The Angel of Knowlton Park (19 page)

"Cut?" she said. "Work the body? That's an ugly way to talk about the death of a little boy. And who plays golf in heat like this?"

"Golfers. And it was an ugly death," he said. "Come back to bed. I won't survive in there without you. I'll freeze to death."

"Yeah," she said. "Nice, isn't it."

"Another way you've changed my life."

"I do what I can. Speaking of which, you want me to get up with you, fix breakfast?"

He shook his head, still feeling shaky, beginning to feel trapped. "Look," he said, "the next few days, the next week, nothing's going to be normal. The way I work these things, it's day and night. I just follow everything as far as I can, push as hard as I can, see what I can make happen. I don't do stuff like breakfast."

"I know," she said. "Terry told me how this was going to be."

Good old Terry. Dragging himself back from his own depths to help someone else. No wonder the guy wore himself out. "Even I don't know how this is going to be," Burgess said. "Just that it will be intense, and I'll be unavailable. I don't know how it's going to be for us, either. I only know that you can't get in my way. You can't lay expectations on me, like being home for dinner, or breakfast, or even to sleep."

He studied her, trying to see how she was taking this. He was not articulate about relationships. All he knew was truth. That it wouldn't help them through this for him to play Mr. Nice Guy and try to let her down easy. There was no easy. He had to call it like it was.

"You know I've always been a loner." He waved a hand toward the bedroom. "I'm trying, with you, with this... but this case, this little boy... it's gonna snap me right back where I was when we met."

She pushed her hair back over her shoulders. "I'm not a sweet young thing with her head full of dreams about the perfect romance and the ideal man, Joe. I've been around. I can take care of myself. I can still eat dinner if you're not across the table. I can read a book if you're not here to talk to. And I can sleep alone without sobbing into my pillow. You go do whatever you have to do, and don't worry about me, okay?"

He still wasn't sure she understood. "My reputation for being mean?" he said. "I earned it during cases like this. I will get mean. I won't let anything get in my way. Not even you."

"You trying to scare me away?"

"I don't know."

She folded her arms, her chin lifting. "Then we'll just have to see, won't we?"

"Ms. Tough guy, huh?"

"Mr. Bloodhound, I presume?"

He tried to sweep her a bow, but pain from his knee caught him mid-motion and stopped him dead. "Pleasure to make your acquaintance," he said.

She stepped past him, opened the medicine cabinet, and handed him some Advil. "You go back to bed," she said. "I'm getting some ice for your knee. And tomorrow, I'm buying you a knee brace. You know..." She stepped up until her breasts were touching his chest—a sweet, decent, generously-made woman—and looked straight into his eyes. "You're good at taking care of other people, Joe Burgess, but you don't know a damned thing about taking care of yourself."

Chapter 14

It hadn't cooled off overnight. At five a.m. the air had the congealing quality of semi-set Jell-O. The air smelled of rotting vegetation and everything was faintly slimy to the touch. A few streets away, there was a sudden, explosive crash. For a moment, he was in the jungle again, dropping into a defensive crouch and scrutinizing the world around him. Nam had only been a year of his life, over a quarter century ago, but it still happened, leaving him awash with adrenaline and memory. He straightened up and went to the car, the driveway and walk slick and oily under his shoes.

Running on four hours sleep, he felt dopey and slow, lacking edges. He'd heard when people got older, they needed less sleep. He seemed to need more. At least he spent more time in bed. Maybe it was just the novelty of having Chris there, a reason to linger, something to offset the dreams. It was a gray morning, the overcast sky a dingy blanket overhead, the world wrapped in a faint haze. He drove north under a gray sky down a gray road through a gray world. No surprise. He'd long ago recognized that little he encountered would be black and white.

Wink Devlin was already there, taking close-up photographs of deep bruises on the boy's upper arms. "Hell of a lot to do in an hour," he muttered. "I should have brought Rudy. You see these?" He set the camera down and motioned for Burgess to look at the bruises. "What do they tell you?"

Burgess studied the bruises, then lifted the stick-thin arm and looked at the other side. He lowered the boy's arm carefully and measured the bruise pattern with his own hands, picturing the child being held down. "I'm not surprised."

Devlin shook his head. "Nor am I. Sorry, though."

Sorry. A meager word for such an immensely brutal thing. Together they went through the process. Scraping under the fingernails. Combing the hair for trace evidence, then securing standard hair samples. Soft, silky clean hair, still a young child's hair. Burgess sniffed and smelled herbal shampoo. Carefully, they removed the underpants and put them in a paper bag. Took oral and anal swabs and examined the skin for semen. Photographing every step. The many bruises. The wounds. The body, front and back. It was a grim process. The boy was so small, the wounds so ugly.

The room helped. It was cold and clinical, all hard-edged, shiny and utilitarian. Stainless steel and tiles, saws and tools, knives and scales. Nothing soft or worldly. No hooks for sentiment.

A small scrap of white paper fluttered to the floor. Burgess picked it up. Read: Inspected by 117. He took the underpants from the bag and smelled new cloth. He looked at Devlin, who was preparing to fingerprint the boy's hands. "Let's think about this for a minute," he said. "After the boy's dead, someone cleans up the body, dresses it in new underpants and wraps it in a clean new blanket. There's a chance, if we haven't already screwed it up, that we might get fingerprints from the skin."

"Wish you'd thought of this yesterday," Devlin grumbled. "We'd have a lot better chance if the body wasn't cold, the interval wasn't so long."

