Authors: Deirdre Savoy
Body Of Truth (3 page)
Wesley leaned down so that his face was almost in hers. “Yeah, well if they come for me, I'ma stand up like a man, not go running like some punk. Anybody wants me, I'm right here.”
He spoke in a quiet voice, his words made more chilling by his tone. One thing Dana had never felt was that her life was so hopeless that dying was as viable an option as living. “Who will take care of your grandmother then?”
He straightened away from her, but she could tell she'd gotten to him just a little. “That was low, lady. That wasâ” His words were cut off by the squeal of tires coming from a car rounding the corner. Wesley's head snapped up and his body stiffened. “Get inside.”
Alarm prickled at her nerve endings as she watched the same car head down the street, much faster this time. No one needed to tell her that the car's driver and occupants were up to no good. She fumbled to get the door open, and doing so, she turned to pull him inside with her. She didn't want to find out if he'd do what he said he would. “Come on, Wesley,” she pleaded, grabbing at his arm.
“Get inside.” He shoved at her, a backhanded swat that caught her in the solar plexus, winding her. She gasped for air, watching the car speed closer to them. As if in slow motion, the rear driver's side window rolled down and the barrel of a gun appeared in the window.
For a split second, she contemplated the unreality of her situation, the beauty of the cloudless day marred by the ugliness of the black gun pointed at her and the murderous intentions of the man who held it. She inhaled and air whooshed back into her lungs. She lunged forward, grabbing hold of Wesley's arm. “Come on,” she shouted. Yanking as hard as she could, she drew him toward her.
But she froze as a bullet whizzed past her ear to shatter the glass door behind her. And then her shoulder was on fire. The force of her own momentum threw her backward, through the front door. She landed on her back, still clutching Wesley's arm in a death grip. He bounced down of top of her, pushing her backward along the floor, his weight as dead as his eyes staring back at her. Her head snapped back, making contact with broken glass and a concrete floor covered in a thin layer of vinyl tile. As blinding pain and terrifying darkness claimed her, Dana's last thought was that she wasn't going to be getting on any airplane any time soon.
Two
Jonathan Stone pulled up behind one of three squad cars blocking the alley behind Mario's Pizza off Vandall Avenue. Earlier that morning, some poor bum looking for cans to redeem had been rifling through the trash when one of the trash cans produced an unexpected bounty: a woman's naked body.
Jonathan and his partner, Mari Velez, had taken the call an hour ago, while they were investigating a homicide on the other side of the Bronx, ironically across the street from the cemetery on Webster Avenue. The Bronx might not be the murder capital of the North America, but today it was holding its own.
Jonathan cut the engine and rubbed the back of his neck. It was barely ten o'clock and already the heat topped ninety degrees. For the second year in a row, New York had been treated to a frigid winter followed by an equally brutal, humid summer. Jonathan took one last gulp of air-conditioned air and cut the engine.
“Here we go again,” Mari said, nodding toward the crowd assembled at the sceneâa smattering of uniforms keeping the curious at bay; a couple of detectives he recognized from his time at the 44 talking with the uniform sarge, a few crime-scene techs combing the back of the alleyway. The same old, same old. Mari got out of the car, humming the tune to Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.
Jonathan retrieved his jacket from the back seat and followed her. He'd inherited Mari when she'd come to the station two years ago. None of the other guys had wanted to partner with her, first because she was a woman, second because she didn't take any shit from them and third because she didn't put out.
After that they'd dismissed her as the most incomprehensible and most hated woman of all: a dyke. Jonathan didn't know if that was true or not and didn't care. Mari was a good cop. She did her job and didn't complain about having to do it. That's all he needed to know about her. One of these days, if he ever wanted to really piss her off, he'd ask her.
He pinned his badge to his jacket lapel as he ducked under the police tape cordoning off the alley and crossed to where the two detectives he knew from the 44 stood. He'd never bothered to analyze the peculiar cop practice of nicknaming everyone, but he admitted he wasn't immune either. This pair he'd dubbed Mutt and Jeff, as the younger lanky one resembled a taller, fairer, more obnoxious Jeff Goldblum, and the older one, a Yaphet Kotto look-alike sans the cheesy Afro wig, sported a pot belly Buddha would have admired.
“What have you got?” He directed his question at Mutt, a.k.a. Ken Patterson, who, along with the bigger gut, possessed the greater brain power.
