Company Man (12 page)

Audrey's desk phone was ringing as she approached her cubicle. She glanced at the caller ID and was glad she did, because it was a call she didn't want to take.

She recognized the phone number. The woman called her every week, regular as clockwork, had done so for so many weeks Audrey had lost count. Once a week since the woman's son was found murdered.

The woman, whose name was Ethel Dorsey, was a sweet Christian woman, an African-American lady who'd raised four sons on her own and was justifiably proud of that, convinced herself she'd done a good job, had no idea that three of her boys were deep into the life of gangs and drugs and cheap guns. When her son Tyrone was found shot to death on Hastings, Audrey recognized right away that it was drug-related. And like a lot of drug-related murders, it went unsolved. Sometimes people talked. Sometimes they didn't. Audrey had an open file, one less clearance. Ethel Dorsey had one less son. But here was the thing: Audrey simply couldn't bring herself to tell poor devout Ethel Dorsey the truth, that her Tyrone had been killed in some bad drug deal. Audrey remembered Ethel's moist eyes, her warm direct gaze, during the interviews. The woman reminded Audrey of her grandmother. “He's a good boy,” she kept saying. Au
drey couldn't break it to her that her son had not only been murdered, but he'd been a small-time dealer. For what? Why did the woman need to have her illusions shattered?

So Ethel Dorsey called once a week and asked, politely and apologetically, was there any progress on Tyrone? And Audrey had to tell her the truth: No, I'm sorry, nothing yet. But we haven't given up. We're still working, ma'am.

Audrey couldn't bear it. Because she realized that they'd probably never find Tyrone Dorsey's killer, and even if they did, it would bring no peace to Ethel Dorsey. Yet even a lowlife drug dealer was someone's son. Everyone matters, or else no one matters. Jesus told of the shepherd who kept searching for the one lost lamb, leaving his flock behind. For this purpose, Christ said, I was born.

Today she couldn't even bring herself to pick up the phone and talk to the woman. She looked at the photo of Tyrone she'd taped to the side wall of the cubicle, alongside the pictures of all the other victims whose cases she was working or had worked. As she waited for the phone to stop ringing, she noticed a folded square of paper that had been placed on top of the brown accordion file at the center of her desk. “UNKNOWN WHITE MALE #03486,” the file had been labeled in her neat capital letters.

The white square of paper, folded a little unevenly into a makeshift card. On the front a black-and-white image of some generic church, a cheesy graphic that looked like clip art downloaded off the Internet. Below it, in Gothic lettering done on someone's computer, the words “Jesus Loves You.”

She opened it, knowing more or less what she'd find. Inside it said, “But Everyone Else Thinks Your an Asshole.”

She crumpled up Roy Bugbee's inane little prank, misspelling and all, and tossed it into the metal wastebasket. She glanced, for the five-hundred-thousandth time, at the index card taped to her computer monitor, the card starting to go sepia at the edges, her lettering neat and fervent: “Remember: We work for God.” She wondered who Roy Bugbee thought he worked for.

Bugbee sauntered in an hour or so later, and they sat in an empty interview room.

“Strikeout on AFIS,” he announced, almost proudly. “Nada.”

So the old man's prints didn't match any of the fingerprint records in Lansing, neither the Tenprint Database nor the unsolved ones in the Latent Database. No real surprise there. The victim's prints would only be in AFIS if he'd been arrested for something.

She said, “The rounds that were fired were .380s, according to Bert Koopmans. Brass-jacketed.”

“Oh, that's helpful,” said Bugbee, deadpan. “Narrows it down to about a thousand possible weapons.”

“Well, not really.” Audrey ignored his sarcasm, proceeded on the assumption that Roy just didn't know what he was talking about. “Once the MSP in Grand Rapids takes a look at it, they'll winnow it down a whole lot more for us.” The Forensic Science Lab of the Michigan State Police, in Grand Rapids, handled the firearms investigations for the police in this part of the state. Their examiners were good, trained in identifying weapons and ammunition using all sorts of tools, including IBIS, the Integrated Ballistics Identification System database, which was managed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

“That shouldn't take more than six months,” said Bugbee.

“Actually, I was hoping that when you drive it over there, you could press them to speed it up.”

“Me?” Bugbee laughed. “I think
you
ought to drive to Grand Rapids, Audrey. Pretty woman like you, bat your little eyes at them, ask 'em to put it on the top of the heap.”

She breathed in. “I'll drive it over there,” she said. “Now, what about informants?”

“None of the snitches know a damned thing about some old guy trying to buy crack down the dog pound,” he said grudgingly, as if it annoyed him to part with the information.
Why that section of town was called “the dog pound” Audrey didn't remember if she ever knew. It just was.

