Endangered Species (34 page)

“Gabriel, please don’t make no jokes. I’m so worried—I ain’t never seen him like this. He’s … frightened. But he won’t tell me why. He won’t go to school, he won’t go to work, and he don’t even go out. He won’t talk on the phone unless I tell him who it is. And these people keep calling—they hang up without saying nothing when I answer.”

Kolagny could even lose this one: a domestic with victim and assailant wearing the same blood, and which should take the ADA a hell of a lot less time in court than it took Wager to write up. Not only was the gun smoking, the blood was still smoking when the patrol officers came through the door. Even the perp had been equally hot, a wife who had discovered what a shotgun could do to Mr. Slusser’s personality, not to mention his belly, and had insisted on telling Wager and every other officer in earshot that the low-life son of a bitch deserved what he got, that she didn’t give a goddamn who Miranda was or anybody else, and that if the shit-sucker wasn’t dead by the time he reached the hospital, she, Mrs. Slusser, would by God do it again. Even Kolagny should be able to handle that.

“Maybe he’ll talk to you, Gabe. Maybe what he needs is a man to talk to.” “He” was cousin Julio, sixteen—seventeen?—somewhere around there. Old enough to have a driver’s license, but young enough to still be in high school and trouble, both.

“All right, Aunt Louisa. I’ll come over. …” The radio mounted in its desk charger popped with the code number for homicide and the familiar request for “any homicide detective.” Wager covered the telephone speaker and, his aunt’s voice buzzing in one ear, replied with his call number. The dispatcher’s precise voice gave him an address that he jotted down quickly, replying with an automatic “ten-four.” Aunt Louisa’s voice was saying “Gabe? Gabe?”

“I’ll be over this evening, Aunt Louisa.” He shrugged into his sport coat and holstered the radio as he talked. “I really will.”

His aunt was saying something about not wanting to bother Wager, and he let her apology go on for a few seconds before interrupting. “It’s all right, Aunt Louisa.” She had got what she wanted, and now she had to pretend that he could have said no—that it was Wager who had called up and insisted he come by and talk to Julio instead of her calling to ask a favor. “I should get off around five and I’ll be over after that. … It’s no problem, really. … It’s all right.” She was still making “You’re really sure?” noises when he said he had to go and hung up.

Initialing the route slip on the Slusser file, Wager quickly slid the packet into a mailer and dropped it in the interdepartmental delivery box on his way to the elevator. Five minutes later, he was driving up the ramp from the police headquarters garage into the traffic of Cherokee Street.

“We got a positive on him.” The uniformed officer didn’t look at either Wager or the small, dark shape in the striped T-shirt and frayed, cutoff denims. It had been flung like trash into weeds and chokecherry bushes that had grown up around the broken foundations marking the remains of the demolished Stapleton housing project. The weedy concrete pads, the low mounds of overgrown rubble, the strips of broken sidewalk that led nowhere reminded Wager of an old cemetery. And, in a way, that’s what it had become. “John Erle Hocks. One of the kids that found him knew him, and his mother came down for a positive ID. That’s her over in the car.”

It wasn’t routine to bring a relative to the crime scene; the procedure called for identification in the morgue where, even before the cosmetics of an undertaker, the dead were given a little more dignity. “You brought her down here?”

“No, Detective Wager. We did not bring her down here.” The patrolman’s silver name tag said L. Minks, and he let the disgust in his tone sink in for a moment. “She came down here herself. Took a goddamn bus. One of the kids who found him told somebody who called her.”

“All right. Witnesses?”

“My partner’s still canvassing.” He nodded toward a row of bungalows that showed their dilapidated back fences far across the neglected stretch. The steady rush of traffic, invisible behind a tall wooden sound barrier, came like a noisy stream off I-25. A block to the east loomed an old brick school building built before World War II, three-story, square, and gloomy. It was now a private home for mentally retarded juveniles.

Harry Gebauer and his team from the forensics lab, whose radios monitored the homicide frequency, had arrived at about the same time as Wager and were now stringing yellow barrier tape around the site and trying to determine where people had walked after the body had been discovered. The flash of a strobe light made a dim pulse in the midday sun. Behind the line of marked and unmarked police cars at the distant curb, an ambulance waited, its crew leaning against the orange-and-white truck and staring toward the weeds. A white Honda Civic skidded to a halt behind the ambulance, and a familiar black T-shirt hurried through the tall grass toward the cheery yellow tape: Gargan, ace crime reporter for the
Denver Post
. Wager turned his back to the bustling figure.

