Cool in Tucson (3 page)

Behind his back, Ibarra’s mouth formed the silent words, “No shit?”  Sometimes the Sergeant let his mouth ran on while his mind went off to other cases.  Sarah looked at her watch to keep from snickering, and kept her voice neutral. “Fine.  And here come the replacements for Soames and Daly, so, Jimmy?  Will you get their information and turn ‘em loose before Soames has a worm over there?  And then get the new guys walking the area, okay?”

“You got it,” Jimmy said.  He pulled out his pocket recorder as he walked toward the parking lot, where the night shift uniforms were briefing the day shift.   

Gloria ducked out from under the yellow tape and said, “Okay, that part’s done.  Sarah, you the primary on this?”

“Right,” Sarah said.  “I’m leading this great big crew.”  They walked back inside the ring together and began surveying the body and the ground around it, looking for evidence items to mark with flagged pins so Gloria could photograph them.

“Yo, pretty scarce, huh?” Gloria said. 

“For sure.  No weapons, not even a bloody rock.  Is that a scrape mark?  Let’s call it one.  This could be a footprint—too dry to be sure.  Let’s mark it and take a picture, sometimes things show up better on film.  Isn’t this strange?  Such a violent death with no signs of a struggle.  All we’ve got is the body.  And the blood.”

“But plenty of that.  Shee.”  Gloria made a face.  “Sure ain’t your Daddy’s cologne, is it?”

“You need some Vicks?”

“Nah, I got some gum.”  Gloria was from South Central L.A., she had her pride.  She liked to point out that “compared to the place I grew up in, Tucson’s just a peaceful little village.” 

Delaney was standing a few feet down the path, fielding one message after another on his cell phone, already multi-tasking although his official workday wouldn’t start for another hour.  Sarah thought he micro-managed a little too much and made himself more accessible than he needed to, though she had taken advantage of his availability gladly enough when she first came into the section. 
Back when we were still talking
. 

Last winter she had made something of a game of identifying grunt work she thought she could offload when, as she firmly intended, she eventually got his job.  Now it didn’t look as if she could expect a recommendation from Delaney.  But then he’d be gone by the time she was ready.  He’d been top dog in Homicide for four years already, and the powers that be in the department seemed to think five years in his pressure-cooker job was long enough.  Sarah disagreed with that policy too, and knew her chances to change it totaled zero.

“Okay,” Delaney said, snapping the phone shut.  “Sarah, I’m going to have to leave in a minute.  Ready to talk?”

“Sure.”  They stood together by the victim.

 “What do you see so far?” he asked her.

“Good looking man.  Took care of himself.  Nice clothes.”

“Uh-huh.  Those shoes cost one-fifty easy.”

“They did?  I guess you’re right, Doc Martins.  Calvin Klein walking shorts.  His hair has a nice trim, too, doesn’t it?  And his nails are clean.”

“Do a scrape anyway.”

“Oh, we will.  Not a homeless guy, is all I meant to say.”  She looked around.  “Where’s his car, though?”

“Not in the lot, obviously.  Soames and Daly looked around before I got here, they didn’t find anything nearby.”

“Well, he wasn’t jogging in those shoes.  Not really dressed for biking either, and there’s no bike lying around, is there?  So how’d he get here?  Walking in the dark?” 

“Good question.  Also, why no watch or jewelry?  This look like a mugging to you?”

“Maybe.  Big strong guy though, I wouldn’t pick him to jump unless I had plenty of help.  And the thing is, there’s no sign of a struggle.”

“I know.  You think he got those muscles lifting weights?  He sure doesn’t look like a laborer.  Although his hands”—he pointed to a couple of fingers without touching them—“They look a little crooked, don’t they?  Maybe he’s a fighter.”  Delaney looked at his watch.  “Well.  I’ll call in, tell ‘em what we got here, and then I have to go—I’ll see you back at the station.”  He walked away punching numbers into his cell. 
So much for his help with the body
. 
Well, I never
counted on it anyway
.  It was a rare day when you finished one whole conversation with Sergeant Delaney without his phone ringing several times.

Sarah finished her walk with Gloria and turned her loose to start her blood samples and fingernail scrapings.  The two patrolmen were walking toward their cars.  Ibarra came back punching his recorder off, and Sarah said, “Okay, Jimmy, you ready to take a look?” 

They both gloved up.  Ibarra’s round face took on the clenched look he wore at messy crime scenes.  He enjoyed the intelligence-gathering part of his job, the piling up of evidence, the endless phone calls and interviews that nailed a case down solid.  But he still, after years in homicide, had to grit his teeth and focus hard to tolerate the stench of death and the appearance of bodies that had been abused.    

For Sarah, it was just what she did at work.  She had decided on police work in her first semester at Pima College and could no longer remember any of her earlier ambitions.  The bad behavior of live people still bothered her sometimes, but she had no problem with the dead.  Sometimes they took on a dignity they had lacked in life.  And the bystanders you encountered at crime scenes, in extreme states of fear and grief, were often more truly themselves than at any other time.

             “Okay, let’s do it,” Ibarra said.  They squatted on either side of the dead man on the ground, and began going over his body like pickpockets, looking for money, wallet, jewelry, dog tags, all the closely-held artifacts of life whose only use to the victim now would be his own identification.

But this victim had nothing.  “Not even lint,” Ibarra said, with an inside-out pocket in his hand.

“I got ninety cents over here.  Otherwise, squeaky clean.”  Sarah sat back on her heels and looked around.  “A robbery, then?  But I don’t read this as a gang hit, do you?”

