Red Tide (11 page)

Lehane was still rambling. “If there’s dead, there’s bodies. Bodies eventually end up at Harborview ’cause that’s where the coroner is.”

“Mr. Lehane…” Robert Tilden began. “I could send…”

Lehane wasn’t listening. “Let’s go, Jim,” he said. “Hustle it up to Harborview.”

20

D
etective Sergeant Charly Hart was not, by nature, a happy man. In the best of times, the most charitable description of his demeanor was reckoned to be somewhere in the immediate vicinity of morose. That he’d spent the past three hours with a nearly decapitated corpse and hadn’t been to bed for a day and a half merely served to deepen the sense of gloom that followed Charly Hart around like a flock of starving pigeons.

That said, Charly Hart found himself intrigued by the young woman in the chair. Most murders were strictly mom-and-pop. Once in a while somebody got tricky and threw them a curve, but, for the most part, after nearly thirty years on the job, he could walk in the door of a crime scene and pretty much see what had come down. This one though…

Something about this one didn’t feel right. His partner Reuben Gutierrez had picked up on it too. Instead of throwing smooth all over her like he usually did, Reuben the Cuban was over by the door, leaning against the wall, picking his gold front teeth with a matchbook cover, waiting for something to lend a little clarification before he picked up the ball. Reuben hated to be wrong.

“Paperwork in his pocket says his name’s Martin Magnusen. From Toronto, Canada,” Detective Hart said.

“His name is Brian Bohannon,” she said again. “He’s wanted on felony assault charges. He’s been living in Europe for the past five or six years.”

“The ID’s legit,” Reuben said.

“His name’s Brian Bohannon,” she said stubbornly.

Reuben sucked his teeth and then spit something small and white onto the floor. He was digging for another morsel when the squeak of shoes drew his liquid brown eyes toward the hall, where they followed an indistinct form as it passed by the wavy glass window and came to stop at the door of Interrogation Room Number Four. Reuben used his handkerchief to shield his hand from the doorknob. Pulled it open, stuck his other hand out into the hall, came back with a thick black folder.

Meg Dougherty and Charly Hart looked on in silence as Reuben used a well-buffed fingernail to pry open the folder. Several photographs were paper-clipped to the inside cover. His facial expression said nothing at all.

He crossed the room, keeping his body between Dougherty and the folder as he made his way to his partner’s side. He held the open file in front of Hart’s face.

“Look like him to you?” he asked.

Hart thought it over. “Could be, I suppose.”

“Hair’s different.”

Detective Hart’s eyes moved to the bottom of the page. “Height and weight are about right,” he said.

Reuben dropped the case file onto the scarred desk and leaned down into the woman’s face. “So…let’s go over this again.”

Dougherty rearranged herself in the chair. Looked him right in the eye. “I had a show tonight…” she began. Waved a hand. “Last night.”

“You’re a photographer.”

“…at the Cecil Taylor Gallery on Occidental.”

“Which ended when?” Reuben asked.

“It ended about nine o’clock when the cops came and told us we had to evacuate the area.”

“So you what?”

“So I…we headed down to the stadiums to get a cab.”

“We who?”

Charly Hart watched the waver in her eyes and, for the first time, thought she might be about to lie. “A friend of mine and me.”

“You didn’t mention a friend before,” Reuben complained.

“I was making a long story short,” she said.

“What’s this friend’s name?” Charly Hart inquired.

She hesitated. “Frank Corso,” she said finally.

Charly Hart wrote it down. Reuben began to pace back and forth behind her chair.

“This Frank Corso…” Reuben said. “He your lover?”

She looked over at Charly Hart as if to question what this had to do with the subject at hand. Hart slipped his notebook into his jacket pocket and met her gaze. “We’re gonna have to check this out with Mr. Corso,” he said. “The nature of the relationship…between you two…” He waggled a hand. “I’m sure you understand.”

She surrendered a grudging nod. “No…” she said. “Not anymore.”

“But you used to be,” Reuben pressed.

“Yes.” She squeezed the word through her teeth.

“And you two were alone.”

She started to say something and then stopped. Raised a finger. “We walked the last part with another guy.” Reuben stopped pacing. She anticipated the next question. “I don’t know his name, but he said he was the maintenance supervisor for the Smith Tower.”

