Serious Crimes (A Willows and Parker Mystery) (5 page)

“You got it,” said Wilcox.

“I mean now, Tommy.”

“Right after lunch.”

“You’ll work faster on an empty stomach.”

Wilcox sighed. He unwrapped another stick of gum and stuck it between his jaws, clamped down hard. Homicide dicks were always in such a goddamn hurry. The people they worked for were
dead
, for God’s sake, and they were gonna stay that way forever. So why the big rush?

Willows stood up. He started to walk away and then stopped and turned and looked Wilcox straight in the eye. “Half an hour, Tommy?”

“Yeah, sure. Think we should synchronize our watches?”

“What time you got?”

Wilcox glanced down at his wrist. It was twelve, no, thirteen minutes past ten. He looked up, ready to share this information.

But Willows was gone.

Chapter 5

Christy Kirkpatrick had enjoyed a long and varied professional life, and believed that during his career as a forensic pathologist he had been privileged to see and do things that other men rarely even dreamed of.

But this was weird. This was, in fact, weirdness beyond weird.

The city morgue is situated in an old orange brick and mullioned-window building located on Cordova Street, just around the corner from 312 Main. The operating theatre is located on the top floor of the building, in a large, square, brightly-lit room. The floor and two of the four walls are covered with small, glossy blue tiles. The remaining walls are lined with lockable refrigerated stainless-steel drawers that are just the right size for storing a body. There is a massive cast-iron and frosted glass skylight in the ceiling. If you look closely, you can see where repairs were made to the skylight in the spring of 1947, when a cop named Wilbur Cartwright fell through the glass while moonlighting for a sleazy tabloid that wanted candid shots of the autopsy of a notoriously fickle B-movie star who’d asphyxiated in the arms of her blind lover.

Directly beneath the skylight stood two zinc tables. Each table is seven feet long and three feet wide, and stands exactly forty-two inches above the tile floor. A constant stream of cold water flows along a shallow groove that runs down the middle of each table, from the slightly elevated top end all the way down to the bottom, where a chrome drainage pipe vanishes into a hole in the tiles.

Kenny Lee’s corpse, still in a classic full-lotus position, sat proudly erect in the middle of the table closest to the door.

Kirkpatrick was trying to melt him down with a 1000-watt Philips
Vanite
blow dryer. He’d been wielding the blow dryer for the better part of two hours. His wrist ached, and the whine of the machine’s tiny electric motor was driving him crazy.

As he’d plugged the Philips into the extension cord, he’d worked out a simple strategy. He’d start at Lee’s head and work his way to his feet. His theory was that the warm, melted water that dripped down the body would help speed the thawing process.

It had started well enough. The ice that covered Lee’s face was less than an inch thick. Kirkpatrick found that he could hold the nozzle of the hair dryer as close as two inches away from the surface of the ice, but no closer, because the melt had a tendency to spray back at him, and he didn’t care to risk electrocution.

After almost two hours, he was just clearing the last traces of ice from Lee’s face, directing the flow of hot air upwards at Lee’s snub nose to loosen the two plugs of ice that filled his nostrils.

He switched the hair dryer to his left hand, flexed his aching wrist and aimed the dryer so the blast of hot air was directed at the bridge of Lee’s nose. He had a small bet going with himself — which nostril the ice plug would fall out of first.

He’d also given some thought to working out how long it was going to take to thaw out the whole body, from head to foot. What he had failed to consider when he’d started was the fact that Lee wasn’t simply sheathed in ice, his entire body — even the marrow in his bones — was frozen through and through.

Kirkpatrick wondered if there was a mathematical formula for calculating the time required to thaw a given number of cubic feet of frozen human flesh. He couldn’t recall studying such a formula at med school, but then, there was an awful lot about med school that he couldn’t remember.

Thank God.

The telephone rang. Kirkpatrick switched off the dryer. He could hear fat drops of melted water hitting the puddle that had collected on the tile floor. It was slippery down there. He’d have to watch his step. He went over to the telephone and picked up.

Willows said, “What’ve you got, Christy?”

“Nothing much, Jack. I’m still trying to melt the ice off him.”

