Cool in Tucson (2 page)

Delaney was standing just outside the tape, staring into the circle of light his flashlight made on the ground, talking quietly to the patrolmen beyond him.  “Soon as you’re done with that, you better go on down the path a couple of hundred feet and set up a barrier, okay?  You got signs with you?”

“Yeah, I got some,” one of the men said. “You know we’re both due off in half an hour?”

“Oh, right…you called for replacements yet?  We’ll be a couple of hours here at least.”  One of the uniforms muttered something.  “Good.  Will you hang some of those signs on this side too?  And then just…keep people away from here till you’re relieved.”  The patrolmen disappeared beyond the trees. 

Sarah stepped up onto the bike path and said, “Hey, Boss.” 

Delaney, without looking up, said, “Morning, Sarah.”  He had the pale skin of a redhead, blotchy from the punishing desert sun.  His very pale blue eyes were rimmed with white lashes that blinked rapidly when he was concentrating.  He stood cocooned inside himself like that for a few more seconds before he turned and said, “You’ll be the primary on this one.”

“You said, on the phone,” Sarah said.  Did he think she was going to argue?  His crew took turns leading investigations, in strict rotation with adjustments for vacations and illness and court dates.  Sarah already had a heavy caseload and she knew very well what the Department remedy was for that: suck it up.

She had transferred into Homicide a little over a year ago, because Auto Theft had begun to feel like a revolving door and she was ready for bigger challenges.  Her other incentive for making the move was the chance to work for Delaney, who had a reputation in the Department for rigorous investigation and a good clearance rate.  More ambitious than ever now that she was single again, Sarah wanted to work with the best people, hone her skills, keep moving up. 

The first six months in Delaney’s section had been all she hoped, and she had congratulated herself for making the move at exactly the right time.  Learning fast and feeling at the top of her game, she was certain she was gaining the good opinion of her peers and her boss. 

But sometime in early Spring, by almost imperceptible degrees she had felt Delaney begin to turn against her.  At first she told herself she was imagining things, because he never complained about her work.  But as she redoubled her efforts to please him, it appeared that the harder she worked, the more he turned away.  He was polite and fair, but his face closed up when she approached and he talked to her exactly as much as necessary to get the work done, never more.  She watched his easy way with the other detectives, who were all men, and decided she must be looking at a case of male chauvinism.  Why the delay, though?  He had been friendly and helpful at first.

By July she had made up her mind to talk to a counselor.  But then she lay awake all one night composing the first few sentences: 
I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but something is wrong.  My boss just doesn’t seem to like me any more.
  Even to herself, it sounded like a high school girl getting dumped. She imagined her statement on a sheet in her service jacket, and decided to keep her grievances to herself. 

A couple of times she almost blurted, “Please tell me what you’re mad about.”  But he didn’t seem angry, exactly.  Cold and distant.  Detached, but not punitive.  In her mind she could hear her own voice begging for an explanation, see the contempt in his pale, blinking eyes as he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

So this morning in September she stepped up on the knoll beside him steady as a rock, wearing the demeanor she had decided on, all spit and polish.  Whatever happened, the fault would not be hers; she was going to deliver one perfect day’s work after another while she waited for the axe to fall. 
Damned if I’ll beg.  If he busts me he busts me.  At least then he’ll have to say why. 

They turned together toward the dead man on the ground.  Number five male, Delaney had said on the phone, using the HIBOW code they all used, Hispanic, Indian, Black, Oriental, White.  A correct call if ever there was one, Sarah thought; the victim was so white he was almost blue.  Probably because most of his blood was in the ground around him.   Blood had saturated his shirt, too, and the back of his pants, and caked in his hair.  The air was heavy with the sickly-sweet smell of it, and the salty stench of urine.

Nobody I’ve ever arrested. 
She remembered people she’d put the cuffs on.
Late thirties
,
maybe early forties.  Buffed up.  Looks like he worked out.

