Night Moves: Dream Man/After the Night (50 page)

He and Trammell were opposites in a lot of ways. Trammell was whipcord-lean, and as aloof as a cat. No matter what the circumstances, he always looked elegant and cultured, his clothes hanging perfectly. He liked—actually
liked
—opera and ballet. Dane was the exact opposite: he could wear the most expensive silk suit made, perfectly tailored to fit his muscled, athletic frame, and he would still look subtly unkempt. He liked sports and country music. If they had been vehicles, Trammell would have been a Jaguar, while Dane would have been a pickup truck. Four-wheel drive.

On the other hand, Dane thought as he wandered back out to the kitchen, nature had balanced itself out in their faces, in a kind of backwards way. In person, Trammell was smoothly handsome, but in photographs his face took on a sinister cast. Dane figured his own face would frighten children and small animals, assuming there was any difference between the two, but the camera loved him. All those angles, Trammell had explained. Trammell was a camera buff and took a lot of photos; he was never without his camera. Dane, being his partner and constantly in his company, was naturally in a lot of the photos. On film, the brutal lines of high, prominent cheekbones, the deep-set eyes and cleft chin, all became brooding and intriguing instead of merely brutish. Even the broken nose somehow looked right in a photograph. In person, he looked grim, his face battered, his eyes a cop’s eyes, watchful and too old.

Dane got himself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table. Trammell was still cooking, and whatever it was smelled good.

“What’s for breakfast?” he asked.

“Whole wheat waffles with fresh strawberries.”

Dane snorted. “There’s never been any whole wheat flour in
my
house.”

“I know. That’s why I brought it with me.”

Healthy stuff. Dane didn’t mind. He could be pretty damn affable when someone else was doing the cooking. When
they were working they mostly lived on junk, whatever was fast and easy, so he didn’t mind balancing it with low-fat, nutritious shit whenever they had the time. Hell, he’d even learned to like sprouts. They tasted like green peanuts, fresh out of the ground and not quite developed, with the hulls still soft. He’d eaten a lot of green peanuts when he was a kid, preferring them over the fully formed ones that had to be shelled.

“So what kept you awake last night?” he asked Trammell. “Anything in particular?”

“No, just one of those nights when a weird dream starts every time you doze off.”

It was funny how the dreams came and went. All cops had dreams, but he and Trammell had gone through a rough patch a few years back, just after the shootout; the dreams had come every night for a while. Most cops went through their entire careers without ever firing their weapons on the job, but Dane and Trammell hadn’t been that lucky.

They had been trying to find a suspect for questioning in a shooting and had been led, by the suspect’s pissed-off girlfriend, right into the middle of a big-time drug operation, operated by none other than the suspect himself. That was usually the way the bad guys went down; they weren’t caught by sharp detective work most of the time, but by someone dropping the dime on them.

That particular time, instead of bailing out any available window and disappearing down rat holes, the bad guys had come up with lead flying. Dane and Trammell had hit the floor, diving into another room, and for five of the longest minutes in history they had been cornered in that room. By the time backup had arrived, in the form of every cop in the vicinity, uniformed and otherwise, who had heard Dane’s radio call of “officer under fire,” three of the bad guys and the girlfriend were down. The girl and one of the men were dead. A slug had ricocheted, splintered, and part of it had hit Dane in the back, just missing his spine. It had still packed enough punch that it had broken a rib and torn a
hole in his right lung. Things had gotten a little fuzzy there, but the one clear memory he had was of Trammell kneeling beside him and cussing a blue streak while he tried to stop the bleeding. Three days in intensive care, fifteen days total in the hospital, nine weeks before he’d been able to return to the job. Yeah, they’d both had a lot of bad dreams for a while after that.

Just as Trammell served up the waffles, the phone rang. Dane stretched to pick up the receiver, and at the same time Trammell’s beeper went off. “Shit!” they both said, staring at each other.

“It’s Saturday, damn it!” Dane barked into the receiver. “We’re off today.”

He listened while he watched Trammell hurriedly gulp a cup of coffee, then sighed. “Yeah, okay. Trammell’s here. We’re on our way.”

“What canceled our day off?” Trammell wanted to know as they went out the door.