“I thought you’d be finished by now.” There was an edge to Willows’ voice. “How long is it going to take?”

“In some places, Jack, Lee’s covered in a layer of ice that’s as much as six inches thick. But the main problem is that his body’s frozen solid, too. If you think about it, the water falling on him couldn’t have frozen unless the entire corpse was thirty-two degrees or less.” Kirkpatrick paused, and then said, “You see what I’m getting at?”

“Over the weekend,” Willows said, “the temperature in the city dropped to a maximum low of twenty-one degrees. The Sun Yat-Sen Gardens were closed to the public from six o’clock Friday evening until Monday morning. Was there enough time, during that period, for the body temperature to drop from ninety-eight point six to the freezing point?”

“I don’t know,” said Kirkpatrick. “It depends how much the guy weighed, and I can’t find that out because he’s still covered in ice.”

“Parker and I worked out roughly how long the hose had been running by the volume of the flow and the amount of water sprayed on the corpse and surrounding ice,” said Willows. “Our guess is between six and eight hours.”

“What time was it Yang discovered the body?”

“Approximately six thirty.”

“So the hose was turned on, say, between ten and midnight?”

“Somewhere in there.”

“Then my guess is Lee was killed at least twenty-four hours before he was dumped in the pond. And that the body was frozen solid at the time he was dumped.”

“So it’s fair to say the body was stored outside, or in an unheated building for twenty-four hours or more before somebody turned him into an ice sculpture?”

“Right.”

“How long before he thaws, doc?”

“I’d say at least two days.”

Willows sighed, and hung up.

Kirkpatrick cradled the receiver and went back to the zinc table. He studied Lee’s face. The skin had a faint greenish tinge. Lee had combed his hair straight back, and that’s the way it was now, except for a bit sticking out over his left ear. Kirkpatrick resisted the urge to use his comb. Lee’s eyes were wide open. He was staring straight ahead, into distances so vast they were immeasurable. But then, that’s what you were supposed to do when you meditated, wasn’t it? Lose focus. Slip outside yourself. Kirkpatrick reached out and gently pinched Lee’s nose. The plugs of ice shot out of Lee’s nostrils and into the palm of his hand.

Lee sat perfectly still — about what you’d expect from a man who was colder than a freshly-mixed margarita.

Kirkpatrick took a quick pass with the dryer. A single tiny crystalline bead of water hung trembling from Lee’s eyelash. He remembered a late-night movie he’d seen on TV a few weeks ago, about a group of explorers who’d stumbled across a frozen stiff locked into an iceberg somewhere in the arctic. A Neanderthal type, who’d been in a state of suspended animation for several thousand years. The explorers had made the mistake of thawing him out, and he’d turned on them and…
eaten
them
.

Well, after a fast that lasted two or three thousand years, they should have expected the poor guy to have an appetite.

Tentatively, Kirkpatrick reached out and touched the droplet of crystal-clear water that hung trembling from Lee’s eyelash. There was, of course, an explanation for the movement. Passing traffic would cause the building to vibrate. Although the vibrations were usually too minute to notice, they were always there. The whole city was constantly shaking, if you thought about it.

One thing for sure, Lee sure as hell wasn’t
alive
.

But just to make sure, Kirkpatrick reached out and pressed the tip of his index finger gently against the dead man’s eyeball. The orb was cold and unyielding. Lee’s eye, like his brain and all his thought processes, was frozen solid, hard as a bowling ball.

The telephone rang again, startling him badly enough to make him scream and drop the hair dryer, which fell into the puddle of melted ice water. A bright orange bolt of electricity arced from the dryer to the zinc table. The air filled with the stench of melting plastic, and then a circuit-breaker somewhere deep inside the bowels of the old building automatically turned over and all the lights went out.

There was a moment’s silence, and then a chunk of ice shattered on the tile floor.

Christy Kirkpatrick’s overworked heart did a backflip, raced out of control. He screamed again, but much louder this time, as if his life depended on it.

