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“Swifty, what do you make of this?”
John Swift heard his name and looked up from where he was squatting next to the snow-covered body. Alan Cohen, the Sheriff’s Deputy, the first on-scene after the emergency call, was pointing to something in the powdery drift alongside Route 9N.
John Swift sighed to himself and stood up, feeling the strain in his knees as he got upright. The snow pattered down on his coat, sounding like a crackling fire. He longed to be home by the wood stove, with Kady resting her head on her front paws beside him. Anywhere but out here in the cold at three a.m., with evidence vanishing under the snowfall, and more bunny and deer tracks than tire or foot tread.
Swift went over to where Alan Cohen was standing, hands on his hips, facing the direction of Marshall Hamilton’s open field. Cohen looked down at something near his feet. A piece of cardboard was sticking out of the snow. Swift squinted down. “Looks like trash, Alan. I’ll have my CSI bag it, though. Thanks.”
“Sure,” said Cohen. Alan Cohen was a relatively young, eager deputy. He was well-meaning, but spent most of his time doing pick-up orders for the county mental-health clinic. He looked completely out of place at a crime scene.
Swift clapped a hand on Cohen’s shoulder. “Thanks,” he said. Cohen smiled, staring down at the cardboard as if he’d cracked the Lindberg case.
As Swift walked away he saw ambulance lights spreading color in flashes, so that the forest on the other side of the road seemed to pulse red. He stared into the woods for a moment, stopping in his tracks, hypnotized. Then the moment was over, and he looked back-and-forth along route 9N.
More troopers had arrived and set up blockades at either end of the crime scene, giving them a core scene of about two hundred yards to work with. But no one was coming. This time of night, in the middle of February, snow like this beading down, you’d have one car coming along every ten minutes. But as dawn approached, traffic would increase. They would have to set up a detour two miles back, onto an inconvenient circuitous route around New Brighton.
Swift forced himself to look back at the body. The EMTs who arrived first had detected no pulse, and initial assessments were that the body had been in the snow for at least fifteen minutes. Short enough that the corpse still radiated some heat, but long enough that the brain was surely dead, the life irrecoverable. They needed to wait for the official declaration from the coroner, who was on his way, probably wrested from deep sleep like Swift had been.
And here were his headlights, stabbing through the snow, turning it to black particles in the beams.
* * *
“Deceased,” said Hal Woodruff, crouching next to the body. Woodruff was in his early seventies, silver-haired, dressed in a thick winter coat.
Swift looked at the arm sticking up in the air. “Recognize him?”
Woodruff shook his head. “Never seen him. Don’t know him, doubt I know the family.”
“First impressions?”
Woodruff sighed. His eyes gleamed in the headlights that illuminated the scene. “Not good. I don’t see any blood. Arm is sticking out at a weird angle, but . . . I don’t know . . . he could have landed like that or something; fell over.”
Swift knew where Woodruff was going. There were three possibilities. Firstly, natural causes — a heart attack, stroke, aneurism, pulmonary embolism, something like that. The kid could be a diabetic. Didn’t have his meds, got in a fight with the parents, ran away from home, went into insulin shock, froze to death. The second possibility was an unnatural cause, such as drugs or alcohol in the system. The third was foul play.
A state trooper was taking a statement from the plow-truck driver, Lenny Duso, who’d discovered the body. Duso had reported that a car had arrived at the scene shortly after he’d come across the body and then turned and sped away.
That alone made foul play grimly probable. And worst of all, the decedent in the road was just a kid. Barely a teenager. Maybe thirteen years old.
The parents would have to be contacted. Swift knew it wouldn’t be Woodruff who talked to the family, it would be him.
Which was shitty.
“When do you put time of death?”
“Offhand? I’d say it was recent. Just stiffening with rigor now, no lividity yet, still some warmth emanating from the skin. It’s faint, but it’s there.” Woodruff looked at Swift again with those old-man eyes that hurt Swift somewhere deep inside of him. “This just happened,” Woodruff said.
