Nobody Lives Forever

by Edna Buchanan

  Police and technicians paused to greet a new arrival. Bob Lansing, a round and genial bespectacled man, always introduced himself as the only doctor in town who made house calls. Of course, he explained, all of his patients were dead.

  “Let’s see how this young fellow got this way,” Lansing, a county medical examiner, said cheerfully. As he shifted the body slightly, the small, harmless-looking bullet hole brimmed and overflowed with blood that spilled and streaked Rob’s chest.

  Lansing scrutinized the limp arms, then lifted each foot to inspect the soles for clues to their final steps. He and Rick rolled the body over together. No wounds in the back, but there was something, a small hard lump, protruding just below the left shoulder blade. Bullets slow down as they travel through a human body. The skin often stretches like elastic, yielding to the impact and capturing the spent projectile just beneath the surface.

  “Ahh,” the doctor said. “Want the bullet?” The autopsy would not be performed until midmorning. Detectives might find it useful to know the bullet’s caliber now.

  “Anything we can get,” Rick said.

  “Anybody got a penknife?” the doctor asked casually. Detectives and uniforms who did knew better than to respond, all except for newly arrived Patrol Officer Terry Lou Mitchell, eager to help. The doctor admired the keen blade of her knife, then used it to smoothly open a one-inch incision. The wound gurgled loudly, bubbling blood, as he probed with a gloved finger.

  The doctor held up the slug as though it were the prize from a cereal box. The bullet was a .38-caliber, in good condition. They eased Rob over onto his back. The wound continued to sputter and hiss with a ghastly sound as air from a punctured lung escaped the chest cavity.

  Smiling in gratitude, the doctor placed the bloodstained knife in the palm of his smeared rubber glove and offered it back to its owner. The sturdy young woman had used the red Swiss Army knife to peel fruit for her daily cottage-cheese lunches. “I don’t think I need it anymore,” she said quietly and turned away.

  “You pick up more stuff that way,” Jim whispered to the doctor, who winked.

  Throughout the rest of the night, Rick’s kitchen served as unofficial command post for those whose working lives revolve around violent death. For some weary technicians, it was their fifth major crime scene of the night. Laurel appeared numb, her dazed expression changing only to wince as if in pain at the throb of the police chopper passing low overhead, again and again. First with a fiercely brilliant searchlight and then with the first rosy blush of dawn, the crew scanned the neighborhood and its rooftops. Fleeing killers will often fling a murder weapon up onto a building.

  A family on the other side of the island found their dead dog just after dawn. Huddled in a neighbor’s kitchen, so that crime-scene technicians could work uninterrupted, they learned that the intruder who prowled their home might also be a killer.

  “I could have been raped and murdered in my own bed!” Sandra Corley announced grimly. The big woman wore a shapeless housecoat and scuffs.

  Larry Corley looked pale and shaken. “Our kids were asleep in their rooms, Rick. It coulda been one of them, or us. We never heard a thing. We lost some jewelry, a little cash and a cameo that belonged to Sandy’s mother.”

  “No gun? You’re not missing a gun?”

  “Never owned one, Rick. I may get one now. I never dreamed this could happen here on the island.”

  “Bosco didn’t bark his brains out?”

  “That’s the hell of it,” Larry said, shaking his head. “You know Bosco. Our kids grew up with him. He was harmless. Nobody had to kill that dog to keep him quiet. We never heard a whimper, not a thing.”

  “We should have got rid of that damn mutt a long time ago,” Sandra announced, sipping noisily from a coffee mug. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “What did he do when we needed a watchdog?”

  “He watched,” Larry said. There was no humor in his smile.

  “I think that’s right,” Rick said grimly. “It looks like it wasn’t done to keep him quiet. There was a lot of blood…”

  “Tell me about it,” Sandra snapped. “Did you see my floor?”

  “But we didn’t find a trace anywhere else in the house. Whoever did it apparently did the dog on the way out, just for the hell of it.”

  “That’s it!” Her voice was raspy. I want a Doberman named Killer—today.”