“One round to the back of the neck.” Minks stared at his clipboard as if reading the words. “Came out the top of his skull.”

“Any gang symbols?” It was what you asked now when children were shot.

“None I saw. I didn’t go through his pockets.”

“That’s good.” The less a victim or site was disturbed, the better the lab people liked it. That was repeated to every uniformed cop a dozen times a year, but more often than not they poked around anyway. Everybody wanted to play detective. Wager copied down the few notes the officer had—the names of the kids who found the body, the time, the fact that no witnesses had been located. And probably wouldn’t be; the area was almost deserted during the day and more so at night, and from the heavy appearance of the torso and its twisted, skinny legs, Wager figured the body had been here since last night at least. Bodies did that with time: tended to sag into the earth, to conform to the shape of the ground they lay on. It was as if they wanted to find refuge by sinking out of sight. “I’ll see what the mother has to say.”

“All yours.”

She was a gaunt woman with high cheekbones and dark eyes that stared unseeing through the iron grille behind the patrol car’s front seat and on out the windshield. She did not turn her head to look when Wager showed his badge, and he stood in the sun at the open car door. It was a way of observing the formality and privacy of her grief. “Can you tell me when you saw your son last, Mrs. Hocks?”

Her answer wasn’t a word but a moan, the kind made by someone who hurts badly in their sleep.

“Mrs. Hocks?”

“Uh-uh.”

An insect zinged into the shade of the car and batted itself against the windshield before finding an open window and zipping away. Wager felt the late August sun press hotly on his neck and shoulders. “Mrs. Hocks, we want to find who did this. We need your help for that, so I’ve got to ask you some questions. I’d appreciate you trying to answer them, OK?”

The staring brown eyes closed slowly, and she nodded.

“When did you see your son last?”

“Las’ night. After supper.” The whisper barely made it past her dry lips.

Wager caught the eye of one of the lounging ambulance attendants. “You got any water in your vehicle? Something she can drink?”

The attendant looked surprised, as if he were really seeing the woman for the first time. “Yeah—hang on.” He trotted back to his ambulance and returned with a can of 7-UP. “It’s cold—we keep it in the medicine reefer.”

“Thanks.” Wager opened it and handed it to the woman, who sat with it in her hand. “Take a drink, Mrs. Hocks. Drink up.”

She followed his directions.

The attendant, a ponytail and thick glasses, hovered. “She need anything? She a relative?”

“Mother. No. Thanks.”

“Give me a call if she does.”

Wager nodded. The attendant wandered back to his ambulance and said something to his partner, who glanced their way. Then they stared across the open space as the three lab men measured, took notes, photographed, picked up things, and put them in plastic Baggies.

“Las’ night. After supper.”

Wager nodded. The woman’s voice was stronger now. She’d probably start wailing soon. Give way to tears and sobs and even screams. You wanted to get your information before that happened. “Did he say where he was going?”

She shook her head. “Went out on his bicycle. Was still light. And then he jus’ didn’t come home.”

“Did you file a missing persons report, Mrs. Hocks?”

She shook her head. “I kep’ figuring he’d come home. I went on to sleep—I go to work early and John Erle, he likes to stay out late summer nights. …” Her voice almost broke, but something inside managed to stifle what she was feeling, and Wager had the sense that this wasn’t one of those women who would wail in public but who would hold in her grief, live with it silently.

“Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill him?”

“No! Ain’t nobody want to kill him! Who want to kill a little boy like that?”

“How old was he, Mrs. Hocks?”

“Was.” She gripped the wrinkling can with both hands. The dark skin of her large knuckles paled. “Thirteen. Be fourteen ten December. Thirteen and a half.” A shuddering breath. “Tha’s all.”

“Can you give me the names of some of his friends, kids he hung around with?”

Her brown eyes blinked, and she drew her mind back from wherever it had gone. “Londe. That’s his best friend. They some others—I don’t know. …”

“What school did your son go to?”

“The middle school. Cole Middle School.”