Then the battery-powered emergency backup lighting system clicked in, and he managed to get himself under control. My God, what a terrifying experience! He went over to the sink, splashed cold water on his face. His chest ached where his heart had thumped against the bones and flesh. He silently vowed that
no
one
would
ever
learn about the day all the horror movies he’d ever seen sprang to life and nearly did him in.

Chapter 6

It was cold. Garret could feel the chill in his bones. His knee joints, as he scuttled down the alley, were stiff and tight.

“C’mon,” whispered Billy. “Move it! Haul ass!”

Garret turned to look back down the alley. Billy’s rusted-out Pinto was parked under a mountain ash. The cold snap had pinched the last dead leaves from the tree; the branches were bare except for clusters of shrivelled red berries. What was left of the Pinto’s chrome trim gleamed beneath a streetlight. Piece of shit. Garret drove a ’65 Mustang powered by a 289-cubic-inch V-8. Black on black. He spent every spare dime he made on the car, and he loved it the way he’d never loved his mother. They were using the Pinto because the Mustang was in the garage, waiting for a new fuel pump Garret couldn’t quite afford.

The car they were going to break into was a green Volkswagen Golf. It was three years old and worth maybe eight thousand dollars. Whoever owned the car had spent another three grand on the stereo system. The dashboard was crammed with a Blaupunkt tape deck, state-of-the-art Alpine CD shuttle, Alpine speakers and a sub-woofer, the whole system powered by a 200-watt Sony amplifier. The Golf was parked in a paved lot behind a bakery. The owner started work at two in the morning and didn’t finish his shift until noon. By then, Billy and Garret would be long gone and so would the stereo.

Garret stood in the distorted diamond-pattern shadow cast by a chain-link fence, keeping watch, as Billy approached the car from the driver’s side. There was a thin burst of white light from his flash. He barked like a dog, a whispered howl of triumph.

Garret rubbed his hands together, breathed little puffs of smoke.

“Clear?” whispered Billy from the darkness.

“Yeah, yeah. Hurry up!”

Billy raised the ball-peen hammer and hit the side window just above the door lock. The window exploded. Billy reached inside, unlocked the door and swung it open.

The Golf’s interior light came on.

Billy stuck the flashlight in the back pocket of his jeans and attacked the dashboard with the hammer. He had the Blaupunkt out in fifteen seconds flat. The CD shuttle was a little trickier. Delicate electronics, he couldn’t nuke it with the hammer, had to go easy. Cut some wires. Thirty seconds. He could hear Garret pacing back and forth in the lane, heels clicking on the asphalt. Billy had to watch himself — there were loose wires and chunks of shattered plastic and glass all over the front seat. He went to work on the amplifier. He needed a medium-size Philips screwdriver and he didn’t have one. Fuck. He yanked on the Sony’s support bracket, pressing his shoulder up against the steering wheel for leverage, using brute strength to do the job. The bracket tore free without warning and he hit his head against the rear-view mirror.

The Golf shifted on its springs. Hail on the roof. No, Garret’s knuckles.

“What the fuck’s taking so long, man?”

“Fuck off!” hissed Billy.

He popped open the glove compartment. A road map of the city, registration papers. Kleenex. He passed the radio and CD player and Sony amp to Garret, climbed out of the car and eased shut the door. The Golf’s interior light went out. They hurried down the alley.

Billy slipped behind the Pinto’s wheel. He paused to light a cigarette, knowing the delay would drive Garret crazy, and then turned the key in the ignition. The Pinto’s dinky four-cylinder engine coughed twice and then caught, spewing a cloud of burnt oil at the mountain ash. Billy put the car in gear and drove to the end of the block and hung a right, turned on the headlights.

Garret, starting to relax, leaned back in his seat and rested his boots on the Pinto’s scaly dashboard.

Billy ran a stop sign, not even bothering to check for oncoming traffic. He felt flat, depressed. Let-down. He could remember when busting into a car gave him a nice little buzz, really got him pumped up. But he’d done it too many times. It was like playing the same record over and over and over again. Or spending too much time with the same girl. Didn’t matter how crazy about her you were when you got started, after a while nothing much was happening. You were bored. He blew a lungful of smoke at Garret’s surly profile.

“Fuck off,” said Garret.

Billy laughed.

