It’s cold even for March. My breath fogs out into the darkness. The smell of fish, booze, and industrial dust hits me as I make my way down the block, to the alcove—a boarded-up doorway, covered by the original awning—where the body lies. Last call is in about five minutes, but even dive bar clocks are always fast, so there’s an exodus. Drunk college kids leave the two trendy—the Plain Dealer calls them “up-and-coming”—bars across the street and try to get past the police tape to their cars. Uniforms detain them to ask questions. I feel my senses sharpen to a fine point.
The guy could be in any one of these bars, any of these cars, in any abandoned building, any alley. He could be going anywhere in this city on Lake Erie that, in times like this, feels both too big and too small.
Red-and-blue lights flash against Tom Goran’s torso as he turns and spots me. “Boyle,” he calls. “Over here.”
My partner is standing near the alcove across from a wider alley where the bars’ dumpsters are. He towers over a green sheet that shrouds a formless object lying against the painted plywood that covers what used to be the door to a club. I make a mental note that the perp didn’t leave the victim behind the dumpsters in the alley, because he wanted someone to find the body. I flash my badge at the uniform behind the crime scene tape, sign in on the scene register, then slip under the tape.
We were supposed to be off for three days after the indictment we got yesterday. I guess it doesn’t really matter that the next case was supposed to go to somebody else. Sometimes things just don’t work out the way we think they will.
Goran holds out a cup of coffee and studies my face when I reach him. “Did you get any sleep?”
“A little. Enough.” I take the Styrofoam cup and eye his rumpled clothing. “You? Is there cream in here?”
“I’m okay. I could use about five more cups of coffee. And of course there’s cream in there.” He winks at me as he pulls his knit watch cap down over his ears so that it covers his graying hair.
His wife, Vera, calls him a “silver fox.” He’s a pretty good-looking dude. Tom—short for Tomislov—and I have been partners since Lieutenant Fishner recruited us. Goran’s a great guy in that Cleveland-Croatian-Catholic-conservative way. There are rumors about him, rumors about me. Being a cop is a lot like being in high school, and we laugh about it all the time, especially since he’s not my type at all. When I date—which I don’t, at least not recently—I date women. The Plain Dealer didn’t mention that in the profile, but I guess it’s just as well.
He drains his coffee and hands me the empty cup. I pocket the lid, slide my own cup inside his, and drink half of what’s left.
“Damn, it’s cold tonight,” he says as he buttons his peacoat. He’s had that coat about twenty years, since he was in the navy. “Where’s your poofy coat? No gloves? What, you trying to prove you’re Wonder Woman or something?”
“I thought it was almost April. And Goran, I am Wonder Woman.” I strike a superhero stance, and he chuckles.
Lieutenant Rick Castor, my old boss who is now the head of Homicide, ambles over. “Hey, Boyle,” he growls, yet his eyes are warm. “This one’s all yours. I’m going back to bed. Call me if you need me.” He turns and walks away.
Homicide hands cases off this quickly only if something is really off. The wind blows down from the lake and against our backs. I feel as though I’m finally moving past whatever that couch maybe-dream was. Those are the worst because they mess with my brain. I know I’ve had them, but I don’t recall details. All I know is that I wake up confused and sweating, with my heart pounding, my jaw sore, and a raw feeling in my throat. Maybe it’s for the best that I don’t remember.
“Yeah, well, get your cape and tights,” Goran says. “I got a feeling this is gonna be a doozie.”
“What’re we looking at?”
When we catch the case instead of our very capable fellow detectives, especially when we’re due for days off, it’s probably something high profile that the media will sink their fangs into and shake, as murderous dogs do. The brass likes putting Goran and me in front of TV cameras. We’re both decent enough on the witness stand, and the fact that our case clearance rate is among the highest in the area certainly doesn’t hurt our reputations. Goran’s a smart guy. I’ve seen him convince a waffling jury before. When he thinks it’s going to be bad, it’s probably going to be really bad.
