Five Card Stud Page 2

  "Jake Hines," I shouted into the din, and Frank said, "Wait—" and set the phone down so hard it hurt my ear. A few seconds more of loud conversation and barking dogs came over the phone before he picked up again in a quieter place, saying, "Whee. There. Go ahead," and somebody crashed the first phone back into its cradle.

  "If you're busy with a riot—"

  "Aw, Sheila's birthday, is all. But everybody came from both sides." Frank and his wife both have huge family clans, and they're creating another one of their own. I try not to listen to his descriptions of weekends. "What's up?"

  "I'm on my way to look at a DOA. It's probably just a frozen drunk, but in case something looks funny—we're gonna stick to this new rule, right, that if we call BCA for help with a homicide, we get them to do the autopsy as well as the lab work?"

  "Sure. You bet. Why not?"

  "Just that they're very backed up right now, and there may be quite a delay," I said. He didn't ask me where I got that information. He knew I was splitting the rent on a farmhouse with Trudy Hanson, the photographer and fingerprint analyst at the state crime lab.

  "Maybe so, but if it looks like a homicide, then you know we're gonna want their lab work. And they say if they're gonna handle the evidence, they wanna start with the body. Which seems reasonable to me. I know Pokey doesn't like it, but that's just tough titty. Pokey's not a forensic pathologist, he's a dermatologist with a part-time coroner's license, and I can't justify having him handle sensitive evidence when there's better help available."

  "I wasn't thinking about him," I said, although I was, a little. Pokey got pretty outraged, last summer during the Rowdy's Bar case, about "goddamn fascist bureaucrats" invading his turf. "Just wanna be sure I know what my options are, before I get there and say the wrong thing."

  "Okay, let's go over it again. If you're pretty sure you got a homeless person who fell down drunk and froze, something like that, get Hampstead County to put him in their morgue overnight, and in the morning we'll get Pokey to confirm the cause of death. But if you got any reason to think it's homicide, call BCA."

  "Gotcha." I put the phone down on the seat and pulled my 35 millimeter camera and flash out of the glove compartment. If it turned out we were handling this DOA by ourselves, I'd want to take a few pictures. I dropped the camera in the inside pocket of my jacket, felt how cold it was, and remembered the manufacturer's admonition: warm it up too fast in very cold weather, you'll fog up the lens. So I pulled it out of there and dropped it on the seat, just as I made the wide turn onto Burton Hills Drive. A broad new express road that hopscotches on pilings across a grid of older streets to reach the new developments at the northwest edge of town, it’s busy at rush hours and almost empty after dark. Four costly lanes of new concrete glittered under a glaze of ice. Snowplows had windrowed three-foot snowbanks along the curb, and now a rising wind blew them in white streamers back across the street. Occasional gusts threw whirlwinds of snow up to halo the streetlights.

  I speed-dialed Milo Nilssen's home number. He answered before the first ring ended. One thing about this lousy weather, most people were staying close to the phone.

  "Nilssen?" He put a funny little question mark after his name, as if he were looking for somebody to confirm his identity. Milo's self-esteem seemed to have shriveled, not grown, since his sudden jump to acting county attorney last September. His former boss had departed suddenly during a scandal, and even though nobody was blaming Milo, the sudden weight of responsibility had made him jumpy and defensive.

  "Jake Hines. I'm on my way to look at a DOA out on beautiful breezy Burton Hills Drive. You wanna come out and play with me?"

  "Oh, hey, that's really thoughtful of you, Jake. I mean it's only about twice as cold as a witch's tit out there tonight, right? Whaddya got? Homicide?"

  "Don't know for sure. Possible. But probably hypothermia because the body's way out on the edge of town wearing hardly any clothes."

  "Ah-hah. A clue. You haven't seen it yet, huh?"

  "No. But I promise you, I'm not going to take any longer than necessary deciding what to call it. It's twelve below downtown, and out here it's starting to blow. Not a good night to stand around and speculate. So if you want somebody from your office to view the scene, you better be sending him soon."