It was Tuesday, three o’clock in the morning. The graveyard shift. They’d been doing business since a little past midnight, scoring Porsches and Golfs and the odd Mercedes. The way they worked, their
modus
operandi
, Billy would pick a neighbourhood and then cruise around in the Pinto, looking for cars parked in unlit driveways or unlocked garages. He had a little penlight he used to make sure the car had a decent radio. He was quiet, but not too quiet. If the car owner was an insomniac or it turned out there was a couple of pit bulls tucked away on the back porch, forget it. Billy kept a baseball bat in the car, but it was only for self-defence, in case some asshole pushed him too hard.

If there was no problem, everything looked good, Billy wrote down the address on a piece of paper. When he had maybe a dozen cars lined up, he arranged the addresses in order so they could go from one place to another as efficiently as possible. The radios, as they bagged them, went into a cardboard box in the trunk of the car. Usually, they’d hit seven or eight cars out of twelve. The other cars wouldn’t be there or something about the situation wouldn’t be quite right.

It wasn’t a bad way to make a buck. A bit on the risky side, but they’d usually come away, in the space of two or three hours, with anywhere from two to four grands’ worth of electronics.

From the fences, of course, they’d be lucky to get twenty cents on the dollar. Still, it was a lot easier than shovelling hamburgers at McDonalds. And there was always the chance of catching a bonus. One warm summer night in July, Billy had busted a Porsche and walked away with a hundred grams of coke. Garret had wanted to deal it but Billy said no. His argument was they didn’t know shit about dealers or dealing, might put somebody’s nose out of joint without even realising it. End up in some back alley garbage can with a couple broken legs. “Let’s don’t fuck with luck,” was the way Billy put it. So they had a couple of girls over and got all bright-eyed and snuffled. Had a pretty good time, all in all.

Garret said, “You hungry, wanna grab something to eat?” Billy shook his head. He sucked on the cigarette, flicked ash at Garret’s lap.

“Steal some more radios? I know where there’s a Jag, guy keeps it…”

“I ripped my fuckin’ hand wide open. Look at that, for fuck’s sake.”

Billy thrust out his hand. They passed under a streetlight, and in the sickly blue glow Garret saw the cut, a raggedy slash that ran the length of Billy’s thumb.

“How’d you do that?”

“Fucking dashboard. Pulling the Blaupunkt.” Billy sucked at the gaping wound, rolled down his window and spat blood, rolled the window back up again.

“Wanna smoke some dope?”

Billy didn’t answer. Garret took that for a maybe. Encouraged, he said, “I got a six-pack of Coors. We could…”

“Where’d you get it?”

“The dope?”

“No, stupid. The booze.”

“Off a guy outside that liquor store in the mall, on Broadway by Kingsway.”

“What’d you pay him?”

“Ten bucks.”

“Plus the beer.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Ten bucks for a six-pack. Whyn’t you get him to buy you a case?”

“Too heavy. I got no wheels, remember?”

Billy flicked his cigarette. The butt hit Garret square in the chest, a shower of orange sparks on black leather.

“Jesus, Billy!”

They were about three blocks from Garret’s apartment. Close enough. Billy pulled over to the curb, turned off the lights.

“Beat it.”

“Huh?” said Garret.

“Read my lips,” said Billy. “Fuck off.”

“You expect me to
walk
home? In this cold? C’mon, I’m gonna freeze my ass off.”

Billy leaned across the seat, opened Garret’s door and gave him a push. Garret sat there for a minute, his head down. Billy could see he was working out his options — climb out of the car or get his head kicked in. Even for a dummy like Garret, it wasn’t all that tough a choice. He got out of the car. His lungs puffed small clouds into the night. “See you tomorrow?”

“Shut the door,” said Billy. “And don’t slam it.”

“Asshole.”

“Everybody’s got one.” Billy’s thumb had stopped bleeding. He tilted his head, sniffed the cold night air. Night lights lit up the peak of Grouse Mountain. Lots of snow up there, cold and white and pure. Pastel ski bunnies shifting ass as they cruised the powder.

