Red Man Down (14 page)

‘On the other hand, the knot used to fasten the noose around the clothes pole is huge and clumsy, wrapped many times, the way an amateur or excited person would do it – consistent with self-inflicted death by hanging. And the edge of the hanging groove, at one point, was slightly puckered in the direction of slippage the cord would have taken when the weight of the body settled on it. He was proud of himself for noticing that, but to be honest I wasn’t sure I could see it.

‘Lividity evidence is not consistent – some blood settled in back and rear parts of arms, but also some lividity in soles of the feet.

‘Two puncture marks on upper left shoulder appear to match the footprint of the taser used by the Tucson Police Department. He was very unhappy that I hadn’t worn a taser, so he could match up the marks. I reminded him that’s for street patrolmen and he called Dispatch and got them to send a car. It was Byron, and you should have seen his face when … He wasn’t wearing his taser, he had to go back out to his car to get it. OK’ – as Delaney shuffled his feet impatiently – ‘yes, the marks matched. “Appeared to match” is how the doc said it – there was nothing he wasn’t prepared to question by then. Burn marks in those puncture wounds, by the way, indicate the jolt may have been sent more than once. Unless the puncture wounds were made by two hypodermic needles, in which case the burning might be due to whatever was injected. He’s having that tissue tested.

‘There’s a bruise at the base of the skull, indicating something soft but strong may have been pressed there for a minute or two while the victim was still alive.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like a fist, maybe? Or a large knot of some kind. The doc is sending out beaucoup samples of blood and tissue, of course,’ Ray said, ‘and he won’t reach any conclusions till they’re back. But for now, what he says is, “Don’t bet the farm on suicide. But don’t make up your mind to reject it, either.”’

‘Jesus,’ Delaney said, ‘I could have said that much without an autopsy.’

‘I kind of thought you might feel that way, so I asked him if he couldn’t give us a nudge in either direction. He got sort of offended and said, “I’m not going to tell you I know something before I know it.”’

F
our-thirty … too late to go looking for Joey
, Sarah decided. She walked around to Ollie’s desk and found him with Angela’s laptop, laughing quietly with his hand on his mouse.

Sarah asked him, ‘Finding any good stuff?’

‘Yeah, great old stuff. Did you ever get this dog email?’ He showed her a long message with pictures of dogs looking guiltily up at the camera. ‘The captions are priceless!’

‘You’re looking at dog videos? Have you lost your mind? You’re supposed to be looking for emails from Frank!’

Ollie looked sheepish, the way everybody does when they’re caught wasting time in the intellectual swamp of the internet. ‘I went looking for Ed’s email messages and I got distracted for a minute. So shoot me.’

‘OK,’ Sarah said, pretending patience. ‘Play FBI profiler for me and tell me all about Angela as a computer user.’

‘She’s just like my Aunt Kate – barely a computer user at all. It’s an old installation of Windows XP. The logon screen asks for a password but you can just hit Enter and it lets you in – she never bothered to set up a password. The machine has Microsoft Office on it but I can’t see that she ever created a document or saved a spreadsheet. Press the Outlook Express icon on the desktop and her inbox opens up. Almost every email she ever got is in that inbox, including the original Welcome to Outlook message. Nothing in the trash but some particularly nasty spam messages from random Russians. She read every joke email she ever got, but hardly ever forwarded one. Most of the junk email came from that clothing store owner she worked for. She had a very small circle of email correspondents.’

‘What about email from Frank? Or Ed?’

‘None from Frank at all. A few replies from Ed, including one suggesting very politely that she not forward junk email to him at work.
I’ll see it when I get home, honey
, he said. Amazingly sweet, for a Red Man.’

‘So, Ed did have an email account of his own?’

‘Yeah, somewhere. But he didn’t use this laptop for it that I can see. If he had, there’d be a folder with his name on it under Documents and Settings. The only folders here are the ones that come with the machine and Angela’s. You need me to show you or you want to believe me on that?’

Sarah held up her hands and said, ‘Hey, it’s not a question of believing. You know more about this stuff than I thought. How come?’

‘Most families have one person who is the designated technical support person. In my family, that’s me. Kids, wife, grandma, Aunt Kate – I spend a lot of time figuring out where things have gone to on the box.’

