Innuendo (8 page)

“You want to write up the warrant?” said Rawlins, wondering how in the hell he was going to get back in there.

With a shrug, Foster replied, “Sure. I got my computer out in the car, all I gotta do is find a printer. You want to go downtown and take her statement?”

“Actually… actually, can't we get someone from the dog watch to do that? We're going to have a shift carry over in a few minutes,” he said, meaning that the next Car 1110 rotation was about to begin, “and I really don't want to leave here yet, not while this is so fresh.”

“Sure.”

An empty silence fell between them. They both knew what had to be done next. And they both knew it was the worst.

Foster said, “What about the family? You want to do it? I looked in his wallet and got his home address.”

“Listen…”

“Okay, okay, I'll do it but you're gonna owe me, big-time too.” Foster pushed himself to his feet. “You know what the best part about retirement's gonna be? Not having to make these shitty calls, that's what. Not having to call up some mother or father or wife or husband in the middle of the night and say, guess what, your worst nightmare has just begun.”

“Thanks. I'll do the next call, I swear. And I'll take care of all the other ones tonight.”

Among other things, of course, he'd have to call dispatch and see if they had a record of any recent calls from this address. Then he'd have to run a CAPRS check and see if the Computer Assisted Police Reporting System indicated the victim had any felonies or arrests.

“I want a beer and a burger out of this one,” said Foster.

“You got it.”

They left the laundry room, Foster heading to his Crown Vic, parked somewhere in the mayhem outside, and Rawlins starting down the hall toward Andrew Lyman's apartment.

Rawlins figured he had an hour, plus or minus. It would take Foster that long to write up a warrant on his laptop, swing by one of the precinct stations—probably the fifth—to print it up, then stop by an on-call judge, who'd read and sign it. And that, Rawlins was sure, would give him more than enough time. Technically, of course, he shouldn't look through anything, but a search warrant in a murder case was a foregone conclusion—no judge in his right mind would deny it—and who was going to quibble with a bit of time this way or that?

You just gotta do it. You just gotta go back in there.

Right. He simply had to get some distance. And then he had to walk back into that single room basement apartment and not see some kid who was lost and looking, not some gorgeous farm boy whose young, firm body had pressed against his. No, he had to go back and look at a corpse. Andrew was gone. All that was left was the shell. This was work, and in the scope of things Rawlins had seen much worse, from decapitations to vivisections.

Forcing himself down the hall, he took a deep breath, then turned into the room.

This was the door, he told himself, that Kathy Diedrich had found ajar. She'd come down, found it cracked open, knocked once or twice. And perhaps the door had swung open. Looking into the room just as she must have done, Rawlins saw the body, the blood. But not the mask. No, Andrew's head was tilted back slightly, so she easily could have missed the thin black material covering Andrew's eyes.

Ignoring the two people from the Bureau of Investigation coolly going about the room doing their work, Rawlins focused on the double mattress on the floor. The sheets were kicked this way and that. And the beautiful naked body, trim and muscular, once so active, now lay forever still. It was a perfect body, Rawlins saw that now more than ever. The chest was big and broad, the nipples erect with just a trace of youthful blondish hair around them. And that perfect waist was smooth and lean, again with just a hint of hair leading up to and surrounding the navel. The arms were big, too, not pumped up, not overblown, but firm and naturally muscular. Exactly, Andrew was no gym queen, vainly working biceps or triceps over and over again. There was no one muscle that had been overworked and swollen to the point of deformity. No, this boy's body was perfect, naturally so, because he'd grown up on a farm, hauling bales of hay, shoveling seed, driving fence posts. And in that regard, Andrew had died at his physical peak.

But the neck…

Once lean and powerful, now destroyed by a single powerful slash that cut deep into muscle and vein. And, yes, blood. A great river of it that had burst from the body and spilled onto the bed as if onto a floodplain.