“Stroud and Keegan are already working another scene. Worley called in sick this morning. Freddie’s in the dentist’s office with an abscessed tooth.” Things happened; no sense getting hot about it. “I’ll drive.”

“So where are we going?”

Dane gave him the address as they got into his car, and Trammell wrote it down. “A man called in and said his wife was hurt. An EMT was dispatched, but a patrol officer got there first. He took one look and canceled the EMT, and called Homicide instead.”

It took them about ten minutes to reach the address, but there was no mistaking the house. The street was almost blocked with patrol cars, a paramedics van, and various other official-capacity vehicles. Uniformed officers stood around on the small lawn, while neighbors gathered in small bunches, some of the onlookers still in their nightclothes. Dane automatically studied the onlookers, looking for something that didn’t fit, someone who didn’t seem to
belong or who was maybe just a little bit too interested. It was amazing how often a murderer would hang around.

He shrugged into a navy jacket and grabbed the spare tie out of the backseat, loosely knotting it around his neck. Somehow, he noticed, Trammell had managed to impeccably tie his own tie in the car. He looked again. Damn, he didn’t believe it! The dapper bastard had chosen a doublebreasted Italian suit to wear
on his day off!
He’d simply slipped into the suit jacket as they’d left the house.

Sometimes he worried about Trammell.

They showed their badges to the policeman at the door, and he stood aside to let them enter.

“Sheeit,” Dane said in an undertone as he got a good look.

“And all the other bodily excretions,” Trammell replied in the same disbelieving tone.

Murder scenes were nothing new. After a while, cops reached the point where violent crimes were pretty routine, in their own way. Stabbings and shootings were a dime a dozen. If anyone had asked him half an hour earlier, Dane would have said that he and Trammell had been detectives long enough that, for the most part, they were unshockable.

But this was different.

Blood was everywhere. It was splattered on the walls, on the floor, even on the ceiling. He could see into the kitchen, and the bloody path wound from there through the living room, then into a small hallway and out of sight. He tried to imagine the kind of struggle that would have sprayed blood so extensively.

Dane turned to the uniformed policeman who was guarding the door. “Have the crime lab guys showed up yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Shit,” he said again. The longer it took the crime lab, or forensics, team to arrive, the more the crime scene would be compromised. Some disturbance was unavoidable, unless the forensics boys were the ones to discover the victim and
immediately secured the area. But forensics wasn’t here, and the house was crowded with both uniformed and plainclothes policemen, milling around and inevitably muddying the evidential waters.

“Don’t let anybody else in except for Ivan’s guys,” he told the officer. Ivan Schaffer was head of the crime lab team. He was going to be really pissed off about this.

“Lieutenant Bonness is on the way.”

“You can let him in, too,” Dane replied, his mouth quirking.

The house was middle-class, nothing out of the ordinary. The living room was furnished with a couch and matching chair, the required coffee table and matching lamp tables of genuine wood veneer, while a big brown recliner had the best spot in front of the television. The recliner was occupied now by a dazed-looking man in his late forties or early fifties, probably the victim’s husband. He was giving monosyllabic answers to the questions put to him by another uniformed officer.

The victim was in the bedroom. Dane and Trammell forced their way through the crowd and into the small room. The photographer had already arrived and was doing his job, but for once was noticeably lacking in his usual nonchalance.

The nude woman lay jammed in the cramped space between the bedside table and the wall. She had been stabbed repeatedly—
hacked
was a better description. She had tried to run, and when she had been cornered in the bedroom she had tried to fight, as evidenced by the deep defensive wounds on her arms. She had been nearly decapitated, her breasts mutilated by the sheer number of wounds, and all of her fingers had been severed. Dane looked around the room, but he didn’t see the missing digits. The bed was still neatly made, though splattered with blood.

“Has the weapon been found?” Dane asked.

A patrolman nodded. “It was right beside the body. A
Ginsu knife from the kitchen. She had a whole set. It looks like they really do what the ads say; I think I’ll get my wife some.”

Another patrolman snorted. “I’d rethink that idea if I was you, Scanlon.”

Dane ignored the black humor, which all cops used to help them handle the ugliness they saw on a daily basis. “What about her fingers?”

“Nope. No sign of ’em.”

Trammell sighed. “I think we’d better go talk to the husband.”

