A Quiet Neighbor (30 page)

Chapter
Twenty-Five:

Flashback
to:

Friday,
May 18, 1979

10:30
P.M.

LIEUTENANT GEORGE MALONE
was a
large man with steel-colored eyes, flat and judgmental. By the book, extra
starched creases, bullshit meter perennially set to stun. He wore his badge
like a medal of honor and performed his interrogations like a clean shave with
a new blade. Family, friends, co-workers, victims, and lookyloos alike damn
well listened when Lieutenant Malone spoke, and they damn well answered when he
asked a question. Sometimes, after even casual conversations with the man,
people would walk away dumbstruck by the amount of information he managed to
squeeze out of them. He cut to the chase, was able to spot an inconsistency if
there ever was one, and could read a crime scene like the back of his hand.

Check that. Bullshit meter perennially set to
fucking
fry
.

It was another Friday night in homicide. Malone
was the ranking officer on-duty that particular evening, with 23 of his 45
years spent serving the badge and no end in sight. He arrived at the reported
location of a nine-one-one distress call, pausing to gulp the last of his
coffee and crumple the paper cup before stepping out of his squad car. Possible
187, according to dispatch.

The perimeter was already cordoned off by a
strip of yellow police tape. A couple of rookie cops were standing guard at the
entrance. Their faces flushed red and cooled blue as the roof lights of the squad
cars turned slow arcs in the dirt drive in front of them. The door to one of
the squad cars hung wide open, the radio squelching out dispatch codes and
commands into the darkness. An ambulance pulled up next to the coroner’s van.

Slouched and haggard from the double shifts
they were pulling, the officers’ inability to stop yawning exposed their youth.
But once they spotted the Lieutenant they each grew a steel rod in their back.
Malone merely gave them a look and their yawning ceased, their eyes bugged and
rolled and goggled to regain focus.

Malone removed his hefty Mag-Lite—a sturdy new
toy the force was adopting, putting his old Kel-Lite to shame—and made a
general loop around the outer perimeter, noting if there were any unusual
disturbances.

Nothing out of the ordinary,
he
mused. The run-down property looked more like an abandoned dump site than a
house, but that was to be expected in this area. Wrong side of the tracks.

He walked around back, out of the Technicolor
glow from the squad car but still within muffled earshot of the squelching CB.
The rear windows—panes covered in yellowed newspaper—were visibly illuminated
from within but cast no useful light outside. There were broken surfboards,
cracked toilet seat covers, rusty water pails, shaved wood chips, and a few
plungers piled haphazardly along the bank of a ravine. Peering down into the
black maw of the ravine, he swept his flashlight and saw more of the same,
along with mattresses, thousands of decaying plastic trash bags, and what
looked (and smelled) like raw sewage.

Near the back stoop of the shack, beer cans
littered the ground around a well-used washtub fire pit, along with a few
coffee cans overflowing with cigarette butts.
Your cup runneth over
are
the words that popped into his mind at that moment, though he couldn’t say why.

He expanded his focus beyond the ravine, to the
occasional wafting scent of laundry and the brassy staccato of Mexican radio,
turned low. The glowing green eyes of a feral cat levitated out of the ravine
as it made its nightly rounds.

The place was seedy, he’d give it that, but his
gut sensed no danger, and Malone trusted his gut.

Back to business.

The windows and doorjambs were intact. This
wasn’t a forced entry. There was some sand and gravel on the rear steps but
nothing significant. Anyone who walked along the dirt road abutting this place would
pick up sand in their treads. And the perp certainly didn’t approach from the
ravine, or there would be Arthur Murray two-step diagrams mapped in shit across
the porch. Step, step,
smear
,
smear
.

Judging from the shriveled hedges, the coarse,
haphazard weeds that grew up fast and died as giants, and the broken planters
with a poorly fenced yard, it was easy to see the family that lived here wasn’t
living the high life. Robbery was clearly not a motive.

