Red Man Down(2)

As for the Saturday night date they had planned, they could see the movie later, Will said. ‘And should I cancel the dinner reservation?’

‘Guess you better,’ Sarah said. ‘Officer-involved shooting and a fatality, so I’ll be gone a while.’

‘Well, nice to have known you,’ Dietz said, their standard black humor for these times. He kissed her neck and went back outside to prep the new lumber he’d been cutting – he was fixing the crumbled wainscoting in the hall.

On her way out, she stopped at Denny’s room again to ask her to keep an eye on her grandmother. ‘I heard her mixer going; she’s cooking up a storm out there. If she starts to fade she might need some help with the cleanup.’

‘She said she was thinking about banana bread.’ Denny giggled and hopped off the bed. ‘I’ll go ask her if she needs me to lick the bowl.’

Dietz had taught her how to light the old gas oven, because Aggie got dizzy bending over. Denny would do that first, Sarah knew, and then find a spoon and clean out that bowl till it hardly needed a rinse. How could you not make a trip to the mall for a kid as good as that?

Although, maybe by tomorrow … if she found something on the internet … Would she think it was fun to have something delivered by UPS?

Officer Spurlock looked unusually pale for a Tucson street cop, Sarah thought. A little sweaty, too, despite an ambient outdoor temperature of fifty-seven degrees. He was standing very straight by his black-and-white squad car in a trash-strewn gravel parking lot that surrounded an empty warehouse on Flowing Wells. Two of his fellow officers were stringing crime-scene tape around the entire lot. A third patrolman, whose name badge read, ‘T. Garry,’ had set up a surveillance post across the lot’s driveway, holding a clipboard inside a posse box. Inside the tape, a police photographer carried two bags of camera equipment toward a tarp-covered mound that lay near a pickup in the otherwise-empty lot.

Sarah said, ‘Hi, Tim,’ signed the sheet on the clipboard Garry handed her and timed herself in at 10:03 a.m. Walking carefully to keep out of dog poop and some prickly-looking weeds, she approached Spurlock, showed him her badge and announced herself the first detective on the scene.

‘Glad to see you,’ he said. ‘Glad to see anybody at all, actually. Felt like forever I stood here alone with that body.’

‘How long was it really?’

‘Twelve minutes till the EMT team got here. Took them about two minutes to pronounce him dead and be on their way. Then a hundred years or so went by till these two guys,’ he nodded toward the two men working on the tape, ‘showed up and told me to stand over here and wait. I did that for another century till this photographer walked in and said the same thing. Been standing here like a dork since before I was born, it feels like …’ Hearing himself begin to babble, he stopped and swallowed. Then he quickly added the one other thing he simply had to say to somebody. ‘This guy didn’t leave me any choice at all, you know?’

‘You’ll have a chance to tell me all about that, and anything else you want to tell me. But we have to take this one step at a time. You were the first responder, is that right?’

‘Yes, ma’am. First and only, for what seemed like a long time.’

‘OK. Detective is probably better than ma’am for this occasion. Or you can just call me Sarah. Do you know if the items in the pickup were stolen from this building?’

‘Beats the hell out of me – I never had time to find out.’

‘I see. Did you just happen across this scene or did somebody call in a complaint?’

‘Alert seniors drinking beer over there in the bar called it in – see the little sign on the second floor of that warehouse? Somebody converted that room to a bar, I guess, and all the patrons were having fun watching this guy work for a while. Then they talked it over and decided that even if this place is abandoned, this mutt probably shouldn’t be wrecking it, so they called nine-one-one.’

‘You get their names?’

‘No. The minute I got here I saw that guy pulling wire out of that power box and called for backup. He wasn’t moving very fast but I saw him spooling out wire, and I could see that the back of his truck’ – he licked his lips, as if his mouth was dry – ‘was full of those fixtures that looked like they’d just been ripped out of somewhere, and I thought, I gotta stop him, so I—’

He stopped and made a small hissing sound, like somebody who’s just been hit in the gut. Following his stare, Sarah saw that the photographer had pulled the tarp off the mound. A dead white man lay there, face up, with a bright smear of blood under his head.