Endangered Species (9 page)

“What color was it?”

“Blue. Dark blue, with factory trim package. A real cherry.”

“Did he come in alone or with someone?”

“Alone.”

“What was he driving when he came in?”

The salesman stared at Wager, finger and thumb pausing on the pimple. “Good question!” He shook his head. “You know, I don’t think he was driving anything—he paid his money and drove the car off the lot. So I guess he wasn’t driving anything.”

“Did you see anybody let him off?”

“No. I saw him looking at the car and went out. He checked it over and then bought it.”

“And handed you forty-one hundred dollars in cash.”

“Hey, it happens. Some people don’t trust banks. Other people go shopping, they take their money with them. There’s nothing illegal about doing cash business, is there?”

Wager had to admit there wasn’t. “You didn’t ask to see his ID when he signed the purchase papers?”

“Well, no. Why should I? I mean, if he paid by check, then, yeah, I want an ID. But cash ….”

And the permanent car registration would be sent to the address on the sales slip—the Wyandot address—regardless of whose name was given as the new owner.

Wager thanked the man and started out the door.

“No problem, Officer. Say, if you’re looking for a good deal on a good car, here’s my card. I give a special discount to public servants. And hey, something else: if you bring in a friend who buys a car, I’ll throw in a bonus discount for you on your own choice of fine vehicle. Here, take a couple more cards.”

In his car, Wager requested a BOLO for the blue Toyota and its BAC 881 license, then for any arrest record on Roger B. Taney. He didn’t expect any, and that’s what he was told. A scan of the now-computerized contact file didn’t bring up the name, which fulfilled another expectation. One or both of the man’s names were aliases, and for some reason he’d gone to a lot of trouble to hide his identity even before the arson and homicide. False names, cash business, and a series of visitors. It fit what Wager had heard about safe houses for draft dodgers, or even a cell for the Panthers or Weathermen. But that had been the Vietnam era, and this was the nineties. A stash house for a narcotics ring? It didn’t match any pattern Wager had run across during his stint in the Organized Crime Unit, but that didn’t mean new patterns couldn’t evolve. And dope dealing was a high-risk business—half the murders in Denver were related to dope. Look at Ray Moralez.

He could have waited for Archy Douglas to finish his report on the Wyandot crime scene, and Douglas would have preferred that. When he saw Wager, he nodded shortly and turned back to measuring the distance from the chalked outline of the body to something half buried in the black ash of a charred baseboard near the closet. Walt Adamo, drawing sketches and taking the notes, was a little friendlier. “Morning, Gabe.”

Wager nodded hello. Forensics usually operated in teams, not only to check each other’s work and save time, but so at least one officer would be available out of the work schedules to testify when the case was finally heard. “Did the arson squad give you a copy of their report?” Wager asked.

Adamo answered. “Yeah. Four points of origin: bedroom closet, here; the living room near the front door; small bedroom across the hall; the back porch. Accelerant trailers along the walls. Arson, no question.”

“Gasoline?”

“Looks that way. The lab tests should be back tomorrow.”

“Hefley says the victim probably died from a blow to the back of the head.”

Douglas looked up from the measuring tape. Its other end was anchored at the left toe of the chalked outline by a colored tack. “Any idea what the weapon was?”

“Blunt instrument.”

The technician’s finger pointed at the object he measured, a small bed lamp whose metal shaft was bent by heat. “About this size?”

Wager, too, stared at its neck and heavy base. He would have to make another survey of the neighbors to ask about any loud arguments they may have heard, any indications that “Marshall” and his woman didn’t have the most copacetic of domestic lives. “Can you people get fingerprints off that?”

Adamo wagged his head. “We can try, that’s about all. Dust, ash—harder than hell to get anything with enough points for courtroom use.”

A satisfactory courtroom identification usually called for ten points of similarity between a latent print and a suspect’s fingerprint. The more the better; but the fire’s ash, the flood of water, the traffic of fire fighters, all cut the chances of finding good prints. “It looks like the guy living here used an alias. And there was no identification on the victim.”

