New River Blues (3 page)

‘Gil Tompkins? He's your backup?'

‘Yeah. He's around there in back somewhere. This is one big mother of a place.'

‘For sure. Three 911 calls, that's what they got?'

‘Right. Kind of surprising when you see how far apart the houses are here. But the weather's so perfect right now, I guess a lot of people are sleeping with their windows open. The neighbor in that house over there –' he pointed across the street – ‘said he was awake when it started so he was pretty positive about what he heard – two gunshots and two screams, coming from this house. Dogs were still barking when I got here, they sounded really freaked. So I got Dispatch to call the house, stood out here and listened to it ring. Nobody answered, but I said, “That's funny though, I can see from here there's a couple of lights on, sure looks like somebody's home.” So they sent the night detectives.'

‘OK. They still here?'

‘Uh . . . just handed it off, I think. No, wait, that's them talking to the Field Sergeant, over there by the front door.'

‘Oh, it's Dietz's crew tonight, huh?' Delaney slid a quick glance at Sarah. ‘He's doing all right, isn't he?'

‘Yes.' Fighting a deep desire to run over and grab him, she stood still and kept her expression bland. Dietz was her new steady. Probably. If she could get herself to believe in this much luck and not do something stupid to wreck it. He had just gone back on full time after a long recovery from a near-fatal shooting, and had taken a night shift gladly in order to get command of a crew again. They were at pains to stay reserved when their paths crossed at work, to show everybody their romance was no distraction.

‘OK,' Delaney said, starting toward him. ‘Leo, you'll take the scene, OK?'

‘You got it,' Tobin said. He pulled his long notebook out of the back of his pants and pulled the fat ballpoint he favored off his pocket protector. All his work utensils showed the wear and patina of long use. He called himself ‘the old dog,' and hated change. Ollie Greenaway, smiling and chipper as if it was noon, caught up with them as they walked over, and Menendez was right behind him. So Delaney had an almost full crew by the time he greeted Dietz and the Field Sergeant.

‘Well, if you're here already,' Dietz told Delaney, ‘I might as well just pass off to you—' The Field Sergeant nodded and took a step back, and Dietz started downloading information at once. Her boyfriend got along very well with Delaney on the job, Sarah noticed with pleasure. Two driven workaholics with hardly a word of small talk between them, why not?

He described the scene he'd found an hour and a half ago, two patrolmen in the yard trying to decide if the neighbors' reports of gunshots and screaming, and the frantic barking of several dogs, constituted enough probable cause to enter a house without a warrant. ‘But by that time the neighbors were getting almost as noisy as the dogs. They'd all called each other about the shots and they were all scared. People kept sticking their heads out of doors saying, “Do something!” So I talked to the duty sergeant one more time and we decided to go in.' He made a wry face. ‘Deciding was the hard part, going in was no problem. Whole house was unlocked, can you believe it? Back door too.'

They made a standard entry, taking turns covering for each other, turning on lights and clearing rooms as they came to them. ‘The house was fairly clean and neat except some clutter on the stairs and a couple of rugs needed vacuuming. Looked like a big party had been mostly cleaned up. But nothing broken, no signs of a fight. We smelled gunpowder upstairs though, as we went along the hall toward the master bedroom, so we were pretty sure we had a shooting. What we found, though . . . it's quite extreme.'

‘What, trashed?'

‘No, most of the room is neat like the rest of the second floor. Clothes strewn around the bed is all. But – there's a man and a woman, both naked, close together in this great big king-size bed, both shot at close range. I'm guessing a twelve-gauge shotgun – their faces are damn near blown away. Nothing else touched, looks like.'

‘You're saying not a home invasion?'

‘Doesn't look like it – no drawers emptied, pictures up on the walls where they belong, nothing tossed. Of course that's cursory, but – just the two bodies in the bed, and a helluva mess of blood and tissue around it. You're going to be working physical evidence for a while. No weapon in sight, though, no ammo we could see.'

