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Half a dozen patrol units were parked at all angles on the crushed shell, along with the lab wagon, a van from maintenance, that had brought the huge fans and floodlights and the necessary electrical cables, a veterinarian’s pickup, and several unmarked police cars that had brought Dystal and Captain Mercer. The media vans were there too, their crews kept back by the police. And the crowd. People were standing on the rails of the track, on the loading docks, scattered in the weeds and along the edge of the street.
Someone finally located the circuit switch that turned on six small lights in the ceiling, but because the shipping crates were stacked so high the lights’ feeble illumination was useless on the floor. Several teams of uniformed officers had been given the task of scaling the mountains of crates and either opening the windows along the walls at the ceiling or breaking out the panes. The intermittent sounds of shattering glass echoed between the rows of warehouses.
The floodlights were brought in first, lighting the way back to the bloody cul-de-sac in the center of the warehouse and then, set up on all the pillars of crates surrounding it, shining down into the gore. Each of the men on the maintenance crew stringing the electrical cable and placing the lights took turns coming outside for fresh air. Next, the huge fans were set in place. Already the heat had begun to lighten as it escaped in a natural venting action through the broken and opened windows near the ceiling, but the bricks of the cavernous warehouse had absorbed the summer sun for so long that its contents generated a fever of its own like a living giant.
When everything was in place, everyone cleared out of the warehouse, and the veterinarian entered. He wore a gas mask and carried an exterminator’s tank filled with repellent, not insecticide. If the flies died in there, the lab technicians would not be able to work. The veterinarian was accompanied by an assistant, also in a gas mask, a young woman whose blue jeans fit like a second skin.
Outside, everyone waited in silence. The gray haired Captain Mercer, Dystal, looking sober from having been wakened from a sound sleep and wondering what the hell was happening with the case, Haydon, and Mooney, pale but recovered, standing together and leaning on the hood of Mooney’s car. They all had gone in with flashlights before the equipment had been set up. One of the crime lab men had gone with them to take pictures. There was nothing to say until they could actually see what was there. All they knew at this point was that they had found a slaughterhouse.
Suddenly there was an audible deep droning and then they heard the fans kick on.
“Shit, look at that,” a policeman said.
The television camera lights came on and pointed at the windows of the warehouse as sooty clouds of flies came boiling out, great regurgitating surges of them, fat and sated from the abattoir inside. They came longer than anyone thought they would, their flight one continuous torrent, slackening, then surging again in a roiling hemorrhage of flying blood.
After a while the flights diminished, but the insects continued to haunt the windows, clinging to the walls around them like clumps of black mold, wanting to get back inside but unable to tolerate the repellent. Finally the veterinarian and his assistant came out of the door, removing their masks. They set their equipment down on the weeds and walked over to Haydon.
“You’re not ever going to get them all out,” he said. “They’re going to be buzzing that place for the next ten years.”
He was a little shorter than Haydon, in his late forties, with a grizzled beard that he kept clipped short and which made him look like Ulysses Grant. Both he and the girl, who could have been his daughter, were drenched in sweat.
“I sprayed repellent on the shipping cartons all around the area as well as in the bloody pocket. The flies aren’t going to light in it, but they aren’t going to leave it alone either. Whoever works in there is going to have to fight them off. I hate it that we couldn’t use insecticides. There’s billions in there. It’s worse than a stockyard.”
He turned his head aside and spat, cleared his throat, and spat again. The girl was wiping her face and mouth with her shirttail.
“The maggots are something else,” he said. “You couldn’t have created better conditions for them in a laboratory. It’s rank You don’t want them killed?”
Haydon shook his head. “I think our crime lab people will want to look at them the way they are.”
“Okay, it’s all yours then. I’ll hang around, maybe spray some more repellent later if it’s needed. When you’re through with your business you’d better notify the health department about it. They’ll need to come over and clean the place up. It’s an incredible health hazard.”
Mooney walked over and told the crime lab technicians they could start and reminded them that Haydon wanted a lot of photographs. Then there was more waiting. A couple of the patrolmen drove around to an all-night diner and got doughnuts and coffee. It helped pass the next hour. Mercer went home, saying they could tell him about it in the morning, and Dystal opened one of the car doors and sat in the front seat sipping coffee, his feet outside on the shell drive. Mooney walked over and visited with some of the patrolmen.