Reuben flipped Charly a quick glance. “So you get down to the stadiums,” Charly prompted.

“It’s a zoo down there,” she said. “But I get a cab.”

“What about this Corso guy?” Charly asked.

When her eyes flickered a second time, they knew they’d touched a nerve.

“He went his way and I went mine.”

“What was his way?”

She shrugged. “Back to his boat, I guess.”

“And where’s that?”

“I don’t know. He moves it around from marina to marina.”

When neither cop said anything, she went on. “He’s sort of a recluse. He doesn’t like to be bothered.”

“So you took a cab home,” Charly Hart said.

She laid it out for them. For the third time. They had a few questions along the way, but mostly they just let her talk. When she finished, Charly Hart excused himself and left the room. Reuben Gutierrez waited for a moment and then picked up the case file from the table and began to leaf through it. Near the middle, he came to another set of photographs. Of Dougherty this time. She’d seen the look before. That odd amalgam of pity and lust that men experienced when looking at her tattoos.

She heard the involuntary rush of breath. When she looked up, he was looking her over with renewed interest. “Nobody’d blame you,” he said in a soft voice. He looked down at the folder again. Shook his head. “What he did to you. Nobody’d blame you if you offed the guy. You come home. You’re big-time stressed out and there’s this guy who…” He flicked the folder with his fingernails. “Who wouldn’t?” he asked sympathetically. Shook his head again, as if to say he was at a loss for words. “All those years…All that anger built up inside.”

“I didn’t kill him,” she said. “I found him there on the floor.”

Reuben stayed at it for another ten minutes. All kindness and understanding. Fishing for admission, he liked to call it. Dougherty sat there staring at the wall, occasionally issuing a denial, but otherwise refusing to play the game, until suddenly, the hall was full of voices and then people.

First in the door was Charly Hart, his hands thrown out at his sides as he backpedaled into the room, rightfully indignant that anyone would violate the sanctity of the interrogation process, negate the sense of isolation that skilled interrogators instilled in a suspect until finally it seemed as if the only people who existed were right there in that room and the only hope of salvation was to give it up and come clean.

“We got a murder investigation going on here,” he bawled. “Who the hell are these yahoos to say they’re gonna walk with one of our…”

A trio of suits followed him into the room. Mid-thirties. Clean-shaven. Looked like they had a mold somewhere out back and these guys were fresh off the assembly line. The guy in the middle cocked an eyebrow and pointed at Dougherty. “Margaret Dougherty?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. Before anyone could respond, the other two stepped forward, took her by the elbows and helped her from the chair.

“What’s—” she sputtered.

“FBI,” said the center suit. “We’ll be needing Ms. Dougherty here.” He pulled out a black leather ID case and waved it around the room like he was dispensing holy water.

“No fucking way,” Reuben said evenly. “You think you walking out of here wid…”

Center fed stuck out an arm as if to ward Reuben off only to have it brushed aside like a twig. “You’re interfering with a—” the fed mewed, rubbing his elbow.

“Fuck you,” Reuben spat. “You gonna take somebody in our custody, you damn well better—”

That was as far as he got. The doorway filled again. Everybody stood still.

“Detective,” Harry Dobson said.

Reuben straightened his shoulders and stood at attention. In his peripheral vision he could see Charly Hart doing the same thing. Life without a pension was the first thought to cross his mind. “Yeah…ah…Chief,” he mumbled.

“I appreciate your dedication to the job,” the chief began. “But we’ve got an extraordinary situation going on here. These gentlemen are going to need to borrow Ms. Dougherty for the foreseeable future.”

“Yessir,” the two detectives said in unison. “But listen, Chief, we got a—”

Dobson waved them off. “One of you just make a file request on a Frank Corso?”

Charly Hart raised a tentative hand. “He’s her alibi,” he said.

Dobson nodded. “He’s also involved in a terrorist act.”

“No way,” Dougherty said.

Dobson’s eyes were hard as rivets. “We’ve got a hundred sixteen dead citizens,” he said. “And this guy Corso is the closest thing we’ve got to a suspect.”

