Redemption (A Joe Burgess Mystery, Book 3) (4 page)

Burgess stomped on his feelings and went back to kneel beside the body, trying not to look directly at the hard-worn face. If he let it start, a dozen Reggies from other times and places would cram into his mind. He was here to do a job. The rest could wait. Cops didn't wear their hearts on their sleeves. The public and the press were always looking for ways to fault cops. Exposed hearts made easy targets.

"Yeah, I knew him," he said. "Name's Reginald Libby."

No surprise that he'd know a victim here in Portland. A lot of policing went into dealing with the vulnerable, lost, and damaged. Cops knew their cities and the people in them. Even now, years since he was a street cop, the city remained a map of stories. He couldn't go a block without recognizing someone. In some parts of town, half the houses he passed had history. Take a civilian on a ride-along, and if a cop were inclined, he could tell stories nonstop, reading the buildings like a guidebook of crime and bad luck.

Lee nodded and went back to examining the body. "No obvious signs of trauma," he said. "I don't want to undress him out here. Too much risk of losing something if this is suspicious. I'll know better when I get him on the table. Could be this fellow just fell in and with all these clothes, he couldn't save himself. Was he a drinker, Joe?"

Burgess nodded. "Vietnam vet." It felt like breakfast was going to come up, and he hadn't eaten breakfast. He pulled out his notebook and started taking notes. Document everything. That was the rule. A year or two down the road, a case could turn on the smallest thing. That was why they took the time now. The black shadow of a gull passed over them like a bad omen. Burgess shook it off. Saw that Dani was trying to take pictures and moved back. When she was done, Wink checked the security of the bags on the hands and feet, did a quick search for a wallet or other ID, and came up empty.

Lee zipped up the bag. "I can do this tomorrow morning," he said, consulting his Blackberry. "Nine work for you?"

Burgess looked at Stan and Wink. They nodded. "Nine works for us." Nine meant eight or earlier, and the ME's office in Augusta was an hour away. Saturday and Sunday now both gone. Chris wasn't going to be happy, though they'd both known it would be like this since Burgess had uttered the word "floater."

"If you're done with me," Lee said, tapping a golf shoe, his spikes clanging on the old wood, "I'll be off."

"Body's yours 'til you release," Burgess said. "He ready to go?"

Lee nodded, turning to go, then swiveled back. "Don't be too hard on yourself. Sometimes, whatever you do, you can't save people."

Burgess stared after him, surprised. Dr. Lee was a good ME, smart, observant, fast. On the stand, he was great. Many a defense attorney had made the mistake of assuming that Asian and
from away
—without six generations of Maine in his pedigree—meant ill-informed and mediocre, the best a poor state could do, when Lee was anything but. If he could fault the man anywhere, it was in the area of compassion. The first ME he'd worked with had had such a reverence for the dead; Lee treated them like bodies. They'd clashed over this on his last big case, a conflict that had given him more insight into the man. But Lee had never been so personal, and it was disconcerting. Burgess wore his cop's face in public—and public included Dr. Lee. He was uncomfortable that he'd let his guard down.

Chris would have laughed at him, she of the lancet observations, following her laugh with one of her incisive comments. Here it would have been something like what was wrong with caring about someone he had a thirty-year history with? Nothing, of course. In her world—Chris was a nurse—being a caring person was a good thing. Fine in his, too. You just kept it to yourself. Other cops thought you were too emotionally involved, they wouldn't trust your theories and observations, and often with good reason. Get too emotional and sometimes you couldn't trust yourself. You'd see what you wanted instead of what was there; get locked into your assumptions instead of keeping an open mind, violating that basic principle of investigation—don't let your assumptions get ahead of the facts.

Burgess shook himself. He hated it when he wallowed. He was out here to do a job. "Stan," he said, "I'm going to talk to some people, see what they know about when Reggie was last seen. You and Wink stay here, be ready to debrief the divers when they come in. Take care of anything they find down there. Be sure you get written reports. Body position, animal feeding, water depth and visibility, temperature. Make sure they got water and soil samples. Chaplin's good. He'll think of all that. Get a tide chart for the file. Put the word out to patrol, we want to know when anyone last saw him. Anything significant, you call me."

