John spent the rest of the morning mulling over the Cardozo killing. Flashbacks to the ripped and dismembered body distracted the detective to the point where conversation with his wife was forced at the breakfast table. Melissa could have told him she was pregnant again, and it wouldn’t have registered. He grabbed his pager, clipped it to his belt, gave Melissa a practiced kiss on the cheek, and said a mumbled “Love you,” then he was out the door.
Police activity evaporated with the first light, and the only indication that a life had ended along the remote levee road was a torn length of yellow crime-scene tape on a rusty metal guardrail.
John pulled the car off the narrow levee road into a sparse, brown, grassy patch a few yards upriver from where Daniel Cardozo’s remains had soiled the muddy bank a couple of hours ago. He got out, leaned on the fender, and out of habit, patted his jacket pocket for his cigarettes. The rattle of nicotine gum when he expected to find the cigarette pack darkened his mood. He tossed back one of the chalky gum pieces and worked it with his jaw while he looked for anything out of place along the water’s edge. Crime scenes always looked different in the daylight.
The sunshine revealed scores of muddy footprints that traced from the asphalt down to the water’s edge where Cardozo had turned up. Thick, dried chunks of mud clumped on the road’s surface, evidence of the foot traffic from everyone who had worked the scene. If he hadn’t known better, John thought the site looked like an amphibious landing zone. It wasn’t so much the mud or mud-print patterns John had come for—it was the river.
The killer selected this open spot on the riverbank, where heavy brush, less than twenty yards in either direction, provided more seclusion for his body dump. He hadn’t bothered to hide Cardozo’s body under the water’s surface, and it hadn’t accidentally washed up on shore. Leaving the gang member’s remains out in the open, in plain view, was deliberate by design.
John stood at the edge of the road, kicked a small chunk of crumbling asphalt down the embankment, and watched it tumble down the levee. The black hunk of tar and rock made it halfway to the waterline before it lost momentum and toppled over on its side. It sat alone in the trampled mud, where it stood out on display among the clumps of clay and native grasses. It was an insignificant piece of asphalt on exhibit in the open space, unlike the fleshy billboard display of the killer’s latest handiwork.
Across the river, five ducks formed a quick-moving, V-shaped flock, searching for a place to land in the marshy rice fields. The wind carried the deep, muffled report of two shotgun blasts from the far side of the river. One bird tumbled down, followed by another splashing in the rice field. Another dead creature along the waterway.
John’s cell phone buzzed. “Penley here,” he responded.
“John, it’s Tim,” the caller said.
“What’s up, Lieutenant?” Tim Barnes was the ranking supervisor in the detective bureau and one of the few John trusted to have his back when it mattered.
“We’ve got one of Cardozo’s next of kin in one of the interview rooms. You heading in, or do you want Paula to run with it when she gets here?”
John watched the river current push through without an echo of last night’s activity. Life goes on—for some. “I’ll take the interview. I dropped by the crime scene again but should be back in the office in about twenty. By next of kin, you mean . . .”
“One of his West Block Norteños gang brothers we rounded up. We’re trying to run down his wife.”
“Who filed the missing person’s report on Cardozo?”
“The wife reported his disappearance. So did Manuel Contreras. We have Contreras on ice in the interview room,” Barnes said.
“Anyone make contact with the wife?”
“Gang unit. They couldn’t wait to go make that notification.”
“No love lost between the gang unit and the Norteños,” John said.
He hung up and headed back to his sedan, convinced the body dump was an obscure message from the killer. A warning to other gangbangers, or the act was a personal vendetta against Cardozo. Either way, he wanted attention.