“But the crack in the guy's pocket was fake.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Bugbee said with a wave of his hand. “Oldest trick in the book. White guy, easy mark, goes down to the dog pound to buy rock, and some zoomer sells him flex made outta candle wax and baking soda.”

“Horehound lemon drops broken up, actually.” So Bert Koopmans had told her.

“Whatever, don't make no difference. White guy argues with the zoomer, who says, Who needs this shit? and wastes the guy. Takes his wallet while he's at it and takes off. Open and shut.”

“And leaves the lemon drops.”

Bugbee gave a “lay off” shrug. He leaned back in the steel chair until his head was resting against the wall.

“And then instead of leaving the body in an alley somewhere, he goes to the trouble of wrapping it in garbage bags and then lifting it into a Dumpster, which isn't easy.”

“Coulda been two guys.”

“Wearing surgical gloves.”

“Hmm?” He looked annoyed.

“The lab found traces of surgical-grade cornstarch on the trash bags consistent with the use of latex gloves.”

Bugbee probed a seam in the Sheetrock wall with a lazy forefinger. “Probably the lab's.”

“I think they're more careful than that,” she said, thinking:
Come on, Roy, did you even think this one through? Are you working this case?
She felt a pulse of annoyance, then willed herself back to serenity. “I kind of doubt many crackheads have surgical gloves lying around.”

Bugbee exhaled showily. “Is Noyce in this room?”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, I don't see Sergeant Noyce standing here, so if you're trying to show off, no one's watching, okay?”

Audrey swallowed, heard her inner voice begin,
Now the God of patience and consolation grant you
…and then she interrupted that inward sensible voice and spoke in a voice
even softer than usual: “Roy, I'm not here to impress you. I'm here to do my job.”

Bugbee brought his chair forward, sat up straight, gave her a sleepy-eyed look.

She could hear her heart thudding. “Now, I know you don't like me, for whatever reason, but I'm not going to apologize to you for being who I am and what I am. I'm afraid you're just going to have to deal with it. I don't judge you, and you shouldn't judge me. You don't sign my paycheck on Fridays. If you want off of this case, talk to Noyce. Otherwise, let's both try to be professionals, okay?”

Bugbee looked as if he was debating shoving the table at her or getting up and slamming the door. A couple of seconds of silence passed. Then he said, “You don't judge me, huh? Christers like you, that's all you do. You're always ticking off everyone's little infractions like some hall monitor at school. It's all about feeling superior, isn't it, Audrey? Like you got the Big Guy on your side. All that praying you do, it's about sucking up to the Big Boss in the Sky. Ass-kissing your way to heaven, right?”

“That's enough, Roy,” she said.

A pounding on the door, and it swung open. Sergeant Noyce stood there, squaring his shoulders, looking from one to the other. “May I ask you two something?” he said. “Did either one of you check the missing persons database?”

“I called Family Services this morning,” Audrey said, “but they had nothing.”

“You've got to keep checking, you know,” Noyce said. “These things sometimes take a day or more to get posted.”

“You got a possibility?” Bugbee asked.

“It's a lead, a pretty decent one,” Noyce replied. “I'd say it's worth a look.”

Nick called Eddie, didn't IM him, still feeling paranoid about what kind of records were stored on the corporate server.

They met at the southwest building entrance, outside of the Security offices, Eddie's idea. Eddie didn't want to talk inside the building. What did that mean, Nick wondered, if his own security chief didn't feel safe talking in there?

They walked along the paved path that encircled one of the parking lots. The air had a faint manure smell, from all the surrounding farms, mixed with the charred scent of the burnt buffalo grass.

“What's up?” Eddie said, lighting up a Marlboro. “Dude, you look worried.”

“Who, me?” Nick said, grimacing. “What's to worry about?”

“Come on. Everything's under control.”

Nick looked around, made sure no one was walking remotely near. “What'd you do with…him?”

“You don't want to know.”

Nick was silent, listened to the scuff of Eddie's shoes on the pavement. “No, I do. I want to know.”

“Nick, believe me, it's better this way.”

“Did you get rid of the gun, or do you still have it, or what?”

Eddie shook his head. “The less you know, the better.”

“All right, listen. I've been thinking a lot about it, and I think—I've got to go to the cops. There's just no other way. What happened was legally defensible. It'll be a goddamned mess, but with a smart enough attorney, I think I can tough it out.”

Eddie gave a low, dry chuckle. “Oh, no, you don't,” he said. “You can't put that toothpaste back in the tube.”

“Meaning what?”

“Friday night you wanted it to go away. I made it go away.” He seemed to be straining to keep his tone civil. “At this point, we've got a serious cover-up, involving both of us.”

“A cover-up devised in a panic—”

“Look, Nick,” Eddie said. “I don't swim in your toilet, you don't pee in my pool, understand?”

