Magic Line (14 page)

‘I guess I'll have to.' He kicked the leg of his desk. ‘Damn! I hate it when I do something stupid.'

‘Oscar, you made a mistake and you caught it. Do you want to go on Facebook and cry about it or do you want to finish the report?'

‘You got a mean edge to your lip sometimes, you know that? Why don't you get out of my space and let me fix this?'

‘Hey, you're welcome!' She left him furiously punching numbers and went on toward her own workspace, stopping wherever she found another detective. She was trying to catch up on the skinny before the call came from the ME's office. After that she'd be in the morgue watching autopsies for hours.

‘Then I'll be even farther behind all the rest of you,' she told Jason. ‘So tell me, did you learn anything from the narcs yesterday?'

‘They claim it's plain old Mexican weed,' Jason said. ‘Just regulation naughty stems looking for the dirty dollar. The narcs'll burn it eventually, but it's gotta go to the end of a long queue.' He leaned back in his chair and sighed. ‘I like the locals fine but they don't have charisma like the feds, do they? Them DEA guys, you ever take a good look at their badges? I mean,' his voice dropped to a sibilant whisper, ‘Special Agent.' He patted his glossy dome, which was shaved to chocolate perfection. ‘Don't that just about curl your toes?'

‘Just about. You get anything from snitches?'

‘Nah. Ray did, I think. I heard him bragging about how street he is.'

‘And every word of it is true.' She followed happy noises to Ray's cubicle, where he was telling tall tales to a couple of cold-case detectives.

‘Yeah, I still got my connections,' Ray told her, flashing his neon smile, shooting his cuffs. ‘Two years in that gang unit was the best thing ever happened to me.' He loved to play the cool hand, show he could dredge up fresh dirt from the barrios, be a player in both worlds. Besides that, these days he knew he looked good enough to lick. He had moved in with a beautiful girl who was so thrilled by the shine of her engagement ring that she was ironing his shirts to glossy perfection.

Sarah asked him, ‘Aren't your connections getting a little long in the tooth for gang stuff by now?'

‘Aw, you know, a lot of those guys never get over themselves. And even the ones who finally get jobs and wives and start looking after some of their kids, they still get back to the old crack house every so often, sit under the ramada and shoot the shit. It's like an early family they can't quite leave behind.'

‘They reminisce about the good old knife fights?'

‘Not in so many words. Just some hand signals, some eye rolls, maybe a name and a nod. It may be bad opera but it's their opera, you know?'

‘So what are they singing this week?'

‘Word is the Klutzbach brothers have been seen riding around with a smooth-faced wise guy named Rolly. Or maybe Richard or Robin.'

‘He uses different names?'

‘Sounds like he uses everything that doesn't use him first.'

‘What's his game?'

‘Anything that moves. He sells a little meth around town, moves a few guns across the border. But his real specialty, my guys say, is putting a hurt on somebody and taking whatever they've got.'

‘You think Rolly might be our ex-dead-guy?'

‘I kind of like him for it. You know how we keep getting amazed by how quick and resourceful he is?'

‘The way he thinks on his feet and doesn't quit. Yes.'

‘Well, the gang-bangers say that's a fair description of ol' Rolly. They got downright respectful when they talked about how fast he is with a balisong.'

‘A what?'

‘You know – that butterfly knife that guys flip in Asian slasher flicks. Jaime said, “That Rolly's some heavy shit. You go after him, don't play nice. You see him pull out the balisong, you kill him right away.” I asked him, “Why don't you guys kill him?” and he sort of shuddered and said, “Only if I got to.”'

‘Sounds like our guy.'

‘Sure does.'

‘They have any idea where he hangs out?'

‘Jesus says he used to have a pad on MacArthur Street, near the rodeo grounds.'

‘You didn't get a number?'

‘Not far from Ricky's Sports Bar is all he could remember. Anyway, Jaime says he thinks he lives under his hat now, moves in with chicks and like that.'

‘That doesn't sound like a steady cash flow.'

‘Which is a really good reason to knock over a stash house, no?'

‘Good point. Well . . . are your bad boys going to help you find him?'

‘And get a rep on the street for snitching? Not hardly. But Jaime said behind his hand he'll call me if he sees him.'

