Magic Line (11 page)

‘I can do that,' Jason said happily. He loved schmoozing with guys from the narc squad. They made big busts, got their pictures in the paper. Not as well funded and glamorous as DEA guys, but he would trade for one of their jobs in a heartbeat. Kept you away from domestics – idiot couples beating on each other.

‘Oscar, you find the carpet cleaner?'

‘Yes. He's coming into town today. Soon as I call him he'll come and see me.'

‘Call him now, get him in here. He might have a hunch who took his van; sometimes they see somebody stalking and don't think about it till later. And Sarah, you . . .'

‘I keep thinking about Josephina, the woman with the babies who called in the shooting. Can you give me some time at her house? Maybe have Ray go along and introduce me? All due respect, but I was thinking, maybe with another woman . . .' Delaney was nodding, thinking about it, but as usual their conversation was interrupted by a phone call. He looked at the caller ID, said, ‘Wait,' to Sarah, and into the phone, ‘Yes, Doctor?'

There was a burst from a loud voice and Delaney said, ‘She's right here.' He handed the phone to Sarah, saying, ‘Greenberg.'

‘Been a silly kerfuffle down here,' the doctor said, yelling over some background noise. ‘I end up with time to autopsy one of your shooters this afternoon. Make any difference to you which one I do?'

‘Um . . . yes. Let's do Mr Brush Cut.'

‘Mr who?'

‘Sorry.' Having worked all night with the monikers they'd assigned to their many John Does, she'd forgotten they were not proper names. ‘The black-haired man from inside the house.'

‘OK. Why no hesitation? Something special about this guy?'

‘We think he was the last man standing. We've got four weapons, and we'd like to know which one killed him.'

‘Great Scott – a mystery. OK, get down here fast and we'll see what we can find.'

She handed back the phone.

‘What is it?' Delaney said. ‘You look surprised.'

‘Moon must be blue. Greenberg's cheerful.'

He still looked pretty amiable an hour later when Sarah faced him in the operating room at the ME's office on District Street. They both wore slippery plastic gowns, caps and booties the color of a swamp. Their voices were pitched a little louder than usual, in an effort to combat the tinny echo off scrubbed metal surfaces. Between them lay the naked body of a well-muscled, thirty-something man who, except for being dead on a cold steel table, appeared to be in great shape.

Greenberg's movements were supple and sure as he prepared the body for surgery. He was in his element here, his usual Type-A pickiness ameliorated. Recording his findings as he worked, he looked reasonable and confident. And who but Greenberg, she reflected, would have thought to ask her which body she'd like to examine first?

The shot that had creased the victim's scalp was of no significance, he said. But he had found the fatal gunshot wound, no bigger than a dime, under the victim's abundant dark hair.

‘We can only see one entry wound on this body,' the doctor said, speaking into his recorder before the cutting began, ‘on the back of the neck, just above the hairline. There is no evidence of an exit. There is a burn ring around the wound, indicating a very close-range shot . . .'

He made the great Y cut that opened the body and began removing remarkably sound organs, one after another. Their basic good health contrasted powerfully with the disastrously opened corpse and the rigid set of the dead face. ‘Look at this,' he said, cradling the dead man's liver tenderly in his gloved hands, ‘we should all have a liver like this one.'

Finally he made the cut across the top of the brush cut, peeled the scalp down over the face, sawed a quarter-moon slice out of the skull and lifted out the drastically damaged brain. The bullet had pierced the brain stem and plowed through the right hemisphere, caromed off the heavy plate of bone above the eyebrows and criss-crossed to the skull behind the left ear before burying itself in the midbrain.

‘Of course, we can't really see the fatal kink that was the real cause of his death,' he said after tracing the wound track. ‘It's too bad stupid ideas don't leave a scar, isn't it? Maybe we could find a cure for the next generation of crazies.' He laid what was left of the brain gently in the weighing dish and finished his riff. ‘If this fool hadn't become convinced that drug-dealing and murder were sensible ways to earn a living, you can see by these flawless innards, Sarah, that he could have had a long, comfortable life.'

He was always so respectful of the bodies, Sarah thought. Death absolved them, somehow, in his eyes, of the inane futility he saw in his fellow humans while they lived.

