Chapter 3
Captain Rooney looked over the reports and statements from the various officers. They were, as he had half expected, of little use. The cab driver had given them a bum address and nobody had located the bloodstained woman with only one shoe. She had disappeared — could even be dead. The Summerses had been questioned again to see if they could match the description from the anonymous caller. He was similar, they said, but they were not too clear about the driver of the vehicle. When shown a photograph of Norman Hastings, they were sure that it was not him. Rooney doodled over his notebook.
He wondered again if they were looking for two killers, the man and the blonde woman working together. They had killed Hastings and then had an argument — maybe they had come to blows inside the car at the shopping mall. The woman subsequently made the anonymous phone call describing her partner, husband or lover... But if that was so, she would have known the killer’s height and could even have given his name, although that might have incriminated her, too. Rooney concluded that the woman was probably not involved in the murder and did not know the killer’s name or height because she was, as he had first thought, a prostitute the driver had picked up.
The missing blonde woman had become a vital witness to the murder of Norman Hastings. Somebody out there knew who she was. A man and a woman had helped her out of the cab; the man had even paid her fare. Rooney instructed his officers to step up the search for her, and called in the two officers Lorraine had met earlier.
He checked over all the statements they had taken. They were convinced that no one had lied. They thought the cab driver might have been mistaken. ‘We saw only one blonde woman, Captain — but she’d got all her teeth, her hair was short and she was real smart, just staying with her friend. She didn’t look like a whore or the type to know one.’
Rooney told them to question everybody once more. Seeing them exchange covert, bored looks, Rooney snapped, ‘Get the cab driver to go with you, if needs be. Go on, get moving!’
The two men had just reached the office door when Josh Bean walked in. ‘You better look at this, Captain.’
Rooney reached out his podgy hand for the internal fax sheet. Bean gave the nod for the two men to leave the room, but to wait outside. Rooney looked up. ‘We’d better check this out. Looks like our missing girl.’
He snatched up his jacket, told the two officers they could go off duty. If the new information panned out, they had just found their star witness.
The run-down apartment block was a graffiti jungle. Burned-out cars littered the disused yard and every window was smashed. The Paradise Apartments billboard, showing palm trees and a semi-naked girl sunbathing, was peeling and covered in daubed slogans.
Rooney stepped under the obligatory yellow tape to join the group gathered round the covered corpse. There were five patrol cars, lights blinking, and a horde of officers assembled to protect the men in this notorious down-town area. Groups of kids were hanging around watching avidly. This wasn’t unusual in the middle of the day as most of them never bothered to attend school for more than one or two days a week, if that. This was crack-dealer territory. The kids on their BMX bikes more than likely had shooters stuck up their fashionable jackets.
‘Who found her?’ Rooney asked as he neared the corpse.
That kid over there, one with the red hat on, but he must have had help to drag her from the trunk of the car. That’s been there for weeks, by the way, the car not the body:’
Rooney stared at the kid, who was no more than six or seven and laughing as he pointed to the dead body, nudging his pals.
‘She was in the wrecked car, nearest the tapes. He dragged her out here, said he thought she was alive — but if she had any jewellery on her, she ain’t got it now.’
As he crouched down, Rooney took out his handkerchief to cover his face — the stench was of a body at least two days old. So much for the kid’s story about thinking she was still alive. She was wearing a floral patterned dress, with a belt and flat black shoes. Rooney noted they were the same size as the one they had found in Hastings’s car. Her thin legs were bare, and one stretched out at an odd angle. Her arms were by her sides, the back of her dress undone. The thin blonde hair was matted with dark congealed blood; a wound gaped at the base of her skull, so deep, he could see white bone. Slowly they turned over the unwieldy corpse. Her face had been hammered out of all recognition. Blood obliterated the brightly coloured flowers that had once patterned the front of her dress.
There was nothing Rooney could do; he couldn’t tell if it was their witness or not. His only option was to wait for the report to come in, and for her to be cleaned up so he could see her face.
‘Any of her teeth missing?’ he asked as an afterthought.
An officer peered down into the mass of blood hiding her face. ‘I can’t tell, her nose has been flattened so bad...’
Rooney returned to his office with Bean. They opened a bottle of Scotch, and both had a heavy hit. No matter how many you see, it’s always the smell that gets to you, stays in your nostrils. The sweet, sticky, cloying smell of rotting flesh.
‘I think it’s our witness. Cinderella,’ Rooney said flatly. ‘Fuck it! Really needed to talk to her.’ He sighed.
‘Yeah.’ Bean knocked back his drink.
Rooney looked up as his secretary peered in. A message had come through from the city morgue: the corpse wouldn’t be ready for viewing until at least the following day, maybe longer. Did he want to speak to the scene-of-crime officers? Rooney jerked his head for Bean to go and do the leg-work; he had some paperwork to finish. Bean raised his eyebrow, knowing Rooney always said that when he wanted to take himself off home. But he was wrong this time: Rooney spent the next hour making phone calls to different precincts. It was something one of the officers had said — or he might even have said it himself. She had been hammered in the face and at the back of the head. He wanted to know if anyone else had a similar homicide — weapon used probably some kind of hammer, that was all... In reality he passed more time chatting to old buddies, in no hurry for the facts. He knew he wouldn’t get them straight away, if at all. Old files would have to be sifted through, and checked out on computer. Probably wasting everybody’s time, but he caught up on gossip, arranged a game of billiards and agreed to have a drink with Colin Sparks, an old poker-playing pal he’d not seen for six months.
Sitting on a bar stool in Joe’s Diner, his fat ass bulging over the red plastic stool top, Rooney had downed two beers and a chaser by the time Sparks walked in, but promptly ordered another round and a fresh bowl of peanuts.
Sparks whacked him on the back, then produced a dogeared file. ‘I’m late because I got interested in that! It happened before I got transferred — it’s been around for four years. Dead hooker. Go on, read it.’
Rooney grinned at the young, fresh-faced lieutenant, and cuffed him like a father would his son. ‘Looking sharper than ever, Colin. How you keeping?’
‘Fine, new baby on the way — everything’s good.’
Rooney opened the file. He looked at the prostitute’s face, her dyed blonde hair scraped back from her head showing at least an inch of dark hair growth. Half Mexican. Maria Valez, aged thirty-two. The next page had a photograph of her body when it was discovered in the trunk of a wrecked Buick. Like the dead woman that afternoon, Maria’s face had been virtually obliterated by heavy blows. There was an enlarged shot of the back of her scalp, showing the deep wound. Type of weapon, possibly a claw-sided hammer. No witness, no arrest, no charges, case closed for lack of evidence, but authorized to remain open on file.