Bad Wolf Chronicles, Books 1-3

by McGregor, Tim

  Then a cruiser rolled up in front of his house and they hauled him away. It hadn't occurred to him the cops would trace the call. They picked up Justin down the block and rolled in here. Justin hissed that he'd kill him when this was all over. And now this, this stanky cop barking at them like they'd done something wrong.

  “He shot it,” Justin said. Owen cast eyes at him but Justin didn't look back.

  “This is what you two do for fun? Shoot dogs?” Gallagher looked them over, a couple of brain-dead boys with nothing better to do than shoot up the riverbank. They find a body and just leave it there. He wanted to knock their empty skulls together. He glanced over at Mendes, listening to these two idiots stutter, writing it down in her spiral. She seemed impassive to it all. Aloof. Least she got that part right.

  “How many dogs were there?” Lara looked up from her notes and zeroed in on the chubby kid. He phoned it in, he'd talk.

  “I dunno. Lots.”

  “Have you ever seen these dogs before?”

  Owen shook his head. Justin didn't say anything, just folded his arms like he needed to be somewhere else. Gallagher shoved him against the car. “The officer asked you a question, sparky. Speak up.”

  Shock then rage flashed in the kid's eyes. Gallagher smiled at him, pleased. “I ain't seen those dogs before. They were all mangy and shitty-looking.”

  “Then what?”

  “We wanted to see what they were scrapping over,” Owen said. “We went down and the dogs, they were...” His eyes rolled down the bank and he choked. Justin finished for him.

  “They were eating it.”

  GALLAGHER packed the boys back into the car and asked Latimer to take them to precinct to get their statements while he finished up here. Latimer groused but he always groused when Gallagher asked for something. Gallagher trudged down to Caroline and clocked Mendes working the grid again, giving the area a third pass. Least she's thorough.

  “What's the verdict, Caroline? Suicide or old age?”

  Caroline didn't look up from her clipboard. “You do know how to pick 'em. This is a beaut.”

  “You got nothing for me?” He feigned hurt.

  “I've done all I can out here. I need to bring the body in.”

  “Sure. How soon can you ID her?”

  “Don't wait up. Matching dental records takes a long time.”

  “Dental? Use the prints.”

  The medical examiner looked over the rim of her glasses. “What prints? The left hand is mutilated and the right is missing altogether. All I have are teeth.”

  That was when someone yelled from the field. Bingo. Gallagher looked up. Who the hell yells out bingo? Twenty yards out stood his new partner, waving at him. Bingo.

  LARA thought Gallagher was too rough on the boys and had told him so. You come down too hard on kids that age they just shut you out. Gallagher guffawed, said he should've been harsher with those dipshits. Kids were so full of themselves, he said, that you gotta smack them just to wake them from the self-absorbed fogs they travel in. She asked if he had ever actually spent time with anyone under twenty. He just laughed then walked off to talk to the M.E.

  It wasn't worth getting mad about. She'd already humiliated herself by hurling on the crime scene and didn't need anymore bullshit from super-cop.

  She went back to scrutinizing the perimeter. The uniform they'd asked to search the weeds was eager to help but not exactly diligent. Too easily distracted by his chirping cell. She took another pass, just to be sure.

  That was when she spotted it, hidden under a tangle of matted reeds. Something dark and lumpy. She pushed the grass apart with a pen and looked down at the torn flesh. Severed at the elbow joint and mutilated into a lump of jellied blood. The missing arm, bloated and erupting with ants.

  Lara sprang up and hollered out the first thing that crossed her mind. And immediately regretted it. Her first day in Homicide Detail hadn't gone bad enough, she had to shout out that? Jesus.

  6

  WORKING HOMICIDE WASN'T how she imagined it would be. One day in and Lara hated it.

  She tossed her stuff onto the kitchen table and groaned when she saw the time glowing on the microwave. Stuffed into her bag was a file of current case reports and a thick protocol document for her new detail, all of which she had no time to read tonight. Not after this hellish day.

