King City

Chapter thirteen

Once they got to the station, Charlotte led the two deputies to the holding cell, uncuffed them, and locked them inside. Wade took the woman to a seat at Billy’s desk and gave her a bottled water. Charlotte gestured to Wade and met him at the counter.

“You won’t arrest prostitutes and drug dealers, but you’ll arrest two sheriff’s deputies,” she said, her voice low so the others wouldn’t hear them.

“I’m picking my battles,” Wade said.

“You’re starting wars.”

“Do you disapprove of what I’ve done?”

She glanced back at the deputies in the cell, who were both making calls on their cell phones. “Actually, much to my astonishment, I don’t.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that.” Wade reached into his pocket and handed her a crumpled twenty?dollar bill. “Do me a favor and get this lady something hot to eat and make her comfortable. I’m going to try to get a few hours’ sleep before morning.”

She tipped her head toward the cells. “What about the paperwork on them?”

“Start filling it out,” he said.

“I’m going to tell it the way it happened,” she said.

“I would expect nothing less,” he said. “Get me if anything comes up.”

Wade made the long commute up the two flights of stairs to his new home. He undressed, plugged his phone into the charger on top of one of the boxes, and went to take a shower. He let the shower run for five minutes, waiting for the muddy?brown tinge to clear and for the water to heat up. It must have been years since anybody had used the shower. The water was lukewarm when he got in, but it felt good anyway after his long day. It washed away the tension.

A lot had happened since the previous morning, but what stuck with him most was the intimate relationship that had developed with Mandy. It was a change in his life he hadn’t seen coming, and now that it was here, he wasn’t quite sure how to handle it.

Then again, that was becoming a familiar feeling in his life lately. Ever since his first meeting with the Justice Department, every day felt like he was venturing into unexplored territory. Some people craved that discomfort, that mystery. It made their lives exciting. He preferred predictability and routine. Excitement wasn’t something he valued much.

He decided to deal with Mandy the same way he tackled everything else-he’d take things as they came and trust his instincts, not that they’d served him too well lately. That same approach had landed him in Darwin Gardens, living alone in a squalid apartment, the last fourteen years of his life packed in a dozen cardboard boxes.

And yet, he felt more centered, and more sure of himself, than he had in years.

Wade dried off, wrapped a towel around his waist, and went into the living room, where he unpacked some sheets and blankets from a box and tossed them on the mattress in a clump.

He tossed the towel, slipped on a pair of boxers, and crawled onto the mattress, pulled the mass of sheets and blankets over himself, and went to sleep.

It seemed like only seconds later when he was awakened by his ringing phone, but the sunlight coming through the newspapers taped to his windows told him at least a few hours had passed. He grabbed the cell phone from the charger and answered the call, his teeth sticky and tongue dry.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Sorry to wake you, Sergeant,” Charlotte said. He could tell from the stiff and formal tone in her voice that she was not alone. “There’s an assistant district attorney here who’d like to speak with you.”

“I’ll be right down,” Wade said.

He pulled on a T?shirt and a pair of sweats, washed his mouth out with Listerine, spit it out in his kitchen sink, and then trudged barefoot down the stairs to the station.

Because he was groggy, and still not entirely used to his new surroundings, there was an off?kilter, dreamlike quality to what he was seeing. The sight of the deputies in the cell, the homeless woman sipping a Coke at a desk, and the ADA, a woman in a business suit clutching the handle of her slim briefcase like it was a life preserver only made it seem more surreal.

Charlotte stood beside the prosecutor and watched Wade with a mix of wariness and amusement.

He trudged past them to his desk, where he’d dumped all the junk food that they’d bought that night, and picked out a Milky Way bar, which he unwrapped as he turned to face his guest.

“May I help you?” he asked.

“I’m assistant district attorney Pamela Lefcourt and I am here to tell you that you are way, way out of line.” She pointed to the cells. “I’m ordering you to release those deputies right now.”

Wade took a bite out of his Milky Way bar and nodded to Charlotte, who got up and unlocked the cells. Just the taste of the chocolate and caramel seemed to clear his head, though he knew he was one long blink away from sleep.