  "I hear you." He took down the address, sighed, and said, "Hell, I'll probably come myself. It's easier than chasing down my joy boys on a Sunday night." Milo had been given a staff of three newly graduated attorneys, shanghaied out of various other county offices, to help him through his transitional phase as acting CA. The county paid them peanuts and expected donkey's labor. Milo was supposed to make it work.

  As I punched Off, I saw the two squads, far ahead and downslope from me, parked close to each other with their headlights blazing into the underpass. Their roof lightbars flashed a jittery message of trouble into the night. Battery-powered caution lights blinked, four ahead and four behind. Two officers were stringing crime scene tape around something on the ground.

  TWO

  I pulled past the squads, made a U-turn on the other side of the bridge, came back, and parked just inside their caution lights, on the wrong side of the street facing the other two cars, so that I added my headlights to theirs. A dark shape bulged under the tarp they had spread by the road. I dropped the camera in an outside pocket, then decided it might get damaged there, moved it to a zippered cargo pocket on the right leg of my khakis, and dropped the flash attachment into the big outside pocket. Reluctantly, I took off my leather gloves and pulled on a pair of the surgical ones I keep in the glove compartment.

  "Hey, Al," I said, getting out of the truck. "Buzz." Two red noses bobbed at me out of fur-lined caps sunk deep in turned-up collars. Al Hanenburger handed the roll of tape to Buzz Cooper and came over.

  "Howsgoin’, Jake?" His breath made a great plume of white against the dark sky.

  "Whatcha got here?" I picked up the corner of the tarp nearest me. A young man lay on his right side, his arms flung forward on top of the snowbank, which was level with my knees. His body paralleled the roadway, facing me. He wore pants but no shirt, and one of his shoes was missing. His bare chest and shoulders looked like pale blue marble, mottled a little, and his eyes were open and fixed. His nose had turned black, his cheeks were dark purple, and his hands were frozen into grasping black claws. I touched his arms and face; he felt like stone.

  "He got a wallet on him?"

  "I couldn't find one," Al said. "I didn't want to mess around too much till you saw him." I searched all four of his pockets, carefully. They were empty. Cooper came over and turned on his Streamlight. The three of us stared.

  "What did you do with the clothes he took off?" I asked them.

  "I never saw any other clothes around here," Hannenberger said. He turned to Cooper. "Did you?"

  "Nope."

  "They have to be here," I said. "He wouldn't walk around in a blizzard like this."

  "Look around," Hanenburger said. "We haven't moved a thing." We all swung flashlights around the area randomly till we got sick of it and went back to staring down at the body.

  "I can't see any other damage," I said, "except the freezing."

  "I couldn't either," Hanenburger said, "but do you notice the way his head seems to be kind of down in a hole? Lower than the rest of him?"

  "Something shiny under there, too," Cooper said, "kind of orange colored."

  "I don't want to mark up the snow before I take pictures," I said, "but do you think we could roll him from here?"

  "Sure. He's stiff as a board," Hanenburger said. We leaned across the curb. Hanenburger grabbed the knees; I lifted a shoulder. Cooper pointed his light underneath.

  "Careful," I said, "he's brittle. Oh, look at that." The right side of his face was disfigured by a hole about the size of a baseball. A great string of fluorescent orange blood and tissue hung out of it. Fragments of bone and bits of brain glistened along the length of the strand, which was frozen to the snowba
nk at the lower end. Beneath it, hot blood had melted snow to make the hollow we noticed. Blood and melted snow had crystallized into orange ice that glittered where the light hit it. All the blood must have run down into the snowbank and frozen there; I couldn't see any blood in the street.

  Car lights swept across us. I looked up to see Pokey's old Jeep parking behind the squads.

  "Can you hold him there a minute longer," I asked Hanenburger, "till Pokey gets a look?" Cooper moved to help him. I said, "Here, I'll take your light," and Hanenburger said, "Not the arm, get the shoulder." They leaned there, hunched against the cold, while Pokey crunched up to us, jaunty in his red watch cap. He cast a long shadow across the body as he stepped across the light, then stood beside me, holding his black bag, while he stared at the gruesome string of blood and tissue hanging out of the dead man's head. He shook his head and clucked. "This looks like hypothermia to you guys?"

