Rose City Free Fall

by DL Barbur

  "Dammit, Dent. I'm tempted to throw that thing out the window." My phone only rang when Audrey called, or work called. I'd tried to trade duty with somebody over the weekend, but everyone either had sick kids or plans. It happened that way sometimes.

  Aud looked exasperated. I didn't blame her. I was too. She got up, tucked her shirt back into her skirt and closed the latches on her cello case. I dug the phone out and looked at the number: Central Dispatch. I had hoped that it was just somebody calling in with a question, or maybe Lubbock. I could ignore him. But a call from dispatch usually meant somebody had gotten themselves shot, stabbed, beaten to death or had died in some other unpleasant matter.

  I started to dial Central back when the phone rang again. This time it was Mandy.

  "Hey! Didja get the call?" She sounded excited. She probably was. She'd been with me for two months and so far we'd spent the whole time working old cases. Random chance had kept me from catching a new homicide since she started. It was an odd job we had. We got excited and developed career opportunities out of homicides.

  "Yeah. I was just getting ready to call dispatch."

  "I just got off the phone with them." Jesus, did she sit there with the phone in her hand? It hadn't taken me but a minute or two to find my phone.

  "What have we got?"

  Please let it be an easy one, I thought. I very much wanted to spend the night with Audrey, and if was something like Dumbass A shot Dumbass B and was still standing there when the cops arrived, I could be back at her place by midnight. I wasn't up to any Sherlock Holmes action tonight.

  "Body of a young female, found dumped in Kelly Point Park. She was bound. The medical examiner hasn't gotten there yet so nobody's touched her."

  Damn. The game was afoot, and all I wanted to do was have dinner with my girlfriend.

  “Ok. See you there.” I hung up. I hoped I hadn't hurt Mandy's feelings, but I really wasn't in the mood to talk right now.

  I sighed and started strapping all my gear on. When I was done, I went out to the living room and found Audrey staring out the window at the street below. I stood there, my hands jammed in the pockets of my coat.

  "I gotta go. I'm sorry."

  "I know. Should I wait for dinner until you to get back?"

  I sighed again. "No. Probably shouldn't wait up on me either. This is liable to be a long one."

  "Ok." She tried a smile. It didn't quite work.

  I walked up and kissed the back of her neck. "I'm really sorry."

  She turned and kissed me, not like earlier, but still a good honest kiss. "It's ok. Be careful."

  I nodded, and with that, I turned and headed out the door.

  Chapter Four

  I didn't waste any time getting to the scene, but I didn't burn up the road either. The victim would still be dead when I got there, and I needed some time to mentally switch gears. Driving to a homicide scene was like the long, slow, up-hill beginning of a roller coaster ride. Once you got to the scene, the ride started in earnest and you never knew how long the drop would last. I would work the case until I had a solid suspect in custody, I had chased every lead, or I keeled over from exhaustion. If a suspect isn't in custody in twenty-four hours, the odds of ever solving the murder went way down.

  Part of my brain was humming in anticipation. I was realistic enough about myself to realize that I needed this. I needed this the way a Wall Street Eagle needed a hot trade, the way a Vegas gambler needed a blackjack table. To be even more honest, I needed this the way a junkie needed his fix. My cases were big game hunts. They started with a dead body and ended with another trophy on my wall.

  The other part of my brain was still reeling at being torn away from Audrey so quickly. I tried to shut that part off.

  The city of Portland had a fondness for parks. We had over two hundred and fifty of them, ranging from the smallest, a whimsy of a park that was only a few square feet, to Forest Park, almost 5,000 acres. It was one of the things that made the city a cool place to live. Most Portlanders had their favorite parks and probably lots of fond memories about them. I tended to put them into two categories: parks where I'd found dead bodies, and parks where I hadn't found a dead body yet.

  Kelley Point Park sat at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, right smack in the middle of a major industrial area. The wooded acres and picnic tables seemed out of place among the grain elevators, shipping terminals and light industrial outfits that surrounded it. A single patrol car sat at the gate, parked across the entrance. I was glad to see the overhead lights were turned off. I'd found over the years that the best way to keep your crime scene secure was to not draw attention.

