The Wolfen (4 page)

Becky was struck by the sheer damage—this attack had been so unbelievably savage. And somehow she found that reassuring; nothing from nature would do this. It had to be the work of human beings, it was too terrible to be anything else.

“The Forensics lab hasn’t found a single thing except dog hairs, rat hairs and feathers,” Doctor Evans said mildly. He was referring to the results of the examination of the area where the deaths had occurred at the auto pound. “No human detritus that didn’t belong to the victims.”

“OK,” Wilson said, but he took the information like a blow. It was not good news.

Evans turned to Becky. “Look, we’re about to start. What do you think it’ll take to get Wilson out of here?”

“You can’t. There might be something,” she replied.

“Something I’d miss?”

“Something we’d see.”

“But not him. He won’t be able to take it.”

“I’ll be fine. Just do your job, Doctor.”

“There will be no repeat of the Custin mess, Detective Wilson.” During the Maude Custin autopsy Wilson had lost his lunch. The reference to his embarrassment hurt his feelings, but he was too proud to acknowledge it before Evans.

“I’ll leave if it gets to me,” he said, “but not unless it does. We’ve gotta be here and you know it.”

“Just trying to help you, trying to be accommodating.”

“Thank you. Why don’t you get going?”

“That’s what I am doing.”

Evans picked up a scalpel and commenced taking a series of tissue samples. An assistant prepared slides of them at a side table, and sent the slides to the lab. The autopsy proceeded swiftly—there was pitifully little to examine. “The main thing we’re hunting for is signs of poison, suffocation, anything that would give us a more plausible cause of death,” Evans said as he worked. “That good for you two?”

“That’s good for us.”

“Well, we’ll find out all about it from the lab. Look at this.” He held up a sharp white tooth. “Embedded in that busted wrist. You know what it means —really what it confirms?”

“The man was alive when his wrist was bitten. Otherwise the tooth wouldn’t have been wrenched loose.”

“That’s right, which confirms that this one was definitely alive when the dogs attacked him.”

There was a long silence in the room. Wilson seemed to sink into himself, becoming smaller and more square than he already was. Becky felt a dull powerlessness. As the vague outlines of what they were confronting began to take shape Becky could see all lands of nasty problems, not the least of which would be simple crowd control. What do people do when they discover a thing like this in their midst? Their placid, workaday lives are suddenly disrupted by a new terror of the most dangerous type—the unknown. And if it can kill two healthy, alert, armed policemen, the run-of-the-mill citizen isn’t going to have a prayer.

“I think we’d better get downtown as soon as the lab results are in,” Becky said. “Why bother to wait?”

“Confirming, just so we won’t have any loose ends.” Convincing Underwood of this wasn’t going to be especially easy. She didn’t want there to be any stray questions unanswered that might allow him to put off the inevitable decision—admit what killed the cops, seal the area, and kill everything in it that looked faintly like a dog—wild or trained.

The two detectives returned to the M.  E.’s office before the autopsies were completed; they didn’t spend any more time observing than they had to. Wilson was visibly grateful to leave; Becky was glad to follow.

Wilson seemed unusually quiet, almost chastened. “What do you think Underwood will do?” she asked just to break the silence.

Wilson shrugged. “Two cops got killed by some kind of dogs. It’s a pretty flimsy story, you ask me. No matter what’s been confirmed, I think we’ve got to keep digging. Somehow or other we’ll uncover a real motive and a real crime.”

Becky felt a twinge of concern—didn’t Wilson believe the evidence? “But if it was dogs and we don’t act pretty fast there could be more deaths. I think we’ve got to make that assumption. That’s certainly where the facts are leading us.”

Wilson nodded. If she wasn’t sure that it couldn’t be true, she almost would have suspected Wilson of knowing something about the case that she didn’t. But they had not been apart since it had happened, not for a minute. Whatever information he had, she also had.

“You know,” he said in a low, angry tone, “you damn well never get over smoking. If you weren’t armed I’d mug you for your cigarettes right now.”

She didn’t reply; she was staring past him, toward the door of the office. Evans walked in carrying a clipboard. “Lab says we might have carbon monoxide poisoning as a secondary factor,” he said, “but the basic cause of death was the injuries. Primarily the throats in both cases.”