  "Put him down," I said, and the two men laid their burden carefully back into his indentation in the snow. "See how good he looks from this side?"

  "Ah," Pokey said. "Yah." He dropped his bag in the street and opened it, propped his knees against the snowbank, and began his examination. I went back to my pickup, got my phone off the seat, and started back toward the body.

  "Jake?" Pokey turned, peering through the headlights. "Show you something." Buzz was standing close beside him, shining his Streamlight directly on the dead man's face. Pokey's fingers, ghostly in surgical gloves, were busy in front of the dead man's ear, spreading dark hair away from a section of temple. "See here?" He wiggled his right index finger above a small red spot, less than half the size of a dime, glistening in the light. "Is your entry wound."

  "Entry wound? That little tiny hole? You mean we're looking at a gunshot victim?"

  "Well—sure. Whatcha think made big hole like that? Mosquito bite?"

  "I thought he got attacked with something heavy and sharp like a chisel. Looked like somebody tore a great big chunk out of him."

  "Yeah, well, you just ain't used to seeing anybody shot so close up. Hardly ever happens here. Is kinda like execution style."

  "Well, but Pokey, a bullet that small, to tear a hole like that on the other side? Hard to believe."

  "Don't have to be so small; your own gun could make entry hole like this at close range. If gun is close to head, skin blows apart some from pressure when bullet goes in, shrinks up after."

  "And you think there could be that much difference between the entry and exit wounds?"

  "Sure. Bullet explodes as it goes through, maybe bounces off bone, path keeps gettin' bigger."

  "Okay." I poked the speed-dial number for BCA, asking Cooper, "You guys didn't see a gun around here, I guess, huh?"

  "Nope," Buzz said.

  "It sure would be convenient if we found the gun that fired this bullet."

  "Guess it would," Al said, peering under the bridge supports. "You want us to look around?" He had mentioned a couple of times that he was past due for his lunch break. Now he wanted to be sure I understood that he was hungry and very cold. He swung his flashlight aimlessly around beneath the underpass, while the phone at the state crime lab rang and rang and rang. Finally a woman's voice said, breathlessly, "Bureau of Criminal Apprehension."

  "Jake Hines, Rutherford PD." I told her about my gunshot victim and asked to speak to the forensic specialist in charge.

  "Mr. Chang is here," she said, "hold on a minute." I listened to Muzak for some time before Jimmy's voice said, quietly, "Chang."

  "Jake Hines," I said. "Why are you working Sunday night? You get demoted?" Jimmy is the head scientist at BCA, famous in the bureau for his workaholic tendencies.

  "Oh, Christ, Jake, this place is a zoo. Christmas must have disappointed a lot of people this year; they can’t kill each other fast enough. Plus a couple of staff people aren't back from Christmas leave yet, and one has the flu. And now this weather...What do you need?"

  "I've got a gunshot victim frozen in a snowbank. He's damn near naked and his clothes are nowhere in sight. Also the gun is missing. Can you send a team?"

  "Well, not for at least...uh, it'll be twelve hours, minimum, before we'll have a van available. We've been backed up for days—"

  "Uh-huh. Trudy told me that."

  "Yes. There are four calls ahead of you, and I'm telling all of them I don't know when we can get there because one of the vans is stuck in a snowdrift up near Thief River Falls. Trudy's in it, by the way."

  "No kidding? Really stuck, huh?"

  He sighed. "They got about a foot more snow up there than we did, I guess, and out in the country it's drifting badly. They slid off the road. They put chains on and tried to power their way out, and they just dug in deeper. I guess the van is barely visible. They say they found a farmer nearby who's got a tractor with lugs on, and they hope he's going to pull them out."

  "Poor poor Trudy. But listen, Jimmy, this body's outside. On a major street, right where it goes under the highway, and the wind is coming up—" I watched a fine layer of drifting snow settle over Pokey and the body in front of him. We were all turning white. "Actually I guess it's starting to snow again."

  "I understand, Jake, but I can't send you what I haven't got. You know what, I think it would be best if you just get a hearse to bring the body up here, and you take as many pictures as you can of that crime scene, huh? Can you still see it? "

  "Just about. It's gonna be drifted over before long."