‘You think he'll do it?'

‘He might. I did him a favor once.'

Sarah's phone call came through just then, so she didn't have to hear about the favor. Doctor Bernie Olbermann said, ‘Three very studly and awesomely smart physician types are waiting for you down here at the morgue, lady.'

‘Well, there you go, see, I was just born lucky,' Sarah said. ‘Be right there.' She shoved a notebook and two fresh pens into her briefcase.

She was ready to go when Delaney walked out to his crew and said, ‘Listen up. I've been on the phone with the lab, asking where our DNA report is. They say it's still cooking but they should have it for us before lunchtime.'

‘Oh, good,' Ollie said, ‘then we'll know for sure who it is we can't catch.'

‘Trouble with Ollie,' Jason said, ‘is he just can't seem to stifle his enthusiasm.'

She found the forensic surgeons under punishingly bright lights, already draped in plastic and taking turns at the X-ray machine – they had decided to do all three remaining autopsies at once this morning. Sarah got into the gown and booties quickly and began trotting from room to room, making notes. She spent the most time watching Homer Klutzbach's autopsy, which so enthralled Moses Greenberg that he was silent for the better part of two hours, except to describe to his recorder the body part from which he was digging still another piece of lead.

‘Let's see, cause of death,' he said near the end. ‘Damn good question. Maybe we'll use that thing they used to say in westerns, hmm? “He died in a hail of gunfire.”' Homer had been shot in the left ear, right cheek, right kidney, left lung, the clavicle, pancreas and spleen. ‘Two through-and-through shots also, right thigh and calf – you'll have to dig them out of the yard yourselves. How in hell did he manage to run all the way to the sidewalk in this condition?'

‘In some ways Homer was born to be a champ, I think,' Sarah said, looking ruefully at the scraps that were left of him. ‘He just never learned to make good choices.'

‘Good choices? Oh, that's priceless!' Greenberg laughed out loud, a rare sound. ‘Where'd you learn that, kindergarten?'

‘I suppose.'

‘I bet you were a little whiz at holding hands while you crossed the street.' He was still chuckling as she left the room, muttering, ‘Good choices, Jesus.'

Why is it so easy to make fun of good behavior, she wondered, even for us who spend our lives cleaning up after misbehaving wretches? In the next room, Doctor Bernie stood over the corpse of Old Baldy, aka Mr Desert Eagle.

‘Looks like the two gut shots came first,' he said. ‘They both hit his heart, see? That's what all this fragmented tissue is. After those two shots he was dead, of course, so the three wounds he got lying down hardly bled at all. This one plowed right through his brain and throat and lodged in his trachea. These two shoulder shots: the one on the left went through the trapezius muscle and ended up in his spine. On the right the bullet entered through the deltoid, crossed the chest cavity here and tore through the superior lobe of his right lung and plowed right along to the left anterior. All potentially fatal wounds, but they didn't bleed much because his heart had already stopped.'

‘So . . . five shots. All from the Smith & Wesson? Oh well, we won't know that till the lab tells us, will we?'

‘Well, not from me, anyway,' Bernie said. ‘I'm a doc, not a firearms expert. All I know is the guy who fired the last three shots wasted his ammo.'

Another bad choice, Homer. You should have run away sooner.

In the third operating room, Dr Reynaldo Valdez had opened the body of Earl LeRoy Klutzbach. Valdez was the newest forensic scientist on the ME staff, midway in his first week on the job. They were trying to break him in easy, Greenberg said, so they had given him Earl's autopsy because it appeared simplest – demonstrably, the man had been shot in the face.

Earl's right eye was undamaged, though, and after Valdez looked into it and inspected what was left of Earl's complexion, the doctor put on an extra pair of gloves, told Sarah not to touch anything, and sent some blood out to be tested. By the time he'd seen the shrunken liver, the test came back positive and Valdez said, ‘Earl was lucky to get off the planet with one quick blast in the face. He had hepatitis C. See here? Cirrhosis of the liver.'

‘Oh? Well, he did a long stretch in prison.'

