'Yes, sir.' The words came from both men in two-part harmony.
Andreas walked over to the dumpster and peered inside. Without looking back he said, 'Was the lid up when you got here?'
'No, sir,' said the rookie.
'How did you open it?'
'With my baton.' Again his voice was shaky.
'Good.' Andreas believed in praising the good along with damning the bad.
The container was nearly full, packed with commercialsize black garbage bags. The body was on top: face up, eyes closed. Andreas always dreaded these first moments staring at the face of a once-living, unique being now reduced to the ubiquitous status of victim. Andreas felt a shiver. This was not the face of a man. It was a boy.
'You didn't close his eyes by chance did you?'
'No, sir, I never touched the body, only his clothes.' He almost barked his answer.
Andreas looked at the man from the coroner's office. 'Can you tell me if he died like that, or someone closed his eyes for him?'
'I'd guess someone did it for him.'
'I can guess on my own, Spiros. I want to know if you can tell me for sure.'
'Probably not.'
'So, whose garbage is this?'
'Belongs to that bar over there.' Manos pointed to the back door of a building directly across from the lot. 'It's a notorious late-hours gay bar, lot of drugs in there. Our guess is that the victim was in the wrong place at the wrong time, looking for the wrong thing.'
'And just how did he happen to end up in the dumpster?'
Manos seemed surprised at the question. 'Whoever killed him hid the body there to make time to get away before someone found it. This part of the street gets pretty busy late at night, especially just before sunrise when the bar closes.' He finished the last part with a smirk.
'I bet it does.' Andreas again looked in the dumpster. 'So, where's last night's garbage?' Manos again looked puzzled. 'What do you mean? It's in the dumpster.'
'I see, so when the bar closed last night, probably around sunrise from what you said, whoever dumped the garbage carefully placed it around the body or pulled him out, put the bags in, and then tossed him back on top?' Manos' face was beet-red. Andreas didn't wait for an answer.
'Have you spoken with anyone from the bar?'
'No one's there yet.'
'When you talk to the guy who dumped the garbage, I'm sure he'll swear there was no body in the dumpster when he did. But that corpse has been dead a lot longer than since sunrise.' Andreas shook his head. 'I don't think this is the murder scene. Somebody picked this place to dump the body.'
He gestured for Kouros to get a camera from the car. 'We've got a lot more going on here than just some kid in the wrong place at the wrong time. And who said he's foreign?'
The rookie raised his hand. 'He looks a lot like the Eastern Europeans living around here.'
'With all the intermarriages, so do a lot of Greeks. This kid could be Greek, and if I get a better look at the ring on his finger I might know for sure.' The coroner started toward the body.
Andreas put out his hand to stop him. 'No, Spiros, don't. I want everything videotaped exactly as it is before anyone touches the body. I'll get what I need from this.' He took the camera from Kouros, leaned back in and took a few pictures.
'So, let's see what we have.'
He brought one of the photos up onto the screen on the back of the camera and zoomed in on what he wanted to see.
'Damn handy, these things.' He stared for a moment; everyone was quiet. 'Gotcha!' He practically shouted the word.
Manos and Kouros moved in for a closer look at the screen. It was a blurry image of a crest from a ring, but distinct enough to make out the emblem of Athens Academy, the most prestigious private school in all of Greece: the place where the richest and most powerful sent their children to study and, more important, to network a life for themselves and, on occasion, for their parents. Next to the crest was the year of graduation: one year from now.
'He's just a boy, and I bet he's no foreigner,' said Andreas. He'd also bet, but didn't say aloud, that a media circus was about to begin. He looked up from the image of the ring and over to the dumpster, then to the backdoor of perhaps the seediest gay bar in the seediest section of Athens. What more could the press ask for? It was a story they could run with forever.
Whoever set this up knew that, too. Anyway you looked at it, Andreas sensed this was going to get real messy, real fast. He looked at Manos. 'What did the guy who called your precinct say? That he'd found the body while rummaging through dumpsters?'
'Something like that. Sounded like a bum, wouldn't leave a name.'
Andreas shook his head. 'Whoever set this up wanted the body to be found here. He wouldn't leave that to chance. Find your caller and we find our killer. Trace that call ASAP.'
Manos almost seemed to snicker. 'We're way ahead of you, Chief. Already did the trace. It gave us nothing. We even called the number and no one answered. It's for one of those disposable cell phones you can buy anywhere. This one was activated last night.'
Andreas shook his head. 'Gave you nothing, huh? Like a fucking destitute bum rummaging through garbage bins would buy a cell phone to call in a dead body. Yianni, let's get out of here. We've got some catching up to do. Someone definitely is way ahead of us.' He stared at Manos long enough to get the point across without saying the words, but it's not you.
2
Zanni Kostopoulos looked at his watch. It was still early. His assistant wasn't due in for another half-hour. Things weren't going as planned and he worried the media might turn on him. They would for sure if they ever found out. He tried not to think about it.
Zanni wasn't an easy man to get to know, and an even tougher one to like. He'd achieved his wealth the old fashioned way: stolen, bribed, and laundered for it. And, if the truth to rumor could be measured by its persistence, he'd killed for it more than once. Today, though, the Kostopoulos name was 'a pillar of Athenian society.' At least that's what his third wife paid several publicists to get virtually every society reporter in Greece to repeat ad nauseam. If you linked 'respected international businessman' and 'philanthropist' to a name long enough, people started believing it. Or so went the theory.
Mrs Kostopoulos' plan certainly had worked on her husband; Zanni was intoxicated with himself, never missing a word uttered about him in the media, and bothered to no end when the press did not grasp that his vast fortune made him right in all things and deserving of public esteem equivalent to his wealth. Each morning, the assistant he'd hired solely for the purpose of keeping track of his fame gave him a folio containing clippings and tapes of every recorded mention of his name in the past twenty-four hours. His mood for the next twenty-four depended upon the size of the package she handed him.
Where is she? Zanni stepped away from his desk and paced around the room. He'd experienced the media turning on him before and didn't like it one bit. That last run-in was what got him into this current mess. At least that was his take on it. He still bristled at the memory of his public battle with the owner of Athens' most popular soccer team. As Zanni saw it, the owner was no different than he — both had returned from family exile in the former Soviet bloc to amass vast, newly-minted Greek fortunes — and yet, Zanni was forever in the other man's shadow. Zanni's decision to attempt wresting control of the team away from his rival wasn't made for business reasons; he did it because he believed the team was the source of the other's prominence.
Two such famous boys fighting over a nationally popular toy had every headline writer and talk show host in frenzy for weeks. It was a bitter fight with a rival at least as tough as he was and resulted in an even more bitter loss. Zanni felt he'd been singled out by the media for ridicule, and looked for someone other than himself to blame for his humiliation. He settled on an easy target: old-line Athens society. Many old-liners barely hid their disdain for what they considered upstart, political opportunist, nouveaux riches. Accusing them of relishing his fall was undoubtedly accurate. What he couldn't accept, though, was the obvious fact that old-line society would prefer both men to perish in the press.