Among Thieves

Chapter Two

Detective Paul Stone drove. He and Elorea Sanchez had been partners for two weeks. Though he’d been a cop for five years, he was a rookie on the homicide squad, and she had every right to take the wheel, but never did. They walked out of the station house that first day to the dented, unmarked Lincoln and Sanchez had tossed the keys onto the driver’s seat. She’d never said a word about it, and Stone had driven ever since. He’d joked once that she must like having a younger man chauffeuring her around the city, but it hadn’t gone over well. She just stared at him with a hard look that was effective at cutting off conversation.

She wasn’t easy to figure out. They’d spent nearly ten hours a day together for two weeks, but they seldom spoke more than a few words to each other at a time. Her idea of conversation was to tell him where to turn. Most of what he knew about her he’d gotten from her personnel file and station gossip. She was fifty years old, female, Hispanic of unspecified geographic origin, five-seven, one hundred and thirty-five pounds. She had joined the police force later in life than most cops-after the army, college, and a master’s degree in criminal justice. She’d even done two years of law school, but hadn’t finished. No one knew why she’d dropped out. What people did know was that she had shot up through the BPD ranks with incredible speed. The jealous credited affirmative action, ignoring the fact that she had the best clear rate in the homicide unit. In her fifteen years on the detective squad, she’d cleared over seventy-five percent of her cases. That meant that if a case was assigned to her, three out of four times someone was convicted of the crime. The national average was sixty-five percent. In Boston, the average had sunk in recent years as low as thirty-three percent. That meant that only a third of all murders were being solved. It was one of the worst records in the country. Given that grim reality, affirmative action or not, seventy-five percent made Sanchez a star.

Word was, though, that she was difficult to work with. Since joining the detective squad, she’d churned through five partners. Those inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt claimed that her intensity burned partners out. Those less charitable said it was because she couldn’t be trusted, and without trust there could be no real partnership. Whatever the reason, she was working alone when Stone was bumped up to homicide. He’d been told the arrangement was on a trial basis, but had been given no indication when the trial would end or by what criteria he would be judged. He was a team player, so he kept his mouth shut. At the very least, he figured, he could learn something riding with someone who had a seventy-five percent clear rate, no matter for how short a time.

“You got the address?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

He didn’t need the address; he’d grown up in Southie. Never left there, in fact. When he was growing up, the Body Shop had been a landmark. The sign that hung from the grimy, low-slung stucco building read “Murphy’s Car Body and Engine Repair,” but it was known to everyone in the neighborhood simply as the Body Shop. It was located on an oversized lot fringed with knee-high weeds, set back from the street, in an area that drew little traffic. That hardly mattered, though-no one ever took their cars there anyway. A mechanic was on the premises during the daytime to keep appearances up, but anyone looking to have a car repaired was invariably told that all of the appointments were booked. The only auto-body work performed there took place at night, and few of the cars that found their way into the garage emerged again in one piece.

Notwithstanding the lack of legitimate automotive services offered, the place usually buzzed during the day. Murphy, a leader in what remained of the loosely affiliated Irish-American gangs, kept his office in the back, running his crews and brokering a tenuous peace among those in the neighborhood who operated on the wrong side of the law.

The place was humming with activity as Stone guided the car into the driveway, though not with its normal daily business. The driveway was crammed with BPD squad cars and crime scene units. Yellow tape was strewn loosely around the entire complex, and a patrolman had to lift one of the banners strung across the entryway to allow the detectives’ car in.

“You think this is the start of another war?” Stone asked as he eased the Lincoln around to the back of the lot.

“Don’t know,” Sanchez replied. “Been a long time since the last one, and things have been outta whack since Whitey took off. If it is another war, it’s gonna get ugly.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. He remembered the times when he was a boy and he’d heard whispers about the wars that went on between the rival gangs back in the sixties and seventies. They had seemed at the time like mythic, almost heroic battles. Later he came to understand that they were more like scraps between vicious animals.

“You grew up here, right?” Sanchez asked.

“Yeah.”

“Did you know him?”

“Murphy?” Stone thought about his answer. “Everyone knew him. He was one of Whitey’s guys back in the day. He had a rep as being nicer than most, but still dangerous. You ever deal with him?”