Burgess didn't lob the ball back. Devlin should have thought of it; he was the evidence tech. But Burgess was the scene detective. It was on his shoulders. It was a long shot anyway. It was hard to get prints off skin. But if the child had been cleaned and dried, the killer nervous, sweaty, on a hot night.

"It's worth a try," he said. He helped Wink with the process, pointing out the likeliest places. Mostly they got a lot of nothing. Then they raised one on the boy's shoulder another on his arm where the bruises were.

"Where's the blanket?"

"Over there." Wink indicated a large paper bag. "Got the blanket and the sheets. I've got five filters from yesterday, unwrapping him. Even vacuumed out the body bag. If there's anything there, I'll find it."

"Get Dani to help. She loves playing Nancy Drew."

Wink smiled proudly. He'd recruited Dani Letorneau, trained her, and took an avuncular pleasure in her success. It didn't hurt that she was Sally Field cute and brave enough to face down a mob of Hell's Angels. "Will do."

Burgess watched him print the boy's fingers and got another idea, imagining small damp feet on a bathroom or bedroom floor. Footprints the perp might not have thought to clean up. "Do his feet, too, would you?" As Wink moved to the boy's feet, he saw the Band-Aid around the boy's big toe, something he'd noticed at the scene. "And get that Band-Aid."

Wink removed the Band-Aid, grinning a bandit's grin. "Maybe this time, the good guys will get lucky," he said as he took plantar prints from the child's feet.

A Band-Aid. A thin rectangle of flesh-colored plastic. It seemed so unimportant. But it was very difficult to apply a Band-Aid without leaving friction ridge impressions, which meant it might offer them a good partial print. The Band-Aid had been carefully applied, making it unlikely Timmy had done it himself. There was no one in the Watts household except Darlene Painter who would have bothered, and that was something he could check. Finally, there was the fact that the Band-Aid was clean, as was the skin underneath. By all reports, Timmy Watts had rarely been clean.

A picture of the events on the night Timmy Watts died was beginning to form. At least some of the events. A lot more would be filled in by Dr. Lee's autopsy. Someone had taken Timmy Watts to his home and persuaded him to take a bath or shower and wash his hair. That person had then held him down forcefully and raped him. Either before or after the rape, his assailant had hit him in the head. When the blow to the head didn't kill him, the man had taken a knife and stabbed him repeatedly. The washing afterward had been to clean the blood off the body, probably so it could be transported without too great a mess.

The door swung open and Dr. Lee flew in, moving, as always, at twice the pace of normal folk. He was followed by his assistant, a silent, stolid fellow who'd always struck Burgess as someone who should be following Dr. Frankenstein. The contrast between the slender, dark-haired, athletic Lee and his hulking, pale assistant couldn't have been greater. Lee greeted Devlin with a nod. "Morning, Wink. I see you've been messing with the little fellow. He looks like a chimney sweep."

Wink assumed a self-mocking hangdog look and pointed at Burgess. "I just do what he tells me."

"Yeah," Lee agreed. "People do, don't they." His quick gaze rolled up and down Burgess's body, doing a visual autopsy. He turned to his assistant. "Al, can you get the sergeant a stool, then clean this boy up a bit?"

"I don't need a stool."

"I know you, detective, you've got a long day ahead. Save yourself for the bad guys." Al hadn't moved. Lee gave him a fierce look. "Al. The stool?" The man hunched his shoulders and slouched out of the room. Lee stared after him a moment, animosity plain on his face, before he looked down at the body and then at them. "My turn?"

Burgess nodded. "You know what we're looking for. Cause of death. Evaluation of the head injury. Any information you can give us about the weapon. Weapons. Whether the child was standing or lying down when he was stabbed. How long since his last meal. Whether he was molested." The block under Timmy's neck thrust his bony chest forward, reminding Burgess of a painting he'd seen once of Icarus. Yesterday, for a while, the boy had even had wings.

"Whether the assailant was right-handed or left-handed, a member of Mensa, and a vegetarian." Lee looked down at the boy on the table. "This child is unnaturally clean. Look at his fingernails. At his toes." He cleared his throat and began to dictate. Al came back with the stool, dropped it a few feet from Burgess, then stumped sullenly forward and gave the body a cursory wash.

Wink photographed and videotaped. Burgess, from the comfort of his stool, observed, and Lee went through the protocol. There was a moment after he'd finished the external exam, when Lee picked up his scalpel but before he began to cut, when they all stood silently and stared down at the body, thinking their individual thoughts. The purplish wounds glistened on the pale skin like lipstick kisses. It was the moment when Dr. Geller, the pathologist who'd done the first autopsies Burgess had witnessed, had given his silent prayer for the departed. In his memory, Burgess still did. Then Lee began the Y-incision, slicing cleanly through the thin white skin.

By that time, Burgess knew that the boy weighed 45 pounds, small and underweight for a child almost nine, and had definitely been sexually assaulted—there was trauma and tearing and traces of KY. A dark piece of him was pondering what kind of adult could force himself on a 45-pound child. He'd expected it. Over the years, he'd seen so many unimaginable things that little
was
unimaginable. People raped two year olds. Raped babies. But it was always hard in the moment when he first confronted the blunt reality.

Lee conducted the autopsy with frightening speed and precision, keeping up a running staccato commentary on what he was doing and his findings. Unwillingly, Burgess found himself remembering the Kristin Marks autopsy, the sickness he'd felt, not at the procedure—he'd grown used to seeing the human body dissected this way—but at the information about how she'd suffered. To do his job, he had to imagine the scene, but no one comfortably imagines of the violent rape of a child. Burgess tried to keep his rational and emotional sides far apart. Today, he failed, anger and impatience arcing between them as Lee's brisk voice reported his findings.