“Don’t you have anything better to do?” I snap.
“Not really.”
I turn to Officer Panola and ask, “No purse?”
She points to a red Nissan parked just beyond the police cars. “In her car.”
“You still carry that bowie knife?” Tilghman asks.
“It isn’t a bowie knife,” I tell him, then ask Panola, “Who found the body?”
“It’s big as a bowie knife.” Tilghman again.
Officer Panola tells me a coworker found the body and points to her police car, where I see a figure seated in the back seat. “Both start working at five. They clean the restaurant before the cooks come in.” She’s looking at her notes now. “Victim is Monique Lewis, spelled like Meriwether Lewis. Witness is Shameka Johnson.” She spells out Shameka for me. “When Shameka arrived, she saw Monique’s car but couldn’t find her in the restaurant, so she stepped out, figuring Monique was taking a smoke, and found her. Didn’t see anyone else around. Went back in and called 911.”
Panola looks up at me, and I ask, “Where’s your partner?” NOPD beat units are usually two-man cars. I look over as another NOPD car joins us.
“He went home sick. Sarge came along in his unit.”
Tilghman puts a friendly hand on my shoulder. “Come on. They don’t believe you carry a backup knife instead of a pistol.” He nods toward the Levee Board cops and the two JPs.
Jesus! I reach under my coat to the scabbard and pull out my black obsidian hunting knife, sharpened on one side only, like the true plains warriors of my ancestry. I slap the buffalo bone handle in Tilghman’s open hand. “Don’t drop it.”
While the men gather around like kids leering at a new toy, I ease Panola closer to the body and ask her to focus her flashlight on the victim’s neck. We both go down on our haunches.
Red marks ring her throat, bluish bruises across her larynx. Her neck seems distorted, swollen, her tongue purple and protruding, a line of blood seeping from her mouth. Death by strangulation. Three of her fingernails, painted light purple, are broken. I find one a couple feet from her, the other a little farther away. Can’t find the third. Looking closely, I see they are real fingernails, not the glue-on type.
“She put up a fight. Probably scratched him.”
I stand and Panola follows and wavers, so I take her elbow.
“You all right?” I whisper.
She nods.
“No ligature,” I tell her as she stands more erect, and I let go of her elbow.
“Huh?”
“No ligature mark. A rope or like instrument wasn’t used. Someone used their hands to strangle her.”
“Damn.”
“Exactly.”
I step back and snatch my knife from one of the Levee Board cops who’s trying to cut a strand of hair with it. Two pair of headlights close in on us, a crime lab van and another unmarked Chevy. I slip my knife back into its scabbard.
“She’s a granola girl,” Tilghman announces, looking at the victim again.
“Granola?”
“Yeah. Tie-dyed blouse. Tattoos. Body piercings. West Coast Oregon sandals. She’s a New Age hippie.”
“Oregon sandals?” I shake my head.
“Birkenstocks,” Panola tells me.
I’ve heard of that brand name.
“Granola girl,” Tilghman repeats. “Eats roots and stuff. Granola.”
“Can you do me a real favor?” I ask my old friend.
“Sure.”
“Go canvass. Take those two with you.” I point at the two newly arrived NOPD guys. “Check if any of these restaurants have outdoor surveillance cameras, but leave Panola with me. I’ll need her and her flashlight. Go see who’s out there, maybe saw something.” I wave at the line of restaurants, the dark parking lot, and the park beyond. “Keep an eye out for a broken purple fingernail.”
“A what?”
The second homicide detective moves through the cops. Mike Borgo, a rookie detective without a permanent partner at the moment, came to our squad earlier this week. He’d been bouncing from scene to scene to get a grasp of what we do. He nods at me, and I ask him to get the names of all these cops — which will run the JPs off pretty quickly.
Then I give Borgo the rundown on the body and the witness in the car. Borgo’s in a black suit, stands about five ten, husky, a big-boned Sicilian with brown eyes even lighter than mine, a thick mane of blackish hair, and a matching mustache.
“Damn,” he says. “Strangled by hand. See this often?”
“Nope.”
Panola gives me a weak smile.
“Which restaurant?” I ask.
She points to the nearest, Maxim’s Crab Claw Restaurant. The crime lab tech arrives with his camera case and evidence bag. I nod to the body, telling him about the fingernails, and then point to the victim’s red Nissan. Borgo will assist him with the measurements, triangulating the body’s position to fixed objects, the oak tree, light posts, while Panola and I go speak with our witness.
Shameka Johnson is twenty-two, five four, one-twenty pounds, brown and brown with caramel-colored skin. She wears a dark green sweat suit and jogging shoes as she sits with her feet up on the seat, knees pressed to her chest, arms holding them close. In a wavering voice she tells me how her boyfriend Eddie dropped her off at Maxim’s and drove away right after. I get his name and contact information for follow-up. They live together on Mazant Street.
The restaurant was locked, but Shameka saw Monique’s car so she went in but didn’t see her inside, so she came back out and found her. No, she saw no one in the area. She knows very little about Monique except she was single, liked boys all right, toked an occasional joint. She knows no one who would have done something like this and no suspicious people in the area. Both had been working for Maxim’s for only a few months. Monique about three months. I list the name of the boss, cooks, everyone she can name.
“What now?” Borgo asks as the strobe from the crime lab’s camera flashes behind us.
I point to the car just arriving. “Those’ll be the cooks for Maxim’s. You know what to do.” I remind him anyway to get their IDs, alibis, check for scratches, how well they knew the victim, if they know who would’ve done this, suspicious people in the area, the usual.
I stretch the kinks in my back as the sky is now purple and pink in the east. Two brown pelicans glide over the lake, dipping toward the water beyond Maxim’s. Standing next to me, Panola tells me she’s part Choctaw, on her father’s side.
I nod and say, “Panola means cotton in Choctaw, doesn’t it?”
She’s surprised and gives me a shaky smile. “It sure does.”
We go back to make certain the crime lab tech photographed the fingernails before dusting them for prints (partials more likely) and that he doesn’t leave them by mistake. As the crime lab finishes, the coroner’s van arrives and the coroner’s investigator pulls on a pair of rubber gloves to touch the body.
“Doesn’t appear to be a sex crime,” Panola says. “Maybe he knew her.”
“Could be a sex crime,” I tell her. “Whatever enraged the killer could be sexual. A sexual hatred. He might have been interrupted before finishing. We have no idea if he knew her. Not yet.”
“Only he knows why,” Borgo adds.
I go on, “We don’t focus on why she was killed. We establish what happened, when, where, and most importantly, who. Who is she and who did this. Sometimes we find out why. Sometimes we don’t.”
After the tech dusts the Nissan for prints, we pull out Monique Lewis’s purse, securing her driver’s license for the coroner for identification purposes before they take her body. We also secure her apartment keys. Monique lived on First Street, right in my old beat in the Second District.