Killing Zone (35 page)

“What’s it look like to you?”

Douglas shook his head; his strip of balding scalp caught the red and blue of the flashers as the ambulance pulled out for Denver General. “Can’t tell. I just had Lincoln take some pictures, and I marked the scene. If we have to, we’ll come back tomorrow when there’s better light.”

The tall, lanky photographer—Lincoln Jones—came down the steps and rubbed wearily at bloodshot eyes. A still camera hung over one shoulder; on the other he balanced a video camera. Nodding to Wager, he told Douglas, “I’m done. Anytime you’re ready. …”

“See you later, Gabe.”

Wager, too, was done—for a while. The search for identity and next of kin could start in a few hours, when the various offices and bureaus opened. Now there was only an hour or so left of the night, not enough for sleep, maybe, but at least enough for a shave and a long, hot shower to wash his skin and hair clean of the clinging smell of smoke and other odors.

He could have gone back to Elizabeth’s to clean up. After their first three or four months of going together, she had bought him a toothbrush and a razor as an indication that he was welcome to stay at her place. But there was no sense waking her up again by clattering around in her house. Besides, he should check the telephone recorder and yesterday’s mail at his apartment. He didn’t expect anything—the dispatcher had Elizabeth’s number for emergencies, and the mail was never anything but bills and ads. Still, it was his habit to look.

The red light of the answerer gleamed for message waiting, and as he stripped off the smoke-tinged shirt and dropped it into the wicker hamper, he played back the tape. Elizabeth’s sleepy voice said, “Hi. If you get this before you go to work, I’ll be in meetings all day. If it’s after work, give me a call. I don’t know what my schedule is for tonight.”

That’s what he got for shacking up with a city councilperson: someone whose days were as busy and unpredictable as his own. But the warm, slightly husky voice brought an image of her face looking up at him through the half-light, dark hair curling out on the pillow, and the pale glimmer of her teeth between lips slightly swollen from kissing. The image tightened his groin with sudden yearning, and he had that hunger to cling to a living body, a feeling that often came after he’d seen death. Maybe he should go over there. … No, not stinking with the odor of smoke and burned flesh. And by the time he showered and shaved, it would be morning anyway.

They had talked about his moving into her home. It was a hell of a lot larger than his apartment, and he spent a lot of time there. But so far it was only talk, and casual at that; they had each lived alone so long that it was difficult to think of sharing all their space and time with someone else. And given the chaos of days that each of them faced, periods of isolation were a necessity.

His trousers had a black smear from brushing against something in the burned house; he set them aside for the cleaners. His sport coat he placed on a hanger, which he looped over the towel rack before stepping into the hot shower. The steam would loosen the smoky odor from the wool, and in a day or so he could wear it again without clamping his lips against the smell. It was a trick he’d learned while he was still in uniform and the cleaning bills ate deeply into his patrolman’s pay. The maintenance allowance never had been enough to cover shoe repair and the various rips and stains from cleaning up others’ messes. Now he made enough so the steam trick wasn’t necessary, but old habits have long life, and that—in a roundabout way—was another reason why he and Elizabeth had decided to keep separate homes and why they steered away from any talk of marriage.

He washed his hair three times before trusting that the smell was gone, then boiled up a cup of coffee as he dressed. Twenty minutes across town, and he would walk in the door of the homicide offices, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

Max Axton greeted Wager when he checked in for the regular shift. “Christ, Gabe, you look almost as good as dog puke.” A wide finger tapped the brief notice of the unidentified body found in the fire. “You catch this one?”

Wager nodded and sipped at a mug of sour-smelling coffee. No matter how often the coffeemaker was washed out or what brand they changed to, it always smelled and tasted the same. And started each day with the same vicious bite. “Anything from the morgue yet?”

Axton shook his head. His heavy shoulders pushed his collar up a thick neck. “Homicide?”

“Don’t know. Doesn’t look like it.”

“Let’s hope not—I’ve got an interview lined up on Moralez this morning. I could use your help, partner.”