I hand Goran the coffee cups then pull a latex glove out of my jacket pocket. Sliding it on and squatting down almost in slow motion, I swallow to push down the acid collecting behind my rib cage. I pull the sheet back to get a look at the victim. He couldn’t be more than five or six. The bile rises. Deep breaths. One, two, three.
Child victims. I always think next time I won’t freak out, next time I won’t puke. Then the next time comes, and I’m on the floor in a bathroom somewhere, trying to pull it together before anyone hears me.
“Was he covered when they found him?” I ask.
“Yeah.” He shines his flashlight onto the sheet so I can see better.
Reddish-blond hair that looks freshly cut almost conceals the sizable dent in the left side of his skull. He’s wearing a red Spiderman sweatshirt, blue jeans, black Converse tennis shoes, and no jacket. There’s very little blood. I’m grateful his eyes are closed. I notice his left arm looks too short. Maybe a birth defect? I lean forward to try to see more of that side of the body. Damn it, no. I feel something hot and greasy uncoil in my chest and press against my sternum.
I look up at Goran to give my eyes a break from the view. “Who found him?”
“Guy over there, talking to the unis.” Goran gestures with his notebook toward a college-aged man of about average height. “I’m gonna head over there in a minute and get his statement.”
The guy is about sixty pounds overweight and carrying it all in the front. His reddish stubbly mustache and beard were probably grown to cover the double chin, and he’s wearing one of those knit hats with a logo on it, leather gloves, and a scarf but no coat. He’s crying, complete with streaming snot and tears, while the uni tries to look sympathetic. A second guy, a tall man in a gray suit, stands off to one side with his arms crossed and his brow furrowed.
I point at him. “Who’s that dude, the one in the suit? We talk to him yet?”
“Not yet. He’s all yours.”
I turn back to the corpse. In my experience, most homicide victims know their killers. And when someone takes the time to swaddle the body like this, we might be looking for a relative or a close friend, someone with a shred of remorse, someone who might be easy to track down once he starts feeling bad and is compelled to confess. But there isn’t enough regret in the universe, not for this.
I pull the sheet back over the boy. “Let’s get the lab out here. Watson on his way?” The deputy medical examiner is usually pretty quick to a scene, even though he has a wife and four kids.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s take a look around, establish a bigger perimeter.” I scan the area, noting the flurry of uniforms holding back curious onlookers. “Scene’s secure. You talk to the guy who found the body, then we’ll do the grid search. Are unis on the canvas?” I pull myself up out of the squat. “Did you talk to the first responders?”
He nods and searches my face. “You okay?”
I wish he would stop asking me that. “Not really, no.” I maintain eye contact. “Any ID yet?” I don’t expect one with a kid, since they don’t have driver’s licenses, but I have to ask.
“No, but I put the word in to Missing Persons.”
“Roberts and Dom on their way? Fishner?”
“The guys’ll be here any minute. Fishner’s meeting us back at the squad. She was here a little bit ago with Castor.”
The Flats is pretty much right in the middle of Cleveland, straddling the river between the East Side and its West Side rival. I search the street in front
of the alcove, moving in a spiral out from the body, careful not to disturb anything. The crime scene unit will be here soon to take pictures and gather physical evidence. Within the hour, we’ll have an entire team of cops and techs working this dead little boy.
It isn’t generally regarded as a dangerous part of town, especially now that they’re sprucing it up, building townhomes for the bankers and lawyers. I used to come here in my college days, but it looks a lot different with a badge and a gun instead of a chain wallet and a concert ticket.
There are other parts of Cleveland where I wouldn’t take my worst enemy, places that help make us one of the most violent cities in the Midwest. But even in the Flats, there were fourteen rapes and six suspicious deaths last year, so this isn’t unfamiliar territory for us. What usually brings CDP to this part of town is drunk college kids misbehaving. Sex Crimes gets calls mostly for groping and date rapes, generally easy-to-solve stuff.
