“Yeah,” he said.
“Sorry to wake you, Sergeant,” Charlotte said. He could tell from the stiff and formal tone in her voice that she was not alone. “There’s an assistant district attorney here who’d like to speak with you.”
“I’ll be right down,” Wade said.
He pulled on a T?shirt and a pair of sweats, washed his mouth out with Listerine, spit it out in his kitchen sink, and then trudged barefoot down the stairs to the station.
Because he was groggy, and still not entirely used to his new surroundings, there was an off?kilter, dreamlike quality to what he was seeing. The sight of the deputies in the cell, the homeless woman sipping a Coke at a desk, and the ADA, a woman in a business suit clutching the handle of her slim briefcase like it was a life preserver only made it seem more surreal.
Charlotte stood beside the prosecutor and watched Wade with a mix of wariness and amusement.
He trudged past them to his desk, where he’d dumped all the junk food that they’d bought that night, and picked out a Milky Way bar, which he unwrapped as he turned to face his guest.
“May I help you?” he asked.
“I’m assistant district attorney Pamela Lefcourt and I am here to tell you that you are way, way out of line.” She pointed to the cells. “I’m ordering you to release those deputies right now.”
Wade took a bite out of his Milky Way bar and nodded to Charlotte, who got up and unlocked the cells. Just the taste of the chocolate and caramel seemed to clear his head, though he knew he was one long blink away from sleep.
Lefcourt took a step toward him. She was in her thirties, her dark suit perfectly pressed, her silk blouse open just enough to show a trail of freckles leading into her cleavage. Her hair was pulled back tight, making her face look even more severe than it already was.
“What the hell were you thinking arresting them?”
“I was thinking that abducting people off the street of one city and transporting them to another against their will is kidnapping.”
“You are meddling in matters so far above your pay grade they are in a galaxy far, far away.”
“Way, way and far, far,” Wade said. “My, my.”
He took another bite of the Milky Way bar as the deputies, smirking at Wade, gathered their weapons from where they’d been left on Charlotte’s desk.
“I don’t appreciate your attitude,” Lefcourt said.
“You ought to. I’m letting these boys walk out of here as a courtesy to you,” Wade said. “But I will arrest anybody I see dumping people here.”
“You have no authority to do that.”
“I think I do. But if you like, we can go talk to a judge about it. I’m sure bringing me back into a courtroom to discuss illegal activities by law enforcement officers won’t create too much attention,” Wade said. “Or maybe I’ll just follow your example and start ferrying our homeless out to the suburbs. I hear the parks are big and beautiful out there.”
Lefcourt’s cheeks turned bright red and her nostrils flared. He allowed himself another look at her freckled chest. There was a blush there too. He wasn’t entirely sure if she was furious or having an orgasm.
“I’m going to call Chief Reardon about this,” she said.
“Please do.” He finished off the candy bar, but the slight sugar rush was no match for his fatigue. “Be sure to give him my best.”
She marched to the door, the two deputies following her. Wade watched her go, yawned, and without saying a word to Charlotte, headed upstairs to go back to sleep.
He closed the door, got onto his mattress, and pulled the bedding over his head to shield his eyes from the daylight. As he lay there in his dark cocoon, he caught Mandy’s scent on the mattress and all his troubles seemed to drift away, taking his consciousness along with them.
Wade awoke on the floor, the sheets twisted tightly around him, the phone ringing again. He was less groggy this time when he answered.
“Yeah?”
“You were right,” Billy said.
“About what?” Wade checked his watch. It was 3:00 p.m.
“Our first call is a corpse,” he said.
Wade was instantly alert and sat up straight on the floor. “Where are you?”
“Outside the gates of the old King Steel factory,” Billy said.
“Don’t move. I’m on my way.”
He hung up and called the dispatcher, asking her to send the paramedics, homicide detectives, the medical examiner, and a forensic investigation unit to the scene.
Wade put on his uniform, hurried down the stairs to the station, and grabbed the keys to a squad car from his desk drawer.
He drove out of the parking lot, got out of the car, locked the gate behind him, and then flicked on the lights and siren as he sped off.
Wade didn’t use the siren because he was in a hurry and needed to clear a path in the traffic ahead of him. He did it to attract attention, to let people know that the police were there and responsive. He wanted the community to get accustomed to the sound and draw some security from it instead of fear.
He got to the factory in less than five minutes.
Billy’s car was parked on the street, blocking the gate into the desolate, weed?choked parking lot. He sat on the hood, warily eyeing a dozen men who stood outside a bar across the street, watching what was happening, which so far was just the breeze fluttering the yellow crime scene tape that encircled the rusted hulk of a stripped Honda Accord in the parking lot.
Wade parked beside Billy’s car and got out. Billy was idly fingering the scorched hole in his shirt.
“What have we got?” Wade asked.
“A dead woman,” he said. “She’s in that car.”
Wade nodded. Billy seemed a bit dazed, either because he’d been shot by his boss or because he had just seen his first corpse or maybe a combination of the two. It was understandable.
“Who called it in?”
“The birds,” Billy said.
“Excuse me?”
“I was cruising by and saw all these squawking crows swarming that junker,” Billy said. “I was curious what the birds were so interested in. I found out.”
“Did you touch anything?”
Billy shook his head.
Wade slipped on a pair of rubber gloves from his pocket and walked slowly over to the junked car, surveying the cracked asphalt and clumps of weeds for evidence. There were lots of bottle caps, broken glass, and fast?food trash around, but he doubted that any of it came from the killer. The flock of crows watched him warily from their perch on the fence twenty yards away.
The Honda had been picked clean by human vultures years ago, leaving only the metal skeleton to rot away, used as a toilet by every man and four?legged animal that passed it.
A young woman, in her late teens or twenties, was splayed out on the exposed coiled springs of the backseat, her bare feet sticking out of the open door. He didn’t see a purse, wallet, cell phone, or her shoes.
She was dressed in an elbow?length cropped cardigan sweater over a V?neck T?shirt that didn’t quite cover her stomach and a pair of denim mini?shorts not much larger than panties. Her feet were soft and clean, just like her hands. Her nails, on both fingers and toes, were manicured and polished.
All of that told Wade that she wasn’t a street person. She had a home and probably a job.
Her skin was pale, as if she’d completely bled out, but Wade didn’t see any large wounds that would account for that much blood loss. Her hair was matted with dried blood from a gash on her scalp, just above her forehead, and there was some light spatter on her clothes, but that was it. There were no large bloodstains on her clothes and no visible blood in the car.
Her left leg was swollen, blue, and bent at an odd angle, as if she had an extra joint between her knee and her hip. The flesh around her thigh was blue?black and engorged. Her arms, legs, and face were covered with divots pecked out by the crows.
She wasn’t a woman anymore. She was carrion.