Back on Murder (7 page)

“You’re not asking for much,” he says. “Seriously, though, can’t your own people handle this?”

“Oh, they’ll get to it just as soon as they can. But we’re sending our dna work out, and that’s what this is going to take. We’ve got blood, but no body, and I think the whole key to this killing was that person tied to the bed. If I can identify her, that’s the ball game.”

“Her?”

“I’m assuming.”

“Well, listen, I can’t promise same-day service on the dna front, but if you want me to expedite the basics, I can do that. That would tell you if you have another victim, give you gender and so on. Running the profile through codis, though, that’ll take longer. But provided you can rush a sample over, I’ll make sure it happens. All right?”

“Perfect, Alan. I’ll bring it myself.”

I thought taking Main the whole way would be clever, avoiding freeway traffic, but by the time I finally reach Holcombe I’m having second and third thoughts. The Harris County medical examiner is just a stone’s throw from the Astrodome – assuming you have a good arm – but I can’t seem to get there in the bumper-to-bumper.

If you’d told me at age twenty-one I’d spend a good portion of the next quarter century sitting in traffic listening to talk radio, I’m not sure I’d have had the strength of character not to drown myself in the toilet bowl. One of those phrases from Rick Villanueva’s speech comes back to me. It’s time for Houston to get moving again. When Bill White entered the mayor’s office promising to do just that, I voted for the guy – and have twice more since then – never thinking this was more than a campaign promise. Nothing could get this city moving, unless you count a slow crawl.

During the news break, I turn up the radio volume.

“In the disappearance of northwest Houston teen Hannah Mayhew,” the announcer says, “hpd officials announced today the formation of a new multi-agency task force to continue the search. A spokesman for the department refused to comment on rumors surfacing over the weekend that reported video footage of the teen’s abduction in the parking lot of Willowbrook Mall.”

Even though I work for HPD, just a couple of floors away from the center of gravity on the Mayhew case, this is the first I’ve heard about a task force. That’s media pressure for you. Wanda’s people, the ones with experience in these matters, haven’t found the girl yet, so the powers that be decide to throw more manpower at the problem, confusing an already Byzantine jurisdictional map. A task force might sound good, but it just means more people to keep in the loop, more warm bodies without Missing Persons experience.

All the sudden I’m feeling grateful that my own missing female – assuming there is one, and that she’s in fact a she – doesn’t merit as much public interest as the girl on the cable news. It’s bad enough having to deal with Lorenz. And possibly Bascombe.

By the time I reach the ME’s office, Rush Limbaugh is off the air and a new guy’s repeating everything he just said. I switch the radio off, grab my sample, and hustle inside.

Bridger’s lab is a lot nicer than the one I’ve just come from downtown, which always reminds me of a high school science classroom being run by student teachers. Here, everything is bright white and gleaming, an exemplar of sterile technology. None of the encrusted surfaces you see in our own lab, and none of the sexy mood lighting from tv. Every time I cross the threshold, a tremor of sci-fi excitement goes through me.

“You wait here,” he says, pointing me into his office. He relieves me of the sample as we pass.

“You’re gonna do it this minute? I want to watch if you are.”

He pauses. “What part of ‘wait here’ didn’t you get?”

Although he’s my brother-in-law and I impose on him at will, Bridger can’t help being intimidating. In his mid-fifties, handsome, with rimless eyeglasses and hair as white as his lab coat, there’s something downright objective about the man, like whatever he says must be so. Which is why, when the district attorney’s office has to put an expert on the stand, they always want it to be him. He speaks with the authority of science, even one-on-one.

So I kill some time flipping through this morning’s
Chronicle
, the only piece of paper on Bridger’s desk accessible to the layman. Not surprisingly, Hannah Mayhew’s on the front cover, bottom fold, looking as blond and wholesome as she did on the flat screen. I dig for the sports section only to find it’s missing. Someone must have snatched it, because Bridger’s never taken much of an interest. I’ve had to explain to him twice who Yao Ming is.

As I’m shuffling through the pages, Sheryl Green pokes her head in. She stares at me like I’m a lab specimen, then she frowns.