“Carbon monoxide? Could those men have been impaired by it?”

“Normally I wouldn’t say so. The levels are very low, just residual. You’ve both probably got higher levels right now just from your drive over here. But it’s absolutely the only abnormal thing we found about these men.”

“Could it have been higher when they were killed and then dissipated?”

“Not likely. These guys were functioning normally when they were hit. It’s just the only other thing.”

Wilson seemed greatly relieved; at the moment Becky couldn’t understand exactly why this was so.

The Chief Medical Examiner put down his clipboard. “It’s as strange as they come,” he said, “the strangest case I have worked on in my entire career.”

“Why so?” Wilson tried and failed to sound unconcerned.

“Well, they were supposedly killed by dogs, right?”

The detectives nodded like twins; Becky was secretly amused by the similarity of the gesture. She wondered what it was that brought the two of them so close to one another. God knows you couldn’t call it love.

“The dogs had to be very unusual. Their mode of attack was extremely clever. It wasn’t until DiFalco went for his gun that they attacked.”

“So what?”

“So when did you ever hear about a dog smart enough to grab a man’s wrist to prevent him from unholstering his gun? Never, is the answer. Dogs don’t think like that. They don’t know what the hell guns are.”

“Maybe and maybe not.”

“Oh, come on, they don’t know. Point a pistol at a dog’s head and not a damn thing will happen. He certainly won’t try to defend himself. Whoever heard of dogs working like that?”

“It was a lucky coincidence. The dog went for the movement of the hand, not to prevent it from reaching the gun. I think we can assume that.” Wilson picked up the phone. “I’m calling Underwood to tell him we’re on the way. His nibs is awaiting us.”

“Now don’t go running him down, Wilson. Word is he’s got the inside track to the big job. Your next Commissioner.”

Wilson dialed. “A lot of difference it makes to me. I’ve been on the promotion list for at least ten years.”

Becky was surprised to hear her partner admit this. His own complete inability to handle department politics had assured that he would never move beyond Detective Lieutenant. No matter the level of his achievement; while good work counted in the scramble for top jobs, pull and ass-kissing counted more. And with Wilson not only did he not try to ass-kiss, people were afraid even to let him try. You don’t let a guy like that get into the delicate politics of the Police Department. Next thing, he’d unwittingly uncover some scandal and embarrass everybody.

That made him a less than ideal senior partner. The brass would hesitate to promote Becky around Wilson. It just wasn’t done unless the senior was completely incompetent—which was far from the case here. So she’d have to sit around as a Detective Sergeant until either she or Wilson rotted, or she was transferred away from him and that was one thing the department would never do. Only Wilson himself in his wisdom would ever consider such a thing. She hated the thought of it right now, too; it could easily mean being moved away from the action, back into the obscurity of a more typical policewoman job.

Wilson muttered into the phone, using no more than a few monosyllables. He had informed the Chief of Detectives that they were coming with just about as much grace as he would inform his building superintendent of a stopped-up toilet.

A wet, shuddering north wind hit them as they left the building; the drizzling cold of the past few days had finally given way to the first real touch of winter. It was seven-thirty and already dark. Thirtieth Street was quiet, with the wind clattering in the skeletons of scrawny trees up and down the block. A few pedestrians hurried past, and out on Fifth Avenue many more figures could be seen amid the flashing lights and the shapes of cars moving slowly downtown. Becky watched the people they passed on their way to her car, looking at the gray, blank faces, thinking about the lives hidden behind those faces, and of how what she and Wilson would soon be telling the Chief of Detectives would affect those lives.