I recall one case in particular from a few months ago, though, one that haunts me. Over on the west bank of the river but still in the Flats, a guy raped a seventeen-year-old girl, a Chinese immigrant, then threw her out a warehouse window. He left no DNA, no fibers, nothing on the body. The only physical evidence was a hair on the ground outside the warehouse, and that could have come from anybody. It was the cleanest rape we’d ever seen. I’ll try not to think of how he must have disinfected her body.
He’d pierced her heart with an ice pick before strangling her from behind and tossing her out the window. The ME report stated that she was alive for about an hour before a homeless woman found her in the bushes and called us from one of the last remaining pay phones in the city. Cause of death was a massive cerebral hemorrhage caused by blunt force trauma. Her heart kept beating even with the ice pick stuck in it, and he didn’t do the job with the ligature. She’d smacked her head when she’d fallen three stories to the ground.
We never found him. We interviewed a lot of people and followed several leads. There was one suspicious guy, and Goran and I are still sure he did it. The guy lived in the same building as the girl and worked at a chemical plant as a janitor. The girl’s friends told us that they ran into him a lot at the bus stop and that he was a creep, always asking the vic out, even though he was way too old for her. He had a record but nothing violent. We could tell something was off, but we couldn’t get enough evidence for a search warrant, so he was off the hook.
I look back at the mound under the sheet and vow to find whoever killed this little boy.
Chapter Three
The media parasites are starting to gather along the edge of the yellow tape as I turn to head to the alley to look around by the dumpsters. The nightclub two doors down looks different than it did in my late-nineties heyday. It used to be Jack’s Down Under, but now it’s Jack’s Concert Club. I guess Jack wanted to class up the place, but I’m willing to bet it’s still a dive, even though they book bigger names these days. Fewer punk bands play at Jack’s now, but the floor is probably still sticky, and the place most likely still smells of old fryer grease and sweat.
I spot an ATM across the street from Jack’s, just to the left of where I’m standing. Surveillance footage, maybe. I turn to head into the alley beside the alcove and hear rustling behind me and spin back around.
I catch movement between two dumpsters across the narrow street, about halfway down another alley but visible from here. “Hey!” I call to the person rolling out of a tattered sleeping bag. “Police. Stop!” He could have had a perfect view of the alley, the alcove, the scene.
He tries to stand and stumbles as I jog over to him. “Mehrrr,” he says. “Mfff, hmmm, mehrrr.”
“Sir, how long have you been here? And where are you going?” I try to catch Goran’s eye, but he’s busy with leather-gloved college guy, who has stopped crying and is leaning against the back of a patrol car.
“Hey, laaaaaady.” Sleeping-bag guy has dirty, matted hair and a scruffy beard. His clothes are torn, and even from a few feet away, he smells like a combination of a sewage treatment plant and cheap gin. “You got a smoke for me?” He grins.
I smile at him and say a tiny little prayer: maybe he saw something. “Answer a couple questions?” I slide my notebook and pen out of my jacket pocket.
He slumps down against the dumpster closest to his sleeping bag. He’s too drunk, maybe too cold. Even if he did see something, he probably doesn’t remember. It’s clear that he’s in no condition to murder a little boy, at least not in the way it looks as though the kid was killed, and he wouldn’t have access to a clean bedsheet, either. If he did, he’d keep it.
I squat next to him anyway and point at my badge clipped to my lapel. “What’s your name?”
“Anthony Dwayne Smith. I live here. Well, over there.” He gestures west, across the river.
“Anthony, why are you on this side tonight?”
“That place.” He points at a café down the road. “Always throw food out on Thursday nights. ’Cept not tonight, no sirree. I got nothin’ tonight ’cept a little pint. Coulda used a fifth.” He chuckles and coughs.
I look back and forth between his two glassy eyes. He relaxes a little.
Please, give us something, anything to go on. “Will you come to the station so we can ask you a few more questions?” When he doesn’t respond, I ask, “Did you see anything weird tonight, Anthony?”
“Weird?” His eyes move to where the uniforms are working around the green sheet. “Shit.”