Ray Moralez was the latest teenaged victim of the increasing gang violence over on the west side of town. Not too long ago, neighborhood gangs were just bunches of kids who hung around together, drank a little illegal beer, maybe had a few fights to show how tough they were. But west Denver’s gangs were becoming big business, with cheap labor and high, tax-free profits from dope. Now there were ties between gangs in L.A. and Denver, Chicago, and Kansas City. There was a viciousness now that spread to younger and younger kids, along with a carelessness about life that, more and more, erupted in quick and deadly violence. The line had become thinner between a bunch of kids hanging out and acting tough and a criminal gang, and as a consequence the room for those kids to bend a few laws had become smaller, the results harsher. Wager didn’t know the causes of it—maybe the feeling that the country is crumbling away and nobody gives a shit, maybe throwaway kids whose mothers had them when they were thirteen or fourteen years old, maybe so many people out of work or sweating their
talangos
off for nothing while they see people with connections and power steal millions with the blessings of Congress. Maybe it was from the river of drugs our own government had allowed in to pay for its illegal wars in Central America. Maybe it was the still-echoing effects of that decades-old turmoil called Vietnam. Whatever it was, a feeling of resentment and anger and frustration filled the streets like an evil odor and affected the kids who lived there.

With the Moralez shooting, no witnesses had been found, as usual, and no one wanted to talk to cops. Or at least to Anglos like Axton, and that was where Wager, with his roots in the barrio, came in. “Let me make a couple calls first.”

Axton glanced at his watch. “Sure—take your time,” he lied.

The first call was to the fire department’s headquarters; the arson investigator hadn’t reported in yet, but the woman who answered the telephone took Wager’s name and number and told him the investigator would get in touch with Wager as soon as he had any conclusions about the fire’s origins. The second call was to Denver General and the morgue. The secretary said the pathologist hadn’t started yet on that case number. “Dr. Hefley will get to it as soon as he can, Detective Wager. It’s the best I can tell you.”

Wager tried to keep the impatience out of his voice. “I need to know as soon as possible if it’s a homicide or not.”

“I understand that, Detective Wager. And I’ll tell the doctor.”

He thanked her and hung up.

“No luck?” Axton was shrugging into his jacket.

“He’s in no rush. Victim’s health insurance ran out.” Wager drained the bitter coffee, rinsed his mug in the break room’s small sink, and hung it on its peg to dry. “Let’s go talk to your snitch.”

9/21

0830

T
HEY PARKED THE
unmarked cruiser in front of a two-story brick building that filled a busy corner on Tejon Street. Here and there, in the rows of windows that punctured the blank walls, potted plants—geraniums of the same bright-red shade—sat on the whitestone sills. They were probably all cloned from a single plant; Wager could remember his mother’s kitchen window and the jars of cloudy water that held cuttings from a friend’s geranium she’d admired. As a kid, he used to watch for the first tiny wisp of root at the ragged tip of the pale twig, and when the water was filled with a swirl of white roots, like coarse, bleached hair, he and his mother would gingerly transplant the fragile plants into wax-paper cups filled with rich, black earth. Then, when the scalloped leaves grew wide and dark with health, the plants would be set out in the warm sun of late spring to form an avenue along the entry walk. Here, where there were no walks, the red flowers perched in the windows like bright targets in a shooting gallery.

The desk was vacant, the lobby almost bare. It had a tired, worn feeling, but it was reasonably clean; Wager had seen much worse. High in a corner, a silent black-and-white television with an ill-adjusted horizontal hold slowly rolled its image frame by frame over the screen. A couple of Naugahyde chairs, sagging and wrinkled from too much use, faced the grainy screen. On the stained plaster beside an old-fashioned mirror was a large poster of a Hispanic youth in a black beret wearing some kind of olive-drab uniform. He clenched his fist against a threatening red glow, and under the figure, raw brush strokes spelled a black “Vinceremos!”

“Everybody’s on a crusade,” said Wager.

“Yeah. Well, some of these people, that’s all they have, Gabe. They’re alienated from society’s normal avenues of change, and their traditional family values are breaking down.”

Wager never liked it when Axton talked like a goddamned sociologist—one of those people who made up labels for everything and understood nothing. “Sure, man—tha’s why we off the peegs when we’re deprived of offing each other, man.”

