by DL Barbur
"Damn,” I said.
"Yeah. My guess is this: they struggle; he puts the carotid choke on her, for a little too long; he thinks she's unconscious so he cuffs her up. He realizes she's dead at some point. He panics, takes her and dumps her."
"Damn,” I said again. There it was. The end of a life.
Mandy picked it up from there. "He takes her, puts her in a van. Rolls her out the back at the park and gets interrupted."
"Which explains why he didn't get his handcuffs back," I finished. They both nodded.
I sat there silent for a minute, walking it back and forth in my head.
"It fits together pretty well." I looked at Alex. "You got ideas on where we go from here, I'm happy to hear them."
"Well, there's hair and fiber from her clothes, but you know that." I nodded, that was obvious.
"I scraped her nails, but there was so much crap under them I don't know if we'll get anything good. If you manage to find his place it will be a gold mine of evidence. Her hair in the shower, both head hair and body. Wherever the rape happened you'll have a little blood, most likely. I'm not sure how precisely we can match makeup, but I took swabs just in case you find some at the murder scene. I'm pretty sure he provided the makeup. Most of these little street rat girls don't do the whole cosmetics thing. And you need to find her bag."
I nodded. I had already thought of that. These kids always had a bag. Maybe it would be a hiking style backpack, maybe just a duffel bag, maybe just a really big purse, but they always had a bag. They had to. They had no permanent place to stay so everything they owned had to stay with them.
"Anything else you can think of?" I asked.
"Nope. I'll call you if anything comes up. I'll have tox screens and the full workup done by the end of the week, so you have to remember I’m guessing about the strangle. But I think it's pretty solid."
"Me too," I said, standing up. "Thanks, Alex, you've been a big help." She stood and I shook her hand. I forced myself to keep it brief.
I kept running it back and forth in my mind, looking for holes. A guy cruises, looking for girls he can exploit for a little porn and a maybe a little sex. Our victim fit the bill, hard up enough to be desperate, but not on the streets long enough to lose her attractiveness. Things go south, she winds up dead and dumped in a park. A sad way for a life to end, but it all worked.
As we headed outside, I checked my watch and sighed. I hadn't enjoyed the autopsy, but the worst part of the evening was coming up: I had to call the boss.
Chapter Seven
I was tempted to make Mandy call Lubbock. She was ostensibly the lead detective on this case. But Mandy was serving a six-month probationary period as a detective. She could be bounced back to patrol during that time, pretty much at Lubbock's whim. No, it was better if I dealt with Lubbock and let Mandy fly under the radar. Mandy was just competent enough for Lubbock to strongly dislike her if he noticed her.
I dialed as I drove. Lubbock answered on the first ring.
"When were you going to inform me that you had a new homicide?" The headache started immediately.
"Right about now," I said, careful to keep my tone neutral.
"From now on, I want to know the second you report to the crime scene," Lubbock said.
"Ok," I said, wondering if I still had a bottle of aspirin in my valise. Again, I bit my tongue to keep from pointing out that obviously somebody had already clued him in on the fact that we had a new homicide. I wondered who his snitch was?
I opened my mouth, intending to give him a rundown of the facts, tell him where I was going with the case. Before I could get a word out, he started talking.
"What are we telling the media?"
"The media?" It took me a second to switch gears.
"You haven't figured out anything for the media? What have you been doing?"
My grip tightened on the phone and the plastic case creaked ominously. "Well Steve, mostly I've been doing detective work, you know, trying to figure out who the victim is, who killed her. Things like that."
"Listen, Miller," Lubbock was almost shouting. "I'm tired of your cowboy attitude. You need to start thinking about what's good for the Portland Police Bureau, not what gets the most glory for Denton Miller. Every homicide case brings a tremendous amount of exposure to the Bureau. There's always somebody who wants to second guess the investigation, say we aren't doing enough. If you aren't taking that into account, you're doing sloppy police work."
Sloppy police work? I had thirty-four homicide investigations under my belt, with an almost perfect clearance rate. I'd checked our records. Lubbock hadn't arrested anybody for five years.
"I'll take care of talking to the Public Information people this time," Lubbock was saying. "But next time I want some media ideas from you when you call from the crime scene. Now give me the details of what we've got."
Mechanically, I rattled off the details. It was hard to hear myself over the hum of anger in my ears, hard to see over the red haze that had settled over my vision. I wanted to hit something.
"So we don't even know if she was killed in our jurisdiction," Lubbock said when I finished. "We just know she was dumped in the city limits, so the murder may have happened somewhere else." He sounded hopeful. If we discovered the actual killing had happened somewhere else, the other jurisdiction would take over as the primary investigators.
"Maybe," I said.
"Well, I want you to keep an open mind to that possibility. If we can put this into somebody else's pocket, the sooner the better. Understood?"
"Yeah,” I said. The edges of the phone were pressing into my palm. I wondered if it would actually break if I squeezed hard enough.
"I'll get to work on this media angle. Let me know if anything develops."
"Ok."
He hung up. Not a second too soon. I put the phone on the dash, tried very hard to breathe in and out, slowly and rhythmically.