“Huh?”

“I don't tell you how to run Stratton. You don't tell me about crime and cops and all that shit. This is my area of expertise.”

“I'm not telling you what to do,” Nick said. “I'm telling you what
I'm
going to do.”

“Any decision you make involves me too,” Eddie said. “And I vote no. Which means you don't do a damned thing. What's done can't be undone. It's just too fucking late.”

They pulled up in front of a modest house on West Sixteenth in Steepletown, Audrey feeling that jellyfish wriggling in her belly, the thing she always felt when she first met a survivor of a homicide. The spill of raw grief, disbelief, fathomless pain—she could hardly stand it. You had to distance yourself from all that, or you'd go crazy, Noyce had warned her early on. We all do. What looks to the outside world like cynicism, hardness, that's what it is. Protective insulation. You'll learn it.

She never did.

The investigative work, even the routine stuff that phone-it-in types like Roy Bugbee had no patience for, she enjoyed. Not this. Not feeling the hot spray of another human being's agony up close and being unable, fundamentally, to do anything about it. I'll find your dad's murderer, I'll track down the kids who killed your daughter, I'll uncover the guy who popped your father in the 7-Eleven—that was the most she could promise, and it helped, but it didn't heal.

So a missing persons report had been called in to the police by a woman whose father had never come home Friday night. The physical description—age, height, weight, clothing—matched the murder victim found in the Dumpster on Hastings. Audrey knew this was it. The Family Services Division had called the daughter, which was the protocol, to
say in their most diplomatic, tender way—they were good at this—that a body had been found, and there was a chance, just a chance, that it was her father, would she be so kind as to come down to the police morgue at Boswell Medical Center and help them identify a body, rule it out?

The aluminum screen door slammed, the woman coming toward them, even before Audrey was out of the Crown Vic. She was a small woman, even tiny, and from twenty feet she looked like a little girl. She wore a white T-shirt, faded and paint-splotched jeans, a ragged jeans jacket. Her brown hair was cut in a spiky sort of hairdo that Audrey associated with punk rockers and artists. Her hands flopped from side to side as she walked, making her look a little like some neglected rag doll.

“You must be from the police,” she said. Her brown eyes were large and moist. Up close she was actually quite beautiful and even more fragile. She looked to be in her mid-to late twenties. She had that glazed look of disbelief that Audrey had seen dozens of times in the faces of victims' families. Her voice was deeper than Audrey had expected, its timbre oddly soothing.

“I'm Audrey Rhimes.” She extended a hand, beamed a look of compassion. “That's my partner, Roy Bugbee.”

Roy, standing beside the open driver's side door, did not come around to shake the daughter's hand, probably figuring that it would be overkill. He gave a quick wave, a tight smile. Move your butt over here, Audrey thought. The man had no manners, no compassion. He didn't even have the ability to fake it.

“Cassie Stadler.” Her palm was warm and damp, and her eye makeup was smudged. She got into the backseat of the cruiser. Bugbee drove.

The object here was to low-key it, to reduce the woman's anxiety if at all possible. She's being driven over to the city morgue to identify a body that might be her father's, for God's sake; probably nothing could diminish her anxiety. Cassie Stadler probably knew just as surely as Audrey knew. But Audrey kept speaking, turning around to face the pas
senger, who sat in the middle of the back seat, staring glassily ahead.

“Tell me about your father,” she said. “Does he tend to go out at night?” She hoped the present tense would just slip in there unobserved, silently reassuring.

“No, not really,” Cassie Stadler said, and fell silent.

“Does he get disoriented from time to time?”

She blinked. “What? I'm sorry. Disoriented? Yes, I guess he does, sometimes. His…his condition.”

Audrey waited for more. But Bugbee, heedless, broke in, his voice booming. “Did your father go down to the Hastings Street area often, to your knowledge?”

A series of expressions flashed in this lovely woman's dark eyes, a slide show: puzzlement, hurt, annoyance, sorrow. Audrey, embarrassed, averted her gaze and turned back around in her seat, facing forward.

“It's him, isn't it?” was all the daughter finally said. “My daddy.”

They pulled into the hospital parking garage in silence. Audrey had never done one of these before. Identifying a body in the morgue—it was not at all common, thank God, no matter what you saw on TV. There were no sliding drawers at the morgue either, none of those hokey gothic touches. But death was gruesome, unavoidably so.

The body lay on a steel gurney covered with a green surgical sheet, the room sterile and air-conditioned to a chill and smelling of formalin. Jordan Metzler, polite if distant, pulled back the green cloth as matter-of-factly as if he were turning down a bed, exposing the head and neck.

Beneath that spiky mane, Cassie Stadler's perfect little doll face crumpled, and no one had to say anything.