First Blood (7 page)

“But we’re not allowed,” Leroy said.

“I don’t agree. Technically, our narcotics guys are supposed to be investigating the cocaine ring. If they’ve found a body up there, they have to call the assistant public attorney, who will then assign the case. Nobody will make any moves before that. And nobody can get us in trouble for doing our job.”

She got out of the car.

“I’m right behind you,” Leroy said.

They dived into the crowd, elbowing their way through.

The most perilous part was slipping past the group of officials, where their colleagues from the drug squad and homicide could have recognized them. But the officers guarding Adam were having too hard a time managing the media to notice the two people wearing police armbands.

Once past that obstacle, they walked as confidently as they could, pushing past the people standing in front of the entrance. The group of firefighters looked at them, ready to turn them away.

“Hey, you over there, what are you doing?”

“Homicide,” Eva said in an authoritative voice. “We’re here to see the body.”

She pointed up.

“The one you found on the twelfth floor.”

A firefighter nodded.

“Okay, but there’s still a lot of smoke. You should wait awhile.”

“We need to be up there,” Leroy said. “Thanks for the heads up.”

When they got into the hallway, they pulled out their latex gloves. Leroy dug in his pocket for two paper face masks. Eva took one. They covered their noses. It wouldn’t be miraculous, but it was better than nothing.

Behind them, a concert of protests rose again from the mass of tenants blocked outside.

They climbed the stairs to the twelfth floor. The higher they went, the blacker the walls got. Water was streaming down the steps. By the time they reached the landing on the top floor, they were wading through massive puddles. They made sure their masks were tight against their faces.

“Watch your feet,” Leroy said.

He pointed his flashlight at the apartment door. The scene was a burned-out ruins. Everything had been reduced to an indistinguishable, smoking magma. The walls were mottled and cracked like a molting snake. That is, where there were still walls, because part of the building had collapsed.

The smoke burned their throats, despite the masks. Eva coughed uncontrollably as she carefully stepped over the carpet of black ashes. Leroy, looking pallid, walked next to her, lighting up the corners with his flashlight as they searched for the victim.

“Hey, you,” a voice rang out. “Who let you through?”

A firefighter, still wearing his oxygen equipment, burst from one of the rooms. He looked furious.

“You’re going to get smoke poisoning, idiots.”

Eva turned so he could see their red armbands.

“We’re with homicide. I’m Inspector Svärta.”

“I’m Detective Leroy.”

“Are you the one who found the body?” Eva asked, trying not to give him time to think.

The firefighter lifted up his visor. He had an honest face and a perfectly shaven square chin. He was also tall and seemed to be well built under his gear. He was the iconic teddy bear in uniform of many women’s fantasies.

“Um, okay. I’m Deputy Chief N’Guyen. You guys were awfully quick. I found it just five minutes ago.”

“Your colleagues told us,” Eva said. “It’s a priority case.”

That was a huge lie. There wasn’t any “case” yet. But the deputy chief had no way of knowing that.

“Is the district attorney here?” he asked. “You usually all come together.”

“The others should be here soon.”

Unfortunately, that was the truth. They only had a few minutes before the officials would arrive and chase them away. There was no time to waste.

“We wanted to see the body before the apartment was overrun. You understand, don’t you?”

The firefighter did not look convinced. “I don’t know if I can let you. Rules are rules.”

Leroy stepped in and played it straight, saying, “Of course you can. A crime has occurred here, and the victim is a drug dealer we were investigating.”

“Yes, well, I suppose.”

The firefighter stared at them, focusing on Eva, with her white hair and dark sunglasses. He swore under his breath.

“So it’s Constantin?”

It was the two police officers’ turn to be surprised.

“You know him?”

“Rather well, yes. I used to live in the projects, in the building on the other side of the street, to be exact. That was a long time ago, before Constantin got here. Since then, I’ve watched the neighborhood change,” he said.

