He turned and started toward the body, then stopped and looked back over his shoulder. “You two will notify the next of kin?” Baker asked, addressing the question to Al and me.
“We’ll handle it,” I told him.
With Baker’s departure, the group disintegrated as the crime-scene team set about their business and the David-sector patrol officers returned to their squad car. Within seconds I found myself standing alone beside the photographer, who was busily stowing her equipment in a shoulder-strapped camera bag.
She looked young and vulnerable. I felt an awkward, middle-aged urge to smooth over the medical examiner’s brusque manners.
“I’m sure Doc Baker’s bark is worse than his bite,” I murmured. It was small comfort, tentatively offered.
Zipping the camera bag shut with a decisive tug, she glanced up at me, still with the dark smudge on her face but with a smile tickling the corners of her mouth. “Don’t worry about me, Detective Beaumont. Doc Baker doesn’t scare me. I’ve had my shots.”
She turned on her heel and walked away, leaving me wondering how she had known my name when I didn’t know hers. So much for being blown away by a strong wind.
So much for first impressions.
I tagged along after Sergeant James and Big Al, who were bird-dogging the crime-scene investigators. They were carefully surveying the area from which the body had been removed. By now the sun was well up, and it was easy to see that the entire length of railroad track was littered with loose garbage blowing this way and that in the early-morning freshening breeze off Puget Sound.
There were empty pizza boxes and paper cups still with plastic tops and straws attached. There were paper towels and napkins and more than a few used disposable diapers. There was the usual assortment of beer cans and wine bottles, some shattered and some not.
Nobody who ever worked crime-scene investigation thinks of it as glamorous. It’s tough, painstaking, stinking, dirty work.
It requires persistence, skill, attention to detail, and a certain amount of luck. And judgment. It’s always a judgment call to determine whether the jagged shards of a smashed cheap wine bottle should be picked up or ignored, to tell if one piece of junk is in its natural habitat, if it is somehow out of place, or even if it’s important.
It’s human judgment, too, that sets up the limits of the crime-scene area, that decides how big an area should be searched.
Al and I were almost ready to leave to follow up on the Bellevue Avenue address when one of the Washington State Patrol criminalists gave an excited whistle. He was nearly a block away, standing next to a blackberry bramble that virtually covers that side of the bluff. He motioned us toward him.
“What do you think of that?” he demanded, pointing toward something on the ground.
I looked where he pointed. There, partially hidden in the foliage, was a shoe, a cobalt blue leather shoe with a five-inch stiletto heel.
“That look like blood to you?” he asked.
Dark splotches covered the heel and had wicked up onto the body of the shoe itself. It did indeed look like blood.
The second criminalist reached us and dropped down on all fours to examine the shoe more closely. Finally he straightened up, leaving the shoe where it was.
“We have a bingo,” he said quietly. “That sure as hell looks like blood to me. And I think that’s a human hair where the rubber tip should be.”
Big Al Lindstrom caught my eye and shook his head. “He musta done something that pissed her off real good,” he said thoughtfully.
“And she must be one hell of a handful,” I added.
CHAPTER 2
BELLEVUE AVENUE EAST RUNS NORTH AND south along the western flank of Seattle’s Capitol Hill. It consists mainly of small- to medium-sized brick apartment buildings, four or five stories high, most of them carefully landscaped and well maintained. I was surprised, then, when we pulled up in front of 1120 and it turned out to be a single-family residence.
Actually, the house was little more than a cottage. There was an air of benign neglect about it. No one had deliberately destroyed anything, but the outside shingles were cracked and peeling, the grass had gone to seed, the low hedge surrounding the place was badly in need of trimming, and weeds had invaded what had evidently once been a prized rose garden.
From the looks of it, I would have guessed it was a house in search of gentrification, a forlorn relic someone was hanging onto, all the while hoping a developer would show up to buy it, preferably someone with a bottomless checkbook stashed in his hip pocket. There are lots of places like that around cities these days, areas where existing buildings fall into disrepair while greedy owners wait for the pot of gold at the end of some fast-talking developer’s rainbow.