‘I do that too for my family, but I think in another year or two I’ll be asking Denny for help instead of the other way around. So … anything else you can tell me about Angela from what you see there?’

‘Her email usage started to peter out right after Frank’s death – and ended about when her marriage was breaking up. Probably got to the point where she couldn’t stand to turn on the laptop and just let it sit on that table.’

‘I don’t understand; what’s painful about turning on a computer?’

Ollie clicked the mouse a couple of times and rotated the laptop. ‘Check out her desktop background.’

Sarah stared at the full-screen picture of Angela and Ed, radiant and laughing, cutting their wedding cake on what may have been the happiest day of their lives. When she nodded, Ollie pulled the screen back around to face him again.

Having placated and praised, Sarah went back to her strong suit – persistence. ‘I still would like to have Genius Geek take a look at the machine before we put it back in that trunk. I’ve seen him find stuff that just wasn’t there for us mere mortals.’

‘Aw, come on. What’s a kid with zits going to find that I haven’t?’

‘Plenty, I bet. Ask Leo.’

‘Go away, Sarah.’ He put on his don’t-mess-with-me look.

‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘Go on, ask him.’

For a few seconds, Ollie looked as if he might be getting seriously annoyed – she saw, now, how proud he was of his keyboard skills. She was counting on their history – some speed bumps they’d shared during their years as street cops, and the fund of trust it built up. And before long she saw him get up and walk, grumbling, two cubicles east, where he said, to Leo Tobin’s wide rumpled back, ‘Sarah says you think this Genius Geek kid is the real deal on a computer search.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Leo kept his eyes on his screen and went on tapping keys.

‘You think he might find something in this machine even if I can’t?’

‘Almost certainly.’

‘Well, what’s that silly kid got that—’

Losing patience with the ongoing interruption, Leo leaped out of his chair, scattering paper clips and memo pads over a wide area, and yelled, ‘What the fuck’s the matter with you? Can’t you take yes for an answer?’

Startled, Ollie jumped back. Unfortunately, Sarah had followed close behind him. He barely missed crushing her instep, but trod heavily on her right small toe.

Leo blinked as Sarah jumped out from behind Ollie, yelling in pain. She kicked off her shoe and cradled her right foot in both hands. Standing on one leg like a stork, she groaned, ‘Oh, it’s all my fault.’

‘What is?’

‘I’m the one who insisted he come over here. Ow. I should have checked to see if you were busy. Oh, hell, this hurts.’

Leo said, ‘What’s the matter with your foot?’

‘Ollie stepped on it.’

‘Did I?’ Ollie said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He didn’t sound sorry – just absent-minded. He was staring open-mouthed at Leo’s screen. ‘Leo, what are you looking at?’

‘What does it look like? It’s a perp walk, the unnecessary spectacle beloved of two-bit lawmen everywhere. Two policemen are leading Frank Martin out of the credit union in handcuffs, as if that poor little weenie there was any kind of a threat to anybody. Look at him. Wouldn’t it make you barf?’

Sarah was already looking, but not at poor, cringing Frank Martin. And Ollie was seeing the same thing she was, evidently. Behind a desk, to the right of Frank Martin and his clinging lawmen, an attractive female observer registered shock.

Cifuentes walked up and looked at the screen and then around at the others, saying, ‘Why are you all looking at Angela Lacey?’

‘Can you believe that’s only three years ago? She looks so …’ Her hair was golden – OK, maybe with a little help from a bottle. Her eyes were bright blue.
She’s maybe a couple of pounds overweight and, sure enough, she did have a very nice
… the screen blurred; Sarah realized she was weeping. The pain in her foot had melded with the infinite pathos of lost time, and for one panicky moment she felt as if she might stand on one foot in this busy building and cry them a river.

But the other detectives had heard the commotion and crowded around. Ray looked over and said, ‘Oh, you found the ugly perp-walk picture.’

Jason walked all the way into Leo’s workspace, animated and smiling, and said, ‘Leo, what’s up, baby, you find something so ugly it made Sarah cry?’

Delaney heard the commotion and came out of his office, looked at the odd grouping and said, ‘Sarah, why are you crying?’

‘Oh … I hurt my foot.’

