The Ten-Mile Trials (4 page)

‘Except when you're short-handed like this,' I said. I'm not given to undue heroics, but I wasn't going to go sit in Maxine's house while Darrell's little band of brothers went after the bad guy in the garage.

‘OK. Please don't shoot my dog.' He was not on my crew any longer, so he could afford that little swipe that he'd probably been saving up for years. Walking back to Sam, he took off the dog's leash and said ‘
Fass
!'

Sam got up at once, delighted, and resumed his fang-and-claw behavior, barking madly and scratching at the bottom of the garage door. Darrell walked over to the old Dodge Dart at the east edge of the driveway, opened the driver's-side door, and touched the electronic doorlifter fixed to the visor. Al and Ruskie and I stood braced on the cement apron, with our weapons aimed at the middle of the rear wall. I half expected a volley of lead to pour out as the door slid up. Instead, we faced a short forest of leafy green herbs where nothing moved.

Sam went through the plastic tubs in three leaps, a tawny brown streak of power, knocking plants right and left. When he reached the cupboard against the back wall, he began pawing and snarling at the bottom of the tall central doors.

‘One last chance,' Darrell yelled. ‘Come out right now with your hands over your head or my dog will bring you out.'

Nobody answered. ‘Hold your fire, now,' Darrell said softly. He ran along the west inside wall of the garage, cut sharply in to the front of the cupboard, and pulled the middle door open. Snarling, Sam leaped on the body lying on the bottom shelf and dragged it out, climbed on top of it, and sank his teeth in its upper arm.

Darrell had to use all his new expertise then, shouting ‘
Fooey
!' as he quickly handed Sam the white ball. Sam didn't really want to quit biting the man, since biting the man was the
über
-reward that his macho life was aimed at. But he was, as Darrell repeatedly reminded him now, a
good
dog, a
very good
dog, a
very
,
very good
dog. He seemed to understand the English for that just fine. And as Darrell petted Sam's big wolfish head and crooned to him about his superior qualities, he let himself be led away, chewing and tugging on his white ball and drooling with glee.

In the grateful silence that followed his departure, we cautiously approached the body, which lay motionless where Sam had abandoned it, on the garage floor. I bent and touched the artery behind its ear. It was still a little warmer than the floor, but no pulse beat there. I stepped back to look at the whole length of the corpse. A man, I thought, though so battered and bloody it was hard to be sure. His injuries from Sam amounted to no more than a couple of punctures in the shoulder of his jacket and drool marks down the front, but he had been beaten severely and shot many times before he died. There was a dark stain of urine between his legs. All of his clothing, from neck to toe, was streaked and spattered with blood, and he and the cupboard reeked of it.

The three of us stood around the grossly abused body, waiting for our ears to quit ringing and our heartbeats to slow down a little. Then we all did what men of action do in the twenty-first century. We each pulled a cell phone out of its holster and dialed a number.

I called Ray Bailey, head of my People Crimes section, gave him the address on Marvin, and told him I was looking at a body.

‘New or old?'

‘Just died, I think,' I said. ‘He's in a grow house in a two-car garage. He was badly beaten before he died, and the person who shot him conveniently left the murder weapon beside him in the cupboard.'

‘Jeez, they're killing each other over a roomful of buds now?' Ray's the kind of guy who can make a silence feel sad. After a few woeful seconds, he vented his Friday night sigh. ‘OK, I'm on it.'

I asked if he needed any help rounding up detectives. ‘Five thirty on a Friday,' I said, ‘they might be kind of scattered.'

‘I know most of their hangouts,' he said. ‘But OK, you want to help, how about you call the BCA and the coroner for me? I'll get one of my guys over there to inventory the dope and get it moved to the storehouse.'

