“TELL ME SOME good news, Walter.”
David held the Styrofoam cup in both hands. A column of fragrant steam rose to his nostrils, filling them with the rich scent of slightly burnt coffee. He took a sip, wincing as the liquid scalded his lip. This was his third cup in as many hours. David savored every stimulating drop. He’d been up since eight AM the previous morning, clocking his current stretch of wakefulness at about twenty-nine consecutive hours. At this point, holding back his exhaustion with caffeine was like trying to dam a river with a sieve.
They’d found the body easily enough. It lay strewn through the field about twenty feet past the edge of the parking lot, streamers of skin and entrails threaded through the waist-high grass. The sun hadn’t yet had the chance to put the spurs to decomposition, but the sheer volume of viscera alone smelled pretty ripe. David puffed away at a pair of cigarettes as he approached, grateful as always for the olfactory-deadening effects of a lifetime addiction to nicotine. He’d told his wife on numerous occasions that he’d quit smoking when he retired—and he sincerely believed that he meant it every time—but until that day, putting down the lighter would be tantamount to handing in his badge. He whistled, summoning Walter and the forensics team over, and brushed the grass aside to see what he had to work with.
The answer was very little. Calling the mess in the weeds a body would be like calling the Food Basics baking aisle a cake. The raw materials were there, but the end result was nowhere in evidence.
“Oh man,” said Walter, rubbing his chin. “It looks like something tried to eat the poor son of a bitch.”
“Looks more to me like something succeeded. Come on, let’s get this over with.”
The detectives crab-walked through the grass, snapping photos and turning up leaves to peek for clues, taking care all the while to keep any residual evidence off of their shoes. Dewy fronds dampened their pant cuffs and clung to their gloved fingers. The forensics team hung back a respectful distance, waiting for homicide to give the go-ahead to start bagging and tagging.
Organic tissues sprawled over tufts of dandelion and clover, stirred in a slurry of flesh and blood and bone. The face was unrecognizable, the jaw so badly shattered—at least half of it seemed to have disappeared altogether—that dental records wouldn’t be of much help. A field inspection yielded no tattoos or obvious birthmarks. DNA samples abounded, but unless the victim was logged on a known database, they couldn’t tell him much. The current tactic was to check on any folks who’d been spotted around the Sundown Lounge the night of the murder, to see if someone failed to turn up. The next step would be to put out a call to anyone in the region who’d filed a missing persons report. They wouldn’t be of much use at giving a positive eyeball ID, but if they could scrounge up a bit of the target’s DNA, the police forensics unit could check for matches. But even assuming the samples existed, all of this runaround took precious time. David could feel the case cooling while he sat on his hands, waiting for the bloodhounds to point him down the right path. As things stood now, all he had were untold miles of forest primeval and a couple of matches to light the way.
It was thus with a much-needed spark of hope that David watched Walter slap the file onto his desk. His pudgy fingers walked a rapid syncopated rhythm over the manila folder, a gesture that David’s longstanding partnership made easy to read—a break.
“We got a match,” Walter said. “Poor bastard didn’t leave us much besides fingerprints, but fingerprints did the trick.”
“The guy’s a perp?”
“Not just any perp. Check the mug shots.”
David opened the folder. “Holy shit.”
A familiar face sneered up at David from the mug shot. Blue eyes glinted above a piggish nose, the chief flaw in an otherwise fairly handsome visage. A coif of frosted blond hair framed the face on three sides, while a square and dimpled chin rounded out the fourth.
“Eddie Ballaro.”
“Rotten apple of his pappy’s fuckin’ eye.”
David flipped through the pages. “We had prints on this guy? I thought he wasn’t in his dad’s game.”
“He’s not. But a guy as dumb and pampered as our pal Eddie can get into plenty of mischief without his father’s say-so. Did six months for assault and battery on a Pakistani store clerk. Poor schmuck caught Eddie’s girlfriend shoplifting a Snickers and actually tried to call her on it. The kid didn’t even own the place.”
“Civic duty’s its own reward, Walter.” David took a long sip of his coffee.
“Thirty-six an hour plus overtime don’t hurt either. Anyway, Eddie kept out of trouble after his one little stint. He still gets up to the usual macho bullshit, but he keeps it focused on the sort of people don’t go cryin’ to the cops.”
David’s ears perked up. “You mean other families?”
“Pfff, Eddie don’t got the stones for that. No, he holds court in the bars down on Main Street, cruises the strip clubs, throws cash around. Acts like king of the low-rent scum, takes it as his privilege to pummel the ones who look at him cross-eyed.”
David fidgeted with the ring on his right ring finger, a sterling silver alligator coiled chin to tail, its snout a stubby protrusion that his thumb could catch, allowing the ring to spin endless revolutions around its flesh and bone axis. The ring had been a gift from his eight year old son—six at the time—purchased with pocket money at the region’s annual Friendship Festival. As a piece of jewellery, it was, if David were to allow himself utter objectivity, cheaply forged and a little tacky. But it was the first gift his son had ever picked out and bought him all by himself, and he loved it more than just about anything he owned.
“So what if Frank ordered it himself? You know, got tired of his son making a mockery of his good name?”
Walter shook his head. “I ain’t one to normally romance the wops, but I don’t see the Ballaros whacking one of their own. Especially not hard enough to turn ‘em into hamburger. A death like that ain’t dignified. If there’s one thing Ballaro believes in, it’s dignity.”
“So what, you think it was one of these low-rents that did Ballaro?”
“Sure. Guy on bath salts, maybe, doping himself up for the job? Someone like that wouldn’t care who Eddie’s daddy was.”
David tapped a pen against the edge of his desk. “It could be we’re overthinking this whole thing on account of the victim. Eddie looks like he was mauled by a wild animal, maybe he was. We should call up Marineland and see if they’ve got any missing bears, plus do a quick sweep of zoos and the like. What’s that place up near Hamilton?”
“African Lion Safari.” Walter sprechsanged the jingle in an off-key tenor. “I dunno, the whole thing feels awful deliberate to me. But we should probably cover our asses, make sure we don’t end up puttin’ out an APB on a perp turns out to be Yogi Bear.”
“You wanna make the rounds, I can hit up animal control for details.”
“Gonna scope out the local wildlife, huh? You get any ideas, you use protection, eh? That’s how AIDS got started.”
David rolled his eyes. “You’re a real asshole, Walt.”
Walter touched hand to heart. “I only put up with that ‘cause I know, deep down, you love me.”
“Real deep, maybe.”