That Darkness Read online

  “Must be an old building,” Rick said. He dropped the handcuffs and drummed his fingers, no doubt wishing he’d brought some coffee with him. So did Maggie. A taste for caffeine and gnocchi Alfredo had turned out to be all they had in common.

  “Pre- about 1978 or so,” Maggie said. “Might have lead paint on the walls, or maybe some pipe or window frame is exposed and leaking—but there were five separate flakes. I’m guessing it’s the walls.”

  “So she’s from an old building with yellow paint,” the redheaded one said.

  “Wonder if she was driven or carried to the cemetery,” Patty said. “There’s a lot of old buildings right around there, and our girl’s so small she could have easily been carried a few blocks by a decent-sized guy.”

  Maggie could see their minds starting to wander along the divergent paths of possibility. Except for the dark-haired one. He watched her with an appraising stare that felt uncomfortably familiar, and fingered the tack on his perfectly tied tie.

  She said, “I wonder if she was squatting. Any building with lead paint should have been renovated by now. There certainly shouldn’t be people living in it. Combined with the carpeting, her being a little underweight . . . her nails were painted but had dirt underneath them. The soles of her feet were dirty, lightly stained as from lengthy exposure to a dirty floor—not from the mud or grass in the cemetery.”

  “She sure didn’t walk there,” the redhead said, “not with broken ribs, in nothing but a T-shirt on a spring night.”

  Maggie went on, talking fast before she lost their attention. “Yes. So wherever she’s been staying it’s either never been renovated, or it’s being renovated now—that’s why the paint is flaking. That would fit with being a runaway. Could be a vacant building, or one that someone started to renovate, and then ran out of funds.”

  “Wow,” Rick said. “Not too many of those in Cleveland.”

  Sarcasm, of course. At one time Cleveland had led the country in foreclosed properties, and still appeared on top ten lists.

  “About twelve hundred,” Maggie said. “But if we’re looking for vacant property, the number multiplies. Exponentially.”

  “In English, Maggie,” her ex-husband huffed.

  “There’s a ton of them, that’s the bad news. The good news is there can’t be that many pre-1978 vacant buildings that were never de-leaded in the past forty years. You might ask the city Planning and Zoning department if they can generate a list.”

  Four people gazed at her.

  Maggie sighed. “Or I can. I know someone there who owes me a favor.”

  The redhead smiled. Rick rolled his eyes.

  Patty threw her a bone. “Try keeping it to buildings in a two-mile radius from the cemetery. Guys like this don’t have the restraint to drive a body across town purely in order to create the artistic effect of draping it along some tombstones.”

  Then the detectives discussed their usual suspects for a while, had nothing to particularly implicate any one of them, and the meeting broke up. Maggie and Rick looked at each other, couldn’t figure out what to say, and finally parted with a nod. Patty had a short conversation with the redheaded detective. The dark-haired one slipped toward the door.

  “I’m sorry,” Maggie surprised herself by saying. “I didn’t catch your name. I’m Maggie Gardiner.”

  He stopped and hesitated before holding out a hand. “Jack Renner.”

  Chapter 5

  Tuesday, 9:20 a.m.

  She found Denny in the wet processing room, spraying a bad check with ninhydrin. It dangled from a clothespin inside a square Plexiglas hood, the electric motor churning noisily, yet some of the acrid fumes managed to escape. Maggie stopped in the doorway to cough.

  “It’s not that bad,” Denny said, raising his voice over the hum.

  “Yes, it is. And you should be wearing gloves. The overspray will turn your skin purple.”

  He chuckled. “As if I could tell. How would you like to take another trip to the morgue?”

  “What now?”

  “Unidentified black male, found shot this morning.”

  “Another Doe? What is this, ‘Drop your dead bodies in Cleveland week’?”