Lefcourt took a step toward him. She was in her thirties, her dark suit perfectly pressed, her silk blouse open just enough to show a trail of freckles leading into her cleavage. Her hair was pulled back tight, making her face look even more severe than it already was.

“What the hell were you thinking arresting them?”

“I was thinking that abducting people off the street of one city and transporting them to another against their will is kidnapping.”

“You are meddling in matters so far above your pay grade they are in a galaxy far, far away.”

“Way, way and far, far,” Wade said. “My, my.”

He took another bite of the Milky Way bar as the deputies, smirking at Wade, gathered their weapons from where they’d been left on Charlotte’s desk.

“I don’t appreciate your attitude,” Lefcourt said.

“You ought to. I’m letting these boys walk out of here as a courtesy to you,” Wade said. “But I will arrest anybody I see dumping people here.”

“You have no authority to do that.”

“I think I do. But if you like, we can go talk to a judge about it. I’m sure bringing me back into a courtroom to discuss illegal activities by law enforcement officers won’t create too much attention,” Wade said. “Or maybe I’ll just follow your example and start ferrying our homeless out to the suburbs. I hear the parks are big and beautiful out there.”

Lefcourt’s cheeks turned bright red and her nostrils flared. He allowed himself another look at her freckled chest. There was a blush there too. He wasn’t entirely sure if she was furious or having an orgasm.

“I’m going to call Chief Reardon about this,” she said.

“Please do.” He finished off the candy bar, but the slight sugar rush was no match for his fatigue. “Be sure to give him my best.”

She marched to the door, the two deputies following her. Wade watched her go, yawned, and without saying a word to Charlotte, headed upstairs to go back to sleep.

He closed the door, got onto his mattress, and pulled the bedding over his head to shield his eyes from the daylight. As he lay there in his dark cocoon, he caught Mandy’s scent on the mattress and all his troubles seemed to drift away, taking his consciousness along with them.

Wade awoke on the floor, the sheets twisted tightly around him, the phone ringing again. He was less groggy this time when he answered.

“Yeah?”

“You were right,” Billy said.

“About what?” Wade checked his watch. It was 3:00 p.m.

“Our first call is a corpse,” he said.

Wade was instantly alert and sat up straight on the floor. “Where are you?”

“Outside the gates of the old King Steel factory,” Billy said.

“Don’t move. I’m on my way.”

He hung up and called the dispatcher, asking her to send the paramedics, homicide detectives, the medical examiner, and a forensic investigation unit to the scene.

Wade put on his uniform, hurried down the stairs to the station, and grabbed the keys to a squad car from his desk drawer.

He drove out of the parking lot, got out of the car, locked the gate behind him, and then flicked on the lights and siren as he sped off.

Wade didn’t use the siren because he was in a hurry and needed to clear a path in the traffic ahead of him. He did it to attract attention, to let people know that the police were there and responsive. He wanted the community to get accustomed to the sound and draw some security from it instead of fear.

He got to the factory in less than five minutes.

Billy’s car was parked on the street, blocking the gate into the desolate, weed?choked parking lot. He sat on the hood, warily eyeing a dozen men who stood outside a bar across the street, watching what was happening, which so far was just the breeze fluttering the yellow crime scene tape that encircled the rusted hulk of a stripped Honda Accord in the parking lot.

Wade parked beside Billy’s car and got out. Billy was idly fingering the scorched hole in his shirt.

“What have we got?” Wade asked.

“A dead woman,” he said. “She’s in that car.”

Wade nodded. Billy seemed a bit dazed, either because he’d been shot by his boss or because he had just seen his first corpse or maybe a combination of the two. It was understandable.

“Who called it in?”

“The birds,” Billy said.

“Excuse me?”

“I was cruising by and saw all these squawking crows swarming that junker,” Billy said. “I was curious what the birds were so interested in. I found out.”

“Did you touch anything?”

Billy shook his head.

