Time of Death (2 page)

PJ walked back to the group. “Who found the body?”

“Woman walking a dog. She had her dog off the leash—oughtta get a ticket for that—and the dog raised a ruckus. She called it in on her cell at half past five,” Dave said. “Still dark then, but she carries a flashlight about the size of a baseball bat. Grabbed her dog and ran. She said she didn’t get a really good look, but enough to know that the guy was dead. Officers Garcia and Leeds responded. Did you talk to them already? You probably passed them on your way down.”

“I don’t think I took the most direct route,” PJ said. Schultz grunted.

A clattering sound alerted PJ to the arrival of the body removal crew. They’d pushed a gurney down the cobblestones. Wouldn’t it have been easier to carry the body than to try to roll the gurney uphill, rattling and shaking? She pictured the corpse in its body bag sliding out of the straps on the gurney and bumping its way down the cobblestones, and that brought something else to mind.

“There’s not a lot of blood here, so this is probably a dump site instead of the murder scene. How’d the body get here?” she asked. “Did it wash in from the river?”

“The body hasn’t been submerged in the water,” Dave said. “Just ended up with the feet like that.”

“Okay, so he was either carried or dragged from a car up there,” she pointed uphill toward the road that serviced the levee, “or rolled down. Whichever way, that should mean evidence on the path down.”

“Ahead of you there,” Anita said. “Techs have a large area cordoned off where the body could’ve rolled or been dragged. They’re going to wait until the sun burns off this fog a little to do a better search. Tromping through there now might damage evidence. The photographer’s been grousing about condensation in his lenses, and he’s put everything away until the fog clears.”

“Do we wait around for that?” PJ said.

“One of us will, unless Mr. Big Time Detective says we can all leave,” Anita said, looking at Schultz. He glowered back at her. “I’ll interpret that as a no.”

PJ had a good view of the two men working to get the victim into a body bag. They’d sized up the job, put back the standard bag, and brought out a heavy-duty one. It had two zippers and a flap that closed like an envelope. The men handled the body with atypical reverence, and in silence. PJ could hear the zipper closing. They grasped the handles of the body bag, lifted it up to the gurney and strapped it on—securely, she was glad to see.

The gurney clacked its way up the levee. Conversation stopped until it reached the top, a spontaneous expression of respect for the dead.

“I don’t suppose there are any witnesses to the dumping,” PJ said.

“None so far,” Dave said. “But we can narrow the time the body was dropped. The security staff of the casino patrols this section of the levee a couple of times a day. As of 10:00 p.m. last night, this section of levee hadn’t sprouted any bodies.”

“Leaving us with a little after 10:00 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. There’s a tall hotel near here, isn’t there?” PJ said.

“Yeah, the Embassy Suites.”

“We need to get somebody over there and see if any guests saw anything from rooms that face this way.”

“I’ll do it,” Dave immediately said. “At least it’s indoors.”

“I think a couple of officers can handle that,” PJ said. “It’s a little too early to start knocking on hotel room doors anyway. No sense ruining their opportunity to sleep in.” She directed a glare at Schultz, but it slid off him like an egg off a non-stick pan.

“The way the chest is carved up, all that stuff with the heart, that’s our holdback,” Schultz said. “So don’t spread that around.” It was his first contribution other than a grunt since she’d offered the olive branch. “The ME said the time of death was six to nine in the evening based on rigor progression and body temperature, but the cold weather, nudity, lying on cold cobblestones, and muscular development were giving her fits. Said she had to suck the goo out of his eyeball to confirm it, only it sounded real professional when she said it.”

“Thanks. I needed that image.” PJ tried not to think about what the victim’s last hours were like.

“Nasty mutilations,” Schultz said, nodding in the direction of the corpse. “Regular chop job. Think it’s a homo thing?”

“Not necessarily,” PJ said. “There are lots of mutilation murders with heterosexual killers. Women target male genitals for a lot of reasons.”

“He’s got no mouth,” Schultz said. “Look at that face. I wouldn’t be surprised if the autopsy shows his asshole’s cut out, too. You know, the two places where a guy can take it. Fucking hard way to go.”

PJ sighed. Working with Schultz was something of a trial.

Living with him was even harder.

