I follow Tate and Maclin down the hall, passing a large formal dining room to the left and a sitting room to the right. It’s a big house with tall, vaulted ceilings in the entryway and wrought-iron banisters on the curved stairway to the second floor. The production and sale of meth has been very, very good to Bender.
When Uncle Benny worked homicide in Brooklyn, the first cops to a murder scene spoke in code to prepare later-arriving law enforcement for the level of carnage. They used cuts of meat to describe the crime site: Round meant there was no obvious external violence, little or no blood, perhaps a death by poison or a discreet puncture wound to the back of the head by an ice pick. Sirloin was a single bullet wound, usually a small amount of blood; rib, a knife wound with a bit more blood; chuck, multiple shots or stab wounds with lots of red. Of course, occasionally there would be ground, reserved for the most violent, rage-filled deaths, often the result of domestic violence, and with that designation you knew to forget eating for the rest of the day. I know how much my fellow Texas law enforcement officers value euphemisms, so Maclin’s telling me that the body was “a bit of a mess” suggests that it’s bad.
Seth is standing in the arched doorway and he turns and gives me a terse nod.
“Where’s Hoskins and Craddock?” I ask him.
He takes a breath and points into the kitchen. I follow behind Maclin, putting on the two pairs of latex gloves, and walk into the room, large enough to service a restaurant. I stop to take in the scene.
All the tiles, marble, and cabinetry are white or off-white with expensive copper pots in pristine condition hanging above the enormous stove. The bottles in the spice rack have matching labels, and a bowl of perfectly arranged oranges sits on an island counter next to a repro Remington sculpture: a cowboy forever catching air between his backside and his mount. The door to the nearby laundry closet is open, probably the place where the witness had hidden.
The kitchen, like the house I had walked through earlier with Jackie, looks staged, never used. But in the middle of the floor, beyond the island counter, is the supine body of a female, fully clothed, dried blood over her face and pooling around her head in a viscous, rusty pond. Her throat has been cut.
I’m keenly aware that all the live people in the room—my guys, the local patrolman guarding the door, the Homicide detectives, even the Forensics techs—have stopped what they’re doing to look at me. Waiting to see if I’m going to lose it: my breakfast, my cool, my sanity. You can’t work Narcotics and not see bodies. But witnessing death by overdose is different than staring at a body whose features have been savaged by the hand of man.
I ask Maclin if I can move in closer and he tells me yes. Mindful not to step in the blood spatters on the floor, I rest one gloved hand on the island counter and lean down to the body. The woman’s mouth and eyes are slightly open, her black hair matted close to her head at her temples but strangely bristling and choppy at the crown. There’s no mouth gag, so there would have been a lot of screaming. At least until her windpipe was opened up. There are livid bruises on both upper arms from being restrained by rough hands or maybe from a pair of knees anchoring her to the floor. She’s young, petite, and Asian, wearing a stained T-shirt that reads COWGIRLS RIDE HARD.
“Yes,” I say to Maclin. “It’s Lana Yu.”
I track my gaze back to her face and imagine I can see defiance in the pull of her lips baring strong, frequently whitened teeth and in the half-mast droop of her eyelids.
One of the Forensics guys moves in and with a probing tool carefully lifts a section of her hair away from the side of her face. Her left ear has been severed.
I look at him questioningly and he says, “The right ear is missing too.”
There is a guilty tug of memory from yesterday: my desire to rip the diamond stud from her earlobe when she was being a smart-ass. There’s no way to know yet whether the removals had been pre- or postmortem.
I back away from the body as another Forensics team member moves in to photograph Lana’s remains. I turn toward Maclin, meaning to ask him if the house has been searched in its entirety yet, when the skin on my arms begins a slow creeping crawl, and I pull out my phone and hit redial on the last incoming call from the previous night. There is a pause and then the muffled sounds of a cell phone ringing begins somewhere behind me. I turn toward the xylophone chirp and realize that it’s coming from Lana.
The Forensics photographer bends down and tugs a cell phone from the front pocket of her expensive jeans.
“She tried to call me last night,” I tell Maclin.
