Megan
Knowing that a body on occasion might not be as dead as it looked, I switched on my lights and siren, zipped up University, and turned right into Forest Park. The crowd of people near the woods flanking the jogging trail made it clear where the body had been found. Taking a deep breath to steel myself, I parked the cruiser and climbed out.
Opening the back door and steel hatch, I motioned for Brigit to hop down. “Come on, girl.” I supposed I could have left her in the car, but frankly I wanted her along for moral support. Surprising how much comfort a dog could provide.
As we sprinted up the path, I attempted to mentally prepare myself for what we would find. I forced myself to visualize a body with a bullet in the chest. A body with multiple stab wounds. A body with a bloody scalp from head trauma. I’d seen enough pictures at the police academy and in various files to know what a dead body looked like. Heck, as cadets we’d even taken a trip to the morgue, seen a number of frozen corpses with toe tags identifying them.
As we approached, the crowd erupted in fresh murmurs. A few people stepped back, giving me my first glimpse of the victim, from his chest down to his feet. He wore rumpled blue jeans, scuffed black biker boots, and a fleece-lined denim jacket. From this vantage point, no wounds were visible. What had he died of? A drug overdose? A heart attack? I’d assumed the guy would be a murder victim, but maybe he’d simply died of natural causes, called home by his creator as he took a late-evening stroll at the park. Could he have been so lucky? Could I be so lucky?
As I made my way forward, more people stepped aside.
Holy shit.
The photographs and morgue visit did nothing to prepare me for seeing what I saw now.
Oh, God. Oh, God! OhGodOhGodOhGod!
I bent over, hands on my knees, and up came my fair-trade coffee and organic oatmeal.
Bruuup.
As the crowd gasped and groaned, a hot blush rushed to my cheeks. How humiliating. Nothing like a cowardly cop to make the people feel safe and protected, huh?
When Brigit went to sniff my regurgitated breakfast, I pushed her away with my foot. “No!”
Standing up straight, I pulled my citation pad from my pocket, ripped off a page, and used it to wipe my mouth. I looked up to find every eye in the crowd locked on me. Great. I clutched Brigit’s leash tightly, hoping it would make my shaking hands less obvious. Stepping forward, I took a closer look at the victim, attempting to force myself to think of the situation clinically.
Easier thought than done.
The victim lay ten feet or so into the woods, behind the trunk of a large tree. He faced away from the trail, as if he were looking into the woods, only the back of his blood-drenched head and blood-soaked shoulders visible from my current angle. Thank God. I wasn’t ready to see his face yet. I needed to ease myself into this.
His patchy, stringy hair was too soaked with blood to tell what color it might have been before he’d been attacked. He rested on his side, his arms and legs scissored. He appeared to be slightly below average in height and on the thin side, the kind of scrawny person for whom the saying “pick on someone your own size” had been invented.
But who had picked on this man? And why?
Kneeling, I took yet another deep breath and reached out over his shoulder to take hold of his wrist, breaking out in a sweat at the feel of his cold, stiff skin. No pulse. No surprise there. It would have been nothing short of a miracle for someone to have survived after losing so much blood.
I stood and slowly circled around to his front. If there’d been any coffee or oatmeal remaining in me, it would have spewed forth at this point. This guy definitely had not died of natural causes. Not unless having your throat ripped open and your face pulverized beyond recognition counted as natural causes. His face and neck were nothing but shredded flesh covered in a thick ragu of blood.
I’ll never eat ziti marinara again.
Wait.
Movement at the man’s mouth caught my eye. Was he moving his tongue? Had I somehow missed his pulse?
Two antennae emerged from between the narrow gap in the man’s lips, followed by the long, flat brown water bug to which they belonged. Gah! My legs turned to wet noodles and I melted to my knees beside Brigit in the moist, leaf-covered dirt.
The dog looked at me with soulful eyes and gave my cheek a soft lick, almost as if she realized how traumatic this scene had been for me and wanted to offer some consolation. But the dog couldn’t be that smart, could she?