Stan nodded. "Sure thing, Boss."

"I'm not your..." Stan was grinning.

As soon as he stepped over the yellow tape he was mobbed by the media. All those fuzzy mikes and made-up talking heads coming at him in a group squawk, everyone vying for his attention and talking at once. Charlene Farrell smiling like he was her own special sweetheart, cooing "Joe," in her breathy little-girl voice. He held up a hand. "Come on, guys and gals, you know the drill. Any statement about this case will come from Lieutenant Melia or Captain Cote. I'm just a poor cop trying to do his job. Appreciate it if you'd let me through."

Even at that, he had to push his way back to the Explorer, first through the press and then through the crowd, screening out the idle chatter, the comments, the noise, as he planned where he'd go first. As he passed an idle group of laughing, beer-swilling young men—well into it, by the sound and smell, though it was barely past noon—he heard one tell a newcomer, "Yeah, I heard it was an old wino fell in. No big loss."

"Shit, no, man," the other replied. "You see anything?"

"Nothin' but a body bag."

His rage boiled up. He tried to choke it off. Cops heard this all day long. It was supposed to bounce like water off a duck's back. As he turned to look, the speaker tossed an empty off the wharf into the water and grabbed another from a cooler.

Burgess dropped a hand on the guy's shoulder. "What's your name, son?"

The shoulder twisted away. "What's it to you?" The flabby young face swiveled toward him, all arrogance and attitude.

Burgess showed his badge. "It's littering, an open-container violation, and refusing to cooperate with an officer," he said. "For starters. You want to see where else you can take this?"

He thought the kid would wet himself as the flab flushed crimson. The guy's buddies moved away. "Oh, shit, officer, I'm sorry. I just... you know... guess I wasn't thinking."

"You got that right," Burgess agreed. "Now why don't you take yourself and your pals somewhere else. Maybe think about the fact that someone's dead and it's really not that funny."

Big-mouth and his buddies fell all over themselves getting out of there, leaving their cooler behind. Burgess flipped the lid and saw about two dozen beers left, so he drained it and took it to the car. Just doing his civic duty, keeping the waterfront clean, but you never knew when a cooler full of beer might come in handy. Then he hefted himself into the driver's seat and headed for the back side of the hill. Practicing his self-control. He kept this up, he might as well go stand in the park and give speeches about civics. That wouldn't do Reggie's memory any more good than a bunch of loudmouthed louts or a mother with misplaced family values.

He'd already sent patrol to sit on Reggie's room. The way word traveled in this city, if he hadn't, by the time he got there, Reggie's possessions might have been subject to a little equitable distribution. It was a logical street mentality. If Reggie was dead, he didn't need his stuff. Living the way he did—hand to mouth and in a shitty place—there were probably no caring relatives who'd be coming around. And though they'd been a longtime couple, Reggie and Maura didn't live together. Mostly 'cuz he came and went, while she'd been in the same place for years.

He turned off Cumberland onto a side street, pulled up in front of a peeling gray three-decker with a mangy yard and saggy front porch. Two men sat on the porch enjoying the sunshine, passing a paper bag back and forth.

"Hey, Joe," one of them said, "nice day, huh?" The toothpick-thin man grinned, showing a scattering of tobacco-stained teeth. "You come to see Reggie? He ain't home. Wasn't home yesterday, neither. Maura's in a state."

Burgess sat down on the steps. "Benjy told me. When's the last time you saw him, Jim?"

The man squinted up his eyes, considering. "Dunno. Today's what? Saturday? I saw him on Thursday, I think. I was up early. Thursday my daughter comes by, brings me my clean laundry, takes away the dirty stuff. I tell ya. I was shit for a dad when she was kid, but she's nice as can be to me. Bakes me stuff. Does my laundry. Sometimes she even brings the kids by, let's 'em say hi."

He fumbled through his pockets, extracted some photos from a tattered wallet, and offered them to Burgess. "That's my Diane. Ain't she just the prettiest thing?"