The victim was not sprawled exactly but crumpled, as if he’d fallen straight down in a heap.  He had been neatly dressed before he bled out, in good walking shorts and a white golf shirt.  Odd, in view of the catastrophic bleeding, that she could see no wound.

“Here comes the crime scene van,” Delaney said, “let’s get her going here, and then we can start.”

Gloria Jackson parked beside Sarah’s car, hopped out and waved before she hurried to the rear door of the van, her taffy-colored curls bouncing above her gleaming amber cheeks.  At that moment a blazing sun rose above the mountains east of town, lit the tops of the buildings and trees around them, and turned Gloria’s hair to glowing brass. 

Six feet tall and moving like the High School basketball star she had been in L.A.,  Gloria was building a reputation at TPD as a mood-enhancing presence at a crime scene.  “Soon’s I found out I wasn’t getting no scholarship to UCLA,” she had told Sarah, “I said, ‘Let’s get out of these baggy pants then, and have some fun!’ ” 

“That when you dyed your hair?”

“Bleached it to match my skin,” she said, nodding happily, “and bought the tightest jeans I could squeeze my ass into.  Whoo!  Believe me, girlfriend, it made all the difference!”

Sarah believed her.  When the men were around, Gloria never had any trouble getting help with her equipment.

Radiating energy now, she came chattering up the path.  “Wow, am I holding you guys up?  Jeez, and I hurried like
mad
.  How’d you get here so
fast
?”

“I don’t have to comb out my curls,” Delaney said, lifting his baseball cap to show his receding hairline.  Gloria brought out the jokey side even in Delaney, who was usually about as amusing as a quarter pound of tofu. 

That one quick pleasantry was all he had in him, though; he looked at his watch, shuffled his feet and said, “Ready to get to work?” 

Gloria gave him a radiant smile, said, “Mos’ def,” and followed him to the tape.

“Looks like everything’s within this perimeter, right here.”  His flashlight didn’t work very well as a pointer now that sunlight was filtering down through the sparse foliage of the acacias.  “See here?  The body and the area right around it.  Blood all seems to be pooled right here.  I haven’t seen any spattering at all.”  He led her around the body, pointing. As soon as her camera began to flash, he came back and stood beside Sarah, who had to stay outside the taped-off crime scene till Gloria finished.

The victim’s features were thrown into high relief by the slanting rays of the rising sun.  His handsome face and the grace of his strong, supple-looking body made a striking contrast with the reeking, blood-soaked clothing, alive now with crawling insects. 
Why is he so white?
  Even newcomers, after a few days in Tucson, usually picked up a little color.  This man’s face looked as if he’d been working underground—
or at night?

The rising sun warmed them up fast.  Sarah unbuttoned her shirt at the neck; Delaney rolled up his sleeves. Gloria and the two patrolmen soldiered on in stolid discomfort in their dark blue uniforms.  Sarah saw Jimmy Ibarra, down in the parking lot, take off his jacket and toss it in his car.  

“Here comes your backup,” Delaney said.  Ibarra saw them and started toward the trees, a round, rosy-cheeked man with an extra chin that bounced a little as he walked.  “Hispanic in name only,” was how she thought of him; his family went back a couple of generations farther than hers did in this valley and he used the same southern Arizona argot they all did, a blend of accents from all over.  Historically a waypoint on the shifting border with Mexico, long an oasis for armies, evangelicals and fortune hunters and now a magnet for retirees, Tucson was the quintessential melting pot.

“Sure I speak Spanish,” Jimmy Ibarra said of himself.  “
Arroz con pollo.  Pan dulce
.”  He got the broad vowels right but flunked rolling his r’s.  Cheerful and pragmatic, a veteran homicide investigator who knew all the shortcuts, he was Sarah’s favorite partner. Happily married, he never laid any moves on her, and was always willing to trade favors, information and inside jokes. Working with Jimmy, she thought, made the job go smoother.         