In police work you gradually acquire a distance from nonpolicemen. People on the outside have such a limited concept of what you really do that they might as well know nothing at all. They see only the headlines, the endless propagandizing of the newspapers. Crimes are reported, their solution is not. As a result the people you meet outside of the force see you as incompetent. “You’re a cop? Why don’t you get the muggers off the street? I never see a cop on the street. I thought that’s what we paid you for.” Then you might see that same person dead somewhere, the victim of the very crime he said you wouldn’t protect him from. It does something to you to realize that you aren’t going to protect everybody, you aren’t going to make the world a hell of a lot safer by your work. You are there to hold life together, not to bring on the millennium. When you see the incredible suffering and degradation, you begin to realize the truth of that. Sooner or later crooks and victims all merge together into one miserable, bloody mass of whining, twisted bodies and fear-glazed eyes. Murder after murder comes before you, each with its sordid tale of failed lives…

And then you get a thing like this. It doesn’t make sense, it scares you. There’s a chilly feeling that something wrong has happened but you don’t quite know what it is. You want like hell to solve the crime because the victims were your people. The twisted bodies were from the inside, from the real world of the department, not from that chaos that swirls around outside.

Usually there is no mystery to a cop’s death. He knocks on a door and a junkie blows him away. He hollers freeze at some kid running out of a liquor store and gets a bullet in the face. That’s the way cops get killed, suddenly and without mystery. Death in the line of duty—rare, but it happens.

“Here’s the car,” Wilson said. Becky had walked right past it; she had been too deeply engrossed in her thoughts. But she got in, drove mechanically through the increasingly heavy rain, listening to it drum on the roof, listening to the wind soughing past the closed windows, feeling the pervasive dirty damp of the afternoon.

Headquarters was dark and gray, standing like some black monument in the storm. They pulled into the garage beneath the building, into the sudden flood of fluorescent lights, the squeal of brakes and tires as they maneuvered through the garage and found a parking space in the area marked off for the Homicide Division.

Underwood was not alone in his office. With him was a young man in a polyester suit and round rimless glasses. For an instant Becky was reminded of John Dean, then the face looked up and the impression of boyishness disappeared: the man’s eyes were cold, his face thinner than it should be, his lips set in a terse line.

“Good afternoon,” Underwood said stiffly, half rising from behind his deck, “this is Assistant District Attorney Kupferman.” He then introduced Neff and Wilson. The two detectives pulled up chairs; this was going to be a work session and there was no time to stand on formality.

Becky relaxed into the comfortable leather wing chair Wilson had gotten for her. The Chief’s office was all leather and paneling; it looked like an expensive private library without books. Hunting scenes were hung on the wall a pewter chandelier from the ceiling. The whole impression was one of subdued bad taste—a sort of subtle and completely unintentional self-mockery.

“Let’s go,” Underwood said. “I told the papers we’d have a statement tonight. Was I right?”

“Yeah,” Wilson said. He looked at the assistant DA. “You’re chewing. Got any gum?” The man held out a pack of sugar-free gum. “Thanks. I’m not supposed to smoke.”

“I want to know if you’ve found out anything about those guys that might justify us getting into the act,” the assistant DA said.

So that was what he was here for. He was the District Attorney’s little watchdog, sent here to sniff out any departmental wrongdoing. Maybe the two dead cops were bent, the thinking would go, maybe that’s why they were dead.

“There’s nothing like that,” Wilson said. “These guys were Auto Squad, not Narcotics. They weren’t into anything.”

Becky’s mind flashed to her husband Dick, to the Narcotics Squad. Just as quickly she pulled her thoughts away, returning them to this conversation. What was it that made her worry so about Dick, especially lately? She couldn’t allow herself to think about it now. As firmly as she could, she returned her thoughts to the question at hand.

“You’re sure?”

“We haven’t investigated that aspect,” Becky put in. “We’ve just now established a cause of death.”

This was obviously the part Underwood wanted to hear about. He leaned forward and made a little pulling motion with his hands. “It was the dogs,” Wilson said tonelessly.

“Oh, no, you can’t tell me that! I can’t have that!”

“It’s the truth as far as we know. They were killed by dogs.”

“Hell no. That’s completely unacceptable. I’m not putting that in any press releases. Let the damn Commissioner do it, it’s his responsibility.”

The way he began to back off would have been funny if it wasn’t so sad. He had called them down here hoping to get some glory thrown his way when they solved the crime; but now that it looked like this he wasn’t so eager to be associated with it. Let the Commissioner tell the world that two fully armed policemen got themselves killed by a bunch of dogs; Underwood sure as hell wasn’t going to do it.