“I’m sorry about that,” Noyce said under his breath.
Audrey didn’t entirely understand what he was sorry about. “He’s got a unique sense of humor,” she said, taking a stab.
“Owens was intoxicated, according to Dispatch. Bugbee was next on the call list. I wouldn’t have partnered you two, but…” He shrugged, his voice trailing off.
Noyce waved at someone. Audrey turned to look. Curtis Decker, the body mover, was getting out of his old black Ford Econoline van. Decker, a small man of ghostly pallor, had a funeral home in Fenwick and was also the town’s conveyance specialist. He’d been transferring bodies from crime scenes to the morgue at Boswell Medical Center for twenty-seven years. Decker lighted a cigarette, leaned back against his van, chatting idly to his assistant, waiting his turn.
Noyce’s phone chirped. He picked it up, said, “Noyce,” and Audrey silently excused herself.
Bert Koopmans was painstakingly brushing powder on the rim of the battered dark-blue Dumpster. Without turning his head from his work, he said, “Morning, Aud.”
“Good morning, Bert.” As she drew closer to the Dumpster, she caught a whiff of a ripe stench, which mingled with the odor of bacon that wafted from the open service entrance door.
The asphalt was littered with cigarette butts. This was where the busboys and short-order cooks smoked. There were a few jagged shards from a brown beer bottle. She knew there wasn’t likely to be any evidence here, no shell casings or anything, since the body had been dumped.
“Partnered with Bugbee on this, I see.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“The Lord trieth the righteous.”
She smiled, her eyes straying to the body in the Dumpster, wrapped tightly in black trash bags. It did look a little like a take-out burrito. The bundle lay atop a foul mound of slimy lettuce heads and banana peels, a discarded submarine sandwich, next to a giant empty tin of Kaola Gold All-Vegetable Solid Griddle Shortening.
“Was it right on top like that?” she asked.
“No. Buried under a bunch of trash.”
“I assume you haven’t found anything, shell casings or whatever.”
“I didn’t really look that hard. There’s eight cubic yards of garbage in there. I figure that’s a job for the uniformed guys.”
“You already print the bags?”
“Huh,” Koopmans said. “Hadn’t thought of it.” Meaning: Of course, what do you think?
“So what’s your take, smart guy?”
“On what?”
“You unwrap that package up there, Bert?”
“First thing I did.”
“And? A mugging? Did you find a wallet or anything?”
Koopmans finished dusting a patch, carefully replaced his brush in the kit. “Just this.” He held up a plastic sandwich bag.
“Crack cocaine,” she said.
“Off-white chunky material in a Baggie, to be precise.”
“Which looks like crack. Like eighty dollars’ worth.”
He shrugged.
“A white guy in this part of town,” she said, “has to be a drug deal.”
“If the deal went bad, how come he got to keep the crack?”
“Good question.”
“Where’s your partner?”
She turned, saw Bugbee smoking, laughing raucously with one of the uniforms. “Hard at work interviewing witnesses, looks like. Bert, you’ll get this stuff tested, right?”
“Standard procedure.”
“How long does it take to get back results?”
“Few weeks, given the MSP’s work load.” The Michigan State Police lab did all the drug testing.
“You happen to have one of those field test kits with you?”
“Somewhere, sure.”
“Can I have a pair of gloves? I left mine in the car.”
Koopmans reached into a nylon rucksack beside him and pulled out a blue cardboard box, from which he yanked a pair of latex gloves. She snapped them on. “Could you hand me that Baggie?”
Koopmans gave her a questioning look but handed over the bag of crack. It was one of those Ziploc kinds. She pulled it open, removed one of the individually wrapped chunks-five or six in there, she noticed-and peeled off the plastic wrap.
“Don’t start doing my work,” Koopmans said. “Leads to worse things. Pretty soon you’ll be squinting into a microscope and bitching about detectives.”
With one gloved index finger she scraped at an edge of the off-white rock. Strange, she thought. A little too round-looking, too perfect a formation. Only one side was jagged. Then she touched her forefinger to her tongue.
“What the hell are you doing?” Koopmans said, alarmed.
“Thought so,” she said. “Didn’t numb my tongue like it’s supposed to. This isn’t crack. These are lemon drops.”
Koopmans gave a slow smile. “Still need me to get the test kit?”
“That’s okay. Could you help me up the side of this Dumpster, Bert? Of all the days I picked to wear my good shoes.”
17
Another ordinary morning at the office. Arrive at the Stratton parking lot at seven-thirty. Check e-mail, voice mail. Return a few calls, leave voice mails for people who won’t be in their offices for at least another hour.
You have killed a man.
Just another ordinary day. Business as usual.
The day before, Sunday, he’d even fantasized about going to church, to confession, which he hadn’t done since he was a kid. He’d never do it, he knew, but in his mind he rehearsed his confession, imagined the dark confessional booth, that musty cedar-vanilla smell, the scuffling footsteps outside. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” he says. “It has been thirty-three years since my last confession. I have committed these sins. I have taken the Lord’s name in vain. I have gazed lustfully upon other women. I have lost patience with my kids. And, oh yeah, I killed a man.” What would Father Garrison say about that? What would his own father have made of it?
He heard Marge’s voice, intercepting the early morning calls like the pro she was. “He is in the office, yes, but I’m afraid he’s in conference just now…”
How much had he slept in the past two days? He was in one of those weird, wobbly all-nighter states poised between calm and despair, and despite the coffee he’d had, he felt a sudden surge of weariness. He would have been tempted to close his office door and lay his head on his desk, except there was no door.
And it wasn’t an office, really, at all. Certainly not what he used to imagine a CEO’s office would look like. Which wasn’t to say he’d ever spent much time thinking about being CEO of Stratton, or CEO of anything for that matter. As a kid, sitting at supper at his parents’ Formica kitchen table, inhaling the acrid must of machine oil that emanated from his dad’s hair and skin even after his father had taken his post-shift shower, Nick used to imagine one day working alongside Dad on the Stratton shop floor, bending metal at the brake machine. His father’s gnarled stubby fingers, with the crescents of black grime still lodged under his fingernails, fascinated him. These were the fingers of a man who knew how to fix anything, could open a Mason jar that had been rusted shut, could build a fort out of spare lumber, nestled securely in the oak in their tiny backyard, that was the envy of all the neighbor kids. They were the hands of a worker, a guy who came home from the factory exhausted but then went right to work again, after his shower, around the house, tumbler of whiskey in one hand: fixing the dripping sink, a wobbly table leg, a lamp whose socket had a short. Dad liked fixing things that were broken, liked restoring order, getting things to work right. But more than anything, he liked being left alone. Working around the house was his way to get what he really wanted: a cone of silence around him, his thoughts kept to himself, not having to talk to his wife or son. Nick Conover only realized this about his dad much later when he saw it in himself.
He never thought one day he’d be running the company his father spoke of, the rare times he did speak, with such awe and disgruntlement. They barely knew anyone who didn’t work for Stratton. All the neighbor kids, all the grownups his parents ever saw or talked about, they all worked at Stratton. Dad always groused about fat old Arch Campbell, the nasty round-shouldered factory manager who tyrannized the day shift. Complaining about Stratton was like complaining about the weather: you were stuck with whatever you got. It was the big annoying extended family you could never escape from.