Redemption (A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 3) (8 page)

It had been a huge challenge for him to allow one person into his life after spending so much of it as a solitary creature. She knew that. He was learning to make the adjustments that went with their living arrangement—curbing his temper, learning to be patient, explaining his comings and goings instead of simply doing whatever he thought needed doing. He tried not to be impatient when she questioned the demands of his job, when she asked where he was going or when to expect him home.

He was learning to share his bed and his dark dreams; figuring out how much he could tell her about the ugliness that papered the inside of his head. He was coming to understand why so many cop marriages failed. How hard it was to balance the instinct to protect and the necessary practice of boxing up feelings with the need for sharing and intimacy. Hard to change habits decades in the making. He felt their situation was hopeful, yet still fragile and precarious.

And now this. He certainly wasn't ready to bring more players into the mix. Doubted he ever would be. Chris should have known this, yet she acted like it was no big deal. Despite her facility for discussion and building their relationship, in spite of the many times she'd pushed him to talk when he felt black and silent, when he tried to explain why he thought it was a bad idea, she refused to discuss it, not even the fact that Neddy and Nina, having seen so much violence and death in their short years, were incredibly needy children who would tax the most stable of parents. Something he most assuredly was not.

He pulled his attention back to the road as a huge sheet of cardboard, planing like a waveboard across the lane in front of him, suddenly reared up. There were cars on either side and no place to go. He had no choice but to hit it, the force sweeping it up over the hood and plastering it against the windshield. For a heart-stopping moment, he was driving blind at sixty-five. Then it let go, flying off over the roof to resume its dance of death behind him.

He pushed Chris and everything else that didn't have to do with today's case into a locker, slammed it shut, and turned the key. The last thing he needed was complications in his life that kept him from doing his job.

He'd already had the button-pushing call from the brass, in the form of Captain Paul Cote. Cote had called Burgess at home to complain about all the manpower and overtime hours being wasted on some unfortunate wino who'd fallen into the harbor. Though he should have known that Burgess and the deceased were friends, Cote hadn't spent a word on sympathy or regret before launching into a lecture about budgets and the department's limited resources.

There were many on the force, Burgess included, who believed that Cote had been built in a robotics factory somewhere and that the techie who programmed him had forgotten to install the part of the program that mimicked humanity. He'd counted to ten, deleted the expletives, and said, "It's all SOP for an unattended death, sir. We wait until tomorrow and then the ME tells us it's suspicious, we've lost the first twenty-four, along with potential evidence and witnesses."

Cote had harrumphed and muttered something about locksmiths and too many divers. "The diving thing is safety, sir." Burgess, choking on the "sir," reminded himself that he saluted the rank not the man. "Securing the residence just good practice." No use mentioning that without Robeck's quick thinking, Reggie's room would have been quickly stripped of anything useful. Cote had no concept of life on the streets. He probably thought Reggie'd used the money from returning those cans to put steaks on the barbie. Buy a better grade of beer.

He forced himself to listen as Cote continued. "Well, I'm laying odds you're going up to Augusta tomorrow to find you've got a wino that fell in the harbor. Just exactly what it looks like. Nothing suspicious. We don't need two detectives for that." So Stan Perry got to sleep in this morning, getting rested after his night of unbridled lust, while Burgess faced near-death out here on the highway at the hands of a vagrant piece of cardboard.

Burgess had not said to Cote what he would have said to any of his detectives—don't let your assumptions get ahead of the facts. Cote had no use for facts, at least not of the case-solving kind. It was as though, as he moved up the ranks, his mind was swept clean of everything he'd learned in his previous job. He loved data of all sorts, though. Numbers, especially good numbers—good solve rates, low overtime, coming in under budget—made him smile. The badge numbers, the cops who did the work, solved the crimes, earned the overtime, were mere annoyances.

* * *

Reggie was out of the body bag and lying on the table. Now Wink was pulling the bags off Reggie's feet. Clean, pale feet that looked especially naked because the rest of the body was so heavily dressed. There were no socks. Next, Wink pulled the bags off Reggie's hands, carefully examining them. The thumb of the right hand was slightly swollen and there were scrapes across the knuckles. Wink looked at Burgess. "Do the fingernails?"