  "Yeah, well, so get as many pictures as you can right away. What else have you got there? A vehicle? Do we need to get blood samples from his car or his house?"

  "No vehicle in sight, and we have no idea where he lives. How soon you think you can do this autopsy?"

  "Well...I don't see how we can possibly do it tomorrow. But I'll get it on the list for Tuesday if I possibly can."

  "Really backed up, huh? Maybe we'll go ahead and fingerprint him before we send him up. See, he's got no wallet on him, no way to ID him at all."

  "Oh, well, but...didn't you say the body is frozen? Are the extremities turning black?"

  "Yeah, his fingers and nose are black, yeah."

  "So you can't autopsy till he thaws out anyway. At least twelve hours. Could be twenty-four. Let me make a deal with you, okay? We'll get him fingerprinted sometime tomorrow, and then we'll schedule the autopsy as soon as we can. Maybe in the meantime we'll get lucky and get a match on the prints. Trudy and Brian are getting very good with our AFIS program—"

  "She's been bragging about it."

  "Well, it's good on repeat offenders. If your victim's been arrested lately in the U.S., we'll get his name for you."

  "And if you don't get a match, you'll do a DNA test, right?"

  "We'll do that in any case. Automatic, now, for homicide."

  "Damn thing takes forever, though, doesn't it?"

  "Maybe not. Our new STR method only takes a couple of days, and it's the most accurate of all. And I can justify using STR if you've got a John Doe homicide."

  "Awesome." I had no idea what STR was; Jimmy always seems to be one or two clusters of initials ahead of me. "What else should we do here, then? Besides the pictures? We've got some bloody snow under the body, can you test that?"

  "Yes. Have Pokey collect some in a test tube or any clean glass container. Have you got blood in several locations, or—"

  "No. Just under the head."

  "Well. Almost certainly the victim's, right? Still, you better send me some if you can. The weapon, do you have the weapon?"

  "No. And no tracks. I just realized this, Jimmy, there are no tracks in the snow around the victim."

  "Well, of course with this wind—"

  "Maybe. But I didn't see any when I got here. I'm gonna go take another look. If we find any we'll try to make casts, if the plaster doesn't freeze before it sets up. I'll call you when the body's on its way."

  I hung up and began digging through three layers of clothes for my camera. I couldn't remember where
I'd finally put it. Hanenburger watched my contortions with interest. "You got the itch?" he asked me sympathetically.

  "No. I keep my camera in my shorts," I said. It was a dumb joke, but I was trying to keep my spirits up while my hands froze.

  I finally identified the bulge in the zippered pocket and fished out my Minolta. "We're gonna be ready to transport this body before too long," I told him. "Will you call dispatch? Tell them to find an undertaker who'll send a hearse out here ASAP, with a driver who's prepared to drive to St. Paul. And listen, both you guys?" I turned to look for Cooper and found him behind me. "Take another close look around, will you? I don't see any tracks around this body, but they have to be here. He was on top of the snow when you found him, right?"

  "Just like you see him, sure," Hanenburger said.

  "So he got here after it quit snowing this afternoon, right? So where are the tracks?"

  Cooper started shining his light around while Hanenburger crunched off toward his car phone. Beyond him, I saw Milo Nilssen's felt-lined boots emerging from the driver's side of his taupe sedan. He struggled out from under the steering wheel, his usually svelte silhouette bundled inside many layers of clothing and a down-filled overcoat the size of a love seat. He could barely lower his arms. When he reached the front of the two squads he stopped, blinded by the glare of the headlights, and inquired of the group around the body, "Howsgoin'?"

  "Doin' pretty good till you got in my light," Pokey said. "Move over." Crouched above the blue-white body, trim and wiry in his ancient pea coat, Pokey seemed impervious to cold, his appearance a reproach to the thickly padded shapes around him. It's something I've noticed about him before: he ignores routine hardships like weather and traffic. I guess Soviet work camps taught him to save his energy for the big stuff.

  Milo said, "Sorry," stepped sideways, and edged toward me across the disorienting circle of light. "Hey, Jake. You know who this is yet?"

  "Don't have a clue. Help me look around here, will you? You see any tracks or footprints around this body?"