  “How old is Lacey now?”

  “Thirteen.” The father and Rick exchanged wary glances.

  “Boyfriends?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You sure?”

  “Christ, Rick, she’s in the eighth grade.”

  “Anybody bothering her, following her, calling?”

  Sandra’s eyes looked frightened instead of angry for the first time. “She’s going to her grandmother’s in Vermont—tomorrow, if we can’t arrange to send her today.”

  “You think some psycho is…” the father’s voice trailed off.

  “Doubtful,” Rick said. “We just have to cover all the bases. Problems with anybody lately? On the job, in the neighborhood, in the family?” They shook their heads.

  The weeping children, Lacey and her eight-year-old brother, mourning their dog, were little help.

  Despite a high crime rate in the city, there had been a few problems on the island. A knife had been used at one scene, a gun at the other. Yet what were the odds of two violent criminals choosing to roam the same peaceful island on the same night? The other recent prowler complaints had been minor, nuisance-type calls, reports of sounds and shadows in the night. These two cases have to be part of one isolated incident involving one offender, Rick thought. A prowler, pursued and panicky, pulling the trigger in the dark. Murder among strangers, the most difficult homicide to solve.

  Back at the command post, Rick was surprised to see Laurel bustling around the kitchen, pouring steaming coffee brewed from beans she had ground herself, fixing sandwiches and sliding ashtrays beneath the cigarettes of preoccupied smokers as they filled out their paperwork and completed diagrams. Good girl, he thought fondly, relieved by her show of resilience. He regretted her exposure to this, the ugly side of his job. Part of the charm that had initially attracted him was her naïveté about his work. Investigating violent death is so consuming a task that the lines between personal and professional life become blurred. The two comingle until no private place is left untouched. Unlike Dusty and the other women in and out of his life in recent years, Laurel understood little about police work, even less about death. He liked that. Her innocence touched him, stirring emotions he thought were long lost to the cruel brutality of the streets. She thrilled to the crackling excitement of the seventeen-channel police scanner he kept at home, and the job-related war stories she continually coaxed from him. He knew that. But he had been in control, keeping their time together in an isolated compartment, untainted by the job. The daily pain and sordid secrets were his own. Now she had seen violent death on their doorstep. It could have happened anywhere. He cursed the fact that it had happened here.

  Spontaneous, moody and unpredictable, she was barely grown up. He did not want her to become callous and accustomed, as he was, to trouble and death. How would this change her?

  Her fair hair had been wild, whipping like a banner in the wind, when he first saw her. She was a triple traffic violator who did not give a damn about his authority.

  He had been on the outs with the captain, which was not unusual. Rick had thought he had a sure shot at solving an old homicide by traveling to Seattle to talk to a suspect who now lived there. The budget was tight, as always. Cash and manpower were in short supply. The captain had called the expense unjustified and denied the trip request. Rick was furious. The two men had clashed, and as a result, he had been temporarily transferred to motors. He had worked days, riding a big Kawasaki 1000, telling himself he was better off writing tickets, escorting funerals and stopping speeders. The hours were regular, b
ut it got old fast.

  Speeding thirty miles an hour over the legal limit in her open white MGB convertible, Laurel had changed lanes abruptly, causing another motorist to swerve off the road. She swung into a wide U-turn, bounced across a flower bed on the median and ignored Rick’s flashing light and siren. He had to chase her for four miles. Pulled over, she pouted. Then they made eye contact, and she had trouble suppressing a smile as he lectured her sternly.

  He studied her license. She told him he was too serious.

  “Smile!” she told him. “You can do it. It’s not that difficult. Come on,” she coaxed. “Life’s not all that bad.”

  She stared boldly at the sandy hair that curled from under his helmet, the motor squad’s lightning-bolt insignia on his shirt, and the lean and muscular six-foot three-inch frame in the tapered trousers and shiny leather boots. “Hey, Bootsie,” she said. “Lighten up.”