“Nah,” Ibarra said, “in this part of town?  And where’s all the bullet holes?”  He looked at the few flags stuck in the ground.  “You and Gloria didn’t find much, did you?”

“No.” Sarah slapped her neck.  “The body, a possible footprint, a scrape mark and a million insects, some of which are biting me right now.”  

“Damn, it’s already getting hot, too, isn’t it?”  Ibarra wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, holding his gloved hand carefully away.  “Here comes the M.E.  Hoo boy, we got Animal today.”

“Morning, group,” Dr. Moses Greenberg said, walking up with his bag.  “What do we have here?”  A taut Type A at work and radically over-trained athlete in his free time, he had run marathons and done white-water kayaking ever since medical school and was now, in his late thirties, escalating to triathlons and Iron Man competitions.  Coupled with the demands of forensic medicine and a couple of shifts a week at a volunteer clinic in Sells, his insane schedule and the physical demands he placed on himself made him so tense he seemed to vibrate slightly when you stood next to him.

“We have a well-dressed victim who’s lost most of his blood,” Sarah said, “as well as his car and ID.”

              “Well, no use letting him lie around here while you search.”  Greenberg opened his bag.  “Feel that sun?  We need to get this body to the cooler before it turns to
mush
.”  He opened his bag, shone a light in the victim’s eyes, took his temperature, and looked at his fingertips.  As Sarah watched, he held the two hands up together and looked at them thoughtfully.  
Noticed them right away, I knew he would
.  

Sarah tolerated Dr. Greenberg’s shoot-the-moon persona better than most of the detectives.  He was arrogant and impatient, but she liked his results.  He was quick and precise and he never bluffed.  His knowledge of forensic science was awesomely comprehensive, and if he didn’t know something he had no trouble saying so.  One benefit of a towering ego, Sarah thought; Greenberg didn’t need approval from the likes of them.    

He did seem to be wrapped a little tighter every year.  TPD homicide division had a pool going for the expected date of his collapse/implosion/freakout.  In the meantime, working around him felt like trying to deal cards in a tornado.  All around the Department, people had learned to beware of Dr. Greenberg’s short fuse.   

“The wagon’s on its way,” Sarah said.  “Okay if we roll him?  I’d like to find out where all this blood came from.”

“What, this much blood and you haven’t found his wounds?  Christ, looks like he was shot by a cannon.  Okay, let’s do it.  You two got him?”

 The stench was stronger for a few seconds.  The blood-soaked shirt was almost black in back and turning stiff.  Intact, though. 

“I don’t see any holes back here either,” Ibarra said.

“Wait, I see it.  Base of the neck,” Greenberg said.  “Put him back.”  He pulled aside the collar of the shirt. 

“That’s just a little cut, isn’t it?  Doesn’t look like much,” Sarah said. 

“Made by a sharp narrow blade,
very
sharp on both sides and long enough to cut the subclavian artery.  I
think
.  And if I’m right you’re not looking for any ordinary mugger, kiddies.”  There was something uncommonly condescending about the way Greenberg said, “kiddies.”

“What’re you saying?  Mack the Knife?”

“Somebody with street smarts, anyway.  You’ve got to be
bold
to cut a man this way.  What’s this?”  He pulled the collar farther aside. 

“Now those look like jailhouse tats,” Ibarra said.

“Sure do,” Sarah said.  “No color, and kind of crude.  They don’t match the rest of him, do they?”

“Jesus,” the doctor said, “cops know such weird stuff.”

“Oh, and doctors don’t?  Subclavian artery, hoo-ah.”

“That’s Anatomy 101, don’t be impressed by that.”

“Okay, I’m not impressed,” Ibarra said.  “You gonna do your wise-ass forensic doctor thing and tell us how long he’s been dead?”

“Sure.  Let’s see.  Body temperature…oh…by the book, maybe a couple of hours.  Of course we live in a warm climate.”  Ibarra made a derisive sound.  Greenberg cocked an eyebrow at him but didn’t pause.  “Lividity,” he lifted the victim’s left leg and peered at the underside of the buttocks, “looks like three to twelve hours.  Also—”  he lifted an arm and looked some more—“doesn’t look like he’s been moved since he died, you glad to know that?  Let’s show a little gratitude then!”  He put the arm back down.  “Let’s see.  Beginning rigor mortis
¾
” he touched the jaw, neck and shoulders, extended his long-fingered right hand and rocked it
¾
“maybe two to six hours.  Or more.  Or possibly less.”  He divided an ironic smile equally between the two detectives.  “Take your best shot, kiddies.”

“So sometime last night,” Sarah said.

“I should think so,” Dr. Greenberg said.

“Call me crazy,” Ibarra said, “but I think I could have guessed that.”

“Why are you wasting my time with it then?  Let’s go, guys.”  Muscles twitched in his cheek as he packed his kit.   

Sarah said, “You picked a time for the autopsy yet?”

“Uh…is today Tuesday?”  His life a blur of over-reaching, he had trouble keeping track of days.

“Yes.” 

“So…sometime tomorrow.  I think.  Probably morning but I’ll let you know.  Depends on…you know.  Today.”

“Right.  Okay then, I want to ask you for a favor.  This body’s got no ID on it at all and now it looks like there’ll be no ballistics.  How about letting us do the fingerprints at the lab, before you put him away?”  She looked at Ibarra.  “You agree with me this guy’s probably done time, right?”