Kill and Tell (4 page)

He lifted the weapon and sniffed. It hadn't been fired; he didn't smell the stench of burned gunpowder, only the sharp, clean scents of metal, plastic, and gun oil. The weapon was in excellent condition, well cared for and maintained. He didn't check the clip, because he didn't want to blur any fingerprints, but he would bet it was full.

"Has it been fired?" Shannon asked.

"No." Marc deposited the weapon in the evidence bag, all the while studying the victim for other interesting details.

Possessing a Glock definitely raised the victim's status from ordinary street bum to unordinary street bum, which raised Marc's curiosity in direct proportion. Why would an ordinary street bum be packing a Glock? Drugs? Not likely. Street bums were users, not dealers. That was how they got to be street bums in the first place. So, say he stole the Glock, maybe to sell for drugs; why was he still packing it around?

A Glock would be easy to unload. Maybe he had felt he needed the protection, for all the good it had done him.

Why would he need protection? People who were worried about their safety made an effort not to live in the streets.

As he studied the victim, something… a memory… some sense of recognition… nagged at him. It wasn't the victim himself, but something about him. He let his eyes unfocus a little so he was seeing the entire body, not one detail at a time, and it hit him. Dirt.

The victim was dirty, the normal condition for street bums. But his face and hands looked as if they had been deliberately smeared. An image flashed in Marc's mind, and his head lifted sharply.

"What?" Shannon asked. He squatted beside Marc, dark eyebrows pinching together. He was a lean young black man, recently promoted to detective, sharp and tough and eager to learn.

"I think he's ex-military." Carefully, he began patting the victim's pockets, feeling for identification, but all the pockets were empty.

"Why's that?"

"Take a look at his face and hands."

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Shannon studied the victim. He had done four years in the Army, so he had some experience himself.

"Camouflage," he said with faint astonishment. "He was hiding."

"Probably from whoever did him." Marc studied the sidewalk and street around them. Nothing in the Quarter was new; everything was stained with age. If the television cameras hadn't been there, he might not have seen it, but the bright lights lit up the scene like daylight. Even so, the dark splotches some ten feet away blended in with the wet sidewalk so that they were barely distinguishable.

"Take a look at this." He stood and moved over to the spots, and Shannon followed.

"More blood," Shannon said.

"Yeah, but I doubt it's the victim's. The head shot killed him instantly; he didn't bleed enough to fill a thimble."

Shannon looked over at the body. "But you said his weapon hadn't been fired. Where did this blood come from?"

"Did you read the patrolmen's notes?"

"Yeah, what about them?"

"They found four shell casings, all twenty-two caliber. And the victim has how many holes in him?"

"One. But he could have been
fired
at four times and been hit the last time."

"He had a Glock seventeen in his waistband. If someone was shooting at him and had already missed three times, don't you think he would at least have tried to shoot back? He wouldn't have just stood there while the first three shots were fired, so he was killed by the first one, second one for sure; any more than that, and he would have had time to react."

"So we have two, maybe three shots unaccounted for, and blood in another location."

"Right. It follows that whoever did our victim also shot the unknown blood donor, who may or may not be dead. Another body may turn up somewhere, though I don't see the logic in carrying one body away and leaving the second one here, unless the perps just didn't have enough time to grab the second body."

"Perps? Not one guy, then?"

"He would have to be pretty damn strong to pick up a dead guy. You know how it is. They flop all over the place."

"Plus they're dead weight," Shannon said, his face straight. Marc hid a chuckle, turning it into a cough so the television cameras wouldn't pick up the image of a callous cop laughing over the body. Cops had to laugh, otherwise they wouldn't be able to bear the carnage they saw.

"Maybe the blood donor walked away under his own steam," Shannon suggested. "There's not much blood."

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"Neither is there a blood trail that I can see, though drops would be hard to spot on a wet sidewalk in the dark. What did he do, administer first aid to himself quickly enough, cleanly enough, that not even one drop hit the ground?"

