Redemption (A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 3) (2 page)

The two boys on the curb shot out into the street so abruptly Burgess had to stand on the brakes to avoid hitting them. It was seven a.m. Saturday. Columbus Day weekend. The weather was perfect. The city was quiet. And even as he rocked to a stop, shoved the truck into park, and rolled down the window, he knew from the wild look on the taller boy's face and the single gasped word, "body," that his day, and probably his weekend, was lost.

In the rearview, he watched Nina and Neddy cease their happy chatter about school and the upcoming picnic and go quiet, their bright heads still, their faces wary.
Body
was a word they knew too well.

It was no prank. The taller of the two, a gangly kid with a lamb's pelt of curly dark hair, freckles standing out against his pale, drained skin, was wide-eyed with alarm. "Excuse me, sir," he gasped, his fingers tightening around the window frame to steady himself, "There's a... Do you have a cell phone? We need to call the police. There's a body in the water."

"I am the police," Burgess said. "I'll park and you can show me."

He pulled to the curb and turned to the kids in the back seat. "Stay in the car. I'll just be a minute." He'd hoped they hadn't heard, but Neddy's coxcomb of red hair was pressed up tight against his sister, his eyes squeezed shut, and Nina wore the stricken look he kept hoping time would erase.

Cursing quietly, he followed the boys out onto the wharf, wishing he could have just made a phone call passing this to someone else. But he was a cop, a homicide detective here in Portland, Maine, and the boy had said
body
. A few minutes earlier or later, the boys would have stopped another car and he could have gone on with his day. He might have made it out of cell phone range before word went up the food chain and came back down to him, making it someone else's problem.

Neddy and Nina didn't need this. They'd already been through more trauma than a combat vet. This was what they got, Burgess feared, for hanging around with him. He tried to keep his personal and professional lives separate, but trouble had a way of rising up and smacking him in the face. This was a perfect example.

His girlfriend, Chris, wanted to adopt these two foster kids, rescue them from the crap that life that thrown at them. After what they'd seen and had done to them, it was no simple task. Endearing as they were, Nina and Neddy were damaged. First, from having witnessed their father killing their mother. Later by being the targets of a disturbed and violent pedophile. He wasn't sure he was on board for another thing in his life that was this demanding. His day job—hell, his day, night, weekend, whole life job—was demanding enough.

The boys, moving with herky-jerky eagerness, led him out the wharf to a spot where two fish poles and some gear were propped against a railing, and pointed down into the water. "Down there," the tall boy said. "Do you see? Floating on bottom, there in the seaweed?"

"Is it really a body?" the smaller boy asked. He was blond, pink-cheeked and blocky, and tended to stay behind the other boy.

Burgess followed the boy's pointing finger, peering down through foam and flotsam into the choppy green water. Lot of times, you looked into the water, you couldn't be sure what you saw, but this one was pretty clear. A man's body—at least, it looked like a man—face-down, fully dressed, and shifting with the currents down there on the murky bottom.

In the moment his eyes confirmed that this
was
a body, a series of tasks vested. He needed to pay attention to what he was seeing here. He needed to get information about these boys, and to be sure they were okay, given what they'd seen. He needed to put the series of calls in motion that would bring divers and cops and evidence techs and the ME down to the waterfront. He needed to reassure Neddy and Nina until he could get Chris down here to pick them up. All this meant that his day's plans were canceled—no more holiday and no picnic—and that he and Chris would fight.

Burgess's day was fucked. At least he was still breathing. He pulled out his phone and called dispatch.

The boys—the taller one was Reese Pullman, the shorter Teddy Robideau—told him they'd come down to the waterfront for some early morning fishing. For the last hour, they'd fished on the other side of the wharf. When they'd moved over here to see if they'd have better luck, they'd spotted the body. Lucky for the dead guy, and Portland PD, these kids had consciences. They didn't try to snag him with their hooks or ignore their discovery in favor of their planned recreation. They'd raced right out to Commercial Street and flagged him down.

