Blood Line (2 page)

“I be all right.”

“It would be good for you to have somebody around.”

“I be all right.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Wager said good-bye and headed across the deserted fragments of sidewalk for the taped-off area.

The forensics team had finished, and two of them stood comparing notes while Gebauer toted his metal detector back to the trunk of their vehicle. He held up a labeled Baggie for Wager to see. “Found the slug. Looks like a thirty-two.”

Wager peered at the twisted wad. Although its nose was splayed by impact with bone and dirt, the base of the bullet was still intact enough for a ballistics test “Good. If the killer’s dumb enough to keep the weapon, and if we’re smart enough to find the killer, we might have a case.” But more and more, gang shooters tended to use throwaway guns—cheap, small-caliber weapons that couldn’t be traced to whoever pulled the trigger.

“Yeah, well, I leave that to you, Gabe; my fun’s ended and yours is just beginning.”

The ambulance attendants were waved over, and it was time for Wager to inspect the victim, to get the preliminary forensic reports on the body and site before the body was removed, and to draw his own sketch of the crime scene that would provide accurate memory if he were called upon months from now to testify in court.

A
UNT
L
OUISA’S HOUSE
was one of the small bungalows just off 38th Avenue in District One, the northwest quadrant of Denver. It was mostly one story, though sometime in the past a couple of attic rooms had been added by poking a pair of flat dormers through the roof to get a little more space. The one with the yellow light glowing dimly behind the small windows was probably Julio’s room. Wager pulled his Camaro into the driveway and stood a minute before climbing the three wooden stairs up to the porch.

He had spent the long afternoon following up the patrolman’s neighborhood contacts and rapping on doors that, for one reason or another, hadn’t answered to the uniformed officer. No one heard or saw anything, and Wager would have been surprised if they had. The residents in the single row of small houses said all they ever heard was noise from the highway, and the staff members at the home for the mentally retarded said their doors and windows were always closed and the building secured at night against neighborhood vandalism. Wager had put off talking to John Erle’s sisters, figuring they had enough to handle today. And besides, he was exhausted. A new murder—especially a kid’s—always left him feeling weary. What he did not feel like was playing the Dutch uncle to a reluctant teenager. But a promise was a promise.

Aunt Louisa met him at the door, a square shape in a black dress with her gray hair pulled back into a bun. She had worn black ever since Uncle Julius died, over ten years ago, and Wager—who had stopped going to the family gatherings and hadn’t seen her in almost two yeans—tried to pretend he didn’t notice the new lines of deep worry on her forehead or the sharper lines beside her mouth. They gave her a bitter look that he did not associate with his memory of the woman, and that made him feel a little twinge of something at having avoided his family for so long. “Gabe—come in!” She gave him an
abrazo
, wrapping him in the thin aroma of some unnamed perfume or soap or lotion that brought back a tangle of almost forgotten feelings and sharpened the sense of so much time passing between what he remembered and what he now saw. They talked for a few minutes, Aunt Louisa urging him to have a cup of coffee and some of the small almond cookies she had lined up formally on a plate. “I’ll go get Julio. He’s just upstairs.”

Wager sipped at the coffee, savoring its thickness and aroma—his aunt and his mother had always challenged each other at coffee making—and listened to her footsteps up the stairs and across the creaky floor above. Then there was a long silence punctuated by a rising mumble that suddenly and self-consciously dropped into another silence. Then the ceiling creaked again, and his aunt’s steps came heavily down the stairs. The lines beside her mouth were deeper, but she forced a smile. “He’ll be down in a couple minutes, Gabe. He was sleeping, you know?” She added, “I hope you’re not in no hurry.”

Wager shook his head. “The coffee’s good, Aunt Louisa.” He searched for something to talk about besides his afternoon’s work and remembered his cousin Donna’s wedding—her third, he thought—and asked about that. His aunt was glad to tell him, including histories of the first two husbands and dropping a few names that Wager recognized and a lot that he didn’t. But he nodded and made the right kind of sounds in the right places, and let her words fill the space until they heard the sullen thud of Julio’s heels on the stairs.