‘Well, let’s get it tended to. Guys, are you going to let her stand there all day holding her foot? Give her a hand, will you?’ With Ollie and Oscar boosting her on either side, Sarah hopped into the good light in front of Delaney’s office and sat down in a straight chair.

Holding the shoe Ollie had handed him, Delaney bent over her foot, which looked undamaged in its pristine nylon sock. He said, ‘It looks OK, but you need the city doc? Shall I get somebody to drive you?’

‘Boss, no – listen. It’s just a bruise – my foot’s OK.’ She nodded toward Tobin’s work station. ‘It was that picture on Leo’s computer that made me cry.’

Delaney walked over, read the caption under the picture, and shook his head, puzzled. He came back saying, ‘I don’t get it. What’s so sad about a stupid perp walk?’

‘Frank Martin had worked there for over twenty years.’

‘So?’

Sarah blinked a couple of times. ‘I guess it just struck me how fast even very substantial people can sometimes lose everything.’

‘Well, Jesus, you been a cop half your life and you just noticed that?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Time to go home. Here’s your shoe – can you make it to your car, Sarah? Sure? Better soak that foot tonight.’

On Bentley Street, Sarah gimped into the kitchen and said, ‘Something smells wonderful here.’

‘Scalloped potatoes and ham,’ Denny said, ‘sliced into a casserole by your very own personal niece.’

‘And cooked by your personal mother in this sweet little device,’ Aggie said, pulling the dish out of the toaster oven on the counter. ‘See how easy?’

Sarah winked at Denny, who was beaming with satisfaction. Aggie looked up from spooning food onto plates and said, ‘Why are you limping?’

‘Dumbest cop move of the year,’ Sarah said. ‘I let myself get stepped on by a cow-footed detective.’

‘Better soak it after we eat.’

Sarah seriously intended to do that, but fell asleep after dinner watching the news. She woke with a start when her mother poked her, and stumbled off to bed.

Dietz wasn’t home from work yet when she woke in the gray dawn, feeling her right foot throb. Pulling it out from under the covers carefully, she saw that it was swollen, especially the bulbous fifth toe, and now sported rainbow hues.

‘My pinkie is purple with a blue and yellow surround,’ she told Delaney when he answered his cell at home. ‘It’s sore as hell – I can’t stand on it.’

‘OK, this is what we pay work comp for – go to the city doc and get something done about it.’

‘I will. And depending on what that turns out to be, I’ll try to make it in around noon.’

‘Get the foot fixed first, then decide.’

She took along a magazine and a short novel, and almost finished both during the alternating pain and boredom of the long morning. She waited for a doctor, then for an X-ray technician, then for the development of X-rays.

‘Well, you’re lucky,’ the doctor said, ‘your toe’s not broken. It is dislocated, though. I can put it back right here in the office, but’ – he patted her shoulder – ‘I better put some happy juice in there before I do that, or you might punch my lights out before I finish.’

She had another nice read while a couple of shots deadened the area. Then she watched with wonder as the doctor put a toe joint she now couldn’t feel back where it belonged. Downing the Ibuprofen he swore would not render her unsafe to drive, she watched him wrap a light bandage around the whole set of toes and tape it in place. Beginning to feel like a movie monster, she replaced the thick white sock and ugly sandal that were now the only footwear her right foot would tolerate, and clumped out of the building into worsening weather.
I live in a land of perpetual sunshine, so of course I have to mangle my foot during the only cold snap we have all winter.

It didn’t hurt any more, though, so as soon as she got used to walking unevenly and ignoring the odd sound effect of one clicking suede flat and one rubber-tired monster sandal, she decided she was good to go back to work.

It was a little awkward driving the car with a right foot she couldn’t feel, but she relied on exterior clues like the speedometer and made it back to South Stone without killing any bystanders. Her balance was somewhat precarious; she cursed the heavy outside doors at South Stone and waddled like a beginning toddler on the highly waxed floors inside. She watched the elevator doors close as she approached, not daring to try a last-minute jump. Waiting for the car to come back, she whispered, ‘Patience, patience,’ knowing it would never be her area of talent. She normally took the stairs.

Ollie saw her getting off on the second floor and said, ‘Sarah, you’re actually riding the … Oh!’ He looked at her big right foot in the sandal. ‘God, buddy, I really busted you up, huh? Jesus, I’m sorry. Can I help you some way?’