Cuts Through Bone

by Alaric Hunt

  Greg Olsen was the mutt of the group, only partly from being the eldest. The slow voice came from Wisconsin, and his military service was long and distinguished. He was discharged as a lieutenant colonel, then resumed his interrupted education. Guthrie was puzzled by the rank, because Olsen was only twenty-eight. The big man had played hockey for the Wisconsin Badgers, and Uncle Sam was paying his way at Columbia.

  Until the murder, and then the arrest, all three had led ordinary lives. They did the things everyone else did—bought CDs and books, had traffic tickets, and went unnoticed by the people around them. Bowman and Olsen had the distinction of having faces that caught attention. Tompkins was invisible, protected by a machine that would keep her overlooked forever, if that was what she wanted. The night had grown old and died into morning before Guthrie was satisfied and called a stop.

  By then, Vasquez was sober and frustrated. “What’s this going to do for us?” she demanded.

  “Maybe nothing. But suppose I wanted to ask one of Olsen’s old girlfriends if he’s a jealous type. How do I find her?”

  She drummed a pencil on the desktop for a moment. “We go to Wisconsin?”

  “That’s right. Or we could make some calls, or I could hire someone out there. But eventually we knock on a door, ask a question, and decide if we believe what we hear. But anyway, how do you know about Wisconsin?”

  “Okay, you win that one,” she said. “It’s quitting time?”

  “Not yet. Now we take a little ride. I think it’s finally late enough.”

  “Late enough? We going to work all night?”

  Guthrie grunted. Sometimes, late nights or all nights were part of the job. “You’re driving. We’re going to Washington Heights.”

  Once they reached Highbridge Park, the night seemed eerily quiet. The Harlem River was hard by them, lapping away slowly. Vasquez needed two passes to find the scene, hidden behind a hairpin turn around a hurricane fence that was a magnet for trash. The old Ford’s headlights lit up some strands of crime-scene tape, waving idly where they had been broken, but still long and bright. Guthrie had her douse the lights before they climbed out, and then they stood for a minute, allowing their eyes to adjust to the gloom. Bowman had been murdered in a quiet, dark corner of the city.

  The river added a tangy smell to the garbage. Cars buzzed and whirred distantly on the bridge. In the darkness, the lined columns could have been the arched nave of a church, with the insects quietly whispering prayers. Fragments of tape formed a communion rail around the altar of a green Dumpster. Graffiti made a resplendent iconostasis along the columns and abutment. Guthrie used a small flashlight. They searched the ground around the Dumpster. Amid the broken glass and litter, a few evidence flags remained pinned around a dark stain in the thirsty dust.

  “See anything else?” Guthrie asked.

  Vasquez shook her head. She kicked a bottle.

  A laugh floated from the darkness. “Expecting a party?” The voice sounded half-cracked and drunk.

  “In this part of the city, a wake, at least,” Guthrie called back.

  “Them tight-ass micks don’t drink to the dead no more.”

  Quiet followed. A bottle gurgled faintly.

  “You’re out here a lot, aren’t you?” the little man called.

  Some gravel rattled. “You ain’t no cop.”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think so. Cops ain’t got pretty girls for partners.”

  “You got a face out there?” Vasquez demanded.

  “What? For you to punch? Too drunk for that.” More laughter.

  Guthrie kicked slowly through a pile of trash while Vasquez muttered threats.

  “So? You want to know about the little girl? That’s it?”

  “You know something?” Guthrie called.

  More laughter, and then the thud of an empty bottle. “She had a wad in her pocket. I been drunk all week.”

  Guthrie’s face tightened; he waved at Vasquez to stay out of it. “You came on it after, or were you near when it went down?”

  “This my spot, little man.” For a minute, silence threatened. Then gravel sounded from another direction. “He came in here slow. I felt he was creeping ill, so I dee-deed. I look back, he’s already playing with the girl. He’s posing her for the fashion show. I didn’t know he had the pistol, then, bang!” Stones rattled, and something heavy slid in gravel. “Bang! Not little firecrackers, something heavy!” Footsteps followed after cracked laughter. “He looked around, after. That kinda spooked me, like he could see or something.”