The woman in the photo was heavy, with bleached blond hair tending toward orange. The kids were both pudgy and sullen. The lighting made them all look slightly green. It was a bad studio photo that Burgess wouldn't have paid two cents for, but it said family, and holding on to any kind of family when you were a drunk was something. Besides, it was nice out here in the sun. He wasn't eager to face Reggie's room.

He handed it back. "She's got a real sweet face, Jim. How old are the kids?"

"Dakota's eight and Shawna's six." Jim returned the pictures to his wallet with great care. "Yeah, woulda been around eight, eight-thirty, I'm thinkin'. That's when she woulda been drivin' the kids to school. She was carryin' the basket of laundry up the steps, I was holdin' the door, and Reggie came out past me and got into that van."

"What van?"

Jim looked at the other man. "You see him, Chub?" Chub hunched his shoulders and looked longingly at the bag that held the bottle. "Well, I think it was a van," Jim said. "Unless it was a truck. I dunno. I guess I wasn't paying much attention. Diane was saying she'd brought me cinnamon rolls, like her mom used to make. Which were always my favorite."

He ducked his head and grinned again. "Woulda stayed married to her mom just for them rolls, only she threw me out for the drinkin'." His eyes were suddenly clear and sad. "She's a good woman. Didn't deserve the likes of me."

He crumpled the bag tighter around the bottle. "And hell, I wasn't even so bad back then. Kept down a job and everything. Even after she threw me out, she never tried to turn the kids against me, see. That takes character. I dunno, the situation was reversed, I'd of done so good."

He was about to take a drink when he remembered who Burgess was. "Reggie's got him a job."

Burgess nodded. "What kind of job?"

"Workin' in some factory. Cleanin' 'n stuff. Part-time. Paid under the table, ya know." Another duck of the head. Another recognition that maybe he shouldn't be telling this to a cop. But then he grinned. "You don't care none about that, do ya, Joe? You're his friend so probably you're just glad Reggie's workin', huh?"

Burgess wasn't ready to tell this man Reggie was dead. "I'm always glad when Reggie's working. It keeps him straight. You know who he was working for?" Jim shook his head. "Where he was working?"

Another shake. Maybe there would be something in Reggie's room that would say. "So, you saw him Thursday early, huh? And not since then? Hear about anyone seeing him?"

Jim squinted up his eyes again. "Something happen to Reggie?"

"What makes you ask?"

"Coupla things. You got a cop sitting upstairs in Reggie's room. And that when Reggie's workin', he's real regular, and he ain't been regular."

"You'd make a good detective, Jim."

The man laughed and slapped his thigh and took a drink from the bottle. "Little late for that. I shoulda thought of it sooner." He passed the bottle to the other man, Chub, and tilted his face toward the sun. "It's a hell of a nice day. Sure hope it keeps on like this. Winter's a bitch."

"You got that right. Look, you hear anything about Reggie, you let me know, okay. Be glad to know if it was a truck or van, too, Jim, in case you remember."

He gave Jim his card and went inside, up the dark creaking stairway that smelled of age and urine and old cooking. Reggie's room was on the second floor. Burgess knocked and pushed open the door. The young patrol officer who sat on a rickety chair reading a paperback thriller seemed very glad to see him.

"Anyone been by?" Burgess asked.

"Those two old guys downstairs. They seemed real affronted when I told them they couldn't touch anything. The guy across the hall." The officer checked his notes. "A Kevin Dugan. He had a key, though, that's how I got in. Said he was just stopping in to check on Reggie, that he and Reggie did that for each other. He said Reggie hadn't been feeling too good lately. Oh... and... uh..."

The officer, whose name tag said Robeck, put the book down. "And a woman came by, looking for him." He pulled out his notebook. "Maura O'Brien. You want her address?"

"Thanks, I know it," Burgess said. "I'll take the info on the guy across the hall, though. What did Maura have to say?"

"Well, she wasn't exactly articulate. She was kind of hard to understand, sir. She said something about dark spirits and bad signs. Said she'd seen dark clouds around Reggie lately. Then she said she thought he was probably dead."