Endangered Species (4 page)

“You don’t know who she might have rented it to?”

“No. She makes the payments, and they’ve been on time.” She added, “Of course, there’ve only been a couple.”

“Have you called to tell her about the fire yet?”

“I called the insurance company right after I heard from you. I suppose they’re the ones to call the property owner.” A small, relieved smile. “The policy covers the market value of the property. We require that as a condition of the loan.”

“Borrow your phone?” The dark-haired woman nodded, and Wager dialed the number on the loan application. After three rings, Gail Weil answered, and Wager mentally crossed her name off the list of possible victims. He told her about the fire and asked if he could come by.

“Fire? My property—it burned down?”

“I understand your insurance company’s already been notified. Will you be at home in the next half hour, ma’am?”

“My new house? The one I just bought?”

“Yes, ma’am. Are you going to be at home?”

“My God! How did it start? Who did it?”

“I’ll be over in a few minutes, ma’am.”

“My God—that’s my property! How—”

Wager hung up and thanked the loan officer. Gail Weil was waiting for him when he pulled to the curb in front of her house. On Ivanhoe a block north of busy Colfax, it was one of those English brick cottages with steeply pitched roof and arched front door that were supposed to remind people of a castle. What it reminded Wager of was a Sinclair gas station that used to be near his home when he was a kid. In fact, Ms. Weil looked like a pump jockey. She wore a tan jumpsuit with short sleeves, and her graying straight hair was combed back from the forehead and cropped at her neck. She didn’t glance at Wager’s badge case when he introduced himself.

“I called the insurance company. They told me it was a total loss!”

“Yes, ma’am. It looked that way.”

“My God! I’ll never get my investment back!”

“You’ll want to talk to the insurance company and the bank about that, ma’am. Could you tell me—”

“I did! I told you that. All that man would tell me was that he’d get back to me. Wouldn’t tell me anything, and I can’t make heads or tails out of that policy, the way they put things in language a body can’t read!”

“Can you tell me—”

“I didn’t have a replacement clause. It was covered for the market value—I had to have market value when I used it for collateral. But I don’t know if that’s enough for replacement, and that insurance man wouldn’t tell me. …”

“Ma’am—Ms. Weil—I need your help. Somebody was killed in that fire.”

“Killed! Oh, my God! Killed? The insurance man didn’t say anything about that!” She clapped both hands to her cheeks and stared at Wager with wide eyes. “I’m not responsible for that—you can’t arrest me for that!”

“I’m not here to arrest you, lady. I just want to know who rented the place. I’m trying to identify the victim.”

Her mouth snapped shut, lips making a hollow click. “Name? Of the renter?”

“Yes, ma’am. Can you tell me who you rented it to and who lived there?”

“Marshall. Just a minute.” She left Wager standing on the small, unsheltered slab of concrete that served as a porch to the cottage. He heard drawers sliding and papers rustling. Then she came back and read from a legal-size sheet of paper marked with heavy type and a lot of blank spaces filled in by pen. “John Marshall. He rented it by himself, and as far as I know he lived there by himself too.”

“Does he list a previous address?”

“Oceanside, California. North Tremont Street—951.” She asked, “Is that who died? Mr. Marshall?”

Wager looked up from his notebook. “We’re not sure yet. Any next of kin listed?”

“His mother. He put her down as a reference: Elizabeth Marshall. Same address in Oceanside.”

“Can you tell me what he looks like?”

“Young, but not too young. Maybe thirty, more or less. Had kind of long brown hair but not real long. Not like a hippie, you know. He seemed nice enough, I guess.”

Wager found himself using the past tense too. “Did he have any facial hair?”

“No.”

“Wear glasses? Rings? Any jewelry?”

“Not that I recall. I didn’t really notice that.”

“Do you know the names of anyone who might have been living with him?”

“No. I told you, he rented it by himself.”

“The neighbors said several other people stayed there from time to time. He never mentioned any names?”

“No. But it was his house. To use, I mean. If he wanted people staying with him, that was up to him. That don’t break any laws, does it?”

“No, ma’am. Was he tall? Short? Fat? How would you describe him?”

“Taller than you. Maybe six feet. Kind of slender but not what you’d call skinny.”