Patterson adjusted his belt over his ample waist. “Some old rummy finds the body of a white female stuffed in a trash can back in the alley. He pulls off the lid and there she is. Nearly scared the guy to death.”
“Where is he?”
“Back of one of the squads.” He nodded toward the building. “We're still waiting on the owner to show up. Lives in Larchmont and doesn't usually come in for another hour.”
As they talked they walked the short distance toward where the body lay uncovered on the concrete. Mari had already squatted alongside the body, next to Bill Horgan, one of the guys out of the coroner's office.
If the girl in the can had ever been a pretty woman there was no evidence of it now. Three quarters of her face had been smashed in, leaving only her chin and a portion of her right cheek untouched. A row of purplish bruises ringed her neck, as well as several deep scratches, probably wounds she'd inflicted herself trying to fend off her attacker. Whoever she was, she probably hadn't been in that can for long, as the stench usually associated with decaying bodies in hot enclosed spaces was thankfully absent.
Whoever had left the secret surprise had probably hoped it would find its way to the dump before anyone discovered its contents. But garbage pick-up in this neighborhood was less of a scheduled affair than a game of what if. Or maybe he hadn't cared. Whoever had left her had robbed her of whatever dignity or identity she possessed by dumping her here like so much trash in an alley.
That fact galled him, as whoever she had been, she'd been someone's daughter or sister or mother. Whatever else she might have been in life, he understood his obligation to her in death. He owed her that, even if no one else did.
He pulled the Polaroid from his pocket, opened it and snapped a picture of the corpse. He lowered the camera and picked off the picture. There would be plenty of official photographs to sift through later, but the pictures he took now were just for him. His own reminder, his own incentive.
“What's your guess?” Jeff nodded toward the body. “A working girl?”
Jonathan's gaze slid to the man. His eyes were over-bright, his movements jerky. Either he was on something or he was an adult victim of hyperactivity disorder.
Jonathan shrugged. The fact that she'd been found nude might hint at a sexual motive for the crime, but Jonathan doubted it. That had nothing to do with the scene before him, but his own cop's intuition that he'd learned to rely on. Right now, that intuition told him this wouldn't be some simple open and shut case. Maybe it was just the way his luck was going right then.
Mari looked up. “She's no pro. Not on the street anyway.”
“You can tell that just by looking?” Jeff scoffed. “You turn psychic and nobody told us?”
Mari speared him with one of her dark-eyed looks. “Aside from what this creep did to her, there isn't a mark on her, no tracks. How many hookers do you know with a dye job that probably cost more than you make in a week?”
Jeff laughed as if the answer didn't matter much. “Speaking of which,” he nodded to a spot lower on her body. “I guess more than her hairdresser knows for sure now.”
Jonathan shot the other man a look that made him take a step backward.
“Let's see if the owner's shown up yet,” Patterson said, and the two of them walked off down the alley.
He caught Mari giving him a patient look. “Ease up, Stone. That's probably the closest that jerk's gotten to a naked woman in ten years.”
Jonathan snorted. All the more reason not to put up with an idiot who'd use a corpse to make a lame joke. Jonathan focused on Horgan, a short stocky man with a stock of gray hair reminiscent of Spencer Tracy. “What have you got?”
“White female, or possibly Hispanic, thirty to forty years old. Signs of strangulation here.” He gestured along the breadth of her throat with his index finger. “Someone gave her face a good going over, but as to which killed her, the bludgeoning or the asphyxiation, your guess is as good as mine.”
“Was she raped?”
Morgan shook his head. “I don't think so. There's no sign of penetration, no evidence of fluids. I don't think I'd find any, anyway. Someone cleaned this girl up before dumping her here, clipped her fingernails. Whoever did this knew how to cover his tracks.”
Jonathan frowned, which meant her killer could be someone in law enforcement, a medical practitioner or any of the millions of CSI devotees. Great to narrow down the field a little.
“Time of death?”
“Hard to say. Roasting in that can probably threw off the body temp. Rigor has set in, and judging from the posterior lividity, she lay on her back for a few hours before finding her way here. I'd say no more than twenty-four hours, but that's the best I can say now.”
He nodded. “Thanks.” Though he didn't really know much more than he'd started with, except that whoever killed this woman had gone to a great deal of trouble to conceal both her identity and his.