The single bullet had bounced around through brain tissue, reducing much of the beautifully subtle organization to a bloody pulp. ‘All in a few seconds,' Greenberg said, ‘and even so he was probably dead before the destruction was finished. Soon as a high-velocity slug like this one' – he tweezed it out and laid it gently on a soft napkin – ‘goes through a brain stem, as it did right here, it's over in a blink.'

‘This autopsy introduced a very interesting twist,' Sarah told her fellow detectives at the end of the day. They were all gathered in Delaney's office again when she got back to the station. ‘The shot that killed Brush Cut could not have come from outside the house.'

‘So somebody did get in through the window,' Ollie said, ‘and shot him from behind?'

‘From right up close behind,' Delaney said. ‘Is that what you're saying?'

‘A contact shot. Yes.'

Ollie said, ‘You think it was the tricky ex-dead-guy that got away?'

‘Unless it was the guy with the wonderful tats in Barney's photo,' Ray said. ‘Wouldn't the chief be happy if we nailed him with the photo equipment he fought so hard to get in the cars?'

‘What if it was his own partner?' Jason said. ‘Mr Desert Eagle.'

Ollie said, ‘That's not possible, is it?'

‘I don't think so,' Sarah said. ‘Pretty sure that was a .22 slug I just turned in.'

‘No use speculating till the crime lab processes the slug,' Delaney said. ‘They'll tell us if it matches any of the four weapons we've collected here.'

‘If it does,' Ollie said, ‘we have to figure out how that could possibly work with the crime scene as we've sketched it.'

‘Which is going to take some very fancy figuring if you ask me,' Ray said.

‘But maybe no fancier,' Delaney said, ‘than explaining how anybody but a lunatic would climb in that window with bullets flying all around and run up close enough to a guy firing an AK47 to shoot him in the back of the head.'

‘Yes – unless he has very long arms, he had to get really close. Think about that,' Sarah said. ‘And if I'm right about what went on here, that's not the most amazing thing he did.'

‘Aw, come on – what else?'

‘He must have thought he had some time, probably. Wouldn't you, if you'd just shot the last man standing? We're spread pretty thin in Tucson right now. Sometimes a first response can seem to take forever. But Barry was only a couple of blocks away when he got the call, he said. He hit the siren and got here while the yard was still full of smoke.'

‘So . . . almost as soon as he'd killed the last man standing,' Oscar said, ‘it was too late to run away.'

‘Exactly. This is the part that kind of spooks me, because it means we're dealing with a guy who just doesn't give up. If I'm right, when this home invader heard the sirens, he must have tucked that small, lethal weapon back in his underpants—'

‘Hides it behind his junk where you can't find it on a pat-down,' Jason said. ‘Practical man.'

‘Yes, and then crawled under the corpse of the man he'd just killed and played dead till he decided it was time to pretend to wake up and get us to haul him out of here.'

Jason nudged Oscar's elbow and said, ‘Get this woman wound up, she sounds just like Inspector Poirot, don't she?'

‘If all that's true,' Ray said, ‘and I gotta say, it sounds way over the top . . . but are you thinking he expected to have time to find the money?'

‘He must have had a pretty good idea where it was,' Sarah said. ‘Why else would he break in? But the part that's driving me a little nuts is . . . think how fast his reaction times have to be. If he thought he could get the money and get away in that cleaning van . . . and then Barry's siren started, almost as soon as the shooting stopped. Most guys would just give up and run then. But he stayed, for the two or three minutes it took Barry to get here. And
then
had the presence of mind to crawl under the man he'd just killed.' She looked around at the tired crew wanting to go home. ‘He thinks on his feet just fine. So what was he doing there all that time?'

‘You can't expect to answer all the questions with one bullet,' Delaney said. ‘Quit trying to solve the case before all the information's in. I want you all to go home on time and get a good night's sleep.'

‘Aw, don't be such a weenie,' Ollie said. ‘We were all counting on working all night.'

‘I bet. Tomorrow Sarah's got to watch all the other autopsies, and the rest of you have got to follow up on phone calls and interviews. Jason, you still have to sketch the scene, right? You're all recording everything you find? Keeping careful notes?'