“What happened to him?” asked a woman in running gear with her red hair pulled up in a ponytail.
I gulped, forcing my throat, which had squeezed itself shut, to open. “I’d only be guessing at this p-point.”
Good police work involved gathering evidence, critically assessing the clues, and reaching conclusions based on proof. I wasn’t about to engage in idle guesswork here. But between you and me, from the looks of this guy, my money was on werewolves.
Using a tree limb for leverage, I pulled myself to a stand, brushed the dirt and leaf fragments from the knees of my pants, and pushed the button on my shoulder mic. “This is Officer Luz. I need backup at Forest Park, a team from crime scene, and a detective.” I also needed another breakfast, given that I’d just lost mine. Mouthwash couldn’t hurt, either. Raising my eyes to the crowd, I asked, “Who found him?” My voice sounded as weak and faint as I felt. Some tough cop I was, huh?
A lanky man with wavy black hair and pointed features stepped forward, raising his hand as if he’d been called on in class. He wore running shoes, a lightweight blue windbreaker, and black spandex running pants that hugged and accentuated his naughty bits. Let’s leave that fashion choice to people without external genitalia, shall we?
“Your name, sir?” I asked, pulling out my notepad.
“Clark Dennison.”
I jotted it down on my pad. “When d-did you f-find him?” Here came my stutter in full force. Great.
“Just a few minutes ago,” he said.
“You were jogging on the trail?”
He nodded.
“And you sp-spotted the b-body from the trail?”
The man looked around as if embarrassed. “Not exactly.”
His gaze met mine, imploring me for privacy.
I willed my stutter to screw off and looked at the crowd again. “Anyone with information wait by that tree.” I pointed to an oak thirty feet away. “Anyone else p-please move on.” They’d only get in the way of the crime scene technicians and detectives.
The crowd dispersed, none of them going to wait by the oak, though several people ignored my instructions to leave and hung out in a group in the parking lot, engaging in speculative chatter.
I turned back to Naughty Bits and arched a brow.
“I came over here to take a leak,” he said. “That’s when I found the body.”
So nature called, then coughed up a dead body. Nature seemed to enjoy toying with us humans today.
“Any idea who he is?”
Dennison shook his head. “None.”
“Did you touch him?” I asked. “Move him?”
“Lord, no!” The man shook his head vehemently. “I was too freaked out.”
Understandable. “Did you see anyone in the area when you found him?”
He shook his head again. “Only other joggers.”
“Anyone running particularly fast?”
“Not that I noticed.”
I obtained his contact information and asked him to wait for the detective. “The detective will have more questions for you.” Probably better questions, too. I was still having trouble standing upright, let alone performing a proper witness interview.
He pulled his cell phone from its clip on his waistband and phoned his office, explaining that he’d be late coming in today. “I came across a dead person in the park when I was jogging this morning and I need to wait for a detective to come interview me.” He paused a moment. “Yep, that’s what I said. A dead person.” Another pause. “No idea. Looks like his throat was slashed.”
Lest he spill a detail the detective would want to keep secret, I motioned for him to zip his lip. He nodded, said “gotta go now,” and ended the call.
Sirens wailed and tires screeched as Derek whipped around the corner and into Forest Park. Given that the victim was halfway to heaven or hell by now, there was no need for the hoopla, but far be it from Derek not to make a show of any case he was involved in. The guy was an attention whore.
He stopped his cruiser at the curb, leaving the lights flashing but turning off the siren. He trotted over with a rolled-up ribbon of crime scene tape, took one look at the victim, and chuckled. “Hoo-ee. That is one unlucky son-of-a-bitch.”
No puke.
No trembling hands.
No falling to his knees in the dirt.
Derek either had nerves of steel or was a heartless ass. Or maybe he was both. Without another word to me, he tied an end of the yellow plastic tape around a tree and began to mark off a perimeter.