“Alright,” Swift replied. He felt something buzzing against his chest — his cell phone, stuck in an inner pocket of his winter parka. Swift went over to the trooper who was interviewing Duso. He pulled out his phone and glanced at it. It was a new email notification.
“Oh for God’s sake,” he muttered. He’d only gotten the phone recently, a top-of-the-line smartphone, when they became mandatory within the department. A week or so ago the phone had asked him if he’d wanted “push notifications,” and he’d asked a co-worker who said that he did. He realized now that it meant his phone buzzed every time he received an email. But it was his personal account, so he didn’t bother to check it, merely glancing at the time.
It was 3:23 a.m., Duso’s emergency call had come in twenty minutes ago, and about a half inch of snow had fallen in just the last few minutes, probably two inches since the call. Highway Department plows would want to come through any time now. They would have to be diverted.
The trooper looked up as Swift came over, and his eyes widened expectantly.
Swift asked, “You got the description of the vehicle?”
“I did, yes.”
Duso started talking. “I told him what I saw. I told him it was some little Jap—”
Swift held up his hand. “And we have coverage at exits 30 through 33?”
“That’s correct.”
“Let’s get units out to Route 73, in case they knew they were spotted and decided to stay off the Interstate.”
“Yes, sir.”
Swift started to turn away, then looked at Duso. “Thank you for your . . . quick reaction calling this in.”
Duso’s expression was hard to read, concealed by his gnarly beard. “I did what any good American ought to do. You know, I look to serve justice, not the bureaucracy.” His eyes narrowed, no doubt hoping Swift would feel the sting of his little barb. When Swift said nothing, Duso went on, “I would have chased those sons of bitches down myself, but you know, again, you gotta play by the rules, or if the rule-makers don’t like it, there you go off to the stony lonesome.”
Swift nodded sympathetically. In his mind he could see the sands slipping through the hourglass. There was no way he was going to get into a political argument with the likes of Lenny Duso. Hal Woodruff had made the death pronouncement, and everything needed to move quickly now. No time for Duso’s moralizing. “You did just fine,” Swift said. “Thank you.”
He hurried away before Duso could bend his ear further. He returned to the body, twenty yards away. He heard the grumble of an engine and saw a set of headlights approaching. He hoped it was his Crime Scene Investigator. He was going to need more people on this, and fast.
Woodruff was still on his knees next to the dead kid. Swift pulled his phone out. The cold bit into the skin of his hand as he dialed and held the phone up to his ear.
Woodruff was not a forensic pathologist. The nearest medical examiner was in Plattsburgh, about forty miles away, a consultant who did some work with the college, but ninety percent of her gigs came from law enforcement. Swift listened to the recorded message in the medical examiner’s office and left a voicemail. The approaching headlights drifted over to the side of the road. He put his phone back into his pocket and watched the CSI get out of the vehicle. He could only imagine what she was thinking. A crime scene in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, under a snowfall that just kept coming.
Brittney Silas had on a big puffer coat with a fur-lined hood, yet she still looked numbed by the cold as she approached the crime scene. The bitter wind hunted the gaps in Swift’s own jacket as he watched the CSI squint through the flashing reds and blues of the state-trooper vehicles, taking in the scene before her.
She located him in the commotion and came over. Despite the ditch hour, she looked alert and present. The rumor about Brittney Silas was that she was a tough woman, a take-charge type. As far as Swift knew, she was single, never married, no kids. She’d been a Crime Scene Investigator for thirteen years. It didn’t exactly make her a veteran, but she was experienced enough. She worked all over the County, but lived nearby, the one positive in a night filled with negatives.
“John, how are you?”
“Like I took a tumble on an honest bet. Busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest. I’ve got more.”
Her gaze was roving, taking in the whole scene, finally landing on the lump of snow in the center of it all.
Swift’s eyes followed. “I’m guessing you’re going to be able to get your photographic log, your narrative log, barely an in situ diagram, and you’re not going to have much of a latent print-lift log.”
She seemed unfazed. “Did you have Mr. Woodruff bag the hands?”
Swift blinked. He could feel the snow on his eyelashes. “No. Left everything for you just the way it was.”