Jonathan looked up at the building across the street, which provided a perfect view into the alley. Maybe someone had seen something, and more importantly, might be willing to tell what they saw. In this neighborhood, the most likely response to police inquiries was a not-so-polite litany of what cops could do with themselves and how often.
Ironically, residents of this neighborhood, when asked what the police can do for the community, cite increased police protection as the most pressing issue. Good thing nobody ever said life had to make sense.
Jonathan sighed. Time to get down to the real work: getting a canvass started, rounding up witnesses. By the time this was over, he'd probably know this woman in the alley better than her own mother did.
He folded the camera and slid it into his pocket. “Let's go.”
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Coming back to consciousness, Dana opened her eyes slowly. Her head ached and her shoulder throbbed. Groggily, she took in her surroundings: a dingy white room, clunky, industrial furniture, and above, the tracks for a privacy curtain. Images of the shooting flooded her consciousnessâthe car, the gun pointed at her, firing, Wesley's cold, dead eyes. She closed her eyes and inhaled.
Please, God, don't let me be in Washington Hospital.
Please, God, don't let me be in Washington Hospital.
“Welcome back to the land of the living.”
Dana turned her head to the right to see Joanna sitting in a high-backed chair beside her bed. Dana licked her dry lips. “Where am I?”
“Montefiore Hospital. How do you feel?”
“Grateful to be alive. What about Wesley?”
“The kid who was with you? He didn't make it.”
Dana squeezed her eyes shut. She'd known. She'd known from the moment she'd seen his eyes that he was gone, but hearing it flat out brought tears to her eyes and a sweeping sense of sadness rushing through her.
“I'm sorry,” Joanna said.
Dana wiped her eyes with her hand. “I know.” She was sorry, too, that a young man with such potential was gone before he'd really had a chance to do anything with his life. As sure as she knew her own name, she knew she'd been getting to him. Maybe with a little more guidance . . . Her speculations didn't matter anymore. Wesley was gone and she couldn't change that either.
“There's a detective outside waiting to talk to you. Do you feel up to it?”
She nodded. If she could, she wanted to help find Wesley's killer, though she doubted she'd be much help. “Send him in.”
With a little effort, Joanna rose from her seat and went to the door. Through the opening she could see a uniformed officer outside her door. He nodded as Joanna spoke to him. Dana supposed such protection wasn't out of line considering she was a material witness to a murder.
After a few moments Joanna waddled back to her. “He'll be right here. Are you sure you're up to this? Maybe I should get your doctor.”
“I'm fine.” Dana smiled wickedly and appealed to her friend's nurse's pride. “Do you think a doctor would know my condition better than you would?”
“Of course not. But he is a man. You know how they tend to pay more attention to each other than they do to us.” Joanna grinned. “Besides, he's single.”
Dana rolled her eyes. That was Joanna, the perpetual matchmaker. “One of these days I'm going to convince you to give up on me.”
“Never.”
As Joanna spoke, the door pushed open and a tall, Caucasian man walked in. He wore his dark hair long and shaggy, as haphazardly arranged as his clothes, a dark brown suit with an askew tie. His gaze went immediately to Joanna. “I'd like to speak to Miss Molloy alone.”
Dana's eyebrows lifted, not because of his request, but because of his wide-legged, hostile stance at the foot of her bed. THE LAW had arrived, and he wasn't taking any prisoners. Clearly, he expected a confrontation with her, though she wondered why. Maybe he was simply impatient to find out what she knew, but she doubted it.
Joanna rolled her eyes comically, breaking the tension in the room. “I'll be right outside.”
After Joanna left, she focused on the man standing at the foot of her bed. “What can I do for you, um . . .”
“Detective Moretti, 16th squad. I'd like to ask you some questions about the shooting.”
“Go ahead.”
“How well did you know Wesley Evans?”
“Not well. I was his grandmother's nurse. I work for At-Home Healthcare.”
“That's why you were at 4093 Highland Avenue this morning?”
“Yes.”
“What do you recall about the shooting?”
Dana inhaled and let it out slowly. “I came out of the building after seeing Mrs. Evans. Wesley was outside. We talked for a few minutes when this black car came careening down the street. The next thing I knew they were shooting at us.”
“They? How many were there?”
“At least two. One driving and the one with the gun.”
“Did you get a look at either of them?”
Dana shook her head, sending pain dancing along her scalp. She shut her eyes for a moment until it passed. “No. The windows were tinted black and I was too busy staring at the gun to see anything else.”
“Did you get a license plate?”
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