Sanchez and Deveneaux found Slade, and the three of them joined Turner, Fenwick, and Scanlan who led them down corridors they hadn’t seen before to sections of the station that hadn’t been renovated. The detectives had their flashlights out. Concrete floors were chipped, ceiling tiles were ripped and torn when they weren’t missing entirely, walls had paint flaking off and blotches of mold, and Turner heard the soft pattering of unseen critters skittering away and saw a large cockroach sauntering away from the light.
Slade said, “This is an old, old section.”
They crawled through an opening in a two-foot-thick wall. Slade said, “I think this was part of the original wall.” In places where the wall had chipped or weathered away, Turner could see the original color of the limestone. They passed through a series of buildings that were little more than sheds and finally came out at a boarded-up alcove.
Scanlan pushed at several boards. They came away in the form of a sort of door for a kid’s fort built unhampered by adult help.
Turner and Fenwick shone their lights out the opening. They were on the opposite side of the station from where they’d first entered, this street parallel to that one. Turner thought they were maybe fifty feet farther south down this street. They were about ten feet above ground level. No streetlights. The glow of the city barely penetrated the gloom.
Sanchez crowded next to them. He pointed down. “You climb up there and there. Can’t be that hard.” The detectives saw various protuberances that could be used for hand and footholds. It wasn’t that far to the pavement.
Turner used the light to examine the ground around them inside and out. “Get the forensics people in here,” he said. He didn’t know what the smudges he saw were. The dust and dim light made observation difficult, but he would need the crime team’s expertise to know if these smudges were blood, and if they had anything to do with their murder. He also ordered crime scene tape to link this area to the first opening they entered from and also for where the body was found.
They made their way back to the original murder scene. Turner and Fenwick let all the others go on ahead. Once they were out of earshot, Fenwick said, “If the kid can find and use a secret entrance, then anybody could. And there could be more than one secret entrance with cops, criminals, people crashing the party.”
Turner said. “It could have been like a train station. So to speak.”
“I’m the humor guy in this relationship.”
“Just taking lessons from the master.”
“The kid kill him?”
Turner shrugged. “He seemed more pissed off than frightened. I don’t know. There was something odd in his reaction. He’s lying. About what, I’m not sure. He’s been attending at least one rough leather event, probably since he was thirteen. He might be fifteen or sixteen. That’s at least two years of sexual activity of possibly an unusual or dangerous kind. Doing all that might make the kid think he was tough and invulnerable.”
“And stupid,” Fenwick said.
“Lot of that going around,” Turner said.
Fenwick said, “He described the guy who talked to him about coming down here as being in jeans. That’s not Belger.”
“Or he’s lying.”
Fenwick said, “Belger had enough money in his pants to pay what the kid said he offered.”
“Gives some credence to the kid’s story, but doesn’t give me a notion about the murder. The kid is hiding something. No kid is that confident. Can’t be. Gotta be something else.”
Fenwick said, “I agree.”