  “What he looked like?” Vasquez demanded.

  “Looked like?” Laughter was punctuated by gasps and rattling gravel. The voice was farther away. “I ain’t no wit-ness!”

  “We gotta get him!” Vasquez hissed.

  Guthrie shook his head. “Relax, will you? Don’t chase squirrels. Squirrels come back for nuts.” The little man strolled back to the car. Vasquez hesitated a moment, then followed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Early the next morning, Guthrie picked Vasquez up in front of her parents’ tenement apartment on Henry Street. The traffic on the Lower East Side was as thick as cool syrup on the streets and on the sidewalks as the workingmen walked to catch their trains. The tenements emerged from darkness as shades of gray, sparkling slowly in the sunshine. On the way downtown, the detectives drank coffee, and Vasquez finished waking. She aimed a few scowls at the little man while she searched for the bottom of her cup.

  “Viejo, that was crazy to let the drunk get away,” she said.

  “Maybe,” he replied. “But I need some convincing about him.” He parked in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, a few blocks from Police Plaza. “We heard enough details to check his story against the newspapers, and we could save getting excited by finding out first if the NYPD talked to him. Right? That works out, we’ll talk to him again.”

  Vasquez grunted; the little detective had good reasons, but reasons wouldn’t catch a drunk. The Lower East sheltered plenty of drunks and crackheads. She knew enough of them. They could get low and dodge cops better than anybody but a priest. The detectives locked the old Ford and walked, pausing to wait on the south side of the plaza.

  Downtown Manhattan filled with people while they waited. Trains and taxis poured forth rushing torrents of busy professionals. Women held purses clamped beneath their arms and phones to their ears. Men uniformed in dark suits and wing tips wielded briefcases and folios like shields. Offices and cubicles awaited them, each with an appointed place at the end of the scramble of rush hour.

  The detectives waited, as invisible as lampposts, while the rush slowed to a trickle. A tall young man wearing a dark blue NYPD jogging suit leaped from a taxi on the south side of Police Plaza. He rushed the entrance like a linebacker chasing a ball carrier, but stopped suddenly when he saw Guthrie.

  “Yo, Guth! I should’ve known you’d wait here. You need a pass—” He gawked at Vasquez, pulling off wraparound sunglasses. “Geez! How old are you? Twelve?”

  The young Puerto Rican laughed, looking up. He towered over her, but he still didn’t have a beard.

  “Tommy, I know you’re a blond, but seriously,” Guthrie said. “She’s Rachel Vasquez, and she’s, like, fourteen at least. Ask her if she wants to go roller-skating, why don’t you?”

  “All right! Don’t get upset, Guth, come on.”

  “This’s Tommy Johnson,” the little detective said. “I changed a few of his diapers when he wasn’t so big—his folks are from Ohio. Now he’s some hotshot engineer who plays with the chemistry sets they keep in there.”

  “I’m just a tech,” he said with a shrug. “Guthrie kind of helped me find a job while I’m finishing school.”

  The young man secured passes, then ushered them through the glowing marble lobby. The elevators opened into a different atmosphere—less impressive but more human, without any feel of their being watched. Glass walls in the work spaces allowed an illusion of depth, but the sight lines
were cut by moving people, banks of tables and machinery, freezers, racks, and darkened spaces. The ISU processed evidence for the NYPD. Almost all of the investigative threads in the city passed through the ISU lab.

  Tommy Johnson’s boss was Beth Whitcomb, a first-grade in her mid-forties. Locks of dark hair peeked from behind her ears, escaping from her paper cap. She sighed impatiently when she saw the young man and his visitors.

  “You’re who wants a walk-through on Bowman?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Guthrie replied. “The papers haven’t had much, and now that you have a perp—”

  “About a perp, I’d say maybe,” Whitcomb interjected. “Anyway, we’re off the record and we’re not talking about a perp, only a crime. Only this crime. What we do is about the crime, not the suspects. Right, Tommy?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the young man intoned dully.