I caught the coroner just as he walked into his house. He wasted no time on elaborate greetings, just said ‘Allo?', listened to my story, said ‘Yah, OK,' and hung up in my ear. Adrian Pokornoskovic, whose Ukrainian name was so hard to pronounce that we all called him Pokey, had survived extreme cold and near-starvation in a work camp behind the Iron Curtain before he was grown. His small stature, in fact, was partly the result of many missed meals in adolescence. Those years had made him dubious of all authority and tough as nails – he never complained, as the rest of us did, if we spent all night standing in a snowbank or slogging through cold rain.

Another man his age who had worked all day on his feet might express regret about being called out on a Friday night to examine a corpse. But Pokey loved forensics and gladly abandoned the zits and wrinkles of his dermatology practice whenever we called him to come to work for us. Hampstead County still got by with a part-time coroner, since part-time in Pokey's case implied no lack of due diligence – he waded into a crime scene as if it was a privilege to be there, digging through stinking dirt and the detritus of sordid violence, looking for the truth.

The BCA call was smoother and more bureaucratic, a matter of waiting through several rings, poking the right numbers after the tape answered, and getting grilled for specifics before placing the name of our department in the queue at the request desk. The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was becoming a huge system. Crews dispatched from its gleaming new building in Saint Paul in effect added the Bureau's top-of-the-line scientists and equipment on to our smaller force. Trudy reminded me often that Rutherford crime got service every bit as good as big metropolitan skulduggery.

‘We have the best of everything now. We
are
the best. Other states send their mitochondrial DNA work to us. Doesn't that make you proud?' That was on one of her cheeriest days last month, when the pains of childbirth were forgotten, Ben's schedule was smoothing out nicely, and return to work was still a distant, alluring dream.

Now when she answered my call I could feel the heat of her insecurities come blasting across the radio waves. She had just pulled into the yard at home, Ben was awake and fussing, and she needed to get inside and warm a bottle. That was the other big adjustment going on, the switch to bottle feeding – she had taken pills to dry up her milk, and she had to add formula prep time to the many other routines that were fighting for primacy in her brain. The switch from Earth Mother to Techno Mama was giving my lover a bumpy ride.

I told her what was going on and why I hadn't left town yet. ‘I wanted to see this situation stabilized before I left Maxine,' I said, leaving out any mention of my native curiosity.

‘OK. Come as soon as you can, though, will you? I've got a carload of gear and groceries to get inside.'

‘Leave all the stuff in the car,' I said, ‘I'll get it when I get home.'

‘Which will be when?'

I was beginning to understand how Eddy felt about his potatoes. ‘Half an hour,' I said. ‘Soon as my People Crimes crew gets here, I'll be out of here in two minutes.'

I walked past Ruskie's car to let him know that Ray's crew was on its way. I could hear him as I walked toward him, reading his systematic way through the search warrant worksheet he held in his hand. The stilted language made him sound as artificial as a long-range weather forecast. ‘Judge Tolliver? This is Officer Hruska of the Rutherford Police Department. Will you swear me in please?' He told the judge about the grow house they had inadvertently found in the garage, and about the paraphernalia in the kitchen. For these reasons, he said, he needed a warrant to search the rest of the house and the grounds around it, as well as the rest of the cupboard in the garage and ‘two other cabinets on an adjoining wall.' As attorneys get smarter about fending off the results of searches, police warrants become more and more precisely detailed – it's an arms race both sides urgently want to win.

When he finished, I told him about the two crews that would shortly join him here. I left him stringing crime scene tape with Al Hanenburger, and hurried back to Maxine's house to let her know her street would soon be swarming with law-enforcement types of every rank and color.

‘I'm afraid you'll be living on a very busy street for a couple of days,' I said. ‘But hey, you'll be in the safest place in town – crawling with cops.'

‘That's true, isn't it? Plus it gives Eddy a lot to watch.'

He had even more to watch before sundown. I was forty miles away, unloading Trudy's car, when Ray called and said, ‘This damn house is turning out to be like the creature that ate Detroit.'

‘What now?'

‘Ruskie got his search warrant OK'd by the judge just before I got here,' Ray said. ‘Nobody else was here yet and there wasn't anything to do for the stiff till the coroner saw him, so Ruskie and Al and me, we decided to go ahead and look through the house.'

