Jackie had been quiet since then: we had scared him with Harold Brubaker and he had been lying low. Now he was starting up again, and I’d bet there’d be another one before long. Success breeds success. There’s nothing worse than a cunning killer who strikes down people he doesn’t know, for no reason other than a blood lust.
3
I waited until the coroner was finished, then I moved in for a look at the body. They had turned him over, and he lay on the pavement with his arms crossed gently over his chest. He looked like he might get up and walk away. His eyes were closed and he had the unwashed, unshaved look they all had. But there was something different about this one, something vaguely familiar, as if I had known him once, long ago.
“What can you tell us, Georgie?” I said. The coroner, a spectacled man in his fifties, spoke while his assistant looked on.
“It’s a lot like the others, but there are some significant differences. As you can see, the victim is a guttersnipe, body not well nourished, white male, probably mid-thirties, five foot seven inches, hundred fifty, sixty pounds. Murder weapon was a heavy blunt instrument, a pipe wrench or a crescent wrench or some steel tool would be my guess. The victim was hit twice in the center of the rear cranium, once for business and once for good measure. There was no doubt in the mind of the killer what the objective was. I think the first one did it—we’ll know more in the morning. Time of death was within the last three hours.”
“Call came in about one-thirty,” Hennessey said.
“He had probably been dead a little over an hour then,” the coroner said.
I looked at the face of the dead man and again felt that disquieting rumble deep in my brain.
“There’s some evidence he was killed somewhere else, then dumped here,” the coroner said.
“That’s new,” Hennessey said.
“What evidence?” I asked.
“I think there’s a good deal of blood unaccounted for,” the coroner said. “Again, we’ll know more in the morning, but let’s say I’m about eighty percent sure. That pipe really opened his head up. A wound like that will bleed like a geyser, but this one didn’t, or, if it did, where’s the blood? This little puddle’s just leakage, as if the heart had stopped some time prior to his being put here. I think that’s what happened. Somebody did this man in somewhere else, then dropped him here.”
“Any signs of a beating?”
The coroner gave me a look. “You don’t consider this a beating?”
“I mean injuries to other parts of the body… indications that he was beaten severely before he was killed.”
“Nothing so far. Looks like he was hit twice and that’s that.”
I shook my head. “I’ve seen this guy somewhere. I can’t make him.”
Hennessey asked the coroner if they had a name. The coroner looked at his notes and said, “The deceased had no driver’s license. There was a fragment of a social security card. Most of the number had worn away, but we were able to get a name. Robert B. Westfall.”
The name clicked. “Yeah, I know him,” I said. “He’s a bookscout.”
“A what?”
“A guy that hunts for books. That’s where I’ve seen him, selling books in the neighborhood stores.”
“I always heard you were the intellectual type, Janeway,” the coroner said.
“Is that what you hear?” I said dryly.
“It’s a small world, my friend, and the night has a thousand eyes.”
“You’ve been observed reading books again, Clifford,” Hennessey said. “I guess I’m the man of action on this team.”
I turned my attention back to the corpse. The coroner hung over my shoulder like a scarecrow. I was trying to place the guy, to remember where and when I had last seen him.
“In the bookstores they call him Bobby the Bookscout,” I said. “He was pretty good, from what I hear.”
“How does a bum get to be good at something like that?” the coroner asked.
“They’re not bums in the usual sense. Most of ‘em work like hell, don’t drink, and stay out of trouble.”
“What about the ones that don’t like to work, do drink, and don’t stay out of trouble?” Hennessey said.
“I guess there are some of those.”
“I don’t know much about this kinda stuff,” Hennessey said. “You tell me, Cliff. Could one of these boys find something, say a book, since that’s what they look for, that’s so valuable another one might kill him for it? And where does that leave us with Jackie Newton?”
“I’ll let you boys hash that out,” the coroner said. “Call me tomorrow.”
“Thanks, George.”
We stood for a moment after the coroner had left. Hennessey’s questions kept running through my mind. I felt a pang of disappointment that Jackie Newton might slide on this one for the plain and simple reason that he hadn’t done it.
“Cliff?”
“Yeah, Neal. Just give me a minute.”
I watched them cover the body and take it away. The sketcher had left and the lab men were packing up: the sad saga of Bobby the Bookscout was just about over. All that was left was the hunt for his killer.
“We sure can’t rule out the possibility of Jackie,” I said.
Hennessey didn’t say anything.
“Let’s go see the son of a bitch,” I said.
“I’ll call Jeffco.”
As peace officers, we were empowered to investigate and arrest anywhere in the state of Colorado. Usual procedure when you went out of your jurisdiction was to take an officer from that district along, in case something happened. Thirty minutes later we had arrived at the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, where Officer Ben Nasses was waiting for us. Officer Nasses was young and articulate, one of the new breed. He was also very black. Jackie Newton would love him.
Jackie lived in an expensive villa a few miles south of the town of Morrison. He wasn’t quite in the mountains, but the house was perched at the top of a bluff where you could see most of Denver and the front range south, halfway to Colorado Springs. We pulled into the driveway. The house was dark, with no sign of life. I had a sinking feeling that we’d find Jackie Newton asleep, that he’d been asleep all night. I had the feeling, not for the first time, that I’d never be able to make him on anything.
But Jackie wasn’t home. Nasses rang the bell three times and knocked, but no one came. “What now?” he said. I told him we would wait, if he had nothing better to do, and he said that was fine. “I’d like for us not to be visible when he comes home,” I said, and Hennessey went to move the car on down the street. By the time Neal came back, Nasses and I had moved off the step and into a gravel walkway that skirted the house. Hennessey was nervous. “I don’t think we want to mess around here, Cliff,” he said. He had been my partner for a long time: he knew all about my impatience with oppressive procedure, and he also knew how much I wanted to put Jackie away. Don’t be stupid—that’s what Neal was saying. But I was very much aware of the rules of evidence. I had never had a case thrown out because I was weak in court, and Hennessey knew that too. Sometimes you play by the book, sometimes you had to take a chance.
“I’m going to take a look in the garage,” I said.
Hennessey whimpered but stayed with me. I moved around the house. “You boys’re crazy,” Nasses called. He wasn’t going anywhere. Hennessey tugged at me in the dark. “Cliff, the kid’s right. This makes no sense. Even if you find something you won’t be able to use it. Let’s get out of here.”