Malone headed back toward the front entrance.

Up the street, a familiar red light oscillated
brilliantly against the black sky.
That would be Crogg
, thought Malone.
The sliver of moon provided little light for the tired neighborhood, if you
could call it a neighborhood. Most of the sparsely placed houses (if you could
call them houses) along this stretch of road were dark, shades drawn, bars
secured, and doors bolted shut. Only this shit-hole of a shack was brightly
lit, with every light turned on, plus additional lamps on tripods brought in by
the crime lab techs. There were no rubberneckers in this part of town.
Neighbors kept to themselves, especially when the red and blue lights came to
visit, which was often.

An unmarked tan sedan with a twirling bubblegum
light pulled up across the road and Detective Alex Crogg stepped out. Crogg
tucked his hands into his pockets and proceeded toward him. They’d been
partners for two years, ever since Crogg was promoted to detective. Malone
trained him, so Crogg knew the drill. Malone would be bad cop and lead the
investigation and Crogg would follow suit, playing good cop.

With his short blond curls and baby blue eyes,
Crogg was a real chick magnet, a boy-next-door kind of guy. He was thirty-four
but looked twenty-five. Kids loved and trusted him off the bat. Women adored
him and let their eyes linger a bit too long on his solid frame. He personified
the child book image of a trustworthy cop; he was the cop that would rescue
your cat from the tree, chase down the bad guy who snatched the old lady’s
purse, strike a hero’s pose, and
sparkle
.

Crogg had a good guy image that partnered well
with Malone’s harsh features and cold ruggedness.

With Crogg by his side, Malone marched up to
the front steps, regarded the two rookies with a cold stare, and waited. The
two rookies shifted glances at each other and back at Malone, confused and uncomfortable
by the silence. Finally one of them took the hint and cleared his throat.

“Sir, we’ve already taped off the perimeter and
secured the area, sir.”

“Yes. I can see that.”

“Uh…Oh, yes. Deceased vic is known as
forty-four-year-old Peter Hayes. Resident and owner of property. Crime scene
techs already inside, powdering the area. Daughter, seventeen-year-old
Elizabeth Hayes, and daughter’s boyfriend, sixteen-year-old Neil Wilcox, also
inside waiting to be questioned.

“Apparently daughter was being abused by the deceased
and boyfriend intervened. Girl shows signs of physical and sexual abuse, and
most likely, you can add in emotional abuse.

“No weapon found at scene, but bedroom in rear
has a wall lined with various pistols, shotguns, and revolvers. Crime techs are
bagging the items.

“Hands of the daughter, boyfriend, and vic have
been paraffined for GSR and are being tested back at the lab. Expected to be
negative. Boyfriend’s right hand is in pretty bad shape. Both will need to
visit the hospital after you talk to them. Also, blood is everywhere in the
house, some old, some recent.” The rookie inhaled deeply, frantically searching
his brain to see if he forgot anything important.

Malone grunted and motioned to the door. “How
was the door found?”

The second rookie piped up. “Unlocked, sir. The
vic didn’t believe in security. Word is he considered himself the security. You
should really see the arsenal we found—”

Malone cut him off with a brusque wave of the
hand and started up the short flight of steps. Crogg stepped up right behind
him giving the two rookies an apologetic smile and a nod. So far, his primary duty
as detective was covering for Malone’s manners, or lack thereof. Yin to his
yang. The good thing about being Malone’s trusty sidekick was he never had to
ID himself to the rookies or cross-jurisdictional blowhards usually manning the
perimeter. Everyone recognized Malone. Crogg was a Malone man; that’s all they
needed to know to wave him through. No hazing, no third degree, no
my-balls-are-bigger-than-yours displays of authority—all of which at Crogg’s
age should have been par for the course. Working with the biggest swinging dick
in the county sure had its perks.