“Where is he?” she asks, answering her own question by glancing back into the lab. “What is this, then, your break time?”

“He told me to wait.”

I’m not sure if Dr. Green is Bridger’s protégée these days or his chief rival, but I do know she’s never cared much for me. Before my fall from grace, I camped out on Bridger’s doorstep all the time, cadging for one favor or another. Sheryl reacted pretty much the way Jesus must have, arriving at the temple only to find money changers setting up shop. Lucky for me there were no whips handy.

With a sigh of resignation she drops a thin folder on Bridger’s desk, taking the opportunity to glance over whatever paperwork happens to be faceup. Then she sees the
Chronicle
in my hand, her eyes tracking the headlines.

“Can you believe all that?”

I glance at the front, making sure it’s Hannah Mayhew she means, then treat her to a commiserative headshake. “Yeah, I know.”

“If that girl was black like me,” she says, “or just ugly like you . . .”

“Tell me about it. That’s why I’m here.” I jab my thumb in Bridger’s general direction. “I’ve got a bloodstain I’m pretty sure belongs to a female victim, from that shoot house off of West Bellfort? I can’t even get anybody to look at it.”

Not precisely true, but I don’t often find common ground with this woman, so I’d like to make the most of it.

“That houseful of bodies?” she asks. “Four victims?”

“Possibly five. I think the guys who did the shooting took her with them.”

Her eyes narrow. On the phone, Bridger hadn’t seemed too impressed by the possibility, but Green is intrigued. I explain what I’m after from the test: confirmation of my hypothetical victim for starters, and eventually an id.

“That’s a long shot,” she says. “Running a profile through codis would get you hits for known homicide victims, offenders, military, unidentified samples from other crime scenes, that kind of thing – ”

“I know how it works.”

“Then you know how unlikely it is you’re gonna identify someone from the blood on those sheets. Unless you have something to compare it with.”

What can I say? I answer with a shrug. “I’ve only got what I got.”

“Then you don’t have much.”

Just as she turns to go, Bridger appears in the doorway. “You’ve got something, anyway.”

He hands me a printout, which I spend all of two seconds examining. “How about an executive summary, Doc?”

“You have blood from a second victim on the sheets,” he says, ticking the points off on his fingers. “Type O-positive, as opposed to Morales’s much rarer B-neg. Your second victim is also female, as you suspected.”

I feel like hugging the man, or at least pumping my fist in the air, but Green’s presence coupled with Bridger’s usual reserve precludes most anything beyond a smile.

“And there’s more.”

“More?”

“I told you not to expect same-day service, but – ”

“You ran it through codis?”

He shrugs. “I got curious. Bad news is, you didn’t get a hit. Whoever she is, she doesn’t have a dna sample in the system.”

Green nods her head and gives me a told-you-so smile.

“You find something to match it against, Detective, and then you come back.”

“Thanks,” I say, and I really mean it. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

Back in the parking lot, results in hand, I have no idea how to proceed. My initial hunch is confirmed, but then I never doubted there’d been a woman tied to that bed. All I know now that I didn’t before is that I’m right. This will help me with Hedges, but it won’t break the case, which is what I really need.

Instead of waiting until I get back downtown, I call in the results. Lorenz’s number goes straight to voicemail, which is fine with me. I dial Bascombe and report directly to him.

“So that’s that,” he says.

“I guess so. It’s more than we had this morning, anyway.”

On the radio, a local call-in show is discussing nothing but Hannah Mayhew, alternating “oh, what a tragedy” with “why can’t the police do more?” in perpetual rotation. A woman whose daughters attend Klein High calls in to let everyone know how devastated the students are. She’s dismayed the kids are returning to class after the Labor Day holiday.

Then an anonymous caller who claims he’s from the Harris County Sheriff ’s Department says this task force thing is only going to make matters worse. My sentiment exactly, but the rivalries being what they are, I find myself doubting when they come from a county deputy’s lips.

“At this point,” the host says, “Hannah’s been missing for more than seventy-two hours. Since noon on Thursday. How likely is it now that she’s gonna turn up safe?”

