Killing Zone (34 page)

“That’s it.”

“I don’t like letting people off, Wager. Not even for this. There are other ways of making that witness come forward.”

Wager had thought about that, too. “That’ll take time. And might not work. What about suspending the charges for a year on Franklin and Roberts?”

“Suspending them?”

“That way, if they’re convicted, they don’t get sentenced as habitual criminals. A year puts them beyond the ten-year limit on their first conviction.”

“And they’d still stand trial.”

Wager agreed. “If they’re convicted, it’s their third felony. One more and it’s life. Automatically.”

“Would your informant go along with that?”

“I can make him see it.”

“Very well. I’ll talk to Papadopoulos. How soon can we move on Wilfong?”

2253 Hours

The riot standby had been cancelled by the time Wager reached his apartment. He had finished the last paperwork and had had a matron escort Julia Wilfong to the holding cells in the sheriff’s building. The woman had been shaken when she learned of the witness who saw her at the scene, but she still admitted nothing, “I have a right to a lawyer.”

She was probably talking to him now in one of the quiet cubicles whose only adornment was the fixed worktable and benches and the white paint on the walls, and whose only sound—other than the muted voices—was the steady buzz of fluorescent lights. A grinning Adamo had brought in a pair of shoes from the woman’s closet and held them aloft like a prize-winning fish: “A match, Gabe—perfect match with the casts. And we found traces of soil from the crime scene in the cracks between the heel and the shoe. These are the heels that went in heavy and came out light.” And with that evidence and the arrest, the chief had turned loose a detachment to look in every parking lot surrounding Stapleton Airport. The word had come in maybe ten minutes before Wager left: Green’s Lincoln had been located.

Wager stretched back in his chair to reach the beer on the table behind him. He figured the weapon never would be found; Wilfong was too smart to keep it. But they would search all along the route from the murder site to the car for any place a person might lose a pistol. With luck, they’d find it; without luck, they still had a strong, logical case against her. Thanks to Rabbit, the witness, and to Willy, who only nodded and smiled when Wager asked if the youth would keep to his story on cross-examination.

It wasn’t all that legal, but it was justice nevertheless. And it was the best Wager could do for Green. He felt satisfaction with it. Green had been a man with faults—a lot of faults, like a lot of people. But he still had virtues enough to be loved by his women and admired by most who knew him. Sufficient virtues, anyway, to soften those faults and to make his death a loss to others. So it felt especially good to find his murderer before even more harm was done under the excuse of avenging his death. It kept Green’s name decent.

Yawning again, he looked without seeing the tail end of the late news on television where the featured story was an interview with the chief and Lieutenant Wolfard of Crimes Against Persons about an arrest in the Councilman Green homicide. A vague thought crossed Wager’s mind as it slowly relaxed like the tight muscles of his back and neck: Jo. He hadn’t thought of her once in the last twenty-four hours. He had been too busy to surrender to the screaming nightmares, the swirl of guilt, the angry self-blame. It was as if the intense focus of the case had burned that away to leave him missing her, yes, but no longer cursing himself for her death. For some reason he felt that’s what she would want, and as he accepted that idea, the more convinced he was of it. It’s what she would want. Eyes heavy, the natter of television voices sliding away into the rush of sleep, Wager felt something inside gradually unfold like a fist easing into a hand, and his self-anger and guilt for her death began to sift away between the opening fingers like sand.

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9/21

0444

“T
HE FIRE FIGHTERS
found it. After cool-down they could go through the rooms.” Rodriguez, a barrel-shaped man, wore a slicker striped with silver reflective tape that made him look even broader through the chest. He wore a large helmet and flash mask too, and all the equipment added authority to a posture that said the firemen had done their job right, and it wasn’t their fault somebody died. Homicide Detective Gabriel Wager nodded and added to his notes. The pumper crew had received the call at 0312. By the time they arrived, less than eight minutes later, the small frame house on Wyandot Street was a flare of orange and red, and every window belched fire. None of the wide-eyed and disheveled neighbors, awed by the roar and heat, could tell the fire fighters if anyone was in the building. “It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway,” said Rodriguez. “The place was gone.” They set up containment and began pouring water over the roof and walls. There was no possible way to get through the searing flame that spiraled out of every doorway, and little hope for finding anything alive if they could.

“Look like a homicide?” Wager followed the glare of Rodriguez’s flashlight and stepped where the fire fighter’s boots smeared ash and mud into the soggy carpet. The floor, like the rest of the structure, was wood, and in places it had burned through. Under his feet, the weakened joists were quivering beneath the weight of bulky firemen, their equipment, and the first wave of official investigators.

“Can’t tell. But it was found curled up in a closet.”

Which was probably the sign of a futile attempt to escape the flames. But whether accident, suicide, or murder, it was an unnatural death, and unnatural death meant a police report. Wager was the homicide detective on call when the body was found. “Male or female?”

“Can’t tell.”

The smell of wet, charred wood and burned cloth mingled with the heat of still-smoking embers and fire-blued metal. And another smell too: that of newly burned flesh, a greasy, sweet-fried odor that made Wager breathe shallowly through pinched nostrils. They crowded into a bedroom where the remnant of a door hung open to the black and glistening insides of a gutted closet. Huddled against the indignity of the flashlight’s beam, and at the foot of one of the wet and steaming walls, was a cramped shape. In the pitiless circle of pale glare, it was mostly black, like the charred studs surrounding. But here and there splits of pink and white erupted through the baked crust. Wager could see, a darker circle against the flaking ash of the cheek, the socket of one eye. “The medical examiner been called?”

“Yeah.” Rodriguez looked up from the tangle of heat-twisted wire hangers and the fallen clothes bar that lay atop the figure. “There’s not much to work with.”