“Let’s get him to bag the body’s hands immediately.” She moved off fast, and Swift hurried to get in step with her.
“How do you want to handle this?” he said.
“Well, let’s start to process. We’ll work up to the body, just the way we’re supposed to.” She seemed to be talking to the night, to the relentless weather, as much as to Swift. Within another couple steps they were next to Hal Woodruff, Deputy Cohen, and the body.
Brittney turned on a high-wattage smile for Hal Woodruff. “Hi, Hal.”
“Hi Brit.”
“Decedent identified?”
“No ma’am.”
She put her hands on her hips. Swift saw she was wearing snug ski gloves. CSIs had been referred to as Evidence Techs not long ago, a term they surely resented. The scene was Swift’s to control, but he could already feel Silas insinuate herself. Her breath plumed out in front of her. She looked around. She peered into the trees, then she rotated around and looked at the field. Now she was looking down the length of route 9N, at the house in the distance. “When’s the last time you worked a DB case?”
Swift thought back. “Two years,” he said. There had been a suicide in the woods. A man around his own age, late fifties.
“Okay,” she said. “Hal, let’s check for an ID.”
“Probably too young for a driver license,” said Swift.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Before this layer of snow here, we could see the face better. Young male, Caucasian, about 120, 130 pounds, somewhere between twelve and fifteen years of age.”
“No wallet, no ID, nothing in his pockets,” said Hal. “Think he’s wearing pajamas.”
“Thanks, Hal.” She walked away from the body. Swift followed. As she walked she pointed to Lenny Duso, who was watching them from beside the trooper’s car.
“That’s our discoverer?”
“That’s him.”
She pointed beyond, into the road.
“And probably we’ve driven all over the tire tracks. The vehicle he said turned around and hightailed it out of here.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She shot him a quick look, and Swift realized he was on the defensive. “We had to approach somehow,” he said.
“Wish we could have protected a little more of the core scene.”
“Deputy Cohen was the first to arrive. Then two of my troopers, and then I got here.”
She said nothing and he could sense the tension rising between them. “I’m sorry, Ms. Silas, but this is the best we got. This is a pretty major route here.”
“Have to turn the vehicles around.”
“We’re rerouting traffic, yes. In two hours, there’s going to be twenty cars trying to come through every minute.”
“Too bad for them. Processing the scene can’t be rushed.”
“I know it can’t, and, Ms. Silas, I’m not trying to fight you here. But we’re in the middle of a blizzard at three o’clock in the morning. I don’t think you’re going to be tagging a whole lot to take back to the lab. That body is the most important piece of evidence, so the sooner we can get to it, the better.”
She stopped walking and faced him directly, frowning up at him. They were near one of the vehicles, which washed one side of her in thin white light. “Do you think this is a homicide?”
“My kneejerk reaction? Yes. But I can’t say for sure. I’ve got to put my worksheet together. I need you to document the scene as best you can, given these conditions. It’s going to be your chain of evidence. But we do need to get an ID on that kid and find out who his parents are. Start questioning his friends, family, associates. Someone was here, according to a witness, who did a one-eighty right over there and took off.”
“They weren’t just scared by what they saw? Maybe someone just didn’t want to get involved?”
“I don’t know. Anything’s possible.”
“Well you made the call, detective. You think there’s foul play, that this is a crime scene. But this kid could have walked here, could’ve been driven here, could’ve been lowered from a helicopter for all we know. The scene can tell us that. I need to find what I can, before it vanishes under all this white stuff. As you keep pointing out.”
“Understood,” he said quietly.
“You don’t sound happy, Detective Swift.”
“Happy? I’m happy. There’s a handful of homes within a half mile of here. My guess is that, no, he wasn’t flown in by chopper, but he came from one of those homes. But I have no ID. If I had an ID, I might be better prepared to give someone the worst news of their life. So in the next few minutes, see if there’s any ante-mortem data in all this shit that can tell me whose dead kid is lying there before I go knock on their door.”
She stood looking at him, the snow falling between them; the lights sweeping through.
Her voice was softer. “Gotcha,” she said. Then a pause. “I liked the line about the one-legged man.”
