Dirty Harry 09 - The Killing Connection (7 page)

Callahan grimaced, pushing a long exhalation of air through his nose. “Shit,” he said for the second time that morning. “Anything else?”

“All different shapes, all different sizes,” White mused with sing-song consideration. “By the looks of it, all different ages. They were buried at different times over the last few years though. That much is clear by the rate of decomposition on each body. Won’t know much else for sure until we get them back to the lab.”

Harry leaned over and looked up at the sky from under the umbrella’s lip. The rain was still coming down in near torrential fashion. It had been falling like this, on and off, for days. Harry thought that this graveyard would not have been discovered had it not been for the monsoon-like downpour. Judging from San Francisco’s usual rainfall, this cemetery could have remained undiscovered forever.

“How recent was the latest victim?” Harry asked.

“A good six months at least,” White shrugged. “This could be one of those psycho cemeteries, Harry. The bastard could have done all this without anyone knowing and skipped town months ago.”

“And that’s just what I want you to find out, Inspector,” came another voice from behind the labman—stronger, higher, and less considerate than White’s. Callahan recognized it immediately. It was Captain Winston McKay.

Harry turned to look down at the five-foot-eleven inch police officer, who had his neatly coiffed black hair under a Captain’s rain-shielded hat. Behind him was a hulking sergeant carrying the additional protection of an umbrella. Harry said and did nothing, inspiring the smaller officer to continue.

“Nice of you to show up, Inspector,” he said sarcastically. “Isn’t it proper protocol for a lesser ranking officer to salute his superior?”

“Only in the military,” Callahan said, looking back to the corpse pit. “Otherwise it’s just a matter of perspective.”

“Perspective?” McKay echoed. “I don’t know what you mean.”

This time Harry looked at him. “One man’s superior is another man’s inferior,” he explained.

McKay’s lips vibrated and his fists clenched before he was able to bring up a retort. “You watch your mouth,” he exploded. “I could bust you down to nothing!” All of a sudden, the men who had been working in the excavation were watching the Inspector and the Captain.

Aware of this, but indifferent to it, Callahan shrugged. “So bust me,” he invited. “I don’t need this. I could think of better things to do than play politics while dead women are being dragged out of the ground.”

It was McKay who was not only aware of all the eyes on them, but was desperate to get the upper hand. “What could be more important than finding their killer?” he pompously demanded.

“What could be less important than talking to you about it?” Callahan countered quietly. Harry’s insubordination was a calculated risk on two fronts. First, demotions had no meaning for him. He had thrown away his badge before, and after everything he had been through—and not just this morning—he really didn’t care whether he was on the police force or not.

Second, he figured there had to be a good reason for McKay to ask for him personally. So if the Captain was hot for Harry’s body, there had to be something mighty pressing behind it.

Callahan watched as McKay struggled to control himself. With an obvious effort, he managed to swallow his wrath and pull back his lips for a snake-like smile. His facial pyrotechnics only offered more proof to Callahan’s theory that McKay was offering him the olive branch under duress.

“Oh no, Inspector,” McKay responded with something approaching pleasure. “I’m not going to demote you. That would be too easy. Especially with all these witnesses.” The captain motioned to all the other plain-clothesmen.

“No, Inspector,” McKay continued. “I’m going to do something worse. I’m going to assign you to this case. Under me. I’m going to give you the responsibility of finding the murderer of these women. Under my direct orders. I’m going to bury you down there with them, Callahan. You’re going to be up to your nose in rotting flesh. You’re going to have to do so much legwork and so much research that you’ll have to put in for a new set of eyes and feet.”

Harry well understood the threat. With the last victim being at least six months old, investigating would be like trying to travel back in time through Jello. The trail will have cooled and clues, let alone evidence, would be almost impossible to find. In fact, a major investigation would have to be launched just to discover who those corroding corpses were. And once that was done, their killer would be that much further away.

“What’s the matter, Inspector?” McKay pressed. “Cat got your tongue? You can’t think of some other insult all of a sudden? Come on, Callahan, I want to know what you think about that. Let everybody hear what Dirty Harry has to say on the subject.”