  The bottle of wine in the fridge door held only half a glass. She took it and the phone out to the deck off the kitchen. Her backyard was small. A failed vegetable garden and patio lights that had burned out long ago. Still, it was good enough to just sit back and listen to the crickets.

  She smoothed her thumb over the number pads on the phone, wanting to call her sister. Marisol was a good listener, with a knack for teasing out the real problem underneath an earful of complaints. Lara wanted to vent about how bad her first day in Homicide had gone. She'd wanted this detail for so long only to get partnered with a Neanderthal and then humiliate herself by throwing up all over the crime scene. Marisol would listen and say all the right things to her, shoring up her battered resolve to go back in the next morning with her head high and taking no prisoners. But her sister would be asleep by this time, exhausted after a day of chasing her four-year-old son. Lara smiled at the thought of her nephew. How big was he now? She hadn't seen him since Christmas.

  Back in the kitchen, inside the folder of homework was the first draft of a letter to Lieutenant Vogel. An official request to mentor with a different partner. She knew it would look bad to start her new detail this way but the problem here was Gallagher. Any other veteran homicide cop and she would be fine. She had planned to redraft it tonight but it would have to wait until morning. Which meant another early start to the day. Go to bed.

  A noise skittered over the buzz of the crickets. A scratching sound coming from the far side of the yard. A plump raccoon waddled onto the top of the wooden fence and looked at her. It slouched over and folded its creepy little hands together. Like it was surprised to see her and wanted her to leave. It was big and scruffy and Lara hated raccoons. She shot to her feet like she would charge at it but the animal just scratched its belly and watched her.

  Lara marched back into the house and slammed the door, as if emphasizing to the scavenger how displeased she was to see him. The raccoon clawed down the fence and waddled across the grass to her garbage bins.

  THE jump into Homicide had been fast, accelerated by the case dropped in her lap and Lara hadn't had time to move desks. Not a task she looked forward to as she wound through the fourth floor bullpen to her cubicle. She tried her best to keep her desk neat and orderly. Honest. It just never worked out that way. It overflowed with paperwork and files. The old school binders she kept for each case. She couldn't even see any personal stuff buried under all that riot.

  “Hey, look who's back!”

  Charlene Fabre came up behind and squeezed her elbow. Charlene was a detective in the Sex Crime Unit and, although they weren't partners, they shared a cubicle. “How was your first day?”

  “Busy.” Lara shuffled papers into binders and folders. “I'm there two minutes and we already got a body. Charlie, you wouldn't believe the condition of this poor woman. It was horrendous. I lost my lunch, totally embarrassed myself.”

  “Oh honey, that's awful.”

  “How about you? Miss me yet?”

  “Do you know who's getting your desk? Reynard, the miserable S.O.B.”

  Lara winced. Reynard was a slow-eyed cretin who talked nonstop without ever actually saying anything useful.

  “The man cornered me in the kitchen yesterday and prattled on for twenty minutes about property taxes. How am I going to endure that nonsense all day? I'll kill myself.” Charlene wheeled her chair closer and lowered her voice. “Is it true they stuck you with Gallagher?”

  “Yup.”

  “What is Vogel thinking sticking you with that gorilla? Like you don't have enough to do learning new detail.”

  “It isn't about me. The Lieutena
nt is punishing Gallagher, trying to rein him in. I just happen to be the next warm body.”

  Charlene patted her arm. “He gets out of line, you talk to Vogel straightaway. You don't need that man's foolishness.”

  A cell phone went off. Lara checked the ID. “Speak of the devil.” She flipped it open and deadpanned, “Mendes.”

  “You know where the coroner's office is?” No hello, no how-are-you.

  “It's on Knott, isn't it?”

  “The M.E.'s got an initial report on the body. You wanna take part, I'll be there in twenty.” He hung up. No goodbye.

  She dropped the phone into her pocket, turned to Charlene. “I'll have to clean this up later. You okay with that?”

  “Take your time. The sooner you clear out, the sooner Reynard moves in.”

