I rolled the window down an inch. Between the beats of our screamer, I heard Logan and Shuttles’s siren. It would be close.
“Next block, Harry. Turn right.”
A radio car at each end of the block had secured an intersection at the edge of a warehouse district. On one corner was a restaurant equipment wholesaler, catty-corner was an industrial laundry.
We raced down the street from one direction, Logan and Shuttles from the other. A semi sat dead in the street, a red Mazda a dozen feet from the big truck’s grille. Harry skidded to a stop and dove into the rain, no time to pull on his rain gear. I slid into a plastic slicker and followed.
Harry splashed toward the Mazda as Logan jumped from his vehicle, almost on the Mazda’s bumper. Logan stepped in front of Harry, finger jabbing, voice angry. The uniformed officers closed in, drawn by the smell of confrontation. I hurried over, rain pouring into my eyes.
“I’ve got the scene, Nautilus,” Logan said. “Get back in your vehicle and haul ass.”
“Not gonna happen, Logan,” Harry said. “It’s ours.”
“I got seniority, Nautilus.”
“Then join AARP,” Harry said. “I’m not saving your worthless ass anymore.”
Logan froze. His eyes tightened. “It was a Forensics screwup, not mine.”
“You almost blew the case, Logan,” Harry said. “Have the balls to own up to it.”
Logan’s hands squeezed into fists. “For a simple fuck, Nautilus, you’re a sanctimonious son of a bitch.”
“And for a cop, Logan, you’re a helluva defense lawyer.”
Logan made a guttural sound and launched a punch toward Harry’s gut. Harry blocked it, grabbed Logan’s wrist, twisted, dropped to a knee. Logan went down. Harry rammed Logan’s arm behind his back. He writhed on the wet pavement, cursing and threatening.
“Knife!” someone yelled, a nightmare word. Everyone froze, heads turning, hands dropping to holsters.
“Easy, guys,” Tyree Shuttles said, a few feet behind the Mazda. He pointed into shadows by the curb. “I found a big-ass knife. Over here in the gutter.”
Harry released Logan’s wrist. Logan squirmed up, gasping and wheezing, a heavy smoker. He leaned against the Mazda to catch his breath. Something caught his eye, and for a moment Logan seemed transfixed by an image near the sidewalk. I turned to look, but all I saw was water rushing down the gutter, dumping into a storm sewer.
Harry and I jogged to Shuttles, kneeling beside a metal object in the gutter, only a portion of the handle visible above the water. Logan wheezed up, looked at the weapon, then at Shuttles. Harry backed away and sighed, having the civility to invent an ad hoc protocol.
“Shuttles found evidence, Logan. You guys get the case.”
Logan leaned against the driver’s side of the Mazda, looked inside. He stared a moment, pulled a flashlight from his pocket, checked again, shook his head. Logan laughed without a trace of humor.
“You want this one, Nautilus? It’s yours.”
Logan turned away, walked back to his vehicle, climbed in the passenger’s side. Shuttles shot a glance at his vehicle, Logan sulking within. The young detective looked embarrassed.
“I’m sorry about what went down with Pace,” Shuttles said. “He’s been in a shitty mood the last couple weeks.”
Harry brushed rain from his face, stepped closer to Shuttles, lowering his voice so the uniforms couldn’t hear. “I know you won’t request a new partner assignment, Tyree. I respect that. But transfer to another district. Get a new partner that way. Logan’s not doing your career any good.”
“Pace is retiring in two months, Harry. He’ll be gone soon.”
“You sure?”
Shuttles nodded.
Harry bounced a gentle punch off the young detective’s shoulder, said, “Hang in there.”
The slender black officer walked back toward his car. He paused, turned to Harry, and mouthed Thanks. Shuttles climbed in, flicked off the flashers behind the grille, pulled away. I didn’t envy him the rest of his shift with Logan pissing and moaning and inventing ways he got screwed.
Harry told the uniforms the show was over and to get back to diverting traffic, if any happened to show up. I put on latex gloves, opened the door of the Mazda. The victim’s bowels had released and the car was thick with the smell of blood and excrement. She was tumbled across the transmission hump, her head on the passenger’s seat, braided and beaded hair flung like a rag doll’s. Her nose appeared broken. Her lower lip was torn. There were wounds across her torso, her blouse glossy with blood. Her throat had been slit.
I took a deep breath and continued my visual inventory. One of her hands looked odd. It was hanging down on the passenger’s side, in shadow. I went to the passenger’s side and opened the door, my fears confirmed. Three fingers broken, the digits bent backward. It was unsettling, like a hand assembled incorrectly.
I made myself concentrate on the pillaging of the vehicle-sound system removed, wires dangling. The glove box was open, contents scattered. Maps half open on the floor, registration, manual, tire-pressure gauge. Sun visors pulled forward. Sometimes folks clipped a few spare bucks there, for toll roads and the like. Blood was everywhere, like the interior had been hosed down with an artery.
I knew why Logan had passed on the case. This one had an immediate bad feel, a one-glance Creep Factor. I studied the woman again, a cold wave spreading through my gut. The smell overwhelmed me and I withdrew.
“She was beaten and cut,” I told Harry. “It’s bad.”
Harry had gone to the car for his rain gear, not that it would do much good. He leaned in and scanned the scene for several minutes, his mind taking pictures. Now and then a detail pulled a grunt or a sigh. He studied the floor at the woman’s feet, put his hand in, touched the floor, looked at his fingertips. Then, aiming the flashlight close to the floor, he repeated the motion.
“What is it, bro?” I asked.
Harry didn’t hear me. He turned his face to the sky, like he was looking for the answer to something.
CHAPTER 2
Lucas crouched in shadow beside the fast-food restaurant’s stinking Dumpster, wadding cold French fries in his fist and jamming them into his mouth. Untouched fries were safest, he figured. The cast-off sandwiches all had bite marks.
Lucas pushed sodden, foot-long black hair from his eyes, brushed French-fry salt from his thick beard. He leaned out into the light. There was a bank beside the restaurant, a small branch office with an ATM in the drive-through. Getting money was critical to Lucas’s plan. Money breeds money, hadn’t he heard that a thousand times? Like a mantra: Money breeds money.
In the half hour he’d been waiting, over a dozen cars had slipped to the ATM, drivers making transactions, zooming away. Two of the drivers had pulled to the side, close to the rear of the restaurant. Lucas had watched as the drivers turned on their dome lights and fiddled with banking paperwork.
The door at the back of the restaurant slammed open. Lucas froze in the shadows and stench.
“You there, you,” a voice yelled, angry. Lucas felt his muscles tighten, his hands ball into hard fists.
“Me?” said someone inside the place.
“You-Darryl, is it?”
“Daniel,” a voice grunted.
“I got soft drink canisters out here. Get ’em inside.”
“I still got to finish mopping the-”
“Now.”
The door banged shut. Lucas slithered beneath the wheeled Dumpster. His heart sank when he saw he’d forgotten his purse. Made of cheap white vinyl, it lay past the Dumpster, almost in the cone of light from the restaurant. The door reopened and feet appeared. Canisters were hefted in the door.
The door shut. Lucas squirmed from beneath the Dumpster, pavement grease now added to his shirt and pants, pulled from a donations pile outside a Goodwill store. He’d left his institutional clothing with the other castoffs.