‘OK,' Delaney said, ‘anything else?' He meant out of the ordinary. Delaney and most of his crew had worked night-detectives' shifts at one time or another and knew what they would have done – backed out of the room without touching anything, gone back downstairs, called Dispatch, and said something like, ‘We got an 0101 here, two victims, need a U unit and detectives—'

‘Time I'd called downtown' – Dietz's face took on a humorous expression that was not quite a smile – ‘there were two other cars here, Nye and Bailey near the end of their shifts and looking to blow off an hour. Boy, are they sorry they got curious. Dispatch said keep 'em there, the Field Sergeant's on his way.'

‘And now that you're here,' the Field Sergeant said, ‘I'll be on my way again. You got four men guarding the perimeter and two in the house, front and back doors. Replacements on the way soon as the shift changes.'

‘We'll get out of your way too,' Dietz said, ‘we got another scene waiting on us. Oh, there's two crime-scene specialists already up there, working away. Plenty for 'em to do.' He rolled his eyes up.

‘You get the name of the neighbors that called it in?'

‘Lopez has all that, I told him hang on to it for you.'

‘Sarah,' Delaney said, ‘would you . . . ?'

Sarah walked back around the fountain to where Lopez still guarded his tape. Dietz, walking past her with his crew, tweaked her elbow and she flashed him a quick, secret smile. He and his night detectives ducked under the tape and piled into their vehicles, their lights raking across the yard as they hurried away toward the next crime scene.

‘The first caller was Ortman,' Frankie Lopez said. ‘Michael Ortman, lives in that one-story Santa Fe across the street there. He was the only one brave enough to come out in his yard to talk to me.' His quick smile gleamed in the dancing shadows. ‘Ortman seems to be kind of the Big Daddy of this block. Everybody kept calling him to find out what was going on. He said, “They all want me to tell them the gunslingers are gone, how am I supposed to know that?” Here's your list.' He tore it off the bottom of a sheet. ‘They're all waiting to talk to you, said don't worry, they won't go back to sleep.' His dark eyes roamed ironically over the hand-painted tiles and beautiful wrought iron of the neighborhood. ‘They probably don't hear many gunshots in this part of town.' Lopez, Sarah remembered, lived in the livelier streets on the south end, and thought people who lived north of the highway were out of touch with the real Tucson.

Sarah took the sheet of paper and walked back to the bunched knot of detectives – Jason Peete had arrived, adding a dash of street funk to the crew. He had recently shaved off the dreadlocks he'd taken a year to perfect, and now inclined a bald, gleaming dark brown dome toward Menendez. His bold, mocking eyes darted around the yard as he downloaded Ray's information.

Delaney looked up from a clipboard, shrugged and said, ‘Well, everybody's here but Cifuentes, hmm? I had him on my list for case detective on this one, but . . . ah, well, let's go up.'

They all put on booties and followed him silently up the middle of the stairway, careful not to touch anything, pulling on gloves. The deeply carpeted hall was lined with family pictures, identically framed and hung in groups of eight or ten. They featured two tow-haired children who began as toddlers at the top of the stairs and progressed through birthdays, sports and school graduations, often with parents beaming behind them, becoming young adults near the open door at the end.

Inside the room, one crime-scene specialist was taking pictures of the bed and its surroundings while another dusted the furniture and woodwork with black powder. The smell was not bad yet, Sarah thought, and took a deep breath to get adjusted to it early. She hated wearing a mask and would not use Vaporub if she could get along without it. A homicide investigator, she believed, needed all five senses working. After one glance at the horror on the bed, she forced her eyes to go on scanning the room, to set the scene in her mind.

Half my house would fit in this room.
It was professionally decorated in soft shades of mauve, gray, and rose, luxuriously comfortable but without ostentation. There was a velvet chaise by a long window, slipper chairs on either side of a low table. A wall of closets was bisected by an open arch leading into a double dressing room with a bath beyond. Everything said,
Stay here and rest.

But the two people on the bed had not come in here looking for rest, Sarah thought. They were naked and uncovered, the bedspread lay tangled at the foot of the bed. The bodies were close together, their legs intertwined, both on the side of the bed nearest the door. There was plenty of space left on the far side of the king-size bed.

