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Malin and Temeke pulled into Guadalupe Trail at nine thirty at night and parked behind a chain of units, light bars glowing. Malin spotted the white Honda Accord abandoned on a narrow track between a tall hedge and the west side of a derelict house. A driver would have been hard pushed to have seen it from the road.
“It’s his car,” she said, eyes snapping further up the road to Temeke’s house.
Reporters stood behind yellow tape, speaking into microphones and waiting impatiently for the moment when a body was brought out. One female dressed in a Hermes scarf and a green swing coat caught her eye. Jennifer Danes was standing close to a camera crew who were recording the incident on the Friday evening news.
Temeke said little as they walked toward the house, black eyes flicking back and forth as if he was looking for something. Traces, she thought, tracks, irrefutable evidence that he could somehow see in the dark, something he could clutch onto because right now there was nothing else.
She examined the license plate on the Honda, noting the absence of tags, and peered down into the passenger seat where a sheet of paper caught her eye. Handwritten directions to the house and a dollar number ‒ one hundred and fifty. Temeke matched the writing to the note left in the house. It was Paddy’s all right.
The south wall was pockmarked as if it had been rammed with a wrecking ball and yellow tape ran all the way to the back yard, a mere huddle of weeds that led to a cornfield. Peeling stucco flashed in fierce blues and reds and Malin eased her way between two units and an ambulance, nodded at an officer with an attendance log who checked his watch and summoned her in.
Officer Manning was in the cornfield shouting to his K-9. Malin could see the remote control flashing on Brock’s collar as he appeared to be herding a flock of quail toward the house.
She stood two feet from the back door, watching a Field Investigator dressed in protective clothing who was marking a bloody footprint on the threshold. It was pointing toward the back yard, where only the faint indentation of a second print suggested the perpetrator might have been in a hurry.
Malin held her breath from the familiar metallic stench and one of the worst bloodbaths she had ever seen. The doctor was talking to Temeke, saying how the thin trickle of blood from the victim’s neck once started out as a pumping geyser and now coated nearly three walls. There was blunt force trauma to the back of his head, victim was in full rigor. Said his name was Paddy Brody.
It was worse when you knew them, once suspected them and then found out they weren’t the sick perpetrators of the crime you were trying to investigate. Shame and sadness came in one quick surge and she forced herself to take a breath, tried to calm her racing pulse.
Temeke was leaning against the outside wall near a crate of evidence bags, mouth opening and closing like a fish. “Not bloody fast enough, was I?”
“You called them as soon as you could,” she reminded, shivering a little under her coat.
He seemed to flinch involuntarily as if he was about to lose the one last thread of evidence he had to solve the case. “You can never underestimate the meanderings of an art student, especially one with the morals of a tom cat. It’s a bleeding crack house. Has been for years. Who the hell was he meeting?”
Malin peered back into the kitchen which was already taped off, crime scene specialists mapping and marking and recording descriptions of the scene. A young man meticulously cleared Coke cans and fast food wrappers into evidence bags, and the doctor collected samples with forceps and placed them in metal evidence buttons. Malin wasn’t allowed any further.
Temeke pushed himself away from the wall when Matt Black hovered at the doorway in a white bunny suite. He was holding up a cell phone bagged in clear plastic and what appeared to be an old metal iron. “We think he was struck from behind with this. Looks like he had a text two days ago. Someone called D asking him to come over to grandma’s for a ride.”
Malin knew the word grandma’s was slang for a meeting place and as for ride it could have referred to sexual favors.
“Looks like he was collecting money.”
Temeke responded to Matt with the customary ribaldry and Malin sniffed back a bite of anger. The knot in her stomach wouldn’t go away, nor would the feeling that she was peering through the glass of a fisheye lens and everything she saw was curved and distorted.
“There’s a handprint on the inside door frame,” Matt said, leaning back a little and studying it for a moment. “Thumb’s facing forward. Killer probably tried to steady himself on the way out. Floor’s slippery. Pauline’s checking the blood arcs. But she thinks the killer came at him from behind the door. He was already here.”
“Prints?” Temeke asked.
“He must have worn gloves.”
“How tall was the deceased?”
“Seventy-two inches. About six feet. There’s some cash in a coffee can,” Matt whispered, “a grand at a peek.”
“Under all the coffee grinds or in full view?”
Matt gave a small smile. “He could have brought it with him. Maybe it was already there. Hookers... drug dealers, they all take cash.”
“Do you think this is the primary crime scene?”
“The doc said it was.”
Malin watched three heads bobbing back and forth behind the kitchen window, saw Pauline Bailey, the blood spatter analyst, and gave her a quick wave.
