Red Man Down (25 page)

Sarah said, ‘You want me to hold the light for you?’ and did, for a couple of minutes. But it proved so difficult to fit two sets of arms in the small space that before long the tech said, ‘Nah, lemme clip it again, it’s easier.’

Delaney was pacing the Arcadia Street side of the bridge, catching detectives as they arrived and telling them to go back out onto Speedway and come in and park in the lot behind the sports bar.

‘Plenty of room over there right now,’ she heard him saying. ‘They won’t be open for several hours.’ He told the patrolmen who were stringing crime scene tape, ‘Tape it up straight across the street side, good and tight over here. Two strands so we can keep everybody out. And then on the other side of the ditch, the parking lot side, make a big half-circle, will you? Give us a little room to work.’ He put the officer with the posse box at the top of the half-circle on the parking lot side, and spent a lot of time at the beginning motioning everybody around to that side to sign in.

He and his detectives had to wait, anyway, for the photographer and other crime-scene specialists to finish. So although they had arrived in the gray dusk of a winter dawn, it was full light by the time Sarah got a look at Joey García.

The big surprise was how little there was to see. He looked even less dangerous slumped over his steering wheel in dirty canvas pants and a ragged sweater than he had in an orange jumpsuit, and he also looked undamaged. Except for the lack of a pulse, waxy skin and staring eyes turning milky, he might have been just catching a snooze. He was slumped forward with his head resting on the steering wheel, turned to the right as though he’d been watching something out the passenger’s-side window. There were no visible marks or scars; no blood showing and no signs of a fight.

He had been prepared to have one, they discovered, after the photographer was finished and the ME arrived. It was Greenberg, this time, with his transport van following right behind. As soon as he’d confirmed the presence of death and had a cursory look, he recruited a couple of patrolmen to help his driver get the body out of the car. Greenberg never took on any of the grunt work if he could possibly avoid it; he was saving his honed-to-the-max body for finer things, and was especially careful with his hands.

Stretched out on the gurney, with his dimpled face ablaze in a red sunrise, Joey looked like somebody who’d had a momentary seizure or shock and ought to be revived at once. But the doctor was matter-of-factly shining light in his eyes and taking his temperature, and while he was getting ready to strap him down the detectives, gloved up and intent, got busy patting him down and checking pockets. He had a fully loaded Glock Nine in the cargo pocket of his pants and a Walther P22, also with a full magazine, in an ankle holster strapped to his right leg.

It wasn’t an arsenal but it was a lot more than most people carried with them to a bar, especially after you added in the switch-blade in his jacket and the box-cutter that slid out of a special pocket with a Velcro closure sewn onto the left leg of his pants. Joey had been loaded and locked, ready to go into battle, but there was no sign that he had used any of his weapons.

He had an old leather wallet, very dirty, in his back pocket. It held just over two hundred dollars in cash, an Arizona driver’s license and no credit cards.

While four men hoisted the gurney into the van, Delaney talked to Greenberg, asking him for the earliest possible autopsy for this victim. ‘Unless something obvious shows up when you get him undressed,’ he said, ‘this is going to be one for you and your lab guys to figure out, isn’t it? So sooner is better, don’t you think?’

‘Sure,’ the doctor said, ‘but I don’t run the place, you know. I’ll try, though – I’ll let you know.’

Ollie took charge of disarming and listing the weapons. The rest of the detectives, as soon as the lab technicians would let them have it, swarmed the Toyota, wanting to see it clearly before it was towed again to impound. There was nothing in the backseat but a fleece jacket and an empty grease-stained carton with the remains of a burger and fries. A ratty, soft-sided suitcase stuffed with clothing, a cardboard box of shoes and underwear, and another with a radio, camera and a few batteries took up the storage space behind the seats. The glove compartment held the vehicle documents that belonged there, and nothing else.

What the Toyota didn’t hold, that they could see, was any money.

Greenberg phoned Delaney within the hour with a time for the autopsy next day. Sarah took the observation job, even though it once again required her to work on Friday. She had been the first detective on the scene, it was her turn to do an autopsy, and she welcomed the chance to watch Greenberg discover what killed Joey.

