computer.”
“What you got?”
“That there have been five TV sets and three videos stolen from rented accommodations in the last eleven months.”
Powder leaned back.
“Other things were taken from three places. Couple of appliances and some cash.”
Powder gave the sheets of paper back to her. “OK. Get it ready for me to pass on to Burglary.”
Powder took the internal telephone and called the Forensic Lab. Yes, they were doing the tests for the autopsy on Bull’s body.
“Good,” Powder said. “Preliminary report said she’d had sexual intercourse shortly before her death.”
“Or shortly after,” the technician said somberly.
“What I want to know is, could it have been with more than one man?”
“Christ, Powder, what kind of case is this?”
“A suspicious one,” he said. “Can you tell?”
“Possibly. May have to go back to the body, though.”
“Do that little thing for me, will you?”
“Why you? It’s not your case all of a sudden, is it?”
“I’m cooperating with Bull. Just being, you know, helpful.”
The story about the burned body made late editions of the morning paper, the Star, and before noon Missing Persons began receiving telephone calls.
“It’s like this every time,” Powder told Fleetwood.
“Seems to remind them somebody’s missing that they forgot about.”
Powder called William G. Weaver, Jr., at his store.
“Hello, Mr. Weaver. Lieutenant Leroy Powder here. I wanted to know whether you had heard from Annie yet.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Powder said.
Weaver paused. “Was there something else?”
“Yes. I thought the department might have called you already this morning?”
“The police department? No.”
“Well, you know how it is. These things take time.”
“What things?”
“We have an unidentified body of a woman who might be your wife.”
“You have?”
“You should go to County Hospital’s morgue and have a look.”
“Now?”
“Sure,” Powder said.
Powder hung up and leaned back in his chair. Then he rocked forward and jumped up. “Enough of this telephone fiddling,” he said.
He took Agnes’s papers on the television and video thefts and delivered them personally to Burglary.
And then he stopped in Fraud. While he waited, they found out that the company that had printed the insulation leaflets that disturbed the Lockerbie residents’ association was registered and properly constituted, as far as they knew. A sergeant called Drayton tried the number on the sheet. “Huh! Weird sound.” He shrugged at Powder.
“That all you going to do for me?”
“What do you want, Powder? We’re busy here, you know.”
Powder returned to the Missing Persons office and tried the number himself. All he got were funny sounds, not like a disconnection but as if there were a slight fault. Damp connections?
He turned to Agnes. “How good are you at getting addresses to go with phone numbers, kid?”
Powder left the office and the building.
He went to Johnson’s store, intending to talk to Uncle Adg about the leaflet. But when it came to the point, he decided that he didn’t have anything to say. He did some shopping instead and drove home to drop it off, following a blue Triumph TR7 along Vermont Street.
It pulled up in front of his house.
As Powder parked behind the Triumph, Ricky got out of the car in front of him.
“Hey, hi, Dad. How do you like it?”
Powder stepped forward to examine the vehicle. He went to the driver’s side and opened the door.
“You want a drive? Go on, take a spin.”
“There’s eight thousand miles on the clock.”
“It has some time left. You’ll be safe enough.”
“This yours?”
“Sure. Man, I’ve always wanted one of these English sports jobs. And the guy offered me such a good price that I couldn’t resist it.”
Powder took his shopping into the house.
Fleetwood was still on the telephone when Powder returned a little after one.
“There were so many calls, I kept the office open.”
Powder nodded and told her to take her lunch break.
“All right,” she said
“How you doing on the taxis?”
“I’m not.”
“Well, get on it this afternoon,” Powder said.
The telephone rang.
Powder moved to answer the phone, then said, “Hey, hang on a tick.”
She stopped.
The call was from Cedric Kendall at County Hospital. He told Powder that the woman who had looked at the corpse of the unidentified man with the beard had come back for a second look at the body and had decided that it was, after all, her husband.
Kendall expected Powder to be surprised.
“Why?” Powder asked. “Half the time they think it is who they’re missing and then they faint when the missing person walks in the door at home with the loaf of bread he went out for in the first place. People look different dead.”
“But her husband!” Kendall said.
/>
“You’re the one that’s married, Cedric. You ought to understand that kind of thing.”
Powder turned to Fleetwood when the call was finished. “Just a minute,” he said.
He moved over to Agnes, who was absorbed at her desk. On a slip of paper he wrote out a request for her to check the history of ownership for Ricky’s TR7.
“Now,” Powder said to Fleetwood, “Jane Doe in the hospital this morning.”
“Yeah?”
“What do you think about her?”
“What?”
“What’s your feeling about her? Your impression?”
“Troubled,” Fleetwood said.
“What kind of troubled? What do you feel about her, damn it? What words come to mind?”
Fleetwood didn’t know exactly what kind of game Powder was playing, but she offered, “Trapped?”
Powder rubbed his face. He repeated, “Trapped.” Then he said, “Good. What kind of trapped? Could it be criminal?”
“You mean . . .?”
“I mean,” he snapped, “could it be criminal trapped? No money to get away, parents live around the corner and read every detail of the newspapers?”
Fleetwood thought, but shook her head slowly.
“Involved in drug and/or violent crimes as a minor participant, say, because of a passion for a major participant?”
“Sort of a Svengali relationship?”
“Who? I was thinking, like, Charles Manson. How does that grab you?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t have—”
“How about escaping from something more personal?”
“I guess so.”
“So you think maybe it’s just your basic suicide on the one hand, with a wish to protect someone from knowing about it on the other.”
“That feels better.”
“So she’s savable. If she’s thinking of somebody else even when she’s setting about killing herself, there is a connection with the outside which is pretty strong.”
“Mmmm,” Fleetwood said.
“You can tell her, if you want, that if she cooperates now, we’ll do everything we can to sort it out quietly.”
“I can tell her?” Fleetwood asked.
“You’ve made arrangements to go see her again, haven’t you?”
“Well ...”
“But maybe you’re right. Maybe I should talk to her myself. Give her a little famous Powder bedside manner.”
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