Max’s large head wagged, but he didn’t push it. He’d been Wager’s partner long enough to know that the smaller man didn’t like to hear excuses for criminal behavior. And to Wager, the word “family” meant only the Denver Police Department.

“What room’s she in?” asked Wager.

“Two-oh-three.” His partner had never said much about it, but Axton knew Wager’s divorce had put a lot of distance between him and his own family, especially his mother, who had liked Wager’s wife. And the death years later of Wager’s longtime girlfriend, Jo Fabrizio, hadn’t left many people in Wager’s world. Maybe this new woman—City Councilperson Elizabeth Voss—was helping. His partner had been dating her for half a year now, and what little Max had seen of the woman, he liked. And apparently Wager did too; he wasn’t the kind of man to spend any time with anyone he didn’t like. Wager had met her on the Councilman Green homicide, and at the time, Max had thought they didn’t like each other. But then, Max had to admit, Wager wasn’t the easiest guy to get close to; you had to understand his compulsion to do the job better than anyone else—a textbook case of overcompensation for the insecurity Gabe felt at growing up half Anglo, half Hispanic. You just had to understand those things, and when you did, you could see Gabe was good people. And there was no one at all that Max would rather have back him up in a tight spot—you could trust the man, and that’s what Max told his wife whenever she got going about his partner.

Well, Wager and Elizabeth might have started out rubbing each other wrong, but that, Max figured, was because they were alike in a lot of ways. Which, he also figured, was why that dislike had turned to mutual respect and maybe even something more.

A span of scarred and uncarpeted stairs lifted to the dimly lit landing. At the top, they turned left. Wager found the number and rapped on the door. From an apartment down the hall came the mumble and the long, music-filled pauses of a soap opera. From somewhere else, the squawk and loud laughter of a game show. But Vickie Salazar’s apartment remained so quiet they heard the cautious squeak of a floorboard. Wager had the feeling someone was peering through the peephole. Finally, a dead bolt grated, and the heavy door opened to a length of security chain above a brown eye. “Who’re you people?”

“You’re Miss Salazar?”

“Yes. What you want?”

Axton showed his badge. “I’m the one you talked to on the phone.”

The door closed and then opened just quickly enough to let them in. Wager and Axton crowded into the narrow entry that led past a doorless closet to a sunlit room divided by a breakfast bar into a kitchen and a living area. A foldaway bed had not yet been made up into the couch. Cigarette smoke spread from a wavering column that rose out of an ashtray on a magazine-littered coffee table and layered the closed room with haze. In a corner, the small television set had its volume turned down to a whisper so the woman could listen to the sounds of the hallway.

“This is Detective Wager. Miss Salazar.”

They touched fingers like a couple of boxers.

“I heard of you,” she said. “You’re Charlene Quintero’s cousin, right?”

The name was familiar to Wager. Second or third cousin, maybe—his grandmother’s sister married a Quintero, so it was likely. His mother kept book on all that family stuff. Wager figured he had marriage or blood ties to half of Hispanic Denver. But the only time it meant anything was when he used to get an occasional call from some relative who needed something from the police. Then Wager had had to put two of his cousins in the Canon City prison, which didn’t do much for his relationship with the family, and even those calls had stopped.

Max sat on one of the wooden stools at the tiny breakfast shelf, and it gave a startled groan as the heavy man settled. “You told me you had something on the Moralez shooting.”

“Yeah, I got something—Flaco Martínez. He’s the one did it.”

“How do you know, Vickie?”

“Everybody knows. The whole barrio. You ask anybody.” Ignoring the smoldering butt in the ashtray, she rattled another cigarette from the pack and lit it with a match, striking the head toward her like a man.

“We have,” said Wager. The woman was somewhere in her mid-twenties, though the dark circles under her eyes made her look older and Wager thought she was a little on the scrawny side too, which added a few years. “All the people we talked to didn’t know anything. Now all of a sudden you do.”

“You go find Flaco. You ask him where he was at when Raimundo got hit.”

“He was your man?” asked Wager.

Her shoulders under the baggy sweatshirt sagged, and she stared for a long moment at the large patch of naked weave that showed where the carpet took the most wear. “Was. Yeah.”