Archy Douglas let out a long breath as he glanced around the gutted room. “You’re saying this crap is the only evidence you’ve got.”

“Hey.” Wager smiled. “You’re always telling me that physical evidence beats eyewitnesses.”

“Yeah, well, that’s still true.” He told Adamo the measurement and tied a tag around the small lamp before reeling in the tape. Adamo penciled in the item number and recorded it on his clipboard. “But all I can do is give you the facts, Gabe,” said Douglas. “You got to bring in the suspects.”

Easier said than done. Wager began a slow tour of the broken and sagging house. The yellow police tape was still strung around the entry, and an occasional car would slow as it passed on Wyandot. But for most of the neighborhood, the excitement was over, and only a cluster of preschoolers chasing a ball next door paused to peer through the scorched and withered lilac bushes to see if anything interesting was going to happen.

Wager, hands in his pockets to avoid touching anything, stepped cautiously through the gaping rooms to look at things he had not been able to see in yesterday morning’s darkness. The living room was a tumbled mess of fallen plasterboard, broken and burned studs, padded furniture that had been split and soaked to kill any sparks. The only surviving decoration was a scorched and curled poster taped to one of the inside walls; it showed a whale curving gracefully in the blue light of a clear ocean. Its caption read,
SAVE THE EARTH FOR ALL OF US
. In the silence and through the punctured walls, Wager could hear the murmur of voices from the bedroom. Scattered in the debris and muck of the carpet was a partially melted telephone and a handful of torn and fire-scarred newsmagazines—
Time
,
Newsweek
—and several copies of glossy nature publications:
Audubon Magazine
,
Greenpeace
,
Nature
. The small drawers in the living room end tables held nothing. The drawers of the bedrooms were also empty, and that’s what Wager felt about the entire house—it was empty. A lot of rental properties had that feel. Even after more than a decade, his own apartment still had a temporary quality to it that upset Elizabeth. She said it seemed as if he were a guest in his own rooms. Which didn’t bother Wager: a photograph or two and his Marine Corps NCO’s sword on the wall, clean underwear in the rented bureau, his shoes and an extra sport coat in the closet, and he was home. But these rooms were even more stark than that. Aside from the cooking utensils—the usual hodgepodge of spatulas, rusty can openers, and dented spoons that a series of tenants had left behind—this house had been stripped. No television set or stereo, bathroom cabinets empty of both toiletries and cleaning gear, even the refrigerator and storage shelves missing everything except a few perishables. The only thing left behind in the closets was a body.

The more Wager wandered through the rooms, the more they had the look of a stash house, a place to store drugs and divvy shipments for further delivery to street sellers. He took a last look around the shattered kitchen with its scorched stove and refrigerator, doors gaping open to lightless and wet interiors, then he went back to Douglas and Adamo.

“Will you run some dope smears on the kitchen table and counters?”

Walt Adamo was tying another numbered tag to a piece of evidence before bagging it, a small brass belt buckle blued by heat and burned away from any belt. “You think that’s what this place was?”

“Either somebody cleaned the apartment out before the fire or they never really moved in.”

Archy Douglas nodded. “We’ll get to it.”

It would help if the department could spare another team from the crime lab. But that had been one of the places where the chief had decided to save money: support units weren’t allowed to hire the replacements to fill retirements or transfers. Only the already overtaxed street divisions were allowed to keep their strength up. The patrol units, the chief liked to say, were the first line of defense. But as in a lot of other cities, Denver’s population paid more and more in taxes and got less and less back for what it paid. It was Elizabeth’s complaint that most of the local tax money now went to the state and especially to the federal government, where it was dumped by the truckload into the bottomless pockets of the greedy, the crafty, the dishonest, and even some who weren’t Congressmen. Meanwhile, high prices went higher, low income went lower, and the city’s ability to function began to stumble and fail. It was, she said, a hell of a tough time to be on the city council, but it was no time to quit.

