Blood Line (19 page)

“Lives over on the north side. Deals a little crack.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Deals crack?”

“No. You asking me about him. What’s it mean do I know him?”

“Doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know him. You never had a run-in with Lucero?”

“Never.”

“OK, Mr. Hastings. Thanks for your help.”

The man smiled slightly with his lips. “Anytime.” The door closed softly.

Wager’s alarm pulled him out of bed groggy enough to scratch at his itching wound before he realized what he was doing. The sting of breaking flesh reminded him and he said “damn” and pressed a Kleenex hard against the bleeding scab. The shower started it bleeding again, and as he shaved he held a wad of toilet paper over the wound. It didn’t stop bleeding, but he managed to put an awkward bandage over it to keep the color from seeping through his shirt. It was a lousy way to start the day, and he hoped it wasn’t an omen; but at least the rain had stopped, and even the thick clouds seemed to be lightening. He checked on duty via radio and asked the clerk if there were any urgent messages for him.

“Negative, Detective Wager. Some telephone messages but nothing marked urgent.”

“OK—I’m headed out to DIA and I’ll be in the office about ten.”

“Yessir.”

He pulled his rental car into a vacant square of dirt in front of the trailer marked D & S Contractors. The door stood open but the office was empty; Wager lounged against the doorframe and looked for Tarbell’s figure among what he could see of the almost completed buildings. Finally he spotted the man walking his way, wearing a hardhat and carrying a clipboard aflutter with papers.

“Morning, Officer. What can I do for you?”

“Just a few more questions, if you’ve got time, Mr. Tarbell.”

He glanced at the watch nestled in the thick, sun-reddened hairs on the back of the wrist. “Jesus, I wish you guys could do it all at once and get it over with. I really got a shitpot full of work to do.”

“Has another detective been out talking to you?”

“Yeah, week or so ago. Goldman, Golding. Something like that. Me and the crew.” His irritation increased. “You going to want to talk to them again too?”

“I don’t think so.”

He nodded, a little relieved. “All right—but let’s keep it short OK?”

“When did Roderick Hastings start working for you?”

“Hastings. He was one of our first hires. That was when we set up operations here. That would be about eighteen months ago.”

“Just what does your company do?”

“Disposal and salvage. That’s what the D and S stand for. We’ve subcontracted to clean up the site. That’s what the boys do—gather up packing materials, discarded supplies and equipment, odds and ends that other contractors want to get rid of but that we can salvage.”

“So your workers go all over the site.”

“Sure. Everywhere there’s stuff to pick up. Have to.”

“Did you ever hear of any trouble between Lucero and Hastings?”

The man shook his head, the stubby bill of his white hard hat wagging back and forth. “They could have had some words, but as long as it didn’t interfere with their work, I wouldn’t have heard about it.” His eyes widened slightly. “Why? You think Hastings had something to do with that boy’s death?”

“Not necessarily. Does he have a locker here? A place where he keeps his street clothes?”

“No. None of the boys do. If they change on the job, it’s in their cars or behind a trailer.”

“Do you know which car is Hastings’s?” Wager nodded toward the line of vehicles in an uneven row and glinting in the weak light of the thinning overcast

“That Honda over there, I believe.” He pointed to a red sedan. “Listen, this is kind of upsetting. Do you really suspect him? You really think he might have done it?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Tarbell. I’m just checking things out.”

The man’s pale red eyebrows pulled together. “I don’t know that much about Hastings. He’s just one of the laborers.”

“Isn’t he a bit old to be in the youth program?”

“He didn’t come through them. He showed up asking for work and I put him on.” He added, fairly, “He’s been a good worker. And like I say, I’ve never heard of him having any troubles with anybody.”

“Is he always around when you need him?”

“Around? Sure—I mean, I don’t see the crew all the time. I’ve got the deskwork to keep up with. But I start them on a job first thing in the morning and then check around ten or eleven. Then after lunch, if there’s another job, I start them there. And I always check around three to see how things are going—get some idea of the next day’s work. I haven’t had any trouble with Hastings doing his work. I got to say that.”

