by Allen Eskens
“This has to be one of the cleanest alleys I’ve ever seen,” Max said.
“This is Kenwood,” Niki said. “Even their crime scenes are nicer than everyone else’s.”
“Who found the body?”
“An early-morning jogger,” Niki said, pointing to a man wearing a 1970s-styled headband and standing just beyond the crime-scene tape.
Max pulled a corner of the blanket back to uncover the woman’s head. Her hair, a paprika shade of red, was the same color as Jenni’s, and for a razor-thin moment, he saw Jenni’s face peeking out from behind the mess of red hair. He dropped the corner of the blanket and stood up—the movement filling his chest with a queasy sensation as if he’d just stepped up to the edge of a high precipice.
The bedspread had fallen open and Max could see that the woman was not Jenni. He glanced at Niki to see if she had seen his reaction. If she had, she didn’t show it. Max replaced the spread to wait for the medical examiner. “Hey, Bug, you didn’t happen to find a purse or ID lying around by chance?”
Only in his twenties, Bug looked like he just stepped out of a Dragnet rerun with his flat-top haircut and thick, black-rimmed glasses. His real name was Doug, but everyone called him Bug. Max had heard that Bug got his nickname by publishing an important paper on insect entomology. Max preferred that explanation to the possibility that some asshole in the department started calling him Bug to highlight the kid’s many quirks: the way he tapped his thumb and fingers together when he thought, or the way he struggled with small talk like it was an unpracticed foreign language.
Bug stopped his examination of the parking lot, pausing as if he had to process the question. Then he stood up, giving his full attention to Max before answering, and said, “I didn’t find anything yet.”
Max wanted to say “at ease” or “carry on” to let Bug know to go back to his inspections. Instead he just nodded and looked down at the bundle. “That looks like a little girl’s bedspread, not something a grown woman would have on her bed.”
“I had the same thought,” Niki said.
Behind them came the shuffle of tired feet, and they both turned to see Dr. Margaret Hightower making her way down the alley—the grand dame of the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office. In her mid-sixties, Margaret moved with the gait of an eighty-year-old woman, carrying her hard life on her shoulders and in her face. For the past six years now, she wore a sobriety necklace, a silver dog tag with the inscription “one day at a time” etched on its face, and she no longer came to crime scenes with a hint of single-malt scotch on her breath.
“Hey, Maggie,” Max said. “Isn’t it a bit early for the day-shift to be on duty?”
“You know me, Max; I get up at the butt crack of dawn. Besides, we’re a bit short-staffed, so I’m on call. What do we have?”
Niki peeled the blanket back to show a pale-skinned woman, attractive, athletic, with a thick tangle of red hair wrapped around her face as though she’d been walking through cobwebs. Half-opened eyes stared through the web of hair, and the eyes had dark-yellow lines forming where they had grown dry. A thick smear of blood surrounded a wound on the right side of her neck. Niki unwrapped the rest of the body to show that the woman was naked.
“Caucasian, female,” Niki said. “I’d guess mid-forties. One obvious wound on the right side of her neck.”
Maggie made her way to the woman’s head and started to kneel down but then stood back up. “Jesus Christ, my knees suck. Max can you give me a hand?” Max held Maggie’s arm as she went down to her knees, then flopped to her butt. “I used to be a dancer, you know . . . a ballerina. Did I ever tell you that, Max?”
She had, but Max said, “I don’t think so.”
“Yeah, back in college. I could pirouette ’til the cows came home. I was flexible as all hell. And now I can’t even kneel down without a crane to hoist my fat ass back up. Don’t ever get old, Max.”
“I’ll do my best, Maggie.”
Maggie gently pulled back the woman’s hair to get a better look at the wound. “Yeah, that’s our frontrunner for the cause of death.” Maggie carefully touched the skin around the wound. “Probably a knife. That’s a perfect location if you’re looking to cut the carotid or jugular. Either one would be enough to kill her. Your suspect either knew what they were doing or got lucky.”
Maggie lifted one of the woman’s arms; it didn’t move easily. “Rigor’s set in. Could you guys tip her onto her side just a bit?”
