The Luma-Lite is an alternate light source with a high-intensity arc tube that emits fifteen watts of light energy at 450 nanometers with a twenty-nanometer bandwidth. It can detect body fluids such as blood or semen as well as expose drugs, fingerprints, trace evidence and unexpected surprises not evident to the naked eye.
Shaw found a receptacle inside the warehouse, and I slipped disposable plastic covers on the Luma-Lite’s aluminum feet to make sure nothing from a previous scene would be transferred to this one. The alternate light source looked very much like a home projector, and I set it inside the container on top of a carton and ran the fan for a minute before turning on the power switch.
While I waited for the lamp to reach its maximum output, Marino appeared with the amber-tinted glasses needed to protect our eyes from the strong energy light. Flies were getting thicker. They drunkenly knocked against us and droned loudly in our ears.
“Goddamn, I hate those things!” Marino complained, swatting wildly.
I noticed he didn’t have on a jumpsuit, only shoe covers and gloves.
“You going to drive home in a closed car like that?” I asked.
“I got another uniform in the trunk. In case something gets spilled on me or whatever.”
“In case you spill something on you or whatever,” I said, looking at my watch. “We got one more minute.”
“Notice how Anderson’s conveniently disappeared? I knew she would the minute I heard about this one. I just didn’t figure on nobody else being here. Shit, something really weird’s going on.”
“How in the world did she become a homicide detective?”
“She kisses Bray’s ass. I hear she even runs errands for her, takes her brand-new fancy-schmansy black Crown Vic to the car wash, probably sharpens her pencils and shines her shoes.”
“We’re ready,” I said.
I began scanning with a 450-nanometer filter that was capable of detecting a large variety of residues and stains. Through our tinted glasses, the inside of the container became an impenetrably black outer space scattered with shapes that fluoresced white and yellow in different shades and intensities wherever I pointed the lens. The projected blue light exposed hairs on the floor and fibers everywhere, just as I would expect in a high-traffic area used to store cargo handled by many people. White cardboard cartons glowed a soft white, like the moon.
I moved the Luma-Lite deeper inside the container. Purge fluid didn’t fluoresce, and the body was a dejected dark shape sitting in the corner.
“If he died naturally,” Marino said, “then why’s he sitting up like that with his hands in his lap like he’s in church or something?”
“If he died of suffocation, dehydration, exposure, he could have died sitting up.”
“It sure looks wacko to me.”
“I’m just saying it’s possible. It’s getting tight in here. Can you hand me the fiber optics, please?”
He bumped into cartons as he made his way in my direction.
“You might want to take off your glasses until you get here,” I suggested, because one couldn’t see anything through them except the high-energy light, which wasn’t in Marino’s line of sight at the moment.
“No friggin’ way,” he said. “I hear all it takes is one quick look. And zap. Cataracts, cancer, the whole nine yards.”
“Not to mention turning to stone.”
“Huh?”
“Marino! Careful!”
He bumped into me and I wasn’t sure what happened after that, but suddenly cartons were caving in and he almost knocked me over as he fell.
“Marino?” I was disoriented and frightened. “Marino!”
I cut the power on the Luma-Lite and took off my glasses so I could see.
“Goddamn fucking son of a bitch!” he yelled as if he’d been bitten by a snake.
He was flat on his back on the floor, shoving and kicking boxes out of the way. The plastic bucket sailed through the air. I got down next to him.
“Stay still,” I firmly told him. “Don’t go thrashing around until we’re sure you’re all right.”
“Oh God! Oh shit! I got this shit all over me!” he yelled in a panic.
“Are you hurting anywhere?”
“Oh, Jesus, I’m gonna puke. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.”
He rushed to his feet and knocked boxes out of the way as he stumbled toward the container’s opening. I heard him vomit. He groaned and vomited again.
“That should make you feel better,” I said.
He ripped open his white shirt, gagging and heaving as he struggled out of its sleeves. He stripped down to his undershirt, balled up what was left of his uniform shirt and hurled it out the door.
“What if he’s got AIDS?” Marino’s voice sounded like a bell at midnight.
“You’re not going to get AIDS from this guy,” I said.
“Oh, fuck!” He gagged some more.
“I can finish up in here, Marino,” I said.
“Just give me a minute.”
“Why don’t you go on and find a shower.”
“You can’t tell anyone about this,” he said, and I knew he was thinking about Anderson. “You know, I bet you could get a really good deal on some uh this camera shit.”
“I bet you could.”
“Wonder what they’re gonna do with it.”
“Has the removal service come yet?” I asked him.
He raised his portable radio to his lips.
“Christ!” He spat and gagged some more.
He vigorously wiped the radio on the front of his pants and coughed and conjured up spittle from the bottom of his throat and let it fly.
“Unit nine,” he said on the air, holding the radio a good twelve inches from his face.
“Unit nine.”
The dispatcher was a woman. I detected warmth in her voice and was surprised. Dispatchers and 911 operators almost always remained calm and showed no emotion, no matter the emergency.