Garret eased shut the Pinto’s door and turned his back on Billy and started walking down the street. The sky was dark, stuffed with heavy black cloud. An icy wind seeped through his jacket and began to gnaw at him. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets. It was so damn cold his eyes were watering. He glanced over his shoulder, wondering where in hell Billy was going, this time of night.

Billy and he had been together a long time, but there were parts of Billy’s life that Garret knew nothing of. Fair enough. Garret had plenty of secrets himself. His worst secret was that Billy didn’t scare him one little bit. Billy thought he was in charge. In many small ways, he ran roughshod over Garret, and Garret let him do it. There was a reason for this. Garret was fast approaching the time when somebody dangerous and dumb and disposable would be exactly what he needed.

*

Billy was headed for the West Side of the city, an address on Point Grey Road. He didn’t know exactly why he’d decided to make the trip, and it troubled him.

Garret’s idea of a fun time was cruising up and down Kingsway or maybe Hastings Street, cutting in and out of traffic, leaning out the window and yelling at people, spitting at pedestrians. Billy was just the opposite. He didn’t like to waste time. Everything he did, he did with a purpose. As far as he was concerned, wasting time was a waste of time. So what did he think he was up to, driving halfway across the city for no reason that made sense?

Truth was, he didn’t know.

He crossed Main Street at Twenty-fifth, running a yellow. Now he was an East Side kid on the West Side of the city. Unknown territory, where there were a lot more parks and the parks had trees. What else? People owned poodles instead of dobermans. The girls were prettier. Better dressed, anyhow. He’d heard about West Side girls. That they’d put out for anybody, but didn’t much enjoy it.

At Oak Street, he stopped for a red and pulled out Nancy Crown’s chequebook. He squinted at the address in the glare of passing headlights. Point Grey Road. What the fuck kind of address was that? Thirty-six-hundred block. He was still miles away. He revved the engine, waiting for the green. A police car pulled up beside him. Billy leaned back in his seat, looked straight ahead, letting the engine idle. Be calm, look calm, act calm. So what if they pulled him over, took a peek in the trunk and saw he could tune in a dozen different stations at once? At his age, there wasn’t a whole lot they could do to him — he’d be in and out of jail faster than an egg in a frying pan.

The light turned green. The cop punched it and the patrol car cut in front of Billy, turned sharply right, made him hit the brakes to avoid a collision, the blue and white flashing past in front of him and accelerating down Oak. Cowboys. Like Garret, cops were always in a hurry and never going anywhere. Billy lit a cigarette. Probably they had a hot date with a jelly donut.

At Broadway and Arbutus, Billy stopped at an all-night Chevron station, pumped ten dollars’ worth of gas into the Pinto and cleaned the windshield. The kid guarding the cash register had long black hair combed straight back, a rash of pimples across his chin and down his neck. He was too big to rob. Billy asked him for directions. By the time the kid finished talking to him Billy was still lost but at least now he didn’t have any doubt about it. He bought a city map for a dollar and a quarter.

3682 Point Grey Road was easy to find, because the address was written over the green-tinted glass roof of the garage in hot pink neon.

A glass garage. What the fuck kind of mess had he gotten himself into? Jesus.

Billy parked the Pinto on a side street about half a block away. It was half past three, dark as it was going to get. He checked to make sure he had his knife and flashlight, took a quick look up and down the street, locked the Pinto and ambled along the sidewalk towards the house.

The house was set well back from the street, behind an evergreen hedge that screened a sound-deflecting six-foot-high wall of textured concrete blocks. Billy forced his way through the hedge, got a hand on top of the wall and levered himself up in one easy, fluid motion. He sat there for a moment, orienting himself.

The garage was at the front, to the left of the house. The walls were textured concrete blocks painted dove-gray, and the sloped roof of huge sheets of green-tinted safety glass was supported by green-painted metal joists. The garage doors were also made of big sheets of green glass. The interior of the garage was brightly lit by a dozen or more twenty-foot lengths of neon suspended on wires from metal tubes. The outwash of neon lit up the whole front yard, stained everything pale green, made it look as if it was under water. Billy had never seen anything like it. He felt as if he’d just come off the farm, and it made him angry.