“Frank would never…” Dougherty began. But, by then, it was too late. Her feet barely touched the floor as the G-men hustled her out the door.

Detectives Charly Hart and Reuben Gutierrez stood silent as the sound of scuffling feet faded from hearing. Chief Dobson heaved a sigh. “Get some sleep,” he said. “Then report to your lieutenant for reassignment.”

“We really got a hundred dead citizens?” Charly wanted to know.

“A buck sixteen,” the chief confirmed. “And a viable terrorist threat for Sunday sometime.”

Reuben swallowed hard. “This is the real deal then,” he said.

“The President has been notified,” Dobson said and walked away.

21

S
hauna Collins caught sight of them the minute she turned the corner. The one in the Mariners cap…must be the cameraman…screwing some kind of aluminum tripod together over in the corner. The newscaster guy…the one with the red hair…the ski report guy…was leaning on the reception desk, smiling, trying to draw Laura’s attention from the paperwork in front of her. Shauna thought about turning around and scurrying back down the hall to the cafeteria where the impromptu staff meeting had just been held, but instead took a deep breath and walked faster, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the clean tile floor as she hustled along.

She kept her eyes on the door at the far end of the reception area. The one marked
NO ADMITTANCE
—
STAFF ONLY
, hoping that if she didn’t acknowledge the newshound, maybe he wouldn’t acknowledge her. No such luck.

Three squeaks in, he lifted his eyes from Laura’s desk, swallowed the grin and started her way. “Hi there,” he said. “I was hoping you could help me…”

She waved him off. “Information is released through the Public Affairs Office,” she said, picking up her gait until it amounted to a brisk trot.

He was at her left shoulder now, keeping pace as she hurried along. “You’re a pathologist, right?”

She didn’t answer, just kept making a beeline for the door. “All information is released through the Public Affairs Office,” she said again. He hurried over to the door, and while not exactly blocking the way, made his presence conspicuous.

Shauna Collins moved him aside with a swimming motion, belly-bumped the swinging door open and started down the hall toward the autopsy room. He was still throwing questions her way when she turned hard left and let herself into the room.

She pushed a long breath of air out through her generous lips, grabbed a fresh pair of latex gloves from the box on the wall and began to pull them on over her chubby hands.

“Let’s clean this up and then get that last one outa here, George. That way we’ll have the decks clear when they start coming down from upstairs.”

“Comin’ right up.” George Bell announced it like it was an order for chili con carne. Sixteen years of dancing with the dead had taught George the value of a positive outlook. Early on, he’d come to realize that survival as a coroner’s assistant was entirely contingent upon the manner in which one approached one’s job. Although he’d begun his tenure as a full-fledged adult—thirty-four to be exact—long past starry-eyed illusions regarding the goodness of man and the sanctity of life, the true nature of the urban slaughterhouse had not become apparent to him until he’d spent sufficient time on the job to see, firsthand, the array of violence, casual and otherwise, which members of the species were prepared to visit upon one another on a daily basis.

So it was with a cheerful whistle that George Bell wheeled the silver table to the middle of the room and began to hose it down. When the trickle of murky water got too loud, he switched to humming while he worked. Somewhere among the whistles and the hums and the slap of water, “When You Wish Upon a Star” found its way along the tile walls. He’d been humming the tune for the better part of three days now. He was like that. Something caught his ear and, sure enough, he was stuck with it until another tune came along to take its place. The Jiminy Cricket thing was wearing thin on him. He was ready for something new.

“They tell you what they got going on up there?” he asked as he worked.

When he looked up, her round face was grim. “Just that we’ve had an act of terrorism,” she said. “The figure I heard was in the low hundreds. Hundred ten…hundred twenty dead. Something like that.”

George shook his head sadly. “What are we comin’ to around here? What those Al Queda people got with us make ’em do something like that?”

“They think we’re the devil. And let’s not jump to any conclusions here. We don’t know for sure who did it,” she chided.

“Who else it gonna be?” George demanded. “Who else crazy enough to do something like that ’cept that Osama Ben Saddam fella.” He placed the power washer on the cart. “Somethin wrong wid those damn people. Might better we just took out that whole section of the world and be done wid it…once and for all.” He made a chopping motion with his free arm. “Good-bye.”