  Ahead of me, a white van slowed down, saw the police car, and did an abrupt u-turn. The driver stared at me as he drove past, a young guy with one of those goofy shaggy haircuts that were all the rage these days. I could see the outline of another, larger man in the passenger seat. Something seemed off about them. I looked in the rearview mirror as they sped away hoping to get a plate number, but they were gone before I could catch it.

  I turned off my lights and flashed my badge to get inside. I drove down a long winding road to a parking lot at the end. The Deputy Medical Examiner's black van was already parked there, along with a couple of marked cars. Mandy's Vic was parked there too, along with a lone Volvo. The Volvo had a sticker on the bumper: "I," a heart, and a picture of one of those little low slung dogs, the kind the queen of England likes.

  Mandy was standing next to the Volvo, talking to a guy in his fifties, expensive looking rain jacket, beard, flat-brimmed hat and a halfhearted attempt at a ponytail. The guy probably made six figures a year and still listened to the Grateful Dead. Portland was like that. He had a fat little dog on the end of the leash that kept smelling Mandy's shoes. Corgi. That was what they called them.

  Mandy seemed to have that pretty well in hand. I turned to the little knot of people standing at the other end of the lot. A sergeant, I recognized him as Dan Millan, and Rex Fairbairn, the Deputy Medical Examiner. Good, not too many people. I didn't know Millan well, but he had a good reputation and seemed to be doing a good job of making sure my crime scene didn't get trampled to death.

  A pair of headlights lit me up, casting my shadow twenty feet ahead of me. Another van squeaked to a stop beside my Vic. These would be the crime scene techs from the ID division.

  A short woman with bright red hair got out of the driver's seat. "Evening, Dent," she said, pulling on a pair of latex gloves.

  "Hi, Jeannie." A big hulking man with a heavy brow and dark hair that stuck up in all directions got out of the passenger side. "Hey, Roger." Roger grunted back, gave a little wave. I knew better than to take that personally, that was about all anybody ever got out of him. Roger and Jeannie made an unlikely, Mutt and Jeff pair. But they were both smart as hell and meticulous. If there was anything to be found at this scene, they would find it. If I was ever the victim of a homicide, I would want Roger and Jeannie to work the scene.

  “Whatcha got, Dent?" Jeannie asked.

  "Dunno. Let's go find out." I turned back to my car for a second and pulled out my shoulder bag, or as Auds called it, my "man-purse." It was almost twenty years old, the brown leather scuffed and worn to softness. I carried around my essentials in there.

  Mandy walked up her notebook in one hand.

  "Let me guess," I said. "He was out here walking his dog and found the body. He called on his cell phone and there was nobody else in the park."

  Mandy's mouth quirked up in a half smile. "Yeah. You want to talk to him before we cut him loose?"

  "You got everything you need from him?"

  She stopped for a second, considering both the question and the fact that I was leaving it up to her. She nodded slowly.

  "Ok," I said. "Cut him loose."

  Mandy waved the guy on. He couldn't get into his car and out of there fast enough. I couldn't blame him. Most people only saw dead bodies in caskets at funeral homes. I predicted a few
glasses of a nice red or maybe even a bowl or two of Oregon's finest in his future.

  There was a strip of grass at the edge of the parking lot, then a steep embankment. I noticed a pair of tire tracks in the grass. It looked like somebody had pulled off the parking lot right to the edge of the embankment. Everybody was standing well away from the tire tracks.

  I nodded to Fairbairn and Millman; they both knew me by sight.

  I turned to Mandy. "Lead on." I had resolved on the way over to make this Mandy’s show.

  Mandy led the way down the trail, a camera and a crime scene bag slung over her shoulder. She carefully shined her light on the ground in front of her before setting her foot down. No one in their right might would drag a body across the route we were taking, so the chance of destroying evidence was almost nil. But it paid to be thorough, and we would document our caution in our reports, so no defense attorney could dream up some piece of exculpatory evidence and claim we had destroyed it by trampling around the crime scene. Fairbairn followed us.