He nodded agreement. The closet had been a trap rather than a refuge. Disoriented, blinded, choking, the victim could have groped for the bedroom door in the other wall, stumbled across the closet door instead, and, overcome, collapsed to smother in the heavy smoke instead of finding his way out. “How’d the fire start?”

“Don’t know yet. Arson won’t get here until morning.” The fire fighter glanced at the heavy wristwatch under the cuff of his glove. “Which won’t be too goddamn long. You can’t see that much at night anyway.”

Wager gazed around the once-private room, now invaded by disorder and by figures lumpy with protective gear and bulky equipment. A platform of scorched slats held a futon that had charred and split to spill wads of water-soaked cotton. A broken lamp and a burned and overturned end table had been kicked into a corner. The sheathing had burned off two of the walls, to show fire-blackened two-by-fours that glittered and dripped as if a summer shower had passed over. Through glassless windows and ragged gaps in the outside wall, floodlights from the fire trucks threw streaks and patches of light. He could hear a thunk and creak as fire axes dug for hot spots in the smoldering debris somewhere in the back rooms. There wasn’t much he could do in the dark, except to tell Rodriguez to keep everyone away from the closet until the forensics team arrived, which should be soon. He followed the high boots that mashed their way back through the small living room cluttered with fragments of plasterboard from the ceiling and a soggy, half-burned sofa that had been ripped apart in the search for remaining sparks.

Wager crossed the small wooden porch and went down the three steps to the cramped front yard. A clutch of neighbors huddled against the night’s chill in robes and blankets and watched in silence. Wager used his GE radio pack to ask the dispatcher for a deputy DA to bring a warrant—the body was on private property, and any possible evidence gathered there had to be legally covered. Then he went over to the knot of silent people.

“Does anyone know who lived here?”

A man whose beard stubble looked like a dark smear of ash on his pale skin glanced at the woman standing beside him. Then he cleared his throat. “Told me his name’s John.”

Wager had his small green notebook out. “John? Did he give you a last name?”

“No. Hasn’t been here long—rented maybe a month ago. John.”

That was a problem: Wager wouldn’t be able to notify the next of kin until he could identify the victim. “Can I have your name, sir?”

“I guess.” The man told him and gave Wager his address. It was the house next door, a small frame building like the burned one, and the rounded eyes of the man and woman said they were staring at the sudden nightmare vision of their own home. The curtained windows behind them reflected the erratic flash of emergency lights as an unmarked official car pulled up. Probably forensics. “My wife saw the fire. Got up to go to the bathroom and saw it and called me. I called the fire engines.” His voice dropped. “Seemed like they took a hell of a long time to get here.”

The woman, brightly flowered robe gripped tightly at her throat, nodded and spoke in a puff of frosty breath. “Virgil got the garden hose out of the shed and started wetting down our roof. He had time to do all that before they got here.”

“Yes, ma’am. Is this John the only person living there?”

This time the woman answered first. “He has some people stay with him now and then. Young people, you know. Visiting him, I think.”

“Some? How many?”

“Sometimes one, sometimes two or three—wouldn’t you say, Virgil?”

Virgil nodded. “Hard to say for sure. They come and go, and they’re quiet. I mean, it’s not like one of these party houses or crack houses or whatever you call them. But there’s been maybe half a dozen people there one time or another.” He added, “A lot of times from out of state. Arizona plates, and Oregon, I remember. Some others too.”

Wager glanced up at Virgil. “You go out and look at their license plates?”

The man got defensive. “Sometimes they park their cars in front of our house. You got to park on the street in this neighborhood, and sometimes parking’s hard to find.”

“Were the cars there this evening?”

The man’s fingernails scratched in his whiskers. “Not when the fire was going. Didn’t look like nobody was home.” He glanced at the curb where the pumper truck made a steady clatter with its auxiliary engines. Another unmarked automobile was waved past the orange police tape by a uniformed officer. This would be the medical examiner, to say the corpse was a corpse. “There’s no cars parked now. Maybe earlier. I can’t remember, tell you the truth.”

“What about John’s car? Do you see it?”

Another squint. “No. Might be down the block—dark car, blue, I think. Like I say, parking’s hard to find.” The man looked again at the smoking hulk whose roof was half-eaten away. “You telling me he was in there?”

“Someone was.”

One of the woman’s hands went to her mouth. “Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord, that poor man!”

Virgil cleared his throat. “I—ah—I yelled ‘fire.’ I couldn’t get near the place—it was too hot, and the sparks was coming down on my place. But if I’d of known somebody was in there …”

“He was probably dead by the time you saw the fire. Do you know the name of the realtor who rented the house?”

Virgil looked at his wife again. “Miller? Milton? Red-and-blue sign—Milltown Realty?”

“McMillan,” said his wife. “McMillan—that was it. Had the sign up for the longest time. Big red ‘McMillan Realty.’”

The post office could give Wager a name to go with the address, but most rental agreements also listed the name and address of the nearest relative. Wager elicited enough description of John to help verify the corpse—white male, about six one, maybe one hundred eighty pounds, in his mid-thirties—and went to the next group of staring figures. They lived on the other side of the burned house and told him pretty much the same thing, except that they didn’t even know the occupant’s first name. But they had heard a fireman say someone had been found inside, and no one wanted to say anything bad about the dead. “He was friendly and all; he waved whenever we saw each other. But we didn’t have any reason to talk much.”

Wager was finishing with the last of the neighbors when the ambulance team brought the body bag across the small wooden porch and down the steps to lay it on a gurney for the short ride to the vehicle. A few minutes later, one of the forensics people, Archy Douglas, followed. He paused to blow his nose into a wad of handkerchief and glance at the sooty results. Then he stuffed it back in his hip pocket. “Only one thing worse than bloaters or floaters: crispy critters.”