“Now can we go back to Headquarters?” Dave said.

“Yeah,” said Schultz. “Everybody but you. You’re staying with the techs.”

Dave shot a glance at PJ, and she could see that he was hoping to be rescued from the task. She waved goodbye, thoughts of hot coffee already simmering in her mind.

When she got back to her car, there was a parking ticket tucked under the windshield wiper.

I
N PJ’S OFFICE, IDEAS
were tossed as vigorously as a house salad in an Italian restaurant. As a psychologist and the civilian leader of the Computerized Homicide Investigations Program—CHIP—PJ knew that these early brainstorming sessions often produced information of lasting value. Their first hours on a case were usually spent around her battered old desk. She trusted the instincts of the people gathered there as much as she trusted her own.

It hadn’t always been that way. As a female shrink with a background in computerized marketing research simulations, PJ had been an outsider who’d cried in a bathroom stall on her first day of work. Then, in case after case, she’d proven the value of her forensic virtual reality simulations. She’d been in horrifying situations and come out on top, if not completely unscathed. Even more significant to her were the acceptance she’d gained from her team members and the nascent love she felt for one of them.

Schultz answered his cellphone, and it was clear right away that it wasn’t a social call. It irritated PJ that she regularly got news second-hand from a subordinate because she wasn’t as plugged into the police pipeline as the rest of her team. Shouldn’t whoever was on the other end of that call be talking to her? The silent phone on her desk said it all.

To derail those thoughts, PJ refreshed her coffee, even though her mug was half-full. She was out of creamer—Dave practically ate the stuff. She wondered what would happen if she bought individual packets. He’d probably rip open dozens of them. Sarcasm didn’t work on him either—she’d tried. PJ had been driven to buying the stuff at a warehouse club. The sugar had been disappearing at an alarming rate, too.

After waiting for a few minutes as Schultz listened and interspersed a few “yeahs” and “no shits” on his end, she was getting impatient. Something that was said caused him to raise his eyebrows, and she wondered what that could be. She tapped her pencil rapidly on her desk, drawing a frown from Schultz. Anita’s eyes were closed. PJ wondered if the woman could fall asleep that fast. At last, Schultz folded his cell. With that nearly imperceptible sound, Anita’s eyes popped open and she was as attentive as ever.

Handy trick. She must be able to take twenty naps a day.

Schultz sat back in his metal folding chair—upholstered chairs for her office were perpetually on order—and puckered his lips. Her pencil resumed its
tap tap tap,
but he waited until he’d collected his thoughts.

“As far as ID goes,” Schultz said, “there’s been a missing persons report just filed that generally matches this man physically. Guy named Arlan Merrett was supposed to be looking over some business deals in Chicago since last Wednesday. His wife got home from Kansas City this morning. She expected him to have gotten home Saturday night, but he wasn’t there. She checked his hotel and he never showed up. Never kept his appointments, either, according to a couple of pissed-off clients. She says he’s never done anything like this and there has to be something wrong.”

“Any chance he just ran out on the marriage?” Anita said.

“Not according to June Merrett, his wife. She says they were happily married. ‘Ask anybody,’ she says, ‘they’ll tell you.’ Of course, wives always say that shit.”

“He’s out of town for several days and she never tries to call him at his hotel, not even once?” PJ asked.

Schultz’s right shoulder went up in what passed for a shrug but looked more like a muscle spasm. The twisting motion pulled his worn leather jacket, already gaping slightly across his belly, far enough apart that she cringed, expecting to be hit with a flying button. They all held.

“Some people aren’t clinging vines,” he said. “They can be out of each other’s sight and not freak out.”

“This whole business of the Missing Persons report falling in our laps just when we need it seems way too convenient.”

“I’ll take any coincidence I can get. There’s probably a shitload of homicides out there that get solved because the killer gets a parking ticket or something.”

“Or maybe the wife didn’t try to contact Arlan because she wanted time for some hanky-panky of her own,” Anita said. “What about this trip to K.C.?”

“Shopping at Country Club Plaza,” Schultz said. “Mrs. Merrett likes the Christmas lights. Went to some kind of conference while she was there, she says.”

“Lots of hotels around there,” Anita said. “Wifey will play while hubby’s away.”