  Up until now, the victim had been an abstraction. From up above, she was just another shape in the gloom. I'd grown used to dead people, seen them cut in half by trains, seen their heads blown off with shotguns, seen them after they'd sat out in a field under a hot sun for a week. You got used to it, but there was always a feeling of dread as I walked up to a new one. Not so much because I was about to see something unpleasant, but because I was about to crawl into this person's life, get to know everything about them, even things their friends and family might not know. I'd devote myself to figure out who the killer was until I was done. There was an old saying: "homicide detectives get paid by the taxpayers, but they work for God."

  She was small. It was hard to tell precisely, with her legs drawn up to her chest, her head bent forward, and her hands bound behind her back, but I could tell from the fine bones in her wrists and the narrow shoulders that she wasn't very big. She was lying on her left side at the bottom of the slope.

  "Want to snap a few before I check her?" Fairbairn asked Mandy.

  Mandy nodded and took the lens cap off the camera. Her hands shook ever so slightly, but she was cool as she walked around the body in a circle, always conscious of the ground in front of her before putting her feet down. She snapped a photo every few steps, getting a view of the body from all the way around.

  In the flash of the camera, I got a better view of the victim. Black hair, dyed and showing blond roots cut almost boy short. She was wearing a black hooded sweatshirt with a "Dropkick Murphys" panel sewn on the back and all sorts of metal studs and safety pins. Her black jeans were dirty and torn, with more patches sewn on at random. A scuffed pair of Doc Martin boots were on her feet. Pieces of dead grass, weeds and, leaves were all over her, consistent with being rolled down the hill. Her hands were bound behind her back by a pair of handcuffs.

  I saw dozens of kids dressed like this all the time downtown. Some of them were homeless or semi-homeless. Others lived in nice little suburban homes.

  Mandy nodded at Fairbairn and he bent down and put his fingers on the pale white skin of the girl's neck for a few seconds. He liked to tell a story about how he’d put a guy in a bag once, only to have him sit up and start mumbling. Now he always made sure first.

  Dead bodies occupied some interesting legal territory in Oregon. The body actually belonged to the Medical Examiner. Cops weren’t allowed to touch the body until a Deputy Medical Examiner arrived. The MX had a duty to figure out how the person died. If it was a homicide, it was our duty to figure out who killed them.

  Satisfied that there was no pulse, Fairbairn started rummaging through her pockets, first the sweatshirt, then the jeans. He came up empty-handed.

  "No ID?" I asked.

  "Nope. Not a thing in her pockets." Damn. The first part of identifying a killer was identifying the victim.

  "How long has she been here, you think?" Mandy asked.

  "I'm guessing since last night,” Fairbairn said. “Her clothes are soaked. The body's still pretty rigid. I'm going to roll her over on her back."

  Fairbairn was a big guy. He gently rolled her onto her back with little effort. She had been young. It was hard to tell age on a dead person sometimes, but I had a feeling this girl wasn’t even eighteen. Her face looked funny. The right half was pale and white, the left half was blotchy looking in a way I hadn't ever seen before.

  "What's up with her face?" I asked.

  Fairbairn examined her for a second under the light of his flashlight. "Makeup. Heavy makeup. The rain's washed a bunch of it away. From the way she was lying it all ran down her face and all over her sweatshirt." He pointed to a big smear around the collar of the sweatshirt.

  "I'm not seeing any wounds," Mandy said.

  "Me neither, at least not yet," Fairbairn said. Sometimes even a gunshot wound wasn't immediately obvious. A bullet or knife could cause surprisingly little bleeding external to the body, but cause somebody to bleed out internally.

  Fairbairn ran his fingertips around her head gently, then shined his light on her face and stooped over to where his face was inches from her skin. He rolled first one eyelid open, then the other. From there he tilted her head back as much as he could against the rigor. He shined his light around her neck and felt her throat gently.