Burgess got their names and contact information, then said, "Your families know you're down here?"

Reese looked at his watch. "Yeah, and now we've only got thirty minutes before we have to go do family stuff."

"I'm sorry," Burgess said. "You're not going to be able to fish here anymore today. We're going to have to close the wharf while we get this body out of the water. But thanks for stopping me. You're good citizens, you know."

The shorter boy grinned shyly and shuffled his feet. "Maybe you oughta tell that to my mom. She thinks I'm just a big loser."

"I can do that," Burgess said. "You want me to send a letter?"

Teddy's eyes lit. "Jeez, would that be on official police paper and everything?" Burgess nodded. "Wow. That would be so cool. Can Reese get one, too?"

"You bet." Burgess watched the boys gather up their gear. "Either of you guys see anyone around when you came down to fish? People on the wharf or the waterfront, someone in a car?" A long shot, but he might as well ask.

Reese shrugged. "Nope. There were some trucks and stuff. You know. Making deliveries. You see anything, Teddy?" The shorter boy considered, then shook his head.

"One more thing." Burgess made his voice very serious. "I don't want either of you talking to the press—the TV or newspapers, okay? I know it sounds cool, being a celebrity but... do either of you watch TV? Watch those cop shows?" The boys nodded. "Well, that stuff about keeping the details away from the public—that's true. What you saw this morning is important. We don't want people knowing about it. Just your parents. Nobody else. Okay?"

He waited for their solemn nods, then gave business cards to each boy. "Hold on to these," he said. "If anyone pesters you to talk, you call me, okay?" Another pair of solemn nods. He walked them back to the street, then pulled out his phone and called Chris.

Instead of "hello," she said, "Where the heck are you?"

"Down on the waterfront. We've got a floater in the harbor."

All she said for the longest time was "No," but she got paragraphs into that one word. Then, finally, "Did the kids see?"

"No. A couple boys who were fishing flagged us down. I walked out on the wharf with them, saw the body in the water."

"I guess that's a shred of good news," she said. "They certainly don't need any more bodies. But what does this mean for us... for today? Can't you hand it off to someone else?" Before he could speak, she answered her own question. "It means Detective Sergeant Joe Burgess is going to be working today after all. It means... oh, never mind, we both know what it means. I'll take them myself."

"Chris, you know..."

"What your life is like? Yes, dammit, I do. I'll come get them."

She slammed down the phone and he went back to the car to explain to two kids who'd already had way too much death in their lives that he couldn't spend the day with them because there had been another death.

After Neddy's whispered, "Are we still going to have the picnic?" and his reassurance that they were, they took it well, if polite silence and pale, fixed faces below their bright red hair could be interpreted as "well." It left him wanting to go kick something, but that wouldn't have helped a damned thing.

"Chris is coming down. She'll pick you up, okay?" he said. "You wait in the car until she does." He hated to leave them, but there were things to do.

Burgess's call had put the series of other calls in motion that would mobilize the Portland police dive team and the police boat, call out detectives, patrol, and another police boat to fend off the curiosity seekers, and a call to the medical examiner's office up in Augusta to send an ME to the scene. The discovery of a body also called Portland Detective Stan Perry away from
his
weekend plans and down to the waterfront to deal with an unattended death.

Burgess's phone rang. His boss, Lieutenant Vince Melia. "What've we got, Joe?"

"Don't know yet, Vince. Body in the harbor. On the bottom, not a floater, which maybe means fresh, maybe means weighted. Fully clothed, as far as I can tell. Looks male, but we won't know 'til we get it up. Patrol's roping off the wharf. Dive boat's on the way and Stan and Wink are coming over. ME's office is sending Dr. Lee."

"Keep me up on it."

"Sure thing, Vince. Gonna be a while, though."