Sanchez shook her head. “Not really. I watched him get grilled after a bust back in the nineties, but that’s it.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought he was smart. One of the smartest I’ve seen.” She opened the door and slid out of the car; Stone did the same. She looked around the front of the building. A young man from the coroner’s office was leaning against his van, a gurney at his side. Piled loosely on top of the rolling stretcher were two empty black vinyl body bags. “Not smart enough, I guess.”

She started walking toward the doorway and Stone fell in just behind her. As he walked, it dawned on him that the exchange was the longest conversation they’d had since they’d become partners.

The stench in the Body Shop was overpowering. It was a warm day for April in Boston, and the aluminum-lined building seemed to trap the heat. Sanchez could feel the sting of oil and gasoline in her nostrils, but the odors were swallowed up in the sickly sweet aroma of death and decay. It smelled like rotten meat boiled in sour milk and honey. She clenched her jaw so as not to betray her nausea. She’d been on the force long enough to understand the double standard-men could show their disgust at a crime scene, but for women it was viewed as a sign of weakness.

“Any word on the time of death?” she asked Stone as they walked through the front-counter section, past a couple of uniformed officers acting as bored sentries, and back around into the garage bays.

“Doc thinks Saturday. No time yet, and even the day’s an estimate until they get the bodies back to the lab to run some tests.”

“Smells like Saturday,” she said.

“Smells like shit,” he said. He coughed and put a hand to his face.

“Found this morning?”

Stone nodded. “Place was closed yesterday, and no one was around. They were supposed to be closed today, too, for Patriots’ Day, but one of the mechanics stopped by to do some work on his own car and found them.”

She threw a quick look at her partner. He was young and good-looking in an overmuscled, athletic sort of way-the kind of a man whose neck strained against his collar, and who developed a five o’clock shadow as he pulled away from the sink after shaving. His hair was thick and dark and his brow jutted forth just a little more than necessary. His accent chopped his hard consonants and slid through his “r”s in a manner characteristic of lifelong Bostonians from working-class neighborhoods. She’d worked with men like him before. The jury was still out on him, as far as she was concerned. She’d be disappointed in the end, she was sure-she always was. It had become such a predictable pattern that she now thought of a “partner” merely as an obstacle to be negotiated as she focused on getting the job done.

As they approached the back of the building, toward the bays where the cars were dismantled, a uniformed sergeant in his early fifties broke free from a group of officers and strode to meet them. She reached into her pocket and fished out her badge, holding it up for the sergeant.

He nodded to her. “Detective,” he said. He looked at Stone and said nothing.

“Sergeant…” Sanchez scanned her memory and the tag on the front of the man’s shirt for a name, “McAfee.” She squinted at him. “We’ve worked together before.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “Two years ago.”

“Right. The Darvos case.”

“That’s correct, ma’am.”

She said nothing more about it. “What have we got?”

“Nothing good. You just missed the doc, but he said he’ll be in the office writing up some notes later if you want to talk. He’s gonna do the autopsies once we get the bodies to him this afternoon. He got a good first look, but we put the bodies back the way we found them. I figured you’d want to see them the way they were found.”

She nodded. “Good.” She looked around the room and noticed a tall black man in the corner talking on a cell phone. He was dressed in a dark blue suit, white shirt, and a dark tie. He was wearing sunglasses. “Feds got a line on this?” she asked.

McAfee looked over his shoulder and grunted in distaste. “Yeah. He showed up about ten minutes after we got here. Don’t know how he found out about it.”

“What’s he been doing?”

“Just looking. We haven’t let him touch anything, but I didn’t know whether we could kick him out. He’s got a badge.”

She nodded and walked toward the man. He saw her coming and closed his phone. As she got nearer, he took off his glasses. “Detective?” he said.

She nodded. “Sanchez. And you are?”

“Special Agent Hewitt.”

“Special Agent Hewitt, what are you doing at my crime scene?”

He stared at her. “Looking,” he said after a moment.

“For anything in particular?”

“I’m on a task force that deals with organized crime. I heard there was a murder down here at the Body Shop.”

“Do you have any specific reason to believe that this case is federal in nature?”

The agent sucked slowly at his teeth. “Murphy was a well-known gang leader. He was involved in everything from guns to drugs to prostitution to extortion. I don’t have any reason to believe that this wasn’t related to his racketeering activities.”