Wager thanked Tarbell and asked him not to tell Hastings about his visit. On the way to his car, he strolled by the red Honda and glanced in through the windows. The seats were empty, though a lunch box and large metal thermos rested on the floor of the rider’s side. There was nothing to be readily seen by the casual observer that would support a search warrant.

Wager would very much like to have the lab boys run trace tests on the vehicle’s trunk, but he’d need more probable cause before he could get that. And looking for probable cause, given the Neeley lawsuit, could be tricky for Wager. But he did write down the license number—a Denver code—before he headed back to the admin building.

B
URIED AMONG THE
routine messages waiting for him were two pink telephone slips that warranted quick attention. One, dated earlier this morning, told him to “Call Counselor Dewing.” The other said “Mrs. Hocks called.” The Please Call Back box was double-checked, Esther’s shorthand for “caller said important.” The time and date of receipt on that was yesterday afternoon, and Wager cursed himself for forgetting to tell the cleric that he was waiting for the call. Wager dialed the number—the convenience store—and a man said that she hadn’t come in yet.

“What time do you expect her?”

“Seven AM.”

The clock over the cluttered bulletin board said it was well after nine. “Did she call in sick?”

“Officer, that woman didn’t call in at all; I had to call her. And even her kids said they didn’t know where she was.”

“Thanks. If she does come in, tell her I was trying to reach her, will you?”

“After I tell her she’s fired.”

Wager, too, tried her home number, but there was no answer.

A weekday, the girls should be in school by now. He shifted his attention to Counselor Dewing.

“Detective Wager, have you been poking your nose into this case?”

“Which case?”

“The only case you and I have a mutual interest in right now—Neeley.”

“No.” Then he remembered. “I did search CCIC to see if Nelda Stinney’s name turned up, but it didn’t. Why?”

“Don’t even do that! Heisterman called me bright and early this morning to complain that you were threatening to harass his client, you were close to tampering with his witnesses, and that any such action on your part, no matter how inconsequential, would result in immediate and severe criminal charges. They would, too.” She added, “Of course if you do tamper, you won’t have to worry about saving your job—you won’t have it, and that would include your pension. You still there?”

“… Yeah, I’m here. I just don’t know what in the hell Heisterman’s talking about. I haven’t talked to, called, or communicated with Neeley or Stinney in any way.”

“Well, don’t—and I mean it, Detective Wager. Not with Neeley, not with Stinney, not with anyone who might know them. Don’t do anything that could possibly be construed as a direct or indirect communication with them. Hard as it may be, you have to trust me to handle things. You stay the hell out of it.”

That was her repeated message and summed up what she had to say, even when he kept asking questions. No, Heisterman had not yet made any formal claim of harassment or tampering. No, he did not speak to any specific instance. He just telephoned a warning, and Dewing was relaying it. With emphasis: Do not screw up.

For a few minutes after she hung up, Wager didn’t hear any of the clatter and chatter of the office; he was going back over the last few days trying to remember the people he had spoken with and the subjects they’d discussed. Heisterman …

Neeley … the CMG Bloods … that’s where the connection had to be—Roderick Hastings, maybe Big Ron Tipton, they both had ties to the Bloods. Somewhere in there … Either one of them or someone Wager had talked to who knew one of them … Perhaps a name he’d asked about, a question he’d asked someone … Wager felt his ideas slowly begin to come together in that way they sometimes did: moving from question to possibility, shifting the angles of possibility a little here, a touch there, and then with one of those tingling starts, knowing! And knowing that—

“Any homicide detective.”

Wager jotted down the tail end of his fragmented thought on a memo pad and grabbed the radio resting in its battery pack. The call was to District Two and wasn’t unusual for that city quadrant—another body had been found.

