Red Man Down
Authors: Elizabeth Gunn
Table of Contents
Further Mysteries by Elizabeth Gunn
The Jake Hines Series
TRIPLE PLAY
PAR FOUR
FIVE CARD STUD
SIX POUND WALLEYE
SEVENTH INNING STRETCH
CRAZY EIGHTS
McCAFFERTY’S NINE *
THE TEN MILE TRIALS *
ELEVEN LITTLE PIGGIES *
The Sarah Burke Series
COOL IN TUCSON *
NEW RIVER BLUES *
KISSING ARIZONA *
THE MAGIC LINE *
RED MAN DOWN *
*
available from Severn House
Elizabeth Gunn
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First published in Great Britain and the USA 2014 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.
eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2014 by Elizabeth Gunn.
The right of Elizabeth Gunn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Gunn, Elizabeth, 1927
Red Man down.–(A Sarah Burke mystery; 5)
1. Burke, Sarah (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 2. Women
detectives–Arizona–Tucson–Fiction. 3. Ex-police
officers–Fiction. 4. Murder–Investigation–Fiction.
5. Detective and mystery stories.
I. Title II. Series
813.6-dc23
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8367-4 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-504-8 (ePub)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland
I’
ll just have one quick go at the crossword, Sarah Burke told herself, and then I’ll get my lazy buns out of this chair and take Denny
shopping.
A mall run on the first Saturday after Christmas had never come close to making her Favorite Treats list. In fact, it was near the top of her secret WOO list, composed of things she usually tried to Weasel Out Of. But she had promised this trip on Christmas morning, when gift money fell out of cards and began burning a hole in her niece’s pocket.
No question, Denny had earned the favor. Ever since they moved into the house on Bentley Street, she’d been doing more than her share to support this improbable household. Several times in the hectic months since Sarah and Will Dietz had cobbled their family together under one roof, Sarah had thought,
My lover, my mother and my niece? Even the French wouldn’t try to make this movie.
But against all odds, it was working pretty well. And eleven-year-old Denny’s helpful hands, especially in the kitchen, had been a big part of that success. Abandoned by her addicted mother after years of neglect, she had bounced back from the self-abusing waif Sarah had adopted last year and shown how much juice and humor a willing pre-teen could contribute to the lives of striving adults. So if a mall run today felt like pulling teeth without a sedative, Sarah had made up her mind to suck up and do it anyway, with a smile.
But just a little self-indulgence first, to help me stay patient, even if Denny sets a new desert southwest record for the number of jeans tried on in a single day.
She poured a second coffee, yawned and stretched. Around her, the house on Bentley Street hummed with Saturday morning sounds – Aggie’s mixer whirring in the kitchen, Will running a power drill out in his shop. And down the hall from the breakfast table where she sat, Denny’s favorite hip-hop music rattled her bedroom door.
Sarah was counting the letters in ‘ebullient’ when her cell played the opening bars of ‘On the Road Again.’
‘Looks like we might be growing some new brand of stupid,’ Delaney said. Her sergeant was still at home too, she could tell: his background noises were TV cartoons and a barking dog, definitely not homicide division. ‘Some numbskull all by himself, stripping copper wire in full view of heavy traffic. Ripping it out of the power hook-up in front of an abandoned warehouse on Flowing Wells and stashing it in his pick-up.’
‘Easier to see what you’re doing in daylight, I guess,’ Sarah said, waiting for the real news. She knew he hadn’t called to talk about wire theft.
‘No doubt. And then deciding to shoot it out with the officer who caught him at it. That was brilliant, too.’
Ah. Well, there goes Saturday.
‘Officer’s name is Spurlock. He called it in and he’s waiting at the scene for you. Should be three backups covering the scene by now, and the ME’s on his way – I caught Greenberg before he started his morning run. I’ll be along as soon as I get everybody else called.’ She was starting to hang up when she heard him say, apparently from a little distance, ‘Oh, say—’ Then he came back on, in full voice, and added, ‘The IR guy’s running a little late, too – he wants to meet us downtown. So will you secure our shooter’s weapon and shield until I get there?’
Oh, sure, boss. Why wouldn’t I be glad to be the one to strip him of his most important possessions?
All she said was,
‘OK.’
On her way to gear up, she stuck her head in Denny’s room and said, ‘I’m sorry but the mall’s got to wait, babe. I just got called to work.’
‘Drat,’ her niece said. But then quickly added, ‘Oh, well, the sales will still be on tomorrow.’ She’d been living in Sarah’s house long enough to adopt a cop’s-kid attitude: stuff happens; work can’t wait; live with it. Anyway, she had fresh Christmas loot – a new iPad that was never out of her sight and shared the bed with her now – so she had plenty to keep her occupied.
‘Got a call, huh?’ Dietz said, coming into their bedroom while Sarah was dressing. It was the closest he would come to offering sympathy. The good thing about two-cop couples was they both had plenty of experience with wrecked weekends, and knew bitching only made things worse.