Sanchez folded her arms. “Let me ask the question a different way, Special Agent Hewitt: are you asserting federal jurisdiction here? Because if you are, I’ll have our people out of here in about five minutes and you can take over. Then if something goes wrong, it’s your ass in a sling, not mine.”

It took him a moment to answer. “No, I’m not asserting jurisdiction,” he said.

“Good,” Sanchez said. “In that case, I’d appreciate it if you’d clear out until my people are done. I’ll get you a report as soon as one is ready, but until then, I have control over the crime scene, and I can’t have my people working with someone looking over their shoulders.”

“Detective Sanchez, I’m a special agent with the FBI,” Hewitt began in protest. She cut him off.

“So was John Connolly, and he’s still got three years left in supermax out at Allenwood for tipping off Whitey Bulger and his mob, right? For years, your federal boys ran interference for these guys whenever we tried to put them away, so you’ll pardon me if the ‘Special Agent’ mystique doesn’t cut a whole lot of shit with me. I’ll keep you informed as appropriate, but I need you out so we can do our job. Either that or you take the lead yourself. Which is it gonna be?”

Hewitt put his glasses back on. “I’ll expect a full report, complete with pictures, by the end of the day,” he said.

“You can expect whatever you want,” Sanchez replied. “No skin off my nose.”

Hewitt stood there for a moment, then walked past them, out toward the front door to the garage.

“Cocksucker,” McAfee said under his breath as he watched Hewitt walk out of the Body Shop.

“Maybe he’s just doing his job,” Stone offered.

“Maybe,” Sanchez said. “I’m not taking any chances, though. We have a job to do, too. And I don’t want the feds fucking up one of my cases.” She looked at McAfee. “Let’s get to it. What are we looking at?”

“You want to look at Bags first?” he asked.

“Should we?”

McAfee gave a gesture falling somewhere between a nod and a shrug. “He’s a good warm-up. He’s in better shape than Vinny.” He pointed over into a corner behind a tool rack. Sanchez moved in that direction and Stone followed.

John Smith was known to most as “Johnny Bags.” The nickname came from his early career ferrying loads of cash to local political bosses. His body was crumpled in a corner of the garage, tucked behind a rack of utility drawers. In life he’d been a fearsome man, six-five with an angry face and a disposition devoid of humanity’s finer traits. In death he looked almost peaceful, curled into a fetal position, his head resting on his left hand. Only the angle at which his right arm was twisted-straight out from the shoulder, its palm turned upward in an impossible feat of contortion-suggested that the man was anything other than resting. A closer look revealed the two holes in his forehead, and stepping over the body, Sanchez could see flies buzzing around a dark pool of congealed blood spread out from his black hair.

“Not much left of the back of his skull,” McAfee commented. “Looks like they used shredders. Pretty much blew off the back half of his head.”

“Nasty,” Stone said with a frown.

“Effective,” Sanchez replied. “Any other points of entry?”

McAfee shook his head. “Just the head, from what we can tell. Doc’ll confirm it with the autopsy.”

“Anything else? Cuts? Contusions? Anything?”

“Just the arm,” McAfee said. “Looks like it was pulled out of the socket. Could’ve happened when he fell after he got popped.”

Sanchez lingered over Smith’s body for another minute or two, drinking in the scene. Other than the body and the stagnant, well-defined mat of blood underneath the head, the area was neat and tidy, with tools stacked in an orderly fashion on top of the utility cabinets. She pulled back the jacket and patted it down. There was nothing in the pockets. A shoulder holster was strapped to his torso, and a gun was tucked into it.

“Okay,” Sanchez said at last. “Let’s see Murphy.”

McAfee nodded. “The main attraction. If either of you have a weak stomach…”

“Just show us the body, Sergeant,” Sanchez said.

McAfee said nothing, but led them to a mechanics’ bay at the very rear of the building. It shot off from the main space, and was concealed from view. They rounded the corner, and Sanchez heard Stone suck in his breath.

Murphy’s body was there. At least, she assumed it was Murphy’s body. It was difficult to tell given the amount of damage. It looked more to her like two hundred pounds of ground beef covered in torn clothing than what she remembered of Vinny Murphy. It didn’t appear that any spot on the body had escaped violence.