  She smiled. “Good. Now you’re having all the fun I’m having, and that makes us even.” She waved them all into her office. Tommy closed the door. Beyond the glass on the other side, a long table held a bank of microscopes. Two techs worked repetitively at sample cases. Faint chemical odors and ozone mixed, giving her office a spicy smell.

  “We have a bullet and we have a gun,” Whitcomb said. “That’s the end result, but not the order they came to us.” She opened a laptop on her cluttered desk. “Here’s my time line. On the twenty-fourth, we receive a body, petite Caucasian female, blond/blue, a well-kept Jane Doe—probably not a runaway. Her face is marked up with undarkened contusions. Nice clothes but no other personal effects. Two bullet wounds. One wound is ragged. The other is entry only. We work the body up as a homicide. At the scene, we find a small amount of blood. The body may’ve been dumped.”

  Vasquez scowled at Guthrie, thinking, the drunk vagrant is three for three already.

  “Something to share with the class?” Whitcomb asked. “No? Okay, on the twenty-fifth we have a provisional ID. Our Jane Doe may be Camille Bowman, a missing Columbia student. We confirm by one P.M. and move on to the ballistics. One bullet is battered; it entered the body and passed through, struck the ground, bounced, and reentered the body. That sequence explains the wound channel and the condition of the bullet. Trace from the scene entered the wound channel—she was shot in situ. Minor blood pooling under the body indicates the bullet was fired from above the prone body. That particular bullet pierced the heart twice, but it still wasn’t the fatal shot. The first shot killed her, and prevented bleeding. That bullet entered at the base of the neck on a plunging trajectory. The wound channel stopped at the diaphragm. We recovered a pristine bullet. Two bullets—one smashed and one clean, both forty-four caliber. This was a small woman. The forty-four was massive overkill. Her blood alcohol was point oh-two. No other chemicals.”

  “What about the beating?” Guthrie asked.

  “Some argument about that, but no disagreement that it was only a few blows shortly before TOD. Slapping or punching, no indication of a weapon. The contusions are too diffuse for a weapon—no edges or lines. This happened ten or twenty minutes before TOD.” She drew a long breath. “Negatives—no ligature marks, so she was never restrained. No sexual assault apparent. The only thing disturbed was her pockets—could be a robbery motive, that being speculation, but it was evident that something was removed from her possession.”

  Whitcomb sighed and tapped keys on her laptop. “So, a few days, no significant trace, but we have a bullet. Early on the thirtieth, we receive a gun by warrant, a forty-four Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special five-shot, recently fired. We trace ballistics. The weapon is a perfect match for our clean bullet. We have the gun that fired the bullet—” She studied Vasquez. “You need some water? You look like you’re choking.”

  The vagrant witness was four for four; the pistol was tiny. Vasquez knew because she carried the same pistol in .40 caliber. Guthrie glared at her, but it was too late.

  “What the hell is going on?” Whitcomb demanded. “This is some sort of circus? Tommy?”

  “Guth, what the hell?” the young man asked.

  “Some people will be looking at this,” Guthrie said. “You already knew that when you pushed the first ballistics test up the list, right?”

  Whitcomb slid Tommy Johnson a sharp glance. “I guess we’re done here,” she said. “Walk them out, Tommy; then come back up here.”

  The elevator ride down was silent. Several times, Guthrie or Tommy Johnson started to speak but subsided before words broke out. Vasquez studied their reflections in the brushed stainless-steel elevator door. The two men were made from the same mold; even the way they held their heads when they brooded was similar. Vasquez kept quiet because she knew she’d screwed up. She had been excited. The NYPD didn’t need to know they had something to work from, because they weren’t on the same team. While the elevator was sinking, she realized the only worse thing she could’ve done was blurt out anything about the witness.