The supposed deputy clears his throat. “Well, I mean, stranger things have happened, but . . . If you ask me, it sure doesn’t look hopeful.”

I turn it off. Not because I disagree with his prognosis, which is only common sense, but because a light just went on in my head. Everyone’s up in arms about this missing girl. And I’ve got a missing girl I’m looking for, too. With O-positive blood. Hannah Mayhew disappeared at midday Thursday. My shooting went down later that night.

Has the solution been staring me in the face? It’s crazy, I know, but like the deputy said, stranger things have happened. And in a way, it’s so obvious. How many girls go missing in one day, even in a city of millions? No one has reported my victim’s disappearance, and that only strengthens the tie.

I’m afraid to say it aloud. Afraid to think it. But I’m going to have to when I get back to the office, because I’m starting to believe it’s true. The girl tied to the bed, the one the shooters took after lighting up Morales and his crew.

It was Hannah Mayhew.

It had to be.

CHAPTER
5

I should know better. But listening with such rapt intensity, Lorenz fools me at first. As I show him the printout from Bridger, explaining the significance just in case, he nods in that odd way of his, like there’s a neck spasm synchronized to his pulse.

“I know it’s a stretch,” I say, “but there are no coincidences.”

Not that I believe this. My work is full of coincidences – people in the wrong place at the wrong time – but my need to persuade him overcomes all nuance. To pursue this line of inquiry without any hindrance, I have to convince him it’s worth checking. At the same time, he needs to think it’s a fool’s errand, the perfect time-waster to keep me out of his way.

He examines a little chart on the page, bringing it close to his nose, then sets the printout to one side. The stacks of paper from this morning are neatly sorted into a series of piles, a sort that must have taken him all morning.

“Well?”

“Take a look at this,” he says, handing me a folder from the top of the nearest mound. “I need you to follow up on it – ” he consults his watch – “by the end of the shift today.”

Inside the folder, there are several muddy faxes, half-page incident reports typed in capital letters.

“What about my lead?”

“The guy to talk to in Narcotics is Mitch Geiger. He’s a friend of mine, does a lot of street-level intel. Rumor is, there’s a crew that’s been jacking stash houses on the southwest side. They don’t report it, obviously, but we’ve been hearing things. I want you to follow up on the prior incidents, see if you can substantiate anything. Maybe there’s a connection to the guys who hit our house.”

I toss the folder on his desk. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“What question?”

“I’m going to follow up on the blood trail. Running the dna profile turned up nothing, but if we can get a sample to compare with – from Hannah Mayhew’s parents, for example – that will tell us whether there’s a connection to pursue or not.”

He nods, then hands back the folder. “That’s what I want you working on, March. Geiger’s expecting you. If you have a problem, take it up with Bascombe.”

“What about the missing girl?”

“This is Homicide, not Missing Persons.”

“We have a missing female victim, and they’re missing a juvenile female. Her disappearance and our shooting took place on the same day. It’s reasonable to assume – ”

“Are you even listening to yourself, March? You think this girl from the news really ditched her classes, drove down to the ghetto, got herself tied down to a bed, then vanished after a crew came in and wiped out everybody else in the house? That’s your theory? Trust me, I’m saving you a world of embarrassment here.” He chuckles at the thought of this favor he’s doing me. “You’d be a laughingstock, man. Just talk to Geiger, all right? I think all that time on the cars-for-criminals detail warped your instincts. The point here is to clear some murders, not get yourself on TV.”

An hour ago I’d have put down money on the fact that nothing Lorenz could say had the power to sting. I would have been wrong. Problem is, he’s only saying what everyone else will be thinking. The lesson I learned putting in time with Villanueva is that the right kind of media attention makes careers. Hitching my wagon to Hannah Mayhew would represent the perfect application of the principle, assuming my hunch proved out. That’s not my motive, but Lorenz won’t be the last colleague to see it that way.

“I have to pursue this.”

Again with the insufferable nod. “March, you gotta do what you gotta do. But so do I. You’re either with me on this thing, or you’re against me. And if you’re against me, you’re out. I’m not just blowing smoke here. Go ask Bascombe and you’ll see.”