His voice turned bitter as he continued, “It only took him a few years to reorganize everything. You must know that every family here took cash from him to cover for him, to transport his merchandise, or to store it. Constantin’s money pays the rent for the poorest people here. That’s how he buys their services when he needs them. Well, that’s how he
bought
them.”

He pointed his light into an adjoining room and then added, “Come on, take a look, if you’re in a hurry.”

They followed him, happy to have made it through so easily. The smell was thicker here. And it was not just smoke. There was another, more compelling odor, one that could never be forgotten once it had been smelled.
The odor of human flesh.

“There you go. I warn you, it’s not a pretty sight. The hot spots suggest that the fire started in this room.”

He led them into the living room. The body was in the middle, but it was hard to make out a human shape in the black form on the floor. It looked like it had melted into the linoleum.

Where was the head? Where were the legs?

Eva knelt down next to the sooty remains. She moved her flashlight around and finally recognized the skull. From there, she could imagine where his chest was and then his arms and legs. He was in a fetal position. The black flesh was waterlogged. It looked like it had expanded and then burst, like a roasted chicken. She breathed slowly, trying to understand what was wrong with this picture.

She lit up the black lines on the body. It was wire.

“His luck ran out,” N’Guyen said. “He was tied up and couldn’t get away.”

“You said the fire started here.”

“Yes,” the deputy fire chief said, shining his light on the remains. “You see these traces that look like waves on the ground? That was the hottest spot. It tells us that the fire originated here. He was the point of origin. It was an execution.”

Eva nodded. “Do you think they poured gasoline over him?”

“Gas or some other accelerant. We’ll know soon enough. It’s true that gas is most common for this kind of case.”

“What kind of case are you talking about?”

“You know,” the firefighter sighed. “It looks like someone was settling a score, don’t you think?” He ran his hand across his forehead to wipe off the sweat. “The hoods around here douse people with gasoline when they have a score to settle. They lock them in the trunk of a car, pour gas all over the vehicle and light it up. They call it a barbecue.”

Leroy walked around the body. The beams from their flashlights danced a macabre ballet on the burned flesh.

“Do you see a lot of these barbecues?”

“No, it’s not that common,” N’Guyen said. “I’ve seen three in five years.”

Eva ran her flashlight along what remained of the body. There was something else about it. “This man had a huge opening in his torso.”

“You’re right,” Leroy said, feeling sick. “It looks like he’s been cut open.”

Now the deputy fire chief directed the beam of his flashlight on the body. “Damn. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Eva looked up at him. “This dude was mutilated before being set on fire. It doesn’t look like the usual gang payback anymore.”

She looked around the room. Black matter, covered by several inches of water, was splattered all around. A steam radiator had been ripped off the wall and lay in the middle of the floor, an odd island in a charred world.

“I’m intrigued by this hole in his torso. We’re going to have to find the missing organs.”

Leroy understood what she meant. “Do you think it’s possible?” he asked. “Do you think the guys who did this took off with pieces of Ismael Constantin like souvenirs?”

“I’m just saying that we’ll need to check. You never know. But in a gang dispute, I don’t know why his enemies would want to collect, well,...”

She was looking for the right word.

Leroy finished her sentence, daring to say it out loud, “Trophies.”

“I didn’t say that,” Eva said.

“But you were thinking it.”

Eva was silent for a few moments. Leroy and N’Guyen looked on as if they were expecting her to analyze the situation. She was not ready for that.

“This doesn’t add up,” she finally said. “If Constantin was so powerful here, why didn’t any of his men stop this?”

“I don’t get it,” N’Guyen said. “I thought his soldiers were always around to defend him, no matter what.”

“But he was alone tonight,” Eva said.

“That’s what it looks like. Otherwise, his attackers would never have been able to do this to him, right?”

“Have you inspected the other apartments?”

“Yes, of course. On this floor, there is only one other apartment. It’s on the other side of the hallway. There’s no one in there.”

Eva nodded. She remembered very clearly what the young man Sammy had said in the parking lot.

“We can’t do nothing.”

Those were his exact words.

“You already got told.”