After rejecting an impulse to go inside and watch the lab men rake through the gore, Haydon opened the back door of Dystal’s car and sat down too. He lit a cigarette. It tasted nasty from the start.
At two forty, a lab technician came out of the warehouse door and stepped around the corner to vomit. No one said anything or moved to help him. After a while he went back inside.
Shortly after three o’clock, two of the lab technicians came out of the warehouse, one of them carrying an assortment of plastic bags. They were Jake Klein, who led the group, and Dorothy Lea, who held several plastic bags in both hands. They looked around and then started toward Haydon, who was already out of the car.
Klein had been with the police lab for fifteen years and was never, at any time or any place, surprised by what he saw. To him crime scenes were only variations of a theme, and the theme was so old even the variations had begun repeating themselves. Klein did not look too intelligent. His eyes were a little wild and lurked behind eyeglasses with black plastic frames that rose slightly on the outside corners to a small point. His long face always needed a shave, and he favored nylon shirts that were so thin the black glossy hair that covered his back and chest easily showed through. He smelled always of strong, stale tobacco.
“You got a cigarette?” he asked Haydon.
Haydon gave him one, offered one to Lea, and took one himself. “There seems to be blood in there from several occasions,” Klein said. “It’s hard to say. Some appears old, a week. Some a few days. There’s so much of it it’s hard to say. Either a lot of people died, or several people died fighting it. The quantity indicates that. We’ve taken dozens of samples. The stuff that’s mixed isn’t going to do us any good.
I just hope we can find splashes that haven’t been mixed.”
He pulled absently at a nostril hair. He turned to the woman and took the plastic bags from her and put them on the hood of the car. Dystal and Mooney had come up, and Mooney shined a flashlight on them.
“The maggots stripped most stuff.” He pulled a bag out of the bunch that contained a short length of knotted cartilage. “This is a little finger from a left hand. Just enough flesh to hold it together. It’s been cut off, kinda chopped.” He pulled out another bag with something black and shriveled. “A nose. Probably male. A whole left nostril, but part of the right one nicked away.” Another bag with a concave piece of bone fragment the size of a quarter. “You know, I think this is a piece of kneecap. Here’s another piece of a finger, just one joint. A tooth. A little chunk of scalp, Negroid. Got several fabric samples. Some Negroid hair samples. Some sawdust. That’s about it.”
“What does it look like to you, Jake?” Haydon asked.
Klein shrugged. “Looks like somebody got chopped up. Black folks.”
In another half hour everyone was through, and Haydon, Dystal, and Mooney made one more trip inside. They walked the perimeter of the cul-de-sac, trying to make something out of daubs and sprays and smears of blood that climbed the wooden sides of the shipping cartons. Heavy bellied flies cruised around in the air under the bright lights, constantly slamming into the three men, who steered clear of the mess in the center of the open area where the maggots were also squirming in the heat created by the flood lamps.
When they got around to the right side of the entrance of the cul-de-sac, Haydon stopped. He remembered in Toy’s tape that all the men had seemed to bunch up on this side. Then he noticed that for several feet the boxes were shorter and were arranged in a regular configuration.
“Ed, look at this. What does this look like to you?” The three men looked at the arrangement of boxes.
“Goddamn bleachers,” Dystal said. “Those boys was sitting here watching.”
“Watching what?”
“Like Klein said, watching somebody get chopped up.”
They stood by the edge of the boxes, between the blood and the seats.
“What about light?” Mooney said.
Haydon looked up. “Just that one,” he said. Above them, one of the six ceiling lights in the warehouse was installed directly over the cul-de-sac.
“This is hard to believe,” Mooney said. He swatted at the flies. “Some silly shit cut people up in here, and those men watched.”
“We’re going to pull every one of them in tomorrow,” Haydon said. “Downtown. None of them will leave until we know what happened here. All of them. Roeg. All of them.”
Haydon was trembling again. He was aware of Dystal studying him.
Somebody came down the wide aisle and into the glare of the floodlights. It was a uniformed officer.
“Detective Mooney? You’ve got a call outside, sir.”
They all followed the officer, glad for an excuse to get outside, where even the muggy July night seemed light compared to the atmosphere inside the warehouse.