“We’re getting ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? We don’t even know if the victim is Arlan Merrett,” PJ said.

Schultz waved his hand dismissively. “A patrol car’s picking her up now. She’s coming in for identification.”

PJ imagined a cheerful woman, arms filled with Christmas gifts from a pleasant shopping excursion, fresh from hearing motivational speakers at a conference, coming home to an empty house. Not too worried at first, figuring her husband just got delayed on a business trip. Then in a matter of hours, she’s on her way to the morgue. PJ’s heart went out to June, if that was her Arlan who’d been bounced up a slope on a gurney. She allowed herself to slide into June’s despair, just a little.

Her pencil snapped in two.

“Easy, Doc,” Schultz said. “That’s city property.”

Dave came in, cold air hitching a ride in the crevices of his coat, bringing a bit of winter to PJ’s stuffy basement office.

“No blood on the street, but there was some on the cobblestones, not a lot, in a pattern that indicates the body was rolled,” he said. “You know, like a tire with a patch of mud on it that leaves an intermittent track as it spins around.”

PJ caught Dave up on the development with June Merrett.

“How is she going to identify him for certain?” he asked. “The guy’s face has got to be hard to recognize.”

“That’s where things get interesting,” Schultz said. “The clincher might be a scar he has on his back, high on the left shoulder, same place we saw one when the ME turned the body. That is, those of us who were here when the ME arrived saw the scar,” Schultz said, keeping his eyes away from PJ, the object of his scorn. “The wife says a horse kicked him. We’ll know after the autopsy. She’s got a photo of the scar.”

“What, she has a scar scrapbook or something?” Dave said. “Sounds fishy to me.”

“Yeah. Of course, we could be looking for a jilted male lover,” Schultz said. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I don’t think it matters what sex that woman is.”

PJ noticed him looking pointedly at her—
Huh?
—and gave him a shrug of her own. None of her buttons shot across the room, although the extra twenty pounds on her frame tried their collective best.

“Hey!” Anita said. “What about a sex change operation gone really, really bad? Bad enough that the so-called surgeon got rid of all traces of the botched work, and the patient, too?”

“There could be something to that,” PJ said. “There are known cases of transgendered people who didn’t make it through the rigorous pre-surgical program at clinics. Driven to change, they’d do anything for sex reassignment surgery—even put their lives in the hands of an amateur.”

“Shit,” Schultz said. “So they got a few inches of dick they don’t want. Maybe I should do a little Dumpster diving behind one of those clinics, check out the leftovers. Hell, I can sew on a button. I oughtta be able to sew on a dick.”

That’s it. That’s absolutely it. What exactly do I see in this guy?

PJ smacked her hand down on the desk, rattling her Mickey Mouse clock. Her hand smarted a little, but it was a righteous pain. “Leo, that has to be the most insensitive and crude thing you’ve ever said.”

“Amen, sister,” Anita said.

The office door swung open a foot, and Lieutenant Howard Wall, PJ’s boss, made one of his lightning appearances. His face poked through the opening. If he’d tried to squeeze the rest of himself in, the contents of the office would be at critical mass.

“The scar matches. Plus June Merrett ID’d her husband at the morgue. Claimed she recognized his eyes,” Wall said, with a roll of his own. “ME wants another source of ID, but her word will do until we get dental records. Mrs. Merrett seemed subdued when she saw her husband, a lot less heated up than she was acting earlier. Then it hits ’em about three in the morning, and they fall apart.” The door quickly closed, leaving PJ’s mouth open. She’d been about to give Schultz a scathing lecture.

“Catching flies, Doc?” Schultz said.

“Play nice, kids,” Dave interrupted, before she could respond. “What’s the matter with you two lately, anyway?”

PJ felt heat on her cheeks and hoped the blush wasn’t too obvious. As a psychologist, she should know better than to let Schultz get under her skin, especially in her work environment.

There
was
something wrong between them. Meanwhile, though, the sex was great. Schultz had hidden talents.

PJ cleared her throat. “That was a remarkably fast ID. Doesn’t it seem like June Merrett was anxious to have her husband declared dead?”

“So she could take center stage with lover-boy?” Anita asked. “I mean, really, a scar photo?”