  He found it difficult to keep from smiling. But he managed. Too bad about her date of birth, he thought. He snapped the ticket book shut abruptly and handed back her driver’s license. “I’m going to let you go with just a warning this time, miss. But you’re headed for trouble if you don’t pay more attention to your driving. This could have earned you half a dozen points against your license. You know what that would do to your insurance rates? But more important, I’d hate to have to be the one to tell your parents their daughter had been badly injured, or worse, in a traffic accident.”

  Her eyes were wide and full of mirth. “You mean I’m not under arrest?”

  She tucked the license into her wallet among half a dozen credit cards and glowed up at him, eyes apple-green under blond bangs. “Why don’t you teach me to drive? Show me what you’re talking about, Bootsie.”

  Spoiled brat, he thought. Her eyes were flecked with amber, the look in them was blatant. She was outrageous.

  He dug a quarter out of his pocket, handed her his card, flipped her the coin and smiled. “I never back down from a challenge. Give me a call when you’re eighteen.” He kicked over the Kawasaki and roared off, leaving her in the dust.

  She was funny. She was also beautiful. Rick knew a lot of beautiful women, Dusty among them. But there was something else, something about this one. He thought about it that night as he drank a beer at the Southwind. Later he thought he spotted her little sports car once or twice on the expressway.

  It was a total surprise six months later when, back in homicide, on a bad night in a world full of dead people, live troublemakers and mean dogs, a call was transferred to him from motors.

  It was her birthday.

  Four

  When everyone left, Harriet, the homemaker in Laurel, took charge. She shut down the central air conditioner and threw open all the windows. She soaked a thick bath towel in the sink, wrung it out and swung it around the room to cleanse and circulate the air befouled by cigar and cigarette smoke. Then she scrubbed every square inch of kitchen surface with Lysol. The guest bathroom was next. She hoped that the police technician with the greasy skin and bad complexion had not used it, but she was afraid he had. She had always been fussy about bathrooms, haunted by bad dreams and memories of one that had been full of blood.

  She hand-polished the ceramic tile floor. No mops, no applicators. She crouched on her only concession, a thick plastic kneeling pad, wearing a small smile as she scrubbed. She was sorting out and savoring every compliment on her coffee, her thriving houseplants and her home-baked muffins. Energized and elated, she was not at all tired. She loved this room—the kitchen was the heartbeat of this home, her home now.

  The shining floor bore no resemblance to the raw floorboards of the first kitchen she remembered. She would never forget its dank, smelly icebox, the pitted porcelain sink, the empty shelves lined with dust. She remembered balancing on a wobbly chair to stir thin oatmeal before she was tall enough to reach the burners on the cheap stove. She rubbed harder, as if to scour that first kitchen out of her memory. Elbow grease—that’s what her father had always demanded. “Elbow grease!” he would bellow. He wanted her to do everything—everything. She remembered his big soft stomach and his sickening smell. She remembered him coming into her room at night when she was alone in the dark. That son of a bitch.

  Odd that she could remember so little about her real mother now. Only the sharply thin naked limbs, sprawled ungainly in the tub. And of course the blood.

  Harriet got to her feet, kneading the small of her back with her rubber-gloved fingers, and reached again for the can of Lysol. She depressed the nozzle, spraying a diffuse stream of disinfectant across the room and then stopped to survey her domain. She regarded it with satisfaction, this kitchen with both a hooded gas stove and a microwave oven, with its gleaming stainless-steel twin sinks. When Rick’s parents had retired, they had remodeled the kitchen to enhance the value of the house they planned to sell. Then their bachelor son had decided he wanted his childhood home, the place where he had grown up. He did no cooking, so the kitchen had never been used when they had moved in. Left up to Laurel, Harriet thought, it would still be that way. But Harriet loved it and used it all: the spacious cabinets in pale pickled oak with state-of-the-art slide-out shelves, the white Corian countertops and the lazy Susan in the corner—perfect, light, bright and immaculate, the way she would always keep it. She had arranged her cookbooks on a shelf above the spice rack next to the philodendron with the shining leaves, polished daily with mayonnaise. Her Cuisinart, the crock pot that had belonged to Rick’s mother and his four-slice toaster were lined up like soldiers at attention. All their appliances and kitchenware irrevocably mingled together—forever.

