When Audrey learned who’d be picking her up this morning, who she’d been partnered with on this case-the loathsome Roy Bugbee-she felt her body go rigid with annoyance. More than annoyance, she had to admit to herself. Something stronger. This was not a worthy feeling, not a generous impulse.
Silently, as she dressed-she kept a clean outfit in the parlor closet-she recited one of her favorite verses of scripture, from Romans 15: “Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be likeminded one toward another, according to Christ Jesus.” She loved this line, even as she realized she didn’t yet fully understand it. But she knew it meant that the Lord first teaches us what is true consolation and true patience, and then He instills this in our hearts. Reciting this to herself got her through Leon’s recent sulking fits, his drinking problem, lent her a much-needed serenity. Her goal had been to re-read the entire Bible by year’s end, but the irregularity of her schedule made that impossible.
Roy Bugbee was a fellow detective in Major Cases who had an unaccountable loathing toward her. He didn’t know her. He knew only her outward appearance, her sex, and the color of her skin. His words cut her, though never as deeply as Leon’s.
She gathered her equipment, her Sig-Sauer and her handcuffs, rights cards and IBO request forms and her PT, her handheld radio. While she waited, she sat in Leon’s favorite chair, the worn rust BarcaLounger, and opened her old leather-bound King James Bible, her mother’s, but there was barely time to find her place before Detective Bugbee pulled up in his city car.
He was slovenly. The car, which he was lucky enough to have at his disposal-she hadn’t been given one-was littered with pop cans and Styrofoam Quarter Pounder boxes. It smelled of old French fries and cigarette smoke.
He didn’t say hello or good morning. Audrey said good morning to him, however, determined to rise above his pettiness. She sat in uncomfortable silence, amid the squalor, observing the scattering of ketchup packets on the floor around her feet and hoping that none of them was on the seat beneath her plum business suit. The stain would never come out.
After a few minutes he spoke as he flicked the turn signal at a red light. “You got lucky, huh?” Bugbee’s blond hair was slicked back in a pompadour. His eyebrows were so pale they were almost invisible.
“Pardon me?”
His laugh was raucous. “I don’t mean with your husband. If Owens wasn’t drunk on his ass when Dispatch called, you’da been assigned to him. But lucky you, you get me.”
“Mm hm,” she said, her tone pleasant. When she first arrived at Major Cases, only two of the men would talk to her, Owens being one of them. The others acted as if she wasn’t even there. She’d say, “Good morning,” and they wouldn’t answer. There was no women’s bathroom, of course-not for one woman-so she had to share the men’s. One of the guys kept urinating right on the toilet seat just to make it unpleasant for her. Her fellow detectives thought it was hilarious. She’d heard it was Bugbee, and she believed it. He’d done “practical jokes” on her she didn’t like to think about. Finally she’d had to resort to using the bathroom downstairs in the warrant unit.
“Body found in a Dumpster on Hastings,” Bugbee continued. “Wrapped up like a burrito in Hefty bags.”
“How long has it been there?”
“No idea. You better not go blow your cookies on me.”
“I’ll do my best. Who found it, one of the homeless looking for food?”
“Trash guy. You lose it like you did with that little black girl, you’ll get yanked off the case, I’ll see to it.”
Little Tiffany Akins, seven years old, had died in her arms a few months earlier. They’d got her father cuffed, but her mother and her mother’s boyfriend had already died of their gunshot wounds by the time Major Cases showed up. Audrey could not keep herself from weeping. The beautiful little girl, wearing SpongeBob pajamas, could have been her own child if she’d been able to have kids. She didn’t understand what kind of father would be so blinded by rage and jealousy that he’d kill not only his estranged wife and her lover but his own daughter too.
She recited to herself: Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be likeminded one toward another…
“I’ll do my best, Roy,” Audrey said.
16
The crime scene was a small blacktopped parking lot behind a ratty little diner called Lucky’s. A yellow streamer of evidence tape secured the area, barricaded off a small gathering of the usuals. It was remarkable, Audrey thought, and not a little sad, that this unknown vagrant was getting in death the kind of attention that he surely never got when it could have made a difference. A man wanders through the streets alone and unnoticed and despairing. Now, with the life gone out of his body, a crowd gathers to pay him the respect he’d never received in life.
No TV cameras here, though. No Newschannel Six truck. Maybe not even a reporter from the Fenwick Free Press. No one wanted to come down to the five hundred block of Hastings at six in the morning to report on the discovery of some vagrant’s body.
Roy Bugbee parked the city car on the street between two patrol cars. They got out without exchanging another word. She noticed the white van belonging to the Identification Bureau Office, meaning that the crime-scene techs were already there. Not the Medical Examiner yet. The uniformed first officer, who’d notified Dispatch, was swanning around self-importantly, warding off neighborhood gawkers, clearly enjoying the biggest thing that had happened to him all week. Maybe all month. He approached Audrey and Bugbee with a clipboard and demanded that they sign in.
Her eye was caught by a flash of light, then another. The IBO evidence tech on the scene was Bert Koopmans. She liked Koopmans. He was smart and thorough, obsessive-compulsive like the best crime-scene techs, but without being arrogant or difficult. Her kind of cop. Something of a gun nut, maintained his own personal Web site on firearms and forensics. He was a lean man in his fifties with a receding hairline and thick Polar Gray spectacles. He was snapping pictures, switching between Polaroid and digital and 35mm and video like some crazed paparazzi.
Her boss, Sergeant Jack Noyce, the head of the Major Case Team, was talking on his Nextel phone. He saw Audrey and Bugbee duck under the yellow tape, held up a finger to ask them to wait. Noyce was a round-faced, stout man with melancholy eyes, gentle and sweet natured. He’d been the one who’d talked her into putting in for Major Cases. He said he wanted a woman on the squad. Never had he admitted it might have been a mistake. He was her steadfast defender, and she did him the favor of never going to him with the petty insults of her colleagues. From time to time he’d hear about something and would take her aside, promise to talk to them. He never did, though. Noyce preferred to avoid confrontation, and who could blame him, really?
He ended the call and said, “Unknown older white male, sixties maybe, gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Waste Management guy spotted it after he loaded the Dumpster on his frontloader. First pickup too. What a way to start your day.”
“Before or after he tipped the trash into the hopper, boss?” asked Audrey.
“He noticed it before. Left the contents intact, stopped a patrol car.”
“Coulda been a lot worse,” Bugbee said. “Coulda put it through the compactor, huh?” He chortled, winked at his boss. “’Stead of a burrito we’d have a quesadilla. Ever see a body like that, Audrey? You’d really blow lunch.”
“You make a very good point there, Roy,” Noyce said, smiling thinly. Audrey had always suspected that her boss shared her dislike of Roy Bugbee but was too polite to let on.
Bugbee put a comradely hand on Noyce’s shoulder as he strutted past.