Back on Murder (24 page)
“It’ll help me.”
“Will it really? March, look at me. Will it really help?”
She grabs my arm and pulls. I could twist free. I could whip my arm away and start running – limping, anyway – but I know she’s right about this.
“I want to hurt him,” I say. “I want to hurt them all.”
She stares at me, breathing hard, moving her hand in a calming but tentative way, as if she’s working herself up to touch something that might scald.
“Let’s get out of here,” she says.
“Not yet.”
I walk up the driveway, bending over to catch the bottom of the tarp, pulling it free to reveal a shiny patch of red metal. I hike the crackling fabric all the way to the windshield, then flick the wiper up.
“What are you doing?”
From my wallet I slip out a business card, tucking it under the wiper. Then I slide the tarp back in place, giving the hood a tap. I pause to eyeball the video camera. I don’t know whether the feed goes to tape, but if it does, I want there to be no mistake.
After dropping Cavallo off, I head home, pulling up the driveway at a little past three. On the way to the back door, my foot hits something round and glassy, sending it spinning across the concrete. A beer bottle by the sound. I glance up at the garage apartment entrance, but there’s no crack of light under the door.
Charlotte’s asleep in bed, the covers pooled at her knees as if, feeling warm, she’s unconsciously kicked them down. I undress quietly and slip beside her. Overhead, the fan turns, lulling me to sleep.
I dream about Hannah Mayhew. She’s younger than her picture, a little girl, walking around our kitchen like she owns the place. Charlotte pours a glass of milk, makes her sit at the breakfast table, ruffling her hair with exaggerated tenderness. I pause in the doorway, frozen by the pretty scene.
“You’re here,” I say. They both look up at me in surprise. “They told me . . . never mind what they told me.”
And she gets up, bouncing toward me, bare feet slapping the tile. “What did they tell you about me, Daddy? What did they say?”
The phone starts ringing. I open my eyes. The nightstand clock says four hours have passed and there’s a faint brightness behind the closed window shades. I reach for the sound, miss, then try again. I can’t quite find the handset. The next ring prompts Charlotte to vault over me, elbow digging into my side. She grabs the phone and presses it into my hand before remembering my injuries.
“Sorry,” she whispers.
I push a bunch of buttons but with no effect, then open my eyes wider to locate the right one. Is this Templeton calling at this hour? If so, I’ll wring his neck. On the other end of the line, though, a serious-sounding Captain Hedges starts asking questions about my fitness.
“You looked all right yesterday, all things considered.”
“I’m fine, sir.”
“The thing is, something’s come up. I know I shouldn’t be doing this, and you’re entitled to a little time after what happened yesterday – not to mention the strings I’d have to pull to get you cleared for work this soon. But under the circumstances, and knowing how the task force assignment wasn’t what you wanted . . . I know you’re looking for a way back into the squad, so – ”
“Yes,” I say, sitting up straight. “Whatever it is, yes.”
“You haven’t even heard what I’d like you to do.”
“I don’t need to, sir. I want back in.”
“It’s not exactly what you’re looking for,” he says. “I know you’re tired of these peripheral assignments, but – ”
How much clearer can I be? “I’ll do it, sir.”
He exhales long and hard, either relieved or despondent, I can’t tell which. “Before you say yes, I need you to know it’s a suicide, March.”
“Ah.”
“I know you don’t like the nickname, and I can’t argue with you that the assignment was originally not, well, not very complimentary. But if you’re serious about getting back in . . .”
“I am serious. And no I don’t like the name, but I realize somebody’s got to do it. We owe something to our people, even when they . . .”
My voice trails off. When somebody takes a shot at one of us, like what happened yesterday, it doesn’t matter if you like the guy or not, if you think he’s a solid officer or a lightweight, crooked or straight.
When they come after one of us, they come after us all. We hit back quick, and we hit back hard. Because that kind of thing, it could happen to any of us.
When one of us tops himself, though, when a sworn officer sticks a service piece under his chin and lets off a live round, then suddenly we’re all tongue-tied and bashful. It has to be handled, and as with the other, quick and hard is the only way. But woe to the detective who pulls the duty. He’ll get no sympathy or slack. Because this kind of thing, we have to believe, it could never happen to us. We could never sink so low as to eat a bullet. Nobody wants to get close to that.