“Is there anything you can think of that might help us, Mrs. Hocks?”

“No.”

“Is it possible your son was in a gang? Or thinking about joining one?”

“Gang? John Erle? He wasn’t in no gang! He wasn’t one of them!”

“Yes, ma’am.” Despite the woman’s denials, her son’s death looked like a gang assassination, and at thirteen John Erle was prime gang bait But Wager wasn’t going to argue with her. He asked a few more questions, trying to get more names, more places John Erle hung out, more leads to people who might know more than she did herself about her son’s real life. But she didn’t have much to add: She clerked at a convenience store, six-thirty to three in the afternoon, a lot of times she worked an extra shift in the evenings or part-time as a janitor’s assistant. John Erle was her only son, and a real smart boy and a good one, and wouldn’t be in no gang. Always did good in school without even trying, seemed like. He had two younger sisters, Coley and Jeanette. Their father was long gone, left somewhere down in Texas when she and the kids had moved up to Denver four years ago, looking for the better life. Wager got her address and telephone, where the girls went to school, and finally closed his notebook. “The officers will give you a ride home, Mrs. Hocks. Is there anybody we can call to stay with you for a while?”

“I be all right.”

“It would be good for you to have somebody around.”

“I be all right.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Wager said good-bye and headed across the deserted fragments of sidewalk for the taped-off area.

The forensics team had finished, and two of them stood comparing notes while Gebauer toted his metal detector back to the trunk of their vehicle. He held up a labeled Baggie for Wager to see. “Found the slug. Looks like a thirty-two.”

Wager peered at the twisted wad. Although its nose was splayed by impact with bone and dirt, the base of the bullet was still intact enough for a ballistics test “Good. If the killer’s dumb enough to keep the weapon, and if we’re smart enough to find the killer, we might have a case.” But more and more, gang shooters tended to use throwaway guns—cheap, small-caliber weapons that couldn’t be traced to whoever pulled the trigger.

“Yeah, well, I leave that to you, Gabe; my fun’s ended and yours is just beginning.”

The ambulance attendants were waved over, and it was time for Wager to inspect the victim, to get the preliminary forensic reports on the body and site before the body was removed, and to draw his own sketch of the crime scene that would provide accurate memory if he were called upon months from now to testify in court.

A
UNT
L
OUISA’S HOUSE
was one of the small bungalows just off 38th Avenue in District One, the northwest quadrant of Denver. It was mostly one story, though sometime in the past a couple of attic rooms had been added by poking a pair of flat dormers through the roof to get a little more space. The one with the yellow light glowing dimly behind the small windows was probably Julio’s room. Wager pulled his Camaro into the driveway and stood a minute before climbing the three wooden stairs up to the porch.

He had spent the long afternoon following up the patrolman’s neighborhood contacts and rapping on doors that, for one reason or another, hadn’t answered to the uniformed officer. No one heard or saw anything, and Wager would have been surprised if they had. The residents in the single row of small houses said all they ever heard was noise from the highway, and the staff members at the home for the mentally retarded said their doors and windows were always closed and the building secured at night against neighborhood vandalism. Wager had put off talking to John Erle’s sisters, figuring they had enough to handle today. And besides, he was exhausted. A new murder—especially a kid’s—always left him feeling weary. What he did not feel like was playing the Dutch uncle to a reluctant teenager. But a promise was a promise.

Aunt Louisa met him at the door, a square shape in a black dress with her gray hair pulled back into a bun. She had worn black ever since Uncle Julius died, over ten years ago, and Wager—who had stopped going to the family gatherings and hadn’t seen her in almost two yeans—tried to pretend he didn’t notice the new lines of deep worry on her forehead or the sharper lines beside her mouth. They gave her a bitter look that he did not associate with his memory of the woman, and that made him feel a little twinge of something at having avoided his family for so long. “Gabe—come in!” She gave him an
abrazo
, wrapping him in the thin aroma of some unnamed perfume or soap or lotion that brought back a tangle of almost forgotten feelings and sharpened the sense of so much time passing between what he remembered and what he now saw. They talked for a few minutes, Aunt Louisa urging him to have a cup of coffee and some of the small almond cookies she had lined up formally on a plate. “I’ll go get Julio. He’s just upstairs.”