Oh, Christ, thought Rawlins. What a handsome kid. He saw those small, firm lips, the very ones that had kissed his neck, and Rawlins felt his stomach swell and shrink. Just keep it professional, he told himself. Just pull back. Just look at the scene. What's going on here?

There's one very dead young man lying in the middle of this room and, besides himself, there were two B of I guys circling the body; only they weren't both guys like they usually were. One was a heavy man in gray polyester pants and a striped shirt, his hair gray, his face wrinkled. The other was a woman wearing dark slacks and a blue sweater, her long, thick hair just barely streaked with gray. He was putting a new filter into a small, handheld vacuum cleaner, and she was holding a small video camera to her eye and obsessively taping every inch of that beautiful body, every fold of the sheet, and every drop of death.

Slipping into professional mode, Rawlins stepped farther into the room, crossed to their work kit, and grabbed a thin pair of latex gloves from a small cardboard box. He pulled them on and went to work.

The acrid smell of death filled the room, both from the drying blood that was growing more thick and syrupy by the minute as well as from the body's bowels, which had discharged. Rawlins stepped closer, saw that the apricot-colored sheets were darkened with a foul stain. The top sheet was pushed halfway between the navel and the crotch, and Rawlins lifted it up and peered in. Ignoring the fresh gust of fecal matter, he saw light brown pubic hair and a shrunken, lifeless circumcised penis. He also saw exactly what he expected, a dried milk-ish dab of semen on the tip of the penis and a glycerinlike shine on the shaft. As if to confirm it, Rawlins dropped the sheet and glanced to the left of the bed and saw a plastic bottle of lubrication and a crumpled white towel that had surely been used for cleanup. Could the perfect DNA samples be simply and easily found in those soft folds?

Turning his attention to the slashed neck, he saw that the deepest part was in the center and then continued to the left, a thick cut that indicated the perpetrator was right-handed. The blood spilled down the neck and to the left as well, then onto the mattress, some of it soaking in and a great lot of it flowing over and onto the floor in a puddle that was undisturbed by footprints or the slightest of smears. That alone indicated that the body hadn't been moved and that the victim had been killed not simply in this apartment, but right here in this bed. Rawlins surmised there had been no struggle, that the attack had come as a total surprise.

But why the mask?

Turning his full attention to Andrew's face, Rawlins studied the thin black mask covering the eyes and held in place by an elastic band around the back of the head. A narrow thing, it resembled the infamous mask of Zorro, except of course this one had no slits cut for the eyes. So it wasn't really a mask, but a blindfold. But why? The obvious reason was to prevent Andrew from seeing someone, and that someone was most surely either the last person he'd had sex with or the person who had killed him. More likely than not, it was one and the same, but perhaps not. In any case, the mask indicated why there'd been no struggle—Andrew literally hadn't seen what was coming.

Oh, God, the poor kid. Shaking his head, Rawlins turned away and rose to his feet.

Andrew, Rawlins knew, had taken the job as caretaker to this and two neighboring apartment buildings not because of the pay, which was nearly negligible, but because it included this cold, one-room apartment. Actually, caretaker was a glorified title. Andrew's job wasn't to screen tenants and lease apartments, for that was done by the owner, who lived in a big ranch house in the suburb of Richfield. Rather, Andrew's job was to vacuum the hallways, empty the trash in common areas such as the laundry rooms, rake the leaves outside, and shovel the walks front and back. All of which he gladly did in exchange for his own place, his first apartment, which was furnished with the abandoned goods of former residents—this lumpy mattress, the beat-up white dresser, the sagging couch, that broken coffee table.

Where would Andrew have put it?

Standing up, Rawlins looked around. There was this room, a closet in the corner, and an alcove that held a small kitchen with a built-in dinette table. Rawlins turned and headed straight to the dresser.

As the B of I guy started vacuuming around the bed, sucking up any fiber, any hair that he could into the small brown, high-filter machine, Rawlins scanned the top of the dresser. Some change, a movie stub, a mostly burned candle. Keys. A beat-up old nylon wallet, dark green with worn-out black stitching on the edges. No, realized Rawlins, Andrew wouldn't have kept it in the open, not just sitting right out here for anyone to see.