Max lifted the woman at the shoulder as Niki did the same at the woman’s hip. The skin on the woman’s back had turned a deep red.
“Lividity,” Maggie said. “Help me up, would you?”
Max and Niki each grabbed one of Maggie’s arms and lifted her to her feet.
“Preliminarily, I’d say that this isn’t your crime scene,” Maggie said. “Not enough blood loss. A cut to the throat like that . . . if it’s the internal jugular, it might not bleed all that much, but the carotid . . . no, I’m thinking she was killed somewhere else, bled out there and then brought here. Besides, why wrap her in a blanket if you’re not transporting her?”
Maggie continued, waving a finger above the body. “Rigor and lividity both set in here in this parking lot. She would have been laid out in this position within an hour or two after death. My rough guess on time of death would be late last night or early this morning, probably within an hour either side of midnight. As soon as we can get her on a table, I can take a reading of her liver temperature. I should be able to give you fairly precise TOD after the autopsy.”
Max nodded, then said, “Mind if we take a minute with her here?”
“Absolutely. She’s all yours.” Maggie stepped back to let Max and Niki have full access to the body.
They knelt down beside the woman, one on each side, and Max nodded toward Niki to give her the go-ahead. Niki started at the woman’s feet. “Pedicured toenails.” Then she ran a gloved finger along the woman’s leg and brought her finger to her nose to smell. “Lotion . . . vanilla.” Niki lifted the woman’s hands to see long fingernails painted with a professional touch. “Expensive manicure, clean, no obvious scrapings under the nails. No immediate signs of defensive wounds.” She looked closer at the hand. “This indentation on her ring finger suggests that she usually wears a ring, maybe a wedding band, but it’s not there now. Possible robbery, but the whole dumping-of-the-body thing makes me think robbery’s not our motive.”
Max took great delight in watching Niki work. Her observations and inferences came quick and certain, as though she’d been working Homicide for three decades as opposed to just three years. For her part, she couldn’t have been happier escaping Vice and the misogynistic jokes that floated behind her back. Her supervisor in Vice, a thick-necked man named Whitton, once told Max that Niki’s appearance made her the perfect Asian prostitute, the kind of Geisha-girl that every traveling salesman wanted to screw. That was back when Whitton was fighting to keep her in Vice and Max was fighting to get her assigned to Homicide.
Max first met Niki when Chief Murphy temporarily assigned her to Homicide to deal with a glut of murders in North Minneapolis three years earlier. They had been called to an apartment complex where a woman was found murdered in her fourth-floor bedroom. The building had a security system with cameras showing that no one had entered or left the apartment near the time of death.
Max couldn’t figure out how an intruder entered or exited without being seen. That’s when Niki noticed that the dust pattern on the window blinds suggested that the blinds were not in their normal position. That discovery led to the arrest of a man in the next building over, who had climbed from his window to hers using a telescoping pole he’d designed just for that purpose. He’d been hiding in the poor girl’s apartment when she came home after bar closing.
That began the tug-of-war.
Whitton told the chief that he needed Niki as bait. When he saw that point failing, he argued that the cohesiveness of the unit demanded that she s
tay, portraying them as a family. Whitton lost the battle when Max asked Whitton to speak Niki’s Hmong name. He couldn’t. He’d never taken enough interest in Niki as a detective to learn that her real name was Ntxhi, a name she converted to Niki because most Westerners tripped over their tongues trying to pronounce it. Max uttered her given name and sealed her transfer to Homicide.
Niki moved to the dead woman’s head, leaning down to smell a strand of her hair. “Smells like fresh shampoo, like she just showered.” She peeled back more strands of the matted hair and unveiled the woman’s attractive face with no makeup or lipstick. Niki thought out loud. “She showers . . . maybe puts her hair up in a towel . . . puts vanilla body moisturizer on . . . and gets stabbed in the neck before she can brush her hair.”