“Mr. Brody hadn’t been here before,” Malin said, hands pressed inside her pockets. She tried to form words through the constriction in her throat, and coughed a few times. “The address was in the car on the passenger seat. And there was a dollar amount. Probably cash he was owed.”
Matt nodded and gave her a small smile before ambling toward a Field Examiner who was squatting about ten feet away from the house in the back yard. He seemed to be leaning over a muddy path that led to the cornfield and shouting something about a set of footprints. Size nine, Vibram sole, same as a duty boot.
“Get those in plaster,” Matt shouted back.
“I hope they’re not yours,” Malin murmured, staring at Temeke’s yawning mouth. It was a common man’s boot and size.
More flashlights, more shouts from a patrol officer trying to deter Captain Fowler from lifting the tape to let Hackett past. Hackett stood there with a cashmere coat draped over his shoulders, chin lowered and peering over his glasses.
“Temeke!” he shouted. “What have we got?”
“Got, sir?” A spent match dropped into the dirt. Temeke lit a cigarette. “Terrible business. I wouldn’t go in there if I were you, not after that nice dinner you’ve just had.”
“Who is it?”
“Well, it’s not a bunch of old biddies playing poker, that’s for sure.”
“Get out of my way!”
“Before you go, sir, Detective Santiago and Lieutenant Alvarez were supposed to meet the victim at two o’clock this afternoon,” Temeke continued, pointing with his cigarette. “This explains why the poor old sod didn’t show up. Must have got the surprise of his life. I thought it was a nasty case of hara-kiri when they found him. It was his throat, sir. Sliced from here to here and the kitchen’s a nasty mess. I didn’t touch anything, I promise.”
Hackett gave a tolerant smile. “Doctor Vasillion or Doctor Henderson?”
“Dr. V. He’s bringing the deceased out now, sir. Twenty-two-year-old male. Patrick Brody, art student at Gibson.”
It was the black body bag carried by two examiners that claimed Hackett’s interest and quickly wiped the smile from his face. Dr. Vasillion followed behind, jutted a chin greeting to Hackett.
“Homicide,” the doctor confirmed, staring down at the body. He peeled off his gloves in two quick snaps and stuffed them in the top of his bag. “We’ll know more after the exam. Given the temperature, I’d put time of death at around twenty-two to twenty-four hours. Two slices to the carotid and jugular here and here.” He lifted his head and motioned to the left and right.
Malin was hardly able to pay attention to the steady stream of chatter, thoughts jumbled and where no scenario, no matter how intricate, seemed to fit into place. She recognized the tension under her hair, the sour surge in her gut, and stumbled a few feet from the house to inhale a gust of wind. Judging by the cuts, the killer hadn’t hesitated for a second.
“Makes you want to down a large whisky, doesn’t it?” Temeke said over her right shoulder.
“I don’t drink,” she reminded him, watching the blistering end of a lighted cigarette.
“Pauline’s a bloody trooper. Imagine what it must be like having to analyze every tiny speck of blood, every smear, and wonder how it all happened. Said our unspecified subject would have been covered in blood ’cause there was plenty of it on the grass and leaves outside. Got a male intern with her this time. Smells like he threw up over here.”
Malin rolled her eyes and walked ten feet to her right. Couldn’t get the brutal visual out of her head, thick hair coated in blood and the staring eyes that had once been so blue. He wasn’t a bad kid, a little confused that’s all. But lying there on that hard wood floor eliminated the only suspect they had.
Temeke was right there beside her, puffing out smoke at her elbow. He raised his eyes to the sky as he had done five minutes earlier, and five minutes before that. “A guy like that doesn’t need to visit a hooker.”
Malin counted off a few more possibilities of her own. “A friend of a friend, a drug deal gone wrong―”
“Besides the girls, did Paddy mention any names when you saw him?”
“Demon. I don’t know if it’s a code name for a drug, or the person Paddy came to meet.”
“Why here?”
All Malin could think of was a rundown old house in close proximity to Temeke’s. She winced and turned her back on it all, walked toward the car with a determined stride. She could feel the warmth of Temeke’s breath against her cheek, and tensed when she heard the tone of his voice.
“Someone was watching me the other night,” he said, confirming her worst fears. “Young man, late teens, early twenties, between one twenty-five, one thirty. I followed him all the way through that cornfield. He was talking to a female.”
Lean at one hundred and twenty-five pounds, Malin thought. “What did the female look like?”
“I didn’t see her.” Temeke took a deep drag and then crushed the cigarette under his foot. “But I’d recognize the man if I saw him again.”