He was about to say what he thought when Devlin suddenly appeared behind the captain. His tapping McKay on the shoulder at that moment was enough to surprise the officer forward. He accidentally bumped right into Harry with a choked gasp. Grimacing, Harry stepped back and put his hands on McKay’s shoulders to keep the captain upright. Unfortunately, his right foot sunk into the mud on the edge of the incline, throwing the Inspector off balance.

Harry’s hands left McKay’s shoulders abruptly as he felt himself sinking in the goop and sliding over the hill’s lip. He fell back slowly and rolled through the muck, the earth unable to hold his weight. He drifted down and finally came to rest midway between the medical workers and the police watchers.

He looked up to see Devlin and White looking down with concern while McKay was shaking with laughter. Disgusted, Harry pushed his hands into the mud to attempt to stand. Instead, he looked between his arms to see something shiny beginning to appear.

Looking closer as the water completely revealed it, he could see that it was an old-fashioned silver tube whistle—the kind that consisted of a simple mouthpiece and a thin, elegant tube. Wrapping his hand around it, he saw that a chain was connected to the other end. Harry pulled on the whistle and two chain strands appeared, each sinking into the mud in a “V” shape, the base attached to the whistle. Rising out of the stuff on the left side was a tight, metal knot. Harry looked at it closely, seeing that someone with great strength had tied the chain together so that it held. Whoever it was had to be strong to be able to tighten links the way others could tie shoelaces.

Harry could feel whatever was holding the chain down giving way. As he pulled harder, he saw a ruined face emerging, washed as it came by the rain. It was a woman’s face, beaten until beauty had little meaning. But it was a fresh face. Harry could see that easily; he knew his corpses. This one was less than a day old.

He held it up as the rain washed the mud from her head, finally revealing a shapely, naked torso, and a rich, full mane of brown hair. Then, as quickly as it had started the night before, the rain stopped.

C H A P T E R
F i v e

T
he newspapers and television reporters were practically wallowing in it. It seemed to Harry that the anchor people could hardly contain their beaming smiles as they rattled off the rumors they had been able to barely substantiate so far. Harry heard it all on his black and white set with the coat hanger standing in for the broken antennae. As he changed clothes, showered and shaved in his third floor apartment, he corrected the report as the toothy local newsman went along.

“A scene of horror was uncovered today when the police discovered a burial ground on the side of Mount Douglas near John McLaren Park late last night . . .”

“Early this morning,” Harry said aloud.

“. . . At least a dozen bodies were dug up . . .”

“A half dozen.”

“. . . by Sheriff’s officials . . .”

“The Justice Department medical staff.”

“. . . All the victims were women.”

Callahan couldn’t argue with him there. What he could disagree with was that the report was given at all. It was just what some poor girl needed on her way to work. While it might make her a little more careful, it certainly wouldn’t illuminate the matter, which would lead to meaningless paranoia.

“For more on the story, let’s go to Ted Burnett at McLaren Park . . . Ted?”

The picture quickly changed to that of a neatly dressed man picking up the morning newspaper outside his quaint cape house.

“Thank you, John,” intoned another voice, although the speaker wasn’t the man who held the paper. “Little did Trevor Samuels know that when he went out early this morning to walk his dog, that he would be walking right into the middle of a gruesome murder scene,” the voice continued. “Samuels had always lived on this quiet residential street a few blocks from the park . . . seemingly an oasis from inner city violence . . . that is, until this morning.”

The scene shifted to the face of a fat woman standing on her lawn in a moo-moo and slippered feet with a microphone stuck in her face. The legend on the bottom of the screen read ‘Mrs. Howard Fratellini’ and below that, ‘Neighbor.’

“We moved here to get away from all that stuff, you know,” the audio caught her saying in mid-sentence. “We didn’t like all that stuff so we came here for a little quiet.”