“Ten-five Rene Anderson,” Marino was saying. “Don’t know her unit number. Tell her if she doesn’t mind, we sure would like removal service guys to show up down here.”
“Unit nine. You know the name of the service?”
“Hey, Doc,” Marino stopped transmitting and raised his voice to me. “What’s the name of the service?”
“Capital Transport.”
He passed that along, adding, “Radio, if she’s a ten-two, ten-ten, or ten-seven or if we should ten-twenty-two, get back to me.”
A storm of cops keyed their mikes, their way of laughing and cheering him on.
“Ten-four, unit nine,” the dispatcher said.
“What did you just say that got you such an ovation? I know ten-seven is out of service, but I didn’t get the rest of it.”
“Told her to let me know if Anderson was a weak signal or negative, or had time to get around to it. Or if we should fucking disregard her.”
“No wonder she likes you so much.”
“She’s a piece of shit.”
“By chance do you know what happened to the fiber-optic cable?” I asked him.
“I had it in my hand,” he replied.
I found it where he had fallen and knocked over cartons.
“What if he’s got AIDS?” He started in on that again.
“If you’re determined to worry about something, try gram-negative bacteria. Or gram-positive bacteria. Clostridia. Strep. If you have an open wound, which you don’t as best I know.”
I attached one end of the cable to the wand, the other to the assembly, tightening thumbscrews. He wasn’t listening.
“No way anybody’s saying that about me! That I’m a goddamn fairy! I’ll eat my gun, don’t think I won’t.”
“You’re not going to get AIDS, Marino,” I repeated myself.
I turned on the source lamp again. It would have to run at least four minutes before I could turn on the power.
“I picked a hangnail yesterday and it bled! That’s an open wound!”
“You have on gloves, don’t you?”
“If I get some bad disease, I’m going to kill that fucking little lazy snitch.”
I assumed he meant Anderson.
“Bray’s gonna get hers, too. I’ll find a way!”
“Marino, be quiet,” I said.
“How would you like it if it was you?”
“I can’t tell you how many times it’s been me. What do you think I do every day?”
“You sure as hell don’t slop around in dead juice!”
“Dead juice?”
“We don’t know a thing about this guy. What if they got some weird diseases in Belgium that we can’t treat here?”
“Marino, be quiet,” I said again.
“No!”
“Marino . . .”
“I got a right to be upset!”
“All right then, leave.” My patience had walked off. “You’re interfering with my concentration. You’re interfering with everything. Go take a shower and throw back a few shots of bourbon.”
The Luma-Lite was ready and I put on the protective glasses. Marino was quiet.
“I’m not leaving,” he finally said.
I gripped the fiber-optics wand like a soldering iron. The intense pulsing blue light was as thin as pencil lead, and I began scanning very small areas.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Not so far.”
His sticky booties moved closer as I worked slowly, inch by inch, into places that could not be reached by the broad scan. I leaned the body forward to probe behind the back and head, then between the legs. I checked the palms of his hands. The Luma-Lite could detect body fluids such as urine, semen, sweat and saliva, and of course, blood. But again, nothing fluoresced. My back and neck ached.
“I’m voting for him being dead before he ended up in here,” Marino said.
“We’ll know a lot more when we get him downtown.”
I straightened up and the rapid-fire light caught the corner of a carton Marino had displaced when he’d fallen. The tail of what looked like the letter Y blazed neon green in the dark.
“Marino,” I said. “Look at this.”
Letter by letter I illuminated words that were French and written by hand. They were about four inches high and an odd boxy shape, as if a mechanical arm had formed them in square strokes. It took me a moment to make out what they said.
“Bon voyage, le loup-garou,” I read.
Marino was leaning over me, his breath in my hair. “What the hell’s a loup-garou?”
“I don’t know.”
I examined the carton carefully. The top of it was soggy, the bottom of it dry.
“Fingerprints? You see any on the box?” Marino asked.
“I’m sure there’re prints all over the place in here,” I replied. “But no, none are popping out.”
“You think whoever wrote this wanted someone to find it?”
“Possibly. In some kind of permanent ink that fluoresces. We’ll let fingerprints do their thing. The box goes to the lab, and we need to sweep up some of the hair on the floor for DNA, if it’s ever needed. Then do photographs and we’re out of here.”
“May as well get the coins while I’m at it,” he said.
“May as well,” I said, staring toward the container’s opening.
Someone was looking in. He was backlit by bright sunlight and a blue sky and I could not make out who it was.
“Where are the crime-scene techs?” I asked Marino.
“Got no idea.”
“Goddamn it!” I said.
“Tell me about it,” Marino said.
“We had two homicides last week and things weren’t like this.”
“You didn’t go to the scenes, either, so you don’t know what they were like,” he said, and he was right.
“Someone from my office did. I would know if there was a problem . . .”
“Not if the problem wasn’t obvious, you wouldn’t,” he told me. “And the problem sure as hell wasn’t obvious because this is Anderson’s first case. Now it’s obvious.”
“What?”
“Brand spanking new detective. Hell, maybe she stashed this body in here herself so she’d have something to do.”
“She says you told her to call me.”