  AN elevator ride down two levels, through a door and Lara was in the morgue. Two shroud-covered gurneys were parked in the hallway. Something else she'd have to get used to in the new detail. She took a breath and entered the morgue proper. Gallagher leaned against a stretcher, chatting away with Caroline like it was a tailgate party. He looked surprised that she showed up.

  The M.E. led them to the far end of the examining room. It was cold and it smelled awful. Lara tried to breathe through her mouth but that just made it worse, like tasting death on her tongue.

  Caroline peeled back the sheet. The body of their vic laid out cold and exposed. The remains examined and cut, the flesh peeled back in layers. The severed arm Lara had found lay reassembled below the raw right elbow.

  “Female, Caucasian.” Caroline read off the details from a clipboard. “Forty to fifty years old. As you can see, she suffered an extraordinary amount of trauma. Most of the internal organs are missing, presumably devoured. I didn't have a lot to work with.”

  Lara had her notebook out, scribbling down the pertinent details. Gallagher produced no notebook. He just started firing questions at Caroline.

  “Can you ballpark the time of death?”

  “Given the level of rigor, plus the fly larvae already embedded in the soft tissue, I'd say sometime within the last forty-eight hours.”

  Lara looked up from her notes. “Will you be able to narrow that down after the autopsy?”

  “I hope so but with so much damage, I can't make any promises.”

  “Cause of death?”

  “Tricky. You got multiple bite wounds to seventy-five percent of the body. Massive injuries to the head, neck and extremities. More here to the torso, followed by dismemberment. Difficult to determine a C.O.D.” Caroline tilted the dead woman's chin, exposing the carnage at the throat. “For now, I'd say blood loss. The trauma here at the jugular and carotid. She bled out.”

  Gallagher frowned. “The dogs killed her?”

  “It appears that way, but there's damage to the skull here.” The medical examiner pointed to the jellied blood on the back of the head. “Blunt force. It may have occurred during the attack.”

  “Or prior to?”

  Caroline agreed. She righted the woman's head, returning the dead stare to the ceiling.

  Lara shuddered. Just the idea of it, devoured by dogs. “Can you tell what kind of dogs attacked her? Or how many?”

  “It's impossible to determine the breed of dog but I found the bite radius of at least four different dogs. These were big, I can tell you that. There's also—” Caroline broke off, her brow knotted up.

  Gallagher leaned forward. “What is it?”

  “This.” Caroline pointed to a wound on the ribs. Gallagher just blinked at it, the torn flesh looked the same as all the rest. “This wound is much larger than the others.”

  Lara took a closer look, but like her partner, couldn't distinguish one wound from the next. “Another bite mark?”

  “Too big. Has to be something else. A dull weapon maybe?”

  Gallagher broke in. “What if it is teeth?”

  “Then you got one big animal on your hands.”

  The desk phone rang. Caroline excused herself to get it. Gallagher leaned over the face, the raw pull of exposed muscle and bone, the eyes cloudy and without warmth.

  Lara wanted to sit, still finding her sea legs but there were no chairs. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  “I've seen people mauled by their own dogs. Assholes bit up at dog fights. But this, eaten up the way she is? This is a first.”

  Caroline came back with a sheet of paper. “I got her prints. The thumb was too damaged but the index and middle fingers were clean.”

  “Thanks. You check under the nails?”

  “Scraped and sent to the lab. I'll let you know what we find.”

  BACK to precinct and up to Homicide, where Gallagher shared cubicle space with Detective Roberts. He fed the prints into the system. Lara took Roberts's empty chair and used his desktop to write the initial report. Gallagher finished up, scowled at her. “Don't get too comfortable in that chair,” he said. Then he left without another word.

  Lara scanned through her notes, sorting it all out before typing anything. Knocking out a good report was tricky, sifting pages of hurried notes and crafting it into a succinct summation of a crime. Be concise but most of all be brief. People hated reading anything, most of all your superiors, and they resented you for putting it on their desk. Anything over two pages and you can expect an email instructing your dumb ass to get to the point and leave the writing to Shakespeare.