‘No big mystery about what killed him,’ Greenberg said, once he had the body open. ‘This guy died of suffocation.’ He showed her the red spots in the lungs and inside the eyelids. ‘Not strangulation – no marks on his throat. Nothing fancy about the means, either. See here? It appears he met his end inside a used plastic garbage bag.’ He showed Sarah the morsels of lettuce and cooked egg he had just found in Joey’s airway. ‘That’s just about the ultimate insult, isn’t it? You don’t even get a clean garbage bag to die in? Jeez.’ He thought a minute before he said, ‘You know, I found some lettuce in his hair earlier, and I just figured it was a result of his messy eating habits. But now I think that might have been left by the murder weapon, too.’

‘Is it here somewhere – do you still have it?’

‘What, the shred of lettuce? It’s in the garbage,’ Greenberg said. His nose twitched. ‘I’m not going through
that.
’

‘OK. Has he got a bruise on the back of his head?’

‘Not on the back. On the right side here, all around this ear, above and below – he’s pretty tan, but do you see the discoloration here on his jaw? How’d you know to ask me that?’

‘Angela had one on the back.’

‘Ah, yes, the hanging victim that gave Cameron so much anxiety.’ He was already feeling competitive towards the new doctor, Sarah saw. ‘Yes, well, this is very similar, in a way, I suppose, but there’s no attempt to disguise it as strangulation. All he shows in the way of marks is this bruise, left by a fist or some other device, that held the bag tight till the victim stopped trying to breathe.’

‘You would think,’ Sarah said, ‘that he’d have put up a monumental struggle, wouldn’t you? And in that confined space in the front seat – why isn’t everything all torn up?’

‘Because of this,’ he said, and showed her the taser marks on the right shoulder. ‘He was immobilized.’

‘Just like Angela,’ Sarah told her team when they reviewed the autopsy on Monday. ‘I think we can forget all the conjecture about suicide in her case.’

‘So now we’re looking for the murderer that did them both?’ Delaney said. ‘I thought you were all looking to hang this one on Joey’s buddies in the bar.’

‘Well, we all liked that better in the beginning,’ Jason said. ‘Nice and clean, and it fits his character – he got some money, came back to Tucson and started partying in a favorite bar, bragging to his mates, “So long, you suckers with jobs, I’m off to Mazatlan to play in the sun.” And one or two of his buds decided to get some of that cash he kept flashing.’

‘I still like it,’ Delaney said. Then, looking at Sarah, he said, ‘But you don’t want to settle for that, huh?’

‘I’m bothered by the similarity to Angela. The taser marks and the suffocation – that’s not a typical crime in Tucson. We live in a city awash in guns, and most of the mopes just go ahead and use them when they want somebody gone.’

‘That’s right,’ Leo said. ‘And there’s something else she’s right about. It’s in the report – the tellers at that small branch bank in Mesa get to know their depositors, and they say Joey made all the deposits into that savings account, and all the withdrawals that came out of it. The last withdrawal he made cleared the account – that was on the morning he died.’

‘I read that report too,’ Delaney said. ‘So?’

‘We know he never held a steady job in all those years, so where did the money come from if not from Frank and the credit union here?’

‘He’s got a record of small crimes he got caught at. We don’t know how much thievery he was able to do in between without getting caught.’ Delaney obviously wasn’t convinced.

‘That would be occasional money, though,’ Leo said. Working with the bank examiners had given him a clearer feel for this case than the rest of the team. ‘Joey’s deposits were systematic, between fifteen hundred and two thousand a month for about four years. He’d have to have fantastic luck to get a steady income like that from fencing electronic toys and jewelry.’

‘You make it all sound very logical,’ Delaney said, ‘but Joey is dead, the money has disappeared, and we don’t have anything that proves he ever had anything to do with Frank or the money Frank supposedly stole.’

‘Still,’ Leo said, ‘we can’t just walk away from a string of four violent crimes in one family and say we don’t have a clue.’

‘I’m not saying we should. I’m saying what are we going to do next? I want to hear,’ he looked at his detectives, ‘what’s left to do that we haven’t done?’

‘Well, we have the DNA sampling that was done on the car,’ Sarah said. ‘We won’t have the results for some time, but—’

‘And when we do it may all match Joey García,’ Delaney said. ‘Let’s not pin our hopes on
that
.’

‘I’d like to go up to Mesa and interview each of those bank tellers,’ Leo said. ‘It’s a small bank and they remember things.’