Mooney walked over to a blue-and-white with the patrolman and talked for a minute, then came briskly across the crushed shell.
“You’re not going to believe this. Langer and Jennifer Quinn have been found shot over in Memorial Park.”
~
IT WAS FOUR O’CLOCK, still night, yet morning, the time when Haydon’s bones felt molded of lead and he longed to see the sun lighten the sky, so he could think of the interminable gruesome night as being over. But it was not over.
Their cars were parked side by side. That’s the way the park police had found them. They were both in the Lincoln, the motor was running, and the air conditioner was on high. The park police hadn’t touched anything. When they looked in the window they radioed in for the license check.
Quinn was sitting with her back against the door on the passenger side of the car, facing Langer, a hole high on her forehead. The exiting bullet had blown blood and shattered glass outside on the parking lot asphalt and across the left side of her white Porsche. She looked as if she were asleep, her hands in the lap of her emerald silk dress.
Langer was wedged in between the steering wheel and the door. He had also been facing Quinn. His bullet wound was in his right temple, with the exiting bullet splattering the windshield. He was still holding the Charter Arms .38, the force of the charge having flung his arm back so that it rested on his thigh.
The patrol unit flashers lit up the woods as Haydon, Mooney, and Dystal walked around the car in the empty lot. After a minute Haydon raised the tire tool he had brought with him and broke open the door window at Langer’s back. He gouged out a hole and reached in and punched the automatic lock button. Then he opened the door, careful not to let Langer’s body slide out as Mooney reached across and turned off the motor.
They backed away from the car and looked at it. It reminded Haydon of a nineteenth century hearse with windows. You could see the dead as they passed you on the street. He looked at Langer asleep and Quinn asleep. Tragic lovers? Romeo and Juliet. Antony and Cleopatra. Tristan and Iseult. David and Bathsheba. Lancelot and Guinevere. Orpheus and Eurydice. Bill and Jennifer? They didn’t even come close. It was pitiable and tawdry. A bad ending.
“They’ve called the crime lab?” Haydon asked. Mooney nodded. “And the coroner’s investigators.”
“Has anyone checked with Pete?”
“I called the unit sittin’ around the corner from him,” Dystal said. “Nothin’ happening. I guess Toy got scared off. He don’t seem quite as thick skulled as these other jokers. He’s not goin’ to come ooching up to bait like that.”
“Why don’t we send Pete home,” Haydon said. He was staring off across the parking lot.
“Good idea,” Dystal said. He glanced at Mooney and flicked his head.
“I’ll call him,” Mooney said, and started across to the car.
After Mooney was out of hearing range, Dystal asked softly, “How about you, Stu? How you holdin’ up? You gonna ride this one out okay?”
“Yes,” Haydon said. He was still staring, thinking. “When do you want to start picking them up tomorrow?”
“It’s up to you.”
‘‘I’ve got to have some sleep. I want to be there when they come in. They’re going to be screaming for their lawyers. It’ll be a madhouse. I want to go get Roeg myself. We’d better try to get them simultaneously, or we’ll lose some of them.”
“What about Toy? I got a man set aside to start checkin’ the banks first thing in the mornin’.”
“Right. We ought to go ahead with that.”
Dystal was feeling a little uncomfortable. Haydon was growing moody. That was dangerous for him, but at the same time it never hurt his work. In fact, it seemed to enhance it. It was as if his emotional agitation and his mental acumen were directly related, and when the former was at its most delicate state, the latter was at its strongest and most resolute. As Dystal saw it, the man was simply hard on himself, but was very good at living with it.
Still, Dystal was concerned about Haydon slipping so quickly into his melancholy ways. It was too soon, and Dystal felt more than a little responsible for his condition. He wanted to get Haydon back to work; he thought it was time and would be good for him. But the stress of the case had come on a little stronger than Dystal had expected. Instead of being the routine puzzler he had hoped would stimulate Haydon’s interest in the work at which he was so uncommonly skilled, and which Dystal believed he loved, the unexpectedly brutal nature of the case might have the reverse effect.
Dystal rammed his hands down into the pockets of his bagging double knit pants, sucked in huge, bulging lungsful of the damp woodsy air, and then let it out slowly. He looked at Haydon. They waited for the morgue van.