“Holy shit,” Stone whispered softly.

“Nothing holy about it,” Sanchez said. “An impressive piece of work, though.” She moved slowly toward the body, being careful not to disturb the scene. “Are the pictures done?” she asked.

“All done,” McAfee replied. “The whole lovely scene has been recorded for posterity.”

“Crime scene?”

“They’ve done all they can do until the body is moved out. Prints, scrapings, the works. They’ll do it all again once we’ve cleared out, but they think the place is pretty clean.” He tossed her a box of latex gloves. “He’s all yours.”

She took two gloves out of the box and passed it to Stone, who did the same. They both pulled the gloves on and advanced toward the body.

“Jesus,” Stone said as he looked at the area that had once been Vince Murphy’s face. “What did they use?” Sanchez said nothing.

“Not sure,” McAfee said after a moment. “Could have been chains. There were a bunch of them hanging over in the corner, and it looked like there could’ve been blood on them. The crime scene boys bagged ’em and we’ll know soon enough. Doc should also be able to get us a read on any patterns to the abrasion, which may tell us something.”

Stone moved slowly around the corpse. Sanchez watched him out of the corner of her eye. She was annoyed at the distraction of having him there, but said nothing. He was her partner, after all, at least for the moment, and there was no way to prevent his participation. As long as he was careful to stay out of her way, she could live with it. “Shit, they even got the bottoms of his feet,” Stone said.

“Yup,” McAfee said, using a fingernail to pick some of his breakfast free from his teeth. He pointed to a hook hanging from a hydraulic lift used to get engine blocks into and out of cars. “Looks like they had him strapped to that for at least part of the time. They found a couple of torn pieces from his shirt on the hook.”

“Why?” Stone said to no one in particular.

“I guess that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?” McAfee said. “My guess is that he pissed off one of the goombahs in the North End, or maybe one of the Salvadoran gangbangers over in Eastie. Who knows, could have even been one of his own boys looking to move up in the world.”

“Doc give any thoughts on the extent of the injuries?” Sanchez asked.

“Just that the gunshots to the head were pretty clearly the cause of death. And the external injuries are mainly superficial. There may be some broken bones, and he won’t know about any internal injuries until he splits him open to look inside. The only other thing that sticks out is the hands.”

“The hands?” Stone said.

“See for yourself,” McAfee said.

Sanchez looked at the body. It was turned to the side, and both hands were underneath the torso. “Help me turn him,” she said to Stone.

The two of them reached down. She placed her palms flat underneath the shoulder, and he lifted from underneath the hip. Rigor had set in, so the body rolled easily, like a mannequin, and the arms shot upward once released from under the body.

Sanchez frowned. The skin on the hands had a ghostly white, fleshless tone to it below the wrists. Dark holes marred the palms, and looking closely, Sanchez could see that the injuries went all the way through the hands.

“Doc picked up some ligature marks on the wrists,” McAfee said. “Looks like they tied his hands together and shot him clean through the palms.”

“Why?” Stone asked.

“Who knows,” McAfee said. “Maybe just for kicks.”

“Padre Pio,” Sanchez said quietly.

“Padre Pio?” Stone replied.

“Padre Pio,” she repeated.

Stone looked at McAfee. “You know what Padre Pio means?” he asked.

McAfee shook his head. “Sorry, I’m not Mexican.”

Stone looked back at Sanchez. “What does Padre Pio mean?” he asked.

“It means you need to pay attention.” She moved to the other side of the body. “The message?”

McAfee pointed to the left of the head. “It’s up there. No one has any idea about it. It’s not gang-related as far as we know, and no one has seen anything like it before.”

She bent down. It was there, though it had faded as the blood had dried. “The Storm.” She looked at Stone. “You’re the local, you know what that means?”

Stone shook his head. “Doesn’t ring any bells.”

“Anyone go by that nickname?”

“Not that I’ve ever heard.”

“Great.”

“Maybe it’s just some sort of psycho with a flair for drama.”

She stood up. “Maybe. It’s definitely a psycho. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with drama, though.”

“What, then?”

She took off her gloves and they snapped as she rolled them into a ball. She tossed them to McAfee. “That’s what I expect you to find out.”