The familiar yellow tape closed off one mouth of the alley, a patrol car with flashing lights blocked the other end. It was a slit between the backs of tall redbrick buildings: warehouses and clothing manufacturers, furniture stores and office suppliers, distributors, wholesalers. Already cluttered with dumpsters, fire escapes, and scarred concrete loading docks, the narrow space was even more crowded by those whose job was to clean up after the city’s violence and death: the policemen and crime scene technicians, the waiting Cadaver Removal Service team, a television crew busy unloading from a Jeep station wagon, Gargan—whose mouth Wager could see in action as he approached it. It wasn’t the importance of the victim that drew the media, Wager knew; it was just that the body had been found during working hours and close enough to the media offices so it couldn’t be ignored. A handful of civilians with nothing better to do clustered across the street to peer through the traffic being waved past.

Wager, his badge recognized by the patrolman guarding the tape, nodded to Lincoln Jones. The tall lab photographer was just finishing some long shots of the scene with the video recorder before shifting to the Speed Graphic he liked for the stills. He had once told Wager that none of the newer cameras the department could afford worked as quickly or picked up as much detail as the bulky old box.

“Any ID?”

Jones shook his head. “Don’t know. Woman, middle-aged.”

Wager nodded. Gebauer, ballpoint pen busy at the crime-scene form on his clipboard, looked up as Wager approached. “Beating death. Pretty ugly.”

It was, but that wasn’t what gave Wager that sudden ache in the gut. The face, twisted unnaturally over the bleeding shoulder that poked through the torn cloth of her dress, was battered and spongy. One eye bulged like a boiled egg from its socket. The skin of the cheeks and jaw was crusted with dried blood and oddly shaped from the force of whatever had shattered the bones beneath. Broken front teeth glimmered through the blood and meat of what had been her lips. But the face was still recognizable: Arleta Hocks.

No identification had been found on the woman, and Gebauer said he was pretty sure she had been killed elsewhere and dumped here. “The autopsy will verify it, but my guess is the body was pushed out of a car.”

“Leads?”

He shook his head. “Nothing right off. We didn’t see any knife or gun wounds—beating death probably. But by God she put up a fight. You can’t see it because of the Baggies, but half the fingernails on her right hand were ripped back and the rest had shreds of skin under them. She clawed the hell out of somebody.”

“Defense wounds?”

“Not evident—neither arm’s broken. My guess is the killer used his fists—it looks like somebody really lost it, Gabe. Just kept beating the shit out of her with his fists even after she was out or dead.” He shook his head. “Fists wouldn’t break the skin on her arms or shoulders, but the bruises’ll show up on autopsy. My guess is they’re there. I don’t see how they couldn’t be.”

Wager did not spend much time at the crime scene. The victim was identified, there were no neighbors’ doors to knock on, no witnesses standing and waiting to talk, no apartment windows overlooking the site. And the surrounding commercial buildings had been closed after five or six, their cleaning crews gone after eight. He interviewed the bearded and fragrant can collector who, pushing his shopping cart down the alley to scratch through the dumpsters, had found the body. He looked around the alley; a vehicle could have come in from only one of two entrances, probably the west where a quick right turn would take it out of its own lane without crossing traffic. If there had been any traffic late last night, and that’s probably when her body was dumped, regardless of when she was killed.

Then Wager drove up Stout Street toward Mitchell Elementary School where Mrs. Hocks’s two daughters should be.

The principal, a heavy woman whose brown eyes were enlarged by the thick lenses of her glasses, had shut the door to her office. “The Hocks girls? Their mother?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Oh, Jesus. Lord Jesus. Poor children …”

“Yes, ma’am.”

It had taken a good half hour before the girls, holding hands and wide-eyed with worry, were ushered into the principal’s office. The school secretary had run a phone search for any relatives or close friends of the Hocks family, but it hadn’t turned up anyone. Wager finally had to ask District Two to send a patrolman to knock on doors around the Hocks address for anyone who could come down and take the children home and look after them for a while. Social Services was notified, of course; and the school nurse, on duty that day at neighboring Harrington Elementary, was called over just in case. Wager, Mrs. Owings the principal, and a counselor, Mrs. Yankin, were waiting. The girls recognized him.

“Hello, Coley—how are you, Jeanette.” There wasn’t any easy way, and the pain and fear were already in their eyes. Wager knelt down to be level with them. “It’s your mother, sweethearts. She was … in a bad accident.” He shook his head, not wanting to say what he had to.

“She hurt?”