“Coffee?” he asked, motioning us into chairs.
The stuff they call coffee in the M.E.“s staff lounge bears a startling resemblance to battery acid with just a hint of formaldehyde on the side. When Emma Jackson nodded and said, yes, she’d like some, I figured she simply didn’t know any better. I did, but I was desperate. The beneficial effects of Ralph Ames’s refueling breakfast were fading fast. My back hurt and so did my feet. My eyes burned from lack of sleep. Even terrible coffee was bound to help a little.
“I’ll have some too,” I said.
“Still drink it black?” Baker asked.
I thought for a moment he was talking to me and was surprised and gratified that he remembered, considering the number of Homicide dicks that pass through his office on a daily basis, but it turned out he was asking Emma.
“Black will be fine,” she said.
That set me back on my heels. Theirs had to be more than a nodding acquaintance. “How is it that you two know each other?” I asked.
“Emma didn’t tell you? She used to work here. Upstairs, I mean, in the hospital trauma center. Whenever she lost a patient, she’s the only one of the whole bunch who ever bothered to follow them down here to find out what exactly went wrong. A lot of doctors never figure out that even dead patients can teach you something. Sometimes especially the dead ones.”
Doc Baker smiled a proud mentor’s smile which Emma Jackson did not return. Instead, she picked up the steaming cup of coffee the receptionist had placed on the desk in front of her.
“Tell him about the dog, Howard,” she urged.
“What about the dog?”
Baker seemed unhappy that she had turned the conversation away from his reminiscing. “Spot’s the only one we’ve had a chance to work on so far. He’s told us a little, but not much.”
“For instance?”
“He bit somebody,” Emma Jackson blurted, answering my question before Baker had a chance.
“Really?” I asked.
Baker nodded. “Tried to anyway. Just before he died. I found traces of material, a thread or two, still stuck to his teeth. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to determine whether or not he actually drew blood.”
“He did,” I said.
Both Doc Baker and Emma Jackson sat up and took notice. “How do you know that?” Baker asked.
“The boy told us,” I replied. “Junior Weston. He told me the man’s arm was bleeding. I thought maybe he’d cut himself with his own knife in the struggle with Bonnie, but I’ll bet the dog nailed him at least once.”
Baker nodded and began writing himself a note, talking as he did so. “We’ll have to analyze all those bloodstains very carefully. We may have some of the killer’s blood mixed in with that of the victims. As for the bite itself, the killer may have been bitten, but it’s hard to say how badly. It might be worthwhile to check with the emergency rooms around town and see if they treated any dog-bite victims overnight.”
I was shocked to hear Baker strategizing in front of a civilian, a victim’s mother yet, without seeming to care whether or not she was authorized to hear those kinds of case-specific details, but it wasn’t my place to tell him to shut up, not when he was essentially giving me marching orders. The possibility of finding a dog-bite victim somewhere among the metropolitan area’s myriad hospitals didn’t amount to much of a lead.
“There are a lot of emergency rooms in this town,” I said.
Baker glowered at me with a look that meant don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. He said, “It’s more than you had before.” Which was undeniably true.
“Now tell him about the hair,” Emma Jackson urged.
“The hair we found in Shiree Weston’s hands?”
Doc Baker opened his desk drawer, carefully removed a pile of paper clips and began to toss them thoughtfully into the vase in the windowsill. “Actually, we found two distinctly different hair samples-the ones in Shiree Weston’s hand and on her body and some with the daughter as well. Naturally, the Crime Lab will be doing a detailed analysis of all samples, and there may be some other explanation for their presence at the crime scene, but my initial reaction is that we have two distinctly separate individuals here.”
“Two?”
Baker nodded. “Two. One would be a…” I’m sure Doc Baker started to say “black,” but he corrected himself in time. “…an African American. The second is definitely Caucasian.”
I remembered what Junior Weston had told us about the bad man he had seen struggling with Bonnie, about his skin color being similar to mine. So the child had seen only one of his family’s attackers, not both of them. It was a chilling thought. What the hell had Ben Weston been up to that so many people wanted to see him dead?
For a moment or two, we were all three quiet. “So what do you think?” I asked at last. “Gang warfare of some kind?”
Considering Ben Weston’s position on the CCI unit, that was the most logical question, and one the whole city would be asking the moment the story hit the papers. Emma Jackson and Doc Baker both shook their heads in instant unison.
“No way,” Baker answered at once. “Not their style unless they went out and hired a pro to do the dirty work. Those kids are all playacting at being big-time gangsters. They all want to be Al Capone or some other mafioso hood. If gangs decide they’re going to kill somebody, they usually assign it to somebody as an initiation kind of thing, a rite of passage, or they want to do it in style and make like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. This isn’t right.”
“What isn’t right?”
“You know yourself, Beau. Drive-by shootings or the guy who took a shot at you from outside on a porch. Those sound like gang activity. This is something else. Those kids may all have street names and guns, and they don’t think twice about blowing somebody off the face of the earth, but they aren’t trained killers. They don’t do silent kills. At least one of the perpetrators involved here is a highly trained professional killer.”
“What do you mean professional?” I asked.
“Military most likely. Marines maybe? Whatever, he’s dangerous as hell.”
“And I want him,” Emma Jackson added softly, almost under her breath. “Hanging’s too good for a monster like that.”
It was the only time in the whole process that Dr. Emma Jackson’s professional demeanor slipped, and it caught Doc Baker off guard. She may have been a colleague of his, a sometime insider of the M.E.“s office, but right that minute she was just another mother of a homicide victim, someone interested in vengeance, not justice.
If anyone was to be faulted in that situation, it was Doc Baker for forgetting that Emma Jackson was a mother first and a doctor second. Doc Baker’s rash disclosures in her presence had been indiscreet to say the least. In my opinion, she was a victim, and she, by God, should have been treated as such.
“You put that idea right out of your mind, Emma,” he ordered indignantly. “We’re talking about very dangerous men here. You stay out of it and let Detective Beaumont and the others handle it. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have discussed any of it in front of you.”
“Don’t worry about me, Howard,” she returned coldly. “I can take care of myself. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I want to go home.”
Dr. Emma Jackson walked out of the room and closed the door behind her, leaving Baker and me staring at each other across the stacks of papers on his messy desk.
“Thanks a whole hell of a lot,” I said. “When you screw up, you do it all the way. What in God’s name do you expect me to do with that woman now?”
In all the years I’d known him, I had never seen Dr. Howard Baker so chagrined. In a matter of minutes he seemed to have aged a good ten years. His ran his fingers through his hair, leaving his unruly white mane standing even more on end.
“Do what you can to keep her out of it,” he said.
“Right,” I said. “I’ll do my best, but thanks to you, right this minute she has more information than I do.”