  "Off the record," he said. "I'm guessing this one's going to be a strangle. Some petechiae in her eyes and cheeks, some bruising on the throat. Her trachea is intact so I'm guessing what killed her was a carotid choke."

  Petechiae was the red speckling left over from tiny burst blood vessels, just under the surface of the skin of the face and eyes. They would show up really well against her pale skin. Instead of restricting the flow of air through her trachea, a carotid choke would have killed her by restricting the flow of blood to her brain in the carotid arteries. I knew all too well how quickly that would kill somebody.

  Fairbairn pulled up the bottom of the bulky sweatshirt, then the t-shirt underneath, baring her belly. The right half was pale white. The left looked like one giant bruise, blue and red mostly, with some brown and yellow mixed in.

  "Yeah, she's been here a while, judging by the lividity."

  When somebody died, gravity took over and the blood pooled downward, causing post mortem lividity. Fairbairn ran his gloved hands down her legs, looking for wounds or obvious fractures. He found nothing of interest and stood up. He looked up the embankment.

  I turned to Mandy. "So what do you think?"

  "I think we don't have a whole hell of a lot yet except a dead girl."

  She was right. No identification on the victim. She was most likely killed somewhere else and dumped here. No clue as to a suspect.

  I sighed. It was going to be a long night.

  "Ok. Let's do a search down here while we wait for Fairbairn”

  I realized I was unconsciously referring to our suspect as a he. They almost always were.

  We both had compact, powerful flashlights. We started a search of the area, expanding out in a grid surrounding the body. The idea was to walk over each piece of ground twice, from a different direction each time. You might miss something from one angle, only to see it from another.

  Bright light flooded the area from above. I squinted and yelled, "Thanks, Jeannie." The techs carried big floodlights in their truck.

  "Welcome, Dent," her voice floated down from above. "Want us to start a search up here?"

  "Yeah, please," I said. A twinkle of light caught my eye, about halfway up the slope. Something was reflecting light. I made a mental note but continued searching where I was.

  The bottom of the embankment was full of scraggly weeds about shin high. There were some scrub bushes in a thin line, then woods, then the river. Mandy and I searched back and forth up to the wood line. Flashlights or no, it was too dark in there to see anything. Later we might decide to bring some more help in and search the wood line, maybe even the whole park.

  But I didn't think the evidence would lead us that way
.

  While we searched, Fairbairn worked on the victim. He knelt over the body and I saw the glint of a pair of EMT shears in his hand. He'd need to get a core body temperature before we put her in the bag. It was a valuable piece of info, but I would just as soon not be there as he got it.

  Mandy and I finished our search. Both of us came up empty-handed. I trudged back up the hill to the body, a little disappointed in myself that I was starting to breathe hard. Fairbairn turned to look at us.

  "Can I get a hand getting her in the bag?"

  I stepped forward but Mandy beat me to it. Together she and Fairbairn lifted the girl into the bag that he had spread out on the ground. I walked past them, looking for the item I'd seen glittering in the light. I shined my light around.

  It was an earring, shaped like a small gold butterfly with a diamond in the center. "Hey, is she wearing an earring?" I asked.

  Fairbairn was zipping up the body bag. He paused and shined a light inside. "Nope. Both ears are pierced though." I nodded my thanks and he zipped the bag up. I put the earring in an evidence baggie. It might turn out to be hers, it might not. It sure didn't fit the rest of her outfit.

  Mandy and I squatted, then picked up the bag. The girl was light, but the term "dead weight" had been coined for a reason. I hated carrying bodies. Fairbairn followed as we huffed and puffed up the hill then across the parking lot to Fairbairn’s van. He pulled the gurney out of the back and we put the bag down as gently as we could.

  I stood there, stretching the muscles in my back and staring at the bag. I hated it when I had a victim but no name. Somehow a name made them a person to me, and not just a body.

  "I'll roll her prints as soon as I get her to the morgue." It was like Fairbairn was reading my mind. Hell, he might have been, we'd worked enough scenes together.

  "Thanks. Any chance one of the docs can come in and do an autopsy tomorrow morning?"