The ground floor was just the stinking mess you expect with drug freaks, he said. ‘We found a little more meth in a kitchen cabinet, along with some pot that smelled like the good stuff in the garage. But it looked to us like the little girl had been sleeping on a sleeping bag on the kitchen floor, and the parents were using this dinky bedroom – probably meant to be a den – off the living room. So Ruskie says, “Wonder what they got against the upstairs?” and we went up. The smell got stronger and stronger as we climbed the stairs. By the time we opened the door at the top we were already guessing what it was. They been setting up the mother of all meth labs up there, Jake.'

Four rooms full of top-of-the-line gear, Ray said. ‘No messy little pissant camp stoves here – a big propane cooker. Supplies stacked against the walls. You hear what I'm saying? Almost a superlab.'

‘Ray, listen, you don't want to touch any of that stuff.'

‘You think I'm crazy? I closed the door and we all went back downstairs while I called the county Health Department. The person who answered the phone got all huffy about it being after hours and Friday night – like I should have had the good sense to find it Thursday morning. So I got huffy back, about this mess being in the middle of a crime scene in a residential neighborhood, and we yelled at each other for a while till I told the young lady if I don't get an ETA for a clean-up crew within half an hour I'm calling the director.'

‘But now it's been half an hour and you can't remember who that is,' I said.

‘And if I could, I don't suppose he'd be exactly bowled over by a call from a city police detective, do you think? So will you call him?'

‘Sure. Tell me first what number you called before, so I can start there.'

‘You think?'

‘Damn straight,' I said. ‘I'll stay on it till I find the right person – we have to get that crap out of there, you guys can't work around that, and neither can . . . Oh. Damn.' . . .'

‘You already called BCA, I bet,' Ray said.

‘Yeah. We weren't exactly next in line, but . . . I better call them back. Talk to you later, Ray.'

I'm not much of a politician, but over the years you get to know some people. So after the number Ray gave me played a tape saying the office was closed, I called my old buddy Ivan. He's a Health Department scientist I play poker with occasionally, and what I happened to know about him is that he's the kind of good husband and hard-working plodder who goes home and cuts the grass on Friday nights. I caught him there and explained my plight. He got back to me in a few minutes to say, with an embarrassed laugh, that a clean-up crew was already on its way to Marvin Street. The woman Ray had the fight with dispatched them as soon as she cooled down, but though she had noted down the correct address she got too steamed up to make a note of Ray's number and was trying to reach him at home, where Dispatch thought he was.

‘I don't know why Myra went off on your guy like that, Jake,' Ivan said, ‘except everybody's uptight because they're overworked and afraid of more job cuts.'

‘Tell me about it,' I said. ‘I've never known Ray to get crosswise of anybody that way before. But we're taking a beating too – seems like we lose someone every week. Thanks, Ivan, I owe you a big one.'

I told Ray his crew was coming, skipping most of the details about crossed signals because he still had the whole damn night to work. ‘What about the body?' I asked him. ‘You find any ID on him?'

‘Not a scrap. No records, no money, no watch. Surprised they left his shoestrings. I told Pokey he'd better get good fingerprints, they're all we got.'

‘Pokey's there?'

‘Come and gone. Soon as I told him about the mess upstairs, he came right away with the meat wagon and grabbed his corpse. He said no use letting the Department of Health decide it was toxic waste, it wasn't anywhere near the meth operation and he wanted his crack at it first. So I had Andy take a bunch of pictures and he rolled it away. When I didn't say anything, he said, “What? You think I shouldn't have let him have it?”'

‘It's Pokey's call, I guess. For all we know, the guy was just there to buy some pot. Let's not pick a fight with the coroner, we don't have time. Is your crew all there?'

‘Yeah. Rosie's in the garage getting all herbed up, taking samples. Andy's in here shooting really dismal pictures, and Winnie and Clint are outside looking for trace evidence. They found eight casings in the garage. Nothing outside but grass, so far. What does BCA say?'