"Don't I know it. Nice day. You'll probably get a crowd."

"Already got one. I've got marine patrol sending out a boat to keep the gawkers away. I'll let you know if I need another."

"You got enough patrol?"

"I hope so."

"Need anything else?"

"Disposition transplant?"

"Your body would reject it." And Melia was gone.

Burgess
was
cranky—something Chris said was getting too common. He loved being a detective, the way his mind started ticking when he heard about a body or rolled up on a crime scene, wondering, planning, anticipating what he might find. He loved getting justice for victims. He relished that essential confrontation between himself and the bad guys—the conflict he
had
to win. Not that there was ever a good time for a body, but today's timing couldn't have been worse. Things had been tense between him and Chris lately. Even the most understanding partner gets sick of a detective's hours, the distraction, the broken dates.

Today's outing was to have been a step toward mending the breach. Instead, as so often happened, his personal life would have to be postponed. A body took precedence over everything. Depending on what the divers found down there, it could be hours, days, even weeks before life got back to normal. If there was any such thing as normal for a homicide detective.

A few minutes later, some young patrol officers, including Remy Aucoin, arrived to help control the scene. As Aucoin and another officer started stringing up crime scene tape to keep people off the wharf, a gray Taurus jerked to a stop, and Stan Perry got out. Perry snatched a windbreaker from the back seat, jammed a Portland PD ball cap on his shaved head, and pushed his way through the gathering crowd, growling at people who didn't move fast enough. Burgess, being an able detective, surmised that his colleague wasn't in a good mood either.

"Sheesh, Joe," Perry said. "I was in bed when Melia called."

"Lucky you."

"I wasn't alone," Perry said, "which is the good news. Bad news is that I'd promised her breakfast at Becky's. And now look."

Burgess studied the young detective's bloodshot eyes and puffy face. "Doesn't look like you got much sleep." Stan could take it. Soon he'd be clear-eyed and perky. One of the advantages of a youth Burgess had long ago left behind. These days, wear and tear, and regret dragged behind him like an invisible tail. Chris had been nudging him out of it, but lately, she'd become as much a part of the problem as the solution. She said he avoided responsibility and connection. He thought he had enough responsibility, more of which would vest when the boat brought the body ashore, and he'd been working on connection.

"Not much sleep but man did I get laid." Perry's grin widened. "Whew! This one is a wildcat." Burgess rolled his eyes. Stan's exploits were legend in the detectives' bay.

* * *

They stood at the edge of an old granite wharf that reeked of lobster bait, as the two divers, seal-like their sleek black suits, and the personnel on the boat struggled to load the basket holding the bagged body. Beside them, Assistant Medical Examiner Andrew Lee bounced restlessly in his spiked beige golf shoes. The body was not small, the clothes heavy with water, and the Stokes basket kept slipping as they tried to raise it up.

Pleasure boats circled like sharks, carrying morbid gawkers the cops called blood maggots, kept back by a patrolling police boat that periodically barked arrest threats through a bullhorn to those who came too close. Too bad they couldn't just string a half-mile of crime scene tape out there. They had strung it up on land to create a secure area where they could unload and examine the body. A noisy crowd had gathered behind it, the noise augmented by new vans and news crews and the loud thwack of a helicopter overhead. Two gulls squabbled over a donut some wiseass had tossed.

The scene had all the hallmarks of a carnival and none of the gravity it deserved. He was glad that SOP for water recovery was to bag the body underwater so the gawkers who'd brought binoculars didn't get to violate the victim's privacy any more than they already had.

The warm and windy October day was so beautiful it hurt. The sky and the dancing sea were a deep, sapphire blue, the trees in the city rising up behind them in the full glory of a Maine fall. Fishing boats tied to the dock creaked and groaned and the rigging on berthed sailboats clanged. Farther out, the water was dotted with white canvas as sailors squeezed in one last day before their boats got hauled and shrink-wrapped.