Will Dietz was a nondescript man, noticeable only for the scars left from a firefight he’d inadvertently walked into a couple of years ago. They had fallen passionately in love during his recovery, just as her obligations to her abandoned niece and ailing mother were threatening to overwhelm her. His efforts had rescued them all, doing most of the work to move everybody into this one old house near two good schools. Now Denny was powering through middle school and Sarah’s mother had a nice guest house in the backyard and the assisted living she needed. Undemonstrative, stoical and steady, he had quietly become Sarah’s North Pole.
As for the Saturday night date they had planned, they could see the movie later, Will said. ‘And should I cancel the dinner reservation?’
‘Guess you better,’ Sarah said. ‘Officer-involved shooting and a fatality, so I’ll be gone a while.’
‘Well, nice to have known you,’ Dietz said, their standard black humor for these times. He kissed her neck and went back outside to prep the new lumber he’d been cutting – he was fixing the crumbled wainscoting in the hall.
On her way out, she stopped at Denny’s room again to ask her to keep an eye on her grandmother. ‘I heard her mixer going; she’s cooking up a storm out there. If she starts to fade she might need some help with the cleanup.’
‘She said she was thinking about banana bread.’ Denny giggled and hopped off the bed. ‘I’ll go ask her if she needs me to lick the bowl.’
Dietz had taught her how to light the old gas oven, because Aggie got dizzy bending over. Denny would do that first, Sarah knew, and then find a spoon and clean out that bowl till it hardly needed a rinse. How could you not make a trip to the mall for a kid as good as that?
Although, maybe by tomorrow … if she found something on the internet … Would she think it was fun to have something delivered by UPS?
Officer Spurlock looked unusually pale for a Tucson street cop, Sarah thought. A little sweaty, too, despite an ambient outdoor temperature of fifty-seven degrees. He was standing very straight by his black-and-white squad car in a trash-strewn gravel parking lot that surrounded an empty warehouse on Flowing Wells. Two of his fellow officers were stringing crime-scene tape around the entire lot. A third patrolman, whose name badge read, ‘T. Garry,’ had set up a surveillance post across the lot’s driveway, holding a clipboard inside a posse box. Inside the tape, a police photographer carried two bags of camera equipment toward a tarp-covered mound that lay near a pickup in the otherwise-empty lot.
Sarah said, ‘Hi, Tim,’ signed the sheet on the clipboard Garry handed her and timed herself in at 10:03 a.m. Walking carefully to keep out of dog poop and some prickly-looking weeds, she approached Spurlock, showed him her badge and announced herself the first detective on the scene.
‘Glad to see you,’ he said. ‘Glad to see anybody at all, actually. Felt like forever I stood here alone with that body.’
‘How long was it really?’
‘Twelve minutes till the EMT team got here. Took them about two minutes to pronounce him dead and be on their way. Then a hundred years or so went by till these two guys,’ he nodded toward the two men working on the tape, ‘showed up and told me to stand over here and wait. I did that for another century till this photographer walked in and said the same thing. Been standing here like a dork since before I was born, it feels like …’ Hearing himself begin to babble, he stopped and swallowed. Then he quickly added the one other thing he simply had to say to somebody. ‘This guy didn’t leave me any choice at all, you know?’
‘You’ll have a chance to tell me all about that, and anything else you want to tell me. But we have to take this one step at a time. You were the first responder, is that right?’
‘Yes, ma’am. First and only, for what seemed like a long time.’
‘OK. Detective is probably better than ma’am for this occasion. Or you can just call me Sarah. Do you know if the items in the pickup were stolen from this building?’
‘Beats the hell out of me – I never had time to find out.’
‘I see. Did you just happen across this scene or did somebody call in a complaint?’
‘Alert seniors drinking beer over there in the bar called it in – see the little sign on the second floor of that warehouse? Somebody converted that room to a bar, I guess, and all the patrons were having fun watching this guy work for a while. Then they talked it over and decided that even if this place is abandoned, this mutt probably shouldn’t be wrecking it, so they called nine-one-one.’
‘You get their names?’
‘No. The minute I got here I saw that guy pulling wire out of that power box and called for backup. He wasn’t moving very fast but I saw him spooling out wire, and I could see that the back of his truck’ – he licked his lips, as if his mouth was dry – ‘was full of those fixtures that looked like they’d just been ripped out of
somewhere
, and I thought, I gotta
stop him
, so I—’
He stopped and made a small hissing sound, like somebody who’s just been hit in the gut. Following his stare, Sarah saw that the photographer had pulled the tarp off the mound. A dead white man lay there, face up, with a bright smear of blood under his head.
‘Officer Spurlock,’ Sarah said, ‘are you sure this is a fatality?’
‘Well, the ME isn’t here yet, but the head guy on the EMT team said he was qualified to call it and he did – no use transporting a dead body, he said, and he called the ME to take care of it. Take a look if you— Do you think he’s still alive?’
‘No, but I’m puzzled – where’s all the blood? Just hang on here a second while I take a look, OK?’ She hurried toward the motionless body on the ground. She had recently had a corpse at a crime scene begin to move. It was not an experience she expected to forget, or wanted to repeat.
Buddy Norris was the police photographer today. A methodical man who didn’t like distractions, he said sharply, ‘I’m not done yet, Sarah.’ Which meant
get the hell out of my crime scene
. And the rules said he was right.
An iron-clad rule at a crime scene was to
take a picture of everything before you touch anything.