“If it isn’t just a crank call,” I said. “If there is a body in the first place.”
“There will be.”
I followed him down to the garage. We got into our patrol car and cut across the Boulevard il-Jameel and under the big gate. There was a lot of pedestrian traffic on the Street that morning, so Shaknahyi angled south on First Street and then west along one of the narrow, garbage-strewn alleys that wind between the flat-roofed, stucco-fronted houses and the ancient brick tenements. Shaknahyi drove the car up onto the sidewalk. We got out and took a good look at the building. It was a pale green two-story house in terrible disrepair. The entryway and front parlor stank of urine and vomit. The wooden lattices covering the windows had all been smashed some time ago, from the look of things. Everywhere we walked, we crunched broken brick and shards of glass. The place had probably been abandoned for many months, maybe years.
It was very still, the dead hush of a house where the power is off and even the faint whir of motors is missing. As we made our way up from the ground floor to the family’s rooms above, I thought I heard something small and quick scurrying through the trash ahead of us. I felt my heart pounding in my chest, and I missed the sense of calm competence I’d gotten from Complete Guardian.
Shaknahyi and I checked a large bedroom that had once belonged to the owner and his wife, and another room that had been a child’s. We found nothing except more sad destruction. A corner of the house had entirely collapsed, leaving it open to the outside; weather, vermin, and vagrants had completed the ruin of the child’s bedroom. At least here the fresh air had scoured out the sour, musty smell that choked the rest of the house.
We found the corpse in the next room down the hall. It was a young woman’s body, a sexchange named Blanca who used to dance in Frenchy Benoit’s club. I’d known her well enough to say hello, but not much better. She lay on her back, her legs bent and turned to one side, her arms thrown up above her head. Her deep blue eyes were open, staring obliquely at the water-stained ceiling above my shoulder. She was grimacing, as if there’d been something horrible with her in the room that had first terrified her and then killed her.
“This ain’t bothering you, is it?” asked Shaknahyi.
“What you talking about?”
He tapped Blanca’s hand with the toe of his boot. “You’re not gonna throw up or nothing, are you?”
“I seen worse,” I said.
“Just didn’t want you throwing up or nothing.” He bent down beside Blanca. “Blood from her nose and ears. Lips drawn back, fingers clutching like claws. She was
juiced at close range by a good-sized static gun, I’ll bet. Look at her. She hasn’t been dead half an hour.”
“Yeah?”
He lifted her left arm and let it fall. “No stiffness yet. And her flesh is still pink. After you’re dead, gravity makes the blood settle. The medical examiner will be able to tell better.”
Something struck me as kind of odd. “So the call that came into the station—”
“Bet you kiams to kitty cats the killer made the call himself.” He took out his radio and his electronic log.
“Why would a murderer do that?” I asked.
Shaknahyi gazed at me, lost in thought. “The hell should I know?” he said at last. He made a call to Hajjar, asking for a team of detectives. Then he entered a brief report in his log. “Don’t touch nothing,” he said to me without looking up.
He didn’t have to tell me that. “We done here?” I asked.
“Soon as the gold badges show up. In a hurry to travel?”
I didn’t answer. I watched him pocket his electronic log. Then he took out a brown vinyl-covered notebook and a pen and made some more notations. “What’s that for?” I asked.
“Just keeping some notes for myself. Like I said, there’s been a couple of other cases like this lately. Somebody turns up dead and it seems like the bumper himself tips us off.”
By the life of my eyes, I thought, if this turns out to be a serial killer, I’m going to pack up and leave the city for good. I glanced down at Shaknahyi, who was still squatting beside Blanca’s body. “You don’t think it’s a serial killer, do you?” I asked.
He stared through me again for a few seconds. “Nah,” he said at last, “I think it’s something much worse.”
I remembered how much Hajjar’s predecessor, Lieutenant Okking, had liked to harass me. Still, no matter how hard it had been to get along with Okking, he’d always gotten the job done. He’d been a shrewd if not brilliant cop, and he’d had a genuine concern for the victims he saw in a day’s work. Hajjar was different. To him it was all a day’s work, all right, but nothing more.
It didn’t surprise me to learn that Hajjar was next to useless. Shaknahyi and I watched as he went about his investigation. He frowned and looked down at Blanca. “Dead, huh?” he said.
I saw Shaknahyi wince. “We got every reason to think so, Lieutenant,” he said in a level voice.
“Any ideas who’d want to shade her?”
Shaknahyi looked at me for help. “Could be anybody,” I said. “She was probably wearing the wrong moddy for the wrong customer.”
Hajjar seemed interested. “You think so?”
“Look,” I said. “Her plug’s bare.”
The lieutenant’s eyes narrowed. “So what?”
“A moddy like Blanca never goes anywhere without something chipped in. It’s suspicious, that’s all.”
Hajjar rubbed his scraggly mustache. “I guess you’d know all about that. Not much to go on, though.”
“The plainclothes boys can work miracles sometimes,” Shaknahyi said, sounding very sincere but winking to let me know just how little regard he had for them.
“Yeah, you right,” said Hajjar.
“By the way, Lieutenant,” said Shaknahyi, “I was wondering if you wanted us to keep after Abu Adil. We didn’t get very far with him last week.”
“You want to go out there again? To his house?”
’To his majestic palatial estate, you mean,” I said.
Hajjar ignored me. “I didn’t mean for you to persecute the guy. He throws a lot of weight in this town.”
“Uh huh,” said Shaknahyi. “Anyway, we’re not doing any persecuting.”
“Why do you want to bother him again in the first place?” Hajjar looked at me, but I didn’t have an answer.
“I got a hunch that Abu Adil has some connection to these unsolved homicides,” said Shaknahyi.
“What unsolved homicides?” Hajjar demanded.
I could see Shaknahyi grit his teeth. “There’ve been three unsolved homicides in the last couple of months. Four now, including her.” He nodded toward Blanca’s body, which the M.E.’s boy had covered with a sheet. “They could be related, and they could be connected to Reda Abu Adil.”
“They’re not unsolved homicides, for God’s sake,” said Hajjar angrily. “They’re just open files, that’s all.”
“Open files,” said Shaknahyi. I could tell he was really disgusted. “You need us for anything else, Lieutenant?”
“I guess not. You two can get back to work.”
We left Hajjar and the detectives going over Blanca’s remains and her clothes and the dust and the moldy ruins of the house. Outside on the sidewalk, Shaknahyi pulled my arm and stopped me before I got into the patrol car. “The hell was that about the bitch’s missing moddy?” he asked.
I laughed. “Just hot air, but Hajjar won’t know the difference. Give him something to think about, though, won’t it?”
“It’s good for the lieutenant to think about something now and then. His brain needs the exercise.” Shaknahyi grinned at me.
We were both ready to call it a day. The sky had clouded over and a brisk, hot wind blew grit and smoke into our faces. Angry, grumbling thunder threatened from far away. Shaknahyi wanted to go back to the station house, but I had something else to take care of first. I undipped the phone from my belt and spoke Chiri’s commcode into it. I heard it ring eight or nine times before she answered it. “Talk to me,” she said. She sounded irked.