The young man paused, eyeing Wager like a nervous cat. Julio had grown half a foot and now had some weight across the shoulders; a hint of dark hairs promised a mustache, and his arms were gaining the thickness of a man’s though they didn’t yet have the ropy muscles of hard use and repetitive labor.

“You want some coffee, Julio? Your cousin Gabe’s having some coffee.”

He shrugged, which his mother took for a yes and went quickly to the kitchen for another saucer and cup; Wager saw in the gesture a remnant of the younger boy Julio had been after his father died: sulky and stubborn, wanting something but too proud to admit that he needed anything from anyone.

“Hello, Julio.” Wager stood and held out a hand, man-to-man. “Your mother thinks we should talk.”

“Talk about what?”

“She’s afraid you’re in trouble. She’s worried about you.”

“I ain’t in no trouble.”

“I’m not the one saying you are. It’s your mother who is. Remember her? She’s the one brought you into this world. Changed your diapers. Kept a roof over your head after your dad died.”

Aunt Louisa came back with a cup and served her son, tilting a dollop of milk into the coffee the way she knew he liked it. “I got to go next door for a little bit. You two excuse me, OK?”

Wager stood and thanked her again for the coffee; Julio remained sitting and frowned at the steam rising from his cup. When the woman had closed the door behind her, Wager sat and munched another of the carefully arranged almond cookies. “How you doing in school?”

“Fine. I’m doing fine.”

Wager took another bite. “Your mother tells me you’ve been missing a lot lately.”

A shrug.

“Well, you’re right—it’s your life; you’re the one that’s responsible for it—good, bad, or indifferent.”

“What’s the point in school, man? I ain’t going to college—I don’t need all that shit they talk about.”

Wager didn’t have the heart to argue with that. In fact, Julio was repeating the words that he had used, too, before he quit school and joined the Marine Corps with his mother’s half-relieved, half-worried blessing and her signature on the age-waiver form. “Hey, I didn’t finish high school, either, and, look, it didn’t hurt me: Now I’m the family cop.”

For the first time, Julio looked directly at him, defensiveness replaced by the puzzlement of whether Wager was joking or not.

“So what about your job? Your mother told me you have this job with the Youth Opportunity Program. What kind of work they have you doing?”

“Construction.”

He waited for more, but Julio turned back to reading the wallpaper.

“So, they teaching you a trade? Carpentry? Concrete work?”

“No. I quit.”

Wager took another cookie and nudged the plate toward Julio, who studied the blobs of pale pink and white and green for a moment and then picked one up.

“Why?”

“They didn’t have me doing nothing but cleaning up crap—picking up lumber and plastic and crap after the workmen. So I quit.”

“And now you stay around the house all the time and don’t go out at all.”

“Yeah. That’s what I do.”

Wager started to ask him who he was hiding from, but the jangle of the telephone, loud in the still house, interrupted. Julio stiffened, brown eyes wide as he stared toward the small table that held the old-fashioned dial telephone; Wager picked it up. “Hello?”

“Julio? Where you been, man? We want to talk to you.”

“Who’s this?”

The voice, male and young sounding, paused. “This Julio?”

“I asked you first.”

The line clicked dead. Wager put the handset in its cradle. Julio had seemed to shrink, the half-eaten bit of pink cookie held between fingers that were still slender with boyhood. His dark eyes watched Wager intently.

“It’s whoever’s after you.”

He said nothing.

“You in a gang, Julio?”

“No.”

“Sometimes it’s hard not to be, neighborhood like this. Not a real member, maybe. Just a friend of a friend who is. Know a little bit of what’s going down, maybe say the wrong thing by accident, give some people the wrong idea.”

“That’s not it, man—I’m not in a gang!” He stood abruptly, clattering his coffee cup and sloshing liquid into its saucer. “Just leave me alone, you hear? Leave me alone—get out of my goddamn house and leave me the fuck alone!” His feet thudded up the stairs.

Wager had waited until Aunt Louisa came back and then told her what happened and tried to calm her worry with the promise to try again.