The woman was farthest from the door, turned slightly toward it with her legs curled up a little. Her position would have suggested natural sleep, except that her face was mostly gone. The blood and tissue that had splattered in an elongated oval around what remained of her head made it clear she'd been shot by a very powerful weapon.
I agree with Dietz's guess about the twelve-gauge.
Not that they needed to guess. Identification of weapons and ammo would be up to the lab crew. Her job was to notice, as she did now, that the distribution of pellets and tissue around the woman looked as if she'd been shot from this side of the bed, a couple of steps inside the door.
Not far from where I'm standing.
She scanned the lush carpet, looking for scuff marks or stains to mark the spot. Nothing.
We'll figure it out, though.

The man's torso was sprawled alongside the woman, face up except that he, too, had hardly any face left. His left leg dangled over the side of the bed, the right lay parallel to the woman, and his hands lay sedately by his sides.
But he must have sat up just before . . .
The overspray of shot that had missed him had left an eerie outline of his head and torso on the headboard and the wall behind it.

Delaney was already talking to the backs of the two crime-scene specialists, who went right on working. The photographer was a new criminologist Sarah had never seen before. Delaney called him, ‘Roy,' and told him he wanted pictures of the entire scene from every angle, close-ups and panoramic shots of the whole scene. ‘Close-ups of the spatter on the walls, individually.'

Roy answered him in muttered monosyllables, ‘Uh-huh, OK, sure,' and went right on shooting.

‘The light keeps changing in here,' Roy complained. ‘I've got to use flash but I'm worried about glare on the close-ups, I don't know. . . .'

‘Just take your time and do the best you can,' Delaney said, trying to be supportive but clearly frustrated about the long wait facing his crew before they could start. He turned to Gloria Jackson, the other crime-scene specialist, and asked, ‘How much longer you think you'll be?'

‘Better tell the rest of the bad guys in this town to take the day off,' Gloria said, gently spreading black powder over a sill. ‘We got all we can do here for quite some time.' Six feet tall, an ex-jock proud of her athlete's body and flaunting glowing copper hair dyed to match her skin, Gloria was usually the antic presence at a crime scene who kept the jokes going. Today's level of violence seemed to have damaged her sense of humor a little.

‘Uh-huh.' Delaney was chewing gum and blinking, his default response to heavy thinking. ‘OK, let's all –' he turned with his arms spread and herded his crew back out into the hall – ‘step back here and talk about what we
can
do.' He had his notebook out, starting a list. ‘I'm going to call the ME right now and then the transport vehicle. We need to get the scene sketched and measured before they get here, so Leo, will you go back in there and get started on that? Ollie, you can help him out with measurements, huh? You got a sketch pad, got your tape?' Delaney, who always carried backups for his backups, rummaged in his briefcase till he got them going. ‘OK, now . . . I'm gonna have Cifuentes take the lead on this one, if he ever gets here, but Ray?'

The whites of Menendez' dark eyes gleamed in the dim hall when he turned toward his boss. He beamed his abundant cheerfulness at Delaney and said, ‘Present!'

‘I want you to take the post, because Cifuentes is going to have a lot of other information to correlate. Chances are the doc won't get to it till tomorrow, though, so right now, you and Sarah take that list and start interviewing the neighbors, chop chop, get their first impressions and bring them back here.' He turned away, back toward the bedroom, already speed-dialing his phone.

‘Let's go down to that little anteroom at the bottom of the stairs,' Sarah said, ‘and find some quiet while we divide up this list.' When she was new in Homicide, trying to learn names fast, Sarah had memorized Raimundo Menendez by dubbing him, in her mind, ‘Rye Moon Dough.' It stuck in her mind because it was vaguely noir and suited his beautiful eyes and hair, so reminiscent of old-time Hollywood's Latin lovers. Now she knew him as a good-natured team player, and had forgotten how he looked.

Walking along the hall she noticed something, a glint on the pale rose carpet and then another just beyond. ‘What's this, though?' She bent over it, squinting – a hard candy wrapped in bright yellow cellophane. The next glint was an identical candy in hot pink cellophane. ‘Funny.' She looked beyond and found a blue one.