“Did he put down his work address?”

She looked at the blanks on the lease agreement. “Crystal Pure Chemical Corp., 11589 San Bernardino Boulevard, Los Angeles.”

“Did he tell you anything about his work?”

“Said he was a salesman—an area rep, he called it.” She added. “Said he traveled a lot.”

“Did he pay by check or cash?”

“Cash. The damage deposit and three months’ rent. The next month’s not due yet.”

“Three months? You require three months’ rent up front?”

“No. That was the way he wanted it. Said he might be out of town when it was due and wanted to make sure it was covered.”

Wager nodded. “Anything else you can tell me about him?”

“No. No complaints. He just looked around the place and said it was fine and he’d take it.”

“Was it furnished?”

“Stove, refrigerator, washer and dryer. He said he’d get his own furniture.” She thought about that. “I don’t know if the appliances are covered in the insurance, either.”

“Did he say if he’d rent the furniture?”

“No. I didn’t ask.”

“And you didn’t go by the house to see how he was getting on?”

“No. His rent’s paid, and the house is his to use. I was a renter for a long time, and I never did like landlords coming by all the time and snooping. And then when something went wrong, they couldn’t be found.”

Wager thanked her. As he turned to go, she said, “I don’t have any liability for him. If anybody’s liable, it’s Marshall himself.”

“Sounds fine to me, ma’am.”

9/21

1200

D
OC
H
EFLEY HAD
been expected at the morgue around ten, so he should have been working on the body by noon. Wager went south and took Eighth Avenue across town to Denver General. The usual crowd of limping, dragging, and halting figures clustered in the shade of the hospital’s long covered walkway to wait for relatives or Handi-Vans to pick them up. Inside, the large echoing lobby always reminded Wager of a train station crowded with Denver’s poor of all races. Just beyond the entry, Wager turned past the desk that provided both information and security. A bored guard surveyed people entering and kept an eye on the escalators leading up to the second level. The lobby noise was a steady shuffle on polished stone, worried voices in a variety of languages, the echoing wail of a crying baby. In a way, the building
was
a busy depot, except that the place a lot of the travelers were headed for wasn’t on the map and they wouldn’t be coming back.

The morgue was in the cool, windowless basement. A shortcut led through an unmarked door, down an ill-lit stairway, and along a maze of halls to the reception room. The secretary saw him through the glass and answered before Wager could ask the question. “He’s working on it now, Detective Wager. I told him you were in a hurry.”

“Thanks.” He followed the dark-paneled L-shaped hall back past the pathologists’ offices to a cramped lounge. There, morgue assistants waited between jobs to watch television and eat sandwiches. An open doorway on the far side led to the examining room. At the nearest end of the room, a ramp sloped to the ambulance bay, and a concrete-block wall half-hid a faintly hissing gas furnace, used to cremate bits and pieces. At the other end of the room was a narrow hallway to the viewing station. Making up part of the far wall, like a large built-in filing cabinet, stainless-steel cadaver drawers formed three long rows starting at the floor and reaching as high as two men could lift a body. On the end closest to the delivery ramp, two larger drawers were designed to hold awkwardly stiff or swollen bodies that wouldn’t fit the normal space.

The rest of the wall was a narrow, waist-high workbench backed by a supply cabinet whose glass doors reached to the ceiling. In the center of the brightly lit room, three stainless-steel dissecting tables were anchored above floor drains whose chrome winked in the tile. Doc Hefley stood at the middle table, bending over a charred, stiffly contorted body. In the cold fluorescent glare, it looked like something left too long on the barbecue.

“Wager.” Hefley turned from the microphone that dangled over the body. “I should have known who it was when Sharon said Homicide kept calling about this one.”

“I need an ID, Doc. Somebody somewhere will have to be told.”

“Somebody somewhere will have to wait. I’ll do what I can to get fingerprints, but the hands are burned so badly, I don’t think anything’s left. My guess is it’ll take a forensic dentist to establish a definite ID.”

Wager nodded and tried not to notice the smell. An X-ray machine on an extension arm hovered above the corpse. Wager watched as Hefley, without touching the victim, scanned the remains carefully, muttering into the microphone. The torso and arms were clenched something like a boxer—the usual “pugilistic attitude” caused by heat-contracted muscles. “Did the forensics crew get photographs of the site?” Hefley asked.