“I don’t know who else to talk to, Gabe. His teachers, they don’t tell me nothing except he should come back to school. The priest tells me to pray. His boss at his job, Mr. Tarbell, says he don’t know why Julio quit. He was doing a good job, Mr. Tarbell said, and he can come back but he can’t hold the job open for too much longer. I just don’t know. …”

It had gone on for another half hour—wet, repetitious, and nasal—and Wager had felt the stirrings of anger at Julio not only for what he was putting his mother through but also for what promised to develop into a major drain on Wager’s time. He didn’t need it, he didn’t want it; but it was
la familia
, and there was no way out when somebody like Aunt Louisa asked for help. That’s what he was telling Elizabeth Voss as they divided up a double order of spaghetti and drained the carafe of red wine into their glasses.

She preferred wine with her food—“Pasta and beer? Gabe, how can your stomach do that?”—and, after a while, Wager had come to like it too. Good thing, because the couple of years they had spent together so far had shown him that Elizabeth wasn’t going to change. Not that she prided herself on being stubborn, but she had lived long enough to make up her mind about a few things, as well as to understand there was a lot she didn’t know. She had, after all, a life of her own that included divorce, a career in commercial real estate, a son now in college, and four years on the Denver City Council. In fact, Wager met her at the scene of a riot in District Two; she had been the only councilperson with the guts to show up and, despite Wager’s warning, had made an effort to calm the situation. The attempt failed, and Elizabeth blamed herself more than the rioters. But out of that guilt began a series of interviews and meetings to learn a lot more about the city she spoke for. One of those meetings had been with Wager, to thank him as well as to pick his brain. When he asked her if she would like to see Denver from a cop’s perspective, she said yes. A patrol car, when the city’s quiet at night, is a good place to talk; it was also one of the few times in his life that Wager had felt comfortable enough to talk. At first he thought it was because they were in a police car, but then he realized it was the woman. Elizabeth asked questions, she listened, she wanted to know. And not just about the city and its people. After a while, he realized he even enjoyed talking with her.

“Do you believe he’s not in a gang?” Elizabeth, along with the rest of the city council members, had been faced with the rapidly growing gang problems in Denver and its neighboring cities. The Hocks murder was only more evidence of the pervasive violence and the younger age of victims. For the past few years, summer nights had been marked with drive-by shootings, and every Saturday night registered half a dozen reports of gunfire. Children and teenagers, mostly from the Hispanic and black neighborhoods of Districts One and Two, were routinely checked into Denver General’s emergency room—the Knife and Gun Club, medics called it—with a variety of wounds. Schools had been trying desperately to be neutral territories by banning gang-style clothing, holding shakedowns for weapons, using dogs to sniff for drugs, expelling armed kids, and establishing uniformed patrols in the halls and on the grounds. Wager figured that pretty soon the teachers would be striking for flak jackets and combat pay. It was, Elizabeth believed, the legacy of Reagan and that era’s selfish callousness; Wager thought there was more to it than that, and they’d had some pretty sharp disputes over it. “His mother said he doesn’t wear colors; I didn’t see any tattoos. But that doesn’t mean some gang members aren’t after him.” Wager shook his head when the waitress asked if they would like more wine.

“Why would they be?” The little spark came into Elizabeth’s hazel eyes, a signal to Wager that the issue of gangs was pushing that quick temper.

“It’s one of the things I have to find out.” He didn’t feel like an argument so he didn’t tell her about that voice on the telephone asking for Julio. But he wasn’t going to have someone else, even Elizabeth, tell him how to do his job. “And I’m not going to say he is in one if I don’t know that for a fact.”

She apparently heard something in his voice. “Well, you’re right, of course. You shouldn’t jump to conclusions, nor should I. But,” she added, unwilling to roll over and die, “I wouldn’t be surprised if a gang wasn’t at the bottom of it.”

Neither would Wager, and, mouth too full of spaghetti to speak, he nodded. After all, it wasn’t just Wager’s belief about the causes of the gang problem that had Elizabeth on edge: it was the upcoming campaign for reelection and the constant harping on crime that filled the almost nightly citizen’s meetings. The elderly were terrified for themselves, the parents worried about their children, neighborhoods that had not yet been invaded were afraid of getting hit by the violence they read about in the newspapers, and even some gang members—for whatever reasons, and Wager had his beliefs about that too—spoke against the rising rate of death and mayhem. He had asked Elizabeth why she wanted to run for city council again, and her answer had been one he understood: You don’t quit just because things get tough.