After the mall shooting, Lubbock had been shuffled around from one harmless assignment to another, community liaison this, coordinator of that, the touchy-feely program of the week, where he just had to go to meetings and "manage perceptions."
No one knew why Lubbock was promoted to head of Major Crimes. I couldn't figure out if it was somebody's idea of a reward or a punishment.
I pulled into the precinct parking garage and sat there stewing for a minute. I found some aspirin in my bag, dry swallowed. I chased them with a couple of antacids, for the heartburn that I knew was going to start any minute now.
I walked up to our office. Mandy had made coffee. Good, old-fashioned cop coffee, from the urn in the squad room that got cleaned out once a year, whether it needed it or not. Black, with an oily sheen floating on top. No cream. No sugar. No foamed milk. No flavored syrups.
I took a cup, inhaled the steam coming off the top. "Ahhhhh…" I said. "Thank you."
"Welcome," she said.
Mandy and I wrote up what we had on the case so far. By the time we reached the end, the words were swimming in front of my eyes like hieroglyphics.
Jeannie came up to the office with a photograph in her hand and sat it on my desk. It was a big fat thumbprint, outlined clear and crisp in black fingerprint powder on the polished metal surface of the handcuffs.
"Hot damn," Mandy said, looking over my shoulder. "You AFIS it yet?"
"Of course. It's in the hands of the Feds now," Jeannie said.
Which meant if we were going to get a match, it could take hours, maybe up to a day. Of course we might not get a match at all, but the print on the cuffs was a good one, detailed and pristine. If our guy had ever been arrested, been in the military, or been fingerprinted under one of a dozen other sets of circumstances, his prints would be in the system and we would get a match. I had a good feeling about this. Guys who murder somebody usually have some kind of run-in with the cops before they escalate that far.
Jeannie stifled a yawn. “Unless you guys need anything else, I’m outta here.”
&nbs
p; I told her to have a good morning and Mandy and I gave the case file one last glance, looking for something we’d missed.
We hadn’t. We were stalled out until we got an identification of either the victim or the suspect.
I looked at my watch. "Let's bag it," I said to Mandy. "If an AFIS hit comes in on the victim, we'll start working the victim. If an AFIS hit comes in on the suspect, we'll start working the suspect. Either way, we'll be going full tilt boogie again. Let's get some rest while the computers do their magic."
She'd agreed, a little reluctantly, I think. Pausing in the middle of an investigation was one of the hardest things to do, but we both needed sleep and there was no sense just sitting here in the office.
I hated this part.
Chapter Eight
The sky was clear outside, rare for this time of year. I put my sunglasses on and decided to forego more coffee. It would make it all that much harder to sleep if I got the chance. I flipped through the radio as I drove. Nothing but talk shows, nattering on about stupid stuff.
It was hard not to drift off as I drove. It was getting harder to stay up all night chasing a case and just keep going for as long as it took. I remembered when I'd been a nineteen-year-old Ranger and staying up for a week straight, running on a ten-minute cat naps.
I drove to Audrey's on autopilot and was a little surprised when I finally pulled into the lot. I didn't remember the last few minutes of the drive. Yeah, it was hell getting old.
I let myself into Audrey's place and started taking off my gear as quietly as I could. I heard the creak of box springs and a mumble from the bedroom. I debated waking her.
Sometimes, when the depression was hitting her hard, Audrey would spend the whole day in bed if she didn't have a class or a performance. I figured I would take a shower, then, I'd wake her up and see if I could get her to go out with me. I needed sleep, but the sunshine would make Audrey feel better. I could always drink more coffee.
I put the lockbox away in the bottom of the closet and stood in the bedroom doorway for a minute to look in on her. Her red hair was unbound and spread out in a wild spray. She slept on her side with one of my old t-shirts on. For some reason I didn't fully understand, I really liked it when she wore my clothes like that. I was struck by a sudden urge to touch her. It wasn't really sexual, at least not completely. I just wanted to feel that red hair of hers, run my hands along the white skin of her calf. It made me feel a little ashamed of myself for how I'd felt around Alex earlier.
I decided to let Audrey sleep. I padded off to the shower, trying to switch mental gears from work to home. It was tough. I honestly would have just preferred to work my case from beginning to end and stay totally in cop mode the whole time, but I'd learned the hard way that relationships weren't something you could just hang up on a hook and get down again when you wanted to.
I stood there in the shower for a long time, letting the hot water unknot my back. I saw that my right knee had a huge bruise, courtesy of hitting the ground while I was wrestling with Wendt. That seemed like forever ago now.
Over the noise of the shower I heard footsteps, then the shower curtain rattled back on its rod. Audrey stood there with her hair wild and messy and a smile on her face.
"Hey," I said.
By way of answering she stepped into the shower with me, not even bothering to take the shirt off first. I dropped the soap and wrapped her up in my arms. She kissed me hard, her tongue probing between my lips.
"You seem to be feeling ok," I said.
"I've decided I'm going to make myself feel ok," she said. We stood there under the water, kissing and touching, for a long time. I was almost successful in shoving work out of my head. I had a bad second when Audrey stepped back and pulled the shirt over her head. I flashed back to my dead victim, lying white, still, and naked on the autopsy slab. I blinked my eyes, trying to get the image out of my head.