Max nodded in agreement. Then a glint of light caught Max’s eye as Niki moved the woman’s hair back. “Well look at that,” Max said, lifting an earlobe mounted with a large diamond stud—a stone that had to be at least two carats. “You’re right about this not being a robbery.” He leaned in to get a closer look at the earring, then he pulled the hair away from the woman’s other ear to show the pair. “Do women wear earrings into the shower?”
“Sometimes . . . sure.”
“I think your shower hypothesis has legs.” Max turned to Bug, who was taking pictures of the earrings. “Hand me a gem bag and a forceps, would you?”
Bug reached into a tackle box, pulled out the items, and handed them to Max. Max then carefully pulled the earring from the woman’s ear and dropped it into the paper bag.
“A gift for the missus?” Bug said with a forced chuckle.
Max closed his eyes. Bug must have had no idea that Max’s wife was dead or that today was the anniversary of that death. Bug was just trying to crack a joke. Max also knew how hard it was for Bug to make any attempt at humor, so he didn’t hold the faux pas against the awkward technician. But that didn’t mean that the words didn’t cut Max anyway.
When he opened his eyes again, he could see Niki at the far edge of his periphery mouthing something to Bug. He couldn’t tell what she said, but he saw Bug shrivel and walk away. Max felt bad for the kid and tried to get everybody’s attention back to the investigation.
“Our best theory right now is that we have a dead woman, stabbed in the throat after getting out of the shower. The killer brings her here, intending to drop her into the dumpster, but unloads into the parking lot instead. So, who is she, and where was she killed?”
“And are there any other victims?” Niki added. “If that indent on her finger is from a wedding ring, she may have a family.”
“We have to find that crime scene.”
“I’ll canvass,” Niki said. “Maybe someone around here saw something last night, or maybe they know her from the neighborhood.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and snapped a close-up of the woman’s face. “Not the best picture, but it’ll do.”
Max waived an ambulance crew over to transport the body to the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office. “I’m going to borrow Bug.” Max said. “I have an idea on getting an ID.” Max slipped the specimen bag with the diamond stud into his pocket and gave it a pat.
Chapter 4
Max pulled into the parking lot of the Ballistics Lab at 8 a.m., the time that his normal shift should have been starting. That was the thing about being a homicide detective, dead bodies never waited for the start of a shift to turn up. Unpredictability came with the job and had been the one aspect of Max’s chosen profession that bothered Jenni. One time, they were celebrating their anniversary at a nice restaurant, and just before the meals came to the table, Max got a call.
He tried to read her face as he kissed her good-bye. He knew that she had to be embarrassed to have to cancel such an elegant and expensive meal, disappointed at having to spend the rest of their anniversary at home, alone. Then there was the time that they were hosting a Christmas dinner for her family, twelve guests in all. Max left home about the time that Jenni was putting the twenty-pound turkey into the oven. He expected her to be angry when he came home nine hours later. But if she harbored any resentment, she never showed it.
The only time Jenni had ever voiced reluctance at Max’s job was when the topic of having children came up. She wondered if a child would understand why their father had to run out in the middle of a school play or a soccer game. How would a child feel when he or she looked into the audience to bask in the glow of a father’s admiration, only to find an empty seat? Yet every one of those conversations found its way to their first date, back in high school, when Max shared with Jenni his dream of being a homicide detective. She bought into that dream from the very beginning, and no wife could have been more supportive. “I understand,” she would say about his disappearances. “But I don’t have to be happy about it.”
In the end, those conversations didn’t matter. There would be no children.
Max and Bug walked into the Ballistics Lab, Bug swiping his ID badge to get into the heart of the facility. The Ballistics Lab was separate from the main crime lab and focused on matching bullets to gun barrels or tools to an injury. Max didn’t have a bullet or a tool, but he had a diamond and the lab had a microscope.
Bug sat down at one of the microscopes and turned on a computer screen where the image would appear. Max handed him the gem package that contained the diamond.
“Look on the girdle of the diamond. If this is a real diamond, it might be branded.”
When Max had asked Bug to accompany him to the lab, Bug didn’t utter a word. Nor had Bug said anything when Max asked him to fire up the microscope. Now as Bug worked to secure the diamond in place below the lens of the microscope, his fingers twitched as though he were more nervous than usual.