‘Where they learn some very ugly habits. See how dark his urine was? Bet it already hurt to pee. You can see the jaundice in his eye, the one he's got left. The rest of this man's life was going to be very short on pleasure.'

Sarah had worn her most comfortable cross-trainers but her legs were already screaming for relief. She had always found standing in one cold spot for a long time, which you had to do to watch an autopsy, more exhausting than an all-day hike with any amount of climbing. She asked Bernie, ‘How can you tolerate it every day?'

‘I can't. My feet and legs are ruined, my kids call me cow-foot. I'm designing a harness so I can dangle from the ceiling while I work.'

Walking out felt like an escape. It was just past noon and Tucson was having, no surprise, a beautiful, cloudless day in the mid-nineties. Tourists and snow-birds thought this was way too hot and had already fled but Sarah, like the rest of the Tucson natives, had a different perspective. Soon it would be June, the hardest month of the year in Tucson, dry and well above a sizzling hundred degrees.
So let's enjoy what we've still got here
, she thought, and slid the window down. She left the radio off to enjoy the drive back to the station in breezy quiet.

But she couldn't stop thinking about the four dead men lying in their cold storage bins, their vital organs neatly tucked inside their shells in no useful order. It kept eating at her, so many lives lost –
for nothing but money.
What a waste! But if you think about it they're just an exaggerated version of the way we all waste our lives, she thought – always talking about money, wishing we had more.
Getting and spending, we lay waste
our powers
. . .

How much money have I made in my life so far? Hundreds of thousands. It's never felt like enough, and at the end of every year it's all gone. This big, rich country – millions of us working our butts off and every day we worry: do I make enough money? Will I have enough?

Deciding how much is enough is getting trickier every day, too. The price of gas is going through the roof suddenly, and as for groceries, Aggie said yesterday, ‘I never thought I'd feel guilty buying peppers.'

Yet there's always a ready market for an eight-ball of coke at a hundred-plus dollars a pop. And last Sunday's
New York Times
was filled with advertisements for fifteen hundred dollar bags, three thousand dollar shoes. While politicians yell about debt, nothing but debt as far as the eye can see, and say they have no choice but to cut funds for children's health care, they also want to cut taxes on the top two per cent of earners. What are we building here, Versailles? Am I working for a kleptocracy?

The bright streets of the city she loved looked sordid to her suddenly. On South Stone she walked into the dark cave of the station feeling relieved, as if she'd escaped a storm.
Maybe with luck I'll find somebody in here with an interesting problem that has nothing to do with money.

‘Hey, Sarah,' Delaney said. He was typing furiously and didn't stop when she walked in. ‘We got a couple of breaks today.' He glanced up, said, ‘What's the matter? Oh, three autopsies in one morning. Here, sit down. Have some water.'

‘Thanks. Feels like I've just run a marathon with bodies for mile markers.' She sat and began to tell him about the long trot through the autopsies. ‘The brother with the Glock didn't have long to live even if he'd behaved himself. Otherwise, no surprises.'

‘Good. Save all your notes though, you never know what'll surprise you later.' He glanced back at his screen.

‘You want to finish that report and I bet my email box is jammed.' She got up to leave but found Oscar Cifuentes blocking the door.

‘I finally caught up to Ed Benson,' he said. ‘I didn't make a mistake. Three o'clock is the time he gave me and he swears it's right.'

‘Well, good for you,' Sarah said. ‘See? Right all along.'

‘OK, but what are we supposed to think? I mean, there's no way the time can be wrong on Barry White's report – he called in for backup the minute he got there.'

‘An hour doesn't sound like enough time,' Delaney said. ‘But if it's what everybody says happened – put it down, Oscar, and we'll see how it works when we review the case together.'

But Ray Menendez was in the doorway now too, beaming self-satisfaction. ‘I told you what the answer is. Ol' Rolly's just as hot as my guys said he is.'

‘Why are you still calling him that?' Delaney said. ‘I told you about the DNA report.'

Sarah said, ‘Oh, it did come back?'

‘Oh, right, you weren't here. Ray, get everybody back in here, will you? I found a lot more on him since I got his name. They matched him to a file in AZAFIS,' he told Sarah while they waited. ‘His name's Robin Brady. Usually.'