Just as he whipped out his cell to check his messages, he heard voices. Hmm. So they hadn’t used the sirens. Probably didn’t want to cause a ruckus in a neighborhood like this one.
Hadden stuck his nose back in the azaleas. There they were. Two uniformed Hamptons cops, coming up the same walk he had. He could hear every word. Quinton was walking along with them and was explaining how he’d been picking up the trash, but was interrupted pretty quickly by the short cop. He had his back to Hadden, but Frank could still hear him clearly.
“But why were you back here? Don’t you pick it up out front?”
“Oh, yeah. But I do this as a favor for the Saxtons when they’re out of town, you know, so burglars won’t see the trash cans on the road for days on end and come loot the place. You know, just to be safe… right?”
The cops just looked at him and started taking notes on little pads they both had. They walked up to the glass door and looked in. The tall one took one look and puked right onto a bush beside the walkway. It sounded like he was vomiting all the way up from the soles of his feet.
What an embarrassment. Hadden started laughing to himself, then it turned into a coughing fit. Damn cigarettes. He could hardly laugh without coughing like a wild dingo.
Hadden stifled it. Didn’t want to explain to cops why he was sitting out back on a freaking pine cone.
After the tall, young one quit with the puking, the other cop just looked at him. The contempt for his weakness was barely concealed.
The short one held his hand to a shoulder police-band radio, barked a series of numbers into it, began asking the routine questions. What time did Quinton get there, was it his usual route, blah, blah blah.
Quinton was holding up pretty well. It was easy… So far he was just telling the truth. Not hard, or so you’d think.
Thank God. Here came the EMTs. The body would soon be out on a stretcher. The cops were already fiddling with the lock on the glass doors.
What was the hold-up? Even Hadden could jimmy a sliding glass door in no time. Then… They got it. The door slid open and they all walked in, including Quinton. Hey, maybe Hadden could actually enter the pool house after they all left and get inside shots.
Within forty-five seconds, the young one was back outside puking again, this time on a different bush. Who could eat that much this early in the morning?
Hadden couldn’t hear what the other cop was asking or what the EMTs were saying over all the puking sounds. Plus, the puking cop was obscuring his view. He finally finished, wiped off his face, and went back in to the murder scene. A man in a blue sports coat-Hadden could tell it was polyester from fifty feet away by the way the material shined in the morning light-and gray slacks reappeared. He’d walked up along with the EMTs and started taking pictures with a black camera. Not a bad piece of equipment, either. Hadden recognized it as similar to his own. Must be the detective for the Coroner’s Office.
Hadden crouched into position, secured the long lens, and started snapping away. He was waiting on the body. They’d probably have a white sheet over the face but maybe he’d get lucky and they wouldn’t. After he got shots of the dead body being rolled out, he’d take a few beauty shots from the front yard, a couple of side shots showing the walkway around back, and of course a few shots of the pool, complete with hidden grotto. He could only imagine what went on in the grotto.
Then, who would give him the best money? After all, it was Eric Saxton’s house. Who knew who the broad was. Whoever she was, he had plenty of shots of those legs.
It came to him in a flash. Mike Walker with Snoop. That was the primo mag. Walker was no idiot. After a stint in the air force in Japan, he became the youngest-ever foreign correspondent for International News Service, which later became UP. He ended up as a foreign correspondent for NBC, then went for the big money with Snoop. They were the single largest-circulation mag in America. Over seventeen million readers weekly.
Hadden was nearly giddy at the thought of Walker and Snoop. He started snapping shots even faster.
Who knew what headline they’d attach to the story? One of Walker’s fortes was headlines. Hell, Hadden didn’t care what they printed, as long as they paid him. He could easily get fifty grand for this. He’d make sure to get a shot of the Oscar statuette, just yards away from a dead body!
Hadden had no idea how to reach Walker directly. He’d only spoken to underlings at Snoop in the past, and in all his years, had only gotten two shots published on Snoop’s pages.
He could hardly wait until they rolled the body out.
It had been over an hour now. Hadden could see the coroner’s investigator down on his knees, measuring the length from the pool house door to the body, then from the window to the body. The others were also on their hands and knees, likely combing the carpet for a shell casing or maybe even a bullet. The head was so mangled, it would take an autopsy to determine if there was an exit wound. For all they knew, one or more bullets could either still be in her skull, or have shot out the back of her head onto the floor.
How long would they be in there? He had a cramp in his leg but didn’t dare move a hair. Squatted there behind the bushes, Hadden was shifting positions when he spotted a dog. Oh, hell.
The damn thing came right over to him and started to bark. The cops turned around and looked. Hadden froze.
The dog nosed his way through the azaleas and actually started sniffing at Hadden.
What the hell? He must smell the McDonald’s. Fast-food sausage biscuit smell could linger on clothes for hours. One of the cops stepped outside the pool house, looking back at the bushes.
Damn dog. Now he was sniffing Hadden’s leg. What would be next?
The cop took a few steps toward the bushes where Hadden was trying his best to shoo the dog away before its sniffing got any more personal.
The dog looked him straight in the eye, raised its left hind leg, and seemed to enjoy taking a long, warm piss right on Hadden’s shoe. There was not a damn thing Hadden could do about it. He could feel the urine soaking down through the ankle of his sock.
Static-laced squawks came out of the cop’s shoulder radio. He stopped to talk back into his shoulder, turned on his heel, and walked back to the pool house.
Suddenly, it happened. They were bringing out the body on a gurney. Hadden could barely contain himself. He needed a cigarette badly.
The coroner’s staff rolled her out, and sure enough, they had a white sheet over her body, including her face. Damn them to hell.
But then, in a moment of serendipity, her left wrist fell out.
The girl’s dead, manicured, salon-tanned hand dangled there, as only a dead hand could. It was beautiful.
Hadden almost wet his pants.
Chapter 7
YOU KNOW WHAT A JPEG IS DON’T YOU? YOU’VE HEARD OF THAT, right?”
Walker was losing patience with the moron on the other end of the phone, but if he had a shot of what he claimed to have, this could be the winning lottery ticket for Walker. But you had to give the guy credit for persistence. Walker didn’t know how Frank Hadden, whoever the hell that was, got his cell number, but he’d called it no less than fifteen times.
Walker noticed the cell lighting up on the bathroom counter when he got up to take a leak. Assuming it was an emergency that early in the morning, he picked it up even though he didn’t recognize the caller’s number. After a brief self-introduction, Walker could hardly make out, Hadden said one phrase loud and clear: Dead girl, great legs, Eric Saxton, and pool house.
Hearing those words together in the same sentence, alarms started going off in Walker’s head. Now he was trying his best to walk Hadden through sending the photos to him via his iPhone. He’d been explaining for the last fifteen minutes.