“You okay, Bug?”
Bug stopped fiddling with the diamond. The muscles of his mandible flexed as though trying to utter words that would not come out. Finally, Bug said, “I forgot your wife is dead. I didn’t mean . . .” He stopped talking and took a breath.
Max put a hand on Bug’s shoulder and tapped lightly on muscles pulled rigid by the young man’s crushing anxiety. “It’s okay, Bug. That was a long time ago. Don’t kick yourself over it.”
Bug seemed to relax as he refocused on his task. Once he set the diamond in the mechanical stage, he focused the lens onto the side of the diamond, a flat, thin strip that separates the diamond’s crown from its pavilion. Bug turned the stone under the lens and Max watched on the monitor until a laser inscription appeared. First he saw an image of a bird with long, elaborate wings. Beside the bird was the name Hercinia, and beside that a serial number.
“Bingo,” Max whispered. “Ever heard of Hercinia Diamonds?”
“No,” Bug said. He wheeled his chair to another table with a computer and typed in the name. “It’s a diamond company out of Toronto, Canada.” Bug read some more. “They specialize in diamonds mined in the tundra. No blood diamonds.”
“Should we give them a call?”
Bug used a phone in the lab to dial the contact number from the website. He handed the phone to Max.
“Hercinia Diamonds Incorporated. How can we help you?”
“Detective Max Rupert calling from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I’d like to speak to your records department.”
Pause.
“Or your boss, whichever is easier.” The words came out sounding like a threat, but they weren’t meant to be one.
“One moment please.”
A click, a few seconds of Karen Carpenter singing “Close to You,” and then another click. “This is Richard Holerman of Customer Relations. Can I help you?”
“Mr. Holerman, I’m Max Rupert, a homicide detective with the City of Minneapolis, Minnesota. I’m investigating a death here and I thought you might be able to help.”
Silence.
“Mr. Holerman?”
“Yes . . . I’m not sure how I could—”
“The victim is a woman and she was wearing a pair of earrings wi
th Hercinia diamonds. We have the serial number from the diamond. We need to identify her. If you could tell us who those were sold to—”
“Oh, Detective . . . I’m sorry . . . what was your name again?”
“Rupert. Detective Max Rupert.”
“Yes, Detective Rupert. I don’t think I can help you. We aren’t a retail store. We don’t sell directly to the public.”
“You sell to stores, though, right? If we knew which store you sent these particular earrings to, we can take it from there.”
“I’d love to help, but I’m not sure if I can give out that information. This is a rather unusual request.”
“I’m not asking for trade secrets here, Mr. Holerman. I just need a place to start. This is terribly urgent.”
“I’d have to ask my legal department and get back to you. I don’t want to run afoul of the law.”
Max could feel the grip of his hand on the phone growing tight. He closed his eyes, exhaled, and loosened the grip. “Mr. Holerman, we have a dead woman and no idea who she is. We don’t know if we have other victims somewhere, maybe a husband or a child who might be clinging to life, waiting for help to arrive. We could have a murderer cleaning up his crime scene as we speak. If you need to talk to your legal department, do it, but for God’s sake, do it quickly. These earrings are our best source of finding her identity. We need to move on this, and you’re the key.”
“I . . . I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve never . . . I’ll call you back shortly. At this number?”
He must have been looking at a caller ID. “No, call my cell.” Max recited his cell number, thanked Holerman, and hung up. Then he wrote the diamond’s serial number on a piece of paper and headed for City Hall, leaving the diamond earrings with Bug to be processed.
At City Hall, Max pulled up a blank administrative subpoena on his computer screen and began filling in what he could, which wasn’t much. But he would have everything ready for when—or if—Holerman called back. Max called over to the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and spoke to an attorney in the Adult Prosecution Division, a woman he’d never worked with before, and gave her a heads-up that he’d be e-mailing the paperwork for her signature as soon as he heard back from Holerman. He hung up the phone and waited, tapping his fingers on the desk of his cubicle, a two-person space that he shared with Niki Vang. He thought about calling Holerman back but called Vang instead.