  Outside, the morning was already warm. Traffic poured around Police Plaza. Guthrie and Tommy Johnson shook hands. “Don’t mind her,” the young man said. “She acts like my boss sometimes.” He glanced at Vasquez. “Maybe I’ll see you around, but it’ll probably be hot around here for a while.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Vasquez hurried after Guthrie before Tommy Johnson went inside. The little detective was marching fast toward Barclay Street, where he’d parked his old Ford. She brushed past a string of messengers to catch him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  Guthrie shook his head. “That was on me, Rachel. I knew I might be putting him in a spot, having already talked with Inglewood, see? I just wanted more time. I wanted to get away with it. Now I gotta try to get in front of this mess with somebody else I know downtown.” He kept hurrying. The sidewalk crowds had a monotonous sameness. At the car, he tossed her the keys, then made a phone call.

  They went down to the Battery and waited for the lunch hour in a shallow-lot fry shack called Tony’s Fillets. Guthrie gave the waitress a sawbuck for holding up a booth. They watched ferries plow across the harbor, and scanned the news clippings on the Net to see if the vagrant might have picked up his details from someone else. Tony’s filled up with a lunch crowd, and Guthrie ordered three platters and an extra lemonade, no ice.

  Before the fish could cool, a dark-haired woman appeared suddenly at their table. She paused to study Vasquez, then gave a dismissive shake of her head before she sat down. Her hair was cut bluntly across her forehead, and she slipped off dark glasses, revealing blue eyes. She was pale and thickly built, while still having a waist she could show off with a slender belt. Her dark pantsuit proclaimed office drone, but her smile when she looked at Guthrie said hungry shark. “Hello, Clay,” she said.

  “Sorry about the rush,” he said. “Monica, this’s Rachel Vasquez, my new operative.” He pushed a platter of fish across to her, and the glass of lemonade.

  Monica shrugged, glancing again at Vasquez. She ate with neat, quick bites while Guthrie watched her. They laughed back and forth, not saying anything. Vasquez studied news clippings on her palmtop and ignored them almost as well as they ignored her. When she was done eating, Monica handed Guthrie a disc and ran her gleaming fingernails down his arm.

  “All right already,” he said. “What’s on it?”

  “Just the files on Bowman,” she replied. “The rest of that stuff is radioactive.” She smiled. “Actually, I rubbed my trail off on the captain of the one-nine—he’s a shit—but it was still too risky to try for the other stuff.”

  Guthrie grunted.

  “Don’t be like that, Clay,” she said, then paused. “You think they have the wrong man?”

  “That’s what I get paid for,” he said.

  Monica stood up and slid on her dark glasses. The little detective smiled. “You like that, huh?” she asked.

  “As much as you like fish.”

  “Meow,” she said before gliding out.

  Guthrie tucked the di
sc into his pocket. “NYPD has something big going on,” he said. “Monica’s on the inside. She usually gets everything. I know they’re looking at Olsen for the Barbie dolls—that just makes sense—but without some details to examine, we’re gonna end up focusing on the Bowman murder.”

  “How’s that a problem?” Vasquez asked.

  “Maybe it ain’t,” Guthrie replied as he chased some catsup around his plate with a french fry. “I reckon it’ll keep me honest.”

  After lunch, Guthrie called for an appointment with Olsen’s lawyer, James Rondell. The law firm had Wall Street offices, tucked among other elderly buildings holding aristocratic chins high beneath the shadows of the downtown skyscrapers. Reed, Whitaker & Down had a street entrance, with a lobby cut from marble polished to a mirror sheen. Thick walls produced an awesome quiet. The city seemed miles away.

  Rondell’s office featured a window looking directly down onto Wall Street. Even without a partnership, he had arrived. Leather chairs, old wood, and molded plasterwork made the office smell like a gun club. Books marched along the walls, but the desk was bare of paper. The lawyer was an electronic worker. A desktop computer shared the blotter with an open laptop. James Rondell was neat and dark-haired, about midway into his thirties. He had a cleft chin and square jaw, unremarkable features, and a lean build wrapped in a charcoal suit.

  Without preamble, he said, “George Livingston recommended you.” He struck quickly at the keyboard of his laptop. “I have to admit I have some qualms about using an outsider, but Henry Dallen is mostly good for watching old apartments and driving people back and forth. I need a sharp knife for this one.” He frowned at Vasquez.

  Guthrie sat down and gestured for her to join him. The lawyer wasn’t going to waste breath on an invitation.