She thought back to the silence that reigned in the building before the fire. It was the same kind of quiet that occurs in a tropical forest before an earthquake or a tidal wave.

Told what?

There was something strange about the tenants—in the way they did not look shocked or surprised. Eva was sure that everyone here knew this was going to happen.

Did he know?
She looked at the burned body again. Ismael Constantin, fifty years old, top dog in the projects, the man who literally ran this building. Where were his soldiers?

She could not let go of the thought.
Did Constantin know, as well? Did he expect to die this way? Is that why he called his men in the day before?
When Leroy heard the rumors in the cafés, he thought that Constantin was going to meet somebody and that everyone would be there. There had been a meeting, but it was one on one. And it was fatal for the gangster.

Something else was wrong. Something more serious.

She did not have time to finish her line of thought. Other people were coming up the stairwell. She could hear them. Then the beams from a dozen or so flashlights pierced the darkness in the apartment.

“Is someone in there?” It was the voice that Eva would have recognized anywhere.

It was the voice of Assistant District Attorney Blaise Larusso.

Every cop’s nightmare.

She looked at Leroy.

“This is not our lucky day,” he said.

“Mr. Larusso!”

Eva’s mouth went dry.

Not him
, she screamed inside,
anybody but him.

“We found the body,” she added, already on the defensive.

Several people came into the room. The flashlights blinded her.

“Good evening, Mr. Larusso,” Leroy said in turn, shielding his eyes with the back of his hand.

Larusso did not greet them. He simply stared at Leroy from behind his huge glasses, sending a palpable look of disdain.

It had to be him, tonight,
Eva thought.
That idiot will keep us off the case just to annoy us, just to prove that it’s his turf, and he is all powerful.

Fifteen or so people wearing armbands and face masks accompanied Larusso. Eva recognized guys from the drug squad, crime-scene investigators in white coats, and a reserved-looking blond woman. She remembered her name: Pauline Chadoutaud. She was a medical examiner she had worked with several times. They got along fairly well.
At least there is one friendly face among the vultures.

Pauline Chadoutaud nodded at her. Eva gave her a stiff smile as she waved to Deputy Fire Chief N’Guyen. He was leaving, having been chased away by this new crowd of very serious faces. In seconds, the agents had taken over the apartment and formed a circle around the burned remains. Joseph Adam’s team was there in full force. Adam himself was standing back, near the door. He looked at her in silence, inscrutable under his paper mask. But Eva imagined that he was smirking.

It was best to face her problems, one by one. She turned to Larusso and said, “Sir.”

He cut her off, “You’ve got no reason to be here. I haven’t assigned this to the Homicide Unit yet.”

“Precisely.”

“Please leave.”

Eva almost laughed. Larusso was five feet three at the most, and he had a serious inferiority complex. He expressed it by being petty and aggressive. He could wear men’s platform shoes and scream louder than anyone else, but he still looked ridiculously small and scrawny. She had to keep her composure, or she would ruin things.

“If you could just hear me out,” she tried to say.

“That’s close to insubordination,” Larusso yelled behind his mask.

She swallowed. There was a taste of ashes and anger in her mouth.

In the doorway, Adam still had that smile in his eyes. He would not need to be told twice to chase them away.

“Is it Constantin?” Larusso barked without looking at the body.

“We think so, sir,” Leroy responded quickly.

Larusso turned to him and glared. “I wasn’t asking you.”

“Yet I answered. Do you have a problem with that?” Leroy said, towering over Larusso a good eight inches. Larusso had to look up at him. His right cheek was twitching.

“Watch out, kid. You don’t seem to know who you are talking to.”

“On the contrary,” Leroy said, enunciating each word, “I know very well to whom I am talking.”

The blood drained from Larusso’s face. “You’re looking for trouble,” he said.

Eva tried to come to Leroy’s rescue. “Sir, this is murder with premeditation and no longer just cocaine trafficking,” she said in a voice full of authority. “Ismael Constantin was tortured and gutted like a pig before being set on fire.”