Shannon shook his head in answer to Marc's question. Even a cut finger tended to drip before the blood could be staunched. "So… you think there were two or more perps, and the missing guy was loaded up and carried away."

"You catch on fast."

"What do you think it was, a drug deal gone bad or some bums arguing over a cardboard house?"

"I don't know. There would be at least three parties involved, and that doesn't feel right. Our victim, who was armed, didn't get a chance to protect himself, so that means he was taken by surprise. There aren't any witnesses, any weapons, any known motive."

Shannon glanced at the crowd. "So what do we do?"

"Go through the motions." It was a hard fact of life, but no police department in the country would expend a lot of effort on catching the murderer of a street bum. Marc was ruthlessly pragmatic; the city's resources were limited, so the money and effort should be spent where it would do the most good, protecting the normal, law-abiding citizens who worked and paid taxes and went to their kids' ball games. "If he's ex-military, the way we think, at least we should be able to ID him."

"Yeah." Shannon stood. "Too bad it had to be tourists who found him." Without the tourists, this would all have been handled without fuss. With the pressure on to keep the murder rate down, there were occasional rumors that a body had been quietly taken across the river to Jefferson Parish and dumped there, so the murder wouldn't show up on New Orleans's statistics. Marc had personally never done that, never asked, so he couldn't say if it really happened or not. In New Orleans, anything was possible. It was just as possible that the rumor was the result of someone overhearing a couple of cops saying they
wished
they could dump a body somewhere. But the rumor added to New Orleans's reputation and, true or not, had become part of the local lore.

"The fuss will die down," he said briefly. "The press will make a big deal of it on the morning news, we'll identify him as homeless, there'll be a mention of it on the evening news, and then it's history." Shannon shrugged, accepting reality as readily as Marc did. He looked around at the shabby old buildings. "You live in the Quarter, don't you?"

They walked back to the body. "Yeah, I've got a house on St. Louis."

"How'd you manage that, man?"

"Inherited it from my grandmother."

"No shit? So you're from one of those old Creole families?"

"My grandmother was. My father was shanty Irish." Marc didn't add that he had grown up in the house on St. Louis; he didn't flaunt his background. Making a big deal of his heritage would be stupid. Besides,
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there was nothing to flaunt. His father hadn't been able to keep a job, so, rather than see her daughter and grandson live in progressively worse dumps until they were finally homeless, his grandmother had taken them in and tolerated, reluctantly, her son-in-law's presence as the price she must pay for peace of mind. His grandmother had always acted like a dethroned queen, but the family money had long since dwindled away, and all that was left was the big house in the Quarter. Marc didn't think of himself as Creole; he was simply an American. More than that, he was a damn good cop, hard-nosed enough to recognize there were times when he could make a difference and times when he couldn't. This was one of the times when he couldn't, and he didn't waste time beating himself up over it.

Still, as he looked down at the victim, he couldn't help wondering if the guy had any family, where they were, if they would even care that he was dead. Most of the street bums were trash, too lazy to work, into drugs and petty crimes. But some of them were mentally incapacitated, incapable of looking out for themselves, and Marc didn't have any patience with the families who simply turned these people out to shift for themselves. Yes, they were a lot of trouble, a hell of a lot of trouble, but they couldn't help it, and families were supposed to take care of their own. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but his grandmother had put family above everything, and her example had stuck.

Marc squatted by the body again, studying the dead eyes, wondering at the scenario that had been played out here in the middle of the Quarter without anyone hearing or seeing anything suspicious. No gunshots had been reported, though at least four had been fired. Silencer? That made him think pro, and pro made him think organized crime, not street drug dealer. This guy didn't have the look of a user, anyway; under the dirt, he looked to be fairly muscular and well fed. Street bums could eat as well as anyone these days, with all the shelters and soup kitchens, but users weren't much interested in food. And dealers usually weren't homeless; they needed a base of operations.

