Willy's jaw tightened. That wasn't enough for him-a couple of cops poking around, a late-night off-the-cuff one-liner from a medical examiner. It didn't fit what he'd found at the apartment, or, more importantly, what he'd felt spending the night there. But that wasn't anything he could admit, nor did he want anyone to know of his misgivings, for fear of being thrown out.
Still, if he didn't show at least part of his hand, he'd never get Ogden to do the same with what they'd collected. And that was something Willy really wanted to see.
"I saw her track marks," he said, trying to sound purely professional. "Except for the one that killed her, they all looked pretty old."
Ogden's eyebrows furrowed slightly. "That's not too surprising, is it? A lot of addicts overdose because they shoot the same load they did when they were regulars. Only their systems aren't used to it anymore."
That ran against Willy's professional instinct to always "think dirty." Even knowing what this man's workload must be, he found the comment conveniently pat. "I suppose."
Ogden sighed slightly. "The door was locked from the inside, the window, too. There was no sign of violence and nothing obvious missing. I know this is hard to face, but I think what we see here is what we got."
After a pause, still studying Willy's face, he added, "What're your plans?"
Willy didn't want to lie outright, but he hedged his bets with his phrasing. "I want to find out more about her life down here-what led her to it."
Ogden hesitated before asking, "There anything going on I should know about?"
"I don't know," Willy answered truthfully. "I need to talk to some of the people who knew her-if I can find out who they were." He then steered for safer waters, adding blandly, "I'm not arguing with your conclusions. She was a user. I just…well, you know…I feel pretty responsible."
That was truer than Ogden could know, but his choice of words had been kept simple for their manipulative effect. One thing about dinosaurs: In exchange for their experience and wisdom, they often lost the knee-jerk judgmental hard edge they might have had early on. Having seen damn near everything there was to see, they viewed their fellow humans in a more tolerant light. Willy was counting on Ward Ogden's sharing that outlook, and perhaps on his cutting him a little slack.
Ogden was apparently having the same internal debate. "You don't know any of her friends down here?" he asked.
"Nobody."
After another thoughtful pause, Ogden reached a conclusion. He stood up, motioning Willy to stay. "I have to go use the men's room for about fifteen minutes." He tapped on a closed file with his fingertip. "That's what we got on your wife. Make sure you don't give it a quick read while I'm gone."
He leaned forward slightly, resting one hand on the desktop so his face was inches from Willy's. "Don't do me dirt here, okay? This is cop-to-cop."
Willy matched his gaze. "You got it."
He waited until Ogden had left the room before reaching out and swiveling the file around right side up. No one else in the room was paying any attention, so he flipped it open and began to read.
First on top was the responding patrol officer's UF-61 complaint report. In dry, unimaginative prose, it told of Mary's ailing, elderly neighbor's calling to say that Mary hadn't knocked on her door in several days to share their ritual cup of morning coffee. Additionally, the super, Mr. Rivera, when told of the same concern, had pounded on Mary's door to no response, but had noticed a foul odor coming from the apartment. It was the super using his master key who let the officer in, where he found the decedent, an apparent overdose, dressed in her nightgown, lying on the couch, the needle she'd used still in her arm.
Beneath the UF-61 was Ogden's own DD-5, or follow-up report, commonly called a "pink" for its color.
Willy skimmed the pink before moving quickly on to the scene photos and sketches, feeling his face tighten as he saw Mary from every angle, harshly lit, grotesquely exposed, rendered disgusting and foul by her body's own reactions to the poison she'd injected. General shots of the apartment showed him most of what he'd seen last night, except that the shade was drawn in front of the window and the entire apartment looked neat and tidy, since the pictures predated the search.
Of the close-ups, he studied the shots of the locked window and door, the syringe dangling from her arm just below the rubber tubing she'd wrapped around her biceps, and the photograph of the plastic bag containing the heroin she'd used. Crudely stamped on its surface in red ink was a simple cartoon drawing of a devil, complete with horns, tail, pitchfork, and leering expression: the dealer's trademark, as relevant in the competitive urban drug world as any other advertisement. Willy didn't doubt that if he asked the right people about Little Devil or Red Devil or whatever name went with this symbol, he'd be directed to the proper outlet. He also knew that was about all he'd gain from the experience. Nevertheless, he pocketed one of the pictures of the bag.
Next in the file came the papers he'd been looking for: the divorce decree, tax forms, pay stubs, various bills, personal letters, and Mary's bank account. In fact, there wasn't much there. If the sum total of such documentation was any reflection of a person's standing in society, then Mary Kunkle barely had a toehold. There were only three letters, all recent, all from friends telling her about things of no interest to Willy. Her back account revealed that she had $228.34 in checking, her tax records showed her below the poverty level, and her pay stubs for a miserable amount came from the same place he'd seen in the background of the group photograph back in her apartment: the Re-Coop. There was no address book anywhere in the file, nor was there a date book or journal. And she had always had both in the past.
The phone bill was the last item and was just two pages long, largely made up of the arcane and slipperysounding fees and extra charges that always seemed to be there.
Willy glanced at it with no great care, mostly looking for an unusual prefix, either to someplace far away or to a 900 number that might indicate an interesting wrinkle in Mary's lifestyle.
Instead, he found several calls to a number in southern Westchester County-a number he didn't need to crossreference.
It belonged to his brother, Bob. Ward Ogden returned from checking some files down the hall-and using the bathroom so as not to be a total liar- and found the file where he'd left it. Willy Kunkle was gone.
"You see where the guy went who was sitting here?" he asked one of his colleagues.
The other man looked up from his paperwork, a phone wedged under his chin. "He left," he said vaguely, "not two minutes ago. Said to say thanks."
Ogden resumed his seat and tapped on the file with his fingertips. "Yeah, I bet," he said softly.
The phone next to him rang. "Ogden-detective squad."
"Detective, this is Joe Gunther." The voice on the other end was hollow and tinny-sounding, clearly on a speakerphone. "Special Agent Sammie Martens is on the line with me. We're with the Vermont Bureau of Investigation."
Ward Ogden knew where this was heading. "You looking for your boy Willy?"
The woman's voice he recognized from the day before. "Have you seen him?" she asked, clearly on edge.
"He just left," Ogden answered, his interest piqued. For an accidental overdose, Mary Kunkle was raising more dust than he was used to. Of course, most such victims weren't ex-wives of out-of-towner cops.
"What's he up to?" Gunther asked with a directness that made Ogden smile.
"Not sure I know. He ID'd his wife's remains last night and dropped by this morning to ask me what we had on her." He resisted saying more. Two things you learned in this department in particular: Never say, "I don't know," and never volunteer any more information than is strictly necessary.