“But that quiet was shattered today when Mr. Samuels slipped near the McLaren Reservoir, letting go of his pet’s leash,” the reporter continued, the camera looking over the guarded, cordoned-off area near the hill. “It wasn’t only a lost dog he had to worry about. It was what the dog brought back clenched in its teeth. It was a skull . . . a human skull.”

“It was a human skull,” Harry saw Samuels say. “I couldn’t believe it. A real skull. Well, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather, I was so surprised. Nothing like that ever happens around here.”

“ ‘Nothing like that ever happens around here,’ ” Ted Burnett quoted ominously, now fully on camera in his tie and trenchcoat, holding the mike to his own chin. “Well, John, it looks like hoping is just not enough to keep the specter of violent crime away from any door in our city. And the major questions remain. Will the police be any more successful in finding these victims’ killers than they have been with all the other unsolved murders so far this year? Will this Mortician Murderer strike again? Is there anyplace safe? Is anyone?”

Here the reporter paused ominously, then signed off. “Ted Burnett . . . Eyewitness Action News.”

Harry went at the set from the bathroom. He just managed to keep himself from putting his leg through the picture tube as anchorman John continued with professional seriousness.

“Thank you, Ted. Violence against women is not new in the City by the Bay, but it seems as if it has reached epidemic proportions this year. For background on this story, here’s Connie Baxter. Connie?”

It was impressive in its callous slickness. Callahan had to hand it to them. Not only had they stirred up terror and titillation, but they had also taken a swipe at alleged police inefficiency. Now the pretty, capable, dark-haired Baxter was sonorously reminding her sisters how dangerous it was out on the street as if she had no personal interest in the situation. Her voice was as clipped and reserved as though she were reading a recipe. In fact, someone later told Harry, she had returned to do a restaurant review further on in the broadcast.

“Yeah, guys,” Harry told the TV screen as he turned it off. “And James Brady was killed during the Reagan assassination attempt.”

Given his media-fueled state of mind, Callahan went right back to the Justice building between the Skyway and the Southern Pacific station, ready to chew up and spit out anybody who got in his way. He left his green bomb at the curb and vaulted right toward the front steps. There were reporters on the stairs, outside the main doors, inside the lobby, and in front of the homicide department’s door on the seventh floor.

They accosted almost everyone of note who came in, jostling for position, holding their cameras over their heads and using their microphones and tape recorders like electric prods. Every time an officer or politician appeared, they would crowd around him like bees to honey, forcing him to push his way through while their questions were thrown together in a shouted buzz.

They had just given the treatment to someone when Harry appeared. At first they turned on him expectantly, but when they recognized the face, they gave him plenty of room. Dirty Harry was well known to the veterans of the City Hall Beat, only they thought his nickname signified something other than his investigation techniques.

More than a half decade ago, when they sorely abused him during the “Scorpio Sniper” and the “Enforcer” cases, Callahan decided he wouldn’t be seen in the papers or on the TV news again. So now, whenever a camera or mike is turned his way, all he does is make faces, obscene gestures, and swear grievously.

Someone could try to embarrass him by printing the goofy pictures, but he’d slap a suit on them which would bring their ethics in question. And a paper or network could lose its license on a question of ethics far faster than it could on almost anything but pornography.

Harry ran up the steps without interruption and just made it out the seventh floor elevator doors when a young photographer tried to catch him off-guard. Bringing the camera up to capture Callahan’s serious expression on the way to room seven hundred and fifty, he shouted.

“Over here, Inspector!”

He saw Harry’s head turn in his direction, so he quickly brought the Nikon up, a feeling of success in his head. He found himself looking through the viewfinder at a widely smiling Harry, whose middle finger was prominently in evidence.

He left them all behind the door of the homicide department. The world could be going to hell in a hand-basket—and judging by their caseload, it was—but very little changed within the walls of suite seven-fifty. It still smelled like a locker room and looked like the psychiatric ward of S.F. General Hospital. The major difference between it and the horror of the Vice Squad was that, there, the nuts were all the suspects; here, the cops were the crazies.