“Who else is coming?” she asked Delaney.

“You two are it, so far.  We had a shooting at a drive-in out on the east end of Speedway around midnight and the rest of the crew is still out there.  The two of you can manage this, can’t you?  Eisenstaat can give you a boost with the paper work.  There aren’t any witnesses to interview and I don’t see much physical evidence.”

“I guess,” Sarah said.  “If I need more help I can ask for it, huh?”

“Right,” Delaney said dryly, “you can ask.”

You bet.  But she knew that shorting her crew on this job was no sign of malice on Delaney’s part.  He was doing the best he could with what he had.  Tucson had logged forty-odd homicides so far this year, and he and his six detectives were investigating all of them.  Keeping pace with last year. 
Which we said at the time was above average, but hey
.  Given the area’s growth rate, they were not likely to return to the body count of the year before last.

 Ibarra walked up to them, panting a little.  He planted his feet wide on the path, patted his belly and said, “Hey,” smiling, showing his dimples and gold tooth.  He looked at his watch, smiled again in his self-satisfied way and said, “Fifteen minutes from the Tangerine Road turnoff, pretty good.”  Making a big macho deal out of tucking in his shirt, ignoring Delaney’s little snorts of impatience, he rolled his large dark eyes casually toward the body on the ground and asked, “What we got here?”

Delaney flipped immediately to the page of notes he had bookmarked.  “Here’s all we know: jogger called it in.  Here’s his name and phone numbers.” He handed Sarah a slip of paper.  “Said he had to go to work, he’ll be available to interview by four this afternoon.  He’s working now at University Medical Center if you feel you need to talk to him sooner.  Soames and Daly answered the 911 call,” he gestured toward the uniforms, who were finishing their barriers.  “They secured the scene and called the paramedics.  The paras called in his vitals and the E.R. Doc pronounced death.  Soames and Daly are both working, what, eight to oh-six hundred?”  Both men looked up and nodded, Soames pulling a pitiful face and pointing to his wristwatch.  He liked to get back to the station and take his sweet time logging out.  “Right, so their backup’s coming, and we need to get ’em downloaded and out of here as fast as we can.”

Sarah said, “We got an M.E. coming?” 

“Yeah, whoever’s on call, he’ll be here any minute.  It’s warming up fast,” Delaney pointed out, unnecessarily.  Sweat had begun to pool under his eyes and run down his pale, freckled cheeks.  He had the wrong metabolism and pigmentation for summer in the Tucson valley.  But his parents and all his siblings lived here and he had never thought of moving.  “I already called for the van, we don’t have a whole lot of time.” 

“Yeah, and the driver’ll be yelling to transport about two minutes after he gets here,” Sarah said. 

“Man, yeah, somebody at County’s lit a fire under those guys,” Ibarra said, “they don’t even  say ‘Hello’ anymore, just ‘I gotta go.’ ”  He looked at Sarah and said, “So shall we get a move on?”  As if he hadn’t been the last one on the scene.

“Well, we can’t start till Gloria’s done,” Sarah said.

 “Listen,” Delaney said, “just do what you gotta do, they can all wait if they have to.  Here’s all your initial crime report forms, the case number’s on ’em.”  He handed her a manila folder.  “Assignments aren’t a tough call since there’s just the two of you.  Sarah, you’ll take the body, of course, here and at the autopsy, I’ll help with that if I can.  Jimmy, you’ll be the scene detective, whatever Sarah shows you, bag it and tag it.  And be sure you get all the stats, times and temp and so on, and measure and sketch the scene, of course.  And the follow-on will be whatever she says it is, hard to say right now with so little to go on.”  Delaney cleared his throat and looked around in that absent-minded way he had.  Sometimes he stared right through you when he was thinking.  “Only witness you’ve got is that jogger who found the body.  He almost stepped on it, he said.  Yelled out loud and fell over.  After that I think he was too shocked to see much for a while.  So…up to you to find everything else, guys.”