Only last night, Brown had gone so far as to joke weakly about his status. Sitting at an admin office typewriter at the beginning of the overnight shift, he concocted a short, plaintive memorandum to McLarney, which he left in the sergeant’s mailbox:
With Officer Corey (I’m a superstar) Belt looming on the horizon, I thought I’d take just a moment to reintroduce myself to you.
Until I came to your squad, I was just another long-haired, drug-infested, raving homosexual. Working under your knowledge, talent, skill, kindness and love I have become a detective of barely questionable means. Keeping this in mind, and to include the great feelings of my squad toward me (Worden: “He’s a useless fuck”… James: “He never pays his fucking bar tab”… Ed Brown: “I doesn’t even know the motherfucker”) I was wondering what plans you had in mind for my CONTINUED service to you.
I will remain ever vigilant, awaiting your response. Respectfully (everyone takes advantage of me),
David John Brown, Detective.
CID? Homicide? (Forever, Please God)
McLarney found the memo about an hour into the midnight shift and read it aloud in the coffee room, giggling at the more obsequious passages.
“Amusing,” he declared in conclusion. “Inatrulypatheticsortof way.”
Fred Ceruti’s troubles had not gone unnoticed, and Dave Brown, in his own, feverish brain at least, was feeling a little of the same heat. Driving out to Johnson Street, he had reasoned that an investigative sortie into Billyland might be just the cure.
“Well, Brown,” says Worden, getting out of the passenger seat, “let’s see what you’ve got.”
She is face down in the hard mud and stone, a pale figure framed by a semicircle of radio cars. A short woman with straight reddish-brown hair, her red-and-white-striped tank top is pulled up to expose most of her back; her white corduroy cutoffs are torn at one side, revealing the buttocks. A pair of cream-colored panties, also torn from the left side, are down between her knees, and a single sandal rests a few feet from her right foot. Around her neck is a thin gold necklace and a pair of gold hoop earrings lie in the gravel on either side of her head. On closer inspection, one of the earrings is bloody, apparently because it was torn from the woman’s left earlobe, which shows a laceration and some dried blood. Scattered near the body are a few coins; working carefully, Worden manages to liberate $27 in bills from a back pocket. Jewelry, money-if it was a robbery, it didn’t get far.
Dave Brown looks at Worden, conscious of the fact that the Big Man is participating in this scene reluctantly.
“How old would you say, Donald?”
“Twenty-five. Maybe a little older. Can’t really say until we roll her.”
“I’d say twenty-five might be high.”
“Maybe,” says Worden, bending over the woman. “But I’ll tell you what my first question is.”
“Lemme guess. You want to know where that other sandal is.”
“You got it.”
The scene is a gravel lot that serves as a tractor-trailer turn-around and loading dock for an aging, red brick warehouse at the edge of the Chessie System railbed. Three trucks are parked at the eastern edge of the lot, but their drivers were sleeping in the rear of their cabs before the warehouse opened and they heard and saw nothing; whatever happened on the lot happened quickly or quietly enough that they stayed asleep. The body is on the western side of the lot, near the warehouse itself, perhaps ten or fifteen feet from the concrete wall of the loading dock. At the edge of the dock is a truck trailer that blocks any view of the body from Johnson Street.
She was found by two teenagers who live a few blocks away and were out running a dog at dawn. Both of them have already been sent downtown by uniforms, and McLarney will soon be busy taking statements. Both are billies tried and true, with Harley-Davidson tattoos and minor police records, but nothing about their story will arouse any suspicion.
While Worden deals with the lab tech, Dave Brown begins walking the length of the gravel lot, from the loading dock to the overgrown grass at the edge of the railbed. He jumps up on the concrete dock, then walks around both sides of the warehouse. No sandal. Brown walks a block and a half down Johnson Street, checking the gutter, then walks back to the southern boundary of the lot, where he jumps down to the railbed and searches a few hundred feet of the tracks. Nothing.
By the time he returns, the lab tech has recovered the money and jewelry, photographed the body in its original position and sketched the scene. The ME’s attendants have also arrived and taken their Polaroids, followed by two television news cameras that are perched at the lot’s entrance, shooting a few seconds of tape for the noon broadcasts.
“Can they see the body from up there?” asks Worden, turning to the sector sergeant.
“No. The trailer blocks the view.”
Worden nods.
“We ready?” Brown asks.
“Let’s do it,” says the ME’s lead attendant, putting on his gloves. “Slow and steady.”
Gingerly, the two attendants roll the corpse, turning the dead woman slowly onto her back. The face reveals itself as a bloody, fleshy pulp. More surprising, black treadmarks cross the left upper torso and head in a consistent diagonal.
“Whoa,” says Dave Brown. “Road kill.”
“Well, what do you know,” says Worden. “I guess it’s a whole new ball game now.”
The older detective walks back to the Cavalier for one of the handheld radios and opens the citywide channel.
“Sixty-four forty,” says Worden.
“Sixty-four forty.”
“I’m down at this homicide scene on Johnson Street and I need to get a supervisor in the traffic investigation section down here.”
“Ten-four.”
Half a minute later, a TIS sergeant is on the wire, explaining to the dispatcher that he is not needed on Johnson Street because the incident is a homicide, not an automobile accident. Worden listens to the conversation with growing irritation.
“Sixty-four forty,” says Worden, interrupting.
“Sixty-four forty.”
“I know it’s a homicide. I want someone from TIS down here for their expertise.”
“Ten-four,” says the traffic man, cutting back in. “I’ll be out there in a few minutes.”
Unbelievable, thinks Worden, a perfect illustration of the not-my-job reflex. Traffic section handles any auto fatalities, including hit-and-runs, so they are reluctant to send a man down if it means they might get stuck with the case. McAllister and Bowman encountered something similar back in March when they called for traffic while working a body found mauled by the shoulder of Bayonne Avenue in the Northeast. The detectives were walking around that scene looking for chrome and paint chips; the traffic man was looking for shell casings.
“Did you catch that?” asks Worden, almost amused. “That guy wasn’t going to come down here until he heard me say it was a homicide.”
Dave Brown doesn’t answer, preoccupied with the change in scenario. Death-by-auto requires an entirely different perspective, though neither detective believes that this was an accident. For one thing, the body is on a vacant gravel lot and was run over not ten feet from the concrete wall of the loading dock: It’s hard to imagine a car whirling around in such a confined area for no reason. More important is the missing sandal. If the dead woman was a pedestrian, if she was merely the victim of a hit-and-run, then why wouldn’t that other sandal be somewhere on the lot? No, the detectives reason, she wasn’t a pedestrian; she arrived at the scene in the car that killed her, and chances are she had to get out of that car in a hurry, leaving behind one of her shoes.
On a closer inspection of the body, Worden also notices bruising in the approximate shape of fingers on both forearms. Was she grabbed? Was she attacked before the killer got back in the car and finished her? And the earrings: Were they pried out by the movement of the tire over her head, or were they pulled from her ears in an earlier struggle?