He rubbed his nose. This didn't feel like drugs. Maybe the guy just pissed off the wrong party; maybe he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and some wiseguy took him down. Likely he'd never know, but damn, he hated mysteries.

The meat wagon boys came over. "You through here, Detective?" Marc stood. "Yeah." There was nothing else he could do, no other details to glean from the scene. Maybe the medical examiner could come up with a name, but other than that, they likely knew as much about the victim as they were ever going to know.

In the meantime, he had four young women to interview. After watching the body being loaded and carried away, he glanced at Shannon. "You want to do some interviewing?" The young detective looked over at the women. "As long as I don't have to talk to the one who's squalling. Man, she hasn't shut up since I got here."

"Just do some preliminaries. I'll get in touch with them tomorrow." He could request that they come down to the Eighth District, but he didn't want to make things tougher for them than he had to. The young ladies, all of whom looked to be in their early twenties, had come to the Quarter for a good time. The brutality of murder had never touched them before; he could forgive them a few tears.

"Take it easy on them," he advised Shannon under his breath as they approached. "They need a little petting."

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Shannon darted a startled glance at Marc; in case the senior detective hadn't noticed, he was black, and the witnesses weren't. Pet them? Was he crazy?

But though Shannon had been a detective for only a few months, he had heard some things. Chastain kind of kept to himself, but he was well liked in the department. The word was he was the best at interrogating witnesses and suspects alike, because when he needed to be, he was cool and low-key and could calm the most hysterical witness, but he was also a real hard-ass with the bad guys.

"Chastain," one detective had said, "is the type of guy who carries a blade." By that, Shannon deduced, he was referring not to the utility pocket knife almost every man carried but to a knife whose sole function was as a weapon.

Yeah, that described Chastain, all right. A good knife fighter was smooth and controlled, sneaky and lethal.

Shannon also admired Chastain's sense of style. Man, look at him; obviously just out of bed, unshaven, his eyes heavy-lidded, but he was wearing pleated linen slacks, some kind of drapey pullover shirt, and a cream-colored jacket. Even his sockless feet looked cool, as if he'd planned it. Now, that was style. They reached the knot of young women and introduced themselves. Shannon noticed that Chastain's voice changed, became lower, more gentle. The women subtly moved closer to him, dazed, frightened eyes fastening on his face. Even the one who kept sobbing tried to get control of herself. Smoothly, Chastain separated the group, directing two of the women a few steps away with Shannon. The girl kept weeping, though more quietly now. He heard Chastain making some low, soothing sounds, little more than rumbly whispers in his throat. Before Shannon could gather his thoughts to do more than ask names, he was aware of the girl wiping her eyes and answering Chastain's questions in a clogged, wavering, but much calmer manner.

It was a little after five before the scene was finally cleared. The witnesses were escorted to their hotel by a patrolman, the crowd dispersed, the media fed enough information for them to have their stories without giving them any salacious details, the street tidied for the next human wave. Morning brought a different set of people to the Quarter: shoppers, delivery men, tourists who felt safer during the day or simply weren't interested in nightlife.

Marc silently cursed when he thought of the paperwork he had to do. He would like to go home and fall into bed, but he'd already had all the sleep he was going to get today. He rubbed his hand over his face, beard stubble rasping. The paperwork could wait until he had showered and shaved.

"No sense walking when my car is here," Shannon said, falling into step beside him. "You going home or to the station?"

"Home first, then to the station. Thanks for the ride." They reached Shannon's car, and Marc slid into the passenger seat.

"So, did you do a hitch in the Army?" Shannon asked. "I mean, you noticed the camo."

"Marines. Right out of high school. That way I could go to college."

"Yeah." Shannon had enlisted for the same end purpose. It felt strange for them to have that in common, a tough young black dude from a bad neighborhood and a smoothly sophisticated white guy from one of the old French Creole families.