A few minutes later, the crime scene van pulled up, lumbering up over the curb and onto the grass, coming to a stop a few feet outside the taped-off perimeter. Three technicians climbed out, plastic tool kits in their hands. A moment later, an unmarked police car drove into the lot and parked next to my cruiser. Detective Audrey Jackson, a fortyish African-American woman with short, perky braids climbed out. She was dressed in her usual khaki pants and loafers, which she’d paired today with a pink button-down shirt and a FWPD windbreaker.
After donning a pair of blue booties she’d obtained from one of the techs, she walked toward me, raising a hand in greeting. “Good morning, Officer Luz.”
Good? Hardly. Nonetheless, I raised a hand in reply.
Circling wide, she watched her step as she came around the front of the victim. “Oh, yeah. He’s dead all right.”
A choking sound spurted involuntarily from me.
Jackson glanced over at me, her brown eyes soft with concern. “This your first corpse, Officer Luz?”
Despite my attempts to hold them back, tears filled my eyes as I nodded.
“I’d like to say it gets easier,” she said, giving me a consoling look before turning back to the victim, “but it doesn’t. It can get much worse than this, in fact. And if you remain a cop, it will.”
I didn’t want to think how much worse it could get, so I refused to let my mind go there.
She pulled out a notepad. “What do you know so far?”
“Not much.” I gestured at Clark Dennison, who’d taken a seat on the curb outside the tape to wait. “That’s the guy who found the victim. He was jogging and came over here to relieve himself. That’s when he spotted the body.”
“Did he touch it?”
“He says no.”
“Did you touch it?”
“Only his wrist to check for a pulse.”
Jackson glanced around, her gaze landing on my vomit. “Looks like this guy might have been sick or overdosed before getting his face ripped off. Or maybe whoever did this to him threw up.”
I shook my head. “The vomit’s mine.”
“Ah.” Her nose twitched. “I’ll let the techs know they don’t need to collect it as evidence.” She looked my way again. “You’re looking awfully green. You’re not going to throw up again, are you?”
I shook my head. “My stomach’s empty.”
“You can go on, if you’d like.” She angled her head as if evaluating my condition. “But if you’re up to it you’re welcome to stick around and listen in. It’s not every day we get a homicide investigation.”
Thank God. No way could I deal with this type of horrific crime on a regular basis. Still, I knew if I wanted to make detective, I’d have to learn how to handle these types of gruesome situations. “I appreciate the offer, Detective Jackson. I’ll stick around.”
Detective Jackson had become a mentor to me during the bombing case. She knew I aspired to make detective one day and, despite her hectic schedule, made time to help me out and provide pointers when she could. I appreciated her taking me under her wing.
I followed her over to Clark Dennison.
“Mr. Dennison? I’m Detective Audrey Jackson.” She reached out and gave his hand a shake before pulling a notepad, pen, and small digital tape recorder from the pocket of her windbreaker. “Mind if I tape this conversation?”
“Okay with me,” Clark replied.
I suspected she was taping the interaction so that she could review it later, see if there were any tidbits that might seem insignificant now but that could provide additional leads later if a suspect could not be identified immediately.
Detective Jackson pushed a button on the device to begin recording. “Interview with Clark Dennison, Monday, February ninth—” she glanced at her wristwatch—“9:13 A.M.” She looked up at Mr. Dennison. “Can you tell me how you happened to find the body?”
The man repeated the story he’d told me, that he’d been jogging, felt the urge to urinate, and headed into the woods only to come across the corpse.
“You recognize the deceased?” Jackson asked.
I mentally grimaced. I don’t know that anyone would recognize the man now, even the man himself if he were still alive. Kind of hard to identify someone whose face has been pulverized beyond recognition.
“No,” Dennison said. “I don’t know him.”
She asked some of the same questions I had, telling me that, despite my overwhelming sense of panic and nausea, my short interrogation had been on the mark.
“You touch him?” she asked. “Maybe check to see if he was breathing or had a pulse?”