"What?" Audrey asked.
I shook my head and pulled her to me. I bent and kissed the line of freckles that ran between her breasts, losing myself in the feel of warm, living flesh under my lips and hands.
Finally, she pulled my head away and kissed me on the lips. She turned and walked out of the shower, towards the hallway and the bedroom.
The sun shone through the blinds in Audrey's bedroom, leaving lines of light and shadow on her body as she lay back on the bed. She reached over and pulled me down beside her. Between my work and her blues, it had been a while since we had been together. We were in that stage of our relationship where we were comfortable and familiar with each other, but not to the point we were starting to take each other for granted.
As we kissed and touched, I finally let it all go: the case, Lubbock, the tension between me and Mandy. I forgot about all of it and the world narrowed down to just me and Audrey, the feel and smell of her hair wrapped around me and the sweet anticipation of where her roaming mouth was going to kiss me next. I let myself be lost in it.
Later, as we lay in a knot of arms and legs, I reveled in the feeling of dreamy lassitude. It felt good not to think about anything, just to feel. My last thought before I drifted off to sleep was that I'd meant to take Audrey out for breakfast.
"Dent? Dent?"
I opened my eyes. Audrey was standing there, dressed now. I smiled. “Hey.”
“It’s almost noon. Hungry?”
“Yeah.” I flipped the covers back and stretched, partly because I needed to stretch, partly because I liked the way she looked at me.
“What’s that from?” She reached out and touched the bruise on my knee. I swore and drew back. Damn. That thing was getting sore. Maybe I was getting too old to be wrestling around on the ground with twenty-year-olds.
“Just a bruise,” I said, trying to work some kinks out of my back. I really could have used a few more hours of sleep. But I didn’t want to sleep and leave Audrey alone. I had no idea when the phone would ring again, sucking me back into the whirlwind of the investigation.
“I know it’s a bruise, silly. Where did you get it?”
Distracted, I looked around for my clothes, then remembered they were in the bathroom.
“I arrested a guy on Friday I’d been looking for. He fought a little,” I called over my shoulder.
She followed me. “You got into a fight on Friday?”
I rooted around on the bathroom floor, realized we’d both walked all over my clothes as we got out of the shower. They were soaked.
“Yeah. Remember that guy Wendt? The guy that shot that little old woman? I finally put him in jail on Friday. Well, the hospital first, then Mandy took him to jail.”
I gathered up my clothes. “Let me throw my clothes in the dryer for a minute. You want to go get some breakfast?” I asked.
I walked back out into the hall. She was standing there with a funny look on her face.
“You put somebody in the hospital?”
“Yeah. He had a gun. I took him down with my baton.” I turned towards the utility room, where the washer and dryer were.
“He had a gun? Jesus, Dent. What happened? Why didn’t you tell me this?”
I shrugged, realized the dryer had a load of her clothes in it and put my stuff down so I could unload it. “Not much to tell. I followed him to an apartment building. He came running out the back door. I hit him with my baton, arrested him and he’s done.”
“But if he had a gun, why did you hit him with a baton? He could have shot you.”
We’d had a conversation a few weeks ago, about use of force, about how you always met deadly force with deadly force. About why you never tried to take knives away from people like in the movies. You just shot them. I felt like I’d been speaking Greek. We had these conversations from time to time, but it was beginning to dawn on me that for the most part, they’d been theoretical.
“He had it in his waistband. I hid outside a door and cracked him with my baton the second he walked out the door.”
“So you ambushed him?”
&
nbsp; “Exactly,” I said, pleased that she had gotten it. I turned back to my laundry.
“But how can you do that?” She asked.
I almost explained that it was just a matter of picking the right spot to hide when it dawned on me that we were probably having two different conversations.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“How can you just ambush somebody when they walk out a door? What did you do to him to put him in the hospital anyway?”
“I, uh… Hit him in the arm and the leg. Look, the guy had a gun. He’s already killed two people. The quickest and safest way to do this was to just take his ass out before he knew what hit him.”
“You hit him in the arm and the leg. Did you break his arm and leg? Is that why he had to go to the hospital.”
“Uh… Yeah.” There was no use lying. She’d been curious one night about my stuff and I’d shown her the ASP baton.
She stood there, arms crossed, cheeks flushed. She was mad and I really only had the vaguest idea of why. I stood there naked, my wet clothes in a pile around my feet, holding a double handful of her clean underwear and feeling supremely disadvantaged.
“So you ambushed a guy, broke his arm and leg, then came back here and acted like nothing happened. Jesus.”
“It was your birthday,” I said. It sounded plaintive to my ears. I started to feel a little angry. For one thing, I didn’t like sounding plaintive, and for another, Audrey freely admitted that her sole exposure to violence was movies and the time in fifth grade when another kid pushed her down.
She threw her hands up. “Jesus Christ, Dent!” She turned around and walked towards the living room.
I hated fighting with Audrey. For one thing, I usually wasn’t sure what, exactly we were fighting about, just that it usually had to do with my work, and by extension that I was somehow morally bereft for doing it.