“What time?” he asks.
I check the time stamp on my phone. “About nine thirty. I didn’t know it was Lana. A woman started talking and then the call cut off. I tried calling back but got no answer.”
“Well,” Tate says, motioning to the “bit of a mess” on the floor. “That gives us a possible start time to all this.”
My team and I follow Maclin and Tate back into the dining room, and we stand around the formal table.
Craddock, his face pale and shiny with sweat, looks close to hurling his breakfast, and I have to wonder if this self-proclaimed hunting enthusiast has the stomach to skin and eviscerate his kills. He points to one of his own ears and asks, “What was that for?”
“Trophy of some kind, maybe,” Maclin offers.
“Maybe,” Tate answers. “Or sending a signal to someone. Your guy Ruiz like to take body parts?” he asks me.
“Not that I know of. If Ruiz had wanted to send a message, he would have removed her whole head. Think the murderer could be our witness?”
Tate shrugs his shoulders, says, “Doubt it. No evidence of blood on him.”
He leaves to check on the progress of the interview so I can question the witness, and the rest of us continue to stand together in the dining room, our heads bowed, brooding silently on what lies in the kitchen. Something nags at me about Lana’s appearance, apart from the obvious, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Maclin is studying me. “What is it?”
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Looking at Lana—her clothes are the same as when I saw her yesterday, but something’s different about her.”
Hoskins mutters, “You mean like both of her ears being gone?”
Seth opens his mouth to say something to Hoskins, but I hold up a hand.
“It’ll come to me,” I say. “Maybe the witness can help us out.”
One of the Forensics team members walks into the dining room holding up a key and the card that I had thrown at Lana the day before. “We found these in the victim’s pocket,” he tells Maclin. “The key works the back-door lock.”
Maclin asks me, “Did Lana Yu know Bender?”
“I wasn’t aware of it. But both Bender and Lana knew Ruiz.”
Tate appears at the doorway and signals to me, says that the witness has refused to give any information and is asking for a lawyer.
“I don’t know what you’ll learn from him,” Tate tells me. “But you can give it a try.”
I follow him into a sitting room and find the witness sitting in a large armchair, pointedly ignoring a plainclothes detective, wearing a plaid jacket. The oversize chair has made the man seem even more diminutive, the colors of his jacket garish against the subtle silk upholstery. Seeing me, he looks ready to bolt.
“Hello, Tony,” I say. “Your witness there,” I tell Tate, “is the owner and manager of a massage parlor called Blue Heaven. My partner and I paid him a visit yesterday. Lana Yu was one of his prostitutes.”
Tony takes a deep breath, pulling his posture up straighter, and gives me a familiar hateful glare. But behind the glare is a fear that must have blossomed like a toadstool in the black of the laundry closet as he listened to Lana being murdered. I have to admire the little bastard for trying to puff himself up to a more dignified height. There are a lot of unanswered questions—why he was in Bender’s house with Lana, how she came to have a key, who the killer was—but I know just b
y looking at him that he’s not going to give me anything.
“No,” I tell Tate. “He won’t talk to me. I can send you whatever I have on file. But you’ll probably get more on him from Vice.”
Maclin walks with Seth and me to the front door, tells me he’ll send me any progress notes on Lana’s murder. I tell him that’s fine but that, wherever it won’t interfere with the murder investigation, Hoskins and Craddock need to stay and continue looking for any cash left hidden in the house for our case against Ruiz. Maclin takes my elbow and steers me out the door, away from Seth. His grip is light but insistent.
He walks me onto the lawn, pulling a dark face at the news reporters who have gathered, yet again, to comment on another neighborhood murder.
One male reporter leans into the crime tape and shouts at me, “Hey, Red! Yeah, you, the tall one. What’s going on in there?”
Maclin motions for the guy to step back and says, none too quietly, “Fucking reporters.”
I stare down at the hand resting on my elbow. What I first perceived as a friendly touch now feels predatory. “Well, Marsh, they’ve got their jobs to do. Just like us.”