  “Let me check.” He glanced at the Brownielocks calendar that DNA analyst Carol posted every month in an attempt to bolster department morale—which, since there seemed to be at least one chocolate-themed day per month, usually worked. “No. Just Library Appreciation and Haiku Day. Besides, I doubt he’ll be unidentified for long. Shot in the wee hours, prison tats. Probably not your standard upstanding citizen.”

  Maggie sighed. “I’ll head over there now. On the way back I’m going to drop in at ICE and see if they can run our Girl Doe’s prints.”

  With the piece of paper now dripping wet, purplish drops onto the blotter paper in the bottom of the hood, Denny sat the bottle on the counter but let the hood continue to run. “You think she’s foreign?”

  “It’s a possibility. Even if she is, there’s no guarantee ICE will have her prints. It all depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether she planned to stay.”

  “She’s staying now,” Denny pointed out.

  Just because Maggie had an odd affinity for the coroner’s office didn’t mean she wanted to make multiple trips out to University Circle per week. While she drove along Chester, manila envelopes would pile up on her desk, each containing two-by-three-inch white glossy cards with prints lifted by the patrol officers at burglarized homes and offices throughout the city. About sixty percent would hold nothing but unidentifiable smudges or background patterns. She would take the other forty percent, slap them onto her scanner, find the usable prints, mark the identifying characteristics, and let the computer look through its ever-growing database for a match. Only six to ten percent of these “latent” prints would find one, and of those about half a percent would turn out to belong to the victim or someone else in the household and therefore be less than helpful in solving the crime. It wasn’t a job for someone who needed a lot of pats on the back, but even at only ten percent of the time Maggie found solving burglaries—the most mundane and routine crime committed—particularly satisfying. She didn’t neglect them lightly.

  But a homicide investigation got a huge leg up when the cops knew exactly whose homicide they were investigating, so she sent herself off to the coroner’s office without further complaint. The same deskman, smoking with deep, deliberate breaths, opened the door for her again without so much as a questioning glance.

  Two different doctors were in the autopsy suite today, but with the same two deiners as the day before. The office’s stable of pathologists rotated through the autopsy suite, since writing up the reports often took three or four times longer than the actual procedure. Today’s victims were both male, but she could easily distinguish her target from the elderly, un-tattooed white male on the other table.

  The unidentified black male, approximately twenty to twenty-five years old and 220 pounds, had been found in an alley off East 22nd. His clothes had nothing that could identify him, no monograms, no names written on the tags. No jewelry, wallet, or cash. He had probably been shot by a robber—a particularly cold one, who drilled him three times in the back of the head.

  “Twenty-two.” The doctor was a petite woman with a slight Southern accent and each ear pierced in three places. “If I was going to commit armed robbery I’d want a large caliber.”

  “But it’s quiet,” Maggie pointed out. “Quiet-er.”

  The doctor shrugged and continued slicing the heart along its side, quick, shallow cuts that exposed the coronary arteries, but Maggie figured this guy was too young for any significant arteriosclerosis and turned her attention to the body. He had tattoos—crude black ones of the ace of spades, teardrops, and something that resembled a demonic sun, as well as a tiger, a dragon, and a black widow spider in bright colors. The spider surprised her. A spider, yes, but why would a man identify with a black widow—she wondered if h
e got some teasing from his friends about that one. Probably not. Any friends of his would know better.

  But the tattoos were not distinctive enough to get an ID through the media and not something really helpful like his name, or the name of his girlfriend or child. His face would not be much help since the slugs had mushroomed and broken apart. One had stayed somewhat intact, the deiner told her, and had lodged in the back of his eyeball, bowing it out. Another forced shrapnel into the brow bone above it. Consequently the whole right side of his face bulged to the point of deformity and, worse, made it much too much of a shocking picture to feature on the nightly news.

  Maggie gloved up and collected his prints, being sure, as with the dead girl the day before, to gather palm prints as well as the fingertips. If they ever found the murder weapon she might need to eliminate any prints on the grip. Not that Maggie had ever yet gotten a decent print from the grip of a gun—despite the fact that they did it on TV all the time—but one never knew. Rigor had begun to pass but still had hours to go and she had to wrestle with the man’s large, stiff hands.