‘I agree,’ Delaney said. ‘Anybody else?’

‘That laptop we gave to Tracy,’ Ollie said. ‘Where is it now?’

‘Back in the trunk,’ Delaney said. ‘The kid’s been good about remembering that.’

‘OK if I check it out again?’

‘Sure. Anybody else?’

‘I want to talk to a couple of people at the jail,’ Sarah said. ‘Maybe Joey, you know …
said
something.’

‘Good. Why don’t you do that? Now, here’s what I want. Ray, just for the hell of it, go back to that block on Speedway where we found Joey. Must be four or five bars on that block, plus a couple of antique shops, good places to move some used merch, right? Stroll around there today, talk to the folks, take along the picture, see if anybody remembers Joey. Watch their eyes if they say yes, and see how many lies they tell right after that.

‘And Oscar, pick up the tool kit we keep in Lost and Found and go back to the impound yard. Pull the Toyota out into an open spot and tear that sucker apart. Joey didn’t get much time to enjoy that last pile of money, so most of it’s gotta be someplace. See if you can find it in the car. Maybe, come to think of it, you ought to have some help with that.’

‘I’ll do it,’ Jason said quickly. ‘I’m cool with Toyotas, put myself through Pima College selling used ones.’

‘Good enough. Go for it.’

You’d think he gave them a week off with pay
, Sarah thought, watching Jason and Oscar charge off the second floor with their eyes alight.

Sarah phoned the jail, found Greta in the admitting section and got her to agree to a short interview in one hour’s time, perhaps with coffee if things broke just right. She cleared her desk and stopped by Ollie’s workspace on her way out.

‘What are you looking for on the laptop?’ she asked him. ‘Is Tracy helping you?’

‘Tracy’s gone back to high school, where he probably does not enjoy perfect rapport with his teachers. He’s going to be working here a few Saturdays this winter, he said, but not many because the college hunt is getting serious. So before he left I got him to show me a couple of those conjuring tricks he was using to pull stuff out of the laptop. I don’t have specific goals, I just want to nose around in there and see if I can act enough like a teenager to find something. It’d be cool if I got some idea about what the late Angela Lacey was finding out about just before she got so rudely interrupted.’

‘What a good idea,’ Sarah said, in a voice so full of fake admiration Ollie stopped checking his email and gave her his equally fake Alfred E. Neuman grin.

‘I can put my toe in my ear, too,’ he said. ‘What do you want, Sarah?’

She told him about Marjorie Springer’s remark about Angela’s ‘research.’

‘She asked me that day, “You think maybe she found something?” But then, you know, there was so much else to do … I never got back to that. Would you take a look for a folder conveniently labeled, oh, I don’t know, “Angela’s Deadly Research”?’ She smiled at him.

‘Sure. Happy to – making a note, “Angela’s Deadly …” There! Now will you go away and leave me alone for a long time? Because I’m not very good at this yet, and I don’t want you listening when I have to call a high-school boy and ask for advice.’

The freeway was full of drivers behaving as though they had just received word that this was the last Monday of the year for getting work done. Wide awake and feeling her jaws throb, Sarah pulled off on Silverlake a few minutes later and parked to the right of the jail. She took her time walking in across the brick pavers – the weather had returned to Resort Special, and the sun on her back felt like a cure for traffic and other forms of stress.

Greta Wahl apparently felt the same way – she walked out to the desk to greet Sarah, said they’d better skip coffee today and suggested they sit outside, ‘I like to get out of this air-conditioning once or twice a shift if I can.’ A compact, tightly organized woman with no outstanding features, she somehow exuded confidence and authority so completely that, in the potentially chaotic surroundings of the admitting section, her presence alone was sufficient to calm the room.

She’d read the report of Joey’s death. ‘I have to say I’m not surprised. His temper was out of control. But I’m glad you called me – you reminded me of something I meant to tell you.’ She tapped her upper lip a couple of times, thinking.

‘It was two days, I think, before his mother bailed him out. Joey had been brought up into the front section to make a phone call. You know the arrangement? They can have all the phone calls they want, but they all have to be collect calls, there aren’t any coin boxes on the phones here. We don’t have to monitor calls, in fact we’re not allowed to – that’s supposed to be the advantage of this pod construction: they’re never in direct contact with the outside so they don’t have to be monitored for visits and phone calls.