Maclin drops his hand. “You really kept it together back there,” he says, smiling. It’s a TV smile, like he’s got Vaseline on his teeth so his lips won’t stick to them.
I don’t feel like smiling back, but I do. Keeping it friendly. “I’m sure you’ll be telling all the men the same thing.”
“That’s not what I meant, Betty. I’ve seen cops twenty years on the force lose their lunches to a body in that kind of shape. Your guy Craddock, for instance, looks about to faint.”
I glance back at the front porch, where Seth is making an arms-wide what-gives gesture.
“So did you pull me out onto the lawn to tell me that you’re impressed with my cool”—I look at my watch to hide my annoyance—“or to insult members of my team?”
He’s right, I did keep my composure. Not because I didn’t feel shock over a violent death, especially the murder of a young woman, but because I’ve had so much practice in hiding it.
Maclin asks, “You been to a rodeo yet?” For the first time I notice that he has TV hair as well, cut to perfection at some sports-clip salon where he can watch on a big screen as the pigskin cowboys grind each other into the turf.
I blink a few times and exhale with exaggerated patience. “Wow, actually, I have not. You’re not asking me out again, are you?”
“Everybody in the rodeo has their function,” he says as though he didn’t hear my last question. “You’ve got your wranglers, your emcees, your clowns. They’ve got these cowboys called pickup men. They ride in the rough stock events, rescuing bronc riders from the horses after they’ve made their time. They don’t make a successful rescue, the cowboy gets bucked off his horse and sometimes he gets trampled.”
“Okay, I get it,” I tell him, understanding that he’s marking his territory, and we’ve gone from a friendly, comrade-in-arms chat to a pissing contest. The time-honored dance between departments. Doesn’t matter that we’re all DPD. The department that makes the collar is the department that gets the glory, the news coverage, the political support, the funding, the promotions.
“I get it,” I repeat. “Sometimes you get the bull, sometimes the bull gets you. Are you warning me about something specific, Maclin, or are you giving me some arcane Texas wisdom?”
“I’m telling you,” he says, “that the rescue men now are Homicide, and at a murder scene, we’ve got precedence over a thwarted-drug-deal search. What’s your body count now, Betty? Four? No, actually, it’s five as of today.”
“So no more we’re-all-in-this-together bullshit.” I signal for Seth to join us and as soon as he’s in earshot I say to Maclin, “My partner is now going to call FBI liaison Carter Hayes to request his operatives here on scene. Our little drug sting has federal support.”
Seth pulls out his phone and makes the call.
“You know,” I tell Maclin, who’s no longer smiling, “we didn’t have rodeos where I grew up. But we did have the circus, and if I learned one thing as a kid, just a girl, sitting on the bleachers with my uncle eating my cotton candy, it’s that the guys with the biggest whips control the biggest cats. And the FBI has very big whips. Good luck, Detective. Nice seeing you again.”
Seth walks with me to my car and I glance over my shoulder once and see Maclin standing on the front porch with his hands jammed into both pockets, watching me, no friendly wave good-bye.
“I want the three of you to stick close to Maclin’s team,” I tell Seth. “Lana was there for one reason: to find Bender’s money. I don’t really care right now how or where she got a key or why she was there with Tony. I think Ruiz sent her there to search the place, hoping it would not be under close scrutiny, knowing that if it was, she’d be the one caught.”
Tate has joined Maclin on the porch and now they’re both watching us.
“Like waiting blackbirds at a picnic,” Seth says.
“I know Ruiz is a psychopath and all,” I say, “but this doesn’t feel like one of his. He leaves bodies on the streets to scare off competition or in retaliation. He had easy control of Lana. If he meant to kill her, he would have taken her into the woods. He wouldn’t have been so…”
“Obvious?” Seth offers.
Lana wasn’t bound or gagged. Someone would have had to sit on her chest and arms to do what he did, up close and personal. It would have been loud and bloody. The cartel shoots its victims in the back of the skull and then, when there’s no more struggle, cuts off the offending head.
“No,” I say. “He wouldn’t have been so messy. As soon as Hayes’s people show up, I want that house torn apart. And better call Ryan and tell him he doesn’t need to be watching Lana’s place anymore.”