  The teeth would sew up an identification, if they could find the correct set of records to compare the X-rays to—he had gold caps and a number of fillings, and two molars had gone missing altogether. With luck a loved one or close friend would wake up this morning, realize they had not seen this man for over a day, and begin to make inquiries. Though no longer required most families would still observe a twenty-four-hour wait before filing a report on a missing adult, especially a grown male with no apparent health issues who appeared more than capable of taking care of himself. He could have had mental issues that endangered him, of course, but clothing or other factors usually clued authorities in to that. Maggie didn’t expect him to be unidentified for long. But then, she would have expected an immediate dragnet issued for a missing fourteen-year-old girl, and that hadn’t happened.

  “Anything else interesting about him?” Maggie asked, stripping off her gloves to sign the fingerprint cards. She moved to the counter, where the doctor held the man’s stomach over a large beaker and snipped a hole in its side with a pair of shears. It resembled a half-filled water balloon, only much less pleasantly colored. And a lot smellier.

  A sploosh, and the brownish contents of the stomach dropped into the beaker. Maggie reached for the dispenser of paper masks and looped elastic bands over her ears. She wasn’t proud.

  “He didn’t die on an empty stomach, that’s for sure. Plenty of food that he didn’t have time to digest.” The doctor noted the volume for the record, then sniffed it—actually smelled the goop, which Maggie found completely insane. The doctor poured a small amount out into a metal strainer, rinsed, and held it under an illuminated magnifying lamp. “And alcohol, too, of some kind. Liquor, not beer. Looks like scallops—did you know sometimes restaurants use stingray cut out with a cookie cutter instead of scallops? You can’t tell the difference—and a slivered . . . what is that, almond? A raisin. Didn’t chew his food well enough, but then no one does.”

  “Interesting,” Maggie agreed while maintaining her distance.

  “Some kind of starchy—fries, French fries. What else? At least they’re sweet potato fries, get a little bit of beta-carotene to offset the bucket of grease. Love those things, though. Must have eaten out, I doubt too many people make them at home. Can you get them frozen? Jimmy!” she suddenly bellowed to the pathologist at the next sink. “What are we getting for lunch? Now I have a taste for sweet potatoes.”

  A coroner’s investigator appeared in the doorway to the autopsy suite and asked if they were done with the victim. “Someone’s here to identify him.”

  The doctor looked over the top of her glasses at the splayed corpse on the table, then at the man. “He’s a little busy right now.”

  “Can you throw a sheet over him? Then we can get this ID done.”

  The doctor shrugged. The deiner sighed, because he was the one who had to get a gurney, slide the emptied body over onto it, cover the gaping torso with the small towels they used for cleaning up, and get a clean white sheet to cover him from the neck down.

  “Might soak through,” he warned the man as he maneuvered the gurney out into the hallway. Maggie trailed them.

  The investigator said, “I wouldn’t worry about it. I get the feeling this guy has seen blood before.”

  The deiner wheeled the gurney into the viewing room, an eight-by-six cubicle with nothing in it except one large window. Friends and family would stand on the other side of the glass; unlike television, they were not walked right up to the body so that the sheet could be whisked back at a dramatic swell in the music.

  Maggie stayed with the investigator as he fetched the identifying person from the lobby. Maggie tended to avoid victims’ families when possible—there was nothing she could do or say to ease their grief—but if the identification was going to be taken care of right there she needed to know about it. A possible ID could hurry up identification of the prints, if she could go directly to one name instead of searching the entire database.

  A slender man with skin the color of coal and eyes to match followed them back to the window. He wore blue jeans with untied shoes and at least three T-shirts, fashionably layered. He did not express the slightest curiosity about who Maggie might be and she did not waste his time by explaining. His face stayed still, cautious, revealing nothing, perhaps steeling himself for a difficult task, but she had the feeling he always looked like that. There was nothing about him that specifically said criminal, and yet everything about him screamed you do not want to make me angry.