Looking carefully over his left shoulder, he saw that the woman— what was her name? Glass? Marcia Glass?—had put down the video camera and picked up a 35mm camera. Focusing her complete attention on the body, she was now shooting picture after picture of the slash on the victim's throat, a close-up from this angle, a broader shot from the right. Good, thought Rawlins, relieved not to be in the cameras view, for he couldn't by any means have this documented.

There were three drawers to the old dresser, the top one narrower than the bottom two. Obviously the piece of furniture had been painted a number of times, the latest coat being white, and he had to tug at the top drawer to get it open. As it revealed its contents, Rawlins's eyes were immediately caught by a photograph of a naked body, a muscular guy posed on a beach, his cock fully erect. Reaching in, Rawlins did a quick check, guessed there were, what, three, maybe four porno magazines. Tugging the drawer a little farther, he saw a small stash of sex toys, including a handful of condoms, a chrome cock ring, and a pinkish latex butt plug. Ignoring the paraphernalia, Rawlins saw a handful of pencils and pens on the other side of the drawer, some paper clips, a rubber band, a checkbook, and a small spiral notebook with a red cover.

A rush of relief surging through him, Rawlins reached for the notebook, then just as quickly caught himself. Glancing back, he ascertained that neither Glass nor the guy was either watching or photographing him, but were both still focused on the corpse and its immediate environs. Knowing that he'd never have another chance, Rawlins lowered his hand into the drawer, cracked the small notebook, and saw the small, neat handwriting, page after page.

Oh, Christ, it was all in here, wasn't it, just like he'd said it was.

And without another moment's hesitation, Rawlins shut Andrew's diary, carefully lifted it from the drawer, and slipped it into his coat pocket.

It was their nightly
ritual.

While the water power of the mighty Mississippi had once made Minneapolis the milling capital of the world, the title, due to the advent of the gasoline-powered engine, had been lost decades earlier. A substantial share of the world's grain was still grown in the upper Midwest, of course, and the most important thing to the people who farmed the land even today was simply and absolutely one thing: the weather.

So as they did every night just before ten, John and Martha Lyman sat down in their living room and turned on the television. They lived in a white three-bedroom rambler that John's father had built some thirty years ago when he'd torn down the old farmhouse that had stood for almost seventy years. They'd wanted something new. Something modern. A few of the conveniences, because, after all, they did live almost one hundred miles west of The Cities and the land did stretch boringly flat for as far as the eye could see and the mind could imagine.

And while what happened in Minneapolis and St. Paul was of little concern to those who lived out here on the plains, the weather forecast was critical. Particularly now. It was mid-September, and things would start changing fast. The first snows could come anytime, really, though usually nothing stuck until after Halloween. After that, pretty much anything went. Two years ago the summertime high had been one hundred and five above, while the wintertime low had been forty-four below.

“Don't forget tomorrow night's the parent-teacher conference,” said Martha, sipping some strawberry herbal tea as she sat down on the couch, a plaid thing done in orange and green.

She was a trim, reasonably handsome woman, with shoulder-length blond hair that she usually pulled back into a ponytail. She wore a wool sweater and, as she did most days, blue jeans. A busy woman, her days were filled with two things, the farm and their children, two of whom still lived at home.

“You're not going to be late again tomorrow, are you?” she asked.

Relaxing in the brown imitation leather recliner to her right, her husband replied, “Nope.”

He'd been gone all day until just a little while ago. Off doing some business, he told her. It was something about a loan for a new piece of equipment, though she didn't much like the idea of that. It had been John's grandfather's farm, and while they owed no money on the land, trying to keep this place going was more than a challenge. For over five years now they'd been trapped in a cycle of horribly low prices, grisly weather, plant diseases, not to mention a bad dip in the export market. In the last two years alone six nearby families had gone bankrupt.