It was a fact that most homicides, except for the random gang drive-bys, were committed by someone who knew the victim: a friend, a neighbor, co-worker, or relative. When the victim was a woman, the usual list of suspects was narrowed down even more, because the murderer was almost invariably her husband or boyfriend. A lot of times, the murderer was the one who “discovered” the body and reported the crime.

They went back to the living room, and Dane caught the eye of the officer who was talking to the husband. The officer came over to them.

“Has he said anything?” Dane asked.

The officer shook his head. “Most of the time he won’t answer the questions. He did say that his wife’s name is Nadine, and his name is Vinick, Ansel Vinick. They’ve lived here twenty-three years. Beyond that, he ain’t talking.”

“Is he the one who called it in?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. We’ll take it now.”

He and Trammell went over to Mr. Vinick. Dane sat down on the couch, and Trammell moved the other chair closer before sitting down, effectively sandwiching Mr. Vinick between them.

“Mr. Vinick, I’m Detective Hollister and this is Detective Trammell. We’d like to talk to you, ask you a few questions.”

Mr. Vinick was staring at the floor. His big hands hung loosely over the padded arms of the recliner. “Sure,” he said dully.

“Are you the one who found your wife?”

He didn’t answer, just continued to stare at the floor.

Trammell stepped in. “Mr. Vinick, I know it’s tough, but we need your cooperation. Are you the person who called the police?”

Slowly he shook his head. “I didn’t call no police. I called 911.”

“What time did you call?” Dane asked. The time would be on record, but liars often tripped themselves up on the simplest details. Right now, Vinick was a suspect by virtue of being married to the victim.

“Dunno,” Vinick muttered. He took a deep breath and seemed to make an effort to concentrate. “Seven-thirty or thereabouts, I guess.” He rubbed his face with a trembling hand. “I got off work at seven. It takes about twenty, twenty-five minutes to drive home.”

Dane caught Trammell’s glance. They had seen enough death to know that Mrs. Vinick had been dead for several hours, not half an hour or so. The medical examiner would establish the time of death, and if Mr. Vinick had been at work during that time, if witnesses could reliably state that he hadn’t left, then they’d have to start looking at other possibilities. Maybe she’d had a boyfriend; maybe someone had been keeping Mr. Vinick’s bed warm for him while he worked third shift.

“Where do you work?”

There was no answer. Dane tried again. “Mr. Vinick, where do you work?”

Vinick stirred and named a local trucking company.

“Do you normally work third shift?”

“Yeah. I work on the dock, loading and unloading trailers. Most freight comes in at night, see, for delivery during the day.”

“What time did you leave to go to work last night?”

“Usual time. Around ten.”

They were on a roll, finally getting some answers. “Do you punch a time card?” Trammell asked.

“Yeah.”

“Do you punch in as soon as you get there, or wait until time for your shift to start?”

“As soon as I get there. The shift starts at ten-thirty. We have half an hour to eat, and get off at seven.”

“Do you have to clock in and out for lunch?”

“Yeah.”

It looked like Mr. Vinick’s night would be pretty much accounted for. They would check out everything he’d told them, of course, but that wouldn’t be any problem.

“Did you notice anything unusual this morning?” Dane asked. “Before you came in the house, I mean.”

“No. Well, the door was locked. Nadine usually gets up and unlocks it for me, then starts cooking breakfast.”

“Do you usually come in the front door or the back door?”

“Back.”

“What did you see when you opened the door?”

Mr. Vinick’s chin trembled. “Nothing, at first. The shades were pulled and the lights weren’t on. It was dark. I figured Nadine had overslept.”

“What did you do?”

“Turned on the light in the kitchen.”

“What did you see then?”

Mr. Vinick swallowed. He opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. He put his hand to his eyes. “B-Blood,” he managed. “All—all over the place. Except—it looked like ketchup, at first. I thought she’d dropped a bottle of ketchup and broken it, the way it was splattered. Then—then I knew what it was. It scared me. I thought she must have cut herself, real bad. I yelled her name and ran to the bedroom, looking for her.” He stopped, unable to carry the tale any further. He began
to shake, and didn’t notice when Dane and Trammell got up and stepped away, leaving him alone with his grief and horror.