Wade slipped on a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket and walked slowly over to the junked car, surveying the cracked asphalt and clumps of weeds for evidence. There were lots of bottle caps, broken glass, and fast?food trash around, but he doubted that any of it came from the killer. The flock of crows watched him warily from their perch on the fence twenty yards away.

The Honda had been picked clean by human vultures years ago, leaving only the metal skeleton to rot away, used as a toilet by every man and four?legged animal that passed it.

A young woman, in her late teens or twenties, was splayed out on the exposed coiled springs of the backseat, her bare feet sticking out of the open door. He didn’t see a purse, wallet, cell phone, or her shoes.

She was dressed in an elbow?length cropped cardigan sweater over a V?neck T?shirt that didn’t quite cover her stomach and a pair of denim mini?shorts not much larger than panties. Her feet were soft and clean, just like her hands. Her nails, on both fingers and toes, were manicured and polished.

All of that told Wade that she wasn’t a street person. She had a home and probably a job.

Her skin was pale, as if she’d completely bled out, but Wade didn’t see any large wounds that would account for that much blood loss. Her hair was matted with dried blood from a gash on her scalp, just above her forehead, and there was some light spatter on her clothes, but that was it. There were no large bloodstains on her clothes and no visible blood in the car.

Her left leg was swollen, blue, and bent at an odd angle, as if she had an extra joint between her knee and her hip. The flesh around her thigh was blue?black and engorged. Her arms, legs, and face were covered with divots pecked out by the crows.

She wasn’t a woman anymore. She was carrion.

Wade had been at this long enough to know where all the blood had gone and what had probably killed her. But that didn’t put him much ahead of the game, which was OK. This wasn’t his crime to solve.

He heard a siren and turned to see a paramedic unit heading their way.

“Why did you call them?” Billy asked. “There’s nothing they can do for her now.”

“She’s not officially dead until a medical professional says so, even if her head is across the street.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

“Someone dumped her here after she was hit by a car, or took a beating, or had a bad fall,” Wade said. “Whatever happened, she died from internal bleeding.”

“If it’s internal,” Billy said. “How can you see it? You got X?ray vision?”

“Did you see her leg?”

“Yeah,” Billy said, grimacing with disgust at the memory.

“She broke her femur, a sharp edge or a bone shard punctured an artery, and she bled out into her leg,” Wade said. “That’s why it’s all bloated and blue, while the rest of her is so pale.”

“I thought she was pale because she’s dead,” Billy said.

“The thigh can hold a lot of blood,” Wade said.

“I don’t want to know how you know that.”

“You learn a lot of things you don’t want to on this job,” Wade said.

The paramedic truck pulled up behind Wade’s squad car, and two guys in their twenties who looked like they hadn’t slept in days got out. They put on their gloves as they approached the officers.

“What’ve we got?” one of the paramedics asked. His hair was disheveled and his face was covered with stubble that looked like tar.

“The body is in the car over there,” Wade said. “Be careful, it’s a crime scene.”

“This isn’t our first day on the job,” Stubble?face said and went over with his partner to take a look. He leaned over her body and did a cursory check of her vital signs, and they came back to Wade. “She’s very dead.”

“Internal bleeding,” Billy said.

“You think?” Stubble?face said.

Billy nodded sagely. “Thighs can hold a lot of blood.”

Wade sighed and turned to the paramedic. “I just need an MT slip and you can be on your way.”

Stubble?face reached into his back pocket for a pad that resembled a traffic ticket book. He quickly filled out a medical treatment form, tore off the top copy, and handed it to Wade.

“Have a nice day,” the paramedic said.

“You too,” Wade said.

The paramedics left. Billy watched them go. So did the dozen people across the street.

“What now?” Billy asked.

“We secure the scene until the homicide detectives get here.”

“How long is that going to be?”

“Another ten or fifteen minutes,” Wade said. “Forensics might take as long as an hour if they are stretched thin. Then it’s out of our hands.”

“So we’re basically just guarding a corpse.”

“Pretty much,” Wade said.

Billy sighed. “Still beats standing at the door of a Walmart checking receipts.”