"I would," Burgess said.

When Wink was done, they started undressing the body. First the heavy olive drab jacket with "Coates" over the pocket. The one that said "Libby" had long since disintegrated. Reggie had been wearing army jackets for thirty years. When one wore out, he picked up another at the Goodwill. Underneath, there was a quilted vest over a brown "Life is good" hooded sweatshirt, a gray waffle-weave thermal shirt, and a gray Gap tee shirt. A thick brown belt held up too-large khaki cargo pants.

As he bent to undo the belt, Burgess spotted a scraped patch on the leather and leaned in for a closer look. The belt was worn. It might just be a place where Reggie had fastened something to his belt and it had worn away the finish, but the wear in that spot was significantly greater than anywhere else on the belt, as though something had been tied to the belt heavy enough to rub the brown surface down to raw leather and wear a groove in the top of the belt.

"Take a look at this, Wink," he said.

Wink studied the belt and reached for his camera. He photographed the belt in place, then undid the buckle and loosened the belt so he could twist it to study the back side. Clinging to the rougher inside leather were some whitish threads. "Dollars to donuts these match the rope on that cinderblock Chaplin brought up," he said.

Burgess watched Wink collect the threads with tweezers. "What do you think it means?"

"You're the detective," Wink said, "but if they match, it could be this gentleman wanted to be sure he'd stay down once he went into the water."

"Or someone else wanted him to stay down."

"Or someone else did," Wink agreed. "But right there on the waterfront's a pretty dumb place to dump a body."

In cold water, a properly weighted body in an obscure location might not have surfaced for weeks. By the time it did, most indices which could have told them about the death might have been corrupted or eradicated. Did that mean Reggie had done this because he only cared about staying down long enough to keep from changing his mind? Or had some stupid or impatient criminal dumped him in the first convenient place, not thinking about how easily the body might be spotted?

"Here's something." Wink, who was putting the sodden jacket into a bag, held out his hand. In the palm was a business card. Nicholas Goodall. Sculptor.

"Something to look into," Burgess said, "assuming we're looking into any of this."

In the same pocket, Wink found a black envelope. Too wet to open or try to read, but it looked like the ones in Reggie's suitcase. Burgess remembered Maura's ramblings about an evil woman. The threatening letter he'd read. The return address had been Goodall.

There were no more surprises. Some things in Reggie's pockets, mostly paper, which would have to be spread out and dried, along with the clothes, back at the lab in Portland. Unless Cote's fallible instincts were right and the matter would be ended by this morning's autopsy. Then he'd be giving Reggie's things to Clay.

Dr. Lee flew in just as his assistant, Albert, and Wink had finished removing Reggie's clothes. Lee was capped, gowned, and ready to roll. He strode up to the table and stood looking down at Reggie, his eyes scanning the pale skin. Burgess watched the unreadable dark eyes moving over the body and wondered what Lee was seeing. When Lee was ready, he nodded, the body was turned, and he gave Reggie's back the same slow, careful scrutiny.

It was cold in the room, temperature cold, and the tile walls and floor and all the stainless steel and sharp instruments gave it a cold, hard edge as well. Burgess had the absurd impulse to cover his friend to keep the chill away and protect him from prying eyes. Instead, he forced himself closer to the table to watch what Lee was doing.

Lee was the expert, but Burgess had been studying victims for clues since the ME was riding his trike on the sidewalk. Now he thought that Reggie's body was trying to tell him something, and he looked at Lee to see if the ME was seeing it, too. Lee looked up from his scrutiny, met his eyes, and nodded, pointing to a strange circular bruise on Reggie's back and a pattern of bruises at the base of his neck.

"If that's pre-mortem," Lee said, "this bruise pattern suggests someone put a knee in this man's back, put their hands on the back of his neck, and forced his head under water. Just conjecture at this point. We'll see what else he's got to tell us. Wink, you want to get your pictures?"

