That kind of loss was hard to come back from. I imagined that kind of grief lasted forever.
The chief lowered his finger from my face to my belly. “How are you feeling?”
I looked down and felt the spark of surprise that hit me every time I saw the expanding dome under my breasts. I was six months’ pregnant. A girl, if the sonogram didn’t screw up and hide a tiny penis in the shadowy, gray imagery.
We called her the Peanut.
“I still can’t figure out why they call it morning sickness when you’re puking every hour of the day, but I seem to be over the worst of it. Now I’ve just got this backache that keeps me up at night.”
In truth, I was happy to trade the vomiting for the aches in my lower spine. I could work through pain; I couldn’t work through near constant runs to the bathroom… or sink… or whatever handy receptacle was available.
Chavez grimaced and touched a knuckle to the small of his own back. He’d been through this with his wife, a sturdy Jamaican woman who’d delivered naturally, and at home, four children in the last ten years. There were rumors she wanted more kids but Angel Chavez had put his foot down, crying he couldn’t survive one more labor.
“Are you up for this, Gemma? I can talk to Finn. You could take it easy and work on some traffic cases…” he trailed off.
I knew he was weighing my skills against the political shit storm we’d hit if we didn’t wrap this up nice and neat for Mayor Bellington. There hadn’t been an unsolved murder in Cedar Valley in thirty years. Bellington’s cronies in the city council would find a way to spin this. Traveling circus, seedy fairgrounds. This wasn’t the Cedar Valley way; this was the Outside World Way.
I was happy to take the challenge. While the scene was messy, the motives could only be so many. My money was on a love triangle; the circus seemed ripe with young things used to hard living.
“No way. My call, my case,” I said. “I’m fine.”
Chavez nodded and walked off. He left through a flap at the far end of the tented space. A cracked and peeling leather strap held the coarse canvas open, allowing one long narrow triangle of sunlight to shine through. Dust floated in the light, sparkly and pretty.
I longed to walk the twenty or thirty feet and step out into the fresh air, but I wasn’t done with Reed Tolliver yet. I grabbed my two-way and called in the medical examiner.
Dr. Ravi Hussen had waited patiently outside while we roped off the crime scene and marked the ground with dozens of tiny colored flags and pins. The CSI team would continue working the scene long after Ravi left with the body. The detail guys handle the minutiae, while Dr. Death woos secrets from the dead. I just try to put it all together and chase down the killer.
She ducked into the tent, pristine in spotless pants, blouse, and heels, a black leather medical bag in the crook of her arm. Behind her were two attendants, Lars and Jeff. Brothers, they wore pale blue jumpsuits with the words “Coroner’s Office” stitched across the breast in fine, red cursive print. They moved in silent tandem, a gurney between them.
Ravi pulled out latex gloves as she approached, snapping them on with an efficiency that said she had done this sort of thing countless times before. Too many times, it seemed; she swore as she took in the blood, and the body.
“He’s just a kid,” Ravi said. “He’s what, sixteen? Seventeen?”
I patted her shoulder. “Nineteen. His name’s Reed Tolliver. I’ll meet you at the morgue. I’m going to stop by the station and run some reports and grab a sandwich. Do you want anything?”
Ravi Hussen shook her head. She motioned to Lars and Jeff. Silently, Lars prepared the gurney as Jeff unfolded a black body bag. He paused to pop a peppermint in his mouth and sucked on it with a steady, squelching sound.
Ravi squatted and pulled a large flashlight out of her medical bag. She said, “I just ate. Some concession guy out there gave me a free hot dog. No mustard, though. Jiminy Cricket, it looks like our killer used a butter knife. This is an incredibly jagged cut, Gemma, did you notice?”
I squatted beside her and paired the weak, narrow beam of my penlight with her more powerful torch. Peering closely, I tried to ignore the blood and gore and focus instead on the edges of flesh. I had seen enough knife injuries to agree with the medical examiner; the skin looked torn, not sliced.
“I’ll know more when I get him in the lab, but I can tell you right now, this was not any kind of flat blade. I don’t even think a hunting knife would leave this kind of damage,” Ravi said. She gently touched the crimson pool below the body, her gloved fingertip sinking into the blood and dirt and dust. “Your killer would have been absolutely soaked in this boy’s blood.”
“How did he manage to leave without anyone seeing him? It’s the middle of the damn day. There’s a hundred people out there,” I said. I stood, my knees screaming.
Ravi stood, too, and shrugged. “That’s your area of expertise, not mine.”
“I can tell you this much. The blood, the destruction on another human being, it reeks of rage. Yet no one saw a thing. That takes cold, calculated planning. Our guy caught Reed Tolliver alone. He had an escape route. He probably brought the murder weapon with him, whatever it turns out to be. What could this poor kid have done in his nineteen years to make someone kill him?” I asked.
“‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’” Ravi quoted with a grim smile. “Shakespeare wasn’t talking about murder but I think he knew a thing or two about the mysteries of our motivations.”
Her quote hung in the air over Tolliver’s body, an invisible shroud. It contained my question, and a killer’s answers, all the thoughts and feelings and ultimate, final action that led to one person taking the life of another.
Chapter Three
I made a fresh pot of decaf back at the station and two turkey sandwiches on rye with mayo, mustard, Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato, and red onions. I added a couple of dill pickles for good measure and a stale-looking chocolate-chip cookie I found tucked behind some cans of soup in the pantry. Balancing the full plate and a cup of coffee, I slowly maneuvered to my desk in the back corner. A low whistle filled the room and I turned to see a handful of cops watching me.
Phineas Nowlin leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Holy shit, Gemma. Are you growing a grizzly in there?”
“Screw you, Finn. I’m starving.”
He grinned and something about the way his jaw jutted forward, coupled with his gleaming white incisors, gave him a positively wolfish appearance. I could summarize what I knew of Finn in three important points: experienced cop; lousy boyfriend; general pain in the butt. We’d never dated but I had seen enough of the wreckage he tended to leave behind to feel I had a good grasp on his love life, good enough to apply the “lousy” to the boyfriend.
I gave him the finger and ignored the other cops’ laughter as I scarfed down the first sandwich. I slowed a bit on the second, chewing each bite thoroughly. By the time I finished eating the pickles, the room was absolutely silent.
I smiled when I saw the four of them still watching me, their jaws open.
“Do you think one of you could grab me a bag of chips from the vending machine?” I asked sweetly. Sam Birdshead, the newest, and youngest, member of our small police department, gulped and nodded. He was almost out of the door when I called to him.
“Sam? Not the Doritos, hon.”
“Christ. Your ass is going to be bigger than a house by the time this baby’s born,” Finn said. “Don’t you want to maintain your figure? Maybe get Brody to put a ring on it after all?”
He slid his lanky body out of his chair and joined me at my desk. He sat on the edge of it and as I looked at the manicured black eyebrows that framed his baby blue eyes, groomed as carefully and obsessively as a woman’s, I felt the first ache of acid reflux flood my chest.