‘I haven't had time to type up my notes,' Sarah said, ‘and I won't tomorrow.'

‘Put it all on your desk and put a brick on it. The chief loves how much money we found, by the way. He's already planning the awards and the photos.'

‘Ooh, photos, where'd I leave my blusher?' Jason said.

Back at their desks, they checked their emails and closed their PCs. ‘Hey, I love driving home in daylight,' Ray said. ‘Maybe I'll barbeque tonight.' He called home to ask his partner if she'd started anything. Everybody in the section started salivating as Ray and his girlfriend debated the relative merits of brats and ribs.

‘Exhausted again!' Jason said, slumping against his car in the parking lot. ‘Must be quitting time.'

‘And, hey, the good news is we got the money, so the chief is happy.' Ollie said. ‘Isn't the drug business wonderful? It works for everybody!'

TEN

A
van with Hannah's Housemaids painted on the side pulled in at the bus stop and dropped off a night-shift cleaning crew from the stores in the area, four women in aprons with tired brown faces. They stood in a row, staring at Zeb like suffering saints until he got up off the middle of the one long bench. ‘
Gracias!
' they cried, and crowded their hard-worked haunches onto the metal seat, chattering like happy sparrows. The old lady and her packages were scrunched into a tight corner at the end.

Standing a foot away from the housemaids, Zeb watched them covertly, thinking that he must look the way he felt – like a homeless man with no money. These women had had their share of hard times, too – you could see that in their faces. Was bad luck supposed to make people more sympathetic, or less? He couldn't remember what he'd heard about that.

When they momentarily ran out of things to say and settled into patient silence, he leaned across the front of their chastely-covered bosoms and said, ‘I just got beat up and robbed.'

Four broad faces turned up and watched him out of black expressionless eyes. Zeb said, ‘Could one of you ladies spare me a dollar so I could get on this bus?'

They all looked at each other. Turning back to him, the oldest one said, ‘
No
hablo Inglés.
'

Zeb moved a couple of steps farther away and studied his shoes.

As a bus marked Downtown approached, a thin gray-haired man trotted across the parking lot from the Valencia Apartments, reaching the bench just as the bus pulled in. As the doors hissed open, Zeb stepped up to the lightly panting man, told him he had just lost his wallet, and asked for three quarters. The gray-haired man snarled, ‘Get away from me, you freak,' and climbed aboard.

The cleaning crew climbed aboard behind him and sat together in the back. The bus belched carbon residue at the bench and rolled away. Zeb sat down again by the old woman and stared dully across the street as the sun rose higher and the street grew busier.

Two more people came down the long slope from some houses behind the apartment complex, housewifey women with large purses, chatting as they walked. They looked solid and certainly solvent, but not sympathetic. Just in case, though, Zeb rehearsed new lines in his head. When they came to the bus stop and sat down, he told them right away how he had just awakened after a night in the bars, found that his wallet had been stolen, and now in order to get to the bank and start repairing his life he had to solve this problem: how to get on this bus with only fifty-five cents?

‘What a tough break,' one of the ladies said. ‘Where do you live, honey?'

‘Well . . .'

‘That's what I thought.' She pulled a small digital camera out of her purse and snapped his picture. ‘My husband is a security guard at St Mary's and he has access to police records. Look at this worthless scum,' she told her friend, ‘with his eyebrow ring and that shit on his arms. He'll be easy to identify. So the next time either one of us sees you in this neighborhood,' she said, turning on Zeb angrily, ‘we'll have you arrested, Deadbeat.' A bus pulled in just then. As she climbed aboard, she said loudly to her friend and everybody else on the bus: ‘We've had enough of these homeless loafers around here; we're not putting up with them any longer.'

Zeb got ready to flip her the bird but she never looked back. He stood in his dorky T-shirt, very rumpled, squinting into the punishing morning glare, wishing he had his sunglasses. Yesterday morning at about this time, he reflected, he had been wearing a sporty cotton-and-spandex shirt with many secret pockets that he'd intended to stuff full of stolen cash. He had escaped from that adventure without a scratch, almost as if he lived a charmed life. But today he was being treated like a snake because he'd asked for seventy cents. If there was a lesson to be learned from the last twenty-four hours it was going way over his head.