“No,” Dennison replied. “It was clear the guy was dead. I mean, he doesn’t even have a face anymore and his neck looks like someone took a steak knife to it and tried to saw clean through.”
Oh, God.
Never mind that my stomach was empty, it was going to try to purge itself nonetheless. My mouth expelled a loud burping sound, which was only partially stifled by the hand I’d placed over my lips. “Excuse me.”
After casting me a pitying look that said she doubted whether I could stomach detective work, Jackson returned her attention to Dennison. “Did you notice anyone leaving the scene?”
“No,” Clark said. “All I saw were other joggers and a couple of women pushing kids in strollers.”
“Did you hear anything unusual?”
“Like what?”
Jackson shrugged. “Rustling in the woods. Birds cawing as they were scared off. Shouting or footsteps. A car or motorcycle taking off quickly. Anything like that?”
Dennison ran his fingers through his hair and left his hand atop his head, cupping his scalp. “Not that I can recall. Honestly, I was so shocked I’m not sure I would’ve even noticed anything like that.”
Jackson looked Dennison up and down. “You’re in good shape. You jog here every day?”
“Most weekdays,” the man said. “Weekends I sleep in.”
She scanned the vicinity. “Ever notice anything odd when you were here? Someone loitering? People arguing? Anything like that?”
“I’ve run across some teenagers I suspected were skipping school,” he said. “But that’s it.”
“When was this?”
Dennison looked up in thought. “Week or two ago.”
“How many were there?”
“Two boys, one girl.”
“What did they look like?”
“One of the boys was black. Average size. Short hair. The other boy was white. Tall. I think he had brown hair but I don’t remember for sure. The girl was white, too. Long blond hair. Kind of chunky.”
“Did you recognize them?”
“No. I hadn’t seen them before and I haven’t seen them since.”
“What were they wearing?”
Dennison was unsure. “All I can say is they were dressed casual, like kids would dress for school. None of their clothing made a big impression on me.”
“Any distinguishing characteristics? Scars? Tattoos? That kind of thing?”
“I didn’t get close enough to tell. The two white kids were smoking cigarettes. I remember that.”
Detective Jackson reached under her windbreaker to pull a business card from the breast pocket of her pink button-down. “If you think of anything else or see those kids again, give me a call right away.”
“I will.”
With that, Dennison left.
The detective motioned for me to follow her. “You up for taking a closer look?”
No! “Yes.” I took a deep breath to fortify myself and wrapped Brigit’s leash tightly around my hand to keep her from disturbing the crime scene.
Keeping a ten-foot span between herself and the victim, Jackson slowly walked a circle around the body and the tech photographing it. Brigit and I followed along. The detective stopped when she faced the body, bending down to get a straight-on look. When she was done, she looked up at me. “Okay, Padawan. Give me your observations.”
Observations. Hmm …
I looked around. “I don’t see a trail of blood, so it doesn’t look like he was just dumped here. He was probably killed here, too.”
“Good. What else?”
“The killer used something jagged on his neck. Maybe a serrated knife.”
“Not a knife,” called the tech, who was crouching next to the body with his camera. He reached out with a hand clad in a blue latex glove and lifted the end of a narrow chain from the wound in the victim’s neck. “A chain.”
He tugged on the chain, slowly pulling it out from the victim’s neck where it was embedded, pieces of bloody flesh sticking to it as it came free. Ew.
The chain looked too thick and had loops too big to be a typical necklace, but it was too small for other typical purposes, like towing a car or securing a fence.
Jackson must have had the same thought. “Any idea what kind of chain that is?”
My first thought was that it could be a man’s rosary, but it lacked the requisite prayer beads. “Could it be a chain for military dog tags?” Maybe our victim was a veteran.
The tech chimed in now. “No, not dog tags. Those hang from a ball chain. This chain has open loops. Looks to me like something Mr. T would wear. Could be the suspect’s a gangbanger.”