Wager’s job was to catch killers, and it was work he knew he was good at. But seeing the world more and more from Elizabeth’s perspective lately, he had the feeling that many of the murders he faced were symptoms rather than causes—the results of crumbling neighborhoods, of city services that no longer worked, especially of inept or self-serving state and federal bureaucrats and of politicians who did not care, of the cynical flaunting of greater and greater wealth in the faces of more and more poor people. And so much of that wealth stolen from the neediest. The big crooks got away with it; the little ones got chased by Wager.

He wandered back through the remains of the kitchen and out into the musty, charred odor of what was left of a screened room that served as a back porch. A pair of iron cots and wet, half-burned mattresses showed where visitors had stayed. A washer and a dryer stood against one wall, their white enamel finishes blistered in large brown patches. But this area, like the rest, was void of signs of life. A few scattered and empty plastic containers, many half-melted, a small pile of soaked newspapers stacked against one wall. He lifted the top wad of charred and browned pages—the
Rocky Mountain News
—and looked at the date: September 20, two days earlier, the last paper delivered before the fire. Under that were copies of the
New York Times
and the
Christian Science Monitor
bearing the same date. The three papers alternated in the stack, starting with the twentieth and going back for about a week. All had that refolded look of having been thoroughly read before being stacked.

The backyard, too, had a little-used feel about it. Though the lilacs and honeysuckle bushes nearest the house were burned and withered, the remnants of a flower bed along the back fence blossomed with unkempt life and held a few scraps of windblown trash. The concrete sidewalk that led to the alley gate was tufted with grass and weeds. Someone had stretched yellow police tape across the outside of the board fence to seal the gate, and Wager looked over it into the narrow alley: trash cans, garage doors for those few houses that had garages, the power lines that served the neighborhood. If the scene had anything to tell him, Wager wasn’t sure what it was.

A survey of the neighboring houses was just as informative. No, there were no loud parties or fights; no one had heard angry noises coming from the house prior to the fire; in fact, there was nothing to draw attention to the inhabitants. A young blond woman had recently been seen hanging laundry to dry out back, but nobody had a chance to talk to her and she didn’t seem interested in anything outside her own yard.

Wager looked up from his little green notebook. “She hung out clothes to dry?”

The woman in the doorway was one of those he’d talked to the night of the fire. Today, however, instead of a tightly clutched robe, she wore a pair of denim pants and a faded T-shirt that read:
WEST SIDE STREET FAIR
. “Yes. They have that clothesline thing in the backyard. A lot of the houses around here have them.”

Wager remembered. It was a galvanized pole set in an old concrete pad, with four braces to hold clotheslines in a series of squares. “Their dryer didn’t work?”

“I don’t know. I remember seeing clothes hanging out there, is all.”

He thanked the woman and drove slowly over to Zuni Street and a telephone hood at the corner of a 7-Eleven store. A survey of the yellow pages gave him addresses for the area’s newspaper dealers, distributors, and services. Local papers and the
New York Times
could be bought at hundreds of vending boxes all over town; the
Christian Science Monitor
was harder to find. Wager guessed that if they weren’t delivered by mail—and that mailman hadn’t mentioned carrying them—they must have been purchased at a newsstand. The closest one he found was downtown at Fifteenth and Stout.

9/22

1244

“S
URE,
I
KNOW
him. Comes in almost every day.
Times
,
Monitor
, and
News
. Sometimes a magazine or two.” The man behind the glass counter handed the sketch back to Wager. “Don’t know why he doesn’t subscribe to the
News
or the
Post
, at least. Home delivery, you know.
Times
too, for that matter. But I’m not complaining if it’s the way he wants to do it.”

“When’s the last time he came in?”

“Well, it has been a couple days—hasn’t been here yet today, either. Wasn’t yesterday. Maybe the day before.”

“Ever talk to him?”

“Talk?” He ran a hand over some strands of lank hair raked across a balding spot on his crown. “Not much. He comes from California, I know that.”

“How?”

“We got to talking once about the difference in traffic between here and L.A. I got a son lives out in L.A. Visit him sometimes.”

“Does he ever come in with anyone?”

Another rub. “Yeah—last time, maybe time before that, he came in with a tall fella. Maybe six two, young-looking, but I think he was older than he looked.”