“Archy Douglas said he’d have them back this morning.”

“I ought to go look at the site, Wager. But goddamn it, I don’t have time.” He nodded at the rows of steel drawers. “There’re four more jobs waiting in there, and everyone else is in a hurry too.” He didn’t add what Wager already knew: that Hefley was the only forensic pathologist currently available to the City and County of Denver. The latest spate of vicious politics and ineptitude among the hospital’s managers was taking its toll. The mayor, of course, claimed nothing was wrong—the chief administrator was his appointee—but Elizabeth had told Wager that a real scandal was building in the mayor’s office over the hospital administration’s failures.

“The victim was found in a closet.” Wager described the site as he remembered it.

“Any debris around the body?”

“Some hangers. The clothes bar. Hard to tell about anything else—ashes and muck, mostly.”

“I’ll look at Archy’s photographs. That’ll have to do.”

A buzz interrupted the background silence, and Hefley fished wet X-ray plates from the developer. He pinned them in a row to the screen’s white surface and began studying the hazy blobs and smears of white and gray. Wager could identify some of the larger bones in a couple of the negatives, but Hefley was busy peering at shadows and dark spots that meant little to the detective.

“Any foreign objects?”

“Don’t see any.”

“Fractures?”

“Yeah.” He pointed to a crooked line in a long streak of white. “Ulnar fracture. But it might have been caused by sudden muscular contraction. Fires are a bitch that way, especially hot ones.”

“Did it happen before or after death?”

“As tight as this body’s clenched, it could easily be after.” He moved to another plate. “Well, now ….”

“Something?”

He tapped a pencil at another smear of shadow. “Bit of extradural hemorrhage here.” The doctor muttered something into his microphone. “Fire this hot, Wager, you can get postmortem fracture of the vault of the skull, resulting from transudation of blood between the dura and calvarium.” He glanced at the detective. “That means the brain steams and cracks the skull open. Ever cooked clams?”

Wager hadn’t. Didn’t want to, either. “But you say that’s postmortem.”

“Right. The victim would have died of smoke inhalation before the brain boiled. But here’s something interesting.” The pencil tip moved to another shadowy area, about the size of Wager’s thumb. “A depression at the base of the skull. Now, that kind of fracture doesn’t come from steaming.”

“Antemortem or postmortem?”

“Where in hell’d you learn all your Latin, Wager? Parochial school?”

“Some. But a lot of it’s like Spanish too.”

“By God, you’re not as dumb as you look, are you?” Hefley spoke while he studied the plate. “It could be antemortem. And it could be either the primary or a secondary injury—a falling beam, for example. Maybe that metal clothes bar you told me about. That’s one of the reasons I should view the site. But we’ll know better when I check the blood for carbon monoxide.” The man made a note on the plate’s margin with a red grease pencil and then began pulling on chain-mail gloves, whose tiny rings looked heavy and oiled. The steel gloves were supposed to keep a pathologist from nicking his hands with a scalpel and infecting himself with AIDS.

“Did you see any external wounds?”

“Christ, Wager, this cadaver’s one big wound.”

The doc knew what Wager meant, but like a lot of people who handled corpses—including cops—he had his tough act. Wager watched as the man made long slices into the torso’s stomach and chest and then gingerly stuck a needle into the victim’s heart. The syringe’s tube filled with dark blood. “Good. Sometimes there’s no blood left in a fire victim—cooks away, and you have to use bone marrow. But this is real nice.” Hefley labeled it and placed it in a tray of still-empty vials. “The lab will tell us how much carbon monoxide’s in the blood. More than forty-five percent, and we can blame death on the fire.” He held up a pair of stubby snips and squeezed them a time or two. “Less than that, and we presume the victim stopped breathing before the smoke began. And that, Detective Wager, means that little trauma at the base of the skull becomes very important.”

Hefley plunged the snips into the open cut and began clipping. “Now comes the weighing of organs. You want a little fried liver?”

“No. Can you estimate his height and weight?”

“Who says it’s a he?”

Wager looked at the starkly illuminated figure with its contrast of black crust, spongy pink interior, and white bone. “It’s a female?”