“We’ve got plenty of those around here.” Jackson gestured to the body. “What about his face? How do you think the killer did that?”
I eyed what remained of the dead man’s cheek. It contained four dark bruises spaced at even intervals. The two marks in the center were slightly darker than the outer two. I looked around, noting a few jagged stones and pointy tree limbs on the ground. “Was he hit repeatedly with a rock maybe? Or a stick?”
“Nope. The spacing is too precise. Whoever hit the victim was wearing brass knuckles.”
Ouch.
“Look here.” Jackson pointed at something small and white lodged in the bark of a tree a few feet away.
I stepped closer. Oh, my God! It was a tooth!
The tech pulled a tongue depressor from his tool kit. “This killer was brutal. Take a look at this.” He used the wooden stick to lift the dead man’s blood-caked upper lip, revealing a set of jagged, broken teeth. “I better collect the fragments.” He exchanged the tongue depressor for a pair of oversized tweezers and began to pick small white objects, which I’d originally mistaken for pebbles, from the ground.
Again my stomach attempted to purge itself. I made a mental note to take a Dramamine next time a corpse cropped up on my to-do list.
The second tech joined the first and began to pat down the dead man’s pockets. Finding nothing in the pants or outer jacket pockets, he reached inside to check the inside pockets. “No wallet. No ID. Nothing.”
Jackson pulled out her cell phone. “I’ll call the station. See if we’ve got any missing person reports that fit his description.”
She placed the call, was put on hold for a minute, then said, “Thanks.” She put her phone away. “No missing person reports. Not yet, anyway.”
Who was this man?
And why did someone kill him?
I felt a tug on the leash in my hand, Brigit trying to pull me over to the body.
“No, girl.” She was probably curious, but no way did I want to get any closer. This was just too damn creepy.
Brigit tugged again, refusing to take no for an answer, this time digging her claws into the soft dirt and leaning toward the body.
I nudged her furry butt with my knee. “I said ‘no, girl!’”
The techs and Jackson looked our way. An embarrassed flush burned my cheeks. Brigit was making me look like an idiot, like I couldn’t control my dog.
Brigit woofed and tugged again. That’s when I realized she was trying to tell me something.
I looked from the techs to the detective. “I think she smells something and wants to check it out. Is it okay to let her get closer?”
“Sure,” the lead tech said. “Can’t hurt anything at this point.”
I led Brigit over, letting the leash out a few inches so her head could move freely. She began to snuffle along the body, her nose twitching and wiggling as she sniffed, thankfully starting at the guy’s boots. She made her way up his calves, nudged a knee, and thoroughly sniffed his thigh. She sat back then, giving her passive alert.
“She’s indicating there’s drugs on him,” I explained.
The tech frowned. “I already checked his pockets.”
Jackson stepped up beside me. “Check inside his pants.”
The tech carefully unzipped the man’s jeans and pulled them down a few inches, revealing a pair of blue briefs and hairy thighs. Sure enough, a plastic bag containing small white crystals was affixed with medical tape to a shaved spot on the guy’s thigh.
“Aha,” Jackson said. “Looks like fuzzy-wuzzy discovered a possible motive.”
Drugs. Not a surprise, really. Drugs played a huge part in crime. Many of those who committed crimes were high on drugs at the time. Others committed crimes in order to get money to buy drugs.
“Good girl!” I praised my partner, retrieved a liver treat from the stash in my jacket, and held it out to her.
She took the treat from my fingers, wolfed it down, and began to snuffle around in the nearby trees, probably scenting a squirrel or raccoon.
A call came in on my shoulder radio, reporting a disabled vehicle impeding traffic on Rosedale. “I better get back to work.”
Jackson lifted her chin in acknowledgment. “I’ll let you know what we find out.”
As Brigit and I headed back to our cruiser, I found myself wanting to talk to Seth. He’d seen people killed in Afghanistan, seen people die in fires here. Surely he could help me deal with this murder.
What do you know? Maybe I did need him for something, after all.