  Harriet loved the house, the plants, the garden, but most of all she loved this room where copper-bottomed cookware glowed warmly from hangers on the wall. This was even more modern than the adopted parents’ kitchen and far better because it was hers. Being here meant everything to Harriet, which was why the shooting and Rob’s death, so close by, frightened and angered her. She did not mind the others so much, but she was furious at Alex. She wished she could stop him from coming out and doing these things. He was careless. He was stupid. Rushing into the shower, leaving Laurel with wet hair when the police arrived. And that policewoman had noticed. You can lose everything so quickly, Harriet thought, even your life. One mistake and it can all be gone. Achieving what is most dear to you and then holding on to it is never easy.

  Harriet promised herself that she would do whatever she had to.

  Five

  The first twenty-four hours, the most crucial in a homicide investigation, led the detectives nowhere. Dead ends, blind alleyways—the lab found no prints and little physical evidence. Ballistics matched no other outstanding cases. Dusty volunteered to stay on and help work the Thorne case, though she would not officially rejoin Rick’s team until the first, which was Sunday. “Appreciate it, but catch some rest while you can,” he told her. “By then we’ll need somebody fresh. There’s not much you could do now anyway. We’ve got nothing.”

  Divers had spent the daylight hours since the murder plumbing the waters around the islands and the causeway, on the theory that the fleeing killer might have deep-sixed the gun. They found tin cans, junk and old tools.

  A police chopper crew patrolling the bay spotted something else—another corpse. The find created a flurry of excitement. Hopes were that the killer had botched his getaway and drowned trying to swim from the murder scene, or that his car had plunged off the side of the bridge.

  “We don’t get that lucky,” Jim said glumly. “Things never come wrapped up that neatly.”

  He was right. The uniforms who got there first radioed that the body, floating facedown in the mangroves at the edge of a small uninhabited island, appeared to have been submerged too long to be linked to the murder on San Remo.

  Nonetheless, Barrish and Ransom boarded a police boat at the mouth of the Miami River. “Just what we need. I hate this.” Ransom looked pained. The twenty-five-f
oot patrol boat sliced through the water, a damp breeze lifting the thinning hair Jim had carefully combed to cover his bald spot. “If I wanted to go to sea, I’da joined the Coast Guard. I know I’m gonna be sick.”

  “You think about it too much, Jim,” Rick shouted over the noise of the twin engines. “I’ve seen you go green just standing on the dock. Relax. Enjoy it. Look at that.” The late summer sunset was spectacular, the western sky and the mirrorlike water aflame with blood-scarlet color.

  Jim shook his head and glared accusingly at the darkening eastern edge of the world, where the bay already gleamed silver. “It wuz the goddamn full moon,” he muttered. “Full moon. It happens every time.”

  “I tell you Rick, twenty-seven years is enough. I shudda bailed out a long time ago. I don’t know why I waited this long. My back is killing me from lifting too damn many dead bodies. The job is getting worse, not better. Always on call, the fucking hours, you don’t eat right, you don’t sleep right, you don’t go to the bathroom right … The public doesn’t give a shit. Now with all these damn Cubans…”

  The swarthy young patrolman at the helm, a native of Camagüey Province, swerved smack into a swell, throwing Ransom off balance. The heavyset detective lurched across the deck and clung to a rail. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

  The corpse floated facedown where the mangroves and the roots meet, awash in crystal-clear water over white sand. The mottled skin on his naked body looked gray. Several patrolmen stood by, along with a crime lab photographer. Ransom unfolded a polypropylene body bag. Rick stripped off shoes and socks, rolled up his trouser legs and stepped gingerly into the shallows for a better look. Bay water lapped gently around his ankles, cool and soothing. Wiggling his toes, he sighed, inhaling a deep breath. Then he sniffed again. The body did not have the usual unmistakable odor. It smelled more like an old septic tank.