  There were two photos on Roberts's desk, both of his wife and three kids (two boys, one girl). A Father's Day card made from orange construction paper and pinned to the cubicle wall. Two cartoons clipped from The Oregonian, neither of them funny. A favorite coffee mug and a metal spur paperweight, a souvenir from a trip to Arizona. A working detective's desk, nothing more.

  Both desks butted up against each other in the cramped space. Gallagher's desk was clean and without clutter. Paperwork filed and binders squared up neatly to the wall. There were no photos, no unfunny cartoons nor tacky souvenirs. The desk looked unused, like something out of a catalogue.

  “You finished yet?” Gallagher lumbered back, spitting pink sprinkles from the donut he was devouring.

  “Almost.”

  “Wrap it up, huh? Leave the writing to Vonnegut.”

  “You like Vonnegut?”

  “Hey.” He sat up straight, seeing what lit up on his screen. “We got a hit.”

  The database returned a match on the prints. A harshly lit DMV photograph of a woman. Pale and drawn, she looked to be in her late forties. Gallagher gleaned the pertinent details. “Elizabeth Riley, age forty-two. No criminal record, no occupation. Nothing.”

  “Then why is she in the system?”

  “Who knows.” Gallagher jotted down a few notes.

  “There's an address. We can start there.”

  “I'll do that,” he said. “Round up a few uniforms and canvass the area where the body was found.”

  “We should both check her place. Two eyes and all that.”

  “No, we split the work. No sense getting cozy.” He rose. “You file that request yet?”

  “I'm writing it up.”

  “Good.” He headed for the door.

  7

  THE DECEASED WOMAN'S apartment was up on the 8800 block of North Edison, where it crossed Baltimore. Elizabeth Riley lived in a dumpy low-rise with a battered intercom box and two yellowed stovetops stacked outside the front entrance. The super was an uncooperative jerk in moldy flip-flops who bitched until Gallagher mentioned the sour tang of weed drifting out of his basement burrow. The prick got the keys and lead Gallagher up to a door on the second floor.

  Gallagher waited while the guy squinted at the labels on each key. “You ever see a boyfriend hanging around? Any friends or family?”

  “I dunno anything about these people.” He separated a key, tried it. “How soon can I clear her shit outta here?”

  “You know she's dead, right?”

  The guy shrugged. “And now I got an empty unit that needs t
o be rented.”

  Gallagher crowded the man, stepping on his flip-flops. “How about I plaster that door with police tape until you die?”

  The lock popped. The super pushed the door open then slunk away. Gallagher stepped inside and scanned the small room. What a shithole.

  He tossed the entire place within the hour and came up with nothing. No personal info, no private phone book, not even a laptop. Any identification she possessed, she must have had on her. Meaning it was lost. He flopped down onto the couch. What had he missed?

  His cell rang. The caller ID read Cheryl. He grimaced. “Cheryl, what's up?”

  “You need to come get her.” The voice on the other end was sharp.

  “I'm picking her up Sunday.”

  “I'm bumping you up. When can you get here?”

  Stick to the damn routine, woman. “What happened?”

  “I don't have time to go into it right now. How soon can you be here?”

  “I'm on the clock, Cheryl.”

  “John...”

  “Two hours.” She groused. He hung up, put his feet onto the coffee table. Did he have time for a ten-minute nap? Tilted his wrist to see the watch face. Yup.

  LARA put the victim’s photo and physical description onto a police flyer and printed copies. She found a uniformed officer named Lee, bored with desk work. He agreed to help her with the canvassing, anything to get out of the precinct.

  There wasn't a lot to investigate, considering where the body was found: an auto body shop, a warehouse and a small marina south of the bridge. No one there remembered seeing the woman. North of the bridge was a strip club called The Devil's Backside. The bar staff were less than helpful and the daytime drinkers downright hostile. Lara stepped out of the bar, shielding her eyes from the sun after the gloomy interior of the bar.

  Officer Lee smoothed a flyer against a post and staple-gunned it into place. Looked her way. “Where to now, detective?”