“Right. Like I can’t bother, so I dis you, and then you get pissed off at me. She’s a fucking liar,” he said.
An hour later we were done. We walked out of the foul-smelling dark, returning to the warehouse. Anderson stood in the open bay next to ours, talking to a man I recognized as Deputy Chief Al Carson, head of investigations. I realized it was he whom I had seen at the mouth of the container earlier. I moved past her without a word and greeted him as I looked out to see if the removal service had shown up yet. I was relieved to see two men in jumpsuits standing by their dark blue van. They were talking to Shaw.
“How are you, Al?” I said to Deputy Chief Carson.
He’d been around as long as I had. He was a gentle, quiet man who had grown up on a farm.
“Hangin’ in, Doc,” he said. “Looks like we got a mess on our hands.”
“Looks like it,” I agreed.
“I was out and thought I’d drop by to make sure everything’s all right.”
Carson didn’t just “drop by” scenes. He was uptight and looked depressed. Most important, he paid no more attention to Anderson than the rest of us did.
“We’ve got it covered,” Anderson outrageously broke rank and answered Deputy Chief Carson. “I’ve been talking to the port director . . .”
Her voice trailed off when she saw Marino. Or maybe she smelled him first.
“Hey, Pete,” Carson said, cheering up. “What you know, old boy? They got some new dress code in the uniform division I don’t know about?”
“Detective Anderson,” I said to her as she got as far away from Marino as she could. “I need to know who’s working this case. And where are the crime-scene techs? And why did the removal service take so long to get here?”
“Yeah. This is how we do undercover work, boss. We take our uniforms off,” Marino was saying loudly.
Carson guffawed.
“And why, Detective Anderson, weren’t you in there collecting evidence and helping in any way possible?” I continued grilling her.
“I don’t answer to you,” she said with a shrug.
“Let me tell you something,” I said in a tone that got her attention. “I’m exactly who you answer to when there’s a dead body.”
“. . . bet Bray had to go undercover a lot, too. Before rising to the top. Types like her, they gotta be on top,” Marino said with a wink.
The light blinked out in Carson’s eyes. He looked depressed again. He looked tired, as if life had pushed him as far as he could go.
“Al?” Marino got serious. “What the fuck’s going on? How come nobody showed up at this little party?”
A gleaming black Crown Victoria was driving toward the parking lot.
“Well, I’ve got to head on,” Carson abruptly said, his face etched with his mind elsewhere. “Let’s hook up at the F.O.P. It’s your turn to buy the beer. Remember when Louisville beat Charlotte and you lost the bet, old boy?”
Then Carson was gone without acknowledging Anderson in any way, because it was clear he had no power over her.
“Hey, Anderson?” Marino said, pounding her back.
She gasped, clamping her hand over her nose and mouth.
“How you like working for Carson? Pretty nice guy, huh?” he said.
She backed away and he stayed with her. Even I was rather appalled by Marino and his stinking uniform pants, filthy gloves and booties. His undershirt would never be white again, and there were big holes where seams had succumbed to his big belly. He got so close to Anderson, I thought he might kiss her.
“You stink!” She tried to get away from him.
“Funny how that happens in a job like this.”
“Get away from me!”
But he wouldn’t. She darted this way and that, and with each step he blocked her like a mountain until she was pressed against supersacks of injectable carbon bound for the West Indies.
“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” His words grabbed her by the collar. “We get some rotting body in a cargo container in a fucking international shipping port where half the people don’t speak fucking English and you decide you’re gonna handle things all by yourself?”
Gravel popped outside in the parking lot, the black Crown Victoria driving fast.
“Miss Junior Detective gets her first case. And may as well have the chief medical examiner show up, along with a few helicopter news crews?”
“I’m turning you in to internal affairs,” Anderson yelled at him. “I’m taking out a warrant on you!”
“For what? Stinking?”
“You’re dead!”
“No. What’s dead is that guy in there.” Marino pointed at the container. “What’s dead is your ass if you ever have to testify about this case in court.”
“Marino, come on,” I said as the Crown Victoria brazenly drove onto the restricted dock.
“Hey!” Shaw was running after it, waving his arms. “You can’t park there!”
“You’re nothing but a used-up, washed-up, redneck loser,” Anderson said to Marino as she trotted off.
Marino yanked off gloves inside out and freed himself of his blue plasticized paper booties by stepping down on the heel of each with the opposite toe. He picked up his soiled white uniform shirt by the clip-on tie, which didn’t stay attached, so he stomped them as if they were a fire to put out. I quietly collected them and dropped them and mine into a red biological hazard bag.
“Are you quite finished?” I asked him.
“Ain’t even begun,” Marino said, staring out as the driver’s door of the Crown Victoria opened and a uniformed male officer climbed out.
Anderson rounded the side of the warehouse and walked quickly toward the car. Shaw was hurrying, too, dockworkers looking on as a striking woman in uniform and sparkling brass climbed out of the back of the car. She looked around as the world looked back. Someone whistled. Someone else did. Then the dock sounded like referees protesting every foul imaginable.
“Let me guess,” I said to Marino. “Bray.”