Red Man Down(75)

‘Plenty of room over there right now,’ she heard him saying. ‘They won’t be open for several hours.’ He told the patrolmen who were stringing crime scene tape, ‘Tape it up straight across the street side, good and tight over here. Two strands so we can keep everybody out. And then on the other side of the ditch, the parking lot side, make a big half-circle, will you? Give us a little room to work.’ He put the officer with the posse box at the top of the half-circle on the parking lot side, and spent a lot of time at the beginning motioning everybody around to that side to sign in.

He and his detectives had to wait, anyway, for the photographer and other crime-scene specialists to finish. So although they had arrived in the gray dusk of a winter dawn, it was full light by the time Sarah got a look at Joey García.

The big surprise was how little there was to see. He looked even less dangerous slumped over his steering wheel in dirty canvas pants and a ragged sweater than he had in an orange jumpsuit, and he also looked undamaged. Except for the lack of a pulse, waxy skin and staring eyes turning milky, he might have been just catching a snooze. He was slumped forward with his head resting on the steering wheel, turned to the right as though he’d been watching something out the passenger’s-side window. There were no visible marks or scars; no blood showing and no signs of a fight.

He had been prepared to have one, they discovered, after the photographer was finished and the ME arrived. It was Greenberg, this time, with his transport van following right behind. As soon as he’d confirmed the presence of death and had a cursory look, he recruited a couple of patrolmen to help his driver get the body out of the car. Greenberg never took on any of the grunt work if he could possibly avoid it; he was saving his honed-to-the-max body for finer things, and was especially careful with his hands.

Stretched out on the gurney, with his dimpled face ablaze in a red sunrise, Joey looked like somebody who’d had a momentary seizure or shock and ought to be revived at once. But the doctor was matter-of-factly shining light in his eyes and taking his temperature, and while he was getting ready to strap him down the detectives, gloved up and intent, got busy patting him down and checking pockets. He had a fully loaded Glock Nine in the cargo pocket of his pants and a Walther P22, also with a full magazine, in an ankle holster strapped to his right leg.

It wasn’t an arsenal but it was a lot more than most people carried with them to a bar, especially after you added in the switch-blade in his jacket and the box-cutter that slid out of a special pocket with a Velcro closure sewn onto the left leg of his pants. Joey had been loaded and locked, ready to go into battle, but there was no sign that he had used any of his weapons.

He had an old leather wallet, very dirty, in his back pocket. It held just over two hundred dollars in cash, an Arizona driver’s license and no credit cards.

While four men hoisted the gurney into the van, Delaney talked to Greenberg, asking him for the earliest possible autopsy for this victim. ‘Unless something obvious shows up when you get him undressed,’ he said, ‘this is going to be one for you and your lab guys to figure out, isn’t it? So sooner is better, don’t you think?’

‘Sure,’ the doctor said, ‘but I don’t run the place, you know. I’ll try, though – I’ll let you know.’

Ollie took charge of disarming and listing the weapons. The rest of the detectives, as soon as the lab technicians would let them have it, swarmed the Toyota, wanting to see it clearly before it was towed again to impound. There was nothing in the backseat but a fleece jacket and an empty grease-stained carton with the remains of a burger and fries. A ratty, soft-sided suitcase stuffed with clothing, a cardboard box of shoes and underwear, and another with a radio, camera and a few batteries took up the storage space behind the seats. The glove compartment held the vehicle documents that belonged there, and nothing else.

What the Toyota didn’t hold, that they could see, was any money.

Greenberg phoned Delaney within the hour with a time for the autopsy next day. Sarah took the observation job, even though it once again required her to work on Friday. She had been the first detective on the scene, it was her turn to do an autopsy, and she welcomed the chance to watch Greenberg discover what killed Joey.

‘No big mystery about what killed him,’ Greenberg said, once he had the body open. ‘This guy died of suffocation.’ He showed her the red spots in the lungs and inside the eyelids. ‘Not strangulation – no marks on his throat. Nothing fancy about the means, either. See here? It appears he met his end inside a used plastic garbage bag.’ He showed Sarah the morsels of lettuce and cooked egg he had just found in Joey’s airway. ‘That’s just about the ultimate insult, isn’t it? You don’t even get a clean garbage bag to die in? Jeez.’ He thought a minute before he said, ‘You know, I found some lettuce in his hair earlier, and I just figured it was a result of his messy eating habits. But now I think that might have been left by the murder weapon, too.’