The persistent news reporter has edged closer to Seth and me, trying to hear our conversation. The guy’s head is shaved clean, but he sports a full, bushy beard and wears plaid shorts, black socks, and white sneakers. It’s the kind of forced hipster look that makes me want to tie him to a chair, shave the pubic hair from his face, and glue it to his shiny pate.
He yells, “Come on, Red, tell me something I don’t already know.”
“Okay,” I yell back, getting into my car. “You’re a douche bag.”
9
The mechanical bull on which I’m sitting seems to be emblematic of my life right now. No head, no tail, no real forward momentum, just a lot of twisting, circular motion controlled and manipulated by an unseen hand, like the hidden wizard in the tale of Oz; the intent and construction are all designed to unseat the hapless victim in the most uncomfortable and undignified way.
The bull ride I am about to take is due to a lost bet with Jackie that I could get her grandmother Rodean to talk to me within the first fifteen minutes of our arriving here at Babcock’s Barbecue—a huge, barnlike building with old farm tools, like implements of torture, nailed to the walls—for the old woman’s eightieth-birthday celebration. It cannot be overstated how much the women in Jackie’s family hate me. In their minds, if I hadn’t corrupted her, she’d be happily married to Bud or Stew or Billy Ray, have two kids, and be an accepted part of her community, not an outcast living with her lesbian “friend.”
Jackie’s mom, Anne Walden Nesbitt, had grown up in Texas before moving to Oregon with her husband to raise a family. After Anne became a widow, she moved back to Dallas to be with her parents. A few years ago, Anne was diagnosed with a heart condition—an ailment that she insisted was liable to result in her death at any moment—which is one of the reasons why Jackie and I moved to Texas, so that Jackie could help take care of her mom in her final years. Her mother’s symptoms seem to include rapid heartbeat and dizziness, headaches, the onset of chronic complaining, and a rabid strain of xenophobia and bigotry. Jackie worries that her mother has only a few years left. I believe the woman will outlive all of us.
The Walden family female who hates me the least, Jackie’s olde
r sister, Susan, gives me a weak nod from the table and goes back to trying to coax her surly fifteen-year-old son away from his iPhone.
Susan’s husband, Neal, and her grandfather Terence are at the long bar drinking beer and watching sports TV. From time to time they look in my direction, grimacing the way they might after discovering that a possum had crawled up into the engine of their John Deere tractor and murmuring tight-lipped opinions about me under their breath.
There are some technical difficulties with the bull, the operator informs me. Sit tight, he says. It’s hard to look natural sitting astride a barrel with a saddle, so I slump over my work phone, my feet dragging the ground, looking for more text updates on the Ruiz case. Two hours after the Feds showed up at Bender’s house they found the cash behind a false wall in the attic. About eight hundred thousand dollars, along with four pistols, two semiautomatic rifles, and enough meth to light up a small town for weeks.
The mechanical bull gives a lurch, and my hand instinctively reaches for my Saint Michael’s medal—a superstitious hiccup to ward off bad luck, and a gesture that seemed to start the instant my mother fastened it around my neck.
The bull mechanic gives me the signal that the ride is about to begin. (When asked earlier how much of a ride I wanted, I had glared at him and hissed, “Disney slow. Mess with me and I’m coming for you.”)
The bull starts a sedate, gentle bucking motion, easing to the left and then to the right, and I begin to loosen the death grip on the pommel. It makes a full circle, bucks a few more times, and stops just as I see Jackie capturing the scene with her phone camera.
Jackie stumbles over the injury mat toward me, laughing. She kisses me in a gloriously unself-conscious way, yanks at my hair, and says, “Now you have to be nice to me, or I post this to the DPD site. This is fun, right?”
“Oh yeah,” I say. “Lots of funsies here.”
Looking over Jackie’s shoulder I can see the senior-most Walden watching us from the bar, his mouth downturned and sour. Last family gathering, I had to sit through Terence’s angry tirade about “hom’sexiality” leading to bestiality.