  He stepped up to the window without hesitation, his gaze locked on the dead man’s face, now surprisingly small and childlike while lost in that sea of white cotton cloth. It seemed lucky that they had not yet cut open the scalp and exposed the brain before the interruption; there would be no way to disguise the absence of the top half of the skull with just a sheet or a towel.

  Maggie watched the man as he viewed the corpse. His eyes narrowed, his jaw tightened. His breathing skipped a few beats, and then his chest expanded in a shallow inhale. But all of those things were completely typical reactions to seeing a dead body—anyone’s dead body.

  “Do you know who this is?” the investigator asked, in a gentle tone that sounded as if he practiced it in the car every morning.

  “No,” the guy said immediately. “I got no idea.”

  Then he turned and walked back to the lobby, without glancing at either of them.

  The deiner grumbled all the way back to the autopsy suite. “Might have said sorry. Takin’ up your time and all.”

  “He’s missing somebody,” Maggie said, “or he wouldn’t have come here. So maybe he’s just grieving.”

  “Then there would be some relief, big sigh that maybe who he’s looking for isn’t dead after all.”

  Maggie agreed. “He really did recognize this guy. He just changed his mind about saying so.”

  “Probably,” the deiner told her. “It goes that way a lot. Families who can’t afford a funeral will come here to identify a guy found in his own home who matches his driver’s license photo. They take a look at him, feel that covers paying their respects, and let the county pay the undertaker.”

  Maggie grabbed one edge of the gurney, helped him negotiate the turn into the autopsy suite.

  “Either that or,” he went on, “this guy was a major player, and Mr. T-shirts knows that if he admits knowin’ our guy, the cops are going to be asking him a lot of questions he don’t want to answer. So he pretends they ain’t even acquainted.”

  “But we’ll have a list of all known associates.”

  “Yeah, but maybe T-shirts ain’t known. And he wants to stay that way.”

  “Then why come here at all?”

  “Pay his respects.” He picked up a scalpel and sliced the dead man’s scalp from ear to ear, just below the hairline. “Or, he wants to make sure the bastard’s really dead.”

  Maggie thanked him,
and also the doctor, who simply nodded as she continued to decipher the stomach contents. Maggie took her fingerprint cards and left, pretty sure it would be a while before she could look a sweet potato in the eye.

  Then she went upstairs to the Trace Evidence department.

  Chapter 6

  Tuesday, 8:55 a.m.

  The Russian mob, Jack decided, had been vastly overrated.

  This thought came to him as he watched Viktor Boginskaya stumble up 25th, spilling most of a coffee he had bought a few moments before at the West Side Market. Viktor spilled the coffee, that is. Jack would waste blood before he would waste caffeine.

  Eastern European criminals, finally able to escape from behind the Iron Curtain and emigrate to the soft meadows of America, had become the new boogeymen of crime. Made of wire and gristle, tattooed, scruffy, and inoffensively white, anyone with a Soviet-style accent had become the go-to villains of page and screen. They had starved in the ghettos of Moscow and Kiev and Tbilisi. North American jails resembled a Sandals resort compared to gulags in Siberia. Neglected and abused, they had developed sociopathic tendencies by the age of three. They feared nothing, would do anything, and were capable of violence that defied description. They prowled as wolves among the coddled, fluffy masses of their adopted countrymen, feeding at will.

  Now, watching Viktor try to cross Lorain-Carnegie during morning rush hour without getting creamed by an SUV while carrying a small shopping bag, Jack wondered if any of those beliefs were true. Viktor’s ancestry did not seem to have bestowed any special protection upon him. Viktor looked scrawny rather than wiry, nervous rather than tough, and (according to his Interpol file) Viktor’s method of street fighting involved curling up in a ball on the pavement and covering his head.