After Wink had photographed the bruises, Lee took tissue samples of the bruised areas. Burgess watched the ME carefully examine the rest of Reggie's skin, touching it lightly, turning the limbs, examining the fingers and noting the bruised thumb and scraped knuckles. Then they turned Reggie back over. It struck him then that despite the sense of bulk provided by his clothes, Reggie was terribly thin. "He used to be a big guy," Burgess said. "My size."

They all looked at the bruising on Reggie's stomach, mottled patches of purple that could have been from a fist or from being jammed against a hard object. Again, Wink took pictures and Lee took tissue samples. Then Lee nodded. "If you gentlemen are ready?"

Wink backed away as the ME examined Reggie's mouth and nose, dictated some findings, and picked up his scalpel. As the knife sliced through the pale skin, Burgess felt a pain so sharp he might have been the one being cut. He closed his eyes, momentarily dizzy.

He felt a hand on his shoulder, vaguely heard a barked command, as he was pressed down into a chair and ordered to lower his head. Even as the floor swam before his eyes, he cursed himself for letting an autopsy get to him. As pathetic as a rookie.

He raised his head, humiliated, and met Lee's eyes. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know what..."

"You should have sent someone else," Lee said. "I wouldn't do an autopsy on a friend. You shouldn't watch one."

"If he was killed," Burgess countered, "I need to know that."

Lee held his ground. "Some other cop couldn't tell you? You're the only one on the planet who can handle this?"

"It's not that," Burgess said, feeling like an idiot. "I didn't realize..."

"Well, I've got to do this now." The ME, being both Asian and a doctor, had a completely inscrutable face. "Got two kids waiting to go apple picking. What do you want to do? Stick it out or go sit in the hall? We haven't got time to wait for a replacement."

Burgess had never heard Lee mention a family before. Usually the doc was impatient to go play golf. He pushed up off his chair. "I'll stick." He understood Lee was making him mad so he'd get past his emotions. And it was working. His face felt hot and his hands had clenched into fists. He worked on his breathing, decades of training whispering in his brain—if you can breathe, you can think, you can respond. He forced his fists to uncurl.

"Okay. I'm fine," he said. "Let's do this."

Watching Lee ply his knives and saws on Reggie, watching that poor lost man reduced to meat and bone and organs weighed and sampled was one of the hardest things he'd ever done. He'd found autopsies on kids grueling. Seethed with anger as he stood through the autopsy of a fourteen-year-old raped and eviscerated by her stepfather. Soul sick at the autopsy of little Kristin Marks. This one just hurt.

He tried to hold himself in the room, an observant, dispassionate cop, but tripped by Reggie's puckered scars, the open flesh, and the coppery tang of blood, his traitor mind sneaked back to Nam. Back to their days and their nights, the long talks in the dark, the endless hours spent waiting, necks prickling and sweat running, for the bullet, the bomb, the mortar shell to come whizzing out of nowhere and end it all. Even in the icy room, the meaty body smell brought back the remembered scents of wounds and death, the weird rotten-vegetable smell of the air, the crazy dope-filled haze.

Memory carried him back to a day in a rice paddy. The green rice so tall you couldn't see anything. To the sudden explosion of gunfire, mortar shells, a chaos of voices yelling warnings and commands. He'd lost Reggie somewhere and was all alone in that green sea, hunkered down and still amid the bursts of gunfire until suddenly Reggie was screaming. "Joe, Jesus, Joe, help me!"

He'd floundered through the muck, heavy-footed, found Reggie writhing on the ground, wet, slick with mud and blood, screaming. Burgess had hauled him up and pulled Reggie off the field, trying not to panic at the gushing hot wetness of Reggie's blood, his awareness of how exposed they were. Trying to offer comfort as Reggie clung to him, pleading, "Please, Joe, don't let me die. Joe, don't let me die."

He'd dragged Reggie back to some cover while they called in a chopper to take the wounded away. Finally, a blood-soaked medic giving Reggie a shot. His friend's screams dying away.