“There’s a body over there, Anthony. You hear anything?”
He shakes his head. “I been asleep.”
“And earlier? Earlier in the night? Anything wake you up, anything strange?”
A few seconds tick by. He rubs the back of his hand across his face. Suddenly, his eyes open wider, and he looks more alert. “I mighta seen some dude over there. He was carryin’ somethin’. He looked, I dunno, sketchy. And a car… I’m not sure when… there was a car sped away. That way, I think.” He gestures to his right, up Center Street, which leads directly to the Shoreway, a pretty major east-west artery.
“What happened to the car?” I move a bit closer and try not to breathe through my nose. “Do you see the guy or the car anywhere right now?” I don’t have a visual on either of our two witnesses, and I hope to everything holy that someone interviewed both of them.
He looks around then shakes his head. “Nah, he gone. Least I can’t see him.” He laughs too loudly. “But I mighta—what’s the word? Heh heh—hallucinated him in the first place.”
Fucking hell. “Do you remember what the vehicle looked like? Was anyone driving it?”
“Of course, lady! How else a car gonna move? It gonna drive itself?” His chuckle sputters into a cough.
I gesture at a uniform to come over here.
The officer, obviously a rookie—I can tell from the way she carries herself, all swagger with nothing behind it yet—approaches. She nods at me. “Detective Boyle, hello.”
I squint at her gleaming name badge then tell Anthony, “Officer Colby is going to take you someplace warm.” I’m using my witness voice, the soft, soothing one that often gets people—potential witnesses—to talk to me. “She’ll make sure you get something to eat, maybe that smoke.” I stand up and jot down his name and the location on a new page, wondering what happened to make him homeless.
“Aw, hell no! I didn’t do a damn thing!” he yells. “I didn’t see nothin’, neither, ’cept some stupid dude!” He tries to climb to his feet again.
A lot of the homeless in Cleveland are homeless, at least in part, because they’re mentally ill. Anthony is clearly drunk, but I’m not getting a crazy vibe off of him, which makes him a viable enough witness, assuming he doesn’t change his story a million times or show up in court completely hammered. If we can get him to sit still long enough, we might get a solid lead out of him. And he’ll get a hot meal and a safe p
lace to sleep for a few hours.
“Get up, sir,” Colby barks.
I shoot her a look, and she freezes in place. I guess I sometimes look more severe than I intend, but whatever. It gets the job done.
I squat back down and put my hand on his shoulder, softening my features in sympathy to show that she shouldn’t have shouted at him that way. “Anthony, we just need your help,” I explain, almost in a whisper. “A little boy’s body is over there, and if you know—if you saw anything, it might really help us.”
“Getcher hand offa me.” He brushes my hand off his shoulder. “Fuck you! I ain’t gonna help no cops. Fuckin’ cops. Pigs. Ha-ha! Oink! I smell bacon! Hell no. No way, José.” When I don’t respond to his diatribe, he looks over at the green sheet. “A little boy? He dead?”
I use my liberated hand to steady my squat. “Anthony, please. Aren’t you hungry?” I wonder what he’s seen, beyond whatever went down tonight. My guess is a lot.
“’Course I’m hungry. You got a smoke?” His jaw moves as if he’s chewing, and he gestures at me for a cigarette. He’s missing a couple of teeth, and the remaining ones don’t look as though they’ll be staying long. “He dead, or what?”
“Yeah, Anthony, he’s dead. You’re going to ride with Officer Colby”—I wave my other hand at her—“to the station, and she’s going to chat with you for a few minutes. You can eat, maybe take a nap, and I’ll see you in a little while, okay?”
“All right, yeah, damn it. Fine. But I want a cheeseburger and fries and a Marlboro, a’ight? Menthol, if you got it. And a Coke.”
“Sure, okay.” I stand and hold out my hand to help him up.
He grasps it and almost pulls me down on top of him as he rises. He’s shaky but not completely crocked, and I’m thinking that some food and a smoke might be exactly what he needs to remember what he saw.
The Flats Page 2