So it falls to one man, typically the lowest, which over the past few years, ever since I fell off the captain’s good books, has been me. Roland March, the suicide cop. If you wear a badge in the city of Houston and decide to put a gun to your head, the first face you’d see, assuming you could ever open your eyes again, would be mine.
I ease my legs onto the floor, running my hand over the now-familiar bandage. My holstered pistol sits inside the half-open nightstand drawer.
“Where do you need me?” I ask.
“Good,” he says. “Thanks. I really mean it. The body’s in a truck parked over on Wayside, close to where it crosses Harrisburg.”
“Near Buffalo Bayou?”
“Sort of. There’s a bunch of warehouses. Looks like he just pulled over to the side of the road and did it right there. There happens to be a fairly decent golf course not far down the road – I don’t know if you play, but . . .”
I’m not sure what to say to that, so I don’t say a word.
“I could send a car by for you, if that would be easier.”
“No, just give me the address and I’ll find it.”
I jot down the specifics on the pad next to the phone stand, then go over the obvious details. Patrol has already sealed off the road, redirecting traffic, and the crime scene unit is en route. Even an obvious suicide gets the full treatment. This one sounds pretty straightforward. Officers on the scene say gunshot wound to the head, he’s holding what appears to be his duty weapon, empty bottles kicking around in the foot well.
“All right,” I tell him. “I’m on my way. Just one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Who is it? Anybody I know?”
It never has been. I’ve shepherded half a dozen of these things through the process, never anybody I’d worked with or even knew by sight. We’re a big department, so there’s nothing strange in that.
“You might know this guy,” Hedges says. “A narcotics detective, or used to be. Guy by the name of Joseph Thomson – ring any bells?”
“Joe Thomson?”
A pause. “So you did know him. I’m sorry to hear that. Does it change anything?” He listens for an answer, but on my end nothing comes. “March?”
“I’ll handle it, sir. This one’s mine.”
The corpse of Octavio Morales, with its mask of beatific agony, had put me in mind of some martyred Spanish saint, but Joe Thomson’s puckered wince is more pedestrian, the look of a man who’s just smashed his thumb with a hammer, or remembered an errand he’d promised then failed to perform. Rimmed in black, the contact wound over his right ear raised a blood stamp roughly conforming to the muzzle of a sig Sauer P229, the same as the service pistol he still clutches in his right hand. The cavernous exit, blasting out the top left side of the head, sprayed wet tissue over the interior windows, the projectile embedding itself in the door pillar. We have a neat, self-contained scene, one that tells a straightforward, though tragic story.
“What were you thinking?” I ask under my breath, peering at him, willing the lips to move, but of course that’s not going to happen. To my shame, in spite of the spectacle of a man’s death – a man I had met and spoken with, a man whose life I knew a little about – my thoughts are entirely focused on the loss Thomson’s death represents to me. No shooters named in the Morales case, no damning testimony against Reg Keller or Tony Salazar. The fact that my captain sees this as an avenue toward redemption doesn’t comfort me much, since I’d been planning to return in triumph, thoroughly vindicated, and not as a kneeling supplicant.
The smell of burnt gunpowder is still strong, in spite of the open driver’s side door and the post-rain mist. My nostrils twitch, and the sound of the revolver going off in my lap fills my head. A sympathetic ache in my thigh reminds me, that could be you. I step back, glancing at the droplets clinging like dew to the exterior of Thomson’s vehicle, a several-year-old blue gmc Yukon.
“Good to see you again, sir.”
At my elbow, an eager kid in the garb of a crime-scene investigator smiles at me, giving no sign of being affected by the scene. I nod.
“Remember me?” he says. “Edgar Castro. We talked about that other case . . . ?”
“Right. Castro. I remember. Let’s get to work here, okay?”
Overhead, a muddy gray sky threatens a repeat of the shower I drove over in. In spite of the sticky air, the first responder, a squared-away young patrolman named Nguyen, still wears a dripping poncho over his uniform. After Castro’s eagerness, I appreciate the businesslike demeanor of Nguyen. I take him to one side and let him rattle off his satisfyingly precise report. He responded to a call from dispatch at 6:04 a.m., arriving at the scene seven minutes later, where he secured the victim’s vehicle and did a preliminary interview of the security guard who called in the shooting.