The crime lab techs were still working away, in
matching coveralls, like bees tending to the hive. Slipping on booties and
gloves so they wouldn’t contaminate the crime scene—Malone still couldn’t get
used to all these new procedures—Malone and Crogg stepped over the yellow tape
and entered the dimly lit shack.

The smell hit them first. A mixture of dirt,
vomit, beer and cigar ash—that same
eau de dirtbag
Neil had smelled as
he slunk through this space just ninety minutes ago.

As they made their way into the living room,
Crogg couldn’t help but take a second look at the easy chair. How dusty it
looked. How its edges seemed to smear and blur away in a cloudy gradient of
shifting dust, which seemed to billow of its own accord from the worn
upholstery in an unholy Brownian motion. His father had owned a chair like
that, and would tie one on most nights in that chair before laying into him or
Mom. Mostly Mom. Crogg shuddered and rushed to catch up with Malone in the
kitchen.

Three crime scene techs were busy dusting the
kitchen and living room for prints, collecting the rats (both the cannibal-live
and cannibalized-dead varieties) for their stomach contents. Seated at the
kitchen table was the girl, boy, and a female social worker. The social worker,
not an officer, was sent in by the Precinct’s fourth-floor brass to appease the
kids into providing a statement in a non-threatening, non-traumatizing,
non-suable way. She was specially trained in “delicate” interrogation and had
some mail-order certifications to prove it. Malone thought she was shit at her
job. And a liability. According to Malone, she was a prime example of the ugly
bureaucracy behind (or on top of) the badge: CYA before real justice. According
to Malone, she was responsible for setting perverts, kidnappers, and worse free
because the Defense would always have a field day with the credibility of
outside consultants and the stories they pulled from minors. It compromised the
whole damn shebang to bring in outsiders even to pull pubes and toenail
clippings from behind the toilet, let alone to be the lynchpin of primary
witness statements.

Needless to say, it would be one of the first
action items on Malone’s shit list if and when he ever joined the club on the
top floor.

Crogg remembered seeing her a few times before.
From what he heard around town, Dr. Rachel Dawes was the best at coaxing and
reassuring frightened children and battered women into providing a coherent
statement. He liked her, too. He thought she was cute.

The Medical Examiner came downstairs, spotted
them, and headed over. He was a gaunt, silver-haired man, whose body seemed to
be lost in his shapeless navy blue coveralls with loosely hanging elastic
cinches and reflective cuffs. The jumpsuit swished like a pall of tent fabric
when he walked. The word CORONER was silkscreened in four-inch-high block
letters on his back, and REAMS appeared in similar one-inch-high block letters
on the left side of his chest. His sunken eyes and pale, furrowed face betrayed
his decades of life on the night-shift, the many hours spent soaking in
bleached light hovered over the autopsy table. Neither Malone nor Crogg knew
him well. Neither man much wished to change that fact.

Reams joined them, his face a stone, and filled
them in on his findings. “Body is in the upstairs bedroom.”
Click.
“Daughter’s
room.”
Click.
“DOA.”
Click.
He tapped his pen against his steel
clipboard to mark every period and key word.

“Body, unmoved. Blunt force trauma at a single
location, posterior, perimortem hemorrhaging detected between the C1 and C2
vertebrae. Likely intoxication, blood test to confirm. COD likely related to
C1-C2 trauma.” He then moved out of his comfort zone, observation to
speculation, and the authoritative pen taps ceased as he instead brought the
capped end to his lower lip. “Daughter’s boyfriend called it in…claims
self-defense using just his hands. What’s fishy…is that the deceased is
twice…no three times as big as the kid. No way.”

He waved his hands in disbelief.

“Highly improbable the kid could have killed
the guy with his bare hands. Even though…his right hand appears broken and both
left and right are bruised and swelling like crazy. Appears to be old and new
contusions on boy’s hands…as if the trauma were weeks in the making. There are
no other apparent injuries found on the boy.” The stoic, rapid-fire bursts of
neurosis brought a perplexed, pained look across Reams’ face, which might have
been the closest he ever came to smiling.