She said, “I don’t think we can do that, George,” which, not surprisingly, did little to soothe his wrath. He continued to rave about world politics as he worked to remove every last scrap of blood and tissue from the smooth stainless steel surface.

“What kinda crazy son of a bitch gonna strap fifty pounds of dynamite to his ass and then set the damn thing off?” He made another chopping motion with his arm. “How crazy you gotta be? Wanna die that damn bad. Suicide bomber my ass. They wanna die that damn bad, we ought to help their ass out. If it was me…”

George ran out of gas by the time he was satisfied with the table and had rolled it to the far side of the room. Dr. Collins had replaced the cassette in her tape recorder and was about ready to go. Collins was all right. Not too cheery, not too grim. Got her business done and got the hell out of there…just the way George liked it. Not like that damn Dr. Chiarchiaro. Always playing that loud rock music and singing while he worked. Or that Petersen woman with her jokes and disrespectful talk about the dead. No. Far as George was concerned, Dr. Collins was just right.

“He’s in eleven,” she said as George pushed the cart across the room to the bank of refrigerated storage bins covering the north wall. He twisted the handle and eased the rollers outward until the entire body came into view beneath the harsh overhead lights.

The victim lay on his back, hands neatly folded across his chest. Drained of blood, the cadaver seemed to have absorbed the unnatural purple hue of the overhead lights. This one was easy. What the doctors called a slam dunk. Somebody damn near cut the boy’s head clean off. Nothing but a little flap of neck muscle holding the head on at all.

George moved his eyes downward. Guy was covered with tattoos. At least a dozen. Some of it…like the dragon on his chest…was really nice work. Some of the rest was blurry and indistinct. Strictly amateur stuff.

This kind was easy. Like the car wrecks and the knife killings and the baseball bat beatings…you didn’t have to wonder what had come down. The worst mankind had to offer was right there in front of your face and what was left was no longer worth keeping.

The ones that bothered George were the ones without a mark on them. Perfect in every way except for the purple hue around the lips. Looked like maybe they were just sleeping there on the cold hard metal. Like they were gonna get up later and go out for dinner. They were the ones reminded him how fragile and elusive the spark of life could be and how close to the line we all walk every day.

George raised the table to the same level as the cadaver. He started to slide the body his way and then stopped. The head had stuck to the table and was not coming along for the ride. If he wasn’t careful, the guy’s noggin was gonna end up swinging around in the air, or, worse yet, gonna fall on the floor and roll around. Couldn’t let that happen neither. The man had a right to his dignity. Bad enough to be laying around stark naked, with your throat cut and your dick all shriveled up. No need for any of that head-rollin’ stuff. None at all.

“Think maybe I’m gonna need a little help,” he said.

Dr. Collins crossed the room to George’s side and stood for a moment looking down at the corpse. “Clean,” she said.

“Excuse?”

She poked a gloved finger into the wound. “A clean cut,” she said, lifting the victim’s chin to expose the gaping maw that was now his throat. “One clean stroke. No hesitations…no sawing…no nothing. Something real sharp used by someone real strong,” she said. “Somebody without the slightest hesitation about what he was doing.”

She lifted the shoulders, slipped her arm under the upper torso and then used her other hand to push the head back into place.

“You ready?”

George said he was and, on the count of three, they slid the body, head and all, onto the table. As Dr. Collins wheeled the cadaver over to the autopsy station and used her foot to lock the wheels, George reached into the bin and came out with a green plastic bag. He untied the rough knot and looked inside. The victim’s stuff. Cops had already been through it for anything they might want. The rest they left for the coroner, in case something might shed some light on the victim’s last moments. Later on, they’d send whatever was left over to the evidence room to be cataloged.

George shook the contents out onto the tray. The short leather jacket was still in pretty good shape. Other than a couple of bloodstains along the inside edge of the zipper, the garment seemed little the worse for wear. George was careful as he went through the pockets. Never knew when you were gonna come across a needle or something like that.