“His name is Wendell Cropper,” he says, nodding toward a uniformed security guard having a smoke just outside the perimeter tape. “First thing out of his mouth is, he used to be on hpd back in the mid-nineties, which is funny because he should have known better than to disturb the scene.”
“What did he do?”
Nguyen makes a pistol out of his fingers. “He opened the door and uncocked the pistol, then pushed the victim’s finger out of the trigger guard. Said he was afraid it might go off again. Then he shut the door and called us.”
“The car door was unlocked?”
Nguyen nods.
“Okay, I want to have a talk with Mr. Cropper.”
The security guard flicks his cigarette away at my approach. I lift the tape, letting him duck underneath. He’s about my age, mid-forties, with a lean, smooth face and thick black eyebrows knitted together in the middle. Pale skin, but a charcoal shadow of beard in need of shaving. His uniform consists of fatigue pants and a short-sleeved shirt with epaulets and his name embroidered over the pocket.
“What exactly is it that you secure?” I ask.
He points with two fingers, like he’s still holding the cigarette between them, sweeping a row of gray corrugated buildings behind the tall hurricane fence.
“I got these warehouses here, and then some others a street over, which is where my security office is. About four in the morning, while I was doing a foot patrol, I heard what sounded like a gunshot off in the distance. I couldn’t tell where it come from, so I just noted the time – 4:14 a.m. – and went on with my route.”
“You didn’t call it in?”
“I wasn’t a hundred percent sure,” he says. “Plus, I know you boys got better ways to occupy your time than hunting down random gunshots in the night.” He alternates between crossing his arms and resting his hands on his hips, unable to find a comfortable posture. “In hindsight, I guess that’s what I should’ve done, but the rain started up and, honestly, I started second-guessing myself.”
An hour later, though, he’d hopped behind the wheel of his truck and done another circuit, finding Thomson’s Yukon.
“From the exhaust I could tell the engine was running, so I got out and walked up alongside. Soon as I flashed my light on the window, I knew something was wrong.” He gives an exaggerated gulp. “All that blood and brain on the glass.”
He’s apologetic about interfering, but says he’d heard a story before he left the police department of somebody taking a bullet at a crime scene because a cocked pistol hadn’t been rendered safe. He reached in without thinking and uncocked Thomson’s gun.
“Why’d you leave HPD, Mr. Cropper?”
The question prompts some thinking on his part, but after I remind him how easily these things can be checked, he admits the department cut him loose.
“I had a whole series of problems,” he says with a bashful smile completely at odds with his rough appearance. “The main thing was, I didn’t like all the reports, so I’d kinda forget to do them, you know? This work here, it’s much more suited to my temperament.” He pronounces the word as
temper mint
. “I don’t mind the hours or the solitude.”
When police officers daydream about bagging the job for some high-paying private sector security gig, this isn’t what they typically have in mind. Consulting on matters of security is where the money is. Actually securing things? Not so lucrative. Cropper’s a type I’ve encountered before, desperate to be part of the real action in spite of his reluctance to admit disappointment with the turn his career’s taken. In that light, his behavior makes sense. He didn’t think we’d be irritated at his tampering with the suicide weapon so much as grateful that he’d prevented the dead man’s punching an officer’s ticket from the grave.
As I’m conducting the preliminary interviews, detectives start trickling onto the scene. Mack Ordway rambles up with grim-faced determination, followed by Hedges and Bascombe, who apparently shared a car. Aguilar arrives with a few others, and a while later, bringing up the rear, Lorenz reports in. He walks toward Bascombe, but when he gets close, the lieutenant moves my way.
“You up to this, March?” he asks.
“A suicide? I think so. Don’t forget, I’ve had a lot of experience.”
He nods. “Then maybe it’s time to get the canvass going. Put some of these detectives to work.”
Across the street from the warehouses, a scrawny hedge of pines screens a residential neighborhood lit by amber streetlights, the mist forming haloes around their bulbs. I gather up the detectives, give them a rundown on the situation, and make the canvass assignments. As I speak, eyes cut frequently to Bascombe as if saying, Is this for real? We’re taking orders from this guy? The lieutenant ignores them. Before we break up, Hedges offers a few words.