Across the room, Dr. Collins had adjusted her minimic and begun her monologue.
“Subject is a white male. Thirty to thirty-five. Brown hair, blue eyes. Approximately a hundred and ninety pounds. Severe frontal laceration to the…”

From the inside pocket of the jacket George extracted a fresh pack of cigarettes, an old-fashioned silver Zippo lighter and a plastic credit card type thing. Had an arrow on it. Looked like it might be one of those electronic keys to something. The rest of the pockets were empty. The shirt was a wadded-up mess. Barely tell it had once been brown. George used the tips of his gloved fingers to pry the blood-soaked folds apart, smoothing and separating the stiff fabric until he had the shirt laid out on the table before him. He patted it down for evidence, but found nothing. By the time he’d finished, the rusty-iron smell of blood wafted its way to his nostrils causing him to turn his head to the side for a couple of quick breaths before continuing.

Dr. Collins used a metal caliper to measure the depth and width of the wound and then set the tool aside as she circled the body, lifting it here and there, poking this and prodding that.
“Contusions on the upper arms and neck suggest the victim was in a struggle at some time immediately prior to the fatal wound. The amount of residual bleeding suggests less than an hour passed between the struggle and the moment of death. Victim was, in all probability…”

The black parachute pants were stiff with dried blood, making it difficult for George to go through the maze of pockets and compartments, zippered and snapped and Velcroed and buttoned, that made up the design. He could feel something inside the rough material but couldn’t figure out which of the many pockets it was in. He narrowed his search to the right leg and began a systematic search, top to bottom, until, finally, he pulled aside a small silver zipper and extracted a glass vial from a little compartment along the outside of the thigh. A black rubber stopper filled the top of the vial. He held the glass tube up to the light. Inside, a fine white powder filled the vial nearly three quarters full. George shook it and was amazed at how completely it filled the void…whatever the stuff was floated around inside like one of those Christmas paperweights. He stood openmouthed, waiting for the material to settle back into place, but it didn’t. It was like the stuff had some kind of motor that kept it aloft. Weird.

He shifted his gaze to Dr. Collins who was about to make the central incision in the cadaver, the T-shaped cut they used to take the organs out, so they could check for damage and then weigh them one by one. The doctors didn’t like being bothered when they were doing that, so George returned his eyes to the vial, where the powder was still roiling around inside like a blizzard of artificial snow.

“Whatcha got there?” Collins wanted to know.

“Maybe some new kinda club drug or something,” he said.

“Save it for the boys in blue,” she said, as she folded back the abdomen walls to expose the dark shimmering mass of internal organs. “Probably got something to do with how he got this way.”

Wasn’t like he thought about it. Somehow or other…no tellin’ why…just seemed to be the thing to do…George pushed at the stopper with his thumb. Turned the vial and worked it from the other side. Then again. Nothing. Damn thing was jammed in there tight as hell. He thumbed it again, and again failed to budge the rubber.

Being careful not to squeeze the glass vial too tightly, he grasped the stopper with his thumb and forefinger and gave a twist. The plug squeaked as it turned. He applied upward pressure and finally the plug began to move. A third of the way out, it bound and wouldn’t move again. Frustrated, he jerked hard. The stopper came out in a hurry, eluded his twitching fingers and fell to the floor.

George watched the stopper bounce twice and finally come to a jerky rest on the tile. Just then, his vision wavered. He blinked his eyes, trying to maintain his focus. His head had suddenly begun to throb, as if an animal were trying to claw its way out from inside his skull. Seemed like the air around him was filled with tiny white particles. Seemed like he weighed a thousand pounds and that his legs just couldn’t carry the load.

Wasn’t till he heard the clink of the vial on the floor that he realized he’d gone down. “George,” he heard Dr. Collins call.

His chest felt like it was full of water. He listened to the shuffle of her feet and felt his bowels empty themselves down his pant legs and onto the floor. He opened his mouth to apologize but could manage only a wet gargle. And then she was kneeling at his side. Blue eyes wide behind the rimless lenses. And he watched as a red flower bloomed on her white surgical mask. Watched as it grew from a tiny dot in the middle of the mask to a spreading tulip of crimson that rolled down over her chin in the last moment before she collapsed on the floor beside him. He sought for a phrase. An epithet perhaps. But nothing came to mind. Only the roaring in his head and the sound of waves lapping on a distant shore.